Here, There And Everywhere | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The suggestion that it did comes directly from Paul. It has become one of Paul’s stock stories, with it even getting an outing for Anthology:

One of my special memories is when we were in Obertauern, Austria, filming for Help !. John and I shared a room and we were taking off our heavy ski boots after a day’s filming, ready to have a shower and get ready for the nice bit, the evening meal and the drinks. We were playing a cassette of our new recordings and my song HT&E was on. And I remember John saying, “You know, I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.” Coming from John, that was high praise indeed.

My question is, how well does the story stand up to examination?

There has been some discussion of this in this thread already. My idea here is to bring the conflicting evidence together and see what you all think.

Now, what is there to support Paul’s memory of having it on tape for John to hear in March 1965?

There is nothing. Even Paul’s own memories of writing the song and its influences are at odds with John commenting on it in March 1965.

Now, one way people skirt around the early date for the song, is to suggest that they were listening to a tape of various demos of songs they were writing.

The idea deserves consideration. Unfortunately, for me, it quickly falls over. To me “our new recordings” feels like they’re listening to group studio recordings, not a tape of various home demos. But even were they listening, this cannot be some sketchy little idea that needs lots of work, as evidenced by Paul’s memory of John’s reaction.

Which leads, inevitably, into the question of its absence from both Help ! and Rubber Soul . On RS they’re digging up Help !-reject Wait because they’re out of time and out of songs, and yet Paul reckons he had this gem in his pocket by that time.

Yes, it is worth pointing out that there were songs that had long gestations or were resurrected years later. However, the point is, we know all those stories. And there are no such stories about HT&E hanging around for a long time or causing them problems.

We then have to turn to look at what is known about the song’s writing. He is the description in Many Years from Now by Miles (aided by Paul), directly following Anthology:

HT&E also had its genesis in John’s sleeping patterns. In this case Paul arrived at Kenwood for a songwriting session and John was still in bed. Since it was a nice June day, Paul asked someone to make him a cup of tea and went to sit by John’s swimming pool while he waited.

I sat out by the pool on one of the sun chairs with my guitar and started strumming in E, and soon had a few chords, and I think by the time he’d woken up, I had pretty much written the song, so we took it indoors and finished it up. But it’s very me, it’s one of my favourite songs that I’ve written. Jazz people used to pick it up because they like the chord structure.
HT&E has a couple of interesting structural points about it: lyrically the way it combines the whole title: each verse takes a word. ‘Here’ discusses here. Next verse, ‘there’ discusses there, then it pulls it all together in the last verse, with ‘everywhere’. The structure of that is quite neat. And I like the tune. John might have helped with a few last words. When I sang it in the studio I remember thinking, I’ll sing it like Marianne Faithfull; something no one would ever know. You get these little things in your mind, you think, I’ll sing it like James Brown might, but of course it’s always you that sings it, but in your head there’s a little James Brown for that session. If you can’t think how to sing the thing, that’s always a good clue: imagine Aretha Franklin to come and sing it, Ray Charles is going to sing it. So that one was a little voice, I used an almost falsetto voice and double-tracked it. My Marianne Faithfull impression. So I would credit me pretty much 80-20 on that one.

John described HT&E as ‘one of my favourite songs of the Beatles’ and told Hit Parader, ‘This was a great one of his.’…

Now, if the dating of it to a sunny June day is correct, for it to be heard in March 1965, it would need to have been in June 1964! (Granted, the June date could be wrong. It is also interesting to note that although John’s admiration for the song is acknowledged, there is not a sniff of the March 1965 story.

Paul has also spoken of the Beach Boys ‘-influence on this, with suggestions this was one of the first songs Paul wrote after hearing Pet Sounds, with God Only Knows – a song Paul has described as “The greatest song ever written” – being a direct influence on it.

Pet Sounds was released in May 1966. Just in time for a song written at the beginning of June 1966, but far too late for a song that was around in March 1965.

And then we move to the handwritten draft:

Unfortunately, I could only find it in b&w on the interweb. If you see a colour picture, you’d see how it starts off in pencil, then switches to a black pen at the little “as long as” box followed by “She’s beside me” with the two corrections above being in the black pen, while the last lines, from “Each one believing…”, and the top correction, are in red.

