Piggies

For the animal, see Pig. For the species in the Ender's Game series, see Pequeninos.
"Piggies"

Cover of the Apple Publishing sheet music
Song by the Beatles from the album The Beatles
Published Harrisongs
Released 22 November 1968
Recorded 19–20 September and 10 October 1968,
EMI Studios, London
Genre Baroque pop
Length 2:04
Label Apple
Writer George Harrison
Producer George Martin

"Piggies" is a song by the English rock group the Beatles from their 1968 album The Beatles (also known as "the White Album"). Written by George Harrison as a social commentary,[1] the song serves as an Orwellian-like satire on the greed and consumerism in mainstream society. The recording features harpsichord and orchestral strings in the baroque pop style, accompanied at times by the sound of grunting pigs. Although credited to George Martin, the track was largely produced by Chris Thomas, who also contributed the harpsichord part.

In the context of the turbulent political climate of 1968, "Piggies" was adopted by the counterculture as an anti-establishment theme song. It was also among the tracks on The Beatles that cult leader Charles Manson used as the foundation for his Helter Skelter theory of an American race-related countercultural revolution. Inspired especially by the line "What they need's a damn good whacking", Manson's followers left clues relating to the lyrics at the scenes of the Tate–LaBianca murders in August 1969.

Since its release in November 1968, "Piggies" has received a mixed response from music critics. While some reviewers admire its musical qualities and recognise sardonic humour in the lyrics, many others consider the song to be too direct and lacking in subtlety. A live version by Harrison, reinstating a verse that was omitted from the Beatles recording, appears on his 1992 album Live in Japan.

Composition and lyrics

This song was originally written in 1966 and worked up for the White Album after Harrison found a copy of the manuscript at his parents' home in 1968.[2][3] Harrison's mother provided the line "What they need's a damn good whacking",[4][5] and Lennon contributed the line "clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon".[2] There was an additional verse written for the song in 1968 but omitted during the actual recording. It involved the "piggies" playing "piggy pranks" and, in Harrison's original lyrics, "Paying piggy thanks – to thee Pig Brother!"[6] Harrison reinstated this verse in his live performances of the song in the 1990s. A version can be heard on his double album Live in Japan (1992).[7]

The original lyrics read "to cut their pork chops" (as heard on the Anthology 3 album). Lennon created the tape loop for the pig noises that were sampled for this song.[8] Author Walter Everett refers to the lyrics as involving an "Orwellian comparison of pigs to socially horrid though outwardly refined tyrants".[2] Pink Floyd (who were working on A Saucerful of Secrets at the same time), later released Animals in 1977, also about Orwell's social comparisons.

Musical structure

The harpsichord, an instrument long associated with classical music, features prominently on the Beatles' recording.

"Piggies" features a baroque-style harpsichord and string quartet – which take an unexpected turn at one point playing a blues riff (0:56). Chris Thomas (producing in George Martin's absence on some of the White Album sessions) played the harpsichord part.[2][9] Author Andrew Hickey identifies the song's mood as partly satirical in the style of Ray Davies of the Kinks, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.[10] Harrison biographer Simon Leng recognises the composition as essentially a folk song but given a "satirical, drawing-room [musical] arrangement".[11]

The song is in the key of A♭ and the verses (such as "Have you seen the little piggies in their starched white shirts?") open with a I-V-I-V (A♭ to E♭, A♭ to E♭) chord alternation.[12] The expected cycle of fifth notes in the scale is thwarted by means of a III7 on the way to the IV (subdominant) chord, the III7 (C7), pointedly accentuating, for example, the lyrics on "damn good whacking".[13] The unusual III7 (C7) move also appears just before the characteristically jarring shift down a tone to the minor ii (B♭m) on "In their sties".[13] The song has a subtle closing instance of the parallel minor/major principle as the harpsichord's C note (the major 3rd of the A♭ tonic key chord) shifts (at 1.44 s) to a darker C♭, creating a more "classical sounding" A♭m.[14] Harrison's vocals in the song notably range from a low E♭ bass note (at 1.28s) to a descant falsetto B♭4 (at 1.41 s).[2] Other features include the implied but unfulfilled tonicisation of VI in the bridge and a change of mode on the tonic in the coda in harpsichord and strings.[2][15]

