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“, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH!”: GENDER ROLE CONSTRUCTION IN ’ LYRICS

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magister der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Mario Kienzl

am Institut für: Anglistik Begutachter: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Hugo Keiper

Graz, April 2009

Danke Mama. Danke Papa. Danke Connie. Danke Werner. Danke Jenna. Danke Hugo.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction ...... 4

2. The Beatles: 1962 – 1970...... 6

3. The Beatles’ Roots ...... 18

4. Me Do: A Roller Coaster of Adolescence and Love...... 26

5. : The Beatles Get the Girl ...... 31

6. The Beatles enter the Domestic Sphere...... 39

7. The Beatles Step Out...... 52

8. Beatles on the Rocks...... 57

9. Do not Touch the Beatles...... 62

10. The Beatles Explore Other Options...... 67

11. The Beatles’ ...... 71

12. The Beatles Seek a Higher Power ...... 75

13. The Beatles Look Within Themselves ...... 78

14. The Beatles Pack their Things...... 82

15. Conclusion...... 88

16. Bibliography ...... 91

3 1. Introduction

It may well be no exaggeration to claim that in the Beatles’ geographical sphere of action (.. , Northern America, Australia, Japan and the Philippines) people are familiar and many of their tunes. But what about ’ lyric work? Are their words regarded as being as important as their music? I do not think so. This fact may especially be true for non English-speaking countries. I have known and loved the Beatles from my pre-teen years on, but it was always the sound of the group that fascinated and electrified me, never the words. Even as my knowledge of the grew over the years it was still the Beatles’ energy and sound which sent shivers down my spine, regardless of the words which accompanied them. What I did not realise then was that a band’s “sound” can only be transformed into a “uniquely great sound” if the words’ syllabic structure and patterns fit and support a ’s tune. Having realised that, I could go one step further and concentrate on the Beatles’ lyrical content, images and ideas they presented to the audience in their . In my thesis, systematically examine if and how the Beatles are willing to communicate with an audience via the abstract construct of a speaker-receiver situation within their lyrical work. I will concentrate my attention almost exclusively on the lyrics of , Paul McCartney, and , well aware of the importance and great influence of their innovative musical style within the realms of the history of . I will turn my attention to the various, and at times surprising, gender-related roles male and female characters take on within the Beatles’ lyrics. In addition, I will describe in what way the relationship between the male speaker (“I”) and the almost exclusively female receiver (“you”) develops over the years of the Beatles’ active career. Moreover I will take a closer look at the importance of “home” in the Beatles’ song-lyrics focusing on the different concepts of gender roles associated with the of home. The image of physical contact between speaker and receiver and how this topic is translated and developed by the Beatles form one further question I will try to answer. Of course, I will also examine the inevitable topic of love and relationships between the sender and the receiver which is dealt with in many of the band’s songs. Furthermore I will survey ’ rock and roll songs in order to find out what artists like or Goffin and King used as subject matter in their lyrics and to what extent, if at all, the Beatles were influenced by them. I will start my thesis, however, by giving a concise overview of the Beatles’ original and single releases by EMI for the purpose of providing the reader with a concise idea about the Beatles’ oeuvre

4 in chronological order. The lyrics I work with in my thesis (either those of the Beatles themselves or those of other artists) come from such diverse sources as books, songbooks, record , compact disc booklets, guitar chord songbooks and the world wide web. All the lyrics, with no exception whatsoever, have been double-checked for possible mistakes against the recordings by me.

5 2. The Beatles: 1962 – 1970

What I would like to do now is give a rough year-by-year, record-by-record based overview of the Beatles’ literary output. For this basic analysis I am looking for an overall impression each album or single may suggest and how this impression may change over time. As objects of my research I will focus on the Beatles’ original UK album and single releases by EMI, that is from their 1962 single release Please Please Me to the LP , their last recording from 1969. Within the Beatles’ recordings I will take into account original Lennon/McCartney, Harrison and Starkey compositions as well as lyrics generated by other artists, aware of the fact that especially in the earlier years of the Beatles’ career many 1950s rock and roll cover versions filled their . I compile this chronological listing in order to present a complete picture of the Beatles’ own work as ‘men of letters’ as well as a glance at the sources where they took their inspirations from.

1962

Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You (single; released on October 5th) – The Beatles’ debut single was released late in 1962 and includes two Lennon/McCartney originals1. Both of the songs’ lyrics suggest romantic love and eternal faithfulness on an intimate “I-You” level between the sending and the receiving part. Additionally, “P.S. I Love You” was written in the style of a ‘ song’ which we will encounter again in songs like “” and which seems to be a trait allotted to McCartney rather than Lennon.

1963

Please Please Me/ (single; released on January 11th) – The lyrics of “Please Please Me” represent a plea for love by a male voice asking a girl to “please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you”. Lennon liked the double meaning of the word “please”. Like in “Please Please Me” the lyrics of “Ask Me Why” are told on an “I-You” basis between addresser and addressee telling the latter that “I love you”.

1 This was unusual at the time, as most performers did not write their own material. Plus the Beatles’ single releases only included Lennon/McCartney or Harrison material right from the start through to the ending of their active career. 6 Please Please Me (LP; released on March 22nd) – This is the Beatles’ first album from 1963. It contains eight Lennon/McCartney compositions which exclusively revolve around the topic of adolescent love and relationships, most of them on a very personal, straightforward “I love you” basis suggested also in song-titles like “” or “P.S. I love you”. It is also a very traditional record in terms of gender role (woman at home, waiting for man – man away, longing for woman) with allusions to physical contact in the manner of “holding each other tight” and “dancing through the night” between addresser/ and addressee/audience. The record contains six cover versions of songs written by artists like Goffin/King, Dixon/Farrell or Medley/Russell. Most of the lyrics of these songs very much resemble Lennon and McCartney’s own idea of a suitable love lyric. The only difference worth mentioning is that the cover versions’ lyrics tend to illustrate a more “macho approach” towards women. They often infantilise women by calling them “baby” or “little girl”, a feature not to be found in Lennon/McCartney lyrics at the time.

From Me To You/ (single; released on April 11th) – Lyrically both songs stand very much in the tradition of the Beatles’ rock and roll predecessors from the 1950s. The Beatles “thank you”, “hold you”, “kiss you” and will “always be in love with you”, “little girl”. The lyrics are explicitly directed towards their predominantly female teenage fans.

She Loves You/I’ Get You (single; released on August 23rd) – “She Loves You” discovers the speaking voice as a mere mediator between two lovers. The perspective changes from “I- You” to “She-You”, which suggests for the first time that our “you” gives a male personality the opportunity to identify with it. The addresser observes , still being involved in the ongoing love story, which is a novelty in the Beatles’ lyrics. “I’ll Get You” is the addresser’s promise that “you” will be his in the end.

With The Beatles (LP; released on November 22nd) – The Beatles’ follow-up LP from 1963. This record contains seven Lennon/McCartney compositions and the Harrison debut “Don’ Bother Me”, the latter being the only song explicitly telling the recipient to “go away, leave me alone”. Still, all the lyrics are concerned with love and relationships in one way or another. Songs like “” and “” do even contain allusions to direct sexual encounters in lines like “making love to ” and “I wanna be your lover baby”. Yet “kissing”, “holding” and “dancing” are most prominent throughout the album. What is also interesting to observe on the album is that the Beatles cautiously started playing with the

7 traditional role and cliché of women patiently waiting at home for their breadwinners. In songs like “It Won’t Be Long” or “All I’ve Got To Do” these traditional gender-roles are reversed so that suddenly she is away and he is waiting at home for her arrival. A reversal of these “patriarchal structures” can also be discovered in two of the six cover versions the Beatles chose to be on their second album. Amongst the covered artists we find Berry, Robinson and Drapkin, to name but a few.

I Want To Hold Your Hand/ (single; released on November 29th) – Both “” and “This Boy” feature a rather adolescent and naïve approach towards love relationships between boys and girls or addresser and addressee respectively. The lyrics are concerned with physical contact in the form of holding hands and a broken-hearted lover who wants his girl back again. What is interesting though in “This Boy” is that the persona of the “I” is replaced by a more distanced sounding third person “this boy” instead.

1964

Can’t Buy Me Love/You Can’t Do That (single; released on March 20th) - In “Can’t Buy Me Love” McCartney sings about the burdens of money in the sense that you cannot be sure any longer about who wants you for your own sake and who for your money. “You Can’t Do That” is a typical Lennon lyric about his jealous mind when it comes to his woman talking to other men. Both songs are included on the LP A Hard Day’s Night.

A Hard Day’s Night/ (single; released on July 10th) – “A Hard Day’s Night” seems the culmination of traditional role allocations between man and woman. He is the breadwinner, she waits at home to be able to hold him “tight” and make him feel “right” when he finally gets home. “Things We Said Today” promises eternal love. Both lyrics are on a personal “I-You” level and are included on the album A Hard Day’s Night.

A Hard Day’s Night (LP; released on July 10th) – “A Hard Day’s Night” is the 1964 soundtrack album to the Beatles’ film of the same title. It contains thirteen tracks, all of which are written by Lennon and McCartney. The overall impression of the record is still very much determined by lyrics about teenage love and relationships. Only this time the tradition is spiced up with new dimensions such as money, unfaithfulness and unfounded jealousy. So, the predominant romantic view of love which we encountered in the Beatles’ first two LPs is

8 suffering a little. Still most of the lyrics found on this record express a very personal and traditional “I – You” love relationship between addresser and addressee not being averse to kissing or dancing.

I Feel Fine/She’s A Woman (single; released on November 27th) – The Beatles’ last single- release of the year 1964 comprises two lyrics about loving relationships between addressee and a third-person “she/her”. It is the Beatles’ first single-record which avoids the direct “I– You” addressing in both lyrics. The addressee is excluded from the lyrics’ plots and functions as a mere observer. Lines like “I’ in love with her” in “” indicate a distancing from the direct “I-You” approach prevalent in most of the Beatles’ love lyrics so far. Plus the line “Turns me on” in “She’s A Woman” could be interpreted as Lennon and McCartney’s first reference to drugs on a record. Direct physical contact does not occur in the lines of the songs.

Beatles For Sale (LP; released on December 4th) – Another eight Lennon/McCartney originals are to be found on this 1964 album. But of the four straightforward “I-You” love relations only one lyric deals with “” so to speak. The other three titles are about lost love or unrequited love. All in all it is interesting to notice that even though all eight lyrics consider the topic of love, six of them feature love as lost or unrequited. So a slight distancing from the listener can be observed in . Also the lyrics start revealing more about the authors’ inner selves or thoughts about their states of mind at the time. Primarily I am thinking of Lennon’s “I’m A Loser” which is supposed to express his own ambiguity about himself. The Beatles included six cover versions of 1950s rhythm & and rock and roll classics on the album. This is to stress their influences by various American musical styles before they started writing their own material.

1965

Ticket To Ride/ (single; released on April 9th) – The authors in both of the songs’ lyrics express a certain insecurity and a feeling of sadness in lines like “I think I’m gonna be sad” taken from “Ticket To Ride” or in lines like “I could be happy with you […] if I could forget her” taken from the lyrics of “Yes It Is”. Both songs deal with the topic of love, “Yes It Is” even on the personal “I-You” level, but still a tone of sadness is tangible as painful thoughts of a lost love are conjured up.

9 Help/I’m Down (single; released on July 23rd) – This 1965 single’s song-titles alone suggest signs of desperation and depressive feelings within the Beatles or at least the two . In this case it is who is crying for “Help!” as he was going through his “fat Elvis period” as he called it, and McCartney who confirms Lennon’s state of mind with the lyrics of his composition “I’m Down”. Encounters in a traditional man-woman love relationship including physical contact can to a certain degree be envisioned in McCartney’s lyrics.

Help (LP; released on August 6th) – As yet another soundtrack album it comprises ten Lennon/McCartney compositions, two tracks by George Harrison and two cover versions. Unlike all the Beatles’ songs so far Help starts off with a lyric that is not at all concerned with the topic of love - at least not in the sense that there is an object of carnal desire involved in the speaker’s thoughts. As the Beatles were well into marijuana by the year 1965 the album offers textual allusions to drugs. This is clearly visible in lines like “she’s ridin’ so high” in “Ticket To Ride” or “I get high” in the song “It’s Only Love”. And like in Beatles For Sale Lennon’s insecurity shines through when he is “feeling two foot small” in “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” or is “not so self assured” in the lyrics of the title track “Help”. Personal or physical contact suggested in the lyrics between addresser and addressee which was so dominant in the Beatles’ very early records can only be found in one lyric. The general mood of the record’s eleven songs regarding the topic of love is a rather deflating one. Eight of these lyrics talk about lost or unrequited love, one even suggesting the possibility of illicit love. The song I am thinking of is “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”. What should be mentioned as well is that both Lennon and McCartney obviously are longing for their carefree pre-Beatles lives in songs like “Help” and “Yesterday”.

We Can Work It Out/ (single; released on December 3rd) – In “” McCartney tells his companion to “try to see it ” because “if you see it your way […] our love may soon be gone”. These words seem to be quite a macho-approach towards women yet with a positive sounding “we can work it out” as a refrain. I used the word companion before because there is no explicit hint at the gender McCartney is referring to in his song. Lennon’s “Day Tripper” is an allusion to the use of drugs in the guise of a personalised “she”.

Rubber Soul (LP; released on December 3rd) – The Beatles’ second album from 1965 contains no more cover versions of songs by other artists. As prolific songwriters Lennon, McCartney,

10 Harrison and Starkey as ‘The Beatles’ never again recorded a cover version2 to be included on an album. It is also the Beatles’ first album with a complete absence of explicit suggestions of physical contact. No more ‘holding hands’, ‘kissing’ or ‘dancing’ can be found on . The distance between the four musicians and their millions of fans is growing noticeably. To a great extent the songs no longer cater to their audience (predominantly teenage girls accustomed to putting themselves in the role of the ‘you’ sung about in the Beatles’ lyrics) but branch out more and more lyrically as well as musically. And even though ninety percent of the lyrics on the LP include the idea of love, it is getting more difficult for the audience to identify with the lyrical object of desire. The Beatles have moved away from the traditional where the role patterns were clearly ascribed to addresser and addressee respectively. For the first time names are mentioned in the Beatles’ songs of love. The lyrics of “Michelle” determine quite concretely who McCartney is declaring his love to. Another example of emerging distance is Lennon’s “The Word”, where he asks an unidentified addressee to “say the word and you’ll be free” and to “spread the word”. He continues that “the word is love” and thus transfers the song of love into another dimension. This could be called Lennon’s first journey into the universality of love where the spiritual part of love is emphasised, not the physical one. On Rubber Soul traces of a certain longing for the past can be found in songs like “”, with the author reflecting about lost friends and lovers.

1966

Paperback Writer/ (single; released on June 10th) – “Paperback Writer” is composed in letter-form and is addressed to “Sir or Madam”. The speaker takes on the role of a jobseeker who has written a book and is now looking for a publisher. The topics of love or the relationship between men and women only occurs in the speaker’s book’s plot, which is mentioned briefly. The Beatles’ lyrical work does no longer revolve almost exclusively around the love trenched “I-You” or “I-She” relationships but include other influences, ideas and topics to a great extent. On the surface John Lennon’s “Rain” is a song about the weather, or rather the often rainy English weather in particular. But at closer inspection it seems to treat the topic of conformity and narrow-mindedness and Lennon’s aversion to traits like that in the human mind.

2 One exception is the inclusion of the traditional folk song “Maggie Mae” on the 1970 album . 11 /Yellow Submarine (single; released on August 5th) – “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine” are two quite contrasting lyrics in terms of the basic moods the songs convey. Both songs show traces of surrealism in their words, “Eleanor Rigby” leaving the listener in a state of deep sadness. But “Yellow Submarine” gives the impression of being written as a cheerful song for young children. With this single the Beatles find themselves miles away from the then expected traditional topics of love and faithfulness or holding and kissing the girl of your dreams.

Revolver (LP; released on August 5th) – The Beatles’ 1966 album was the last one to be recorded while they were still performing as a live act, doing radio shows and being booked for TV appearances. Within the same month of the record’s release the Beatles gave up live performances. Though written still under the additional pressure of having to do public appearances, the record’s lyrics emerge as rather complex in terms of the different song topics used and influences digested. The tax system, sleep, doctors working for national health, loneliness in a cosmic sense, birds, submarines, sunshine, and even death were topics mostly unheard of until then on a rock’’roll album. Moreover, the Beatles were influenced more and more by eastern philosophies and Indian music, avant-garde and the underground scene, and not to a small extent by drugs. Apart from the extensive use of marijuana the Beatles were by then heavily influenced by psychedelic drugs like LSD. Drug allusions can be found in many of the song-lyrics on Revolver but there is still space for some beautifully sculpted love-lyrics by McCartney and Harrison mainly, the latter being rather explicit about carnal love in lines like “I’ll make love to you if you want me to”, taken from his song “”. Lennon is responsible primarily for the surrealistic lyrics strongly suggesting psychedelic drug experiences in songs like “” or “”. Revolver with its many new images, topics and ideas at the time challenged the conventions of popular music and lyrics.

A Collection Of Beatles (LP; released on December 9th) – This album was released due to the fact that, in order to push Christmas sales, the Beatles’ record company needed to bring out a new Beatles album. Yet the Beatles did not have new album-filling material at hand and so a re-release of songs was decided. For the UK audience the track “Bad Boy” by Larry Williams was new as it had only been put out before in the United States on the Capitol album Beatles VI.

12 1967

Strawberry Fields Forever/ (single; released on February 17th) – Both songs are reminiscing looks back at Lennon and McCartney’s childhood years in Liverpool and are based on real places, streets and buildings.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (LP; released on June 1st) – Considered the Beatles’ first ‘concept album’, it reflected the spirit of what was to become the so called ‘summer of love’ in the year 1967. A great innovation was the Beatles’ alleged loss of their own identity replaced by something like an ‘alter ego’ in the form of Sgt. Pepper’s Edwardian-style band members. Basically McCartney’s idea, he remembered: We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop- top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’ now got turned on to pot [and LSD] and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers[…] I thought, Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free. (Miles. Paul McCartney Many Years from Now: 303)

So after having given up touring the album was thought of as being a substitutional equivalent for seeing or rather hearing the Beatles perform for their audience. In the record’s first song the singer introduces the band the audience are about to follow by stating “We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, we hope you will enjoy the show”, later in the lyrics claiming that “you’re such a lovely audience”. The addressee is directly referred to as ‘audience’, which makes it impossible for the individual listener to identify with the “you” in the lyrics as being specifically catered to him or herself; you are now one of many possible characters. Much emphasis is given to the lyrics on the album, which is evident due the fact that, for the first time ever, they were printed on the back of it. The songs’ topics are again very varied. They reach from a circus performance to a runaway kid to thoughts about what life is going to be like “When I’m Sixty-Four”. No sign of physical contact between addresser and addressee is suggested within the lyrics and we have quite a few hints at drug experiences that are interwoven into the often surrealistic seeming pictures painted with words. Also the album was supposed to be a glance back at the Beatles’ Liverpool childhood. But it does not include the single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane, two songs strongly reflective of Liverpool childhood.

13 /Baby You’re A Rich Man (single; released on July 7th) – “All You Need Is Love” seems to be the Beatles’ declaration that love is the answer and thus coincides with the spirit of the so-called ‘summer of love’ of 1967. The “you” in the lyrics’ refrain is supposed to talk to whoever hears the song, conveying the simple message that love is the most important spiritual experience in one’s life. “Baby You’re A Rich Man” on the other hand seems to celebrate the convenience money can bring to its owner, or does it? The Beatles’ lyrics have become much more complex and surreal compared to their straightforward “boy loves girl” plots from their earlier years.

Hello Goodbye/ (single; released on November 24th) – “Hello Goodbye” could be characterised as a song of duality. It is full of repetitions and opposites, presented in an accessible, almost childlike rhyming-pattern of a “yes-no”, “stop-go”, “high-low” manner. The lyrics of “I Am The Walrus” have a strongly surrealistic touch to them and are hard to capture. Included are amongst others allusions to sexuality, Englishness, religion, poetry, drugs, politics and more. The lyrics leave room for interpretation and discussion as they are open to a large variety of readings.

Magical Mystery Tour (EP; released on December 8th) – The Beatles’ third soundtrack album was released in December 1967 and includes eleven songs, ten Lennon/McCartney compositions (one being an instrumental piece) and one song by George Harrison. Very varied again in their lyrics’ topics (including the eggman, a fool, your mother, childhood memories from Liverpool), many songs seem to have taken up the oriental tradition of mantra-like repetitions. The Beatles were then getting deeper and more seriously involved in eastern philosophies, and in Maharishi Mahesh they seemed to have found their own ‘personal ’ to give them advice and teach them in the art of Transcendental . The record is culminating in “All You Need Is Love”, the “love anthem”, which embodies the gist of the love generation’s philosophy, namely that love is the answer. The song was also chosen to appear on the BBC’s “Our World” global TV broadcast with an estimated audience of four hundred million. It is interesting to observe that in actual fact “All You Need Is Love” is the only song on the album concerned with the topic of love. Yet by then it was already plain to see that the Beatles were no longer catering to teenage girls, fanatic about their four mop-tops. Also they had more freedom in what they wanted to do as their manager had died of an accidental drug-overdose while the Beatles were attending lectures held by the Maharishi in August 1967.

14 1968

Lady /The Inner Light (single; released on March 15th) – With the lyrics of “” Paul McCartney obviously honoured motherhood in general but took an explicit character to do so. The lyric’s speaker follows a mother together with her children through the week’s tasks and challenges, wondering “how you manage to make ends meet”. Teenage fans who have grown up with the Beatles may be faced with the same problems now as is the song’s lady Madonna and thus may find a possibility to identify with one of the Beatles’ lyrics’ female characters again. “The Inner Light” is George Harrison’s first song to appear on a Beatles single. Its lyrics are concerned with the speaker’s as well as the addressee’s inner state of mind and the suggested importance and possibility to transcend the spiritual boarders one may be blocked by.

Hey Jude/Revolution (single; released on August 30th) – The lyrics of “” are dedicated to the character “Jude” who is encouraged to take life a little easier and open his heart for love. It kind of says that as soon as you open your heart for other people your life will change for the better. “Revolution” is a Lennon song and the first overtly political song of the Beatles. The lyrics basically state the revolution needs to be a non-violent one in order to induce Lennon to be part of it.

The Beatles [a..a. The White Album] (LP; released on November 22nd) – Released as a in November 1968 the Beatles’ White Album contains thirty songs, many of which were written while Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey were in practising Transcendental Meditation together with the Maharishi. The record is extremely varied regarding its music as well as the lyrics incorporated in it. The Beatles stretches from McCartney’s “Back In The .S.S..”, which is a pastiche of Chuck Berry’s 1950s song “Back In The USA”, to Lennon’s contemporary and seemingly ahead-of-its-time collage of sounds and lyrics, “” the latter being heavily influenced by as an artist. The album also comprises self-reflecting lyrics as in “” where references to ‘old’ Beatles lyrics and Ono’s art and philosophy are made. Another example are the lyrics of “” where Lennon, with lines like “Yes I’m lonely wanna die”, obviously tries to convey to the audience a suicidal feeling that’s lingering deep inside him. The sheer extensiveness of this double album makes it an extremely interesting and diverting work of art. The different topics continue to revolve around nature, a hunter, a guitar, chocolate,

15 insomnia, pigs, a fool, politics, birds and many more. Of course there is also love and women to be found as a subject matter in some of the songs’ lyrics, but as in the previous albums of the Beatles’ later period these lyrics hold no traces of physical contact between addresser and addressee with one alleged exception. The song “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” says it all already in the title, or does it? The speaker here asks some receiving part in quite an encouraging way to “do it in the road”. It may be an open secret in our contemporary society (and the Beatles’ contemporary society for that matter), that the “it” our speaker wants to “do” in the road is used as a synonym for sexual intercourse. But in actual fact “it” as it is used in the lyrics of the song has no antecedent other than “do”, and thus could mean anything from “our homework” to “a rehearsal” or something like that. It has no sexual explicitness or suggestion of physical contact between a man and a woman about it when you look at the lyrics as a mere connotation-free sentence. So in a way one could argue that “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” has nothing to do with the idea of physical contact whatsoever. Anyway, the White Album reflects a time of great upheaval and change in the songwriters’ own private lives as well as a change in society as the naively peaceful “summer of love” of 1967 came down to an unhappy period of unrest and revolution in 1968.

