The 40-Year Audition

Forty years ago today, Paul McCartney released his debut (semi-) eponymous solo album, with a Q&A in the NME, which has been reproduced here, and with relevant bits included here:

Q: “Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?”

PAUL: “No.”

Q: “Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?”

PAUL: “Time will tell. Being a solo album means it’s ‘the start of a solo career…’ and not being done with the Beatles means it’s just a rest. So it’s both.”

Q: “Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?”

PAUL: “Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t really know.”

Q: “Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again?”

PAUL: “No.”

The shock felt by fans was almost immediate, and Apple Records went into damage control mode. A press release was issued by Derek Taylor, publicist for the Beatles:

Spring is here and Leeds play Chester tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and living in hope. The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops, that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.

Much has been written on the why of their breakup: the presence of Yoko Ono, the apathy of John Lennon, the dominance of Paul McCartney, the death of Brian Epstein, the unscrupulousness of Allen Klein… The truth is, they just grew up. Consider their output in the eight years that they were together: ten studio albums, two half albums (Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine), 55 singles, four feature films, traveling all corners of the globe hundreds of times in five years of non-stop touring, and the most prolific and influential songwriting team that pop-rock would ever see. Lesser bands have cracked under a fraction of the pressure; the Beatles thrived upon it, and it benefited the rock world greatly.

Forty years later, the Beatles are still one of the biggest bands on the planet, and their effect on pop culture and rock music in general is immeasurable; it’s almost as if they didn’t even go away. Chances are, they’ll still be talked about in such revere in another forty years, and undoubtedly for many forty years after that.

09.09.09 Dream

With September 9th only 12 days away, excitement for the Beatles’ remastered catalog is building. Personally, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to justify spending the money on albums I already have, and even reading excerpts from Uncut magazine’s article still didn’t convince me. But then I sauntered over to Amazon’s Beatles page and listened to the 30 second clips.

Uh … wow.

You say goodbye, hard-earned paycheck, and I say hello, Beatles in amazing clarity.

My friend, former co-worker, and musicologist Sean currently has in his possession the stereo box set, which he’s reviewing for a forthcoming piece on his own blog. For the rest of us unlucky schlubs, we have to wait until the actual day of release to get these lovingly remastered gems in our hands. I might have to go the cheap route and buy them one at a time … but maybe I can go without eating for two weeks, until I get paid next. Priorities!

Also, VH1 has been running the anthology (wait a minute – VH1 running actual music content?! JUDGMENT DAY IS UPON US STOCK UP ON BREAD AND WATER AND SHOTGUNS), and it’s made me tremendously nostalgic for November 1995.

The Beatles: The Beatles

Ask a group of a dozen Beatles fans what their favorite Beatles album is (don’t do this now), and you’re bound to get a dozen different responses. (Well, maybe … considering that the Beatles only put out a dozen studio albums in the UK … anyway.) However, chances are just as likely that the assembled group will pick albums from anything released from Rubber Soul onward, a period of time when the band focused more on their studio work than their concerts. It’s just as likely that The Beatles and Abbey Road will vie for top spot among many of the group’s choices. At that point, you should commend them for having excellent taste, and come back and read this review.

Three notable events happened on November 22: the first, and most globally important, was the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. At the same time, British Beatle fans were most likely beating down the door of their local record store to pick up the band’s sophomore album, With The Beatles. Fast forward five years, and the Beatles’ newest, eponymous album – justifiably nicknamed “The White Album” not only because of its stark white cover, but also because of the confusion caused when one fan would ask another, “Hey, have you got The Beatles yet?”, to which the answering party would likely cock an eyebrow and say, “You can’t have the Beatles, man … they weren’t really ‘for sale’, y’know” – had just hit the shelves.

First things first: happy birthday, With The Beatles and The Beatles! Second, and most importantly, it’s amazing to hear what a five year difference can do to a band. On their earlier album, they were still reigning champions of the bubblegum pop song, with ‘All My Loving’ an indisputable single-that-should-have-been; on the White Album, they had completely abandoned that notion and instead delivered 30 tracks of varying genres and quality. What’s even more astounding was that both albums produced no UK singles; it was common practice, at least in the early 1960s, in Britain to not issue songs as singles from albums, out of fear that it would be seen as gyping the record buying public. By 1968, this practice was in the early stages of being shattered, and yet the Beatles still had enough material to issue the epic ‘Hey Jude’ as a single yet not release it on the White Album.

I was given the White Album as a gift in 1995 by my dad, who had also gotten me Pink Floyd’s P*U*L*S*E. I can’t remember if it was a “graduation gift” (in sixth grade, you didn’t really graduate … it was more of a commencement from elementary to middle school), or maybe it was an Easter gift. Whatever the occasion, it was definitely during the spring, because I remember discussing it with my friends at school, most of whom were Beatles fanatics, just like me. (My first Beatles album, appropriately enough, was also from my dad, and was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a review of which will be forthcoming at some point.) While I had listened to bits and pieces of the album, the first time I truly remember listening to it all the way through was later that summer, when I put the first disc into my CD player, laid down on my bed, my hands folded behind my head, and just let the music take control of me. (I remember it was the summer, because halfway through the second disc, an intense thunderstorm knocked out the power in the neighborhood.)

Personally, my favorite Beatles album is Abbey Road, but there’s a certain charm to the White Album that I can’t help but place it high on my list of favorites. It was recorded at a time when the band were splintering and fracturing, when outside projects precluded the Fab Four from recording in the same room together, and when influences of the female persuasion were starting to directly affect (for better or worse, depending on your opinion) their personalities, songwriting, and approach to recording. Yoko Ono was a huge presence during these sessions; she and John Lennon were practically attached at the hip, and her avant garde background was rubbing off on his songs. With Paul McCartney deeply rooted in perfecting the pop song, and Ringo Starr the amenable, affable drummer who was happy to just be playing with three guys he cared a lot about, it was up to Lennon (and, to a lesser degree, George Harrison) to provide the acerbic edge that the Beatles so sorely needed.

However, here’s where pigeon-holing can get one into trouble: the White Album is such a varied, sprawling piece of work, that there’s bound to be a bit of cross-pollination happening. Lennon delivered some truly gorgeous ballads in the way of ‘Dear Prudence’ (find me a better climax in any Beatles song, with McCartney deputizing for an absent Starr on drums flailing away and Harrison’s guitar slinks around the melody – go on, I dare you), ‘Julia’, and ‘Good Night’ (the last title ultimately given to Starr to sing), while McCartney came up with some uncharacteristic rockers (‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’, ‘Helter Skelter’) that many assumed were Lennon’s work. McCartney’s more pop-oriented moments, such as ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ (a song that drove the other Beatles crazy, due to McCartney’s perfectionism), ‘Martha My Dear’, and ‘Honey Pie’ are all excellent, disposable compositions that show off his obvious love for exploring new avenues – specifically, in the latter two cases, music hall. Lennon, meanwhile, was starting to become bored with the Beatles, and was more annoyed with McCartney’s increased domination of the band; this lethargy shows through especially on ‘Glass Onion’ and ‘I’m So Tired’, though he was able to come up with some absolutely astounding compositions in the way of ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ and the aforementioned ‘Dear Prudence’, two songs that have endured over time.

Throwaways are more prevalent here than on any Beatles album before: ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’ and ‘Birthday’ are dumb singalongs more in the vein of ‘All Together Now’, while ‘Wild Honey Pie’ is more of a non-song than anything, with McCartney dicking around on an acoustic guitar and a thumping bass drum while chanting the nonsensical lyrics. (Also recorded at that same session was the far more substantial ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and the uncredited ‘Can You Take Me Back?’, a snippet of which was tagged on the end of ‘Cry Baby Cry’.) There were some themes running through the album, too, notably a trio of animal-related song titles (‘Blackbird’, ‘Piggies’, and ‘Rocky Raccoon’) that were viewed as sociopolitical commentary instead of disposable tributes to the respective animal. Harrison’s ‘Piggies’ was the most pronounced, though it would later come under heavy fire after Charles Manson misinterpreted it as a suggestion to kill police.

