Toppermost of the Poppermost - UK Number Ones : part 2 - The 1960s

[Chriddof]

After reading some of those articles, I can't quite get my head round the fact that Dusty apparently liked to do Goon Show impressions. Anyway, I've always loved this song.

[daf]

Quick update - due to a work pile-up, tomorrow's scheduled post will now appear on Saturday.

[Artie Fufkin]

Quick update - due to a work pile-up, tomorrow's scheduled post will now appear on Saturday.

You absolute bastard !

[daf]

With a big hooter & spindly pins, it's . . .

214.  Manfred Mann - Pretty Flamingo



From : 1 – 21 May 1966
Weeks : 3
Flip side : You're Standing By

The Story So Far : 

Following the success of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" the sound of the group's singles moved away from the jazzy, blues-based music of their early years to a pop hybrid that continued to make hit singles from cover material.

They hit #3 in the UK in October 1964 with another girl-group cover, "Sha La La" (b/w "John Hardy"), the song, originally by The Shirelles, also reached #12 in the US, and they followed it with the sentimental "Come Tomorrow" (b/w "What Did I Do Wrong?") but both were of a noticeably lighter texture than their earliest output.



The group returned to jazz and R&B themes on their albums: their first, 'The Five Faces of Manfred Mann', released in September 1964, included standards such as Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning"  /  Muddy Waters' "Got My Mojo Working"  / and Bo Diddley's "Bring It to Jerome", as well as a few of the group's own jazzy compositions, including "What You Gonna Do?" and "Mr. Anello", plus songs penned by lead singer Paul Jones, including : "Don't Ask Me What I Say"  and "Without You".

The American version of the album  was released on 8 February 1965 by Ascot Records with a very different track listing, including "Sha La La", "Come Tomorrow", and "Hubble Bubble (Toil and Trouble)". It is essentially a whole different album, sharing only two songs with the UK release ("I'm Your Kingpin" and "You've Got to Take It").

 

With a cover of Maxine Brown's "Oh No Not My Baby" (b/w "What Am I Doing Wrong?") - #11 in April 1965,  they began a phase of new depth and sophistication in the arrangements of their singles.

The group began its string of successes with Bob Dylan songs with "With God on Our Side"  in June 1965, from the best-selling EP The One in the Middle, which also included "Watermelon Man" and "What Am I To Do".


 

Their next single, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" (b/w "Stay Around") reached #2 in the UK in September 1965.

 
 

In October 1965, 'Mann Made', was released. It was the second and final UK album to feature the original lead singer Paul Jones in the line-up, and included several songs written by the band members, such as "L.S.D." by Tom McGuinness, "You're for Me" by Mike Vickers, the instrumental "Bare Hugg"  by Mike Hugg, and "I Really Do Believe" by Paul Jones.

The album was reduced to twelve songs by Capitol Records in the Canadian market, where "You're for Me", "I Really Do Believe", and "Hi Lili, Hi Lo" were excluded, and replaced by "She Needs Company", and current hit single "Pretty Flamingo" when issued in June 1966.

 

Two EP's followed - the first, No Living Without Loving, released in November 1965, featured : "There's No Living Without Your Loving"  /  "Let's Go Get Stoned"  /  "Tired Of Trying, Bored With Lying, Scared Of Dying"  / and "I Put A Spell On You".

 

The second EP, Machines, released in April 1966, featured : "Machines"  /  "She Needs Company"  /  "Tennessee Waltz"  /  and "When Will I Be Loved"

In May 1966, the band scored their second UK #1 single with "Pretty Flamingo", produced by John Burgess.

The group had managed an initial jazz/rhythm-and-blues fusion, and then had taken chart music in their stride—but could not hope to cope with Paul Jones' projected solo career as singer and actor, and with Mike Vickers' orchestral and instrumental ambitions.

Jones intended to go solo once a replacement could be found, but stayed with the band for another year, during which Mike Vickers left. McGuinness moved to guitar, his original instrument, contributing the distinctive National Steel Guitar to "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" and "Pretty Flamingo", and was replaced on bass by Jack Bruce, who had been playing for the Graham Bond Organisation for some time before a recent brief stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers.

In his brief tenure before leaving to form Cream, Bruce played on "Pretty Flamingo" and on the June 1966 EP 'Instrumental Asylum', on which both he, and wind instrumentalists Henry Lowther and Lyn Dobson, were included in the sleeve photo of the group.



As well as "Still I'm Sad", the EP began the group's experiments with instrumental versions of current chart songs, including : "My Generation"  /  "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"  / and "I Got You Babe".

 

In July 1966, Paul Jones was replaced by Mike d'Abo, Jack Bruce was then replaced by Klaus Voormann, and the group switched labels to Fontana Records, where they were produced by Shel Talmy.

   
 

Their old record company, EMI, controversially used session players to complete an unfinished track for the single "You Gave Me Somebody To Love" (b/w "Poison Ivy"—both sung by Paul Jones) which made #36 in the UK singles chart in July 1966, upsetting the group—hence Tom McGuinness's wry comment "Manfreds disown new single" on the sleeve of their next studio album for their new record label.



Released in October 1966, 'As Is' was the third UK album by Manfred Mann, and their first to feature new members Mike d'Abo and Klaus Voormann.

The twelve tracks on the record included the line-up's first single release, a cut-down version of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" which reached the UK top ten in August 1966, and a short cool jazz version of "Autumn Leaves", reminiscent of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Mike d'Abo's presence sparked Mike Hugg into producing several baroque pop miniatures, including : "Each Other's Company", "Morning After the Party" and "Superstitious Guy".

Mike d'Abo penned "Box Office Draw", "Trouble and Tea" and "As Long as I Have Lovin'", while guitarist, and sleeve-note scribe, Tom McGuinness provided a range of textures including his trademark National Steel Guitar and the gentle folk-ballad "A Now and Then Thing".

 

The same month, EMI released an EP of earlier unissued 1963–66 Paul Jones era songs, titled As Was (a pun on the title of their new 1966 album, As Is) - which included : "I Can't Believe What You Say"  /  "That's All I Ever Want From You Baby"  /  "Driva Man"  / and "It's Getting Late".

Their next single, "Semi-Detached, Suburban Mr James", reached #2 in November 1966, this was followed in December by 'Instrumental Assassination' - another EP of covers, including : "Sunny"  /  "Wild Thing"  /  "Get Away"  /  and "With A Girl Like You". The songs featured original member Dave Richmond on double bass, but not Mike d'Abo, suggesting the sessions dated from a little earlier in 1966.

 
   

In April 1967, "Ha Ha Said The Clown" (b/w "Feeling So Good"), reached #4, but their next single, an instrumental version of Tommy Roe's "Sweet Pea" (b/w "One Way") only reached No. 36 in May, and the follow-up, Randy Newman's "So Long, Dad" (b/w "Funniest Gig"), with its intricate keyboard arrangement, missed the charts altogether when it was released as a single in August 1967.

The Single :

"Pretty Flamingo" was written by Mark Barkan. The original demo of the song was recorded by noted New York City vocalist Jimmy Radcliffe in the style of The Drifters, but songwriter Mark Barkan was dissatisfied with the overly produced results and had Radcliffe recut the song with a pared-down arrangement. The song became a hit when Manfred Mann's recording of it was released as a single in 1966.



The single reached number one in the UK Singles Chart on 5 May 1966, remaining at the top for 3 weeks. It also spent four weeks at the top of the Irish charts.

Manfred Mann's recording was a minor hit in the United States where it spent eight weeks on Billboard 's Hot 100 chart, peaking at number 29 during August 1966. The recording featured future Cream bassist Jack Bruce, who briefly joined the band in 1965.

Other Versions include :   Gene Pitney (1966)  /  The Everly Brothers (1966)  /  The Vanguards (1966)  /  Mel Tormé (1966)  /  Gerry and the Pacemakers (1966)  /  Tommy Roe (1966)  /  The Ravers (1966)  /  Harold Betters (1966)  /  "Kaunis flamingo" by Pekka Loukiala (1966)  /  "Sur notre plage" by Richard Anthony (1966)  /  "El Gran Flamingo" by Los Mustang (1966)  /  The Sandpipers (1969)  /  Bruce Springsteen (1975)  /  Rod Stewart (1976)  /  Rolf Harris (1997)  /  The Queers (1998)  /  Paul Weller (2008)  /  Danny McEvoy (2011)  /  Ray Paul (2016)

On This Day  :

1 May : Last British concert by The Beatles during the NME Poll winners Awards at at the Empire Pool in Wembley, London
6 May : "Moors Murderers" Myra Hindley and Ian Brady are sentenced to life imprisonment.
9 May : China performs nuclear test at Lop Nur
10 May : Jonathan Edwards, Olympic triple jumper, born Jonathan David Edwards in Westminster, London
16 May : The Beach Boys release "Pet Sounds" album
13 May : Darius Rucker, (Hootie & the Blowfish), born Darius Carlos Rucker in Charleston, South Carolina
13 May : Alison Goldfrapp, (Goldfrapp), born Alison Elizabeth Margaret Goldfrapp in London
14 May : Megan Lloyd George, Welsh politician, dies at 64
14 May : Fab Morvan, (Milli Vanilli), born in Paris, France
16 May : Randolph Turpin, boxer, shot dead in his home, age 37.
16 May : Janet Jackson, singer, born Janet Damita Jo Jackson in Gary, Indiana
21 May : "Time for Singing" opens at Broadway Theater NYC
21 May : Muhammad Ali beats Henry Cooper in 6 rounds to win heavyweight boxing title

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

                    

[purlieu]

This is pleasant enough, but there's a definite dip in quality from the early days of British Invasion stuff in recent posts. I'm not sure how much of it actually topped the charts (probably very little), but the psychedelic era is definitely overdue by this point.

[Psmith]

And bass Klaus is more famous for being matey with the Fab Four and creating the Revolver cover :)

[Satchmo Distel]

Tomorrow Never Knows was finished on April 22nd so The Beatles were pulling even further ahead of the British Invasion field at this moment. Rain is just about to be released as the flipside of their next No. 1.

I do think 1966 has more great chart toppers than any other year ever but they are not British invasion records in the main. More of them are the US hitting back and/or pure songcraft like the Dusty one, which is a throwback to the 1962 songwriters era.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Pretty Flamingo is such a gorgeous song, it's so pure and sparkling. Actual perfect pop.

[daf]

God Knows how I missed this in my 'Other Versions' section - as it's probably the first time I ever heard the song!

Elvis Costello with Glenn Tilbrook, Chris Difford, Nick Lowe (1989)

[The Culture Bunker]

Eh, I quite like the chug of the guitar but the song feels incredibly slight to me, and doesn't really go anywhere. Much prefer what I think is their final #1.

edit: If I rated the Manfreds version as about 4/10, I'd give an extra mark for the above linked run through by Elvis, Nick and the Squeeze lads.

[daf]

Girlfriend, it's a Comma, I know, I know, it's serious . . .

215.  The Rolling Stones - Paint It, Black



From : 22 – 28 May 1966
Weeks : 1
Flip side : Long, Long While
Bonus 1 : Ready Steady Go
Bonus 2 : Colour TV

The Story So Far, and Slightly Further : 

In May 1966, The Rolling Stones released Paint It Black as a single, and appeared for the last time on British TV's Thank Your Lucky Stars.

 

In May, Brian Jones spends time in Marbella, Spain; Bill Wyman and his family spend time in Majorca, Spain, and Mick Jagger and Andrew Oldham visit Beach Boy Bruce Johnston at his hotel room in London, where they are played the just-released Pet Sounds album. 


On 26 May, The Rolling Stones and girlfriends/wives attend Bob Dylan's concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and the following day perform live on Ready, Steady, Go.

On 1 June, 1966, Brian Jones joins The Beatles in their recording of Yellow Submarine at EMI Studios in London. 
 On 8 June, Mick Jagger collapses from exhaustion and is ordered rest. He moves into a new apartment near Regents Park in London. 


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Their next US single, "Mother's Little Helper" was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, and recorded at the RCA Records studios in Hollywood, California, in March 1966.

It first appeared as the opening track to the United Kingdom version of their 1966 album Aftermath. It was released as a single in the United States and peaked at #8 on the Billboard chart in 1966, while the B-side "Lady Jane" peaked at number 24.

 

The song deals with the sudden popularity of prescribed calming drugs among housewives, and the potential hazards of overdose or addiction. The drug in question is variously assumed to be meprobamate (Miltown) or diazepam (Valium).

The song is based around folksy chords and an eastern-flavoured guitar riff sounding like a sitar, but is a dual-slide riff played on two electric 12-string guitars by Brian Jones and Keith Richard. Keith Richard has noted that the ending of the song was the idea of Bill Wyman, who also contributed a powerful and distinctive bass riff.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On 23 June, The Rolling Stones arrive in New York City for their fifth North American tour, and the following day hold a press conference aboard a yacht in New York City, and spend time afterward with Bob Dylan at a recording studio, then start their tour with their first ever performance at Manning Bowl in Lynn, Massachusetts. 
  


Mick : "Vietnam has changed America. It has divided and made people think. There's a lot of opposition - much more than you think, because all the opposition is laughed at in American magazines. It's made to look ridiculous. But there is real opposition. Before, Americans used to accept everything, my country right or wrong. But now a lot of  people are saying my country should be right, not wrong."

Between 25 June and 10 July 1966, the group performs in arenas and stadiums in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Baltimore,  New York City, Syracuse, Detroit and Chicago, Hartford, Connecticut; Buffalo, New York; Atlantic 
City and Asbury Park, New Jersey; Virginia; Indianapolis; Toronto and Montreal.  


Mick : "It was unbelievable (in Montreal). We've never seen anything like it before. I was disgusted. There were about 30 bouncers when we appeared - all of them huge blokes, wrestlers, I think. They were punching people for no reason at all and then throwing them out. One fight broke out at the front of the theatre while we were playing and 6 of the chaps set on one kid. It was terrible. It was going on in front of 12 000 people, too. In the end we stopped playing because the fans were booing and hissing and pointing at the bouncers. We joined in - and after the show, had to run for our lives because the wrestlers tried to get up on the stage after us. I was scared out of my life. I thought we were going to get it that time."

