MOG

This is one of my favorite Beatles outtakes. I love the way John Lennon messes up the chords at the beginning of the song. And by the end he yells out, "I showed ya!" to George Martin in the control booth who replies, "Great fine."

To me this is a rare historical document hearing The Beatles in the recording studio. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall on this or any of these sessions. You would learn so much on how timeless music is created.

About the lyrics, Lennon said of the song: "I was trying to write about an affair, so it was very gobbledegooky. I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was having one. I was sort of writing from my experiences ... girls' flats, things like that."

There has been some misunderstanding of the ending lyric of this song: McCartney explained," It was a little parody, really, on those kind of girls who, when you'd get back to their flat, there would be a lot of Norwegian wood. It was completely imaginary from my point of view, but not from John's. It was based on an affair he had. She made him sleep in the bath and then, finally, in the last verse, I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as a revenge. She led him on and said, "You'd better sleep in the bath." And in our world, that meant the guy having some sort of revenge, so it meant burning the place down...."

I always naively heard the closing of Norwegian Wood as someone who's content of just sitting there and relishing the beauty of seeing the fireplace light up their stoic darkness. It's as if yr at peace with being on yr own. To me there's some kind of honor code about being the one who stays up and goes home alone and not submitting to the awkward humiliation of a casual affair.

Either way, this is still one of the best Beatles outtakes in their canon. I first heard it in this now defunct second hand record store in Austin, Texas. This was back in the late eighties when stores would sell Beatles bootlegs as "imports." This store had this Beatles Ultra Rare Trax disc and one of the first songs on it was this version Take 4 of Norwegian Wood. Looking back, I realize, that was the moment my obsession of hunting down Beatles audio outtakes as artifacts had begun.