1969

Yellow Submarine (LP; released on January 17th) – The Beatles’ soundtrack album no. 4 was released in early 1969 and contains only six compositions by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. The remaining six tracks are instrumental film scores composed by the Beatles’ . Two out of six Beatles songs are credited to George Harrison, the other four songs are Lennon/McCartney compositions. The LP starts with the title track “Yellow Submarine” (already existent as a single and on Revolver) and culminates in “All You Need Is Love” (like on the Tour LP from 1967). The album’s alternative lyrics comprise a child-like sing-along, a meta-song, and two rather surreal- seeming songs about a bulldog and thoughts about love and life. To some degree the album gives an impression of catering to children rather than adults. But this may easily be explained by the fact that the film Yellow Submarine is a cartoon.

Get Back/Don’t Let Me Down (single; released on April 11th) – The lyrics of “” feature two characters who are told to “get back” in a repetitive, chant-like manner in the song’s refrain. Moreover, McCartney alludes to soft drugs and plays with the conventions of

16 gender construction within the two verses of the lyrics. “Don’t Let Me Down” is a Lennon song in which he declares his love to a third-person “she”. Additionally he asks the lyrics’ character in a desperate-sounding plea to not ever desert him. It is quite obvious that the speaker’s words are directed to Yoko Ono who Lennon married just around the time of the single’s release, on March 20th 1969.

The Of John And Yoko/ (single; released on May 30th) – The lyrics of “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” tell the story of Lennon’s wedding to Yoko Ono and their subsequent honeymoon. Lennon also reflects on press and newspaper reactions concerning their marriage and peace activism of “talking in our beds for a week” at the Amsterdam Hilton. “Old Brown Shoe” is a song written by George Harrison. It is slightly reminiscent of the Beatles’ earlier, more direct approach towards the audience. Lines like “I’m in love with you” allow the addressee again to identify with the “you” in the lyrics as being reached out to on an intimate “I-You” level.

Abbey Road (LP; released on September 26th) – Abbey Road was the last album the Beatles recorded together but was released before Let It Be in 1969. The album contains seventeen songs including a rather confessional lyric by Richard Starkey called “Octopus’s Garden” in which he is looking for a “little hideaway beneath the waves”. Many of the other lyrics on the record also reflect what the Beatles were concerned with at the time. They wrote about business problems, a recently experienced burglary in the case of McCartney or the burdens of being a rock and roll megastar. Plus the topic of love was dealt with explicitly again. This can be seen in the lyrics of Harrison’s “Something”, McCartney’s “Oh Darling” or Lennon’s lyrically minimalist “I Want You”. The “I -You” relationship from the Beatles’ early lyrics can be encountered more often again on Abbey Road. But still the Beatles’ lyrics seem to have abandoned the explicit suggestion of physical contact between two loving characters completely since the year 1966. An affinity for 1950s rock and roll lyrics is displayed by John Lennon in the initial line of his song “”, which even brought him a sue for plagiarism. Furthermore I would like to mention that a different perception of the traditional concept of ‘home’ is used on the album in McCartney’s “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” when it is used for the studies of “pataphysical science”.

Something/Come Together (single; released on October 31st) – “Something” represents Harrison’s reflections on the insecurities and uncertainties that come along with the idea of

17 love. “Come Together” is a Lennon original, reminiscent of 1950s rock and roll, both lyrically and musically, in a convoluted way.

1970

Let It Be/You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) (single; released on March 6th) – The lyrics of “Let It Be” could be regarded as a cry for help on the side of Paul McCartney. He desperately wanted to keep the Beatles going but found himself “in times of trouble” because he knew the group had fallen apart already. “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)” is a mantra-like repetition of the very title of the song, varying slightly throughout the number.

Let It Be (LP; released on May 8th) – Recorded mainly in but released over a year later, it shows how unsure the Beatles were about their product. The LP was intended to be another soundtrack album for the television documentary ‘Get Back’. It was planned to demonstrate to the public how the creative process within the Beatles worked by filming them develop songs, rehearsing and recording them. Instead the film Let It Be became a record of what the breaking-up of a group looks like. The album Let It Be itself shows evidence of being partly constructed as a ‘back to the roots’ concept. It includes the traditional Liverpool folk song “”, altered to “Maggie Mae” by the Beatles. It includes “”, a song written in the 1950s by Lennon with a helping hand by McCartney. “Two Of Us” shows signs of childhood memories Lennon and McCartney could share and of course “Get Back” says it all already in the title. Let It Be is an album which may evoke some promising feelings in an audience desperate to get the Beatles back together again, but the tenor of the album is a sad and constrained one.

3. The Beatles’ Rock and Roll Roots

No technician starts his work by reinventing the wheel and the same must be true for the Beatles when it comes to generating suitable lyrics for their music. And although are often regarded as exceptionally gifted and inventive songwriters and lyricists (which they undoubtedly are), even they must have had sources where they took their inspirations from. In the case of the Beatles it was 1950s’ mainly.

18 What I would like to do now is to find out what the 1950s’ rock and roll idols of the Beatles’ adolescent Liverpool years were concerned with in their lyrics; what traditions or patterns they were following in their lyrical styles and to what extend, if at all, these writings influenced the Beatles in their early creative work as lyricists. Now, in order to learn what kinds of rock and roll songs John, Paul, George and Ringo impressed the most, we should take a look at what songs they performed as cover versions early in their career. For that reason I will concentrate on lyrics taken from the album Live At The BBC which, amongst Lennon/McCartney originals, includes forty two cover versions of 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll as well as tracks performed by the Beatles. The LP is compiled from live appearances the Beatles did for different radio shows for the British Broadcasting Corporation in the years 1963 to 1965. It was not until 1994 though that the album was released, and thus the songs as Beatles performances were not open to the public in the 1960s3. I will turn my focus of attention to a selection of the twenty-nine cover versions not officially released by the EMI until 1994, and (amongst others) will have a closer look at what the subject matter may be, how the conversational level between addresser/speaker and addressee/audience is constructed and to what extent stereotyped thinking in terms of gender role construction is visible. When I went through the lyrics of these covered 1950s and very early 1960s rock and roll songs, one thing that caught my eye was the fact that family and relatives seem to play an important role in American . The speakers of the various lyrics mention parents, aunts and uncles or sisters quite frequently, mostly seen as obstacles to be overcome in order to be allowed to enjoy life in one way or another. The addressee puts himself in the minor’s place dependent on the “grown-up’s” decision, which gives the target audience (mainly teenage girls and boys) a great opportunity to identify with the speaker and thus find an ally in his or her fight against parental rule. A good example of the generational clash between teenage kids and their parents is the 1957 song “Young Blood” by Leiber/Stoller/Pomus. The lyrics are narrated in first person by the speaker who is stunned by a girl, stating: “I took one look and I was fractured / I tried to walk but I was lame / I tried to talk but I just stuttered / What’s your name” and on he goes “She looked so tough / I had to follow her all the way home”. And the song culminates in “Then things went bad / I met her dad / He said / You better leave my

3 Apart from “A Taste Of ”, “Baby It’s You”, “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”, “Everybody Is Trying To ”, “Honey Don’t”, “Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey”, “”, “Matchbox”, “Rock And Roll Music”, “”, “Slow Down”, “” and “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me”, which were all released on official Beatles records by EMI. 19 daughter alone”. So in this case the father is seen as the “bad guy” who would not allow a relationship to form between his daughter and the lyric’s speaker. In the 1958 song “Memphis Tennessee” by Chuck Berry the male speaker wants to “get in touch with my Marie” via a long distance phone call to Memphis Tennessee. He mentions a relative in the line “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / ‘Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall”. Later in the lyrics he continues “More than that I cannot add / Only that I miss her and all the fun we had / But we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree / And tore apart our happy home in Memphis Tennessee”. In this situation our speaker is kept away from his loved one by the girl’s mother who obviously felt that a relationship was out of the question, which is quite comprehensible for me as the speaker in the last verse reveals to his audience that “Marie is only six years old”. In “Memphis Tennessee” a mother took the part of the “killjoy”, and I am not quite sure if it is an over-interpretation from my part when I state that to me traces of paedophilia are not to be denied in the lyrics of this song. Another Chuck Berry lyric where parents play an important role is the 1958 recording of “”. The title already suggests a subject matter which revolves around teenagers and their problems. The lyric’s speaker, obviously a teenage boy, wants to go to a in order to see this lovely sixteen year old girl, and seen through the eyes of a teenager he asks “Oh, Mommy, Mommy, please, may I go? It’s such a sight to see / Somebody steal the show / Oh, Daddy, Daddy, I beg of you / Whisper to Mommy it’s all right with you”. A clear-cut state of dependence is displayed in this example between a teenage-boy and his parents. In order to support my impression that American rock and roll lyrics have a tendency to incorporate family and relatives as an integral part of the subject matter, I would like to give some more short examples of family-related cover versions the Beatles did for Live At The BBC. I’ll start with a lyric written by Arthur Crudup in the year 1954 and originally performed by , called “That’s All Right Mama”. Apart from having a very revealing title, the lyrics seem to revolve around an obedient son, contrasting the “rebel-image” of pre-army Presley completely. The speaker of the lyrics tells his audience “Mama she done told me / Papa done told me too / Son that gal your foolin’ with / She aint no good for you / But that’s all right that’s all right / That’s all right now Mama anyway you do”. An additional lyric made famous by Elvis Presley is “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry Over You” written by Joe Thomas and Howard Biggs in 1953. It is another example of an

20 early rock and roll song-lyric which allows teenage recipients to fully identify with the “I” in the text. The speaker seems to represent a rather naïve, childish young character still dependent on the older generation. He is unable to solve his problems without a helping hand by a father-figure or a mother-figure respectively. The narrator threatens his loved one to squeal on her in the lines “I’m gonna tell your Mama / Tell your Papa too / So they’ll know exactly / Just what I’m gonna do / If you ever say goodbye”. The thing he is “gonna do” is cry. The “I” in the lyrics tries to misuse the parent’s authority over their daughter in his own favour. “Lucille”, a rock and roll song written in 1957 by Collins and Penniman and performed by makes use of a family member in order to influence the speaker’s situation to his disadvantage. In the case of “Lucille” the lines of importance run “Ah, Lucille, / Baby do your sister’s will / Well, you ran off and married, / But I love you still”. Quite obviously this time it was a character’s sister (as opposed to being a character’s parent) who did not consent to a love-relationship with the lyric’s narrator by suggesting running off and marrying somebody else. One further family-related song is the 1958 composition “Johnny . Goode” by Chuck Berry. After the second chorus the narrator tells the audience that “His mother told him some day you will be a man / And you will be the leader of a big ol’ band / Many people comin’ from miles around / To hear you play your music when go down”. Other than representing an obstacle to be overcome, this lyric’s mother believes in her son and encourages him to continue making music, which leads us to a second feature of many of the Beatles’ early rock and roll cover versions: a kind of “meta-lyric” about the act of making music (which evidently includes the use of certain lyrics to the music) in connection with the importance of knowing how to dance to it. A very nice example of the importance of knowing how to dance with a simultaneous focus on live music itself can be found in the lyrics of the 1958 Chuck Berry number “Carol”. The first-person speaker starts the song by addressing Carol directly: “Oh Carol, don’t let him steal your heart away / I’m gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day”. It is interesting to observe that dancing to rock and roll or rhythm and blues in the 1950s obviously was quite standardised and traditional in form. Unlike today or in the Beatles’ 1960s even, where people moved their bodies spontaneously and intuitively to popular music, you had to actually learn how to dance to whatever style of music would be played in the nineteen-fifties. It was seen as a kind of social convention and necessity to be able to be versed in dances like the “Chive” or the “Twist” in young people’s lives, if you did not want to be branded an

21 outsider. Dancing was regarded as the first step of getting close to a potential partner in the youth-culture of the nineteen-fifties, and that is why artists like Chuck Berry included material in their lyrics that explicitly touched on the topics of dancing and playing music. Many other songwriters did that too because it appealed to their audience: a newly emerged class of post world-war two teenage-boys and girls who because of their newly achieved relative affluence were gaining more and more importance as an economically potential group of buyers. The lyrics of “Carol” are also interesting in regard to the explicitness with which music is portrayed. On a personal “I-You” level the speaker tells the character of Carol that “If you wanna hear some music like the boys are playin’ / Hold tight, pat your foot, don’t let ‘em carry it away / Don’t let the heat overcome you when they play so loud / Oh, don’t the music intrigue you when they get a crowd”. Music is very much regarded as being played live and we can find traces of dancing in the line “Pat your foot”, which is quite a natural occurrence as music and dancing cannot be treated as two completely unrelated subjects. The strong relation between music and dancing in 1950s rock and roll lyrics can also be observed in songs like “A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues”, performed by ‘Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’. The narrating character of “A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues” starts “[…] if you start to swing and sway when the band start to play / A real cool and way-out sound […] / You feel like you gotta move around / You get a shot of rhythm and blues / With just a little rock and roll on the side” and continues later in the lyric “Don’t you worry about a thing / When you start to dance and sing”. Rock and roll music and dancing are used as an escape for young people from the burdens of everyday-life it seems. The lyrics give an impression of “you are safe as long as you are surrounded by rock and roll music”. Moreover I think that many of the rock and roll lyrics were written in an attempt to also promote this relatively new strain of music, to make it popular in society and simultaneously give the child a name. As a slight contrast to the rock and roll lyrics of the 1950s which often emphasise the necessity of dance I would like to mention a song from the year 1961 called “Don’t Ever Change”, written by Goffin and King. The lyrics of the song put into perspective the often exaggerated views concerning the significance of knowing how to dance, and stress the fact that even if a person should not “know the latest dance”, it is still possible for that person to be loved and that it is still possible for this person to find somebody who wants to be with that person. The male speaker of the lyrics states on a personal “I-You” basis that “You don’t know the latest dance / But when it’s time to make / Your kisses let me know you’re not a tomboy”. The focus here still lies on “dancing” but the context is a different one. This time the narrator foregrounds the fact that the girl in question cannot dance and that is what

22 appeals to him, as he obviously loves unconventional girls who break with the old gender- stereotypes of society. The speaker addresses a kind of “new woman”, one that will not let herself be put in a pigeonhole. He addresses a self-confident, independent young woman when he utters “You never wear a stitch of lace / Your powder’s never on your face / You’re always wearing jeans, except on Sundays / So, please, don’t ever change”. These lines paint a new picture of a girl who will not let herself be dominated by a man (except on Sundays). I must admit that the picture of the strong new woman in the lyric is not flawless as it leaves behind an aftertaste of religiously motivated subordination, but still it points cautiously into a new direction when it comes to gender-roles and stereotypical approaches towards it. One of the reasons for this may be found in the fact that the song was written in 1961, and not in the still more conservative 1950s. Another reason could well be the fact that one of the two songwriters, namely King, is a woman. Gerry Goffin and Carole King worked as a song- writing team but were in a relationship in their private lives as well. And although King wrote the music and Goffin was responsible for the lyrics, they never would have released anything that did not have the consent of both of them. Quite the opposite of Goffin and King’s song “Don’t Ever Change”, regarding the role of the woman in the lyric, can be encountered in one of the oldest rock and roll songs the Beatles covered for Live At The BBC. I am talking about the 1954 song “I Got A Woman” by whose speaker in the song is miles away from political correctness regarding today’s standards. He reports about his woman that “She’s there to love me / Both day and night / Never grumbles or fusses / Always treats me right / Never runnin’ in the streets / Leavin’ me alone / She knows a woman’s place / Is right there, now, in the home”. This macho-approach towards women paints a very conservative, patriarchal picture of society in the nineteen- fifties. A woman is portrayed here as an obedient “sex-slave” who would never dare to answer back her master and whose chains are just about as long as to reach the kitchen when the narrator feels it is time to cook his dinner. It is an interesting phenomenon that the vast majority of rock and roll lyricists in the 1950s seem to have had a clearly stereotyped notion of the “concept of woman”, when it came to the determination of their duties and place in society, or in a relationship with a man, for that matter. The narrators hardly ever question the traditional role-allocation of men embodying the dominant part and women being regarded as nothing more than a possession. In the lyrics of “Lucille” we find the lines “I’ll never let you go” and “come back where you belong”, which is just another demonstration of the speaker’s overt claim to superiority over his addressee within the lyrics.

23 Now, apart from explicit statements on the part of the speaker about what “his” woman is supposed to do or not to do, and where he thinks she belongs and such like, there is another direct addressing of women in rock and roll lyrics that is worth taking a look at. Let me illustrate this topic by offering some lines from the 1956 lyrics of Frank Pingatore’s “Clarabella”. The lyrics run “Wo, baby baby, Clarabella / Baby baby, Clarabella / Baby baby, wo wo, yeah uh / Well now, Clarabella / You’re my honey, Clarabella / Ooh yeah now, Clarabella / I said you’re my baby, Clarabella / Yeah, Clarabella, baby”. “Baby” as a form of address for women in the lyrics of 1950s’ popular songs was the most common of all, followed by “honey”, “little girl”, “little cutie” or “babe”. This derogative form of language from the speaker’s part lacks respect for women and infantilises them. I do not think though, that these kinds of lyrics were meant to affront or assault women, but were part of the rock and roll culture of those days. On the Beatle’s Live At The BBC there is one fine example of a reversal of the male macho-approach towards women which can be found in the lyrics of “I Just Don’t Understand”, a Wilkin/Westberry song which runs “Well, you call me your baby / When you’re holding my hand / But the way that you hurt me / I just don’t understand”. The speaker of the lyrics finds himself in an inferior position because the woman he longs for does not answer his love. This assumption is confirmed by the lines “Well, you know that I love you / More than anyone can / But a one-sided-love / I just don’t understand”. The lyrics emphasise the fact that a girl calls the narrator “baby”, because traditionally it was the other way around. It is interesting to see that from a male perspective the form of address “baby” is not at all marred by negative or insulting associations. It is rather seen as something positive; you confirm your love by calling somebody “baby”. But the lyrics of “I Just Don’t Understand” are the only source of evidence I could find which reveal that women called their boyfriends (or ex-boyfriends in this case) “baby” too. As a rule it is boys infantilising women. From the twenty-nine lyrics I concentrated on in this chapter, four revolve around the topic of dancing and playing music. The rest, that is twenty-five, have love and relationships between a man and a woman as their concern. Of these twenty-five lyrics concerned with love, twelve deal with the topic of lost or unrequited love, and thirteen have to do with “happy love” so to speak. The addresser is always male, depicting himself either as lover, or as victim in search of, or left by his woman. All of the lyrics suggest a very personal “I-You” or “I-She” conversational level between addressee and addresser, so that a personal identification for the listener/audience with the role of the “object of desire” is made fairly easy. What I found astonishing was that of twenty-nine love lyrics only seven put forward the issue of physical contact between two lovers. Three lyrics talk about “kissing”, two other lyrics involve the

24 subject of “holding hands”, and the remaining two texts speak of “holding tight” the admired person. It is also interesting to note that the subject of marriage in relation to the subject of physical contact is treated disproportionately often. Marriage, or the suggestion of marrying somebody occurs five times, often in a rather teenage-macho-like, naïve kind of way, like in Chuck Berry’s 1960 song “I Got To Find My Baby”, where it says “Well I don’t care if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life / I’m gonna find that little girl and make her my wife”. This sounds more like a serious threat than the declaration of eternal love to me. And although the song was released in 1960, its lyrics still reflect the attitude towards marriage in the United States of America in the nineteen-fifties. A woman’s main purpose in marriage was to serve her husband and to make him feel comfortable when he returned home from his “world of strain and pressure”. In order to hold up a happy marriage many women felt impelled to submit to their husbands and thus sacrificed their own identities and egos. The lyrics of Berry’s “I Got To Find My Baby” also reveal that a woman in middle-class US society hardly had a voice of her own. The speaker seems absolutely determined to find and marry the girl in question, no matter what she might think of re-establishing a relationship with him. I am talking about “re- establishing” the relationship because before the audience learns about the speaker’s plans to “make her my wife”, he indirectly reveals the woman’s thoughts about their love relationship. The narrator states “I ain’t had no real good loving / Since that woman said goodbye / Yes, ever since that day / That she said we were through / I’ve been nervous / And shook up too”. From these lines it is quite obvious to discover that the girl feels no desire whatsoever to be in a relationship with the speaker, let alone getting married to him. On the other hand there is the speaker who shows no intention of taking into consideration a woman’s opinion on the subject of marriage as long as his desires are satisfied. So, even the supposedly rebellious rock and roll lyrics of 1950s’ America adapt to a great extent to the patriarchal and moral ideas and ideals of state and church likewise. Even though the Beatles’ Live At The BBC recordings of cover versions give insight to only a limited range of American 1950s’ and early 1960s’ rock and roll lyrics, I believe it is still a representative spectrum that is displayed. We discovered that the lyrics’ topics revolve around the entity of family very strongly, in particular parents and their sometimes over-protective attitudes towards the next generation. Then there is the focus on dancing and music itself which is often regarded as the first step for teenagers into the world of grown-up relationships. But most important is the fact that virtually every song the Beatles covered for the Live At The BBC record deals with the topic of love in one way or another. Be it so-called

25 “happy love” or unrequited love, there is always a certain macho-approach palpable in the speaker’s attitude. And in an attempt to keep up moral standards, the 1950s’ rock and roll lyrics leave the addressee behind with a notion of “there is no physical contact allowed between the both of you unless you are married”. But whatever the topics of the lyrics may be, the conversational level between addresser and addressee almost exclusively take place on a very intimate “I-You”, “I-She” basis.

