Let's face it - there's simply no end to me talking about The Beatles.
Liam wrote about the albums back in 2018 and I had my say, as a form of comment on his work, at the time. But I did reconsider how I would rank the 13 albums today. Having done so, I checked with what I had said back in 2018.
Nothing had changed. (But there's still a chance that Revolver might move up a place. We'll see.)
So let's do the singles instead. The Beatles released 22 UK singles, and we need to account for one UK EP as well. (Magical Mystery Tour, which was actually a double EP, can be consigned to the album bin.) Fully half of their singles stood completely alone, and would not be issued on an album at all, until being gathered up in some later compilation. Of the others, most functioned as a kind of advance trailer for a subsequent album on which it would be included. The title tracks for their two films were released as singles at the same time the films and albums were released, in an obvious bit of cross-platform promotion. Just two of their singles were drawn from an album that was already available (and both were issued within the same week as the album it came from.)
23. "Love Me Do" (October 1962)
Sixty years on, it still sounds... different somehow. The song is basic to the point of being crude, just a simple verse repeated as often as necessary, with an equally simple middle section. It's the sound that's different, and I'm neither old enough nor British enough to fathom just how odd it must have sounded coming out of English radios in 1962. That simple plodding beat, that harmonica hook, and especially those strange Northern voices. From the very beginning, there was no one like them. The flip side, "P.S. I Love You," is a pretty standard piece of early 1960s pop, which wears its US influences - especially the Brill Building songwriters - on its sleeve. Both sides would be included on their first album when it was issued six months later in March 1963.
22. "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (May 1969)
Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on 12 March 1969, and John and Yoko were keen to get married themselves. Making it happen was an adventure - they couldn't get on the cross channel ferry at Southampton, as Yoko wasn't British. So they went to Paris but they hadn't been residents long enough. They finally got married in Gibraltar on 20 March instead. From there, they instantly went to Amsterdam to stage a week long media event, and made a day trip to Vienna before returning to London. John wrote a song about the whole adventure, and being John, wanted to record it that very minute. Ringo was tied up with his film, George was out of the country, and John and Paul were not seeing eye to eye - their business dispute was growing more and more bitter. But what choice did he have? At that moment, none that he could imagine. So he went to Paul's house in London and played it for him. And he and Paul went into the studio and cut the track that same day. The song is quite witty and quite irritating - Lennon takes for granted that the entire world is as deeply invested in his trials as he is himself - and there's no real arrangement. They just bash it out. The chorus got Lennon into some trouble - "Christ you know it ain't easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They're going to crucify me." There were radio stations that refused to play it, although its biggest sin is presumption - come on John, being hassled by the man isn't quite as rough as being nailed to a cross. But it does provide the song's greatest moment, Lennon's utter exasperation after he wearily notes how much the press is enjoying the whole show:
We wish you success
It's good to have the both of you back
CHRIST!
21. "Yellow Submarine" / "Eleanor Rigby" (August 1966)
Really silly, really great. Children will be singing about living in a yellow submarine as long as there are children to sing. While repetition has dulled its novelty it's still impossible to resist when it catches you in the right mood. It's placed this low mainly because the single has no intrinsic value of its own- it will always be thought of as a piece of the mighty whole that was Revolver, issued on the same day as the single. And that is what it was always intended to be, sitting between the serene beauty of "Here There and Everywhere" and the nasty snarl of "She Said She Said." EMI had grown very tired of watching other artists seize upon the most obviously commercial pieces from a new Beatles album and turning it into a hit single of their own. This was a kind of corporate pre-emptive strike to prevent that sort of thing.
We do need to talk about the stunning b-side, even though it also has its true home as the second track on the album. More than half a century on, it remains an utterly unprecedented piece of pop music. George Harrison is rightly thought of as the man who brought Indian classical music to the west. We should not forget that he brought it to his own bandmates as well, who were both fascinated by some of the possibilities it opened for them. In particular, both Lennon and McCartney were struck by the notion of building an entire piece of music around a single chord.
John and Paul had both begun writing music on the guitar, and both approached composition as guitar players typically do - the vocal line was what shaped the melody and the harmony to support that melody line was made with a sequence of changing chords on the guitar. You can't really do much else with a guitar. You can certainly play both harmony and melody on a piano, of course. But while Lennon and Harrison would both eventually write songs on the piano, only McCartney was sufficiently adept enough on a keyboard to play both harmony and melody. But Indian music dispensed with this western notion of harmony entirely. And so Lennon brought "Tomorrow Never Knows" to the Revolver sessions, a song which sets its melody over nothing more than a single C chord. Lennon's characteristically horizontal melody adds to the general sense of a drone. McCartney wasn't quite as formally radical, but "Eleanor Rigby" modulates between just two chords, and those two chords are as alike to each other as two chords can possibly be: G major, which is G-B-D, and E minor, which is G-B-E. Just one note in the triad changes, and only by a single tone. His melody, like so many McCartney melodies, is aggressively vertical. The track is done at an extremely fast tempo - just try singing along with the record - and rather than Beatles instruments it was scored by George Martin for a string octet playing an arrangement heavily influenced by the jagged, ominous film scores of Bernard Herrmann.
The story that is told in these three short verses is as utterly bleak as anything one will find in contemporary art. McCartney is usually seen as the lightness to Lennon's shade, but he had as little use for the standard pieties of modern Christianity as his bandmate. The despair here is not personal - it's universal. The priest wipes the dirt from his hands, and we reach the awful, damning conclusion: no one was saved. Simply devastating. It's as final, as chilling, as the famous piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life." All the lonely people.
20. "From Me to You" (April 1963)
The third single, coming a month after their first album, is something of a holding action that repeats the tried and tested parts of their previous hit - the personal pronouns, the harmonica hook. It doesn't have anything like the same energy - well, how could it? - but they did their best to spice it up and make it interesting.
19. "All You Need Is Love" (July 1967)
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18. "Can't Buy Me Love" (March 1964)
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Released as a standalone single, it wasn't supposed to be part of A Hard Day's Night at all - but Richard Lester didn't want to use "I'll Cry Instead" and so this became the soundtrack to the unforgettable dash down the fire escape. Lester was right , of course - McCartney's opening wail simply sounds like freedom busting through. It's not really much of a song, a simple enough twelve bar structure that George Martin cunningly reorganized (it was Martin's idea to begin with a fragmentary line from the song's middle section, and that idea is the best thing about the record, along with Harrison's guitar solo.) It was written and recorded in a terrible rush, like most everything they did in the first part of 1964, during a three week stand in Paris, and finished off at Abbey Road. I've always thought much more highly of the b-side, "You Can't Do That" - it's one of Lennon's early nasty songs, with the author taking one of his rare guitar solos. While the band's live performances suffered greatly in the din and strain of Beatlemania - it's extremely hard to play music when you can't actually hear what you're doing - this song regularly survived somehow, rising above the enormous din. It's a consistent live highlight, on the bootlegs, and on the Hollywood Bowl recording.
17. "I Feel Fine" (November 1964)
Lennon was always enormously proud of this record. He would claim to his dying day that this was the first deliberate use of feedback on a pop record (he may have been right) and he was just as proud of the little guitar riff he built the song around. (He acknowledged nicking it from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step" - it's not quite an exact copy, but the resemblance is pretty plain.) I don't like it nearly as much as he does. There's really nothing to the song except that riff. It is a neat little riff though, and Ringo's work is peerless, as always. That "Latin" beat he's playing is actually lifted almost entirely from Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," a number the Beatles had often played in their Hamburg days, usually with Pete Best behind the kit. McCartney still talks about the first time they played "What'd I Say" with Ringo filling in for Pete, and how they all looked at each other in astonishment. Wait a second - it can sound this good? There is, after all, no type of shuffle beat that Ringo Starr can't play better than any drummer alive or dead.
16. Long Tall Sally (EP) (June 1964)
The EP format - a 7 inch disk played at 45 RPM, but typically holding two songs in each side - never really caught on in North America. It was invented by RCA Victor, who issued a couple dozen Elvis Presley EPs, but none of the other US companies followed suit. They were much more popular in the UK, and are an important part of the very early discography of both the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. The Beatles, not so much - they issued EPs as well, but all but one of them used material already issued on album or single. This was the exception. Even so, two of the tracks are somewhat unremarkable covers - the Beatles loved both Larry Williams and Carl Perkins, but despite being the greatest cover band that ever walked the earth, they rarely did much with either man's material. There's only one original song, "I Call Your Name" which is a very early Lennon tune, which McCartney recalls as the first John original he remembers ever hearing. It's the other cover that's worth the price of admission, as McCartney gets his teeth into Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" and actually outdoes his idol for sheer energy and frenzy. McCartney doesn't have a clue what the actual lyrics are - does anyone? - and it matters not one bit. Harrison and Lennon each get off a wild guitar solo, and the whole thing is over in a breathless two minutes and three seconds. Mercy.
15. "Let It Be" (March 1970)
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Shortly before he was killed, Lennon remarked that he didn't know what McCartney was thinking when he wrote something like this. On the face of it, this is an astonishing sentiment from John Lennon, of all people. But Lennon never knew Mary McCartney. Cancer had taken her nine months before her eldest son first met John Lennon. Paul McCartney was a Northern boy, and it was not his way to let anyone see his pain. He has always chosen to present a brave face to the world. (But let anyone, anytime, disrespect a nurse and they will be shocked at the fury they have summoned. As Margaret Thatcher would one day discover.) This is Mary McCartney's song. Paul dreamed about her one night, (apparently during the White Album sessions,) and found the experience enormously comforting.
It is, of course, an exquisitely beautiful song. It's built around the eternal I-V-vi-IV chord progression that has been the basis of literally dozens of popular songs by artists from Bob Marley to Lady Gaga, and most everyone else in between. (I was shocked to discover I had never used it myself, and immediately set about correcting my oversight.) But I don't think McCartney and the Beatles took the time to work out how best to arrange and record it. They only got to grips with it in the final week of January 1969, while they were also preparing the songs for the rooftop show, and temporarily integrating Billy Preston into the fold. And they basically set all of this work aside once they were done with it. The January sessions produced one single - "Get Back" / "Don't Let Me Down" - the legend of the rooftop show, and a bunch of rumours, as bootlegs from the sessions slowly made their way into public awareness. The world was vaguely aware that McCartney had written a beautiful "religious ballad." But the track sat in the EMI vault for almost a year., before the remaining band members (Lennon had quit a few months earlier) assembled at Abbey Road to finish it.
There are three different "official" versions of the song. Two of them, the single version and the album version, are based on Take 27 as recorded on 31 January 1969. Martin and McCartney added orchestration and backing vocals in January 1970, while Harrison recorded a new guitar solo to replace the one he had earlier overdubbed (in April 1969) in place of his original solo. Martin and McCartney were thinking of combining the two solos, but they ended up sticking with the second one, from the preceding April. This was the version of the song that was issued as a single in March 1970. Phil Spector remixed the track later that month, removing the backing vocals, using the most recent Harrison guitar solo from January 1970, and bringing up the orchestra. This version appeared on the album, when it was released in May. Finally, a third version, based on a completely different take from the January 1969 session, with a slightly different lyric, was used in the Let It Be film. It was never issued as an audio track until the deluxe edition of Let It Be was released in 2021.
Got all that?
14. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (October 1963)
The record that conquered America. Bob Dylan heard this, and totally lost his shit. The chords were outrageous, he said, and the harmonies made it all valid. He also thought they were singing "I get high, I get high" which may have led him astray. Almost sixty years on, the sheer energy of this track could still power a city. America capitulated, instantly, and the world soon followed. Wisely. This is what the Irresistible Force sounds like.
13. "Lady Madonna" (March 1968)
After the year of psychedelia, and the shocking failure of the Magical Mystery Tour film (well, it is pretty awful), the Beatles - got back. They were about to head off to India, they weren't sure when they were coming back, and they wanted to put out a single before they left. This was the best candidate they had. This is practically a Fats Domino tribute, and something of a throwaway, but they all loved Fats Domino and they have some fun with it, imitating a horn section with their voices and doubling piano lines with electric guitars. Years later, Paul would notice that he ran through the days of the week and somehow forgot Saturday.
