The Beatles Through a Glass Onion: Reconsidering the White Album 9780472074082, 9780472124849

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T RA CK I NG PO P s e ri e s e d ito r s: jo c e ly n n e a l , jo hn covach , ro b e rt f in k , a n d l o r e n k a jikawa ti tl e s i n th e se r ie s : The Beatles through a Glass Onion edited by Mark Osteen The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer by Bill Bruford I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by Andrew Flory Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era by Christopher Doll Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical Perspective edited by Philip Lambert Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies by Ulrich Adelt Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music by Stephen Graham Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop by Justin A. Williams Powerful Voices: The Musical and Social World of Collegiate A Cappella by Joshua S. Duchan Bytes and Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age by Steve Savage Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s by Theo Cateforis

Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown by Joel Rudinow I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America by Albin J. Zak III Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music edited by Mark Spicer and John Covach Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin by Theodore Gracyk

The Beatles through a Glass Onion Reconsidering the White Album

Mark Osteen, Editor

University of Michigan Press  •  Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Osteen All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper First published March 2019 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­07408-­2 (Hardcover : alk paper) ISBN: 978-­0-­472-­12484-­9 (ebook)

Contents

Acknowledgments  

ix

Introduction. Part of Everything: The Beatles through a Glass Onion   mark osteen

1

Part I. Umbrella: Pretexts and Contexts   1. “. . . Out/In . . .”: The Beatles’ Image in Transition during the “Year of the Barricades”   michael r. frontani

37

  2. Children of Nature: Origins of the Beatles’ Tabula Rasa   walter everett

54

  3. Beatles Unplugged: The White Album in the Shadow of Rishikesh   john kimsey

72

  4. Producing an Enigma for the Ages: George Martin within (and without) The Beatles   kenneth womack

91

  5. “Where Everything Flows”: The Beatles and the Fruits of Psychedelia   russell reising

108

vi  Contents

Part II. Songs for Everyone: Music, Lyrics, Performances   6. I Call Your Name: Introducing the Cast of the White Album   ian inglis

127

  7. The Colors That Made the White Album: The Beatles’ Mastery of Orchestration and Arranging   anthony d. villa

145

  8. Blisters on His Fingers: Ringo Starr’s Performance on The Beatles   steve hamelman

161

  9. George Harrison, Songwriter   john covach Appendix: George Harrison’s Songs   10. You Say You Want a Revolution: John Lennon’s Contributions to The Beatles   stephen valdez 11. “That Was Me” in “Vintage Clothes”: Intertextuality and the White Album Songs of Paul McCartney   vincent p. benitez

177 190 197

213

Part III. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill: Adapting the White Album 12. Loaded with Meaning: Adaptations of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” by U2 and Tori Amos   alyssa woods and lori burns

233

13. White, Black, and Grey   adam bradley

251



263

Afterword   john covach

Contents  vii

References  

271

Contributors  

293

Index  

297

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9450783

Acknowledgments

This is my opportunity to thank every person with whom I’ve shared the Beatles’ music as a listener, lover, or fellow musician. Because that would require pages and pages, I am forced to acknowledge only a few who truly made come on such a joy. Here they are. My cousin Dave Johnson, with whom I first listened to The Beatles. Life goes on, bra! My friend Duane Richards, for many stimulating discussions of all things Beatle. It’s gonna be all right! My first college roommate, Jim Parlier, former officer in the Beatles Fan Club, who turned me on to the Fab Four’s Christmas records. We’re old enough to know better. My rock bandmates, too numerous to list, with whom I sang and played so many wondrous Beatles tunes. We laid it down for all to see. Special thanks to my son Cameron, who takes a sad song and makes it better; and to my wife Leslie: the two of us have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead. Both of you are part of everything I do. Thanks also to LeeAnn Fields, Mary Francis, and John Covach, who helped me see the plan.

introduction Part of Everything The Beatles Through a Glass Onion mark osteen

Umbrella “I came up with calling the next album Umbrella, an umbrella over the whole thing” (Miles 1997, 421). So said Paul McCartney about the many songs he and John Lennon had written at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India. Even then, before the LP called The Beatles—­ known to everyone as the White Album—­had been recorded, the band members knew it would be a diverse collection. And so it is. Yet the album’s variety is one reason it has long been perceived as the ugly duckling in the Beatles’ oeuvre, a sprawling potpourri redeemed (perhaps) by the occasional jewels shining through the honey pie. If their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band recalls a modernist literary masterpiece—­say, a work by Virginia Woolf—­the White Album resembles one of those nineteenth-­century novels that Henry James famously dubbed “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” (1921). However, as Ed Whitley (2000) has persuasively shown, The Beatles’ bagginess, along with its frequent use of bricolage, self-­referentiality, fragmentation, and pastiche, is not Victorian but postmodernist.1 Not all critics have deemed these traits a virtue; many have found the album maddeningly uneven, its strong songs weakened by fluff

2  the beatles through a glass onion

such as “Wild Honey Pie,” its virtues weighed down by leaden experiments such as “Revolution 9.” The album’s richness has also yielded a wide disparity in critical responses. For example, Beatles scholar Ian MacDonald judges “half the tracks” to be “poor,” their lyrics too often “the lazy navel-­gazing of pampered recluses” (2007, 327). Others have described it as “something of a failure” and “a collection of bits and pieces.”2 Why isn’t it better? In his book on the Beatles’ media image, Michael Frontani sums up the negative consensus answering this question: it is the “product of a band in disarray” (2007, 169). Yet despite this common reading of the album as a symptom, many Beatles fans and scholars contend that it succeeds precisely because it is such an unruly farrago. Devin McKinney, for instance, finds in it “all the confrontation that Pepper lacks” and gushes that “nothing else in rock and roll has ever come close to it” (2003, 237, 225). Others have called it “unsurpassed” (Quantick 2002, 13) and an “unquestionably glorious . . . tapestry of musical textures” (O’Dell and Neaverson 2002, 133–­ 34). One reason for this lack of concord is that the album embodies the band’s responses to several significant events—­some personal, some political—­that occurred between the release of Sgt. Pepper in June 1967 and the White Album’s release in November 1968. The essays in this volume analyze these events as they are reflected in the album’s songs, which suggest that the Beatles aimed to demonstrate that they were, as Lennon sings in “Dear Prudence,” “part of everything.” That fact, along with the album’s emergence during turbulent times; the wealth, diversity, and inconsistency of its songs; and its endurance as a problematic icon of popular culture all suggest that it is ripe for reconsideration. Taking our cue from the third song on the LP, the contributors to this volume examine the White Album and the Beatles as if through a glass onion. The chapters in Part I place the band in the context of their times and trace the musical and personal forces that influenced the album, which include the stay at Rishikesh, producer George Martin’s departure and return, and the band’s use of psychedelic drugs. Part II’s chapters analyze the album’s lyrics, characters, arrangements, harmonies, and forms and incorporate analyses of the procedures and progress of the group’s three principal songwriters. Part III and the afterword track the album’s trail through later years, analyzing how other musicians have appropriated it for their own work. With its broad array of approaches, the collection mirrors the all-­encompassing spirit of the White Album itself. But before zooming in, let us deploy a wide-­angle lens.

Introduction  3

Out By 1968, writes Jonathan Gould (2007, 506), a great many young people (especially in the United States) regarded the Beatles as “the quasi-­ mythic figures” depicted in the animated film Yellow Submarine (although the band had virtually no involvement in the movie). Sgt. Pepper’s unprecedented role as the symphony of the Summer of Love had much to do with that lofty condition. But only a few months later, the number of youths who believed that all you need is love had declined dramatically. Nineteen sixty-­eight is often referred to as “the year of the barricades” because of the numerous protests that broke out across Europe and the United States. As the Vietnam War grew hotter in the wake of the Tet Offensive, the hippie ethos began to seem dated: apparently throwing flowers and getting high wouldn’t change the world after all. For nearly two months in early 1968, the Beatles were ensconced at the Maharishi’s ashram, seeking enlightenment through meditation. In chapter 1, Frontani traces the evolution of the Beatles’ status within the counterculture in 1968. He shows how the band now emerged as a safer alternative to the radicals and to groups like the Rolling Stones and details how their relevance was boosted by Rolling Stone magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner. Nevertheless, as Frontani also demonstrates, by the time the band had returned to London in April, their vision of a hippie utopia based on authenticity, creativity, music, and LSD had been overtaken by events. Increasingly, young people aligned themselves with the New Left and opted for political engagement over apathy. the same week that protests at the In the last week of August—­ Democratic National Convention in Chicago metamorphosed into riots answered by police violence—­the Beatles released a new single: “Hey Jude” backed with “Revolution.” While the A-­side endorsed the belief that problems could be solved through intimate caring, the latter offered “a response to specific events in the public sphere” (McKinney 2003, 214). The first verse of Lennon’s lyrics, after acknowledging the validity of a revolution, ends with “when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.” Those lines landed with a thud among the New Left. Radicals heard the song’s request to “see the plan” and its condemnation of Mao Zedong as a “bland rich-­man’s assurances” (MacDonald 2007, 283) and scolded the Beatles for “preaching appeasement in the manner of wealthy, dithering dilettantes” (McKinney 2003, 216). It didn’t help that the Rolling Stones’ single “Street Fighting Man,” which seemed more in tune with the current mood (though Jagger and

4  the beatles through a glass onion

company were, if anything, less radical than the Beatles), was released the same month.3 Of course, “Revolution” does not appear on the White Album. In its place is a slower, less raucous rendition called “Revolution 1.” On this track, after singing “count me out,” Lennon quietly adds, “in.” The song ends with Lennon assuring us that everything will be “all right.” On the single, however, he doesn’t just sing “all right”—­he screams it. As McKinney observes, the single’s distorted guitars and thumping, insistent shuffle rhythms “howl[ ] violence.” Lennon, he continues, does not believe the lyrics; he “believes only in the scream” (2003, 221–­22). Indeed, Lennon’s roar seemed to give voice to the angst of every young person fed up with the Establishment and crying for change. The album version may equivocate, but the single electrifies, its raunchy guitars and raw vocals endorsing what the lyrics do not. But doesn’t the White Album’s embrace of parody and self-­reflexivity blunt any political purpose? Perhaps not: Jeffrey Roessner argues that the Beatles’ postmodernism allowed them to “contest the commodification of rock music” and “redefine the relationship between artistic style and political relevance” (2006, 148). In other words, by employing parody and pastiche so prominently, the band admitted that rock, having been co-­opted by corporate interests, was no longer subversive. In this way, the album’s refusal to fulfill listeners’ expectations militates against corporatism and conservatism. Thus, in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” they thumb their noses at Cold War politics; “Glass Onion” mocks the marketing of musicians as wise men; “Yer Blues” winks at white Britishers’ appropriation of black music. More broadly, however, as Ian Inglis has suggested, the events of 1968 fostered a spirit of “argument, disunity, confrontation and disillusionment” that inevitably made its way into the Beatles’ music (2009, 112). Of course, the Beatles didn’t just reflect the counterculture; they shaped it. If they were briefly out, it didn’t take long for fans to count them in once more. And even if the White Album questions the commodification of music, it was nonetheless a mammoth seller: the audience followed them wherever they went. The Beatles—­and The Beatles—­were, for the youth of 1968, part of everything.

Sages That spirit of disunity and disillusionment was palpable on a personal level. As McCartney remembers, the band members shared a “feeling of ‘Yeah, well, it’s great to be famous, it’s great to be rich, but what’s it

Introduction  5

all for?’” (Spitz 2005, 749). They had taken divergent paths after giving up touring: George Harrison sojourned in India to study Eastern philosophy and music; Lennon accepted a role in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War and got more heavily into drugs; McCartney went on a safari. After the Magical Mystery Tour project of late 1967 flopped, the band, urged on by Harrison, gravitated toward the Maharishi. Finding him charismatic and his ideas compelling, they made their pilgrimage to Rishikesh (“land of sages”) in February 1968, to spend several months meditating and receiving instruction (see chapter 2 in this volume for a time line). All but Starr spent several weeks there, interspersing long sessions in meditation with a lot of listening, singing, playing, and composing. As chapters 2 and 3 in this volume detail, the seeds of the White Album were planted in Rishikesh, where the band members wrote “nearly forty” songs (Spitz 2005, 752), most of which ended up on The Beatles (see table 1 of chapter 2 for a helpful list of these songs). As Walter Everett argues in chapter 2, the spare setting and the influences of folk musicians prompted the Beatles to craft a “back to the basics” credo for the new record. Although they ended up using more than a touch of craft on many songs, the album is impelled by a principle of authenticity, argues Everett, which prompted an emphasis on the acoustic not heard since Rubber Soul and set the stage for the unvarnished approach of Let It Be. In chapter 3, John Kimsey further examines how the Beatles’ Himalayan stay inspired them to sprinkle the album with “tracks that evoke an ethos of intimacy, sincerity and contemplative quietude” that led to the birth of the singer-­songwriter genre. Kimsey also discusses how their relationship with the yogi was informed by Orientalist discourse in which Westerners are saved or cleansed by an encounter with the East. Alas, the Rishikesh experiment ended in disharmony. Put off by the food and flies, Starr and his wife lasted only ten days; McCartney and girlfriend Jane Asher stuck it out for two more weeks. Then in March a serpent arrived at Shangri-­la—­Alexis Mardas, “Magic Alex,” a hanger-­on and would-­be electronics whiz who spread a rumor that the Maharishi was having sex with a young American acolyte (Mardas has denied this, but his role is verified by many accounts). Despite a lack of evidence, Lennon believed him and persuaded Harrison that the Maharishi was a fraud. The next day they left, taking their entourage and a lot of ill will with them, though Harrison already entertained second thoughts about the abrupt departure and likely held a grudge afterward. On the drive to the airport, Lennon began writing a spiteful song about the guru, which became the White Album’s “Sexy Sadie” (see Spitz 2005, 757).

6  the beatles through a glass onion

Corps(e) An even more disorienting blow had been struck in August 1967, when the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died of a (probably accidental) drug overdose. With Epstein gone, the band was financially rudderless. Not only were the Beatles not businessmen; they had relied on Epstein to keep predators at bay. With callow overconfidence, they launched Apple Corps in late 1967. Apple soon blossomed from a bright idea into a clothing boutique, an electronics firm (to be headed by the incompetent Mardas), and a record company. In April 1968, the Beatles bought an ad in the London newspapers soliciting tapes, and in May Lennon and McCartney visited New York and appeared on the Tonight Show, where they told bemused guest host Joe Garagiola that Apple would be “a sort of umbrella so people who want to make films about . . . grass . . . don’t have to get on their knees in an office . . . begging for a break” (Spizer 2009, 142). Apple did sign and record some talented new artists, including James Taylor and Mary Hopkin, whose “Those Were the Days” became an international hit. But for the most part, as MacDonald observes, the company “emptied the Beatles’ coffers in the pursuit of witless follies and gargantuan expense accounts” (2007, 280). Gulled by the aptly named duo known as the Fool, the Beatles saw their boutique fall victim to rampant employee theft (they closed it July), and Apple Electronics turned out to be another of Magic Alex’s con jobs. So much for the hippie ethos of sharing. Apple also drove a wedge between Harrison and the other band members, for while seeking new artists, he had played music with non-­Beatles and found the low-­pressure atmosphere and camaraderie of those sessions refreshing. Later, of course, the battle over who would handle the Beatles’ businesses became one of the biggest bones of contention in their breakup. The Beatles’ grave on Sgt. Pepper’s cover had begun to seem prescient.

The Boys Enter Yoko Ono. Actually, she had come into John Lennon’s life in November 1966, when he attended a preview of her exhibition at London’s Indica Gallery. Afterward she had peppered him with notes, phone calls, and letters, even while he was in Rishikesh with his wife, Cynthia. After getting back from India, Cynthia left for a two-­week vacation; when she returned home earlier than planned, she found Ono wrapped in Cynthia’s bathrobe, sipping tea (Gould 2007, 478). She and

Introduction  7

Lennon had been up all night making the tapes that became their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, consummating the nocturne with sex. Although Ono always stated that she hadn’t known who Lennon was before meeting him at the Indica show, this claim is belied both by others’ testimony and by her own behavior (Gould 2007, 476). Bob Spitz’s catty comment that she was “drawn both to John and to the girth of his bankbook, which could endow her career” is likely not far from the mark (2005, 748).4 By June the couple was appearing together in public: Lennon’s marriage was dead. Like many men reaching their late twenties, Lennon, having found his soul mate, had lost interest in “the boys.” However, as Barry Miles remarks, the boys were not just drinking buddies; they were also his colleagues at work (1997, 491). Breaking a long-­standing, if unspoken, agreement, he brought Ono to recording sessions, where she managed to offend everyone not named John Lennon. Musically, her arrival signaled a seismic shift, because it ended McCartney’s habit of soliciting Lennon’s advice about songs; conversely, Lennon had a new sounding board, a woman who was neither McCartney’s equal as a musician nor inclined to offer constructive criticism (Gould 2007, 512, 513). Many Beatles fans blame her for the group’s demise, but Lennon maintained that she merely woke him to the reality that he had become “Elvis Beatle,” “surrounded by sycophants and slaves who were only interested in keeping the situation as it was” (Beatles 2000, 301). Is it fair to blame her for wanting to be with her beloved every minute? Anyone who has experienced such overpowering passion can understand what Lennon meant by telling his friend Pete Shotton, “I don’t give a fuck about the Beatles. . . . I’m going to go and live with Yoko, even if it means living in a tent with her” (qtd. in Spitz 2005, 765). In fact, the two were briefly homeless before staying in longtime associate Peter Brown’s apartment and then moving into Starr’s basement flat in Montagu Square. The feelings of rootlessness and paranoia these events incited are palpable in Lennon’s White Album songs, as I show below. And—­oh, no—­the two began using heroin. McCartney’s relationship with Linda Eastman bloomed around this same time: having met in 1967, they got together for good in July 1968 and in October spent two weeks being tourists, incognito, in New York City. Although Eastman was a much less divisive presence than Ono, McCartney’s coupling further estranged him from the band and ensured that collaborations with Lennon were largely a thing of the past. In sum, the death of Epstein, the search for meaning in their lives, the flirtation

8  the beatles through a glass onion

with the Maharishi, the Apple debacle, and, perhaps most of all, the entrance of lovers who triggered an emotional divorce from bandmates all contributed to an atmosphere of dissension when the Beatles began recording the White Album in May 1968.

Back As Everett’s chapter details, Rishikesh’s spartan atmosphere, along with the band’s desire to do something different from what they’d done before, inspired a “back to nature” approach for the new album. And I do mean nature: natural images and scenes appear more frequently on the White Album than on any other Beatles recording (Russell Reising traces this trend in chapter 5). Another influence on this back-­to-­the-­basics approach was Bob Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding, which the band had listened to repeatedly in Rishikesh. Further, as Kimsey demonstrates in chapter 3, the Scottish singer-­songwriter Donovan taught Lennon and McCartney a new fingerpicking style that better equipped them to write spare, personal songs such as “Blackbird” and “Julia.” Everett observes that even the white album cover “cast the group . . . in a new light, as if an optimistic eggshell of unlimited possibilities was about to hatch.” But the eggshell was fragile. On May 30, when the Beatles met at Harrison’s house in Kinfauns to plan the new album and demo their new songs (see Everett’s table 1 for a list), the atmosphere was more competitive than collegial, as each songwriter lobbied fiercely for his own work (Spitz 2005, 763). They did agree, however, that this album would eschew the elaborate production techniques that had distinguished Sgt. Pepper. Perhaps, too, there was some “unspoken resentment” at the credit George Martin had received for its success (Gould 2007, 489). And yet this turn toward simplicity bore an ironic edge: many of the songs are letter-­perfect burlesques of other styles. In going back to basics, the Beatles borrowed from the entire history of popular music.5 Some songs caricature particular artists: “Rocky Raccoon,” for instance, is an “artful send up” of the outlaw ballads on John Wesley Harding (Gould 2007, 518). Lennon’s “Yer Blues” at once participates in and parodies the contemporary trend of white artists playing electric blues. McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “Honey Pie” are part of what Lennon scorned as Paul’s “fucking Cole Porter routine” (qtd in Whitley 2000, 112), derived from his affection for the early jazz and music hall songs he had learned from his father. Not that Lennon was exempt from this play with the past: what is “Good Night” but a ripe imitation of an “easy listening” lullaby?

Introduction  9

Further, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” takes off the Beach Boys imitating Chuck Berry, “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” spoofs ska, and the concluding section of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” satirizes 1950s doo-­wop. Thus, Roessner argues, far from being an escape from history, the White Album’s heavily intertextual postmodernism was an “acknowledgment of the past” (2006, 156).

The Fight Album The Beatles arrived at EMI studios with a wealth of material. Engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles on several records, recalls that the once lighthearted, affable lads now seemed “solemn and prickly” (Emerick and Massey 2006, 224). “In later years,” he continues, “Paul would refer to it as ‘the Tension Album’ and I couldn’t agree more”: the atmosphere was “poisonous” (225). Instead of asking, “what are we going to do,” the band members asked, “what have you got?” (240). The other Beatles mostly served as sidemen playing on each composer’s song. And sometimes there were no sidemen: no Beatle other than McCartney plays on “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Blackbird,” whereas “Julia” is all Lennon; only McCartney and Starr are heard on “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” and not one Beatle plays on “Revolution 9.” Sometimes the musicians worked on different tracks simultaneously. Meanwhile, according to Emerick, Martin was no longer acting as a real producer, and McCartney, who had called most of the shots on Sgt. Pepper, had lost clout. In short, “no one was in charge” (Emerick and Massey 2006, 250). The Beatles had forgotten Lennon’s caution that “life is very short and there’s no time / For fussing and fighting, my friend.” They couldn’t work it out. Other factors contributed to the tension, but the most disruptive influence was Ono, whose ubiquity in the studio amounted to a “declaration of war” (Spitz 2005, 777). It wasn’t just that she was there; it was that she was here, there, and everywhere Lennon was (even the lavatory: Gould 2007, 480)—­and where he wasn’t. McCartney remembers her ordering the staff to fetch Lennon’s tea “like we were her courtiers” (Beatles 2000, 310). She even had the temerity to offer opinions about the music. In mid-­June McCartney faced off with his musical partner, accusing him of being “reckless, childish, of sabotaging the group” (Spitz 2005, 778). But if Ono was a lightning rod for the storm of animosity that reigned during the sessions, she merely “brought to the surface resentments that been brewing” for some time (Spitz 2005, 778): Lennon’s

10  the beatles through a glass onion

impatience with McCartney’s crowd-­pleasing attitude and lightweight songs, Harrison’s disenchantment with all things Beatle, Starr’s fears of irrelevance, and the others’ exhaustion with Lennon’s volatility and out-­ of-­control drug use. These tensions radiated out to the technicians as well; Martin exacerbated them by bringing in a very young Chris Thomas to assist Emerick, against the latter’s wishes. Yet they all worked hard.6 For example, the initial version of “Revolution 1,” the first track recorded, required eighteen takes. Possibly aware of Starr’s worries, they then turned to his first composition, “Don’t Pass Me By.” Another early piece was “Revolution 9,” which McCartney hated and about which he argued heatedly with Lennon (Emerick and Massey 2006, 244). The sessions for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” injected some enthusiasm into the proceedings, with all four Beatles playing on the track; all four contributed to “Good Night,” as well, with McCartney and Harrison coaching Starr on the vocals. But the good vibes were short lived. In July, the entire team became enervated by the seemingly endless hours spent on McCartney’s “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da.” A few nights after they thought they had finished the track, McCartney wanted to start over. Lennon stormed out, only to return a few hours later, announce that he was “fucking stoned,” and launch into the tune’s pounding piano intro at a faster tempo than they had been playing it. Ironically, this is the take they used (MacDonald 2007, 294; Miles 1997, 492). Matters soon came to a head. While recording the “Revolution” single Lennon criticized Emerick for his inability to get the distorted guitar sound he wanted; the offended engineer seethed all weekend. The following Monday, July 15, McCartney insisted on redoing the vocals to “Ob-­La-­Di” yet again. When Martin offered an anodyne suggestion, McCartney bridled and barked at him; Martin shouted back—­a shocking outburst by a man who carefully cultivated a gentlemanly persona. That was enough for Emerick: the next day he quit. It wasn’t only the arguments that drove him away. The studios at Abbey Road offered no place to relax, and the band couldn’t even go to the canteen for fear of being mobbed. It was, Emerick recalls, “like working in a prison” (257). The Beatles thought so too, as indicated by the songs’ pervasive images of enclosure and frustrated escape. Emerick wasn’t the only one to seek fresh air. By mid-­August Harrison, fed up with the band’s failure to master his song “Not Guilty,” departed for Greece. A few days later, Starr followed suit, albeit for different reasons. He recalls, “I felt I was playing like shit. And those three were re-

Introduction  11

ally getting on. I had this feeling that nobody loved me” (qtd. in Inglis 2009, 119). When Ringo talked to the others, however, he learned that each one believed he himself to be the outsider! Everybody, it seemed, had something to hide. In his absence, the Beatles recorded Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” (written to entice Prudence Farrow out of her meditative trance at Rishikesh) and McCartney’s “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” with Paul filling in on drums. Missing their musical anchor, the other members floated a telegram to Starr saying, “We think you’re the best rock ’n’ roll drummer in the world. Come on home, we love you,” and festooned the studio with flowers upon his return (Beatles 2000, 312). Then they rerecorded “Helter Skelter,” which McCartney had written to challenge The Who.7 At the end of the eighteenth take, Starr threw his sticks and screamed his famous complaint: “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” Ringo’s physical trauma embodies the group’s emotional condition: the White Album was the fight album. Increasingly uncomfortable with the animus pervading the studio and frustrated with the band’s unwillingness to take his advice, in September Martin went on a monthlong vacation, leaving the youthful Thomas in charge. Martin returned in October to assist the band through the final sessions. In chapter 4 in this volume, Kenneth Womack further discusses Thomas’s production work and his tense relationship with Emerick and argues that Martin returned just in time to transform near-­calamity into triumph by, for example, adding the strings to “Glass Onion,” playing the tack piano on “Rocky Raccoon,” and scoring the horn parts for “Mother Nature’s Son.” Womack also traces how Martin’s production strategies on the White Album evolved through his changing relationship with the band, which had begun in 1962. Given the desertions and dissension, it is no wonder that the album seems messy and undisciplined. It coheres, however, in part through the Beatles’ shared intention to scrub away production excesses and experiment with new musical techniques. Yet there was another influence that fostered unity: psychedelia. In chapter 5 in this collection, Russell Reising takes his cue from “Glass Onion” to propose that The Beatles engenders an alternate world where “where everything flows.” And flow it does through a broad range of musical styles, lyrical evocations, and emotional extremes, exhibiting an embrace of contradictions that Reising identifies as the fruit of mystical and psychedelic experiences. The Beatles’ use of hallucinogens, he argues, enabled them to comprehend and convey a new recognition of universal interconnectedness and the flexibility of time, manifested in songs such as “Mother Nature’s

12  the beatles through a glass onion

Son” and “Long Long Long.” Reising thus demonstrates the Beatles’ recognition that they and their music were part of everything.

Better I was the first person in my hometown to own a copy of The Beatles. I recall the buzz of anticipation I felt when first beholding the all-­white cover, peeling off the shrink-­wrap and putting the needle down. But as I scanned the track listing, my mouth gaped in disappointment: where was “Hey Jude?” I owned the single; it was already my favorite Beatles song. I was not alone in loving it: the single stayed at number one for nine weeks in the United States, and sold three million copies in two months. It emerged in the middle of the White Album sessions when McCartney, driving to visit the Lennons, was inspired to console Lennon’s son, Julian, who was caught in the undertow of his parents’ separation. The other Beatles immediately recognized it as a masterpiece and, aside from a brief argument between McCartney and Harrison (see Everett 1999, 194), the sessions for the song constituted an interlude of concord amid the contretemps. It is as if the entire band took to heart the song’s advice to “make it better.” But the balm was brief: the contentious sessions for “Not Guilty” soon followed. The sessions continued until the final track, “Julia,” was wrapped up on October 13.

Songs for Everyone The White Album offers not only an amazing array of styles and subjects; it also presents a village worth of characters. In chapter 6 in this collection, Ian Inglis supplies a census of the album’s populace. Counting twenty-­four different persons named, both real (e.g., McCartney and Dylan) and fictional (Rocky Raccoon), he argues that this move toward fictionalization marks a new trend, especially for Lennon, who had largely adhered to a confessional aesthetic. The new pattern, Inglis proposes, accompanied by an increase in the songwriters’ vocabulary, specificity, and narrative content, shows that Lennon and McCartney “approached the adoption and application of names with the same care, deliberation, and precision” that they did with their other songwriting procedures. Inglis’s witty analysis suggests that the Beatles attempted, as McCartney croons in “Mother Nature’s Son,” to write “songs for everyone.” Their aim to strip away studio embellishments, moreover, was not stringent. As Anthony D. Villa reminds us in chapter 7, the White

Introduction  13

Album’s tabula rasa received numerous chunks of chalk. Thus, although the album includes “Yer Blues,” recorded in a closet-­sized room with very little track separation, it also contains the syrupy strings of “Good Night” and the six barking saxophones of “Savoy Truffle.” Villa demonstrates how the band embraced new “timbral effects and recording techniques in ways both subtle and obvious” on The Beatles, using them not as ends in themselves (as some critics accused them of doing on Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour) but for specific musical and expressive purposes. Dividing his set of six songs into the “small” and the “big,” Villa reveals that, just as whiteness results from all colors of light coming together, so the composition of the White Album required a full palette of arranging and recording hues.

Knock The remaining essays in Part II analyze each Beatle’s work individually. Steve Hamelman’s chapter 8 meticulously dissects Ringo Starr’s performances on the album by taking seriously his negative self-­evaluation. While acknowledging inconsistencies in Starr’s work, Hamelman challenges the drummer’s assessment and notes that his fine work on “Yer Blues” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” occurred before his hiatus. After returning, Starr set a stable foundation for the metrically challenging “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and contributed tasty brushwork on “Honey Pie.” But perhaps the album’s worst innovation, Hamelman argues, was the decision to dampen Starr’s drums with towels, which both deadened the sound and inhibited stick bounce, an essential tool in a drummer’s kit. Hence, Hamelman writes, the drumming on The Beatles often lacks “dynamics, movement, bite, and kick.” He concludes that Ringo’s drumming encodes the “stress-­fractures that had begun to tear the band apart, the band’s constant search for innovative sounds and recording techniques,” while still exemplifying their musical genius. Starr also made his composing debut on the White Album with “Don’t Pass Me By,” whose title sends an unsubtle message to his fellow Beatles. I’ll pass it by for now but return to it later, leaving readers in the same position as the song’s narrator—­waiting.

Search George Harrison’s four songs epitomize the album’s eclectic moods and styles. Like Starr and like the narrator of his gorgeous ballad “Long Long

14  the beatles through a glass onion

Long,” he had been waiting for years to be recognized as a significant contributor. Revolver had featured his excellent “Taxman,” “I Want to Tell You,” and “Love You To,” but since then his output had been inconsistent, with the thought-­provoking “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper counterbalanced by the droning “Blue Jay Way” (which ended up on Magical Mystery Tour) and the dull “Only a Northern Song,” cut from Sgt. Pepper and consigned to the leftovers on Yellow Submarine. But although three songs from the Kinfauns demos—­“Not Guilty,” “Sour Milk Sea,” and “Circles”—­did not make it onto the White Album, those that did signaled his arrival as a major songwriter. Indeed, in chapter 9 herein John Covach proposes that the White Album signifies Harrison’s “second emergence,” the moment when he forged the singer-­songwriter style that would typify his post-­Beatles work. This emergence, Covach suggests, brought his work nearly to the level of his more celebrated bandmates’. However, the early sessions on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” seemed typical of the group’s habitual treatment of Harrison’s songs: nobody seemed enthusiastic. Irritated, Harrison enlisted an initially reluctant Eric Clapton, whose wailing solo and embellishments engender an aural portrait of a weeping guitar that stands among the album’s musical highlights. His presence, moreover, temporarily “made everybody cool out” (Beatles 2000, 306). Clapton’s contributions, the thrumming rhythm track (where Starr’s stop-­time pattern helps to avert monotony), and Thomas’s flanging compensate for the lyrics’ weakness: the music speaks, just as it weeps, more eloquently than words do. Like “Revolution,” “Piggies” is social satire—­albeit one so heavy-­ handed that the deranged Charles Manson interpreted it as an invitation to mass murder (MacDonald 2007, 317). As Covach points out, the lyrics were likely influenced by Orwell’s Animal Farm and borrow the counterculture’s use of the word “pigs” to refer to police officers and the bourgeoisie. If the song’s acidic edge is exaggerated to near-­comic extremes by Harrison’s pinched-­nose vocals, its satire is enhanced by the ingenious use of a harpsichord (played by Thomas) and other faux-­baroque textures (see Everett 1999, 199). As in Sgt. Pepper’s “She’s Leaving Home,” classical instruments and rhythms capture the staidness of the old guard, an elite so committed to conspicuous consumption that they devour their own kind. Still, the song is too ham-­handed and its targets too generic to be very effective. The ballad “Long Long Long” by contrast, is delicate, its emotional impact amplified by its restraint. Although harmonically and melodi-

Introduction  15

cally similar to Dylan’s “Sad-­Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (see Everett 1999, 204–­5), it is utterly original in the way it blends Harrison’s Indian-­ influenced philosophy with Western instruments, as Covach notes. Its addressee is not a human lover but God, for whom the speaker has waited a long, long, long time, a torturous period embodied in the structure, where each verse in 6/8 ends with a 9/8 bar (Everett 1999, 206), forcing the listener to wait for the end of the cadence just as the singer has awaited God’s appearance. Waiting, as I show in more detail below, is the most pervasive condition on the White Album, and in this regard “Long Long Long” is prototypical. The song’s compelling dynamics culminate in another of those aleatory moments that the Beatles so brilliantly exploited, as Villa points out, when a bottle of Blue Nun,8 left on top of a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet, started to rattle sympathetically near the song’s conclusion. This effect captures the singer’s yearning, which may give way to the explosive satisfaction of communion with the divine. “Savoy Truffle,” though its lyrics are little more than a rundown of a chocolate box’s contents, transcends the trite with a smart arrangement featuring six sinewy saxes. Harrison’s sly vocals simultaneously chide us for our devotion to sweets and relish the flavors that chewing them produces. All in all, Harrison’s years of searching and study pay off to yield four songs as diverse—­acid rock, quasi-­baroque satire, aching ballad, horn-­ band riffing—­as the treats in that box.

Oh, Yeah John Lennon sings those words on the bridge of “Glass Onion,” his sneering tone prompting some critics to hear in it disdain for his listeners (Riley 1988, 266). But to my ears the song conveys not contempt but playful challenge. Indeed, it follows up on Lennon’s entreaty in “Dear Prudence,” which immediately precedes it, to “come out to play.” James Joyce famously remarked about his novel Ulysses that he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries” (qtd. in Ellmann 1982, 521). Lennon, the author of Joycean works such as In His Own Write, similarly commented, “Let’s stick that in there . . . that’ll start them puzzling” (qtd. in Roessner 2006, 153). He was probably referring to the line “the walrus was Paul,” which he later admitted was an apology to McCartney that recognized his efforts to keep the band going.9 Although Lennon professed irritation with those who overread the Beatles’ lyrics, he was conflicted about the issue; as Gould shrewdly notes, Lennon’s bluster revealed “the depth of his insecurity

16  the beatles through a glass onion

at the fact that the Beatles’ music was now being taken so seriously and scrutinized so closely” (2007, 499): he wished to present himself both as a no-­nonsense, working-­class hero and as a wise, witty wordsmith. Whatever his motives were, “Glass Onion” exemplifies his growth as a songwriter. A brief comparison with an early Lennon song reveals his development. The words “Oh, yeah” are also heard in 1963’s “I’ll Get You.”10 Distinguished musically only by the somewhat innovative use of an Am7 in the prechorus, it is otherwise very simple, with verses that move back and forth between two chords, D and A. The four “Oh, yeahs” that begin and end the song descend from F♯ to D and C♯ to A: major thirds outlining the chord progression. Following the threat, “I’ll get you in the end,” these major harmonies undermine, rather than underscore, the lyrics’ hint of menace. In “Glass Onion,” however, “Oh, yeah” is sung only during the bridge, where the words accent the singer’s challenge to the audience. The first “Oh, yeah” drops from E♭ to A—­the interval of a flatted fifth—­so that the E♭ functions as a “blue note” emphasizing the lyrics’ ambiguous invitation: while urging us to pay attention, it implies that our scrutiny will reveal nothing. On the second and third “Oh, yeahs” the top note is raised to an E natural, and on the third instance Lennon holds the E for two full measures, his voice rasping to a near scream—­ or laugh. That laugh is echoed in the coda, where the Martin-­arranged strings play descending and ascending diminished seventh chords that sound like nothing so much as a “nyah, nyah, nyah.” Whereas in “I’ll Get You” “Oh, yeah” is a filler phrase that softens its minatory sentiments, in “Glass Onion” the words mark a musical exclamation point that punctuates and propels the song’s provocative effect. Indeed, “Glass Onion” is one of the most important songs on the White Album, for it both registers Lennon’s annoyed recognition that the Beatles were objects of incessant surveillance and speculation and furthers the motif of vision initiated in “Dear Prudence.” A glass onion is a monocle, but it is also an image of mirrors within mirrors—­a visual representation of self-­reflexivity.11 Hence, the song alludes to six other Beatles songs, five of them recent: “There’s a Place” (1964), “Strawberry Fields Forever,” (1966/67), “Fixing a Hole,” “I Am the Walrus,” “The Fool on the Hill” (all 1967), and 1968’s “Lady Madonna.” Some of these songs are themselves allusive: “Lady Madonna” repeats the line “see how they run” from “I Am the Walrus” (borrowed from “Three Blind Mice”), which itself refers to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (MacDonald 2007, 314), as if Lucy’s trip transformed her into a walrus, then a beleaguered mother. The layers multiply, as though we’re staring into multiple re-

Introduction  17

flective surfaces. Sometimes the song’s arrangement underlines the allusions, as when a recorder answers the nod to the fool on the hill, or when Pepper-­like strings reinforce the reference to “Fixing a Hole.” Visions proliferate too: for example, “The Fool on the Hill” refers to the fool’s eyes “spinning round,” as if he too were looking through a glass onion. In fact, four of the five recent songs cited emphasize vision, which may provide an accurate picture (“see how they run”), produce hallucinations, as in “Lucy in the Sky” (which begins with “Picture yourself . . .”) or be blocked, as in “Strawberry Fields,” where the singer lives “with eyes closed,” misunderstanding all he sees. In “Glass Onion” Lennon pictures himself asking his listeners to picture themselves—­with eyes wide open. Rather than “berating” the audience, as MacDonald tsks (2007, 314), the song tasks us to become self-­aware. After all, we’re already eyeing the Beatles—­but so are the Beatles, who gaze back at their fans from the other side of the glass while at the same time regarding themselves as they are reflected and refracted in their audience’s gaze: here “everything flows.” The song is thus a multilevel puzzle, a self-­reflexive work about self-­reflexivity, a sketch of how Beatles fans project their wishes and fantasies upon the group who, in turn, become that projected image. Being Beatles, Lennon suggests, is a performance by four guys in costumes; now they are peering through the “bent-­backed tulips / To see how the other half”—­that is, their own fans—­live.12 He’s looking through us. We thought we knew him: what did we know? As Whitley (2000, 118) and Everett (1999, 181) observe, the song implies that peeling back layers will never get us closer to the truth. Why not? Because we’re using the wrong sense. Instead of looking, Lennon implores us, “listen to me.” The best way to know the Beatles, in other words, is to play their records. As the third song on a thirty-­track album, “Glass Onion” establishes the criteria for appreciating what follows. As if to prove that fans may know him by listening to him, in “Julia” Lennon movingly addresses the mother who abandoned him, then returned, only to be killed in an accident. Replacing her is the “ocean child”—­a translation of his new love’s first name, “Yoko.” Even if half of what he says is meaningless, Yoko will understand.13 As Villa (chapter 7) and Everett (1999, 172) point out, the song splits Lennon in two by double-­tracking his vocals and overlapping them—­suggesting that one part of him is still in thrall to his mother, while the other says “Oh, yeah” to Ono. McCartney later noted that his partner’s hostility hid a tender side; that side emerges here and in “Good Night,” which closes the album (Miles 1997, 487) and which, despite its parodic elements, works

18  the beatles through a glass onion

beautifully as a sleepy-­time song, as I can attest after using it as such for many years with my own son. Similarly, “Cry Baby Cry” recalls the Lewis Carroll books that influenced Lennon and, like “Good Night,” reminds us that he was then the father of a little child. Even Lennon’s pastiches, such as “Yer Blues,” contain lines of shocking self-­exposure. Putting that song’s threat of suicide together with the jaundiced lyrics of “I’m So Tired” reveals a singer so depressed that he believes he is going insane. Given the upheavals in Lennon’s personal life, there is little reason to doubt the lyrics’ sincerity. “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide,” one of the band’s most sophisticated rockers ever, seems joyous and carefree. Yet lines such as “Your inside is out and your outside is in” continue the promise of “Glass Onion” by suggesting that we have passed through a Carrollian mirror.14 And what is “Revolution 9” but an aural glass onion? A sound collage created by editing tape loops together, it entices us to forge meaning out of juxtaposition. The mostly negative critical reception of this track bears out Lennon’s thesis in “Glass Onion” that listeners find what they want to find in Beatles’ music. Pasted together from fragments drawn from a dizzying array of sources, “Revolution 9” is, almost literally, a part of everything.15

Bang Stephen Valdez, in chapter 10 herein, painstakingly analyzes the musical aspects of Lennon’s White Album songs, arguing that his compositions make outstanding use of variation in their approaches to form, harmony, and time and display “a creative mind cleverly pushing its musical limits within the construct of a return to his musical roots.” No song better exemplifies this experimental impulse than “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” which Valdez discusses in detail. He’s not alone in singling it out for attention and praise. Not only were all four Beatles enthusiastic about this striking song; it has inspired numerous cover versions and remakes, as Alyssa Wood and Lori Burns show in chapter 11. With its enigmatic lyrics, unorthodox four-­part structure (which lacks both a chorus and a conventional verse),16 disorienting metrical shifts, brilliant parody of doo-­wop, and Lennon’s chameleonic vocal performance, “Happiness” crystallizes the White Album’s formal variety and manifold strengths. The story of the song’s conception is well known and recounted in chapters 10 and 12. But Lennon was then unable to move beyond the “I need a fix” and “Mother Superior” fragments. Free association during an acid trip with Shotton, Derek Taylor, and Neil Aspinall yielded the

Introduction  19

striking images that follow. The “velvet hand” refers to moleskin gloves, and the man with mirrors (glass onions?) on his boots was plucked from a newspaper article about a soccer fan who used shoe-­mirrors to peer up women’s dresses (Turner 2005, 157). This man’s lying eyes again remind us of the unreliability of vision described in “Glass Onion.” The warm gun, like the trigger mentioned in the final section, suggests that gun fetishists channel their genital fascinations and frustrations into weapons of another sort.17 As McKinney ingeniously notes, the song is “about holes—­hypodermic, vaginal, bullet” (2003, 229). The tone shifts dramatically from the low-­ key beginning to the amped-­up lines describing what the “girl” is well acquainted with, then changes again in the segments about the fix (as if the gun has become a needle) and the nun (who, presumably, does not have sex), before finally settling into the “bang, bang, shoot, shoot” section, where the Beatles, tongues planted in cheeks, parrot the singing groups of the 1950s.18 The meter undergoes similar metamorphoses: Everett, for example, finds six different meters in the first twenty-­one measures, and in a later segment Starr plays in 4/4 while the rest of the band is in 12/8 (1999, 184). Other scholars, including the contributors herein, parse the meter differently (compare Valdez’s analysis to Woods and Burns’s), but all agree that the song’s shifting time signatures produce an unsettling experience for listeners who, already mystified by the lyrics, are now perplexed on two levels at once. Like “Glass Onion,” “Happiness” is a puzzle and a provocation, and even when it finally settles into a welcome C major, it denies us true relief, for Lennon’s goose-­bump-­inducing, falsetto high C on “gun” reminds us that this is a love song to a lethal weapon. Although the band needed seventy takes to lay down the song’s basic tracks (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 471), their effort was worth it, for it packs “a wealth of imaginative variety and  .  .  . power” into its brief running time (Everett 1999, 184). Further, in presenting a capsule history of pop/rock music—­jazz becomes hard rock becomes doo-­wop—­it is a synecdoche of the entire album: a patchwork that somehow coheres, incorporating juxtapositions that shouldn’t work, but do. The song also brings together several of the album’s themes: the unreliability of vision, the pretenses of the rich and powerful, the problematic connection between sex and violence, the enclosures we build for ourselves—­whether they be walls, windows, or rules of romance—­and the urgency of escaping from them. How better to convey the need for change than by jolting listeners with metrical, lyrical, and structural shocks? All in all, it is difficult not to agree with Everett that the White Album

20  the beatles through a glass onion

represents John Lennon’s Beatles apotheosis (1999, 185). A parlor game among Beatles fans is to concoct a one-­disc White Album containing only its best songs; in my version, most of them would be Lennon compositions (see the table in John Covach’s afterword for a White Album containing only Lennon songs). Despite the difficult circumstances of their creation—­or perhaps because of them—­Lennon’s contributions embody his brilliantly mercurial personality and expose the many colors of the man who called himself Dr. Winston O’Boogie.

Wings If Lennon implores us to listen, McCartney urges us to fly, despite our broken wings. That, at least, is his charge in “Blackbird.” The speaker of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” however, has already landed, and that song establishes a pattern of departure and return or aborted flight that typifies McCartney’s songs on the album. For example, when Rocky Raccoon’s vendetta against Dan fails, he repairs to his room, flat on his back, with no wings to lift him. The addressee of “Helter Skelter” follows a looping trajectory—­down the slide, then back up, again and again—­but never gets launched. Likewise, the speaker of “Honey Pie” hopes his lover will come back to him and wishes that the wind will fill her sails, but his longing is likely in vain. An inveterate storyteller, McCartney is responsible for many of the personages that Inglis lists. As so often with McCartney, however, it is difficult to determine where pastiche ends and personal signature begins. For example, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” inspired by watching monkeys copulate in India (Miles 1997, 499), seems like a throwaway, but McCartney’s vocal gymnastics signal an intense emotional investment. It beseeches the listener to throw off social conventions—­a theme that runs through much of the Beatles’ music—­and displays McCartney both participating in and parodying the back-­to-­the-­basics approach described above. In contrast, nothing in the lighthearted “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­ La-­Da” points to any personal stake (as Harrison slyly notes in “Savoy Truffle”: “we all know ob-­la-­di, bla-­dah / But can you show me where you are?”). Likewise, “Martha My Dear,” though undeniably charming and structurally innovative,19 seems to be about nobody at all: the addressee, at first a sheepdog, morphs into a human lover who becomes an alter ego of Prudence when she is told to “take a good look around.” What she will see remains indeterminate.20 Similarly, “I Will,” as Villa notes in chapter 7, addresses a faceless lover in rather clichéd terms, its steril-

Introduction  21

ity more starkly silhouetted by its placement next to Lennon’s powerful “Julia.” In that context, “I Will” won’t do. “Honey Pie,” McCartney’s “obligatory vaudeville number” (Everett 1999, 189), boasts a clever arrangement that impeccably captures the period. But unlike the similar “When I’m Sixty-­Four,” which uses parody to pay homage to McCartney’s father and shed light on the dark side of aging, “Honey Pie” lacks layers. Paul glows most powerfully in “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son.” Both express the appreciation for the natural world that bloomed from his sojourn at Rishikesh and his purchase of a farm in Scotland.21 The persona in “Mother Nature’s Son” is not McCartney, however, who was not “born a poor, young country boy” (is anyone born old?). But if the song’s waters and daisies seem sketched in, its internal rhymes—­ “long” and “song,” “daisy” and “lazy”—­display a developing ear for lyrics. What most elevates it are Martin’s judicious brass arrangement and McCartney’s insouciant vocal. The song is as pleasant as a holiday in the country. “Blackbird,” however, is more than pleasant: it is not only McCartney’s best contribution to the White Album, but one of his best songs ever. Written at his farm, it took wing via an attempt to master a Bach bourrée, as Kimsey, Everett, and Vincent Benitez detail in their chapters here.22 Though addressed to the title avian, it is a song for everyone, as if the singer were encouraging the entire flock to overcome its fears and soar. Indeed, its sentiments resonate with those of “Hey Jude,” written soon after, and both songs testify to McCartney’s stated aim to create music that empowers listeners (Miles 1997, 486). No enigmatic “Glass Onion” here: his intentions are as clear as a mountain stream. Or are they? It has become de rigueur to read the blackbird as a metaphor for African Americans who, by mid-­1968, had witnessed their greatest leaders murdered and their recent civil rights gains threatened. McCartney has stated in recent concert intros that he meant to address a black woman, but this may be an instance of retrospective embellishment.23 In any case, the blackbird does not fly—­in the song, at least. Again we find a major character poised, awaiting a significant event. Vincent Benitez takes up the question of race in “Blackbird” and much more in his illuminating chapter 11, which analyzes McCartney’s compositions on the White Album musically, lyrically, and intertextually. If McCartney’s eyes often seem fixed on the past, Benitez persuasively shows that this backward glance is also a gaze into a crystal ball. On the White Album, McCartney anticipates not only budding musical genres—­heavy metal on “Helter Skelter,” the singer-­songwriter form in his ballads—­but his own post-­Beatles work. Benitez examines how

22  the beatles through a glass onion

McCartney revisits the Beach Boys parody and blues-­based rock of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” on post-­Beatles albums, explores how the music hall tradition exemplified by “Honey Pie” reappears later, and anatomizes the kin of “Blackbird” in his later songs “Calico Skies” and “Jenny Wren.” McCartney’s vintage songwriting clothes, Benitez concludes, were not merely a costume but essential threads in his aesthetic sensibility. Still, McCartney’s White Album output, though equaling Lennon’s in its variety and innovative boldness, does not match its impact. If Sgt. Pepper was largely a McCartney tour de force (notwithstanding Lennon masterpieces such as “Lucy” and the verses of “A Day in the Life”), the White Album belongs to Lennon, who later expressed a preference for it over Sgt. Pepper (Beatles 2000, 310). While The Beatles lacks the McCartneyesque gloss of discipline and perfection that permeates Sgt. Pepper (Roessner 2006, 148), it provides a truer picture of who the Beatles were and who they would become. Moreover, given the album’s widely varying moods, tempi, and styles, it fulfills the goal of singing songs for everyone.

A Doll’s House Helter Skelter My discussion so far has emphasized the album’s eclecticism. In this respect, one of its working titles, “A Doll’s House,” seems to fit this “attic of odds and ends” (MacDonald 2007, 328). But the album’s diversity has been a stumbling block to appreciation. George Martin, for example, opined that the songs “reeked of the argument and self-­indulgence that had gone into their making” (qtd. in Roessner 2006, 155). Those who champion the record have had difficulty articulating why they like it. McCartney himself could only state that it’s “cool” because “it’s got so much on it” (Beatles 2000, 310). Ed Whitley has made the most persuasive effort to present its disunity as a positive feature by demonstrating how it mobilizes postmodernist practices such as fragmentation, bricolage, pastiche, and self-­reflexivity and noting how even the paratexts—­ the white cover and collage poster inside the original LP—­“contribute to the sense of fragmentation” (2000, 115). The album, he concludes, is “irreducibly plural” (117). Is this quality a strength or a weakness? And is the album truly not unified? The programming, achieved in a marathon twenty-­four-­hour session by Lennon, McCartney, and Martin on October 16–­17, forged

Introduction  23

some cohesion (MacDonald 2007, 327). Yet their criteria were less aesthetic than political: one Harrison song on each side, no more than two consecutive songs by the same writer, and Starr sings one tune on each disc (Gould 2007, 512). Riley (1988, 260) notes that the programming often pairs musical extremities, as when “Revolution 1” is followed by “Honey Pie.” Such dialectical couplings generate a sense of narrative tension. Hence, for instance, the peppy “Martha My Dear” gives way to the somnolent “I’m So Tired,” and then to “Blackbird,” which implores us to rise from our sofas and soar. “Mother Nature’s Son” offers a remedy for “Yer Blues” (and mine), and “Monkey” shouts out the results of that liberation: “come on is such a joy!” Gould (2007, 512) also points out programming “jokes,” such as following “I Will” with “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” as if to insinuate that animal lust actually underlies the former song’s greeting card endearments. Three animal tunes are herded together on side 2, and the request “Don’t Pass Me By” is followed by an account of what happens if one doesn’t pass: doing it in the road. And there are companion pieces, such as side 1’s sisters Martha and Prudence (Gould 2007, 517). More broadly, as Reising notes in chapter 5, the album begins with a lament about jet lag, then describes a case of insomnia and ends with a lullaby. McKinney asserts that the album finds “its unity in radical fragmentation,” but this ingenious paradox does not get us far (2003, 225). More compelling is his view that the White Album “seeps chaos, breathes it and voices it” and finally seeks a “battered refuge” from it (225). That is, its helter-­skelter quality represents revolution pressed on vinyl. If so, the White Album is a portrait of its time. I don’t disagree, but I find a different brand of cohesion that both reflects the upheavals the Beatles experienced around the time of recording and reveals that, despite their differences, they shared numerous concerns and employed many of the same tropes and devices. The White Album’s diversity, that is, camouflages a set of consistent motifs and situations that surface under close analysis. MacDonald comments on the album’s “many associations of guarded privacy and locked rooms” (2007, 328), and McKinney remarks on its “relentless swing between confrontation and escape” (2003, 230). Both notes are rung repeatedly on the White Album, which also contains at least thirty-­five references to eyes and vision. Indeed, as “Glass Onion” suggests, we seem to be outside the Beatles’ house gazing in, waiting for a sign from them as they perform inside, meanwhile peering and smiling back at us. Beholding their own images as icons, sages, role models, businessmen, and seekers, they discover these roles mirrored in their

24  the beatles through a glass onion

fans. Although this motif pervades the album, the prison of celebrity is just one of its many forms of enclosure and confinement. Such tropes are followed sometimes by images of breaking free, but the liberation is almost always undercut or questioned. The songs also frequently remind us that we’re all playing a game and exhort us to enjoy it. Perhaps above all, the White Album is about waiting: forms of the verb “wait” occur eleven times in the lyrics, not counting states of waiting where the verb is not used. The prototypical situation on the album, in other words, is that of suspension on the brink of consummation. This motif both expresses the individual Beatles’ emotions at the time and encapsulates the counterculture’s expectations in 1968.

Play Side 1 introduces the tropes of games, vision, and confinement. It opens with a man rushing from the claustrophobic space of an airliner, looking forward to coming home. The music shouts, “I’m free”—­but ironically, for the singer has landed in a totalitarian state. The opening guitar pattern of “Dear Prudence” emerges quietly, as if from under the jet or from another room, gently luring an addressee too sensitive or fearful to open the door. In this regard, Prudence embodies the Beatles themselves, whose recognition of the carceral elements of fame was explored as early as the movie A Hard Day’s Night, with its repeated images of cages. The singer’s entreaties to Prudence become more urgent as the song proceeds, and when backing vocals and instruments join—­the bass is particularly insistent—­the encouragement to open up her eyes becomes communal; during the bridge (“look around, round, round”), the entire ashram pleads with Prudence. What do they say? Come out to play! In fact, that is the Beatles’ charge throughout the album: since this is a game—­a puzzle, a joke, a holiday, a parody, a contest, a playground —­why not join us? We don’t know if Prudence responds, however, so the song leaves us waiting. As I’ve suggested, “Glass Onion” lends an acidic edge to the enticements in “Prudence,” but its provocation is still an invitation. The speaker, waiting inside the onion, feels oppressed by constant scrutiny, but his demand that we listen to him may open an escape hatch. The pounding piano that opens the next song announces that we’ve arrived at a new place, with a happy couple and their kids. Unlike the singers in “Prudence,” Molly Jones does not wait in vain: she gets her golden ring. But the biggest payoff is not jewelry but a home—­a secure abode away

Introduction  25

from prying intruders, the same kind that the Beatles sought at the time. Yet the simultaneously joyful and mocking la-­la-­las in the chorus intimate that this is all a joke. “Ob-­La-­Di,” then, is McCartney’s reply to “Glass Onion”: at the Joneses’ house, everything flows, bra. “Bungalow Bill” is a joke, too, albeit a nasty one in which the chorus outside Bill’s bungalow scolds him for slaughtering animals. Eyes again figure prominently, both as a target and as a metaphorical weapon (“if looks could kill”). Trophy hunting, it suggests, lets gun users scapegoat others, whether humans or animals, for their own flaws. As his name suggests, Bill (inspired by a Rishikesh attendee who took breaks from merging with the universe to kill animals) dwells in a domicile of fear and thus foreshadows the twisted sisters and brothers in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Both songs expose the warped sexual desires that motivate violence. The narrator of “While My Guitar” also uses eyes to diagnose the world’s problems (“I look, . . . I see”), but like most of the album’s narrators, Harrison’s singer is suspended between states, hoping his guitar will express his dismay at our inability to “unfold” our love. Instead we are, as in “Happiness” and “Bill,” “diverted” and “perverted.” “Happiness” lists various forms of entrapment as it moves from sexual deviance to the confinement of addiction and then to the bliss of a fired gun. But this consummation is a chimera, as the Beatles’ mocking “bang bang shoot shoots” insinuate: violence, like voyeurism, is not an escape but a snare, a glass onion that only looks like a door.

Wait Side 2’s dominant mood is more clearly that of waiting and suspension. “Martha My Dear” echoes “Prudence” in asking its addressee to look around. Coming on the heels of this bouncy tune, “I’m So Tired” sounds unbearably languid. This speaker’s confinement has become paralyzing: he hasn’t slept but cannot move. He pleads and waits (probably fruitlessly) for a liberation that would involve “peace,” not violence. Likewise, the addressee of “Blackbird” is waiting for her “moment to arise”—­a lovely phrase that can be read two ways (is it the moment or the bird that will arise?). But first her “sunken eyes” must learn to see. Whereas she may break free someday, the “Piggies” don’t even know they’re caged in a sty. These hapless consumers give way to the seemingly innocuous yarn about Rocky Raccoon. But there’s more to Rocky than first meets the eye, for within McCartney’s countrified shaggy-­dog story lies another critique of gun violence and aggressive vision (Dan hits Rocky “in the

26  the beatles through a glass onion

eye”). In vying with Dan over Nancy, Rocky falls victim to the same perversion as Bungalow Bill and the characters in “Happiness.” Thus at the song’s end he lies wounded and waiting in his room, his revival very much in doubt. Neither he nor the singer in “Don’t Pass Me By” escapes his prison. Indeed, Starr’s song sounds like nothing so much as “Rocky Raccoon Part Two,” as if he were recounting his plight to Nancy/Lil. In a house alone, listening to the ticking of a clock, Rocky II awaits the lover’s knock that will never come. The next song, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” announces an imminent breakout, celebrating the sexual congress that the last two narrators failed to achieve. But this singer remains aware of prying eyes: “no one will be watching us,” he assures his would-­ be partner. The narrator of “I Will” is, like both Rockies, waiting, albeit chastely. “Julia” affirms this state of limbo, as the singer wavers between mother-­longing and a new amour. Like “While My Guitar,” this song laments an inability to say what the singer wants to say, but Lennon’s narrator is even less certain that he can convey his emotions (“sing my heart”) musically. This first disc thus begins with an ending, then takes us on a journey. We deplane only to encounter a series of enclosures—­a room holding a frightened girl, mirrors trapping us within mirrors, a bungalow stocked with weapons—­and then witness or wait for a series of threats or violent acts. By placing the kinks of “Bungalow” and “Happiness” alongside “Why Don’t We” and “Julia,” the Beatles also imply that violent perversions derive from childhood traumas.

Come On Side 3 expands and contracts, as moments of freedom respond dialectically to intervals of confinement. Although this, the album’s most rocking side, contains four powerhouse songs, it too ends in suspension, or at best an ambiguous liberation. “Birthday,” the only song written in the studio, restates side 1’s invitation to come out to play. But when the party ends, it leaves, in “Yer Blues,” a sad sack chained like Prometheus while an eagle picks his eye (he won’t be gazing at anyone). Lennon’s ravaged voice channels his rage even better than the raucous guitars and drums, and the track’s “mistake”—­singing into a dead microphone—­brilliantly renders his frustrated muteness. As noted earlier, “Mother Nature’s Son” both prescribes the remedy for “Yer Blues” and fulfills the need expressed in “I’m So Tired,” as its open spaces and soothing streams supply peace of mind. A different feeling of liberation characterizes “Monkey,” which, though it seems to be about heroin, returns us to the

Introduction  27

playful mood of “Birthday,” as though the Beatles have just remembered that this trip is supposed to be fun. Indeed, the line “come on is such a joy!” blends the two balms so far proposed, first echoing the initial request to play but adding the caveat, “take it easy.” The song’s metrical displacements imply that to take it easy you have to syncopate, man. The pendulum swings back with “Sexy Sadie,” a bitter chant about “waiting for a lover” who never comes through. A con artist, Sadie dupes the gullible with false promises of bliss. The background vocals scold her and us with “see, see, see, see,” reminding us that vision is both misleading and menacing. Knowing that Lennon aimed this song at the Maharishi, we understand that it conveys his disappointment at being left waiting for “the answer.”24 “Helter Skelter” is ostensibly about a playground slide. What fun! But its freedom is illusory, for the sliders are caught in some Sisyphean punishment or purgatory. Their plight is rendered even more torturous by the out-­of-­tune guitars, bashing drums, and lack of harmonic movement. This singer is also waiting for “the answer.” Does he get it? No: he only gets blisters. “Helter Skelter,” like “Yer Blues,” documents the fraught conditions under which the album was created: as their popularity became a prison, the Beatles must have felt they were on an endless loop, and each one looked for a way out. Coming in that song’s cacophonous wake, “Long Long Long” is nearly inaudible, yet its pianissimo produces an electrical charge. This singer swears that he has “found” the love he has sought, but the many years of waiting have left a residue of tears and pain. He will remain suspended between fulfillment and longing, because to truly “be” the beloved would snuff out the very spark that ignites desire.

Hold On the heels of Harrison’s otherworldly incantation, we return to the realities of politics with “Revolution 1.” Lennon cautions us that “we’ll have to wait” for a genuine revolution if we have hateful minds, because, as we learned in “Happiness,” such minds perpetrate violence and pervert the desire for liberation. If “Honey Pie” is an indication, however, lovers also have to wait. “Won’t you please come home,” this singer begs, like, say, Cynthia Lennon: Honey Pie has escaped but her lover has not. Nor has the candy-­addicted person wolfing down treats in “Savoy Truffle.” The “blap, blap” snare hits during its breaks reiterate those in “Glass Onion,” and “Savoy Truffle” is similarly puzzling—­until we real-

28  the beatles through a glass onion

ize it is about toothaches. This pain, a physical parallel to the spiritual torment of “Long Long Long,” resembles the kind experienced by the singer of “Honey Pie,” also a slave to sweetness. Beneath its manifest content, though, “Savoy Truffle” poses a question that the Beatles had been asking themselves for years: what happens when you get everything you want? If you’re Harrison, you wish to be “pulled out” of the band. And if the chocolate box is indeed a metaphor for wealth and celebrity, Harrison is warning us that fame is a fake heaven. Thus this side begins with three depictions of false nirvanas: political, romantic, and consumerist, respectively. We seem to have escaped these traps into the whimsical, childlike world of “Cry Baby Cry,” but although the queen plays with the children, these royals are, like the Beatles themselves, confined. Perhaps the children have found a way out through the séance that, like this album, conjures voices of out nowhere. Not a blackbird but a lark, the séance is game that promises to “take [us] back,” like the fragment that leads into “Revolution 9.” Taking us back, after all, is what the Beatles have done throughout this journey through pop music styles. But the trip is not finished, and it culminates in the Beatles’ most expansive riposte to the disenchanted militants. You say you want a revolution, they seem to declare, well here it is.25 “Revolution 9,” the album’s most hideous progeny, is a Frankenstein’s monster animated by stitched-­ together fragments. Its aleatory aspects suggest a riddle or a jigsaw puzzle with mismatched parts: your inside is out, and your outside is in. The final fragments, in which a crowd shouts, “hold that line” and “block that kick,” remind us again that this whole experience has been a game, albeit one that has turned menacing. Is the slumber of “Good Night” the outcome of our quest for freedom? Perhaps, but dreams don’t build a revolution. Sleep is merely a holding pattern or a prelude to regeneration. But at least with all eyes closed, nobody is peering at anyone through a glass onion. Our ears still work, though, and what they hear is “good night, everybody, everybody everywhere.” In sleep we are all part of everything. It should be clear now that the White Album coheres through repeated motifs of seeing, playing, waiting, holding, and searching; it returns again and again to situations of enclosure and escape. It is a compendium of the many ways that humans fail to find happiness and communion. In that way, it is completely of its time—­an era of revolutions that did not come to pass. Moreover, the uneasiness that pervades the album, as well as its mistrust of vision and of those who offer solace, registers the

Introduction  29

Beatles’ responses to the tumultuous personal events of the past year. Each one sought a space at once safe and free, and increasingly found it alone or with one other person. And yet its credo that all of us are part of everything—­of nature, of the social world, of each other—­offers a prescription for unity and serenity.

Salt The all-­ white cover seems to portray this tranquility. Artist Richard Hamilton, who conceived and designed it, had in mind something “pure and reticent” (qtd. in Roessner 2006, 154). If the Beatles’ previous album was pepper, this one would be salt. Yet the cover seems to represent the antithesis not only of Sgt. Pepper’s colorful collage but of the album it contains, which is if anything too highly seasoned. After McCartney protested that the Beatles were “not quite a blank space, a white wall” (Miles 1997, 500), Hamilton, who also suggested titling it simply The Beatles, added the embossed title and “limited edition” numbers to the cover. If its whiteness seems to defeat interpretation, few listeners or viewers have been satisfied to let it be. Instead, like the Beatles themselves, the cover has become a “blank canvas onto which [audience members] can project their fantasies” (Roessner 2006, 153). Each listener shines a personal, prismatic light upon it, separating out elements and examining the colors that emerge. In this regard, the white sleeve is brilliantly appropriate. Of course, the sleeve wasn’t the whole package: inside was a poster collage containing a scrapbook’s worth of candid photos of the Beatles and their community. The contrast between the cover and the poster captures the tension between the album’s postmodernist traits and the modernist desire, retained from Sgt. Pepper, to present a unified work. It is all one thing—­yet it is many different things. If the sleeve says, “Make of this whatever you will,” the collage says, “Here are examples of what others have made of us.” The white cover is a glass onion; the collage is helter-­skelter. Both elements show us that the Beatles are part of everything.

The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill However Big Wildly divergent responses met the album upon its release on November 22, 1968. Nik Cohn, in the New York Times, disparaged it as “boring,”

30  the beatles through a glass onion

deeming “at least half the songs” to be “profound mediocrities” (qtd. in Spitz 2005, 795). Ellen Sander of the Saturday Review likewise found the material “woefully inconsistent” and the overall feeling “sloppy and diffuse” (qtd. in Gould 2007, 528). Yet Richard Goldstein, who had infuriated Beatles fans with his pan of Sgt. Pepper, celebrated the White Album as a “major success,” noting that “even the flaws add to its flavor” (Spitz 2005, 795). The strongest endorsement came from Rolling Stone cofounder Jann Wenner, who lauded it as “deliberate, self-­conscious, pretentious, organized and structured, coherent and full”—­a “more perfect album” than Sgt. Pepper (qtd. in Gould 2007, 529).26 Beatles scholars have echoed these polarized views, as I suggested above. One reason for the initially mixed response was that the album’s seeming refusal of narrative coherence disappointed fans for whom the “Beatles’ own story . . . had reached a new peak of ‘intelligibility’” (Gould 2007, 510). In other words, its diversity defeated those seeking a new identity badge for the group and themselves. In their effort to be everything, the Beatles created a sense of clutter, hanging curtains before the eyes of those peering through the glass onion. For scholars, one barrier to appreciation has been the lingering need for modernist “concepts,” and few have taken the trouble to discern the motivic threads that do exist. Further, the fraught conditions of the album’s making have diverted us from examining its contents, as the White Album has become as much a symptom of the band’s dysfunction and an omen of its imminent breakup as a collection of songs. Many, that is, have failed to follow Lennon’s exhortation to listen. The critical response has scarcely mattered to fans: The Beatles immediately hit number one on the UK and US charts, spending eight weeks at the top spot in England and nine weeks there in the States (“1969 The Number One Albums” 2017). In the first five weeks after its release four million copies were sold in the United States alone (Gould 2007, 528). Over the decades, it has become their largest-­selling album: all told, it spent 155 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 200 albums chart (“Gold and Platinum” 2017; “Heritage” 2017). More than 19.5 million copies had been sold by mid-­2017. Ordinary music lovers clearly have complied with Lennon’s entreaty to listen.

Help Yourself And so have other musicians, for the White Album has enjoyed a long afterlife. For that reason, this collection concludes with two chapters and

Introduction  31

an afterword exploring and summarizing how other artists have covered, remade, and adapted the album’s songs. These artists, following the advice in “Martha My Dear,” have helped themselves to a bit of it. And I do mean bits: they have rearranged, reworked, and sampled not just songs but fragments of songs, using procedures in the spirit of the White Album itself. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” has been reheated numerous times, as Alyssa Woods and Lori Burns demonstrate in chapter 12. Like Benitez, they present the song’s material through an intertextual frame to divulge how different artists have appropriated it to serve their own aesthetic and political goals. Drawing also from the paratexts—­the covers and the artists’ commentary—­they discuss U2’s retooling of the song as a critique of gun violence, and show how Tori Amos, by placing it on her album Strange Little Girls, accents its condemnation of violence and uses it to attack misogyny in popular music and the media. Both versions, then, mobilize the song as a statement against violence and “diverted” sexuality. The Beatles’ bricolage, fragmentation, and pastiche have also cued later artists, particularly in the hip-­hop world, where sampling is a prime métier. In chapter 13, Adam Bradley discusses the recoloring of the white album by hip-­hop artists—­first Jay-­Z, on The Black Album, and then, more radically, by Danger Mouse, who on The Grey Album mashes-­up samples from The Beatles with snippets from Jay-­Z’s record. The White Album, Bradley reminds us, is now part of our collective archive, but that archive is not fixed. Both works celebrate the album’s sense of play, its ethos that any music can be reused or remodeled, and its demonstration that artistic creation involves appropriation. These later artists endorse The Beatles’ theme that an artwork should be part of everything.

Back to the Top While it is true that The Beatles, as Emerick comments, marked “the beginning of the end” for the Beatles (2006, 236), the band left a compelling, complex, multilayered work as a record of that moment. The album documents the erosion of faith, not so much in the possibility of revolution, but in the myth of the Beatles. As Lennon astutely remarked, “up until then we really believed intensely in what we were doing. . . . Suddenly we didn’t believe . . . and that was the end of it” (qtd. in Gould 2007, 530). However, as our contributors show, the album also signals the beginning of the band members’ post-­Beatles lives as musicians and human beings. The chapters here demonstrate why the White Album, despite its mis-

32  the beatles through a glass onion

fires and self-­indulgence, has achieved unparalleled success and enduring fascination as an artifact of the world’s greatest popular music group at their artistic peak. In his review of the album in Commonweal, Michael Wood praised it as a “survey of styles, like a chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses, . . . done with something of Joyce’s energy” (qtd. in Gould 2007, 529). I would go further: this epic work is rock music’s Ulysses, a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” (Joyce 1986, 345) of the music that influenced the Beatles, of their lives and loves, of the times in which they lived, and of their responses to fame. By looking through a glass onion at the White Album, our contributors reveal its multifarious colors. These essays prove that The Beatles both repays our attention more than fifty years after its release and promises to do so in decades to come. We hope that once you’ve finished this book, you’ll go back to the top and listen, with fresh ears, to this rich album again. Notes 1. Jonathan Gould estimates that “fully half” of the Lennon-­McCartney songs on the White Album are “musical parodies” (2007, 514). I take issue with the word “parody,” which implies an element of mockery. Nonetheless his count seems accurate: of the twenty-­five Lennon-­McCartney songs on the album, thirteen employ pastiche. That number does not include Harrison’s “Piggies,” with its faux-­classical arrangement, nor Starr’s cod-­country “Don’t Pass Me By.” I’ve argued elsewhere (Osteen 2017) that Sgt. Pepper displays a similar tension between its modernist mock-­band concept and its unifying motifs and themes, and its postmodernist pastiches and parodies. 2. These quotations are taken from Inglis 2006, 120. The original sources are Salewicz 1986, 202; Doney 1981, 89. 3. Jagger recalled that he wrote the lyrics after attending an antiwar rally at the US Embassy in London; he was also inspired by the May 1968 protests in France. The lyrics, however, suggest quietism, apologizing that a poor boy can do nothing more revolutionary than sing in a rock ’n’ roll band. It’s not exactly a call to arms. 4. For details about Yoko Ono’s background and earlier career, see Gould 2007, 473–­79, and Spitz 2005, 741–­48. 5. See Inglis 2009, 122, for a chart listing the major musical sources for the album’s songs. 6. Everett 1999, 164, provides the track order and the dates of the initial recording session(s) for each song. MacDonald also lists the sessions and instrumentation for each track (2007, 280–­327); interested readers may also peruse the lists in Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 456–­515, and Turner 2005, 150–­71. 7. McCartney had read a story in Melody Maker where Pete Townshend boasted that “I Can See for Miles” was the “raunchiest, loudest rock record ever.” “So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that, something really wild’”

Introduction  33 (Beatles 2000, 311). The first sessions on the song occurred in July, but they rerecorded the track on September 9, after Starr’s return (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 500). 8. In his talk at the Summit of Creativity Conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, engineer Ken Scott (2017) identified the wine as Blue Nun. 9. “The line was in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko. . . . It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul . . . ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion . . . because I’m leaving’” (Golson 1981, 74). 10. The song appears in the United States on The Beatles’ Second Album and as the B-­side of the single “She Loves You.” According to McCartney, “I’ll Get You” was a fifty-­fifty collaboration (Miles 1997, 150), whereas Bill Harry credits it to Lennon only (1992, 322). It sounds to me much more typical of Lennon than McCartney, and John sings it. 11. According to Beatlesbooks.com, “an actual glass onion is a large glass bottle that was used on ships to hold wine or brandy, hand-­blown to be larger at the bottom to prevent toppling over.” Though it resembles an onion, “we can only wonder whether anyone could attempt ‘looking through’ one with any success. Then again, John’s father spent much time employed at sea, so John may have been familiar with this kind of drinking vessel”: “Glass Onion History” 2017. 12. Turner (2005, 152) quotes Derek Taylor, who connects the line about bent-­backed tulips to a flower arrangement in a restaurant called Parkes. The Cast-­Iron Shore is a beach in Liverpool, and the song’s title was the name Lennon wanted to give The Iveys, who hated the name and instead became Badfinger. 13. Everett (1999, 170) notes that many of the song’s lines were borrowed from Kahlil Gibran’s Sand and Foam, including “half of what I say is meaningless,” and its contrasting images of mind and heart. 14. Lennon said, “It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except us two, who were in the glow of love” (Golson 1981, 161). 15. Interested readers may consult Everett’s meticulous charting of the piece’s 154 fragments from forty-­five sources (1999, 174–­79), and McKinney’s ingenious analysis of its trajectory from “Approach” and “Entry” through “Realization” and “Restoration” (2003, 240–­43). 16. Aaron Krerowitz (2017, 107) proposes that the song has five parts, dividing the first four measures from the rest of the portion preceding the 3/4 section. Perhaps because the entire initial, fourteen-­bar portion is all in the same meter, most other analysts deem it a single section. 17. Riley similarly suggests that the song is about “the seedy side of sex that springs from cultural repression” (1988, 270); MacDonald states that it concerns “sexual authenticity in a sordid world of unfeeling voyeurism and violence” (2007, 319). 18. According to Steve Turner (2005, 157), the specific source is “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals (1960), a song that Lennon loved. When journalist Jonathan Cott interviewed Lennon on September 18, 1968, Lennon played for him “Give Me Love,” the B-­side of the “Angel Baby” single. Five days later, sessions on “Happiness” began.

34  the beatles through a glass onion 19. Krerowitz notes the song’s “unpredictable AABCABA form” and calls attention to its metrical variations (2017, 108). 20. McCartney recollects that the song began as a piano exercise he created to improve his two-­hand independence: see Miles 1997, 498. 21. McCartney cites Eden Ahbez’s haunting “Nature Boy” as an inspiration for this song (Miles 1997, 490). In chapter 2 Walter Everett locates another source in the Maharishi’s writings about nature. 22. See also Turner 2005, 160. Some writers have suggested that part of the song was recorded outdoors, and that a few of the birdcalls were taped from actual birds. In his talk at the 2017 Sgt. Pepper conference, however, Ken Scott stated firmly that it was all recorded indoors and that all the birdcalls were drawn from EMI’s tape archive. 23. Kimsey and Benitez raise this question in their chapters in this volume. Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith discuss the issue in detail, citing a January 1969 conversation between McCartney and Donovan that partly corroborates the civil rights story. They conclude that the “rhetorical appeal” of McCartney’s story is “specific to a mostly twenty-­first-­century context,” that he did not tell the story for nearly three decades, and that his attempts to present “Blackbird” as a race-­conscious song is likely part of his effort to affirm his “iconic status” (2016, 62–­63). 24. In Rishikesh, when the Maharishi said that only one person could ride in his helicopter, Lennon quickly volunteered. Afterward McCartney asked him why he was so eager to take the flight. Lennon answered, “I thought he might slip me the Answer” (The Beatles 2000, 283). 25. In a 1971 interview, Lennon said he thought he was “painting in sound a picture of revolution,” but later concluded that the piece was “anti-­revolution” (qtd. in MacDonald 2007, 288). In 1971 Lennon’s politics were passing through a Maoist phase that he later repudiated. 26. In chapter 1 Frontani quotes other reviews of the White Album and provides further details about Wenner’s unstinting praise for the band.

part i Umbrella Pretexts and Contexts

one | “. . . Out/In . . .” The Beatles’ Image in Transition during the “Year of the Barricades” michael r. frontani

An article on music appearing in London’s leading underground Marxist newspaper, Black Dwarf, in October 1968, closed with the hope that the Beatles would “get so fucked-­up with their money-­making that they become as obscure as Cliff Richard” (Wiener 1984, 82). The jibe reflected the New Left’s growing hostility toward the Beatles for not being active in the wave of political protests sweeping the globe. This response starkly contrasted with the all-­but-­unanimous acclaim they had enjoyed just a few months earlier. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in June 1967, extended and solidified notions of the band’s musical superiority and commercial dominance. More importantly, it and related events and accomplishments of that year positioned the Beatles as the most influential leaders of the youth culture and the embodiment of the hippie ideal. Though they had not performed live in nearly a year, the Beatles were at the height of their creative, commercial, and cultural powers, and even the debacle of the BBC television broadcast of Magical Mystery Tour, on Boxing Day, did little to change that. The recordings that accompanied the release of the film were, as usual, applauded by the critics and rose to the top of music charts in the United States and United Kingdom. As the Beatles left England in mid-­February 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, they were not simply the world’s most popular entertainers; they also oc37

38  the beatles through a glass onion

cupied the seat of de facto authority within the youth culture. Yet, by mid-­April, by which time all the Beatles had returned to London, their status was no longer so clear. Something had changed while they were gone. Their values seemed out of step with those of a growing number of young people. The countercultural ideal embodied in the Beatles’ music and embedded in their image—­that of a society outside of the constraints of the establishment, a hippie utopia based in love, community, authenticity, creativity, music, and, of course, LSD—­had been overtaken by events. By the end of the year, that idyllic vision would be little more than a memory. Integrating an analysis of contemporary media and other resources, this chapter treats the Beatles’ image and its resonance within an evolving youth culture. The evolution of the Beatles’ cultural status during the year preceding the release of The Beatles in late November 1968 reflects changes fomented by the intensification of the Vietnam War. For many, as the war wore on, the countercultural ideal embodied in the Beatles’ image and music seemed a less and less tenable response to American involvement in Southeast Asia. Increasingly, young people were aligning themselves with the New Left, opting for political engagement over the hippie apoliticism that had seemed so right and relevant just a short time ago. Before turning to the events of 1968 and their relationship to the evolving status of the Beatles, it is necessary to describe the Beatles’ relationship to the youth culture at the height of the band’s influence, in 1967.

