When Let It Be... Naked was released in 2003, the critical focus was very much on the removal of Phil Spector’s post-production work. This is understandable. Although Spector was a fine producer (past tense, as he’s unlikely to do anything decent again), bringing him in to work on already-recorded material was a huge mistake. A notorious control freak, he was always likely to smother the tracks in overdubs to ensure his own stamp was on them. Perhaps the greater surprise is that more of the tracks weren’t affected. Hearing Spector’s work on ‘The Long And Winding Road’ throws into sharp relief just how thoughtful and tasteful George Martin’s orchestrations for The Beatles are: I always feel horribly deflated when the 1 album stumbles into this puddle of slush at the end.
However, this focus on Spector’s work obscured two important issues about Let It Be... Naked: one, that the album’s title was so bad that it’s difficult to use it in ordinary conversation; the other, that although the album had been improved substantially by stripping it down, it had benefited just as much from the tracklisting being rearranged.
No amount of polishing and shuffling can disguise the fact that this isn’t a strong collection of Beatles tracks. In his haste to get The Beatles started on a new project, McCartney harried the group into the rehearsal studio just ten weeks after wrapping a 30-track double album, and it shows. Lennon’s three-and-a-half songs on the original album include one that was over a year old and had apparently been abandoned by the rest of the group (‘Across The Universe’) and one that had been written in 1957 and been abortively recorded at the ‘From Me To You’ session in 1963 (‘One After 909’, which cops the skiffle style so completely it even has a railway-themed lyric). And of the other one-and-a-half, ‘Dig A Pony’ seems to be a cunning steal from Joe Cocker’s radically reworked cover of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, released in October 1968. So the tracks aren’t top-drawer. But just as a film can be made or ruined in the edit, an album can be made or ruined in the sequencing.
‘Two Of Us’ is a good opener, but ‘Across The Universe’ kills the pace of the album early on, whilst the two most melodramatic tracks – ‘I Me Mine’ and ‘Let It Be’ – are used up too soon. The second side also begins well but badly loses its way – ‘For You Blue’ doesn’t really go anywhere and is a terrible choice for the penultimate track. ‘Get Back’ is a logical choice for the closer – it was the last song they played at the rooftop gig – but Spector’s odd decision to lop the end off means the album peters out in an anticlimactic splutter.
Also, whilst the studio chatter is entertaining in itself it breaks up the flow of the album. The false start on ‘Dig A Pony’ deflates the entire track, and Lennon’s comment before ‘Let It Be’ is snide mockery of a song he wasn’t keen on (admittedly it’s a poor man’s ‘Hey Jude’, but still a very good song. It has also been widely misinterpreted – ‘mother Mary’ is not the Virgin Mary, but McCartney’s dead mother, whose name was Mary). The chatter is all Lennon, and he seems to have been responsible for the final sequencing. Given that he later suggested he was glad the album had blown the Beatles ‘myth’, I wonder if he arsed it up on purpose (Ian MacDonald also suggests that Lennon was responsible for okaying the use of the dodgy take of ‘The Long And Winding Road’, when McCartney could easily have been called in to redub Lennon’s inept bass-playing).
This project originally had a clear focus – to create a stripped-back album of live performances – but the finished product seems totally unsure of what it’s trying to be. The studio chatter gives it a ‘documentary’ feel which reflects the film it’s meant to be a soundtrack for – but Spector’s heavy overdubs on ‘Across The Universe’, ‘I Me Mine’ and ‘The Long And Winding Road’ work against this aesthetic and are nothing like the music heard in the film. Several attempts were made at compiling an album from the tapes, including drafts that featured McCartney’s ‘Teddy Boy’ (included on Anthology 3) and a brief cover of ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ (bafflingly left off Anthology 3), and they still made a hash of it. The Beatles always left sequencing to George Martin, and when you see what happened when he wasn’t involved you realise how good at it he was.
The Naked version is an infinitely better piece of sequencing. ‘Get Back’ is still truncated, but by making it the opening track the effect is to make the album move on more quickly, and removing the false start from ‘Dig A Pony’ creates an excellent transition. ‘For You Blue’ is still a minor track, but placing it earlier in the album rescues it and gives it a chance to breathe. The album now opens with three upbeat rockers, so ‘The Long And Winding Road’ is a welcome change of pace. The most successful segueway from the original album, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ into ‘One After 909’, has been retained. ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ – by far Lennon’s best song in these sessions, which could easily have been on the original album even though it had already been released as a B-side – raises the overall quality by replacing ‘Dig It’ and ‘Maggie Mae’. But best of all, a new closing sequence has been created from three tracks originally located on side one. ‘I Me Mine’ is much better for the removal of a heavy-handed orchestra, and thunders tempestuously before the zen moment of ‘Across The Universe’ (at the correct speed, for the first time ever – and the stripped-down clarity improves it hugely) and finally the catharsis of ‘Let It Be’. The album is tighter and flows much better, with the only minus point being that the unsung gem of these songs – ‘Two of Us’ – gets a bit lost.
I’ve heard people say they don’t like the Naked version as much; that McCartney took advantage of the death of his colleagues to indulge in some spurious revisionism. For me, this is a case where you’re entitled to your opinion but you’re wrong. The original album is still out there – has now, in fact, been cleaned up and reissued – and after a month of both albums in rotation, I’m in no doubt which is the better. That’s possibly cheating the original intention of the blog, but it’s still true.
Friday 31 December 2010
Tuesday 21 December 2010
Let It Be (1)
When The Beatles failed, it was rarely for want of ambition. Take Magical Mystery Tour, for example (the film, not the EP). The group’s only experience of making films had been as actors, and their knowledge of what was involved in scripting and overseeing a production was far too limited. Their ambition outstripped what they were capable of. Yet this was partly rewarded in retrospect: although their naivety made the film incoherent, the same quality also produced something unique, with some interesting imagery and genuinely funny moments.
By contrast, the ‘Get Back’ project – as Let It Be was originally titled – demonstrates that The Beatles’ ambition was failing them. McCartney conceived it as an album written to be performed and recorded live, at an exclusive one-off gig to be filmed for television. (Ian McDonald oddly claims that the gig was originally to be an hour long and feature eight songs, even though the longest eight tracks The Beatles ever recorded add up to less than fifty minutes.) A number of outré, grandstanding venues were considered, including the Pyramids at sunset and the deck of a cruise liner. A perhaps more practical suggestion was the Roundhouse: in the end, the group could only be arsed to go as far as the roof of the Apple building. Iconic as this was, it was indicative of diminishing enthusiasm for the project and was hardly conducive to performance or sound quality, given that these would be the definitive renditions of the songs. The Beatles had essentially decided to perform their new album in the guise of celebrity buskers.
If the gig been done properly, it would certainly have been a huge event and I’m not sure anyone had ever recorded an album of original songs this way (The Yardbirds’ debut ‘Five Live Yardbirds’, for example, was a covers album). Yet would the music have really stretched them? The intent was to refocus on the four of them as a playing ensemble, which was logical in the light of McCartney’s desire to rediscover the unity they’d had in their touring days. Given Lennon and Harrison’s wariness of the project, he probably didn’t want to overcomplicate it. Additionally, in the wider music scene the arena-rock groups of the early 70s were starting to emerge, with a similar emphasis on ‘live’ musicianship ahead of tracks layered up in the studio. But The Beatles’ take on this was disappointingly ordinary. They all seem to have grown tired of studio artifice (particularly Lennon, who was becoming fixated on tedious notions of ‘honesty’ in music) but came up with nothing fresh to replace it. There are good tracks in this lot but other bands could have done it just as well, and that was never what The Beatles were about.
The ‘Get Back’ project should have changed people’s notions of what a rock concert could be. It shouldn’t have just been about getting the group back onto a stage together. They’d quit touring in 1966 partly because they music they were making was difficult or impossible to recreate onstage: perhaps, for a one-off gig, they should have looked to do so. Or injected some unique aspect to the performance, making the event into a piece of performance art incorporating the ‘random’ elements they’d used in their music since ‘I Am The Walrus’. Or radically reworked their existing songs. A group of their talents was capable of creating a late-60s equivalent of The Wall or Stop Making Sense, and if they’d still been at the peak of their powers I think they would have done. But the group was fragmenting, the end was in sight and they just didn’t have the energy.
By contrast, the ‘Get Back’ project – as Let It Be was originally titled – demonstrates that The Beatles’ ambition was failing them. McCartney conceived it as an album written to be performed and recorded live, at an exclusive one-off gig to be filmed for television. (Ian McDonald oddly claims that the gig was originally to be an hour long and feature eight songs, even though the longest eight tracks The Beatles ever recorded add up to less than fifty minutes.) A number of outré, grandstanding venues were considered, including the Pyramids at sunset and the deck of a cruise liner. A perhaps more practical suggestion was the Roundhouse: in the end, the group could only be arsed to go as far as the roof of the Apple building. Iconic as this was, it was indicative of diminishing enthusiasm for the project and was hardly conducive to performance or sound quality, given that these would be the definitive renditions of the songs. The Beatles had essentially decided to perform their new album in the guise of celebrity buskers.
If the gig been done properly, it would certainly have been a huge event and I’m not sure anyone had ever recorded an album of original songs this way (The Yardbirds’ debut ‘Five Live Yardbirds’, for example, was a covers album). Yet would the music have really stretched them? The intent was to refocus on the four of them as a playing ensemble, which was logical in the light of McCartney’s desire to rediscover the unity they’d had in their touring days. Given Lennon and Harrison’s wariness of the project, he probably didn’t want to overcomplicate it. Additionally, in the wider music scene the arena-rock groups of the early 70s were starting to emerge, with a similar emphasis on ‘live’ musicianship ahead of tracks layered up in the studio. But The Beatles’ take on this was disappointingly ordinary. They all seem to have grown tired of studio artifice (particularly Lennon, who was becoming fixated on tedious notions of ‘honesty’ in music) but came up with nothing fresh to replace it. There are good tracks in this lot but other bands could have done it just as well, and that was never what The Beatles were about.
The ‘Get Back’ project should have changed people’s notions of what a rock concert could be. It shouldn’t have just been about getting the group back onto a stage together. They’d quit touring in 1966 partly because they music they were making was difficult or impossible to recreate onstage: perhaps, for a one-off gig, they should have looked to do so. Or injected some unique aspect to the performance, making the event into a piece of performance art incorporating the ‘random’ elements they’d used in their music since ‘I Am The Walrus’. Or radically reworked their existing songs. A group of their talents was capable of creating a late-60s equivalent of The Wall or Stop Making Sense, and if they’d still been at the peak of their powers I think they would have done. But the group was fragmenting, the end was in sight and they just didn’t have the energy.
Thursday 16 December 2010
The Toppermost of the Poppermost RESULTS SHOW
Thanks for all your votes. Here’s the final top ten, with number of points next to them (five points awarded for first-ranked songs, four for second and so on). As we had a pretty small sample, some ties were inevitable and we have an annoying three-way tie for second place. The votes centred heavily around 1965 and 1966 and Lennon dominates with four-and-a-half of the top five. The winner surprised me – although it’s always been a favourite of mine, and I’ve often cited it as my overall favourite Beatles song, I’ve never seen it top a Beatles poll or even come second or third. But here it established an early lead and was the winner by miles. Good work, everyone.
1) Tomorrow Never Knows – 24
2=) In My Life – 15
2=) Strawberry Fields Forever – 15
2=) A Day in the Life – 15
5) Rain – 13
6) Eleanor Rigby – 11
7=) Help! – 10
7=) Here Comes the Sun – 10
9) For No-One – 9
10) Across the Universe – 8
1) Tomorrow Never Knows – 24
2=) In My Life – 15
2=) Strawberry Fields Forever – 15
2=) A Day in the Life – 15
5) Rain – 13
6) Eleanor Rigby – 11
7=) Help! – 10
7=) Here Comes the Sun – 10
9) For No-One – 9
10) Across the Universe – 8
Friday 3 December 2010
The Toppermost of the Poppermost
People always moan when a magazine or website runs some witless, space-filling, cheap attention-grabbing Best Ever Beatles Songs poll. But not me! I like witless, space-filling, cheap attention-grabbing Best Ever Beatles Songs polls and I’m going to do one of my own. Post your top five in the comments section down there. I’ll start the ball rolling:
1) Eleanor Rigby
2) Tomorrow Never Knows
3) Strawberry Fields Forever
4) Paperback Writer
5) Long, Long, Long
Results will be posted as soon as I can be bothered to collate them. Depends how many people vote, really. I reserve the right to discount stupid/"comedy" votes as I see fit.
1) Eleanor Rigby
2) Tomorrow Never Knows
3) Strawberry Fields Forever
4) Paperback Writer
5) Long, Long, Long
Results will be posted as soon as I can be bothered to collate them. Depends how many people vote, really. I reserve the right to discount stupid/"comedy" votes as I see fit.
Tuesday 30 November 2010
Abbey Road (2)
Going from vague anecdotal evidence collected by me, most Beatles fans think of Abbey Road as the last Beatles album. This is partly because it was the last to be recorded (ALTHOUGH just to be annoying there was one final session, without Lennon, in January 1970 to knock off a proper recording of ‘I Me Mine’) and therefore any analysis of their development should consider it their last. It’s also partly because it makes for a better final Beatles album and, given the choice, we’d rather it was the final Beatles album. It finishes their career on a high and side two’s ‘long medley’ has the feel of a grand finale. And unlike the brisk forced-bonhomie of Let It Be, attempting to recreate the solid unit they’d been in Hamburg and during their early touring days, Abbey Road not only looks ahead to the future but deals with their break-up head-on, with ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ referring to the legal battle within the group and ‘Carry That Weight’ (one of my favourite Beatles songs) addressing the magnitude of what they’d achieved together.
So the consensus is that Abbey Road, although not the final Beatles album to be released, is the final Beatles album in spirit. A more controversial issue, in my experience, is whether they were right to stick ‘Her Majesty’ at the end. The ‘long medley’ had been crafted to conclude with ‘The End’, featuring a drum solo from Ringo, a guitar solo from each of the others and then a lovely piece of quintessentially 1960s cod-philosophy (‘And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make’). It also seems to rattle through their career, running from an ‘Oh yeah!’ and a squalling rock ’n’ roll riff to a closing orchestral sting and languid guitar wash.
