THE BEATLES
|
Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
|
1962–1970 |
Classic pop-rock |
I Am The Walrus (1967) |
Page
contents:
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: March 22, 1963 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) I Saw
Her Standing There; 2) Misery; 3) Anna (Go
To Him); 4) Chains; 5) Boys; 6) Ask Me Why;
7) Please Please Me; 8) Love Me Do; 9) P.S. I Love You; 10) Baby Itʼs
You; 11) Do You Want To Know A Secret; 12) A Taste Of Honey; 13) Thereʼs
A Place; 14) Twist And Shout. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
In short, there
is no need to prove to anyone that Please
Please Me represents the tender infancy of the Beatles. For most bands,
such «tender infancy» is, at best, giggly-cute, at worst, confusing and ugly,
but in both cases, normally, there is no good reason to listen to this music
for a second time other than research purposes. And yet Please Please Me still stands up — despite all the flaws, the
silliness, the rampant naïveness, and ʽAsk Me Whyʼ, which might
just be the worst Beatles original ever composed (and is definitely the worst original Beatles song composed by John
Lennon). It all begins
with "love, love me do / you know I love you". When the Ramones
wrote lyrics like that twelve years later, they were taken as smart, ironic,
streetwise minimalism. When the Beatles wrote them, they were sternly
serious, or, more accurately, they did not give a damn — the words never
mattered at the time, except for the stipulated convention that it had to be
something about «love». As an artistic statement, ʽLove Me Doʼ has even fewer credentials than a Sesame Street composition (the
latter ones have educational value at least). Big question, then: why does it
stick so sorely in the head, much more so than the average Dave Clark Five or
Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas song? Melodically, it has very little going
for it other than the main harmonica part, and the repetitive vocal melody
that partially replicates it. But there is
this little matter of the Beatle-specific hook: the resolution of that melody
during the extended "so plea-ee-ee-eeese..." bit — Iʼd bet my head on it that a hypothetical Billy J.
Kramer would have been able to come up with everything in this melody but that particular resolution, which
so admirably breaks up the monotonousness of the main part of the verse. In
other words, we start out «simple, stupid», then add a tense «longing» effect
with the "please", then bring it all to a natural conclusion with
an accappella moment of half-comic «spookiness». It might seem stupid, but
there is a touch of suspense, maybe even some primitive mystique, in the song
— which makes it stand out among dozens of technically similar compositions
of 1962, and explains its rapid chart success (No. 17 on the UK charts at
the time), achieved, by the way, without any serious marketing / promotional
campaign. There is no
such element of mystique in the follow-up single, ʽPlease Please Meʼ, which, instead, concentrates on overwhelming joy, conveying it with
as much effect as a standard four-piece band in 1963 could be capable of.
Lennonʼs harmonica is
triumphant rather than menacing this time, the joint vocal harmonies sound as
if George Martin was pushing them in a «Beethoven for teens» direction, and,
again, the Beatle-specific hook: the "come on come on..." crescendo
that nobody else could think of delivering at the time. The Dave Clark Five
would later shamelessly steal that technique for ʽAny Way You Want Itʼ — but even if they had enough talent to more or less convincingly
replicate the mood, they still did not come up with the better song. It is
interesting that, for all of the bandʼs Hamburg- and Cavern Club-acquired reputation as rough and tough
onstage performers of genuine rockʼnʼroll, Please
Please Me features only one genuine self-penned «rocker». I have always
thought that, perhaps, had the Beatles started their recording career one or
two years later, when mainstream fears towards «aggressive music» had already
slightly diminished, they may not have had to endure the reputation of
«softies» compared to the Stonesʼ tough guy
image; on the other hand, had they started out later, they would not be so
much in the lead — let alone the fact that there is no use in all these ifs
and buts. In any case —
the one rocker in question is a stupendous rocker. Paulʼs "one, two, three, FOUR!" countdown that
opens the song was specially glued on to the final master tape from another
take — a genius decision, giving the album an energetic blast-off start,
again, sounding like nothing before it. The idea behind the LP was to give
the audiences a slight approximation of a Beatles live show; clearly, this
was incompatible with George Martinʼs perennial quest for sonic perfection, but the few «live» elements
that they did incorporate still gave the record a huge advantage. To me, the
main hero of ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ, however, is
the other George: it is his lead
work, both in between the verse lines and on the solo, that gives the song
its genuine tough edge. The vocals, harmonies, lyrics may all be «teen fluff»
(although the "she was just seventeen" bit was slightly
risqué at the time), but Georgeʼs echo-laden licks, some of which seem to be imitating 1950s guitar
gods such as Scottie Moore, are the true grit of the song. The transition
into the instrumental section is one of the ass-kickingest moments in Beatle
history. As for the
other originals, I have always thought of ʽMiseryʼ as
tremendously underrated — not only does it have a fabulously catchy melody,
but there is something deeply disturbing as well about how the bitter-tragic
lyrics of the song clash with its overall merry mood: how is it possible to
sing lines like "without her I will be in misery" when the singer
is clearly having a hard time preventing himself from toppling over in
spasms of laughter? (The truly
disturbing realization about it is that the song might easily have reflected
Johnʼs genuine
feelings about his affairs). The rest is fluff indeed, ranging from passable
(ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ — Paul in his
songwriting infancy stage) to quite awkward (the already mentioned ʽAsk Me Whyʼ: the most fake song John
ever wrote, trying to convey an atmosphere of care and tenderness of which he
barely knew anything at the time — the whole song is a mess of poorly strung
together clichés that are really grating). ʽThereʼs A Placeʼ is frequently found in comparisons with the Beach
Boysʼ ʽIn My Roomʼ due to both of them exploring the topic of «loneliness» in the
lyrics, but if we dig from there, there is no question that the Brian Wilson
song is the better of the two — its slow, melancholic musical backing fully
matches the word, whereas the Lennon song is upbeat and optimistic (but not
devoid of subtlety: its harmonica blasts are notably sterner and sadder than
the ones on ʽPlease Please
Meʼ). Still, the
vocal harmonies are beyond reproach. Of the six
covers, Arthur Alexanderʼs ʽAnnaʼ is a fantastic
achievement — on the instrumental plane, the band extracts and amplifies its
main melodic hook in the form of a finely shaped, mysteriously resonating
guitar riff; and in the vocal department, John finds a good way to let go of
the self-restraining mannerisms of traditional black R&B and actually
convey a believable tragic atmosphere in the bridge section. Goffin and Kingʼs ʽChainsʼ is given to George, who does a fine job of
transposing his natural slight tongue-tiedness onto the songʼs message of love confusion; and the Shirellesʼ ʽBaby Itʼs Youʼ, like so many
other songs the Beatles did, simply converts the originalʼs excessive «roundedness» into sharper angles. One
might argue that at this particular juncture, John was actually a better
singer than songwriter: his sandpaperish approach to sentimental R&B
gives the material a sharper, more street-wise edge than any other white interpreter’s
at the time, with a unique combination of scream, roar, and nasal twang on
the high notes ("can’t help myself!...") that has an air of instant
believability to it. He would never get better as a singer than he already is
on this album — but he would never get worse, either, all the way up to his
dying day. It is useless
to speculate on whether Please Please
Me already sows the seeds of the grand successes to come. The Beatles
certainly do not come across as enthusiastic revolutionaries when you listen
to Paul telling us how he is coming home again to you love, or even when John
is screaming his head off throughout ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, trying to
beat the Isley Brothers at their own game (I think he did beat them — except, of course, the Isley Brothers probably
did not need to go home and nurse their voices with cough drops after the
recording session). But it also never really seems as if they just went into the studio to record
some songs, knock off an LP and be done with it. All of the little things I
have mentioned show ambition, and lots of it: a strong desire, right from the
start, to be the very best at what they are doing, otherwise there is no
point in doing it in the first place. And there is a clear understanding of
the long-playing record as the proper medium to do it — a realization that it
is a bit humiliating when your fourteen song-long collection consists of two
well-written hit singles surrounded by a sea of useless filler. Which is why Please Please Me, after all these
years, holds together quite fine as an album, unlike 99% of pop-oriented LPs
from 1963 (too bad for the Wilson brothers, who did not start properly
understanding the LPʼs potential
until All Summer Long). It is
slight, occasionally clumsy, lyrically trivial, not devoid of very strange
decisions (such as saddling Ringo with ʽBoysʼ, a tune that
was perfectly fine when the Shirelles did it, but predictably earned him a
gay image with certain audiences), yet it is unmistakably Beatles, and
everything that is unmistakably Beatles deserves an endorsement without any
need for meditation on the subject. And anyone who tries to slight it too much should just try to remember
the names of at least ten other pop LPs from 1963 without calling on the
Internet for help. Might be a chore even for some of those who had already
struck their teens back in the day. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: November 22, 1963 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
4 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) It Wonʼt
Be Long; 2) All Iʼve
Got To Do; 3) All My Loving; 4) Donʼt Bother Me; 5) Little
Child; 6) Till There Was You; 7) Please Mister Postman; 8) Roll Over
Beethoven; 9) Hold Me Tight; 10) You
Really Got A Hold On Me; 11) I Wanna Be Your Man; 12) Devil In Her Heart; 13)
Not A Second Time; 14) Money (Thatʼs
What I Want). |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
Reviews of the album often (almost
always, in fact) start with expressing admiration for the front sleeve. Ooh,
black and white! wow, standing in the shadows! dark! disturbing! what a far
cry from the silly smiling faces on Please
Please Me! progressive and intelligent! look at what Gerry and the
Pacemakers, or Freddie and The Dreamers were putting on their album covers at the time. No comparison whatsoever. Frankly,
I am not all that sure that the album cover (although it does look cool) is
really such a tremendous achievement. What is much more interesting is that With The Beatles manages to sound
fairly «dark» without any actual
help from the blackness of the album sleeve. Well, maybe not «dark» as such,
if by «darkness» we mean Jim Morrison or Black Sabbath — but I have always
felt that there was a very significant line separating With The Beatles from Please
Please Me, perhaps even one of the
most underrated lines in Beatle history (and Beatle history knew plenty of
those lines). It is the line that separates lightweight from heavyweight; and
it is no coincidence that it was only With
The Beatles that the first «serious» musical critics started suspecting
there might be something of use for them in that air. One thing that need not confuse us
are the lyrics. At this point, neither John nor Paul (nor George, who makes
his songwriting debut on here) showed any care for the words; the epitome of
«wordy cleverness» to them was finding a line like "it wonʼt be long ʼtil I belong to you" ("be-long — belong", get it?), and
the rest generally just rearranges all the love song clichés extracted
from wherever they happened to hear them first. (Thatʼs what you get for sticking to crude rockʼnʼroll values and
ignoring The Songbook — at least the Tin Pan Alley people knew their
Merriam-Webster). But it is not likely that, before Bob Dylan got the Fab
Four interested in the magic powers of language, either John or Paul invested
a lot of time and work into the words, or had any high thoughts of those
words. Later on, John would make it a personal hobby to look upon the Beatlesʼ legacy with a critical laser-eye, and demolish the
stupidity of the lyrics in particular (Paulʼs, preferably, but his own were not exempt from self-criticism
either). In 1963, however, none of them were teenagers any more, and they
must have understood how silly it all sounded to the average «grown-up»
person — yet, apparently, they did not give a damn about it. Nor should we. The lyrics merely
followed the conventions of the times, which certainly does not apply to the
music. Take ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, for instance.
On the surface, it is just an upbeat tune about... well, find the quote in
the previous paragraph. But, for some reason, I have never thought of that
song as «happy». The main melody rather shows a clear Shadows influence, and
Shadows mostly wrote «shadowy» music — that British variant of surf-rock with
a spy movie atmosphere. Now there is no spy movie atmosphere in ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, but its meat and bones are tough, and its colors
disturbingly grayish. And then there are the vocals. Any
other vocalist would probably sing the lines "since you left me, Iʼm so alone, now youʼre coming, youʼre coming on
home" with all the proper tenderness and sympathy that they require. Not
John, who never in his life stooped to simulating emotions on his songs. But
instead of just being all out wooden about it, he sings it... probably in the
same way he would be greeting his wife Cynthia after a hard dayʼs night: pretending to care, but in reality not
giving much of a damn. As a result, both ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ and the immediate followup, ʽAll Iʼve Got To Doʼ, have a surprisingly emotionally hollow sound — but
they still work. (A good way to sense this would be to play ʽAll Iʼve Got To Doʼ back-to-back with any of those Yoko-period Lennon
ballads on which he really cared, like ʽJuliaʼ). So genuine sugary sentimentality
is left in the care of Paul, right? Not quite. It certainly rears its head on
the recordʼs only
old-fashioned sappy number, a cover of ʽTill There Was Youʼ from The Music Man, but nowhere else. Even
there, the sentimentality is tempered with class: Paul learned the tune from
Peggy Lee, who already performed it in a poppier, more rhythmic, slightly
Latinized arrangement when compared to the orchestral sludge of the original
— and still the Beatles almost completely reinvented the music, coming up
with a complex melody played on twin nylon-stringed acoustic guitars (and
featuring one of Georgeʼs first
brilliant solos). But a song like ʽAll My Lovingʼ is anything but
sentimental; or, rather, sentimentality is merely one of its side effects
rather than the main attraction. It started out as a country-western tune,
actually (traces of that history can still be found in Georgeʼs Nashville-style solo), but ended up becoming a
fast pop-rocker; and any lesser band would have simply settled for placing
the emphasis on the catchy vocal melody, but what really pushes ʽAll My Lovingʼ over the threshold is the rhythm guitar work from John: the rapidly
strummed triplets that drive the verses are technically unnecessary, but,
being there, they give the illusion that the song is played thrice as fast as
it would be otherwise, and shift the focus away from Paulʼs vocalization, closer to what almost looks like a
bit of subconscious paranoia. Finally, in comes George with his
first original offering, and while ʽDonʼt Bother Meʼ is simply a preliminary stage in his songwriting
maturation, it is decidedly dark,
not to mention how much the title really reflects Georgeʼs persona: "please go away, leave me alone, donʼt bother me", I believe, should have eventually
been etched on his tombstone. A big hooray to whoever had the idea to
double-track the vocals: the trick magically transformed the stuttering,
insecure delivery on ʽChainsʼ and ʽDo You Want To
Know A Secretʼ into a thick,
threatening rumble-grumble. Careful: one step further in that direction, and
no more teen pussy for George! (Or, rather, he would have to start borrowing
from the special Mick Jagger/Keith Richards brand). Part of why With The Beatles has this darker aura around it lies in it being
almost totally dominated by John, which was not the case on Please Please Me: he is the main
composer and/or «spiritual presence» on more than half of the songs, whereas
Paul bears primary responsibility for only three of the tracks — the third
one, still unmentioned, is ʽHold Me Tightʼ which I have always perceived as one of his weakest
ever tunes, if only because the vocal melody resolution (the "itʼs you — you, you,
you-ooo-ooo" bit) comes across as excessively silly. John, on the other hand, further
extends his reputation by throwing in three excellent interpretations of
Motown material, turning the Marvelettesʼ cutesy-flimsy ʽPlease Mister
Postmanʼ into a
rip-roaring personal tragedy, the Miraclesʼ soulful ʽYou Really Got
A Hold On Meʼ into the same
tongue-in-cheek, slightly sarcastic stab as ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, and delivering Barrett Strongʼs ʽMoneyʼ with enough evil glee to make us all believe that
that is what he wants indeed — not that hard to do once he has already
established his lack of a proper tender heart on the previous tracks. Real
nasty guy, Mr. Lennon, without any attempts to mask it. From a sheerly musical point of
view, it would take too much time to list all the new tricks that the band
introduces here (besides, it has all been written about a million times
already), so I will just mention one obvious thing — the complexity and
creativity of vocal harmonies on With
The Beatles completely dwarfs Please
Please Me. That this is going to be a seriously voice-oriented record is
obvious from the very start: in the place of the energetic, but not
particularly surprising "one two three four" of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ we have the multi-flanked assault of "it wonʼt be long yeah – YEAH – yeah – YEAH" which, to the best of my knowledge,
comes from nowhere at all. There is no «beauty» as such in these harmonies that get ever more trickier as the album
progresses (no comparison with The Beach Boys, who had a strictly
Heaven-oriented approach), but there is a wonderful dynamics, warranting your
undivided attention. In effect, With The Beatles might be said to introduce the unspoken motto of
«leave no spot unfilled». Not only is there supposed to be no filler, the
idea is that there should be no «filler within non-filler», that is, the
songs are not supposed to have any wasted moments. Gaps between verse lines?
Fill them in with counterpoint backing vocals. Instrumental passages? Make
them either reproduce the verse melody or construct an economic solo that
makes perfect sense and is easily memorable, rather than merely respects the
convention that there be an obligatory instrumental passage. And so on. Admittedly, it does not always
work. The curse of pop repetitiveness strikes hard on the overlong chorus to ʽHold Me Tightʼ, and even harder on ʽI Wanna Be Your
Manʼ, a song that
John and Paul originally wrote for the Rolling Stones, and, honestly, I think
they should have left it at that: the Stones arranged and performed it as an
eerie sexual menace, with a supertight, take-no-prisoners attitude, next to
which the Beatlesʼ comparatively
«relaxed» performance and, especially, Ringoʼs near-comical vocals (as opposed to Jaggerʼs evil predator gloating) lose hands down. (It did
give Ringo a more assured and natural live solo spot than ʽBoysʼ, though).
