Tomorrow is Tax Day in America - April 15th, the day before Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia (April 16th). So Monday represents America's formal Emancipation Day from what H & R Block & Co like to dignify as "Tax Season". As I used to say on Rush every year round this time, the acceptance of that term is not a good sign: Baseball should have a season, but not tax. Nevertheless, in the brokey brokiest nation in the history of brokeness, on this day the season of 1040s and 1099s draws to a close, and so, as we do with spring and summer, we offer a song for said season.
For the first half of Tin Pan Alley's history, tax barely rated a mention in popular song. Before the Second World War, I can think of just two well-known ditties that even broach the subject, and then only in fifth or sixth choruses that rarely if ever get sung. Gus Kahn was the lyricist of not only our very first Song of the Week, but the second, too: "San Francisco" and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", respectively. Long before either hit, he wrote one of those defining anthems of the Jazz Age, in 1921 with Richard Whiting and Raymond Egan. "Ain't We Got Fun?" is a breezy rejoinder to straitened times:
Ev'ry morning
Ev'ry evening
Ain't We Got Fun?
Not much money
Oh, but honey
Ain't We Got Fun?
Several verses and choruses later, the song wraps up:
Streetcar seats
Are awful narrow
Ain't We Got Fun?
They won't smash up
Our Pierce Arrow
We ain't got none
They've cut my wages
But my income tax will be so much smaller
When I'm paid off
I'll be laid off
Ain't We Got Fun?
Thirteen years later, Cole Porter briefly touched on the theme in the seventh chorus of his peerless laundry list:
You're The Top!
You're the Tower of Babel
You're The Top!
You're the Whitney stable
By the river Rhine
You're a foaming stein
Of beer
You're a dress from Saks's
You're next year's taxes
You're stratosphere!
The stratosphere was a relatively novel concept back then, having been discovered simultaneously by Richard Assman and Léon Teisserenc de Bort in 1902. But it was not until tax itself soared into the stratosphere that the state's revenue collectors secured a permanent place in the musical repertoire:
Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman...
It was April 1966. The Beatles were earning serious money. They'd been having hits for three years, of course, but in show business it can be some time before the royalties roll in, and it took a couple of annual returns before the scale of the Fab Four's success made itself felt in their declarable earnings: not just hit singles in Britain, but Number Ones in America, and Canada and Australia, and Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway; and not just Number One singles but Number One albums, and compilation albums; and not just platinum albums, but double platinum, triple platinum, quintuple platinum, albums that keep selling and selling; and not just studio albums but soundtrack albums for films, films in which you also star... The Beatles were making more money than anyone had ever made in British pop music. And then they noticed that very little of it was going to them - and, as their accountant informed them, at least two of the four were in danger of going bankrupt.
The difference between being, on the one hand, Cliff Richard or Adam Faith and, on the other, the Beatles was hardly worth it. "'Taxman'," said George Harrison, "was when I first realised that, even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes."
Harold Wilson's Labour Party had been elected in 1964, and in an early example of the political class's now routine modish pandering had had the Queen make all four moptops Members of Her Majesty's Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Cute. You get a nice ribbon, and a medal. If only Mr Wilson had confined his innovations to inducting pop stars into chivalric orders. But among the Labour Government's other novelties was a new marginal tax rate, a "supertax" for the "super rich" of ninety-five per cent. American fans of the song sometimes fail to appreciate that its opening lines are not a bit of literary license but a bald statement of fact:
Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me...
That's to say, out of every pound, HM Treasury took nineteen shillings for themselves, and you got to keep the one remaining. So who cares whether you go double platinum or triple? It's Nigel and Derek at the Inland Revenue who should be following the Hit Parade ups and downs, and lip-synching for you on "Top of the Pops". After all, they'll see more of the loot than you ever will.
This was all new to Harrison. Not until he sat down with his accountant did he understand that, while he was free to make as much money as he wanted, he would never get to spend most of it. Born in anger, "Taxman" wound up rather sardonic. Like innumerable rock'n'roll numbers, the song begins with a traditional count-off:
One, two, three, four...
Personally, I've always found this device rather boring – not an indication of "raw" "energy" but instead the literal paint-by-numbers tedium of rock. However, in this instance, the count-off's not in the same tempo as the music that follows, and functions more as a droll pun, representing the eponymous taxman peeling off pound notes. I'd be interested to know whether that was George's inspiration, or maybe John's – Lennon claimed he'd provided a few "one-liners" for the number, as Harrison was relatively inexperienced at songwriting – or perhaps it was George Martin's idea as producer. Whatever the origin, it sets the tone for the song: "Taxman" uses all the tricks of rock'n'roll – notably driving repetition – but in the cause of ramming home a message of statist authority. As if to emphasize that there's something not quite kosher about this, the one musical novelty is the lop-sided length of the main phrase - a conventional eight-bar couplet yoked to a five-bar explanation thereof. In combination, the thirteen bars sound both utterly routine and faintly menacing:
Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman...
Harrison had written his first song in 1963, in an hotel room in Bournemouth just to see if he could do it:
"Don't Bother Me" made it onto the With the Beatles LP, but it's safe to say that in the spring of 1966 nobody thought of George as a songwriting Beatle. "Taxman" was Side One Track One of Revolver, and the first Harrison number really to land. Beatologists speculate endlessly on the origins of the Revolver songs: "And Your Bird Can Sing", for example, is said to derive from John Lennon seeing Gay Talese's famous Esquire piece on Sinatra, which discloses that in Rat Pack lingo one's "bird" is one's penis. Could be true:
You tell me that you've got everything you want
And your bird can sing
But you don't get me
You don't get me...
