The White Album 50 Project: The End

And so, now it really is time to say good night . . . to everybody, everywhere.

This is the thirty-ninth - and last - post that I have written about the Beatles' White Album for its golden anniversary.  It's been a fun but exhausting adventure, and don't ask me if I'm planning a fiftieth-anniversary series of blog posts for Abbey Road in 2019, because I still need to recover from the past thirty-two weeks of this project.

I'd like to thank Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as the memories of John Lennon and George Harrison, for all the wonderful music here - even "Wild Honey Pie" and "Revolution 9" - and also extend my thanks to Chris Thomas and the memory of George Martin for producing it.  I'd like to give a special shout-out to all of the people who inspired the songs.  They include Donovan, Mike Love, Prudence Farrow, Richard Cooke, Eric Clapton, Little Richard, various Beatle girlfriends and wives, and of course, the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  And, because I know his son would likely be embarrassed by the mention of it, Warren Herlihy and his gun obsession.  Also, a tip of the hat - or, in some cases, a wag of the finger - to the various individuals I was inspired to bring up (or down) in the writing of these blog entries - Ray Stevens, Joel Grey, Theodore Roosevelt (who gets a finger wag because he went out rhino hunting with his gun, but probably didn't have an elephant, and took his son Kermit in case of accidents), the Avett Brothers, Diana Ross, Bing Crosby, Weird Al Yankovic, Billy Joel, Freddy Fender, John Mayall, John Denver, Mia Farrow, her son Ronan, Led Zeppelin, Fountains of Wayne, and a whole bunch of other folks I can't think of right now.   

And - this is in all seriousness - I dedicate "The White Album 50 Project" to the late Geoff Emerick, who died of a heart attack at 72 earlier this year while this series was in progress.  Now that he and George Martin are in the next world with two of the Beatles, I hope they rock on together.  Geoff . . . put the red light on.  :-(

And last but hardly least, I only need remind you of the releases of the various fiftieth-anniversary editions of the White Album, out now, with all-new remixes courtesy of George Martin's song Giles, who brings forth (or fifth) this monumental feat with, as he explains, "the hope of immersing old and new listeners into one of the most diverse and inspiring albums ever made."

For a hundred and fifty-three bucks, you can get the seven-CD Super Deluxe edition, with:

• the 2018 stereo album remix on two compact discs
• a disc of 27 demos from the sessions at George Harrison's house in Esher Demos
• a disc of 50 newly released and remixed outtakes
• a Blu-ray disc featuring an album mix in high resolution PCM stereo, a Master Audio 5.1 album mix, a Dolby True HD 5.1 album mix, and a direct transfer of the White Album's original mono mix 
• a book - a really nice book!

For those of more modest means, there's the Deluxe edition, with the new stereo remix of the double album plus the Esher disc, and for those who still have turntables, you can just get the new stereo remix of the original double album on vinyl.  Whichever you choose, you can't go wrong.  More information is here. 

And you can read my review of the entire White Album, published on this blog in May 2015, by going here.

And so I declare my series on this album closed.  So what am I going to do after this?

I think I'm going to listen to the White Album. :-)     

The White Album 50 Project: The Release

There may have been some trepidation at EMI as the respected record conglomerate prepared to issue the Beatles' new double album in November 1968, the first album from the group on their new Apple label. After all, it was a double album, which would sell in America for about nine or ten bucks - a lot to ask the fans to pay back then.  And George Martin was worried about the damage it could do to the lads' reputation; after all, he thought that thirty tracks were, well, all too much, and, as noted here before, he had never wanted a double album. And all of the anticipation was building up big time, as it had been over a year since Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released.  Not a lot of Beatles fans in the States considered Magical Mystery Tour, with all of its previously issued single cuts, a real album (it wasn't, as they would later find out, just like Yesterday and Today wasn't), and even though the Beatles had put out the equivalent of an album in the form of thirteen songs spread out over the Magical Mystery Tour record and four singles since June 1967, nothing beat the look, the feel, the mere presence of a real long player, with all-new songs, in one's hands.  A brand new album from the Beatles was much more of an event than even a Beatles single - and this new album was to have two LPs!

And then, on November 22, 1968 in Britain, and on November 25, 1968 - fifty years ago today - in the United States, it happened.

The original reviews for The Beatles were mostly positive, with Derek Jewell of the Sunday Times in Britain writing, "Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what the Beatles are on about. Created by, creating for, their age."  Over at the Observer a little farther down Fleet Street (give or take a few blocks), Tony Palmer declared,  "If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert, [The Beatles] should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making."  When commissioned to write liner notes for the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album, Derek Taylor was so impressed with Palmer's review that he used that instead.  (Not that American fans got to read it; for the U.S. release, Capitol had liner-notes writer and future label vice president Dan Davis compose a clumsy explanation of the Yellow Submarine movie's plot in a blatant - and blatantly unsuccessful - attempt at replicating Liverpool humor.) 

In America, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone - then only a year in publication - led the chorus of praise, writing, "Nothing could have been more ambitious than the current release: The Beatles is the history and synthesis of Western music. And that, of course, is what rock and roll is, and that is what the Beatles are."  Wenner singled out the Beatles' genius for adapting themselves to genres beyond rock and roll, saying that their ability to assume a non-rock style was "so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further."  Even Richard Goldstein of the New York Times, who had panned Sgt, Pepper, said that The Beatles was "a major success" and "far more imaginative" than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour.  (Goldstein would later call Sgt. Pepper a success as well, saying of his original negative 1967 review, "I was wrong.")

Once in awhile, though, the White Album would get a raspberry, such as New York Times critic Nik Cohn calling it "boring beyond belief" and dismissing many of the songs as "profound mediocrities" in a counterpoint to Goldstein's review.  Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, meanwhile, dismissed it as a collection of a "pastiche of musical exercises."  The problem for the White Album's detractors was its admittedly exhausting 94-minute length, making it an endurance test for some.  Putting out an album with too many songs at one time seemed pretty fishy to George Martin, who suspected that the Beatles were trying to fulfill a pre-set song quota in their EMI recording contract sooner rather than later, and Beatles author Nicholas Schaffner even calculated a few years later that, after the White Album's two long players, the song quota clause meant that the group would only owe EMI one album after that.  (They ended up recording two more albums.)

