“Hey Jude” sums up the Beatles’ turbulent summer of 1968 — a tribute to their friendship, right at the moment it was starting to fracture.
The single was a smash as soon as they released it on August 26th, 50 years ago — their biggest hit, topping the U.S. charts for nine weeks. It’s the Beatles at their warmest, friendliest, most open-hearted. John, Paul, George and Ringo sound utterly in sync, building to that power-drone “na na na na” chant. Yet it’s a song born from conflict. Nobody knew they were falling apart — in fact, “Hey Jude” was released four days after Ringo officially quit the band, walking out on the White Album sessions. Paul wrote it during John’s divorce, to cheer up his mate’s five-year-old son. As Julian Lennon recalled, “He was just trying to console me and Mum.” The world has been taking consolation from “Hey Jude” ever since.
It’s one of very few Beatle songs about a conversation between men — and like “She Loves You,” it’s a conversation where one friend is urging the other to do right by a woman. (Neither Paul nor John really cared what men had to say about anything — that was one of their deepest spiritual connections.) George Martin fretted the radio wouldn’t play a seven-minute single. John’s reply: “They will if it’s us.” A classic statement of fabulously bitchy Beatle arrogance — yet the word “us” really jumps out of that line. “Hey Jude” is the sound of the lads working hard to capture that feeling of “us,” after it stopped coming easy.
That’s where “Hey Jude” comes from. It’s a moment of fellowship the Beatles had to earn, after a decade when that bond had been the most reliable constant in their lives. Right up to the spring of 1968, John, Paul, George and Ringo were four mates who wanted to spend as much time together as possible, even when they weren’t working. (They’d just gone to India on retreat with the Maharishi.) John was the one who depended most on the other three emotionally. He rarely spoke to anyone outside the band. As he said in 1967, “We understand each other. It doesn’t matter about the rest.” But right after that New York visit, John made a few drastic changes — like walking out on his wife and child, the morning after his first night with Yoko Ono. (Cynthia came into the kitchen and found the two of them eating breakfast. Good morning, good morning.) The others no longer saw him without Yoko around, not even in the studio. His drug intake escalated. This bird had flown.
Like everyone else, Paul was blindsided by the sudden changes in John, and “Hey Jude” was his direct response. He composed it in his head while driving his Aston Martin out to visit Cynthia and Julian, at the Weybridge house where he used to join his partner for afternoon writing sessions. He brought Cynthia a red rose. Nobody else from the Beatles camp was speaking to her. But as Paul reasoned, “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life.” He also arrived with a tune to sing for Julian, who was only five. That’s just one of the countless weird things about this song — it’s impossible to imagine any other Sixties rock star choosing to spend his day off this way, checking in on his bandmate’s abandoned wife and kid. But that’s just more proof there’s only one Paul McCartney.
Through the years, in all his sniping about Paul, John never hid his admiration for “Hey Jude.” “I always heard it as a song to me,” he told Playboy’s David Sheff in 1980, shortly before his death. “The words ‘go out and get her’ — subconsciously he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.” Paul was going through his own turmoil, splitting with fiancée Jane Asher. He couldn’t stop thinking about this woman he’d met during that NYC visit in May — an American photographer named Linda Eastman. In September, he called and invited her to London. They remained inseparable for the next 30 years, until she died of cancer in 1998. He and John had both found their “someone to perform with” — female artists they not only married but collaborated with musically.
“Hey Jude” wasn’t easy to record — the first time they tried it, Paul and George had a furious argument over the guitar part. When they cut the final track on July 31st, Paul started without glancing back to notice that nobody was at the drum kit. Ringo was in the bathroom. “‘Hey Jude’ goes on for hours before the drums come in and while I was doing it I suddenly felt Ringo tiptoeing past my back rather quickly, trying to get to his drums. And just as he got to his drums, boom boom boom, his timing was absolutely impeccable.” (Ringo enters at the 50-second point.) Paul took the mishap as a good omen. “When those things happen, you have a little laugh and a light bulb goes off in your head and you think, ‘This is the take!’ And you put a little more into it.”
(Excerpt) Read More at: RollingStone.com