What The Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie” Is Really About
Wikimedia CommonsJealousy over the influence of the Maharishi (above) may have inspired “Sexy Sadie.”
A nasty rumor spread by a jealous yogi may have inspired one of the White Album‘s most biting songs.
While in India, Lennon’s guru, Yanni Alexis Mardas, arrived. And some believed that Mardas, worried that Lennon might ditch him for another yogi named Maharishi, started spreading false rumors that Maharishi had a wandering eye.
“Alexis and a fellow female meditator began to sow the seeds of doubt into very open minds,” Cynthia Lennon later said. “Alexis’s statements about how the Maharishi had been indiscreet with a certain lady, and what a blackguard he had turned out to be gathered momentum. All, may I say, without a single shred of evidence or justification.”
According to Paul McCartney, the ruse worked on Lennon, who came to view Maharishi as an imposter.
As McCartney recounted:
“It was a big scandal. Maharishi had tried to get off with one of the chicks. I said, ‘Tell me what happened?’
“John said, ‘Remember that blonde American girl with the short hair? Like a Mia Farrow lookalike. She was called Pat or something.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’
“He said, ‘Well, Maharishi made a pass at her.’ So I said, ‘Yes? What’s wrong with that?’
“He said, ‘Well, you know, he’s just a bloody old letch just like everybody else. What the fuck, we can’t go following that!'”
Lennon soon packed his bags to leave India — at which point he says he began to write “Sexy Sadie.”
“That was written just as we were leaving, waiting for our bags to be packed in the taxi that never seemed to come,” Lennon said. “We thought: ‘They’re deliberately keeping the taxi back so as we can’t escape from this madman’s camp.'”
After returning to the U.K., George Harrison insisted on removing Maharishi’s name from the song.
“John had a song he had started to write which he was singing: ‘Maharishi, what have you done?'” Harrison said.
“And I said, ‘You can’t say that, it’s ridiculous.’ I came up with the title of Sexy Sadie and John changed ‘Maharishi’ to ‘Sexy Sadie.’ John flew back to Yoko in England and I went to Madras and the south of India and spent another few weeks there.”
However, if you ask Charles Manson (who nurtured a bizarre obsession with both The Beatles and the Beach Boys), “Sexy Sadie” was about Manson family member Susan Atkins, whom they had nicknamed Sadie Mae Glutz before the White Album‘s release.
Atkins — who served life in prison for her part in the Tate/LaBianca murders — died in 2009.
How Paul McCartney Wrote “Yesterday”
Abbey Road Studios/FacebookPaul McCartney at the piano.
Paul McCartney wrote plenty of memorable songs while with The Beatles. But one of his most famous tunes, “Yesterday,” came from a remarkable place — his dreams.
As McCartney tells it, he was spending the night at his girlfriend Jane Asher’s when he woke up with a tune in his head. “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?'” McCartney remembered.
He sat down and began to puzzle it out on a piano. “I couldn’t believe I’d written it,” he later admitted. “I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing.
“It’s like an egg being laid – not a crack or flaw in it.”
Still, McCartney wasn’t sure that he’d come up with the melody on his own. “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before,” he said.
But even once McCartney was satisfied that the tune was his own, it still lacked something — lyrics.
For a while, McCartney and The Beatles kicked around a couple of different ideas. Before “Yesterday” became a tale of heartbreak, McCartney sang: “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby, how I love your legs.”
“We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us,” Lennon recalled. Once McCartney came up with “Yesterday,” Lennon added, “I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
From there, the song practically wrote itself. “It’s easy to rhyme those a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily,” McCartney explained.
But although most take “Yesterday” to be a love song, McCartney has mused that it might be about his mother Mary, who died when McCartney was 14.
“I think without realizing it I was singing about my mum,” McCartney said in 2013.
