The White Album 50 Project: "Yer Blues"

When George Harrison made one last attempt at a definitive vocal on his ill-fated song "Not Guilty," he tried to record it in the control room of EMI Studio Two with the speakers playing the music at full blast, so that he felt like he was singing on the concert stage.  This required the technicians to set the monitor speakers at the appropriate level, which had its problems.  While engineer Ken Scott was doing that, John Lennon walked in, and Scott turned to him and said, "Bloody hell, the way you lot are carrying on you'll be wanting to record everything in the room next door!"  The room next door to Studio Two at Abbey Road isn't so much a room as it is a closet, meant to store tape machines and with no acoustic set-up to speak of for proper recording. 

Well, you didn't slight John Lennon like that, if you made a sarcastic suggestion to him, he'd act on it.  Sure enough, when Scott made this flippant suggestion of recording in an eight-by-eight walk-in closet, John replied, "That's a great idea, let's try it on the next number!"  The next number happened to be "Yer Blues," and the Beatles had their instruments set up in the small room with great difficulty.  By Scott's own admission, it all worked out great.

There's no mystery of how a song like "Yer Blues" - the title not mentioned in the lyric - was successfully recorded in such a tiny room.  It's a blistering, thunderous cut with some piercing guitar riffs, heavy bass lines, and perfectly anchored drums - all accentuated by John's pre-primal scream of a vocal - that was stripped to the barest, most essential elements of rock and roll.  What is somewhat less clear is how much of "Yer Blues" is for real and how much of it is parody.  John presumably wrote it as a parody of the blues-based rock songs coming from bands like Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and a then-new version of the Yardbirds . . . the group that became Led Zeppelin.  The forerunners of  the late-sixties blues craze included British bluesmen like Alexis Korner and, below, John Mayall.  Mayall was and remains a devout purist who has always stressed the need for white musicians who want to play the blues to adhere to the rules and structures set by the black bluesmen in the United States.

The idea behind "Yer Blues" was to make it plain that the Beatles were acknowledging that while they could play the blues, they could never feel the blues, at least not feel them the way black American artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson did.  In his book "Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles Britain, and America," Jonathan Gould wrote that "Yer Blues" was an confession of their "acceptance of the idea that, except as a subject of self-parody, certain expressive modes of [black American] music lay outside the realm of their experience and hence beyond their emotional range as singers." 

Except that John, having grown up in emotional turmoil and having had a tormented adulthood, and having come from Liverpool - a city looked down upon by the cosmopolitan south of England - did have an understanding of the black experience in America, at least enough of one to convey his own feelings of inferiority and pain.

"Yer Blues" was written in India while the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi, and John admitted that he had been "trying to reach God and feeling suicidal" while he was there, going through the anguish of his separation from Yoko Ono and felling utterly lost.  She was the girl who knew the reason why he wasn't already dead - and she herself was the reason.  "The funny thing about the [Maharishi's] camp," he remembered, "was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth. In 'Yer Blues,' when I wrote, 'I'm so lonely I want to die,' I'm not kidding. That's how I felt."

There are elements of parody and cheekiness toward the Beatles' contemporaries in "Yer Blues," mainly drawn from John's self-awareness of trying to imitate someone else's music, and the cheekiness probably helped keep John going.  Knowing he couldn't get to the heart of the blues the way a black man in America could, he threw in esoteric references in the verses that acknowledge that.  Instead of trying to be black, he plays on Native American mythology about his mother being of the sky and his father being of the earth, leaving him as a child of a vast, empty, worthless universe.  Ironically, John got American Indian beliefs the wrong way around - the sky is the father and the earth is the mother - but the joke is still obvious.  Even more obvious is his coy reference to Bob Dylan's song "Ballad of a Thin Man," about the paranoid reporter Mr. Jones covering a circus sideshow and being too clueless to understand what's going on.  But behind the jokes, he makes it clear that he's enveloped by black clouds and a blue mist to the point where he even hates his rock and roll.  (His rock and roll - but not his blues.)  It becomes all too clear at this point, as John leads the band into an instrumental break, that when he spoke about feeling suicidal, he bloody well meant it.

And the music is damn sure convincing.  The Beatles swing and storm through the song with great force, the guitars and drums chopping across the stereo spectrum brutally before going into the instrumental break with a dense guitar riff that crunches and pushes though like Johnny Cash's train rhythms.  The guitar solo that follows reaches the heavens with a perilous wail before Ringo Starr's drums bring the song back to the slow blues riff to finish it out.

The whole feel of the song is as confining as the room it was recorded in; instruments invade each other's sonic space and leak into the wrong microphones.  Paul McCartney employed a  Fender Jazz Bass for "Yer Blues," giving the song a deeper and richer tone.  The claustrophobic nature of the recording was so chaotic that it caught John's guide vocal in the fade-out; his voice sounds so distant that it's as if the black clouds and blue mists have swallowed him whole.  He almost sounds nonchalant here at the end - instead of hearing him sing "If I ain't dead already, girl, you know the reason why," I think he almost seems to be phrasing the lyric much more lackadaisically and singing, "If I'm not dead already . . . well, then, you know the reason why."

Ringo pretty much sums up "Yer Blues" quite nicely in the Beatles' "Anthology" book: "'Yer Blues,' on the White Album, you can't top it. It was the four of us. That is what I'm saying: it was really because the four of us were in a box, a room about eight by eight, with no separation. It was this group that was together; it was like grunge rock of the sixties, really - grunge blues."

And someone ought to preserve that walk-in annex room the Beatles recorded it in.  Call it "the Lennon closet."

The Beatles never performed "Yer Blues" in concert, of course, but had the band stayed  together into the seventies and resumed touring like the Rolling Stones did, this song would have definitely been a staple of their concert set lists.  John certainly had an affinity for it; he performed it in December 1968 with a one-off supergroup he formed for the Rolling Stones' "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" TV special, which he called the Dirty Mac (shown above), featuring himself on guitar and vocals, Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, and the Stones' own Keith Richards on bass, and he played it again nine months after that at a rock festival in Toronto in the first stage iteration of the Plastic Ono Band - himself, Clapton, Yoko Ono, Klaus Voormann on bass, and future Yes member Alan White on drums.  (The latter version of "Yer Blues" was preserved for posterity on his Live Peace In Toronto 1969 album.)

To conclude this blog entry, I offer a clip of the Dirty Mac version, from the Rolling Stones' TV special, which wouldn't be aired in Britain or America until 1996.

Yer blues, John. :-)