Some reviewers faulted the Beatles not for the quantity of tracks on the new double album but for the overall conservatism of the album, saying it marked a retreat from the adventure of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper.  Indeed, the White Album's primarily traditional sound would conventionalize pop for a decade, just as Abbey Road would inspire the rock and pop performers of the seventies to add a high sheen of polish and gloss to that conventional sound.  Paul McCartney defended the Beatles' decision to be more traditionalist on the White Album, saying it was possible to make good music without coming up with a new sound, adding that too many critics wanted the group to innovate for the sake of innovation "until we vanish up our own B-sides."  (He was likely not referring to songs like "The Inner Light" and "Revolution." :-D )

The fans would ultimately decide if paying a couple weeks' worth of their allowances or paychecks, depending on how far along they were in school and/or the workforce, was worth the trouble.  Radio disc jockeys on the free-form FM radio stations emerging in 1968 would help them make that decision by playing the White Album on their shows, and one such DJ was Vin Scelsa (above), then just beginning a radio career that would span decades at various FM stations in the greater New York area before his retirement in 2015.  In 1968, Scelsa was a 21-year-old student at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey (coincidentally, the college where Allen Klein earned his accounting degree) working at the campus radio station WFMU.  (Upsala closed in 1994, its campus turned into a McMansion development aimed at black home buyers in now overwhelmingly black East Orange, but WFMU is still on the air, now broadcasting out of Jersey City.) In November 1968, Scelsa, depressed over Richard Nixon's recent election to the Presidency, went over to nearby West Orange to browse in the record department at E.J. Korvette, a now-defunct discount department store chain.  (The store's West Orange location happened to be a few blocks away from where Carole King and Gerry Goffin briefly lived, their suburban neighborhood inspiring them to write the Monkees tune "Pleasant Valley Sunday.")  He knew the Beatles were coming out with a new album soon, but with the release date still a few days or so away, he wasn't looking for that on the store racks.

And then . . . in the middle of the record department . . . away from everything else in the record department . . . was a huge cardboard box, and on its slightly open flap . . . in capital letters . . . huge font . . . without parentheses or quotation marks . . . read the following words: CAPITOL RECORDS.  Scelsa peaked in and found a bunch of white album covers with the embossed words "The BEATLES" on them.

Scelsa and his friends at Upsala wouldn't have to pay a dime for their copies of the White Album.  He stole a bunch of them - he literally took an armful out and left the store without a word - and brought them back to the college campus, giving each of his friends a copy and playing cuts from his own copy on the campus radio station.  Thus, WFMU was one of the first radio stations, in not the first radio station, in the United States to play the White Album.  And it happened in Essex County, New Jersey, my own neck of the woods. (I remember E.J. Korvette in West Orange very well - it's a K Mart now, in fact - and I'm more than a little familiar with Pleasant Valley and the former Upsala campus.)  Today, incidentally, WFMU wouldn't play old Beatles records; instead, it plays a lot of avant-garde and experimental music that the Beatles themselves couldn't have anticipated.

The music, once played on the radio, clearly helped to sell the album - it sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release in the United States, making it one of the fastest-selling new-album releases ever.  It sold four million copies worldwide by the end of 1968, and in the United States it's been certified platinum nineteen times over.  Really.  (Or so Wikipedia says.)  For awhile, it was the most commercially successful double album of all time, but a decade later, the two-record soundtrack album for the movie Saturday Night Fever surpassed it in sales.  But The Beatles is still the most commercially successful Beatles album in the United States - even more so than Abbey Road - and it spent nine weeks atop the Billboard album chart in late 1968 and early 1969, though it was a nonconsecutive run (it was a run interrupted one week by a Motown TV-special soundtrack featuring the Supremes and the Temptations).  Until Robert Stigwood compiled the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from recordings from the Bee Gees, Tavares, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and some other folks (telling, isn't it, that it took a various-artists two-record set to top the Beatles?) in 1977, the only double album that came close to the White Album's success was Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, from 1973.

As to the question as to whether the White Album was too long and too excessive, with a few inferior songs . . . I'll let Paul have the last word here. :-)

   

The White Album 50 Project: The Artwork

Oh come on, now, you didn't think I was going to stop writing about the White Album as soon as I finished writing about each individual track, did you? :-D

Almost as soon as the Beatles began recording the White Album, they bandied about different ideas for the title and also for sleeve artwork.  The challenge was to come up with something even more daring and clever than the cover of their previous album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The group had become known for producing bold, eye-catching LP covers, especially from the release of Rubber Soul on, and they were eager to do it again in 1968.  In the early weeks of the sessions, as I wrote earlier on this blog, the Beatles had planned to call the LP A Doll's House, after Henrik Ibsen's play about finding one's own independence, until the Leicester band Family beat them to punch with their debut LP, Music In a Doll's House.  And thank goodness for that, because this is what the front cover most likely would have looked like if the Beatles had been able to stick with the original title.

Dude, this is even more hideous than that album cover showing Sammy Davis, Jr. sporting a Nehru jacket!

For the record (no pun intended), the cover above was designed by John Patrick Byrne, a Scottish playwright and artist who proves here that as a fine artist, he's one hell of a writer.  Though, to be fair, he made out better a decade later with his artwork for the cover of Gerry Rafferty's City to City album.  (Byrne's rejected artwork for the Beatles' double album was used in 1980 for The Beatles Ballads, a compilation LP issued outside the United States.)  

