Hear the original demo for The Beatles ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’
In May of 1968, The Beatles gathered at George Harrison’s Esther home Kinfauns to begin work on their next project. Having recently returned from their spiritual trip to Rishikesh, India, with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Fab Four had a wealth of new songs ready for action. The first goal was to put them down as demos in order to get them organized.
The recordings made at Kinfauns would become legendary, largely thanks to their inclusion on official Beatles releases like Anthology 3 and the 50th-anniversary deluxe reissue of The Beatles, better known as The White Album. 27 songs were recorded during the initial demo process as Kinfauns, of which 19 would end up on The White Album. That left eight songs abandoned, at least as initial ideas.
Some of those tracks would later become the basis for solo compositions, like Harrison’s ‘Circles’ that later appeared on Gone Troppo, Paul McCartney’s ‘Junk’ which later appeared on McCartney, and John Lennon‘s ‘Child of Nature’, which was later reworked into ‘Jealous Guy’. Some songs, like Lennon’s ‘What’s the New Mary Jane’, never got to see an official release until Anthology 3. Two songs from those demo sessions would get recorded by The Beatles, just not for The White Album.
Lennon brought in both ‘Polythene Pam’ and ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ to the Kinfauns sessions. The former was largely in its completed form when Lennon put down the demo, although Lennon gets tangled in his own words during the demo recording. The latter was in need of a bit of polishing, considering how Lennon only had an acoustic guitar and a rough idea of the song’s form.
The most notable difference in the demo version compared to the final version of ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ is that the central character’s sister is named Shirley. Lennon would later change it to Pam in order to thematically connect the song to ‘Polythene Pam’ once the two were paired up in the medley that ended Abbey Road. Lennon also notably doesn’t switch to a 3/4 time signature during the song’s final section, an addition that would be included on the final recorded version of the track.
Check out the demo recording for ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ down below.
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