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

[purlieu]

Shite.

New page shite!

[gilbertharding]

Those caricature drawings are quite striking. I like the idea of the 'Blind Date' singles review by a famous person - and to know what Simon Dee, Emperor Rosko, and Beaky think about various new releases is very interesting.

Meanwhile this:

In 1970, the band committed a series of grave errors that started innocently enough. The members, apparently weary of being treated as a soft pop band, decided to change their sound and image. They spent a year writing and preparing an album of music that was intended to prove they could do serious songs, and that was not, in and of itself, a mistake. The error came when the group announced their intention and, in the process, disparaged all of their past hits and dismissed the listeners whom they had attracted as "morons"!

When the smoke cleared, the group had managed to alienate most of their listeners and any representative of the music press who had previously been in their corner, while the new music released on the album 'Master', was ignored by the very people they'd sought to attract.

...sounds intriguing. Blimey - it's on Spotify. The opening track is pretty hilarious, as a statement of intent. But then the second tune is normal service.

[The Culture Bunker]

With or without Brian Poole, the Tremeloes were lame enough that they made Herman's Hermits seem like Black Sabbath. It doesn't help here that they're covering a song that I would consider one of the Four Seasons' more duff numbers either, but all the same, when you're going over ground Frankie Valli has already walked down, you better have a voice like Scott Walker to even get close to matching up.

Didn't Poole wind up working back at his family's butcher shop, rather than a barbers?

[daf]

Didn't Poole wind up working back at his family's butcher shop, rather than a barbers?

Oops yes - I didn't bother re-checking my Brian Poole notes when I put that bit in - well spotted!

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
(I do occasionally slip in some spurious 'mountweazels' for my own amusement - but that wasn't one of them!)

[gilbertharding]

I have a miniscule, tiny, fragment of a memory of Brian Poole cropping up on the 1970s equivalent of The One Show which was Nationwide - and the report was (IIRC) made for the sole reason that he had reverted to whatever his trade was before he was a pop singer.

God knows why I remember it - but I think the film must have sparked a short conversation between my parents about pop music from before I was born which I would have found sufficiently interesting to file away in my head.

[Johnboy]

i like this one, i'm pretty sure it was on the k-tel comp I'm always droning on about

[Satchmo Distel]

The Tremeloes turned down at least two songs that became Number 1s in 1969-70. I won't spoil the thread by naming them.

The harmonies on this song are fine but it's clearly another light entertainment friendly chart-topper in the middle of psychedelia.

[daf]

Hair on my G-String, it's . . .

234.  Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale



From : 4 June – 15 July 1967
Weeks : 6
Flip side : Lime Street Blues
Bonus 1 : Promo Film 1
Bonus 2 : Promo Film 2
Bonus 3 : Top of the Pops (Moustache)
Bonus 4 : Top of the Pops (Monk)

The Story So Far & Further : 

The Paramounts, based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, were led by Gary Brooker (organ) and Robin Trower (guitar). The line up also included Chris Copping on bass and B. J. Wilson on drums. They scored a moderate British success with their version of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Poison Ivy" (b/w "I Feel Good All Over"), which reached #35 in the UK Singles Chart in January 1964.

"It Won't Be Long", the B-side of the third single, "I'm The One Who Loves You", was the first song written by Brooker and Trower to be released. Another Brooker & Trower song - "Don't Ya Like My Love?" - graced the flip side of their 1965 single "You Never Had It So Good". But further chart success proved elusive, and they became backing musicians on European tours by Sandie Shaw and Chris Andrews. The Paramounts eventually disbanded in 1966.

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Gary Brooker concentrated on writing music, collaborating with poet Keith Reid, and Matthew Fisher (organ). They recorded "A Whiter Shade of Pale" with Ray Royer on guitar, David Knights on bass, and session man Bill Eyden on drums.

   

Guy Stevens, their original manager, named the band after a Burmese cat, which had been bred by Eleonore Vogt-Chapman and belonged to Liz Coombes. The cat's "cat fancy" name was Procul Harun, Procul being the breeder's prefix.

   

With a countermelody based on J. S. Bach's Orchestral Suite N° 3 in D Major played by Fisher's Hammond organ, Brooker's vocals and Reid's lyrics, the single reached #1 in the UK, Canada and Australia. It did almost as well in the United States, reaching #5.

 

After "A Whiter Shade of Pale" became a hit, the band set out to consolidate its studio success by touring, with new official drummer Bobby Harrison added to the line-up; its live debut was opening for Jimi Hendrix in 1967.



This version of the band was short-lived, with old Paramount mates B. J. Wilson on drums and Robin Trower on guitar coming in to replace Bobby Harrison and Ray Royer - who, exited stage left in pursuit of a beer, to form the band Freedom)

   

In September 1967, there were plans for a Procol Harum film, titled 'Seventeen Plus', to be written by Wolf Mankowitz, but just a month later it was all off, leaving Matthew Fisher time to to plan a solo LP . . .

 


The group's follow-up single, "Homburg" (b/w "Good Captain Clack"), reached No. 6 in the UK, No. 15 in Canada, and No. 34 in the US in October 1967.




Having set out their stall with a massive number 1, following it up was always going to be a tough job, and 'Homburg' got it in the neck . . .

 

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The first album, 'Procol Harum', was released in early September on Deram in the US, but was held back until December 1967 in the UK, on the magnificently named Regal Zonophone record label.

As was standard practice in the 1960s of not including singles on albums, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", doesn't appear on the UK version of the album, but was included on the US issue. The original North American release included a poster of the album cover. The artwork by Dickinson, the then-girlfriend, and subsequently wife of Keith Reid was heavily influenced by the style of the late-victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.
   
 

All songs were originally credited to Gary Brooker (music) and Keith Reid (lyrics), except "Repent Walpurgis" which was written by Matthew Fisher, after works by French organist Charles-Marie Widor and German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The track "Salad Days (Are Here Again)" was featured in the film Separation.

   

Unusually, the music for "Conquistador" was written before the lyrics. Keith Reid claimed that "99 out of 100 of the Procol Harum songs, back then, were written the words first, and then were set to music."

 

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The band's follow-up album, 'Shine On Brightly' was released the following year and saw a greater excursion into progressive rock stylings.



The title of the nearly side-long suite "In Held 'Twas in I" is an acrostic. It is formed by taking the first word of the lyrics in each of the first four movements as well as the first word of the sixth verse in the first movement

Jim Miller, writing for Rolling Stone, was unfavourable: "Procol Harum's first release was generally more satisfying, especially since this new album displays little in the way of startling growth – the group has apparently chosen to refine their old approach and the musical result, while usually listenable, is not consistently interesting."

The single "Quite Rightly So", (b/w "In The Wee Small Hours Of Sixpence", scraped into the Top 50 in April 1968.

 


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Feeling kinda seasick, their third album, 'A Salty Dog' was released in June 1969. It was very popular among fans and their first album to sell well in the UK - reaching #27 in the UK Albums Chart. The title track, "A Salty Dog" (b/w "Long Gone Geek"), reached #44 in the UK charts in June 1969, and also gained a good deal of US FM radio airplay.

The album has an ostensibly nautical theme, as indicated by its cover - a pastiche of the famous Player's Navy Cut cigarette pack.

 

Interspersed with straight rock, blues and pop items, it showed a slight change of direction from its predecessors, being thematically less obscure. The title track was the first Procol track to use an orchestra. The album was the first record produced by Matthew Fisher, who quit the band soon after its release. This was also the last Procol Harum album to feature bass guitarist Dave Knights.

Recorded in March 1969, the musical tensions between the group and Robin Trower were beginning to show in this album, and although his guitar sound remains integral to most of the tracks, "Crucifiction Lane" featured a rare Trower vocal, in retrospect, shows that Trower was already moving in a different direction from the rest of the band.

Rolling Stone called it : "a confusing album. At its best it represents the group's greatest success to date with the brand of rock for which the group is known; at its worst it is both surprisingly mediocre and trivial."

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With the departure of organist Matthew Fisher and bassist David Knights and the addition of former bandmate bassist/organist Chris Copping, Procol Harum was, for all intents and purposes, The Paramounts again in all but name. The purpose of bringing in Copping was to return some of the R&B sound to the band that they had with their previous incarnation.

The initial sessions for their fourth album were performed in London at Trident Studios under the supervision of former organist Matthew Fisher who had also produced the band's previous album. Unhappy with the sound and performances, the band scrapped the Trident sessions and began again with producer Chris Thomas and engineer Jeff Jarratt at Abbey Road Studios.

'Home' was released in June 1970, with a cover that parodied the board game Snakes and Ladders featuring members of the band. It charted at #34 in the US, #49 in the UK, and #6 in Denmark.

 

The album was preceded by the US single "Whiskey Train" written by guitarist Robin Trower with lyricist Keith Reid. The songs "Your Own Choice" (b/w "About To Die") were released as a 'promo' single in the UK.

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By 1971, the disparities in style had become too great and, after the release of the fifth album 'Broken Barricades', Trower left to form his own power trio band and was replaced by Dave Ball.

The album cover was a fancy gatefold, and featured the band members' ugly mugs as seen through die-cut holes in the front flap.

 


Two singles were released in the US : "Broken Barricades" (b/w "Power Failure") in July 1971, and "Simple Sister" in September 1971.

"Song for a Dreamer" was a tribute to late Jimi Hendrix from Trower, who was stunned by Hendrix's death in September 1970 at the age of 27.

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In 1972, Procol Harum returned to the charts with the live album 'Procol Harum Live: In Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra'. Despite reaching a modest #48 in the UK, in the US it went Top 5 and was a gold record.

 

A song from the album "Conquistador", (b/w "Luskus Delph"), reached #22 in the UK, #16 in the US, and #7 in Canada in August 1972.

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Their follow-up album, 'Grand Hotel', released in March 1973, signaled a change of direction for the band.

Guitarist Dave Ball who had joined the band for their live album the previous year left shortly after the photo shoot for the proposed album's cover to be replaced by Mick Grabham. Grabham's head was superimposed on the front and back cover of the album on Ball's body. Although the band had gone through significant personnel changes in previous years, the band would enter its most stable phase with this line up.

Although "Grand Hotel" appears on the surface to be a concept album, the "concept", according to lyricist Keith Reid, doesn't extend beyond the title tune. The album reached #21 in the US, and #4 in Denmark, where the group was always well received.

Rolling Stone called Grand Hotel a "confused and uneven transitional album" and "a collection of overblown production jobs that, at their worst, approach self-parody, and simpler, less grandiose tracks that suggest Procol Harum may yet find a way out of the corner they have worked themselves into."

Village Voice noted the split in musical identity: "For years, these guys have vacillated between a menu of grits that certainly ain't groceries and larks' tongues in aspic. Despite their current white-tie conceit, they still haven't decided."

Two flop singles were released from the album : "Robert's Box" (b/w "A Rum Tale") in April 1973, and "A Souvenir of London", (b/w "Toujours L'Amour") in August 1973.

That single was banned by the BBC for its reference to venereal disease in the lyrics of the song. Keith Reid claimed that the song was really inspired by a visit to a souvenir shop near George Martin's Air Studios : "Almost every album has had at least one comic song...and this one was a bit tongue in cheek"

 

Their seventh album, 'Exotic Birds and Fruit', was released in April 1974. In Argentina, the album was released as "Pájaros Y Frutas Exóticas" ["Birds and Exotic Fruit"]. The cover artwork for the album is by Jakob Bogdani, a noted Hungarian fruit and bird artist.

Collaborating again with producer Chris Thomas, Procol Harum the band recorded the album at George Martin's Air London Studios in London, but without an orchestra this time.

Gary Brooker : "We made the live album with an orchestra. We'd then taken the orchestra into the studio for 'Grand Hotel'...we'd had enough of orchestras."

The album features the song "Butterfly Boys" written about the founders of the band's record label at the time Chrysalis. The band were unhappy with the terms of their contract and expressed that frustration in song.

The album met with a good critical reception, but only reached #86 in the US album charts. In Denmark, it peaked at #9 upon release, and nearly a year later in early 1975 it re-entered the Top 20 peaking at #19.

The album was preceded by the single release of the opening track "Nothing But the Truth" backed with the non-album track "Drunk Again".

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Their eighth album, 'Procol's Ninth' was released in September 1975. Produced by songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the album featured a starker sound than Chris Thomas's more elaborate productions.  According to guitarist Mick Grabham, Leiber and Stoller focused less on the production sound and more on the structure of the songs.

It was the first release from the band to feature non-original songs : The Beatles' "Eight Days a Week" and Leiber & Stoller's own "I Keep Forgetting". The album also featured "Pandora's Box", a track that had been composed by Gary Brooker and Keith Reid early in the band's career. As included on Ninth, it differed substantially from the more psychedelic unfinished original version of the song.

Two singles were released from the album : "Pandora's Box" (b/w "The Piper's Tune"), which reached #16 in the UK in August 1975, and "The Final Thrust" (b/w 'Taking The Time") which flopped in November 1975.

A song from their previous album, "As Strong As Samson (When You're Being Held To Ransom)", was released as a single in January 1976, backed with the Procol's Ninth album track, "The Unquiet Zone", but it failed to trouble the charts. The band appeared on the cover of the album in a straightforward unassuming photograph, mirroring the sound of the album itself. The cover also featured each band member's signature.

 

'Something Magic', their ninth album, was released in 1977. They elected to work with producers Ron and Howie Albert when their previous producers, Leiber and Stoller, proved to be unavailable.

The band flew into Miami with more than enough material for their album. However, the Alberts rejected more than five of these tracks, leaving only four from the material the group had intended to use.

Gary Brooker then offered up the epic "The Worm and The Tree" : Part 1 : "Introduction / Menace / Occupation"  / Part 2 : "Enervation / Expectancy / Battle"  /  Part 3 : "Regeneration / Epilogue" - a piece by lyricist Keith Reid that Brooker had been toying with on and off for several years.

Brooker turned to local Miami arranger Mike Lewis to complete the orchestral arrangements for the title track "Something Magic", and band member Chris Copping to complete the woodwind arrangement for "Skating on Thin Ice". Guitarist Mick Grabham offered up his only composition, set to Reid's "The Mark of the Claw", to help pad out the album.

the single "Wizard Man" (b/w 'Backgammon") was released in February 1977, and following the North American tour, and the poor performance of the album in the US charts - tanking at #147 - the band broke up.

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The band reformed in 1991 with Brooker, Fisher, Trower and Reid, and released 'The Prodigal Stranger'. The album was dedicated to the memory of B. J. Wilson, who had been the drummer on all of the group's previous albums. 

Gary Brooker : "We never knew if it would work out, but we did know one thing and that was that the basis of us making the new Procol Harum record would be if we could get together a good set of songs...it was very like making a first album."

Matthew Fisher : "I felt that I just sort of slotted back into it, like it had only been like the day before ... so it's not so much déjà vu as just carrying on where we left off."

Robin Trower performed on the album and co-wrote the music for "All Our Dreams are Sold" but he declined to join the group on the following tour and was replaced by Tim Renwick. The tour to promote the album was well received and attended in both Europe and the United States reflecting the respect and status of the group but was not reflected in album sales.

Entertainment Weekly commented that "... though the songs in The Prodigal Stranger are occasionally overproduced, singer Gary Brooker's powerfully soulful voice still makes the difference every time. Most of The Prodigal Stranger would have sounded perfectly wonderful in 1969 — and in this case, that's a compliment."

 

In 2003 the band released a new studio album, 'The Well's on Fire'. Fisher left Procol Harum in 2004.

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In 2008, just before a concert, Brooker, skipping a light fandango, fell off a pile of road-side logs in Finland and broke several ribs. The show went ahead but he was unable to sing properly, and many of the songs were performed either as instrumentals or sung by others in the band.

On 29 May 2012, Gary Brooker was hospitalised after suffering a fall, in a hare-brained attempt to turn cartwheels 'cross the floor in his hotel room in Cape Town. He was admitted to the ICU of the Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital with a serious skull fracture.

The band's 13th album, Novum, was released on 21 April 2017 and the band played 36 dates in the UK and Europe to promote it. However, the most significant concert of the year came in March when the band played with an orchestra at The Royal Festival Hall in London - Gary Brooker fell leaving the stage at the end of the first half, was seriously hurt but reappeared for the second half with his head bandaged and nursing "a broken hand".

 

2018 saw the band again touring in Europe, including an orchestral show at the London Palladium on 9 October. And the crowd still calls out for more . . .

The Single :

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" was written by Gary Brooker, Keith Reid, Matthew Fisher, and J.S Bach. It was released as a single by Procol Harum on 12 May 1967, and reached number 1 in the UK Singles Chart on 8 June 1967, staying there for six weeks.

It also reached #5 in the United States, and became one of the anthems of the "Summer of Love", and one of the best selling singles in history, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide.



Keith Reid got the title and starting point for the song at a party. He overheard someone at the party saying to a woman, "You've turned a whiter shade of pale", and the phrase stuck in his mind. 

Keith Reid : "I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn't trying to be mysterious with those images, I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I'm describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs."

The original writing credits were for Brooker and Reid only. On 30 July 2009, Matthew Fisher won co-writing credit for the music in a unanimous ruling from the Law Lords. J.S. Bach, being slightly dead, has so far failed to contest the credits, and grab himself a deserved slice of the delicious money pie.

The similarity between Hammond Organ line of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and J.S.Bach's Air from his Orchestral Suite No. 3 BWV1068, (the "Air on the G string"), where the sustained opening note of the main melodic line flowers into a free-flowing melody against a descending bass line, has been noted.

Gary Brooker : "If you trace the chordal element, it does a bar or two of Bach's 'Air On A G String' before it veers off. That spark was all it took. I wasn't consciously combining rock with classical, it's just that Bach's music was in me."

Procol Harum recorded "A Whiter Shade of Pale" at Olympic Sound Studios in London, England. The recording was produced by Denny Cordell. Because they did not have a regular drummer, the drums were played by Bill Eyden, a session musician.

A few days after the session, the band re-recorded the song with their newly recruited drummer, Bobby Harrison, at Advision Studios. This version was discarded, and the original mono recordings was chosen for release as the band's debut single.

 

The first promotional clip for "A Whiter Shade of Pale" was shot in the ruins of Witley Court in Worcestershire, England. It features four of the five musicians who played on the hit single: Gary Brooker, Matthew Fisher, David Knights and Ray Royer, in performance and walking through the ruins. Only the drummer in the video is not on the record: early band member Bobby Harrison is seen miming to session man Bill Eyden's drumming. The film was directed by Peter Clifton, whose insertion of Vietnam War newsreel footage caused it to be banned from airplay on the BBC's Top of the Pops TV show.



Procol Harum subsequently made a second promotional clip, using "Scopitone" technology. By this time, Robin Trower and B.J. Wilson had replaced Royer and Harrison in the band, so only three of the five musicians on the recording are represented. No performance footage appears in this film – only scenes of the five musicians cavorting around London and running across fields. The same lineup, with Fisher wearing a monk's cowl, mimed to the song on Top of the Pops, although Brooker sang live.

 

Other Versions include :  The Everly Brothers (1967)  /  The Box Tops (1967)  /  Noel Harrison (1967)  /  Alton Ellis (1967)  /  King Curtis & The Kingpins (1967)  /  Big Jim Sullivan (1967)  /  Roland Alphonso (1967)  /  "Merisairaat kasvot" by Topmost (1967)  /  "Les orgues d'antan" by Nicoletta (1967)  /  "Le jour du dernier jour" by Donald Lautrec (1967)  /  César et les Romains (1967)  /  "Tränen im Gesicht" by Buddy Caine (1967)  /  "Senza luce" by Dik Dik (1967)  /  Wess and The Airedales (1967)  /  Fausto Leali (1967)  /  "Como Um Dia a Nascer" by Márcio Greyck (1967)  /  "Esse Amor Que Eu Não Queria" by Agnaldo Timóteo (1967)  /  Jean Carlo (1967)  /  "Då är hon åter lika blek" by The Telstars (1967)  /  Johnny Rivers (1968)  /  Hugh Masekela (1968)  /  Freddie McCoy (1968)  /  Los Impala (1968)  /  The Dells (1969)  /  The Congregation (1972)  /  Jimmy Castor Bunch (1973)  /  Sylvester and The Hot Band (1973)  /  Herbie Mann (1974)  /  Zulema (1975)  /  Flintlock (1976)  /  Joe Cocker (1978)  /  Munich Machine (1978)  /  Pat Kelly (1979)  /  Pete Tex (1980)  /  Bonnie Tyler (1981)  /  Nelson's Willie (1982)  /  Gerry & The Pacemakers (1982)  /  The Shadows (1983)  /  Annie Lennox (1995)  /  John Farnham (1998)  /  Michael Bolton (1999)  /  Helge & The Firefuckers (1999)  /  Sarah Brightman (2000)  /  The Twang (2010)  /  HumanDaikon 8bit (2010)  /  Dennis Brown (2011)  /  Danny McEvoy (2011)  /  Gabriella Quevedo (2012)  /  Keith Emerson (2013)  /  Kim Kirkman (2015)  /  a robot (2019)

On This Day  :

5 June : Six-day war begins between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria
7 June : Israel captures Wailing Wall in East Jerusalem, Jericho and Bethlehem
10 June : Spencer Tracy, actor, dies at 67
10 June : Emma Anderson, (Lush), born Emma Victoria Jane Anderson in Wimbledon, London
12 June : US Supreme Court unanimously ends laws against interracial marriages
12 June : USSR launches Venera 4 for parachute landing on Venus
12 June : "You Only Live Twice", 5th James Bond film starring Sean Connery, premieres in London
12 June : Bombardier Billy Wells, English heavyweight boxer & Rank Films 'Gong Basher', dies at 79
14 June : Mariner 5 Launched (Venus Flyby)
14 June : USSR launches Kosmos 166 for observation of Sun from Earth orbit
16 June : 50,000 attend first day of the Monterey Pop Festival
19 June : Paul McCartney admits on TV that he took LSD
20 June : Mohammed Ali sentenced to 5 years for refusing to be inducted into the army to fight in the Vietnam War
20 June : Nicole Kidman, actress, born Nicole Mary Kidman in Honolulu, Hawaii
24 June : Pope Paul VI publishes the kinky sex manual Sacerdotalis coelibatus
25 June : First global satellite television programme "Our World" broadcast
28 June : George Harrison is fined £6 for speeding
29 June : Primo Carnera, Italian boxer (World Heavyweight Champion 1933-34), dies at 60
29 June : Keith Richard sentenced to 1 year in jail on drugs charge
29 June : Jayne Mansfield dies in a car crash
30 June : Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. named 1st black astronaut
1 July : "Funny Girl" closes at Winter Garden Theater NYC after 1348 performances
1 July : 1st British colour TV broadcast, on BBC 2
1 July : Pamela Anderson, actress (Baywatch), born Pamela Denise Anderson in Ladysmith, British Columbia, Canada
7 July : Wimbledon Men's Tennis: John Newcombe beats Wilhelm Bungert of Germany 6-3 ,6-1, 6-1
8 July : Wimbledon Women's Tennis: Billie Jean King beats UK's Anne Jones 6-3, 6-4
8 July : Vivien Leigh, actress (Gone with the Wind), dies of tuberculosis at 53
12 July : Richard Herring, English comedian, born Richard Keith Herring in Cheddar Pocklington, East Yorkshire
13 July : Benny Benassi, disc jockey, born Marco Benassi in Reggio Emilia, Italy
14 July : Surveyor 4 launched to Moon; explodes just before landing
15 July : "Sweet Charity" closes at Palace Theater NYC after 608 performances

Extra! Extra!

