Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”
I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.
Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):
PAUL: [trying] See, what we need is a serious program of work. An endeavour. Not an aimless rambling amongst the canyons of your mind. [inaudible] —life.
6 years ago, I went searching for the origin of the phrase "canyons of your mind." This blog is kind of aimless rambling through the canyons of my mind. I'd reached the point where I was playing the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song with that title, from 1968, but I knew — it was in my canyons — that the phrase was older and the BDDDB were making fun of what was an existing phrase.
The 1965 song "Elusive Butterfly" had the line: "You might have heard my footsteps/Echo softly in the distance through the canyons of your mind." It became a standard, humorous hippie reference, but it wasn't cool. It was cool to make fun of the sincerity of "canyons of your mind," and I think that's where Paul was, decrying "aimless rambling amongst the canyons of your mind."
JOHN: Take me on that trip upon that golden ship of shores… We’re all together, boy.
"Take me on that trip upon" is an approximation of the line in Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" — "Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship." Why did John change "magic swirling ship" to "golden ship of shores"? Are the canyons of my mind the only place where you can find what you need to understand the reference? Let me help:
Ship'n Shore was a clothing brand! Lennon was doing word play and free association, demonstrating the very aimless wandering Paul said wasn't working. But it does seem to work! Isn't this how the lyrics sprang into being? Maybe Paul was doing a routine of playful suppression because he knew it activated John.
This is where Paul comes out with the line in the post title, revising "aimless rambling" to "wander aimlessly":
PAUL: To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip.
John reacts with another quoting of song lyrics, this time Beatles lyrics:
JOHN: And when I touch you, I feel happy inside. I can’t hide, I can’t hide. [pause] Ask me why, I’ll say I love you.
Paul continues his demand for stricter order:
PAUL: What we need is a schedule.
JOHN: A garden schedule.
John's joke works better — for Americans — in the audio version. What you need to realize, if you stick to the transcript, is that Paul pronounces "schedule" the British way, with the first syllable "shed." John's fanciful but concrete — i.e., poetic — mind pictures an actual shed.
PAUL: Point A to Z. Travel to A to Z, and having reached the point – take a holiday.I'm not sure if that refers to anything, but it made me think: "The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,/Moves on...." Which means there's no rewriting life, but the line could be rewritten, "You can never get back to where you once belonged."
JOHN: It’s holiday time.
PAUL: Achieve something, everyday. [pause]
YOKO: It’s a hell of a lot to ask for…
JOHN: That’s sort of hard to live up to, Paul.
At last, John shows that he has absorbed what Paul has been saying. Interestingly, it happens after Yoko pushes Paul back. John pulls Paul in, and yet he's echoing Yoko, but softening Yoko's line — "sort of" replaces "a hell of," and one's own aspiration — "live up to" — replaces being on the receiving end of a demand.
PAUL: [very quiet] It’s very hard to live up to.
Paul echoes John, with the added empathy of "very hard" for "sort of hard."
MICHAEL [the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Ernest Hemingway had a very good remark about that, which I’ve unfortunately forgotten. About achieving something everyday. It’s the only thing of his writings I like.
Too bad he didn't know the exact quote. I can't find it.
PAUL: It may in theory sound silly, but—
JOHN: In practice…
PAUL: —it’s even sillier. Well, if practice is all there is.
These lines are brilliant! Practice is all there is — that's so much better than Achieve something every day. Maybe like me, you're thinking about the day Hemingway "achieved something" by shooting himself dead. I love how the perfect couple, John and Paul, danced quickly away from Lindsay-Hogg's plodding contribution.
JOHN: This is where it’s at.
PAUL: This is where it’s at, unless that is where it’s at.
JOHN: This is where it’s at, now.
True love! They proceed to bounce sillily off the walls of their own canyon:
PAUL: Mm-hmm. [long pause] Teamwork. A good defense. And a line of forwards. A good strong pair of boots.
YOKO: [inaudible]
JOHN: You play ball with me, and I’ll play ball with you.
PAUL: Don’t swing the lead, sonny.
JOHN: Every cloud have a silver mouth boat.
PAUL: Could be learning something instead of this, you know.
JOHN: Bob Newridges is a tartan that covers Yorkshire.
PAUL: Rutland is the smallest county.
JOHN: Scarborough is a college scarf.
PAUL: Amo amas a minge.
Paul seems to be corrupting a line from "Alec Speaking" — a poem in John's book "In His Own Write." It's a corruption because John wrote "Amo amat amass" — corrupting the rote Latin conjugation — and Paul brought in the dirty word that Ricky Gervais used at the 2020 Golden Globes (Judi Dench was born to play a role in "Cats" "because she loves nothing better than getting down on the carpet, lifting up her leg and licking her own minge").
John laughs and extends the faux Latin chatter:
JOHN: [laughs] Amanty meaty monkey monk… [Paul laughs]...