4. Love Me Do: A Roller Coaster of Adolescence and Love

In the previous chapter, I concentrated my observations on what the Beatles’ rock and roll predecessors’ lyrics dealt with. Now, the next step will be to have a closer look at what the Beatles’ own compositions’ lyrics are able to offer, and to what extent their words reflect the topics and themes that were so dominant in the 1950s’ and early 1960s’ American popular music. Are the Beatles following in the lyrical footsteps of artists like Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Leiber/Stoller, to name but a few, or are they finding new frontiers for their work as lyricists. The Beatles’ first official EMI song-release was “Love Me Do” from their 1962 debut-single “Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You”, which peaked at 17 in the British national charts. The whole composition basically consists of a 4-time repetition of its 5-line-chorus “Love, love me do / You know I love you / I’ll always be true / So please, love me do / Whoa, love me do” and a middle eight following the second chorus, running “Someone to love / Somebody new / Someone to love / Someone like you”. The lyrics are considered an emotional plea made by a male speaker to a female “you”, asking her to love him, as she knows he loves her. The sheer simplicity of the prevalently single syllable words in combination with the lyric’s simple message almost forces a personal identification with the “you” on the part of the female listener. With “Love Me Do”, Lennon and McCartney left no traces of doubt regarding who their lyrics catered to: female teenagers (who in British clubs like “the Cavern” represented the lion’s share of their following). The words of “Love Me Do” function on a very intimate “I-You” level between addresser and addressee, promising the rather traditional idea of eternal love and faithfulness in the line “I’ll always be true”. As soon as it comes to eternal promises, the listener is left with the even more traditional notion of getting married or at least being engaged to be married. So, in a way, the Beatles’ first recording very much ties in with the classic 1950s’ rock and roll lyrics of their American predecessors. In addition, the topic of love is dealt with in a very unambiguous way in “Love Me Do”, which had been one of the features of many rock and roll songs the Beatles listened to and were influenced by in their

26 days as adolescents in the city of Liverpool, England. Author Steve Turner, in his 1994 book, A Hard Day’s Write, states that: “In 1967, when every Beatle song was believed to be drenched in meaning and they had been elevated into ‘spokesmen for a generation’, Paul commented to in an interview for ‘”Love Me Do” was our greatest philosophical song…for it to be simple, and true, means that it’s incredibly simple.’” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 1994: 23) And the words to the song are incredibly simple too; only, in 1962, nobody would search for some hidden philosophical message behind the lyrics. This idea would only manifest itself some years later. On the same record, labelled only as B-side, the British public could listen to a song called “P.S. I Love You”, written by Lennon and McCartney, as was “Love Me Do”. “P.S. I Love You”, as the title already suggests, was written in the form of a letter song. The lyrics start “As I write this letter / Send my love to you / Remember that I’ll always / Be in love with you”, which again feature the subject matter of love and a promise of eternal love to a female addressee, which enables female listeners to identify with the “you” in the song. The lyrics continue, “I’ll be coming home again to you, love / And ‘til the day I do, love / P. S. I love you / You, you, you”. The whole song reflects a very intimate “I-You” relationship between sender (in our case speaker-singer Paul McCartney) and receiver (some teenage girl), as was the tradition to be followed in those days. Another striking feature of the words of “P.S. I love you” is that the concept of “home” is presented to the audience in a rather conservative, almost patriarchal manner. Home is seen as the domain of the woman and thus the words of the song are clearly forced into gendered norms. A man is regarded as the breadwinner, the one who is away for work, meets all kinds of challenges and after a certain period of time returns home to his wife or girlfriend who is gladly awaiting her loved one’s arrival. This storyline, in actual fact, could have resembled Paul McCartney’s own situation while he and the Beatles were far away from home and girlfriends, performing in , , early in the 1960s. It is known that McCartney’s girlfriend during the Beatles’ Hamburg- period was a certain Dorothy Rhone, a teenager from Liverpool, whom he allegedly had in mind while writing the lyrics to “P. S. I Love You”. Steve Turner, in his book, A Hard Day’s Write, claims that “‘P. S. I Love You’ was written by Paul in Hamburg, as a message to his Liverpool girlfriend Rhone, who had just been over to visit him.” He continues that “[…] Paul wrote a song for her in which he declared his love and reminded her that he’d be home soon.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 24) However, just to demonstrate how contradictory thoughts and ideas about sources of artistic inspirations for song-lyrics can be, I would like to quote Paul McCartney himself, from ’s book, Paul McCartney: Many Years from

27 Now, where Paul remembers “The letter is a popular theme and it’s just my attempt at one of those. It’s not based in reality, nor did I write it to my girlfriend from Hamburg, which some people think.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 38) But whoever McCartney’s muse might have been does not affect the average female listener’s attitude towards the song’s lyrics at all. They can still personally and individually identify with the “you” in the lyrics, picturing themselves to be the woman addressed in the love letter by the male speaker who promises eternal love to them. As a lyricist, you cannot establish a more intimate or closer relationship between the speaker and a single female receiver than by pretending to write her a love-letter. In the minds of the audience, the speaker provides written evidence of his love in the form of a letter to them. It is not just spoken words, so to say, but a piece of paper acting, for all intents and purposes, like a contract, which the addressee can refer back to, and nail the speaker down to, if necessary. After all, there is the receiver’s address and name written on the envelope, which eliminates the possibility of there being a rival she might have to compete with. So far, the Beatles’ lyric output (“Love Me Do” and “P. S. I Love You) confines itself to rather innocent-sounding lines when it comes to the topic of love. This facet changes slightly with the release of “Please Please Me”, a Lennon original. On the surface, the lyrics may look like yet another happy, up- love song, but on closer examination of the song the strong sexual innuendo is palpable. Lennon starts his song with the lines, “Last night I said these words to my girl / I know you never even try girl”, which, for the first time, suggest a certain distancing of the speaker from the audience. Suddenly, it is not the well known “I-You”-level the addressee finds herself in; rather, Lennon’s character claims to have he “said these words to”. The first line of “Please Please Me” makes it seem impossible for the female Beatles fan to identify with the speaker’s desired character as there is no “you girl”, but a “my girl” to be found instead. The second line, however, once again offers a more intimate “I- You” conversational level, and although from this line on, the lyrics are to be understood as the representation of a reported-speech-situation, it is again possible to put yourself in the position of the speaker’s beloved. The lyrics continue, “Come on, Come on, Come on, Come on / Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you”. These lines, lines three and four, brim over with sexual innuendo. We find a climactic repetition of imperatives which resemble the talk of a sexually aroused character leading to orgasm in a shouted out “whoa yeah”. The remaining “Please please me, like I please you” is the speaker’s plea or request for a certain form of sexual activity which he obviously already does or did to her and wants to be done to him now as well. When you think about the whole scenario depicted in “Please Please Me”

28 thus far, you can only come to the conclusion that what Lennon hints about in his lyrics is oral sex. Because a man can do to a woman which a woman could do to a man in return without the use of additional implements, within a system of the more common and traditional forms of sexuality? The answer must be cunnilingus and fellatio. Lennon’s speaker continues, “You don’t need me to show the way love / Why do I always have to say love / Come on, Come on, Come on, Come on / Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you”. The middle eight run “I don’t wanna sound complainin’ / But you know there’s always rain in my heart / I do all the pleasin’ with you / It’s so hard to reason with you / Oh yeah, why do you make me blue”. The first two lines of the second verse refer to a cliché of the sexually passive female character in opposition to the sexually demanding male character in a relationship. The speaker has had enough of constantly giving directions when it comes to sexuality. By asking “why do I always have to say love” he indirectly complains about his girl’s inactivity and in the next two lines continues again to ask her to please him like he pleases her. In the middle- eight of “Please Please Me” the speaker confirms my assumption that the lyrics so far have revolved around a complaint about his girl, by negating his intention of complaining. He remarks that he does not “wanna sound complainin’”, followed by a very big “but”, which again is followed by the effects her behaviour has on him. The speaker declares that, although he does “all the pleasin’” with her, she still makes him feel blue and leaves him behind in a state of depression. The word “pleasin’” in this case can be understood either as “asking someone to do something” or “make someone satisfied”, a minor difference of semantics when it comes to the lyrics’ interpretation. The speaker obviously “pleased” his girl in both possible ways without proper response on her part. The lyrics of “Please Please Me” embody a certain macho-approach towards women and sexuality. The speaker takes for granted that it is the female character’s fault that he finds himself in an unbearable situation of sadness and discontentedness. He never questions his own sexuality or sexual demands, only seeing what he regards as the negative characteristics of his counterpart. And although there is no explicitness present in terms of sexuality, aspects of the lyrics definitely seem to be composed of subliminal allusions to oral sex. If this is so, then it is the British public’s first encounter with a Lennonesque lyrical cheekiness of which there will be plenty more to be expected in his future works of art. To complete the picture of the Beatles’ arrival on the shores of popular lyricism, I will now take a look at the B-side of their second single release “Ask Me Why”. The lyrics start with the ultimate declaration of love by the male addresser to an audience of primarily female teenagers on an intimate “I-You” basis. It starts with the words “I love you”. And right after

29 the speaker’s confession he gives the reason for his feelings by stating “’cause you tell me things I want to know”. It is exactly this commentarial statement which, upon closer inspection, once again displays a 1950s macho-approach towards the “weaker” sex. By claiming that our speaker only loves the “you” in “Ask Me Why” because she tells him things he wants to hear, he automatically excludes hearing about stories from his girl which could upset him. So, please do not tell me about the fears and problems that could hound you, but let us talk about some funny television series and how successful your last trip to the hairdresser was. The rule is simple: do not upset your husband, boyfriend or lover with things he does not want to hear. As a woman, you are expected to retract your own ego completely and to devote all your strength and energy to keeping your breadwinner happy, whatever the cost. This is, of course, strongly reminiscent of the previous section on marriage in the United States of America in the 1950s. If a woman wants to make her husband happy, she is expected to sacrifice her own identity and support her husband with all means and tactics she is able to exercise. The speaker in “Ask Me Why” expects the “you” in the text to fulfil this “obligation” by continuing “And it’s true that it really only goes to show / That I know, that I, I, I, I / Should never, never, never be blue”. For him, it is out of the question that the situation he finds himself in could ever change. And the reader can only speculate about what will happen if the “you” should ever leave the speaker, as he reflects on his condition with the words “I can’t believe it’s happened to me / I can’t conceive of any more misery”. Our speaker seems to have a rather fragile personality, suggesting a break-down if anything unpleasant should happen to him. Another confirming fact concerning the speaker’s fragility can be found in the lines, “If I cry it’s not because I’m sad / But you’re the only love that I’ve ever had”. This emotional overreaction can be explained by arguing that the “you” is the speaker’s first, possibly even only, love he has ever had; and thus, is desperate not to lose her. The song’s lyrics do definitely work on an emotional “I-You” basis between sender and receiver when you look at lines like, “Now you’re mine, my happiness still makes me cry”, or “Ask me why, I’ll say I love you / And I’m always thinking of you”.

30 5. Please Please Me: The Beatles Get the Girl

To this point, I have been concentrating on the Beatles’ first two single releases of the years 1962 and early 1963. I will now take a closer look at Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first LP release with a focus on the Lennon/McCartney compositions, discussing the cover versions on the album as a sideline. Please Please Me starts off with an up-tempo rock and roll song which mirrors the feelings of a who sees a girl at some dance, and while dancing with her he falls in love with the girl. To offer some insight into how Lennon and McCartney collaborated as a song- writing team in the earlier days of the 1960s, here is a quote by Paul McCartney about the lyrical development of “”: Sometimes we would just start a song from scratch, but one of us would nearly always have a germ of an idea, a title or a rough little thing they were thinking about and we’d do it. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was my original, I’d started it and I had the first verse, which therefore gave me the tune, the tempo and the key. It gave you the subject matter, a lot of the information, and then you had to fill in. I had, ‘She was just seventeen, she’d never been a beauty queen.’ So we went, ‘Ugh, this is one of these.’ And by then we’d written a couple in the little book and we’d started to realise that we had to stop at these bad lines or we were only going to write bad songs. So we stopped there and both of us cringed at that and said, ‘No, no, no. Beauty queen is out! There’s got to be another rhyme for seventeen’: so we went through the : between, clean, lean, mean; ‘She wasn’t mean; you know what I mean; great! Put that in.’ And then the significance of it built as we sang it, ‘She’s just seventeen, you know what I mean?’ and people picked up on the implied significance later. It was a good way out of that problem. So it was co-written, my idea, and we finished it that day. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 93f)

It is interesting to discover that even the congenial song-writing team of Lennon and McCartney at times “went through the alphabet” to find a missing rhyme-word for their lyrics in a rather haphazard way. The lyrics of “I Saw Her Standing There” on the record actually start off with McCartney’s introductory 1-2-3-4 count off, to “set the group firmly in its context of sweaty ballrooms, full of adoring teenage girls and dancing.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write. 1994: 18) However, unlike the Beatles’ previous song releases, the speaker did not see “’you’ standin’ there”, but did see “her standin’ there”, which means that a personal identification with the “you” as the subject of desire in these lyrics is not possible. The Beatles built up an “I-She” or “I-Her” relationship in the song. “You” occurs only once in line two of the first verse and it functions as a mere sign of recognition between the speaker and an imaginary character, to whom the speaker is relating a story about a girl he saw at a dance. Furthermore, the song lyrics suggest physical contact between the speaker and his chosen “victim” in the lines, “Whoah, we danced through the night / and we held each other tight”

31 and, “I held her hand in mine”. The integration of bodily contact into the text is highly evocative of the Beatles’ rock and roll heroes’ style of developing their lyrics, as they also often incorporated “holding” or “kissing” in their lyrical artwork. Apart from the display of a youthful physicality, however, “I Saw Her Standing There” is a good example to demonstrate that the act of “dancing” as an adolescent’s first approach towards the other sex was still seen as vital. Even the title of the song can be interpreted as being a direct offspring of a 1950s’ rock and roll song. The song I have in mind is the 1957 track “Young Blood” by Leiber/Stoller/Pomus which starts with the line “I saw her standing on the corner”, and, as in “I Saw Her Standing There”, deals with the subject of a boy being stunned by a girl when he sees her for the very first time. As for Please Please Me, I have thus far only examined the lyrics of five (out of eight) original Lennon/McCartney compositions4, and will now briefly discuss the six cover- versions included on the album. All of the six cover-songs are written by American artists, and thus do not basically differ in style and content from the American rock and roll lyrics discussed so far. This is despite the fact—and this is really quite surprising—that one of the compositions was originally released prior to 1960, the latest release being “(Go To Him)”, in September 1962. Still, there is a high degree of standardised, traditional and stereotyped gender roles to be found: The idea of marriage as part of the subject-matter in a popular song was still rated very highly, as we can see in “Anna(Go To Him)”, where it says “You give back your to me / And I will set you free”. Here we have the ring as an unmistakable symbol of eternal faithfulness. In “Chains”, the speaker talks about “These chains of love got a hold on me”. Marriage is connoted negatively, as chains almost always imply a connection with some form of imprisonment. The 1961 lyrics of “Baby It’s You” contain the line, “I know I’m gonna love you any old way”. Here, it is the “old way” which suggests a traditional form of love. “I will return, yes I will return / I’ll come back for the honey and you” is a line taken from the track “A Taste Of Honey”, which considers the topic of women waiting at home for their men to return again. “” from 1962 infantilises women by calling them “baby”, “honey”, or “little girl” in lines like “Work it on out, honey”. For the Lennon/McCartney lyrics of Please Please Me the Beatles have not yet taken over the habit of their American heroes of infantilising women.

4 The Beatles’ first two single releases Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You and Please Please Me/Ask Me Why are included in their first LP release Please Please Me. 32 Then there is “Boys”, with a lyric all about the celebration of boys and kissing. It is kind of odd though, when you imagine Ringo Starr, who sings this song on the album, shouting out “Well, I talk about boys / Don’t ya know I mean boys / Well, I talk about boys now / Aaahhh, boys / Well, I talk about boys now / What a bundle of joy! Alright George!”. In the early 1960s, the Beatles didn’t concern themselves about the possible homosexual connotations in a song about boys, although the Beatles altered the gender pronouns employed on the Shirelles’ version (i.e. “My girl says when I kiss her lips...”). In an October 2005 interview, Paul McCartney stated: “Any one of us could hold the audience. Ringo would do ‘Boys’, which was a fan favourite with the crowd. And it was great - though if you think about it, here’s us doing a song and it was really a girls’ song. ‘I talk about boys now!’ Or it was a gay song. But we never even listened. It's just a great song. I think that's one of the things about youth - you just don't give a shit. I love the innocence of those days.” (The lyrics talk specifically about boys kissing girls, not “each other”.) “Boys (The Shirelles Song)” [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_(The_Shirelles_song) [2008, August 21].

Although all of the fourteen lyrics on Please Please Me relate to love relationships between a boy and a girl in one way or another, there are two works which seem to go a little deeper than the usual girl-boy banter. One of them is “Misery”, where Lennon sings of losing a girl in a profound way. The lines start “The world is treating me bad, misery”. The speaker makes it clear that some extraordinarily bad incident must have happened to him, as he feels the whole world come down on him. He continues, “I’m the kind of guy / Who never used to cry / The world is treating me bad, misery / I’ve lost her now for sure / I won’t see her no more”. The speaker tells the audience that he used to be an optimistic person until he lost his girl. It is the intensity, certainty and finality with which the addressee pronounces that he has “lost her now for sure” and “won’t see her no more” which makes the audience feel as if he was talking about someone who was gone forever—a dead person. And, as though speaking to some higher spirit, he pleads “Send her back to me / ‘Cause everyone can see / Without her I will be in misery”. It is highly probable that Lennon gave the speaker of “Misery” the opportunity to reminisce about John’s own mother who died in a road accident when he was only seventeen years old. Lennon’s mother, Julia, was hit by a car and killed on the street by a drunk, off-duty policeman. The words of “Misery” can be interpreted as a first effort of Lennon to come to terms with the loss of his mother by writing about that traumatising occurrence in a song. Unlike Lennon’s apparent explicitness in post-Beatles song-lyrics—like the 1970 song, “Mother”, in which he states, “Mother, you had me / But I never had you”—in “Misery” the speaker talks about the loss of a parent in a rather inexplicit and veiled way. The speaker uses the word “her”, and thus makes it impossible for an audience to pin down the lyrics’ weight to one specific character. For an addressee who has no idea about the recent

33 passing away of Lennon’s mother, “Misery” can only deal with the painful loss of the addresser’s girlfriend. Of course, it is likely that Lennon himself was not aware of the possible deeper meaning the lyrics of “Misery” might implicate while he was writing the words to the song. Still, the lyrics of the song leave the listener with a feeling of severe sadness and the impression that there is more to it than the adolescent plotline of “boy loses girl”. The other Lennon/McCartney song on Please Please Me which seems to go beyond the predominantly physical idea of love between a boy and a girl is “There Is A Place”. “There Is A Place” contains a lyric which was co-written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The text of the song starts, “There is a place / Where I can go / When I feel low / When I feel blue”. This leads the audience to the assumption that the speaker, in effect, does go some place or to somebody’s place whenever he feels low or lovesick. However, the lyrics continue, “And it’s my mind / and there’s no time when I’m alone”. The Beatles, in contrast to the vast majority of their colleagues in the rock and roll business, suggest for the first time an escape route into something like the spiritual world. Additionally, rather than just restricting themselves to the realms of bodily or physical love, they provide a further level of lyrical dwelling. Paul McCartney stated that, “In our case the place was in the mind, rather than round the back of the stairs for a kiss and a cuddle. This was the difference with what we were writing, we were getting a bit more cerebral.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 95) In spite of first traces of song lyrics which seem to go deeper than the usual “boy loves/holds/kisses girl” or “boy loses girl”, the majority of the Beatles’ earlier song material still approaches the topics of traditional forms of love between a boy and a girl, rock and roll music and the idea of physical contact between characters in the broadest sense. Most of it takes place on a very intimate and personal “I-You” level between sending and receiving parts. The phenomenon of the “I-You”-intimacy between addresser and addressee can be observed especially well in the Beatles’ lyrical work of both of their single-releases following their first LP Please Please Me. The song titles of the two singles are already very revealing: /Thank You Girl and She Loves You/I’ll Get You. Talking about the lyrics of the song “From Me To You”, but representative of all the Beatles’ earlier “I-You”-love songs, John Lennon offered some interesting information about the matter: In April 1963, John commented: “We were just fooling about on the guitar. This went on for a while. Then we began to get a good line and we really started to work on it. Before the journey was over we’d completed the lyric, everything. We were so pleased…” A year later, again talking about how the song was written, John said: “Paul and I kicked some ideas around and came up with what we what we [sic] thought was a suitable melody line. The words weren’t really all that difficult – especially as we had decided quite definitely not to do anything that was at all complicated. I suppose that

34 is why we often had the words ‘you’ and ‘me’ in the titles of our songs. It’s the sort of thing that helps the listeners to identify with the lyrics. We think this is very important. The fans like to feel that they are part of something that is being done by the performers.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 31)

Paul McCartney later said about the same song: “There was a little trick we developed early on and got bored with later, which was to put I, Me or You in it, so it was very direct and personal: ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘From Me To You’ […]” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now: 148) Lennon and McCartney’s statements about their early lyrical artwork can be confirmed by looking at the lyrics of the Beatles’ songs of that 1963 period. “From Me To You” is a direct love lyric from speaker to receiver. The Beatles were well aware of the fact that their ‘receivers’ were predominantly female teenage fans of theirs, so the words of “From Me To You” went “If there’s anything that you want / If there’s anything I can do / Just call on me and I will send it along with love from me to you / I’ve got everything that you want / Like a heart that’s oh, so true / Just call on me and I will send it along / With love from me to you”. In these first lines, the speaker devotes himself to the addressee by suggesting that he can offer all a girl could possibly want and that he would do anything for her. Still, the words are not explicitly directed towards a female receiver, as the speaker only ever addresses a “you” in the lyrics, as is the case in “From Me To You”, it is possible for both sexes to identify with the “you” in the lyrics. However, as the Beatles, functioning as performers behind the character of their song’s speaker, are not homosexual, it is only logical to assume that the addresser approaches a girl. In these first few lines, the forms of sincere honesty and love from “me” to “you” stand very much in the tradition of American rock and roll lyrics. The song continues with the words “I got arms that long to hold you / And keep you by my side / I got lips that long to kiss you / and keep you satisfied, oooh”. The physical contact between boy and girl which is expressed here, gives the female receiver an opportunity to imagine being touched and kissed by the sender which was another important feature of 1950s’ rock and roll lyrics. Only the Beatles’ words could be interpreted again (as in “Please Please Me”), to allude to a sexual act. It is the “kiss you”, together with the word “satisfied” and the adjacent emotional release—ultimately manifesting in a scream—which leads me to the assumption that the speaker is suggesting cunnilingus. And looking at the first lines of the song again, I would even like to go to such lengths as to claim that the speaker of “From Me To You” finds himself in the role of a male prostitute; a callboy who would do “anything that you want”, if you “just call on me”. This interpretation, of course, is just one of many possible readings of the words of “From Me To You”.

35 “Thank You Girl”, for me, symbolises the epitome of gratefulness offered by the Beatles towards their faithful female teenage fans, who at the time were the main contributors to the Beatles’ success. It is a lyric about eternal love, promised by the speaker to the receiving girl, while at the same time he is thanking the girl for “lovin’ me the way that you do”. Of course, the only way for a fan to show her love to the Beatles was by buying the band’s records and attending their live shows. Obviously, both Lennon and McCartney felt obliged to send a thank-you letter to their ever growing masses of female fans in England. In Ian Macdonald’s book, Revolution In The Head, there is a sarcastic comment to be found, made by John Lennon about the Beatles’ fans, wrapped in a monetary context. “When fans mobbed his Rolls-Royce one night in 1963, he told his chauffeur not to worry: ‘They bought the car. They’ve got a right to smash it up.’” (Macdonald. Revolution in the Head: 81) In addition, it is interesting to mention that with the song lyrics of “Thank You Girl”, the Beatles adopted a feature which was very common with their rock and roll heroes in the 1950s—the addresser’s use of the infantilising “little girl” in reference to a woman. One could argue that, in fact, the Beatles’ female following consisted mainly of “little girls”; but this is too much of a generalisation, as the average age of Beatles fans increased consistently over the months and years of the band’s existence. The Beatles’ next single release She Loves You/I’ll Get You shows one further advancement in Lennon and McCartney’s lyrical style. For the first time on record, the Beatles make use of a “middleman” to act as an intermediary between two loving characters appearing in the text’s plot. In the case of “She Loves You”, the “middleman” is the speaker’s “I” in the lyrics. The addresser acts as a link and point of connection between a boy and a girl who seem to have abandoned their relationship. At the same time, however, the focal viewpoint shifts away from “I-You” to “She-You”, which distances the speaker from the female character in the text, simultaneously offering a male audience the possibility of identifying with the “you” in the lyrics. The entire lyric is framed by the “She-You” situation, as it starts and closes with the chorus “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”. The speaker then approaches the “you” in the first verse of the text by commenting, “You think you lost your love / Well I saw her yesterday / It’s you she’s thinking of / And she told me what to say / She says she loves you”. Here, an “I-You” situation between sender and receiver is still present, but the speaker only delivers the message from the female character to the male recipient. Still, our speaker is not entirely uninvolved in the love relationship of the lyric’s protagonists. The second verse’s first four lines, “She said you hurt her so / That she almost lost her mind / And now she says she knows / You’re not the hurting kind”, reveal that obviously our female character was hurt by

36 the “you” some time before and that is why he thought that he had lost his love, as was uncovered in the first line of the first verse of “She Loves You”. This is where the “I” in the song picks up the topic of love and relationship for himself, and in lines one to four of verse three he declares, “You know it’s up to you / I think it’s only fair / If I can hurt you too / Apologise to her”. The addresser projects into the future and envisions the possibility of building up a relationship with the female character himself, which would, of course, hurt the male protagonist. Moreover, the mediating “I” tells the “you” in a commanding tone to “apologise to her” for whatever he had done to her in the past. The speaker demands an apology even though—or rather, because of the fact that—he imagines he and the “she” to be a couple and he could not live, knowing his girlfriend’s feelings had been hurt without the culprit apologising to her. The single’s B-side “I’ll Get You” starts off its lyrics with a four-time repetition of “Oh yeah”, which echoes the “yeahs” of the single’s A-side and strongly reminds the listener of human pleasure-sounds in connection with a sexual encounter between two lovers. These initial lines of the song set the tone for all the lines that follow, and may bring about a more sexually oriented reading of the lyrics. The speaker of “I’ll Get You” starts with the words, “Imagine I’m in love with you / It’s easy ‘cause I know / I’ve imagined I’m in love with you / Many many many times before”. In lines one and two, the male addresser invites a female addressee to envision him being in love with her, and strengthens his suggestion by claiming that he knows it is easy to do so. I am convinced that the vast majority of the Beatles’ female following did imagine that the lyric’s speaker (which for the Beatles’ fans embodied either John, Paul, George or Ringo anyway) was in love with them. The beginning of the text must have sounded quite promising for any adolescent female Beatles fanatic and the words do give you a genuinely warm feeling inside. But all the audience’s hopes are devastated by lines three and four. The speaker claims he had imagined being in love with the receiver (“you”) many times before. This can only mean that the addresser is not in love with the listener whatsoever, because if he were he would not have to imagine being in love, but would feel so straight from his heart. For the speaker, love is not the issue; rather, he seems to be driven by a sexual desire towards the female “you” in the lyric. When the speaker tells the listener to “imagine I’m in love with you”, it is easy for the listener to do so. All she has to do is visualise the speaker as being madly in love with her. In the addressee’s mind, they would make a perfect match. From the speaker’s point of view, the matter seems to turn out more complicated. The words “I’ve imagined I’m in love with you” definitely reveal the fact that he is not enamoured of the “you” he addresses. Obviously, there is no need to imagine that you

37 are in love with a character when you actually are in love with this character. At closer reading, the whole lyric sounds more like a threat than a love song. Lines like, “So I’m telling you my friend / That I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end / Yes I will, I’ll get you in the end / Oh yeah, oh yeah”, sound intimidating and hint at some kind of obsession as far as the speaker is concerned. He is absolutely focused on the “you” and does seem to have only one ambition in his life, and that is to “get” the addressee. The speaking voice confirms this assumption with lines like, “I think about you night and day / I need you and it’s true / When I think about you I can say / I’m never, never, never, never blue”. I must admit that these words do not give the impression of meaning to harm or threaten anybody per se, but when you regard the words within the context of the addresser not being in love with the addressee, the lyrics of “I’ll get you” become irritating. The speaker continues “Well there’s gonna be a time / When I’m gonna change your mind / So you might as well resign yourself to me, oh yeah”. The female “you” in the lyric seems to be given no alternative by the male speaker but to accept the fact that he will win in the end. Furthermore, he appears to lack any interest in what his “victim” feels about the whole situation. When interpreted in this extreme manner, the lyrics of “I’ll get you” give the impression of resonating with the thoughts and ideas of a criminal mind, or even a rapist. The final lines of the song complete the picture of the speaking voice and represent a rather unstable and disrupted mind, showing the uncertainty he feels about his own emotions. He admits that, “It’s not like me to pretend / But I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end / Yes I will, I’ll get you in the end / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Woah yeah!”. The words “It’s not like me to pretend” seem to reveal that the addresser wants the “real thing”—in this context, the addressee. He seems to have had enough of imagining things and is determined to “get” the girl of his desire. Of course, the word “get” leaves room for interpretation. After all, what precisely does this “get” mean? It could mean that the speaking voice wants to “get” the “you” in the lyrics as his girlfriend, aiming to marry her in the end. However, this assumption seems rather unlikely to me when we consider the fact that his love for the addressee is nonexistent. To me, the “get” simply means having intercourse with the girl. This would shift our speaker away from the level of fantasy, and onto the level of physical pleasure.

