Baby, You're a Rich Man

• 1. Introduction

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  "Baby, You're a Rich Man" was born at midnight in May 1967, when the Beatles spent six hours at an independent studio in Barnes, south-west London, stitching two unfinished songs into one. John Lennon had been wandering through London's counterculture scene. Paul McCartney had a melody hanging around without a home. What came out of that long night at Olympic Sound Studios was unlike anything the band had cut before: an oboe-like wail that wasn't an oboe, a lyric that asked who exactly qualifies as "beautiful", and a release date that put it at the centre of the Summer of Love.

  The song raises questions that the source material spends considerable time unpacking. Who are the "beautiful people"? Was Lennon singing to a Californian hippie, to the Beatles' own manager, or simply to everyone? Why did George Harrison take the song to Haight-Ashbury and play it in a public park? And how does a track dismissed by some critics as a second-rate morality ditty end up as the final note in a film about the founding of Facebook?

• 2. Two Songs, One Chorus

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  Lennon described it himself in a 1980 interview as "two separate pieces... forced into one song". The working title was "One of the Beautiful People", drawn from his own verses, and the two songwriters worked through the composition at McCartney's home on Cavendish Avenue in St John's Wood.

  Lennon wrote his portion after attending the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, an all-night festival held at Alexandra Palace in north London on the 29th of April 1967. According to author Ian MacDonald, this event attended by 10,000 people marked the first large-scale coming together of Britain's "beautiful people". It was a fundraiser for the underground newspaper International Times, whose offices had been shuttered following a police raid. Sociomusicologist Simon Frith, writing in 1981, described events like this as "multi-media happenings" where dancing gave way to listening, and fashion traded sharp edges for vivid colour.

  Author Barry Miles, who was among the leading figures in the UK underground scene in 1967, says Lennon drew his initial inspiration from newspaper articles about the emerging hippie phenomenon. McCartney's portion, the chorus, is thought by author Barry Miles and musicologist Walter Everett to address the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein. Everett writes that the song "asks an unnamed Brian Epstein what it's like to be one of the 'beautiful people'", noting that the label applied both to communal hippies and to those who moved among celebrated entertainers. The synthesis of these two strands let the song speak in multiple directions at once, without quite committing to any single target.

• 3. Olympic Sound and the Clavioline

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  The six-hour session on the 11th of May 1967, starting at 9 pm, was notable for where it happened as much as for what was recorded. Olympic Sound Studios was an independent facility in Barnes, south-west London, free from record-company oversight. The session engineers assisting producer George Martin were Olympic manager Keith Grant and Eddie Kramer. Mick Jagger attended as well, and later contributed backing vocals.

  Lennon created the track's most distinctive sound using a clavioline, a monophonic three-octave keyboard that was an early forerunner of the synthesizer. He played it on the oboe setting, producing a tone that suggested an Indian shehnai. Music journalist Gordon Reid, citing a report from the session, says Lennon generated the trill effect "by rolling an orange up and down the keyboard". Musicologist William Echard describes the clavioline part as a "garble line" with Orientalist connotations, a musical part that "often meanders widely through pitch space, following a rhythmic profile that does not adhere strongly to the prevailing harmonic or melodic logic".

  Kramer himself played vibraphone on the overdubs. Only a single note of that vibraphone is clearly audible in the finished track, at the 0:53 mark. A feedback delay effect called spin-echo was used to fill the gap between lines of the verse. McCartney overdubbed a second piano part that enters at 1:45 and is heard in reverse over the third verse. Kramer later recalled the session with enthusiasm, saying the energy level was "so intense... that you were riding wave upon wave of amazing creativity. It was like watching a well-oiled machine." Grant and Kramer also told Olympic colleagues they could not believe Lennon's vocal ability. McCartney remembered the six hours as "rather exciting", adding that Grant "stood up at the console as he mixed it, so it was a very exciting mix, we were really quite buzzed."

• 4. The Beautiful People

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  Lennon's lyrics take the form of a question-and-answer exchange, a structure he had used with McCartney before, most recognisably in "With a Little Help from My Friends". Authors Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc single out the image of keeping money "in a big brown bag inside a zoo" as the song's sharpest dismissal of material hoarding. Music critic Tim Riley identifies a droll quality in the answers Lennon gives to his own questions, noting that the line "Baby, you're a rich man, too" extends the designation of "beautiful people" outward to every listener.

  Lennon summarised the intention plainly: "The point was stop moaning. You're a rich man and we're all rich men." George Harrison framed it similarly, saying the message was that all individuals are wealthy within themselves regardless of material concerns. Yet Reising and LeBlanc also note an element of ridicule directed at certain members of the beautiful-people scene, those who travel only "As far as the eye can see" and even then see "Nothing that doesn't show".