Did they wander aimlessly? It's impossible to think that they were "unswinging" and "unhip." They got something going, in their magical mystical way, and they achieved something, even if they were always only practicing, if that's all there is.
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Here's where somebody says, "Not all who wander are lost."
Was this really meant to be made public? One can amuse one's friends with droll, mildly amusing puns and comebacks, but does one really want them to be immortalized?
Paul sounds like a teacher trying to convince teenagers that being neat and well-organized and having good hygiene is really "hip" and "cool" and "with it."
You can see that this will end badly.
What about wandering "aimfully" sprang to mind. Why doesn't the creative process involve having a target, and dropping thoughts into the marinade of your mind? The kind of free association that the two of them move into seems like wandering, but don't they have a goal, so that it isn't ,mindless?
I bet they'd done this sort of thing many times before. They'd had good results.
Spinal Tap: "Jazz is mistakes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5U6xmwyFPs
Isn’t Paul, like, Catholic?;0)
Sure, Hemingway certainly achieved something the day he killed himself. But the next day, and the day after, and all the rest of the days he would have had? Nada. Zero. Zip. Nothing. There is a quality of achievement to which one must adhere if one desires to continue achieving. And that quality very, very rarely includes killing oneself.
As to the Beatles, their wordplay in this case no doubt came from memories of adolescent schoolboy jokes, rather than some deeply creative well of inspired stream of consciousness. I'm just glad they didn't start into the Pyramus and Thisbe jokes.
'I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool.'
I don't know anything about Paul's upbringing other than I believe they all came from working-class backgrounds.
Perhaps his parents emphasized hard work as a core value when he was young. Perhaps his mother kept the house neat and tidy.
Song lyrics = poetry
Poetry = best words, best order
So long as you wonder as you wander, you are getting somewhere. Your mindfull-ness will let you trip over something and you’ll come home short a cow but long some magic beans.
“Be orderly and regular in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.”
It’s on Disney? That means I can watch it. My sister in Florida gave me her code. I went in once and never went back. There’s just so much to check out these days.
Paul is exactly right because being a top pop tiger beat heart throb star is the definition of hip. No wonder it's their worst album and the title track is the most nausea inducing banal turd of a song.
Yes, Hemingway tried to write everyday. Which is why he died with several novels that were later edited and published.
I love the putdown of Hemingway. I'm trying to think of Hemingway relating to "The Beatles" and having anything other than contempt for them. Or some English wanker flunky. You could probably write a comedy skit of Hemingway taking John and Yoko on Safari.
But who knows, maybe he would've appreciated their "craftsmanship". He always respected anyone who did what they did well
AKA - Killin It
I'm no Beatles maven, but people have commented on their class and background so I'll add my mite.
The Fab Four were the earliest Brit Boomers, and working- to lower-middle class. There was still rationing when they were very young, and their standard of living compared to most Americans pretty low. No wonder they look older than comparable twenty-somethings now, or the better-off then.
Oh yeah. Smoking. Everybody smoked, everywhere. On campus, every office had ashtrays, from weapon-grade hunks of glass to little pressed-metal ones, about 2" (50cm) across, embossed with sigil or slogan.
“Smiling’s my favorite!”
“Make work your favorite. Okay? Work is your favorite…”
- Elf
Anyone who has ever been in a band knows that getting some people, often the most gifted, to replay and fine tune songs over and over until they are good is like herding cats. Ultimately, the Beatles couldn't be "herded" enough to give us a decade more of their incredible songs. Paul tried.
I looked up the lyrics to "Windmills of Your Mind." The French lyrics (Les moulins de mon coeur) repeatedly suggest that the sight of the beloved, or even hearing her name, causes distraction and confusion, like spinning windmills. The English simply give the impression that life is confusion, although surely a mechanical windmill implies some repetitious order. (Morning? Again?)
They lost focus after Brian Epstein's death. He had not only done the business, but was constantly coming up with future project for them that kept them engaged and working. McCartney made an attempt to take the reins, but the others resented him for it.
Like Paul trying to make order out of the chaos that was John Lennon, I am going off on a tangent on your topic here yet it is connected to the topic!
PAUL: Rutland is the smallest county.
Eric Idle (of Monty Python) fame and Neil Innes (also a featured player on Monty Python’s Flying Circus) created a comedy sketch show called “Rutland Weekend Television” for the BBC in 1975. Their most famous sketch was creating the fictional band The Rutles, a parody of The Beatles. In 1967, Neil Innes was a member of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a favorite of The Beatles. The Beatles invited the BDDDB to perform their hit song “Death Cab for Cutie” in the TV special “Magical Mystery Tour”. BTW, this is the song that the band Death Cab for Cutie got its name from. Circling back to The Rutles, their mockumentary “All You Need is Cash” (years before “This is Spinal Tap” came up with the term ‘Mockumentary’), had a cameo by George Harrison as a reporter. Eric Idle played the Paul role of Dirk McQuickly in The Rutles while Neil Innes played the John role of Ron Nasty. The Beatles liked the parody of themselves but it took Linda to change Paul’s mind about the project as she loved it.
