The Word - Lennon/McCartney

Quoted from Barry Miles' Many Years From Now:

THE WORD was the first of the Beatles overtly love and peace songs; the word in question was 'Love', which in 1965 made it one of the first hippie anthems. It was a song that John and Paul wrote together at Kenwood. It was their normal practice to scribble songs down, with many annotations and changes, and afterwards make a fair copy each. After writing THE WORD they rolled a joint, and instead of their usual lyric sheet, they produced a psychedelic illuminated manuscript using coloured crayons.

Paul: 'We smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multicoloured lyric sheet, the first time we'd ever done that. We normally didn't smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting because it would just cloud your mind up - "Oh, shit, what are we doing?" It's better to be straight. But we did this multicolour thing.' When Yoko Ono first arrived in Britain, before she met John, she turned up at Paul's house asking for manuscripts to give to John Cage for his fiftieth birthday. Cage collected musical scores. Paul told her that he always kept his original manuscripts, but not long afterwards she asked John to give her one and he chose the multicoloured fair copy of THE WORD as a birthday gift. It is reproduced in John Cage's Notations, a selection of the scores he had been collecting for the Foundation of Contemporary Performance Arts to show the diversity of notation in modern music.


Gepost op: 23 jan 2008