By Kiki Arochas, Arts and Culture Editor
The Beatles are the greatest band of all time. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is at best uneducated, and at worst, an idiot. The four-headed beast that is John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr dominated the music industry in ways never before seen or replicated since. In the process, they molded the music scene into their own image, setting the standard for artistic excellence for decades to come. As much talent as each of them brought to the table, my personal favorite Beatle is the genius behind the ballad “Hey Jude,” Paul McCartney. Once you hear the story behind its making, he just might become your favorite, too.
The story starts with Lennon and the rest of the gang touring in Mayfair, London. Having heard about an “amazing woman” who was putting on a showcase in the Indica (art) Gallery, Lennon went on to have a fateful encounter with the presenter of the exhibit: Yoko Ono. After a “playful back and forth,” Lennon and Ono soon actualized their newfound feelings for each other, starting an affair amid future musical collaborations. In the process, he divorced and abandoned his wife, Cynthia, and their five-year-old son, Julian.
Despite his bandmate’s sudden separation, Paul McCaurtney didn’t feel quite as comfortable abandoning Cynthia as Lennon did. “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them [Cynthia and Julian] to suddenly to be persona non gratae out of my life,” McCaurtney said. “So I decided to pay them a visit.”
Driving up to Cynthia’s residence in Kenwood, McCartney began writing a song, something he would usually do on these trips when Cynthia and John were married. “I was very used to writing songs on my way out to Kenwood because I was usually going there to collaborate with John.” It was there, on this drive up, where McCartney began formulating his masterpiece.
McCartney wanted to write a song for Julian Lennon, John’s son, who was suffering through the turmoil of his parents’ divorce. He started the song with the words, “Hey Jules,” in reference to Julian, and other comforting lyrics that he hoped would be a ballad of encouragement for the boy. McCartney would later change the lyric from “Jules” to “Jude,” because it “sounded a bit better.”
“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better,” was the essence of his message to Julian: “Hey, try and deal with this terrible thing.” Subsequent lyrics would offer advice to not let opportunities in life slip him by. The beautiful words all build up to perhaps the song’s most iconic line: “And don’t you know that it’s just you, hey Jude, you’ll do /
The movement you need is on your shoulder,” meaning everything Julian will need is right there, in his head. Only he has the ability to actualize his dreams; only he can make something of himself.
Incredulously, McCartney was planning on discarding the line when presenting it to John for the first time. “I played it to them [Lennon and Ono], and when I got to the line ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ I looked over my shoulder and I said, ‘I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy.’” Lennon, however, was having none of it. “You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!”
Despite McCartney’s stated interpretation, Lennon somehow found a way to make the song about himself. “But I always heard it as a song to me,” he told David Sheff in an interview. “If you think about it… Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying ‘Hey Jude–hey, John’. . . subconsciously he was saying, go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying ‘bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all, because he was losing his partner.”
Still, “Hey Jude” went on to become an instant classic in its time and remains so today, as a number one hit in several countries and the ‘top selling single’ of 1968 in the UK. Julian himself, interestingly, stated recently in an interview with Bill Maher that he has a “love hate” relationship with the song, despite his gratitude. “People don’t really understand that that’s a stark and dark reminder of actually what happened,” he said. “The fact that Dad walked out, walked away, left Mum and I.”
McCartney’s kindness gave way to one of his greatest hits. In the face of turmoil, band drama, fame, and fortune, McCartney saw through it all and focused on what really mattered: caring for others in the way he always has. This is why I easily label him as the best of the Beatles.
Not convinced? I’ll give you one more tidbit. Long after Lennon’s death, his widow Ono has tried her utmost to deprive Julian of his inheritance in every way imaginable. Her pettiness knew no bounds, going as far as auctioning off Lennon’s possessions after his death, including Julian’s own letters that he wrote to, and received from, his father. He was forced to draw from his inheritance money (over which he had to fight Ono in court for sixteen years) to buy back his deceased father’s possessions. Paul McCartney rose up to the occasion and bought many of the possessions, and promptly gave them back to their rightful owner, Julian.
Paul is too good for this world.
Photo Caption: Paul McCartney, the artist of “Hey Jude”
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons