Yer Blues

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"Yer Blues"

Song by the Beatles
from the album The Beatles
Released	22 November 1968
Recorded	13 August 1968
Genre	Blues rock
Length	4:01
Label	Apple Records
Writer(s)	Lennon-McCartney
Producer(s)	George Martin
The Beatles track listing
Birthday (1 of disc 2)	"Yer Blues" (2 of disc 2)	Mother Nature's Son (3 of disc 2)

"Yer Blues" is a song by the Beatles, the second song on the second disc of the CD version of the White Album. It was written by John Lennon while in Rishikesh, India, and has a basic I, IV, V chord progression.

Lennon apparently intended the song as a friendly parody of British blues, but it was delivered with such spirit that it has been hard for some listeners not to take it seriously. The lyrics are extremely suicidal, and include references to Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man as well as cosmology, and were almost certainly reflective of Lennon's well-documented battles with his psychological demons. The claustrophobic sound of the recording is due to the fact that, according to Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles Recording Sessions, the band recorded the song in Abbey Road Studio Two's "annex", which was actually a large closet in the control room. The vocals in the final verse can barely be heard. In interviews for the Beatles Anthology series, Ringo Starr affectionately recalls recording this song in the stripped-down conditions, saying it was like the old days of Beatles live performances. This may have been influential on the Beatles approach to their next album project, Get Back (released as Let it Be). The stripped-down, bluesy nature of the song bears similarity to much of Lennon's early solo output, including Cold Turkey and his 1970 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album and marks a retreat from Lennon's concern with studio experimentation that marked such songs as Tomorrow Never Knows and Strawberry Fields Forever.

Just after the White Album came out in late 1968, John Lennon performed "Yer Blues" at The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus with a supergroup dubbed the Dirty Mac, consisting of himself, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. The performance was followed with a boogie instrumental jam called "Whole Lotta Yoko", featuring dissonant avant-garde violinist Ivry Gitlis and vocals by Yoko Ono. The recording was never broadcast, and for decades the performance was only available on bootleg, but it finally came out officially on both CD and video in 1995. Lennon's performance with "The Dirty Mac" was his first live performance since the Beatles' last concert in 1966 and may have contributed to his renewed enthusiasm for live performance in 1969 (see Give Peace a Chance and Live Peace in Toronto).