Personally, I have never been a big fan of Johnʼs ʽLittle Childʼ, either, a somewhat sub-par R&B composition,
only lifted out of mediocrity by an over-pumped tour-de-force on harmonica,
which John must have been trying to literally «blow to bits» during the
session — even Sonny Boy Williamson II could have appreciated that. But none of this really matters,
because the major goal of With The
Beatles was to stabilize the bandʼs position as accomplished artists, and that goal is clearly
fulfilled. In addition, the record just might feature the best ever balance
in Beatle history between covers and originals: the covers, although ranging
from Motown to Chuck Berry to musicals, are all strong, inventively rearranged,
and sit fairly well next to the originals. (On Beatles For Sale, the band would be falling back on covers for
lack of free time to come up with more originals rather than out of free
will, and that had its negative effect on the final results). With The Beatles often gets a little
bit overlooked next to the great big breakthrough of A Hard Dayʼs
Night and its all-original cast, but in the story of the Beatlesʼ evolution it may actually have played an even more
important role. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: July 10, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
5 |
5 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) A Hard Dayʼs
Night; 2) I Should Have Known Better; 3) If I Fell; 4) Iʼm
Happy Just To Dance With You; 5) And I Love Her; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Canʼt
Buy Me Love; 8) Any Time At All; 9) Iʼll Cry Instead; 10) Things We Said Today; 11) When I Get Home; 12) You
Canʼt
Do That; 13) Iʼll
Be Back. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
It is true that, in the UK at
least, A Hard Dayʼs Night sort of turned the whole idea of a movie soundtrack
on its head. In the US, which the Beatles had only just finished conquering
in early ʼ64 with the
success of ʽI Want To Hold
Your Handʼ, it was
released as a proper soundtrack — seven songs on
Side A and a bunch of movie-related instrumental versions of Side B
(including, among others, a very stylish Duane Eddy-style reworking of ʽThis Boyʼ as ʽRingoʼs Themeʼ — this is the track played in the movie when Ringo
takes his solitary stroll upon «leaving» the band). But at home, the second
side was completely unrelated to the first: six more songs, all of them
originals, that had nothing to do with the movie. Yet formally the album
remained a «soundtrack», perhaps intentionally and subtly provoking the
casual fan into thinking that, from now on, every recording even a collection
of toothpaste commercials with the Beatlesʼ name on it might still be worth buying for some great pop music. As for artistic growth, the true
strength of A Hard Dayʼs Night lies in the small details rather than in any
conceptual framing. At this point, experimentation was not yet an integral
part of the bandʼs career: as
much as they did try out new ideas and approaches, it did not seem as if
anybody was too obsessed about «pushing the limits» at the time. John and
Paul were bursting with melodies, not innovative concepts, and the only
global thing that A Hard Dayʼs Night proved to us was that Lennon and McCartney no
longer really needed all those covers from other people — in other words,
their self-confidence as songwriters had reached peak levels. For one thing, up until that
moment, the Beatles had a hard time coming up with original gritty rockers:
other than ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ and, to a
lesser extent, ʽShe Loves Youʼ (really more of a «loud pop song» than a genuine
«rocker»), they preferred to rock out on their cover versions (ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, ʽRoll Over
Beethovenʼ, ʽMoneyʼ etc.). Now,
with ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ they showed the world that they could just as easily craft a fast,
kick-ass pop-rocker along with the best of them; and on the other end of the
spectrum — with ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ, that they could
leisurely rock out in a mean and nasty manner, holding their own on the same
field with contemporary R&B heroes and blues-rockers (I suspect that ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ was John intentionally pulling a Mick, or at least
intentionally trying to be mean and lean in order to scrub away some of that
good-boy reputation and finally start playing on the ultra-cool side of the
scruffy rhythm-and-blues people — it did not really help, but at least he got
it out in the open). At the opposite end of the pop
scale, ʽAnd I Love Herʼ establishes Paul as the epitome of an independent,
fully self-confident lyrical balladeer for his generation — placed at
approximately the same strategic juncture on the LP as ʽTill There Was Youʼ was on the previous album, and showing that the band no longer
requires the services of Meredith Willson to feed its fans with wonderful
roses and sweet, fragrant meadows. Granted, we have not yet entered the Age
of Seriousness, and Paul still cannot write a decent non-clichéd lyric
to save his life, but here, the clichés work as a sort of minimalistic
device: there is a solid charm in "I give her all my love / Thatʼs all I do / And if you saw my love / Youʼd love her too" which sits perfectly at home
with the equally minimalistic four-note acoustic «Spanish» riff driving the
song. And to conclude with a bit of self-confident teasing, at the end of the
song that minimalistic riff is forcefully rammed home with four more
definitive bars («yes, this song is simple and naive, but you will never
forget this coda anyway»). That said, at this time John still
represents the dominant presence in the band. To be sure, most songs were
still written collectively, yet Paulʼs stamp is strongly felt only on ʽAnd I Love Herʼ, ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ, and ʽThings We Said
Todayʼ — an almost pitiable
three out of thirteen! (This might actually explain some of the extra-ordinary
old school fan worship towards the album, although now that in the era of
«poptimism» Paul has largely replaced John in terms of significance in the
public eye, the explanation no longer holds water). And by this time, Johnʼs songwriting had reached a level of perfection
from which it would never fall back again (except for those short periods
when he would be derailed by avantgarde temptations or politics). Of course, not all of his songs
here are equally deserving. On Side B, the rather unfortunate ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ frequently gets the flack for being cruder and less coherent in its
melody than the rest (although the chief culprit is usually the lyrics:
word-wise, it is like the little imbecile brother of ʽA Hard Dayʼs Nightʼ — in my case,
for some reason, the line "Iʼm gonna love
you till the cows come home" and especially
its almost solemn, triumphant vocal delivery have always been a particular
irritant). To throw in another nitpick, ʽIʼll Cry Insteadʼ suffers notably from the lack of a guitar solo: it
is quite a respectable little pseudo-rockabilly number as such, but way too
repetitive as a result. Most importantly, these two tunes just do not look particularly
imposing against the background of everything else. But although John is
overrepresented on the album and Paul is underrepresented, now that I think
of it, the starkest contrast on the record is between the best songs of each
one of them — and that contrast, funny enough, is just the opposite of the
publicʼs general
opinion on their artistic and personal natures, since it is John who is
primarily responsible for the brightest song on the album and Paul who is
behind the creation of the darkest one. Coincidence, or one of those
«stereotypes suck» kind of moments?.. The brightest song is, of course, ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ. Its glorified anthemic nature feels utterly
artificial against John’s personality as we know it (even as we see it in the
movie in which he sings it), and yet it is probably the most successful
attempt they ever made at capturing the mood of «first love feeling», swaying
innocent teenagers all over the world. Three ingredients combine to make it
into this kind of mind-blower: Johnʼs massive harmonica runs, triumphantly overwhelming all the other
instruments for miles around; Georgeʼs brilliantly minimalistic solo which, once again, makes the right
choice in mimicking Johnʼs already
perfect vocal melody rather than trying to invent something different; and
the singing, of course — all the prolonged notes that bookmark the verses
from both ends, all the "whoah-whoahs", all the sexy
"oh-oh"s and dips into falsetto in the bridge section, so many
individual snares within so short a track, and not a single ounce of croony sentimentality
in sight. Anybody who is incapable of reflecting and radiating pure joy at
the sound of this song is probably in very deep psychological trouble. The darkest song is, of course, ʽThings We Said Todayʼ. The lyrics are actually stronger here than on ʽAnd I Love Youʼ, but whether they really fit the doom and gloom of the tune is
questionable. There is a little bit of irony in the words, but, overall, the
theme of separation is much better indicated by the music: although the
tempo is relatively fast and the rhythm is quite toe-tap-provoking, the minor
mode of the song provokes an entirely different reaction. And as the whole
thing eventually fades away on the same melody that opened it, it becomes the first in a relatively short line
of «wholesale tragic» Beatle songs. Actually, I would say that in
general, there is a certain drift in A
Hard Dayʼs
Night from Side A to Side B: the movie-related songs are, perhaps
predictably, lighter, brighter, and fluffier, whereas as we get to the
second side, the mood becomes darker and denser. John allows himself to be a
nasty jealous guy on ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ, Paul goes all
melancholic on ʽThings You Said
Todayʼ, and even the
opening drum crack on ʽAnytime At Allʼ would probably seem a bit out of place, had they
wanted to put that song in the movie as well. Then it all ends with ʽIʼll Be Backʼ, a song that vies with ʽThingsʼ for the title
of «saddest» — only barely losing out
because the vocals do not quite manage to outshine the ominous tingle of
"you say you will love me...". Itʼs just these little things, really, that elevate A Hard Dayʼs Night above the general «good pop album» status. It may
be all about trivial sentiments dressed in simple musical forms, but never in
simple musical clichés. The slamming chord that opens the title track;
the falsetto peaks on ʽI Should Have
Known Betterʼ; the deletion
of the verse/chorus opposition on ʽIf I Fellʼ; and so on and on and on, from the bright lights of
Side A to the relative darkness of Side B. There is nothing genuinely
«revolutionary» about the album, because the songwriting and the artistic
personae of John and Paul had already become fully formed on With The Beatles. There is simply a
sense of a sort of completeness: it is the ultimate «light-pop» experience of
its epoch, and an experience that could not even theoretically be reproduced
once pop-rock had gotten out of its infancy stage. It is, at the same time,
utterly naïve / formulaic and
hunting for genius musical decisions. Genius musical decisions would, of
course, be quite plentiful in years to come, but the virginity would be lost
forever. Look at all the «twee-pop» bands of today — many of them are quite
fine, but nobody in their right mind strives to close up that hymen, understanding
well enough that it is impossible. As of the 2010s, naïveness and
innocence in attitude is reserved for the likes of Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran
— mainstream puppets that are almost always the laughing stock of «advanced»
music listeners. The miracle of A Hard
Dayʼs Night is in that,
even today, «advanced» music listeners may easily listen to it without
laughing it off, and cherish it as one of the greatest pure pop albums ever
made. P.S. A few words about the movie
are probably in order as well. Time has been a little less kind to the movie
than the accompanying album, I think. In 1964, it was seen as an even more
colossal breakthrough: Richard Lester showed the world that a «pop artist
movie» could actually be seen as an individual work of art, not just a dumb vehicle
for the current teen idol to show off his charisma. That alone was a
staggering discovery, rendering insignificant the fact that most of the
Beatles could barely act (fortunately, Lester had the good sense not to ask
them to act, so most of the time they were just being themselves — good news
for John, worse for the rest of them), or that most of the jokes, puns, and
gags, now that you look at them with a fresh eye, arenʼt really all that
funny. (One exception is the cut-in scene between George and the advertising
executive — some truly wicked dialog out there, as relevant for us today as
it was fifty years ago, if not more so). Nevertheless, even if the movie is
not as hot on its own as it is sometimes proclaimed to be, it is still one of
the most fascinating — and, in a way, «authentic» — documents of its era. For
best effect, watch it on a double bill with Viva Las Vegas and savor the difference. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Dec. 4, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
5 |
2 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks:
1) No Reply; 2) Iʼm A Loser; 3) Babyʼs In Black; 4) Rock
And Roll Music; 5) Iʼll Follow The Sun; 6) Mr.
Moonlight; 7) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 8) Eight Days A Week; 9)
Words Of Love; 10) Honey Donʼt; 11) Every Little Thing; 12) I Donʼt
Want To Spoil The Party; 13) What Youʼre Doing; 14)
Everybodyʼs
Trying To Be My Baby. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
Critical tradition may be square
and boring for us iconoclasts, but, admittedly, it does not arise out of
nothing at all (other than coordinated whimsy of shady individuals, as
certain conspiracy theories would have us believe). It is certainly well
documented that the boys were getting tired, particularly of having too many
other people make the decisions for them, and it does seem to be true that, with
their constant international touring (recording sessions took place in
between the band’s major US and UK tours in the fall of ’64), they simply did
not have the time to come up with enough original material to fill a complete
LP. It is unquestionably true that, on the whole, the sound of Beatles For Sale is less happy than
that of Hard Dayʼs Night — the album does, after all, begin with three
«downers» in a row, and John is no longer contributing even a single teenage
ode to joy à la ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ. Speaking of the covers, after decades
of listening I still stand by the opinion that ʽMr. Moonlightʼ is one of the
unluckiest choices in covers that the band ever made. The Dr. Feelgood version,
which they copied with unusually little imagination, had it registered as a
soul ballad with an almost crooning atmosphere, barely compatible with Johnʼs usual singing voice; where his frenzied and
desperate screaming worked so well on something like ʽAnnaʼ, since the song
had a tragic heart from the very beginning, it feels rather wasted on the
bridge sections of this particular tune. The only clever touch was to
replace the original rudimentary guitar solo with an eerie Hammond organ
passage, which gives the recording a proto-psychedelic vibe; but certainly no
Beatles song in which the instrumental, rather than vocal, part is the best part
of the song could really count as successful. However, apart from that minor
misstep, Beatles For Sale is
anything but a «step backwards» in
the ongoing story of the Beatlesʼ artistic
development. Any detailed song-by-song analysis, such as performed by Alan
Pollack, for instance, would immediately reveal just how many new
itty-bitty-beatly «trifles» make their first appearance here: whenever the
guys were locked in the studio with George the Fifth at the helm, be they
exhausted or well-rested, they were never content, like so many of their
peers, to simply repeat the same old formula. «Beatle-quality» had to mean
«creative», even if, for the time being, this meant being «creative» on an
old piece of Carl Perkins boogie. So, just a few things off the top
of my head. Buddy Holly wrote ʽWords Of Loveʼ in 1957, and he must have been so proud to have
come up with that melody that he did not bother properly polishing it with all
the studio care it required (admittedly, in 1957 the studio itself may not
have been ready for this, both from the technological and the sociological
points of view). Play the original and the cover back to back, and the first
thing you notice is how much juicier the main guitar line is sounding. Where Buddy
is satisfied with just occasionally letting out that high-pitched piercing
tone, George uses it on every note, getting a warm, jangly effect — tender
and cordial, yet still without a trace of cheap sentimentality. With John out
there behind him, partially doubling his work on a second, barely audible
guitar, the effect is otherworldly, and even if the solo break, faithfully
following Hollyʼs original, is
no more than two different phrases played over and over again, I would not
mind an infinite loop. Yes, Buddy wrote the song, but the Beatles completed
it, bringing the song to such perfection that I could not imagine anybody
ever doing an even better job on it. (Here’s Jeff Lynne’s tribute
version for you, for comparison — big-ass whooping drums with Jeff, as
always, and guitars which honestly sound like sanitized compressed trash next
to George and John’s succulent tones). Laying on echo effects was one of
the bandʼs favorite
tricks ever since With The Beatles
at least, but they took it one step further when they applied them to ʽRock And Roll Musicʼ and ʽEverybodyʼs Trying To Be My Babyʼ, giving those old rockʼnʼroll chestnuts a proto-arena-rock feel instead of
the more subdued, chamber-like feel of the originals. As a result, the effect
of ʽRock And Roll
Musicʼ has completely
shifted: Chuck did this song just like he did all the rest — with his
friendly (and just a tad creepy) smile, inviting all the young ladies and
gentlemen out there to try out this brand new hot dance like they would try
out a new brand of ice cream. This
rendition notably demands that you yell your head off, instead of dancing
your legs off: because of the echo effects, Johnʼs all-out-there screamfest, and Paulʼs somber bass, it is far more aggressive and
anthemic than Chuck ever intended it to be. Ditto with Carl Perkins, when
they start laying that thick reverb on Harrisonʼs vocals (on the other hand, this approach did not seem to work so
well with ʽHoney Donʼtʼ, so they just
ended up giving it to Ringo, driving up the comedy effect instead); and note
also how all of George Harrison’s solos go at least one octave higher than
Carl’s in the original version, raising the bar on tension and recklessness. Now, about the originals. First,
we are all taught by biographers that it is here, and nowhere else, where
John started to fall under the Dylan spell and take a healthier attitude
towards the lyrics — hence, ʽIʼm A Loserʼ, a somewhat
tentative, but determined, first attempt to climb out of the mire of teen-pop
clichés. The famous "although I laugh and I act like a clown /
beneath this mask I am fearing a frown" would hardly count as a significant
lyrical breakthrough today, but for the Beatles in 1964, it was a milestone.
It is debatable if we can really point to ʽIʼm A Loserʼ as the true beginning of Johnʼs «no bullshit allowed» phase, where everything had
to be either strictly tongue-in-cheek or strictly heart-on-the-sleeve, but,
in any case, there is increased «character complexity» here, and that be
good: deep psychologism is not gained overnight, after all. Also, behind all
that lyrical debate what often gets lost is that melodically, ‘I’m A Loser’
is a big step on the road toward folk-rock and country-rock as their own
genres: those little licks George throws in between each of John’s lines
predict both the Byrds and the
Beatles’ own subsequent mastery of the style on Rubber Soul. (‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’ is another good
example of the same style, though the song itself is less often remembered
than ‘I’m A Loser’). Second, McCartney is quickly
learning how to put genius and corn in the same package, coming up with his
first genuinely great softie. Curiously, ʽIʼll Follow The
Sunʼ is usually
said to have been written around 1960, which might explain the man dragging
it out of the storeroom for lack of time to write something new; but maybe it
is a good thing that it was given four years of fermentation. Now it sounds a
bit Searchers-style, what with the folksy melody and the harmonic layering
and all, but more homely and sincere, due to the production and the clever
alternation between group singing and Paulʼs solo lines. Just a year and a half separate this from the
thematically similar ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ, but that song screamed NAÏVE all over the place, and this one spells WISENED — big reason why Paul still performs ʽIʼll Follow The
Sunʼ in concert, on
occasion, but hardly ever the other one (not that anyone would mind). Third, shortly after discovering
feedback on the single ʽI Feel Fineʼ, they also discover the potential of the fade-in — on ʽEight Days A
Weekʼ. Much of the
bandʼs
experimentation was done randomly, «just for fun» etc., but one big
difference of the Beatlesʼ approach to
experimentation is that they rarely kept
their experimental results if they werenʼt sure that they had come out somewhat meaningful and were appropriate
for the song in question. So, before we go «a fade-in on ʽEight Days A Weekʼ? big deal! who the heck cares?», let us listen to the fade-in and,
perhaps, understand that it works here as the teen-pop equivalent of a
crescendo, which the band had no special means of producing at that time
(they would need an orchestra at least). ʽEight Days A Weekʼ is another one
of those ode-to-joy songs, cruder and simpler than ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, and never one of my favorites in that genre (for
one thing, too repetitive — a solo break couldnʼt have hurt, and the "hold me, love me, hold me, love me"
refrain also seems too roughly hewn), but the fade-in suits it perfectly —
it is really the opening ten seconds of the song, from the first faraway
notes to the breakout of "ooh I need your love babe..." that clinch
it for me. Fourth, the Beatles discover the
value of... silence. While the more famous songs of Side B have always been ʽEight Days A Weekʼ and ʽEvery Little
Thingʼ, I have always
held a soft spot for ʽWhat Youʼre Doingʼ, because of
the important role with which they entrusted Ringo — hold the melody for the first few bars on his little old drummerʼs own, before introducing the looped electric riff
(very similar in texture, by the way, to the one that would soon make the
Byrds famous with ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ). Then, once
the song is done, they repeat the same trick once again before fading out —
as if saying, «hey, it was quite cool in the beginning, surely you want us to
do it one more time? heavier on the bass this time, right?»... and it works. Fifth, ‘No Reply’. You know what
is probably the single most gripping thing about ‘No Reply’? The odd beat.
