When Hey Jude actually did make it better

It is 1969 again and the Beatles are everywhere once more thanks to Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, which dropped on the weekend and is a feast for those of a certain age looking for a happy distraction from the plague times in which we live, as well as the obsessives who once played Revolution 9 backward to see if Paul was really dead.

My debt to John, Paul, George, and Ringo is immense, even if they did not supply the song track to my life, as they seemed to do for so many, and even if I cannot make an educated guess on whether they are the greatest band of all time as some reading this are absolutely certain.

If I am honest I will admit that I love the covers of some of their tunes as much as the originals: Aretha Franklin’s Eleanor Rigby, Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help From My Friends, both of which I heard when they were originally released, and Stevie Wonder’s We Can Work It Out, which I just came across a couple of years ago, and which is responsible for my greatest musical moments: a “like” from Lyle Lovett on Twitter when I listed it among my favourite cover songs.

Wilson Pickett’s version of Hey Jude, with Duane Allman’s extended guitar solo, is equally magnificent.

But to me there will only ever be one version, the original, not just because it has a great chorus that I can actually sing, along with the fade-out to beat all fade-outs, but also because when the last faint “na-na-na-naa” echoes, the song is more than seven minutes long.

Because of that extended playing time, twice as lengthy as most of the songs on the radio in 1969, I am forever beholden to this tune.

That year, you see, I entered Grade 8 at the Halifax school that used to be known at Cornwallis Junior High. By then, something monumental had occurred: house parties, usually in a semi-finished basement, where the host’s dad would normally be found nursing a CC and ginger ale.

I recall a predictable routine: at first the genders lurked at opposite ends of the room, plowing through the cheezies, sucking on cans of Mountain Dew, while stealing glances toward the other side.

Eventually someone would make the long walk, breaking the impasse.

If everything worked out, dancing ensued.

We were a bunch of white, middleclass kids in a small Canadian city that lacked an authentic record store, so the music to which we cavorted was the same stuff on the CHNS and CJCH airwaves: Simon and Garfunkel, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, The Monkees, 1910 Fruitgum Company, Steppenwolf when the blood was up.

Mostly, of course, it was the Beatles. In the fall of 1969, in the early going at one of those parties, it might have been Revolution, with John Lennon’s furious guitar work threatening to turn the room into a whirling mass of denim and tie-dye.

Hey Jude’s moment was later in the evening, at the very end in fact, when the earlier reticence had evaporated and the room pulsed with teenage hormones.

By then the waltzes were underway, and the most-requested last waltz at rec room parties when I was in Grade 8 was the A side of the Revolution 45, Hey Jude, not because of the comforting lyrics, but because it was seven minutes long, which meant 420 seconds of pressing your body against another teenager’s, which many of us seemed to want to do at this point in our lives.

This was not Astaire and Rogers flitting lightly about the room. These were two people barely moving. All some of us knew for certain was that we wanted this event to continue for as long as possible.

So as Paul Mccartney sang about taking a sad song and making it better, we shuffled on. In time we knew the song well enough that as the nana-na-naas started to fade we understood the end was near.

At that point, one of the bolder among us would briefly disengage from their partner. With the wail of guitar feedback threatening to blow off the top of their head, they would sprint for the turntable, the kind that half a century later is in vogue again.

Then, just before the song ended, and the needle slid from its groove, they would lift it ever so carefully, and return it to the start, ensuring another 420 seconds or so of bliss.

My memory is that sometimes this would happen two or three times, prolonging the party for another half hour. Only then would the parental units upstairs bellow down that they were onto us, and to start saying goodbyes.

The hard day’s night was over. We had been given a ticket to ride.