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   CLUB SANDWICH 58

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            San Francisco Bay Blues
            "This one was by Ramblin' Jack Elliott - I had the record somewhere - and I think George Harrison used to do it. I nearly did 'Bearcat Mama', too, with those old-fashioned chord changes. 'Your Feet's Too Big' by Fats Waller was in the same vein: it was just a bit of laugh. If a gig got a bit serious you could do 'Your Feet's Too Big'. The kids at the Cavern used to like it, it was a popular request with the girls.
            "So if I've got an acoustic guitar in my hand, I tend to play certain types of songs. It all comes from playing to my own kids, although there's a slightly different set of songs that I have for them. They used to ask me to play guitar when they were going to bed and I'd just sit there for five or ten minutes, to send them to sleep, playing things like 'Cut Across Shorty', the Eddie Cochran song, which I nearly did for Unplugged. I have a little batch of songs like that, for kids or for when I'm on my own or at a party, and they tend not to be songs I've written but from my teenage years, when I used to sit at home and practice. I used to learn 'Pink Champagne' so that if anyone asked if I could play a solo, I'd say, 'Well, do you know "Pink Champagne"?' They're little relics from my teenage years, really."

            I've Just Seen A Face
            "It's a nice easy song to do, if I can get the words in the right order. There's a torrent of words to get out. It's fast but it works at that speed, because it's sustained."
            YOU DID IT ON THE 1975/76 WlNGS WORLD TOUR AT A TIME WHEN YOU WERE BARELY TOUCHING BEATLES SONGS, AND PEOPLE REALISED THEN THAT PERHAPS THIS WAS A SPECIAL SONG FOR YOU.
            "It wasn't that so much, but if I was going to do Beatles songs, I would do lesser known ones. Now, with so much water under the bridge, I feel comfortable with any of them. The old troubles no longer apply, they're just songs now, nice songs, that I enjoyed recording, like doing and people like hearing."

            Every Night
            "This was really nice to do on Unplugged. I always enjoyed 'Every Night' and particularly associate it with first being with Linda. I remember sitting outside a Greek villa on a lovely night and playing it [in 1969]. Phoebe Snow did a great version, because of which a lot of people don't know it's my song. I like that: it suggests that the song is strong - it's not just my voice or personality that helped, somebody else can get some emotion out of it, too. But I suppose, in a way, I wanted to reclaim it.
            "We all enjoyed playing it, and got the idea for the a cappella singing, which worked very well in the small TV studio. It's a good trick for live work: anybody who stops their song and sings it a cappella always goes down well. So I really liked doing this one, although, of course, I sang the wrong words, which is a feature of the Unplugged album!"

            She's A Woman
            "This song reminds me of Abbey Road Studios. I love the simplicity of the Beatles' recording, John's off-beat guitar going with the snare. It was the first time we ever did that, a very effective trick, because the bass is then completely free. And it has strange little lyrics, 'she ain't no peasant...don't give me presents'. Weird.
            "I suppose it was my first attempt at a blues song. Good blues songs are the hardest songs to write, really. It was great fun, having loved all the black stuff, to suddenly be able to do things like 'She's A Woman' and 'I'm Down'. We were the white boys but we felt like we were almost in there. Then, when Wilson Pickett or Ray Charles would cover something, it was like the ultimate accolade, because that's where we got it from. We loved the black guys so much. Still do.
            "For Unplugged, we did 'She's A Woman' in a lower key, so it's a more laid back, country version. The Beatles' version was more wiry."

            Hi-Heel Sneakers
            '"Can I Get A Witness', 'Hi-Heel Sneakers', 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' - I think of all of those early Motown-type songs in one great rush. There was no particular reason to do it on Unplugged other than that I just thought of it one day. What I like about it now is that sneakers are so in vogue - Reebok, Nike, Air and the others - so I think the idea of 'Hi-Heel Sneakers' is a very funny one, this year particularly. They should bring one out, a sneaker with a built-in heel! And I love all those black lyrics, 'A wig-hat on your head'! Like in 'Crackin' Up' - 'I spoiled you woman a long time ago!'. Very chauvinist stuff."

            And I Love Her
            "This is a pretty early one. I was living in London when I wrote it, and I had the last verse first, 'Bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky'. And then I got this idea of 'And I Love Her' as the title, which was great. It was like, what came before it? I got on the bus...and I love her? There was something literary about that, which was nice. It's a very, very simple tune, so this time, just to change it, I asked Hamish to sing the melody and I sang the falsetto harmony above him. It's a song you can do lots of ways."

            That Would Be Something
            "This is a little song from when Linda and I were getting together, a simple little thing that I used to jam. I recorded it all on my own for McCartney and heard it again a couple of weeks before the Unplugged show and thought that it was nice. And I was looking for something a little bit bluesy so that Robbie could play slide and Hamish could harmonise. It worked quite well. There's no lyrics, really: hippies and the rain, a very '60s idea, very peace and love.
            "There are other obscure songs of mine which people say are their favourites. People occasionally mention 'Waterfalls', 'Little Lamb Dragonfly' and 'Long Haired Lady' to me, and Liza Minnelli said that 'Maybe I'm Amazed' was her favourite. One of the complaints on the World Tour was that we didn't do enough Wings or solo stuff, like from Ram. There are some good songs from those times. In a way, I feel that it's my undiscovered work, because it got so criticised that it's kind of ' good, really. There's still quite a bit of delving to be done, actually, even among the mainline things - like 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', which would go down well on stage. And the guys are suggesting that 'I'm Down' would be nice to resurrect. I'm very lucky to have this much material to mess around with."