While Harrison had always been a less-than-prolific writer, he had started to come up with some truly inspired material by 1965, with many of his songs released on Beatles albums on a par with Lennon’s and McCartney’s compositions. On the White Album, he comes up with two knockouts and two duds: ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Long, Long, Long’ fall into the first category, with ‘Piggies’ and ‘Savoy Truffle’ classified in the second. Starr even debuted as a songwriter on this album, with ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, a trivial yet enjoyable C&W tune that had been in development as far back as 1963. While the drummer would go on to write only one more song for the band (‘Octopus’s Garden’), Harrison later submitted a multitude of songs during the Let It Be and Abbey Road sessions, many of which (‘All Things Must Pass’, ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, and ‘Let It Down’) would be rejected by Lennon and McCartney and instead turn up on his debut solo album.

Many of the songs had been written during the Beatles’ trip to Rishikesh, when they studied transcendental meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Harrison and Lennon were far more interested in this than McCartney and Starr, though it gave the quartet a chance to busk a series of songs they had been working on and would eventually wind up on the album. The acoustic influence is notable especially on ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Cry Baby Cry’, though a lot of the other songs would be reworked for a heavier sound. The trip ended in ill feelings when it was reported that the Maharishi had made sexual advances on many of the women, with Lennon immortalizing his anger in ‘Sexy Sadie’, originally titled ‘Maharishi’.

The most jarring composition on the album is ‘Revolution 9′, an epic eight minute sound collage that was the work of Lennon and Ono, with a helping hand from Harrison. (Another avant garde “song” was ‘What’s The New Mary Jane?’, originally intended to be on the album but vetoed by McCartney. He had also tried to prevent ‘Revolution 9′ from appearing on the album, though he was outvoted by the others. What’s often forgotten is that McCartney was well into the avant garde scene before Lennon, having constructed the 14-minute outtake ‘Carnival Of Light’ during the Sgt. Pepper sessions.) With an anonymous voice intoning “Number nine, number nine” ad infinitum, the piece then degenerates into vocal and music clips, tape loops, and sound effects, sounding very much like apocalyptic chaos. Originally, it had been the extended coda of ‘Revolution’ (an acoustic version of which, retitled ‘Revolution 1′, had appeared earlier on the album), though it was lopped off to make it more commercial, as it appeared on the B-side of the ‘Hey Jude’ single. Personally, I had always skipped over ‘Revolution 9′, because eight minutes of random strangeness is well beyond my toleration, though I had the misfortune of listening to it on a drive to work on the turnpike a few weeks ago; coupled with the fact that I was stressed out due to bumper-to-bumper traffic, I sat in a stupor as the piece unfolded around me. It was a dementedly glorious experience, and one that I hope never to repeat. (I can only imagine how it would sound in a dramatically altered state of mind.)

Harrison, Starr, and producer George Martin had all hinted that they would have preferred to have seen the album condensed to a tighter single album, or at least have seen the songs come out as two separate albums, Starr cheekily calling them The White Album and The Whiter Album. While I’ve tried to come up with an alternate running order for a more condensed White Album, it’s something that I just can’t do; the beauty of the album lie in its margins, and while many of those songs can be classified as filler, they add a certain atmosphere and general playfulness to the album that would otherwise have been lacking. (I probably would have substituted ‘Savoy Truffle’, the only song on the album I really cannot stand, with the far superior ‘Not Guilty’.) But as it stands, it’s an epic mess of an album, skipping delightedly from songs of stern seriousness to pastiche rockers to meaningless doodles. It’s been derided and criticized over the years for failing to exceed expectations, though hindsight has proven that it remains near the top of many critics’ lists – not only of Beatles albums, but of rock albums in general. There’s nothing else quite like it in the Beatles catalog; shortly after its release, they would record the lethargic Let It Be and follow that up with the inspired Abbey Road, but both of those albums were more about dusting off the cobwebs and presenting a more compacted package. For all its faults, the White Album shows how far the band had evolved from With The Beatles, when they were wide-eyed mop tops singing simple boy-meets-girl love songs. How times had changed.

Essential listening: Dear Prudence, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, While My Guitar Gently Weeps … oh geez, they’re all essential in their own ways!