Some songs are still works in progress – in “Yer Blues,” John is “insecure” rather than “suicidal,” while George’s “Piggies” eat pork chops instead of bacon. Ringo’s a quiet presence, though you can hear him bray away on “Bungalow Bill.” Yet the vibe is friendly – it’s like the White Album minus the hostility, which might mean it’s nothing like the White Album. On the tape, they sometimes speak to Mal Evans and Derek Taylor, presumably there to make tea or roll the smokes.
“Not Guilty” will require 102 takes and not even make the album. “Ob-Li-Di, Ob-La-Da” will go through 47 takes. Nobody knows the sessions will be an endless nightmare straining to duplicate the loose feel of the demos. They sound excited to hit the studio and knock something out in a few days, like they used to, back when they had to.
They whoop through each another’s songs – even “Honey Pie” rocks. Mustard”), others for their solo records (Paul’s “Junk,” George’s “Not Guilty” and “Circles,” John’s “Child of Nature,” which he later rewrote as “Jealous Guy”). A couple of half-finished sketches got saved for Abbey Road (“Polythene Pam,” “Mean Mr. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps. The Esher demos are a real treasure trove they mined it for years. They recline on leather cushions – George and Patti don’t have anything so square as chairs. On the tape, you can hear them relax in an informal setting – they sit around the living room, banging guitars or tambourines or shakers, breathing in the joss stick. John showed up with 15 tunes, more than Paul (7) or George (5). So they met at George’s hippie bungalow in the Surrey countryside, decorated in the grooviest Indian style. When the Beatles regrouped in England, they decided to get together and tape home demos on their own turf before stepping into Abbey Road – an innovation they’d never tried before and would never revisit.
(The previous album with the mostest and bestest John songs was A Hard Day’s Night, four years earlier.) We wrote tons of songs in India.” John, the most distractible Beatle, had the hot streak of his life during his three months in Rishikesh, which is why the White Album is their most John-intensive record. As John Lennon said years later, “We sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all these songs. They also had no drug connections, which might help explain why they came up with their sturdiest tunes in years. They wrote these songs on retreat with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India, a place where they had no electric instruments. When the boys gathered at George’s pad in the last days of May – nobody’s sure of the exact date – they had excellent reason to feel cocky about their new material. Fifty years later, the Esher demos remain one of the Beatles’ strangest artifacts.
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