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After recording several takes of “Got to Get You into My Life” last night, the Beatles apparently decided that they weren’t up to snuff and started over from scratch. You can hear one of the early versions on Anthology 2; it has a slower tempo and sounds pretty bare-bones without the horns. There are lyrical and structural differences, too — the early version has a “somehow, someway” interjection in the chorus, and a different bridge and outro. It has a certain charm, though, and feels a little more in tune with its subject matter.
It can make you a little crazy to start pondering all the might-have-beens in Beatles history. Every day they were making decisions that we’re still talking about today, but at the time they were just living their lives, making records.
It always floors me to think about what it must have been like to try to be creative while living inside the Beatle fishbowl. Imagine trying to write songs with the whole world watching, wondering what you’re going to do next. You’d think a person would crack under that kind of pressure. And Lennon, for one, possibly did crack; a strange enough fellow to begin with, he got progressively weirder as the years went on, and who can blame him?
There were no more sessions until Monday. So what did the Beatles do on a random weekend in 1966? Do records exist? I’ll have to look into it.
Why do you think GTGYIML is about weed?
Paul McCartney: “Got To Get You Into My Life was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. I’d been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting… I didn’t have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding. “So Got To Get You Into My Life is really a song about that, it’s not to a person, it’s actually about pot. It’s saying, I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it’s actually an… Read more »