Fixing A Hole

Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“Fixing a Hole” is a song written by Paul McCartney (credited to Lennon–McCartney) and recorded by the Beatles, featured on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Writing

In a 1968 interview, McCartney said that the song was “about the hole in the road where the rain gets in, a good old analogy—the hole in your make-up which lets the rain in and stops your mind from going where it will.” He went on to say that the following lines were about fans who hung around outside his home day and night, and whose actions he found off-putting:

See the people standing there
who disagree, and never win
And wonder why they don’t get in my door

Recording

The first of two recording sessions for the song was at Regent Sound Studio in London on 9 February 1967 in three takes. Regent was used because EMI’s Abbey Road studios were not available that night. This was the first time that the Beatles used a British studio other than Abbey Road for an EMI recording. Overdubs were recorded on 21 Feb 1967 at EMI studios Abbey Road.

The lead vocal was recorded at the same time as the rhythm track, a change from their post-1964 approach of overdubbing the vocal.

Paul has also stated about the recording: “The funny thing about that was the night when we were going to record it, at Regent Sound Studios at Tottenham Court Road, I brought a guy who was Jesus. A guy arrived at my front gate and I said, ‘Yes? Hello’ because I always used to answer it to everyone. If they were boring I would say, ‘Sorry, no,’ and they generally went away. This guy said, ‘I’m Jesus Christ.’ I said, ‘Oop,’ slightly shocked. I said, ‘Well, you’d better come in then.’ I thought, Well, it probably isn’t. But if he is, I’m not going to be the one to turn him away. So I gave him a cup of tea and we just chatted and I asked, ‘Why do you think you are Jesus?’ There were a lot of casualties about then. We used to get a lot of people who were maybe insecure or going through emotional breakdowns or whatever. So I said, ‘I’ve got to go to a session but if you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner, you can come.’ So he did, he came to the session and he did sit very quietly and I never saw him after that. I introduced him to the guys. They said, ‘Who’s this?’ I said, ‘He’s Jesus Christ.’ We had a bit of a giggle over that…But that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus!“

Musical structure

The song alternates between the key of Fm (in verse) and F (in bridge) in basically 4/4 time with a structure of Intro -> Verse -> Verse -> Bridge -> Verse -> Verse (Guitar Solo) -> Bridge -> Verse -> Outro (fadeout). On track one George Martin opens on harpsichord briefly playing a descending chromatic line (resembling “Michelle“) in a staccato-like pattern 4/4 time, but Ringo’s hi-hat in the final measure of the introduction introduces a swing beat that stays for the remainder of the song. The first eight-measure verse begins with Paul’s vocals on track three (“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in“). The optimistic word “Fixing” here is sung to a piano F major chord (bass now also on track one playing an F note) but on “hole” a C aug chord (which includes a G# note that is a III (3rd) note in the thus predicted Fm scale) (bass now playing a C or V (5th) note in both the F major and F minor scales) pivoting towards the Fm pentatonic minor scale on the more negative mood of “rain gets in“. The Fm key melody in the verse is tinged both by blues flat 7th, and dorian mode raised 6th notes. The harpsichord repeats the descending chromatic line in the F minor key in swing beat.

In the second half of the verse Paul’s bass begins a syncopated three-note pattern that leaves the downbeat empty, meanwhile Paul’s vocal is dropping to F an octave below (on “stops my mind“), climbing back to C (“from wandering“) then sailing free of the song’s established octave to a high falsetto A flat on “where it will go.” George Harrison then comes in on track two in the seventh and eighth measure with a syncopated distorted Stratocaster with gain, treble and bass all turned up high, providing his distinctive counter-melody, double-tracked phrase descending from Paul’s high A flat vocal note through a “series of biting inversions on the tonic chord;” George later adding an eight bar solo that culminates in a two octave descent. McCartney, Lennon and Harrison do backing vocals on track 4 for the bridge (“And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right where I belong I’m right“) in the parallel major key (F). This shift between minor (verse) and major (bridge) is also seen in the songs “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (verse E, chorus Em); “Michelle” (verse F, chorus Fm); “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (bridge A, verse Am), “I Me Mine” (chorus A, verse Am), “The Fool on the Hill” (verse D, chorus Dm) and “Penny Lane” (verse [bars 1-3] B, verse [bars 4-8] Bm).

Live performances

Paul McCartney performed the song live for the first time by any Beatle on his 1993 New World Tour. He later reprised the song on his 2005 US Tour. […]

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 21 Feb 1967. edited.
UK: Parlophone PMC 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol MAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.

[b] stereo 7 Apr 1967.
UK: Parlophone PCS 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol SMAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46442 2 Sgt Pepper 1987.

The mono is two mixes edited together. The mono is a few seconds longer, long fade.

Before I write a song, there’s a black hole and then I get my guitar or piano and fill it in. The notion that there is a gap to fill is no less honourable a basis for an inspiration than a bolt of lightning coming down out of the sky. One way or another, it’s a miracle. I sit down and there’s a blackness. There’s nothing in this hole. Maybe I start conjuring and at the end of three hours I have a rabbit to pull out of what had looked like a hole but was actually a top hat. Or, at the end of the session there’s not a black hole any more but a coloured landscape.

On the subject of coloured landscapes, I was the last in the group to take LSD. John and George had urged me to do it so that I could be on the same level as them. I was very reluctant because I’m actually quite strait-laced, and I’d heard that if you took LSD you would never be the same again. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I wasn’t sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant. In the end I did give in and take LSD one night with John.

I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn’t screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn’t. You’d say, “Okay, that’s enough, party’s over,” and it would say, “No it isn’t.” So you would have to go to bed seeing things.

Around that time, when I closed my eyes, instead of there being blackness there was a little blue hole. It was as if something needed patching. I always had the feeling that if I could go up to it and look through, there would be an answer. The most important influence here was not even the metaphysical idea of a hole, but this absolutely physical phenomenon — something that first appeared after I took acid. I still see it occasionally, and I know exactly what it is. I know exactly what size it is.

Paul McCartney – From Paul McCartney on his lyrics: ‘Eroticism was a driving force behind everything I wrote’ | Times2 | The Times – From “The Lyrics”, 2021

It’s about the hole in your make-up which lets the rain in and stops your mind going where it will. The ‘Silly people who run around, they worry me, and never ask why they don’t get in my door.’ These were the fans that constantly besieged my home, often camping outside on the pavement for days. If only they knew that the best way to get in is not to do that, because, obviously, anyone who is going to be straight and like a real friend and a real person, is going to get in. Sometimes I invite them in, but it starts not to be not really the point, because I invited one in and the next day she was in the Daily Mirror with her mother, saying we were going to get married.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

I stayed with [Paul] for four months and he had a music room at the top of his house with his multi-coloured piano and we were up there a lot of the time. We wrote ‘Sgt Pepper’ and also another song on the album, ‘Fixing A Hole’. When the album came out, I remember it very clearly, we were driving somewhere late at night. There was Paul, Neil Aspinall and myself and the driver in the car, and Paul turned round to me and said, ‘Look Mal, do you mind if we don’t put your name on the songs? You’ll get your royalties and all that, because Lennon and McCartney are the biggest things in our lives. We are really a hot item and we don’t want to make it Lennon-McCartney-Evans. So, would you mind?’ I didn’t mind, because I was so in love with the group that it didn’t matter to me. I knew myself what had happened.

Mal Evans – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

Last updated on February 13, 2023

Lyrics

Variations