BEATLENCYCLOPEDIA

Interesting Song Facts

Hi everybody! I'm here again after a long time, you know, holidays 😁. I'm glad you're still with me!

In this chapter (definitely not the last one with this topic) we'll look at some Beatles songs and interesting facts about them.

Long Long Long

Maybe you remember this little known soft George's song from The White Album. And maybe at 2:30 you wondered what that helicopter sound is. Here's the answer from George Martin's assistant Chris Thomas:
"There's a sound near the end of the song which is a bottle of Blue Nun wine rattling away on top of a Leslie speaker cabinet. It just happened. Paul hit a certain note and the bottle started vibrating. We thought it was so good that we set the mikes up and did it again. The Beatles always took advantage of accidents."

Plus my book says that the last chord is moll version of A Hard Day's Night's opening chord and is considered for a symbol of death.

There's a Place

John and Paul wrote this song together at Paul's and John later said:
" ‘There’s A Place’ was my attempt at a sort of Motown, black thing. It says the usual Lennon things: ‘In my mind there’s no sorrow…’ It’s all in your mind."

Paul claims that the song was inspired by a song from

West Side Story.
"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. We both sang it. I took the high harmony, John took the lower harmony or melody. This was a nice thing because we didn’t actually have to decide where the melody was till later when they boringly had to write it down for sheet music."

"There's a place for us...." We were watching West Side Story at school and I thought that the lyrics are similar, but I assumed that it was accidental🤔. Do you like West Side Story? If you want to download for free in high quality (and if you don't mind Czech subtitles) here it is:

https://uloz.to/file/53cEw8Zcd3JW/west-side-story-zip#!ZGV1AmR2AGuzZ2VlZQZ1ZQZ4ZwAvZSqXZ2DmLGN5HHkHpTEvAj==

Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite

"The whole song is from a Victorian poster, which I bought in a junk shop. It is so cosmically beautiful. It’s a poster for a fair that must have happened in the 1800s. Everything in the song is from that poster, except the horse wasn’t called Henry. Now, there were all kinds of stories about Henry the Horse being heroin. I had never seen heroin in that period. No, it’s all just from that poster. The song is pure, like a painting, a pure watercolour."

So as you know now (John was speaking👆) he wrote the text with a little help from his poster. Seriously I've never heard the rumour about the horse Harry being heroin, have you?
B

ut the most interesting is the big mishmash in the second half, full of big organ, not so big organ, small organ and Hammond organ noise. John wanted the song sound like an orange 😂😂 and when George Martin raised his eyebrow, he ecplained that he want to smell the sawdust from the song (no clue how is it related to orange🤷‍♀️). So the made the first little mishmash with harmonica and Hammond organ with scales played by Martin (he wanted them to be very fast, so they used varispeed to make the scales faster). But he knew (how an orange sounds😉) so he found somewhere a hoard of old tapes with funfair organ, barrel organ... All those sounds that smell like sawdust. He gave them to the engineer and told him to cut them into little pieces. He carefully did that. The George Martin said: Now throw them in the air and glue them together on random. I bet the engineer's face was really funny. He did that but it still wasn't an orange sound. So this big conglutinate is played backwards!

Poor George Martin, it wasn't easy job with those guys.. 😁 But he did it great! Thank you!