FEATURE:
Groovelines
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles on Sunday, 28th July, 1968 during the famous ‘Mad Day’ photographic session/PHOTO CREDIT: Don McCullin
The Beatles – Hey Jude
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THERE is a good reason…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in February 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Rex Features/Blackbrow
why I want to bring in this timeless classic from The Beatles. Hey Jude is one of their best-known and adored songs. I am going to introduce some information about an iconic track with a fascinating story. It was released as a 7” single on 26th August, 1968. As it is fifty-five soon, it is a perfect time to spotlight this wonderful and epic song. You can see more information about the song here. Put down between 29th July and 1st August, 1968, this emotion-stirring song is one of The Beatles’ most played and celebrated. That 26th August release date was in the U.S. Hey Jude was released on 30th August, 1968 in the U.K. A number one in many countries around the world – including the U.S. and U.K. -, this Paul McCartney-penned song was written for John Lennon’s son, Julian, during a time when a lot of heavy stuff was going on. A call that things will get better. This encouragement and support from uncle Paul!
“Paul McCartney: vocals, piano, bass
John Lennon: backing vocals, acoustic guitar
George Harrison: backing vocals, electric guitar
Ringo Starr: backing vocals, drums, tambourine
Uncredited: 10 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos, 2 double basses, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 contrabassoon, 4 trumpets, 2 horns, 4 trombones, 1 percussion
‘Hey Jude’ was the first release on The Beatles’ own Apple Records label. It was a ballad written by Paul McCartney, to comfort John Lennon’s son Julian during the divorce of his parents.
‘Hey Jude’ is a damn good set of lyrics and I made no contribution to that.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
It was written in June 1968, as McCartney drove his Aston Martin to Weybridge to visit Cynthia Lennon and her son. On the journey he began thinking about their changing lives, and of the past times he had spent writing with Lennon at the Weybridge house.
I thought, as a friend of the family, I would motor out to Weybridge and tell them that everything was all right: to try and cheer them up, basically, and see how they were. I had about an hour’s drive. I would always turn the radio off and try and make up songs, just in case… I started singing: ‘Hey Jules – don’t make it bad, take a sad song, and make it better…’ It was optimistic, a hopeful message for Julian: ‘Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you’re not happy, but you’ll be OK.’
I eventually changed ‘Jules’ to ‘Jude’. One of the characters in Oklahoma! is called Jud, and I like the name.
Paul McCartney
Anthology
McCartney recorded a piano demo of ‘Hey Jude’ upon his return to his home in Cavendish Avenue, London. On 26 July 1968 played the song to Lennon for the first time.
I finished it all up in Cavendish and I was in the music room upstairs when John and Yoko came to visit and they were right behind me over my right shoulder, standing up, listening to it as I played it to them, and when I got to the line, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ I looked over my shoulder and I said, ‘I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy. I was just blocking it out,’ and John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’ That’s collaboration. When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in.’ So of course you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever. I love those words now…
Time lends a little credence to things. You can’t knock it, it just did so well. But when I’m singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line; it’s an emotional point in the song.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
The lyrics struck an immediate chord with the record-buying public, who related to the hopeful sentiments. Its universality was demonstrated when John Lennon later revealed that he felt the song had been directed at him.
He said it was written about Julian, my child. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian. He was driving over to say hi to Julian. He’d been like an uncle to him. You know, Paul was always good with kids. And so he came up with ‘Hey Jude’.
But I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it… Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying, ‘Hey, Jude – hey, John.’ I know I’m sounding like one of those fans who reads things into it, but you can hear 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. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
It wasn’t until 1987 that McCartney came to discuss ‘Hey Jude’ with Julian Lennon, after a chance encounter in a New York hotel.
He told me that he’d been thinking about my circumstances all those years ago, about what I was going through. Paul and I used to hang out a bit – more than dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and dad.
Julian Lennon
Mojo, February 2002
The recording notes for ‘Hey Jude’ were bought at auction by Julian Lennon in 1996 for £25,000. In 2002 a sale of the original handwritten lyrics was announced by Christie’s in London, with an estimated price of £80,000. Paul McCartney took out a court order to prevent the auction, saying the paper had disappeared from his London home.