The song is formally in 4/4, but only the bridge, actually, is in standard 4/4; on the main part of the
song, Ringo plays something trickier, shifting the location of the strong
beat from bar to bar, which is probably why Chris Hillman of the Byrds
described the song as «funky». That might have been the reason the Beatles
never played the song live — the tricky pattern might have been too much for
Ringo to keep up properly during actual show time. Listen to the early demo
bits on Anthology 1 and see how
much less interesting the song is at the beginning of its life journey;
listen to the completed version and hear just how much the stuttering
confusion of its rhythm agrees with the perturbed state of mind of its
protagonist. Had the song been written by the likes of, say, the Dave Clark
Five, they would never have taken the time to embellish it in this particular
manner, and it would have forever remained just a normal, average,
run-of-the-mill pop song from 1964. In the end, itʼs just all those little things that make Beatles For Sale as essential a
Beatles album in your catalog as everything that surrounds it. It takes its
cue from the second half of Hard Dayʼs Night, not the first one, and overcomes it in terms of
diversity, jangliness, and, in a way, «darkness». Artistically, it is still
dominated by John, which is a good thing, because Paul as dominant
personality would only be acceptable once the band had fully embraced its
wild-experimental-frenzy phase (otherwise, they might have drowned in excess
sentimentality); but overall, it is still very much a group effort, and,
ultimately, another success, if not necessarily another «triumph». Skipping
the album in your exploration of the Beatlesʼ legacy is possible, but only if you are really seriously pressed for time. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Aug. 6, 1965 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
5 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks:
1) Help!; 2) The
Night Before; 3) You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away; 4) I Need You; 5) Another
Girl; 6) You’re Going To Lose That Girl; 7) Ticket To Ride; 8) Act Naturally;
9) It’s Only Love; 10) You Like Me Too Much; 11) Tell Me What You See; 12) I’ve
Just Seen A Face; 13) Yesterday; 14) Dizzy Miss Lizzy. |
||||||||
|
Although the overall critical
reputation of Help! traditionally
holds it in more esteem than Beatles
For Sale — no doubt, due to the presence of such titanic breakthroughs as
the title track and ‘Yesterday’ — I do believe that if we place it in its
proper context, it may safely be concluded that it is here, really, that the band allowed themselves a bit of a
creative sag (at least, in some respects). In fact, relatively little was
heard of The Beatles throughout the first half of 1965, as they’d spent a
large chunk of that period «undercover», shooting for their second movie in
various locations around the world and taking a rather extended break from
touring; their only new record releases from January to June were the
«teaser» singles — ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘Help!’ itself — which certainly
whetted public appetite but could hardly satisfy the hunger for another
Beatles LP. Meanwhile, this (somewhat illusive) «procrastination» was giving
other artists plenty of time to catch up. Thus, the Stones came up with ‘The
Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, finally proving their worth as original
songwriters and creators of a whole new type of rock’n’roll sound; the Kinks
pumped out single after single in a continuous journey of putting the
«British» back into the British Invasion; The Beach Boys Today! tremendously raised the stakes in the
pop-rock business on the other side of the Atlantic; The Byrds were pressing
from behind the lines with their ability to fuse folk and rock into a single
whole; and, of course, Bob Dylan himself was going electric. Things were
really happening — and this time around, the Fab Four would find themselves
surrounded with mighty impressive competitors, both on the UK and the US
scenes. Suddenly, the idea of «progress» — the understanding that the popular
music field was the perfect space for honing one’s creativity and using it to
transform the world — was up in the air in a way it hadn’t been since at
least the Jazz Revolution; and having helped, to a far greater extent that
they may have realized themselves, to open those floodgates, The Beatles were
now founding themselves challenged to defend their royalty status against the
rising tide. |
||||||||
|
In all fairness, Help! — the movie — was hardly a great
defensive move in this situation. Where Richard Lesterʼs first experience with the boys bordered on the
biographical and, at least in some places, read like a smart jab on the relation
crisis between the older and younger generations, Help!, with its absurdist and lightly parodic plot, was clearly
just a comic excuse for a bunch of Beatle-acted gags and a handful of
Beatle-mimed songs. For sure, quality-wise it was still miles ahead of the
average contemporary Elvis movie, but only because the gags were seriously funnier
and the songs, written by the Beatles themselves rather than commissioned
from a bunch of disinterested (and probably underpaid) court songwriters,
were incomparable. In retrospect, this helps a lot: amusingly, every time I
rewatch it, Hard Dayʼs Night seems to shrink a little bit in stature, while Help!, on the other hand, seems to
grow — not because it is the better movie of the two, but simply because A Hard Day’s Night, with its
sociological pretense, has far more potential to be overrated from the start,
while Help!, with its
«look-at-me-I’m-so-unabashedly-shallow» lack of ambition, may be too much of
an initial disappointment for the viewer to notice the finer qualities of its
humor. ("He’s out to rule the
world!... if he can get a government grant.") But even if time helps correct a
bit of balance, there is still hardly any doubt that of the two «proper»
Beatle movies, A Hard Day’s Night
is bound to forever hold the status of critical darling — and it doesn’t help
matters, either, that PC pundits these days would be more than happy to
bounce upon Help!’s dated racial
stereotypes ("look what you have
done with your filthy Eastern ways!") and casting choices (e.g. Jewish
actress Eleanor Bron playing an Indian woman). More importantly, The Beatles
themselves simply have much less agency in their second movie: for one of the
very few times in their entire career, they look here as if they’re playing
second fiddle to the system. (In fact, the movie actually works better if you
decide to view it as a subtle metaphor
of the system itself — the fanatical Indian cult striving to get Ringo
sacrificed to their gods should be seen as the record industry trying to
subjugate the band’s independence and bend them to their will... and, of
course, you can never hide from the sharks of capitalism, who’ll get you both
in the Alps and in the Bahamas). I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn that quite a few people may have temporarily
lost faith in the Fab Four upon returning from the movie theater on a late
summer night in 1965, feeling that a certain barrier that separated them from
the laughable movie career of Elvis had just been pushed to the side. The good news was that, unlike in
Elvis movies, the soundtrack of Help!
continued to be completely and utterly unrelated to the movie itself, with
none of the songs specifically written for or adapted to the purposes of its
plot and atmosphere; like A Hard Day’s
Night, the resulting album — at least, in its proper UK form, not the US
release that intersperses the movie songs with Ken Thorne-arranged
instrumentals — could not even be suspected of being a «soundtrack» if heard
outside of the proper information context. Nor could it be accused of not
containing plenty of «tactical», if not necessarily «strategic»,
breakthroughs. But on the whole, it wasn’t jaw-droppingly amazing, either, especially at a time when things like
‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Satisfaction’, ‘See My Friends’, and ‘My Generation’
were beginning to snatch the musical crown away from Jazz and place it on the
head of Rock as music’s chief cutting-edge creative force. To be fair, most of the album was
recorded rather hurriedly, over a week-long session in mid-February 1965
right before the Beatles flew over to the Bahamas to begin shooting for the
movie — and if we are drawing strict chronological lines between the
«adolescence» and «maturity» of rock music, I’d still place those winter
months in the first category, which gives the Fab Four a good excuse if you
feel like they need an excuse. Some might feel they don’t, though, because
even the most lightweight numbers recorded during that session are still
excellent pop songs in their own right, and what’s wrong with that? Each of
them continues to nurture some special vibe, dissolving the «feel-of-formula»
— the secret Beatles trick that places their «filler» on a whole other level
compared to, say, The Dave Clark 5. Thus, it is easy to dismiss
something like Paul’s ʽAnother Girlʼ — whose swinging rhythm, at first, would seem to
denounce it as just an attempt to capitalize on the formula of ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ, that is, something decidedly beyond the Beatles’
dignity. But then ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was an exhilarated, drunkenly-delirious
explosion; ‘Another Girl’, in comparison, is a pretty gloomy song with a
subtle context. Paul expressly sings the verses in a tired, morose, and a tad
threatening manner: the way he intones "you’re making me say that I’ve got nobody but you / but as from
today, well, I’ve got somebody that’s new" has always made me
suspect that the protagonist is really bluffing his way out of a conflict
situation here — the ‘Another Girl’ in question is just a phantom invented to
trick his partner into backing down and submitting, and throughout the song,
the singer is feeling quite nervous about whether the bluff is going to be
successful. With the addition of some rather weird bluesy lead lines, alternating
between high-pitched aggressive stings and rambling, paranoid licks (all of
it played by Paul himself because George apparently had problems working out
the perfect mood), ‘Another Girl’ is more than just self-derivative filler —
it’s a cute little psychological maneuver. (It’s also possible that the song
might have been subtly referring to some tensions in Paul’s relations with
Jane Asher at the time — and it is slightly symbolic that in the movie, it is
the song that the Beatles play upon their arrival to the Bahamas, while
frolicking around on the beach with some local beauties... infidelity
check!). Interestingly, the exact same
topic of friction between the two lovers dominates ‘The Night Before’, the
second out of three «pure McCartney» creations at the February sessions. ‘The
Night Before’ is, in fact, a thematic prelude to ‘Another Girl’ — the guy
sees diminished passion in the girl’s behavior, so then he tries to salvage
the relationship by calling on the remedy of jealousy. The song, too, may be
treated as filler, but it is also a cool example of how the Beatles smoothly
merge blues and pop — the instrumental introduction consists of several bars
of «tough» guitar-driven rock’n’roll in the vein of ‘Some Other Guy’ or
‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, and then wham!,
ten seconds into the song we forget all about the instruments as our
attention is completely switched over to the gorgeous vocal trade-offs
between solo Paul "we said our
goodbyes..." and the rest of the band ("ah, the night before...") who conflate their group harmonies
with Paul’s in what has sometimes been described as their adoption of the
«hocket» technique. Again, there are subtle mood
swings here that find no immediate analogies in contemporary pop: the first
two lines, with John and George picking up Paul’s line and footballing it
high up in the stars, symbolize the atmosphere of lovers’ bliss, then in the
third line those harmonies return crashing back to Earth while Paul’s lead
vocal changes to bitter and sardonic ("now today I found you have changed your mind..."), and then
to gently pleading ("treat me like
you did the night before"). I’m a little disappointed by the
exceedingly simplistic double-tracked guitar solo (which, honestly, feels
more like a temporary placeholder where they forgot to fill in the real thing), and the "last night is a night I will remember you
by" bridge carries relatively little emotional weight, but the main
body of the song still remains a thing that only the Beatles were capable of
back in 1965, filler or no filler. The third of the «pure McCartney»
tracks was ‘Tell Me What You See’, though in this case, the «purity» was a
bit disturbed by Paul using as inspiration a religious motto that used to
hang on the wall of John’s Aunt Mimi’s house ("however black the clouds may be, in time they’ll pass away; have faith
and trust and you will see, God’s light make bright your day"). In
contrast with the other two, this one might seem to be completely devoid of
any psychologism — just an optimistic little piece, relatively relaxed and
nonchalant, good to play on a lazy warm summer day or something. Alan
Pollack, in his description of the song, keeps referring to it as
«Latin-flavored», but the only justification for this is the use of
semi-exotic percussion instruments (like the güiro, which is apparently
manned by Harrison here — since the song has no use for the lead guitar, he
had to leave his mark in some special way). I don’t really hear a lot of
«Latin» influences here; instead, to me the song feels more like something in
an early folk-pop, Sonny & Cher-like style, thus incidentally presaging
the stylistic twists on Rubber Soul.
The most interesting part of the
song, though, in this case is its bridge section — the Beatles’
unpredictability strikes again as the languid flow of the song is suddenly
interrupted by the louder-than-expected chanting of the title, followed by
Paul’s bluesy mini-solo on the electric piano. Are these interruptions
supposed to be the «big black clouds» in person, breaking up the overall
serenity, only to be promptly whisked away by the friendly arpeggios from
John’s rhythm guitar? And what’s up with Ringo’s drumming here, as he briefly
lays it all on the big bass drum, while the rest of the song only relies on
very light percussion in comparison? However you interpret it, the bridge
section does remain unusual and enigmatic. Remove it, and you are left with a
smooth, well-behaved, pleasant and ultimately quite forgettable composition.
Put it back, and you learn an important lesson about creativity — there’s
always room for it even in the most generic of environments, as long as you
do not forget that surprise is one
of the most essential components of good art. Meanwhile, John, too, brought
three new songs to the same session, and, from a certain angle at least, we
see him largely being on the same page with Paul: insecure and dissatisfied,
though, naturally, with a bit more of a snarl about it. ‘You’re Going To Lose
That Girl’, perhaps not incidentally placed right after ‘Another Girl’, gives
us another triangle — except this time it’s not one guy and two girls, but
rather two guys and one girl, with John «punishing» his rival for his
inefficient (insufficiently alpha?) behavior. (Might this be a hint that in
real life, Paul always had two girls where John had just one?) Whether this
is just a conniving strategy or a true knight-in-shining-armor moment,
though, remains largely irrelevant because nobody (apart from picky critics)
ever listens to ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ for the lyrics — we all love
the song for its unique vocal harmony arrangements, clearly influenced by the
Beach Boys but adapted to the Beatles’ own abilities. The call-and-response
mechanics between John’s lead and Paul and George’s backing are arguably
their most complex on a song chorus up to that date, and the falsetto note
sustained for two whole seconds is John’s proudest achievement in that range
so far, as well. (There’s some great instrumental stuff happening here, too,
like the unpredictable shift from E Major to G Major in the bridge, but I’ll
just refer you to Alan
Pollack for such matters). There’s still a bit of atmospheric
mystery about that song for me: it’s clearly meant to be «triumphant» in
tone, and on their previous records, the Beatles had no problems coming
across as beaming victors on the field of battle, but there seems to be a
shadow of regret and self-doubt on ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’: the
protagonist almost feels forced to
make his move on the lady out of pure compassion ("if you don’t take her out tonight... I’m gonna treat her kind"),
and the melody, albeit lively and upbeat, also feels compassionate rather
than aggressive — even the brief guitar solo seems to sting you with notes of
pity rather than violence. (In fact, thinking about this situation gets me to
realize that the song would be perfect
for the soundtrack to a docudrama about the relationship between Brian Jones,
Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg — the three of whom pretty much
re-enacted this whole story in 1967). Regardless of any concrete judgements,
it can hardly be denied that ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, behind the
still rather simplistic wordcraft, shows a ton of psychological maturity next
to John’s output circa 1964 — here, he is beginning to use the simple form of
the commercial pop song to express fairly complex human feelings, rather than
a cartoonish approximation thereof. And this, mind you, is one out of
three Lennon songs from February ’65 that is usually the least commented upon, with most of the critical attention
diverted toward ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and ‘Ticket To Ride’,
both of which feel unusual and attractive from the outset. The former, as is
well acknowledged by John himself and everybody else who ever mentions the
song, continues his fascination with Dylan, and, indeed, if you only play the
first two seconds, you might suspect that you are going to be treated to a
Beatle cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. But the funny thing is that the
vocal melody — "here I stand, head
in hand..." — has nothing whatsoever to do with Dylan. Hum it in
your head and you shall rather feel the atmosphere of an old-fashioned
lullaby — "hush-a-bye, don’t you
cry", something to that effect. Bob himself would never have sung anything
like this (and not because the song
is too vulnerable for the size of his ego — Bob could be very vulnerable on record, but only on his own terms of what
defines vulnerability); instead, amusingly, the song would catch the eyes and
ears of the Beach Boys that same year, and be included on their Party! record with Dennis Wilson
singing lead vocal — the first time, ironically, that the «wild» Beach Boy
would reveal his bleeding heart, albeit in a comic, vaudevillian setting. Anyway, while I have always found
this early excursion into folk-pop territory a bit tentative and repetitive,
and its chorus hook seriously undercooked (couldn’t he have at least thought
of a second rhyming line, rather than chant the title twice in a row?),
there’s no denying that, once again, here we have a big step forward in terms
of emotional content. Most of John’s love songs on previous albums were
either of the knight-in-shining-armor kind ("anytime at all, all you gotta do is call" blah blah blah),
or of the jealous and/or angry kind ("I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad" and so on) —
typical teenage stuff when the thing that matters most is asserting your
masculinity rather than honing your empathy. With lines like "if she’s gone I can’t go on, feeling
two-foot small", he takes a giant leap forward — farther along than
Dylan himself, in fact. The funny thing is that the inspiration behind this
imagery could hardly have been Cynthia; there are speculations that the song
is a reflection of John’s married status which he had to downplay or conceal
for reasons of public image (hence the "everywhere people stare" line), but they hardly hold water.