Then, when the album was being mixed, McCartney discovered that a track he’d decided to drop from the ‘long medley’ had been placed at the end of the master tape for convenience (once they became successful, nothing The Beatles recorded was ever junked – hence the Anthology albums). He decided he liked it that way and kept it there. So, did he spoil his beautifully crafted coda by chucking this acoustic doodle after it?
I don’t think so. To me this track sums up the story of The Beatles’ latter period, and that’s entirely because of where it is on the album. There are few groups who’ve shifted quite so decisively from one member leading the group to another. In fact, the only one I can think of are Ride. No offence to Ride, who I think were brilliant, but we’re not really talking about the same ballpark. Although The Beatles were very much a group – the first group to project themselves as four personalities – they were originally Lennon’s group. Yet as their working methods evolved, McCartney – with his multi-instrumental talent and greater interest in production – became more central, and it’s clear he continued to see The Beatles as enabling him to do things, rather than – as Lennon and, especially, Harrison did at times – holding him back.
The Beatles arguably became McCartney’s group around Sgt. Pepper, and there’s no doubt that they were his group after Brian Epstein died. For example, an interview with Richard Hamilton in Mojo about his sleeve for the ‘White’ album reveals that all his meetings were held with McCartney. Most of The Beatles’ projects in their last couple of years were McCartney’s idea. He often arrived at the studio ahead of the others, laying down demos and basic tracks – sometimes completing tracks without bothering to involve the others. Because McCartney was the first to announce that he was leaving the group, some people who don’t know the backstory assume that the group might have carried on without him. The truth is that by this stage he was the only one who cared. The Beatles without him was unthinkable.
And that’s why ‘Her Majesty’ feels so apt to me. At the end of an album where the group pulled together one last time, this track conjures an image of McCartney alone in the studio. The others have all gone home and turned out the lights, whilst he carries on regardless. But rather than playing some doleful lament for the group he’s lost, he’s being whimsical and irreverent. Yes, it treads on the gesture of giving each of them their solo spot in the final minutes of their final album – but after the effort McCartney had put into holding the group together long enough to make this record, I don’t begrudge him the last word.
So the consensus is that Abbey Road, although not the final Beatles album to be released, is the final Beatles album in spirit. A more controversial issue, in my experience, is whether they were right to stick ‘Her Majesty’ at the end. The ‘long medley’ had been crafted to conclude with ‘The End’, featuring a drum solo from Ringo, a guitar solo from each of the others and then a lovely piece of quintessentially 1960s cod-philosophy (‘And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make’). It also seems to rattle through their career, running from an ‘Oh yeah!’ and a squalling rock ’n’ roll riff to a closing orchestral sting and languid guitar wash.
Then, when the album was being mixed, McCartney discovered that a track he’d decided to drop from the ‘long medley’ had been placed at the end of the master tape for convenience (once they became successful, nothing The Beatles recorded was ever junked – hence the Anthology albums). He decided he liked it that way and kept it there. So, did he spoil his beautifully crafted coda by chucking this acoustic doodle after it?
I don’t think so. To me this track sums up the story of The Beatles’ latter period, and that’s entirely because of where it is on the album. There are few groups who’ve shifted quite so decisively from one member leading the group to another. In fact, the only one I can think of are Ride. No offence to Ride, who I think were brilliant, but we’re not really talking about the same ballpark. Although The Beatles were very much a group – the first group to project themselves as four personalities – they were originally Lennon’s group. Yet as their working methods evolved, McCartney – with his multi-instrumental talent and greater interest in production – became more central, and it’s clear he continued to see The Beatles as enabling him to do things, rather than – as Lennon and, especially, Harrison did at times – holding him back.
The Beatles arguably became McCartney’s group around Sgt. Pepper, and there’s no doubt that they were his group after Brian Epstein died. For example, an interview with Richard Hamilton in Mojo about his sleeve for the ‘White’ album reveals that all his meetings were held with McCartney. Most of The Beatles’ projects in their last couple of years were McCartney’s idea. He often arrived at the studio ahead of the others, laying down demos and basic tracks – sometimes completing tracks without bothering to involve the others. Because McCartney was the first to announce that he was leaving the group, some people who don’t know the backstory assume that the group might have carried on without him. The truth is that by this stage he was the only one who cared. The Beatles without him was unthinkable.
And that’s why ‘Her Majesty’ feels so apt to me. At the end of an album where the group pulled together one last time, this track conjures an image of McCartney alone in the studio. The others have all gone home and turned out the lights, whilst he carries on regardless. But rather than playing some doleful lament for the group he’s lost, he’s being whimsical and irreverent. Yes, it treads on the gesture of giving each of them their solo spot in the final minutes of their final album – but after the effort McCartney had put into holding the group together long enough to make this record, I don’t begrudge him the last word.
Sunday 28 November 2010
Abbey Road (1)
One of the most popular pastimes among Beatles fans is to compile hypothetical follow-ups to Abbey Road, made out of the best tracks from the 1970 solo releases. (Yes! We know how to party, don’t we?) I’ve tried it myself but it’s not as simple as it seems. Do you make the best album you can make from the material, or try to assemble the album The Beatles might actually have made?
Harrison’s All Things Must Pass has so much good stuff, it’s tempting to pick out four or five tracks – but many of them had already been rejected by the group and there’s no reason to think Lennon and McCartney would have changed their ‘You’ll get two songs and you’ll like it’ policy. Then there’s the question of McCartney’s contributions: unlike Lennon and Harrison, he gave his all to The Beatles until the end and his early solo efforts are less full-blooded. His solo debut is a lovely record, but the tracks sound small and inconsequential next to the heavily-produced Harrison material. ‘Instant Karma’ is hard to resist, but can you justify including a track which might never have been written if Lennon had remained a Beatle? And so on.
Yet if the aim is to define what The Beatles might have sounded like in 1970 or 1971, there’s actually no need. They saved you the bother when they made Abbey Road.
This is a lot of people’s favourite Beatles record, but it’s one I’ve always found hard to get to grips with. I think that’s because it sounds so different to any of the others. That’s a slightly stupid thing to say, because as we’ve established most of The Beatles’ records don’t sound like any of the others (in particular those from Revolver onwards). But when I think of The Beatles, I think of 1960s music and much of Abbey Road doesn’t sound like 1960s music. Harrison’s tracks are pure early-70s AOR. Lennon contributes two of the least Beatles-sounding Beatles tracks in ‘Come Together’ and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, both far more like the product of early arena-rock bands. Even McCartney’s doo-wop revivalism on ‘Oh! Darling’ anticipates the likes of Bowie’s ‘Drive-In Saturday’ and even Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’.
We’re covering the records in release order rather than recording order, so Let It Be comes last (I placed Yellow Submarine before The Beatles partly for convenience, but also because the film came out much earlier and so the songs were in the public domain). But applying the knowledge of what Let It Be sounded like, it’s clear that since finishing Sgt. Pepper the group had been putting less and less effort into sounding ahead of their time. There are some forward-thinking tracks on The Beatles, but also a lot of pastiches and doodles. Then, the ‘new phase’ of Let It Be was (as noted by Mic Wright on his blog about that record) actually a retrograde step, returning to a ‘live’ sound which comfortably accommodated a song they wrote in 1957.
On Abbey Road, knowing it would be their last album, they pulled their fingers out and did it properly. Because they hadn’t been thinking ahead for a while, when they did the result was a jarring leap. It’s bizarre to hear synths on a Beatles album (they were practically the only ones who could afford one, so few of their contemporaries were using them) – but here it is, bouncing merrily over ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and swirling menacingly in the outro of ‘I Want You’. The ‘Long Medley’ on side two, and in particular ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, fuse the group’s pop sensibility with prog’s ‘symphonic’ approach. The album all but dispenses with the notion of music as something you might want to dance to, embracing it instead as a mode of ‘serious’ expression. This divergence between pop and rock characterised much 1970s music, and perhaps wasn’t fully bridged again until the turn of the next decade.
As solo artists, the members of The Beatles were never really at the forefront of popular music again (although McCartney has made creditable efforts to keep pace via collaborations). We could speculate whether that might not have been the case had they stayed together, spurring each other on (in 1978 Lennon sent his former bandmates a postcard telling them they should be making records like Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’, not that he could be arsed to do so himself). But I think that’s fruitless: the spirit of friendly competition that had made them a great band was no longer friendly, and for them to have stayed together would require them to have been fundamentally different people in the first place.
Harrison’s All Things Must Pass has so much good stuff, it’s tempting to pick out four or five tracks – but many of them had already been rejected by the group and there’s no reason to think Lennon and McCartney would have changed their ‘You’ll get two songs and you’ll like it’ policy. Then there’s the question of McCartney’s contributions: unlike Lennon and Harrison, he gave his all to The Beatles until the end and his early solo efforts are less full-blooded. His solo debut is a lovely record, but the tracks sound small and inconsequential next to the heavily-produced Harrison material. ‘Instant Karma’ is hard to resist, but can you justify including a track which might never have been written if Lennon had remained a Beatle? And so on.
Yet if the aim is to define what The Beatles might have sounded like in 1970 or 1971, there’s actually no need. They saved you the bother when they made Abbey Road.
This is a lot of people’s favourite Beatles record, but it’s one I’ve always found hard to get to grips with. I think that’s because it sounds so different to any of the others. That’s a slightly stupid thing to say, because as we’ve established most of The Beatles’ records don’t sound like any of the others (in particular those from Revolver onwards). But when I think of The Beatles, I think of 1960s music and much of Abbey Road doesn’t sound like 1960s music. Harrison’s tracks are pure early-70s AOR. Lennon contributes two of the least Beatles-sounding Beatles tracks in ‘Come Together’ and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, both far more like the product of early arena-rock bands. Even McCartney’s doo-wop revivalism on ‘Oh! Darling’ anticipates the likes of Bowie’s ‘Drive-In Saturday’ and even Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’.
We’re covering the records in release order rather than recording order, so Let It Be comes last (I placed Yellow Submarine before The Beatles partly for convenience, but also because the film came out much earlier and so the songs were in the public domain). But applying the knowledge of what Let It Be sounded like, it’s clear that since finishing Sgt. Pepper the group had been putting less and less effort into sounding ahead of their time. There are some forward-thinking tracks on The Beatles, but also a lot of pastiches and doodles. Then, the ‘new phase’ of Let It Be was (as noted by Mic Wright on his blog about that record) actually a retrograde step, returning to a ‘live’ sound which comfortably accommodated a song they wrote in 1957.
On Abbey Road, knowing it would be their last album, they pulled their fingers out and did it properly. Because they hadn’t been thinking ahead for a while, when they did the result was a jarring leap. It’s bizarre to hear synths on a Beatles album (they were practically the only ones who could afford one, so few of their contemporaries were using them) – but here it is, bouncing merrily over ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and swirling menacingly in the outro of ‘I Want You’. The ‘Long Medley’ on side two, and in particular ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, fuse the group’s pop sensibility with prog’s ‘symphonic’ approach. The album all but dispenses with the notion of music as something you might want to dance to, embracing it instead as a mode of ‘serious’ expression. This divergence between pop and rock characterised much 1970s music, and perhaps wasn’t fully bridged again until the turn of the next decade.
As solo artists, the members of The Beatles were never really at the forefront of popular music again (although McCartney has made creditable efforts to keep pace via collaborations). We could speculate whether that might not have been the case had they stayed together, spurring each other on (in 1978 Lennon sent his former bandmates a postcard telling them they should be making records like Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’, not that he could be arsed to do so himself). But I think that’s fruitless: the spirit of friendly competition that had made them a great band was no longer friendly, and for them to have stayed together would require them to have been fundamentally different people in the first place.
Sunday 31 October 2010
The Beatles (2)
Shall we have the debate over whether The Beatles (the album) should have been a double album or a single? Yes, let’s. I’ll start: if you think it should’ve been a single, you’re wrong.
I’ve got some space to fill so I suppose I might as well back that up a bit.
The Beatles is a double album for ruthlessly pragmatic reasons. In 1967, Brian Epstein had cut a new deal with EMI. This tied the group to the label not for a period of time, nor a number of albums, but for a set number of tracks. It’s a deal that would not have been made at any other point in history, coming at a time when the albums market had taken off but the notion of what constituted a ‘track’ was still clearly defined by the demands of the single. The general trend was towards longer tracks, so EMI probably didn’t see a problem. Bob Dylan had released Blonde On Blonde as a double the year before, but that had contained fourteen tracks, with several long ones. It’s safe to say they weren’t expecting The Beatles to make the album they made in 1968: I don’t think there’d ever been a album like it, in fact. And I’m fairly sure that once EMI heard ‘Wild Honey Pie’ they resolved never to base a deal on ‘number of tracks’ ever again.
So The Beatles, having signed perhaps the only deal in history where a double album counted as two albums, made this 30-track opus purely to eat up their contract faster. Yet in doing so they hit upon a way to follow one of the hardest-to-follow albums anyone had ever made. As I noted last time, its looser approach comes as a disappointment after the meticulously-constructed Pepper – but what wouldn’t have? By making it a double The Beatles made it a totally different prospect, hard to compare with its predecessor.
I’ve never been interested in trying to construct that parallel-universe version of the album that’s only got fourteen or fifteen tracks on it. That’s not to say I haven’t had a go, just that I’m not interested. Mine goes like this, probably:
Back In The USSR / Dear Prudence / Glass Onion / Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da / Martha My Dear / Sexy Sadie / While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Happiness Is A Warm Gun / Birthday / Yer Blues / Blackbird / Revolution 1 / Honey Pie / Long Long Long / Good Night
or something, although it probably works better if you add ‘Hey Jude’ as a penultimate track and use the B-side version of ‘Revolution’. (Note also that I’ve kept the members’ contributions in proportion – so there are two George tracks, one Ringo track etc.) But that’s not the point – I don’t think that album’s as interesting as the one they put out. It’s worth noting that every time I read someone’s single-album cut, there’s at least one track they think is disposable that I think is wonderful, and vice versa. It’s far from clear-cut which are the ‘good’ ones.
I’ve cut tracks which I think are great because they’d seem a bit lightweight on a single-disc version of the album: the likes of ‘I Will,’ ‘Julia’ and ‘Cry Baby Cry’. The Beatles’ frivolous side is best captured on tracks like ‘Bungalow Bill’ and ‘Rocky Racoon’, but there’s probably not room for those either; ditto ‘Revolution 9’, but it’d be a terrible shame to lose an avant-garde experiment which has been smuggled into millions of homes. Christ, I’d even miss Ringo’s ‘You were in a car crash / And you lost your hair’ line from ‘Don’t Pass Me By’.
