The Beatles from a to Zed by Peter Asher

Author:Peter Asher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

That’s all very well, and I am certainly very proud if I or my room even made a contribution, but I cannot honestly remember ever doing out my room in wood. I have to ask Paul at some point what exactly he remembers. Maybe it was a different room in our house. I do remember something about putting up some pine paneling in a downstairs room where we sometimes had parties. But my bedroom had weird, geometrical ’50s wallpaper and no wood at all that I can recall.

So, it’s a bit mysterious, even to me. But anyway, I suppose the whole song ends with him setting fire to her bedroom with its wooden walls in revenge for her making him sleep in the bath. A bit much, I must say—but that is what it means. Not lighting a fire in the fireplace or lighting a cigarette or any of the other theories. I am sorry to say that it is certainly a song which ends with arson being committed by our hero.

Before we close this chapter, I realize that it wouldn’t be right to omit my own connection to the Beatles in conjunction with the letter N, in the form of a song called “Nobody I Know.”

The story starts soon after Gordon and I recorded “A World Without Love.” Sometimes, for any artist, finding a follow-up song to a big hit can be really difficult. There’s a sense in which one is trying to live up to one’s previous achievement and expectations, and we had just had a record that was No. 1 all over the world, so that was kind of scary. But when one is following up a big hit, one gets sent an awful lot of songs—and numerous songwriters sent us songs they hoped would be our next single. Luckily, one of those songwriters was Paul McCartney, who had written a song called “Nobody I Know,” which he played for me as soon as we returned from our first U.S. visit—and I loved it.

John and Paul took their songwriting duties seriously. They understood the responsibilities of being successful songwriters, which meant knowing how to get the right song to the right artist at the right time. If you wrote a big hit, you wanted the follow-up to also be written by you. You didn’t want someone else cashing in on your brilliant success. So when we came back from America after our first tour, Paul had already written “Nobody I Know” specifically for us. If you look at the Beatles’ early interviews, they were often asked, “What are you going to do when this is all over?” Indeed, this was one question which we could all count on being included in every interview. There existed a universal and confident assumption that a rock and roll career would last two years at most. John and Paul always responded, “Oh, we’ll be songwriters.” They wanted to follow in the mold of Leiber & Stoller, Goffin & King, and the other great songwriting teams whom they admired so deeply.

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