Where exactly is Blue Jay Way?
By the time of their Magical Mystery Tour TV feature and accompanying soundtrack EP, The Beatles were already the leading psychedelic forces in mainstream pop. Dropping the lysergic whirlwind of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ while still slogging the Beatlemania touring schedule, an abandonment of gig operations in the summer of 1966 freed up the Fab Four to let loose in the studio and deploy all manner of recording trickery and sonic effects to realise their increasingly ambitious pop arrangements.
Now unrestricted by the need to recreate their songs live, in came ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’s surrealist nostalgia, the swirling fairground fantasy of ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’, and ‘I Am the Walrus’ absurdist tripped-out collage. Paying homage to the love of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s musique concrète theories and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s pioneering tape manipulations, John Lennon and Paul McCartney eagerly looked beyond conventional band instruments and set-ups to translate the era’s countercultural lysergic flavours.
Lead guitarist George Harrison, too, was toying with EMI Studios’ novel recording innovations. Already counting ‘Only a Northern Song’ in the can—his kaleidoscopic swipe at the Northern Songs publishing company cut during the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions but released on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack—Harrison would push The Beatles’ acid-soaked explorations to their most hypnotic and trance-inducing plane they’d ever reach with 1967’s ‘Blue Jay Way’.
Creeping into the listener’s ears with a droning Hammond organ, Harrison crafts an utterly haunted fog of flanged filters and backwards percussion scoring the fraught atmosphere of a trip turning stale and unwelcome. Pouring his love of Indian style arrangements into the piece, ‘Blue Jay Way’ penetrates a meditative and transportive spot in the brain charged with the East’s arcane energy.
Harrison sketched out the composition during a bout of jet lag. Arriving in Los Angeles during the Summer of Love’s 1967 peak, he and his wife Pattie Boyd headed to the house they’d rented at 1567 Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills West overlooking the Sunset Strip. Waiting for The Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor to arrive, Harrison fought to stave off the tiredness and dreamed up a humorous ditty while overlooking the evening’s unusually misty shroud.
“There was a fog and it got later and later,” Harrison revealed to Hunter Davies in 1968. “To keep myself awake, just as a joke to fill in time, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this rented house … I messed around on this and the song came”.
The real story Behind George Harrison’s ode to Blue Jay Way
It’s in keeping with Harrison’s sardonic humour, painting an evocative psychedelic gem born from the everyday banalities of waiting for a business partner, yet another low-key gem in The Beatles’ canon which captures ‘The Quiet Beatle’s unique presence in the band’s glowing songbook.
Visiting San Francisco’s hippy capital in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, Harrison became disenchanted with the dropouts and “hypocrites” that littered the scene and sought greater enlightenment from the Transcendental Meditation as taught by the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. ‘Blue Jay Way’s listless shuffle and smothering aura spells Harrison’s disillusionment, the sound of an LSD dose ebbing and the party finally over.
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