Welcome to Getting to Know The Beatles, 1962-1964.

We'll be playing
select tracks from their early work, highlighting what made the Fab
Four so fab in the first place. That little montage we just played gives
you an idea of the sorry state of popular music in America right before
the Beatles famously crossed the pond. No cherry picking here. Those
were the top five songs as compiled by Billboard for the week of Jan.
18, 1964. The following week would see the first Beatles song enter
the top 10. And it would become the No. 1 song the next week,
ushering in Beatlemania. At one point, all five of the top five songs
would be written and performed by the Beatles., a feat no recording
act has come even close to matching before or since. Here is ... the
song that started it all.
So, that may sound a little primitive to our ears. But in early 1964, it
was a revelation. The high harmonies. The yearning in Lennon's voice
as he says "I wanna," the surge of guitars, the brash, off-kilter
drumming. It's a teenage orgasm set to tape. But, um, we're just
talking about holding hands, of course. Anyway, we're getting ahead of
ourselves a little bit. By the time the Beatles came to America, they
already had two full-length albums and several singles under their
belts. For their first proper recording session, producer George Martin
wasn't about to take chances. Yes, these boys from a working class
seaport in the north of England fancied themselves songwriters. But he
thought it best that they record a song by a professional songwriter
first. Let's hear a bit of that.
That's how British rock n' roll bands were supposed to sound at the
time. Bland. Nonthreatening. Not even a hint of sex. But there's a
reason this song can only be found on the Beatles Anthology. As soon
as Martin heard what Lennon and McCartney had written for him this
time, to his credit, he immediately knew he'd made a mistake. The
result was their first British hit.
We'll be quoting Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head liberally; it's
the best Beatles book, in my opinion. He writes "..." Now, the love
affair with the Beatles wasn't automatic. That tentative-sounding
version of Love Me Do, with a studio drummer sitting in for the arhythmic Ringo, only went up to No. 17 on the charts. But it contains
an undeniable glimmer of what would come. Toward the end of the
Love Me Do session, the band played a bluesy kind of torch song.
Martin saw potential and told the group to speed it up and work on it
some more. That was all the ambition Lennon and McCartney needed.
When they finished recording the new version at their next session,
Martin pressed the intercom button and -- in a statement that would
ring down through music history through the years and even find its

way into a Simpsons episode -- he said, "Congratulations, gentlemen,

you've just made your first number one." He was right.
To that point in the 20th century, the greatest songwriters worked in
teams. Rogers and Hammerstein. Leiber and Stoller. Goffin and King.
Lennon and McCartney thought quite a lot of themselves from the
beginning. So they agreed that all of their songs, whether written
together or individually, would be credited as Lennon hyphen
McCartney, Lennon being a year older and therefore receiving first
billing. But once again, the Beatles broke new ground. Songwriting
duos almost always consisted of a lyricist and a composer. Lennon and
McCartney were equals, each more than capable of writing words and
music alone. What's more, they even had a third regular songwriter in
George Harrison. Unheard of! Please Please Me is a collaboration, to be
sure, but it's undeniably a Lennon tune. How do I know this? Part of the
Beatles genius was how disparate their two lead songwriters were in
their method. Lennon's melodies reflect the natural cadences of the
English language, the melodies moving up and down as little as
possible. A section of music may revolve around only one or two notes.
You hear it in Please Please Me in the bridge: "I don't wanna sound
complainin' , second note but you know there's always rain in," Not
until you get to the "in my heart" is there any relief from the tension,
and it comes with a note-bending flourish that's sure to melt the heart
of any teenage listener. You hear this talking-as-singing over and over
again in Lennon's work in songs like "Help," "I should have known
Better," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Julia," etc. Here's a trick to
help you distinguish Lennon from McCartney songs. Put your fingers
over your Adam's Apple and sing the chorus. If it doesn't move up and
down very much, you've got a Lennon song. Contrast that with even an
early McCartney song.
Feels like you're running up and down a staircase when you try singing
a McCartney tune. That vertical nature to his songs led to the creation
of popular standards. What do I mean by that? Think of Lennon as Elvis
Presley and McCartney as Frank Sinatra. When Presley sang a song, it
was his. If someone covers "Heartbreak Hotel," you say that's an Elvis
Presley song. The song is so intertwined with the performance, they're
inseparable. Sinatra, on the other hand, sang standards. He could
make a song famous, but there could be two, sometimes three other
"definitive" versions. Even his version of "My Way" the song we most
closely associate with the Chairman of the Board, has to compete with
the one performed by its lyricist Paul Anka. That's why you would see
McCartney write so many songs for other artists and his music be
covered by so many others. Guiness's Book of World Records certified a
McCartney tune, "Yesterday," as the most covered song of all time,
with 1,600 versions of it recorded by 1986. When Lennon and

McCartney worked together, as they did particularly in the early days,

the result was almost always magic.
I can't underestimate the importance of Producer George Martin's role
here in the making of The Beatles. When Parlophone Records first
signed them, label executives didn't think much of them. So they
assigned the band a producer best known for his work on novelty
songs and comedy records. Little did they know they picked the perfect
man in George Martin. Another producer might have forced them into
the "How Do you Do it" mold, and we wouldn't be listening this series
right now. But Martin heard something in those early sessions. It was
raw, but that was the beauty of it. He wanted to go right up to the
Carvern Club where the Beatles played in order to capture their live
sound as authentically as possible. Instead, he did the next best thing,
recording their first album, "Please Please Me" in one marathon, 12hour session. Martin let the Beatles be, musically as well as in the way
he let them work. In one illuminating tale, Martin asked the Beatles
after their first session together whether they had any thoughts for
him, and George Harrison quipped, "Well, first off, I don't like your tie."
Now, remember, this was still in the days of the National Service in
Britian, of a strict class structure. Martin laughed, putting the boys at
ease. Speaking of George, here he his singing a Lennon-McCartney
tune during that legendary session.
MacDonald again: Quote, unquote. Rock n'roll, of course, was born in
America, built on a scaffolding of the musical and racial diversity
decidedly lacking in Great Britain and elsewhere. There was the
influence of black music from the edginess of blues and
improvisational, looseness of jazz. And there was heavy borrowing from
the traditionally white music of country and western, with its emphasis
on melody and guitars. The Beatles, original hipsters that they were,
looked to America for inspiration. Growing up in the seaport of
Liverpool, where cultures were more likely to mix than stodgy old
London, gave them a crucial leg up on their peers and exposed them to
sounds they might not otherwise have heard. Carl Perkins, Chet Atkins,
Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Arthur Alexander. An
unprecedented eight songs on their first album were their own
compositions., all of them built on the sounds they heard coming out of
radios and imported records largely in the 1950s. Now, for the last
hours of their recording session, they got more direct in displaying
their influences, laying down their favorite covers from their live act.
But as 10 p.m. rolled around and they were officially out of time, Martin
insisted that they needed something more to close out the album. The
Beatles knew what it had to be. The only question was whether
Lennon's voice, badly shredded from hours of singing, was up for it. He
drank a glass of warm milk and attacked the song with a fierceness

never before heard in a British studio. Afterward, they tried one more
take. But Lennon had nothing left. That first and only take would be all
they needed, it turned out.
Their first record in the can, the Beatles had a bound of confidence
heading into the sessions for what would become With the Beatles in
the U.K. and Meet the Beatles in America. They would get to record
their songs over several weeks. But their frenetic concert and
appearance schedule left little time for writing. Lennon and McCartney
usually could only snatch a few moments in the back of a bus or in a
hotel room to write. Then they would maybe only get a handful of
takes in the studio to get it right. If a track didn't come together pretty
much right away, it was shelved or given away. But that wasn't the
only reason they were writing for other artists. That's what professional
songwriters did in those days. But they weren't about to hand off their
A material to the likes of Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. Still, the
Beatles were so hot that this song shot to No. 1 in Britain and No. 9 in
America the following year.
This next song is easily the Beatles most iconic song, remarkable as
much for its youthful exuberance as for the speed with which it was
composed. If you didn't think the Beatles were leading a musical
revolution, here was your proof. Here's what Bob Dylan would say
about a decade later of his first impression of the group.
Their second album would follow much of the same formula of the first:
mostly originals with a handful of covers thrown in to round things out.
There is a swagger here not heard on the first record and particularly
apparent on the covers. Many critics agree that the Beatles version of
Money That's What I Want surpasses the original. The first, recorded in
1960, was the first hit for Motown records, and it's a darn good song.
You can hear the transition from the rock n roll of the Barrett Strong
original to the rock sound of the Beatles take. The Latin beat becomes
an incessant pounding. The growl of Strong voice becomes an all-out
roar in Lennon's throat. I'm going to give away the ending a bit here,
but you have to here what another author, "Tim Riley" in his
authoritative "Tell Me Why," has to say about one scintilating moment
in the song's coda.
Chuckle. The Yeah Yeahs. That's what fans in some non-Englishspeaking countries would come to call the Beatles. That's power. So,
you'll recall Dylan's comments about the band's outrageous chord
changes. That didn't come about by accident. Oh wait, it did. Lacking
professional training and even the ability to read music, they relied on
improvisation and their own ears to craft songs. Unchained from the

conventions of the past, they were free to shape a new future of sound.
Here are two With the Beatles songs that illustrate their unusual
songwriting style, the first is a well-known song by McCartney.
MacDonald says of the number that "the innocence of early Sixties
British Pop is perfectly distilled in its eloquent simplicity." The second a
lesser-known work by John that could be a McCartney tune for its
highly vertical structure.
The Beatles didn't have time in these days to find perfection in the
studio. Not that the technology would have allowed it anyway. On their
first album, they only had two tracks to work with. They would record a
song live, vocals and all, and then have just one track on which to
record overdubs, usually a Lennon harmonica solo. By now, they had
four tracks, but time for songwriting and recording remained a precious
commodity. The record company had required the Beatles to re-record
German-language versions of "She Loves You" and "I want to hold your
hand," and they knocked off those chores in a Paris studio while they
were in residence in the city. During the last hour of the session, they
tackled a newly written McCartney tune. It would stand as the only
Beatles song performed by the band in a studio anywhere but London.
As written at the piano a few days earlier in their hotel room, the song
had a syncopated rhythm and bluesy delivery. Over the course of just
four takes, however, it would shape-shift into the unforgettable pop
song we know today. MacDonald: "Its effortless rightness from
McCartney's boisterous vocal to Harrison's first wholly memorable
guitar solo, bespeaks a band of talents on top of their world. Their
teenage ambition to displace Elvis Presley from the ruling summit of
pop is achieved here."
That's the first song we cover here from A Hard Day's Night, the
Beatles third album. We've moved into 1964 now. Beatlemania has
taken hold on both side of the Atlantic. Thanks to the Beatles, parents
in the English-speaking world and increasingly outside of it no longer
understand their daughters. A Hard Day's Night the album is significant
in many ways. As the first album to contain only Beatles originals, it
would underscore that the future of music would be written by the
performers themselves, not some record company's stable of writers.
The album would also signify the end, more or less, of LennonMcCartney as a purely 50-50 songwriting duo. McCartney's relationship
with the actress Jane Asher and Lennon's suburban life with wife
Cynthia would translate into working solo. Lastly, the album would
mark 18 months of creative dominance by Lennon. He would write
more than half of the songs on the album alone. By the end of the
period, the last four singles had been Lennon's alone, with McCartney
contributing 2/3 of the songwriting and not the lead vocal on Eight
Days a Week. Lennon's work was getting deeper; McCartney seemed

