Some not at all lighthearted thoughts about Maxwell's Silver Hammer
I've been thinking a lot about Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Joe Orton, and 'original sin'.
Orton was killed by his (male) partner with a hammer on the 9th of August 1967. He had written a script for a potential Beatles movie (it was returned without comment) earlier that year. He was due to meet with Richard Lester on the morning of his death, to discuss filming a revised version of the script, with Mick Jagger as a possible lead.
18 days later, on the 27th of August, Brian Epstein was found dead.
Less than six months later, in Rishikesh, Paul started working on Maxwell's Silver Hammer. On the face of it, one of Paul's 'story songs'. On closer inspection though there's reason to suspect it's more symbolic and less allegorical. The timeline is off: Maxwell starts in college, then goes back to school, then suddenly finds himself in a court. The second and third verses are dream-like in their unrealism.
The other three Beatles' frustration with the recording of the song is well known, but John also said it was their first attempt at writing a song about Instant Karma.
From this site:
Former Apple employee Tony King expands on the song's meaning a little further in Steve Turner's book “A Hard Day's Write,” by relating a conversation he had with John Lennon concerning his song “Instant Karma.” “John told me that 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was about the law of karma. We were talking one day about 'Instant Karma' because something had happened where he's been clobbered and he'd said that this was an example of instant karma. I asked him whether he believed that theory. He said that he did and that 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was the first song that they'd made about that. He said that the idea behind the song was that the minute you do something that's not right, Maxwell's silver hammer will come down on your head.”
Paul tends to speak of the hammer metaphor more like random negative events, rather than some kind of deserved retribution, but he did talk about the breakup like this:
That whole period weighed on me to such an extent that I even began to think it was all tied in with the idea of original sin
So I was already thinking something along the lines of: what if John and Paul had come to some terrible conclusion about "sinful" gay activity attracting divine retribution. They decide they need to find "the right woman" to settle down with, and resist these "sinful" urges. Paul deals with this, in part, by writing a freaky song partially inspired by Orton's murder, where he giggles at the mention of the word 'behind' (in every take, apparently). He also allegedly obsesses over the recording of the song.
So when I saw this section of John's lyrics sheet for Now and Then I gasped:
Remember when we thought our life <love> had ended the gods had been offended
Yeah.
