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Apr. 2nd, 2008 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanI love the Beatles – it is one of the most constant aspects of my life, part of the furniture of my mind. The first album I ever bought was Sgt Pepper. Pop music may have far more to offer than the Beatles, but very little of it is as good. Consequently, do not expect a dispassionate assessment here.
I want to write about the albums released by the band during their relatively brief existence as a recording outfit, and how they have fared in the critical and public consciousness. Twelve and a bit albums, recorded in just over six years (to say nothing of a slew of other tracks) is an exceptional work-rate – a band who released half that volume these days would be classed as prolific.
The first five albums tend, fairly or otherwise, to get considered together. The early albums (Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, and Help!) are generally seen as “the moptop years”, frothy and fun, with little depth. It doesn’t help that very few of the songs for which the Beatles first became famous are on those albums, because there was no need to pad them out with singles and EP’s. Certainly, if you put any of the early works up against Revolver, or Sgt Pepper, they show relatively narrow musical ambition, but this is not to say that they are bad. Above all, they show the Beatles doing what they became famous for – producing popular music which managed to be insanely catchy, and yet incorporate a range of influences and musical ideas far beyond their peers. This, though overshadowed by what came next, was no mean achievement.
John Lennon once described “Rubber Soul”, as “where it started to get contemporary”. Right from the peculiar, elongated cover portrait, this was clearly something a bit different. Just how different has been forgotten to some extent – these days, Rubber Soul is seen only as a curtain-raiser for Revolver, a dipping of toes into the water of alternative styles. This does the album a disservice – while not as adventurous as Revolver, it nonetheless expands the musical and lyrical palette considerably. The songs by Lennon are especially striking – In My Life is one of his most beautiful ballads, and Girl one of his most acerbic put-downs. He even manages one of the few genuinely nasty Beatles lyrics – Run For Your Life.
It is with 1966’s Revolver, however, that the modern taste in all matters Beatles really gets excited. There is a critical effort nowadays to reclaim the Beatles from the ageing hippies and the grannies, and to make them cool again. This can most clearly be seen in the respect granted to Revolver, mostly at the expense of its successor, Sgt Pepper. The zeitgeist is assumed to be most present at liminal points, where everything is (metaphorically speaking) edgy. There is a consequent tendency to over-exaggerate the progression from Rubber Soul to Revolver, and to play down that from Revolver to Pepper. Plus there are the drugs, of course – it is much easier to sell the thrill of an album containing She Said, She Said (about taking LSD for the first time) than one containing Michelle (about trying to woo a girl with execrable schoolboy French). Without LSD, there would surely not have been anything like Tomorrow Never Knows, probably the least pop-like song to appear on any album to that date, and certainly the only one inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
None of this faint praise suggests that I don’t think Revolver is a great album – I do. From the opening riff of Taxman to the drone of Tomorrow Never Knows, it is a spectacular gallop through every musical style the four could lay their hands on. But its veneration does strike me as a very selective reading of the album – it’s hard to take seriously the bleeding-edge credibility of an album containing Yellow Submarine (marvellous song though it is)
A recent edition of MOJO (which sometimes reads like an alternative Beatles fanzine) set out to explain why Sgt Pepper is the most underrated album in the Beatles canon. Amazingly, they had a point. Everything which is used to build up Revolver is used to knock down its successor, an album which, for better or worse, really did define its time, albeit with a deeply nostalgic patina. This is, I think, much of what the critics take issue with – there is something irredeemably cosy about the fairground noises of Mr Kite, the cavalcade of heroes long dead on the cover, and the pervading whiff of Victoriana. Above all, there’s Now I’m 64, a song Max Bygraves could have covered without sounding in the slightest out of place – can this really encapsulate the Sixties?
While Pepper something does ooze sentimentality, it is also musically audacious in a way which is easily forgotten. The opening riff of the title track a classic rock moment, and both Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite both pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in the studio. Eclipsing even them is A Day In The Life, probably the most important track in the entire Beatles catalogue. It is a clever, listenable song, which just happens to do utterly extraordinary things with sound. Even if the Beatles had never recorded another album, that track alone would have assured their legacy.