stuck. Let's listen to a trio of Lennon's compositions for the album, with
an ear toward their incredibly varied styles and lyrical content.
These last two songs demonstrate the striking difference in mood
between McCartney and Lennon songs. Even when he's writing in a
moody minor key, as he does on Things We Said Today, McCartney is
ever optimistic. Though we may be apart, we'll still have the things we
said today to comfort us.
Meanwhile, Lennon's I Call Your Name is one big ball of stress, the only
antidote for which is calling out the name of a lover in the middle of
the night. Lennon would invoke that idea again in his solo years. Steve
Turner notes in his book A Hard Day's Write. In 1971, Lennon sings in
the "middle of the night I call your name." This time, the object of his
desire has a name. The song is Oh Yoko. Two other notable facts about I
call your name. Lennon wrote the original tune in 1957, long before
there was anything called the Beatles. Its introduction here is probably
a byproduct of their rigorous production schedule. The only addition
the song from its original incarnation is an excursion into a style of
music imported from the West Indies and becoming fashionable in the
underground music scene at the time. They would call it blue beat at
the time. Today, we call it ska.
____________________
Welcome to Volume 2 of Getting to Know the Beatles. This time, we're
covering late 1964 through the end of 1965. In a mere 16 months, the
Beatles would release three albums, another movie and several singles
and tour almost constantly. Their handlers -- and the Beatles
themselves -- were all but certain that their flame would burn out at
any moment. You get a year in the limelight, maybe two, and you're
done. Another Cliff Richard or Fabian. Don Henley has compared trying
to stay at the top of the charts to standing on a windy and narrow
mountain ridge. The Beatles were doing everything they could not to
fall off. It was exhausting work. On their fourth British album, The
Beatles For Sale, that fatigue finally began to show. It is their poorest
reviewed full-length album after Magical Mystery Tour. It's a letdown
after the precocious Hard Day's Night. The cover songs return. And
since the band has long since cut them from their live act, the rust
shows. McCartney is at a low ebb in his songwriting. He contributes
only three songs here. Lennon carries the torch.
Mark down this date: August 28, 1964. Two monumental events would
take place, forever altering the trajectory of the Beatles as a band and
in their personal lives. In the Hotel Delmonico in Manhattan, the
foursome would meet a young American folk singer and songwriter.

They were already fans, but the meeting would take their appreciation
to a whole new level. Bob Dylan excited in Lennon, in particular, a shift
to a more country and western sound, heavy on acoustic guitars and
introspective lyrics. He has been vulnerable before in his lyrics. But for
the first time in "I'm a Loser," he seems like he's crying out. Fame is
transforming him, isolating him from his old friends and the life he
once knew. Thus begins an arc in his songwriting that would continue
through songs like "Help" and "Baby You're a Rich Man" and into his
early solo work.
The second sea change from that famous meeting came when Dylan
shared a joint with the band. It was their first taste of anything harder
than scotch and amphetamines. From then on, pot would become the
band's ubiquitous fifth member. Under its influence, their songs
alternately become more thoughtful and more whimsical. You see
them start to experiment in other ways, particularly with the studio
controls. MacDonald calls McCartney's "What You're Doing" quote
"something of an experiment record" because of its drop-in piano and
rumbling bass part. Riley agrees, wriing, "The Beatles conception of
what the studio allowed them to do in altering textures and changing
musical colors for different sections of songs is emerging as a stylistic
trait, not just a gimmick."
Lennon wasn't the only Beatle who could cut a classic cover in a single
take. Listening to it, it's no wonder the song remains a part of
McCartney's concert repertoire nearly five decades later.
We're leaving Beatles For Sale now, but not before noting that if you
were a fan in America you never saw a record on the shelves called
Beatles For Sale. As soon as the band hit it big, their American label,
Capitol, did everything in its power to wring money out of their
releases, including shortening their length to preserve songs for future,
cobbled-together releases. Americans were fed a steady diet of Beatles
albums in the mid-60s with bland titles like The Beatles Second Album,
Something New and Beatles '65. Because it was tied to a movie of the
same name, their next album, "Help" would retain its title in America.
But the whole second side was lopped off to make way for the movie
score. My parents owned it, and I'm proud to say I never flipped the
record over to listen to that side. The title track Riley would call a
"whirlpool of paranoia." It's Lennon, once again, trapped by his own
fame, at his most Lennon-ness.
We've reached 1965 now, and bands like The Who and The Kinks are
starting to turn up the volume. The Beatles, taking note, started
placing a heavier emphasis on guitar riffs and McCartney's bass.
Lennon would call this next song, his of course, one of the first heavy

metal songs in history. The tight harmonies, Lennon's insouciance and

the unmistakable Ringo drum fills make this a Beatles song all the way.
It's their first recording to break the 3-minute mark and it points
forward to where increasingly potent drugs, studio experimentation
and the inexorable pull of the'60s revolution in thinking were taking
them as a band and as individuals.
"Help," the album, is the last to feature a heavy complement of covers.
The Beatles were musical omnivores, and as this track shows, they
weren't above tackling the sillier side of country and western. The
selection squares perfectly with the caricature of Ringo as a selfdeprecating everyman. One of the most attractive things about the
Beatles and their music is that they could have fun. Take it away,
Ringo.
By now you've probably realized that the Beatles didn't put much care
into their lyrics during their early years. You'll recall the pressure they
were under to produce songs quickly. If the words sounded good and
set the tone the writer was looking for, that was enough. But budding
around the time of Beatles for Sale and coming into fuller bloom with
Help was a more thoughtful approach to lyrics. One probably inspired
by the meeting with Dylan and their growing drug use. On this next
song, Lennon is in full Dylan mode. The phrase "feeling two foot small"
is one of their first meaningful turns of phrase. And in another signal
that the band's music was moving beyond the conventions of a fourpiece rock n' roll band, it's the first song in their catalog to feature a
musician outside the band. Let's see if you can name that instrument.
Yep, that was a tenor and alto flute playing where you'd normally hear
a guitar solo. So here's another date to remember: June 14, 1965. I
don't think you'll find another day in rock history when an artist
recorded at least three original works back to back to back and had
them all turn out to be a) career-defining songs and b) so wildly
different in sound and lyric. It's an important day, and I'm surprised
that Beatles historians don't make a bigger deal out of it. MacDonald at
least notes that it marks McCartney's rousing from his two and a half
album long slumber. I think it's more than that, though. This day's
sessions are nothing less than a signal event in rock history, an artist
finally distilling the sounds he had been studying since early
adolescence -- folk, r&b and performance hall standards -- into a
trifecta of unforgettable tunes. In a day's work, McCartney pitches the
rock genre forward as he looks back to its roots. The songs are
presented here in the order in which they were recorded.
The 1965 album Rubber Soul marks a pivot point in the Beatles
catalog. Gone are the covers. The lyrics are their strongest and most

consistent yet. A few of the songs even tell a story, complete with a
beginning, middle and end. Here on the sixth Beatles album, they
finally unveil a song about something other than love, with "Nowhere
Man." Drug references are beginning to creep in as we'll hear, but they
don't yet dominate the atmosphere. And some of the tunes still have a
rushed-to-market feeling about them. Still, the album is a favorite
among many fans. The lead-off track encapsulates the band's
newfound confidence with its clever lyric -- complete with punchline -and difficult-to-play guitar solo.
Two things to know about this next song, written by Lennon with the
exception of the middle 8 by McCartney: Its lyrics were so revered they
ended up in a book of poetry. For real. And it marks the first use of the
Indian instrument the sitar in a Western pop recording. Harrison had
bought one after tooling around with one on the set of Help. It would
soon become a regular set piece in his own compositions.
I've just always had a stronger personal connection with the middle
and later Beatles works. They're just more .. .adult. So I'm going to put
the books down for a moment and say what a huge fan of this song I
am. I don't think it was ever released as a single. You rarely hear it on
the radio. But everything from the oddly uplifting Lennon lyric to the
Motown-inspired funk of the melody just hits my ear in all the right
ways.
Harrison has had a few of his own tracks recorded by now, but this one
is the first that deserves to be in this collection, his first classic.
MacDonald dismisses it as flawed, but Riley agrees that it's his best
song yet. In another band, this would have been a single.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Lennon and McCartney had
prodigious sex lives outside the confines of their main relationships,
and many of the songs we've been listening to have been about those
extracurriculars. This is almost certainly about one of Lennon's. As
usual, he's feeling small beside her, not man enough to grapple with
his own anxiety healthily, seeking outlets in sex and drugs instead.
You'll note the not-so-subtle marijuana reference with the comical
inhaling. And a certain part of the female anatomy gets name-checked
repeatedly by the background vocalists. Real mature, guys.
As immature as the narrator sounds in "Girl," it's hard to believe the
next song is by the same author. It is the perfect expression of
nostalgia. The lyrics eschews sentimentality while retaining more than
a pang of yearning to be back in the old times and among the friends
that you've left behind. Many fans cite this as their favorite Beatles
song. It's not hard to see why.

We end with another favorite of mine, a track that was oddly recorded
at the end of the Help sessions but not released until Rubber Soul. To
me, it's like a little brother of "We Can Work it Out," a 50-50 LennonMcCartney number that points up the strengths of both composers and
singers. I'm going to go out on a limb and call it the most
underappreciated song in their catalog. I'm not saying it should have
been a No. 1 hit, but enough musical jewels abound here to fill a
crown.
The Beatles greatest album. That's what many call their 1966 release
"Revolver." So in this, the third edition of Getting to Know The Beatles,
we focus solely on its 14 tracks and the singles of the era. That was
"Paperback Writer," McCartney's first official non-love song. The single
held the top of the American charts for two nonconsecutive weeks,
interrupted by, who else, Frank Sinatra with "Strangers in the Night."
That piece of trivia speaks volumes about the state of the music
industry and American culture in 1966. It is the pivot between the ginswilling generation that fought WWII and the generation just beginning
to realize -- with the help of certain pharmaceuticals -- that all they
needed was love. Each new Beatles release was hotly anticipated by
this point. The title of each album might as well have been, "This is
what music would sound like this year." Judging by Revolver's leadoff
track -- the first and only kickoff to be written and performed by
Harrison -- the sound of 1966 would be marked by pulsating bass,
bright guitars and a new social awareness that was about to explode
into a worldwide movement.
Is Revolver really the Beatles best album? Is it better than the
paradigm-shattering Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band?
Increasingly, the consensus is ... yes. A 1994 book called All Time Top
1000 Albums ranked Pepper No. 1 and Revolver at No. 5 all time. By
the 2000 edition, Revolver had moved into No. 1. Rolling Stone
magazine polling shows a similar upward trend. In 2003, readers put
Pepper at 1 and Revolver at 3 among the top 500 albums. In a Beatlesonly poll in 2011, Revolver beat Abbey Road out for the first slot by two
votes. Pepper had slipped to No. 4. Where do I stand? Pepper is the
better, more cohesive album; Revolver is a stronger collection of
individual songs.. Almost every song here stands alone as a how-to for
pop composers. Take the second track. In the 12th grade, I wrote a
1,000 word essay comparing its protagonist to Antigone, the title
heroine of the Sophocles tragedy. You know, it must have worked
because the teacher read the whole thing out loud to the class, the
only paper to get such a treatment.

