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Paul McCartney, MEN Arena 19/12/11
I sometimes think Paul McCartney can't win. One of the big complaints I'd read from reviewers after the previous shows on this tour was "He's doing too many hits. Why doesn't he do some more obscure stuff? It's just the obvious set."
And yes, of the thirty-six songs in the set, twenty-five are the absolutely obvious choices that everyone would expect. But then, if you were Paul McCartney, you'd put Can't Buy Me Love, Michelle, Penny Lane, My Love, Mull Of Kintyre, We Can Work It Out, Silly Love Songs, Coming Up, Let 'Em In, Another Day, Drive My Car, Here, There And Everywhere, Love Me Do, Things We Said Today, I'm Down, I've Just Seen a Face, I Saw Her Standing There and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the set, wouldn't you?
And that's the problem, of course. Paul McCartney is the most commercially successful songwriter in the history of the world, and has as good a claim as any to be the most artistically successful. So much so that he didn't have space to fit *any* of those songs in last night. Nor did he do Mary Had A Little Lamb, Hi Hi Hi, Listen To What The Man Said, With A Little Luck, Goodnight Tonight, Waterfalls, Ebony And Ivory, The Girl Is Mine, Say Say Say, Pipes Of Peace, No More Lonely Nights, We All Stand Together or Once Upon A Long Ago, all of which went top ten. Yet he's *still* apparently doing too many of his hits!
What he did do was a perfect mix of songs – weighted, yes, towards the Beatles years (and frankly I'd have loved him to have dropped at least three of those songs for solo songs, as he did Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da, Let It Be and The Long And Winding Road, none of which I have any time for) but with a good mix of solo material – both hits like Jet and Band On The Run and more obscure tracks like Mrs Vanderbilt and Ram On. He even did Sing The Changes, from the third Fireman album. And while there's no such thing as an obscure Beatles song, choices like The Night Before or The Word are as close as it gets, and it was wonderful to hear them live.
McCartney is a stunning live performer – I can hardly even believe he's human, frankly. His voice is *very* slightly gone at the very top end, but the set was chosen well enough that this was not noticeable, and in the mid and low ranges he sounds a good forty years younger than he is, and he can still scream with the best of them. He also got through the whole two-and-a-half hour show without as much as a sip of water, which given the amount of dry ice and the vocal gymnastics he was having to do is nothing short of miraculous. This is, remember, someone who was at school with my grandfather, yet there's no way I could perform even half this show without taking a break.
The only thing that showed McCartney's age at all was that he's taking less strenuous instrumental parts these days, playing rhythm guitar or second keyboard for the most part. While he plays bass on a few songs, he leaves the complex stuff like Paperback Writer to his guitarists, and his few lead guitar spots are mediocre. But if he can no longer play complex counterpoints to his lead vocals the way he could when he was twenty-three, the fact that he can still sing those vocals at all is more than enough for me.
It was one of those shows that are all highlights from start to finish – whether the expected sort,like the mass crowd singalong to Hey Jude or the fireworks in Live And Let Die, or the unexpected, like Sing The Changes, a rather arty track on record, turning out to be a wonderful chantalong arena-rock song in a live setting (sounding spookily like a cousin of Stay Positive by The Hold Steady actually). Even Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da wasn't too horrible, thanks to some ska keyboards from Wix Wickens. But a few of the standout moments:
Dance Tonight, with drummer Abe Laborio Jr dancing with his hands. When McCartney put on his mandolin, someone in the audience shouted "Petrushka!" which McCartney misheard as "Red Rooster". (Oddly, this didn't look like a scripted bit).
Ram On – just beautiful, one of those lovely little fragments that McCartney does so well.
Junior's Farm – a brave choice for second song, and it worked very well.
A Day In The Life – the orchestral build works surprisingly well as a garage-psych rock section, though it was truncated to only 16 bars. Wonderful to hear the man who co-wrote this perform it live. Instead of the last verse and orchestral build, they went from the end of the "woke up" section into Give Peace A Chance.
Something – not performed solo like on the Back In The World tour, but instead done as he did it at the tribute to George, starting as a solo ukulele performance, but the full band coming in for the solo and finishing the song in the same style as the record.
But there were two moments that for me made the gig, and rose above the slick professionalism of the show to something approaching great art. The first was Here Today, performed solo on acoustic guitar. I've always loved this song, McCartney's 1981 tribute to John Lennon, because even though the latter half is too generic by far, the first verse is as good a tribute to the loss of a particular kind of friend as I could imagine ("And if I said I really knew you well, what would your answer be/if you were here today?/Well knowing you, you'd probably laugh and say that we were worlds apart…"). I don't mind saying I cried.
The other real highlight was Come And Get It, the song McCartney wrote for Badfinger in the late 60s. With McCartney banging away at the piano, for a moment he seemed to transform into the man he was when he wrote the song – a cocksure lad in his mid-twenties, able to turn out classic pop songs without even thinking about it, discovering the song as it came out of his fingers and mouth, and grinning a stupid grin at his own cleverness.
I really can't recommend McCartney's show highly enough. While I've seen better gigs, and certainly cheaper ones, he really is astonishingly good, and given that he's nearly 70 and has had heart trouble in the past, I can't imagine he'll tour too many more times, so go and see him while you can.
If nothing else, when else are you going to get a chance to see the late lamented Liberal MP Clement Freud projected on a screen the size of several houses? (During Band On The Run they show footage from the album cover shooting, featuring Freud, Michael Parkinson, Christopher Lee and others).
There are only two complaints I could make about the show. The first, which McCartney couldn't really do anything about, is the Everton supporter who was sat next to me. He confirmed my opinion of footballists (which some would call a low opinion – I prefer the term 'accurate') by deciding that what delicate, thoughtful ballads like Eleanor Rigby really need is a drunk moron bellowing along to them with no attempt to either keep his voice down or have any idea of the tune or the words. He even managed to sing the wrong words to the 'na na na nanana na' section of Hey Jude, which is impressive. Luckily, he also didn't seem to know anything that wasn't on the Beatles' red and blue albums.
What McCartney *could* do though is augment his band. Wix Wickens is a fine keyboard player, but when you're playing to 21,000-seater arenas, with audiences paying up to a hundred and fifty quid a ticket (not mine, I was in the nosebleed seats), there is no possible excuse for not having real strings and horns. If Brian Wilson or The Monkees can do it playing theatre venues with lower ticket prices, there's no reason to skimp on the musical side of things. Leave Wix to play the piano and organ parts, but get some real cello and violin players for Eleanor Rigby, and real horns for Got To Get You Into My Life. Those songs deserve better than tinny synth patches.
Magical Mystery Tour
Junior's Farm
All My Loving
Got To Get You Into My Life
Sing The Changes
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady
Paperback Writer
The Long And Winding Road
Come And Get It
Nineteen Hundred And Eight-Five
Maybe I'm Amazed
I'm Looking Through You
And I Love Her
Here Today
Dance Tonight
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Ram On
Band On The Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back In The USSR
I've Got A Feeling
A Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance
Let It Be
Live And Let Die
Hey Jude
First Encore
The Word / All You Need Is Love
Wonderful Christmastime
Day Tripper
Get Back
Second Encore
Helter Skelter
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
Spotify playlist: John Lennon
You'd have thought that after spending much of the last month finishing writing a book on the Beatles which required listening and relistening to every track they ever recorded multiple times, that I'd have had enough John Lennon for a while. And you'd be right. But then, a day after I finished my book and got it published, Lennon's solo catalogue showed up on Spotify.
Lennon's solo work gets a bad press these days, and his critical stock is very low. To some extent it's justified – albums like Double Fantasy and Some Time In New York City would be weak by any standards, let alone when you know they're the work of someone who could come up with songs like A Day In The Life, Strawberry Fields Forever or Happiness Is A Warm Gun.
But far more of it's an over-reaction to the way that in the aftermath of his death, Lennon became the Great Untouchable in the eyes of that generation of rock critics, his every note perfection itself. And on top of that, for quite understandable reasons Yoko Ono has maintained a tight grip on Lennon's public image, presenting St John The Martyr, Who Died For Peace. Frankly, I'd probably be doing something similar in her position – had I seen my spouse shot dead in front of me, I'd probably want to make sure everyone thought as well as possible of them, and not want to dwell on their faults.
But of course, naturally, then people find out about the man's real faults (and he had some tremendous faults – he was at times a horrible person), presume that his public image now is how he presented himself in life, and conclude he was a horrible hypocrite, and let that judgement reflect on their view of his music.
But of course Lennon was neither a saint nor Satan, and nor did he ever claim to be either. He was, rather, someone who by instinct was an unpleasant, vicious, mysoginistic, near-psychopath, albeit one who was very charming, bright and funny. But he was someone who *didn't want to be that way* and tried to change. Nobody desires peace quite as much as someone whose every instinct is telling him to go for the throat, and has seen where that gets you. Nobody is as sincere a feminist as a repentant former wife-beater.
And that complexity fuelled his music. While outside books like Ray Coleman's hagiography nobody would claim Lennon was as good post-Beatles as during the 60s, and very few people would seriously argue his inspiration didn't drop off, at the same time he *was* still one of the two or three greatest songwriters of his generation, and probably *the* greatest vocalist. Cutting this complex man down to the banality of Imagine and a load of songs about how much he loved his wife misses the point.
So I've put together this playlist of my personal favourite Lennon solo tracks. Listening to the new remasters via Spotify, they're not the best mastering I've heard of this material – there's a sheen to them I don't like, and there's even more reverb here than on the original recordings, which were already reverb-heavy thanks to Lennon's desire to cover up his voice and Phil Spector's obsession with echo. But I'm still glad to have Lennon's music on Spotify, and I hope that when his critical reputation settles down, it will be higher than it is right now (though still not at the "Angela and John Sinclair are masterpieces" levels of the early 80s).
Well (Baby Please Don't Go) is a live version of an old blues track by the Olympics, performed onstage live with Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention (the "Flo & Eddie" line-up – this was actually recorded on the second of the two shows that became the Filmore East June 1971 album). In general, I prefer the mix of this show that Zappa put out on the Playground Psychotics album to the version on Some Time In New York City, but on this track I prefer Phil Spector's mix, just because the massive reverb works so well with Zappa's astonishing guitar solo.
