The White Album 50 Project: "Savoy Truffle"

There aren't any songs on the Beatles' White Album about buildings, but there is one song about food.

Singing the verses of his song "Savoy Truffle," George Harrison sounds like he's reciting a dessert menu from one of London's poshest restaurants . . . and heralding the availability of such exotic sweets as "good news."  Well, if you're an American, that's how you might have first heard it.  In fact, George was singing about the flavors in a box of chocolates - called "Good News," an assortment  of chocolates with cream fillings.  The Good News brand was to Britain what Russell Stover and Whitman's Sampler are to America.        

Good News chocolates, made by the Mackintosh company, were a favorite of Eric Clapton, who was said to reach for a box of candy as easily as he would reach for his guitar. Alas, his obsession with chocolate would prove to be indicative of an addictive personality, as his later battles with heroin and alcohol bore out.  Clapton's chocolate addiction was so severe that his dentist warned him that he'd have to pull out all of Clapton's teeth if he kept eating more candy.

The verses of "Savoy Truffle" mention the various flavors in a Good News chocolate box, including the title itself - and for those who don't know, "montelimart" is a form of nougat that originated in the town of Montélimar in southeastern France.  George made up other flavors to fit the rhyme scheme and meter.  "Savoy Truffle" is an ostensible admonishment of Clapton's inability to control his sweet tooth and a warning to him to stop eating so much candy before it was too late, but it has a couple of other messages in it to consider.  George's song warns us that we indulge too much in the sweet pleasures of comfort food in the form of materialism and that we fail to keep check on our appetites at our own peril, heading toward ruin.  But he's also warning us against indulging in too much of other sweet things - ideas, entertainments, amusements, political platitudes - that provide cheap satisfaction but don't enlighten us.  Rather, such sweetness dulls our senses and dumbs us down.  (To put it into contemporary terms - think of Donald Trump as the political equivalent of a Twinkie.)  Too many sweet things are not only bad for our bodies, but also our minds.

The lyrics of "Savoy Truffle"'s second bridge verse underscore the serious message in what many take to be a less-than-serious song. "You know that what you eat you are," George sings, "but what is sweet now turns so sour."  How true, as we ultimately regret our most excessive indulgences when we're recovering from the aftermath.  (Beatles publicist Derek Taylor suggested the former line, inspired by the title of the American counterculture film You Are What You Eat - which in turn, was named after the old saying that our bodies are only as healthy as the food we consume.) But then George turns on Paul McCartney to illustrate his disdain for sweet entertainment - "We all know Ob-La-Di-Bla-Da, but can you show me where you are?"  How subversive for George to put down his fellow Beatle - the chap who got him into the group - for his songwriting style by singling out the McCartney song on this record that John Lennon (who does not appear on "Savoy Truffle," ironically enough) and George hated the most.  He was biting the hand that fed.

(Pointless aside that I couldn't resist: The Beatles sequenced "Blackbird," "Piggies" and "Rocky Raccoon" in that order on side two as a joke, because all of the titles referred to animals or birds.  I have no doubt that "Savoy Truffle" follows "Honey Pie" because both song titles refer to desserts. :-D)

The music of "Savoy Truffle" serves the words perfectly, with a gritty soul-based arrangement that features some intense organ playing from Paul, steady, shuffling drums from Ringo Starr, and a stinging guitar solo in the middle eight, with a slashing chord repeated four times in rapid succession at the end that is much in the style of the coda of George's Rubber Soul tune "Think For Yourself."  But the heaviest - and the most heavily symbolic - feature of "Savoy Truffle"'s arrangement is the hefty saxophone ensemble that anchors the song.  It was George Martin's idea to have "Savoy Truffle" scored for saxophones - four tenors and two baritones - and Chris Thomas, an accomplished musician himself, went ahead on a score and delivered.  And so did the saxophonists, delivering a fantastic, beautiful sound.  But George Harrison found the result too clean . . . too nice . . . too . . . sweet.  Having gotten the perfect sax ensemble sound, George instructed Abbey Road technician Brian Gibson to deliberately distort it with heavy overload, which made the brass sound dirty and crude.  As a result, the brass makes the same point as the lyrics do about all that is sweet.  And, in case you didn't notice, George's own vocal on this song is also distorted; it sounds like it's coming through a transistor radio from a low-wattage AM station.

George's treatment of a soul-based, brass-tinged rock song is in stark contrast to the ethos that would dominate a good deal of pop in the seventies.  Records became more polished and more pristine, as a new generation of producers would aspire to make popular music that would go down smooth - especially in Los Angeles, where recording artists would create perfect, seamless, flawless music as effortlessly as breathing.  As the seventies wore on, the Aphex audio company, founded in 1975, introduced its "Aural Exciter," an audio signal processor designed to sweeten sound.  Its use became so predominant and derided that the Eagles, when they released their 1979 album The Long Run, emphatically stressed that they didn't use one, so intent were they at the time on distancing themselves from their LA soft-rock reputation.  One of the best-known purveyors of this sweetening trend in pop was James William Guercio, who established himself as the mastermind behind hit records from two brass-dependent pop-rock bands - Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago.  The hit singles these two groups generated weren't necessarily bad - I still crank up the radio every time Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" comes on - but even their best songs are somewhat bland and predictable.  Think about it . . . if George Harrison had left the brass on "Savoy Truffle" alone, it would have been comparable to a Guercio production - and it wouldn't have been as memorable or as meaningful.

As fate would have it, Halloween will have come and gone by the time I'm back here to discuss the next White Album track.  Take it easy on the candy. ;-)