Instead, I do believe that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is the very
first one (and the next one would follow in just a few months — see below) of
John’s many songs about... Yoko Ono, yes, a year and a half before the two even met for the first
time. It’s an imaginary, premonitory vision of that particular type of love
that this «big, strong man» was craving for — blind, submissive, perhaps even
with a slight whiff of some sort of emotional masochism. (For what it’s
worth, Dennis Wilson spent a lot of his life also looking for that kind of
love, though his self-destructive nature made it much more difficult for
him). Thus it is probably not an
accident that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ uses a flute part, played
by guest musician John Scott, in the outro — formally, this just serves to
reinforce the folksy, «pastoral» vibe of the song, and they probably settled
on flute instead of the more usual harmonica just so as to avoid accusations
of copying Dylan’s style way too blindly; but the flute is a more tender and
«vulnerable» instrument than harmonica (unless you’re playing it Ian
Anderson-style), and the switch from harmonica (one of John’s most common
self-expressing instruments in the past) to flute is perfectly symbolic of
the switch from a «dominant» to a «submissive» attitude. (It’s amusing that
in the movie the song is played by the band in their home while entertaining
their newest guest, the beautiful Eleanor Bron — except that John isn’t even
looking in her direction, instead it’s George who keeps making eyes at her,
as in «hey there, see what a beautiful song my friend John wrote about no-one
in particular? how ’bout we make it about you and me, gorgeous?» Meanwhile,
John is just blankly staring into space — maybe there’s a ghost of Yoko
already floating somewhere out there). But now let us rewind just a
little bit to February 15 for the very first song recorded during those
sessions, most of the credit for which also goes to Lennon. On a purely
personal level, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has never been a favorite of mine. It’s
slow, it’s very repetitive, there’s
no solo section, and the revved-up "my
baby don’t care" bit cuts out way
too fast. But this gut impression is only there if you think of ‘Ticket To
Ride’ as what it is — a
verse-chorus-bridge pop song — and not as what it could aspire to be, namely,
an early psychedelic drone that might, perhaps, best be enjoyed under the
influence. Because there is no denying that, in sheer technical terms of
melody, arrangement, and production, ‘Ticket To Ride’ marks the band’s
greatest leap forward on the album (‘Yesterday’ comes close, but from a
completely different perspective). Unlike the average Beatles song that gets
better and better for me the more I listen
to it, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has the distinction of getting better and better for
me the more I think about it — not
coincidental, perhaps, for a song that is sometimes described as being the
Beatles’ first properly experimental creation, taking full advantage of the
studio as its own instrument. Sometime around 1970, John
boastfully called ‘Ticket To Ride’ «the earliest heavy-metal record ever
made» or something to that effect — probably being jealous of the rise of the
new generation of heavy music around him, though even hyperbolic remarks like
that one have their use in that they get you to notice things you might have
otherwise missed. The main riff of the song — the jangly, shrill ostinato figure that traverses the
entire tune — is far more The Byrds than The Kinks or The Who (in fact, it
bears an uncanny resemblance to the opening riff of The Byrds’ cover of ‘Mr.
Tambourine Man’, though this is almost certainly a coincidence, as both bands
were working on these songs around the same time); but its arrogant
insistence on the A chord does also give it a bit of a raga feel, which means
it’s «folk-pop going psychedelic» — an early precursor of what the Byrds and
all those other West Coast bands would start doing in about a year’s time.
What does make the song heavy,
though, is McCartney’s bass which, for most of the verses, he does not so
much «play» as «manipulate», using just a few notes to generate a constant
deep, monotonous hum (if you look at his playing in the accompanying video, he
seems to be barely moving his fingers — just a leisurely twitch of the thumb
here and there). In between that sort of loose-wiring bass and Ringo’s unusually
complex and loud-as-heck drumming pattern, ‘Ticket To Ride’ does sound...
well, I still wouldn’t describe it as heavy,
but monumental would probably be a
good term. Monumental and high: having ingested quite a bit of weed since being officially
introduced to it by Dylan in August 1964, the band had definitely opened
their minds to new vibes and sensations such as this one — up until now, I
haven’t ever used the word «trippy» to describe any Beatle song, but ‘Ticket
To Ride’ is a pretty good start, I believe. Before ‘Ticket To Ride’, most of
the band’s loud numbers were party anthems, sonic firecrackers to get the
girls thrashing and screaming and wetting their seats; ‘Ticket To Ride’, even
if, through the inevitable pull of momentum, it did get the girls to do the
same things when played live, is still their first «loud» song that would
rather put you in a trance instead, slow and repetitive as it is, while
Doctor McCartney’s hypnotizing bass pendulum subjugates your brainwaves. In
this respect, I’d rather put ‘Ticket To Ride’ into the same category as the
(still upcoming at the time) Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ than any of the
hard-’n’-heavy songs on the mid-1965 circuit. One semi-observation,
semi-complaint here could be that the musical vibe of the song feels rather
detached from the lyrics, which, in themselves, also mark an important
development. Both in ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide
Your Love Away’, the male protagonist steadily remains in focus, whether he’s
being competitive, chivalrous, or masochistic. In ‘Ticket To Ride’, however,
it is the girl who’s shown to go all these-boots-are-made-for-walkin’ over
our hero: "She said that living
with me was bringing her down / She would never be free when I was around"
— now that’s definitely not about
Cynthia, is it? People are still debating, after all these years, what ticket to ride really means, but to me
it’s never been about anything other than an abstract declaration of personal
freedom, so, kind of, welcome to the first proper feminist anthem out of the
ever-unpredictable mind of John Lennon, professional wife-beater. The only
question is: what the hell does that particular message got to do with the
proto-psych folk drone and the deep proto-metal bass rumble of the musical
arrangement? I’m still having a bit of trouble connecting the dots here — the
same sort of thing would work much better next year with ‘She Said She Said’,
but in this case, it’s two different dimensions of the conscience sitting
next to each other like two accidental passengers in adjoining airplane
seats. Regardless, ‘Ticket To Ride’ was
very important in that, as the only officially released piece of new Beatle
output over the entire first half of 1965 (backed with ‘Yes It Is’ on the
B-side), it gave the world a proper reassurance that the Fab Four were involved in the great big race to
finally make rock’n’roll into serious art — clearly, of all the songs
recorded at that February session this was the most stereotypically
«mind-blowing» candidate, topping UK and US charts as usual. But as important
as the song is, I think that the truly outstanding moment of the February
sessions was the emergence of George Harrison as an accomplished songwriter
in his own right. After the acceptable, but forgettable ‘Don’t Bother Me’ on With The Beatles, and a frustratingly
bungled effort to turn ‘You Know What To Do’ into something accomplished
during the Hard Day’s Night
sessions, George finally hits the jackpot, proving that mediocre talent can mutate into something grander,
given a conveniently beneficial environment, so to speak. Of the two songs he contributed
for the sessions, only ‘I Need You’ made it into the movie, but ‘You Like Me
Too Much’ was still deemed good enough to make it onto Side B of the LP —
although as a proper «Harrisong», it feels rather conventional, and the
greatest attraction here comes from some ingenious keyboard work, where John,
Paul, and even George Martin are all involved in combining acoustic and
electric piano parts. Lyrics-wise, George has not yet progressed beyond
standard boy-girl thematics (then again, neither have his superiors), but the
words to ‘You Like Me Too Much’ aren’t too bad; as both John and Paul are
upping their game in this department a little, progressing beyond simplistic
stock clichés to thinking up slightly more realistic and emotionally
complex situations, so does George, giving us a more nuanced tale than the
trivial "I’m so happy" or "I’m so gloomy" message.
("Though you’ve gone away this
morning, you’ll be back again tonight" kind of gives us both at the
same time already, doesn’t it?). Ironically, though, it is the
lyrically and emotionally simpler ‘I Need You’ that ends up being the best of
the two — arguably, George’s very first serious emotional punch captured on
record. It’s possible to treat it as a direct sequel to ‘Don’t Bother Me’,
except this time the atmosphere of doomed melancholy, permeating the
imaginary conversation between the dumped protagonist and his friends, shifts
to one of subtly hopeful melancholy, reflected in what might be an imaginary
letter from the dumped protagonist to the love of his life (the song is said
to have been inspired by George’s feelings for Pattie Boyd, but if so, it
comes about a decade too early). One thing both have in common is George’s
love for long-winded verse lines: 12 syllables in ‘Don’t Bother Me’, 10 in ‘I
Need You’ — this skill would later come in handy for all of George’s
religious-philosophical needs — but where ‘Don’t Bother Me’ does not expand
much beyond the angry grumble, ‘I Need You’ makes a terrific shift between
depressed exposition ("you don’t
realize how much I need you...") and desperate pleading ("please come on back to me..."),
where John and Paul also seriously enhance the effects with extra harmonies
that reinforce the feeling of hope-beyond-despair. For all of its superficial
simplicity, George has no other song like ‘I Need You’ in his entire
Beatle-era catalog, and maybe even beyond that, too, though it is hard for me
to quickly rewind all of it in the back of my mind; already on Rubber Soul, his seriousness and
preachiness would start to get the better of him, and his desperate pleading
in the future would rather be addressed to the Lord above than any of his
blonde-haired creations below, which is a whole different story already. But
if you’re looking for a proper starting point to that famous «George heart
tug» which affects some of us so deeply, look no further than the chord
change from "love you all the time
and never leave you" to "please
come on back to me". Forty years later, the first man to properly
play tribute to that moment would be Tom Petty, whose performance of ‘I Need You’ during the
memorial Concert For George is one
of the show’s major highlights — and, of course, that chord change, along
with the words, took on a whole different meaning back then. Whoever implied
that George Harrison only began to compete with the level of Lennon-McCartney
around 1968–69, with songs like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ or ‘Something’
(I think Paul, rather condescendingly, said something to that effect), is
willingly ignoring the fact that it is George Harrison who is responsible for
one of the strongest, most painful flashes of genuine feeling on this whole
album, and it would take a pretty thick-skinned non-believer not to notice
that. With the work on those eight songs
mostly completed, the Beatles headed off to the Bahamas and to Austria in
order to film Help!, and, ironically
enough, ‘Help!’ — the actual song — was not written or recorded until early
April, after most of the shooting was over; in fact, Lennon actually wrote it
to match the agreed upon title of the movie, not the other way around. The
really interesting thing here is that, later on, John would always talk about
the song as representing a true
«call for help», reflecting his feelings of being trapped, exploited, and
miserable at the time ("I WAS
crying out for help!"); yet if you look more closely, the lyrics here
actually continue the motif already initiated in ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your
Love Away’, with a perfectly logical transition from "if she’s gone I can’t go on" to
"I know that I just need you like
I’ve never done before". In other words, this is not just a vague,
abstract call for help — it’s more like an explicit advertisement for a
soulmate. On the other hand, there is no serious contradiction here: John did
feel trapped, and it did take his falling in love with Yoko to free him from
the trap eventually — regardless of any of our own perspectives on the breakup of the Beatles. Years later, John would also
regret the decision to record the song as a speedy pop-rocker instead of a
slow ballad, in the context of which the words might gain more emotional
resonance (as it is, I’m sure most people barely pay them any attention
indeed, other than just the chanted title). No evidence exists, as far as I
can tell, of the Beatles themselves trying it out slow and mellow — but, of
course, you can always go to later cover versions by Deep Purple or the Carpenters to see
how it would work out, and I’m pretty sure you’ll agree with me that it
wouldn’t work out nearly as well as the original (although I have my share of
respect for both attempts). The «breakneck» tempo is not there merely for
commercial purposes; it is there to underline the urgency and seriousness of
the situation. The hero is not just sitting, all gloomy and depressed,
finding masochistic pleasure in his own wounds in some hotel room; he’s
panicking, running through the streets in his underwear after having just set
the hotel room on fire, or something like that. At a slower tempo, John’s
voice would never have sounded as urgently desperate as it does on "but-now-these-days-are-gone-I’m-not-so-self-assured"
(note how on the slower Carpenters version, the tempo allows Karen to throw
on a little flowery melismatic hop on self-assured
— it’s totally adorable, but it also kiddifies the song, downplaying the pain
and upping the playfulness). The most inventive trick
associated with ‘Help!’ are its vocal harmony arrangements, particularly the
idea of George and Paul’s lines «previewing» the lead vocal, creating the
effect of an echo that comes before the main part — "[and now] and now these days are gone...".
I always like to imagine that the boys came up with this solution to help
John better memorize his own lyrics: what with the long-winded nature of the
verse lines and the high speed of delivery, it would have been hard for him
not to flub the words — in fact, several live recordings of the song do exist
where he still messes up — and thus it’s quite helpful to have yourself an
official prompter in such dire straits. According to Mark Hertsgaard, the
author of The Music And Artistry Of The
Beatles, this strategy is "underlining
the importance of the words even as it softens their sorrow with wistful
nostalgia", but I don’t know where the nostalgia bit is coming from, other than an association with the
song’s single line of "when I was
younger, so much younger than today...". To me, it’s more about a
realistic symbiosis of the internal voices disrupting the protagonist’s peace
of mind — his inner demons, if you like — and his own inevitable reaction.
Paul and George are playing out the role of John’s nerve impulses, driving
him to act in crazy ways, and he is their obedient slave like most of us are
obedient slaves to our own impulses. Make sense? Anyway, regardless of the actual
interpretation, the vocal harmonies on ‘Help!’ are just another awesome
example of how the Beatles, whose singing and harmonizing techniques could
never hope to match those of the Beach Boys (well, maybe if John and Paul and
George had all been blood brothers and living under the same roof with their
dictatorial and abusive father... ah well, never mind), could compensate for
that by relying on their sheer creativity and coming up with inventive and
meaningful arrangements that might not require all that much training and
practice but could still earn them a place at the same table with all the
great masters of vocal harmony, past and present. And not that this should in
any way downplay the importance of the instrumental parts — the doom-laden
three-chord mini-stairway-to-hell guitar line between each of the chorus
lines, the sympathetic arpeggiated jangle backing up John’s "won’t you please please help me?"
falsetto, or that panicky Ringo fill connecting the verse to the chorus. If there’s anything seriously
critical to be said about any of those songs, it is probably that they feel
totally disconnected from the movie for which, allegedly, they should have
been written. Granted, so was most of the material used for A Hard Day’s Night, but there at least
the band had the excuse of the pseudo-documentary approach, being free to
perform just about anything as long as it was in a relatively realistic
setting. By contrast, within Help!
all the songs play out like early examples of music videos where the visual
content has practically nothing to do with the musical, which seriously
detracts from the songs’ power — it’s hard to take John singing ‘Help!’
seriously when he is having darts thrown at his onscreen image by infuriated
cult members, or to notice the actual pain within ‘I Need You’ when it’s all
about tanks and artillery setting up positions to safeguard the Beatles
against the cult during their recording process. And what exactly does
‘Ticket To Ride’ have to do with skiing up in the Alps? Is the cable car
supposed to be a metaphor for "riding
so high"? Clearly, this problem is no longer
relevant in the 21st century, but back in 1965, it was relevant: the music written for the movie was so far ahead of
the movie that the very existence of the movie was a bit insulting next to
it. These days, it’s just harmless nostalgic fun and adorable old-school
silliness, but back then it could reinforce some pretty harmful stereotypes
about the band, and indeed it is quite telling that the conservative Daily Express praised the movie while
the liberal Daily Mirror condemned
it, or that the movie is often listed as a chief source of inspiration for
the Monkees’ TV show — not that there was anything wrong with the Monkees’ TV
show, mind you, but it was
good-natured fluffy light entertainment, and most of the songs written for Help! go way beyond good-natured
fluffy light entertainment. The «proper» soundtrack version of
the album was, just as it was with A
Hard Day’s Night, only released in the US, where the seven songs used in
the movie were padded out with additional instrumentals from the score,
composed and conducted by Ken Thorne; it’s mostly rubbish, but due to the
film’s «Indian» motifs, a few of the compositions featured Eastern instruments
such as sitar — thus officially marking the first presence of a sitar on a
Beatles album, several months prior to ‘Norwegian Wood’. (Joking aside,
George’s introduction to the sitar did
occur during the shooting of the movie, so there was at least one
long-lasting positive effect from those almost-wasted months). For the UK
release, however, it was artistically necessary to come up with a whole other
side of new songs, given that fans had been impatiently waiting for a proper
new Beatles LP for more than half a year already. Two of the songs for that Side B
came from the same February ’65 sessions — ‘You Like Me Too Much’ and ‘Tell
Me What You See’, which did not make it into the movie — but five more had to
be rounded up to complete the picture, and this was a bit of a patch-job:
spread over two or three different sessions in May and June ’65, including
two covers of outside artists (the last ever time the Beatles would include
somebody else’s songwriting) and at least one song that John would later come
to despise with a vengeance (‘It’s Only Love’). However, even if on an
objective level Side B of Help!