            Blackbird
            "It's always good to have a little party piece. Robbie and Wix know all the sports themes - A Question Of Sport, Match Of The Day, the cricket - they can play all of those. You learn these fun things: the Beatles used to do 'The Harry Lime Theme', I had 'Pink Champagne' and George and I used to do a cod Spanish guitar thing, a Bach melody or something, so that if anyone ever started talking seriously about the guitar, or classics, George and I would play this piece. And some of the ways we played it started me writing 'Blackbird'. It's two notes all the time. • Once you know those two notes and where they go it's actually quite easy to play, though it looks slightly complicated. Some guitar players like 'Blackbird' - I remember Gregg Allman saying that it was clever - and it came from the cod Spanish thing.
            "With 'Blackbird' I was thinking of a black girl, though I never made it obvious because I always liked the ambiguity. The Beatles had quite a few black fans and we always liked that. I'm always pleased to see black people in the audience, the more the merrier for me. So 'Blackbird' was a little bit like that - written to black fans in the civil rights movement: one of these days you'll be free, this is the time to take these broken wings and fly. All of us were keen civil rights supporters."

            Ain't No Sunshine
            "I wanted Hamish to do something, and during a break in jams we often swap around instruments - I get on drums and Hamish might start doing 'Ain't No Sunshine'. It was good fun, doing it on Unplugged. Any excuse to be loose, as I said before.
            "I like playing drums, I have a reasonable feel, though I'm not a good technical drummer. But as Elvis Costello told me recently, not many people have got feel. So I thought, right then, I'll play on telly!"

            Good Rockin' Tonight
            "This goes right back, it's one of the pre-pubescent ones. I never really learned the words to it and don't even like it when I get the words, they spoil it for me. It's a memory thing, a nostalgia trip, from the days when I wanted to sound like Elvis. I always wanted to sing like Elvis, like a million other kids, then I found my own voice .in the middle of Elvis and Little Richard. There I was, sandwiched. And 'Good Rockin' Tonight' is just a nice little rocker, the Elvis version. I always liked the line 'Meet me behind the new barn'. Now, being a farmer, it's even more amusing. You never saw a barn in Liverpool, now I've got one! It was nice to think of those country guys meeting girls behind the barn, having dances in the hay. It was part of a culture we felt was very romantic. I also liked the line 'Do you no harm' - C&W is very weird: the fact that she might be thinking that her boyfriend might do her harm, behind a barn: it's a very weird scenario. So it fired our imagination, all those things we couldn't understand.
            "Beatles song titles were always great. You totally remember the song by the title - they just work, they were like film titles, which is why people still use them for articles, films and TV. And John and I got it from looking at America. 'Quarter To Three' by US Bonds was the big one: we used to think, how can he get a song out of that? Chuck Berry was great like that, too, I really love his poetry. 'Motorvatin" - very hard to find an English equivalent to that. Alabama. Georgia. That's why I was able to put Georgia into 'Back In The USSR', because there are certain words that just make it. Chuck Berry was full of them - 'Brown-Eyed Handsome Man', just so clever. It comes naturally to blackwriters, like rap. It's very genuine."

            Singing The Blues
            "To me it's Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steele, even though there's been a more recent hit. It's a very simple song to do, one of the ones I'd sing to the kids.
            "I recently met Jonathan Routh when I was on holiday in Jamaica - he used to be the Candid Camera man - and he paints now, lives in a place without electricity, and he takes in all the local kids, like an orphanage. We were sitting around his kitchen table and I was tuning his cook's guitar, so - being left-handed - I turned it upside down. You have to play simple songs if it's upside down, and I started playing 'Singing The Blues' and Jonathan said to all the little kids, 'Now you listen to this! This is a good one!', because it excited him from the Tommy Steele period. That really pleased me. I thought, yes, this is an important song in our lives."

            Junk
            "Linda was very helpful, because she used to say, 'I love to hear you play the guitar'. I was no longer sitting in a room on my own, like I used to be. So I'll strum along when I watch telly. 'Junk' came along that way. Handlebars, sentimental jubilee, jam jars: I like images like that. There are certain words you like. I always used to say that candlestick was my favourite word. Certain words either make colours in your head or bring up a feeling. So the song was a pot-pourri of nice words that I had to make some sense out of, so it was 'buy buy, sell sell, Junk says the sign in the yard'. To lump it all together I got the idea of 'Junk'. It was a nice way to write a song. There was also the 'Singalong' instrumental version, influenced by Phil Spector's technique of taking off the lyric for a B-side and calling it 'Singalong'.
            "For Unplugged, I thought it would be nice to do a little instrumental, so I reminded the guys of it. It worked nice on the show: they used it as the playout and rolled the credits over it."