The White Album 50 Project: "Good Night"

And now, the grand finale. :-)

What better way to end a double album with a musically diverse selection of recordings and a running time of over ninety minutes - longer than even some feature movies - than with an exquisitely orchestrated lullaby, and one sung by Ringo Starr at that?  Nighttime is probably the most convenient time to listen to any record album for most people, and when you've been listening to the Beatles' White Album in the evening hours, "Good Night" provides an appropriate close.  Especially after "Revolution 9," as exhausting to listen to as the twenty-eight previous tracks combined.  And the sudden shift from avant-garde experimentalism to something that could have been played on the BBC Light Programme is such an obvious joke that it's easy to see why the album's final two tracks were so sequenced.

There's nothing jokey about "Good Night" as a song, though.  John Lennon wrote it for his son Julian, then five years old, in the same way that he would write "Beautiful Boy" in 1980 for his son Sean, when Sean was five years old.  But John wrote "Good Night" under dubious circumstances; his marriage to his wife Cynthia was falling apart, and he was leaving Julian behind to be with Yoko.  "Good Night" was John's effort at keeping a connection with his son.  John's and Julian's relationship weathered the storm of John's divorce from Cynthia; father and son managed to stay in contact and get together even after John moved to America in the early seventies.  But at the time John wrote "Good Night," his domestic life made things awkward as far as Julian was concerned.  Perhaps that's why he had Ringo sing the lead vocal.

Indeed, given John's own troubled childhood, and with his own disconnection from his father Fred (with whom he'd briefly reconciled) likely on his mind, it was undoubtedly easier for him to let someone else sing "Good Night."  As Rob Sheffield wrote recently in Rolling Stone, it "expresses the naked vulnerability John was afraid to show - it was easier for him to hide behind Ringo."  And Ringo himself  was quick to point out that John, and not Paul McCartney, had written "Good Night" as soon as the White Album was released.  "He's got a lot of soul, John has, you know," Ringo said.

But there's yet another reason Ringo got to sing this song.  John wanted "Good Night" to sound as lush as possible, as befits a song for a five-year-old boy - he later admitted it was "possibly overlush" - and Ringo's unassuming vocal style perfectly counterbalances the song's musical arrangement.  John had told George Martin to "arrange it like Hollywood," and Martin delivered with a 27-piece orchestra - twelve violins, three violas, three cellos, one harp, three flutes, one celesta (played by Martin), one clarinet, one horn, one vibraphone, and one string bass, according to Wikipedia.  For good measure, eight vocalists from the Mike Sammes Singers - you already know them from "I Am the Walrus" - offer a backing choir.  (Incidentally, Mike Sammes himself would sing backing vocals for Olivia Newton-John in the seventies.  You know the backing basso voice on "Let Me Be There"?  Him.) Ringo, delivering John's simple but poignant lyrics, carries the tune in his own doleful way, unencumbered and uninhibited by the treacle that threatens to envelop him.  His everyman posture is what keeps "Good Night" from being pure schmaltz.

Paul, though, wishes John had performed "Good Night" himself for the White Album, having heard John sing it when he was working on the song with Ringo.  "I think John felt it might not be good for his image for him to sing it but it was fabulous to hear him do it, he sang it great," Paul said.  "We heard him sing it in order to teach it to Ringo and he sang it very tenderly.  John rarely showed his tender side, but my key memories of John are when he was tender, that's what has remained with me; those moments where he showed himself to be a very generous, loving person.  I always cite that song as an example of the John beneath the surface that we only saw occasionally . . ..  I don't think John's version was ever recorded."

The final recording captures a tenderness unique among pop songs devoted to children, especially lullabies.  It's a lullaby more personal than Paul Simon's whimsical "St. Judy's Comet" and warmer than Billy Joel's stark, rather harrowing song "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)."  And, by the way,  Simon and Joel wrote those songs for their own children, in both cases their first-borns.

Although Ringo is the only Beatle who appears on "Good Night," the song was actually a group effort.  John and Ringo (pictured above) recorded a rhythm track together to allow Martin to score the song, and Paul and George Harrison were in the studio offering ideas for the recording.  The four of them even harmonized on a take of "Good Night" with John playing guitar in the double-thumb style Donovan had taught him.  Ringo added some unused spoken preambles himself, which would have solidified the song's charm had any of them made it on the final master.  Only Ringo could have gotten away with opening a song with spoken verses like, "Come on, children! It's time to toddle off to bed. We've had a lovely day at the park and now it's time for sleep." Or, "Put all those toys away. Yes, Daddy will sing a song for you!" Or, "Cover yourself up, Charlie. Pull those covers up and off you go to dreamland!"

And in the end . . . Ringo instead concludes with a quiet, universal message to ladies, gentlemen, and children of all ages all across the world.  "Good night . . . good night, everybody . . . everybody everywhere . . ..  Good night."  It's a message of peace and hope, not unlike that auspicious moment a month after the White Album's November 1968 release, when the astronauts of Apollo 8 read the opening verses of the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve as they passed by Earth in their module.  It was that same mission that produced the first-ever photograph of Earth from space.  Nineteen sixty-eight had been a tough year for the world - and for Americans, that went double - and, in wishing the world sweet dreams as the White Album faded out, the Beatles were once again in step with history.

It's getting late, boys and girls.  Good night. :-)