#9 Dream is from Lennon's other solo masterpiece (the first being Plastic Ono Band), Walls & Bridges. Lennon's last great single, it's actually a rewrite of Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers To Cross. Lennon had recently produced a rather poor Harry Nilsson album, Pussycats, on which Nilsson covered that song, and Lennon took the string melody he'd written for the backing track and used it as his vocal melody here.
The other song I've included here from Walls & Bridges is Nobody Loves You When You're Down And Out. Originally written for Frank Sinatra (who turned it down), I *love* Lennon's vocal here, the hesitant, croaking, laid back verses contrasting with the screamed "When I get up in the morning" section, and the way the backing track is mostly going for a lounge singer kind of feel, except that the horns do the occasional dissonant squawk and the strings are being faux-Oriental. The whole thing's wonderfully put together, down to the way that the "ooh wee"s and "what it is"s that Sinatra would have ad-libbed are actually part of the lyric proper.
Gimme Some Truth from Imagine is actually the last Lennon/McCartney song to be recorded, though not credited as such. If you listen to the Get Back sessions, you can clearly hear McCartney singing the "no short-haired yellow-bellied" part (originally "No freaked-out narrow-minded son of Gary Cooper") in his Little Richard voice, and studio chat referring to it as Paul's bit of the song. It's one of those things that once heard can't be unheard – of course McCartney wrote that bit. George Harrison provides the great slide solo on here.
Woman Is The Nigger Of The World is the one real song worthy of the name on Some Time In New York City. Inspired by a quote by Irish revolutionary leader James Connoly, via Yoko Ono, this rock & roll waltz, musically very like some of the later Beatles material, is the perfect example of the zeal of the recent convert, and one of the greatest feminist songs of all time. "We insult her every day on TV/And wonder why she has no guts or confidence" "If she's real, we say she's trying to be a man/While putting her down we pretend that she is above us". These may be obvious sentiments now, at least to that proportion of people who hold "the radical belief that women are human beings", but in 1972 they were not especially widely-voiced sentiments.
And Lennon includes himself in his condemnation – every line is "we", not "you" – he's not preaching to other men from a better position, he's a member of the patriarchy saying "this is what we're doing". But this would mean nothing were the music not so good, from the great sax part at the start to the end, where Lennon screams "we make her paint her face and dance!" over relentless, driving, horns and strings.
Crippled Inside is an almost-perfect track. An upbeat skiffle-flavoured 12-bar, with some lovely dobro work by George Harrison and some nice piano playing by Nicky Hopkins, it manages to turn what lyrically is a vicious put-down of person or persons unknown (probably McCartney, though as with many of Lennon's attack songs he later admitted the lyrics seem aimed far more at himself than anyone else) into a jaunty country track.
Jealous Guy is one of Lennon's best ballads, and one that I'm sure almost everyone can identify with. What's amazing is that this started during the White Album sessions as Child Of Nature, with a totally different feel and different lyrics ("I'm just a child of nature/I don't need much to set me free") and still worked almost as well. One touch I particularly like is that he sings "thought that you was trying to hide" rather than you were. That little bit of vernacular Scouse sells the whole lyric as being honest.
Nobody Told Me is a wonderful little piece of nonsense ("There's Nazis in the bathroom, just below the stairs", "Everybody's running and no one makes a move/Everyone's a winner and no one seems to lose/There's a little yellow idol to the north of Katmandu") from the posthumous Milk And Honey album. Clearly a guide vocal, it's entirely possible that had Lennon lived, he'd have added a much more polished, but much less fun, finished vocal. But as it is, his wit shines through here in a way it does all too little on his later recordings generally.
Grow Old With Me is a piano-and-beatbox demo of a song Lennon never got round to recording properly, and you can hear how even though he was only recording on a boombox for himself, he nevertheless still double-tracked his vocal to disguise what he thought were its flaws. Actually, it's astonishing how different his voice is here – right at the top of his falsetto range, this sounds vocally like the Bonzo Dog Band track Piggy Bank Love. This song, one of my very favourites of his later tracks, was written in response to Ono writing the song "Let Me Count The Ways" – Ono's song was based on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so Lennon wrote a song starting with a line by Robert Browning.
Look At Me is an acoustic track from Plastic Ono Band that was writen in Rishikesh when the Beatles went there in 1968, and is very much of a piece with other songs from that era that made the White Album, like Mother Nature's Son and Julia, that are based around a finger-picking technique Donovan taught them while they were there.
God is one of the most well-known songs here, the climax of the Plastic Ono Band album where, over "Love Letters" piano, Lennon throws away his past and all his beliefs, climaxing with "I just believe in me/Yoko and me/that's reality". This has been seen as the worst kind of navel-gazing solipsism, but in fact it's Lennon trying to get away from his own past mistakes and his own worst attributes – Lennon was always looking for a father figure, a leader, whether that be Elvis or the Maharishi, and was disillusioned by all of them. And he was, after all, singing "I don't believe in Beatles" while Ringo Starr was drumming behind him (and indeed 'fifth Beatle' Billy Preston was on piano, and Klaus Voorman, who played bass, was the cover designer for Revolver. For someone who wanted to leave the past and the Beatles behind he wasn't doing a very good job)…
Mother, the opener of Plastic Ono Band is another song that comes in for criticism for being too self-centred. But while it is very obviously based in Lennon's traumatic upbringing – and since when did it become a bad thing to draw on personal experiences to create art? – it was, as Lennon said when introducing it in his 1972 New York concert, "about 90% of all the parents". While I am lucky enough to have had a relatively (all things considered) stable upbringing, those people I know who haven't can identify *VERY* strongly with this song (about Lennon's memory of being forced to choose which parent to stay with – the father who abandoned him, or the mother who left him to be brought up by her sister). And even I am utterly astonished by the feeling when Lennon screams "Mama don't go, Daddy come home". One of the truly great vocal performances of all time.
Working Class Hero is essentially a rewrite of Dylan's Masters Of War. A lot of people misread this title as triumphalist, but in fact the song is not even about class, as such, but about the way society harms everybody – "then they expect you to pick a career/when you can't even function you're so full of fear", "there's room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill".
Cold Turkey is one of the greatest singles ever made. The arrangement is one of the simplest ever – Ringo's kit damped to the point where it's almost a click track, Voorman's bass low in the mix, leaving empty space for that vocal and Eric Clapton's greatest guitar part ever. What's fascinating is to compare this to the version on the Live Peace In Toronto album (with Clapton, Voorman, Alan "the one from Yes not the one from Oasis" White, and Yoko on extra screams), which is far rawer, faster and more primal than this one, and a near-perfect performance in itself (even though none of the band had heard the song til the plane trip over). But whereas that one was angry and exciting, this is tense and scary. What amazes me is that Clapton actually started taking heroin after recording this – what kind of fool makes a record like this and then thinks "That sounds like a good idea!"?
And finally, from Lennon's Rock & Roll covers album we have Just Because, a Lloyd Price song that Lennon probably knew from Larry Williams' version. This is mostly fun for Lennon's intro and outro banter as "Doctor Winston O'Boogie".
The Beatles Mono Reviews 11: The Beatles (The White Album)
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
I've gone a week without posting because this is going to be a huge one, and I wanted to make a big post my 400th one, rather than some tossed-off linkblog or something.
The White Album is a tremendously difficult record to write about, far more so than any other Beatles album. This is not just because of the sheer amount of material on there – though thirty songs is a lot by anyone's standards – but because this is the first Beatles album that doesn't feel like a coherent work by a group, but a rehearsal for four separate solo careers. Many of the tracks (especially Paul's) are essentially solo tracks, Ringo quit the band for a while during recording, and even George Martin wasn't present for a large part of it, leaving much of the production work to his assistant Chris Thomas (later producer of Never Mind The Bollocks, For Your Pleasure and Different Class, among other classic albums).
Despite that, though, there are a number of threads connecting the album together – in particular there's a strong sense of musical nostalgia here. While every previous Beatles album had broken new ground and looked forward, this one is looking back. In a way, this is an extension of the childhood influence felt throughout Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, but this time they're looking back to their teens, and to the simpler musical styles then – along with the music-hall influences that have already shown up, we now have the return of Little Richard, doo-wop, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and the early Beach Boys to the band's musical palette.
In part, this reflects a general turn to 'getting back to our roots' that was happening throughout the pop-music world in 1968. The first sign of this was probably the Beach Boys' late-67 R&B-flavoured album Wild Honey, but in 68 the music world completely turned towards 'rootsy', 'bluesy' music at the expense of pop artifice and 'progressive' sounds. This was around the time the ridiculous notion of 'authenticity' first took hold in popular music, leading to ridiculous ideas like the Rolling Stones being better than the Beatles because their music is more 'authentic' and 'raw' (because the 'authentic' music of white English LSE graduates is the same as that of black sharecroppers from Mississippi?)
Luckily, the Beatles were far too self-aware to fall for any notions of 'authenticity' (though Lennon would occasionally do so in his solo career, for brief periods), and so even though the bulk of this album was written during the most famous 'getting our heads together in the country' period of any of these bands – when the band went to stay in Rishikesh with the Maharishi – it's as knowing, self-parodic, and downright funny as any Beatles album.
Back In The USSR, the opening track, brings a lot of this to the surface. Mostly written in Rishikesh (though the demo – recorded at George Harrison's house in Esher along with demos for much of this album and several others by all the songwriting Beatles – is missing most of the verse lyrics), it's a take-off of Chuck Berry's Back In The USA.
It also, however, shows up the splits in the band. This is the first Beatles record since Love Me Do to feature someone other than Ringo on drums – Ringo having quit the band for two weeks, all three of the other band members supplied drums here, though it's mostly Paul's rather stiff style you can hear (giving the lie to John's alleged quote – which I've never seen reliably cited – that Ringo wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles). And in fact, the lyric shows up the general exhaustion with the band that everyone was feeling – it's just heartfelt enough that it sounds like the relief of a musician home after an overlong tour.