Recording

The Beatles recorded "Piggies" at EMI's Abbey Road Studios on 19 and 20 September 1968.[16][17] Final overdubs on the song were completed at Abbey Road on 10 October.[18][19] These last additions included orchestral strings, which were also added to Lennon's "Glass Onion" that day, and the pig noises.[20]

The mono version (originally released on an LP mono incarnation of The Beatles) has the pig sounds positioned differently from that of the stereo mix.[21] The Beatles in Mono box set contains a version of The Beatles featuring this mono mix. At 1:53 on the released recording, Harrison can be heard saying, "One more time" before the orchestra plays the last two chords.

Release and reception

On the White Album, "Piggies" appears between two other songs with animals in their titles – "Blackbird" and "Rocky Raccoon".[22] This was a deliberate decision on the part of Lennon and McCartney,[23] who prepared the sequencing of the album's 30 tracks, with Martin,[24] after Harrison had left for Los Angeles to work with Apple Records signing Jackie Lomax.[25] Despite the humour and satire that Harrison had aimed for in the composition, "Piggies" was embraced as an anti-authoritarian anthem by the counterculture following the politically turbulent events of 1968.[5] However, while author Mark Hertsgaard later wrote that it "[kept] the Beatles' countercultural flame alive",[26] the track, like McCartney's "Rocky Raccoon", was identified by writers from the New Left as an example of the Beatles resorting to whimsical parody instead of addressing contemporary issues.[27]

Record Mirror remarked that the birdsong effects on "Blackbird" were replaced by "snorts and grunts" on "Piggies", which the reviewer described as "a society beef (or pork if you like)" that musically recalled the work of Roy Harper.[28] In Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner considered the song to be "an amazing choice to follow 'Blackbird'", given the contrast between the two pieces – "'Blackbird' so encouraging, 'Piggies' so smug (though accurate: 'what they need's a damn good whacking'). Ha!" Wenner added: "By comparison, both 'Piggies' and Ringo's polka, 'Don't Pass Me By' … are weak material against some of the superb numbers, although on their own, they're totally groovy."[29]

Melody Maker's Alan Walsh admired the instrumentation on the recording while deeming the song to be "The Beatles' satire track … a kick at upper-class reactionaries or journalists (or both)".[30][31] In his unfavourable review of the White Album, in The New York Times, Mike Jahn considered that many of the tracks were "either so corny or sung in such a way that it is hard to tell whether [the Beatles] are being serious", among which the words of Harrison's song served as "an act of lyrical overstatement".[32] Barry Miles of the International Times opined: "['Piggies'] is unsubtle but will probably find favour with those involved with Chicago's pig-police."[33] The Times' William Mann noted the recurring nature theme in many of the album's songs, from brief mentions of monkeys, lizards, elephants and tigers to titles such as "Blackbird" and "Piggies", and asked of Harrison's characters: "are they Chicago police or just company directors?"[34]

Charles Manson interpretation

Everybody was getting on the big Beatle bandwagon. The police and the promoters and the Lord Mayors – and murderers too … It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson.[35]

– George Harrison, in The Beatles Anthology (2000)

Charles Manson derived personal meaning from many songs on The Beatles,[36] which he interpreted as an inducement for him and his followers to carry out a series of murders in the summer of 1969.[37] "Piggies" was used in particular to justify attacks on the White establishment, with the lyrics "what they need's a damn good whacking" reflecting what Manson envisioned would be a Black victory in an apocalyptic racial uprising, after which America would be run on counterculture principles.[38][39] At the scene of the murders of Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Gary Hinman and others, the words "Political Piggy", "Pig" and "Death to Pigs" were written with the victims' blood on the walls. In the case of the LaBianca murders, knives and forks were inserted into the victims in reference to the lyric "Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon".[40]

