Origins
It was improvised by Lennon while he, Starr and McCartney were running through two other songs of his, the future Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard" and the unreleased song "Madman", which the Beatles ultimately abandoned after a few run-throughs. The song is very often associated with three other songs by the Beatles. The first song associated with it is the structurally similar McCartney tune "I've Got a Feeling", which the Beatles eventually released. One of the most intelligible pieces of lyric in the whole song is the oft-repeated line "Standing in the garden, waiting for the sun to shine," which is reminiscent of a line from an earlier Beatles tune, "I Am the Walrus", which contains the line "Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun." Because of this slight similarity, the song is often interpreted as being derived or loosely inspired by "I Am the Walrus". The third song connected to it, because it was being played right before they went off into "Watching Rainbows", is "Mean Mr. Mustard".
"Watching Rainbows" became one of the three songs that made "I've Got a Feeling". The other two songs were "I've Got a Feeling", and Lennon's "Everyone Had a Hard Year", which is another unreleased song from the Get Back sessions.
"Watching Rainbows" was also the name of a bootleg, released in 1978.
Read more about this topic: Watching Rainbows
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)