The Beatles' White Album 40th Anniversary

The White Album: Side One
The Beatles' White Album 40th Anniversary

1. Back in the U.S.S.R.
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: August 22-23, 1968 at Abbey Road

It’s hard to think of any better way to start The Beatles than with jet engines, social commentary, and a portrayal of the band’s American influence with a hard edge. Had “Back in the U.S.S.R.” been written stateside during this period, it couldn’t have been taken as parody, but Britain had blood-red communists roaming its everyday streets, and this was Paul McCartney’s brilliant political commentary and quite possibly one of the best songs he ever contributed to the Fab Four.

A perfect case of tragedy meets comedy in the popular music realm, “Back in the U.S.S.R” is almost a contradiction of sorts. It was obvious the U.S. had a conflict with the Soviets during this period, and it’s rather interesting that McCartney arranged the song to share Beach Boys surf-guitar kicks and vocal harmonies circa 1965. Let’s also not forget that the title is a play on Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA”, and its hook carries the same punch that Berry’s compositions often did. It seemed like the entire band was having fun in a time of personal turmoil—everyone except for Ringo Starr, who stormed off mid-session after arguing with McCartney over the drum part. McCartney, being the perfectionist he is, laid down a fiery drum performance that was just what the doctor ordered.

John Lennon and George Harrison played two of the better guitar performances, sharing the lead spot and chugging along with fast-driven chord breaks. It’s hard to judge Lennon’s character at this time during the Beatles, considering he wrote some of his most controversial tunes for the band during the “White Album” sessions—but as he seemed largely to show little interest in McCartney’s pop compositions during this period, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was right up his alley. Lennon even found himself playing solid rock ‘n’ roll tunes with the Plastic Ono Band, and whether he would come to admit it or not, this is one of the last truly great Lennon-McCartney partnerships.

There are many people that claim there is no place for satire in rock music, and although McCartney’s image has been somewhat tarnished by the media in recent years, he still remains one of the masters at tackling serious issues in a comedic fashion. As the rest of the Westernized world worried about Nuclear power subsiding in the Soviet Union, here’s McCartney claiming things such as “Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out / They leave the West behind / And Moscow girls make me sing and shout / That Georgia’s always on my my-my-my-my-my-my-my-my mind!” A Beach Boys-style anthem just went from surfing to skiing and furry hats are now all the rage. Nuclear bombs? No way. Nuclear women? You got it, boys. There had to be some Lennon input here subconsciously, because McCartney tuned in one of the best hard rock vocal delivered from below the belt.

“Back in the U.S.S.R.” is not only a political and social commentary, but it’s also a step forward for the Beatles during a period of turmoil in their career. Starr aside, they all put their troubles away and delivered one of the most fierce and joyful performances of their career. Forty years later, it sounds as fresh and fun as it did at the time of release. It may be time to pull this one out again during a time of conflict in the same region, and help people realize again exactly what the Beatles’ made people see during the height of their career: that music truly can change the world.

—John Bohannon

2. Dear Prudence
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: August 28-30, 1968 at Abbey Road

“Dear Prudence” is a sunrise of a song, a description of the perfect day that sets the Beatles experience to a specific place and time. Like much of The Beatles, “Dear Prudence” was born in India and of the Beatles’ 1968 visit to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Lennon’s distinctive guitar finger-picking is widely believed to have been taught to him by Donovan, who was also in India to meditate with the Maharishi. Prudence is Prudence Farrow, sister of Mia and such a fanatical devotee to the Maharishi that she spent much of the retreat locked away in her room. At the tail end of a demo version of “Dear Prudence”, Lennon cheekily explains, “All the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So we sang to her.”

During the recording of The Beatles, a gap began to open between Lennon and McCartney, both personally and in their musical styles. Although most of the Beatles’ catalog is credited to the pair, they didn’t always write that way. Often one would write a piece of a song and the other would help to finish it. By the time they recorded The Beatles, however, the relationships between the Beatles had changed and the collaboration between Lennon and McCartney had eroded.

Lennon was falling in love with Yoko Ono, who suddenly appeared inside the recording booth. As Harrison explains in the Anthology, “there was a lot of ego in the band”. Instead of making decisions within the group, the writer of each song determined how it would sound. Like “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, the drumming on “Dear Prudence” is widely credited not to Starr, but to McCartney.

The record opens with “Back in the U.S.S.R”, a high-concept rave-up that sets the tone for McCartney’s other contributions to the record. “Dear Prudence” follows, and does the same for Lennon. Some of his contributions to the The Beatles are in stark contrast with the optimism of “Dear Prudence”. But all of the songs share a raw intimacy.
“Dear Prudence” exudes a vulnerability that Lennon doesn’t bother to hide behind musical embellishments. He is more direct here than in any other song on The Beatles—including “Julia”, which clearly has a more personal subject. The lyrics are simple and sweet and it’s more than a little ironic that, besides the Beatles, the group most identified with “Dear Prudence” is Siouxsie & the Banshees. The punk band’s 1983 cover version of the song was their biggest hit.

On “Dear Prudence”, Lennon’s request builds from a quiet entreaty to a full-blown petition. In the song’s final minute, as Lennon’s voice breaks on the refrain, he is, for all intents and purposes, Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, holding a boombox under a window. It’s hard to imagine how Prudence could resist coming out to play.

—Rachel Kipp

3. Glass Onion
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: September 11-13 and October 10, 1968 at Abbey Road

In his Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote, “A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They are like strange countries that you have to enter.” By that definition, “Glass Onion” is an epic songwriting achievement. And yet, Lennon, the song’s author, dismissed it as “a throw-away song”. Fans and critics alike argue whether, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “there is any there, there”, but as I explain below, despite Lennon’s protestations, “Glass Onion” holds significance that elevates it above many of the “better” songs in the Beatles oeuvre.

One can begin with the title, about which—no surprise—there isn’t any firm agreement. Lennon stated that a glass onion is an object that, after multiple layers were peeled away, would reveal a void core. Utter transparency through and through. The Emperor without any clothes. This interpretation suited Lennon’s belief that over-zealous fans had taken to over-analyzing every Beatle lyric—the urban legend of McCartney’s death and its resulting hysteria, being a primary exemplar. This was why he said he teased listeners with:

I told you about the walrus and me, man
You know that we’re as close as can be, man.
Well here’s another clue for you all:
The walrus was Paul.

On the other hand, didn’t “glass onions” also refer to caskets with glass covers? Thus, wouldn’t such a title fuel the “Paul Is Dead” fable?

