Brian Epstein & The Beatles Top 100 Countdown (#50-41)

Yesterday we mentioned the holidays in Spain with Lennon accompanying Epstein. More on that today.

On Sunday 28 April 1963, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr went to Santa Cruz, Tenerife, for a 12-day holiday. At the same time John Lennon accepted an offer from Brian Epstein to accompany him to Barcelona, for a trip also lasting 12 days. It was just three weeks after Lennon's wife Cynthia had given birth to their son Julian.

John Lennon's account (from All We Are Saying, David Sheff):

"I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.

It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. He had admitted it to me. We had this holiday together because Cyn was pregnant, and I went to Spain and there were lots of funny stories. We used to sit in a cafe in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one, do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this, you know. And while he was out on the tiles one night, or lying asleep with a hangover one afternoon, I remember playing him the song Bad To Me. That was a commissioned song, done for Billy J Kramer, who was another of Brian's singers."

The question of whether any sexual contact happened between Lennon and Epstein has been the subject of considerable speculation in the years since.

"Cyn was having a baby and the holiday was planned, but I wasn't going to break the holiday for a baby and that's what a bastard I was. And I just went on holiday. I watched Brian picking up the boys. I like playing a bit faggy, all that. It was enjoyable, but there were big rumours in Liverpool, it was terrible. Very embarrassing." (John Lennon, Lennon Remembers, Jann Wenner).

Paul McCartney later suggested that Lennon agreed to the holiday in order to assert his authority within The Beatles.

"Brian Epstein was going on holiday to Spain at the same time and he invited John along. John was a smart cookie. Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress upon Mr Epstein who was the boss of the group. I think that's why he went on holiday with Brian. And good luck to him, too - he was that kind of guy; he wanted Brian to know whom he should listen to. That was the relationship. John was very much the leader in that way, although it was never actually said."

Although neither he nor Epstein spoke on record about the event, Lennon did apparently reveal to his former schoolfriend Pete Shotton what happened. Shotton quoted the exchange at length, and with characteristic frankness, in his 1983 memoir. This is perhaps the fullest published account which claims to shed light on the true nature of Lennon's Spanish encounter with Epstein.

"I visited John at Aunt Mimi's a few days after his return to England. And when he started in about how much he had enjoyed Spain, I could hardly resist taking the piss out of him. "So you had a good time with Brian, then?" I smirked. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

I was somewhat taken aback when John didn't so much as crack a smile. "Oh, fuckin' hell," he groaned. "Not you as well, Pete!"

"What do you mean, not me as well?"

"They're all fucking going on about it."

It's OK, John. Don't take it so serious. I'm just joking, for Christ's sake."

"Actually Pete," he said softly, "Something did happen with him one night."

Now that wiped the grin right off my face. Had I even dreamed there might be any truth whatsoever to the rumors, I would never have made light of the subject in the first place. Still - as John surely knew - I would have stood by him, and let the rest of the world handle the business of passing moral judgement, even if he had just told me he'd committed murder. And John would surely have done the same for me.

Which, after all, is what true friendship is all about.

"What happened," John explained, "is that Eppy just kept on and on at me. Until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him: 'Oh, for Christ's sake, Brian, just stick it up me f*cking arse then.'

"And he said to me, 'Actually, John, I don't do that kind of thing. That's not what I like to do.'

"'Well,' I said, 'what is it you like to do, then?'

"And he said, 'I'd really just like to touch you, John.'

"And so I let him toss me off."

And that was that. End of story.

"That's all, John" I said. "Well, so what? What's the big f*cking deal, then?"

"Yeah, so f*cking what! The poor bastard. He's having a f*cking hard enough time anyway." This was in reference to the "butch" dockers who, on several recent occasions, had rewarded Brian's advances by beating him to a bloody pulp.

"So what harm did it do, then, Pete, for f*ck's sake?" John asked rhetorically. "No harm at all. The poor f*cking bastard, he can't help the way he is."" (Pete Shotton, John Lennon: In My Life). To be continued...

