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Blue Jay Way
"Blue Jay Way" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. Written by George Harrison, it was released in 1967 on the group's Magical Mystery Tour EP and album. The song was named after a street in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles where Harrison stayed in August 1967, shortly before visiting the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The lyrics document Harrison's wait for music publicist Derek Taylor to find his way to Blue Jay Way through the fog-ridden hills, while Harrison struggled to stay awake after the flight from London to Los Angeles.
As with several of Harrison's compositions from this period, "Blue Jay Way" incorporates aspects of Indian classical music, even though the Beatles used only Western instrumentation on the track, including a drone-like Hammond organ part played by Harrison. Created during the group's psychedelic period, the track makes extensive use of studio techniques such as flanging, Leslie rotary effect, and reversed tape sounds. The song appeared in the Beatles' 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour, in a sequence that visually re-creates the sense of haziness and dislocation evident on the recording.
While some reviewers have dismissed the song as monotonous, several others have admired its yearning quality and dark musical mood. The website Consequence of Sound describes "Blue Jay Way" as "a haunted house of a hit, adding an ethereal, creepy mythos to the City of Angels". Artists who have covered the song include Bud Shank, Colin Newman, Tracy Bonham and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
George Harrison wrote "Blue Jay Way" after arriving in Los Angeles on 1 August 1967 with his wife Pattie Boyd and Beatles aides Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. The purpose of the trip was to spend a week with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' former press officer and eventual publicist for California-based acts such as the Byrds and the Beach Boys. The visit also allowed Harrison to reunite with his sitar tutor, Ravi Shankar, whose Kinnara School of Music and upcoming concert at the Hollywood Bowl he helped publicise.
I told [Derek Taylor] on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way … There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to fill in time, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this rented house … I messed around on this and the song came.
The title of the song came from a street named Blue Jay Way, one of the "bird streets" high in the Hollywood Hills West area overlooking the Sunset Strip, where Harrison had rented a house at 1567 Blue Jay Way for his stay. Jet-lagged after the flight from London, he began writing the composition on a Hammond organ as he and Boyd waited for Taylor and the latter's wife, Joan, to join them. The home's location, on a hillside of narrow, winding roads, together with the foggy conditions that night, created the backdrop for the song's opening lines: "There's a fog upon LA / And my friends have lost their way." Harrison had almost completed the song by the time the Taylors arrived, around two hours later than planned.
The week with Taylor proved to be important for the direction of the Beatles. At the height of the Summer of Love and the popularity of the band's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, Harrison, Taylor and their small entourage visited the international "hippie capital" of Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, on 7 August. Harrison had expected to encounter an enlightened community engaged in artistic pursuits and working to create a viable alternative lifestyle; instead, he was disappointed that Haight-Ashbury appeared to be populated by drug addicts, dropouts and "hypocrites". Following his return to England two days later, Harrison completed work on "Blue Jay Way" at his home in Esher, and he shared his disillusionment about Haight-Ashbury with John Lennon. The Beatles then publicly denounced the popular hallucinogen LSD (or "acid") and other drugs in favour of Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose seminar in Bangor in Wales the band attended in late August. While noting Harrison's role in "inspir[ing] the West's mainstream acquaintance with Hindu religion" through his leadership in this aspect of the Beatles' career, author Ian MacDonald describes "Blue Jay Way" as a "farewell to psychedelia", just as "It's All Too Much", which the Beatles recorded in May 1967, became Harrison's "farewell to acid".
"Blue Jay Way" was one of several songs that Harrison composed on a keyboard over 1966–68 – a period when, aside from in his work with the Beatles, he had abandoned his first instrument, the guitar, to master the sitar, partly under Shankar's tutelage. The song is in 4
4 time throughout; its structure consists of an intro, three combinations of verse and chorus, followed by repeated choruses. While MacDonald gives the musical key as "C major (minor, diminished)", musicologist Alan Pollack views it as a mix of C major and C modal, and comments on the "highly unusual" incorporation of the notes D♯ and F♯. The inclusion of the latter note suggests the Lydian mode, which, according to musicologist Walter Everett, had only been heard previously in popular music in the Left Banke's 1966 single "Pretty Ballerina".