The epitome of “a John song”, “Glass Onion” is labyrinthine, layered, challenging, confounding, ironic, jarring, dreamy. As one of rock’s first “post-modern” compositions, it boasts inchoate intertextuality and rampant self-referentiality; licentiously mixing past and present, it blurs image and reality, juxtaposes surface and depth, and decomposes truth through allusion to other pieces of a pre-existing puzzle (of which it forms a part). The song verily winks at its listeners: challenging them, in the final verse ("Trying to make a dove-tail joint, yeah"), to connect the dots. And how? By employing a glass onion—which also can mean “monocle”, a device that helps us to see more clearly.

The obvious dots are the litany of Beatles songs—eight in all—which are referenced: “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool on the Hill”, and “Fixing a Hole”, overtly; “There’s a Place”—in the lyric “Well here’s another place you can go”—likely; “Within You Without You”—possibly—in the word “flow”; and “She Loves You”—I would aver—in Lennon’s intentional repetition near the end of (the differently inflected) “Yeah, yeah, yeah”.

Although “Glass Onion” is the third cut on the album, it was the first to feature Starr on drums. Thirty-four takes of the drum track were recorded and a second was laid two days later. A tambourine, piano, and eight strings were added in subsequent sessions. The return of Starr is significant because it best captures the degraded spirit underlying these sessions: personnel feeling slighted, roles minimized or usurped, contentious bickering, the principals sometimes recording in separate rooms—in the case of McCartney, working solo.

Legend has it that much of the discord was Lennon’s fault: committing the sacrilege of inviting Ono into the midst. Lennon, himself, suggests that the Walrus line had its origins in the new dynamic:

At that time I was still in my love cloud with Yoko. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just say something nice to Paul, that it’s all right and you did a good job over these few years, holding us together’… The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul…

Only...it wasn’t just that line. A careful reading suggests that the entire song is an ode to McCartney, homage to a deep friendship from a time now passed. Hence the references to a common Liverpool past ("cast iron shore") and the early songs composed together ("She Loves You") at Paul’s home ("There’s a Place"). Once distinct talents perfectly complemented one another, souls were hermetically linked. The joint held fast.

And by twisting McCartney’s own lyrics, Lennon was able to chart the group’s evisceration. McCartney playing wet nurse to the fragmenting family ("Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet—yeah"), band members pleading for reconciliation or accord ("trying to make the dove-tail joint"); but, ultimately being unable to patch the irreparable ("fixing a hole in the ocean"). Metaphoric tears become a torrent precipitated by the iterated peeling of onion skin: layers of years, layers of accumulated scar tissue.

Lennon’s artistic gift lay in how he externalized his internal. The world he reduced to meaningful song was one of attachments forged and broken. Leaving McCartney, cutting out on the Beatles, would require externalization: explanation, justification, apology. In “Glass Onion” we encounter a lover’s confession, a partner’s admission of infidelity. There is morning-after remorse, but also open-eyed realization that a threshold of no return has been crossed. As the final stanza fades, George Martin’s staccato strings declare inertia in decline, with the final pulses mimicking a terminating heartbeat. “Glass Onion” verily pronounces: “Paul, we are dead. I want a divorce”.

As paean to Lennon’s lost love for his Beatles, “Glass Onion” should be regarded not only as one of the more important Beatles songs on the album, but in the band’s entire catalogue. As deep archeology, it stands as a musical cipher, enabling us to decode the human dynamics and political-historical back-story of the formation and impending demise of rock’s greatest band.

—tjm Holden

4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: July 3-5, 8-9, 11, and 15, 1968 at Abbey Road

The Beatles can be regarded as rock’s first truly sprawling double album mess-terpiece, eschewing any singular sound in favor of stream-of-consciousness genre-hopping. That is, of course, what makes it so exciting: the total abandon of thematic unity altogether is the theme. It’s not just unfocused—it’s brilliant. But the line between genre exploration and parody, paying tribute and mocking, is awfully thin—just ask Ween—and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” deserves some of the blame.

Sure, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is a Beach Boys/Chuck Berry knock-off, and “Yer Blues” spoofs British blues, but “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, a McCartney-penned foray into reggae-tinged novelty territory, is the least straight-faced of them all. For one thing, it has the distinct honor of regularly appearing on lists of the worst songs of all time, including Blender‘s “50 Worst Songs Ever”. (The rest of the band despised the track, and vetoed McCartney’s request to release it as a single. Lennon famously referred to it as “Paul’s granny shit”—until he got stoned to the gills and recorded the almost willfully obnoxious honky-tonk piano. McCartney had spent something to the tune of 40 hours trying in vain to record a good take, working with much slower tempos.) It’s also the only Beatles track ever to feature a reggae skank, the rhythmic accent on the off-beat. Hell, how many Beatles fans even recognize that word (skank) in a musical context?

If I’m being indirect, it’s because “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is at once the worst and the most fun track on the album. Of all the Beatles’ songs, no other so openly embraces the corniness of a readymade karaoke tune. What makes it even more hilarious is Starr’s(?) seeming inability to inject into his drumming any of the funk that reggae syncopations demand—but hey, life goes on, bra. I’m reminded of my childhood summer camp, where “Ob-La-Di” was a regular camp-wide sing-along. It was always the hippest counselors who faithfully recited those cute little elements from the recording that don’t appear on a lyric sheet: the creepy laughter, the infectious horn breakdown during the bridge, the badass piano riff at 2:32. Other little accidental sounds are all over the recording, giving it the screwing-around-in-the-studio vibe of the Beach Boys’ Party! album. It’s whimsical, and certainly tons more fun than the Offspring’s insipid tribute, “Why Don’t You Get a Job?”

The title isn’t drug-addled gibberish, by the way. Nigerian singer and congo player Jimmy Scott took credit for the phrase (basic translation: “Life goes on, bra!"), and went so far as to sue McCartney for its use. Scott reportedly dropped charges after McCartney helped him with alimony payments. The song is an ode to starting a family, touching or trite, depending on your mood. Desmond, the song’s protagonist who presents Molly with a “20-carat golden ring”, is a reference to reggae legend Desmond Dekker. As for the name mix-up in the last verse ("Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face/ And in the evening she’s a singer with a band"), McCartney intended to sing Molly’s name, yet left the mistake in for confusion’s sake.

