I was thinking about the Beatles recently, thinking about their music and their legacy and how after 40-some years I’m still angry about John Lennon’s death. I was thinking about how funny they were in interviews and press conferences and in particular the movie A Hard Day’s Night. The “who’s that little old man” scene at the beginning is a masterstroke of dry British humor, perfectly suited to the lads’ comedic talents.
I was thinking how cool it would have been if Paul and John hadn’t been too tired to take a cab down to the SNL studio and accept Lorne Michaels’ offer of $3000 for a Beatles reunion. I was thinking about how cool George Harrison always seemed and how he turned a B-side into the birth of the Traveling Wilburys.
And somewhere in the midst of this thinking I said to myself “Self, one thing you’ve never done in your life is listen to every Beatles studio album in order.” By golly, I replied, you’re right—I should start doing that right now mainly because I’m not quite as familiar with their earlier albums as I am with everything from Rubber Soul and later. I need to correct that.
It was quite a conversation.
I asked Siri for the name of the first Beatles album. She said Please Please Me and I thanked her and requested that she give it a spin. She said what and I said sorry, I meant to ask you to play the album Please Please Me by the Beatles. She did, and we repeated this process for the second, third, and fourth albums all the way down to the last one although at some point I said wait a minute, where’s Magical Mystery Tour? She never mentioned Magical Mystery Tour and I knew it hadn’t come out after the White Album.
It was only this morning that I realized Siri had been giving me a list of the Beatles’ UK releases in order. Which was fine, I guess, but there was a bit of Siri humble-brag to it. Oh, silly me, I just got back from Europe so naturally I assumed you meant the studio albums released in their home country, not in the country I know you’re driving around in.
Anyway. Thanks to Apple CarPlay, I did indeed manage to listen to every Beatles album released in the UK, plus Magical Mystery Tour which I crammed in there between the White Album and Abbey Road. This project took 2-3 weeks and I had to complete it while driving because I find I can’t have music playing while I’m trying to write. Sometimes I can’t even listen to music while I’m driving because all the iPhones I’ve ever owned have the uncanny habit of connecting only sporadically to Apple CarPlay. Sometimes the phone connects but then if the cord gets jiggled slightly it goes off. One time it went off just because I was looking at it funny.
Technical issues notwithstanding, one of my big takeaways from this project was that the Beatles should never be taken for granted.
Here in the third decade of the 21st century I think it’s easy to forget just how good those guys were. It’s easy to dismiss the umpteenth hearing of “Yesterday.” It’s easy to write off Beatlemania as just a result of hysterical teenagers going overboard for a new sound.
But for me, listening to the Beatles’ studio work from start to finish was eye-opening. This approach forced me to listen for the context, to imagine these songs being heard for the first time. The tight harmonies. The subtle twists on traditional three-chord rock-and-roll. The raucous joy of playing music with your friends. The confident ease with which they infused Dylan’s influence into their work and then the explosive “Let’s see what this sounds like” period that followed.* The stress of fame and the occasional bit of self-indulgence.
It's an impressive body of work, and I appreciate it more now as an old guy in my sixties than I did as a young guy in the sixties. I was not a Beatlemaniac. I knew who the Beatles were and I watched the cartoon version, but I wasn’t even aware you could listen to music on the radio until I started riding Stan Austin’s Bus 5 to Richland Elementary and by that time the Beatles weren’t that far from breaking up. (The radio was for baseball and school closings. Oh, and Wally Phillips’ morning show on WGN out of Chicago.) I was also a naif who believed everything people told me, so when a friend told me the Beatles said they were “better than God,” I was shocked.**
In Trombone Answers this bit of misinformation comes from the mouth of Parker Graham’s fifth-grade teacher, Mrs Bender, who tells her class that she “used to like the Beatles until they said they were better than God.” Ten-year-old Parker can’t conceive of the arrogance behind such a statement and even wonders why a truly omnipotent being would allow such words to come out of someone’s mouth. He doesn’t doubt the veracity of the story, though:
…because I’d heard it from a teacher I knew it must be true, and so I felt it was my duty as a good churchgoing boy to spread the word.
Parker’s cousin Jamie, an actual Beatlemaniac, sets him straight and explains the context of John Lennon’s “We’re more popular than Jesus” quote. This leads to Parker’s sincere attempt to help his teacher like the Beatles again:
Having learned a valuable lesson about the art of discrediting and demonizing that which one finds distasteful, I took this new information back to Mrs Bender on Monday. I hung back while everyone else went out to recess, then approached her desk confidently, importantly. “Remember when you told us how you used to like the Beatles? I found out what they really said.”
Mrs Bender narrowed her eyes. It was a look I’d only seen adults give each other on TV, and it wasn’t friendly. “What do you mean, ‘what they really said’?”
“That thing where people thought they said they were better than God. It turns out it was just one of them talking about how many more fans they had than Jesus.”
“There are a lot more Jesus fans than Beatles fans,” she huffed.
“Oh. Right. He meant Jesus fans then and Beatles fans now.”
I guess I thought she’d thank me for setting the record straight, thought she’d be glad she could go back and revisit her Beatles collection. But instead she grabbed a stack of math worksheets and plopped them in the middle of her desk. “I don’t care what you heard,” she said. “I just know what I know.”
I never revisited the character of Mrs Bender but I can guarantee that in later life she became a Fox News viewer.
In 1973 the Apple record label released two double albums with the titles 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, essentially eight sides’ worth of the Beatles’ greatest hits. A friend of mine owned these albums, probably on 8-track, and in a nifty bit of irony this friend was a member of my church youth group. In fact, riding in that friend’s car on a number of youth group trips (bowling, movies, skeet shooting, or whatever it was we young Christian folk used to do) is how I finally came to realize why the Beatles had become such a phenomenon. Those double albums were amazing. Now I knew. Now I was a fan.
Naturally, the group had some misfires. “Run For Your Life” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” both take a callous and casual attitude toward murder, and the latter is one of Paul McCartney’s most cloying melodies. “Honey Pie” is fun to play on piano but almost embarrassing to listen to; John Lennon said it was beyond redemption and Paul’s line “I love this kind of music” seems to be a direct slap at his songwriting partner. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” was a pastiche of some of Lennon’s unfinished songs, and as such it suffers from too much stop-and-start. (Each individual segment had great potential, though.) Some of George’s sitar songs could have been tightened up as well.
But for every misfire there is immeasurable brilliance. From the early albums I’ll take “Eight Days a Week” and “From Me to You.” From the mid-60s I’m partial to “Help!”, “In My Life,” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.” It’s hard to pick favorites from Sgt Pepper and the White Album but “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey,” and “Savoy Truffle” fit that category, at least for today. I love “Something” off Abbey Road and have a soft spot for “Dig a Pony” off Let It Be. Heck, I even put “Revolution #9” and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” in the plus column.
We only get a short time on this planet, but you won’t regret devoting a portion of it to listening to every Beatles studio album in order.
*All the amazing singles from the Beatles’ early years would qualify Lennon and McCartney for the top tier of pop/rock songwriters. What’s most impresssive to me is how smoothly they made the transition to more complex lyrics and melodies.
** I remember exactly which friend it was but will not reveal his name.
I'm still hooked on "Rubber Soul."
I was 8 when they performed on the Sullivan show, and have been a huge fan ever since. They were 100% responsible for my love of all music, and will always be #1 favorite.