The White Album 50 Project: "Back In the U.S.S.R."

So off we go with the first song on the Beatles' White Album . . . "Back In the U.S.S.R."

For those of you Beatles fans too young to remember . . . the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a country comprised of numerous eastern European and northern and central Asian ethnic homelands.  The fifteen largest of them, including Russia, were separate states in a federation ruled by a central government in Moscow under the auspices of communism, an economic order in which everything is owned by the state.  It was created from the remains of the old Russian Empire.  The Soviet Union broke up in December 1991; three of the republics, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had already seceded, and calls for independence within the remaining twelve republics led the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to dissolve the union, resulting in fifteen countries where there had once been one.  Russia, the largest Soviet republic, then assumed the U.S.S.R.'s place on the United Nations Security Council.  "Back In the U.S.S.R." is probably the only Beatles song not from the group's psychedelic period to become dated and obsolete.   

Paul McCartney got the idea for the song from the Beatles' visit to India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  Mike Love of the Beach Boys was another student at the Maharishi's retreat, and he and the Beatles spent their free time playing music and jamming together. McCartney and Love had a common affinity for Chuck Berry (above), whose 1959 single "Back In the U.S.A." had inspired the Beach Boys' "California Girls," about the geographic diversity of young American women, and the melody of the "Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." borrowed the melody of Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen."  Over breakfast at the Maharishi's retreat, Mike Love thought it would be fun to do a Soviet version of "Back In the U.S.A."

"Back In the U.S.A." celebrated uniquely American cultural icons such as hamburgers, skyscrapers, and superhighways, but Berry was simultaneously showing patriotism for his homeland and expressing frustration over all the freedoms and possessions that a black man like himself could not enjoy in America.  (As rock critics Greil Marcus and Tim Riley suggested, when Berry sang about how glad he was to be living in the U.S.A., he was being racially ironic.)  "Back In the U.S.S.R." turned Berry's song around completely, celebrating a country that made no pretense of guaranteeing freedom to anyone and was personified by cultural artifacts that no one would ever desire, such as bugged telephones and collective farms - and Russian balalaikas in place of American guitars.

The Beach Boys themselves, at Love's suggestion, got satirized when Paul recast "California Girls" to a Soviet setting in the bridge of "Back In the U.S.S.R.", celebrating the girls of Moscow and the Ukrainian Republic.  He even threw in a reference to Ray Charles with a reference to "Georgia On My Mind," the song written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell that Charles recorded the definitive version of in 1960, taking note of the fact that Georgia was both the name of a Soviet republic and an American state.  George Harrison (below, with Love), a Hoagy Carmichael fan, must have loved that.

The song convinced the American conservative movement what they'd suspected all along - that the Beatles espoused communism and anti-Americanism.  (Right-wing paranoia hit an all-time peak in 1968, with the Vietnam War going badly against the Communist insurgency and the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia.)  The memoir writer John Paul Godges recalled his Polish immigrant father breaking his copy of the White Album because he couldn't tolerate a song that sounded pro-Soviet, as the Soviet Union dominated Poland at the time.  Ironically, the Beatles had been banned in the Soviet Union because the Kremlin thought they promoted Western capitalist decadence that took attention away from the struggle against those controlling the means of production. 

The song itself was recorded by the Beatles in the style of Chuck Berry with a Fats Domino-style piano riff and Beach Boys-style backing harmonies.  John Lennon played six-string bass. George later revealed that the song was also a cheeky take on British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's "I'm Backing Britain" economic campaign. 

"I wrote that as a kind of Beach Boys parody," Paul said in 1984.  "And 'Back In the U.S.A.' was a Chuck Berry song, so it kinda took off from there. I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not. The kids from there do. And that to me is very important for the future of the race."

Ray Stevens later recorded his own Beach Boys parody, "Surfin' U.S.S.R.", about a Soviet naval squadron that parties with Americans when their submarine runs aground in California.  A master satirist in his own right, Stevens was off his game this time; by 1988, when "Surfin' U.S.S.R." was released, the joke was old and the Beach Boys (then enjoying a hit single with "Kokomo") were parodying themselves unintentionally.    

The legacy of "Back In the U.S.S.R." came full circle when the Beach Boys performed on the National Mall in Washington for the 1984 Independence Day celebration.  Drummer Dennis Wilson had died in an accident the previous December, so Ringo Starr sat in with them.  Inevitably, the Beach Boys and Ringo performed "Back In the U.S.S.R." in the concert.  Ironically, Ringo hadn't actually played on the Beatles' recording of "Back In the U.S.S.R."; he had walked out on the group, frustrated by Paul's perfectionism and his own lack of faith as a drummer.  He eventually returned to the group, but the Beatles went ahead and recorded this song without him.  The drumming on "Back In the U.S.S.R." was Paul's.  

Once you hear the airplane sound effect that begins (and also ends) the original Beatles recording, you know that the White Album is going to take you for the ride of your life. :-)