The Beatles Bible

A combination of two unfinished Lennon-McCartney song fragments, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ was recorded in a single day and issued as the b-side to ‘All You Need Is Love’.

Continue reading on Beatles Bible →

Wikipedia

"Baby, You're a Rich Man" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the B-side of their "All You Need Is Love" single in July 1967. It originated from an unfinished song by John Lennon, titled "One of the Beautiful People", …

Continue reading on Wikipedia →

This is a lively psychedelic sibling of its A-side All You Need Is Love and cousin to With A Little Help From My Friends and Hey Bulldog with perhaps second cousin relationship to It’s All Too Much and Only A Northern Song, all songs written and recorded around the same time.

Baby You’re A Rich Man was recorded at Olympic Studios. It has a different sonic texture from the Abbey Road recordings of the time. It was engineered and mixed in a single intense session by Keith Grant, yet Geoff Emerick (Abbey Road’s Beatles engineer) was quite complementary about the sound and the Beatles apparently enjoyed the process (maybe contrasting a bit with the more indulgent/time consuming experience they’d recently been through with the Sgt Pepper album).

The song was apparently a proper collaboration between Lennon (verses) and McCartney (chorus and tweaking), and I think it works really nicely both lyrically and musically. You’ve got to love the thudding rhythmic bass, tightly compressed piano, and the crazy “snake-charming”* clavioline. It’s all very 1967, but less disciplined than Sgt Pepper or it’s A-side.

The verse lyrics are word play with a hint of an underlying message, nothing too explicit. IMO, it’s like the three bears with pop lyrics: this one is too preachy, this one is too wishy-washy, but this one is just right. The Beatles very often were just right, especially when Lennon-McCartney collaborated. Example:

Tuned to a natural E
Happy to be that way
Now that you’ve found another key
What are you going to play?

There are persistent, but as far as I can see unsubstantiated, rumours that a) the song is about or directed at Brian Epstein, and b) that Lennon sings a homophobic/antisemitic phrase on the chorus toward the end. When you look into this you find a lot of people quoting other people, but little direct evidence. Neither a) nor b) is entirely implausible but at the same time it seems a bit of a stretch for me to interpret the song in that light given I haven’t seen/heard anything very convincing. In researching this entry I listed to the relevant section of Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald – a sometimes infuriatingly judgemental book but systematic in that it deals with each song. (Side note: for these reasons it is not the best book to get in audio format). Like quite a few other Beatles sources there is a bit of a blurred line between factual information and interpretation. So while he states b) as fact (and maybe he is the original source of this?), it’s not clear whether this is just what he is hearing or is it supposedly unambiguous?