The Beatles by Steve Turner

a quote. “He was a great friend of mine,” he wrote. “In the Sixties we used to meet in a lot of clubs and spent many a happy hour chatting until closing time. He had a great positive attitude to life and was a pleasure to work with.”
    Two British cover versions of ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ were recorded and the one by Scottish group Marmalade went to Number 1. The Beatles’ version was only released in America, but not until 1976.

WILD HONEY PIE
    The shortest and most repetitive of any Beatles’ lyric, ‘Wild Honey Pie’ emerged from a spontaneous singalong in Rishikesh.
    “It was just a fragment of an instrumental which we were not sure about,” said Paul. “But Pattie Harrison liked it very much, so we decided to leave it on the album.”
    Coincidentally, Mike Love had recently co-written a Beach Boys’ track entitled ‘Wild Honey’.

THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL
    Bungalow Bill, the song says, ‘Went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun. In case of accidents he always took his mum.’ Written by John while in India, it recounts the true story of Richard Cooke III, a young American college graduate, who visited his mother Nancy while she was on the course in Rishikesh.
    John described Bungalow Bill as “the all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son” and Cooke agrees that it was an accurate description of him when he first met the Beatles. Cooke was over 6ft tall, dressed in white and sporting a crew cut. “The other Beatles were always real nice to me but John was always aloof,” he says. “They epitomized the counter culture and I was the classic good American boy and college athlete. There wasn’t a whole bunch that we got to connect on.”
    The tiger-hunt the song refers to took place three hours from Rishikesh. Cooke and his mother travelled by elephant and then hid in a tree on a wooden platform known as a marchand to await the arrival of a tiger.
    “Rik sat down and I stood behind him,” remembers Nancy. “It wasn’t long before I saw this flash of yellow and black. I let out a yell and Rik twirled and shot the tiger right through the ear.”
    “I was pretty excited that I had shot a tiger,” remembers Cooke. “But the Texan who organized the shoot came over to me and said, ‘You shot it, but don’t say a word. As far as the world is concerned you didn’t shoot this tiger.’ He wanted to be the one who went back home with the skin and the claws as his trophy.”
    It was when they arrived at the ashram that Cooke began to feel some remorse, wondering whether the killing of the animal wouldbring him ‘bad karma’. He and his mother had a meeting with Maharishi that was also attended by John and Paul.
    “It was a fluke that they happened to be sitting there when I had this conversation with Maharishi,” says Cooke. “My mother is a very vocal person and she was talking excitedly about killing the tiger and Maharishi looked pretty aghast that his followers could actually go out and do something like this. It was the only time I ever saw him almost angry.”
    “Rik told him that he felt bad about it and said that he didn’t think he’d ever kill an animal again,” recalls Nancy. “Maharishi said – ‘You had the desire, Rik, and now you no longer have the desire?’ Then John asked, ‘Don’t you call that slightly life-destructive?’ I said, ‘It was either the tiger or us. The tiger was jumping right where we were’. That came up in the lyric as ‘If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him.’”
    Bungalow Bill was an allusion to Buffalo Bill, the performing name of American cowboy showman William Frederick Cody (1846–1917) who was a hero in post-war schoolboy comics. It became ‘Bungalow’ because all the accommodation in Rishikesh was in bungalows. Ian MacDonald points out in Revolution In The Head that the tune appears to be based on ‘Stay As Sweet As You Are’ which was written by Mack Gordon and Henry Revel and was used in