Now, let's get on with our Top 100 Beatles' songs countdown. At #50 is a love ballad called Michelle, composed principally by Paul McCartney, with the middle eight co-written with John Lennon.

It is featured on their Rubber Soul album, released in December 1965. The song is unique among Beatles recordings in that some of its lyrics are in French. Michelle won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1967 and has since become one of the best known and often recorded of all Beatles songs.

A (relatively easy) quiz for you. Which other hit in the 60s, by perhaps the most important male solo British singer/songwriter of that decade, a good friend of the Beatles, also has some of its lyrics in French? Answers in the comments' section today.

As a bonus, here's a track from a #1 UK album of the 70s that also has French lyrics. It's found on the magnificent album Stranded (1973). It's by Roxy Music and is called A Song For Europe. A great song.

On a personal note, Michelle was the first song that I learned to play on guitar. Then came Yesterday, And I Love Her... And then I stopped playing guitar. I was lousy.

I coudn't find a decent enough version of the song on YouTube, so here's the first minute of the original version. I'd rather you hear half the original than a whole second rate version.

The song was a UK hit in 1966 by The Overlanders, hitting number one on the UK chart. The Overlanders released their version after the Beatles declined to release it as a single themselves in the United Kingdom and United States (although the original version was released in some other European countries, including Norway, where both versions went to number one).

Michelle was also covered by David and Jonathan, whose version went to #1 in Canada and was otherwise a Top 20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1966.

At #49 is a song that I failed to appreciate for a long time, but which has gradually inched its way up on my list to become an essential Beatle track. Magical Mystery Tour (1967) is the opening track and theme song for the album, double EP and TV film of the same name. Unlike the theme songs for their other film projects, it was not released as a single.

Magical Mystery Tour is written primarily by Paul McCartney. McCartney said it was co-written. John Lennon said, "Paul's song. Maybe I did part of it, but it was his concept." In 1972, Lennon said, "Paul wrote it. I helped with some of the lyric."

Paul McCartney himself said about the song:

"Because those were psychedelic times it had to become a magical mystery tour, a little bit more surreal than the real ones to give us a license to do it. But it employs all the circus and fairground barkers, 'Roll up! Roll up!', which was also a reference to rolling up a joint. We were always sticking those little things in that we knew our friends would get; veiled references to drugs and to trips. 'Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away,' so that's a kind of drug, 'it's dying to take you away' so that's a Tibetan Book of the Dead reference. [...] Magical Mystery Tour was the equivalent of a drug trip and we made the film based on that."

At #48 is the song that would have been discussed anyway, because it's one of the few Beatles' songs with a possible gay subtext. It was written and sung by John Lennon released on the album Help! in August 1965. The song in question is You've Got To Hide Your Love Away.

"That's me in my Dylan period," Lennon remarked about You've Got to Hide Your Love Away. "I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan."

Just as the Beatles had inspired Bob Dylan to incorporate a tougher Rock & Roll sound into his music, Dylan's example had pushed the Beatles — and Lennon in particular — to explore a more personal approach to writing songs. McCartney said that Dylan's poetic lyrics "hit a chord in John. It was as if John felt, 'That should have been me.' And to that end, John did a Dylan impression" on You've Got to Hide Your Love Away. (The song's opening lines are remarkably similar to Dylan's 1964 track I Don't Believe You [She Acts Like We Have Never Met], which begins, "I can't understand/She let go of my hand/And left me here facing the wall.")

Serendipity also helped in writing Hide Your Love Away. Lennon had originally written, "If she's gone, I can't go on/Feeling two foot tall," but when he accidentally sang "two foot small" while showing the song to McCartney, they both realized that was better.

Hide Your Love Away was recorded in one day for the Help! soundtrack, and its performance in the film, with the Beatles relaxing in their house built for four, is one of the movie's highlights. It was the first Beatles recording to feature all acoustic instruments, and it also marked one of the few times that Lennon, always painfully self-conscious about his singing, did not double-track his lead vocal, as he often did since discovering this studio trick.