The middle eight adds another influence – it's not much of a conceptual jump to go from Chuck Berry to the early Beach Boys, especially given that Mike Love, the Beach Boys' nasal lead vocalist, was with the Beatles on their retreat, so we get some Beach Boys pastiche (with some fairly good Love-esque bass vocals and much less convincing falsetto) in the middle eight. Mike Love has often claimed to have co-written this section – though McCartney has never mentioned this in any interview I've seen. And it's noticeable that Love – who has shown no reticence about suing his mentally-ill cousin for such minor contributions to lyrics as 'giddy-up' or 'good night baby/sleep tight baby' – has never sued over this. Love also doesn't seem to realise that this section is a *joke*.
But this track has a lot of clever little touches – from the balalaika-like guitar in the last verse (louder in the mono version) to the quote from Georgia On My Mind, and is also a fun rocker. The main differences between the mono and stereo versions are just the plane noises being in different places, though you can also hear a final drum thump under the fade-out plane sounds that isn't on the stereo mix.
And by the way, Ringo did eventually perform on a version of this – a live recording with the Beach Boys, on a charity record put out for Mike Love's Love Foundation…
Dear Prudence is a gorgeous little song by Lennon (again featuring McCartney on drums). Based around a descending picking pattern all around a D-chord, this was probably musically inspired by the folk-pop singer Donovan, who was also in the group at Rishikesh and showed the band several picking patterns around odd tunings. However, the drone in the picking style (which probably comes from both Harrison's interest in Indian music and Donovan's knowledge of Scottish music – pipe-band music in particular bearing an almost shocking resemblance to Indian classical music at times) is offset by McCartney's bass part, which while a fairly simple descending part that fits with the picking pattern, calls to mind more the baroque influence that had been seen recently in both the Beatles' music and others' (most notably A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum).
Lyrically, however, the song is a sweet message to Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrow's sister, who was *also* in Rishikesh, along with her sister), who was spending so much time in her room, meditating, that many of the rest of the people there thought she was suffering from depression and wanted to make her feel better. Farrow herself now says that she was fine, and found the song irritating, but it's still a nice thought.
There's no real difference between the mono and stereo versions of this song.
Glass Onion is the first track on the album to feature all the Beatles, and the difference is immediately apparent – even though this is not Ringo's best drum performance (and in the mono version his tambourine part is *much* higher in the mix than in the stereo), the performance still has a groove to it that the first two tracks are lacking (competent as Paul's playing is).
Of course, the song itself is a nothing, a deliberate joke at the expense of people hunting around in the lyrics of I Am The Walrus for 'clues' (when I Am The Walrus itself had at least started out as that kind of joke itself), but the joke is carried off with aplomb, and the arrangement has a lot of fun with recorder quotes from Fool On The Hill, a string part pastiching Martin's parts for Strawberry Fields and I Am The Walrus but going ludicrously over the top, and Ringo's little fills being semi-quotes from Rain, and then Martin's out-of-nowhere string coda. It should be self-indulgent, rather nasty nonsense, but in fact it's too much fun to feel bad.
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, on the other hand, is just unpleasant. A cod-reggae track which features McCartney putting on an hilarious Jamaican accent, with a chorus line taken from a saying of the Nigerian Yoruba tribe (because all those black people are really the same, you know), it's a patronising example of cultural appropriation – taking a few surface elements of the culture of Britain's Carribean (and African) population and treating them as a joke. At a time when The Black And White Minstrels were mainstream evening TV, when Enoch Powell's anti-immigrant Rivers Of Blood speech had just caused national outcry, and where the reggae and ska the band are making fun of here were being enthusiastically taken up by the very same skinheads who wanted to 'send back' the black people who brought that music to Britain, it's possibly a blessing that this track is affectionately patronising rather than hostile, but that's all that could be said for it. See Get Back for more on this…
Of course, that could be excused somewhat were Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da in any way a good song – or a good joke – but it's a relentlessly cheery song with the forced rictus grin of a suicidal holiday camp entertainer getting the audience to sing along to the Birdie Song, rather than having any spark of joy or wit about it. There are dozens of neat details in the arrangement or production, but I can't face listening to this song again to note them down.
Wild Honey Pie on the other hand – an entirely solo McCartney performance, is, despite its tossed-off improvised nature, genuinely fun. Musically rather similar to Girl or Michelle if one looks at the actual musical elements (and bearing a striking resemblance to the Toreador song from Carmen), we have guitars sounding like harpsichords, the first example of the humorous steel guitar that would dominate much of McCartney's first two solo albums, and Goon Show vocals. It's only a shame that McCartney could toss off something as spontaneous and joyful as this in a matter of minutes, and then spend hours or days producing something as joyless as Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da…
The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill is a singalong written by Lennon in Rishikesh, apparently about a fellow meditator who took a quick break from communing with nature to go and shoot endangered animals for fun. It's another tossed-off joke song, but with a lot more bile and feeling to it – "he's an all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son" – although it descends into surrealism by the end with references to Captain Marbles [sic]. It's actually quite close, lyrically, to the short story On Safairy With Whide Hunter from Lennon's In His Own Write, while musically it's simply pinched wholesale from the old standard Stay As Sweet As You Are.
And of course the fact that Yoko Ono becomes the first non-Beatle to sing a lead line on a Beatles track, in character as 'mommy', has a whole new resonance when one realises the Freudian elements of their relationship…
While My Guitar Gently Weeps takes us back to more 'meaty' musical matter after four joke songs in a row, and unfortunately is a little too ponderous in this arrangement (which I always liked – until I heard Harrison's original acoustic demo of the song).
As with many of Harrison's songs, the finished record owes a lot to other people – not only Eric Clapton's famous solo (to my ears much better than almost anything that most overrated of guitarists did elsewhere, with the exception of his playing on Cold Turkey), but McCartney's piano and organ part make up a large part of the sound of the track. But the fragile little song at the heart of it is more-or-less overwhelmed by the dense arrangement – possibly because this was the first track ever recorded at Abbey Road with an eight-track machine, they went a little overdub-crazy on the track.
In the mono version, the main differences are that Clapton's guitar is more audible after his solo, and that the fade lasts quite a bit longer.
Happiness Is A Warm Gun… where to even start with this one? Like so many of Lennon's best works, it's so idiosyncratic and personal a song in its construction that even if one dissects it bar-by-bar and examines every little detail, it's impossible to see *why* it works, but at the same time it's as affecting a piece of music as any ever recorded.
In its two minutes and forty four seconds (the same length to the second as Back In The USSR, which opens the side this closes – an example of the kind of little details, conscious or not, that go into the sequencing of something as mammoth as this), Happiness contains as many ideas as many entire albums by other people. This is another of those songs that I point to when people say that Ringo can't drum, as well, because metrically this is *astonishingly* difficult – just to break down the 'jump the gun' section, we've got that oddly stressed melody (which I strongly suspect was 'inspired' by America from West Side Story) which would be tricky enough itself, but every *second* repetition throws in an extra beat, so for every two 'mother superior jump the gun's you have five bars of 3/4 and one of 4/4 (or four threes and a seven, which is how it sounds to my ears). We also get odd single fives thrown in (like 'a soap impression of his wife…')
On top of this we have Lennon's most sexually charged lyric to that date – even the 'nonsense' opening section has the man with mirrors on his boots (to look up women's skirts), let alone the parts about jumping the gun and feeling 'my finger on your trigger'.
But ultimately, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel the truth of Zappa's dictum that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and is why ultimately I feel more overawed by Lennon's talent than McCartney's. With McCartney, even his best songs I can sit down and examine them and say 'he did this, for this reason, and that's why it's so good. I could have thought of that, if I'd been clever enough to think of that'. With Lennon, on the other hand, at his peak, in songs like this, or Walrus, or Strawberry Fields, or Tomorrow Never Knows, one can analyse the songs for entire books (and people have) and still be none the wiser about why they're so spectacularly good.
The mono mix to this is very different to the stereo one. While the only differences I can put my finger on are that there is an organ part in the intro that's not there on the stereo version, and they didn't accidentally leave some vocal in on the instrumental 'need a fix' part, everything sounds subtly different, and clearer. It's just a mix that's had *more time* spent on it, and while I can't point to many individual distinct differences, it is *far* superior in mono.
Side two opens with Martha My Dear, which couldn't be more different, even though it too has metrical irregularities (note the five-beat bar at the end of the first line, to allow that lovely ascending phrase). One of the really interesting things about the White Album is that we see the band members trying out their solo styles, and this is *exactly* the kind of thing McCartney did in his early solo career, especially the ridiculously-out-of-his-range notes in the middle section.
And indeed, it is a solo track, with McCartney playing piano, guitar, bass and drums. George Martin's arrangement is spot-on here, with a lovely combination of 'Northern' brass band and 'classical' strings. The song is facile and empty, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else – it exists purely to sound pretty, and does the job exceedingly well.
I'm So Tired is one of my personal favourite Lennon songs, but doesn't lend itself to very much analysis – I just love the anger in the bridge/choruses, which anyone who has suffered with insomnia will know all too well (at least Lennon, if he lay awake til 6AM, didn't then have to get up and be in work a couple of hours later…). Lennon came up with very few lines much better than "Curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get". The main difference between the mono and stereo versions is that McCartney's harmony is louder.
Blackbird is an example of McCartney doing what he does best, but all too infrequently – writing very sparse, precise melodies that nonetheless carry an inordinate amount of emotional weight. This kind of folky song is something McCartney more or less abandoned once he discovered the power ballad, and it's made his music much worse.
The only real difference between the mono and stereo versions here is that the bird noises are dubbed on in a slightly different place.
McCartney himself has said that this was based on Bach's Bouree in E minor, but I really can't hear much of a similarity at all, and it seems more to be the kind of song that arises from playing with tunings (as the band were at the time) than out of conscious emulation of another piece. Much like his later claims that the song was about civil rights (something he only started saying *after* various over-interpreting analysts read that into the song) this seems to me like McCartney retroactively trying to make his songs seem more profound than they would otherwise appear.
However, the song *does* contain baroque elements, which makes the segue into Piggies (also the second of three animal-themed songs) all the stronger. I think I'm the only person I know of who actually thinks that Piggies is Harrison's strongest contribution to the White Album by quite a long way.
The song gets a bad press, primarily because it's seen as Harrison being preachy, but to be honest the attitude of 'look at those squares with their boring lives' was pretty much endemic in popular music around this time – if we're going to attack songwriters for that, we probably have to start with Ray Davies, but *everyone* was doing it, from Frank Zappa (Plastic People etc) to Pete Seeger (Little Boxes).