The Context: The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Youth Culture Sgt. Pepper cast a long shadow over popular music and youth culture and was an important catalyst in the summer and fall of 1967 for widely distributed analyses of the Beatles’ cultural significance. For instance, in September, Time noted the comments of concert promoter Sid Bernstein, who had booked the Beatles for their Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium concerts. He maintained that “only Hitler ever duplicated their power over crowds. . . . They could sway a presidential election if they wanted to.” If that was “far-­fetched,” the article concluded, “the fact remains that when the Beatles talk—­about drugs, the war in Viet Nam, religion—­millions listen, and this is a new situation in the pop music world” (Porterfield and Birnbaum 1967, 62). This view prevailed throughout mass media. It should be noted that the youth culture was not monolithic. It

“. . . Out/In . . .”  39

took some effort, for instance, to transcend the barriers and suspicions that plagued student activism. Yet fondness for the Beatles presented a bridge, as Todd Gitlin observes in his book The Sixties. At a meeting of University of California, Berkeley, students protesting the campus administration’s barring of an antiwar recruiting table from the student union, “Someone,” he writes, “started singing the old union standby, ‘Solidarity Forever.’ Then someone started ‘Yellow Submarine,’ and the entire roomful rollicked into it, chorus after chorus” (1987, 208). One Free Speech Movement veteran, Michael Rossman, was moved to post a statement of “NO CONFIDENCE” (in Berkeley’s administration) all over campus. The leaflet, sporting a little submarine, declared: The Yellow Submarine was first proposed by the Beatles, who taught us a new style of song. . . . Last night we celebrated the growing fusion of head, heart and hands; of hippies and activists; and our joy and confidence in our ability to care for and take care of ourselves and what is ours. And so we made a resolution which broke into song; and we adopt for today this unexpected symbol of our trust in our future, and of our longing for a place fit for us all to live in. Please post, especially where prohibited. We love you. (Gitlin 1987, 210)

The Beatles’ song, notes Gitlin, who was a president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and one of the radicals, could be “taken as the communion of hippies and activists, students and nonstudents, all who at long last felt they could express their beloved single-­hearted community” (1987, 208–­9). As a further mark of the symbolic value of Beatle iconography and the extent to which it was woven into the social fabric of the youth and countercultures of the late 1960s, one might note the establishment of several religious communes and “submarine” churches, particularly in the United States. Bearing names like the Ecstatic Umbrella and Alice’s Restaurant, they adopted a symbol combining a yellow submarine, a cross, and a peace symbol. As one church leader commented, “In the Beatles’ movie the submarine was the place where they loved each other in a groovy way and got strength to do battle with the Blue Meanies. It also shows that a Church has to have flexibility and maneuverability” (O’Neill 1971, 317). In 1967’s Summer of Love and the months that followed, the lifestyle revolutionaries were ascendant, and the Beatles became the world’s most visible and influential hippies. It was during this period that the Beatles and the youth culture achieved, and were constructed in the media as

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having achieved, a unity of vision that had been realized only once before in postwar culture and never again since. The first such period of alignment began with the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in February 1964, and continued at least through their record-­breaking tour of the United States in August 1965, typified by the historic concert at Shea Stadium that opened it. During this period, the Beatles enjoyed unprecedented cultural and commercial success fueled by the seemingly universal support and adulation of young people. Sex, primarily, provided a basis for unity in this first instance, whether it was the puppy love of the young fans the Beatles elicited (and exploited, commercially), or the attraction of the subversive qualities of an image constructed to embody unconstrained romantic and carnal relationships. The Beatles, through their music and image, were a vehicle for youths to fully engage in a euphoric sense of being young, and, for the first time, to partake in a culture of their own, a fact that was not lost on industry, which immediately set to work providing product for this new market. Eventually, other youth icons arose and diluted the Beatles’ dominance, but none could dethrone them. The release of Sgt. Pepper, considered by many to be the greatest album of all time, in early June 1967, opened another period of unity. This time sex remained a factor, as it surely must for people approaching or reaching sexual maturity, but, more importantly, the countercultural ideal embodied on the album and in the Beatles’ art and image was at the core of the youth culture’s self-­definition. Later that month, the Beatles represented the United Kingdom in the first global satellite broadcast. Viewers around the world viewed the band and their friends, among them Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, and Keith Moon, all adorned in the finest hippie garb, as the Beatles recorded their new single and flower power manifesto, “All You Need Is Love.” Also that summer, McCartney admitted to having experimented with LSD, and the band financed, and appeared with other British luminaries on, a petition in the London Times calling for the legalization of marijuana. These events and accomplishments epitomized the ethos of the Summer of Love and flower power, firmly established the Beatles’ countercultural credentials, and distinguished them as the prime cultural agents of the period. Both the mainstream media and the underground and emerging rock press assigned remarkably similar attributes to the Beatles, among them notions of the group’s superiority to other bands, their exceptional artistry, their function as an engine of progress, their role in legitimizing rock as an art form, and their status as leaders of the counterculture. The

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Beatles, individually and as a band, presented the hippie ideal for both those aspiring to a countercultural lifestyle and those assessing it from the outside. The Beatles, however, were evolving, as was the youth culture. Having reached the pinnacle of the entertainment industry in their midtwenties, they were for the first time addressing many of life’s bigger questions. As John Lennon told biographer Hunter Davies, “I’m pleased that I made it young. . . . It would have been terrible to spend your whole life before you make it, just to find out it’s meaningless” (1991, 289). Within the youth culture, many, including the Beatles, viewed LSD as a means to enlightenment. In early August 1967, however, George Harrison made a pilgrimage to San Francisco’s Haight-­Ashbury. Rather than the hippie paradise he expected, he found something he likened to the Bowery. Far from being about “spiritual awakening and being artistic,” the Haight scene was overrun with “a lot of bums and drop-­outs; many of them very young kids who’d dropped acid and come from all over America to this mecca of LSD” (The Beatles 2000, 259). The experience convinced him that meditation, rather than drugs, would enable the spiritual awakening the Beatles sought, and it led, ultimately, to their studying and engaging in Transcendental Meditation. This was consistent with the practices of many within the youth culture who sought alternatives to established religions (Wuthnow 1995, 379). Thus, as 1968 was ushered in, the Beatles, embodying the zeitgeist, were the definitive agents in the youth culture. As the months passed, this position was usurped as opposition to the war in Vietnam emerged as the youth culture’s new catalyst for cohesion and a unifying vision.

The Year of the Barricades Depending on one’s location, age, ethnic background, class, gender, and many other factors, the term “1968” conjures up different images and memories. The most turbulent year since the end of World War II, it was a year of rebellion and movements and causes and violence. It was a global phenomenon in which the impulse to protest against the postwar world order reverberated across borders and cultures. Yet, while there was some—­often substantial—­linkage between activists in different countries, the events are best viewed at the level of the nation. People in different places protested for different reasons: in Northern Ireland, the Catholic minority marched for civil rights; German students protested against their poor living conditions and what they perceived as

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an authoritarian government; in Spain, students and workers protested against the repressive Franco government; Brazilian students mobilized against their country’s military dictatorship; in Japan, students protested against the American military presence in their country; in May, workers joined students in Paris and across France for a monthlong insurrection pursued via protests and a general strike that nearly toppled the government; and in Czechoslovakia, students and intellectuals agitated for reform during the “Prague Spring,” prompting the Soviet Union to invade in August. In the United States, it was a year of violence at home and abroad. Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet Offensive on January 30. In perhaps the most important battle of the Vietnam conflict, civilian and military command-­and-­control centers throughout South Vietnam came under fire. In mid-­February, the United States suffered its greatest weekly casualties to that point, including 543 dead and 2,547 wounded; in response, the Pentagon authorized the second biggest call-­ up of the war and mobilized reserves (Willbanks 2006, 154). CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite returned from South Vietnam in late February and told his audience he was certain that “the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate” (155). While the South Vietnamese and American forces ultimately repelled the attack and won back all of the territory lost during the offensive, the victory was pyrrhic—­American sentiment began to turn against the war, and antiwar presidential candidates began to gain momentum. By the end of March, President Lyndon Johnson, his approval rating at its nadir, elected not to seek the nomination after losing an early primary to Eugene McCarthy. In early April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Barely two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, an antiwar presidential candidate, was also assassinated. In August, at the nationally broadcast Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar protests devolved into rioting by activists and violence by police that shocked Americans. The escalation of the Vietnam War brought about an increase in the New Left’s influence, particularly among students, and the political disengagement endorsed by the hippies gave way to the political activism championed by the radicals (Whalen and Flacks 1989, 10–­15). The largest and most influential organization in the New Left was the SDS, which had first emerged in the early 1960s as an advocate for participatory democracy and civil rights. It spread quickly across campuses in the Americas. As described by Kurlansky (2004), the SDS was also active in Europe, where members were in close contact across national

“. . . Out/In . . .”  43

borders. English radicals, returning from the International Vietnam Conference sponsored by the German SDS at the height of the Tet Offensive, were moved to mount their own antiwar protest, on March 17, 1968, which started in London’s Trafalgar Square before moving to Grosvenor Square, where ten thousand protesters marched on the US Embassy. As reported by the Associated Press (“Antiwar” 1968, 13), it was only one of several actions on a day of anti-­American protest and violence across Europe: in Nuremberg, five hundred radicals protesting the war blocked West German foreign minister Willy Brandt’s entry into his party’s convention; in Paris, bombs exploded outside the offices of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America, and TWA. In London, more than two hundred protesters were arrested and more than eighty policemen injured during the fifty-­five-­minute confrontation in front of the embassy. The German SDS delegation urged the English radical Tariq Ali and his Vietnam Solidarity Campaign to enter the embassy compound. The protesters broke through the police line blocking their access to the mission, but the constabulary was able to restore order. The Grosvenor Square protest was a watershed event in the antiwar movement that ushered in a period of political activism and violence in opposition to the war. And the Beatles missed it. In short, things had changed by the time that the Beatles returned from India. To many, the countercultural lifestyle they exemplified no longer seemed a sufficient response to the sins of “straight” society, particularly the war in Vietnam. But while momentum shifted to the activists, much of the hippie program remained in play. In the battle for the soul of the youth culture, the Beatles remained the biggest arrow in the quiver of those who still sought a new society based on community and universal love. Nowhere was the conflict between the values of the New Left and those of the lifestyle advocates more clearly reflected than in the underground press, and no underground publication was more widely read or influential with the youth culture than Rolling Stone.

The Beatles, Rolling Stone, and the Antiwar Movement Numerous underground publications intended for a counterculture audience arose in the 1960s. The underground papers, with their uninhibited style and content and their philosophical ties to the counterculture, recorded and participated in the rebellion against the establishment and the mass media. The underground press was instrumental in defining not

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only the establishment and opposition to it, but also the values and aspirations of the counterculture. Rolling Stone magazine quickly emerged as a leader among the underground press. Yet Rolling Stone never espoused the revolutionary solutions and direct engagement with the political system proposed by the radicals and their press. Rather, it challenged the attitudes and values of straight society. This hippie sensibility was at the core of the countercultural program Rolling Stone espoused during the peak of its underground period, from 1967 to 1970 (Atkin 1995, 188). Jann Wenner, the newspaper’s cofounder (with Ralph Gleason) and editor, disliked politics and doubted its utility for bringing about social change. Wenner’s antipathy toward politics and activism is apparent in his denouncement of the efforts of the Yippies (Youth International Party)1 and New Left to draw students and musicians to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. “The Yip protest—­in methods and means—­is as corrupt as the political machine it hopes to disrupt,” he wrote. Arguing against participation in the protests expected at the convention, Wenner, decrying “political exploiters,” declared, “Rock and roll is the only way in which the vast but formless power of youth is structured, the only way in which it can be defined or inspected” (1968b, 22). Draper observes that “Wenner stuck to his belief that kids spoke through music, not with ballots or bricks” (1990, 121). As a result, as antiwar protests gained in number and fury and Rolling Stone clung to its apoliticism, the radicals’ dissatisfaction with Wenner and his newspaper grew. It is important to note that Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco and was to a large degree motivated by the spirit and ideals embodied in that city’s Summer of Love. Those ideals determined Wenner’s definition of the counterculture. Rock musicians, and especially the Beatles, were models for the new society he envisioned. I offer a number of observations about the Beatles’ centrality to Wenner’s program. First, with regard to the band’s artistry and status as an engine of progress, and their role in the legitimization of rock ’n’ roll as art, the magazine largely echoed sentiments present in the mainstream press. Second, to put forward the Beatles as counterculture leaders was, again, to amplify an opinion already current in contemporary mainstream media. Finally, in light of the growing militancy of the antiwar movement, it is noteworthy that this underground publication and the mainstream press presented such similar views on the Beatles. I attribute this similarity, at least in part, to the fact that for the mainstream press the countercultural values championed by Wenner and embedded in the Beatles’ image presented a safe alternative to the student radicals’ militancy.

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There was another motivating factor—­sales. For the magazine, political apathy walked hand in hand with commerce. True, Wenner, like most Americans, rejected overt radicalization (and violence), but many among the magazine’s staff attributed this rejection to Wenner’s determination to earn profits at the expense of advocacy. Certainly, Rolling Stone had used the Beatles to increase sales from the very first issue, which featured Lennon on the cover. Further, perhaps most importantly for the success and survival of the magazine, the November 23, 1968, issue’s cover bore a photograph of the naked backsides of Lennon and Yoko Ono, while the inside contained full-­frontal nude pictures of the couple, the two photos that adorned the back and front of their album of experimental music, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Tetragrammaton/Apple, November 1968). Urged to do so by his mentor and cofounder Ralph Gleason, Wenner had contacted Apple Corps and requested the nude photos. Derek Taylor, Apple’s press secretary, was happy to oblige, and the pictures appeared in the magazine’s first anniversary issue, as did an interview with Lennon, who welcomed the opportunity to shock the sensibilities of the establishment. The cover was enough to place the struggling magazine within American consciousness. Wenner, one writer recalled, had “a rule of thumb”: “When in doubt, put the Beatles on the cover” (Anson 1981, 172). As the antiwar movement intensified, the newspaper’s staff may have preferred more political coverage and advocacy, but, Wenner’s aversion to politics aside, the Beatles sold.

The Beatles’ Ideal and Rolling Stone Essential to Wenner’s notion of progress within the counterculture, and underpinning his use of the Beatles in defining the countercultural ideal, was his belief in the Beatles’ supremacy in music and art. As one would expect, Sgt. Pepper was central to this assumption. In December 1967, Wenner wrote of the band: How they do it is anybody’s guess, but I recall a conversation in the back of the Avalon Ballroom about what the Beatles might do after Sgt. Peppers [sic]. Someone suggested that they would set the bible to music. “Ah no,” was the reply, “They’ll write their own.” And the reply to that was that if we had just come up with the idea, the Beatles would be doing something well beyond that. (1967, 16)

The Avalon Ballroom revelers had their answer with the release of the album The Beatles, in November 1968.

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The Beatles exhibits more than any other album the individual interests of the band members. On the White Album, the Beatles’ efforts canvas much of popular music: Lennon lampoons the white British blues of John Mayall and Eric Clapton on “Yer Blues,” and McCartney’s “Honey Pie” pays tribute to the songs of the 1920s and 1930s; the Beatles try their hands at heavy rock with “Helter Skelter”; McCartney adds a country flavor with “Blackbird,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and, especially, “Rocky Raccoon”; and the Beatles turn to Hollywood kitsch with “Good Night.” Lennon, with the help of Ono and Harrison, presents “Revolution 9,” which Ian MacDonald calls the “world’s most widely distributed avant-­ garde artifact” (1994, 230). While demonstrating the band’s incredible creative capacity, the album also displays each member’s unwillingness to cut his own songs, to put the whole before its parts, so to speak. Though producer George Martin advised them to prune their production down to fourteen of the best tracks, in the end, everything was delivered to the public in a two-­disc set; despite Martin’s concerns, it became one of the top-­selling albums of all time (Whitburn 1995, 381–­83). The album received generally good reviews, though some critics shared Martin’s concerns. Newsweek’s Hubert Saal, for instance, wrote, “With 30 arrows of song, it’s hard to see how the brilliant quartet could have missed their marks so often. Unlike previous albums, the bull’s-­eye of variety in lyrics, wit, ease of style that made changing keys or tempi natural, lovely love songs, and adventures in electronics is rarely hit in ‘The Beatles’” (1968, 109). Time was equally critical of the uneven quality of the album, which it termed an example of the band’s “mannerist phase”: “Skill and sophistication abound, but so does a faltering sense of taste and purpose. The album’s 30 tracks are a sprawling, motley assemblage of the Beatles’ best abilities and worst tendencies” (“Mannerist Phase” 53). Nevertheless, these criticisms were in the minority. Richard Goldstein (1968), who had evoked much resentment among critics and fans for his negative review of Sgt. Pepper, applauded the Beatles’ turn away from technology to songwriting: “In terms of melodic and lyrical diversity, it is far more imaginative than either ‘Sergeant Pepper’ or ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’” Those albums had relied on the “surrogate magic of studio technique,” while songwriting was neglected. “This time,” wrote Goldstein, “the Beatles have dared to be restrained” (1968, 33, 37). In England, Melody Maker declared the album a “fascinating cross-­section of the Beatles—­perhaps the finest collection of their work since Revolver” (“The Beatles” 1968). International Times called it the “best album of 1968” (Miles 1968). The Guardian review, in addition to applauding the

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album, incisively captures the Beatles’ status among British counterculturalists, one that would ring true for Wenner: The Beatles rates high not just as new music, nor just as art, but as a demonstration of a fact so blatant as to be invisible, so close and new that we’ve few hearings on it yet: that art is now in process of replacing science as the determinant of the way we see ourselves and the world. The point has to be made in this context; without it the potency of the Beatles, now fully equalled only by Dylan and Godard, remains hermetic; an enigma. But the Beatles’ artistic consciousness is autonomous. . . . The joyful idea contained in the Beatles’ music is that individual consciousness can be as real as the external world. They are the first full citizens of the post-­scientific age, with a few other artists. (Cannon 1968)

Wenner, for his part, was ecstatic. He deemed The Beatles the “perfect product and result of everything that rock and roll means and encompasses,” and “the best album they ever released”; further, “only the Beatles are capable of making a better one.” He went so far as to term the album “more perfect” than Sgt. Pepper, and the “history and synthesis of Western music” (1968a, 10). Thus, at the end of 1968, the Beatles retained much of their commercial and artistic clout. And yet. . . .

Out/In: The Beatles, the Stones, and the New Left We get back to the Beatles, returning from India. The group had missed the Grosvenor Square protest. Mick Jagger had been there and was moved to write “Street Fighting Man.” One can only speculate as to what impact being in London at the time of the protest in March 1968 might have had on the Beatles. But at this point, they were apolitical hippies. Lennon was haltingly becoming political, but not fast enough for the radicals, especially after the release of the single “Revolution,” the B-­side of “Hey Jude,” in late August. Lennon sings, “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out,” and “You tell me it’s the institution / Well, you know, you better free your mind instead.” The song put Lennon on a collision course with London’s radicals, and this chapter opened with Black Dwarf, a revolutionary socialist newspaper published in London, attacking the Beatles’ apoliticism. As MacDonald notes, many among the New Left in Britain and the United States shared the newspaper’s view. Increasingly, New Left and counter-

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culture editors and writers were coming to believe that the Beatles were more interested in protecting their fortunes than in changing society (1994, 226–­27). The next issue of Black Dwarf, which also promoted the Rolling Stones’ radical status, contained “An Open Letter to John Lennon.” The letter, written by John Hoyland, moved Lennon to respond with “A Very Open Letter to John Hoyland from John Lennon”; this was met by a collective response from the editors, under the pseudonym “John Hoyland” (Wiener 1991, 81–­83). Rolling Stone published Hoyland’s “Open Letter” and Lennon’s response side-­by-­side in its May 3, 1969, issue. Hoyland’s “Open Letter” indicates a program far from the agenda advocated by either the counterculture or the Beatles: Now [that Lennon had been busted for possession] do you see what was wrong with your record “Revolution”? That record was no more revolutionary than Mrs. Dale’s Diary. In order to change the world we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then—­destroy it. Ruthlessly. This is not cruelty or madness. It is one of the most passionate forms of love. Because what we’re fighting is suffering, oppression, humiliation—­the immense toll of unhappiness caused by capitalism. And any “love” which does not pit itself against these things is sloppy and irrelevant. Hoyland compared the Beatles to the Rolling Stones: But recently your music has lost it [sic] bite, at a time when the music of the Stones has been getting stronger and stronger. Why? Because we’re living in a world that is splitting down the middle. The split is between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. You can see it here, and in the jungles of Vietnam, and in the mountains of South America, and in the ghettos of the U.S. and the Universities all over the world. It’s the great drama of the second half of the twentieth century—­the battle for human dignity fought by the exploited and the underprivileged of the world. The Stones, helped along a bit by their experiences with the law, have understood this and they’ve understood that the life and the authenticity of their music—­quite apart from their personal integrity—­demanded that they take part in this drama—­that they refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up our lives. (“Revolution: The Dear John Letters” 1969, 22)

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Hoyland patronized Lennon in his conclusion: “But learn from it, John. Look at the society we’re living in, and ask yourself: why? And then—­ come and join us. Yours fraternally, John Hoyland.” Lennon’s angry response took the New Left to task for its willingness to turn to violence: You’re obviously on a destruction kick. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it—­People—­so do you want to destroy them? Ruthlessly? Until you/we change your/our heads—­there’s no chance. Tell me of one successful revolution. Who fucked up communism—­christianity—­ capitalism—­buddhism, etc? Sick heads, and nothing else. Do you think all the enemy wear capitalist badges so that you can shoot them? It’s a bit naïve, John. You seem to think it’s just a class war. Lennon also criticized the false dichotomy of Beatles versus Rolling Stones: Look man, I was/am not against you. Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones—­think a little bigger—­look at the world we’re living in, John, and ask yourself: why? And then—­come and join us. Love, John Lennon P.S.: You smash it—­and I’ll build around it. (“Revolution: The Dear John Letters” 1969, 22) The notion of the Stones’ relative radicalism bothered Lennon, but it was consistent with a growing sentiment within the New Left. While Wenner held the line against joining the radicals, New Left politics nevertheless found their way into Rolling Stone, and many of his more politically motivated writers and editors viewed the Rolling Stones as more relevant to the current state of things. In a review of their new album, Beggars Banquet, in January 1969, Jon Landau, one of the magazine’s most capable and influential critics (and the future manager and producer of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band), said of the Stones: From the beginning they themselves have been exponents of emotional violence and it’s hard to imagine any group more suited to

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voicing the feelings of discontent we all share in these most violent of times. Wherever they wind up themselves, they are writing songs of revolution because they are giving powerful expression to the feelings that are causing it. (1969, 12)

Landau criticized McCartney for being out of step with the times, unlike the Stones: There is no way they can separate themselves as human beings from what is going on. It isn’t a question of feeling sorry for people in India, as Paul McCartney seems to think.2 The point is that the things that keep those people in a state of near starvation are the same ones that may force John [Lennon] to take a drug rap, that almost sent [Stones guitarist] Brian Jones to jail, and which has forced Elridge [sic] Cleaver into hiding. Sooner or later, something brings that home to each of us. (1969, 12)3

If Landau’s political leanings weren’t clear enough, he applauded the Rolling Stones for being the “first band to say, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’ and they said it with class” (1969, 11). Landau refers to the slogan that was often chanted at police officers attempting to break up student and radical demonstrations. Taken from a line in a poem by “beat-­turned-­black-­nationalist” LeRoi Jones, the crude phrase was also the source for the moniker of the Lower East Side Motherfuckers (Gitlin 1987, 239). Landau, critical of London Records for changing the cover of Beggars Banquet (initially a photograph of a most unsavory and filthy lavatory), jokingly (?) comments, “The next time New York’s East Side revolutionary contingent wants to shake somebody up . . . why don’t they head up town to London Records. I’m sure the President of London Records could use the education.” Landau is referring to the Motherfuckers, “tough hippies,” and “postbeat, postbiker, would-­be Hell’s Angels with manifestoes,” who had formed a chapter of the SDS and employed street theater and violence in the service of their “cultural revolution”; many newer SDSers welcomed the Motherfuckers and their disposition toward direct action (Gitlin 1987, 238–­41). While a full description of his views is beyond the scope of this chapter, Landau, like many of his colleagues at the newspaper, clearly was more sympathetic to the activist Left than either Wenner or Gleason were; like Hoyland and the other editors of Black Dwarf, he found the Beatles’ leadership of the coun-

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terculture flaccid, at best, and nominated instead the Rolling Stones, a band whose dark side seemed more in tune with the times. Many young people, apprehensive that the countercultural apathy to politics was self-­defeating, turned to the activist Left to speak for them. Although the halcyon days of the Summer of Love were a distant memory, Wenner maintained his stand against the radicals, who “do not understand  .  .  . that as surely as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and scores of other rock and roll people have changed the face of popular music, become the de facto spokesman of youth, . . . they have also brought with them new ideas, new approaches, new means and new goals” (1968b, 22). By the end of the decade, however, his ideas and goals, run through as they were with the theme of love, were perhaps, as Cmiel says of the counterculture at its most utopian, simply too nice to secure systemic change (1994, 271–­72). As flag-­bearers for that alternate culture, the Beatles, too, seemed to be out of step with the increasingly radicalized and fragmented youth movement. The Beatles, their unity largely a myth by 1969, stayed out of the political fray. Only Lennon would forsake the counterculture ideal for activist politics, something that was only hinted at in 1969.

Conclusion Despite the dissonance within the youth culture during the year of the barricades, and the antipathy the Beatles generated among the radicals, their commercial and critical success and acclamation continued apace in 1968. In addition to The Beatles, which reached the top of the charts across Europe and the Americas, “Lady Madonna” (backed by “The Inner Light”) reached the top spot of the UK singles chart in late March; the first single on the band’s new Apple label, “Hey Jude” (backed by “Revolution”), released in late August, was a chart-­topper in the United Kingdom and United States; Sgt. Pepper was awarded a number of Grammy awards by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in the United States; the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors (BASCA) awarded an Ivor Novello Award to “She’s Leaving Home,” for Best British Song, Musically and Lyrically; and “Hey Jude” was recognized by BASCA for attaining the highest certified British sales. We should understand the Beatles’ rejection of New Left radicalism within the context of the British New Left. Kurlansky (2005) notes a sig-

52  the beatles through a glass onion

nificant difference between the New Left in the United States and its versions in the United Kingdom and Europe. The “peace movement” and “antiwar movement” were largely American constructs evoking a desire to see the war end. European radicals went beyond that hope to a desire to witness the North Vietnamese win and regarded the Tet Offensive as the action of an oppressed people. Tariq Ali, one of the Black Dwarf editors who had participated in the “Dear John Letters” episode, captured the mood of Euro-­left radicals when he said, “A wave of joy and energy rebounds around the world and millions more are suddenly, exhilaratingly, ceasing to believe in the strength of their oppressor” (Kurlansky 2005, 151). About the protest at the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square in March, of which he was a leader, Ali told the press, “We were not there for a peaceful demonstration.  .  .  . Peace has no part in this crisis. The Americans are criminals and this must be shown to the world” (“Pakistani Admits” 1968, 15). Vanessa Redgrave, who had recently achieved international stardom for her portrayal of Guinevere in the Warner Bros. production of Camelot, addressed the crowd and declared, “In my view, a Viet Cong victory is the only way to peace” (“Antiwar Outbursts” 1968, 13). However, one should not overestimate the appeal of the radicals. Despite the New Left’s growing popularity, most students and young people were not radicalized. In Great Britain, where students accounted for, perhaps, only 10 percent of the university-­age population, the radicals found it difficult to drum up support among a largely apathetic or conservative student body (Hoefferle 2012). In the United States, the SDS fragmented badly as the decade came to a close, and zealots within dissident factions such as the Weather Underground pursued a campaign of bombings and disruptions, further turning public sentiment against them. Between September 1969 and May 1970, for instance, there were at least 250 bombings of ROTC buildings, draft boards, and other federal offices (Patterson 1995, 716–­17). Rather than advocate a complete restructuring of society, many people sympathetic to aspects of the New Left program opted instead to abide by a widely accepted code of ethics, defined by Whalen and Flacks (1989) to include avoidance of complicity with the “war machine” by eschewing employment within the defense industry or multinational corporations, and organizing one’s life so that it not be “part of the problem,” including declining employment with polluters and firms that “rip people off.” Many also resolved not to cooperate with the draft (13). For these people, the Beatles’ absence at the barricades was less likely to be viewed as a failure.

“. . . Out/In . . .”  53

To define revolution as primarily or even solely a fundamental alteration in a political system obscures the revolution in consciousness the Beatles inaugurated. They did not attempt to overturn the system, but they did envision something more benign. While not wishing to overthrow capitalism, the Beatles and those following their path intended that it be more responsive to human needs and dignity, and, thereby, conducive to spiritual and intellectual development. The Beatles’ image encapsulated this effort. Notes 1. The Youth International Party, whose constituents were known as “Yippies,” was an antiwar radical revolutionary group founded in 1967 by Paul Krasner, Nancy Kurshan, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman. Yippies were provocateurs who specialized in garnering media attention for their street theater and protests. Rubin and Hoffman were tried and convicted of inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were among the five convicted from the “Chicago Seven,” though their convictions were overturned on appeal. Far from humbled by the experience, Rubin and Hoffman continued to protest the war in Vietnam, organizing various events and protests, and further provoking the authorities. 2. This sentence refers to a statement McCartney made to the London music publication New Musical Express. He told the interviewer, who was pressing him on the issue of the Beatles putting on a charity event, “Starvation in India doesn’t worry me one bit. Not one iota. It doesn’t, man. And it doesn’t worry you . . . if you’re honest. You just pose. You don’t even know it exists. You’ve only seen the Oxfam ads. You can’t pretend to me that an Oxfam ad can reach down into the depths of your soul and actually make you feel for those people any more, for instance, than you feel about getting a new car. If it comes to a toss-­up, you’d get a new car . . . and don’t say you wouldn’t because that’s the scene, with you and with most people” (Smith 1968). 3. Further indicating Landau’s pique at the inaction of the counterculture and its most visible proponents, in the same review he favorably compared the Rolling Stones to the MC5, a rock band managed by John Sinclair, a leader of the White Panther Party—­an organization whose manifesto exhibited all the excesses of the counterculture: “Fuck God in the ass. Fuck your woman until she can’t stand up. . . . Our program of rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone” (Caute 1988, 312–­13). Landau went on to manage and produce the MC5.

two | Children of Nature Origins of the Beatles’ Tabula Rasa walter everett

The Beatles continually reinvented themselves. Revolver, referred to as “Mark II” during its production, announced itself with a warped reinvention of the 1-­2-­3-­4 count-­off that had introduced their first album.1 For Sgt. Pepper, they created another band in their own image. The slate was wiped clean again with the White Album, not only by their desire to return to the natural state sought in their early-­1968 Himalayan meditative rituals, but also through their 180-­degree turn from the lavish artifice of Pepper, an album high with artistic pretensions, groundbreakingly imaginative lyrics, radically colorful instrumentation, and a deep exploration beyond the limits of four-­track recording, its extravagance marked by a groove audible only to dogs, all wrapped in a cover as opulent as it was mystifying.2 In contrast, the plain white cover of the 1968 double album emblematized the group’s return to nothingness just as surely as did their removal of the garish 1967 paint jobs from three of Lennon’s and McCartney’s guitars, now stripped down to bare unvarnished wood. This new blank slate cast the group not in the austere, somber tones of the With the Beatles cover photo, but in a new light, as if an optimistic eggshell of unlimited possibilities was about to hatch.3 This chapter aims to show that a post-­India back-­to-­nature simplicity guided much of the White Album’s motivational impulses.

54

Children of Nature  55

Rishikesh to Esher First, for orientation, I should mention that only three tracks heard on the White Album—­“Cry Baby Cry,” “Piggies,” and “Don’t Pass Me By”—­ are known to have existed in any form before the Beatles’ February–­ April 1968 spiritual training in Rishikesh, India, where Lennon and McCartney wrote many songs on the new Martin acoustic guitars they had brought with them. These and another crop of new songs were taped as composers’ demos in late May 1968, supposedly at Lennon’s and Harrison’s homes, all collectively known as the “Kinfauns” (or “Esher”) tapes after the Surrey town (and house) in which Harrison resided at the time.4 From May through October, the Beatles recorded most of these songs and eight more at London’s EMI and Trident Studios, ending up with the thirty tracks selected for the double album. Table 2.1 lists songs found on various bootlegs of the Kinfauns tapes and those appearing on the White Album and other related titles, and provides information on their chronological development. That the White Album demos are known variously as the “Esher” and the “Kinfauns” tapes points to questions about their nature. Many of the recordings seem to be double-­tracked performances by the song’s composer only, with the principal artist singing and playing acoustic rhythm guitar over a practically identical recording. Thus, the tapes could well originate from each of the composers’ home studios, each bringing his batch of new songs to one or more collective singalongs-­to-­tape at Kinfauns, with most full-­group home rehearsals either not recorded or not circulating. One outlier is the demo of Harrison’s “Sour Milk Sea,” which is a full-­band arrangement; others of Harrison’s songs have keyboard as well as guitar and could still have been all his own work.5 Much birdsong on the Kinfauns tapes (especially in Lennon’s; see particularly “Dear Prudence”) suggests an outdoor setting. If they were indeed recorded (or just overdubbed) at Kinfauns, the predominance of acoustic guitars would indicate a recapturing of the natural atmosphere in which the songs had been composed in India, and also predict the sort of space in which Harrison would write “Here Comes the Sun” in the spring of 1969: Eric Clapton’s home garden. It makes sense that Harrison hosts the White Album rehearsals: whereas McCartney had risen above Lennon to lead the band through the Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour projects, it’s Harrison who led the group to India, and in his new song “Not Guilty” he expresses snide modesty about any leadership role he may be perceived to exert, and his creativity seems to be un-

56  the beatles through a glass onion Table 2.1. Sources for Substantial Audio Drafts and Finished Recordings of Beatles Compositions Appearing on, or Related to, the White Album (all dates 1968 unless given otherwise) A: Songs whose origins are known to precede the Rishikesh stay “Don’t Pass Me By”: Starr mentions in WQXI-­AM interview (April 27, 1964); McCartney busks snatches of chorus in interviews for Sydney radio (June 26, 1964) and Top Gear, BBC Radio (July 14, 1964); studio (June 5–­6, July 12, 22; edited and mixed October 11) “Piggies”: Harrison’s drafts (as early as 1966); Kinfauns demo (Kinfauns, late May); studio (September 19–­20, October 10; mixed October 11) “Cry Baby Cry”: five early Lennon sketches on piano, Mellotron and electric guitar with voice (late 1967; see Everett 1999, 166); Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (July 15 rehearsal heard on Beatles 1996; basic tracks commenced same day, with overdubs on July 15 and 17; mixed October 15) B: Rishikesh songs not appearing among Kinfauns demos “Spiritual Regeneration” (aka “Thank You Guru Dev”): Rishikesh tape of McCartney, Harrison, Donovan, and Mike Love (March 15) (see Everett 1999, 158–­59) “Dehra Dun”: Harrison’s Rishikesh song first recorded with his own band (May 26, 1970) “Wild Honey Pie”: McCartney, studio (August 20, mixed October 13) C: Songs whose first known recordings are among Kinfauns demos “Revolution”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); “Revolution 1” studio (recorded May 30–­31; June 4, 21; mixed June 25); “Revolution 9” studio (recorded May 30–­31; June 4, 6, 10, 11, 20; edited and mixed May 20, 25, August 20); “Revolution” studio (recorded July 10–­12; mixed for mono July 15, for stereo December 5, 1969) “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (June 26–­27, July 1, 23; mixed October 23) “Sexy Sadie” (originally “Maharishi”): Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (July 19, 24; August 13, 21; ad-­libbed outtakes include “Brian Epstein Blues”; mixed on August 21, October 14) “Yer Blues”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (recorded, edited, and mixed August 13–­14, 20, October 14) “Dear Prudence”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (recorded August 28–­29, mixed October 13) “I’m So Tired”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (recorded October 8, mixed October 15) “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (recorded October 8, mixed October 9) “Julia”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (two run-­throughs heard on Beatles 1991; recorded and mixed on October 13) “What’s the New Mary Jane”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); studio (recorded August 14, mixed October 14 [and later, in 1969 and 1985]) “Look at Me”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo [?]; rerecorded for John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band (1970) “[I’m Just a] Child of Nature”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May?); rehearsed on January 2, 1969; rerecorded as “Jealous Guy” on Imagine (1971) “Glass Onion”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May); studio (September 11–­13, 16; overdubbed and mixed October 10) “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demos (Kenwood, late May); studio (September 23, 25; mixed on September 26, October 15) “Mean Mr. Mustard”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May); rerecorded for Abbey Road (1969)

Children of Nature  57 “Polythene Pam”: Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Kenwood, late May); rerecorded for Abbey Road (1969) “Blackbird”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (June 11; mixed October 13) “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (July 3–­5, 8–­9, 11, 15; mixed October 12) “Mother Nature’s Son”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (August 9, 20; ad-­libbed outtakes include “Et Cetera”; mixed October 12) “Rocky Raccoon”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (August 15, mixed October 10) “Back in the U.S.S.R.”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (August 22–­23; mixed August 23, October 13) “Honey Pie”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); studio (October 1, 2, 4; mixed October 5) “Jubilee”: McCartney’s Kinfauns demo (Cavendish Ave., late May?); rerecorded as “Junk” on McCartney (1970) “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”: Harrison’s Kinfauns demo (Kinfauns, late May); studio (July 25, August 16; September 3, 5; mixed October 7) “Circles”: Harrison’s Kinfauns demo (Kinfauns, late May); rerecorded for Gone Troppo (1982) “Sour Milk Sea”: Harrison’s Kinfauns demo with electric guitar, bass, and percussion (Kinfauns, late May) “Not Guilty”: Harrison’s Kinfauns demo (Kinfauns, late May), studio (August 1, 8, 9, 12 [mixed later, in 1985]); rerecorded for George Harrison (1979) D: Songs likely postdating Kinfauns tapes “Good Night”: Lennon, studio (June 28, July 2, 22; mixed October 11) “Helter Skelter”: McCartney, studio (July 18, September 9–­10; mixed September 17, October 12) “Hey Jude”: McCartney’s Cavendish Ave. demo (done by July 26), studio (July 29–­31, August 1; mixed August 2, 8) “I Will”: McCartney, studio (September 16–­17; ad-­libbed outtakes include “Down in Havana,” “Los Paranoias,” and “The Way You Look Tonight”; mixed September 26, October 14) [“Can You Take Me Back”]: McCartney, studio (September 16) “Birthday”: McCartney, studio (September 18; mixed October 14) “Savoy Truffle”: Harrison, studio (October 3, 5, 11, 14) “Martha My Dear”: McCartney, studio (October 4–­5) “Long Long Long”: Harrison, studio (October 7–­9, mixed October 10, 14) “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”: McCartney, studio (October 9–­10, mixed October 16)

leashed in new abundance in his four tracks—­almost five—­on the 1968 collection.6 The acoustic colors of the Rishikesh and Kinfauns settings would carry through the album’s ultimate studio production in terms of engineering as well as instrumentation: “the use of phasing, varispeed and ADT fell off sharply” from the psychedelic effects of recent releases. “The echo chambers continued to see use, but there was an overall shift back” to a drier sound (Ryan and Kehew 2006, 503), which best suggests a rural lack of reverberation. Varispeed is applied most notably to “Don’t Pass Me By,” a singleton that has no ties to Rishikesh in any event.

58  the beatles through a glass onion

The Beatles’ new gift for simplicity is heard most readily in their approach to instrumental and vocal arrangement. In a Radio Luxembourg interview broadcast on November 20, 1968 (two days before the album’s release), McCartney says that for “Mother Nature’s Son,” he walked back the lavish colorings of Pepper by using fewer and simpler instruments; he says they “tried to play more like a band this time,” with fewer overdubs. Perhaps thinking of how “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” had first been taped with acoustic guitar and piano (which were only to be overcome by exotic organs, tamboura, processed guitars, and speed-­altered vocals—­ nearly to the point that the basic track was inaudible), McCartney said a year later that “we decided not to try to cover them up like we might do normally and just use the acoustic guitar instead of say a piano, or electric guitar” on top (Beatles 1999b, disc 3). Although true in many cases, these statements include four ironies: (1) “Mother Nature’s Son” is given a brass-­ensemble overdub; (2) anomalies like “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “Revolution 9,” and “Good Night” are the furthest things from group performance the Beatles ever recorded; (3) at least fourteen White Album tracks feature overdubbed keyboards (piano, organ, harmonium, harpsichord, and Mellotron); and (4) each composing Beatle was laying down basic tracks to his own songs in various tracking rooms, often simultaneously, and then serving as superimposed sideman on others’ songs. In his interview with Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone, Lennon said of the White Album, “All you experts listen. None of you can hear. Every track on that album is an individual track; there isn’t any Beatle music on it. It was John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band. It was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group” (Wenner 1971, 88). Given their growing distance, it is not happenstance that, not long after the album’s release, Lennon and McCartney had such different memories of the intent and process. The concept for “Mother Nature’s Son,” written in India, came from a lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In February 1967, Harrison’s wife, Pattie, joined the Spiritual Regeneration Movement (Everett 1999, 129), overseen by the Maharishi, whose standard invocation was “Jai Guru Deva Om” (Gould 2007, 462), which forms the chorus of Lennon’s “Across the Universe.” This song was recorded in February 1968, but not as part of the White Album project. (Nor were the contemporaneous “Lady Madonna,” “Hey Bulldog,” and “The Inner Light,” the last of which included recordings made in Mumbai along with Harrison’s soundtrack work for the film Wonderwall.) When the Maharishi scheduled a lecture in London in August 1967, the Harrisons roused Lennon and Starr to attend

Children of Nature  59

it with them, and they became so enamored of him so quickly that the entire group followed the Maharishi immediately to Bangor for further indoctrination. As Lennon told Playboy in one of his final interviews, the London talk inspired not only “Mother Nature’s Son,” but also Lennon’s own draft from India, “Child of Nature” (also known as “On the Road to Rishikesh,” and performed in January 1969 by that title), which later became “Jealous Guy,” released in 1971 on Imagine.7 The two known songs composed in India that most openly reflect the band’s spiritual mission were not developed for the White Album. “Circles,” whose last lines relate to reincarnation, did not see release until 1982. “Dehra Dun,” named for the state capital of Uttarakhand, which includes Rishikesh, is a communal chant celebrating enlightenment not unlike the Hare Krishna mantra that Harrison recorded as a single in July 1969, his “Govinda Jai Jai” and “Gopala Krishna” (both 1970; see also O. Harrison 2011, 240), or indeed the coda of his worldwide number one hit, “My Sweet Lord,” recorded in mid-­1970. Harrison played “Dehra Dun” on May 26, 1970, to open the All Things Must Pass sessions (Winn 2005, reel E97537); officially unreleased, it is heard on Beatles 2014. “Mother Nature’s Son” is more subtle in its spirituality. Its core idea is fleshed out in the Maharishi’s 1963 book on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation, Science of Being and Art of Living, in which the practice is said to lead one to the natural joyful state of bliss, innocence, and simplicity. Perhaps the book’s most relevant sentence is as follows: “When one has submitted oneself in this manner to the almighty power of Mother Nature, then one is the loving, submissive and obedient child who will certainly enjoy all the power of the divine.”8 Other back-­to-­ nature emblems of this time include (1) McCartney’s humble December 1967 furnishing of his wild farm on the Mull of Kintyre; (2) discoveries of the simple philosophy of the Tao Te Ching (in a book given to Harrison in November 1967), which texts were to turn up in lyrics for “The Inner Light” and “All Things Must Pass,” and of Kahlil Gibran, whose lines were borrowed for “Julia”; and (3) the band’s hearing for the first time in Rishikesh Bob Dylan’s retro-­acoustic album, John Wesley Harding (rel. December 1967). Jonathan Gould thus proposes that the Beatles “seemed to feel that their next album should be a kind of formal antithesis to Sgt. Pepper, on which production and arranging would be downplayed in favor of the sort of raw, unadorned sound that Bob Dylan had used to such startling effect on John Wesley Harding, [hailed] as a much-­needed musical antidote to the excesses of acid rock” (2007, 489).

60  the beatles through a glass onion

It was also at this time that John Lennon intensified his career as destroyer of myths; his quest for direct truth, warts and all, led him to conceive of the rush-­released oracle, whether it be a statement about revolution (invoking the conceptual Dada work of his new soul mate, Yoko Ono, transcendental in its own way), an album cover of Edenic innocence offering his and Ono’s full-­frontal nudity, or musical installments of des actualités in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Instant Karma.” It was Lennon who a year later would want the album of “Get Back” material (eventually, Let It Be) presented without gimmicks, without overdubbed sweetening and edits, as a true document of the Beatles at work. The Beatles was a major step along the way toward Lennon’s vision of the group au naturel in a back-­to-­the-­ womb yearning he would attain most closely in “Mother” (1970), perhaps his response to McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son” as well as to the figure of “Mother Mary” referred to in “Let It Be.” Still, Lennon is abTable 2.2. Best-­Known Sources of All Key White Album Recordings (including studio-­floor discussions) and Mixes Abbey Road Tape, vol. 1 (2001): EMI studio work Another Sessions . . . Plus (1999): EMI studio work Anthology VHS (1996) and DVD (2003) sets: EMI and Trident studio work Anthology 3 (1996): four of Lennon’s Esher demos; EMI studio work Arrive Without Aging (1991): “Cry Baby Cry” Kenwood sketches The Beatles (1968): EMI mono and stereo releases of EMI and Trident studio work (Giles Martin’s 5.1-­channel Ogg Vorbis stems [2009] for Rock Band are available for “Birthday,” “Revolution,” “Dear Prudence,” “Helter Skelter,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) The Beatles, 1967–­1970 (1973): EMI and Trident studio work The Beatles at Abbey Road (1983): EMI studio work Complete Controlroom Monitor Mixes, vols. 1 and 2 (2002): EMI studio work Down in Havana (2000): EMI studio work EMI Outtakes (1974): EMI studio work From Kinfauns to Chaos (1999): most Esher tapes; EMI studio work on “Revolution” Gone Tomorrow, Here Today (1997): EMI and Trident studio work “Hey Jude”/“Revolution” single (1968): EMI and Trident studio work Mythology, Vol. 3 (1999): EMI and Trident studio work The Peter Sellers Tape (1993): EMI studio work Primal Colours (1995): EMI studio work Rarities (1980): EMI studio work Revolution (1994): EMI studio work on “Revolution” series Strawberry Fields Forever (1985): Rishikesh performances of March 15 Unsurpassed Masters, vol. 4 (1990): EMI studio work Unsurpassed Masters, vol. 6 (1991): EMI studio work “What a Shame Mary Jane Had a Pain at the Party” 12″ single (1980): EMI studio work White Sessions (1998): Trident studio work

Children of Nature  61

struse in “Glass Onion,” particularly in the wacky gibberish abandoned after the song’s Kinfauns demo, but also in the odd verses and complex harmonies that hide meanings in layers of riddles. The opening verse of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “she’s not a girl who misses much,” is similarly suggestive yet opaque. His mutterings grafted onto the ending of “I’m So Tired” became the prime motivation for fans listening to Beatle records backward, and thus for the “Paul Is Dead” theory. Lennon continued to be nature-­bound yet enigmatic through the remainder of the Beatles’ work together. Many available recordings allow us to trace changes to the composition and arrangement of White Album songs from home demos to the rehearsals, outtakes, and preliminary mixes of studio work. While an exhaustive study is not possible here, I’ll present many of the sorts of revisions that occurred in arrangement, lyrics, tonality, harmony, melody, rhythm, formal structure, and engineering as the album’s tracks took shape.9 Table 2.2 lists the primary sources for recordings auditioned for this chapter.

Arrangement It’s hard to imagine “Blackbird” with a setting other than a single vocal line and acoustic guitar. In fact, throughout the group’s career, that’s the way many, if not most, Beatle songs were brought to the studio and were first demonstrated to George Martin, who would then work with the Beatles to create a group arrangement and perhaps add outside players as well. In the studio, McCartney is heard suggesting to Martin that for “Blackbird,” a string quartet might enter after the second verse; the producer agrees (“it does want something like that”) and adds that he had thought “in that stop bit, there should be something coming from a distance, an arranged sound, coming from a distance” (Beatles 1997). Perhaps this function was later fulfilled by the chirping birdsong. Preliminary takes show Lennon trying a countermelody for “Blackbird” on a second acoustic guitar (see example 1) and then hunting for an accompaniment in various rhythmically placed first scale degrees on piano, all for nought (all heard on Beatles 1997). Ultimately, McCartney was to tell an interviewer on the eve of the album’s release why “Blackbird” ended up so spare: “it’s simple in concept, because we couldn’t think of anything else to put on it” (Beatles 1999b, disc 3). Conversely, whereas “Mother Nature’s Son” might have remained a

62  the beatles through a glass onion

Figure 2.1. “Blackbird” outtake

simple acoustic-­guitar number, a mellow brass quartet warms the pastoral texture. This was Lennon’s idea. Inspired by euphoniums in a recent release by Harry Nilsson, he announced the notion from the control room to McCartney (down on the studio floor) via a talkback microphone. Thinking of the arrangement for “She’s Leaving Home” on Nilsson’s album Pandemonium Shadow Show (rel. December 1967), Lennon is heard to suggest “in the distance a little bit of brass band, a little bit of Nilsson’s brass band.” McCartney responds, “yes, that’d be lovely . . . that would be nice with a brass—­like four-­cornered euphonium, just a little” (Beatles 1997). Not only did the Beatles add a Martin-­arranged brass setting, but in the released track’s closing moments, a simple descending major scale is detectable in an overdubbed guitar not present in an alternate mono mix (RM8) and heard in the dub given away to Peter Sellers (Beatles 1993c). In a studio run-­through of “I’m So Tired,” as included on the third volume of the Anthology (Beatles 1996), Harrison plays a guitar idea that was scrapped but reappears only slightly differently a year later on “Octopus’s Garden.” In addition to the brass in “Mother Nature’s Son,” Martin recorded Chris Thomas’s parts for a six-­saxophone track for “Savoy Truffle,” and his own woodwind parts for “Honey Pie,” trumpets and trombones for “Revolution 1,” a double string quartet for “Piggies” and “Glass Onion,” both strings and brass for “Martha My Dear,” and a full orchestra for “Good Night.” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” and “Mother Nature’s Son” harken back to the natural outdoors rather obviously through their subdued acoustic instrumentations. But the Beatles’ electric arsenal was augmented in 1968 with new Gibson and Fender guitars featured in “Birthday,” “Yer Blues,” “Helter Skelter,” “Glass Onion,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” “Savoy Truffle,” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Nature could be powerful as well as quiet; blues-­based rock ’n’ roll was “real, not a concept” for Lennon, and the White Album had the Beatles rocking as hard as ever on the six tracks just mentioned.10 Beatle enthu-

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siasts know January 1969 as the Get Back month, for a project in which Lennon and McCartney wanted to return to their live-­performing, rock ’n’ roll, Cavern-­and-­Hamburg roots. But such a seed had been planted in pop radio of early 1968 by a rock ’n’ roll revival that led off with “Lady Madonna” and went on to resuscitate original recordings of Gene Vincent’s “Be-­Bop-­A-­Lula,” Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” and Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly,” all of which returned like cicadas after a ten-­year absence to the British charts that spring and summer. Primitive qualities in February’s “Lady Madonna” and in “Hey Bulldog” also fit Lennon’s drive for gut-­level realism. But of all the rock-­band White Album tracks mentioned above, only the elemental “Yer Blues” was given no instrumental overdubs. Harrison’s friendship with one of music’s hardest-­rocking guitarists, Eric Clapton, led to this giant’s searing contribution to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and to the Beatle’s acquisition of a new Les Paul that would lend a hard, bluesy edge to many late group tracks. It’s rewarding to trace the development of new lines for bass, guitar, and piano in the White Album’s hardest-­rocking songs (particularly those played on the new Fender equipment: the Jazz Bass, the Bass VI, and two Telecasters). Although McCartney would typically add highly creative keyboard parts to Lennon songs, as in “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Lucy in the Sky,” and “Sexy Sadie,” he blossomed on his bass in overdubs to Harrison songs such as “Something,” “Old Brown Shoe,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” That last song, like McCartney’s “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” required several remakes of basic tracks before a proper arrangement was agreed upon. This song is among several White Album tracks for which we have tapes monitoring preliminary mixing sessions, often showcasing “Easter egg” material present on four-­and eight-­track working tapes that would later be replaced (and otherwise lost), or simply muted out of released mixes. In one mixing session (Beatles 2002), an early attempt at a bass line for “Weeps” can be heard; it sounds like something Lennon might have played on the Bass VI (on September 5), before McCartney was to devise his celestial bass melody (recorded the next day along with Clapton’s solo, probably erasing Lennon’s early attempt). As another example of documents showing how songs could change during the recording process, take 4 of “Ob-­La-­Di” (heard on Beatles 1991a) is centered on acoustic guitar strumming and hand percussion much more in line with the ska feel the Beatles later credited (otherwise inscrutably) for the song’s inspiration.

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One of the Beatles’ simplest constructions ever, “Rocky Raccoon,” is a rarity in having as its basis an endlessly repeated, never relieved, four-­chord loop. Set in a nineteenth-­century western saloon, this India composition might well be a direct answer to John Wesley Harding. While the recording backs McCartney’s acoustic guitar with a rhythm section (simple bass and drum parts) and backing vocals, it also features a harmonica, harmonium, and tack piano (this last recorded at half speed by Martin), all redolent of the gin-­mill setting, plus an overdubbed snare to mark the single gunshot.

Lyrics It is not remarkable that eight Kinfauns demos (such as those for “Revolution,” “Glass Onion,” and “Rocky Raccoon”) lack verses heard in released recordings, or that others include lyrics that were altered later; since their earliest days, the Beatles routinely changed or added lyrics to each other’s songs in the studio. So Lennon changes Harrison’s original “pork chops” (heard in the Kinsfauns tape) to “bacon” in “Piggies.” McCartney polished “Honey Pie” by adding the “weak in the knee” line after it was sung at Kinfauns. In fact, lyrics would change throughout a song’s development: the title of the White Album’s opening track began life as “I’m Backing the U.S.S.R.,” but took its final form before the group left India. A discarded final verse of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (“I look from the wings of the play you are staging . . .”) is among a number of the manuscript’s later-­altered lines (G. Harrison 1980, 121–­ 22) heard in audio performances surfacing among Kinfauns demos and on the shelved project Sessions (Beatles 1993d). The verse was cut amid studio takes. More remarkable is the fact that one line appearing in the finale of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (“when I hold you in my arms”) had originally been part of an Elvis-­like spoken verse in “I’m So Tired” (Beatles 1999a). Sometimes an inadvertent error is deemed inspired: from early performances (Beatles 1991a), we know that Desmond and Molly originally represented more predictable genders than those finalized on the White Album. While taping “Sexy Sadie” at EMI, Lennon shares the song’s original malevolent intent (“Maharishi, .  .  .  who the fuck you think you are?”—­heard on Beatles 2002; see also Winn 2005, reel E106141, July 19, 1968).

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Tonality, Harmony, and Melody In terms of tonality, several songs were transposed from one key to another, either to accommodate a new vocal melody, as when “Me and My Monkey” was taken from its original A major to D, or to attain a faster tempo, as when the tape of the same song was sped up from D to E. A capo brought C-­major fingerpicking in “Julia” to E♭ major for at least one draft, and ultimately to D major, where Lennon’s voice settled in just right.11 George Martin left perhaps his most indelible fingerprints on a Beatles track in “Good Night”—­not only its orchestration, but also the baroque chromatic harmonic sequence written into the instrumental passage just prior to the final verse. Much more understated were most melodic modifications wrought by a song’s composer through the composing process. “Julia” furnishes one such example: as shown in example 2a, Lennon’s Kinfauns demo (Beatles 1993a) includes vocal ornamentation in the returning motto and third verse that would be simplified for the definitive version, excerpted in example 2b.12

Figure 2.2. “Julia”: (a) compositional draft (b) released version

Throughout the Beatles’ career, alterations to chord changes would frequently occur early in a song’s conception. In a 2006 video, McCartney and classical guitarist Carlos Bonell demonstrate how the opening parallel tenths of “Blackbird” were adapted from a misheard Bach lute piece that McCartney and Harrison played at parties c. 1963–­64 (Bramwell 2006). Example 3a shows the opening of the Bach original, 3b as played by McCartney, and 3c as recomposed in “Blackbird.” In other songs, individual chords were changed to alter colors later in a song’s history. Instances from Lennon include Kinfauns drafts of both “Sexy Sadie” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” that contain chords for which substitutes were later made. It’s likely that, in the bridge

66  the beatles through a glass onion

Figure 2.3. Evolution of “Blackbird” opening: (a) Bach Bourée, Suite in E minor, BWV 996 (b) McCartney’s 2006 demonstration of his mishearing of Bach (c) released version

of “Sadie” as well as in earlier cases (“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” among them), McCartney smoothed out Lennon’s original progression. Whereas John plays a Lennonesque chord succession, G–­E minor–­B minor–­C major in the Kinfauns demo (see, e.g., the opening of “Across the Universe”), this becomes a smoother G–­A minor–­B minor–­C major passage (which also better supports the A sung over the second chord) in an EMI rehearsal take (Beatles 1996) and in the final version. Not only is this progression featured in the same key in McCartney’s “Here, There and Everywhere,” but as further evidence, McCartney can be heard working through different chord combinations on piano and Pianet in various takes of “Sadie” (Beatles 2002), settling on the A-­minor chord by the third verse of the Anthology 3 take. In “Bungalow Bill,” in the phrase-­ending that accompanies the line characterizing the “Saxon mother’s son” Lennon’s harsh A major to F minor succession (Kinfauns), in which each of the three triadic pitches moves a half step between chords, is rewritten at EMI as A minor to F minor: two chords joined by a common tone, C. (Note how the resulting progression at “Saxon mother’s son” rhymes with the same harmonic and vocal idea as transposed for the phrase ending, “fix myself a drink” in “I’m So Tired.”) Similarly, at the end of the bridge of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Harrison gives up a dissonant augmented triad

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he’d originally played on harmonium (Kinfauns), to substitute a gentler major triad for the released master. The results of all of these examples were smoothed out quite a bit, made less garish and more natural.

Rhythm The Beatles brought many rhythmic improvements to songs in the course of the White Album’s evolution through simplifying ideas that had been overly complicated. Listen to the complex meter with which “Cry Baby Cry” ends in the Kinfauns demo; there is little perceptible regularity in the numbers of beats. Each line has an odd seven bars of triple meter, for a pattern that repeats only every twenty-­one beats. The released pattern, repeating every fourteen beats, is still unusual but a bit more easily appreciable. An alteration to meter was necessary to take “Bungalow Bill” from demo to studio track: for a singalong at Kinfauns, each two-­phrase chorus had an irregular metric pattern, with bars of 4 + 4 + 5 beats, then 4 + 4 + 4 beats. With everyone clapping backbeats in the final chorus, the “extra” fifth beat led to confusion, with singers uncertain where to enter for the second phrase. As an aid, Lennon adjusted the phrasing to 4 + 4 + 6, 4 + 4 + 4 in the studio, permitting an uninterrupted flow of strong and weak beats. In the studio, McCartney adds a measure to extend the deceptive cadence that had graced the end of the “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­ Da” Kinfauns demo. Irregular rhythms of nonsense gibberish in multiple voices bring the second and third verses of “Glass Onion” to a dead stop in the Kinfauns demo; the third verse slows suddenly and radically from 112 beats per minute to 80; none of these disorienting effects survives to the odd-­enough final recording. In only a very few other cases, complexity crept into a previously simpler rhythmic structure as arrangements took shape in the studio. One such example is the introduction to “Me and My Monkey,” which lacks the inscrutable syncopated guitar chords that distinguish the song’s introduction and that were incorporated only after Kinfauns play-­ throughs. One of the most compelling moments of “Yer Blues” comes when Lennon leads his mates from a slow driving dirge into a moderate rock ’n’ roll shuffle (after “even hate my rock and roll”). But the shuffle had made no appearance in the Kinfauns performance. Changes in tempo from original to final conception are occasional: “Sexy Sadie” speeds up over the months, but “Ob-­La-­Di” slows down.13

68  the beatles through a glass onion

Formal Structure Right from 1962, the formal structure of many Beatles songs took shape during home and studio sessions, when they would rearrange verses, insert transitional vamps and entire bridges between sections, and—­ frequently—­add intros or codas. So the introductory guitar tattoo and transitions of “Blackbird” were devised gradually in the studio (Beatles 1997). The two opening bars of “Mother Nature’s Son” were still not present as of take 2 (Beatles 1996). The Kinfauns tape of “Julia” (Beatles 1999a) reveals that sections were reordered at a later time. Sometimes passages originally intended for one song were transferred to another. One idea apparently conceived as part of “Cry Baby Cry” (aside from the line that, we’ve already noted, ends up in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”) was used for “Across the Universe”: the chant, “Jai Guru Deva Om,” leads directly into the chorus of “Cry Baby Cry” in piano demos recorded in late 1967 (Beatles 1993b). Such cannibalization is notable in many of Lennon’s home demos, right through his work of 1980. By 1968, the Beatles often ended their performances with long jams; “Hey Jude” retained its superlong coda, but “Something” lost its similar repetitious free-­form ending. The original mono master of “Sexy Sadie” (RM5) ended with a largely instrumental jam, most of which was excised before release. Listeners would recognize the beginning and ending of this passage (as heard on Beatles 1993c), but most have probably never heard the middle part (beginning at 2:57 in RM5), which was edited out of the released master. (No ending had been worked out for the Kinfauns demo of “Sadie,” which concludes uneasily on a tonic added-­ sixth chord.)14 The Beatles also limited their compositions in ways other than such edits. For “Blackbird,” Martin asked McCartney to record a demo so he could study the song and consider expanding it. Lennon disagreed with the premise and wanted the structure to stay just as it is: “it’s a minute long, that’s enough . . . it doesn’t get boring then” (Beatles 1997). The final take clocks in at a modest 2′18″, a jewel-­like miniature. It had been common for the Beatles to bring a song’s core ideas into the studio, only to have Martin create an introduction. A few years later, they got pretty good at this on their own, but the perfect intro was still often elusive in writing the White Album songs. The half-­spoken, half-­ sung intonation with which McCartney opens “Rocky Raccoon” (“Now somewhere in the Black mountain Hills of Dakota . . .”) was not present at Kinfauns. Similarly, his “Honey Pie” as released gets much of its charm from the stanza-­tempo opening (“She was a working girl . . .”). This passage was an afterthought, as we learn from the bare-­bones Kinfauns tape

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of four months previous. Not only was the slow intro nowhere to be heard in the May run-­through, but McCartney began then with a line (“Aw, Honey Pie, my position is tragic . . .”) that he found worked much better at a later point in the final lyric. It’s conceivable that the period-­ correct slow-­intro approach (not used in “Good Day Sunshine,” “When I’m Sixty-­Four,” or “Your Mother Should Know”—­McCartney’s obligatory and self-­distancing music-­hall tunes for prior Beatles projects) was inspired by the very parallel intro to Nilsson’s “Little Cowboy,” which appeared on the album Aerial Ballet, released in July 1968—­between the recordings of the Kinfauns demo and the “Honey Pie” studio work of October. In an early home recording, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” lacks both its obscurantist, cold-­opening “she’s not a girl who misses much” verses and its final title-­bearing doo-­wop passage. Numerous experiments for a spoken intro by Ringo for “Good Night” were ultimately scrapped for a simple six-­bar orchestral lead-­in. Substitute producer Chris Thomas added the odd Mellotron-­based beginnings and endings of “Bungalow Bill.” Similarly, “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Glass Onion” were all packaged with appropriate new endings worked out in the studio.

Engineering Just as song styles vary widely on the White Album, so does the sonic landscape. While heavy reverb is indeed not characteristic of the album overall, the drums in “Mother Nature’s Son” (played in a hallway), piano in “Sexy Sadie,” and vocals for bridges of “Yer Blues” (as at 1:01+) are far from dry. A very unnatural overdriven acoustic guitar sound is heard in “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” (Lewisohn 1988, 11). In an online video, Andrew Lubman demonstrates how engineer Ken Scott manipulated the discrete three-­way “tone selector” switch on a Vox Conqueror amp to give the piano part in “Birthday” very strange filter changes, particularly noticeable in the fade-­out (Lubman 2012). This is not the place to discuss some key aspects of White Album engineering; the many differences between mono and stereo mixes are covered elsewhere and relate to final, not original, compositional decisions.15 Whereas it would be appropriate to discuss the interwoven origins of “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9,” a proper examination would require a chapter of its own. But some aspects of this topic work against the back-­to-­nature thesis: Foley-­like effects—­jets panning between speakers as the album’s opening salvo, suggestions of a tea in “Cry Baby Cry,” 78-­r.p.m. shellac surface noise in “Honey Pie,” hog grunts in “Piggies”—­ may range from bucolic to jet age, yet they all remain artificial simulacra,

70  the beatles through a glass onion

and thus far from natural. Perhaps better to set up “Revolution 9,” we know that a number of incongruous and quite unnatural effects were muted from the released mixes of “Glass Onion” (they are heard in take 2; Beatles 1996). While some sounds do not sound natural, perhaps one could argue that the Beatles satisfied a different sort of authenticity by including everything under the sun. So the Beatles employed more than a touch of craft in this back-­to-­ nature project. In many other ways, though, they convey their message absolutely directly—­through the simply repeated pitches of Lennon’s vocal melody in “Julia”; in the long-­sustained drones of “Dear Prudence”; through the pleading for peace of mind in “I’m So Tired”; via the childlike request, “won’t you come out to play?” as Desmond and Molly’s kids run in the yard with unflagging joy, for a lark; and with the straightforward suggestion that we do it in the road. The group’s rebirth with an innocent new purpose that embraces authenticity does not stray from an ethic always notably plumb true, but it brings an emphasis on the acoustic not heard since Rubber Soul and sets the stage for the unvarnished bar band of Let It Be. Whereas the multiply overdubbed Abbey Road—­an electronic marvel—­would never be considered simple, it has an antipsychedelic realism at its core that never could have been possible without the Beatles’ having wiped the slate clean as they did with the White Album. Gee, it’s good to be back home! Notes 1. A brief version of this essay was presented at Skidmore College in 2008. 2. Still, one of Brian Epstein’s last wishes as Beatle manager was that Pepper be marketed in a plain brown paper bag, an idea not realized until Lennon and Ono’s November 1968 release of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. 3. In its way, this progression from drab past to future promise is another instance of the waxworks-­to-­rainbow representation of the eight Beatles posing for the Pepper cover. 4. John Winn (2003, 184) identifies the tapes’ sources as both Kinfauns and Lennon’s Surrey home, Kenwood. 5. The Kinfauns demo of the Rishikesh song “Sour Milk Sea” features acoustic and electric guitars, bass, Harrison’s double-­tracked vocal, tambourine, maracas, and conga-­like percussion. After the performance ends, Harrison and Lennon can be heard talking briefly; the track is heard on Beatles 1999a. Later, on June 26, 1968, Harrison (on rhythm guitar), McCartney (bass), and Starr (drums), along with Eric Clapton (lead guitar) and Nicky Hopkins (piano), recorded the track for singer Jackie Lomax. “Sour Milk Sea” was among a small group of songs with which Harrison (perhaps considering his own release of the

Children of Nature  71 composition) warmed up his own band on June 26, 1970, to begin sessions for All Things Must Pass. See notes on the John Barrett cassettes in Winn 2005. 6. In the last song dropped from the album, Harrison sings “Not guilty for leading you astray on the road to Mandalay,” citing the major Buddhist center in coyly adapting a line from Kipling that romanticizes British colonial misadventure in India. 7. Lennon’s quotations are found in Golson 1981b, 210. “Child of Nature” is also known by its first line, “On the Road to Rishikesh,” which itself is a trope of the refrain in Kipling’s poem, “Mandalay.” Perhaps Harrison’s “Not Guilty” is actually a reference to Lennon’s song rather than to Kipling’s poem. The Marrakesh version was aired on January 2 and 24, 1969, in various “Get Back”-­era bootlegs. 8. Maharishi 1963, 80. Another statement, “Any unnatural manner of behavior only strains the mind, but when one behaves innocently and naturally on all levels the stream of life flows smoothly and in accord with the laws of nature” (99), chimes with “Within You Without You” (“life flows on . . .”). Pattie Harrison can be credited for George’s and the Beatles’ growing interest in this area, which began with his sitar playing and carried through the appearance of gurus’ images on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. 9. For further details, see Everett 1999; Everett-­Riley forthcoming; and Winn 2003 and 2005. 10. Quotations are from Wenner 1971, 78; see also Gould 2007, 522–­23. Lennon channels Plato here—­he says blues “is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair or a bigger chair or a chair with leather or with design”—­and in doing so, he gets back to the spiritually innate as well as to primordial basics. 11. Lennon’s fingerpicking in “Julia” and “Look at Me” was in a style Donovan taught him in Rishikesh. See chapter 3 in this volume for details about this style and the Beatles’ adoption of it. 12. Naturally, the live demo does not include the overlaps of Lennon’s superimposed vocals that give the final recording such a surreal quality. The term “motto,” as defined in Everett 2009a, 151, is a short phrasal unit not part of a verse, chorus, or bridge “that may reappear as if to bring the song back into focus [or] to make it seem as if we are off to a fresh start.” 13. McCartney performs the Kinfauns demo at 120 beats per minute. The version released on the White Album begins at 114, but settles into a tempo of 110 bpm. The change here is due to Lennon’s impatient frustration at McCartney’s insistence that they work on the track repeatedly. (This story is recounted in Lewisohn 1988, 141, and repeated in Emerick 2006, 247.) An intermediary performance, take 4 (heard on Beatles 1991b), is played at 124 bpm. Complicating these tempos is the possibility of tape-­speed adjustment, but because the two earlier versions sound in A major and the released version in B♭, it’s most likely that the disparity is even greater than noted here, the earlier performances being faster still. 14. I compare the hypermetrical playfulness in the eventual coda of “Sadie” to that of “Because” in Everett 2009, 195–­97. 15. The White Album’s many differences between mono and stereo masters are discussed in Lewisohn 1988; Everett 1999; and Winn 2003 and 2005.

three | Beatles Unplugged The White Album in the Shadow of Rishikesh john kimsey

In late May 1968, the Beatles gathered at George Harrison’s house, Kinfauns, in the London suburb of Esher, to record demos of songs written during their stay at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in the Himalayas, a sojourn that began in mid-­February and ended, rather abruptly, in early April.1 Accompanying their vocals with acoustic guitars augmented only by occasional harmonium and hand percussion, they taped twenty-­three songs on Harrison’s four-­track Ampex recorder (Lewisohn 1992, 283). Most of those songs ended up on the White Album, and the tape documents the only time in their career when the Beatles systematically demoed so much material. Moreover, the copious quantity of material speaks to the fruitfulness of their stay at the ashram. Whatever else it may have been, Rishikesh proved an incubator of Beatles music. In John Lennon’s recollection, “We got our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all those songs” (Beatles 2000, 305). The trip to India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi is enshrined in Beatles lore.2 The film version of the Anthology paints it as a scene from Lost Horizon—­beleaguered Westerners shedding their burdens in a transporting encounter with the mystic East, a construction shaped by romantic discourses of pastoral and by the Orientalist trope, described by Edward Said, in which “the East” provides the West with “deliverance” so as to “release the spirit” (1979, 257). Accounts from fellow attendees at the retreat, such as those of 72

Beatles Unplugged  73

Paul Saltzmann and Paul Horn, paint its effect on the Beatles as salutary (Saltzmann 2000; Lapham 2005).3 But alongside such glowing appraisals—­all from current or onetime followers of the Maharishi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement—­Beatles fans are familiar with another take on the experience, one voiced by Lennon in later years and underscored by reporter (and attendee) Lewis Lapham as well as by commentators such as Ian MacDonald, who frames the Rishikesh trip as a frivolous dalliance on the part of “pampered recluses” (1998, 286), another in a string of hiccups, beginning with Magical Mystery Tour, continuing with the Apple Ltd. fiasco and ending with Let It Be, in which the band sputters to a dispirited stop. The commonplace view of the White Album as portent of the band’s dissolution (individual composers working in separate studios simultaneously; Ringo briefly resigning; Geoff Emerick leaving in a huff, fed up with the band’s bickering) fits this tale of slow decline. Yet taken as musical evidence of the band’s Rishikesh experience, the Kinfauns demos exude lighthearted camaraderie and artistic promise. Moreover, if, as in another commonplace reading, the Beatles’ career constitutes a quest in which the four lads from Liverpool represent a generation of seekers, then Rishikesh signifies a major step in the Beatles’ engagement with things “Indian” and “spiritual.” For all these reasons, what Harrison called “the world-famous ‘Beatles in the Himalayas sketch’” is worthy of close attention (Beatles 2000, 286). This chapter examines the Beatles’ stay in the Himalayas by looking at how it influenced their music-­making, how it infuses the narrative of the band’s “disillusioned fall” (Ebert 2002, 218), and how it was informed by Orientalist discourse.

The Beatles Unplugged A bootleg CD has circulated since 1995 titled The Beatles Unplugged that features the Kinfauns demos along with two more “party” tracks recorded in Rishikesh by the Beatles and fellow TM students.4 Applied to Beatles music, “unplugged” is an anachronism, the term not becoming widespread until MTV’s Unplugged series debuted in 1989. Yet the term highlights the loose, homey feel of the demo session as well as the fact that the sound is dominated by the Martin D28 steel string acoustic guitar, three of which the Beatles purchased in preparation for the India trip (Everett 1999, 301). Indeed, the Beatles went on an electronic fast at the ashram, those Martin dreadnoughts being the only instruments they carried to Rishikesh. Along with this emphasis on acoustic guitar

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comes an emphasis on acoustic guitar technique—­that is, fingerstyle approaches that eschew use of a plectrum—­that is new to Beatles music. “Julia” and “Blackbird,” to name two such tracks, feature their respective authors solo, accompanying themselves with deft fingerpicking in the manner of a folk singer-­songwriter such as Tom Paxton or Bert Jansch. Beatles music had featured the acoustic guitar before, of course, but those guitars were always strummed, typically with the picking hand holding a plectrum. On the White Album, fingerstyle acoustic comes, for the first time, to the fore in Beatles music.

“Tone’s in Your Fingers” For some guitarists, playing fingerstyle means getting closer to the source: “Tone’s in your fingers, so I’m told. Why introduce an extra factor into the equation? Your fingers are far more sensitive than a plec—­it only deadens the feeling, and adds ever-­so-­slightly to the reaction time between your brain and your fingers.” So writes Vic Lewis at his blog Guitar Noise, in a post titled “Why I Don’t Use a Plectrum” (2017). Lewis’s concern about mediation is familiar to rock listeners. According to Keir Keightley, the worry that excessive mediation might interfere with the “ideal of direct communication between artist and audience” is central to the Romantic conception of authenticity that informs much rock discourse (2001, 133). Noting the apparent contradiction that a music so commercialized and mass-­mediated should inspire a discourse of musical “honesty” and “rootedness,” Keightley traces this obsession partly to the urban “folk” movement that flourished outside the mainstream record industry in the 1950s and early 1960s, primarily on or around college campuses and in bohemian enclaves such as Greenwich Village (2001, 120–­21). Prominent in the audience for the mid-­60s music called “rock” (as opposed to rock ’n’ roll or pop) were youth (this term replacing the earlier “teen”) who had been members of the audience for that genuinely non-­commercial—­if also genuinely nonrural—­folk music of the 1950s college set. They carried the musical values of folk into the new culture of rock. Though noted for its cheeky pastiches and postmodern sprawl, The Beatles is sprinkled with tracks that evoke an ethos of intimacy, sincerity and contemplative quietude commonly associated, then and now, with the categories “folk” and “singer-­songwriter.” In fact, this unplugged version of the Beatles appeared just as the singer-­songwriter movement, exemplified by figures such as Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, was getting

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underway. Consider that Taylor’s first LP was on Apple and came out just two weeks after the White Album. Moreover, Taylor’s signing to Apple was strongly encouraged by Paul McCartney, who played bass on the singer’s debut. (In addition, Harrison borrowed a line from Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” for his breakout ballad “Something,” in 1969.) In the 1970s, former Apple executive Peter Asher went on to produce Taylor and other artists associated with Los Angeles’s singer-­songwriter scene. Crosby, Stills & Nash are noteworthy in this regard, as they auditioned for Apple in 1968 before ultimately signing with Atlantic. Indeed, a staple of the trio’s early performances was a version of “Blackbird” rendered in three-­part harmony and accompanied by Stephen Stills’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Moreover, the stance adopted by Crosby, Stills & Nash (and later Young) toward being in a band—­that they were individual singer-­songwriters who simply agreed to accompany each other—­ recalls Beatles lore, mentioned earlier, about how Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison functioned in making the White Album. Informed by the Romantic version of rock authenticity—­in particular, its allergy to artifice—­the singer-­songwriter aesthetic privileged, alongside acoustic guitars and fingerpicking, a supposedly intimate connection between the artist’s material and her personal experience that came to be called “confessional” (Crowe 1979). This quality is well captured in David Crosby’s spoken introduction to the song “Triad” on CSNY’s 1971 live album 4 Way Street: “We write a lot of our songs just right out of what goes on . . . to us. About the people that we love and stuff and things that happen to us . . .’cause . . . that’s what you have to write about if you’re gonna get down to stuff that means anything to you” (Crosby 1971). Under the heading “Genres: History: The Singer/Songwriter,” the BMI website articulates the ethos as follows: When a song is both written and performed by the same person, audiences assume that the material comes from the heart; that it emerges from the person’s own experience. A certain transparence is inferred such that the audience believes a singer/songwriter has cast aside any impediments to their thoughts and feelings and put into words their honest and authentic point of view. . . . [Artistic] possibilities remain . . . when expression is stripped to its essentials: one performer, a set of words, a haunting melody and an acoustic guitar. (BMI 2016)

Circa the Plastic Ono Band project, Lennon and Ono gave voice to a similarly subjectivist ideology, and that first Lennon solo LP epitomizes the

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confessional lyrical approach as well as the musical minimalism meant to lend it gravitas. Yet both the Beatles and The Beatles are too canny—­and perhaps too much a collaboration—­to ever fully affirm the confessional mode. Indeed, a dialectic of irony and confession is evident in Lennon’s work of the 1968 period. Though it is not played fingerstyle, an acoustic demo of “Yer Blues,” as composed at Rishikesh, appears on the Kinfauns tape. David Fricke is typical of Beatles chroniclers in reading the song as ironic: “When John indulged in parody or pastiche, he took dead aim. ‘Yer Blues’ was wicked, raunchy parody of the British blues scene, as if the title weren’t clue enough” (Fricke 1981, 22). Yet Lennon himself framed the song as straightforwardly autobiographical—­“Up there trying to reach God and feeling suicidal” (Beatles 2000, 283). Other songs from the Kinfauns demos such as “Julia” and “I’m Just a Child of Nature” show Lennon, the author of “I Am the Walrus,” dropping irony—­as well as his guard—­in exchange for a childlike innocence. The ultimate fates of these two songs vis-­à-­vis the White Album—­with “Julia” following the jokey “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” and “I’m Just a Child of Nature” being left off entirely—­suggest that “innocence” may simply have been another mask tried on by Dr. Winston O’Boogie. But in the underproduced context of the “unplugged” session, each song sounds disarmingly sincere. And though the Kinfauns demos include characteristically artifice-­laden pastiches by McCartney such as “Honey Pie” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” they also feature “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son.” In these stripped-­down songs, the Beatle whom MacDonald characterizes as extroverted (1998, 11) and who had overseen the grand masque that was Sgt. Pepper evokes the “transparence” highlighted by BMI.

