TRACK FIVE
- WRITTEN BY: Starr
- LEAD VOCAL: Starr
“We would be warm, below the storm,
in our little hideaway beneath the
waves,” Ringo sings in the tune he
composed when he was seeking just
such a sanctuary. Aboard Peter
Seller’s yacht in the Mediterranean
after he briefly quit the band in 1968,
Starr became intrigued by the
captain’s description of octopus life.
“He told me that they... go around
the seabed finding shiny stones and
tin cans and bottles to put in front of
their cave like a garden,” he recalled
on The Beatles Anthology, 1995. “I
thought this was fabulous, because at
the time I just wanted to be under the
sea too.” The track features two
extremes of recording technology:
The then-new Moog synthesizer and
air bubbles blown by Ringo with a
straw in a glass of water in the studio.
TRACK SIX
- WRITTEN BY: Lennon
- LEAD VOCAL: Lennon
The longest song the band ever
recorded—at 7 minutes 47 seconds
it’s a half minute longer than the
epic Hey Jude—it also features a rare
extended guitar jam. Guest keyboard
maestro Billy Preston (inset) brought
the sound of his Hammond organ
to Lennon’s love song for Yoko Ono.
His presence in the studio lightened
the mood, just as it had during the
recording of Let It Be the previous
January. “Come in and play on this,
because they’re all acting strange,”
Harrison told Preston, an old friend
from the Beatles’ Hamburg days.
“It was like a breath of fresh air,”
Harrison recalled in The Beatles
Anthology in 1995. “It’s interesting to
see how nicely people behave when
you bring a guest in.”
side two
TRACK SEVEN
- WRITTEN BY: Harrison
- LEAD VOCAL: Harrison
Escaping the long, lonely winter of the
Beatles’ discontent—not to mention
London’s actual sunlessness and cold
season—Harrison fled business meet-
ings at Apple headquarters one day in
early spring for his friend Eric Clapton’s
home. “The relief of not having to
go see all those dopey accountants
was wonderful,” Harrison recalled
in his 1980 book I, Me, Mine. “And I
walked around the garden with one of
Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here
Comes the Sun.’ ” Harrison’s truancy
paid off with this follow-up to “Some-
thing” and what author Jonathan
Gould called “a second astonishment, a
song with the elemental simplicity and
sublime beauty of its subject matter. ”
60 THE BEATLES 1969 PEOPLE
‘IT’S ALL RIGHT’
Harrison (with Clapton
in 1987) wrote the
song at his pal’s home.