The Ray Davies comparison is actually quite apt, because this track could quite easily fit onto The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the title track to which it resembles musically (both bands were recording at the same time, so it's unlikely either was inspired by the other). A large part of the interest comes from Chris Thomas' pseudo-baroque harpsichord and 'cello parts, but the various joke voices Harrison puts on (this is one of his finest vocal performances, one of the few times he really shows just what he could do as a vocalist – every verse is sung in a different voice) show that Harrison wasn't taking himself too seriously here – the song is clearly intended to be something along the lines of Harrison's friends The Bonzo Dog Band (whose Equestrian Statue has something of the same feel as this track) rather than a profound moralistic statement.
And seen in that perspective, this is quite a fun little grotesquerie – a caricature, yes, but nowhere near as mean-spirited as its detractors would claim.
The main difference between the mono and stereo mixes is that the pig noises are in different places.
Rocky Racoon is just a bad shaggy dog story. It's pleasant enough, but I've done more than 3200 words on this album already and I'm not even half-way through yet, so I'm not going to waste space on it.
Don't Pass Me By is Ringo's first solo composition for the Beatles, and he really could have done with some help from the other band members – if nothing else, this is one of the longest songs on the album (at 3:45 the mono version is longer than anything on the first disc except Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and the stereo version plays slower and thus even longer), and would have been better if it had been cut at around 2:45 (where the false ending comes in).
This is one of the few examples of the mono version being definitely inferior to the stereo version. While neither is by any means a masterpiece, the mono version is sped up by what sounds like a tone, giving Ringo's voice a very peculiar sound, and most of the instruments sound vaguely Joe Meeked, but not in a good way. The violin part also continues even longer after the end of the song. Given that Ringo had been working on this song for three years, it wouldn't have hurt the rest of the band to spend a bit more time to get a performance that wasn't so sloppy. Thankfully Ringo's material has been served better in his solo career, where at least at first he made some perfectly pleasant records.
Why Don't We Do It In The Road is almost entirely a solo Paul performance, with Ringo on drums, and is just a twelve-bar blues with two lines of vocal. Not much really to talk about. The mono version differs from the stereo only in that there are no handclaps on the beginning.
I Will – and coming to the end of side two, we find the strong songs appearing again. The first disc of the White Album is incredibly well-sequenced (something that's not true for the inferior second disc) with the first and last few songs of each side being by far the best, so even when one's listened to some fairly weak filler tracks, each side leaves the impression of being great.
One of McCartney's loveliest melodies – though spoiled a little bit by one of his more incoherent lyrics – the arrangement here shows the typical White Album playfulness, with Lennon and Starr adding percussion, while the bass role is filled in by McCartney's 'vocal bass guitar'. The main difference between the mono and stereo versions is that this vocal bass doesn't come in until the second verse in the mono mix – a definite improvement, as it makes the track less static overall.
And Julia is probably Lennon's most personal song to that point, to the extent that I believe this is the only Lennon 'Beatles' track not to feature any of the other band members (as opposed to McCartney who regularly recorded either solo or with orchestral backing, or even Harrison who did a couple of tracks with only Indian musicians) – Lennon was far more attached to the idea of the Beatles as a unit than any of the others, and deeply resented McCartney knocking off tracks without him.
But here he's performing entirely solo – and not only that, for, I think, the first time since A Hard Day's Night, he's doing a mostly single-tracked vocal without any real processing on it. Other than the harmonies and overlaps, this is the plainest vocal Lennon ever recorded, leaving in the cracks in his voice and the occasional slightly flat note. It's a very *human* recording – down to the slight guitar flubs around the 0:20 mark (he appears to have tried to get slightly more complex with the simple picking pattern and to have thought better of it).
Of course, given that this is a love song simultaneously to his dead mother (with whom he had an… unconventional… relationship) and to his new lover Yoko Ono ('ocean child' is a fairly literal translation of 'Yoko'), Lennon treating the song as so personal is understandable. In fact, much like much of Lennon's early solo work, this is *so* personal that one feels almost uncomfortable listening to it, almost voyeuristic. But the song is so stunning that one is compelled to listen to every note anyway.
The only noticeable difference between the mono and stereo versions is that some of Lennon's breaths are slightly louder in the mono mix.
At the end of disc one, what is immediately noticeable is how re-energised Lennon has become by the period in Rishikesh, away from the distractions of both the city and of his disintegrating personal life. In 1967 he'd written practically nothing – only five songs in total, in what was supposedly one of the Beatles' most creative years as a group. Here, though, he's already contributed six, including some of the best songs he ever recorded. McCartney, meanwhile, has become lazy, engaging in shallow pastiche and knocked-off jokes, and only rarely hitting the heights he's capable of.
Side two starts with Birthday. Famously dismissed by Lennon as 'a piece of garbage', it's slightly better than that. Written in the studio by McCartney and Lennon directly after watching the film The Girl Can't Help It (a film which has special importance for Beatles fans as it features Eddie Cochran singing Twenty Flight Rock, the song which was essentially McCartney's 'audition piece' to join the Quarrymen, but which also featured among others Little Richard and Gene Vincent) the song is one of the very few Beatles songs to be based around a straight twelve-bar blues. The band are obviously having fun – especially Lennon, despite his later comments, who also apparently played all the guitars on this track, although some sound like McCartney's style – and it's infectious enough to make the track listenable, if hardly up to the band's normal standards.
The mono mix sounds stronger than the stereo, and reveals a lot more details, such as McCartney's count-in/screams during the drum break, and the really bizarre reverb added to the piano in parts, which continues after the end of the song proper.
Yer Blues, the second twelve-bar (more-or less – the structure is slightly thrown out by the out-of-time guitar break after 'if I ain't dead already') song in a row. In this case, the song is both a sincere cry for help and a parody of the same, in much the same way as I'm A Loser. Lennon seemed to feel up to this point that he couldn't honestly express his depressive and self-loathing tendencies, something he only really gained the ability to do once he went through Primal Scream therapy – up until then he had to slather it in a thick layer of irony.
(This was actually more common in the Brit-blues people than is commonly thought these days – Peter Green, one of the few Brit-blues musicians to be anything other than a stale pasticheur, has expressed bafflement that his similarly depressive 'Man Of The World' was taken as entirely straight, pointing out that he was singing the 'my life' parts in a stereotypically Yiddish voice).
The song also bears quite a resemblance to You Can't Do That (astonishingly, one of only two twelve-bars Lennon had written prior to this, the other being The Word), with its traded-off guitar solos (once again, Lennon is presumably the one who is just slashing chords, while Harrison is the more melodic solo), but the whole track feels far more of a joke than that one, right down to the very obvious splice after the guitar solo – here the start of a different take is pasted in as the end of this one (although Lennon's vocals are mixed out, but you can hear the bleed on the other tracks). Not quite successful as either a genuine blues track or a joke, the track obviously meant a great deal to Lennon, as at his first two solo live performances (on the Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus and Live Peace In Toronto) he performed it (though this may have been as much to do with the ease with which it could be taught to a scratch band as anything else).
The mono version lasts several seconds longer than the stereo.
Mother Nature's Son is another of McCartney's pastoral attempts, very much a musical relation of Blackbird, though incongruously featuring a brass band (which normally conjures up much more industrial images). This is definitely the weaker song, though, being one of the half-finished songs (gorgeous melody, practically no lyrics) that would be McCartney's stock in trade for the next few years. (The long scat sections show you exactly why Nilsson covered this one).
The mono version has much more reverb put on McCartney's voice from the second verse onwards, allowing the vocal to live in the same sonic world as the brass band, rather than being distanced from it as it is in the stereo version, giving the track a much more unified feel. The result is still filler, though, albeit nice filler, and it's a shame that this kept Lennon's similar-but-better Child Of Nature off the album.
And Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey is yet more filler. It's enjoyable-enough filler, especially the way McCartney's bell-shaking interacts with Ringo's drumming, and the babble of overlapping 'come on' vocals towards the end (much more prominent here than on the stereo mix), but this is the kind of thing that would normally have never got past Beatles quality control, and at this point – with this being the fourth song in a row that doesn't feel like it's got a real reason for existing – the goodwill that one comes into the album with is fast evaporating.
Luckily Sexy Sadie is much better – although most of the interesting musical points (the leaps into falsetto, the backing vocals) come from the song Lennon was 'writing off', I've Been Good To You by Smokey Robinson (the first two lines of which, in particular, are almost word-for-word and note-for-note identical with Lennon's song).
Written about the Maharishi, this is easily Lennon's bitterest song to this point, with lines like "you'll get yours yet, however big you think you are" carrying a real venom – possibly more than the Maharishi deserved given the minor nature of the supposed transgression which caused his break with Lennon. Surprisingly, given Harrison's apparent dislike of the song (he remained a supporter of the Maharishi until the end of his life) this features some very nice guitar work from him, in the arpeggiated style that would later become a major feature of much of Abbey Road.
On the mono version, pretty much *everything* sounds like it's been put through a Leslie speaker, something that's far less noticeable on the stereo one, and the bass comes in much later.
Helter Skelter, another piece of nothing, has some of the most significant differences between the mono and stereo versions. The lead guitar is almost inaudible in the mono version for the first half, which sounds much more like a straight band performance (albeit with a ton of reverb) than the overdub-heavy stereo version. After the false ending, the fade back is a different section of the performance, with sound effects over the top, and finishes more than a minute earlier than the stereo version. All told the mono version is a much tighter, more structured track, rather than the freeform wankery of the stereo mix, but that's not enough to save what is ultimately a non-song – especially since the mono version is missing Ringo's exclamation of "I've got blisters on my fingers!", easily the best thing about the track.
And Long Long Long rounds off side three with easily the strongest song on this deeply underwhelming side. Recorded essentially as a live performance by Harrison (acoustic guitar), McCartney (hammond), Starr and Chris Thomas (piano), with only a few simple overdubs, the arrangement here still sounds much fuller than on many of the more complex earlier tracks, in part due to little touches like the out-of-nowhere honky-tonk piano in the middle eight, or the acoustic lead guitar part played with enough harmonics to make it sound almost like a sitar. Of course the most famous aspect of this song (the rattling wine bottle on top of the hammond organ at the end) was an accident, but even so, this track makes a rather lovely end to an utterly underwhelming side three.