Guitaristics Another psychedelic popstar who went to Rishikesh simultaneously with the Beatles was their friend Donovan Leitch, who began his career in 1965 imitating the prototypical singer-­songwriter, Bob Dylan, but whose sensibility crystallized in the bohemian atmosphere of the London folk scene, where he was deeply influenced by the “folk baroque” (Laing et al., 1975, 145) guitar and vocal work of fellow Scot Bert Jansch (Solomon 2016). Along with the classically trained John Renbourn, Jansch was an acolyte of fingerstyle virtuoso Davy Graham, inventor of the DADGAD tuning that has become the “new standard tuning” for Celtic guitar (McQuaid 1995, 4). With bassist Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox,

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and singer Jacqui McShee, Jansch and Renbourn formed the acoustic supergroup Pentangle in 1968. Jansch had come to London from Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh folk scene also helped give birth to the Incredible String Band, the psychedelic folk group centered around Robin Williamson and Mike Heron, whose 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter might be described as the Sgt. Pepper of folk music, and whose previous LP The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion was selected by McCartney as “the best album of 1967” (Everett 1999, 97). Both MacDonald (1998, 192) and Everett (1999, 186) note the influence of the ISB on Beatles music of this period. Among other doings at Rishikesh, Donovan taught Lennon the fingerstyle technique that Americans call Travis picking. In addition to “Julia,” Lennon used the technique on “Dear Prudence” and the opening section of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” a piece whose through-­ composed quality, MacDonald suggests, “may have owed something to the novel structures introduced by the Incredible String Band on . . . The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” (1998, 279). Donovan refers to the technique as “clawhammer,”5 a term that in the United States typically denotes the five-­string banjo technique also known as “frailing,” a style that, unlike the one named after Earl Scruggs, does not involve actual plucking of strings by fingers of the picking hand. What Donovan calls “clawhammer” is in fact a guitar style identified popularly in the United States with country crossover star Merle Travis (1917–­1983), hence the term “Travis picking.” The key feature involves the thumb of the picking hand articulating one and then another of the lower three strings oompah-­style, so as to create an alternating bass. Meanwhile, the first, second, and sometimes third fingers of the picking hand work independently of the thumb, plucking out arpeggios or syncopated melodies on the higher strings. Though refined into something virtuosic by guitarists such as Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke, and Tommy Emmanuel, folk players often use a simple form of the Travis style to produce a gentle roll such as one finds in Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” (figure 3.1). The origins of this vernacular picking style remain obscure, though it is firmly in evidence in the 1920s recordings of Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Blake as well as in the 1930s recordings of Gary Davis, all African American artists. Davis’s penchant for ragtime tunes may offer a clue, in that he uses thumb and fingers Travis style to approximate the complex division of musical labor between left and right hand on the ragtime keyboard. Donovan’s 1967 recording “Sand and Foam” provides an apt illus-

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Figure 3.1. Rolling Travis picking pattern with strings played by thumb bolded

tration of the technique taught to Lennon (Leitch 1967). Donovan’s picking pattern includes what Travis pickers call a “pinch”—­two strings plucked simultaneously by thumb and forefinger—­twice in the bar. Lennon’s pattern for “Julia” and “Dear Prudence” is similar, if a touch simpler (figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Travis picking pattern a la “Julia,” with “pinch” or double stop on beats 1 and 3 (strings played by thumb bolded)

For “Dear Prudence,” Lennon uses drop D tuning, a favorite of Travis pickers. Here the guitar’s top five strings remain in standard tuning while the low sixth string is tuned down from E to D. Drop D enables an alternating bass that capitalizes on two open Ds an octave apart. On “Dear Prudence,” this thumb-­picked bass pattern is balanced by picking fingers articulating F♯ and D in the treble, creating the overall effect of a drone in D major (figure 3.3). Indeed, with its chant-­like vocal and inverted pedal point, “Dear Prudence” comes closer than any other White Album song to the “Indian” sound favored by the Beatles during 1966–­67. In the solo demo for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recorded by Lennon in late 1966 and featured on the Anthology 2 CD, one can hear the composer haltingly attempt a Travis-­style accompaniment only to abandon it, “muttering ‘I cannae do it’” (MacDonald 1998, 192). The 1968 trip to

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Figure 3.3. Travis picking pattern for “Dear Prudence” with guitar in drop D tuning (strings played by thumb bolded)

Rishikesh provided Lennon with an adept tutor in Donovan as well as the requisite practice time to achieve the independence of thumb and picking fingers crucial to the style. With its setting of the composer’s voice to accompaniment of a lone fingerstyle guitar, Lennon’s “Julia” finds a parallel in McCartney’s “Blackbird.” McCartney does not Travis pick here, however, instead using a pattern of tenths plucked by thumb and middle finger, moving contrapuntally around the guitar’s open G string, which is plucked by the index finger (figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4. Turnaround figure from “Blackbird”

In the 2006 television documentary Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, McCartney relates that the opening bars of J. S. Bach’s Bourrée in E Minor (probably as adapted for guitar by Segovia) provided him and Harrison with an acoustic guitar “party piece” when they were teenagers and furnished the source for the guitaristics of “Blackbird” (McCartney 2006). He then proceeds to play a slightly garbled version of Bach’s opening E-­minor passage. Interestingly, McCartney does not refer to the B section of the Bach piece, which shifts to the relative major and uses a tenth enclosing an open G initially, much as does “Blackbird” (figure 3.5).6

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Figure 3.5. J. S. Bach, “Bourée” from Lute Suite in E Minor, opening of B section

“Mother Nature’s Son” is another McCartney piece that centers on the composer’s solo voice and fingerstyle guitar. MacDonald writes of McCartney’s playing “familiar guitarist’s games with the D chord” (1998, 268), but they become subtly sophisticated games by the B section, which moves, chord-­melody style, over a pedal tone played by the thumb on the open D string, through D–­Dmaj7–­D7–­D13–­G–­Gm, all under a subtly soaring, wordless vocal. Perhaps it was this hint of ecstatic release that motivated the Beatles to include this song on the White Album rather than Lennon’s “Child of Nature” (both inspired by a Maharishi lecture on nature given at Rishikesh). According to Everett, the song “resounds with the simple folk style of ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and the Incredible String Band and portrays McCartney as a natural busker, ‘singing songs for everyone’” (1999, 186). A difference, though, is that “I’ve Just Seen a Face” is, as noted above, played with a pick, whereas “Mother Nature’s Son” finds McCartney playing fingerstyle (though again not Travis picking), a factor that adds to the barefoot-­boy image the tune evokes. The Kinfauns demos include five compositions by Harrison, and although none involves fingerstyle guitar, several sound austere and pensive, perhaps none more so than “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” In this regard, the White Album rendition of the song as a four-­on-­the-­floor rock powerhouse enlivened by Eric Clapton’s wailing Les Paul couldn’t be further from the demo. On the Kinfauns tape it’s just Harrison accompanying himself, his acoustic guitar capoed at the fourth fret so that he can give chord forms from D minor a concert pitch of F♯ minor. When the demo was released on Anthology 3, Beatles listeners, familiar only with the album version, were taken by surprise, and indeed, the two versions dramatically illustrate the transformation a Beatles song could undergo during the process of record-­making. Since 2006, the acoustic version—­ with Harrison’s vocal and guitar now limned by strings scored by George Martin—­has been a centerpiece of the Cirque du Soleil Love soundtrack.

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The Kinfauns demos of “Julia,” “Dear Prudence,” “I’m Just a Child of Nature,” “Blackbird,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” construct a handmade, human-­scale singer-­songwriter EP spinning in the background of The Beatles. And yet no “Revolution 9” is needed to deflate this balloon of Beatles sensitivity, for the Kinfauns tape also contains its own piss-­take on the singer-­songwriter style in McCartney’s “Rocky Raccoon.” Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, released in late 1967, saw the mercurial song-­and-­dance man return to his acoustic roots, though the ballads he now sang sounded like enigmatic, po-­faced parables rather than antiestablishment anthems. In “Rocky,” McCartney contrives a cartoonlike take on Dylan’s outlaw balladry. The spoken intro, the faux Okie drawl, the homely guitar strum (no deft fingerpicking here) and—­on the White Album rendition—­the harmonica, all shout “Dylan!” Parodying Dylan with western movie tropes is good fun, of course. But in light of the band’s newfound, unplugged proclivities, one wonders: Is “Rocky” also meant as a poke at the Beatles—­at their own tentative ventures into troubadour territory?

“Singing Songs of Love” As is well known, Lennon saw “Julia” as one of his most personal statements, a paean to both his dead mother and to Yoko Ono, whose name in Japanese translates as “ocean child” and whom he would come to call “Mother.” “Lennon’s most childlike and self-­revealing song, ‘Julia’ is almost too personal for public consumption,” writes MacDonald (1998, 286). According to Donovan, however, Lennon shared the idea of the song during their fingerpicking lessons at Rishikesh and asked for his help as “the king of children’s songs” (qtd. in Marchese 2016). Something of a séance in song, “Julia” centers around a variation on the doo-­wop chord progression Lennon used in his early Beatles ballads “This Boy” and “Yes It Is.” Regarding “Yes It Is,” MacDonald argues that the female “fantasy-­figure conjured” in the song “is probably a transmutation of Lennon’s dead, red-­haired mother” (1998, 130). One can read fixation in the very music of “Julia,” with its melody circling around one note even while its chords venture beyond doo-­wop to some unexpected places, the chromatic shift to C♯ minor that opens the bridge being worthy of Antonio Carlos Jobim. The vocal line’s use of the name “Julia” to both begin and end the six-­bar verse (with the last syllable from bar 6 overlapping the first syllable of bar 1) adds to this sense of circularity. So too does the steadily alternating bass and persistent high A of the Travis-­picked guitar.

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“The dream I had was true”: so warbles an insistent Lennon in “I’m Just a Child of Nature,” the Kinfauns demo that begins with its speaker “on the road to Rishikesh.” Though officially unreleased, this widely bootlegged track shows Lennon using the melody and chords he later deployed in the self-­critical “Jealous Guy” for a very different poetic purpose—­“an unguarded confession of religious faith,” in the words of MacDonald (1998, 254). Both this song and “Julia” present the composer as a metaphorical child, suggesting that, for a while at least, the road to Rishikesh was a road to rebirth for Lennon. Though it was recorded in February 1968, just before his party left for Rishikesh (and so does not appear on the Kinfauns tape), Lennon’s “Across the Universe” is of a piece with “I’m Just a Child of Nature” in that it too is the work of a faithful follower of the Maharishi. The song’s refrain quotes, prior to “OM,” the sacred syllable of Hindu mysticism, the Sanskrit phrase, “Jai guru dev,” which the Maharishi and his followers employed to refer to the Maharishi’s own teacher, Guru Dev (Brahmand Saraswati), as well as to their gnostic project of self-­realization, the phrase translating literally as “victory to the guru-­god” (Everett 1999, 157) and figuratively as “hail to the greatness within you” (“Meaning” 2008). Observing that Lennon remained quite proud of this lyric, MacDonald dismisses the song’s tumbling verbal phrases as embarrassing baby-­talk (1998, 242). On the other hand, Monika Kocot argues that, in the lyric’s long line and evocation of cosmic fecundity, we find an apt analogue for the veil of maya, that welter of surfaces that manifests in meditation as the bustling thought to be quieted by repeating the mantra (2010, 189). In the Beatles Anthology film, “Across the Universe” effectively serves as theme song of the Rishikesh trip. Though it was not, as was “Mother Nature’s Son,” written at Rishikesh, “Blackbird” serves, in MacDonald’s view, as another call to higher consciousness: “Inspired by the experience of being woken by a blackbird bursting into song before sunrise, McCartney’s lyric translates this into a succinct metaphor for awakening on a deeper level.” MacDonald dismisses the notion that the song has, as subtext, the black liberation struggle in the United States, claiming the reading has “no supporting evidence” (1998, 256). But MacDonald wrote his entry on “Blackbird” in the early 1990s, before McCartney confided to biographer Barry Miles that “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about.” Acknowledging his tendency to address political themes obliquely, McCartney affirms that the song is about “empow-

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erment” (1997, 485–­86; in later editions of his book, MacDonald has deleted his dismissal of McCartney’s explanation). It’s a tribute to the song’s subtlety that it can support both readings. Aware that he had written something gemlike, McCartney named his book of verse, edited by Adrian Mitchell, Blackbird Singing. Pop music metaphysics reaches a peak in Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” completed while its singer was in residence at Rishikesh. Like “Across the Universe,” this song has a refrain that might be dismissed as childish, but it aims to make an anthem of an avatar. Its vision is theosophical—­ history as a sequence of millennial periods, ages of darkness alternating with ages of enlightenment, the latter’s approach always heralded by an archetypal musician figure who comes “singing songs of love.” The point is well made in what Donovan calls “George’s verse,” a stanza Harrison contributed that was left off Donovan’s 1968 hit recording: When the truth gets buried deep Beneath a thousand years of sleep Time demands a turnaround And once again the truth is found ’Tis then that the hurdy gurdy man comes singing songs of love. (Donovan 1997)

Donovan has said that the figure he had in mind was the Maharishi (Wickham 2013), but at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius one could be forgiven for thinking of the Beatles themselves as the harbingers in question. Indeed, Timothy Leary would soon declare them “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen” (Leary 1998, 69).

Down from the Mountain Metaphysical affirmations aside, Lennon’s satirical wit did not go into complete hibernation in Rishikesh. The Kinfauns tape contains a virtually complete version of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” a Goons-­like spoof targeting a Great White Hunter type who moonlighted as a student on the retreat (Beatles 2000, 284). In a similar vein, the acoustic demo of “Dear Prudence,” for all its wistful yearning, closes with a cod-­documentary voiceover by Lennon saying: “No one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk under the care of

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the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So we sang to her” (Beatles 2000, 284). Today, Prudence Farrow is a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and, while acknowledging that she became overly enthusiastic about meditation on the 1968 retreat, she affirms her experiences with the Maharishi and his teachings as transformative (“Prudence” 2013). By all accounts, Lennon wrote the song, and stood outside Prudence’s hut singing it, as a plea for her to pause in her marathon meditating and rejoin her peers. Lennon’s spoken remarks at the end of the Kinfauns demo hint at a cynicism about the Maharishi that the song itself—­and this goes for its White Album rendition as well—­does not convey. “Cry Baby Cry,” another Lennon song demoed at Kinfauns, can be read as a cousin to the two child’s-­eye pieces—­“Julia” and “I’m Just a Child of Nature”—­mentioned earlier, but with a similar cynicism starting to creep in. Like “Child of Nature,” “Cry Baby Cry” features the irregular phrase lengths that are a Lennon hallmark (Everett 1999, 166) and that give the song a subtle sense of imbalance. Though MacDonald describes the song as “written in India” (1998, 260), Everett documents a recording history that dates to late 1967. Everett also notes that early drafts of the song contained the “Jai guru deva” refrain later transplanted to “Across the Universe” (166). This suggests kinship between this “ironic and sinister” (MacDonald 1998, 260) ditty and the true-­believer testimony of “Across the Universe.” The relation may be one of opposites, however, and the refrain’s “old enough to know better” line might, in retrospect, be read as the childlike follower admonishing himself. As is well known, Lennon and Harrison fell out with the Maharishi in early April when they were apprised of rumors that he had acted inappropriately with one of the Western women on the retreat. The two spent a night stewing over the report before gathering their entourage and leaving in umbrage the next day. Lennon says that by default he was the one singled out to confront the Maharishi (Beatles 2000, 285). Lennon’s most intense musical attack on the Maharishi was written, according to Harrison, as he, Lennon, and their entourage were leaving the ashram. “Maharishi, what have you done / You’ve made a fool of everyone” was the original lyric but, insistent that such a nose-­on denunciation was unacceptable, Harrison suggested changing “Maharishi” to “Sexy Sadie,” a switch to which Lennon immediately agreed (286).

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“What Have You Done?” In Harrison’s account, the lyric’s shift from “Maharishi” to “Sexy Sadie” seems casual, but viewed through the lens of gender politics, it’s telling. From a patriarchal perspective, the Maharishi is a feminized male, his high, lilting voice, stringy locks, flowing robes, and penchant for flower garlands placing him far from the center of conventional masculinity. Of course, the Beatles had led the counterculture in turning several of these same attributes into signifiers of revolt against fifties-­style machismo. Nonetheless, McCartney biographer Howard Sounes seems oblivious to the parallel when he condescendingly describes the Maharishi as “a funny, happy little fellow with long hair like a girl” (Sounes 2010, 90). Such myopia can be ascribed to the Western habit of framing nonwhite “foreigners” as radically other. In Sounes’s retrospect, long hair on white male celebrities is no problem, but long hair on an Indian guru reads as fey. Eurocentric discourse on race is bound up with gender. Racial formation theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant observe, as I have noted elsewhere, that “gender distinctions operate similarly to racial ones” in that both “map social conflicts onto bodily differences” (Kimsey 2005, 114). Moreover, racial formation theory holds that, in American culture, race and gender constitute overlapping “‘regions’ of hegemony,” such that “in many respects race is gendered and gender is racialized,” and it seems reasonable to describe Eurocentric culture in similar terms (Omi skinned Maharishi, whom and Winant 1994, 168). Thus, the brown-­ Lennon and Harrison suspected of sexual improprieties, is easily transformed into a female figure, and a promiscuous one at that: . . . the world was waiting for a lover She came along and turned on everyone . . . Sexy Sadie you broke the rules You laid it down for all to see.

It should be noted that Lennon and Harrison were operating from suspicions generated by thirdhand accounts coming from what Miles characterizes as a dubious white male source (1997, 427).7 No proof that the Maharishi “made a pass at” one of the women was ever provided, and in later years, McCartney and Harrison characterized the rumor as codswallop (Beatles 2000, 285), with Harrison in 1992 going so far as to seek out the Maharishi to apologize (“Beatles” 2006).

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To his credit, Sounes probingly questions Lennon’s outrage over the alleged incident, which came at a time when Lennon was himself scheming to violate his marriage vows to Cynthia with Yoko Ono. Like a character out of Joss Whedon, Sounes effectively says to Lennon, “Project much?” (Sounes 2010, 203). Media studies scholar Jane Iwamura attributes such outrage to Western presumptions that Eastern spiritual teachers must, like monks in the West, invariably hew to a code of chastity and celibacy (Iwamura 2011, 96). In the chapter “Hyperreal Samadhi: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” Iwamura examines the rhetoric of Western media accounts of the Maharishi during the 1960s, with an emphasis on visual imagery. She demonstrates that one of two patterns typically governed such accounts, the first being reverential, while the second—­and much more common type—­evoked skepticism and suspicion, usually through winking irony and glib insinuation (2011, 65–­68, 95). Of particular concern to some writers and photographers was the Maharishi’s apparent embrace of Western technology and media, which was viewed by Western skeptics as transgressing the bounds of the West’s “Oriental Monk” stereotype (Iwamura 2011, 6). Equally dubious, from this establishment view, was his closeness with youth culture figureheads like the Beatles and Mia Farrow—­who, as celebrities, were themselves creatures of Western media—­and the direct access to a huge, supposedly uncritical youth culture audience such associations were thought to give him (Iwamura 2011, 69–­71, 90, 101). Iwamura is particularly telling in her analysis of cover stories and photo spreads from the period that appeared in such publications as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. She points up juxtapositions of the dark-­skinned, foreign-­looking guru’s face with that of the blonde, virginal-­appearing Mia Farrow (2011, 106–­7). One Post cover montage displays a relatively huge head of the Maharishi towering over tiny figures of the Beatles, their paramours, and Mia (Iwamura 2011, 81). The images have been cropped and placed to make it appear that the Maharishi is staring at Mia, and the difference in sizes evokes King Kong eyeballing Fay Wray. I should note that in one persistent version of the rumor, the woman at whom the Maharishi is supposed to have made advances is Mia’s younger sister Prudence (Beatles 2000, 285). The question of whether any such thing happened aside, the imagery is like that of The Birth of a Nation transplanted to the Himalayas—­the flower of white womanhood ogled by the lascivious, dark-­skinned Other. Could such white supremacist rhetoric have influenced Lennon’s thinking in Rishikesh? This is a man who married a strong Japanese

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woman who herself endured enormous amounts of racist abuse for marrying a Beatle, abuse that Lennon bravely condemned over the years. And yet, Lennon affirmed the myth of rock ’n’ roll as originating in the jungle rhythms of black bodies: Because it’s primitive enough and it has no bullshit—­the best stuff. And it gets through to you. Go to the jungle and they have  .  .  . the rhythm going, everybody gets into it. I read that Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver or somebody said that, with rock, the blacks gave middle-­class whites back their bodies. (Wenner 2000, 76)

An Africanist parallel to the Orientalist trope in which the East provides deliverance for alienated Westerners, essentialism of this sort is key to Eurocentric discourse on race. White Album indeed.

Master and Disciple Iwamura focuses on the Western figure of the Oriental Monk as this icon has been constructed in American popular culture of the 1950s through the 1970s. In this narrative A lone monk figure . . . takes under his wing a fatherless, often parentless, child (usually a boy). This child embodies a tension—­although he symbolizes the dominant culture in racial terms, he has an ambivalent relationship with that culture. This allows him to make a break with the Western tradition that is radical enough to allow him to embrace his marginalized self. The Oriental Monk figure discerns this yearning for difference, develops it, and nurtures it. As a result of this relationship, a transmission takes place: Oriental wisdom and spiritual insight pass from the Oriental Monk figure through the bridge figure of the child. Ultimately, the Oriental Monk and his apprentice(s) represent . . . a revitalized hope of saving the West from capitalist greed, brute force, totalitarian rule, and spiritless technology. (2011, 20)

Iwamura demonstrates that, circa 1967–­68, numerous members of the Western counterculture viewed the Maharishi and the Beatles through this lens. She observes that in certain press accounts “the Beatles paradigmatically serve as the Monk’s Western pupils, who, disillusioned with their inherited spiritual heritage, are drawn to Mahesh’s philosophy and practice” (2011, 94). Such accounts effectively make the band “a synec-

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doche for Western youth,” treating the Beatles and their young audience as “almost interchangeable”: thus, the band members are “referred to as ‘the blessed leaders of the world’s youth,’” while youth are read as “increasingly defining themselves in relation to their musical heroes” (2011, 94). Framed in this way, the Beatles “reflect both the exuberance and excess of their young audience” (2011, 94). If compositions such as “Across the Universe” and “I’m Just a Child of Nature” can be taken as evidence, it appears that Lennon saw his relationship with the Maharishi in these terms. This point is crystallized in an anecdote McCartney relates in the Rishikesh section of the Anthology. He tells of a day when a helicopter arrived at the ashram to transport the Maharishi to Delhi. Before flying off, the Maharishi offered his pupils the chance for one of them to take a ride with the master: We all traipsed down in our kaftans and then it was: “One of you can go up for a quick ride with Maharishi. Who’s it going to be?” And, of course, it was John. I asked him later, “Why were you so keen to get up with Maharishi?” “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I thought he might slip me the Answer.” That was very John! (Beatles 2000, 283)

If the fatherless Lennon’s involvement with the Maharishi began with an earnestly chanted “Jai guru dev” and ended with “If you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why” (Beatles 2000, 285)—­his backhanded response to the Maharishi’s desperately asking him why he, Harrison, and company were abruptly leaving Rishikesh—­then we have a steep story arc. By the time of his ringing denunciation “God” on the confessional Plastic Ono Band LP, Lennon could unhesitatingly add “Don’t believe in Gita” to his list of self-­defining disavowals (Lennon 1970). Iwamura argues that virtual Orientalism “constructs a modernized cultural patriarchy in which Anglo-­ Americans reimagine themselves as the protectors, innovators and guardians of Asian religions and culture and wrest the authority to define these traditions from others” (2011, 21). If informed, as I suggest, by masculinist gender ideology, white presumption, and grandiose expectations of unction, Lennon’s outrage over the rumor about the Maharishi fits this mold. What some paint as an over-­the-­top response on Lennon’s part was in fact an attempt to redefine the Maharishi’s mission, a playing out of the patriarchal script of virtual Orientalism. Meanwhile, the other Beatles kept their mantras and meditation practice—­ Harrison most emphatically so, much as he converted to Hinduism—­and, in the Anthology, spoke fondly of their time in Rishikesh.

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Whereas the retreat was actually a course for future TM instructors, the Beatles and their circle consistently liken the experience to a British “holiday camp” (Beatles 2000, 281). Although they were earnest in seeking answers to life’s questions and about moving beyond LSD in that process, they also clearly viewed the retreat in the way that Bob Dylan viewed his motorcycle accident—­as an opportunity to unplug from what Joni Mitchell called “the starmaking machinery behind the popular song” (1974). Meanwhile, the Maharishi was plugging into that machinery in hope of promoting his cause. According to Iwamura, the master, unable to control his public image, ended up being mastered by the Western media’s “hyperreal” hall of mirrors (2011, 108). Returned to the United Kingdom by early May, the Beatles would lay down demos of “all those songs” from Rishikesh in the intimate and mellow-­sounding Kinfauns tape, only to begin making the decentered, ultraeclectic White Album. Closing with the wild sound collage “Revolution 9” followed by the Disneyesque treacle of “Good Night,” the double LP bears Lennon’s emphatic stamp, much as the Kinfauns tapes do. His sense of agency, irony, and ambivalence again in full sway, Lennon counted himself “out” as well as “in” regarding violent revolution on the White Album, whereas in the Kinfauns tape, documenting the Rishikesh version of “Revolution,” he hewed straightforwardly to the pacifist line. Having experienced Orientalism’s “release of the spirit” in the Himalayas, he and, to a lesser extent his bandmates, went in a different and in some respects opposite direction on The Beatles. By mid-­1968, the road to Rishikesh, where “the dream I had was true,” was a world away.

Notes 1. The Beatles and their significant others Jane Asher, Pattie Harrison, Cynthia Lennon, and Maureen Starkey (along with Jenny Boyd, Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall, and Peter Brown), arrived in mid-­February. Singer-­songwriter Donovan, jazz musician Paul Horn, Beach Boy Mike Love, and Mia Farrow, with her siblings Prudence and John, arrived around the same time. The Starkeys left after two weeks, and McCartney and Asher departed after about a month. Harrison, Lennon, and company stayed through early April. Alexis Mardas arrived in mid-­ March. See “Rishikesh” in Miles 1997, 408–­30. 2. For background on the Maharishi and his Spiritual Regeneration Movement, see Kocot, 2010, 187–­90. 3. Horn’s remarks on the retreat’s positive impact on Beatle creativity are quoted in Unterberger 2006, 197.

90  the beatles through a glass onion 4. For background on the various bootlegs made from the Kinfauns tapes, see Unterberger 2006, 195–­200. The songs on The Beatles Unplugged are “Cry Baby Cry,” “I’m Just a Child of Nature,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “I’m So Tired,” “Yer Blues,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” “What’s the New Mary Jane,” “Revolution,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Circles,” “Sour Milk Sea,” “Not Guilty,” “Piggies,” “Julia,” “Blackbird,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Honey Pie,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” “Junk,” “Dear Prudence,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Helter Skelter,” “Spiritual Regeneration Song,” and “Saints Medley” (the latter two recorded at Rishikesh as sing-­alongs with various attendees). In the interval since this essay was written and went to press, Apple released its fiftieth anniversary edition of the White Album. This edition includes, as bonus tracks, the Kinfauns demos discussed here which, prior to this release, were available in bootleg form only. 5. Donovan erroneously identifies Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family as the inventor of the style. Although hers was an influential country/folk guitar style, her “Carter scratch” does not involve an independent thumb plucking out an alternating bass while fingers pluck arpeggios on the upper strings. 6. Though he aptly relates “Blackbird” to the British fingerstyle movement, MacDonald’s account of the piece as being played in an altered tuning is mistaken (1998, 256). For further details about the bourrée and McCartney’s use of it, see chapter 11 in the present volume. 7. Miles identifies Alexis Mardas as the source of the rumors, though Mardas has denied this. According to McCartney, in spring 1967 Lennon introduced Mardas to the group as “my new guru” (quoted in Miles 1997, 375).

four | Producing an Enigma for the Ages George Martin within (and without) The Beatles kenneth womack

The production duties associated with the recording sessions for The Beatles (the White Album) were, by any measure, convoluted—­and especially in contrast with the careful, exacting activities that resulted in such previous Beatles masterworks as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In many ways, the White Album had begun as the bandmates’ most self-­conscious effort, with the composition of the lion’s share of its songs having occurred inside Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in February and March 1968, followed by the group’s demo recordings later that spring at George Harrison’s Kinfauns studio. For George Martin, the band’s legendary producer, the White Album offered yet another embarrassment of riches from the Fab Four’s unparalleled songwriters. It was his latest opportunity to work at the helm of the most critically and commercially successful act in the history of pop music. At the outset, it must have seemed like business as usual; in retrospect, it was anything but. By July, interpersonal pressures inside the studio had reached their nadir. During a July 15 session, after engineer Geoff Emerick witnessed Martin shouting at Paul McCartney about the quality of his lead vocal, Emerick decided that he had to escape the tension-­filled atmosphere; he resigned from the project on the very next day. Emerick had also grown weary of newcomer Chris Thomas, Martin’s protégé from AIR (Associated Independent Recording) who had been fulfilling Martin’s 91

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duties when he was away from the studio. On July 19, Harrison and Martin quarreled, with the guitarist chiding the producer for being “very negative!” (Winn 2003, 207). Yet surprisingly, as Thomas assumed more of the older producer’s duties at the recording console, Martin took the opportunity, in September, to go on an extended holiday, leaving the Beatles—­under Thomas’s less-­watchful eye—­to their own devices. Had Martin simply become overenmeshed with the Fab Four in their studio environs, having previously served as the band’s elder statesman behind the recording desk? Or was his effort to distance himself during the album’s construction—­with Thomas as his carefully chosen stand-­ in—­part of a more elaborate, calculated plan? As history demonstrates, Martin returned to the Beatles’ fold in the nick of time, leading the bandmates during the waning months of the album’s recording and mixing sessions. In so doing, as this chapter shows through biographical and critical analyses, he transformed near-­calamity into triumph. But as it happened, the rudiments of Martin’s strategy during the production of the White Album find their roots much earlier in the producer’s evolving relationship with the band—­perhaps even as early as November 1962, when he finally threw his lot in with the group and, in many ways, never looked back. Martin’s partnership with the Beatles always seemed like an unlikely collaboration, with the thirty-­six-­year-­old former navy man from London mixing it up with a quartet of Liverpool toughs. But in one respect, they were a near-­perfect match. In spite of his posh-­sounding accent, Martin had far more in common with the Beatles’ working-­class origins than they imagined when they first came into his orbit at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in June 1962. Martin was born on January 3, 1926, into a North London household without benefit of electricity or running water. During the Great Depression, Martin’s father Harry worked sporadically as a carpenter, while his mother Bertha took odd jobs as a maid and a seamstress. The sound of music pierced young George’s world at an early age, as he toyed with an old upright that the family had acquired via an uncle, who worked at a piano factory. At the tender age of eight, he wrote his first composition, “The Spider’s Dance,” after half a dozen lessons. His great epiphany occurred several years later when his school played host to the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Under the direction of Sir Adrian Boult, the orchestra performed Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faune, and fifteen-­year-­old George fell under the music’s spell. “I thought it was absolutely heavenly,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe human beings made that sound.” But even then, George found himself

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enrapt with the making of music as much as with its beauty. “I could see these men in their monkey-­jackets, scraping away at pieces of gut with horsehair and blowing into funny instruments with bits of cane on their ends. But the mechanical things I saw simply didn’t relate to the dream-­ like sound I heard. It was sheer magic, and I was completely enthralled” (Martin with Hornsby 1979, 30). Soon afterward, Martin and his friends organized a dance band called the Four Tune Tellers. “We played the standards by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and so on, things like ‘The Way You Look Tonight,’” he recalled. “Quicksteps were always the most popular, and we always ended with ‘The Goodnight Waltz’” (Martin with Hornsby 2003, 30). During World War II, he joined the War Office’s nonuniformed ranks before enlisting in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. Although Martin never saw combat, his training took him from England to New York City and Trinidad and back again. Along the way, he began self-­consciously to refine his North London accent with the posh tones of the gentlemen-­officers whom he emulated. After the war, he enrolled in the Guildhall School of Music and, three years later, landed a plum job as assistant A & R (Artists and Repertoire) for EMI’s Parlophone label. By the mid-­1950s, he had salvaged the struggling label from the scrapheap after developing an eclectic stable of artists, including comedy acts like Peter Sellers and the Goons, with whom Martin recorded several strong-­selling records. There is little doubt that his newly acquired “cut-­glass voice,” in the words of Mark Lewisohn, played a role in his ascent (2013, 254). The well-­honed deference and gentlemanly nature that Martin accrued during his war years came in handy as he climbed the ranks at EMI and sought his métier as an A & R man–­cum-­producer. He could make people feel relaxed by taking himself out of the equation and thus get the best performance from virtually anyone. That was his genius. Martin remained largely invisible, having disappeared into the background of the act of creation. By the time that the Beatles entered his world in the early summer of 1962, Martin had developed a keen ambition to work with a beat group—­preferably, one with hit-­making potential. But the Beatles did not fit the image of the band he had in mind. Until recently, the narrative of Martin’s first brush with the Beatles was the classic show-­biz discovery story—­one that the producer himself carefully preserved until his death in March 2016, at age ninety. As the old narrative went, in early 1962 Martin had initially rebuffed manager Brian Epstein’s efforts to win a recording contract for the Beatles, who were virtually unknown

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outside of their North Country environs. But by May, their fortunes suddenly and inexplicably shifted when Martin, having apparently heard something promising in their otherwise primitive sound, issued them a recording contract and fixed a June date for their first session; until the early years of the twenty-­first century, Martin remembered the session as purely an audition, although EMI’s records suggested otherwise. From the June 1962 session forward, a tentative flirtation supposedly ensued in which Martin attempted to coerce the band into throwing over their original material in favor of a cover tune by Tin Pan Alley songsmith Mitch Murray entitled “How Do You Do It?” After the Beatles proved their mettle with the Lennon-­McCartney original “Please Please Me,” Martin announced, with great drama and what seems now like incredible foresight, that the band had just recorded their first number-­one single. By February 1964, the pop music world was truly theirs. Although it lacks the fairy dust of the show-­biz discovery story, the truth about Martin is far more interesting in terms of its revelations about human nature. As it happened, Martin did, indeed, first meet Epstein in February 1962, although he admitted he was not “knocked out at all” by the Beatles’ sound. He was especially nonplussed by Epstein’s insistence that they would be bigger than Elvis, a preposterous notion at that point in the history of popular music. Martin did issue the Beatles a contract in May 1962, but it had little, if anything, to do with that “something” that he heard in the sound, and much more to do with the internal politics of the EMI Group. In recent months, Martin had challenged his boss, L. G. Wood, over the continuing lack of residual income allowed by his latest contract, had been discovered to be carrying on a protracted affair with his longtime secretary, and had rebuffed the Beatles—­and, far more importantly, Epstein, whose NEMS record store accounted for the vast majority of EMI sales in the North Country. Thus, we can now understand Martin’s initial Beatles contract as having been issued entirely under company duress. The June 1962 session was not an audition; rather, it was the first contracted session for Parlophone Records’ latest beat band. From Martin’s point of view, it would be a short-­lived professional relationship, as he was obligated only to record four sides by the Liverpool quartet, half of which he accomplished with the “Love Me Do” single backed with “P. S. I Love You.” While the “How Do You Do It?” episode is true, what happened next was vintage Martin. After “Love Me Do” managed to crack the UK Top 20, the A & R man enjoyed a sudden and profound change of heart about the band that he had wanted nothing to do with only a few months ear-

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lier. After they followed his instructions and amped up “Please Please Me,” he was far more sold on their abilities than they were. In November, when he famously announced, “Gentlemen, you’ve just recorded your first number-­one single,” the Beatles burst out laughing. But Martin didn’t care. He had thrown in his lot with the band with the funny name for keeps. What is particularly notable about the discrepancies between the show-­biz story and the facts is how calculating Martin proved to be. In the former tale, the Beatles happen to him. They mysteriously arrive as Epstein’s protégés, slowly win Martin over, and subsequently conquer the world. In the latter story line, Martin sits in the driver’s seat in spite of his EMI superior’s directive to place the Beatles under contract. The veteran producer knew full well that he could wait, record the contractually required sides with the Beatles, and be done with them. But events transpired very differently when Martin witnessed the fervent manner in which they had transformed “Please Please Me” under his tutelage. By November 1962, he was so certain about this new band that he did the unthinkable with a pop act during that era: to their shock, he suggested recording an LP with them when they had virtually no track record outside of “Love Me Do,” which had peaked at number 17 on the British charts. Along with Epstein’s role as the architect behind Beatlemania, Martin’s calculated behavior as their de facto musical director drove the band through the early iterations that saw them consolidate their fame with a quintet of number one UK chart-­toppers from Please Please Me (1963) through Help! (1965), followed by the consensus masterworks Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), in which Martin and the Beatles pioneered the invention of the album as a cultural and artistic statement. Along the way, Martin left his mark on their music—­however subtle that imprint may have been to the average listener. He frequently prompted the band members to revise their songs in key ways—­witness “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which began, quite arrestingly, with the chorus at Martin’s suggestion. And then there’s “A Hard Day’s Night,” which the producer launched into the stratosphere via his varispeed “wind-­up piano” technique.1 But for Martin, “the turning point” emerged during the June 1965 sessions for “Yesterday,” the most covered composition in the Lennon-­ McCartney songbook. “It was on ‘Yesterday,’” Martin later wrote, that we first used instruments or musicians other than the Beatles and myself (I had often played the piano where it was necessary, as

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on A Hard Day’s Night). On “Yesterday” the added ingredient was . . . a string quartet; and that, in the pop world of those days, was quite a step to take. It was with “Yesterday” that we started breaking out of the phase of using just four instruments and went into something more experimental, though our initial experiments were severely limited by the fairly crude tools at our disposal, and had simply to be molded out of my recording experience. (Martin with Hornsby 1979, 166–­67)

For Martin’s money, “Penny Lane” backed with “Strawberry Fields Forever” was “the best record we ever made” (Everett 1999, 87). With its crisp production and rich melodies, the single had all the hallmarks of a Martin recording. It also required a fair amount of studio trickery to pull off—­especially “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which consisted of two takes with conflicting tempi and key signatures that Martin (and Emerick) skillfully grafted together. The most important moment in Martin’s progress with the band was clearly Sgt. Pepper, which Martin later (and aptly) described as a “musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. It grabbed the world of pop music by the scruff of the neck, shook it hard, and left it to wander off, dizzy but wagging its tail. As well as changing the way pop music was viewed, it changed the entire nature of the recording game—­for keeps” (Martin with Pearson 1994, 1–­2). But the events associated with Sgt. Pepper’s production were also explosive in terms of the bandmates’ relationship with Martin. After many years in which he had played their elder statesman, the power dynamics among the group’s brain trust had shifted dramatically. This was true not only for Martin, but also for Epstein, who felt increasingly marginalized since the Beatles had ceased touring after their August 1966 concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. By August 1967, the Beatles’ manager was dead following an accidental drug and alcohol overdose, leaving Martin as the most influential non-­Beatle in their circle. Epstein had not been the only person to feel uncertain about his place in the post-­touring, post-­Pepper world. Although Martin had produced the music for the successful Magical Mystery Tour EP and LP releases (1967) in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively, he had watched from the sidelines as the television film of the same name flopped on British TV that December. By February 1968, they were back in the studio recording a batch of new songs, including the chart-­topping “Lady Madonna” backed with “The Inner Light.” But shortly thereafter, the Beatles left for their sojourn in India, where they composed dozens

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of new songs, returning to the United Kingdom by May and recording the twenty-­three demos that make up the Kinfauns tapes—­outside of Martin’s earshot—­at Harrison’s home studio.2 It would be easy to understand how Martin might feel that his role in the band had been diminished at this juncture—­less than a year after their shared triumph with Sgt. Pepper. But as the summer of 1968 progressed, Martin’s perspective shifted into something else when the bandmates’ hitherto close personal relationships began to splinter during the White Album sessions. In Martin’s official biographical record, the White Album exists as a strange, glaring ellipsis—­an explicable lacuna, especially given the album’s sizable place in the band’s artistic achievement. In Martin’s trio of autobiographical works All You Need Is Ears (1979), With a Little Help from My Friends (1994), and Playback (2003), it is all but invisible. But Emerick, the band’s balance engineer and the technical genius behind Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, gives the toil associated with the White Album considerable attention indeed. As noted above, he was the first casualty of the sessions. By 1968, Emerick had a long history with the band, having served as a fifteen-­year-­old junior assistant during the group’s first EMI session in June 1962. He had been hired as a novice “button-­pusher,” as the assistant engineers were known in those days. By 1968, he was an integral part of the Beatles’ studio team—­nearly as indispensable as Martin himself. For Emerick, July 15 marked the end of the line as far as the Beatles went. During one of the seemingly endless sessions for “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­ La-­Da,” everything came to a head. This should be hardly surprising, given the consternation that the bandmates and their inner circle already felt about the track, which required more than forty hours to record. The sessions for the song had begun on July 3, followed by overdubbing sessions on July 4 and 5. It underwent successive remakes on July 8 and 9, with additional overdubbing sessions on July 11 and 15. Along the way, the song was subjected to numerous takes as the group attempted different versions and McCartney constantly tinkered with his vocal, testing his colleagues’ patience in the process. On July 15, Martin attempted to assist McCartney in fashioning the perfect vocal for the song, saying, “Paul, can you try rephrasing the last line of each verse?” As Emerick recalled, Martin made the suggestion in his gentle, slightly aristocratic voice. . . . [H]e was still trying to do his job, still trying to steer his charges toward increased musical sophistication and help push them to their best performances. “If you think you can do it better, why don’t you fucking come

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down here and sing it yourself?” [McCartney] snarled as he whipped off his headphones and glared up at the control room. Stunned, I looked over at George.  .  .  . What happened next shocked me to the core: in sheer frustration, quiet, low-­key George Martin actually began shouting back at Paul. “Then bloody sing it again!” he yelled over the talkback, causing me to wince. “I give up. I just don’t know any better how to help you.” (Emerick and Massey 2006, 255)

“That was it for me,” he wrote. “I took one last glance down at the studio, where McCartney was standing defiantly, arms crossed, and decided that this just wasn’t worth it. I had to leave: I simply had to escape the pressure cooker. . . . [E]very fiber in my body was screaming, Get out! Now!” (2006, 255). Regardless of the reasons for the bandmates’ worsening interpersonal relations, Emerick pointedly blamed Martin’s failure of leadership. As Emerick wrote, Given his status and experience, it would have been reasonable to expect that at some stage George Martin would have taken a stand, but he . . . never confronted the Beatles about their bad attitude or the lack of respect they gave the EMI staff; he never pointed out the way we were sacrificing our personal lives and constantly coming up with innovations for them; he never made the case that we were there to help them, that we were with them, not against them. In short, George never tried to instill a sense of camaraderie, a sense of teamwork. To be blunt about it, he never displayed the right kind of leadership skills. (2006, 265)

Even more bluntly, Emerick contended that Martin feared losing his influence over the group lest anyone else—­namely, Emerick himself—­ appear to be as essential as Martin. “[H]e simply didn’t want to give us any credit. Whether it was because of ego or insecurity, he didn’t want the Beatles to get the impression that we were doing anything special. He wanted them to believe that only he was indispensable, that he was pulling the strings and we were just doing what he told us to do” (2006, 265). As it happened, Emerick’s departure in mid-­July proved to be a harbinger of even more unusual things to come. Since the band’s initial professional recordings, Martin had held sway over the group as their most valued and trusted musical partner, a role he protected at nearly every

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turn. In the past, any threat to his dominion was greeted with concern. Take, for example, the March 1967 episode involving Sgt. Pepper’s “She’s Leaving Home.” When an enthusiastic McCartney arrived at Abbey Road Studios to begin work on the composition, he learned that Martin was occupied with a Cilla Black session. Caught up in the excitement of the song, McCartney simply couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wait and enlisted Mike Leander as the arranger: “I had one of those ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go!’ feelings and when you get those, you don’t want anything to stop you,” McCartney recollected. “You feel like if you lose the impetus, you’ll lose something valuable” (Cross 2005, 438). Although he later conducted the studio musicians with his usual professionalism during the March 17 orchestral overdub, Martin “minded like hell,” he later recalled (O’Gorman 2004, 242). Yet scarcely more than a year later, Martin clearly felt very differently—­and, apparently, felt a lot more confident—­about his place in the Beatles’ milieu. Or did he? After working in an August 30 session for “Dear Prudence” with the group at Trident Studios, Martin was suddenly absent from his usual place in the control room. Even stranger, he had left young Chris Thomas to produce the Beatles in his stead. As Emerick later observed, bringing Thomas on board allowed Martin to take a much-­needed vacation, but also to maintain his dominion with the Beatles through a carefully chosen surrogate (2006, 261). At first glance, Martin’s leaving the Beatles in Thomas’s care might seem like an unnecessary risk. Why chance even the remotest possibility of ceding your professional relationship with the most commercially and critically successful musical group of all time simply to go on holiday? One year Emerick’s junior, Thomas had already proven to be a studio wunderkind, having worked as Martin’s assistant since the formation of AIR in the mid-­1960s. A few years later, Thomas would enjoy the enviable opportunity to mix Pink Floyd’s legendary 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. While Martin ultimately received overall production credit for the White Album, Thomas oversaw the production of six songs during the elder producer’s absence, including “Helter Skelter,” “Glass Onion,” “I Will,” “Birthday,” “Piggies,” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Thomas also played keyboards—­standing in for Martin as the Beatles’ sideman—­ on “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Long Long Long,” “Not Guilty,” and “Piggies.” In the months before he left the Beatles’ inner circle, Emerick had already grown weary of Thomas. “Though he would tread carefully at times,” Emerick recalled, Thomas “began developing an attitude, an ar-

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rogance, that I just didn’t like. I felt that he had no business being there; he had no background or training, so why should we value his opinion? George Martin and I had been doing these sessions for years, with great success, and all of a sudden Chris had infiltrated the inner sanctum, without having ever paid any dues” (2006, 238). It was a perspective about Thomas that only hardened as Emerick spent more time with him: Eventually, Chris and I had a real falling out. He came into Abbey Road one day with a new band, and he said to me—­rather officiously, I thought—­“I want the Lennon sound on the vocal and I want the Ringo sound on the drums” . . . as if it were as simple as turning a dial or pushing a button. I didn’t reply, but I gave him the exact opposite of what he had asked for, and then I tried my best to never work with him again. Those were sounds I had created for Beatles records only; I wasn’t about to reconstruct them for other artists. Frankly, I found it offensive that Chris even asked me to do so, especially since he had been part of our team. (Emerick and Massey 2006, 238)

Although Emerick may have resented the newcomer’s youthful arrogance, Thomas achieved a number of impressive results during his brief tenure as the Beatles’ producer. As it turned out, even he was surprised to find himself at the helm of the Beatles’ recording sessions in early September 1968. As Thomas later recalled, I came back from my holiday, and there was a note from George [Martin] on my desk: “Chris: Hope you had a nice holiday; I’m off on mine now. Make yourself available to the Beatles. Neil [Aspinall] and Mal [Evans] know you’re coming down.” It took a while for the Beatles to accept me. Paul was the first one to walk in—­I was sitting in the corner wearing a suit and tie!—­and he said, “What are you doing here?” I felt such an idiot, but managed to blurt “Didn’t George tell you?” “No.” “Well, George has suggested I come down and help out.” Paul’s reply was “Well, if you wanna produce us you can produce us. If you don’t, we might just tell you to fuck off!” That was encouragement? I couldn’t speak after that. (Lewisohn 1988, 155)

But Thomas emerged as the emollient that the band sorely needed. Tape operator John Smith recalls that Thomas fostered “a different vibe. I think they thought Martin was like a schoolteacher, sort of out of place, and with Chris, I think there was a much cooler vibe.” With Martin having

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been increasingly absent from the console in recent weeks, the Beatles often operated without benefit of a producer at all. “I remember a lot of sessions where there was no one there producing,” Ken Scott recalled. “The Beatles were very much in control” (qtd. in Ryan and Kehew 2006, 476, 477). During Martin’s vacation, Thomas took over the production duties in their entirety, with Scott sitting in as balance engineer. As far as Thomas was concerned, working with the Beatles was the opportunity of a lifetime: The thing I always remember about them, and where they were different to all the other bands, was that they were very playful—­in the way that kids are. You know, a bit mischievous like that. . . . And that’s where a lot of the mad ideas came from. They’d just try anything, really, to see what it was like: “What happens if you do this, what happens if you do that?” They were very different from anybody else in that way. (Ryan and Kehew 2006, 496)

Clear examples of Thomas’s positive impact upon the album’s production abound and include his inspired Mellotron work on Lennon’s whimsical “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” Playing with the mandolin stop engaged during the verses and using the bassoon stop during the coda, Thomas afforded the song much-­needed depth, and added its sophisticated flamenco guitar introduction, which he created using a preset Mellotron track. His work on Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” may have been even more significant, as Thomas devoted considerable effort to the mixing sessions associated with Eric Clapton’s magnificent, driving solo played on Harrison’s Gibson Les Paul Standard. At Clapton’s request, Thomas treated the famed guitarist’s solo with heavy doses of ADT (automatic double-­tracking) to achieve a more “Beatley” sound. “I was given the grand job of waggling the oscillator on the ‘Gently Weeps’ mixes,” Thomas recalled. “We did this flanging thing, really wobbling the oscillator in the mix. I did that for hours” (Babiuk 2001, 229). Thomas’s efforts paid off, as “Weeps” not only elevated Harrison’s songwriting stock considerably, but echoed across the decades, particularly during the heyday of 1970s guitar rock. By the beginning of October, Thomas was relegated to the second chair again, with Martin having returned to the control room—­just in time, as it turned out—­to exert a considerable impact upon the direction of Lennon’s “Glass Onion.” A self-­referential work of metapoetry, “Glass Onion” had been recorded with Thomas behind the mixing desk dur-

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ing the previous month. Searching for an innovative means to end the composition, Lennon had supervised a bizarre late-­September session in which he overdubbed the sound of broken glass, a ringing telephone, and BBC soccer commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme exclaiming “It’s a goal!” over a roaring football crowd (Spizer 2003, 104).3 When Martin returned from his extended holiday, he was unimpressed with Lennon’s arcane epilogue. By superimposing an arrangement for four violins, two violas, and two cellos onto the track, Martin furnished “Glass Onion” with an eerie string coda that enhances the song’s textually subversive contents, rather than shrouding them behind a veneer of disconnected sound effects. As with the lion’s share of his efforts as the Beatles’ producer, Martin’s contributions were characterized by the detail work, as with the “Glass Onion” coda, that allowed their music to shine even brighter than it might have otherwise. For Lennon’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”—­one of the tracks Thomas supervised—­Martin’s input may have been as simple as showing John a magazine cover with the phrase “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” emblazoned across the front. As Lennon later remarked, “I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something” (Lennon 1970, 115). For McCartney’s countrified “Rocky Raccoon,” Martin brought the song’s disquieting universe of cowboys, gunplay, and hoedowns into life by virtue of his keyboard finesse. Martin provided a saloon-­like ambience on the Challen “jangle box” piano, which he played at half-­speed, honky-­tonk style, using the same varispeed wind-­up piano technique he had employed on “A Hard Day’s Night” and “In My Life.” And then there was Martin’s usual top-­drawer (and often understated) work as arranger and conductor. For McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son,” Martin scored a plaintive brass accompaniment, supplying the song with the warm embrace of trumpets and trombones that enhances its rural folkways. For “Revolution 1,” recorded at the onset of the White Album sessions on May 30, Martin amped up the song’s complex musical incongruities in unforgettable fashion. “Revolution 1” pointedly featured Lennon on his heavily distorted Fender Strat, while McCartney and Harrison offered an intentionally jarring series of “shoo-­be-­doo-­wop” backing vocals. In an express effort to compound the bizarre nature of the composition’s mélange of competing styles and instrumentation, Martin scored an arrangement for two trumpets and a quartet of trombones.4 Martin would achieve a similar, albeit far more dramatic effect with his arrangement for “Good Night,” the White Album’s intention-

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ally overblown closing number. Created explicitly to follow the haunting soundscape of “Revolution 9” as its madness recedes from earshot, Martin’s arrangement for “Good Night” commences with the sound of a distant harp, which establishes the palette for Ringo’s warm farewell to the band’s understandably disoriented listeners: “Good night, everybody / Everybody everywhere.” Having been tasked by Lennon to arrange the song in an intentionally “corny” style, Martin ornamented “Good Night” with a harp, a thirty-­piece orchestra, and a choir of four boys and four girls (Dowlding 1989, 250). Thus the White Album concludes with the intentionally syrupy mawkishness of “Good Night” in the cataclysmic wake of “Revolution 9.” As Allan Kozinn shrewdly observes, “The juxtaposition is brilliant in its incongruity” (Kozinn 1995, 178). “Good Night”—­a stunning portrait of intentional absurdity—­may have been Lennon’s brainchild, but the execution was vintage Martin. Although Martin had missed more than a quarter of the White Album sessions during his September holiday, he was present at Abbey Road Studios during the mixing sessions to prepare the double album for its November 22 debut—­five years to the day since the release of their second album, With the Beatles. On October 16, Lennon and McCartney conducted a twenty-­four-­hour session at EMI Studios in which they organized the songs in an effort to establish thematic unity. As Lennon later recalled, “Paul and I sat up putting The White Album in order until we were going crazy” (Golson 2000, 55). Their strategy distributed the heavier rock ’n’ roll tracks on side 3, with the animal-­oriented songs relegated to side 2. In order to create a sense of balance, they apportioned Harrison’s songs across all four sides. With Martin, Scott, and Smith on hand to provide technical expertise, Lennon and McCartney crossfaded and edited the tracks, ensuring that the album, like Sgt. Pepper, would be mastered without rills. The daylong session made for one of the most remarkable moments in the history of the Beatles’ artistry. Some eight months earlier, the White Album had originated in the Maharishi’s ashram, only to be rehearsed and recorded at Kinfauns, reborn at Abbey Road and Trident Studios, and transformed for the ages by Lennon, McCartney, and Martin in the control room.5 The album’s release, as with previous Beatles efforts, proved to be a significant global event, with the White Album quickly topping the charts in a number of world marketplaces, eventually emerging as the best-­selling LP of the 1960s—­all of which begs the question: why was Martin virtually silent about the production efforts associated with the White Album in interviews, as well as in his autobiographical works?

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Perhaps the reason may have been as simple as Emerick’s conjecture that Martin wished to maintain his key role in the Beatles’ inner circle, a perspective that earns even greater credence after rudimentary analysis of Martin’s official autobiographical record. While Emerick receives some well-­deserved credit in Martin’s autobiographical works, Thomas, his ostensible protégé, receives no mention at all. It also bears some evidentiary value to think of Martin as an unreliable narrator, sometimes intentionally slanting the truth, at other times seeming unreliable by virtue of an aging memory. Or perhaps it was something else altogether, a strategy that he had previously employed to protect his standing among the Beatles’ artistic brain trust, and, in so doing, to be of the greatest service to their creative vision. The Beatles’ producer had long recognized that his relationship with the band members was ever-­shifting, given their growing knowledge and expertise as songwriters and recording artists, which meant that he, too, had to alter his approach as their time together unfolded. As Martin reflected on his years with the Beatles, A two-­way swing developed in our relationship. On the one hand, as the style emerged and the recording techniques developed, so my control—­over what the finished product sounded like—­increased. Yet at the same time, my need for changing the pure music became less and less. As I could see their talent growing, I could recognize that an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me, though it would still be up to me to decide which was the better approach. In a sense, I made a sort of tactical withdrawal, recognizing that theirs was the greater talent. (Martin with Hornsby 1979, 167)

Was Martin’s work with the White Album, then, part of a larger, calculated plan to strategically remove himself from the proceedings at an opportune moment, only to return at a precise juncture when he could most effectively assist the group in achieving their vision? In the ensuing years, there has been unremitting conjecture about the Beatles’ motives in producing a double album in the first place. Some argue that they were trying to hasten the completion of their latest EMI contract. Perhaps they were attempting to sate their seemingly relentless creative impulses with the expansive artistic space of four long-­ playing sides. Others have suggested that the Beatles, competitive to the end, were trying to match, if not exceed, the critical success of Dylan’s two-­record masterwork Blonde on Blonde. Speculation aside, Martin has

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never minced words regarding his feelings about the White Album’s sprawl: “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album, rather than a double.” Starr has argued that it should have been released as two separate LPs—­“the ‘White’ and the ‘Whiter’ albums’” (The Beatles 2000, 305)—­while Harrison felt that thirty songs was “a bit heavy” (Spitz 2005, 794). For McCartney, the question was moot. Self-­ reflexively withdrawing from himself and the band, he made no bones about the indisputable quality of their achievement: “It’s great. It sold. It’s the bloody Beatles’ White Album. Shut up!” (The Beatles 1995). Regardless of the record’s impetus, the White Album’s rough magic succeeded, if only briefly, in restoring the Beatles’ earlier unity—­so much so that they returned to the studio less than two months later, eager and energized to commence their next project. As Harrison later recalled, the White Album “felt more like a band recording together. There were a lot of tracks where we just played live.” Meanwhile, Starr saw the record as a sign of the Beatles’ artistic renaissance: “As a band member, I’ve always felt the White Album was better than Sgt. Pepper because by the end it was more like a real group again. There weren’t so many overdubs like on Pepper. With all those orchestras and whatnot, we were virtually a session group on our own album” (Ryan and Kehew 2006, 476). Although he later described the White Album as the “tension album,” McCartney appreciated the opportunity to simplify and reconsolidate the group’s sound, to retreat from the highly orchestrated production of their 1966 and 1967 recordings (Dowlding 1989, 219). Perhaps even more so than McCartney, Lennon was delighted to dispense with elaborate production in favor of a spare and more conventional rock ’n’ roll sound. And while he later portrayed the White Album as a series of solo recordings by each individual Beatle with the others acting as session men, Lennon was quick to point out that, in reality, their demeanor in the studio hadn’t changed all that much since the early days: “We were no more openly critical of each other’s music in 1968, or later, than we had always been” (Dowlding 1989, 219). And it would be naive to believe that Martin, in spite of his role as the group’s producer, was removed from the workaday tensions that the bandmates experienced as they completed album after album under the eyes of a global fan base hungry for more Beatles product. In his finest moments, Martin afforded the Beatles with the artistic space to chart their own creative destiny, an unusual move in a recording industry that frequently treated pop singers and musicians like so much chattel. And that final aspect, in and of itself, defines the whole of

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Martin’s work. As he well knew, the act of production should be so effective and evocative that you don’t even know the producer is in the background, behind the curtain, bringing the whole effort into tantalizing Technicolor. A Phil Spector production is always inalienably by Spector. Whether it involves the Beatles or the Chiffons, the echo chamber is right there, front and center, reminding us who is standing behind the control board. But a George Martin production is both less and more. It is decidedly less because Martin’s identity in the music is latent—­he has guided the artist, without noise or fanfare, to the moment in which the art comes to fruition. But it is also more because he is able to facilitate the release of the magical germ inside the artist’s head over and over—­ so much so, in fact, that Martin’s skills as a producer emerged as a fifth instrument for the Beatles: it was always there for the playing, for making the track brighter and, more often than not, better. With George Martin and the Beatles, brighter and better usually translated into a new classic. And with the White Album, perhaps Martin’s most obscured and least obvious production on the band’s behalf, his desire to maintain invisibility within the recording may never have been more stark. Notes 1. Years later, Martin recalled that he used the wind-­up piano technique “because I couldn’t play it at real speed anyway. So I played it on piano at exactly half normal speed, and down an octave. When you bring the tape back to normal speed again, it sounds pretty brilliant. It’s a means of tricking everybody into thinking you can do something really well” (Babiuk 2001, 169). 2. For a list of the songs on the Kinfauns demos, see table 1 in chapter 2 of this volume; that chapter also provides details about their transformation into the album’s tracks. 3. The Thomas-­produced September 26 version of “Glass Onion” is included, broken glass and all, on Anthology 3 (1996). 4. “Revolution 1” stands in stark contrast with the up-­tempo, even more distorted version of the song (entitled “Revolution” and released as the B-­side of “Hey Jude”). To distinguish between the two versions of “Revolution,” studio personnel took to calling “Revolution 1” the “Glenn Miller version,” according to John Smith, referring to Martin’s brass arrangement (Ryan and Kehew 2006, 485). 5. Although he didn’t participate in the October 16 session at EMI, Harrison ended up making a belated and very significant contribution to the album’s production. While visiting the Capitol Tower in Los Angeles, he listened to test pressings for the White Album. Capitol’s production team had employed a limiter to compress the volume range, and the results were disastrous. Aghast at

Producing an Enigma for the Ages  107 their subpar quality, he insisted that he be allowed to work with Capitol’s engineers during the mastering process (Spizer 2003, 118). “If George had not heard it in time and taken the tape away to work on it himself and returned it the way it should be,” Mal Evans later remarked, “the American LP might have been a bit of a mess! It was a lot of work for George but worthwhile” (Ryan and Kehew 2006, 494).

five | “Where Everything Flows” The Beatles and the Fruits of Psychedelia russell reising But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul. —­Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick; or, The Whale (1998, 162) Good God! I believe that the long-­haired boys have lost control! —­Carson Mark, military officer, upon seeing the first atomic bomb test (Jungk 1970, 200)

The critical reception and legacy of The Beatles might imply that these four “long-­haired boys” had, indeed, totally lost control. Most commentators from early reviewers to today’s casual bloggers and scholars agree, even in some of the most glowingly positive assessments, that The Beatles is “a glorious, Quixotic Mess” and “impressionist splatter” (“Why Pop Matters” 2016), “the tension album” according to Paul McCartney, or, as John Lennon put it, “a disjointed affair” (Rybaczewski 2017). Jon Dennis noted, “Like the Beatles’ earlier albums, the White Album is eclectic, but here the songs are in conflict rather than harmony” (“The Beatles White Album” 2011). Ian MacDonald labels it “sprawling  .  .  . [merely] a masterpiece of programming” and concludes that “half the tracks on it are poor by earlier standards” (1994, 261). I will cite just two other important perspectives, ones with which I engage throughout this chapter. According to Tim Riley, whose chapter on The Beatles is titled “Fractured Unities,” “the ‘White Album’ defies structure. Where Revolver and Pepper had 108

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self-­conscious beginnings and endings, the compilation of songs here is less formally arranged; its totality is not as central as the idea of any given track” (1989, 287). Walter Everett notes that “the album has been called a history of rock and roll because of the wide variety of styles represented and parodied” (1999, 164). These two views, although somewhat at odds, also share some common ground, that is, the diversity of the album’s offerings. I explore, expand upon, and, contextualize that common ground in this discussion. First, back to Riley’s claim that the album “defies unity.” The album begins with screaming jet engines, raucous rock music, and the sung couplet: “Flew in from Miami Beach, BOAC / Didn’t get to bed last night,” and it ends with Starr singing “Good night, sleep tight” and then whispering, “Good night, everybody. . . . Everybody, everywhere . . . Good night.” The album thus moves from chaos, travel, and insomnia through a mind-­boggling series of visions, including the other insomniac tune, “I’m So Tired,” to the comfortable, tucked-­in coziness of a lullaby. Furthermore, the two sounds that dominate the first bars of each framing song represent wildly opposite registers, with the sound of the screaming jet engines of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” being displaced by the beautifully sustained female voice with a shimmering vibrato in the opening bars of “Good Night,” suggesting something like the domestication, or, at least, humanization of those initial industrial sounds.1 This jarring juxtaposition of sounds figures repeatedly throughout The Beatles. If that isn’t some kind of formal arrangement, both sonically and in terms of the movement from insomnia to sleep, I don’t know what is. Of course, it remains to figure out what the twenty-­eight-­song sprawl between these two moments might constitute. Let’s not forget that the Beatles themselves chose, albeit as a second choice, to name this album not Meet the Beatles, Beatles for Sale, or With the Beatles, but simply and definitively The Beatles. I’m aware of the dangers inherent in any attempt to suggest unity within a collection of songs such as constitutes The Beatles. Of course, things were beginning to bulge apart; of course, many of the songs were individual compositions rather than Lennon-­McCartney fare. However, is it actually possible for the creative minds of four men who had shared a lifetime’s worth of adventures and trials to become so thoroughly disconnected that their combined contributions on The Beatles simply spin out of control and be devoid of any meaningful relationship? I think not. What I propose is an appreciation of the ways in which the shared experiences, psychedelic and otherwise, result in a collection of songs that, perhaps even in spite

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of themselves, still embody a collective creative achievement, the way that the psychedelic explorations given such vivid and exhilarating form on albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band constitute the shared grounds of the Beatles’ imaginative work. So the title, The Beatles, could represent the group collective or the individual efforts of each of its members or both. In this endeavor, I follow D. H. Lawrence’s famous hermeneutic maxim: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (1990, 14). In other words, I address the finished work of art, an artistic and cultural achievement that lives outside of the tensions, acerbities, debates, disclaimers, revisions, and evaluations offered by the Beatles themselves. The question that most of The Beatles’ commentators beg is that of unity. Most follow Riley’s remark that the album “defies structure,” and even the likes of MacDonald and Everett find what “coherence” they do find in its sequencing, or propose that the diversity of the album is, itself, a noteworthy achievement. However, unity can take many forms, and one of the ways in which philosophers of mystical/peak/psychedelic experiences understand the effects of such experiences is that they provide a new perspective from which the disjointed fragments of daily life can be comprehended as part of a different kind of whole. In fact, the Beatles teach us how to listen to their new release in “Glass Onion,” the double LP’s third song and a paean to their previous work: while “Strawberry Fields” exists as “the place where nothing is real,” The Beatles is that other world, that other “place you can be” “where everything flows.” And flow it does through the broadest possible range of musical styles, lyrical evocations, and emotional extremes.

Tune In, Turn On While critics and even the Beatles themselves differ on the extent to which The Beatles can be considered a psychedelic album, their observations are usually limited to the album’s sonic dimension. The Beatles, especially John Lennon, continued using LSD after their work that is usually considered psychedelic, but their music had evolved beyond the bracing sonic effects of songs like “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” “Rain,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Music and lyrics informed by LSD needn’t sound psychedelic; the motivic element can also dominate. Psychedelic lyrics commonly express the psychological and philosophical insights gained during a trip. As Jim DeRogatis maintains, “psyche-

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delic rock must transport the listener to a place that he or she has never been before, to transcend the everyday and experience the extraordinary” (1996, xii). That “place” DeRogatis mentions can be communicated through lyrics, not always or only in the sound. Not all psychedelic music sounded like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, or other pioneers who wrote and played under the influence of acid. Songs by Joni Mitchell, Donovan, Neil Young, or Bruce Cockburn, for example, might not highlight psychedelic musical effects, but their lyrics frequently conjure up insights and reflections communicating the inner impact of LSD experiences. So, while “Mother Nature’s Son” or “Yer Blues” might not sound like psychedelic rock, the conceptual drift of their lyrics can, especially in conjunction with the other twenty-­eight songs on The Beatles, express the conceptual fruits of the Beatles’ psychedelic experiences. We should remember that the effects of and the alterations of perspective initiated by LSD experiences are not limited to the period of the trip itself. Timothy Leary noted this in High Priest: “You are never the same after you’ve had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn” (1968, 34). Dr. Stanislav Grof also notes, “the day of the LSD experience often became a dramatic and easily discernible landmark in the development of individual artists” (1980, 25) and continues, “an increasing number of reports seemed to suggest that sometimes a single administration of LSD could have a deep influence on the personality structure of the subject, his or her hierarchy of values, basic attitudes, and entire lifestyle. The changes were so dramatic that they were compared with psychological conversions” (20). Walter Pahnke uses the term “transiency” to indicate “that the psychedelic peak does not last in its full intensity, but instead passes into an afterglow and remains only as a memory” (1969, 8). In this respect, to speak of The Beatles being non-­or postpsychedelic makes no sense. One can’t simply “turn off” the insights and impacts of LSD trips. What effects do LSD trips typically have on reflective users? Various theoreticians have offered schemes to account for the effects of what they variously label “peak,” “mystical,” and “psychedelic” experiences.2 These theorists agree that these experiences somehow simultaneously expand, compress, and integrate the randomness of “ordinary” consciousness into a state of mind freed from the trammels of the mundane. The three areas of most interest here are the integrative nature of the experience, the impact of one’s experience of time and duration, and a sense of one’s relatedness to one’s natural surroundings. These thinkers all agree that a new sense or understanding of the integrated nature

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of all consciousness forms the hallmark of psychedelic experience. Dr. Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD, notes, The true importance of LSD and related hallucinogens lies in their capacity to shift the wavelength setting of the receiving “self,” and thereby to evoke alterations in reality consciousness. This ability to allow different, new pictures of reality to arise, this truly cosmogonic power, makes the cultish worship of hallucinogenic plants as sacred drugs understandable. . . . In the LSD state the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world more or less disappear, depending on the depth of the inebriation. . . . In an auspicious case, the new ego feels blissfully united with the objects of the outer world and consequently also with its fellow beings. This experience of deep oneness with the exterior world can even intensify to a feeling of the self being one with the universe. (Hofmann 1983, 197–­98)

Other theorists speak of psychedelics removing filters from the receiving consciousness, admitting the influx of perspectives, values, and ideas previously ignored or suppressed by conventional consciousness, enabling what William James referred to as “non-­ordinary” consciousness. On Sgt. Pepper, Harrison first expressed his sense that “life flows on within you and without you.” To cite one other famous example of such a realization, after his first LSD experience, John Coltrane noted that he perceived “the interconnectedness of all things” (Lee and Shlain 1985, 79). This apprehension of interconnectedness is the perspective within which The Beatles does offer a unified vision of existence, certainly not a conventional one, but one that nevertheless translates the Beatles’ psychedelic experiences and insights into a unified field of vision. This interconnectedness functions generally, but it also takes various microforms, including what Pahnke refers to as a grasp of “paradoxicality,” referring to the logical contradictions that become apparent if descriptions are strictly analyzed. A person may realize that he or she is experiencing, for example, an “identity of opposites” (1969, 8). Abraham Maslow adds, “in peak-­experiences, the dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts of life tend to be transcended or resolved. . . . The person himself [sic] tends to move toward fusion, integration, and unity and away from splitting, conflicts, and oppositions” (1964, 65–­66). In addition to this macro perspective, The Beatles also engages the human experience of nature and another element of virtually all psychedelic experiences, the sense of having transcended time and space and of experiencing all time as encapsulated in

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the present moment, a point included by everyone else who tries to characterize the psychedelic experience. The Beatles might not exactly be an album whose songs encompass the interconnectedness of all things, but the range of musical styles, of vision, even of length represent something that no other album has remotely approached, something akin to what James Joyce attempts in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. If we view the album as framed by sleeplessness and, finally, peaceful slumber, The Beatles can be understood as the Beatles’ attempt to offer the broadest possible range of ideas, attitudes, emotions, and sounds that a day in the life might contain.

The Whiteness of The Beatles Because of the conscious mind expansion brought on by meditation, The Beatles’ records will show changes in the future, which I feel will bring out depths in their talent that even they haven’t reached yet. —­Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1968 (Badman 2002) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) —­Walt Whitman (1967, 67)

In the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in Melville’s Moby-­Dick, narrator Ishmael performs a philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic tour de force as he relentlessly pursues the significance of the very concept of “whiteness.” The Beatles can, from the perspectives I’ve outlined above, be reimagined as an expression of the similarly encyclopedic cumulative insights of the Beatles’ psychedelic experiences. Lest what follows seem like mere list making, I intend these catalogs to suggest the unique, unprecedented scope of The Beatles as the fruit of their psychedelic adventures rather than as something “merely” sequenced to create an impression of continuity. Yes, the final arrangement of the thirty songs was the product of the shared ingenuity of George Martin and the Beatles, but the materials included in the totality of the songs remain the same, however they might be arranged. Many commentators have addressed the album’s variety of musical allusions and samples. These include not only the tripartite references to the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, and Ray Charles in “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” but to the Byrds in “Savoy Truffle,” the Rolling Stones in “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” much of the British blues tradition and Bob Dylan

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in “Yer Blues,” and The Who in “Helter Skelter.” Moreover, Everett, referring to Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” claims that “Long Long Long” is “as close as the Beatles ever came to plagiarism” (1999, 204). And, as fans of the Mothers of Invention sensed immediately, “Revolution 9” resembles two Frank Zappa pieces, “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” (1966) and “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny” (1968), released two months before the Beatles began recording. “Revolution 9” samples a panoply of classical compositions, including Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, op. 13, Vaughn Williams’s “O Clap Your Hands,” Sibelius’s Symphony no. 7, along with various sonic and verbal samples; all told, 154 entries from at least forty-­five sources (Everett 1999, 175–­78). Of course, The Beatles also incorporates many echoes of and references to the band’s own music, not limited to the catalog of allusions in “Glass Onion,” but including numerous evocations of their entire catalog, with special emphasis on Revolver (Everett 1999). Unlike any other Beatles album, The Beatles traverses numerous specific global locales: Moscow, Ukraine, and Georgia in the U.S.S.R.; Strawberry Fields (Liverpool); India; “the black mining hills of Dakota”; Nigeria; Jamaica; an amusement park; the English countryside; “north of England way”; Hollywood; a royal residence with garden; a bed chamber; and El Dorado among them. The Beatles’ cast of characters also includes a teeming range of humanity similar to the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet. Named directly are Prudence, Martha, Julia, Sadie, Rocky Raccoon, McGill/Lil/Nancy, Desmond and Molly Jones, Bungalow Bill (along with his mom and Captain Marvel), Dylan’s Mr. Jones, Mother Superior, Chairman Mao, Sir Walter Raleigh, a man who calls himself Dan, and the nameless king, queen, duchess, drunken doctor, mother nature’s son, honey pie, Moscow and Ukraine girls, a wife, a surgeon, a night watchman, the dentist who will pull Eric Clapton’s teeth, and someone celebrating his or her birthday (see chapter 6 in this volume for a detailed list and commentary). Such catalogs could also include the variety of wildlife referred to either literally or metaphorically throughout the album. Obviously, there are the titular blackbird, monkey, raccoon, and pigs, but we also have dogs (“Martha My Dear”), tigers and elephants (“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”), eagles and worms (“Yer Blues”), a lizard (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), and the walrus (“Glass Onion”). It is a commonplace among Melville scholars to refer to the Pequod in Moby-­Dick as a microcosm of the entire world; we can see The Beatles in similar terms. As I show below, the very idea of the diversity, perhaps sprawl, of the subject matter and soundscapes of The Beatles

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mirrors the idea of unity within diversity, or coherence within chaos that many theorists characterize as definitive of the psychedelic experience. The performers constitute an equally diverse and unique collection. In addition to the studio players who contribute to several songs, coproducer Chris Thomas plays on “Bungalow Bill,” “Long Long Long,” “Piggies,” and “Savoy Truffle.” Road manager Mal Evans performs on “Dear Prudence,” “Birthday,” and “Helter Skelter.” Surprisingly, Sir George Martin appears on only two cuts, “Rocky Raccoon” and “Cry Baby Cry.” Although the Beatles’ use of such adjunct players did not, of course, begin or end with The Beatles, on this album they deploy a significant number of partners in an unprecedented way. The wife or girlfriend of each Beatle performs on at least one song, Pattie Boyd on “Piggies,” Maureen Starkey on “Bungalow Bill,” Francie Schwartz on “Revolution 1,” and Yoko Ono on “Birthday,” “Bungalow Bill,” and “Revolution 9”; and McCartney’s cousin John appears on “Dear Prudence.” Wives or girlfriends had not previously been present in the recording studio(s). The decisive inclusions, however, are those of Eric Clapton on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Jackie Lomax on “Dear Prudence,” and Nicky Hopkins on the single version of “Revolution.” Moreover, Donovan evidently deserves some songwriting credit for “Rocky Raccoon” (Everett 1999, 186), and Harrison’s mother pitched in a line for “Piggies” (Beatles Bible 2017). Never before had any such independent or otherwise group-­affiliated musicians graced Beatles recordings. As Harrison later recounted in a story about recruiting Clapton, the latter at first exclaimed, “Oh, no. I can’t do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles’ records” (The Beatles 2000, 306). Evidently The Beatles changed all that, and the group’s openness to such significant contributions to their musical efforts suggests a fundamental shift in their compositional and performative philosophy, one fully consistent with what I’ve been discussing as the “integrative” dimension of their psychedelic experiences. Like Whitman, The Beatles contains multitudes. The Beatles also traffics heavily in mood swings, and posits numerous intellectual and emotional contrarieties, again suggesting the embrace of contradictions that many identify as the fruits of mystical or psychedelic experiences. The thirty songs sample a broad range of tones, from chaos, celebration, dismay, despair, laughing, crying, commitment, irony, and rage, to spiritual yearning, soothing lullaby, revolutionary zeal, and domestic quietude. Probably the most famous, and most controversial, such incongruous juxtaposition occurs in the two versions of “Revolution,” in which the singer can be counted “out” on the single version, but “in” on

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the album. Similar strained binaries abound. Are the Beatles “back in” or “backing” the USSR? The blackbird flies “into the light of the dark black night.” Half of what Lennon sings in “Julia” is “meaningless,” implying another half full of meaning, and, in “Yer Blues,” his mother is “of the sky,” while his father is “of the earth,” and, in one of the album’s greatest rock ’n’ roll songs, Lennon hates his rock ’n’ roll. In “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Lennon advances the paradoxical notions that “the deeper you go the higher you fly” and that “the higher you fly the deeper you go,” as well as “your inside is out, and your outside is in.” McCartney jumps on the same bandwagon with lines like “When I get to the bottom, / I go back to the top of the slide.” These lyrics from “Helter Skelter,” along with the notions of airplane travel and the time traveling suggested by the album’s sampling of music from diverse historical periods, get halted in their tracks on “Revolution 9,” with its clearly enunciated lines “every one of them knew that as time went by they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower,” and finally the complete stasis of “They are standing still.” Most famously, the linkage of Charlie Brown and Peanuts cartoons with an NRA slogan in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” would have to be regarded as a definitive oxymoronic linking.3 In other words, the Beatles ride the helter-­skelter throughout all four sides of The Beatles. The album also processes two radically different perspectives on the Maharishi. “Sexy Sadie” lashes out at his opportunism and hypocrisy. However, as Lennon admitted, the idyllic atmosphere of “Mother Nature’s Son” was inspired by a Maharishi lecture on nature, as was his own song “I’m Just a Child of Nature,” which did not make the final cut (Golson 1981, 169). Lennon is capable of both savaging and honoring the Maharishi in one Beatles release. Does he contradict himself? He, too, contains multitudes. Finally, the love songs. In addition to the raunchiness of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” “Wild Honey Pie,” and “Helter Skelter,” we have the pastoral carpe diem message of “Dear Prudence,” the clichéd tale of lost love and revenge in “Rocky Raccoon,” the sweetness of “Honey Pie,” and the tenderness of “I Will.” The Beatles further complicate the genre with a love song to Paul’s dog (“Martha My Dear”), with Lennon’s fusion/confusion of mother Julia and lover Yoko Ono in “Julia,” and the generalized spiritual love in Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Long Long Long.” This surely constitutes as diverse a catalog and revision of the love song tradition ever presented on one musical release. But even within these songs, The Beatles offers subtle nuances.

