Because: A Fan Picks His Top Forty Songs by the Fab Four

By Mark R. Brewer

As a devoted fan of the lads from Liverpool, Mark considers himself an expert on their songs, both with the Beatles and during their solo careers. He has selected his favorite forty songs and tells their story in each chapter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664170391

Mark R. Brewer

MARK R. BREWER has an MA in US history from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught history in New Jersey for nearly a hundred years. He is really old.

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Copyright © 2021 by Mark R. Brewer.

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Rev. date: 06/04/2021

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For Joyce and Janet, who were born too soon

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgments

1     Strawberry Fields Forever

2     A Day In The Life

3     Eleanor Rigby

4     Rain

5     Something

6     Maybe I’m Amazed

7     Norwegian Wood

8     Revolution

9     For No One

10   While My Guitar Gently Weeps

11   Instant Karma

12   Hey Jude

13   Happiness Is A Warm Gun

14   Because

15   I Saw Her Standing There

16   I Am the Walrus

17   Here Comes the Sun

18   In My Life

19   Yesterday

20   Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

21   Imagine

22   Girl

23   You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

24   Within You Without You

25   Tomorrow Never Knows

26   Help!

27   We Can Work It Out

28   Here, There and Everywhere

29   Hey Bulldog

30   Ticket to Ride

31   Don’t Let Me Down

32   Let It Be

33   My Sweet Lord

34   I’m So Tired

35   I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

36   Things We Said Today

37   And I Love Her

38   I’ll Be Back

39   Apple Scruffs

40   Isolation

Afterword

Bibliography

Notes

INTRODUCTION

I have been a Beatles fan since I first watched them on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9, 1964. I was nine. I can remember my older brother Mike telling me that afternoon, "The Beatles are gonna be on Ed Sullivan tonight! Who are the Beatles? I asked. You know, that long-haired band," he replied, as though I should know who he meant. But I didn’t. My entire family—two girls, three boys, and my parents—watched it in our living room together on the only TV set we owned. The experience was electric. They were young, their music was fresh and exciting, and they looked great and sounded so cool with their English accents. I loved them immediately. I grew up with their music and matured as it did. The first album I ever purchased was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I received Let It Be for my sixteenth birthday in 1970—and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band for Christmas that same year—from my brother Mike.

No band in the history of the world can compare to the Beatles. They contained one certified genius (Lennon), one musical genius (McCartney), one very gifted and multitalented guitarist who at first brought a bluesy edge and later an Eastern influence to their music (Harrison), and a great and insightful drummer (Starr). Nothing can compare to the magic created by the Beatles. They also had a brilliant producer (George Martin) and a manager who whole-heartedly believed in them (Brian Epstein). Theirs was an unbeatable combination. Their music remains highly relevant today, and they continue to bring as much joy as they ever did.

Like every certifiable Beatles fan, I have my favorite and least favorite songs by the Fab Four. It therefore seemed only natural that I should create my own list. But be forewarned: my list probably won’t look like yours, nor does it resemble the lists made by the experts. For one thing, I have a favoritism for songs by John Lennon. In my opinion, he wrote the greatest Beatles songs, and his solo career, brief as it was, far outshines that of the other three. This is not to say that I don’t appreciate the fabulous songs by McCartney, Harrison and Starr. I do. But Lennon’s songs strike a deeper chord with me somehow. I also don’t necessarily rate the hit songs as high as some might. Part of the reason is that repeated airplay over the years has rubbed the gloss off of some of these songs. But I also believe that many of the Beatles best songs are deeper cuts that never made it to #1. Unlike some other lists I have seen, I do not include the medley from Abbey Road, as this is many different songs strung together.

Anyway, for better or for worse, here is my list of the 40 best songs by the lads from Liverpool.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I would like to thank my brother, Michael, for reading, correcting and commenting on my manuscript. His aid is invaluable and his support is immeasurable.

I am also indebted to my wife, Laurie, and my children, Nick and Maddie, for their constant and continued support of my writing endeavors. All three have offered their suggestions as to which songs should be on my list and which songs should not.