On 2 July 1966,  The Rolling Stones' released the U.S. version of Aftermath, their sixth North American studio album. On the same day, following their concert at New York City's Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group witnesses unknown Jimi Hendrix - calling himself Jimmy James - performing at a club. 
On 6 July, In Syracuse, Brian Jones attracts controversy by allegedly dragging an American flag across the floor.

  


Keith : "To some extents the hatchets with Brian were buried on that '66 tour.... Brian brought Anita Pallenberg along half-way through somewhere in Texas. We were totally wrecked every day on real good Mexican grass. It was much easier to get along with Brian because we were all into the same thing. Mick too. This was like a rapprochement with Brian. Brian was very happy that everybody was getting along. We knew this was going to be our last American tour for a bit, so this was more of a celebration."

Between 16-18 July, The Rolling Stones spend some days off from the tour relaxing in Los Angeles. 


(Tour manager) Michael Gruber : "One night at the Bel-Air in Los Angeles, Brian and Anita had to get off by beating the shit out of each other. He'd take a chair and bash it over her head. Cary Grant is in the next bungalow. He doesn't want to hear you fucking cunt and televisions being smashed over champagne and caviar. About 4 AM the manager came to my bungalow. He tells me one of our party is destroying their bungalow. I told him not to worry as we'd pay the damages. When I go to Brian and Anita's bungalow it looked demolished, like a truck had ran through it."

In August, following the end their 1966 North American Tour in Honolulu, Hawaii, The Rolling Stones start work on their next single and album at RCA Studios in Los Angeles.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys visits the group in the studio in Los Angeles, where he  hears the track "My Obsession". The Stones then proceed to get Wilson high on marijuana.


In September, the group convene at  IBC Studios in London, to continue work for their next single, and Brian Jones starts work on the soundtrack for the German film 'A Degree of Murder'. 


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On 23 September 1966, The Rolling Stones' release the single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow! (b/w "Who's Driving Your Plane?").


  
  
  
  

Mick :  "Have You Seen Your Mother? was like the ultimate freakout. We came to a full stop after that. I just couldn't make it with that anymore; what more could we say? We couldn't possibly have kept it up like that. You just drain out totally. Because it's just the end of a certain period and we just had to stop."

"Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, it was recorded in the late summer of 1966 during early sessions for what would become their Between the Buttons album.

It is the first Rolling Stones song to feature a horn section, which was arranged by Mike Leander. The group have said that they were unhappy with the final cut, bemoaning the loss of the original cut's strong rhythm section. It is also the first song Richard is said to have written on piano even though he does not play piano on the final cut. Jack Nitzsche, friend of the band and their occasional pianist, is credited in the session logs to piano, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones is also credited in the logs for playing the piano. But when the band mimed the song on The Ed Sullivan Show on 11 September 1966, shorty before its release, Keith mimes the piano with Brian miming the guitar.



The American picture sleeve includes a photo of the band dressed in drag, shot by Jerry Schatzberg. Peter Whitehead's promotional film for the single was one of the first music videos. The Stones only performed the song live over a span of twelve days during their 1966 tour.




It was the first Stones' single to be released simultaneously in both the UK and the US, and reached #5 in the UK and #9 in the US charts. Their failure to score another number 1 with the single was the subject of some comment in the press :

 


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In late September 1966, the group undertake their 1966 Tour of Great-Britain - their last for over four years, with opening artists Ike & Tina Turner and The Yardbirds among others.

Mick : "It's good to be touring again. When we toured last time, we'd done so much we had become blasé about it. But we haven't toured Britain for a year now, so it's fresh again. I'm very surprised at the fans - I thought they'd be older but they seem as young as ever. I never expected this sort of reception. It's a knockout."

Brian : "A new generation came to see us on tour with Ike and Tina Turner. Youngsters who had never seen us before, from the age of about 12, were turning up at the concerts. It was like it was three years ago, when the excitement was all new."

Keith : "The tour has been an enormous success because it's brought the young people back again. In the It's All Over Now era, we were getting adults filling up half the theatre and it was getting all draggy. We were in danger of becoming respectable! But now the new wave has arrived, rushing the stage just like old times."



In early October, the group perform on Top of the Pops and make their last appearance on British TV's Ready, Steady, Go.

The same month, Marianne Faithfull separates from her husband John Dunbar to continue her relationship with Mick Jagger, and the group work on recordings of the British tour with Glyn Johns in London for a live album.

Bill : "Got Live we recorded on 4-track. Some of the vocals were overdubbed later and some of the guitars, too. I remember Mick and Keith going into the studio a few times on that one. Charlie and I didn't do any studio stuff so the rhythm section is pretty much from our concerts. Plus there are two studio cuts, of course, Fortune Teller and I've Been Loving You Too Long with audience tracks overdubbed on them. Don't forget in those days we didn't do very long shows, we used to play 25 minutes at the most if you or we were lucky. Kids would get onstage, attack me, attack Brian, Charlie, Mick and Keith. So you would ahve the guitar go out for twenty seconds, drums, etc., half a minute where you would lose the bass or drums completely. Out of six shows you would be lucky to get together a full set LP."

In October the group are reported to be working on soundtrack music for their film adaptation of the Dave Wallis novel Only Lovers Left Alive.

 

In November, Brian Jones joins Anita Pallenberg in Munich, West Germany, who is shooting 'A Degree of Murder'; the compilation album Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) is released in the UK; and the group continue working on their next single and album at Olympic Sound Studios in London.

 
   

Keith : "All we wanted was to catch up on everything we hadn't been able to do. Although we made money we were still living in rented apartments or hotels. Consequently we hadn't been able to appreciate the position we were in. By '66 we reached a point where another change was coming. Over the next two years we would get there. We needed to be part of the audience for a while. We just needed to enjoy ourselves and take stock of what was happening. We had lots of personal things to deal with too. Brian was becoming impossible to work with. In every other way he was totally alien to the band. Much of that though was caused by the non-stop work."

On 10 December 1966, The Rolling Stones' first live album, Got Live If You Want It!, is released.

 

A week later, Mick Jagger breaks up with Chrissie Shrimpton, who tries to commit suicide and is hospitalized.


   

In late December 1966, Charlie and Shirley Watts holiday in the United States, while Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg meet up with Keith Richards and Linda Keith in Paris for Christmas. 
 


Keith : "It was the first time where we didn't have to think about getting to a gig or anything like that. That was one of my real concentrated periods of pulling chicks as Brian and Anita were together and Mick was getting into Marianne. And we were all enjoying getting stoned. As we started to get out of this stupor. I remember Linda Keith was there. And I suddenly realized the relationship had been over for months as far as I was concerned. I was not interested in starting anything serious. I was having too good a time on the loose. We spend the whole of Christmas on our hands and knees. We'd conned the hotel nurse into thinking we couldn't sleep so she'd given us all these downers that were very, very strong... We used to take two pills at a time and everybody would crash out, sleep, and order another Christmas dinner."

In early January, Bill and his wife Diane decide to separate. 
Diane goes to live in South Africa and leaves him with their son. 

Charlie : "Our scene is really the recording scene. Producing and writing and playing - trying to keep ahead of the rest. This is much more exciting than the show-business aspect."

Mick : "We're at a funny stage. We are just making records and have time to gather our thoughts. It's impossible to do that when you're dashing around all over the place, worried about getting to gigs and things. I don't really know whether it's a good thing or not. I know I didn't enjoy last year very much. I enjoyed the things I did but I didn't enjoy things so much as a whole. It's true we didn't sell so many discs in England during 1966 as in the previous year, but neither did the other groups. As far as abroad goes, America is okay and we broke the Italian and German markets in 1966. We haven't quietened down. It's madder now than ever before. We couldn't possibly go on doing ballrooms and cinema appearances all the time. All the groups seem to be cooling off in this respect."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On 13 January 1967, their next single, the double-A side "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" was released. 
  
  
  


 

"Let's Spend the Night Together", written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, was recorded in December 1966 at the RCA Records studio in Hollywood, California. Recording engineer Glyn Johns recounts that while mixing "Let's Spend the Night Together", Oldham was trying to get a certain sound by clicking his fingers. Two policemen showed up, stating that the front door was open and that they were checking to see if everything was all right. At first, Oldham asked them to hold his earphones while he snapped his fingers but then Johns said they needed a more wooden sound. The policemen suggested their truncheons and Mick Jagger took the truncheons into the studio to record the claves-like sound that can be heard during the quiet break at one minute 40 seconds into the song.

The song features piano by Rolling Stones contributor Jack Nitzsche, organ by Brian Jones, drums by Charlie Watts, piano, electric guitar and bass by Richards, lead vocals by Jagger and backing vocals from both Jagger and Richard. Usual bassist Bill Wyman does not appear on the recording.



On The Ed Sullivan Show, the band was initially refused permission to perform the number. Sullivan himself told Jagger, "Either the song goes or you go". A compromise was reached to substitute the words "let's spend some time together" in place of "let's spend the night together" ; Jagger agreed to change the lyrics but ostentatiously rolled his eyes at the TV camera while singing them, as did Bill Wyman.

When the Rolling Stones, following their performance of the song, returned on stage, they were all dressed up in Nazi uniforms with swastikas, which caused Sullivan to angrily order them to return to their dressing rooms to change back into their performance clothes, at which point they left the studio altogether. As a result of this incident, Sullivan announced that the Rolling Stones would be banned from performing on his show again.

The other side of the single, "Ruby Tuesday" was a number-one hit in the United States and reached number three in the United Kingdom.  Keith Richard explained that the lyrics were about Linda Keith, his girlfriend in the mid-1960s:

Mick : "That's a wonderful song. It's just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but I always enjoy singing it."

Due to the controversial nature of "Let's Spend the Night Together" lyrics, "Ruby Tuesday" earned more airplay, and that side ended up topping the US chart, while the "Let's Spend the Night Together" languished at #55. In the UK, both sides of the single, sensibly, reached #3 in January 1967.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

'Between the Buttons', the group's fifth British and seventh American studio album was released on 20 January 1967 in the UK and 11 February in the US.

By the time principal recording occurred on the album, founder Brian Jones had all but abandoned his original role as guitarist, instead playing a wide variety of other instruments. It would be the last album produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, who had to this point acted as the band's manager and produced all of their prior albums.

Sessions for the album began on 3 August 1966 and lasted until the 11th at Los Angeles' RCA Studios during the Rolling Stones' 1966 American Tour. The second block of recording sessions for Between the Buttons began on 8 November at the newly opened Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, London, alternating between Olympic and Pye Studios until 26 November. The album was recorded using 4-track machines, with the initial sessions pre-mixed to make room on the remaining tracks for overdubs.

Mick : "We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times we lost the sound of it. The songs sounded so great, but later on I was really disappointed with it. I don't know, it just isn't any good. 'Back Street Girl' is about the only one I like."

The photo shoot for the album cover took place in November 1966 on Primrose Hill in North London. The photographer was Gered Mankowitz, and the shoot took place at 5:30 in the morning following an all night recording session at Olympic Studios.

Using a home-made camera filter constructed of black card, glass and Vaseline, Mankowitz created the effect of the Stones dissolving into their surroundings. The goal of the shoot was, in Mankowitz's words, "to capture the ethereal, druggy feel of the time; that feeling at the end of the night when dawn was breaking and they'd been up all night making music, stoned." Brian Jones' disheveled and gaunt appearance on the cover disturbed many of his fans.

Gered Mankowitz : "Brian was lurking in his collar, I was frustrated because it felt like we were on the verge of something really special and he was messing it up. But the way Brian appeared to not give a shit is exactly what the band was about."

The back cover of the album featured a six-panel cartoon accompanied by a rhythmic poem drawn by drummer Charlie Watts. When Watts asked Oldham what the title of the album would be, he told him it was "between the buttons", a term meaning "undecided". Watts gave the phrase to the title of his cartoon which in turn became the title of the album.

 

Between the Buttons, like many of the Rolling Stones '60s albums, differed between its UK and US versions. Songs common to both included : "Yesterday's Papers"  /  "My Obsession"  /  "Connection"  /  "She Smiled Sweetly"  /  "Cool, Calm & Collected"  /  "All Sold Out"  /  "Who's Been Sleeping Here?"  /  "Complicated"  /  "Miss Amanda Jones"  /  and "Something Happened to Me Yesterday"

The UK only songs were "Back Street Girl" and "Please Go Home", while the US version replaced those two songs with the recent singles "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday".

The UK edition was issued on 20 January 1967, and reached number three in the UK charts, while the US version was released on 11 February 1967, and peaked at #2 in the US album charts.

On 22 January, The Rolling Stones appeared for the first time on British TV's prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium, but caused controversy by refusing to participate in the tradition of going on the roundabout at the end of the show. 
  


Mick : "What I want to do is have a show for young people which is not just pop stars coming on stage singing their latest recordings. I want it to include all kinds of acts - a stage show - except at the end we'll go round on a revolving stage, leaping about for an hour to make up for the Palladium. Oh, and the ice creams will all have acid in them - that's my brother's idea! I suppose we could take an elephant on stage and break that up!"

At the end of January, As their relationship becomes public, Mick flies to Italy to join Marianne Faithfull, then takes a holiday with her in the south of France, and Bill Wyman with new girlfriend Astrid Lundstrom spend time in Spain. 


   


Astrid Lundstrom : "I was immediately aware of the split in the band: Mick and Keith together, and Brian, Bill and Charlie on the other side. I found it frustrating to be with somebody who was able to be that passive. I felt Bill should be more outspoken, not put up with as much as he did, and I told him so. He said he tried but didn't get very far."

In early February, Mick Jagger issues a press statement announcing he will sue the British newspaper News of the World for alleging he revealed using drugs. (Brian Jones had been mistaken for Mick Jagger.)