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Consider “Long Long Long,” probably one of the most lugubrious love songs ever written. Harrison’s song accepts the convention of the “we’ve been apart too long” tradition, only to displace its overt carnality with spiritual separation and divine reunion, a transformation signaled by the eeriness of the song’s psychedelic electronic effects as much as by its explicitly spiritual drift. The range of the musical styles in these love songs’ deliveries also includes the country inflections of “Don’t Pass Me By,” the Nigerian/Jamaican ska-­inflected lightheartedness of “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” and the nostalgic sounds of “Martha My Dear.” An element of squeamishness creeps into the hyperraucous “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” Far from the untrammeled sexual exhibitionism the title suggests, McCartney domesticates this proposed sex romp with the assurance that “no one will be watching us.” Doing it in the road becomes merely a private moment, albeit in an unconventional arena. The Beatles might still agree that “all you need is love,” but they now understand love in terms that range from “let’s get it on” to the rarified abstraction of spiritual yearning. Surprisingly, the Beatles only rarely evoke images of nature prior to their LSD experiences, with even these few allusions functioning primarily to accompany happy or romantic feelings. Later songs like “Octopus’s Garden” and “Across the Universe” do employ references to nature and the cosmos, but it is on The Beatles that they explore nature more deeply than on any other album. My guess is that Donovan inspired them along these lines in India. More importantly, numerous theorists, psychologists, and religionists stress LSD’s effect in connecting users with their natural environment. Hofmann provides a scientific foundation: [The] uniformity of material composition is connected to the larger metabolistic and energetic cycle of all living beings, in which plants, animals, and humanity are united. The energy that keeps this cycle of life going comes from the sun. The plant, the green carpet of the plant world, is able to—­in motherly receptiveness—­absorb light as immaterial energy flow and store it in the form of chemically bound energy. (1997, 51)

Timothy Leary provides several experiential accounts. Commenting on one of his own early trips, Leary notes that “all that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals—­they look as though they had come straight from the Maker’s workshop,” and, during the so-­called Good Friday Experiment,

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one professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. . . . As I looked at the rose it began to glow, he said, and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. . . . A few days later when I reread the biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense to me. (1968, 22, 285)

In the most remarkable firsthand account of LSD experiences I know of, Malden Grange Bishop, a conventional businessman, decided, in 1963, to undergo psychedelic therapy, hoping to broaden his understanding of himself and his relationship to the world. Bishop describes one experience that blossomed during his visionary walk through a beautiful valley. I was the fertile land, and I was the barren hillside. I was the mighty oak, and scrawny sapling. I was the hard, durable rocks, and I was the loose shifting sands. I was the atmosphere which moved as a gentle breeze at one time and then as a fierce wind at another. . . . I was a bright blossom of a fruit tree, and I was a dead leaf moldering in the ground. I was the honey of a bee, and I was a piece of human excrement bobbing in the swift current of the ditch. . . . I was the thunder and lightning which exploded from the heavens. I was the sudden storm which slashed the countryside, sending water to rut the landscape, and then the warm sunshine which made it all bloom again. (1963, 105)

In this context “Dear Prudence,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Julia,” “Yer Blues,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” provide another unifying motif while also situating The Beatles within the ambit of the psychedelic lyricism of nature. And as with the variety of love songs included on The Beatles, these evocations of identity with nature run quite a gamut. Beginning with “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles charts a vision of nature begun with Harrison’s “Within You Without You.” While the lyrical urging to “greet the brand new day” because “the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you,” could simply be seen as inducements to sexual adventurism, the verses “See the sunny skies, / The wind is low, the birds will sing that you are part of everything” move well beyond any erotic drift, focusing instead on that sense of cosmic interconnectedness Coltrane reported experiencing during his first LSD trip. “Mother Nature’s Son” has been called an example of “Paul’s musical mimicry” of Donovan, his title character an “innocent simpleton, pure beyond

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belief” and the song “a plastic pastoral” (Riley 1989, 279). But these descriptions falsify the close relationship the Beatles had with Donovan. The characterization also misses the extent to which the songwriters all took their LSD experiences seriously, certainly still while they were in the midst of the White Album’s sessions. So the fact that mother nature’s son basks in tranquil introspection “beside a mountain stream” watching its waters rise while “listen[ing] to the pretty sound of music,” or lingering “in a field of grass” contemplating “swaying daisies . . . beneath the sun” while singing a “lazy song” like the fool on the hill (or, for that matter, like Otis Redding, Henry David Thoreau, Lao-­tzu, or any number of poets and sages who cultivated a profound relationship with nature), can be regarded as philosophically and psychologically profound, not as mimicry or foppishness. In fact, existence punctuated by profound beauty and communion with nature frees one from the strictures and pressures of the everyday and provides the philosophical underpinning for psychedelic music in general. Lennon’s “Julia” reinforces this line of thought, offering a veritable catalog of the possible ways in which the human and the natural can be understood symbiotically. Julia is an “ocean child” with “seashell eyes [and a] windy smile”; her “hair of floating sky is shimmering / glimmering in the sun,” and she figures as the “morning moon.” Lennon concludes his portrait by asking Julia, now represented as “sleeping sand [and] silent clouds,” to touch him. Consistent with The Beatles’ yoking of contrarieties, “Yer Blues” follows only a few minutes later with a completely different linkage of human and natural: My mother was of the sky. My father was of the earth. But I am of the universe And you know what it’s worth.

We might not know what “it’s worth” yet, but “Yer Blues” plumbs the depths of how natural metaphors can also function as hellish connections between person and environment. With a black cloud crossing his mind and a blue mist surrounding his soul, an eagle picking his eye and a worm licking his bones, Lennon explores the flip side of this equation of humans and nature, yielding the same kind of paradoxical grasp as The Beatles does with so many other motifs. Another of LSD’s most examined impacts deals with the bizarre ways in which users experience time. Robert Masters and Jean Houston stud-

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ied 206 LSD subjects in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, noting that what they term the “recollective-­analytic level” of the psychedelic experience is characterized by “the subject ‘going back in time’ to experience vividly the emotional as well as the other contents of important forgotten or repressed events,” to relive “events from his past as to lose all contact with the present and relive, as child or even infant, the significant occurrences most relevant and crucial to his present . . . situation” (1966, 185). Grinspoon and Bakalar offer a more detailed description of this phenomenon in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered: Time may also run backward; past, present, and future events may be experienced as happening all at once; or the whole idea of temporal succession and measurement may seem irrelevant and artificial. . . . Timelessness seems to be an aspect of the release from recollection and anticipation, the concentration on the present moment that psychedelic drugs produce. (1979, 96)

The Beatles’ own psychedelic experiences resulted in a series of such “going back in time” both sonically and lyrically. In “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” Lennon and McCartney evoke memories of childhood in terms mixing mystery with innocence, definitive themes of what I have elsewhere termed “psychedelic nostalgia.”4 Beginning with “Eleanor Rigby” and continuing through songs like “When I’m Sixty-­ Four,” “Your Mother Should Know,” and “Oh, Darling,” they also traveled to earlier periods and musical styles much more frequently than before their LSD trips. The entire thematic concept of Sgt. Pepper informs this category, and The Beatles is particularly rich in such material. “Martha My Dear,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” “Honey Pie,” and “Good Night” immerse themselves in comfortably nostalgic soundscapes, replete with marketplaces, saloons, and a simple home with kids running in the yard, all of which stand in stark contrast to the hectic sounds and pace that begin the album in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” George Martin’s harpsichord introduction to “Piggies” strikes an anachronistic note, and even “Cry Baby Cry” communicates an aura of long-­ faded aristocratic indulgence. The contradictory nature of highly technologized musical forms harkening back to a simpler, pretechnological sound enabled the Beatles to establish some time-­warping matrix within which all soundscapes, past, present, and future (and futuristic) might coexist. So, both thematically and tonally, such anachronistic moments are themselves embodiments of the ways in which psychedelic music experiments with notions of time, linearity, and historicity (Reising 2009).

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“Long Long Long” recounts love and recovered love by staging disorienting chronological shifts within its own soundscape and lyrics. In one instance, Harrison stretches out the persona’s obsessive musings with morbidly bent guitar notes put under almost tectonic strain. In the line “How could I ever have lost you / When I loved you,” the measure inserts a powerful guitar-­percussion surge between the question proper and the adverbial “when I loved you.” This sonically highlights the incomprehensible time separating the beginning from the consolidation of this relationship and its reunion. Moreover, “Long Long Long” disrupts the very idea of time and reimagines time as grief by recasting “years” as “tears” in the lines “So many tears I was searching, / So many tears I was wasting, oh. Oh—­.” McCartney’s “I Will” amplifies this sense of time stretched by the pressures of desire, again by implying an infinity of time both before and after his lover: Who knows how long I’ve loved you, You know I love you still. Will I wait a lonely lifetime, If you want me to, I will.

Lennon stretches across the abyss of death “just to reach” his mother in “Julia.” We can also think of “Helter Skelter” in terms of a frantically circular notion of time. The song doesn’t only stress the notion of getting to the bottom and returning to the top of the slide, apparently repeated endlessly, but highlights the idea of seeing someone “again,” with the duration of climbing and descending separating such reunions. Not exactly “Long Long Long” in its scope or sense of separation, but a song of time, circularity, repetition, and returning nevertheless. Finally, “Glass Onion” offers a mildly ambitious journey through the Beatles’ past, in this case encapsulating much of their 1967 musical output. In these ways, The Beatles traverses, encompasses, and synthesizes musical time from at least the heyday of the harpsichord to the final moments of their recording sessions.

“Where Everything Flows” Let us return to my notion of The Beatles being framed by a song of sleeplessness and a lullaby leading gently into slumber, a perspective that might enable us to situate the enigmatic “Revolution 9” more meaningfully as well. “Revolution 9” is the deal breaker for many critics. MacDonald (1994) demonizes the track as “perpetrated” on the public and suspects

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that “few who bought the album ever bothered to listen to revolution 9 more than once” (231, 230). A Rolling Stone readers’ survey positions “Revolution 9” as the “Fifth Worst Song of the Sixties,” and urges readers to “Admit it. This is the one song you always skip when listening to The White Album” (Rolling Stone 2011). The Village Voice labels it “one of the most universally hated songs of all time,” but concludes that “these days, it . . . has an uncomfortable resonance, as its topsy-­turvy nature reflects our unpredictable world more than ever before” (“In Defense” 2014). The fact that I have always found the song both gripping and beautiful is beside the point. These critics all write as though “Revolution 9” can simply be ripped from the album and considered alone. More to my point, a Pitchfork.com review suggests that “in one sense, ‘Revolution 9’ almost seems like The Beatles in microcosm: audacious, repetitive, silly, and intermittently dull, but also pulsing with life” (Richardson 2009). Exactly! Just before the final soothing tones of “Good Night,” The Beatles stages something like a disconcerting, yet still “flowing,” sonic transition from the twenty-­eight preceding songs to the end, one consistent with the framing and motivic interrelationships I have traced. Artists from Edgar Allan Poe to Salvador Dalí and beyond have exploited what researchers call the “hypnagogic state,” a liminal state between waking and sleeping. In fact, there is even a musical genre known as “hypnagogic pop.” “Revolution 9” incorporates many of the sonic hallmarks of that state. Most studies indicate that sounds range from soft to loud and include household noises like phones ringing, bags crumpling, doorbells ringing, voices calling your name, loud buzzing sounds, knocking or crashing sounds, and other ambient noises. Music and snatches of poetry are also sometimes heard. The linguistic element can include wordplay, neologisms, and voices calling one’s name, all of which may be perceived either as one’s own “inner voice” or the voices of others (Mavromatis 1987, 81, passim). A psychological musique concrète, in other words. Does not “Revolution 9” reproduce many of the effects of the hypnagogic state and, perhaps, introduce the way that “Good Night” resolves the sprawl of The Beatles? Everett provides a bridge to this line of thinking, noting that, in “Julia,” Lennon “paraphrases and tropes Gibran’s [Sand and Foam] to illustrate the integration of dreamlike memories into waking consciousness” (1999, 171). In this respect, we may hear “Revolution 9” as an experimental revisiting of the shifts, clashes, and juxtapositions throughout The Beatles, all verging on resolution as they flow gently into “Good Night.” This dreamlike quality does not conflict with the ways that

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The Beatles communicates the kinds of personality and perceptual transformations typical of psychedelic experiences, but rather adds another level of what William James and others would call “non-­ordinary consciousness” to the often surrealistic quality of the compilation. Finally, that no Beatle plays an instrument on “Good Night” might, from this perspective, even suggest that they’ve put their instruments away and, themselves, called it a night. Clashing, yes. Disconcerting, yes. Contradictory, yes. Incoherent and lacking any kind of unity, no. “There’s a Place” we can go “where everything flows,” and that place is The Beatles. Notes 1. I have consulted numerous Beatles scholars regarding the first few bars of “Good Night” and found interesting disagreement over whether the “voice” is produced by a human singer or the Ondes Martenot. I thank Walt Everett, Jim LeBlanc, Mark Lewisohn, Ken Womack, and others for their input. Both Everett and Lewisohn have always heard it as an electronic instrument, while others are equally sure it is a human voice. My conclusion that the sound is, indeed, that of a human voice is based on three sources. In an internet Q & A forum, Beatles producer Ken Scott was asked “what we hear in the intro to the Beatles’ “Good Night” (a high D, with a lot of vibrato, at around seven seconds in). Is it an Ondes Martenot? I suppose it could be a coloratura soprano, but the attack of the note doesn’t sound human. Theremin? Musical Saw?” Scott replied: “Hi Andrew, I thought I knew but wanted to check and upon listening I can confirm that it’s a female voice. I do not remember who it was” (Gearslutz.com). Adding to that, Lewisohn catalogs an exhaustive list of instruments used on “Good Night,” but nowhere mentions the Ondes Martenot. Finally, the published scores of the song indicates “voice” for “the single high note that spans the 3rd and 4th measures of the introduction” (Complete Scores, 342–­46). 2. The most influential of these statements include William James’s from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Rudolf Otto’s from The Idea of the Holy (1923), Alan Watts’s from The Joyous Cosmology (1963), Abraham Maslow’s Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (1964), and Walter Pahnke’s “The Psychedelic Mystical Experience in the Human Encounter with Death” (1969). 3. “I am the Walrus” (“see how they run like pigs from a gun”), “Come Together” (“he shoot Coca-­Cola”), and “Polythene Pam” (“she’s a killer-­diller when dressed to the hilt”) all contain figurative references to guns, killing, or shooting. 4. See Reising 2009.

part ii Songs for Everyone Music, Lyrics, Performances

six | I Call Your Name Introducing the Cast of the White Album ian inglis

An observable facet of the Beatles’ songwriting is their persistent use of nonspecific pronouns (“me,” “you,” “she,” “I”) in many of their early compositions. This was most evident in the run of singles that introduced the group to the world, ushered in Beatlemania, and confirmed the songwriting talents of Lennon and McCartney. Indeed, of their first eight official UK single releases (from “Love Me Do” / “P.S. I Love You” to “I Feel Fine” / “She’s A Woman”) only two featured titles (“This Boy” and “A Hard Day’s Night”) did not contain one or more personal pronouns. A similar pattern can be noted on their early albums: six of the eight original compositions on Please Please Me, five of the eight on With the Beatles, and eleven of the thirteen on A Hard Day’s Night included personal pronouns in their titles. This approach was somewhat at odds with the traditions of US rock ’n’ roll that had inspired the Beatles to become musicians. Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” Ricky Nelson’s “Mary Lou,” Ritchie Valens’s “Donna,” Little Richard’s “Lucille,” “Long Tall Sally,” and “Miss Molly,” the Everly Brothers’ “Little Susie” and “Cathy,” Dion’s “Runaround Sue,” Ray Peterson’s “Laura,” Paul Anka’s “Diana,” Chuck Berry’s “Nadine,” “Maybellene,” and “Carol,” Tommy Roe’s “Sheila,” and Larry Williams’s “Dizzy Miss Lizzie” and “Bony Moronie” were among the many specifically identified female characters celebrated in songs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition, the placement of male names in titles such as the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown,” Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” Etta 127

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James’s “Roll with Me Henry,” Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry,” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was also a regular, if less common, feature of popular songwriting. But although the Beatles were happy to cover several of the above songs in live performance and on record,1 their own songwriting eschewed the practice. The policy remained intact until 1965, when “Ticket to Ride”/“Yes It Is” was released as the group’s ninth single, and the inclusion of “Michelle” on Rubber Soul (their sixth album) became their first composition to mention a named character. While the Beatles did not abandon completely their previous fondness for nonspecific personal pronouns, from that point onward the songs were marked by a significant decrease in their usage and a substantial increase in the appearance of names: in the titles of singles (“Lady Madonna,” “Hey Jude,” “Ballad of John and Yoko”) and album tracks (“Eleanor Rigby” and “Doctor Robert” on Revolver; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and “Lovely Rita” on Sgt. Pepper) alike. Other songs included references to individuated characters in their lyrics: Edward Lear in “Paperback Writer”; Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in “Taxman”; Vera, Chuck, and Dave in “When I’m Sixty-­Four”; Jojo and Loretta Martin in “Get Back”; Mother Mary in “Let It Be”; B. B. King, Doris Day, and Matt Busby in “Dig It.” Some songs took the form of a speech addressed to a particular character (Michelle, Jude); others of a tale told about a third person (Eleanor Rigby, Doctor Robert). Nowhere was this change of emphasis demonstrated more emphatically than in the songs of The Beatles. No fewer than fifteen of its thirty tracks include, in the title or lyrics, references to named individuals; in all, a cast of twenty-­four (real or fictitious, contemporary or historical) characters populate the album’s one hour and thirty-­three minutes, as detailed in table 6.1. A closer inspection of The Beatles reveals that its cast subdivides into three distinct groupings: fictional creations, personal acquaintances, and public figures. Before assessing the place that the introduction of these characters occupies in the history of the Beatles’ songs, it may be useful to briefly examine each category in turn.

Fictional Creations Lady Madonna Originally presented as the central character in the Beatles’ seventeenth UK single release, the eponymous lady was seen by McCartney as “sym-

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bolic of every woman. . . . [I]t’s really a tribute to the mother figure, it’s a tribute to women” (Miles 1997, 449). However, when mentioned by Lennon in the lyrics of “Glass Onion,” she has no function other than to add to the song’s sense of confusion and multiple meanings which, like the layers of an onion, can be stripped away until nothing remains. The track also includes references to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Fixing a Hole,” and “The Fool on the Hill.”

Desmond and Molly Jones In “Ob-­ La-­ Di, Ob-­ La-­ Da,” McCartney built his foray into Jamaican rhythms around the romance between barrow-­boy Desmond and singer Molly. Over a period of several years, they meet, marry, have children, and happily continue in their jobs. Although the song’s title was attributed to Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, its two protagonists are McCartney’s own creation, as he explained: “[I]t’s a fantasy about a couple of people who don’t really exist” (Miles 1997, 419).

Captain Marvel Introduced by Fawcett Comics in 1941 and resurrected by Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics in 1967, Captain Marvel was one of several superheroes (Superman, Spider-­Man, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) who oversaw Table 6.1. The Characters of the White Album Song “Dear Prudence” “Glass Onion” “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” “Wild Honey Pie” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” “Martha My Dear” “I’m So Tired” “Rocky Raccoon” “Julia” “Yer Blues” “Sexy Sadie” “Honey Pie” “Cry Baby Cry” “Revolution 1”

Characters Prudence (Farrow) Paul (McCartney); Lady Madonna Desmond and Molly Jones Honey Pie Bungalow Bill; Captain Marvel Mother Superior Martha Sir Walter Raleigh Rocky Raccoon; Magill/Lil/Nancy; Dan; Doc Julia (Lennon) (Bob) Dylan; Mr. Jones Sadie Honey Pie King and Queen of Marigold; Duchess and Duke of Kircaldy Chairman Mao

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the protection of the earth, particularly during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. Lennon borrowed the character for a brief appearance in “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” at a time when the popularity of the ABC-­T V series Batman (1966–­68) was giving such superheroes an enhanced profile.

Rocky Raccoon Of all the songs on The Beatles, “Rocky Raccoon” contains the greatest number of fictional characters. Presented as an affectionate pastiche of a Saturday morning western series, McCartney’s song tells the story of Rocky, a young cowboy from the hills of Dakota. Seeking revenge on the man who stole his girl, he checks into the local saloon for an ill-­advised showdown with his rival.

Magill/Lil/Nancy She is Rocky Raccoon’s former love—­“the girl of his fancy”—­who goes under three names: Magill, Lil, and Nancy.2

Dan Rocky’s rival (also referred to as Danny and Daniel) shoots Rocky during their confrontation in the saloon. McCartney constructed the characters of Lil and Dan from Robert W. Service’s narrative poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” which relates the story of “Dangerous Dan McGrew” and “the lady that’s known as Lou.”

Doc The drunken doctor is a staple character in many western films3 and here Doc—­“stinking of gin”—­arrives at the scene of the gunfight and attempts to treat the injured Rocky.

Mr. Jones In “Ballad of a Thin Man” (included on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home) Bob Dylan ferociously attacks a hapless and ill-­prepared reporter, whom he names Mr. Jones. At the time, Dylan was described as “the enfant terrible any journalist feared to interview” (Heylin 1991, 147)

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and his lyrics here repeatedly taunt the character for his lack of insight: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?” Although several suggestions have been made about his likely identity (Shelton 1986, 280–­81), Mr. Jones is essentially an invention. In “Yer Blues,” Lennon employs the name as a metaphor for his own feelings of hopelessness and confusion.

Honey Pie McCartney describes this fictional 1930s film star as “an imaginary woman, across the ocean, on the silver screen, who was called Honey Pie” (Miles 1997, 497). She appears on two tracks: “Honey Pie,” which recounts her transition from a working-­class girl in the north of England to a Hollywood legend, and “Wild Honey Pie,” in which the singer affirms his love for her.

King and Queen of Marigold Lennon revisited some of the literature of his childhood —­Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (whose characters include the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts, and the Duchess) and the traditional nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (which describes the King in his counting house and the Queen in the parlor)—­to create the King and Queen of Marigold. In “Cry Baby Cry,” the two engage in a number of daily routines—­they cook breakfast, play the piano, pick flowers, and paint pictures.

Duchess and Duke of Kircaldy Lennon drew from the same sources to create the characters of the Duchess and Duke and continue the nursery rhyme / fairy-­tale theme of “Cry Baby Cry.” Kirkcaldy itself is a coastal town in Scotland, some ten miles north of Edinburgh.

Personal Acquaintances Prudence Farrow When the Beatles and their wives spent several weeks in early 1968 practicing Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ash-

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ram in Rishikesh, their fellow celebrity guests included Donovan, Mike Love (of the Beach Boys), and actress Mia Farrow, who was accompanied by her younger sister Prudence. In “Dear Prudence” Lennon reprises his attempts to persuade her to take a break from her intense devotion to meditation.4

Paul McCartney Lennon’s announcement that “the walrus was Paul” in “Glass Onion” was the first of several direct references to McCartney to feature in his lyrics. Although several of the later (solo) songs—­notably “How Do You Sleep”—­were overtly hostile to his former collaborator, Lennon used this opportunity to express his gratitude and affection: “I thought, well, I’ll just say something nice to Paul, that it’s alright, you know, and you did a good job over these few years, holding us together” (Wenner 1971, 106).

Bungalow Bill Among the other guests at Rishikesh were Richard A. Cooke III and his mother Nancy, whom Mia Farrow described as “a self-­important, middle-­aged American woman [and] her son, a bland young man” (Farrow 1997, 139). The pair were members of a group who shot and killed a tiger while on a hunting trip. Unsurprisingly, the Beatles disapproved and Lennon wrote “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” as a sarcastic commentary on their actions. His depiction of Bungalow Bill draws from childhood memories of Buffalo Bill Cody (the nineteenth-­ century frontier scout and prolific hunter of bison) and comic book hero Jungle Jim (created in 1934 by Alex Raymond and portrayed on screen in the 1950s by Johnny Weismuller). Lennon dismissed Cooke as “a guy in Maharishi’s meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then came back to commune with God” (Golson 1981, 168).

Mother Superior In “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” which Lennon frequently nominated as one of his favorite compositions, Mother Superior is a casual acknowledgment of Yoko Ono. He explained: “I call Yoko Mother or Madam just in an offhand way. . . . [I]t’s just images of her” (Golson 1981, 160).

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Martha Often incorrectly interpreted as a conventional love song, “Martha My Dear” is McCartney’s sentimental tribute to the Old English sheepdog he had acquired two years earlier. He later revealed: “Whereas it would appear to anybody else to be a song to a girl called Martha, it’s actually a dog, and our relationship was platonic, believe me” (Miles 1997, 498).

Julia Lennon’s mother was killed in a traffic accident in 1958, and “Julia” is his personal tribute to her memory. Two years later, on the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, he would express the darker side of his emotional attachment to her in songs such as “Mother” and “My Mummy’s Dead.”

Sadie Disillusioned and frustrated after his weeks in Rishikesh, Lennon felt that he had been deceived, and put his distrust of the Maharishi’s opportunistic and hypocritical brand of religious enlightenment into song. He was persuaded to change the title from “Maharishi” to “Sexy Sadie” to avoid a possible lawsuit, but the underlying message to his former guru is clear: “you made a fool of everyone.”

Public Figures Sir Walter Raleigh During his time in Rishikesh, Lennon found it difficult to sleep at night and often lay awake smoking a cigarette. “I’m So Tired” is a record of that period and, as the man credited with the introduction of tobacco to Britain in 1586, the Elizabethan adventurer (and favorite of the queen) Walter Raleigh is singled out for especial condemnation.

Bob Dylan The Beatles first became aware of Dylan’s music in early 1964, and from that point onward, the two artists began to exert reciprocal influences on each other’s performative and songwriting styles.5 By 1968, they were not only professional rivals and leading figures in the emerging counter-

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culture, but valued acquaintances. However, in the lyrics of “Yer Blues,” Lennon’s reference to Dylan is not to a personal friend or fellow traveler, but to a public figure whose songs are likely to be familiar to the group’s listeners.

Chairman Mao Mao Tse-­tung (as his name was then spelled) was the Communist leader of the People’s Republic of China who in 1966 launched the country’s Cultural Revolution, aimed at removing reactionary elements from the society. His Little Red Book (properly titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung) was widely distributed throughout the West and regarded as an essential text of revolutionary thought. In 1968, when mentioned by Lennon in “Revolution 1,” Mao was a hugely divisive figure, seen by some as a visionary anti-­imperialist and by others as a ruthless dictator. Two years later, Lennon clarified his own position: “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at” (Wenner 1971, 132). Linguists and philosophers have long debated the complex relationships surrounding power, knowledge, and meaning in the origins and employment of names.6 But very little attention has been concentrated on the functions that the presence or absence of proper names serves in popular culture, or on the historical roots from which these conventions have developed. As far as I am aware, only one study has investigated this overlooked feature of the Beatles’ songwriting. Cook and Mercer, in a concordance analysis of songs comparing the early (1962–­65) and later (1966–­70) periods of the group’s recording career, note that All the Beatles’ songs are about human situations. There is a basic but indicative fact about the way language is used to refer to the characters in these situations. In the songs of 1964, everyone is referred to by a pronoun, nobody is ever named. . . . In the songs of the later period, there is a positive infatuation with naming. Unspecified pronouns remain, but often with a new meaning. This change in the way people and places are named is significant. (2000, 89)

This significance deserves to be explored, since it represents far more than a casual grammatical shift: it signals the Beatles’ deliberate adoption of a fresh direction in their songs. Numerous commentators have

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correctly recognized a cumulative change in the group’s approach to songwriting that had become evident by the time of The Beatles’ release. Heinonen and Eerola point to “a tendency towards more biting social commentaries and more openly sexual lyrics” (2008, 33); Stephen Valdez identifies “a more philosophical approach to their lyrics” (2010, 164); Colin Campbell believes that their words become “reflective, self-­ revelatory or narrative [and] the language is richer and more varied” (2010, 38). Though perceptive in many ways, these accounts fail to mention the group’s previous predilection for personal pronouns and its new fascination with unique, named characters. Historically, the use of personal pronouns in popular music derives to a great extent from the blues (firsthand accounts of hardship and suffering), gospel (expressions of a common plea for salvation), and, more immediately, the show tunes of twentieth-­century musical theater written by composers such as Cole Porter (“I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You Do Something to Me”), Irving Berlin (“You Can Have Him”), and George and Ira Gershwin (“The Man I Love,” “But Not for Me”). Richard Crawford has pointed out that most show songs that won popularity in the years between the wars were songs about romantic love. Courtship and love, treated almost as rituals in many earlier songs, now emerged as absorbing, sometimes mysterious personal adventures. The plots of virtually all shows of the day involved characters seeking someone to love [and] the songwriter’s craft lay chiefly in saying “I love you” in thirty-­two bars. (2001, 411)

In such cases, the overt need for names as markers may disappear, as the characters typically reveal their emotions in face-­to-­face conversations (such as those reproduced by the Beatles in “I’m Looking Through You,” “You Won’t See Me” and “You Like Me Too Much”) or through introspective soliloquies (of the kind presented in “And I Love Her” and “I’m a Loser”).7 The deployment of names, often associated with the storytelling traditions of country music (which itself developed from the folk ballads of European communities), illustrates the narrative traditions deeply embedded in every aspect of human existence. Roland Barthes has asserted that “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. . . . [N]arrative is international,

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transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (1977, 79). Such narratives are usually told by one person about others and are built around characters; these characters require names, or other descriptors, to allow for continuity, recognition and comparison (as in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Polythene Pam,” “The Fool on the Hill”). Regardless of time or place, the use of names anchors songs to specific stories and identifiable protagonists, and places them within a distinct context outside the listener’s direct experience. This approach contrasts with the use of nonspecific pronouns, which imply the existence of generalized, unnamed characters who might at any time be taken to include the performers and their audiences. Thus, the statement that “Frankie and Johnny were lovers” does not provide the same opportunity for self-­ identification as does “You’ll never know how much I really love you”; the information that “Marie’s the name of his latest flame” lacks the potential for subjective associations embedded in “she says she loves you, and you know you should be glad.” The Beatles themselves were certainly well aware of this fact. McCartney referred to it as “a little trick we developed early on . . . which was to put I, Me or You in it, so it was very direct and personal” (Miles 1997, 148); Lennon explained: “[T]hat is why we often had the words ‘you’ and ‘me’ in the titles of our songs. It’s the sort of thing that helps the listeners to identify with the lyrics. We think this is very important. The fans like to feel that they are part of something that is being done by the performers” (Turner 2005, 31). Their insights as songwriters chime with the conclusions of those who suggest that listeners use music to satisfy, or gratify, needs in their own personal lives. Simon Frith has written of the way in which love songs “give people the romantic terms in which to articulate and so experience their emotions” (1988, 123); Kotarba and Vannini discuss the attraction of pop or rock songs that allow listeners to insert themselves into the romantic situations or emotional circumstances that they describe: “A significant aspect of the continuous popularity of rock ’n’ roll music is its use in helping make sense of others, especially in intimate relationships.  .  .  . One of the more interesting romantic uses is the our-­song phenomenon, in which a musical performance serves to define a relationship” (2009, 118–­19). Thus, the universal applicability of personal pronouns (we can all envisage ourselves as the optimistic narrator of songs such as “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “I Feel Fine,” or as the disappointed lover in “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” and “I’ll Cry Instead”) readily permits this easy identification with music that mirrors the everyday routines of our lives. Tia DeNora’s investigation of the functions performed by music in daily

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life identifies this phenomenon very clearly. Following interviews with women in the United States and United Kingdom, she concludes that music occupies a central place in the presentation of self and the organization of social life. In particular, she notes: Music can be used as a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is. . . . One of the first things respondents used music for was to remember key people in their lives. The most frequent type of relationship respondents described in relation to music was romantic or intimate. Music helped them to recall lovers or former partners and, with these memories, emotionally heightened phases or moments in their lives. (2000, 62)

Although all texts contain narrative elements, the movement from first-­person conversation or disclosure to third-­person storytelling marks an explicit shift not just in the relationship between author/performer and audience, but in the form and function of the text itself—­in this case, the song. Chris Barker defines the narrative as “an ordered sequential account that makes claims to be a record of events. Narratives are the structured form in which stories advance explanations for the ways of the world. . . . Stories take different forms and utilize a variety of characters, subject matters and narrative structures” (2012, 35–­36). And such stories, whether delivered in prose, verse, or song, may be comic, tragic, or a combination of the two. But they remain stories specifically about others—­often in situations we are unlikely ever to come across. Of course, the Beatles are not alone in using personal pronouns and proper names to reflect the distinctions between universality and specificity in their songs. Many of Bob Dylan’s albums contain examples of both approaches: the lyrics of “I Don’t Believe You,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “I Want You,” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” permit easy identification between the singer and his audience, while narrative songs such as “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Hurricane,” and “John Wesley Harding” tell real or fictional stories in which the listener has no obvious place. But while Dylan has consistently and simultaneously used both approaches throughout his career, the Beatles underwent an evident transition from one songwriting style to another. Attempts to systematically investigate the songwriting process are beset by a range of difficulties. Problems of motivation, intent, reception, interpretation, employment, and the interaction between words and

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music cloud definitive assessments of even the most superficially simple pop song. Frith has suggested three trajectories along which the lyrical analysis of song ought to proceed: the way in which a song is sung, the genre in which a song is located, and the manner in which its language works—­as rhyme, as rhythm, as sound (1988, 120–­21). However, this suggestion switches the focus from composition to performance and opens up the possibility of conflicting, often irreconcilable, judgments on the part of those conducting the analyses.8 Nor does relying on explanations offered by songwriters themselves always guarantee clarification. George Martin has asserted that “the irony is that often the very composers are not entirely clear how they generate wonderful works. . . . [A]ll give hints about methods of working, but the $64,000 question remains” (1983, 8). Thus, although Lennon’s claim that his early love songs “were basically made up. . . . They weren’t about real situations” (Golson 1981, 129) and Harrison’s recollection that “I wrote ‘Don’t Bother Me’ as an exercise to see if I could write a song” (Harrison 1980, 84) seem to rule out any expressive involvement in the songs’ creation, room still remains for alternative, additional, or subsequent assessments. Decades after he wrote and recorded “Yesterday,” McCartney realized that its meaning had changed (for him) over the years: “When I sing it now, I think back. I’ve seen friends come and go, I’ve seen loved ones die. . . . So when I sing ‘I’m not half the man I used to be,’ I can think ‘Well, I know what I mean now.’ Then, I was some kid. I was twenty-­ two. I hadn’t become a man” (Coleman 1995, 73). McCartney has also offered new interpretations of some of Lennon’s songs on A Hard Day’s Night: “I think a lot of these songs like ‘Tell Me Why’ may have been based in real experiences or affairs John was having or arguments with Cynthia or whatever, but it never occurred to us until later to put that slant on it all” (Miles 1997, 164). Moreover, this lack of coherent identification with their songs’ creative origins applies equally to the Beatles’ earlier and later works. Lennon’s account of the composition of “Across the Universe” (recorded, like the songs on The Beatles, in 1968) explicitly denies personal motivation: the words “were purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! . . . I don’t know where it came from. . . . [I]t’s not a matter of craftsmanship; it wrote itself’ (Golson 1981, 162–­63). And Harrison’s explanation of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”—­one of the most thoughtful and introspective songs on the album—­also seems to disavow any careful preparation: “I visited my parents’ house in the North of England. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any

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book, as it would be relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps,’ then laid the book down and started the song” (Harrison 1980, 120). Indeed, such complicating explanations forced Wilfrid Mellers, when embarking on the first major scholarly analysis of the group’s songs, to concede the unreliability of firsthand accounts: “I eventually gave up any attempt at an ‘authoritative’ interpretation of Beatle texts since the ‘in’-­ interpretations are mutually contradictory. . . . [T]his applies both to the words of Beatle lyrics, and to their verbal pronouncements about their life and work” (1973, 17). The majority of the songs on The Beatles were written in 1968, during or after the group’s visit to India.9 By that time, Lennon and McCartney had largely abandoned the close collaboration that characterized the Beatles’ earlier compositions and were, in effect, writing independently.10 Nevertheless, the parallels in their songs and the similarities to each other’s perceived musical preferences were so pronounced as to cause confusion among many critics attempting to review the album. The Times mistakenly attributed McCartney’s “Helter Skelter” to Lennon (Mann 1968, 9); New Musical Express named McCartney as the creator of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and Lennon’s “Good Night” (Smith 1968b, 5); Disc & Music Echo believed Lennon’s “Sexy Sadie” was written and sung by McCartney (Valentine 1968, 3). The failure of these (and many other) writers to correctly distinguish the authors of the album’s songs is one illustration of the continuing affinities within the Beatles’ separate trajectories, and it is no surprise therefore to note that the shift from universality to specificity applies equally to the group’s two leading composers. The Beatles’ introduction of external characters into their songs is accompanied by a significant expansion of vocabulary and the provision of copious details: even when names are not given, listeners are supplied with a wealth of information. In the early songs, when descriptions are offered that go beyond the mere use of a pronoun, they are sparse in the extreme: “that boy” (“You Can’t Do That”); “that girl” (“You’re Going to Lose That Girl”); “another man” (“No Reply”); “my girl” (“Please Please Me”); “my baby” (“When I Get Home”). By contrast, the songs of The Beatles drip with detailed and specific information: “the All American, bullet-­headed, Saxon mother’s son” (“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”); “a working girl, North of England way” (“Honey Pie”); “the man in the crowd with the multi-­colored mirrors on his hobnail boots” (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”).11

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West and Martindale’s analysis of the group’s songwriting vocabulary charts the characteristics of the Beatles’ lyrics within five semantic categories: sensations, drive, perceptual disinhibition, regressive cognition, and Icarian imagery. It concludes that across a range of variables (including the diversity of language and difficulty level of words) there are comparable and significant increases in the lyrics of all three songwriters over time: “Later Beatles lyrics involved less repetition, a greater tendency to use words only once, and more difficult verbiage; in short, language use became more novel and complex. . . . [T]hese uptrends are consistent with the conscious efforts of the group as a whole toward creative excellence” (1996, 115). That this new linguistic creativity was at least in part deliberate is not in doubt. Explaining that his detailed descriptions of Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie were derived from conversations with elderly people in Liverpool, McCartney has stated, “as I fancied myself as a writer, a part of me was getting material . . . building a repertoire of people and thoughts. Obviously writers are always attracted to detail” (Miles 1997, 282). Lennon similarly identified “In My Life” as a significant turning point in his approach to lyrics: “Up till then, it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. . . . [T]hat was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric” (Golson 1981, 151). The origins of the Beatles’ lyrical (and musical) mutation have been variously attributed to their reluctance to comply with Parlophone’s constant demands for a steady supply of commercial hit singles and radio-­ friendly album tracks, to the perceptual shifts that resulted from their increasing use of drugs, to the extra time and space they enjoyed after their decision to abandon touring in the summer of 1966, to their immersion in individual musical projects and consequent awareness of new possibilities outside the group, to their interest in Transcendental Meditation, and to the series of disruptions in their personal lives that began with the death of Brian Epstein in August 1967 (Inglis 1997a, 52–­58). By the time of The Beatles’ release in November 1968, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were, inevitably, very different people from the four young men who had traveled from Liverpool to London in June 1962, hoping to impress George Martin with a selection of their own compositions that included “Love Me Do,” “Hello Little Girl,” “Ask Me Why,” and “P.S. I Love You.” In his authorized biography of the group published in 1968, Hunter Davies suggested that the nature of their songs had also inevitably changed:

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The songs were simpler in those days. The Beatles were simpler lads, writing songs simply to play to screaming fans on one-­night stands, and wanting a simple and immediate reaction. . . . They deny today that they were deliberately concentrating on simple emotive words like I and Me and You. That was just how it happened. (282)

The deletion of universal pronouns and their replacement by unique names thus needs to be seen within the wider context of the Beatles’ transition from apprentice songwriters whose compositions betoken a personal stake in the situations and emotions they describe to accomplished writers who adopt a detached stance to relate a tale about others. The incorporation of additional information emphasizing the songs’ narrative elements is also evident in the precise specification of place. Beginning with the Liverpudlian addresses of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields and progressing through the references on Sgt. Pepper to Bishopsgate, Blackburn, and the Isle of Wight, the songs of The Beatles depict a multitude of settings. Some are named destinations: Miami Beach, the USSR, Ukraine, Moscow, Georgia, Dakota, the United States, Hollywood, the Atlantic Ocean, Kirkcaldy. Others are recognizable locations: the West, the marketplace, the jungle, the local saloon, a mountain stream, the north of England. In both cases, their specificity and attention to detail “creates a distance both between singer and character, and between listener and character” (Cook and Mercer 2000, 92). In any discussion of the Beatles’ relationship with people and places, the case of Bob Dylan merits particular attention. Although references to the Beatles—­as a group or as individuals—­abound in others’ lyrics,12 they themselves make very few references to other performers. Apart from Lennon’s comment about McCartney in “Glass Onion,” the prolonged narrative about himself and Yoko Ono in “Ballad of John and Yoko” (and the offhand, spoken reference to Elmore James in “For You Blue”), the naming of Dylan in “Yer Blues” is the only occasion when this principle was broken. In one sense, this is surprising given the group’s eagerness to acknowledge musicians elsewhere (the cover of Sgt. Pepper includes images of, or references to, Dylan, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fred Astaire, Dion, and the Rolling Stones). However, during the 1960s, Dylan held a unique place in the Beatles’ musical landscape, and commentators have repeatedly argued over which of the group’s three songwriters most clearly betrayed his influence in his work.13 One of the few attempts to assess the motivation behind the inclusion of a fellow musician or

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“competitor-­colleague”14 in lyrics has been carried out by Storm Gloor. His examination of Billboard’s top thirty singles for each of the years from 1960 through 2013 chiefly focuses on lyrical references to real and well-­ known people as branding devices. However, he also suggests that the inclusion of someone’s name in lyrics might give the performer a higher degree of credibility or hipness, or at least create a desired image or theme. It could also be a way to call to mind a particular era [or] to pay homage. The insertion of one’s own name into a song could involve anything from a simply practical purpose to sheer ego. . . . Whatever the intent, the mention of a well-­known person or icon can tell the listener more about the artist performing it, whether it is intended or not. (2014, 43)

When Dylan (and Mr. Jones) are mentioned in Lennon’s lyrics, it therefore tells listeners that the Beatles—­and, by implication, their audience—­ are among those hip enough to be able to recognize Dylan’s music, to understand the immediate relevance of his invented character, to know the song from which that character comes, and to appreciate the aptness of the metaphor.15 The selection and placement of names is a dominant feature of the songs on The Beatles. There are subtle differences in approach. Lennon’s preference for alliteration reveals itself in the names of Sexy Sadie and Bungalow Bill (as it would later in the shape of Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam). McCartney’s insistence on fitting the name to the character is apparent throughout, from the Caribbean overtones of Desmond Jones to the traditional English working-­class families suggested by Vera, Chuck, and Dave (Miles 1997, 419–­23). But composers’ attention to names and naming reflects a series of related developments in their songwriting sensibilities. These center around the move from subjective statement to unfolding narrative, a growing ability to employ an enlarged vocabulary, and a willingness to compose music outside the traditional parameters of the two-­or three-­minute love song. In “The Naming of Cats,” published in 1939, the poet T. S. Eliot pointed out that “The naming of cats is a difficult matter / It isn’t just one of your holiday games.” Thirty years later, the eclectic and extravagant cast assembled on The Beatles suggests that John Lennon and Paul McCartney approached the adoption and application of names with the same care, deliberation, and precision.

I Call Your Name  143 Notes 1. Among the songs regularly performed by the Beatles in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg from 1960 through 1962 were “Be-­Bop-­A-­Lula,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Clarabella,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Bony Moronie,” “Sheila,” “Little Queenie,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Anna,” and “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” 2. Lil, or Lily, appears to be a preferred name for songs about women and saloons: Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” tells a similar tale about a saloon girl, the rivalry of the two men in her life, and its fatal outcome. 3. See, for example, Stagecoach (Ford, 1939) in which Thomas Mitchell won an Academy Award (for Best Supporting Actor) for his role as the alcoholic Doc Boone. 4. For Prudence Farrow’s own account of the circumstances leading to the song see Farrow Bruns 2015. 5. See, for example, Williams 1993; Inglis 1997b. 6. See, for example, Mill 1973; Russell 1911; Ayer 1963; Anderson 2007. 7. It should be noted that in this respect Harrison’s development as a songwriter differed from that of Lennon and McCartney. Many of Harrison’s earliest songs for the Beatles followed the group’s established pattern of using personal pronouns: “Don’t Bother Me,” “I Need You,” “You Like Me Too Much,” “I Want to Tell You.” However, it was only after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 and Harrison’s emergence as a solo singer-­songwriter that his songs began to include specific names in their titles and lyrics: “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp,” “Miss O’Dell,” “His Name Is Legs,” “Soft-­Hearted Hana.” 8. Consider, for example, the difficulties that arise when trying to assess the relationship between lyrics and performance in Peter Sellers’s version of “A Hard Day’s Night” or William Shatner’s version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” 9. Ringo Starr wrote “Don’t Pass Me By” in early 1963. See Smith 1963 and Everett’s table 2.1 in the present volume. 10. Despite their increasingly individual approach to songwriting in Rishikesh, the Beatles still maintained a mutual awareness of, and close interest in, each other’s songs. See Donovan 2005, 237–­48. 11. The reference to “hobnail boots” in the lyrics of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” exemplifies the innovative qualities of the Beatles’ lyrics. The only previous appearance of the words in rock ’n’ roll was in Lonnie Donegan’s 1960 comedy hit single “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” where they were used comically to describe the dustman’s laughable and ridiculous appearance. That the Beatles are able to employ the same words to supply a striking and memorable visual image, free from sarcasm or condescension, is a testimony to the imaginative and often audacious approach to lyrics that characterizes so many of their songs. 12. See, for example, the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” Blue Mink’s “Melting Pot,” David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” Shania Twain’s “When,” Paul Simon’s “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” Electric Light Orchestra’s “Shangri-­ La,” and many more. 13. Compare, for example, the following observations: “McCartney and especially Harrison also became admirers of Dylan at this time, but it was Lennon

144  the beatles through a glass onion whose work was most obviously affected” (Hertsgaard 1995, 127); “It was Paul who was the most profoundly affected. . . . [H]e was thinking, he declared, really thinking for the very first time  .  .  . [H]e would never be the same again” (Salewicz 1986, 170); and “To George Harrison, Dylan was a revelation: never in his short life had he met anyone so persuasively hip” (Giuliano 1989, 54). 14. The term “competitor-­ colleague” was introduced by Jeremy Tunstall (1971) to describe the professional relationship between journalists who share information and common goals while working in the same field for rival organizations. 15. While “Yer Blues” is the only occasion in the Beatles’ repertoire on which Lennon mentions another musician by name, there are at least two occasions when he pays homage by quoting from their songs in recognizable ways. In the opening couplet of “Run for Your Life,” he reproduces the words “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man” from Elvis Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House”; and in “Come Together,” he takes “Here come a flat-­top, he was moving up with me” from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” to write “Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly.”

seven | The Colors That Made the White Album The Beatles’ Mastery of Orchestration and Arranging anthony d. villa

Tone Color, Texture, Pitch, and Recording Techniques Having reached a pinnacle in 1967 in producing highly polished, richly orchestrated (in both the classical and rock music connotations of that term) pieces of popular music and in using cutting-­edge recording techniques and timbral effects, the Beatles, in 1968, embarked on creating an album of music that was simpler in conception and execution and that incorporated more of themselves as performing musicians. Clearly, they eschewed the big-­production, concept album approach of the previous year. This is not to say, however, that they completely turned their backs on such things as double-­tracking (manual or artificial), reverb, delay, or the like.1 Indeed, they embraced these timbral effects and recording techniques in ways both subtle and obvious on their 1968 double album The Beatles. Now, however, the Beatles were using them less as ends in themselves and more for specific musical and expressive purposes: to emphasize a lyric or the main focus of the song. This chapter examines, in two sets, the musical/compositional elements of tone color, texture, the use of intentionally out-­of-­tune pitches, and the incorporation of many recording techniques pioneered at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in songs from each of the three principal songwriters. The first grouping, called simply, if not completely accurately, the “Small” songs—­McCartney’s “I Will,” Lennon’s “Julia,” and Harrison’s “Long Long Long”—­show their creators at work in melodically lyrical 145

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forms with simple but ingenious arrangements that allow us to hear each musician at his most direct. The second—­McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son,” Lennon’s “Cry Baby Cry,” and Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle”—­permit us to hear the composers when they put more forces to work in realizing their musical vision. Together, the sets paint a picture of each musician as songwriter, arranger, and performer of his original music and reveal them all as masters of their art.

The “Small” Songs The first set of songs, “I Will,” “Julia,” and “Long Long Long,” are expressions of love and dedication: romantic, maternal, and spiritual, respectively. Each uses relatively simple means—­a few instruments arranged subtly but effectively—­to bring to musical life the essence of the lyrics. Even the most elaborate of these songs, “Long Long Long,” remains, at its heart, an intimate private conversation. While these songs are outwardly unpretentious, their musical impact is profound thanks to the careful and expressive arrangements forged by their composers. Just as the subject matter differs from song to song, so too does each composer’s approach to his use of instruments, timbres, and textures in creating an aural landscape for his song. “I Will”

“I Will” by Paul McCartney (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 486) is a sweet, engaging love song that, unlike the other two “small” songs, is sung to or about no one in particular. Its simple but well-­constructed melody exhibits diatonic approach notes that alternate from above and below their target pitches and uses a balance of leaps and skips to create a pleasing whole. All of this spins out within an asymmetrical but balanced series of phrases. Three Beatles contribute to the recording: McCartney on lead vocal and acoustic guitar, with Lennon and Starr playing various bits of percussion (Lewisohn 2004, 155). This song, especially for its length, provides the listener with a number of colorful timbral and textural contrasts. Most readily apparent is the verse-­concluding bluesy guitar riff that contrasts with the preceding mellow vocal line and simple guitar work. The part is double-­tracked not simply to make it more present in the mix but to add an attractive new timbral element to this short arrangement. The

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doubling creates a sound reminiscent of a twelve-­string guitar but with some slight pitch-­inflecting chorusing. The most colorful effect in “I Will” is the performance of the bass part. McCartney sings, rather than plays, it and does so in a manner that mimics the envelope of a plucked bass instrument. The notes in the line have a pronounced, round attack and decay. The vocal sound is slightly distorted, raising the question of whether the part was close-­miked with a directional microphone. The benefit of this setup would have been an increased emphasis of the bass end of McCartney’s vocal range due to the phenomenon called the proximity effect.2 Given that McCartney could have easily played the bass part, the fact that he chose to sing it suggests that the vocalization was an important musical component, and it certainly supplies an additional human element to this touching song. Interestingly, in the stereo mix, the vocal bass part comes in at the song’s first downbeat (on the right channel alone) whereas in the mono mix of the song, the part is withheld until the end of the first verse. These mixing decisions support a claim that the vocalized bass part was an important structural/timbral element. The stereo mix allows the bass part to have an uncluttered, more conspicuous place on the right side of the stereo field. The mono mix, however, cannot allow for such separate sonic distinctions. Emphasis on the bass part, therefore, is created through the delayed entrance. Less dramatic timbrally, though still important, are the percussion sounds. These include maracas, tapped cymbals, metal hit with wood (Lewisohn 2004, 155) and, unlisted but almost certainly used, bongos and tuned woodblocks (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 486). These last two instruments, along with the maracas, brighten the percussive timbre as the song progresses, replacing the darker sound of the wood on metal. These are simple touches but ones that lend a relatively large and appealing timbral change to this short, small-­scale song. We can also hear McCartney’s attention to detail in timbral matters in the very subtle use of what sounds like a bass drum (an eighth-­note pickup note and downbeat) at the end of the bridge going into verse 3. “Julia”

“Julia” is the only song that John Lennon recorded solo as a Beatle. It is an expression of tender affection toward his mother, Julia, with perhaps a brief hint of bitterness (“When I cannot sing my heart, / I can only

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speak my mind”) along with at least one reference to Yoko Ono (“Ocean Child”). It was also the last track recorded for The Beatles (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 488). Its gentle melody is often static, with a large portion devoted to the pitch A (the dominant of song’s key of D major), manifested either in a succession of repeated notes, as in the opening four measures and in the two-­bar refrains, or as the focal note in a more active line, as is heard in the verses. The emphasis on repeated pitches creates a conversational tone as if Lennon were speaking, or writing a letter, to his mother. While the instrumentation in “Julia” is quite ordinary, namely acoustic guitar and lead vocal, the realization of the parts is not. Both parts are double-­tracked (Lewisohn 2004, 161), but not merely for reinforcement. They have a significant impact on the articulation of the lyrics and on the formal structure of the song. Lennon records his arpeggiated guitar part twice. Throughout the song, one can clearly hear that the two parts are not completely in sync. Measure 6, at the second “Julia” of the refrain, offers a typical example. This misalignment, rather than detracting from the song’s presentation, enhances it by thickening the rhythmic texture while retaining its flowing quality. This full-­bodied, rhythmically fluid guitar part provides an effective counterbalance to Lennon’s airy vocal performance. Although the song is recorded on a four-­track machine (Lewisohn 2004, 161) and, therefore, ADT (artificial double-­tracking) could have provided the second guitar part easily and convincingly, Lennon chose to record the doubling manually despite his well-­known dislike for doing so (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 294).3 It is clear that Lennon embraced the rhythmic and textural effect that resulted from the manual double-­tracking and was intentional in its use. Lennon, through the use of overdubbing, records an overlapping lead vocal line. This technique allows him to create verse/refrain sections of unequal lengths. (See table 7.1.) On three occasions, as Lennon sings the concluding syllable of the lyric “Julia,” he simultaneously sings the opening words of the next section, requiring an overlapping overdub of the lead vocal line. This device serves both as a seamless musical and textual connection between the two principal sections of the song and as a way to draw particular attention, through the simultaneous vocalization by the “two” John Lennons, to his mother Julia, the focus and addressee of the song. The overlaps occur at the intersection between the end of the initial four bars (the intro) and the beginning of the first verse, between the end of the first refrain and the beginning of the second verse, and between the end of the

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four-­bar phrase (intro 2) and the beginning of the fourth verse. Despite the unequal lengths of their phrases, these sections flow seamlessly into one another and leave the impression of a dynamically balanced form. Lennon uses overdubbing to perhaps its greatest expressive effect in this song in the manual double-­tracking of selected parts of the lead vocal. More than simply reinforcing the vocal line within the mix, his thoughtful application of the technique furnishes a dual-­voiced exposition of the lyrics. This technique both emphasizes particular words or phrases and draws attention to instances of irony. Through this juxtaposition of single-­and double-­tracked vocal lines, neither line type stands out as special. They become equal partners in this bifurcated exposition of the text. The opening lines of the song are a good example. The single-­ tracked line, “Half of what I say is meaningless,” is followed by the double-­tracked, “But I say it just to reach you.” These two contradictory lines (how can the words be without meaning while being a way to reach his mother?) delineate Lennon’s two voices and two minds about his mother. Significantly, the name “Julia” is not double-­tracked along with the rest of the latter phrase. Lennon treats the lines, “When I cannot sing my heart” and “I can only speak my mind, Julia” in the intro 2 secTable 7.1. The Formal Structure of “Julia” Intro 1 Verse/refrain 1

(4 bars) (6 bars)

End of “Ju-­li-­a” overlaps into the verse Verse 1 (4 bars) refrain 1 (2 bars) (“So I sing a song of love—­Julia”) The refrain overlaps into verse 2

Verse/refrain 2

(7 bars) Verse 2 (4 bars) refrain 2 (3 bars) (“So I sing a song of love—­Julia”) No overlap

Bridge Verse/refrain 3

Intro 2 Verse/refrain 4

(5 bars) (7 bars)

(4 bars) (6 bars)

Verse 2 (4 bars) refrain 2 (3 bars) (“So I sing a song of love—­Julia”) End of “Ju-­li-­a” overlaps into the verse Verse (4 bars) refrain (2 bars) Overlaps into the last section

This last measure sounds like the extension of the refrain that we heard in verses/refrains 2 and 3 but is actually the first bar of the final hummed verse. Verse/refrain Coda

(6 bars) (3 bars)

Hummed and sung (Refrain extension)

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tion in similar fashion. The difference in recorded texture, in text (heart vs. mind), and the fact that he sings the latter line more loudly and emphatically than the former supports a conclusion that Lennon is of two, conflicted minds. In parallel significance to the earlier example, Lennon does include “Julia” in the double-­tracking. “Long Long Long”

George Harrison wrote “Long Long Long” to express his yearning for God (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 502). The most adventurous of the “small” collection of songs by the three Beatles, it is at once contemplative and emotional. The song’s wide dynamic range features staid, soft passages juxtaposed with loud, dramatic outbursts. Three Beatles (Harrison, Lennon, and Starr), with the addition of assistant producer Chris Thomas on piano, recorded the song (Lewisohn 2004, 159–­60). Its clearly heard AABA form is made more unorthodox and ear-­catching by the inclusion of a half measure (3/8 rather than the prevailing 6/8) at the end of each A.4 This stretches the already unusual phrase length to 9.5 bars and delays the beginning of the next section. All this serves to maintain the unrushed nature of the main body of the song—­an important consideration in this reflective portion. Of the three “small” songs, “Long Long Long” displays the broadest spectrum of unusual colors generated through instrumentation and recording techniques. These colors produce the necessary sonic environment for Harrison’s prayerful, cathartic melody and lyrics. Pitch, phase, timbre, and ambience manipulations all play important roles in the creation of that landscape. The guitar, voice, and organ parts are notable in this regard. The simple, pentatonic guitar line, which starts the song, is double-­ tracked (Lewisohn 2004, 160). As a result, the guitar sound is not merely thickened, but modulates timbrally over the course of its two measures. At first, the tone is darker, warmer, and quasi-­dampened. Then, as the soft organ melody enters, the doubling creates a sitar-­like buzzing at the end of each guitar note. These timbres, combined with the simplicity of the instrumental melodic lines, create in the listener’s eye and ear a meditative environment in which Harrison sings. At the same time, the relatively complex timbral changes supply an intriguing introduction that draws the listener further into the song. Harrison also manually double-­tracks his vocal line throughout (Lewisohn 2004, 160), which has the effect of smoothing off any edges in his already liquid voice, par-

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ticularly in the refrain/verse sections. This rather delicate prayer about having lost and found God is forcefully punctuated by the drums, which are made even larger by the use of reverberation.5 The juxtaposition of these two disparate parts effectively expresses the two facets of the text. Although it provides only a simply harmonized melodic line, the organ part takes on a prominent role due to its treatment in the recording and mix-­down processes. Indeed, it is a key element in the dynamic shaping of the song. A good example occurs in the first A section, where the part swells along with the punctuating drums to move the song from soft and peaceful to loud and agitated and back again. At the end of the section, the organ’s gradual harmonic thickening convincingly propels the song into its second refrain. Through the application of pitch-­ modulated ADT, the organ part makes another significant contribution. Engineers use the ADT process to create a chorusing effect (referred to by the Abbey Road engineers of the day by the more generic term “flanging”; Ryan and Kehew 2009, 299). The chorus effect changes the pitch of the organ part noticeably but pleasantly. Taking things one step further, the tape on the ADT machine was made to run out-­of-­round, thereby compounding the resulting pitch change. The organ’s most emphatic contribution comes at the end of the song when a wine bottle that had been left on top of the organ’s rotating speaker cabinet rattles sympathetically with a low note played on the instrument. Harrison and Starr add guitar and drum parts, along with higher organ notes and a human wail, to complement the bottle’s rattle. The result of Harrison’s approach to the organ part is a musical contribution that is anything but mundane and beautifully conjures a spiritually charged world that perfectly sets up the song and its lyrics.

Comparisons among the “Small” Songs In comparison to the other songs in the group, “I Will” is less personal in its expression of love and dedication. The object of the singer’s devotion is never identified. It is also the song that has the most “produced” quality in terms of fit and finish. Execution is clean, clear, and well-­crafted. The timbres and their evolution are always appealing in and of themselves, and there is no attempt to make them play a role in word-­painting or to emphasize anything in the lyrics. They do, however, enhance the song’s overall buoyant atmosphere. Lennon’s “Julia” stands in sharp contrast to “I Will.” It is quite intimate in texture, instrumentation, lyrics, and performance, and the refer-

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ences to both Lennon’s mother and Ono heighten this personal quality. The recording techniques—­double-­tracking and overdubbing—­support and amplify the text rather than working simply as production or mixing devices. The song’s static melody, in contrast to McCartney’s tuneful song, sounds conversational rather than sung. “Long Long Long” shares these songs’ theme of love and devotion. Like “Julia,” it is a personal, rather than universal, statement of love. Clearly, however, it is the most overtly spiritually motivated song of the group; it also displays the widest dynamic and dramatic range and thus succeeds in being simultaneously contemplative and emotional (no mean feat). Notably, it is the only song in the group with substantial contributions by other Beatles. As stated above, Lennon and Starr lend their talents only to ancillary percussion in “I Will,” and Lennon goes it alone in “Julia.” McCartney’s and Starr’s full participation as well as the performance by Thomas stand in significant contrast. Perhaps, then, the outward-­looking nature of “Long Long Long” extends to the inclusive nature of the recording process, in that it, alone among the three, is a group contribution.

The “Big” Songs The three compositions that make up the “Big” songs are McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son,” Lennon’s “Cry Baby Cry,” and Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle.” The significant feature of this group is not simply the songs’ bigger sound but that each is an excellent example of how its composer takes advantage of a wider tonal palette and that each demonstrates his mastery of expressive, timbrally complex arrangements using larger forces. If the “small” songs can be counted among the ballads and more intimate pieces on the album, the “big” songs should be grouped with the production numbers. All three are more generous in their use of orchestration, as manifested in the use of a brass quartet and orchestral-­ sounding percussion in “Mother Nature’s Son,” an ensemble of saxophones in “Savoy Truffle,” and lots of colors from an augmented rock band in “Cry Baby Cry.” Concomitantly, the three songs require a larger group of musicians. Although during “Mother Nature’s Son” only one Beatle (McCartney) was present in the studio, a quartet of brass players was called in for the session (Lewisohn 2004, 150). “Cry Baby Cry” is the only song under consideration that includes all four Beatles, each filling a variety of musical roles, and George Martin in the bargain (Guesdon and Margotin

The Colors That Made the White Album  153

2013, 510). Three Beatles play on “Savoy Truffle”—­ everyone except Lennon—­augmented by seven instrumentalists, for a total of ten musicians. A study of the songs in this group shows how the three Beatles used larger forces differently in the service of a “bigger” song. “Mother Nature’s Son”

This song paints a picture of a man in tune with nature. As with “I Will,” there is nothing in it to make a connection to any particular person. It is an inviting postcard photo—­colorful, well-­composed, and printed—­ featuring someone we don’t personally know. Nonetheless, McCartney’s melody and orchestration provide a moving experience for the listener. As we would expect of a McCartney song, the colors and textures, perfectly suited to creating the sonic environment of the song, are always clean, beautiful, and evocative of the subject and its setting. While it is not, strictly speaking, a solo effort, McCartney, the only Beatle who plays on “Mother Nature’s Son” (Lewisohn 2004, 147 and 150), supplies the lead vocal, acoustic guitar, bass drum, and percussion parts.6 Two trumpets and two trombones, played by studio musicians from a score by Martin, complete the instrumentation (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 494). McCartney is quite inventive with his choice of instruments and in their tone colors. The guitar, bass drum, brass ensemble, and even the cover of a book make substantial and unusual timbral contributions to the song. The opening melody-­then-­chord acoustic guitar line, which recalls the introduction to “Michelle,” has a pinched sound on the lower, descending melodic notes. The brightened timbre is aggressive at the outset but diminishes steadily over the four-­note passage leading to the pastoral-­sounding strummed guitar part. This timbral change is a simple but very effective device to bring the listener into the main body of the song, placing him or her squarely in a natural setting. In reinforcement, the bass drum, whose sound, later in the song, will be altered significantly, produces three quick notes that punctuate this transition in an unadorned fashion (no reverb or processing of any kind)—­a natural beginning to a song about nature. In the final, hummed verse, the guitar part uses a chorus-­like effect that appropriately thickens the sound at the point when the guitar plays its most prominent role as an equal voice in counterpoint with McCartney’s hummed melody. Taking an idea that Lennon had suggested for “Blackbird” (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 490), McCartney incorporates a brass quartet in the ar-

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rangement of “Mother Nature’s Son.”7 The ensemble adds the perfect suggestion of the outdoors, a certain alpine quality, which sets the song’s lyric in a proper context. The brass quartet enters at the end of the first verse on the second half of the guitar interlude on a single sustained note and continues chordally in the next verse. Reverb and a flanging effect are used on these lines. The manufactured sense of distance from the reverb and the added weight provided by the flanging give the part an impressive presence. This, in turn, places McCartney’s vocal line in front of an expansive backdrop that is particularly appropriate for this song about nature. Between the two lines of the second verse, McCartney has the low brass double the guitar’s bass line (an arpeggiated E-­major chord). The result is a punchier, much more articulated, immediate, and animated brass sound that effectively counterbalances the preceding sustained, chordal sounds. As a complement to the big, live sound of the brass, McCartney searched for a way to make the bass drum part in the second bridge (the “Doo” section) display an ambient quality as well. There are two conflicting accounts about how this was achieved (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 490), both of which are credible. One account says that the drums were placed in a corridor, the other, a stairwell. Either way, we may infer that the three echo chambers at Abbey Road did not generate the sound that McCartney desired. Whichever process was used, distantly placed microphones capture the ambience, creating a capacious, reverberant drum sound very much in keeping with the world within the song. A quaint and subtle touch is the addition of percussion from an unlikely source. McCartney taps on a book cover to serve as the only steady percussion in the verses (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 490). This “book” percussion, which starts very softly in the first verse, becomes louder and more pronounced in the second. At the bridge, with the introduction of the bass drum part, the tapping becomes even louder and, at times, more rhythmically active, offering a sufficient and higher-­pitched complement to the deeper drums. After a tacit third verse, the tapping returns once more to play along with the now-­reverberant bass drum. McCartney omits the tapping in the final section, the “humming” verse, perhaps because it is not needed, given the guitar’s prominence here (see above). The imaginative use of instrumentation in “Mother Nature’s Son” creates evocative timbres and an ambience that beautifully and effectively sets a stage for the song’s peaceful, picturesque lyrics. The electronic effects (tape-­recorder-­created flanging, stairwell reverb, a miked-­up book cover) are a means to an end. The composer’s approach is distinctly

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orchestral even when the process of creating those sounds is not. That is, the resulting sound is orchestral in scope: big, powerful, and organic. The timbres are clean and well-­articulated in a manner that might suit a classically minded listener. “Cry Baby Cry”

Lennon’s “Cry Baby Cry” (Lewisohn 2004, 143) features a fancifully detailed but disjointed description of a day in the life of a king, queen, duke, duchess, and the king’s children. Its form is equally unusual (though not so much by Beatles’ standards), exhibiting section lengths of nine, nine and a half, and eleven bars. It is the only one of the six songs under consideration in this chapter to which all four Beatles contribute. Even the so-­called fifth Beatle, George Martin, adds a part. The song is full of delightful timbral oddities that perfectly underscore its whimsical lyrics. Some, like the acoustic guitar part, are ongoing, while others are short and fleeting, as if to match the popping in and out by the various characters in the narrative. At the outset of the song, an acoustic guitar treated with tape-­induced phasing (“flanging”) introduces an appropriately disorienting wash of modulated pitch and timbre (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 143). Contributing to this sense of undulation, the vibrating reeds of Martin’s harmonium enter a measure and a half later with a melody reminiscent of a seafarer’s song. To counterbalance the floating pitch and timbral qualities so prominent in the arrangement, and to help give a sense of solid rhythmic ground, Lennon permits a niche in the mix to a snare hit with a brush on each upbeat to bolster the acoustic guitar’s light strumming. But to remind us that this is not a typical day at home, Lennon soon adds a tremoloed “wooing” sound (unidentified in the list of instruments used), which sneaks in and out of earshot. Simultaneously, an aggressively played piano part enters. Heavily equalized to take out the low and high frequencies, it leaves only the midrange, producing what is often called a “telephone” effect (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 278) and lending an unnatural sound to a usually familiar instrument—­a reflection of the lyrics’ odd arrangement of otherwise familiar objects and people. The piano part ends the verse with a bit of tone painting as its cascading, tinkling notes offer the aural manifestation of the “queen . . . in the parlor / Playing piano for the children of the king.” In contrast to the unsettled nature of the verse, the refrain drives rhythmically with strong bass and snare hits augmented by tambou-

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rine. The piano, playing a rhythmic, rocking chord pattern, seems to be double-­tracked, or perhaps treated by ADT. Regardless of the manner of production, there are clashes between pitches in the two iterations of the part, causing a smearing effect. Apparently, Lennon found these happy accidents appropriate for the song and its subject matter. Another instance of intentional out-­of-­tune pitches occurs in the third verse, where a raucous rock guitar lead line clashes with the equally aggressive piano line. The organ also does its part in the march to muddle intonation. At the second verse, where McCartney adds an active bass part that is tightly locked into the drums, the organ plays heavily flanged sustained notes. The effect creates randomly changing high-­pitched harmonics with a decidedly out-­of-­tune metallic tinge. Other bits of sound painting (one might call them sound effects) are the inclusion of what could pass as wind chimes or the clinking of silverware and the falsetto laughter during the Duchess’s late arrival for tea. All in all, Lennon takes a fanciful setting and sets it fancifully. He pens his royal caricatures in his lyrics but gives them and their antics life and color through the brush of his instrumentation and the timbres they produce. Although the musical setting has all the grit and drive of any of his rock-­oriented tunes, “Cry Baby Cry” never loses its whimsical quality due in large part to Lennon’s imaginative arranging. “Savoy Truffle”

The two inspirations for George Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle” are a box of chocolates known as Mackintosh’s Good News and a desire to poke fun at his friend Eric Clapton for his addiction to them (Lewisohn 2004, 158). Many of the words in the lyrics consist of the names of candies within the box; much of the rest is devoted to outlining the wages of sin for those who overindulge. Three Beatles play on the recording of this song. Harrison sings and plays guitar, McCartney, bass and background vocals, Starr, drums and various percussion sounds. The song’s rhythm is hard driving, featuring all the staple instruments of rock music mentioned above plus organ and an important electric piano part most likely performed by Chris Thomas. There is metric complexity at the level of the eighth note not heard in the other five songs (or in many other Beatles songs, for that matter) in which a measure of 7/8, heard as a bar of the prevailing 4/4 shortened by an eighth note, precedes the beginning of the first two verses.8 A key feature of this song is Harrison’s fine guitar work, which match-

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es the exuberant and humorous tenor of the lyrics. Timbrally, the gritty, distorted sound comes in at least three flavors. The most prominent, the lead guitar heard in the solo section, has that fuzzy sound often heard on recordings of the middle to late 1960s. The second, discerned in the rhythm guitar accompaniment, is a warmer, overdriven sound that continues to be in widespread use several decades later. The lead line version of this sound appears at the opening of the verse as it doubles the vocal line (listen to the left channel only). The third flavor is a brash, brightly metallic sound played on the refrain’s offbeats on a chord pattern reminiscent of the James Bond movies’ theme music. Harrison continually changes his guitar sound throughout the song, as a comparison of the first and last verses shows. He varies and develops the sound in a musically logical manner, building to a climax in the guitar solo, dropping back through the bridge and then building again, along with the lead vocal and sax sections, to the final refrain. As part of this development strategy, Harrison combines two contrasting guitar sounds in the second refrain, bridge and solo sections, thus broadening the texture and increasing the song’s intensity. For the saxophone parts, Harrison uses Thomas’s arrangement of six instruments, all tenors and baritones, the deepest and most resonant in that family (aside from the rarely used bass sax: Lewisohn 2004, 161). Playing a sinewy line throughout the verse and providing thumping punctuations in the refrain and bridge, the saxes are a key element in the song’s drive and building intensity. They also feature prominently as antiphonal partners to the guitar during its solo. Not happy to let the sound of six barking tenor and baritone saxes alone, Harrison asked engineer Ken Scott to distort it (Lewisohn 2004, 161). Martin, upon hearing the result, asked Harrison whether it was not all a bit bright. Harrison simply replied that that was the way he wanted it and looked away (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 494). Clearly, the biting, incisive sound of the saxes suited Harrison’s timbral vision for his song. The drum sound is integral to the arrangement in “Savoy Truffle.” Various techniques for reducing the ringing of the drums, such as laying thin towels across the drumheads and specific tunings, had been in use for some time by the Beatles (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 479–­80) and their effects are clearly evident in the sound of this recording.9 Harrison also uses a delay on the snare—­“repeat echo” in the language of Abbey Road (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 285)—­manually adjusted to be in sync rhythmically with the song’s tempo. This thickening of the drum part ensures that it matches the thickly textured saxophone and guitar tracks.

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Although the specific instrument is not listed, the electric piano part in the two intro sections is most likely a Hohner Pianet, which Abbey Road is known to have had on hand at the time of the double album, or some other similar, reed-­based electric keyboard. In any event, the instrument’s bright, nasal, and short-­sustained timbre with the hint of pitch modulation is an appropriate introduction to this humorous song about death by chocolate. It provides an edgy, raucous opening to a song full of like-­minded instruments. One final Harrison touch is worthy of mention: the falsetto voices in the repeat of the final refrain, which put one in mind of finger-­wagging mothers warning their children of the dangers of eating too many sweets.

Comparisons and Conclusion In terms of its clean, clear timbres, “Mother Nature’s Son” shares qualities with McCartney’s “small” song, “I Will.” Just as his voice has an uncompromising clarity, so, too, do the instrumental parts. There is an openness to the mix where each instrument (including the voice) is in balance with the others: each part is given room. Both “I Will” and “Mother Nature’s Son” offer well-­constructed melodies that are beautiful to hear and a joy to sing. The songs’ underlying structural or timbral complexity never gets in the way of their accessibility. All elements contribute positively to attract the listener’s interest. At the same time, their musical qualities are engaging without pretension. McCartney’s approach to his songs’ subjects and protagonists appears to be from a universal rather than a specific perspective. The object of his devotion in “I Will” is no one in particular, someone who could change from listener to listener. Likewise, “Mother Nature’s Son” declares a love of nature that is pleasantly but generically descriptive. Its lyrics read like a poetic poster rather than an exposition of a deeply personal experience with nature or a call to the outdoors. In this regard, McCartney’s approach could be considered that of a classicist rather than a Romantic, taken in the traditional musical meanings of those terms. Its orchestration uses traditional instruments (brass quartet) or mimics them (the timpani-­like bass drum sound). The timbres and textures are as clean and beautiful as the scene they portray. Recording studio manipulations such as chorusing or the book-­cover percussion provide musically appealing timbres to produce the outdoor tableau backdrop for its unspecified occupant.

