Tag: the Beatles

checking in and checking out with the big beatles sort out

April 6th, 2023

I’m a big fan of The Big Beatles Sort Out podcast, which is now towards the end of its third season. I think the relationship between the two brother-presenters is warm and witty, and I enjoy listening to every episode, even when I profoundly disagree with the scoring system and the scores. Worrying about the actual rankings is like arguing about pizza toppings. So my disagreements with Garry (who does the rankings) are on the same level as the line from Pixar’s Inside Out: “Congratulations, San Francisco, you’ve ruined pizza.”

There are two main areas of disagreement, and I think they’re to do with a couple of memos that have been circulating in the fandom for a while now. The first memo concerns the post-breakup unfair treatment of McCartney set against the valorisation of Lennon. While you will still find large sections of the internet determined to treat Lennon as if he was Jesus, I think the tendency of 70s and 80s rock critics (those another kind of podcast has termed “the jean jackets”) to treat McCartney has a joke has largely faded.

The second memo concerns Yoko Ono, who was also treated unfairly by the press – in particular the mainstream press – and whose own work has been reevaluated in recent years. I’m fine with all this. I was never a member of the Yoko-broke-up-the-Beatles club anyway. On the other hand, I remain entitled to my opinion about her contributions. To this end, there needs to be a Yoko Sidebar around here:

The Yoko Sidebar

My opinions about Yoko divide into three. The first concerns her art. She was known as an artist before she met John, and has continued to produce art throughout her life. Personally, I think it’s all a bit twee. It’s the sort of stuff I’d see in a gallery, say, huh, and move on.

Then there’s the music, which I do not like. Whether screaming and wailing, proto-disco, or whatever other genre she tries, I just don’t see the appeal. People compare her to Bjork: fine. I don’t like Bjork, either. John compared her to the B52s: yep, didn’t like them. My beef with the Sort Out crew here is that they’ve included Yoko in the Season 3 sort out, which kind of makes her a member of the Beatles. And frankly, she’s not good enough to be in the Beatles. I know there has been a strong movement towards enjoying Yoko’s music, with some people arguing that it is better, bolder, and more cutting edge than John’s solo work, but while I might agree that solo Lennon was fairly average, I still find it more listenable than Yoko.

Which brings me to the third opinion, which is to do with her character. I think there’s plenty of evidence that she is manipulative. The whole May Pang story is a red flag there, as are the tales about her sending John away on trips because of astrology or numerology or whatever, and stories about her preventing John from meeting up with Paul. I also think that the Lennon-Yoko love affair was hyped by the two gifted self-publicists, and has been hyped since John’s death. I think there was Stuff Going On in ’68 and ’69 to do with the disintegrating Beatles and the relationship between John and Paul, but I don’t really believe in the Great Love Affair. And the last thing I’ll say is this: I think Yoko is sometimes, often, crass and tasteless., exploiting John’s murder to further her career and public image. Exhibit one here is her album cover for Season of Glass, which features a pair of spectacles with blood on them. I think she has a tendency to evoke John’s name when she has something to sell, and she doesn’t do it tastefully.

So in terms of the two fandom memos, I think I’m probably guilty of not getting the second. I don’t appreciate her music and I think her personality is toxic – an opinion that has nothing to do with whatever happened in 1968 and 1969 and a lot to do with what I’ve observed since 1980.

And I think Sort Out Garry is a bit guilty of not getting the first. I think his pro-John bias was very evident in Season One of the sort out, and has become even more apparent in Season 3. The song “Imagine” for example, has been placed at #1 (so far), with a score of 100 for lyrics, 96 for music and 90 for production. I mean, it’s okay. But 100 for lyrics? I think the lyrics are, whisper, a bit twee. But this is fine, it’s his podcast. He’s put Lennon’s “Starting Over” at #5 (so far), and I probably have more of an issue with that. There was no bigger Lennon fan in the world than me in 1980 when it came out, and I had been eagerly anticipating Lennon’s first new music in years. And, well, it was a bit rubbish wasn’t it? Furthermore, considering how vicious Lennon had been about McCartney’s seventies silly love songs and “granny music”, he had some fucking brass neck to release “Starting Over” without accompanying it with a 400-page mea culpa.

