One of several improvised performances taped by The Beatles during the recording of ‘I Will’, a snippet of ‘Can You Take Me Back?’ was included between ‘Cry Baby Cry’ and ‘Revolution 9’ on the White Album.
In the studio
‘Can You Take Me Back?’ was taped on 16 September 1968, the first of two sessions for ‘I Will’. ‘Can You Take Me Back?’ was take 19 of ‘I Will’, although it was listed as ‘Jam – Unidentified’ on the tape box.
The recording featured just three of The Beatles – Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr. During the session they played several additional songs, including ‘Step Inside Love’, ‘Los Paranoias’, ‘Blue Moon’, and ‘The Way You Look Tonight’.
The release
A 28-second snippet of ‘Can You Take Me Back?’ was included on the White Album, taken from the end of the recording. On the compact disc version the song was part of ‘Cry Baby Cry’, rather than its own track.
The snippet was included on the 2006 mashup album Love, towards the end of a ‘Come Together’/‘Dear Prudence’/’Cry Baby Cry’ medley. ‘Can You Take Me Back?’ was treated with lashings of echo, transposed down a semitone from F minor to E minor, and combined with strings from ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
The full version was widely bootlegged prior to its release on 9 November 2018, on the deluxe 50th anniversary box set of the White Album. There it was listed as ‘Can You Take Me Back? (Take 1)’, although no further takes are known to exist.
On the recording, John Lennon is heard to say “Are you happy here, honey?” This is a quotation from ‘Voices Of Old People’, a spoken-word piece on Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends. Lennon’s aside prompts Paul McCartney to improvise several lines around the phrase.
Lyrics
Oh no brother
Can you take me?
Can you take me by the hand?
Oh no brother
Can you take me?
Can you take me by the hand?
All you brother
Please vibrato
Oh no take me back
Can you take me?
Can you take me?
Can you take me back?
Anybody, can you take me?
Can you take me back?
Take me back to where I have came from
Oh take me back
[Are you happy here, honey?]
I am happy here my honey
Can you take me back?
I ain’t happy here my honey
Can you take me back?
Can you take me, can you take me
Can you take me back?
I ain’t happy here honey
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Are you happy here honey, happy?
Are you happy here?
I ain’t happy here my honey
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Are you happy living here honey?
Honey are you happy living here?
I ain’t happy living here baby
Honey can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?
Can you take me back where I came from?
Brother can you take me back?
Can you take me back?
Mmm can you take me where I came from?
Can you take me back?
This is so crazy. I had been looking for this song for years. As a kid, I had the Love album and at the end of Come Together was a riff from this. It resonated with me so highly listening to the song and I always wondered what the original song to the medley was. Crazy that this was just released last year but I have hung on to it so dearly. I came across it recently and was just shocked. All the memories from listening to Love came flooding back and this is now one of my favorite Beatles songs just because of the odd ineffable connection I have to it. Bravo to this beauty.
I recently heard the Los Paranois ‘jam’ which simply sounds like John speaking and Paul playing with the same set up as this track and is a rambling barely coherent mess. I interestingly also recently heard a Kenny Everett ‘interview’ with primarily John, around the same time (though I may be off by weeks, but it is surely the White Album sessions), and at one point Kenny muses ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to use any of this’. It feels a little ‘forced’ humour wise, compared to the genuinely gut wrenchingly belly busting laughs on the ‘Think For Yourself’ outtakes from 3 years earlier, obviously the band were still much tighter there as compared to 1968 when things were decidedly unravelling!
When I first heard this song and heard Lennon say, “Are you happy here, honey?” I immediately thought of “Voices of old people” from Bookends. After looking through Wikipedia and Genius’ quotation and not finding a proof to my thesis. I have finally found out about it from beatlesbible, thank you to the random person who added that paragraph about Lennon quoting the old women from the S&G track.