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During this period George Harrison, tired of being the Cosmic Beatle, seems to have been making a conscious effort to lighten up a bit. In September he’d told interviewer Alan Smith,
I now want to write songs that don’t have any meaning, because I’m a bit fed up with people coming up and saying, “Hey, what’s it all about? What does it mean?”
He was also hanging out a lot with Eric Clapton, who had developed a nasty candy habit to go along with the other bad habits he was cultivating at the time. According to George’s book I Me Mine,
At that time [Clapton] had a lot of cavities in his teeth and needed dental work. He always had a toothache but he ate a lot of chocolates – he couldn’t resist them, and once he saw a box he had to eat them all. He was over at my house, and I had a box of “Good News” chocolates on the table and wrote the song from the names inside the lid: “Creme Tangerine, Montelimart….”
One wonders why George kept chocolates laying around when he knew his friend had a problem (though Clapton would get his revenge by stealing George’s wife, so it all comes out in the wash). And he did, it must be noted, get a pretty good tune out of it:
I bet after hearing that you’d like to try some of the candy, but unfortunately Mackintosh Chocolates is no more; in 1969 it merged with another company, which was subsequently swallowed up by the giant Nestle corp. I wonder A) if somewhere in the world there exists a still-wrapped specimen of the Good News collection, and B) how much a box of 50-year-old chocolates might fetch from some Beatles fan on eBay.
Though it may be devoid of Deep Meaning, “Savoy Truffle” — following in the footsteps of “Glass Onion” — does contain an embedded reference to another Beatles song, in this case one that would appear earlier on the same album:
We all know Ob-la-di-bla-da
But can you show me where you are?
Which is pretty clearly a middle finger — if not two — extended in the direction of Paul, perhaps as payback for deathmarching the band through endless takes of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Or maybe George was just jealous that Paul had perfected the art of writing songs that have no meaning.
And here we are again, sliding in to taking potshots at Paul. When that happens, it’s time to quit for the day.
well that didn’t take the turn I was expecting. When you mention Clapton and a candy habit, i thought it was code for another habit(s)