Talking of “Silly Love Songs”: it’s ranked at #45, if you can believe that. Just 70 points for music, for that bass line. Absolute insanity. But even more ignominious – and what drove me to put fingers to keyboard on this occasion – is the placement of “With a Little Luck” somewhere down in the 60s. If I was wounded by “Silly Love Songs” in the 40s, I’m broken by “With a Little Luck” in the 60s. I’ve always felt this song was one of Paul’s secret message songs for John, and it breaks my heart a little bit to hear it dismissed so easily. I had to switch off the podcast for a bit and go for a walk.

I think where the bias comes through is with the tracks Garry is unfamiliar with. I think if he hears a John song he doesn’t know, he’s inclined to over-reward; a Paul song he doesn’t know, he finds reasons not to like. Meanwhile Sort Out Paul sits there bemused by the whole scoring system, as usual.

Congratulations Garry, you’ve ruined The Beatles. First the Hawaiians, and now you.
Lonely Hearts Clubhouse – Episode 9: Fred Astaire

November 9th, 2022

And so we come to the end of Season 1 of the Lonely Hearts Clubhouse, and we finish with a fun episode about musician, actor and dancer – and Hollywood legend – Fred Astaire. He’s the ninth personage along in the back row of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. It’s hard to say which of the Beatles (or which of the artists involved) picked him, but he’s a very interesting subject. We opted for possibly Lennon in the end, but it could equally have been McCartney. Like Mae West and W C Fields, Astaire was an unconventional movie star. Not gifted with the good looks normally required to be a leading man, he nevertheless headlined movies because of his extraordinary talent for dancing.

More than that, Astaire was a versatile musician. You’ll see him at the piano in Roberta, and you’ll see him playing his drums in one of his TV specials. Macca-like in that respect. There’s even an extraordinary dance/drum sequence in Damsel in Distress in which Astaire plays drums with his hands and his feet, and tap dances, all shot in one continuous take with a single camera.

It’s this extraordinary talent that made him an inspiration for Frank Sinatra, 16 years his junior, but who always loved to sing songs made famous by his hero.

This is the season 1 finale of Clubhouse. Elodie is away in New Mexico for now, so season 2 will wait a while.
Uninvolvered

November 1st, 2022
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Revolver — although I have always hated “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Is there really any such thing as a bad Beatles record, after all? But I think there are a couple of reasons why it’s not my favourite. Firstly, I think it’s latter day popularity stems from the fact that it is the closest Beatles album to the contemporary sound of Indie rock. But I was never into that genre. By the time the NME C86 compilation came out, I was already drifting towards country music (a process that started, like a lightbulb going on, when I heard Nashville Skyline for the first time). So while a lot of my contemporaries and just-youngers were getting into the indie jangle, I was listening to The Band, early-middle Dylan, and the likes of Dwight Yoakam. Indie jangle passed me by in favour of chicken pickin’. 12-string guitars are all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living with them.

All of which means that I never felt a connection between Revolver and the other stuff I was into. The Beatles record nearest to the music I got into later on is, of course, Beatles for Sale, which is as close to a country album as the group made. But I should also say that I’d been in possession of my copy of Revolver for several years by the time of C86. So the second thing I have to say is that I think your favouriting of Beatles albums will depend on the order in which you obtained them.

Revolver was neither the first nor the last of the Beatles albums I bought. It kind of dropped into the middle of my collection and didn’t really stand out to me. In fact, I’d offer the same critique of it that some people make of the White Album: it’s so eclectic that it lacks cohesion.

So Revolver landed for me at a time when all Beatle music was new, and it didn’t stand out particularly. If you asked me to nominate a personal top 5, I would say:
- Beatles For Sale
- Abbey Road
- The White Album
- Let it Be
- Help!
A top 4 would have been easier. Let it Be is a mixed bag, but has to be there for the title track and “Two of Us”. But if I did swap it out, I think I’d prefer Rubber Soul to Revolver, so now you’ll think I’m just being perverse. But that run, from Beatles for Sale to Rubber Soul is so good.

And I know some people would throw in A Hard Day’s Night as being their first breakthrough album. Of that I would say that Side 2 is weaker than side 1, whereas Side 2 of Help! has “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Yesterday”.