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Blue Jay Way
"Blue Jay Way" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. Written by George Harrison, it was released in 1967 on the group's Magical Mystery Tour EP and album. The song was named after a street in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles where Harrison stayed in August 1967, shortly before visiting the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The lyrics document Harrison's wait for music publicist Derek Taylor to find his way to Blue Jay Way through the fog-ridden hills, while Harrison struggled to stay awake after the flight from London to Los Angeles.
As with several of Harrison's compositions from this period, "Blue Jay Way" incorporates aspects of Indian classical music, even though the Beatles used only Western instrumentation on the track, including a drone-like Hammond organ part played by Harrison. Created during the group's psychedelic period, the track makes extensive use of studio techniques such as flanging, Leslie rotary effect, and reversed tape sounds. The song appeared in the Beatles' 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour, in a sequence that visually re-creates the sense of haziness and dislocation evident on the recording.
While some reviewers have dismissed the song as monotonous, several others have admired its yearning quality and dark musical mood. The website Consequence of Sound describes "Blue Jay Way" as "a haunted house of a hit, adding an ethereal, creepy mythos to the City of Angels". Artists who have covered the song include Bud Shank, Colin Newman, Tracy Bonham and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
George Harrison wrote "Blue Jay Way" after arriving in Los Angeles on 1 August 1967 with his wife Pattie Boyd and Beatles aides Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. The purpose of the trip was to spend a week with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' former press officer and eventual publicist for California-based acts such as the Byrds and the Beach Boys. The visit also allowed Harrison to reunite with his sitar tutor, Ravi Shankar, whose Kinnara School of Music and upcoming concert at the Hollywood Bowl he helped publicise.
I told [Derek Taylor] on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way … There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to fill in time, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this rented house … I messed around on this and the song came.
The title of the song came from a street named Blue Jay Way, one of the "bird streets" high in the Hollywood Hills West area overlooking the Sunset Strip, where Harrison had rented a house at 1567 Blue Jay Way for his stay. Jet-lagged after the flight from London, he began writing the composition on a Hammond organ as he and Boyd waited for Taylor and the latter's wife, Joan, to join them. The home's location, on a hillside of narrow, winding roads, together with the foggy conditions that night, created the backdrop for the song's opening lines: "There's a fog upon LA / And my friends have lost their way." Harrison had almost completed the song by the time the Taylors arrived, around two hours later than planned.
The week with Taylor proved to be important for the direction of the Beatles. At the height of the Summer of Love and the popularity of the band's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, Harrison, Taylor and their small entourage visited the international "hippie capital" of Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, on 7 August. Harrison had expected to encounter an enlightened community engaged in artistic pursuits and working to create a viable alternative lifestyle; instead, he was disappointed that Haight-Ashbury appeared to be populated by drug addicts, dropouts and "hypocrites". Following his return to England two days later, Harrison completed work on "Blue Jay Way" at his home in Esher, and he shared his disillusionment about Haight-Ashbury with John Lennon. The Beatles then publicly denounced the popular hallucinogen LSD (or "acid") and other drugs in favour of Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose seminar in Bangor in Wales the band attended in late August. While noting Harrison's role in "inspir[ing] the West's mainstream acquaintance with Hindu religion" through his leadership in this aspect of the Beatles' career, author Ian MacDonald describes "Blue Jay Way" as a "farewell to psychedelia", just as "It's All Too Much", which the Beatles recorded in May 1967, became Harrison's "farewell to acid".
"Blue Jay Way" was one of several songs that Harrison composed on a keyboard over 1966–68 – a period when, aside from in his work with the Beatles, he had abandoned his first instrument, the guitar, to master the sitar, partly under Shankar's tutelage. The song is in 4
4 time throughout; its structure consists of an intro, three combinations of verse and chorus, followed by repeated choruses. While MacDonald gives the musical key as "C major (minor, diminished)", musicologist Alan Pollack views it as a mix of C major and C modal, and comments on the "highly unusual" incorporation of the notes D♯ and F♯. The inclusion of the latter note suggests the Lydian mode, which, according to musicologist Walter Everett, had only been heard previously in popular music in the Left Banke's 1966 single "Pretty Ballerina".