One After 909

From BeatlesWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

One After 909 is a song off The Beatles' 1970 album Let It Be. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

[edit] Writing

The song was written in the late 1950's and it was trying to emulate all the train songs that The Quarrymen covered. Paul recalls, "It has great memories for me of John and I trying to write a bluesy freight-train song. There were a lot of those songs at the time, like Midnight Special, Freight Train, Rock Island Line, so this was the One After 909; she didn't get the 909, she got the one after it! It was a tribute to British Rail, actually. No, at the time we weren't thinking British, it was much more the Super Chief from Omaha." Even though Paul claimed the song to be co-written, John claimed the song to have been written solely by himself. He told Rolling Stone in 1970, "The One After 909, on the whatsit LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say, well, you're going to make an album together and knock off a few songs, just like a job." The number 909 was possibly chosen because many numbers in John's life had to do with nine. Because of this, he also included the number nine was included in Revolution 9 and #9 Dream. John told Playboy in 1980, "That was something I wrote when I was about seventeen. I [had previously] lived at 9 Newcastle Road. I was born on the ninth of October - the ninth month [sic]. It's just a number that follows me around, but numerologically, apparently I'm a number six or a number three or something, but it's all part of nine."

[edit] Recording

The first recorded version of it was recorded during the rehearsals at Paul's house in 1960, when two versions of it were recorded. Both these performances are available on bootleg, and one of these were featured partially in The Beatles Anthology TV series. In addition to that, two rehearsals were done in an empty Cavern Club in 1962, and are both also available on bootleg. The next available version was recorded during the From Me To You/Thank You Girl single session on March 5, 1963. They also wanted to record to more songs, this one and What Goes On, in the spare session time they had, although they only had time for one, this one. Four takes of this song were recorded, only one of which was complete. They also recorded an edit piece from the solo afterwards. They did not release the 1963 version until Anthology 1 in 1995. Paul McCartney said in his authorized biography, Many Years From Now, "It was a number we didn't used to do much but it was one that we always liked doing, and we rediscovered it. There were a couple of tunes that we wondered why we never put out; either George Martin didn't like them enough to or he favoured others. It's not a great song but it's a great favourite of mine." They would not return to the song until 1969, when they played through it several times during the Get Back sessions. The version included in the Let It Be album and film was a performance on the rooftop of Apple Studios on January 30, 1969. At the end of this, John sang a a line from the song Danny Boy. Engineer Glyn Johns made two early mixes of this song for early tracklistings of the album Get Back. Both of these mixes opened up the first two track lineups. Neither of them went on the final album. Phil Spector made another mix with no changes to the song's arrangement, which actually ended up on the final Let It Be album.

[edit] Personnel

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Guest Musicians

[edit] Production

[edit] Available Versions

[edit] Available On

[edit] Cover Versions

  • Callejeros
  • Laibach
  • Rick Nelson
  • Willie Nelson
  • Carmen Rasmusen
  • The Smithereens

[edit] Source

Retrieved from "http://www.beatleswiki.org/wiki/One_After_909"
Personal tools