The view from the remote B842 which is thought to have inspired Paul McCartney (Image: Courtesy Jon Combe)
Ventura Highway. Route 66. Highway 61. The New Jersey Turnpike. Santa Monica Boulevard. For as long as there’s been cars and rock ’n’ roll, musicians have been inspired to write songs about roads – more often than not in America.
And yet, arguably, the most famous road song of them all isn’t about a highway in California, Arizona or Texas. In fact the name, or rather number, of the road which inspired the ballad in question isn’t even mentioned in the lyrics, which probably helps explain why the B842 has yet to enter into rock mythology, let alone the public consciousness.
In 1967, right at the peak of Beatlemania, Paul McCartney bought a rural retreat in Scotland as a way of escaping from the media circus which was beginning to engulf the band.
Situated on the remote Kintyre Peninsula, High Park Farm was at that stage a semi-derelict property overrun by rats and in dire need of a lick of paint.
Other than a series of connecting ferries, the only way of getting there from London involved a circuitous 540-mile drive via a series of outposts to the north and west of Glasgow. The final stage of that journey along the single-track B842, besides being extremely twisty, was also the most scenic, with the Kilbrannan Sound and the majestic mountains of the Isle of Arran on the left and the heather-clad slopes of Kintyre to the right.
The traffic on this stunning stretch of road was, and indeed remains, sparse.
McCartney could drive for miles and not see a single soul. Which, given all the attention he was getting in the real world, was just what he wanted.
The Beatles last public performance together, on the roof of their London HQ in January 1969 (Image: The Beatles)
Over the next couple of years, McCartney started making improvements to High Park Farm with help from Linda Eastman, his then-girlfriend and eventual wife.
“Linda said, ‘We could do this place up’, and I’d never thought of that,” McCartney would recall. “I thought it just stayed how you bought it. I just wasn’t enterprising enough to actually think, ‘We could clean this place up!’ Linda really turned me onto it. I quite liked it before.
“I liked its isolation and I liked the privacy and the end-of-the-world remoteness compared to a city.”
For her part, Linda once said: “Scotland was like nothing I’d ever lived in. It was the most beautiful land you have ever seen.
“It was way at the end of nowhere. To me, it was the first feeling I’d ever had of civilisation dropped away.
“I felt like it was in another era. It was so beautiful up there, clean, so differentfrom all the hotels and limousines and the music business, so it was quite a relief, but it was very derelict.”
While McCartney’s attempts at DIY were coming to fruition, so his group was starting to fall apart at the seams.
The Long and Winding Road was one of the highlights of the Let It Be sessions (Image: The Beatles)
George Harrison, disheartened at the way his songs were being rejected for albums in favour of those penned by McCartney and John Lennon, had already left The Beatles once before returning to the fold.
Lennon himself was choosing to spend more time with Yoko Ono, whose presence in the studio during recording sessions was not welcomed by everyone. Unbeknown to the four of them, their business affairs were in disarray, with Allen Klein having been brought in – against McCartney’s wishes – to run the band’s affairs following the death of Brian Epstein, their mentor and original manager, in August 1967.
Through it all, though, their music remained beyond compare.
Despite being the penultimate album The Beatles recorded, Let It Be, for all sorts of reasons, proved to be the last one released as a band. Many of the tracks on it remain paragons of songwriting excellence – Get Back, The Ballad of John and Yoko, Across The Universe and the eponymous title track.
And then there was McCartney’s song about a long, and winding, road leading through a rain-lashed landscape to “your door” – a song that would, in the final reckoning, sound the death knell for The Beatles.
McCartney himself, mindful perhaps of his privacy at a turbulent time in his life, never categorically stated that The Long And Winding Road was in fact the B842. He did, however, suggest to confidantes that it formed the bedrock on which the song – which reflects the frustrations and discord in the band towards the end of the 1960s – had been written.
“I was a bit flipped out and tripped out at that time,” he later admitted. “It’s a sad song because it’s all about the unattainable, the door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of.”
In reality, the B842 does have an end, running out of Tarmac amid Kintyre’s southern extremes not long after passing through Campbeltown, by some distance the Peninsula’s largest settlement with a population in the region of just 4,500.
It also happens to be the town where McCartney bought much of the second-hand furniture which went towards furnishing High Park Farm. Written in 1968 and recorded the following year, The Long And Winding Road ended up being one of 11 songs included on Let It Be.
Initially the album was engineered by Glyn Johns, who would go on to produce records for a who’s who of top bands including The Eagles and The Who.
However, when Allen Klein heard the results he decided to ditch Johns and bring in the legendary producer Phil Spector to beef up the sound, without McCartney knowing anything about it.
When McCartney heard what Spector had done to The Long And Winding Road, he was furious.
Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album took it’s title from a US road (Image: Columbia Records)
In the words of Beatles’ fan and biographer Hunter Davies, “Spector turned it into a lush, mushy, orchestral smoochy number, like a corny Hollywood film score, with an over-the-top female choir in the background”.
McCartney asked for the song to be restored to its original form, which had been more of a jazzy number written with the voice of Ray Charles, the iconic American singer and pianist, in mind.
“It doesn’t sound like him at all, because it’s me singing and I don’t sound anything like Ray,” McCartney once remarked. “But, sometimes, you get a person in your mind, just for an attitude, just for a place to be, so that your mind is somewhere rather than nowhere.”
When that request was ignored by Klein, McCartney announced he was leaving the band. By the time Let It Be entered the albums charts in May 1970, The Beatles were no more.
All that remained was for the band to be dissolved through the law courts later that year.
Today, 54 years later, the B842 continues to serve the far-flung communities and outposts along the eastern flank of Kintyre in much the same way as it did when McCartney first discovered the Peninsula back in the 1960s.
Out here, there are no speed cameras, only wildlife – more wildlife than cars. It may not be California, Arizona, or Texas. The kicks might be altogether different than the ones found on Route 66. And it’s certainly not Santa Monica Boulevard or Highway 61.
Yet, when it comes to roads that have inspired songs, you have to go some to beat the remote glory of the B842.
Singer/songwriter Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, pictured in 1967, sang about the New Jersey Turnpike (Image: Michael Ochs Archives)