I am also grateful for the many Beatles experts I have utilized in writing this book—Dave Rybaczewski, Ian MacDonald, Walter Everett, Geoff Emerick, Steve Turner, Phillip Norman, Barry Miles, Ray Coleman, Robert Rodriguez, Bill Harry, Albert Goldman, Thomas Brothers, William Dowlding, Kenneth Howlett, Mark Lewisohn, Bob Spitz, and Bill Wyman, to name a few.

In addition, I am thankful to John, Paul, George and Ringo, who revolutionized music, have brought me endless hours of listening pleasure, and have influenced my own songwriting more than any other artists.

ONE

Strawberry Fields Forever

I was hip in kindergarten.

John Lennon (¹)

John Lennon sits cross-legged on a beach in Almeria, Spain, his acoustic guitar in hand. He picks at chords and experiments with different lyrics. Lennon is working on a new song, and he is taking his time. It is the autumn of 1966, and the acknowledged leader of the Beatles is not under any undue pressure. The band had stopped touring in August, and they were not scheduled to return to the studio until late November. So Lennon was toying with ideas. (²)

He is in Spain filming How I Won the War, a satiric film by Richard Lester, who had directed A Hard Days’ Night, the Beatles first and critically acclaimed film. In How I Won the War, Lennon had a small part as Private Gripweed. Lennon biographer Albert Goldman called How I Won the War a dreadful film that proved that Lennon didn’t have a scrap of acting ability. (³)

No longer having to perform left the Beatles with a great deal of free time to explore their own pleasures. That same fall, George Harrison and his wife Patti were on their first trip to India, where they would meet Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi Yogi. Paul and Beatles friend Mal Evans were on a tour of East Africa. (⁴) Lennon was desperate for something to occupy his time, so he accepted Lester’s invitation to appear in the film because I didn’t know what to do. (⁵)

It was a period of great uncertainty for Lennon. I was thinking, ‘Well, this is the end, really,’ he later recalled. There’s no more touring. That means there’s going to be a blank space in the future. . . . That’s when I really started considering life without the Beatles—what would it be? And I spent that six weeks thinking about that. (⁶) Part of the problem was that Lennon had too much time on his hands. Shooting a movie typically requires short bursts of filming and long periods of waiting. It was pretty damn boring to me, Lennon remembered. I didn’t find it at all very fulfilling. So he smoked pot and worked on his new song. (⁷) It took me six weeks to write that song, Lennon said. I was writing it all the time I was making the film, and as anyone knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around.

The opening line was originally No one is on my wavelength. Lennon was trying to express the fact that no one could really relate to him. (⁸) This line was soon changed to No one I think is in my tree, and it was moved to begin the second verse. As Lennon told David Sheff in a Playboy interview in 1980,

let’s say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. I was different all my life. The second verse goes, No one I think is in my tree. Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius—I mean it must be high or low, the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn’t see. . . . I was always so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way.

It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my Auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see what I did. (⁹)

The resulting song demonstrated perfectly Lennon’s uncertainty at the time. I’m expressing it haltingly, Lennon explained, because I’m not sure what I’m feeling. (¹⁰) He also admitted that the song was psychoanalysis set to music. (¹¹)

There is a line in the song that goes I mean, it’s not too bad. This caused Lennon to give the song the working title of Not Too Bad. (¹²) But once he had written the chorus or middle eight as the Beatles often called it, the name of the song was changed to Strawberry Fields Forever.