                       

Read all about it! :

                     

 

[Johnboy]

the King Curtis version used to great effect in Withnail and I

[The Culture Bunker]

One of those bands were I couldn't tell you anything else but their one "big" song - I'm aware they had a few other hits, but I can't remember ever hearing them. And it's nice, a good song, just not sure I ever need to hear it again.

I was amused when the singer appeared on some BBC4 show about old rockers, and he described my hometown as the roughest gig he could remember, getting run out by the locals who weren't impressed with this bunch of long-haired Southerners getting all the attention from the lasses.

[purlieu]

It's a great song, and one I thankfully haven't over-played in the past.
I had a 2CD set with their first four albums on, and despite listening a number of times, I don't remember a thing about it at all. Staggeringly dull.

[Egyptian Feast]

I'm quite fond of some of the stuff I've heard from their first couple of albums. This Italian version of 'Shine On Brightly', for example.

[daf]

Couple of bonus bits, that didn't quite fit :

• John Peel, then a pirate DJ, was an early fan -

"A Whiter Shade Of Pale" owed much of its success to heavy exposure on Radio London, while John Peel was working on the station. The Radio London website describes how enthusiastic listener response to advance plays of the single in April 1967 persuaded the record company to issue it in the following month. Yet Peel later said he preferred the follow-up single, Homburg, released in autumn 1967 after the pirate stations had closed down and only a minor hit.

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

Peel used to host an hour-long concert programme on Radio One entitled The Sunday Show, which Procol Harum played in 1970: with Trower on bass and Copping on organ they performed A Salty Dog, which he back-announced :

John Peel : "and, er, that was A Salty Dog, which was once released as a single, and should have done, er, a lot better in fact as a single than it did; unfortunately, um, seeing as it was longer than two-and-a-half minutes long and isn't exactly a bright tempo, a lot of my colleagues won't play it because they feel that, er, more than two-and-a-half minutes without some, er, feeble quip from them, er, is going to make the world a sadder place ..."

• The name-tag for 'A Salty Dog' on the jukebox in Danny Baker's local pub in the early 70s had been amended with a biro to read 'A Salty Dong'.

[Gulftastic]

Name checked in a Nanci Griffith song means it's OK by me.

[bigfatheart]

They're all salty dogs by the time I'm etc etc

[Satchmo Distel]

It's a really dark song to be No. 1 in the Summer of Love. It really belongs with 1969-70 where the party has turned sour and rock stars are dying from overdoses. Paint It Black might be its twin in that respect.

Bach should really get a writer's credit because the tune is basically a mixture of several of his pieces. The production though is absolutely awesome and I doubt anyone had got that swirling paranoid sound before, conveying being on smack so precisely.

[famethrowa]

Couple of bonus bits, that didn't quite fit :

• John Peel, then a pirate DJ, was an early fan -
• The name-tag for 'A Salty Dog' on the jukebox in Danny Baker's local pub in the early 70s had been amended with a biro to read 'A Salty Dong'.

He's right though, A Salty Dog is good but a dreary dirge. Who would go down the pub and give it a spin on the jukebox??

[daf]

Silly Moo!, it's . . .

234b. (MM 184.)  The Monkees - Alternate Title (Randy Scouse Git)



From :  15 - 21 July 1967
Weeks : 1
Flip side : Forget That Girl
Bonus : Tracking Session

The Story So Far :

The beginning of 1967 had seen the group take control of their musical identities on their third album 'Headquarters'.

Peter Tork : "I listen to it now, and it sounds like a pretty good kids' garage album. Nobody was a slouch. You don't hear good sophisticated musicians at every post, but that's not the point of a bunch of kids getting together and playing music. The whole point of a band is that you get something that comes out of who's there. That's the difference."

One would think quality of the album would have silenced many of the group's detractors, however . . .

Mike Nesmith : "What happened was staggering. The press went into a full-scale war against us, talking about how 'The Monkees are four guys who have no credits, no credibility whatsoever and have been trying to trick us into believing they are a rock band.' Number one, not only was this not the case, the reverse was true. Number two, for the press to report with general alarm that The Monkees were not a real rock band was looney tunes! It was one of the great goofball moments of the media, but it stuck.

"The records were goin' #1, we were sellin' millions of 'em, and the people who somehow had got it into their minds that The Monkees weren't a real rock band decided that this was some kind of great hoax that was being perpetrated. Which is just absurd. We never were a real rock band. We all knew what was goin' on inside. Kirschner had been purged. We'd gone to try and make Headquarters and found that our better move was to just go back to the original song-making strategy of the first albums, except with a clear indication of how it came to be."

After the removal of Don Kirshner, and the release of 'Headquarters', the band decided to return to the songwriting strategy of the earlier albums.

Mike Nesmith : "I thought Pisces, Aquarius was the one that caught it all. We went back to the basics of making music for the television shows and trying to make good pop records, and I think we did a good job at it."

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The resulting Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., released on 14 November 1967, was a shift from the overall purity of 'Headquarters' to a more palatable, though still group-oriented, musical blend.

Peter Tork : "There were still some wonderful moments on Pisces Aquarius. It's sort of a mixed-mode band. You hear us, and you hear the pros. It's a compromise. It's not what I would have liked, but it's better than what was before, as far as I'm concerned."

Sessions started in April '67 employing two four-track machines, but sometime in August shifted to RCA's newly installed eight-track recording facilities.

Chip Douglas : "Just getting it done was like a major nightmare. After they did Headquarters, it was really difficult to get together and talk about anything. There were all these parties going on at Micky's house. Mike had his friends and his business things – he was always talking on the phone. There was hardly a minute and a half for you to actually sit down and discuss something without some interruption taking place. It was weird. Things were kind of falling apart. There was less and less time, and everybody was more and more frustrated, wanting to do their own ideas."

A large portion of the album had to be recorded during The Monkees' hectic 1967 summer tour.

Chip Douglas : "Some was done in New York, some was done in Nashville, and some was done in Chicago. As far as the number of takes per song, it went quicker. On Headquarters there was a lot of editing of different takes together to make one good take. The only difference was we had a different drummer, basically, and a few extra musicians to work with."

 

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"Salesman" kicks off the album in supreme Nesmith-twanging style. The song was composed by Craig Vincent Smith - a mid-'60s acquaintance of Nesmith's -

Mike : "Craig Smith was a member of a band whose name I can't remember right now. I really liked the way they sang, and I produced a couple of songs on 'em. I was drawn to record 'Salesman' because it reminded me of Sir Douglas and the Tex-Mex oompah."

Peter : "That song was in the show 'The Devil And Peter Tork'. Initially, NBC said, 'We're not putting that song in because it has drug references.' What it really says is, salesmen are so sleazy, they'll just sell anything. Bert Schneider was convinced that the reason that they didn't want that episode out was that we were challenging the notion that you can't say 'hell' on television. Bert felt that they didn't want to put the show on because they were pissed off directly and personally having their idea of what's right and wrong challenged. They said it was centered on 'Salesman,' but he thought it was a red herring."

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"She Hangs Out" was previously recorded and almost issued on the 'A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You' single, which Don Kirschner attempted to release without The Monkees' approval. The Monkees' new and improved recording was previewed on episode #41, a full week prior to Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.'s release.

"Love Is Only Sleeping" was not originally intended to be included on 'Pisces'. This Mann & Weil song was meant to be issued as a single. One month prior to the album's release, however, a manufacturing delay, and its vaguely risqué lyrics kept it confined to album-only status.

Mike : "I remember when they would send me Barry and Cynthia's songs.  We were always looking for songs to record. I just remember liking the song quite a bit in the demo." 




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"Cuddly Toy" was recorded on April 26, 1967, under the title of "By Any Boy", and is the only song on the album to feature Micky behind the drums. It was submitted to the group by Harry Nilsson, who first performed the song for the group during a private demo session -

Mike : "Bill Martin brought Harry over to one of the recording sessions. I think it might have been while we were doing Headquarters.  Harry was working at a bank at the time and writing songs on the side trying to make a living at it.  He had a stack of 'em, but I loved 'Cuddly Toy' when I heard it.  I said, 'Oh, man, we gotta do this.'"

Despite it's innocent sounding title, the subject matter of Nilsson's song was a Hell's Angels' gang-bang. Reportedly, when Screen Gems' Lester Sill was let in on this fact after the record's release, he was furious -

Mike : "There were a lot of double entendres and innuendos going around, but I ignored all that stuff. I certainly never had any sense of, 'This would be cool. We'll say something euphemistically.' If I wanted to say something, I would have said something straight out. I liked 'Cuddly Toy' because I took it at face value."

"Cuddly Toy" would mark Micky's last solo stand as studio drummer for The Monkees -

Peter : "He did a great job on Headquarters, but he wasn't going to do it again, and there was nothing you could do to change his mind.  We had to go back in the studio.  He said, 'Peter, you can't go back.'"

For the remainder of the album sessions, Micky would be replaced on the drums by Eddie Hoh -

Peter : "Eddie Hoh did the drumming. Chip got him 'cause he could read music. The result is you get directed stuff, and there's no group interaction, which is why I wanted the group to be on the album in the first place. You listen to Beatles albums, and one of the things that makes them great is they found ways to use who they had to get what they want, without asking anyone to do what they couldn't do. That's what makes groups work. That's all I ever hoped for. I had it for a minute on Headquarters, and I thought it was pretty good."

In addition to bringing Nilsson to The Monkees, songwriter Bill Martin also proffered his anti-war song "The Door Into Summer".  Sessions for the tune began in May and were spread over the next several months.

Chip Douglas : "We did a demo of that together, Bill Martin and I. It had a real good feel to it, but we had to redo it for some reason.  I was always a little disappointed in the newer version from the original demo of it."

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Though it is credited to their '60s alter egos, Travis Lewis and Boomer Clark, "What Am I Doing Hangin' 'Round?" was the work of Michael Martin Murphy and Owen Castleman. It was chosen by Nesmith who saw the song as another step in the direction he ultimately hoped to take The Monkees in.

Mike : "I felt country rock was honest, and I wanted to move The Monkees more into that. This song had a lot of un-country things to it – a familiar change from a major to a 6th minor. It was a little bit of a new wave country song. It didn't sound like the country songs of the time, which were Buck Owens."

Peter Tork's main vocal contribution to the album was the whimsical spoken word piece "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky"  -

Peter : "That was taught to me by Judy Mayhan, who was a singer that I worked with and managed for a time – she had an album on Elektra. It was just a thing she had heard at a nursery school. I got credited for it because Screen Gems never asked me who wrote it. It's actually public domain."



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In one of the strangest pairings in rock and roll history, The Jimi Hendrix Experience was the opening act for several cities during the U.S. summer tour.

 

Mike Nesmith : "I was in London visiting John Lennon, and I was having dinner with him, McCartney, and Clapton, and John was late. When he came in he said, 'I'm sorry I'm late but I've got something I want to play you guys.' He had a handheld tape recorder and he played 'Hey Joe.' Everybody's mouth just dropped open. He said, 'Isn't this wonderful?' So I made a mental note of Jimi Hendrix, because Lennon had introduced me to his playing."

Micky Dolenz had watched Hendrix perform prior to his famous appearance at Monterey -

Micky : "I'd actually seen him before, in New York, when he was a sideman for John Hammond, and he was known as Jimmy James. He was introduced as the guy who plays the guitar with his teeth. Then, months later, he went to England and picked Mitch and Noel, and Chas Chandler put together the Experience. Then I was at the Monterey Pop Festival, and they came on stage. I was like, 'Hey, that's the guy who plays guitar with his teeth!'"

Hendrix joined The Monkees as the tour officially commenced on 8 July 1967 in Jacksonville, Florida, with Hendrix continuing to appear through dates in Miami, Florida on 9 July, Charlotte, North Carolina on 11 July , and Greensboro, North Carolina on 12 July 1967.

 

Promoting a supporting act as cutting edge as the Jimi Hendrix Experience on The Monkees' 1967 summer tour was perhaps in some ways an attempt to solidify The Monkees' standing as serious musicians and entertainers. The group was thrilled to have Hendrix and company on the bill, even showing up early to the shows to watch his set. The Monkees fans, however, had other ideas . . .

Micky : "The parents were probably not too crazy about having to sit through a Monkees concert, much less see this black guy in a psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar like he was fucking it, then lighting it on fire . . . Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps and break into 'Purple Haze,' and the kids in the audience would instantly drown him out with, 'We Want Davy!!' God, it was embarrassing."

Peter : "Nobody thought, 'This is screaming, scaring-your-daddy music compared with The Monkees'. It didn't cross anybody's mind that it wasn't gonna fly. And there's poor Jimi, and the kids go, 'We want The Monkees, we want The Monkees.'"

 

As the arrangement didn't work with the crowds coming to the concerts, Hendrix and company eventually left the tour amicably after the New York shows at Forest Hills Stadium. Despite the complications, it was reported that both The Monkees and The Experience got along and even jammed off-stage.



Mike : "The Jimi Hendrix Experience were the apotheosis of '60s psychedelic ribbon shirts and tie-dye—they had pinwheels for eyes and their hair was out to here.  I thought, 'Man, I gotta see this thing live.'  So that night I stood in front of the stage and listened to Hendrix at soundcheck.  And I thought, 'Well, this guy's from Mars; he's from some other planet, but whatever it is, thank heaven for this visitation.'  And I listened to him play at the soundchecks and the concert.  I thought, 'This is some of the best music I've heard in my life.'"



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Before its appearance on the album, Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was issued as a single on 10 July 1967, and reached #11 in the UK in August 1967.

 

The recording was made on the Saturday and Sunday following The Monkees' triumphant Hollywood Bowl performance on Friday, 9 June, 1967 -

Chip Douglas : "It didn't take too many takes to get that one. Bill Chadwick played the rhythm guitar, and Mike played the lead live and then overdubbed it and fattened it up."

Mike Nesmith : "Chip said, 'We need a riff like in "Paperback Writer," "Last Train To Clarksville," "Day Tripper."' 'How does this riff sound?' He played the riff to 'Pleasant Valley Sunday.' I said, 'Well, teach it to me, let me see.' So he taught it to me, and he said, 'You know, we could put this to "Pleasant Valley Sunday," and it would work really well.' I said, 'That sounds good to me!' So I pulled out the Black Beauty, hooked it up and we made it. Everybody was trying to get that great big, present guitar sound – nobody knew quite how to do it. I think I used like three Super Beatle [Vox] amps playing really loud, trying to get the sound. It ended up sounding like it does, kind of wooden. There was a type of limiter compressor – which is still in use – called a UREI 1176. It was a tube-type compressor and limiter, and boy you could really suck stuff out of the track. I think everyone got a little carried away with the 1176 on that record."

Also of note is the track's remarkable reverb-drenched ending - Chip Douglas : "I think Hank Cicalo said, 'Why don't we crank on some reverb and make this big psychedelic ending?' The take just went on and on. It was a matter of either fading out or doing something."

 

The flip side, "Words", was Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart's lone contribution to the album. It was originally a song that had originally been recorded with backing from The Candy Store Prophets for 'More Of The Monkees' in August 1966. Chip Douglas and the band re-cut the track almost identically, but replaced the original version's flute solo with a Hammond B-3 organ solo.

Tommy Boyce : "We had done American Bandstand way up in Bakersfield, and they had this hayride. One girl was standing over to the side, and no one was talking to her. So we said, 'Why don't you come on the hayride with us?' She said, 'Well, no one really talks to me up here.' I said, 'Well, Rosemary, come on, and have a great time.' When we got back to Los Angeles about two weeks later, she sent us this unbelievable thank-you note. As you opened the card, it just said in big letters 'WORDS.' She said, 'Tommy and Bobby, WORDS can never express how nice you two were to me at the hayride.' I said, 'Wow! What a great idea for a song – words!' That was also one of the first times we thought Peter could actually sing on a record – we thought it would be good for him and Micky to do those overlapping vocals."



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Mike Nesmith's "Daily Nightly" was the album's most overly psychedelic track, with Micky Dolenz's use of a Moog synthesizer on this track marking the first time the instrument had been utilized on a mainstream pop record.

Micky Dolenz: "Somebody introduced me to this guy in L.A. named Paul Beaver, and he was representing the Moog company on the West Coast. I went over to his workshop and saw one in operation – I was just blown away and ordered one immediately. It was a monstrosity to operate compared to what's around now. Paul Beaver came around and helped me kinda set it up and tune it and stuff. But it was pretty exciting. I remember Mike was really into it."

After recording the basic track, Micky randomly overdubbed his Moog parts - Chip Douglas : "It seemed chaotic when he was doing it. He had no idea how to play it; it was just random, hit-and-miss kind of stuff. I just turned on the track, and he did it one time through, and all of these weird sounds came out."

Mike Nesmith : "It's the Hollywood street scene. I wrote it because I had bought a Hammond B-3.  That guitar line, that's a keyboard lick that got over to the guitar.  Somewhere around that time [the Sunset Boulevard nightclub] Pandora's Box burned down.  The street scene which would congregate had gotten a bus on fire which in turn burned down Pandora's Box.  That was the first real time that those crazy kids got out of control.  I was amused by the obvious inability of the press to digest this information; they just didn't have any sense of what was going on at all.  So I just wrote it down in that poem."

Mike Nesmith's second composition for the album, "Don't Call On Me", was a re-vamped version of a song that Nesmith had been playing around with since 1963 - Mike : "That was pre-Monkees. It was an experimentation in major 7th chords and what cocktail lounge music was all about."

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"Star Collector" was another song from Goffin & King. The song's lyrics were about the growing phenomena of groupies. This time around, Paul Beaver took over for Micky on Moog - Chip Douglas: "After Micky experimented with his synthesizer, I thought, 'Well, let's find a real synthesizer player. Micky had told me about Paul Beaver. He was a good player and knew what to do."

Peter Tork : "I always thought Paul didn't know what he was doing. As far as he was concerned it was just a monophonic keyboard – he played it for the musicality. Micky's Moog part on 'Daily Nightly' was – I thought – brilliant. Another example of his intense creativity, when he was into it. He just made the Moog stand up and speak. Paul thought it was a flute or something. He was sort of out there musically, but still within normal harmonic bounds."

NME Journalist Keith Altham attended the "Star Collector" session and wrote this eyewitness report :

"When I arrived at 10 p.m., Peter, Micky and Mike were completing the last track for their fourth album – 'Star Collector.'  There were ten or twelve takes before the group and Lester Sill were satisfied with the track.  'Star Collector' was supposed to run for about two and a half minutes, but ran out of control as they improvised their way into six minutes of playing time, with Micky 'buh-by-ooing' his way into infinity.  Dolenz was particularly gratified by the playback.  'That's great, you guys,' he shouted.  'I can do some fantastic things with my sound synthesizer in there!'  This electronic machine is Micky's latest plaything.

"The group went back to tape some dialogue, and the conversation wheeled around to what they could have on the album cover.  Mike suggested, 'I thought we might have this gigantic organ grinder thing which goes up right out of the picture so you can just see the handle and a huge hand turning it.  Then the four of us in monkey suits, with shackles and chains around our necks, attached to the giant wrist.'  Dolenz suggested: 'How about a huge monkey foot with just us squatting beside it?'  Dolenz decided the muse was upon him, and further expounded: 'Black!  That's what I want.  I want the whole sleeve black – black, black, black!'  Nobody seemed terrible enthusiastic about the idea and they all went home."

In late August a final track was taped in Hollywood for inclusion on the album. "Hard To Believe", composed by Davy Jones in conjunction with members of The Monkees' summer tour opening act The Sundowners, fully utilized RCA's new 8-track facility.  For the first time, a Monkees song would be built up one instrument at a time. 

Chip Douglas :  "Kim Copli did all the instruments on that starting with the drums.  It came out well for what he did and sounded like a real track.  But I'd never done that with anybody before.  When it came to anyone but The Monkees in the studio, I didn't like anyone but them around really.  Anyone from the outside that they collaborated with was like pulling it apart to me.  Having The Monkees collaborating together on something, that's what I was always wishing for, you know." 

   

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When cover artist Bernard Yeszin came to illustrate The Monkees' fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., he took a brave step.  The group would be drawn in silhouette only, with just their respective astrological signs hinting at their identities. 

Bernard Yeszin : "The Monkees were so popular and so hot at the time, that I could do just about anything that reminded you of The Monkees.  I could do an album cover and just show their outline and people would identify them.  People would know they were The Monkees. It was really based upon a photograph that I had taken of them. The flowers were part of that flower child love-fest that was going on during that period of time. Historically, it was right on the money."

 

Mixed during October and issued in November 1967, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. coasted to #1 by year's end. The group were at the height of their creative powers, but their problems were just beginning -

Mike Nesmith : "By the time this album came out, we had really gotten our feet under us. We were feeling pretty good about the first season, and we were feeling pretty good about our improvisational and comedic skills. It was also at the height of Monkee bashing, which was pretty rampant at that point. Everybody in the press and in the hippie movement had got us into their target window as being illegitimate and not worthy of consideration as a musical force. We were really gettin' beat up pretty good. It's very difficult to explain now, especially if you weren't there – the hatred that was engendered is almost impossible to describe. It lingers to this day among people of my age."

Despite the success, the album was a signpost of the group's growing fragmentation. Without the common enemy of Don Kirshner to unite the members, the group splintered. Having succeeded in becoming a true musical unit, the members now pursued individual goals. 

Chip Douglas : "Things were kind of falling apart, and there was less and less time, and everybody was more and more frustrated and wanting to do their own ideas and didn't want to have to go through a central interpreter like me. Everybody wanted to do these songs and produce them the way they wanted to hear them.  It was sad.  I was ready to do that Boyce and Hart song 'P.O. Box 9847.'  I thought, Boy, that could probably be pretty good.  We began to talk a little bit about that.  I was getting more ideas, you know.  Then they said, 'Chip, we're not working with you anymore.  We're going to do our own thing.'  It just drifted apart."

   

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Chip Douglas : "Actually, I always felt the reason Pisces didn't sell more was because they didn't put 'Daydream Believer' on it. 'Daydream Believer' was supposed to be in the album. Lester Sill said, 'Well, we're not puttin' it on this album, we're gonna put it on the next album.'  That was their theory; we'll just keep one as an ace in the hole for the next album."

