The Beatles' White Album was officially titled after the group - The Beatles - but it has been increasingly heard as a collection of four men's separate recordings, with most of the songs foretelling their solo careers. John Lennon's contributions are a preview of the introspection and brutality of his early-seventies work and the obsession with Yoko Ono that would permeate his work from one end of the 1970s to the other, while Paul McCartney offered numerous pop songs that sounded like the hits he would have with Wings. George Harrison's four cuts show his spiritual side and his increased interest in record production, both of which came to the fore on his own records. Ringo Starr's first composition, "Don't Pass Me By," could have been included on his Beaucoups of Blues album, while "Good Night," a Lennon-McCartney song given to Ringo to sing, was recorded with a little help from his friends - foretelling his wildly successful Ringo album of 1973, which would feature contributions from John, Paul and George, but also from Harry Nilsson, Billy Preston, members of the Band, and Marc Bolan, among others.
Was the White Album really a Beatles album?
The Beatles were already growing apart, and it showed on this album . . . not just in how the thirty recordings were conceived and how they demonstrated their individual personalities but also with the vast quantity of them and in how they were recorded. When they returned from India they had over twenty new songs to consider. Many more would be written during the White Album sessions, and they wanted to record all of them. Producer George Martin, opposed to the very idea of a double album, thought that a few of the songs weren't worthy of release and tried to convince them to be more selective and make a really good single album of about fourteen or sixteen titles, but the Beatles wouldn't hear of it. None of them were willing to sacrifice their own personal artistic interests for the greater good of the group. John wasn't about to give up the chance to include a sound collage when Paul was insisting on adding more "granny songs," as John called Paul's lightweight pop numbers, while George was happy to bring in Eric Clapton to help him on a song and Ringo wasn't about to surrender the opportunity to get his first composition on a Beatles record after having taken five years to finish it.
Thus, many of the songs were recorded in a solo fashion. John is the only Beatle who appears on "Julia." Paul is the only Beatle who appears on "Blackbird" and "Mother Nature's Son" and required only Ringo to accompany him on "Why Don't We Do it In the Road?" Other songs had only two or three members of the group involved. If not for his own "Piggies," George's role on side two would have been that of a occasional session man; he's absent from five of that side's nine songs. At one time, group members would be working on separate tracks in different studios at Abbey Road at the same time. And when all four Beatles were playing together, the composer of the song would usually employ the others as a backing group and be in complete control of the arrangement. John and Paul would still occasionally suggest a change of key or lyric to each other's songs, but they had gone in such different directions as composers that it would have been more honest to give a bulk Lennon-McCartney credit to the 25 White Album tracks they conceived between them, rather than giving a joint composing credit to each one of them. George Martin was the White Album's producer in name only; he was merely observing many of the sessions he attended. The Beatles mostly ran them, sometimes with assistant producer Chris Thomas (who subbed for Martin during Martin's late-summer vacation).
The fracturing of the group musically was based on their personal fracturing. So many sessions at EMI Studios at Abbey Road devolved into shouting matches among the Beatles and into hostility directed to the production crew that engineer Geoff Emerick quit working on the White Album seven weeks into the sessions, unable to handle the arguments between and with the fabulous foursome. He was so eager to get out of it that he quit on a Tuesday - July 16, 1968 - and Martin tried unsuccessfully to get Emerick to finish out the week. Emerick had been like a son to Martin and had learned a lot from him, but not even their special relationship could keep Geoff on board - not even for a couple more days. Emerick would eventually work with the Beatles again, but for the time being, he'd had enough.
Emerick explained to the Beatles why he was leaving, and John Lennon tried to dissuade him. "Look," he told Emerick, "we're not moaning and getting uptight about you, we're complaining about EMI. Look at this place, studio two, all we've seen is bricks for the past year. Why can't they decorate it?" Emerick concedes that the studio did need some refurbishing, but he could also see that this was an excuse for the growing rifts between the Beatles. "They were falling apart," he recalled later.
The next day, July 17, the Beatles, in good spirits, attended the premiere of the Yellow Submarine movie in London's Piccadilly Circus, as if nothing were wrong.
At least Emerick, for whom Martin unsuccessfully tried to secure a credit on the original release of Sgt. Pepper, got a credit for his White Album contributions. Too bad his name was misspelled ("Jeff" Emerick).
Emerick was lucky not to have witnessed worse arguments among the Beatles. The worst of them were done in private; the foursome would send the engineers out on their dinner breaks when it became apparent that they couldn't proceed with recording until they worked out their disagreements. Once, being assigned to work on a Beatles session had been a plum for an EMI recording engineer; by 1968, receiving such an assignment had become like drawing the short straw. Things got so bad that by late August 1968, Ringo Starr walked out.
Ringo had gotten so fed up with trying to please the others with his drumming and having to do several retakes that one day, after waiting an eternity at EMI Studios at Abbey Road for the other members of the group to show up, he just got up and left, not to come back for ten days. Ringo felt he was not playing well, and he even admitted later to John and to Paul on separate occasions that he felt so out of it, that the other three were so close and he felt like he didn't belong. Both of them gave him the exact same reply: "I thought it was you three!" (George would most likely have said the same thing, had Ringo confided in him too.)
Ironically, Ringo looks back on the White Album as a more satisfying experience for him than Sgt. Pepper because he got to play more on the White Album.
The other three persuaded Ringo to return after assuring him that they greatly appreciated his drumming, but if Ringo was so alienated that he could quit the group, how long would it be before any of the others quit? Not long - a few months later, during the rehearsals for what became the Let It Be album, it was George who walked out for a few days and brought everything to a temporary halt. (Ringo, by the way, would henceforth remain loyal to the bitter end. He was the only Beatle to play on the very last recording session for a Beatles album before the breakup - the Phil Spector-produced orchestral overdub session for Let It Be.)
The reason the White Album is officially called The Beatles, though, is because it is a Beatles album. A real band is still at work here, as evidenced by how Paul knows when to bring in his bass on one of John's songs, or how John and George respond to each other with their guitars. Tim Riley has pointed to this "intuitive musical flow," explaining how "you can hear it in the way Ringo second-guesses Paul's bass lines, or the way Lennon reads a vocal space they leave open for him." No backing group of faceless session men could have compensated for the loss of such chemistry. That's why these are still Beatles songs. That's why these songs - even the ones recorded solo - work together here despite the disparity of style and production. Despite the fractured nature of the album, the thirty tracks here still unite the group. E quattuor unum - one formed from four.
"I've never felt it in any other circumstances," Chris Thomas later said of the Beatles' magic in talking about his career as a producer, a career that includes producing records from groups such as Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, the Pretenders, and INXS. "It was the special chemistry of the four of them which nobody since has ever had."
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