Paperback Writer

The Zoo Crew has got Paperback Writer spinning right now for all you Zoo Freaks tuned in to THE ZOO, and if you have been riding with this station for any length of time you already know we do not just drop the needle and walk away. This one comes off the American album Yesterday... and Today, that Capitol collection that pulled together tracks the British fans had already heard on singles and on Revolver, and then wrapped the whole package in one of the strangest covers ever to hit a record rack. The song itself is a two-minute blast of guitar and bass that still feels like somebody kicked the studio door open. Paul McCartney wrote most of it, John Lennon chipped in, and the four of them cut it at EMI Studios in London on the 13th and 14th of April 1966, right in the middle of the sessions that produced Revolver. Rain sat on the flip side. It was not an album track in Britain. It was a single, and it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.

The story of how the thing got written is pure McCartney, and it starts with his Auntie Lil. Years before the song existed, she got tired of hearing love songs and told him straight out, why do you always write songs about love all the time, can't you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting. Paul took the dare. He later told interviewers he thought, all right, Auntie Lil, and from then on the band stopped writing every single number about holding hands. The spark for this particular song came when he spotted a piece in the Daily Mail about an aspiring author, and he also told a story about seeing Ringo Starr backstage with his nose in a paperback. Either way, the idea stuck. He showed up at Lennon's place in Weybridge with a bowl of cornflakes in mind and a plan to write the lyric like a letter. Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book. He sat there with a bit of paper and wrote it out in front of John, line by line, occasionally rhyming it, while Lennon sat there with that amused smile and just said yeah, that's it. They went upstairs, put a melody on it, and finished the thing between them. Paul has called it a little bluesy song, not a lot of melody, and then they worked the harmonies out once they got into the studio.

Lennon never tried to claim it. Talking to Hit Parader in 1972, he said he might have helped with some of the lyrics, yes he did, but it was mainly Paul's tune. A few years later, in 1980, he called Paperback Writer son of Day Tripper, meaning a rock and roll song with a guitar lick on a fuzzy, loud guitar, but still Paul's song. Around the time of release he was even a little cool about it, telling people it was not one of their best songs, it was just the only one they had ready for the record release date. That is Lennon for you. The record still climbed to the top of the charts in Britain, America, Ireland, West Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. George Harrison's overdriven guitar figure carries the thing, and the three-part vocals stack up in a way that still sounds a little strange if you listen close, almost like a choir that wandered into a garage.

The session is where the song really changed the way the band sounded on tape. Geoff Emerick had just been promoted to the Beatles' recording engineer, and he later said Paperback Writer was the first time the bass had been heard in all its excitement. Paul set aside his usual Höfner and played a Rickenbacker. Lennon had been asking why the bass on a certain Wilson Pickett record was louder than anything they had managed, and the crew answered him. They boosted McCartney's part by using a loudspeaker as a microphone, sitting it right in front of the bass speaker so the moving diaphragm of that second speaker made the electrical current. EMI had strict rules about how microphones and amplifiers were supposed to be used, and this little trick bent those rules. The bass line is busier and more melodic than anything they had put on a single before. They got the rhythm track in two takes on the evening of the 13th, after they had already finished Harrison's Love You To earlier that day, and then piled on the overdubs. A photographer from Beatles Monthly was hanging around the next day while they kept experimenting.

The promotion side of the single is tied straight to the album you are hearing it from. In Britain they pushed the record with a photograph of the four of them draped in raw meat and decapitated baby dolls. That same picture was used, briefly, as the cover of the American album Yesterday and Today, and it became known as the butcher cover. Capitol pulled it almost as soon as it hit the stores and pasted a milder sleeve over the top, the one with the band sitting around a trunk. Plenty of Zoo Freaks spent years steaming those covers off to get at the original. A few weeks after the session, the band shot promotional films for Paperback Writer and Rain at Chiswick House in London, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the same man who would later shoot Let It Be. He had to cut the film in a hurry. Three days later Paperback Writer was on BBC television's Top of the Pops. They shot it in color. The broadcast went out in black and white.

None of that happens if four lads from Liverpool do not find each other in the first place. John Lennon started a skiffle group in 1956 with school friends from Quarry Bank High School and named them the Quarrymen after a line in the school song. His mother Julia had shown him banjo chords and how to tune a guitar the same way. They played house parties, school dances, and amateur contests. On the 6th of July 1957, Paul McCartney saw them at a garden fete at St. Peter's Church in Woolton, performing off the back of a truck, and he joined that fall after showing John he could tune a guitar and play chords the others did not know. Early in 1958 Paul brought in George Harrison, who was only fourteen. John thought he was too young until George played Raunchy on the top deck of a bus and earned the spot. They drifted through other names, Johnny and the Moondogs, Japage 3, the Silver Beetles, a wink at Buddy Holly and the Crickets, before the spelling settled on Beatles. Stuart Sutcliffe came in on bass, they took the residency in Hamburg that knocked the rough edges off, Pete Best kept the beat for a while, and Ringo Starr came over from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in 1962, just before Love Me Do. Brian Epstein cleaned them up, George Martin signed them, and the rest is the reason we are still playing this record on the air.

If you want the band's own word on the song, the official site at thebeatles.com keeps a Paperback Writer page with the release dates, the session notes from EMI, and the story of those promo films at Chiswick. Their official Facebook is facebook.com/thebeatles, the official Instagram is instagram.com/thebeatles, and the official account on X is x.com/thebeatles. For the long-form session history, the Beatles Bible page on the song is worth a slow read at beatlesbible.com. Beatlefan magazine has been covering the band and the solo years since 1978, and their home on the web is beatlefan.com. Apple Corps and Universal also run an official fan group on Facebook at The Beatles Official Fan Group, if you want a room full of people who still argue about the butcher sleeve. That is the crew, that is the record, and that is Paperback Writer. Stay with the Zoo Freaks.