The band brought in an outside musician for only the second time: For a six-pound fee (roughly $17 at the time) and no credit, Johnnie Scott recorded tenor and alto flute parts for the song. The Beatles gave Scott some general direction and let him sketch out the arrangement on his own. Scott did recall that the boys were in a fine mood at the time. "Ringo was full of marital joys," he said. "He'd just got back from his honeymoon."

The song lyrics are ambiguous. They may tell of an unrequited love and hidden feelings. John could also have been referring to the fact that as a Beatle he was expected to keep the fact he was married a secret. He could also have been writing about his inability to express his true 'loving' self in public and his feelings of isolation and paranoia related to fame. Some, such as singer Tom Robinson, have suggested that it was written for their manager Brian Epstein, who had to hide his homosexuality from the public. Lennon himself however never discussed the inspiration for the lyrics.

The song is not to be found on YouTube, but you can catch it here:

You've Got To Hide Your Love Away

Though the Beatles didn't release it as a single ("It's not commercial," Lennon said), the English folk group the Silkie, who were signed to Brian Epstein's management company, scored a Top 10 hit with it in the United States, and the Beach Boys covered it on 1965's Beach Boys' Party! album. Here's the version from Silkie:

Another beautiful song is at #47. McCartney wrote this quiet classic in the second person, as if he were addressing, but not quite comforting, a friend abruptly abandoned by a lover: "You want her, you need her/And yet you don't believe her/When she says her love is dead." He was talking to himself: For No One, written in March 1966 while he and Jane Asher were on vacation in Switzerland, was about an argument they had. The intimacy of the production and performance — a kind of exhausted acceptance — stand out amid the accelerated experimentation everywhere else on Revolver. McCartney and Starr were the only Beatles present at the session; they cut the backing track — McCartney's piano and Starr's minimalist percussion, plus overdubbed clavichord — in a single night. George Martin later suggested a dash of brass, so they called in Alan Civil of the London Philharmonia, who played the song's brief, moving French-horn interjections. Civil was paid about 50 pounds for his efforts, but got something more valuable: a rare Beatles-album credit on Revolver's original back cover.

At #46 is Drive My Car, written primarily by Paul McCartney, with lyrical contributions from John Lennon. It was first released on the British version of the band's 1965 album Rubber Soul; it also appeared in North America on the Yesterday and Today collection. The upbeat, lighthearted Drive My Car was used as the opening track for both albums.

On his way to a writing session with Lennon in 1965, McCartney came up with a melody he liked — but lyrics that merely recycled the idea of buying a girl a diamond ring from Can't Buy Me Love. Lennon suggested a sexual metaphor — "drive my car" — and the two devised a lyric about a fame-hungry wanna-be. "To me it was L.A. chicks — 'You can be my chauffeur,'" said McCartney, who supplied the twist ending, when the girl admits she doesn't have a car.

Drive My Car is one of the most overtly R&B-flavored songs in the Beatles' catalog, thanks mostly to Harrison, who based the taut guitar lines and funky bass part on Otis Redding's Respect.

Drive My Car was removed from the US version of Rubber Soul: With the Folk-Rock craze at its height, Capitol Records tweaked the American album to focus more on acoustic songs. Drive My Car would show up six months later on the compilation LP Yesterday and Today, but for a whole generation of Americans, Rubber Soul was missing its most soulful cut. Catch it here:

Drive My Car

At #45, here's an Everly Brothers inspired song called If I Fell. It first appeared in 1964 on the album A Hard Day's Night in the United Kingdom and on the North American album Something New. It was written by John Lennon.

If I Fell was Lennon's first attempt to write a slow, pretty number for a Beatles record. "People forget that John wrote some nice ballads," McCartney said. "People tend to think of him as an acerbic wit and aggressive and abrasive, but he did have a very warm side to him, really, which he didn't like to show too much in case he got rejected."

Lennon said the lyrics — in which he begs a new lover for tenderness after being wounded by the last girl — were "semiautobiographical, but not consciously." On the surface, they had little to do with his life: He had been with his wife, Cynthia, for years, and their son, Julian, was almost a year old.