I point all this detail out to show this isn’t some handwritten copy written later, but rather the earliest draft of the lyric, the one written out at Kenwood on a sunny June day.

Is there anything about the draft to place it timewise? After all, if something dates the draft, which fits with Paul’s description of the song being the product of one songwriting session, and that dates it later than March 1965, then the hearing of it by John then cannot have happened.

I wish I could show you a picture of this, but it’s not on the web (if somebody has a scanner and Hunter Davies’ The Beatles Lyrics, you could always upload this for me), but the lyric is written on the back of what appears to be a draft for a fan club communication (possibly the fan club newsletter that appeared in each months The Beatles Book Monthly). It begins:

BEATLE PLANS FOR NINETEEN SIXTY-SIX

During early April the Beatles wrote and rehearsed no less than sixteen new songs. The rest of the month and part of May in their London recording studio putting them on tape ready to be made into a new single record and a new L.P. album. The album – as yet untitled – is not likely to be issued before August. The single “PAPERBACK WRITER” + “RAIN” – will be in the shops on Friday June 10. To hear it before this date you should send a request on a postcard to at least one of the Radio request programmes or Radio Stations as they are issued with a copy in advance…

It then goes on to detail the 1966 tour dates. The contents obviously date the piece of paper on which the lyrics are written and worked out to not existing before May 1966.

If the words and music were written at the same time, as Paul describes, the draft would very strongly suggest it was written no earlier than May 1966, and fits the June date always assumed for it.

Now, there is one more piece of evidence to add. This, I believe, is the very first telling of the Help ! story, given during an interview for Rolling Stone toward the end of 1984 in support of Give My Regards To Broad Street . He is asked how much John’s praise meant to him. This was his response:

A lot, but I hardly ever remember it, actually. There wasn’t a lot of it flying about! I remember one time when we were making Help ! in Austria. We’d been out skiing all day for the film and so we were all tired. I usually shared a room with George. But on this particular occasion, I was in with John. We were taking our huge skiing boots off and getting ready for the evening and stuff, and we had one of our cassettes. it was one of the albums, probably Revolver or Rubber Soul … I’m a bit hazy about which one. It may have been the one that had my song, Here, There And Everywhere . There were three of my songs and three of John’s songs on the side we were listening to. And for the first time ever, he just tossed it off, without saying anything definite, “Oh, I probably like your songs better than mine.” And that was it! That was the height of praise I ever got off him. [mumbles] “I probably like your songs better than mine.” Whoops! There was no one looking, so he could say it. But, yeah, I definitely did look up to John. We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest and all that kind of thing. So whenever he did praise any of us, it was great praise, indeed, because he didn’t dish it out much. If ever you got a speck of it, a crumb of it, you were quite grateful. With Come Together , for instance, he wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smoky, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot. I was quite pleased with that. He also liked it when I sang like Little Richard, Tutti-Frutti and all that. All my screaming songs, the early Beatles screaming stuff… that’s me doing Little Richard. It requires a great deal of nerve to just jump up and scream like an idiot, you know? Anyway, I would often fall a little bit short, not have that little kick, that soul, and it would be John who would go, “Come on! You can sing it better than that, man! Come on, come on! Really throw it!” All right, John, OK… He was certainly the one I looked up to most definitely.

The bit about HT&E is a mass of contradictions that doesn’t stand up in the least. The later tellings are airbrushed in comparison, lacking all the detail that show him remembering something real but struggling to place it. This is Paul struggling to remember something, and getting so much wrong. Though I would suggest, that in this first telling of the story Paul was remembering them listening to the album, and John commenting on the album recording, which goes against those who suggest it may just have been a demo.

I am not suggesting that Paul misremembers John’s praise for the song. It was always a song that John was never afraid of praising publicly. My suggestion is not that he misremembers, but that he misdates the incident. I would suggest that they are likely to have taken a copy a two of Revolver on the Germany tour that started directly after they’d finished recording it, and that the incident of John’s praise probably happened during that tour. Maybe on the train back to Hamburg.

Paul for some reason has it happening when they’re filming Help ! in Austria, while the more likely explanation is that it happened on tour in Germany.

I just do not believe the evidence supports the March 1965 story.