He wasn’t really pleased with the song in the end. He said it didn’t come out as he’d heard it in his head. When they came back from India in April 1968 he decided to try to record it again, having thought of new ideas.
When John is talking to George Martin, on a John song, there is a lot of whooshing and wow wow wow, as he tries to let George Martin hear what he can hear in his head. He’s also not as definite as Paul, or doesn’t appear to be, asking the others what they think when they’ve just heard a track played back. Paul tends to say straight away, let’s do it again.
‘Heh Bulldog’ was another John song which began simply with a set of words to which music was put. This is probably one of the quickest post-touring songs they’ve ever recorded. It was done, in February 1968, almost in a day, from start to finish. They had to come into the studio one Sunday to be filmed for a three-minute promotional film to go with ‘Lady Madonna’, Paul’s song, the A side of their single in March 1968.
‘Paul said we should do a real song in the studio, to save wasting time. Could I whip one off? I had a few words lying around at home so I brought them in.’ Along with Neil and the others, the words were finished in the studio. John told them roughly how he heard the song and they all created the backing between them, just by getting their instruments and playing together, while the film people filmed them.
The words changed, even as they sang them, as Paul misread John’s handwriting. One line had ‘measured out in news’, which came out as ‘measured out in you’, which they agreed sounded better. There was no reference anywhere to bulldog when they started recording the song. There was a mention of bullfrog, which made Paul, as a joke, start barking, just to make John laugh. They kept the barking in and changed the title. John said the idea of a dog fitted very well. It could be a dog that barks away, worrying at you, trying to pull you, just like the girl in the song. He then picked up a sitar and started singing the words in a Lancashire voice, strumming on the sitar like George Formby, but they couldn’t work that in.
Most of John’s composing is done at the piano, just doodling over it for hours, letting his mind wander, almost in a trance, while his fingers look for bits of tunes. ‘I’ve got another one here, a few words, I think I got them from an advert — “Cry baby cry, make your mother buy”. I’ve been playing it over on the piano. I’ve let it go now. It’ll come back if I really want it. I do get up from the piano as if I have been in a trance. Sometimes I know I’ve let a few things slip away, which I could have caught if I’d been wanting something.’
Paul tends to work on whole songs, rather than little bits. But very often songs are left unfinished. And even when they are finished, they are sometimes left around for a long time. ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ (the age is in honour of Paul’s dad) was written in the Cavern days before it popped up and was revised as being ideal for Sergeant Pepper.
Sometimes, when they both have a half-finished song, they meld them together, to make one new whole one. The classic example of this was ‘A Day In The Life’.
‘I’d written the first section and I let Paul hear it. I said to him what we want now is a middle eight bars. He said what about this — “Woke up, Fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head?” This was a song he’d written on his own, with no idea of what I was working on. I said yeh, that’s it.
‘Then we thought we needed some sort of connection bit, a growing noise to lead back into the first bit. We wanted to think of a good end and we had to decide what sort of backing and instruments would sound good. Like all our songs, they never become an entity until the very end. They are developed all the time as we go along.
‘Often the backing I think of early on never comes off. With “Tomorrow Never Knows” I’d imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical, of course, and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realize now that was what it wanted.’
Their long stay in India with Maharishi in the spring of 1968 proved an ideal environment for writing songs — and not Indian ones either. The strange, foreign environment of Hamburg produced from within themselves a Liverpool sound. (Marshall McLuhan, who fancies himself as a Beatle expert, says this proves his theory that when a new environment goes round an old environment, the old one becomes an art form). India had a similar effect, at least with Paul, making him go back to his boyhood influences, like Hollywood musicals and westerns.
Anyway, when they came back, both John and Paul had written about six or seven songs each, enough for a new LP. They even came back with an idea for its format — the LP would consist of the songs from the sound track of a non-existent musical. It was originally going to be called Doll’s House — Doll being a girl’s name, and her house being a house of pleasure, where all the people in the fictional musical would congregate. But they found that Doll’s House had already been used as a title.
Paul came back and played his songs, with Jane singing a lala accompaniment, to all the friends who dropped in, especially when they were going to launch into some saga of the things that had gone wrong when he’d been away. ‘No, no, don’t tell me, listen to this instead.’ Then he began a song about Rocky Racoon checking into his room and finding only a Gideon Bible. At the rhyming of ‘Bible’ with ‘rival’ he gave an apologetic grimace. He’d also written a song about junk in a junkyard. He paused in the middle of singing a line about ‘broken hearted jubilee mug’ to say wasn’t ‘jubilee’ a lovely word to sing. Then he had a song about a girl sitting in the distance with a red umbrella. It had few words but lots of la-las. He enjoyed most of all singing to everyone a mock folksy-American song about it being great to be back in the USSR. He put on a Beach Boy voice for the chorus. Mike, his brother, said why didn’t they get the Beach Boys themselves to sing the chorus, but Paul said no. Although Paul still obviously had many gaps to fill in the songs, in singing them to others he was not looking for suggestions, the way John might do, or even to show off. He was just sharing the enjoyment he was having in beginning some new songs, before he’d finished and forgotten them for ever.
It is hard enough for John, Paul and George to get the sound they think they can hear in their heads, but it can be even harder for George Martin. They leave him with bits of tracks that can’t sometimes be tied together, or present him with problems that can’t be solved, at least at short notice. Just as they thought they could hire Shepperton studios to film Magical Mystery Tour at a week’s notice, so they still decide overnight that they’d like a 40-piece orchestra for the next evening. George Martin is expected to get it for them.
He is sometimes slightly amused by their lack of musical knowledge. ‘They ask for such things as violins to play an F below middle C, which, of course, violins can’t do.’
But he approves of and enjoys their method of piling track upon track until they get the sound they like. He’s always enjoyed the electronic side of recordings, since the days of trying funny noises for his Peter Sellers records. He thinks that they could often do with 64 tracks, not just four, in order to add on everything they think of.