More Beatles self-reference from "If I Fell"
'Cause I’ve been in love before
And I found out love is more
Than just holding hands
(A reference to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”)
And then there’s “Garden Party” by Rick Nelson:
Yoko brought her walrus…
More Beatles self-reference from "If I Fell"
'Cause I’ve been in love before
And I found out love is more
Than just holding hands
(A reference to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”)
And then there’s “Garden Party” by Rick Nelson:
Yoko brought her walrus…
Patrick Humphries, Paul Simon
Phonetically, there’s not much difference between the two, and the cadence of the melody repeats The Beatles song.
I’ve been listening to the song for 40 years and I think this is the first time anyone has questioned the connection. It was taken for granted when the song came out and the connection is made in just about every book on them. If it weren’t right I’d have to wonder why Simon hasn’t taken time in 40 years to explicitly deny it, because he’s done that about other theories of his work.
Wiki has a weird exegesis of why the Beatles didn’t steal it from Simon:
Seriously, back in 1968 everybody thought that it was homage to the Beatles. Paul was a huge fan of Sgt. Pepper’s. He was trying to create an album of that magnitude himself and was crushed that somebody else got their first and better.
S&G’s career was running in odd parallel to the Beatles’ at this point. Parsley, Sage is full of hip, sassy, intelligent songs that were beginning to make comment on the system, similar to Revolver. He didn’t have an answer to Sgt. Pepper’s - he worked much more slowly than the lads, but look at Magical Mystery Tour, a side that a concept suite and a side of recent singles. Just like the Bookends album had a side one suite and a side of recent singles. And The Graduate Soundtrack, released with not much new stuff, some old stuff and just plain stuffing in the form of movie score music. That would be a good, if not perfect, description of the Yellow Submarine Album. The the groups start falling apart. The lads wrote and worked mostly separately for the eclectic White Album filled with music traditions they hadn’t tackled before while Simon wrote songs about Artie’s not being there and tackled musical traditions they hadn’t tackled before. Synchronicity? Or just the feel of the era? Or deliberate winks back at forth at their peers?