The Beatles Top 100 (#20-17) & The Beatles Covers Top 20 Countdown (#20-17)

Good friend of the blog and fellow voter AFHI has proposed a list of the best Beatles' covers. Since there are so many to choose from, a joint list would be highly impractical. So, at the speed of sound, I prepared my own Top 20 list, to be broadcast alongside our regular list, which is practical, because there are 20 songs left there too. Each day for the next five days I'll be counting down 4 songs sung by the Beatles preceded by 4 songs written by the Beatles (as a group or as solo artists), but sung by other people. I'll be expecting our friends AFHI, Recordman, Snicks and whoever else to comment on my choices and to present their own. I won't be reacting to other people's choices, however, so as not to betray the rest of my list. I'll make sweeping comments during the last day. Let's get on with it.

At #20 of my covers list is Siouxsie Sioux, the Goth Punk empress in the UK. With her group the Banshees they had a number of hits in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but more than that they had widespread critical acceptance and a dedicated group of loyal fans. In 1983 they released Dear Prudence, originally found on the Beatles' White Album (1968), as a single and were quite successful. In fact, peaking at #3 in the UK and at #10 in Ireland, it was to be their most successful single ever.

At #19 is a man we've already presented: if you look for the June 30th and July 1st entries here at GCL, you'll learn all about him. It's Disco legend Sylvester. In 1979 he covered yet another song from the White Album (1968), a favorite of mine called Blackbird. With him are Two Tons O' Fun, who were the great Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes.

As you may have noticed, my main criterion for inclusion in this list is for the cover to be as creatively removed from the original as possible. So many are trying to imitate the Beatles' sound - it simply can't be done.

While the two songs that I've already presented were by artists that appealed to a niche audience, the next two are by artists who are as big as they come. Next are Guns N' Roses, the kings of Rock from the mid 80s to the early 90s. They put their foot in their mouth a number of times, especially concerning gender and sexual politics. They sort of made up for it by singing at the Freddie Mercury memorial tribute, duetting with Elton John in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Anyway, despite their personalities, they had some great songs. One of those was Live And Let Die, McCartney's 1973 contribution to the James Bond film of the same name. At #18 in our list.

At #17, here's an artist who's as familiar as the Beatles: the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. By the way, here's a thorny question for you, the readers: should I give Jackson the full presentation when the time comes? Does he belong to the group of artists discussed here?

Back to our topic, Jacko covered Come Together, the Lennon penned song from Abbey Road (1969), in HIStory (1995), although the song was recorded back in 1988.

Now, back to our list of Beatles songs that were actually sung by the Beatles. At #20 is a McCartney penned song from the White Album (1968). Back in the U.S.S.R. is a loving tribute to the Beach Boys. In fact, there's even a Beach Boy's involvement to the creation of the track: In February 1968, McCartney played his variation on Chuck Berry's Back in the U.S.A. for Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love while the two were visiting India. Love suggested that McCartney add a California Girls-style section about the women of the Soviet Union. McCartney then recorded a loose, jovial demo of the song in May.

By the time they started work on the album version on August 22nd, though, the Beatles were at each other's throats. When McCartney criticized Starr's drumming on "USSR," Starr announced he was quitting the band, walked out and headed off for a Mediterranean vacation. The other three Beatles got back to work, recording the basic track with McCartney on drums and Lennon playing six-string bass. They finished it the next day with jet-airplane noise from a sound-effects collection. When Starr returned two weeks later, they covered his drum kit in flowers to welcome him back.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

At #19 is a George Harrison song, also from the White Album (1968). It's the highest placed Harrison penned song in our list. The lyrics for While My Guitar Gently Weeps, George Harrison's first truly great Beatles song, began as an accident — but a deliberate one. Harrison composed most of the music during the Beatles' February-April 1968 trip to Rishikesh, India, but wrote its words after the band returned to England. Inspired by the relativism principle of the I Ching, Harrison pulled a book off a shelf in his parents' house, opened it to an arbitrary page and wrote a lyric around the first words he saw, which turned out to be the phrase "gently weeps." (Its source might have been Coates Kinney's much-anthologized 1849 poem "Rain on the Roof," which includes the lines "And the melancholy darkness/Gently weeps in rainy tears.")

Even though the band had recorded Harrison songs on six previous albums, the guitarist still had trouble getting John Lennon and Paul McCartney to take his contributions seriously. Lennon, for his part, later noted that "there was an embarrassing period where [George's] songs weren't that good and nobody wanted to say anything, but we all worked on them."

The initial studio recording of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, from July 25th, 1968 (later included on Anthology 3), was a subdued, nearly solo acoustic piece with an extra verse at the end, very much along the lines of Harrison's original demo. A second version, with the full band (Lennon playing organ), was recorded on August 16th and September 3rd and 5th; it eventually incorporated tape-speed trickery, maracas and a backward guitar solo that never quite yielded the "weeping" sound Harrison was looking for.

Producer George Martin had left for a monthlong vacation before the band began working on a third, electric version on September 5th, with Lennon on lead guitar and Ringo Starr contributing a heavy, lurching rhythm. That arrangement didn't quite come together, either. "They weren't taking it seriously," Harrison later remembered. "I went home that night thinking, 'Well, that's a shame,' because I knew the song was pretty good."

