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Lot Essay
At least two sets of abbreviated lyrics were written out by Paul McCartney for John Lennon and George Harrison to use as a prompt during the first recording sessions for ‘Hey Jude’ at EMI Studio Two on Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 July 1968. Thanks to a rare concession by the Beatles, part of the 30 July session was captured on film by the National Music Council of Great Britain, allowing us to identify the present handwritten lyrics in the footage and definitively place them in the studio during that session as most likely intended for use by George Harrison, before a disagreement with McCartney relegated him to the control room.
The Beatles had assembled at Abbey Road on 29 July to rehearse the song and finalize the arrangement, ultimately recording six rehearsal takes that evening, with Paul on piano and vocals, John on acoustic guitar, George on electric guitar, and Ringo on drums. When the group returned to Studio Two the following evening to resume recording, they were joined by a film crew from the National Music Council who had been granted rare access to record footage for a short documentary on popular music. While the 30 July session has often been classified by Beatles historians as little more than a rehearsal, studio engineer Ken Scott confirmed to Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan for their extensively researched book Recording The Beatles, that the seventeen takes recorded between 7.30pm and 3.30am that evening, numbered 7 through 23, were true attempts to capture the backing track, the idea being to record the master backing track at EMI and then move to Trident Studios the following day to complete the overdubs on their eight-track machine. The roughly six minutes of footage that was ultimately released as part of the documentary is believed to predominantly show the band working on take 9, indicating that the crew were only present to film the first few takes of the recording session. Titled Music!, the short documentary was screened in UK cinemas in October 1969 before the Mel Brooks feature film The Producers and aired on US television as part of NBC’s Experiment in Television series in February 1970. In the released footage, Lennon is seen referring to a very similar sheet of abbreviated lyrics as he records his acoustic guitar parts for the backing track, while McCartney sits at the piano with a set of complete lyrics, Starr pounds the drums, and Harrison sits out the session in the studio control room with producer George Martin and engineer Ken Scott. However, extended footage and outtakes from the National Music Council recording, circulating on a European bootleg DVD, distinctly show this exact sheet of handwritten lyrics spindled to a microphone stand to the left of the piano, almost certainly placed there for use by George Harrison before he abandoned the session and retreated to the control room. Notably, the paper still displays a puncture through the top line of the lyrics, where the page was fixed to the stand.
Footage shot earlier in the session shows that Harrison started out in the studio with his Gibson SG (see lot 10), seated to the left of McCartney at the piano – and behind the microphone stand where the lyrics would eventually be skewered – as they continued to work out the arrangement. Although the unreleased footage lacks sound, it appears that the film crew captured the conversation becoming visibly heated as McCartney infamously vetoed Harrison’s idea to play a guitar phrase in response to each line of the vocal. I remember on ‘Hey Jude’ telling George not to play guitar, McCartney told Vic Garbarini of Musician magazine in 1980. He wanted to echo riffs after the vocal phrases, which I didn’t think was appropriate. He didn’t see it like that, and it was a bit of a number for me to have to ‘dare’ to tell George Harrison – who’s one of the greats, I think – not to play. It was like an insult. McCartney elaborated on the incident in a 2018 conversation with Howard Stern, explaining: It didn’t seem like a good idea, and the rule in the Beatles was if it was your song, you were allowed to call it. You were the boss of the song… I mean, I tried to be nice and say, “No, George, I really don't hear it, I don't think that's gonna work.” I think he was a bit miffed. The disagreement would add to Harrison’s increasing frustration with Lennon and McCartney, who he felt weren’t taking his contributions seriously. Yet, engineer Ken Scott attributed the increased tension during the 30 July session to the uncomfortable presence of the film crew, recalling in his 2012 memoir: The crew was all over the studio and in everyone’s way, so they managed to put everyone very much on edge. There was a huge argument between George and Paul as to what George should be playing, which ended up with George just hanging out in the control room for most of the takes.
When the group reassembled at Trident the following afternoon, ready to overdub their basic backing track from the previous evening, the decision was ultimately made to tackle the backing track anew and four fresh takes were recorded straight to Trident’s eight-track, with Harrison reinstated on minimal electric guitar. It seems likely that McCartney’s handwritten lyric sheets were transferred from EMI to Trident along with the band and their equipment to continue the recording. Black and white photographs taken by Tony Bramwell during the recording of vocal overdubs at Trident on 1 August show various sheets of paper on the top of the piano and an indistinct sheet of lyrics used by John, Paul and George as they gathered around the microphone to record their backing vocals. According to Julien’s, who first auctioned the present lot in 2020, the lyrics were afterwards gifted to a studio engineer at Trident.