But musically, it was one of Lennon's cleverest songs to date: The harmonic tricks of its strummy, offbeat opening were miles beyond what other bands were doing at the time, and it was "dripping with chords," as McCartney said. It also showcased some of the Beatles' finest singing. Lennon and McCartney shared a single microphone for their Everly Brothers-like close harmonies.

"[If I Fell] was the precursor to In My Life," Lennon pointed out later. "It has the same chord sequences: D and B minor and E minor, those kind of things. It shows that I wrote sentimental love ballads, silly love songs, way back when."

At #44 here's one of my favorites: The Sgt. Pepper's lp (1967) was a Xmas present for me 7 years after its release. I didn't originally pay too much attention to Fixing A Hole. During the last decade it's been growing on me, to become one of my Top 10 Beatles' songs. First we have the lyrics, Paul's wonderfully astute reaction to the insanity surrounding them, by focusing on the small things and by reaching back to his roots, thus gathering strength. John would reach the same head space 13 years later, with Watching The Wheels. Then there's the music, that attractive mix of Rock 'n' Roll, Music Hall and Jazz. I especially like the way the song ends.

Paul has also stated about the recording: "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 breakdowns 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…But that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus!"

At #43, another Paul song and another favorite of mine, it's in my Bealtes' all-time Top 20. Blackbird was recorded for The White Album in 1968.

Blackbird was really about the struggle over civil rights: "I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird," McCartney said. "Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: 'Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.'"

In one sense, the song was an oblique response to Lennon's Revolution, the other big political song on the White Album. "As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place," said McCartney, "so, rather than say, 'Black woman living in Little Rock,' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic."

McCartney recorded Blackbird on his own. Harrison and Starr were in California (where Harrison was being filmed for Ravi Shankar's movie Raga), and Lennon was in a different studio working on Revolution 9. McCartney has said that the fingerpicked guitar lines of Blackbird, written at his Scotland farm soon after he returned from India, were loosely based on Bach's Bourrée in E minor, which he and Harrison used to practice in their early years. The blackbird heard on the track was from a sound-effects collection. "He did a very good job, I thought," McCartney joked. "He sings very well on that."

After he'd run through the song a number of times, McCartney told engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted the song to sound as if he were singing it outdoors. "Fine," Emerick said, "then let's do it outdoors" — and they relocated to tape Blackbird outside Abbey Road Studios' echo chamber.

McCartney gave the first semipublic performance of Blackbird to a group of fans outside his Cavendish Avenue home. "Paul opened the window and called out to us, 'Are you still down there?'" one of them recalled. "Then he sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang Blackbird to us, standing down there in the dark." Here's one of the takes during the rehearsals:

Here's a fine cover version by Brad Mehldau and Anne Sofie Von Otter (2010):

At #42 there's a change of pace. "She was just seventeen, you know what I mean" wailed McCartney in 1963. (Do we, sir Paul?) The song is the opening track on the band's 1963 debut album Please Please Me.

When McCartney began hashing out the song that became I Saw Her Standing There on a drive to his Liverpool home one night in 1962, the first couplet he came up with was "She was just 17/She'd never been a beauty queen." But when he played the song for Lennon the next day, "We stopped there and both of us cringed at that and said, 'No, no, no, "beauty queen" is out,'" McCartney recalled. "We went through the alphabet: between, clean, lean, mean. . . ." Eventually, they settled on "you know what I mean," which was good, he said, "because you don't know what I mean."

Though Lennon's exact contribution is unclear ("I helped with a couple of the lyrics," he said), I Saw Her Standing There is one of the songs that further cemented the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. A September 1962 photo by McCartney's brother Mike shows the pair in the front room of Paul's house, working face to face with acoustic guitars, Lennon wearing the glasses he hated, scratching out lyrics in a Liverpool Institute notebook. McCartney wrote the song on his Zenith acoustic guitar, the first guitar he ever owned.

