SOMETHING
wonders at George Harrison’s inarticulate speech of the heart.
RANK SINATRA CALLED SOMETHING “THE GREATEST love song of the past 50 years”. John Lennon called it the best song on Abbey Road – which might have felt like even greater praise to George Harrison, given his underdog status as a songwriter in The Beatles. He had originally offered it to Joe Cocker, figuring that it wouldn’t make the cut. But The Beatles made it a single – their first with an A-side by George.
The first time I heard it was 50 years ago, on the portable record player in my bedroom, sitting on the bed, listening hard. There was no way back then of knowing what the new Beatles album would be and a serious need to know. This big, beautiful ballad was the kind you’d expect from Paul later in the album, but here it is, side one, track two, and it’s George. Not one of his “Indian type of tunes”, as McCartney put it, but a classic love song. Sort of along the lines of the latter’s I’ve Just Seen A Face – seen a girl, knows she’s the one – but George’s is more about the mystery. Something’s going on, but what is that something?
It was a mystery ever since George started writing it, at the piano, during The White Album sessions. The “Something in the way she moves…” part was easy, since he took it wholesale from the title of a James Taylor song. He’d come up with just three more words: “attracts me like”. But like what? Lennon advised to go with the first thing in his head for now, suggesting “cauliflower”, maybe alluding to Harrison’s new love, gardening. The melody, though – the verses’ descending half-steps in C; the soaring bridge in A – came so easily Harrison worried that he might have pinched that too. He spent six more months on the lyrics. There’s not that many and they’re pretty vague, but they paint a perfect picture of a smitten, tongue-tied man – the inarticulate speech of the heart. The bridge adds some conflict: the elusive woman is there with him now, asking if he’s in it for the long run. He says he doesn’t know. The tender, lonely guitar solo suggests it could go either way.
It’s funny how some songs are considered romantic when closer examination doesn’t back it up – Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me To The End Of Time, a song about the Holocaust, and this, are both popular at weddings. What’s romantic is the gentle, fluid melody, the subtle strings, the sweet simplicity. When McCartney’s bass counter-melody came on too strong, Harrison told him to back off. And let’s not forget the vocal. To quote Ian MacDonald, “Lacking [Harrison’s] usual bitter harmonies, it deploys a key-structure of classical grace and panoramic effect.”
In a 1969 interview George said that the song was about his wife (sort of): “Maybe Pattie probably I think.” Later he’d say it was Krishna. But he also said, “It’s probably the nicest melody tune I’ve written.”
embraces the child who thrilled to Macca’s gaudy slasher flick. IN’T IT SO THAT THE TRACK YOU LIKE MOST UPON first hearing a Beatles album is the track you like least upon becoming a MOJO reader? And vice versa? So if you first crossed Abbey Road aged five, that track would be Octopus’s Garden. But if you were 10, chances are you’d skip Maxwell’s Silver Hammer when once upon a time you relished its delicious wickedness and raffish execution, the Kind Hearts And Coronets of Beatles songs, or Macca playing Hilaire Belloc to Lennon’s Lewis Carroll. Cringe at Maxwell and you’re cringeing at your younger self.
That we now know how much aggro went on in the studio as Paul had everyone bar John grafting away on “fruity” Maxwell as if it were a potential hit single rather than a Mean Mr Mustard/Polythene Pam-weight skit is neither here nor there; if you want to enjoy a sausage, don’t watch it being made. Maxwell may have been a slog but certainly doesn’t sound it.
A thought experiment: Macca started writing Maxwell in Rishikesh early in 1968, and upon returning to the UK co-produced I’m The Urban Spaceman, a Top 5 hit for The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band that October, by which time Maxwell was ready to record, too late for The White Album. Now just imagine Maxwell sung by Viv Stanshall as he did the black comedy Death Cab For Cutie, which the Bonzos performed on the Fabs’ 1967 Magical Mystery Tour TV special, and all irritation vanishes. For what grates today is how pleased with himself Macca sounds, as if rather than going into character as he does in The White Album’s redemptively melancholy murder tune Rocky Raccoon, he’s merely courting our applause – look, no hands!
And yet… It works. In its tightly plotted, audaciously rhymed and jauntily scored completeness, Maxwell hits his target (clang! clang!). Admittedly, this is not quite how critical consensus sees it – a fact even the famously thick-skinned McCartney acknowledges. As far as MOJO can glean, he has never played it live, although once, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in April 2001, he read out the lyric – included in his book of poems, Blackbird Singing – in a deadpan style that seemed part knowing self-deprecation and part stubborn “fuck you” (it’s on YouTube).