(Has anyone ever tried comparing the structures of double albums with those of Doctor Who four-parters? The third part always seems by far the most tedious in both cases).
The mono version of this has what sounds like a different vocal take for the lower-in-the-mix part of Harrison's double-tracked vocal – it comes in two 'longs' later than on the stereo mix, and sounds slightly different from then on, though it's hard to be sure.
Side four opens with Revolution 1, an odd choice – this was the early attempt at what later became Revolution, the B-side that had already been released before the album came out, and would normally have been regarded as an outtake. That this version was included is possibly because of Lennon's indecision about one line – "count me out" in this version being "count me out – in". When the band had performed Revolution on the David Frost show to promote the single, Lennon had changed the lyric back to 'out – in', and they'd also included the 'bom-shoo-be-doo-wop' backing vocals from this version (the David Frost version is actually my favourite performance of this song, and it's a shame it's never seen a full legitimate release (or even been bootlegged much)).
This is definitely a weaker version of the song than the B-side version, but it's still a great song, and one of the only overtly political statements the Beatles ever made as a band. Some of the 'revolutionaries' of the time objected bitterly to Lennon's seemingly-conservative attitude here, with Nina Simone in particular berating Lennon in an answer-record (though one can see how a need for 'revolution' might have seemed more pressing in a USA that was still electing segregationist politicians to national office and sending a generation off to fight in imperialist wars, than in a Britain going through an economic boom and with one of the most small-l liberal governments in history in power (note for my Lib Dem friends – I'd argue that the first Wilson government was one of the very few truly liberal governments at least in social policy – legalising homosexuality and abortion, while getting rid of capital punishment and theatre censorship and introducing new universities) ). In the USA revolutionary rhetoric was driven by a genuine anger against real injustices, while in the UK (not to diminish the real injustices which of course did and do take place) the anger was mostly middle-class students wanting to upset mummy and daddy by worshipping genocidal maniacs as 'countercultural' figures.
So while Revolution/Revolution 1 might have seemed a deeply conservative track in the US, over here its measured approach was eminently reasonable – and it's notable that almost as soon as Lennon moved to the US, he became for a while convinced of the rightness of the revolutionaries' cause. Revolution 1 shows Lennon's ambiguity on the matter more openly, but Revolution is still the better track.
The mono version of this track has a more extended fade, and one can clearly hear in this extended fade many of the sounds which would be used in Revolution #9, which we will come to shortly.
Honey Pie is one of McCartney's pastiches, of the kind of 1920s song that his dad's band would have played. But while he had a genuine affection for this kind of music, one suspects that the proximate influence was the success of Tiny Tim, whose Rudy Valee impersonation McCartney seems himself to be impersonating at times.
(Tiny Tim was, of course, far from alone in his resurrection of 1920s novelty songs, and mention must here again be made of the Beatles' friends the Bonzo Dog Band, who had started out as a 1920s revivalist band performing songs like I'm Going To Bring A Watermelon To My Girl Tonight, before the New Vaudeville Band stole their act and trumpet player…)
The song itself fits perfectly into its idiom, with the lyrics, about a local girl who has made it big and left the small North of England world behind her, being reminiscent of many, many other songs (see for example Jake Thackray's Kirkstall Road Girl). It's enjoyable enough, though hardly McCartney's best, and shows that the album is now back on track.
Savoy Truffle, the first rocker for several tracks, shows George doing much better at creating an interesting riff-based rocker than his bandmates. Again performed with Chris Thomas but without Lennon, this driving rocker is in a style Harrison was briefly enamoured with – the track is almost fingerprint-identical at points to Sour Milk Sea, which Harrison wrote and produced for Jackie Lomax around this time – but never really returned to. A shame, as this is one of the Beatles' less embarrassing attempts at hard rock, helped by the Fats Domino-esque horn section.
Cry Baby Cry begins a run of three Lennon tracks to finish the album, which could not be more different musically, but all of which have a slightly skewed take on childhood. We see Lennon here returning to the Lewis Carrol and nursery rhymes which had inspired I Am The Walrus, here starting off with 'the queen of hearts she made some tarts' as a basis for a very eerie song which never quite makes sense until the last verse ("at twelve o'clock a meeting round the table for a seance in the dark/with voices out of nowhere put on specially by the children for a lark"). One of Lennon's better tracks for the album, this leads into McCartney's Can You Take Me Back improvisation (from the I Will sessions, which also produced the Step Inside Love/Los Paranoias track on Anthology 3), which in turn leads to…
Revolution #9. This is by far the most controversial recording in the Beatles' entire career, totally unlike anything they'd ever done, and unlike anything by any of their peers except maybe Frank Zappa (when I first heard this track, my only point of reference for this).
Most people's attitude to this kind of music can be summed up in Richard Herring's line – "I never used to like that experimental, atonal stuff until someone locked me up in a room and played it at me for several days, but I get it now, although my psychiatrist says I've got Stockhausen syndrome". I like mid-twentieth century experimental music of this kind myself – I love Varese, Boulez, Stockhausen, and others who were experimenting with what does and doesn't count as 'music', and I personally enjoy Revolution #9 immensely – while I don't have the musical vocabulary to talk about it in any meaningful way (my musical training at university extended to one year of a Popular Music course, which gave me tools to talk about three-minute pop songs, but not so much collages made out of tapes of American football crowds, backwards recordings of orchestras, and people reciting the names of dances, among many other elements) I can tell that despite its seemingly random nature, this is a carefully constructed piece. It flows, and has a 'story' to it, with peaks and troughs that come in semi-regular intervals. It's put together by someone who has a very firm understanding of sonic structure, even if it's apparently structureless.
But even if you don't like it, even if it doesn't appeal to you at all, I'd suggest that we'd all think less of the Beatles if they *hadn't* done something like this, at least once. That the most famous and popular pop band (and the Beatles were definitely, above all, *POP* music, with an audience made up largely of teenage girls) of all time would put out a track so resolutely difficult as this sums up just why they were so special. Of the hundred million or so people who've bought this album, my guess is that ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand listened to this track no more than once or twice, and hated it. But the other thousand may well have loved it. And even those who didn't love it will have been forced to think about their preconceptions about what does and doesn't count as music.
Just by introducing *that many* people to avant-garde concepts they otherwise would never have known existed – by broadening their awareness of what is possible, even if they chose never to look at those possibilities – this track by itself does as much to justify the Beatles' existence as any entire album they made.
The mono mix of this is actually a fold-down of the stereo mix, so there are no significant differences, but the clarity of this CD release allows me for the first time to properly make out the conversation between Alistair Taylor and George Martin that starts the track.
And to finish off both this album and the Beatles mono releases, we have Good Night, a lovely little lullaby by John that's deliberately over-orchestrated into absurdity by Martin (it sounds actually exactly like the orchestrations on Let It Be about which McCartney complained so vociferously). By far Ringo's best vocal on a Beatles record, this is a very silly, but sweet track, and a perfect closer to a wonderfully *im*perfect album.
And that's the lot as far as the mono reviews go. I'm probably going to do the final two (stereo-only) albums in one long post, about this long, as their recording overlapped and the releases were backwards from the recording dates.
I hope you've enjoyed these, and if I do (as Pillock in particular keeps suggesting) expand these into a book, I hope you buy it – they've been a lot of fun but also a lot of work.
And if you've not had enough of the White Album by now, here's two Spotify playlists. This one by my friend Tilt containing covers of every song (yes, including Revolution #9), while this one contains eight of the songs I've mentioned as influences or inspirations in this post.
Good night, sleep tight.
The Beatles Mono Reviews 10: Magical Mystery Tour
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
So we're getting near the end of these reviews now – after this there's only the White Album in the mono box set. Do people want to hear my thoughts on the Abbey Road/Let It Be reissues or is it more the mono mix differences you're interested in?
Magical Mystery Tour gets surprisingly little respect as an album among Beatles fans, which I can only assume is because of its semi-canonical status (it was only released as a double-EP set in the UK, and padded out to album length in the US with singles) – either that or its association with the famously disastrous but really not all that bad film to which it was a soundtrack. Either way, it's still one of my very favourite albums – up there with Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver as the band's best work.
(Incidentally, when the Magical Mystery Tour LP was finally issued as an LP in the UK, they used Capitol's masters, which included weird reprocessed-fake-stereo versions of the mono mixes of the tracks on side 2. As until buying this box I only owned the album on vinyl, that means that I've never heard the proper stereo version of Baby You're A Rich Man so won't be able to compare that one very well).
Magical Mystery Tour itself is an inauspicious start to the album, given that there's very little actual song there, with what little interest there is coming from the horn arrangement, and from Lennon's comedy Scouser voice. The melody – what there is – is mostly a reworking of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. I don't hear any distinct differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but what details there are are much clearer.
The Fool On The Hill again has few if any noticeable differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but is one of the most rewarding songs on the album. This simple, sparse melody is the kind of thing that McCartney used to be able to write almost without trying, and which he appears to have consciously chosen to give up bothering with around 1969. It's a shame, because this plain little D major/minor tune is one of the best things he's ever written.
And the arrangement, which is stunningly clear in this new mastering (and I can't say often enough how much better these CDs sound than any previous release, and this is coming from a fan of vinyl), shows that McCartney had been paying attention to Brian Wilson – almost all the distinctive instrumental touches (the flute trio, the huffing bass harmonica, the jew's harp) had been used by Wilson on Pet Sounds and/or Good Vibrations. But this isn't to say that the music here is a Beach Boys pastiche – the answering phrases on the acoustic guitar in the second verse are not something Wilson would ever do, the recorder part (the single most distinctive bit of the entire record) is McCartney's original idea. And most original of all, and totally Ringo, that hand percussion. The finger cymbal on the second beat of each bar in the chorus is completely out of nowhere, and still throws me off balance a little, but in a good way.
Flying is an instrumental credited to all four Beatles. A simple 12-bar with a gorgeous mellotron part played by John, it's pretty much like all the other twelve-bar instrumentals they noodled around with but didn't release. The guitars in the mono mix sound a bit louder than in stereo.