On 10 February, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard attend the orchestra overdub on the Beatles' A Day in the Life
 at EMI Studios in London, and the following day, Brian Jones does more soundtrack work for A Degree of Murder at Olympic Studios.



On 11-12 February 1967, Keith Richard holds a weekend party at his home Redlands, with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, George and Patti Harrison, art deal Robert Fraser and others. Tipped off by the News of the World, the police arrive on the premises (after the Harrisons have left) and conduct a search for drugs. The police confiscate pills from Mick Jagger's coat, heroin belonging to Robert Fraser and cannabis resin. 



Keith : "There's a big knock at the door. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everyone has managed to find their way back to the house. TV is on with the sound off and the record player is on. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself up in a rug and is watching the box. Bang bang bang, this big knock at the door and I go to answer it. Oh look, there's lots of little ladies and gentleman outside. He says, Read this, and I'm going, Wha? wha? All right. We were just gliding off from a 12-hour trip. You know how that freaks people out when they walk in on you. The vibes were so funny for them. I told one of the women with them they'd brought to search the ladies, Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion? Because you're ruining the tapestries. We were playing it like that. They tried to get us to turn the record player off but we said, No. We won't turn it off but we'll turn it down. As they went, as they started going out the door, somebody put on Dylan's Rainy Day Women really loud. Everybody must get stoned. And that was it."
 
Mick : "The Stones were good targets. We made good copy. It was the idea of degenerative moral standards. They were looking for scapegoats for some sort of generational lifestyle."




Two days later, Mick and Keith meet with a lawyer concerning the bust. 
It is decided it would be safer for the group if Mick, Keith and Brian were out of the country.

Keith : "We had just started to turn on to acid. Yeah, we had picked it up in America in '66, on that last tour in the summer and we came home and just laid back and started to get it on. We had been working for a long time without stopping, without thinking, for along time. For three years. The bust ended it. We knew it was going to be heavy. . .

"The English are very strange. They're tolerant up to a point where they're told not to be. You get to a point up there where somebody turns around and swings a little finger. They've had it in their hands so long, the power. They haven't been fucked since Cromwell, man. First they don't like young kids with a lot of money. But as long as you don't bother them, that's cool. But we bothered them. We bothered 'em because of the way we looked, the way we'd act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever. Whereas the Beatles had. They'd gone along with it so far, with the MBEs and shaking hands. Whenever we were asked about things like that we'd say, Fuck it. Don't want to know about things like that. Bollocks. Don't need it.

"After the bust everyone's reaction was to get out of England. Although the bust happened in February we weren't charged then. They just took some substances. We weren't even arrested. For a while it was hoped that the lawyers could get the whole thing dropped. In the meantime everybody thought the best idea was to get the fuck out of England so nothing else could happen. We decided to go to Morocco."

On 26 February, Keith flies to Paris, and is joined by Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, and the next day they start driving in Keith's Bentley down towards Morocco. Brian Jones becomes ill and is hospitalized in Toulouse, France. 



Mick : "I was thinking about this the other day, and I don't really think I was suited to heavy drug behavior, to be perfectly honest. But I don't mind talking about it. It's hard to believe that you did so many drugs for so long. That's what I find really hard. And I didn't really consider it. You know, it was eating and drinking and taking drugs and having sex. It was just part of life. It wasn't really anything special. It was just a bit of a bore, really. Everyone took drugs the whole time, and you were out of it the whole time. It wasn't a special event . . . All these drugs had tremendous influence on behaviour. I think half of starting to take drugs in that early period was to kind of place yourself outside of normal society."



On 4 March 1967, Anita Pallenberg flies back to Toulouse to see Brian Jones; Keith Richard and his driver Tom Keylock ferry to North Africa and drive to Tangier, Morocco, where they meet friends, including Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs and Michael Cooper. 
A few Days later Brian and Anita Pallenberg fly back to London where Brian is re-hospitalized. 


Keith : "By then I'd given up on Brian. I was disgusted with the way he treated Anita Pallenberg and the way he behaved. I knew there wasn't any possibility of any long-term friendship lasting between Brian, me and Mick. But then Anita had had enough. Besides we were really into each other... With Brian being in between Anita and I for 10 days we both realized there was something more to it than just a bit of a laugh on the journey... "

On 25 March 1967, The Rolling Stones start their 1967 European Tour, their last tour of the era, with first-time concerts in Helsingborg and Orebro, Sweden.

Keith : "Brian nearly didn't make the European tour. We weren't talking again. Having been through that before it was like being back to square one, except that now he resented me bitterly for taking his chick."

In April, the group perform in Paris, followed by a show in Warsaw - their first ever concert in a Communist country.
  

Mick : "I wanted the kids in Poland to have the chance to listen to us. The kids get their records from western European countries, and they hear us on the radio. I'd love to go to Leningrad too."

 

Keith : "Like in Poland, in Warsaw in ' 67. Nearest thing to that Long Beach riot (1965) I ever saw...  We get there, behind the Iron Curtain, do the whole bit, all very uptight. There's army at the airport. Get to the hotel which is very jail-like. Lots of security people about, a lot like America. And it gets even more like America as it goes along. We're invited by the Minister of Culture, on a cultural visit, and we're playing in the Palace of Culture. We get there to do our gig. We go on. Honksi-de-boyski, boysk. Zee Rolling Stones-ki. And who's got the best seats in the house right down front? The songs and daughters of the hierarchy of the Communist Party. They're sitting there with their diamonds and their pearls... and their fingers in their ears.

"About 3 numbers, and I say, Fuckin' stop playing, Charlie. You fuckin' lot, get out and let those bastards in the back down front. So they went. About 4 rows just walked out. All the mamma and daddy's boys. Outside, they've got water cannons... All the cops had white helmets and the big long batons... There were 2000 kids that couldn't get in because of the sons and daughters. They wouldn't have had a riot there if they'd let the kids in. Only later I found out Poland is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. There can't be many bands that have played behind the Iron Curtain."

Between 14-17 April, The Stones end their European tour with their first ever concerts in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Greece. 
  




Bill : "We had another madness in Greece in early '67. They put us in the Panathinaikos Football Stadium, with the crowds in seats and 3 rows of police, so they weren't allowed to leave the seats. Of course as soon as we started they all poured onto the pitch, running and tackling the cops and they stopped the show about 3 times. And the police were beating them with batons, really viciously. Tom Keylock was with us because he worked for Keith and we had all these big bunches of flowers we were going to distribute but we couln't get them to the crowd. So Keylock says I'll do it. He took two armfuls and jumped offstage and ran and had a fight with the police; they broke his nose or wrist. The rest all left for England, while I stayed for a holiday and got stuck there, because two days later there was the military coup - that's probably why the police were so uptight."

The Single :

"Paint It, Black" was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, it was first released as a single by the Rolling Stones on 7 May 1966, and later included as the opening track to the US version of their 1966 album Aftermath.



The single reached number 1 in both the US and the UK Singles Chart. The song became the Rolling Stones' third number-one hit single in the US and sixth in the UK. Since its initial release, the song has remained influential as the first number-one hit featuring a sitar.

The song's lyrics are, for the most part, meant to describe blackness and depression through the use of colour-based metaphors. Initially, "Paint It, Black" was written as a standard pop arrangement, humorously compared by Mick Jagger to "Songs for Jewish weddings". The song describes the extreme grief suffered by one stunned by the sudden and unexpected loss of a wife, lover or partner. It is often claimed that Jagger took inspiration from novelist James Joyce's 1922 book Ulysses, taking the excerpt "I have to turn my head until my darkness goes", referring to the novel's theme of a worldwide view of desperation and desolation. The song itself came to fruition when the band's leader Brian Jones took an interest in Moroccan music.

"Paint It Black" came at a pivotal period in the Rolling Stones' recording history, a time that saw the songwriting collaboration of Jagger and Richard assert itself as the principal composer of the band's original material. This is evident from the sessions for the album Aftermath, where for the first time the duo penned the complete track list.

Brian Jones, overshadowed by Jagger and Richard, grew bored with attempting to write songs, as well as conventional guitar melodies. To alleviate the boredom, Jones explored eastern instruments, more specifically the sitar, to bolster the group's musical texture and complexity. A multi-instrumentalist, Jones was able to develop a tune from the sitar in a short amount of time, largely due to his studies under Harihar Rao, a disciple of Ravi Shankar. Not long after a discussion with George Harrison, who had recently recorded sitar on "Norwegian Wood", Jones arranged basic melodies with the instrument that, over time, morphed into the one featured in "Paint It Black".



The master take of "Paint It Black" was recorded on 8 March 1966, at RCA Studios in Los Angeles, with record producer Andrew Loog Oldham present throughout the process. Much of the early recorded arrangements, and keys of the track were modeled after The Animals' version of "The House of the Rising Sun", but The Rolling Stones were dissatisfied with the song, and considered scrapping it. However, while twiddling with a Hammond organ, Bill Wyman searched for a heavier bass sound, while playing the part on his knees. Wyman's playing clicked with the group, and inspired the up-tempo and Eastern pentatonic melody. By all accounts, the sitar was brought into the mix when Harihar Rao happened to walk in the studio with the instrument in hand.

 

"Paint It Black" was released to the US on 7 May 1966, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 during a stay of 11 weeks. In the UK, the song was released on 13 May 1966 and also became a number-one hit on the UK Singles Chart throughout a chart stay of ten weeks. It was originally released as "Paint It, Black", the comma being a grammatical error by Decca Records, but, nonetheless, stirred controversy among fans over its racial interpretation.

Other Versions include :  The Standells (1966)  /  Chris Farlowe (1966)  /  Tomcats (1966)  /  The Folkswingers  (1966)  /  "Marie douceur, Marie colère" by Marie Laforêt (1966)  /  "Tutto nero" by Caterina Caselli (1966)  /  "Pintada de Preto" by Os Baobás (1966)  /  "Todo Negro" by Los Salvajes (1966)  /  "Píntalo negro" by Los Sprinters (1966)  /  Eric Burdon & The Animals (1967)  /  Joe Pass (1967)  /  "Rot und Schwarz" by Karel Gott (1969)  /  Flamin' Groovies (1978)  /  Mo-Dettes (1980)  /  Echo & The Bunnymen (1985)  /  Deep Purple (1988)  /  The Feelies (1990)  /  U2 (1992)  /  Band of Susans (1992)  /  Vanessa Carlton (2002)  /  Ali Campbell (2010)  /  Sinfonico Honolulu (2011)  /  Danny McEvoy (2011)  /  Sungha Jung (2011)  /  The Coal Porters (2012)  /  Phoenix City All-stars (2013)  /  Giuseppe Torrisi (2015)  /  The OzSkas (2015)  /  a robot (2016)  /  Giulia Marta Vallar (2017)  /  MonaLisa Twins (2018)  /  Spinning Jenny (2017)  /  8 Bit Arcade (2018)  /  Jamie Dupuis (2018)

On This Day  :

24 May : Eric Cantona, footballer, born Eric Daniel Pierre Cantona in Marseille, France
24 May : "Mame" opens at Winter Garden Theater NYC
26 May : Helena Bonham Carter, actress, born in Islington, London.
26 May : Zola Budd, "British" Olympic runner, born in Bloemfontein South Africa
26 May :Guyana (formerly British Guiana) declares independence from UK
28 May : Dmitri Shostakovich's 11th String quartet premieres in Leningrad

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

             

[Jollity]

My favourite Rolling Stones song.

(I may change my mind later)

[jobotic]

Wow, looking forward to working my way through all those versions. Thanks.


(you missed out Fennesz though)

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

One of the Stones' greatest songs, it perfectly encapsulates the nihilism and genuine sense of danger they had in those days. It was all a pose, of course, but that doesn't matter. Paint It Black (comma be damned) is relentless in its intensity; Eastern-flavoured proto-punk (in attitude, if not in sound).

It's such a brilliant band performance, too, everyone contributes something of note.

[daf]

(you missed out Fennesz though)

Is that the same song?

(loads more I didn't include - here's my crib sheet listing over 200 covers)

[jobotic]

Is that the same song?

Yeah I'm not sure to honest. It does use the original. Haven't heard it in years

ooh Acid Mothers Temple, didn't know that.

[purlieu]

Yeah, it's a decent one that, despite the angst.

[Satchmo Distel]

One of the Stones' greatest songs, it perfectly encapsulates the nihilism and genuine sense of danger they had in those days. It was all a pose, of course, but that doesn't matter. Paint It Black (comma be damned) is relentless in its intensity; Eastern-flavoured proto-punk (in attitude, if not in sound).

It's such a brilliant band performance, too, everyone contributes something of note.

Yes, totally agree, much darker than The Beatles or anyone else were doing, until The Doors went down a similar but more monotonous path.

I'd also give a shout to Ruby Tuesday, such a brilliantly rich but dark arrangement and recorded earlier than Strawberry Fields Forever.

[daf]

Scatting with a piece of shit, it's . . .

216.  Frank Sinatra - Strangers In The Night



From : 29 May – 18 June 1966
Weeks : 3
Flip side : My Kind Of Town

The Story So Far :

In February 1954, Frank Sinatra released "Songs for Young Lovers" - his seventh studio album overall, but, crucially his first on Capitol Records. It was issued as an 8-song, 10" album, and was the first Sinatra album not to have a 78rpm multi-disc release collected into a book-style 'album' (hence the origin of the name).

The album followed a formula similar to Sinatra's previous releases for Columbia - rather than compiling a potentially inconsistent set of former hits, a set of newly recorded songs would be arranged around a specific theme or concept. Songs featured on the album included : "My Funny Valentine"  /  "A Foggy Day" /  "I Get a Kick Out of You" and  "They Can't Take That Away from Me"

The tracks were conducted by Nelson Riddle, the sessions for this album and the preceding singles ("I've Got the World on a String" and "From Here to Eternity") initiating a long-standing collaboration between the arranger and singer that would continue for the next twenty years.

