Quote of the Day (Paul McCartney, on Early Concert Mistakes)

“When we first started out, I was terrified of doing anything wrong onstage. I got to learn, though, that people don’t mind. In fact, they kind of like it. People go, ‘I was at the show where he made a mistake!’”—English composer and rock ‘n’ roll legend Sir Paul McCartney, quoted by Hardeep Phull, “Paul McCartney Plays for the Kids at Frank Sinatra School,” New York Post, Oct. 9, 2013

I wasn’t that big a fan of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles work in the Seventies, but I’m curious to see the recent documentary about that period, Man on the Run. 

It sounds like, more than half a century after he went on his own, we may be learning new, even surprising, things about one of the most significant forces in popular music in the 20^th century.

Quote of the Day (E. L. Doctorow, on Song Standards)

“With Tin Pan Alley, songs became a widely distributed product. The standards that emerged then released us into a flow of imagery that whirls us through our decades, our eras, our changing landscape. When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you merely recite the words, you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will articulate themselves in your mind. That is an unusual self-referential power. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains to be called up in whole, or in part, or, in fact, to come to mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of times past.”—American novelist and editor E. L. Doctorow (1931-2015), “Standards,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1991

Years ago, I heard a “standard” defined as a song performed by Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Surely, E. L. Doctorow had the likes of the Gershwins, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Mercer, Arlen, and Porter in mind—the tunes that Ms. Fitzgerald placed in her classic “Songbook” LPs—when he wrote the above.

Judging from the kinds of pop and jazz tunes that the novelist referenced in works like Ragtime and City of God, I doubt that his frame of reference for “standard” encompassed rock ‘n’ roll.

But, as I listened to the SNL 50^th anniversary show the other day, I heard two songs that would make that list—Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound” and the “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” medley by Paul McCartney (pictured, of course).

In the documentary Get Back, a young McCartney experiments with different lyrics for the latter tune, telling Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr, when he has it refined, that this new song for the 1969 Abbey Road LP "should be ready for a Songs For Swinging Lovers album soon."

The joke has long since been fulfilled for baby boomers like myself, with artists such as Phil Collins, Steven Tyler, Richard Sambora, Neil Diamond, Jennifer Hudson, and Dua Lipa offering cover versions.

And so, as I listened to McCartney—a slight crack now developed in one of the greatest vocalists of his generation—perform the song to help close out the SNL special (as seen in this YouTube clip), it felt unbearably poignant to me, and, I suspect, so many of the millions listening worldwide.

It summoned more than a half-century of experience, conveying a wistful hope, amid a new time of turbulence—for all we know, perhaps even more convulsive than the Sixties decade in which the Beatles recorded it—that there might yet be “a way to get back homeward.”

Flashback, December 1971: Lennon’s Yule Classic, ‘Happy Xmas,’ Released

Released 50 years ago this week, while American soldiers were still dying in Vietnam, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” did not enjoy the kind of immediate success that John Lennon was used to. But the single from the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono has since become a staple of the holidays.

The single was so melodic that some have decried it for sappiness. (Producer Phil Spector noted its resemblance to The Paris Sisters’ 1961 hit “I Love How You Love Me.”)

But Lennon wanted to leave listeners with more than the cheerful ditties that he, Paul, George and Ringo used to send each Christmas to members of members of their fan club.

As a religious skeptic who had caused a firestorm of controversy by claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” he would not write a hymn to Christ the Redeemer. Likewise, he was uninterested in evoking the sleigh rides or winter landscapes that had increasingly filled the pop airwaves in the last few decades.

What he aimed for was, in part, a challenge—another attempt, like “Give Peace a Chance,” to attempt to rally sentiment against the Vietnam War through the power of music. His song’s refrain, “War is over (if you want it),” put to musical use a slogan of his “Bed in for Peace” protest with Yoko in late spring 1969.

The tune, recorded in late October 1971, came too late in the year for it to be promoted adequately in time for the Christmas season. (One singular exception: Lennon’s performance on the song in a December 16 appearance on The David Frost Show.)

