The Beatles Top 100 (#04-01) & The Beatles Covers Top 20 Countdown (#04-01)

We have finally reached the ultimate day of the Beatles' countdown. Some may think that 15 days of Beatles in a row are too many. Well, I gave as many to the Stones and will give as many to Dylan (eventually). Although these were spread over a longer time with other projects in-between. But I had given 6 continuous days to REM. And they were read by one third of the people that followed the Beatles saga. So...

At #4 in my list of best Beatles covers is the only song by a solo Beatle that could easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the Beatles' best. Imagine, the 1971 song by John Lennon that has become a classic among classics.

The morning after the November 2015 Paris attacks, German pianist Davide Martello brought a grand piano to the street out in front of the Bataclan, where 89 concertgoers had been shot dead the night before, and performed an instrumental version to honour the victims of the attacks; video of his performance went viral. This led Katy Waldman of Slate to ponder why Imagine had become so frequently performed as a response to tragedy. In addition to its general popularity, she noted its musical simplicity, its key of C major, "the plainest and least complicated key, with no sharps or flats" aside from one passage with "a plaintive major seventh chord that allows a tiny bit of E minor into the tonic". That piano part, "gentle as a rocking chair", underpins lyrics that, Waldman says, "belongs to the tradition of hymns or spirituals that visualize a glorious afterlife without prophesizing any immediate end to suffering on earth". This understanding is also compounded by the historical context of Lennon's own violent death, "remind[ing] us that the universe can run ramshod over idealistic people". Ultimately, the song "captures the fragility of our hope after a violent or destructive event ... [but] also reveals its tenacity".

I will include two versions of the song here, because: a. they will allow me to present two great Ladies of song, and b. they perfectly complement each other. While Diana Ross' version (an album track from Touch Me In The Morning, 1973), is a serene prayer from a person imagining this utopia, Patti LaBelle's version, from The Live Aid concert (1985), is a triumphant affirmation: this utopia is already around the corner.

Here's Diana Ross:

... And here's Patti LaBelle:

At #3 is a cover that was also in AFHI's list: Ticket To Ride, as its composer, John Lennon, once claimed, was "one of the earliest heavy-metal records." The Carpenters take it in another direction altogether. Richard gives the song the Soft-Rock treatment that was so popular in the early 70s, but it's Karen's otherworldly vocals that elevate the song from the heap and turn it into something magic. It's so sad that both the composer and the singer left this world so soon. They still had so much to offer!

At #2 is a song that somehow defies the characterization of a cover, since it was released months before the actual Beatles song. Aretha Franklin belts out Let It Be, and literally takes it to church. There is such strength in her version, that, to use the title from a funky classic of the 70s, it "Tear(s) the Roof off the Sucker". Aretha's brand of Soul was unique, especially everything that she released between 1967-1976. No one had reached this unique mixture of precision and power before, and no one has since.

Before I get to #1, let me explain about an intentional omission. I deeply appreciate Judy Collins' version of In My Life, although I don't have any particular emotional ties to it. It would've been in my Top 20, but since I was sure that AFHI (and possibly RM) would include it in their top positions, I decided to leave it out, so that I could include some other songs that I felt had to be mentioned.

Now, it's time for our #1: I will absolutely agree with AFHI on this one. One cannot consider Beatles' covers without noting that this is the definitive cover.

There were two things that really stood out in Woodstock, in my humble opinion: one was Jimi Hendrix's rendition of The Star-Spangled banner. The other was Joe Cocker singing With A Little Help From My Friends. He came on stage high as a kite (on one or possibly more substances), so much that one was overcome by the agony of whether he would make it through or collapse. he did make it through, and we were treated to a Dionysian feast of the highest order.

Joe Cocker must have loved the Beatles: 4 out of his first 7 singles were Beatles' covers: I'll Cry Instead, Something, She Came In Through the Bathroom Window, and the biggest one of all, With A Little Help From My Friends, which peaked at #1 in the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland, #3 in Germany and France, #6 in Austria, #8 in Belgium, and, for reasons unknown to me, only #68 in the US.