As always, with these super deluxe editions, I find the extra tracks fairly underwhelming. While it is interesting to hear their works in progress, and to consider their creative process, it’s not as if I’m going to make a point of listening to most of this stuff. Or any of this stuff. I honestly don’t see the appeal of the giggling version of “And Your Bird Can Sing” (perhaps I’ve been around too many students making too much of a small thing). And I really don’t give a shit that “Yellow Submarine” started off as a sad song. This problem is compounded by the fact that Revolver isn’t my favourite in the first place. I’m happy to have a stereo mix that sounds more like a modern stereo mix, and I’m more likely to listen to that than to the original. As to the mono mix, sure, since it turns out that most of my non-headphone listening is on a single, mono speaker.

But the extra discs of outtakes and song sketches hold very little interest for me because I am not of the trainspotter/collector tendency. I’ve always felt that the Beatles released everything that was worth releasing by 1970, and there has been nothing released over the years that changed my mind about that.

I was listening to people discussing Beatles bootlegs the other day, and nothing they said changed my mind about having no interest in that kind of thing. Not even the “Live at the BBC” stuff appeals to me much. It all sounds a bit thin in comparison to their George Martin produced and released catalogue.

The other question I’ve been meaning to address is the meaning of the word psychedelia, especially in relation to Revolver. I’ll be frank and admit that I have never heard anything “psychedelic” on a Beatles record. Not even “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” strikes me that way. Maybe It’s hard to explain what I mean, and perhaps it’s because I’ve never really taken drugs myself, but let’s, say, compare early Pink Floyd to The Beatles. Those first two Floyd albums, synth heavy, weird, put you in the middle of their light show. I can see that, even stone cold sober as I am. But The Beatles for me are always more oneiric than psychedelic. “I’m Only Sleeping” has an oneiric quality, and so does “Tomorrow Never Knows”, really.

Anyway, now that demixing has happened on a Beatles album, what price returning to Sgt Pepper and giving us yet another version? And what happened to the Magical Mystery Tour material?
Lonely Hearts Clubhouse – Episode 8: Edgar Allan Poe

October 26th, 2022

Eighth along on the Sgt Pepper cover, and we come to the master of the macabre, the sovereign of spooky, the uncle of the uncanny, Edgar Allan Poe. A writer, poet, and critic who died, like John Lennon, at the age of 40 — and was name-checked by Lennon in the lyrics of “I Am the Walrus”.

An overnight success who laboured in obscurity for most of his working life, Poe can be seen as the originator of the detective genre, but is also the quintessential Southern Gothic author, and a purveyor of horror stories that were frequently focused on people being buried alive.

Join Elodie and me as we sit in the summer garden and discuss Poe’s life and debts. The usual health warning about the night sounds (bats! a Chihuahua with a chainsaw! hosepipes!), although we think the baby sparrows had fledged by this time. Elodie wrote the script and I chip in whenever it’s inappropriate.

This is the penultimate episode of the first season of the Lonely Hearts Clubhouse.
Lonely Hearts Clubhouse – Episode 7: Carl Jung

October 12th, 2022

It’s like a Jung-le out there. Or: somebody spoke and I went into a dream…

Carl Jung! Founder of analytical psychology, originator of the idea of the collective unconscious, coiner of terms like synchronicity — and seventh along in the back row of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

I really enjoyed this episode, because this whole field of study is so fascinating. And of course, the Beatles were always singing about dreams and dreaming, so Jung’s interest in dream interpretation is central.

As with previous episodes, we recorded this outside in the garden, so there was a lot of noise in the background, and I had to do some serious work to reduce it as much as possible. The baby birds were either asleep, or flown away, but the hosepipe was running; the pump in the basement was droning, the night market up in the hills was in full voice, and there were the usual motorcycles and reversing vehicles.

Still! I think it is listenable. As usual, Elodie did all the research, and I chipped in. Listen to the end for her Jungian interpretation of the song “Let it Be”.
Room

March 28th, 2022

I’m really vague on whether I was 15 or 16 or maybe even 17, but at a certain point, my bedroom at my parents’ house was in need of decoration and I was given a free rein as to how to decorate it. Black and White was the theme. White carpet, lol, and a black and white bedspread. Black sheets? *Shudder* Forgive, me, I was a teenager. I painted by desk black, but the best and most important detail is that my sister painted Beatle murals all around the room.

My sister, my younger brother, and George.