At the time, many rock acts were trying to come up with covers more colorful and elaborate than that of Sgt. Pepper, and the Beatles themselves produced a garish sleeve for their Magical Mystery Tour double EP, showing the Fabs as the Walrus and his Eggmen from the film, that, like the music inside, was mostly a pale imitation of Pepper-style psychedelia.  The sleeve became even more garish when Capitol Records in the U.S. turned Magical Mystery Tour into an album of all of the Beatles' 1967 non-Pepper song releases, listing all the songs on the front cover with a hideous letter font.

It was Paul McCartney, now assuming more of a leadership role in the Beatles in the wake of Brian Epstein's death and the founding of Apple Corps, who took the initiative to get the artwork going.  He'd become acquainted with London art dealer Robert Fraser, who had helped put together the Sgt. Pepper sleeve, and Paul knew many artists through him, one of which was Richard Hamilton.  Hamilton, a generation older then the Beatles, was known for his "minimalist" art.  He reduced objects to their most basic elements, using simple shapes that used order and simplicity to project purity and subtlety.  Minimalist art was typified largely by paintings with mostly one color or sculptures that were no more than basic shapes.  The concept was gently made fun of in the 1969 romantic-comedy movie The April Fools (Catherine Deneuve's first Hollywood film, by the way), in which some of the characters debate whether a piece of art - a tall rectangular sculpture in the shape of a pedestal - makes its own quiet statement . . . or whether there should be something on it.

*

"The White Album, Ian - there was nothing on that damn cover!" - Fran Drescher as Bobbi Flekman in This Is Spinal Tap

Well, when Richard Hamilton considered the upcoming Beatles double album in 1968, he proposed that the cover should make, well, its own quiet statement, presumably as a response to the overblown rock album artwork of the time.  He proposed a blank, white sleeve with a title as minimalist as the cover: The Beatles.  It would be the perfect counterpoint to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had a very long title and and had a front-cover photo filled with a cavalcade of faces and decorations.  I don't know if Hamilton heard any of the new songs the Beatles had recorded, but, as with the cover of Sgt. Pepper, the sleeve for the double album would reflect the music on it - simpler, sparse, and virtually devoid of the experimentation of the Beatles' 1967 output.

Paul McCartney loved the idea, but he had to check that there had never been an album simply called The Beatles.  There had been several eponymously titled albums from the group not just in Britain (With the Beatles and Beatles For Sale) or America (Meet the Beatles!, Beatles '65, Beatles VI, and others), but also in Germany (And Now: The Beatles), Mexico (Conozca A The Beatles), Japan (Beatles No. 5), and several other countries.  In fact, the group's name by itself had never been employed as an album title, and so everyone agreed that they should go for Hamilton's idea.

The final sleeve was a blank white space with the group's name embossed in white lettering, at a crooked angle, plus a nice added touch:  Each copy of the first edition of the double set would have its own seven-digit serial number, thus no two copies would be alike and each one would be an individual work of art.  In the United States, a separate set of seven-digit serial numbers prefaced by the letter A (for America) was used.  Ringo Starr got copy number 0000001 - "because I'm lovely!" he explained.  Copy A0000001 was last offered for sale in 2013, while Ringo put his copy up for auction in 2015; it sold for a whopping $790,000.  Subsequent editions of the White Album were printed without serial numbers, and the embossed white lettering of the LP title was replaced by printed gray lettering, though still askew.  (For the thirtieth-anniversary CD re-issue of the White Album in 1998, which I own a copy of, the embossed white lettering and serial numbers were revived.  I have number 0298527.)

Opening the gatefold, one finds on the left the track listing printed in dignified, gray lettering in the Sabon font, each title separated by a colon.  In keeping with the minimalist theme, there's no delineation between the last track on one side and the first track of the next.  To the right are black-and-white photo portraits of each of the Beatles, taken by John Kelly.  That's it, and that's all.  

Until you open the record wallets.

By keeping the cover stark and simple, the Beatles and Hamilton were able to pass the savings onto the fans in the form of goodies cooler than any prize ever found in a Cracker Jack box.  There was the collage poster, of course, which Hamilton conceived before he considered the cover, tacking up photos supplied by the group and then strategically adding white space between them to give them some sort of proportion.  "He explained that this was so the whole picture could breathe," Paul McCartney later said.  "You could see through the density, which was a great idea and gave me my education about negative space."

The pictures included are a curious and revealing look into the Beatles' personal and public lives.  There are numerous Mad Day Out outtakes, stills from the "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" promotional videos, and proofs of their visit to India, as well as a naughty doodle from John Lennon of himself and Yoko - and a very naughty picture of Paul wearing an open robe with nothing underneath, hiding his privates behind a pillar!      

Other notable snapshots include Paul in disguise while traveling abroad in late 1966, John, Paul and George Harrison trying out brass instruments with Brian Epstein looking on, John and Ringo wearing Napoleon hats while in France in 1964, Paul soaking in the bathtub, Ringo posing with Herb Rooney of the pop group the Exciters, with whom the Beatles toured in 1964 (I always thought that was soccer star Pele!), the Beatles with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and even Ringo dancing with Elizabeth Taylor.  And look at John, will ya?  Whom could he be talking to on the phone - and about what - while Yoko Ono sleeps beside him?  The photos, like the double-record set, are sprawling and comprehensive, but their scattered nature betrays the fractured nature of the band.  Consider the pictures in the lower-right-hand corner of the poster; you have black-and-white shots of at least three of the Beatles looking like something is very wrong.  Ringo looks depressed, George looks distracted, and Paul is deep in thought.

Turn the poster over, of course, and you find a lyric sheet.  Once again, the Beatles, even though they couldn't control how people interpreted their songs, were going to make sure that at least the fans would get the words right.  This was the third time the Beatles offered a lyric sheet with a record release, after the Sgt. Pepper LP and the Magical Mystery Tour double EP.  (The American Magical Mystery Tour LP was also issued with the lyrics for the songs from the film of the same name, but not with the words for the supporting singles on side two.)   It would also be the last. As their partnership deteriorated through 1969 and 1970, they couldn't be bothered to include lyric sheets for Abbey Road or Let It Be.

