Getting Better

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Getting Better is a song off The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was cowritten by both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with the music written mostly by McCartney. As usual, it was credited to Lennon/McCartney.

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[edit] Writing

The song was inspired by a favorite phrase of Jimmy Nicol, a drummer who played live with The Beatles in Australia while Ringo was having his tonsils removed in 1964. Hunter Davies, who wrote the authorized 1968 biography on The Beatles said this about Nichol, "It’s getting better, it’s getting better. All he’d say was ‘it’s getting better’. That was the only comment they could get out of him. It ended up becoming a joke phrase and whenever the boys thought of Jimmy they’d think of ‘it’s getting better’." Davies recalls that Paul told him that he had come up with the idea for the song one day while walking his sheepdog Martha in Hampstead. In his official biography, Many Years From Now, Paul recalls this, "Getting Better I wrote on my magic Binder, Edwards and Vaughan piano in my music room. It had a lovely tone, that piano, you'd just open the lid and there was such a magic tone, almost out of tune, and of course the way it was painted added to the fun of it all. It's an optimistic song. I often try and get on to optimistic subjects in an effort to cheer myself up and also, realising that other people are going to hear this, to cheer them up too. And this was one of those. The 'angry young man' and all that was John and I filling in the verses about schoolteachers. We shared a lot of feelings against teachers who had punished you too much or who hadn't understood you or who had just been bastard generally." Paul also recalled, "I was just sitting there doing 'Getting better all the time' and John just said in his laconic way, 'It couldn't get no worse,' and I thought, Oh, brilliant! This is exactly why I love writing with John... It was one of the ways we'd write. I'd have the song quite mapped out and he'd come in with a counter-melody, so it was a simple ordinary song." John admitted the lines "I used to be mean to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" were based on himself, later saying, "It was a diary form of writing. All that, ‘I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her up and kept her apart from the things that she loved,’ was me. I used to be cruel to my women, and physically, any woman. I was a hitter! I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and women. That is why I am always banging on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything’s the opposite, but I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

[edit] Recording

Work began on the track on March 9, 1967, when seven takes of the basic track were recorded, including guitars, bass, drums, and George Martin playing piano. The next day, George Harrison added his tambura part, as well as Paul overdubbing more bass and Ringo overdubbing more drums. Work on the song resumed on March 21, when the vocal parts were overdubbed. Hunter Davies was at this session, who recalled being quite disappointed with the vocals. He said that the backing vocals were "flat, grainy and awfully disembodied. I remember thinking, 'Why am I such a big fan of theirs, why do I think they're good singers? They're completely out of tune!" It is not known if the vocals he described stayed in the final mix. Shortly into this recording session, though, John announced he was feeling ill. In reality, he had unknowngly taken LSD. George Martin recalls, "I was aware of them smoking pot, but I wasn't aware that they did anything serious. In fact, I was so innocent that I actually took John up to the roof when he was having an LSD trip, not knowing what it was. If I'd known it was LSD, the roof would have been the last place I would have taken him. He was in the studio and I was in the control room, and he said he wasn't feeling too good. So I said, 'Come up here,' and asked George and Paul to go on overdubbing the voice. 'I'll take John out for a breath of fresh air,' I said, but of course I couldn't take him out the front because there were 500 screaming kids who'd have torn him apart,. So the only place I could take him to get fresh air was the roof. It was a wonderful starry night, and John went to the edge, which was a parapet about 18 inches high, and looked up at the stars and said, 'Aren't they fantastic?' Of course, to him I suppose they would have been especially fantastic. At the time they just looked like stars to me." In 1970, John recalled this incident. "I never took [LSD] in the studio. Once I did, actually. I thought I was taking some uppers and I was not in the state of handling it. I took it and I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I said, 'What is it? I feel ill.' I thought I felt ill and I thought I was going cracked. I said I must go and get some air. They all took me upstairs on the roof, and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid. I said, 'Well, I can't go on. You'll have to do it and I'll just stay and watch.' I got very nervous just watching them all , and I kept saying, 'Is this all right?' They had all been very kind and they said, 'Yes, it's all right.' I said, 'Are you sure it's all right?' They carried on making the record." George recalls this, "He took some LSD to keep him awake for a while. At that point, the session was effectively over." Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, "John started pointing at the ceiling and said, ‘Look at that!’ And Martin didn’t know what was going on, so he took him onto the roof and left him there, thinking that he was feeling a bit feint." George Martin said, "The problem was where to take him. There were the usual five hundred or so kids waiting for us at the front, keeping vigil like guard-dogs, and if we had dared to appear at the entrance there would have been uproar and they would probably have broken the gates down. So I took him up to the roof, above Number Two studio. Then I suddenly realised that the only protection around the edge of the roof was a parapet about six inches high, with a sheer drop of about ninety feet below." Geoff Emerick remembers that when Martin told everybody he left John on the roof, they all rushed up to make sure he didn't try to fly or do anything stupid. Martin recalled in his autobiography, All You Need Is Ears, "I would be stupid to pretend that I didn’t know drugs featured quite heavily in the Beatles’ lives at that time, but at the same time they knew that I, in my schoolmasterly role, didn’t approve, and like naughty boys they would slope off into the canteen, lock the door and have their joints. They always used to disappear to have a little puff, he explained. They never did it in front of me, you see. They always used to go down to the canteen, and Mal Evans used to guard it." The song was completed on March 23, when more vocals were overdubbed and a conga part.

[edit] Recording Sessions

  • March 21, 1967: Recording Session. Songs Recorded: Lovely Rita. Songs Mixed: Getting Better. This was the infamous night where John took LSD when trying to record. →


[edit] Personnel

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Guest Musicians

[edit] Production

[edit] Available Versions

[edit] Available On

[edit] Sources

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