Note: This is a pre-production script and may deviate from the finished show.
Hey there, Cousiiiin! Welcome to the next episode of How Good It Is, and today we’re meeting another inspirational woman. Speaking of which, let’s hear from Jenna!
[♫HGII♫]
I’m Claude Call, and I’m proud to be amongst you. And today, since we’ll be talking about Beatles songs, I’ve got a bit of Beatles trivia for ye. Have a listen to this clip from the song “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” from the White Album:
[HIAWG Solo]
Many guitar players agree that this is a very hard guitar part to play because of the way those notes are being bent, but George Harrison, in addition to being a musician who was always striving to improve his technique, had a guitar that was very special, and that may have helped him a little bit. What was so special about that guitar?
I’ll have that answer near the end of the show.
We’re just ramping up in this series of women who inspired hit songs, and this time around we’re looking at Jane Asher
Before meeting the love of his life in Linda Eastman in 1967, Paul McCartney was in a relationship with Jane Asher, the sister of musician Peter Asher. The two met just as the Beatles were starting to rise in popularity in 1963, so she had a front-row seat to their explosion onto the music scene. In fact, in those early days McCartney spent a lot of time with his friend Peter and his girlfriend Jane at their house in London. But let’s back up a little bit.
Jane was the second of three children in her family. We’ve already talked about her older brother Peter, who was half of the duo Peter and Gordon and who later became a producer. Her younger sister is radio actress Claire Asher. Jane first appeared in a 1952 film called Mandy, when she was eight years old. She was also in the 1955 film The Quartermass Experiment, and in 1961 she appeared in a film called The Greengage Summer, which was released in the US as Loss of Innocence. She also did some British and American TV, and was a frequent panelist on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury.
In 1963 she was assigned to interview the Beatles for the Radio Times. A photographer for the magazine asked them to pose with her, and that was the start of a five-year relationship with McCartney. Now, frankly, if you do an internet search for Beatles songs about Jane Asher, you’re going to get some variations on the list, largely because when Paul was at the Asher’s house in London, he and John Lennon spent a lot of time in that house writing songs together, so occasionally the lines blur a little bit. For instance, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was written there, and while some people have said it’s about Jane, there’s not a lot of evidence that that was the case.
What’s a little clearer, though, is that McCartney did write “And I Love Her” about Jane. He said in a 1984 interview that it was more of a generic love song, but nobody’s really buying that. Paul has also described it as the first ballad he impressed himself with. Some credit has to go to John Lennon and George Harrison on this song, as it was John who helped to come up with the bridge section—“A love like ours, could never die”—and it was George who wrote the acoustic guitar introduction that makes the song immediately recognizable. The other thing I like about it is that it changes from a minor to a major key for the guitar solo and stays that way through the rest of the song. It’s a common change in pop music, but it really uplifts this specific tune.
There are some who think that “Here There and Everywhere” is likely about Jane, but there isn’t much to back that one up, either, other than the fact that they were dating at the time, and starting to get noticed as a couple. Paul has said that he was actually at John Lennon’s place, waiting for him to wake up, so he sat poolside with his guitar and started working out the chords that became the song. He was looking for something like Fred Astaire’s “Cheek to Cheek” combined with The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” He’s also said that when they cut the track, Lennon complimented the song and it really warmed his heart, since Lennon wasn’t often given to compliments. In his autobiography, their roadie-slash-bodyguard Mal Evans took credit for the line “Watching her eyes, and hoping I’m always there,” saying he’s always eye-conscious and when Paul was stuck for a lyric, he was the one who came up with that. Do with that bit what you will.
Paul and Jane were a public couple, but Paul wasn’t above the occasional one-night stand with other women, rationalizing that it was okay because he and Jane weren’t married. Different times, cousin. Between that and the amount of time they had to spend apart, cracks began forming in their relationship. By the time the Beatles started working on the Rubber Soul album, you can sense the relationship stress in his compositions. “We Can Work It Out” is a song that Paul concedes “might be personal” in nature. And again, it was John who supplied the “Life is very short” bridge to the song. But overall, the song has simultaneously a sense of optimism and urgency, and the shift in tone from McCartney’s realism to Lennon’s philosophy is just plain interesting.
Paul and John, but mostly Paul, wrote “What You’re Doing” in Atlantic City in August of 1964 when they were on a break from a US tour. Paul is on record as not especially liking the song itself, considering it to be album filler that’s maybe a better recording than a song as such. Personally, I like the fun rhyming scheme where he rhymes two-syllable words with two one-syllable words, such as in the lines “You got me runnin/And there’s no fun in it”, with that last non-rhyming bit serving as a lead-in to the chorus line.
In late 1965, while the Beatles were working on their Rubber Soul sessions, Jane accepted an offer to appear on the stage at the Bristol Old Vic theatre. This turned into an argument, because Paul thought she should stay home and support him. Not financially, of course, but in other ways. This resulted in the two of them breaking up briefly. He later said that it was shattering to be without her. At any rate, when he tried to telephone her in Bristol, she refused to return his calls, leading to the opening lines of the song. You can hear that things are getting a little more bitter on the romantic front here. Musically, Paul has said that he was inspired by the Four Tops hit “It’s the Same Old Song”. And to continue the chain, it’s said that “You Won’t See Me” was the inspiration for the melody to Chicago’s song “Saturday in the Park.”