I’m afraid that Paul is lost to time. No photos of the Paul wall exist, as far as I know. This breaks my heart. But the John and Ringo wall is here, and it was such an amazing image that you could see it from up on the Downs, looking down over hundreds of metres to my upstairs bedroom:

Portrait of the artist with the fuckin’ artist

That white thing she’s sitting on was my parents’ old sideboard, legs removed, and painted white. I wonder what I kept in there? O to rootle through those drawers.

I was listening to something the other day (so many podcasts) and they were talking about what you had up on your bedroom wall when you were a teenager. For me, it was les Beatles, but also I had a few 8×10 black and white film star publicity shots. My favourite of these was Natalie Wood. It was a great head and shoulders photo of her, at her absolute peak – hair over one eye – around the time of Love with the Proper Stranger, although I’ve never been able to find it on the internet, which is weird. O to be back in that slightly seedy London bookshop, the one with the racks and racks of movie star photos.
Let it Be

October 15th, 2021

Let it Be was one of the last Beatles albums I got hold of, in that intense period between my 14th and 16th birthdays, when I obtained all that was then available. I still have a vivid flashbulb memory of listening to the album for the first time, playing it in the old front room at home whilst also dealing with my mum’s demands that I do some vacuuming. I already knew five of the tracks, of course, because Let it Be was very well represented on the Blue album: Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, Let it Be, Across the Universe, and The Long and Winding Road all featured.

So for me as a 16-year old, the “new” songs were Two of Us, Dig a Pony, I Me Mine, I’ve Got a Feeling, One After 909, and For You Blue. Those, and the inter-song chatter and the brief snatches of Maggie Mae and Dig It, which added an atmosphere of surprise and delight to the album — along the same lines as the “Ey op!” at the beginning of While My Guitar Gently Weeps on The Beatles.

Of the Let it Be songs that were new to me, the one that moved me the most was Two of Us, a song that asserts itself to be about Paul and Linda but of course it is so obviously also about Paul and John. For me, it evoked a feeling of two friends on their way home from school, getting up to mischief, killing time, wanting to be together and not wanting to be home. This hit me hard as a sixteen year old who would take his sweet time walking home from school, checking out the record shop, popping into Woolies, and generally dawdling. And the poignancy of “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead” is an acknowledgement that their long and winding road is near its end. A feeling with the Beatles that they had done all that they could do together and that it was getting to be time to move on.

Other real revelations for me on the Let it Be album were that the versions of Let it Be and Get Back were completely different from the standalone single versions I was familiar with. And, to this day, I so much prefer the crunchier guitar on the album version, it hits me in a much more visceral way than the somewhat anaemic guitar played through a Leslie speaker on the single. This crunchier guitar was an imposter, added a whole year later, after the divorce, when it was just the Threatles. The problem in 1969 was that there was too much playing with effects, like tremolos and spinning speakers. I’m interested in that 1970 George, who plays that much punchier solo with none of the nonsense. It’s like he realised that he was being a bit too pernickety in 1969, trying to play something too intricate.

After the lush album packaging of Sgt Pepper and The Beatles, the skimpy sleeves and inners of both Abbey Road and Let it Be were a disappointment. Which doesn’t detract from the music, but gives you less to do when you’re listening (apart from the hoovering). I know there was a Let it Be box and book back in 1970, but they’re vanishingly rare, and – by the time I got my copy – nearly a decade in the past.

How strange it seems now, that long-ago Saturday hoovering session, with Let it Be on the stereo, and a strong feeling that I was dipping into the distant musical past. Those were the days when to be a Beatles fan was a slightly strange choice for a teenager to make, and it really did seem as if they belonged to a different age. You could go in a record shop and wouldn’t even find a copy of Abbey Road or Let it Be. And The Beatles, I seem to remember, was only stocked by the bigger retailers (Boots!) because it was so freaking expensive.

Every new purchase was filling in gaps for me, missing pieces of a puzzle I was working out with the help of The Beatles Monthly and the books available in the 70s.

One of my puzzles – because I didn’t know the circumstances and the history in much detail – was the way their facial hair seemed to be all over the place. If Let it Be was their last album, I wondered, why was John so much beardier on Abbey Road and Paul so much less? Paul had gone from being stubbly in his The Beatles colour portrait to being clean shaven on Abbey Road, and then very beardy on Let it Be. I didn’t know then what we all know now, I was a very confused boy.

