Brian Epstein & The Beatles Top 100 Countdown (#35-31)

Yesterday we started discussing Epstein's downward spiral, mainly caused by his addiction to prescription drugs. Today we continue with the story. What happened after the Beatles and Epstein together reached the top?

After two more years of non-stop touring, The Beatles made the decision to quit performing live. As Epstein neared the end of his five-year contract, he began to tell his friends that he would not be asked back as their manager. He was right: As the group entered the final act of their lives as Beatles, Epstein’s five-year contract was not renewed.

Following their farewell performance at Candlestick Park in August of 1966, Epstein’s anxiety had heightened, as the necessity of his role begun to diminish significantly. Add to that the fact that, despite his success with creating and selling the image of the band, he’d lost out on a number of lucrative deals, namely due to inexperience. Elvis’ own manager, Colonel Tom Parker, once told Epstein he’d thrown away “tens of millions” of dollars due to oversights in areas such as merchandising rights.

When the five-year contract between The Beatles and Epstein expired, the boys had elected to manage themselves, and did not renew the contract. Brian was found dead on the morning of 27th August 1967 in his Chapel Street home near Buckingham Palace, with the coroner concluding his death was accidental – a result of an ‘accidental self-overdosage’. He was 32 years old. He had returned to London alone the previous evening after a group of young men had failed to turn up to a party at his country home in Sussex. The events that followed are anybody’s guess, and like other 1960s tragic figures Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, his death by prescription drugs is believed by some to have been intentional, and suggested by others to have been a murder.

Many theories went around: one theory suggested that Epstein decided to kill himself when the father of one 15-year-old, with whom he allegdly had sex in Lionel Bart's house, complained to the police, and an investigation was under way.

Another theory claims that the downward spiral began because his then current boyfriend, a hustler called Diz Gillespie, had robbed him of money and valuable documents. According to his attorney and close friend Nat Weiss, that accounted for 'his first major depression: that was the beginning of his loss of self-confidence.'

Then again, it could have been what the coroner concluded: that his death was accidental – a result of an ‘accidental self-overdosage’. We'll never really know, will we?

Tomorrow we'll examine the aftermath of Epstein's death. Now, let's get on with our Top 100 Beatles' songs countdown.

At #35 we have a Paul McCartney song called Lady Madonna. In March 1968, it was released as a single, peaking at #1 in the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, #4 in the US and was a Top 3 hit in most other markets.

Like many of McCartney's finest songs, Lady Madonna is a tribute to working-class womanhood, expressed through Irish-Catholic imagery. "Lady Madonna started off as the Virgin Mary, then it was a working-class woman, of which obviously there's millions in Liverpool," he later said. "There are a lot of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection." The Madonna of the song is a long-suffering but indestructible matriarch, as tough as the title character of Eleanor Rigby, yet as comforting as Mother Mary from Let It Be.

Musically, Lady Madonna has an earthier inspiration: the New Orleans piano boogie of Fats Domino. McCartney called it "a Fats Domino impression," composed while trying to play something bluesy on the piano. The recorded version is a full-on tribute to the New Orleans R&B sound, with tootling saxophones. Domino must have taken it as a compliment. A few months after the song came out, he released his own cover version, which became the last Top 100 hit of his career.

Here's an OK version:

Here's a better one:

Lady Madonna

At #34, it's one of McCartney's finest moments in Sgt. Pepper's (1967). She's Leaving Home was inspired by a newspaper story about a well-to-do 17-year-old girl named Melanie Coe who disappeared from her parents' home in London. While McCartney took the perspective of the teen runaway, Lennon sang counterpoint (the "Greek chorus," as McCartney called it) in the voice of the heartbroken parents.

McCartney was so impatient to record the song, he hired arranger Mike Leander to orchestrate the strings instead of waiting for George Martin, who was busy with another artist. "I was surprised and hurt," Martin admitted. "It was just Paul being Paul."

The real-life Melanie Coe ended up going back home to her mom and dad after three weeks; she was pregnant and had an abortion. But the girl in the song represented all the teenagers who were running away from their conventional lives in the Sixties. In April 1967, McCartney visited Brian Wilson in L.A. to preview Sgt. Pepper, playing She's Leaving Home on the piano for him and his wife. "We both just cried," Wilson said. "It was beautiful."