The song "Love Is Only Sleeping" was originally slated for a single release on 13 October 1967, but when the overseas masters did not arrive in time to make the scheduled date, this release was postponed. Eleven days later, Screen Gems officially scrapped the planned single, deciding that the more commercial flipside should be placed on the A-side -

"Daydream Believer" was The Monkees' second biggest seller of all time, as well as their fifth gold single. It became The Monkees' third and final chart-topping single in the US, and reached #5 in the UK in November 1967.




The filp-side, "Goin' Down" was a product of the band's increasingly frequent studio jam sessions - Mickey : "That was originally the track for Mose Allison's 'Parchman Farm,' and it came out real good. I remember Mike saying, 'Why should we cover someone else's tune. We're not stealing the melody.'"

Mike Nesmith : "Peter had always loved to jam to Mose Allison's 'Parchman Farm' and started off on this thing. Then Micky started riffing this thing over the top of it, and we just headed off into la-la land."

The sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees were the most extensive ever undertaken by the original Monkees. Beginning at the end of October '67 and going roughly through March '68, these sessions yielded a large amount of material that would turn up on The Monkees' next two album releases – Head and Instant Replay – while countless other tracks remained in the can. The reason for this burst of productivity was a new policy set forth by Screen Gems stating that each Monkee was allotted a certain amount of time in the studio every week.

Micky Dolenz : "By that time we had all decided that we were going to do our own brand of music – three tracks each on the album. We just went away and got our own songs and arrangers and produced, as it were, our own sessions."

This new situation meant that on any given day each one of The Monkees could be holding a session in a different studio around the city. Although they were essentially in charge of the final product, The Monkees were often ably assisted in the studio by longtime supervisor Lester Sill, veteran jazzman Shorty Rogers, or future manager Brendan Cahill.

Shorty Rogers : "At that point their contract read that they were to be credited as producers on any product of theirs that came out. Brendan Cahill and I really did all the studio work and production with Lester Sill. When we finished the album, Lester said, 'We'll put you down as producers,' but The Monkees didn't want it, so that went by the wayside."

Another point of contention during the album's production was the cover. The sleeve for The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees was a collage-like display created by Alan Wolsky, but, it was not to the group's liking.

Lester Sill : "There was a terrible argument about the cover. I got a lot of heat from them. They wanted it to be their record from beginning to end. On the sleeve their faces are all over in small shots – they didn't want it. So I called back the guy who ran the whole operation in New York, Jerry Hime, and he said, 'That's the cover, that's the way it stands.' I said, 'OK, boss.'"

 

Released on April 22, 1968, 'The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees' was the band's final gold album of the '60s and their first to miss the top spot on the album chart. It was also the group's first release after the show's second, and final, season had ended. Although the album did not reach the artistic or commercial heights of its predecessor, it is memorable for being one of the group's most eclectic and challenging works.



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"Dream World" was composed by Davy Jones with a new collaborator, the previously unknown Steve Pitts.

Davy Jones : "Steve Pitts was a musician from Austin, who was a friend of Mike Nesmith's. He and I sat down to write some tunes originally for the movie Head. But we had also written some other tunes during that particular session, including this one. The idea of 'Dream World' I think was a bit of a steal in the sense that I had done an album years before with Colpix, and I had a song called 'Dream Girl.' I wanted to try and incorporate some of the violins and all that early '60s stuff into 'Dream World.' It was actually one of the first things I'd gone in to do and produce myself. However, we were very restricted in our studio time and budget availability."

"Auntie's Municipal Court" was probably Nesmith's most accessible offering on the album. Recorded and composed with future Paul Revere & The Raiders member Keith Allison, the song grew out of a studio jam in which Nesmith fit one of his poems with Allison's improvised riffs. Later in the same session, Micky was called in to add his vocals to the track, making this the only "new" recording on the album to feature more than one Monkee.

The recording of Carole Bayer and George Fischoff's "We Were Made For Each Other" was actually The Monkees' second attempt at cutting the song. An earlier version was produced at the tail end of the 'Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.' sessions with producer Chip Douglas at the reins.

"I'll Be Back Up On My Feet" was originally recorded during the sessions for 'More Of The Monkees'. However, that version was shelved when the group gained their musical independence from Don Kirschner in early 1967. Although a remake of "I'll Be Back Up On My Feet" was attempted during the sessions for Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., no finished takes were completed. Ironically, by the time a completely new version was cut for The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, the group had returned to utilizing session men for their musical backing.

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"The Poster" was a wholesome Davy Jones ditty that beat a similar lyrical path to The Beatles' "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite." The song's origins were related to the poetic sleeve note Davy chose for the album's back cover -



Davy Jones : "On that particular one I collaborated with Steve once again – he was the guy who put down the notes that went along with me singing the tune, and my lyrics. Once somebody writes one line, then they're part of the tune. I was in Manchester, and I went to see this woman called Edith Sidebottom. She was an old lady of 85 or 86 years old, and we discussed some things. She showed me this one song that she had about a circus. I think the only line I took from her was 'The circus is coming to town' – that was the end of her song. She also said, 'Why are we forever weaving new ties to bind us to the earth?': it wasn't hers – it was some person's from yester decade – but I put that on the back of the album.

"When the album came out in America, I actually sent her a copy. Then all of a sudden I got a letter from her lawyer! Not to make an old lady unhappy, I think I sent her about three thousand bucks, which is probably more than she'd seen in a long, long time. I like to write stories, and 'The Poster' is just a story. I try to paint a picture with my lyrics. If you can't go to the circus, read the lyrics; you'll feel as if you're there."



Prior to it's inclusion on the album, songwriters Boyce & Hart released their own version of "P.O. Box 9847" on a single, with Bob Rafelson credited as co-author -

Bobby Hart : "It was Bob Rafelson's idea to do a song about a classified ad. It wasn't his title or anything, but he did say, 'I have a great idea for a song worded the way a classified ad would read – in abbreviated style.' So when Tommy and I wrote 'P.O. Box 9847' we gave him a third of the writing credit for his inspiration and original idea. Later, when The Monkees released it, the powers that be would not let him have a writer's credit. I guess it was some kind of conflict of interest, because he was the producer of the television show. He never cashed his first royalty check, and they took his name off it, subsequently."

"Magnolia Simms" was Nesmith's fourth and final song on 'The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees'. Reportedly, the song was inspired by Mike's purchase of $100 worth of shellac 78s dating back to the Roaring '20s. Nesmith's tip of the hat to this fact was this song's low-fi production, which included vinyl surface noise and creating a mono sound by placing all the sound on one channel only.

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Like many of their songs, "Valleri" was featured on the group's show far in advance of its official release on record. It achieved near-legendary status when regional DJs who pirated the song from the television show, aired their homemade recordings, creating public demand for the song's release. The main reason the song was not originally issued was The Monkees' concern that all future tracks bear their collective production credit.

Bobby Hart : "'Valleri' was specifically written for them. We actually came up with that in a car on the way over to see Don Kirschner, who had asked us to write a song with a girl's name in it. Donnie was always making these lists with his formulas, and writing a song with a girl's name was one of them. We originally cut 'Valleri' just prior to the point when we were dismissed as producers. Over a year later Lester Sill came back to us and said that they wanted to recut 'Valleri,' but we couldn't use the original track because we were the credited producers on it. They wanted us to go back in and make it sound as close to the original as possible and not take producer's credit on it."

The new version of "Valleri" was released in March 1968. It became The Monkees' final Top 10 single in the US, and reached #12 in the UK in April 1968.

   

The B-side, "Tapioca Tundra", was recorded at a single session on November 11, 1967, and was another of Nesmith's forays into Latin music.

Mike Nesmith: "I have always enjoyed writing poetry – stand alone poetry. As a matter of fact, one of the ways I got into songwriting was to find poems and see if I could put them to music. I did that in high school and college – in English class I would set some of the poems we were studying to music. By the time that 'Tapioca Tundra' came along, I had been writing my own poetry for a while. The poems tended to be fairly complex, because I realized I couldn't continue to write pop tunes of the type that Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, and Boyce & Hart were writing. I thought I probably ought to go ahead and put my own imprimatur on things."

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"Zor And Zam" was composed by longtime Monkees confidant Bill Chadwick and his brother, John. The song was actually conceived prior to the Monkees project -

Bill Chadwick : "Originally, my brother John and I had written a treatment for a television series that was to be called The Friendship. John was a former Disney animator, and the show was to incorporate live action into the animation. It was a very fantasy-oriented project – like Yellow Submarine but with live action, and about two or three years earlier. The story featured these two kings – Zor and Zam – and the pilot for the show was to include the song. Unfortunately, we never did anything with it – we got bogged down by the creative end of things."

An alternate mix of "Zor And Zam" was aired during The Monkees' season finale, "The Frodis Caper", on March 25, 1968.

 

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"Alvin", a spoken-word performance by Peter Tork that was penned by his younger brother Nick Thorkelson, was originally intended to serve as a brief prelude to "Daydream Believer". Nonetheless, this recording and two others were pulled from the finished album master just four weeks prior to release, for reasons unknown.

"Lady's Baby", another outtake from the sessions, required ten recording sessions to produce due to Tork's insistence on using real baby sounds for the song's intro and fade, as opposed to the less costly practice of using a pre-recorded special effects disc. Tork's plan entailed studio engineers following the song's infant subject, Justin Hammer, around the studio floor with a microphone in order to capture these unique sounds, hence the prolonged production.

Davy Jones : "They laugh and joke about that – it cost as much to do as 'Good Vibrations,' that record. But that was a true-to-life thing. He was living with a woman at the time, and she had a little baby, and that changed his life, you know? That gave him something to think about. He was being downtrodden by the studio in regards to his recording, his playing, his songs, and everything else. But Peter Tork was the salt of the earth. It wasn't just Hare Krishna, waterbeds, and brown rice – that guy was a very accomplished musician. It's a nice song, it's true, it's got the warmth and everything of what he was living. I remember it so well – it's a real tune. I love it!"

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"D. W. Washburn" (b/w "It's Nice To Be With You"), was the first single they released after the final season of their TV series concluded.

All their previous singles reached the Top 3 in the US due to strong promotion through their use in various episodes, but without this exposure, the song became the band's first to miss the Top Ten - peaking at #19. In the UK it reached #17 in July 1968, and would be their final Top 40 hit in the UK.

 

The Single :

"Randy Scouse Git" was written by Micky Dolenz in 1967 and recorded by The Monkees. It was the first song written by Dolenz to be commercially released, and became a number 2 hit in the UK where it was retitled.



RCA Records in England told the band that they would not release the song unless it was given an "alternate title". By his own account, Dolenz said "OK, 'Alternate Title' it is".

 

The song captured the sights and sounds of Micky's recent trip to London, the lyrics name-dropped some famous faces amongst its blurred imagery. Dolenz took the song's title from a phrase he had heard spoken on an episode of the British television series Till Death Us Do Part, which he had watched while in England, probably round at Top of the Pops 'disc girl', and future wife, Samantha Juste's pad.

   

Micky Dolenz : "It was the morning after The Beatles had thrown us a party. I was literally just making it up as I went along.  It's not very significant but it mentions The Beatles, it mentions this girl I was with at the time who later on was to become my first wife.  She's the girl in the limousine.  It was just about my experiences.  It was like word association, really.  Mama Cass is in there, who I knew at the time.  The Monkee experience of limos with black darkened windows and black leather Naugahyde.  Then there was a social comment, 'Why don't you cut your hair, why don't you live up there?'  It was about young long-haired hippies being abused by the establishment."

The song was played on by all four Monkees : Dolenz on vocals, drums and timpani; Davy Jones on backing vocals; Mike Nesmith on guitar; Peter Tork on piano and organ, and producer Chip Douglas on bass guitar.

Micky : "I don't recall specifically how we managed to put the arrangement together, but it was a pretty collaborative effort at the time with Chip Douglas. I should think Chip had a lot to do with it."

 

After numerous run-throughs, the song was finally recorded on 4 March 1967. Tired of tapping on his wood block, Micky noticed a kettle drum sitting in the corner of the studio and hit upon the idea of using the instrument for the choruses, intro, and fade.

Peter Tork : "I remember when Micky first showed me that song, I was so excited, he played me the verse and he played me the chorus and he said, 'And then at the end we do them both at the same time. Wow, I thought, that was a brilliant piece of music. I've always thought that Micky was more creative than he ever gave himself credit for. He's a vastly more talented individual than he's aware of. I always thought that song was proof of it."

   

It was released as a single on 1 July 1967, and reached Number 1 on the Melody Maker chart.

Other Versions include :  Peter Covent Band (1967)  /  Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (1990)  /  Bad Manners (1997)  /  Danny McEvoy (2011)  /  Micky Dolenz (2012)  /  Steve Gilligan (2013)  /  Pete Zolli (2015)  /  The Orwells (2016)  /  Didirri (2016)  /  The Balcony Shirts Band (2017)

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! :

             

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The Story So Far & Further :

'Head' was The Monkees' sixth album release and the soundtrack to their sole feature film outing. The film was shot in various locations between February and May 1968, and was an extension on the cinema verité experiments and improvised setups in The Monkees TV series.

Peter Tork : "We wanted to do something special. Something a little extraordinary. Something not quite normal. We really didn't want to make another episode of the television show. I saw the movie of McHale's Navy, and it was absurd to watch an hour-and-a-half version of a half-hour episode. Basically, you didn't get a sense that there was anything else going into it – they just wrote a longer script. The four of us, Bert Schneider, Bob, and Jack Nicholson all went to Ojai (California) and talked about what we did and didn't want. We sort of found a common ground. What exactly that was, we wound up leaving to Bob and Jack – the exact script of the movie was basically their idea."

Micky Dolenz : "We all wanted to do something different than a 90-minute version of the show. Which, in retrospect, would have been a lot more commercial. But then again, we wouldn't have this strange little cult movie, which I'm very proud of."

The accompanying soundtrack to the film was packaged in a silver foil 'Mylar' sleeve – designed to reflect the buyer's own head – unfortunately, the heavy sleeve bent the presses at RCA's manufacturing plant and caused the album's release to be delayed by several weeks.

 

Peter Tork : "It's the most diverse and trippiest. It was really all about trips – going someplace. You know, we used the word in those days very specifically – 'trippy' meant not just spacey, but actually involved in some kind of adventure as opposed to plodding along. The first four albums were no trip at all – they didn't go anywhere. There were those little interludes on Headquarters – 'Band 6' and 'Zilch' – which were a lot of fun. And I thought actually 'Randy Scouse Git' was pretty much of a trip. But Head – that was something special."

The record featured just six songs cut into a collage of dialogue and sounds assembled by Jack Nicholson.

Peter Tork : "Nicholson coordinated the soundtrack, but he made it different from the movie. There's a line where Zappa says, 'That song was pretty white.' Nicholson juxtaposed it with another line in the movie when Mike says, '...and the same thing goes for Christmas.' That's funny! It was a different trip from the movie, and I thought that was very important and wonderful, that he did assemble the record differently. It was a different artistic experience."

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Kicking off the musical proceedings was Goffin & King's mesmerizing "Porpoise Song (Theme From 'Head')" which remains a remarkably cryptic composition for the hit-driven duo. The main group of musicians who performed the musical backing on this track were at the time part of Clear Light - the bands guitarist, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar, went on to become one of the West Coast's most in-demand session men.

Bob Rafelson : "Carole King was living in an apartment building on Sunset Boulevard, and I went to her apartment every day, and we would sit and we would talk. That song was critical to me. 'A face, a voice, an overdub has no choice.' In other words, the whole synthetic process of making The Monkees' records was about to be examined in the movie. They are constantly being picked up, used, transplanted, subjected to influence by the guru, by the war, by the media, and all of these things are exposed. They are always portrayed as the victims of their own fame. That's what I chose to make the movie about.... It was Carole or Gerry's idea to record live porpoise sounds and use them on the track. That's what you hear at the end of the song. I just thought that they were the appropriate people. It is far and away my favourite Monkees' song."

It was released as a single in 1968 in the US, and as a B-side to the non-charting "Daddy's Song" in 1969 in the UK. The single version of "The Porpoise Song" runs over a minute longer than the album version.

The song's lyrics and melody echo the psychedelic vibe of mid-1960s rock music. Micky Dolenz provides the vocals, which are distorted by echoing effect, and a mix of organ riffs, cello, string-bass, woodwinds and horns float in and out of the tune. The lyrics call into question the order of the world and one's place therein, and there are also veiled in-joke references to Dolenz's childhood work as the star of the television series Circus Boy.

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"Ditty Diego – War Chant" was originally titled "Movie Jingle" this short satirical piece was penned by Jack Nicholson and Robert Rafelson to poke fun at The Monkees' pre-fabricated image. Not coincidently, part of the real-life subplot of Head was Raybert Productions' goal to destroy The Monkees' career as teen idols in the process of making the film.

Peter Tork : "Basically, the movie Head is not the story of The Monkees' release, it is Rafelson's idea of who The Monkees are. Nobody comes off too good in this movie. If you look carefully, Davy gets called a 'Manchester midget genie,' Micky is a blithering space case, I am some Indian wise man's mouthpiece who doesn't know what he's doing, and Mike is a con man. That's because Rafelson is a cynic – he has a low view of life, and he doesn't mind spewing it in your face. He thinks life sucks, and if you don't think it sucks, then you're a fool. The movie is not pure bad by any stretch. But finally, the point of it is pretty grim. The way Head ends is, if we're not trapped into a black box, we're trapped in a mobile pool of water."

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Mike Nesmith's "Circle Sky" was first recorded in late 1967, by his usual studio cohorts of Keith Allison, Richard Dey, and longtime group sidekick Bill Chadwick. Later, when the film's script specifically called for a concert scene, The Monkees were recorded before a live audience in Salt Lake City performing the song.

Mike Nesmith : "I was thinking of what would be a good, simple, aggressive rock 'n' roll tune that The Monkees could play. It was written around the concept of The Monkees playing as a band."

Less specific are Nesmith's free-form poetry-style lyrics, which are largely indecipherable -

Mike : "A good example is 'Hamilton smiling down,' which refers to the name of the music stand I was sitting in front of. They were made-up lyrics to represent a collage of the time, and of The Monkees playing as a band. That's one of the reasons it's one of the best things The Monkees did as a band, very simple power-trio stuff."

The Monkees' outstanding live take was passed over when the soundtrack was assembled -

Mike : "I don't have any idea how that happened. I think that The Monkees always played it better. I can't remember a studio version being better than the way we played it live, because live it was just pure unbridled energy."



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Peter Tork's contributed two songs to the album. The first, "Can You Dig It", was inspired by Tork's study of the Tao Te Ching and originally recorded with Peter handling all the vocals. However, when the song became part of the soundtrack, Micky took over as lead singer.

Peter Tork : "It was Bert's decision. Because it fell into place in the movie right after Micky's desert scene, they wanted him to be the lead singer on the song, so I put him on it – no big thing. That's the way we did it. The first song Mike ever produced he had Micky sing lead on, because Micky was the lead singer. Neither Mike then, nor I later, thought twice about it. It wasn't until later on that we thought, 'We should do this ourselves, because it's our song.' We didn't have any of that proprietary interest until afterwards."

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"As We Go Along" was Carole King's second composition for Head. The recording featured a stellar crew of musicians, including Ry Cooder, Neil Young, and the author herself on guitar.

Micky Dolenz : "I remember that because it was a bitch to sing. It was in 5/4 time or some bizarre signature, and I had a lot of trouble picking it up. Typically, we didn't have a lot of time to rehearse this stuff. But I love it, and it's still one of my favorites."

Peter Tork : "Carole King – an astonishing creature. 'Porpoise Song' is a great song, but I think 'As We Go Along' is even better."

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Davy Jones' showpiece in Head was "Daddy's Song" composed by Harry Nilsson. In the film, Jones performs the song with choreographer Toni Basil . Although the track was undoubtedly molded to suit Jones' "Broadway-rock" style, "Daddy's Song" was originally cut with Mike Nesmith handling the vocal chores.

Tork's final offering on Head was "Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again". Going out on a magnificently funky high, this song would be Peter's last release with The Monkees, as he would leave the group at the end of 1968.

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Head was a box office disaster when released in November 1968. Part of the problem was Raybert's subliminal marketing plan, which made no mention of The Monkees, nor of the fact that Head was a motion picture.

Peter Tork : "We were all in it together, we were trying to shake off the old Monkee image, but I think Bert and Bob had given up on The Monkees at this point. They collapsed, and that's why Head didn't do anything. It was their publicity decision to have advertising consultant John Brockman's face on the poster, and those two-minute commercials for Head that were so avant-garde as to be positively repulsive. I think those were very conscious decisions to deep-six the movie and the entire project. Bert said to me the point was to destroy The Monkees. Charitably, you could say that this point was to break our bubblegum image, but less charitably he wanted to be done with the project."

Brockman's unorthodox ad campaign was a mantra-like radio promo for the film with just three words – "Head coming soon" – chanted ad infinitum.

   

The soundtrack album for Head fared only slightly better. Issued on 1 December 1968, the record had been delayed due to manufacturing defects on the album's elaborate cover. According to Tork, part of the problem with the soundtrack's chart failure was Colgems' choice for the lead-off single -

Peter : "They made a decision to release 'Porpoise Song' as the single from the album and for the movie. I think it was premature. If they had released any of the other songs, then 'Porpoise Song' would have been a good one to come back with . In retrospect, you can tell it wasn't right."

Despite this, the 'Head' album still wound up charting for 15 weeks, eventually peaking at #45 in the US.

Although 'Head' essentially marked the end of The Monkees' career as popular artists, the film and its music are still among The Monkees' favorite creations.

Peter :  "It was great to break loose with it. There's some funny stuff in it, some brilliant scenes. You look at Head now and there's an awful lot of stuff in there that would beguile you away from the basic view of the movie – it's like a time capsule. It's really interesting from that point of view."

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After 'Head', the group completed one last project as a foursome, the equally bewildering '33 ⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee' NBC television special.

Although they were billed as musical guests, Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger (and their backing band The Trinity) found themselves playing a prominent role - The story follows Brian Auger and his assistant (Driscoll) as they take The Monkees through various stages of evolution until they are ready to brainwash the world via commercial exploitation. Trapped in giant test tubes, the four are stripped of all personal identity and names.

Each Monkee attempts to regain their personal identities by thinking a way out of captivity into their own world of fantasies. Dolenz performs an R&B up-tempo duet of "I'm a Believer" with Driscoll  /  Tork, sitting like an Eastern Guru, performs "I Prithee (Do Not Ask For Love)"  /  Nesmith sings a country duet "Naked Persimmon" with himself via split-screen, and a toy-sized Jones sings and dances to the tune of "Goldilocks Sometime."

Next, the Monkees perform "Wind Up Man" in the stiff-legged form of robots. Auger, criticizing their performance, introduces a four-part piano harmony in a unique piano-stacked set up with Auger and his electric keyboard on top, then descending to Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and finally Fats Domino on the bottom.

Disapproving Auger's brainwashing method, Charles Darwin steps in for a psychedelic dance performance to "Only The Fittest Shall Survive". Then the Monkees, clad in ape costumes, perform Neil Sedaka's "I Go Ape".