Ultimately, “Ob-La-Di, “Ob-La-Da” is a prelude to the inevitable Lennon-McCartney musical divorce. Lennon hated the song; he was drifting towards a solo career highlighted by “Imagine” and the deeply personal catharsis of Plastic Ono Band, in which there is no room for throwaway reggae tributes. McCartney was drifting towards...pop. It’s still comforting to know that the Beatles didn’t take themselves too seriously, and if that puts “Ob-La-Di” on some Worst Songs Ever poll—and more than a few karaoke machines—then so be it.

—Zach Schonfeld

5. Wild Honey Pie
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: August 20, 1968 at Abbey Road

At first, it sounds like notes selected at random, a near-atonal haywire melody that might come from plucking a rubber band around a lidless cigar box. It’s like a surging swarm of Jew’s harps sounding each of the metronomically alternating notes. Then we settle uneasily into the song’s fumbling staccato rhythm, which could only have been discovered by accident, a plodding stomp with no hint of backbeat that works itself out awkwardly and improbably in seven measures rather than the eight you’d expect. A hobo chorus of ragged falsetto voices sing the phrase “honey pie” as a derelict war cry rather than a term of endearment; when one of them warbles “I love you” at the end of the track’s minute of maundering, it sounds more lecherous than sincere. Then almost before we have a chance to process all that we’ve heard, a florid flamenco guitar figure ushers us into the world of “Bungalow Bill”. So it goes with McCartney’s “Wild Honey Pie”.

As a mid-album-side palate cleanser (especially necessary after the inane “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”—dismissed by Lennon as “granny shit"), “Wild Honey Pie” is peculiarly aggressive, about as far from the syrupy ballads on which he’s made his fortune. On the track, McCartney works as a one-man band, and it’s palpable how much this suits and pleases him at this point in the Beatles’ disintegration. The amount of fun he seems to be having with himself is almost antisocial, and it’s plain that McCartney no longer needs collaboration to stoke his creativity.

“Wild Honey Pie” presents McCartney at virtually his most unfettered; nothing else he would make for the Beatles would be as strange (assuming you don’t count the Magical Mystery Tour film). In Barry Miles’s biography, McCartney remembers the song as “a little experimental piece”:

It was very homemade; it wasn’t a big production at all. I just made up this short piece and I multitracked a harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and built it up sculpturally.

As a kind of deliberately arty aural sculpture, “Wild Honey Pie” functions as the dialectical response to his nostalgic, music-hall ditty “Honey Pie”, illustrating the two McCartneys that were beginning to diverge at this point in his career. One is the Mr. Mellow who is stolidly wedded to traditional forms and continually sought to outdo himself in mawkishness—the evil McCartney that would spew out “The Long and Winding Road” and “My Love” and ultimately “Ebony and Ivory”. The other McCartney, though, is a restless artiste heedlessly chasing his muse into playful self-referentiality and an odd, madcap minimalism. This McCartney would give us the sublime Ram (1971) and the 1990s techno experiments of “the Fireman”.

Unlike Lennon, whose experimentalism manifests in the arbitrary tape-loop cacophony of “Revolution 9”, McCartney seems more interested in testing the limits of hookiness than testing listeners’ patience and freaking them out. The freakiest thing that happens during “Wild Honey Pie” is hearing how the incongruous elements gel in 52 seconds flat to become coherent and memorable, a sui generic minor McCartney miracle. His first solo album would end up being full of these homespun throwaway scraps that defy you to forget them.

—Rob Horning

6. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: October 8, 1968 at Abbey Road

Even on the most spiritual of journeys, whenever there’s a crowd involved, you are guaranteed to have at least one asshole in the mix.

That, in perfectly blunt terms, is the general crux of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”. As legend has it, when the Beatles were on their much-publicized stay with the recently-departed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for a transcendental meditation retreat at his ashram, one of their fellow students was a wealthy American woman by the name of Nancy Cooke de Herrera, whose son, Richard A. Cooke III, made a most controversial visit to the camp to see his mother. Apparently both were big fans of the Beatles, and were said to have had friendly relations with all of them but Lennon, who maintained a cynical and distant rapport with them, because they were rich white Americans at an Indian transcendental meditation camp, and apparently doubted that the intentions of their presence were wholly sincere.

Well, as is interpreted by Nancy Cooke de Herrera in her book about her experiences with the Maharishi, Beyond Gurus, Cooke III, who also went by the name Rik, and his mother joined a group from the camp on a tiger hunting excursion on elephant. However, when one of the tigers charged at the herd of elephants, it was Rik who shot it dead in a kneejerk reaction and got all puffed up over it, going so far as to take a photograph of him standing over his trophy kill to brag over with his frat buddies back in the U.S.

When the party returned from their adventure, Lennon quickly called out Rik on his decision. “Wouldn’t you call that slightly life-destructive?” he quizzed sardonically, mindful of his surroundings at the ashram. To be publicly lambasted by a Beatle, on a spiritual journey no less, surely must have been a low point in the life of Richard A. Cooke III. Meanwhile, Lennon chose to write this silly campfire sing-along in response to the situation, a song that certainly appealed more to children than the adults actually going out to their local Korvette’s and picking up The Beatles back on Thanksgiving week in 1968.

“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”, at 3:05, recounts the story of the tiger hunt in Lennon’s own scathingly English way. “It was written about a guy in Maharishi’s meditation camp who took a short break to shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God,” he told Playboy magazine.

“Bungalow Bill”—also the only Beatles track to feature a female lead vocal, with Ono squeaking out the line, “Not when he looked so fierce”, the sheepish call to Lennon’s snide response, “His mummy butted in”—might not be the most beloved Beatles song. Critic Clark Collis took a swipe at it in a review of the new Oasis album in Entertainment Weekly just recently, calling Dig Out Your Soul “more ‘Bungalow Bill’ than ‘Eleanor Rigby’”. But if you were a little kid born between 1968 and 1975, there’s a pretty sporting chance you know the lyrics to “Bill” better than “Ba Ba Black Sheep”.

—Ron Hart

7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Primary Songwriter: Harrison
Recorded: July 25, August 16, and September 3 and 5-6, 1968 at Abbey Road

My introduction to the Beatles came through my mother who happened to have been born at an ideal time to appreciate every stage of their evolution: she was young enough in 1964 to join the legions of screaming girls across America, singing along to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show yet mature enough to appreciate the group through their more artistic, studio-hermit years. An important aspect about her influence on my experience with their music is the fact that she always cited Harrison as her favorite Beatle. For me, the fact that such a powerful force in my young life felt a certain way about a band whose albums I began to immerse myself in at a very young age augmented my experience with a heightened level of intrigue into all things George. The Harrison compositions became my typical starting point for discovery into any Beatles album.