Most of all, you would lose what makes the album distinctive and enjoyable. When I first bought a second-hand vinyl copy, it kept me fascinated for weeks – there was so much to discover, such a breadth of styles, that you had to inhabit it. It’s so well constructed, like four mini-albums: it may not have a clear identity, but it does have continuity. I think the most facile criticism you can make of any double album is that it would’ve been a better single album: in terms of average track quality this is obviously true, but you may as well say that any given album would’ve made a better EP. You have to engage with what a double album is trying to do on its own terms and ask whether it succeeds. For the reasons above, I think The Beatles does succeed.
Even if it was a failure, I still wouldn’t exchange it for the single-album version. The Beatles covered so many of the bases of pop and rock in their careers together, it would feel wrong if they hadn’t made a double album. You see it on the discography and you think Oh yeah, there’s The Beatles’ double album. Of course there’s a Beatles double album. If it didn’t exist, then we would have to invent it. Only we couldn’t, because we are not The Beatles. So let’s be grateful it does exist.
I’ve got some space to fill so I suppose I might as well back that up a bit.
The Beatles is a double album for ruthlessly pragmatic reasons. In 1967, Brian Epstein had cut a new deal with EMI. This tied the group to the label not for a period of time, nor a number of albums, but for a set number of tracks. It’s a deal that would not have been made at any other point in history, coming at a time when the albums market had taken off but the notion of what constituted a ‘track’ was still clearly defined by the demands of the single. The general trend was towards longer tracks, so EMI probably didn’t see a problem. Bob Dylan had released Blonde On Blonde as a double the year before, but that had contained fourteen tracks, with several long ones. It’s safe to say they weren’t expecting The Beatles to make the album they made in 1968: I don’t think there’d ever been a album like it, in fact. And I’m fairly sure that once EMI heard ‘Wild Honey Pie’ they resolved never to base a deal on ‘number of tracks’ ever again.
So The Beatles, having signed perhaps the only deal in history where a double album counted as two albums, made this 30-track opus purely to eat up their contract faster. Yet in doing so they hit upon a way to follow one of the hardest-to-follow albums anyone had ever made. As I noted last time, its looser approach comes as a disappointment after the meticulously-constructed Pepper – but what wouldn’t have? By making it a double The Beatles made it a totally different prospect, hard to compare with its predecessor.
I’ve never been interested in trying to construct that parallel-universe version of the album that’s only got fourteen or fifteen tracks on it. That’s not to say I haven’t had a go, just that I’m not interested. Mine goes like this, probably:
Back In The USSR / Dear Prudence / Glass Onion / Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da / Martha My Dear / Sexy Sadie / While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Happiness Is A Warm Gun / Birthday / Yer Blues / Blackbird / Revolution 1 / Honey Pie / Long Long Long / Good Night
or something, although it probably works better if you add ‘Hey Jude’ as a penultimate track and use the B-side version of ‘Revolution’. (Note also that I’ve kept the members’ contributions in proportion – so there are two George tracks, one Ringo track etc.) But that’s not the point – I don’t think that album’s as interesting as the one they put out. It’s worth noting that every time I read someone’s single-album cut, there’s at least one track they think is disposable that I think is wonderful, and vice versa. It’s far from clear-cut which are the ‘good’ ones.
I’ve cut tracks which I think are great because they’d seem a bit lightweight on a single-disc version of the album: the likes of ‘I Will,’ ‘Julia’ and ‘Cry Baby Cry’. The Beatles’ frivolous side is best captured on tracks like ‘Bungalow Bill’ and ‘Rocky Racoon’, but there’s probably not room for those either; ditto ‘Revolution 9’, but it’d be a terrible shame to lose an avant-garde experiment which has been smuggled into millions of homes. Christ, I’d even miss Ringo’s ‘You were in a car crash / And you lost your hair’ line from ‘Don’t Pass Me By’.
Most of all, you would lose what makes the album distinctive and enjoyable. When I first bought a second-hand vinyl copy, it kept me fascinated for weeks – there was so much to discover, such a breadth of styles, that you had to inhabit it. It’s so well constructed, like four mini-albums: it may not have a clear identity, but it does have continuity. I think the most facile criticism you can make of any double album is that it would’ve been a better single album: in terms of average track quality this is obviously true, but you may as well say that any given album would’ve made a better EP. You have to engage with what a double album is trying to do on its own terms and ask whether it succeeds. For the reasons above, I think The Beatles does succeed.
Even if it was a failure, I still wouldn’t exchange it for the single-album version. The Beatles covered so many of the bases of pop and rock in their careers together, it would feel wrong if they hadn’t made a double album. You see it on the discography and you think Oh yeah, there’s The Beatles’ double album. Of course there’s a Beatles double album. If it didn’t exist, then we would have to invent it. Only we couldn’t, because we are not The Beatles. So let’s be grateful it does exist.
Tuesday 26 October 2010
The Beatles (1)
Up to this point, the challenge of this blog has been to avoid seeing each Beatles album as an inevitable progression towards Sgt. Pepper: now, the challenge is to avoid seeing them as steps in an inevitable decline. It’s less imperative because I do think their decline was inevitable: the collaboration that made The Beatles so good equally gave them a short shelf-life. The contrasting and complementary talents of Lennon and McCartney couldn’t have worked together indefinitely. However, at the time their fans presumably believed (or at least hoped) that the group was going to last longer than a couple more years, and the whole point of this blog is to try to view it through those eyes.
As noted, the group had just got a massive commercial second wind after Sgt. Pepper. Magical Mystery Tour may have tarnished their image slightly back home, but as Jonathan Gould’s excellent book Can’t Buy Me Love identifies, their reputation in America continued to grow. Having already been adopted by American teenagers as figureheads for their generation, as the decade wore on The Beatles came to be cherished by the counter-culture (including Charles Manson, who would be very interested in this album) – whilst continuing to enjoy major mainstream success. It’s notable that whilst in the UK The Beatles never bettered ‘She Loves You’ for singles sales, in America their biggest hit was ‘Hey Jude’. (The song is one of their very best, and nothing sounds quite as distinctively Beatles as that mid-paced downward progression). But it also suggests that the group had made a transition from pop to rock, and this probably seemed like their future at the time: big, long, grandstanding soul-inflected ballads with politicised scuzzy rock on the flipside.
Yet the album from the same sessions that followed it three months later was quite different. The original title of The Beatles (or ‘The White Album’ as it’s popularly known) was A Doll’s House, but this was dropped when Family got in first with a very similar title. This was bemoaned by Ian McDonald in Revolution in the Head, noting that it suited the interior, miscellaneous, often childlike quality of the songs inside. This is true, but I think the title and sleeve it ended up with are more telling. Sgt. Pepper had worked hard to build a new identity for the group, with a binding concept as well as a visual approach that matched the music inside. The tracks were typically disparate in style, but George Martin’s production and the kaleidoscopic, colourful sleeve created a sense of unity. And although I said before that the whimsical caricature of Sgt. Pepper is inaccurate, there’s something broadly optimistic and open about it: even when it’s downbeat, it’s prettily downbeat.
The Beatles couldn’t be more of a contrast. With its eponymous non-title and blank sleeve, the album seems to actively dodge identity. This is mirrored by the sprawl of tracks within: it’s as if they didn’t want to pin down a new direction, and so included every idea that seemed half-decent. The album flits from lightweight comedy to autobiographical rawness, from upbeat rock to hazy melancholia and, in its last two tracks, from pure chaos to a lush Hollywood lullaby. Always adept at assimilating new styles, here they often slide into pure pastiche, forgetting to add much of their own – another sign that they weren’t sure what to do next.
It’s often said that Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting interests were diverging towards the end of their career, but this record sees them both dabbling in each other’s traditional territory – Lennon contributing ‘Good Night’, McCartney bringing ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ Also, both men were showing an interest in more straightforward guitar-based stuff again (‘Birthday’, ‘Yer Blues’) as well as stripped-down acoustic tracks (‘Blackbird’, ‘Julia’) and rambling comedy songs (‘Rocky Racoon’, ‘Bungalow Bill’).
The level of collaboration hadn’t dropped as far as often claimed. The album has often been described as a set of solo recordings on which the other members were employed as session musicians, and indeed there are solo Beatles songs with more Beatles involved than on several of the tracks here. Yet they didn’t just turn up and phone it in by any means. The new remasters reveal McCartney’s bassline on ‘Glass Onion’ to be one of his best, and clearly carefully considered: matching the mocking sneer of Lennon’s delivery, it stalks menacingly along behind it like hired muscle. Lennon returns the favour with a charming ragtime guitar solo on ‘Honey Pie’, although he was the least involved in tracks other than his own – notably, the peerless group performance that produced ‘Long, Long, Long’ (which gets my vote as Harrison’s best Beatles song) just involved the other three.
The extent to which McCartney was the glue holding the group together by this stage is evident in that he is on every track except ‘Julia’ and ‘Good Night’ (and his contribution to ‘Revolution 9’ was buried in the layers). He was the only one to pitch in on Starr’s ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ and turned up for all Harrison’s tracks, unlike Lennon who only did half. That said, even he sometimes got bored with his colleagues’ songs, drifting out of the ‘Yer Blues’ sessions to record ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ on his own (one of four tracks on the album where he is the only Beatle present, a solipsistic habit which you can imagine annoyed the others). Yet Starr, perhaps conveniently forgetting that halfway through the sessions he got fed up and quit the group for a week, recently remembered the album as a welcome return to group performances.
The album is great (I’ll go into just why next time), but feels like a backward step after the multi-layered productions of 1966 and 1967. Perhaps they felt there wasn’t anywhere else to take that approach, perhaps it was a lot of work and they just couldn’t be arsed. A mild rift with George Martin meant that he didn’t produce large chunks of it – the only Beatles record apart from ‘Let It Be’ where he was absent. The quantity of tracks seems almost an apology for the drop in quality. The result sounds a lot more like the guitar music that’s come since, especially indie and lo-fi stuff: its sound is more attainable than that of Pepper and so it’s arguably been more influential in the long run. But the fact is, if you were going to get into that pointless argument over whether The Beatles were as good as Bach or whatever, you’d go in armed with Eleanor Rigby and Strawberry Fields Forever, not this stuff.
As noted, the group had just got a massive commercial second wind after Sgt. Pepper. Magical Mystery Tour may have tarnished their image slightly back home, but as Jonathan Gould’s excellent book Can’t Buy Me Love identifies, their reputation in America continued to grow. Having already been adopted by American teenagers as figureheads for their generation, as the decade wore on The Beatles came to be cherished by the counter-culture (including Charles Manson, who would be very interested in this album) – whilst continuing to enjoy major mainstream success. It’s notable that whilst in the UK The Beatles never bettered ‘She Loves You’ for singles sales, in America their biggest hit was ‘Hey Jude’. (The song is one of their very best, and nothing sounds quite as distinctively Beatles as that mid-paced downward progression). But it also suggests that the group had made a transition from pop to rock, and this probably seemed like their future at the time: big, long, grandstanding soul-inflected ballads with politicised scuzzy rock on the flipside.
Yet the album from the same sessions that followed it three months later was quite different. The original title of The Beatles (or ‘The White Album’ as it’s popularly known) was A Doll’s House, but this was dropped when Family got in first with a very similar title. This was bemoaned by Ian McDonald in Revolution in the Head, noting that it suited the interior, miscellaneous, often childlike quality of the songs inside. This is true, but I think the title and sleeve it ended up with are more telling. Sgt. Pepper had worked hard to build a new identity for the group, with a binding concept as well as a visual approach that matched the music inside. The tracks were typically disparate in style, but George Martin’s production and the kaleidoscopic, colourful sleeve created a sense of unity. And although I said before that the whimsical caricature of Sgt. Pepper is inaccurate, there’s something broadly optimistic and open about it: even when it’s downbeat, it’s prettily downbeat.
The Beatles couldn’t be more of a contrast. With its eponymous non-title and blank sleeve, the album seems to actively dodge identity. This is mirrored by the sprawl of tracks within: it’s as if they didn’t want to pin down a new direction, and so included every idea that seemed half-decent. The album flits from lightweight comedy to autobiographical rawness, from upbeat rock to hazy melancholia and, in its last two tracks, from pure chaos to a lush Hollywood lullaby. Always adept at assimilating new styles, here they often slide into pure pastiche, forgetting to add much of their own – another sign that they weren’t sure what to do next.
It’s often said that Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting interests were diverging towards the end of their career, but this record sees them both dabbling in each other’s traditional territory – Lennon contributing ‘Good Night’, McCartney bringing ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ Also, both men were showing an interest in more straightforward guitar-based stuff again (‘Birthday’, ‘Yer Blues’) as well as stripped-down acoustic tracks (‘Blackbird’, ‘Julia’) and rambling comedy songs (‘Rocky Racoon’, ‘Bungalow Bill’).
The level of collaboration hadn’t dropped as far as often claimed. The album has often been described as a set of solo recordings on which the other members were employed as session musicians, and indeed there are solo Beatles songs with more Beatles involved than on several of the tracks here. Yet they didn’t just turn up and phone it in by any means. The new remasters reveal McCartney’s bassline on ‘Glass Onion’ to be one of his best, and clearly carefully considered: matching the mocking sneer of Lennon’s delivery, it stalks menacingly along behind it like hired muscle. Lennon returns the favour with a charming ragtime guitar solo on ‘Honey Pie’, although he was the least involved in tracks other than his own – notably, the peerless group performance that produced ‘Long, Long, Long’ (which gets my vote as Harrison’s best Beatles song) just involved the other three.
The extent to which McCartney was the glue holding the group together by this stage is evident in that he is on every track except ‘Julia’ and ‘Good Night’ (and his contribution to ‘Revolution 9’ was buried in the layers). He was the only one to pitch in on Starr’s ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ and turned up for all Harrison’s tracks, unlike Lennon who only did half. That said, even he sometimes got bored with his colleagues’ songs, drifting out of the ‘Yer Blues’ sessions to record ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ on his own (one of four tracks on the album where he is the only Beatle present, a solipsistic habit which you can imagine annoyed the others). Yet Starr, perhaps conveniently forgetting that halfway through the sessions he got fed up and quit the group for a week, recently remembered the album as a welcome return to group performances.
