The joke Beatles song John Lennon wrote while in “space cadet mode”
Not every song that The Beatles wrote was meant to be groundbreaking and serious. From the very beginning, the Fab Four had comedy and silliness baked into their DNA. That included yearly Christmas records for their fan club, which was usually little more than some improvised skits. But every once in a while, The Beatles would get serious about the notion of comedy and record lighthearted tracks.
Following the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, there was a brief stop-gap before the band began work on what became Magical Mystery Tour. While the album and film’s title song was recorded in April 1967, the actual filming and subsequent recording of the Magical Mystery Tour album didn’t begin until September. In May, just two weeks before Sgt. Pepper was released, John Lennon brought in a new song fragment called ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’.
“John had arrived one night with this song which was basically a mantra: ‘You know my name, look up the number.’ And I never knew who he was aiming that at, it might have been an early signal to Yoko,” Paul McCartney recalled in the book Many Years From Now. “It was John’s original idea, and that was the complete lyric. He brought it in originally as a 15-minute chant when he was in space-cadet mode, and we said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with this then?’ and he said, ‘It’s just like a mantra.’ So we said, ‘Okay, let’s just do it.’”
“That was a piece of unfinished music that I turned into a comedy record with Paul,” Lennon later recalled to David Sheff in 1980. “I was waiting for him in his house, and I saw the phone book was on the piano with ‘You know the name, look up the number.’ That was like a logo, and I just changed it. It was going to be a Four Tops kind of song – the chord changes are like that – but it never developed, and we made a joke of it. Brian Jones is playing saxophone on it.”
“He arrived at Abbey Road in his big Afghan coat. He was always nervous, a little insecure, and he was really nervous that night because he’s walking in on a Beatles session,” McCartney recalled about Jones’ participation in the track’s recording session. “He was nervous to the point of shaking, lighting ciggy after ciggy”.
“I used to like Brian a lot. I thought it would be a fun idea to have him, and I naturally thought he’d bring a guitar along to a Beatles session and maybe chung along and do some nice rhythm guitar or a little bit of electric twelve-string or something, but to our surprise, he brought his saxophone,” McCartney added. “He opened up his sax case and started putting a reed in and warming up, playing a little bit. He was a really ropey sax player, so I thought, ‘Ah-hah. We’ve got just the tune.’”
“We had these endless, crazy fun sessions,” McCartney would say in 1988. “And eventually we pulled it all together… and we just did a skit, Mal and his gravel. I can still see Mal digging the gravel. And it was just so hilarious to put that record together. It’s not a great melody or anything, it’s just unique.”
‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ would later be released as the B-side to the ‘Let It Be’ single in 1970. The relative obscurity of the track appealed to McCartney. “People are only just discovering the B-sides of Beatles singles. They’re only just discovering things like ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ – probably my favourite Beatles track, just because it’s so insane. All the memories…”
It could well be the strangest song the band ever wrote, which, when you consider they happily laid down the tracks for ‘Revolution no.9’, is really saying something. Uniquely positioned as a whacked vision of 1960s creativity, the tune might not be considered for any Nobel prizes in the future, but its zaniness did seemingly please McCartney enough to label it one of his favourites.
The truth is, it was songs like this that really helped to lay the foundation of the band. Yes, they had more serious numbers about transcendental humanity, about relationships lost and loved, but their ability to also let loose and allow art to flow out of them was the kind of expression that moved them away from being a pop group into being a more serious band. Even if they did need a “comedy record” to help them do so.
Check out ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ down below.
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