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The Source Of The Intro To Bungalow Bill Revealed!

If you own a copy of The Beatles, better known as "The White Album", you will probably know the intro I am speaking of.  Very unlike anything preceding or following it, the intro to The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill is an acoustic flamenco guitar riff.

I have read several theories in the past as to who played this intro.  If you listen to any number of Beatles tracks, it becomes clear that guitar line is too intricate for any of The Beatles to have played (fine musicians though they were).  The major speculation was that Eric Clapton (who played lead on While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the same album) played this line, or that it was some snippet of a recording from the EMI vault.  It's fascinating to learn that it's actually a 'sample' from the mellotron, an organ-like instrument made famous by another John Lennon song (Strawberry Fields Forever).

Here's the clip of someone fiddling with a mellotron today, demonstrating the guitar sample:

Here's the original recording of "The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill".  The story behind this song is rather interesting.  As with most of the songs from The Beatles (The White Album), this song was written while The Beatles were on a spiritual retreat in Rishikesh, India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  This song is based upon an American man who took a break from the same retreat The Beatles were attending to go hunting.  John found the hypocrisy and irony too great: the man saw no conflict between meditation and the killing of beasties.  He was going to hunt down a few animals and then get back to the retreat in time to finish his meditation stuff.  While not a particularly great song by Beatles standards, it's there nonetheless.

Here's Strawberry Fields Forever, probably the one song in the history of music most associated with the mellotron.  The mellotron on this track is the flute-like sound in the intro, which you can also hear repeated throughout the song.  The mellotron was unique in its ability to make many different kinds of sounds, which it achieved through multiple loops of magnetic tape that would play when the corresponding key on the keyboard was pressed.