Blue Jay Way is one of George Harrison's most musically interesting songs. It sounds more like a standard pop song than his recent Indian work, thanks partly to the full-band performance, but like those songs is based around a drone, switching between C and Cdim7, with no other chords (George, like myself, was almost obsessed with the tonal ambiguity possible with diminished 7ths – you hear them, especially Ddim7, throughout his later Beatles and early solo work).
The mono mix has far fewer backing vocals than the stereo mix, and the 'cello appears to be much higher in the mix (there's a little run of notes just after "soon will be the break of day, sitting here in Blue Jay Way" that I'd never noticed before, despite twenty years of listening to this album).
And the mastering quality is so good that you can hear the Hammond organ's motor kicking in in the opening bars…
Your Mother Should Know is the first case I've come across of the mono version being substantially inferior to the stereo. There's phasing slathered over the whole thing, getting more noticeable towards the end, and the whole mix is very tinny. The cymbals, in particular, sound incredibly swooshy, and the whole thing sounds like listening to a tape that's been chewed up, through a tin can. It's a shame, because the song itself, while hardly a masterpiece, is pleasant enough. But this just sounds bad.
I Am The Walrus is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever recorded, based (as so much of Lennon's best work) on the most banal of sources. I've spent three days trying to write this piece, and this and Strawberry Fields have caused me the most difficulty – how do you talk sensibly about great art like this? Were I a more honest writer, this entire article would have been replaced with me talking about a bus journey I took into work about two years ago, listening to the Beatles through headphones and reading Promethea, and breaking down in tears because the human race is capable of this kind of utter, life-affirming beauty and greatness, and still spends the vast majority of its time doing such awful, dull, and downright evil things instead.
Which is, actually, I think one of the things this song's famously oblique lyric is about. The lyric was inspired by a letter from a kid at Lennon's old school, who told him that the teachers who ten years earlier had been saying Lennon had no potential were now teaching Beatles lyrics in class. So he took an old Scouse playground rhyme (the version in Pete Shotton's book is very slightly different, but the way we used to sing it in school was "Yellow belly custard, green snot pie/All mixed up with a dead dog's eye/Slap it on a sandwich, nice and thick/And drink it down with a cup of cold sick") and proceeded to write the biggest load of nonsense he could think of.
But it's nonetheless resonant nonsense – the rage at the teachers who he believed to have oppressed him mixes in with the police (the melody of the song is taken from a police siren) to become hatred of authority and repression in general, especially the repression of artists – the policemen are 'sitting pretty' while 'you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe' – and of sexuality. It manages simultaneously to be utter nonsense and perfectly expressive, the surrealist rage of the id against the ego.
And the music complements it perfectly, and this is as much down to George Martin as to Lennon. Lennon's chord sequence is, of course, extraordinary, being as it is based on a circular pattern of all the major chords that start on the white notes, but Martin's arrangement adds to that, sticking a perpetually ascending string line over the perpetually descending bass part (most noticeable in the fade) to create the musical equivalent of an Escher picture (I'm sure I've nicked that line from somewhere, but it's true nonetheless).
But the really extraordinary thing about Martin's contribution is the sound. Martin had been inspired by Bernard Herrman in his arrangement for Eleanor Rigby, and that's an influence that's definitely in evidence here (and on Strawberry Fields, very much this song's twin, and about which I'll have less to say partly because I'm saying some of it here), but the difference is in how the parts are recorded. The 'cello parts on this, especially, are recorded with the mic up against the strings, producing a sound that you could never hear in a normal orchestral or chamber performance – it's simply not possible to get your ears that close to that many instruments simultaneously – and giving the instrument a different timbre from anything I've heard in music before the Beatles (and one that had a few imitators, notably ELO – listen especially to Roy Wood's 'cello playing on 10538 Overture). The orchestrations on the Beatles' records at this point were genuinely sounds that had never been heard before. And they were being created by a man in his forties, an ex RAF officer who always wore a jacket and tie to work.
And those 'cello parts are far more audible in the mono mix – up front and centre, loud and grungy and with a huge, magnificent sound. You can hear the bow scraping across the strings. I've actually had to interrupt myself from typing this several times to play air 'cello, and I'm only very slightly ashamed of the fact.
Everyone is on form here (though George stays in the background) – Paul's bass is rock-solid and makes up a vital part of that Escher staircase at the end (when the chords become almost redundant, and the harmonic movement comes from the interaction between strings and bass), Ringo's playing like a man possessed, even the Mike Sammes Singers (of all people) are sounding suitably strange.
And then you have possibly the most perfect serendipity in the whole history of recorded music, when the radio that was being randomly fed in to the mix said "are you, sir?" straight after Lennon's "I am the eggman". (Incidentally, the radio at the end means that up until the release of Love in 2006, the last minute of this song had never been released in true stereo, a fake-stereo bit of the mono mix being edited on).
And one last thing, for the Doctor Who trivia fans among you – one of the actors in the performance of King Lear heard on the radio in the fade is Roger Delgado, later The Master (the proper one).
Hello Goodbye was the A-side while I Am The Walrus was the B-side. Has ever a track been so completely outclassed by its flip side? Hello Goodbye is a mindless little nothing, written as essentially a game to show Alastair Taylor, Brian Epstein's assistant, how easy songwriting was. The mono and stereo mixes are essentially identical.
Strawberry Fields Forever… this is frankly unfair. The last couple of albums each had *one* monumental track about which I could easily write a book. This one has two – and they're similar enough that a lot of what I would say about this one (the string sounds, Martin's arrangements) has already been said about Walrus. I can't possibly write *another* thousand words on *this* song.
What I can say is that more than Walrus this is a genuine group effort. While John wrote the song (and listening to his home demo on Anthology 2, the bare song with just him and the guitar would have been quite sufficient to make a remarkable record even without the contributions of the other band members), Ringo does some of his best playing on here, playing what sounds like a through-composed part, getting steadily more complex throughout the track (quite astonishing when you consider that the recording we have is, of course, a splicing together of two different performances/arrangements that were created separately). While George is in the background – as he was through much of 1967, having become disillusioned with the band at the time – his slide work in the earlier part of the track foreshadows much of his later playing style.
And McCartney of course came up with the Mellotron countermelody/intro (played by the horns in the second half of the track). Does anyone else think that this sounds influenced by the BBC Time Pips, incidentally?
I'm not doing Strawberry Fields justice here, much as I wouldn't I Am The Walrus had their positions on the album been reversed, but this is one of the greatest pieces of popular music ever recorded, and everyone involved – all four Beatles, George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick – did a staggering job of making a record that sounded like nothing else that had ever been recorded. Martin is particularly to be praised for his contribution here. He was always more of a fan of McCartney's work than Lennon's (and continued to work with McCartney up to the present, off and on, while never collaborating again with Lennon after the Beatles split) but while his arrangements for McCartney's work were tasteful, intelligent, and complemented the music beautifully, his work on Lennon's songs, especially in 1966 and 67, was some of the most imaginative, innovative and groundbreaking work as an orchestral arranger and record producer ever.
It's one of the great musical tragedies of our age that a man as talented as Martin has such a duff ear for talent (with the staggering exception of the Beatles) – while the comedy records he made before working with the Beatles, and his own occasional bits of experimental electronica in the early 60s, are wonderful, since 1970 he's mostly worked with people like Celine Dion, America and Ultravox, wasting an extraordinary production talent on material that's unlistenable no matter how much he improves it.
But here, working with Lennon (who, no matter how much he later denied it, needed Martin possibly more even than he needed McCartney – the only times he ever even came close to the power of his Beatles work were when he was working with Phil Spector, an even more auteurish producer), Martin lets out a side of his musical ability that otherwise would never have been set free, and it's quite, quite gorgeous.
The mono mix differs only slightly from the stereo mix, mostly in that the double-tracking on the lead vocal is more noticeable.
Penny Lane is another McCartney one that was on the other side of a Lennon classic (this time as a double A-side) but here, while it's not up to that extraordinary level, McCartney at least provides an extremely good track. The interesting thing here is the way the song sounds so simple and ordinary, while being simultaneously surrealistic lyrically ( it's a bright rainy summer day in autumn, and 'finger pies' is both sexual slang and a rather unpleasant image that could have fit into that poem I quoted earlier), and musically a stylistic melange.
Even though it all fits together well, we actually have here several very distinct, separate types of influence. The inspiration for the basic feel of the song appears to have been the Beach Boys' Wouldn't It Be Nice, which shares its rhythmic feel (the piano here is very roughly playing the same role as the mandolins in the Beach Boys' track, while the horns in the later verses are kinda-sorta like the accordions) and whose melody line has something of the same shape ( try singing the first two lines of the verse of one over the backing track of the other – "(Penny) Lane there is a banker selling photographs/of every head he's had the pleasure to have known" sounds very much like someone noodling round "(Wouldn't it be) nice if we were older/And we wouldn't have to wait so long" – the resemblance is closest on 'every head' and 'and we wouldn't').
But then McCartney has noted the similarity between the staccato, four-on-the-floor feel of the WIBN rhythm to a slowed-down Motown track, and so we have horn pads in the choruses that could easily come from soul records of the period (or at least from a British band like Sounds Incorporated who tried for that kind of feel). And then over that we have the piccolo trumpet part inspired by Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto. The amazing thing is that this utterly calculated, intellectual pastiche of several different styles feels as light, breezy and simple as it does. A charming little minor masterpiece.
Depending on how you count I've Got A Feeling, Baby You're A Rich Man is the last true Lennon/McCartney collaboration (at least to be released by the Beatles – McCartney contributed to Lennon's Gimme Some Truth during the Get Back sessions, though that song was later released as a Lennon solo composition), with Lennon writing the verses and McCartney the chorus. The result is a minor, but interesting, track, especially for Lennon's clavioline part (set to sound like a shehnai, a type of Arabic oboe) and some interesting backwards instruments. It also appears to have inspired Lennon to write some of the song fragments that later turned up on Abbey Road (the chorus would fit rather well with Mean Mister Mustard) and to have been at least partly inspired by With A Little Help From My Friends.
There's a rumour going round that John sings 'Baby you're a rich fag Jew', presumably aimed at Brian Epstein (the Beatles' manager, who was, indeed, rich, gay and Jewish), but he doesn't – although it would not surprise me had Lennon sung this during the session ( Lennon was not the most sensitive man in the world when it came to identity politics – his suggested title for Epstein's autobiography had been simply Queer Jew).
