Off The Beatle Track

Among the many revelations offered by Peter Jackson’s Get Back was a glimpse of how The Beatles (i.e., Paul) crafted their backing vocals.

For example, as the band was learning John’s Don’t Let Me Down (before Billy Preston arrived on the scene), Paul suggested busy, wordy, repetitive backing lines that, thankfully, they soon dropped:

John: I’m in love for the first time.

Paul: For the first time in my life.

John: Don’t you know it’s gonna last.

Paul: Don’t you know it’s gonna last.

John: It’s a love that lasts forever.

Paul: It’s a love that lasts forever.

John: It’s a love that has no past.

Paul: It’s a love that has no past.

No one but Paul seemed to think those backing vocals were a good idea, which makes sense, because they weren’t. But that’s how the creative process works: You try something, and if it’s lousy, you move on.

Paul tries the same method on an early version of George’s All Things Must Pass:

George: Sunset doesn’t last all evening.

Paul: Doesn’t last all evening.

George: A wind¹ can blow the clouds away.

Paul: A wind blows those clouds away.

And so on. The point is that, at least in early 1969, Paul was the one driving the backing vocals, maybe especially on songs that weren’t his.

Sexy Sadie

Both of those songs were eventually released without the meddlesome backing vocals. The Beatles typically had exquisite taste, but I think there’s a song from roughly the same period on which they neglected to jettison the crappy backing vocals: John’s Sexy Sadie.

Sexy Sadie was recorded in July and August of 1968, about 5 or 6 months before the Get Back sessions. It’s John’s song, for which he recorded a demo at Kinfauns, George’s Esher home. The vocal on the Esher demo is double-tracked, and the demo has no backing vocal. Take 6 of the track appears on Anthology 3, and like the demo it lacks backing vocals.²

The always excellent Beatles Bible site says that the band recorded 107 takes of Sexy Sadie. I’ve not listened to all 107, so I can’t say who introduced the backing vocals or when he introduced them.

But we all know it was Paul.

Right? Because they’re busy, goofy, and largely unnecessary. The demo and take 7 prove to me that the song could have worked with just John’s lead vocal.

The backing vocals start at about 26 seconds into the song and start with Paul and George singing “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah” for about 10 seconds. Then at about 48 seconds, after John sings “You laid it down for all to see,” Paul and George sing “see-see-see-see-see-see-see” for about 7 or 8 seconds, before switching to an elongated “Sex-y-Sa-dee.” At about 68 seconds in, Paul and George sing “Sexy Sadie, she’s the greatest,” before switching back to “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.” Later, Paul and George sing “Sexy Sadie, she’s the latest and the greatest of them all.”

The backing vocals seem to appear high in the mix, which might be why I find them so distracting. The song also has an unusually long fadeout of about a minute, in which the backing vocals are mixed much lower.

Another reason I find the backing vocals distracting is that I regard Sexy Sadie as almost a proto-Plastic Ono Band track. It’s not quite as honest as the songs on John’s solo album,³ but with the benefit of hindsight (and even the White Album’s Julia), we know that when John sang something important to him, busy production techniques only interfered with his message.

What do you think of the backing vocals on Sexy Sadie? Let me know at beatletrack@gmail.com.

1. What ended up as “A mind can blow those clouds away” started as “A wind.” When John read the handwritten lyrics, he thought George’s w was an m, and George liked the change. ↩︎
2. But Ringo does include the same drum fill that he later used on George’s Something. ↩︎
3. Because, at George’s request, he changed the subject of the song from “Maharishi.” ↩︎