Also dating from 1967 is the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour, the group’s most notorious flop. Building on the musical ideas (and nostalgic feel) of Pepper, the songs are soundscapes, but without the same sense of control – I Am the Walrus, for instance, whilst a fascinating listen (and surely the only pop song ever to incorporate an excerpt a radio production of King Lear), does not exactly hang together. More satisfying are the singles collected on side two – Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane are the two sides of the mirror of childhood, and All You Need Is Love is an anthem of a generation (even if they have subsequently accepted that knowing where the next meal is coming from is also kind of important).
After the orchestral orgasm and piano-chord which climax Pepper, and the gumbo of aural textures of I Am The Walrus, the only way for the band to go was back to their roots, separately as well as together. There was a year and a half between Pepper and the White Album, and the portraits which accompanied the latter showed four men who had grown up fast – cheery grins replaced by unsmiling thousand-yard stares, and (ominously) four separate pictures rather than one group shot. Where every Beatles album before had boasted at least the semblance of a unity of purpose, the White Album is a morass of songs, styles, and ideas, over 85 very variable minutes.
The most interesting debate surrounding the White Album is also the most obvious – should it have been trimmed down to a single album? Swimming against the tide of modern opinion, I think it should – there are a lot of great tracks on the album (While My Guitar Gently Weeps?), but also rather too much filler (Wild Honey Pie?), and some real dross (Rocky Raccoon?). And in all honesty, thrilling though it may have sounded to its creators in post-coital bliss, Revolution 9 is a track most of us can cheerfully do without. Properly cut down, the White Album could have been a blistering album, the equal of Pepper or Revolver – as a double, it sags in too many places. In modern regard it is held second only to Revolver, a respect I cannot quite understand for what is, at best, a very uneven listen.
Also around this time comes the runt of the catalogue – the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine. With only four new songs, and half an album of orchestral music, it was a half-arsed package, and remains the only original album to have been substantially changed in modern CD re-releases (all seventeen Beatles tracks appearing in the film are now crammed into a “songbook”). What is worse is that none of the four new songs have anything to say – from cod-psychedelic sprawls to skipping songs, it is hardly their finest hour…
Following release rather than recording order, we come to another album whose star has dimmed in modern appreciation – Abbey Road. The last act of a band which had run its course, one might expect it to be a dirge – in fact, it’s an album full of joyful songs. Though Lennon was in a heroin-induced haze through most of its creation, and the putrefaction of Apple hung constantly in the background, it is nonetheless a triumph, and (very unfashionably) my favourite of all their albums.
Abbey Road is these days derided for being “slick”, too commercial and not interesting enough – and for having Octopus’s Garden on it (possibly the reason I like it so much, because that is one of the first songs I remember as a child). Even its standout track, Something, is a big love ballad, and thus not as interesting as songs about drugs or mysticism. Abbey Road is, above all, an exceptionally well-crafted album, with a surprising number of strong songs (given the way things were in the band by that point), and as good a production from George Martin as is to be heard on any Beatles album.
Last scene of all, which ends this strange, eventful history, is Let It Be, the album of the film of the squabble, tarted up for release by Phil Spector, whose orchestral and choral overdubs so irked McCartney that he had a revised mix of the album released in 2003. The NME famously described the original as “a cardboard headstone” to the band’s career, and certainly it was no glorious swansong. This has little to do with Spector, and more with the weakness of the source material – too many of the songs are rough sketches, expanded out in jam sessions into something approximating to a song. They even included one of their first compositions, One After 909, which John wrote when he was seventeen … and it shows. There are a couple of great tracks on the album – Get Back, in particular, is a perfect rocker – but too much of it feels like an attempt to fulfil an obligation, just like the rooftop concert in January ‘69 of which it purports (untruthfully) to be a record.
And that, more or less, is that. Or rather, it isn’t, because the albums miss out much of the best work – it’s hard to believe, but a complete set of original Beatles albums will still leave the owner without She Loves You, Paperback Writer, or Hey Jude. Then there’s the three Anthology sets, the Beatles at the BBC, the recent Love mash-up … the legacy runs on forever. But it is the albums released at the time which form the core of what the Beatles are remembered for, and, as legacies goes, it’s hard to beat, and impossible to imagine being without. In the end, the love they took was equal to the love they made … and that is more than enough for most of us.