From the last days of the Beatles through most of his decade as a solo artist, Lennon was engaged in a competition with Paul McCartney. One manifestation of that rivalry can be seen in their respective biggest Christmas hits as solo artists. Before he was murdered in 1980, it would not have been out of character for Lennon to compare his major solo Christmas song with McCartney’s, “Wonderful Christmastime.”

In the U.S., “Happy Xmas” peaked at number 36 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles and number 28 on the Record World Singles Chart. Over in the U.K., matters were even worse, as a publishing-rights dispute between Lennon and music publisher Northern Songs led the song to be delayed for a year. “Wonderful Christmastime” didn’t do particularly well, either, in the U.S., reaching only number 83 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles chart.

But in terms of how other artists how viewed the tunes, matters have shifted more decidedly Lennon’s way. The Website Second Hand Songs, which tracks song covers, lists approximately 100 interpretations of “Wonderful Christmastime” by other artists, versus more than 2 ½ times that amount for “Happy Christmas.”

The question of other artists’ interpretation of the song came to the forefront for me over 30 years after its release, when Sheryl Crow sang it live as part of the televised Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in 2002. One year after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, with an attack on Iraq being prepared for the following year, Lennon’s call for collective responsibility (“Another year over/And what have we done?”) retained its melancholy undertone.

Nearly 30 years later, it still does, along with its appeal to universal brotherhood and the instinct for peace that crosses so many spiritual traditions.

Quote of the Day (Alice Cooper, on a Beatles Classic)

“Every moment of this song is pure Beatles. It’s absolutely, mathematically perfect. I’m pretty sure they were aliens.”—Rock ‘n’ roller Alice Cooper, on the Beatles’ hit “You Won’t See Me,” quoted in “The Playlist—Guest List: Alice Cooper,” Rolling Stone, Feb. 13, 2014

I agree with this observation 100%. Well, maybe except for that last part about the aliens…

Quote of the Day (Billy Joel, on Why He Is Most Proud of ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’)

“I’m proud I got away with it. That song [‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’] was made of fragments of other songs that I’d started and never finished but kept around. Then I stitched them together like the Beatles stitched together the suite on Abbey Road. The songs kind of worked together, but I didn’t know how I’d tie it all up. Then I thought of the idea of scenes from an Italian restaurant. There you go!” —Rock ‘n’ roller Billy Joel quoted in David Marchese, “The Legend: A Mini Master Class With Billy Joel,” New York, Aug. 6-19, 2018

Flashback, September 1969: ‘Abbey Road’ Brings Beatle Saga to ‘The End’

Abbey Road, the LP that represented the final collaboration of The Beatles, was released this month 50 years ago to a public largely unaware of the tensions that had disrupted and sidelined their prior album. As the group climbed the charts again with this latest song, the news that they were splitting plunged their fans into gloom.

As I recounted in a prior post, Rubber Soul remains my favorite LP by the Fab Four, with hardly a dud from start to finish. Revolver and, of course, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has been acclaimed as revolutionary.

But critics and fans have been correct in calling Abbey Road a masterpiece. In their final days, The Beatles continued to develop and innovate as songwriters and musicians, and even as their lyrics speak of the greatest stress they had ever experienced in their professional lives, the sonic surface was as smooth and gorgeous as anything they had ever put to vinyl.

No small credit for both came from the group member who might have come the longest way as a musical force: George Harrison. It was not only that his composition, “Something” represented his first A-side single for the quartet, but that—after being widely regarded as a mediocre guitarist in the early days of Beatlemania—he had become a peerless practitioner of his instrument. His confidence was evident in every note he played. 

“The quiet Beatle” who had chafed at having his suggestions or contributions to prior albums shot down by Paul McCartney and John Lennon had even learned, like the two principal Beatles songwriters, to channel his frustrations into song. 

“Here Comes the Sun” reflects Harrison’s elation when, after a stressful business meeting in the spring with his bandmates about the management dispute that eventually sundered them, he was able to drive out to the estate of good friend Eric Clapton and enjoy the first real sunshine of the season. 