Choosing a favorite Harrison Beatles song is as utterly trivial as determining the best song on The Beatles. Upon first listen, however, no song in either category struck me with such brilliant immediacy as “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. It is an emotionally, melodically, and structurally complex masterpiece. Although it received limited attention upon release, the song has since gained status a guitar rock staple, as a certifiable major Beatles work, and as perhaps the definitive statement of Harrison’s career.

The supposed inspiration for Harrison’s first composition on the Beatles’ historic double album came about through his studies of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text, which Harrison—as quoted in the 1980 book of his recollections, I Me Mine—described as seemingly “based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else, as opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental”. The legend of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is that Harrison, while visiting his parents’ home, committed to writing an entire song by applying this theory of relativism to randomly chosen words out of a randomly chosen book; those words happened to be “gently weeps”.

Harrison first wrote “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” as an organ-accompanied, acoustic guitar composition. His fellow Beatles were rumored to have approached this initial incarnation with complete indifference. The level of annoyed displeasure with early takes among the band is believed by many to be the only documented occasion in which Harrison’s actions were a primary source of inner Beatle turmoil. After a failed electric reworking, Harrison invited Eric Clapton to assume lead guitar for the recording session which, according to Harrison, “was good because that then made everyone act better...they all took it more seriously”. The session ended up producing the official album version after, as admitted by Harrison, Clapton’s great yet “not Beatley enough” guitar work had to be put “through the ADT to wobble it up a bit”. (Due to legal reasons, Clapton’s guest appearance was uncredited.)

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, compared with other Beatles compositions, is superficially familiar in its verse, bridge, verse, guitar solo, bridge, verse, outro structure. The uniqueness of the composition lies in the melodic and lyrical structures of the verses and bridges. The downbeat, minor-keyed, four-line verses transition into the pleasantly sublime, major-keyed bridges. Wide-ranging, pessimistic observations make up the odd lines of each verse while the even lines are the familiar refrains of “While my guitar gently weeps” and then “Still my guitar gently weeps”. The most distinctive aspect of the composition lyrically is the fact that the words of the bridge are completely changed from its first occurrence to its second while the aforementioned single-line, inner-verse refrains represent the sole lyrical consistency throughout the track.

The actual content of the lyrics of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” can most easily be interpreted as a lament of love lost, not particularly on a personal level, but more in a global sense. The opening line of the song, “I look at you all / See the love there that’s sleeping”, implies a sense of large-scale desensitization. The opening line of the second verse, “I look at the world, and I notice it’s turning”, evokes negative sentiments toward the ostensible indifference shown by some in acknowledging such a loss of compassion. The constant refrain about the perpetual, gentile weeping of his guitar puts Harrison’s real power to change things into an existential perspective. Even as part of the most influential artistic force in the world, he is still simply a musician. His greatest weapon against the ills of the world is his music which, in the grand scheme of things, only amounts to a gentle weep.

—A.J. Henriques

8. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: September 23-25, 1968 at Abbey Road

The Beatles‘ first side ends with an intricate masterpiece that represents a united—and unusually wonderful and weird—effort amidst so much individuality. Reportedly McCartney’s favorite “White Album” song, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is also classic Lennon: a lyric mixture of the psychedelic ("She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand / Like a lizard on a window pain"), the distinctly British ("Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime / A soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust"), the obviously sexual ("When I hold you in my arms / And feel my finger on your trigger"), the personal ("I need a fix”, reflecting Lennon’s drug dependency), and the political ("Happiness is a warm gun” came from a magazine article about the American gun lobby).

But beyond its potent poetry of religion, sexuality, violence, and vision, “Happiness” is one of the Beatles’ most musically sophisticated tunes. It is not built on verses and choruses but rather from four or five distinct sections that build in intensity. Lennon claimed it as a miniature history of rock ‘n’ roll, and that is fair enough. It opens with a delicate verse of guitar and voice only, shifting upward as bass and drums enter. There is a sudden change to 3/4 time for a brief, guttural blues guitar solo that precedes “I need a fix”. Just as suddenly, the triple meter double-times to 6/8 while Lennon starts to sing “Mother Superior jump the gun”, slowing to 3/4 on the second half of the phrase. Which happens six times. But with a measure of 4/4 on the end of the every other repetition. Got it? Needless to say, the familiar doo-woppy “Happiness is a warm gun / Bang-bang, shoot-shoot!” is back in 4/4 again, but Lennon’s spoken interlude ("When I hold you...") is in 3/4 again.

All this intricacy might sound like symphonic prog-rock run amok except that it takes a scant 2:43, with each section as concise as a dot of color in a Seurat painting. And the wonder of the song is precisely this almost shocking brevity and incongruity: no section repeats, and each part seems like a new world, a revelation. While it is clear that “Happiness” glues together several different tunes, there is also flat-out artistry in how these disparate pieces echo off each other. The toggling between duple and triple meter gives the tune balance, even as the intensity of each section ramps ever upward. There is also a balancing of romantic imagery (starting with a girl and a man) and violent imagery, allowing Lennon to be alternately provocative ("Mother Superior” mixed together with “gun") and playful (is it the woman’s trigger or the gun’s trigger he has his finger on?). As always, Lennon is aware of how the commodification of the Beatles can be exploited: the title of the song is a bitter joke about the gun lobby but also a reference to the cuddly catch-phrase from Peanuts of the time, “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”. The joy of this play is that it is also sonic: the beautiful reverb on the opening guitars doesn’t even last a minute, but the vocal falsetto doubling that starts with “I need a fix” is its own kind of candy, which then develops into the mocking harmony of “Bang-bang, shoot-shoot”.

All of which is to say: Wow. Only five years had passed since “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, yet the Beatles were now writing and recording complex poetic suites rather than verse-chorus pop tunes. Radiohead apparently found “Happiness” of inspiration when working on its own multi-part tune, “Paranoid Android”, for OK Computer. But what had not changed for the Beatles was their keen awareness that rock ‘n’ roll—the sublime art of the three-minute symphony—was worth an investment of great wit and passion. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is catchy like a pop song, provocative like protest art, effortlessly complex and yet off-the-cuff funny. Which is to say: it is the apotheosis of “Beatle-esque”.

—Will Layman

P.S. To be continued
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/the-beatles-white-album-40th-anniversary/

È êîãäà ýòà "ïðåëåñòü" âûéäåò?

