The Beatles song John Lennon called “three minutes of contradictions”
The Beatles were perfectly comfortable with subverting expectations. The second that you thought you knew what they were going to do next, he Fab Four would make a drastic shift. Sometimes it was into languid folk rock with Rubber Soul or hard-hitting psychedelia with Revolver. Being the biggest band in the world while making some of the most experimental pop music of all time was a contradiction that The Beatles had no trouble embracing. In fact, one of their songs was all contradictions.
“‘Hello, Goodbye’ was one of my songs,” Paul McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “There are Geminian influences here, I think: the twins. It’s such a deep theme in the universe, duality – man woman, black white, ebony ivory, high low, right wrong, up down, hello goodbye – that it was a very easy song to write. It’s just a song of duality, with me advocating the more positive. You say goodbye, I say hello. You say stop, I say go. I was advocating the more positive side of the duality, and I still do to this day.”
Lennon himself wasn’t quite on the positive side of the song. “That’s another McCartney. Smells a mile away, doesn’t it?” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “An attempt to write a single. It wasn’t a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano. Like one of my favourite bits on ‘Ticket To Ride’, where we just threw something in at the end.”
Lennon would later describe ‘Hello Goodbye’ as “three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions”. Lennon was famously stung by the fact that ‘Hello Goodbye’ was released as an A-side single while his own tour-de-force ‘I Am The Walrus’ was relegated to the B-side of the single. However, the sparkle of ‘Hello Goodbye’ was impossible to resist.
“From the recording aspect, I remember the end bit where there’s the pause, and it goes ‘Heba, heba hello’. We had those words, and we had this whole thing recorded, but it didn’t sound quite right, and I remember asking Geoff Emerick if we could really whack up the echo on the tom-toms,” McCartney told Mark Lewisohn for his book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “And we put this echo full up on the tom-toms, and it just came alive. We Phil Spector’d it. And I noticed that this morning and I said to Linda, ‘Wait! Full echo on the toms, here we go!’ And they came in quite deep, like a precursor to Adam and the Ants.”
Check out ‘Hello Goodbye’ down below.
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