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Lennon’s two songs, however, are very different from one another, and he approaches the arrangements according to each song’s needs. “Julia,” an open letter to his mother, is conversational, sensitive, and heartfelt—­tender, with moments, perhaps, of irony. Lennon supports this atmosphere with simple instrumentation that uses timbral reshaping that is subtle in application but delicately profound in effect. “Cry Baby Cry,” in contrast, is whimsical and humorous but sardonically so. While it tells a ballad-­like tale (as if it were a “Ballad of the King and Queen”) it retains a rock-­at-­heart nature. Through his choices in instrumentation and recording techniques, Lennon allows the song’s two personalities to coexist. It is no surprise, given that it is one of the “big” songs, that, when compared to “Julia,” the arrangement has much more going on: more processing, such as the heavily equalized piano, the flanged acoustic guitar and organ; and more in terms of instruments and sound sources, including driving drums, electric guitar, and aggressive bass and the harmonium, the laughter and the mysterious “woo.” These devices are not simply musical ends in themselves, however, but help to form, in the listener’s eye and ear, an engaging picture of the song’s strange and wonderful world. This world is gritty or at least a lot less tidy than McCartney’s generically rustic environment. Though fictional, it easily becomes concrete in the listener’s mind through the visual and sonic imagery of Lennon’s lyrics and orchestration. The scene and characters are peculiar but particular. They take on flesh and substance. Both of Harrison’s songs under consideration use timbre intentionally and to good effect as the instrumental underpinning of each one’s gist. So, too, in both songs, there is an interplay among the different textures. “Long Long Long” is tender and serious—­a joyful prayer with outbursts of wonder. The timbres befit the occasion and play out one after the other or in a gently overlapping manner. They are heard simultaneously only in the B section. In contrast, jabbing good humor is the central mood of “Savoy Truffle,” so a big sound with thick timbres is the rule of the day. Harrison supplies these through his guitar sounds, the tape-­delayed drums, and the pin-­you-­to-­the-­wall saxophones. These sounds pile upon each other as the song progresses in a crescendo of thickening textures and volume. All three songs in the “big” group have significant arrangements that impress the listener with intriguing timbral details. “Mother Nature’s Son” stands alone among the three in its “classical” approach to orchestration (the brass quartet, the pristine instrumental sounds and articula-

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tions), while “Cry Baby Cry” and “Savoy Truffle” principally use rock-­ band instrumentation, often made grittier through electronic manipulations. Although the approach and application vary by composer, the expressive manipulation of timbre and texture plays a major part in shaping each song considered here. In each case, tonal color and texture, which stand in equal partnership with the melody, harmony, and lyrics, amplify the text and generate an appropriate sonic environment within the song. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, they are always used for expressive musical ends and not merely as attractive ornaments. Notes 1. Double-­tracking is the recording of a second version of a previously recorded part. Both the original and second versions are placed in the final mix either for reinforcement or creative purposes. 2. The closer a directional microphone (cardioid, bidirectional, etc.) is to a sound source, the greater its bass response. This “proximity effect” is usually evident starting within three feet of the microphone (Senior 2015, 127). 3. Although the new eight-­track machine, obtained by EMI at the time of the recording of The Beatles, did not have ADT capabilities until modifications were made, the four-­track machines had long been able to use it. 4. Other writers, for example Everett (1999, 206), analyze the meter slightly differently: instead of two measures in 6/8 and 3/8, respectively, they transcribe the final nine beats within a single measure in 9/8. 5. It is not clear whether the reverberation was created during the initial recording stage—­by recording in a large space—­or was added during the overdubbing or mixing stage by using one of the “echo chambers” (actually reverberation chambers) (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 268). 6. The bass drum is often listed as timpani. In addition to his or her own ears, firsthand evidence from the recording session tells the listener that the parts in question were played on the bass drum (Ryan and Kehew 2009, 482 and 490). 7. Walter Everett, in chapter 2 in this volume, provides evidence that Lennon is the one who suggested the brass arrangement for “Mother Nature’s Son.” Here, then, is an example of how the Beatles continued to collaborate despite the fractious atmosphere of the White Album sessions. 8. Geeky listeners such as myself might want to listen to the break at the end of the first refrain just before the music heads back to the second intro. The left channel of the stereo mix contains the drum break. By listening to the right channel only (by muting the left, or panning fully to the right) one can hear what sound like finger snaps. Presumably, this was to help the musicians set up for the next, metrically challenging, section. 9. See chapter 8 in the present volume for further details about the drum-­ dampening techniques used during the White Album sessions.

eight | Blisters on His Fingers Ringo Starr’s Performance on The Beatles steve hamelman —­HUdrummer: I’m getting blisters all over my hands from my drumsticks. My skin is all peeling off, and it burns like crazy. Is it something I’m doing wrong like the way I hold my sticks, or how hard I’m hitting the drums, or what. (3.20.11) —­Banzai: Jojo Mayer explains in his DVD that you get blisters and calluses from bad technique. Drummer Official World Discussion Forum (Castiglione 2016)

In the debate, now in its fifty-­fifth year, about Ringo Starr’s drumming skills, no one seems to have considered his own opinion of them, at least not with respect to his performance on a celebrated Beatles album. Many drummers who value speed and technique write Starr off because he can’t play odd time signatures at blazing speeds while showcasing four-­ way independence and mastery of the rudiments in grooves and solos. Others, plenty of “name” drummers among them, argue that Starr more than compensated for his lack of virtuosity by giving the Beatles exactly what they needed—­great time as well as unique “feel,” singular fills, and personality. According to Kenny Aronoff, one of those name drummers, “[Starr] wasn’t getting any good credit because his technique wasn’t at the level of other people around who had mad technique—­and that’s how people judge other people.” Until he saw the light, Aronoff “didn’t understand how amazing Ringo was—­how great of a musician” (qtd. in Starr 2015, 358, 354). 161

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This essay won’t dispute that latter claim. For Aronoff, himself an amazing drummer, to call another drummer amazing should be enough for skeptics to think twice before criticizing that drummer, and if that drummer is Ringo Starr, so be it. We revel in the creative parts and the bedrock pulse he provided in one of rock music’s treasured oeuvres, the one recorded by the Beatles from 1963 to 1970. And although it may be stretching the point to say that Starr was the greatest rock drummer of all time or some variation of that accolade—­journalist James Woodall, writing in The Spectator in 2015, called him a “genius”—­it’s an equal stretch to say he wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles, as the British entertainer Jasper Carrott once quipped (Lewisohn 2013, 1592). Starr wasn’t the best drummer in the Beatles, but that’s true only for the few tunes on which someone else played drums. Four of these tunes—­“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Dear Prudence,” “Wild Honey Pie,” and “Mother Nature’s Son”—­appear on the White Album (hereafter referred to by its official title, The Beatles), and the drummer on those tracks was Paul McCartney. The question of Starr’s skills is a key concern for a reinterpretation of The Beatles, fifty years after its release, because he thought he didn’t play well on the record. (My sources throughout this paper are the original LP released in November 1968 and the remastered stereo compact disc released in September 2009. The increased clarity of the drums in the stereo mix makes it preferable over the remastered mono version, estimable in its own right, which also appeared at that time.) Speaking with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street drummer Max Weinberg in 1984 about the recording of this double LP, Starr first contradicted conventional wisdom by claiming that the group was tight during sessions normally described as tense and fractured. In fact, sixteen years after the album appeared—­during which time bickering, a tendency to record individually, and an atmosphere of Yoko-­inspired discontent, all presaging a breakup a year later, had become the accepted narrative based on copious eyewitness testimony—­Starr maintained that Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison were “really getting on” and that he was the odd man out. So “horrible” did he feel about the situation that he decided to quit: “I left the group . . . because I felt I was playing like shit” (Weinberg 1984, 182). But his two weeks away ended happily. Helping to hasten his return to Abbey Road, he told Weinberg, was a telegram from the other three declaring him “the greatest rock drummer on earth” (182). That made everything okay. The Beatles were (superficially) whole again. This business of being crowned with superlatives in a field in which, gauged by modern standards of expertise, Ringo Starr is not even in the

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conversation, pervades commentary on him, and it must be addressed before we analyze his playing on The Beatles. “Best,” “most,” and “greatest” are irrelevant; feel, time, and imagination are what matter. Superlatives are empty signifiers compared to what our ears hear. Nonetheless, when interviewed by Modern Drummer magazine in 2009, Yoko Ono invoked the superlative “most,” exclaiming, “Ringo is the most underrated drummer in the industry!” (Ono 2009). How does one prove such a subjective remark? After all, as a quick review of drum solos on YouTube shows, there seems to be an endless roster of brilliant drummers whose combined lifetime audiences will never approach the hundreds of millions who have heard Ringo Starr. Rather than make a blanket statement that begs all kinds of questions about the correlation between fame and skill, Ono might instead have said what master drummer, friend, and occasional collaborator Jim Keltner said about Starr—­that he is “one of the greatest rock drummers ever” (qtd. in Flans 1991, 69). Keltner knows enough to qualify the superlative.1 Not so Starr himself, who wasn’t humble about his abilities, telling interviewer Geoffrey Giuliano, “I’m the best rock ’n’ roll drummer on the planet” (1994, 191), as if no word other than “best” would measure him. Rather than claim unrivaled greatness on an instrument that many have mastered, Starr might instead have acknowledged his stature in the world of drumming in three ways: one, that he was born and raised in Liverpool at a certain time in history; two, that he was eventually recruited into the Beatles (a band from Liverpool that happened to include the British Invasion’s two supreme songwriters) just weeks before they recorded their first LP; and three, that thanks to the world fame resulting from irresistible songs to which he contributed memorable parts on drums and percussion, he inspired countless youngsters to pick up sticks, get a kit, and start rock bands. For this, above all drummers who ever lived, Ringo Starr did. Numberless drummers who at a young age came under the spell of the Beatles are quick to point out his massive influence on them. The editor of Modern Drummer, when presenting the Editor’s Achievement award to Starr, stated as much: What is beyond question is Ringo’s impact on an entire generation of drummers who first became drummers as a direct result of seeing and hearing him play in the early days of The Beatles. Literally hundreds of thousands of players—­including some of the greatest drummers playing today—­cite Ringo as their first motivating influence. (Schultz 2016)

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In the same spirit, Ed Breckenfeld, another expert at Modern Drummer, distilled all the good things that admirers of Ringo have said about him since 1963: Technical-­minded detractors will point out that he didn’t have the “chops” of many modern rock drummers, or couldn’t do what contemporaries like Keith Moon and Ginger Baker could do. But Ringo[’s]  .  .  . strengths lie in creating the right drum part for the song, a classic approach that proved perfect for the writing of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. . . . With unwavering groove, creatively musical ideas, and a marvelous sense of taste, Ringo set the prototype for the modern pop-­rock drummer. (2001, 130)

These two voices, representative of the worldwide drumming community, neither stoop to condescension nor rise to hyperbole. They pay homage to Starr’s talent, relish his ingenuity, appreciate his influence, and love his style—­taken together, more than enough to place him among the immortals.2 Thus, when one-­quarter of the world’s leading band says he had been playing badly on an album that ranks number 10 on Rolling Stone’s list (compiled in 2012) of the Five Hundred Greatest Albums, Beatles fans and scholars may wish to know which of his badly played songs made the final cut. Starr neither identifies these tunes nor points out specific flaws, leaving us the unpleasant task of searching out technical errors and probing for lapses, song by song, in the order of recording. The album contains thirty tunes. Four of them do not have a drum part. McCartney played drums on four, maybe five, of them. That leaves Starr on twenty-­ one or twenty-­two songs. Taping began on May 30, 1968, with “Revolution 1.” (Like many scholars before me, in this analysis I am indebted to Mark Lewisohn’s [1988] chronology.) On this medium-­slow shuffle, Starr does little. As on several of the album’s songs, he keeps a steady backbeat, some might say to the point of monotony. He links the choruses and verses with one-­bar triplets; the bass drum remains locked in a one/three thump, with no linking hi-­hat or ride cymbal. Overdubs on June 4, including “various percussive clicks by Ringo” (Lewisohn 1988, 136), prevented total sameness of sound for the full four minutes and fifteen seconds of the final mix. Those who can imagine a heavier backbeat, shuffle action on the hi-­hat, and a bigger bass drum might conclude that on this track Starr is

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at best noncommittal, at worst dull. To those who might object by saying Starr was a master of space—­of knowing when not to play—­one might reply, yes, that’s a virtue in a drummer when it works; but on “Revolution 1” Ringo barely plays at all. As we sift through the songs, we must remember that any of the final takes predating Starr’s two-­week “retirement” on August 22 may be examples of what he himself told Weinberg was “shit[ty]” drumming. The apathy displayed on this first session could well be the first of several such examples. Not so the drumming on “Don’t Pass Me By,” recorded second. Starr jumps in by attacking the snare drum and sustains his authority with odd fills played all over the bar line, as if in dialogue with Jack Fallon’s violin embellishments, overdubbed a month later. Sudden rolls, cymbal strikes, and thick backbeats enliven the left channel; in the right, the violinist generates scrappy counterpoint. Starr’s exuberant vocal and McCartney’s simpatico bass salvage the lyrics. Starr’s sixteenth-­note snare drum figure that shatters the pause at 2:48 helps make “Don’t Pass Me By” not only a top performance on The Beatles but one of his standout moments on all Beatles recordings. Despite this, the tune is subject to ridicule. Alan Clayson, Starr’s biographer, dismisses “Don’t Pass Me By” as a “slight, laughable novelty” (1991, 171). Clayson overlooks Starr’s drumming; for this reason alone, his disparagement is less than convincing. The most interesting thing about “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is that Starr ends each of the first four bars of the verse (not counting the first) with two snare eighth notes (i.e., “and-­four”), finishing the fourth bar (and the rest to follow) with parallel eighth notes on the bass drum (“and-­one”). Aside from what sounds like half-­closed hi-­hat crashes on the 7/4 turnaround, this tune is, like “Revolution 1,” a dry track. No riding hi-­hat is audible, even when the strident firebell pauses. Starr’s groove is deep but spare, leaving room for the track’s restless time signatures and guitars, cranked hot, to move around at will. Even at 2:00–­2:03, when another drummer might have thrown down a speedy fill, Starr stays the course, secure in this snare/ bass drum structure (“one-­t wo-­three-­and-­f our-­and”: a backbeat) to which he often turned in the sixties (figure 8.1). On this number we hear the epitome of Ringo Starr’s aesthetics of simplicity. But simplicity is sometimes underachievement. Drummers are likely to hear missed chances to do more with what Lennon’s hyperstrumming goads the rhythm section to do—­craft a more syncopated groove and to let loose, not simply fill space but fill it in step with the

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Figure 8.1. Drum pattern accenting two and four

song’s hopped-­up velocity. On bass, McCartney certainly doesn’t need to be asked. On drums, Starr can’t be bothered, or aroused, to conjure a funky snare/bass/hi-­hit interplay, to finagle a roll. Grooving or not grooving, filling or not filling: it’s not as if either is inherently right or wrong. Up until 1968, on dozens of album tracks and singles, Starr had proved himself to be a master of taste as well as of space. He possessed an unerring instinct for when to groove, when to roll, when to do both. Early songs like “Misery” and “Hold Me Tight” don’t need rolls, so they don’t have them, and what Starr does play on these tunes, as on so many other Beatles tracks, fits like an aural mortise-­ and-­tenon joint into the pop artifact. At the same time, “Boys” and “Twist and Shout” propel partly because of clever, agile fills, as do “Long Tall Sally,” “Day Tripper,” “The Word,” and “Hello, Goodbye,” all of them fueled by serious grooves. We’re not trying to nitpick the drumming skills of Ringo Starr; rather, we’re looking for signs of his self-­alleged “shit[ty]” drumming on The Beatles. And although we may not be inclined to apply this expletive to his work on “Monkey,” this performance is a likely example of what Ringo meant. The saga of “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” began on July 3. Lewisohn reports that “seven takes were recorded of the basic rhythm; Paul on acoustic guitar and Ringo on drums” (1988, 140). Lewisohn’s logs show many overdubs and new takes over the next two days, including twelve on July 8. Lewisohn quotes second engineer Richard Lush: “Poor Ringo would be playing from about three in the afternoon until one in the morning, with few breaks in between, and then have to do it all over again the next night” (141). They finished it on July 9. Percussion added at the last session offsets the same dryness—­inaudible or weak hi-­hat, crash, or ride cymbals—­heard so far on The Beatles. Except for a few visits to the floor tom, Starr doesn’t budge from the pocket, laying down one of the most

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rudimentary drum tracks in the Beatles’ catalog. Rudimentary doesn’t necessarily mean bad; listen to the snare/bass/hi-­hat interplay on Rubber Soul’s “What Goes On” for proof that Starr could make a challenging part (he lands every backbeat, bass drum note, and hi-­hat strike with precision) sound both simple and exciting. On “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” however, the one/three bass drum is buried in the mix; the snare drum clicks rather than cracks or cuts as “calypso” percussion should do; no eighth-­ note ride spices the rhythm; and Starr’s energy level seems low when set against the overdubbed antics and instrumentation—­percussion, hoots, laughter, piano, horns. Lennon’s dark ballad “Cry Baby Cry” reinvigorates Starr, who returns to top form, entering at 0:27 with a four-­pulse snare/bass on the chorus, leading into the verse with a triplet, switching to a syncopated groove accented with loud ride crashes set up by more triplets growing out of cymbal taps on the last verse. Next, “Sexy Sadie” is exceptional in that Starr opens on snare and tom with what becomes for the rest of his Beatles career a signature fill based on interrupted sixteenth-­ notes starting on the three: “three-­e-­[rest]-­e-­four-­e-­and” and its variation “four-­e-­and-­e” (hereafter notated RS*),3 in figure 8.2 transcribed in 2/4 for snare drum. Starr shores up the rest of the tune, heavy on midverse fills and crashes, on the tried-­and-­true “one-­t wo-­three-­and-­f our-­and” snare/ bass groove. On “Sexy Sadie” he plays behind the beat, thereby disorienting the listener, as if to enhance Lennon’s disillusionment with the Maharishi, whose moral character Lennon had come to doubt. The Fabs’ drummer continues to invalidate his negative self-­ assessment on the full-­band “Yer Blues.” Behind the Ludwigs, crammed against his mates (they recorded it in a small room in Abbey Road studio), Starr slams backbeats in earnest, his kit surging with feeling, time, power, and those trademark triplets skittering over the snare and tom heads while cymbals wash and clang in big half-­ride/half-­crash strikes. A reinforcement snare drum added at 2:25 helps to lock down two guitar solos, the first a primal and grungy twelve bars (perhaps by Lennon, and thus a premonition of Plastic Ono Band, on which Starr drummed), and the second a fierce and nasty (by Harrison?) odd-­count ten bars. At this point, mid-­August 1968, with the catharsis of “Yer Blues” accomplished, McCartney brought in the vastly different “Rocky Raccoon,” to which Starr contributed hi-­hat and what sounds like brushed snare. Attempting to judge the drumming on The Beatles through the lens of Starr’s less than enthusiastic opinion of it becomes especially difficult

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Figure 8.2. Starr’s signature fill

on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” recorded over the course of three weeks marked by the drummer’s absence. In its final version, its magisterial sweep makes any one player’s contribution to it impossible to fault. For the track’s nearly five-­minute length, Starr’s half-­time pattern, “one-­two-­t hree [four rest],” keeps everything, everyone, in line—­as it should, this being a drummer’s main job—­while his frequent fills, mostly slow eighth-­note rolls, combine with an idiosyncratic tambourine part, overdubbed by Starr, to counteract the tune’s tendency to lug like a car in the wrong gear. Starr looks Harrison’s entropic hymn in the face and refuses to decelerate as a sinking organ depresses the mood; McCartney drags heavy quarter notes and eighth notes out of his bass; and, in the fade-­out, Eric Clapton’s guitar pulls up and away from Harrison’s moans and yells. There’s a busy minimalism in Starr’s interpretation of despair, with drums providing vitality and rhythmic counterpoint to McCartney’s bass, the tambourine, and the keening guitar, yet few cymbal crashes to punctuate the depression. Less than a week later, Starr was gone. In the two-­week interim, McCartney handled drum duties on “Dear Prudence” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Of the latter, Lewisohn notes the possibility that Harrison and Lennon added drum tracks (1988, 151). Walter Everett (1999, 165), Ian MacDonald (1994, 247), and Kenneth Womack (2014, 63) cite “Back in the U.S.S.R.” as the song over which Starr, fed up with being coached by McCartney, quit. The latter drives this fierce, addictive rocker with panache. On “Dear Prudence,” he recycles Starr’s “one-­two-­t hree” kick/ snare beat heard on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (or did Starr lift this beat from McCartney and apply it to “Guitar,” which was redone after his return?), builds to a climax, and lashes the four-­piece kit with spectacular rolls in a ten-­bar drum break, with exquisitely timed crashes, over the last verse (2:50 to 3:18). For some time, McCartney may have been awaiting his chance to do what Starr either wouldn’t do or was incapable of doing to McCartney’s satisfaction. The alleged spat over “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” in which Starr couldn’t play what McCartney wanted, leads to this conclusion. (Less than two years later, McCartney indulged

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his drum-­desire on his first solo LP McCartney, which included the drum solo “Kreen-­Akrore.”) Whatever the reason, “Dear Prudence” marks a drumming high point not only on The Beatles but on all Beatles recordings. Having had two weeks to clear his head, would Starr play at this level on the rest of the sessions? He was put to the test right away. Lewisohn (1988, 154) reports that on September 9, over the course of seven-and-a-half hours of “cacophonous maelstrom,” McCartney’s “Helter Skelter” was nailed on the twenty-­first take. Starr had been back for a few days; nothing had yet challenged him as much as “Helter Skelter,” which required him to play hard and long. By the time of this session, he had, we must assume, crossed the divide from playing badly to playing well, as might be expected of the self-­proclaimed best rock ’n’ roll drummer in the world. But ordinarily, to become and to remain the best at anything demands years of attention to one’s craft and to conditioning oneself for the physical toll exacted. In other words, musicians must practice. To the question, in 1966, posed by BBC’s Brian Matthew, “Did you ever have any kind of tuition at all?” Starr replied that at the age of fourteen he “had about three lessons.” His instructor “wrote it all down, and I never went back. After that, I couldn’t be bothered. It was too routine for me, you know, all the paradiddles. I couldn’t stand it. I don’t think I’d ever bother learning now” (1966). The passing of time didn’t change this attitude: in 1997 he told drummer/interviewer Robyn Flans, “Both of my sons do the thing that I find impossible, which is practice. I’ve never been able to do it. I have a kit at home and I get on it, but within two minutes it’s the most boring thing for me because I like to play with other musicians” (1997, 67). An unusual thing for a musician not to spend free time on his or her instrument in order to improve technique! Thomas Lang is a drummer with astounding speed, imagination, and four-­limb dexterity gained through years of practice.4 In an instructional video, Lang explains why he still practices and why the rest of us should too: Why practice hands alone when you can practice with your feet at the same time? This creates a coordination challenge that forces you to spend long periods of time with each exercise, which again requires stamina and adds an endurance component to these exercises. . . . I train myself to play difficult things in order to play easy things with more confidence and ease. This is the point of practicing in general, of course: conditioning yourself to being able to play everything with

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ease and confidence. . . . Do it for long periods of time; count hours rather than bars. (2004)

Another believer was John Coltrane. According to jazz writer Bob Blumenthal, during club dates Coltrane would leave the stage after his solo and practice in the bathroom while the piano player soloed (qtd. in Porter 1998, 255). When asked by Frank Kofsky about his daily practice schedule, the virtuoso Coltrane replied, “I don’t know how many hours, it’s just all day, on and off.” Despite having attained the highest level of musicianship, Coltrane knew that to reach “the area that I want to get into” meant one thing: “I need to practice” (Kofsky 1998, 156). Two extremes: Starr’s none-­at-­all approach; Coltrane/Lang’s as-­often-­as-­you-­ can approach. Although one shouldn’t hold one musician to another musician’s standards, one can extrapolate results from observing the differences yielded by this comparison. On the evening of September 9, 1968, Starr faced two challenges. First, his hands were soft from lack of playing, a situation ideal for the formation of blisters. Drummers who don’t drum and then try drumming at a “Helter Skelter” level of intensity are going to suffer. The pain—­ as the blisters grow, the drumsticks irritate the fluid-­swollen epidermis with each stroke—­will mar execution. Playing backbeats is hard enough; thumping toms and whacking a twenty-­inch crash cymbal increase the pain. More nuanced touches such as riding the cymbal and ghost-­noting are sure to be lost. The drummer shifts the sticks, looking for a comfortable grip, and succeeds only in destabilizing groove and time. Second, the lack of practice may also have affected Starr’s chops. Although we’ve already noted that an excellent drum track doesn’t necessarily demand fills, when a drummer does choose to roll in order to complement a song’s introductions, turnarounds, or rests, he or she usually varies those rolls. “Helter Skelter” wasn’t “Hold Me Tight.” It needed more action from the drummer, mainly because McCartney’s plan was to surpass the thunder of The Who’s “I Can See for Miles.” This didn’t mean Starr had to try to match Keith Moon’s frenzied style. It does mean, however, that he could have done more than bang out the RS* pattern, first sticked on “Sexy Sadie,” fifteen times. One might defend this choice by saying that repetition is the soul of “Helter Skelter,” and that even Thomas Lang, if afflicted with blisters, would be misfiring by the end of the twenty-­first take of such a hard rocker. True, the net effect of bone-­crushing straight-­four verses and choruses, guitars, and drums in unison is to batter listeners in a rock ’n’

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roll death march across the playground. And at this blow-­by-­blow pulse Starr finds the deep pocket. Yet for all that, an overdubbed two/four snare (becoming habitual in these sessions) indicates that someone wanted more attack in the backbeat. Moon never needed an overdubbed backbeat. Neither did John Bonham, Mick Avory, Dino Danelli, Charlie Watts, or Ginger Baker, nor any members of a long gallery of modern masters, from Aronoff to Zoro. As for blisters, they’re the fault of the drummer, not of the song or the number of takes. Starr’s famous cry, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers,” may have been mock hyperbole caught on tape after hours of nocturnal rock mayhem. On the other hand, if blisters really did pop up on his fingers that night, something good came of them. A vocal outcry took the place of the dynamic sticking that “Helter Skelter” invited. Fans got not great sticking but a great line out of the blue, a scream that startles everyone on first hearing. (To fully appreciate the impact of the scream, one need only listen to the mono mix, which lops off the entire false ending / fade-­in sequence.) Creative interpretation would take this literal reading a step further. Figuratively, the word “blisters” stands for many festering problems, including Starr’s two-­week estrangement from the Beatles. It represents the friction in Abbey Road that led to engineer Geoff Emerick’s leaving in mid-­July, to Starr’s leaving in late August, to squabbles, and to separate sessions. By the time The Beatles was released in November 1968, the group had only a year to go. Ringo Starr was the coal mine canary of the Beatles, and no one saw it at the time. Emotional blisters were forming in the hearts of the other three Beatles as they taped their tunes in increasing isolation. Starr’s cry on “Helter Skelter” expressed something terrible that perhaps even the Beatles were not ready to admit and that fans could not have surmised: the Beatles were breaking up. In Ringo’s drumming lay one clue. His “holiday” in Greece was another. An unrehearsed screech was yet another. The pain and frustration in Starr’s voice, added to the “shit[ty]” playing about which he felt embarrassed, reflect the internal drama mastered into each groove of The Beatles. Something else contributed to lackluster backbeating and filling not just on “Helter Skelter” but all over The Beatles. This appears to be the first Beatles album in which the drums were damped with tea towels rather than by taping a small flat object—­say, an empty cigarette pack—­to the snare batter head (Babuik 2001, 222). While it’s true that to muffle a drum is to eliminate the overtones anathema to most producers, it’s also true that to muffle a drum is to diminish what it was made to do: reso-

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nate and project. Clarity and quality of tone and projection begin with a shell—­American maple being a favorite, along with birch, mahogany, and oak—­to which designers attach lugs, rims, finish, and heads without limiting the shell’s tonal properties. Starr’s Ludwig kits, built from mahogany until the introduction of the company’s three-­ply maple/poplar/maple Hollywood series in autumn 1968 (Ludwig 2017), were musical instruments fabricated to sound good. If air can’t move around the shell and project unhampered toward the listener or microphone, then volume and tone will be lost. Drape a tea towel over the most expensive, best-­tuned snare drum in the world, and its sound won’t differ much from a budget model made of pressboard teetering on a cheap stand in a pawnshop. In the studio, some damping is good—­a few inches of tape on the batter head, a custom piece of foam inside the bass drum. Moreover, on stage an overly resonant drum can cause bothersome sympathetic tones in other drums and instruments. Between 1968 and 1969, Starr played on, at the least, a floor tom with the bottom head removed (without a bottom head, a tom will lose most of its melodic tone) and damped further with a towel; a bass drum with the front head gone and damped with blankets (thus reducing the thrust of a low-­pitch bottom); and a snare drum covered with towel. One hears the results of this meddling on Let It Be and Abbey Road, on which Starr used his new five-­piece Hollywood kit. In addition to these tonal losses, a tea towel detracts from stick rebound, which is the drummer’s key to technique. All twenty-­six drum rudiments, the building blocks of mastery, are based on rebound. The extraordinary speeds and complicated patterns that Thomas Lang can play occur because he has mastered stick control. To hamper a drum with chamois, cloth, or blanket is to forfeit attack; the backbeat won’t crack, bass drums won’t boom, and toms won’t ring, and the drummer can forget about various double-­stroke rolls, the wide range of paradiddles, drags, triplets, the drama of rimshots, the subtleties of ghost-­noting, etc. The drums on The Beatles lack dynamics, movement, bite, and kick. On “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” “Revolution 1,” and “Savoy Truffle” the Ludwig snare drum isn’t optimized. It doesn’t matter how well Starr plays—­rather, how well he is able to play—­on an altered surface where stick rebound is essential even for a nonrudimental drummer like him. The tea-­toweled batter heads may be the reason so many backbeats had to be overdubbed. Here we have an “amazing” drummer handicapped by the equipment with which he plies his trade.

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Nonetheless, this condition defines the Beatles’ drum sound for the rest of their career. One looks in wonder at the photographs of Starr’s be-­toweled drum set in Ethan Russell’s book packaged in the original Let It Be (Russell, Cott, and Dalton 1969). Was Harrison ever asked to duct-­tape his Fender’s strings to kill overtones? Was Lennon made to insert cotton wadding inside his Epiphone Casino? Did McCartney line his Rickenbacker’s fretboard with felt? These rhetorical questions show the extent to which the Beatles sacrificed drum acoustics on The Beatles and the remaining albums, as well as compromised Starr’s agility on the skins, which is too bad, for Ringo could tune drums, and he could strike them, could race across them—­whatever served. Hear, for example, his gigantic snare and toms on “Twist and Shout,” “Day Tripper,” “I’m Down,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” all featuring body-­slam backbeats and rolls. Hear his chain-­whip momentum on “Paperback Writer,” his angular, skewed fills on “Rain,” his soul-­deep groove/roll combos on “The Word,” and the masterly speed and crunch driving “Old Brown Shoe.” On these tracks Starr’s snare punch satisfies the way Doug Clifford’s does on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Keep on Chooglin’,” Mel Taylor’s does on each track of The Ventures À Go-­Go (Mel Taylor), and Buddy Harman’s does on Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.” “Helter Skelter” was succeeded by several days of work on “Glass Onion”—­no evidence of physical or group blisters on this rocker. Starr and McCartney are locked in; brief tambourine runs top off Starr’s syncopated backbeat. “I Will,” the McCartney bagatelle, asks little of Starr. On “Birthday,” however, he takes the commanding lead-­in, then pounds McCartney’s riff into the ground beneath Studio Two. “Piggies” is a trifle; “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is not. Everett is right to lavish this tune with praise, focusing on rhythm: “it is Lennon’s rhythmic contrasts that make this song a standout, instead of just the tired rock-­and-­roll number of which its clichés remind us” (1999, 183). Starr is in form for a challenge normally reserved for jazz drummers, and he makes it seem easy. Everett notes, “There are six different meters in the first twenty-­one bars, with cross accents in every first beat” (184). No loss of feel or time is evident as “Ringo somehow maintains 4/4 for four and a half bars while the rest of the band is agreed on three bars of 12/8” (184). Everett concludes his analysis by declaring, “every note is just right, and the two-­minute, forty-­ second song packs a wealth of imaginative variety and inevitable power” (184). To these remarks I am obliged to add that in the song’s last, doo-­ wop, section, Starr plays RS* four times in one minute and nine seconds.

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Whether or not the listener lumps “Honey Pie” with other titles in Paul McCartney’s repertoire of “granny music” (Lennon’s phrase), he or she shouldn’t be deaf to Starr’s lovely music-­hall brushwork, broken up with taps on the closed hi-­hat and cymbal. Easy to overlook, Starr’s effective brushing, a skill that requires technique, is presumably the kind of thing that impresses multipercussionist Aronoff. One day the band is bringing in “Helter Skelter,” the next it’s “Birthday,” then it’s “Honey Pie,” and Ringo Starr is there, ready to accommodate each composer’s wishes. For those with ears on Starr, “Honey Pie” is one of the most pleasing tunes on The Beatles. It doesn’t rock, it swings, which is what it’s supposed to do. “Long Long Long” contains the last significant drum part on The Beatles. For Harrison’s dirge of spiritual hunger, Starr echoes his sublime low-­tuned tom-­tom filigree in 1967’s “A Day in the Life,” but now, eighteen months later, adapted to a three-­count where he displays what dynamics can bring to a song. The upheavals of longing, regret, and unfulfilled love are expressed in every touch of the drums and cymbals, which range from crashing all-­kit fills, to waltz-­like lightness, to nothing at all. Sound? No tune on The Beatles has more open drums. Performance? Ringo Starr is as far from playing “shit[tily]” as it is possible to be. Here are abstract ideas channeled into rolls so apt that they transcend mere rhythm, becoming an essential component of harmony and melody too. On the first of the three remaining songs, “I’m So Tired,” Starr captures Lennon’s insomniac despair on the flat, thwacked snare drum, reinforced in the bridge to emphasize the singer’s dismay. Sixteenth notes on snare (?) added to the second bridge torque the drama yet higher: in all, a sympathetic drum track that fashions tension-­building/breaking counterpoint. Reliable time-­keeping is Starr’s main role in “Bungalow Bill,” as it is in the final cut to consider, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” on which McCartney asked Starr to overdub his, Paul’s, drum part on the demo. The opening three bars of handclaps and percussion entice us into a tune where, with otherwise sparse instrumentation, the snare drum’s constricted resonance is more audible than on any other tune on The Beatles. An RS* fill triggers the second of three verses. Where does all this talk of smothered drums, repetitive fills, overdubbed backbeats, less than stellar technique, a drummer’s discontent, a drummer’s self-­deprecation, and a drummer’s literal and figurative blisters lead us in terms of The Beatles? Not to a dismissal of Ringo Starr’s musicianship in the summer and fall of 1968—­which, after all, did see him

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perform in masterly fashion on the single “Hey Jude” (recorded July 30–­August 1)—­but to two concluding points upon which to reflect. First, the experienced listener of this double LP long ago took a side on the perennial debate over Ringo Starr’s skills, and most likely he or she took that side by listening to Starr not in isolation but as the percussive voice in an ensemble sound painstakingly constructed by the Beatles and their production team. In this context, he excelled. Starr himself said he didn’t bother practicing rudiments because he enjoyed playing only with others. He was a group man, not a solo artist, in the sixties sense of the term: that is, no one, certainly not a drummer, was in a hurry to leave for a solo career. Of that generation of drummers, two stood out as spectacular soloists—­Baker and Bonham (who were also great ensemble players). Others such as Al Jackson, Dino Danelli, Mick Avory, Mitch Mitchell, Moe Tucker, Keith Moon, Charlie Watts, and Hal Blaine played, like Ringo Starr, for the song, not for the spotlight. Second, what Starr did on The Beatles is best evaluated in the context of what he did on every other Beatles album. This writer’s opinion is that, discounting tuning issues, on The Beatles Starr (the individual) embodied the same consistency, with inevitable dips, with which his band (the collective) composed and recorded all of their albums. He was at his peak, as they were, on Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper. Had the band not begun to unravel in 1968, their double album, and their drummer’s role on it, would have reached the same level as these midsixties masterpieces. Exacerbated by bad vibes in the studio, the causes of which have been well documented, Starr’s playing on The Beatles exhibits, at times, a flatness of effort and missed opportunities for varied grooves and fills. Nonetheless, we listen with gratitude and joy, aware that even the best players and the best bands are subject to (relatively) bad days. Rather than presuming to judge the sixties legacy of Ringo Starr, this chapter has attempted, out of a reverence for the Beatles, to assist listeners, from novices to completists, in entertaining some new thoughts on Starr’s contributions to The Beatles without recourse to superlatives. Encoded in Starr’s playing on this double LP are the stress fractures that had begun to tear the band apart, the band’s constant search for innovative sounds and recording techniques, and the musical genius the four of them could summon at will. One detects these creative yet conflicting forces in Starr’s tuning, in his at times stunning, at times indifferent, drumming, and, perhaps above all, in his eight-­syllable song-­ending screech—­as singular a sound as Ringo Starr, or the Beatles themselves, ever caught on tape.

176  the beatles through a glass onion Notes 1. Even Keltner falls into the superlative trap, saying, “Ringo simply played the best rock ’n’ roll drums with the most honest feel you have ever heard” (Flans 1991, 69). 2. Mark Lewisohn on Starr: “He wasn’t a technical drummer . . . he was just solid and reliable, metronomic, dead steady in all the requisite styles, tempos and beats, doing precisely what he was there to do” (2013 661); “[on] only a handful of occasions during  .  .  . thousands of recording hours can Ringo be heard to have made a mistake or wavered in his beat. His work was remarkably consistent—­and excellent—­from 1962 right through to 1970” (1988, 95). 3. Post–­The Beatles, the RS* pattern is heard on “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Golden Slumbers,” and “She Came in through the Bathroom Window.” 4. For an example, see “Meinl Drum Festival 2015—­Thomas Lang Drum Solo.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g0MGRaF1oM

nine | George Harrison, Songwriter john covach

Musing on one of George Harrison’s best-­known songs, fellow Beatle Paul McCartney praises Harrison’s writing. “I think Frank Sinatra used to introduce ‘Something’ as his favorite Lennon/McCartney song. Thanks Frank” (The Beatles 2000, 340). The punch line here depends on the idea that many casual fans of the Beatles assume that the songs they know and love were written by Lennon and McCartney. Even a seasoned show-­business veteran like Sinatra, it seems, could make such a mistake. But, of course, “Something” was indeed written by George Harrison, and though McCartney notes the confusion with some irony and amusement, what is perhaps most significant is that Harrison’s songwriting can be confused with Lennon and McCartney’s at all. It is a testament to how dramatically Harrison’s writing developed over his Beatle years that his songs from 1968 forward can compare with those of his bandmates. But as Harrison himself points out, this might not have happened had he not had the chance to observe Lennon and McCartney working at close range: “I knew a little bit about writing from the others, from the privileged point of sitting in the car when a song was written or coming into being” (The Beatles 2000, 97). This chapter explores George Harrison’s songwriting with the Beatles. Comparing and contrasting Harrison’s writing with that of both Lennon and McCartney, it provides an overview of Harrison’s work while also focusing especially on his songs on the band’s 1968 double LP, The Beatles.1 I divide Harrison’s development with the band into three stages: the early songs, which show promise and a familiarity with the norms of songwriting structure; the first emergence, in which Harrison traces a 177

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roughly parallel path with Lennon and McCartney from craftsperson to artist; and a second emergence, in which he forges the singer-­songwriter style that characterizes the remainder of his mature songwriting career, extending well beyond the demise of the Beatles. The appendix to this chapter presents a comprehensive and chronological list of Harrison’s songs from his Beatle years, extending to the release of his first solo album, All Things Must Pass (1970). It is organized according to these three stages of development and includes both released and unreleased songs, placing each as accurately as possible within Harrison’s overall creative output.2 This list guides the discussion that follows.

The Beatles as Songwriters While the teenaged Lennon and McCartney aspired to be songwriters, the musical attention of the young George Harrison was mostly focused on guitars and guitar playing.3 When he did begin to focus on writing, it is reasonable to expect that Lennon’s and McCartney’s songs had some influence on him. In the early days of the group, Lennon and McCartney often wrote together; but for much of the band’s career, these two Beatles composed mostly separately, one often helping the other but with songs very much being “John songs” or “Paul songs.”4 In comparing Harrison’s writing with that of Lennon and McCartney, then, I outline three developmental paths—­one for each of these Beatle songwriters. In addition, the Beatles played hundreds of cover versions of 1950s and 1960s pop in their early days, and these songs might also have influenced the young Harrison.5 Elsewhere (Covach 2006) I argue that Lennon’s and McCartney’s songwriting traces a developmental path “from craftsperson to artist.” This model designates the craftsperson approach as focusing on producing hit songs, with no special concern for innovation. The artist approach, by contrast, places a premium on innovation—­on trying new things creatively and pushing the envelope musically and stylistically.6 Between 1962 and 1967, Lennon and McCartney chart distinct but parallel developmental paths on the way from “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” to “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” After the disappointing reception of the film Magical Mystery Tour in late 1967, their subsequent singles tend to return to a more craftsperson-­like approach, while album tracks are often more ambitious and driven by the artist impulse. My previous discussion focuses on form in these songs, demonstrating that the craftsperson approach is dominated by the pres-

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ence of AABA structures, while the artist model brings with it a wider variety of forms and formal innovation.7 My earlier study only briefly considers Harrison’s songwriting; this chapter thus expands on those observations while maintaining the craftsperson-­to-­artist model to compare Harrison’s songs with those of both Lennon and McCartney.

George’s Early Songs Harrison was not drawn to songwriting as early as Lennon and McCartney were. “They’d had a lot of practice, put it that way,” he remarked. “They’d been writing since we were at school and so they’d written . . . most of their bad songs . . . before we got into the recording studio. . . . I had to come from nowhere and start writing and to have something at least quality enough to be able to, you know, put it in the record with all their wondrous hits.”8 Harrison’s early songs are few. Two of the earliest are contained in the Anthology 1 recordings. He wrote “In Spite of All the Danger” with McCartney, and a 1958 recording features Lennon singing lead, McCartney singing harmony, with rhythm-­and-­blues-­style vocal backup from Harrison. This track seems to be influenced by American doo-­ wop ballads, employing a medium tempo and the standard thirty-­two-­bar AABA form, though the harmony singing of Lennon and McCartney also suggests the influence of the Everly Brothers. It is perhaps noteworthy that Harrison solos on guitar over the standard twelve-­bar blues progression (not the eight-­bar verse), which is inserted into the song after once through the thirty-­two-­bar structure.9 The song concludes with a return of the eight-­bar A section, including a tag on the second four bars of that verse. Another early recording, “Cry for a Shadow,” clearly refers to the guitar-­driven instrumentals of the Shadows, Cliff Richard’s backup band and UK hitmakers in their own right. Written with Lennon, this 1961 instrumental track focuses on Harrison’s lead-­guitar playing.10 It opens with a four-­measure introduction before launching into a thirty-­two-­bar AABA form, all of which features the melody on the electric guitar. After a return to the introduction, the band repeats the thirty-­two-­bar form with only slight variation. After once more through the introduction, the track concludes with the eight-­bar A section. There is only one Harrison original on the Beatles’ albums through Beatles for Sale (1964). “Don’t Bother Me” appears on With the Beatles (1963) and constitutes George’s debut as a songwriter for the band. The song is once again in AABA form, like most of the Lennon and McCartney songs of 1963–­64 (see table 9.1). Each A section consists of

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two four-­bar phrases, followed by a four-­bar refrain, creating a twelve-­bar verse. The B section (bridge) features four four-­bar phrases, making for a sixteen-­bar section. The formal arrangement employs a partial reprise of the AABA form in which ABA return, with the first A devoted to a guitar solo for the first eight bars followed by a sung refrain. The song ends with a fade-­out serving as coda. The lyrics center on a teenage romance gone sour.11 A demo of an unreleased Harrison song, “You Know What to Do,” reveals a structure similar to “Don’t Bother Me.”12 It is in AABA form; two four-­bar phrases are followed by a six-­bar refrain, creating a fourteen-­bar verse that serves as the A section. The B section (bridge) is eight bars in length, and the overall structure of the song employs a partial reprise, this time bringing the B and A sections back with no guitar solo. The lyrics remain within the realm of teen romance, perhaps with a hint of the Everly Brothers’ rockabilly pop and naive courtship (as in “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Bye Bye Love”). Although Harrison’s early songs show promise, they are clearly weaker than those of Lennon and McCartney in terms of craft and sophistication. Their use of harmony is mostly conventional, though there are already some early indications of Harrison’s tendency to explore new possibilities.13 These songs confirm, however, that Harrison was fully aware of the AABA form that was so common in Lennon’s and McCartney’s songs at the time. This form plays a significant role in Harrison’s writing, as the majority of his songs during his Beatles years depend on it to some extent.

Pop Craftsman to Artist: The First Emergence The release of Help! in the summer of 1965 marks the first significant emergence of George Harrison as a songwriter and pop craftsperson, as it includes both “I Need You” and “You Like Me Too Much.” “I Need Table 9.1. “Don’t Bother Me” Form: AABA with partial reprise (intro AABA ABA tag) 0:00–­0:06 0:06–­0:22 0:22–­0:39 0:39–­1:02 1:02–­0:18 1:18–­1:36 1:36–­1:58 1:58–­2:23

Introduction, 4 mm., E minor: ♭VII -­i A (verse w/ refrain), 12 mm., 4 + 4 + 4, E minor pentatonic + Dorian A (verse w/ refrain), 12 mm., as before B (bridge), 16 mm. 4 + 4 + 4 + 4, E Aeolian (pure minor) A (verse w/ refrain), 12 mm., as before A (verse w/ refrain), 12 mm., (4 + 4)* + 4, guitar solo w/ sung refrain B (bridge), 12 mm., as before A (verse w/ refrain), 16+ mm., 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 + 2 + (refrain tagged to fade)

Note: *Instrumental phrases are enclosed in parenthesis in all examples.

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You” resembles “You Know What to Do” in employing an AABA form with two four-­bar phrases and a six-­bar refrain to create fourteen-­bar A section verses. The bridge is noteworthy for its nine-­bar structure (4 + 5), extending the second phrase from what might have been a four-­ bar phrase to five measures. The arrangement features a partial reprise, bringing back the B and A sections before tagging the final two bars of the refrain to create an ending. Like “Don’t Bother Me,” its lyrics deal with a romantic breakup, but here the situation is treated with more nuance and finesse, especially when the lyrics “you told me” are picked up from the end of the verse to initiate the bridge. The “volume-­pedal effect” in the guitar part creates a sense that the guitar is pleading with the lost love, helping to create the first Harrison song to compare favorably with songs of Lennon and McCartney.14 “You Like Me Too Much” also employs AABA form, though the partial reprise (ABA) includes a modified A-­section verse featuring an instrumental solo for guitar and piano. The previous harmonic structure of the first part of this instrumental verse is abandoned until the return of the refrain at the end, where the sung refrain concludes the verse and sets up the move to the B-­section bridge. Although inserting new material for the solo verse was not an unusual practice for the time, in this case it is especially reminiscent of “In Spite of All the Danger.”15 The lyric “I really do” leads nicely into the bridge, and its continuation from the refrain lyrics at the end of the verse resembles the technique used in “I Need You” to make the transition between A and B sections. Harrison’s songs on Rubber Soul and Revolver—­with the important exception of “Love You To”—­remain mostly within the craftsperson approach.16 This fact contrasts with the increased presence of the artist approach in some of the songs of both Lennon and McCartney, as their lyrics get increasingly ambitious, the instrumentation moves beyond the pop combo, and the reliance on AABA form is replaced with a greater variety of formal structures. Harrison’s “Think for Yourself” does indeed eschew the AABA form in favor of a contrasting verse-­chorus structure, though “If I Needed Someone” and “I Want to Tell You” continue to employ this familiar form, while “Taxman” employs a modified version of AABA.17 The lyrics of both “Think for Yourself” and “Taxman” move beyond topics of innocent romance, the former expressing romantic anger, while the latter lampoons the British government’s taxation policies. At this stage, however, Harrison’s lyrics are not as ambitious or accomplished as those in McCartney’s “For No One” and Lennon’s “In My Life.” The humor of “Taxman” is expanded in future Harrison songs; the

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critique found in “Think for Yourself” mostly migrates to the philosophical lyrics of Harrison’s Indian-­influenced music. And while “Think for Yourself” features McCartney’s fuzz bass and “Taxman” includes Paul’s sitar-­like lead guitar, Harrison’s songs through 1966 mostly do not feature the kind of adventuresome arranging present in McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” and Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” not to mention “Penny Lane” (McCartney) and “Strawberry Fields Forever” (Lennon), which followed in early 1967.18 The harmony in these songs is conventional for mid-­1960s pop, though with a few interesting and idiosyncratic twists.19 As a craftsman, Harrison in late 1966 lags behind Lennon and McCartney by about a year: the fairest comparison of Harrison’s Rubber Soul and Revolver songs is with those of his bandmates on Help! or perhaps Rubber Soul. Standing against “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (McCartney) or “It’s Only Love” (Lennon), “Taxman” and “I Want to Tell You” hold their own. Though they appeared in 1969 on the Yellow Submarine album, “Only a Northern Song” and “It’s All Too Much” both originate from 1967. Initially intended for Sgt. Pepper, “Only a Northern Song” employs a modified AABA form: AAB is followed by an instrumental interlude and then by BAB.20 Like those of “Taxman,” its lyrics are humorous, though in this case the target of the sarcasm is the band itself, or more precisely, the way in which they organized publishing royalties.21 Inspired by Harrison’s experiences with LSD (Harrison 1980, 106), “It’s All Too Much” is cast in contrasting verse-­chorus form. What is striking about these songs is how much the band experimented with collage technique, though here it was mostly for their own amusement. The juxtapositions of musical material resemble the endings of “Strawberry Fields” and “All You Need Is Love.” A third song from 1967 that was likely unfinished at the time but was later released as a solo track, “See Yourself,” is also in AABA form and features lyrics that reflect on McCartney’s 1967 public revelation of the group’s drug use (Harrison 1980, 108). Harrison’s most ambitious writing, and his clear step outside of the pop craftsperson model, appears in his Indian-­influenced music. Indian music—­and the sitar, in particular—­first caught his interest during the filming of Help! in 1965. Securing his own inexpensive instrument, he famously added sitar to Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” for Rubber Soul (Beatles 2000, 196). With “Love You To,” Harrison took a more committed step, making his first attempt at blending Western pop with Indian music.22 As table 9.2 shows, this song is cast in simple verse form, with the verses based on a fourteen-­bar model. The verse consists of two phrases: a nine-­bar phrase followed by a five-­measure refrain.23 In addition,

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there is a two-­bar instrumental passage (shown in parenthesis) that recurs throughout and is presented first in the introduction.24 Note that while most of the song is in 4/4, both the nine-­bar and five-­bar phrase conclude with a bar of 3/4 (indicated by a superscript). The harmony is mostly static, with a drone on C and melodic material mostly in C Dorian. The song unfolds in two sung verses, an instrumental verse, and a final sung verse. While the lyrics seem focused on making love, the emphasis here is less on sexual abandon and more on the rising hippie nonconformity of the day. Much like Lennon’s “Nowhere Man,” the song takes aim at the status quo, like Lennon’s “The Word,” it posits love as the answer, and like “Taxman” and “Think for Yourself,” it is finger-­wagging. While Lennon’s and McCartney’s aspirations toward increased artistic expression were manifested in increasingly thoughtful and sometimes experimental lyrics and in the use of classical and avant-­garde musical techniques drawn almost exclusively from Western culture, for Harrison Indian music and spirituality played this role. Sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar was a central figure in Harrison’s engagement with Indian music and culture. Harrison first met Shankar in the summer of 1966, and Shankar relates part of that conversation: George expressed his desire to learn the sitar from me. I told him that to play the sitar is like learning Western classical music on the violin or on the cello. It is not merely a matter of learning how to hold the instrument and play a few strokes and chords, after which (with sufficient talent) you can prosper on your own, as is common with the guitar in Western pop music. (Shankar 1999, 189)25

Harrison took Shankar’s words to heart and used the band’s break in the autumn of 1966 to travel to India to study the sitar for several weeks,

Table 9.2. “Love You To” Form: simple verse (intro V V V V coda) 0:00–­0:39 0:39–­1:08 1:08–­1:35 1:35–­2:05 2:05–­2:35 2:35–­2:56

Introduction, freely then 2 mm. instrumental Verse (w/ refrain), 16 mm., 93 + 53 + (2), C Dorian Verse (w/ refrain), 14 mm., 93 + 53 Instr. Verse (w/refrain), 17 mm., (10) + 53 + (2), sitar solo w/ sung refrain Verse (w/refrain), 16 mm., 93 + 53 + (2) Coda, 10+ mm., sitar solo, moderate tempo increase, C Dorian

Note: Superscripts above indicate that a measure in 3/4 occurs at the end of a phrase unit otherwise in 4/4.

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becoming a serious and disciplined student of the instrument, while also becoming more familiar with Eastern philosophy and religion.26 Harrison’s next two Indian-­influenced songs, “Within You Without You” and “The Inner Light,” further extended the East-­meets-­West stylistic blend of “Love You To.” “Within You Without You” employs a modified AABA form, presenting two verses and a bridge, followed by two varied repetitions of the verse played instrumentally. After a reprise of the introduction, a sung verse and bridge return much as they were performed in the first part of the song. The resulting AAB A′A′ AB form is a creative reshaping of the AABA idea, representing both the craft and art approaches at work. The lyrics reflect Harrison’s new familiarity with Eastern ideas: as with “Love You To,” love is still the answer, but now the problem is our illusory separation from one another. Whatever one may think of Harrison’s spiritual ideas, his lyrics embrace a seriousness of purpose that rivals Lennon’s and McCartney’s more ambitious songs. His Eastern take on alienation also resonates with McCartney’s Western exploration of this idea in “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Lennon remarked that “Within You Without You” is “[o]ne of George’s best songs. One of my favorites of his, too. . . . His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent; he brought that sound together” (Golson 1981, 157). “The Inner Light” marks both a point of arrival and a point of ending for Harrison’s engagement with Indian music. This track employs a modified simple verse form in which a lyrical verse with refrain alternates with a double-­time instrumental passage. The lyrics derive from the ancient Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, and the backing tracks were recorded in Bombay using Indian musicians—­the last of Harrison’s Beatles tracks to employ Indian instruments.27 In subsequent songs Eastern ideas return in the lyrics, but the Eastern timbres, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms are replaced by those of Western pop and rock. A move in this direction had already occurred with “Blue Jay Way,” which features the drone of Indian-­influenced music, but without the Indian instruments and with more harmonic activity than in “Love You To” and “Within You Without You.”28 In late 1967 and early 1968, Harrison composed the music for Wonderwall, a psychedelic film directed by Joe Massot. The soundtrack shows Harrison exploring a wide range of styles, including avant-­garde music that goes further into the world of contemporary art music than any Beatle had yet ventured. It also features Indian music and musicians, thus serving as a compendium of Harrison’s artist-­approach creative in-

George Harrison, Songwriter  185

terests. Although Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton make guest appearances, the music was largely created outside of the influence and participation of the other Beatles. In fact, the trio of Indian-­influenced Beatles tracks, “Love You To,” “Within You Without You,” and “The Inner Light,” were also produced with minimal involvement of the other group members. They were essentially solo tracks, produced with the help of George Martin and using outside musicians, similarly to McCartney’s “Yesterday.” Along with “The Inner Light,” Wonderwall Music signifies an endpoint for Harrison’s first emergence. According to Harrison: I’d played sitar for three years. And I’d just listened to classical Indian music and practiced sitar—­except for when we played dates, studio dates—­and then I’d get the guitar out and . . . learn a part for the record. But I’d really lost a lot of interest in the guitar. I remember I came from California and I shot this piece . . . for the film on Ravi Shankar’s life called Raga and I was carrying a sitar. And we stopped in New York and checked in a hotel, and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were both at the same hotel. And that was the last time I really played the sitar like that.29

Although his exploration of the Moog synthesizer on Electronic Sound extends his experimentation with new timbres and styles, his songwriting in 1968 takes a noticeable turn toward a singer-­songwriter style that blends elements of the craftsperson and artist model into a style that remains securely within Western pop and rock. The Beatles marks Harrison’s second emergence.

The Singer-­Songwriter: The Second Emergence As we consider the songs Harrison contributed to The Beatles, it is useful to consider not only the four songs included in that release, but also three others that were not. The Beatles rehearsed “Sour Milk Sea” and “Not Guilty”; “Sour Milk Sea” was given to Jackie Lomax to record, and the Beatles’ recording of “Not Guilty” proceeded almost to completion before the song was shelved.30 “Circles” appears only in the earliest rehearsal tape, performed solo by Harrison. I consider each of these tracks in discussing the four tracks that did appear on the album. As shown in table 9.3, “Savoy Truffle” employs AABA form with a partial reprise.31 The structure of the first two verses is complicated by the meter in the introduction, where the prevailing 4/4 is disrupted by

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a measure of 7/8, and the first measure of the verse, where only the first measure is in 6/8. If we look to the third and fourth statements of the verse, however, it is clear that the verse sections are built on a sixteen-­bar model made up of four four-­bar phrases; in those appearances, the 6/8 bar is replaced by a bar of 4/4, while the return of the two-­bar introduction containing a bar of 7/8 is missing entirely. On the first two verses, this metric complication creates a rubato feeling at the beginning of the first phrase. “Savoy Truffle” also provides a clue to Harrison’s exploration of harmony during this period: the movement of I–­II–­IV–­♭III–­V in E in the verses is followed by a turn to E minor before a cadence of IV–­I in G. The bridge begins with a i–­IV progression, suggesting a Dorian-­ inflected E minor, before proceeding to III and V, recalling the verse. Although somewhat more adventurous harmonically than most previous Harrison songs, it is conservative compared with “Sour Milk Sea” and “Circles,” which employ traditional chord movements that nonetheless suggest remote modulation or tonal ambiguity.32 “Not Guilty,” by contrast, remains relatively securely in E minor, though it contains some remote harmonies.33 Harrison has recounted how the lyrics for “Savoy Truffle” were inspired by Eric Clapton’s passion for candy in spite of dental problems that made sweets painful to eat (1980, 128). The lyrics are taken from a chocolate box, with a certain poetic license. The playfulness and humor here resonate strongly with Lennon’s “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” and McCartney’s “Rocky Raccoon.” The literal reference to a chocolate box also seems influenced by Lennon’s use of found texts to create or prompt lyrics: “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Timothy Leary), “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (circus poster), “Good Morning Good Morning” (television commercial) and “A Day in the Life” (newspaper) on previous albums, and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (magazine Table 9.3. “Savoy Truffle” Form: AABA with partial reprise (AABA BA tag) 0:00–­0:05 0:05–­0:36 0:36–­1:11 1:11–­1:27 1:27–­1:58 1:58–­2:14 2:14–­2:53

Introduction, 2 mm., (27) lead-­in fill on drums then piano riff A (verse w/ refrain), 18 mm., 64 + 4 + 4 + 4 + (27), E to G A (verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., 64 + 4 + 4 + 4 B (bridge), 8 mm., 4 + 4, E Dorian A (verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., (4 + 4 + 4) + 4, guitar solo, vocal on refrain B (bridge), 8 mm., as before A (verse w/ refrain + tag), 20 mm., 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4

Note: Superscripts before a measure count indicate that a measure in 6/8 occurs at the beginning of a phrase unit otherwise in 4/4. Superscripts after indicate a measure of 7/8.

George Harrison, Songwriter  187

story), “Julia” (Kahlil Gibran poem), and “Cry Baby Cry” (advertisement) on the White Album. The use of horns on this track suggests a nod to southern soul, and perhaps to Stax in particular (“truffle” rhymes with “shuffle,” after all), but the horns also recall McCartney’s “Got To Get You Into My Life.”34 Harrison began work on “Piggies” in 1966, returning to and completing it in 1968 (Harry 2003, 296). It employs a modified AABA form (see table 9.4) in which an extra verse is added to create an AABA + A arrangement. Loosely influenced by George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the lyrics are primarily satirical: the upper classes are piggies who take themselves far too seriously while also eating their own. The straightforward harmonic language never strays far from a secure A♭ major: the verse sections modulate to the dominant, and the end of the second verse suggests a shift to F minor that never materializes. Like McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Lennon’s “Revolution,” “Piggies” engages in social commentary. But unlike his bandmates—­whose lyrics reflect a certain earnestness and, in Lennon’s case, earnest ambiguity—­Harrison’s stance is entirely ironic. That irony also extends to the use of classical instrumentation: the harpsichord and chamber strings are used to poke fun at the pomposity of the wealthy. Here again, Harrison’s use of classical instruments—­and the general reference to classical music and the high culture that comes with it—­contrasts with that of Lennon and McCartney. It is especially Paul’s aspirational and earnest use of classical instrumentation—­from “Yesterday” through “For No One,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Penny Lane,” to “She’s Leaving Home”—­that is potentially ripe for parody. Consider, for instance, the elegant horns on “Mother Nature’s Son,” which add majesty and sophistication to the track. Harrison is having none of that here. In “Piggies,” classical music is a sign of corruption and decadence. Interestingly, the acoustic demo of this song features no classical references, and as a result it sounds much more like McCartney’s “Blackbird”

Table 9.4. “Piggies” Form: modified AABA (intro AABA A codetta) 0:00–­0:05 0:05–­0:26 0:26–­0:47 0:47–­1:06 1:06–­1:26 1:26–­1:53 1:53–­2:03

Introduction, 2 mm., (2), intro melody introduced A (verse), 8 mm., 2 + 2 + 2 + (2), intro returns, A♭ → E♭, (A♭) A (verse), 8 mm., 2 + 2 + 2 + (2), intro modified, to F minor? B (bridge), 7 mm., 4 + 3, A♭ A (verse), 8 mm., (2 + 2 + 2) + (2), harpsichord solo A (verse), 10 mm., 2 + 2 + 2 + (2 + 2), intro extended, ends in E♭ Codetta, 2 mm., (2), IV–­I cadence in E

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than any of the songs employing classical instrumentation considered above.35 The struggles Harrison endured getting the band to record “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” were—­at least in his opinion—­symptomatic of the problems that ultimately caused him to become dissatisfied with the group. After many attempts, the others did not seem motivated or energized by the song. Harrison hit upon the idea of bringing Clapton into the studio to guest on lead guitar.36 Though Clapton was hesitant, his presence rallied the band to deliver a much more committed performance. As table 9.5 shows, the song is cast in a modified AABA form, consisting of a single A section, a B section, and an A section, all of which is repeated in full before a coda ends the track. The verse here is labeled a “double verse,” since the refrain occurs twice, though the overall harmonic design reinforces a sixteen-­bar section. The harmony of the verses remains mostly in A minor, with a harmonic gesture toward C major (♭III) in the second refrain that quickly retreats to A. The bridge provides a modal shift to the parallel major. Like “Savoy Truffle,” but much more earnestly, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” employs the found text idea. In this case, Harrison opened the I Ching and used the first phrase he saw there: “gently weeps” (Harrison 1980, 120). The resulting lyrics describe a situation that seems to capture Harrison’s sense of the band at the time: the love between the members is sleeping, he looks at the floor to avoid eye contact, but there is hope that these mistakes will lead to learning. In the bridge, it is not clear who is being addressed: is Harrison addressing the others in the group or reflecting on his own behavior? With “Long Long Long,” Harrison translates some of the most central aspects of his Indian-­influenced music into a markedly Western pop context.37 Table 9.6 shows the AABA form of the piece.38 The only significant modification consists of an extended final A section, created by

Table 9.5. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Form: ABA with full reprise (modified AABA); (intro ABA ABA coda) 0:00–­0:16 0:16–­0:50 0:50–­1:24 1:24–­1:57 1:57–­2:31 2:31–­3:03 3:03–­3:37 3:37–­4:39

Intro, 8 mm., (4 + 4) piano melody, A minor A (double verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., 4 + 4, 4 + 4, emphasis on ♭III B (bridge), 16 mm., 8 + 8, A major A (double verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., as before A (double verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., (4 + 4 + 4 + 4). Clapton solo B (bridge), 16 mm., as before A (double verse w/ refrain), 16 mm., 4 + 4, 4 + 4 Coda, 24 mm. and fade, based on double verse, Clapton solo

George Harrison, Songwriter  189

repeating the refrain. The harmony is based on Bob Dylan’s “Sad-­Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” though the similarity is very general.39 This quiet and intimate song is, as Harrison has remarked, a prayer—­an account of searching for and eventually finding God. The lyrics embody all the seriousness of purpose of his previous Indian-­influenced music, but there are no Indian instruments or textures employing drones; the music remains in a stable and diatonic F major. This song compares favorably with Lennon’s “Julia” and “Across the Universe” and with McCartney’s “Blackbird” and “I Will” and secures the emergence of George Harrison as a singer-­songwriter. In fact, all seven songs that were in the mix for inclusion on The Beatles establish what would become Harrison’s style as a solo artist.

Conclusions Harrison’s tracks with the Beatles after the White Album continue along the same stylistic lines established on that record. While “For You Blue” is a traditional twelve-­bar blues in simple verse form, “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something,” and “Here Comes the Sun” are all cast in AABA form. Only “I Me Mine” stands apart as a contrasting verse-­chorus song. None of these tracks employs Eastern instruments, nor is any of them particularly philosophical or experimental. Though Harrison offered some of the more philosophical songs to the band, he ended up using these for his debut solo album, All Things Must Pass.40 Having surveyed Harrison’s songwriting during his Beatles years, we can discern an early period in which the songs are few but nevertheless display familiarity with the norms of pop harmony, melody, form, and lyric writing. This is followed by Harrison’s emergence as a songwriter, paralleling Lennon and McCartney during the 1965–­67 period in developing his skills but lagging behind them by about a year. His movement toward the artist model is shaped by his interest in Indian music and Table 9.6. “Long Long Long” Form: AABA (AABA’ codetta) 0:00–­0:10 0:10–­0:41 0:41–­1:14 1:14–­1:40 1:40–­2:32 2:32–­3:03

Introduction, 6 mm. (6), F major A (verse w/ refrain), 19 mm., 6 + 6 + 4 + (3), F major A (verse w/ refrain), 19 mm., as before B (bridge), 15 mm., 6 + 6 + (3), F major A′ (verse w/ refrain), 30 mm., 6 + 6 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + (2) Codetta, unmetered, C7sus4

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philosophy, and the songs that are most influenced by Indian music display the greatest ambition and willingness to break with standard pop models. In early 1968, Harrison turns away from Indian musical styles, though he mostly retains the dedication to spiritually committed lyrics. This second emergence defines what becomes Harrison’s mature singer-­ songwriter style, which serves as the foundation of his music well after the breakup of the band, beginning with the release of All Things Must Pass in 1970. Years into his solo career, Harrison continued to resist the role of songwriter, at least as that role is traditionally defined. He remarked, “I have never really thought of myself as someone who writes songs as a craft. Many songwriters do. I suppose I have seen it that way without being conscious of it, but not often. Mainly the object has been to get something out of my system, as opposed to ‘being a songwriter’” (Harrison 1980, 58–­59). In spite of such reservations and his discomfort with the role, George Harrison’s songwriting constitutes a significant and important portion of the Beatles legacy.

Appendix George Harrison’s Songs, 1958–1970 Early Songs, 1958–­1964 “In Spite of All the Danger” (w/ Paul), demo, 1958 “Cry for a Shadow” (w/ John), recorded June 1961, various releases in 1962–1964 “Don’t Bother Me” With the Beatles Sept 1963 / Nov 1963 “You Know What to Do” demo June 1964 First Emergence, 1965–­Early 1968 “I Need You” Help! Feb 1965 / Aug 1965 (volume pedal) “You Like Me Too Much” Help! Feb 1965 / Aug 1965 “Think for Yourself” Rubber Soul Nov 1965 / Dec 1965 (finger-­wagging) “If I Needed Someone” Rubber Soul Oct 1965 / Dec 1965 (12 string) “Love You To” Revolver April 1966 / Aug 1966 (Indian influence) “Art of Dying” incomplete autumn 1966, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “Taxman” Revolver Apr–­May 1966 / Aug 1966 (finger-­wagging)

George Harrison, Songwriter  191

“I Want to Tell You” Revolver June 1966 / Aug 1966 “Piggies”* The Beatles (begun 1966, May 1968) Sept–­Oct 1968 / Nov 1968 “Only a Northern Song”* Yellow Submarine Feb, April 1967, Oct 1968 / Jan 1969 “Within You Without You” Sgt. Pepper March–­April 1967 / June 1967 (Indian influence) “It’s All Too Much”* Yellow Submarine May–­June 1967, Oct 1968 / Jan 1969 “See Yourself” incomplete summer 1967, completed for Thirty Three & 1/3 Nov 1976 “Blue Jay Way” Magical Mystery Tour Sept–­Nov 1967 / Dec 1967 (Indian influence w/o the instruments)  [Wonderwall Music (solo), Dec 1967–­Jan 1968 / Nov 1968]  “The Inner Light” B-­side to “Lady Madonna” Jan–­Feb 1968 / Mar 1968 (Indian influence)  Second Emergence, 1968–­1970 “Dehradun” (Feb–­Apr 1968) [“Sour Milk Sea” (Feb–­Apr, May 1968) Jackie Lomax June 1968 / Aug 1968] “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” The Beatles (Feb–­Apr, May 1968) July–­ Oct 1968 / Nov 1968 “Long Long Long” The Beatles (Feb–­Apr 1968) Oct 1968 / Nov 1968 “Not Guilty” (May 1968) Aug 1968 / unreleased (Anthology 3) [reworked for George Harrison, Feb 1979] “Circles” (May 1968) reworked for Gone Troppo Nov 1982 “Savoy Truffle” The Beatles Oct 1968 / Nov 1968 [“Badge” (w/ Eric Clapton), Oct 1968 / Mar 1969 Cream, Goodbye] Electronic Sound (solo), Nov 1968, Feb 1969 / May 1969 “I’d Have You Anytime” (w/ Bob Dylan) Nov 1968, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “All Things Must Pass” All Things Must Pass Jan, Feb 1969 / Nov 1970 “Hear Me Lord” Jan 1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “Isn’t It a Pity” Jan 1969, All Things Must Pass demo, Nov 1970 “Let It Down” Jan 1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “Wah Wah” Jan 1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970

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“For You Blue”* Let It Be Jan, Mar–­April 1969 / May 1970 “Old Brown Shoe” B-­side of “Ballad of John and Yoko” Jan–­Feb 1969 / Mar 1969 “Something” Abbey Road Jan, Feb, May, July–­Aug 1969 / Sept 1969) [Joe Cocker, Mar 1969 demo] “I Me Mine”* Let It Be Jan 1969, Jan, Mar–­Apr 1970 “Maureen” Jan 1969 [suggested for Ringo, written by Dylan?] “Ramblin’ Woman” [Dylanesque] “Get Off” [blues jam] “Hey Hey Georgie” [for Ringo] “How Do You Tell Someone?” “It Is Discovered” “Window, Window” [also demo for All Things Must Pass] “Run of the Mill” mid-­1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “What Is Life” mid-­1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “Here Comes the Sun” Abbey Road July–­Aug 1969 / Sept 1969  “Beautiful Girl,” incomplete autumn 1969, completed for Thirty Three & 1/3 Nov 1976 “Behind That Locked Door,” autumn 1969, All Things Must Pass Nov 1970 “Woman Don’t You Cry for Me” Dec 1969, Thirty Three & 1/3 Nov 1976 All Things Must Pass (solo), May–­Oct 1970 / Nov 1970 “Beware of Darkness” “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” “Awaiting on You All” “I Dig Love” “I Live for You” “Out of the Blue” “It’s Johnny’s Birthday” “Plug Me In” “I Remember Jeep” “Thanks for the Pepperoni” Note: Songs released by the Beatles are leftmost. Those indented once are songs that were released by Harrison, but not as a Beatle. Titles in square brackets are songs released by other artists. Songs indented twice have never been officially released. Asterisks indicate songs that were released significantly later than they were recorded.

George Harrison, Songwriter  193 Notes 1. See also Ian Inglis’s survey of Harrison’s songs with the Beatles (2010, 1–­ 21), as well as Matthew Bannister’s (2003) study of Harrison’s songs for Revolver, which traces his development as a songwriter through 1966. 2. This list relies principally on Harrison 1980; Sulpy and Schweighardt 1997; and Lewisohn 1998, though many other sources were consulted as well. 3. Harrison remarked: “I’ve still got some of my books from when I was about thirteen, and there’s drawings of guitars and different scratch plates. Always trying to draw Fender Stratocasters” (Harrison 2011, 50–­51). 4. Lennon discusses authorship of the Lennon-­McCartney songs in detail in Golson 1981. See also Martin 1979, 131–­33. 5. See Everett 2001 for an extensive listing of cover versions performed by the Beatles during the band’s early years. 6. “Craftsperson refers to an approach that privileges repeatable structures; songs are written according to patterns that are in common use. When innovation occurs within this approach, there is no difficulty with the idea of duplicating this innovation in subsequent songs. Opposed in a loose way to the craftsperson approach is the artist approach. Here, the emphasis is on the non-­repeatability of innovations; the worst criticism that can be leveled against a creative individual according to this approach is that he or she is ‘rewriting the same song over and over’” (Covach 2006, 39). 7. For a fuller discussion of formal structures in pop and rock, see Covach 2005. The AABA form is significant because of its traditional use by professional songwriters in the first half of the twentieth century. Lennon and McCartney’s awareness and consistent use of this form demonstrate a familiarity with the craft of Tin Pan Alley songwriting. As Lennon and McCartney move toward the artist model, they significantly modify AABA forms and other formal types—­ such as contrasting verse-­chorus and simple verse forms—­emerge with greater frequency. 8. Anthology, Episode 4, 53:10–­53:35. 9. McCartney has remarked that he wrote the song and shared credit with Harrison because of the solo section. McCartney recalls that he modeled it on an Elvis Presley song—­likely “Trying to Get to You,” which had indeed been released in the United Kingdom in 1956. See Lewisohn 1988 (6), Lewisohn 2013 (171), and Sounes 2010 (25). A guitar solo over the twelve-­bar blues that acts as new material also occurs in Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” which the band also recorded at the same session. 10. Harrison traces the origin of this song in Forte 1987, 95–­96. He and Lennon seem to have viewed the track as a sendup of the Shadows, not as a tribute. Lewisohn 2013 (381) provides a slightly different angle, suggesting that the joke was on Rory Storm. This song was also known as “Beatle Bop.” 11. Harrison (1980, 84) discusses this song as his first attempt at songwriting, though his account is somewhat at odds with that of Bill Harry (2003, 159–­60). 12. Thomson (2013, 93) reports that “You Know What to Do” was rejected for Beatles for Sale, replaced by Harrison singing a cover of Carl Perkins’s “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.”

194  the beatles through a glass onion 13. “You Know What to Do” employs conventional pop harmonic language throughout, but in Harrison’s demo it begins on IV, walking down to the I chord to begin the verse. “Don’t Bother Me” also begins with an off-­tonic introduction (drawn from the beginning of the bridge), in this case starting on ♭VII before moving to i in E minor. The verse is built mostly on the minor pentatonic scale in both the melody and the harmony, except at the end where the Dorian IV is employed in exchange with the i. The bridge then moves to pure minor (Aeolian), employing v, iv, and ♭VI. See also the analysis in Everett 2001, 193–­94. 14. Clayson (2003, 180) reports that Lennon assisted Harrison in composing the two songs on Help!, or at least with preparing them for recording. What is often considered the volume pedal effect in this song, as with the one in “Yes It Is,” was likely created using the volume control on Harrison’s guitar. He describes how Lennon would swell the volume control on the guitar as Harrison played to get this effect, since Harrison admits he could never quite get the hang of using the volume pedal. See Forte 1987, 93. Babiuk 2001 (134) writes that this technique was first used during the recording of “Baby’s in Black,” though if so, it is much less pronounced than on the two later songs. 15. Another well-­known instance of inserted material in Beatles music from this period occurs during Harrison’s Chet Atkins-­and-­Scotty Moore-­influenced solo on McCartney’s “All My Loving.” 16. For a detailed discussion of Harrison’s Rubber Soul songs, see Kruth 2015. For detailed discussions of the Revolver songs, see Rodriguez 2012. Valdez analyzes the Revolver songs and addresses issues of form (2002, 90–­93). 17. “If I Needed Someone” employs AABA with a full reprise, “I Want to Tell You” uses AABA with a partial reprise (AABA BA), and “Taxman” employs AABA with two additional A sections (AABA AA)—­an unconventional partial reprise. “Art of Dying,” likely begun in the second half of 1966, also employs a slightly modified AABA form, at least in its finished form from 1970. An instrumental interlude drawn from the intro is placed after the B section, creating a structure that unfolds AAB interlude A. 18. Ryan and Kehew (2006, 421) provide detailed information on the recording of “Taxman.” 19. The use of figuration around the guitar’s open D chord voicing (capoed at the seventh fret to create an A-­major chord) in “If I Needed Someone” displays a tendency toward the kinds of drone bass that would be featured in Harrison’s India-­inspired pieces, as well as in Lennon songs such as “Rain” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The chord succession in the bridge of “I Want to Tell You” is particularly interesting. The movement ii–­ii07–­I–­II–­ii–­ii07–­I employs the diminished chord (here used as a substitute for V7) that Harrison referred to (along with the augmented chord) as one of the “naughty chords” and that would become a trademark of his later music. See the remarks of Dhani Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty on Harrison’s passion for the naughty chords at 2:20–­2:57 of the extra feature entitled “Interviews” contained on the DVD Concert for George (2003). 20. George Martin recounts how “Only a Northern Song” was rejected from the album (Martin considered it “boring”), causing Harrison to return with “Within You Without You” (which he considered “very interesting”). See Living in the Material World (Scorsese 2011), Part 1, 1:08:21–­1:10:11.

George Harrison, Songwriter  195 21. At the time, Harrison was signed to Northern Songs, a company owned by Lennon, McCartney, Brian Epstein, and publisher Dick James. When his contract expired in 1968, he did not renew it and published his music through his own company, Harrisongs Ltd. See Harrison 1980, 100. 22. “I wrote ‘Love You To’ on the sitar, because the sitar sounded so nice and my interest was getting deeper all the time. I wanted to write a tune that was specifically for the sitar” (Beatles 2000, 209). 23. An alternate analysis might cast this as a nine-­bar verse followed by a five-­ bar chorus, and thus as a contrasting verse-­chorus form. By considering this a fourteen-­measure verse section that contains a five-­bar refrain, the analysis in example 2 posits that the two phrases are part of a single section, privileging the continuity from one into the other over the contrast. 24. This two-­bar instrumental passage is grouped after the first verse section, resulting in a sixteen-­bar unit, while its absence from the end of the second verse section produces a fourteen-­bar unit. 25. Shankar was not much impressed with the sitar playing on “Norwegian Wood”: it “was supposed to be causing so much brouhaha, but when I eventually heard the song I thought it was a strange sound that had been produced on the sitar!” (Shankar 1999, 189). 26. For Harrison’s account of this visit, see Beatles 2000, 233. According to Kevin Howlett (2014), members of the Byrds recommended Shankar’s album Portrait of Genius to Harrison when the Beatles were in Los Angeles during the 1965 American tour. 27. Harrison (1980, 118) recounts the genesis and recording of this song. Emerick and Massey (2006, 219–­21) furnish details of the London session at which Harrison recorded the lead vocal, encouraged by McCartney. 28. “Blue Jay Way” employs contrasting verse-­chorus form. 29. Glazer 1977, 35. Harrison here is referring to his New York visit during the winter of 1968, after the completion of “The Inner Light” and Wonderwall Music. See also Harrison 1980, 57–­58. 30. Harrison was producing Jackie Lomax’s Is This What You Want for Apple at the time of the White Album sessions. Lomax’s version of “Sour Milk Sea” features Harrison, McCartney, and Starr, as well as Clapton and Nicky Hopkins. The fact that Lennon is missing from this lineup has led Everett (1999, 199–­200) to conclude that it was he who rejected the song for the Beatles’ album. For a firsthand account of the Lomax session, see Emerick and Massey 2006, 242. See Brown (1979, 75) for Harrison’s remarks on the history of “Not Guilty.” 31. For analyses of the arrangements of “Savoy Truffle” and “Long Long Long,” see chapter 7 in the present volume. 32. The verses of “Sour Milk Sea” (contrasting verse-­chorus form) suggest I–­ ♭III, IV–­♭VI in F#, while the choruses suggest I–­♭VII, I–­II, I–­♭VII–­♭VI–­II–­I in E. The verses of “Circles” (AABA) begin with i–­V–­V7/V in C♯ minor, followed by V–­i in C minor. See Everett 1999 (200) for an analysis of an earlier demo of “Sour Milk Sea.” 33. “Not Guilty” is a simple verse form in which the verses are constructed much like verses in Harrison’s other AABA forms, including the use of a refrain to conclude each verse. These verses seem to begin in A minor, though the lis-

196  the beatles through a glass onion tener quickly learns that the key is actually E minor. The use of ♭vii (D minor) and ♭iii (G minor) suggest modulations that never materialize. 34. Everett (1999, 203) has suggested that the primary influence on “Savoy Truffle” is the Byrds’ “Artificial Energy.” 35. Other uses of classical references in Harrison’s songs would include the “bad trumpet” in “Only a Northern Song,” and the quotation from Jeremiah Clarke’s Prince of Denmark March in “It’s All Too Much.” Both could be taken to lampoon the trumpet in “Penny Lane” or the French horn on “For No One,” though if so the parodies didn’t seem to bother McCartney, who participated in both sessions—­even playing the trumpet on “Only a Northern Song.” 36. For more on the recording of this track, see Ryan and Kehew 2006, 495. 37. See Ryan and Kehew (2003, 502) for more regarding the recording of “Long Long Long.” 38. Example 6 transcribes the meter of “Long Long Long” as 3/4. The Beatles Complete Scores notates the song in 6/8. 39. Everett 1999 (204–­6) provides an analytical comparison of the two songs. In his study of phrase rhythms in the Beatles’ music, he notates the meter for “Long Long Long” as 6/8. See Everett 2009a, 185. 40. As the appendix shows, several of the songs that appeared on All Things Must Pass were brought into Beatles rehearsals, especially in January and February 1969.

ten | You Say You Want a Revolution John Lennon’s Contributions to The Beatles stephen valdez

Nineteen sixty-­eight was a year of change for the Beatles. All four Beatles experienced a number of upheavals in their working relationships and lives in 1968 that affected their music, including a journey to Rishikesh, India, in the first part of the year. Perhaps the most significant change to affect the Beatles’ creative life was the growing level of animosity all four experienced during the recording sessions for The Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been together for over ten years, beginning with the Quarrymen days in 1957; George Harrison joined them in early 1958, and Ringo Starr in 1962 after they had become the Beatles: they had been playing and composing together for a long time, especially by popular music standards. In addition, during the years of Beatlemania the band had lived together in close quarters as they toured the world. It isn’t surprising that Lennon compared the breakup of the group with a divorce. Nor is it surprising that the beginning of the end starts in 1968 and is documented on The Beatles. The most notable difference in their musical output on The Beatles is that they no longer sound like a unified whole, but rather (as Lennon said later) like a band with a front man and backups: Lennon and the Beatles or McCartney and the Beatles, etc. (Dowlding 1989, 221). There are many instances on The Beatles in which all four members were not present for recording sessions. The resulting album gives the earliest hint of how the music of their solo careers would sound. 197

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An important change that influenced Lennon’s music was the breakup of his marriage to Cynthia and his taking up with Yoko Ono. While the Beatles were in India, Lennon and Ono frequently corresponded, even though Cynthia had joined her husband in Rishikesh. Once Lennon returned to London, he and Ono were essentially inseparable, with Lennon even bringing her to recording sessions. Ono’s presence at the recording studio, as is well documented in several sources, disrupted the Beatles’ established working relations.1 The Beatles entered their last creative period in 1968, after years of experimentation in the studio on their recordings from Rubber Soul to Magical Mystery Tour. The music of this third creative period backs away from the excessive experimentation of the previous period, bringing the band back to their musical roots in rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and blues. By 1968, they were influenced by various other musicians (such as Bob Dylan and Donovan), by the use of hallucinogenic drugs (as Russell Reising argues in chapter 5 herein), and by the social turmoil of the day. The songs Lennon contributed to The Beatles demonstrate his return to his roots combined with his desire to experiment with sound. Lennon’s contributions also point forward to the kinds of sounds and songs he would create as a solo artist in the 1970s.