 

Released in August 1954, "Swing Easy!", his Eighth album, was another 8 track 10" album. The album was Sinatra's second for Capitol and the first to feature arrangements by Nelson Riddle (Riddle had merely conducted on the previous album).

Sinatra came to consider Riddle "the greatest arranger in the world", and Riddle, who considered Sinatra "a perfectionist", offered equal praise of the singer, observing, "It's not only that his intuitions as to tempi, phrasing, and even configuration are amazingly right, but his taste is so impeccable ... there is still no one who can approach him."

Again, the songs were all standards, including  "Just One of Those Things"  /  "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams",  and  "All of Me" - which the singer felt benefited from the new thematic setting, new arrangements, and his increasingly playful and textured vocal style.

In 1955, the eight songs were combined with the eight songs from the 10" album 'Songs for Young Lovers' on a new, 16 song, 12" LP, also called "Swing Easy!"

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"In the Wee Small Hours", released in April 1955 deal with themes such as loneliness, introspection, lost love, failed relationships, depression and night life. Inspired by having to get up for a piss in the middle of the night, it was the first concept album of his to make a single persuasive statement, with an extended program and melancholy mood.

 

By the time he recorded the album, Sinatra witnessed the end of several relationships. He and his first wife, Nancy Barbato, separated on Valentine's Day 1950. While still married, he began a relationship with Ava Gardner. After he and Barbato divorced in October 1951, he married Gardner ten days later. But they were both jealous of the other's extramarital affairs. The relationship deteriorated during the recording of Songs for Young Lovers.

Set against his then-current relationship troubles, Sinatra set out to record "angst-ridden" songs involving lost love, including : "I Get Along Without You Very Well"  /  "Mood Indigo"  /  and  "Glad to Be Unhappy".

Sinatra was very tense during the recording of the album, reportedly breaking down and crying after the master take of "When Your Lover Has Gone" - the soppy twat!

Nelson Riddle : "You have to be right on mettle all the time. The man, himself, somehow draws everything out of you, and he has the same effect on the boys in the band. They know he means business, so they pull everything out."

His UK singles in 1955 included : "You My Love" - #13 in June  /  "Learnin' The Blues" - #2 in August  / and "Not As A Stranger" - #18 in September 1955.

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His next album, "Songs for Swingin' Lovers!", was once again arranged by Nelson Riddle, and took a different tack from the previous album, recording existing pop standards in a hipper, jazzier fashion.

Songs included "You Make Me Feel So Young", "Makin' Whoopee",  and "How About You?". The album also featured a recording of "I've Got You Under My Skin" by Cole Porter that took Sinatra a reported 22 takes to perfect.

The original cover had Sinatra facing away from the young couple, but in 1957 Capitol altered the cover with a new image of Sinatra facing the couple.

 

Giving his pipes a rest, his next album, Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color was an album of short instrumental 'tone poems' by eight notable mid-20th century Hollywood composers including Gordon Jenkins ("Green"), Billy May ("Purple"), Nelson Riddle ("Gold"), and Elmer Bernstein ("Silver").

The album was conducted by Sinatra and marked the first musical collaboration between Sinatra and Gordon Jenkins. Each composition was inspired by the poetry of Norman Sickel.

The instrumental album has been interpreted to be a catharsis to his failed relationship with Ava Gardner. Also that year, Sinatra sang at the Democratic National Convention, and performed with The Dorsey Brothers for a week soon afterwards at the Paramount Theatre.

 

'This Is Sinatra!' followed in 1956 - a collection of Sinatra's singles and B-sides recorded between 1953 and 1955 with Nelson Riddle. The compilation album included some of his most memorable songs, including : "Young at Heart", "I've Got the World on a String" and "South of the Border".

His February 1956 recording sessions inaugurated the studios at the Capitol Records Building, complete with a 56-piece symphonic orchestra. His recordings of "Night and Day", "Oh! Look At Me Now" and "From This Moment On" revealed powerful sexual overtones, achieved through the mounting tension and release of Sinatra's teasing vocal lines, while his recording of "River, Stay 'Way from My Door" in April demonstrated his skills as a syncopational improviser.

Nelson Riddle said that Sinatra took particular delight in singing "The Lady is a Tramp", commenting that "he always sang that song with a certain amount of salaciousness" - I bet he did, the dirty old bollocks, I bet he did!

His UK singles in 1956 included : "Love And Marriage" - #3 in January  /  "(Love Is) The Tender Trap" - #2 also in January  /  plus the chart-dodging flops : "(How Little It Matters), How Little We Know" in June, "Our Town" in August, and "You're Sensational" in November 1956.

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In 1957 he was releasing albums like they were going out of business, including : "Close to You" and "A Swingin' Affair!" with Nelson Riddle.

 

Plus "Where Are You?" and "A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra" with Gordon Jenkins.

 

His UK singles in 1957 included the double A-side : "Chicago" / "All The Way" - a #3 in November. Also released were the non-charting "Crazy Love" in May, and "Something Wonderful Happens In Summer" in July 1957.

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Released in January 1958, "Come Fly With Me" was Sinatra's first collaboration with arranger/conductor Billy May. The album was designed as a musical trip around the world.

In his autobiography, George Martin wrote of having visited the Capitol Tower during the recording sessions for the album. According to Martin's book, Sinatra expressed intense dislike for the album cover upon being first shown a mock-up by producer Voyle Gilmore, suggesting it looked like an advertisement for TWA.

One of the songs, "On the Road to Mandalay", based on Rudyard Kipling's poem "Mandalay" was replaced on some versions of the album after the Kipling family objected to Sinatra's interpretation. When the album was released in the United Kingdom, it was replaced by "It Happened in Monterey" on original mono releases and "French Foreign Legion" on stereo copies, while the song "Chicago" was used in other parts of the British Commonwealth.

His next album, "This Is Sinatra Volume Two, was the second collection of singles and B-sides with backings courtesy of Nelson Riddle.

Unlike the first volume, it included seven new tracks, all recorded in late 1957: "Everybody Loves Somebody"  /  "You'll Always Be the One I Love"   /  "Time After Time"  /  "If You Are But a Dream"   /  "It's the Same Old Dream"  /  "I Believe"  /  and "Put Your Dreams Away." Since Sinatra first recorded these songs in the 1940s, and since most dealt with dreams, they might have been meant for a concept album that never came to completion.

 

In September, Sinatra released "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely", another collaboration with Nelson Riddle, and comprised of stark introspective saloon songs and blues-tinged ballads. It proved to be a huge commercial success, spending 120 weeks on Billboards album chart and peaking at No. 1. Songs from this LP, such as "Angel Eyes" and "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", would remain staples of Sinatra's concerts.

His UK singles in 1958 included : "Witchcraft" - #12 in February  /  "Mr. Success" - #25 in November  /  plus the Keely Smith duet "Nothing In Common" in May  /  "The Same Old Song And Dance" in August  /  and "If I Forget You" in September 1958.

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In 1959, Sinatra released "Come Dance with Me!", a highly successful, critically acclaimed album with arrangements by Billy May. He also released "No One Cares" in the same year, a collection of "brooding, lonely" torch songs.

On 19 September 1959, having risen to the top in Hollywood, he was asked by 20th Century Fox to be the master of ceremonies at a luncheon attended by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

His UK singles in 1959 included : "French Foreign Legion" - #18 in April, and "High Hopes" - #6 in September, plus "To Love And Be Loved" in May, and "Talk To Me" in October 1959

 

In October 1960, "Nice 'n' Easy", a collection of ballads, topped the Billboard chart in October 1960 and remained in the charts for 86 weeks, but Sinatra grew discontented at Capitol, and fell into a feud with Alan Livingston, which lasted over six months.

His next album, 'Sinatra's Swingin' Session!!!', was recorded with Nelson Riddle at the end of August 1960. With a skimpy running time of just over 26 minutes, it consisted of 12 songs - half of which were re-recordings of songs, such as "It's Only a Paper Moon", "Should I?" and "You Do Something to Me" that Sinatra had previously recorded on his final Columbia album, 'Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra' - originally released in October 1950.

His UK singles in 1960 included : "It's Nice To Go Trav'ling" - #48 in April  /  "River, Stay 'Way From My Door" - #18 in June  /  "Nice 'N' Easy" - #15 in September  /  and "Ol' Mac Donald" - #11 in November 1960.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

His first attempt at owning his own label was with his pursuit of buying declining jazz label, Verve Records, which ended once an initial agreement with Verve founder, Norman Granz, failed to materialize.

He decided to form his own label, Reprise Records and, in an effort to assert his new direction, temporarily parted with Riddle, May and Jenkins, working with other arrangers such as Neil Hefti, Don Costa, and Quincy Jones.

Sinatra built the appeal of Reprise Records as one in which artists were promised creative control over their music, as well as a guarantee that they would eventually gain complete ownership of their work, including publishing rights.

His first album on the label, Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, was a major success, peaking at No.4 in the US album charts. The album was released in February 1961, the same month, Reprise Records released Ben Webster's "The Warm Moods" and Sammy Davis, Jr.'s "The Wham of Sam".

During the initial years of Reprise, Sinatra was still under contract to record for Capitol, and his next album, "Come Swing with Me!" would be his final swing session with Capitol Records, and included jazzy versions of "That Old Black Magic", "Lover" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street".

This album is possibly unique for the orchestral arrangement and stereophonic set-up by Billy May. Due to Capitol's signature "full-spectrum Stereo sound," the audience can distinctly hear the placement of specific orchestral pieces in the studio at the time of the recording, i.e. differences in brass sections from left, to right, to all together in the center. This is most apparent to the apt listener in the album's opening hit, "Day by Day".

 

His next Reprise album, released under the almost identical name : "Swing Along with Me", led to Capitol seeking a court order requiring Reprise to change the title - as that sort of thing could confuse a stupid person. Reprise were instructed to change the title to "Sinatra Swings". They had to print new labels and jackets, but were not required to recall LPs already shipped.

It was advertised on the record sleeve as featuring "twelve of the most uninhibited Sinatra things ever recorded." The tracks were arranged and conducted by Billy May and his orchestra, and included "Falling in Love with Love", "Have You Met Miss Jones?", and "You're Nobody till Somebody Loves You".

 

His next Reprise album, "I Remember Tommy..." was recorded as a tribute to bandleader Tommy Dorsey, and consists of re-recorded versions of songs that Sinatra had first performed or recorded with Dorsey earlier in his career. Fellow Dorsey alumnus Sy Oliver arranged and conducted the sessions, which included "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You", which was Dorsey's instrumental theme song.

Reviews of this album were mixed, some noting that this was a well intended effort but which paled in comparison the original 1940s recordings. Others still feel this was a fresher, more contemporary session with sharp high fidelity recording and crisp Sy Oliver arrangements, complemented by a more mature Sinatra but still with top control of his vocal abilities and smart interpretations.

His UK singles in 1961 included his last single for Capitol :  "My Blue Heaven" - #33 in April  /  and his first two for Reprise : "Granada" - #15 in October  and  "The Coffee Song" - #39 in November 1961.

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In 1962, Sinatra released "Sinatra and Strings", a set of standard ballads arranged by Don Costa, which became one of the most critically acclaimed works of Sinatra's entire Reprise period.

"Point of No Return", completed Sinatra's contractual commitment with Capitol. As the title reflects, the album, recorded over a two day period on September 11 and 12, 1961, contains Sinatra's final original recordings with Capitol Records.

The album was still a special occasion, reuniting Sinatra with Axel Stordahl, the arranger and conductor who helped Sinatra rise to stardom in the 1940s. Stordahl had also arranged the vocalist's first Capitol session back in 1953, so his presence gave a sense of closure to the Capitol era.

 

"Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain" was recorded in London in June 1962. It was Sinatra's only UK studio album, but was apparently not very happy with his voice as he was tired after touring.

The album, including versions of "The Very Thought of You", "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and "We'll Meet Again", was released on by Reprise in Great Britain, but not in the United States.

Also in 1962, as the owner of his own record label, Sinatra was able to step on the podium as conductor again, releasing his third instrumental album Frank "Sinatra Conducts Music from Pictures and Plays", including versions of "Laura", " "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face", and "If Ever I Would Leave You".

His UK singles in 1962 included the bandwagon jumping "Ev'rybody's Twistin'" - #22 in April  /  the duet with Sammy Davis Jnr. - "Me And My Shadow" - #20 in December 1962  /  plus "Pocketful Of Miracles" in February  /  "I'll Be Seeing You" in May  / and  "Goody Goody" in July 1962.

In December 1962, Sinatra and Count Basie collaborated for the album "Sinatra–Basie: An Historic Musical First", arranged by Neal Hefti. A popular and successful release which prompted them to rejoin two years later for the follow-up "It Might as Well Be Swing", arranged by Quincy Jones.

 

In 1963, Sinatra reunited with Nelson Riddle for "The Concert Sinatra", an ambitious album featuring a 73-piece symphony orchestra arranged and conducted by Riddle. The concert was recorded on a motion picture scoring soundstage with the use of multiple synchronized recording machines that employed an optical signal onto 35 mm film designed for movie soundtracks.

1963 spawned only one chart hit : "My Kind Of Girl", recorded with Count Basie and his Orchestra reached #35 in March, and a second collaboration with Count Basie, "Hello Dolly", proved to be his sole chart entry for the following year - reaching #47 in September 1964

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Released in April 1964, he collaborated with Bing Crosby and Fred Waring on "America, I Hear You Singing" - a collection of patriotic songs, including "The House I Live In", "You're a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith", and  "You Never Had It So Good" - recorded as a tribute to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In 1964 the song "My Kind of Town" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and he released the album "Softly, as I Leave You" - Sinatra's first tentative attempt to come to terms with rock and roll music.

Arranged by Ernie Freeman, "Softly, as I Leave You", "Then Suddenly Love" and "Available" were stabs at incorporating rock and roll into Sinatra's middle-of-the-road pop sound, featuring drum kits, backing vocals and keyboards in an attempt to mimic the sound of Dean Martin's #1 hit "Everybody Loves Somebody".

