Paul McCartney is no stranger to divine intervention when it comes to music. As one of history’s best songwriters, it seems like fate so often stepped in to make The Beatles’ principal penman a star. But one of those instances wasn’t for any of his own projects as he put a track down on tape in under an hour, all to give another band a hit.
There are plenty of stories of McCartney being hit around the head with a timeless classic. In the case of ‘Let It Be’, he dreamed up the fully formed track in his sleep, proving his talent is subconscious, too. The same goes for ‘Yesterday’ as he woke up with the melody in his head one morning. As a duo, John Lennon and McCartney seemed to take pride in their speed, regularly writing a song in under three hours and playing games with themselves by trying to make that process faster and faster.
In the case of one track, he managed to cut his time down to a personal best of around 30 minutes. However, that song wasn’t for The Beatles but for one of the bands they’d signed to their Apple Records label. After being scouted by the Fab Four’s tour manager, Mal Evans, he started managing Badfinger, a Welsh group brought into the fold in 1968. While at the time, The Beatles were still writing, recording, and releasing music before their split, they were all beginning to get distracted in other directions. For McCartney, that came in the form of helping out the new rock band.
“I said, ‘Great band, but they’re gonna need a hit,’” McCartney told Evans when it came to Badfinger. After being signed to Apple, they’d changed their name from The Iveys to Badfinger and begun their mission to launch as the UK’s newest classic rock obsession. The Beatle offered his services in the form of a song.
It seems that all his best ideas come to him in the comfort of his bed as McCartney remembered, “One night I was in bed, and I couldn’t get to sleep so just ran downstairs and had this little idea for ‘Come and Get It’”. Seemingly landing in his lap as an immediately fully formed track, he took it to the studio the next day.
“We were set up to make a Beatles album, can’t remember which one it was,” he remembered, with the album most likely being Abbey Road as this track was written in 1969. “But we were all in the studio. The drums were mic’d, everything was mic’d for the next day,” he continued, “So I just ran in and said to Phil McDonalds, the engineer, ‘Everyone gonna get here in half an hour. Before they get here, I wanna do a quick demo’. I said, ‘I know exactly what I wanna do, get the mics, go now.’”
In the half-hour deadline, McCartney sped through the recording, knowing exactly what he wanted from each instrument. “We did it in about half an hour. We made that demo,” he said.
He was so certain of his vision for the song that he even demanded that Badfinger didn’t change a thing about the piece when they came to record it themselves. “I said to Badfinger, it’s gotta be exactly like this. The band were like, ‘Well, no. We’re gonna do it a little differently.’ I said, ‘No, do the rest of the album like that, but this has gotta be exactly like this because this is the hit’,” he explained, “And in the end, they did.”
Across the course of his career, whether with The Beatles, Wings, in his solo career or as a co-writer, Paul McCartney has bagged 32 Billboard number ones. So, really, Badfinger should never have doubted his view of the track. They did right to follow his instructions, as McCartney said, “We did get a big number one hit which introduced them to the world.” Earning the top spot in both the UK and US, ‘Come and Get It’ was another hit offered to McCartney by the musical gods.