Although by 1968 The Beatles had stopped performing live, the anthemic ending of ‘Hey Jude’ was perfect for crowd participation. It was fitting, then, when later years McCartney made it a key part of his live shows.
I went into the Apple shop just before ‘Hey Jude’ was being released. The windows were whited out, and I thought: ‘Great opportunity. Baker Street, millions of buses going around…’ So, before anyone knew what it meant, I scraped ‘Hey Jude’ out of the whitewash.
A guy who had a delicatessen in Marylebone rang me up, and he was furious: ‘I’m going to send one of my sons round to beat you up.’ I said, ‘Hang on, hang on – what’s this about?’ and he said: ‘You’ve written “Jude” in the shop window.’ I had no idea it meant ‘Jew’, but if you look at footage of Nazi Germany, ‘Juden Raus’ was written in whitewashed windows with a Star of David. I swear it never occurred to me.
Paul McCartney
Anthology”.
There are a few other articles I want to reference before I end things. Smithsonian Mag spend time looking inside Hey Jude ahead of its fiftieth anniversary in 2018. It is an evergreen song that has huge relevance and meaning today. A track that will be played through the ages:
“When “Hey Jude” was recorded, a 36-piece orchestra—ten violins, three cellos, three violas, two flutes, one contra bassoon, one bassoon, two clarinets, one contra bass clarinet, four trumpets, four trombones, two horns, percussion and two string basses—joined the Beatles, and all but one of the orchestra performers accepted double pay for singing and clapping during the taping. As the first recording session began, McCartney did not notice that drummer Ringo Starr had just walked out to take a bathroom break. Seconds later, he heard Starr walk behind him and return to his drums just in time for his first contribution to the performance. McCartney considered this fortuitous timing a good omen that led the other performers “to put a little more into it.” He recalled thinking: “This has got to be the take, what just happened was so magic!”
Shunning public appearances, the Beatles introduced the song to the world via film and video. The film version premiered in Britain on September 8 on David Frost’s show “Frost on Sunday,” and a month later the video version premiered October 6 in the U.S. on the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
McCartney composed the piece during a drive in his Aston Martin from London to Weybridge, where he visited fellow Beatle John Lennon’s estranged wife Cynthia and five-year-old son Julian Lennon. McCartney has said that he conceptualized the song as a message to Julian, with “Hey Jules” offering advice to preserve Julian’s happiness as his parents faced a messy divorce over Lennon’s affair with future wife Yoko Ono. Later, he says, “I just thought a better name was Jude. A bit more country and western for me.” Julian’s dad thought McCartney’s lyrics were about his new relationship with Ono and that in a way, McCartney was giving him the go-ahead to leave their songwriting partnership and transfer his entire allegiance to his new love.
Other interpretations have surfaced. For instance, while the song’s beginning fits into McCartney’s description of his song for Jules, many other lines “seem directed more at a grown man on the verge of a powerful new love,” author Mark Hertsgaard writes. “That so many people seek to assign competing meanings to the lyrics, even with the Julian story so well-established, attests to the song's deep emotional impact as well as the lyrics' openness, even vagueness. It’s a masterclass example of songwriting in part because it continues to elude fixed meaning while grandly satisfying the listener.”
Quite a few features were published in 2018. Marking fifty years of Hey Jude was a big event. Now, almost fifty-five years since it came into the world, we get to talk about it again. The Guardian published a brilliant feature about Hey Jude. Articles like this and this put Hey Jude in the top ten Beatles tracks ever. Given their incredible body of work, that is a huge honour. It is one richly deserved!
“You could argue forever about which of the Beatles’ songs is the greatest. According to the Daily Telegraph, it’s something nostalgic: In My Life. According to the NME, it’s something psychedelic: Strawberry Fields Forever, which wasn’t even the best song on the single it appeared on, alongside Penny Lane. According to Rolling Stone and USA Today, it’s something epic: A Day in the Life, which often does well in polls, perhaps because it’s written by both Lennon and McCartney.