And finally . . . color versions of John Kelly's White Album portraits, suitable for framing.  Of course, these went up on the walls of bedrooms and college dorm rooms all over the world, and John Lennon's picture became iconic in its own right, with his pensive, inquisitive expression.  And I'm sure it led to spikes in sales of granny glasses and denim jackets.

Again, though, the pictures spoke to the disjointed, discordant nature of The Beatles . . . and the Beatles.  They were attached along perforations, but in tête-bêche style; that is, if you tried to display them without separating them, two of them would be upside down.  By the way, why didn't they pose for a group photo?  And did you notice that none of them are smiling?  (There were outtakes showing the Beatles smiling for Kelly's lens, though, obviously, none of them made the cut.  I've already shown a couple of those outtakes in this blog.)  In the spirit of the symbolic title they almost used for the White Album, they were clearly in their own separate rooms while making music in the doll's house that was EMI Studios.  Literally as well as figuratively; sometimes, John and Paul would be working on two different tracks in two different studios at the same time.

The White Album's artwork left as much room for interpretation as the music, but for the most part, the fans didn't analyze it - they took Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason's advice for approaching pop and just dug it.  High-quality portrait photos, a cool poster with the words to all the songs on the back, and a simple, basic antidote to the pretentious LP artwork then filling record stores (Remember record stores?  They were popular before the days of Amazon and streaming!) were indicative of how the Beatles respected and valued their fans.  Value for money and impeccable taste with the packaging of the music as well as with the music itself show how the Beatles re-wrote the rules for how to sell recorded music.

Too bad those rules have since been re-re-written.      

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. :-)       

The White Album 50 Project: "Revolution 9"

"Revolution 9" is the longest - and also the most controversial - Beatles track ever released.  (Eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, or 8:22.)  An offshoot of John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's work with avant-garde art, it was their attempt to sonically depict a revolution against the system.  It was derived from the last six minutes of the full ten-minute rhythm track of Take 18 of "Revolution 1," that take providing the master recording of "Revolution 1" for the White Album.  In those final six minutes, John produced some strident guitar noise while screaming, "All right, all right! Right! Right!  Right!" over and over while Yoko muttered various phrases.

Along with that, John, Yoko, and Abbey Road technicians assembled and compiled various tape loops and spooled them onto tape machines.  John and George Harrison even created new vocal tapes for the collage.  John then mixed them altogether to get the magnum opus that appears on the White Album.  

How on earth do you write about a track like "Revolution 9"?  If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about a tape-loop collage is like using mime to describe quantum physics.  But there is a definite structure to how the sound effects evolve and build up as the track progresses.  Even if sound collages aren't your cup of tea, you have to concede that John clearly knew what he was doing.  As Tim Riley noted, none of this was random.  A trajectory was mapped out - either in advance or as John went along.

Before we get to that, though, I must acknowledge the compère of this sonic excursion: the faceless voice repeating the words "number nine."  John heard it on an exam tape for the Royal Academy of Music - the voice artist was announcing the ninth question on the test - and thought it was, in the words of Abbey Road tape operator Richard Lush, a real hoot.  So John made a loop out of it, fading it in and out of the mix at will.  As spooky as it sounds when it kicks off the track with a plaintive piano in the background, what makes it spookier is that no one knows who the voice belonged to.  The exam tapes for the Royal Academy of Music were disposed of long ago, and so there's no way to identify the voice artist who recorded them.  It's a voice out of nowhere, calling from some long, distant past that was already long and distant by 1968. The Beatles and other musicians of their ilk had found success without having to go to some silly, elitist music school.

The intensity of "Revolution 9" is set by the muted, ironically contentious dialogue that precedes it, which is a studio control room recording of Beatles producer George Martin asking Beatles assistant Alistair Taylor about a promised bottle of wine and Taylor apologizing to Beatles producer George Martin for having forgotten it.  They resolve things with Taylor asking, and Martin granting, forgiveness, for a laugh - "Cheeky bitch!" Taylor says as the "music" begins.  The piano and the repeated words "number nine" suggest, to first-time listeners, an intro to an orchestrated, aggrandized version of the song "Revolution."  John, cheeky bitch, quickly makes it clear that we're listening to nothing of the sort as soon as other elements of sound enter the mix and start to ratchet up the tension.  Loops of string instruments, choirs, and repeated classical riffs filter in and out before a cacophony of horns takes over and leads into voices fading in and out, John and George offering random phrases in half-heard conversations.  A disgruntled population of souls yields to and enters into samples of music spinning backwards and forwards.  A woman's laughter turns into a child's panting (at about 1:58 into the track).  Screams from "Revolution 1" briefly take over in isolation.  Auto traffic goes back and forth.  Children are crying.  People are ready to revolt.  Something is going to happen.  There's a call to arms that gets repeated - "Hey . . . everybody!"  Voices of authority try to reassure us that all is well ("They are standing still.").  And that damned voice keeps reminding us we're in "number nine, number nine . . ."  At about 4:01 into the track, another number is announced: "Number thirty!"  Part of a head count of the foot soldiers in the revolution John and Yoko are depicting?  (Not a reference to the number of tracks on the White Album, which wasn't finalized until long after this track was finished.)   A few seconds later, at John's goading ("All . . . right . . ."), a crowd cheers and, at 4:27, the strings subsequently swell up against the horns.  It keeps building, building, building . . ..  Then, at the five-minute mark, all hell breaks loose.

The roar of a crowd takes over everything, sounding as if a government building - a palace, a prison, Parliament - is being stormed.  A baby's cry is turned on; the pace of the car horns quickens as people yell and march . . . and that's when everything really goes off the rails.  The cracking of plaster (at 5:43) is followed by the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and buildings collapsing, while the choirs keep singing. As the dust settles, John contemplates the aftermath in terms of reality ("industrial output . . . financial imbalance . . .") and, as the classical piano piece "Revolution 9" began on quietly returns, lost innocence ("the Watusi . . . the Twist . . ."), while George pines for a greater ideal ("Eldorado").  And then . . . "Take this brother, may it serve you well!"

