Blue Jay Way

"Blue Jay Way" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. Written by George Harrison, it was released in 1967 on the group's Magical Mystery Tour EP and album. The song was named after a street in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles where Harrison stayed in August 1967, shortly before visiting the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. [Wikipedia]

Blue Jay Way is a song by The Beatles, written by Harrison and led on vocal by George Harrison. George written in LA waiting for friends in fog; Hammond drone, phasing. The song evoked a deliciously gloomy mood characteristic of Harrison's contributions, written while he waited in LA fog for friends to arrive (Kozinn 1995, p.169).

The session work falls within the band's Magical Mystery Tour (late 1967) period, recorded 6 Sep 1967 at EMI Studios + Olympic Sound Studios (Barnes) for some MMT/All You Need Is Love work. George Martin produced; Geoff Emerick engineered. For session-by-session detail, see Mark Lewisohn's account on p.123 of The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (excerpt below). Insufficient usable engineering detail available in Emerick's account for this Harrison composition. Harrison's composition employed Hammond organ drone and phasing effects to create an atmospheric texture, representing his developing production sophistication (MacDonald 1994, p.116).

In the canonical discography it on the EP Magical Mystery Tour. Documented alternate versions include 2009 Stereo Remasters. Mono and stereo histories vary by era — see the dedicated section below. Basic recording from 6 Sep 1967 with additional work on 7 Sep and 6 Oct; master used 4-track 3rd-generation tape; edited stereo version issued 7 Nov 1967.

• Lord Sitar included "Blue Jay Way" on his 1968 album of Indian music-style recordings, titled Lord Sitar. The artist credit was a pseudonym for London session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, although rumours circulated that Lord Sitar was in fact Harrison himself, partly as a r...
• "Blue Jay Way" was a rare Beatles song released before their 1968 self-titled double album that Charles Manson adopted as part of his theory of an impending social revolution in the United States, a scenario that led to his followers carrying out a series of murders in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969...
• Colin Newman, singer and guitarist with the post-punk band Wire, included a cover of "Blue Jay Way" on his 1982 solo album Not To. In March 2015, the song was his selection for the NME's "100 Greatest Beatles Songs" poll.
• Borbetomagus released a live recording of the song on their 1992 album Buncha Hair That Long, a version that Trouser Press later said "could easily reunite the Beatles for good if it were played in the presence of the surviving trio". On their 2003 live album Se...
• Harrison's experience when writing "Blue Jay Way" is referenced in the Jonathan Kellerman novel Obsession (2007), as the lead character, Alex Delaware, waits among the "bird streets" overlooking Sunset Strip. The US hip hop group Death Grips included a reversed sample of "Blue Jay Way" as well...
• In a 2011 interview, music producer and radio host Kim Fowley identified "Blue Jay Way" as the first song in which a member of the Beatles wrote about America and cited it as evidence of Harrison's standing as "the most American of all the Beatles" during the 1960s.