Here we are then, and it’s an out of time re-release mixed up remix super deluxe set that should have appeared at some point in 2020 but didn’t (for some reason). And alongisde it, if you can afford it, a new book, Get Back, not the book that comes in the Super Deluxe boxed set, but a book that transcribes the audio tapes of the January 1969 sessions, with lots and lots and lots of lovely photographs. It’s lush.

And yet, and yet: such a book is really a pain. It’s too big to hold up, too hefty to hold comfortably on your lap, the sort of book you need a lectern to support. Also it has lots of glossy back pages, and boy, do they attract fingerprints. You don’t want it smaller because of the photos (everything looks better when it’s bigger), but you do want it smaller because it’s too much. And when the cat tries to climb in your lap as you read, the situation is impossible.

I like the book though. It’s part of the new narrative, that things were never that bad, that the arguments weren’t even particularly intense, and that mostly it was good humoured chat, talk about what was on TV the night before, with the only fly in the ointment Michael Bloody Lindsay Fucking Hogg, who will keep banging on about the show that George definitely doesn’t want to do.

I came up with a new theory: if Hogg had shut up about it, the others could have chivvied George along a bit and things might have turned out differently. They knew him best, after all. Anyway, there’s a sweet moment in the transcript of January 25 1969, when Paul is moaning–not moaning about the not-happening show, and one of the reasons he gives for wanting to do it is that he wants people to see Ringo playing. This is six months or so after Ringo walked out of the white album sessions feeling unloved, and it’s absolutely the case that he is fucking brilliant on these sessions. So good, lifting every song as soon as he hits his groove, and he hits his groove almost immediately, every time. On the rough version of All Things Must Pass, for example, when he comes in with his fill, it just sounds immediately better.

As for boxed sets, not for me. I don’t want a thing that just sits on a shelf and takes up space. I’m happy with the streaming version, especially now it’s lossless and better than CD quality sound — even though, in truth, I don’t have any equipment to play it on to make that worthwhile.

So to the music. Let’s not pretend my ears can really hear anything different about the new 2021 mixes of the main album. All I will say is that I heard what Paul was doing on the bass during John’s “Everybody had a hard year” section, and it is, of course, ace. Let it Be is still a marvel though. And I think people are only now able to appreciate what they achieved in such a small space of time. It wasn’t that they had no songs, because there were ideas knocking around, such as the title track. But they did indeed complete composition, learn, work out arrangements, and then record this whole collection of songs in such a short period. The evolution of Get Back is remarkable. And my key insight here is that because a lot of that evolution happened in the hiatus following George’s walkout, that’s why he’s not playing lead guitar on it.

Disc 2 is alternate takes of some of the album tracks, while Disc 3 has little hints of what might have been, and another reminder that this was an extraordinarily productive period. In fact, probably the reason they carried on in February and did Abbey Road was that they already had so much stuff. So you get a bit of The Beatles playing All Things Must Pass, a snippet of Gimme Some Truth, some embryonic Abbey Road tracks, including both John and Paul singing Oh Darling!

I’ve never been one for bootlegs, so I’m hearing a lot of this stuff for the first time. I’m sure for a lot of people none of this is new.

Disc 4 is the first of Glyn Johns’ 1969 mixes for the aborted Get Back album, including a lot more fly-on-the-wall chatter, and some rougher-sounding takes. Disc 5 has two of his 1970 mixes, and 2021 mixes of the Let it Be Single and the Don’t Let Me Down B-side which should have been on the album in the first place.

As with all such boxed sets, you might wonder just how many times you’re likely to listen to this. I love the song Let it Be, but there are five (!) versions of it here, and only one of them has the good guitar solo. I expect I’ll be steeped in this from now until the release of Peter Jackson’s film at least. And after seeing the trailer this week, I’m as excited as my 16-year-old hoovering self.
[A knocking within]

October 12th, 2021

There’s a theory about the knocking in Macbeth (at the end of Act 2 Scene 2 and the beginning of the following scene) that it signals the intrusion of the real world of politics and consequences into the cloistered “night time” world of curtained sleep and wicked dreams/deeds.

And I feel there’s been a little bit of that going on in the world of Beatle fandom this week, as the publicity machine ramps up in the lee of the forthcoming Let it Be release and Get Back film. My copy of the Get Back book arrived today, and this is the week that Paul McCartney has been widely quoted, discussing, for the 500 millionth time, the break-up.