The time in the studio for Harrison and the other Beatles went far more smoothly than it had at the start of the year, when a planned album and documentary, Get Back, had to be shelved because of acrimony during recording sessions. (The tapes had been in such chaotic shape that Phil Spector, called in to salvage the product, released it over a year later as Let It Be—much to Paul’s consternation’s over the super-producer’s “Wall of Sound.”)

After a few months, McCartney approached longtime producer George Martin about working with them again. He agreed to do so, but only if they were more cooperative this time. They were as good as their word.

Years later, Martin still thought of this last collaboration as his favorite with the group he had helped to stardom: "It was a very, very happy album. Everybody worked frightfully well and that's why I'm very fond of it." 

For me, the emotional centerpiece of the LP is the Side 2 medley, a string of half-finished songs that Paul figured out how to turn into a long suite. (In its wake, other artists would be emboldened to try similar quicksilver sonic experimentation, such as Cat Stevens in “Foreigner Suite” and Marvin Gaye in Here, My Dear.) It rises to a level of wistfulness in “Golden Slumbers,” where McCartney seemed to acknowledge the increasing difficulty of recovering the group’s initial joy in music-making (“Once there was a way to get back homeward”), and concluded with what amounted to a final bow in “The End,” with each of the Fab Four (even the reluctant Ringo) taking turns soloing.

Even Lennon, not above bad-mouthing McCartney in the months after the group’s breakup, couldn’t help tipping his hat to the lyric that concluded the medley and, it turned out, the group’s relationship with its fans: “And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make.”

 For a group that began singing about love (“Can’t Buy Me Love”) and gave one of its most buoyant endorsements of the emotion (“All You Need is Love”), it might have been the only truly appropriate way to bid farewell.

Quote of the Day (Mikal Gilmore, on the Significance of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’)

“Sgt. Pepper captured a moment, but Revolver created the context and motion that became that moment. Partly because it was swallowed by the events of the summer of 1966, and partly because of the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper, it would take years – decades, even – before critics and fans would widely regard Revolver as the Beatles' finest album. But the form-stretching possibilities it had unleashed would change popular music by giving it new and more blatant thematic range, matched by innovative and outrageous sounds. It introduced different angles in chords and melodies and gave other bands the courage to look at the risky moment as both internal and social unrest. The Beatles sneaked all of this into their music with flair and confidence, with beauty and dissonance.”— Mikal Gilmore, “The Beatles' Acid Test: LSD Opened the Door to Their Masterpiece 'Revolver'—But Also Opened Wounds That Never Healed,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1269 (Sept. 8, 2016)

This August marks the 50^th anniversary of perhaps the most unsettling month in The Beatles’ history as a group—begun with John Lennon’s controversial remark that the band had become “more popular than Jesus now,” and ended, in exhaustion, with the Candlestick Park appearance that served as the final stop of their last tour. In between came their transitional LP, Revolver. I discussed this masterpiece in a prior post, but it's worth another look in light of what Gilmore brings to light on its history.

Rubber Soul, as I discussed in this prior post, remains (for me, anyway) the most consistently satisfying Beatles studio album. But in his essay in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore makes a credible case for Revolver as the group’s first to spring from a self-conscious search for personal meaning.

That search was spurred mainly by the LSD taken—first unwittingly, then more enthusiastically—by John Lennon and George Harrison. While Rubber Soul was what Paul McCartney later called the band’s “pot album,” Revolver originated with the more intense, dangerous LSD.  “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sometimes called the first example of  “acid rock,” derived from Lennon’s attempt to make sense of his LSD trip through reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience.

I wish I could have heard more from Gilmore about the evolution of the album’s other sterling songs (notably, "Eleanor Rigby," “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But in view of the group’s subsequent history, it’s understandable why he delves into the LSD angle.

The drug opened up the band to new thinking and new sounds—and irrevocably altered its internal dynamics. From then on, Lennon and Harrison shared a bond that would endure until Lennon’s murder in 1980. Simultaneously, they treated McCartney as someone apart from their philosophical and creative journey, a Johnny-come-lately to their altered state.

