The Beatles

Dear Prudence (Alternate version)

Notes from Wikipedia. Edited by Flip.

The inspiration and ostensible subject of the song is Prudence Farrow, the sister of actress Mia Farrow, both of whom were present when the Beatles went to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Farrow came to Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi's teachings as a result of a highly disturbing experience with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. While in Rishikesh in early 1968, Farrow became intensely serious about meditating, refusing to venture out of her bungalow for days on end. Of all the Beatles, Farrow felt closest to John Lennon and George Harrison, who were assigned by the Maharishi to act as her "team buddies".
Lennon and Harrison took the responsibility seriously, having similarly experimented with LSD before discovering meditation. The two musicians were asked to coax Farrow out of her seclusion to ensure she socialised with the other students on the course. As a result, Lennon wrote the song "Dear Prudence". In his lyrics, Lennon asks Farrow to "open up your eyes" and "see the sunny skies", reminding her that she is "part of everything". Singer-songwriter Donovan remembered that "we were diving deep inside ourselves, not just for 20 minutes in the morning and the evening, but we had days of it ... deep exploration of the deep psyche ... So Prudence was in deep, and this [song] was John's way of saying, ‘Are you OK in there?’”
According to author and journalist Mark Paytress, Lennon was less "charitably disposed" when commenting on the song after he had grown disaffected with the Maharishi and Transcendental Meditation. In a 1980 interview, he said of "Dear Prudence":
"A song about Mia Farrow's sister, who seemed to go slightly barmy, meditating too long, and couldn't come out of the little hut that we were livin' in. They selected me and George to try and bring her out because she would trust us. If she'd been in the West, they would have put her away ... She'd been locked in for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anybody else. That was the competition in Maharishi's camp: who was going to get cosmic first. What I didn't know was I was already cosmic." (Laughs.)
According to Farrow: "I would always rush straight back to my room after lectures and meals so I could meditate. John, George and Paul [McCartney] would all want to sit around jamming and having a good time and I'd be flying into my room. They were all serious about what they were doing, but they just weren't as fanatical as me." Farrow did not hear "Dear Prudence" before the Beatles recorded the track, although she has said that, before leaving Rishikesh, Harrison told her that they had written a song about her.
Lennon wrote "Dear Prudence" using a guitar finger-picking technique that he learned from Donovan, who had followed the Beatles out to Rishikesh to study Transcendental Meditation. The technique, known as clawhammer picking, was later described by Donovan as "the Carter Family finger style". Donovan recalled that Lennon asked him to demonstrate the technique one morning as they sat playing guitar under a jacaranda tree; Lennon, a "fast learner", subsequently mastered it in just two days. Author Steve Turner comments that the Beatles' songwriting in Rishikesh reflected the simplicity of their environment, with the lyrics' frequent references to "birds, flowers, clouds, the sun, and the wind", while Paytress finds Lennon's songs particularly evocative of "the 'slow-motion' sensibility of life on the ashram".

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