Suddenly love-struck Paul McCartney had begun taking long drives across the U.K. countryside in late 1968 with his new girlfriend, Linda Eastman. Along the way, McCartney wrote the opening song from the Beatles‘ last-released album.
“One of the great things about Linda was that while I was driving and going, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m lost,’ she’d simply say, ‘Great!'” McCartney remembered in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “She loved getting lost, and she pointed out to me quite rightly that there would always be a sign somewhere saying ‘London’ – so we’d just follow that.”
One day, rather symbolically, they drove beyond Esher (home to George Harrison‘s Kinfauns bungalow) and Weybridge (where John Lennon has purchased the Kenwood house) and out into the country near Cobham. McCartney and Eastman “just pulled off in a wood somewhere and parked the car,” she said in Steve Turner’s A Hard Day’s Write. “I went off walking while Paul sat in the car and started writing.”
‘Two of Us’ Was Very Different at First
Eastman took several shots of McCartney, acoustic guitar in hand, upon returning to his classic 1966 Aston-Martin DB6. “That’s me,” McCartney added, “writing ‘Two of Us.'”
In a Beatles session that followed on Jan. 24, 1969, McCartney ends an early pass through of “Two of Us” by saying, “And so we leave the little town of London, England.” The song would took a similarly meandering path toward completion.
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McCartney initially offered “Two of Us” to a lost New York-based acoustic trio named Mortimer, with an eye toward issuing it as their debut single on the Beatles’ Apple Records imprint. Their album was shelved by controversial new Beatles manager Allen Klein, however, and Motimer’s version would go unreleased until resurfacing on 2021’s Good As Gold: Artefacts of the Apple Era 1967-1975.
As the Beatles began their own loose rehearsals of “Two of Us” in early January at London’s Twickenham Studios, “Two of Us” was still being approached like a rock song. The Beatles couldn’t get this now plainly wrong arrangement to work, and at one point Harrison briefly quit the band.
Listen to the Glyn Johns Mix of ‘Two of Us’
“Two of Us’ Arrived at a Fraught Moment
They decided to reconvene at Apple Studios upon George Harrison’s return, and “Two of Us” finally started coming together as an acoustic number. “It sounds lovely, that, now, after all the anguish we went through with it,” Harrison admitted during the Jan. 24 session.
The new rearrangement also recalled a key Beatles inspiration. Lennon and McCartney took to calling one another “Don” and “Phil” during these sessions, and even played an impromptu snippet of the old Everly Brothers song “Bye Bye Love” on Jan. 25 before making another pass at “Two of Us.”
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It was an increasingly rare moment of levity. The Beatles were in the midst of arguments over their business affairs and management that would soon split them apart. By the time Lennon and McCartney were face-to-face again at the mic, the end of their partnership seemed very near. McCartney’s bucolic lyric about open-hearted wanderers suddenly took on new meaning.
“Lying behind the phrase ‘We’re on our way home’ is less the literal sense of going back to London,” McCartney admitted in The Lyrics, “but more about trying to get in touch with the people we once were.” “Two of Us” hints at their legal issues too, as McCartney sings: “You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere.”
Listen to the Phil Spector Mix of ‘Two of Us’
How the Beatles Finally Completed ‘Two of Us’
They didn’t finish the version heard on 1970’s Let It Be until Jan. 31, 1969, after the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert. Even then, this was Take 12 of the day. Glyn Johns was then given the task of sorting through all of these tapes in the hopes of completing a new Beatles album.
He presented two master tapes to the Beatles, completed at Olympic Sound Studios in London – but the Beatles rejected them both. (At different points, the Jan. 24 performance of “Two of Us” had been relegated to the second or third song on Side Two.) The Beatles then handed everything over to Phil Spector.
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He ended up opting for their Jan. 31 run through of “Two of Us,” and moved the song to the album’s lead position. Then Spector returned to tapes from Jan. 21 for a snippet of Lennon nonsense to attach to the beginning. He references a song now sequenced second on Let It Be: “‘I Dig a Pigmy’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-aids. Phase one in which Doris gets her oats.”
Ironically, the Beatles hadn’t even rehearsed “Two of Us” that day. But a song that was once lost finally found its way home. “It’s a favorite of mine,” McCartney said in The Lyrics, “because it reminds me of that period, getting together with Linda, and the wonderfully free attitude we were able to have.”
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In some ways, the Beatles’ album art could be just as fascinating as the music inside.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
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