After the summer of love’s lysergic pop psychedelia began to wear off, and the emerging roots rock trends sought to pull music toward a more rustic and foundational plane long before acid’s arrival on the charts, so too did The Beatles seek to shake off their kaleidoscopic regiment uniforms on 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Fab Four wanted to present their awaited follow-up album free of any grand concept or Technicolour marvel in favour of a simple eponymous title and blank white artwork.
Released in 1968, The Beatles double LP didn’t lack imagination, however. Behind its empty canvas is a jumbled toybox of an album, a messy, strewn-together brilliance of a record that dizzyingly races across everything from proto-heavy metal, cod reggae, avant-garde sound collages, and orchestral lullabies.
Running the gamut of grade-A Beatles and aggressively bad Fab Four cuts, the record’s charm is its scrappiness—30 songs lumped together haphazardly with little care for cohesion or arc—and all the more interesting for it. Its low points become part of the album’s appeal, with ‘Wild Honey Pie’, ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, or the blood-pressure raising ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ all infuriating yet essential features of The Beatles‘ enduring mythos and character.
By this point, lead guitarist George Harrison was seriously coming into his own as a songwriter. Always interesting, and adding a uniquely introspective flavour to the otherwise John Lennon and Paul McCartney-dominated songbook. Ever since With the Beatles‘ ‘Don’t Bother Me’, Harrison spent a couple of years across the psychedelia era seemingly more immersed in Hindu spirituality and sitar mastery over the frivolities of rock and pop. Yet, following the band’s Rishikesh retreat and preparations for the new album, ‘The Quiet Beatle’ began to flex his writing muscles in earnest, as well as dispel the perceptions of his mystical aloofness.
Owing to the expanded double album length, Harrison boasts four compositions for The Beatles, the most for any of their records. From ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ meditative rock and ‘Long, Long, Long’s’ divine communion to the ‘Piggies’ baroque satire, Harrison gifted the record with some of its most essential numbers. It’s true of ‘Savoy Truffle’, too, the horn blasting sunny cheer of a cut that glows with infectious mirth and hooky bounce.
So, who is The Beatles’ ‘Savoy Truffle’ aimed at?
Fractures had begun to emerge in The Beatles’ creative unity, the result of ten years slogging it together as teens from way back in the Cavern Club and Hamburg days, and later weathered by Beatlemania’s wild hysteria. Nearing their 30s, the band was growing apart. Seeking varying company and inspiration, Harrison struck up a lifelong friendship with Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, inviting him to play the memorable solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and later co-writing Cream’s final single, ‘Badge’, the following year.
Alongside a penchant for alcohol and heroin, Clapton was famed for his sweet tooth, known for polishing off a box of Mackintosh’s Good News chocolates in no time. “He always had toothache, but he ate a lot of chocolates,” Harrison revealed in the memoir, I Me Mine. “Once he saw a box, he had to eat them all”. Taking lyrical cues from the box’s inner list of chocolate types, as well as making up a few such as “coconut fudge” and “pineapple heart”, the singer reels off the confectionery delights before warning Clapton of indulging in that one truffle too many lest his teeth fall out.
‘Savoy Truffle’s’ a joyous cut, charged by a renewed love of the guitar and R&B roots, and showcases Harrison’s deft lyrical knack for crafting songs that could veer into lighthearted and silly just as easily as he could dream up some of most cerebral and transportive numbers of The Beatles’ songwriting canon.