The album is great (I’ll go into just why next time), but feels like a backward step after the multi-layered productions of 1966 and 1967. Perhaps they felt there wasn’t anywhere else to take that approach, perhaps it was a lot of work and they just couldn’t be arsed. A mild rift with George Martin meant that he didn’t produce large chunks of it – the only Beatles record apart from ‘Let It Be’ where he was absent. The quantity of tracks seems almost an apology for the drop in quality. The result sounds a lot more like the guitar music that’s come since, especially indie and lo-fi stuff: its sound is more attainable than that of Pepper and so it’s arguably been more influential in the long run. But the fact is, if you were going to get into that pointless argument over whether The Beatles were as good as Bach or whatever, you’d go in armed with Eleanor Rigby and Strawberry Fields Forever, not this stuff.
Wednesday 29 September 2010
Yellow Submarine
It barely makes sense to talk about this album as a coherent entity. It was supposed to be an EP consisting of the four new tracks, but the American market demanded a full album, so it was padded with the title track and ‘All You Need Is Love’ on one side and George Martin’s orchestral score on the other. (This did at least mean that the album had mostly new music on it – another route might have been to combine the four new songs with nine or ten others from the film that most Beatles fans would own already.) It was the only Beatles album I never bought before getting the boxset: I knew the tracks incredibly well anyway, as my schoolfriends and I went through a phase of watching the film every time we got stoned. (I still love the film, and recently it became the second movie my three-year-old son had ever seen – one of the joys of being a Beatles fan is the huge range of ephemera, which enable you to come at the group from so many different angles.)
But most of all, the recording of these tracks was so disparate. Accumulated over the course of a year, they have nothing to unite them, no direct relevance to the Yellow Submarine concept. The result is like looking through the back door of Abbey Road during the making of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour – the paths they didn’t take during this period.
‘Only A Northern Song’ was supposed to be Harrison’s other track on Sgt. Pepper but was dropped for not being good enough. Harrison was the Beatle whose songs were least suited to a project like Yellow Submarine – he was the most abstract songwriter in the group, tending to write about his ideas and views. Lennon was a more ‘visual’ songwriter and McCartney made more use of character and narrative, both of which worked much better in this context. Notably, the only two songs of Harrison’s to feature prominently in the film are both ones which the filmmakers had no option other than to use, since a major selling point was that the film featured new Beatles songs and they had to use the exclusive songs they’d been given. I like ‘Only A Northern Song’ quite a lot, but the filmmakers must have been nonplussed to receive a sour rant about Harrison’s publishing contract set to music, with no visual hooks at all. The sequence they came up with is great, but has no narrative content or relevance to the lyrics.
‘It’s All Too Much’, apparently written by Harrison in an uncharacteristic fit of exuberance at the wonder of the world (must’ve been the drugs), slots into the end sequence of the film very well. It’s also an interesting example of The Beatles’ facility for picking up and dropping styles. Apparently intended for Magical Mystery Tour, it’s The Beatles attempting a full-on psychedelic wig-out with feedback, layers of sound and an extended outro. Having flung it out to Yellow Submarine, they then never recorded anything like it again. (It does however seem to be the model for Oasis’ entire Be Here Now album.)
‘All Together Now’ was recorded before the release of Sgt. Pepper but never found a home, and probably later struck McCartney as being good fodder for a cartoon: it also struck me as a great opener for a playlist of Beatles songs aimed at kids, which I’ll share with you at some point. (It’s also interesting as a jolly summer-of-love preview of the weirder, more sinister childlike songs on The Beatles.) The only one which may have been written with the soundtrack in mind was ‘Hey Bulldog’, purely because it must have been submitted for use at the last minute: Mark Lewisohn states that it replaced ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ as the final new track for the film. (It did emerge very late in the day – the concept for the ‘Lady Madonna’ video was to show them at work in the studio, but rather than mime to the already-recorded single, they decided to record something new and let the cameras film that. The footage, since re-edited, makes a better video for ‘Hey Bulldog’ itself, since that’s what they were actually playing.)
‘Hey Bulldog’ has become a minor Beatles classic, and is the only track from Yellow Submarine to genuinely point to where the group was going next: less whimsical, more focused around guitars/bass/drums/piano, with a harder edge. It has a rawness and menace that hadn’t been heard since ‘Money’ on Beatles For Sale. The other tracks were already relics from the group’s psychedelic phase: the lag time of an animated film had no chance of keeping up with The Beatles’ restless creativity.
But most of all, the recording of these tracks was so disparate. Accumulated over the course of a year, they have nothing to unite them, no direct relevance to the Yellow Submarine concept. The result is like looking through the back door of Abbey Road during the making of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour – the paths they didn’t take during this period.
‘Only A Northern Song’ was supposed to be Harrison’s other track on Sgt. Pepper but was dropped for not being good enough. Harrison was the Beatle whose songs were least suited to a project like Yellow Submarine – he was the most abstract songwriter in the group, tending to write about his ideas and views. Lennon was a more ‘visual’ songwriter and McCartney made more use of character and narrative, both of which worked much better in this context. Notably, the only two songs of Harrison’s to feature prominently in the film are both ones which the filmmakers had no option other than to use, since a major selling point was that the film featured new Beatles songs and they had to use the exclusive songs they’d been given. I like ‘Only A Northern Song’ quite a lot, but the filmmakers must have been nonplussed to receive a sour rant about Harrison’s publishing contract set to music, with no visual hooks at all. The sequence they came up with is great, but has no narrative content or relevance to the lyrics.
‘It’s All Too Much’, apparently written by Harrison in an uncharacteristic fit of exuberance at the wonder of the world (must’ve been the drugs), slots into the end sequence of the film very well. It’s also an interesting example of The Beatles’ facility for picking up and dropping styles. Apparently intended for Magical Mystery Tour, it’s The Beatles attempting a full-on psychedelic wig-out with feedback, layers of sound and an extended outro. Having flung it out to Yellow Submarine, they then never recorded anything like it again. (It does however seem to be the model for Oasis’ entire Be Here Now album.)
‘All Together Now’ was recorded before the release of Sgt. Pepper but never found a home, and probably later struck McCartney as being good fodder for a cartoon: it also struck me as a great opener for a playlist of Beatles songs aimed at kids, which I’ll share with you at some point. (It’s also interesting as a jolly summer-of-love preview of the weirder, more sinister childlike songs on The Beatles.) The only one which may have been written with the soundtrack in mind was ‘Hey Bulldog’, purely because it must have been submitted for use at the last minute: Mark Lewisohn states that it replaced ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ as the final new track for the film. (It did emerge very late in the day – the concept for the ‘Lady Madonna’ video was to show them at work in the studio, but rather than mime to the already-recorded single, they decided to record something new and let the cameras film that. The footage, since re-edited, makes a better video for ‘Hey Bulldog’ itself, since that’s what they were actually playing.)
‘Hey Bulldog’ has become a minor Beatles classic, and is the only track from Yellow Submarine to genuinely point to where the group was going next: less whimsical, more focused around guitars/bass/drums/piano, with a harder edge. It has a rawness and menace that hadn’t been heard since ‘Money’ on Beatles For Sale. The other tracks were already relics from the group’s psychedelic phase: the lag time of an animated film had no chance of keeping up with The Beatles’ restless creativity.
Monday 27 September 2010
Magical Mystery Tour
A perverse index of how successful Sgt Pepper was can be found in the backlash that followed six months later. Today, the slating that Magical Mystery Tour received seems magnificently irrelevant to the group’s reputation. Indeed, it’s rather gratifying that The Beatles used their huge commercial clout to convince the BBC to devote an hour of the Boxing Day schedule to their rambling stoner home movie: having done their three years of punishing, crowd-pleasing itineraries, they were now doing what the hell they wanted. Take that, The Man!
Yet the kicking they received was not entirely undeserved. The Beatles do appear to have lost focus quite rapidly after Sgt Pepper, partly as a result of McCartney’s bullish determination to maintain it. Just four days after finishing Pepper, when they probably should have taken a break, they were back in the studio working on Magical Mystery Tour. Another factor was the death of their manager Brian Epstein, which was not only traumatic but robbed them of a key authority figure. And although they’d been doing lots of drugs for some time by this stage, in the air of the summer 1967 – and with a resounding creative and commercial triumph behind them – it’s just possible that it all went to their heads.
In the Anthology series there’s a sequence of interview clips where nobody can come to a consensus on whether ‘All You Need Is Love’ was written specially for the Our World TV special or not. It’s generally unclear to me whether the material they were recording in this period was intended for specific projects, or whether they were just slinging songs together and putting them out wherever seemed appropriate at the time. Up to this point, their record releases had been very straightforward – they aimed to average a single every four months and an album every six. Recently the gaps between releases had stretched, but the pattern was more or less the same. Yet post-Pepper, they were working on two different soundtracks (Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine) whilst still putting out singles, but not working on an album. Their approach to the Yellow Submarine soundtrack appears to have been to use it as a dumping ground for less favoured material (as evidenced by poor George contributing two of the four new songs).
In addition, the group were also accruing offcuts like ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’, which didn’t see the light of day until the ‘Let It Be’ single in 1970. Pre-Pepper, they’d never had time to mess about in the studio. Now they seemed to be doing it quite often, no doubt to the delight of George Martin and his team who had to sit around until the early hours committing to tape what might only be an extended in-joke.
A lot of the material from this period has been celebrated in retrospect, and there’s a lot to like about it. The only real dud on the Magical Mystery Tour EP, for me, is ‘Blue Jay Way’ (I even like the much-maligned ‘Flying’). ‘I Am The Walrus’ is of course a Classic Beatles Song, as Lennon gets away with a measly single contribution to the soundtrack by the simple tactic of making it one of the most astonishing pieces of popular music ever made. (It’s been analysed enough elsewhere – Howard Goodall covers it well in the documentary I linked to in the second piece on Revolver.) Neither ‘The Fool On The Hill’ nor ‘Your Mother Should Know’ would have dragged down the hit-rate of Sgt Pepper. Although there’s sometimes a lethargy to the performance or a lack of polish in the production to the tracks from this period, it’s only by comparison with their own high standards – and you only have to listen to the ‘Weimar’ version of ‘Your Mother Should Know’ (recorded after the ‘proper’ version, but discarded) to know that they were still disciplined enough to search for the best way of doing something rather than go with the first thing that came into their heads.
Yet whilst these tracks may have been celebrated individually, they simply don’t add up to as much as Sgt Pepper, or indeed Revolver or Rubber Soul. It’s annoyingly nebulous and I’m possibly trying too hard to justify an instinctive response here, but it does seem that the unifying sense of purpose which had shaped earlier Beatles albums is missing here – and would arguably remain missing until Abbey Road.
Yet the kicking they received was not entirely undeserved. The Beatles do appear to have lost focus quite rapidly after Sgt Pepper, partly as a result of McCartney’s bullish determination to maintain it. Just four days after finishing Pepper, when they probably should have taken a break, they were back in the studio working on Magical Mystery Tour. Another factor was the death of their manager Brian Epstein, which was not only traumatic but robbed them of a key authority figure. And although they’d been doing lots of drugs for some time by this stage, in the air of the summer 1967 – and with a resounding creative and commercial triumph behind them – it’s just possible that it all went to their heads.
In the Anthology series there’s a sequence of interview clips where nobody can come to a consensus on whether ‘All You Need Is Love’ was written specially for the Our World TV special or not. It’s generally unclear to me whether the material they were recording in this period was intended for specific projects, or whether they were just slinging songs together and putting them out wherever seemed appropriate at the time. Up to this point, their record releases had been very straightforward – they aimed to average a single every four months and an album every six. Recently the gaps between releases had stretched, but the pattern was more or less the same. Yet post-Pepper, they were working on two different soundtracks (Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine) whilst still putting out singles, but not working on an album. Their approach to the Yellow Submarine soundtrack appears to have been to use it as a dumping ground for less favoured material (as evidenced by poor George contributing two of the four new songs).
In addition, the group were also accruing offcuts like ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’, which didn’t see the light of day until the ‘Let It Be’ single in 1970. Pre-Pepper, they’d never had time to mess about in the studio. Now they seemed to be doing it quite often, no doubt to the delight of George Martin and his team who had to sit around until the early hours committing to tape what might only be an extended in-joke.
A lot of the material from this period has been celebrated in retrospect, and there’s a lot to like about it. The only real dud on the Magical Mystery Tour EP, for me, is ‘Blue Jay Way’ (I even like the much-maligned ‘Flying’). ‘I Am The Walrus’ is of course a Classic Beatles Song, as Lennon gets away with a measly single contribution to the soundtrack by the simple tactic of making it one of the most astonishing pieces of popular music ever made. (It’s been analysed enough elsewhere – Howard Goodall covers it well in the documentary I linked to in the second piece on Revolver.) Neither ‘The Fool On The Hill’ nor ‘Your Mother Should Know’ would have dragged down the hit-rate of Sgt Pepper. Although there’s sometimes a lethargy to the performance or a lack of polish in the production to the tracks from this period, it’s only by comparison with their own high standards – and you only have to listen to the ‘Weimar’ version of ‘Your Mother Should Know’ (recorded after the ‘proper’ version, but discarded) to know that they were still disciplined enough to search for the best way of doing something rather than go with the first thing that came into their heads.
Yet whilst these tracks may have been celebrated individually, they simply don’t add up to as much as Sgt Pepper, or indeed Revolver or Rubber Soul. It’s annoyingly nebulous and I’m possibly trying too hard to justify an instinctive response here, but it does seem that the unifying sense of purpose which had shaped earlier Beatles albums is missing here – and would arguably remain missing until Abbey Road.
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (2)
Usually when you look at the tracklist of the most famous album by a very famous artist, you see a clutch of their most famous songs. Bringing It All Back Home has ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. Ziggy Stardust has the title track, ‘Starman’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide’. Parklife has the title track, ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘This Is A Low’. And The Joshua Tree probably has some of the most famous U2 songs on it but I don’t know which ones on account of I hate U2.
The surprising thing about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is that it’s not really like that at all. When I started to become interested in The Beatles, I decided to get Sgt. Pepper first because I reasoned you probably couldn’t go far wrong with that. But on looking at the back of the slightly rubbish cardboard slipcase the album used to come in, I was surprised by the lack of famous songs. The title track is famous because the album is. ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was better known in versions by other people (at least it was to me – the Wet Wet Wet charity Xerox and the Joe Cocker one which I knew because it was the theme from The Wonder Years). ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ is notorious, but hardly among The Beatles’ best.