The Music Nineteen sixty-­eight was an incredibly prolific year for the composing Beatles, and Starr joined the others that year as a composer in his own right. Besides the songs for The Beatles, they also composed and recorded, for the soundtrack of the animated film Yellow Submarine, Lennon’s “Hey Bulldog”; they released two singles, McCartney’s “Lady Madonna” backed by Harrison’s “The Inner Light,” and McCartney’s “Hey Jude” backed by Lennon’s “Revolution”; they engaged in a variety of solo projects including Harrison’s Wonderwall Music soundtrack and Lennon and Ono’s avant-­garde experiment Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins; they composed and produced songs for new artists such as Jackie Lomax and Mary Hopkin; and Lennon created his first band without the other Beatles, a supergroup consisting of himself and Ono, Cream’s Eric Clapton (lead guitar), the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards (bass guitar), and drummer Mitch Mitchell, late of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.2 In addition, all but Starr wrote a number of songs that never made it onto an official Beatles release, including Lennon’s “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Child of Nature” (later rewritten

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and recorded as “Jealous Guy” on Imagine, 1971) and a great many songs by Harrison that eventually appeared on his first solo album, All Things Must Pass (1970). As stated earlier, the music of the Beatles’ third period, while retaining an element of experimentation, is marked by a return to their musical roots; their performing skills are vastly improved, and their sense of time is much looser than on the music preceding 1968. Yet each composer finished his songs with minimal input from the others. Lennon’s songs on The Beatles run from the deceptive simplicity of “Julia” to the reinterpretation of blues and rock ’n’ roll of “Revolution 1” and “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” to the radical musique concrète of “Revolution 9.” One of the most fascinating aspects of the Beatles’ music throughout their career is their tendency to introduce subtle variations of musical content in recurring song sections. Important musical elements are the principles of exact repetition, varied repetition, and contrast. Popular songs are notoriously repetitive, being primarily strophic and standard song forms, and are designed more for dancing than for listening. Beginning in 1965, rock musicians were active in the change from rock ’n’ roll to rock, a change facilitated by varying song forms, harmonic progressions, melodic phrases, instrumentation, and other elements (Valdez 2010, 150). Lennon’s compositions on The Beatles make great use of varied repetition, especially in his approach to form, harmony, and time, as the following discussion reveals. As has been well documented, Lennon, Harrison, and McCartney took their acoustic guitars with them to India. Most of Lennon’s contributions to The Beatles were composed at Rishikesh and therefore sound like guitar-­based (rather than piano-­based) songs. Lennon makes excellent use of the guitar’s tuning, blending open strings with stopped strings in fingerpicking patterns that sound intricate and create many passing extended harmonies in songs like “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” Other songs, for example “Glass Onion,” “Me and My Monkey,” and the “Revolution” single, feature guitar-­based chord progressions similar to those in the hard rock and psychedelic music of the period. Not surprisingly, these chord progressions and fingerpicking patterns lie comfortably on the guitar fretboard. Lennon’s lyric writing, often displaying clever wordcraft, took on a noticeably literate, even philosophical, cast after roughly 1965, when he became familiar with the lyric styles of Dylan and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (Valdez 2010, 163). Several of Lennon’s songs for The Beatles are

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character songs, clearly defining individual personae with his insightful, sometimes acerbic, commentary on them. Several of Lennon’s songs concern people in attendance at Rishikesh, including “Dear Prudence” (about actress Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence), “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (lampooning a hypocritical guest who liked to hunt tigers in between meditative sessions aimed at becoming one with the cosmos), and especially Lennon’s disillusioned diatribe about the Maharishi, “Sexy Sadie.” The lyrics for “Dear Prudence” stem from an incident in Rishikesh in which Lennon and Harrison were enlisted to coax Prudence Farrow into joining the rest of the group instead of meditating by herself for long periods (Spitz 2005, 753). The lyrics are gentle, innocent, and almost childlike in their simplicity, a simplicity enhanced by Lennon’s use of short, balanced phrases and the imagery of sunshine, clouds, and smiles. Several sources (e.g., Riley 1998, 265; Mellers 1973, 29) have also alluded to a sexual aspect or a “sexual awakening,” but I think the lyrics express a sense of childlike innocence. As Mellers points out, the melody is a simple D pentatonic tune sounding like one from a children’s game (1973, 29). The childlike lyrics, the pentatonic melody that does not even span an octave, the repetitive ostinato of the guitar parts, and the short, balanced phrases all contribute to this sense of innocence. The introduction to “Dear Prudence” emerges from beneath the fading jet engine sound that wraps up the opener of the album, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Its D Mixolydian mode is defined by the high notes playing a descending scale (E–­D –­C –­B –­A–­G –­F♯) above the picking pattern ostinato and leading to the repeated ostinato figure (D–­F♯) that forms the motivic basis of the song. As harmony to the F♯ pitch, Lennon introduces a chromatic descending pattern (D–­C –­B –­B ♭) in an inner chord part that is doubled by the electric bass guitar beginning at the second part of the first A verse; this inner descending diatonic/chromatic pattern appears often in the Beatles’ songs going back to some of their early recordings. Fitting in nicely with the modal chord progression, the melody of “Dear Prudence” is taken entirely from the D pentatonic scale (D–­E–­ F♯ –­A–­B), changing to a more static-­pitch melody in the bridge (“Look around round”). Cast in a standard AABA form, the song features A sections based on the ostinato picking pattern described above. In the bridge, where composers usually briefly change key (often to the subdominant), Lennon retains a similar picking pattern over a simple chord pattern of I–­IV–­V–­I (D–­G–­A–­D), ending the bridge with a chromatic

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chord progression with a flat-­III (F natural), flat-­V (A♭), and IV (G) that, like the introduction, brings the listener back to the D Mixolydian A section. The melody of the bridge moves slightly away from the D pentatonic notes of the A section, corresponding to the diatonic chords used. The contrast necessary between the A verses and the bridge is enhanced by the addition of two more electric guitars recorded with some distortion. On the return of the A section, the intensity of the bridge diminishes to the original mood, though the distorted electric guitars used in the bridge are added to the guitar ostinato. This A verse is followed by a recapitulation of the first A verse, but in a harder rock style and sound, joined by some tinkling, high-­range piano figures. The gentleness of the beginning shifts to a much harder feel, perhaps indicating the singer’s frustration that he hasn’t convinced Prudence to “come out to play.” This recap is followed by a return to the high, descending Mixolydian passage of the introduction, but beginning on the third (F♯) of the mode: 10–­9–­8–­flat 7–­6–­5–­4–­4–­3 (F♯ –­E –­D –­C –­B –­A–­G –­G –­F♯). During this descending scale pattern the sound gradually fades out to the last, barely audible F♯ . Although “Dear Prudence” includes electric guitars—­Lennon playing his semihollow Casino and Harrison a solid-­body Telecaster (Everett 1999, 168)—­the tone of the music is subdued as Lennon tries to coax Prudence to join the others. Altogether, the guitar sounds coupled with the innocent lyrics, the hypnotic picking ostinato, and the simple pentatonic melody create a gentle mood appropriate for the lyrics. The lyrics of “Julia,” Lennon’s song for his late mother that also invokes his feelings for Ono, likewise call up a sense of innocence or perhaps nostalgia. The opening phrase, “Half of what I say,” and the later phrase beginning “When I cannot sing my mind . . .” are derived from a collection of aphorisms titled Sand and Foam by the poet Kahlil Gibran (Everett 1999, 170–­71), while the phrase “ocean child” is the English translation of “Yoko” (Dowlding 1989, 238). The gentle, repetitive, almost hypnotic fingerpicking pattern Lennon overdubs in two acoustic guitar parts, the narrow range of the melody (mostly spanning the interval of a sixth, D to B), and the subdued style of his performance bring out Lennon’s tender feelings for his mother and his future wife. “Julia,” placed at the end of side 2 of the record (the end of disc 1 on the CD set), uses the same fingerpicking pattern as “Dear Prudence.” The chord progression mixes major and minor modes: as in his verses on “A Day in the Life,” Lennon seems unable to commit to a specific key, fluctuating between D major (I and V, D and A) and B minor (vi7 and iii, B minor 7 and F♯ minor in D, but i and v in B minor). As in “Dear

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Prudence,” the soft dynamic level, the repetitive picking pattern, and the slow tempo create a relaxed, almost hypnotic, atmosphere. The form of “Julia” is a modified AABA form, the A verses consisting of two distinct but related melodic phrases: phrase 1 sung on a repeated dominant pitch (A) until the slight descent at the cadence (5–­3–­2–­1, A–­ F♯–­E–­D), and phrase 2 with a slight ascent over a modal progression that ends with a return to the repeated A pitch of phrase 1 and concludes with the same cadential figure, unifying the two phrases. While the initial phrase moves between D major and B minor, the second phrase follows a colorful modal progression that includes a minor dominant triad and minor dominant ninth chord (A minor and A minor 9), moving to VI7 (B7), IV9 (G9), and iv (G minor) chords before returning to the second half of phrase 1. The bridge (which Lennon called “the middle eight”) contrasts with the A verse by beginning the five-­measure phrase in his lower vocal range (“Her hair of . . .”) over a different chord progression. Here, as in “Dear Prudence,” the chord additions (m7, m6, and +5) present the ear with a descent in an inner voice part: A (in Bm7) –­G ♯ (Bm6) –­F♯ and E (F♯m7) –­ D ♯ (F♯m6) –­C-­double sharp (F♯+5) –­C ♯ (F♯m). The return to the A section is followed by a coda in which Lennon hums the first part of the V2 phrase before singing the last part (“calls me”), then repeats his mother’s name twice over an alternating I–­iii (D–­ F♯ minor), which is followed by a final cadence of I–­iii–­V–­I maj7 (D–­F♯ minor–­A–­D maj7) as the tempo gradually slows to the final sustained chord. The slow arpeggio Lennon strums on the final major-­seventh tonic chord lends a restless, unfinished quality to the harmony, reinforcing the mood of reverence and bittersweet memories expressed in the lyric as well as in the haunting sound of Lennon’s overdubbed, slightly reverbed acoustic guitars. Songs like “Dear Prudence” and “Julia” foreshadow some of Lennon’s later songs directed toward Julia Lennon, for example “Mother” (1970), although the mood of “Mother” is radically different from that of “Julia.” Several of Lennon’s later solo songs directed at Yoko, such as “Woman” and “Oh Yoko” (both 1980), express similar feelings, if not atmospheres, as does “Julia.” The most experimental, rhythmically complex, yet tuneful contribution Lennon made to The Beatles is the closer of side 1, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” This is a notably sectional piece, cleverly edited together to make it work. Each of the four sections has its own identity, as if Lennon, with the help of Martin and the engineers, spliced together four individual pieces to make a single song. The track is noteworthy for

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Lennon’s use of rhythmic and metric changes, as it switches from four beats to two beats and immediately back to four beats, employs compound meters like 9/8 and 12/8, and inserts odd meters like 5/4 and 10/8. The meters are so complicated that the rhythm track took seventy takes before it sounded like what Lennon had imagined (Lewisohn 1988, 157). Once the foundational rhythm track was done, another sixty-­five takes (including overdub sessions) were required to make him happy with “Happiness.” The lyrics for “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” fit to its sectional form of contrasting meters and tempi, were, like those of Lennon’s part of “A Day in the Life,” suggested by newspaper and magazine articles he had read, while the title of the song was taken from an article published in the May 1968 issue of American Rifleman (Davies 2014, 277). Lennon presents these lyrics in the stream-­of-­consciousness manner he used previously in “I Am the Walrus” and would perfect in “Across the Universe.” The lyrics of the other sections, such as in “Mother Superior . . .” and “happiness is a warm gun,” are as confusing as those of “Glass Onion.” The four sections of the song are defined by rhythmic and metric changes, while the harmony moves around between A minor and the relative C major through the use of tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords. The chord progression of the opening section (“She’s not a girl . . .”) is in A-­natural minor, or Aeolian mode; it has a modal sound created by Lennon’s use of minor dominant and dominant-­ninth chords. In tonal music, the dominant chord in a minor key alters the seventh degree of the scale, the third (G ♯) of the V chord, to create a leading tone a half step below the minor tonic chord. The natural seventh of the key adds a little darker color to the music. The first section is mostly in a slow, four-­beat pattern, the opening four measures oscillating between the minor tonic (with seventh and sixth additions) and the minor dominant ninth and minor dominant triad: i7 i6 –­v9 v (Am7 Am6 –­Em9 Em). At this point, the lyrics change to the stream-­of-­consciousness lines taken from newspaper articles, while the harmony changes to alternate between minor subdominant sixth and minor tonic chords. For these nine measures, the slow beat continues with two metric shifts: in the second measure there are two beats followed by a return to four beats, and in the eighth measure an extra beat is added to the four beats for a 5/4 measure before returning to the final, four-­beat measure. The first part segues into the second part, where we experience a metric change (to 9/8 and 12/8) and a tempo change simultaneously.

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Now the tonic minor chord becomes a major chord with a seventh for the first two (9/8 and 12/8) measures, moving to the relative C major for two 12/8 measures. In this segment of the song, the guitars play a distorted, hard-­rock instrumental version of the “I need a fix” melody, then repeat the four-­measure progression with the lyrics: (9/8) I7 –­(12/8) I7 –­III –­i (9/8 A7 –­12/8 A7 –­C –­A minor). After a brief stop, part 3 (“Mother Superior”) begins, consisting of an alternation of one 9/8 measure with one 10/8 measure, the two measures played a total of three times, again with basic chords of C major/A minor: (9/8) i III –­(10/8) I7 VII7 (9/8 Am C –­10/8 A7 G7). The last section begins immediately after these unusual nine-­and ten-­beat measures and settles back into the opening slow four beat. Here, with the first mention of the song’s title and one of the few spots on The Beatles that features the three-­part harmony singing typical of earlier Beatle recordings, Lennon introduces a 1950s-­style doo-­wop progression (I vi –­IV V) in C major: C Am –­F G. Starr maintains a steady four beat for the next three measures while the guitars and vocals create a compound 12/8 feel, generating provocative cross rhythms between the drums’ even subdivision and the guitars’ triple subdivision of the beat. In these three 12/8 –­4/4 measures, which also feature a slight tempo change, the doo-­wop progression is played in its entirety in each measure. The meter and tempo shift once more to 4/4 and slower tempo, with two chords per measure in the doo-­wop progression—­(4/4) I vi –­IV V (C Am / F G)—­leading to a free rubato measure on the minor subdominant (F minor) and a two-­beat measure on the same sustained chord. The song ends once again in a four-­beat pattern, the doo-­wop progression being played twice with two chords per measure, and concludes on a sustained C major chord. One of Lennon’s cleverest compositions, “Happiness” features elemental tonal harmony and complex metric and tempo changes that work with and against each other, like a miniconcerto, to create the whole artwork, a powerful closer to the first side of the album. Several other Lennon contributions to The Beatles—­like the album closer “Good Night”—­evoke a similar sense of remembrance or bittersweet emotions as does “Julia”; or, like “Cry Baby Cry” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” they portray innocence and childhood as in “Dear Prudence.” Yet they also demonstrate some aspect of musical experimentation or mood setting that now becomes more common in Lennon’s compositions. In other songs on the album, Lennon stays mostly with traditional blues (“Yer Blues,” “Revolution 1”), rock

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(“Me and My Monkey”), and folk progressions (“Bungalow Bill”), but adds color chords to instill unusual sonorities. The harmony of “Yer Blues,” in the key of E, uses the traditional I, IV7, V7 (E–­A7–­B7) twelve-­ bar blues progression, except that Lennon adds a flat III (G) chord before hitting the dominant seventh (B7). Lennon inserts the flat III chord in the same spot before the V7 in “Me and My Monkey” and employs a similar added chord at the same place in “Revolution 1,” but here uses a minor ii chord before the dominant, a common variation to the blues heard in modern jazz styles such as bebop. In a mellow, folklike style, “Cry Baby Cry” features on-­ the-­ beat strummed chords on acoustic guitar rather than the fingerpicking style used on “Julia” and “Dear Prudence.” A simple strophic verse/chorus song, it was inspired by a television advertisement that urged children to pester their mothers to get some toy or cereal (Dowlding 1989, 246). The chorus is in the G Mixolydian mode: I–­ii–­VII–­I–­vi–­II7–­VII–­I (G–­ Am–­F–­G–­Em–­A7–­F–­G), with the infrequent use of sevenths on chords adding to the modal, folklike character of the song. The introduction is essentially the chorus without the final tonic chord and a metric change on the second F chord (VII) to two beats while the other measures are in four; for the remaining choruses, the meter stays in four, except in the coda, where Lennon shifts from four beats to two beats on the A-­minor (ii) chords. The start of the coda dovetails with the end of the chorus, the G chord being common to both sections. Lennon repeats the progression but deceptively ends on an E minor (vi, the relative minor key of G major) rather than on the tonic G chord, giving the song an open, incomplete feeling. The verse progression indicates G major rather than G Mixolydian by presenting four measures on an E-­minor (vi) sonority, ending on a subdominant (IV) C7 to tonic (I) G cadence, the B♭ seventh of the C7 chord creating a dissonant cross relation with the B-­natural third of the G chord. Lennon flavors the E-­minor sonority with a chromatic descent from the pitches E to C in an inner part progression: vi –­vi maj7 –­vi7 –­vi6 –­IV7 –­I, each chord contributing to the chromatic descent (E–­D ♯ –­ D–­C ♯ –­C) followed by the tonic chord. In contrast to the gentle lyrics of “Julia” and “Dear Prudence,” the hard-­rocking songs “Glass Onion” and “Me and My Monkey” demonstrate Lennon’s predilection for using words for their sound rather than their meaning, as he had done previously in “I Am the Walrus.” “Me and My Monkey” is remarkable for the alliterative use of the hard c (/k/) in “Come on, come on,” etc., and for contrasting phrases like “Your inside is

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out and your outside is in,” but the lyrics are essentially a string of unconnected, nonnarrative phrases. “Glass Onion,” on the other hand, sounds psychedelic in its imagery while not making much narrative sense, as in the stream-­of-­consciousness lyrics of “I Am the Walrus.” Lennon stated numerous times that the lyrics for “Glass Onion” were written to make fun of, and totally confuse, those people who insisted that Beatles lyrics had deep meaning (Davies 2014, 268); he offered a similar comment in reference to “Walrus.” Lennon further enhances the mystery by invoking earlier Beatles songs, including “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Fixing a Hole,” while phrases like “looking through the bent-­backed tulips” and the song title recall the psychedelic imagery of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” He also adds a clue to the “Paul is dead” hoax: “the Walrus was Paul.”3 Perhaps the idea of trying to see through several layers of an onion, distorted by curved glass, can be experienced as psychedelic, but it’s likely that Lennon was merely indulging in the word games he played so well. “Glass Onion” maintains a straight-­ahead, four-­beat hard-­rock meter. Intended to sound psychedelic, the recording is subjected to some fuzz distortion to highlight the odd imagery of the lyrics. “Glass Onion” is in a standard AABA song form with a coda; however, unlike traditional AABA songs in which each section has the same number of measures (usually eight), its sections are asymmetrical, with the A portions consisting of fifteen measures and the bridge of ten measures. Lennon also attaches the hook from the end of the A section (“looking through a glass onion”) to the end of the bridge. The key of the song is an altered A blues with a Phrygian-­sounding flat second degree (B♭) and a flat dominant (E♭) borrowed from an altered bebop blues scale, resulting in the pitches A–­B♭–­C–­D–­E♭–­E–­F–­G–­A. The progression uses the simple tonic triad (A minor) and multiple seventh chords, creating a modal atmosphere beneath the image-­laden lyrics. The chords in themselves are not all that unusual; however, the progression juxtaposes some noticeable cross-­relations between pairs of chords, for example, the A minor/F7 pair (I–­VI7) places the seventh of the F7 chord (the pitch E♭) after an E-­natural fifth of the A-­minor chord (plus, of course, the root change from A to F, a third relation), while the F7/ D7 pair (VI7–­IV7) juxtaposes the F-­natural root of the F7 chord next to the F♯ third of the D7 chord (as well as the third-­related roots). These are hardly earth-­shattering dissonances, but the progression does present some sweet ear candy for the listener. “Good Night” is the most traditional of Lennon’s songs on The Beatles

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in terms of structure, time, and harmony. Composed as a lullaby for his son Julian (Golson 1981, 169), it was assigned to Starr to sing. The song follows the standard AABA form with an introduction and a coda; those two sections balance each other with six measures each, but an asymmetry typical of Beatles songs by 1968 occurs between the twelve-­measure A verses and the four-­measure bridge. In addition, Lennon includes some appealing chord extensions, such as an added major seventh interval (F♯) to the tonic G chord in the introduction and at the end of the A verse, and a single secondary dominant chord to the modal minor dominant (V7/v [A7] to v7 [Dm7]). For this relatively traditional progression, Lennon directed producer George Martin to arrange the song “like Hollywood. Yeah, corny” (Dowlding 1989, 250). The resulting orchestral arrangement is as thick and lush as the score of a golden age Hollywood film, though not as cloying as Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” arrangements on Let It Be: Martin’s orchestration for “Good Night” never intrudes on the lyrics or on Starr’s delivery and, after the sonic cacophony of “Revolution 9,” “Good Night” exudes a serene atmosphere. After a fast, decorative flamenco guitar passage that seems to come out of nowhere and is totally unrelated to the song, “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” uses the basic tonic, subdominant, and dominant (I, IV, V, or C, F, and G) chords of tonal music, but substitutes a minor iv chord (F minor) for the traditional major subdominant (F major). In the chorus, there is a slight modulation to A with the I, iv, V chords in the new key (A, D minor, E). The simple progression for the chorus is I V –­I iv –­I iv –­V in C (C, F minor, and G), followed by a repeat of the progression in the new key of A (A E –­A D minor –­A D minor –­E). The progression in the verse is in A minor with a slow scalar ascent: i III –­VI VII (A minor C –­F G) played twice; it is followed by a standard authentic cadence from V to i (E to A minor), with the insertion of a VII chord (G) between the E and A-­minor chords; a sustained F-­minor chord (vi) occurs before Lennon directs us back to the chorus with the phrase “all the children sing.” The basic track of the song was recorded in three takes, giving it a hurried, slapdash quality (Lewisohn 1988, 160)—­fittingly, as Lennon intended to create a fun, party-­like atmosphere in the manner of “Yellow Submarine” (1966; it is also reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” from Blonde on Blonde [1966]). The late-­night session added overdubs on the chorus, enlisting everyone present in the studio, including Maureen Starkey and Yoko Ono, to join in the chorus and add shouts, laughter, applause, and whistles. In a bit of Beatles history, Ono

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sings one line as a solo voice (“not when he looked so fierce”), “the first female lead vocal line on a Beatles recording” (Lewisohn 1988, 160). On the first visit Ono made to a Beatles recording session in February 1968, she heard a playback of Lennon’s “Hey Bulldog.” When Lennon asked her what she thought of the recording, she asked, “why do you always use that [regular and repetitive] beat. . . . [W]hy don’t you use something more complex?” (Everett 1999, 155).4 While the other Beatles were insulted, and the Abbey Road staff was flabbergasted, Lennon took this criticism to heart.5 And so, although Lennon remains fairly close to traditional progressions in these songs, he adds a great deal of metrical variety to many of them. The opening segment of “Yer Blues,” instead of maintaining a steady, slow, four-­ beat pattern, changes from four measures of 4/4 to one measure each in 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8 time, with 12/8 equivalent to 4/4 except that each beat is subdivided into three eighth notes (a triplet) in place of each quarter note. On top of this, the guitar solo (almost two times through the traditional twelve-­bar blues) is played in double time, twice as fast as the slow four-­beat beginning, and in 12/8 time to capture the blues barrelhouse, bounced rhythm of the triplets, before returning to the original slow tempo after the solo as the music slowly fades. In “Revolution 1,” which is also played at a slow tempo with a 12/8 feel, Lennon occasionally shifts from 4/4 to 2/4, but unpredictably. In “Bungalow Bill,” there is only a single sidestep from four beats to two beats in the chorus, while the verse maintains a strict 4/4 beat. In “Me and My Monkey,” after a steady pulse in 4/4 time Lennon inserts a 6/8 and a 4/4 measure, played twice, after the hook (“except for me and my monkey”) as the turnaround to the beginning of the next verse. Several other Lennon songs on The Beatles feature similar metric shifts, notably, as we have seen, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Lennon’s experiments with meter created many problems in recording and resulted in an enormous number of takes for the songs. Thus “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” required 65 takes, “I’m So Tired” 14 takes, “Yer Blues” 17 takes, “Revolution 1” 22 takes (with the faster single version “Revolution” needing 16), “Cry Baby Cry” 12 takes, “Good Night” 34 takes, and a whopping 117 for “Sexy Sadie,” though this high number was due to Lennon’s remaking the song twice before he was satisfied. “I’m So Tired,” “Sexy Sadie,” and “Good Night” all mostly use traditional tonal chord progressions, with chromatic chord extensions occasionally added. Each of these songs is cast in an essentially standard song form; however, Lennon (as the Beatles had done with traditional

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forms since “I Saw Her Standing There”) creates modified versions of the orthodox AABA form and, as in so many of his songs for this album, he introduces various metric changes as well. “I’m So Tired” is an AABA form with a coda, but Lennon places a return to the bridge after the last A verse, before the coda. Mostly composed in 4/4 meter, the song displays nearly balanced A and B sections, except for an extra two beats (2/4 meter) in the penultimate measure (with the final measure going back to four beats), so that the verse consists of six and a half measures, contrasted with the six measures of the bridge. Harmonically in A major, the chord progression is rather tame except for Lennon’s inclusion of a VII7 (G♯ 7) in the second half of the first measure. Lennon also alters the dominant E chord by raising the fifth of that chord to create an augmented dominant chord, resulting in a short chromatic ascent in the pitches B ♯ (the fifth of the E-­augmented chord and sounding C natural) –­C ♯ (the fifth of F♯ minor) –­D (the root of D minor) for the ending of the verse. The bridge uses a simple tonic, dominant, subdominant harmony (I, V, IV; A, E, D) within six measures: I–­I–­V–­V–­IV–­I (A–­A–­E–­E–­D–­A). Even more simple, the coda is twice through a plagal (“Amen”) cadence of IV–­I (D–­A), the final unsustained chord followed by Lennon mumbling something that when played backward sounds like “Paul is dead, man. Miss him, miss him.” Lennon also slightly alters the standard form in “Sexy Sadie”; instead of a typical AABA pattern, he presents two truncated versions of the form AABA AB with an introduction and a coda. The introduction consists of three measures, while the A verse consists of seven measures contrasted with the five-­measure bridge. A restatement of the A-­verse progression, the coda consists of seven measures repeated with a fade-­out. The chord progression of “Sexy Sadie,” in G major, is composed primarily of the typical tonic, subdominant, and dominant (G, C, D) chords ornamented with a variety of diatonic minor chords (ii and iii, A minor and B minor), some modal VII7 chords (F♯7), some chromatic passing flat-­VII (F) and flat-­II (A♭) chords, and an added major-­seventh interval to the subdominant (C) and the flat-­II (A ♭) chords. While Lennon uses the modal VII7 sonority in all sections but the bridge, the chord serves different functions at different points. In the second measure of the introduction, in the pattern IV V –­I VII7 –­flat-­V II V7 (C D –­G F♯ 7 –­F D), the F♯ 7 functions as a chromatic passing chord between the tonic G and the altered flat-­V II F. In the A verse, Lennon uses this same F♯ 7 in the first, fourth, and sixth measures with different functions; in the first measure, F♯ 7 is used as a secondary dominant (V7/iii) of the B minor

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(iii) chord. However, in the fourth measure, the F♯ 7 chord functions as a dominant substitution leading to the dominant D chord in measure 5. And in the sixth measure, the F♯ 7 chord takes on the chromatic passing chord function used in the introduction. The bridge also employs the diatonic chords of G major, with a few colorful alterations (flat-­II, A♭) and extensions (IV major 7 [C major 7] and flat-­II major 7 [A ♭ major 7]). Certainly the most challenging track on The Beatles to listen to is “Revolution 9,” an experiment using numerous tape loops of sound effects, orchestral music, spoken voices, the shouts of a football (soccer) crowd, and a repetition of the phrase “Number 9” that were manipulated by Lennon and Ono (with some input from Harrison and Martin) on the tape machines at Abbey Road and produced by treating the loops with heavy echo and distortion. The Beatles had been inspired to make musique concrète through exposure to the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Henri, Edgard Varèse, and other art music composers of the 1950s and 1960s. They had also been experimenting with tape manipulation since Revolver (on Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”), though “Revolution 9,” with suggestions from Ono, carried it even further than what had been accomplished on “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The arts of the mid-­1960s (poetry, literature, visual art, and music) were all undergoing radical changes aimed at challenging the modernist intelligentsia, and with “Revolution 9” musique concrète was packaged for a mainstream audience and “designed to change the way its beholders experienced reality” (MacDonald 1994, 231); the piece exhibits a decidedly consonant atonality. Lennon was also impressed with and inspired by Ono’s artworks. “Revolution 9” was created about three weeks after the couple’s experimental Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. The basic track was taken from a long improvisation from the coda of one version of “Revolution 1”; this track was then layered with numerous snatches of tape, creating a thick texture through which the initial track becomes mostly inaudible (Everett 1999, 175). Walter Everett (1999, 174–­ 78) presents a thorough discussion of the tapes and sounds that were used to make “Revolution 9.” I direct the reader to this source, as Everett has painstakingly compiled the sources of the tape loops and the times (on the compact disc) in which these loops appear.

Conclusion The Beatles, in retrospect, was described by the four band members as a “tense album” (Dowlding 1988, 212). However, also in retrospect,

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Lennon, Starr, and Harrison agreed that the result was outstanding and that “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was one of their favorite Beatles songs (Dowlding 1989, 231). The tension in the studio, which led to much arguing and to Starr’s quitting the group for a short time, seems to have brought out the best in the Beatles’ composing and playing. In cutting back (for the most part) on the excessive studio experimentation that typified their recordings from Rubber Soul to Magical Mystery Tour and returning to their musical roots in rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, and blues, the Beatles entered a third creative period. The songs on The Beatles, with their great variety and subtle studio experiments, foreshadow the sounds and songs that would later define each man’s solo career. In Lennon’s case, “Julia” and “Dear Prudence” presage the heartfelt emotions in songs like “Woman” (1980), “Oh Yoko,” (1980), and “Jealous Guy” (1971), while political and social commentaries like “Revolution 1” are further explored in songs such as “Imagine,” “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier” (from Imagine, 1971), and in the entire album Sometime in New York City (1971), on which Lennon addresses sociopolitical subjects like prison riots (“Attica State”), women’s rights (“Woman Is the Nigger of the World” and “Sisters O Sisters,” cowritten with Ono), and the problems in Northern Ireland (“The Luck of the Irish” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday”). In addition, songs like “I’m So Tired” and “Yer Blues” that express Lennon’s observations about his personal life presage many of Lennon’s later songs, such as “Watching the Wheels” and “Beautiful Boy” from Double Fantasy (1980). The Beatles is a well-­constructed album, the songs for the most part representing tightly organized commentaries on each Beatle’s experiences. Lennon’s compositions, at their best, demonstrate a creative mind cleverly pushing its musical limits within the construct of a return to his musical roots. Notes 1. See, for example, Norman 1981, 340–­41; Everett 1999, 161–­62; and Emerick 2007, 224 passim. 2. This supergroup, which Lennon dubbed the Dirty Mac, prepared a performance of “Yer Blues” for the December 11, 1968, taping of a rock music project of the Rolling Stones entitled Rock and Roll Circus (Everett 1999, 210). The project also featured Yoko Ono vocalizing from within a cloth bag onstage performing an avant-­garde piece “Whole Lotta Yoko,” also with the Dirty Mac. After filming, the project was scrapped, and was not heard or seen by the public until the release of the CD (1995) and the DVD (2004). Some sources state that the

212  the beatles through a glass onion phrase “dirty mac” is British slang for one who exposes himself after opening his dirty raincoat (or mackintosh); it’s also possible that the band’s name was an angry dig at his bandmate McCartney. 3. According to the booklet that accompanies Magical Mystery Tour, page 7 is a still from their performance of “I Am the Walrus.” The Walrus is seated at a white piano and the hippopotamus standing in front of the piano is holding the bass guitar left-­handed. Clearly, the Walrus was John and the Hippo was Paul. 4. This incident is fully (and painfully) reported by in Emerick 2006, beginning on page 224. 5. Lennon had previously experimented with changing meters, as in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and with odd meters, such as in “Good Morning Good Morning.” However, his use of mixed meters in earlier songs was more predictable than the sudden changes that occur in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Yer Blues.”

eleven | “That Was Me” in “Vintage Clothes” Intertextuality and the White Album Songs of Paul McCartney vincent p. benitez

Paul McCartney’s album Memory Almost Full (2007) includes a medley that begins with the song “Vintage Clothes,” a track that seemingly reminisces about his 1960s apparel. At first glance, its lyrics express that what was once passé is coming back into vogue. But its central theme concerns having one’s eyes directed toward the future and not the past. “Vintage Clothes” segues into the medley’s next track, “That Was Me,” a song recalling McCartney’s life growing up in Liverpool. Cast in an early rock ’n’ roll style, this song is replete with nostalgic images of him attending scout camps, participating in school plays, having fun at the beach with a spade and bucket, playing Conkers (an Anglo-­Irish children’s game) at bus stops, and performing with the band that he joined in 1957, among other activities. The messages celebrated by “Vintage Clothes” and “That Was Me” encapsulate how I view McCartney’s songs on the White Album: they look to the past through his use of parody and pastiche. As is commonly known, McCartney parodies Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys in “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” rock ’n’ roll in “Birthday” (a possible fifty-­fifty collaboration with John Lennon [Miles 1997, 496]), and Bob Dylan in “Rocky Raccoon.” Pastiche is evident in the blues-­flavored “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” in the British music hall numbers “Martha My Dear” and “Honey Pie,” and in the Jamaican ska-­inspired “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da.” In the rest of his White Album songs, McCartney looks to the future 213

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in relation to musical style. He anticipates heavy metal with the raucous, guitar-­ riff-­ driven sound of “Helter Skelter.” Along with Dylan’s folk songs, McCartney’s “Blackbird,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “I Will” influenced the singer-­songwriter genre of the 1970s and beyond. In this genre, artists like James Taylor and Carole King wrote compelling songs, with lyrics centering on personal experience, delivered in a manner as personal as McCartney’s, using minimal instrumental resources. But this troika of McCartney songs points to a level of artistic sophistication perhaps not present in such near-­ contemporaneous works. “Blackbird” features socially sensitive lyrics linked with race relations in late-­1960s America, enhanced by a complex setting rich in musical content and structure. “Mother Nature’s Son” reflects the tendency of acid-­drenched rock musicians of the late 1960s to seek spiritual renewal by getting back to nature. And although lyrically clichéd, “I Will” includes innovative phrase rhythms as part of its musical structuring (see Everett 2009a, 192–­94). From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-­first century, McCartney’s White Album songs are even more forward-­looking, as their stylistic elements point to salient aspects of his songwriting craft after he left the Beatles. As noted in the scholarly literature on the Fab Four, McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison functioned essentially as solo artists on the White Album, with their bandmates serving as studio musicians. Through their work on The Beatles, they foreshadowed the creative paths that they would take as individual artists in a few years’ time. But since McCartney’s solo career greatly overshadows those of Lennon and Harrison in terms of length and productivity—­let alone quality of music—­the creative approaches underlying his White Album songs can supply a framework to better understand his later music. In this chapter, then, I examine the vintage songwriting clothes McCartney wore when contributing tracks to The Beatles, exploring how his compositional strategies work in tandem with the messages he wanted to convey through his lyrics. But in these discussions, I do not look back to the past by recalling what he did as a Beatle on previous LPs, as if to substantiate “that was him” on the White Album. Instead, I look forward to the future by showing how these songs inform his work as a solo artist. With these goals in mind, I examine how the Beach Boys parody in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” continues in a more serious vein in the Brian Wilson–­inspired “The Back Seat of My Car” from Ram (1971). Building upon my discussion of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” I investigate how its blues-­based rock style, along with those of “Why Don’t We Do It in the

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Road?” and “Birthday,” persist in McCartney’s solo oeuvre in “Used to Be Bad” from Flaming Pie (1997) and “I’ve Had Enough” from London Town (1978). I likewise delve into how the British music hall genre exemplified by “Honey Pie” and “Martha My Dear” remains a constant in McCartney’s solo work, cropping up in “You Gave Me the Answer” from Venus and Mars (1975), and in “English Tea” from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005). Finally, I scrutinize the socially conscious “Blackbird” and how it evolves into “Calico Skies” from Flaming Pie and “Jenny Wren” from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. With “Calico Skies,” McCartney wanted to compose an acoustic-­guitar song reminiscent of “Blackbird,” and did so, with an antiwar message in its third verse. He also used the guitar part of “Blackbird” to generate that of “Jenny Wren,” so that both songs feature similar two-­part, fingerpicking styles. Although the title of the song bears the same name as a character in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, “Jenny Wren” is a fictional person in McCartney’s eyes, a happy-­go-­lucky young woman whose heart is broken by witnessing the injustice of poverty.1 To understand how McCartney’s vintage songwriting clothes reflect his artistic persona on the White Album, I use intertextual approaches developed by Mark Spicer to analyze John Lennon’s late Beatle songs (Spicer 2009, 353–­54). Extending Robert Hatten’s ideas about intertextuality to popular music (1985), Spicer argues that there are two types of intertextuality—­stylistic and strategic—­operating in the Beatles’ mature oeuvre. Stylistic intertextuality occurs when there are references to a preexisting style, such as the nod to the high Baroque in the string arrangement of McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” from Revolver (1966).2 Strategic intertextuality transpires when there are references to a specific work or works, which is Spicer’s approach to analyzing Lennon’s songs. This dual intertextual approach provides multiple vantage points from which to uncover the rich imagery and meaning in McCartney’s late Beatles music and beyond.

Back Seats Strategic intertextuality shapes McCartney’s tongue-­in-­cheek take on the Cold War in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Through its references to the title and content of Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” (1959), the song spoofs how proudly Americans appreciate their country’s everyday pleasures upon returning home from overseas. Turning this tale on its head, McCartney

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has an equally proud “traveling Russki” express similar sentiments about his homeland upon returning to the USSR after spending time in the United States (Miles 1997, 422). He takes Berry’s return to the United States via an international flight and appreciative list of American cities and conjures up a parallel universe for his Russian protagonist on a return flight from Miami Beach. The protagonist particularly expresses his nationalistic pride in the song’s bridge through strategic allusions to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind.” He professes a cheesy admiration for Ukraine and Moscow girls, and then suggests that he cannot wait to see the mountainous landscapes in the Republic of Georgia. The Beach Boys’ stylistic influence in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is present in the song’s bridge through references to the group’s early vocal style, exemplified by hits such as “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” When devising early Beach Boy harmonies, Brian Wilson emulated the Four Freshmen of the mid-­1950s. He was particularly fond of the high tenor voice featured in the music of that white pop group, which inspired him to write and sing a high male part in his arrangements, sometimes in falsetto (which he claims the Four Freshmen taught him). In “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” itself a strategic allusion to Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958), vocal harmonies hover above and below Mike Love’s midrange lead, which is followed by Brian Wilson’s falsetto lead on the line, “Everybody’s gone surfin’,” answered by Love’s stop-­time hook, “Surfin’ U.S.A.”3 In “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which includes a strategic allusion to Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (1958) via its guitar intro, the vocal harmonies at the end showcase Wilson’s signature falsetto, which rockets off into the vocal stratosphere. The bridge of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” features a vocal texture approximating that of “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” with a midrange solo supported by background vocals above and below, and the higher harmony vocals imitating Wilson’s falsetto from “Fun, Fun, Fun” (these high-­range vocals return as the song winds down). All in all, these instances of stylistic intertextuality in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” wed Berry’s particular brand of rock ’n’ roll to the California surf sound of the Beach Boys to produce a hard-­driving, raucous Beatle song. Let us also consider the song’s blues-­rock aspects, which prefaces my discussion of the intertextual precursors driving McCartney’s solo work in this subgenre. Its intertextual influences notwithstanding, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” features high-­energy, blues-­based rock in the key of A major, exemplified by the verse-­refrain’s I–­♭III–­IV minor-­pentatonic harmonic structuring, and the song’s vocal licks and guitar solo. Used in

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the chorus of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the I–­♭III–­IV progression stems from a tonal system shaped by the minor pentatonic collection in which each of its notes plays host to a major triad (Everett 2004, [19]–­[22]). New to rock music, this system showcases chords that are not functionally related, and any sense of a tonic chord is accomplished through metric assertion. In the bridge of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” McCartney introduces a chromatic bass descent (D–­C♯–­C–­B) that highlights the lyric about Moscow girls making the protagonist sing and shout. The chromatic line descends within an expansion of an applied dominant-­seventh chord (V7/V), as the music moves from D to B7. This compositional strategy points to two similarly framed chromatic descents, although in contexts linked with expansions of tonic harmony, as well as different musical styles. In the bridge of the folk-­styled “Mother Nature’s Son,” there is a similar chromatic descent in the lowest horn part, spanning D4 to A3. The chords supporting the descent clearly prolong the tonic chord of D major: D–­ Dmaj7–­D7–­G/D–­Gm/D–­D (I–­I7–­I♭7–­IV6/4–­iv6/4–­I). The rock ballad “Maybe I’m Amazed” from McCartney (1970) features a comparable descent and prolongation. In the song’s bridge, there is a descending, primarily chromatic line (D–­C♯–­C–­B–­A) in an interior voice that descends within an expansion of the tonic chord in D major: D–­Dmaj7–­D7–­G–­D (I–­I7–­I♭7–­IV–­I). This chord succession intensifies a harmonically static bridge that suggests the rock-­solid strength McCartney derives from Linda Eastman’s being at his side after the immediate breakup of the Beatles (Benitez 2010, 26–­27).4 The Beach Boys’ stylistic imprint on McCartney, evident not only in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” but also in “Here, There, and Everywhere” from Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) in general, continues in “The Back Seat of My Car” from Ram.5 This kind of “teenage” or “meet the parents” song with sexual innuendos suggests a stylistic intertextual link with Beach Boys’ car songs, such as “409” (1962) and “Little Deuce Coupe” (1963). But more importantly, the unconventional verse-­refrain/chorus design, symphonic scope (heightened by the presence of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on the track), and vocals of “The Back Seat of My Car” suggest the more sophisticated songwriting approaches of Brian Wilson, as he moved away from composing celebrations of surfing and hot rods. By 1965, Wilson was favoring verse-­chorus designs that included episodes in the midst of the flexible placement and repetitions of a verse or chorus, rather than the formulaic AABA structures characteristic of his earlier hits. Such a choice may

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stem not only from his experimentation with drugs but also from a desire to have more room to develop a song’s emotions and musical ideas (O’Regan 2013, 112). By the time of Pet Sounds in 1966, Wilson was experimenting with unconventional formal structures in “You Still Believe in Me,” “That’s Not Me,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” “Let’s Go Away for a While,” and “Pet Sounds” (O’Regan 2013, 119). In these tracks, although traditional sections (such as verses and choruses) do appear, the structures lack the closure supplied by a final A section. In other words, these songs convey a sense of restlessness, where, in the words of Jade Simone O’Regan, “lyrical themes are rarely concluded or resolved satisfactorily” (2013, 119). In “The Back Seat of My Car,” McCartney uses a complicated structural design, with verse-­refrains alternating, for the most part, with choruses (see Benitez 2010, 34). Present in this mix are two episodes, along with an instrumental intro and outro. Situated in B♭ major, the verse-­refrains project images of the protagonist ruminating about his adolescent concerns while sitting in the back seat of his car. Prolonging the tonic chord of B♭ major through neighboring motions (I–­♭VII–­I over a tonic pedal), the choruses convey the thought that the protagonist seeks adventure by looking for a ride or strolling around. The first episode appears after varied iterations of the verse-­refrain and chorus, moving to C Dorian to distinguish itself from a tonal-­harmonic standpoint. It expresses the protagonist’s self-­confidence that he and his female companion cannot be wrong. The second episode occurs in the last vocal section of the song and is more expansive, moving from C Dorian to E♭ major. In my view, this last section reaffirms the duo’s hopeful assertion about not being wrong. Since it did not end in the key and vocal section with which it began, “The Back Seat of My Car” evokes a sense of restlessness, as if the future for the duo is fraught with uncertainty. Finally, Beach Boys–­like harmonies also inspire the vocals of “The Back Seat of My Car.” Brian Wilson’s high tessitura is suggested in parts of the verse-­refrains, and his trademark falsetto (“oos”) in the choruses. But the first chorus also seems to hint at a Wilson/Love duet through the coupling of its falsetto and lower vocals. Underneath the soaring and relatively more sustained upper line is an insistent rhythmic declamation on one note, suggesting Love’s rhythmic but limited-­in-­range lead vocals in the Beach Boys’ songs. But it is this very insistent line that asserts the protagonist’s desire for adventure in “The Back Seat of My Car.” Ultimately, although it may have contained “jokey allusions to the Beach Boys” when it was “previewed while filming Let It Be at Twickenham

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Studios” (Blaney 2007, 47), it is a substantive Wilsonesque song, conceived on a grand scale. McCartney alludes to stylistic elements from his blues-­rock numbers on the White Album in “Used to Be Bad” from Flaming Pie and “I’ve Had Enough” from London Town. He and singer-­guitarist Steve Miller cowrote and recorded “Used to Be Bad,” a Texas twelve-­bar blues track in E major, whereas McCartney recorded “I’ve Had Enough,” a guitar-­ dominated rocker in D major, with Wings. Like “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and “Birthday,” both songs include musical characteristics associated with the minor-pentatonic collection, particularly in the form of 025 trichords in vocal lines and instrumental solos. However, the ♭III chord featured in these two White Album songs—­on the musical surface in “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and as a key area in “Birthday” (C major in the overall key of A major)—­is used only in the turnaround of “Used to Be Bad” (B7–­A7–­ G7–­E7 [V7–­IV♭7–­♭III♭7–­I♭7]), and not at all in “I’ve Had Enough.” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” a raunchy twelve-­bar blues pastiche likewise shaped by the minor-pentatonic collection, does not include the ♭III chord. But the song has a sexually tinged ethos not present in the other White Album tracks under consideration. Inspired to write the song after seeing monkeys copulating in Rishikesh, India, McCartney regarded it as a “primitive statement [having] to do with sex or . . . freedom” (Miles 1997, 499). In the song’s great vocal, he is all over the place in his virtuosic delivery. Blues genres also convey other emotions, such as anger, frustration, love, masculine pride, and personal revenge. Not surprisingly, “Used to Be Bad” and “I’ve Had Enough” take these up. Most of the lyrics of “Used to Be Bad,” for example, center on male pride, with the last stanza revolving around the protagonist’s love interest. “I’ve Had Enough” conveys anger and frustration about the vicissitudes of life. But it may also suggest that McCartney was fed up with Wings and desired to move on to new creative vistas (see Blaney 2007, 125; Benitez 2010, 83).

Vintage Clothes The best examples of pastiche in all of McCartney’s music involve the British music hall tradition (vaudeville for Americans), which “Honey Pie” and “Martha My Dear” represent on the White Album. As suggested by McCartney’s remarks to Barry Miles, “Honey Pie” alludes stylistically not only to the music hall but also to Fred Astaire’s crooning vocal delivery (Miles 1997, 497). With this number, McCartney recreates a late-­ 1920s-­style pop song, replete with period effects, such as (1) the sound of

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a record needle on a scratchy 78-­rpm record, in which he is heard singing a line about the song’s heroine making the big time in the United States; (2) a clarinet and saxophone instrumental accompaniment; (3) a hint of a fox-­trot rhythm; (4) Lennon’s Django Reinhardt–­like guitar playing; and (5) a possible reference to the late-­1960s crooner, ukulele player, and television personality Tiny Tim, via the protagonist’s falsetto line proclaiming that he likes the “hot kind of music” he is hearing. McCartney’s “You Gave Me the Answer” from the 1975 Wings album Venus and Mars builds upon the stylistic allusions in the flapperish “Honey Pie” (which in turn recalls the old soft-­shoe “When I’m Sixty-­ Four”) through its evocation of an Astaire-­influenced song.6 This bouncy, 1930s-­style number features Astairean vocals modified electronically to emulate the megaphone crooning of Rudy Vallee, and an instrumental break featuring a preswing, jazz-­band sound. Incidentally, during the break, after the song’s protagonist has sung to his love interest during the first part of the track, he asks her to dance, suggesting that the two will glide elegantly on a dance floor. This obviously conjures up images of Astaire singing Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” to Ginger Rogers as they dance in a scene from the 1935 musical comedy Top Hat. Although “You Gave Me the Answer” is not as sophisticated as “Honey Pie” in form and harmonic language, its imitation of Astaire and the popular music of the 1930s—­emerging from the model established by the White Album track—­allows us to better understand McCartney’s songwriting craft. Through stylistic intertextual relationships present in both songs, we can see how McCartney uses musical gestures, instrumental textures and timbres, production facets, and vocal expression to fashion such period pastiches, revealing, in the words of George Martin, McCartney’s “sneaking regard for the old rooty-­tooty music” (Blaney 2007, 110).7 Although indebted to the British music mall tradition, “Martha My Dear” tilts more strongly toward the music McCartney would compose for Abbey Road and as a solo artist. (Indeed, the track anticipates McCartney’s work in this latter capacity in another respect, since the other Beatles were not involved in the song’s creation or recording.) As the former Beatle described in an interview with Miles, the song began as a challenging piano exercise for him to play, with him later mouthing the song’s title, “Martha My Dear” (1997, 497–­98). The exercise became the song’s scintillating intro, which contains an opening 5/4 measure followed by 4/4 measures, mirrored in the second bridge’s two 6/4 measures, followed by 4/4 measures. Despite its innovative melody, harmony, instrumental backing, tonality, rhythm, and form, McCartney does not fare

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well with the lyrics of “Martha My Dear,” as they evoke a succession of jumbled images, which, according to Ian MacDonald, are related to his adorable canine Martha and to a current love affair (probably with Jane Asher), which in toto amount to a mélange of nonsense (2007, 322). Yet “Martha My Dear” would not exist if it were not for the British music hall. Opening with a vibrant piano introduction followed by a jaunty tune, and coupling it with a recurrent piano line, is straight-­up music hall expression. This ambience continues in McCartney’s much later and quaint song “English Tea” from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Unlike “Martha My Dear,” “English Tea” begins with a slow, sentimental introduction played by a string quartet, after which the song proper proceeds with McCartney singing while accompanying himself on the piano, decidedly a music hall trait. What is more, the humorous lyrics of “English Tea” are in keeping with this tradition, celebrating the everyday pleasures of the British in their love of tea, gardens, croquet, and fairy cakes. Although it continues to build in sound as other instruments join in the fun, the song never loses its music hall demeanor; both it and “Martha My Dear” release meaning through a shared stylistic intertextual context.

Blackbirds and Wrens under Calico Skies In response to tense race relations in the United States during the spring of 1968, McCartney composed “Blackbird” while on his farm in Scotland (Miles 1997, 485–­86).8 He envisioned the song as encouragement for African Americans to keep the faith and persevere during the civil rights struggle of the late 1960s. He conveyed this message through the creative pun contained in the song’s title: “Blackbird” can denote a black woman, in British slang, or an actual avian. Accordingly, McCartney directs the song toward an African American woman who represents her oppressed race, using the symbolic imagery of a blackbird. Despite acknowledging the repressive environment in which she has to live, McCartney encourages the song’s addressee to persist through these trying times and be hopeful via avian metaphors emphasizing flight, ascent, sight, and freedom. For all of these reasons, “Blackbird” has more gravitas than later McCartney efforts at political messaging, such as his sugary racial harmony duet with Stevie Wonder, “Ebony and Ivory,” from his 1982 Tug of War album.9 But there are two other politically oriented songs that McCartney wrote and recorded decades after “Blackbird” that recall its folk-­music style and social commentary: “Calico Skies” from Flaming Pie

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of 1997, and “Jenny Wren” from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, eight years later. “Calico Skies” exhibits a stylistic intertextual link with “Blackbird” by revisiting the singer-­songwriter persona McCartney assumed in that track. It is a gentle love song, with McCartney singing and accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, using a Donovan-­inspired fingerpicking technique similar to that used in “Blackbird.”10 Although seemingly departing from the tender content of the first two verses, the third verse actually cements the song’s theme of the primacy of love through its hope that soldiers born under the song’s “calico skies” will never have to take up the weapons of war they loathe. “Calico Skies” is not as complex musically as “Blackbird.” As McCartney explained and illustrated on acoustic guitar on the DVD Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road (37:32–­39:15), “Blackbird” is indebted to J. S. Bach’s Bourrée in E Minor for lute (the fifth movement of the composer’s First Lute Suite, BWV 996). As budding teenage guitarists in Liverpool, McCartney and George Harrison were captivated by the bourrée because it features melody and bass lines occurring at the same time, prompting them to play it as a “show-­off party piece.” McCartney learned the first four measures, although not accurately, as he added and left out notes. Luckily for posterity, in this party piece he omitted the concluding tonic note of the bourrée’s melody as it ascends stepwise from the dominant (B–­C♯–­D♯–­E) in its second measure. McCartney modified the melody notes he retained—­supported a tenth below—­so that they would fit into the key of G major (B–­C–­D). Thus, “Blackbird” was born.11 The gently gliding parallel tenths in the accompaniment of “Blackbird” are pivotal in communicating the song’s placid mood. “Blackbird” also contains aspects of chromatic harmony in its guitar part, such as an applied dominant seventh (V7/V) and a mixture-­inspired IV–­iv move (characteristic of other Beatle songs by McCartney or Lennon). The song’s inventiveness likewise extends to the inclusion of changing meters (the guitar intro and song’s first phrase both consist of, for instance, a 3/4 measure followed by one in 4/4) and expressive instances of recorded blackbird chirpings taken from EMI’s effects library at Abbey Road. Finally, McCartney organizes the form of “Blackbird” in a verse-­bridge scheme, with the song’s guitar intro serving as a refrain. He varies this structural framework through elision and extension. McCartney elides the conclusion of the bridge with the song’s instrumental break, which is based on verse 1. At the repeat of this formal juncture, he extends the

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McCartney’s version of Bach’s Bourée melody in E Minor

Introduction to “Blackbird” in G Major

Figure 11.1. Comparison between “Blackbird” and Bach’s Bourée in E minor

beginning of the break, which consists of the refrain, and then inserts a brief caesura. As the recorded bird chirps away, the coda appears, consisting of the refrain followed by two statements of the last phrase of verse 1. Instead of the more sophisticated harmonic techniques found in “Blackbird,” however, “Calico Skies” is limited to variations of four basic chords, D♭, G♭, A♭, and B♭m. And it is structurally simple, with an instrumental refrain punctuating its verse-­chorus statements. These comparisons aside, “Calico Skies” definitely points back to “Blackbird” and can hold its own in terms of beauty. “Jenny Wren” likewise points to “Blackbird” as an intertextual precursor, but one that is strategic in scope, exhibiting closer relationships to the White Album track than does “Calico Skies.” In the DVD Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, McCartney specifically mentions that he wanted to revisit the style of “Blackbird” in a new song for that album. As a result, he experimented on his guitar and eventually developed “a top line and a bass line,” and “came up with this song called ‘Jenny Wren’” (2005). Like “Blackbird, “Jenny Wren” emphasizes social commentary, offering hope in the midst of injustice.12 In the verses, the narrator tells the story of Jenny, a pleasant young woman who becomes heartbroken after witnessing the injustice of poverty. She sees the world for what it is, broken and foolish. The narrator states (rather naively) that Jenny will regain her happiness once the broken world abandons its foolish ways. The bridge describes Jenny’s perspective on life, inquiring why people ignore the preeminence of love and consequently miss out on what it means to be alive. But on its second iteration, the bridge proclaims that Jenny’s example will enable everyone to deal with life, helping people to become whole.

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Through its music, “Jenny Wren” reveals that it is the artistic progeny of “Blackbird,” which McCartney’s statements on the aforementioned DVD reaffirm. Besides revisiting the folk-­music genre in which he sings a solo melody while accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, McCartney developed a two-­part accompaniment for the song, which is ultimately traceable, again, to Bach’s Bourrée in E minor. In addition to using a “Blackbird”-­inspired guitar accompaniment, he plays it with a comparable fingerpicking style. Lastly, the song features the exotic color of the duduk, an Armenian double-­reed instrument played by Pedro Eustache, which highlights the song’s melancholy character. McCartney incorporates a sophisticated tonal-­harmonic design to underscore the emotional content of “Jenny Wren,” where verses are in B♭ major and bridges in B ♭ minor. To match each verse’s progression of sunny ideas moving to darker ones as the narrator recounts Jenny’s story, McCartney uses a series of diatonic chords to support the more positive aspects of her character (I–­vi–­V–­IV), followed by another series of chords cadencing on a tonic minor harmony that accentuates the more negative facets of Jenny’s story (V–­vi–­V6–­i). He sounds this cadential mixture chord for four measures before it gives way to a tonic major harmony for subsequent verses. The presence of this mixture chord at this formal juncture mirrors the iv chord in “Blackbird,” and i7 chord in “Mother Nature’s Son,” which are used near the conclusions of verses, all of which underscore McCartney’s penchant for modal mixture. This flirtation with the parallel minor (via the i chord) in the harmonic support of each verse anticipates its use as a key in the bridge, which draws attention to the narrator’s thoughts about Jenny’s outlook on life.13 Melodically, there are two phrases in the bridge that exhibit motivic links with the latter part of the verse’s melody. These phrases are then repeated, with the second phrase achieving closure by concluding on a B ♭ (rather than ascending a third from B ♭ to D ♭, as in that phrase’s first iteration). Harmonically, the bridge includes inverted sonorities (or “slash chords”) that accentuate the music’s linear bass motion. For example, in the third and fourth measures of the first phrase, the chromatic bass line E ♭ –­D –­D ♭ is harmonized by a iv–­V6/5/iv–­bVI6/4 succession, whereas in the analogous location in the second phrase, the bass line B ♭ –­C –­D ♭ is harmonized by a i–­V4/3–­♭ III succession. As in the end of each verse, McCartney sounds the cadential tonic minor harmony for four measures at the conclusion of the bridge before moving to the tonic major chord

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“Jenny Wren”: Motivic cells in the latter part of each verse (mm. 6–7, 9–10 of each verse)

“Jenny Wren”: Motivic cells in the bridge that are linked with those in each verse (mm. 3–4, 7–8 of the bridge) Figure 11.2. Motivic cells in McCartney’s “Jenny Wren”

for the ensuing verse. And finally, in the first part of a long instrumental interlude in which McCartney later provides wordless vocals, there is a repeated stepwise succession of three minor chords—­i–­v6–­vi—­that adds further harmonic color to the piece. In addition to its verse-­bridge structure’s being reinforced by the use of parallel major and minor keys, the formal design of “Jenny Wren” includes a guitar intro; a long, bipartite instrumental break whose second half is based on the bridge; and an outro that sounds a varied version of that instrumental break. McCartney contrasts verse with bridge by incorporating asymmetrical phrase lengths in the former and symmetrical phrase lengths in the latter. Each verse contains thirteen measures, divided unequally into 3 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 2 (the last two measures a prolongation of the i chord). On the other hand, the bridge is even and very regular, totaling eighteen measures, divided equally into 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 (likewise, the last two measures prolong the i chord). The asymmetry associated with each verse underscores the instability overtaking Jenny’s optimistic world, whereas the bridge’s symmetry lends an air of constancy to her viewpoint about life. Although the use of asymmetrical phrase lengths suggests a link

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with “Blackbird,” in “Jenny Wren” they are used in a more global fashion, geared more directly to the song’s expressive content.

Conclusion Through intertextual readings motivated directly by Spicer’s work on Lennon’s late Beatle songs (2009), and indirectly by Burns et al. (2015), Hatten (1985), and Klein (2005), I have shown that Paul McCartney truly wore vintage songwriting clothes in his White Album songs. Yet these tracks say much more about his future work as a solo artist than about his past work as a Beatle. Although Lennon may have been increasingly disillusioned with the Beatles, wanting a “divorce” from his mates on September 20, 1969, McCartney was already in the process of leaving the group from a musical point of view, as reflected not only by the White Album but also by Let It Be (1970) and Abbey Road (1969). Despite his attempts to keep the band on life support through the Get Back sessions of January 1969, and his dogged determination to record what was—­most likely in the view of the group and George Martin—­the Beatles’ last album in Abbey Road, he was clearly having more fun making his own music at this time than collaborating or associating with his fellow Beatles. In other words, he wanted to lead his own life. Difficult business dealings related to Apple Corps compounded his personal situation, which resulted in his public exit from the Beatles on April 17, 1970 via McCartney I, and the subsequent lawsuit to dissolve the group on December 31 of that year. My examination of McCartney’s White Album songs from an intertextual vantage point can be extended to his entire musical corpus. For example, “Here Today,” McCartney’s tribute to Lennon on his Tug of War album, alludes strategically to “Yesterday.” Like that song, “Here Today” is a touching ballad that includes a solo vocal backed by an acoustic guitar and string quartet (an ensemble that was included on the song despite some hesitation by McCartney and Martin about its “Yesterday” connotations). This is not to say that “Yesterday” specifically influenced the writing of “Here Today,” for an intertextual account is not necessarily restricted to such matters; rather, we bring the musical text of “Yesterday” into our understanding of “Here Today,” and vice versa. In other words, music is “caught up in a web of references to other music . . . [where musical] texts speak among themselves” (Klein 2005, 4). We can expand this web of references, moreover, by combining “Yesterday” and “Here Today” with “Eleanor Rigby,” in an ahistorical intertext that informs our

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comprehension of McCartney’s forays into classical music (e.g., Standing Stone [1997]). Whether it is used to analyze McCartney’s music as a Beatle or solo artist, or to analyze pop or rock music from any historical period, an intertextual approach suggests that elements of fantasy, history (or the lack thereof), style, and even theoretical rigor can come together in an interpretation. We can look retrospectively at a particular song or body of music and conclude “that was him or her,” or look forward to the future in “vintage clothes.” Either way, through different intertexts, we are able to better enjoy the vast richness of this repertoire.

Notes 1. Due to the scope and length of this chapter, I do not discuss McCartney’s other White Album tracks (“Wild Honey Pie,” “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “I Will”), nor “Hey Jude,” recorded contemporaneously with the White Album. 2. The string arrangement of “Eleanor Rigby” might also derive from McCartney’s listening to Vivaldi at the behest of his then-­girlfriend Jane Asher, or, much more likely, from George Martin’s arranging the strings in a manner reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s score for François Truffaut’s 1966 science-­ fiction film, Fahrenheit 451. See Everett 1999, 51. 3. The singing on “Surfin’ U.S.A.” provides an early indication of the vocal variety Wilson would achieve as a composer in his later music. As noted by Jade Simone O’Regan (2013, 283), the Beach Boys had several talented members who could sing either lead or backup vocals. And in their vocals, augmented by falsetto, they projected an expansive range, with Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston singing tenor; Dennis Wilson baritone; and Mike Love bass. These ranges indicate the superior vocal resources that Brian Wilson had at his disposal. 4. Descending chromatic lines (and their variants) are a staple of Beatle songs. This can be seen in the E–­D♯–­D♮–­C♯–­C♮ bass descent used near the beginning of Lennon’s “Cry Baby Cry,” or the D–­C♮–­B–­B♭–­A bass line employed in the refrain of McCartney’s “Magical Mystery Tour.” McCartney continued to use these lines in his solo music, as illustrated not only by the D–­C♯–­C♮–­B–­A inner-­ voice descent in “Maybe I’m Amazed” but also by the E–­D–­C♯–­C♮–­B and C♯–­C♮–­B–­ A♯–­A♮ inner-­voice descents in the bridge of “My Brave Face” from Flowers in the Dirt (1989). See Benitez 2010, 125–­26. For a discussion of the different types of harmonic support associated with such bass lines in rock music from 1955–­69, see Everett 2009b, 274–­77. 5. According to Ian Peel (2002, 73), Ram shows the “influence of Brian Wilson . . . , from the production on ‘The Backseat of My Car’ [sic] and the vocals on ‘Dear Boy’ to the vibes on ‘Uncle Albert.’” 6. One could question McCartney’s decision to compose and include such a

228  the beatles through a glass onion song on a Wings album released in the midst of mid-­1970s disco and glam rock, but compose and release it he did, because it reflects his strong penchant for British music hall pastiche—­as well as pre-­swing-­era music in general—­in his approach to songwriting. 7. In addition to “You Gave Me the Answer,” the song “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” from Band on the Run (1973) and the instrumental single “Walking in the Park with Eloise” (1974)—­included as part of the 1993 reissued compact disc, The Paul McCartney Collection: Wings at the Speed of Sound—­likewise reflect McCartney’s “regard for the rooty-­tooty music.” Perhaps as a way to depict Picasso’s approach to painting, McCartney structured his musical homage as a collage—­a succession of disparate musical blocks. Although it also contains typical formal sections such as verses, choruses, and bridges, the song includes a 1920s-­style instrumental interlude featuring a clarinet solo, heard over French dialogue, which is repeated later in the song. “Walking in the Park with Eloise” is an instrumental composed by McCartney’s father Jim, who sparked his son’s love of the British music hall. Neither Jim McCartney nor anyone else wrote the music down. Encouraged by Chet Atkins to record the instrumental, McCartney assembled a cohort of players that included not only Atkins but also Floyd Cramer, Geoff Britton, and the Country Hams, Atkins’s band, to record his father’s piece. For more information about “Picasso’s Last Words” and “Walking in the Park with Eloise” see Benitez 2010, 58–­59, and 78. 8. In “Blackbird Singing: Paul McCartney’s Romance of Racial Harmony and Post-­racial America,” Kapurch and Smith (2016, 59–­68) examine McCartney’s civil rights story in connection with “Blackbird,” which he has regularly recounted in his concerts since 2002. They note the inconsistent history related to the matter, citing Beatles biographer Hunter Davies’s claim that he never heard McCartney mention the civil rights story when the track was released in 1968, suggesting that the story is probably revisionist and likely influenced by an American writer. Yet, Kapurch and Smith also refer to a January 1969 recorded conversation between McCartney and Donovan that corroborates his civil rights story, although McCartney was rather nonchalant about it. They conclude that the “rhetorical appeal of McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’ narrative is specific to a mostly twenty-­first-­century context, so it is significant that McCartney does not tell this story publicly for nearly three decades” (2016, 62). 9. For an analysis of “Ebony and Ivory” as a “reflection of post-­racial discourse that continues to appeal to the American public,” see Kapurch and Smith 2016, 53–­56. 10. While they were in Rishikesh studying advanced Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Donovan taught John Lennon how to use the “clawhammer” fingerpicking style (derived from banjo playing) when playing guitar. For McCartney, what resulted was “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son”; for Lennon, “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” See Everett 1999, 171; Donovan 2012; and chapter 3 in the present volume. 11. The analytical reductions in example 1 are transposed up a whole step from what McCartney played while illustrating this Bach connection on the DVD, since his guitar was tuned down a whole step.

“That Was Me” in “Vintage Clothes”  229 12. Like “Blackbird,” the title of “Jenny Wren” contains a pun. In addition to alluding to the sentimental character of Dickens, although obliquely, “Jenny Wren” brings to mind the image of an actual wren. Indeed, McCartney even has Jenny metaphorically “taking wing” in verse 2. 13. This move to the parallel minor finds a strategic intertextual precursor in McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill,” where choruses in D minor follow verses in D major.

part 3 The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill Adapting the White Album

twelve | Loaded with Meaning Adaptations of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” by U2 and Tori Amos alyssa woods and lori burns

“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” has been covered by a host of artists, including Alanis Morissette, the Breeders, Marilyn Manson, Phish, U2, and Tori Amos, in a variety of styles and with a range of cultural implications. The diversity of musical responses to the song reflects its inherent potential for expansion in both the lyrical and musical realms. Inspired by a gun magazine (American Rifleman, May 1968) featuring the line “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” (Turner 2005, 157), Lennon’s allusive lyrics suggest a wide array of meanings involving gun violence, sexuality, and drug use. Musically, the track’s shifting patterns pull the listener in multiple stylistic directions that are evocative for expressive development. This chapter focuses on two versions that adapt the original song materials to create pointed political messages. U2 released their cover version (“The Gun Mix”) as the B-­side of the single “Last Night on Earth” (Pop, 1997), developing an alternative rock sound for the song. Alternative singer-­songwriter Tori Amos featured the song on her 2001 covers album, Strange Little Girls, beginning her track with a reference to Lennon’s shooting and developing a striking commentary on the US Constitution’s Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. The versions in question emerged during the period branded by George Plasketes as the “Cover Age” due to the sheer volume of adaptations produced: 233

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Standardization, interpretation, incorporation, adaptation, appropriation and appreciation have been manifest in a multitude of manners and methods, including retrospectives and reissues, the emergence of rap and sampling as commercially dominant pop styles, karaoke, and a steady flow, if not wave, of cover compilations and tribute recordings which revisited a significant cross section of musical periods, styles, genres and artists and their catalogs of compositions. (Plasketes 2005, 138)1

In response to what Plasketes describes as an explosion of creative adaptations, popular musicologists have devised a number of interpretive frameworks to consider the relationship between an original text and cover version.2 Kurt Mosser (2008) adopts a taxonomic approach, identifying a range of interpretive categories, from reduplications and tributes to major interpretations, ironic interpretations, and parodies. Linda Hutcheon suggests a related approach when she considers the adaptation of literary works to other cultural forms: “When we adapt, we create using all the tools that creators have always used: we actualize or concretize ideas; we simplify but we also amplify and extrapolate; we make analogies, we critique or we show respect” (2004, 109–­11). Hutcheon explains adaptations as double-­natured, involving both a product and a process: as a product, “an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works” (2006, 7). As a process, it is “a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging [entailing] an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). The invocation of process leads Hutcheon into the domain of intertextuality, a framework that offers valuable tools for analyzing cultural texts. Within the field of popular musicology, Serge Lacasse provides a clear delineation of intertextual practices (based on the work of Gérard Genette), demonstrating their relevance to popular music (2008). Pertinent to our study of cover versions are several key elements of Genette’s theory, summarized here: The hypertext, defined as “a text that derives from another by a formal and/or thematic process of transformation” (Lacasse 2008, 13; Genette 1999, 21); The paratext, which includes any materials that mediate the text (artwork, promotional materials, and interviews with the author) (Lacasse, 2008, 21; Genette 1987, 11); The metatext, which encompasses the critical commentaries and

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analyses that surround a given text (Lacasse 2008, 23; Genette 1982, 11). We put these three levels of intertextuality to work as we consider the adaptations of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” by U2 and Tori Amos in the following ways: Both versions function as hypertexts in relation to the Beatles’ hypotext: they derive from the original Beatles version by a formal and thematic process of transformation. Both versions are linked to paratextual materials that mediate the text and, in turn, help the analyst to understand the meanings of the adaptation. Both versions are surrounded by metatextual materials that shape the critical reception of the original song and its adaptations. Thus equipped with detailed analytic data, media materials, and critical commentaries, we present our interpretation of these two adaptations of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” We begin with the paratextual and metatextual levels to establish the media and reception contexts of the original song and its cover versions.

The Paratextual Level: Song Mediations Song meanings emerge not only through the sonic and lyrical materials of the recording itself, but also through the media materials and artist commentaries that surround it. In this regard, the supplementary images and texts released in connection with a given song—­whether an original recording or a cover version—­shape listener reception and interpretation. Beginning with the context of the original recording, we note that the White Album marked a departure—­both musically and in terms of visual aesthetics—­from the psychedelic spectacle of Sgt. Pepper. The album cover was the product of pop artist Richard Hamilton’s suggestion for “an all-­white cover and an extremely simple title, The Beatles” (Guesdon and Margotin 2013, 452). According to Hamilton, “Paul McCartney requested the design be as stark a contrast to Sgt. Pepper’s Day-­Glo explosion as possible. . . . [H]e got it!” (Sexton 2016). McCartney (1968) explains the concept, providing a view into the stripped-­down musical aesthetic adopted for the album on the heels of the experimental style of Sgt. Pepper.

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Well it is another step, you know, but it’s not necessarily in the way people expected. . . . On “Sgt. Pepper” we had more instrumentation than we’d ever had. More orchestral stuff than we’d ever used before, so it was more of a production. But we didn’t really want to go overboard like that this time, and we’ve tried to play more like a band this time—­only using instruments when we had to, instead of just using them for the fun of it.

We can also investigate paratextual materials to understand the derivation of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun’s” title from the American Rifleman. In a 1981 interview with Playboy, Lennon categorically denied the connection between the lyrics and drug culture while reinforcing the compositional narrative. According to Lennon, “A gun magazine was sitting around and the cover was the picture of a smoking gun. The title of the article, which I never read, was called ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ I took it as the idea of happiness after having shot somebody. Or some animal” (Golson 1981, 159). While Lennon appeared to distance himself from the violent imagery of the magazine advertisement, he elaborated on the sexual imagery invoked in the lyrics: “that was the beginning of my relationship with Yoko and I was very sexually oriented then. When we weren’t in the studio, we were in bed” (Golson 1981, 160). Some of the thirdhand stories surrounding the song have also contributed to our understanding of Lennon’s lyrics. According to Ken Mansfield, the American CEO of Apple Records, when Lennon was asked about the meaning of some of the more obscure lyrics (i.e., “Like a lizard on a window pane”), he replied, “Nothing! I just made it up” (2007, 86), but he revealed an important secret to Mansfield later that day: “We’ve learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good, and it didn’t necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us” (86). The meanings are further called into question by Derek Taylor’s claim that the lyrics were written during an LSD experiment; Taylor, who was present that night, along with Neil Aspinall and Peter Asher, recounts that “John said he had written half a song and wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil wrote them down” (Turner 1994, 157). The stories surrounding the original recording of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” lead to a certain level of understanding about its intended message. Although the original inspiration was indeed an advertisement with violent overtones, Lennon reacted strongly against that imagery, accenting instead the sexual connotations, thereby converting the image of

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the gun from a symbol of destruction into one of sexual union. Authorial intentions aside, once a cultural form enters the public sphere, it carries with it the referential potential of its surrounding paratext. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” whether Lennon intended it or not, raises questions about guns, drugs, and sex. The cover versions of U2 and Tori Amos illustrate clearly how referential meanings can be elaborated to create new interpretations of the original material. For U2’s version of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun (The Gun Mix)” there is a distinctive absence of promotional materials, a fact that is not surprising since it was the B-­side to their “Last Night on Earth” single (1997). Despite the lack of promotional images and commentary on the song by the band members, it has had longevity through multiple versions, rereleases, and live performances. It is also valuable to consider the song within the broader contexts of their work. U2’s activist reputation began early in their career, with the release of War in 1983. The album “doesn’t shy away from weighty issues; its songs grapple with such topics as the strife in Northern Ireland, Polish solidarity and nuclear terror” (Henke 1994, 9). The first song on the album, and still one of U2’s most popular, is “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which addresses Bloody Sunday, “a 1972 incident in which British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in an illegal civil-­rights demonstration in Londonderry” (Considine 1994, 6).3 Lead guitarist Dave Evans (“The Edge”) points out that this is “not a song in which U2 takes sides with either faction in Northern Ireland, it’s about the futility of war” (Henke 1994, 14). Over the course of their career, songs such as “The Refugee,” “The Unforgettable Fire,” “Mothers of the Disappeared,” “Red Hill Mining Town,” and “Bullet the Blue Sky” have contributed to their reputation as a politically aware band (Andrews 2011). During their 2001 Elevation Tour, they presented a powerful video montage featuring images of victims of gun violence and of children carrying firearms, created by Catherine Owens for “Bullet the Blue Sky” (Eliscu 2001). The video also includes footage of screen legend Charlton Heston, then president of the National Rifle Association, defending his views on gun control: “There are no good guns. There are no bad guns. Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a good person is no threat to anybody, except bad people” (NME 2001). The clip of Heston is followed by footage of a small child playing with a gun and other violent scenes (NME 2001). Evans offered the following remarks about the use of the video: “The song needed something that would contemporize it. . . . We’re treading a very fine line between being artists and wanting to

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lecture Americans about issues that are important. It’s basically turning the mirror on the audience” (Eliscu 2001). Paratextual materials such as these influence how listeners engage with U2’s music and contribute to their reputation as socially conscious artists. The digital era has brought artists, their music, and the paratextual context of their work into a state of intermedia connectedness, often referred to as convergence culture or participatory culture (Jenkins 2006). Artists may shape perceptions of their music not only through releasing materials directly connected to the recording, but also through public commentary on their work. Surrounding the release of Strange Little Girls, Amos actively engaged with the press, providing extensive commentary through interviews with various news outlets (including print, audio, and video media). By supplying her own statement of intentions, Amos ensured that her interpretive stance would be readily available to both casual listeners and professional critics. Strange Little Girls is a concept album that explores a variety of female perspectives on songs written and originally recorded by men. Amos used the medium of the cover song to bring forward and accentuate what she perceived as the widespread representation of violent and misogynist themes in popular music and mainstream media. She describes the impetus for the creation of this album: “I was nursing Tash in Florida, and I was hearing a lot of male artists on alternative radio. And some of them really hated women. I thought about my daughter and what these guys were thinking about women. I wanted to build some kind of bridge, and I figured that was the only way to get into the heads of these men” (Amos 2001d). Her self-­declared goal was to adapt the original songs’ meanings to offer new perspectives: “By interpreting their lyrics from a feminine point of view, I took possession of their seed. You take a man’s word, you take his seed” (Amos 2001e). To underscore her adoption of female perspectives, the album was released with an elaborate set of liner notes illustrating each track with an individual photo of Amos. Each photo is labeled with a text written by novelist Neil Gaiman that further develops the identity of each persona. Through this unique packaging, the listener is invited to enter each song from the perspective of the represented female character. In the case of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” Amos augmented the paratext by means of its connection to the song that precedes it: “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Originally recorded by the Boomtown Rats in 1979, “I Don’t Like Mondays” is based on the 1979 mass shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, where sixteen-­ year-­ old

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Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on the arriving children, wounding eight students and killing custodian Mike Suchar and principal Burton Wragg. According to the songwriter, Bob Geldof, the title is derived from a comment that Spencer made to reporters when asked why she had committed this heinous act: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day” (CBS8 2009). While discussing the Spencer shooting, Amos made the following remarks (Amos 2001a): I was watching a lot of the commentary at the time after the shooting, and the thing that struck me was: different people from the gun lobby or the NRA would say things to the effect of . . . that these are bad seeds that do these kinds of things. And it was almost like they were absolving themselves because we all know that the issue is accessibility. . . . So “Happiness” became a canvas . . . for the second amendment, written by a man who was killed by a gun. Who, when he saw the ad . . . just couldn’t believe it. . . . [W]hy is it warm? Because he just fired it. . . . So I felt . . . this needs to be put on this record.