clearly loses the game to Side A, even the weakest of its songs still have
their moments and aspects of redemption. Perhaps opening things up with Ringo
singing Buck Owens might feel like a corny move when taken outside of
context; but inside of context,
‘Act Naturally’ is the perfect opener, especially if you listen to it in its
proper place. The monumentality of ‘Ticket To Ride’ has just faded away, the
curtain has fallen, you have turned the record over — and now, as if breaking
the fourth wall, the principal star of the movie (by then, it was a general
consensus that Ringo had the best acting abilities of all four Beatles) walks
out on stage and delivers a boastful-but-humble closing reflection on how
"they’re gonna put me in the
movies, they’re gonna make a big star out of me", which, I dare say,
hits even harder home with Ringo than it did with Owens (although I would
think that "they’ll make a scene
about a man that’s sad and lonely" better describes his part in A Hard Day’s Night than Help!). If you think of it that way,
it’s the first theatrical-conceptual move on the part of the band to ever
appear on an LP, and you can even draw a straight line from here to Sgt. Pepper if you so desire. Additionally, if you compare the
performance to the original
Buck Owens recording, you’ll see just how much the band brings to the
table — the original is pretty barebones, while the Beatles version features
some excellent lead guitar licks from George throughout, starting from the
opening descending «guffawing» riff and shadowing Ringo’s vocal for most of
the song. A very similar style would soon be adopted for Rubber Soul’s original ‘What Goes On’, also with Ringo on vocals
and with even more intricate country-style guitar arrangements, so ‘Act
Naturally’ also happens to be a small step forward in the Beatles embracing
the «folk-rock revolution» of 1965. See how much food for thought is provided
even by the tiniest of trifles at the time! Meanwhile, John took things easy
and went on a brief Larry Williams kick: the Beatles definitely knew of Larry
from their earliest days, as ‘Bony Moronie’ had allegedly featured already in
the Quarrymen’ live setlist as early as 1957, and with a couple new tracks
required a.s.a.p. for their upcoming American LP Beatles VI, they went into the studio on May 10, 1965 (Larry’s
birthday!) and knocked off ‘Bad Boy’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, with John taking
lead vocal on both. Unfortunately, ‘Bad Boy’ ended up half-lost (apart from Beatles VI, it would only surface on
various compilations, from Golden
Oldies to Rarities to Past Masters etc.), even if it’s the
better song of the two — less repetitive, featuring a tremendous George solo,
and one of the «nastiest» ever Lennon vocals from his Beatle days. But there is something to be said
about the minimalism of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, too, even if the band quite
intentionally limits George to replaying the same lead line over and over for
eternity. Like with ‘Rock And Roll Music’ and other early rock’n’roll songs,
the aim here is to toughen up a song whose original vibe was relatively
toothless and friendly. Larry recorded ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ — like every other
hit of his — as a bit of a joke number; the Beatles, particularly George with
his alarm siren-like guitar tone and John with his «hungry» vocal delivery,
take it far more seriously, turning the song into a modernized headbanger
that would also be perfect for their live show (and even long after they
ceased doing live shows, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ would be one of the few songs
John would perform at Live Peace Toronto in 1969 with the Plastic Ono Band,
though, admittedly, they might have settled on it back then mostly because
they had no time to rehearse anything more complex). In any case, it’s one of
his finest «all-out shouting» performances since the days of ‘Twist And
Shout’... and I do admire George’s tenacity in holding down that riff
non-stop for three minutes (while also chuckling at the occasional mistake
here and there, like at 1:46 when he drops an extra note out of the blue and
they decide to keep it in — just so, you know, sixty years later unsuspecting
people would not assume the whole track had been AI-generated or something). John’s last and only fully
original contribution to Side B was ‘It’s Only Love’, a song he would later
single out as one of his favorite targets for self-criticism, and perhaps the
self-criticism is justified when it comes to the lyrics: after the impressive
verbal progress seen on ‘Help!’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, and ‘You’ve Got To Hide
Your Love Away’, something like "when
you sigh, my inside just flies, butterflies" and "just the sight of you makes night time
bright" feels like a conscious nod to the young and innocent days of
1963 — back then, John could have been given plenty of slack for the likes of
‘Ask Me Why’, but this here is the equivalent of a full-grown man walking
around in his school uniform (and not
in an Angus Young manner of doing it). In his defense, though, the song does
begin with "I get high when I see
you go by", which may have been a conscious or subconscious
reference to the famous conversation with Dylan who, allegedly, was surprised
by the Beatles having never smoked pot before despite singing "it’s such a feeling I get high"
on ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Now we have tricky John actually slipping that
bit into the beginning of a sugary love ballad and nobody paying attention —
and to think of all the fuss around Jim Morrison and his "girl we couldn’t get much higher"
bit two years later... What is really surprising is that
by this time, John had all but stopped writing simple, sentimental love
songs, and when he later returned to that practice, he would always make sure
the simple feeling would be transferred directly from the heart; ‘It’s Only
Love’ does feel somewhat hollow and fake as a «Lennon song», though, in its
defense, it fares pretty well as a «Beatles song». We can criticize the words
all we like, but there’s no denying the beauty of the tremolo-laden lead
guitar figure, or the prettiness of the interplay between John’s 12-string
rhythm and George’s little syncopated «pecks» in the other channel, or, most
importantly, the power of the final melismatic falsetto vocal coda — that
last note genuinely gives me the proverbial butterflies in the same manner that only a few other people are
capable of, like, say, Ray Davies on ‘Waterloo Sunset’. In the end, ‘It’s
Only Love’ may be «regressive» in attitude, but in terms of writing and
arrangement it is still miles ahead of the level of Please Please Me and, ultimately, nothing to be ashamed of. Finally, we are left with two more
McCartney songs, and these really couldn’t have come sooner, given Paul’s
relatively «auxiliary» involvement with the proper soundtrack of Help! (as good as ‘The Night Before’
and ‘Another Girl’ turned out to be, they do feel humble and insignificant
next to Lennon’s tracks on Side A). Although nothing shall ever take away the
champion crown from ‘Scrambled Eggs’, it could be argued that ‘I’ve Just Seen
A Face’ does not really drag too far behind its ten-times-more-famous
neighbor — even if it could be formally classified as a «bluegrass ballad»,
it’s the kind of song that could only be written by a compositional genius
working outside of any strict genre conventions or formalities. The contrast
alone between the slow, almost meditative introduction, gallantly picked by
three different Beatles on three different acoustic guitars, and the
breakneck speed of the main melody is something we’d never previously heard
on a Beatles song, or, for that matter, on any song on the pop market — and the twisted shape of the verse,
which feels as if it’s propelling you forward through a narrow corridor with
no clear indication of when and how it’s going to stop, is another innovative
feature that may, perhaps, have been inspired by the «rappy» likes of Dylan’s
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ but is realized in full-on Paul McCartney style:
no aggression or cynicism, just pure charm. My personal moment of mystery with
the song has always been with the chorus: "Falling, yes I am falling / And she keeps calling / Me back again".
It turns out a bit clumsy, with the words clipped and overpressed to fit into
the musical structure, but this is also what gives the whole thing a bit of
an extra dimension. Falling
naturally supposes falling in love,
but it is rare that the complement in
love is omitted in such situations, and a simple I am falling could just as equally mean going to Hell or the like — and in this context, "she keeps calling me back again"
would have an almost Gothic flair. I mean, if you see a vision of someone at
night who "keeps calling you back
again", it’s gotta be some Edgar Allan Poe shit, right? To me, it
was as if, quite inadvertently, Paul was penning a love song to a ghost here,
and if you add this perspective to the song, it actually becomes... something
completely different, as if all the melodic tricks alone didn’t already make it so completely
different. If it were up to me, I’d add a bit of haunting graveyard laughter
to the outro to complete the picture. As for ‘Scrambled Eggs’ (I find
that calling the song by its original working title helps it feel a little
less clichéd in the back of your mind), anything I say on the subject
shall most likely repeat something already written a dozen times before even
if I spend an eternity trying to come up with something original. I can’t
help noticing, though, that the theme of ‘Yesterday’ is precisely the same as that of ‘The Night Before’ — it’s like the
same subject relived in the mind of the protagonist after he’d mellowed out a
little — and also that the song marks McCartney’s initiation into the ranks
of the greatest «nostalgic» songwriters of all time, along with Ray Davies
and maybe, to a lesser extent, Brian Wilson. For some reason, while one of
Paul’s biggest weaknesses in songwriting is the all-too-common lack of
psychological depth, he has few equals when it comes to writing about (a)
loneliness and (b) looking back into the past (sometimes even imagining looking back into the past
from the future, e.g. ‘Things We Said Today’), and ‘Yesterday’ is the first
massive and unassailable argument for that. As is well known, even John
regularly expressed respect and admiration for the song ("thank you Ringo, that was
wonderful!" is a classic moment in Beatle history), and that’s,
like, the highest praise Paul McCartney of Liverpool could ever aspire to.
But it’s also much to Paul’s honor that the success of ‘Yesterday’ as,
essentially, his solo creation never went to his head enough to opt out for a
solo career — the time had certainly not yet come to loosen the Beatle bonds. Yet speaking of Beatle bonds, we
can already see here that they are beginning to loosen up. As the Beatles
mature as artists, their individualities begin to overshadow their collective
influences, and the sharp contrast between a song like ‘Help!’ (pure John)
and ‘Yesterday’ (pure Paul) is felt much more intensely than any John-Paul
contrast on the previous four albums; not coincidentally, it is on Help! that George comes into his own
right as a third, and equally distinctive, creative force. At the very same
time, the Jagger/Richards songwriting team was coming into its own with great
original compositions like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, yet there was
hardly any sign of a «this is a Jagger song» and «this is a Richards song»
dichotomy, which is basically your obvious answer to the question of why the
Beatles broke up and the Rolling Stones survived. Naturally, at this time the
band was still working as a whole, with John and Paul adding beneficial
touches to each other’s material; but even though they continued to spend a
lot of time together, including touring and stuff, the days of their working
out ideas between them in hotel rooms were already more or less a thing of
the past. Which is telling, if you ask me —
great art is rarely, if ever, produced collectively on a 50-50 basis, and it
is quite telling that the closer the Beatles got to their peak, the more
fleshed out their individual styles would become. From that point of view, Help! might indeed represent a bit of
a stutter in the band’s relentless journey to the top of the pantheon, but it
is the record that almost
officially gave us «John Lennon, of Liverpool», «Paul McCartney, of
Liverpool», and «George Harrison, of Liverpool», for all three of whom
«opportunity knocked», and without the satisfaction of that particular
condition prior to everything else, the quality and impact of Rubber Soul and Revolver would have been far less than they are seen today. Thus,
Help! might still have one of its
feet dragging behind in the soil of 1963-64, while the other one is faintly
beginning to grope for the big musical innovations of 1965-66; but it is
important to remember that all those innovations, no matter how many gushing
pages of text have been produced about them by fans, critics, and musicologists
alike, would have signified very little if they were purely a matter of form,
not substance — and that the substance could only be provided by the
individual natures, feelings, and reflections of each of the band members,
rather than by getting together under some sort of «okay, let’s write
something like Roy Orbison does!» pretext. The best songs on Help! all satisfy that requirement,
and the worst seem to at least acknowledge it. That’s a pretty good ticket to
ride if there ever was one. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Dec. 3, 1965 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
5 |
5 |
5 |
4 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks:
1) Drive My Car; 2) Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has
Flown); 3) You Won’t See Me; 4) Nowhere Man; 5) Think For Yourself; 6) The
Word; 7) Michelle; 8) What Goes On?; 9) Girl; 10) I’m Looking Through You;
11) In My Life; 12) Wait; 13) If I Needed Someone; 14) Run For Your Life. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW I suppose that the album cover
alone was sufficient to convey a sense of something
different when fans began pouring into record stores to snatch the latest
Beatles record in the early days of December 1965. I mean, the Beatles’ album
sleeves had always been stylish from the start, but the photos always had an
«official» look to them, be it the cheerful heil-Britain vibe of Please
Please Me, the intellectually-artsy black-and-white of With The Beatles, the Warholish
multi-photo thing on A Hard Day’s
Night, the we-just-flew-in-where’s-the-bathroom look of Beatles For Sale, or the
we’re-totally-not-promoting-our-movie posturing on Help!. Somehow it always seemed that it was the art department
that must have taken all these decisions for the Beatles, that they
themselves had little agency in the matter. |
||||||||
|
On the cover of Rubber Soul, even if, technically, it
was shot by the very same Robert Freeman who took all their pictures starting
with With The Beatles, the Fab
Four look like they finally get to look like what they really are — four
Merry Men from Sherwood Forest, although, for lack of a proper travel budget,
the back garden of John Lennon’s estate in St. George’s Hill had to
substitute for the real Sherwood. Seriously, though, it is the very
«wilderness» of the shot that provides most of the contrast with previous
photos — not just the dense green foliage, but also the Beatles’ velvet
autumnal clothes, their slightly more-dishevelled-than-usual hairdos (which
almost seem to mimick the color of the foliage), and the distant looks on
their faces (only John looks at you directly, with more self-assured
condescension than ever before). And then, of course, there is the
distended-distorted effect on the finished photo, which came about more or
less by accident and has regularly been interpreted as a symbolic
announcement for the coming of the LSD era. Were we a subspecies of Sherlock
Holmes, we would probably have to conclude that the music within the album must reflect the influence of folk
music (the foliage), angry garage rock (the informal looks and the semi-sneer
on John’s face), and chemical substances (the distortion and the «globulous» lettering by Charles Front which would soon
become the default font for all things psychedelic) — and we’d be right on
all three counts, even if it’s all retrospective cheating. Then there’s the album title,
which was chosen, I guess, just because the guys wanted their LP titles to
start having an identity of their own, and the pun «rubber sole» – «rubber
soul» seemed to possess precisely that kind of identity. The Beatles
themselves explained the idea of rubber
soul as a punny variation on plastic
soul, as if this was some kind of self-humiliating homage to American
soul artists, but, honestly, such a move would have made far better sense for
bands like The Spencer Davis Group or Manfred Mann, whose frontmen (Stevie
Winwood, Paul Jones) took far more pride in imitating black American soulmen
than John Lennon or Paul McCartney. While a little bit of Motown influence
certainly has its place on Rubber Soul,
as it had on about 99% of records by British pop artists at the time, Rubber Soul does not really have a
single song per se that would qualify as «soul music», treading the same
ground with the likes of Otis Redding or Marvin Gaye. Rather, it’s just a
title that marks a short-lived «pretentious age» in the titling of Beatles’
albums, together with Revolver; by
1967, the band would be completely over that phase. But in 1965, it served
its purpose — dispensing one more drop of intriguing mystery for the adoring
fanboy or fangirl, ready to be guided further into the unknown. In the absolute majority of
Beatles narratives, a thick red line is always drawn between Rubber Soul and everything that
preceded it — this, the way we are
usually taught, is where the Beatles effectively ceased to be a
teenager-oriented pop band and transitioned into their mature,
psychologically deep, and musically experimental phase; a message that
sometimes has the negative collateral effect of having Beatle neophytes
ignore everything that came before and starting their musical journey with
the Beatles either with this record or with Revolver. Big mistake, unless you’re in a real hurry and unable
to devote just a few more hours of your precious time to one of the greatest
musical acts of the 20th century. Big mistake also because the Beatles’
musical evolution was precisely that — evolution,
gradually taking place in small (or big) steps from one LP to another, rather
than revolution with a clear and
indisputable line of demarcation. Some of the songs on Rubber Soul had a more traditional feel and could have easily fit
in on Help!; others were already
ahead of their time and could have felt perfectly appropriate on Revolver or even Sgt. Pepper. But although the same could probably be said of just
about any Beatles record, since they all combined nods to the past with peeks
into the future, I do believe that there are two facts about Rubber Soul that make it into the «quintessential transitional record»
for the band. Fact #1: this is the first ever
Beatles record to feature original compositions that are not, in fact, «love
songs». Prior to Rubber Soul,
somewhat ironically, the only Beatles’ recordings to not feature love-themed
lyrics were their covers — stuff from rock’n’roll anthems like ‘Roll Over
Beethoven’ to jokey country tunes like ‘Act Naturally’. Even when John began
displaying signs of Bob Dylan’s influence, compositions like ‘I’m A Loser’ or
‘Help!’ would still formally remain
songs about the protagonist’s relationship with his precious other; it’s
almost as if they were aching to break out of the formula but were still
being kept back by either social pressure or, more likely, shyness and fear
of embarrassing themselves through lack of experience with poetic language. Rubber Soul finally breaks through
that barrier — still tentatively, for sure, but with all of the band’s songwriters expressly trying their hand at
stuff that goes beyond the boy-meets-girl or boy-loses-girl motives: John
with ‘Nowhere Man’, George with ‘Think For Yourself’ and even Paul with
‘Drive My Car’ (which could, I suppose, technically be described in
boy-meets-girl terms, but they’re not even in a relationship!). Plus, of
course, there is John’s stuff such as ‘Norwegian Wood’ or ‘In My Life’, which
is about romantic relationships,
but described from such completely new and unexpected angles that neither
could really be classified as a «love ballad». If anything, this is a heck of
an objective marker that demands a thick red line. BUT... Fact #2: this is the last ever Beatles LP to feature songs
that were actually played live on stage for the band’s regular tours, though
the meager two selections were quite telling: George’s ‘If I Needed Someone’,
which he may have been regarding as his finest composition to date (and
gladly sang it in concert over his previously being limited to covers like
‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’), and John’s
‘Nowhere Man’, which, consequently, earns the honor of being one of only two
non-cover non-love songs performed live by the Beatles in their touring era —
the other being ‘Paperback Writer’. Still, this does mean that the music on Rubber Soul still fell into the «technically
performable» category, as opposed to Revolver, which came out in August 1966
but whose material was never even rehearsed for the band’s last North
American tour of the same month. And, indeed, you can easily close your eyes
and visualize the Beatles singing most of Rubber Soul on stage in 1965–1966 — but good luck trying to
imagine the same with songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘She Said She Said’, or,
most jawbreakingly, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. In between these two observations
lies everything else: Rubber Soul
is an album of contrasts, and also one where the four distinct personalities
of the individual Beatles — yes, even Ringo — get delineated more clearly
than ever before while still allowing for some collective spirit to show
through (not to mention continuous minor mutual influences enriching the
individual contributions in ways that would be forever closed off after 1970,
despite all the talent still being there). And then there’s all those other influences, too: with Dylan
being the proverbial idol of 1964, 1965 finds the group paying more close
attention to the contemporary American scene on the whole, starting with the
new developments in pop and soul music of the African-American variety
(Atlantic to Motown) and ending with the newly nascent folk-rock of The Byrds
and their own followers across the Atlantic. But let us start from the
beginning. It’s been quite a long time since a Beatles’ LP opened with a Paul
song rather than a John song — and, for that matter, since it opened with a
distinctive electric guitar line rather than a bombastic vocal hook ("it won’t be long yeah...", "it’s been a hard day’s night...",
"this happened once before...",
and, of course, "HELP!").
