The Beatles Top 100 (#12-09) & The Beatles Covers Top 20 Countdown (#12-09)

Hello everybody! I'm in a foul mood today. If that results in poor writing, I ask for your forgiveness in advance. Let's see how it goes...

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a bad film. It was Robert Stigwood's hubris. After the box-office bonanzas of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, as well as the Bee Gees popularity peak, he thought his streak would continue with this film, a fantasy adventure showcasing the songs of the Beatles, and starring two of the hottest Rock acts of the period, Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, plus a long list of Rock and film greats in cameos. The Bee Gees were soon begging to be removed from the project, to no avail. The film turned out to be a disastrous flop.

It did, however, provide us with two good Beatles covers, which occupy positions 12 and 11 in our list. First, at #12, it's Robin Gibb's version of Oh! Darling. One of the Gibb brothers covering a McCartney composition was a natural move: After all, the Bee Gees' greatest musical influence was McCartney.

The song worked: not much removed from McCartney's version, but not a copy either. It reached #15 in the US, making it Robin's biggest solo hit there.

Better still, the song at #11: A wannabe R&B song in its original version, Got To Get You Into My Life was a perfect fit for one of the best R&B bands, Earth, Wind & Fire. Their version was a #1 US R&B hit and a #9 hit in the Hot 100. The song won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) and also garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.

At #10 is a song that's one of McCartney's best solo songs, possibly among his Top 5. The original version by Sir Paul is a classic, but The Faces did a great job as well. The group that consisted of the remaining members of the Small Faces after Steve Marriott left that group to form Humble Pie, together with two ex members of the Jeff Beck Group, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood.

Their version of Maybe I’m Amazed appeared on their 1971 album called Long Player. The band projected an easy camaraderie on stage which was not unlike that of the Beatles. After the band broke up, all the former members did well, more or less. Ronnie Lane formed Slim Chance and had a modest solo career that ended prematurely when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Ian McLagan became a sought after session man. Kenney Jones joined the Who after the death of Keith Moon. Ronnie Wood became the fifth Rolling Stone. Finally Rod Stewart became... Rod Stewart, one of the most successful British solo artists ever. Here they are, in one of their best moments:

Rod Stewart was one of the three biggest British superstars of the 70s: The other two were Elton John and David Bowie. They all grew up idolizing the Beatles, so it's no wonder that they would all cover their songs. We've just heard Rod Stewart (he also successfully covered Get Back), yesterday we heard Bowie's collaboration with Lennon in Across The Universe, now it's Elton's turn. He too collaborated with Lennon - and they met with much greater success. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was never released as a single by the Beatles, but Elton's reggae-tinged version with Lennon on backing vocals and guitar was, and it made #1 in the US and Canada and #10 in the UK. It's at #9 in our list:

Now, back to our list of Beatles songs that were actually sung by the Beatles. At #12 is a McCartney song whose recording was the straw that broke the camel's back. The Beatles breakup happened as a result of how this song was "treated".

McCartney wrote The Long and Winding Road as he watched the Beatles begin to spin out of control. In early 1969, creative and financial issues were fracturing the band. Lennon had already told the others that he was quitting, Starr had gone on a hiatus, and Harrison and McCartney disappeared for weeks. "It's a sad song, because it's all about the unattainable," McCartney said. "I was a bit flipped out and tripped out at the time."

Months after recording the poignant piano ballad, McCartney got a rude surprise: Producer Phil Spector, who had been given the tapes by Lennon, had reworked his take, adding a layer of strings and a choir. "It was an insult to Paul," engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. "It was his record. And someone takes it out of the can and starts to overdub things without his permission." Soon after, the acrimony became too much: In April 1970, McCartney released his first solo album and issued a statement announcing the end of the Beatles.

All the songs that we're now presenting on our way to #1 are absolute classics. So is Ticket to Ride - the first track the Beatles recorded for the soundtrack to their second feature film, Help!, on February 15th, 1965. Its composer, John Lennon, once claimed that it was "one of the earliest heavy-metal records."

"It was [a] slightly new sound at the time, because it was pretty fuckin' heavy for then," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "If you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making, and you hear it now, it doesn't sound too bad. It's all happening, it's a heavy record. And the drums are heavy, too. That's why I like it."

After playing mostly acoustic guitar on A Hard Day's Night and Beatles for Sale, Lennon had picked up his electric guitar for Ticket to Ride. A chiming 12-string riff kicks off the song with a jangly psychedelic flourish, and the guitars strut and crunch through the verses over Starr's grinding groove. The sound was probably inspired by bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks, who were all exploding out of Great Britain at the time. But the Beatles were still ahead of the competition.

Ticket to Ride was the first Beatles recording to break the three-minute mark, and Lennon packed the track with wild mood swings. His singing and lyrics teeter between ambivalence and despair in the verses. The bridge is a powerful double-time burst of indignation ("She oughta think right/She oughta do right/By me"). Another surprise came in the fade, an entirely different melody and rhythm with the repeated line "My baby don't care," sung by Lennon at the upper, stressed top of his range. "We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out," said McCartney, who also played the spiraling lead-guitar part in the coda. "It was quite radical at the time."

The Beatles now saw making records as a goal in itself — rather than just a document of a song — and were changing their approach to recording as they got more comfortable with the possibilities of the studio. Instead of taping songs as they would play them live, picking the best take and then overdubbing harmonies or solos, the band now usually began with a rhythm track and slowly built an arrangement around it. Considering that, Ticket to Ride took almost no time to record: The entire track, including the overdubs, was finished in just over three hours. "It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well," said McCartney. Ticket to Ride effectively became their new theme song: The title of their final BBC radio special was changed to "The Beatles (Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride)."

