I Call Your Name

John Lennon listed this among the very first songs he ever wrote when he got a guitar and formed a group in 1957.  When he and Paul McCartney became a hot songwriting duo in 1963, their manager Brian Epstein encouraged them to donate some of their songs to other Liverpool groups under his management.  This served a dual purpose - it would bring more money into the Lennon/McCartney music publishing partnership plus it would bolster the careers of the other acts in the Epstein stable.

At some point in time, John added a middle eight to this early number before handing it over to Billy J. Kramer.  Kramer recorded it as a B-side to go along with another Lennon composition Bad to Me in June of 1963.  While Bad to Me went to number one in the UK, I Call Your Name got little recognition.

For some reason, this song came to Lennon's mind when the Beatles were completing the soundtrack recordings for A Hard Day's Night on March 1st, 1964.  After nailing Long Tall Sally in one live take, the group turned their attention to I Call Your Name, requiring seven takes before they had a keeper.  John then double-tracked his lead vocal and Ringo added a cowbell as an overdub.

The song was mixed for mono on March 3rd and given to the producers of the film, so it seems to have been in the running for the soundtrack at this point.  Another mono mix on March 4th saw producer George Martin edit take five of the instrumental break into the middle of take seven.  This became the standard procedure for all subsequent mixes.  The first stereo mix was not made until March 10th.  These two mixes were given to Capitol Records in the US for The Beatles' Second Album released on April 10th.  Due to this early release, the song had now probably been dropped from the soundtrack.

A new mono mix was prepared on June 4th.  This was used on the EP Long Tall Sally released on June 19th in the UK.  Only three days after this release, on June 22nd, I Call Your Name was among the songs newly mixed for stereo for the UK album A Hard Day's Night.  Had it been added, it would have brought the number of songs on that album up to the usual complement of fourteen.  Perhaps since it had already been released, it did not make the lineup.

The boys performed the song exactly one time for the BBC program Saturday Club.  This was recorded on March 31st, ten days before its initial release in the US and months before its appearance on the Long Tall Sally EP in Britain.  Sadly, this performance was not chosen for either of the Live at the BBC collections.  The song's original recording was included on the Rock and Roll Music compilation in 1976.

The Beatles' recording of the song is unusual for the instrumental break, which becomes one of the first known attempts by a white group to play ska.  The form was hardly known outside of Jamaica at the time, but Blue Beat Records were starting to appear in the UK.  Even at this early stage of their recording career, the Beatles were always on the lookout for new sounds and influences.  They did not succeed at capturing the proper off-beat style of playing here, and the change in rhythm was probably puzzling to fans.  In retrospect, it was merely an indicator of just how far they were willing to go. 

I Am the Walrus

On September 5th, 1967, the Beatles reported to the studio for the first time since the death of their manager Brian Epstein.  They had already met only days after his untimely death and had decided to carry on with the Magical Mystery Tour project as soon as possible in order to keep themselves occupied.  Following the practice that had been established for their two feature films A Hard Day's Night and Help!, the natural order of business was to record a batch of new songs for the soundtrack before principal photography was scheduled to begin.

To date, there were just two songs earmarked for the film - the title tune and Your Mother Should Know, both by McCartney.  Now, John Lennon brought in his sole contribution for the TV movie, apart from the group instrumental Flying and some incidental music.  This otherworldly composition began simply enough as a droning wordgame to confound those who were constantly digging for deeper meaning in the lyrics of the band's songs.  Of course, the Beatles themselves had unwittingly encouraged those who did so by printing the words of all the Sgt. Pepper songs on the back of that album earlier in the year.

In his book Here, There and Everywhere, engineer Geoff Emerick reports that producer George Martin found the song bewildering when Lennon first played it for all to hear, uttering, "What the hell do you expect me to do with that?"  The mood did not improve once they began working on the basic track.  Sixteen takes were necessary (and only five of them were complete) before they yielded a decent master.  After just a few takes, Paul abandoned his bass and grabbed a tambourine to help the usually-reliable Ringo maintain a steady beat throughout.  Emerick relates that Martin wondered aloud in the control room why John was playing the electric keyboard instead of Paul, as Lennon made numerous mistakes.

Things went better on the following night, September 6th, as Paul added his bass part and John recorded his amazing lead vocal.  Anthology 2 presents take sixteen from September 5th with only John's vocal overdub from this date.  This allows us to hear George Harrison's minimal electric guitar in the clear, which turned out to be his only work on the track.  At this point, George Martin took away a copy of the recording to try and figure out what kind of arrangement he could possibly come up with to augment the song.  As usual, his input turned out to be exceptional. 

In the meantime, however, most of the filming of Magical Mystery Tour took place, including the sequence for I Am the Walrus.  Though Paul directed much of the film, this was definitely John's baby, and it remains one of the best sections of the finished product, serving today as a perfect example of the promotional films of the psychedelic period.

On September 27th, a sixteen piece orchestra spent the afternoon session recording George Martin's ingenious score, which once again incorporated the sliding strings that he had first used in support of George Harrison's Within You Without You months earlier.  The evening session was even more inventive, as sixteen members (eight boys and eight girls, according to the standard notation of the time) of the commercial group the Mike Sammes Singers sang many strange backing vocal parts arranged for them by Martin and Lennon.

At the all-important mono mixing session on September 29th, Lennon finally got to add the live radio feed he wanted to the second half of the recording.  He unknowingly settled on a BBC broadcast of Shakespeare's King Lear.  As this was mixed live into the song, it created difficulties when the stereo mix was done on November 6th.  The equipment of 1967 made it impossible to separate the radio signal and so, from the moment that that signal was introduced, the sound is in mono, though it moves from speaker to speaker thus causing a unique effect.

Though the song was part of the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, it was also chosen to be the B-side of the single Hello Goodbye.  In addition to Anthology 2, the song can also be found on the Blue Album, the American version of Rarities and Reel Music.