 

The album "September of My Years" was released September 1965, and went on to win the Grammy Award for best album of the year. One of the finest of his Reprise years, it was a reflective throwback to the concept records of the 1950s, and distilled everything that Sinatra had learned as a vocalist.  One of the album's singles, "It Was a Very Good Year", won the Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Male.

But it was a very bad year for him in the UK charts, where none of his singles - "Somewhere in Your Heart"  /  "Anytime At All"  /  "Tell Her You Love Her (Each Day)"   and "When Somebody Loves You" - made the slightest dent in the pop parade.

Things started looking up in 1966, when he finally got back into the charts in May with "Strangers In The Night" - reaching the Number 1 spot in the US and the UK. He followed it up with "Summer Wind" - #36 in October, and "That's Life" - #44 in December 1966.

 

The Single :

"Strangers in the Night" was either written by Avo Uvezian . . .  or possibly Ivo Robić . . . or probably Bert Kaempfert, with English lyrics by Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder.

Frank Sinatra reached #1 on both the US and UK charts with the song, and was the title song for Sinatra's 1966 album 'Strangers in the Night', which became his most commercially successful album.



In an interview, Avo Uvezian gave an account of the story behind "Strangers in the Night", stating that he originally composed the song for Frank Sinatra while in New York at the request of a mutual friend who wanted to introduce the two. He wrote the melody after which someone else put in the lyrics and the song was originally titled "Broken Guitar". He presented the song to Sinatra a week later, but Sinatra did not like the lyrics, so they were rewritten.

When asked about why Bert Kaempfert was claiming to have written the song, Uvezian went on to say that since Kaempfert was a friend of his and in the industry, he asked him to publish the German version in Germany so the two could split the profits, since Uvezian did not feel he would get paid for his work on the song in the US. Uvezian stated that when he gave the music to Kaempfert the song had already been renamed and lyrics revised. Uvezian also stated that Kaempfert gave him a letter acknowledging Uvezian as the composer.

It is sometimes claimed that Croatian singer Ivo Robić was the original composer of "Strangers in the Night," and that he sold the rights to Kaempfert after entering it without success in a song contest in Yugoslavia.

It was published in 1966 by the Yugoslav record company Jugoton. On the label of the record, B. Kaempfert and M. Renota are stated as authors, wherein Marija Renota is the creator of the Croatian lyrics.

The original composition of "Strangers" was under the title "Beddy Bye"—referring to the lead character William Beddoes—as an instrumental for the score of the movie A Man Could Get Killed.



In 1967 French composer Michel Philippe-Gérard established a claim that the melody of "Strangers" was based on his composition "Magic Tango", which was published in 1953. Royalties from the song were frozen until a court in Paris ruled in 1971 against plagiarism, stating that many songs were based on "similar constant factors".

The song was initially given to Melina Mercouri, who thought that a man's vocals would better suit the melody and therefore declined to sing it.

The track was recorded by Frank Sinatra on 11 April 1966 with 'The Wrecking Crew' including Hal Blaine on drums and Glen Campbell on rhythm guitar. Campbell recalls that he was so dumbstruck by being in the presence of "the master" that he couldn't stop staring at him.

Glen Campbell : "Frank asked [the producer] Jimmy Bowen, 'Who's the fag guitarist over there?' I told him I'd slap him if he said that again."

Campbell did not know the song and faked his way through the first take while listening to the tune, making a mistake in the process. Sinatra was used to recording in a single take, and when told he would have to sing it again, he glared at Campbell and shouted, "Is that guy with us or is he sleeping?".

Glen Campbell : "Actually, Frank was friendly. When I was playing golf in one of the Bob Hope Classics down in Palm Springs, he said, 'You can have my house, I'm not going to be there. I said, 'Which one?' He had about three of 'em. A guy like Frank, it's like they don't laugh much. I always thought he was bashful. He was kind of off-standing until you made him mad, and then he was a tyrant."

One of the most memorable and recognizable features of the record is Sinatra's scat improvisation of the melody with the syllables "doo-be-doo-be-doo" as the song fades to the end.

   

For the first time in 11 years Sinatra had a #1 hit, and it remained on the charts for 15 weeks. Despite this, Sinatra despised the song, calling it at one time "a piece of shit" and "the worst fucking song that I have ever heard."  Charming!

 

Other Versions include :  Bert Kampfert (1966)  /  Duane Eddy (1966)  /  Floyd Cramer (1966)  /  Vikki Carr (1966)  /  Connie Francis (1966)  /  Mel Tormé (1966)  /  Mrs Miller (1966) (!!!) /  The Sandpipers (1966)  /  The Baroque Inevitable (1966)  /  Matt Monro (1966)  /  Petula Clark (1966)  /  Gerry and the Pacemakers (1966)  /  Shirley Bassey (1966)  /  Peggy Lee (1966)  /  Trini Lopez (1967)  /  Andy Williams (1967)  /  Johnny Mathis (1967)  /  The Anita Kerr Singers (1967)  /  "Sola più che mai" by Dalida (1967)  /  "Extraños en la noche" by José Feliciano (1967)  /  Liberace (1967)  /  Stan Kenton (1967)  /  James Brown (1969)  /  The Ventures (1970)  /  Bette Midler (1976)  /  The Volcanoes (1983)  /  Barry Manilow (1998)  /  Engelbert Humperdinck (2000)  /  Cake (2005)  /  Perrey And Kingsley (2006)  /  Danny McEvoy (2011)  /  Yvan Jacques (2016)  /  Raffy Lata  (2016)  /  Jake Reichbart (2019)

On This Day  :

30 May : Stephen Malkmus, (Pavement), born Stephen Joseph Malkmus in Santa Monica, California
30 May : Country singer Dolly Parton weds Carl Dean in Ringgold, Georgia
30 May : US launches Surveyor 1 to Moon
2 June : US Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum; the 1st soft-landing on the moon
3 June : Gemini 9 launched; 7th US 2-man flight (Stafford & Cernan)
6 June : Stokely Carmichael launches "Black Power" movement
6 June : Claudette Orbison, wife of singer Roy, dies in a motorcycle crash
7 June : Jean Arp, French-Swiss sculptor, artist and poet, dies at 78
11 June : "Skyscraper" closes at Lunt Fontanne Theater NYC after 248 performances
12 June : The Dave Clark Five sets record as they appear for 12th time on the Ed Sullivan Show
17 June : Peter Green joins John Mayall's Bluesbreakers

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

               

[Satchmo Distel]

This might be the #1 hated most by the artist who sang it, although Sandie Shaw rivals it a year later.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

It really is Ol' Blue Eyes on autopilot, so God only knows how it got to number one. And in swinging 1966 too. Baffling.

[timebug]

Could never stand ol' red eyes myself, nor understand the adulation for him. My mum was a fan though, but theres no accounting for taste!

[purlieu]

Bloody hell, where did that come from? Like a britpop song going to number 1 this year or something. Bizarre.

[Pranet]

Nice Shooby Taylor impersonation from Frank there.

When I hear Paint it Black I always think of watching Tour Of Duty on ITV on a Friday night after doing some underage drinking.

[The Culture Bunker]

Could never stand ol' red eyes myself, nor understand the adulation for him. My mum was a fan though, but theres no accounting for taste!

Yeah, me either. I've heard all the muso arguments about his perfect pitch and timing, which I don't question, but whenever I hear the actual music the best I feel is apathy. I'm not one for Elvis Presley either, but at least with his early stuff I get the feeling of youthful urgency.

[timebug]

Might be me, but his so called 'perfect timing' quite often seems a bit 'off' to me.Also, like Diana Ross, he sings ever so slightly flat and offkey, yet their respective fans love it.No accounting for taste sez I!

[daf]

It took me years to write, will you take a look?, it's . . .

217.  The Beatles - Paperback Writer



From : 19 June – 2 July 1966
Weeks : 2
B side : Rain
Bonus 1 : Paperback Take 1
Bonus 2 : Paperback Colour Promo Film

The Story So Far : Bigger Than Jesus

On Wednesday 12 January 1966, John and Cynthia Lennon, Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen all flew to Port of Spain in Trinidad on this day for a winter holiday.

On Friday 21 January 1966 George Harrison married Patricia Anne Boyd at Epsom register office, Surrey.

Pattie Boyd : "I bought a Mary Quant pinky-red shot-silk dress, which came to just above the knee, and I wore it with creamy stockings and pointy red shoes. On top, because it was January and cold, I wore a red fox-fur coat, also by Mary Quant, that George gave me. She made George a beautiful black Mongolian lamb coat. The ceremony took place early in the morning at Epsom register office, in Surrey, not the most glamorous place, and the room was very hot and stuffy. Brian Epstein was there and Paul McCartney, who was George's best man. Otherwise it was family – my mother, with her cousin Penny Evans, who had been around a lot while I was growing up. Colin, Jenny, Paula, David and Boo, George's parents and brothers. Uncle John, my mother's twin brother, gave me away."



John Lennon and Ringo Starr were still on holiday and couldn't attend the wedding. The happy couple left the register office in a Rolls-Royce Princess, for a reception at Kinfauns, their bungalow in Esher.

Pattie Boyd : "It was not the wedding I had dreamt of – I would have loved to be married in church, but Brian didn't want a big fuss. They all trusted him so implicitly that when he said it should be a quiet register office wedding George agreed. He also said it had to be secret – if the press found out, it would be chaotic. There was no shortage of pictures of us leaving the register office. We came out into the street to find dozens of press photographers lined up outside. So much for keeping the whole thing secret."

On Tuesday 8 February 1966, eighteen days after they married in Esher, Surrey, George and Pattie Harrison flew to Barbados for their honeymoon. The couple were followed by television cameras through the London Airport terminal until they boarded their BOAC flight.

Pattie Boyd : "We spent our honeymoon in Barbados in a fabulous rented villa called Benclare at Gibbs Beach, on what is now the Sandy Lane Estate. It was perched on a hill with a sweeping lawn to the main road, views of the sea and a full staff. One day we were out in the garden and the maid said, 'Oh, look, there's the Queen of England!' Sure enough, there she was, driving past in an open-topped car waving to everyone, with Prince Philip sitting beside her, head buried in a newspaper.

"We spent beautiful sunny days exploring the island, playing in the sea and having romantic dinners at home to the sound of the ever-present tree frogs. We lounged on the beach, went to the famous Sandy Lane Hotel, swam, talked and walked, and I was so happy I thought I might burst. It was bliss to have George to myself, no work pulling either of us and no fans making life a misery."


 

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On Friday 11 February 1966, Peter And Gordon released the single, "Woman" written by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym "Bernard Webb".

McCartney had written three previous Peter and Gordon singles - "A World Without Love", "Nobody I Know", and "I Don't Want to See You Again", and wanted to see if one of his songs would be a success without the Lennon–McCartney credit.

 

Paul : "People come up to them and say, 'Ah, we see you're just getting in on the Lennon–McCartney bandwagon'. That's why they did that one with our names not on it...because everyone sort of thinks that's the [only] reason they get hits. It's not true, really."

However, the publishing credit 'Northern Songs' was a bit of a giveaway, and according to Gordon Waller it took only two weeks' time for the song's real pedigree to be revealed, as the first review of the record said, "This Bernard Webb has an amazing talent. Could even be Paul McCartney!" 

 

Gordon Waller : "You can sing it without any music, you can sing it with one guitar, you can sing it with a band, or you can sing it with a bloody orchestra. I think it envelops a lot of our other songs from that period, which were basically all love songs."

The venture was not a resounding success, as the single stalled at #28 on the British charts. In the United States it fared slightly better, peaking at #14.



Meanwhile, with the newly married George and Ringo busy enjoying married life, and John and Paul messing about with tape recorders at home, The Beatles were in no hurry to return to the recording studio.



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On Tuesday 1 March 1966, 'The Beatles At Shea Stadium' - The film of The Beatles' 15 August 1965 concert at New York's Shea Stadium had its world première on BBC 1.



The concert had been filmed by Sullivan Productions, owned by Ed Sullivan, in association with Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises and Subafilms, the company co-owned by Epstein and The Beatles.

While the  film was shown in colour in cinemas in the US, in the UK the 48-minute programme was shown in black and white, and the songs 'She's A Woman' and 'Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby' were left out of the final edit, which also featured audio overdubs recorded in London on 5 January 1966.

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On 4 March 1966, an article was published in the London Evening Standard written by Maureen Cleave, a close friend to The Beatles. A portrait of John Lennon's home life, The piece was headlined "How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this". It grew notorious in later months when Lennon's comments about Christianity were republished around the world.

He is much the same as he was before. He still peers down his nose, arrogant as an eagle, although contact lenses have righted the short sight that originally caused the expression. He looks more like Henry VIII than ever now that his face has filled out – he is just as imperious, just as unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, charming and quick-witted. He is still easy-going, still tough as hell. 'You never asked after Fred Lennon,' he said, disappointed. (Fred is his father; he emerged after they got famous.) 'He was here a few weeks ago. It was only the second time in my life I'd seen him – I showed him the door.' He went on cheerfully: 'I wasn't having him in the house.'

    His enthusiasm is undiminished and he insists on its being shared. George has put him on to this Indian music. 'You're not listening, are you?' he shouts after 20 minutes of the record. 'It's amazing this – so cool' Don't the Indians appear cool to you? Are you listening? This music is thousands of years old; it makes me laugh, the British going over there and telling them what to do. Quite amazing.' And he switched on the television set.

    Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it's closed round whatever he believes at the time. 'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.' He is reading extensively about religion.

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On Friday 25 March 1966, a photo session which was to become a notorious part of The Beatles' history took place: the infamous 'Butcher Cover' pictures were taken by Robert Whitaker for a conceptual art piece titled A Somnambulant Adventure.

The session took place at a top floor studio on the second floor of 1 The Vale, Chelsea, London, where the group had earlier posed for a more conventional shoot for Nigel Dickson, working for The Beatles Book magazine.

Robert Whitaker had the idea of creating a satirical commentary on The Beatles' fame, inspired by the German surrealist Hans Bellmer's images of dismembered doll and mannequin parts.