38 6. The Beatles enter the Domestic Sphere

The Beatles’ second LP, With The Beatles, starts off with five compositions by either Lennon and McCartney or George Harrison. It is interesting to note that the Beatles appear to confirm the 1950s’ rock and roll lyrics clichés, while in the same breath partly try to adapt them to their own ideas of a good rock and roll lyric. As in the Beatles’ predecessors’ lyrics, the concept of home seems to play an important role in With The Beatles. To begin, let us have a closer look at the song “”. The song begins with the words, “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you / Tomorrow I’ll miss you / Remember I’ll always be true / And then while I’m away / I’ll write home ev’ry day / And I’ll send all my loving to you”. Even in this short first verse, we can detect several 1950s’ traditions of rock and roll lyricism within the Beatles’ artwork. The lyrics are based on a personal I-You level, which makes it easier for the recipient to identify with the “you” in the text. What is also of great importance is the suggestion of physical contact between the speaker and the receiver. In the case of “All My Loving”, this is done in line one, in the form of kissing. Line two suggests a separation of some sort between addresser and addressee, which is immediately followed by the promise to “always be true”. This stands very much in the tradition of eternal faithfulness and loyalty towards the partner, and it strongly mirrors the idea of as the basic prerequisite for a boy and a girl in order to take part in a socially accepted relationship. The next traditionally accepted, but rather conservative, cliché follows in lines four and five, where the story’s male character is away, probably in order to do his job as the family’s breadwinner, while his good wife sits at home and awaits his letters to arrive day after day. Thus, what we have got here is an American of a family, or rather a relationship between two people, with the most important ideas and traditions of a bourgeois lifestyle fulfilled. One further feature of American rock and roll lyricism can be found in the song “” by Lennon and McCartney. Here, I am referring to the “old” tradition of infantilising women by calling them baby, child or little girl and the like. The Beatles, so far, had never done this before, but with “Little Child”, they seem to prostrate before their American song-writing- heroes and incorporate yet another of their rules. Also in the lyrics of “Little Child”, we encounter the usage of dance to convince the girl of desire to “take a chance with me”. The song’s lines run, “Little child, little child / Little child, won’t you dance with me / I’m and lonely / Baby take a chance with me / If you want someone to make you feel so fine / Then we’ll have some fun / When you’re mine, all mine / So come on, come on, come on”. Like in “I Saw Her Standing There”, the speaker of “Little Child” tries to win a girl’s heart

39 via the act of dancing. One important difference, though, is that “Little Child” works on a much more intimate level in terms of speaker-receiver approach, as the listener finds him or rather herself in an “I-You” situation, as opposed to an “I-She” situation in “I Saw Her Standing There”. The role of the woman in “Little Child” is a traditionally passive one, which is confirmed by the addresser’s persuasively repeated phrase, “We’ll have some fun / When you’re mine, all mine / So come on, come on, come on”. What shines through these lines might be the speaker’s intention to convince the receiving “you” to surrender herself to him in a carnal way, and that the act of dancing itself is of minor importance anyway. Amplified through the use of “baby” and “little child” as terms to describe the girl or woman in the text, the risk of the woman being regarded as a mere naïve object of sexual desire is high. The result is the obvious apparition of a male approach towards women which can be described as machismo in full swing. However, as I mentioned earlier, the Beatles played with the traditional roles of men and women in their lyrics with caution, and although the words to their song “All I’ve Got To Do” – which I will have a closer look at next – apparently start off as yet another celebration of manhood, an interesting twist can be seen with the of the lyrics’ lines. The song’s lyrics revolve around a friendship or a relationship of some kind between a man and a woman, and it comes as no surprise that the conversation between addresser and addressee takes place on an “I-You” level. The words are “Whenever I want you around, yeah / All I gotta do / Is call you on the phone / And you’ll come running home / Yeah, that’s all I gotta do”. The lyrics of “All I’ve Got To Do” so far imply an unreserved devotion to the male speaker by the female character. The suggested “I click my fingers, you come running”-attitude of the sender smacks of machismo in a profound way. However, upon closer examination of the use of the traditional concept of home, we realise that it is, in fact, the woman “running home” to the male speaker. This means that, although the addresser acts very much from an allegedly superior position compared to his female counterpart, it is he, not she, who is waiting at home for the woman’s arrival. This is indicative of the Beatles’ cautious, early play with the traditional roles and clichés of sex and gender in society. For the first time within the lyrical art of the Beatles, as the 1960s unfolded, we encounter a reversal of gender roles, away from the rigidly structured ideas of earlier days, towards a more liberal and free way of thinking. Still, the lyrics of “All I’ve Got To Do” continue in the predominantly assertive tone which we have come across in the first verse “And when I, I want to kiss you, yeah / All I gotta do / Is whisper in your ear / The words you like to hear / And I’ll be kissing you”. Thus far, we have been confronted with a male attitude which quite bluntly seems to say “my wish is your

40 command”, but when the speaker of “All I’ve Got To Do” continues his lyrical journey, the listener will be faced with a pleasant surprise. Let us therefore examine the chorus of the song, which runs, “And the same goes for me / Whenever you want me at all / I’ll be there, yes I will, whenever you call / You just gotta call on me, yeah / You just gotta call on me”. After two verses in which the speaker has taken on the role of a dominant, almost patriarchal figure, the chorus of the song reverses this situation by equally granting the addresser’s rights to the addressee, thus providing a balance between both sexes. As a third example which alludes to the concept of home, I would like to mention the opening title of the Beatles’ second album, With The Beatles, and that is “It Won’t Be Long”. Like in the lyrics of “All I’ve Got To Do”, it is the suggestion of an interchange of roles between man and woman when it comes to home which catches the reader’s eye. It is the male speaker who awaits the arrival of the “you” in the lyrics, and this phenomenon is visible in the lines “Now you’re coming, you’re coming on home / I’ll be good like I know I should / You’re coming home, you’re coming home”. It is interesting to observe that, apparently, the importance of home for the Beatles as lyricists is emphasised quite strongly within the first three tracks of their second album-release. It is even noticeable in the choice of their cover-versions on the LP. Here, I am referring to such songs as “Please Mr. Postman” by Dobbin/Garrett/Garman/Brianbert, in which it says “There must be some word today / From my girlfriend so far away / Please mister postman look and see / If there’s a letter, a letter for me / I been standing here waiting mister postman / So patiently / For just a card or just a letter / Saying she’s returning home to me”. In “Please Mr. Postman”, it is once again the male speaker who is at home, “waiting patiently” for some signs of life from his girlfriend who is away. Why the Beatles decided to accentuate the significance of home on their second album release, one can only speculate. One possible reason could be the fact that with the “arrival” of and the Beatles’ densely packed schedule of performances and TV appearances of all sorts, they may have started appreciating the quietness and security home could provide for them. Late 1963 was also the beginning of John, Paul, George’s and Ringo’s first foreign tours outside the realms of British amenities and familiarity, which could have accounted (maybe only in a subconscious way) for their foregrounding of home in some of their lyric work. Still, all of the Beatles’ own lyrics maintain the attempt to speak directly to their audience about topics with which they could see their audience being concerned. And, as the average Beatles fanatics were teenage kids (mainly girls) and adolescent girls and boys who might have just discovered the excitement of a first infatuation, or even the bodily pleasures a

41 relationship (and not only a relationship) can bring about, the topic of love together with the topic of relationships between boys and girls was omnipresent in the Beatles’ early lyrics. The presentation of physical contact between two people, or rather addresser and addressee, in the lyrics of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison is predominantly restricted to “holding”, “kissing” or “dancing” on the album With The Beatles. “Kissing” of the “you” in the lyrics occurs in the songs “All I’ve Got To Do” and “All My Loving”. “Dancing” is part of the topic in the lyrics of “Little Child”, and “holding” can be encountered in “Hold Me Tight”. But unlike Please Please Me, With The Beatles contains explicit allusions to direct sexual contact. The speaker of “I Wanna Be Your Man” quite bluntly bursts out the words “I wanna be your lover baby” as line one of the lyrics to the song and six lines later continues, “Love you like / Like no other can”. With these words, the male speaker depicts himself as an extraordinary, if not unique, character in terms of his alleged abilities to love his “baby”. Now, whether the speaker really talks about bodily love can only be answered by finding out whether or not it would be in any way possible for him to verify the statement “Love you like no other baby / Like no other can”. On a spiritual level, I do not think that it is possible to verify the statement. Love as a concept is not tangible and beyond measurement; therefore, there is no way to determine whether or not it is true that our speaker should love the “you” in the lyrics “like no other can”. It is impossible to compare two people’s idea about how or how much they “can” love somebody else. On the other hand, on a physical level, it seems possible to verify our speaker’s words. As the bodily ability to love somebody is concrete, and thus measurable and comparable, it would be possible to prove the addresser’s exclamation right or wrong. However meaningful such doings seem to appear is a separate matter; however they prove evident my assertion that the speaker of “I Wanna Be Your Man” definitely talks about carnal love, albeit with a probable exaggerated opinion of himself. In the lyrics of “Hold Me Tight” the addressee is told to “Hold me tight / Let me go on loving you / Tonight, tonight / Making love to only you”. In this case, too, the speaker is quite open about his intention to have intercourse with the receiving character, which I would say is quite astonishing when you think of the relative prudery which was still prevalent in society in the earlier years of the 1960s. Apart from the common topics of love and relationships and music and dancing, the Beatles introduced another theme via a by Radford and Cordy on With The Beatles. The song’s title already reveals the topic. The track is called “Money (That’s What I Want)” and only marginally deals with the subject of teenage love. The lyrics start “The best things in life are free”, which can be interpreted as a positively affirmative truth about life. Only, the

42 speaker continues with, “But you can keep them for the birds and bees”, which counteracts the sentence perceived before and makes the speaker appear to be frustrated. He concludes the first verse with the words “Now gimme money (That’s what I want) / That’s what I want (That’s what I want) / That’s what I want, ye-ye-yeah / That’s what I want”, and by doing so, he makes known to the listener what is of vital importance in the speaker’s world, which is to get money. The lyrics of this song contravene all the Beatles’ earlier songs about adolescent love and relationships by displaying a negatively sober attitude towards relationships between men and women. This is clearly demonstrated in verse two, which says “Your lovin’ give me a thrill / But your lovin’ don’t pay my bill / Now gimme money (That’s what I want)”. The speaker’s perspective is a very matter-of-fact, grown-up one, without the idealising adolescent views about relationships. The importance of money is put before the importance of love. But “Money (That’s What I Want)”, with its focus on the speaker’s own capitalistically driven behaviour, is an exception in the Beatles’ early repertoire, and stands in gross contradiction to the McCartney lyrics of “Can’t Buy Me Love”, which can be found on the Beatles’ next but one single release, as well as on their next LP release A Hard Day’s Night. Before I examine the lyrics of A Hard Day’s Night, however, I will have a brief look at the Beatles’ last single release from 1963, called “I Want To Hold Your Hand/This Boy”. “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, as the title already reveals, revolves around the topic of holding hands on a personal “I-You” level between addresser and addressee. It is evident that the lyrics cater for teenage girls (the Beatles’ main following), for whom “hand holding and kissing was the ultimate in physical expression. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ certainly wasn’t an indication of their [the Beatles] own sexual reticence”. (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 42) Incidentally, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was the Beatles’ break-through song in America, as it hit the Number one spot of the American charts in early 1964. And, very much like Great Britain, America was full of teenage girls who adored the Beatles’ sound and responded wholeheartedly to their lyrics, which more often than not met with the teenagers’ needs. The single’s B-side “This Boy”, in contrast to the preferential “I-You” perspective between speaker and audience, works on a more remote sounding level whereby the “I” is replaced by a third person: “this boy”. The addresser portrays himself here as some broken-hearted character who has lost his love to “that boy”. The lyrics of “This Boy” can be understood as a warning to the speaker’s rival, “That boy took my love away / Oh he’ll regret it some day”, as well as to his ex-lover (the “you” in the text) by stating “That boy isn’t good for you”, and “That boy won’t be happy / Till he’s seen you cry”. The alleged negative attributes of the speaker’s enemy are brought out even better by the juxtaposition of his own positive

43 characteristics, which he does in alternating intervals. He emphasizes, “Oh, and this boy would be happy / Just to love you”, or “This boy wouldn’t mind the pain / Would always feel the same / If this boy gets you back again”. The lyrics nicely illustrate male behaviour when it comes to courting females: Display your own qualities and try to decry your rival. The ’s “Beatle-year” of 1964 started with the release of two singles, which were both included on the album A Hard Day’s Night. The LP was put out as the soundtrack to John, Paul, George and Ringo’s first film of the same name. A Hard Day’s Night was the first Beatles album which exclusively consisted of Lennon/McCartney originals with no cover versions of any of their American heroes to be found on it. Each and every song on A Hard Day’s Night is concerned with the topic of love and friendship, and even though “kissing”, “holding” and the traditional views about “home” and “marriage” seem to prevail, at times, a touch of insecurity is palpable. The title-song “A Hard Day’s Night” finds itself to be full of clichés and traditionally allocated gender roles. Moreover, it seems to reflect the Beatles’ tensely packed daily schedules and the hectic lifestyle they found themselves in, seemingly working twenty-four hours a day, not knowing whether it is day or night-time. The phrase “A Hard Day’s Night” emerged from one of the famous “malapropisms” created by Ringo Starr “who said in 1964: I came up with the phrase ‘a hard day’s night’. It just came out: We went to do a job and we worked all day and then we happened to work all night. I came out, still thinking it was day and said ‘It’s been a hard day…looked around, saw that it was dark and added…’s night.’” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 46) “A Hard Day’s Night”, as we have encountered several times before in the Beatles’ lyrics, once again displays a rigidly followed stereotypical thought-pattern concerning man and woman and their roles in society. The “I”, in the form of a male speaker, addresses a “you”, which immediately is pushed to play the part of the good housewife as the lyrics build up. “It’s been a hard day’s night / And I’ve been working like a dog / It’s been a hard day’s night / I should be sleeping like a log” characterises an excessively hard working man who knows he should rest, but is still out to earn his daily (nightly) bread. It almost seems some unknown power forces him to work that hard. The lyrics continue, “But to you / I find the things that you do / Will make me feel alright”. The female audience “you” finds itself in a static, defensive position at home, in contrast to the moving character of the working male. With “the things that you do”, the female character slips into the part of an active woman, but only in connection with a sexual context. However, there is also innocent physical contact mentioned between speaker and audience in the lines “When I’m home / Everything seems to be right / When I’m home /

44 Feeling you holding me tight, tight”, plus we have the phenomenon that “home” and “you” are seen as an inseparable entity. The cliché of the dominant breadwinner and his domestic wife seems to reach a pinnacle in the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night”. Let us examine, however, how the song’s lyrics carry on in the second verse: “You know I work all day / To get you money / To buy you things / And it’s worth it just to hear you say / You’re gonna give me everything”. These lines reveal an interdependency between man and woman. The male speaker brings to light the reason why he actually works like a dog, and that is to satisfy the “you”’s requirements of money and things. As a “countertrade” the addressee is going to give him all that he asks for. The two protagonists, “I” and “you”, seem to live in a symbiotic relationship. The speaker’s only possibility to keep his lover is to provide her with worldly goods and money, whereas the addressee’s “job”, in order to get all the wealth from him, appears to be to satisfy his carnal needs. When we regard the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night” in their most reduced and rudimentary form, what remains are the structures of a relationship between a prostitute and her customer. I might over-interpret the meaning of the words, but I think the Beatles wanted to denounce the superficiality of certain society circles, where happiness and love are often mistaken for wealth and sex. Another song which touches on the subject of money and love on A Hard Day’s Night is “Can’t Buy Me Love”. The lyrics of the track feature a male speaker and a receiving “you” and work within three levels of relationships. The first level depicts an addresser who treats the addressee as a mere friend, which might symbolise a love or relationship that is evaluated only by the addresser’s affluence and the lover’s greed. The words of verse one are “I’ll buy you a diamond ring my friend / If it makes you feel alright / I’ll get you anything my friend / If it makes you feel alright / ‘Cause I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love”. A very rich speaker who can get “you” anything is unable to love the “you” in the lyrics, because he cannot be sure whether the “you” only wants him for his money. On the second level, presented in the second verse, a man is summarised who still tries to win his love’s heart by giving her all he has to give, even if it is not a lot. But can the speaker be sure this time if he is wanted for his own sake? I do not think so, as he still focuses too much on his own monetary possessions as the “attractant”. The second verse runs, “I’ll give you all I got to give / If you say you love me too / I may not have a lot to give / I’ll give to you / ‘Cause I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love”. The third verse of “Can’t Buy Me Love” pictures the speaker’s ideal notion of a loving relationship. It is a relationship without money and wealth as a precondition to become successful, be it only on the surface. Now, this time sender and receiver find themselves on equal terms, with a shared

45 attitude towards the values which seem right for them when it comes to the topic of love. “Say you don’t need no diamond ring / And I’ll be satisfied / Tell me that you want the kind of thing / That money just can’t buy / ‘Cause I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love”. However positive the final lines of “Can’t Buy Me Love” might be, it is a fact that Lennon and McCartney at times start drifting away from the predominant romantic view about love, which dominated their first two albums and their single releases so far. Paul McCartney remembered the Beatles’ first visit to Miami Beach, Florida where they were lent cars by MG Motors for publicity reasons, and were able to relax in some private villa for a few days. “I remember meeting this rather nice girl and taking her out for dinner in this MG in the cool Florida night, palm trees swaying. You kidding? A Liverpool boy with this tanned beauty in my MG going out to dinner. It should have been ‘Can Buy Me Love’, actually.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 162) In 1964, the Beatles have already come to realise that money and fame in actual fact are able to open one or the other door which would remain locked for “mere mortals”. Of course there still are lyrics generated with a plain “I love you” as their message, but the structures behind most of their lyrics and love-lyrics start becoming more complex and intricate in shape. Additionally, the “you” in the lyrics is no longer exclusively celebrated as the speaker’s absolute love; rather, at times, it seems to be regarded in more diverse ways. Moreover, the Beatles cautiously start making use of the more distanced sounding “I-Her”, instead of the common “I-You” level, which so far made it easy for the devoted female fan to identify with the speaker’s beloved character. It is barely noticeable, but physical contact suggested between addresser and addressee in the form of kissing and holding and so forth also starts dwindling with the release of A Hard Day’s Night. This phenomenon will be more easily detectable in the Beatles’ record releases following A Hard Day’s Night. For now, let us have a quick look at the lyrics of the song “”. As the title already reveals, “And I Love Her” is a love song to a third-person “her”, as opposed to the more direct and intimate sounding “you”. It is a ballad written by Paul McCartney as a declaration of love to his new girlfriend, the very attractive and successful actress . “Paul has since said that it wasn’t written with anyone in mind but it’s hard to believe that in his first flush of love with Jane Asher he was writing such tender songs to an imaginary girl” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 49) The speaker of the words of “And I Love Her” begins his ode by declaring his love to an anonymous third-person “her” by stating “I give her all my love / That’s all I do / And if you saw my love / You’d love her too / I love her”. The you in this first verse of the song is a

46 general “you”. It could be anybody, with the exception of female “yous”5. Therefore, a female teenage fan, waiting for a love song directed to the “you” she could identify with, would be utterly disappointed by hearing the speaker (McCartney) declare his love to some other girl. The second verse continues, “She gives me everything / And tenderly / The kiss my lover brings / She brings to me / And I love her”. The second verse only amplifies what was said about “her” by calling her “my lover” in line three. In the middle-eight, the level of communication suddenly drops from a third-person to a first-person conversation in line four: “A love like ours / Could never die / as long as I / Have you near me”. And all of a sudden it is again possible for any female fan to identify with the one the addresser claims to love. Verse three and its repetition, verse five, on the other hand, bring back the communication level to its starting point, namely a third-person addressing. “Bright are the stars that shine / Dark is the sky / I know this love of mine / Will never die / And I love her”. “And I Love Her” is a good example which displays the writer’s uncertainty concerning the level of communication between addresser and addressee. He jumps from third-person addressing to first-person addressing for no explicable reason other than the speaker’s, or should I say performer’s, newly opened possibility to communicate at eye-level with the one girl he sings this song to. But this consideration can only be true for Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher, for the composer and his muse, side by side. I personally think it is quite courageous or risky to write a love song in third-person style to someone you adore. But perhaps McCartney never did. First of all, the line “Have you near me” is included in the lyrics of “And I Love Her”, and secondly McCartney denies the idea of having had any one special person in mind while he wrote the lyrics. Still, it is a song taken from an early transitional period of the Beatles’ lyrical artwork. Another song which shows a certain deviation from the Beatles’ lyrical constructions of a straight-forward and romantic view about love between boys and girls appears to be “”, written mainly by John Lennon. The words of “If I Fell” demonstrate a subliminal insecurity on the part of the speaker and show evidence of a “going-beyond” the rock and roll lyrics’ sample of viewing physical contact as the addresser’s main request in a love relationship. The lyrics start “If I fell in love with you / Would you promise to be true / And help me understand / ‘Cause I’ve been in love before / And I know that love was more / Than just holding hands”. With these lines, the Beatles seem to deliberately distance themselves from songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “Hold Me Tight”. The speaker found out that there was more to love than just holding each other’s hand. And although the actual

5 This is not true if we assume that the female “you” referred to is homosexually oriented. 47 words “holding hands” are used in the song’s lyrics and do remind the audience of physical contact, the context of the track proposes an altered understanding. It is suggested that, in the long run, the mere pleasures of bodily contact between two lovers are just not enough to keep a relationship interesting. I read this as a sign that the Beatles’ lyrical artwork is drifting more and more away from the usual “boy holds/kisses/dances with girl” image prevalent in many of their previous songs. Much like in “There Is A Place”, where an escape route is offered for the individual, “If I Fell” accentuates the imperative necessity of a spiritual kinship between two people if they want to enter a love relationship. Moreover, the speaker shows signs of insecurities and an outspoken helplessness in his words. He comes across a very cautious, almost defensive, character as he addresses the listener. He continues, “If I give my heart to you / I must be sure / From the very start / That you would love me more than her”. The sending voice demands a stronger love towards him from the “you” than his other woman was or is able to give. For the listener, it is not clear what the role of the second woman in the lyrics is. Only later, when the speaker states, “So I hope you see that I / Would love to love you / And that she will cry / When she learns we are two”, does it become evident that obviously the “she” in the lyrics must be the addresser’s current girlfriend or wife, which he is willing to leave for the listener, if he gets a reassuring guarantee of absolute devotion from her. Still, the speaker’s questions and pleas towards the listener are all hypothetical questions and pleas, using a subjunctive construction. And it is the use of the conditional in “If I Fell”, which proves a high degree of insecurity and hesitation in the speaker’s mind. He tries to avoid an active decision on his part by telling the “you” in the lyrics that he would be hers, if she directed all her devotion in his direction. The speaker of “If I Fell” kind of suggests a “battle of love” between two female characters, and whoever is able to prove that she loves him more than does her “enemy” will be “allowed” to become (or remain) our speaker’s lover. Apart from physical contact, it seems that communication and discussion between lovers has become a more prominent topic in the Beatles’ lyrics on A Hard Day’s Night. As examples, I would like to mention “I Should Have Known Better”, and its lines “That when I tell you that I love you, oh / You’re gonna say you love me too / And when I ask you to be mine / You’re gonna say you love me too”. Then there is “Tell Me Why”, with a title which already hints at communication, and is confirmed by lines like “Tell me why you cried / And why you lied to me”. By using these words, it seems the Beatles have outgrown the lyrical representation of adolescent first steps of getting to know each other and falling in love with a character from the opposite sex at the very beginning of a relationship. The lyrics represent fully grown

48 relationships worth fighting for. “If there’s something I have said or done / Tell me what and I’ll apologise” from “Tell Me Why” is one further piece of evidence which proves the Beatles’ emphasis on dialogue. Also in “Things We Said Today” there is proof in the words “You say you will love me / If I have to go”, or “Me I’m just the lucky kind / Love to hear you say that love is luck”. “Things We Said Today” also points out that not only direct, immediate communication between partners is important, but also that reflection plays a vital role in a relationship. It is exemplified with “Someday when we’re dreaming / Deep in love, not a lot to say / Then we will remember / Things we said today”. One song on A Hard Day’s Night which mixes the need to communicate with an exaggerated amount of seemingly unfounded jealousy is “You Can’t Do That”, which runs “I got something to say that might cause you pain / If I catch you talking to that boy again / I’m gonna let you down / And leave you flat / Because I told you before / Oh, you can’t do that”. The song’s lyrics are based on an intimate “I-You” discourse between addresser and addressee, whereby it is the speaker who expresses discontent over his woman’s behaviour. The lyrics continue “Well it’s the second time I’ve caught you talking to him / Do I have to tell you one more time I think it’s a sin / I think I’ll let you down”. “You Can’t Do That” conveys a male attitude towards women which only exhibits a severe insecurity and lack of strength towards the “you”. An extremely self-conscious macho-type character is reflected in the words of “You Can’t Do That”. An ancient-seeming tradition of women having no freedom or right of self-determination shines through these words. Upon closer inspection, the song displays a character who is not willing to discuss apparent problems, other than from a very one-sided point of view. The female “you” in the text is being lyrically repressed in her freedom to talk to other male characters, other than her own partner. And if she does talk to somebody else, the speaker thinks about letting her down. He must be very unsure of her love and additionally seems to possess no other means of communication than telling-off and threatening his partner. The female audience find themselves in a situation almost unknown to them so far in a Beatles lyric. Because, other than being told that “I love you” or “Hold me tight”, the “you” is depicted as the culprit who has done wrong and did not obey her master’s orders. “When I Get Home”, apart from the depiction of a conservatively traditional concept of women and “home”, is a song which at first sight also seems to confirm the Beatles’ stronger concentration on the topic of communication on A Hard Day’s Night. It starts “ Whoa-ho I, whoa-ho I / I got a whole lot of things to tell her / When I get home / Come on, out of my way / ‘Cause I’m gonna see my baby today / I got a whole lot of things I’ve gotta say / To her”.