Strawberry Field (Lennon added the s) was a Salvation Army orphanage on Beaconsfield Road in the Woolton neighborhood of Liverpool. It contained a huge Victorian mansion with wooded grounds surrounding it and was a childhood haunt of Lennon’s. There was something about the place that always fascinated John, his Aunt Mimi, who had raised him, would remember years later. He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year. He used to hear the Salvation Army band, and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.’ (¹³) It [provided] an escape for John, Paul McCartney, who also knew the place, would recall. There was a wall you could bunk over and it had a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. (¹⁴) Lennon admitted he was trying to write about Liverpool, and I just listed all the nice-sounding names arbitrarily. But I have visions of Strawberry Fields . . . Because Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go. (¹⁵)

On the evening of November 24, 1966, a blustery Thursday, the Beatles met at EMI Studio Two, a massive room where they had previously created so much music. It was their first time in the studio in five months. (¹⁶) They went into their regular routine, George Martin remembered. I sat on my high stool with Paul standing beside me, and John stood in front of us with his acoustic guitar. (¹⁷)

It goes something like this, George, Lennon said, and he began strumming gently and sang the song. That wonderfully distinctive voice had a slight tremor, a unique nasal quality that gave his song poignancy, almost a feeling of luminescence, Martin remembered. I was spellbound. I was in love. (¹⁸) As engineer Geoff Emerick remembered, when Lennon finished, there was a moment of stunned silence. Paul McCartney broke it. That is absolutely brilliant, he said. Emerick himself wrote that Lennon had created a gentle, almost mystical tribute to some mysterious place, a place he called ‘Strawberry Fields.’ I had no idea what the lyric was about, but the words were compelling, like abstract poetry, and there was something magical in the spooky, detached timbre of John’s voice. (¹⁹)

Oh, how I wish I had caught that very first run-through on tape and released it, Martin reminisced years later. The song, Martin went on, was gentle, dreamy, uncharacteristic of John then. He had broken through to a different territory, to a place I did not recognize from his past songs. (²⁰)

I’ve brought a demo tape of the song with me, too, Lennon said, and he offered to play it. But everyone—Martin, McCartney, Harrison and Starr—decided they wanted to get right to recording it. The energy in the room was staggering, Geoff Emerick recalled. (²¹)

What do you reckon? Lennon nervously asked Martin.

It’s great, John, Martin replied. That’s a really great song. How do you want to do it?

I thought you were supposed to tell me that! Lennon replied flippantly. (²²)

One thing Lennon did say is that he wanted the lyrics to sound like conversation. (²³)

The band took up their instruments and began playing the song. Lennon biographer Phillip Norman says it was George Martin who suggested beginning the song with the chorus. (²⁴) Lennon had a new toy, a massive keyboard in a wooden cabinet. It was called a mellotron, a kind of synthesizer, and Lennon had had it shipped to Studio Two from his Weybridge mansion specifically for the sessions for the new album. What Geoff Emerick called the big breakthrough occurred when McCartney came up with the stunning Mellotron line that opens the song. Paul’s inspiration really set the stage. (²⁵) Albert Goldman says that what McCartney played on the mellotron were otherworldly chords. (²⁶)

Recording the song with the Beatles on their normal instruments, Martin noted, the song started to get heavy—it wasn’t that gentle song that I had first heard. We ended up with a record that was very good heavy rock. (²⁷)

But Lennon wasn’t satisfied. Unlike McCartney, who always knew specifically what he wanted on any song, Lennon had difficulty articulating how he thought a song should be arranged. I don’t know; he told Martin, I just think it should somehow be heavier.

Heavier how, John? Martin asked.

I dunno, just kind of, y’know . . . heavier, Lennon replied.

Paul suggested that outside musicians be brought in for an orchestral arrangement. John loved the idea and said he wanted cellos and trumpets on the song. Martin would see to getting the musicians and would write the score for their instruments. Do a good job, George, Lennon told Martin. Just make sure it’s heavy. (²⁸)

They eventually did several takes of the remake, which included the addition of the cellos and trumpets, and also unusual instruments such as plucked piano, backwards cymbals, and George Harrison playing Swordmandel (which Emerick says was an Indian instrument somewhat like an autoharp). Everyone seemed pleased with the mix on the latest take, and they were all ready to move on to the next song. But Lennon was still not completely happy.

A few days later, he went to the control booth where Martin and Emerick were seated. I’ve been listening to these acetates of ‘Strawberry Fields’ a lot, he told them, and I’ve decided that I still prefer the beginning of the original version.

Emerick said his jaw dropped, and he saw Martin blinking slowly.

