Good Things
I’m finally back from the land of dial-up and lost luggage, a week behind schedule on everything I’m meant to be doing, and exhausted. Proper posts resume tomorrow, and PEP! will be out some time early next week, but in the meantime, here’s a brief list of things that are officially Good right now:
The site Less Wrong , which contains fascinating stuff about Bayesian logic.
PEP! – Having finally got over my writer’s block (which led to a *HORRIBLE* editorial I sent out to the other contributors, which was just forced), and finally got my research stuff back, I can tell you that my own articles are going to be called I Love LA, Why Gavin Is Wrong (But Still Right), Nine Lessons And Carols: A Review, and A Discourse On The Minor Works Of Grant Morrison, With Respect To His Adaptations Of TV Series Originally Created By Mr Sydney Newman, as well as a Further Reading page. I *think* these will help give a spurious thematic coherence to this collection of wonderful stuff. I think it’ll really be exciting.
Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus lecture notes. I can’t *believe* that I’d never realised before that quantum mechanics is actually just what falls out naturally if you generalise standard probability theory to allow for negative numbers.
Lawrence Miles’ astonishing Faction Paradox: The Book Of The War, along with the notes on it Alex W sent me, and also Richard & Alex’s article on Doctor Who continuity for PEP! (which I hope the next episode of the Welsh series doesn’t invalidate). The best Doctor Who since 1980.
The music of Roy Wood, and the documentary on it that Tilt sent me.
The documentary film Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, for so many reasons (Brian talking coherently and intelligently putting the ‘drooling vegetable’ stuff to rest, sitting at the piano with Van Dyke Parks singing Orange Crate Art, sitting at the piano with his mother and brother singing In My Room and God Only Knows…)
My wife.
(Beatles post tomorrow, then some other Actual Content of the Pop-Drama kind over the weekend. I’ve also finally got Asterios Polyp on order from Amazon, so I may review that only a year late when it arrives…)
Delays…
If you’re waiting for either the next mono review, or for PEP!, you’ll have to wait a little longer, I’m afraid.
I’m in Minnesota, having arrived at my in-laws’ house at 2AM yesterday local time, ‘only’ 29 hours after we left, thanks to what was initially a two-hour delay because it didn’t occur to anyone to de-ice the ‘plane until it was already supposed to be leaving.
As far as anyone can tell, though, (which isn’t far, because KLM/NorthWest/Delta aren’t actually answering their ‘phones) my luggage, including pretty much every piece of clothing I own, but also including various CDs, DVDs and books I was using to research my pieces for PEP!, along with my Beatles Mono Box Set, is currently in Amsterdam.
We’re in the land of dialup, so my net access will be limited for the next few days, so I’d just like to say to everyone: Bah, humbug.
The Beatles Mono Reviews 8: Revolver
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
Cover to the Beatles album Revolver, by Klaus Voorman
The Beatles’ seventh album – and their last as a touring band – starts with a count-in, in a deliberate echo of the start of their first album, Please Please Me, recorded a whole three years and two months earlier. While nowadays people tend to think of Revolver as being very much of a piece with Rubber Soul, the eight month gap between the two albums was absolutely massive by the Beatles’ own standards, and this was at the time thought of very much as a reinvention of the band.
While Sergeant Pepper initially overshadowed it, for at least the last fifteen years or so the critical consensus has been that Revolver is far and away the better album. I’ve tended to disagree with that consensus in these posts, placing Please Please Me ahead of With The Beatles and finding a lot of merit in Help! and some filler in Rubber Soul. But for once I have to absolutely agree.
While the idea of a ‘best album ever’ is a fundamentally flawed one – it assumes that, say, Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, Trout Mask Replica and ABC’s Lexicon Of Love are all trying to do the same kind of thing and can be judged accurately against each other – Revolver is as non-ridiculous a candidate for that role as any could be. At least five of its songs are classics by my reckoning, and there’s not a single track that’s less than extremely good.