49 The speaker claims to have to talk to his “baby” when he gets home and seems quite ecstatic about getting home to her as soon as possible. That was verse one. Verse two also includes the words “I’ve got a whole lot of things to tell her”, plus “Come on, if you please / I’ve got no time for trivialities / I’ve got a girl that’s waiting home for me tonight”. So, from verse one’s “today”, to verse two’s “tonight”, there is a palpable tendency away from mere talk, towards something more intimate. In addition, the listener asks him or herself what the trivialities the speaker has no time for could be. Could it be he has no time for discourse? The middle-eight of “When I Get Home” contain a very revealing lyric: “When I’m getting home tonight / I’m gonna hold her tight / I’m gonna love her till the cows come home”. Once imagined how our speaker is going to act or react to his “coming home”, there are no more traces of a need of verbal communication observable, but a mere appetite for a sexual encounter with his “girl who’s waiting home for me tonight”. “When I Get Home” develops from an ostensible lyric about the importance of an efficient talk to a lyric which emphasises carnal pleasures as the non plus ultra in interpersonal relationships. I Feel Fine/She’s A Woman can be described as a single-release with a positive overall feel to it. Both lyrics have to do with a loving relationship between the songs’ speakers and their addressees, confirming how happy they are to have each other. On the surface, “I Feel Fine” does not offer a lot of innovation (apart from the feedback intro, which was used for the first time on vinyl), but the lyrics provide the listener with the idea of equality between man and woman when it comes to direct forms of address. The first verse starts with an infantilising “baby” on the part of the speaker, “Baby’s good to me, you know / She’s happy as can be, you know / She said so / I’m in love with her and I feel fine”. The chorus of “I Feel Fine” continues the belittlement of women and runs “I’m so glad that she’s my little girl / She’s so glad, she’s telling all the world”. The speaker expresses delight that she is his, and obviously his “little girl” feels equally happy so that she has to tell everybody about it. Or does she? Because when we follow the lyrics after the first chorus into the third verse it becomes clear that what “she’s telling all the world” is, “That her baby buys her things, you know / He buys her diamond rings, you know / She said so / She’s in love with me and I feel fine”. By uttering these lines it becomes clear that in “I Feel Fine” both man and woman call each other by the term “baby”, which gives the impression of some sort of equality between both sexes. Simultaneously, it becomes evident that the “she” in the lyrics is most impressed with the financial security the speaker is able to offer her. And, unlike in “Can’t Buy Me Love”, the lyrics of “I Feel Fine” paint the picture of a woman who is in love with the speaker’s money rather than with his character. One could argue that “I Feel Fine” in actual fact describes a

50 shallow and superficial relationship between the speaker and the “she” as addressee. She likes him for his wealth and he does not seem to mind the situation. Both of them feel fine because they seem to know exactly where they stand with each other. Compared to “I Feel Fine”, the single’s B-side, “She’s A Woman”, sketches a contrarian picture of the female character talked about in the lyrics. A woman is described who does not evaluate a relationship in terms of how many “things” and “diamond rings” her lover buys for her. She brings the merits of love, truth and faithfulness, to the forefront, as does the lyric’s speaker. “She is happy just to hear me / Say that I will never leave her”, is a line taken from verse two, which confirms that for the speaker’s woman eternal love is of vital importance, not grounded in worldly goods. The lyrics of “She’s A Woman” start by claiming “My love don’t give me presents / I know that she’s no peasant / Only ever has to give me / Love forever and forever”. The role in which the speaker finds himself in is equal to the role of the loved-one he talks about. Both of them ask for nothing more than a loyal partner who is prepared to dedicate his or her love to his or her lover. It is interesting to note, though, that neither in the lyrics of “I Feel Fine” nor in the words of “She’s A Woman” does the direct “I- You” addressing between the addresser and the listener occur. This could indicate that the Beatles were starting to distance their lyrics’ speaker from the intimately direct “I-You” to a more remote sounding “I-her/she”, in order to put some fictitious space between addresser and listener. What is even more interesting is that on the single I Feel Fine/She’s A Woman no direct physical contact between addresser and addressee is included. I interpret this fact as yet another step towards a stronger detachment between the Beatles and their hundreds of thousands of female teenage fans all over the world. Some of the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney seem to become more mature, more serious, some might say more “grown-up” towards the end of 1964. Another novelty that begins to appear in texts formulated by the Beatles is the processing of drug experiences. “Processing” might be too strong a word in the case of “She’s A Woman” where it says “Turns me on when I get lonely” in verse one, to be understood as a reference to drug usage. In 1964, the Beatles’ newly discovered drug (after the use of together with amphetamines in their Hamburg days) was the soft drug marijuana, which undoubtedly influenced their way of thinking and thus their way of writing. However, in the interest of locating some more proof of a lyrical maturation, let us have a look at the Beatles’ next original album-release: Beatles For Sale.

51 7. The Beatles Step Out

Beatles For Sale is widely regarded as the Fab Four’s first album to show evidence of a most significant new influence in terms of lyrical artwork, and that is the Beatles’ meeting with singer- . Both McCartney and Lennon met Dylan for the first time during one of their American concert tours in August 1964 in New York. “They were drawn to Dylan because his words were just as important as his tunes. In writing what he felt rather than following any conventions, Dylan’s intensely personal style of expression contrasted starkly with the anodyne pop lyrics of the day.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 60) Ray Coleman in his book Lennon: The Definitive Biography writes: Dylan’s achievements then became Lennon’s goal, an attempt to marry the power of rock ’n’ roll to lyrics of some substantiality. The Dylan influence first manifested itself on the Beatles’ fourth album, Beatles For Sale. ’s6 sleeve notes announced that the album was “straightforward 1964 disc-making…there is little or nothing on the album which cannot be reproduced on stage!” Such jolliness disguised the intensity with which Lennon approached the album. Beatles For Sale displayed the bleaker side of the Lennon persona. “No Reply”, “I’m A Loser”, and “Baby’s In Black” formed a pretty bleak trilogy to open an album by the Fabs at the height of their power. (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 400)

But Dylan was not the only person who had a profound effect on Lennon’s work as lyricist. A second character who encouraged John to reveal more about his inner feelings in the song- texts of the Beatles was journalist Kenneth Allsop. Allsop worked for the and also had a job as an interviewer for the BBC’s news programme Tonight. It was he who, after having read John’s book , encouraged Lennon “not to hide his own feelings behind the usual banalities of the pop song. […] It was obvious to Allsop from reading In His Own Write that John had much more to give if he was prepared to open up to his deeper feelings”. (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 64) The album’s opening number, “No Reply”, depicts a desperate speaker who has just found out that his beloved “you” in the song’s lyrics had possibly been unfaithful to him. He feels the whole world is conspiring against him. “No Reply” arrives with the line “This happened once before / When I came to your door / No reply”, and develops in a narrative style, which could be attributed to the influence of Dylan. And, although John Lennon had been writing poetry and short stories for years, it was Dylan who encouraged him to use a more introspective way of writing for his song lyrics as well. Verse two runs “I tried to telephone / They said you were not home / That’s a lie / ‘Cause I know where you’ve been / I saw you walk in your door

6 Derek Taylor was a British journalist and long-serving press agent for the Beatles. 52 / I nearly died, I nearly died / ‘Cause you walked hand in hand / With another man in my place”. The lyrics present the speaker as a loner in a hopeless situation, with everybody obviously working against him. He is unable to communicate, is being lied to and has to watch his loved one disappear before him with another man. “They” as a term to describe an indefinite number of people is used to make the speaker appear even smaller and more solitary in his seemingly fruitless attempts to establish some sort of communication with the lyric’s addressee. In contrast to many of the Beatles’ earlier lyrics, the woman portrayed in “No Reply” finds herself in the dominating position and radiates strength, self-determination and sovereignty. What is also interesting is the fact that physical contact is still a topic in the Beatles’ lyrical artwork; only this time, it is not addresser and addressee who walk “hand in hand”, but addressee and some other man who do so. The lyrics of “No Reply” are not at all full with a positive energy when it comes to touching or physical contact in general, but the focus is placed on the pain physical contact can bring about for a third party. The second song within the “bleak trilogy to open an album”, as suggested by Ray Coleman, is “I’m A Loser”. The title alone suggests a lot about the state of mind in which Lennon found himself at the time. The lyrics feature a speaker who shouts out, “I’m a loser / I’m a loser / And I’m not what I appear to be” as a seemingly irrevocable and confessional statement at the beginning of the song’s lyric. This raises a question for the audience. Why would someone like John Lennon of the Beatles, who is young, successful and adored by so many people feel so desperately insecure, going so far as to call himself a loser? It is verse one which seems to unravel the mystery when our speaker continues with the lines “Of all the love I have won or have lost / There is one love I should never have crossed / She was a girl in a million, my friend / I should have known she would win in the end”. The audience experience a “light bulb moment” while hearing the first verse’s illuminating words. The speaker sings about a love he has lost, and that is the reason for calling himself a loser. In the listener’s mind, the addresser does not consider himself a loser in life, just a loser in love, which was no novelty in the Beatles’ lyrics. Just think of songs like “Misery” from the Beatles’ Please Please Me album. But “I’m A Loser” seems to let the author of its lyrics appear more transparent than ever, which in actual fact is a novelty. This is clearly displayed in lines like, “Although I laugh and I act like a clown / Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown / My tears are falling like rain from the sky / Is it for her or myself that I cry”. It is a line full of sadness and discontentedness which comes across as a truly autobiographical piece of work on the part of Lennon. A new era, which Lennon called his “fat Elvis period”, was heralded with the author’s newly found self-reflective way of writing, displaying an often painful honesty which

53 could be labelled “confessional self-consciousness”. Still, it is the topic of love which Lennon uses as a metaphor to wrap his true feelings. Another interesting point is that the “you” in the lyrics of “I’m A Loser”, in a very Dylanesque way, is referred to as “my friend”, which indicates that the speaker is communicating with a man rather than with a female character. My suspicion is confirmed by the words of verse three, where a seemingly desperate addresser tells his friend, “What have I done to deserve such a fate / I realise I have left it too late / And so it’s true pride comes before a fall / I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all”. It seems as if the speaker sends out “I’m A Loser” as a warning from one friend to another not to make the same mistakes he has made. The addresser speaks from personal experience and tries to prevent his friend from suffering the same defeat he did. In order to complete the “bleak Lennon-trilogy” with which the Beatles started the album Beatles For Sale, I will now concentrate on the lyrical output of “Baby’s In Black”, song number three on the LP. The lyrics offer yet another situation in which the speaker talks to some unidentified third party about the loss of some beloved female character. The girl in the text is referred to as “baby”, but other than the naïvely positive and adolescent appearing “babies” used in 1950s’ and early 1960s’ rock and roll lyrics, “Baby’s In Black” paints a sombre, funeral-like picture. The adoption of dark colours and the fact that the song is full of unanswered questions leaves the listener behind with the impression of a desperate speaker, together with an even more desperate lyrical “baby”. With this in mind, I am not quite convinced that Steve Turner in his book A Hard Day’s Write is right about “Baby’s In Black” when he claims, “A simple song with a simple story. Boy loves girl, girl loves other boy, other boy doesn’t love girl. Girl feels blue and dresses in black”. (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 68) Let us now examine the song’s lyrics more closely. “Oh dear what can I do? / Baby’s in black and I’m feeling blue / Tell me, oh what can I do?”, depicts an addresser who seems to have more questions than answers, in a sad and lovesick state of mind. The speaker continues, “She thinks of him / And so she dresses in black / And though he’ll never come back / She’s dressed in black”. The “she dresses in black” in combination with “he’ll never come back”, is strongly redolent of a widow who grieves for her deceased husband on the day of his funeral. In addition, she can only think of him and does not seem to even have a theoretical possibility to meet her loved one. If the black dress is an indication of death, it seems to me Lennon thinks of his dear friend, the late Stuart Sutcliffe and his fiancé, the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr, via the speaker of “Baby’s In Black”. Stuart died of a brain haemorrhage in April 1962. The sudden death of Lennon’s art school friend and Beatles bassist during their

54 Hamburg years was a tremendous shock for John, equal to the shock he felt when his beloved mother died in a road accident a few years earlier. John never got over the tragedy of Stuart’s death but was now beginning to let his inner thoughts and feelings shine through his lyrical artwork within the Beatles. The word “though” in the lyrics suggest that Astrid will dress in black for the rest of her life because of Stuart’s death. Although she knows that he will never come back and it does not help the situation she dresses in black, because she feels as though she is attending Stuart’s funeral every single day she has to live without him. Lennon uses a “she” in his lyrics to express his own feelings about Sutcliffe’s death, I think. The “she” might be John’s inner self, which is slowly brought to the surface in order to be able to start dealing with and work through certain difficult blows of fate he had to face in his life thus far. Beatles For Sale is a record which shows the Beatles at the outset of a transitional period in their lives as lyricists. There are Lennon’s confessional lyrics, other lyrics which cater to the needs of the Beatles’ teenage female fans, and still others which focus on their own rock and roll roots, either as cover versions or written by the Beatles trying to adapt their own lyrical style to 1950s’ American rock and roll attitudes. One example of an original Lennon/McCartney composition on Beatles For Sale which reflects a certain macho-approach towards women might be “Every Little Thing”. The song’s words present a woman whose sole task is described as serving her man, without even considering her own needs. The composition’s refrain runs “Every little thing she does / She does for me, yeah / And you know the things she does / She does for me, ooooh”. Paul McCartney (main contributor to “Every Little Thing” remembers: “[…] it was something I thought was quite good but it became an album filler rather than the great almighty single. It didn’t have quite what was required”. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 174) “” is a good example which demonstrates that the Beatles still thought of the needs of their Beatlemaniacs and were still able to provide them with love and agitating physical contact between addresser and addressee on an intimate “I-You” level. The speaker slips into the role of an applicant for love and hopes that his pleas will be answered in the affirmative. “Ooh I need your love babe / Guess you know it’s true / Hope you need my love babe / Just like I need you / Hold me, love me, hold me, love me / Ain’t got nothing but love babe / Eight days a week”. The lyrics are written in an adolescent, naively romantic manner in order to be accepted by the young Beatles’ fans as a plea for love, sent out by the speaker directly to their open hearts. And this is done in an exuberant way. In order to create emphasis on the overwhelming amount of love the speaker has to give, he makes use of a figure of speech; he uses a hyperbole (exaggeration). A week is a construct which consists of seven

55 days, and in order to express the addresser’s unspeakably great amount of love he has to give he takes the hyperbole to such great lengths as to suggest a complete impossibility, “Eight Days A Week”. This resulting figure of speech is called an adynaton. In principle, it is not possible to fit in eight days within a week, but all is fair in love and war, so why not use an adynaton as an amplifying medium. The girl or woman referred to in the lyrics is addressed as “babe”, following the “snot nosed” male rock and roll traditions of 1950s’ America. Also the romantic idea of eternal love – inevitably resulting in marriage – is brought to light in verse two, “Love you every day girl / / One thing I can say girl / Love you all the time”. Love between addresser and addressee is laid out as an immortal entity, using “every day”, “always” and “all the time” in rapid succession. Beatles For Sale includes six cover versions of 1950s’ rock and roll songs by people like Leiber/Stoller, or , most of them in the well known “I love you, baby” style of its time. The reason for the use of the unusually high number of cover versions on Beatles For Sale, following the Beatles’ release of A Hard Day’s Night which included no covers, is unclear. There are two possible explanations. One could be that the Beatles, due to an overload of TV appearances, radio broadcasts, concerts, tours and recording sessions, simply did not find sufficient time to write enough original song material. The second explanation comes from Paul McCartney, who stated at the time that he wanted to give back to America some of the finest songs written by American artists, to remind people in the United States of their great names in rock and roll history, which were threatening to pale due to the British invasion7 steamrolling America. But other than the Beatles’ American rock and roll role models, Lennon and McCartney as writers expanded their frames of reference within the context of love or a loving relationship between two people. More and more new subjects were introduced in their songs. In “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party”, an explicit reference to alcohol is made in the line “I’ve had a drink or two and I don’t care”. The drinks in the lyrics are presented as one possible way to escape the dreariness life may entail sometimes, and make it easier for the speaker to “not care” and forget about the disappointment he has just faced. The speaker’s great let-down he meets in “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party” is that “she” is not there. The song’s lines run “I

7 The was the term applied by the news media – and subsequently by consumers – to the influx of rock and roll, beat and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular in the United States and Canada. The classic British Invasion period was 1964 to 1967 (roughly bracketed by The Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan and the emergence of as a U.S.-born superstar who had his first success in the UK), but the term has also been applied to later "waves" of UK artists that had significant impact on the North American entertainment market. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. “British Invasion” [online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_invasion [2008, November 23].

56 don’t want to spoil the party so I’ll go / I would hate my disappointment to show / There’s nothing for me here / So I will disappear / If she turns up while I’m gone pleases let me know”. Now, one way of interpreting these lines could be to regard the lyrics’ message as a plain “boy waits for girl he cares for and is disappointed because she does not show up”-story, but I think there is more to it. Reading the lines, one should be aware of the fact that the Beatles have just been introduced to marijuana, and immediately developed an enormous liking to the drug. In addition, the song’s plot is set in the carefree surroundings of British nightlife within a pleasure-seeking party scene. Furthermore, I do not think that I am going too far in claiming that the “she” Lennon sings about could be interpreted as being an image of the newly discovered drug marijuana, without which life seems only half the fun it could be. Lennon sings that he is disappointed because there is “nothing” for him here. It is this word “nothing” which seems to corroborate that the speaker of “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party” is looking for a non-living, non-human “she”, which will make him happy. The second verse reveals that “I’ve had a drink or two and I don’t care / There’s no fun in what I do if she’s not there / I wonder what went wrong / I’ve waited far too long / I think I’ll take a walk and look for her”. The words of verse two clearly indicate the fact that alcohol alone is no longer sufficient to function as the stimulant of the day. And, as a matter of fact, increasingly, it was pot which was becoming en vogue in the mid-sixties, both within Britain and the western world. The average female Beatles-fan at the time was, of course, unaware of them smoking and enjoying marijuana. To the listener, “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party” was still to be interpreted as a “speaker loves girl” lyric, following a long tradition in rock and roll song-writing. But the truth is, despite the Beatles’ still sober image which was created by their manager Brian Epstein together with the British and American press, in “real” life they were not averse to drinking and taking drugs. The Beatles were opening up in many different directions. They did not want to be cut down any longer to four loveable mob-tops, and they were slowly beginning to show evidence of this appetite in both their music and their work as lyricists.

8. Beatles on the Rocks

The Beatles’ first LP release in 1965 was Help, their second soundtrack album after their 1964 A Hard Day’s Night. The record starts off with a very honest, and simultaneously desperate, lyric by John Lennon, crying for help. Only, in 1965 it was unthinkable that a

57 Beatle, one fourth of the world’s most successful and influential pop group at the time, might genuinely feel as insecure and self-conscious as the speaker of the lyrics of “Help” illustrates. “Help” is the first original Beatles composition not to touch the topic of love, nor does it revolve around music and dancing. It represents a Lennon lyric which mirrors John’s state of mind and feelings about himself and the situation he finds himself in. Yet somehow, miraculously, nobody seems to have noticed how depressed Lennon was during that period. In retrospect, he recalled this time: I mean, I go into these troughs every few years. It was less noticeable in the Beatles because the Beatles’ image and thing would carry you through it, you know what I mean. I was in the middle of a trough in Help, you know, but you can’t see it really. I mean, I’m singing Help for a kick-off, you know, and it was less noticeable because you’re protected by the image and the power of the Beatles. (Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles & 4 [Documentary]. Episode 4, Chapter 6, minute 42:44 to minute 43:04. Limited.)

Very much like Paul McCartney’s song “Yesterday”, which can also be found on the album Help, John Lennon’s lyrics of the song “Help” seem to demonstrate a profound longing for the past. A very confessional John states, “When I was younger, so much younger than today / I never needed anybody’s help in any way / But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured / Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors”. Lennon’s cry for help goes out to a very general you, the lyric’s speaker asking, “Help me if you can I’m feeling down / And I do appreciate you being ‘round / Help me get my feet back on the ground / Won’t you please please help me”. It is interesting to note that Lennon’s speaker has come from a confident “please please me” to an almost desperate sounding “please please help me” within a period of only two years. Other than Lennon’s words to “Help”, the lyrics of “Yesterday” are embedded in the context of a girl having left the speaker. In other words, McCartney still hangs on to the love-lyric as his medium in order to transport a message. Paul’s speaker opens with the words “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay / Oh I believe in yesterday”. The female character comes into play a little later in the song, when the addresser admits that “Why she had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say / I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday”. So, “Yesterday” claims to be just another song about some lost love, but under the surface (especially when you think about the very revealing opening lines), the track uncovers a certain vulnerability and irritation on the part of McCartney. And while “Yesterday” was and probably still is received as a tender little love-song by the public, I credit it to have at least semi-hidden tendencies of a self-conscious and insecure speaker.

