Behka’s Breakfast with The Beatles Recap: Week of July 28

Here's a look back at all the songs I played to kick off the show this week. On Monday, I played "Long, Long, Long".

Long, Long, Long" is a song written by George Harrison, and first released by the Beatles on their 1968 album The Beatles, also known as the White Album. According to Harrison's autobiography, I, Me, Mine, the rattling heard at the end of the song was the result of a bottle of Blue Nun wine sitting on the Leslie speaker. When Paul McCartney played a certain note on the Hammond organ, the bottle began to rattle. To compound the sound, Ringo Starr recorded a fast snare drum roll.  It was not, as is commonly thought, the voice of Yoko Ono.

On Tuesday, I played "Hello, Little Girl".

"Hello Little Girl" is the first song ever written by John Lennon. According to Lennon, he drew on an old "Thirties or Forties song" that his mother sang to him. Written in 1957, it was used as one of the songs at the Beatles unsuccessful Decca audition in 1962. They recorded a home demo of it, with Stuart Sutcliffe on bass, which is available only on bootleg currently. In 1963, the English Merseybeat band the Fourmost made a recording of the song in the Abbey Road Studios (produced by George Martin) and released it as their debut single. Two weeks later Gerry & The Pacemakers also recorded a version of the song, but the version by the Fourmost was selected for the issue and reached number 9 in the United Kingdom. Albeit different than the previous version with Sutcliffe, the Beatles' version of the song can be found on Anthology 1, with John Lennon as the lead singer.
The Fourmost' version of this song is also on The Songs Lennon and McCartney Gave Away.

On Wednesday, I played "Julia".

This version is on The Anthology 3, it's one of the first takes. "Julia" was written by John Lennon and features Lennon on vocals and acoustic guitar. It was written during the Beatles' 1968 visit to Rishikesh in northern India, where they were studying under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was here where Lennon learned the song's finger-picking guitar style  from folk singer Donovan. No other Beatle sings or plays on the song. While Paul McCartney made several "solo" recordings attributed to the group, dating back to his famous song "Yesterday", this is the only time that Lennon played and sang unaccompanied on a Beatles track. "Julia" was written for John's mother, Julia Lennon, who was knocked down and killed by a car driven by a drunk off-duty police officer when John was 17 years old. Julia Lennon had encouraged her son's interest in music and bought him his first guitar. But after she split with John's father, John was taken in by his aunt, Mimi, and Julia started a new family with another man; though she lived just a few miles from John, Julia did not spend much time with him for a number of years. The song was also written for his future wife Yoko Ono, whose first name, which literally means "child of the sea" in Japanese, is echoed in the lyric "Oceanchild, calls me."

On Thursday, I wasn't here. I was sick. Sorry.

On Friday, I played "Real Love".

"Real Love" is a song written by John Lennon, and recorded with overdubs by the three surviving Beatles in 1995 for release as part of the Beatles Anthology project. To date, it is the last released record of new material credited to the Beatles. Lennon made six takes of the song in 1979 and 1980 with "Real Life", a different song that merged with "Real Love". The song was ignored until 1988 when the sixth take was used on the documentary soundtrack Imagine: John Lennon. "Real Love" was subsequently reworked by the three surviving former members of the Beatles (Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) in early 1995, an approach also used for another incomplete Lennon track, "Free as a Bird".

Let me know if there's something you'd like to hear next week, we start off on Monday at 6:00 a.m.

Fourmostly yours,
Behka