Baby, You're a Rich Man



"Baby, You're a Rich Man" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. It was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and released as the B-side of the band's "All You Need Is Love" single in July 1967. The recording features a monophonic keyboard instrument known as a clavioline, and was made at Olympic Sound Studios in London rather than at EMI Studios, where the Beatles usually recorded. In its lyrical themes, the song addresses the "beautiful people" of the 1960s hippie movement and partly echoes the utopian message of "All You Need Is Love". The song peaked at number 34 on America's Billboard Hot 100 chart.

"Baby, You're a Rich Man" also appeared on the Magical Mystery Tour album and in a sequence in the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine. Although the song was not included on the soundtrack album for the latter film, a new mix of the track appeared on the 1999 release Yellow Submarine Songtrack.

Background
"Baby, You're a Rich Man" was the result of combining two unfinished songs written by Lennon and McCartney, in a similar fashion to "A Day in the Life" and "I've Got a Feeling". The working title, based on Lennon's verses, was "One of the Beautiful People", to which McCartney added the "Baby, you're a rich man" chorus. In a 1980 interview, Lennon described it as "two separate pieces ... put together and forced into one song".

During the 1960s, "beautiful people" was the term adopted by Californian hippies to refer to themselves. It is thought that McCartney wrote his section of the song about the band's manager, Brian Epstein. Lennon's lyrics are in the form of a question-and-answer exchange, similar to that used by him and McCartney in "With a Little Help from My Friends". Musicologist Walter Everett writes that the song "asks an unnamed Brian Epstein what it's like to be one of the 'beautiful people'"; Everett adds: "This appellation was used of both communal hippies and those who mingle with the most celebrated entertainers." Another interpretation is that the "Beautiful People" verses were meant as a "tip of the hat" to Epstein for finally taking the psychedelic drug LSD. Lennon claimed, however, that the meaning of the song was that everybody is a rich man, saying, "The point was stop moaning. You're a rich man and we're all rich men ..." George Harrison said that the message of the song was that all individuals are wealthy within themselves, regardless of material concerns. According to author and critic Ian MacDonald, Lennon was most likely inspired to write the verses after attending the first recognised coming together of Britain's "beautiful people" – an all-night festival known as the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, held at Alexandra Palace in north London on 29 April 1967.

Musical characteristics
The song opens in what appears to be the key of G in Mixolydian mode, a G chord moving to ♭VII/I (Fadd9/G) on "now that you know who you are", all over a G pedal (sustained harmonic tone). Soon, however, the song moves to the key of C major and becomes reminiscent of "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" with its use of non-Western sounding gamak melodies on the clavioline. Musicologist Alan Pollack considers a notable feature in the chorus to be the bass move from C to G via a ♭III (B♭).

Recording
The Beatles recorded "Baby, You're a Rich Man" during a six-hour session held at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, south-west London, on 11 May 1967. The session marked a rare example of the Beatles recording outside of EMI's facility at Abbey Road, after the band had briefly used Regent Sound in central London during the sessions for their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The engineers assisting George Martin, the Beatles' producer, were Olympic manager Keith Grant and Eddie Kramer. Mick Jagger, whose band the Rolling Stones regularly used the same studio, also attended the session.

The song was mixed (in mono) that same day. The music featured an unusual oboe-like sound reminiscent of an Indian shehnai, which was created with a clavioline (an early forerunner of the synthesizer being a three-octave monophonic keyboard). In addition, "spin-echo", an feed back delay effect, was used to fill from the end of one line of the verse to the start of the next.

Following the completion of Sgt. Pepper in late April 1967, the Beatles' recording sessions for the remainder of that year have been dismissed as uninspired by the majority of commentators. Kramer contests this view, however; he says of the Beatles' playing during the session for "Baby, You're a Rich Man": "The energy level was so intense … that you were riding wave upon wave of amazing creativity. It was like watching a well-oiled machine. Just incredible." According to another Olympic staff engineer, Grant and Kramer were highly complimentary of Lennon as a vocalist and "couldn't believe anyone could sing that well". Having enjoyed the experience of working at Olympic Sound, the Beatles returned to Barnes on 14 June to record the basic track for "All You Need Is Love".

During the session for "Baby, You're a Rich Man", Lennon changed a line in the chorus to "Baby, you're a rich fag jew". According to author Bob Spitz, this was either a joke at the expense of Epstein or a provocation in reaction to the band's former moptop image. Spitz writes that the session tapes also reveal Lennon improvising similarly "wicked" remarks about McCartney, Ringo Starr and Jagger.

Release
"Baby, You're a Rich Man" was initially submitted for inclusion in the Beatles' upcoming animated film, Yellow Submarine. While the song was used in the film, its initial release was as the B-side of "All You Need Is Love", which the Beatles performed on the Our World satellite broadcast on 25 June 1967 and then rush-released as a single. The release took place on 7 July in the United Kingdom and on 17 July in the United States.