Lennon went on. So what I’d like our young Geoffrey to do is to join the two bits together.

Martin sighed audibly. John, we’d be happy to do that, he said. The only thing that stands in our way is the fact that the two versions were played in different keys and in different tempos.

This affected Lennon not at all. Emerick says he was not even sure if Lennon understood the problem. (²⁹) Yeah, but you can do something about it, I know, Lennon said. You can fix it, George. (³⁰)

Martin listened to the two versions of the song again and realized that if he slowed down one and speeded up the other, they just might match. The two versions were combined using a variable-control tape machine. (³¹)

At the end of the evening, Lennon returned to the control booth to see how work on his song was progressing. Emerick says they had literally just finished the edit moments before he arrived. They played him what they had done, and Lennon listened intently, his head down, focusing on the music. Emerick says he purposely stood in front of the tape machine so that Lennon could not see when the splice went by. He wanted to see if Lennon could hear it. Seconds after the splice, Lennon lifted his head and smiled. Has it passed? he asked.

Sure has, Emerick replied, pleased that Lennon could not tell.

Well, good on yer, Geoffrey! he said.

Lennon had them play the finished song over and over that evening. Each time the song concluded, he said, Brilliant. Just brilliant. (³²)

We did a few versions of it, Paul McCartney remembered. John wasn’t happy with the first couple of takes, so we remade the whole track, and in the end John and George Martin stitched two different versions together. We could hardly hear the join, but it’s one of those edits where the pace changes slightly: it goes a bit more manic for the second half of the song. (³³) Thomas Brothers, who wrote a wonderful book about musical collaboration, points out an unexpected bonus that was achieved by joining the two versions. He noticed that, each time the chorus returns there is more momentum and greater urgency, putting the formal parts in constant motion. (³⁴)

The finished song had taken more than forty-five hours to record. (³⁵) In comparison, the entire Please Please Me album had taken less than ten hours (³⁶)

While recording for Strawberry Fields Forever was going on, Paul McCartney also wrote a song about his childhood in Woolton. (³⁷) (George Martin called this creative rivalry.) (³⁸) Penny Lane would be the third song recorded for the new album (When I’m Sixty-four was second). Martin described Strawberry Fields as dreamlike in contrast to the solid realism of Penny Lane. (³⁹) The songs were to be part of what would surely become the Beatles greatest album. But it would not happen that way. It seems it had been six months since the Beatles last single. EMI was pressuring for a new one. (⁴⁰) The only reason they didn’t become part of the album was that Brian Epstein came to me and said we badly need a single because the Beatles were slipping a bit, George Martin remembered, and he didn’t want that to happen, quite rightly. So we rushed out a single, which was the best coupling ever, I think. Martin said that at the time, we liked to give as much value for the money as we could to the public and, wrongly, we decided to keep our singles separate from our albums. (⁴¹) So the two songs would not be on the new album. Imagine how much better Sgt. Peppers would have been if they were. Martin would later regret removing the two tracks from the album, calling it the biggest mistake of my professional life. (⁴²)

On January 30 and 31 1967, the Beatles traveled to Kent where they filmed a promotional video for Strawberry Fields Forever. (⁴³) The film shows the group frolicking in a field, jumping into a tree, and pouring paint into a piano. During a break in the filming, Lennon went to a local antique store and purchased a poster from 1843 that advertised a traveling circus. (⁴⁴) This would become, of course, the inspiration for his song, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite.

Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane were released in February 1967 as a Double A side single. (⁴⁵) They were packaged in a sleeve that had photos on one side of the current Beatles, each sporting mustaches. The reverse side showed photos of the Beatles as infants. (⁴⁶) The dual songs reached Number 2 in the United Kingdom, the first Beatles single to fail to reach Number 1 since Love Me Do. (⁴⁷) It was kept out of the Number 1 spot by Englebert Humperdink’s Please Release Me. Ringo Starr said that the fact that the two songs had not reached Number 1 in the UK was a relief as it took the pressure off. (⁴⁸) Penny Lane reached Number 1 in the U.S; Strawberry Fields Forever peaked at Number 8. (⁴⁹)