You'll recall that the Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, was
recorded over a span of about 13 hours in one day. By contrast, the
third track on Revolver took 24 hours over four days -- by itself. And it
was far from their most worried-over work. The backwards guitar solo
took six hours to get right. Painstakingly constructed by Harrison, the
lead guitarist played it forward first, then had the notes transcribed in
reverse and he played it that way. The tape was then dubbed onto the
track backwards to produce the unusual vacuum-like effect. As you
may have guessed, the Beatles were no longer writing songs with any
interest in performing them live later on. Although they would have
one more world tour left to perform, they were studio musicians now,
pushing their craft beyond the known limits.
Revolver introduced several recording innovations. The first involved a
change in personnel. Longtime engineer Ken Scott had graduated to
producing. Replacing him was Geoff Emerick. He was relatively
unknown before getting the plumb assignment to record the biggest
band in the world. But he quickly distinguished himself as being openminded to The Beatles often-wild production ideas. If Lennon wanted to
sound like an old man, as he did on "I'm Only Sleeping," Emerick was
willing to give it a go. In that case, he used a new technique called
varispeeding in which a sound is recorded at one speed and then sped
up or slowed down to alter its pitch. Lennon sang the track slower than
it sounds on the record and it was sped up to produce the track's
hollowed-out vocals. Another innovation, invented in-house at EMI, was
automatic double tracking, or ADT. Let's say you wanted a bigger,
chorus-like sound on your vocals, as on "Can't Buy Me Love." The
singer would literally have to sing it once and then a second time,
trying to match the first performance as closely as possible. What a
pain. Lennon, in particular, hated it. ADT eliminated that hassle. The
vocals were piped into two recorders at the same time, and the second
would be varispeeded slightly to give the sonic illusion of two separate
voices. On this next track, the ADT is applied to the lead guitar and
McCartney's vocal. See if you can tell.
Riley writes of the next track: "The sitar flourishes in the opening
moments make the sitar in "Norwegian Wood" sound like a normal part
of a rock band -- it's the first Beatles track where traditional Western
instruments aren't even alluded to." The lyrics, too, are a middle finger
to Western values. Harrison carries over the cynicism of "Taxman" and
expands his list of villains to include sinners who would "screw you in
the ground." For all this song's exotic musical and philosophical
trappings, the message here is as old as balladry itself: Let's make love
while we still can.

We went a little out of order there. "Love You To" is actually the third
track, and "Here, There and Everwhere" is the fourth. But now we're
back on track and just in time for the Beatles most successful novelty
song. You'll recall from their cover of the goofy Buck Owens tune "Act
Naturally" that humor was an important ingredient in whatever the
Beatles were creating. This song, Riley notes, "doesn't subvert
Revolver's darker moods; it provides joyous distraction from them."
Written by McCartney and sung (obviously) by Ringo, it would zoom to
the top of the charts in America.
Side 1 ends with the song that was chronologically last in the recording
sessions. The song has a back story that speaks volumes about
Lennon's state of mind in the period of 1966-67. In August 1965, he
was in L.A. hanging out with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the
Byrds. And of course, the drug LSD joined them as well. The actor Peter
Fonda came over at one point and started droning on about an
operation he'd had as a kid and how he'd had a near-death experience.
Lennon had recently seen Jane Fonda's new film and hated it, so he
wasn't so keen on the Fonda family in general at that point. And here
was her brother Peter, pushing him toward a bad trip with his morbid
stories. So, Lennon had him thrown out. The female protagonist in this
song who keeps saying she knows what it's like to be dead: it's actually
a very annoying Peter Fonda. Musically, the song is notable for its
absence of McCartney, who had left the studio after one too many of
his ideas had been turned down. Harrison plays bass instead, and the
track goes on without the whimsical overdubs that were becoming a
McCartney trademark.
"Daydream" by The Lovin' Spoonful. "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks.
"Summer in the City" by The Lovin' Spoonful. "Sunshine Superman" by
Donovan. The summer of 1966 was remarkable for its warmth. And as
that list attests, that heat was inspiring. Here is The Beatles' ode to
that freakish summer. Despite the song's seeming simplicity, it could
never be produced live note for note. The piano that George Martin
plays is varispeeded. The psychedelic edge doesn't distract from the
overall, easygoing vibe, though. The next time you're having a great
day and the weather matches your mood, you'll want to think of this
song.
Beatles manager Brian Epstein blocked off three months at the start of
1966 for filming of what would be the band's third movie. "A Talent for
Loving" would feature the boys in full cowboy gear in the Old West. Talk
about fish out of water. Well, it never happened. Instead, the foursome
rejected the script and went about their own pursuits for those three
months. It was their first extended vacation after three years of
nothing but recording, touring, photo ops, press interviews, making

movies and generally being the biggest band in the world. Harrison
studied his sitar, as we've already heard in "Love You To." McCartney
dove into classical music, as we learned in "Eleanor Rigby." By now, all
of the songwriters had installed recording equipment in their homes
and would work out their new songs long before entering the EMI
studios in London with their mates. For his part, Lennon became a
devout follower of LSD. And he was eager to recruit others. That is, if
they were willing to put aside their prized possessions and be awoken.
Revolver is an album of brilliant contradictions. An album of sub-3
minute pop songs filled with obscure music like Indian ragas, backward
guitar solos and the then-novel technique of tape-looping. The lyrical
themes are similarly all over the map. It's really the first album of
theirs that would benefit from footnotes. One minute they're singing
about English income tax law, the next it's subaquatic seafaring. This is
the Beatles first adult album, and it's an album in full. Each songwriter
is peaking creatively. This next song, Paul's, recalls his work from two
years earlier on "Things We Said Today" with its dark shadings and
minor chords. But here, the love that was once sustained by warm
memories has gone cold and died. The working title was "Why Did it
Die?" -- an appropriate question given MacDonald's observation that
the song's chess-like progress "precisely reproduces his hero's
obsessive examination of his predicament: exhausting every
possibility, yet hesitating over a suspension at the end of each chorus
before going round again to make sure all the options have been
covered."
I now have the unenviable task of describing what hippie culture was
all about without making them sound ridiculous. MacDonald does a
good job, so I'll outsource the analysis to him. "The enemy was the
System," he writes. "The materialistic machine which processed crewcutted US youths through high school into faceless corporations or the
army -- an uptight society of straights so estranged from their bodies
and feelings that sex had become a source of guilt for them
assauageable only by setting fire to the living flesh of Vietnamese
peasants. The core of this System was the unfeeling rational intellect,
the mind divorced from its body, the ego separated from the rest of
creation." It was all one big attack on the childlike id, the freewheeling,
all-feeling part of each and every one of us, according to their Freudian
thinking. The problem was the ego, the mind, the head -- whatever you
want to call it. Suppress it, and you would begin to experience the
world as it should be experienced. Enter LSD and two rogue Harvard
professors: Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Their 1964 book,
"The Psychedelic Experience," was a manual for maximizing the
spiritual possibilities of an acid trip. LSD is more than a
phantasmagoria of hallucinations. Users experience what Freud would

have called "ego-death." Essentially, you lose your self-identity. You

are one with everything, and vice versa. "Though losing selfimportance," MacDonald writes, "we cease struggling and become
reconciled to a meaninglessness and hence goal-less and hence
peaceful existence." That's all well and good except for one... big ...
thing: Contrary to Dr. Leary's teaching, you can't really control what
happens to you on a trip. It's a dangerous, unpredictable drug, and
some users never come back. Ever. Lennon didn't realize it, but his
self-experimentation in the name of creativity was having the opposite
effect in some ways. Of the 14 songs on Revolver, only five are his. In
his state of near-constant dreaminess, Lennon had ceded the role of
band leader to the younger McCartney, who had yet to try LSD. If he
wasn't careful, Lennon was heading down the same road of no return
as other 1960s-era geniuses-turned-train wrecks, such as Syd Barrett
of Pink Floyd and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. But Lennon had
something they didn't. The same weapon that enabled him to write
songs like "Misery" and "Girl" without sounding completely trite was
now being turned against his drugged-out haze. It turns out he was just
self-aware enough to keep intact his skepticism. If you really want to be
psycho-analytical about it, I would offer that his hide had more than
thickened from the experience of having lost his mother TWICE during
his youth, once temporarily and then permanently. Which is why I don't
believe him when he sings "All you need is love" to a satellite audience
one year beyond where we are now. Anyway, in this next song, he
delivers a thinly veiled attack against Leary and his spaghetti-monsterin-the-sky promises, proving that the old Lennon is still in there
somewhere.
Now for one of the stranger songs in the Beatles catalogue. On the
surface, this Harrison original is a 3-minute pop song about a lover
struggling to express himself to his beloved. But there's really a lot to
unpack here. I'll limit my analysis to three items for the sake of time.
First is, once again, we're told that the mind is not to be trusted. Yes,
Harrison sings, "it's only me, it's not my mind that is confusing things."
But he admitted in his 1980 book, "I Me Mine," that it should have been
reversed. "The mind is the thing that hops about telling us to do this
and do that when what we need is to lose the mind," he wrote. If you
listen to that line in context with the rest of the song, you see what he
was trying to say. Second, more Indian influence. There are no Indian
instruments on this track, but the Eastern feel is undeniable,
particularly the ululating in the fade-out over the words "I've got time."
Third, Harrison punctuates the dissonance that is the song's lyrical
theme with literal dissonance. Harrison always hungered to come up
with sounds no one had ever heard before. He was a student of chords,
but none in his vast library of knowledge rightly expressed the song's
confusion and frustration, he felt. So, he made one up. After he sings