12. "Hello Goodbye" / "I Am the Walrus" (November 1967)
Lennon was pretty bitter about his track being relegated to the b-side. One can't blame him. "Hello Goodbye" is extremely minor. It was literally based on a word game McCartney was playing at home with a friend, to prove that he could write a song about anything. Well done, Paul. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It spends about three minutes going absolutely nowhere, then circling back around to go there again. The weird coda at the end is pretty cool, though.
Lennon had long been interrogated about the deeper meaning of his lyrics, and as usual he was of two minds about it. On the one hand he wanted to be understood and believed; on the other hand, would you give him a break? It's only a Northern song. "I Am the Walrus" was in some respects a way of lashing out at everyone who were taking it all too seriously. The words make very little literal sense - many of the words have been invented for the occasion, in the fashion of his hero Lewis Carroll (whom Lennon knew far better than he did James Joyce). But while they may not pack much literal meaning, they still communicate on an emotional level, aided as they are by the drive of the melody, the power of the vocal performance, and George Martin's absolutely stunning arrangement. An incredible recording.
11. "Something" / "Come Together" (October 1969)
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Lifted straight off Abbey Road two weeks after the album had released. It was apparently Allen Klein's idea to give George the a-side, and it's certainly a lovely song, although Frank Sinatra's claim that "Something" (which he hilariously credited to Lennon-McCartney) was the finest love song of the twentieth century is simply bizarre. The song is wonderfully typical of the typically inarticulate George Harrison - there's certainly something about this woman, but just try to get him to tell you exactly what it might be. You'll be out of luck. Go ahead and ask, and he'll just say "I don't know, I don't know." Lennon is barely present - his piano can be heard faintly in the middle section. So it's George playing a very minimal rhythm guitar, supported by Paul and Ringo. It's an arrangement that leaves an enormous amount of space for the rhythm section, and McCartney and Starr simply played their asses off. Both of them are astonishing on the track, although McCartney has spent the last 50 years worrying that his bass playing is a little busy, and maybe George should have said something about it. (It's not, Paul. Relax. It's perfect.) I've always thought George Martin's string arrangement was slightly over the top, as close to syrupy as Martin - whose taste and restraint were always impeccable - could ever get. That's a very minor quibble. George does a nice job singing it, and plays a wonderful tasty guitar solo. He would one day be surprised when he played the song live, and found his bandmates were all hugely disappointed when he didn't duplicate the solo from the record. They all sang his own solo back to him after the show to impress upon him just how iconic it was, and insisted he learn it properly. Poor George, he had no idea it was so memorable and so important.
Lennon's b-side nicks its opening line from Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" (the loathsome Morris Levy, who controlled the copyright, sued Lennon for his presumption) but the song was completely rearranged in the studio - the general "swampy" feel of the arrangement was McCartney's idea. Lennon was not feeling particularly warm about his old bandmate at that moment, but no matter how much they got on each other's nerves they always recognized when the other guy had a better idea. (Lennon got his revenge by studying how McCartney played a piano part and then playing it himself, and also by doubling his own voice rather than letting Paul sing along.) The lyrics are gibberish, but memorable gibberish, with individual lines that somehow jump out and mean something anyway and other lines so obscure that people still wonder to this day what he was actually singing (is it "hold you in his armchair?" Is it "hold you in his arms, yeah." No one will ever know for sure.) The whole thing just sounds utterly fabulous, especially the rhythm section - as always, Ringo and Paul absolutely rule - and Lennon sings the hell out of it. As he usually did.
10. "A Hard Day's Night" (July 1964)
Released to coincide with the opening on the very same day of their first film, six days after the songs from the album had taken up one side of their fifth album. A nifty bit of cross-platform promotion for the summer of 1964. Generations of guitar players would puzzle over the famous opening chord. (The actual guitar chord is simple enough - as George said in one of his last interviews, it's just an F chord with a G on the top. It was the bass note, and its ensuing harmonic, played by McCartney that made it sound so unique. George said we'd have to ask Paul about that. Paul obliged - a D, on the twelfth fret. Why on earth Paul was playing a D note remains a question for another day.)