The next day, Harrison was giving Eric Clapton a ride from Surrey into London, when Harrison figured out how to make his bandmates focus on While My Guitar Gently Weeps: He asked the Cream guitarist to play on it. Clapton initially declined. "'Nobody [else] ever plays on Beatles records,'" Harrison recalled Clapton arguing. But Harrison replied, "Look, it's my song. I want you to play on it." (A few months earlier, Clapton had joined Harrison, McCartney and Starr to record Jackie Lomax's version of the Harrison composition Sour Milk Sea.)

With the famous guest in the studio, the other Beatles got down to business — McCartney's harmonies sound particularly inspired. As Harrison put it, "It's interesting to see how nicely people behave when you bring a guest in, because they don't really want everybody to know that they're so bitchy." Clapton's flickering filigrees and spectacular, lyrical solo brought the whole thing together, and it was finished that night. "It's lovely, plaintive," Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone in 2002. "Only a guitar player could write that. I love that song."

Clapton became one of Harrison's closest friends — as well as his potential replacement. When Harrison briefly quit the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions, Lennon's response was to snap, "If he doesn't come back by Tuesday, we'll just get Clapton."

Here's the original version:

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Here's what the Cirque du Soleil did with The Beatles LOVE version:

At #18 are the two opening tracks from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): the title track seamlessly segues into With A Little Help From My Friends. We decided to treat the two songs as one, because, really, they are.

The Beatles were looking for a way to kill their old Fab Four image altogether by late 1966, and McCartney had an idea: "I thought, 'Let's not be ourselves,'" he said, and suggested that they invent a fake band. "Everything about the album," McCartney said, "will be imagined from the perspective of these people, so it doesn't have to be the kind of song you want to write, it could be the song they might want to write." McCartney proposed the mock-Victorian-era Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the name came from a joke with roadie Mal Evans about salt and pepper packets), and he wrote a title song to introduce the premise at the album's outset: a fiery piece of psychedelic hard rock. The Beatles were all fans of Jimi Hendrix; McCartney saw Hendrix play two nights before they recorded "Pepper." Hendrix was paying attention right back: He played "Pepper" to open his live show in London two days after the album's US release.

The Beatles cut With A Little Help From My Friends in an all-night session after the photo shoot for the Sgt. Pepper cover. At dawn, Starr trudged up the stairs to head home — but the other Beatles cajoled him into doing his lead vocal then and there, standing around the microphone for moral support. Though nervous and exhausted, Starr delivered a magnificently soulful vocal, right up to that final high note.

The lyrics about loneliness and vulnerability were in some ways more revealing than Lennon and McCartney might have written for themselves. But there's also a typical Beatle joke. As McCartney admitted, "I remember giggling with John when we wrote the lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.' It could have been him playing with his willy under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level."

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band / With A Little Help From My Friends

Finally for today, at #17, the title song from the Beatles' first and best movie, A Hard Day's Night (1964). The song was written by Lennon, was a #1 hit all over the world and was covered by everybody from the Hoodoo Gurus to Peter Sellers.

A Hard Day's Night opens with the most famous chord in all of Rock & Roll: a radiant burst of 12-string guitar evoking the chaos and euphoria of Beatlemania at its height. The sunlight in that chord, the exhilaration of the Beatles' performance and the title's sigh of exhaustion make A Hard Day's Night a movie in itself, a compact documentary of the Beatles' meteoric rise.

"In those days, the beginnings and endings of songs were things I tended to organize," said George Martin. "We needed something striking, to be a sudden jerk into the song." At the session, Lennon played around with some fingerings for the opening chord. "It was by chance that he struck the right one," said Martin. "We knew it when we heard it." (In a February 2001 interview, Harrison said the chord is an "F with a G on top, but you'll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story." McCartney played a high D.)

The title came from a throwaway crack from Starr. "We were working all day and then into the night," he recalled, "[and] I came out thinking it was still day and said, 'It's been a hard day,' and noticing it was dark, ' . . . 's night!'" When Lennon passed the remark on to director Richard Lester, it instantly became the film's title. All they had to do was write a song to go with it. "John and I were always looking for titles," said McCartney. "Once you've got a good title, you are halfway there. With A Hard Day's Night, you've almost captured them."

Lennon wrote the song the night before the session — he scrawled the lyrics on the back of a birthday card for his son, Julian, who had just turned one — and the group cut it in a breakneck three hours. The biggest issue was Harrison's solo: A take that surfaced on a bootleg in the 1980s features him fumbling over his strings, losing his timing and missing notes. But by the time the session wrapped at 10 that night, he had sculpted one of his most memorable solos — a sterling upward run played twice and capped with a circular flourish, with the church-bell chime of his guitar echoed on piano by Martin. "George would spend a lot of time working out solos," said Geoff Emerick. "Everything was a little bit harder for him, nothing quite came easily."

Harrison also played the striking fade-out, a ringing guitar arpeggio that was also a Martin inspiration. "Again, that's film writing," Martin said. "I was stressing to them the importance of making the song fit, not actually finishing it but dangling on so that you're into the next mood."

A Hard Day's Night