"drag me down," the piano plays in F while the bass and guitar travel
to E7th. And there was much rejoicing among music geeks. Yaaaaaay.
I've had so much to say about everything else, I haven't gotten around
to some of the other important recording innovations introduced on
Revolver. By 1966, many English bands, including the Rolling Stones
and the Kinks, had packed off to record in American studios, which
offered a richer sound. The Beatles even sent Brian Epstein on a secret
mission to Memphis to secure time at the legendary Stax studios. But
that never happened, leaving fans down the ages to wonder what-if.
What did happen was the switch to engineer Geoff Emerick. For one,
he got the Beatles to start using headphones during overdubs. The old
practice was to play the track live in the same room as the new part
was added, which inevitably led to leakage. Another change would
quickly become an industry standard, dampening or muffling the
drums. On their own, drums can sound harsh, too punchy with not
enough resonance. Stuffing a pillow or a few sweaters into the kick
drum creates a richer, fuller sound. Those "dirty drums" you love in
every Fleetwood Mac song? Well, thank the Beatles for that, or more
precisely, Geoff Emerick. He also pioneered close-miking. The
standard in his day was to mike an instrument from a few feet away
from the source of the sound. Emerick would put a microphone right up
to an acoustic guitar's strings. For the first time on a Beatles record,
the drums move to the forefront and the bass becomes a lead
instrument. Thus inspired, McCartney crafts some of the most intricate
and influential bass lines of his career. In the case of this next song, the
microphones are literally inside the horns. The result is a harmonic
blast the likes of which had never been heard before.
The Beatles saved their most stunning achievement on Revolver for
last. Ironically, it was the first track they recorded for the sessions. So
all the new sounds we've been hearing so far -- the backward guitars,
the close-miked instruments, the automatic double tracking -- the band
was simply following the template they created on this track. In any
book about the Beatles songs, this one usually takes up the most
pages. What is this song that looms so large in the Beatles legend? I'm
so sure you've never heard of it that I'll give away the title: Tomorrow
Never Knows. Never heard of it? MacDonald offers this explanation for
why you haven't: "As a pure sound-event, Tomorrow Never Knows
remains exhilarating. Yet it is easy, 30 years later to underestimate its
original cultural impact. Part of this is due to an intervening change in
Western musical habits. Wheeling in on a fade-up, the whirring drone
of darkly glittering sitar-tambura harmonics seemed in 1966 like an
unknown spiritual frequency tuning in -- an impact lessened for
subsequent generations conditioned to pedal-point harmony by
ambient synthesizer pieces and monochordal rave music." Look, this

song was nothing less than a shot across the bow to other musicians
and the music industry in general. The Beatles' message: Either keep
up or be yesterday's news. Tomorrow is Lennon's attempt to convey an
acid trip in song. The lyrics, many of them anyway, are direct
quotations from Leary and Alpert's The Psychedelic Experience. Now
remember, outside of a handful of elites in London and San Francisco,
there were no hippies in 1966. So even the song's themes were foreign
to the vast majority of listeners' ears. The Psychedelic Experience itself
borrows heavily from another text, the mystical Tibetan Book of the
Dead. That was Leary's way of grounding his version of enlightenment
in a spiritual foundation. Rather than spend years perfecting one's soul
through meditation, his solution offered a shortcut: Just take this
simple pill. Is it any wonder that the same generation that once
reached for a tab of acid for spiritual ecstasy was the same one that
brought us Viagra for the same effect down in the loins? (cough) Taking
his cues from Leary's source material, Lennon told the studio's staff
that he wanted to hire 1,000 monks to sing on the song, creating an
effect as though the words were being chanted from the side of a
mountain. Well, everyone knew that wasn't in the budget. If it weren't
for the inventive Emerick, Lennon's vision might never have been
realized. For the first half of the song, his voice was simply doubletracked -- a familiar sound by this point in the album but altogether
new when it was recorded. Lennon wanted the monk-like sound for the
second half. Martin and Emerick did so by sending the voice track
through a speaker inside an organ. What made this speaker so special
was that it revolved in circles, to make the studio organ sound more
church-y. In headphones, the effect on Lennon's voice is downright
mesmerizing. Ringo's drum-playing is also a revelation. Freed from his
distant corner of the Beatles sound experience, he plays what might as
well be one long drum solo. The effect on some poor acid-dropper must
have been ego-shattering. And then there is the song's sonically
unsettling tape loops, a then-novel addition to a pop record. Today, it's
commonplace, achievable by highlighting a section of music on the
screen and pasting it back to back over and over again. Look, I'm doing
it right now. But in 1966, tape loops had only been used by obscure
electronic composers. Well, not everything they produced was so
obscure. You may recognize this piece. I think Charlie will know it too. I
think you'll both agree: It's worth the 2:28 second diversion.
Wearing their trademark suits, their hair still combed in mop-top
fashion, the four Beatles share a couch inside a Chicago hotel. Their
faces betray a mixture of boredom, discomfort and nervousness. The
press crowds in close. The backs of a few heads are visible in the
foreground of the black and white news footage. By August 1966,
being a Beatle has devolved into managing claustrophobia. John fixes
his gaze on the questioner to his right and into a phalanx of

microphones, he says: Im not saying were better or greater or

comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or
whatever it is. I just said what I said, and it was wrong or it was taken
wrong and now and here he jerks his head wearily at the gathering of
reporters, and he says: its all this.
Welcome to the fourth edition of Getting to Know the Beatles. 1966 is
drawing to a close and the future of the Beatles is uncertain. They have
just wrapped up a tour that was supposed to be their victory lap after
recording the masterful Revolver album. Instead, its one disaster after
another. In Japan, their arrival is met with far-right protests against
Western influence on traditional Japanese culture. In the Philippines,
they dont even get a chance to play. After failing to pay court to
Imelda Marcos, the band finds itself as the subject of Imelda Marcos
wrath. Her goons rough up the band and its entourage as they flee the
archipelago. Then, in America, a stray comment John made five
months earlier to a British publication incites a vicious reaction. Across
the South, people hold bonfires to burn Beatles memorabilia in
response to Johns bigger than Jesus comment. What he actually said
was: Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. We're more popular
than Jesus now. Accurate as he was, he is forced to eat crow to head
off more bad press. The American leg of the tour is marked by poor
performances and empty seats in the stadium-size venues. On Aug. 29,
as the band polished off Long Tall Sally, the last number of its 11song set and said its goodbyes to the crowd at San Franciscos
Candlestick Park, no one knew it would be their last concert.
George was ready to quit the band entirely. John went off to film a
movie. Paul worked on his first solo project, an instrumental soundtrack
for his girlfriend Jane Ashers film The Family Way. Its somber melody
and melancholy strings seemed like a deliberate coda to the Beatles
chapter of his life.
FAMILY WAY
Riley writes: There probably has been more written about Pepper than
any other rock album, and even though now most critics claim either
Rubber Soul or Revolver as their best overall achievement, Pepper was
the record that made rock criticism worthy of its subject.
After some cooling off, The Beatles indeed returned to the studio in
November 1966. A couple factors persuaded them to come back
together: 1) The pretty much universal praise for Revolver and 2)
Manager Brian Epsteins acquiescence to the bands demand that they
would no longer have to tour. The Beatles had revolutionized and
conquered the 3-minute pop song. Now, they turned their attention to

the next musical frontier: the album. A few contemporary artists were
already gesturing in this direction, most notably The Beach Boys with
Pet Sounds and the Mothers of Invention with Freak Out. The
Beatles had to answer and, of course, take it further. Their first idea
was to craft a set of songs about growing up in Liverpool. The result
was a pair of songs that perfectly encapsulated the worldviews and
songwriting preferences of their two authors. McCartney took listeners
on a sun-drenched journey through the neighborhood where he and
Lennon grew up. Beneath the blue suburban skies and good-natured
artifice, though, lie some darker quirks for those willing to spot them.
Children laugh behind the backs of their elders. Theres the raunchy
mention of a finger pie. And one character feels that shes in a play
and, were told, she is anyway. It became the bands 13 No. 1 hit in
America. To shake things up, heres the Anthology 2 version, which
includes a different piccolo arrangement and an extended ending.
PENNY LANE
Why do these Beatles sound so dramatically different from The Beatles
of just two or three years earlier? Four key reasons: 1) The leaps
forward in studio technology and know-how, which we discussed at
length on the Revolver retrospective. If Revolver was the Beatles
experimenting in the studio, Sgt. Pepper was them perfecting the
studio as an instrument. 2) These four lads arent 20 anymore. Theyre
growing up. Theyre adults with wives or, in McCartneys case, a longterm girlfriend. Theyre adults grappling with adult issues, and their
lyrics are reflecting that transition. 3) Where once speed pills ruled
their individual metabolisms, now pot and LSD shaped their world. Out:
straightforward, adrenaline-fueled rockers. In: Introspection and testing
pops musical boundaries. 4) Unshackled from the rigors of touring,
The Beatles were finally free to pour all their energy into recordmaking. Gone were the days of scribbling down lyrics late at night in
hotel rooms, their ears still ringing from the raucous set played earlier
in the night. Now, they could wander into the studio just about
whenever they wanted and take up as much time as they wanted. You
could call their habits either ambitious or self-indulgent and probably
be right on both accounts. Well listen to Lennons contribution to the
childhood theme that kicked off the Pepper sessions. See how
comparatively Spartan it is on take one right here before it got
developed over the equivalent of more than two days of recording in
the studio.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS TAKE ONE
The protagonists thoughts are so garbled, he has trouble getting the
words out in the right order. It takes a confident songwriter to leave a

line in like, That is, you cant you know, tune it, but its all right. No,
this isnt the product of a mind just embracing randomness. It shows,
rather than tells us (the way Help did) the extent to which he, the
songe subject, has broken down. Strawberry Fields was a girls reform
school near where Lennon grew up. He would hop the fence and play in
its fields. Here, it becomes a metaphor for an escape an escape from
all this confusion. Here returns a familiar Lennon theme: the childlike
id, the place where theres nothing to get hung about, being prescribed
as the antidote to the trouble stirred up by the mind.
The final version is a masterpiece of 1960s era production. It splices
together takes 7 and 26. Not so hard, right? Wrong. Lennon liked take
7s simplicity. It features the typical band lineup along with McCartney
playing a Mellotron, a precursor to the modern synthesizer. Lennon
wanted the song to end on a darker note, accomplished by take 26s
cello and haunting horn section. The two takes, however, were at
different speeds and a semitone apart, MacDonald notes. By sheer
luck, the difference in tempo was almost exactly the same as the
difference in keys. One was sped up a little; the other slowed down a
little until they matched. You can hear the splice at exactly 1 minute
into the record. MacDonald writes: This swoop from the airiness of the
first chorus/verse into something more shadowy, serious and urgent
was what Lennon had been groping for all along, yet ultimately, it had
to be achieved through controlled accident.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS
Thirteen songs made it onto the album that would be known as Sgt.
Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, and not one of them is called Penny
Lane or Strawberry Fields Forever. Thats because the label, EMI, was
getting antsy and demanded that the band release something,
anything, to fill the increasing void in music. So the two songs became
a double A-side and wouldnt make it onto an LP until Magical Mystery
Tour, the bands follow-up to Sgt. Pepper.
Producer George Martin has called the trimming of those two tracks the
biggest mistake of his professional career. They certainly would have
been the best two compositions on the forthcoming album. So its all
the more impressive that the Oxford Encyclopedia no less declares
Pepper to be the most important and influential rock and roll album
ever recorded.
Re-entering the studio after the holidays, The Beatles were back to
square one. Well, almost. They still had one track in the can, a
vaudevillian-sounding number McCartney had written as a teenager
called When Im 64. The first song listeners would hear, however,

would be the title track. And that wasnt created until about halfway
through the sessions. So the idea of making a concept album didnt
enter the proceedings until they were halfway over.
Thats an important fact to keep in mind. Sgt. Pepper is nowhere near
as fleshed out conceptually as The Whos Tommy or Pink Floyds The
Wall, which muster each song into the service of telling an albumlength story. What makes Pepper so important is that it created the
genre of album rock. In that regard, were not just talking about a new
style of music but rather an entirely new form of art: a rock album
crafted to stand on its own.
With the opening track, McCartney the ideas originator, of course
introduces us to the concept. The curtain comes up on some fairground
in the English countryside and instead of The Beatles, you see or
rather, hear -- an Edwardian-era military band. Theyre going to sing a
song, and they hope you all sing along. And then the spotlight turns to
the bands most unassuming performer, Billy Shears.
SGT PEPPER/WITH A LITTLE HELP
The material on Sgt. Pepper is of lighter weight, compared with the
world-weary Revolver that preceded it. This next song is typical of the
albums fare. Many of the lyrics Lennon simply cribbed from an 1840sera festival poster he found in a junk shop and subsequently
purchased. Its a fanciful, strange trip and perfectly in sync with Sgt.
Peppers whimsical atmosphere. In one of his more-straightforward
production requests, Lennon told Producer George Martin that he
wanted the music to conjure the smell of sawdust. And Martin delivers.
I dare you not to feel transported to another world here.
MR. KITE
This next song completes the Beatles trilogy of orchestral songs,
following Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby. Like several of the songs on
Pepper, the lyric comes from found material. McCartney got the idea
from a front-page story in the Daily Mirror about a girl who had run
away from home. Running away was something of a trend at the time
as the generation gap widened, and drugs filtered into the middle
class. This is a fictionalized account of the plight of one Melanie Coe,
who was 17 at the time. One thing McCartney didnt know, or realize,
was that he had once crossed paths with the girl in question. In 2008,
the Daily Mail caught up with Coe and she related how McCartney had
chosen her in 1963 as the prize winner of a dancing contest on ITVs
show Ready Steady Go! Funny how things work out. One last note:

The title of this song was turned into McCartneys first words to Lisa on
his appearance on The Simpsons.
SHES LEAVING HOME
Sgt. Pepper covered more musical ground than any previous rock
album. The lyrics are challenging, too. Fans would spend way too many
hours trying to unpack them. Some were actually worth unpacking.
For the penultimate track, the band did something it nor any other
group in the rock era had done and reprised the lead-off song. This
version of the title track, though, served as an official closing of the
curtains on the fake band. But just when the last electric guitar starts
to fade and you think its over, a lonely acoustic guitar rises from
beneath, ushering the Beatles themselves onstage for an encore. No
longer wearing the Pepper costume, they present a song that is two
minutes longer than anything theyd previously released. MacDonald
would call it their finest single achievement.
Its a pastiche of two songs really. Lennon begins, relaying bleak stories
hed been reading in the newspapers. But the Beatles, even at worldweariest, still held fast to their optimistic message. Lennons first part
ends with his voice quavering over the line Id love to turn you on.
Yeah, it sounds like a call to do drugs. But theres a deeper meaning:
We can still transcend the ugliness, he seems to be saying.
Lennon sings in similar, folky fashion to close the song. In between lies
a fragment of a song McCartney had lying around. In any other
context, the lyric would just be a mundane recounting of the days
events rendered in tuneful fashion by a bouncy piano. But here, it is
like waking from a dream. Or is it the other way around? Is it the dream
itself?
Anyway, the song was all but done except for one teensy matter: There
was a 24-bar bridge that needed to be filled between the two
completely different sounding Lennon and McCartney recordings. The
band, and Lennon in particular, called for the sound of the end of the
world. George Martin obliged by scoring what MacDonald calls an
unsynchronized slide from the lowest to the highest note an orchestra
can make. The result sounds like chaos but Martin actually scored each
players part individually, telling them to end on whichever note on the
E major triad was nearest the highest on their instruments.
Closing with a massive piano chord, the song, MacDonald writes,
remains among the most penetrating and innovative artistic
reflections of its era.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Released in June 1967, Sgt. Pepper instantly became the soundtrack of
the Summer of Love. In his song, Summer Rain, Johnny Rivers would
recall how everybody kept on playing Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club
Band. Such instant mythologizing was apt. Everyone literally did play
it. Radio stations across America gave up all other programming to
simply play the record over and over.
A large part of its appeal, to be sure, was its marketing. This was
nothing new for the Beatles. Youll recall how their initial recordings
landed with a thud stateside on the hapless VeeJay label until they got
a new distributor and Ed Sullivans all-important blessing. Now, here
they were dressed in psychedelic-colored Edwardian uniforms on their
album cover. Behind them was a montage of famous faces for fans to
puzzle over. Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Johnny
Weissmuller, Lewis Carroll, and, yes, Dr. Livingstone, I presume its an
eclectic group and thats just naming a few.
On the back of the album jacket, you could find another picture of the
band. Around them were the lyrics to all the songs. No one had ever
really done that before. Here was a signal call that the words would
matter from now on as much, if not more than, the music.
So how do you follow up the greatest album of all time. (Yeah, I said it.)
Well, serious artists in the future would learn from the Beatles mistake
and work to not repeat themselves. Bruce Springsteen doing the edgy
Darkness on the Edge of Town after Born to Run. Or Fleetwood Mac
following up the ubiquitous Rumours with the far-less-accessible
Tusk. As youve guessed by now, The Beatles, having no such history
to guide them, endeavored to repeat past glories.
The result was the warmed-over Magical Mystery Tour album and
movie. The cover found them once again wearing costumes. The music
was once again draped in heavy, of-the-period production. The title
track even borrowed the take you away lyric from Peppers Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds. In the afterglow of that long, hippie summer,
the music was generally well received. But Magical Mystery Tours star
has dimmed over time. Today, its their poorest reviewed work. Just
listen to the biggest single from those sessions. It is among the Beatles
most famous and least-deserving hits.
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

I mean, you need more than love. You need oxygen, water, shelter,
clothing and so forth. On the emotional front, you probably also need
things like empathy, patience, a sense of humor and on and on.
As for this next song, you either love it or hate it. MacDonald loves it;
Riley hates it. I find myself vacillating between those poles myself. But
if I may slip into personal biography here, Id say that no other song
has had as deep or as lasting of an impact on my life as this one. I
guess I had a sheltered childhood because I just thought the Beatles
were always those lovable mop-tops who went woo! Then I heard this
song.
My family and I were leaving Pizza Hut one night, and the local classic
rock station was playing all the Beatles songs in alphabetical order.
This song came on when we got in the car, and I remember asking,
half-stunned, Is this the Beatles? My parents assured me that it was.
Being 12 or 13 or whatever years old at the time, I was just the right
age to be exposed to the Beatles post-adolescence period. Luckily, my
parents had most of the albums, and I spent the next several months
absorbing them the way a tree soaks up all the rainwater it can after a
long drought.
I dont know who Id be today without this song.
I AM THE WALRUS
So, as I said, there was a Magical Mystery Tour movie. The bands
manager, Brian Epstein, died of a sleeping-pill overdose in August
1967. While he was no longer around, the movie contracts he had
made on the bands behalf were very much alive. The plot of the
movie, such as it was, had the four lads traveling around the
countryside in a bus with a bunch of extras getting into, I guess,
adventures. McCartney got the idea from actual trips tourists would
take in Britain called mystery tours. The movie had no director, no
script. The bands songs were interspersed. It came out on British
television on Boxing Day, a day when families often crowd around the
telly together. Probably no surprise then that this, not-even-half-baked
psychedelic fantasy was roundly panned. It stands up a little better as
an early example of the long-form music video. To me, the whole
project only enables audiences to see -- and not just hear -- the bands
malaise during the latter half of 67.
BABY YOURE A RICH MAN
So where has Harrison been all this time? Well, he did have one song
on Pepper, a rather drab, sitar-laden piece called Within You, Without

You. He pitched other tunes as well, but they were rightfully passed
over. That is, until the Beatles needed to submit some songs for
another contractual obligation, The Yellow Submarine movie and
album. This time, their contributions would be kept at a minimum. It
would be animated and, although the characters would be the Beatles
themselves, they would be voiced by other actors. One side of the
soundtrack would be George Martin orchestration. The other began
with an old song, All you need is love, and ended with one, yellow
submarine. In the middle of this stale sandwich were just four new
tracks. Here was a home for two previously discarded Harrison songs.
In this one, the obvious Jimi Hendrix influence demonstrates that the
band remained ever-aware of its competition.
ITS ALL TOO MUCH.
The Yellow Submarine soundtrack album wouldnt be released until
1969. In the meantime, in early 1968, the band began to take its first
tentative steps toward a new direction, its first since Rubber Soul
kicked off its era of studio wizardry. Still stinging from his critical
beating, McCartney sounds re-energized on this ready-made single.
Before this track, you have to go all the way back to Good Day
Sunshine to find a Beatles song that uses bar chords, MacDonald
notes. The track points forward to a raw rock sound that the band
would develop more fully on the subsequent White Album and Let It
Be.
LADY MADONNA
HEY BULLDOG
THE INNER LIGHT
Welcome to Getting to Know the Beatles, Volume One of the White
Album edition. We opened with George Harrisons The Inner Light,
the last of his triad of mystical Indian songs after Love You To and
Within You Without You. I hope it got you in the mood for a trip to
India because thats where were going.
1968 was a pivotal year in the Beatles biography and in the culture
they influenced and reflected. The year opened with the Tet Offensive
in the Vietnam War, which proved the resiliency of the Viet Cong and
helped turn the tide of American public opinion against the war. Martin
Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Meanwhile, the
Democratic National Convention turned into a grotesque spectacle of
police-on-protester violence. Yes, the Summer of Love had evaporated,
replaced by an era of revolution.

As for the Beatles, the year started with an escape literally, to

Rishikesh in northern India to attend a kind of masters course in
transcendental meditation. They decamped all of them, Ringo
included for the foothills of the Himilayas along with a few of their
famous friends, such as Donovan and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Oh,
and their wives and girlfriends.
For the first time in ages, the four men really cleared their minds. The
meditation helped. But they probably got an even bigger creativity
boost from having to leave their drugs at home -- with the exception of
enough pot for a nightly joint. There, they wrote 18 of the 30 songs
that would appear on their next album. After they got home, they
recorded several demo versions at Harrisons home studio one day in
what was certainly one of the most epic jam sessions of all time. Heres
a Lennon track that would have to wait a year before being properly
recorded during the Abbey Road sessions.
MEAN MR. MUSTARD
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the spiritual guide on the Beatles journey
toward enlightenment. Led by Harrison, theyd met him at a seminar
the previous year in Wales and were eager to learn more. Their trip
helped cement the Wests fascination with Indian spirituality and
transcendental meditation. One historian, with only a little sarcasm,
has compared the bands trek to Jesus 40 days in the wilderness. One
of the Maharishis disciples, the new-age guru and Oprah Winfrey crush
Deepak Chopra, has credited Harrison and the Beatles with turning the
West on to Eastern spiritual practices.
As well see, events that precipitated the bands departure would
produce no small amount of cynicism in their recollections of the
experience. But before all that happened, theres no denying that they
were anything but model students. John and Paul would each write
songs about one particular lecture. Heres Pauls.
MOTHER NATURES SON
Johns take on the lesson demonstrates just how keen he was to
internalize the yogis messages. Exhibit A: the songs lack of his
trademark sarcasm. He cut a version of it during the Harrison home
demos. But back in England with his perspective re-orienting itself to
its former state, he opted shelve the composition. Interestingly, he
would come back to it a few years later for his second solo album,
retaining the melody but completely reworking the lyrics into the song
we know today as Jealous Guy. Since no versions of the 1968