I can't speak for the differences between mono and stereo mixes here from personal experience, as before the 1987 CD release the only true stereo mix of this song was on a 1971 German vinyl issue of the album, so I've only heard the stereo mix in a dodgy MP3 copy, owning the albums on vinyl rather than CD before the reissues, but I'm informed that the stereo mix has louder bass and is missing some of the effects after the lines "far as the eye can see" and "often enough to know".
And All You Need Is Love – possibly the most unfairly-maligned Beatles single ever. Yes, the lyrical sentiment is trite (though no less true for all that), but the song was written and performed for the world's first ever international round-the-world TV broadcast, and so had to be simple to understand and to sing along to.
That said, musically, this is very innovative. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't the most metrically-irregular piece of music ever to get to number one – the verse is *almost* in seven/four (or alternating bars of 4/4 and 3/4), apart from one bar of eight (two bars of four), while the chorus is *almost* straight fours, but the last bar is in 3/4. That it sounds so simple and sing-along anyway just shows that these supposedly 'difficult' metres are actually only difficult when they're written by a deliberately difficult composer.
In the same way, this song is possibly the first post-modern hit single, presaging sampling culture by quoting other pieces of music throughout (the Marseillaise, Greensleeves, In The Mood, Bach's two-part invention in F major, Yesterday and She Loves You). As is appropriate for a song written for a celebration of TV, the medium is very much the message here – the verse lyrics are genial gibberish, leading up to the simple message. It's an advertising jingle for the concept of love, but with orchestrations at the end in the style of Charles Ives. What is there not to like?
But my favourite bit of the record is unfortunately not as noticeable in the mono mix as the stereo. I never really noticed this until the singer Glenn Tilbrook did a bit on stage where he'd perform his favourite *seconds* of pop music (like just the bit in Space Oddity where David Bowie says "ssseven!" in an amazingly camp way). Tilbrook pointed out that George Harrison, presumably petrified at the thought of playing his guitar solo live in front of a billion people (the claimed TV audience for the Our World show), played half the solo then just got his fingers tangled in the strings – something that's covered up by quickly ducking the guitar in the mix and mixing up the string part.
On the mono mix (the one they spent time on), there's a clean edit on the first wrong note on the guitar, but on the stereo mix you can clearly hear Harrison flailing almost randomly for another bar or so. It's one of those little mistakes (like the 'fucking hell' on Hey Jude) that, by showing the Beatles were human, actually make their records all the more impressive, and I miss it. (Though I've no idea why this wasn't fixed, as between the TV broadcast and the single release John redid his lead vocal and Ringo added a drum roll under the intro to replace a tambourine part from the broadcast version).
The other mono/stereo differences here are fairly minor – the drums are quieter on the intro, the fade is quicker, and the tinkly barrelhouse piano you can hear buried in the mix in the stereo version is even less audible.
Magical Mystery Tour is the first Beatles album where the differences between mono and stereo are fairly minor. The next album – the 'White album' – would see the greatest differences yet, before their last two albums dropped mono altogether. Of the mono releases, this is the only one where I'd say the stereo release has the slight edge over the mono (for Your Mother Should Know not sounding appaling) but I don't know the stereo Baby You're A Rich Man well enough to know if that tips the balance back. But mono or stereo, this is some of the best music ever recorded.
(One final question re: the White album – would you prefer me to do with this like I did with Mono Masters, and just deal with 'important' tracks or those with huge differences between mono and stereo, or would you prefer two posts, a disc one and a disc two, dealing with every single song?)
The Beatles Mono Reviews 9: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Oh, it's far from a bad album – I'd go so far as to say it was 'quite good' – but it's infinitely inferior to the albums on either side of it (though it's not helped by the fact that Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane end up on the next album 'canonically'). For any other band it'd be a triumph, but after Revolver, it's a bit of a let-down, frankly. And it's the most over-rated album on earth.
Which is, of course, to somewhat miss the point. Sgt Pepper, uniquely in the Beatles' catalogue, wasn't conceived as music as much as a STATEMENT – this is where the world is, Summer 1967, come and join the show. As such, it was probably horribly dated as early as January 1968. Which is fine as it goes – these albums weren't recorded with the expectation of being listened to decades later, but more like newspapers – but it makes it difficult for someone whose mum was only eight when it was released.
So I have to judge it on the music, and the music, frankly, isn't the Beatles' best – possibly because many of the band weren't particularly interested. Harrison says in the Anthology DVD series that he would rather have been in India, Ringo's most vivid memory of the album is famously that he learned to play chess while the others got on with it, and John… well, the fact that John wrote three and a half songs (albeit some of the best on the album) to Paul's eight and a half speaks volumes.
So this is the only Beatles album other than A Hard Day's Night to have an obvious leader, and McCartney wasn't really ready for the challenge. All the production tricks in the world (and they are astonishing) can't hide the paucity of good songs on the album.
That said, there is still a lot to say about the album, and the mono mix is one that differs more than any other from the frankly appaling stereo mix, so here we go…
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the title track, must have sounded strangely familiar even when it first came out. After the opening sounds of an orchestra tuning up (taken from the A Day In the Life sessions) and crowd noises (from the Beyond The Fringe live album, which Martin produced and which was as important to comedy as the Beatles' music was to music), we go into a Hendrix-esque riff (played by McCartney, but the chord sequence is strangely familiar.
That's because the verse of Sgt Pepper is just a straight rewrite of You Won't See Me, at double-speed – and You Won't See Me was itself a rewrite of Eight Days A Week (all sharing the same I-II-IV-I chord progression). What differentiates this song from the earlier one is the odd combination of styles – the juxtaposition of the brass band (the first time one would be used on a Beatles record, but far from the last) with the screaming electric guitar.
The brass band acts as a pointer to the feel of the whole album – unlike American psychedelia, which came out of a sense of rebellion against a society that was sending people off to fight a pointless war while denying basic human rights to many of its citizens, British psychedelia came about at a time of national prosperity under one of the more progressive (relatively) governments of the last cenury, and while it's anti-authoritarian, it's more about puncturing pomposity than crying out for injustice. As the Kinks would put it, "Preserving the old ways from being abused, protecting the new ways for me and for you".
So the choice of a brass band, the music of Northern industrial towns during the time when McCartney's father would have grown up, is one of several pointers in Pepper which suggest it's aimed at everybody – this is a fundamentally welcoming album, and everyone's invited to join the party. The instrumental choice itself may well have come from McCartney and Martin's project immediately prior to Pepper, the score for the minor British film The Family Way, which used a lot of this kind of instrumentation. Brass bands would continue to pop up in McCartney's music for the next few years.
With A Little Help From My Friends has, frankly, little of interest, in either its mono or stereo versions.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is Lennon's first song on the album, and also his first instrumental performance on the record (unless you count an alleged cowbell on the previous track that I can't hear). Even though it's Lennon's song, though, much of the arrangement (including the lowry organ countermelody which is the most distinctive feature of the track) comes from McCartney. An interesting thing about this album is that while Lennon & McCartney were no longer collaborating as much as they used to, almost all the interesting songwriting ideas in McCartney's songs come from Lennon, while most of the arrangement in Lennon's comes from McCartney.
Van Dyke Parks has often claimed that Sgt Pepper was in some way 'ripped off' from the then-unreleased Smile album he was working on with Brian Wilson, after McCartney visited the sessions and heard recordings. While the two albums are very different, this song is one where I could believe such a relationship, at least in the production – the combination of a gentle 6/8 verse with elliptical lyrics and a pounding, uptempo chorus with one line of lyric repeated is one I've not heard anywhere else before these two tracks, and the timing is about right. That said, it's still probably a coincidence.
Either way, Lucy is absolutely marvellous, and all the more so in the mono version, which is properly mixed. In particular, there are swathes of phasing all over Lennon's verse vocal, and over the final 'aaah' in the chorus. In fact almost every instrument seems to have some sort of recording trickery in the mono mix that isn't there on the stereo one. The organ in the chorus sounds 'swampy', as does the guitar/bass on the bridge, and the tambura is more prominent, and McCartney's bass is no longer the absolute centre of attention.
The bass part is extraordinary though, especially the way on each repetition of each section he plays a more complex variation of the same part – it's almost a through-composed part of its own, rather than just accompaniment. Somewhat buried in the thicker, meatier mono mix, it's still a highlight.
And we move from a Lennon song vastly improved by McCartney to a McCartney song vastly improved by Lennon – Getting Better. While the arrangement is musically fascinating – in particular the way there's a held G octave on rhythm guitar and piano everywhere except the verses, no matter what chords the rest of the band are playing (creating a drone-like effect which is presumably the reason for the tamboura on the last verse – the music is fairly simplistic, never leaving its home key. (But there are some wonderful embellishments in the arrangement – listen especially for the variation in the drumming between sections).
Those parts of the lyric that were part of McCartney's original conception appear to have been fairly bland; inspired by a saying of Jimmy Nicol, the song was originally a purely optimistic one. It was only when Lennon added the sarcastic rejoinders ('no I can't complain' and 'couldn't get much worse') and finished off the lyrics, turning them into something far more personal. It's probably Lennon's first undisguised confessional lyric, probably aided by the fact that he was putting the words into McCartney's voice rather than his own, and was just 'finishing' his friend's song – but even so, it's notable that he harmonises on the lines "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved".
The mono mix of this is not noticeably different from the stereo, apart from the obvious differences (no separation of guitars into left and right channels on the intro). The one difference I have noticed is that the almost-inaudible "four, five, six" countin on the stereo mix during the intro is less audible in mono – so much less that I have trouble convincing myself that I'm not just imagining it because I'm used to hearing it there.
Fixing A Hole isn't a song I have a great deal to say about. It's filler, albeit very pleasant filler with a nice harpsichord part. The mono mix has a much more organic sound than the stereo – the subtle reverb makes it sound like it's being played live in a room (which apparently it largely was, with the vocal and rhythm track cut together), with only the fairly sloppily double-tracked lead vocal sounding slightly out of place.
She's Leaving Home is another McCartney song that's hugely improved by Lennon's additions. On their own, McCartney's verses would be rather simplistic – the girl is leaving, so she can have fun, and the concern of the parents is presented as selfish ("How could she treat us so thoughtlessly/How could she do this to me?").
