Forty years ago this week, the Beatles released arguably the most crucial single of their already unprecedented career ― “Hey Jude,” backed with “Revolution.” The 1968 45 rpm single, packaged in a black, minimalist sleeve, would go on to sell eight million copies worldwide and top the American charts for nine weeks, the biggest commercial success of a single song in a musical career that had long since set the benchmarks for artistic ambition, cultural influence and commercial success.
Like so many of Paul McCartney’s epochal Beatles compositions, the melody seemed to waft nearly fully formed from his subconscious, its lyrics rooted in the marital discord of bandmate/songwriting partner John Lennon. By the s
ummer of ’68, Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia, his wife of five years and mother of son Julian, was all but over, casualty of a budding romance/collaboration with Japanese
avant garde artist Yoko Ono. McCartney, their oldest friend in the Beatles’ cloistered, fishbowl existence, continued to visit Cynthia and Julian in the midst of the estrangement. “I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be
persona non grata and out of my life," Paul would later explain of his visits.
Driving to see them one afternoon, he began singing a song to himself, a tune intended to help young Julian deal with the stress of his parents’ divorce. “I’d known Cynthia for a long time, she was a good friend,” McCartney later elaborated. “When people like that are getting divorced you can’t just blank the wife. I’d got this little (tune) of ‘Hey Jules.’ I was thinking of a nickname for Julian. ‘
Hey Jules, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.’ You know ― don’t be too brought down by this divorce, lad, it’ll be all right, kind of style.”
“Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit,” Julian Lennon confirmed. “More than Dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seems to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and my dad.”
McCartney’s original “Hey Jude” lyric sheet“Paul was devastated by the break-up,” Cynthia Lennon confirmed. “He brought me a rose and offered marriage, as a joke. ‘We’ll show ’em, won’t we, Cyn?’ It was very touching, and on the way to the house he had written ‘Hey Jude.’ It always brings tears to my eyes, that song.”
McCartney eventually swapped “Jules” for “Jude,” simply because “it sounded better.” In doing so, he gave the stately melody ― somewhere between hymn and lullaby ― the sort of opaque lyrics that characterized many later Beatles songs, leading fans to interpret them in myriad ways. Indeed, even John Lennon later admitted he was convinced “Hey Jude” was “a song to me. If you think about it. Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying. ‘Hey, Jude—Hey, John.’ I know I’m sounding like one of those fans who reads things into it, but you can
hear it as a song to me. Subconsciously, he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead.”
Whatever its inspiration, the band began working up “Hey Jude” in July 29-30 rehearsals at EMI’s Abbey Road Studio Two, where so much of their legacy had been forged. Yet the song was never intended to be recorded there: The actual sessions would quickly follow at London’s Trident Studios, where one of the first eight track recording machines had recently been installed. Fortuitously, filmmaker James Archibald captured some of the July 30 Abbey Road rehearsals, including six minutes of it in his documentary
Experiment in Television: Music!, which aired on NBC in February, 1970.
The Trident sessions lasted two nights, with the studio’s new eight track allowing them to layer parts with more precision than Abbey Road’s old four tracks. The final August 1 session concluded with a 36-piece orchestra, arranged by producer George Martin, playing under the extended fade. McCartney recalled later that the Beatles’ Trident sessions were also blessed by the flawless instincts of their drummer: “Ringo walked out to go to the toilet and I hadn’t noticed. The toilet was only a few yards from his drum booth, but he'd gone past my back and I still thought he was in his drum booth. I started what was the actual take, and ‘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."
Released on August 26 in America, and the 30th in the U.K., “Hey Jude” quickly became the Beatles most commercially successful single release ― and
Billboard’s top release of 1968 – yet subsequently failed to win any of the three top Grammy Awards it was nominated for. It was also the first release by the Beatles’ Apple label, holding the top spot on the British charts until being supplanted by Mary Hopkins’ “Those Were the Days” – Apple’s second single release.
To promote the record, the band commissioned a promo film by director Michael Linday-Hogg, who’d first worked with the Beatles on their 1966 promo clips for “
Paperback Writer” and “
Rain,” and would subsequently helm their ill-fated
Let It Be documentary feature (Lindsay-Hogg would also direct the Rolling Stones’
Rock and Roll Circus in 1968). Two takes of “Hey Jude” (and its B-side, “Revolution”) were filmed and edited, with McCartney singing live over a pre-recorded track, while an invited audience swarmed ’round the band and orchestra to join in its quasi-gospel chorus fade-out.
American audiences first saw the “Hey Jude” clip on CBS’
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in October, while the British version had already aired on David Frost’s
Frost Programme on September 8, with the band interrupting the TV host’s introduction with typically goofy shenanigans.
The clip is also notable for the appearance of John Lennon’s
Epiphone Casino, the same instrument he’d used on the band’s final, 1966 world tour and
Sgt. Pepper sessions. Its finish now sanded off in an effort to open up its tone, it would be Lennon’s signature guitar in his final years with the band.
In 2002, Christie’s auction house in London sought to auction off Paul McCartney’s original hand-written lyric sheet for “Hey Jude” (estimated to be worth $116,000 at the time) but were blocked by successful legal action by McCartney, claiming the memento had been stolen from his home decades earlier. The current owner claimed he’d purchased them at a Portobello Road flea market as a student in the early ’70s, paying the equivalent of $20.