This is hardly just an accident: Rubber
Soul had very few songs written for it that could qualify as all-out
«rockers», but the Beatles had been accustomed to the practice of beginning
and ending their LPs with blasts of energy, so it was probably a toss here
between ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Run For Your Life’, and, well, the latter song
must have been way too nasty-sounding to provide the necessary opening
positive blast... ...not that the opening blast is
perfectly well described as «positive», though. The prevailing mood in ‘Drive
My Car’ is that of sarcasm, and sarcasm was generally not a thing associated
with the Beatles, and definitely
not with Paul McCartney. John, of course, was well known for sarcasm in his
everyday behavior, both onstage and off it, as well as in his non-musical
writings — but up to this point, he was very careful about sowing any
sarcastic seeds in his songs; and Paul was about as sarcastic as the average
folk singer in Greenwich Village. ‘Drive My Car’, however, does not merely
feature lyrics that roast pretentiously inadequate socialites to almost the
same crisp as Mick Jagger or Ray Davies; it even starts out by adopting the
meanest guitar tone as of yet heard on a Beatles song. It’s a fuzz effect
alright, but George did not use the same kind of overwhelming, deep-and-dirty
fuzz as had already been popularized by the Stones with ‘Satisfaction’ (even
if, I believe, George and Keith used the exact same pedal); it’s a lighter, more
playful version, which perfectly well complements the «light-hearted mockery»
of the lyrics. Apparently Paul went on record
saying that ‘drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex or something
like that, but I have been unable to find direct confirmation of this; I suppose that he may have been thinking
of something like Memphis Minnie’s ‘Me And My Chauffeur’ ("won’t you be my chauffeur, I wants him to
drive me downtown") which is definitely about sex — for that matter,
reverting us to the etymological identity of the word chauffeur = ‘warmer-up’ — but I am not even certain that the
analogy truly popped up into Paul’s or John’s head when they were
collaborating on those lyrics. (Another urban legend, apparently kindled by
the 2014 TV series Cilla, is that
the song tangentially refers to Cilla Black who made her manager and future
husband Bobby Willis turn down his own recording contract because she needed
him to "drive her car" — which is far more close to the song’s
message, but could be just a puffed-up tale). In any case, there is no need to look for any sexual metaphors
in ‘Drive My Car’ unless your stated goal in life is to find sexual metaphors
in everything. There is, however, a need to look at ‘Drive My Car’ as the
Beatles’ first tongue-in-cheek look at themselves from the «stardom» angle —
this is a song that they could hardly have been able to write even a year
earlier, reflecting a somewhat jaded air that could only have come from a
long period of moving up the social ladder. And most importantly, this air is
coming from Paul, not John. The
world might not have realized that immediately, but ‘Drive My Car’ announced
the arrival of a new Paul McCartney — the eccentric, whimsical,
try-anything-once Paul McCartney who would very soon become the primary
energy-generating engine for the Beatles in their «mature» stage. For the
sake of historical correctness, too, it should be noted that Paul’s original
lyrics for the song ("you can buy
me diamond rings") were said to be traditionally fluffy, and it took
a solid session with John at his side to arrive at the sarcastic wit of the
final version. But the final version was
fully endorsed by Paul, and there is no doubt that his own lyric-writing
skills must have been greatly expanded by the successful result. And it doesn’t hurt, either, that
this «new Paul arrival» would be presented in the form of one of the band’s
most musically and sonically sophisticated songs to date. A change in
artistic philosophy always goes better with a little revolution in musical
style, doesn’t it? There is usually said to be a strong Stax influence here,
with McCartney’s bass and Harrison’s guitar joining together in low-end
unison, but this is still a pop-rocker with sharply pronounced, repetitive,
tightly disciplined vocal and instrumental hooks, rather than the
comparatively more loose and free-flowing melodies by the likes of Otis
Redding. The song has grit and determination as it ploughs on (more cowbell!),
not to mention Paul’s slide solo which, as it climbs higher and higher up the
scale in those final bars, has almost more of an Indian feel to it than the
actual use of the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’ further on down the line. And let
us not forget about how brilliantly the sarcastic mantra of beep beep-mm, beep beep yeah! «modernizes»
the jam-coda repetitive endings of the past by bringing them in line with
this new ironic attitude. She’s got no car, and it’s breaking her heart, but
who’s to stop her from honking? Another thing that is quite
striking about ‘Drive My Car’ is the increased level of «textural» diversity
and richness. Before 1965, the Beatles were always mostly concerned about basic instrumental melody and vocal
harmony, which usually meant that you could more or less extrapolate the
first 30–40 seconds of any Beatles song onto the rest of it, predicting
everything but the instrumental break. Likewise, instruments beyond the
standard rhythm-lead-bass-drums combo were rare (at most, a piano part here
and there). Listen to a bombastic album opener like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or
‘Help!’ for the first time in your life and chances are your attention won’t
even be drawn to anything other than the vocal melodies which just get you
immediately entangled in that unstoppable tide. ‘Drive My Car’, while
certainly not the most inventive Beatles song when it comes to build-up (the
sonic arrangement is kept fairly stable throughout), is really the band’s first album-opener which explicitly states
that "we’re not the boy band
you’re looking for — we are the music makers". I myself remember
fiddling with the stereo balance on my old cassette tape player and how
‘Drive My Car’ was so particularly striking when you muted either the left or
the right speaker: vocals only and percussion in one channel, and then you
could just get the guitars and pianos in the other and it was a completely
different and still awesome experience. But let’s
get back to this «new and improved Paul» thing. ‘Drive My Car’ is clearly the
most radical stage of his evolution on here, even if it is unquestionably
tainted with John’s DNA as well. But although the other three songs on here
which are also direct brainchilds of Paul’s — ‘You Won’t See Me’, ‘I’m
Looking Through You’, and ‘Michelle’ — are more conventional in their subject
matters, they all reflect significant advances in lyrical skills and
emotional complexity. That line about how "I have had enough, so act your age" in ‘You Won’t See Me’
might just as well be hurled by Paul at himself, as he struggles, and
occasionally succeeds, in overcoming standard romantic clichés.
Doubtless, the difficulties of his relationship with Jane Asher contributed
to this, as both ‘You Won’t See Me’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You’ are usually
said to have been written about their confrontations; and although neither of
the two can raise above the «male point of view», as the protagonist always
keeps presenting himself and only himself as the wronged side, it’s still a
far more interesting point of view than, say, the straightforwardly
unreflected "I ain’t no fool and I
don’t take what I don’t want" bit from ‘Another Girl’. ‘You Won’t
See Me’, in particular, has always seemed like a heavily underrated classic
to me — just because the song does not have something glaringly unusual and
outstanding about it, like that accordeon in ‘Michelle’, does not warrant
popular neglect. Have you ever noticed that, despite being always branded as
the sentimental Beatle, Paul McCartney is pretty much incapable of presenting
himself, in any of his songs, as the owner of a broken heart? Even John
Lennon could find it in his heart to plead and grovel; meanwhile, Paul’s
«women problems» always result in anger, bitterness, and accusations. ‘You
Won’t See Me’ is a perfect example — the lyrical hero here is confused and
embittered about his lover not returning his calls, but all those "I will lose my mind if you won’t see me"
and "I just can’t go on"
sound like expressions of discomfort rather than desperation. The song has a
sharp, stern, driving pulse, punctuated by Harrison’s choppy, blues-rockish
rhythm chords and extremely well-disciplined, which would never agree with a
message of madness and chaos — it’s more of a complaint about the ungrateful
girl wasting the protagonist’s precious time with her irrational behavior.
Yet at the same time there is a heavy cloud of psychological confusion
hanging around the song, illustrated first by the nagging, sustained backing
vocals with their shifting pitch, and then, only during the last verse, with that totally genius move of
having Mal Evans holding down a single A note on the Hammond organ through
all of its bars. Ever since I was a little kid listening to this on tape, I
always wondered about why that last verse sounded deeper and heavier than
everything that came before it, as if some new dimension formed itself around
the singer — and as I found out decades later, it was all just a member of
one not-particularly-musical roadie holding down one note with his finger. It
may arguably be the quintessential example of generating genius effect with
the simplest means in pop music history. ‘I’m
Looking Through You’, thematically, is pretty much the sequel to ‘You Won’t
See Me’: the hero and his partner are reconnected, but things don’t get much
better because some invisible line has already been crossed. This time,
McCartney chooses the language of the young folk-rock genre to deliver the
message — which is perfectly appropriate, given how both Bob Dylan and the
Byrds had already used it to deliver series of sharp barbs in the general
direction of their real or virtual girlfriends. It’s a bit slight / clunky next
to ‘You Won’t See Me’, both lyrically and musically ("the only difference is you’re down there
/ I’m looking through you, and you’re
nowhere" has always confused me with its unintentionally
Schrödinger’s perspective), but what makes it more fun is when you
compare the original version (as seen on bootlegs or Anthology 2) with the finalized one. Originally, each verse ended
with a short instrumental chorus playing nasty, distorted two-note organ
«strikes» that would temporarily transpose the song to a gritty blues-rock
setting, as if to symbolize the protagonist temporarily going off his rocker
and winding himself up to a state of hyper-aggression. "Don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a
baseball bat", that kind of vibe. But in the end, they threw out
that idea — the Hammond chords stay there all right, but now they are not as
shrill or distorted, and the main hook power is transferred to the little
winding «jiggy» riff played by George, which is far more playful and cuddly
than crazy-angry. I still couldn’t call that mood shift perfect — I mean, who
on earth breaks out into a harmless jig upon prodding himself into an
emotional outburst? — but I appreciate the effort in recognizing that a
particular transition was unnaturally jarring and trying to remedy it to the
best of their ability. Still, I believe that ‘I’m Looking Through You’ falls
a wee bit short of the Beatles’ standard for perfection, and could have used
a little more thought in all departments. The same
complaint is, of course, inapplicable to ‘Michelle’, which is as perfect as a
song of that kind could ever be, but writing about ‘Michelle’ after all these
years feels particularly embarrassing, what with all of its
«Frenchploitation» resulting in its status as one of those several «Beatle
songs for ringtone people», along with ‘Yesterday’, discussing which in a
serious tone is akin to discussing ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ in a
serious tone. I shall be, therefore, very brief on this one, and just state
two fairly obvious observations that might, perhaps, help broaden somebody’s
perspective on this one: (a) the «Frenchploitation» is forgivable because of
its absolute innocence — this is clearly
written from the viewpoint of a humble admirer of a non-understandable,
mystical foreign beauty, mesmerized by the very fact of the communication
breakdown and probably not wanting at all to improve his understanding of the
French language or culture so as not to break the spell; (b) the fact that
the base melody of the song actually owes more to Chet Atkins than Michel
Legrand or Marguerite Monnot is quite hilarious in itself, since it
reinforces the idea of «American tourist lost in the shadow of the Eiffel
Tower», with a clever lad from Liverpool serving as a medium. In any
case, cheesy or not, ‘Michelle’ is the final top cherry on Paul McCartney’s
triumph of diversity here: Stax, Motown, Byrds, Chet Atkins, and the Eiffel
Tower are all run through his melodic converter and emerge transformed and
reinvented in different ways. This is not «peak McCartney» yet; he has not
yet properly begun to create his legendary «gallery of characters», singing
mostly from his own perspective, which, as we know, is not really the easiest
thing for him to do —probably the biggest difference between him and John, as
John always found it difficult and, perhaps, even deeply dishonest to hide
behind a mask, whereas Paul would turn out to be one of the biggest mask fans
in the musical world. But it also makes this little transitional batch of
songs somewhat unique, as we see Paul move away from stereotypical and
formulaic ways of songwriting (especially in terms of lyrics) to something
more deeply meaningful, trying on the cloak of «singer-songwriter» for a
short while. It did not suit him all that well, so he would eventually
exchange it for the much better fitting cloak of «master storyteller». But
it’s fun to catch somebody in a moment of such a transition, is it not?.. Meanwhile,
for Beatle John this transition seems to have been completed. Out of the five
«totally John» contributions to Rubber
Soul (‘The Word’ and ‘Wait’ are «mostly John», but reflect more of a
collective group spirit than the others), only the much-maligned ‘Run For
Your Life’ — which, since it closes the album, we shall return to later —
reflects the past rather than the future. Any
of the other four songs could have easily and comfortably fit onto any of the
later Beatles albums, or even onto some of John’s own solo records: apart
from a leftover naïve or clumsy lyrical twist every now and then, they
all capture John Lennon at the peak of his creative abilities. As I
already said, the key difference in the evolutionary arcs of John and Paul
was that Paul, through much of his life, strived to become an actor, trying on one persona after
another; be it Sergeant Pepper or the traveling con man in his video for ‘Say
Say Say’ with Michael Jakson, Paul loves feeling what it is to be in somebody
else’s skin. John’s journey was the complete opposite — early on,
inexperience forced him to adopt other people’s clichés and formulas,
but by late 1965, he was all but set to follow the principle that would soon
be put into words by Elvis: I’m never
going to sing another song I don’t believe in. Elvis himself,
unfortunately, did not succeed in keeping that vow (or maybe he thought he
did, but it didn’t help him anyway), but for John, this would become the
natural way of existing, as he’d hatefully blast to pieces everything that he
perceived as «fake» (e.g. ‘It’s Only Love’ from Help!). Perhaps it
was this particular fork in the road, more than anything else, that
ultimately led to the Beatles’ breakup (and a somewhat similar dichotomy would
occasionally strain the partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, though
their own personalities were better capable of weathering any such storms) —
but as of late 1965, I suppose that John and Paul were still incapable of
coming up with the well-thought-out conclusion that they were really
incompatible with each other, and with Paul writing these Asher-inspired
songs like ‘You Won’t See Me’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You’, and with John
learning to write direct songs about his own state of mind, Rubber Soul might ultimately be the
most «personal» LP the Beatles ever released — everything that came later was
very much torn between the personal and the impersonating. Technically,
one could probably perceive a song like ‘Nowhere Man’ more «impersonating»
than «personal», especially if you happened to see Yellow Submarine as a little kid and your memory forever
associated ‘Nowhere Man’ with the character of «Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph. D»
from the cartoon. It is, by the way, somewhat telling that the earliest
Beatles song on Yellow Submarine —
the pinnacle of the Beatles’ «psychedelic» image — is ‘Nowhere Man’ from Rubber Soul, as if it was
specifically intended to point out that the band’s psychedelic period starts here. But it somewhat depends also on
how far-stretched our limits are for the term «psychedelic» itself. For
instance, are ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ both
psychedelic, or is the latter more psychedelic than the former? ‘Lucy In The
Sky’ does, in fact, create an alternate imaginary colorful reality; ‘Nowhere
Man’, on the contrary, is very much a tale of this world, merely stripped of its everyday hustle-and-bustle. And oh
yes, bless you, writer’s block, as the tale goes that John created ‘Nowhere
Man’ while lying on the studio floor and desperately realizing that he had no
new ideas to use for writing another number — which led him to the idea of
writing a song about nothing, and make that proper nothing, rather than the famous «pseudo-nothing» of the
creators of Seinfeld. The very
first Beatles song that is not — or, at least, has no hope of being
interpreted as — a love / romance song, ‘Nowhere Man’ is also the first in a
series of John tunes that could be collectively dubbed «cosmic flow songs»,
which also includes ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Across The
Universe’, ‘#9 Dream’ from his solo career, and perhaps a couple other songs
with the overall message of turn off
your mind, relax and float downstream. It is a classic Taoist / Buddhist
motif that you would rather expect from the likes of the ultra-religious
George Harrison — but, surprisingly, George never wrote a single song like
that in his lifetime; despite the «quiet Beatle» reputation and all, his
spiritual songs would always be bursting with activity, philosophy,
preaching, and emotion. He had absolutely nothing on John when it came to
truly becoming «one with the flow» — even a song like ‘The Inner Light’,
directly quoting the Dao de jing
and all, feels like an energized travelogue next to the titles I just listed. The actual
genius of ‘Nowhere Man’, though, is how it manages to convey this «cosmic
flow» feel within what seems like a relatively conventional and fairly
dynamic folk-rock framework. There’s no sitar here, no droning, no super-slow
tempo, you can even dance along to the tune — heck, the Beatles actually took
this on tour with them in 1966
rather than ‘Drive My Car’ or ‘What Goes On’ — but it does feel like the
perfect song for lying on the floor and floating downstream, doesn’t it?
Perhaps it has something to do with the opening a cappella vocal harmonies — he’s a real Nowhere Man, sitting in his
Nowhere Land — giving the impression of a lullaby, even if they are
delivered with much more energy than any genuine lullaby. The steady, lulling
tempo, the soft change to the relative minor key in the bridge which gives
the impression of added depth without disrupting the flow, the mantraic
repetition of making all his nowhere
plans for nobody at the end — this is really the perfect meaningful
lullaby for an infant, even if it was actually written about a 25-year old
Scouse git. But I guess he was
lying in a fetal position, more or less. One thing
that separates ‘Nowhere Man’ from all those other cosmic flow songs, though — and ultimately makes it more of a
fascinating puzzle than all of them — is that the others all sound like works
of professional advertisement, a set of alluring, tempting invitations to
drop everything and go chasing after all that limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns
and so on. ‘Nowhere Man’, however, does not at all feel like shameless
propaganda for the song’s portagonist or his personal world of anti-matter.
First, John cleverly shifts the narrative to 3rd person perspective, as if he
is really the exhibit and we are trying to give him an objective assessment
from the other side of the bars. Second, there is no morale here, no
judgement, no admiration or condemnation, perhaps just a sort of slight
bewilderment and amusement. We are teetering on the brink that separates our reality from his, getting a good view and soaking in the fumes while at the
same time remaining somewhat aloof and skeptical. Our own reaction ranges
from a subtle desire to help ("you
don’t know what you’re missing... the world is at your command") to
an equally subtle desire to let things evolve precisely the way they are
meant to be ("leave it all till
somebody else lends you a hand"). At the end of the day, the
question of whether it is awesome or awful to be a Nowhere Man remains unanswered.
