Just ahead of today's Song of the Week, a programming note: Next week I'll be attempting our first ever Mark Steyn Club request edition Song of the Week - in effect, your Songs of the Week rather than mine. In the comments section below, Steyn Club members should leave the particular song title, the artist's version thereof that you happen to like, and the reason you picked it. Try not to be too obvious: If it's all "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "Blurred Lines", I reserve the right to cancel the show. But jump around the decades and the genres and introduce your fellow members to numbers they might not know, and by the end we'll all be doing the equivalent of those nightly Italian balcony window singalongs that seemed so charming for the first month or three of the house arrest. And with that on to this week's song:
Okay, we tried the end of the world as we know it, and then we went bananas. So how about something a little comforting? Exactly half a century ago, April 1970, this was the Number One hit on America's Billboard Hot One Hundred:
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me...
There will be an answer
Let It Be
Let It Be...
On this strange Easter in a locked-down Christendom, we should note that "Mother Mary" is, according to the author, a reference not to Mary, mother of Jesus, but to Mary, mother of Paul. McCartney lost his mum to an embolism arising from her breast cancer treatment when he was fourteen: She was a midwife who bicycled off to her Merseyside patients in the hours before dawn, and the breadwinner in the family. The early death of his mother was one of Paul's most basic connections to John Lennon, whose mum died when he was seventeen.
Of course, even the bond of shared tragedy can fray. By 1968, the Beatles were starting to crack, and under the pressure, as happens fairly often, Paul began dreaming of less fraught times. And in one such reverie his mother (Mary) came to him speaking words of wisdom, and the visitation sparked a song. Nevertheless, McCartney was initially reluctant to put her in the lyric. On early rehearsals with John, George and Ringo around January 1969, he'd sing:
When I find myself in times of trouble
Brother Malcolm comes to me...
That would be "Brother Malcolm" as in Mal Evans, the doorman at the Cavern Club back in Liverpool who became the Beatles' roadie, bodyguard, personal assistant, general dogsbody and the man who, for example, went out and bought Ringo a pair of undies for his visit to the doctor.
That's all very well, but had Brother Malcolm stayed in the song I very much doubt its appeal would have been anywhere near as great. The healing balm of Brother Malcolm is all very well when you're a rocker needing a change of socks, but it doesn't speak to the non-rocker in quite the same way. Nor would Mother Vera or Mother Gladys. McCartney is too canny not to know what he was doing: What son, after all, refers to his mother by her Christian name? Paul is generally a little coy about what he intended by "Mother Mary", but undoubtedly it enlarged the lyric in a way that was in tune with the tenor of the times. There was, as the Sixties turned into the Seventies, a brief vogue for easy-listening "pseudo-religiosity" (as NME's Derek Johnson put it in his review), as exemplified by "Oh Happy Day" (one of many things loser cockwombles Cary Katz and Blaze TV sued me over) and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" among others. Paul McCartney certainly had a mother called Mary, but putting those two words in a pop song moved it beyond autobiography.
They were also the two words that ensured John Lennon's intense loathing of the song for the rest of his life. Per their longstanding and legally binding agreement, Paul's solo creation was credited to "Lennon & McCartney". We're inclined to honor those legalities in our sub-titular listings above, but in this particular case John disdained the song, and ever more so in the years that followed. Not long before his death, he told Playboy magazine, "That's Paul. What can you say? Nothing to do with the Beatles. It could've been Wings. I don't know what he's thinking when he writes 'Let It Be.'"
What John was thinking was: Oh, God, not another of Paul's "granny songs", as he called them. Conversely, Paul thought the psychedelic experimentation side of John was mostly a waste of time. I have been berated by many readers for almost a decade and a half for all but ignoring Lennon & McCartney, and by almost as many readers, on those rare occasions I have tiptoed around the edges of their catalogue, for preferring Paul to John. Well, I've had just one brief semi-substantive conversation with him in my life, and it struck me that his interest in "granny songs" is a big part of where he's at. Sammy Cahn, three decades older than McCartney, shared a birthday with him, and told me that, when they'd meet in the run-up to the big day, he'd greet Paul with, "I don't want to swap catalogues, just the year of birth." "I wouldn't mind swapping catalogues," said Paul.
McCartney is a very successful music publisher, who now owns Frank Loesser's oeuvre and publishes among others Charles Strouse. Charles told me years back about taking Paul to an early performance of Annie. McCartney hadn't seen many musicals in his Liverpool boyhood, and he was fascinated by the way the songs continued the narrative. "You wrote that?" he'd say to Charles after each number. "But it fits the story so well..." By contrast, or so I heard from Lionel (Oliver!) Bart, Lennon couldn't have been less interested: "I don't like musicals," he said. "All that 'Ding! Cue for a song...'"