Interviewed by David Sheff some months before his death in 1980, Lennon called ‘Hey Jude’ one of [Paul’s] masterpieces. McCartney was famously inspired to write the song as a source of comfort for Lennon’s young son Julian during his parents’ divorce. In his 2021 publication The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, McCartney explains: The song had started when I was travelling out one day to see Julian and his mother Cynthia… I was thinking about how tough it would be for Jules, as I called him, to have his dad leave him, to have his parents go through a divorce. It started out as a song of encouragement. What often happens with a song is that it starts off in one vein – in this case my being worried about something in life, a specific thing like a divorce – but then it begins to morph into its own creature. The title early on was ‘Hey Jules’, but it quickly changed to ‘Hey Jude’ because I thought that was a bit less specific… What happens next is that I start adding elements. When I write, ‘You were made to go out and get her’, there’s now another character, a woman in the scene. So it might now be a song about a breakup or some romantic mishap. By this stage the song has moved on from being about Julian. Although McCartney had originally written ‘Hey Jude’ for Julian, Lennon read it as a song about him, his relationship with Yoko Ono, and the strain on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, telling Sheff I always heard it as a song to me… The words ‘go out and get her’ – subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead… he didn’t want to lose his partner. Released as a non-album single on 26 August 1968, ‘Hey Jude’ was a number one hit around the world and became the top-selling single of the year in both the UK and US, where it held the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks – longer than any other Beatles song. To date, it has sold approximately eight million copies and is frequently included on music critics' lists of the greatest songs of all time.
Christie's would like to thank noted Beatles handwriting expert Frank Caiazzo for his assistance in authenticating this lot.
REFERENCES:
V. Garbarini, ‘Paul McCartney: Lifting the Veil on The Beatles’, Musician, Player & Listener, No. 26, August 1980.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
J. Lennon, Y. Ono and D. Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, New York, 2000.
K. Scott and B. Owsinski, Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, Los Angeles, 2012.
P. McCartney, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, London, 2021.
P. McCartney, interviewed by H. Stern, ‘Paul McCartney on Writing “Hey Jude” (2018)’, recorded 5 September 2018, posted 1 September 2024, by The Howard Stern Show, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVrfyjWtSM.
The Beatles had assembled at Abbey Road on 29 July to rehearse the song and finalize the arrangement, ultimately recording six rehearsal takes that evening, with Paul on piano and vocals, John on acoustic guitar, George on electric guitar, and Ringo on drums. When the group returned to Studio Two the following evening to resume recording, they were joined by a film crew from the National Music Council who had been granted rare access to record footage for a short documentary on popular music. While the 30 July session has often been classified by Beatles historians as little more than a rehearsal, studio engineer Ken Scott confirmed to Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan for their extensively researched book Recording The Beatles, that the seventeen takes recorded between 7.30pm and 3.30am that evening, numbered 7 through 23, were true attempts to capture the backing track, the idea being to record the master backing track at EMI and then move to Trident Studios the following day to complete the overdubs on their eight-track machine. The roughly six minutes of footage that was ultimately released as part of the documentary is believed to predominantly show the band working on take 9, indicating that the crew were only present to film the first few takes of the recording session. Titled Music!, the short documentary was screened in UK cinemas in October 1969 before the Mel Brooks feature film The Producers and aired on US television as part of NBC’s Experiment in Television series in February 1970. In the released footage, Lennon is seen referring to a very similar sheet of abbreviated lyrics as he records his acoustic guitar parts for the backing track, while McCartney sits at the piano with a set of complete lyrics, Starr pounds the drums, and Harrison sits out the session in the studio control room with producer George Martin and engineer Ken Scott. However, extended footage and outtakes from the National Music Council recording, circulating on a European bootleg DVD, distinctly show this exact sheet of handwritten lyrics spindled to a microphone stand to the left of the piano, almost certainly placed there for use by George Harrison before he abandoned the session and retreated to the control room. Notably, the paper still displays a puncture through the top line of the lyrics, where the page was fixed to the stand.