It's a marvellous song, written to order by Lennon at the last minute once they had the film's title. The record is even better than the song. Lennon couldn't easily hit the notes in the middle part of his own song, but luckily he had a bandmate who could, which permits the delicious little overlap of the two vocal parts as the verse starts up again. Bonus points for Ringo's cowbell in the middle section..
9. "Please Please Me" (January 1963)
Holy hell, what a record. And what a thing to achieve on just their second studio date, way back in November 1962. It was famously George Martin who suggested trying Lennon's slow, Roy Orbison-influenced ballad at a faster tempo. Perhaps because they were embarrassed at not having thought of it themselves, they dug into it with an energy that is simply overwhelming. This is the sound of the Beatles splitting the atom, and the world would never be the same.
8. "Get Back" / "Don't Let Me Down" (April 1969)
This was, for the longest time, the only tangible evidence that the January 1969 sessions had taken place at all. It sounds almost casual, effortlessly brilliant, but Peter Jackson's massive documentary shows how much work went into making it sound that way. The magic may begin with inspiration, but it's achieved with perspiration.
7. "Paperback Writer" / "Rain" (May 1966)
Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith (christened "Normal" by John Lennon) as the Beatles recording engineer in April 1966. Smith had been promoted to become a producer, and as such he would certainly distinguish himself - he was at the helm for Pink Floyd's debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as well as the Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow, which is something very like a rock opera well before the Who did Tommy or the Kinks made Arthur. But Emerick, a callow 20 year old with little respect for authority and none at all for the traditional way things were done at EMI's Abbey Road studios, would help the Beatles produce sounds never heard before on records made in the UK. It began right here, with the way he recorded Starr's drums and, especially, McCartney's bass. The Beatles had been complaining for years that they could never get the same kind of bass sound as what they heard on the American R&B records they all loved so much.
"Paperback Writer" is a strange song indeed, one of Paul's stories about an odd character who wants to be a hack writer. The track is strange, driven by a jagged, spiraling guitar riff and lush California style harmonies. Lennon's flip side is even stranger. They recorded the backing track at an extremely fast tempo. It was then drastically slowed down before Lennon recorded his vocal. The record as issued sits in between - the instruments we hear have been slowed down from what they actually played while Lennon's voice is higher than what he sang. (So yes, Starr's drumming, so berserk on the record that it surprises Ringo to this very day, was even wilder as it was played.) This was also where they discovered the fun one could have by running a tape backwards, and had trouble resisting the impulse to try everything backwards for some time after.
6. "Help!" (July 1965)
The single was kind of a trailer for the film of the same name (which opened a week later) and the album (which followed two weeks later.) More canny cross-platform promotion! It's a very great song, of course, one that Lennon was justly proud of for the rest of his life. (Typically though, he was proud of it because he thought he was being honest about his life, not for any other reason.) He would also eventually complain that they took it at too fast a tempo, "trying to be commercial." He was quite wrong about that. It's the very speed with which the band plays the song - and they take it very fast indeed - that lends the record its touch of panic, something that would have been missing entirely had it been done at a ballad tempo. (Which is how everyone else who assays the song has to do it - only the Beatles could pull it off at such a tempo.)
On the flip side, "I'm Down," McCartney tried to write his own Little Richard type song and succeeded, magnificently. He recorded it on 14 June 1965, along with two other new songs he had - "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday." All the same day. The mind reels, and reels some more. Not that anyone thought it was a big deal at the time. This track was only issued as this b-side and wasn't available on album for years afterward. The other two tracks were buried on the second side of the Help album, although they didn't stay buried very long.
5. "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out" (December 1965)
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Oh man, what a riff. You can have "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." Give me this one! All due respect to Jagger's wonderful rant, but this record is so much more interesting. It just doesn't quit, continually finding new ways to raise the ante as it goes along. It's mostly Lennon's song - he says the guitar riff for this one was also based on "Watch Your Step" though I don't hear it this time - and no one's too sure what it's actually about. Both Lennon and McCartney would later think it had something to do with drugs - it was written and recorded shortly after their famous Beverly Hills excursion with Peter Fonda and several Byrds, which would eventually prompt "She Said She Said" on Revolver. But it sounds to me mostly like Lennon complaining about some woman. His verse melody is a little closer to McCartney's comfort zone than his own, so - just as in "A Hard Day's Night" - they trade off the lead vocals. Lennon's vocal dynamics on the chorus are a wonder - he sings the line "it took me so long to find out" three different times in three different ways, each of them wonderful (first time straight, second time with his "Twist and Shout" edge, third time with his gorgeous falsetto.) The rave-up after the second chorus, a duet between Harrison's guitar and wordless vocals is utterly fab. And Ringo, as usual, is peerless driving it all forward. (And his overdubbed tambourine work is surely the best use of that humble little instrument ever.)