2Ñòàñ:

>È êîãäà ýòà "ïðåëåñòü" âûéäåò?

Ýòî ïîäáîðêà ñòàòåé î êàæäîì òðýêå "Áåëîãî àëüáîìà" ê åãî 40-ëåòèþ.

ÿ èìåë ââèäó 3-äèñêîâûé êîìïëåêò î êîòîðîì ïèñàë "Mojo"...

2Ñòàñ:

>ÿ èìåë ââèäó 3-äèñêîâûé êîìïëåêò î êîòîðîì ïèñàë
>"Mojo"...

Ïîêà íåò èíôîðìàöèè.

Ïðîäîëæåíèå.

--------------------------

9. Martha My Dear
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: October 4-5, 1968 at Trident Studios

A friend of mine once fell for a girl because when faced with an incomplete yet impressive catalog of Beatles songs in a pub jukebox, she chose this song. He needed no further convincing, beyond her beauty and charm, that she was the one for him: her choice of a deep cut rather than an overplayed hit proved she was unpredictable; her endorsement of something so explicitly Paul spoke to a sweetness typically absent from the alcohol-dictated arc of a barroom playlist; and her weakness for melodic jaunts into falsetto was not a weakness at all, actually, but a badge of honor to wear, proudly, while bounding back to the table in sync with the song’s spritely rhythm.

It’s those sudden falsetto lift-offs that really make “Martha My Dear” so irresistible: “Look what you’ve done!” and “...with each other, silly girl!” That, and McCartney’s blossom-within-a-blossom-within-a-blossom melody, which moves through three distinct sections, each more rhythmically aggressive and infectious than the last. (And we should take a moment to remind everyone that yes, the song’s subject shares a name with McCartney’s Old English sheepdog; since the singer addresses her as “you silly girl”, we can assume the song is an ode to a family pet, because why would a grown man speak that way to a woman? OK? Kinda like how “Got to Get You Into My Life” is about pot.) The first section ("Martha, my dear...") sounds like a combination of a barrelhouse piano vamp and British music hall; the second section ("Hold your head up, you silly girl...") brings in the pumping brass, which attempts to ground McCartney’s increasingly lightheaded melody; and the third section ("Take a good look around you..."), a rock-band arrangement tackles an unexpectedly minor-key twist.

“Martha My Dear” was recorded soon after the band finished “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, and as Ian MacDonald suggested in his book Revolution in the Head, “it’s possible that McCartney, his musical funnybone tickled by his partner’s eccentricities, here set out to create something equally tricky for his own amusement”. It’s not as serpentine a song as “Happiness”, but it does sound blessed with the same kind of budding creativity, as if the songwriter were discovering music for the very first time while in the midst of writing the song. It’s one of the handful of songs on The Beatles that McCartney knocked out on his own: he laid down the instruments and vocals in two days at Trident Studios, even having extra time to work a little on “Honey Pie” while he was at it. It’s pure McCartney all the way, this pretty little autonomous nugget that, like so many of his contributions to The Beatles, served as a prelude to imminent solo albums like McCartney and Ram.

I love the image of McCartney walking into the studio late one afternoon and hammering out this tune, as if it were an afterthought—an aside, a thing of lesser consequence. Of course, “Martha My Dear” is none of these things; it’s yet another precious metal hidden in The Beatles‘ rough. And if someone puts this on the jukebox at your neighborhood bar, then proceed directly to his or her heart.

—Zeth Lundy

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10. I’m So Tired
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: October 8, 1968 at Abbey Road

The best thing about “I’m So Tired” is that it’s a perfect example of Lennon just being Lennon. The song was written in Rishikesh, and expresses Lennon’s growing ambivalence about the Maharishi and the experience in general. Apparently, all the meditation was, of all things, causing Lennon insomnia. A couple years after the trip, he said, “the funny thing about the camp was although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth”. Part of Lennon’s grumpiness here is due to his missing a couple of his usual vices. As a listener, you become privy to the push-pull going on in Lennon’s head. “I wonder, should I get up and fix myself a drink?” he asks, before answering his own question with a harried, “No, no, no!” Later, he admits, “Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette.” But instead of getting down on himself for giving into the vice, he goes after the man who helped popularize tobacco in the first place: “...and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git”. Even in such a befuddled, lethargic state, the acerbic wit is sharp as ever. “I’m So Tired” is often compared to “I’m Only Sleeping” from Revolver. Some of the general sentiment may be the same, but there’s something far more complex, even sinister, going on here.

Lennon thought his material for The Beatles was some of his best. The authenticity in Lennon’s vocal definitely backs up that claim. By the time he sings, exasperated, “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind”, you believe that at that moment, he would, custom-painted Rolls and all. How like Lennon to become so tortured on a soul-searching, meditative retreat. It’s not his fault that in expressing his feelings he may have inspired a hundred latter-day rock stars to bitch about their rock ‘n’ roll lives.

Musically, “I’m So Tired” is fairly straightforward. Though parts of the original demo, including an extra verse, were trimmed, the track was recorded in a day’s work. Lennon’s shifty state of mind transfers perfectly to the music. To whatever extent they were “working solo” at this point, the Beatles remained peerless interpreters of each others’ songs. The soulful, laconic feel of the verse shifts to the dirty, bluesy chorus like a rollercoaster cresting the first big hill. Starr’s drumming lends to the illusion of a tempo change before, as musicologist Alan W. Pollack notes, McCartney’s nonchalant little bass riff ushers the solipsism back in. And catch the agitation behind the bass/organ squawk at 1:54...one in an endless list of the Beatles’ “little touches”. At the time, Lennon’s muttering at the end of the track was factored into the whole “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy. What he’s saying, perhaps, is “Monsieur, monsieur, how about another one?” All this happens in about two minutes. Part of why “I’m So Tired” remains a favorite “White Album” track, and was one of Lennon’s, is those two minutes are wonderfully, quintessentially him.

—John Bergstrom

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11. Blackbird
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: June 11, 1968 at Abbey Road

On an album that came to be known as the “White Album”, “Blackbird” might rightly be subtitled McCartney’s black song. This is because the tune is said to have been inspired by America’s racial troubles in the spring of 1968—lyrics like “take these broken wings and learn to fly” can easily be applied to the African-American struggle at that time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed four years earlier, banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations. There was also the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which restored and protected voting rights. Then in 1968, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passed, which banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Yet despite all this progress, Martin Luther King was assassinated in April of 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots subsequently broke out in more than 110 cities across the United States in the days that followed. These hot spots included many major metropolises, such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. These birds may have been freed, so to speak, but their wings were broken by a gut-wrenching assassination and then trampled on the ground during angry riots.