58 The lyrics of song number two on Help confront the audience with a reversal of traditionally held views regarding typically male and female characteristics. Here, I am referring to “The Night Before”, which depicts the situation of a man and a woman after having had a sexual encounter the previous night. Now, if I may think in stereotypes, it is usually the male character who promises his “one-time stand” heaven and earth just to score with the female character. Then, once the act is over, it is he who leaves the girl behind, even if the girl’s feelings for the boy might be sincere. In the case of “The Night Before”, McCartney plays with these gender roles and puts the girl in the superior, and thus commanding, position. The lyrics start, “We said our goodbyes, ah, the night before / Love was in your eyes, ah, the night before / Now today I find you have changed your mind / Treat me like you did the night before / Were you telling lies, ah, the night before / Was I so unwise, ah, the night before / When I held you near you were so sincere”. Compared to the 1963 Beatles’ song “Not A Second Time”, in which it says “And now you’ve changed your mind / I see no reason to change mine / I cried, it’s through, oh”, “The Night Before” seems to take a great leap towards gender equality. This is reflective of the mood of the time, with women being granted the same rights as men, and with Russell Earl Marker’s “invention” of the birth-control pill, which had its break-through in the early 1960s, ushering in a new sexual revolution, led by women. With this in mind, on the album Help, “The Night Before” is the only original Lennon/McCartney number to feature physical contact between a man and a woman; the other being “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, a 1958 rock and roll song by Larry Williams. It is true that “The Night Before” is based on an intimate “I-You” level, but like many songs on Help with love or relationships as their topic, it is actually lost or unrequited love that is discussed. One song which I understand as an attempt to put some distance between the Beatles and their adoring female fans on Help is “Another Girl”. The song’s lyrics drift from an initial “I-You” level between speaker and receiver to a remote-sounding “I-She” level, describing a new love to the “you” in the lyrics. “For I have got another girl, another girl / You’re making me say that I’ve got nobody but you / But as from today well I’ve got somebody that’s new / I ain’t no fool and I don’t take what I don’t want / For I have got another girl”. Verse two starts with an allusion to sexual contact and ends suggesting marriage “She’s sweeter than all the girls and I met quite a few / Nobody in all the world can do what she can do / And so I’m telling you ‘This time you better stop’ / For I have got another girl, another girl / Who will love me till the end / Through thick and thin / She will always be my friend”. I cannot imagine that any of the Beatles’ fans (at least the female fans) would have been overly happy to hear such a negative assertion by the lyric’s speaker. In general, the LP Help is full of somewhat

59 negatively connoted song-lyrics concerning the topic of love. There is, for example, “You’re Going To Lose That Girl”, which already says it all in the title. A highly self-assured speaker tells some “you” that “If you don’t treat her right my friend /You’re gonna find her gone / ‘cause I will treat her right and then / You’ll be the lonely one / I’ll make a point of taking her away from you / The way you treat her what else can I do?”. The speaker of “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” suggests that treating a woman right (whatever this entails) results in her falling for you. There is a definite macho-approach towards women shining through these words, disregarding the fact that treating a woman (or any human being for that matter) “right” should go without saying. The idea of a lost love or of women leaving their men due to mistreatment must have also occupied George Harrison. In his song, “”, verse one provides the lines “Though you’ve gone away this morning / You’ll be back again tonight / Telling me there’ll be no next time / If I just don’t ”. A certain awareness of the fact that women as the “weaker sex” often are mistreated by their men seems palpable within each of the Beatles. “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” stands as another example of an unhappy love-lyric. John Lennon created a speaker who appears to be self-conscious and insecure when it comes to love. He announces, “Everywhere people stare / Each and every day / I can see them laugh at me / And I hear them say / Hey you’ve got to hide your love away”. He even depicts the speaker as someone who demands to be punished by using lines which command, “Gather ‘round all you clowns / Let me hear you say / Hey you’ve got to hide your love away”. Both at the time, and later on, it was rumoured that John Lennon wrote the song as a message to the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who was gay and in actual fact was forced to keep his homosexuality private from the public. It is hard to imagine, but homosexuality remained illegal in Great Britain in 1965, the year “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” was written. A fact that, ironically, did not change until September 1967, only one month after Epstein’s tragic death, when homosexual relationships were finally legalised in England. Rumours at the time maintained that John Lennon had had an affair with Epstein while they were away on holiday in Spain. These rumours are countered by Ray Coleman in his book, Lennon: The Definitive Biography, in which he states: Anyone who knew John Lennon would dismiss the suggestion that he was a homosexual. On tour, he was an aggressive woman hunter, something he was to confess to Cynthia when their marriage foundered. He had a massive sexual appetite for women, and particularly for new conquests. […] All through his life he was a woman chaser. ‘I slept in a million hotel rooms, as we all did, with John and there was never any hint that he was gay,’ says Paul McCartney. (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 319)

60 The third song lyric I would like to mention in the field of sad and unhappy love lyrics on Help is “Ticket To Ride”. In a bitter and insecure manner the lyrics’ speaker starts “I think I’m gonna be sad / I think it’s today, yeah / The girl that’s driving me mad / Is going away”, and he continues “She said that living with me / Is bringing her down, yeah / For she would never be free / When I was around”. A male character is described whose stifling presence is dragging down the woman in the lyrics. The focus of the words is on the woman’s loss of personal freedom and her being repressed by the addresser. For her, the only way out of this situation is by “going away”, leaving the speaker behind. In the middle-eight of “Ticket To Ride” a reference to the use of marijuana can be found in “I don’t know why she’s ridin’ so high”. The “so high” might well describe the state of mind the Beatles found themselves in most of the time in those days. Lennon: By then we were smoking marijuana for breakfast – at that period. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us ‘cause it was just four glazed-eyed giggling all the time, you know, in their own world. (Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). 3 & 4 [Documentary]. Episode 4, Chapter 6, minute 36:12 to minute 36:22. Apple Corps Limited.)

Allusions to drugs can also be found in other songs on Help. One can be spotted in a line from the title-song “Help” itself: “Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors”. Maybe the encounter with marijuana has opened up the doors of perception of the speaker’s mind, letting thoughts and ideas expand in different directions; directions unbeknownst to the speaker without drugs. A third hint at the use of soft drugs like marijuana is visible in the lyric to the song “It’s Only Love”, where it says “I get high when I see you go by” in line one. Even the Beatles’ next single release, We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper, strongly smacks of drug influenced actions. As for John Lennon, Ray Coleman reveals: Slowly, his songwriting as well as his life was infiltrated by the hallucinatory effects of soft and hard drugs, though the world did not know it. He hid his marijuana and LSD in the garden at Kenwood, fearing a police raid. The evidence was there in two songs in particular: ‘Day Tripper’ alluded to anyone who was not properly into drugs, but was what John called a weekend hippie; and in ‘We Can Work It Out’, written mostly by Paul, John composed the middle part. […] ‘Life is very short and there’s no time…for fussing and fighting, my friend.’ Love and peace, man, was now his chief passion. The man who had told me at at the height of Beatlemania that he was ‘waiting for something to happen’ set about making it happen. (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 435f.)

It is interesting to note that the general tenor of the Beatles’ lyrics starts to depart increasingly from the “happy” love lyric or the songs about music and dancing to a more varied field of images and ideas. Physical contact suggested between addresser and addressee decreases from record to record and the “you” in the lyrics is no longer exclusively female.

61 9. Do not Touch the Beatles

Once the Beatles arrived at their sixth original UK LP release Rubber Soul, they were well into the art of reversing the prevailing gender role patterns of the time, a fact which is clearly visible in the lyrics of “”, the opening track of the aforementioned record. The song offers a catchy chorus which runs, “Baby you can drive my car / Yes I’m gonna be a star / Baby you can drive my car / And maybe I’ll love you”. It is this chorus which might lead the superficial listener to the assumption that it is the Beatles who offer some “baby” to drive their own car. In reality, it is rather the male speaker who is offered by some female character to drive her car. After all those years of male characters calling their female counterparts “baby”, the human ear was just not accustomed to hearing it being reversed in a popular song. There are, of course, earlier songs like “Baby It’s You” by Burt Bacharach and Mack David, or “Be My Baby” by , Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, in the lyrics of which men are referred to as “baby”. But the difference to “Drive My Car” is that these songs were performed by female singers on an intimate “I-You” level, and for that matter, between the speaker and a male receiver. It was a female voice which openly, directly and unmistakeably called her man “baby”. In the case of “Drive My Car”, it is the male voice which takes on the role of the female by creating a situation of reported speech. The “I” in the lyrics of “Drive My Car” jumps from being regarded as the male speaker, to adapting the part of the female input on a personal “I-You” level. The development of this situation becomes clear when we take a look at the lyric’s first verse: “Asked a girl what she wanted to be / She said baby can’t you see / I wanna be famous, a star on the screen / But you can do something in between”. The “something” he can do in between is to drive the girl’s car and thus become her servant or chauffeur; and if he is lucky she will love him in return. As one of the Beatles’ first story- songs, “Drive My Car” surprises the listener in verse three by presenting a slight twist within the story’s plot towards a touch of sex. It says “I told that girl I can start right away / And she said listen babe I got something to say / I got no car and it’s breaking my heart / But I’ve found a driver and that’s a start”, immediately followed by the chorus’s “Baby you can drive my car”. Paul McCartney remembers: The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it. […] The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal. […] ‘rings’ always rhymes with ‘things’ and I knew it was a bad idea. […] and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘gold-en rings’, and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail […] which was ‘I actually haven’t got a car, but when I get one you’ll be a terrific chauffeur’. […] and it also meant ‘you can be

62 my lover’. ‘Drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex […]. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 269f)

Love and sex still seem to capture a great deal of emphasis within the Beatles’ lyrics, but the difference to earlier Beatles recordings lies in the fact that women increasingly begin to take over the actively demanding and assertive role in relationships. A total absence of suggestions of bodily contact is a phenomenon which is attended to by the appearance of self-confident female characters in the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. The emergence of the strong and self-determined woman also reflects in the words to the song “Norwegian Wood”. The picture painted in the song’s lyrics is one of a somewhat insecure and reserved male speaker together with a woman who seems to be in command. The speaker’s insecurity is already apparent in line one in which it says “I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me”. He seems unsure about “who had whom” and feels more comfortable pushing the responsibility of their meeting (or meetings) in the girl’s direction, taking on the role of a passive character8. Line two reveals that the meeting takes place in the woman’s own flat, which immediately amplifies the impression of her being in charge of the situation. Line two runs “She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?”, and perfectly fades into line three where the woman’s leading position is emphasised by her commanding tone, “She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere”. The lyrics continue to portray a woman who stands in vast contrast to the traditionally held view of the good housewife by letting the speaker state “So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair”. The female character is in charge of her place but does not consider it necessary to have her rooms furnished, which might encourage the thought that she sleeps out a lot or, as a hard-working single-woman, does not have the time and desire to build herself a “home sweet home”. Our speaker goes on to voice “I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine / We talked until two and then she said ‘It’s time for bed’ / She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh / I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath / And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown / So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood”. The features of the strong woman who is in command and the weak male speaker are confirmed by these lines. She is again depicted as a tough woman who has got a job and can look after herself. She needs no man as a “breadwinner” on whom to depend by her side. The speaker, on the other hand, is outlined as a jobless, homeless weakling who possesses neither the strength nor the courage to object to her

8 “Norwegian Wood” is known to be a lyric about a “one night stand“ which Lennon had in 1965 with a journalist and stands for many more occurrences of the sort, as Lennon had often been an unfaithful husband to his wife Cynthia. By making the speaker appear weak, Lennon tries to present the “I” in the lyrics as a victim rather than a coldly calculating alpha male. 63 demands, let alone ask her for anything more than his meagre sleeping place in the bathroom. Line one of “Norwegian Wood” suggests carnal love, but it never materialises. In the end, the addressee is left alone, and burns down the woman’s place as comic relief, answering the deep-cutting lyric which preceded the grand finale. It is remarkable that, the more popular and influential the four “mop tops” become, the more the Beatles’ lyrics seem to hint at a certain insecurity and self-consciousness on the part of the speaker. Lennon’s song “Help” was a first indication of the direction in which some of the Beatles’ lyrical work was to head, and the topic of uncertainty and self-doubt on Rubber Soul cannot only be found in “Norwegian Wood” but in other song lyrics as well. “Girl” is one such lyric, and as the title already reveals, it revolves around a woman. Like in “Norwegian Wood”, the lines “She’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there / You feel a fool / When you say she’s looking good / She acts as if it’s understood / She’s cool, cool, cool, cool / Girl, girl”, present a strong woman and juxtaposes the weaker male speaker who “feels a fool”, thus displaying a high degree of insecurity. Unlike “Norwegian Wood”, however, the lyrics of “Girl” also reveal a soft side about the girl in question. Verse three informs the listener that “When I think of all I’ve tried so hard to leave her / She will turn to me and start to cry / And she promises the earth to me / And I believe her / After all this time I don’t know why / Ah, girl, girl”. Within the song, the image of the strong woman and the weaker male character is reversed and is therefore an indication of the appearance of more complex love lyrics within the Beatles’ repertoire. Compared to earlier Beatles’ lyrics, it has become much more difficult for a female audience to identify with the “you” in the lyrics. I would like to cite a few examples of “I-You” situations within lyrics that are positive about love, relationships or friendship taken from Rubber Soul, to demonstrate how hard it can be for the devoted female fan to feel directly referred to in a lyric. One obvious example is the song “Michelle”, written mainly by Paul McCartney. The title already makes perfectly clear that the focal point here is placed on a character of the name Michelle, and that there is a minimal chance for British girls to be called by the name in question. It is known that whenever the Beatles played France, it was boys rather than girls who responded to their live act, and maybe “Michelle” can be regarded as McCartney’s attempt to flirt with French girls and women (taking the name Michelle as a mere synonym, standing for every woman in France) in order to encourage them to become more active in their role as Beatles fans. That is, of course, a personal, and thus subjective, interpretation of one possible intention that could be read into the lyrics of “Michelle”. In any case, it is the

64 first Lennon/McCartney song to feature a concretely tangible female character called by a specific name. The track starts “Michelle, ma belle / These are words that go together well / My Michelle / Michelle, ma belle / Sont le mots qui vont tres bien ensemble / Tres bien ensemble”. The French lines are simply the translated repetitions of what was said in the preceding English. The speaker goes on to address the lyric’s protagonist in a very direct and unmistakably intimate manner when he repeatedly claims that, “I love you, I love you, I love you / That’s all I want to say”. Unfortunately for most of the Beatles’ female devotees, it was impossible to relate to the “I love yous” within the text of “Michelle”, because the “you” in the song is defined as being a specific person, namely a girl or woman by the French name of Michelle. As a second Rubber Soul song to exemplify how difficult it had, at times, become for a female listener to identify with the character the speaker of a Beatles’ lyric addresses (even when it is done on an intimate “I-You” basis and is explicitly directed towards a girl), I would like to take up “Run For Your Life”, a song mainly written by John Lennon. The song can be understood as an “upgrade” of Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That” from the album A Hard Day’s Night. We have learnt that John is on his way to become a lyricist who is increasingly drawn towards topics that are true to himself and his personal life. He tries to move away from standardised all-appealing song texts and towards self-confessional lyrics. One example of this is “Run For Your Life”, in which he creates a speaker who is extremely candid about his jealousy when it comes to other men interfering in any way with his loved-one. It is a song full of stifling warnings directed towards a female “you”. “Well I’d rather see you dead little girl / Than to be with another man / You better keep your head little girl / Or I won’t know where I am” illustrates a speaker who, due to his jealousy, places death over the merits of love. In verse two the speaker tells the audience in an explicitly self-revealing manner that, “Well I know that I’m a wicked guy / And I was born with a jealous mind / And I can’t spend my whole life / Trying just to make you toe the line”. No woman in the whole world, I think, could be willing to really take on the role of the “you” in the lyrics of “Run For Your Life”. The song is just not comparable any longer to earlier Beatles’ lyrics performed on an intimate “I-You” basis – not even to the ones that deal with the topic of “unhappy love” or “lost love”, like “Not A Second Time”, which is all about the addresser’s refusal to reunite with a girl. “Run For Your Life” opens up a new dimension of cruelty aimed at female characters. It likens itself to a death-threat by John Lennon targeted at all the “little girls” who have been, or will ever be, unfaithful to him. Verse three of the song’s lyrics makes jealousy appear to be something akin to the speaker’s religion. When he states, “Let this be a sermon / I mean

65 everything I’ve said / Baby, I’m determined / And I’d rather see you dead”, the speaker lifts up his words to shine as something similar to a divine command. The heavy threats, which can be found throughout the lyrics of “Run For Your Life”, stand in vast contrast to “The Word”, another Lennon song to be found on Rubber Soul. As yet another lyric to fit within the category of “self-revealing” songs, it contradicts the philosophy of “Run For Your Life” one hundred percent. “The Word” contains a lyric which is positive and is able to provide the listener with a warm feeling inside. It is a Beatles’ track which, when you compare it to “Run For Your Life”, beautifully demonstrates what seems to be Lennon’s continuing inner struggle. On the one hand, he is an alpha dog, cruel to women with an almost uncontrollable quick temper and born with a jealous mind, on the other hand, he is developing into a man whose main passion is the spread of a spirit which uses the idea of love and peace as its groundwork. “The Word” is a song about love; but unlike earlier Beatles’ tracks, the love that is sung about is a spiritual one, not a carnal love between two characters. If “Run For Your Life” explicitly mentioned a sermon, then “The Word” is in actual fact a sermon, addressing the topic of love. It starts, “Say the word and you’ll be free / Say the word and be like me / Say the word I’m thinking of / Have you heard the word is love / It’s so fine / It’s sunshine / It’s the word love”. The speaker directs his words towards a general “you”, moving away from the Beatles’ preferred tactics of earlier days of referring mainly to female listeners. In this, they seem to insist that if there is a general message in a lyric, then it should go out to and be true for everybody, without any restrictions such as gender. The universality of love, with a focus on its spiritual side, is a newly found direction which will be encountered to an increasing degree in the Beatles’ future work as lyricists. The speaker of “The Word” appears to illustrate his spiritual rise from “ignoramus” to “enlightened character” by what he reveals to the listener with each of the three verses. “In the beginning I misunderstood / But now I’ve got it, the word is good”, “Everywhere I go I hear it said / In the good and the bad books that I have read”, and “Now that I know what I feel must be right / I’m here to show everybody the light”. In a preacherly or even messiah-like manner, it seems the addresser of “The Word” tries to “show the light” to his “disciples”. Lines like “Give the word a chance to say / That the word is just the way / It’s the word I’m thinking of / And the only word is love” demonstrate quite clearly that the speaker is convinced that “Love” is the answer. This song from late 1965 already foreshadows the “all you need is love attitude” of the so-called “summer of love” of 1967. Barry Miles remembers: “‘The Word’ was the first of the Beatles’

66 overtly love and peace songs; the word in question was ‘Love’, which in 1965 made it one of the first hippie anthems.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 272)

10. The Beatles Explore Other Options

The year1966 brought the Beatles’ seventh album release, Revolver, and it became evident that the “Fab Four” were breaking new ground musically as well as lyrically. They began experimenting with new recording techniques, for example working with tape-loops to create a perpetually cycling sound, which can be heard on the LP’s final song “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Moreover, the Beatles’ lyrics became more varied and touched on topics other than love and relationships, at times appearing ambivalent or even nonsensical. The traditionally personal “I-You” boy loves girl banter which dominated the Beatles’ earlier records has formed a hasty retreat on Revolver. While lyrics about love and interpersonal relationships formed the Beatles’ composers’ main oeuvre so far (“Help”, from the Beatles’ fifth album was in actual fact the first Lennon/McCartney composition not dealing with the topic of love), only six of the fourteen lyrics on Revolver concern a speaker-receiver relationship. I would like to have a closer look at one of these love songs, namely the McCartney number “Got To Get You Into My Life”. The lyric starts with an image of a lonely speaker who is in search of a partner, “I was alone, I took a ride / I didn’t know what I would find there / Another road where maybe I / Would find another kind of mind there”, and strikes lucky, “Ooh, then I suddenly see you / Ooh, did I tell you I need you / Every single day of my life”. For the female addressee, it is easy to identify with the “you” in the lyrics and it will become even more convenient, as physical contact between addresser and addressee is suggested in verse two, “You didn’t run, you didn’t lie / You knew I wanted just to hold you / And had you gone you knew in time / We’d meet again for I had told you”. The speaker furthermore suggests that their meeting each other was predetermined by destiny in the song’s second bridge, “Ooh, you were meant to be near me / Ooh, and I want you to hear me / Say we’ll be together every day”. The chorus features a desperate sounding speaker who shouts out, “Got to get you into my life”, as an unmistakable sign of how much he desires his loved one. In verse three the addresser adds, “What can I do, what can I be / When I’m with you I want to stay there / If I am true I’ll never leave / And if I do I know the way there”. Obviously, the speaker is madly in love with the “you” he addresses in “Got To Get You Into My Life”. But let us have a look at what Sir Paul McCartney has to say about the origin of the song lyric:

67 ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I’d been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana. I didn’t have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding. So ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ is really a song about that, it’s not to a person, it’s actually about pot. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 190)

On the surface “Got To Get You Into My Life” is a love lyric to some female character, but really it is a love song, or an ode, to marijuana. The Beatles had already started defying all kinds of conventions by this point, and as this demonstrates, one way of doing so is to make the “you” in the text an ambivalent or unreliable factor. The informed listener regards the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life” from a different angle. Informed listening makes it possible to see the true or intended meaning behind a lyric, which in the case of “Got To Get You Into My Life” at first glance seems to present a rather unobtrusive story of love. It is easy for the present day listener to find out about background information to any Beatles’ song and lyric, due to all sorts of sources of information like the various books and articles that have been released about the Beatles’ song writing, or the ever growing flood of information to be found on the internet. But in 1966 the circle of informed listeners was restricted to the Beatles themselves and some of their family and friends. For the average Beatles fanatic, “Got To Get You Into My Life” sounded just like an overt love lyric addressed to a female listener, which in fact it was not. Another interesting fact which can be discovered for the first time in some of the lyrics on the LP Revolver is an absence of the speaker’s “I” together with its respective pronouns. In songs like “Eleanor Rigby”, a speaker is no longer detectable for the listener. It is a song-lyric full of questions and seemingly surreal images of lonesome people, and it deals with the topic of a woman’s death in a serious and despondent way. The text runs, “Ah, look at all the lonely people / Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding / Lives in a dream / Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door / Who is it for? / All the lonely people / Where do they all come from? / All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?”. The surrealism in the words makes people think about the meaning of the lyrics and simultaneously leaves room for interpretation. The clear-cut “I love/thank/wanna hold you girl” decreases visibly within the Beatles’ lyrical artwork, and clearly “Eleanor Rigby” is proof of a radical change of direction. The words go on, “Father McKenzie / Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear / No one comes near / Look at him working / Darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there / What does he care?”,

68 followed in verse three by Eleanor’s death, “Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name / Nobody came / Father McKenzie / the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave / No one was saved”. The role of the woman in the Beatles’ lyrics has, to a great extent, developed away from “merely” representing the speaker’s object of desire, towards highly versatile and complex images of womanhood, the character of Eleanor Rigby being only one example. It is not only the role of the woman which changes in the text, but also the speaker himself, if present, is at times apt to assume a different persona than the well-known adolescent lover. One good example of such an occurrence is the Harrison song “”, which touches upon the topic of the British tax system, a subject matter unheard of until then in the realms of popular music. The lyric’s speaker starts his observation by projecting into the future, “Let me tell you how it will be / There’s one for you nineteen for me / ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman / Should five per cent appear too small / Be thankful I don’t take it all / ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman”. “[…] Harrison stops beating about the bush and attacks the nineteen-shillings-and-six-pence-in-the-pound top rate of income tax under ’s Labour government.” (MacDonald. Revolution in the Head: 200) He generates a speaker whose “I” in the lyrics presents itself as an unscrupulous tax inspector, and continues in a cynical way, “If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street / If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat / If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat / If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet”. In a tongue-in-cheek manner Harrison, represented by the lyric’s speaker, attacks the British tax system, as the Beatles success had landed them in the United Kingdom’s top tax bracket. The song also criticises the doings of the then Prime Minister of the UK, Harold Wilson of the Labour Party, and Edward Heath, a member of the British Conservative Party, in the lines, “Don’t ask me what I want it for (Ah, ah, Mister Wilson) / If you don’t want to pay some more (Ah, ah, Mister Heath) / ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman.” These lines include the warning not to question the current system, because otherwise you will be punished for it. The lyric concludes with some final guidelines for people who “dare” to pass away and thus eventually could evade the British tax system, “Here’s my advice for those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes / ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman / And you’re working but me.” The custom of putting pennies on the eyes of corpses is an old funeral custom “so that they can pay the ferryman to carry them across to the other side.” “The British Columbia Folklore Society”. Social Customs. [Online] http://www.folklore.bc.ca/Socialcustoms.htm [2008, December 3].