And not saying anything new. Not saying anything he didn’t say in 1971, and not contradicting anything Lennon said in 1970. In fact, for as long as I’ve been a Beatles fan, I’ve been aware that John was the one who instigated the break-up. And even in those long-ago days of my early Beatle fandom, before John was killed, when I was reading whatever books were available, like The Beatles in their Own Words, and The Beatles, An Illustrated Record, I was fully aware that Lennon boasted of breaking up the band and that the media and presumably some fans, laid the blame at Paul’s door. So I have never once in 40-odd years thought that it was Paul who caused the break-up.

How weird it has been then, to hear the knock-knock of the mainstream discussing The Beatles and their break-up, and to have the mainstream reporting Paul’s remarks (that ‘our Johnny’ asked for a divorce) as if it were news.

(I’m aware that they don’t really think it is news. I’m aware that it’s just churnalism, but still ever so slightly infuriating.)

Even weirder to hear one of the luminaries of one of the top Beatles podcasts interviewed on BBC Radio Five, and to endure the painful questioning of at least one poorly briefed presenter. That Steven Cockcroft (of Nothing is Real) was able to reply with patience and forbearance is all you need to know about why it was him being questioned and not me. I wonder if other Beatle podcasters were a little miffed that the call from the mainstream media went to him and not them?

This is where we are, then. Worlds are colliding. Some of us have reached a level of sophistication and understanding about this story where we’re not questioning whether John asked for a divorce first, but whether he meant it when he did. We’re delving into time-lines and wondering how many Beatles can dance on the head of a pin. Whereas others are making fatuous comparisons between the breakup of The Beatles and that of One Direction. Which is not me sneering at One Direction or their fans (I totally am) but pointing out that The Beatles weren’t just some boy band. This is more like making meaningful links between the theme of equivocation in Macbeth and the trials of the gunpowder plotters.

And who’s behind all this nonsense in the mainstream media? Step forward Maccabeth himself, who was asked a damn-fool question and presumably gave this damn fool answer. Knock knock knock. Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub? Faith, here’s a journalist who sold his soul for a byline and “the exposure” who has been asked to write 1000 words on The Beatles so reached for his trusty 1975 NME Encyclopaedia of Rock…

Anyway, deep breath. It’ll all be over soon, this mainstream interest, and then we can all go back to being obsessed with the lyrics to “I Know (I Know)”.
Beatle thoughts over coffee

April 24th, 2021

1. Yer Blues

I’ve been meaning to ~~complain~~ write about this for a while, because there are a couple of bugbears surrounding this song in particular that I’ve been meaning to get off my chest.

First of all, what is it called? I think of all the jokes the Beatles ever told, this one fell as flat as a cartoon cat run over by a steamroller. I think this is largely because The Beatles belong to their American fans in a way they never did to the British. British fans have always had to contend with peer pressure, the fickle and arbitrary whims of the music press, and the disapproving curtain twitching of the Daily Mail etc. American fans, with at best a loose understanding of British regional accents, really stood no chance at understanding how to say “Yer Blues” out loud.

Sadly, over time, it seems that most British fans (and youthful podcasters) have also lost the ability to pronounce the song.

The song was originally intended as a snipe at the British Blues Boom, exemplified by the likes of the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers, and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, who released their debut album in February 1968. The Beatles were always hip to what was going on, and both they and the Stones responded in their own way to This Kind of Thing. The Stones released Beggar’s Banquet in December 1968, which was their Back to Basics Album. The Beatles, as they so often did, turned to pastiche and satire. Lennon’s song might have been called ‘Yer Actual Blues’’, as in, this is your actual, authentic blues, this is.

In other words, you’re supposed to be saying ‘Yer Blues’ in an iambic rhythm, with an unstressed, cockney ‘yer’ (or yuh) followed by a stressed, earnest, ‘blues’, like a bloke in a pub.

The second issue surrounding this song is that it turned almost instantly from satire to sincerity. Lennon, in his pain and insecurity at the time and in the early 70s, used this song as a crutch, pulling it out for those few live appearances he made (the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus in December ’68 and Toronto in September 1969), with yer actual Eric Clapton on guitar. And in his interviews, he characterised this (and the earlier ‘Help!’ as serious manifestations of his pain).