recording are readily available, heres a cover that hews closely to the
original version.
CHILD OF NATURE
Joining John on the subcontinent was his wife Cynthia. It would be
among their last public appearances together as husband and wife.
Shortly after they returned home, John started seeing the woman that
would be the lodestar of the rest of his life.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. She was an influential figure in the
avant-garde art movement, producing art, music and films. Its said
she met John Lennon when he attended one of her art exhibits in
London in November 1966. He didnt think much of her art, particularly
one piece that was nothing more than a bag of nails. But then he saw
one installation that featured a ladder with a spyglass at the top. He
felt a little silly climbing the ladder until he looked through the glass
and saw the word Yes. Charmed, he started a relationship that
evolved from business to very personal over the next year and a half.
That relationship was different than what most people were
accustomed to. Suddenly, this raven-haired woman was always by his
side, even in the studio. Its probably fair to say that much of the sharp
and mean-spirited criticism lodged against Ono over the years had
racist and/or anti-feminist roots. One article in Esquire was shamefully
titled John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie. Still, the couple certainly didnt
help their cause with their various bizarre public stunts and
pronouncements. Appearing naked together on the cover of their debut
album. Staging a so-called bed-in to promote peace. This wasnt your
typical newlywed stuff.
Her near-constant presence during the White Album sessions became a
big source of strain for the band. Where there were four, now there
were five. She wasnt just a passive observer. In this song, she even
gets a brief vocal solo. The subject of the lyric is another visitor at the
meditation camp, one who put more effort into hunting big game than
reaching nirvana.
THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL
Guess what? Ringo wrote a song! Not much to report here except that
it incorporates all three chords that he knew and that it played a role in
the Paul is dead fiasco. Ringo, as well hear, sings you were in a car
crash, and you lost your hair. That, conspiracy theorists would argue,
was how he died in a car crash, in London, in January 1967. In fact,
there was a crash, and Paul was hurt. Its the reason he grew his Sgt.

Pepper mustache to hide the scar. But dead? Not quite. Hoaxes aside,
lets all bask in Ringos gentle decency.
DONT PASS ME BY
That George Harrisons first proper solo album sprawled across three
discs was a testament to his pent-up creativity during the Beatles
years. By 1968, he was growing increasingly frustrated with his
allotment of one or two tracks per album. He also suspected the others
werent putting as much effort into fleshing out his tracks as their own.
When he initially cut this next song, he was unimpressed with the
results. The next morning, he happened to be driving into the city with
his friend Eric Clapton, and he asked the guitarist to come play on the
track. Clapton at first tried begging off. No one played guitar for the
Beatles but the Beatles themselves. But Harrison prevailed. And when
Clapton showed up in the studio, wouldnt you know it everyone was
on their best behavior. The result was an FM radio classic.
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
The White Album isnt the official title of this album. In sharp contrast
to the colorful Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour covers, this one
was all white. The only relief was the title, The Beatles, which stood
embossed in the lower right corner. The title was supposed to be A
Dolls House, but that name was taken by another band that year. It
would have made more sense for this wildly uneven collection of
songs, MacDonald writes.
Lennon would later say it was his favorite. While I wouldnt say its
their best work, I find it to be almost endlessly interesting. It spans the
whole spectrum of musical genres, from vaudeville to heavy metal and
from reggae to Disney-inspired balladry. The album owes its
schizophrenia to the state of affairs within the band dynamic. Weve
already heard about Harrisons woes. Well, Lennon had stopped
dropping acid, and his domineering personality had re-emerged.
McCartney would no longer have free reign. That led to inevitable
clashes when they had to work together. So, increasingly, they just
didnt work together. In fact, George Martins associate producer Chris
Thomas appears as a musician on more songs written by members not
named John Lennon than Lennon himself. I dont quite buy into the
theory that the White Album is the work essentially of four solo artists,
but I can see why the idea persists nearly five decades on.
This Lennon track perfectly distills the spirit of the album. Its just a
mess, musically and lyrically. And theres a darkness here that would
be disconcerting even on a rival Rolling Stones album. But its also
fascinating in a gritty, poetic way.

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

If theres a common thread running through dolls house of music, its
the back-to-basics sound. That was as much by necessity as by design.
Over in India, all they had at their disposal were acoustic guitars. So
many of these tracks retain their singing-around-the-campfire origins.
You would think that the recording sessions would have been a snap,
what with the overflowing pot of new material and their simple
arrangements. Nope. Many songs required scores of takes as their
authors struggled to obtain just the right sound. This song certainly
doesnt sound like it took more than 90 takes to finish, and yet it did.
Then again, if it hadnt, it wouldnt have its iconic piano intro, which
came after a bored Lennon took out his frustration on the keys in a
later take.
OB-LA-DI-OB-LA-DA
One of the things that distinguishes the White Album from other
albums is its interludes between songs. In the anything-goes
atmosphere of the time, the band left in extraneous noises and musical
snippets that would have been left on the cutting-room floor in the
past. Throughout the album, one song just kind of flows into the next,
bridged by chatter, fading chords or sound effects. Its yet one more
way this seemingly random collection of songs hangs together,
however tenuously.
WILD HONEY PIE
That thing where you look down at your XM display and ask, This is a
Beatles song? Chances are, when that happens, its a White Album
track. Ill meet you on the other side of this song with some startling
information.
GOOD NIGHT
OK, are you ready for it? With all that ooey-gooey sweetness, youd
probably think that Ringo-sung number was written by McCartney. But
youd be wrong. Its Lennon, penning a lullaby to his increasingly
estranged son, Julian.
Placed as it as at the end of the running order, its hard not to detect
some irony in its over-the-top lushness, intended or otherwise. The
White Album could have been called the Dark Album. And were about
to see why. Earlier, the bands penchant for obscure lyrics and musical

jokes had been mostly harmless. But in the maelstrom of 1968, it was
bound to lead to trouble. And it did.
When they listened to the album, Charles Manson and his deranged
family of followers heard a signal call to ignite their long-planned
racial war. When they committed the Tate/LaBianca murders, they left
references to some of the songs in messages around the scene,
scrawled in their victims blood.
One of those messages was the two-word title of this next song. To
them, Helter Skelter meant the time of revelations, of violent
judgment. McCartney had something far less sinister in mind: the
name of an amusement-park ride commonly found on English
fairgrounds.
HELTER SKELTER
You might find it ironic that a rich, high taxes-hating Englishman would
write a song blasting bourgeois gluttony. Harrison apparently didnt.
The Manson clan would latch onto its title as well, leaving it behind at
their crime scene.
PIGGIES
Ive struggled at times with this albums unfortunate connection with
such a notorious, stomach-turning crime. You cant really blame the
band for one nut jobs disgusting misinterpretation of their work. Like it
or not, its more than a footnote in the bands history. The whole, awful
affair demonstrates the sway they held at the time. To some, they were
prophets. And for the vast majority of people who believed it, it was an
innocuous relationship, maybe even benevolent. Thats because, time
and again, the Beatles remind us that their overriding message is love.
Here, Lennon flashes a newly learned finger-picking technique gleaned
from Donovan in India while expressing love at once for his dead
mother, Julia, and his new partner. Ocean child, by the way, is the
translation of the name Yoko Ono into English.
JULIA
Rhythmically abstract, lyrically biting, this Harrison track would have fit
beautifully into the White Albums setlist. But it didnt see the light of
day until the third Anthology was released in the mid-1990s. One
reason, after 100-odd takes, the band just couldnt piece the song
together. Another reason: it was a Harrison song, and he already had
four others slated for the new album. In my humble opinion, its heads

and tails the best unreleased Beatles tune and ranks among Harrisons
finest 1960s-era compositions.
NOT GUILTY
Six weeks into the project, frustrations were mounting. Engineer Geoff
Emerick, who had done so much to modernize the production of
Beatles albums, was sick of it and he left the proceedings. He is
missed. On this Lennon blues stomper, youve got to wonder why the
singer isnt micd on the last verse. You can barely hear him, screaming
in a distant corner of the room.
Also, critics seem to differ on Lennons aims here. Is he really so lonely
he wants to die or is he just sending up the new wave of British blues
bands? Either way, turn up the bass and hold onto the windows.
YER BLUES
Welcome to Getting to Know the Beatles, volume two of The White
Album edition. To me, great rock nroll, as in great writing or visual art,
strikes a balance between raw expression and artifice. If a work is
dashed off too quickly, it will come off as sloppy and shallow no
matter how genuinely it is expressed. I can think of some examples in
pop music. Were talking some of McCartneys solo era, remixers like
Sean Puffy Combs and Kid Rock or pretty much any 80s one-hit
wonder. On the other side of spectrum, we have the fussed-over,
plastic-y work of artists like Boston, Beck and Lenny Kravitz. Dare I add
Nickelback? In these examples, its impossible to get lost in the music
because the music cant get out of its own way. Its too busy showing
off its influences. Or its been buffed to a distractingly flawless shine.
Sometimes, the problem is with the lyrics too ostentatious and out of
place in a pop context. Part of the brilliance of the Beatles was how
they were able to more consistently than anyone else hit the sweet
spot between those two poles. To make effort sound effortless.
Certainly, they could veer too close toward raw expression, as weve
heard in some cases on this album. And they could steer too far toward
artifice, as weve heard with Magical Mystery Tour the song and will
hear again later with Maxwells Silver Hammer. But to pull off this
next song takes a songwriter with the intuition to know just what to
leave in and what to leave out. It could have just as easily gone from
embracing parody to drowning in it. But the infectiousness of the
chorus and the driving rhythm keep this track grounded. And only an
object with as much gravity as pure rock nroll could do that.
BACK IN THE USSR