In part that’s because this is possibly the only Beatles album where the band are on more or less an equal footing. Lennon hit his peak (as far as his contributions to the Beatles go – he had a second peak in the very early 70s) with Rubber Soul and had started his very gentle decline in influence in the band, while McCartney had briefly surpassed his elder partner, being by far the dominant presence on the album, but was not yet overstretching himself and attempting to dictate every note to the rest of the band.
Harrison gets to contribute a greater proportion of the songs than he ever would again, and while Starr only gets to sing one song, he plays here better than he ever had before (or would again – once the Beatles stopped touring the live-in-the-studio backing tracks decreased in frequency, with a consequent loss of the interplay between bass and drums that made their mid-period records so interesting).
Harrison gets to open the album, with Taxman. It’s quite easy in retrospect to see this as an unworthy complaint – “aw, the poor millionaire’s complaining about having to pay taxes, boo hoo”. And indeed that is, in large part, how I do see the song. But in fairness to Harrison, at the time the top marginal rate of tax was 95%, meaning that the “one for you, nineteen for me” line was accurate. Even as an advocate of progressive taxation, I can see how he could consider that a little harsh. (And Harrison wasn’t the only one – around this time Ray Davies was singing ‘the taxman’s taken all my dough’ over a backing track that owed more than a little to the Beatles’ Michelle)
As will so often be the case with this album, though, McCartney makes all the difference on this track. While Harrison and Starr both turn in exemplary performances, just listen to McCartney’s bass triplets under the middle eight. NOBODY was playing like that back then. Rhythmically his bass part is actually quite close to McCartney’s One Drum Idea, but the way it bubbles and twists is astonishing. Add in his Indian-flavoured guitar solo, and you have a track that shows McCartney to be one of the great musicians of his generation.
It’s no surprise, listening to this, that more than a decade later the Jam could just outright steal McCartney’s bass and guitar parts and build a completely new, equally great, single around them.
This new remastering of the mono mix allows this playing to be heard properly for possibly the first time – the greater bass responsiveness allows the astonishing bass playing around the 0:58 mark to be appreciated properly. And many, many little touches in Starr’s percussion playing come out in the remaster.
Eleanor Rigby is another Indian-influenced song. This might not be immediately apparent – especially in the finished version with George Martin’s gorgeous Bernard Hermann-influenced string part – but it’s essentially written on a drone. The only chords in the entire song are Em, C, Em6 and Em7, meaning the E and G are held throughout the entire thing. While it was written on the guitar, you could chord it out on the piano and only have to move one finger (if you played the right inversions).
No-one needs to hear any more about how perfect this song is (although it’s not *quite* perfect – it’s very clear that the last verse was written later than the first two. It lacks their visual references, but does have an internal assonance (“died in the church and was buried along with her name”/”wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave”) missing from the earlier verses. It was no surprise to me when I discovered that this verse was written later at the suggestion of Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton), but it is an astonishing achievement – especially when you consider it was a collaborative work, with Ringo, Pete Shotton and George Martin all contributing to McCartney’s song (Lennon’s claim that he wrote 40% of the lyric appears to be nonsense).
One thing that is obvious listening to the mono mix (which is a much, much nicer mix than the stereo, not being panned stupidly, and not having the mistake where the ADT is left on McCartney’s voice for the first couple of syllables), even more than the stereo mix, is that this is a McCartney solo performance, with none of the other Beatles present. Lennon and Harrison stated this (rather bitterly) in interviews at the time, yet people persist in claiming that Lennon and Harrison contributed backing vocals. Listening to the ‘ah, look at all the lonely people’ sections, it does sound at times like Lennon and/or Harrison are in the mix, but if you actually listen to any individual voice, they’re all McCartney. Certainly the solo ‘ah look at all the lonely people’ in the last repeat of the chorus, which is often identified as Lennon, is McCartney.