Robert Whitaker : "I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call "Somnambulant Adventure" was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.

"It was part of three pictures that should have gone into an icon. And it was a rough. If you could imagine, the background of that picture should have been all gold. Around the heads would have gone silver halos, jewelled. I had to go to the local butcher and get pork. I had to go to a doll factory and find the dolls. I had to go to an eye factory and find the eyes. False teeth. There's a lot in that photograph."

Out-takes from the session, indicate the form the triptych was to take. The first photograph shows the group facing a woman standing with her back to the camera, with her hands raised in surprise or worship. The Beatles held a string of sausages, intended to symbolise an umbilical cord, to emphasise that the group were born like everybody else.

The triptych's centre panel shows The Beatles dressed in butchers' white coats, surrounded by slabs of meat and doll parts. The final panel was an image of George Harrison standing behind a seated John Lennon, holding a hammer as if he was driving nails into Lennon's head. This was intended to underline that The Beatles were real and substantial, not idols to worship.

   

The triptych as intended by Whitaker was to be retouched to make The Beatles appear as religious icons. The decoration was intended to contrast with the earthiness of the meat and dummies, underlining the group's normality beneath their fame.

Robert Whitaker : "The cover was an unfinished concept. It was just one of a series of photographs that would have made up a gate-fold cover. Behind the head of each Beatle would have been a golden halo and in the halo would have been placed a semi-precious stone. Then the background would have contained more gold, so it was rather like a Russian icon. It was just after John Lennon had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. In a material world that was an extremely true statement."



It was later claimed that the photographs were intended as a protest by The Beatles on their treatment by the press and public, and Capitol Records' insistence on reordering their album tracks for the American market, but Whitaker later denied this.

Robert Whitaker : "Rubbish, absolute nonsense. If the trilogy or triptych of the three photographs had ever come together, it would have made sense. There is another set of photos in the book which is the Beatles with a girl with her back toward you, hanging on to sausages. Those sausages were meant to be an umbilical cord."

The butcher photograph was used in advertisements for Paperback Writer in the British music press before it appeared on the cover of the Capitol Records compilation Yesterday... And Today.

 

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'Yesterday and Today' was The Beatles ninth album released on Capitol Records and twelfth overall American release. It was originally issued only in the United States and Canada, on 20 June 1966.

By shaving off a few songs from the last couple of albums, and including some recent singles and B-sides, by 1966, Capitol had eight songs available for a new album :

- from Help! : "Yesterday"  /  "Act Naturally"
- from Rubber Soul : "Nowhere Man"  /  "What Goes On"  /  "Drive My Car"  /  "If I Needed Someone"
- the double A-side single : "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out"
   
However, even in American, an eight song LP would considered slightly too short, so the obvious solution was to include both sides of the current single - 'Paperback Writer' and 'Rain'  . . . but, for some insane reason, they chose to ignore those, and pester George Martin for some unreleased songs from their as-yet unfinished next album instead.

As a result,  "I'm Only Sleeping", "Doctor Robert" and "And Your Bird Can Sing" were duly packed up and shipped over for inclusion on "Yesterday and Today". The early mono mixes on these three songs - particularly noticeable with the backward guitar part on "I'm Only Sleeping" - were different from those used for the August 1966 release of 'Revolver'. As only mono versions of the songs had been sent over, the stereo version of the album contained duophonic ("fake stereo") mixes of the three songs.

Although not originally intended as an album cover, the Beatles submitted photographs from the Robert Whitaker A Somnambulant Adventure session featuring a series of pictures of the group dressed in butcher smocks and draped with pieces of meat and body parts from plastic baby dolls. The group played along, as they were tired of the usual photo shoots; Lennon recalled the band's "boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing".

The cover imagery was viewed by some commentators and music industry executives as a statement on Capitol's policy of "butchering" the Beatles' albums for the North American market. However, former Capitol president Alan W. Livingston stated that it was Paul McCartney who pushed strongly for the photo's inclusion as the album cover, and that McCartney reportedly described it as "our comment on the Vietnam war".

In the United States, Capitol Records printed approximately 750,000 copies of Yesterday and Today with this so-called 'butcher cover'. Reaction was immediate, as Capitol received complaints from some dealers. The record was immediately recalled under orders from Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of Capitol's parent company EMI, and all copies were ordered shipped back to the record label, leading to its rarity and popularity among collectors.

 

The cover photo was replaced with a picture of the four band members posed around an open trunk. Lennon described the replacement as "an awful looking photo of us looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome".

Robert Whitaker : "I shot that photo too, of them sitting on a trunk, the one that they pasted over it. I fairly remember being bewildered by the whole thing. I had no reason to be bewildered by it, purely and simply, because it could certainly be construed as a fairly shocking collection of bits and pieces to stick on a group of people and represent that in this country."

Eventually it was decided that it would be cheaper to paste the new cover shot over the withdrawn butcher sleeves. Unpeeled copies are now highly sought-after by collectors; however, the most valuable are the original 'first state' versions, particularly the stereo pressings.

At the time, some of the Beatles defended the use of the 'butcher' photograph. Lennon said that it was "as relevant as Vietnam" and McCartney said that their critics were "soft". However, this opinion was not shared by all band members.

George Harrison : "the whole idea was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them."

George Martin : "I thought it was disgusting and in poor taste ... It suggested that they were madmen. Which they were, but not in that way."

In Britain, the same photograph of the band smiling amid the mock carnage had been used in promotional advertisements for the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" single. A similar photograph from the shoot with Whitaker appeared on the cover of the 11 June edition of the British magazine Disc and Music Echo, accompanied by a caption reading: "Beatles, What a Carve-Up!"

   

The album topped the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US on 30 July, and stayed at number 1 for five weeks, selling close to a million copies in the by the end of the year.

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On 29 July 1966, Datebook, an American teen magazine that addressed subjects such as interracial dating and legalisation of marijuana, published four Lennon and McCartney interviews in its September "Shout-Out" issue dedicated to controversial youth-orientated themes including recreational drugs, sex, long hair and the Vietnam War.

Art Unger, the magazine's editor, put a quote from Lennon's interview on the cover: "I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity!", placed above it on the cover was a quote from McCartney regarding America: "It's a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty n*gger!" Only McCartney's image was featured on the front cover, as Unger expected that his statement would spark the most controversy.

     

In late July, Unger sent copies of the interviews to radio stations in the American South. WAQY disc jockey Tommy Charles in Birmingham, Alabama heard about Lennon's remarks from his co-presenter Doug Layton and said, "That does it for me. I am not going to play the Beatles any more." During their 29 July breakfast show, Charles and Layton asked for listeners' views on Lennon's comment, and the response was overwhelmingly negative. The pair set about destroying Beatles vinyl LPs on-air. Charles later stated, "We just felt it was so absurd and sacrilegious that something ought to be done to show them that they can't get away with this sort of thing."

United Press International bureau manager Al Benn heard the WAQY show and filed a news report in New York City, culminating in a major story in The New York Times on 5 August. More than 30 radio stations, including some in New York and Boston, followed WAQY's lead by refusing to play the Beatles' music. WAQY hired a tree-grinding machine and invited listeners to deliver their Beatles merchandise for destruction. Several Southern stations organised demonstrations with bonfires, drawing crowds of teenagers to publicly burn their Beatles records, effigies of the band, and other memorabilia.

 

The furore followed soon after the negative reaction from American disc jockeys and retailers to the "butcher" sleeve photo used on the Beatles' US-only LP Yesterday and Today cover showing the band members dressed as butchers and covered in dismembered plastic dolls and pieces of raw meat.

According to Unger, Brian Epstein was initially unperturbed about the reaction from the Birmingham disc jockeys, telling him: "Arthur, if they burn Beatles records, they've got to buy them first." Within days, however, Epstein became so concerned by the furore that he considered cancelling the group's upcoming US tour, fearing that they would be seriously harmed in some way. He flew to New York on 4 August and held a press conference the following day in which he claimed that Datebook had taken Lennon's words out of context, and expressed regret on behalf of the group that "people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended in any way". Epstein's efforts had little effect, as the controversy quickly spread beyond the United States.

In Mexico City, there were demonstrations against the Beatles, and a number of countries banned the Beatles' music on national radio stations, including racist South Africa and fascist Spain. The Vatican issued a denouncement of Lennon's comments, saying that "Some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, not even in the world of beatniks."

   

In response to the furore in the US, a Melody Maker editorial stated that the "fantastically unreasoned reaction" supported Lennon's statement regarding Christ's disciples being "thick and ordinary".

Daily Express columnist Robert Pitman wrote, "It seems a nerve for Americans to hold up shocked hands, when week in, week out, America is exporting to us [in Britain] a subculture that makes the Beatles seem like four stern old churchwardens."

But not all were hostile in the US - a Kentucky radio station announced that it would give the Beatles music airplay to show its "contempt for hypocrisy personified", and the Jesuit magazine America wrote that "Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit."

The Beatles left London on 11 August for their US tour. Lennon's wife Cynthia said that he was nervous and upset because he had made people angry simply by expressing his opinion. The Beatles held a press conference in Tony Barrow's suite at the Astor Tower Hotel in Chicago.

John : "I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have got away with it. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we are greater or better."

He stressed that he had been remarking on how other people viewed and popularised the Beatles. He described his own view of God by quoting the Bishop of Woolwich, "not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us." He was adamant that he was not comparing himself with Christ, but attempting to explain the decline of Christianity in the UK. "If you want me to apologise," he concluded, "if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry."

 

Placated by Lennon's gesture, Tommy Charles cancelled WAQY's Beatles bonfire, which had been planned for 19 August, when the Beatles were due to perform in the South. The Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano announced that the apology was sufficient, while a New York Times editorial similarly stated that the matter was over, but added, "The wonder is that such an articulate young man could have expressed himself imprecisely in the first place."

The tour was initially marred by protests and disturbances, and an undercurrent of tension. On 13 August, when the band played in Detroit, images were published of members of the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan "crucifying" a Beatles record on a large wooden cross, which they then ceremoniously burned. That night, the Texas radio station KLUE held a large Beatles bonfire, only for a lightning bolt to strike its transmission tower the following day and send the station temporarily off-air - clearly demonstrating which side of the argument God was on, and settling the matter once and for all.

The Single :

"Paperback Writer"  was written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney.

At the start of The Beatles' career, Brian Epstein and George Martin had drawn up a plan of releasing four singles and two albums each year to sustain interest in the group and satisfy popular demand. The release of Paperback Writer came 27 weeks after its predecessor, 'Day Tripper'/'We Can Work It Out'. It marked the end of the release plan, and saw The Beatles entering a phase where they were less motivated by commercial demands and more focused on musical development.



Paul : "The idea's a bit different. Years ago, my Auntie Lil said to me, 'Why do you always write songs about love all the time? Can't you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?' So, I thought, 'All right, Auntie Lil.' And recently, we've not been writing all our songs about love."

McCartney wrote Paperback Writer after reading a Daily Mail report about an aspiring author, and composed it on the way to Lennon's house in Weybridge.

Paul : "You knew, the minute you got there, cup of tea and you'd sit and write, so it was always good if you had a theme. I'd had a thought for a song and somehow it was to do with the Daily Mail so there might have been an article in the Mail that morning about people writing paperbacks. Penguin paperbacks was what I really thought of, the archetypal paperback.

"I arrived at Weybridge and told John I had this idea of trying to write off to a publishers to become a paperback writer, and I said, 'I think it should be written like a letter.' I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like 'Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be...' and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it. And John, as I recall, just sat there and said, 'Oh, that's it,' 'Uhuh,' 'Yeah.' I remember him, his amused smile, saying, 'Yes, that's it, that'll do.' Quite a nice moment: 'Hmm, I've done right! I've done well!' And then we went upstairs and put the melody to it.

"John and I sat down and finished it all up, but it was tilted towards me, the original idea was mine. I had no music, but it's just a little bluesy song, not a lot of melody. Then I had the idea to do the harmonies and we arranged that in the studio."

John : "I think I might have helped with some of the lyrics. Yes, I did. 'Paperback Writer' is son of 'Day Tripper', but it is Paul's song. Son of Day Tripper meaning a rock 'n' roll song with a guitar lick on a fuzzy, loud guitar."

 

Recorded on 13 and 14 April 1966, "Paperback Writer" is marked by the boosted bass guitar sound throughout, partly in response to John Lennon demanding to know why the bass on a certain Wilson Pickett record exceeded the bass on any Beatles records. Its recording caused some headaches for the Abbey Road technicians, who were subject to strict rules about how microphones and amplifiers should be used.

Geoff Emerick : "Paperback Writer was the first time the bass sound had been heard in all its excitement. For a start, Paul played a different bass, a Rickenbacker. Then we boosted it further by using a loudspeaker as a microphone. We positioned it directly in front of the bass speaker and the moving diaphragm of the second speaker made the electrical current."

The  single was cut louder than any other Beatles record up to that time, thanks to use a new device called "ATOC" ("Automatic Transient Overload Control") invented by the maintenance department at EMI Studios.

George Martin : "Paperback Writer had a heavier sound than some earlier work – and very good vocal work, too. I think that was just the way it worked out, that the rhythm was the most important part of their make-up by this time."

According to McCartney, the harmony vocals on the track were arranged during the recording session. In their backing vocals over the third verse, Lennon and George Harrison sing the title of the French nursery rhyme "Frère Jacques".

George Martin : "The way the song itself is shaped and the slow, contrapuntal statements from the backing voices – no one had really done that before."

Paperback Writer was performed during The Beatles' last tour in 1966, and was the penultimate song played at their final concert on 29 August, at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.

George : "We were just a little dance-hall band and we never really thought of augmenting ourselves. We thought, 'Well, we can't. We'll do it to the best of our ability until the point where we can't really do it, and then we'll miss it out.' So around this time we were starting to miss out a lot of record tracks on live shows. Paperback Writer, for instance, was all double-tracked, and it sounded pretty crummy on stage. So what we did with it, in the American tour at least, was get to the point where it was particularly bad, and then we'd do our 'Elvis legs' and wave to the crowds, and they'd all scream and it would cover that. As Paul has said, the screaming did cover a lot of worrying moments."