Lennon always maintained that McCartney's role in writing the song was minimal — "Paul's contribution was the way Ringo played the drums" — while McCartney contended that "we sat down and wrote it together" in a three-hour session at Lennon's Weybridge home. That might account for the different stories on where the title came from: An obvious explanation is that it refers to a train ticket. (When the Beatles belatedly filmed a promotional clip for the song in November 1965, they lip-synced the song against a backdrop of gigantic transportation passes). But Don Short, a British newspaper journalist who traveled with the Beatles, claimed that it dated back to the band's days in the red-light district of Hamburg, Germany. "The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health, and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn't have a dose of anything," he said. "John told me he coined the phrase 'a ticket to ride' to describe those cards." McCartney had a more innocent explanation: He said that it was a play on the name of the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. One other possibility: On the day the Beatles recorded "Ticket to Ride," Lennon passed his driver's test.

We now reached the Top 10: At #10 is a Lennon song that's a personal favorite. All You Need Is Love is my third favorite Beatle song, but in our joint list it's at #10.

Flush with creative energy after finishing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles went straight back to work. When they were invited to appear on the Our World TV program - a two-hour show of international performers that would be broadcast live in 24 countries on June 25th, 1967 - they decided to create an elaborately orchestrated new track, All You Need Is Love.

"[Beatles manager Brian Epstein] suddenly whirled in and said that we were to represent Britain in a round-the-world hookup," said George Martin. "We had less than two weeks to get it together." Lennon took the last-minute request in stride: "Oh, God, is it that close?" he said a few days before the telecast. "I suppose we'd better write something." (McCartney also wrote a possible choice for the occasion - most likely the music-hall ditty Your Mother Should Know, but it was obvious which song was more appropriate.)

The Beatles crafted a rhythm track in the studio beforehand (which included Harrison playing violin for the first time and Lennon on harpsichord) but they sang their vocals live on the show, accompanied by an orchestra and a chorus that included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan and Keith Moon. Harrison's guitar solo was also live; he hand-painted his Stratocaster in psychedelic colors for the occasion. Martin's arrangement reflected the event's international spirit: The introduction was a snippet of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, while the coda included bits of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Greensleeves, Glenn Miller's In the Mood - and even an improvised chorus of She Loves You.

The main part of the song was deceptively simple. "John has an amazing thing with his timing," Harrison told Rolling Stone. "All You Need Is Love sort of skips beats out and changes from 3/4 to 4/4 all the time, in and out of each other." The lyrics proved a challenge for McCartney. "The chorus is simple, but the verse ["Nothing you can do/But you can learn how to be you in time/It's easy"] is quite complex," he said. "I never really understood it."

All You Need Is Love was the first of Lennon's songs with a title that could have been written on Madison Avenue (like the later Give Peace a Chance and Power to the People). "I like slogans," he said. "I like advertising. I love the telly."

Here's a preview of the song:

... And here's the whole thing:

All You Need Is Love

Finally for today, at #9, here's a Paul song: Channeling the church-born soul of Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney started writing Let It Be in 1968, during the White Album sessions. (Aretha's cover of the song was released before the Beatles' version.) McCartney's opening lines - "When I find myself in times of trouble/Mother Mary comes to me" - were based on a dream in which his own late mother, Mary, offered solace, assuring him that everything would turn out fine. "I'm not sure if she used the words Let it be," McCartney said, "but that was the gist of her advice."

At that point, the Beatles were in their own time of trouble. A month of on-camera rehearsal and live recording had been intended to energize the bandmates and return them to their beat-combo roots. (They had pushed George Martin into the background: "I don't want any of your production shit," John Lennon told him. "We want this to be an honest album.") Instead, it was a miserable experience, during which the petty arguments of previous albums turned into open hostility. Lennon wasn't crazy about Let It Be; he poked fun at the song's earnestness in the studio, asking, "Are we supposed to giggle in the solo?" But the band worked for days on the song, recording the basic track at Apple Studios on January 31st, 1969.

After wrapping up the filmed sessions that day, the Beatles turned a mountain of tapes over to engineer Glyn Johns to assemble into an album, tentatively titled Get Back. George Harrison didn't like his solo on the version of Let It Be that Johns picked, so he replaced his part with a new take, in which his guitar was run through a rotating Leslie organ speaker. That solo, with its distinctive warbling tone, ended up on the single.

At the beginning of 1970 - almost a year after the initial recording - McCartney, Harrison and Starr convened to do touch-up work on a few songs from a year earlier, including Let It Be. (Lennon, who had effectively quit the Beatles after the recording of Abbey Road, was in Denmark with Yoko Ono.) McCartney replaced John's bass part with his own, Harrison recorded another guitar solo (the one used on the album mix), a brass section scored by Martin was added, and Harrison and Paul and Linda McCartney sang backup vocals.

Lennon had been impressed with producer Phil Spector's work on his Instant Karma! single, and in March 1970, he and Beatles manager Allen Klein called in Spector to work on the January 1969 tapes. "He was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something out of it," said Lennon. Spector did the LP mix of the title track (after the single had already been released) and is credited with producing it, although it's mixed from the same tape as the single. McCartney later declared that Spector's version "sounded terrible."

Johns said he preferred his spare mix of the song, the one done before "Spector puked all over it." Spector called the atmosphere between band members a "war zone" and felt he'd done the best he could under the circumstances. "If it's shitty, I'm going to get blamed for it," he said. "If it's a success, it's the Beatles."

Let It Be was released on March 11th, 1970. A month later, on April 10th, McCartney took the occasion of the release of his first solo album to announce that the Beatles had broken up.