"This" is a melody of piano notes that suddenly falls apart into static before collapsing completely with a fist on the keys, leaving a shell-shocked Yoko Ono to pick up the pieces.  From her disjointed prose, a sense of defeat and disillusionment emerges, as operatic voices leap out from the catacombs behind her.  An initially spirited piano riff turns mournful and fades into Yoko's final thought . . . "If . . . you become naked."

"Revolution 9" is, as John realized after the track was put together, anti-revolution.  The structure of the piece and the strategic mixing in and mixing out of the sound effects paint a picture of the destruction that John had said in the single release version of "Revolution" he clearly wanted out of, a sonic equivalent of Guernica, Pablo Picasso's mural responding to the Spanish Civil War (which the bad guys won).  It's an anti-war message, albeit a pretentious and self-indulgent one.  As you can gather, I have a love-hate obsession with this track.  And while many other Beatles fans simply hate it, many find it fascinating, no doubt in a morbid way, trying to explain and interpret it.  And then there were those who heard it and thought that John Lennon had gone completely off his rocker (my mother heard a bit of "Revolution 9" and dismissed it as "sick John Lennon crap").  One of those people was George Martin, who was no fan of sound collages and found them non-constructive.  Geoff Emerick confessed to finding it interesting, although, he added, "it seemed as though it was as much Yoko's as it was John's. Certainly it wasn't Beatles music."  But then there was also Beatles author David Quantick, who called the track "one of the most exciting recordings ever made . . . the most radical and innovative track ever to bring a rock record to its climax."  Really.

Incidentally, "Revolution 9" did not get its title from the fact that it fades out part of the way through the ninth minute, nor did it get its title from the "number nine" loop.  EMI studio documentation shows that John was calling this piece "Revolution 9" from the moment he started gathering sound effects, before he stumbled on the "number nine" voice, and before he could have known the timing of the final master.  Nine simply happened to be John's lucky number.  He was born on the ninth of October, he first lived at 9 Newcastle Road in Liverpool, Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern in the ninth of November, which used to be the ninth month (hence its name), and the Beatles made their debut on Ed Sullivan's variety show on the ninth of February.  And in 1974, the same year John's solo song "#9 Dream" peaked on the Billboard singles chart at number nine, his greatest nemesis, President Richard Nixon, who tried to have John thrown out of the United States, resigned his office on the ninth of August.  Also, John noted, nine is the highest single-digit number.  After that, it's back to zero.

Paul McCartney's reaction to "Revolution 9" is worth noting.  When Martin insisted that the track be cut from the final album, Paul sided with him.  But Paul was by no means opposed to sound collages.  He'd made a few himself, under the influence of German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.  He collaborated with John on a sound collage for the Carnival of Light show in London in 1967 at Abbey Road during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, much to the consternation of George Martin. Martin couldn't remember that session twenty years later (and told Beatles author Mark Lewisohn that he didn't care to!), and he'd reacted to the Carnival of Light session the way a father might react to a twelve-year-old son's silly drawings and doodles on scrap paper.  Many Beatles fans suspect that Paul didn't want "Revolution 9" on the White Album because he didn't want John to take the credit for being the group's chief innovator with sound collages, while others thought that it was because he didn't think John's piece was good enough.  More likely, it was because of what Emerick said - it wasn't Beatles music.  Paul's only objection might simply have been, and probably was, based on the opinion that such avant-garde excursions didn't belong on a Beatles record.  Besides, John and Yoko put out their own sound-collage record at the time of the White Album's release - Two Virgins, the album with the controversial cover of John and Yoko in the nude. But, of course, putting such a piece of musique concrète on a Beatles record would ensure that Beatles fans would hear a sample of the genre at least once, whereas Two Virgins was destined not to be a big seller (though it did chart higher than some of Ringo Starr's solo albums would).

Beatles author Dave Rybaczewski notes the importance of the placement of "Revolution 9" as the penultimate track of the White Album, a position "meant to leave the listener awestruck and in a jaw-dropped condition."  That it did.  And once fans got over their initial shock, those who had the stamina to hear it again (and again and again, just like the voice uttering "number nine" again and again) did so with the intention of seeking out new sounds they hadn't heard before.  Sometimes this meant playing "Revolution 9" backwards; other times it meant hearing it with one of the speakers turned off (most people bought the White Album in stereo).  Or cranking the volume up full blast, which probably blew a few speakers.  Even today, fifty years later, listeners can still find new sound effects they hadn't heard before.  I'm still trying to find that loop of George Martin instructing Geoff Emerick to "put the red light on."   And there ain't no rule for the company freaks.  (I'm still trying to find that quote in the mix, too.)  And after all of this radical avant-garde stuff, listeners would inevitably need something soothing to listen to afterwards to close the album . . . something more conventional, more conservative, with, say, a Mantovani-style arrangement.  Hmm, now what sort of song could fit the bill?  A lullaby, maybe?  ;-)

"Revolution 9" fades out with a crowd of spectators at an American football game exhorting the home team to intercept the visiting team's attempt at a field goal ("Block that kick!").  The symbolism is obvious. The people have resumed their silly games. The revolution is over. It failed.

The White Album 50 Project: "Cry Baby Cry"

John Lennon told official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that he'd gotten a slogan from an advertisement that went "Cry baby cry, make your mother buy," and he thought he could make a song out of it.  That song made it onto the White Album, and it's the last song John would ever write under the influence of Victorian children's literature.  

"Cry Baby Cry" is a sly little song that presents a social satire in the form of a deceptively fanciful nursery rhyme.  Based on "Sing a Song of Sixpence," John's song starts out painting a quaint picture of a king and queen who engage in activities designed to please others, like the king making breakfast for the queen while she plays piano for their children.  The music starts off as sweetly as the words, the sound dominated by an acoustic guitar, light piano and, courtesy of George Martin, a harmonium.  The elders of this royal family of the fictional country of Marigold, though, are utterly clueless, living in their own little bourgeois bubble without a care in the world and involving themselves in irrelevant activities.  As "Cry Baby Cry" continues, Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's drums and percussion become pushier, coming down hard at the conclusion at each line.  George Harrison's lead guitar gets especially biting as John snidely observes the duchess of Kirkcaldy (an actual town in Scotland) being tardy for tea time while her husband has issues - "problems" - at a local pub.  