  For listeners unfamiliar with the counterculture terminology, author and critic Kenneth Womack writes that the lyrics appear to "address issues of wealth and celebrity" rather than a specific subculture. The song reflected a broader shift the Beatles had been making since Revolver, where their use of LSD had prompted lyrics dismissing consumerism. Author Nicholas Schaffner, reflecting on the band's quick pivot away from the drug by late August 1967, observed that "Baby, You're a Rich Man", alongside "Strawberry Fields Forever", captured the point where repeated LSD trips began to offer more riddles than revelations.

• 5. Harrison in Haight-Ashbury

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  On the 7th of August 1967, George Harrison walked into Golden Gate Park in San Francisco carrying an acoustic guitar. Press reports from the time compared what followed to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: Harrison played "Baby, You're a Rich Man" and led a crowd around him in the process.

  The visit came at the height of the Summer of Love, when Haight-Ashbury was understood as the physical centre of the hippie movement. Lennon, in a 1970 interview, said he had been "all for going and living" there but that "George went over in the end." The Beatles were widely viewed as leaders of a counterculture they had helped inspire, and Harrison's appearance was received as an endorsement of the youth movement gathering in the district.

  Harrison left disappointed. Haight-Ashbury struck him as a haven for dropouts and drug addicts rather than a community genuinely pursuing the kind of spiritual enlightenment that LSD had originally seemed to promise. When he returned to London, he shared this disillusionment with Lennon. Within weeks, both had attended a seminar by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Bangor, Wales, and publicly renounced LSD on the 26th of August. The song Harrison had used to greet the counterculture's home district was now part of a summer that the Beatles themselves were quietly stepping back from.

• 6. Release and Reception

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  "Baby, You're a Rich Man" reached record shops on the 7th of July 1967 in the United Kingdom and on the 17th of July in the United States, released as the B-side of "All You Need Is Love". The A-side had been performed on the Our World satellite broadcast on the 25th of June and then rushed out as a single. In Australia, both tracks were treated as a double A-side, and the single topped the Go-Set national chart. In the United States, the B-side charted independently, peaking at number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 60 on the Cash Box Top 100.

  Critical response divided sharply along lines of enthusiasm for the counterculture versus impatience with what some heard as unfocused experimentation. Writing in the NME in July 1967, Derek Johnson admired Lennon's falsetto, the "Oriental instrumentation" and "unusual shuffle beat, emphasised by handclaps", and concluded that "the whole effect is startling and packed with interest from the word go." Billboard called it "an Eastern-flavored rocker with an infectious beat and an intricate lyric". Richard Poirier, writing for the journal Partisan Review in one of the earliest serious critical assessments of the Beatles' American cultural impact, cited both sides of the single as a "particularly brilliant example" of how British rock had restored sincerity to popular music.

  Others were harsher. Ian MacDonald acknowledged the song's command of musical feel and what he called its "black-white acid-dance fusion", but found McCartney's choruses weak and the song overall lacking in well-crafted structure. Tim Riley wrote that it "sounds spent", arguing that unlike "Help!" or "Drive My Car", the song "flounders in privileged emptiness". Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef in 2009 called it "a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme". Rolling Stone, by contrast, ranked it number 68 on its 2010 list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs, with editors writing that Lennon's delivery captured "the playfully spaced-out mood of the summer of 1967".

• 7. Afterlife and The Social Network

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  Against the Beatles' wishes, Capitol Records placed "Baby, You're a Rich Man" on the US album Magical Mystery Tour, released in November 1967. In the rush to prepare the release, Capitol used a duophonic, or mock stereo, mix for the LP's stereo version. The first genuine stereo mix was not created until the 22nd of October 1971, when George Martin and recording engineer Geoff Emerick prepared it for a German release of the album. Because the spin-echo effect had been introduced at the original mixing stage and could not be recreated, they simply removed it. That mix reached British listeners in December 1981, when it appeared on a bonus EP in The Beatles EP Collection box set.

  Parts of the song turned up in the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, though it was left off the accompanying soundtrack album. Portions of Lennon's clavioline part later surfaced in the Love version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", released in 2006, and elements of the song also appear in the Love remix of "All You Need Is Love".

  The most unexpected destination for the track came in 2010, when director David Fincher used it at the close of The Social Network, a film about Facebook's rise and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg. Noel Murray and Matt Singer of The Dissolve included the placement among the five most effective uses of a Beatles song in a feature film. Inkoo Kang of Slate wrote that the Beatles appear to "sing-taunt" Zuckerberg with the chorus as he sits in the final scene, having built a billion-dollar company and found himself alone. A song written to question what wealth actually means turned out to be well suited to that conclusion.