I want to write about the albums released by the band during their relatively brief existence as a recording outfit, and how they have fared in the critical and public consciousness. Twelve and a bit albums, recorded in just over six years (to say nothing of a slew of other tracks) is an exceptional work-rate – a band who released half that volume these days would be classed as prolific.
The first five albums tend, fairly or otherwise, to get considered together. The early albums (Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, and Help!) are generally seen as “the moptop years”, frothy and fun, with little depth. It doesn’t help that very few of the songs for which the Beatles first became famous are on those albums, because there was no need to pad them out with singles and EP’s. Certainly, if you put any of the early works up against Revolver, or Sgt Pepper, they show relatively narrow musical ambition, but this is not to say that they are bad. Above all, they show the Beatles doing what they became famous for – producing popular music which managed to be insanely catchy, and yet incorporate a range of influences and musical ideas far beyond their peers. This, though overshadowed by what came next, was no mean achievement.
John Lennon once described “Rubber Soul”, as “where it started to get contemporary”. Right from the peculiar, elongated cover portrait, this was clearly something a bit different. Just how different has been forgotten to some extent – these days, Rubber Soul is seen only as a curtain-raiser for Revolver, a dipping of toes into the water of alternative styles. This does the album a disservice – while not as adventurous as Revolver, it nonetheless expands the musical and lyrical palette considerably. The songs by Lennon are especially striking – In My Life is one of his most beautiful ballads, and Girl one of his most acerbic put-downs. He even manages one of the few genuinely nasty Beatles lyrics – Run For Your Life.
It is with 1966’s Revolver, however, that the modern taste in all matters Beatles really gets excited. There is a critical effort nowadays to reclaim the Beatles from the ageing hippies and the grannies, and to make them cool again. This can most clearly be seen in the respect granted to Revolver, mostly at the expense of its successor, Sgt Pepper. The zeitgeist is assumed to be most present at liminal points, where everything is (metaphorically speaking) edgy. There is a consequent tendency to over-exaggerate the progression from Rubber Soul to Revolver, and to play down that from Revolver to Pepper. Plus there are the drugs, of course – it is much easier to sell the thrill of an album containing She Said, She Said (about taking LSD for the first time) than one containing Michelle (about trying to woo a girl with execrable schoolboy French). Without LSD, there would surely not have been anything like Tomorrow Never Knows, probably the least pop-like song to appear on any album to that date, and certainly the only one inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
None of this faint praise suggests that I don’t think Revolver is a great album – I do. From the opening riff of Taxman to the drone of Tomorrow Never Knows, it is a spectacular gallop through every musical style the four could lay their hands on. But its veneration does strike me as a very selective reading of the album – it’s hard to take seriously the bleeding-edge credibility of an album containing Yellow Submarine (marvellous song though it is)
A recent edition of MOJO (which sometimes reads like an alternative Beatles fanzine) set out to explain why Sgt Pepper is the most underrated album in the Beatles canon. Amazingly, they had a point. Everything which is used to build up Revolver is used to knock down its successor, an album which, for better or worse, really did define its time, albeit with a deeply nostalgic patina. This is, I think, much of what the critics take issue with – there is something irredeemably cosy about the fairground noises of Mr Kite, the cavalcade of heroes long dead on the cover, and the pervading whiff of Victoriana. Above all, there’s Now I’m 64, a song Max Bygraves could have covered without sounding in the slightest out of place – can this really encapsulate the Sixties?
While Pepper something does ooze sentimentality, it is also musically audacious in a way which is easily forgotten. The opening riff of the title track a classic rock moment, and both Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite both pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in the studio. Eclipsing even them is A Day In The Life, probably the most important track in the entire Beatles catalogue. It is a clever, listenable song, which just happens to do utterly extraordinary things with sound. Even if the Beatles had never recorded another album, that track alone would have assured their legacy.