Interesting note about Back in the USSR: That isnt Ringo on drums.
Even easy-going Ringo was fed up with the tension in the studio, and
he actually quit the band for a fortnight. He was eventually coaxed
back into the fold and returned to find his drum kit wreathed in flowers.
Having been recorded in the interim, USSR features the multi-talented
McCartney on the skins. This next song is Lennons deliberate effort to
throw fans of his lyrics off the trail a kind of I am the Walrus on
steroids. This time, however, the practice is all for show and a rather
unkind one, seeing as the object of his derision is his own admirers. If
nothing else, the song unwittingly reveals insights about Lennons
state of mind at the time. Like Everybodys Got Something to Hide
Except Me and My Monkey, the song at the top of this playlist, this
song distills the heroin junkies ethos. Its all id and paranoia, crunchy
guitars and tension-building bass.
GLASS ONION
The head-trip to India ended rather unceremoniously amid the Beatles
suspicions that the yogi was a little too interested in women and
money. It was a waterfall of cold water on their idea of a drug-inspired
utopia. No surprise then that the White Album represents a stark shift
from sentiments like All You Need is Love and Say the word and
youll be free. If they talked about love anymore, it was directed at a
particular person, as in Julia, or chased with a bitter dose of irony, as
in this next song. The original title was Maharishi, but Lennon
changed it probably out of libel concerns and a mellowing of his initial
pique after hed been home a few months.
SEXY SADIE
9: the number of weeks this next song stood at the top of the American
pop charts, the longest run of any Beatles tune. 7 minutes, 11 seconds:
the longest No. 1 single in the charts history, a record that would
stand for more than a quarter-century. Its certainly ironic that amid
their most tumultuous recording sessions to date, the Beatles
produced a song whose lyric centered around healing from emotional
wounds. Or maybe its not so ironic. There is much mythology around
what this song is really about or who its about. I prefer to look at its
circumstances. This instant and enduring classic was penned by
McCartney while he was leaving one relationship with the actress
Jane Asher for another with the American photographer Linda
Eastman. It also came as Lennon was divorcing his wife Cynthia, a
mere formality since he was basically already Yoko Onos puppy at this
point. There was Johns son Julian, the songs purported subject, caught
up in the middle of the divorce. There were the Beatles themselves,
who were in the first phases of their own separation, though no one

quite knew that yet. And finally there were the troubling world events
of the time, which included the continuing quagmire in Vietnam,
student protests, urban riots and the recent assassinations of Robert F.
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. McCartney says he wrote the track
while driving back from an impromptu visit with Julian and his mum.
MacDonald sees evidence of this genesis in its composition. Partly
because conceived without an instrument to hand, he writes, partly
because driven more by feeling than form, its verse/chorus lacks its
composers usual elegant construction, cadencing so often on the tonic
that the plain seventh leading to the middle eight seems like the sun
coming out. The tonic by the way, is the home key of a piece of
music, and good musical composition usually has a melody that starts
with the tonic, moves away from it and returns to it, usually multiple
times through the course of the piece. Here, McCartneys frequent
returns to it in this piece is certainly out of character for the melodic
acrobat that he was. I agree with MacDonald. It works for me. The
musical repetition underscores the protagonists persistence to, in his
words, make it better. That bit of music theory out of the way, lets
let Riley have the final word on this, one of the Beatles finest tunes:
Paul starts the song alone with an immediacy of feeling, an urgency
he can no longer suppress. He sings with the hope that something just
may come of his effort, and by the end a sad song is made better. Part
of this transformation lies in the journey from a lone voice to a chorus
of others singing with him the implicit message is faith in other
people.
HEY JUDE
The Beatles were first and foremost a pop band. Their compositions
remained relatively tight while other bands unwound and jammed
toward the end of the 60s. There are only two moments in their
discography that come close to what we would consider a drum solo.
The following song contains one such moment. Hearing it, its safe to
say Ringo was no showoff. Still, look for it between the 42-second and
56-second marks.
BIRTHDAY
Before it was a popular relationship advice column on Slate.com, Dear
Prudence was a Beatles song. As we leave The White Album, well
return once more to the highlands of India. Its subject was Prudence
Farrow, a sister of actress Mia Farrow and another Maharishi devotee.
And I mean devoted. She meditated so much for so long, the others
were started to get worried about her. So John wrote a song
encouraging her to leave her hut and come out to play.

DEAR PRUDENCE
McCartney has given various accounts over the years as to the
meaning of this next song. Its about a bird he heard one day while in
India. Sometimes, its just a love song. And over the past decade or so,
he has interpreted it as, of all things, a Black Power song addressed to
a female African-American woman. And Im fine with all this. A great
pop lyric can fit itself into whatever context it needs to be at that
moment. I like to think the song is about all those things and more. Its
a top 10 McCartney song all the way, maybe top 5.
BLACKBIRD
Lets reflect on the album as a whole. George Martin, the Beatles
producer, had strongly suggested trimming down the material to make
one strong album instead of releasing a double album with perhaps too
many slight offerings. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a Beatles
narrative without a two-disc White Album. The album spans the long
afternoon of their career. Or, if you prefer, the late summer turning into
fall. The leaves once so green are turning brittle. The days are hot, but
the nights betray a hint of the approaching winter. The album is rife
with contradiction, sounding at once slick and off-handed, Muzak-soft
and heavy metal-hard. The lyrics and the tone seesaw between hopeful
and pessimistic, between direct pleas and intentionally muddled
nonsense, between being out and being in. Im making reference
here to Lennons vacillation in the original version of the song
Revolution. Its not the version you typically hear on the radio. This is
the album version. The radio version is quite clear. We all want to
change the world, he sings. But when you talk about destruction,
dont you know that you can count me OUT. At the time, the New Left
was split between those who wanted to effect change through the
system and those who preferred violent insurrection. When the single
version came out in the summer of 1968, it sounded like the rich,
aristocratic Lennon had thrown in with the safe crowd. When the album
came out later that year and people heard the slower version, his
critics on the radical left rejoiced at his addition of the word in to the
end of the lyric. In fact, it was the other way around. They were
hearing his original words. To me, this is all overblown. The lyric is all
about seeking a peaceful resolution. If he were to sing in, it would
clash with lines like, But if you want money for people with minds that
hate/All I can tell you is brother you have to wait. I dont understand
why Lennon was still of two minds on the subject when he had devoted
99 percent of the song to disavowing destruction as the answer.
Perhaps its a window into his heroin-addled mind. Or maybe his
uncertainty is a reflection of the volatility of the politics of the moment
and his role in them. Here he was, the king of a movement but too

insecure in his own beliefs to make a definitive call. Mel Brooks said,
Its good to be the king. Well, not always, I guess.
REVOLUTION 1
Lets explore one of the more curious chapters of the Beatles
biography: Apple Corp. It was a company founded by The Beatles in
1968 that housed several divisions, including publishing, recording,
retail and electronics. According to advertising, anyone with an idea
could bring it to the company and have it executed, so long as it was
deemed good enough. In reality, the Apple tree was firmly rooted in
the British tax system. The band was minting so much money, its
members realized that they could do one of two things: continue
forking over much of their profits to the Labour-era government or use
that money to start a business. So, the Beatles became businessmen.
And it went about as well as you might expect. The venture has gone
down in history as a case study in mismanagement that probably
hastened the bands breakup. But it wasnt a complete failure. For one,
Apple is still around, thanks in no small part to perennial reissues of
Beatles material. It also can point to a legacy of launching the careers
of several new artists. Individual Beatles would find these artists or
groups and, with the approval of the rest, sign them to recording
contracts. Often, these acts would work closely with their Beatle
sponsor. Our first example came to the Beatles through the bands
roadie/assistant Mal Evans, who basically foisted demos on the Fab
Four until they finally relented and agreed to sign the group. The Iveys,
as they were known then, were the first outside group signed to the
label. Here they are performing a song written and produced by Paul
McCartney that became a top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
COME AND GET IT
By the end of 1969, the Iveys changed their name to avoid confusion
with another band. Thereafter, they were known simply as Badfinger. It
would become one of the most successful Apple signings, churning out
four top 40 hits, including No Matter What and Day After Day. The
next artist is a solo act. His presence here underscores the eclecticism
curated by the label. These werent just pop groups or Beatle clones
as Bandfinger would unfairly be labeled throughout its career. No,
Apple put out everything from classical to traditional Indian music,
from jazz and folk music. This musician was an African American from
Houston and a keyboard virtuoso. Well talk about him more on the
next CD because he figures prominently in the sessions that produced
the Let It Be album. Needless to say, the Beatles were more than
familiar with his work when they signed him. Here he is performing

George Harrisons All Things Must Pass, which, incidentally, was

released before Harrisons own version.
ALL THINGS MUST PASS
Sadly Billy Preston died in 2006 at the age of 59. He was no stranger
to success either, notching six top 40 hits. That included two No. 1 hits,
Will it Go Round in Circles and Nothing from Nothing. Two more
pieces of Billy Preston trivia: He and folk singer Janice Ian shared the
billing as the musical acts on the first episode of Saturday Night Live.
And I did not know this -- he co-wrote You Are So Beautiful, the
tear-jerking hit for Joe Cocker.
This next artist was among a handful to record for Apple who already
was a known quantity. The eccentric American record producer Phil
Spector in the early 70s had signed on to be the A&R man for Apple,
essentially its top talent scout. He looked and looked all the way to
the other side of his bed. Ronnie Spector, of course, was a member of
the Ronettes, they of Be My Baby and Baby, I Love You fame. Here
she is performing a George Harrison song for the label. It would be her
only Apple recording.
TRY SOME, BUY SOME
The song went nowhere commercially, but Harrison saved the backing
track laid down for Mrs. Spector and released it a couple years later on
one of his own albums.
Our next artist didnt need any songwriting help. In a career still going
strong more than 40 years later, he has released 17 albums and 12 top
40 hits, including one No. 1 hit. But success didnt come easy at first.
After several years of trying to break into the industry in American and
nothing to show for it but a heroin addiction, he moved to England.
There, he passed along a demo tape through a friend to Apples first
A&R man, Peter Asher. Both parts of his name ought to ring a bell. He
was the Peter in the British pop due Peter and Gordon. And he is the
Asher, as in the older brother of Jane Asher, McCartneys long-time
girlfriend. When Asher heard the demo, he was sold, and soon the
Beatles were, too. He became the first non-British act to sign to the
Apple label and would record his first album at Trident Studios just
down the hall from where the Beatles were recording the White Album.
On this song, McCartney and Harrison play in the background.
CAROLINA IN MY MIND

Yep, thats James Taylor. He had another song around that time called
Something in the Way She Moves. Harrison plucked its title for the
central lyric to his own song, Something, his greatest ballad.
The Beatles period of anointing disciples was all too brief. It lasted
only about a year, ending when their new manager Allen Klein came on
the scene in mid-1969 and started righting the ship. Apple soldiered on
for a few more years, basically serving as the distributor of solo Beatles
work and reissues. Aside from a bitter legal battle with the Apple
computer company over the rights to the name, which ended in a
settlement, the company floundered through the late 70s and 80s. It
found itself in the limelight again in the 1990s, when the Beatles
catalog was reopened and the BBC sessions and the three Anthologies
spilled forth.
Our last artist is the Welsh folk singer Mary Hopkin. Never heard of
her? Well, her time in the spotlight was short, and her music doesnt
get much play these days. But she technically had three U.S. top 40
hits, all in 1968 and 1969. This is one of them, written by McCartney
and played here as a fitting, final message.
***
Welcome to Getting to Know the Beatles, The End of Days. Our journey
through the Beatles catalog takes us on its final leg, to the bands final
two albums, Let it Be and Abbey Road. Much has changed over six
short years. The lads from Liverpool have become men. With no
precedent to rely on, theyve felt their way forward musically,
individually and as a group. Theyve led the push that converted rock
n roll into just plain rock. Theyve experimented with new sounds and
new technologies in the studio, exhausting every possibility. Theyve
also experimented with drugs and relationships, exhausting those as
well. As for the band, its still together, but not for long. In the old
Cavern Club days, John would call out, Where are we going, lads?
And the other three would reply, To the toppermost of the
poppermost, Johnny! They had done that. And now, there was only
one thing left to do: bring that journey to an end, to go out while they
were still at the top.
We come to a fork in the road in the Beatles biography, one every
storyteller faces at this juncture. The problem is that while the band
recorded the Let it Be album first during January 1969, it wasnt
released until May of 1970. Thats a good six month after the release of
Abbey Road, which was recorded AFTER Let it Be during the spring
and summer of 1969. So, were going to take the more well-worn,
chronological path and discuss Let it Be first. Just keep in mind that
contemporary listeners experienced it differently.