Now let's count down the Top Four songs actually sung by The Beatles. An unusual occurence for such a list: two of the four songs are the two sides of the same single. Naturally, the four of us consider this to be the best single ever made, if you take both sides into consideration. One of the sides is at #4.

John Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields Forever in September 1966 in Spain, where he was making the film How I Won the War. Alone, with no Beatles business for the first time in years, he found himself free to reach deep for inspiration, going back to childhood memories. As Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968, "We were trying to write about Liverpool, and I just listed all the nice-sounding names arbitrarily. But I have visions of Strawberry Fields. . . . Because Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go." Strawberry Field (Lennon added the "s") was a Liverpool children's home near where Lennon grew up with his Aunt Mimi. When he was young, Lennon, who had been abandoned by both his parents, would climb over the wall of the orphanage and play in its wild gardens.

"I was hip in kindergarten," Lennon explained in 1980. "I was different all my life. The second verse goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius — 'I mean it must be high or low,' the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see."

After finishing the song on a Spanish beach, Lennon returned to England and played it for the rest of the band. As engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, "There was a moment of stunned silence, broken by Paul, who in a quiet, respectful tone said simply, 'That is absolutely brilliant.'" At that point, it was an acoustic-guitar ballad, reminiscent of Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. But in the studio, it became a whole new thing, as the Beatles experimented with it for days. Having retired from touring earlier that year, they were free to record at their leisure, cutting dozens of takes in the next two weeks. McCartney composed the intro on a Mellotron, a primitive synthesizer.

Lennon wanted to keep the first part from one take (Take 26) and the second part from another, recorded the previous week (Take 7) - despite the fact that they were in different keys and tempos. Producer George Martin accomplished this by slightly speeding up one take and slowing down the other. The manipulation of time and key only added to the brooding, ghostly feeling of Lennon's vocals, giving the entire song an aura of surreal timelessness. The finished take ends with a fragment of a long jam session, in which Lennon says "cranberry sauce": Paul Is Dead freaks believed he was saying, "I buried Paul."

Strawberry Fields was the first track cut during the Sgt. Pepper sessions. The innovative studio techniques the Beatles employed recording it and McCartney's Penny Lane, another childhood memory of a Liverpool landmark, heralded the band's new direction - as did the acid-inspired reverie in the lyrics of both songs. The tracks were to be centerpieces of the Beatles' greatest album, but under pressure by EMI to produce a new single (it had been six months since their last 45), they released both songs in February 1967 as a double A side. Martin later regretted the decision to remove the tracks from Sgt. Pepper as "the biggest mistake of my career."

Growing up "was scary because there was nobody to relate to," Lennon once said. Strawberry Field the place (which closed in 2005) represented those haunting childhood visions. With Strawberry Fields the song, he conquered them forever.

This is only the first 1:22 of the song:

Here's all of it:

Strawberry Fields Forever

At #3 is Hey Jude, a Paul song which was a single in 1968. there are many records concerning this song: It was the first single from the Beatles' record label Apple Records. More than seven minutes in length, it was at the time the longest single ever to top the British charts. Since the fade-out coda lasts for more than four minutes, it was the first ever hit whose fade-out lasted more than the actual song. It also spent nine weeks at number one in the United States, the longest for any Beatles single.

The single has sold approximately eight million copies and is frequently included on professional critics' lists of the greatest songs of all time. In 2013, Billboard named it the 10th biggest song of all time.

Hey Jude was inspired by John and Cynthia Lennon's five-year-old son, Julian. "Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit - more than Dad and I did," Julian said. "Maybe Paul was into kids a bit more at the time."

McCartney was visiting Cynthia after she and Lennon had broken up, and he was thinking of Julian on the drive over there. "I was going out in my car, just vaguely singing this song," McCartney said, "and it was like, 'Hey, Jules. . . .' And then I just thought a better name was Jude. A bit more country & western for me." The opening lines were "a hopeful message for Julian: 'Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you're not happy, but you'll be OK.'"