Heck, I don’t believe it even remains asked. As is
common for all the best Beatles songs that have to include at least one or
two «sonic puzzles», ‘Nowhere Man’ also has its own befuddling moment: the
guitar solo, which was apparently played in unison by John and George on twin
Fender Stratocasters, ends with this one high harmonic note — the «lightbulb PING!», I call it — which is
absolutely not required, as the solo melody has already been resolved before,
but still adds a terrific final counterpoint. Usually a sound like that would
symbolize intellectual or spiritual illumination — the lightbulb, right? —
and you could, in fact, see this as a symbolic recognition that it is
precisely the «Nowhere Man Lifestyle» that ultimately leads to the Perfect
Awakening. But on the other hand, it is not at the end of the song, it’s in
the middle, so perhaps it is more like an imaginary scenario: what could and should be, a model, a blueprint, whereas the actual reality is
far more ambiguous and uncertain. In any case, it is certainly one of the
most intriguing single-note moments ever generated by George Harrison. (He
could never properly recreate it in any of the live performances of the song
I’ve heard, though. Touring really sucks!) Yet at
this point in Beatles history, ‘Nowhere Man’ is still more of an accident, a
result of spontaneous illumination pointing the way (one way?) to the future;
when it comes to writing on schedule, John Lennon is still mainly preoccupied
with writing about boy-girl relationships. He does continue to write about
them in more and more adventurous ways, though, and if your acquaintance with
Rubber Soul had been limited to
the first two songs — ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ — you would have
left with a firm conviction that the romantic Beatles had all but
fundamentally merged with the venomous Rolling Stones, with a small but
palpable blister of Bob Dylan in between. Melodically,
‘Norwegian Wood’ picks up right from where ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love
Away’ left off on the previous album: a slow, shuffling, meandering acoustic
ballad with a mumbling, morose Lennon vocal. And once again, the hero of the
song becomes the victim of female cruelty — except that this time, he prefers
to take retributive action rather than just stand "head in hand"
and whine like a lil’ pansy. That first verse – "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" —
already builds more character by itself than an entire poem; a little folk
spirit, a little Dylan, and a little sarcasm. As the story unwraps before our
eyes — and this is the first actual story
told within a Beatles song — we get a visual image of the posh, pretentious,
probably esoterically-minded lady (according to McCartney, «Norwegian wood»
was what the furniture was made of in the Ashers’ house, unless he’s just
trying to score himself extra credit for the words here) who is clearly
willing to show off but not so eager to put out, and in the end, receives her
just desserts, so to speak. Funny enough, discussions about the literal-figurative
meaning of ‘Norwegian Wood’ still shake up the Internet from time to time,
and plenty of people still refuse
to take the song’s shocking conclusion of I
lit a fire literally: how could
sweet baby John have written a song about setting somebody’s house on fire,
especially if it was just for the «crime» of having to sleep in that
somebody’s bathtub? But these are probably the same people who think that
Phil Collins actually declined to save a man from drowning, because, well, it
says so in the song. To me,
much more interesting is a thematic link between ‘Norwegian Wood’ and the
significantly earlier ‘Play With Fire’ — while the Stones’ tale of the
crime-and-punishment of their imaginary Posh Girl model is more abstract, the
basic message remains the same: "don’t
you play with me, ’cause you play with fire" (and also delivered
within the setting of a slow acoustic ballad, though the Stones go for a
spooky Gothic vibe rather than Greenwich Village-style folk). John himself
stated that ‘Norwegian Wood’ was his attempt to write a «veiled» account of
an affair he had so as not to rile up Cynthia, but in the end the song is not about an affair — it’s about a failed stab at an affair and its
rather out-of-hand consequences. Thematically, it belongs to that long, long
series of songs written by young British and American pop stars about the
inevitable problem of «low-middle class boy winds up in high society, picks
up upper-middle class girl, sit back and watch the show». The Stones, in
particular, loved that genre, but apparently the Beatles were not immune to
it, either. Moral of the story: «if
your girl invites you to sit on a rug instead of a chair, you clearly took a
wrong turn in life somewhere». That the
song once again employs a Dylanesque melody to get that message across is no
accident — given Bob’s own story of putting down beautiful (and rich?) girls,
John finally got brave enough to deliver his own take on that paradigm. That
it also becomes the very first pop song to use a sitar for its arrangement is,
however, more of an accident. Well, after all, it is documented to have more or less been an accident, with George
just happening to pick up the instrument that had lied there unused for some
time, and the melody he plays is quite trivial, too (this was before he
actually started taking lessons on the instrument). And you can easily
picture ‘Norwegian Wood’ without the sitar and it’ll still sound good with
just the 12-string guitar. (There’s an earlier version on Anthology 2 where the sitar is also
played during the bridge section and it is absolutely-utterly-unbearably
godawful there, thank God somebody had the bright idea to exclude it). But there
are two good «artistic» arguments for why, in the end, it does belong: (a) the simple one — an
«Indian vibe» would definitely agree with the interior of an
exotically-arranged posh house with rugs instead of chairs, symbolizing the
potential Orientalistic trendiness of John’s femme fatale; and (b) the more complex one — the sitar, an
instrument that (to the occasional Western mind at least) symbolizes
peacefulness and wisdom, somehow reinforces the «cool, calm, collected»
attitude of the protagonist, who allows himself to be quietly manipulated
without displaying any emotional excesses, and then, eventually, just lits
his little fire without any particular turmoil and to little fanfare. Listen
to how unperturbed and gentle this gentleman remains throughout — a far cry
from the usually over-emotional vocal deliveries that most of John’s songs
were known for previously. In the end, ‘Norwegian Wood’ is a combination of
gentle, funny, and shocking that remains fairly unique in the Beatles’
catalog, and is perhaps their most sophisticated twisting of the Dylan
influence (Bob’s own ‘4th Time Around’ has often been called a conscious
answer to ‘Norwegian Wood’, or even a «parody» of it, though I really don’t
like that word in this context; I feel, though, that there are still far more
differences between the two songs than similarities, though their comparison
always makes for a good intellectual challenge). But
‘Norwegian Wood’ is also a fantasy — the product of John’s creepy
imagination, a grotesque and terrible scenario of hyperbolic revenge from a
"what-if..." perspective. Meanwhile, a song like ‘Girl’ feels like
it should hit much closer to home. John starts it up with the same kind of
«folksy» introduction, or maybe even in a slightly more epic key — "is there anybody going to listen to my
story..." is almost Homeric here — but this time, the song does not
have a proper plot and is instead a character portrayal, John’s most direct
and detailed one to date, so much so that it is difficult to believe he is
not talking about a real person, or at least about somebody directly inspired
by a real person. In subsequent interviews, John himself would insist that
the «girl» was an imaginary character, a phantom vision presaging the arrival
of Yoko — but I have a nagging suspicion that he was confused, because the
portrait by no means agrees with what we know of the John and Yoko love story
("she’s the kind of girl that puts
you down when friends are there?" "was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?"
— nah, come on!). It seems
much more likely to me that in reality, the song was inspired by John’s
concurrently troubled marriage with Cynthia — the only «girl» with whom he’d
had a lengthy enough relationship by that time to use as a basis for such a
song — but sufficiently well masked so as not to be easily guessed. The
romance here, while clearly managing to hold together for a while through
sheer mystical infatuation, is ultimately doomed, with zero chance of a happy
ending, so a real flesh-and-blood Cynthia would certainly fit the bill much
better than an imaginary Yoko. But it does not matter so much, of course, if
‘Girl’ has a real flesh-and-blood prototype, as it does that a song like
‘Girl’ would have been impossible to write, or to sing with such feeling even
a year earlier — its painful, tired trod, loosely based on a Greek melody
(Paul usually mentions Mikis Theodorakis’ soundtrack to Zorba The Greek as an inspiration), is the confessional sound of
somebody who’s lived through a long period of experience, and one that goes
beyond the simplistic «she cheats on me, I cheat on her, we’re probably
through but it still hurts» messages of generic breakup songs. John is a
master of many emotional states, but there are few he is capable of
transmitting better than basic tiredness
— exhaustion, fatigue, prostration, feeling drained and worn-out, you name it
— and ‘Girl’ is the song that opens up that kind of shop, but, naturally, it
should have taken at least a few years to get around to that state of
conscience. The base
message of the song is even better encapsuled in its chorus, I think, than in
the (already quite superior) lyrics. How many one-word choruses do we know
that simultaneously reflect adoration, misery, and recrimination? but this is
precisely what John’s "girl...
girl..." does, torn between the very ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ that are
explicitly mentioned in the last verse, with the sharply hissing breath
intake (John gave specific instructions to George Martin to capture that one
as clear as possible) as a particular point of interest. There are really
only two types of situations in real life, I think, when you make that kind
of sound — (a) during sex, and (b) before taking some deep and brave plunge
into the unknown (sometimes both are the same thing). That’s ‘Girl’ for you,
the conflict between erotic infatuation and intellectual disillusionment.
(Pretty sure that was more or less the story of John’s relationship with
Cynthia). It’s a nasty business, of course, because, just like in everything
he wrote at the time, the blame is always on the girl, never on the guy, who
comes across as a helpless, pitiful victim (which can hardly be true about
John at the time). We only get one side of the coin here, and have to use our
own intellect and imagination to guess what might be on the other side. But
damn if this one side of the coin isn’t a real beauty in all of its
psychological turmoil. And damn if that last verse — "did she understand it when they said that
a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure?" — isn’t a
phenomenally well-modernized take on the old and beaten "I worked five long years for that woman"
motif. But as
cool as those lyrics are, neither ‘Norwegian Wood’ nor ‘Girl’ represent the
pinnacle of John’s new-and-improved verbal skills on this album; that honor
squarely falls to ‘In My Life’. Not because ‘In My Life’ has any particularly
mind-blowing twists of phrase, similes, metaphors, or allegories; on the
contrary, out of all these songs it is probably the most direct and
unambiguous — you do not have to reconstruct vague particularities of the
plot, like in ‘Norwegian Wood’, or make guesses about the specific details of
the protagonist’s feelings, as in ‘Girl’. It is simply that ‘In My Life’ has
a narrative that confounds our expectations. We are used to the Beatles
singing love songs, so when John begins singing a seemingly nostalgic ode to
"all these places" that
"had their moments", we
are confused — it’s as if he’s turning into Frank Sinatra here, giving us his
own take on ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ (which, by the way, might not be a
total coincidence: Sinatra’s September
Of My Years had just been released in August ’65 before the Beatles went
into the studio to record Rubber Soul,
and must have caught John’s attention one way or another). A heartfelt
nostalgic anthem from the 25-year old John Lennon? Talk about premature
maturity, but then again, why the hell not? Especially considering the sheer
distance they all crossed from their past lives to their present ones in a
matter of three years — certainly their existence in pre-1963 Liverpool must
have seemed like a total dream to the Fab Four by this point. But then
in the second verse, the song completely shifts gears: "But of all these friends and lovers /
There is no one [who] compares with you...". So it is not a nostalgic song after all — the
nostalgia was just lyrical bait for us to get to the real message of the
composition. This is John renouncing
his past, not yearning for it, and looking into the future. I’m no big expert
on the art of popular songwriting, but I did sit through of Ella Fitzgerald’s
Songbooks at one time, and I am
not sure that this kind of smooth transformation, from old-time nostalgia to
current infatuation, had ever been properly realized by any of the great
lyricists of the 20th century. If John himself is to be believed, the song
started life as a pure nostalgia
trip — with lyrics actually referencing Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane in
one of those «premature» efforts — but then he didn’t like the results and
reworked them into this shape,
connecting and contrasting the past with the present and using the nostalgia
as merely a trampoline rather than a goal-in-itself. How grand is that? And
speaking of trampolines, this
particular "in my life, I’ll love
you more" is most definitely not
about Cynthia Lennon, who, for all we know, actually belongs in the category
of "lovers and friends I still can
recall", despite still being very much a part of John’s life in
1965. If anything, it is not ‘Girl’, but rather ‘In My Life’ that presages
the arrival of Yoko — that one idealized romantic partner who can, on her
solitary own, overwrite and override all the happy memories of one’s past
life. Nobody could guess that in 1965, but ‘In My Life’ was indeed a prophecy
that John would become capable of realizing just a few years later — in fact
I’m sure he would have re-recorded it with a new dedication, if only his
personality happened to end up on the cheesier rather than classier side (but
it’s a pretty fantastic kind of if). (On a
somewhat humorous note, looking over the lyrics of ‘In My Life’, I find that
it makes an absolutely perfect
cover for a Christian artist — I mean, from that kind of angle it’s almost as
if Saint frickin’ Paul himself wrote those words — and sure enough, there is
at least an acoustic cover by Phil Keaggy somewhere out there in the woods. Particularly humorous given how it
came out only a few months before John’s bigger-than-Jesus comments; I wonder
if he himself ever looked back on his final lyrical results and had such a
good laugh about what turns out to be his most Christian song ever.) Of course,
we don’t just love ‘In My Life’ for its lyrics. We love it for its opening
tender riff, hanging out there suggestive and unresolved between each verse
until it finally gets a happy resolving «answer» in the final bar of the
song. We might love it for Ringo’s expressive drum pattern, where the hi-hat
acts more like the standard rhythm keeper while the bass and snare do their
steady melodic dance, giving the song its assured and energetic pace rather
than letting it go across all wishy-washy. We might be affected by how the
second part of the verse, so as not to let the song become too predictable
and lose our attention, is enlivened by the stop-and-start elements, as if
there is something so particularly
important about the line "all
these places had their moments" that we have to hear it without the
drums. We might appreciate the thin, ghostly backing vocals to the even
lines, haunting the lead vocalist like will-o’-wisps from the past. And, of
course, there’s always the George Martin-played solo, which, ironically,
probably did more to popularize the harpsichord for the upcoming
«baroque-pop» revolution than any other song of its epoch despite not being played on a harpsichord
(George played it slowly on a regular piano and then sped up the tape to
match the song’s tempo). A little faux-Bach is precisely what the doctor
ordered here, combining an «archaic» vibe to match the nostalgia theme with a
«church» vibe to match its rampant Christianity, uh, I mean, its general
romantic aura and all that. In between
just these three songs, ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘Girl’, and ‘In My Life’, we get a
huger emotional palette than we ever saw from John Lennon before — bitter
irony, straight emotional pain, and glorious cathartic premonition of the
future. Throw in the stark raving mad anger of ‘Run For Your Life’ (which I’m
still not ready to discuss yet), and there you have it, four basic emotional
states of which John Lennon would be the undisputed king in pop music — in my
personal opinion, not even until the breakup of the Beatles, but until his
last dying breath in 1980. And as far as I’m concerned, it is this incredible
ability to express those emotional states that makes all these songs so
great, much more so than any formally admirable musicological aspects. For
all the unusual elements in their chord sequences, harmonic arrangements, and
production details, their chief attraction lies in John’s vocal delivery;
take away every single instrument and those vocals alone, in all their
nakedness, would still be unforgettable. In light
of these monsters, it is rather telling that two other songs whose authorship
also primarily lies with either John or Paul, but both of which radiate a
clear impression of «group work», feel somewhat slight in comparison to the
more «personal» stuff on the album. One of these is ‘Wait’, not a bad tune in
its own right, but one that I have always regarded as the weak link on Rubber Soul and shall probably
continue to do so until my dying day. Apparently ‘Wait’ was an outtake from
the Help! sessions, and oh boy
does it ever show. A catchy, but melodically rigid and lyrically generic
number, it is in the same structural ballpark with ‘Another Girl’ and ‘Tell
Me What You See’: verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, bridge, no solos, no
interesting variations between the different verses, no proper build-up. On
its own, it’s okay, it’s a song about longing and yearning and it does have
some of that atmosphere. Inside Rubber
Soul, it is an official piece of filler, thrown in at the last moment so
that the album could get a Christmas release after all. If I were a sneaky
wizard, I would have justifiedly transposed it over to Side B of Help! and pinched one of its stronger
titles for Rubber Soul instead —
maybe even ‘Yesterday’, or at least ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’. Then again,
perhaps it’s a good thing that ‘Wait’ ended up here, if only as a flashing
symbol of all the progress the Beatles had made in a matter of several
months. Much
better, and much more suitable for the LP as a whole, is ‘The Word’, mainly a
John vehicle but feeling like a joint John-Paul declaration since so much of
the song is taken up by their twin harmonies in the chorus. Obviously, this
is a precursor to ‘All You Need Is Love’: the very first Beatles song on
which «love» is praised as a general concept, rather than used in the narrow
sense of being applied to a particular person. The lyrics are simplistic,
especially compared to all those great strides forward on John’s other songs,
but they are intentionally
simplistic: "in the beginning I
misunderstood", says John (and I assume that by beginning he really means middle
school, where indeed a simple mention of ‘love’ can easily ruin a boy’s
reputation), but then goes on to bravely admit "but now I’ve got it, the word is good" — well, I guess, being
a rich, talented, and admired superstar does
give you quite a bit of leeway after all. This song, unlike ‘Wait’, I have
always loved as strongly as anything else on here, not because it promotes a
universal message of sunshine and marshmallows, but because it fuckin’ rocks. Play the first four seconds and
you will never guess that it is about a universal message of sunshine and
marshmallows. The opening piano chords are badass, the choppy, screechy
guitar licks are blues-rock incarnate, Paul’s bassline, when isolated, sounds like
a creepy theme from a spy movie, and the twin harmonies sound like a military
order as they drill themselves inside your skull (my favorite moment is the
transition to give the word a chance to
say, by which time the drilling has ascended to falsetto range and the
Jedi mind trick is pretty much complete). ‘All You Need Is Love’ is all
flowery and sentimental in comparison, but ‘The Word’ pulls no punches: it
spreads its message in the roughest, rowdiest way possible. Which is, of
course, why ‘All You Need Is Love’ became such a common staple of our
conscious, while ‘The Word’ remains a proverbial «deep cut» and is hardly
ever heard chanted across a sports arena. Nobody of note ever covered it,
either. (Well, Helen Merrill did back in 1970, and she even got the gist of
the vocals, but the arrangement was rather pathetic). Granted,
‘The Word’ is by far the musically simplest number on the entire album, and perhaps it makes a big mistake by
alternating pathetically short verses with the lengthy and repetitive chorus.
