"The Long and Winding Road"

Paul McCartney

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As our readers know, I like to tie Sometimes a Song in with our Word of the Week whenever I can. But I have to say that the word patience presented me with a challenge. Ultimately, it all depended on what we mean by patience.

Of course, the “word” this week was really a phrase, a figure of speech: “the patience of Job.” Now that’s more than simply keeping your mouth shut tight when you’d rather not. What we see in Job is the patience to endure long suffering and loss through apparently never-ending trials. Some sorrows that we bear in life are like that. I’m thinking now of a dear friend of mine whose beloved son died just on the verge of graduating from college, with a long and promising future ahead of him. The death was sudden and, this side of eternity, irrevocable. It was sorrow in general, I think, but also the long-suffering kind of sorrow that Paul McCartney had in mind when he wrote today’s song.

There’s a story indeed about fate, the fates, and this song which I’ll share in a moment. But let’s look first at what was going on when Paul sat down at his piano one day in 1968 to write a song. The Beatles were at the top in popular music. That was the year that “Hey Jude” reached number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for nine weeks. Paul had purchased a farm in Scotland two years earlier, from where he could look out onto (what else?) a long and winding road leading toward the Highlands. He’d had an idea in mind for the song for a couple of years. By 1968 the Beatles were squabbling, and despite their huge success — perhaps because of it — were nearing the end of their association. Paul sat down at the piano to write a sad song. And it’s a feature of the tune that there is and was no particular event that inspired it, other than the view and perhaps the bluesy style of Ray Charles. But as Paul later noted, the song was really about the sadness of aspiring to something that is always beyond your reach. He left “The Long and Winding Road” purposely ambiguous, so that listeners could experience it in their own way, feel the sadness in the music, and perhaps let go of a little bit of their own unspoken sorrow by listening. It’s a sad song that expresses a yearning for something apparently unattainable or unresolvable .. and yet there is hope in the song, the hope of going back and trying again. Just as the lyrics of the song never resolve a particular sadness, the structure of both the tune and the lyric winds around so that the beginning and ending are blurred and at the end you find yourself right where you began. This wasn’t an accidental outcome. It was a superbly executed composition, wistful and moving. The tune itself “leads” the listener back to the starting place.

Now here is where the fates and fate and pressures from within and without enter into what happened to the song, which was, by the way, entirely the product of Paul McCartney’s genius, despite the legal necessity of his sharing the credit for it with John Lennon. Paul originally had in mind writing a song in the style of Ray Charles, and recording it in a paired down way, with piano accompaniment, guitars, and maybe a few other instruments. The group recorded a demo of it in January of 1969, and later Paul offered the song to British singer Tom Jones, who was a high-charting singer at that time. Jones liked the song, but his recording company was about to release a single he had just recorded, and they didn’t want him competing against himself with a second song.

But the real fate of the song was connected to a film documentary that the boys were filming, eventually to be called “Let It Be.” In advance of that film, they had been reworking some studio recordings to fill out an album of the same name, their 12th and final one together. Among other songs, the first studio recording of “The Long and Winding Road” was handed over to music producer Phil Spector for an overhaul. The original recording by the Beatles was kept, but Spector added heavy orchestration and choral portions, ostensibly to cover some bad mistakes made my John Lennon, who had played bass guitar in the original session, not his regular instrument. Paul initially signed off on the changes, but he was never happy about it and later rejected Spector’s work as not at all in keeping with the song as he originally conceived of it.

Alas! The Beatles “corporation” was about to be dissolved, and “the arrangement of the arrangement” was part of the case Paul put forward as legal grounds for the band’s dissolution. Looking back as everyone can do all these years later, with that famed 20/20 vision of hindsight, how bad was it that “The Long and Winding Road” — even with Phil Spector’s heavy “touch,” and even with the Beatles having parted company — rose immediately to number one on the Billboard charts? How bad was it that the song which Paul tried to sell to Tom Jones, a song released after the announcement of the band’s breakup, became the Beatles’ 20th and last Billboard number one hit single? And to think that all of these Billboard number one hits spanned a period of only seven years? That’s quite an accomplishment. The Beatles hold the record for most Billboard number one singles to this day. That’s an unbeatable record in the record business.

So, let’s listen to the song. In addition to the Phil Spectorized “wall-of-sound” version of “The Long and Winding Road,” which hit number one on the Billboard charts in May of 1970, I’m also including the original demo version of the song, a much simpler and quieter version which I think helps us understand what Paul had in mind for the song and why he objected to the overhauled version. And finally, I’m adding the 1971 cover of the song recorded by Ray Charles, whose music also inspired it. I’m pretty sure that Paul McCartney was happy about that.

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