The bad vibes didn’t end there, though: out of the same sessions came the song “I’m Looking Through You”. This is also directly related to their argument and her departure for Bristol, and you can hear the extra bit of anger in the line “Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.” From a recording standpoint, one thing interesting about this track is that it was pretty expensive to record at EMI Studio. As a result, there oftentimes had to be deep decisions about remakes or fixing errors. However, there are a couple of versions of this song out there. The first version, Take 1, is slower and doesn’t have the “Why, tell me why” bridge in it, but there’s also a twelve-bar blues jam in it. You can hear that version on Anthology 2, if you’re curious. It’s actually pretty good, but in retrospect it doesn’t quite match the tone of the rest of the album. So the Beatles decided they didn’t like that version and went back into the studio a couple of weeks later. They didn’t like that version either and went back the following week to record what wound up being the final version. But, as I said, using EMI studios was pricey, so there are a few little anomalies that are audible in the song. For instance, there are some incomplete handclaps, a couple of stray guitar notes, and perhaps most notably, at about a minute-twenty into the record, you can hear Paul dropping his tambourine. It’s also worth noting that Ringo isn’t playing drums on this record but he is providing percussion. He’s providing the handclaps but also slapping his lap in time, though he’s also said that he’s tapping on a matchbox with his finger.
And finally, there’s “For No One.” Paul wrote this song while in a chalet in Switzerland in March of 1966. He was on a holiday with her, and apparently there’d been an argument, again about her choosing career over life with him. The original title was “Why Did It Die?” but obviously he abandoned that one. He must have felt especially badly about the argument, given the tenor of the song, and I’ve personally viewed the song as being the kind of thing that happens when a relationship is over but nobody’s willing to admit it. So the woman is going through her routine to get up, get her act together and maybe go to work or out with friends, and she’s doing it all without interacting with the narrator, who’s just watching wistfully. And yeah, I’ve kinda been there, Cousin. Having said that, they didn’t break up for another couple of years, so I guess they managed to patch things up, even if I didn’t.
But in mid-1968, she discovered Paul in bed with another woman and that was pretty much that, though there were some attempts by both of them to reconcile somehow. But on July 20 she announced on the BBC during an interview that she’d ended their engagement, a move that surprised pretty much everyone, including Paul McCartney.
In 1971 Jane Asher met illustrator Gerard Scarfe, who’s probably best known in America for the artwork on Pink Floyd’s album and film The Wall, and they got married about ten years later when she was expecting their second child. She’s written three best-selling novels among other books she’s written on a variety of topics, from lifestyle to costuming to cake decorating. And she’s still acting on the stage, the big screen and the small one, as I record this, and she’s also an active and prominent member of several British charities. She’s probably the only person associated with The Beatles who hasn’t written a book about it; in fact she greatly dislikes talking about her time with Paul McCartney, largely because it’s a relatively small slice of her much larger life. And really, who can blame her for that?
[BUMPER]
And now it’s time to answer that trivia question. Back on Page Two I asked you about the guitar that produced this riff:
[HIAWG solo]
What was it about the guitar that gave George Harrison the ability to bend those notes so hard?
The guitar was made by a short-lived company called Bartell. The Bartell company was created in 1965 by Paul Barth and Ted Peckles. Peckles was the CEO and Barth served as the director and the chief of design. In 1967 or thereabouts, one of the employees at Bartell suggested that the company make a fretless guitar. Barth said sure, give it a go. Now, for the uninitiated, frets are those raised lines that run across the neck of the guitar. They give the player a specific place to put your fingers when you’re trying to play specific notes or chords. And that employee, by the way, was Tom Marshall. He was a paint finisher at Bartell but later went on to found the company that makes Marshall amplifiers.
At any rate, George Harrison was staying at 1567 Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles—yes, that Blue Jay Way—when he and Beatles assistant Neil Aspinall visited a recording session in Hollywood on August 3, 1967. Harrison saw session guitarist Mike Deasy playing one of Bartell’s prototype fretless guitars. The two of them talked for awhile about it before Harrison and Aspinall left. But it wasn’t long before Aspinall ordered a fretless guitar for George.
There isn’t specific documentation to support this, but people familiar with the Bartell fretless guitar are convinced that it was definitely used on two tracks. You can hear it clearly on “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, obviously, and it can also be picked out of “Helter Skelter”, where it’s used with other guitars. It’s a little easier to hear in the nearly 13-minute-long “First Version/Take 2” version of “Helter Skelter,” a chunk of which can be found on Anthology 3 and which you can hear in full on the 2018 remixed box set of the White Album. Interestingly, there’s anecdotal evidence that John Lennon was ultimately more interested in the guitar than George Harrison was, but the Bartell remained in George’s collection until he gave it away to a friend in 1985. In 2020 the guitar was auctioned for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. If you want to know more about this, check out Paul Brett’s book Finding Fretless: the Story of George Harrison’s ‘Mad’ Guitar. It’s about nine dollars if you have a Kindle, but a paper copy will run you a few bucks, so maybe try your public library.
[OUTRO]
And that, Cousin, is a full lid on yet another edition of How Good It Is. If you’re enjoying the show, please share it with a friend, or chat it up in your social medias Speaking of which, you can find me on the socials as How Good It Is Pod, and if you’re doing the email thing it’s HowGoodPodcast@gmail.com. The theme music for the show is by Jenna Getty, and everything else you can blame on me. Next time around in Part Four we’ll be looking at the other Beatle partner, Pattie Boyd. Strap yourself in, that one’s going to be complicated. Thank you so much for listening, I’ll talk to you soon.