Hello
my friends! We're back with the penultimate broadcast of the Beatles' lists.
Let's get on with it.
As
luck would have it, the song at #8 of my list of Beatles covers is found at #7
in our Beatles Top 100, so I'll say more about the song in a minute. I don't
even think the singer needs much introduction, who isn't aware of who Ray
Charles is? He gave us so many classics, among them more than one Beatle cover.
(He did a great job with Yesterday). But it's with Eleanor Rigby that Ray truly
connects. At the time he was hooked on heroin, and you can feel him identifying
with Eleanor Rigby's existential loneliness and Father MacKenzie's spiritual
void. It's heartbreaking.
Who'd
think that all it would take to get Here Comes the Sun in the Top 10 (#7
Ireland, #10 UK and #7 in my list) would be to camp it up? Obviously Steve
Harley thought so - and he released a wonderfully campy version with his band
Cockney Rebel in 1976. One can almost feel Harley striking poses in the beats
between the lyrics. The summer of '76 was one of the last that I spent in the
UK and this song was the soundtrack to it.
I
have just mentioned how heartbreaking Ray Charles' version of Eleanor Rigby is,
now let me mention how joyful Stevie Wonder's version of We Can Work It Out is
(my choice for #6). Stevie could do joyous songs like nobody could (listen to
Sir Duke and Master Blaster and a smile will automatically appear on your
face). We Can Work It Out is one such song. Obviously McCartney, the song's
writer, was very pleased with the result, as he would ask Stevie to accompany
him on Ebony And Ivory more than a decade later.
Today
we have had heartbreaking, we've had campy, we've had happy and at #5 we have
cool. There was nothing cooler than Bryan Ferry in his prime. He was like James
Bond in a tuxedo with a glass of martini in his hand. He brought that cool
attitude in Lennon's earnest solo song, Jealous Guy. People rewarded it: it made
it all the way to the top in the UK and Australia and made the Top 10 in most
European countries.
Now,
back to our list of Beatles songs that were actually sung by the Beatles. At #8
is the Beatles' biggest-selling song in the UK, as well as the biggest-selling
song overall in the UK for the 60s. The song had great cultural significance:
in many countries in continental Europe the youth who listened to this new kind
of Pop, had longer hair, etc, were called the Yeah-Yeahs.
On
the afternoon of July 1st, 1963, the Beatles were about to record She Loves You
at EMI studios when all hell broke loose. As Geoff Emerick - then an assistant
at Abbey Road, later the Beatles' engineer - recalled, "The huge crowd of
girls that had gathered outside broke through the front door. . . . Scores of
hysterical, screaming girls [were] racing down the corridors, being chased by a
handful of out-of-breath, beleaguered London bobbies." The disruption may
have been a blessing in disguise for the Beatles, who promptly banged out one
of the most exuberant Pop singles of all time. "[The chaos] helped spark a
new level of energy in the group's playing," Emerick wrote.
Lennon
and McCartney began writing She Loves You in a tour van, then did the bulk of
the work in the Turk's Hotel in Newcastle, sitting on twin beds with acoustic
guitars. The breakthrough in the lyrics was the introduction of a third person,
shaking up the typical I-love-you formula. The variation was inspired by Bobby
Rydell's Forget Him, a hit in the UK. "It was someone bringing a
message," said McCartney. "It wasn't us anymore. There's a little
distance we managed to put in it, which was quite interesting."
Still,
something was missing. "We'd written the song and we needed more,"
Lennon said, "so we had 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and it caught on. I don't
exactly know where we got it - Lonnie Donegan always did it. Elvis did that in
All Shook Up."
They
completed She Loves You in McCartney's house back in Liverpool. When his father
heard the song, he said, "Son, there's enough Americanisms around.
Couldn't you sing, 'Yes, yes, yes,' just for once?" McCartney said,
"You don't understand, Dad. It wouldn't work."
For
all the raw immediacy of its sound, the song also signaled a new level of
sophistication for the band as songwriters and arrangers. She Loves You opens
with the chorus instead of the first verse for extra punch — a George Martin
suggestion. The final touch was the distinctive chord that ends the chorus —
Harrison's idea — which sounded "corny" to Martin. "He thought
we were joking," said McCartney. "But it didn't work without it, so
we kept it in and eventually [he] was convinced."
The
appearance by the Beatles on ITV's Sunday
Night at the London Palladium on October 13th, 1963, culminating in the
band's performance of She Loves You, is often considered the tipping point of
Beatlemania. The Beatles would go on to triumph after triumph as the 1960s went
on, but in Great Britain, She Loves You remained the bestselling single of the
decade.