   

The climax of the special takes place in a warehouse full of instruments and props, where The Monkees perform "Listen To The Band". As the song progresses, they are joined by the show's guest musicians resulting in a climactic frantic cacophony. The closing credits feature Tork singing "California, Here I Come" as California is nuked - killing off the fictional Monkees.

This production, their first without Raybert – who were then busy readying their next feature, Easy Rider – was fraught with problems, including an NBC strike. When the program was finally scheduled on 14 April 1969 after several delays, the network dealt it a death blow by sending this offbeat spectacular head-to-head with the 1969 Oscars.

Peter : "NBC was angry with us at that point. The interesting thing about 33 ⅓ is that it's essentially the same story as Head. I think it's the story that wanted to be told. I think 33 ⅓ is more human. It's not as powerful an artistic achievement by any stretch of the imagination."

Mike : "It was a little hysterical. I think in the early stages everybody was working together 'cause it was a very interesting idea. In the later stages a lot of people were just coming around because they felt like they could get up next to The Monkees. It was such a huge hit that they thought that they could somehow make their career or fortune on it. So I think this guy Jack Good had some of that going on. He was supposed to be kind of a quirky and interesting television director. It started to careen and get more and more out of control and have less and less to say. He was, I think, in some way trying to grind the same axe that Head did so beautifully. He did it clumsily. Sort of the television version of Head in a way."

   

When taping wrapped on the special, Peter Tork announced his intention to leave the band -

Peter : "I'd always had deep doubts, ever since the session for 'Last Train To Clarksville.' I walked in there with my guitar and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart looked at me with derision and scorn, like, 'Guitar in your hand, you fool!' That was the end of it for me. Right there I was done with The Monkees in large measure. I struggled against it with some success at one point. But after Headquarters nobody wanted to be a recording group anymore. I did what I could, but I didn't feel like there was any reason for me to be there anymore. I wanted to be in a rock group."

Tork formed a group after The Monkees, named Release, but none of the band's recorded efforts managed to escape Tork's hillside mansion practice room -

Peter : "We recorded some demos, but I think they're lost. It was just a garage band – no particular skill or charm. I also did a demo for Atlantic Records – Ahmet Ertegun gave me a session to see how I would do, but it wasn't good enough.

Mike Nesmith : "I could understand why he wanted to go, 'cause I did too. But I felt like we hadn't quite finished up. I felt like there were some things that The Monkees were and represented that hadn't been said or done."

'Instant Replay', their seventh album, was issued six months after the cancellation of the group's NBC television series, it is also the first album released after Peter Tork left the group. Several of the songs on Instant Replay dated from sessions up to two and a half years earlier.

 

The band's new music coordinator and former road manager, Brendan Cahill, believed that releasing previously unused tracks recorded in 1966—prior to the group's seizing control of their own recording process—was the way for the group to get back to the top.

The album's lead single, "Tear Drop City," was one of the songs taken from the vault. The song was sped up around 9% from the original recording, changing the song's key from G to A-flat. The single, notably similar to the group's first hit "Last Train to Clarksville", was identified by Nesmith as their intended first single in 1966. The track, backed with "A Man Without A Dream", was not a major hit, only managing to reach #56 on the U.S. charts, and #44 in the UK in April 1969.

Micky Dolenz's "Just a Game" had originally been written during the sessions of the Headquarters album, while Nesmith's "Don't Wait for Me" was the first released product of 1968 sessions with Nashville studio musicians. Davy Jones' "You and I" featured guitar work from Neil Young.

Two songs from these sessions, "A Man Without a Dream" and "Someday Man" were produced by Bones Howe with The Wrecking Crew and a nine-piece horn section.

Despite having already quit the group, Peter Tork makes an appearance on this album by playing guitar on "I Won't Be the Same Without Her"

Although 'Instant Replay' reached a respectable #32 on the charts, and the trio mounted a concert tour with a seven-piece band known as Sam & The Goodtimers, The Monkees' return to television exposed cracks within the group.

Guest shots on variety and talk shows including Johnny Cash did little to bolster the public's support for the group, who openly fought on screen. When the band made a June appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show things turned from bad to worse. The Monkees' panel segment featured Dolenz rambling on about holograms, polygraph testing, and the TV Guide.

Micky : "The Johnny Carson show was pretty strange. I was a big fan, and I got up there and I gave him a hologram. Also I had a copy of something that had been in the TV Guide about how to steal a talk show. I started reading that on the air."

An argument between band members after the broadcast placed a further rift into their already strained relations. The end drew nearer when a few days later their concert at the Forest Hills Music Festival was canceled due to low ticket sales. Only two years before they had performed three record-setting concerts at the same venue; now they couldn't attract enough fans to play one.

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By the time recording had begun in earnest for their eighth album, 'The Monkees Present', the Monkees were well past their peak of popularity, and the members were given more control over their albums.

The original plan was to release a double album which devoted one side to each member of the group, who by now were recording virtually as solo artists, but with Tork now gone, and record sales waning, the decision was made to pare the track selection down to a single disc.

 

The album featured two singles, "Listen to the Band", backed with the non-LP song "Someday Man" - which reached - #47 in July 1969; and "Good Clean Fun" (b/w "Mommy and Daddy"), which did not chart chart in the UK. Both singles did much better in Australia, reaching #15 and #26 respectively, and gave the Monkees their last hits.

Mikel Nesmith's "Hollywood", and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart's "Apples, Peaches, Bananas, and Pears" and "My Storybook of You" were songs that were considered for the album, but ultimately rejected.

As concert audiences dwindled, and recording budgets disappeared, Nesmith saw his future – without The Monkees. He left the band in March 1970.

Mike: "It was just an orderly end to a business deal that had finally come to a close. I was ready to move. I was a hired writer, a hired actor, and while I had put all of my good-faith creative energies into it, it was not something that grew up around me organically, so I didn't feel like it was the end of anything."

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'Changes', their ninth studio album, was issued after Mike Nesmith's exit from the band, leaving only Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones to fulfill the recording contract they had signed in the mid-1960s.

The album reunited Jones and Dolenz with producer Jeff Barry, who now had his own successful record label, Steed Records. As with the earliest Monkees recordings, Jones and Dolenz provided only their vocals, despite the album cover featuring them playing percussion, while the backing tracks were provided by session musicians.

Several of the songs selected for the album were outtakes from previous album sessions: Barry resurrected his own produced outtake of his composition "99 Pounds" from the final Don Kirshner-supervised Monkees sessions in January 1967 that also yielded the hit single "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"  /  Micky's "Midnight Train" was recorded during sessions for The Monkees Present  / "I Never Thought It Peculiar" was written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart and was recorded during the sessions for More of the Monkees.

Jones later stated that Changes was his least favorite Monkees effort - Davy : "the album was Jeff Barry and Andy Kim doing an Andy Kim album"

Micky : "I was quite happy to do it as long as somebody wanted to record me. It was simple as that. By that time, it was pretty obvious that the Monkees were over. Davy and I were still getting along, but we were mainly fulfilling a contractual obligation to a record company — that's what Changes is all about."

   

"Oh My My" (b/w "I Love You Better") was accompanied by a promo film directed by Micky Dolenz - showing Micky and Davy Jones riding their motorcycles and horses. "Acapulco Sun" was released as a single in Mexico, becoming a minor hit there.

'Changes' appeared in June 1970 and initially failed to make the charts. Jones announced shortly after its release that he was resuming his solo career, but he and Dolenz would release one more single together -  "Do It in the Name of Love" (b/w "Lady Jane") in September 1970.

The single was released on Bell Records, and was credited to "Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones". This was due to the prohibitive costs of licensing the Monkees name in the US.

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In 1975 the original foursome reconvened to discuss working together again as a group -

Micky : "We met up at my house in the Hollywood Hills. I think it was the William Morris Agency who had expressed an interest in putting the act back together. Everybody was very enthusiastic about it on the surface – you know, 'Oh great, great idea.' But when it got down to the nitty gritty, there were way too many conflicting feelings and attitudes. We only had the one meeting, and I don't think anything else happened after that. There wasn't any animosity. Actually, I remember it being really exciting. Being all together for the first time in quite a few years in the same room. There was a hell of a buzz. Because, we do have – always did and always will – an incredible chemistry between the four of us."

The upshot of the meeting was that, although they couldn't decide on what to do as The Monkees, or even how to do it, they were not totally averse to working together. Jones and Dolenz were especially amenable to teaming up again.

By July 1975 they were back on tour with fellow Monkees veterans Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, making an appearance on American Bandstand in 1976.

Micky : "I think it must have been Tommy or Bobby that put it together. They knew of an gent who had said, 'I can get you guys some gigs.' That's when we came up with the 'Guys Who Wrote 'Em and Guys Who Sang 'Em.' It sounded like a good idea."

   

Following a doomed attempt to sell the new line-up as "The New Monkees", by 1977 Dolenz and Jones had ventured off on their own -

Micky : "Davy and I got a job doing a play, a musical version of Tom Sawyer. Then an agent came to us and said, 'Do you and Davy want to go out with a show?' We had to make a decision whether to go out with Tommy and Bobby or just go out by ourselves. I think it was just an economic decision. We could make more money going out just ourselves. We went out and did a couple of summers just as Dolenz and Jones, doing a lot of The Monkees hits and a lot of new material too. After that we went to England to do Harry Nilsson's musical The Point. That's when Davy and I split up, and I stayed in England."

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

It wasn't until 1985 that all the group members would consider working together again. The catalyst for this particular reunion was Peter Tork, who, along with concert promoter David Fishof, floated the idea of a 20th anniversary tour the following year.

With Dolenz, Jones, Tork, and Nesmith all on board for the event, plans were made, and venues were booked. Concurrently, show cocreator Bert Schneider managed to persuade MTV to run the original Monkees series as a marathon, setting off an unexpected resurgence in popularity.

All parties were rewarded for their efforts when a brand-new single featuring Dolenz and Tork, "That Was Then, This Is Now", reached the US Top 20, and seven different Monkees albums charted simultaneously. Soon the group had one of the biggest tours of the year.

The one setback to this incredible turn of events was that now that the reunion tour looked set to run indefinitely, Nesmith could no longer participate, as he was busy running his Pacific Arts home-video production company, producing films, and spending most of his time rolling around in a big pile of money earned from his mum's invention, 'Liquid Paper'.

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

Their tenth album, 'Pool It!', was released in 1987. It was the first Monkees studio album of new material since Changes in 1970 and the first Monkees album to feature Peter Tork since the 1968 Head soundtrack.

As Mike Nesmith chose not to participate on the reunion album, the billing on the LP itself was attributed to "Peter, Micky, Davy — The Monkees".

Much like the group's early work, the writing of the album was largely handled by outside writers and the instrumentation by session musicians, with the Monkees themselves contributing lead vocals and Peter Tork providing guitar for his own song, "Gettin' In."

 

The first single from the album, "Heart and Soul" peaked at #87 in the US charts, but the follow-up, a remixed version of "Every Step of the Way", failed to chart . . . unsurprisingly - as it sounds like a right load of plastic crap!

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

'Justus', their eleventh studio album, was recorded in celebration of their 30th anniversary and released on October 15, 1996. This album featured the return of Mike Nesmith, and was the first Monkees album since Head was released in 1968 to feature all four Monkees. Although Nesmith only sang lead vocals on a remake of the 1968 song "Circle Sky", he did write the Dolenz-vocal song, "Admiral Mike", and provided background vocals for all tracks.

Although preliminary work on the album was begun using songs from various writers, upon Nesmith's agreement to join the production it was agreed that all songs would be written only by the four members of the group. The four also produced and recorded all the tracks jointly, making it the first Monkees album since 'Headquarters' to be produced entirely by the group as a single unit, and the first album ever to be recorded by the foursome alone.

 

While all four members of the Monkees receive producer's credit, Nesmith ultimately produced and mixed the project while the other three Monkees toured.

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

On 29 February 2012, Davy Jones went to tend to his 14 horses at a farm in Indiantown, Florida. After riding one of his favourite horses around the track, he complained of chest pains and difficulty breathing, and was rushed to Martin Memorial South Hospital in Stuart, Florida, where he was pronounced dead of a severe heart attack resulting from arteriosclerosis.

Mike Nesmith stated that Jones's "spirit and soul live well in my heart, among all the lovely people, who remember with me the good times, and the healing times, that were created for so many, including us. I have fond memories. I wish him safe travels."

Peter Tork : "Adios to the Manchester Cowboy"

Micky Dolenz : "He was the brother I never had and this leaves a gigantic hole in my heart. He was a very well-known and well-loved character and person. There are a lot of people who are grieving pretty hard. The Monkees obviously had a following, and so did (Jones) on his own. So I'm not surprised, but I was flattered and honored to be considered one of his friends and a cohort in Monkee business."



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

'Good Times!', their twelfth studio album, was produced mainly by Adam Schlesinger from The Fountains of Wayne, the album was recorded to commemorate the band's 50th anniversary. It was the first album since the death of founding member Davy Jones. The album features surviving Monkees Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith, and Peter Tork, as well as a posthumous contribution from Jones.

The album featured unreleased songs by the songwriters they used during their initial run including Neil Diamond, Carole King & Gerry Goffin, Harry Nilsson and Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart as well as contemporary rock songwriters Schlesinger, Rivers Cuomo, Andy Partridge, Ben Gibbard, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller.

The title track was written by Harry Nilsson, and a surviving demo from the late 1960s was used incorporating Nilsson's vocals posthumously in a "duet" with Micky Dolenz. Davy Jones performs the Neil Diamond-penned track "Love to Love" which was recorded in 1967 for the Monkees' third album in a Don Kirshner-supervised session. The vocal track was re-recorded in 1969, and for its inclusion on 'Good Times!', the 1969 version was used with new backing vocals by Dolenz and Tork.

The first single from the album was "She Makes Me Laugh". Penned by Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, it was released on 28 April along with a lyric video. The second new track to be released was "You Bring the Summer" written by Monkees superfan Andy Partridge from XTC, who gave them one of their strongest songs since the 60s.

   

The album has received generally positive reviews, with Record Collector in a 4-star review stating "to everyone's considerable relief and delight, they've pulled it off. They really have."

Rolling Stone's Australian edition, noted : "Producer Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne knows a thing or five about classic pop, and although Good Times! is a Frankenstein's monster of something old, something new and something in between, he manages to orchestrate the whole thing into something beyond an embarrassing heritage act."

The Evening Standard decided that the album : "doesn't quite work as it's let down by a flat production and the lack of anything approaching their more magical moments. For all that, though, it's no disgrace"

The album was the highest charting Monkees album in the UK since Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. in 1967.

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

'Christmas Party', their 13th album, was released on October 12, 2018. it was again produced mainly by Adam Schlesinger, with Mike Nesmith's tracks produced by his sons Christian and Jonathan.

The album features a mix of traditional Christmas songs and pop covers mainly sung by Micky Dolenz, including: "Wonderful Christmastime" (Wings) /  "Jesus Christ" (Big Star) and new holiday tunes written specifically for the album by several 'Good Times!' contributors, including  "Unwrap You at Christmas" by Andy Partridge  / "What Would Santa Do" by Rivers Cuomo and "House of Broken Gingerbread" by Adam Schlesinger & Michael Chabon.

Mike Nesmith sang on "The Christmas Song" and "Snowfall". Peter Tork sang on and played banjo on "Angels We Have Heard on High and also appeared alongside Micky on "Christmas Party".

Archive recordings of "Davy Jones were coupled with new backings for "Mele Kalikimaka" and "Silver Bells".

The album cover was illustrated by comics artist Michael Allred : "I can't even remember doing it now. I was on a crazy high trying to squeeze everything I could into it."

 

The album received a mixed reviews, with the Los Angeles Times stating : "the big calling card may well be two vocals that Davy Jones recorded in 1991 and that are newly outfitted in fresh instrumental accompaniment pulled together by album producer Adam Schlesinger."

Variety described it as feeling : "mostly like a Micky Dolenz solo album — co-produced by Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger — that happens to have a few odd interjections from Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork and, yes, the late Davy Jones."

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

In 2009 Peter Tork underwent radiation therapy for Cancer -

Peter Tork : "I recovered very quickly after my surgery, and I've been hoping that my better-than-average constitution will keep the worst effects of radiation at bay. My voice and energy still seem to be in decent shape, so maybe I can pull these gigs off after all."

His cancer returned in 2018, and he died at his home in Mansfield on 21 February 2019, eight days after his 77th birthday.



Micky Dolenz : "There are no words right now...heartbroken over the loss of my Monkee brother, Peter Tork."

Mike Nesmith : "Peter Tork died this AM. I am told he slipped away peacefully. Yet, as I write this my tears are awash, and my heart is broken. Even though I am clinging to the idea that we all continue, the pain that attends these passings has no cure. It's going to be a rough day. I share with all Monkees fans this change, this 'loss', even so. PT will be a part of me forever. I have said this before — and now it seems even more apt — the reason we called it a band is because it was where we all went to play. A band no more — and yet the music plays on — an anthem to all who made the Monkees and the TV show our private — dare I say 'secret' — playground. As for Pete, I can only pray his songs reach the heights that can lift us and that our childhood lives forever — that special sparkle that was the Monkees. I will miss him — a brother in arms. Take flight my Brother."

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

An extraordinary record, and surely a contender for the oddest chart-topper of all time. Psychedelic music hall with a screaming freakout chorus, a prominent kettle drum and some blatant anti-establishment lyrics? Pure-spun commercial gold!

[DrGreggles]

I fucking love The Monkees.
So much pop gold in there.

[gilbertharding]

*Arrives, red faced and panting in the thread...*

Hair on my G-String, it's . . .

234.  Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale

From : 4 June – 15 July 1967
Weeks : 6
Flip side : Lime Street Blues

Is it too late to remember the last time (probably) Whiter Shade of Pale was mentioned on this forum?

Terry was spurred into rhapsodising about the 1940s novelty hit 'The Hut Sut Song' by an younger couple he and June have over for dinner who are banging on about 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' by Procol Harum, which even in the 70s Terry was too square to have heard of. He's all like "OOOOH JUUUUUNE let me get The Hut Sut Song out of the attic, I'll show them what real music is". However, when he gets it down it is scratched and just goes 'the hut sut....the hut sut...." and so Terry loses his temper and tells the couple to fuck off. Somehow thinking that June still gives a tin shit about any of this Terry goes to an old record dealer's shop and asks for a copy of The Hut Sut Song as a surprise present. The man behind the counter has never heard of The Hut Sut song and so physically assaults Terry by grabbing hold of his jacket lapels and going "MIS-TER MED-FORD!" or whatever his surname is in this. Undaunted, Terry starts singing 'The Hut Sut Song' at the moment another female employee of the shop enters. She joins in and they both start dancing about to it. The sexual tension is electric. The female employee promises to find a copy of The Hut Sut Song for Terry and the audience assumes "It'll be the scratched one from before that June will have brought back to the shop, he'll buy back the same copy." On leaving the shop Terry overhears the bloke who physically assaulted him over nothing humming The Hut Sut Song. "I told you it was catchy!" It's the little victories that count in the world of Terry and June.

The next day the female record shop employee calls at Terry's house and hands over a copy of The Hut Sut Song on vinyl that has just been conicidentally brought back to the shop and charges him the earth for it. Terry goes "OOOH JUUUUNE IT'S EXPENSIVE" but pays anyway. Nothing will stop him buying a record for his wife that she showed scant interest in a night ago when he was bollocking on ad nauseum about it to the interest of no-one. Oh yeah, I forgot to say it's their wedding anniversary. He surprises her with this copy of The Hut Sut song which to no cunt's surprise is the same scratched version as before that June had sold to the shop for ahahahaha considerably less money than Terry had paid for it!!! June's present to Terry is the greatest hits of whichever band sang The Hut Sut Song which she picked up for fuck all. They laugh, embrace and fall to the sofa and Terry's fat arse sits on one or both of the records, I forget.

That's where you might have got A Whiter Shade Of Pale from.

[kalowski]

Headquarters > Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd

But What Am I Doing Hanging Round just about beats everything else they did.

I dig Alternative Title too.

[purlieu]

Good song, that. Nice wonky ending.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

I just want to give another big novelty foam glove thumbs up to daf for his sterling work in this thread. Your Monkees write-up was superb.

[daf]

Aw, thanks -

Ideally I'd have liked to include the Headquarters info with this post - (as that's the album 'Randy Scouse Git' appears on as the final track) - but there was so much to include, I had to shift that back with the 'I'm a Believer' stuff.

Amazing how briefly they were hot - their whole peak period in the charts was done and dusted in just over a year!

I quite fancy watching some of the TV episodes now!

[daf]

The Beatles Eighth Album - Part 2 : "Only Some Northern Songs"  [part 1 here]

On The Beatles' final US tour in 1966, Paul McCartney was struck by the inventiveness of the West Coast hippy groups, with names such as Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In November that year, on a flight from Nairobi to England, he came up with the idea of an alter-ego for the band, which would perform an entire album before an audience.

Paul : "I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We could make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place."

John : "Sgt Pepper is Paul, after a trip to America and the whole West Coast, long-named group thing was coming in. You know, when people were no longer The Beatles or The Crickets – they were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes, right? So I think he got influenced by that and came up with this idea for The Beatles. As I read the other day, he said in one of his 'fanzine' interviews that he was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public – and so there was this identity of Sgt Pepper. Intellectually, that's the same thing he did by writing 'He loves you' instead of 'I love you.' That's just his way of working. Sgt Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn't go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with the idea of Sgt Pepper and his band; but it works 'cause we said it worked, and that's how the album appeared. But it was not as put together as it sounds, except for Sgt Pepper introducing Billy Shears and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album."

Some versions of events hold that Mal Evans came up with the name Sgt Pepper. It is believed to have been inspired by Evans asking McCartney what the letters S and P stood for on the salt and pepper sachets on their in-flight meal trays. Road manager Neil Aspinall also claimed to have chipped in some ideas -

Neil Aspinall : "I used to share a flat in Sloane Street with Mal. One day in February Paul called, saying that he was writing a song and asking if he and Mal could come over. That song was the start of Sgt Pepper. At my place he carried on writing and the song developed. At the end of every Beatles show, Paul used to say, 'It's time to go. We're going to go to bed, and this is our last number'. Then they'd play the last number and leave. Just then Mal went to the bathroom, and I said to Paul, 'Why don't you have Sgt Pepper as the compère of the album? He comes on at the beginning of the show and introduces the band, and at the end he closes it. A bit later, Paul told John about it in the studio, and John came up to me and said, 'Nobody likes a smart-arse, Neil'."



'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was recorded over four days. On 1 February 1967, The Beatles taped nine takes of the rhythm track, though only the first and last of these were complete. They recorded drums, bass and two guitars – the latter played by McCartney and Harrison. McCartney then overdubbed his bass guitar onto track two of take nine. This was recorded by 'direct injection' straight into the recording desk, bypassing the use of an amplifier, and was the first time the method had been used on a Beatles session.

