Blue Jay Way (4:42)

The name of the song comes from a street, located high in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Sunset Boulevard, which affords panoramic views of Hollywood and much of the Los Angeles Basin. It is reached from downtown Los Angeles via a complicated street route, which is all the harder to navigate on a foggy night — thus creating the backdrop for the opening lines of the song:

“There’s a fog upon L.A. / And my friends have lost their way”

According to Harrison: “Derek Taylor got held up. He rang to say he’d be late. I told him on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way. And he said he could find it OK… he could always ask a cop. So I waited and waited. I felt really knackered with the flight, but I didn’t want to go to sleep until he came. There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to pass the time while I waited, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this house which I hadn’t noticed until then… so I messed around on it and the song came.”

The song was recorded on 6 September 1967, with overdubs on 7 September and 6 October. The record employs flanging, an audio delay technique, and the stereo and mono mixes differ noticeably. For the stereo version, a full-length copy of the song was played backwards and faded in at key points in the mix. This was not done for the mono or film versions. The television film, Magical Mystery Tour, included the mono mix; the 1990s remastered version used a new stereo mix, sounding closer to the mono mix.