"Hey Jude" - Fifty Years

(Although it's not on the Beatles' White Album, I have chosen to comment here on "Hey Jude," the single recorded during the sessions for that album.  It was such a huge hit, I can't ignore it.  The following is my commentary, slightly reworded, from when I featured the promotional clip for the song on my Music Video Of the Week page.) 

Fifty years ago this week - on August 26 in the U.S. and on August 30 in the U.K. - the Beatles released their most successful single ever.

"Hey Jude" started out as a song Paul McCartney conceived for John Lennon's song Julian.  He was riding out of London to see Julian and his mother Cynthia in Surrey and was trying to think of something to say to the boy after John left his family for Yoko Ono.  He started to think that he should say, "Hey Jules, don't feel bad, take a sad song and make it better . . ." Recognizing that he had the beginnings of a song, he began to write it, changing "Jules" to "Jude" because he thought it sounded better.  Paul's song evolved into both a message of comfort to Julian and a message of re-assurance to himself as he was on the rebound from his failed relationship with Jane Asher and pondering his desire to pursue Linda Eastman, whom he would marry in March 1969.

John Lennon mistakenly believed - very ironically, as it was his abandonment of his family that prompted the song - that "Hey Jude" was a message from Paul encouraging him to go off with Yoko. When Paul played it for John, John said, when he heard the line urging Jude to go out and get her, "Ah, it's me."  "No, said Paul," it's me."  "Check," John replied.  "We're both going through the same bit." In his Beatles book "Tell Me Why," Tim Riley summed up the message of "Hey Jude" quite nicely. "If the song is about self-worth and self-consolation in the face of hardship," he wrote, "the vocal performance itself conveys much of the journey. He begins by singing to comfort someone else, finds himself weighing his own feelings in the process, and finally, in the repeated refrains that nurture his own approbation, he comes to believe in himself."

Though Paul wrote "Hey Jude" by himself, John made it a Lennon-McCartney song not by adding or changing a lyric but by urging Paul to keep a lyric in.  Paul sang the "The movement you need is on your shoulder" and then told John that he'd change that lyric.  John then asked him why.  Paul was flabbergasted when the reasons were so obvious.  First, he needed a line to rhyme with "You're waiting for someone to perform with," and this line didn't rhyme at all.  Second, Paul had already used the word "shoulder" in a previous verse in the first bridge.  Third, it made no sense, and Paul told John all this, adding, "'The movement you need is on your shoulder'?  It sounds like I'm singing about a parrot!"  John was adamant that Paul leave the lyric in, having found his own meaning in it and adding that it was the best line in the song.  John must have thought that the line meant that Jude should look over his shoulder to see what his next move should be, and he was likely thinking of the moment in the Four Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There" where Levi Stubbs called out, "Just look over your shoulder!"

When the Beatles arranged "Hey Jude," they oriented the song around Paul's piano, with an orchestral fade-out at the end that ended up being four minutes long - longer than the verse/bridge section, which was three minutes.  Thus "Hey Jude" was seven minutes long, unheard of (except for "MacArthur Park") for a pop song in 1968.  Producer George Martin feared that radio DJs in Britain and America wouldn't play "Hey Jude" because of its length.  "They will if it's us," John Lennon said.  And, as Martin later said, John was right.

The orchestra was comprised of forty musicians, thirty-nine of whom who did double duty and got double pay for singing and clapping hands to the chorus - "Na, na, na, na na na na, na na na na, hey Jude" - when the Beatles asked them to join in during recording sessions at Trident Studios in London.  One musician refused.  Paul himself yelled, screamed, and hollered in the style of his hero Little Richard in the fade-out, leading many to believe that he'd destroyed his vocal cords, but his voice survived.  Ironically, he later found during the Abbey Road sessions that he couldn't imitate Little Richard (for his vocal "Oh! Darling") as easily as he'd once done on songs like "I'm Down" and Little Richard's own "Long Tall Sally."

"Hey Jude" was the first Beatles single to be released on the group's Apple label, issued simultaneously with three other Apple singles - Mary Hopkin's "Those Were The Days" (a huge hit in its own right), Jackie Lomax's "Sour Milk Sea" (composed and produced by George Harrison) and the Black Dyke Mills Band's cover of "Yellow Submarine."  After the Magical Mystery Tour debacle and only a qualified success with "Lady Madonna," many had wondered if the Beatles still had it in them to make a great record, especially at a time when Americans were turning toward home-grown acts like the Doors, the Mamas and the Papas, the Jefferson Airplane, and Simon and Garfunkel.  (Attentive readers will note that three of these groups came from California, a state that would define much of American rock in the next few years.)  In fact, "Hey Jude" was successful beyond people's wildest imagination; it spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard singles chart, becoming the Beatles' most successful single in America, its hopeful message no doubt a comfort to a nation in turmoil.  Beatles fans in America wrote to EMI's Capitol subsidiary in Los Angeles, distributing Apple releases in the States, urging that "Hey Jude" be re-issued as a stereo single.  (It wasn't, but all subsequent American Beatles singles were issued in stereo.)

The Beatles performed "Hey Jude" on David Frost's TV show in Britain (above) on September 4, 1968, joined by members of the audience on the chorus; the clip of the appearance was shown in America on the Smothers Brothers' CBS variety show.  For all of their great singles, "Hey Jude," arguably, remains the best single they ever made.