Beatles fans were quick to notice that at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon could be heard saying something that sounded very much like I buried Paul. It marked the beginning of the Paul is dead craze. That wasn’t ‘I buried Paul’ at all, McCartney has clarified, that was John saying ‘cranberry sauce.’ . . . That’s John’s humor. John would say something totally out of sync, like ‘cranberry sauce’ when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think, aha! (⁵⁰) Of the incident, Geoff Emerick says, we were recording around the Thanksgiving holiday, and just before the take, we had all been chatting about turkey and all the trimmings, and how Americans traditionally ate such a meal at that time of year. That’s the way John was—he’d often work little phrases or snatches of conversation about something he had been recently reading or talking about into the music he was recording. (⁵¹)

The finished song was, in George Martin’s words, Way ahead of its time, strong, complicated both in concept and execution, highly original and quickly labeled ‘psychedelic’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was the work of an undoubted genius. . . . For my money, it was the most original and inventive track to date in pop music. He would later add, When I hear it now, it can still send a shiver along my spine. (⁵²) From Strawberry Fields onwards it was a one-way ticket for John, writes Lennon biographer Ray Coleman; his music would be more incisive, more personal, more reflective, and more adventurous. (⁵³) Phillip Norman calls the song an abstract painting in sound. (⁵⁴) As for Lennon himself, he would say that, The only true songs I ever wrote were Help! and Strawberry Fields. (⁵⁵) And on more than one occasion, he would state that Strawberry Fields Forever" was his best Beatles song. (⁵⁶) This is one fan who agrees.

TWO

A Day In The Life

I’d love to turn you on.

John Lennon has come to Paul McCartney’s home. It is probably 18 January 1967, and it is quite cold. All of the Beatles refer to McCartney’s house as Cavendish, as it is on Cavendish Avenue in the St. John’s Wood section of London. Cavendish is a three-story Regency-era house on a quiet residential street. McCartney bought it in April of 1965 for 40,000 pounds and spent another 20,000 pounds renovating it before moving in during March of 1966. (¹) Lennon has come because he has an idea for a new song, but he has found it difficult to finish, and he wants McCartney’s help. He is carrying a newspaper with him, the 17 January 1967 edition of the London Daily Mail. (²) The front page of the paper contains the coroner’s report for Tara Browne, a twenty-one-year-old who was the wealthy heir to the Guinness ale fortune. (³) Browne had died in an accident in London on 18 December 1966, going through a red light at 110 mph in his Lotus Elan and crashing into a parked van. Browne had been the friend of several rock stars, including Lennon and McCartney. (⁴) On page four of the paper was another article entitled The Holes in Our Roads, which stated, There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one-twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. (⁵) "I was writing the song with the Daily Mail propped up in front of me on the piano, Lennon remembered. (⁶) His working title for the song was In the Life of . . ." (6)

It was a song that John brought over to me at Cavendish Avenue, Paul McCartney has recalled. "It was his original idea. He’d been reading the Daily Mail and brought the newspaper with him to my house. We went upstairs to the music room and started to work on it." (⁷) He had the first verse, and this often happened: one of us would have a little bit of an idea and instead of sitting down and sweating it, we’d just bring it to the other one and kind of finish it together, because you could ping-pong—you’d get an idea. (⁸) Lennon made a similar point. The way we wrote a lot of the time, you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was . . ., he remembered, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other. And I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. (⁹) It was a formula that had worked so well countless times before. But it never worked better than it would on this song.