In fact, if you look at most polls of The Best Ever Beatles Songs Ever In The World Ever, there’s a pretty good chance ‘A Day In The Life’ will be sitting at the top (an excellent song, and a politically expedient choice given that Lennon and McCartney each wrote a bit of it), but nothing else from Sgt. Pepper will trouble the top ten. Rolling Stone’s laughably poor new list (seriously, #8-10 are utter bollocks and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ is #2 for purely sentimental reasons) follows this pattern. In fact, you probably won’t find anything else from Pepper in the top twenty and very little in the top fifty. Look! Here’s a top forty which just has the one track from Pepper, but four each from Help! and Rubber Soul.
That’s quite strange, if you think about it.
One reason why this is the case is The Beatles’ policy of not putting singles on their albums, a policy which they observed very strictly except when they didn’t. (You often hear it said that The Beatles didn’t put singles on their albums, but six of their eleven albums have singles on them. Which is more than half, as you were probably capable of working out for yourself.) This did apply to Pepper, famously, with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ both intended for the album but pulled off to make a new single in order to stop everyone saying The Beatles had lost it/were going to split up/were dead etc. (I often look at the modern two-to-three year album/tour cycle and wish it was still like the 1960s where bands got told to pull their fingers out if they failed to release anything for six months.) So the album entirely lacks any hits: you’ll find nothing from Pepper on the 1 album, for example.
Perhaps a slightly deeper reason, however, is that Sgt. Pepper was celebrated for ushering in a new approach to the album. Yes, as has been said many times, it’s not much of a concept album due to the ‘concept’ being ‘Hello, we are a band: here are some songs’. Also, the caricature of it all taking place in ‘Pepperland’, a candyfloss world of whimsy, doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny: for every ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, there’s a ‘She’s Leaving Home’ or a ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ which have a very different perspective. Yet it does have a certain unity to it.
This is partly due to the way McCartney took the creative lead on this record: Lennon, in a psychedelic haze, dropped his workrate (only three tracks on the album are mostly his work, with a further two being co-writes), whilst Harrison hadn’t entirely got over his irritation with being a Beatle and found the new studio-based method of working isolated him (he spent seven hours working on a guitar solo for the title track only for McCartney to dump it and perform a new one himself, and on ‘A Day In The Life’ – widely considered the group’s masterpiece – Harrison’s only contribution was to play maracas). Ringo found himself sitting around for hours on end whilst tracks were developed. The concept behind the album was McCartney’s and its layered, kaleidoscopic, eclectic style is clearly more his than anyone else’s. It’s also very mid-paced – this is the first Beatles record to feature nothing that would work in a club (‘Lovely Rita’ comes closest) – and certainly feels different from any other Beatles album.
But it’s perhaps more the reputation of the album as an album which means individual tracks have difficulty standing out for a modern audience. Sgt. Pepper was such a phenomenon, and holds such a legendary status today, that its tracks are bound up with the whole in people’s minds. This is to the benefit of some, like ‘Fixing A Hole’ or ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!’ – lovely productions, but relatively lightweight songs – which would be less renowned if they’d been held over to Magical Mystery Tour. It’s to the detriment of others: ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ is as good a song as Lennon ever wrote, with a vivid lyric and extraordinary unorthodox tempo changes, but is rarely ranked alongside ‘In My Life’ or ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is transparently better than ‘Yesterday’, but one is on all the Beatles Best Of albums and the other isn’t. These tracks are subsumed into the cultural monolith that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The success of ‘A Day In The Life’ in polls perhaps stands in for the album as a whole – pretentious as it sounds, the record is a single piece.
The surprising thing about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is that it’s not really like that at all. When I started to become interested in The Beatles, I decided to get Sgt. Pepper first because I reasoned you probably couldn’t go far wrong with that. But on looking at the back of the slightly rubbish cardboard slipcase the album used to come in, I was surprised by the lack of famous songs. The title track is famous because the album is. ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was better known in versions by other people (at least it was to me – the Wet Wet Wet charity Xerox and the Joe Cocker one which I knew because it was the theme from The Wonder Years). ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ is notorious, but hardly among The Beatles’ best.
In fact, if you look at most polls of The Best Ever Beatles Songs Ever In The World Ever, there’s a pretty good chance ‘A Day In The Life’ will be sitting at the top (an excellent song, and a politically expedient choice given that Lennon and McCartney each wrote a bit of it), but nothing else from Sgt. Pepper will trouble the top ten. Rolling Stone’s laughably poor new list (seriously, #8-10 are utter bollocks and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ is #2 for purely sentimental reasons) follows this pattern. In fact, you probably won’t find anything else from Pepper in the top twenty and very little in the top fifty. Look! Here’s a top forty which just has the one track from Pepper, but four each from Help! and Rubber Soul.
That’s quite strange, if you think about it.
One reason why this is the case is The Beatles’ policy of not putting singles on their albums, a policy which they observed very strictly except when they didn’t. (You often hear it said that The Beatles didn’t put singles on their albums, but six of their eleven albums have singles on them. Which is more than half, as you were probably capable of working out for yourself.) This did apply to Pepper, famously, with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ both intended for the album but pulled off to make a new single in order to stop everyone saying The Beatles had lost it/were going to split up/were dead etc. (I often look at the modern two-to-three year album/tour cycle and wish it was still like the 1960s where bands got told to pull their fingers out if they failed to release anything for six months.) So the album entirely lacks any hits: you’ll find nothing from Pepper on the 1 album, for example.
Perhaps a slightly deeper reason, however, is that Sgt. Pepper was celebrated for ushering in a new approach to the album. Yes, as has been said many times, it’s not much of a concept album due to the ‘concept’ being ‘Hello, we are a band: here are some songs’. Also, the caricature of it all taking place in ‘Pepperland’, a candyfloss world of whimsy, doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny: for every ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, there’s a ‘She’s Leaving Home’ or a ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ which have a very different perspective. Yet it does have a certain unity to it.
This is partly due to the way McCartney took the creative lead on this record: Lennon, in a psychedelic haze, dropped his workrate (only three tracks on the album are mostly his work, with a further two being co-writes), whilst Harrison hadn’t entirely got over his irritation with being a Beatle and found the new studio-based method of working isolated him (he spent seven hours working on a guitar solo for the title track only for McCartney to dump it and perform a new one himself, and on ‘A Day In The Life’ – widely considered the group’s masterpiece – Harrison’s only contribution was to play maracas). Ringo found himself sitting around for hours on end whilst tracks were developed. The concept behind the album was McCartney’s and its layered, kaleidoscopic, eclectic style is clearly more his than anyone else’s. It’s also very mid-paced – this is the first Beatles record to feature nothing that would work in a club (‘Lovely Rita’ comes closest) – and certainly feels different from any other Beatles album.
But it’s perhaps more the reputation of the album as an album which means individual tracks have difficulty standing out for a modern audience. Sgt. Pepper was such a phenomenon, and holds such a legendary status today, that its tracks are bound up with the whole in people’s minds. This is to the benefit of some, like ‘Fixing A Hole’ or ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!’ – lovely productions, but relatively lightweight songs – which would be less renowned if they’d been held over to Magical Mystery Tour. It’s to the detriment of others: ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ is as good a song as Lennon ever wrote, with a vivid lyric and extraordinary unorthodox tempo changes, but is rarely ranked alongside ‘In My Life’ or ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is transparently better than ‘Yesterday’, but one is on all the Beatles Best Of albums and the other isn’t. These tracks are subsumed into the cultural monolith that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The success of ‘A Day In The Life’ in polls perhaps stands in for the album as a whole – pretentious as it sounds, the record is a single piece.
Thursday 26 August 2010
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1)
Ah, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – that most feted, mythologised and sentimentalised of all Beatles albums. This seems a good moment for some dry statistics, doesn’t it?
Early on in this blog, I talked about how easy it is to look at The Beatles’ career and see a steady progression, certainly as far as Sgt. Pepper, where each album is an advance on the previous one. Certainly this is true, creatively speaking: whilst I don’t think every album betters its predecessor, there isn’t a backward step on any of those first eight albums – and this path led to them making Revolver and Pepper, therefore the process was a successful one. However, this was by no means the only way it could have gone – and viewed in terms of their commercial impact, in late 1966 The Beatles were an act who had passed their peak in the UK three years ago. That’s a long time in pop music, and considering the mayfly lifespans of 1960s pop careers it was an eternity.
The Beatles had managed their decline very smartly – they were still the only act whose every single and album topped the charts, and they had lately tested that loyalty with some changes of direction – but the fact remained that their biggest-selling single was ‘She Loves You’. This is hardly surprising when you consider the saturation coverage the group had received in the summer of 1963, and the fact that any pop phenomenon only gets one shot at being the hot new thing. Generating a second groundswell of excitement like the one which shifted over a million copies of ‘She Loves You’ and kept Please Please Me at the top of the LP charts for thirty weeks (only knocked off by With The Beatles, which stayed for 21 weeks – one week shy of a full year at the top for the group) was basically inconceivable. Other acts would always be newer and, although The Beatles were still the biggest band around, they were not as big as they were. They couldn’t be.
A Hard Day’s Night also managed 21 weeks at the top, but after that Beatles records were less dominant than they had been. Beatles For Sale managed eleven in total (over three spells), Help! nine, Rubber Soul eight, Revolver seven. There are a lot of factors involved there: the LP charts became more competitive with the emergence of The Rolling Stones in 1964 and Bob Dylan in 1965, both artists who sold very well in album form (between May 1963 and January 1968, only five artists held the top spot in the UK album charts: The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Monkees and the cast of The Sound of Music). There’s also the simple fact that once The Beatles were established, it became more likely that people already knew whether they wanted to buy the group’s record or not and did so fairly swiftly after release. (I’d be very interested to see contemporary sales figures if anyone can point me towards them, listing numbers of copies sold per week – all you can find these days are the total sales up to the present day, which are useless. Was Please Please Me still the group’s best-selling album in 1966, for instance?)
This gradual decline may have been a contributing factor to the serious consideration the group gave to splitting up after Revolver – in addition to their well-documented frustration with the punishing tour and promotional regime, being vilified in America and so on. Had they split up at that point, I suspect that the Beatles of 1963/4 would be the version of the group that dominated in the popular imagination. It would generally be recognised that their last couple of albums featured their best work, but by splitting in 1966 they would have ensured that everyone forever remembered them as the mop-tops.
It was probably the case in 1966 that a lot of people still chiefly thought of them as the mop-tops – that early success could well have become a millstone, something they could surely never surpass. Their many fans would be well aware that their music was moving on, but could they convince those who’d gone off them, or never liked them in the first place, to see them as something new again? When even their name, The Beatles, spoke of an earlier pop era whose stars had already fallen by the wayside? They needed to pitch themselves almost as if they were a whole new act. Adopting a new name seems a facile method of achieving this, and of course there were may other aspects to the success of Sgt. Pepper – but it’s more than a curious coincidence that the record did indeed take The Beatles to new heights of success at a time when that should have been almost impossible.
Now for the dry statistics I promised earlier. Earlier in this blog I asked when it was that The Beatles stopped being chiefly the preserve of screaming teenage girls and became the preserve of chin-stroking musos. The chart performance of Sgt. Pepper suggests an answer. Where its predecessor managed to top the UK charts for seven weeks, Pepper managed an initial 23 weeks, then returned to the top three times – including Christmas and, amazingly, another week in February 1968, eight months after it came out. With a total of 27 weeks it almost outdid Please Please Me – impressive considering the general boom in album sales in the intervening years.
As noted earlier, by the time Revolver came out people generally knew whether they wanted the new Beatles album or not. The fact that, eight months after Sgt. Pepper came out, people were suddenly deciding to buy it in enough quantities to get it back to number one, strongly suggests that the album had won the group new fans in droves. It was selling to people who’d never bought a Beatles album before. Though it has undoubtedly been sentimentalised in retrospect, Sgt. Pepper was a genuine phenomenon.
Early on in this blog, I talked about how easy it is to look at The Beatles’ career and see a steady progression, certainly as far as Sgt. Pepper, where each album is an advance on the previous one. Certainly this is true, creatively speaking: whilst I don’t think every album betters its predecessor, there isn’t a backward step on any of those first eight albums – and this path led to them making Revolver and Pepper, therefore the process was a successful one. However, this was by no means the only way it could have gone – and viewed in terms of their commercial impact, in late 1966 The Beatles were an act who had passed their peak in the UK three years ago. That’s a long time in pop music, and considering the mayfly lifespans of 1960s pop careers it was an eternity.
The Beatles had managed their decline very smartly – they were still the only act whose every single and album topped the charts, and they had lately tested that loyalty with some changes of direction – but the fact remained that their biggest-selling single was ‘She Loves You’. This is hardly surprising when you consider the saturation coverage the group had received in the summer of 1963, and the fact that any pop phenomenon only gets one shot at being the hot new thing. Generating a second groundswell of excitement like the one which shifted over a million copies of ‘She Loves You’ and kept Please Please Me at the top of the LP charts for thirty weeks (only knocked off by With The Beatles, which stayed for 21 weeks – one week shy of a full year at the top for the group) was basically inconceivable. Other acts would always be newer and, although The Beatles were still the biggest band around, they were not as big as they were. They couldn’t be.
A Hard Day’s Night also managed 21 weeks at the top, but after that Beatles records were less dominant than they had been. Beatles For Sale managed eleven in total (over three spells), Help! nine, Rubber Soul eight, Revolver seven. There are a lot of factors involved there: the LP charts became more competitive with the emergence of The Rolling Stones in 1964 and Bob Dylan in 1965, both artists who sold very well in album form (between May 1963 and January 1968, only five artists held the top spot in the UK album charts: The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Monkees and the cast of The Sound of Music). There’s also the simple fact that once The Beatles were established, it became more likely that people already knew whether they wanted to buy the group’s record or not and did so fairly swiftly after release. (I’d be very interested to see contemporary sales figures if anyone can point me towards them, listing numbers of copies sold per week – all you can find these days are the total sales up to the present day, which are useless. Was Please Please Me still the group’s best-selling album in 1966, for instance?)
This gradual decline may have been a contributing factor to the serious consideration the group gave to splitting up after Revolver – in addition to their well-documented frustration with the punishing tour and promotional regime, being vilified in America and so on. Had they split up at that point, I suspect that the Beatles of 1963/4 would be the version of the group that dominated in the popular imagination. It would generally be recognised that their last couple of albums featured their best work, but by splitting in 1966 they would have ensured that everyone forever remembered them as the mop-tops.