Lennon's lines (and he apparently came up with the chorus melody as well as the chorus lyrics) add several extra layers to this. Apparently made up of phrases that Lennon's aunt Mimi used to say, the voice of the parents in the choruses turns these monsters into fully-rounded people while at one and the same time also adding a comic layer – these people are clearly oblivious, if well-meaning, and one can see exactly why the daughter would want to leave. Particularly wonderful, and worth the existence of the song itself, is the way "How could she treat us so thoughtlessly/How could she do this to me?" goes straight into "We never thought of ourselves/Never a thought for ourselves". Hilarious, and yet genuinely touching.
Of course, unlike other McCartney ballads, this one has a couple of flaws. First and most obvious is the ending – "She is having fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)". Fun – as opposed to love (which the Beatles did, after all, previously claim money couldn't buy…) , or fulfillment, or freedom – seems like a remarkably petty reason to do anything. It may be a more realistic reason, but it seems bathetic in the extreme.
Almost as bad is Mike ("Gary Glitter's producer") Leander's frankly sickly orchestration – the only time while the Beatles were together that anyone other than George Martin arranged parts for outside musicians, because Martin was busy and McCartney didn't want to wait around. How McCartney could let this pseudo-romantic fairy tinkling all over one of his best songs, and yet complain at the comparatively restrained (comparatively is a relative term…) orchestrations Phil Spector had added to the awful The Long And Winding Road I simply can't understand. The annoying thing is that there are some good ideas in the arrangement – the cellos are nice – but they're just swamped with tinkling.
The mono version is a huge improvement on the stereo, thanks largely to being a semitone higher (that's a half-step to Americans) – it plays in F rather than E, and is consequently faster and bouncier (though not as bouncy as this version, which I hope will get an official release somewhere), making the track seem less final, and more hopeful.
(Personally I always think the Beach Boys' Wonderful (spotify link) functions as a more mature, intelligent sequel to this song…)
She's Leaving Home is a flawed masterpiece, but is – just – a masterpiece nonetheless.
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite is a song that Lennon later dismissed – but one suspects more out of ideological purity than anything else. He later tried to exaggerate the differences between McCartney and himself, saying of this album "Paul said 'come and see the show', while I said 'I read the news today, oh boy'" – but in fact, McCartney's song merely hopes you'll enjoy a show you're already attending, while Lennon's lyrics here (taken in large part from this poster for a circus performance in Rochdale in the mid 19th century) are actually exhorting you to come to a show you're not at yet. On the other hand, the previous track, McCartney's She's Leaving Home was based on a story McCartney read in the newspaper…
(This also puts the lie to Lennon's other big claim, that the idea of the album as a show was all McCartney's idea, and other than the opening two tracks and the reprise they 'just did tracks'. Notions of performance pervade the album, whether the 'go to a show' in Good Morning, Good Morning, or the implicit performance in When I'm 64, a stylistic pastiche…)
There isn't a huge amount to choose between the mono and stereo mixes of this witty, clever little song, except that in the mono mix the efects are more prominent at the end.
Within You, Without You is the most controversial song on the album. Personally, I think it's quite a gorgeous song, and while George is preachy and superior in it, as he so often was, it gives the album a conscience that was otherwise lacking.
And just take a moment to think of this – this astonishingly complex piece, which is as far as I can tell a very accurate rendition of Indian classical style, with in parts an almost freeform rhythm, is by the man who less than two years earlier was writing uninspiring filler like I Need You. Just in terms of the amount of growth in Harrison's compositional ability, it's an astonishing achievement, even if it's not to your taste.
It's also a LONG song. While the Beatles had only previously gone one or two seconds over the three minute mark, here side two of the album is bookended by two songs that last more than five minutes.
And compare the imaginative string arrangement here by George Martin, with its microtonal shifts and subtle accomodations to the Western ear (listen to those incredibly low 'cellos under 'try to see beyond yourself', grounding the track almost inaudibly). Given that Martin at the time didn't like the song, it's astonishing how he managed to avoid Hollywood Orientalism here, and actually provide something that made the most difficult song on the album more listenable to the casual audience *without* at any time watering down its difficulty. Just compare the arrangement here to that of She's Leaving Home (the only other track with essentially no Beatle instrumental participation) – Martin's score is sparse, thoughtful and intelligent. The man deserves *another* knighthood, frankly.
The main difference between the mono and stereo mixes here is that the laugh at the end of the track, which to my mind is an absolutely essential part of the song, showing Harrison recognised his own pomposity and was able to make fun of it himself (MOJO magazine once described him as 'the world's only witty Hari Krishna', which I think is about right), is much more prominent and longer on the mono mix.
The big difference between the mono and stereo versions of When I'm Sixty-Four is that the mono version is listenable with headphones – the vocal not being panned entirely to one side makes a *big* difference.
When I'm Sixty-Four is supposedly one of McCartney's first songs, written when he was sixteen, but I suspect that at the very least it was reworked at the time. While overall it's quite a simplistic song (except for the seventeen bar bridge), the second half of the verse has all the fingerprints of McCartney's style around this time, from the same I-II-IV pattern I mentioned in the title track (under 'if I stay out til quarter to three, would you lock the door?' ) which never appeared in any of his songs prior to late 64 as far as I'm aware, to the diminished seventh in the next line.
While the Beatles used diminished sevenths all the time later on, we're talking about someone who had supposedly only just written I Lost My Little Girl (chords – G, G7, C), and who has talked about taking the bus across Liverpool around that time to find someone who knew how to play B7. I very much doubt that the same person was casually playing Ebdim7 chords (it's JUST possible that he wrote the song on the piano and came across the chord in a different inversion, as Cdim7, but unlikely). (The chord sounds here as Edim7, incidentally, but that's because the song was varispeeded a semitone, partly to make McCartney sound younger (as if 24 wasn't young enough, jammy sod) and partly so it would be the same key (Db) as Within You, Without You.) So I suspect it was originally written with a much more limited set of chords (probably just C, F and G originally, given that it's played in C) and only later were the passing chords added. I'm sure the bridge was added later too…
The arrangement is actually more inventive than people give it credit for – the song was originally written in a Sinatra-esque style, but the rooty-toot clarinets transport it into a completely different idiom, and then you have Lennon playing country-blues acoustic guitar under that. We also have one of McCartney's best vocal performances on the album, grinning and winking through – listen to him laughing at the last 'will you still need me' – and playing up his Liverpool vowels. "Berthday greetings", "say the werd", "grrandchildren on yurr knee" – this all ties in with the general Northern-childhood-nostalgia that runs throughout the band's work at this time, and which I'll touch on more in my review of the next album.
Lovely Rita is the second McCartney filler song in a row, and while it's quite witty (if cruel – 'made her look a little like a military man' and so on) it's inessential, and much like on side one with Getting Better going into Fixing A Hole, the sequencing of two filler McCartney songs back to back makes both sound less interesting than they would placed further apart. There are some nice touches in the arrangement, though, particularly the electronically-processed comb-and-toilet-paper playing. The orgasmic sounds at the end are nice, too.
Good Morning, Good Morning is one of Lennon's strongest pieces. I always like Lennon best when he's being aggressively psychedelic – I much prefer this or I Am The Walrus or Hey Bulldog to Lucy or Across The Universe. Inspired by a cornflake commercial, this is in many ways a rewrite of She Said, She Said, with the same disjointed metre and with a similarly quined title, and would really have fit better on Revolver, especially given Paul's extraordinary Taxman-esque guitar solo.
But the whole track is just extraordinary, and packs far more of a punch on this CD – I'm not sure whether because of the clarity of the remastering (though I've now heard the stereo remasters of Let It Be and Abbey Road and the difference isn't that great) or because the mono mix is punchier. But either way, listen to the way Ringo and Paul manage to guide the band through these almost-impossible time-signature changes.
The more I listen closely to this music, the angrier I get at the people who claim Ringo was a bad drummer. The man was quite possibly the best rock drummer of his generation, and effectively invented modern rock drumming. The fact that the Beatles' music sounds so catchy and simple is entirely down to him. The Beatles' music has a groove to it, and that's despite the fact that something like a quarter of Lennon's songs (and several of McCartney and Harrison's) feature all sorts of metrical irregularities. Most drummers would have immense difficulty even keeping time at all through this song. The fact that Starr manages to actually play fills and make the song one you can tap your foot to, that's impressive.
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) is of course a reprise of the opener. The main differences in the mono version are that the transition from Good Morning, Good Morning isn't as smooth, the intro is a few beats longer, there's more audience noise, you can hear Lennon mumbling something *before* 'goodbye', and Paul's scatting over the end is MUCH more prominent. On the whole it's a much more successful mix, but I do prefer the smoother chicken-cluck-to-guitar transition in the stereo mix…
A Day In The Life is, of course, one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever recorded, and frankly nothing I say about it can do it true justice, certainly not in the confines of this article. My friend Tilt suggested, after I made a similar comment about Tomorrow Never Knows, that I write an entire post on that one song. I may do that for both that song and this one, if enough people think it a good idea. For now, all I shall say is that this track is the crowning glory of the Beatles' career, and despite Pepper being a flabby album it manages to bring together enough of the themes of the album (completely serendipitously – it was recorded second, after When I'm Sixty-Four) that it makes it feel like a cohesive whole. Newspapers, passively watching a spectacle unfold around you, workaday life, recollections of childhood, invitations to an unspecified 'you', the North of England – all of these have been either the topics of, or the inspiration for, multiple songs on the album (even traffic laws turn up multiple times – 'he didn't notice that the lights had changed' and the meter maid…)
In many ways, Pepper could have been cut down to three songs – the title track, Within You, Without You and A Day In The Life – with everything else on the album essentially functioning as a comment on or elaboration of the themes of those three songs. It's very easy to see why the album was so hugely popular when it came out – nothing like this had ever been attempted before. But it's also easy to see why the album's critical stock has fallen even while those before it have become more popular. The framing of a 'live performance' and the constant references to the news show that this is an album that was created in a specific time, as a comment on that time, and ultimately the very fact that it has a greater ambition – to be relevant to 1967 – makes it less relevant to 2010 than its less ambitious predecessors.