Situating it in the context of the Spencer shooting and the Boomtown Rats song, Amos explicitly stated her intention to use “Happiness” as a platform for discussing gun control: “[Lennon] saw an ad for a gun . . . and he was murdered by a gun years later. It started to strike me that this was going to be a canvas, a backdrop for the fact that no changes have been made [in gun control] that are effective” (Amos 2001b). Amos’s message here about gun control is juxtaposed with the album’s broader objective to invoke female perspectives. In preparing her version of the song, Amos learned that Lennon’s shooter, Mark David Chapman, had called an escort service shortly before he shot Lennon. In an interview with the Alternative Press, she stated: “And we don’t know if they had sex or if they just talked, but he told her to ‘be silent.’ So this is sung through the eyes of that call girl” (Amos 2001c). In the liner notes, the photo for the “call girl” character is accompanied by the phrase: “The smell of cordite always makes her think of the Fourth of July.” The reference to cordite explicitly connects the song to explosives, as does the oblique reference to the fireworks associated with Independence Day in the United States. The photograph and caption thus create a lens through which the listener might interpret the music and lyrics: we are invited to receive the song from the perspective of the sex worker who spent time with Lennon’s killer. Amos thus juxtaposes sexuality and violence, exploiting two themes present in the original song. A discussion

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at the hypertextual level (below) highlights the ways in which Amos illuminates these themes in her recorded performance.

The Metatextual Level: Song Reception The critical reception of a song—­again, whether it is an original or a cover version—­also shapes its meaning, as the “opinions expressed by musical critics (metaphonography) have a very important influence on our reception, appreciation, and understanding of the music” (Lacasse 2018, 32). Before analyzing the songs’ musical and lyrical content, we explore the metatextual perspectives for the original song and its covers. The stylistic and expressive contrasts within “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” represent the range of genres explored on the White Album. As Alan Walsh of Melody Maker observed, “the musical influences range from hard electric rock through whimsy, ska, and folk music to blues and the strange anarchistic ‘Revolution No 9’ [sic]. But the musical influences of all four Beatles are in evidence, pointing in different directions” (1968). Much like the highly contrasting sections of the song, critics and listeners have reached widely divergent conclusions on what, exactly, John Lennon was trying to express with its lyrics. Critical interpretation has been influenced by a combination of the seemingly violent title and the admission by both McCartney and Lennon that the original inspiration for the song came out of the article in American Rifleman (McCartney 1968; Lennon 1981). Critics have often coupled this reading with a suggestion that the song encourages the use of heroin, which at one point led to its being banned from the BBC (Guesdon & Margotin 2013, 470). These two themes—­violence and drugs—­have dominated the reception history of the song and strongly influenced how other musicians have developed their own versions. Some critics have picked up on the song’s overt sexuality, as we see in the following excerpt from a contemporary British newspaper article: “The deep guitar begins to drone and lines like ‘When I hold you, feel my hands on your trigger’ [sic] and repetitions of ‘Mother Superior jump the gun,’ occur. The firearm becomes feminine and the lyrics ambiguous in this strange subject matter for a song” (“The Beatles” 1968). Here, even though the anonymous reviewer is commenting on the lyrics’ sexually rich metaphors, he or she is still unable or unwilling to fully step away from reading a violent undertone. As we have mentioned, the interpretations of violence and drug use are not supported paratextually. Instead, Lennon’s commentary underscores a sexual interpretation

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linked to his early relationship with Yoko Ono (Lennon 1981, 160). U2’s political stance was already well established metatextually by the time that the “Last Night on Earth” single was released in 1997. Barney Hoskyns of Rolling Stone remarks on how the band members branded themselves as rock stars with a global conscience, noting that “U2 may have given themselves permission to guzzle Dom Perignon and cavort with supermodels, but Bono badly wants us to know that he’s deeply perturbed by the ruin and spiritual decay of the world” (1997). Surprisingly, this critical interest did not carry over to their cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Most critics simply ignored the B-­side, while paying a fair amount of attention to the A-­side, “The Last Night on Earth,” and its placement within the album Pop. Fans and journalists alike observed themes of struggle, ontological insecurity, violence, militarism, and dystopianism on the album. In Amos’s case, fans and critics immediately perceived her musical, lyrical, and visual commentary on gender and violence. The breadth of the Strange Little Girls paratextual materials prompted wide discussion in the popular music press. For example, David Fricke of Rolling Stone observed, “In Strange Little Girls Tori Amos has made a record that is huge in its strangeness: twelve covers of songs written by men—­mostly for or about women, mostly without happy endings—­in which Amos sings from the other side of the anxiety and sorrow” (2001). Irin Carmon of the Village Voice invites listeners to explore the range of emotions on the album: “Neither a straight feminist critique nor a tribute album, Strange Little Girls is rather a nuanced exploration of the dualities of love and aggression” (2001). Most critics, however, focused on the more direct potential for this track to comment on gun violence. Fricke, for example, commented that the original version of “I Don’t Like Mondays” “was arch pop journalism about a real-­life tragedy: a teenage girl turned sniper” (2001). Colin Irwin noted that Amos’s pairing of “I Don’t Like Mondays” with her interpretation of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” “turned into cold assaults on America’s gun culture” (2001).

The Original Song and Its Hypertexts An interpretation of a cover version or hypertext entails an engagement with the formal and expressive properties of the original song as source material (hypotext). To this end, we summarize the sonic and lyrical materials of the Beatles’ version and then illuminate how U2 and Tori Amos transform these materials. Throughout this discussion, we refer to the

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Figure 12.1. Waveform of the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

Figure 12.2. Waveform of U2’s version of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

Figure 12.3. Waveform of Tori Amos’s version of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

illustrations in figures 1–­3, which provide formal diagrams of each song, aligned with the amplitude waveforms. These illustrations map the structures and allow us to observe striking developments in the song form.

Lyrics and Form Walter Everett describes “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” as a “mishmash of styles in a highly sectionalized through-­composed form” (1999, 182). Although the song certainly develops linearly from one section to the next, without featuring the section reprises that are expected in pop songs, we propose an interpretation of the sectional form that is clearly grounded in traditional pop-­rock formal structures: intro-­verse-­bridge-­ chorus. The musical elements that contribute the most to the sectional shifts are meter and tempo, and thus our brief discussion of form will summarize these temporal effects as they are heard in relation to the lyrical content and form. The song begins in a slow tempo (70 BPM) with a brief introduction (“She’s not a girl who misses much”) and a four-­line verse (0:14) in which each line is set to two 4/4 bars. Notably, in the verse, an ad hoc feeling of the phrase hypermeter (caused by an extra 2/4 bar in

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lines 1 and 4) complements the surrealistic impression created by the lyrical invocation of a girl followed by a series of vivid, but disconnected ideas: She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand Like a lizard on a window pane, The man in the crowd with the multicolored mirrors On his hobnail boots.

The verse is followed by a contrasting bridge (B1) section (0:44), which changes from 4/4 to 12/8 meter for the brooding lyrical statement, “I need a fix ’cause I’m goin’ down,” that has incited interpretations about both drug use and sexual activity. As we venture down this path with Lennon, the tempo of the passage is now slower than the verse; the rate of the eighth note is maintained, but the length of the beat is extended from the value of a quarter note (two eighths) to a dotted quarter note (three eighths). These temporal effects contribute a languorous feeling to the lyrics. The second part of the bridge (B2) features the proclamation, “Mother Superior jump the gun,” which has been popularly received as a metaphor for Ono’s sexual relationship with Lennon. Although the eighth-­note pulse remains constant, the tempo feels faster here, becoming rather frenetic, as the beat shifts to the value of that single eighth from the length of a dotted quarter (three eighths) in B1. B2 now offers an apparent triple meter (3/8) that is disrupted by a shift to 4/8 in the final bar of each of the three statements, enhancing the feeling of frenzied intensification. At a broader level, the meter could be heard here as a measure of 9/8, followed by a measure of 10/8, with this alternation heard a total of three times. Returning to the original tempo and 4/4 meter, which brings the length of the beat back to the quarter-­note value (two eighths), the chorus (C) (1:35) functions like a metric recapitulation that resolves the previous instability. Delivering a hook-­like repetition of the title line of the song, interspersed with the playfully sighing backup vocal line “bang bang, shoot shoot,” the chorus is interrupted by a spoken-­word recitation (“When I hold you in my arms”) (1:48) that revives the compound meter and languorous feel of the “I need a fix” section (B1).4 Following the spoken-­word passage, the song closes with four statements of the title hook (2:03). The lyrics of the chorus section can be taken to reinforce the thematic emphasis on sex, as Lennon describes an intimate embrace

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in which her “trigger” and his “warm gun” create a feeling of peace and security (“nobody can do me no harm”).

Sonic and Stylistic Features The song’s sections are demarcated not only by the metric and tempo shifts described above, but also by textural, timbral, and stylistic elements. Lennon delivers the centered vocal of the intro gently over a flowing guitar riff with a clean, warm, and round tone.5 The harmonic patterning suggests a simple plagal gesture in E minor (Am7–­Em). In contrast to the intro, the verse features a more emphatic and rhythmic vocal style, accompanied by a similar change in the instrumental backing, as the bass and kit enter (bass to the left and kit to the right) and the backbeat is emphasized with guitar shots (right). Although effected with a crunchy and saturated distortion, these shots create a controlled and articulate impression. Overdubbed vocals enrich the texture at the third line. Harmonically, the verse takes the plagal patterning of the intro, transposing it up a fourth to A minor (Dm–­Am). As the bridge section shifts to compound meter, the lyrical guitar riff from the intro and verse is replaced by a blues-­based overdriven guitar solo on an A7 harmony, setting up the sung melody that is delivered in a dark vocal, overdubbed with a well-­blended second vocal layer at the upper octave. Although heavy, the controlled compression on the guitar creates a contained and focussed sound. The vocal delivery is dry, without much reverb, building a direct connection to the listener. The second bridge (“Mother Superior”) offers another contrast as it features a counterpoint between distorted guitar and layered, split vocals, embellished by the active tambourine. In this passage (which features the already mentioned 9/8–­10/8 alternation), the bass drives the harmonic patterning from A7 toward G7, which ultimately becomes the tonal route to C major for the ensuing chorus.6 Everett identifies one of the more interesting features of the chorus section as the “greasy ‘bang bang shoot shoot’ doo-­wop backing vocals over the idiomatic 1950s progression  .  .  . I–­VI–­IV–­V” (1999, 182). The slickness of the stylistic appropriation that Everett identifies is felt in the call and response between Lennon’s primary vocal (panned hard to the right) and the sighing doo-­wop vocals (panned to the left). Again, the vocals are dry and compressed, producing an effect of immediacy. The shift to C major for this section has the impact of “sweetening” the sound on the heels of the bluesy A7 harmony in the bridge section.

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When the chorus is interrupted for the spoken-­word recitation (“When I hold you”), the backup vocals chime in with a sliding “ooo, oh yeah.” The combination of the resolving harmonic progression, falling doo-­ wop vocals, sexually suggestive lyrics, and seductive spoken-­word passage provides a gratifying close to the song.

Interpretation The sectional nature of the Beatles’ song leads the listener on a journey from the reflective thoughts about a girl (intro) and some impressionistic scenes offering social observations (verse), through the introspective bridge passage (“goin’ down”) and subsequent vigorous metaphor (“jump the gun”) that lead ultimately to the euphoric sense of well-­being achieved in the chorus. Although seemingly disjointed and certainly open to a range of interpretations, the narrative suggests a move from distant observation, through individual reflection, to action, followed by satisfaction and unity. In this understanding, the ambiguous lyrical references align to harmonize with Lennon’s subcultural worldview.

U2’s Cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”: “The Gun Mix” Lyrics and Form As a hypertext, U2’s version of the song works with many elements from the original but transforms them dramatically to create what Mosser would identify as a major interpretation (2008) and Hutcheon would refer to as an extensive transposition (2006). Figure 2 graphs the form of the song, based on the sections identified in figure 1 for the Beatles’ version. The band’s lyrical presentation completely reorders the original material (U2 1997). Following a lengthy instrumental introduction, Bono delivers the chorus hook, thus presenting first what was last in the original song. Each reprise of the chorus (at 0:30, 1:30, and 2:32) features the hook followed by a brief instrumental section. Placed after the instrumental introduction and chorus, the intro material arrives at 0:54 (“She’s not a girl”) and is immediately succeeded by the material from the second bridge passage at 1:18 (“Mother Superior  .  .  .”), creating a direct connection between two lyrical sections that had not been juxtaposed in the original. The verse lyrics are presented at the temporal center of the track (1:54), but delivered in a spoken-­rap style and close at 2:17 with a statement of the line from bridge 1 (“I need a fix . . .”).

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The spoken style is also adopted for a chorus statement at 2:21 and 3:20. Although Bono places considerable emphasis on rapped vocals, he omits the original spoken-­word passage, which had been a moment of playful intensity in Lennon’s delivery. In the U2 version, it is bridge 1 (“I need a fix”) that appears as the interruption within the extended chorus section, featuring both sung and rapped vocals within an intensely layered texture. The subsequent chorus section serves as a lengthy outro with ten statements of the hook and a fade-­out to close.

Sonic and Stylistic Features One of the most prominent effects of the song is a riff-­based groove that runs throughout at a consistent pace of 80 bpm, a faster tempo than the Beatles’ intro, verse, and chorus (70 bpm). The intro establishes a thick, heavy texture, featuring a processed drum sound (filtered and delayed) that creates a disorienting and surreal impression. The rhythmic groove is characterized by a shuffle that leads to a reverb-­heavy snare backbeat carrying the sonic impact of a gunshot. The guitar riff (heard right) features a similar distortion to the guitar shots in the Beatles’ verse, but the gesture is looser and the tone less bright. Also contributing to a darker sound is the bass, which is centered and very heavy in the mix. When the solo guitar enters (0:42) following the chorus hook, it is panned far to the left and treated to a level of reverb that suggests great distance. These instrumental effects combine to establish an ominous setting for Bono’s voice. Bono’s first vocal entry is the brief chorus statement (0:30). Here, his nasal, pushed tone produces an agitated or distraught sound, especially as his voice is situated within the grainy, saturated mix. His breathy, almost whispered delivery of the intro (0:54) is processed with a stereo delay in which the echo effect moves from left to right in the spectrum, once again yielding an unsettled impression. These destabilizing vocal effects reach a peak of intensity in the spoken-­text presentation passages, starting with the delivery of the verse (1:54)—­where the primary spoken vocal is surrounded by whispered vocal effects to create a chaotic feeling—­and continuing into the spoken chorus (2:21) and bridge 1 (2:56). In the latter section, the distorted guitar solo might connect the listener to the Beatles’ version; however, its darker tone and overdriven buzzy distortion—­especially as these interact with the filtered and delayed processed kit effects—­result in an edgier texture than the original’s.

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Interpretation With this manipulation of formal materials and expressive strategies, U2 communicates a disturbing message. Whereas the Beatles take the listener on a journey through sudden formal and textural shifts, invoking ambiguous lyrics for their suggestive connotations, U2 endows the song with a riff-­based insistence and a strong sense of textural dislocation. By removing the recitation lyrics (“When I hold you  .  .  .), they minimize their sexual connotations, leaving more room for the invocation of the “gun.” The relentless riff, shot-­like snare, overdriven guitar, and disorienting mix overwhelm the song, replacing the Beatles’ playfulness with anxiety. The focus of that anxiety is not explicitly declared, but it emerges as a general malaise understood to derive from gun violence, especially when the song is received in the larger contexts of U2’s work.

Tori Amos’s Cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” Lyrics and Form Produced four years after the U2 version, Amos’s cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is also a major interpretation (Mosser) or extensive transposition (Hutcheon). One of the most extensive modifications occurs in the lyrics, which include a lengthy introduction featuring a variety of sampled voices (Amos 2001f). The first passage features Daniel Bocking reading from a newspaper article written about Lennon’s assassination: “John Lennon was shot here at the entrance to the Dakota building. Lennon was shot four times with a 38-­caliber gun in what seems to be a totally senseless killing” (Amos 2001). After an instrumental link, Reverend Edison Amos enters (0:29) with a lengthy quotation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment, which (arguably) stipulates the right to bear arms. By following the report of Lennon’s assassination with a reference to the Second Amendment, Amos explicitly orients her cover version to focus on gun violence. After a change in musical texture, the introduction continues with a sample of George W. Bush stating (at 1:28) that “people who are gonna commit crimes shouldn’t have guns,” followed by George H. W. Bush stating (at 1:39) that his “reaction [to gun violence] is the same as every other father’s,” and concluding that he does not have the answers to the problem. Amos’s voice overlaps with the last line of this sample, as she begins her vocal presentation in the song (as Bono did) with the chorus hook. Her entry, declaring, “Happiness is a warm gun, mama” stands in ironic contrast to the senti-

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ments conveyed by sampled passages. Compared with the original and the U2 version, Amos’s does not give a significant amount of time to the chorus lyrics (with only relatively short passages at 2:06 and 6:26, and a fragmented reference at 9:26). Rather than emphasizing the chorus, Amos’s formal organization places considerable weight on the bridge. Figure 3 illustrates the lengthy sections of the song dedicated to bridge content, although these passages (3:27, 6:46, and 7:36) offer fragmented and incomplete lyrics. Like U2, Amos removes the recitation section from the song, once again excising the passage that demonstrates the peak of Lennon’s playfulness.

Sonic and Stylistic Features Amos delivers the song over a steady groove that cements the texture and narrative. The tempo is slow (69 bpm), and the complex groove melds the steady bass, dry kit (featuring ticky hi-­hat and warm snare), guitar, and layered keyboards (ARP synthesizer and Bösendorfer piano). In the lengthy and improvisatory presentation, several moments stand out for their sonic effects. One of the most prominent timbral features is the disorienting pitch-­shifting in the synthesizer; as the spoken-­text section opens the song, the warbled synth chords create an eerie backdrop to the textual reflections on guns, politics, and society. During the initial news report of Lennon’s shooting, a pitch-­phased guitar twists and turns in a high register above the spoken voice, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. It does not let go until Reverend Amos concludes his passage (1:24), at which point the keyboard groove builds in the center of the track, surrounded by George W. Bush to the left and George H. W. Bush to the right. When the spoken passage ends, a very prominent and distorted bass enters (2:06) to support Amos’s delivery of the chorus hook. The bridge 2 presentation (“Mother Superior”) (2:34) features an intense dialogue between her vocals and a dark, reverberant guitar riff (heard left). Her staging of the intro and verse material is fragmented, with interruptions from Reverend Amos’s spoken text and then with instrumental passages that ultimately lead into the bridge 1 material (“I need a fix”) (4:59) in an introspective, reflective vocal style. Moving into her higher register, extemporizing on the words “I need,” she eventually states the hook line (6:27) over a gradually clearing texture: the bass and kit drop out, leaving only vocal and synth until the word “gun” (6:46), at which point her voice cracks while the bass and kit reenter, both highly processed to create an edgy, psychedelic effect. The final section of the

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song (7:40) offers a complete change in texture: the warbling and eerie effects disappear, activity slows, keyboards lighten up, and the focus turns to the moody bass and drums backing Amos’s jazz-­inspired vocals. The song closes in this style, with Amos delivering a final statement of the words, “Happiness, mama, mama.”

Interpretation With this lengthy track, Amos imparts a range of experiences, beginning with external content (the news announcement and political reflections of the spoken-­text passages), moving through intense and sometimes disorienting musical developments of the original song, and ending in a moment of clarity where the persistent groove is replaced by a more peaceful style. Like Lennon, Amos guides the song toward a sense of calm, albeit one that is more resigned than peaceful.  Her paratextual materials establish a strongly gendered voice for this interpretation of the song and ask us to experience it through a specific female persona—­ the “call girl” who was the last person to be involved with Lennon’s gunman before the incident. This unique perspective, combined with the news report on Lennon’s death and the political comments about gun violence, invite the listener to hear the song both through a collective context of social significance (gun control) and through the individual experience of a woman linked to the event. Amos thus merges the original themes of sexuality and gun violence, creating a post-assassination commentary that invokes the original song and its composer.

Conclusions The Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is an evocative song that has sent listeners and critics in many interpretive directions. Almost thirty years later, U2 reinterpreted it to convey a message about gun violence. They altered the song’s original meaning by reorganizing the lyrics, significantly reshaping the sonic signature, and creating a more consistent style and formal structure. Tori Amos also adopted an antigun stance in her version but pursued a thread that U2 did not. She reacted to the highly sexual lyrics, re-­presenting them from a female voice and perspective: by adopting the persona of the prostitute who spent time with Lennon’s killer, Amos indelibly juxtaposes the themes of sexuality and violence, making the sexual act a precursor to the violent act. By exploring the paratext-­metatext-­hypertext framework, we have revealed how the

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song’s meanings develop in and through the original publicity materials, the responses of listeners and critics, and, of course, the polysemic and eminently malleable lyrical and musical materials. Although Lennon may never have intended the song to be a political statement, the adaptations of U2 and Tori Amos mobilize “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” to stand against gun violence. Notes 1. Plasketes (2005) defines “the cover age” as beginning in the 1980s. We would certainly argue that the art of covering and revising song materials continues to flourish to the present day, especially because social media dissemination flourished in the new millennium. Song covers were also extremely popular in the 1950s, often involving a pop or rock appropriation of rhythm and blues, as instanced by songs such as Willie Mae Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (1952), covered by Elvis (1956), or the Crew Cuts’ cover of “Sh-­Boom,” originally recorded by the Chords, with both versions released in 1954 (see Weinstein 1998). 2. The interested reader is encouraged to consult the following writings on cover songs: Bailey 2003; Burns, Dubuc, and Lafrance 2011; Burns and Woods 2004; M. Butler 2003; J. Butler 2010; Malawey 2011; Mosser 2008; Plasketes 2005; Zak 2004. 3. U2 owes a debt for this song title to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose song about the same incident appeared on the Lennon and Ono album Some Time in New York City (1972). 4. The spoken passage in the final section of the song (“When I hold you . . .”) was intended for a separate purpose (their “I’m So Tired” demo) but was ultimately not included in that song (Everett 1999, 182). 5. Please note that our analysis is based on the original stereo mix of the album. 6. Readers may wish to compare this discussion to Stephen Valdez’s slightly different analysis of the song’s harmonies and meter in chapter 10 in the present volume.

thirteen | White, Black, and Grey adam bradley

Take the White Album to the top of a building and let it drop. Follow its spiraling descent to the pavement below. Hear it shatter: broken pieces contained by paper sleeves. What remains? The clean white cover embossed center right with two words, The Beatles, and a seven-­digit number, say “No. 0000005,” in the far right corner. Open the gatefold and find the lyric poster and photographs still intact. Inspect the vinyl discs to see what you can salvage: jagged shards fit together like pieces of black lacquered jigsaw puzzles; fractured grooves, more than a mile long if you lay them out end to end. What are these records, now that you can’t play them? They’re not the Beatles’ music anymore, but they are still an artifact of the sound. In February 2004, the American DJ and producer Brian Burton dropped the White Album from the top of a building. The building was a concept he constructed in his mind, one that would fracture the White Album no less spectacularly than would a twenty-­story drop. The concept was this: treat the White Album as a library from which to draw sound for a new recording of Burton’s own design. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” provides a crash of Ringo Starr’s cymbals, the snick of his (or Paul McCartney’s) snare. “Dear Prudence,” a tightly knotted second of McCartney and Lennon’s vocal harmony. Burton’s creative act is predicated on rupture, rending the Beatles’ music from its carefully crafted contexts, conscripting it into the service of Burton’s own sound. That sound would also involve another recording, this one released thirty-­five years after the White Album, and just months before Burton’s concept took shape: Jay-­ Z’s The Black Album. Black and white—­the contrast was obvious but also 251

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elegant. Why not use the coincidence of the albums’ titles as occasion for a virtuoso display of production skill? The Grey Album was born. Burton, who records as Danger Mouse, a name he borrowed from a 1980s British cartoon mouse detective, recalls striking upon the concept for The Grey Album during a period of creative stagnation. “One day I was cleaning my room and listening to the Beatles’ White Album,” he recalls. “I was kind of bored, because the other hip-­hop work I was doing was really easy” (Klosterman 2006). That’s when he happened to pick up a copy of Jay-­Z’s Black Album, and the black-­and-­white contrast caught his fancy. “So I’m listening to the White Album and I’m putting The Black Album away, and I suddenly have this idea: I decide to see if I could take those two albums and make one song, just because of the names of the two albums and because they’re perceived as being so different and because I’ve always loved Ringo Starr’s drum sound” (Klosterman 2006). Meanwhile, somewhere in Manhattan, Jay-­Z, rap’s biggest star, was experiencing his own hip-­hop fatigue. “I can honestly say I’m bored with hip hop,” he confessed in a January 2004 essay he penned for Vibe. “I spend a lot of time feeling uninspired” (2004, 75). A few months earlier, on November 23, 2003, Jay-­Z had thrown himself a “retirement party” at Madison Square Garden with several thousand of his closest friends. A man of many interests and a growing business fortune, Jay-­Z found himself pulled away from the itinerant life of touring and recording. A life marked by conscious self-­transformation seemed destined for yet another. In 1996, after emerging from Marcy Projects in Brooklyn and leaving his life in the drug-­dealer equivalent of middle management, Jay-­Z released his first solo album, the classic Reasonable Doubt. From that point on, he churned out one solo album a year, culminating in 2003 with another classic, The Black Album. It was to be his last will and testament to a recording career that he never imagined would live past a single album. “I wanted my last twelve songs to be my most personal album so far,” he wrote (2004, 75). In keeping with that personal spirit, the first voice one hears on The Black Album is that of Jay-­Z’s mother, Gloria Carter, recounting the circumstances of her son’s birth. The Black Album’s title reflects Jay-­Z’s desire to achieve intimacy and directness in his expression. In doing so, his point of reference wasn’t the Beatles, but Prince. “When I first started planning The Black Album, it was a concept album,” he writes in Decoded. “I wanted to do what Prince had done, release an album of my most personal autobiographical tracks with absolutely no promotion. No cover art, no magazine ads, no com-

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mercials, nothing; one day the album would just appear on the shelves and the buzz would build organically” (2010). The analogy would prove imprecise. Prince’s Black Album was a long-­ rumored recording that, when it was finally emerged in 1994, failed to live up to its lore. In its aspiration and achievement, Jay-­Z’s Black Album actually shares far more with the Beatles’ White Album. Reflecting on his musical ambition in 2006, a few years—­and an unretirement—­removed from The Black Album’s release, Jay-­Z articulated his goal as making “timeless music.” “Right now in hip-­hop, there’s a lot of disposable music, and I believe the genre will suffer unless you have an event album” (XXL 2006). The Black Album is just such an event album, boasting tracks by top-­ flight producers (Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, Rick Rubin, Eminem, Timbaland, and others) and lyrics that display Jay-­Z’s rhythmic virtuosity and keen introspection. The best tracks on The Black Album are among the best tracks in Jay-­Z’s corpus, which is to say that they are among the best tracks in hip-­hop history. On “99 Problems,” he offers a master class in rhetorical technique, mixing elements of oratory and storytelling with a percussive vocal sensibility that plays off and on Rubin’s rock-­inspired beat. On “What More Can I Say,” he displays what the Greeks might have termed copia, outrapping the beat itself and closing the track with an a cappella challenge to the audience: “We’ll see what happens when I no longer exist.” On “Moment of Clarity,” he trades masterly verses with Eminem, perhaps the only rapper at the time to rival his fame. If Jay-­Z was indeed going out, he was going out on top. By the time Burton struck upon his black-­white connection, The Black Album had already joined the White Album among the roster of classics. For three weeks Burton spent twelve or thirteen hours a day extracting sounds from the Beatles’ album, building new tracks, then laying Jay-­Z’s vocals on top of them, giving birth to his sonic Frankenstein’s monster. “It was almost this Andy Warhol moment, where I made a decision to do something artistically without a clear reason as to why, except to show people what I could do,” Burton says. “And the whole time I was doing it, I was terrified someone else would come up with the same idea, which would have ruined everything. Because really, the idea is pretty simple” (Klosterman 2006). Though the concept is simple, the execution would prove daunting. Early on, Burton decided that he would draw all the music from these two albums alone, with Jay-­Z providing the vocals and the Beatles providing the “beats”—­the instrumental tracks that furnish the sonic

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bed for the rapping voice. Burton ended up extracting samples from fourteen of the thirty songs on the White Album: four apiece from sides 1 and 2, and three apiece from sides 3 and 4. Coincidentally, he samples all four of George Harrison’s compositions (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Piggies,” “Long Long Long,” and “Savoy Truffle”). On “Change Clothes,” for instance, Burton loops the harpsichord run that starts around 1:06 of “Piggies” and sets it above McCartney’s bass line from “Dear Prudence.” Whereas the original “Change Clothes,” produced by the Neptunes, has a laid-­back rhythm-­and-­blues feel, Burton’s new track has a tensile urgency owing to the stabbing harpsichord notes, the fractured beat, and pulsing bass line. So far Burton’s work was more science than art: isolating, extracting, and then cataloging sounds. The art began in processing those liberated samples to make them more impactful and emotive in their new setting as parts of an instrumental track. “Taking one little Beatles handclap wasn’t going to do it,” he explains. “But if you double it up and move them away from each other so they’re doubling up the delay, and then take the pitch of it and throw it up in the air and make it a higher pitch. I know it sounds all geeky and stuff, but you get a much better sound to it” (Moss 2004). Consider Harrison’s acoustic guitar riff from “Long Long Long” (which he plays at 0:04–­0:06, 0:17–­0:19, 0:49–­0:51, 1:47–­1:49). In the original song, they are fleeting moments of physical sound, beautiful melodic embellishments. On “Public Service Announcement,” the riff becomes percussive, playing on a loop through the song and becoming part of the texture of the track. Of course, it would have been far simpler to build a Beatles-­sounding beat without using actual Beatles recordings. It would also have been far simpler for Burton to resolve any challenges by breaking his rule and seeking sounds and samples elsewhere. (The album does contain, however, one conspicuous sample from another source—­a sly rip of the golden age rap duo Audio Two’s “Top Billin” [1988] on “What More Can I Say,” where they rap the words of Jay-­Z’s title.) Out of limitation comes unexpected expression. Burton’s monastic attention to these sonic limitations actually occasions an opportunity for imaginative expansion. One can trace this seeming paradox of creativity and constraint across the arts, whether in a poet’s choice of a fixed form like a sonnet or villanelle, or a sculptor’s use of stubborn stone instead of pliant clay. Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the late Saint Lucian poet, once told fellow poet Edward Hirsch the following to explain why he seeks out strict forms in his poetry: “The

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imagination wants its limits and delights in its limits. It finds its freedom in the definition of those limits” (Hirsch 1986). For Burton that freedom came in knowing that he wouldn’t cheat by seeking sounds for his instrumentals anywhere else but on the White Album. It also came in knowing that regardless of his creative aspirations he still had to serve the producer’s primary function: to make tracks that work well with the vocals, to make beats that bang. DJs have long understood that art is in part a game and games must have rules. In conceiving The Grey Album, Burton adhered to a strict set of rules. Listening to the album, we can arrive at some of these rules inductively. It is clear, for instance, that in mashing up the albums he would leave the vocals largely undisturbed, save for shifts in pitch and tempo, while he would deconstruct the instrumentals and stitch them back together in a crazy quilt of sound. It is clear, as well, that save for a few striking samples that last for several seconds, he would piece together his instrumentals from the small neglected parts of the Beatles’ songs rather than from the big, anthemic pieces that would be most familiar to listeners. The differences among the White Album, The Black Album, and The Grey Album aren’t one of kind but of degree. All of these are vernacular recordings, brought together from disparate parts to compose a whole. All testify to the defiant diversity of great art. Listen to The Grey Album as a Beatles album and it is an illuminating frustration: frustrating in that one only rarely gets to hear the band actually play, but illuminating in that it reveals small moments in the album that you might otherwise never hear. McCartney, for one, seems to have experienced this same tension over the years when hearing the Beatles sampled in hip-­hop. “It was really cool when hip-­hop started, you would hear references in lyrics, you always felt honored,” McCartney says. “It’s exactly what we did in the beginning—­introducing black soul music to a mass white audience. It’s come full circle. It’s, well, cool. When you hear a riff similar to your own, your first feeling is ‘rip-­off.’ After you’ve got over it you think, ‘Look at that, someone’s noticed that riff’” (Perry and Beattie 2010). Burton noticed dozens of riffs and, more than that, he also took forgettable fragments of sound and ennobled them. Listen to The Grey Album as a Jay-­Z album and it is a revelation: the new instrumental context shines a spotlight on different lyric moments than does the original, reorienting Jay-­Z’s flow. One of the high points of The Grey Album is “What More Can I Say? / While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The balance and energy of the new production elevates Jay-­Z’s

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original and offers a new point of entry into Harrison’s composition. When asked his impressions of The Grey Album years after its release, Jay-­Z praised both its concept and execution. “I think it was a really strong album,” Jay-­Z told Terry Gross in 2010. “I champion any form of creativity, and that was a genius idea” (Gross 2010). Listen to The Grey Album on its own terms and it sounds like the future: a virtuosic display of a keen musical ear and an expansive mind. You’ll hear proof positive that art can be made on top of art, following the same principle of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q . on the Mona Lisa, but on far richer levels of sound and sense. Unlike Duchamp, though, Burton’s boldness expresses itself not just in conception but in execution. The music theorist Kyle Adams captures the scale of Burton’s achievement: “By combining the most iconic albums from the Beatles and Jay-­Z, and by doing so with skill and finesse, Burton was not only staking a claim in the world of music production, but also publicly asserting his own authority over musical material and his willingness to disregard conventions of copyright and ownership in service of his art” (Adams 2015). The Grey Album is certainly conceptual—­its art begins the moment Burton decides to mash-­up the two albums—­but the artifact exists most powerfully in the new sounds Burton creates, the things we can appreciate by playing aloud. For all its inventive energy, the story of The Grey Album is now most commonly told as a narrative of the unhappy meeting of law and creativity. Creativity seeks open space while law builds fences. Soon after Burton made The Grey Album available for free online, he received a cease-­and-­ desist letter from EMI, which held the copyright for the Beatles’ recordings. Activists responded by urging websites to make The Grey Album available for download for twenty-­four hours in protest, which resulted in over 100,000 downloads on what was dubbed “Grey Tuesday.” For his part, Burton was bewildered by the public response. “I did not make The Grey Album for music fans,” he told Chuck Klosterman. “I made it to impress people who were really into sampling” (Klosterman 2006). Burton was neither the first nor the last to sample the sounds on the White Album. In 1989, the Beastie Boys’ track “The Sounds of Science” sampled “Back in the U.S.S.R.” In 1991 Naughty by Nature’s song “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright (Ghetto Bastard)” sampled “Piggies.” MF Grimm sampled “Glass Onion” on his 1999 track with MF Doom, “Tick, Tick . . . ,” then sampled “Helter Skelter” years later on his solo track “Karma” (2006). Wu-­Tang Clan sampled “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on “The Heart Gently Weeps” (2007), and Nappy Roots used it

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on “Paint a Picture” (2010). Doubtless many other hip-­hop artists would have sampled the album had the rights holder to the Beatles’ catalog not made it prohibitively difficult and expensive. One would think that the living members of the Beatles would support the artistic power of sampling. After all, they used early iterations of the sampling practice on the White Album itself. On “Revolution 9” the Beatles “sampled” their own “Revolution 1” as well as Jean Sibelius’s “Symphony No. 7” (1924), the King’s College Choir’s “O Clap Your Hands,” Jac Holzman’s “College Cheers” (1964), and Myra Hess, Rudolf Schwarz, and the Philharmonic Orchestra’s “Etudes Symphoniques (Theme—­Etudes 1 to 12)” (1954). In other words, the Beatles’ own production techniques anticipated the bedrock practices that hip-­hop would come to refine and perfect in the decades that followed. Talking about The Grey Album means talking about hip-­hop and its tradition of sampling. After all, the album foregrounds Jay-­Z’s rapping voice, and the instrumentals, though derived from the Beatles transgeneric rock, comport themselves in most ways as we would expect of a rap beat. Rap was born with the beat, both the 4/4 measure of the instrumental tracks and the in-­and-­out of the pocket flows of the MC, rap’s master of ceremonies. These two percussive elements, beat and flow, generate a dual rhythmic relationship in which the regularity of the music affords MCs the capacity to follow flights of rhythmic fancy in their flows. You’ll hear this dual rhythmic dynamic clearly on the original “99 Problems” from The Black Album, where Jay-­Z locates his voice in the pocket of Rick Rubin’s beat. The metrical pattern, where the stress falls in each line, even the number of syllables per line all match closely with one another as Jay-­Z rides the beat. It sounds effortless, off the cuff, in keeping with Jay-­Z’s reputation for composing his lyrics entirely in his head. But a closer look at the lyric shows the intelligent design that animates the lines. Though delivered with artful nonchalance, these are crafted words. Consider these opening four lines from the second verse: The year is ninety-­four, in my trunk is raw In my rearview mirror is the motherfuckin’ law Got two choices, y’all: pull over the car or Bounce on the devil, put the pedal to the floor

He knits the lines together first in sound, using assonance through repetition of the “ah” vowel sound. Jay-­Z balances the weight of the lines with care; the first line is eleven syllables long, the second thirteen, and

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then the third line returns to eleven again before the fourth line closes with twelve. There’s a subtle science at work in the language that accounts in part for the song’s success. What makes Jay-­Z’s original version of “99 Problems” remarkable is how he fits his flow to Rubin’s unusually spare beat. There’s a striking amount of air in the track, empty pockets for the flow to breathe in more irregular ways than it could if fitted to a more conventional beat. As a consequence, the a cappella vocals Burton inherited for “99 Problems” still hold the shape of Rubin’s idiosyncratic track. This presented Burton with a distinctive production challenge as he mined the White Album for the pieces that would make up his new “99 Problems” instrumental. “Generally, when you’re doing a track, you want to have the drums set the tempo,” Burton reflected to MTV around the time of the album’s release. “But it wouldn’t work on [“99 Problems”], so I had to use the bass line itself to keep it going, and I accented the bass line with the drums and put the drums here and there, as opposed to, like, the normal way of doing it” (Moss 2004). You can hear the difference in the finished track, where Jay-­Z’s flow, lacking its natural symbiotic partner in Rubin’s track, instead now relates to Burton’s propulsive guitar-­and bass-­driven track. The drums, by contrast, are punctuation marks rather than strict structures. As a finished track, it arrives at much the same place as the Jay-­Z / Rick Rubin original, a rock-­rap hybrid with plenty of edge and energy. It speaks to the flexibility of hip-­hop as an art form that its words can travel, that lyrics written for a particular musical setting can be made to fit elsewhere. It also speaks to Burton’s abilities that he can reverse engineer a track that works both in rhythm and in pitch with what he is given. Of course, this kind of transplant comes with consequences. As with an organ transplant, sometimes the host will reject the new organ. At times across The Grey Album Jay-­Z’s a cappella vocal rejects or at least resists Burton’s new tracks. There’s a slight pitch problem with “Allure,” which he tempers by cutting out parts of the sung chorus that might otherwise clash with his new instrumental. More often, though, the new musical context highlights new depths of meaning, sound, and feeling in Jay-­Z’s lyrics and performance. Jay-­Z and the Beatles seem like a musical odd couple. They come from different places, inhabit different genres, and debuted three decades apart from one another. But they share some things. The Beatles have nineteen number one albums; Jay-­Z, fourteen and counting (Caulfield

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2017). Jay-­Z has worked throughout his career with Kanye West, and Paul McCartney has been doing the same of late. Perhaps the most striking demonstration of the difference between the Beatles and Jay-­Z was made apparent with MusixMatch’s 2015 study entitled “The Largest Vocabulary in Music.” The study analyzed ninety-­ three best-­selling artists from across all genres and compared the total number of words and the total number of distinct words used in these artists’ one hundred densest songs (“densest” is defined as “the total number of words (across any language) used by a musician”). In a group that included everyone from Bob Dylan to Mötley Crüe, Jay-­Z came in second only to Eminem in vocabulary size, with 6,899 distinct words used. Hovering near the bottom? The Beatles. They ranked seventy-­sixth with a total vocabulary of only 1,872 words. For comparison, that placed them just below the Bee Gees (1,882) and just above Enya (1,869). The average vocabulary among artists under consideration was 2,677, with forty artists falling within 400 words of the average (Jewalikar 2015). That means that not only do the Beatles have a more limited lyric vocabulary than Jay-­Z; they have a more limited vocabulary than the majority of hit-­ making artists in modern popular music history. These numbers mean little, however, without the proper context. The Beatles recorded some of the simplest lyrics in the pop canon as well as some of the most cryptic; they have songs marked by their lyric economy and others by their superfluity of expression. MusixMatch isn’t telling us that the Beatles are somehow deficient, the remedial students in the class of best-­selling songwriters. Instead, their relatively conscripted vocabulary speaks to a host of more illuminating matters, things that further underscore the radical implications of Danger Mouse’s Beatles/ Jay-­Z mash-­up. To begin with, the modest size of the Beatles’ vocabulary speaks to the directness of much of their lyric expression—­and to their music’s commercial success. Among the 93 MusixMatch artists, the Beatles rank number one in total album sales. Early on, Lennon and McCartney figured out certain formulas for making hits. “Our early stuff is more simple than our later stuff,” McCartney told Billboard magazine in 2015, “and that’s one of the great things about The Beatles.” The music was simple, too. “Love Me Do” (1964), one of their early hits, was built on a two-­chord structure. The lyrics reflected that same simplicity. “[‘Love Me Do’] was a very simple song that fell into the category of ‘fan songs,’” McCartney said. “All our early songs contained ‘me’ or ‘you.’ We were

260  the beatles through a glass onion

completely direct and shameless to the fans: ‘Love Me Do’; ‘Please Please Me’; ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’” (Tannenbaum 2015). These simple pronouns—­me, you, she, I—­became the backbone of the Beatles’ early lyrics. Not surprisingly, their most common rhyme words among their Billboard-­charting songs are “do/you,” “me/see,” and “be/me.” These also happen to be the three most common rhyme pairs among all Billboard Year-­End Hot 100 hits between 1960 and 2013. From this perspective, the Beatles look something like a pop music Rosetta Stone. Jay-­Z shares two of the Beatles three most common rhyme pairs in his lyrics, “be/me” and the near-­universal “do/you.” Where Jay-­Z distinguishes himself from the Beatles in rhyme, and where we begin to see how his vocabulary might measure more than three and a half times as large, is in his more idiosyncratic rhyme choices. Listening across The Black Album, one hears him rhyme “Jedi Knight” with “better I write” (“Change Clothes”), “back for more” with “ambassador” (“What More Can I Say”), and “procedures” with “Jesus” (“Lucifer). Employing these mosaic rhymes—­that is, rhyme pairs that join a single multisyllabic word with a phrase containing several monosyllabic words—­expands Jay-­Z’s rhyme palette and extends his vocabulary. Similarly, Jay-­Z’s outward-­looking references to contemporary culture through proper nouns, a common practice in rap, also increases his vocabulary beyond the less specific language of the Beatles. On “Change Clothes” alone, he references Maybach coupes and Rolls-­Royce Phantoms; the movie New Jack City and its lead actor Wesley Snipes; Jedi knights from Star Wars; fellow rappers Lady of Rage, Snoop Dogg, and Scarface; the song’s producer Pharrell Williams and his Billionaire Boys Club clothing label; S-­Dots, Jay’s own (now defunct) brand of sneakers; and Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label. By contrast, the Beatles have Desmond in “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” go to the marketplace and the jewelry store, not to Tesco and Goldsmiths or some other proper names that would do more to expand the vocabulary. By the time the Beatles were recording the White Album they little resembled the “can’t buy me love” and “hold your hand” songwriters of their early years. The lyrics often bent toward abstraction and willful opacity. “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you” are the first words we hear on “Julia,” capturing the spirit of play that animates most of the songs on the sprawling album. A similar sensibility took root in the music as well. “By the time of the White Album,” writes Dominic Pedler in The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles,

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The Beatles truly overdosed on multi-­ metre machinations—­ most famously in the sprawling structure of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” which captured Lennon’s collage approach to songwriting in all its glory. The simple observation that the song consists essentially of four sections, each based on a different basic metre, is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the highly complex variations—­within the C and D sections especially—­that turn this particular flexible Lennon frolic into a transcriber’s nightmare. (Pedler 2001)

The very qualities that make much of the White Album “a transcriber’s nightmare,” however, make it a remix artist’s dream. As the critic Ed Whitley points out, the White Album models a postmodern aesthetics of disturbance whereby the goal is not to resolve but to unsettle matters of sound and meaning (2000). The bricolage of the album’s construction lends itself to breaking pieces cleanly off and resetting them in new sonic contexts. Many critics have called attention to the wide-­ranging nature of the White Album, invoking it either to criticize it or to valorize it. “There was such an extravagance of music on those four sides,” writes Bob Spitz in The Beatles: The Biography, “so many sprawling themes and styles to sift through, so much energy and vigor in the grooves, that taken as a whole, the album stymied critics as to how it figured in the Beatles’ canon” (2005, 795). Burton appreciated the capacity of this eclecticism. For his purposes it was an unmitigated virtue. He set out show that a universe could be found in a single sound, the refracting brilliance of an otherwise undifferentiated moment. That’s what DJs at their best do: they put sounds in new settings. Hip-­hop, after all, was born with the break beat—­a looped section of ecstatic rhythm meant to motivate the crowd to get up and dance / get up and move. From the break beat came the sample—­the crate-­digging ethic by which DJs would find obscure sounds from albums across genres and recast them in new soundscapes of the DJ’s design. During the golden age of sampling (1986–­92, according to Navas, Gallagher, and Burrough 2014), before music regulatory institutions all but ended the practice, producers like the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy, Ice Cube) and Prince Paul (De La Soul) would produce elaborate, crazy-­quilt soundscapes built on dozens of samples. The Grey Album testifies to the fact that when it comes to musical culture, the melting pot has already melted. The Beatles themselves practiced Danger Mouse’s sampling ethic; one can hear it throughout the

262  the beatles through a glass onion

album. On the opening track they borrow the Beach Boys signature harmonies and borrow from Chuck Berry’s lyric conceit on “Back in the U.S.A.” They borrow from the blues, with Lennon evincing a certain anxiety, being a white boy playing black sounds, hence the ironic title “Yer Blues,” a kind of preemptive irony to inoculate him from imagined critiques that never materialized. Jay-­Z’s album, too, is an expression of vernacular culture, both sonically and lyrically. “Justify My Thug” plays homage to Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” The samples on the original recording extend from blues to soul to classic rock. Both albums share this roving musical sensibility, an urge to capture a community of sounds in a single space. Quincy Jones once remarked that rap defines a “third entity between songs and instrumental music” (Jones 2001). Rap shares with songs the expression of the human voice through lyrics, and it shares with instrumental music a keen attention to tone. The rapping voice is at once something less and something more than the singing voice; it is less in that it is rarely endowed with the wealth of melody, and more in that it often more readily integrates itself with instruments in the rhythmic soundscape. Listening to the Beatles and Jay-­Z together, thanks to Danger Mouse, one comes close to sensing the full dimensions of this third space in sound. “I always felt it was so silly—­hip-­hop kids in one corner, rock kids in the other,” Burton says. “I wanted people in both corners to see the other side” (Munday 2015). It’s 2017 and I’m listening to The Grey Album with someone uniquely suited to understand that third space that it inhabits, the multimedia artist and producer Paul D. Miller, who sometimes records under the name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. Miller has recently accepted an invitation from the Beatles to remix a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, so he has been thinking a lot about the Beatles’ legacy and the act of reinterpreting them. He’s remixed “Getting Better” and will soon be in Liverpool for a performance of the new composition and a public discussion. “What Danger Mouse did was to challenge how people think about collective memory,” he tells me. “The White Album is part of our collective memory. It’s fixed in the archive. Then here comes Danger Mouse updating the archive, showing us that it’s never fixed. It’s never dead” (M17).

Afterword john covach

As this volume richly demonstrates, the Beatles’ White Album can be the focal point for many types of careful explorations that engage a wide range of topics and concerns. And because the music on this double album is itself so diverse and plentiful, it is no surprise that any search for unifying elements poses significant challenges and readily produces multiple interpretations. Kenneth Womack, for instance, describes the album as “a long-­playing song cycle in which the record’s discrete elements come together, as with an impressionistic painting, in order to form a magisterial, seamless whole” (2007, 220). But as Mark Osteen points out in the introduction to this volume, other authors have described the White Album as “something of a failure” and the “product of a band in disarray.” Pushing the disunity argument a bit further, one might even go so far as to wonder: Is the White Album really “an album” as we usually understand the term? And is this assemblage of songs really attributable to “a band” in the typical sense? If these seem like perverse questions, consider the remarks of John Lennon: “Listen—­all you experts listen, none of you can hear. Every track is an individual track—­there isn’t any Beatles music on it. I just say, listen to the White Album. It was John and the Band, Paul and the Band, George and the Band, like that” (Wenner 1970, 88). It’s important to note that these remarks were made in the context of the Beatles’ breakup in 1970. Lennon’s main point at that time was to emphasize how, in an important way, the band had already ceased to be a band by 1968. And while Lennon might be accused of exaggerating this separation in the heat of his frustration over the demise of the group, his suggestion is 263

264  Afterword

clearly that the Beatles in 1968 were not a band as they had been previously, but had rather become a kind of songwriters co-­op. Indeed, Everett (1999, 185), Vincent Benitez (chapter 11), and I (chapter 9) have all suggested that the White Album marks—­to some extent, at least—­the beginnings of the solo careers of John, Paul, and George. Though the music is marketed collectively as by the Beatles, each songwriter is supported by the playing and contributions of the others. Accordingly—­and quite apart from the influence of the individual songs on the record—­the White Album signifies a turning point in rock history. If Sgt. Pepper was the album that represented the idea of the rock musician as an artist (Covach 2006), the White Album marks a strong move toward the performer as singer-­songwriter. These singer-­ songwriter elements, of course, had already been present in previous Beatles music and can also be found in the music of other artists, including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys. But if the White Album seems at times not to cohere, maybe that’s because—­following Lennon’s remark—­it’s actually a John Lennon album, a Paul McCartney album, a George Harrison EP, and a Ringo Starr single, all released together under the Beatles name. How does a band get to such a point? How can four musicians who have grown up together and worked so closely with one another end up becoming so separated? Much of this separation resulted from the Beatles’ decision to stop touring in the summer of 1966. It’s tough for a band to make the transition from a live act to a studio band, primarily because it causes relationships to shift, in some cases drastically. Until the Beatles stopped touring, they depended on one another in live performance and in the recording studio (in most cases, anyway). In a live setting, for instance, it doesn’t really matter much that the drummer doesn’t write songs; the other members still rely on him heavily to ensure the band’s onstage success: everybody is in it together. But once the live shows stopped, the band dynamic changed—­and it had to change. The focus turned to the primary songwriters, and the recording of Sgt. Pepper found Harrison and Starr less centrally engaged in the music. Harrison cast it as follows: “It was becoming difficult for me, because I wasn’t really that into it. Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn songs and then play them. . . . Sgt. Pepper was the one album where things were done slightly differently. . . . It became an assembly process—­just little parts and then overdubbing—­ and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring” (Beatles 2000, 242). Starr’s take on things was much the same: “Sgt Pepper was great for me,

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because it’s a fine album—­but I did learn to play chess while we were recording it” (Beatles 2000, 242). In spite of the stories of friction—­or at least tedium—­in the studio, the four Beatles remained tight as friends, as the trip to Rishikesh demonstrates. Who, after all, takes a trip abroad with people they’d prefer to avoid? But when it came to planning the group’s next album in 1968—­ only eighteen months since the last live show—­all three Beatles writers had accumulated a lot of songs, so many that each probably could have done a solo LP. Nevertheless, the White Album was organized in the band’s usual way, except as a double album: a Starr song on each record, a Harrison song on each side, with Lennon and McCartney carving up the rest. The arranging and recording of the songs, however, now became more divided than it had been. As Harrison put it, “there was a lot more individual stuff. For the first time I think people were accepting it was individual” (Beatles 2003, Episode 8, 2:46–­2:54). If we take Lennon’s remarks about the White Album at face value, it may be useful and enlightening to create the albums that might have been released from Lennon and the band and McCartney and the band, the EP from Harrison and the band, and even the single from Starr and the band. Table A1 reorganizes songs from the White Album, separating them into McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison tracks while following the order in which they appear on the White Album. Ringo’s one song appears along with the song written for him by Lennon (which also appears on Lennon’s album). I have added the two singles and B-­sides from 1968 to the list, but left out other recordings that were made in 1968 though not released as singles or as White Album tracks. Comparing the McCartney and Lennon albums in this way brings out not only the clear differences between the two songwriters, but also some interesting parallels. Several of McCartney’s songs refer to the music of others (as indicated by asterisks), sometimes to older rock and pop (“Lady Madonna,” “I Will,” “Honey Pie”) and sometimes contemporary styles (“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Helter Skelter,” “Rocky Raccoon”). While some reference to other pop styles can be found on Lennon’s album (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and “Yer Blues”) and on one Harrison track (“Savoy Truffle”), the focus on the music of others, and on pop’s past, is primarily a characteristic of McCartney’s music here. On the other hand, his music embraces the model of what would become the singer-­songwriter style in the early 1970s much more than Lennon’s does. Key features of that style are the use of some acoustic instrument (piano or guitar) for the main accompaniment and the employment of serious,

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sometimes confessional lyrics. These McCartney songs are indicated with a plus sign in the figure, and “Hey Jude” and “Blackbird” are perhaps the strongest examples. Several of Lennon’s songs are what might be termed finger-­waggers, or songs that accuse or criticize (indicated with a ^). “Sexy Sadie”—­his indictment of the Maharishi—­is the clearest example on the Lennon album, followed closely by “Revolution / Revolution 1,” “Bungalow Bill,” and “Glass Onion.” While Harrison’s list includes two finger-­waggers, “Piggies” and “Savoy Truffle,” McCartney’s music generally steers well clear of this kind of direct confrontation. Lennon also continues his practice, begun with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “A Day in the Life,” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” of developing lyrics prompted by phrases of others (indicated with a #). “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and “Cry Baby Cry” were triggered by advertising, while “Julia” was inspired by the poetry of Kahlil Gibran. This external-­prompt lyrical practice is foreign to McCartney’s writing, but the lyrics to two of Harrison’s songs, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Savoy Truffle,” were prompted by external texts (the I Ching and a chocolates box, respectively). If they been released as in table A1, the McCartney and Lennon albums would indeed have been very different records, while Harrison’s EP would have more like Lennon’s album than like McCartney’s. The comparison of these four collections also exposes some interesting similarities between and among Beatles songwriters: McCartney has some fun with Dylan’s style in “Rocky Raccoon,” and Lennon clearly enjoys the satire of “Bungalow Bill,” as does Harrison in “Savoy Truffle.” Each songwriter provides a moment of intimate sensitivity: Lennon with “Julia,” Harrison with “Long Long Long,” and McCartney with “Blackbird.” And each offers social criticism: McCartney again with “Blackbird,” Lennon with “Revolution / Revolution 1,” and Harrison with “Piggies.” Finally, each engages classical music in some way: the horns in McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son,” the modernist elements in Lennon’s “Glass Onion” and especially “Revolution 9,” and the ironic chamber strings and harpsichord in Harrison’s “Piggies.” Admittedly, the sequence of songs in table A1 is not necessarily the one each songwriter would have chosen had he actually released a solo recording. But the sequencing does turn out to have some interesting moments: on McCartney’s album, the progression from “Martha My Dear” into “Blackbird” and then “Rocky Raccoon” is especially smooth, in part owing to the close key relationship between the latter two, as well as the prominence of the acoustic guitar and a general emphasis

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across the trio of songs on the singer-­songwriter model. On Lennon’s album, the movement from “Bungalow Bill” into “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is especially fortuitous, at least in terms of theme, for both are about the use of firearms. If “Revolution 9” were removed, Lennon’s nursery verses in “Cry Baby Cry” would transition nicely into the lullaby of “Good Night,” both being in the key of G major. Harrison’s EP is also nicely paced, separating the two prayerful songs from the humorous ones, though ending with a laugh. While table A1 reveals some interesting parallels among the three Beatles songwriters, it mostly emphasizes the differences among them. One might plausibly argue that the actual sequencing on these hypothetical records seems just as compelling as the song order found on the White Album itself, and in some ways (consistency of personal style, for instance) these constructed playlists seem to make more sense. Seen from this perspective, the White Album as we have it from the Beatles is, much as Lennon claimed, simply an interleaving of four separate groups of songs by four individual songwriters. The resulting album produces more variety than unity, making the parallels noteworthy mostly because so much else is contrasting. My discussion thus far has emphasized the synchronic dimension of the music by considering the songs as they occur on that album and in 1968 more generally. We could, however, trace the diachronic dimension of each songwriter’s work, pointing out how particular songs are both anticipated by previous ones and anticipate later songs. We could point to “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” as a story song that follows earlier such songs as “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home” and is followed by “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Lennon’s “Glass Onion” picks up where “I Am the Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” leave off and continues forward with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Benitez and Everett trace McCartney’s and Lennon’s songs, respectively, into each songwriter’s solo career. The job is made easier with Harrison, since so many of his songs from the last years of the Beatles actually ended up on later solo albums. As we look to 1968 more broadly (and synchronically), we can spot several other important groups making changes in their style and approach. The Byrds, for instance, released Sweetheart of the Rodeo in late August, creating a template for the country-­rock style that would prove so important to the early 1970s. Perhaps most conspicuously, the Rolling Stones opened 1968 with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a track often claimed to mark a new, harder-­rocking and more roots-­based style for the band. The

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release of Beggars Banquet in the fall (just two weeks after The Beatles) seemed to reinforce the idea that the band had turned its back on the psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request. “Sympathy for the Devil” is the most conceptually ambitious track on Beggars Banquet, paralleling “Glass Onion” or, more distantly, “Revolution 9.” “Street Fighting Man” makes a political statement (like “Revolution”), and “No Expectations” shows a more sensitive, acoustic side (as in “Blackbird,” “Julia,” and “Long Long Long”). The Stones turn to blues with “Parachute Woman” and “Stray Cat Blues” (The Beatles’ “Yer Blues,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road”) and to country with “Dear Doctor” (parallel with “Don’t Pass Me By”). The bigger challenge, perhaps, is exploring how the White Album affected later artists. I suggested above that the White Album played a crucial role in the growing development of the singer-­songwriter model. It is difficult, as it turns out, to separate the album’s influence from the influence of late Beatles music more generally. Clearly the band served as a crucial and central model for what we might consider the mature artist in popular music, an approach I have elsewhere linked to the hippie aesthetic in rock—­the idea that rock musicians considered themselves artists and professionals, were required to innovate musically, and were expected to express something serious and thoughtful with their music and lyrics (Covach 2007). In regard to this kind of broader influence on rock musical practice, the range, variety, and idiosyncratic distinctiveness of the White Album —­those very features that resist unity—­are what made the biggest and most sustained impact. In terms of specific influence on later artists, each Beatle made his mark in different ways. A quick visit to Wikipedia confirms that the songs on The Beatles have been covered many times and by a wide range of artists. In this volume, Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods (chapter 12) and Adam Bradley (chapter 13) explore specific and interesting cases of cover versions. In a more general sense and apart from specific covers, the influence of McCartney is clear on performers like Elton John, Billy Joel, Cat Stevens, and even Queen’s Freddie Mercury (isn’t there a little “Honey Pie” in “Killer Queen”?). The music of Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra—­think of “Mr. Blue Sky”—­is deeply indebted to Lennon’s pieces employing orchestral strings (“Strawberry Fields,” “I Am the Walrus,” and “Glass Onion”), as are the progressive rock epics of King Crimson and Genesis (here “A Day in the Life” is crucial). Harrison’s emphasis on Eastern religion, both in music and lyrics, takes root in the music of the Moody Blues and Yes, whose “Close to the Edge,” for instance, is based on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and whose

Afterword  269 Table A1: Paul, John, George, and Ringo Songs Grouped as Individual Releases McCartney and the band (14) Lady Madonna Hey Jude * Back in the U.S.S.R. * Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da Wild Honey Pie (instr.) + Martha My Dear

Lennon and the band Harrison and the band (14) (5) The Inner Light

*+ +

Blackbird Rocky Raccoon * Why Don’t We Do It * I Will * Birthday + Mother Nature’s Son * Helter Skelter * Honey Pie + *

Starr and the band (2)

~

Revolution Dear Prudence ^ Glass Onion ^ Bungalow Bill ^

Happiness Is a Warm Gun I’m So Tired # Julia *Yer Blues Me and My Monkey ^ Sexy Sadie ^ Revolution 1 # Cry Baby Cry Revolution 9 (instr.) Good Night (Starr) #

#While My Guitar ^Piggies ~ Long Long Long ~ >

Don’t Pass Me By (Good Night; Lennon)

^#Savoy Truffle

>

*Songs based on the music of others. +McCartney at piano or guitar, serious lyrics. ^“Finger-­wagging” songs. #Songs prompted by phrases of others. ~Songs influenced by Indian music or Eastern philosophy. >Songs employing humor.

double album Tales from Topographic Oceans derives from a footnote in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. However one interprets it—­as unified or fragmented, as representative of the band as a whole or of its songwriters individually, as one album or many—­the White Album is indeed a sprawling, ambitious, and multifaceted project. Even within the band there were differences about how the album should be released. George Martin thought they “should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double. . . . I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed” (Beatles 2000, 305; italics his). Starr partially agreed, though with tongue in cheek: “There was a lot of information on the double album, but I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums: the ‘White’ and the ‘Whiter’ albums” (Beatles 2000, 305). Paul McCartney probably puts in best when he assesses the situation with characteristic Liverpudlian directness: “I’m not a great one for that, you know, maybe it was too many or that. Look, what do you mean? It was great. It sold. It’s the bloody Beatles White Album. Shut up!” (Beatles 2003, Episode 8, 9:14–­9:22).

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Contributors

Vincent P. Benitez is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Words and Music of Paul McCartney (2010), and two forthcoming books: Olivier Messiaen’s Opera, Saint François d’Assise, and Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide, as well as numerous articles and national/international presentations on Messaien. He has written an online, Gen Ed course at Penn State on the Beatles’ music and is developing an online, inter-­domain course entitled The Music of the Beatles and American Popular Culture. Adam Bradley is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder where he directs the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (the RAP Lab). He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Poetry of Pop, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop; The Anthology of Rap; and the New York Times bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, a memoir he wrote for the rapper and actor Common. Lori Burns is Professor of Music and Director of the School of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her articles have appeared in numerous collections as well as in leading journals such as Popular Music and Society, and Studies in Music. Her book Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music won the 2005 Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She was a founding coeditor of the University of Michigan Press’s Tracking Pop Series and is now serving as coeditor (with Stan Hawkins) of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. 293

294  Contributors

John Covach is Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. He has published dozens of articles on popular music, twelve-­tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music. He is the principal author of the college textbook What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock Music, and has co-­edited Understanding Rock; American Rock and the Classical Tradition; and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music, as well as Sounding Out Pop. Covach has also performed widely on electric and classical guitar in the US and Europe. Walter Everett is Professor of Music in Music Theory at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the two-­volume study, The Beatles as Musicians, and of The Foundations of Rock, all from Oxford University Press. He is currently co-­authoring with Tim Riley a textbook aimed at undergraduates not majoring in music that contextualizes the Beatles within their culture. In addition to editing or co-­editing three other books of analytical essays on popular music, Everett has published more than thirty book chapters and articles on rock music from Elvis to Beck, as well as other analytical papers on Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and late nineteenth-­ century song. Michael R. Frontani retired in 2016 as an Associate Professor from the School of Communications at Elon University. He writes extensively on mass-­mediated culture and is the author of The Beatles: Image and the Media (2007; a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008), as well as a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to The Beatles (2009). He has published numerous essays related to the Beatles and other media topics in academic journals and anthologies. He is currently at work on a number of projects related to the Beatles and to his other interests, the Italian-­ American experience, and American cinema history. Steve Hamelman teaches American literature and critical theory  at Coastal Carolina University. He has published many peer-­reviewed essays on American literature, as well as essays, reviews, and two books on rock music, most recently All by Myself: The Single-­Artist Rock Album (2016). Hamelman is the Book and Music Review Editor for Popular Music and Society and Rock Music Studies. Ian Inglis is a lecturer, writer and researcher, and former Reader and Visiting Fellow at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Contributors  295

His doctoral research considered the significance of sociological, social psychological, and cultural theory in explanations of the Beatles’ career. His authored/edited books include The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices (2000); Popular Music and Film (2003); Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time (2006); The Words and Music of George Harrison (2010); The Beatles in Hamburg (2012); and The Beatles (2015). His articles have been published a variety of journals and he has also contributed chapters to numerous books across a range of subjects. John Kimsey is an associate professor in DePaul University’s School for New Learning. His writings on Beatles music and culture have been published in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism and the Fab Four; “Sgt. Pepper” and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today; The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles; and Fifty Years with the Beatles. He is also a working musician and his song cycle, Twisted Roots: Music, Politics and the American Dream Blues, has been described by recording artist Ben Sidran as “an ingenious way to integrate political and social commentary into a musical architecture.” He is currently working on a book, “Just A Day Too Long”: Music, Race and Parchman Farm. Mark Osteen is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland. He has published widely on modern and contemporary literature, film history, disability, and music. The most recent of his many books are Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen (2014); Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (2013); and One of Us: A Family’s Life with Autism (2010). His awards include the Donald Murphy Prize in Irish Studies (1995) and the Dorothy Cappon Prize for Nonfiction (2016). Osteen has performed for many years as a vocalist and saxophonist with rock and jazz groups across the United States. Russell Reising teaches American literature and Asian studies at the University of Toledo and is a Distinguished Guest Professor at Qilu University of Technology, in Jinan, People’s Republic of China. Reising has worked as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and at the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and served a residency as a consultant in popular music at the University of Salford (UK). He has published widely on popular music and psychedelia and has edited “Every Sound There Is”: The Beatles’ Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll (2002), and “Speak To Me”: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of

296  Contributors

the Moon” (2005). He is currently preparing “They Call My Name Disturbance”: “Beggars Banquet” and the Rolling Stones’ Rock Revolution, an essay collection to be published by Taylor and Francis in 2018. Stephen Valdez is an associate professor of Musicology at the University of Georgia. He teaches a variety of music history courses, including The History and Analysis of Rock Music, the History of Jazz, and courses on music in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. He has authored several essays on the music of the Beatles and has published his textbook, A History of Rock Music, 5th edition. Anthony D. Villa is a composer, director, and pianist and professor of music at Loyola University Maryland, where he teaches music theory, jazz history, digital recording, directs the jazz program and has served as director of the Music Program. An active jazz pianist, he has led the Anthony Villa Trio since 2005, and performs frequently with Cold Spring Jazz Quartet and the Melting Pot Big Band. He was founder and director of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Big Band (2011–­14), which performed and promoted original music by Baltimore-­area jazz composers and arrangers. Villa’s music is available through Ardito Music (ASCAP) at arditomusic.com. Kenneth Womack is dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University, where he also serves as professor of English. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (2007), The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles (2009), and The Beatles Encyclopedia: Everything Fab Four (2014). Womack has also published three award-­winning novels: John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel (2010), The Restaurant at the End of the World (2012), and Playing the Angel (2013). Alyssa Woods teaches popular music studies at Carleton University. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to musical theoretical and sociocultural analysis, focusing on the study of gender and race in popular music with particular emphasis on hip-­hop. She has published articles in Music Theory Online and Twentieth-­Century Music, as well as in the edited collections Pop-­Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom, The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-­Songwriter.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to the illustrations and tables. Abbey Road, 56, 70, 172, 192, 226 Abbey Road Studios, 10, 92, 103 Abbey Road Tape, 60 acid. See lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) “Across the Universe” (Lennon), 58, 68, 82, 117, 138 Adams, Kyle, 256 adaptations, 30–­31, 231–­62 ADT (artificial or automatic double-­ tracking), 101, 148, 151, 156, 160n3 Aerial Ballet, 69 aesthetics, 165–­66 Ahbez, Eden, 34n20 AIR (Associated Independent Recording), 91 Ali, Tariq, 43, 52 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 131 Alice’s Restaurant, 39 All Things Must Pass (Harrison), 59, 71n5, 189–­92, 196n40, 199 “All Things Must Pass” (Harrison), 59, 191 “Allure” (Danger Mouse), 258 “All You Need Is Love” (Lennon), 40 American Rifleman magazine, 203, 236 Amos, Edison, 247–­48 Amos, Tori: cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” 31, 233, 238–­42, 242,

247–­50, 288; Strange Little Girls, 233, 238, 241, 288 “And I Love Her” (McCartney), 135 “Angel Baby” (Rosie and the Originals), 33n18 Anka, Paul, 127 Another Sessions . . . Plus (The Beatles), 60 Anthology (The Beatles), 60, 62, 72–­73 Anthology 1 (The Beatles), 179 Anthology 2 (The Beatles), 78 Anthology 3 (The Beatles), 60, 66, 80, 106n3, 191 antiwar movement, 43–­45, 51–­52 Apple Corps, 6, 45, 73, 75, 195n30, 226 Apple Electronics, 6 Aronoff, Kenny, 161–­62 arrangement, 99, 145–­60, 182. See also specific arrangers; specific works Arrive Without Aging (The Beatles), 60, 289 “Artificial Energy” (The Byrds), 196n34 artificial or automatic double-­tracking (ADT), 101, 148, 151, 156, 160n3 artist approach, 193n6 art music, 210 “Art of Dying” (Harrison), 190, 194n17 Asher, Jane, 5, 89n1, 221, 227n2 297

298  Index Asher, Peter, 75, 236 “Ask Me Why” (Lennon and McCartney), 140 Aspinall, Neil, 18–­19, 89n1, 100, 236 Associated Independent Recording (AIR), 91 Astaire, Fred, 141, 219–­20 Atkins, Chet, 77, 228n7 Atlantic Records, 75 “Attica State” (Lennon), 211 Audio Two, 254 authenticity, 3, 75 Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda), 269 Avalon Ballroom, 45 Avory, Mick, 171, 175 “Awaiting On You All” (Harrison), 192 “Baby’s in Black” (Lennon and McCartney), 194n14 Bach, J. S.: Bourrée in E Minor, 65, 66, 79, 80, 222, 223, 224 “Back in the U.S.A.” (Berry), 215, 262 “Back in the U.S.S.R.” (McCartney), 9–­11, 22, 109, 215–­17, 265, 269; allusions and samples, 113, 213, 215–­16; arrangement, 62; chord progressions, 216–­17, 219; drumming, 162, 168; Kinfauns demo, 76; lyrics, 4, 64; sampling from, 256; sources, 57, 60 “The Back Seat of My Car” (McCartney), 214, 217–­19, 227n5 “back to nature” approach, 8–­9, 54–­ 71, 117–­19 Badfinger, 33n12 “Badge” (Harrison and Clapton), 191 Baker, Ginger, 164, 171, 175 “Ballad of a Thin Man” (Dylan), 130–­31 “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (Dylan), 137 “Ballad of John and Yoko” (Lennon), 60, 128, 141, 192 “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” (Harrison), 143n7, 192

Band on the Run (McCartney), 228n7, 288, 290 Bannister, Matthew, 193n1 Barker, Chris, 137 Barrett, John, 71n5 Barthes, Roland, 135–­36 BBC, 37, 240 BBC Radio, 56 The Beach Boys, 113, 132, 213, 216–­18, 227n3, 262–­64, 288–­89 The Beastie Boys, 256–­57, 289 “Beatle Bop.” See “Cry for a Shadow” The Beatles, 1–­34; apoliticism, 47–­51; breakup and dissolution of, 6, 197, 226, 263–­65; collaborations, 160n7; commercial success, 51–­52; creation of, 197; critical success, 51–­52; cultural status, 37–­53; drum sound, 171–­73; equipment, 62–­63, 193n3; first contracted recording session, 94; image, 37–­53; vs Jay-­Z, 258–­59; lyrics, 15–­18, 140, 143n11, 259–­60; parallels with The Rolling Stones, 267–­68; partnership with George Martin, 92–­95, 97–­99, 104; personal acquaintances, 129, 131–­33; production techniques, 257; psychedelic experiences, 113–­21; return from India, 47–­51; Rishikesh stay, 1–­5, 8, 34n24, 55, 72–­90, 131–­32, 143n10, 198, 228n10, 265; sampling, 261–­62; solo projects, 198–­99; songs regularly performed in Liverpool and Hamburg clubs 1960 through 1962, 143n1; songwriting, 127, 134–­42, 143n7, 143n10, 177–­79, 266; third and last creative period, 198–­99, 211; vocabulary size, 259. See also specific Beatles; specific performances The Beatles (The Beatles), 46; adaptations, 30–­31, 231–­62; afterlife, 30–­31; allusions and samples, 4, 8, 113–­14, 213, 215–­16, 219–­21, 257, 262; arrangements, 23, 58, 61–­64, 109, 113, 145–­60, 265; big songs, 145–­46, 152–­60; Burton’s dropping, 251–­52; characters, 114–­15,

Index  299 127–­43, 129; character songs, 200; as collective work, 1–­2, 116, 263–­69; composition, 12–­13; contradictions, 1–­2, 116; cover, 8, 29, 235–­36; critical reception, 1–­2, 29–­30, 46–­47, 108–­10, 121–­22, 240; descriptions of, 263; fictional characters, 12, 128–­31, 129, 215; fingerstyle, 74–­76; formal structure, 68–­69; harmony, 65–­67; Harrison’s songs, 191; Kinfauns (or Esher) demos, 55–­57, 64–­69, 72–­73, 80–­84, 89, 97, 103, 106; legacy and influence on later artists, 108–­9, 268–­69; Lennon’s contributions to, 197–­212; love songs, 116–­17; lyrics, 64, 125–­229; mastering, 106–­7n5; McCartney’s songs, 213–­29; melody, 65–­67; modernism, 29; mood swings, 115–­ 16; motivation for, 104–­5; musical/ compositional elements, 145–­58; named individuals, 114–­15, 127–­43; named locales, 114, 141; nature references and imagery, 8–­9, 54–­ 71, 117–­19; orchestration, 145–­60; origins, 5, 54–­71; performers, 115; personal acquaintances, 129, 131–­33; pitch, 145–­58; planning sessions, 8; political purpose, 1; postmodernism, 8–­9, 29; production, 46, 91–­107n5; programming, 22–­23; psychedelic fruits, 108–­23, 236; public figures, 133–­34; recording sessions, 8–­12, 32n6, 34n22, 55, 71n13, 72–­90, 103, 162–­65, 197–­98, 265; recording techniques, 69–­70, 145–­58; rehearsals, 55–­57; release, 103–­4; rhythm, 67; Rishikesh songs not appearing among Kinfauns demos, 55, 56; sales, 30; samplings from, 253–­57; side 1, 24–­25; side 2, 25–­26; side 3, 26–­27; side 4, 27–­29; small songs, 145–­52, 158–­59; songs dropped from, 71n6; songs for everyone, 12–­13, 125–­229; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­67, 269; songs known to

precede the Rishikesh stay, 55, 56; songs likely postdating Kinfauns tapes, 57; songs whose first known recordings are among Kinfauns demos, 55, 56–­57; songwriting for, 139; sources for audio drafts and finished recordings, 55, 56–­57; sources of key recordings and mixes, 60, 61; Starr’s performance on, 13, 161–­76; tabula rasa, 54–­71; title, 109–­10; tonality, 65–­67; tone color, 145–­58; whiteness, 113–­21; working titles, 1–­2, 22–­23. See also specific songs The Beatles, 1967–­1970, 60 Beatles 2014 (The Beatles), 59 The Beatles Anthology (The Beatles), 82, 289 The Beatles at Abbey Road (The Beatles), 60 Beatles for Sale (The Beatles), 179–­80, 193n12 The Beatles’ Second Album (The Beatles), 33n10 The Beatles Unplugged (The Beatles), 73–­74; songs, 90n4 “Beautiful Boy” (Lennon), 211 “Beautiful Girl” (Harrison), 192 “Be-­Bop-­A-­Lula” (Vincent), 143n1 Bee Gees, 259 Beggars Banquet (The Rolling Stones), 49–­50, 267–­68 “Behind That Locked Door” (Harrison), 192 “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (Lennon), 110, 128, 186, 266 Benitez, Vincent, 21–­22, 264 Berlin, Irving, 135, 220 Bernstein, Sid, 38 Berry, Chuck, 113, 127–­28, 144n15, 213–­ 16, 262, 289 “Beware of Darkness” (Harrison), 192 Bill, Bungalow, 129, 132, 142. See also “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” Billboard, 30, 142

300  Index Billionaire Boys Club, 260 “Birthday” (Lennon/McCartney), 26, 57, 213–­15, 269; arrangement, 62; chord progressions, 219; engineering, 69; performer contributions, 115; production, 99; Starr’s drumming on, 173 Bishop, Malden Grange, 118 Black, Cilla, 99 The Black Album (Jay Z), 251–­57, 260, 262, 289 “Blackbird” (McCartney), 8–­9, 20–­ 25, 34n23, 46, 58, 153, 215, 221–­26, 228n10, 266, 269; arrangement, 61–­63; vs Bach’s Bourée in E minor, 65, 66, 222, 223; chord changes, 65; civil rights story connected with, 228n8; evolution of, 65, 66; fingerpicking, 74–­75, 79, 79, 90n6; formal structure, 68–­69; influence, 214; instrumentation, 187–­88, 222–­23; Kinfauns demo, 76, 81; lyrics, 82–­83, 187, 214; outtake, 62; recording techniques, 222–­23; sources, 57, 60 Blackbird Singing (McCartney), 83 Black Dwarf (newspaper), 37, 47–­51 Blaine, Hal, 175 Blake, Blind, 77 Blonde on Blonde (Dylan), 104, 207 “Blue Jay Way” (Harrison), 14, 184, 191, 195n28 Blue Mink, 143n12 Blue Nun, 15 blues, 8, 113–­14 Blumenthal, Bob, 170 Bocking, Daniel, 247 Bomb Squad, 261 Bonell, Carlos, 65 Bonham, John, 171, 175 Bono, 246 “Bony Moronie” (Williams), 127, 143n1 book percussion, 154 Boomtown Rats, 233 Boult, Adrian, 92 Bourrée in E Minor (Bach), 65, 66, 79, 80, 222, 223, 224

Bowie, David, 143n12 Boyd, Jenny, 89n1 Boyd, Pattie, 115 “Boys ” (Dixon and Farrell), 166 Bradley, Adam, 31, 268 Brahmand Saraswati (Guru Dev), 82 Brandt, Willy, 43 Brazil, 42 Breckenfeld, Ed, 164 Breeders, 233 “Brian Epstein Blues” (McCartney), 56 British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors (BASCA), 51 British music hall traditions, 8, 219–­20 British New Left, 51–­52 Britton, Geoff, 228n7 Brown, Peter, 7, 89n1 Buffalo Bill Cody, 132 Bungalow Bill, 129, 132, 142. See also “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” Burns, Lori, 18, 31, 268 Burton, Brian (Danger Mouse), 31, 251–­62 Busby, Matt, 128 Bush, George H. W., 248 Bush, George W., 247–­48 The Byrds, 195n26, 196n34, 267 “Calico Skies” (McCartney), 22, 215, 221–­26 candy or chocolates (Mackintosh’s Good News), 156, 186–­87, 266 “Can’t Buy Me Love” (McCartney), 95 “Can You Take Me Back” (McCartney), 57 Capitol Tower, 106n5 Carmichael, Hoagy, 216 Carmon, Irin, 241 Carroll, Lewis, 18, 131 Carrott, Jasper, 162 car songs, 217 Carter, Gloria, 252 Carter, Maybelle, 90n5 Carter scratch, 90n5 Cast-­Iron Shore, 33n12