Mugshot of Manson, taken in 1971

Speaking to Rolling Stone co-founder David Dalton before his trial, Manson also drew parallels between the pig noises that close the track and a similar sound, followed by machine-gun fire, that appears in Lennon's White Album sound collage "Revolution 9".[41][42] Like its rival counterculture publications Los Angeles Free Press and Tuesday's Child,[42] Rolling Stone initially supported Manson, Dalton contending that it was a case of the conservative authorities framing "some poor hippie guru".[41]

Harrison was appalled at Manson's interpretation of "Piggies";[43] he also found it disturbing that Manson came to define the long-haired hippie type in the public's eyes.[35][nb 1] In the 1974 book Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney in the Tate–LaBianca murder trial, said he was denied permission by Harrison to quote lyrics from the song.[44] The 1976 TV-movie adaptation of the book features several Beatles songs, including "Piggies" and Harrison's White Album track "Long, Long, Long", both performed by the group Silverspoon.[45]

Retrospective assessment and legacy

Among Beatles biographers, Philip Norman finds the song "mordantly humorous",[46] while Nicholas Schaffner wrote in The Beatles Forever (1977): "Although created before George's drug bust, Harrison's 'Piggies' are merciless stereotypes … they wallow in their 'clean dirt' and gorge themselves on bacon (the Beatles themselves had become vegetarians) to the accompaniment of a drawing-room harpsichord, as the boys oink derisively in the background."[47] In his book Revolution in the Head, music critic Ian MacDonald describes "Piggies" as a "bludgeoning satire on straight society", dismissing it as "dreadful" and "an embarrassing blot on [Harrison's] discography".[18]

Andrew Hickey writes that the song has received "a bad press", which he views as unfair given that Harrison's "attitude of 'look at those squares with their boring lives' was pretty much endemic in popular music around this time".[10] Hickey adds that the track contains one of its composer's "finest vocal performances" and deems the song to be "quite a fun little grotesquerie – a caricature, yes, but nowhere near as mean-spirited as its detractors would claim".[48] Reviewing Harrison's musical career in a 2002 issue of Goldmine magazine, Dave Thompson termed "Piggies" "whimsically foreboding" and grouped it with songs such as "Something" and "Long, Long, Long" that "certainly pointed the way toward Harrison's first solo triumphs" after the Beatles' break-up in 1970.[49] Author and critic Tim Riley views "Piggies" and the Harrison-written "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Savoy Truffle" as White Album "essentials", and he describes the song's narrative as "smug anti-elitism outdone only by the dourness of John's 'Glass Onion' and 'Sexy Sadie'".[50]

Among reviewers of the 2009 remastered album, Sean Highkin of Beats Per Minute cites the track as evidence that, despite the disharmony within the group during 1968, "All four Beatles were working at their highest levels", with "George at his most acerbic on 'Piggies'".[51] Mark Richardson of Pitchfork Media similarly highlights the song as one of The Beatles' "iffy jokes" that are "enjoyable", due to the high standard of the band's songwriting and the effective sequencing of the double album's 30 tracks.[52] AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine views "Piggies" as "silly" yet, like its composer's other White Album contributions, evidence that Harrison's songwriting had outgrown his typical quota of two songs on each Beatles LP.[53]

When Mojo released The White Album Recovered in 2008, part of a continuing series of CDs of Beatles albums covered track-by-track by modern artists, the track was covered by Pumajaw.[54]

Personnel

According to Ian MacDonald:[18]

The Beatles
Additional musicians

Notes

  1. ↑ In his 1980 autobiography, Harrison says of the "damn good whacking" line: "It needed to rhyme with 'backing', 'lacking', and had absolutely nothing to do with American policemen or Californian shagnasties!"[1]

