The “corny” musicians who made The Beatles’ coolest song
There aren’t many bands that managed to look as effortlessly cool as The Beatles did whenever they played.
They didn’t try to impress anyone whenever they sang one of their songs, but when you listen to all of them playing together, they were clearly trying to make tunes that everyone could sing along to, even if they didn’t enjoy their mop-top hairdos back in the day. But even if they had some of the strangest songs in the world at their disposal, sometimes they needed to make songs that were a little bit cornball to get themselves over the line.
And it’s hard to think about the cornball part of the band without bringing up Paul McCartney. Macca is always going to be one of the greatest melody writers of his time, but when you look at some of the schmaltzy songs he wrote for the band over the years, his tolerance for a healthy amount of musical cheese was a lot more than John Lennon and George Harrison could have taken.
But that didn’t stop George Martin from going along with any of McCartney’s strange ideas. Anything that they thought of for a song was fair game, and for every jaunty tune like ‘Your Mother Should Know’, there was always a more ambitious tune like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ scattered throughout their catalogue. If Sgt Peppers was already strange, though, Magical Mystery Tour was when they became the most oddball band out at the time.
They had already gone down the psychedelic rabbit hole more than a few times, but ‘I Am the Walrus’ was proof that the band’s controlled madness worked out most of the time. Nothing about the song makes sense from a song construction perspective, but whenever Lennon sings his nonsense lyrics over the top of it, that almost doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s singing about, but it’s all about the swagger that he put into every word he sang.
Most people were happy to fall into that musical wonderland whenever they heard it on the radio, but the kicker to the song was the chanting at the end of the tune. And while Martin was trying his best to get every single piece of the song sounding right, he felt that he needed something a little bit more sophisticated than the band was used to, so he decided to bring in the background singers.
The Michael Sammes Singers did end up doing their part to make the end of the song sound great, but Martin admitted that they weren’t exactly the coolest suggestion he could have made, saying, “I had a group of singers called The Michael Sammes Singers who were pretty corny people. They were very good at reading what you wrote.”
Adding, “If you wrote something, they could pretty much sing it instantaneously. They were very good. In the score, you’ve got the directions for them where they have to shout or all the glisses, the up and downs, and the ha ha ha’s and hee hee hee’s and so on.”
And yet that kind of corniness is exactly what makes the tune sound so cool. These singers were able to sing pretty much whatever you threw at them, and even if they weren’t used to singing absolute nonsense whenever they performed, hearing them playing off the female singers at the end of the tune is the kind of strange pairing that seemed just crazy enough to work as the rest of the band builds around them.
Lennon was already testing the waters with ‘Walrus’ by taking everything in a new direction, but he was always great in pushing the band just enough too far over the edge. He was going to make everything sound as weird as possible whenever he could, but he also understood that what mattered is getting a great song out of every track he made.
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