Index  301 Celtic guitar, 76 “Change Clothes” (Jay Z), 254, 260 Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road (McCartney), 222–­23 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (McCartney), 215, 221–­22, 288, 290 Chapman, Mark David, 239–­40 characters in songs, 114–­15, 127–­43, 129; female, 127, 129, 143n2; fictional creations, 12, 128–­31, 129, 215; male, 127–­28, 129; personal acquaintances, 129, 131–­33; public figures, 133–­34 character songs, 200 Charles, Ray, 113, 127–­28 Chicago Seven, 53n1 “Child of Nature” (also known as “On the Road to Rishikesh”) (Lennon), 59, 71n7, 80, 198–­99 chocolates (Mackintosh’s Good News), 156, 186–­87, 266 chord progressions, 65–­67, 199–­202, 227n4; naughty chords, 194n19; slash chords, 224–­25. See also specific songs The Chords, 250n1 “The Chrome-­Plated Megaphone of Destiny” (Zappa), 114 “Circles” (Harrison), 14, 57, 59, 185–­ 86, 191 Cirque du Soleil, 80 civil rights, 211, 228n8 Clapton, Eric, 40, 198; addiction to Mackintosh’s Good News chocolates, 156, 186–­87, 266; “Badge,” 191; contributions to “Here Comes the Sun,” 55; contributions to the White Album, 14, 63, 70n5, 101, 114–­15, 168, 185–­88, 195n30; contributions to Wonderwall Music, 184–­85, 191 “Clarabella” (Pingatore), 143n1 Clarke, Jeremiah, 196n35 classical music, 187, 196n35, 226–­27, 266 clawhammer or Travis picking, 77–­79, 78, 79, 228n10 Clayson, Alan, 165 Cleaver, Elridge [sic], 50

Clifford, Doug, 173 Coasters, 127–­28 Cockburn, Bruce, 111 Cocker, Joe, 192 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 132 Cohn, Nik, 29–­30 “College Cheers” (Holzman), 257 Coltrane, John, 112, 118–­19, 170 “Come Together” (Lennon), 123n3, 144n15 composition, 145–­58 confessionals, 75–­76 Conkers, 213 “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (Lennon), 25–­26, 186, 204–­5, 266–­67, 269; characters, 129, 130, 132, 139, 200; chord progressions, 65–­67, 207; formal structure, 69; keyboards, 99; Kinfauns demo, 83; performer contributions, 115; production, 101; recording sessions, 207–­8; rhythmic structure, 67, 208; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 174 Cooke, Nancy, 132 Cooke, Richard A. III, 132 copyright issues, 256–­57 Cosby, David, 75 Cott, Jonathan, 33n18 counterculture, 40–­47, 50–­51, 53n3 The Country Hams, 228n7 Covach, John, 14 Cover Age, 233–­34, 250n1 cover art, 6, 8, 29, 141, 235–­36 cover songs, 233–­34, 250nn1–­2, 268–­ 69 Cox, Terry, 76–­77 craftsperson approach, 193n6 Cramer, Floyd, 228n7 Crawford, Richard, 135 Cream, 191 creativity, 256 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 173 Crew Cuts, 250n1 Cronkite, Walter, 42 Crosby, David, 75, 289 Crosby, Stills & Nash, 75

302  Index Crüe, Mötley, 259 “Cry Baby Cry” (Lennon), 18, 28, 55, 120, 266–­67, 269; arrangement, 152–­ 53, 159; characters, 129, 131; chord progressions, 204–­5, 227n4; engineering, 69; formal structure, 68; instrumentation, 159–­60; lyrics, 187; musical/compositional elements, 146, 152–­53, 155–­56, 159; performer contributions, 115; recording sessions, 84, 208; recording techniques, 155–­56, 159–­60; sources, 56, 60; Starr’s drumming on, 167 “Cry for a Shadow” (Harrison and Lennon), 179, 190, 193n10 cultural revolution, 50–­51 Czechoslovakia, 42 damping, 171–­73 Danelli, Dino, 171, 175 Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), 31, 251–­62 Davies, Hunter, 41, 140–­41 Davis, Gary, 77 Day, Doris, 128 “A Day in the Life” (Lennon), 174, 186, 266 “Day Tripper” (Lennon and McCartney), 166, 173 “Dear Boy” (McCartney), 227n5 “Dear Doctor” (The Rolling Stones), 268 “Dear Prudence” (Lennon), 11, 15, 24, 70, 116–­19, 204–­5, 211, 228n10, 269; characters, 129, 132, 200; chord progression, 200–­201; drumming, 162, 168–­69; formal structure, 200; Kinfauns demo, 55, 81, 83–­84; Lennon’s fingerpicking, 77–­78, 79, 199–­201; lyrics, 200; melody, 200–­ 201; performer contributions, 115, 201; recording sessions, 99, 168; samplings from, 254; sources, 56, 60; tone, 200–­201 “Dehradun” (Harrison), 56, 59, 191 Democratic National Convention, 3, 42, 44, 53n1

Dennis, Jon, 108 DeNora, Tia, 136–­37 DeRogatis, Jim, 110–­11 Dickens, Charles, 215 “Dig It” (Harrison), 128 Dion, 127, 141 Dirty Mac, 198–­99, 211n2 Disc & Music Echo (magazine), 139 “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” (Williams), 143n1 Djs, 261 “Doctor Robert” (Lennon), 128 Donegan, Lonnie, 143n11 Donovan, 111, 198, 228n8; contributions to the White Album, 8, 115; fingerpicking, 8, 77–­78, 78; “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” 83, 289; Paul’s musical mimicry of, 118; Rishikesh stay, 8, 77, 89n1, 117, 132, 228n10; Rishikesh tape, 55, 56; “Sand and Foam” (Leitch), 77–­78, 289 “Don’t Bother Me” (Harrison), 138, 143n7, 179–­80, 180, 190, 194n13 “Don’t Let Me Down” (Lennon), 176n3 “Don’t Pass Me By” (Starr), 10, 13, 23, 26, 32n1, 55–­57, 117, 143n9, 269; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 165 Double Fantasy (Lennon), 211 double-­tracking, 152, 156, 160n1; artificial or automatic (ADT), 101, 148, 151, 156, 160n3 Down in Havana (The Beatles), 60 “Down in Havana” (McCartney), 57 drop D tuning, 78, 79 drugs, 5–­7, 10, 38, 96, 182; fruits of psychedelia, 108–­23, 236; hallucinogens, 11–­12, 198; heroin, 7, 240; lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 3, 18–­19, 38, 40–­41, 110–­12, 182, 236; marijuana, 40 drum kits, 172 drumming, 13, 157; The Beatles sound, 171–­73; book percussion, 154; drum pattern accenting two and four, 165, 166; Starr’s perfor-

Index  303 mance, 161–­76; Starr’s signature fill, 167, 168, 174, 176n3 Duchamp, Marcel, 256 duduk, 224 Dylan, Bob, 50–­51, 113–­14, 129, 143–­ 44n13, 198, 213–­14, 259, 264; “Ballad of a Thin Man,” 130–­31; “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” 137; Blonde on Blonde, 104, 207; “Hurricane,” 137; “I’d Have You Anytime,” 191; “I Don’t Believe You,” 137; “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” 137; “It Ain’t Me Babe,” 137; “I Want You,” 137; John Wesley Harding, 8, 59, 81; “John Wesley Harding,” 137; “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” 143n2; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” 137; “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” 207; “Sad-­Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” 14–­15, 114, 189; song references to, 133–­34, 141–­42 Easter eggs, 63 Eastern philosophy: songs influenced by, 5, 183–­84, 268, 269; Tao Te Ching or I Ching, 59, 184, 188, 266; Transcendental Meditation, 37, 59, 131–­32 Eastman, Linda, 7–­8, 217 “Ebony and Ivory” (McCartney), 221, 228n9 echo chambers, 160n5 Ecstatic Umbrella, 39 The Ed Sullivan Show, 40 “Eleanor Rigby” (McCartney), 120, 128, 182–­84, 187, 226–­27, 267; string arrangement, 215, 227n2 Electric Light Orchestra, 143n12, 268 Electronic Sound, 185, 191 Eliot, T. S., 142 Emerick, Geoff, 9–­11, 73, 91–­92, 97–­ 100, 171 EMI Group, 9, 34n22, 55, 256; Abbey Road Studios, 10, 92, 103; Complete Controlroom Monitor Mixes, 60; EMI Outtakes, 60; Parlophone Records, 93–­94

Eminem, 253, 259 Emmanuel, Tommy, 77 “English Tea” (McCartney), 215, 221 Enya, 259 Epstein, Brian, 6, 70n2, 93–­96, 140, 195n21 Esher demo tapes. See Kinfauns demo tapes “Etudes Symphoniques (Theme—­ Etudes 1 to 12)” (Hess and Schwarz), 257 Eustache, Pedro, 224 Evans, Dave (“The Edge”), 237–­38 Evans, Mal, 89n1, 100, 107n5, 115 Everett, Walter (Walt), 5, 34n20, 109–­ 10, 114, 123n1, 160n4, 160n7, 168, 210, 242, 264 Everly Brothers, 127, 179–­80 “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” (Lennon), 10, 18, 23, 26–­27, 116, 269; arrangement, 62; chord progressions, 199, 204–­5; lyrics, 205–­6; musical/ compositional elements, 65, 199; rhythmic structure, 67, 207; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 165–­66, 172 “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” (Perkins), 193n12 “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright (Ghetto Bastard)” (Naughty by Nature), 256, 290 Fahrenheit 451, 227n2 Faithfull, Marianne, 40 Farrow, John, 89n1 Farrow, Mia, 86, 89n1, 132 Farrow, Prudence, 11, 84, 89n1, 129, 131–­32, 200 female characters, 127, 129, 143n2, 215 female perspectives, 238–­40 Fender equipment, 63, 193n3 fictional characters, 12, 128–­31, 129, 215 fingerpicking or fingerstyle, 8, 71n11, 73–­81, 90n6, 199–­202, 228n10; clawhammer or Travis picking, 77–­79, 78, 79, 228n10

304  Index finger-­waggers, 266, 269 The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, 77 “Fixing a Hole” (McCartney), 16–­17, 206 Flaming Pie (McCartney), 215, 219, 221–­22, 288, 290 flanging, 151, 155 Flans, Robyn, 169 flower power, 40–­41 Floyd, Pink, 99 Foley-­like effects, 69 Fool, 6 “The Fool on the Hill” (McCartney), 16–­17, 136, 229n13 “For No One” (McCartney), 187 “For You Blue” (Harrison), 141, 189, 192 4 Way Street (Crosby Stills Nash & Young), 75 Four Freshmen, 216 Four Tune Tellers, 93 frailing, 77 Fricke, David, 241 Frith, Simon, 136, 138 From Kinfauns to Chaos (The Beatles), 60, 289 Frontani, Michael, 2 “Fun, Fun, Fun” (Wilson and Love), 216 Gaiman, Neil, 238 Garagiola, Joe, 6 Garrison, Paul, 173 Geldof, Bob, 239 Genesis, 268 Genette, Gérard, 234 geographic settings, 114, 141 George Harrison (Harrison), 57, 191 Gershwin, Ira, 135 Get Back (The Beatles), 192 “Get Back” (McCartney), 60, 128 Get Back month, 62–­63 “Get Off” (Harrison), 192 “Getting Better” (Lennon and McCartney), 262 Gibran, Kahlil, 33n12, 59, 122, 187, 201, 266

Gitlin, Todd, 39 Giuliano, Geoffrey, 163 “Give Me Love” (Rosie and the Originals), 33n18 “Give Peace a Chance” (Lennon), 60 “Glass Onion” (Lennon), 24–­25, 110, 121, 266–­67, 269; allusions and samples, 114; arrangement, 62; characters, 129, 129, 132, 141; chord progressions, 199, 206; engineering, 70; formal structure, 69, 206; lyrics, 4, 15–­18, 64, 205–­6; meter, 206; “Oh, yeah” phrases, 15–­18; production work, 11, 62, 99, 101–­2; recording sessions, 173; references, 129; rhythms, 67; sampling from, 256; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 173; Thomas-­produced version, 106n3 glass onions, 33n11 Gleason, Ralph, 44–­45 Gloor, Storm, 142 “God” (Lennon), 289 “Golden Slumbers” (McCartney), 176n3 Goldstein, Richard, 30, 46 Gone Tomorrow, Here Today (The Beatles), 60, 289 Gone Troppo (Harrison), 191 Goodbye (Cream), 191 “Good Day Sunshine” (Lennon and McCartney), 69 “Good Golly Miss Molly” (Little Richard), 143n1 “Good Morning Good Morning” (Lennon), 186, 212n5 “Good Night” (Lennon), 58, 269; arrangement, 102–­3, 207; chord progressions, 207–­9; critical reception, 139; first bars, 123n1; formal structure, 69, 206–­7; harmony, 65; as lullaby, 8, 17–­18, 28, 46, 89, 109, 120–­23, 204–­7, 267; orchestration, 13, 62, 207; recording sessions, 10, 208; sources, 57 Goons, 93 “Gopala Krishna” (Harrison), 59

Index  305 “Got To Get You Into My Life” (McCartney), 187 Gould, Jonathan, 32n1, 59 “Govinda Jai Jai” (Harrison), 59 Graham, Davy, 76 Grammy awards, 51 granny music, 174 The Grey Album (Danger Mouse), 251–­ 58, 261–­62, 289 Grey Tuesday, 256 Grof, Stanislav, 111 Gross, Terry, 256 Guardian (newspaper), 46–­47 guitaristics, 76–­81, 220; Celtic guitar, 76; chord progressions, 65–­67, 199; fingerpicking or fingerstyle, 8, 71n11, 73–­81, 78, 79, 90n6, 199–­202, 228n10; Martin D28 steel string acoustic guitars, 73–­74; naughty chords, 194n19; slash chords, 224–­ 25 gun control, 237, 239–­41, 249–­50 “The Gun Mix (Happiness Is a Warm Gun)” (U2), 31, 233, 237–­38, 245–­ 50, 290; formal structure, 241–­42, 242, 245–­46 guns, killing, or shooting: references to, 123n3, 238–­39. See also “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” Guru Dev (Brahmand Saraswati), 82 hallucinogens, 11–­12, 198 Hamelman, Steve, 13 Hamilton, Richard, 235 The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (The Incredible String Band), 77 “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (Lennon), 9, 18–­20, 25–­26, 61, 202–­3, 211, 265–­67, 269; adaptations, 31, 233–­50, 288; characters, 129, 132, 139; chord progressions, 203–­4; contradictions, 116; critical reception, 240–­41; formal structure, 68–­69, 241–­44, 242; hypertexts, 241–­42; interpretation, 245; Lennon’s fingerpicking on, 77; lyrics, 64, 143n11, 186–­87, 203, 233, 236,

242–­44; production work, 99, 102; recording sessions, 19, 208, 236–­37; rhythmic and metric changes, 202–­ 4, 207, 212n5; sonics and stylistic features, 244–­45; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 13, 19, 173, 204 “A Hard Day’s Night” (Lennon and McCartney), 95, 102, 127 A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles), 24, 127, 138 harmony, 65–­67 Harrison, Dhani, 194n19 Harrison, George, 10–­11, 15, 41, 197, 222; All Things Must Pass, 59, 71n5, 189–­92, 196n40, 199; and Apple Corps, 6; contributions to “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” 83; contributions to the White Album, 106n5, 150–­51, 185–­89, 194n20, 195n30, 269; and Dylan, 143n13, 191; early songs, 179–­80, 190; experiences with LSD, 112, 182; George Harrison, 57, 191; Gone Troppo, 191; guitar work, 70n5, 156–­57, 179, 193n3, 194n15, 194n19; and “Hey Jude,” 12; Hinduism, 88; influence on later artists, 268–­69; Kinfauns demos, 57, 80–­81; and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 58–­59, 85; and “Revolution 9,” 46; Rishikesh stay, 1–­5, 88; Rishikesh tape, 55, 56; second emergence, 13–­14, 185–­89, 191–­92; on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 264–­65; as singer-­ songwriter, 185–­89; sitar work, 182–­ 85, 195n22, 195n25; solo career, 264; songs and songwriting, 101, 138–­40, 143n7, 177–­96, 193n11, 199, 266–­ 67; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­67, 269; Thirty Three & 1/3, 191–­92; on the White Album, 265; Wonderwall Music, 58, 184–­85, 191, 198 Harrison, George–­specific songs by: “All Things Must Pass,” 59, 191; “Art of Dying,” 190, 194n17; “Awaiting On You All,” 192; “Badge,” 191; “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp,” 143n7,

306  Index Harrison, George–­specific songs by: (continued) 192; “Beautiful Girl,” 192; “Behind That Locked Door,” 192; “Beware of Darkness,” 192; “Circles,” 14, 57, 59, 185–­86, 191; “Cry for a Shadow,” 179, 190, 193n10; “Dehradun,” 56, 59, 191; “Dig It,” 128; “Don’t Bother Me,” 138, 143n7, 179–­80, 180, 190, 194n13; “For You Blue,” 141, 189, 192; “Get Off,” 192; “Gopala Krishna,” 59; “Govinda Jai Jai,” 59; “Hear Me Lord,” 191; “Here Comes the Sun,” 55, 189, 192; “Hey Hey Georgie,” 192; “His Name Is Legs,” 143n7; “How Do You Tell Someone?,” 192; “I’d Have You Anytime,” 191; “I Dig Love,” 192; “If I Needed Someone,” 181, 190, 194n17, 194n19; “I Live for You,” 192; “I Me Mine,” 189, 192; “I’m So Tired,” 62; “I Need You,” 143n7, 180–­81, 190; “The Inner Light,” 51, 58–­59, 96, 184–­85, 191, 198, 269; “In Spite of All the Danger,” 179, 190; “I Remember Jeep,” 192; “Isn’t It a Pity,” 191; “It Is Discovered,” 192; “It’s All Too Much,” 182, 191, 198; “It’s Johnny’s Birthday,” 192; “I Want to Tell You,” 14, 143n7, 181–­82, 191, 194n17, 194n19; “Let It Down,” 191; “Long Long Long,” 11–­15, 27, 57, 99, 114–­17, 121, 145–­46, 150–­52, 159, 174, 188–­91, 189, 196nn37–­39, 254, 266, 269; “Love You To,” 14, 181–­85, 183, 190, 195n22; “Maureen,” 192; “Miss O’Dell,” 143n7; “My Sweet Lord,” 59; “Not Guilty,” 10, 12, 14, 55–­57, 57, 71n7, 99, 185, 191, 195–­96n33; “Old Brown Shoe,” 63, 173, 189, 192; “Only a Northern Song,” 14, 182, 191, 194n20, 196n35, 198; “Out of the Blue,” 192; “Piggies,” 14, 25, 32n1, 55, 56, 62–­64, 69, 99, 115, 120, 173, 187–­88, 187, 191, 254–­56, 266, 269; “Plug Me In,” 192; “Ramblin’ Woman,” 192; “Run

of the Mill,” 192; “Savoy Truffle,” 13, 15, 20, 27–­28, 57, 62, 113–­15, 146, 152–­53, 156–­60, 172, 185–­87, 186, 191, 196n34, 254, 265–­66, 269; “See Yourself,” 182, 191; “Soft-­Hearted Hana,” 143n7; “Something,” 63, 68, 75, 177, 189, 192; “Sour Milk Sea,” 14, 55, 57, 70n5, 185–­86, 191, 195n30, 195n32; “Taxman,” 14, 128, 181–­83, 190, 194nn17–­18; “Thanks for the Pepperoni,” 192; “Think for Yourself,” 181–­83, 190; “Wah Wah,” 191; “What Is Life,” 192; “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” 13–­14, 25, 60, 63–­67, 80–­81, 101, 115–­18, 138–­ 39, 167–­68, 188, 188, 191, 254–­57, 266, 269; “Window, Window,” 192; “Within You Without You,” 14, 71n8, 184–­85, 191, 194n20; “Woman Don’t You Cry for Me,” 192; “You Know What to Do,” 190, 193n12, 194n13; “You Like Me Too Much,” 135, 143n7, 180–­81, 190 Harrison, Pattie, 58–­59, 71n8, 89n1 Harrisongs Ltd., 195n21 Harry, Bill, 33n10, 193n11 Hatten, Robert, 215 “Hear Me Lord” (Harrison), 191 “The Heart Gently Weeps” (Wu-­Tang Clan), 256, 290 Heath, Edward, 128 “Hello, Goodbye” (McCartney), 166 “Hello Little Girl” (Lennon), 140 Help! (The Beatles), 95, 175, 180–­82, 190, 194n14 “Helter Skelter” (McCartney), 20–­21, 27, 46, 113–­17, 121, 139, 214, 265, 269; arrangement, 62; production, 99; recording sessions, 169; sampling from, 256; sources, 57, 60; Starr’s drumming on, 169–­71 Hendrix, Jimi, 185 Henri, Pierre, 210 “Here, There, and Everywhere” (McCartney), 217 “Here Comes the Sun” (Harrison), 55, 189, 192

Index  307 “Here Today” (McCartney), 226–­27 heroin, 7, 240 Heron, Mike, 77 Herrmann, Bernard, 227n2 Hess, Myra, 257 Hesse, Hermann, 269 Heston, Charlton, 237 “Hey Bulldog” (Lennon), 58, 63, 198, 207 “Hey Hey Georgie” (Harrison), 192 “Hey Jude” (McCartney), 3, 21, 128, 198, 266, 269; commercial success, 51; formal structure, 68; recording sessions, 12; sources, 57, 60; Starr’s drumming on, 174–­75 hip-­hop, 31, 256–­57, 261–­62 Hirsch, Edward, 254–­55 “His Name Is Legs” (Harrison), 143n7 Hoffman, Abbie, 53n1 Hofmann, Albert, 112 “Hold Me Tight” (Lennon and McCartney), 166 Holly, Buddy, 63, 127, 193n9 Hollywood drum kits, 172 Holzman, Jac, 257 Honey Pie, 129, 131 “Honey Pie” (McCartney), 8, 46, 116–­17, 120, 215, 265, 269; allusions and samples, 213, 219–­20; arrangement, 21; characters, 129, 131, 139; engineering, 69; formal structure, 68–­69; Kinfauns demo, 76; lyrics, 20, 27, 64; recording techniques, 62; sources, 57; Starr’s performance on, 12, 174 Hopkin, Mary, 6, 198 Hopkins, Nicky, 70n5, 115, 195n30 Horn, Paul, 73, 89n1 Hoskyns, Barney, 241 “Hound Dog” (Thornton), 250n1 Houston, Jean, 119–­20 “How Do You Do It?” (Murray), 94 “How Do You Sleep” (Lennon), 132 “How Do You Tell Someone?” (Harrison), 192 How I Won the War (film), 5 Howlett, Kevin, 195n26

Hoyland, John, 48–­51 humorous songs, 269t “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (Donovan), 83, 289 “Hurricane” (Dylan), 137 Hurt, Mississippi John, 77 Hutcheon, Linda, 234 hypertexts, 234, 239–­40 hypnagogic pop, 122 “I Am the Walrus” (Lennon), 16–­17, 123n3, 205–­6, 212n3, 267 “I Can See for Miles” (Townshend), 32n7 Ice Cube, 261 I Ching or Tao Te Ching, 59, 184, 188, 266 “I’d Have You Anytime” (Harrison and Dylan), 191 “I Dig Love” (Harrison), 192 “I Don’t Believe You” (Dylan), 137 “I Don’t Like Mondays” (Geldof), 238–­39, 241 “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier” (Lennon), 211 “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (Lennon and McCartney), 136 “I Feel Fine” (Lennon), 127, 136 “If I Needed Someone” (Harrison), 181, 190, 194n17, 194n19 “I Live for You” (Harrison), 192 “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (Dylan), 137 “I’ll Cry Instead” (Lennon and McCartney), 136 “I’ll Get You” (Lennon), 16, 33n10 Imagine (Lennon), 56, 59, 198–­99, 211 “Imagine” (Lennon), 211 “I’m a Loser” (Lennon), 135 “I’m Down” (McCartney), 173 “I Me Mine” (Harrison), 189, 192 “[I’m Just a] Child of Nature” (Lennon), 56, 76, 81–­82, 116 “I’m Looking Through You” (McCartney), 135 “I’m Only Sleeping” (Lennon), 210

308  Index “I’m So Tired” (Lennon), 23, 25, 61, 70, 211, 269; characters, 129, 133; chord progressions, 208–­9; formal structure, 209; lyrics, 64; recording sessions, 208; sources, 56, 62; Starr’s drumming on, 174 The Incredible String Band, 77, 80 Indian music, 182–­85, 191. See also Eastern philosophy Indica Gallery, 6 “I Need You” (Harrison), 143n7, 180–­ 81, 190 Inglis, Ian, 1, 12, 193n1 In His Own Write (Lennon), 15 “In My Life” (Lennon), 102, 140 “The Inner Light” (Harrison), 51, 58–­ 59, 96, 184–­85, 191, 198, 269t “In Spite of All the Danger” (Harrison and McCartney), 179, 190 “Instant Karma” (Lennon), 60 instrumentation, 187 International Times, 46 intertextuality, 213–­29; adaptations, 234–­35; allusions and samples, 4, 8, 113–­14, 213, 215–­16, 219–­21, 257, 262, 265–­66; strategic, 215–­17; stylistic, 113–­14, 213, 215–­20 “I Remember Jeep” (Harrison), 192 Irwin, Colin, 241 ISB. See Incredible String Band “Isn’t It a Pity” (Harrison), 191 Is This What You Want (Lomax), 195n30 “It Ain’t Me Babe” (Dylan), 137 “It Is Discovered” (Harrison), 192 “It’s All Too Much” (Harrison), 182, 191, 198 “It’s Johnny’s Birthday” (Harrison), 192 “It’s Only Love” (Lennon), 182 “I’ve Got a Feeling” (Lennon and McCartney), 176n3 “I’ve Had Enough” (McCartney), 215, 219 “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (McCartney), 80, 136, 182

The Iveys, 33n12 Ivor Novello Awards, 51 Iwamura, Jane, 86–­89 “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (Lennon and McCartney), 260 “I Want to Tell You” (Harrison), 14, 143n7, 181–­82, 191, 194n17, 194n19 “I Want You” (Dylan), 137 “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” (Lennon), 267 “I Will” (McCartney), 20–­23, 26, 116–­ 17, 145–­46, 265, 269; lyrics, 121, 214; musical/compositional elements, 146–­47, 151–­53, 158; production, 99; recording techniques, 146–­47; sources for audio drafts and finished recordings, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 173 “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (Williams and Piron), 143n1 Jackson, Al, 175 Jagger, Mick, 3–­4, 32n3, 40, 47 “Jai guru dev” phrase, 82 James, Dick, 195n21 James, Elmore, 141 James, Etta, 127–­28 James, William, 112, 123n2 Jansch, Scot Bert, 76–­77 Japan, 42 Jardine, Al, 227n3 Jay-­Z, 31, 257–­60; The Black Album, 251–­57, 260, 262, 289; “Change Clothes,” 254, 260; The Grey Album samplings from, 255–­57; “Justify My Thug,” 262; “Moment of Clarity,” 253; “99 Problems,” 253, 257–­58; Reasonable Doubt, 252; “What More Can I Say,” 253–­56 “Jealous Guy” (Lennon), 56, 59, 82, 198–­99, 211 “Jenny Wren” (McCartney), 22, 215, 221–­26, 225, 229n12 Jim, Jungle, 132 Joel, Billy, 268

Index  309 John, Elton, 268 John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, 56, 88, 167, 289 “Johnny B. Goode” (Berry), 143n1, 216 Johnson, Lyndon, 42 John songs, 178 Johnston, Bruce, 227n3 John Wesley Harding (Dylan), 8, 59, 81 “John Wesley Harding” (Dylan), 137 Jones, Brian, 50 Jones, Desmond, 129, 129, 142 Jones, LeRoi, 50 Jones, Molly, 129, 129 Jones, Mr., 129, 130–­31, 142 Jones, Quincy, 262 Joyce, James, 15, 32, 113 “Jubilee” (McCartney), 57 “Julia” (Lennon), 8–­9, 26, 204–­5, 211, 228n10, 266, 269; arrangement, 62–­63, 159; characters, 129, 133; chord progression, 81–­82, 201–­2; compositional draft, 65, 65; formal structure, 68, 148, 149, 202; instrumentation, 159; Kinfauns demo, 76, 81; Lennon’s fingerpicking on, 71n11, 74, 77–­78, 78, 199, 201–­2; as love song, 58–­59, 70, 116–­21; lyrics, 17, 116, 122–­23, 147–­48, 151–­52, 186–­87, 201, 260, 266; musical/ compositional elements, 65, 145–­52, 159, 199; recording sessions, 12; recording techniques, 145–­50, 152; released version, 65, 65; sources, 56 “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (The Rolling Stones), 267 Jungle Jim, 132 “Junk” (McCartney), 57 “Justify My Love” (Madonna), 262 “Justify My Thug” (Jay Z), 262 Kapurch, Katie, 34n23 “Karma” (MF Grimm), 256, 290 Keightley, Keir, 74–­76 Keltner, Jim, 163, 176n1 Kennedy, Robert, 42

keyboards, 70n5, 95, 99, 106n1 Kimsey, John, 5 Kinfauns (or Esher) demo tapes, 14, 73–­76, 80–­84, 89, 97, 103; The Beatles Unplugged, 73–­74; bootlegs, 90n4; lyrics, 64; songs whose first known recordings are among, 55, 56–­57 King, B. B., 128 King, Carole, 214 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 42 King Crimson, 268 King’s College Choir, 257 Kirkcaldy, Scotland, 129, 131 Klosterman, Chuck, 256 Kocot, Monika, 82 Kofsky, Frank, 170 Kottke, Leo, 77 Kozinn, Allan, 103 Krasner, Paul, 53n1 “Kreen-­Akrore” (McCartney), 169 Krerowitz, Aaron, 33n16 Kurshan, Nancy, 53n1 Lacasse, Serge, 234–­35 Lady Madonna, 128–­29, 129 “Lady Madonna” (McCartney), 63, 191, 198, 206, 265, 269; commercial success, 51; lyrics, 16–­17, 128–­29; recording sessions, 58, 96 Lady of Rage, 260 Landau, Jon, 49–­51, 53n3 Lang, Thomas, 169–­70, 172 Lao-­tzu, 119 Lapham, Lewis, 73 “Last Night on Earth” (U2), 233, 237, 241 Lauren, Ralph, 260 Lawrence, D. H., 110 Leander, Mike, 99 Lear, Edward, 128 Leary, Timothy, 83, 111, 117–­18, 186 LeBlanc, Jim, 123n1 legal issues, 256–­57 Leitch, Donovan, 76–­77, 289 Lennon, Cynthia, 6, 89n1, 198

310  Index Lennon, John, 31, 33n10, 33n18, 41, 75–­76, 86–­87; and Apple Corps, 6; character songs, 200; contradictions, 116; contributions to the White Album, 19–­23, 56–­57, 146–­47, 150, 153, 160n7, 197–­212, 269; Double Fantasy, 211; as Dr. Winston O’Boogie, 20; drug use, 10, 110–­11; and Dylan, 143–­44n13; Esher demos, 60; experiments with meter, 207, 212n5; fingerpicking, 8, 71n11, 77–­81, 78, 79, 199–­202, 228n10; on George’s songs, 184; guitar work, 61, 62, 220; In His Own Write, 15; Imagine, 56, 59, 198–­99, 211; influence on later artists, 268; John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, 56, 88, 167, 289; Kinfauns demos, 56, 57, 65–­66, 76, 82; love songs, 138; and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 34n24, 58–­59, 84–­85, 88; and Mardas, 90n7; and Northern Songs, 195n21; “An Open Letter to John Lennon” (Hoyland), 48–­49; and Paul, 7–­10, 174, 197, 226–­27; politics, 34n25; Rishikesh stay, 1–­5, 34n24, 55, 72, 82; solo career, 264; Some Time in New York City, 211, 250n3; song references to, 141; songs and songwriting, 15–­19, 127, 132, 138–­42, 144n15, 178–­80, 183, 193n7, 197–­212, 259, 261, 265–­67; songs directed at Yoko, 202; songs directed toward Julia Lennon, 202; songs for the White Album, 197–­212, 269; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­67, 269; Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, 6–­7, 45, 70n2, 198, 210; “A Very Open Letter to John Hoyland from John Lennon,” 48–­49; on the White Album, 9–­10, 58, 105, 108, 263; and Yoko, 6–­7, 33n14, 236, 240–­41 Lennon, John–­specific songs by: “Across the Universe,” 58, 68, 82, 117, 138; “All You Need Is Love,” 40; “Ask Me Why,” 140; “Attica State,” 211; “Baby’s in Black,” 194n14;

“Ballad of John and Yoko,” 60, 128, 141, 192; “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” 60, 128, 141, 192; “Beautiful Boy,” 211; “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” 110, 128, 186, 266; “Birthday,” 213; “Child of Nature” (also known as “On the Road to Rishikesh”), 59, 71n7, 80, 198–­99; “Come Together,” 123n3, 144n15; “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” 25–­26, 56, 65–­69, 83, 99–­ 101, 115, 129, 130–­32, 139, 174, 186, 200, 204–­8, 266–­67; contributions to the White Album, 61, 62; “Cry Baby Cry,” 18, 28, 55, 56, 60, 68–­69, 84, 115, 120, 129, 131, 146, 152–­56, 159–­60, 167, 187, 204–­5, 208, 227n4, 266–­67; “Cry for a Shadow,” 179, 190, 193n10; “A Day in the Life,” 174, 186, 266; “Day Tripper,” 166, 173; “Dear Prudence,” 11, 15, 24, 55, 56, 60, 70, 77–­78, 79, 81–­84, 99, 115–­19, 129, 132, 162, 168–­69, 199–­201, 204–­5, 211, 228n10, 254, 269; “Doctor Robert,” 128; “Don’t Let Me Down,” 176n3; “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” 10, 18, 23, 26–­27, 56, 62, 65–­67, 116, 165–­66, 172, 199, 204–­7, 269; “Getting Better,” 262; “Give Peace a Chance,” 60; “Glass Onion,” 4, 11, 15–­18, 24–­25, 56, 62–­64, 67–­70, 99–­102, 106n3, 110, 114, 121, 129, 129, 132, 141, 173, 199, 205–­6, 256, 266–­67, 269; “God,” 289; “Good Morning Good Morning,” 186, 212n5; “Good Night,” 8, 10, 13, 17–­18, 28, 46, 57, 58, 62, 65, 69, 89, 102–­3, 109, 120–­23, 123n1, 139, 204–­9, 267, 269; “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” 9, 13, 18–­20, 25–­26, 31, 56, 61, 64, 68–­69, 77, 99, 102, 116, 129, 132, 139, 143n11, 173, 186–­ 87, 202–­4, 207–­8, 211, 212n5, 233, 235–­37, 240–­45, 242, 265–­67, 269, 288; “A Hard Day’s Night,” 95, 102, 127; “Hello Little Girl,” 140; “Hey

Index  311 Bulldog,” 58, 63, 198, 207; “How Do You Sleep,” 132; “I Am the Walrus,” 16–­17, 123n3, 205–­6, 212n3, 267; “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier,” 211; “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” 136; “I Feel Fine,” 127, 136; “I’ll Cry Instead,” 136; “I’ll Get You,” 16, 33n10; “Imagine,” 211; “I’m a Loser,” 135; “[I’m Just a] Child of Nature,” 56, 76, 81–­82, 116; “I’m Only Sleeping,” 210; “I’m So Tired,” 23, 25, 56, 61–­64, 70, 129, 133, 174, 208–­11, 269; “In My Life,” 102, 140; “Instant Karma,” 60; “It’s Only Love,” 182; “I’ve Got a Feeling,” 176n3; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 260; “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” 267; “Jealous Guy,” 56, 59, 82, 198–­99, 211; “Julia,” 8–­9, 12, 17, 26, 56, 58–­ 59, 62–­65, 65, 68–­70, 71n11, 74–­78, 78, 81–­82, 116–­23, 129, 133, 145–­52, 149, 151–­52, 159, 186–­87, 199–­205, 211, 228n10, 260, 266, 269; “Look at Me,” 56, 71n11; “Love Me Do,” 94–­95, 127, 140, 178, 259–­60; “The Luck of the Irish,” 211; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” 16–­17, 58, 63, 66, 128, 212n5; “Mean Mr. Mustard,” 56; “Misery,” 166; “Mother,” 60, 133, 202; “My Mummy’s Dead,” 133; “No Reply,” 139; “Norwegian Wood,” 182–­83, 195n25; “Nowhere Man,” 183; “Oh Yoko,” 202, 211; “On the Road to Rishikesh” (“Child of Nature”), 59, 71n7, 80, 198–­99; “Please Please Me,” 94–­95, 139, 178, 260; “Polythene Pam,” 57, 123n3, 136, 142; “Rain,” 110, 173, 194n19; “Revolution,” 3, 10, 47, 56, 56, 60, 64, 115–­16, 187, 198–­99, 208, 266, 269; “Revolution 1,” 4, 10, 27, 56, 56, 62, 69, 102, 106n4, 115–­16, 129, 134, 164–­65, 172, 199, 204–­5, 208, 211, 257, 266, 269; “Revolution 9,” 2, 9–­ 10, 18, 28, 46, 56, 58, 69–­70, 89, 114–­ 16, 121–­23, 199, 210, 257, 266, 269; “Run for Your Life,” 144n15; “Sexy

Sadie,” 5, 27, 56, 63–­69, 84–­85, 116, 129, 133, 139, 167, 200, 208–­10, 266, 269; “She Loves You,” 33n10; “She’s A Woman,” 127; “Sisters O Sisters,” 211; “Strawberry Fields Forever,” 16–­17, 63, 66, 78–­79, 96, 110, 120, 178, 182, 206; “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” 211; “Tell Me Why,” 138; “There’s a Place,” 16–­17; “This Boy,” 127; “Ticket to Ride,” 128; “Tomorrow Never Knows,” 173, 182, 186, 194n19, 210, 266–­67; “Watching the Wheels,” 211; “What Goes On,” 167; “What’s the New Mary Jane,” 56, 60, 198–­99; “When I Get Home,” 139; “Woman,” 202, 211; “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” 211; “The Word,” 166, 173, 183; “Yellow Submarine,” 39; “Yer Blues,” 1, 4, 8, 13, 18, 23, 26, 46, 56, 62–­63, 67, 69, 76, 111–­19, 129, 130, 134, 141, 144n15, 167, 204–­5, 208, 211, 212n5, 262, 265, 269; “Yes It Is,” 81, 128, 194n14; “You Can’t Do That,” 139; “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” 139 Lennon, Julia, 129, 133, 202 Lennon, Julian, 12 Lester, Richard, 5 Let It Be (The Beatles), 5, 60, 73, 172, 218, 226 “Let It Be” (McCartney), 128 “Let It Down” (Harrison), 191 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 63, 166–­67 Lewis, Vic, 74–­76 Lewisohn, Mark, 93, 123n1, 164, 176n2 Life magazine, 86 “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (Dylan), 143n2 “Little Cowboy” (Nilsson), 69 “Little Queenie” (Berry), 143n1 Little Richard, 63, 127 Lomax, Jackie, 70n5, 115, 185, 191, 195n30, 198 London Records, 50 London Times, 40 “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (Dylan), 137

312  Index “Long Long Long” (Harrison), 11–­15, 27, 114–­17, 121, 188–­91, 196nn37–­38, 266, 269; formal structure, 188–­89, 189, 196n38; keyboards, 99; lyrics, 121; meter, 196n39; musical/compositional elements, 145–­46, 150–­52, 159; performer contributions, 115; recording techniques, 145–­46, 150–­ 52; samplings from, 254; sources, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 174 “Long Tall Sally” (Blackwell, Johnson, and Little Richard), 143n1, 166 Look (magazine), 86 “Look at Me” (Lennon), 56, 71n11 “Los Paranoias” (McCartney), 57 Lost Horizon (film), 72–­73 Love (Cirque du Soleil), 80 Love, Mike, 55, 56, 89n1, 132, 216, 227n3 “Lovely Rita” (McCartney), 128 “Love Me Do” (Lennon and McCartney), 94–­95, 127, 140, 178, 259–­60 love songs, 116–­17, 136, 138 “Love You To” (Harrison), 14, 181–­85, 183, 190, 195n22 Lower East Side Motherfuckers, 50 LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 3, 18–­19, 38, 40–­41, 110–­11, 182, 236; effects of trips, 108–­23 Lubman, Andrew, 69 “The Luck of the Irish” (Lennon), 211 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (Lennon), 16–­17, 58, 63, 66, 128, 212n5 Ludwig drum kits, 172 Lush, Richard, 166–­67 Lynne, Jeff, 194n19, 268 lyrical analysis, 138 lyrics, 15–­18, 64, 125–­229, 259; vs performance, 143n8; psychedelic, 110–­11. See also songs and songwriting; specific songs lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 3, 18–­19, 38, 40–­41, 110–­11, 182, 236; effects of trips, 108–­23 MacDonald, Ian, 2, 3, 6, 10, 17, 22, 23, 32n6, 33n16, 46, 47, 73, 76, 82, 108, 110, 168, 221

Mackintosh’s Good News (chocolates), 156, 186–­87, 266 Madonna, 262 Madonna, Lady, 128–­29, 129t Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles), 5, 13–­14, 37, 73, 96, 178, 191 “Magical Mystery Tour” (McCartney), 227n4 “Maharishi.” See “Sexy Sadie” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 37, 58–­59; Beatles’ stay with, 1–­5, 8, 34n24, 55, 72–­90, 131–­33, 143n10, 198–­99, 228n10, 265; Science of Being and Art of Living, 59; Spiritual Regeneration Movement, 73 male characters, 127–­28, 129 Mansfield, Ken, 236 Manson, Charles, 14 Manson, Marilyn, 233 Maoism, 34n25 Mao Tse-­tung, 129, 134 Mao Zedong, 3 Mardas, Alexis (“Magic Alex”), 5–­6, 89n1, 90n7 Marigold: King and Queen of, 129, 131 marijuana, 40 Mark, Carson, 108 marketing, 70n2 Martha (dog), 129, 133, 221 “Martha My Dear” (McCartney), 8, 20, 23, 25, 62, 116–­17, 120, 215, 266, 269; allusions and samples, 213, 219–­21; characters, 129, 133, 221; sources, 57 Martin, Bertha, 92 Martin, George, 220; arrangements, 21, 62, 113, 227n2; autobiographical record, 97, 103–­4; background, 92–­93; contributions to the White Album, 22–­23, 115, 120, 152–­53, 155, 207; fingerprints, 65; keyboard work, 102; orchestration, 80, 207; production work, 8–­11, 46, 62, 91–­ 107, 113, 185, 194n20; on songwriting, 138; “The Spider’s Dance,” 92; on the White Album, 22, 269; wind-­ up piano technique, 95, 106n1 Martin, Harry, 92

Index  313 Martin, Jojo and Loretta, 128 Martin D28 steel string acoustic guitars, 73–­74 Marvel, Captain, 129–­30, 129 Mary, Mother, 60, 128 mash-­ups. See sampling Maslow, Abraham, 112, 123n2 Massot, Joe, 184–­85 Masters, Robert, 119–­20 Matthew, Brian, 169, 289 “Maureen” (Harrison), 192 “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (McCartney), 136, 267 “Maybe I’m Amazed” (McCartney), 217, 227n4 Mayer, Jojo, 161 MC5, 53n3 McCarthy, Eugene, 42 McCartney (McCartney), 57, 168–­69, 217, 289 McCartney, Jim, 228n7 McCartney, Paul, 32n7, 33n10, 50, 56, 129; and Apple Corps, 6, 226; arrangements, 58; Band on the Run, 228n7, 288, 290; best album of 1967, 77; Blackbird Singing, 83; Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, 222–­23; Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 215, 221–­22, 288, 290; and Chris Thomas, 100; “Cole Porter routine,” 8; contributions to Harrison’s songs, 182, 196n35; contributions to the White Album, 9–­10, 20–­23, 146–­ 47, 152, 156, 168, 195n30, 213–­29, 235–­36, 269; drug experimentation, 40; drumming, 162, 164, 168–­69; and Dylan, 143–­44n13; exit from the Beatles, 226; fingerpicking, 8, 79, 79, 80; Flaming Pie, 215, 219, 221–­ 22, 288, 290; and George Martin, 97–­98; granny music, 174; guitar work, 8, 70n5, 79, 79, 80, 269; on A Hard Day’s Night, 138; on Harrison’s songwriting, 177; influence on later artists, 268–­69; and James Taylor, 75; and Kanye West, 259; Kinfauns demo, 57; and Lennon, 7–­10, 90n7, 197, 226–­27; and Linda Eastman, 7–­

8, 217; and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 88; and Mardas, 90n7; McCartney, 57, 168–­69, 217, 289; McCartney I, 226; Memory Almost Full, 213, 288, 290; musical mimicry, 118–­19; and Northern Songs, 195n21; The Paul McCartney Collection: Flowers in the Dirt, 227n4, 288, 290; The Paul McCartney Collection: London Town, 215, 219, 290; The Paul McCartney Collection: Venus and Mars, 215, 220, 289; The Paul McCartney Collection: Wings at the Speed of Sound, 228n7, 290; political themes, 82–­83; Ram, 214, 217, 227n5, 290; Rishikesh stay, 1–­5, 55; Rishikesh tape, 55, 56; solo career, 264; song references to, 132, 141; songs and songwriting, 20–­23, 127, 138–­40, 178–­80, 183, 193n7, 213–­29, 265–­67; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­67, 269; Standing Stone, 226–­27; on starvation in India, 53n2; Tug of War, 221, 226, 289; vocals, 21, 91, 97–­98; on the White Album, 105, 108, 269 McCartney, Paul–­specific songs by: “All My Loving,” 194n15; “All Together Now,” 198; “And I Love Her,” 135; “Ask Me Why,” 140; “Baby’s in Black,” 194n14; “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” 1, 9–­11, 22, 57, 60, 62–­64, 76, 109, 113, 162, 168, 213–­19, 256, 265, 269; “The Back Seat of My Car,” 214, 217–­19, 227n5; “Birthday,” 26, 57, 62, 69, 99, 115, 173, 213–­15, 219, 269; “Blackbird,” 8–­9, 20–­25, 34n23, 46, 57, 58, 60, 61–­65, 62, 66, 68–­69, 74–­76, 79–­83, 79, 82–­83, 90n6, 153, 187–­88, 214–­15, 221–­26, 223, 228n8, 228n10, 266, 269; “Brian Epstein Blues,” 56; “Calico Skies,” 22, 215, 221–­26; “Can’t Buy Me Love,” 95; “Can You Take Me Back,” 57; “Day Tripper,” 166, 173; “Dear Boy,” 227n5; “Down in Havana,” 57; “Ebony and Ivory,” 221, 228n9; “Eleanor Rigby,” 120, 128, 182–­84, 187, 215, 226–­27, 227n2, 267;

314  Index McCartney, Paul–­specific songs by: (continued) “English Tea,” 215, 221; “The Fool on the Hill,” 16–­17, 136, 229n13; “For No One,” 187; “Get Back,” 60, 128; “Getting Better,” 262; “Golden Slumbers,” 176n3; “Good Day Sunshine,” 69; “Got To Get You Into My Life,” 187; “Hello, Goodbye,” 166; “Helter Skelter,” 20–­21, 27, 46, 57, 60, 62, 99, 113–­17, 121, 139, 169–­71, 214, 256, 265, 269; “Here, There, and Everywhere,” 217; “Here Today,” 226–­27; “Hey Jude,” 3, 12, 21, 51, 57, 60, 68, 128, 174–­75, 198, 266, 269; “Hold Me Tight,” 166; “Honey Pie,” 8, 12, 20–­21, 27, 46, 57, 62–­64, 68–­69, 76, 116–­17, 120, 129, 131, 139, 174, 213–­15, 219–­20, 265; “I’ll Get You,” 16, 33n10; “I’m Down,” 173; “I’m Looking Through You,” 135; “In Spite of All the Danger,” 179, 190; “I’ve Got a Feeling,” 176n3; “I’ve Had Enough,” 215, 219; “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” 80, 136, 182; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 260; “I Will,” 20–­23, 26, 57, 99, 116–­17, 121, 145–­47, 151–­53, 158, 173, 214, 265, 269; “Jenny Wren,” 22, 215, 221–­26, 225, 229n12; “Jubilee,” 57; “Junk,” 57; “Kreen-­Akrore,” 169; “Lady Madonna,” 16–­17, 51, 58, 63, 96, 128–­29, 191, 198, 206, 265, 269; “Let It Be,” 128; “Los Paranoias,” 57; “Lovely Rita,” 128; “Love Me Do,” 94–­95, 127, 140, 178, 259–­60; “Magical Mystery Tour,” 227n4; “Martha My Dear,” 8, 20, 23, 25, 57, 62, 116–­ 17, 120, 129, 133, 213–­15, 219–­21, 266, 269; “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” 136, 267; “Maybe I’m Amazed,” 217, 227n4; “Michelle,” 128; “Misery,” 166; “Mother Nature’s Son,” 9–­12, 21–­23, 26, 46, 57, 58–­63, 68–­69, 76, 80–­81, 102, 111, 116–­19, 146, 152–­55, 158–­62, 160n7, 187, 214, 217, 224, 228n10, 266, 269; “My Brave Face,”

227n4; “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da,” 9–­10, 20, 25, 57, 63, 67–­69, 97, 117, 120, 129, 129, 166–­67, 172, 213, 260, 267, 269; “Oh, Darling,” 120; “Paperback Writer,” 128, 173; “Penny Lane,” 96, 120, 178, 182, 187; “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me),” 228n7; “Please Please Me,” 94–­95, 139, 178, 260; “P.S. I Love You,” 94, 127, 140; “Rocky Raccoon,” 8, 11, 46, 57, 64, 68–­69, 81, 102, 115–­17, 120, 129, 130, 167, 186, 213, 265–­66, 269; “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” 216–­17; “She Came in through the Bathroom Window,” 176n3; “She Loves You,” 33n10; “She’s A Woman,” 127; “She’s Leaving Home,” 51, 99, 184, 187, 267; “That Was Me,” 213; “There’s a Place,” 16–­17; “Uncle Albert,” 227n5; “Used to Be Bad,” 215, 219; “Vintage Clothes,” 213; “Walking in the Park with Eloise,” 228n7; “When I’m Sixty-­Four,” 21, 69, 120, 128, 220; “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” 9, 20, 23, 26, 57, 76, 113, 116–­17, 172–­74, 213–­15, 219, 269; “Wild Honey Pie,” 1–­2, 56, 116–­17, 129, 131, 162, 269; “Yellow Submarine,” 39; “Yesterday,” 95–­96, 138, 185, 187, 226–­27; “You Gave Me the Answer,” 215, 220, 228n7; “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” 139; “Your Mother Should Know,” 69, 120; “You Won’t See Me,” 135 McCartney I (McCartney), 226 McKenzie, Father, 140 McKinney, Devin, 2 McSheee, Jacqui, 77 “Me and My Monkey.” See “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” “Mean Mr. Mustard” (Lennon), 56 Mellers, Wilfrid, 139 Mellotron, 101 melody, 65–­67 Melody Maker (magazine), 32n7, 46 Melville, Herman, 108, 113

Index  315 Memory Almost Full (McCartney), 213, 288, 290 Mercury, Freddie, 268 metatexts, 234–­35, 240–­41 MF DOOM, 256, 290 MF Grimm, 256, 290 “Michelle” (McCartney), 128 microphones, 160n2 Miles, Barry, 7, 82–­83, 219 Miller, Paul D. (DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid), 262 Miller, Steve, 219 “Misery” (Lennon and McCartney), 166 “Miss O’Dell” (Harrison), 143n7 Mitchell, Adrian, 83 Mitchell, Joni, 111, 290 Mitchell, Mitch, 175, 198 Mitchell, Thomas, 143n3 Moby-­Dick (Melville), 108, 113 Modern Drummer (magazine), 163 modernism, 1, 29, 32n1, 266 “Moment of Clarity” (Jay Z), 253 “Monkey.” See “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” Moody Blues, 268–­69 Moog synthesizer, 185 Moon, Keith, 40, 164, 171, 175 Morissette, Alanis, 233 Mosser, Kurt, 234 “Mother” (Lennon), 60, 133, 202 Mother Mary, 60, 128 “Mother Nature’s Son” (McCartney), 9–­12, 21–­23, 26, 46, 118–­19, 228n10, 269; arrangement, 58, 61–­63, 102, 152–­54, 160n7, 266; chord progressions, 217, 224; drumming, 162; engineering, 69; fingerpicking, 80; formal structure, 68; influence, 214; instrumentation, 153–­55, 187, 266; Kinfauns demo, 76, 81; lyrics, 111, 214; musical/compositional elements, 146, 152–­55, 158–­60; recording techniques, 153–­55, 158; sources, 57, 58–­59, 80, 116 Mothers of Invention, 114

Mother Superior, 129, 132 Mouse, Danger, 31, 251–­62 Murray, Mitch, 94 music, 3, 125–­229; art music, 210; classical, 187, 196n35, 226–­27, 266; Indian, 182–­85, 191; psychedelic, 110–­11; song elements, 145–­58; vaudeville or British music hall traditions, 219–­20 music hall traditions, 8, 219–­20 musique concrète, 122, 199, 210 MusixMatch, 259 Mustard, Mean Mr., 142 “My Brave Face” (McCartney), 227n4 “My Mummy’s Dead” (Lennon), 133 “My Old Man’s a Dustman” (Donegan), 143n11 “My Sweet Lord” (Harrison), 59 Mythology, Vol. 3 (The Beatles), 60, 289 named destinations, 114, 141 named individuals, 114–­15, 127–­43; female characters, 127, 129, 143n2, 215; fictional characters, 12, 128–­31, 129, 215; male characters, 127–­28, 129; personal names, 129, 131–­33, 142; preferred names, 143n2 “The Naming of Cats” (Eliot), 142 Nappy Roots, 256–­57, 290 narrative songs, 137 Nash and Young, 289 National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 51 National Rifle Association, 237 nature: references and imagery, 8–­9, 54–­71, 117–­19 “Nature Boy” (Ahbez), 34n20 Naughty by Nature, 256, 290 naughty chords, 194n19 Nelson, Ricky, 127 Neptunes, 254 New Left, 3, 37–­38, 42–­44, 47–­52 New Musical Express (magazine), 53n2, 139 Newsweek (magazine), 46

316  Index New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 217 New York Times (newspaper), 29–­30 Nilsson, Harry, 62, 69 “99 Problems” (Jay-­Z), 253, 257–­58 “No Expectations” (The Rolling Stones), 268 “No Reply” (Lennon), 139 Northern Ireland, 41, 211, 237 Northern Songs, 195n21 “Norwegian Wood” (Lennon), 182–­ 83, 195n25 nostalgia, psychedelic, 119–­21 “Not Guilty” (Harrison), 10, 12, 14, 55–­57, 57, 71n7, 99, 185, 191, 195n33 “Nowhere Man” (Lennon), 183 “Ob-­La-­Di, Ob-­La-­Da” (McCartney), 9–­10, 20, 25, 117, 120, 267, 269; allusions and samples, 213; characters, 129, 129; engineering, 69, 166–­67; lyrics, 260; recording sessions, 63, 97, 166–­67; rhythmic structure, 67; sources, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 166–­67, 172 O’Boogie, Winston. See Lennon, John “O Clap Your Hands” (Williams), 114, 257 “Octopus’s Garden” (Starr), 62, 117 “Oh, Darling” (McCartney), 120 “Oh Yoko” (Lennon), 202, 211 “Old Brown Shoe” (Harrison), 63, 173, 189, 192 Omi, Michael, 85 “Only a Northern Song” (Harrison), 14, 182, 191, 194n20, 196n35, 198 Ono, Yoko, 6–­7, 32n4, 33n14, 75–­76, 116; “Ballad of John and Yoko” (Lennon), 60, 128, 141, 192; contributions to the White Album, 9–­10, 115, 207–­8, 210; John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, 56, 88, 167, 289; relationship with John Lennon, 236, 240–­41; and “Revolution 9,” 46; on Ringo, 163; “Sisters O Sisters” (Lennon and Ono), 211; Some Tme in New York City (John Lennon & Yoko

Ono and Elephant’s Memory), 211, 250n3; song references to, 132, 141, 147–­48, 151–­52, 201; songs directed at, 202; “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (Lennon and Ono), 211; Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Lennon and Ono), 6–­7, 45, 70n2, 198, 210; “Whole Lotta Yoko,” 211n2 “On the Road to Rishikesh” (“Child of Nature”) (Lennon), 59, 71n7, 80, 198–­99 “An Open Letter to John Lennon” (Hoyland), 48–­49 Orbison, Roy, 173 orchestration, 145–­60 O’Regan, Jade Simone, 218, 227n3 Orientalism, 87–­88 Osteen, Mark, 263 Otto, Rudolf, 123n2 “Out of the Blue” (Harrison), 192 overdubbing, 152, 172 Owens, Catherine, 237 Pahnke, Walter, 111, 123n2 “Paint a Picture” (Nappy Roots), 256–­ 57, 290 Pandemonium Shadow Show (Nilsson), 62 “Paperback Writer” (McCartney), 128, 173 “Parachute Woman” (The Rolling Stones), 268 paratexts, 234–­40 Parkes restaurant, 33n12 Parlophone Records, 93–­94 parody, 32n1 pastiche, 20–­21, 31, 219–­20 “Paul Is Dead” theory, 61 The Paul McCartney Collection: Flowers in the Dirt (McCartney), 227n4, 288, 290 The Paul McCartney Collection: London Town (McCartney), 215, 219, 290 The Paul McCartney Collection: Venus and Mars (McCartney), 215, 220, 289 The Paul McCartney Collection: Wings

Index  317 at the Speed of Sound (McCartney), 228n7, 290 Paul songs, 178 peace movement, 51–­52 Pedler, Dominic, 260–­61 Peel, Ian, 227n5 “Penny Lane” (McCartney), 96, 120, 178, 182, 187 Pentangle, 77 percussion. See drumming performance(s), 125–­229; vs lyrics, 143n8; singer-­songwriter, 264; song references to performers, 141–­42 Perkins, Carl, 63, 193n12 personal acquaintances, 129, 131–­33 personal names, 129, 131–­33, 142 personal pronouns, 135–­37, 143n7, 260 The Peter Sellers Tape (The Beatles), 60, 289 Peterson, Ray, 127 Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys), 218, 288 Petty, Tom, 194n19 Philharmonic Orchestra, 257 Phish, 233 piano, 70n5, 95, 99, 106n1 “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” (McCartney), 228n7 “Piggies” (Harrison), 14, 25, 32n1, 55, 62, 120, 187–­88, 191, 266, 269; contributions to, 115, 120; engineering, 69; formal structure, 69, 187–­88, 187; instrumentation, 187, 266; keyboards, 99; lyrics, 64, 115, 187; production, 99; sampling from, 254, 256; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 173 pitch, 145–­58 Pitchfork.com, 122 plagiarism, 114 Plasketes, George, 233–­34 Plato, 71n10 Please Please Me (The Beatles), 95, 127 “Please Please Me” (Lennon and McCartney), 94–­95, 139, 178, 260 “Plug Me In” (Harrison), 192 political statements, 211, 221–­26, 237, 268

“Polythene Pam” (Lennon), 57, 123n3, 136, 142 Pop (U2), 233, 241 Porter, Cole, 8, 135 Portrait of Genius (Shankar), 195n26 postmodernism, 1, 4, 8–­9, 29, 32n1 Prague Spring, 42 Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faune (Debussy), 92 Presley, Elvis, 144n15, 193n9, 250n1 Primal Colours (The Beatles), 60 Prince, 253 Prince Paul (De La Soul), 261 prison riots, 211 pronouns: nonspecific, 127; personal, 135–­37, 143n7, 260 proper names, 135–­37 protests, 52; student protests, 32n3, 39; Year of the Barricades (1968), 3, 41–­43 proximity effects, 160n2 “P.S. I Love You” (Lennon and McCartney), 94, 127, 140 psychedelia, 3, 11–­12; fruits of, 108–­23, 236 Public Enemy, 261 public figures, 133–­34 “Public Service Announcement” (Danger Mouse), 254 Queen, 268 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, 134 race and racism, 21–­22, 86–­87, 228n8 radicalism, 51–­52 Raga (film), 185 Rage, Lady of, 260 “Rain” (Lennon), 110, 173, 194n19 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (Dylan), 207 Raleigh, Walter, 129, 133 Ram (McCartney and McCartney), 214, 217, 227n5, 290 “Ramblin’ Woman” (Harrison), 192 rap, 257, 262 Rarities (The Beatles), 60t

318  Index Raymond, Alex, 132 Reasonable Doubt (Jay-­Z), 252 recording techniques, 145–­58, 194n14, 210; double-­tracking, 101, 148, 151–­ 52, 156, 160n1, 160n3; overdubbing, 152, 172; sound engineering, 69–­70 Redding, Otis, 119 Redgrave, Vanessa, 52 Reinhardt, Django, 220 Reising, Russell, 8, 11–­12, 198 remix. See sampling Renbourn, John, 76–­77 repeat echo, 157 “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” (Zappa), 114 reverberation chambers, 160n5 revolution, 53 Revolution (The Beatles), 60 “Revolution” (Lennon), 3, 10, 47, 115–­ 16, 198–­99, 266, 269; lyrics, 64, 187; recording sessions, 56, 208; sources, 56, 60 “Revolution 1” (Lennon), 4, 10, 27, 106n4, 115–­16, 211, 266, 269; arrangement, 102, 106n4; characters, 129, 134; chord progressions, 204–­5; engineering, 69; musical/compositional elements, 199; performer contributions, 115; recording sessions, 56, 164–­65, 208; recording techniques, 62; rhythmic and metric changes, 208; sampling from, 257; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 164–­65, 172 “Revolution 9” (Lennon), 2, 9–­10, 18, 28, 46, 58, 89, 115–­16, 121–­23, 269; allusions and samples, 114, 257; musical/compositional elements, 199, 266; recording sessions, 56; recording techniques, 69–­70, 210; sources, 56, 114, 210 Revolver (The Beatles), 14, 95, 114, 128, 217; Harrison’s songs for, 181–­ 82, 190–­91, 193n1, 194n16; Starr’s drumming on, 175 rhyme words, 260 rhythm and meter, 67, 207–­10, 212n5 Richard, Cliff, 179

Richard, Little, 63, 127 Richards, Keith, 198 Rigby, Eleanor, 140 Riley, Tim, 108–­10 Rishikesh, India: Beatles’ stay in, 1–­5, 8, 34n24, 55, 72–­90, 131–­33, 143n10, 198–­99, 228n10, 265 Rishikesh tapes, 55, 56t Rock and Roll Circus (The Rolling Stones), 211n2 Rock Band (The Beatles), 60 “Rocky Raccoon” (McCartney), 8, 11, 46, 81, 115–­17, 120, 186, 265–­66, 269; allusions and samples, 213; characters, 129, 130; formal structure, 68–­ 69; lyrics, 64, 115; production work, 102; sources, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 167 Roe, Tommy, 127, 143n1 Roessner, Jeffrey, 4 Rogers, Ginger, 220 Rolling Stone magazine, 30, 43–­47, 122 The Rolling Stones, 47–­51, 53n3, 113, 141, 264; Beggars Banquet, 49–­ 50, 267–­68; “Dear Doctor,” 268; “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” 267; “Parachute Woman,” 268; parallels with The Beatles, 267–­68; Rock and Roll Circus, 211n2; “Stray Cat Blues,” 268; “Street Fighting Man,” 3–­4, 47, 268; “Sympathy for the Devil,” 268 Rosie and the Originals, 33n18 Rossman, Michael, 39 Rubber Soul (The Beatles), 5, 95, 128, 167, 182; Harrison’s songs on, 181–­ 82, 190, 194n16; Starr’s drumming on, 175 Rubin, Jerry, 53n1 Rubin, Rick, 253, 257–­58 “Run for Your Life” (Lennon), 144n15 “Run of the Mill” (Harrison), 192 Russell, Ethan, 173 Saal, Hubert, 46 “Sad-­Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (Dylan), 14–­15, 114, 189 Sadie, 129, 133, 142

Index  319 Said, Edward, 72–­73 “The Saints” (medley version), 90n4 saloon songs, 143n2 Saltzmann, Paul, 73 sampling, 31, 144n15, 251–­58, 261–­ 62, 265–­66; The Black Album (Jay Z), 251–­57, 260, 262, 289; The Grey Album (Danger Mouse), 251–­58, 261–­62, 289; White Album allusions and samples, 4, 8, 113–­14, 213–­16, 219–­21, 257, 262 Sand and Foam (Gibran), 33n12, 201 “Sand and Foam” (Leitch), 77–­78, 289 Sander, Ellen, 30 San Francisco, California, 41, 44 Saraswati, Brahmand (Guru Dev), 82 satire, 14 Saturday Evening Post, 86 Saturday Review, 30 “Savoy Truffle” (Harrison), 13–­15, 20, 27–­28, 185–­86, 186, 191, 265–­66, 269; allusions and samples, 113; arrangement, 62, 152–­53; contributions, 115; inspirations for, 156, 186–­87, 196n34; musical/compositional elements, 146, 152–­53, 156–­60; recording techniques, 156–­58, 160; samplings from, 254; sources, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 172 Scarface, 260 school shootings, 238–­39 Schumann, Robert, 114 Schwartz, Francie, 115 Schwarz, Rudolf, 257 Science of Being and Art of Living (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), 59 Scott, Jimmy, 129 Scott, Ken, 33n8, 34n22, 69, 101, 123n1, 157 Scruggs, Earl, 77 S-­Dots, 260 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), 39, 42–­43, 50–­52 “See Yourself” (Harrison), 182, 191 self-­reflexivity, 16–­17, 105 Sellers, Peter, 62, 93, 143n8 Service, Robert W., 130 Sessions (The Beatles), 64, 289

“Sexy Sadie” (Lennon), 5, 27, 63, 116, 139, 266, 269; characters, 129, 133, 200; chord progressions, 65–­66, 208–­10; engineering, 69; formal structure, 68, 209; lyrics, 64, 84–­85; recording sessions, 208; rhythmic structure, 67; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 167 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles), 1–­3, 13, 32n1, 37–­41, 45, 54, 128, 217; commercial success, 51; cover art, 6, 141; Harrison’s songs on, 112, 191; production work, 96; recording sessions, 264–­65; remixes, 262; Starr’s drumming on, 175; thematic concept, 120 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (McCartney), 216–­17 Shadows, 179, 193n10 Shankar, Ravi, 183, 185, 195nn25–­26 Shannon, Del, 128 Shatner, William, 143n8 “Sh-­Boom” (The Chords), 250n1 “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” (McCartney), 176n3 “Sheila” (Roe), 143n1 “She Loves You” (Lennon and McCartney), 33n10 “She’s A Woman” (Lennon and McCartney), 127 “She’s Leaving Home” (McCartney), 51, 99, 184, 187, 267 “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” (Service), 130 Shotton, Pete, 7, 18–­19 Sibelius, Jean, 114, 257 Siddhartha (Hesse), 269 Simon, Paul, 143n12 Simon & Garfunkel, 77 simplicity: aesthetics of, 165–­66 Sinatra, Frank, 177 Sinclair, John, 53n3 “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (nursery rhyme), 131 singer-­songwriters, 264–­66 “Sisters O Sisters” (Lennon and Ono), 211 sitar, 182–­85, 195n22

320  Index slash chords, 224–­25 Smith, John, 100–­101, 106n4 Smith, Jon Marc, 34n23 Snoop Dogg, 260 social commentaries, 211, 266 “Soft-­Hearted Hana” (Harrison), 143n7 “Solidarity Forever” (Chaplin), 39 “Something” (Harrison), 63, 68, 75, 177, 189, 192 Some Tme in New York City (John Lennon & Yoko Ono and Elephant’s Memory), 211, 250n3 song mediations, 235–­40 song reception, 240–­41 songs and songwriting, 127, 134–­41, 259–­60; AABA forms, 193n7; allusions and sampling, 8.4, 113–­ 14, 213, 215–­16, 219–­21, 257, 262, 265–­66; artist approach, 193n6; characters, 114–­15, 127–­43, 129, 215; character songs, 200; cover songs, 233–­34, 250nn1–­2, 268–­69; craftsperson approach, 193n6; finger-­ waggers, 266, 269; with found texts, 186–­88; fruits of psychedelia, 108–­23, 236; geographic locales, 114, 141; Harrison’s songwriting, 177–­96; John songs, 178; Lennon-­ McCartney songs, 193n4; meanings, 236; nonspecific pronouns, 127; Paul songs, 178; personal names, 129, 131–­33, 142; personal pronouns, 135–­37, 143n7, 260; songs about women and saloons, 143n2; songs based on the music of others, 269; songs employing humor, 269; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­67, 269; songs influenced by Eastern philosophy, 5, 183–­84, 268, 269; songs prompted by phrases of others, 269; songs that accuse or criticize, 266; vocabulary, 139–­40, 259. See also lyrics; specific writers and songs sound engineering, 69–­70. See also recording techniques

“The Sounds of Science” (The Beastie Boys), 256–­57, 289 soundtracks, 184–­85 Sounes, Howard, 85–­86 “Sour Milk Sea” (Harrison), 14, 57, 185–­86, 191, 195n32; Kinfauns demo, 55, 70n5; Lomax’s version, 195n30; recording sessions, 70n5 Spain, 42 Spector, Phil, 106 Spencer, Brenda Ann, 238–­39 Spicer, Mark, 215 “The Spider’s Dance” (Martin), 92 “Spiritual Regeneration” (aka “Thank You Guru Dev”) (The Beatles), 56, 90n4 Spiritual Regeneration Movement, 58, 73 Spitz, Bob, 7, 261 Spooky, DJ, 262 Stagecoach (film), 143n3 Standing Stone (McCartney), 226–­27 Starkey, Maureen, 89n1, 115, 207 Starr, Ringo, 7, 197; blisters, 170–­71; brushwork, 174; contributions to “Hey Jude,” 174–­75; contributions to Plastic Ono Band, 167; contributions to the White Album, 9–­11, 109, 146–­47, 150–­52, 156, 161–­76, 195n30, 207, 269; contributions to Wonderwall Music, 184–­85; “Don’t Pass Me By,” 10, 13, 23, 26, 32n1, 55–­57, 56, 117, 143n9, 165, 269; drum kits, 172; drumming, 70n5, 161–­76, 166, 168, 176nn1–­2; influence, 163; and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 58–­59; musicianship, 161–­62, 174–­75; “Octopus’s Garden,” 62, 117; performances, 13–­14, 19, 161–­76; resignation from the Beatles, 73, 162, 168; Rishikesh stay, 1–­5; on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 264–­65; signature fill, 167, 168, 174, 176n3; songs and songwriting, 140, 143n9, 198; songs grouped as individual releases, 265–­ 67, 269; on the White Album, 105,

Index  321 162, 269. See also specific performances Star Wars (film), 260 Stevens, Cat, 268 Stills, Stephen, 75 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 141, 210 Storm, Rory, 193n10 story songs, 267 storytelling, 136–­37 Strange Little Girls (Amos), 233, 238, 241, 288 Strawberry Fields Forever (The Beatles), 60 “Strawberry Fields Forever” (Lennon), 16–­17, 63, 96, 110, 178, 182, 206; chord changes, 66; psychedelic nostalgia, 120; solo demo, 78–­79 “Stray Cat Blues” (The Rolling Stones), 268 “Street Fighting Man” (The Rolling Stones), 3–­4, 47, 268 student protests, 32n3; at University of California, Berkeley, 39; Year of the Barricades (1968), 3, 41–­43 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 39, 42–­43, 50–­52 stylistic intertextuality, 113–­14, 213, 215–­20. See also sampling Suchar, Mike, 239 Summer of Love, 3, 39–­40 “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (Lennon and Ono), 211 “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (U2), 237 “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (Wilson), 216, 227n3 Sweetheart of the Rodeo (The Byrds), 267 “Sweet Little Sixteen” (Berry), 216 “Sympathy for the Devil” (The Rolling Stones), 268 Symphonic Etudes, op. 13 (Schumann), 114 Symphony no. 7 (Sibelius), 114, 257 synthesizers, 185 Tales from Topographic Oceans (Yes), 269 Tao Te Ching or I Ching, 59, 184, 188, 266

“Taxman” (Harrison), 14, 128, 181–­83, 190, 194nn17–­18 Taylor, Derek, 18–­19, 33n12, 45, 236 Taylor, James, 6, 74–­75, 214 Taylor, Mel, 173 telephone effects, 155 “Tell Me Why” (Lennon and McCartney), 138 Temptations, 143n12 The Tension Album. See The Beatles Tetragrammaton, 45 texture, 145–­58 “Thanks for the Pepperoni” (Harrison), 192 “That’ll Be the Day” (Holly), 193n9 “That Was Me” (McCartney), 213 “There’s a Place” (Lennon and McCartney), 16–­17 “Think for Yourself” (Harrison), 181–­ 83, 190 Thirty Three & 1/3 (Harrison), 191–­92 “This Boy” (Lennon), 127 Thomas, Chris: contributions to the White Album, 10–­11, 14, 62, 69, 100–­102, 115, 150, 152, 156; production work, 10–­11, 62, 69, 91–­92, 99–­102, 104 Thompson, Danny, 76–­77 Thoreau, Henry David, 119 Thornton, Willie Mae, 250n1 “Those Were the Days” (Hopkin), 6 “Three Blind Mice” (nursery rhyme), 16 “Tick, Tick . . .” (MF DOOM feat. MF Grimm), 256, 290 “Ticket to Ride” (Lennon), 128 Tim, Tiny, 220 Timbaland, 253 Time magazine, 38, 46 Times newspaper, 139 “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Lennon), 173, 182, 186, 194n19, 210, 266–­67 tonality, 65–­67 tone color, 145–­58 Tonight Show (NBC), 6 “Top Billin” (Danger Mouse), 254 Top Gear (BBC Radio), 56

322  Index Top Hat (film), 220 Townshend, Pete, 32n7 Transcendental Meditation, 37, 59, 131–­32 Travis, Merle, 77 Travis picking, 77–­79, 78, 79, 228n10 “Triad” (Cosby), 75 Trident Studios, 55, 103 Truffaut, François, 227n2 “Trying to Get to You” (Presley), 193n9 Tucker, Moe, 175 Tug of War (McCartney), 221, 226, 289 Tunstall, Jeremy, 144n14 Turner, Steve, 33n18 Twain, Shania, 143n12 Twickenham Studios, 218–­19 “Twist and Shout” (Medley and Berns), 166, 173 U2: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun (The Gun Mix),” 31, 233, 237–­38, 241–­ 42, 242, 245–­50, 290; “Last Night on Earth,” 233, 237, 241; “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” 237 Umbrella, 1–­2 “Uncle Albert” (McCartney), 227n5 Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (Lennon and Ono), 6–­7, 45, 70n2, 198, 210 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 42 University of California, Berkeley, 39 Unsurpassed Masters (The Beatles), 60 “Used to Be Bad” (McCartney and Miller), 215, 219 Valdez, Stephen, 18, 135, 250n6 Valens, Ritchie, 127 Vallee, Rudy, 220 Varèse, Edgard, 210 vaudeville music, 219–­20 “A Very Open Letter to John Hoyland from John Lennon” (Lennon), 48–­49 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, 43

Vietnam War, 3, 42–­43, 51–­52 Villa, Anthony D., 12–­13 The Village Voice magazine, 122 Vincent, Gene, 63 “Vintage Clothes” (McCartney), 213 Vivaldi, 227n2 vocabulary, 139–­40, 259; personal pronouns, 135–­37, 143n7, 260; rhyme words, 260 “Wah Wah” (Harrison), 191 Walcott, Derek, 254–­55 “Walking in the Park with Eloise” (McCartney), 228n7 Walsh, Alan, 240 War (U2), 237 “Watching the Wheels” (Lennon), 211 Watts, Alan, 123n2 Watts, Charlie, 171, 175 “The Way You Look Tonight” (Kern and Fields), 57 Weather Underground, 52 Weinberg, Max, 162 Weismuller, Johnny, 132 Wenner, Jann, 3, 30, 44–­47 West, Kanye, 253, 259 “What Goes On” (Lennon), 167 “What Is Life” (Harrison), 192 “What More Can I Say” (Jay Z), 253–­ 56 “What’s the New Mary Jane” (Lennon), 56, 60, 198–­99 “When I Get Home” (Lennon), 139 “When I’m Sixty-­Four” (McCartney), 21, 69, 120, 128, 220 “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (Harrison), 25, 63, 116–­18, 191, 266, 269; chord changes, 66–­67; formal structure, 188, 188; Kinfauns demo, 80–­81; lyrics, 64, 138–­39; performer contributions, 115, 167–­68; production, 101; recording sessions, 14, 63, 167–­68, 188; sampling from, 254–­57; sources, 60; Starr’s drumming on, 13, 167–­68 The White Album. See The Beatles

Index  323 whiteness, 113–­21 White Panther Party, 53n3 White Sessions (The Beatles), 60 white supremacism, 86–­87 Whitley, Ed, 1, 22, 261 Whitman, Walt, 113, 115 The Who, 11, 114 “Whole Lotta Yoko” (Ono), 211n2 “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” (McCartney), 20, 23, 26, 76, 116–­17, 214–­15, 219, 269; allusions and samples, 113, 213; recording sessions, 9; sources, 57; Starr’s drumming on, 172, 174 “Wild Honey Pie” (McCartney), 1–­2, 116–­17, 162, 269; characters, 129, 131; sources, 56 Williams, Larry, 127 Williams, Pharrell, 253, 260 Williams, Vaughn, 114 Williamson, Robin, 77 Wilson, Brian, 199–­200, 214–­18, 227n3, 227n5 Wilson, Carl, 227n3 Wilson, Dennis, 227n3 Wilson, Harold, 128 Winant Howard, 85 “Window, Window” (Harrison), 192 Wings, 219–­20, 227n6 Winn, John, 70n4 “Within You Without You” (Harrison), 14, 71n8, 184–­85, 191, 194n20 With the Beatles (The Beatles), 54, 190 Wolstenholme, Kenneth, 102 Womack, Kenneth (Ken), 11, 123n1, 168, 263 “Woman” (Lennon), 202, 211 “Woman Don’t You Cry for Me” (Harrison), 192 “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” (Lennon), 211 women: female characters, 127, 129, 143n2, 215; female perspectives, 238–­40; songs about, 143n2 women’s rights, 211 Wonder, Stevie, 221

Wonderwall Music (Harrison), 58, 184–­ 85, 191, 198 Wood, Alyssa, 18 Wood, L. G., 94 Wood, Michael, 32 Woodall, James, 162 Woods, Alyssa, 31, 268 “The Word” (Lennon and McCartney), 166, 173, 183 Wragg, Burton, 239 Wren, Jenny, 215 writing. See songs and songwriting Wu-­Tang Clan, 256, 290 Year of the Barricades (1968), 3, 41–­ 43 Yellow Submarine (The Beatles), 3, 14, 182, 191, 198 “Yellow Submarine” (Lennon and McCartney), 39 “Yer Blues” (Lennon), 23, 26, 46, 118–­ 19, 211, 265, 269; allusions and samples, 4, 8, 113–­14, 262; arrangement, 62–­63; characters, 129, 130, 134, 141, 144n15; chord progressions, 204–­5; contradictions, 116; engineering, 69; Kinfauns demo, 76; lyrics, 1, 18, 111; recording sessions, 13, 167, 208; rhythmic and metric changes, 67, 208, 212n5; sources, 56; Starr’s drumming on, 13, 167 Yes, 268–­69 “Yes It Is” (Lennon and McCartney), 81, 128, 194n14 “Yesterday” (McCartney), 95–­96, 138, 185, 187, 226–­27 Yippies (Youth International Party), 44, 53n1 Yogananda, Paramahansa, 269 “You Can’t Do That” (Lennon), 139 “You Gave Me the Answer” (McCartney), 215, 220, 228n7 “You Know What to Do” (Harrison), 190, 193n12, 194n13 “You Like Me Too Much” (Harrison), 135, 143n7, 180–­81, 190

324  Index Young, Neil, 75, 111 “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” (Lennon and McCartney), 139 “Your Mother Should Know” (McCartney), 69, 120 youth culture, 38–­41

Youth International Party (Yippies), 44, 53n1 “You Won’t See Me” (Lennon and McCartney), 135 Zappa, Frank, 114