The debate is diverting but doomed. The Beatles’ range was so broad that it would be easier to name Matisse’s best painting or Meryl Streep’s best performance – which wouldn’t be easy at all. This isn’t just apples and oranges, it’s the whole fruit stall, so if we must use superlatives, we’d better narrow them down. The most covered Beatles song is Yesterday, the biggest seller is She Loves You and the biggest crowdpleaser is Hey Jude.
Hey Jude, which turns 50 on 30 August, is the Beatles song most likely to be bellowed by a choir of thousands. At Manchester City, fans sang it after the team won their first Premier League title in 2012. At Arsenal, Gooners used it to serenade Olivier Giroud, the team’s sleek French striker, who said of the track before he left for Chelsea : “It gives me goosebumps.” It also rings out at Newcastle and Cardiff, thus spanning the four points of the Premier League compass. Any decent song needs to be singable, but Hey Jude goes further: it’s yellable and flexible. Into the gap after “Nahh, na, na, nahh-na-na, nahhh”, you can slot almost any pair of syllables – Giroud, City, Geordie.
By then, Lennon and McCartney were writing separately, but still acting as each other’s sounding board. After working on Hey Jude some more, McCartney invited Lennon and Ono to his house in north-west London and played it to them. One line, “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, was there as a placeholder. “I’ll change that,” McCartney said. “It’s a bit crummy.” “You won’t, you know,” Lennon replied. “That’s the best line in it.”
This exchange, recounted by McCartney in 1994, had two consequences, beyond preserving the line. “You love it twice as much,” he said, “because it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down.” And it would forever remind him of Lennon: “That is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line. It’s an emotional point in the song.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Paul McCartney in July 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
The weak link in the lyrics was elsewhere, right at the top: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better.” This doesn’t make sense, because a sad song is not a bad thing, as McCartney, of all people, knows. But in music, meaning doesn’t always mean very much. These were the first words that came to him in the car and they stayed. They have redeeming features – they are immediate, they are conversational and they get the rhyme scheme going (an artful AABBCCB). They are, however, just not as good as the next bit: “Remember, to let her into your heart / Then you can start to make it better.”
The heart is standard stuff in pop lyrics, but McCartney breathes life into it by making it one of only three images in Hey Jude, all parts of the body – “into your heart”, “under your skin”, “on your shoulder” – and all at the end of a line. They make the song more touching.
At this stage, Hey Jude was still a piano ballad. It could have become a classic in that form, but McCartney had other plans. One side of his personality, the cuddly uncle, had started the song; the other side, the ruthless artist, had now taken over. McCartney wanted Hey Jude to be long (it ended up just over seven minutes, three times the length of the Beatles’ early hits). He also wanted the ballad to swell into a riff and the fade-out to end all fade-outs.
The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, protested that seven minutes was too long and radio DJs would not play the record. Lennon said: “They will if it’s us.” It was arrogant but accurate.
Martin conceded the point (“I was shouted down by the boys, not for the first time in my life”) and came up with a plan of his own. “I realised that by putting an orchestra on, you could add lots of weight to the riff by [having] counter-chords on the bottom end and bringing in trombones and strings, until it became a really big tumultuous thing.”
After playing, the orchestra were offered double pay to add handclaps and sing the nahh-nas. This prompted another rebuke, this time from one of their number. “I’m not going to clap my hands,” they reportedly said, “and sing Paul McCartney’s bloody song!”
A week earlier, with Helter Skelter, McCartney had made a racket that would be hailed as both proto-metal and proto-punk. Now, with Hey Jude, he pioneered the stadium-rock singalong, even though the Beatles had quit touring two years earlier.
Hey Jude became an instant classic. It spent nine weeks at No 1 in the US, the Beatles’ personal best. By the end of the 60s, it had been recorded by Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and Ella Fitzgerald. At McCartney’s gigs, it often has pride of place as the last track before the encore. When he played at the ICA in London in 2007, McCartney left the stage, the crowd kept up the nahh-nas, and, on his return, he and the band joined in, in a lovely little reversal.
