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Exactly, Anthony. I’m going to translate again (English-Spanish-English, you know) some fragments of Beatles official biography by Hunter Davies published in 1968. It’s an exhaustingly complete book boring at times (the exhaustive descriptions of the Beatles childhood) but Davies was there while the Fab Four were creating their masterpieces and the descriptions of the then present facts while they were composing “Walrus” or “Little Help From My Friends” are the most interesting aspects. Let’s go:
“One day, in his Weybridge home, John heard the siren of a police car in the distance. It consists in a high note and a low one that repeats again and again, like a primitive wail. He kept the beat and began to add some lyrics: “Mis-ter, Ci-ty, plice-man, sit-tin, pre-tty”.
Then he began to change the order of the lyrics: “Sitting pretty, like a policeman”. But he couldn’t get far. He though that it could be the basis for a song, but there was no need to develop it at that very moment. He would work on this the next time he needed a song.
- I got it written down in a paper somewhere. I’m always afraid to forget it and I write it down, but in fact I don’t forget it.
He showed me some other written nonsense to apply to some kind of rhythm: “Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come”. I didn’t understand it well, I though he said “van to come”. He liked it like that and said that he will change the lyrics.
He got also some bit of melody. He got it thinking on the phrase “sitting in an English country garden”. This is what he does at least two hours every day, he sits down on the step in front of the glass door and look to his garden. That day he realized that fact, he repeated the phrase again and again till the melody came.
- I still don’t know what to do. Maybe I could put it all together in the same song: “Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the van to come”. I don’t know.
And that’s what it happened. He put together all the parts and that became “I Am the Walrus”. In the instrumental backing you can hear the persistent beat of a police siren, that it was the thing that inspired the song. This happens often with John. Fragments that began separately ends within the same song”
Another quote this time from John Lennon itself:
“It came from “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a beautiful poem to me… (Later) I realized that the walrus was the bad one and the carpenter the good one. I thought: “Oh, shit, I’ve picked up the wrong guy. I would have said: I am the carpenter”. But it wouldn’t have been the same, would it?”
So (and sorry for the long post):
- Hunter Davies wrote a word on “Walrus” (and he didn’t get paid!!).
- He stole ideas in this one too (like in many others, “Good Morning”, “Mr. Kite”, “A Day in the Life”
. But that’s not negative at all, it’s the way you combine it the important thing.
- This story gives the idea of how positive was for The Beatles to stay away from the stormy Beatlemania in the second part of their career. Finally they got time to slowly develop the songs, to let mature it before the final recording. The amount of available time got a more positive effect that LSD itself.
Sorry if this kind of stories sounds masturbatory, but I find fascinating the process of composing a song (much more that many other aspects involved in pop music). And there’s nothing wrong to learn from the geniuses.
It's a bit sad that only a dozen of us participate in this; and even sadder that only a few of us choose to comment on the songs we're voting for... 