At
#7, as I said before, is Eleanor Rigby, one of Paul's masterpieces. This
rumination on loneliness appeared on Revolver (1966) and on the B-side of
Yellow Submarine. That should really be another world record for the Beatles:
they have the best B-sides to their singles than any other act ever.
When
McCartney first played Eleanor Rigby for his neighbor Donovan, the words were
"Ola Na Tungee/Blowing his mind in the dark/With a pipe full of clay."
McCartney fumbled with the lyrics until he landed on the line "Picks up
the rice in a church where a wedding has been." It was then that he
realized he was writing about lonely people and transformed the song into the
tale of a spinster, a priest and how their lives intersect at her funeral.
There
are conflicting stories of how McCartney came up with the name for the title
character. According to McCartney, he combined the first name of Eleanor Bron,
the lead actress in Help!, with
a last name taken from a sign he had seen in Bristol for Rigby & Evans Ltd, Wine & Spirit
Shippers. But Lionel Bart, the writer-composer of Oliver!, claimed that on a walk with
McCartney in London's Putney Vale Cemetery, they saw the name Eleanor Bygraves,
and McCartney said he would use it in a new song.
Most
intriguing, in the 1980s, the gravestone of an Eleanor Rigby was discovered in
the churchyard of St. Peter's in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton — just yards
from the spot where Lennon and McCartney first met in 1957 after a performance
by Lennon's group the Quarry Men. "It was either complete coincidence or
in my subconscious," McCartney said.
After
McCartney wrote the melody on the piano at his girlfriend Jane Asher's flat, he
gathered Lennon, Harrison, Starr and Pete Shotton, Lennon's childhood friend,
at Lennon's house in Weybridge to help finish the lyrics. The group all agreed
on certain details about this session: The priest was originally called
"Father McCartney" until they found the name "McKenzie" in
a phone book; Starr chipped in the line "darning his socks in the
night"; and it was Shotton's idea that the song end with the funeral,
bringing all of the principal characters together.
Beyond
that, though, Lennon and McCartney offered dramatically different versions of
the writing process. "The first verse was his and the rest are basically
mine," Lennon told journalist David Sheff in 1980. "It was Paul's
baby, and I helped with the education of the child." McCartney, on the
other hand, maintained that "John helped me on a few words, but I'd put it
down 80-20 to me." (Shotton said, "My recollection is that John's
contribution was virtually nil.")
None
of the Beatles actually play an instrument on Eleanor Rigby - McCartney sings
the double-tracked lead vocal, and Lennon and Harrison contribute harmonies,
but the music is performed entirely by a pair of string quartets, arranged by
George Martin. "Paul wasn't immediately enamored of the concept,"
said engineer Geoff Emerick. "He was afraid of it sounding too
cloying."
When
he agreed to the idea, McCartney said he wanted the strings to sound
"biting." With that in mind, Emerick was determined to capture the
sound of bows striking strings with an immediacy previously unheard on any
recording, classical or rock & roll. Instead of recording the octet on a
single microphone, he miked each instrument individually. "I was close-miking
the strings - really close," he said. "So close that the musicians
hated it, because you could see them sort of keep slipping back on their chairs
to get away from the mic in case they made any errors."
McCartney
saw the finished track - a meditation on solitude and aging that sounded like
nothing else on the radio at the time - as a breakthrough moment for him as a
songwriter. He later reflected that when he wrote Eleanor Rigby, he had been
musing about what kind of work he might do when he was done being a Beatle.
"This
could be a way I could go," he recalled himself thinking. "[I had] a
clear vision of myself in a herringbone jacket with leather elbow patches and a
pipe. I could become a serious writer, not so much a Pop writer. Yes, it
wouldn't be bad, actually - at the terrible old age of 30."
At
#6 is a Lennon masterpiece. After Brian Epstein died on August 27th, 1967, the
Beatles were hardly in the mood to be creative. But when the shellshocked band
gathered a few days later, McCartney convinced them there was one sure way to
handle their grief: by getting back into the studio. When they did, on
September 5th, Lennon brought along an eccentric new song inspired by a report
that British school kids were studying Beatles lyrics to discern their hidden
meanings. Lennon played a solo acoustic version of I Am the Walrus, and, as
engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, "Everyone seemed bewildered. The melody
consisted largely of just two notes, and the lyrics were pretty much just
nonsense." Taking off from the Lewis Carroll poem "The Walrus and the
Carpenter," the words were a series of non sequiturs about "pigs from
a gun," Hare Krishna and Edgar Allan Poe, winding up with a
head-scratching "goo-goo-g'joob!"
hook.
"What
the hell do you expect me to do with that?" George Martin said.
