The final album released by The Beatles wasn’t supposed to go out in the form it eventually did. It was almost entirely recorded before the one that preceded its release, Abbey Road, as an attempt to get the band back to where they once belonged, in the mood for making raw-edged rock and roll music. But Let It Be turned out to be a fitting epitaph, a final sigh of acceptance that the group had had a good run and all things must pass.
And its low-key opener ‘Two of Us’ is a suitably wistful reminder of what once was in the songwriting partnership to rule them all. Paul McCartney’s tune may have been written for his wife Linda, but its yearning middle-eight and talk of “chasing paper”, his lyrical life partner John Lennon looms large. The lyrics are tragically prophetic, as McCartney sings to Lennon that their memories together stretch back “longer than the road ahead”. A year longer, as it turned out, with the song released just under 12 years after their first meeting and almost 11 years before Lennon was gunned down by Mark David Chapman.
Drawing on the band’s original idea of recording their album live, eventual Let It Be producer Phil Spector interspersed songs with snippets of studio repartee to mimic the stage patter of a live performance. He kept Lennon’s joke about having “passed the audition” from The Beatles’ famous rooftop concert at the end of closer ‘Get Back’. But additionally used a cut-and-pasted Lennon quip for the start of ‘Two of Us’ as well.
Before the song’s opening acoustic guitar riff, Lennon announces, “‘I Dig a Pygmy’, by Charles Hawtry and the Deaf-Aids. Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats.” There are several different in-jokes and references to unpack there. Spector himself didn’t bother to understand any of them, it seems, as the pronouncement actually refers to another song on the album, ‘I Dig a Pony’. The producer focused on the “Phase One” element of the quip, seeing it as an appropriate introduction to the album.
Lennon appears to substitute “Pygmy” for “Pony” purely on the basis that it rhymes with “Dig” and uses a favourite food of the titular small horse to create a bawdy double entendre. The expression “gets her oats” alludes to a British euphemism for having sex, in which someone “sows their oats”. Doris is a common name for a pet pony.
Who was Charles Hawtry?
On the other hand, Doris is the name of the highly sexualised female protagonist of the British comedy farce Carry On Screaming!, a 1966 release from the Carry On film series. The Beatles were notable fans of Carry On movies, which usually starred the actor Charles Hawtry as the butt of many of their jokes.
While riffing in typically absurdist fashion in between song takes, Lennon’s razor-sharp mind makes a quickfire link between Hawtry, the character Doris Mann, the preferred food of ponies and the kind of sexual innuendo rife in Carry On comedy. In homage to early Beatles heroes Buddy Holly and the Crickets, he gives Hawtry his own backing band, too: The Deaf-Aids.
Deaf-aids was a term for hearing aids widespread in Britain at the time. But it was also the humorous nickname The Beatles gave to their Vox guitar amps.
It’s astounding just how many parts are packed into that single throwaway witticism, made off-the-cuff as an aside from the material The Beatles were supposed to be recording. This is just one example of Lennon’s brilliant comic instincts. Perhaps Spector did get it after all and felt the line had to be given special prominence right at the beginning of the record.