But the chorus is supposed to be
somewhat mantra-like, which is no big deal if it’s such a musically kick-ass
mantra all the way. It’s pretty much throttling you with an iron grip:
"say the word, bitch! I dare you to say the word!" A
little more fuel in the fire and it would become parodic; even as it is, it
teeters on the brink of craziness. Of all the «anthem» songs in the Beatles’
catalog, it is the oddest. Also,
while the track sequencing on the proper, un-mangled UK version of Rubber Soul is not yet nearly as
important as it would soon become, some of the stop-and-starts have an
accidental greatness of their own: ‘The Word’ reinforces the feel of
toughness, as its abrupt piano chords and guitar licks kick in a mere second
after your ears have been released from the punishment of Paul’s fuzz bass on
‘Think Yourself’ — that’s two songs in a row establishing rough spiritual
dominance, mercilessly kicking your ass before finally offering sweet
relaxating release with ‘Michelle’. Let us not forget that, despite all the traditional
«Beatles go folk-rock» labeling for Rubber
Soul, this was 1965, the year of fuzz, feedback, and emerging heroes of
heavy guitar such as Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend, and the Beatles wouldn’t
be the Beatles if they paid no attention to those new developments. The fuzz
bass is what makes ‘Think For Yourself’, the first of George Harrison’s two
contributions to the LP, so distinctive, but it still has a fairly heavy
sound even without the fuzz bass part, as you can hear for yourself on the early non-overdubbed takes,
with just the regular bass part. Although the song has no bridge at all, it
more than makes up for it with the stark contrast between the verses, which
move at a slower, janglier, Byrds-ier pace, and the chorus, which picks up
speed, changes tonality, and almost takes us into a danceable blues-rock
sphere (the instrumental parts have quite a bit in common with ‘I Saw Her Standing
There’, amusingly). This is every bit as surprising and abrupt a shift as in ‘I’m
Looking Through You’, if not more so, making it the most musically adventurous
song George had written at that point. But perhaps
the heaviest thing about the song are its lyrics. Prior to ‘Think For Yourself’,
all of George’s own compositions for the band — ‘Don’t Bother Me’, ‘I Need You’,
‘You Like Me Too Much’ — were in full agreement with the boy-and-girl
formula, even if ‘Don’t Bother Me’ felt rather distinctively bleak for a
simple song about relationships. ‘Think For Yourself’, however, is unusual in
that it leaves lots of space for interpretation. You can, if you so desire, picture it as a stern, stark admonishment
for a former romantic partner: George saying goodbye ("think for yourself, ’cause I won’t be
there with you") to a hopeless case of a lady obsessed with building
sand castles ("you’re telling all
those lies about the good things that we can have if we close our eyes")
and causing trouble and destruction with her reckless behavior ("I know your mind’s made up, you’re gonna
cause more misery"). In fact, I think that’s precisely the natural
way I’d looked at the song in my own early days. But then you read up on what
George himself had to say about it, and he says that it might actually have
been a diatribe against the UK government — again, makes sense, especially
given that he’d soon follow it up with ‘Taxman’ — and that’s a possibility,
too ("the future still looks good
and you’ve got time to rectify all the things that you should", isn’t
that right, eh, Mr. Wilson?). One thing
is for certain: ‘Think For Yourself’, quite true to its title, marks a
turning point where George has begun to carve out a special niche for
himself, rather than just meekly trying to follow in his elder colleagues’
footsteps. The uncanny melodic structure, the unpredictable but natural flow
of chord changes, and, most importantly, the philosophical lyrics set him
here on a direct journey that would culminate in All Things Must Pass five years later. And unlike ‘Nowhere Man’,
which did come about more or less by accident, I think that George’s decision
to «make things more serious» was quite deliberately thought out, and not
merely inspired by that fateful visit to Indiacraft on Oxford Street during
which he bought the ‘Norwegian Wood’ sitar. (On a side
note, I find it slightly adorable that a tiny excerpt of ‘Think For Yourself’
— the you’ve got time to rectify...
bit — was used by the writers of Yellow
Submarine in the scene where the Beatles use music to bring back to life
the Lord Mayor of Pepperland. It’s
like an implicit recognition of the importance of George Harrison’s
contribution to advancing the band’s music to a new stage. Come to think of
it, if performed in full, the song would have been almost as efficient as an
anti-Blue Meanies remedy as ‘All You Need Is Love’, but I guess they just
didn’t have the budget to realize the idea in full). The
situation with George’s other song here, ‘If I Needed Someone’, is a bit more
ambiguous. Many people dismiss it, or at least treat it with a certain level
of condescension because it is such a blatant Byrds rip-off, nicking the riff
from ‘The Bells Of Rhymney’ with just a few minor adjustments to avoid a
copyright suit. (Ironically, pretty much the same chord sequence would also
be used by Pete Townshend for ‘So Sad About Us’ in a few months, but nobody
gave a damn because it was all buried so deep under Keith Moon’s drums, as
usual). I can join in the criticism inasmuch as I agree that the song is not
as «quintessentially George» as ‘Think For Yourself’, and that, along with ‘Wait’,
it is one of the few songs on Rubber Soul
that still somewhat reflects the spirit of the summer of 1965, rather than the autumn of 1965, in between which the tectonic plates of popular
music-making had so drastically rearranged. I can also
join in the criticism inasmuch as I think the lyrics are a bit of a wasted
opportunity. The song starts out shockingly strong with its conditional
phrasing — "if I needed someone to
love" normally implies that I
do not need anybody to love, which is a fairly jaw-dropping statement for
a pop song in 1965, and especially from the guy who, only a few months
before, was so convincingly telling us about how "you don’t realize how much I need you". This gets you
thinking about how the lyrical hero here could be asexual (!), or too busy
with his spirituality, or too preoccupied with his touring schedule, or
simply fed up with romance because all women are evil, or whatever else comes
to an enlightened mind. But then we get to the bridge, and the simple and
boring truth reveals itself: "Had
you come some other day then it might not have been like this / But you see
now I’m too much in love". So he doesn’t need anybody just because
he has already found somebody (Pattie Boyd, presumably). BORING! I really don’t
like that line. Change it to something like "but you see now I’m too far ahead" for me, which would
preserve the mystery of the situation. Other than
that, it’s a fine song, and it does not really sound like the Byrds — derived
from the Byrds, for sure, but just like the Byrds do not sound like Bob Dylan
when they cover Bob Dylan, so do the Beatles not sound like the Byrds when
they are inspired by the Byrds. Harrison’s 12-string sound is brighter and
sharper than McGuinn’s, creating a power-pop shimmery jangle that would later
be bread-and-butter to the likes of Big Star; the Paul/Ringo rhythm section
is tighter and springlier than the Byrds could ever want to be; and as for George’s
attitude on the song, it is actually closer to Gene Clark than to McGuinn —
that one «early Byrd» who could add a much-needed drop of bitterness and
irony to the generally starry-eyed disposition of his bandmates. Even when George
sings you see now I’m too much in love,
the line sniffs of weariness and cynicism rather than the would-be-expected jubilation.
Hence, the question «who needs to hear
the Beatles do the Byrds when you can hear the Byrds themselves?» really makes
about as much sense as asking «who
needs to hear the Beatles do ‘A Day In The Life’ when you can live your own
day in the life instead?». In any
case, at the very least you can credit George here with one unquestionably
breakthrough-type song (with a little help from his friend Paul) and one
unquestionably solid and interesting «tribute»; this continues the pattern,
already set on Help!, of George slowly
carving out his own identity while staying well at the top of current trends
along with his elder companions. This leaves us with Ringo, who, as usual,
gets the short end of the drumstick, but since this is the Beatles, even
their short end is still longer than most of those of the competition. Apparently
‘What Goes On’ is said to have been written by John as early as 1959,
originally in Buddy Holly’s style, and then nearly recorded (but dropped for
time constraints) by the band in 1963 during the Please Please Me sessions — but I imagine that they significantly
rewrote the melody for the Ringo-sung version, because it sounds very much
alike to ‘Act Naturally’, and clearly they wanted to reward their drummer
with another country-style number since he had so much fun singing it live. Of course,
‘What Goes On’ is a trifle, and it also suffers from the problem of an
inadequately overlong chorus (much like ‘The Word’), but Ringo’s cuddly charisma
still manages to shine through in his singing, and besides, it’s a good
indicator of just how the Beatles, at this point — or at any subsequent one
in their career, for that matter — were capable of coaxing a fun, involving,
engaging sound out of virtually nothing. 90% of «rootsy» artists would sound
yawn-inducing when playing this kind of thing, but Lennon and Harrison play
their guitar parts in such a way that it becomes (particularly during the instrumental break) a first-rate example
of «guitar weaving» technique, with the two instruments entering in a
talkative dialog mode with each other. One rarely thinks of John as a «great»
rhythm guitarist — he is certainly not a riffmeister à la Keith Richards
or Pete Townshend — but he always had this knack for extra playfulness, and
here he plays a series of short, syncopated licks, separated by lengthy pauses,
which kind of make you feel surrounded by a bunch of chaotically hopping
little froggies, croaking out in your general direction at random intervals. Around
the friendly toadies, George weaves in his own, slightly more melodic, licks,
culminating in a Carl Perkins-style solo which is also all built around
stop-and-starts. Just listen to this ambience back-to-back with the similar,
but much more straightforward ‘Act Naturally’ and again you shall see just
how far the guitarists have gone in these few months. We started out taking
our friendly horsie out for a simple ride, and we ended up in a magic swamp
filled with a swarm of persistent, but harmless little insects and amphibians.
None of that atmosphere ever really lines up with the lyrics, which mainly
try to nurse a broken heart all the way through, but who gives a damn? Okay,
so it’s Ringo Starr with a broken heart who ends up in a magic swamp, and under
these circumstances, I’m more of a magic swamp guy than an admirer of broken
hearts. So far, as
you can see, if you thought there was even one bad song on Rubber Soul — or, to put it more
intelligently, even one song on Rubber
Soul that had nothing important or interesting to say — I’ve been proving
you wrong (at least, I’d like to think so) on every single occasion. ‘Wait’
was about as close as we’d come to a dangerous point, but even ‘Wait’ has its
redeeming qualities. We did leave the single most polarizing song for last,
and that, of course, is ‘Run For Your Life’, the one song that, in this
super-sensitive age of ours, has probably had its reputation eroded over the
decades rather than rebuilt or reinforced (not least due to Lennon’s own
sentiment, although John’s condemnation of or admiration for any of his own
songs had always been rather spontaneous — then again, he probably did depend
on Yoko’s opinions as his harshest and most trusted critic, and I’m not sure Yoko
would have approved of ‘Run For Your Life’). I think,
actually, that the main reason ‘Run For Your Life’ exists is that the Beatles
were still thinking that they need
to close each of their LPs with a gritty rocker (how symbolic was it that Help! put ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie’ at the
very end, rather than the penultimately-positioned ‘Yesterday’?), and no song
out of everything they recorded in those sessions was grittier than ‘Run For Your
Life’, which continues strictly in the vein of ‘You Can’t Do That’ and other Lennon
«fit-of-jealousy» type of songs. It has the dubious distinction of being one
of the few (if not the only) Beatle songs to be launched off with a direct
quotation from a «master song» — "I’d
rather see you dead, little girl than to be with another man" is
directly quoted from Elvis’ ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ — and it has John more or
less reveling in the psychopathic mode, almost to the point of being
believable (Elvis, by contrast, sang that line in more or less the same
energetic, but harmless frinedly-country-hick tone he sang the rest of the
song). The nasty brutality of his tone certainly contrasts a lot with the
cool-calm-collected irony of ‘Norwegian Wood’ or the tired sorrowfulness of ‘Girl’
or the caring soulfulness of ‘In My Life’ and can easily put off a lot of
people — but as far as I’m concerned, «bad bad John» is every bit as integral
a feature in his personality than all the others. Nobody is going to hug the John
Lennon of ‘Run For Your Life’, we’ll all go straight to the John Lennon of ‘Jealous
Guy’ for that hug if we’re ever in a huggin’ mood. But without a ‘Run For Your
Life’, there might never even have been
a ‘Jealous Guy’. I mean, for Chrissake, before you start asking forgiveness
for your sins, you need to have committed
those sins in the first place. Unless you think that ‘Run For Your Life’ is a
field guide for wronged lovers — and in that case, Charles Manson says hello
to you — you can allow yourself to simply remain impressed by its temperature
level. Personally,
I admire the song’s passion (not to mention its catchiness), but its positioning
at the end of Rubber Soul does
return me to the issue of «thin red lines», and in this case, it still very
squarely aligns the LP with the «early» period of the Beatles rather than the
«late» period. Starting with Revolver,
the Fabs would be clearly preoccupied with the issue of «the perfect goodbye
song» — it would either be a mystical psychedelic trip into the unknown, like
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, or an epic cosmic thing like ‘A Day In The Life’, or
a goodnight-and-goodbye song like, well, ‘Good Night’ or ‘The End’. ‘Run For Your
Life’, however, follows the earlier, simpler, less pretentious formula of «just
bring this whole thing to a stop with some rough crash-boom-bang and be done
with it!», reminding the listeners that, no matter what else we might think
of, in the end it’s only rock’n’roll and we like it. I am not even sure that
the Beatles gave any serious thought to the fact that the song’s lyrics and
attitude were so threatening — it was so normal for the times that they just
decided it was an aggressive and ass-kicking enough tune to put a lid on the LP.
Does this
in any way diminish the status of Rubber
Soul as an epoch-defining musical statement? Not any more and not any
less, I think, than the overall collective and comparative quality of its
songs. It is nowhere near what would soon be called a «conceptual album»; it
is a very natural product of gradual evolution, not revolution, with the sole
difference that evolution happened at a seriously quickened pace in the
second half of 1965 (not just for the Beatles, but for pretty much everybody
who did not consciously resist it). It does not at all feel like the result of someone saying «All right, boys,
time to go into the studio and record the greatest album of all time!» — you
could get that vibe from Sgt. Pepper,
yes, but I do not get this feeling of «we are the Beatles, so we have a
reputation to uphold and be better than everybody else» from listening to Rubber Soul. (Had it been that way, I
am pretty sure that songs like ‘Wait’, ‘Run For Your Life’, or even ‘If I Needed
Someone’ would have been vetoed for publication.) It’s just... another Beatles
album. But, importantly, a Beatles
album fit for late 1965, which can hardly be said about the bastardized US
version that lopped off four tracks, including two of the most important ones
(‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Nowhere Man’), and replaced them with two older titles (‘I’ve
Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’). I mean, a Rubber Soul that starts off with ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ instead
of ‘Drive My Car’? Just exactly how
far out were those people at Capitol? Every time I keep reminding myself that
the Beatles really didn’t do «concept albums» until Sgt. Pepper, my attention keeps returning to these horrible US
mutants and I remember that track grouping and sequencing is an important element
even without any kind of «concept», particularly
for the Beatles (I do not mind the bastardized versions of Rolling Stones
albums that much, for instance). To think that entire generations of young American
people grew up on these headless chickens and still regard them as the «default»
versions almost makes me sad, though I’m not going to take a cheap shot here
and prove there’s a direct straight line from there to, say, the results of
the 2024 presidential elections. (But there could be! There could be!!!) I suppose I
am entitled to conclude the review with a bit of personal feeling that might
come as a shock after reading all that wall of text: I am not the world’s
biggest fan of Rubber Soul at all. It’s been a long, long time
since I last had a «I’m in the mood for some Beatles on the turntable» moment
(my own head is still the best turntable for any Beatles album), but if I had
one, I’d probably stretch out my hand for any of the post-1965 records. As
great as the songs are — and, frankly speaking, there is very little serious competition for this kind of quality from
anybody in 1965 — collectively, they do feel a bit slight; there’s always a
nagging feeling that they could do so much more with every single one of
these ideas had they jumped inside their heads just a year or two later. In a
way, Rubber Soul is really an «early
Beatles» album that has ripened enough to demand to be judged by «late Beatles»
standards, which puts it into an uncomfortable position. You do not hold out
tremendously huge expectations for the lyrics, arrangements, and innovative
ideas of something like A Hard Day’s Night,
where melodicity and liveliness are more important than anything else; Rubber Soul, on the other hand, goads
you into developing such expectations, and then, when they are exceeded with
subsequent albums, comes across as «that first one when they groped for
superhuman greatness, a bit blindly, though». Not that
it’s any sort of tragedy. I mean, we all know that the Beatles were climbing
up the hill, and when you climb up a hill, one part of its slope is always
going to end up lower than the other, right? It’s really the journey that
matters — as well as the fact that 90% of Beatles songs, want it or not, have
their own personalities. The Beatles would go on to make songs even more
sophisticated, even deeper-reaching, even less predictable in every possible
aspect, but they would never do
another ‘Drive My Car’, another ‘Nowhere Man’, or even another ‘The Word’,
for that matter. So while it is sometimes fun to stop and think, "I
wonder how they would have handled that
chord change / that overdub / that special effect in 1967 or 1968?",
no possible answer to that question can in any way diminish the impressive
essence of the song in question. Nor is there any guarantee that the songs could have sounded any better: they
were, after all, the products of their own time. So, instead, let us embrace
the positive way of thinking — for instance, by admiring just how much
diversity there is on here, and how the album truly establishes the Beatles
as the «kings of pop music» in that they, like nobody else, are able to
meaningfully survey almost the entire realm of said music, putting their own
touch on all of its subgenres, from folk to rock’n’roll to R&B to Greek
to French, while also displaying a perfect or near-perfect understanding of
their essence. That is where Rubber Soul truly excels, starting up
a path that would lead all the way to the White Album and beyond. And to
think that all it took was to change from matching suits to suede jackets! |
||||||||
