How Keith Richards’ gardener inspired one of The Rolling Stones’ classic songs
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Credit: Alamy
Was it Mick Jagger’s fault that The Beatles song ‘Hey Jude’ goes on for too long?
As Paul McCartney illustrated at Glastonbury Festival earlier this year, The Beatles produced a mind-blowing volume of utterly timeless and seminal material over the 1960s. The catalogue is as diverse as it is adored, and the colossal legacy the band has built up over the years has too often obscured the reality that some of the tracks weren’t perfect.
Before I continue, as a cursory disclaimer, I have long been a Beatles fanatic and admire the unparalleled songwriting talent of the Lennon-McCartney partnership. However, I will die on the hill – hopefully not as a fool – that states in big Hollywood letters that ‘Yellow Submarine’ is little more than a nursery rhyme and ‘Hey Jude’ is an indulgent waste of time.
Whenever ‘Hey Jude’ plays after a boozy spectator event or Christmas party, for every fan vacantly “la la la-ing” with hands swaying heavenwards, there’s another rolling their eyes and tapping their watch. I’m afraid to admit that I’m party to the latter camp.
I will concede that the first three minutes of the track are perfectly bearable and live up to the standards of most of McCartney’s catalogue of crowd-pleasing balladry. But what on earth possessed him to drag the refrain out for four whole minutes at the close of the track? As it turns out, The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger could be to blame.
In the 1997 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney discussed the development of the relentless 1968 single. “The end refrain was never a separate song,” he asserted. “I remember taking it down to a late night hashish-smoking club in a basement in Tottenham Court Road: the Vesuvio club. We were sitting around on bean bags as was the thing.”
“I said to the DJ, ‘Here’s an acetate. Do you want to slip it in some time during the evening?’” McCartney added. “He played it, and I remember Mick Jagger coming up: ‘Fuckin’’ ell, fuckin’ ‘ell. That’s something else, isn’t it? It’s like two songs.”
Without the need for a second dose of encouragement, McCartney took the song to the studio to record the extended outro with a full orchestra. “It wasn’t intended to go on that long at the end but I was having such fun ad-libbing over the end when we put down the original track that I went on a long time,” he said. “So then we built it with the orchestra, but it was mainly because I just wouldn’t stop doing all that ‘Judy judy judy — wooow!’ Cary Grant on heat!”
So there you have it, with a little encouragement from Jagger, McCartney created one of his most cherished sing-along ballads. This documented conversation between Jagger and McCartney demonstrates the extent to which The Beatles and Rolling Stones’ rivalry was blown up by the media. Either that or Jagger had the same thoughts as me upon hearing the acetate, and his eyes glinted with the intentions of a conniving saboteur.
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