| The Beatles.
1965. Help! [13]. London: EMI Records Ltd. [Parlophone CDP
7 46439 2] |
|
| McCartney [May
1965]: I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, That's
great, I wonder what that is? There was an upright piano next to
me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat
at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th — and that leads
you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all
leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I'd
dreamed it I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, No, I've
never written like this before. But I had the tune, which was the
most magic thing. And you have to ask yourself, where did it come
from? But you don't ask yourself too much or it might go away. (Miles
1997: 202) |
| McCartney:
It had no words. I used to call it "Scrambled Eggs." They lyrics
used to go, "Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs .
. . ." There was generally a laugh at that point, you didn't need
to do any more lyrics. (Miles 1997: 203) |
|
 |
| McCartney: I played
it for George and Ringo and they said, "Lovely, nice one." Ringo said,
"I don't think I can really drum on that." George said, "Well, I'm not
sure I can put much on it either." and John said, "I can't think of anything,
I think you should just do it yourself. It's very much a solo thing.") |
| So I did, just me
and my guitar. then George Martin had the idea to put the string quartet
on it and I said, "No, I don't think so." He said, "I've really got a
feeling for it. I can hear it working." So I said, "Oh, a string quartet,
it's very classical, I'm not interested really . . . . " But he cleverly
said, "Let's try it," and I thought, that's fair enough. "If we hate it,"
he said, "we can take it off. We'll just go back, it's very nice just
with the solo guitar and your voice.") |
| People tend to think
that we did the music and George did all the arrangements. The thing people
don't generally know was that me or John or whoever it was involved in
the orchestral angle would go round to George's house or he would come
round to ours, and we would sit with him, and I did on this. I went round
to George's house and we had a pleasant couple of hours, had a cup of
tea, sat there with the manuscript paper on the piano.) |
| He said, "Okay, G."
And I played it to him. "These are my chords." He said, "That's very nice."
See, what we do in rock 'n' roll is block out chords with one white note
between them. But a classical composer writing for strings might leave
the G there but would think that having one note on either side would
be too closely grouped, it would make a string quartet sound like almost
one instrument. So the trick is to separate them. the chord G is comprised
of G, B, and D. So your G might go down an octave and be on the cello.
The B might stay where it is and you take the D up. I remember that on
that session George explained to me how Bach would have voiced it in a
choral voicing or a quartet voicing. And he'd say, "This would be the
way Bach would do it," and he'd play it.) |
| It would be my same
chords but spread over the piano, rather than closely grouped. It was
nice, I was getting lessons. I find out these little tricks as I go along.
A course in it would teach me them all, but I can't be bothered doing
that. I learn as I go along. Music is such a beautiful innocent thing
for me, a magic thing, that I don't want it ever to smack of homework,
that would ruin it all.) |
| So George showed
me this voicing, and I said "lovely" and we did the whole song, very straight,
for a string quartet. And there was just one point in it where I said,
"could the cello now play a slightly bluesy thing, out of the genre, out
of keeping with the rest of the voicing?" George said, "Bach certainly
wouldn't have done that, Paul, ha ha ha." I said, "Great!" That was what
we often used to do, try and claim our one little moment. I mean, obviously
it was my song, my chords, my everything really, but because the voicing
now had become Bach's, I needed something of mine again to redress the
balance. so I put a 7th in, which was unheard-of. It's what
we used to call a blue note, and that became a little bit well known.
It's one of the unusual things in that arrangement. (Miles 1997:208) |
| Martin: The turning
point probably came with the song "Yesterday," on the Help! album
which we issued in 1965. That was when, as I can see in retrospect, I
started to leave my hallmark on the music, when a style started to emerge
which was partly of my making. It was on "Yesterday" that I started to
score their music. It was on "Yesterday" that we first used instruments
or musicians other than the Beatles and myself (I had often played the
piano where it was necessary, as on A Hard Day's Night). On "Yesterday"
the added ingredient was no more nor less than a string quartet; and that,
in the pop world of those days, was quite a step to take. It was with
"Yesterday" that we started breaking out of the phase of using just four
instruments and went into something more experimental, though our initial
experiments were severely limited by the fairly crude tools at our disposal,
and had simply to be moulded out of my recording experience. (Martin 1979:166-67) |