At #33, a song that has a "lone dissenter". (See yesterday's comment section). In My Life appears on Rubber Soul (1965) and is written and sung mainly by John Lennon. It is ranked 23rd on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" as well as fifth on their list of the Beatles' 100 Greatest Songs. The song placed second on CBC's 50 Tracks. Mojo magazine named it the best song of all time in 2000.

As far as we were concerned, Snicks gave it a 10, while AFHI and I gave it a 9. Recordman, on the other hand, gave it a 3. He is "the lone dissenter".

In My Life represented a crucial breakthrough for John Lennon — as well as a creative struggle. The song began with a question: During a March 1964 interview with Lennon, journalist Kenneth Allsop asked why he hadn't written more lyrics about his life and experiences. "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing Pop songs," Lennon said to Rolling Stone in 1970. "I would write [books like] In His Own Write, to express my personal emotions. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market. I didn't consider them to have any depth at all. They were just a joke."

Taking Allsop's critique to heart, Lennon wrote a long poem about people and places from his past, touching on Liverpool landmarks like Penny Lane, Strawberry Field and Menlove Avenue. "I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic version of a trip downtown on a bus, naming every sight," he said. When he read the poem later, though, "it was the most boring 'What I Did on My Holidays' song, and it wasn't working. But then I laid back, and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember."

What happened next is a dispute that will never be resolved. In My Life is one of only a handful of Lennon-McCartney songs where the two strongly disagreed over who wrote what: According to Lennon, "The whole lyrics were already written before Paul even heard it. His contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle eight." According to McCartney, Lennon basically had the first verse done. At one of their writing sessions at Lennon's Weybridge estate, the two painstakingly rewrote the lyrics, making them less specific and more universal. (Some of Lennon's lines, like his reference to the late Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatles' former bassist, in "some are dead and some are living," remained.) McCartney also says he wrote the melody on Lennon's Mellotron, inspired by Smokey Robinson, as well as the gentle opening guitar figure.

Regardless of its true authorship, In My Life represented Lennon's evolution as an artist. "I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively, but subjectively," Lennon said. "I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that — not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work." The Beatles were huge Dylan fans by early 1964, playing The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan nonstop in between gigs. When Dylan visited the Beatles in New York that August, he famously introduced them to marijuana. (He thought the Beatles were already pot smokers, having misheard the lyrics "I can't hide" in I Want to Hold Your Hand as "I get high.") Dylan and pot would be the great twin influences that led the Beatles out of their moptop period and on to their first masterpiece, Rubber Soul.

The song at #32 is also a Lennon song, also appears on Rubber Soul (1965) and also has a "lone dissenter". AFHI, Recordman & I have each given Norwegian Wood 9 points. Snicks gave it 5. He's "the lone dissenter".

Norwegian Wood had a timeless Rock & Roll inspiration: sex. As Lennon put it bluntly, "I was trying to write about an affair without letting me wife know I was writing about an affair. I was writing from my experiences, girls' flats, things like that." Graced by Harrison's sitar, Norwegian Wood was a huge step forward for the Beatles, continuing their move into more introspective songwriting influenced by Bob Dylan.

Lennon begins with a couplet that flips the usual Rock & Roll bravado: "I once had a girl/Or should I say, she once had me." He recounts a late-night fling with a worldly urban woman, one who lives in her own pad, has her own career and invites gentlemen up for wine. She is very different from the love interests in early Beatles' songs.

As McCartney later explained, it was popular for Swinging London girls to decorate their homes with Norwegian pine. "So it was a little parody really on those kinds of girls who when you'd go to their flat there would be a lot of Norwegian wood," he told biographer Barry Miles. "It was pine really, cheap pine. But it's not as good a title, 'Cheap Pine,' baby."