The original inspiration for the song was a girlfriend of McCartney's at the time, dancer Iris Caldwell, who was in fact 17 when he first saw her doing the Twist — in fishnet stockings — at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton in December 1961. "Paul and I dated for a couple of years," said Caldwell. "It was never that serious. We never pretended to be true to each other. I went out with lots of people. I was working away in different theaters at the time, but if I was back home we would go out. There were never any promises made or love declared." Caldwell's brother was Liverpool rocker Rory Storm, leader of the Hurricanes — whose drummer, Ringo Starr, would leave them to join the Beatles in August 1962. Caldwell said that McCartney intended to give I Saw Her Standing There to Storm, but Brian Epstein talked him out of it.

Under the title Seventeen, the song became part of the Beatles' live act in 1962. Onstage, the tune would sometimes run for 10 minutes, with multiple guitar solos. McCartney borrowed the hard-charging bass line from Chuck Berry's 1961 single I'm Talking About You, a staple of the band's concerts. "I played the exact same notes as he did, and it fitted our number perfectly," McCartney said.

When it came time for the Beatles to record their first album, Please Please Me, George Martin considered taping them live, possibly in front of the group's home audience at the Cavern Club. Though he decided instead to set them up at EMI's studios on Abbey Road, they chose a song list representative of the band's live show. To set the mood, the album begins with McCartney's blazing "one-two-three-faw!" count-off on "I Saw Her Standing There." The Beatles outfitted the song, a veritable celebration of youth itself, with hand claps and the buoyant ooohs that would later show up on singles like She Loves You. The song, which also features Harrison's first guitar solo on a Beatles record, was chosen as the B side for the I Want to Hold Your Hand single that topped the charts in America. It would also be one of the five songs that the Beatles performed on February 9th, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show before a television audience of 73 million people.

Lennon described I Saw Her Standing There as "Paul doing his usual good job of producing what George Martin would call a 'potboiler,'" but the song would assume a greater meaning in his later life. In 1974, Lennon and Elton John made a bet that if Lennon's Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, which featured John on harmony vocals and piano, made it to Number One, Lennon would join him onstage. When the song became Lennon's first solo song to top the charts, he made good and appeared with John at his November 28th show at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Before the final song, Lennon said, "We thought we'd do a number of an old estranged fiance of mine called Paul," and they closed the night with a rollicking version of I Saw Her Standing There. "I just wanted to have some fun and play some Rock & Roll," Lennon said afterward. It would be the last song John Lennon ever performed in concert.

Here are the Beatles:

... And here's the Lennon/Elton version:

Finally for today, at #41 is Nowhere Man, a song written by John. It is found on the British version of their album Rubber Soul. Recorded on 21 and 22 October 1965, Nowhere Man is one of the first Beatles songs to be entirely unrelated to romance or love, and marks a notable instance of Lennon's philosophically oriented songwriting. It was released as a single (although not in the United Kingdom) on 21 February 1966, and reached number 1 in Australia and Canada and number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sing the song in three-part harmony. The song appears in the film Yellow Submarine, where the Beatles sing it about the character Jeremy Hillary Boob after meeting him in the "nowhere land".

"The whole thing came out in one gulp," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I remember I was just going through this paranoia trying to write something and nothing would come out, so I just lay down and tried not to write and then this came out." What emerged was an expression of the boredom and frustration Lennon was feeling in his cocoonlike existence as a Beatle. The references to a man who's "making all his nowhere plans for nobody" and "knows not where he's going to" were, Lennon admitted, "probably about myself."

In the studio, the weariness in Lennon's voice and the dirgelike melody didn't deter the band from reaching for new sounds. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison stacked a wall of sumptuous harmonies, and the beautifully spare solo — played in unison by Lennon and Harrison on their Sonic Blue Fender Stratocasters — cut through the ennui like a machete.

"Nowhere Man is such a beautiful pop song with a groundbreaking, existential lyric," says Billy Corgan, who covered it with the Smashing Pumpkins. "It lets you see that moment of discovery."

Here's an excerpt from the Yellow Submarine film. Nowhere Man starts playing after the first two minutes:

Nowhere Man