On 19 May performances of Paperback Writer and Rain, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg were filmed in colour in Abbey Road's studio one. They were broadcast exclusively by The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS on 5 June. The Beatles also recorded a brief greeting for the host and his viewers, which began with the group holding transparencies of the infamous 'butcher' cover in front of their faces.

George : "The idea was that we'd use them in America as well as the UK, because we thought, 'We can't go everywhere. We're stopping touring and we'll send these films out to promote the record.' It was too much trouble to go and fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to mime the latest single on Ready, Steady, Go!. Also, in America, they never saw the footage anyway.

"Once we actually went on an Ed Sullivan show with just a clip. I think Ed Sullivan came on and said, 'The Beatles were here, as you know, and they were wonderful boys, but they can't be here now so they've sent us this clip.' It was great, because really we conned the Sullivan show into promoting our new single by sending in the film clip."

The single was released on 30 May 1966 in the US and 11 days later on 10 June in the UK. It entered the UK singles charts on 16 June 1966, and a week later it reached the number one spot, where it remained for a second week. In all it spent 11 weeks on the charts.



Paperback Writer was The Beatles' first single not to be a love song, and although the subject matter may not have been a significant hit with the public - it was their lowest-seller since Love Me Do - it showcased their growing maturity as songwriters with the fictional tale of an aspiring writer, and a bluesy, bass-driven sound that was quite unlike any of their previous singles.

Other Versions include :   The Ravers (1966)  /  Floyd Cramer (1966)  /  The Young Gyants (1966)  /  The London Jazz Four (1967)  /  The Cowsills (1969)  /  Gershon Kingsley (1969)  /  The Shadows (1970)  /  Bee Gees (1970)  /  Kenny Rogers and The First Edition (1973)  /  "David & Goliath" by ApologetiX (1993)  /  Kris Kristofferson (1995)  /  The B-52's (2004)  /  The Nashville Superpickers (2008)  /  Danny McEvoy (2010)  /  8BitUzz (2013)  /  Steve Riks (2014)  /  Amy Slattery (2016)  /  a robot (2017)  /  Gavin Libotte (2019)

On This Day  :

25 June : Kosmos 122, 1st Soviet weather satellite, launched
26 June : "Time for Singing" closes at Broadway Theater NYC after 41 performances
19 June : US planes bomb the North Vietnamese capital Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong for the first time
30 June : Beatles land in Tokyo for a concert tour
30 June : Mike Tyson, boxer, born Michael Gerard Tyson in Brooklyn, New York
1 July : NASA launches spacecraft Explorer 33
2 July : Wimbledon : American Billie Jean King beats Maria Bueno of Brazil 6-3, 3-6, 6-1
2 July : 1st France nuclear test on Mururoa atoll

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

                   

[daf]

stare her down and nurries much me ev'rything . . naaaaaaayyyyaaaayyyyR, it's . . .

217.  The Beatles - Rain



From : 19 June – 2 July 1966
Weeks : 2
A side : Paperback Writer

The Beatles Seventh Album - Part 1 : "The Void"

On Friday 1 April 1966, John Lennon and Paul McCartney visited Indica Books & Gallery, co-owned by Barry Miles, which had opened in March 1966 at 6 Masons Yard, London. Lennon was looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, but emerged with something quite different.

While Miles went off to look for the Nietzsche book, John began to scan the shelves. His eyes soon alighted upon a copy of 'The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead' by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. John was delighted and settled down on the settee with the book. Right away, on page 14 in Timothy Leary's introduction, he read, 'Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.' He had found the first line of what would become one of the Beatles' most innovative songs.

   

John : "Leary was the one going round saying, take it, take it, take it. And we followed his instructions in his 'how to take a trip' book. I did it just like he said in the book, and then I wrote Tomorrow Never Knows, which was almost the first acid song: 'Lay down all thoughts surrender to the void,' and all that shit which Leary had pinched from The Book Of The Dead."

Upon returning to his home in Weybrige Lennon recorded himself reciting Leary's words, which he played back during a subsequent LSD trip, and was so enthralled by the result that he resolved to capture the experience in song.

Paul : "Tomorrow Never Knows was definitely John's. Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD. John had got hold of Timothy Leary's adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting."



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Paul : "I remember John coming to Brian Epstein's house at 24 Chapel Street, in Belgravia. We got back together after a break, and we were there for a meeting. George Martin was there so it may have been to show George some new songs or talk about the new album. John got his guitar out and started doing 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and it was all on one chord. This was because of our interest in Indian music. We would be sitting around and at the end of an Indian album we'd go, 'Did anyone realise they didn't change chords?' It would be like 'Shit, it was all in E! Wow, man, that is pretty far out.' So we began to sponge up a few of these nice ideas.

"This is one thing I always gave George Martin great credit for. He was a slightly older man and we were pretty far out, but he didn't flinch at all when John played it to him, he just said, 'Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.' He could have said, 'Bloody hell, it's terrible!' I think George was always intrigued to see what direction we'd gone in, probably in his mind thinking, How can I make this into a record? But by that point he was starting to trust that we must know vaguely what we were doing, but the material was really outside of his realm."

The idea of basing a song on a single chord was something The Beatles had attempted with The Word, and was a direct result of their growing interest in Indian music.

George Harrison : "Indian music doesn't modulate; it just stays. You pick what key you're in, and it stays in that key. I think 'Tomorrow never Knows' was the first one that stayed there; the whole song was on one chord. But there is a chord that is superimposed on top that does change: if it was in C, it changes down to B flat. That was like an overdub, but the basic sound all hangs on the one drone."

Although it was initially known as The Void, Lennon knew that this would be too far out for the majority of The Beatles' 1966 fans. So he settled on a phrase coined by Ringo Starr. In a television interview in early 1964, Starr had uttered the phrase "Tomorrow never knows" when laughing off an incident that took place at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, during which one of the guests had cut off a portion of his hair.

John : "That's me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period. I took one of Ringo's malapropisms as the title, to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics."

George : "You can hear Tomorrow Never Knows a lot and not know really what it is about. Basically it is saying what meditation is all about. The goal of meditation is to go beyond (that is, transcend) waking, sleeping and dreaming. So the song starts out by saying, 'Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying. Then it says, 'Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within – it is being.' From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought. Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn't always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind, and go to the part which Maharishi described as: 'Where was your last thought before you thought it?'

"The whole point is that we are the song. The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the transcendent. I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don't know if he fully understood it."



The first session for The Beatles' Seventh album took place on Wednesday 6 April 1966 in studio three at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, and lasted from 8pm-1.15am.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" was written primarily by John Lennon. The song marked a radical departure for the Beatles, as the band fully embraced the potential of the recording studio without any consideration for being able to reproduce the results in concert.

It was a remarkable and innovative recording for a variety of reasons. Firstly there was Ringo Starr's thunderous drum pattern. The tom toms skins on his kit were slackened, and the recording was heavily compressed and echoed to give perhaps the most remarkable drum sound on any Beatles song.

Geoff Emerick : "I moved the bass drum microphone much closer to the drum than had been done before. There's an early picture of The Beatles wearing a woollen jumper with four necks. I stuffed that inside the drum to deaden the sound. Then we put the sound through Fairchild 660 valve limiters and compressors. It became the sound of Revolver and Pepper really. Drums had never been heard like that before."

At this time, the song had the working title Mark 1.  Although quite different from the final version, it represented a huge leap forward in recording terms for The Beatles. Take one contained a single tape loop, featuring a repeated distorted guitar line, and heavily echoed and treated percussive sounds – giving a distinctly underwater effect. Onto this drums and bass were seemingly added, along with John Lennon's eerie vocals.

Paul McCartney had discovered that by removing the erase head on his reel-to-reel tape machine, and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops. After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of "30 or so" tape loops to Martin, who selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was about six seconds long.

Paul : "People tend to credit John with the backwards recordings, the loops and the weird sound effects, but the tape loops were my thing. The only thing I ever used them on was Tomorrow Never Knows. It was nice for this to leak into the Beatle stuff as it did.

The second day of recording saw a continuation of work on Mark 1, beginning with the overlaying of various tape loops on to take three. Each of The Beatles brought in tape loops made on their home Brennell machines.

 

The loops were played on several mono tape machines located in various studios of the building. Each one was monitored by a technician, who had to hold a pencil within each loop to maintain tension. The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Emerick watched the meters.

Five tape loops are prominent in the finished version of the song :

    A recording of McCartney's laughter, sped up to resemble the sound of a seagull (enters at 0:07)
    An orchestral chord of B♭ major (0:19)
    A Mellotron on its flute setting (0:22)
    A Mellotron strings sound, alternating between B♭ and C in 6/8 time (0:38)
    A sitar recorded with heavy saturation and sped up (0:56).

In addition, a loop featuring a finger rubbing the rim of a wine glass is heard midway through the song only in the stereo mix.

Balance engineer Geoff Emerick, in the control room of Studio Three, created a live mix from the five feeds which was recorded onto track three of the four-track tape; the basic rhythm track had previously been recorded onto tracks one and two, along with a dropped-in backwards guitar solo.

George Martin : "We did a live mix of all the loops. All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning. It is the one track, of all the songs The Beatles did, that could never be reproduced: it would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing: the 'happening' of the tape loops, inserted as we all swung off the levers on the faders willy-nilly, was a random event."

Paul : "We ran the loops and then we ran the track of Tomorrow Never Knows and we played the faders, and just before you could tell it was a loop, before it began to repeat a lot, I'd pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, 'You pull that in there,' 'You pull that in,' we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the things and recorded that to a track on the actual master tape, so that if we got a good one, that would be the solo. We played it through a few times and changed some of the tapes till we got what we thought was a real good one."

Ringo : "I had my own little set-up to record them. As George says, we were 'drinking a lot of tea' in those days, and on all my tapes you can hear, 'Oh, I hope I've switched it on.' I'd get so deranged from strong tea. I'd sit there for hours making those noises."

Lennon sought to capture the atmosphere of a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony; he told George Martin that the song should sound like it was being chanted by a thousand Tibetan monks, with his vocal evoking the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop. The latter effect was achieved by using a Leslie speaker. When the concept was explained to Lennon, he enquired if the same effect could be achieved by hanging him upside down and spinning him around a microphone while he sang into it.



Emerick made a connector to break into the electronic circuitry of the Leslie cabinet and then re-recorded the vocal as it came out of the revolving speaker.

Geoff Emerick : "I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker. It was just one of sheer amazement. After that they wanted everything shoved through the Leslie: pianos, guitars, drums, vocals, you name it!"

As Lennon hated doing a second take to double his vocals, Ken Townsend, the studio's technical manager, developed an alternative form of double-tracking called artificial double tracking (ADT) system, taking the signal from the sync head of one tape machine and delaying it slightly through a second tape machine.

George Martin: "For Tomorrow Never Knows he said to me he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop, and I said, 'It's a bit expensive, going to Tibet. Can we make do with it here?' I knew perfectly well that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn't work, because it would just put a very distant voice on. We needed to have something a bit weird and metallic...

"A Leslie speaker is a rotating speaker, a Hammond console, and the speed at which it rotates can be varied according to a knob on the control. By putting his voice through that and then recoding it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect, which is what we hear on Tomorrow Never Knows. I don't think anyone had done that before. It was quite a revolutionary track for Revolver."

'Tomorrow Never Knows' was completed on 22 April, with a final overdub containing more vocals, organ, tambourine and piano, and the reversed guitar solo by Paul McCartney.

It has been claimed that The Beatles also used part of McCartney's guitar solo for Taxman, reversed and slowed down a tone, in the instrumental break. However, the two parts are different and were likely recorded on different dates.

Paul : "I think it is a great solo. I always think of seagulls when I hear it. I used to get a lot of seagulls in my loops; a speeded-up shout, hah ha, goes squawk squawk. And I always get pictures of seasides, of Torquay, the Torbay Inn, fishing boats and puffins and deep purple mountains. Those were the slowed-down ones."

After completing the recording, McCartney was eager to gauge the reaction of the band's contemporaries. On 2 May, he played the song to Bob Dylan at the latter's hotel suite in London; as the track started, Dylan said dismissively: "Oh, I get it. You don't want to be cute anymore."



Despite the groundbreaking results, Lennon later claimed to be dissatisfied with the recording.

John : "Often the backing I think of early on never comes off. With Tomorrow Never Knows I'd imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical of course and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that was what it needed"

Klaus Voormann drew inspiration from the song for the album cover art, and later said that he found "Tomorrow Never Knows" "frightening", adding that it was "so far away from the early Beatles stuff that even I myself thought, well, the normal kind of Beatles fan won't want to buy this record. But they did."

George Harrison described the song as "easily the most amazing new thing we've ever come up with", but acknowledged that it might represent "a terrible mess of a sound" to listeners who approached the track "without open ears". He added: "It's like the Indian stuff. You mustn't listen to Eastern music with a Western ear."

In advance of the release, EMI had issued the songs to radio stations throughout July, in increments, to prepare the Beatles' audience for the new music. "Tomorrow Never Knows" was the last track to receive a public airing, a few days before the album was issued commercially. To the Beatles' less progressive fans, the radical changes in the band's sound were the source of confusion.

The editor of the Australian teen magazine Mirabelle wrote: "Everyone, from Brisbane to Bootle, hates that daft song Lennon sang at the end of Revolver."

In his review for the NME, Allen Evans said, in response to the lyric's exhortation to "relax and float downstream": "But how can you relax with the electronic, outer-space noises, often sounding like seagulls? ... Only Ringo's rock-steady drumming is natural."

Peter Jones of Record Mirror commented: "You need some sort of aural microscope to get the message from this. But it's darned compelling listening."

