It turns out the song may have indeed been a way for John to blow off some steam, as he later claimed that he was indeed referring to himself and Yoko and how the rest of the world had gone crazy around them, even as they remained blissfully oblivious. (For the rest of the world, you can read that phrase as codename for a certain trio of bandmates whose names rhyme with Saul, Blorge, and Schmingo.)

I’m not quite buying Lennon’s claims of love-induced euphoria throughout these notoriously tense sessions. Maybe on the day he recorded the song he felt “such a joy”, but I get the feeling that he was as fidgety as everybody else during this time. Why else would he and Paul jokingly refer to the band around that time as “Los Paranoias?”

While many could read way into it and see “monkey” as a drug reference, I think John was innocent on that count. This song is too much of a throwaway to be sinister, so let’s take it at face value. It’s a shade more than two minutes worth of unhinged rock silliness, and it’s nice to hear The Beatles could have a little fun even in the darkest days.

We did our longest walk last night, just stretched the edges a bit and it took us to 6.6 miles which added 12 minutes or so to the trip.  Both felt great though as we complete our third week.  That’s 13 bridge walks and about nearly 80 miles in January under our own steam.  Feeling good.

We have a very interrupted week now though.

Beacuse Echo and the Bunnymen are the greatest band ever to come out of Liverpool I thought we’d share some “feelies” with you from another Liverpudliam minor group.

Monkey love is eternal, see.  RIP John.

adsertoris:

The Beatles – Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey (Take 12 Lennon-McCartney 23 Jul 1968)

-

“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is a song written by John Lennon (credited to Lennon/McCartney) and performed by The Beatles on their 1968 album The Beatles, also known as “The White Album”

In 1980, Lennon said: “That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love. Everything is clear and open when you’re in love. Everybody was sort of tense around us: You know, ‘What is she doing here at the session? Why is she with him?’ All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time.”

George Harrison said that the first part of song’s title originated from a quote by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,   however, as for the “… except me and my monkey” part, he attested that he did not “know where that came from” though McCartney believes it was a reference to Lennon’s heroin habit.

Although Lennon denied it, the monkey of the title was widely taken to be a reference to heroin, as were the words “The deeper you go the higher you fly”. ‘A monkey on the back’ was a jazz term for heroin addiction thought to have originated in the 1940s.

Lennon and Yoko Ono had begun taking heroin in 1968; they claimed they used it to escape the press interest in their relationship.

He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin. Until that point we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started talking about fixes and monkeys and it was a harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into. We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really see how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far. In actual fact, he did end up clean but this was the period when he was on it. It was a tough period for John, but often that adversity and that craziness can lead to good art, as I think it did in this case.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

In the studio

The Beatles rehearsed the song a number of times before committing it to tape. A demo version recorded at George Harrison’s Esher bungalow in May 1968 shows how it started as gently blues-based song, with little hint of the rocker it would become.

Initially known as Untitled, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey was first recorded at Abbey Road on 26 June 1968. There were no numbered takes; it was a day of rehearsal only, although it was recorded in case The Beatles came up with anything usable.

The next day they recorded six takes of the still-untitled song. Onto the last of these they overdubbed a number of instruments, including two lead guitars, handbell and shaker. A reduction mix to free up spare tracks also resulted in the song being sped up from 3’07” to 2’29”; it would end up faster still following a later mix.

On 1 July Paul McCartney added a first bass guitar part and John Lennon added new lead vocals, but the latter were replaced on 23 July. Backing vocals – including the frantic ‘come on, come on’ ending – handclaps and another bass guitar part were recorded on the same day, and the song was mixed for mono. The stereo mix followed on 12 October.

• Alan W. Pollack’s analysis of the song
• The Beatles Bible: Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey

____________________________________________________________________

“Drive My Car”
Album: Rubber Soul

Laden with innuendo and bristling with the sound that would later be identified with the whole of 60’s rock, “Drive My Car” begins Rubber Soul with a little taste of the musical change that was only beginning to taking place. The Beatles themselves highly regarded Rubber Soul as “the pot album” (no pun intended), which may account for the slightly augmented lyrical as well as musical creativity. They didn’t smoke in the studio (because it made them way too giggly to get anything done) but the influence is readily apparent throughout the album.

The song starts with a guitar lick distinctive from nearly anything the Beatles had done before. Then the verses kick in, with one of McCartney’s rawer vocals telling the story of an aspiring actress who feigns a search for a chauffeur in order to find… well, a driver of a different kind. The verses are also backed by a lively cowbell (the most beloved livestock-related percussive instrument of all time).

And don’t forget the “beep beep ‘n beep beep, yeah!” that sometimes follows the chorus. It’s extremely hooky, even after we learn that the song isn’t really about a car. It’s also just fun to shout out loud when no one expects it.

“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey”
Album: The Beatles

Loosely based on a saying frequently used by the maharishi whilst The Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in India, “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is the longest Beatles title ever. It’s anyone’s guess to whom or what the “and my monkey” refers, seeing as it wasn’t a part of the original adage, but it does well to suggest the frantic energy of the lead guitar that dominates the song.