Hey Jude can also be heard as McCartney's song of consolation to himself as his relationship with Jane Asher was ending and as the Beatles' future was growing more uncertain. The song was recorded in the middle of the White Album sessions, which were plagued by fighting within the band and increasing alienation as the individual songwriters started treating the other Beatles as sidemen on their songs - if they used them at all. McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr resented the constant presence of John's new girlfriend, Yoko Ono, in the studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick found the squabbling so unpleasant that he quit. George Martin, also exhausted from the bickering and from running between the individual Beatles recording simultaneously in separate studios, abandoned the sessions to take a vacation, leaving production of the album for several weeks to his assistant Chris Thomas. Fed up himself, Starr left the band for two weeks (the first band member to quit the Beatles).

When Lennon first heard Hey Jude, he loved it - he thought McCartney was singing to him, about his relationship with Ono and the strains on the Lennon-McCartney partnership. (Lennon's contribution to the song came when McCartney pointed out a place-holder line in the fifth verse: "The movement you need is on your shoulder." Lennon insisted he leave it as is. "That's the best line in it!" he said.) Calling Hey Jude one of McCartney's "masterpieces," Lennon said in 1980, "I always heard it as a song to me. . . . Yoko's just come into the picture. He's saying, 'Hey, Jude - hey, John.' Subconsciously he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.'"

The band hired a 36-piece orchestra for the session; the classical musicians were encouraged to sing and clap along to the song, for double their usual rate. One musician would not go along. "'I'm not going to clap my hands and sing Paul McCartney's bloody song,'" Martin remembered him saying. "He said his union card said he was a violinist, and he walked out of the studio. Much to everyone's amazement." There were other problems too: McCartney had to tell Harrison to tone down his guitar-playing, which was cluttering up the verses. (Harrison "wasn't into what I was saying," said McCartney. "It was bossy, but it was also ballsy of me, because I could have bowed to the pressure.") And when it came time to record the master take, McCartney hadn't noticed that Starr was in the bathroom. Fortunately, the drums come in so late in Hey Jude that Starr was able to sprint back behind his kit and come in right on time.

The ending refrain goes on for a full four minutes, even longer than the verses, which clock in at just over three minutes. The band hadn't planned it that way, but McCartney was having too much fun ad-libbing to quit. "I just wouldn't stop doing all that 'Judy Judy Judy - wooow!" he said. "Cary Grant on heat!"

Martin objected to the song's length, claiming radio wouldn't play the tune. "They will if it's us," Lennon shot back.

At #2 in our list is not one song, but a 16-minute medley of several short songs, recorded over July and August 1969 and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. It took up most of the second side of the Abbey Road LP.

The original idea was McCartney's, but George Martin claimed that the final triumph of the Beatles' life as a recording band - the eight-song medley dominating Side Two of Abbey Road - was at least partly his. "I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music," the producer said. "Paul was all for experimenting like that." McCartney, in fact, led the first session for that extended section of the album - on May 6th, 1969, for You Never Give Me Your Money, his deceptively sunny indictment of the business nightmares at Apple Corps.

Lennon was a lot less interested in the medley, although he contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering Mean Mr. Mustard and the quick, funky put-down Polythene Pam. He subsequently dismissed the concept as "junk" in Rolling Stone, saying that "none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together."

He was right in one sense. The 16-minute sequence - veering from Money and the luxuriant sigh of Lennon's Sun King to McCartney's heavy-soul shard She Came in Through the Bathroom Window and the sweet lullaby Golden Slumbers, and closing with McCartney's famous prescription in The End ("The love you take/Is equal to the love you make") - has no narrative connection. But the Abbey Road medley is the matured Beatles at their best: playful, gentle, acerbic, haunting and bonded by the music. Their harmonies are ravishing and complex; the guitars are confident and cutting. "We were holding it together," McCartney said proudly. "Even though this undercurrent was going on" - a reference to the pressures and differences that had been pulling them apart since the White Album - "we still had a strong respect for each other even at the very worst points."

