The White Album 50 Project: "Birthday"

There is nothing profound or complex about "Birthday."  It's a fun, energetic party song that fit in nicely with the louder, heavier rock and roll that FM music stations catering to young people were beginning to play in 1968, a portent of the AOR-formatted radio that dominated American airwaves in the seventies and early eighties.  It's the first of several tracks on side three of the White Album that showed that the Beatles could rock as hard as the then-new crop of rock and rollers playing what came to be called "hard rock" and its extreme offshoot, heavy metal.

"Birthday" was one of the few Lennon-McCartney songs on the White Album to live up faithfully to the composing credit.  Unlike many of the songs on the album, it was written in the studio, not in India.  Said Paul in discussing "Birthday" in an interview, "We thought, 'Why not make something up?' So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff. So that is 50-50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all in the same evening."  John later dismissed it as "a piece of garbage," but generations of guitar bands would hold up "Birthday" as the sort of good ol' rock and roll to aspire to.

"I think Paul wanted to write a song like 'Happy Birthday Baby', the old fifties hit," John remembered.  In fact, the song he was referring to was "Happy, Happy Birthday Baby," a 1957 song by the American vocal group the Tune Weavers, and the comparison is dubious at best.  "Happy, Happy Birthday Baby" is a slow country lament that inspired ballads like Freddy Fender's seventies Tex-Mex hit "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."  It may have been about birthday wishes, but that's all it has in common with the Beatles' song.

Though it was a contemporary rock song, the inspiration of "Birthday" was still largely old-school.  A couple of days before the September 18, 1968 session at which the song was recorded, substitute producer Chris Thomas had mentioned to Paul that the Jayne Mansfield movie  The Girl Can't Help It, one of Hollywood's first rock and roll musicals, was to be aired on BBC Television on the eighteenth, and he said that he'd never seen the movie.  "You haven't seen The Girl Can't Help It?" Paul remembers saying to Thomas.  "It's the best, man!"  The Girl Can't Help It featured Little Richard (who was responsible for the movie's title song), Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, and Fats Domino, among others, and this was the first time it was to be aired on British television.  The plot, for the record (no pun intended), revolved around an ex-gangster hoping to turn his girlfriend Jerri, Mansfield's character, into a pop star.  

So the Beatles and Thomas decided to start the September 18, 1968 session early, at five in the afternoon, go over to Paul's townhouse around the corner from EMI Studios to see the movie when it began at 9:05 PM, then resume the session when it was over.  Thomas later remembered that Paul was the first one in at the studio and started playing the riff of "Birthday" before the other Beatles arrived.  John and Paul ended up writing the song and the group had the backing track down about half an hour before The Girl Can't Help It was to start on BBC2.  The Beatles and Thomas saw the movie as planned and returned to the studio shortly before 11 P.M.  Fueled by having seen and heard Little Richard and his peers in action, the Beatles finished taping "Birthday" by 4:30 in the morning, delivering what Mark Lewisohn called "one of the Beatles' most compelling rock and roll songs," with Paul channeling Little Richard in his lead vocal.

At least two elements of this infectious song are uncharacteristic of the Beatles' work.  "Birthday" was the first of only two Beatles songs to feature Ringo Starr playing a drum solo, which serves as an intro to an elliptical guitar line.  Ringo hates drum solos, but in delivering a steady, workmanlike beat here, Ringo managed to avoid sounding like Ginger Baker on a tear.  Also evident on "Birthday" are female voices - specifically, Pattie Harrison and Yoko Ono singing breathy backing vocals that give the song a dollop of charm.  Though Paul was famously against having female backing vocals on Beatles records (true, he did have Linda sing backup on his solo records, but then there is a difference between a Beatles record and a Paul McCartney solo record), and though he doesn't like drum solos any more than Ringo does (George Harrison and John didn't like them either), he was by no means opposed to making an exception to a rule when he felt the situation called for it.

"Birthday" charges along with unstoppable force for over two-and-a-half minutes, fading out with a reverberating keyboard riff.  With side three of the White Album exploding out of the gate, the listener is set up for more incredible heavy rocking to come.