Switching between straightforward rock verses and instrumental bridges featuring a French horn quartet, punctuated by three-part harmonies from McCartney, Lennon and Harrison, the song is more of an introduction to the Sgt Pepper concept than a rounded song.

A brass section, scored by George Martin, were overdubbed on 3 March. Four session musicians were brought in to play the French horn parts: James W Buck, Neil Sanders, Tony Randall and John Burden.

John Burden : "They didn't really know what they wanted. I wrote out phrases for them based on what Paul McCartney was humming to us and George Martin. All four Beatles were there but only Paul took an active interest in our overdub."

After the brass overdub was complete, McCartney recorded lead guitar onto the song. It was then complete, bar the addition of sound effects, which were added on 6 March. The sounds of the imaginary audience and the noise of an orchestra tuning up were a combination of crowd noise from a 1961 recording of the comedy show Beyond The Fringe and out-takes from the 10 February orchestral overdub session for 'A Day In The Life'.



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

"Good Morning Good Morning" was inspired by a Kellogg's commercial he heard while working with the television playing in the background.   

  Good morning, good morning  /  The best to you each morning.  /  Sunshine breakfast, Kellogg's Corn Flakes  /  Crisp and full of sun.

John : "Good Morning is mine. It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought. The 'Good morning, good morning' was from a Kellogg's cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over and then I wrote the song."

With time signatures varying almost from bar-to-bar, 'Good Morning Good Morning's unruly meter was a result of Lennon's tendency to write words first before fitting the music around them.

Paul : "John was feeling trapped in suburbia and was going through some problems with Cynthia. It was about his boring life at the time – there's a reference in the lyrics to 'nothing to do' and 'meet the wife'; there was an afternoon TV soap called Meet The Wife that John watched, he was that bored, but I think he was also starting to get alarm bells."

   

On Wednesday 8 February 1967, The Beatles recorded eight takes of the rhythm track for 'Good Morning Good Morning', with the eighth take becoming the basis for further overdubs.

Following this session, further work on the song was delayed until 16 February when the vocals and bass guitar were added. The song was then left until 13 March, when the brass overdubs were recorded, courtesy of session musicians from Sounds Inc, an instrumental group who had first met The Beatles at the Star-Club in Hamburg in April 1962. Barrie Cameron, David Glyde and Alan Holmes were on saxophone, John Lee and another, unknown person on trombone, and a player merely identified as 'Tom' on French horn.

Alan Holmes : "We were there for about six hours. The first three hours we had refreshments and The Beatles played us the completed songs for the new LP."

[tape operator] Richard Lush : "They spent a long time doing the overdub, about three hours or maybe longer, but John Lennon thought it sounded too straight. So we ended up flanging, limiting and compressing it, anything to make it sound unlike brass playing. It was typical John Lennon – he just wanted it to sound weird."

On 28 March Lennon recorded new lead vocals, and Paul McCartney performed the song's guitar solo. Lennon and McCartney then taped backing vocals. The animal sound effects were also assembled, although they weren't added until the next day.

The sound effects at the end of the song were taken from the Abbey Road sound effects tapes: Volume 35: Animals and Bees and Volume 57: Fox-hunt, and were used in a particular order at Lennon's insistence. Starting with a cock crowing, Good Morning Good Morning later features a cat, dogs barking, horses, sheep, lions, elephants, a fox being chased by dogs with hunters' horns being blown, then a cow and finally a clucking hen.

Geoff Emerick : "John said to me during one of the breaks that he wanted to have the sound of animals escaping and that each successive animal should be capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor! So those are not just random effects, there was actually a lot of thought put into all that."

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

The next song to be recorded, 'Fixing A Hole', was condemned upon its release, for perceived references to heroin injection, however . . .

Paul : "People have told me that Fixing A Hole is all about junk, you know, this guy, sitting there fixing a hole in his arm. If you're a junkie sitting in a room fixing a hole then that's what it will mean to you, but when I wrote it I meant if there's a crack or the room is uncolourful, then I'll paint it."

It has also been claimed that the song is about repairs undertaken by Paul McCartney on High Park, his farmhouse on the west coast of Scotland, although this is untrue.

Paul : "It was much later that I ever got round to fixing the roof on the Scottish farm; I never did any of that until I met Linda. People just make it up! They know I've got a farm, they know it has a roof, they know I might be given to handyman tendencies so it's a very small leap for mankind... to make up the rest of the story."

In truth the song, like 'Got To Get You Into My Life', was "another ode to pot"; it explored the joys of allowing one's mind to wander, and the freedom from being told what to do.

Paul : "It was the idea of me being on my own now, able to do what I want. If I want I'll paint the room in a colourful way... I was living now pretty much on my own in Cavendish Avenue, and enjoying my freedom and my new house and the salon-ness of it all. It's pretty much my song, as I recall. I like the double meaning of 'If I'm wrong I'm right where I belong'."

On Thursday 9 February 1967, EMI studios were all booked, so the group decamped to Regent Sound Studio at 164-166 Tottenham Court Road, London - although they had previously recorded in Paris, this was the first recording session to take place in a British studio other than in EMI studios at Abbey Road. The Beatles' normal engineer Geoff Emerick was unable to attend the session as he was an EMI employee, so Regent Sound's chief engineer Adrian Ibbetson took his place. While it wasn't unusual for friends to visit The Beatles in the studio, this particular session had a notable guest.

Paul : "The funny thing about that was the night when we were going to record it, at Regent Sound Studios at Tottenham Court Road. I brought a guy who was Jesus. A guy arrived at my front gate and I said 'Yes? Hello' because I always used to answer it to everyone. If they were boring I would say, 'Sorry, no,' and they generally went away. This guy said, 'I'm Jesus Christ.' I said, 'Oop,' slightly shocked. I said, 'Well, you'd better come in then.' I thought, Well, it probably isn't. But if he is, I'm not going to be the one to turn him away. So I gave him a cup of tea and we just chatted and I asked, 'Why do you think you are Jesus?' There were a lot of casualties about then. We used to get a lot of people who were maybe insecure or going through emotional break downs or whatever. So I said, 'I've got to go to a session but if you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner, you can come.' So he did, he came to the session and he did sit very quietly and I never saw him after that. I introduced him to the guys. They said, 'Who's this?' I said, 'He's Jesus Christ.' We had a bit of a giggle over that."

They began by rehearsing the rhythm track, at least six takes of which were recorded. They then taped three proper attempts, the last of which broke down, Following a reduction mix, with the vocals combined on track four, and harpsichord, bass guitar, drums and maracas on track one, George Harrison double tracked an eight-bar guitar solo using his Fender Stratocaster.

 

On 21 February, back at Abbey Road, The Beatles intended to record a remake of the song. But after one attemt they decided the results of the earlier session were adequate. Take two from the Regent Sound tape was subjected to a reduction mix to free up space. The Beatles recorded another rhythm track, which featured Paul McCartney on bass guitar, George Martin playing a second harpsichord part, and Ringo Starr on drums. The song's final master therefore contained two bass guitar parts, two harpsichords, and two different drum tracks.

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

"Only A Northern Song" was intended to be George Harrison's contribution to the album. Recording began on 13 February under the working title of "Not Known".

The song's lyrics, although light-hearted, continue Harrison's established themes of introspection and slight misanthropy. The title was a pun on The Beatles' hometown and the company which published their songs - Northern Songs, which was founded in 1963 by The Beatles, their manager Brian Epstein, and music publisher Dick James to publish Lennon and McCartney's songs. Harrison and Ringo Starr were essentially writers-for-hire until their contracts expired in 1968.

George : "Only A Northern Song was a joke relating to Liverpool, the Holy City in the North of England. In addition, the song was copyrighted Northern Songs Ltd, which I don't own, so: 'It doesn't really matter what chords I play... as it's only a Northern Song'."

 

During 1966 Harrison had become disenchanted with being a Beatle, and contributed relatively little to Sgt Pepper. Only A Northern Song, while conceived as a joke, also served as a complaint against the dominance of the Lennon-McCartney partnership and the few songs he was allowed to record each year.

George : "I realized Dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher. As an 18 or 19-year-old kid, I thought, 'Great, somebody's gonna publish my songs!' But he never said, 'And incidentally, when you sign this document here, you're assigning me the ownership of the songs,' which is what it is. It was just a blatant theft. By the time I realized what had happened, when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalog, I wrote Only A Northern Song as what we call a 'piss-take,' just to have a joke about it."

They taped nine takes of the rhythm track, four of which were complete. The best was take three, onto which Harrison overdubbed two lead vocals the following day. It was returned to on 20 April. They discarded the vocals from 14 February, and in their place added bass, trumpet and glockenspiel.

It was ultimately decided that 'Only A Northern Song' wasn't quite right for 'Sgt Pepper', and so was held over for an unspecified future release, until the creators of the Yellow Submarine film needed more songs for the soundtrack.

Paul : "The filmmakers wanted some new songs from us, so we recorded Only A Northern Song in Abbey Road. I remember playing a silly trumpet. My dad used to play. I can't, but I can mess around a lot – and that song gave me the perfect framework. It was very tongue in cheek."

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

On 31 January 1967, while The Beatles were in Sevenoaks, Kent, making a promotional film for Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon wandered in to an antique shop close to their hotel. There he bought a framed Victorian circus poster from 1843. The poster announced Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal, coming to Town Meadows in Rochdale. It grandly announced that the circus would be for the benefit of Mr Kite, and would feature "Mr J Henderson the celebrated somerset thrower" and Zanthus the horse.

Mr Kite was William Kite, a performer and the son of circus owner James Kite. In 1810 he had founded Kite's Pavilion Circus and later moved to Wells' Circus. It is thought that he worked in Pablo Fanques' fair between 1843 and 1845. Pablo Fanque, pictured below, was born William Darby in Norwich in 1796, and was Britain's first black circus owner.

 

Lennon hung the poster in his music room at his home in Weybridge, and began to use it as inspiration for a song. Some of the facts he changed – the circus was coming to Bishopsgate rather than Rochdale; the horse became Henry; the circus became a fair; Mr Kite was 'late of Wells's Circus' rather that of Pablo Fanque; and Mr Henderson, rather than Mr Kite, promised to challenge the world.

Minor changes aside, the words of the poster found their way almost unchanged into Lennon's "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!", which closed the first half of the Sgt Pepper album.

John : "The whole song is from a Victorian poster, which I bought in a junk shop. It is so cosmically beautiful. It's a poster for a fair that must have happened in the 1800s. Everything in the song is from that poster, except the horse wasn't called Henry. Now, there were all kinds of stories about Henry the Horse being heroin. I had never seen heroin in that period. No, it's all just from that poster. The song is pure, like a painting, a pure watercolour."

Paul : "I have great memories of writing it with John. I read, occasionally, people say, 'Oh, John wrote that one.' I say, 'Wait a minute, what was that afternoon I spent with him, then, looking at this poster?' He happened to have a poster in his living room at home. I was out at his house, and we just got this idea, because the poster said 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite' – and then we put in, you know, 'there will be a show tonight,' and then it was like, 'of course,' then it had 'Henry the Horse dances the waltz.' You know, whatever. 'The Hendersons, Pablo Fanques, somersets...' We said, 'What was 'somersets'? It must have been an old-fashioned way of saying somersaults.' The song just wrote itself."

Typically, Lennon was later dismissive of the song -

John : "I wrote that as a pure poetic job, to write a song sitting there. I had to write because it was time to write. And I had to write it quick because otherwise I wouldn't have been on the album. So I had to knock off a few songs. I knocked off A Day In The Life, or my section of it, and whatever we were talking about, Mr Kite, or something like that. I was very paranoid in those days, I could hardly move."

The first seven takes of the song were recorded on 17 February 1967, the day the 'Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever' single was released in the UK.

George Martin was given the task of coming up with a 'fairground' production for the song -

George Martin : "In terms of asking me for particular interpretations, John was the least articulate. He would deal in moods, he would deal in colours, almost, and he would never be specific about what instruments or what line I had. I would do that myself... John was more likely to say, as in the case of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!, 'It's a fairground sequence. I want to be in that circus atmosphere; I want to smell the sawdust when I hear that song. So it was up to me to provide that."

 

On Monday 20 February 1967 George Martin began trying to conjure up the required circus sounds.

George Martin : "I knew we needed a backwash, a general mush of sound, like if you go to a fairground, shut your eyes and listen: rifle shots, hurdy-gurdy noises, people shouting and – way n the distance – just a tremendous chaotic sound. So I got hold of old calliope tapes, playing Stars And Stripes Forever and other Sousa marches, chopped the tapes up into small sections and had Geoff Emerick throw them up in the air, re-assembling them at random."

Nineteen pieces of tape were used in the overdub, which appears towards the end of the song. Although they hoped for a random effect, it took a while to get right.

Geoff Emerick : "I threw the bits up in the air but, amazingly, they came back together in almost the same order. We all expected it to sound different but it was virtually the same as before! So we switched bits around and turned some upside down."

The song was then left until 28 March, when George Harrison, Ringo, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall overdubbed harmonica parts, John played an organ and Paul a guitar solo. The following day the fairground sound snippets were finally added, and George Martin played an organ part. And on the final day's recording – 31 March – another organ and a glockenspiel part, both probably performed by Martin, were overdubbed.

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

"Lovely Rita", Paul McCartney's affectionate tale of a female traffic warden, was originally written as an anti-authority satire -

Paul : "I was thinking it should be a hate song... but then I thought it would be better to love her."

Traffic wardens were a relatively new feature of British life in 1967. In America they were colloquially known as meter maids, a term which caught the imagination of McCartney via a newspaper story.

Paul : "There was a story in the paper about 'Lovely Rita', the meter maid. She's just retired as a traffic warden. The phrase 'meter maid' was so American that it appealed, and to me a 'maid' was always a little sexy thing: 'Meter maid. Hey, come and check my meter, baby.' I saw a bit of that, and then I saw that she looked like a 'military man'."

Some time later, a traffic warden called Meta Davies claimed she had given McCartney a parking ticket in St John's Wood, London.

Meta Davies : "His car was parked on a meter where the time had expired. I had to make out a ticket which, at the time, carried a 10 shilling fine. I'd just put it on the windscreen when Paul came along and took it off. He looked at it and read my signature which was in full, because there was another M Davies on the same unit. As he was walking away, he turned to me and said, 'Oh, is your name really Meta?' I told him that it was. We chatted for a few minutes and he said, 'That would be a good name for a song. Would you mind if I use it?' And that was that. Off he went."

Regardless of that cock-and-bull story, McCartney wrote the words for Lovely Rita in the Wirral near Liverpool, while walking near his brother Michael's house in Gayton.

Paul : "I remember one night just going for a walk and working on the words as I walked... It wasn't based on a real person but, as often happened, it was claimed by a girl called Rita who was a traffic warden who apparently did give me a ticket, so that made the newspapers. I think it was more a question of coincidence: anyone called Rita who gave me a ticket would naturally think, 'It's me!' I didn't think, Wow, that woman gave me a ticket, I'll write a song about her – never happened like that."

 

Recording began on Thursday 23 February 1967 in EMI studio two. Eight takes of the rhythm track were recorded, with George Harrison and John Lennon on acoustic guitars, Ringo playing the drums and Paul on piano. Take eight was the best, and onto this McCartney added his bass part.

The next day his lead vocals were taped, following which Lovely Rita was left until Tuesday 7 March. On that day the song's distinctive backing vocals and sound effects were recorded. Led by John Lennon, The Beatles made various groaning, sighing and screaming noises, played paper and combs, and added some cha-cha-chas for good measure. The Beatles' assistant Mal Evans was sent to collect paper from Abbey Road's lavatory. Stamped with the words, "Property of EMI", the paper was threaded into hair combs and blown, giving a kazoo-like effect.

On Tuesday 21 March George Martin recorded the song's piano solo. It was recorded with the tape machine running at 41¼ cycles per second, and was mixed at 48¾ cycles. This made the solo much faster and higher pitched than it had been during the recording. As with the backing vocals, the piano was plastered in tape echo, and also varispeeded to give a honky-tonk effect.

Geoff Emerick : "I used to try out funny things in odd moments and I discovered that by putting sticky tape over the capstan of a tape machine you could wobble the tape on the echo machine, because we used to delay the feed into the echo chamber by tape. So I suggested we did this using a piano sound. The Beatles themselves couldn't think what should go into the song's middle eight and they didn't really like my idea at first, but it turned out fine in the end because of the effect. It gave the piano a sort of honky-tonk feel. In fact, Paul asked me to play the solo when I made the suggestion but I was too embarrassed."

John Lennon and Paul McCartney took themselves off to a corner of Studio Two, together with Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, and completed the song's lyrics. The original lyrics sheet had Rita "filling in a ticket with her little blue pen". Once the words were complete, McCartney recorded his lead vocals. As with the previous session, this was done with the tape machine running slower – at 46.5 cycles per second rather than the usual 50 – raising the pitch and speed upon playback.

On this day, The Beatles were visited in the studio by Tony Hicks of The Hollies and David Crosby of The Byrds. Beat Monthly reported that David Crosby assisted with the vocals, but these cannot be heard on the final version.

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

On Tuesday 28 February 1967, The Beatles intended to begin recording "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", but rehearsals took so long - lasting eight hours - that no proper takes were recorded. Present in the studio on this evening was a reporter from Life magazine, who subsequently reported :

The session to record music for the newest Beatle album was planned for seven this night in the EMI Studios in London, but the boys are late. Suddenly at eight the room crackles to life. Paul McCartney comes in singing a nonsense tune and John Lennon trails him. Ringo Starr appears shortly and George Harrison is last.

    Now the recording session begins, so casually that it seems no beginning at all. Paul sits down at the piano and begins chording. (I wished for a tape recorder because the impromptu musicale was marvellous.) John, meanwhile, spots a volume of E.E.Cummings poetry lying on the piano and begins to read it. Ringo, hungry or maybe merely disinterested, goes to a corner and starts wolfing down a plate of mashed potatoes and beans which an aid has produced. George is showing off a large black frock coat, which he purchased at an antique clothing shop in Chelsea. "I'd rather imagine some head waiter at the Savoy didn't want it any more," he says.

    A tall, lean young man in a quiet gray suit and modest tie hovers at the piano. This is George Martin, producer and arranger of the Beatles music. He is a recognised musical scholar and the off-stage presence who has come to be called the Fifth Beatle. Paul and John explain to him that they have spent this day writing a song which they want to record tonight. "Alright, let's hear it," he says. Paul pounds out a strong assortment of chords and John sings, falsetto, the melody which is to be called "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." They go through it half a dozen times while Martin nods, quickly familiarising himself with the composition and making notes.

    At this embryonic stage the song sounds like the early Beatle works which dealt in jack-hammer 4-4 arrangements and lyrics which were seldom more eloquent than, "yeh, yeh, yeh", but before they were done with it on this long evening and on many more, it will undergo extraordinary changes. "Picture yourself in a boat on the river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies," sings John over and over again, while George Harrison begins finding a guitar accompaniment and Ringo, sipping an orange drink, slaps out a rhythm. I begin to understand the remarkable process of the Beatles music. It begins absolutely from scratch. The Beatles (who can neither read nor write music) are composing even as they record...

    It is now almost midnight in the recording studio and after four hours of assault, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" still sounds quite terrible. Fifth Beatle Martin grimaces. "We are light years away from anything tonight," he shudders. "They know it is awful now, and they're trying to straighten it out. It may be a week before they're pleased, if ever. They're always coming up with something new they've just learned, something I wouldn't dream of. They never cease to amaze me."

    Now, at the bone-weary hour of 2am, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is beginning to take shape. Paul has suggested a tempo change, John is rearranging the lyrics, George is experimenting on a new guitar sound and Ringo has added brushstrokes. They ask to hear a playback and during the break that follows, I ask Paul if they ever worry that the legions of Beatle supporters might not follow their march into the outer regions. He candidly answers: "Sure, we're going to lose some fans. We lost them in Liverpool when we took off our leather jackets and put on suits. But there's no point in standing still. We always used to say we could never be 30-year old Beatles. But we will be, and not too many years from now. We've reached the point now where there are no barriers. Musically, now, this moment, tonight, this is where we are."

Although the title was widely perceived to be a coded reference to LITSWD : the Welsh Washing powder, 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' in fact took its name from a drawing of a schoolfriend by the four-year-old Julian Lennon.

John : "I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the truth: my son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, 'What is it?' and he said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds,' and I thought, 'That's beautiful.' I immediately wrote a song about it."

The Lucy in the picture was Lucy O'Donnell - she attended Heath House, a private Weybridge nursery school, with Julian Lennon. She didn't realise she had been immortalised in a Beatles song until she was 13, in 1976.



There can be little doubt, however, that the song was directly influenced by John Lennon's continual experimentation with LSD, which hit a peak in 1967. However, he later claimed the main inspiration came from Alice In Wonderland.

John : "The images were from Alice In Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualising that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me – a 'girl with kaleidoscope eyes' who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met Yoko yet. So maybe it should be Yoko In The Sky With Diamonds. It was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until somebody pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? It's not an acid song. The imagery was Alice in the boat. And also the image of this female who would come and save me – this secret love that was going to come one day. So it turned out to be Yoko, though, and I hadn't met Yoko then. But she was my imaginary girl that we all have."

The song was mostly written by Lennon, with a little help from his friend, Paul McCartney.

Paul : "I showed up at John's house and he had a drawing Julian had done at school with the title 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' above it. Then we went up to his music room and wrote the song, swapping psychedelic suggestions as we went. I remember coming up with 'cellophane flowers' and 'newspaper taxis' and John answered with things like 'kaleidoscope eyes' and 'looking glass ties'. We never noticed the LSD initial until it was pointed out later – by which point people didn't believe us."

   

The next day, Wednesday 1 March, they recorded seven takes. The Beatles taped just the rhythm track: piano, acoustic guitar, organ, drums and maracas. Lennon sang the lead vocals off-microphone to guide the recording. Take seven had a tambura, the Indian drone-like instrument.

On Thursday 2 March Lennon recorded his lead vocals, with harmony backing from McCartney. They both manually double-tracked their performances, and then McCartney's bass and Harrison's lead guitar were overdubbed. With that they were finished. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was one of the fastest recordings made for Sgt Pepper.

John Lennon later criticised the arrangement and studio production, claiming it didn't do justice to the song itself.

John : "I heard Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds last night. It's abysmal, you know? The track is just terrible. I mean, it is a great track, a great song, but it isn't a great track because it wasn't made right. You know what I mean? I feel I could remake every fucking one of them better. But that's the artistic trip, isn't it? That it why you keep going, always trying to make that next one the best."



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

With lyrics co-written by Lennon and McCartney and music mostly by McCartney, the idea for "Getting Better" came from a favourite phrase of Jimmie Nicol, The Beatles' stand-in drummer for eight days of their 1964 world tour.