But it wasn’t just King’s assassination that frustrated many African-Americans. African-Americans may have had their legal rights properly restored, but economically they were still down at the bottom rung. This is why Malcolm X’s aggressive—not passive—resistance found such a huge following. It’s also partially why the Black Panther Party came into vogue. Malcolm X preached “by any means necessary”, because civil disobedience simply didn’t finish the job. Certainly, one didn’t see white America crowding the ghettos in large American cities. Equal rights did not immediately lead to equal economic standing, which forced many winged ones to sing “in the dead of night”.

Against this backdrop of anger and pain, however, “Blackbird” is a beautiful song. If you listen closely to McCartney’s acoustic guitar finger picking on it, you can hear how Bach’s Bourrée in E minor inspired its melody. In fact, McCartney and Harrison tried to learn that Bach piece as kids in order to show off their budding guitar skills in front of of other aspiring musicians. Guitarists will immediately recognize how melody and bass notes are played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings, and how McCartney adapted a segment of Bourrée for the song’s intro. He also applies this musical motif throughout the tune.

While this lyric alludes to the Civil Rights Movement, it can be easily applied to almost any situation where somebody is struggling against the forbiding odds. At one point McCartney sings, “Blackbird fly / Into the light of the dark black night.” Even in the shadow of death, so to speak, there is always a glimmer of light. McCartney takes on the role of an encourager when he sings these words. Circumstances may be bleak, but he believes in this struggling one and wants to see him or her overcome.

“Blackbird” fit with its time, but it also attained a sort of timelessness. You don’t need to know McCartney’s original musical or lyrical inspirations to appreciate it. Furthermore, acts ranging from the Waterboys to Eddie Vedder have covered the song over the years. Clearly, its message has remained relevant, and its melody continues to move listeners. And to that we say fly, blackbird, fly.

—Dan MacIntosh

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12. Piggies
Primary Songwriter: Harrison
Recorded: September 19-20 and October 10, 1968 at Abbey Road

Even though Lennon was known as the political Beatle, Harrison proved for the second time in the Beatles’ catalog that he, too, had political chops with “Piggies”. The song, intoned as a humorous social satire of class dynamics, serves as the perfect follow-up to his scathing review of the British taxation system on Revolver‘s “Taxman”.

The delightful Baroque-influenced tune, featuring harpsichord and a four-piece string quartet, is a wonderful offset to the lyrical content, which on first listen is light enough in itself, but upon second glance shows its deeper meaning. Lyrically, Harrison’s Orwellian piggies are broken down into classes: the working class “little piggies” and the upper class/aristocratic/political “bigger piggies”. As life continues to get harder for the little piggies, the bigger piggies continue profiting and leading ever more extravagant lives:

Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt
And for all those little piggies
Life is getting worse
Always having dirt to play around in.

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
And they always have clean shirts to play around in.

And in their styes with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
And in their eyes there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking…

Despite the difficulty the Beatles were going through during this time period, all four were involved in recording “Piggies”. Starr provided tambourine and McCartney purposefully went with a more plucking-style bass line to imitate the sound of pigs grunting. Lennon did not contribute instrumentally, although he helped with the tape-loop pig gruntings that were used throughout the song and recommended that Harrison change the final line from “Clutching their forks and knives to cut their pork chops” to “Clutching their forks and knives to eat their bacon”. The new play on words gave the bigger piggies an even darker tone; instead of just hurting their own, they cannibalize their brethren.

Harrison’s mother, Louise, also contributed to the lyrics, recommending the most violent of the lines—“What they need’s a damn good whacking”—when Harrison was looking for something that would work with the previous line, “In their eyes there’s something lacking”.

Surprisingly, the version that appears on The Beatles was not the song it in its entirety. Harrison’s final verse was left out of the studio cut and was only re-instituted in his concerts in the 1990s. The song, including the additional verse, can be heard on Harrison’s Live in Japan album:

Yeah, everywhere there’s lots of piggies
Playing piggy pranks
And you can see them on their trotters
Down at the piggy banks
Paying piggy thanks
To thee pig brother.

Although Harrison never intended the song as anything more than humorous commentary, upon the album’s release in November 1968 many people took the lyrics to be an attack on the police thanks to the animal chosen to represent humanity in the song.

Unfortunately the song took on even more of a sinister tone in August 1969 when Charles Manson used it as one of the prophesy songs he “heard” within The Beatles. Manson saw the song, along with a handful of others, as a “call to arms” to his family of followers and in the racial war he had long been predicting. This uprising, which became known to Manson as Helter Skelter (see also “Helter Skelter”, on side three), was, in Manson’s eyes, the time for black people to give white people the “damn good whacking” he thought they were due. As the summer progressed and his vision wasn’t coming to pass, Manson felt he would have to start things off by showing the way—by means of starting the murders on his own.

During the murders of Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and four others that Manson instructed, his minions left references to the song lyrics throughout the murder scenes. At both houses, “pigs” and “death to pigs” was written in blood on the victim’s walls and in the LaBianca murder, Leno LaBianca was stabbed and left with both a fork and knife in his body.

Many consider the Manson murders to be the end, or death knell, of the summer of love. For these events to have been tied—even if just through the mind of a crazed and off-kilter fan—to the Beatles catalog, a band who espoused nothing but love and peace, was in itself a true crime.

—Stacey Allen

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13. Rocky Raccoon
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: August 15, 1968 at Abbey Road

The Beatles is that rare breed of album where eccentricities and curiosities, like an acoustic Western ditty about spurned love and revenge, can fit in simply because they stand out. The inspiration for “Rocky Raccoon” hit McCartney while the Beatles were visiting India in the late ‘60s. An Eastern influence, though, is not anywhere evident. “Rocky Raccoon” is a thoroughly American number, complete with a backwoods setting, shootouts, hoedowns, a copy of the Bible, and dubious health care. It almost plays like a send-up of a Johnny Cash tune about the failed wiles of a likeable underdog.

Its frontier-folk nature even compels McCartney into character. He drops the refinement and light Britishness of his usual vocal in favor of rootsy, more roughhewn inflections. The way he mumbles through “black mining hills of Dakota”, his down-home delivery of “that boy”, and his mispronunciation of “Gideon” ("Gidjin") all insert McCartney, as a sympathetic narrator, into the song’s comic theatrics. His bumbling-bard persona is of a piece with the mood and spirit of “Rocky Raccoon”.