It begins with three escalating guitar notes repeated over handclaps. The lyrics are nearly shouted over the backing handbell. John almost sounds like an excited kid who really wants to show you something. He shouts “take it easy” in a voice that suggests that he’s coaxing not just a listener but himself. Lennon said that the song was written about an especially paranoid period of the Beatles’ lives, at which point John felt like the only one of them who had a handle on things. The others argued that he was just as paranoid as the rest of them, if not more so. The song seems to convey this discrepancy between what John thought and what he felt.

The double lead guitars in the verses allow the guitar sound to be at once lazy and frenetic, which is again all too appropriate for the message that the song conveys. The ditty also came packaged with a semi-discreet drug endorsement in “the higher you fly the deeper you go,” which leads some to believe that Lennon’s “monkey” was really heroin (to which he was addicted at the time.) Whatever the song really meant to John, is lost on me, but the little energetic riff that ends each chorus more than makes up for that.

“For No One”
Album: Revolver

“For No One” is the lyrical antithesis of “She Loves You.” In this instance of McCartney as the middleman, he’s past trying to comfort his friend and is on to essentially saying “she doesn’t love you anymore.” Whereas in “She Loves You” the story is a matter of miscommunication and reconciliation, in “For No One” the mediator steps in because, despite the fact that the jilted boyfriend knows how his ex feels about him, he refuses to accept it.

McCartney masterfully conveys this sentiment through the tone of the music, making this melancholy tune one of the highlights of Revolver. The almost jaunty piano and clavichord tune that drives the verses gives them the air of blunt straightforwardness. It sounds almost happy, but underlying that happiness is the detectable sound of distress, as if Paul is really explaining this situation to you and you’re happily in denial until he breaks the barriers down.

The chorus is the most straightforward of all. The piano melody is more complex and sounds sincerely sad, accompanying the feelings of the man in the song whose complicated emotions seem closest to the surface during the choruses. The French horn compliments the sentiment precisely, and is especially impressive because it features a note that is allegedly out of the range of said instrument.

McCartney’s lyricism is especially excellent here as well. His clear and concise, yet poetic, lyricism make this one of the most emotionally evocative tracks of the Beatles catalog. “The tears cried for no one” are futile and aren’t going to make the girl love again, yet the song states that the love “should have lasted years,” as if the singer, too, is beginning to fall prey to denial. In the fourth verse the girl talks about her former lover as if he no longer exists, which told from the perspective of this third, uninvolved party is especially poignant.

The way that the song hits these emotions directly on the head may be a result of turmoil in Paul McCartney’s relationship with Jane Asher at this period. It was written as their relationship was coming to a close, and it seems nearly impossible for Paul to have written this beautiful song without drawing from everything he was feeling during that time. Like many other Beatles songs, it is relatable because he emotion channeled into the song comes from somewhere very real.

“Getting Better”
Album: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The upbeat positivity that characterizes “Getting Better” is apparent from the second the song begins, and is reinforced immediately with the song’s first “It’s getting better all the time!” Throughout the song, McCartney goes through a laundry list of how his life used to be bad but, now that he’s found someone to be his, his life has gotten better.

The song showcases the Paul and John dynamic of the group, with most of the song being dominated by Paul’s optimistic theme of “getting better,” and only peppered with John’s pessimistic “It can’t get no worse.”

It’s almost charming that having a new girl should have little to no correlation with how his teachers in school are treating him. Instead, this new girl seems to help him with his anger issues, making him more likely to put up with nonsense at school. Also particularly interesting are the lines about being “cruel to [his] woman” and “ke[eping] her apart from the things that she loves,” which seem to suggest that he’s still with this woman, yet he’s gotten better since he’s been with this new one. Every aspect of this guy’s life has improved since he began this affair. But he is “doing the best that [he] can,” right?

“Good Day Sunshine”
Album: Revolver

I know quite a few people who absolutely can’t stand this song. Why? It’s way too happy. But I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with “too happy” in this case. The “good day sunshine!”  repeated throughout the song just makes you feel good, even if the reasons given in the song are kind of silly.

The first verse’s “when the sun is out I’ve got something I can laugh about” seems almost ridiculous out of context. Sunshine isn’t typically enough to make a elicit a chuckle (unless you of course consider that The Beatles were from England, where the weather was typically gloomy, but even here laughter seems unwarranted).

It’s better explained a couple of lines later with “I’m in love and it’s a sunny day.” It’s really a song about new love, and how it changes the way you feel, so that even the most minute things can induce drug-like bliss. Even the fact that the sun’s heat is such that he “burns [his] feet as they touch the ground” makes him happy. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

Here, George Martin’s piano perfectly compliments the sentiment. It is the epitome of the feel-good song, and if you don’t like it you’re probably just jealous that you don’t feel this good.

___________________________________________________________________

And if you missed them, check out Part I and Part II !!!