The Beatles recorded the sections of the medley at various times, out of order, during the July and August 1969 sessions for Abbey Road. Mean Mr. Mustard dated back to early 1968. The lingering hysteria of Beatlemania cropped up in She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, which was inspired by an overeager fan. But the emotional heart of the suite was the financial woes that were consuming the Beatles' energy and were on the verge of bankrupting them. Lennon was instrumental in the hiring of Allen Klein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones, to straighten out the books and the chaos at Apple Corps; McCartney wanted the band to hire Lee and John Eastman, his future father- and brother-in-law. McCartney admitted that You Never Give Me Your Money was "me directly lambasting Allen Klein's attitude to us - all promises, and it never works out."

Later, in Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight (the former with lyrics copied from a lullaby published in 1603), McCartney returned to the theme of exhaustion. "I'm generally quite upbeat," he said, "but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can't be upbeat anymore, and that was one of those times. 'Carry that weight a long time' - like forever!"

The swapping of guitar solos in The End was a band brainstorm. Harrison thought a guitar break would make a good climax. Lennon suggested he, Harrison and McCartney all trade licks. McCartney said he'd go first. Coming after Starr's first and only drum solo on a Beatles record, the scorching round-robin breaks - with Harrison in the middle and Lennon at the end - were cut live in one take, a last blast of natural brotherhood from a band only months from splitting.

"I didn't know at the time that it was the last Beatles record that we would make," Harrison said of Abbey Road. "But it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line."

"Out of the ashes of all that madness," said Starr, "that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together."

After two full weeks of Beatles songs, it's time to listen to the concensus #1 of the four wise men. It's the other side of the single that was at #4: it's Penny Lane.

Penny Lane was Paul McCartney's ode to the Liverpool he knew as a child, but the song also had a hidden inspiration: His white-hot competitive streak. "The song was generated by a kind of 'I can do just as well as you can, John,' because we'd just recorded Strawberry Fields," said George Martin. "It was such a knockout, I think Paul went back to perfect his idea. And they were both significant. They were both about their childhood." The songs would be released together - opposite sides of the first single from the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions.

Many of the lyrics come straight from McCartney's adolescence. Penny Lane is a Liverpool neighborhood where Lennon lived as a child and also the name of a bus depot McCartney would pass through on the way to Lennon's house. A barbershop in the area, Bioletti's, displayed pictures of different haircuts it offered - hence the lines "There is a barber showing photographs/Of every head he's had the pleasure to know." As McCartney put it, "The song is part fact, part nostalgia for a place which is a great place - blue suburban skies as we remember it."

Penny Lane was striking not just for McCartney's gorgeous melody but also for its complex arrangements. The Beatles "were avidly hungry for new sounds," Martin said. With McCartney playing three piano parts, bass, harmonium and tambourine; his bandmates playing more piano, guitar, drums and a hand bell; and several horn sections, Penny Lane built a detailed wall of sound that achieved the force of a Rock song without sounding anything like one.

The recording's crowning touch was inspired by a televised performance of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 that McCartney saw after the basic track for Penny Lane had been recorded. He arranged for the trumpet player he'd heard on the broadcast, David Mason, to come in and add a piccolo trumpet solo (as well as a brief coda, which appeared only on early promotional copies).

Besides giving the Beatles a chart-topping hit, Penny Lane gave Lennon's old neighborhood a boost as well: The Penny Lane area became a significant tourist attraction, and Beatles fans quickly went about pilfering its street signs.

Northern Songs, the publishing company that owned all but four of the Beatles songs, was acquired by ATV – a media company owned by Lew Grade in 1969. By 1985 the company was being run by Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes à Court, who decided to sell the catalogue to Michael Jackson.  Before the sale, Holmes à Court offered his 16-year-old daughter Catherine the chance to keep any song "in her name" from the catalogue. She chose Penny Lane as it was her favourite - despite her father's urging to choose Yesterday, which was by far the biggest royalty-earning song on the books (and is in the top four global royalty earning songs of all time).  Catherine Holmes à Court-Mather is still the copyright owner of Penny Lane today, one of only five Beatles songs not owned by Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

That was it folks! Thanks for your patience and I would be grateful for any comments concerning our small project. have a great one!