The Beatles song where Paul McCartney wanted to “appear younger”
One of the major themes that surrounded the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was nostalgia. Kickstarted by the non-album singles ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, John Lennon and Paul McCartney began to wrap themselves in thoughts of their past, including whimsical visions of childhood and the subsequent growth of becoming an adult that subsequently came out in the new songs for The Beatles.
Whether it was interpreting the youthful art of Julian Lennon through the realm of psychedelia on ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ or maturing into a less violent adult on ‘Getting Better’, major jumps from youth to adulthood could be found sprinkled throughout the entirety of Sgt. Pepper’s. But if there was a single song that best encapsulated the divide between childhood naivety and adult reality, it would have to be ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, McCartney’s vaudevillian vision of elderly bliss.
McCartney was still a kid when he first wrote the song, often playing it during The Beatles’ early shows whenever they faced an equipment breakdown. “‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was something Paul wrote in the Cavern days,” John Lennon observed in Anthology. “We just stuck a few more words on it like ‘grandchildren on your knee’ and ‘Vera, Chuck and Dave’. It was just one of those ones that he’d had, that we’ve all got, really; half a song. And this was just one that was quite a hit with us. We used to do them when the amps broke down, just sing it on the piano”.
“It’s pretty much my song. I did it in a rooty-tooty variety style,” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “George [Martin] helped me on a clarinet arrangement. I would specify the sound and I love clarinets so ‘Could we have a clarinet quartet?’ ‘Absolutely’. I’d give him a fairly good idea of what I wanted and George would score it because I couldn’t do that. He was very helpful to us. Of course, when George Martin was 64 I had to send him a bottle of wine”.
The clarinets became a main feature of the track, with the band’s trusted figures behind the mixing board taking their own interests in their recording. “The clarinets on that track became a very personal sound for me,” engineer Geoff Emerick proclaimed in his memoir Here, There, and Everywhere. “I recorded them so far forward that they became one of the main focal points”.
Martin recalled that the hired sessions players that recorded the clarinet lines were initially befuddled when presented with the arrangement. While the band usually recorded in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, classical recordings and orchestral arrangements were often handled in the bigger and more intimidating Studio One. “I remember recording it in the cavernous Number One studio at Abbey Road and thinking how the three clarinet players looked as lost as a referee and two linesmen alone in the middle of Wembley Stadium,” Martin recalled in the book All You Need Is Ears.
McCartney recorded the basic track of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ in just two takes in late 1966, the same year that his own father turned 64. Overdubs were minimal: backing vocals from Lennon and George Harrison, a few additional percussion flourishes from Ringo Starr, and the clarinets. But when McCartney heard the final mix, something still wasn’t right. The song appeared to plod, and McCartney sounded less like the wide-eyed kid who originally wrote and sang the song a decade earlier.
The solution was simple: speed up the tape. McCartney’s voice took on a higher, more youthful tone, and the track had a bit more of a light lilt. The slightly synthetic tone of the newly-sped-up track also gave the song a slightly dreamy quality, all of which McCartney was aiming for. “I wanted to appear younger, but that was just to make it more rooty-tooty,” McCartney told Miles. “Just lift the key because it was starting to sound turgid”.
Check out ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ below.
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