One morning sometime in late 1963, months before that night at the Delmonico Hotel, Paul McCartney awoke from a dream in which he had composed a particularly good tune. He jumped out of bed and began to play the melody on piano so as not to forget what he had dreamt. Initially, he was unsure if the tune was unconsciously plagiarized from a song heard in his childhood, or borrowed from a tune overheard on the radio or in a club. After the assurances from many others that the melody was indeed original, McCartney began to search for the appropriate lyric to bring the finishing touch. For months, the work in progress was known as "Scrambled Eggs" due to the comical substitute lyrics used to fill the void.
The song was finally finished when Paul had a breakthrough with the lyrics during a trip to Portugal in May, 1965.
"I remember mulling over the tune 'Yesterday', and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea ... da-da da, yes-ter-day, sud-den-ly, fun-il-ly, mer-il-ly and Yes-ter-day, that's good. All my troubles seemed so far away. It's easy to rhyme those a's: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. Sud-den-ly, and 'b' again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it."
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
"Yesterday" was voted the best song of the 20th Century in a poll by BBC Radio 2 in 1999, and voted the #1 pop song of all time by both MTV and Rolling Stone in 2000. It has been covered by over 3,000 different artists, and according to BMI, was performed over 7 million times in the 20th century alone.
"thinking for the first time, really thinking"
Paul McCartney, August 1964
I was alone, I took a ride
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I
Could see another kind of mind there
Ooo, then I suddenly see you
Ooo, did I tell you I need you?
Every single day of my life
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... 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. It's saying, I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
Paul's again. I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn't write them. You see? When I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, here's an example. It actually describes the experience taking acid. I think that's what he's talking about. I couldn't swear to it, but I think that it was a result of that.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
Something extraordinary had happened to McCartney between between that dream in 1963 and the breakthrough of lyrics in 1965. We could say that it was his exposure to marijuana; his "ode to pot" is pretty compelling evidence, but I think it would be too simple to attribute all of that to just marijuana. There were many variables at play. Consider that John, George, and Ringo had all smoked the same pot that night, but it was McCartney who seemingly had the most profound awakening. And while John and George fell under the spell of LSD in early 1965, convincing Ringo to join them in August of 1965, it was McCartney who abstained until March of 1967. McCartney must have been exceedingly confident in his abilities in that interim, convinced that his creativity was not in need of the "experience" that his bandmates were so incredibly enamored by. Why did it take McCartney so long? I think McCartney fell back on the attitude he had expressed when the band played all night shows in Germany, when amphetamines were the fuel that drove them on:
The speed thing first came from the gangsters. Looking back, they were probably thirty years old but they seemed fifty... They would send a little tray of schnapps up to the band and say, 'You must do this: Bang bang, ya! Proost!' Down in one go. The little ritual. So you'd do that, because these were the owners. They made a bit of fun of us but we played along and let them because we weren't great heroes, we needed their protection and this was life or death country. There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren't messing around here. They made fun of us because our name, the Beatles, sounded very like the German 'Peedles' which means 'little willies'. 'Oh, zee Peedles! Ha ha ha!' They loved that. It appealed directly to the German sense of humour, that did. So we'd let it be a joke, and we'd drink the schnapps and they'd occasionally send up pills, prellies, Preludin, and say, 'Take one of these.'
I knew that was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we'd be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, 'What are you on, man? What are you on?' I said, 'Nothin'! 'S great, though, isn't it!' Because I'd just get buoyed up by their conversation. They'd be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn't really need one, I was so wired anyway. Or I'd maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you'd find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies. This was good because it meant I didn't have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn't like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I'd wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over. So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock 'n' roll at that time. Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution.
The time between August 1964 and March of 1967 is considered the Beatles most creative period during which Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, the singles which would make up Magical Mystery Tour, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were all written. And according to some, it was McCartney who was the unspoken leader of the group.
Then came that fateful night in March 1967. The Beatles were in the studio recording Sgt. Pepper's when Lennon inadvertently took LSD. Feeling the effects of the drug coming upon him, John left the studio. Paul followed and offered to take John home.
The speed thing first came from the gangsters. Looking back, they were probably thirty years old but they seemed fifty... They would send a little tray of schnapps up to the band and say, 'You must do this: Bang bang, ya! Proost!' Down in one go. The little ritual. So you'd do that, because these were the owners. They made a bit of fun of us but we played along and let them because we weren't great heroes, we needed their protection and this was life or death country. There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren't messing around here. They made fun of us because our name, the Beatles, sounded very like the German 'Peedles' which means 'little willies'. 'Oh, zee Peedles! Ha ha ha!' They loved that. It appealed directly to the German sense of humour, that did. So we'd let it be a joke, and we'd drink the schnapps and they'd occasionally send up pills, prellies, Preludin, and say, 'Take one of these.'
I knew that was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we'd be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, 'What are you on, man? What are you on?' I said, 'Nothin'! 'S great, though, isn't it!' Because I'd just get buoyed up by their conversation. They'd be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn't really need one, I was so wired anyway. Or I'd maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you'd find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies. This was good because it meant I didn't have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn't like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I'd wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over. So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock 'n' roll at that time. Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
The time between August 1964 and March of 1967 is considered the Beatles most creative period during which Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, the singles which would make up Magical Mystery Tour, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were all written. And according to some, it was McCartney who was the unspoken leader of the group.
Then came that fateful night in March 1967. The Beatles were in the studio recording Sgt. Pepper's when Lennon inadvertently took LSD. Feeling the effects of the drug coming upon him, John left the studio. Paul followed and offered to take John home.
I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.
Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.
There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go.
I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while.
I'd just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, 'Go to bed? You won't sleep!' 'I know that, I've still got to go to bed.' I thought, now that's enough fun and partying, now ... It's like with drink. That's enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don't just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. 'Yeah, I think so.' I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
I imagine that prior to that first trip McCartney was driven quite mad by John, George and Ringo, as well as countless others, ranting and raving about the awesome power of the LSD experience. I am sure he had read all about the pros and cons in countless news articles and magazines. So unlike pot, which everyone in the group tried at the same time without much defined expectation in the same room, Paul's set and setting with LSD was markedly different. He had many predetermined expectations; he was also on an island within the group. And I think that the above variables had an big effect on his experience. I don't think that his experience with LSD defined him or furthered his creative potential as much as marijuana had. I don't think that he shared the same passion for it as Ringo, George, and especially John.
About one year after Paul had joined the rest of the band in experimenting with LSD, the group publicly rejected drugs and flew to Rishkesh, India to study at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation training camp. Meditation won out over trepanation. But that too was short lived. And shortly after that, the Beatles were no more.
Ooo, then I suddenly see you
Ooo, did I tell you I need you?
Every single day of my life
Every single day? I'm not sure that this is a good formula for epiphany, and certainly not the kind that McCartney experienced in the Delmonico Hotel. Just how much is too much? John Lennon admitted to taking LSD every day for a long period of time. How much impact could it possibly have any more? Like the alcoholic or the junky, the daily habit is an addiction, not a celebration. It is a medication not an intoxication. It is also a very unenlightened magic. A poor formula for Thunder.
The Fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonn
bronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnska
wntoohoohoordenenthurnuk)
"John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity."
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