This was released as a double a-side, but McCartney's "We Can Work It Out," fine as it is, will always seem like a humble b-side to me, "Day Tripper" is that great. "We Can Work It Out" is often presented as an example of the Lennon-McCartney duality. In fact, even the song's composers seemed to think so sometimes. There's McCartney all optimistic that we can work it out, and there's Lennon impatiently warning that life is too short for this nonsense. I beg to differ. There is indeed a duality in their two parts, but that's not what it is. There was a lot of Andy Capp in the young Beatles, Northern lads with pretty prehistoric ideas about a woman's place. So this sounds to me like yet another of McCartney's arguments with Jane Asher over her having the temerity to live a life of her own that didn't always revolve around Paul McCartney. It's McCartney who's being the impatient one. He's being a positive nag, in fact. We can work it out if you'll just see things my way. Lennon is the diplomat, trying to soothe these troubled waters.
4. "Hey Jude" / "Revolution" (August 1968)
Lennon thought it was important that the Beatles say something about the whole subject of revolution. Oddly enough, Lennon seems not have been very clear in his own mind just what he thought of it (count me out? count me in?) although his crack about Chairman Mao has stood the test of time extremely well (he actually caught some flack for it in the day.) It's been overshadowed, and quite rightly (as Lennon himself freely acknowledged) by the mighty a-side.
After all these years, after all those football stadium crowds doing the singalong at the end, it's very difficult to get to the heart of what makes "Hey Jude", the song and the record, so powerful, so moving, so unforgettable. But no one has come closer to penetrating to the heart of that mystery than the great Brian Phillips:
It’s so much sadder than you remember. Also more ambiguous. The song’s familiarly makes the melancholy hard to detect, maybe, but it’s in there: It’s that gentle, restless churn that you feel in the pit of your stomach. A kind of mournfulness, which the song keeps trying and failing to close around like a pearl. “Hey Jude” literally sounds like a sad song someone is trying to make better. Most piano power ballads don’t come anywhere near the depth or the uncertainty of that feeling.... “Hey Jude” is a song singing to itself, reminding itself what a song should do. Let the world under your skin. Let it into your heart. Don’t make it bad. Don’t make it colder. None of this will work, in the end—all the great pop songs know that pop songs never work—but what else can you do but try? Let it out and let it in.
I really can't add much to that, save to point out that McCartney gives one of the greatest vocal performances of a career that is not exactly without accomplishment. I don't know if he - I don't know if anyone - has ever sung better. He inhabits and expresses an enormous range of emotions - resignation, empathy, warmth, passion, urgency - and he does it all so naturally, so gracefully, so effortlessly you never notice him doing it. You just feel it happening around you. Which is how it's supposed to work. He takes his sad song. He makes it better.
3. "Ticket to Ride" (April 1965)
The song's placement in the Help! film is now so unforgettable - that iconic guitar arpeggio ringing out as the scene suddenly shifts to the Swiss Alps - that it's easy to forget that the single had been issued on its own fully four months prior to the film and the album. There's something rather grown-up about the song's concerns, although this went right under the radar in early 1965. So did the undercurrent of dread that runs through the song. The woman in the song isn't breaking up with her boyfriend. We haven't stopped going steady. No, living with me was bringing her down. Something a little more significant is at stake, has been lost, and has yet to be fully processed. The song stays on the same A chord all through the introduction and half way through the verse, too shocked to even move. The feeling of loss is overwhelming, but it's all boiling away under the surface, under a stiff upper lip, held off at a distance by the guitar calmly repeating its arpeggios, and the drums playing their odd pattern. Lennon begins each verse like a man in a state of shock, who hasn't even begun to absorb the news and what it means, numb with disbelief and denial. But he thinks he's going to be sad. Not yet, but very soon - probably as soon as his chum begins to sing along in support - and for a long time after. But she don't care.
