I like to consider myself pretty knowledgeable when it comes to the topic of the Beatles.
I’ve been an ardent fan of the legendary band going on 35 years or so now, ever since I was old enough to buy records. I’ve read at least 15 books about them – on the collective, the individuals, their songs, their recording techniques, even a book that details every recording session they ever held – seen every major film about the band, and, naturally, own every album in LP and CD and remastered digital form, every film on DVD or VHS, in addition to having enough bootleg albums and unreleased songs to fill the Albert Hall.
(By the way, if you haven’t read Bob Spitz’s The Beatles, not only is it, in my opinion, the best Beatles bio bar none, it may the best bio I’ve ever read, period.)
I even own an exact replica of John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone Casino (it’s a beauty) and an Epiphone Viola Bass similar to Paul McCartney’s iconic Hoffner.
In short, I’m a fan.
Now, I’m sure there are plenty of people who have read seven times as many books as me, made a documentary about them, and have even won international Beatles trivia contests on top of having rooms full of bootleg tapes and copies of their four birth certificates framed over their bed – and that’s all fine, but honestly, who wants to be one of those people?
So there I was one week ago tonight at the TIFF Bell Lightbox cinema complex to see Scott Freiman’s lecture “Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper” presented by Jazz.FM91 as part of their “Thinkers Series.” I expected to hear a lot of things I already knew, and while there was a fair bit of “old fab hat” info that this Beatles buff already had bubbling in his brain, there were enough tidbits that were new to me to make for a quite interesting evening.
First of all, there were the isolation mixes of the songs that Freiman presented, similar to these, to illustrate the evolution of the recording of the songs. Many of these are available on the Internet, but Freiman presented them very cohesively, with decent accompanying visuals up on the big screen. And besides, it’s fun to sit in a movie theatre with a few hundred other Beatles nuts and listen to these deconstructed tracks to see how our heroes made their magic.
But the piece that was completely new to me and that really blew my mind was this:
This is the newspaper clipping from the
February 27, 1967 edition of London’s Daily Mail, a story about a teenaged girl named Melanie Coe who had run away from her parents’ home in Stamford Hill, London. In the article, her father is quoted as saying, “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here.”
While working on the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul McCartney read the article and was inspired to write the song “She’s Leaving Home.” But here’s where it gets bizarre. It turns out, this was not McCartney’s only connection to Melanie Coe.
Three years earlier, at the height of Beatlemania, McCartney had been selected to judge a miming/dancing contest on the popular TV show “Ready Steady Go!”
Take a look at this clip to see what transpired.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO-AMdD4CeY
As Johnny Carson might say, that is some wild stuff. The same girl he had chosen in a TV contest, he coincidentally ends up writing a song about four years later after reading about her disappearance. (I don’t think he realized it was the same girl, not with all the girls those four boys must have met in that four years.)
Here’s a more recent update on the story, featuring Coe herself telling how she was completely unaware that the song was about her. And perhaps the craziest coincidence, that the guy she did meet up with when she left home, had in fact worked in “the motor trade” at one point!