Maybe the Beatles could have survived the other tensions if the core relationship - Lennon & McCartney as a pooled partnership of songs - hadn't decayed into mutual contempt. What with all the Sixties rock combos still staggering around on tour, it's kind of amazing that the Beatles phenomenon went soup to nuts - "Love Me Do" to "Let It Be" - in seven years, or a year less than Michael E Mann's vanity lawsuit against me has been chunkering round the choked toilet bowl of the District of Columbia courts. In September 1968 - less than six years after "Love Me Do" - the Beatles were in the studio recording the George Harrison song "Piggies", and in between takes Macca began noodling around on what would become "Let It Be":
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let It BeAnd in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let It BeLet It Be, Let It Be
Let It Be, Let It Be
Whisper words of wisdom
Let It Be...
There's a touch of dear Doris Day about that: Que sera sera; whatever will be will be. It seems more apt for the fatalism of the Mohammedan than anything specifically Christian. Nevertheless, it was explicitly autobiographical: in his boyhood "hours of darkness", Paul's mother used to tell him, "It will be alright. Let it be."
The hope, presumably, was that in the Beatles' "hour of darkness" heeding his mum's advice would bring them through to the dawn and they would "wake up to the sound of music". Melodically and harmonically, the thing is almost wholly diatonic but decorated with a lot of appoggiaturas that give it that yearning and beseeching quality: O Lord, let it be... I don't think it's as strong melodically as, say, "My Love", but, just like "My Love", it seems pretty obviously a Paul McCartney solo that would be just as powerful with him accompanying himself on piano or guitar, and John, George and Ringo nipping off to the caff round the corner for a fag and a cuppa.
On January 31st 1969, at their new Apple Studios in London, the band recorded what would become the master take for all released audio versions (a second take was used in the film Let It Be). The studio chitchat captures the mood of the room:
John: Are we supposed to giggle in the solo?
Paul: Yeah.
John: Okay.
Paul: This is gonna knock you out, boy.
But it didn't.
For though they may be parted there is
Still a chance that they will see...
Fat chance of that. Three months later, George Harrison went into the studio to overdub a guitar solo onto the master track. And on January 4th 1970 - a year after the recording of that master track - McCartney and George Martin returned to the studio once more to turn the track into a finished record. John Lennon had quit the group by then, and everyone knew they were making, in effect, a post-Beatles single. George Martin added backing singers, including Linda McCartney (the only Beatles record she ever sang on), and George Harrison added another guitar solo intended to be overdubbed onto his previous overdubbed solo from April 1969.
Let It Be, Let It Be
Let It Be, Let It Be
Whisper words of wisdom
Let It Be...
So they let it be and didn't use Harrison's second solo. That's the single version you can hear at the top of the page. Instead George's January 1970 solo wound up on the album version, produced not by George Martin but by Phil (Wall of Sound) Spector, with an entirely different aesthetic - fewer backing vocals, more orchestration. The Beatles were now the sum of their parts, and some of their parts didn't even make the record, depending on who was running the control room:
As to what Phil Spector made of "Let It Be", I'd reckon he inclines more to Lennon's view of the song. The preceding track on the album is "Dig It", which at all of fifty-one seconds doesn't offer a lot to dig other than John Lennon's transatlantic namedropping:
Like a rolling stone
Like the FBI
And the CIA
And the BBC
BB King
And Doris Day
Matt Busby
Dig It!
For American readers, Sir Matt Busby is one of the all-time great footie managers (Man United): this is the first and last time he has ever been as close to Doris Day on record as Rock Hudson was in that bathtub.
And then Lennon goes into his Dame Gracie Fields impression and says: "That was 'Can You Dig It?' by Georgie Wood, and now we'd like to do 'Hark, the Angels Come'."
And McCartney's piano begins to play "Let It Be"...
Hmm.
Likewise for American readers, Wee Georgie Wood was the 4'9" English music-hall comedian, commemorated for the ages not only in a Beatles song but in the Wee Georgie Wood Railway that runs for a mile or so along Lake Rosebery in Tasmania. It is so-named because it is a two-foot narrow gauge railway, and thus the engine is rather small, just like Georgie.
Where was I? Oh, yeah:
And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer
Let It Be...
If John Lennon and Phil Spector can't resist using a fifty-one-second filler to insult the track that follows, well, as McCartney's mum used to say, let it be. Let the whole thing be - and move on.