Gilmore does point out a cost of the hallucinogen to Lennon: it worsened his drug habit, even leading to a 1968 incident in which he summoned astonished Apple employees to issue a press release announcing that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth.

Gilmore might also have discussed how Lennon’s increased absences from the studio within a few years led to more tensions with bandmates, as well as to Lennon’s push back when McCartney sought to fill the inevitable leadership void. But altogether, he shines a strong light on a key album in rock 'n' roll history--one whose significance may only now be properly appreciated.

Flashback, December 1965: Beatles Exercise Creative Muscles With ‘Rubber Soul’

Only a year and a half after American fans first went crazy over their live appearances, the Beatles staked out considerably more ambitious territory with a studio album. With Rubber Soul, the Fab Four dug deeper into their own experiences and pushed harder to incorporate different sounds into their recordings.

Bob Stanley of the British newspaper The Guardian has written that Rubber Soul makes “a strong case for being the most concise and the most complete Beatles album.” My feeling is, if anything, stronger.

Roughly 20 years ago, I came across Rubber Soul in a music shop. It was the first time I had ever seen all the songs together, in their original context rather than filtered through best-of compilations. I’m not sure if I had ever heard so many songs that had wormed their way into my consciousness over the years. In time, I came to think of it as my favorite Beatles LP.

NPR music critic Tim Riley has written of the LP’s “restrained musical confidence.”  The group, pressing hard to expand the boundaries of conventional pop, exerted their newfound commercial power to the utmost: "Finally we took over the studio," John Lennon told Rolling Stone's Jann S. Wenner in a 1970 interview. "In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn't know how you could get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that's all, and we took over the cover and everything."

(Well, not quite everything. Four of the tracks from the British LP were left off the American release: “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” “What Goes On,” and “If I Needed Someone.” Instead, two songs from the Help recording sessions were used: “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love.” The group smarted over Capitol Records’ affront to their creative intentions. They would have more clout from here on in.)

What fans discovered, upon the LP’s release on December 3, 1965 in the U.K. and three days later in the U.S., was more mature songwriting and studio confidence. Indeed, The Beatles were growing as men and artists, and they were betting—successfully, it turned out—that their admirers would follow them, whatever their creative direction.

The Liverpool quartet were commercially rewarded for their risk-taking, as the LP sold 1.2 million copies in nine days of its release in the U.S., en route to 59 weeks on the charts. Nothing new there. But it gave the group additional critical cachet, as well.

The past year had signaled a startling change in the cultural landscape. The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was no flowers-and-candy ode to women, but a loud expression of sexual unrest that seemed to encompass an entire world. More important, folk-rock—embodied most by Bob Dylan’s epic “Like a Rolling Stone”—meant that singer-songwriters were not just freed from conventional teen themes, but that some modicum of intelligence—a consideration of politics, perhaps, a dash of poetry, or even some offbeat psychology—might be required of them.

Enter the Beatles, joking. Or, to be more accurate, enter John Lennon, pondering, when he wasn’t tossing off a sardonic remark, how fame had transformed himself and the certainty he had lost.

Lennon’s murder 35 years ago this month understandably exalted him to martyr status and, consequently, made some slight the contribution of his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney. 

(Recall critic Robert Christgau’s repetition in The Village Voice of his wife’s remark after hearing about the shooting: “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn't it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?")

Paul was primarily responsible for some of Rubber Soul’s biggest singles, including “Michelle” and “You Won’t See Me.” But it was Lennon, trouble-tossed and introspective as he had been at no other time before, who gave the album its teeth. He embodied the Leonard Cohen lyric, “Where there’s a crack, that’s where the light gets in.”

Let’s start with a song that did not originate with him: Paul’s “Drive My Car.” The history of that song supports the notion that even if the original spark for a song did not come from Lennon, he could affect its development. In this case, one listen to McCartney’s tune and Lennon was ready to pronounce it “crap.” After trying out some alternatives, the two came up with a line that was far tougher and more suggestive than “I wanna hold your hand”: “Baby, you can drive my car.”