Also dating from 1967 is the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour, the group’s most notorious flop. Building on the musical ideas (and nostalgic feel) of Pepper, the songs are soundscapes, but without the same sense of control – I Am the Walrus, for instance, whilst a fascinating listen (and surely the only pop song ever to incorporate an excerpt a radio production of King Lear), does not exactly hang together. More satisfying are the singles collected on side two – Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane are the two sides of the mirror of childhood, and All You Need Is Love is an anthem of a generation (even if they have subsequently accepted that knowing where the next meal is coming from is also kind of important).
After the orchestral orgasm and piano-chord which climax Pepper, and the gumbo of aural textures of I Am The Walrus, the only way for the band to go was back to their roots, separately as well as together. There was a year and a half between Pepper and the White Album, and the portraits which accompanied the latter showed four men who had grown up fast – cheery grins replaced by unsmiling thousand-yard stares, and (ominously) four separate pictures rather than one group shot. Where every Beatles album before had boasted at least the semblance of a unity of purpose, the White Album is a morass of songs, styles, and ideas, over 85 very variable minutes.
The most interesting debate surrounding the White Album is also the most obvious – should it have been trimmed down to a single album? Swimming against the tide of modern opinion, I think it should – there are a lot of great tracks on the album (While My Guitar Gently Weeps?), but also rather too much filler (Wild Honey Pie?), and some real dross (Rocky Raccoon?). And in all honesty, thrilling though it may have sounded to its creators in post-coital bliss, Revolution 9 is a track most of us can cheerfully do without. Properly cut down, the White Album could have been a blistering album, the equal of Pepper or Revolver – as a double, it sags in too many places. In modern regard it is held second only to Revolver, a respect I cannot quite understand for what is, at best, a very uneven listen.
Also around this time comes the runt of the catalogue – the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine. With only four new songs, and half an album of orchestral music, it was a half-arsed package, and remains the only original album to have been substantially changed in modern CD re-releases (all seventeen Beatles tracks appearing in the film are now crammed into a “songbook”). What is worse is that none of the four new songs have anything to say – from cod-psychedelic sprawls to skipping songs, it is hardly their finest hour…
Following release rather than recording order, we come to another album whose star has dimmed in modern appreciation – Abbey Road. The last act of a band which had run its course, one might expect it to be a dirge – in fact, it’s an album full of joyful songs. Though Lennon was in a heroin-induced haze through most of its creation, and the putrefaction of Apple hung constantly in the background, it is nonetheless a triumph, and (very unfashionably) my favourite of all their albums.
Abbey Road is these days derided for being “slick”, too commercial and not interesting enough – and for having Octopus’s Garden on it (possibly the reason I like it so much, because that is one of the first songs I remember as a child). Even its standout track, Something, is a big love ballad, and thus not as interesting as songs about drugs or mysticism. Abbey Road is, above all, an exceptionally well-crafted album, with a surprising number of strong songs (given the way things were in the band by that point), and as good a production from George Martin as is to be heard on any Beatles album.
Last scene of all, which ends this strange, eventful history, is Let It Be, the album of the film of the squabble, tarted up for release by Phil Spector, whose orchestral and choral overdubs so irked McCartney that he had a revised mix of the album released in 2003. The NME famously described the original as “a cardboard headstone” to the band’s career, and certainly it was no glorious swansong. This has little to do with Spector, and more with the weakness of the source material – too many of the songs are rough sketches, expanded out in jam sessions into something approximating to a song. They even included one of their first compositions, One After 909, which John wrote when he was seventeen … and it shows. There are a couple of great tracks on the album – Get Back, in particular, is a perfect rocker – but too much of it feels like an attempt to fulfil an obligation, just like the rooftop concert in January ‘69 of which it purports (untruthfully) to be a record.
And that, more or less, is that. Or rather, it isn’t, because the albums miss out much of the best work – it’s hard to believe, but a complete set of original Beatles albums will still leave the owner without She Loves You, Paperback Writer, or Hey Jude. Then there’s the three Anthology sets, the Beatles at the BBC, the recent Love mash-up … the legacy runs on forever. But it is the albums released at the time which form the core of what the Beatles are remembered for, and, as legacies goes, it’s hard to beat, and impossible to imagine being without. In the end, the love they took was equal to the love they made … and that is more than enough for most of us.
