The Beatles Top 100 Countdown & This Week's Statistics (#25-21)

Today we'll be counting down Nos 25-21 of the Top 100 Beatles songs of all time, according to the four wise men (Afhi, Recordman, Snicks, and yours truly). After that, we'll break down this week's statistics.

The Beatles - and especially John Lennon - drew a lot of inspiration from their personal experience, particularly in the mid and late 60s. John got more direct as time passed and it carried through to his solo career. Nowhere else was he more directly personal than on the song at #25 in our list.

The Ballad Of John And Yoko, which chronicled the events surrounding Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono, was released as a single in May 1969 (#1 everywhere except for the US, where it peaked at #8, due to the fact that several US radio stations declined to broadcast the song because of what they saw as sacrilegious use of the words Christ and crucify in the chorus).

On March 16th, 1969, Lennon and Yoko Ono flew to Paris to get married, the first stop on a two-week odyssey that included visits to Gibraltar (where they had the ceremony), Amsterdam (where they held the first "Bed-In" for peace) and Vienna (where they gave a press conference from inside a white bag as a peace protest). Hostile reporters accused the couple of co-opting the peace movement as a publicity stunt. "The press came expecting to see us f*cking in bed," Lennon told Rolling Stone. "We were just sitting in our pajamas saying, 'Peace, brother.'" The trip became the heart of The Ballad of John and Yoko. "We were having a very hard time," said Ono, "but he made [the song] into a comedy rather than a tragedy."

Lennon was in a hurry to release it, so he and McCartney overdubbed all of the instruments on April 14th. (Starr and Harrison were away.) "Paul knew that people were being nasty to John, and he just wanted to make it well for him," said Ono. "Paul has a very brotherly side to him."

The Ballad Of John And Yoko

At #24 there's another Lennon song from the same period. Come Together is a song from Abbey Road (1969) and was also released as a double-sided single with Harrison's Someting (#1 US, #4 UK).

Come Together originated as a campaign slogan for Timothy Leary, who was running for governor of California against Ronald Reagan in the 1970 election. The LSD guru and his wife, Rosemary, were invited to Montreal for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Bed-In" in June 1969, and they sang along on the recording of Give Peace a Chance (and were given a shout-out in the lyrics). Lennon asked Leary if there was anything he could do to help his candidacy.

"The Learys wanted me to write them a campaign song," Lennon told Rolling Stone, "and their slogan was 'Come together.'" He knocked out what he called "a chant-along thing," and Leary took the demo tape home and aired it on some radio stations.

But Lennon decided that he wanted to do something else with the lyric he had started, rather than finish the Leary campaign song. "I never got around to it, and I ended up writing Come Together instead," he said. When he brought his new song in for the Abbey Road sessions, it was much faster than the final version and more obviously modeled on Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me — the opening line, "Here come old flat-top," is a direct lift from Berry's 1956 recording. (Shortly after the release of Abbey Road, Berry's publisher charged the Beatles with copyright infringement; the case was settled in 1973, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs owned by the company — two Berry songs on the Rock 'n' Roll album and Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya on Walls and Bridges.)

Paul McCartney had a few suggestions for how to improve the song, as he recalled in The Beatles Anthology: "I said, 'Let's slow it down with a swampy bass-and-drums vibe.' I came up with a bass line, and it all flowed from there." Lennon said that the "over me" break at the end of the chorus began as an Elvis parody. The lyrics are a rapid-fire pileup of puns, in-jokes and what he called "gobbledygook" that he made up in the studio. The message was clear when he cried out at the end of the second verse, "One thing I can tell you is you got to be free." But for Lennon, the hypnotic rhythm was the most important thing: "It was a funky record — it's one of my favorite Beatles tracks. It's funky, it's bluesy, and I'm singing it pretty well."

After the antagonism of Let It Be, it was almost impossible to imagine the band returning to this sort of creative collaboration. "If I had to pick one song that showed the four disparate talents of the boys and the ways they combined to make a great sound, I would choose Come Together," George Martin said. "The original song is good, and with John's voice it's better. Then Paul has this idea for this great little riff. And Ringo hears that and does a drum thing that fits in, and that establishes a pattern that John leapt upon and did the ["shoot me"] part. And then there's George's guitar at the end. The four of them became much, much better than the individual components."

Come Together was the final flicker of this rejuvenated spirit: It was the last song all four Beatles cut together.

Here are the Beatles with the song from Abbey Road:

Come Together

Here's a solo live recording by Lennon:

We've just mentioned that Come Together was a double-sided single with Harrison's Something. They also lay side by side on Abbey Road. Well, the song at #23 turns out to be Something.

On February 25th, 1969, his 26th birthday, George Harrison recorded three demos at EMI studios. He did two takes each of Old Brown Shoe, which would end up as the B side of Let It Be, and All Things Must Pass, the title song of his 1970 solo album. He also took a pass at a winsome ballad that he had written on piano during a break in the White Album sessions in 1968: Something. "George's material wasn't really paid all that much attention to — to such an extent that he asked me to stay behind after [everyone else had gone]," says engineer Glyn Johns, who recorded the demos. "He was terribly nice, as if he was imposing on me. And then he plays this song that just completely blows me away."

Harrison initially believed the song was so catchy he must have heard it before: "I just put it on ice for six months because I thought, 'That's too easy!'" The opening lyric — "Something in the way she moves" — was a James Taylor song from his 1968 Apple Records debut. (Harrison had attended sessions for Taylor's record and sang backup vocals on another song.) "In my mind," Harrison said, "I heard Ray Charles singing Something." Still, he didn't necessarily think it was good enough for the Beatles.