He followed it with Jerk Of All Jerks, his verse condemnation of Mark Chapman, the real-life murderer of his friend. Maxwell seems somehow more real, and more disturbing, for the association. A last sup from the source of rock’n’roll, saluted by . O NAIL THE RUSTED MIGHT AND DESPAIRING finesse of his last, great-white-soul-singer moment on a Beatles LP, Paul McCartney ran his voice through the wringer over four nearly-consecutive days in mid-July 1969: arriving at Abbey Road in the afternoon, before the others dragged in, and repeatedly attacking the pleading simplicity in his lyrics and melody as if his boyhood gods, Ray Charles and Little Richard, were sitting there in judgement. Engineer Geoff Emerick later noted that McCartney overdubbed without headphones, against the backing track – a near-metallic twist on vintage street-corner melancholy, drilled with George Harrison’s gun-shot-fuzz guitar and John Lennon’s near-lunatic hammering of the ivories – as it roared through the studio monitors with the force and volume of a live performance.
That is what McCartney surely intended for the song, when he introduced its strolling rhythm and piano-triplet hypnosis – straight out of the late-’50s Louisiana R&B known as swamp pop – to the other Beatles on January 3, 1969, just two days into the Let It Be torture at Twickenham Film Studios. Here was the roots-and-gigging aspirations of that venture in a nutshell, McCartney throwing his band a new lifeline to their earliest rock-star dreaming in Liverpool with an open homage to the overdriven vocal ecstasy he last grabbed for himself when The Beatles closed every show in 1966 with Richard’s Long Tall Sally. “This screaming voice seemed to come from the top of my head,” McCartney told the BBC in 2001, recalling his first, teenage attempts to emulate the Georgia Peach. But, McCartney added, “You had to lose every inhibition and do it.”
Lennon may have quoted Chuck Berry at the start of Abbey Road, but Oh! Darling was the most American thrill – with “Mach schau!” force – on their fastest-selling album in the US (five million copies by June 1970). Ironically, it’s another one of those songs McCartney
has never performed in concert – although it soon returned to its spiritual home when Jay Randall And The Epics covered it on a 1970 single for the tiny Lanor label in Church Point, Louisiana. Kelp! joins Ringo underwater as storm clouds gather above. FRIENDLY SEA CAPTAIN, A SAILING BOAT, A FISHYsounding land: Octopus’s Garden was inspired by scenes almost as fairy-tale as the undersea grotto it describes. Temporarily quitting The Beatles in August 1968, Ringo Starr escaped to Sardinia, fleeing increasingly fraught band politics aboard Peter Sellers’ yacht. One day, he was served squid with his chips, his surprise earning a lecture from the captain on cephalopods. “They build gardens and they have a cave and they go round the seabed picking up shiny things…” recalled Starr. “With the ‘medication’, it was like, ‘Wow, God, wow!’ It was like the best thing I ever heard.”
These revelations inspired the drummer’s second solo songwriting mission after Don’t Pass Me By, George later helping anchor its C&W chords. Despite bright, splashy guitar and Paul’s breezy piano, a melancholy tide pulls at its frondy backing vocals. Bubbles made by Starr blowing through a straw poignantly echo The Beatles’ other novelty maritime song, Yellow Submarine. There they’d been in the same boat, all aboard, friends next-door. Here, however, togetherness is a wistful dream, a nursery-rhyme utopia: “Oh what joy/For every girl and boy/Knowing they’re happy and they’re safe.”
Yet amid the heaviness, Octopus’s Garden united The Beatles behind Ringo’s vision, its psychedelic whimsy and anti-authoritarian glee (“We would shout and swim about…”) a vestigial tentacle of simpler times. Unshadowed by bad-trip Blue Meanies (or semolina pilchards), Octopus’s Garden guards the band’s kids-and-grannies, variety-show gene. It’s entr y-level Beatles, there for a Muppet Show performance with Miss Piggy as mermaid, or as a Sesame Street tool for counting to eight. In 2013, Starr finally made it into a children’s book. It gently embodies Derek Taylor’s sleevenotes to Beatles For Sale: “The kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well-being and warmth as we do today.” Even from the depths, The Beatles were still picking up shiny things, offering them to every girl and boy.