The Beatles were professional music-makers, well-seasoned by the time they started making 1965’s Rubber Soul, but they were also something simpler: boys who enjoyed being silly from time to time.
Especially at that time, when the Beatles were moving full steam ahead and continuing to work hard at their craft, it was fun to loosen up a little in the studio as they were recording the song “Girl.”
“It was always amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record: ‘fish and finger pie,’ ‘prick teaser,’ ‘tit tit tit tit,'” Paul McCartney recalled in Many Years From Now. “The Beach Boys had a song out where they’d done ‘la la la la’ and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it, but not use the same phrase.
So we were looking around for another phrase, so it was ‘dit dit dit dit,’ which we decided to change in our waggishness to ‘tit tit tit tit,’ which is virtually indistinguishable from ‘dit dit dit dit.’ And it gave us a laugh. It was to get some light relief in the middle of this real big career that we were forging. If we could put in something that was a little bit subversive then we would. George Martin might say, ‘Was that ‘dit dit’ or ‘tit tit’ you were singing?’ ‘Oh, ‘dit dit,’ George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn’t it?’ Then we’d get in the car and break down laughing.”
John Lennon’s Big Breath
Another thing unique to “Girl” was that John Lennon was purposeful in his decision to include that inhale part that happens in the middle of the chorus.
“My main memory is that John wanted to hear the breathing, wanted it to be very intimate,” McCartney explained, “so George Martin put a special compressor on the voice, then John dubbed it.”
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Musically speaking, the song’s arrangement and instrumentation drew inspiration from McCartney’s recent trip to Greece.
“[T]here’s a Zorba-like thing at the end that I wrote which came from that holiday,” he explained. “I was very impressed with another culture’s approach because it was slightly different from what we did. We just did it on acoustic guitars instead of bouzoukis.”
Listen to the Beatles’ ‘Girl’
“Girl” was mainly Lennon’s song, and as with many of his songs’ characters, the girl in question was not an actual person. In one interview, he said that ultimately “Girl” was written about something much bigger.
“I was just talking about Christianity in that – a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven,” he said to Rolling Stone in 1970. “I’m only saying that I was talking about ‘pain will lead to pleasure’ in ‘Girl’ and that was sort of the Catholic Christian concept – be tortured and then it’ll be all right, which seems to be a bit true but not in their concept of it. But I didn’t believe in that, that you have to be tortured to attain anything, it just so happens that you were.”
READ MORE: The Legacy of John Lennon’s ‘Double Fantasy’ Album Explained
At another point, Lennon explained that “Girl” was about a woman he hadn’t met yet. Until he did.
“‘Girl’ is real. There is no such thing as the girl; she was a dream, but the words are all right,” he said for Anthology. “It wasn’t just a song, and it was about that girl – that turned out to be Yoko, in the end – the one that a lot of us were looking for.”
The Grown-Up Version of ‘Girl’
A decade and a half later, Lennon spoke about returning to this same concept with his solo song “Woman.” It appeared on 1980’s Double Fantasy, released less than a month before Lennon’s death.
“Women really are the other half of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song,” he said to Rolling Stone then. “And it just sort of hit me like a flood, and it came out like that. The song reminds me of a Beatles track, but I wasn’t trying to make it sound like that. I did it as I did ‘Girl’ many years ago. So this is the grown-up version of ‘Girl.'”
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The band’s sixth studio album was unlike anything else on the market when it was released on Dec. 3, 1965.
Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