2. The rock ’n’ rolling argument

‘Yer Blues’ fits into the spirit of the times, and an ongoing conversation/debate within the pages of the music press about authenticity in music. This authenticity debate goes on an on, and is something I wrote about in connection with country music in particular way back in 2012. The Beatles gave up touring in 1966 at least in part because they knew they weren’t able to reproduce their records successfully in a live setting (see below for more on this). They probably needed some time out, to allow the technology of sound reinforcement to catch up with them, but the existence of The Analogues in the 21st Century (not to mention McCartney and Starr’s various live outings) shows that you can reproduce this stuff live.

But the point was, in 1968 and 1969 especially, that the Beatles were being dinged for making records that ‘they couldn’t do live’. Sgt Pepper is all very well, but etc. etc.. And you might have spent five months recording this White Album thing, but how much of it could you perform live? This one is more of a moot point, because it’s already clear that quite a lot of The Beatles is meant to be stripped back to a kind of basics. And into this context, you can fit the ‘live’ videos released for both ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ – both designed to give the lie to the notion that the Beatles could no longer hack it as live performers.

A lot of the debate was surrounding the ‘authentic’ British Blues Boom bands, including the likes of Led Zeppelin, who were formed in 1968, which is Year Zero for the ‘But could you do it live?’ debate.

So there’s this three-way debate going on between the Beatles, the Stones, and the Blues Boom. The Stones’ response to The Beatles wasn’t to try to ape it, like they tried to ape Sgt Pepper, but to get back to what they originally were: a blues band.

And how did The Beatles respond? Their own back-to-basics project, Get Back, and the supposed live show they were going to put on. But it all falls apart, because George didn’t want to play live under any circumstances, and John had completely lost faith/interest in their ability to do it. It’s so telling that he fell back onto the rock and roll music they were playing back in Hamburg, both during these sessions and the Live Peace in Toronto concert. He knows he can do this, he doesn’t want to do moptop Beatles music, and he has no conviction that can manage the new stuff live.

Of course, they could: the rooftop concert, brief as it was, showed that they could.

Meanwhile, Mick Jagger is promoting Beggar’s Banquet and the Stones leaning into live performance by claiming that the Stones were always a better live band. And, even in 1970, Lennon is still responding to what Mick says in his interviews, arguing that the Beatles were a great live band… back in Hamburg.

And poor old Paul is trying to persuade the others that they could get back on the road, if only to prove to themselves that they could still do it. The latest episode of the One Sweet Dream podcast’s Break-Up Series is excellent on this. In January 1969, this is what Paul wants to do: answer their critics by getting back on the stage. In September 1969, it’s still his main suggestion, to which Lennon responds that Paul is ‘daft’, and the rest is history.

And when Paul takes Wings out on tour in 1972, he does exactly what he wanted to do with The Beatles. And while the music press was horrible about him and this tour at the time, he was right, wasn’t he? And as I’ve said before, the tragedy of Lennon’s early death is that he never got to grow up enough to do ‘Baby’s in Black’ live again.

3. Budokan

If you look on YouTube, you’ll easily find the colour film of The Beatles playing the Budokan arena in 1966. And you’ll see the reasons (beyond death threats and chaos) why they stopped touring that year, along with some quite shameful behaviour from members of the band who knew they were bad (by their high standards) and wanted to hide the fact. You see, while they often said in interviews that people couldn’t hear them play, the problem in 1966 was that they could.

By 1966, the screaming had died down. It’s a sad fact that a lot of the 1966 shows didn’t sell out. So, actually, with a decent sound system, The Beatles could be heard. In fact, the sound quality of this concert isn’t too bad. But there are a number of problems.

The microphones are shit. Ironically, 1966 was the year that Shure first produced the SM58. The similar SM57 came in 1965. So if The Beatles had held on, things would have quickly improved in that department. Classics like the Sennheiser MD441 wouldn’t be along until the early 70s, but by the time Zeppelin are touring in ’69, live sound is much better.

But worse than the microphones being shit, they’re loose, they’re at the wrong height, they swing around and won’t stay pointed in the same direction. George has to keep pulling it back when he’s trying to sing into the same mic as Paul. Even when Paul is singing on his own, his mic keeps rotating away from him. It’s extraordinary: for want of some gaffer tape, the band was lost.