The song was parodied, as "L.S. Bumblebee", as part of a satirical sketch on the Swinging London phenomenon in the 'Not Only ... But Also' 1966 Christmas TV special, which included a cameo appearance by Lennon. Sung by comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, both of whom are dressed in Indian clothing, the song evokes the seagull sounds of "Tomorrow Never Knows" through the presence of a bird squawking in the studio.

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During the day's second session The Beatles began work on Got To Get You Into My Life - a Motown-influenced pop number written by Paul McCartney.

 

The song took some time to get right in the studio – the first day's recording from 7 April, played on a harmonium, sounded quite different to the final arrangement heard on the album. The next day The Beatles tried a different arrangement, ending up with the rhythm track they settled on.

The session began at 2.30pm and finished at 9pm. McCartney played bass guitar, Ringo Starr was on drums, John Lennon played a rhythm guitar part, and George Harrison played a tambourine. During the coda George Martin performed an organ part.

John Lennon particularly admired the lyrics of Got To Get You Into My Life, interpreting them as being about LSD.

John : "Paul's again. I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn't write them. You see? When I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, here's an example. It actually describes the experience taking acid. I think that's what he's talking about. I couldn't swear to it, but I think that it was a result of that."

In fact, the song was about marijuana, as McCartney later explained.

Paul : "Got To Get You Into My Life was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I'd been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting... I didn't have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding. So Got To Get You Into My Life is really a song about that, it's not to a person, it's actually about pot. It's saying, I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret."

On 11 April they overdubbed a guitar part, but the song remained untouched again until 18 May, when they added the distinctive brass and woodwind parts, plus two lead vocal parts, tambourine and organ.

The Beatles hired two members of Georgie Fame's group The Blue Flames, who Lennon and McCartney knew from the London club scene. Eddie Thornton and Peter Coe performed along with other freelance jazz musicians.

Peter Coe : "The Beatles wanted a definite jazz feel. Paul and George Martin were in charge. There was nothing written down but Paul sat at the piano and showed us what he wanted and we played with the rhythm track in our headphones. I remember that we tried it a few times to get the feel right and then John Lennon, who was in the control room, suddenly rushed out, stuck his thumb aloft and shouted 'Got it!' George Harrison got a little bit involved too but Ringo sat playing draughts in the corner."

A final guitar overdub was recorded on 17 June 1966, and mono mixes were made on the same day.

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On 11 April 1966, they began work on George Harrison's Indian-flavoured Love You To.

Take one of "Love You To" – which at this time had the working title "Granny Smith" – featured just Harrison on vocals and acoustic guitar, plus backing vocals by Paul McCartney. Take three saw the introduction of the sitar, which appeared again as an overdub onto take six, which became the basis of the final version.



Following the sitar motif on Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Love You To was The Beatles' first full attempt at recording a piece of music in the classical Indian style. At the time George Harrison was learning the sitar from Ravi Shankar, who inspired him to learn more about Indian music and Eastern religion.

Harrison played a rhythm guitar part, McCartney added bass guitar, and various members of London's Asian Music Circle recorded overdubs on Indian instruments. They included tabla by Anil Bhagwat, plus sitar, svaramandal and tambura.

George : "I wrote Love You To on the sitar, because the sitar sounded so nice and my interest was getting deeper all the time. I wanted to write a tune that was specifically for the sitar. Also it had a tabla part, and that was the first time we used a tabla player."

Anil Bhagwat : "The session came out of the blue. A chap called Angardi called me and asked if I was free that evening to work with George. I didn't know who he meant – he didn't say it was Harrison. It was only when a Rolls-Royce came to pick me up that I realised I'd be playing on a Beatles session. When I arrived at Abbey Road there were girls everywhere with Thermos flasks, cakes, sandwiches, waiting for The Beatles to come out.

"George told me what he wanted and I tuned the tabla with him. He suggested I play something in the Ravi Shankar style, 16 beats, though he agreed that I should improvise. Indian music is all improvisation. I was very lucky, they put my name on the record sleeve. I'm really proud of that, they were the greatest ever and my name is on the sleeve. It was one of the most exciting times of my life."

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On Wednesday 13 April 1966, The Beatles completed 'Love You To', and after a break for dinner, work was begun at 8pm on their next single - Paperback Writer.

Paul : "This came about because I love the word 'paperback'. Anyway, when we did the song, we wrote the words down like we were writing a letter. We sort of started off 'Dear Sir or Madam,' then carried on from there. If you look at the words I think you'll see what I mean, the way they flow like a letter. But that's it really, there's no story behind it and it wasn't inspired by any real-life characters."

Musically, it was an attempt by McCartney to write a song based on a single chord – possibly influenced by Indian music, but most likely a result of their marijuana use.

Paul : "John and I would like to do songs with just one note like Long Tall Sally. We got near it in The Word."

They recorded two takes of the rhythm track, the first of which was incomplete. Ringo Starr played drums, John Lennon played a tambourine, Harrison performed a rhythm guitar part on a Gibson SG, and McCartney performed a lead guitar part on an Epiphone Casino. The song was completed the following day.

Paul McCartney recorded his lead vocals alone on one track, and on another he added a Rickenbacker bass part. The latter was taped along with falsetto backing vocals by John Lennon and George Harrison. Other overdubs included a piano part through a Leslie speaker played, and a Vox Continental part, both by George Martin, and extra lead guitar fills by Harrison.

A reduction mix allowed a fourth track to be cleared. Onto this were added more backing vocals by Lennon and Harrison, including the chorus and the famous 'Frère Jacques' counter-melody. Between 7.30 and 8pm two mono mixes of 'Paperback Writer' were made in the control room of Studio Three. This featured heavy tape echo in the vocals of the chorus refrain, which was toned down somewhat on the later stereo mix.



Work then began on Rain, with five takes recorded before work ended at 1.30am.

Geoff Emerick : "One of the things we discovered when playing around with [tape] loops on Tomorrow Never Knows was that the texture and depth of certain instruments sounded really good when slowed down. With Rain The Beatles played the rhythm track really fast so that when the tape was played back at normal speed everything would be much slower, changing the texture. If we'd recorded it at normal speed and then had to slow the tape down whenever we wanted to hear a playback it would have been much more work."

The backing track had drums and Lennon's distorted Gretsch Nashville guitar. The fifth and final take was the only one to feature vocals.

The Beatles performed the song at a higher tempo and in a higher key than G major, but it was slowed down during the mixing stage to give a heavier sound. Lennon's vocals, meanwhile, were taped with the machines running slower: the normal tape speed was 50 cycles per second, but the vocals were recorded at 42 cycles, raising the pitch upon playback.

It is likely that McCartney also recorded a bass part on this day, but it was replaced on 16 April during a session that saw a range of further overdubs, including the backwards vocal part which adorned the coda. The Beatles finished recording 'Rain' during an 11-hour session on this day.

With recording complete, four mono mixes of Rain were made, the third of which was selected for the single. During the mixes Lennon's lead vocals were thickened by artificial double tracking, or ADT.

 

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On Thursday 19 May 1966, The Beatles filmed promos for Paperback Writer and Rain. The Beatles were unwilling to appear on television for promotion. Instead, they took part in a two-day shoot which resulted in a total of seven promotional films for the songs.



This first day's filming took place in Abbey Road's Studio One; the following day they went on location at Chiswick House, London. The crew was supplied by InterTel (VTR Services), and the director was Michael Lindsay-Hogg. The producer was Tony Bramwell. Video tape was used on this first day, while the following day's footage was shot on film.

At 10am a camera rehearsal took place. The first colour performance of Rain was filmed, after which The Beatles watched a playback to see the results. From 1.10-2pm they filmed a colour performance of Paperback Writer.

Both these colour clips were for the US market, and had their première on The Ed Sullivan Show on 5 June 1966, along with a greeting filmed by The Beatles on this day between 6.15pm and 6.30pm.



After lunch The Beatles recorded black-and-white footage for UK viewers, two for Paperback Writer and one for Rain, between 3.30pm and 6.15pm. The first black-and-white clip of Paperback Writer had its television début on Saturday 25 June in "Goodbye Lucky Stars", the final edition of the long-running music show Thank Your Lucky Stars.

The second black-and-white performance of Paperback Writer, along with the one of Rain, were first shown on Ready, Steady, Go! on Friday 3 June 1966.

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Although it had been running for over two years, The Beatles had never previously appeared live on the BBC music show Top Of The Pops. They had pre-recorded exclusive performances in BBC studios, or sent promotional clips to be played on the show.

That changed on Thursday 16 June 1966, with a studio performance of new single Paperback Writer. The Beatles had agreed two days previously, when manager Brian Epstein passed on a request from Top Of The Pops producer Johnnie Stewart. Unusually, on this occasion The Beatles agreed.

The group arrived at BBC Television Centre at 2.30pm for a rehearsal for the camera, and to pose for publicity photographs and conduct press interviews. More rehearsals followed between 4.15pm and 5.30, and from 6.30pm to 7pm.

 

The live broadcast took place between 7.30pm and 8pm on BBC 1. The Beatles were the final act to appear, and mimed to both Paperback Writer and its b-side, Rain. They were introduced by host Pete Murray.

The Beatles' only appearance on Top Of The Pops was, with the exception of the worldwide satellite transmission of All You Need Is Love on 25 June 1967, their final live television appearance as a group.

The Single :

"Rain" was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney.  The song is generally credited to John Lennon, although Paul McCartney claimed it was co-written.

Paul : "I don't think he brought the original idea, just when we sat down to write, he kicked it off. Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing and what we got on to was that it's no bad thing. There's no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back. The most interesting thing about it wasn't the writing, which was tilted 70-30 to John, but the recording of it."

The inspiration for "Rain" is agreed on by Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' roadie, and John Lennon. They both described the band's arrival in Sydney, Australia, marked by rain and poor weather. Lennon said, "I've never seen rain as hard as that, except in Tahiti", and later explained that "Rain" was "about people moaning about the weather all the time".

Noted for its slowed-down rhythm track, tape-manipulation techniques and backwards vocals, 'Rain' is considered by many Beatles fans to be their finest b-side.



Recording began on 14 April 1966, in the same session as "Paperback Writer", and concluded on 16 April, with a series of overdubs before mixing on the same day. At that time, the Beatles were enthusiastic about experimenting in the studio to achieve new sounds and effects. 

The group taped five takes of 'Rain's rhythm track, performed quickly and later slowed down. Ringo Starr's drums, locked in to McCartney's high bass notes, were a key feature of the song.

Paul : "The drums became a giant drum kit... We got a big, ponderous, thunderous backing and then we worked on top of that as normal, so that it didn't sound like a slowed-down thing, it just had a big ominous noise to it. It was nice, I really enjoyed that one."

Ringo Starr later said Rain was among his favourite performances on a Beatles recording.

Ringo : "I feel as though that was someone else playing – I was possessed! I think I just played amazing. I was into the snare and the hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used this trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat."

On the final mix of the single, Lennon played a 1965 Gretsch Nashville, Paul McCartney a 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S bass, Harrison a 1964 Gibson SG, and Ringo Starr used Ludwig drums.

Ringo : "I think it's the best out of all the records I've ever made. 'Rain' blows me away ... I know me and I know my playing ... and then there's 'Rain'."



The other key feature of Rain was John Lennon's backwards vocals, heard during the coda at the song's end. Lennon claimed that the discovery was the result of a stoned accident, when he threaded his rough mix tape of the song into his reel-to-reel player the wrong way round.

John : "I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana and, as I usually do, I listened to what I'd recorded that day. Somehow I got it on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint. I ran in the next day and said, 'I know what to do with it, I know ... Listen to this!' So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. [Singing backwards] Sharethsmnowthsmeaness ...  That one was the gift of God, of Jah, actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Jah gave me that one."

Lennon's version of events was backed up by George Harrison and Geoff Emerick. George Martin, however, recalled the discovery differently . . .

George Martin : "I was always playing around with tapes and I thought it might be fun to do something extra with John's voice. So I lifted a bit of his main vocal off the four-track, put it on another spool, turned it around and then slid it back and forth until it fitted. John was out at the time but when he came back he was amazed."

The backwards vocals are Lennon singing : "shines . . . Ra-a-a-a-a-i-i-i-i-i-i-n . . . If the rain comes, they run and hide their heads."  which, flipped backwards becomes something like : "Stare her down and nurries much me ev'rything . . naaaaaaayyyyaaaayyyyr . . myeah, sh'now"

Rain was released as a B-side to "Paperback Writer" in the US on 30 May 1966 and in the UK on 10 June 1966. In the US, where the chart positions were calculated on both sales and radio plays, "Rain" peaked at #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 9 July 1966, and remained in that position the following week.

 

In the promotional film for "Rain", closeups on Paul's face reveal a scarred lip and a chipped tooth. McCartney had been injured in a moped accident on 26 December 1965. His appearance in the film would become another "clue" in the "Paul is dead" rumours from 1969.



Other Versions include :   The Gants (1966)  /  Petula Clark (1966)  /  "Pioggia" by The Bushmen (1966)  /  The Sunshine Company (1967)  /  Tomorrow's Children (1967)  /  The London Jazz Four (1967)  /  Steve Marcus (1968)  /  "Trece vremea" by Formatia Coral (1969)  /  Randy California (1972)  /  Humble Pie (1975)  /  Todd Rundgren (1976)  /  Bongwater (1988)  /  Gregg Allman (1989)  /  Chapterhouse (1990)  /  Popinjays (1992)  /  Barbara Dickson (2006)  /  Danny McEvoy (2010)  /  SoraxBS 8bit (2011)  /  Saltwater Roses (2015)  /  Amy Slattery (2016)  /  a robot (2017)

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

                 

[Cardenio I]

I fucking love Rain.

[The Culture Bunker]

Yeah, this is really the Beatles at one of their peaks for me. Two great sides, brilliant writing, playing and arrangement. It's probably not a good thing, but it does that cliche of "you could play it to some kids and they'd think it was recorded yesterday". Ringo's best drumming on 'Rain', maybe McCartney's best bass playing on 'Paperback'.