The last verse of "Cry Baby Cry" finds these silly adults gathered around the table for a seance with the children exploiting their silly beliefs and practices by pretending to be spirits from the great beyond - "voices out of nowhere put on specially by the children . . . for a lark!"  The music has gotten more vicious, not only making clear the same contempt John has for the stuffy ruling classes that George displayed in "Piggies" (albeit with greater subtlety here), but also illuminating the paranoia the ruling classes have toward the younger generation.  "As a metaphor for the fear the youth culture's sounds instilled in their parents," Tim Riley wrote in "Tell Me Why," "'Cry Baby Cry' is an underrated Lennon royalty satire;  it's his most accomplished Lewis Carroll pastiche."

And it's also inspired rather novel counterculture art, like the late Alan Aldridge's illustration of the song.

I don't get it either.

The verses revolve around the refrain of "Cry baby cry, make your mother sigh, she's old enough to know better - so cry baby cry." Each recitation of the refrain seems to have more bite, and the beat is more pronounced here than in the verses.  The message of the refrain lyric is obvious: Mum can't be bothered with her kid's tantrums after having seen adults purporting to be her superiors romp through the landscape making fools of themselves.  So trouble your mother all you want, little baby; she's seen it all.

Such a sophisticated song would be a feather in the cap of any pop songwriter, but John actually disliked "Cry Baby Cry" so much that he denied having written it.  ("Not me," he said of the song in  1980, "a piece of rubbish.")  But it's a clever song in so many ways, particularly with how the vocals and the music begin simultaneously and, apart from a piano echo, end together definitively.  And just like that, the song is over.

Except that it isn't.

*     

The Beatles throw in an unexpected song fragment after the moment of silence that follows the dying moment of "Cry Baby Cry."  Conceived by Paul, it's a subdued tune with a lyric along the lines of "Can you take me back where I came from?".  Paul's vocal sounds apparitional, and the light percussion adds to the sense of unease.  Is it a coda to "Cry Baby Cry," with Paul wishing to return to childhood innocence? Or is it a preamble to the White Album's next track, the sonic collage "Revolution 9" - a request from the Beatles to go back to the primordial understanding of music as the art of sound?  It's neither, of course.  As we already know, it's an excerpt of the nineteenth take of Paul's ballad "I Will," an improvisation Paul came up with when at a loss for how to proceed with the song he was working on with John and Ringo (who played percussion) - which, you'll remember, I first mentioned in August when I wrote about "I Will" itself.

So why is this song improvisation here?  Here's my explanation, which I admit may be the wrong answer (but I doubt it).  See, as noted before on this blog, John and Paul (below) agreed when they were compiling the White Album that neither one of them should have more than two tracks in a row, yet they somehow ended up with side four having three consecutive tracks at the end that were composed by John.  To avoid running afoul of the aforementioned sequencing rule, this ad-lib from Paul was inserted between two of those last three tracks.  The ad-lib, I might add, was taped long after "Cry Baby Cry" and "Revolution 9" were finished.

But it's not entirely random that a piece of "I Will," Take 19 (yeah, yeah, I know, I'll take nineteen what?) ends up being the extra recording that breaks up John's domination of side four.  There were other improvisations from Paul from the "I Will" session that could have been used.  This one befits the unsettled mood of side four, with its songs about revolution, the aftereffects of overindulgence, and royal seances; Paul's pleas to return to from whence he came suggests a wandering soul looking for a place to rest.

Beatles author Dave Rybaczewski adds an interesting perspective on how "I Will," Take 19 fits in.  "This section works nicely here," he writes,  "especially because the beat coincidentally is the same as the body of the song we just heard. It also creates a creepy atmosphere that leads perfectly into the cacophony of sound that follows it on the album."

As for the ad-libbed song itself, it's a look into how Paul's mind works and how effortlessly he comes up with song ideas.  It also demonstrates, alas, how he doesn't follow through on enough of his ideas.  He could have written a masterpiece of a song based on the idea of returning to where one came from (a challenge accepted by Rod Stewart and Ron Wood when they wrote the classic title song for Stewart's Gasoline Alley album).  But it's still an intriguing bit piece, operating like a link in much the same way as "Wild Honey Pie" does on side one. And as Tim Riley pointed out, it shows how the Beatles were so prolific in 1968 that they could come up with more material than is necessary for a double album.   

Here's the full Take 19 of "I Will," or as it's now called, "Can You Take Me Back?" :-)

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. ;-)  

The White Album 50 Project: "Honey Pie"

You want retrograde?  It doesn't get more retrograde than this.

"Honey Pie" is the only song from Paul McCartney on the fourth side of the Beatles' White Album, excepting an unlisted, ad-libbed song excerpt, and it provides the only jovial moment on a side dedicated to tracks that are frankly quite harrowing.  It's a charming pastiche of both the lighter side of the early American jazz of the 1920s and the English music-hall sound of the same period.  Not so coincidentally, the twenties were the time when Jim McCartney, Paul's father, was in his own twenties. An accomplished musician himself, Jim McCartney (below, with Paul) had his own big band in his younger days - called Jim Mac's Band - and even wrote a few tunes himself.  Music was always a sideline for Jim, but his example inspired Paul to take his own musical talent seriously, so Jim clearly inspired "Honey Pie."  (Paul's younger brother Mike was also a professional musician for a time, calling himself Mike McGear to avoid looking like he was cashing in on his famous brother's success; ironically, his own records got great reviews but did not garner great sales.)