The song that may have embodied the band’s—and Lennon’s—sonic and lyric exploration best was “Norwegian Wood.” Earlier that year, with “Yesterday,” producer George Martin had added a string quartet, giving McCartney’s plaintive tune a classical feel. With Lennon’s sly, first-person narrative of a seduction, the Beatles employed, for what is believed to be the first time in a pop song, a sitar (an instrument discovered by George Harrison while the band was shooting the film Help!).

The highly unusual sound produced was the first clue that the listener was in unfamiliar, even uncertain and treacherous, territory. The second clue came in Lennon’s opening lines, which seemed to be about to introduce a conventional boy-meets-girl tale, only to undercut it immediately: “I once had a girl, or should I say that she had me?” Well, which is it? the listener wants to know.

And that might be the least of the surprises. Many people believe that the song was Lennon’s account of a fling, albeit carefully disguised so as not to arouse wife Cynthia’s suspicions.

Or did Lennon confess more than he intended? This is not, after all, a song about male sexual conquest—a popular enough theme in rock ‘n’ roll—but of male sexual naivete and even inadequacy. After the young woman has done her level best to seduce the narrator (he notices there isn’t a chair in the place, and she coos that it’s time for bed), he’s too tired to do anything more than crawl “off to sleep in the bath.”

Then he wakes up, only to discover, to his chagrin, that, in the song’s wicked double entendre, “this bird [i.e., the British term for what American males would shortly call “chicks” or, later still, “babes”] had flown.” Before the final one-line refrain, the narrator delivers what might be the most debated line on the LP: “So, I lit a fire.”

Pete Shotton, Lennon’s friend from boyhood to the Beatle’s death, thought that line might have derived from the musician’s purchase of furniture in the fireplace at Gambier Terrace in Liverpool when he lacked money for coal. But McCartney, who gave his songwriting partner ideas on how to open the song out beyond the opening couplet, was closer to the mark: the narrator had burned down the flat as an act of anger and revenge the morning after his all-too-uneventful encounter.

“Norwegian Wood” didn’t exhaust John’s darker impulses when it came to women. “Run for Your Life” was the taunting refrain of a lover to his girlfriend. Lest any doubt exist about his intention, pay special heed to one line, a direct threat: “Catch you with another man, that’s the end, little girl.” At the time, listeners might have gotten caught up in its fast, catchy tune. But nowadays, after Ray Rice, it sounds unremittingly ugly, a blot on its composer's subsequent reputation as an advocate of nonviolence. (In later years Lennon, in copping to his own domestic abuse in his 20s, admitted that it was one of his worst songs, written largely to fill out the album.)

The same could not be said of “Nowhere Man,” a stark picture of alienation. It’s hard to believe that the man in the song who “doesn’t have a point of view” could be Lennon, but he later told Beatles chronicler Hunter Davies that, after trying unsuccessfully to complete a song for five hours—and believing, in the midst of the frustration, that he might not be able to finish another—he himself felt like a “nowhere man.” If so, it constitutes an interesting counterpart to “Norwegian Wood,” with creative failure substituting for physical impotence.

In terms of Lennon’s future as a songwriter, however, “In My Life” may have constituted the true breakthrough on the album. He seems to have begun it by writing down place names from the Liverpool of his childhood, only to be jolted by associations with people: “Some are dead and some are living.” With his suburban home, wife and child, he was in a far more comfortable place than he had been growing up—but he didn't find it enough.

Five decades on, it’s hard not to be struck by the lyrical and attitudinal similarities between “In My Life” and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Were one not to have known the composers, just the lyric sheets at hand, one could only conclude that a middle-aged person could have written such rueful meditations on experience. (Indeed, it is the vocal version by the wised-up Mitchell, not by her girlish-sounding younger counterpart, that is used in the 2003 film Love, Actually).

Perhaps only the 1960s—a decade of startling social dislocation—could have produced similar exercises in nostalgia across the Atlantic by a pair of twentysomethings. Somehow, Lennon and Mitchell had transformed profoundly personal statements of confusion and loss into anthems for an entire generation of lost youth.