How a Jungle Hero Inspired The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’
The Beatles‘ The White Album is, to put it mildly, strange. A fictional hero from adventure stories, an American historical figure, and an event in India inspired one track from The White Album. Here’s how that all went down.
1 song from The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’ was social commentary and a joke
The White Album is one of the oddest ducks in popular music history. It careens wildly between styles, embracing folk, rock, pop, vaudeville, blues, children’s music, and the avant-garde. While the record includes a lot of experiments, listeners tend to remember some of its radio-friendly tracks like “Blackbird,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Somewhere in between the commercial and the experimental is the unusual folk ditty “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” The track is about the title character killing a tiger. The tune goes back and forth between portraying the killing as tragic and heroic. It’s hard not to see “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” as a commentary on our culture’s conflicted relationship with animals and their rights.
During a 1980 interview found in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the “Imagine” singer discussed the origin of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” “Oh, that was written about a guy in the Maharishi [Mahesh Yogi]’s meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God,” he recalled. “There used to be a character called Jungle Jim and I combined him with Buffalo Bill. It’s a sort of teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke. Yoko’s on that one, I believe, singing along.”
Who Jungle Jim was before ‘The White Album’
So who was Jungle Jim? Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels were so popular that they inspired legions of knock-offs, including Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, George of the Jungle, and Jungle Jim. The latter was a comic strip character who inspired several films and a television series. After action star Johnny Weissmuller quit his role as Tarzan, he went on to play Jungle Jim in sixteen movies and a TV show.
Jungle Jim embodied a very masculine approach to the outdoors. Apparently John wasn’t thrilled what with that character represented. After all, Bungalow Bill doesn’t come across very well in hos own song.
What Paul McCartney thought of The Beatles’ ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed his interpretation of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” He described the song as a satirical look at violent people. The cute Beatle compared “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” to another White Album track that speaks out against violence: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Considering that The Beatles wrote The White Album during the Vietnam War and after they’d survived many death threats, it’s not surprising they’d be against violence.
In the nearly 60 years since The Beatles satirized Jungle Jim, the genre of jungle heroes and heroines has gone out of style. Disney has remade most of their famous cartoons, but Tarzan is nowhere on that list. Did The Beatles change our view of the jungle or were they just ahead of the curve yet again? You decide.