References

  1. 1 2 Harrison 2002, p. 126.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Everett 1999, p. 199.
  3. ↑ Harry 2003, p. 296.
  4. ↑ Greene 2006.
  5. 1 2 Miles 2001, p. 317.
  6. ↑ Harrison 2002, pp. 126–27.
  7. ↑ Womack 2014, p. 728.
  8. ↑ Winn 2009, pp. 215, 218.
  9. ↑ Miles 2001, pp. 310, 317–18.
  10. 1 2 Hickey 2010, p. 149.
  11. ↑ Leng 2006, p. 37.
  12. ↑ Pedler 2003, p. 115.
  13. 1 2 Pedler 2003, pp. 109, 115.
  14. ↑ Pedler 2003, p. 185.
  15. ↑ Pollack, Alan W. (1998). "Notes on 'Piggies'". soundscapes.info. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  16. ↑ Lewisohn 2005, pp. 156–57.
  17. ↑ Miles 2001, p. 310.
  18. 1 2 3 MacDonald 1998, p. 278.
  19. ↑ Lewisohn 2005, p. 161.
  20. 1 2 3 4 Winn 2009, p. 218.
  21. ↑ Hickey 2010, p. 150.
  22. ↑ Hickey 2010, pp. 149, 150.
  23. ↑ Fontenot, Robert. "The Beatles Songs: 'Piggies' – The history of this classic Beatles song". oldies.about.com. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  24. ↑ MacDonald 1998, p. 286.
  25. ↑ Miles 2001, p. 312.
  26. ↑ Hertsgaard 1996, p. 258.
  27. ↑ Wiener 1991, pp. 65–66.
  28. ↑ Uncredited writer (16 November 1968). "The Beatles: The Beatles (White Album) (Apple)". Record Mirror. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
  29. ↑ Wenner, Jann S. (21 December 1968). "Review: The Beatles' 'White Album'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  30. ↑ Walsh, Alan (9 November 1968). "The Beatles The Beatles (Apple)". Melody Maker. p. 5.
  31. ↑ Sutherland, Steve (ed.) (2003). NME Originals: Lennon. London: IPC Ignite!. p. 53.
  32. ↑ Jahn, Mike (21 November 1968). "The Beatles: The Beatles [The White Album] (Apple)". New York Times. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
  33. ↑ Miles, Barry (29 November 1968). "The Beatles: The Beatles (White Album)". International Times. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
  34. ↑ Mann, William (22 November 1968). "The New Beatles Album". The Times. p. 5.
  35. 1 2 The Beatles 2000, p. 311.
  36. ↑ Schaffner 1978, p. 115–16.
  37. ↑ Goldmine staff (16 October 2008). "The White Album: Artistic zenith or full of filler? Part III". Goldmine. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  38. ↑ [Famous Trials by Douglas O. Linder (2014) UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-KANSAS CITY (UMKC) SCHOOL OF LAW retrieved 17/12/2014 The Influence of the Beatles on Charles Manson
  39. ↑ cielodrive.com, retrieved 17/12/2014, STATE OF CALIFORNIA BOARD OF PAROLE HEARINGS In the matter of the Life Term Parole Consideration Hearing of:LESLIE VAN HOUTEN
  40. ↑ Bugliosi & Gentry 1994, p. 325.
  41. 1 2 Dalton, David (October 1998). "If Christ Came Back as a Con Man: Or how I started out thinking Charlie Manson was innocent and almost ended up dead". Gadfly Online. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  42. 1 2 Felton, David; Dalton, David (25 June 1970). "Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
  43. ↑ Williamson, Nigel (February 2002). "Only a Northern Song: The songs George Harrison wrote for The Beatles". Uncut. p. 61.
  44. ↑ Bugliosi & Gentry 1994, p. 324.
  45. ↑ Womack 2014, pp. 572, 728.
  46. ↑ Norman 1996, p. 341.
  47. ↑ Schaffner 1978, p. 115.
  48. ↑ Hickey 2010, pp. 149–50.
  49. ↑ Thompson, Dave (25 January 2002). "The Music of George Harrison: An album-by-album guide". Goldmine. p. 15.
  50. ↑ Riley 2002, pp. 260, 262.
  51. ↑ Highkin, Sean (10 September 2009). "The Beatles – The Beatles [White Album] [Remaster]". Beats Per Minute. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  52. ↑ Richardson, Mark (10 September 2009). "The Beatles: The Beatles". Pitchfork Media. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
  53. ↑ Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "The Beatles The Beatles [White Album]". AllMusic. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
  54. ↑ http://www.mojocovercds.com/cd/305

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External links

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