69 The addresser of “Taxman” sends out an exaggerated general warning to all the tax-paying citizens of Britain not to forget that death is not the end when it comes to tax debts. Other topics to be encountered on Revolver cover the influence of recreational drugs as well as psychedelic substances in the lyrics of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, or “Doctor Robert”, which even establishes a connection between the use of drugs like LSD and the British National Health System. Then there is an ode to the amenities of a sunny day, to be found in the words to the song “”; a song about a yellow submarine in the sea of green; and “I’m Only Sleeping”, which evokes feelings of languor paired with a certain paranoia when lines like “Lying there and staring at the ceiling / Waiting for a sleepy feeling” meet the ears of the listener. Even though the exact meaning of the Beatles’ lyrics becomes less easily tangible for the audience, more or less straight-forward “I-You” love lyrics do exist on Revolver. One of these is the Harrison lyric “Love You To”. “Love You To” is an explicit love song combined with thoughts about life’s transitory ways and how people who love each other should take time by the forelock and become active lovers now. This carpe-diem-spirit is somewhat reminiscent of the literary works of the so-called metaphysical poets, a group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, whose poems emphasised the importance of making the most of current opportunities, as life is brief and time is passing quickly. Harrison’s lyric suggests that, “Each day just goes so fast / I turn around, it’s past / You don’t get time to hang a sign on me / Love me while you can / Before I’m a dead old man”. The lyrics continue in the same frame of mind, reminding the audience that “A lifetime is so short / A new one can’t be bought / But what you’ve got means such a lot to me”. The speaker of “Love You To” rounds off the song with a direct invitation to have sex by uttering the words, “I’ll make love to you / If you want me to”. It is quite striking that, compared to earlier Beatles’ lyrics, the female “you” in Harrison’s song is given the opportunity to decide for herself whether or not she would like to have sexual intercourse with the lyric’s addresser. No longer is it taken for granted that the female character falls for the speaker without question. There is definitely more macho-approach and force noticeable in words like “Hold me tight / Tell me I’m the only one”, and “Let me go on loving you / Tonight tonight / Making love to only you”, taken from the 1963 lyric “Hold Me Tight”, than in the 1966 “Love You To”. Here, at this advanced stage, the formerly rather passive female characters finally have a stronger say about interpersonal relationships in the lyrics.

70 11. The Beatles’ Summer of Love

The Beatles’ next album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is widely regarded as a splendid example of one of the very first concept albums in popular history. Apart from the introductory “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” which presents the band to the audience, followed by “With A Little Help From My Friends”, performed by the fictitious character of Billy Shears and the album’s reprise version of the title song, however, the idea of a concept album does not really go anywhere. No other song on the LP has anything to do with the idea of Sgt. Pepper. In terms of lyrics, the record offers a wide-ranging field of topics, from surreal, dream-like images painted in the listener’s mind to down-to-earth impressions of every-day situations to representations of Liverpool childhood to descriptions of a circus show, all “spiced up” with drug-allusions here and there. For the individual female listener the degree of a possible identification with the “you” in the Beatles’ lyrics is a low one, as (unlike in most of their earlier songs) the topic of love is on the decrease. Sgt. Pepper’s also shows no sign of physical contact suggested between addresser and addressee. When it comes to lyrics about love and relationships, the Beatles either present them as being directed towards a general audience or towards a specific character within the text, as in “”. The “typically” intimate “I-You” relationship between addresser and addressee is hard to find on Sgt. Pepper’s, one exception being the lyrics of “”.9 The song reflects on the speaker’s past, conjuring up negative childhood memories about time at school as well as a very confessional picture about Lennon’s relationship towards his woman. The “you” is included in the lyric as the only positive factor, helping the speaker to better himself and his attitude towards life. The text starts with a positive “It’s getting better all the time”, and is immediately followed by reflections about the past. “I used to get mad at my school / The teachers that taught me weren’t cool / You’re holding me down, turning me round / Filling me up with your rules”. From this critique about the British school-system the speaker jumps into the present again and states that, “I have to admit it’s getting better / A little better all the time / I have to admit it’s getting better / It’s getting better since you’ve been mine”. Any female addressee feels spoken to after hearing these lines, uttered by the male speaker of the lyric, and is reminded of the “good old Beatle days”, when the addresser of the majority of Lennon/McCartney songs explicitly turned towards their female fans. Verse three of “Getting Better” runs, “I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved / Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene / And I’m doing the best that I

9 “When I’m Sixty-Four” is also based on an intimate “I-You” level but, the “old-age-you” is not quite what the average female Beatles’ fan is searching to identify with. 71 can”. An interesting commentary about the words of verse three can be found in Ray Coleman’s Lennon Biography: ‘Getting Better’ was John continuing to obviate his guilt about the women in his life, coming to terms with it directly, following on from the oblique inferences in ‘Norwegian Wood’. […] It was an indication of how he had mellowed; the guilt was apparent and made public. ‘I was a hitter,’ John explained later. ‘I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regret his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster,’ he told in magazine in 1980. (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 557)

Cynthia Lennon remembered how the intake of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) gradually changed John Lennon’s behaviour and personality in the years 1966/67, “It opened the floodgates of his mind and he seemed to escape from the imprisonment of fame. Tensions, and bad tempers, were replaced by understanding and love as his message.” (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 434) However, due to the fact that Cynthia refused to take LSD (she took it once but disliked its effects), a “mental barrier” built up between the married couple. Although the drug obviously softened the otherwise often quick-tempered Lennon, by 1967 he was in search of a spiritual counterpart he could share his experiences with, obviously this person was not his current wife.10 Cynthia recalled, “We had lost communication. John was on another planet.” (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 435) Anyway, verse three of “Getting Better” clearly demonstrates that the Beatles have started incorporating their own lives’ experiences and influences openly in their lyrics. The Beatles’ work as lyricists has developed from existing solely in the realms of adolescent love- relations, to representing a more varied and comprehensively open picture about the composers’ interests and outside influences at the time. The Beatles constantly expanded their “sources” of influence when it came to writing lyrics. On Sgt. Pepper’s one of the composers’ influential sources come from newspaper articles. Parts of Lennon and McCartney’s lyrical work is drawn from their interminable newspaper reading and materialise in the songs “She’s Leaving Home” and “”. Both songs are based on articles found in the Daily Mail.11 Lennon’s “A Day In The Life” unmistakably displays an interest in reading the papers by starting the lyrics with the words, “I read the news today oh boy”. John alludes to Tara Browne who was member of an Irish aristocratic family and great grandson of the brewer Edward Guinness with the lines, “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the

10 Lennon will find his intellectual as well as spiritual counterpart in the person of Japanese artist Yoko Ono, who will influence Lennon’s lyrical artwork considerably. 11 Initially a broadsheet, the Daily Mail was published in a tabloid format from 1971 onwards. The paper is known for its centre-right political orientation. 72 lights had changed / A crowd of people stood and stared / They’d seen his face before / Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords”. Browne tragically died in a car accident in December 1966. Lennon later in the song utters, “I read the news today oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”. The reference to the 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, came from the Far And Near column in the Daily Mail dated January 17, 1967. This reported that a Blackburn City Council survey of road holes had revealed the mind-boggling fact that there was one twenty-sixth of a hole in the road for each Blackburn resident. (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 132)

“A Day In The Life” explicitly tells the addressee that the inspiration for the song’s lyrics come from various topical newspaper articles. Unbeknown to the audience, but also based on an article published in London’s Daily Mail, “She’s Leaving Home” is the second song on Sgt. Pepper’s that based its lyrics on a report found in the printed media. It features the story of a female teenage runaway. But unlike “A Day In The Life”, “She’s Leaving Home” leaves the audience in the dark about the fact that the song’s words have its seeds in a newspaper article. The speaker never appears to be in the position of telling the addressee about what he had read in the papers, but switches between the role of an omniscient narrator to becoming the voice of a worried parent. “She’s Leaving Home” is another of Paul McCartney’s story-songs which describes the running away of a girl from her parental home while simultaneously trying to hint at the possible reasons for the act. The basic message of the song’s lyrics can be found by juxtaposing chorus number one with the song’s last chorus. In the first chorus, the speaker states that, “She (We12 gave her most of our lives) / Is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives) / Home (We gave her everything money could buy)”. And the last chorus runs, “She (What did we do that was wrong) / Is having (We didn’t know it was wrong) / Fun (Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy) / Something inside that was always denied / For so many years”. “She’s Leaving Home” brings up the topic of the sometimes incompatible views and preferences of different generations. In our case, it is the parental generation which is presented as being unable to cater to the emotional needs of their daughter. Much as in “Can’t Buy Me Love”, McCartney places emphasis on a “money isn’t everything”-idea, and once again places emotion ahead of monetary needs. The idea of love on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is approached in many different ways. At one end of the scale, we find George Harrison’s “”, which celebrates the universality of love interweaving George’s interest in Eastern philosophies; at the other end of the scale, Paul McCartney offers the audience “Lovely Rita”, with lyrics

12 The speaker takes on the role of the runaway-child’s parents. 73 which revolve around the speaker’s affection for a particular working class girl. “In an interview with International Times in 1967, George said: ‘We’re all one. The realization of human love reciprocated is such a gas. It’s a good vibration […].’ (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 130) Excerpts from Harrison’s “Within You Without You” say: “We were talking / About the love we all could share / When we find it / To try our best to hold it there / With our love”, and “With our love we could save the world if they only knew / Try to realise it’s all within yourself / When you’ve seen beyond yourself / Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there”. The idea that the whole world can be made a better place and actually be saved and held from destruction by means of communal love is one of the thoughts which constitute “Within You Without You”. Its lyrics are abstractly complex, while at the same time longing for a peaceful and united society to be achieved by the individual’s search for peace of mind. Thoughts like these very much remind the listener of Eastern or Hindu philosophies, which the Beatles got more and more involved in around the time. Compared to Harrison’s cosmic lyric of “Within You Without You”, one very “down to earth” piece of love lyric on Sgt. Pepper’s seems to be Paul’s “Lovely Rita”. The speaker of “Lovely Rita” allows a female listener to identify with “Lovely Rita meter maid”, as the lyrics do start. The song’s meter maid seems to symbolise the common people, kind of suggesting that working class people can be interesting characters to fall in love with – even for pop stars like Paul McCartney. Of course, the speaker in song lyrics is not to be put on a level with the author of the lyrics, but, in a female Beatles fan’s imagination, the singer of the song is personally referring to the individual listener. The addresser of “Lovely Rita” declares his open interest in the girl and states, “Lovely Rita meter maid / May I inquire discreetly / When are you free to take some tea with me”. He continues, “Took her out and tried to win her / Had a laugh and over dinner / Told her I would really like to see her again”. The speaker then goes on and reverses the traditional male/female roles. Here, he allows the woman to appear as a strong, independent individual in the line “Got the bill and Rita paid it”, as in the 1960s it was regarded as a sign of weak masculinity if you as the “stronger sex” let a woman pay for the drinks and food in a restaurant. Unlike in many other Beatles’ songs from 1967, “Lovely Rita” enables female listeners to once again identify with the “you” in the lyrics, and may have even evoked the desire in some to pursue the profession of parking attendant. After all, the lyrics of “Lovely Rita” seem to imply greater chances than ever for female parking attendants when it comes to being longed for by celebrities.

74 12. The Beatles Seek a Higher Power

What is interesting to observe on the album is, amongst other things, that many of the lyrics – whatever their basic concern may be – consist of mantra-like repetitions. This could be understood as a consequence of the Beatles’ intense engagement in Eastern philosophies and religion, in which the mantra plays an important role because it is considered capable of creating spiritual transformation. I would like to verify my assertion by offering some examples of word and phrase repetitions included on Magical Mystery Tour. It starts with the title song “Magical Mystery Tour”, in which the speaker encourages the listener to “Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour”. The addresser’s invitation to “roll up” is repeated twenty-four times throughout the song and is directed to no specific gender, but rather to a general listener. The Beatles are offering an escape to the addressee, taking him or her away. The second example of mantra-like repetitions can be found in the song “”. The speaker creates a gloomy, gothic-like picture of himself waiting for his friends who have lost their way. He reiterates the phrase “Don’t be long” in a seemingly endless loop towards the end of the song. “” is repeated extensively within the lyrics to the song of the same name. The lyrics focus on the listener’s ancestors’ generations, uttering to, “Let’s all get up and dance to a song / That was a hit before your mother was born”. “Hello Goodbye”, as the title already suggests, is packed with words of opposite meanings like “high-low” and “yes-no”. But the song’s lyrics are dominated by repetitions of the words “hello-goodbye”. To give you an idea about how repetitively “hello” and “goodbye” occur in the song, here are the last eight lines: “You say goodbye and I say hello, hello, hello / I don’t know why you say goodbye / I say hello, hello, hello / I don’t know why you say goodbye / I say hello, hello, hello / I don’t know why you say goodbye / I say hello, hello, hello / Hello, hello, hello”. The lyrics eventually out, with the whole band singing “Hello, heba, helloa” in a loop. In the same manner, the lyrics to “Baby, You’re A Rich Man” fade out, only this time the repeated phrase runs, “Baby you’re a rich man / Baby you’re a rich man / Baby you’re a rich man too”. It is a song which touches the topic of “the beautiful people”, a phrase which was used to describe the “hippies”, before the term “hippies” was an established one. Magical Mystery Tour culminates in the song “All You Need Is Love”, which stands out due to its repetitions of the word “love”. So far on Magical Mystery Tour none of the songs were

75 concerned with the topic of love. But “All You Need” is known all around the world to be the embodiment of the love generation’s ideas of love being the answer to anything. However, the “love” that the Beatles sing about is a universal, spiritual one, without the suggestion of bodily contact, as was frequently found in the Beatles’ earlier works. The “you” in the lyrics is no gender-specific “you”. There is a certain ambiguity about it. Is it a singular or a plural “you”, is it a male or female “you”? I dare say it is a general and universal “you”, trying to reach the whole world without restrictions such as number or gender. Steve Turner voices that “In its call for universal love, ‘All You Need Is Love’ extended the message that John had first tried to put across in ‘The Word’ in 1965 to a worldwide audience.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 136) For many American people “All You Need” was thought of as the Beatles first “real” statement against the American involvement in the , which was already escalating at the time. The message is peace. , a history professor at the University of California recalled: The song was coming out of every window in every college dormitory in the United States that summer. And this was implicitly, I think, very much a criticism of the war- makers in the US, [the Beatles were saying] ‘you don’t need war, all you need is love’. This time they had succeeded in getting their message across, and in a way which instantly grabbed the attention of people all over the world. (Kevin Howlett & . In my Life: John Lennon Remembered: 82)

For the majority of people, when they talk about “All You Need Is Love”, they think about the song’s anthemic chorus “All you need is love / All you need is love / All you need is love, love / Love is all you need”. Of course, there is more to the song other than its memorable chorus, and in order to find out about that I recommend reading It’s Easy (?): Literaturdidaktische Reflexionen zur Poplyrik am Beispiel von John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love”, by Hugo Keiper. The Beatles’ single release from March 15th 1968 includes the song “Lady Madonna”, an alleged celebration of motherhood by Paul McCartney. The image of “Lady Madonna, children at your feet”, or “Lady Madonna, baby at your breast”, is highly reminiscent of the Virgin Mary with her baby. The reason is that “[…] the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working-class women.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 449) It is the first time in a long time that the Beatles include physical contact in a song-lyric; “Baby at your breast”. And even if a woman’s secondary sexual characteristics in the form of “breast” is explicitly mentioned there is nothing sexual or erotic to the image whatsoever. In the context of “boy loves girl” or “I love you”, it would not have been thinkable to mention a girl’s breasts in a Beatles lyric. The sole exception to the “rule” can be found in the

76 background-lyrics of the 1965 song “Girl”. Paul McCartney remembers that “We’ve always done dirty little things on records. In “Girl” the Beatles were singing “tit-tit-tit-tit” in the background and nobody noticed.” (The Beatles Anthology 2000: 196) But, as the Beatles’ lyrical range has broadened considerably since John, Paul and George started composing, there is nothing sinister about including the word “breast” within the appropriate context. At first glance, one might be tempted to believe that, compared to earlier song lyrics, the presentation of the woman in “Lady Madonna” has changed completely. And in some respects it has. I am thinking here of the Virgin Mary image, or the development towards a somewhat asexual character – asexual in terms of not being the object of desire for some speaker or some third party. In reality, however, Lady Madonna seems to be a single parent alone at home, having to deal with all the household chores and the children all by herself. The situation Madonna finds herself in kind of reflects earlier Beatles lyrics where good women were waiting for their men in a domestic surrounding. But where is the male breadwinner to support Madonna and give her a helping hand? To me, the character of “Lady Madonna” is the result of a broken marriage, left behind a sad and overburdened woman, and instead of trying to help her out, the male speaker of the lyrics is a passive observer full of questions. He converses with Madonna, asking, “Wonder how you manage to make ends meet / Who finds the money? When you pay the rent? Did you think that money was heaven sent?”. In earlier Beatles’ songs like “A Hard Day’s Night”, or “When I get Home” the speaker always took on the role of the reliable, hard-working breadwinner, returning home at least once in a while to visit his beloved girl. The lyrics to “Lady Madonna” sound more grown-up and less naïve in a pessimistically experienced way. The song seems to suggest one possible direction a woman’s life could take after the first glow of love has vanished in the haze and she does not see things through rose-coloured glasses any longer. What can happen if a relationship does not work out? “Lady Madonna, baby at your breast / Wonder how you manage to feed the rest / See how they run / Lady Madonna lying on the bed / Listen to the music playing in your head / Tuesday afternoon is never ending / Wednesday morning papers didn’t come / Thursday night your stockings needed mending / See how they run / Lady Madonna, children at your feet / Wonder how you manage to make ends meet”.

77 13. The Beatles Look Within Themselves

The Beatles’ 1968 album, known as The Beatles or The White Album, starts off with a rocker called “Back in the U.S.S.R.”. It is a McCartney song meant to be understood as a pastiche of Chuck Berry’s song “Back in the U.S.A.”. So Paul’s lyrics can be seen as a reminder of 1950’s rock and roll with a great touch of satire added to it. The Beatles suddenly sing about a place like Russia and call it their “home”, “Gee it’s home […] / I’m back in the U.S.S.R.”. Also, there is no frame of reference whatsoever for all the “Western” girls and women to identify with the female characters dealt with in the lyrics, “Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out / They leave the West behind / And Moscow girls make me sing and shout / That Georgia’s always on my mind”. It was a revolution in rock and roll music to hear about places like Moscow or the Ukraine. After all, it was the time of the , and the United States’ fear of a communist infiltration and takeover was not exactly reduced by lyrics like these. “Back In The U.S.S.R.” is just one example of how versatile the Beatles’ White Album turns out to be. The record features lengthy story-songs like “”, as well as minimalist lyrics such as “ / Honey Pie / I love you / Honey Pie”, taken from the song “”. It comprises topics such as suicidal feelings in “Yer Blues”, discusses dental problems in “”, and follows a hunter through the jungle in “The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill”. But when it comes to love, relationships and physical contact suggested between two lovers, one has to dig deep in order to find such images. One example where physical contact is explicitly mentioned can be found in the song “”, by John Lennon. The lyrics start, “She’s not a girl who misses much”, and through a series of random images about such things as multicoloured mirrors, the National Trust, Mother Superior13 and drug allusions, develops towards the lines “Happiness is a warm gun / When I hold you in my arms / And I feel my finger on your trigger / I know no one can do me no harm”. Apart from the obvious image of holding a gun, one could also envision sexual connotations come with those lines. As Lennon’s “passionate relationship with Yoko Ono was then shading all his lyrics with erotic meaning” (MacDonald. Revolution in the Head: 318) a warm gun could certainly be interpreted as a penis, and the lyrics’ trigger could well be seen as some woman’s clitoris. If Lennon mentions “Mother Superior” as one idea of motherhood, then McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son” is yet another example of how important the concept of “mother” has become within the Beatles’ lyrics. “Mother Nature’s Son” reflects ’s

13 Lennon often called Yoko Ono “Mother Superior“. 78 lessons about the unity of man and nature. Femininity here is thought of as being the universal fountain of life. The speaker himself symbolises humankind’s fusion with the natural world when he states, “Born a poor young country boy / Mother Nature’s son”. An allusion to marijuana can be found in the line, “Find me in my field of grass / Mother nature’s son / Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun”. I would read this as a masked “thank you” for the herbal treasures mother nature is able to offer her sons and daughters. The Beatles’ lyrical artwork has become more and more absorptive for influences emanating from a multitude of sources the writers occupied themselves with at the time. Lennon especially felt an urge to write about himself and his very own impressions and feelings quite candidly, his newly found love Yoko Ono acting as his muse as well as his artistic associate. Still, most of his lyrics left room for interpretation on the part of the informed reader. One very good example of this can be found in the lyrics to the song “Julia”. To the uninformed, average female Beatles’ fanatic the lyrics must seem to be an ode to some girl by the name of Julia but, I think there is more to it than meets the eye. The lyrics are, “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you, Julia / Julia, Julia, oceanchild, calls me / So I sing a song of love, Julia / Julia, seashell eyes, windy smile, calls me / So I sing a song of love, Julia / Her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering, In the sun / Julia, Julia, morning moon, touch me / So I sing a song of love, Julia / When I cannot sing my heart / I can only speak my mind, Julia / Julia, sleeping sand, silent cloud, touch me / So I sing a song of love, Julia / Hum hum hum hum...calls me / So I sing a song of love for Julia, Julia, Julia”. In 1968, far away from western civilisation, in another attempt to find the meaning of life and to learn more about oneself by means of Transcendental Meditation brought to the Beatles by the Indian Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi14 in /India, John Lennon wrote the song “Julia”. His inspiration for the lyrics to this wonderful piece of music (legend has it that Lennon learned the complex finger picking guitar-work from the Scottish musician who had been in India together with the Beatles in the meditation-camp in 1968) came from a multitude of sources. “In early 1968, Lennon must have read Kahlil Gibran’s15 book of aphorisms, Sand and Foam, for he was apparently taken by two of its apothegms: ‘Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you,’ and ‘When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.’” (The Musical Quarterly: 1986: 379) John Lennon took these lines of poetry and used them in a slightly different and paraphrased

14 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917 – 2008) was the founder of the Transcendental Meditation technique. 15 Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese-American writer known for his work on the topic of spiritual love in connection with Christianity. 79 form to start and round off the lyrics of “Julia”. In doing so, he showed his openness and extended intellectual interest in various sorts of poetry and spiritual arts, and that he was not averse to letting it influence and shape his own works of art. Another inspiration for the song- lyrics must have been a woman by the name of Julia. But who exactly is the woman Lennon had in mind while working on the songs’ lyrics? Now, despite the fact that John Lennon and the Beatles stayed in India together with their wives (in the case of Paul McCartney it was with his long-time companion, actress Jane Asher) the only two women that mattered in Lennon’s world at the time were his mother Julia16 and his secret love, the Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Although at first glance the lyrics of the song “Julia” seem to be directed exclusively to John’s mother Julia, at closer inspection it is quite obvious that Yoko Ono had started to become a pivotal figure in the writer’s private life and particularly in his life as an artist and composer. Lennon was madly in love with Yoko (as later actions will prove), and it seems his wife was perceived as nothing more than a millstone around Lennon’s neck to be gotten rid of in order to make way for the spiritual and subsequent bodily merging with Yoko. no longer took part in his world of thought, at least not when it came to love and devotion. Lennon did not, at that time, have the courage, it seems, to explicitly dedicate the lyrics of a love-song – which “Julia” undoubtedly is – to his lover-to-be Yoko Ono. After all, he was still a married man. Rather, he veiled his declaration of love in poetic imagery in the context and disguise of a very personal message towards his mother Julia. I believe that “Julia” was the first “real” love song John Lennon wrote for Yoko Ono. In the last line of the poem, he uses his mother’s name as a mere synonym for the name that must not be spoken – Yoko. He thus is able to give his hidden feelings for this woman an outlet, confessing his emotions to the world (his mother, who meant the world to him) before even his own wife knew what was going on. The song “Julia” represents a John Lennon who, through the lyrics of the song, introduces and presents his new love of Yoko to his mother. At the same time, he tries to obtain her approval concerning his and Yoko’s relationship, a process which John Lennon was never able to experience due to the early death of his mother. To explore this, let us have a closer look at the lyrics of the song. Lines one and two (as well as lines eleven and twelve) are the aforementioned paraphrased lines of Gibran’s book Sand and Foam. Lennon starts his poem by reaching out to his mother, directly addressing her wherever she might be. These lines suggest that, although it might be

16 tragically died in a road accident when John was only seventeen years old. 80 of no use, Lennon is desperate to communicate with his mother, because he has to tell her about his newly found spiritual love. In line three the word “oceanchild” is an explicit hint at who he is talking about. The “oceanchild” who John writes is calling him is Yoko, whose name in Japanese means “child of the ocean”. The words “calls me” at the end of line three could be understood as a spiritual invocation. Lennon is called by Yoko Ono like his mother Julia was called by God onto some higher level of spiritual existence. John Lennon metaphorically puts himself in his mothers’ position, uplifting Yoko into the rank of a godlike figure. The song’s lyrics also include many images borrowed from nature to describe Lennon’s newly found love. We can find “seashell eyes, windy smile” in line five, “floating sky” in line seven, “morning moon” in line nine and “sleeping sand, silent cloud” in line thirteen. Lennon’s inspiration for the use of the words “sleeping sand” and “silent cloud” from line thirteen can easily be traced back to letters he received at the time he started writing the song. Yoko Ono sent him letters to India asking Lennon to “breathe” or to “watch for her in the sky as she is a cloud”. Obviously he was asked to look for her image as a transcendental reflection within the images of nature. Cynthia Lennon recalls the occurrences in India in Ray Coleman’s biographical work Lennon: The Definitive Biography as follows: Every morning he [Lennon] would be up and out of our room before me, at seven ’clock, saying he was off to meditate alone. He cut me dead in the mornings. […] I couldn’t understand why at the time; I put it down to being away and his changed attitudes to meditation […] I realized later that he was going to collect the morning mail with letters from Yoko, but at the time I had no idea. (Coleman. Lennon: The Definitive Biography: 457)

In a way, the overall pattern of “Julia” is the result of Lennon’s reflections about the letter- receiving period in Rishikesh. It goes from “calls me” at the beginning of the song to “touch me” towards the end. It goes from a pure description of facts (Yoko calling him via letters) to his innermost desire of being touched by his goddess. Lennon expresses his desire by the use of the imperative “touch me” in lines nine and thirteen, as opposed to the descriptive “calls me” in lines three and five. Moreover, the “touch” in the lyrics is the second and last example of physical contact suggested between two characters on The Beatles. The use of the image of “hair of floating sky” in the song’s middle bars I would attribute to the same phenomenon, namely the reception of the letters by Yoko Ono. It is easy to imagine Lennon staring at the sky and at clouds for hours on end trying to make out a vision of his loved one building up and vanishing again with the wind. A second possible interpretation is brought up by Ian MacDonald in his book Revolution in the Head. He states as follows:

81 The heart of this ritual – the transfer of Lennon’s love from Julia to Yoko – is its ten- middle where a quasi-oriental scale implies that the accompanying image (‘Her hair of floating sky is shimmering’) applies to both women: Julia in his boyhood memory, Yoko in his present and future thoughts.” (MacDonald. Revolution in the Head: 2007: 327)

I do agree that it is conceivable that Lennon had both Yoko and his mother in mind when thinking about the lyrics to the vision in the sky. I cannot quite agree though when MacDonald writes about a transfer of love from Julia to Yoko Ono. I do not see a transfer of love, because if you transfer your love from one person to another, you abandon one person for the sake of the other, which does not happen in “Julia”. It does not happen in “Julia” because it is not necessary. You can love both your mother and your newly acquired lover simultaneously. That is possible because they inhabit different categories of love. One is purely spiritual (Julia) and the other is based on carnal pleasures (Yoko). The love you feel towards your mother thus is able to coexist alongside the love you have for your lover. MacDonald’s theory of transferring love seems right if you imagine John Lennon having his wife Cynthia in mind while singing Julia. This would mean that the song “Julia” was a highly complex amalgamation of images of the three women who influenced and determined his life the most. John Lennon would pronounce ‘Julia’, really meaning ‘Cynthia’ and in a kind of apologetic way would tell his wife about the arrival of his soul mate ‘Yoko’. “Julia [Cynthia], seashell eyes [Yoko], windy smile [Yoko], calls me [Yoko] So I sing a song of love, Julia [Cynthia]”, taken from lines five and six of the lyrics of “Julia”. But, in my opinion, this assumption does not lead anywhere when we take a look at the last line of the song: “So I sing a song of love for Julia [Cynthia]”. The only living person Lennon would have sung a song of love for in 1968 would have been Yoko Ono. This last line of “Julia” confirms my assumption that Julia stands as a pure synonym for Yoko, which John at the time did not dare being explicit about.

