Dream sweet dreams for me

'Good Night' - The Beatles (The Beatles - 1968)

We are approaching our 100th entry¹ - check all of them out here - and we are finally landing on my favourite album of all time, The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 effort, aka The White Album. In relative terms, I was late to The Beatles - it is a good 15 years older than I am, which explains a lot of that difference, but I didn’t start listening to The Beatles albums until I was sixteen or seventeen. I remember listening to the 2CD² version of the album on my CD Walkman whilst in bed and pouring over the lyric booklet as I worked through the songs on both CD1 and CD2 by torchlight. It has a picture of Ringo Starr inside with a bright blue jacket, which you can see below that almost seemed to glow in the dark.

Ringo’s fetching blue and yellow ensemble.

Fairly often, I would fall asleep during the 2nd CD and probably be out by the time Paul McCartney would ask, “Can you take me back where I came from?”³, and it was usually some cacophonous point of the following ‘Revolution #9’ that would awaken me. So it was left for the final track to help get me back to sleep.

On the previous two albums⁴, the band had closed them with astonishing closers that are rightfully considered among the pinnacles in their stellar career. I don’t think anyone feels that way about ‘Good Night’, but that’s not some diss.

Those are also songs written by John Lennon - this one is very different to both of those and the musique concrète of the penultimate track ‘Revolution 9’.

‘Good Night’ is a lullaby with a simple verse, chorus and bridge ABABCAB structure bookended by an intro and an outro. It is a lush and tender song Lennon wrote for his son, Julian Lennon. Julian was five at the time, and he did not find out it was written for him until John Lennon’s 1980 Playboy magazine interview made it clear he said, “'Good Night' was written for Julian, the way 'Beautiful Boy' was written for Sean.”

Like some other tracks across the double LP, such as ‘Martha My Dear’ and ‘Honey Pie’, the closer is inspired by music from outside the sphere and timeline of Rock ‘n’ Roll music. 1968 was also a tumultuous year whether you were a Beatle or not and those three songs, especially when paired against both versions of ‘Revolution’ represents a break from the contemporary and sonically from the aural assault of ‘Revolution #9’. There’s also a sense that it invokes an understanding of the innocence of youth in the same way that the atmosphere of ‘Julia’ and 'outtake ‘Child of Nature⁵’ inhabit. McCartney did the same with ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, and Lennon revisited that feel on 1980’s Double Fantasy with ‘Beautiful Boy’.

In the liner notes for the 50th Anniversary re-release, McCartney recalls;

We actually did like a lot of music before rock 'n' roll galvanised the whole thing into a direction where you had to go. I know one of John's favourite songs, which is way before rock 'n' roll, was 'Don't Blame Me' and another was 'Little White Lies.' Rock 'n' roll gave us a direction in life. That was finally when instead of just liking 'Little White Lies' and 'Don't Blame Me' and various other songs, it was a question of doing it.

Ian McDonald suggests in Revolution In The Head that Lennon may have been inspired by the Cole Porter song ‘True Love’ that they used to play in Hamburg at the start of the decade.⁶ With producer George Martin able to write, conduct and produce for many genres The Beatles wanted to tackle and include on the sprawling 93-minute record. In this case, a syrupy, almost corny Disney-style, old-Hollywood, sign-off.

‘Good Night’ is an unusual Beatles song as it only features one Beatle. Ringo Starr signs Lennon’s lyrics. Itself a break from expectations as the record already had the Ringo one in 'Don't Pass Me By'; By the album's end, all four would have recorded a “solo” Beatle record⁷.

That is not to say that the song had limited involvement and input from the rest of the Liverpool band - outside of Lennon composing the music, George Harrison and Paul McCartney sang the backing melody on one of the early versions⁸ (below) - indicating that there was full group involvement as the track developed and confirmed by tapes of the sessions having ideas coming at George Martin from all four of them.