The story itself is a well-worn account of shame and jealousy-sparked revenge, or the attempt at it anyway. Young Rocky Raccoon, a good-hearted if impetuous chap, loses Nancy Magill, “the girl of his fancy”, to another guy named Dan. With a shiner on his face and bad blood in his heart, Rocky plots his vengeance. It would be a showdown at the camp hoedown. But Dan proves a quicker draw and shoots Rocky first, leaving him laid up and in the brief care of a boozy doctor. Down and out, Rocky ends his hoped-for reckoning by defiantly vowing a comeback.

McCartney collaborated with Lennon and Scottish folkster Donovan in fleshing out the concept for “Rocky Raccoon”. The broad outline is fairly standard but it’s in the story’s seeming marginalia, its tossed-off narrative details, that this trio of delightfully whimsical and imaginative minds brings the song to life. Like how the divine seems to maintain a watchful presence in the form of Gideon’s Bible or how Rocky intends to harm Dan by shooting off his legs. Perhaps the funniest scene is when the doctor, “stinking of gin”, arrives to aid Rocky and immediately lies down on a table himself. These are the sort of quirks that aren’t unexpected coming from a late-’60s McCartney composition but they still surprise with their blithe oddity.

As a piece of music, “Rocky Raccoon” is exquisitely textured, though it takes its time in achieving that form. It develops gradually, with McCartney’s acoustic guitar initially at the center, garnished by Starr’s light high-hat crunches and Lennon’s (unusual) go at a thudding six-string bass, which, when emphasized, sounds like a brass section. The smoky grayness of the song’s beginning then gives way to an inventive flow of lively and colorful instrumentation: short spurts of harmonica, George Martin’s slinky, saloon-style piano on the bridges, and warm patches of an accordion-like harmonium. The story of Rocky’s travails is too screwy for just an acoustic folk backdrop. That wouldn’t have done him justice. And this is an album where sonic simplicity isn’t often the preferred method.

All added up, this is a tune full of charm, wit, and oddball pop pleasure. The Beatles were peerless in their capacity for such songwriting. But can you imagine it without the snappy name “Rocky Raccoon”? Would it have been so lasting and memorable under a different title, like “Rocky Sassoon”, which was McCartney’s original idea? He later determined that “Raccoon” was more cowboyish and, thus, a better match. In fact, the pairing of “Rocky” and “Raccoon” perfectly captures the character’s mix of macho bluster and lowly inadequacy. It’s absurdly well-calibrated. Rocky is a lovable buffoon who, from the outset, doesn’t appear likely to prevail and probably won’t learn his lesson after he falters. The name “Rocky Raccoon” renders him an open book. But the details of his story and the baroque sounds that accompany it are far from predictable. That is truly the hallmark of The Beatles as a whole. It careens, it deviates, it undermines, and it positively wows. The Beatles may have been in collapse, but their art was still soaring.

—Barry Lenser

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14. Don’t Pass Me By
Primary Songwriter: Starkey
Recorded: June 5-6, July 12 and 22, 1968 at Abbey Road

Originally called “Ringo’s Tune” and also “This Is Some Friendly”, the ditty that ultimately became “Don’t Pass Me By” was the first solo song written by Starr that the Fab Four ever recorded. Although the album was recorded in 1968, Starr probably wrote the song years earlier in either 1963 or ‘64; indeed, bits of the song are heard on a 1964 BBC radio broadcast in which Starr and McCartney discuss its beginnings in their interview.

Fans of Starr commonly claim that his songwriting talents go underappreciated. But we have little material to judge his talents by, at least in the context of the Beatles. “Don’t Pass Me By” and Abbey Road‘s “Octopus’s Garden” are the only Beatles songs Starr wrote by himself, and therefore the only pieces we have to judge his skill. Fans, digging deep, claim the song’s simplicity is endearing, that the lyrics are telling (the line “You were in a car crash and you lost your hair” can be, with some stretching, a reference to the “Paul Is Dead” urban legend), or that the lively performance solidifies its importance in the scheme of the rest of the album. Critics, of course, use the song merely as further proof of Starr’s lack of talent in comparison to his bandmates’ much more innovative songwriting.

“Don’t Pass Me By” is certainly distinct compared to its fellow White Album tracks, possessing a bluesy, folk-inspired bounce. At 3:50, it is the second-longest track on the first disc. But its simplicity (it follows a very basic blues progression, utilizing only three chords) makes it difficult to claim that it holds any real importance, especially compared to The Beatles‘ more experimental or progressive cuts. However, it could also be said that it is this simplistic form that allows for the freedom found in the track’s brief bits of improvisation, both by fiddler Jack Fallon at the song’s end, and also in Starr’s short, tinkling piano introduction.

The significance of “Don’t Pass Me By” is entirely subjective, and ultimately the decision of the listeners themselves. There are a few fans out there who will argue to the end that, although this song is neither technically impressive nor musically innovative, it is most certainly enjoyable. In the context of the avant-garde loops of “Revolution 9” or the poignancy of “Blackbird”, “Don’t Pass Me By” is a different ballgame if not a completely different sport. But in many ways this is the beauty of the The Beatles, and perhaps “Don’t Pass Me By” should simply be seen as what it is—if not a triumph for Starr himself, then at least a necessary and vital piece of an undeniably triumphant whole.

—Elizabeth Newton

15. Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: October 9-10, 1968 at Abbey Road

“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” is posed lyrically as a question, one of the few Beatles songs that uses this popular rhetorical convention in a title. However, although the lyrics provide no answers, instead just repeating the question over and over again, its musical form does. The song is fundamentally a meditation on simplicity. Not simplicity for the sake of being simple, but rather, as an antithesis to the emotionally and intellectually convoluted ways we overanalyze everything. For McCartney, what we most frequently overanalyze is that which we hold most dear: our intimate and sexual relationships.

Invoking the simplest possible approaches to rock ‘n’ roll songwriting, namely two lines of repeated lyrics and the classic 12-bar, 1-4-5 chord blues progression, the song is less than two minutes long and features no solos or musical bravado, just McCartney’s progressively rowdy vocals. The song’s simplicity is a testament to its message, which challenges, and even demands us, to answer this fundamental question: Why do we complicate things so often? Whether it’s sex, politics, religion, or art, why do we complicate life with our emotional attachments? McCartney’s aggressive singing conveys his mounting frustration with this all-too-human limitation.