Hey Jude may seldom top the polls, but it drew the highest praise from one judge. “That’s Paul’s best song,” Lennon once said”.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles performing Hey Jude on The David Frost Show, 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection/Rex Features
I am going to end up with some critical reaction to the sublime and heart-stirring track. Wikipedia have collated some of the feedback this classic has accrued through the years. I have heard Hey Jude countless times, though it always elicits a reaction from me. It is remarkably touching song. One that had a distinct meaning in 1968, it has been adopted by so many different people and areas of society. This anthem that people belt out together. This was Paul McCartney writing at his absolute peak:
“Cash Box's reviewer said that the extended fadeout, having been a device pioneered by the Beatles on "All You Need Is Love", "becomes something of an art form" in "Hey Jude", comprising a "trance-like ceremonial that becomes almost timeless in its continuity". Time magazine described it as "a fadeout that engagingly spoofs the fadeout as a gimmick for ending pop records". The reviewer contrasted "Hey Jude" with "Revolution", saying that McCartney's song "urges activism of a different sort" by "liltingly exhort[ing] a friend to overcome his fears and commit himself in love". Catherine Manfredi of Rolling Stone also read the lyrics as a message from McCartney to Lennon to end his negative relationships with women: "to break the old pattern; to really go through with love". Manfredi commented on the duality of the song's eponymous protagonist as a representation of good, in Saint Jude, "the Patron of that which is called Impossible", and of evil, in Judas Iscariot.[144] Other commentators interpreted "Hey Jude" as being directed at Bob Dylan, then semi-retired in Woodstock.
Writing in 1971, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it "one of [McCartney's] truest and most forthright love songs" and said that McCartney's romantic side was ill-served by the inclusion of "'I Will', a piece of fluff" on The Beatles. In their 1975 book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote that "Hey Jude" "promised great things" for the ill-conceived Apple enterprise and described the song as "the last great Beatles single recorded specifically for the 45s market". They commented also that "the epic proportions of the piece" encouraged many imitators, yet these other artists "[failed] to capture the gentleness and sympathy of the Beatles' communal feel".
Walter Everett admires the melody as a "marvel of construction, contrasting wide leaps with stepwise motions, sustained tones with rapid movement, syllabic with melismatic word-setting, and tension ... with resolution". He cites Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks", Donovan's "Atlantis", the Moody Blues' "Never Comes the Day" and the Allman Brothers' "Revival" among the many songs with "mantralike repeated sections" that followed the release of "Hey Jude". In his entry for the song in his 1993 book Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles, Paul Williams describes it as a "song about breathing". He adds: "'Hey Jude' kicks ass like Van Gogh or Beethoven in their prime. It is, let's say, one of the wonders of this corner of creation ... It opens out like the sky at night or the idea of the existence of God."
Alan Pollack highlights the song as "such a good illustration of two compositional lessons – how to fill a large canvas with simple means, and how to use diverse elements such as harmony, bassline, and orchestration to articulate form and contrast." Pollack says that the long coda provides "an astonishingly transcendental effect", while AllMusic's Richie Unterberger similarly opines: "What could have very easily been boring is instead hypnotic because McCartney varies the vocal with some of the greatest nonsense scatting ever heard in rock, ranging from mantra-like chants to soulful lines to James Brown power screams." In his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald wrote that the "pseudo-soul shrieking in the fade-out may be a blemish" but he praised the song as "a pop/rock hybrid drawing on the best of both idioms". MacDonald concluded: "'Hey Jude' strikes a universal note, touching on an archetypal moment in male sexual psychology with a gentle wisdom one might properly call inspired." Lennon said the song was "one of [McCartney's] masterpieces".
On 26th August, it will be fifty-five years since Hey Jude was released as a single in the U.S. The same anniversary occurs four days later in the U.K. Given the fact the song is over seven minutes long, it does not get as much radio attention as it should. I hope exceptions are made later this month. At a time when The Beatles were going through quite a tough times and relationships and bonds within the group were not as strong as they were several years earlier, I think Hey Jude spoke beyond Julian Lennon. Maybe McCartney talking about himself and the band. His impassioned declaration that thing would get better. Hey Jude is one of these songs that lifts the mood. Those end “nah, nah, nahs!” are infectious and spine-tingling. Go and put the song on now and…
SEE what I mean.