Further to Sgt. Pepper, which was issued in June 1967, the single provided a soundtrack to that year's Summer of Love. On 7 August, Harrison and a small entourage visited the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to experience the atmosphere in the self-styled centre of the hippie movement. When handed an acoustic guitar in Golden Gate Park, Harrison briefly performed "Baby, You're a Rich Man", leading a crowd around in a manner that press reports likened to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Later that year, contrary to the Beatles' wishes, "Baby You're a Rich Man" and other tracks from their 1967 singles were included on the US album Magical Mystery Tour, available in both mono and 'mock stereo' formats. While the song featured in the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, it was not included on the accompanying soundtrack album. The sequence for "Baby, You're a Rich Man" appears towards the end of the film, when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been released from the paralysis initiated by the Blue Meanies' hatred of music. Later editions of the US single include a voice saying "Seven" or "Eleven" before the song starts.

Critical reception
Writing in the NME in July 1967, Derek Johnson recognised the song's "modern" qualities, relative to the sing-along style of the A-side. He highlighted Lennon's falsetto singing, the recording's "Oriental instrumentation and … unusual shuffle beat, emphasised by handclaps", and concluded: "The whole effect is startling and packed with interest from the word go." Billboard's reviewer described it as "an Eastern-flavored rocker with an infectious beat and an intricate lyric". In 2010, "Baby, You're a Rich Man" was ranked at number 68 in Rolling Stone 's list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs. The magazine's editors wrote: "Lennon's deeply stoned delivery and abstract questions about 'the beautiful people' captured the play­fully spaced-out mood of the summer of 1967 – a spirit the Beatles were more tapped into than anyone."

In his assessment of the track, Ian MacDonald welcomes the use of clavioline, saying that the instrument evokes "a beguiling joss-stick exoticism", and he praises Starr's drumming as the equal of his performance on the song "Rain". MacDonald bemoans the lack of focus evident in this and other Beatles recordings from the immediate post-Sgt. Pepper period, however, saying that, while "Baby, You're a Rich Man" demonstrates the band's command of musical "feel" and "black-white acid-dance fusion" a year ahead of the Rolling Stones, McCartney's choruses are weak and, overall, the song is devoid of any "well-crafted music". In a 2009 review of Magical Mystery Tour, Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork Media dismissed the track as "a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme from the considerably stronger 'And Your Bird Can Sing'". He added that it was "the one lesser moment on an otherwise massively rewarding compilation". Writing for Mojo in 2002, Charles Shaar Murray defended the song's message and the band's utopian idealism: "Nobody thought that Baby You're A Rich Man was about money. And how did it feel to be one of the beautiful people? When we listened to The Beatles, we all were … This music was nothing if not inclusive. A splendid time was guaranteed for all." Dan Caffrey of Consequence of Sound writes that, while it lacks the wholly universal scope of other songs by the band, "it's a nice little Lennon morality ditty on the perils of materialism with some innovative work with the clavioline from Lennon."

Remixes, further releases and cover versions
For a 1971 German release of the Magical Mystery Tour album, George Martin and recording engineer Geoff Emerick created the first true stereo mix of the song; unable to recreate the spin-echo effect that had been introduced at the mixing stage of the original recording, they simply omitted it. The stereo mix fades out approximately eight seconds earlier than the mono version. When standardising the Beatles' catalogue for world-wide CD release in 1987, the (1971 stereo) Magical Mystery Tour album was included with the otherwise British album line-up.

"Baby, You're a Rich Man" was mixed in stereo for a second time for the 1999 DVD release of the Yellow Submarine film and the accompanying Yellow Submarine Songtrack album. Portions of Lennon's clavioline part appear in the Love version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", released in 2006. In 2009, remastered stereo (per 1971) and mono (per 1967) Magical Mystery Tour album CDs were released.

The song plays at the end of The Social Network, a 2010 film directed by David Fincher about the rise of Facebook. PM Dawn used a sample of the Beatles recording in their song "The Beautiful" from the 1991 album Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience.

The Fat Boys perform "Baby, You're a Rich Man" in the 1987 film Disorderlies. Their version of the song is also the first track on the Disorderlies soundtrack album. Australian group Company of Strangers recorded a cover version of the song on their 1992 album Company of Strangers. Umphrey's McGee played the song, with Béla Fleck guesting on banjo, during a live concert in Boulder, Colorado on 4 July 2014. Kula Shaker and the Presidents of the United States of America have also covered "Baby, You're a Rich Man".

Personnel
According to Mark Lewisohn and Ian MacDonald:

The Beatles
 * John Lennon – double-tracked lead vocal, piano, clavioline
 * Paul McCartney – backing vocals, bass, piano
 * George Harrison – backing vocals, lead guitar, handclaps
 * Ringo Starr – drums, tambourine, maracas, handclaps

Additional personnel
 * Eddie Kramer – vibraphone
 * Mick Jagger – backing vocals
 * George Martin – producer
 * Keith Grant – engineer