He even gave the song to Joe Cocker, who recorded it first. When Harrison finally presented Something to the other Beatles, they loved it. John Lennon said Something was "the best track on the album." Paul McCartney called it the best song [Harrison has] written." "It took my breath away," producer George Martin later said, "mainly because I never thought that George could do it. It was tough for him because he didn't have any springboard against which he could work, like the other two did. And so he was a loner."

The other Beatles worked on Something for several months, editing, arranging and rerecording it to perfection. In a reversal, Harrison became musical director, telling McCartney how to play the bass line. "It was a first," engineer Geoff Emerick said. "George had never dared tell Paul what to do." At the final session, Harrison shared the conductor's podium with Martin during the string overdubs and recut his guitar solo, a sparkling combination of dirty-blues-like slide and soaring romanticism, live with the orchestra.

Something eventually became the second-most-covered Beatles song, behind Yesterday. Charles would in fact sing it, on his 1971 album, Volcanic Action of My Soul. Frank Sinatra would describe it as "the greatest love song of the past 50 years" (although he often introduced it as a Lennon-McCartney composition).

"He was nervous about his songs," Martin said of Harrison, "because he knew that he wasn't the number-one [songwriter] in the group. He always had to try harder." But with Something, the guitarist proved himself to his peers, and to the world. Here it is:

Something

Here's George, from The Concert for Bangladesh (1971):

At #22 is We Can Work It Out, a true collaboration between Paul and John, with Paul on lead and John on harmony vocals. It was the Beatles first double-sided single (coupled with Day Tripper) and when released in December 1965, it shot to the top of the charts all over the world.

We Can Work It Out plunges the listener into the middle of an argument, a good-cop/bad-cop seesaw between hopeful choruses and verses full of warnings: "Our love may soon be gone." It's a McCartney song that grew out of an argument with girlfriend Jane Asher. Lennon contributed the pessimistic minor-key bridge: "Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting." ("You've got Paul writing 'we can work it out,'" Lennon said. "Real optimistic, and you know, me, impatient.")

The group stumbled upon an old harmonium in the studio. McCartney remembered thinking, "This'd be a nice color on it." In the verses, with the "suspended chords . . . that wonderful harmonium sound gives it a sort of religious quality," Ray Davies of the Kinks told Rolling Stone in 2001. Harrison suggested switching the rhythm in the bridge from a straight 4/4 rhythm to waltz time. With the signature change, the vintage instrument evoked a circus-carousel feel — a vibe that the Beatles would return to two years later on Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! on Sgt. Pepper. The 11 hours they spent on We Can Work It Out was by far the longest amount of studio time devoted to a Beatles track up to that point.

The tension in the lyrics between a hopeful McCartney and a saturnine Lennon foreshadows the ways in which they would move apart. "They were going through one of their first periods of disunity, so maybe it's a subtext to where the band was," Davies observed. "This is one of my little theories: Every career has its story, and if you look at the song titles, it sums up what they were doing."

Finally for today, at #21 is a Lennon song called Across The Universe. One night in 1967, the phrase "words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup" came to Lennon after hearing his then-wife Cynthia, according to Lennon, "going on and on about something". Later, after "she'd gone to sleep – and I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream", Lennon went downstairs and turned it into a song. He began to write the rest of the lyrics and when he was done, he went to bed and forgot about them.

The words to Across the Universe were "purely inspirational and were given to me," said Lennon. "I don't own it; it came through like that." The song is a paean to cosmic awareness, with serene ruminations like "Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind" and a refrain that names Guru Dev, the guru under whom the Maharishi himself studied. "It's one of the best lyrics I've written," Lennon told Rolling Stone. "In fact, it could be the best. It's good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewin' it."

Lennon was dissatisfied with the Beatles' recorded version, originally cut for the White Album. (David Bowie would later cover the song, with Lennon on guitar.) Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled taping the lead vocal "over and over again because John was unhappy with the job he was doing. . . . It hadn't come out the way he'd heard it in his head." For Let It Be, producer Phil Spector slowed down the original recording and added a choir and orchestra. Said Lennon, "Spector took the tape and did a damn good job with it."

Now, let's move on to this week's statistics. It was a week that restored the status quo in a way: the weekly Top Seven is exactly the same as last week, Russia has moved up a place, while Canada returned to the Ten after a while. There is once more a presence from the Far East. This time, instead of Hong Kong it's Japan.

The full Top 10 is as follows:

1. the United States

2. Greece

3. the United Arab Emirates

4. the Netherlands

5. France

6. the United Kingdom

7. Germany

8. Russia

9. Japan

10. Canada

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence this week (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Kuweit, Latvia, Lebanon, Morocco, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

In the all-time list there have also been changes: most importantly, the United Arab Emirates, after another great week, have moved past Cyprus and Canada and now occupy the 7th place. The countries in positions 7-11 are still very close to one another, and the countries just below the Top 10 (Italy, the Netherlands) are also very close, so things are really hot in the bottom half of the list. Here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 46.8%

2. Greece = 18.3%

3. Russia = 7.9%

4. Germany = 3.4%

5. France = 2.7%

6. the United Kingdom = 2.6%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.08%

8. Canada = 0.98%

9. Cyprus = 0.92%

10. Ireland = 0.84%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!