Footage shot earlier in the session shows that Harrison started out in the studio with his Gibson SG (see lot 10), seated to the left of McCartney at the piano – and behind the microphone stand where the lyrics would eventually be skewered – as they continued to work out the arrangement. Although the unreleased footage lacks sound, it appears that the film crew captured the conversation becoming visibly heated as McCartney infamously vetoed Harrison’s idea to play a guitar phrase in response to each line of the vocal. I remember on ‘Hey Jude’ telling George not to play guitar, McCartney told Vic Garbarini of Musician magazine in 1980. He wanted to echo riffs after the vocal phrases, which I didn’t think was appropriate. He didn’t see it like that, and it was a bit of a number for me to have to ‘dare’ to tell George Harrison – who’s one of the greats, I think – not to play. It was like an insult. McCartney elaborated on the incident in a 2018 conversation with Howard Stern, explaining: It didn’t seem like a good idea, and the rule in the Beatles was if it was your song, you were allowed to call it. You were the boss of the song… I mean, I tried to be nice and say, “No, George, I really don't hear it, I don't think that's gonna work.” I think he was a bit miffed. The disagreement would add to Harrison’s increasing frustration with Lennon and McCartney, who he felt weren’t taking his contributions seriously. Yet, engineer Ken Scott attributed the increased tension during the 30 July session to the uncomfortable presence of the film crew, recalling in his 2012 memoir: The crew was all over the studio and in everyone’s way, so they managed to put everyone very much on edge. There was a huge argument between George and Paul as to what George should be playing, which ended up with George just hanging out in the control room for most of the takes.
When the group reassembled at Trident the following afternoon, ready to overdub their basic backing track from the previous evening, the decision was ultimately made to tackle the backing track anew and four fresh takes were recorded straight to Trident’s eight-track, with Harrison reinstated on minimal electric guitar. It seems likely that McCartney’s handwritten lyric sheets were transferred from EMI to Trident along with the band and their equipment to continue the recording. Black and white photographs taken by Tony Bramwell during the recording of vocal overdubs at Trident on 1 August show various sheets of paper on the top of the piano and an indistinct sheet of lyrics used by John, Paul and George as they gathered around the microphone to record their backing vocals. According to Julien’s, who first auctioned the present lot in 2020, the lyrics were afterwards gifted to a studio engineer at Trident.
Interviewed by David Sheff some months before his death in 1980, Lennon called ‘Hey Jude’ one of [Paul’s] masterpieces. McCartney was famously inspired to write the song as a source of comfort for Lennon’s young son Julian during his parents’ divorce. In his 2021 publication The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, McCartney explains: The song had started when I was travelling out one day to see Julian and his mother Cynthia… I was thinking about how tough it would be for Jules, as I called him, to have his dad leave him, to have his parents go through a divorce. It started out as a song of encouragement. What often happens with a song is that it starts off in one vein – in this case my being worried about something in life, a specific thing like a divorce – but then it begins to morph into its own creature. The title early on was ‘Hey Jules’, but it quickly changed to ‘Hey Jude’ because I thought that was a bit less specific… What happens next is that I start adding elements. When I write, ‘You were made to go out and get her’, there’s now another character, a woman in the scene. So it might now be a song about a breakup or some romantic mishap. By this stage the song has moved on from being about Julian. Although McCartney had originally written ‘Hey Jude’ for Julian, Lennon read it as a song about him, his relationship with Yoko Ono, and the strain on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, telling Sheff I always heard it as a song to me… The words ‘go out and get her’ – subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead… he didn’t want to lose his partner. Released as a non-album single on 26 August 1968, ‘Hey Jude’ was a number one hit around the world and became the top-selling single of the year in both the UK and US, where it held the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks – longer than any other Beatles song. To date, it has sold approximately eight million copies and is frequently included on music critics' lists of the greatest songs of all time.
Christie's would like to thank noted Beatles handwriting expert Frank Caiazzo for his assistance in authenticating this lot.
REFERENCES:
V. Garbarini, ‘Paul McCartney: Lifting the Veil on The Beatles’, Musician, Player & Listener, No. 26, August 1980.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
J. Lennon, Y. Ono and D. Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, New York, 2000.
K. Scott and B. Owsinski, Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, Los Angeles, 2012.
P. McCartney, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, London, 2021.
P. McCartney, interviewed by H. Stern, ‘Paul McCartney on Writing “Hey Jude” (2018)’, recorded 5 September 2018, posted 1 September 2024, by The Howard Stern Show, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzVrfyjWtSM.