The Story behind “Blue Jay Way”

Interestingly, on August 1^st, 1967, the day that George had given Chris Agajanian his sunglasses, George wrote the song “Blue Jay Way” in the luxurious 4000 square foot home located at 1567 Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills.

Derek Taylor explains the events. “They’d ring and say, ‘We’re here.’ So, I asked them, ‘Where are you?’ ‘In Blue Jay Way,’ he replied. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘somewhere up in the hills.’ So, I said to him, ‘Never mind. I’ll ask a policeman. There are plenty of them around.’ So, I set out to find them, and while George was waiting, with jet lag and Pattie, he sat down at an organ in the hall and started, ‘Please don’t be long…My friends have lost their way…There’s a fog upon LA…They’ll ask a policeman on the beat…There’s so many there to meet.’”

George Harrison explained: “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 by asking 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.

Derek Taylor became Brian Epstein’s personal assistant, co-founder of the Monterey Pop Festival and was the voice of the Beatles, no one talked to them without talking to him first.

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 I hadn’t noticed until then…so I messed around on it and the song came.”

Derek continues: “By the time I had reached them, the song was virtually intact. Of course, at the time, I felt very bad because here were these two wretchedly jet-lagged people, and I was about two hours late to meet them.

But here, indeed, was a song that would turn up on “Magical Mystery Tour.” George’s original handwritten lyrics for the song, which were suitably written on stationary with the letterhead “Robert Fitzpatrick Associates…Los Angeles,” including an additional verse omitted from the released song.

The Harrisons’ stay at that house had been arranged by The Beatles’ attorney Robert Fitzpatrick, who was on vacation in Hawaii. Robert repped such acts as The Who, the Rolling Stones, Taj mahal, The Buckinghams, Arthur Lee & Love, Peggy Lee, and Dick Dale & the Del Tones. He also co-managed such acts as the Bee Gees, Cream and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels with his partner Robert Stigwood.

Fitzpatrick was born in San Antonio, brought up in New Jersey and ran away from home to New York at the age of 15 where he became an off-Broadway actor. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, eventually serving as a Captain in Vietnam during that conflict. Upon discharge, he put himself through Princeton University then law school and became an attorney. He went to Hollywood and soon after became a film producer, a music executive, and the lawyer for the Beatles.

Chris recalls, “I had met Robert Fitzpatrick earlier that day at the airport, but never in my wildest dreams, would I believe that we would have ended up doing business together and becoming dear friends, while not even realizing until later, that we had met each other some seventeen years earlier at the airport.”