The Beatles by Steve Turner Page A

the 1934 film College Rhythm.
    Cooke knew nothing of ‘Bungalow Bill’ until he started getting postcards saying ‘Hey Bungalow Bill. What did you kill?’ from friends who had recognized him in the song. He now divides his time between Hawaii and Oregon and works as a photographer for National Geographic magazine. His mother Nancy lives in Beverly Hills, California.

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
    George was reading the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, and decided to apply its principles of chance to his songwriting. At his parents’ Lancashire home, he picked a novel off the shelf with the intention of writing a song based on the first words that he came across. The words were ‘gently weeps’ and so George began to write.
    He started recording in July 1968 but felt that the other Beatles weren’t showing sufficient interest in the song. In September, he brought in his friend Eric Clapton to play lead guitar while he played rhythm.

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN
    For this song, John stitched together three songs that he had started but which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The first was a series of random images picked up from a night of acid tripping with Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall and Pete Shotton at a house Taylor was renting near Dorking in Surrey. “John said he had written half a song and wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil wrote them down,” says Taylor. “First of all, he wanted to know how to describe a girl who was really smart and I remembered a phrase of my father’s which was: ‘She’s not a girl who misses much’. It sounds like faint praise but on Merseyside, in those days, it was actually the best you could get.
    “Then I told a story about a chap my wife Joan and I met in the Carrick Bay Hotel on the Isle of Man. It was late one night drinking in the bar and this local fellow who liked meeting holidaymakers and rapping to them suddenly said to us, ‘I like wearing moleskin gloves you know. It gives me a little bit of an unusual sensation when I’m out with my girlfriend.’ He then said, ‘I don’t want to go into details.’ So we didn’t. But that provided the line, ‘She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand’. Then there was ‘like a lizard on a window pane’. That, to me, was a symbol of very quick movement. Often, when we were living in LA, you’d look up and see tiny little lizards nipping up the window,” continues Taylor.
    “‘The man in the crowd with multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots’, was from something I’d seen in a newspaper about a Manchester City soccer fan who had been arrested by the police for having mirrors on the toe caps of his shoes so that he could look up girls’ skirts. We thought this was an incredibly complicated and tortuous way of getting a cheap thrill and so that became ‘multi-coloured mirrors’ and ‘hobnail boots’ to fit the rhythm. A bit of poetic licence,” adds Taylor. “The bit about ‘lying with his eyes while his hands were working over time’ came from another thing I’d read where a man wearing a cloak had fake plastic hands, which he would rest on the counter of a shop while underneath the cloak he was busy lifting things and stuffing them in a bag around his waist.
    “I don’t know where the ‘soap impression of his wife’ came from but the eating of something and then donating it ‘to the National Trust’ came from a conversation we’d had about the horrors of walking in public spaces on Merseyside, where you were always coming across the evidence of people having crapped behind bushes and in old air-raid shelters. So to donate what you’ve eaten to the National Trust (a British organization with responsibilities for upkeeping countryside of great beauty) was what would now be known as ‘ defecation on common land owned by the National Trust.’ When John put it all together, it created a series of layers of images. It was like a whole mess of colour,” Taylor concludes.
    The