Paul : "Getting Better I wrote on my magic Binder, Edwards and Vaughan piano in my music room. It had a lovely tone, that piano, you'd just open the lid and there was such a magic tone, almost out of tune, and of course the way it was painted added to the fun of it all. It's an optimistic song. I often try and get on to optimistic subjects in an effort to cheer myself up and also, realising that other people are going to hear this, to cheer them up too. And this was one of those. The 'angry young man' and all that was John and I filling in the verses about schoolteachers. We shared a lot of feelings against teachers who had punished you too much or who hadn't understood you or who had just been bastard generally."

Although the title is upbeat and positive, the lyrics of 'Getting Better' deal with anger, unruliness at school and violence towards women. It is likely that the darker edge came from Lennon, who was familiar with all three traits.

John : "It is a diary form of writing. All that 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved' was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

Much like 'We Can Work It Out', Getting Better explores the differences in personality between the two songwriters.

Paul : "I was just sitting there doing 'Getting better all the time' and John just said in his laconic way, 'It couldn't get no worse,' and I thought, Oh, brilliant! This is exactly why I love writing with John... It was one of the ways we'd write. I'd have the song quite mapped out and he'd come in with a counter-melody, so it was a simple ordinary song."

 

Recording began on Thursday 9 March 1967. Seven takes were recorded of the rhythm track, being made up of guitars, bass and drums, plus piano from George Martin – played by the strings of the instrument being directly struck.

This was one of the few Sgt Pepper sessions in which Geoff Emerick did not work as the studio balance engineer. He and tape operator Richard Lush were given the night off, and were replaced by two other EMI staffers, Malcolm Addey assisted by Ken Townsend.

Malcolm Addey : "Geoff had been doing a lot of late-night work and was getting very tired. I remember the session was booked to begin at 7pm but there was barely a Beatle in sight before midnight, and we were sitting around waiting. They eventually straggled in one by one. Ringo came in about 11 and ordered fish and chips. The others arrived later, they all hung around and finally started work at about one in the morning. The ego trip of the big-time artists had started to set in."

The following day George Harrison added a droning tambura, McCartney overdubbed his bass part and Ringo added more drums.

On 21 March, 'Getting Better' received its vocals. Hunter Davies was at the session, and noted how the backing vocals sounded "flat, grainy and awfully disembodied. I remember thinking, 'Why am I such a big fan of theirs, why do I think they're good singers? They're completely out of tune!"

It is not known whether the out-of-tune vocals were left in the final mix – certainly some of the harmonies are off-key, though these may have been deliberately varispeeded. Either way, The Beatles had bigger things to worry about - a short way into the session, Lennon announced he was feeling ill and was taken onto the roof of EMI Studios by George Martin.

George Martin : "He was in the studio and I was in the control room, and he said he wasn't feeling too good. So I said, 'Come up here,' and asked George and Paul to go on overdubbing the voice. 'I'll take John out for a breath of fresh air,' I said, but of course I couldn't take him out the front because there were 500 screaming kids who'd have torn him apart,. So the only place I could take him to get fresh air was the roof.

John : "I never took LSD in the studio. Once I did, actually. I thought I was taking some uppers and I was not in the state of handling it. I took it and I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I said, 'What is it? I feel ill.' I thought I felt ill and I thought I was going cracked. I said I must go and get some air. They all took me upstairs on the roof, and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid. I said, 'Well, I can't go on. You'll have to do it and I'll just stay and watch.' I got very nervous just watching them all , and I kept saying, 'Is this all right?' They had all been very kind and they said, 'Yes, it's all right.' I said, 'Are you sure it's all right?' They carried on making the record."



George Martin : "I remember it was a lovely night, with very bright stars. It was a wonderful starry night, and John went to the edge, which was a parapet about 18 inches high, and looked up at the stars and said, 'Aren't they fantastic?' Of course, to him I suppose they would have been especially fantastic. At the time they just looked like stars to me. Then I suddenly realised that the only protection around the edge of the roof was a parapet about six inches high, with a sheer drop of some ninety feet to the ground below, and I had to tell him, 'Don't go too near the edge, there's no rail there, John.' We walked around the roof for a while. Then he agreed to come back downstairs, and we packed up for the night.

Hunter Davies' account of the session does not specifically mention LSD. It is not clear whether he realised that Lennon was under its influence, although possibly the incident was downplayed as the biography was intended as a family-friendly book to be read by young fans.

Hunter Davies : They ran through the song about four times and John said he didn't feel well. He could do with some fresh air. Someone went to open the back door of the studio. There was the sound of loud banging and cheering on the other side. The door began to move slightly inwards, under the strain of a gang of fans who'd somehow managed to get inside the building.
George Martin came down from his box and told John he would be better to go up on the roof and get some air, rather than go outside.
'How's John?' Paul asked into the microphone to George Martin up in the control box.
'He's looking at the stars,' said George Martin.
'You mean Vince Hill?' said Paul. He and George started singing Edelweiss and laughing. Then John came back.

During the session Norman Smith, who had worked as the balance engineer on almost all The Beatles' recordings up to 1966, visited Studio Two. He was producing The Pink Floyd's debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn elsewhere at EMI Studios, and the group wished to meet The Beatles.

Hunter Davies : "A man in a purple shirt called Norman arrived. He used to be one of their recording engineers and now had a group of his own, The Pink Floyd. Very politely he asked George Martin if his boys could possibly pop in to see the Beatles at work. George smiled, unhelpfully. Norman said perhaps he should ask John personally, as a favour. George Martin said no, that wouldn't work. But if by chance he and his boys popped in about eleven o'clock, he might just be able to see what he could do. They did pop in, around eleven, and exchanged a few half-hearted hellos. The Beatles were still going through the singing of It's Getting Better, for what now seemed like the thousandth time. By two o'clock they'd got it at least to a stage which didn't make them unhappy."

As it became clear that Lennon would be unable to continue working, McCartney and Mal Evans drove him to 7 Cavendish Avenue, McCartney's home, which was a short distance from EMI Studios. Upon their arrival McCartney decided to keep his bandmate company by also taking acid. It was McCartney's second trip, and his first with Lennon.

Paul : "I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot. Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.

"There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go. I would walk out into the garden – 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while."



Paul : "I'd just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, 'Go to bed? You won't sleep!' 'I know that, I've still got to go to bed.' I thought, now that's enough fun and partying, now ... It's like with drink. That's enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don't just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. 'Yeah, I think so.' I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably."

George Martin : "It wasn't until much later that I learned what had happened. John was in the habit of taking pills, 'uppers', to give him the energy to get through the night. That evening, he had taken the wrong pill by mistake – a very large dose of LSD. But Paul knew, and went home with him and turned on as well, to keep him company. It seems they had a real trip. I knew they smoked pot, and I knew they took pills, but in my innocence I had no idea they were also into LSD."

[daf]

The Beatles Eighth Album - Part 3 : "Just Freak Out, Beatle Bigheads!"

On Wednesday 15 March 1967, after The Beatles decided not to include 'Only A Northern Song' on the Sgt Pepper album, during this session work began on another Harrison song - the Indian-flavoured "Within You Without You".

George Harrison began writing the song in early 1967 while at the house of musician and artist Klaus Voormann, in the north London suburb of Hampstead. Harrison's immediate inspiration for the song came from a conversation they had shared over dinner about the metaphysical space that prevents individuals from recognising the natural forces uniting the world - Ah, THAT old chestnut!

Having incorporated elements of Eastern philosophy in "Love You To", Harrison became fascinated by ancient Hindu teachings after he and his wife, Pattie Boyd, visited Ravi Shankar in India in September–October 1966. Intent on mastering the sitar, Harrison first joined other students of Shankar's in Bombay, until local fans and the press learned of his arrival. Harrison, Boyd, Shankar and the latter's partner, Kamala Chakravarty, then relocated to a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. There, Harrison received personal tuition from Shankar while absorbing religious texts such as Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi and Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga. This period coincided with his introduction to meditation and, during their visit to Vrindavan, he witnessed communal chanting for the first time.



Harrison and Boyd returned to England on 22 October 1966, and continued to adhere to a Hindu-aligned lifestyle of yoga, meditation and vegetarianism at their home in Esher [bless you!]. He later attributed "Within You Without You" to his having "fallen under the spell of the country" after experiencing the "pure essence of India" through Shankar's guidance.

At this early stage the song was known as "Untitled"; Harrison often had trouble deciding on names for his songs, and working titles were often used instead - usually named after varieties of apples.

Several musicians were recruited from the Asian Music Circle, a collective based in Fitzalan Road in Finchley, north London. They were Anna Joshi and Amrit Gajjar on dilruba  /  Buddhadev Kansara on tamboura, and tabla player Amiya Dasgupta. An unknown player was on svarmandal. They were joined by Harrison and The Beatles' assistant Neil Aspinall on tamburas.

Following rehearsals, the basic track for 'Within You Without You' was recorded in one take during this session, and lasted 6'25". The tamburas were recorded onto track one of the four-track tape. Track two contained tabla and svarmandal, and track four had a dilruba playing the main melody.

Geoff Emerick : "Within You Without You was a great track. The tabla had never been recorded the way we did it. Everyone was amazed when they first heard a tabla recorded that closely, with the texture and the lovely low resonances."



Overdubs were added on Wednesday 22 March. None of the other Beatles appeared on the song. Also present in the studio on this occasion was artist Peter Blake, who had been commissioned to work on the album cover artwork.

Peter Blake : "George was there with some Indian musicians and they had a carpet on the floor and there was incense burning. George was very sweet – he's always been very kind and sweet – and he got up and welcomed us and offered us tea. We just sat and watched for a couple of hours. It was a fascinating, historical time."

The laughter at the end of the track was Harrison's idea. While some listeners initially thought it was the sound of the other Beatles mocking his songwriting effort, it was in fact meant to lighten the mood after five minutes of sad, almost mournful, music.

George Harrison : "Within You Without You came about after I had spent a bit of time in India and fallen under the spell of the country and its music. I had brought back a lot of instruments. It was written at Klaus Voormann's house in Hampstead after dinner one night. The song came to me when I was playing a pedal harmonium. I'd also spent a lot of time with Ravi Shankar, trying to figure out how to sit and hold the sitar, and how to play it. Within You Without You was a song that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi's that he'd recorded for All-India Radio. It was a very long piece – maybe 30 or 40 minutes – and was written in different parts, with a progression in each. I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I'd discovered in his piece. I recorded in three segments and spliced them together later."

John : "One of George's best songs. One of my favourites of his, too. He's clear on that song. His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent; he brought that sound together."

On Monday 3 April – the final day of recording for Sgt Pepper, (apart from the album's run-out groove gibberish taped on 21 April) – George Martin conducted eight violinists and three cellists playing a score written to Harrison's suggestions. That evening Harrison also recorded his lead vocals, a sitar part and some acoustic guitar, and the song was complete.

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

In February 1967 McCartney read a story in the Daily Mail about a teenage runaway. Melanie Coe, a 17-year-old A-level schoolgirl from Stamford Hill, north London went missing without her car, cheque book and spare clothes. Her father was quoted as saying, "I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here."

Coe briefly rented a flat in Paddington with a croupier she had met in a nightclub, and returned home around 10 days after the newspaper report was published. McCartney wrote the music and the initial lyrics, which were later completed with John Lennon.

   

Melanie Coe : "The amazing thing about the song was how much it got right about my life. It quoted the parents as saying 'We gave her everything money can buy,' which was true in my case. I had two diamond rings, a mink coat, handmade clothes in silk and cashmere and even my own car. Then there was the line 'After living alone for so many years,' which really struck home to me because I was an only child and I always felt alone. I never communicated with either of my parents. It was a constant battle...

"I heard the song when it came out and thought it was about someone like me but never dreamed it was actually about me. I can remember thinking that I didn't run off with a man from the motor trade, so it couldn't have been me! I must have been in my twenties when my mother said she'd seen Paul on television and he'd said that the song was based on a story in a newspaper. That's when I started telling my friends it was about me."

Coincidentally, Coe had met The Beatles some time before. On 4 October 1963 she won a miming competition on the TV music show Ready Steady Go. The Beatles were making their first appearance on the show that day, and McCartney presented her with the award.

Melanie Coe : "I spent that day in the studios going through rehearsals, so I was around The Beatles most of that time. Paul wasn't particularly chatty and John seemed distant but I did spend time talking to George and Ringo."

 

The 'man from the motor trade' in She's Leaving Home was taken by some to be Terry Doran, Brian Epstein's partner in Brydor Cars, an automobile company operating from Hounslow. Others took it as a euphemism for an abortionist. In fact it was neither of these.

Paul : "It was just fiction, like the sea captain in Yellow Submarine; they weren't real people. The man from the motor trade was just a typical sleazy characer, the kind of guy that could pull a young bird by saying, 'Would you like a ride in my car, darlin'?' Nice plush interior, that's how you pulled birds. So it was just a nice little bit of sleaze."

"She's Leaving Home" did not feature any musical instruments played by The Beatles. Instead it had a string backing, with a harp, violins, violas, cellos and a double bass.

George Martin was unable to write a score after McCartney asked him to at short notice. Instead, McCartney approached freelance producer and arranger Mike Leander, who provided the string parts for the song.

Paul : "I rang him and I said, 'I need you to arrange it.' He said, 'I'm sorry, Paul, I've got a Cilla session.' And I thought, Fucking hell! After all this time working together, he ought to put himself out. It was probably unreasonable to expect him to. Anyway, I said, 'Well, fine, thanks George,' but I was so hot to trot that I called Mike Leander, another arranger. I got him to come over to Cavendish Avenue and I showed him what I wanted, strings, and he said, 'Leave it with me.'"

Martin saw the move as a slight, but later acknowledged that McCartney's impatience had been the key factor.

George Martin : "During the making of Pepper Paul was also to give me one of the biggest hurts of my life. It concerned the song She's Leaving Home. At that time I was still having to record all my other artists. One day Paul rang me to say: 'I've got a song I want you to work with me on. Can you come round tomorrow afternoon? I want to get it done quickly. We'll book an orchestra, and you can score it.' 'I can't tomorrow, Paul. I'm recording Cilla at two-thirty.' 'Come on. You can come round at two o'clock.' 'No, I can't, I've got a session on.' 'All right, then,' he said, and that ended the conversation.

The Cilla Black session was likely to have been for her single 'What Good Am I?', released in the UK in June 1967, it was arranged and conducted by Mort Shuman, and produced by George Martin.

George Martin : What he did then, as I discovered later, was to get Neil Aspinall, the road manager, to ring round and find someone else to do the score for him, simply because I couldn't do it at that short notice. In the end he found Mike Leander, who could. The following day Paul presented me with it and said, 'Here we are. I've got a score. We can record it now.'

 

Despite his hurt, Martin agreed to conduct the musicians during this session for She's Leaving Home. They were Erich Gruenberg, Derek Jacobs, Trevor Williams and José Luis Garcia on violin  /  John Underwood and Stephen Shingles on viola  /  Dennis Vigay and Alan Dalziel on cello  /  Gordon Pearce on double bass  /  and Sheila Bromberg on harp.

Sheila Bromberg : "I got to the studio early to tune the instrument. I walked in and there was Paul McCartney but I didn't recognise him at first. I was concentrating on what was written on the manuscript, then I turned around, heard the Liverpool accent and realised it was him. I hadn't got a clue, I had just talked to the other musicians and waited. In actual fact he was quite difficult to work with because he wasn't too sure what he actually wanted. He said 'no I don't want that, I want something...' but he couldn't describe what he wanted and I tried it all every which way."

George Martin : I recorded it, with a few alterations to make it work better, but I was hurt. I thought: Paul, you could have waited. For I really couldn't have done it that afternoon, unless I had just devoted everything to The Beatles and never dealt with any other artist. Paul obviously didn't think it was important that I should do everything. To me it was. I wasn't getting much out of it from a financial point of view, but at least I was getting satisfaction. The score itself was good enough, and still holds up today, but it was the only score that was ever done by anyone else during all my time with The Beatles."

The recording of She's Leaving Home took place over two days. The first was on Friday 17 March 1967, which featured just the strings. Six takes were recorded; Paul McCartney was present in the studio.

One oddity of the recording was exposed in the differences between the mono and stereo copies of the album : the mono features the vocals at the 'correct' speed, with the backing sped up, while the stereo has the backing at 'correct' speed, and the vocals slowed down. The 2017 remix ran at the mono speed - indicating that the stereo version was probably a mixing error - and everyone's been hearing it too slow for all these years!

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

"With A Little Help From My Friends" was written collaboratively by Lennon and McCartney, during the final stages of the sessions, for Ringo's spot on the album.

Paul : "This was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always liked to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo actually. It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job. I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek."

John : "That's Paul with a little help from me. 'What do you see when you turn out the light/I can't tell you but I know it's mine' is mine."

Paul : "Ringo liked kids a lot, he was very good with kids so we knew Yellow Submarine would be a good thing for Ringo to sing. In this case, it was a slightly more mature song, which I always liked very much. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know it's mine.' It could have been him playing with his willy under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level; this was what it meant but it was a nice way to say it, a very non-specific way to say it. I always liked that."

 

The song was initially recorded with the working title Bad Finger Boogie, after Lennon tried to play the melody on a piano having hurt his forefinger. Starr had misgivings about singing the final sustained high note in the song, and refused to sing a certain line.

Ringo : "The song With A Little Help From My Friends was written specifically for me, but they had one line that I wouldn't sing. It was 'What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?' I said, 'There's not a chance in hell am I going to sing this line,' because we still had lots of really deep memories of the kids throwing jelly beans and toys on stage; and I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes."

From the start The Beatles knew that the song would be joined to Sgt Pepper's title track. From take one it included the 'Billy Shears' introduction.

Paul : "He was to be a character in this operetta, this whole thing that we were doing, so this gave him a good intro, wherever he came in the album; in fact it was the second track. It was a nice place for him, but wherever it came, it gave us an intro. Again, because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: 'I get high!'"

The Beatles recorded 10 takes of the song on Wednesday 29 March, with Paul on piano, John beating a cowbell, George playing lead guitar and Ringo on drums. Following the final take Ringo overdubbed his lead vocals.

The following day – on the morning of which they posed for the Sgt Pepper cover shoot – they added guitar, tambourine, bass and harmony vocals. For the segue from 'Sgt Pepper', they inserted screams of Beatlemaniacs from the recordings of The Beatles live at the Hollywood Bowl.

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

On Saturday 1 April 1967, "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" was was the final song to be recorded for the album. The idea for a reprise of Sgt Pepper's title track was suggested by The Beatles' assistant Neil Aspinall, who thought the album should be bookended with words from the imaginary compère.

Neil Aspinall : "I said to Paul, 'Why don't you have Sgt Pepper as the compère of the album? He comes on at the beginning of the show and introduces the band, and at the end he closes it. A bit later, Paul told John about it in the studio, and John came up to me and said, 'Nobody likes a smart-arse, Neil'... That was when I knew that John liked it and that it would happen."

Recorded in a single take, the reprise was faster than the previously-recorded title track, and with different lyrics. Opening with McCartney's 1-2-3-4 count-in and Lennon's cheeky "bye", it featured all four Beatles on vocals and was one of the more straightforward rock songs on the Sgt Pepper album.

It was the only song not to be given a reduction mix; the four tracks were filled with the initial instruments, the overdubs were added, then it was ready to be mixed for the album. Nine mono mixes of take nine were made during this session, the last of which was used on the album. Artificial double tracking was applied to the vocals, and some of the crowd noises prepared on 6 March 1967 were added.

The segue into 'A Day In The Life', a crossfade using three tape machines, was carried out on 6 April.

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

With the album all but complete, Paul McCartney decided to take a flight to America to surprise his girlfriend Jane Asher on her 21st birthday. At the time she was touring the United States with the Old Vic Company, performing Romeo And Juliet.

McCartney's US visa had expired but American customs and immigration officials in Los Angeles sorted out the paperwork within 30 minutes. Then a private Lear jet – reportedly hired from Frank Sinatra – took the pair to San Francisco, arriving in the early hours of Tuesday 4 April. McCartney and Asher were reunited on the following day.

With a free day McCartney and Evans saw the sights, photographed the Golden Gate Bridge and bought records. They also visited the Fillmore Auditorium, where Jefferson Airplane were rehearsing. Afterwards they accompanied Marty Balin and Jack Casady to the Oak Street apartment they shared with the band's road manager Bill Thompson, where McCartney played them an acetate of the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. They also attempted a jam, but McCartney had trouble playing the band's right-handed guitars.



McCartney smoked cannabis with Jefferson Airplane, but declined an offer of DMT mixed with cannabis. Despite this, rumours persist in the city that he did partake in the hallucinogenic drug.

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

One Thursday, 6 April 1967, the crossfades for the album were assembled. The session ran from 7pm until 1am the following morning.

At this stage the album was almost complete, but the running order was slightly different. Although the second half was in place, side one had the songs in a different order: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - With A Little Help From My Friends  /  Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!  /  Fixing A Hole  /  Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds  /  Getting Better and She's Leaving Home.

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

On Monday, 10 April 1967, Paul McCartney and Mal Evans spent the day shopping at Century Plaza, Los Angeles, where Evans bought a talking pillow. In the afternoon the pair visited John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas And The Papas. After a while McCartney left to meet The Beach Boys, leaving Evans with the Phillipses.

At the time Brian Wilson was working on the song Vegetables, which was intended for the Smile album. McCartney was recorded chewing celery on the song.

Al Jardine : "The night before a big tour, I was out in the studio recording the vocal when, to my surprise, Paul McCartney walked in and joined Brian at the console. And, briefly, the two most influential musical Geminis in the world had a chance to work together. I remember waiting for long periods of time between takes to get to the next section or verse. Brian lost track of the session. Paul would come on the talkback and say something like 'Good take, Al.'"

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

In order to control their various business interests, The Beatles' tax advisors suggested they form an umbrella company. Formed on Wednesday 19 April 1967, it was named The Beatles & Co. At the time the group had large amounts of capital, which they were in danger of losing to the Taxman. To avoid this occurring they chose to invest in a business venture.

The Beatles & Co. was essentially a new version of Beatles Ltd, their original partnership. Under the new terms, each Beatle took ownership of 5% of the company, and a new corporation – which eventually became Apple Corps – would be collectively owned and would control 80% of The Beatles & Co.

Apart from songwriting royalties, which would be paid directly to the authors of the individual songs, all money earned by the group would be channeled into The Beatles & Co., which would leave them with a much lower corporate tax rate - the big breadheads!

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

The final touch to be added to the album was the gibberish sounds which filled the locked run-out groove of the vinyl record.

Barry Miles : "On 21 April everyone in the studio recorded the run-on spiral for the album, about two seconds' worth of sound. It was a triple session – three three-hour sessions – which ended around 4am. The Beatles stood around two microphones muttering, singing snatches of songs and yelling for what seemed like hours, with the rest of us standing round them, joining in. Mal carried in cases of Coke and bottles of Scotch. Ringo was out of it. 'I'm so stoned,' he said, 'I think I'm going to fall over!' As he slowly toppled, Mal caught him and popped him neatly in a chair without a murmur. In the control room no one seemed to notice. A loop was made from the tape of the muttering and was mixed, but not without some altercation between John and the tape operator."

