The White Album 50 Project: "Julia"

The Beatles were known for their devotion to their mothers, which helped them to respond well to the adulation of the female fans they inevitably acquired as their fame grew in the sixties.  John Lennon, though, had many unresolved issues with women, as evidenced in songs like "It's Only Love" and "Norwegian Wood," and he conceded that his following leaned more toward male fans who saw themselves in him.  John's troubles with women originated with his mother Julia (below, with a young John) when she gave him to her sister Mary "Mimi" Smith to raise.  She remained a constant in John's childhood more as a friend than as a mother, but he remained close to her, and she even bought him his first guitar and saw him play with his group the Quarrymen after teaching him some banjo chords.

The stronger relationship John sought with his mother was never to be.  In July 1958, a few months before his eighteenth birthday, she was killed in a hit-and-run car accident while crossing the street.  John's friend Nigel Walley had escorted Julia Lennon to the street corner across from the bus stop where she planned to catch her bus for home and had chatted with her momentarily before she began to cross the street.  After they said goodbye, Nigel turned to go home and walked about fifteen yards when he heard the crash.  He ran back to the corner to find that John's mother had been thrown into the air and killed instantly from sustained head injuries.  The driver - an off-duty policeman who was either drunk or a novice driver - was cleared of wrongdoing in an inquest and left the police to become a mailman, refusing to apologize to John's family because he feared he would only worsen the situation.

"Her death was the worst thing that ever happened," John later said.  "I thought, 'F--- it.  F--- it F--- it.  That's really f---ed everything, I've got no responsibilities to anyone now.'"

"Julia" was John's first effort to convey his feelings about his mother in song and communicate to her directly.  It proved to be a difficult song for him to write.  He envisioned childlike images to recall a boyhood that he could only wish his mother could give him, and so he turned to Donovan for help.  Yes, Donovan, the same Donovan that pop critic Tris McCall said didn't deserve to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame instead of a rap duo.

"He asked me to help him with the images that he could use in lyrics for a song about this subject," Donovan recalled. "So I said, 'Well, when you think of the song, where do you imagine yourself?' And John said, "I'm at a beach and I'm holding hands with my mother and we're walking together." And I helped him with a couple of lines, "Seashell eyes / windy smile" - for the Lewis Carroll, 'Alice in Wonderland' feel that John loved so much."

The first time I heard "Julia," on the radio, when the only Beatles records I had were the Red and Blue Albums, I assumed that the song was from the Beatles' 1965 folk-rock period.  It is indeed very much in the vein of Rubber Soul, with a gentle, evocative acoustic guitar line, and the lyrics are as gentle and caressing as the melody.  A couple of vocal lines overlap slightly on Julia's name, re-enforcing the intimacy of John's soul-baring. 

John was already dating Yoko Ono when he wrote this, and the lyrics appropriately suggest a quiet, mournful connection to nature that owes as much to the delicate images of Japanese poetry as to the Carrollian world of John's ideal.  The images of a morning moon and sleeping sand suggest the words, if not the meter, of haiku. (For the key opening verse lyrics, John consulted another source; the lines "Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you" and "When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind" were slight re-wordings of lines from the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran's 1926 poem "Sand and Foam.")

But another name appears in the lyric - "ocean child."  Yoko's first name literally means "child of the sea" in Japanese, and the inference here is that John was singing about both his late mother and his future wife, whom he called "Mother."  But - this is just my personal opinion - he could easily be telling his late mother that the ocean child is calling him now, and that he must say a final goodbye to the dead as he embraces the love and companionship of a woman among the living who can teach John how to live again.

"Julia" is, indeed, very much a prayer for the dead, what the Jewish people call a kaddish.

"Julia" was the last song to be recorded for the White Album and is the only Beatles recording to feature just John.  Interestingly, in his 1980 interview with Playboy's David Sheff, John Lennon said he never recorded a Beatles track by himself in discussing Paul McCartney's penchant for doing the same thing, and then Sheff asked him about "Julia."  John discussed the song without acknowledging that he is the only Beatle who appears on the recording.  But just because he's the only Beatle on the track doesn't mean he recorded it by himself.  Paul McCartney was present at the recording of "Julia," guiding his friend through the recording of the song from the studio control room, as heard on the aborted Take 2 of "Julia" on Anthology 3.  After slipping on his guitar on the second take, which caused the breakdown, John wondered to Paul if he should merely pick up where he left off and edit the two parts into a master.  "'Cause that one was perfect," he said of his guitar work on Take 2, "wasn't it?" (Take 3 was the final recording and the master.)  Thus, when John said he never recorded a Beatles track on his own, he was telling the truth.  And Paul's input on the recording of "Julia" is what makes it a true Lennon-McCartney song.

Paul would write "Let It Be" for his own late mother Mary, no doubt inspired by "Julia."  As for "Julia" itself, it is a fine, understated way of closing the White Album's mostly acoustic-based second side, as well as ending the White Album's first half.  (When listening to the whole album, I always seem to need to take a momentary break after side two before proceeding to side three.)  In a bit of ironic symmetry, the White Album finale, the lullaby "Good Night," was written by John for his son Julian, named for a grandmother that the younger Lennon would never know.