Written at a low point for the Beatle, the song went through many iterations — and was transformed by David Bowie
To Abbey Road or The White Album and only appeared on Let It Be when they were looking for material to fill the record with.
There were many takes from the February recording sessions: one features the voices of two teenage girls, Lizzie Bravo and Gayleen Pease, pulled from the line of “Apple scruffs” — the obsessive fans who held a permanent vigil outside Abbey Road studios. Another version was donated to comedian Spike Milligan for his 1969 World Wildlife Fund charity album No One’s Gonna Change Our World, overdubbed with birdsong; this was the song’s first release.
The version most of us know was finished off by producer Phil Spector. Lennon said — again, in Playboy — that McCartney had deliberately ruined the song’s recording process and that’s why it sounded so rickety: “Nobody was supporting me or helping me with it, but we would spend hours doing little detail cleaning on Paul’s. When it came to mine, somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness — ‘Let’s try a few experiments’ — would come over. It was subconscious sabotage.”
