The Beatles‘ The White Album is, to put it mildly, strange. A fictional hero from adventure stories, an American historical figure, and an event in India inspired one track from The White Album. Here’s how that all went down.
1 song from The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’ was social commentary and a joke
The White Album is one of the oddest ducks in popular music history. It careens wildly between styles, embracing folk, rock, pop, vaudeville, blues, children’s music, and the avant-garde. While the record includes a lot of experiments, listeners tend to remember some of its radio-friendly tracks like “Blackbird,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Somewhere in between the commercial and the experimental is the unusual folk ditty “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” The track is about the title character killing a tiger. The tune goes back and forth between portraying the killing as tragic and heroic. It’s hard not to see “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” as a commentary on our culture’s conflicted relationship with animals and their rights.
During a 1980 interview found in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the “Imagine” singer discussed the origin of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” “Oh, that was written about a guy in the Maharishi [Mahesh Yogi]’s meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God,” he recalled. “There used to be a character called Jungle Jim and I combined him with Buffalo Bill. It’s a sort of teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke. Yoko’s on that one, I believe, singing along.”
Who Jungle Jim was before ‘The White Album’
So who was Jungle Jim? Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels were so popular that they inspired legions of knock-offs, including Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, George of the Jungle, and Jungle Jim. The latter was a comic strip character who inspired several films and a television series. After action star Johnny Weissmuller quit his role as Tarzan, he went on to play Jungle Jim in sixteen movies and a TV show.
Jungle Jim embodied a very masculine approach to the outdoors. Apparently John wasn’t thrilled what with that character represented. After all, Bungalow Bill doesn’t come across very well in hos own song.
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What Paul McCartney thought of The Beatles’ ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed his interpretation of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” He described the song as a satirical look at violent people. The cute Beatle compared “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” to another White Album track that speaks out against violence: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Considering that The Beatles wrote …read more
Source:: Showbiz Cheat Sheet