Watch that show and you’ll notice that, um, when Paul is doing a number, they’re pretty damn good. His vocals on ‘I’m Down’ and ‘She’s a Woman’ and even ‘Yesterday’ are fine. And that whole band performance of ‘Yesterday’ is all right, really. On the other hand, George’s voice sounds faint, and their attempts to harmonise on ‘If I Needed Someone’ are ropy. Lennon makes a fair fist of ‘Nowhere Man’, and you can blame poor sound for most of what makes it a bit cringeworthy. ‘Paperback Writer’ is pretty terrible.

And here’s the thing: whenever it starts getting a bit limp or loose, on ‘Paperback Writer’ for example, both Lennon and Harrison try to get the audience to scream to cover up how poor they sound. They’ll just suddenly wave and gurn to try to generate enough noise to hide their failings. Embarrassing really.

But it was clearly the memories of this that were haunting George and John in 1969 when they baulked at getting back on the road. Because there was no way that the 28-9 year old John Lennon, with his beard and his heroin and his avant-garde sensibilities, was going to go on stage and perform ‘Eight Days a Week’ or ‘Baby’s in Black’, or even ‘Nowhere Man.’

And as I said above, that’s a real tragedy. Because the joy Paul and Ringo have brought to the world by doing songs from all eras of their career live is really quite incredible.

Even ‘Yer Blues’, John, would have brought the house down in 1999.
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band

September 13th, 2020

I should have paid more attention to the sub-title of this film, and then perhaps I wouldn’t have been mildly surprised that it only really told the story of The Band up to The Last Waltz. I don’t know why I thought that it might give some consideration to the various members’ solo careers, the 80s reunion (sans Robertson) and the sad deaths of both Richard Manuel and Rick Danko – but I did. I wasn’t disappointed in the actual film, but it’s clear that there’s more of the story yet to be told.

That said, very few of us really want to dwell on the details of that story, so it’s to director Daniel Roher’s credit that he leaves it out of this film.

The other aspect of the film’s title that slightly misled me is the word brothers. I assumed this film would focus on all five members as a band of brothers, but instead the focus is on the close relationship between Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson. This is the relationship that soured after The Last Waltz, and remained unresolved at the time of Helm’s death from cancer.

Christ this is a tragic story, but essential viewing if you love The Band. And if you love The Band and therefore watch this film, you will end up in tears.

The comments under any YouTube videos of The Band will sooner or later (usually sooner) turn to some dickhead singing Levon’s praises while pouring scorn on Robbie Robertson. It’s a tiresome narrative with strange echoes of the one about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. One person is no longer around to argue the point, and the survivor is left in a no-win situation, with a dignified silence the only possible move.

In this film, Taj Mahal calls them ‘America’s Beatles’, a throwaway line that sticks in your head, and the more you think about it the more apposite the description seems. Three lead vocalists; a group that was greater than the sum of its parts; a leading member whose drug use diminished his contribution; another leading member who picked up the slack and kept the group going for two or three years longer than they otherwise might have managed.

Yes, Robbie Robertson is the Paul McCartney of The Band, and the disrespect he gets from so-called fans is undeserved and out of proportion to his supposed sins. The fact is, as uncomfortable as it might be for some to realise, that without him there’s nothing. Almost certainly nothing, or close to it, after the eponymous Brown Album. As various members are sleeping off a drug torpor or driving cars into trees and ditches, Robbie Robertson is getting up in the morning and writing songs. Some good, some indifferent, some great.

Without Robertson’s impetus and the live work it led to (and the relationship with Bob Dylan), The Band were almost certainly done by 1971. That they survived long enough to produce Northern Lights/Southern Cross (which contains at least three of their greatest songs) is a small miracle. And then The Last Waltz, which we’ve spoken about before.

Robbie Robertson spins a good yarn (what do you want him to do, stutter?), and of course this is his film, but it’s respectful towards the others and especially tender on the subject of Levon. Robertson is notably silent as Levon’s grievances are aired; it’s all he could do really.

So here they are. America’s Beatles, and their story is as compelling as our Beatles. I’ve said before that the story of our Beatles is by now a national myth, something akin to the story of King Arthur and his knights; and so it is with The Band, except in their case they are surprisingly overlooked. Sure, they’re loved by musicians and fans of that particular type of music, but most regular punters have barely heard of them.

It really is very strange. Perhaps people need to see this film.