As noted above, "Let It Be" was America's Number One exactly fifty years ago. Was it Number One in the lads' native land? Alas, no. It went straight into the UK hit parade at Number Two, but was blocked from the top spot by "(I was born under a) Wand'rin' Star", which is one of those wacky anomalies you never really get in the US charts. Unable to see off Lee Marvin, the Beatles had nowhere to go but down - from Number Two to Three to Four to Seven...
I wake up to the sound of music...
But it's Lee Marvin, and Simon & Garfunkel, and Andy Williams and Bob & Marcia, and all the other stuff that's kicking your butt...
That said, "Let It Be" did eventually get to Number One in Britain this very week in 1987 - and thus becomes the first Steyn's Song of the Week to hit Number One in two different versions in the same week a generation apart since "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". The occasion was a terrible tragedy: On March 6th 1987 Townsend Thoresen's ferry The Herald of Free Enterprise left Zeebrugge in Belgium for Dover in England. The assistant boatswain had retired to his cabin for a nap and so neglected to close the bow doors before the ship sailed. The ferry promptly filled with water and fell to her side. Nearly two hundred passengers and crew died.
Many of those on board had purchased their tickets through a special offer in The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's big-selling tabloid. The paper's star columnist, Gary Bushell, decided to put together a big charity single to help the bereaved, and enlisted the help of Stock, Aitken & Waterman, the leading pop producers of the day. They in turn called on the various popsters in their rolodex. There was some resistance from certain of the leftier ones, who had no love for either Mr Murdoch or Gary Bushell, the latter best known for offering, as his proposed solution to the Aids pandemic, that homosexuals be tattooed at the base of their spines with the words "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".
However, there was no cancel culture back then, and so Paul McCartney himself came on board, followed by Boy George, Kate Bush, Mark Knopfler, my old chums from Bananarama ...although, as is the way with these things, so many accepted that it was hard to squeeze them all in: of the Bananarama gals, only Keren really had anything much to do - and most of the other participants, including Bonnie Tyler, the New Seekers, the Nolan Sisters, Radio One's Simon Bates, Radio Two's Gloria Hunniford, Linda Lusardi and various other of Mr Murdoch's Page Three Girls whom one is unaccustomed to seeing with their kit on, all these and more were relegated to the huge and protracted crowd scene that closed the record.
So how did Sir Paul sound returning to the recording studio for his first "Let It Be" in eighteen years? Er, well, as it happens he used that same old master vocal he'd laid down on January 31st 1969.
On the other hand, he was sporting enough to agree to mime along to his younger self for the video - while being sufficiently cautious to have the segment filmed at his pad so he didn't get captured on film bellowing along with Batesy, the Nolans, the Page Three totty and the other riff-raff:
A good cause and all that, but that truly hideous arrangement is a terrible way to bury a song. Paul McCartney knew that, I'm sure, but he also knew that a good song can survive even the most grotesque version.
One final thought - I can never hear this song without recalling McCartney's first go at working out the lyric:
When I find myself in times of trouble
Brother Malcolm comes to me...
Three years after the Beatles broke up, their old gofer Mal Evans moved to Los Angeles and wound up living with his girlfriend in a rental apartment at a motel on West 4th Street. On January 5th 1976, police were called and found a depressed Evans high on valium and waving a rifle. They failed to spot it was an air rifle, and shot him dead. Not long before he had been made an "Honorary Sheriff of Los Angeles County".
George Martin and Harry Nilsson attended the funeral, but no Beatle did. The ashes were mailed back to England, but misplaced by the Post Office. "They should have looked in the dead letter file," said John Lennon.
And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me...
Not for Brother Malcolm, not when he needed it.
Shine on till tomorrow
Let It Be.
~If you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget, per our top-of-the-page announcement, to send us any requests for next week's Song of the Week via our comments section below. (We won't publish them until the show airs next Sunday.)
If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we have a mini-audio companion, a bonus Song of the Week Extra, midweek on our Coronacopia edition of The Mark Steyn Show - and sometimes with special guests from Mark's archive, including Eurovision's Dana and Paul Simon.
Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we thought we'd do the same for our musical features just to provide some mellifluous diversions from the Coronapocalypse. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Herman's Hermits to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and the above-mentioned Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's songs, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from house arrest without end.
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you disagree with any or all of the above, feel free to let it rip about "Let It Be" in our comments section. As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges. Please stay on topic and don't include URLs, as the longer ones can wreak havoc with the formatting of the page.