Unlike many of the songs on The Beatles, there is no sign of ‘Good Night’ at the time of the Esher demos, where lots of the songs that the band worked up in India were first committed to tape. It does appear in rehearsals by late June 1968 and the version with McCartney and Harrison on backing vocals above with re-recorded Starr vocals from early July.

When it came to the orchestra, that took place towards the end of July with The Mike Sammes Singers (“4 girls, 4 boys” according to the EMU tracking sheet from the session) on choral duty. Interestingly, four of the eight also sang parts on ‘I Am The Walrus’ the previous year. The orchestra consisted of over two dozen individuals who played violins, cellos, violas, flutes, a harp, a vibraphone and a bass.

Starr also had another attempt at recording his lead vocal after the twelve takes needed to get the orchestral backing. He said in the mid-1990s Anthology TV series;

I’ve just heard it for the first time in years, and it’s not bad at all, although I think I sound very nervous. It was something for me to do.

If you listen to the 2018 remix of the track, you feel the score coming to the front without burying the vocal more - of all the tracks on the album; it feels amongst the most altered by the revelation of this updated version.

If you were going to listen to the whole of The Beatles’ back catalogue, you would probably associate the interludes and counter-motifs as being closer to what you find on the second half of Yellow Submarine’s OST - i.e. the George Martin pieces. In a 1968 interview with Radio Luxembourg, McCartney mused how different the song was from the usual output you expect from Lennon.

Yes. Umm, it’s very much that kind of track, you know. John wrote it, mainly. It’s his tune, uhh, which is surprising for John– ‘cuz he doesn’t normally write this kind of tune. It’s a very sweet tune, and Ringo sings it great, I think. The arrangement was done by George Martin, uhh, ‘cuz he’s very good at that kind of arrangement, you know– very sort of lush, sweet arrangement. And that’s all I can say about it. It’s very sweet. And in fact, it’s ‘Good Night.’

Adding to that, in 1997’s Many Years From Now, McCartney said, after thirty years of reflection, to Barry Miles that;

I think John felt it might not be good for his image for him to sing it but it was fabulous to hear him do it, he sang it great. We heard him sing it in order to teach it to Ringo and he sang it very tenderly. John rarely showed his tender side, but my key memories of John are when he was tender, that's what has remained with me; those moments where he showed himself to be a very generous, loving person. I always cite that song as an example of the John beneath the surface that we only saw occasionally... I don't think John's version was ever recorded."

For a band that produced, on their previous albums, contenders for the best closing tracks of all time, it is odd that they would go on to have McCartney record his own sleepy time, night-night song for Abbey Road with the gorgeous ‘Golden Slumbers’ but that other bands would record similar closers that use an orchestra/strings⁹ such as The Rolling Stones to sign the record off or to say "Good night" such as Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’. So while ‘Good Night’ is no one’s favourite Beatles song in the way that ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ could be, it is still a song that casts a long shadow as the sun goes down.

1. This is the 98th album we’ve looked at.

2. I used to wear a blazer to school, and the pockets were big enough to carry the bulky double CD in. I would often lend it to people, but more often than not, I had it on me as a conversation starter.

3. This is now one of my favourite little cul-de-sacs on the album and even hearing two minutes of it wasn’t enough to dampen my love of this section.

4. We will look at ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘A Day In The Life’ before the end of the year.

5. ‘Child of Nature’ would eventually become Lennon’s solo song ‘Jealous Guy’.

6. George Harrison would cover ‘True Love’ in 1976 on Thirty-Three & 1/3.

7. Lennon’s ‘Julia’ was his first unaccompanied song for The Beatles, with George having ‘Within You, Without You’ to himself. Paul famously did so with ‘Yesterday’ but added four more in 1968.

8. As well as this early version, there’s also this earlier unnumbered rehearsal in which Ringo asks the children to go to bed and get ready for Daddy to sing a song to them.

9. Or with something like Suede’s ‘Still Life’, from Dog Man Star, turn the orchestra up to 11.