14. The Beatles Pack their Things

The year 1969 marked the last year of corporate recording actions of the Beatles. They had lost interest in being “fab” already in the summer of 1966 when they decided to give up touring and retreat into the . In ’69, the Beatles recorded two LPs (Let It Be and Abbey Road) and three singles, one of which (The Ballad Of John And Yoko/Old Brown Shoe) presents a John Lennon self-revealing to the bone. Yoko Ono was his prime concern as

82 well as artistic influence at the time, and “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” amongst other things attests to his almost obsessive involvement with her. The song’s lyrics let the audience know about obstacles John and Yoko had to overcome before “Peter Brown called to say” that they could “get married in Gibraltar near Spain”, about their honeymoon, which was more of a press-conference promoting non-violence by “talking in our beds for a week”, and about other peace activisms performed in Vienna or London. Lennon and Ono’s journey in the song is framed by five choruses which give the impression of them appearing as victims. The chorus runs, “Christ you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me”. The line drawn between the couple’s private and public life is definitely a blurred one in “The Ballad Of John And Yoko”, as the song explicitly conveys the private problems of John Lennon and Yoko Ono to the public. Whereas John was occupied with Yoko and regarded the Beatles as merely one of the projects he was involved in (Lennon also recorded with the so-called “” and was engaged in various peace activisms), Paul McCartney tried hard to keep the Beatles going and avoid their falling apart as a unit. McCartney also tried to take over the leading role within the group but the other members of the Beatles resented him for his attempts. He (together with the Beatles) was going through a most difficult period, and internal dispute and business problems were adding additional fuel to the fire. Now, what do most human beings do when they are in need? They turn to their parents – especially to their mothers – for help and some reassuring words. McCartney, like Lennon, lost his mother when he was still in his teens and thus sees himself forced to create a literary image instead of a tangible mother. John had found his “mother superior” in the form of Yoko Ono. Paul reached out to his mother within the lyrics of the song “Let It Be”. In verse number one the speaker utters “When I find myself in times of trouble / Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be / And in my hour of darkness / She is standing right in front of me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be”. “Written in the style of a modern hymn, the religious feeling was heightened by the invocation of ‘mother Mary’ which appeared to be a reference to the Virgin Mary but was in fact a reference to Paul’s own mother, who he was imagining being there and offering support.” (Turner. A Hard Day’s Write: 180) There is definitely a certain ambiguity about the “mother Mary” image in the song, even more so for the uninformed listener who does not know that the name of Paul’s mother was Mary. McCartney himself explains: One night during this tense time I had a dream I saw my mum […] It was so wonderful for me and she was so reassuring. In the dream she said, ‘It’ll be all right’. […] that got me writing the song ‘Let It Be’. I literally started off ‘Mother Mary’, which was her name, ‘When I find myself in times of trouble’, which I certainly found myself in. […] Mother Mary makes it a quasi-religious thing, so you can take it that

83 way. I don’t mind. I’m quite happy if people want to use it to shore up their faith. [...] I think it’s a great thing to have faith of any sort, particularly in the world we live in. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 538)

Apart from the apparent importance of having reproduced memories about the feelings of security a mother is able to give, the album Let It Be shows evidence of the Beatles trying to return back to their roots musically as well as lyrically. Musically, Let It Be was “conceived of as an absolute return to basics. It was John’s idea not to use any of the tricks of the modern recording studio, not even overdubs, but to play their new album live in the studio.” (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 534) Lots of jamming and spontaneous action was going on in the studio as well, and one song which was generated in the recording studio was “Get Back”. It’s chorus, “Get back, get back / Get back to where you once belonged / Get back Jojo / Go home” together with the 12-bar blues or rock and roll chord sequence seems an attempt to revive the good times and the fun the very early Beatles had on stage. A similar phenomenon of reminiscing about the past can be observed within the lyrics of “Two Of Us”. Claimed by Paul McCartney to be about the relationship with his newly found love Linda Eastman, the song offers lines which are highly evocative of two boys’ teenage years spent together. “Two of us sending postcards / Writing letters / On my wall / burning matches / Lifting latches / On our way back home / We’re on our way home / We’re on our way home / We’re going home”, sounds more like the doings of two teenage boys rather than the doings of a grown-up couple. Also, “You and I have memories / Longer than the road that stretches out ahead” I would allot to Paul and John rather than Paul and Linda due to the fact that John and Paul have known each other for a much longer period. However, apart from the fact that “Two Of Us” reminds the audience of two prankish boys, the lyrics also seem to reflect a certain hopelessness. The song’s first line, “Two of us riding nowhere” followed by, “Two of us Sunday driving / Not arriving”, and “You and me chasing paper / Getting nowhere / On our way back home”, sound like McCartney’s realisation that the collaboration with Lennon (if you could still call it that) was leading nowhere but to the Beatles’ break-up. Together, they were getting nowhere, and they were no longer able to achieve mutual consent. The song mirrors the Beatles’ current situation and at the same time is longing for a home in the past where they can once more come together. The concept of “home” is made an idealised, peaceful place of mutual understanding in the past, wished for by McCartney to be transferred to the Beatles’ here and now, working as a sheet anchor. As yet another indication of the Beatles’, and especially Paul’s, attempt to evoke memories of the ‘good old times’ in order to uplift the group’s , one need look only so far as the inclusion of “One After 909” on the album Let It Be. “One After 909” is a song which was written by John and Paul

84 and can be regarded as one of the first Lennon-McCartney collaborations ever, as it was written as early as 1957. A return home to the Beatles’ rock and roll roots. The lyrics of McCartney’s “”, though, sound like a farewell directed towards the Beatles’ female fans. In an almost apologetic way he seems to convey the message that it is too late for the Beatles to return “home”. When the speaker utters the words, “Once there was a way to get back homewards / Once there was a way to get back home”, these words suggest a ‘but’; ‘but’ it is too late now. The speaker goes on in a comforting way, “Sleep pretty darling do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby”. He reassures the mournful listener not to become desperate, but listen to the songs he will sing for her in the future. When there is no way of getting back home, you are forced to project into the future. Here, not only the spiritual and musical “home” John and Paul were reaching out for, but also the “concrete” idea of “home”, was incorporated into the lyrics of the Beatles’ latest period. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is a fine example of how the concept of home had completely changed compared to the Beatles’ early lyrics. The lyric’s speaker begins by telling the audience that, “Joan was quizzical / Studied pataphysical science in the home / Late nights all alone with a test-tube / Ohh-oh-oh-oh”. Whereas home in the conservatively traditional sense was mainly used to convey the picture of ‘a place where the good housewife eagerly awaits her breadwinner’, this time a totally different perception of home is presented. It is defined as a venue in which science-based research takes place; it is used for the sake of higher education.17 What may even be more remarkable is the fact that it is a woman, Joan, who studies science in the home. Unlike her lyrical predecessors, she does not embody the 1950s ideal of the diligent housewife who was supposed to stay home and submit to her husband, but a self-determined woman who is committed to intellectual activities. It is true she finds herself “in the home”, but her home must be considered as the place of her choice in a very non-domestic context. As we follow the lyrical events, a male character enters the scene, “Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine / Calls her on the phone / ‘Can I take you out to the pictures / Joa-oa-oa-oan?’ / But as she’s getting ready to go / A knock comes on her door”. What happens next is described in the song’s chorus, “Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer / Came down upon her head / Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer / Made sure that she was dead”. Basically – apart from the personal “I-You” relation between addresser and addressee – “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” meets all the criteria which more often than not made a good pop-lyric in the early days of rock and roll, only in an almost contrasting context. There is the

17 Pataphysics (French: Pataphysique), a term coined by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), is a philosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopaedia. “’Pataphysics”. [online]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphysics [20 January 2009]. 85 woman who is alone at home, there is the male character who enters from outside and there is even physical contact suggested between the two in the lines, “Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer / Came down upon her head”. Maybe “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is the Beatles passing subliminal criticism on men who feel threatened by strong, intellectual, self-confident women, and would rather see them dead than take on leading positions in a still male- dominated society. It is interesting to note that a certain “Maxwell Edison” is presented as the culprit in the lyric. Because when you think about it, the name “Maxwell Edison” is a composition of the surnames of two famous and influential “men of science”. On the one hand we have James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish theoretical physicist and mathematician, and on the other hand there is the American Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb. It seems ironic that two great scientific researchers should be interested in eliminating one of their peers. Joan is a scientifically gifted yet female character and thus might represent a threat to her male colleagues - a threat which can only be averted by physical violence, a quality prevalent in male behaviour. Furthermore, the Beatles started playing with gender. Take for example the lines, “Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman / But she was another man”, from “Get Back”, or “Well you should see Polythene Pam / She’s so good-looking but she looks like a man / Well you should see her in drag” from the lyrics of “Polythene Pam”. In both cases the boundaries of being either male or female blur. The audience can never be absolutely sure which gender the song’s speaker has in mind when he talks about these characters. The song “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” leads the audience back to a straight-forward love lyric which leaves no questions unanswered. Lennon’s composition is remarkable due to its incredible economy of language. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy) runs, “I Want You / So Bad / It’s driving me mad / She’s so heavy”. For Lennon these lines included the essence of what he felt for Yoko and what he wanted to tell her. Another straight-forward love lyric was written by George Harrison titled “”. The song has the musical form of a 12-bar blues and the lyrical quality of the song surely is open to argument. If nothing else, it is a wonderful piece of lyric for every female Beatles fan to identify with the ‘you’ in the song. The words are, “Because you’re sweet and lovely girl / I love you / Because you’re sweet and lovely girl / It’s true / I love you more than ever girl / I do / I want you in the morning girl / I love you / I want you at the moment / I feel blue / I’m living every moment girl / For you / I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you / You looked at me that’s all you had to do / I feel it now I hope you feel it too”. George wrote these lines for his wife .

86 Directed towards a woman most people might regard as a very unlikely target for a love lyric is the Beatles’ very last song on Abbey Road, “Her Majesty”. As can be easily recognized, the person in question is Elisabeth II, Her Majesty The Queen. The lyrics to ‘Her Majesty’ are emblematic of how far apart John and Paul had become. Four months before John returned his MBE medal to the Queen, Paul was writing a few lines in her honour, even though they were tinged with irony. Paul: ‘It was quite funny because it’s basically monarchist, with a mildly disrespectful tone, but it’s very tongue in cheek. It’s almost like a love song to the Queen.’ (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 558)

The lyrics run, “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl / But she doesn’t have a lot to say / Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl / But she changes from day to day / I wanna tell her that I love her a lot / But I gotta get a bellyful of wine / Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl / Someday I’m gonna make her mine, oh yeah / Someday I’m gonna make her mine”. For a “mere mortal” to actually regard the Queen as a sexually attractive, appealing young girl, shows the audience how much irony really is to be found within these lines. “Her Majesty” also seems to question the political value of the aristocracy as mere representatives of a country, as “she doesn’t have a lot to say”. On the other hand, it also mirrors a certain affinity many English people show towards their Queen and the Royal House, especially since in 1969 the first TV documentary on the Royal Family was allowed to be broadcast. The aim was to demonstrate to the world that the Royals were human beings just like everybody else. It was a long journey and an interesting development for the Beatles from the lyrical representation of some 17 year old dancing partner on their first LP release, to the point of including explicit characters of public interest on the last album they recorded as a band.

87 15. Conclusion

Most people are probably thankful that John Lennon vetoed Paul McCartney’s initial recommendation “Well, she was just seventeen / She’d never been a beauty queen” to be used as the first song’s first line on their first album and turned it into “Well, she was just seventeen / You know what I mean”. I, however, am not, for the simple reason that the Beatles would have started and ended their recording career’s output with lyrics about queens – a “beauty queen” in 1963 and “Her Majesty the Queen of England” in 1969. Just imagine the potential to both academics and die-hard Beatlemaniacs alike of juxtaposing these two images, and philosophising about the lyrical circle which eventually closes. Consider the joie de vivre in these academics’ work combining these turns of phrases with the fact that in 1965 the Beatles actually met Queen Elisabeth II in order to be awarded their MBEs (Member of the Order of the British Empire). But as neither “I Saw Her Standing There” nor “Her Majesty” ever explicitly use the word “queen” I will start my thesis’ concluding section without any introductory thoughts.

The Beatles started their career as lyricists in the late 1950s and thus inevitably were influenced by American rock and roll which at the time was dominated by male images and ideas mainly. Artists like Ray Charles or Chuck Berry focused on what seemed to be important and true for the American youth or American people in general: amongst other things, the traditional structure of family and home, first relationships and music and dancing. This was all wrapped up in a macho-approach towards the role of women in society, together with an often infantilising tone on a personal “I-You” or “I-She” level between addresser and addressee. Now, the Beatles grew up with these lyrics and so it is only natural that to a certain extent they took over the 1950s’ rock and roll approach in their early lyrics. John and Paul started writing songs which suggested a high degree of closeness between speaker and receiver, primarily talking about love and physical contact on an intimate “I-You” (I-love- You) level. Lines like “You know I love you / I’ll always be true” or “Remember that I’ll always / Be in love with you”, taken from the Beatles’ first single release Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You in 1962, accentuate that closeness marvellously. It was important to give the female Beatles fan the opportunity to identify with the “you” in the lyrics, even if the main purpose then was to convince her to buy the record. Many early Beatles lyrics were full of clichés about gender roles and partly infantilised women or put them in a weak position. “A Hard Day’s Night” is a nice example which displays the picture of the good housewife waiting at

88 home for her breadwinner, becoming active only in a sexual context. Yet, it is songs like “There Is A Place”, taken from the Beatles’ first album which demonstrate that even in their early days as songwriters John and Paul were capable of breaking the alleged borders of popular lyricism, “getting a bit more cerebral”. (Miles. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now: 95) It is plain to see that the Beatles’ early lyrical output focuses to a great extent on the topic of love - a love which presents itself as being very immediate and traceable in terms of who correlates with whom. It is mainly the female recipient, who in her mind is “danced with”, “held” or “kissed” by the lyric’s addresser. However, over time, the act of bodily contact suggested by the speaker dwindles. In fact, the 1965 album “Rubber Soul” shows no traces of suggested physical contact between the sexes whatsoever for the first time in the Beatles’ history of record releases. The love lyric is still present, but the image of women displayed in the songs changes. Women are regarded more and more as strong and self-determined characters, which means that a reversal of the prevailing gender role patterns is taking place. The stronger women become in the lyrics of the Beatles, the weaker and more insecure their male counterparts are displayed – as can be observed in songs like “Girl” or “Norwegian Wood”. Following Rubber Soul the love lyric is on the decrease and it is getting visibly harder for the female fan to identify with a “you” or even “she” in the Beatles’ songs. On the one hand this phenomenon has to do with the fact that the Beatles become more explicit about their songs’ characters’ names. The words to songs like “Michelle”, “Lovely Rita”, “Lady Madonna”, “”, “”, “”, ”Julia” or “Polythene Pam” cater primarily to the few girls with these respective names. On the other hand John, Paul, George and Ringo are getting more and more involved in and fascinated by the idea of a universal and spiritual love, a circumstance which can be observed in the lyrics to songs like “The Word” or “All You Need Is Love”. These songs’ messages are directed towards a general “you” without any restrictions such as gender. Compared to the intimately interpersonal relationships their early lyrics’ speakers often used to talk about, an undeniable distance between male speaker and female receiver is palpable. Apart from gender issues in the broadest sense the Beatles have also started incorporating their own lives’ experiences and outside influences openly in their lyrics. Amongst many others, topics range from the Beatles’ discontentedness with the British tax system (cf. “Taxman”) to nonsensical-seeming “drug songs” (cf. “Tomorrow Never Knows”) to the inclusion of mantra-like phrases (cf. “Blue Jay Way)”. The Beatles have opened up in all

89 directions, and in 1965/66 a decreasing interest in the textual realisation of a close relationship between their lyrics’ speakers and the Beatles’ female teenage fans begins to come more strongly to the forefront. Towards the end of their career, the Beatles showed a high degree of lyrical versatility and complexity within their particular albums. Following Revolver in 1966, not more than one third of the lyrics on each future record will comprise the topic of love or relationships. Magical Mystery Tour - consisting of ten lyrics - features a total of one song with the idea of love behind it. The other lyrics’ topics span from thoughts about a fool on a hill to a repeated invitation to some mysterious journey. Lennon and McCartney even reminisce about their Liverpool childhood and manifest these thoughts in the fractionally surreal seeming lyrics to the songs “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”. The record closes with its only love lyric “All You Need Is Love”, revealing the Beatles’ encouraging philosophies about “Love” as the answer to all your doubts and fears. The “you” in the song is a general one and the “Love” the Beatles sing about is a universal, spiritual one. There is no more talk about some girl the lyric’s speaker is in love with or has just lost. Rather, the Beatles spread a general message to the people of the world, regardless of class or gender. The days of all the “I love/hold/kiss you, girl” banter are numbered. The Beatles have out-grown their lyrical roots and developed into self-contained, creative lyricists. Unlike the naïve little girl presented in earlier songs, they now offer a much broader spectrum of female characters to reflect on. It is interesting to observe that one of these female characters the Beatles include time after time in their later lyrics is “mother” (cf. “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, “Lady Madonna”, “Let It Be” or “Your Mother Should Know”). The Beatles’ presentation of “mother” is often reminiscent of the Virgin Mary image or is introduced as the universal fountain of life. Such concepts of femininity of course do not make it easy for the average female Beatles’ fan to identify with. But within the Beatles’ last two albums a subliminal attempt to return back to their roots musically as well as lyrically seems detectable. It is primarily McCartney who, with songs like “Two Of Us”, expresses a longing for the past. A return back home into an idealised, peaceful past without the permanent burden life as a mega pop-star brings with it. Still, the Beatles’ lyric range was a highly versatile one towards the end of their career. It reaches from straightforward “I love you” lyrics (cf. “For You Blue”) to lyrics written by Lennon and McCartney in the late 1950s (cf. “One After 909”) to the Beatles openly playing with gender (cf. “Polythene Pam” or “Get Back”).

90 16. Bibliography

Primary Literature

Aldridge, Alan, ed. (1996). The Beatles Songbook [1969]. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. The Beatles Bible: 100 Unverzichtbare Beatles-Songs mit Texten und Akkorden (1995). Berlin: Bosworth Music GmbH. The Beatles Complete: Guitar Edition. London: Music Sales Limited. The Beatles Guitar Book: Authentic Transcriptions with Notes & Tablature (1990). Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation.

Secondary Literature

Barrow, Tony (2005). John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me: The Real Beatles Story. London: André Deutsch. The Beatles Anthology 2000. London. Cassell. Buskin, Richard (2001). The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Beatles [1998]. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Coleman, Ray (2000). Lennon: The Definitive Biography [1984]. London: Pan Macmillan Ltd. Davies, Arthur (1996). The Beatles: “Quote Unquote” [1994]. Great Britain: Parragon. Davies, Evan (1969). “Psychological Characteristics of Beatle Mania”. In: Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 30, No. 2. PA: University Of Pennsylvania Press. 273-280. Dylan, Bob (2005). Chronicles: Volume One [2004]. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. Frontani, Michael R. (2007). The Beatles: Image and the Media. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Giuliano, Geoffrey (2000). Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries. London: Robson Books. Gower Price, Charles (1997). “Sources of American Style in the Music of the Beatles”. In: American Music. Vol. 15, No. 2. IL: University Of Illinois Press. 208-232. Howlett, Kevin, and Mark Lewisohn (1990). In my Life: John Lennon Remembered. London: Butler & Tanner Ltd. Ingham, Chris (2003). The Rough Guide to: The Beatles. London: Rough Guides Ltd.

91 Ingham, Peter, and Toru Mitsui (1987). “The Search for Sweet Georgia Brown: A Case for Discographical Detection”. In: Popular Music. Vol. 6, No. 3, Beatles Issue. MA: Cambridge University Press. 273-290. Kane, Larry (2003). Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour that Changed the World. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. Lennon, Cynthia (2006). John [2005]. London: Hodder & Stoughton. MacDonald, Ian (2007). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties [1994]. , IL: Chicago Review Press. Miles, Barry (1998). Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now [1997]. London: Vintage. Riley, Tim (1987). “For the Beatles: Notes on their Achievement”. In: Popular Music. Vol. 6, No. 3, Beatles Issue. MA: Cambridge University Press. 257-271. Schuster, Peter (1989). Four Ever: Die Geschichte der Beatles [1986]. Stuttgart: Belser. Skinner Sawyers, June, ed. (2006). Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on the Beatles, their Legacy, and Why they still Matter. New York: Penguin. Starr, Ringo (2004). Postcards from the Boys [2004]. London: Cassell Illustrated. Wenner, Jann S. (2000). Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970 [1971]. London: Verso.

Electronic Sources

Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles Anthology 1 & 2 [Documentary]. Apple Corps Limited. Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles Anthology 3 & 4 [Documentary]. Apple Corps Limited. Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles Anthology 5 & 6 [Documentary]. Apple Corps Limited. Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles Anthology 7 & 8 [Documentary]. Apple Corps Limited. Aspinall, Neil, Executive Producer (2003). The Beatles Anthology Special Features [Documentary]. Apple Corps Limited.

92 Online

“Boys (The Shirelles Song)”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_(The_Shirelles_song) [2008, August 21]. “The British Columbia Folklore Society”. Social Customs: http://www.folklore.bc.ca/Socialcustoms.htm [2008, December 3]. “British Invasion”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_invasion [2008, November 23].

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