It was probably the case in 1966 that a lot of people still chiefly thought of them as the mop-tops – that early success could well have become a millstone, something they could surely never surpass. Their many fans would be well aware that their music was moving on, but could they convince those who’d gone off them, or never liked them in the first place, to see them as something new again? When even their name, The Beatles, spoke of an earlier pop era whose stars had already fallen by the wayside? They needed to pitch themselves almost as if they were a whole new act. Adopting a new name seems a facile method of achieving this, and of course there were may other aspects to the success of Sgt. Pepper – but it’s more than a curious coincidence that the record did indeed take The Beatles to new heights of success at a time when that should have been almost impossible.
Now for the dry statistics I promised earlier. Earlier in this blog I asked when it was that The Beatles stopped being chiefly the preserve of screaming teenage girls and became the preserve of chin-stroking musos. The chart performance of Sgt. Pepper suggests an answer. Where its predecessor managed to top the UK charts for seven weeks, Pepper managed an initial 23 weeks, then returned to the top three times – including Christmas and, amazingly, another week in February 1968, eight months after it came out. With a total of 27 weeks it almost outdid Please Please Me – impressive considering the general boom in album sales in the intervening years.
As noted earlier, by the time Revolver came out people generally knew whether they wanted the new Beatles album or not. The fact that, eight months after Sgt. Pepper came out, people were suddenly deciding to buy it in enough quantities to get it back to number one, strongly suggests that the album had won the group new fans in droves. It was selling to people who’d never bought a Beatles album before. Though it has undoubtedly been sentimentalised in retrospect, Sgt. Pepper was a genuine phenomenon.
Friday 30 July 2010
Revolver (2)
Revolver is my favourite Beatles album. I sometimes feel that seems a slightly witless choice, as if I’m dodging the default option of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band just for the sake of being different, and have gone for the album that preceded it. But I can argue the case and, as you have probably gathered if you’ve been reading this blog, I will.
Revolver contains my two favourite Beatles tracks, the two I’d choose if I could only listen to two Beatles tracks for the rest of my life: ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. There’s a superb documentary about The Beatles by Howard Goodall – a documentary so good that, even though I think The Beatles are amazing, it made me like them a little bit more. Look, it’s on YouTube. Watch it.
If you don’t have a spare fifty minutes though, here’s a summary. Essentially he deconstructs various Beatles songs to show how cleverly-assembled they are, how well they achieve their desired effects and how innovative they were for their time. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is covered, and this is important to his basic thesis: The Beatles arrived just as ‘serious’ composers had given up on the Western classical tradition and started pissing about with the avant-garde. Goodall explains why the Western classical tradition is brilliant, how it influenced The Beatles, and then demonstrates how they brought it together with the avant-garde (and other influences, such as the Eastern classical tradition) to make music which was massively popular: the prime example being ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
This is a very interesting argument, but it sort of put in context stuff which I already knew about that track: the influence of Indian raga music and Stockhausen on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is fairly obvious even if you’ve never really listened to either. It’s hard to make that track more amazing than it was the first time you heard it and had to check it wasn’t a Candy Flip-inspired early-1990s remix. But Goodall also covered ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the programme, and I found what he said about it quite jaw-dropping.
‘Eleanor Rigby’ does not follow the usual rules of Western music. Instead it’s written in what’s called the Dorian mode, a form of songwriting which originated with mediaeval monks’ chants. McCartney never studied this: it filtered down to him via folk music. The fact that he apparently grasped the ‘rules’ of this mode instinctively and understood that they were a ‘correct’ way to write songs is perhaps a tribute to the mode as much as McCartney, and certainly George Martin may have made a large contribution here as he arranged the strings which form the entire basis of the track, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Goodall’s demonstration of what the song would sound like in a conventional Western classical style – i.e. nowhere near as good – closes his case.
Not only is ‘Eleanor Rigby’ a superb piece of music, tightly controlled and effortlessly affecting, it is also the ideal response to those who dismiss McCartney as a fluff-merchant and pastiche artist. The lyric is stark and startling, dealing with people and subjects not typically covered in pop music then or now. All the great lines of this lyric have been praised by others, but the whole thing is a very focused piece of writing, with every detail – the window, the socks (Ringo’s idea), Eleanor being ‘buried along with her name’ – adding to the effect. Absolutely nothing is sugared or romanticised.
And far from being pastiche, there is no obvious precedent for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it’s remarkable that McCartney thought of doing it at all. It’s of an entirely different order to ‘Yesterday’, which is also carried by its string quartet but which is a far more conventional ballad. I’m not aware that anybody else was making records like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, with its wintry urgency and total lack of glamour. Amazingly, they then decided to put it out as a single and slap a kids’ novelty song on the other side (and it’s a great kids’ novelty song – my son demands it to be played repeatedly). It’s hard to imagine how this sounded to pop fans in 1966, for whom The Beatles were still principally a guitar group, but they went along with it enough to send it to number one. The majority of groups who’ve claimed to be Beatle-influenced would have balked at putting this out, if they’d been capable of it in the first place.
What I love about Revolver is that this huge variety is contained within a pop format, with every song between two and three minutes long. It’s the record that epitomises the best of The Beatles, for me, and is why I stare in bafflement at my many friends who favour Abbey Road.
Revolver contains my two favourite Beatles tracks, the two I’d choose if I could only listen to two Beatles tracks for the rest of my life: ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. There’s a superb documentary about The Beatles by Howard Goodall – a documentary so good that, even though I think The Beatles are amazing, it made me like them a little bit more. Look, it’s on YouTube. Watch it.
If you don’t have a spare fifty minutes though, here’s a summary. Essentially he deconstructs various Beatles songs to show how cleverly-assembled they are, how well they achieve their desired effects and how innovative they were for their time. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is covered, and this is important to his basic thesis: The Beatles arrived just as ‘serious’ composers had given up on the Western classical tradition and started pissing about with the avant-garde. Goodall explains why the Western classical tradition is brilliant, how it influenced The Beatles, and then demonstrates how they brought it together with the avant-garde (and other influences, such as the Eastern classical tradition) to make music which was massively popular: the prime example being ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
This is a very interesting argument, but it sort of put in context stuff which I already knew about that track: the influence of Indian raga music and Stockhausen on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is fairly obvious even if you’ve never really listened to either. It’s hard to make that track more amazing than it was the first time you heard it and had to check it wasn’t a Candy Flip-inspired early-1990s remix. But Goodall also covered ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the programme, and I found what he said about it quite jaw-dropping.
‘Eleanor Rigby’ does not follow the usual rules of Western music. Instead it’s written in what’s called the Dorian mode, a form of songwriting which originated with mediaeval monks’ chants. McCartney never studied this: it filtered down to him via folk music. The fact that he apparently grasped the ‘rules’ of this mode instinctively and understood that they were a ‘correct’ way to write songs is perhaps a tribute to the mode as much as McCartney, and certainly George Martin may have made a large contribution here as he arranged the strings which form the entire basis of the track, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Goodall’s demonstration of what the song would sound like in a conventional Western classical style – i.e. nowhere near as good – closes his case.
Not only is ‘Eleanor Rigby’ a superb piece of music, tightly controlled and effortlessly affecting, it is also the ideal response to those who dismiss McCartney as a fluff-merchant and pastiche artist. The lyric is stark and startling, dealing with people and subjects not typically covered in pop music then or now. All the great lines of this lyric have been praised by others, but the whole thing is a very focused piece of writing, with every detail – the window, the socks (Ringo’s idea), Eleanor being ‘buried along with her name’ – adding to the effect. Absolutely nothing is sugared or romanticised.
And far from being pastiche, there is no obvious precedent for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it’s remarkable that McCartney thought of doing it at all. It’s of an entirely different order to ‘Yesterday’, which is also carried by its string quartet but which is a far more conventional ballad. I’m not aware that anybody else was making records like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, with its wintry urgency and total lack of glamour. Amazingly, they then decided to put it out as a single and slap a kids’ novelty song on the other side (and it’s a great kids’ novelty song – my son demands it to be played repeatedly). It’s hard to imagine how this sounded to pop fans in 1966, for whom The Beatles were still principally a guitar group, but they went along with it enough to send it to number one. The majority of groups who’ve claimed to be Beatle-influenced would have balked at putting this out, if they’d been capable of it in the first place.
What I love about Revolver is that this huge variety is contained within a pop format, with every song between two and three minutes long. It’s the record that epitomises the best of The Beatles, for me, and is why I stare in bafflement at my many friends who favour Abbey Road.
Thursday 29 July 2010
Revolver (1)
Ah, Rubber Soul and Revolver. In everyday discourse about The Beatles, they go together like Laurel and Hardy, salt and pepper, Mel Gibson and misogyny. This bracketing was strengthened when Harrison noted in the Anthology series that in his opinion ‘they could almost have been Part One and Part Two’, and you often see this as a standard critical line on these records.
Apologies, George – I know you were in The Beatles and I wasn’t, and you’re dead so it’s difficult for you to argue back, but I couldn’t disagree more. Harrison did note that he hadn’t listened to them back-to-back lately when he said that, and if one does so the step up from one to the next is very apparent. In fact, heard in the context of this blog’s listening-experiment, Revolver sounds like perhaps the biggest step up in The Beatles’ career.
I’ve always felt there was a substantial difference between the two records, with Rubber Soul being more geared towards developing the band's songwriting whilst Revolver builds on that by exploring how a song can be enhanced by production, additional instruments and/or arrangements that couldn’t easily be replicated live. However, the tracks I’d always thought of as being really progressive were the likes of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Love You To’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. What I wasn’t expecting was for the album to sound so different from the opening seconds: not only the mildly surreal count-in that opens the album, but the entirety of ‘Taxman’.
What I’d never noticed before is how brusquely minimal ‘Taxman’ is. The lead guitar relies on the bass to carry the main riff: the guitar line is then hugely stripped back. I’d never noticed just how stripped-back it is, I’d imagined there were about twice as many notes in it as there actually are. Your brain fills in the gaps. The effect is thrillingly casual yet taut, the coolest opening to any Beatles album, banishing the chirpy-entertainers image of their early recording career. Shame it’s a moan about how much tax they’re paying, but to be fair they were paying a hell of a lot (‘One for you, nineteen for me’ isn’t an exaggeration, they were subject to a 95% supertax – I’m very much in favour of progressive taxation, but I think that’s a bit mad).
What probably brackets Rubber Soul and Revolver most strongly in Harrison’s mind is that this was the period when he was most central to the group. His songwriting on both albums is much better than his previous work, and was rewarded with three tracks on Revolver rather than his usual two. (This, and the lack of 50-50 co-writes from Lennon/McCartney, aids the excellent sequencing of Revolver, whereby you never hear the same lead vocalist handle two tracks back-to-back, and whereby the album opens and closes with the sequence Harrison-McCartney-Lennon. The Capitol version, which pulled three tracks and released them early on ‘Yesterday’... And Today, disastrously selected three Lennon songs, meaning the Harrison wrote more of the American 11-track version of Revolver than Lennon did.) Additionally, their studio practices hadn’t yet become fragmented in the manner which ultimately marginalised both Harrison and Starr. ‘Taxman’ is a fine example of what Harrison could achieve when Lennon and McCartney helped him the way they helped each other, with Lennon having input on the lyric and McCartney offering production ideas and, surprisingly, the astonishing guitar solo.
In places the success of Revolver is about what the group add, such as the numerous effects loaded onto ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the lush backing vocals of ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ and the comedy nautical noises on ‘Yellow Submarine’. Yet in other places, there’s actually less than they might previously have done: where before they might have been tempted to put a token acoustic guitar on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or ‘Love You To’, here they don’t bother. Other tracks, like ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Doctor Robert’, have rather simple arrangements. But whatever The Beatles did on this record, they thought about it and tried all the options rather than settling for the first thing that seemed to work. Where Help! had been made in about thirty hours of studio time and Rubber Soul in a hundred, Revolver took around three hundred – and it shows.
Apologies, George – I know you were in The Beatles and I wasn’t, and you’re dead so it’s difficult for you to argue back, but I couldn’t disagree more. Harrison did note that he hadn’t listened to them back-to-back lately when he said that, and if one does so the step up from one to the next is very apparent. In fact, heard in the context of this blog’s listening-experiment, Revolver sounds like perhaps the biggest step up in The Beatles’ career.
I’ve always felt there was a substantial difference between the two records, with Rubber Soul being more geared towards developing the band's songwriting whilst Revolver builds on that by exploring how a song can be enhanced by production, additional instruments and/or arrangements that couldn’t easily be replicated live. However, the tracks I’d always thought of as being really progressive were the likes of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Love You To’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. What I wasn’t expecting was for the album to sound so different from the opening seconds: not only the mildly surreal count-in that opens the album, but the entirety of ‘Taxman’.
What I’d never noticed before is how brusquely minimal ‘Taxman’ is. The lead guitar relies on the bass to carry the main riff: the guitar line is then hugely stripped back. I’d never noticed just how stripped-back it is, I’d imagined there were about twice as many notes in it as there actually are. Your brain fills in the gaps. The effect is thrillingly casual yet taut, the coolest opening to any Beatles album, banishing the chirpy-entertainers image of their early recording career. Shame it’s a moan about how much tax they’re paying, but to be fair they were paying a hell of a lot (‘One for you, nineteen for me’ isn’t an exaggeration, they were subject to a 95% supertax – I’m very much in favour of progressive taxation, but I think that’s a bit mad).
What probably brackets Rubber Soul and Revolver most strongly in Harrison’s mind is that this was the period when he was most central to the group. His songwriting on both albums is much better than his previous work, and was rewarded with three tracks on Revolver rather than his usual two. (This, and the lack of 50-50 co-writes from Lennon/McCartney, aids the excellent sequencing of Revolver, whereby you never hear the same lead vocalist handle two tracks back-to-back, and whereby the album opens and closes with the sequence Harrison-McCartney-Lennon. The Capitol version, which pulled three tracks and released them early on ‘Yesterday’... And Today, disastrously selected three Lennon songs, meaning the Harrison wrote more of the American 11-track version of Revolver than Lennon did.) Additionally, their studio practices hadn’t yet become fragmented in the manner which ultimately marginalised both Harrison and Starr. ‘Taxman’ is a fine example of what Harrison could achieve when Lennon and McCartney helped him the way they helped each other, with Lennon having input on the lyric and McCartney offering production ideas and, surprisingly, the astonishing guitar solo.
