#mark hertsgaard

“‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ was later called the first gay love song, and it did express the sort of fear, shame, and hopelessness that many homosexuals have felt in the face of the larger world’s disapproval. However, this interpretation is worth noting not because it sheds light on Lennon’s sexual orientation - it doesn’t - but because of what it says about his ability to reach inside himself and articulate larger human truths, truths that reach across barriers of age, race, class, and other categories and speak to people who otherwise feel isolated from one another…the lyrics…are compelling because of the honesty and directness of their self revelation; at the same time, they are inclusive and open-ended enough to accommodate alternative interpretations that others may assign them.”

The alarm clock that heralds the transition to McCartney’s portion of the song was actually set as a joke, according to George Martin, who added, “We left it in because we couldn’t get it off” the tape. But it is a sublime bit of serendipity; there couldn’t be a more appropriate introduction to Paul’s “Woke up, fell out of bed” lyric. Lennon was the more philosophical of the two, but McCartney showed more empathy for the daily life of the average person—think of “Lady Madonna,” for example, or “Paperback Writer”—and here that perspective provides a reassuring anchor to Lennon’s cosmic musings. McCartney’s everyman seems oblivious to all but his own small concerns—a cup of tea, a quick cigarette on the way to work—yet he is not an unsympathetic character; he simply has enough trouble keeping his own life together without also trying to confront the moral issues raised in Lennon’s part of the song. He represents each of us who retreats from full engagement of life.

I just saw a post you did a while ago about your top 3 beatles and its so refreshing to see people who can appreciate both john and paul without putting the other down. So thank you!

The Beatles’ most important artistic contemporary, Bob Dylan, quickly recognized how special they were. […] He was driving through Colorado, he later recalled, when the lightning struck: “We had the radio on and eight of the Top Ten songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.” Dylan said he kept quiet about how much he admired the Beatles, but “in my head, the Beatles were it. In Colorado, I started thinking but it was so far out I couldn’t deal with it—eight in the Top Ten. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn.” If the Beatles influenced Dylan toward a more rock ’n’ roll future, he in turn influenced them toward a more poetic approach to songwriting. But this development came later.

To make things easier, Martin endeavored to learn guitar, but soon gave up when it became clear that John and Paul were learning his instrument, the piano, much more quickly. Nevertheless, moments of incomprehension continued to pop up. During the overdubbing session for Lennon’s song, “Good Morning Good Morning” on Sgt Pepper, for example, John insisted on correcting Martin in front of outside musicians. John was playing notes on his guitar that Martin was translating into notes for saxophone players. John kept contradicting Martin’s instructions because John didn’t realize that some saxophones were pitched in E-flat, some in B-flat, and so forth. When Martin explained this, John replied, his voice heavy with disgust, “That’s bloody silly, isn’t it?” Such brazen technical ignorance caused some professionals to disparage the Beatles as musical impostors, a criticism that confused mere expertise with creativity. The Beatles needed George Martin to translate their ideas into proper musical terms, but the ideas were theirs to begin with. To his great credit, Martin was both intelligent and emotionally healthy enough to accept that “theirs was the greater talent” and to recognize that in most cases “an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me.” Recalling his collaboration with McCartney on the high, piccolo trumpet overdub that brightens the middle of “Penny Lane,” Martin wrote, “It is true that I arranged it, but… if I had been left to myself, I honestly do not think I would have written such good notes [as Paul did].” Moreover, precisely because the Beatles didn’t know what they didn’t know, they could suggest innovations that never would have occurred to better-trained but more conventionally minded colleagues.

When I listened to the working tapes of “A Day In The Life” at Abbey Road Studios, the first words audible as take one began were John murmuring, “Sugarplum fairy, sugarplum fairy.” This was in lieu of a proper count-in to the song, something Lennon was incapable of, according to Mark Lewisohn, the EMI Beatles archivist who listened to all four hundred-plus hours of tapes in the Abbey Road vaults to write his official history, The Beatles: The Complete Recording Sessions. “While Paul or George’s 1-2-3-4 count-ins were always appropriately sensible, John’s—from the earliest surviving archive tape to the last—were anything but,” wrote Lewisohn. “Only John Lennon could have devised so many demented ways of saying four simple numbers.” But there was method to the madness in this case, and humor as well: “sugarplum fairy” was sixties slang for the person who supplied one’s recreational drugs.