2. "Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever" (February 1967)
There were moments when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were as close, as complementary, and as utterly different as two sides of the same coin. This amazing record is one of them. It began with John Lennon, off in Spain shooting a film, bored and lonely and lost without his bandmates, writing a ballad that looked back at his difficult childhood in Liverpool. It was the first song the band worked on when they reassembled at the end of 1966. While it may have started out as a quiet ballad, everyone was so enthusiastic about it that they quickly threw everything but the kitchen sink into the arrangement, with poor George Martin doing his best to make all of Lennon's many wild ideas come to life. As is well known, Martin worked a miracle to produce the record in the end, merging two takes recorded at different tempos and in different keys and somehow coming out with a coherent record in which every component part somehow sounds clear and distinct as a bell. This, of course, makes it quite impossible to play along with the record - it's not in concert pitch at all but rather in that mysterious space between A and B flat - "in the cracks" as classical musicians say.
Some dozen years later, Lennon would tell Martin, to his producer's dismay, that he doesn't really like the "Strawberry Fields Forever" record anymore and wishes he could do it all over again. Lennon was often unhappy with his own work, but in this case one can actually understand why, to a point. There's a simple, beautiful song that gets just a little lost underneath the extravagant production. It's nothing revolutionary - it's just a lovely little ballad about feeling lost and afraid. But still... what a record.
Paul McCartney knew what Strawberry Field meant to Lennon, and he was moved to write his own Liverpool song. And strangely enough, there are a few lines in the song when McCartney sounds exactly like John Lennon - he occasionally gets a touch of that nasal Lennon noise into his voice ("four of fish and finger pies in summer.") But being McCartney, he approached the subject of remembering the hometown they'd left behind somewhat differently. Lennon wrote about how he remembered feeling; McCartney wrote about what he remembered seeing and hearing. There's something almost kaleidoscopic about it, because it's not a single memory - sometimes the sky is blue, sometimes it's raining. It all sounds like a summer day - but a nurse selling poppies from a tray is something that happens in November. Still, all these things could and did happen in Penny Lane and McCartney remembers it all.
The arrangement is every bit as elaborate as that of "Strawberry Fields Forever" but to a completely different effect. Its various components are in such perfect balance that individual components often never stand out, not even the piano that is the basis of the track. The recording process began with three separate piano tracks set down by McCartney in succession, working alone without a click track (it was 1966.) After a reduction mix, they started adding on to it - Lennon on another piano, McCartney's bass, Starr's drums, woodwinds and brass scored by Martin. And as a piece of formal composition - well, McCartney modulates through no less than seven key changes - seriously, seven - so smoothly and so naturally that you never even notice it happening until the moment when you're supposed to notice, when he kicks it up a tone for the final chorus. That's without even taking account of how he switches from B major to B minor ("had the pleasure to know") in the middle of each verse. Bloody Paul McCartney. This is a mastery without limits, a thing that can't be taught.
It was the first Beatles single since "Love Me Do" that didn't go to number one in the UK, held out of the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck. The band was delighted by this, finding it an enormous relief.
1. "She Loves You" (August 1963)
I have previously written, at considerable length too, about this great, great record. So let me just say it again: no other band, no other musicians, in the world was even remotely capable of this sort of thing. Not in their wildest dreams. Not then, and not for years and years afterwards. There were professional session players who could summon up this level of precision. There were other bands who could generate the same brute force. But there was no one, anywhere in the world, who could do both. At the same time.
How could there be? When they made this record, in July 1963, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were by far the most experienced, the most practised rock band in all the world. This was their music. It was, for all intents and purposes, their invention. No one knew it better, no one had been playing it longer. They were inventing this music, and they were inventing the thing that performed this music. In the six years to come, they would get more sophisticated than this. They would get back to this mountain top and many more besides. But they would never get better. Because it doesn't get better than this. It just doesn't.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