Lennon played what he had for McCartney. I had the ‘I read the news today’ bit, said Lennon, and it turned Paul on. Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said yeah . . .. (¹⁰)

We looked at the newspaper and both wrote the verse how many holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, McCartney remembers. I liked the way [John] said ‘Lan-ca- sheer’, which is the way you pronounce it up north." (¹¹)

The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together, recalls McCartney, who said the line was purely a drug reference and had nothing to do with a car crash. (¹²) They had been imagining a stoned politician who had stopped at some traffic lights, George Martin recalled. (¹³) I didn’t copy the accident, Lennon remembered. Tara didn’t blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. (¹⁴) Lennon’s lyric, I saw a film today oh boy; the English army had just won the war, was a reference to How I Won the War, the movie he had filmed the previous autumn. (¹⁵)

And so Lennon and McCartney finished off the lyrics to the verses. When they did, it became obvious that the song needed a middle eight. Lennon asked McCartney if he could think of anything. McCartney had a piece of a song, one he had never finished off, (Woke up, fell out of bed) and he thought it just might fit. (¹⁶) Walter Everett suggests that Paul’s middle part may have been an early Penny Lane castoff. (¹⁷) The next bit was another song altogether, McCartney has stated,

but it happened to fit well with the first section. It was really only me remembering what it was like to run up the road to catch the school bus, having a smoke, and then going to class. We decided Bugger this, we’re going to write a real turn-on song! It was a reflection of my school days—I would have a Woodbine then, and somebody would speak and I would go into a dream. This was the only one on the album written as a deliberate provocation to people. (¹⁸)

Lennon really liked McCartney’s piece for the middle eight. (¹⁹) Now they had the verses and a middle, but they felt they needed to link them somehow. McCartney came up with what Lennon called a beautiful little lick in the song, ‘I’d love to turn you on,’ that he’d had floating around in his head and couldn’t use. (²⁰) Paul has said the line was inspired by Timothy Leary’s, Turn on, tune in, drop out comment from around that time. When Paul suggested it, John and I gave each other a knowing look: Uh-huh, it’s a drug song. You know that don’t you? All of this work on the song happened very quickly—bang, bang, just like that. It just sort of happened beautifully, Lennon stated, adding, that was something. I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. (²¹)

The next day, all four Beatles gathered at Cavendish to hear and learn the song. They practiced it in preparation for their 7:30 P.M. recording session. On the night of 19 January 1967, in engineer Geoff Emerick’s words,

the four Beatles rolled up, a little bit stoned, as had become usual, but with a tinge of excitement. They had a new song they’d been working on—one of Lennon’s—and they were anxious to play it for George Martin and me. They had gotten into the habit of meeting at Paul’s house in nearby St. John’s Wood before sessions, where they’d have a cup of tea, perhaps puff on a joint.

Then they would get in their cars and be driven to EMI (later called Abbey Road) because, although Paul’s house was within walking distance of the studio, they couldn’t take a stroll because of all the fans—which explained why they always showed up together despite living considerable distances from one another. (²²)

In Studio Two, as usual, the Beatles ran through the song with Emerick and Martin in the control booth recording it. Lennon sang and strummed his acoustic guitar, McCartney played piano, Starr played bongo drums, and George Harrison shook a pair of maracas. (²³) Before they began, McCartney suggested, Let’s put aside twenty-four bars and just have Mal [Evans] count them. Martin and Emerick wanted to know what McCartney planned on putting in there. Nothing, McCartney replied. It’s just going to be One, chunk, chunk, chunk, Two, chunk, chunk, chunk. . . . It was just a period of time, an arbitrary length of bars, which was very [John] Cage thinking . . . that kind of avant-garde thinking came from people I had been listening to. (²⁴) They put an echo on Evans’ voice, which increased as he counted higher. As a joke, Evans set off an alarm clock at the end of the twenty-four bars to let everyone know when to come back in. When they tried to erase this later, they could not do it, but it worked out perfectly because it was followed immediately by Paul’s Woke up, fell out of bed" line. (²⁵)

John counted in the song by saying, sugarplum fairy, sugarplum fairy, which gave us all a chuckle up in the control room, said Emerick. The phrase was a nod to Tchaikovsky, coming from his Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies in The Nutcracker. (²⁶) George Martin said he had heard that a sugarplum fairy, was the person who brings you dope, or whatever, so he saw it as a drug reference. (²⁷) But once Lennon started singing, we were all stunned into silence, says Emerick: "the raw emotion in his voice made the hairs on the back