Paul McCartney: “There was a story in the paper about ‘Lovely Rita,’ the meter maid. She’s just retired as a traffic warden,” McCartney recalled in The Beatles Anthology. “The phrase ‘meter maid’ was so American that it appealed, and to me a ‘maid’ was always a little sexy thing: ‘Meter maid. Hey, come and check my meter, baby.’ I saw a bit of that, and then I saw that she looked like a ‘military man.’”
" I have, earned my share of parking violations on the streets of London, so i came up with lyrics while walking near my brother Michael’s house."
The 23rd February, Thursday, am. With Geoff Emerick the stereo master of A day in the life. The session of the track began a 7,00 pm till 3-45 .
When completed the Beatles set to work on Paul’s new song Lovely Rita recording 8 rhythm tracks and reducing the 8 into track 9 on which Paul Overdubbed the bass. On Friday 24th, from 7:30Pm til 1:30 am Paul overdubbed his voice in Lovely Rita on Studio Two at EMI Abbey Road Studios. Source: The Complete Beatles Chronicles – by Mark Lewisohn
“I remember one night just going for a walk and working on the words as I walked,” he said in Many Years From Now. “This was about the time that parking meters were coming in; before that we’d been able to park freely, so people had quite an antagonistic feeling towards these people. I’d been nicked a lot for parking so the fun was to imagine one of them was a bit of an easy lay, ‘Come back to my place, darlin’.’ It somehow made them a figure of fun instead of a figure of terror and it was a way of getting me own back.”
Just few times late, after being at Brian Epstein’s dinner party to celebrate the ending of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul went out to Soho’s Bag O’Nails club. He was a regular with his own table. That night, May 15, 1967, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were playing. And that night an Amercian blonde fotographer was in the club. Linda Eastman. .
“I was near the edge and stood up just as she was passing, blocking her exit. And so I said, ‘Oh, sorry. Hi. How are you? How’re you doing?’ I introduced myself, and said, ‘We’re going on to another club after this, would you like to join us?’ That was my big pulling line! Well, I’d never used it before, of course, but it worked this time! It was a fairly slim chance but it worked.”
“I remember everybody at the table heard ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ that night for the first time and we all thought, ‘Who is that? Stevie Winwood?’ We all said Stevie,” she told Miles. “The minute that record came out, you just knew you loved it. That’s when we actually met.”