The original title of the Let it Be album was taken from the song we
just heard, Get Back. It described not only the gender-shifting
predicament of the would-be title track but also the modus operandi
the Beatles were working under. Dating to Revolver, the band had
grown increasingly reliant on studio wizardry for their sound. Since
theyd stopped touring in 1966, they hardly ever played as an
ensemble. Now, it was time to GET BACK to the basics. That meant
recording the tracks live. No overdubs. No editing. No double-tracking
or other special effects. Just The Beatles. The final product would
stray somewhat from the original intent, but it still represented the
Beatles most stripped-down album since their first, Please Please Me.
DIG A PONY
The idea, Pauls, was to rehearse new material for the album and then
record it during a live show. And since they still owed another film to
the movie studio, all of it would be filmed. So, the day after New Years
Day 1969, the quartet entered the cavernous Twickenham film studio
in London to begin rehearsals. Things went south pretty fast. It was
cold and uncomfortable inside the building. Lennon was distant and
unhelpful. Yoko One was still his shadow, adding another source of
band friction. McCartney was trying to fill the leadership vacuum, but
his efforts to conduct the proceedings largely engendered more ill will
from his band mates. Frustrated with both of them, Harrison quit the
group on Jan. 10. He was coaxed back with promises that they would
return to their Abbey Road home and give up the idea of another tour.
He also brought with him the talented Apple protg, keyboardist Billy
Preston, whose presence forced everyone to shape up a bit. Still, the
sessions remained largely unfocused and tense. Even the final concert
wound up a compromise. Harrison only consented because it had to be
done for the film. So on Jan. 30, the band climbed to the roof of their
Apple headquarters and performed a 42-minute concert for the central
London lunch-hour crowd. They played nine takes of five songs before
noise complaints drove the local police to shush them. Afterward, the
sessions tapes would languish for more than a year as band members
vetoed mix after mix. Finally, they brought in American super-producer
Phil Spector to polish them up. One of his main contributions was
sprinkling the space between the songs with humorous studio and
concert chatter between the group members. That helped give the
album the loose feel the group had always intended. Spector also
decided to layer a mawkish choir and overly lush strings on top of two
of McCartneys songs. The others signed off on the mix without
McCartneys consent. When he heard the results in early 1970,
McCartney had yet another reason to sue for the bands dissolution,

which he soon did. Here, we present one of those songs in its strippeddown original form, as its author intended.
LET IT BE
The drama behind the Let it Be album is more interesting than the
music. Most critics consider it among the bottom two or three
collections from the group, along with Magical Mystery Tour and
Beatles For Sale.
In March, McCartney married Linda Eastman in the British version of a
courthouse wedding. Two days later, Lennon decided he had to marry
Yoko Ono. What happened next would leave the world scratching its
head and become the subject of our next song. At first, they tried to
get marry on a boat in the English Channel. When that couldnt be
arranged, they flew to Paris, leaving it to their assistants to make the
arrangements for them from London. It turned out they couldnt get
married in France; you know, having passports would have helped. But
they could jet over to the Rock of Gibraltar, a British protectorate near
Spain, and tie the knot there. So, thats what they did. Instead of a
traditional honeymoon, they booked into the Amsterdam Hilton and
held the first of their fabled Bed-Ins. For 10 days, Lennon and Ono
gathered the media around their bed and talked of peace as if they
were the ones who had invented the idea. When he got back to
England, Lennon recounted his adventure in song. And it couldnt wait
for Harrison and Starr to complete their obligations. So it was left to
him and McCartney to play and sing all the parts. The result was their
last No. 1 hit in England and a No. 8 hit in America. It probably would
have clocked in higher in the states if not for references to Christ and
the crucifying, which earned radio bans in key markets. It was released
only as a single, never making it on a proper album. On this track, the
interplay between the two leaders of the greatest band in the world is
reminiscent of old times, a reminder of the fun they could create
together.
THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO
Its impressive that the Beatles made another album after the
tumultuous Get Back sessions. Ringo went off to co-star in the move
The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers. McCartney and Lennon were
getting married. Theyd already begun suing each other over bad
business deals. Lennon was weeks away from forming a new imaginary
band to back up his first solo album. And theyd picked a new
manager, Allen Klein, whom McCartney detested. In return, McCartney
brought his own de facto manager, his father-in-law Lee Eastman.
Anyone who watches the Let It Be documentary can see it for

themselves: It isnt about a band making an album; its about a band

breaking up.
But the old mystic bonds were still there. Some credit the rekindled
goodwill to the impromptu Ballad of John and Yoko session in which
Lennon and McCartney can be heard having a good time, even in the
final mix. Its a good thing they got back together because they still
had one great album left in them, according to many critics, their best.
Riley writes: The efficiency of Abbey Road is as far from the gripping
immediacy of Please Please Me as seven years development can be.
But where their first record gains credibility by its unabashed
candidness, Abbey Roads masterful professionalism doesnt work
against it. For my money, Abbey Road is the only Beatles album
that completely transcends its own time. First, the production its
flawless. George Martin is back at the boards, having secured the
bands promise that they would act the way they used to. We actually
did perform like musicians again, Harrison has recalled. Thanks to
their one last surge, the Beatles lasted long enough to benefit from the
introduction of the synthesizer, which can be heard on several tracks,
including this one. The relatively new instrument can be heard in the
opening notes, soaring above the second and third verses and doing
somersaults over the middle eight.
HERE COMES THE SUN
After a few scattershot attempts to make the album, the group came
together in earnest in July. They showed up like regular businessmen,
recording each weekday together. Lennon missed the first week,
convalescing from a car accident in Scotland. When he returned, he
brought a bed into the studio for Ono, who had been hurt more
seriously. A microphone was hung above her so she could make
comments. This next track was his first submission under the new
workaday routine. Its the most political song on the album but its antiauthoritarian themes remain relevant today. Hence the cover versions
by Aerosmith and the Arctic Monkeys. Also, if you want a tutorial on
playing the bass, Mr. McCartney is about to give you one.
COME TOGETHER
The greatest love song of the last 50 years. Such was the high praise
this next song received by no less a luminary than Old Blue Eyes
himself, Frank Sinatra, who dutifully recorded his own cover version.
The author isnt who you might expect. Its Harrison. MacDonald calls it
the acme of Harrisons achievement as a writer. He goes on:
Lacking his usual bitter harmonies, it deploys a key-structure of
classical grace and panoramic effect, supported by George Martins

sympathetic viola/cello countermelody and delicate pizzicato violins

through the middle eight. If McCartney wasnt jealous, he should have
been. This song is sonic proof that Harrison learned something during
his seven-year apprenticeship under the masterful Lennon/McCartney.
And it points toward the flecks of brilliance contained in his sprawling
first solo album.
SOMETHING
Theres a certain creative fluidity that belies the narrative arc weve
developed here. Songs arent necessarily written during a particular
session and released on the upcoming album. Particularly now that the
Beatles are studio musicians, some compositions bleed from one
project to the next. The comedic B side, You know my name look up
the number, was recorded over several dates between 1967s Sgt.
Pepper and 1969s Abbey Road, for example. The jaunty McCartney
tune, Teddy Boy, was first introduced during the post-India jam
session at Harrisons house, and it was a late deletion from the Let it
Be album. It didnt see the light of day again until McCartneys first
solo album. So it was with our next track, Ringos second and last
original song for the Beatles. He first wrote it during that, lets say
unscheduled break from the band during the White Album sessions. He
and Harrison can be seen fiddling with it in the Let it Be footage. The
song finally finds a home here on the first side of Abbey Road.
OCTOPUS GARDEN
The Beatles had always distinguished themselves as a vocal band. If
tasty licks were your preference, you could be a Stones fan. This was
true to the end. Lennon was inspired to write this next song after
hearing OnO play a passage of Beethovens Piano Sonata No. 14. It has
been rumored that the melody is simply Beethovens work played in
reverse, but that isnt true. The classical pomp here owes its existence
to its inspiration. But what resonates with me the most are the voices,
which is why I was so excited when the third Beatles anthology
transformed it into a ca pella. Youre left with the three primary Beatles
singers each singing three parts for nine voices in all. Arriving on the
bands final studio album, it is an almost literal swan song to one of the
groups most enduring strengths. Cue the angels.
BECAUSE
What was the Beatles last song ever? There are arguments about what
exactly was the groups last song. Was it the last song on Let it Be,
their last album to be released? Was it the last track on Abbey Road,
their last album to be recorded? Was it I Want You (Shes So Heavy),

since its final touch-ups on Aug. 11, 1969 mark the final studio time
featuring all four Beatles? Im going with another track, one that was
put to tape later and whose lyric sums up the dysfunctions that led to
the breakup. The song exists in final form only because the band and
their advisors had agreed that each song featured in the Let It Be
movie should appear on the soundtrack. (It won a musical Academy
Award, by the way.) In the final movie cut, one scene showed Harrison
trying out our next and very last track. But since the track was never
completed, the remnants of the band returned to Abbey Road studios
one last time to record music together. It was January 1970. Lennon
was out of the country. He had quietly left the band a few months
earlier, so it was a moot point. It was up to the other three to ready this
Harrison track for a proper issue. Four months later, McCartney made
public what the other three had known for some time: The Beatles
were over.
I ME MINE
Time for a curtain call. I have one final Beatles story, and its about the
end of the Abbey Road album. To close out the album, the band did
something no one had ever done in the pop era and no one has done
successfully since. They blended together each track, leaving no dead
air between them, creating one long suite of songs. You couldnt
separate them if you tried. To this day, when you hear it on the radio,
DJs usually play it in its full 16-minute glory. Its very existence owes to
a problem the band and George Martin faced with the material. The
band had a surplus of short tunes, some dating as far back as the
White Album. Some were little more than a verse or two, some little
more than sketches. In the absence of any new material magically
appearing, they would have to find a way to make it all work. The
solution, driven by McCartney and Martin, was to sequence them all
together. As Riley explains, The songs were connected only after they
were written and recorded, but they make more sense when heard
together, and the emotional impressions they create make their
extended linkage implacable. The common ground is musical, not
narrative. Some changes were made to the originals in a nod toward
the scheme. For example, the name of Mean Mr. Mustards sister was
changed from Shirley (as it had been in in its White Album demo form)
to Pam. That way, the song would have a little more something in
common with the one that immediately follows, Polythene Pam. Its
not that these were categorically weak tunes, mind you. Joe Cocker
would pluck one of them out and turn it into one of his biggest hits. The
Long Medley, as its known, is a last and lasting testament to the
Beatles ingenuity as problem-solvers. Not to mention that it has that
inscrutable quality of all great pop music: It dares you NOT to play it
over and over again. It may wind up at The End, but it feels like a

beginning. The Beatles may have only lasted for seven years, but their
music lives on. It lives on not because they were mop-topped forces of
nature or they made all the right decisions or never wrote a bad song.
Its because they realized what skills each offered to the whole,
considerable as they were, and by working together, made each other
better.
THE LONG MEDLEY