In places the success of Revolver is about what the group add, such as the numerous effects loaded onto ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the lush backing vocals of ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ and the comedy nautical noises on ‘Yellow Submarine’. Yet in other places, there’s actually less than they might previously have done: where before they might have been tempted to put a token acoustic guitar on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or ‘Love You To’, here they don’t bother. Other tracks, like ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Doctor Robert’, have rather simple arrangements. But whatever The Beatles did on this record, they thought about it and tried all the options rather than settling for the first thing that seemed to work. Where Help! had been made in about thirty hours of studio time and Rubber Soul in a hundred, Revolver took around three hundred – and it shows.
Friday 23 July 2010
Paperback Writer
‘Rain’, the B-side of this single, has been so often discussed as an overlooked gem of the Beatles’ back catalogue that it surely no longer counts as an overlooked gem. Excellent as it is, I feel like doing an extra post to shine some light on the A-side, which is one of The Beatles’ less renowned hits but a favourite of mine.
The main context in which ‘Paperback Writer’ is usually mentioned is that it was the first Beatles single not to be a love song. That was a significant watershed for the group, but there are other aspects to its lyric which are at least as important. Its concerns are urban and twentysomething, rather than teenage. The reference to ‘working for the Daily Mail’ makes this perhaps the first Beatles song to be set in a specific location – London – and even if that reference wasn’t there, the song is clearly influenced by what McCartney saw about him at that time. Previous Beatles songs had tended towards the generic, a good example being ‘In My Life’ which began as a journey through locations Lennon had known as a child, but which had all its specific references stripped out.
Furthermore, although McCartney had written many songs where he had adopted a character, this was the first time he’d done so overtly. When he’d invented situations for his earlier love songs these fictions had fed into his persona within the group. With ‘Paperback Writer’, however, nobody was supposed to think that he actually wanted to be a paperback writer: the character is entirely distinct from Paul McCartney. This was the first song the Beatles released in that style – which, aptly enough considering its subject matter, has been dubbed ‘novelistic’ songwriting – and it marked the growing divergence between McCartney and Lennon. Lennon never quite trusted this sort of songwriting, feeling it dishonest (which was rather literal-minded of him), and would instead go down a solipsistic route of writing largely about himself. (This is partly why much of his solo work is a bit tedious.)
Yet, speaking as someone who does want to be a paperback writer, I think McCartney nails his character perfectly here and as a result the song has much to say. The form and content match beautifully: the flashy boldness of the music represents the character’s confidence and ambition as well as the upwardly mobile spirit of the era, whilst the breathless, slightly wheedling manner of McCartney’s vocal balances this with a touch of gauche enthusiasm and desperation to succeed (which, come to think of it, is probably something McCartney identified with even if the situation was alien to him). The way that the opening lines ‘push’ the words ‘it took me yeeears to write’, pleading with the letter’s recipient, is one of the most effective pieces of phrasing in The Beatles’ output. There’s room for humour, too, in the manuscript running to a mind-boggling ‘thousand pages, give or take a few’ (and it still isn’t finished), and in the heavy implication that the author’s work is a thinly-veiled roman á clef about his father. A superb group performance is dominated by McCartney’s deft bass work (his opening riff sounds near-impossible to play) and Starr’s typewriter-imitating drums.
As a brilliantly-constructed song which contrives to sound knocked-off, ‘Paperback Writer’ is entirely characteristic of McCartney – and it was the first McCartney-led Beatles single since ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ two years earlier (he and Lennon having shared the limelight on ‘We Can Work It Out’). During 1966 a turnaround occurred in the balance of power, shifting from a situation where Lennon usually got his way to a situation where McCartney was taking the lead on creative decisions. Which (oddly, considering the modern critical lionisation of Lennon) produced The Beatles’ most celebrated period.
The main context in which ‘Paperback Writer’ is usually mentioned is that it was the first Beatles single not to be a love song. That was a significant watershed for the group, but there are other aspects to its lyric which are at least as important. Its concerns are urban and twentysomething, rather than teenage. The reference to ‘working for the Daily Mail’ makes this perhaps the first Beatles song to be set in a specific location – London – and even if that reference wasn’t there, the song is clearly influenced by what McCartney saw about him at that time. Previous Beatles songs had tended towards the generic, a good example being ‘In My Life’ which began as a journey through locations Lennon had known as a child, but which had all its specific references stripped out.
Furthermore, although McCartney had written many songs where he had adopted a character, this was the first time he’d done so overtly. When he’d invented situations for his earlier love songs these fictions had fed into his persona within the group. With ‘Paperback Writer’, however, nobody was supposed to think that he actually wanted to be a paperback writer: the character is entirely distinct from Paul McCartney. This was the first song the Beatles released in that style – which, aptly enough considering its subject matter, has been dubbed ‘novelistic’ songwriting – and it marked the growing divergence between McCartney and Lennon. Lennon never quite trusted this sort of songwriting, feeling it dishonest (which was rather literal-minded of him), and would instead go down a solipsistic route of writing largely about himself. (This is partly why much of his solo work is a bit tedious.)
Yet, speaking as someone who does want to be a paperback writer, I think McCartney nails his character perfectly here and as a result the song has much to say. The form and content match beautifully: the flashy boldness of the music represents the character’s confidence and ambition as well as the upwardly mobile spirit of the era, whilst the breathless, slightly wheedling manner of McCartney’s vocal balances this with a touch of gauche enthusiasm and desperation to succeed (which, come to think of it, is probably something McCartney identified with even if the situation was alien to him). The way that the opening lines ‘push’ the words ‘it took me yeeears to write’, pleading with the letter’s recipient, is one of the most effective pieces of phrasing in The Beatles’ output. There’s room for humour, too, in the manuscript running to a mind-boggling ‘thousand pages, give or take a few’ (and it still isn’t finished), and in the heavy implication that the author’s work is a thinly-veiled roman á clef about his father. A superb group performance is dominated by McCartney’s deft bass work (his opening riff sounds near-impossible to play) and Starr’s typewriter-imitating drums.
As a brilliantly-constructed song which contrives to sound knocked-off, ‘Paperback Writer’ is entirely characteristic of McCartney – and it was the first McCartney-led Beatles single since ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ two years earlier (he and Lennon having shared the limelight on ‘We Can Work It Out’). During 1966 a turnaround occurred in the balance of power, shifting from a situation where Lennon usually got his way to a situation where McCartney was taking the lead on creative decisions. Which (oddly, considering the modern critical lionisation of Lennon) produced The Beatles’ most celebrated period.
Wednesday 30 June 2010
Rubber Soul (2)
I’m going to try to stop this post from being a rambling load of nostalgic nonsense, but I may not succeed.
I’ve already written about obscure favourite Beatles songs, and how far you have to dig into their back catalogue to find one if you want one. However, there’s one that’s not very famous which I do usually include in my top ten Beatles songs. If I’m honest, I don’t think it’s one of their ten best songs: it’s more of a ‘desert island Beatles’ playlist, and this song is in there because it’s the song which made me realise how good The Beatles were.
I think Rubber Soul was probably the third Beatles album I bought, after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and A Hard Day’s Night. I’ll talk about why Sgt Pepper is an unusual example of a best album by a big group when the time comes, but suffice to say it’s so celebrated as a whole that I wasn’t surprised to find some great tracks on it that I’d never heard before. The stand-out tracks on A Hard Day’s Night were ones I already knew. So I hadn’t been hugely surprised by The Beatles when I bought Rubber Soul.
The first two tracks I already knew about: I’m not sure how, radio, cultural osmosis, whatever, but ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ were not surprises. The third track was. ‘You Won’t See Me’ isn’t rated by everybody (Ian Macdonald gives it a poor write-up in Revolution in the Head) but I thought it was great: a characteristically Beatles descending melody, a simple but well-constructed and melancholy lyric (‘Though the days are few / They’re filled with tears / And since I lost you / It feels like years’) and a lovely movement between its different sections. It’s also superbly sung, both by a double-tracked McCartney and a chiming-in Lennon and Harrison.
I was taken aback to realise that (a) this was a great song that most bands would kill for and (b) I’d never even heard it mentioned before. Because there are too many great Beatles songs for it to get noticed. It still doesn’t: it isn’t even on the ‘Red’ Best Of album, which has six sodding tracks from Rubber Soul on it (and only two from Revolver, a decision that can only have been taken by a maniac.) I mention it to people who know Rubber Soul and they usually comment on what a cracking song it is, but I’ve never seen it figure in It’s Your Very Best All-Time 50 Greatest Beatles Songs Of All Time polls. Instead people vote for hippy nonsense like ‘It’s All Too Much’, which I like but it is a right load of hippy nonsense. And to me that says so much about how brilliant The Beatles are: that they could be so heavily exposed and yet have great songs that I’d not only never heard, I’d never heard of them.
And as I said before, you have to go some distance to find a Beatles song to slide into your list of favourites which makes me think ‘Trying too hard a bit there, fella’. With many groups – even great ones – you have to make a pretty good case to convince me that such-and-such a track is better than the famous ones everyone knows. (I would come up with an example or two but I don’t want to have an argument about it in the comments.) But with The Beatles, the choice is so massive you do find yourself turning to less heralded songs. I can’t think of any artist with as many potential favourites in their back catalogue except perhaps David Bowie.
Every time I hear ‘You Won’t See Me’ I remember that, and that’s why I still love it. That and the fact that it is of course great. But you just watch, someone will turn up and leave a comment saying they think it’s a bit meh actually.
I’ve already written about obscure favourite Beatles songs, and how far you have to dig into their back catalogue to find one if you want one. However, there’s one that’s not very famous which I do usually include in my top ten Beatles songs. If I’m honest, I don’t think it’s one of their ten best songs: it’s more of a ‘desert island Beatles’ playlist, and this song is in there because it’s the song which made me realise how good The Beatles were.
I think Rubber Soul was probably the third Beatles album I bought, after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and A Hard Day’s Night. I’ll talk about why Sgt Pepper is an unusual example of a best album by a big group when the time comes, but suffice to say it’s so celebrated as a whole that I wasn’t surprised to find some great tracks on it that I’d never heard before. The stand-out tracks on A Hard Day’s Night were ones I already knew. So I hadn’t been hugely surprised by The Beatles when I bought Rubber Soul.
The first two tracks I already knew about: I’m not sure how, radio, cultural osmosis, whatever, but ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ were not surprises. The third track was. ‘You Won’t See Me’ isn’t rated by everybody (Ian Macdonald gives it a poor write-up in Revolution in the Head) but I thought it was great: a characteristically Beatles descending melody, a simple but well-constructed and melancholy lyric (‘Though the days are few / They’re filled with tears / And since I lost you / It feels like years’) and a lovely movement between its different sections. It’s also superbly sung, both by a double-tracked McCartney and a chiming-in Lennon and Harrison.
I was taken aback to realise that (a) this was a great song that most bands would kill for and (b) I’d never even heard it mentioned before. Because there are too many great Beatles songs for it to get noticed. It still doesn’t: it isn’t even on the ‘Red’ Best Of album, which has six sodding tracks from Rubber Soul on it (and only two from Revolver, a decision that can only have been taken by a maniac.) I mention it to people who know Rubber Soul and they usually comment on what a cracking song it is, but I’ve never seen it figure in It’s Your Very Best All-Time 50 Greatest Beatles Songs Of All Time polls. Instead people vote for hippy nonsense like ‘It’s All Too Much’, which I like but it is a right load of hippy nonsense. And to me that says so much about how brilliant The Beatles are: that they could be so heavily exposed and yet have great songs that I’d not only never heard, I’d never heard of them.
And as I said before, you have to go some distance to find a Beatles song to slide into your list of favourites which makes me think ‘Trying too hard a bit there, fella’. With many groups – even great ones – you have to make a pretty good case to convince me that such-and-such a track is better than the famous ones everyone knows. (I would come up with an example or two but I don’t want to have an argument about it in the comments.) But with The Beatles, the choice is so massive you do find yourself turning to less heralded songs. I can’t think of any artist with as many potential favourites in their back catalogue except perhaps David Bowie.
Every time I hear ‘You Won’t See Me’ I remember that, and that’s why I still love it. That and the fact that it is of course great. But you just watch, someone will turn up and leave a comment saying they think it’s a bit meh actually.
Friday 25 June 2010
Rubber Soul (1)
The later Beatles have long been more fashionable than the early Beatles, and it’s between Help! and Rubber Soul that the dividing line is most often drawn. There are lots of reasons why this happens: Help! is a tie-in to a movie designed to exploit their popularity before it went on the wane, and very much a product of The Beatles’ ‘showbiz’ years, belonging to a different concept of their career. Rubber Soul, by contrast, sees the group abandoning cover versions once and for all and developing their subject matter beyond love songs for the first time. It also happens to be their best album up to that point, kicking off a run of five iconic studio albums, each quite different in character, each still influential in its own way. Ignoring the posthumous Let It Be (always an annoyance in the Beatles chronology), that’s five albums of ‘pop’ Beatles and five albums of what Lennon once referred to as ‘the clever Beatles’.
But even discounting the fact that this underrates both the importance and the quality of the Beatles’ early work, it is of course an arbitrary dividing line. How could it not be? The Beatles didn’t have a band meeting in the summer of 1965 where they decided that now would be the ideal time to get really good. It’s true that they were searching for a new direction before recording Rubber Soul, but rather than deciding to reinvent pop music (again), their big idea was comedy songs.
Interestingly, this approach did come up with two of the ‘newest’ sounding tracks on the album – ‘Girl’ and ‘Michelle’, tongue-in-cheek songs which adopt pastiche ‘German’ and ‘French’ styles respectively. At the time, unsure of just how to expand their sound beyond that of a beat group, this was the best they could do – alter the lyrical approach and let the sound follow – and they’re not actually that much of a departure than the downbeat calypso of ‘No Reply’. There’s nothing on the album which builds on the startling sound-world of ‘Ticket To Ride’ – the closest being the listlessly dragging (i.e.: stoned) ‘Nowhere Man’, with its idiosyncratically positioned middle eight. There’s also no repeat of the use of strings heard on ‘Yesterday’, with the group largely sticking to guitar/bass/drums and a bit of keyboard. The use of a sitar to jazz up ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ marks that out as one of the more ‘progressive’ tracks, as does its brilliantly obscure lyric (another effort in the ‘comedy’ vein) – but it’s untypical of the album as a whole.