Nonetheless, everyone went to work on the track. Lennon vamped on a simple
electric-piano figure, and McCartney switched to tambourine to make sure Starr
kept on the beat. (McCartney's diligence in keeping the band focused, Emerick
later said, was "one of Paul's finest moments.")
The
track sprung to vivid, woozy life in post-production. Despite his initial
revulsion, Martin composed a masterful orchestral arrangement that felt like
vertigo. Lennon asked for as much distortion on his voice as possible — he
wanted it to sound as if it were coming from the moon.
"The
words don't mean a lot," Lennon said. "People draw so many
conclusions, and it's ridiculous. What does it really mean, 'I am the Eggman?'
It could have been the pudding basin for all I care." The lyrics contained
plenty of inside jokes: "Semolina pilchard" referred to Norman
Pilcher, the London drug-squad cop who'd busted Rock stars like Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards, and "The Eggman" was a reference to both Carroll's
Humpty Dumpty and a story Lennon heard from Eric Burdon about the time a girl
cracked an egg onto the Animals frontman during sex. On the following year's
White Album, Lennon alluded to the song in Glass Onion with the line "The
walrus was Paul" — his way of thanking McCartney for helping to hold the
group together after Epstein's death.
At
#5 is my number #1 song of the Beatles and one of my ten favorite songs by any
artist of all time. It's also #1 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the Top
100 Beatles songs.
A
Day in the Life is the sound of the Beatles on a historic roll. "It was a
peak," John Lennon told Rolling
Stone in 1970, recalling the Sgt.
Pepper period. It's also the ultimate Lennon-McCartney collaboration:
"Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on A Day in the
Life," said Lennon.
After
their August 29th, 1966, concert in San Francisco, the Beatles left live
performing for good. Rumors of tension within the group spread as the Beatles
released no new music for months. "People in the media sensed that there
was too much of a lull," Paul McCartney said later, "which created a
vacuum, so they could bitch about us now. They'd say, 'Oh, they've dried up,'
but we knew we hadn't."
With
Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles
created an album of psychedelic visions; coming at the end, A Day in the Life
sounds like the whole world falling apart. Lennon sings about death and dread
in his most spectral vocal, treated with what he called his "Elvis
echo" — a voice, as producer George Martin said in 1992, "which sends
shivers down the spine."
Lennon
took his lyrical inspiration from the newspapers and his own life: The
"lucky man who made the grade" was supposedly Tara Browne, a
21-year-old London aristocrat killed in a December 1966 car wreck, and the film
in which "the English army had just won the war" probably referred to
Lennon's own recent acting role in How
I Won the War. Lennon really did find a Daily Mail story about 4,000 potholes in the roads of Blackburn,
Lancashire.
Lennon
wrote the basic song, but he felt it needed something different for the middle
section. McCartney had a brief song fragment handy, the part that begins
"Woke up, fell out of bed." "He was a bit shy about it because I
think he thought, 'It's already a good song,'" Lennon said. But McCartney
also came up with the idea to have classical musicians deliver what Martin
called an "orchestral orgasm." The February 10th session became a
festive occasion, with guests like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne
Faithfull and Donovan. The studio was full of balloons; the formally attired
orchestra members were given party hats, rubber noses and gorilla paws to wear.
Martin and McCartney both conducted the musicians, having them play from the
lowest note on their instruments to the highest.
Two
weeks later, the Beatles added the last touch: the piano crash that hangs in
the air for 53 seconds. Martin had every spare piano in the building hauled
down to the Beatles' studio, where Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, Martin and
roadie Mal Evans played the same E-major chord, as engineer Geoff Emerick
turned up the faders to catch every last trace. By the end, the levels were up
so high that you can hear Starr's shoe squeak.
In
April, two months before Sgt. Pepper
came out, McCartney visited San Francisco, carrying a tape with an unfinished
version of A Day in the Life. He gave it to members of the Jefferson Airplane,
and the tape ended up at a local free-form rock station, KMPX, which put it
into rotation, blowing minds all over the Haight-Ashbury community. The BBC
banned the song for the druggy line "I'd love to turn you on." They
weren't so far off base: "When [Martin] was doing his TV program on Pepper," McCartney recalled
later, "he asked me, 'Do you know what caused Pepper?' I said, 'In one word, George, drugs. Pot.' And George
said, 'No, no. But you weren't on it all the time.' 'Yes, we were.' Sgt. Pepper was a drug album."
In
truth, the song was far too intense musically and emotionally for regular radio
play. It wasn't really until the Eighties, after Lennon's murder, that A Day in
the Life became recognized as the band's masterwork. In this song, as in so
many other ways, the Beatles were way ahead of everyone else.
