When you consider The Beatles‘ discography, some of their songs are much more straightforward than others. For instance, when you listen to their early work, a lot of tracks have a sweet and simple meaning behind them that you can more or less work out from the very first listen. Songs like ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘P.S. I Love You’, despite being excellent, don’t need a whole lot of explanation.
Later in the Beatles’ discography, their songs started to become slightly more abstract. Some tracks submerged themselves completely in the realm of fiction, like songs on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while others took from real-world events but were contorted throughout the creative process.
Consider a track like ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’, which Paul McCartney wrote after a fan had broken into his house and stolen a photo of his father. While those events formed the backbone of the track, McCartney gave himself creative license on the song, writing lyrics that made the meaning more convoluted but that gave the track added rhythm and excitement.
Of course, there are some Beatles songs whose meaning is completely lost and up for debate. One of these tracks is ‘Fixing A Hole’, which has three interesting stories attached to it, each of which could potentially give the song a different meaning.
The first is that the song was written about a leaky roof in Scotland. Paul McCartney has confirmed this theory, as he said that the song was about the roof in his farm, which had a hole in it. The hole was so bad that rain used to get into the property and cause minor floods, which Paul used as a muse.
Because of the ambiguous lyricism of some of the Beatle’s previous hits, though, and fans’ willingness to link some of their songs to drugs, a lot of people thought that the song was actually about a reliance on heroin. They believed the track was less about fixing an actual hole and instead was about “getting a fix”. This wasn’t the only time that fans linked an innocent Beatles track with drugs; John Lennon had to repeatedly confirm that ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ wasn’t about LSD.
The final story attached to this song, which didn’t impact the meaning but did impact the recording, was the fact that Jesus sat in on the recording process. McCartney recalled when there was a knock at the studio door and a stranger was on the other side, “I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m Jesus’, so I said, ‘Well, you better come in then’.”
McCartney said he didn’t want to turn him away just in case he was Jesus, so the would-be-Messiah sat in on the recording session and watched the band do what they do best. “So, he sat there for the session of ‘Fixing A Hole’,” recalled McCartney, “We just made it, made the record, said goodnight, and I’ve never seen him since.”
The meaning of the song and the band’s mindset when making it remain in contention. Whether it was the mundane, the addictive, or the divine, it plays a part in ‘Fixing A Hole’.