The album was cut by Harry Moss, and required several attempts before the sound appeared precisely in the run-out groove. The intention was for the sound to loop and be played ad infinitum, preceded by a 15 kilocycle tone intended for dogs. 

Harry Moss : "I was told by chaps who'd been in the business a long time that cutting things into the run-out grooves was an old idea that they used to do on 78s. Cutting Sgt Pepper was not too difficult except that because we couldn't play the masters I had to wait for white label pressings before I could hear whether or not I'd cut the concentric groove successfully, These were the things which, at the time, I used to swear about! It was George Martin who first asked me to do it. I replied, 'It's gonna be bloody awkward, George, but I'll give it a go!'"

Neither the test tone nor the loop of gibberish – known as Edit for LP End on the tape box – was used on the first North American pressings of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was eventually issued as part of the Rarities compilation, with the title Sgt Pepper Inner Groove.
. . . sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss . . .          Nevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyother~wenevercouldbeanyothe..

Early the following morning, The Beatles took an acetate disc of the album to the American singer 'Mama Cass' Elliot's flat off King's Road in Chelsea, where at six in the morning they played it at full volume with speakers set in open window frames.

Derek Taylor : "All the windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering. It was obvious who it was on the record. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up."

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

On Saturday 29 April 1967, a benefit party for the underground newspaper International Times was held at London's Alexandra Palace.

The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream was a multi-artist happening featuring poets, artists and musicians. The headline act was The Pink Floyd, and the other performers included The Arthur Brown, The Soft Machine, The Tomorrow, The Pretty Things and The Yoko Ono.

John Lennon and John Dunbar saw a news item about the event on the television at Lennon's home in Weybridge while tripping on LSD, and decided to attend. Lennon called his driver who took them to the venue.

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

On Tuesday 9 May 1967, The Beatles spent around seven hours, between 11pm and 6.15am, jamming instrumentals which were never released.

Just 16 minutes of the session was recorded, with de-tuned electric guitars – one of which had a vibrato effect – plus harmonium and drums.

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

On Thursday 11 May 1967, The Beatles' recorded their second UK session to take place outside EMI Studios, following their 9 February 1967 visit to Regent Sound Studio. It took place at Olympic Sound Studios, an independent studio situated at 117 Church Road, Barnes, London.

A combination of two unfinished Lennon-McCartney song fragments, "Baby You're A Rich Man" featured Lennon's falsetto verses and McCartney's bouncy, chanting chorus.

John : "That's a combination of two separate pieces, Paul's and mine, put together and forced into one song. One half was all mine.  'How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people, now that you know who you are, da da da da.' Then Paul comes in with  'Baby, you're a rich man,' which was a lick he had around."

Lennon's section was originally titled 'One Of The Beautiful People'. It was possibly inspired by the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, a 'happening' which took place shortly before the song was recorded.

Although originally intended for the 'Yellow Submarine' soundtrack, the song was included on the 'All You Need Is Love' single, which was rush-released following The Beatles' appearance on the 'Our World' satellite link-up.

It was the first Beatles song recorded and mixed entirely away from EMI Studios in Abbey Road. According to studio manager Keith Grant, who also engineered the session, The Beatles were unaccustomed to working to such a fast pace in 1967.

Keith Grant : "I'm a terrible pusher on sessions. I do a lot of orchestral work and you naturally push people along. The Beatles said that this was the fastest record they'd ever made. They were used to a much more leisurely pace. We started the session at about 9pm and it was finished and mixed by about 3am, vocals and everything. They kept playing, version after version, then we spooled back to the one they liked and overdubbed the vocals."

Lennon played a clavioline, a three-octave monophonic keyboard which was sped up to give an oboe-like effect. He also played piano, and sang lead and backing vocals, along with McCartney and Harrison. McCartney also played bass and piano, Harrison contributed lead guitar, and Ringo performed percussion. Eddie Kramer, an engineer on the session, reportedly also played a vibraphone.

Mick Jagger was present at the session, and one of the tape boxes noted his name alongside The Beatles', suggesting he also sang backing vocals during the later choruses.



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

On Monday 15 May 1967, Brian Epstein hosted a dinner party to mark the completion of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Afterwards Paul McCartney went to the Bag O'Nails nightclub to see Georgie Fame performing. The Beatles were regular visitors, particularly in 1967 and 1968, and McCartney had his own private table there. At the club McCartney had his first encounter with his future wife, Linda Eastman.

Paul : "The night I met Linda I was in the Bag O'Nails watching Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames play a great set. Speedy was banging away. She was there with the Animals, who she knew from photographing them in New York. They were sitting a couple of alcoves down, near the stage. The band had finished and they got up to either leave or go for a drink or a pee or something, and she passed our table. I was near the edge and stood up just as she was passing, blocking her exit. And so I said, 'Oh, sorry. Hi. How are you? How're you doing?' I introduced myself, and said, 'We're going on to another club after this, would you like to join us?' That was my big pulling line! Well, I'd never used it before, of course, but it worked this time! It was a fairly slim chance but it worked. She said, 'Yes, okay, we'll go on. How shall we do it?' I forget how we did it. 'You come in our car' or whatever, and we all went on, the people I was with and the Animals, we went on to the Speakeasy."

The Speakeasy was a club on Margaret Street, where they heard Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade Of Pale for the first time.

Linda Eastman : "We flirted a bit, and then it was time for me to go back with them and Paul said, 'Well, we're going to another club. You want to come?' I remember everybody at the table heard A Whiter Shade Of Pale that night for the first time and we all thought, Who is that? Stevie Winwood? We all said Stevie. The minute that record came out, you just knew you loved it. That's when we actually met. Then we went back to his house. We were in the Mini with I think Lulu and Dudley Edwards, who painted Paul's piano; Paul was giving him a lift home. I was impressed to see his Magrittes."

The pair met again four days later, on 19 May 1967, when Eastman attended the press party for Sgt Pepper at Brian Epstein's house at 24 Chapel Street, London.

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

On Wednesday 17 May 1967, recording began for one of The Beatles' most bizarre songs on this day. "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" was taped, mixed and edited over a number of sessions between this day and November 1969. Featuring Rolling Stone Brian Jones honking away on sax, it remained unreleased until March 1970.

The Beatles arrived at Studio Two on this day with no songs in mind, and without the presence of producer George Martin; in his place the session was supervised by balance engineer Geoff Emerick.

Paul : "John had arrived one night with this song which was basically a mantra: 'You know my name, look up the number.' And I never knew who he was aiming that at, it might have been an early signal to Yoko. It was John's original idea and that was the complete lyric. He brought it in originally as a 15-minute chant when he was in space-cadet mode and we said, 'Well, what are we going to do with this then?' and he said, 'It's just like a mantra.' So we said, 'Okay, let's just do it'."

In fact, You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) was inspired by a slogan on the front of the 1967 London telephone directory, which John Lennon saw at Paul McCartney's London home.

John : "That was a piece of unfinished music that I turned into a comedy record with Paul. I was waiting for him in his house, and I saw the phone book was on the piano with 'You know the name, look up the number.' That was like a logo, and I just changed it. It was going to be a Four Tops kind of song – the chord changes are like that – but it never developed and we made a joke of it. Brian Jones is playing saxophone on it."

The final recording was made up of five discrete parts, and during this session the first part was recorded. The Beatles taped 14 takes of the rhythm track, with guitars, bass and drums, and take 10 was labelled the best for the time being. The song was then set aside until 7 June 1967, when overdubs were added to take nine.

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

On Friday 19 May 1967, shortly ahead of the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a press launch was held at Brian Epstein's house at 24 Chapel Street, London.
 
   

Around a dozen selected journalists and broadcasters were invited to attend the event. Several photographers were also present, among them Linda Eastman, who had met her future husband Paul McCartney just four days previously.

Linda : "I took my portfolio over to Brian Epstein's office and left it with his assistant, Peter Brown... Peter Brown got back in touch and said that Brian had liked my portfolio and invited me to a press launch for Sgt Pepper at Brian's home. Peter also said that Brian wanted to buy copies of two of my photos – one of Keith Moon wearing a lace cravat and one of Brian Jones at The Rolling Stones boat party. So I went to the press launch where Sgt Pepper was played for the first time to the media, to take my first photographs of The Beatles. Because I was so used to working almost exclusively with black-and-white I didn't have any colour film with me, and had to get some from another photographer. I eventually sold a colour print of The Beatles from this session for $100 and I thought that I had it made!"

The Beatles were photographed in Epstein's drawing room and on the steps outside the front door. The guests were served champagne, poached salmon and caviar.

Linda : "I got one good photo that I liked, which is that thumbs-up one. The rest are just like everyone else's photographs, but for that one I said, 'Oh, come on, guys! You know?' and that shows at least they were relating, because if you believe the press you'd never think John and Paul ever related."

   

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

On Sunday 28 May 1967, Brian Epstein threw a party at Kingsley Hill, his country home in Warbleton near Heathfield in Sussex. Epstein had recently bought the house for £25,000, and the party was a joint housewarming and a celebration for the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The roads leading to the house were adorned with balloons for the occasion.

All the Beatles were present apart from Paul McCartney, who chose to stay with Jane Asher after her return from the United States. In addition to The Beatles and their wives, it was attended by a number of friends and celebrities including composer Lionel Bart, maverick radio DJ Kenny Everett, the Beatles' friend from Hamburg Klaus Voormann, and many other glittering showbusiness figures.

Also invited, with just two days' notice, were The Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor and his wife Joan. He was in the process of setting up the three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival, but the couple flew 6,000 miles back to England to attend the party. Joan was seven months pregnant. They were hoping for a weekend of alcohol, pills and cannabis, and were wholly unprepared for the rich sensory assault that awaited.

 

At the airport the Taylors were met by Lennon, Harrison, Starr, Terry Doran, and Barry Finch of design collective the Fool. They had been up all night on what Harrison described as "an all-night (or all-week) bells-on-the-knees and perms-in-the- hair LSD trip." All were dressed in full psychedelic finery: silk and satin clothes, embellished with scarves and bells and other ornaments.

Derek Taylor : "Their brains seemed somewhat apart from their bodies, and yet they were not drunk or reeling or grinding their teeth. The other passengers stood and stared, and so did we."

To Taylor's dismay, the three Beatles greeted them with hugs and kisses. "This is the new thing!" Lennon told him. "You hug your friends when you meet them and show them you're glad to see them. Don't stand there shaking hands as if every? one's got some disease! Get close to people!"

The Taylors were ushered into Lennon's Rolls-Royce, painted in psychedelic livery and guaranteed to turn heads. As they set off for Weybridge, Harrison snatched a cigarette from Taylor's mouth and threw it out of the window. "You don't need them; they'll poison you," he admonished Taylor, who was used to smoking three packets a day. "Acid for breakfast," Lennon said gnomically, as they listened to Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade Of Pale. "It gets you like that."

Lennon took the guests to Kenwood, while Harrison returned to Kinfauns. Taylor was still dressed in a blazer, grey flannel slacks and a black tie.

Derek Taylor : "When we got to George's house, we saw for the first time what young psychedelic women were wearing for parties. Pattie and her sister Jenny and Marijke of the Fool were in glittering flowing robes of beautiful colours, with velvet here and there and all absolutely original. These were the fairest of flower children and as they walked through the Claremont Estate of suburban Esher, they made an indelible impression. Already it was Wonderland, and no one had put anything in our tea yet."

They left in three cars. Harrison drove while on LSD with Pattie in his Mini.

Derek Taylor : "We were moving along the road at about 85mph in a little psychedelic box with tantric symbols, Shiva radio aerials and "hello Pisces" on the door, yantra, tantra, mantras and all that. Suddenly, the big gypsy caravan, the $40,000 Phantom Five Rolls bearing the Romany gypsies going to Brian's, was coming the opposite way. Now were they going the right way and we going back the way we came, or were we heading towards the party and they'd missed it? It didn't matter, just hah... great; let's get out."

 

Inside Lennon's Rolls-Royce, spirits were high.

Cynthia Lennon : "It had all the feeling of a school outing. Every time the car passed through town or villages it stopped the traffic. Crowds of jeering, waving people pressed up against the tinted windows trying to get a better look at the occupants of this crazy car. It was like travelling in a time machine. The boys were smoking pot and, even if you don't smoke it yourself, breathing in the fumes can affect you in much the same way. A pill was passed around and everyone giggled stupidly and had a nibble. It was very hard for me to explain what the atmosphere was like in that car at the time. I can only describe it as insane, freaky, self-destructive, irresponsible. A contagious mood that spread like wildfire in the dark, squashed confines of that crazy vehicle."

Remarkably, all three cars and their passengers arrived unscathed at the Epstein party. Taylor found the Beatles' manager free of the stress and anxiety that had overshadowed many of the group's US tours; instead Epstein was relaxed, in joyous mood and full of love for his guests,

The Taylors were offered Indian tea in china cups.

Derek Taylor : "John, who had been sitting with us on the lawn, said he'd just given Joan some "acid" in her tea. Would I like some in mine? Sure, why not? He snapped a tablet in two, gave me a portion about two thirds of the total. "That'll do to start with," he said cheerfully, dropping the tiny jagged pink pill into my cup. "Stir it up well, there's a good lad." George came by and said: "What are you giving them?" "What do you think?" said John. "Oh," said George. "Derek's..." But I had already drained it, and George's tea, too. "Derek's already had... well, it's too late now." He laughed. "Derek's got a double dose inside him.""

Taylor had already unwittingly ingested 500 micrograms of LSD. Coupled with Lennon's offering, he was in for an unusually strong first trip. Fortunately he was in trusted company in a safe space, allowing him to enjoy the experience without too much turbulence or fear. The Beatles and their wives retreated to a room with a log fire burning. A joint was passed around and more tea poured. Taylor, not knowing what to expect from the acid, took a Desbutal tablet – amphetamine combined with barbiturate – "just in case there wasn't enough stimulation". He needn't have worried . . .

Derek Taylor : "Before long I found myself swimming like a parcel of Escher lizards through the lines of a purple jigsaw of increasing and then decreasing size. "What the hell's going on?" I asked, crying with laughter. "You're tripping," said Joan, with a new vocabulary already. Tripping? Me? ... "Are you tripping?" I asked Joan. She nodded lovingly. "We all are," George said. "Everyone is.""



As the effects of the double dose peaked, it proved too much for Taylor, who was assailed by disturbing visions and dark thoughts. Harrison, with enough experience to spot the warning signs, and the calmness – despite tripping himself – to provide reassurance, talked Taylor back from his descent into misery. 'Derek, create and preserve the image of your choice,' Harrison told him. 'It's up to you. The thing is to see what you want to see. Do you want to create something nice? Then look into the fire and see something nice.'

The intervention worked, and much of the remainder of Taylor's trip was filled with talking, laughter and visions. He and Joan bonded over the shared experience, and led a singalong on Epstein's grand piano. Late into the night Taylor was cornered by Harrison, who reiterated his words of wisdom: 'Derek, I love ya. I just want you to know that. I love ya and it's going to be OK. Create and preserve the image of your choice. Don't forget, Derek. Gandhi said that. Pick your own trips.'

Coping less well was Cynthia Lennon, who was on her third and final trip. Once again it was a bad experience, though unlike Taylor she had nobody to comfort and guide her. Her husband was hardly faring better.

Cynthia Lennon : "When John moved away from me I followed hoping that he could in some way comfort and support me. But John was not happy; he was not enjoying the experience as he had before. He ignored me and glared as though I were an intruding stranger."

Distraught at the rejection from her husband, tongue-tied and paranoid, Cynthia retreated into a bedroom where she contemplated suicide.

Cynthia Lennon : "I felt desolate. I sat on the windowsill of an upstairs room contemplating the long drop to the paving- stones below, musing to myself that it wasn't really that far down and that I could even jump. I was drifting off into a very deep depression when someone called my name and I was snapped out of my apathetic reverie. Even though I was under the influence of the drug I knew that all hope for John and I carrying on with our marriage in the same vein flew out of that upstairs window with my thoughts."

[daf]

Rat-ta - Rat-ta - Raaaahhhh, it's . . .

235.  The Beatles - All You Need Is Love



From : July 16 – August 5 1967
Weeks : 3
B-side : Baby, You're a Rich Man
Bonus 1 : Our World
Bonus 2 : Colourised Beatle Bit
Bonus 3 : Isolated Orchestra

The Story So Far :

On Thursday 1 June 1967,  The Beatles eighth album, 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', was issued in the UK, housed in a sleeve designed by Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

Peter Blake : "I offered the idea that if they had just played a concert in the park, the cover could be a photograph of the group just after the concert with the crowd who had just watched the concert, watching them. If we did this by using cardboard cut-outs, it could be a magical crowd of whomever they wanted."

McCartney provided the ink drawing on which Blake and Haworth based the design. Their uniforms were tailored on request by the group before Blake's involvement. The cover was art-directed by Robert Fraser and photographed by Michael Cooper.

 

Peter Blake : "I asked the four Beatles for a list and I did one myself. Robert Fraser did a list and I can't remember whether Brian Epstein did one or not. The way that worked out was fascinating. John gave me a list and so did Paul. George suggested only Indian gurus, about six of them, and Ringo said, "Whatever the others say is fine by me" and didn't suggest anyone. It's an insight into their characters. All kinds of people were suggested. Hitler was there; he is actually in the set-up, but he is covered by the Beatles themselves as we felt he was too controversial. The same applied to Jesus. There were only two of their contemporaries on the cover. Bob Dylan was suggested by John and I put on Dion because he is a great favourite of mine."

The front of the LP includes a colourful collage featuring the Beatles in costume as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people. The group are dressed in satin day-glo-coloured military-style uniforms that were manufactured by the London theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd. Next to the Beatles are wax sculptures of the bandmembers in their suits and moptop haircuts from the Beatlemania era, borrowed from Madame Tussauds.



The cover collage includes 57 photographs and nine waxworks that depict a diversity of famous people, including actors, sportsmen, scientists and gurus. Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon to appear on the cover, but rejected along with Ghandi. As a legal precaution, permission was sought from all those still living. Mae West initially refused, rhetorically asking what she would "be doing in a lonely hearts club", until a personal letter from the Beatles changed her mind.



Top Row : Sri Yukteswar Giri  /  Aleister Crowley  /  Mae West  /  Lenny Bruce  /  Karlheinz Stockhausen  /  W. C. Fields  /  Carl Jung  / Edgar Allan Poe  / Fred Astaire  /  Richard Merkin  /  The Vargas Girl  /  Leo Gorcey (removed from cover after he requested a fee, but a space remains)  /  Huntz Hall  / Simon Rodia  / Bob Dylan

Second row : Aubrey Beardsley  /  Sir Robert Peel  /  Aldous Huxley  /  Dylan Thomas  /  Terry Southern  /  Dion DiMucci  / Tony Curtis  /  Wallace Berman  /  Harold Steptoe Tommy Handley  /  Marilyn Monroe  /  William S. Burroughs  /  Sri Mahavatar Babaji  /  Stan Laurel  /  Richard Lindner  /  Oliver Hardy  /  Karl Marx  /  H. G. Wells  /  The Mona Lisa Sri Paramahansa Yogananda  /  James Joyce  /  Spud from The Brumbeats



Third row :  Stuart Sutcliffe  /  Hairdresser's dummy  /  Max Miller  /  A "Petty Girl"  /  Marlon Brando  /  Tom Mix  /  Oscar Wilde  /  Tyrone Power  /  Larry Bell  /  Windsor Davies David Livingstone, I presume  /  Johnny Weissmuller (in the space vacated by the #cancelled Cardboard Hitler) /  Stephen Crane  /  Robert Maxwell Issy Bonn (yes he is!)  /  George Bernard Shaw  /  H. C. Westermann  /  Albert Stubbins  /  Sri Lahiri Mahasaya  /  Lewis Carroll  /  Lawrence of Arabia

Front Row : Wax model of Sonny Liston  /  A "Petty Girl"  /  Wax model of George Harrison  /  Wax model of John Lennon  /  Shirley Temple  /  Wax model of Ringo Starr  /  Wax model of Paul McCartney  /  Albert Einstein  /  John Lennon holding a french horn  /  Ringo Starr holding a trumpet  /  Paul McCartney holding a cor anglais  /  George Harrison holding a piccolo  /  Bette Davis as Elizabeth I (hidden) /  Bobby Breen  /  Marlene Dietrich  /  Mahatma Gandhi (airbrushed out)  /  An American legionnaire  /  Wax model of Diana Dors  /  Shirley Temple (again)

One surprising omission was Elvis Presley - over to you, Sir Thumbsaloft, explain yourself -

Paul : "Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention, he was more than merely a pop singer, he was Elvis the King."

The final cost for the cover art was nearly £3,000 (roughly £55,000 in today's money), an extravagant sum for a time when album covers would typically cost around £50. The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.

 

Images from a photo session from 30 March 1967 with Michael Cooper were used on the back cover and the inside gatefold,

Paul : "One of the things we were very much into in those days was eye messages ... So with Michael Cooper's inside photo, we all said, 'Now look into this camera and really say I love you! Really try and feel love; really give love through this!' ... and if you look at it you'll see the big effort from the eyes."



The album's inner bag featured artwork by the Dutch design team The Fool that eschewed [bless you!] for the first time the standard white paper in favour of an abstract pattern of waves of red, pink and white. Included as a bonus gift was a sheet of cardboard cut-outs designed by Blake and Haworth. These consisted of a postcard-sized portrait of Sgt. Pepper, based on a statue from Lennon's house that was used on the front cover, a fake moustache, two sets of sergeant stripes, two lapel badges, and a stand-up cut-out of the Beatles in their satin uniforms.

 

The album entered the UK charts on 3 June 1967. The following week it was at number one, where it remained for 23 weeks. It returned to the top spot for another week on 25 November, for two weeks from 23 December, and for a final week on 3 February 1968. In all it spent 148 consecutive weeks in the charts.

Sgt Pepper sold more than 250,000 copies in the UK in its first week of release, and by the end of June had sold over half a million. It remains in the top 10 best-selling albums of all time, both in the UK and worldwide.

The vast majority of contemporary reviews of Sgt. Pepper were positive, with the album receiving widespread critical acclaim. Peter Jones of Record Mirror said the album was "truly fine ... clever and brilliant, from raucous to poignant and back again", while Disc and Music Echo called it "a beautiful and potent record, unique, clever, and stunning".

The Times described Sgt. Pepper as a "pop music master-class" and commented that, so considerable were the album's musical advances, "the only track that would have been conceivable in pop songs five years ago" was "With a Little Help from My Friends".

Gramophone magazine said that the new album was "like nearly everything the Beatles do, bizarre, wonderful, perverse, beautiful, exciting, provocative, exasperating, compassionate and mocking", and found "plenty of electronic gimmickry on the record" before concluding: "but that isn't the heart of the thing. It's the combination of imagination, cheek and skill that make this such a rewarding LP."