"Honey Pie" is an old-time love lament, and as a song that sounds forty years older than it actually is, it's pretty darn convincing.  Against the sweet, soothing backdrop of clarinets and saxophones, Paul's narrator sings about an old girlfriend, calling her "honey pie" as a term of endearment.  Despite John Lennon's apparent cringing over "Honey Pie" when discussing it ("I don't even want to think about that," he said of the song in 1980), he performs a guitar solo here in the style of Django Reinhardt that's more incredible than credible.  (That's a compliment, son.)  George Harrison shows equally astonishing dexterity on six-string bass, with Ringo Starr providing delicate but firm brush work in his drumming.  All of this is charming enough, but when it came time to record the vocal, Paul gave it the perfect finishing touches.  The first was cutting off the tape-machine signals at both ends of the frequency range with the sound of scratches from an old phonograph on the spoken lyric "Now she's the big time!" to make it sound like an old 78-rpm record.  The second was a music-hall-style lyrical improvisation in the middle eight.  I once thought Paul was singing, "I like this girl and her kind of music" - apparently, according to Mark Lewisohn, he was singing, "I like this kind of hot kind of music."  Either way, Paul shows a strong command for the feel and the rhythm of old-time jazz.

The lyrics of "Honey Pie" concern a young lad from the north of England, a lad not unlike our Paul, pining for an old flame who's become a movie star in Hollywood and wanting her to return to him.  In that sense, as I noted in my review of the White Album from May 2015, it's not unlike Fountains of Wayne's 2003 song "Hackensack," about a guy from New Jersey yearning for a girl he had a crush on back in school who's also become a famous actress.  Both songs are heartfelt valentines, and Fountains of Wayne must have been inspired by this song, especially Paul's penchant for the sort of strong bisyllabic rhymes one finds in "Honey Pie" - if Fountains of Wayne's lyric "I saw you talkin' to Christopher Walken" is any indication.  But while "Hackensack" addresses the girl directly, "Honey Pie," though ostensibly aimed toward a second party, is a summation of what this English lad wishes he could say to his old girlfriend, as he makes clear in the slow, muted introductory verse.  The sprightly tempo that carries "Honey Pie" thereafter is as much wishful thinking as the words.

"Honey Pie" was recorded at the same time as "Martha My Dear," and it's in the same vein musically, as it revisits the music of the period between the two world wars.  But there's another similarity.  As I already expressed my belief that "Martha My Dear" was a coded message from Paul to Jane Asher, I can't help but wonder if "Honey Pie" was also written as such a message.  Think about it; "Honey Pie" is about an estranged girlfriend who's an actress.  Does that sound like anyone you know?  True, Jane isn't from the north of England (she's from London), and no, she didn't go Hollywood (her brother Peter did, but that's another post), but Paul's narrator's insistence that his girl come home and leave her movie career behind sounds a lot like Paul insisting that Jane give up her acting career to please him.  And Paul's failure to give a little in order to get a little is reflected in the lyric "I'm in love but I'm lazy."  I'm not saying "Honey Pie" is about Jane Asher; I merely bring up the possibility.

"Hackensack" may be the more selfless of the two songs, as Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood's narrator is stuck in Hackensack and unable to see his old love interest but patiently waits for her unlikely return to New Jersey, but "Honey Pie" is the stronger song and the greater recording.  "Hackensack," with its low-keyed college-indie vibe, is inescapably an artifact of the two thousand zeroes, a decade in which rock and roll's fading relevance became all too obvious.  "Honey Pie," on the other hand, is a timeless, richly arranged and composed song that could fit the playlist of WNEW-AM, for many years New York's premier big-band radio station, as easily as it could fit the playlist of its sister station in New York, rock station WNEW-FM.  (Both stations are long since gone, victims of changing tastes and the decline of locally owned radio in America.)  That's because the Beatles - who loved the songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein as much as those of Leiber and Stoller - were the greatest rock band ever and Fountains of Wayne were merely okay.  What other conclusion can you come to, as we're approaching the 2020s and considering a song that could have been a hit in the 1920s - but was composed and recorded in 1968?      

The White Album 50 Project: "Revolution 1"

(The following is my somewhat reworded commentary from when I featured the promotional clip for the single release version of "Revolution" as my Music Video Of the Week back in August 2018.)

The Beatles' "Revolution" has a long, convoluted history.  It was recorded twice, with two different arrangements, and the group probably never intended to issue two different interpretations of the same song, at least not at first.  The Beatles' alternate interpretations of songs, such as the original version of the White Album's own "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," usually went into the EMI vaults.  "Revolution 1" got released on the White Album after the fast version of "Revolution" was released as a single.  John Lennon wrote "Revolution" in India in response to violent anti-Vietnam War protests in America and Britain and anti-government protests in France and even Communist Poland.  John was against war and against oppression by the elites, and he didn't think violence was the answer to violence and that anarchy was the answer to oligarchy.  He said he wanted these demonstrators to show him the plan for a free and just society before he signed on to their cause, vowing not to give either money to hateful demagogues or support for brutal autocrats.  The song reflected a mainstream liberal take on politics similar to that of Harold Wilson in Britain and Hubert Humphrey in America.  John wrote the song long before Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics, and he also wrote it before the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago - which opened the day that the fast version of "Revolution" was released in the United States.  As it turned out, the Beatles were more in tune with the times than people already thought.

The song revolves around the chorus of "Don't you know it's gonna be . . . alright?", a reassurance that truth and justice would win out in the end. Many rock fans weren't so sure, and they dismissed the Beatles for their mainstream liberalism.  John would later become a radical leftist for a brief time in the 1970s, and he disavowed the song with a reference to it in his solo single "Power To the People" and later said he shouldn't have have slandered Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung in the lyrics of "Revolution."  (When Mao died in 1976 and the effects of his brutal rule of China became more obvious, Lennon's original disparaging of the late Chinese dictator was vindicated.)         

