Friday, February 1, 2013

100 DAYS OF THE BEATLES – TOP 100 SONGS – 68



From GoogleImages

NUMBER 68: "Baby You're a Rich Man" (Lennon/McCartney  July 17, 1967)
B-Side of “All You Need is Love” and Magical Mystery Tour  Side 2, Track 4 (3:07)

YouTube Video

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (sans footnotes/references) 

"Baby, You're a Rich Man" is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and recorded in 1967 by the Beatles. It was released on the B-side of the Beatles' 1967 single "All You Need Is Love". New mixes of the song were made available on the compilation albums Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine Songtrack.

Composition

Two song fragments were combined to create "Baby, You're a Rich Man". The verses from "One of the Beautiful People" by John Lennon were combined with Paul McCartney's previously unaccompanied "Baby, you're a rich man …" chorus. Two songs were combined in a similar fashion to make "A Day in the Life", and "I've Got a Feeling". Walter Everett writes that the song "asks an unnamed Brian Epstein what it's like to be one of the 'beautiful people.'"


Musical characteristics

The song opens in what appears to be the key of G in Mixolydian mode, a G chord moving to ♭VII/I (Fadd9/G) on "now that you know who you are", all over an G pedal(sustained harmonic tone). Soon, however, the song moves to the key of C major and becomes reminiscent of "Norwegian Wood" with its use of non-Western sounding gamak melodies on theclavioline. Pollack considers a notable feature in the refrain ("Baby you're a rich man") to be the bass move from C to G via a♭III (B♭).

Recording

The song was mixed (in mono) on 11 May 1967 at Olympic Sound Studios. The music featured an unusual oboe-like sound which was created with a clavioline (an early forerunner of the synthesizer being a 3 octave monophonic keyboard) and aspin-echo (feed back delay) effect which was used to fill from the end of one line of the verse to the start of the next.

Personnel

John Lennon 
 double-tracked lead vocal, clavioline, piano
Paul McCartney 
 backing vocals, bass, piano
George Harrison 
 backing vocals, guitar, handclaps
Ringo Starr 
 drums, tambourine, maracas
Eddie Kramer 
 vibraphone
Mick Jagger 
 backing vocals
Brian Jones 
 oboe
George Martin 
 producer
Keith Grant 
 engineer


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