There is progression on Rubber Soul of course, but heard from the perspective of what The Beatles had done so far it sounds less like a new direction and more like the kind of album they’d been trying to make since Beatles For Sale. It’s the culmination of a process of refinement, and more than anything reflects the level of work which went into the album. Beatles For Sale and Help! were both made in about thirty hours of studio time, snatched between their numerous other engagements: for Rubber Soul they took about a hundred hours, with sessions extending past midnight for the first time during recording of ‘Drive My Car’. (History does not record just what Mrs Martin thought of this.) A song could easily take more than a full day in the studio to record.
Yet although the success rate is higher on Rubber Soul and fewer of the songs feel like lightweights, many tracks could be slipped into the line-up of Beatles For Sale or Help! without disconcerting the listener. Indeed, ‘Wait’ – a decent song, nicely melodramatic – was recorded for Help! and bafflingly omitted (difficult to see how they judged it inferior to ‘Tell Me What You See’, but there you have it). ‘You Won’t See Me’, although it points the way towards late-period Beatles by pushing piano into the foreground, could have been among the despondent Beatles For Sale numbers, as could ‘I’m Looking Through You’. The songs I consider to be the two duds – ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Run For Your Life’ – both have the country tinge of Beatles For Sale. Even ‘Drive My Car’, which has a swagger about it not seen since ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ gave way to the boys-next-door era, mixed easily with ‘What You’re Doing’ on the Love album.
Harrison clearly raises his songwriting game, and his two contributions are way better than anything he’d managed before. ‘Think For Yourself’ debuts that slightly hectoring, self-righteous tone which we’ve all come to know and love, thereby expanding the group’s range of subject matter even further. ‘If I Needed Someone’ enjoyed the distinction of being the first Harrison-penned track to make it into their live set since they signed to Parlophone.
However, I think there are two tracks which really show The Beatles moving on. ‘In My Life’ has PROPER SONG written through it like a stick of rock: even more than ‘Yesterday’, it feels like an attempt to compete with the kind of guys who wrote for Sinatra. What’s less commented on is that it’s the beginning of a new world of sonic trickery, because George Martin’s ‘harpsichord’ solo in the middle eight is actually an electric piano recorded at half-speed and then played back at normal speed. Within a year the group would be doing stuff like this as a matter of course. The other track which feels very new is the underrated ‘The Word’. One of the final tracks recorded, it has no real chorus and rides along on a groove in a way most Beatles songs don’t – a nicely-executed take on recent soul records, belatedly fulfilling the promise of the album’s title. This influence would have been more pronounced had the album also included ‘12-Bar Original’ (an ironic title, as it’s a clear knock-off of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & The MG’s), but as the world discovered when the track was finally released on Anthology 2, they made a right hash of it. I was originally puzzled that the Anthology version is an edit rather than the full six minutes-plus – there’s room for the full version on the disc, why not just include the whole thing? Then I listened to it and realised I didn’t particularly want to hear another three minutes of that. But the longer one is on YouTube, so let’s have it to play out this post, as it was originally supposed to play out the album. Enjoy.
But even discounting the fact that this underrates both the importance and the quality of the Beatles’ early work, it is of course an arbitrary dividing line. How could it not be? The Beatles didn’t have a band meeting in the summer of 1965 where they decided that now would be the ideal time to get really good. It’s true that they were searching for a new direction before recording Rubber Soul, but rather than deciding to reinvent pop music (again), their big idea was comedy songs.
Interestingly, this approach did come up with two of the ‘newest’ sounding tracks on the album – ‘Girl’ and ‘Michelle’, tongue-in-cheek songs which adopt pastiche ‘German’ and ‘French’ styles respectively. At the time, unsure of just how to expand their sound beyond that of a beat group, this was the best they could do – alter the lyrical approach and let the sound follow – and they’re not actually that much of a departure than the downbeat calypso of ‘No Reply’. There’s nothing on the album which builds on the startling sound-world of ‘Ticket To Ride’ – the closest being the listlessly dragging (i.e.: stoned) ‘Nowhere Man’, with its idiosyncratically positioned middle eight. There’s also no repeat of the use of strings heard on ‘Yesterday’, with the group largely sticking to guitar/bass/drums and a bit of keyboard. The use of a sitar to jazz up ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ marks that out as one of the more ‘progressive’ tracks, as does its brilliantly obscure lyric (another effort in the ‘comedy’ vein) – but it’s untypical of the album as a whole.
There is progression on Rubber Soul of course, but heard from the perspective of what The Beatles had done so far it sounds less like a new direction and more like the kind of album they’d been trying to make since Beatles For Sale. It’s the culmination of a process of refinement, and more than anything reflects the level of work which went into the album. Beatles For Sale and Help! were both made in about thirty hours of studio time, snatched between their numerous other engagements: for Rubber Soul they took about a hundred hours, with sessions extending past midnight for the first time during recording of ‘Drive My Car’. (History does not record just what Mrs Martin thought of this.) A song could easily take more than a full day in the studio to record.
Yet although the success rate is higher on Rubber Soul and fewer of the songs feel like lightweights, many tracks could be slipped into the line-up of Beatles For Sale or Help! without disconcerting the listener. Indeed, ‘Wait’ – a decent song, nicely melodramatic – was recorded for Help! and bafflingly omitted (difficult to see how they judged it inferior to ‘Tell Me What You See’, but there you have it). ‘You Won’t See Me’, although it points the way towards late-period Beatles by pushing piano into the foreground, could have been among the despondent Beatles For Sale numbers, as could ‘I’m Looking Through You’. The songs I consider to be the two duds – ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Run For Your Life’ – both have the country tinge of Beatles For Sale. Even ‘Drive My Car’, which has a swagger about it not seen since ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ gave way to the boys-next-door era, mixed easily with ‘What You’re Doing’ on the Love album.
Harrison clearly raises his songwriting game, and his two contributions are way better than anything he’d managed before. ‘Think For Yourself’ debuts that slightly hectoring, self-righteous tone which we’ve all come to know and love, thereby expanding the group’s range of subject matter even further. ‘If I Needed Someone’ enjoyed the distinction of being the first Harrison-penned track to make it into their live set since they signed to Parlophone.
However, I think there are two tracks which really show The Beatles moving on. ‘In My Life’ has PROPER SONG written through it like a stick of rock: even more than ‘Yesterday’, it feels like an attempt to compete with the kind of guys who wrote for Sinatra. What’s less commented on is that it’s the beginning of a new world of sonic trickery, because George Martin’s ‘harpsichord’ solo in the middle eight is actually an electric piano recorded at half-speed and then played back at normal speed. Within a year the group would be doing stuff like this as a matter of course. The other track which feels very new is the underrated ‘The Word’. One of the final tracks recorded, it has no real chorus and rides along on a groove in a way most Beatles songs don’t – a nicely-executed take on recent soul records, belatedly fulfilling the promise of the album’s title. This influence would have been more pronounced had the album also included ‘12-Bar Original’ (an ironic title, as it’s a clear knock-off of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & The MG’s), but as the world discovered when the track was finally released on Anthology 2, they made a right hash of it. I was originally puzzled that the Anthology version is an edit rather than the full six minutes-plus – there’s room for the full version on the disc, why not just include the whole thing? Then I listened to it and realised I didn’t particularly want to hear another three minutes of that. But the longer one is on YouTube, so let’s have it to play out this post, as it was originally supposed to play out the album. Enjoy.
Monday 31 May 2010
Help! (2)
Ages ago I mentioned that I’d share with you my rejigged running order for Help! This erroneously suggests that I’d properly finalised it. I’ve been trying to do so for years, in fact. It was prompted, before I’d ever even heard Help!, by the fact that it’s the last Beatles album to contain cover versions. It contains two. The B-sides of the album’s two singles are not present, as they were on A Hard Day’s Night (and indeed Please Please Me). In a sort of obsessive-compulsive way it bugged me that The Beatles hadn’t just stuck those tracks on there, as there was already a precedent for doing so: the discography would look marginally neater if they had.
Then I actually heard the album, and felt even more strongly that this is what they should have done. This isn’t so much because of ‘Act Naturally’, which isn’t going to change anyone’s life but is a decent enough vehicle for Starr in this context. (It may depend how much time you have for country music – I like the Buck Owens original as well.) It’s more because of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ which is, like all The Beatles’ Larry Williams covers, rubbish. A monotonous performance by a tired and uninspired group, it was recorded at Capitol’s request (along with ‘Bad Boy’) to pad out the latest collection of tracks the label had cribbed from earlier releases, sequenced poorly and put out under a title which had about four seconds’ thought into it, in this case Beatles VI. It doesn’t appear to have been intended for Help!, and was probably a late replacement for ‘That Means A Lot’, McCartney’s fudged attempt to replicate the success of ‘Ticket To Ride’ (just as ‘Act Naturally’ was hastily recorded to replace ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’). They even managed to misspell the title – it should be ‘Lizzie’.
Even more offensively, the flipside of ‘Help!’ (the single) would have made a perfect closing number. The group evidently agreed, closing their Shea Stadium gig with it. Look, here it is.
So let’s resequence Help! as an all-original album. I admit I’m contradicting myself here because I’ve already criticised A Hard Day’s Night for lacking a Ringo track and here I am scrubbing one from the tracklist of Help! Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun. Side One of Help! needs no improvement in terms of sequencing, but Side Two could run as follows:
1.I’ve Just Seen A Face
2.It’s Only Love
3.Tell Me What You See
4.You Like Me Too Much
5.Yes It Is
6.Yesterday
7.I’m Down
Although I slag off the Capitol albums, I did take inspiration from their placing of ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ as the opening track on Rubber Soul. The only problem I have with this line-up is that it’s a bit lethargic in the middle, which the addition of ‘Yes It Is’ really doesn’t help with. With that in mind, perhaps ‘Yes It Is’ should be omitted in favour of ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’, even if the latter is a bit shit. I don’t think it’s as bad as it’s often been made out to be, even if the performance is half-arsed in places (Lennon’s backing vocal is staggeringly unconvincing) and the decision to pull it in favour of ‘Act Naturally’ entirely justified.
What I think this rejig usefully emphasises is how quickly McCartney kicked into gear during this album. Having taken a back seat to Lennon for much of 1964, his two contributions to the film soundtrack aren’t much to write home about – nice breezy pop tunes, but neither as good as any of Lennon’s four varied and accomplished tracks. ‘Tell Me What You See’ was ready in time for the film but clearly wasn’t up to scratch.
But then, look at what McCartney comes up when the film’s finished and they need to get more tracks in the can: whilst a creatively-spent Lennon offers only the amiable but lightweight ‘It’s Only Love’, McCartney contributes ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘I’m Down’. (There is some confusion about how long McCartney had been mulling over the melody for ‘Yesterday’ - it may have been more than a year – but the lyric only fell into place after filming for Help! had concluded.) The three songs cover an even wider range of tone and style than Lennon had managed in his efforts for the album, and it suddenly becomes apparent that this is what McCartney is really, really good at. You can find earlier examples of McCartney’s versatility, but this is where it emerges as the fuel which will keep him going for the rest of his career: an ability to pick up almost any aspect of music and find a use for it.
Then I actually heard the album, and felt even more strongly that this is what they should have done. This isn’t so much because of ‘Act Naturally’, which isn’t going to change anyone’s life but is a decent enough vehicle for Starr in this context. (It may depend how much time you have for country music – I like the Buck Owens original as well.) It’s more because of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ which is, like all The Beatles’ Larry Williams covers, rubbish. A monotonous performance by a tired and uninspired group, it was recorded at Capitol’s request (along with ‘Bad Boy’) to pad out the latest collection of tracks the label had cribbed from earlier releases, sequenced poorly and put out under a title which had about four seconds’ thought into it, in this case Beatles VI. It doesn’t appear to have been intended for Help!, and was probably a late replacement for ‘That Means A Lot’, McCartney’s fudged attempt to replicate the success of ‘Ticket To Ride’ (just as ‘Act Naturally’ was hastily recorded to replace ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’). They even managed to misspell the title – it should be ‘Lizzie’.
Even more offensively, the flipside of ‘Help!’ (the single) would have made a perfect closing number. The group evidently agreed, closing their Shea Stadium gig with it. Look, here it is.
So let’s resequence Help! as an all-original album. I admit I’m contradicting myself here because I’ve already criticised A Hard Day’s Night for lacking a Ringo track and here I am scrubbing one from the tracklist of Help! Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun. Side One of Help! needs no improvement in terms of sequencing, but Side Two could run as follows:
1.I’ve Just Seen A Face
2.It’s Only Love
3.Tell Me What You See
4.You Like Me Too Much
5.Yes It Is
6.Yesterday
7.I’m Down
Although I slag off the Capitol albums, I did take inspiration from their placing of ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ as the opening track on Rubber Soul. The only problem I have with this line-up is that it’s a bit lethargic in the middle, which the addition of ‘Yes It Is’ really doesn’t help with. With that in mind, perhaps ‘Yes It Is’ should be omitted in favour of ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’, even if the latter is a bit shit. I don’t think it’s as bad as it’s often been made out to be, even if the performance is half-arsed in places (Lennon’s backing vocal is staggeringly unconvincing) and the decision to pull it in favour of ‘Act Naturally’ entirely justified.
What I think this rejig usefully emphasises is how quickly McCartney kicked into gear during this album. Having taken a back seat to Lennon for much of 1964, his two contributions to the film soundtrack aren’t much to write home about – nice breezy pop tunes, but neither as good as any of Lennon’s four varied and accomplished tracks. ‘Tell Me What You See’ was ready in time for the film but clearly wasn’t up to scratch.
But then, look at what McCartney comes up when the film’s finished and they need to get more tracks in the can: whilst a creatively-spent Lennon offers only the amiable but lightweight ‘It’s Only Love’, McCartney contributes ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘I’m Down’. (There is some confusion about how long McCartney had been mulling over the melody for ‘Yesterday’ - it may have been more than a year – but the lyric only fell into place after filming for Help! had concluded.) The three songs cover an even wider range of tone and style than Lennon had managed in his efforts for the album, and it suddenly becomes apparent that this is what McCartney is really, really good at. You can find earlier examples of McCartney’s versatility, but this is where it emerges as the fuel which will keep him going for the rest of his career: an ability to pick up almost any aspect of music and find a use for it.
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