However, the notion that the lads' harmonies on the word "Taxman" are a conscious lift from Neal Hefti's famous "Batman" theme is less persuasive. The Caped Crusader's TV show did not begin airing on Brit telly until a month after the Beatles had begun recording "Taxman", although they had apparently been sent promotional copies of the Marketts' recording of the theme:
An alternative theory is that George Harrison borrowed from "Shotgun" by Junior Walker and the All Stars:
In fact, rockologist Rob Sheffield goes so far as to posit that Hefti lifted the "Batman" theme from "Shotgun". I knew Hefti a little, and I can state fairly confidently that I doubt, had he lived to 237, that he'd ever have heard "Shotgun". And, as Song of the Weekers well know, Hefti lifted his unforgettable dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-Batman from his own arrangement for Sinatra of "Everybody's Twistin'":
The conventional wisdom on Beatles songwriting is that John did all the serious social content and Paul did the best love songs. But I'm not so sure, over the long haul, that George won't best both men in both categories. In the late Sixties and Seventies, everybody did "Yesterday" (Paul) and "Something" (George), but the former seems awfully insipid if you've ever seen Shirley Bassey or Sinatra biting off the latter (Frank's was Harrison's favorite version). Likewise, John was the ne plus ultra of showbiz leftists but, while the rubes lap up the marshmallow nihilism of "Imagine", it's heartening to know he wasn't dumb enough to swallow it himself: he may have sung "imagine there's no countries" but he was happy enough to give money to the IRA to advance the cause of moving a small chunk of real estate from one peripheral jurisdiction to another. By contrast, "Taxman" was the first explicit glimpse into how pop stars really live. Rock'n'roll is one of the most ruthlessly capitalist enterprises on earth, and its most successful proponents pioneered the trick of being "socially liberal/fiscally conservative" long before squishy blue-state Republican governors attempted the straddle.
But Harrison wasn't merely - like David Bowie, when he issued bonds in himself a couple decades back - looking out for Number One and the bottom line; he was something of a genuine philosopher. Not the hippie-dippie Hare Krishna philosophy, but the real thing. In 1969, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, George briefly detoured out of the Maharishi chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the US government's Antitrust Division):
You know, this is the thing I don't like. It's the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the government send them in there, and say you know, you're not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the government's monopolizing, who's gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out?
Good question. There was an old joke in Britain: "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" In fact, it's an incisive observation on the nature of government. We wouldn't like it if there were only one automobile company or only one breakfast cereal, but by definition there can only be one government — which is why, "when the government's monopolizing", it should do so only in very limited areas. Harrison got that and expressed it in almost Friedmanite terms fortysomething years ago - just as he also grasped the essential nature of a tax regime. Alan Keyes, during his entertainingly doomed presidential run of 2000, liked to pose a question to the crowd: If the income tax rate is twenty per cent (or thirty per cent, or forty), how much of your income does the government control?
Someone would always answer twenty per cent (or thirty, or forty), and Keyes would patiently correct them: No, the government controls 100 per cent of your income - because you have to justify the part you keep. Tax is about control, as the patter section of "Taxman" makes plain:
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman...
I love the way the weenier rock critics piously explain that these examples are humorously exaggerated for rhetorical effect. Harrison's view of the Revenue as a micro-regulatory tyranny has come to pass. For a while, I employed a young lady who worked for me in New York City. A few years back, we received a notice at corporate HQ in New Hampshire that we had failed to pay the "New York Commuter Mobility Tax". This is a tax on businesses that operate in New York to cover the infrastructure deterioration caused by employees leaving home for the office every morning and vice-versa every evening: "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street". As it happens, my employee worked from her home. But we still had to pay the "commuter mobility tax". She commuted from her bedroom to whichever room she kept the computer in: "If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet." When I mentioned this on the radio, she emailed back: "It's worse than you think. I live in a studio apartment."
In effect, New York taxes her (or rather me) for sitting down in her own home: "If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat." As for "If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat", how else would you sum up carbon credits? A year or two back, in the interests of "taxing heat" to save the planet, the European Union was considering a levy per cow on bovine flatulence emissions. Even Harrison didn't foresee that one:
If you own a farm, I'll tax your cart
If you own a cow, I'll tax her fart
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman...
But he got to the heart of the matter:
Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman.
And you're working for no one but me.
Whether the harmonies of "Taxman" derive from "Batman" or "Shotgun", it was the Brit rockers who planted the word in the language. At almost exactly the same time George Harrison started work on his song, Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote "Sunny Afternoon", with its famous first line:
The taxman's taken all my dough...
On Tax Day 2024 in America, there are no ninety-five per cent marginal rates. When you do that, as Harold Wilson discovered, the celebrity class tends to decamp, as the likes of Roger Moore and Michael Caine did, to Switzerland and California. And, however they toe the party line on world poverty or climate change, their very mailing address is more potent a political statement than anything else. So today Big Government leaves the super-rich to twitter on about Net Zero and transgender bathrooms and instead levies the supertax on generations of children and grandchildren as yet unborn. The last thing Joe Biden needs is any of his Hollywood/Big Tech pals trending Harrison-like on the government monopoly.
In that sense, "Taxman" is a rare bit of genuine counter-culture to emerge from the Sixties. Yet statism is shameless, and happy to co-opt whatever's to hand: On recent Tax Days, as the clock ticks down to closing hour, American post offices have taken to blasting Harrison's song out to last minute filers shuffling patiently in line. Yeah, they're the Taxman and they're telling you how it will be...
Happy Tax Day. Happy Emancipation Day.
NB There are two corrections above, prompted by comments from Larry Jordan and Calvert Whitehurst. One of the side-effects of writing under heavy medication, I'm afraid.
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