Interestingly, the only lyrical line beyond the title is the occasional repetition of “No one will be watching us”, suggesting that one key problem in human sexual relationships is our surrendering to social pressures. Given the proliferation of sexually explicit media in today’s society, and the pressures those assumptions and stereotypes place on men and women, McCartney’s message is as prescient as ever.

McCartney’s inspiration for the song occurred while traveling in India. Noticing two monkeys copulating in a street, he mused over the simplicity of their act when compared to the emotional warfare humans experience while making love or maintaining a relationship. Quick, uninhibited, and emotionally neutral, those horny monkeys inspired something profound in McCartney. Unlike animals, which copulate for reproductive purposes, our complex relationships to sexuality in profound ways shape our personalities. “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” is Paul’s public lamentation about this paradox: Why should something that feels so good cause us so many problems? Of course, in the midst of the ‘60s sexual revolution, such a message gained instant resonance.

The song’s recording also prompted controversy among the increasingly more fractious supergroup. Since McCartney played bass and lead guitar, sang the vocals, and recorded the song without Lennon’s or Harrison’s knowledge, and since only Starr contributed anything else (drums and handclaps), Lennon in particular was angry. According to McCartney, Lennon and Harrison were busy recording two other “White Album” songs, “Glass Onion” and “Piggies”. The song took five takes; take four, a slightly tamer version of the song, is available on The Beatles Anthology 3.

—Chris Justice

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16. I Will
Primary Songwriter: McCartney
Recorded: September 16-17, 1968 at Abbey Road

Side two of the The Beatles has always been my favorite. My love for it has grown enormously since age three when I was first amused by the hog grunts in “Piggies”. The variety of styles on side two has kept me listening, as does the meaning I’ve collected about each song over the years. The stupefying number of directions those nine tracks take are like passports for nine completely different mini-excursions. No two songs are at all alike. It’s a thrilling ride.

Despite the kaleidoscopic nature of the material, there is continuity to how it’s sequenced, with one song picking up right where the last leaves off. Even after years of listening to side two, there are aural reference points that stir excitement about the sequence of the songs. Hearing the sound of birdsong on “Blackbird” signals that the merry harpsichord melody that starts off “Piggies” is only seconds away. Try to isolate any of these songs and see how difficult it is not to anticipate the song that follows it.

The dynamic between the order of songs and the aural space between them is what makes “I Will” such a startlingly beautiful moment after the cymbal crash that closes the raunchy blues bump ‘n’ grind of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”. In a way, the contrast between the unbridled lust and romantic love between these two neighboring cuts make interesting bedfellows. McCartney’s carnal cry gives way to a cool croon. His incessant demand to “do it” becomes an ode to lifelong devotion.

Or does it? “I Will” boasts one of the sweetest melodies McCartney has ever sung but it’s easy to take the lyrics for granted. I’ve always felt that, for what is ostensibly a love song, the words were a bit ambiguous in their sentiment. The third verse, the one that begins “Love you forever and forever”, gives the song its de facto wedding vow connotation, but the first two verses and the closing fourth suggest that McCartney’s woman is more a romantic vision than an actual person, or someone he’s merely glanced at rather than spoken to. “For if I ever saw you, I didn’t catch your name”, he sings in the second verse. It’s his hope that imbues the song with romance and just a tad melancholy. He will wait a “lonely lifetime” until at last he finds this elusive love. Doesn’t necessarily mean happily ever after, does it?

Still, I argue that it’s much more fun to be swept away by the charm of the song rather than get buried under by any despondency that might be interpreted. “I Will” is certainly the coziest sounding song on The Beatles. The unpretentious knock-and-shake percussive sounds, the chunky rise and dip of the bass line, the crystalline guitar strumming, and, of course, McCartney’s creamy vocal performance create 1:46 of musical ambrosia. It also sets-up the quiet hush that envelops Lennon’s “Julia”, which closes side two.

On an album that is, arguably, the most revolutionary in the Beatles’ catalog, “I Will” is a moment of tranquility. Forty years later, it offers an escape to a romantic vista where the sun never sets on the hope that love is everlasting.

—Christian John Wikane

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17. Julia
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: October 13, 1968 at Abbey Road

Clocking in at just under three minutes, “Julia” is the last song on the first disc (or side two of the LP) of The Beatles. It is the only song recorded solely by Lennon on any Beatles record (and the final song to be recorded for The Beatles). Lennon sang and played acoustic guitar, and though attributed to Lennon-McCartney, the song is a solo Lennon composition. One of the last songs recorded on the album, “Julia” was written during the Beatles’ trip to India in 1968. In fact, while on the same trip, Donovan and Lennon spent a great deal of time playing the acoustic guitar together and it was Donovan who taught Lennon the finger-picking style he uses in the song.

An ode to Lennon’s mother, “Julia” is a song of longing and sadness. Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi, having only limited contact with his mother growing up. However, in his teenage years, they reconnected and began to spend more time together. Her sudden death (she was hit by a bus) when he was 17 was a shock, and the loss of his mother would go on to serve as inspiration for songs throughout his life. He has said of the moment when he learned of his mother’s death: “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

While ostensibly about his mother, “Julia” also references Ono in the line “oceanchild calls me”, as Yoko means oceanchild in Japanese. The song also contains a reference to Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet in the opening line, “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you / Julia.” The Gibran line is, “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it so that the other half may reach you.” Lennon’s altering of the line makes it more pleading and in keeping with the rest of the song.

Lennon’s gentle repetition of “Julia” throughout the song evokes a dreamlike, almost ethereal feeling in the way that it often trails off from one lyric into the next, overlapping words. The technique of using double-tracked vocals and fading one as another line begins lends an ephemeral air to the song, further emphasized in imagery that speaks to the temporary, such as “windy smile”, “floating sky”, and “sleeping sand”. Perhaps no line echoes this sentiment better than “When I cannot sing my heart / I can only speak my mind / Julia”, as it speaks to the limits of communicating his thoughts.

His hushed vocal delivery coupled with the tenderness in which he sings the words makes “Julia” one of Lennon’s most intimate songs. Lennon repeats the line “So I sing a song of love / Julia” five different times emphasizing the simple intent of the song. Regardless of the beautiful imagery and oblique references, at its heart “Julia” is Lennon’s love song to his mother and it stands as one of the great songs on The Beatles, as well as one of Lennon’s most heartbreaking and heartfelt performances.

—Jessica Suarez

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