Free The Beatles by Steve Turner Page A

song was written in India and Prudence overheard various jam sessions between the Beatles, Mike Love and Donovan, John never played the song to her. “George was the one who told me about it,” she recalls. “At the end of the course, just as they were leaving, he mentioned that they had written a song about me but I didn’t hear it until it came out on the album. I was flattered. It was a beautiful thing to have done.”
    Prudence is now married and lives in Florida where she teaches meditation. In October 1983, Siouxie and the Banshees had a British Top 10 hit with their version of ‘Dear Prudence’.

GLASS ONION
    In an age of rapid social change, the Beatles were often regarded as prophets and every song was scrutinized for symbols and allusions. Who was the egg man in ‘I Am The Walrus’? Was the tea that was mentioned in ‘Lovely Rita’ really marijuana? Was ‘Henry The Horse’ street slang for heroin?
    The Beatles had perhaps laid themselves open to this by mixing poetry with nonsense. John, in particular, had enjoyed obfuscating his point of view, perhaps because of his insecurity. However, by 1968, he was trying to write more directly and most of the work he brought back from India was less complicated. When a pupil from his old school wrote and asked him to explain the motives behind his songwriting, John replied that the work was done for fun and laughs. “I do it for me first,” he said. “Whatever people make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes for anyone’s ‘creations’, art, poetry, song etc. The mystery and shit that is built around all forms of art needs smashing anyway.”
    ‘Glass Onion’ was a playful response by John to those who pored over his work looking for hidden meanings. He started to piece together the song using odd lines and images from some of the most enigmatic Beatles’ songs – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘There’s A Place’, ‘Within You Without You’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘The Fool On The Hill’ and ‘Fixing A Hole’. In ‘Glass Onion’, he jokingly claimed that the walrus, from ‘I Am The Walrus’, was really Paul. (In some primitive cultures the walrus is a symbol of death and this was taken as confirmation by those who believed that Paul had been killed in a road accident in 1966, to be replaced by a double.) Finally, he came up with four new tantalizing images for his ‘literary’ fans to pore over – bent-back tulips, a glass onion, the Cast-Iron Shore and a dovetail joint. The bent-back tulips, explains former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, was a reference to a particular flower arrangement in Parkes, a fashionable London restaurant in the Sixties.
    “You’d be in Parkes sitting around your table and you’d realize that the flowers were actually tulips with their petals bent all the way back, so that you could see the obverse side of the petals and also the stamen. This is what John meant about ‘seeing how the other half lives’. He meant seeing how the other half of the flower lives but also, because it was an expensive restaurant, how the other half of society lived.”
    There were simple explanations for the other perplexing references: the Cast-Iron Shore was Liverpool’s own beach (also known as the Cassie); a dovetail joint referred to a wood joint using wedge-shaped tenons and Glass Onion was the name John wanted to use for The Iveys, the band that signed with Apple in July 1968.
    The Iveys didn’t like the name Glass Onion and, instead, called themselves Badfinger after ‘Badfinger Boogie’, the original title of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.

OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA
    Paul first heard the words ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ uttered by Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, whom he met at the Bag o’ Nails club in Soho, London. A flamboyant and unforgettable character in dark glasses and African clothing, Scott was renowned