The Beatles booked an early session at Abbey Road on Sept. 18, 1968 so they could leave partway through. A film was on television that night, and they did not want to miss it.
They started at 5 p.m. and did not leave until 4:30 the next morning. In that time, they wrote and recorded “Birthday.”
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The Movie Break Was Planned
George Martin was on holiday that month, so Chris Thomas was producing. Thomas flagged the film.
“I had mentioned to Paul a couple of days earlier about ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ being on television during this evening,” he said in Mark Lewisohn‘s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. The plan was to start early, walk around the corner to Paul McCartney’s house on Cavendish Avenue, watch the film and come back to work.
That is what happened. McCartney got to Studio Two ahead of the others and started turning over a guitar riff, and the others jammed on it until it became a song. They cut 20 takes, walked over, watched the film on BBC2 from 9:05 to 10:40 p.m., then came back and finished it.
The short window is why the track is so plain. The band kept to a simple blues structure, then wrote the words after the credits rolled. Nothing else about these sessions moved like that. Weeks earlier the band had burned more than 100 takes on George Harrison’s ‘Not Guilty’, and it did not even make the album.
Why That Film Mattered
The Girl Can’t Help It stars Jayne Mansfield, but the draw was the music. Little Richard is in it, along with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Little Richard was a huge influence on McCartney, and John Lennon had seen the film at 16, when it showed him his American heroes were real people.
‘We Decided to Make One Up’
Friends were in the room, which almost never happened. “Normally we didn’t have friends around to sessions so it was very unusual,” McCartney said in 2008. “We didn’t know what song to do so we decided to make one up.”
McCartney said the riff came out of Little Richard’s “Lucille” and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” He has also called the song “50-50 John and me, made up on the spot.” It was one of the last things he and Lennon wrote together.
That churning organ is not an organ. It is a guitar run through a Leslie speaker.
Pattie Boyd, who sang on it with Yoko Ono, still remembers it. “I remember going to Paul’s house around the corner to watch a movie at some point during the evening,” she posted on the anniversary last year.
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