When John Lennon was asked about the song “Wait” in 1970, he couldn’t recall writing it. “That must be one of Paul’s,” he said then.
Paul McCartney did, however, recall. It was mainly his composition, though it was credited to the usual “Lennon-McCartney.” His story was that it was written in early 1965 when the Beatles were in the Bahamas shooting Help! the film. Shortly before that, the band had connected with Brandon deWilde, a child actor whose career had blossomed into big sitcom roles (Jamie) and an Academy nomination (for his role in 1953’s Shane) as an adult.
“Brandon De Wilde was an actor, a James Dean type,” George Harrison recalled in Anthology. “He liked the Beatles’ music and he heard we were going to film in the Bahamas, so he came over from the States with a big bag of reefer. We smoked on the plane, all the way to the Bahamas. It was a charter flight, with all the film people – the actors and the crew – and we thought, ‘No, nobody will notice.’ We had Mal [Evans, the Beatles’ road manager] smoking cigars to drown out the smell.”
Brandon deWilde, Witness to ‘Wait’
It was deWilde that McCartney, apparently, wrote the song “Wait” in front of.
“He was a nice guy who was fascinated by what we did,” McCartney recalled in Many Years From Now. “A sort of Brat Pack actor. We chatted endlessly, and I seem to remember writing ‘Wait’ in front of him, and him being interested to see it being written.”
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Lennon didn’t really factor in, in McCartney’s memory: “I think it was my song. I don’t remember John collaborating too much on it, although he could have.”
Recording ‘Wait’ in the Studio
On “Wait,” the Beatles employed a volume pedal for the guitar part, albeit in an unorthodox way.
“There was a guy in Liverpool [Colin Manley] who used to go to school with Paul and I,” Harrison recalled to Guitar Player in 1987, “and he was in a band called the Remo Four and played with Billy J. Kramer. And he got all that stuff and could play all those Chet Atkins ones where you can play both tunes at the same time like ‘Colonel Bogey.’ He had a volume pedal, and I think we tried that, but I could never coordinate it. So some of those, what we’d do is, I played the part, and John would kneel down in front of me and turn my guitar’s volume control.”
Listen to the Beatles’ ‘Wait’
After the song was recorded, the idea was to include “Wait” on the soundtrack to Help!, but for reasons not entirely clear, this never happened. It only languished for a few months though — later that year the Beatles learned they were one song short for Rubber Soul, which they intended to release in time for that year’s Christmas market. Thus, “Wait” was dusted off, overdubs added to ensure it jibed with the album’s other songs and included on side two.
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The band’s sixth studio album was unlike anything else on the market when it was released on Dec. 3, 1965.
Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