Even if it's a tale of a fling with a mod groupie, it's a strikingly adult one, from the London milieu to the way Lennon spends the night at her place (and wakes up in the bathtub). Lennon is the one who gets pursued and seduced, sitting nervously on her rug until she announces, "It's time for bed." Given all the oblique wordplay, Cynthia Lennon was hardly the only listener puzzled. When he wakes up alone the next morning, he lights a fire — does that mean he burns the girl's house down? Lennon never revealed the solution to this mystery; McCartney has endorsed the arson theory.

Although Lennon claimed in 1980 that Norwegian Wood was "my song completely," he told Rolling Stone a decade earlier that "Paul helped with the middle eight, to give credit where it's due." According to McCartney, Lennon came to him with just a first verse: "That was all he had, no title, no nothing."

Harrison's sitar debut was the song's most distinctive feature — yet it came from a moment of spontaneous studio experimentation. As Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, "George had just got the sitar, and I said, 'Could you play this piece?' . . . He was not sure whether he could play it yet, because he hadn't done much on the sitar, but he was willing to have a go."

Harrison first spotted the sitar on the set of the band's second movie, Help!, where Indian musicians were playing Beatles covers in a restaurant scene. Intrigued, he bought a sitar and "messed around" with it, eventually studying with sitar master Ravi Shankar. Harrison also became interested in Eastern religion and philosophy, which would become a lifelong pursuit.

Looking back in the 1990s, Harrison described the sitar on Norwegian Wood as "very rudimentary. I didn't know how to tune it properly, and it was a very cheap sitar to begin with." But "that was the environment in the band," he pointed out, "everybody was very open to bringing in new ideas. We were listening to all sorts of things — Stockhausen, avant-garde — and most of it made its way onto our records."

Norwegian Wood was swiftly recognized as a creative breakthrough. Brian Jones paid tribute with his sitar riff in the Rolling Stones' Paint It, Black, and Dylan did a sly parody on Blonde on Blonde, 4th Time Around, which he played for Lennon in person. "I was very paranoid about that," Lennon confessed to Rolling Stone in 1968. He was already sensitive because the other Beatles were "taking the mickey out of him" for copying Dylan, and he was afraid Dylan was ridiculing him with 4th Time Around. "He said, 'What do you think?' I said I didn't like it." Although Lennon said he later appreciated the song, he did stop wearing his peaked "Dylan cap."

Norwegian Wood

Finally for today, at #31 is another Lennon song, Happiness Is a Warm Gun. It is found in The White Album (1968).

Lennon called this rapid-fire, erotically charged minisuite one of his best songs. "Oh, I love it," he told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I think it's a beautiful song. I like all the different things that are happening in it. . . . It seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music." The Beatles Anthology book includes a marked-up copy of the lyric sheet, in which Lennon outlines the three different sections that make up "Happiness": "Dirty Old Man," "The Junkie" and "The Gunman (Satire of '50s R&R)."

The title was inspired by a headline in a gun magazine George Martin had showed Lennon that read Happiness is a Warm Gun — a variation on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 bestseller Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. "I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon said. "A warm gun means that you just shot something."

Lennon later claimed that the song "wasn't about 'H' at all," but the drug subtext is everywhere. The "Junkie" sequence from the middle of the song ("I need a fix 'cause I'm going down") was the entirety of his original demo, recorded in May 1968. By the time the song was cut in September, Lennon had begun using heroin — ever since he and Yoko Ono had moved into a London apartment Starr had rented them in July. The "Mother Superior" in the lyrics is a reference to Ono herself, whom Lennon took to calling "Mother."

At this point, Happiness Is a Warm Gun in Your Hand, as its original title ran, had expanded to its final form. A few of the surreal lines in the opening section, "Dirty Old Man," came from a stoned conversation with Apple press officer Derek Taylor: "Ate and donated to the National Trust," for instance, is a reference to people shitting on public land (a common problem Lennon encountered while walking in and around Liverpool), and the "velvet hand" alludes to a man who had told Taylor that wearing moleskin gloves gave him "a little bit of an unusual sensation when I'm out with my girlfriend." The "Satire of '50s R&R," with its classic doo-wop chord progression, was modified from a similar passage in Lennon's demo of I'm So Tired.

It took the Beatles 70 takes over two nights to master the tricky tempo shifts of "Happiness." McCartney was particularly fond of the result, calling it one of his favorite tracks on the White Album.