"Lennon was doing word play and free association, demonstrating the very aimless wandering Paul said wasn't working."
But it wasn't aimless, was it? Free association works because it's not aimless. It's finding an unexpected connection between words that the listener perceives as correct. (See Monty Python's "Word Association" sketch)
Wandering aimlessly also requires a lack of intent. There are many people who imagine themselves musicians, but they never practice. Writers, but they never finish a work. Geniuses who never exhibit evidence of it.
I'm reminded of one of James Thurber's brother who thought he was as funny as Jaime and who resented it when his life experiences was appropriated by JT. He never demonstrated his sense of humor, so he could keep up his facade.
Ann, I forgot to add on my previous comment on The Rutles that near the end of “All You Need is Cash”, the Rutles do their own rooftop concert as the band is starting to break up. See, it all came back to your topic on “Get Back”.
You can see that this will end badly.
Sooner or later everything will end badly — it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Beatles were also feeling pressure from the brilliance of Dylan’s lyrics. The feared losing status of being followed as leaders of thought as well as music. Dylan had a natural ability to combine images and ideas into poetic language always keeping things a bit vague with multi-dimensional meanings. Tough act to follow for the bad that initially prided itself on writing songs only about love. It seems John had free association and word combination skills, part of the Dylan package. He was upping his game on ideas with Yoko. Paul seems to struggle on poetry. He can rhyme etc. but his lyrics always impressed me as one dimensional. He was also short on idea and deep meanings. I see the back and forth between Paul and John as recognition that together they could come up with better lyrics than alone.
On the issue of discipline, Paul did marry the daughter of a career military man, right? He seemed to like the power that comes from discipline. Again in reaction to Dylan’s amazing productivity during that period, they likely saw Dylan as out-working them, which indeed he was. One of the least appreciated aspects of Dylan is how hard working and productive he is beyond music in his art, welding, religious studies, and reading of history and the world of literature and ideas.
On this topic I'm reminded of Roger Miller who said: "The human mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working before you're even born and doesn't stop again until you sit down to write a song."
Of Miller, the great songwriter Bill Anderson said "Roger was the most talented, and least disciplined, person that you could imagine". He was known to give away lines, inciting many Nashville songwriters to follow him around since, according to his song publisher Buddy Killen, "everything he said was a potential song."
I saw that phrase and George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness" came to mind:
Watch out now, take care
Beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of Maya
Wander aimfully
“JOHN: Take me on that trip upon that golden ship of shores…”
The golden ship may be the money expected to be earned from the work Paul wants them to do. Did John say “shores”? In the context, I would hazard a guess that he said “chores” or “yours”.
You have stumbled onto the oral-formulaic theory of poetry, most usually applied to the bards and scops of epic poetry as in Homer or Beowulf, of there being a vocabulary (or palette, maybe) of poetic words that circulates and people are prepared to hear in a variety of metaphors. Such as "house" in Anglo-Saxon, which could be used for "bone-house" (the body) or "cloud-house" (the sky) or a hundred others. The audience had enough preparation for these pieces to be assembled variously - which was necessary for meter or alliteration - to keep up with complex material on the fly. "Mind" was absolutely one of those circulating words in the 60s and 70s, and "canyon" was not an uncommon lego piece to snap in. When the Beatles wrote lyrics gradually as they went along, you can hear them zipping in various buzzwords and zipping them out, trying to find something that worked. Victorian poets trained in various mythologies and common literary heritage used a different vocabulary, but did the same thing, Yeats with Irish mysticism, Eliot with Medieval or Joyce with Greek palettes, etc. Some audiences, at least, catch on and get the flow of it immediately.
I think I've posted this before, but if you really want to get a good idea of what the Beatles' early days were like this book by Mark Lewisohn is highly recommended.
Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years
It covers them from birth to December 31, 1962 with other volumes forthcoming. (He's overdue on volume 2).
You can buy it via the Althouse Amazon Affiliate link.
Ah, The Rutles! Whose legend will last a lunchtime.
I'm watching 1960s music performances on YouTube. I have to say that the homegrown American stuff that the Beatles replaced speaks to me more, probably because the fab four's music is too familiar. It seems too polished and not as emotional. Stuff I would have dismissed as soppy when I was growing up moves me more now.
This is the second post in the last couple of days that ties into the album Ram, the first one was obvious. This one brings this lyric by Paul McCartney to mind.
"We're so sorry,
Uncle Albert,
But we haven't done a bloody thing all day
We're so sorry
Uncle Albert,
But a kettle's on the boil, and we're so easy called away..."
I thought of that lyric in the part where Peter Sellers walks in.
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