JOHN LENNON-ARRANGEMENTS

Maybe the last excellent music John Lennon wrote was for his "Walls And Bridges" album of 1974. Set free by Yoko to party in Los Angeles on the infamous "Long Weekend" that lasted eighteen months, Lennon wrote some interesting things.

 

One of the sax players on the album, Ron Apria, has a page on the web about his experiences of the New York-recorded sessions.

A star feature of his page is a copy of the first page of the chart for "Scared", a slowish piece where Lennon expresses anxiety at the passing of time.

The written notes are not by Lennon--he wrote in the chord symbols... possibly with the bars also.

Musically, you can see a note at the top that the song is in 6/8 time. However. at the left side of the first stave, the place for the time signature, you see 4/4. It looks like John had that wrong. His song is definitely in 6/8, a kind of slow shuffle. The 6/8 may have been written by one of the players, as a correction! This is no surprise really, as rock musicians don't necessarily know time signatures as such: if a song has two guitars and bass you don't need to write it down for anyone. But horn players will need written notes.

Note however that sometimes Duke Ellington's players did not need music either: baritone sax player Harry Carney, with Ellington from the mid '20s to 1974, didn't have charts, at least after the initial recording, as he remembered it all in his head. Carney was pivotal for Ellington's sound. Nevertheless, he still had a separate stave for his parts at record dates.

If John wrote out the bar lines first, then you can also see that the player has apparently inserted a new bar line in what must have been Lennon's original bar, to accomodate the acknowledgement of the true time signature. Conjecture, but it may show how rock greats approach a session. Overall, it doesn't look much neater than my pages!