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On 17 June 1967, Life Magazine ran an interview with Paul McCartney in which the Beatle admitted to having taken LSD. The UK press immediately seized upon it, and two days later McCartney gave a statement to Independent Television News, which was broadcast on the ITN evening news at 9pm on 19 June. As would be expected, this sparked much debate in the press -




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On 18 May 1967, The Beatles signed a contract to represent Britain, on Our World, the world's first live television satellite link-up to be seen by approximately 400 million people across five continents. The event, which lasted two-and-a-half hours, had the largest television audience to date.

Ringo : "We were big enough to command an audience of that size, and it was for love. It was for love and bloody peace. It was a fabulous time. I even get excited now when I realise that's what it was for: peace and love, people putting flowers in guns."

The satellite link-up was devised by the BBC, which took the idea to the European Broadcasting Union in 1966. The project editor was BBC executive Aubrey Singer. Personalities, including Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso, from 19 nations performed in separate items from their respective countries. No politicians or heads of state were allowed to take part in the broadcast, and no pre-recorded videotape or film was allowed. Around 10,000 technicians, producers and translators helped make the event happen; each country had its own announcers, with translators narrating where necessary.

BBC publicity : "For the first time ever, linking five continents and bringing man face to face with mankind, in places as far apart as Canberra and Cape Kennedy, Moscow and Montreal, Samarkand and Söderfors, Takamatsu and Tunis."

The Beatles' appearance was announced on 22 May - John Lennon wrote the song 'All You Need Is Love' especially for the occasion, to the brief given by the BBC: it had to be simple so that viewers around the world would understand it. Rather than perform the song entirely live, the group played to a pre-recorded backing track.

The Beatles began recording the backing track for the song at Olympic Sound Studios in south-west London on 14 June 1967. The producers of 'Our World' were initially unhappy about the use of a backing track, but George Martin insisted, saying, "we can't just go in front of 350 million people without some work".

 

The group taped some vocals and played unconventional instruments - recording 33 takes - before choosing the tenth take as the best.

John : "We just put a track down. Because I knew the chords I played it on whatever it was, harpsichord. George played a violin because we felt like doing it like that and Paul played a double bass. And they can't play them, so we got some nice little noises coming out. It sounded like an orchestra, but it's just them two playing the violin and that. So then we thought, 'Ah, well, we'll have some more orchestra around this little freaky orchestra that we've got.' But there was no perception of how it sounded at the end until they did it that day, until the rehearsal. It still sounded a bit strange then."



From 19 June, working at Studio 2 in EMI Studios, the Beatles recorded overdubs including piano (played by Martin), banjo, guitar and some vocal parts. Among the latter were the "Love, love, love" refrains, and a Lennon vocal over the song's choruses. On 23 June, the band began rehearsing the song with an orchestra, whose playing was also added to the backing track.

On Saturday 24 June, the day before the broadcast, the Beatles decided that the song would be their next single. Late that morning, a press call was held at EMI Studios, attended by over 100 journalists and photographers, followed by further rehearsals and recording. Publicity photos were taken during the press call and rehearsals, and a BBC television crew blocked the camera angles required for the live performance. As part of this pre-broadcast promotion, the Beatles posed in a yard beside the studio building, wearing boards that together spelt out "All You Need Is Love" and approximations of the song title in three other languages.



Lennon was said to be nervous about the broadcast, given the potential size of the international TV audience. Later on 25 June, after the TV broadcast, dissatisfied with his singing, he re-recorded the solo verses for use on the single. On 26 June, in EMI's Studio 2, Lennon's vocal was treated with ADT, and Starr overdubbed a drum roll at the start of the track, replacing a tambourine part.

On Friday 7 July 1967, The Beatles' 15th UK single, All You Need Is Love, was rush-released in the wake of the Our World satellite broadcast.



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On Wednesday 19 July 1967, all four members of The Beatles met in London to discuss the 'Magical Mystery Tour' film project, and their plans to purchase an island hideaway in Greece.

The Greek island idea was John Lennon's. He had decided that the group and their friends and family should live on the same island, in four separate villas with a recording studio and entertainment complex in the middle. There should, he said, also be housing for staff and visitors.

John : "We're all going to live there, perhaps forever, just coming home for visits. Or it might just be six months a year. It'll be fantastic, all on our own on this island. There some little houses which we'll do up and knock together and live communally. I'm not worried about the political situation in Greece, as long as it doesn't affect us. I don't care if the government is all fascist, or communist. I don't care. They're all as bad as here; worse, most of them. I've seen England and the USA, and I don't care for either of their governments. They're all the same. Look what they do here. They stopped Radio Caroline and tried to put the Stones away while they're spending billions on nuclear armaments and the place is full of US bases that no one knows about."

Alexis Mardas, a Greek friend of Lennon's known as Magic Alex, who invented "The Nothing Box", arranged for The Beatles to look for properties in the country. Mardas flew to Greece and found an island, often cited as Leslo, although such an island appears not to exist. The island is said to have had around 80 acres surrounded by four habitable islands, a small fishing village, beaches, 16 acres of olive groves, and was priced at £90,000.

 

Derek Taylor : "We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate. The four Beatles and Brian would have their network at the centre of the compound: a dome of glass and iron tracery (not unlike the old Crystal Palace) above the mutual creative/play area, from which arbours and avenues would lead off like spokes from a wheel to the four vast and incredibly beautiful separate living units. In the outer grounds, the houses of the inner clique: Neil, Mal, Terry and Derek, complete with partners, families and friends. Norfolk, perhaps, there was a lot of empty land there. What an idea! No thought of wind or rain or flood, and as for cold... there would be no more cold when we were through with the world. We would set up a chain reaction so strong that nothing could stand in our way. And why the hell not? 'They've tried everything else,' said John realistically. 'Wars, nationalism, fascism, communism, capitalism, nastiness, religion – none of it works. So why not this?'"

The following day, George Harrison and Pattie Harrison, Ringo Starr and Neil Aspinall flew to Athens where they met Mardas and his father, who was a member of the Greek military police. The party stayed at the Mardas family house in Athens until the rest of The Beatles arrived on 25 July.

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On Saturday 22 July 1967, John Lennon, his wife Cynthia and son Julian, along with Paul McCartney, Jane Asher, Pattie Harrison's 16-year-old sister Paula Boyd, Mal Evans and NEMS employee Alistair Taylor all began a journey to Greece.

Paul : "Alex invited John on a boat holiday in Greece, and we were all then invited. There was some story of buying a Greek island or something. It was all so sort of abstract but the first thing we had to do is go to Greece and see if we even liked it out there. The idea was get an island where you can just do what you want, a sort of hippie commune where nobody'd interfere with your lifestyle. I suppose the main motivation for that would probably be no one could stop you smoking. Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island, and then all the other community things that were around then – 'Oh, we'll paint together. We'll do this. I'll chop wood.

"I think that if you're going to write a great symphony or you're going to rehearse the greatest string quartet in the world, it's fair enough to cut yourself off. It's just a practical matter; give yourself lots of time and if you're going to do that, then why shouldn't it be in Greece? It was a drug-induced ambition, we'd just be sitting around: 'Wouldn't it be great? The lapping water, sunshine, we'd be playing. We'd get a studio there. We had lots of ideas like that. The whole Apple enterprise was the result of those ideas."

The Beatles had hired a luxury yacht, the MV Arvi, to take them to look at the islands, but it was delayed due to a storm off Crete until 25 July 1967. The group remained in Athens until its arrival, staying at the family home of Alexis 'Magic Alex' Mardas

 

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On Monday 24 July 1967, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Times newspaper, signed by 64 of the most prominent members of British society, which called for the legalisation of marijuana. Among the signatories were The Beatles and Brian Epstein.

The advertisement was instigated as a response to the nine-month prison sentence for possession received on 1 June 1967 by John Hopkins, founder of International Times, the UFO Club and the 24 Hour Technicolour Dream. The following day an emergency meeting was held at the Indica Bookshop, during which Steve Abrams of drug-research organisation SOMA suggested bringing the issue into public debate by running a full-page advertisement.

Abrams agreed to organise the signatures, but the question of financing the advertisement proved temporarily problematic. None of The Beatles were present at the Indica, but the bookshop's co-owner Barry Miles telephoned Paul McCartney, who agreed to finance the advertisement.

 

On 3 June Miles and Abrams visited McCartney's house in Cavendish Avenue. McCartney listened to the plans, told Abrams that all The Beatles and Epstein would put their names to it, and told them how to contact the rest of the group for their signatures.

On 23 July, the day before publication, the ad was mentioned in The Sunday Times' Atticus column, written by Philip Oates. Behind the scenes, however, The Times' advertising manager, R Grant Davidson, nervously insisted on checking that all the people had indeed agreed for their names to be associated with the article. Davidson also insisted on advance payment. Steve Abrams contacted Peter Brown at Brian Epstein's office, and shortly afterwards received a personal cheque for £1,800 made out to The Times. At the time the amount was twice the average annual wage.

Although McCartney had wanted to keep the funding a secret, in fear of negative publicity, it soon proved impossible. The day after the advertisement appeared, the information appeared in the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary. Within a week of its appearance, the advertisement led to questions being asked in the House of Commons, and began a public debate which eventually led to liberalisation in the laws against cannabis use in Britain.

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On Wednesday 26 July 1967, Ringo Starr and Neil Aspinall decided to return to England from Greece. Starr's wife Maureen was in the late stages of pregnancy and had remained in Britain, and he was eager to see her. Their second son Jason was born on 19 August 1967.

Ringo : "It came to nothing. We didn't buy an island, we came home. We were great at going on holiday with big ideas, but we never carried them out. We were also going to buy a village in England – one with rows of houses on four sides and a village green in the middle. We were going to have a side each. That was what happened when we got out. It was safer making records, because once they let us out we'd just go barmy."

 

The group, minus Ringo, who had left for England earlier in the day, were taken around the islands to the south of Athens aboard their hired yacht, the MV Arvi. The boat had 24 berths and a crew of eight, including the captain, a chef and two stewards.

George : "We rented a boat and sailed it up and down the coast from Athens, looking at islands. Somebody had said we should invest some money, so we thought: 'Well, let's buy an island. We'll just go there and drop out.' It was a great trip. John and I were on acid all the time, sitting on the front of the ship playing ukuleles. Greece was on the left; a big island on the right. The sun was shining and we sang 'Hare Krishna' for hours and hours. Eventually we landed on a little beach with a village, but as soon as we stepped off the boat it started pouring with rain. There were storms and lightning, and the only building on the island was a little fisherman's cottage – so we all piled in: "Scuse us, squire. You don't mind if we come and shelter in your cottage, do you?' The island was covered in big pebbles, but Alex said, 'It doesn't matter. We'll have the military come and lift them all off and carry them away.' But we got back on the boat and sailed away, and never thought about the island again."

The Beatles spent the early part of the day island-hopping, swimming, sunbathing and taking drugs. They then visited the island they intended to buy. NEMS employee Alistair Taylor was then sent back to London to arrange its purchase.

Paul : "We went on the boat and sat around and took acid. It was good fun being with everyone, with nippier moments. For me the pace was a bit wearing. I probably could have done with some straight windows occasionally, I'd have enjoyed it a bit more. But nothing came of that, because we went out there and thought, We've done it now. That was it for a couple of weeks. Great, wasn't it? Now we don't need it. Having been out there, I don't think we needed to go back. Probably the best way to not buy a Greek island is to go out there for a bit. It's a good job we didn't do it, because anyone who tried those ideas realised eventually there would always be arguments, there would always be who has to do the washing-up and whose turn it is to clean out the latrines. I don't think any of us were thinking of that."

The Beatles were required to buy special export dollars before applying to the Greek government for permission to spend them. Alistair Taylor eventually got clearance for the purchase of the islands, but by that time the group had moved on. The £90,000-worth of dollars was sold back to the government, and the value had risen giving The Beatles £11,400 profit on the unrealised deal.

George : "It was about the only time The Beatles ever made any money on a business venture. To make the purchase, we'd changed the money into international dollars or some currency. Then, when they changed the money back, the exchange rate had gone up and so we made about twenty shillings or so."

   

On Monday 31 July 1967, John, Cynthia and Julian Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jane Asher, Magic Alex and Pattie Harrison's sister Paula Boyd all returned to England from Greece. The party flew to London Airport from Athens. George and Pattie Harrison had returned the previous day.

The Single :

'All You Need Is Love' was written by John Lennon and recorded by The Beatles. The single topped the charts in Britain, the United States and many other countries, and became an anthem for the counterculture's embrace of flower power philosophy. Its message perfectly encapsulated the optimistic mood of the Summer of Love, with a simplicity perfectly judged for their global audience.

The song was Britain's contribution to Our World, the first live global television link, for which the band were filmed performing it at EMI Studios in London on 25 June. The programme was broadcast via satellite and seen by an audience of over 400 million in 25 countries.



The BBC had suggested the idea of using new satellite relays to connect the national television networks of countries across the world, to make a live link-up on a scale previously unknown. The Beatles were the natural choice to represent Britain, but were unimpressed when Brian Epstein first told them that he had arranged for their appearance on 'Our World', and they delayed choosing a song for the broadcast.

Brian Epstein : "The time got nearer and nearer and they still hadn't written anything. Then, about three weeks before the programme, they sat down to write. The record was completed in 10 days. This is an inspired song, because they wrote it for a worldwide programme and they really wanted to give the world a message. It could hardly have been a better message. It is a wonderful, beautiful, spine-chilling record."

Geoff Emerick : "I don't know if they had prepared any ideas but they left it very late to write the song. John said, 'Oh God, is it that close? I suppose we'd better write something.'"

Paul : "It was certainly tailored to the broadcast once we had it. But I've got a feeling it was just one of John's songs that was coming anyway. I threw in a few ideas, as did the other members of the group, but it was largely ad libs like singing She Loves You or Greensleeves or silly things at the end and we made those up on the spot. The chorus, 'All you need is love', is simple, but the verse is quite complex; in fact I never really understood it, the message is rather complex. It was a good song that we had handy that had an anthemic chorus."

 

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25 June was the day of the broadcast - most of the day was spent rehearsing with the BBC camera crew. As it was such an important day, George Martin ensured that The Beatles played along to their pre-recorded backing track - the vocals, bass, guitar solo, drums and orchestra were the only live elements.

Paul : "We went around to EMI for the show. We'd done a lot of pre-recording, so we sang live to the backing track. We'd worked on it all with George Martin's help, and it was a good day. We went in there early in the morning to rehearse with the cameras, and there was a bit orchestra – for all that stuff with Greensleeves playing on the way out of the song. The band was asked to invite people, so we had people like Mick and Eric, and all our friends and wifelets."

For Our World, it was decided that The Beatles, other than Ringo Starr, would perform on high stools in the studio, surrounded by friends sitting cross-legged on the floor. Friends and family in attendance included : Mick Jagger  /  Marianne Faithfull  /  Keith Richard  /  Keith Moon  /  Eric Clapton  /  Pattie Harrison  /  Jane Asher  /  Mike McGear  /  Spud from The Brumbeats  /  Graham Nash  /  and Hunter Davies.

The broadcast took place in the wake of the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War and, for the Beatles, amid the public furore caused by McCartney's recent admission that he had taken LSD. Although the event had been rehearsed for much of the day prior to the 9.36pm live broadcast, nerves were running high on the day.

George Martin : "I was on camera for the broadcast. It was a bit of a panic because it was done in the big number one studio at EMI. The control room was then just at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn't very large, and there was Geoff Emerick, the tape operator and myself in there. We had prepared a basic track of the recording for the television show, but we were going to do a lot live. There was a live orchestra, the singing was live, the audience certainly was, and we knew it was going to be a live television show. There was also a camera in the control room.

"With about thirty seconds to go, there was a phone call. It was the producer of the show, saying: 'I'm afraid I've lost all contact with the studio – you're going to have to relay the instructions to them, because we're going on air any moment now.' I thought, 'My God, if you're going to make a fool of yourself, you might as well do it properly in front of 350 million people. At that point I just laughed."

   

At 8:54 pm, the live transmission cut to EMI Studios - it was a frantic affair for those in the studio – not helped by having to go on air earlier than expected.

Geoff Emerick : "We actually went on air about 40 seconds early. George and I were having a welcome shot of Scotch whisky when we got the word over the intercom. There was a big panic to hide the bottle and the glasses. We were shoving them under the mixing console!"

The orchestra, wearing formal evening dress, conducted by Mike Vickers, included - violin : Sidney Sax, Patrick Halling, Eric Bowie, John Ronayne  /  cello : Lionel Ross, Jack Holmes  /  tenor saxophone : Rex Morris, Don Honeywill  /  trumpet : Stanley Woods, David Mason  /   trombone : Evan Watkins, Harry Spain  /  accordion : Jack Emblow

George Martin's orchestral arrangement, for which he was paid £15, contained elements from Bach's Brandenburg concerto, Greensleeves, and Glenn Miller's arrangement of In The Mood, in addition to the distinctive introduction of La Marseillaise. Lennon also ad-libbed parts of She Loves You.

George Martin : "In arranging it, we shoved La Marseillaise on the front, and a whole string of stuff on the end. I fell into deep water over that. I'm afraid that amongst all the little bits and pieces I used in the play-out, which the boys didn't know about, was a bit of In The Mood. Everyone thought In The Mood was in the public domain, and it is – but the introduction isn't. The introduction is an arrangement, and it was the introduction I took. That was a published work. EMI came to me and said: 'You put this in the arrangement, so now you've got to indemnify us against any action that might be taken.' I said, 'You must be joking. I got fifteen pounds for that arrangement, that's all.' They saw the joke. I think they paid a fee to Keith Prowse, or whoever the publisher was, and I wrote the arrangements out. Greensleeves was also there at half tempo, to weave in with a bit of Bach and the bit of In The Mood."



The segment was directed by Derek Burrell-Davis, the head of the BBC's Our World project. It opened with the band playing "All You Need Is Love" for about a minute, before Martin, speaking from the studio control room, suggested that the orchestra should take their places for the recording as the tape was rewound.The BBC presenter, Steve Race, announced that the Beatles had just recorded this performance and were about to complete the recording live. In fact, Race's statements were part of the "staged" aspect of the segment, which purported to show the Beatles at work in the studio: the opening footage of the band rehearsing over the backing track had been filmed earlier, and by the time Martin appeared to be issuing instructions, the orchestra were already seated in Studio 1.

The Beatles, accompanied by the orchestra and the studio guests, then performed the entire song, overdubbing onto the pre-recorded rhythm track. In addition to the lead and backing vocals and the orchestra, the live elements were McCartney's bass guitar part, Harrison's guitar solo and Starr's drums.

The invited audience all wore the colourful clothes that were de rigeur in 1967. All of The Beatles' guests sang in the song's lengthy fade-out, and some even danced a conga around the studio. Also among the studio audience were members of the Small Faces, and the design collective The Fool. Balloons, flowers, streamers and "Love" graffiti added to the celebratory atmosphere.

George : "I remember the recording, because we decided to get some people in who looked like the 'love generation'. If you look closely at the floor, I know that Mick Jagger is there. But there's also an Eric Clapton, I believe, in full psychedelic regalia and permed hair, sitting right there. It was good: the orchestra was there and it was played live. We rehearsed for a while, and then it was: 'You're on at twelve o'clock, lads.' The man upstairs pointed his finger and that was that. We did it – one take."

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"All You Need Is Love" was issued in the UK on 7 July 1967, and was a smash hit, both in the UK and around the world. It was issued in mono only and, surprisingly, was the first Beatles single to carry a producer credit for George Martin. Five days after its release it was at number one in the UK charts, where it remained for four weeks. In all it spent 13 weeks in the charts.

 


In his review for Melody Maker, Nick Jones said the Beatles represented the : "progressive avant-garde" in their approach to singles releases, and that "All You Need Is Love is another milestone in their very phenomenal career", and concluded: "The message is 'love' and I hope everyone in the whole wide world manages to get it."

John Lennon : "Maybe in the Sixties we were naive and like children and later everyone went back to their rooms and said, 'We didn't get a wonderful world of flowers and peace.' ... Crying for it wasn't enough. The thing the Sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility we all had."

George Harrison : "They all said All You Need Is Love but you also need such-and-such else. But ... love is complete knowledge. If we all had total knowledge, then we would have complete love and, on that basis, everything is taken care of. It's a law of nature."

 

Other Versions include :  The Anita Kerr Singers (1967)  /  "Rakkautta vain" by Kristina Hautala (1967)  /  "Cerchi solo amore" by I Soliti Ignoti (1967)  /  The Blue Cats (1967)  / The Hollyridge Strings (1968)  /  Frannie Golde (1976)  /  Yellow Magic Orchestra (1980)  /  New Musik (1982)  /  Echo & The Bunnymen (1984)  /  Elvis Costello (1985)  /  The Nits (1995)  /  The Punkles (1998)  /  Ringo Ska (2004)  /  Les Fradkin (2007)  /  Danny McEvoy (2010)  /  8-Bit Operators (2011)  /  Camille and Kennerly (2011)  /  Thea Gilmore (2012)  /  Gian Piero Ferrini (2013)  /  The Flaming Lips (2013)  /  Le Pumpe Jazz Band (2014)  /  Carlos Piegari (2018)  /  a robot (2019)

On This Day  :

16 July : Will Ferrell, comic actor, born John William Ferrell in Irvine, California
17 July : John Coltrane, jazz saxophonist, dies of cancer at 40
17 July : Jimi Hendrix opens for The Monkees at Forest Hills NY,
21 July : Basil Rathbone [Philip St. John Basil Rathbone], actor (Sherlock Holmes), dies of heart attack at 75
22 July : Rhys Ifans, actor, born Rhys Owain Evans in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales
22 July : Jimi Hendrix quits as opening act of the Monkees' tour
23 July : Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor, born in Fairport, New York
24 July : The Beatles sign a petition in Times to legalize marijuana
25 July : Matt LeBlanc, actor (Friends), born Matthew Steven LeBlanc in Newton, Massachusetts
26 July : Jason Statham, actor, born in Shirebrook, Derbyshire
27 July : The Sexual Offences Act 1967 : homosexual sex in England and Wales is made compulsory legalized between men over the age of 21.
27 July : Juliana Hatfield, musician, born in Wiscasset, Maine, USA
28 July : British Steel Corporation formally created (Nationalisation by UK Government)
28 July : Pirate Radio Station 390 (Radio Invicta / England) closes down
31 July : Mick Jagger and Keith Richard received suspended jail sentence following an appeal.
2 August : US's Lunar Orbiter 5 launched
4 August : US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
4 August : USSR performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh / Semipalitinsk
5 August : Pirate Radio Station Radio Britain & Radio London close down

Extra! Extra!

         

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[gilbertharding]

The letter writing pop kids of 1967 are such sweet, naive children, aren't they? Where are they now?

Thank GOODNESS for Mandy White, of 38 Batman Close, Shepherds Bush, for such a level headed and clear-sighted take on the Walker Brothers split. Hope you're well, Mandy!