The subdued, low-keyed version of  "Revolution" was the first song to be recorded during the White Album sessions - on May 30, 1968 - with the intention of making it the Beatles' next single.  The four-minute, thirteen-second master was made from the eighteenth take, which ran for ten minutes; the final six minutes were full of discordant guitar noise and screaming.  (This segment of the tape would be used to form the basis of "Revolution 9.")  But Paul McCartney and George Harrison told John that "Revolution," if it was going to be the next Beatles single, ought to be recorded as a song with a loud, heavy-rock arrangement, as that would make a more declarative statement against the anarchy going on in the world.  John took their advice and led the band through just such a recording, on July 9, 1968, with session keyboard ace Nicky Hopkins on electric piano.  It only ended up becoming a B-side because "Hey Jude" was too good not to be the A-side.  The slower version of "Revolution" - retitled "Revolution 1" because that was the first version to be recorded - was to be saved for the White Album, likely in the interest of filling the extra time.

Both versions of "Revolution" are great, though I think the heavy-rock version is better.  "Revolution 1" is still worthy in its own right; "subdued" and "low-keyed" don't mean it's easy listening.  The guitars are still gnarling and biting, though not distorted, and Ringo Starr's heavy beat grounds the song in a blues-based groove.  "Revolution 1" is also notable for doo-wop style backing vocals, callback choruses of the words "Don't you know it's going to be . . ."  and John responding to talk about destruction with "Don't you know that you can count me out . . . in."  (John later explained that he wasn't sure which way to go, because "we all have that streak of violence underneath.")  Also, on "Revolution 1," John sings "We'd all love to change your head." And, in addition, "Revolution 1" contains a brass section.  On the faster version of "Revolution", the backing and callback vocals are gone, there's obviously no brass, John makes it clear that he wants "out" of destruction, and John sings, "We all want to change your head."  However, in the vocal track used on the promotional video for the heavy-rock version of "Revolution," the lyrical differences in "Revolution 1" - the backing and callback vocals, the "out . . . in" lyric, the variation on the lyric about changing heads - were employed . . . and in the video it was Paul, not John, who began the vocals with an opening scream.

One more thing I can't resist mentioning: John recorded the lead-vocal track on "Revolution 1" while lying on the floor to give his voice a different effect.

Did it work?  It must have.  When I first heard "Revolution 1" on the radio, I, having heard and loved the single-release recording of "Revolution" and being at the time completely unaware of the existence of an alternate Beatles recording of the song, was thinking, "Who the heck made this record?"

Whatever the tempo or the arrangement, "Revolution" was the most elegant political statement the Beatles ever made.  As a final footnote, it's kind of funny to think that "Revolution 1" was the first song taped in the sessions for the White Album and meant for a single but became an album track, because, paradoxically, "Strawberry Fields Forever" had been the first song taped in the sessions for Sgt. Pepper and meant to be an album track but became a single.

That's rock and roll for you.

The White Album 50 Project: The Power of Eight

At the end of July 1968, about two weeks after the Beatles moaned about EMI not taking the time to decorate Studio Two at the Abbey Road facility, the group retired to Trident Studios, an independent studio complex in the Soho section of London, for a change of scenery. At Trident, the group recorded the final master of "Hey Jude."  There they discovered the value of eight-track tape machines.

The Beatles started out with two-track tape - the music on one track, the vocals on the other - when they began recording for EMI in 1962.  They had worked with four-track tape since October 1963, and they were very adept at taking advantage of the extra tracks for overdubbing.  Now, at Trident,  while recording "Hey Jude," they realized that one could improve musical arrangements and add more instruments to make better records with twice as many tracks, just as they had found when making the transition to four-track tape five years earlier, and they were chomping at the bit to record on eight-track when they went back to Abbey Road.  It turned out that Abbey Road did in fact have an eight-track tape machine - a new 3M model, similar to the one pictured above - but it was kept in the office of EMI staffer Francis Thompson, who oversaw the acquisition of tape machines and didn't let anyone use them until he said they were up to par and ready to go.  As of the beginning of September 1968, when the Beatles learned that Thompson had an eight-track machine in his office, he had still not cleared it for use.  The group decided to go ahead and get it and wheel it into Studio Two.  Thompson be damned.

The first use of an eight-track tape machine on a Beatles recording at Abbey Road was the remake of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that appears on the White Album, followed by the remake of "Helter Skelter" that also appears on the record.  "Glass Onion" was the first song the Beatles recorded on eight-track from the start at Abbey Road.  (Not every song the group recorded in September and October 1968 was taped with an eight-track machine, but many of them were.)  The new machine did indeed allow the Beatles to add more instruments at will and mix out whatever didn't work, and it lessened the need to mix down the tape to less than the full number of tracks to free up one or two tracks for further overdubbing, but it didn't necessarily improve the quality of the recordings.  Hey, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper fared well with four-track tape, right?  And in fact, the Beatles over-recorded at least one song to the point where the drum sound was buried, so Ringo Starr, according to Abbey Road staffer Brain Gibson, taped for the song a drum pattern that he played on a plastic chair cushion to emphasize the snare beat.  Gibson could not remember which song that was.

Once the Beatles got the hang of eight-track recording, they showed restraint.  But pop musicians who followed them would be subjected to greater temptation to go overboard, as the number of tracks on tape kept increasing - soon after the debut of eight-track machines, 16-track machines were in use, followed by 24-track machines, 32-track machines, 64-track machines, and so on.  Some critics have charged that multi-track recording led to more professional but more antiseptic records, which ultimately took the heart out of rock and roll and led to the soulless pop records we have to deal with today in the post-rock era.  The Beatles were more judicious and more careful with multi-track recording than others, both as a group and as solo artists.  It is true that multi-tracking led to some overproduced records in the 1970s.  But even the records of that era were more soulful and alive than anything recorded on the 96-track digital recording machines that had taken over the music business by the late 1980s.     

And in using multi-track tape machines, John Lennon and Paul McCartney (above, at the Abbey Road mixing console), along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, learned something that any comic-book geek will tell you - with great power comes great responsibility.