I’m Only Sleeping, Lennon’s first song on the album, is also his first instrumental contribution (having so far contributed only backing vocals to Taxman). A minor piece compared to the earlier two, it’s still interesting – it wasn’t until I really listened for these posts, for example, that I noticed the verse is nine bars long rather than the customary eight. It’s also been so varispeeded that it ended up in E-flat minor, a key which no guitar band would ever normally record in.
The most interesting aspect though is George’s backwards guitar part, which took five hours to record, involving George Martin transcribing the solo Harrison had worked out, writing it out backwards, and then Harrison attempting to play that. The effect works surprisingly well (having a ‘yawning’ effect which goes well with the actual yawn at 2:04 (which comes after a spoken ‘yawn, Paul’, which I’d never heard before – don’t know if that’s down to the mono mix or the improved sound quality). Harrison’s solo yet again has an Indian tonality to it, and the free noodling at the end (sounding like a random cut-up of several bits of the solo) leads nicely into
Love You To, Harrison’s second song on the album, is quite astonishing. Featuring only Starr of the other Beatles, playing tambourine (though it’s *possible* that one of the three voices I can hear on the word ‘me’ in the line ‘what you’ve got means such a lot to me’ is McCartney), it’s a serious attempt to write a raga. I know little about Indian classical music, but it’s instantly obvious to me that metrically and harmonically this owes little or nothing to Western pop music. On the other hand, though, it is informed by a Western pop sensibility – this is clearly written by someone who thinks in terms of two minute pop songs written for dancing. As far as I can tell (and I’m wary of my ignorance of Indian music here) it brings the two different forms together without compromising either, and does so in spectacular fashion. Just lovely.
As is Here, There And Everywhere, McCartney’s first ‘answer’ to Pet Sounds. Until hearing this reissue I tended to go along with Ian MacDonald in his view that the song wasn’t inspired by Pet Sounds at all (though MacDonald is simply wrong in his assertion that this track was recorded before that album was released – Pet Sounds was released nearly a month before the recording date) because the harmonies, while vaguely Beach Boys-y, are simple block triads rather than the complex parts the BBs were doing by that time. But what swung me the other way on this reissue is the percussion.
There’s a large, hollow, drum sound (e.g. at 0:10, 0:34 and especially 0:56) which just sounds like a normal tom on the stereo vinyl, but here is a fairly obvious attempt to replicate the big timpani sound Wilson got on tracks like Wouldn’t It Be Nice, You Still Believe In Me and I’m Waiting For The Day. It’s such a distinctive sound that it absolutely must have been a deliberate attempt to emulate specifically that album.
Yellow Submarine is what it is – a fun, jolly little singalong of the kind McCartney’s brother Mike McGear would later specialise in with his band The Scaffold. The sound effects hark back to Martin’s days producing the Goons, while there’s a slight Rainy Day Women feel to the track (with the combination of stompy, loose singalong and brass band). Paying too much attention to this would be to miss the point, but the fact that this can go on the same album as Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows improves both.
She Said, She Said is Lennon’s response to a bad acid trip, when Peter Fonda kept annoying him at a party. One of Lennon’s most metrically-irregular songs, this as always brings out the best in Starr, who manages to guide the band (minus McCartney – Harrison took the bass part on this one, as well as providing some astonishing lead work) through this labyrinth while managing to play an inventive fill almost every other bar.
Lyrically, this bumps up the references to childhood in Lennon’s lyrics another notch, being a clear precursor to the obsession with childhood that would come in ’67 and ’68. Musically, it’s a close cousin of Rain, having much the same supercompressed sound, processed vocals, and bravura drumming. Much like Love You To this was an avenue the Beatles experimented with briefly around this time but never followed up on – other bands could have built entire careers around this sound.
Good Day Sunshine, the opener of side 2, is the most 1966 song possible – a loose reworking of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream, it was recorded during one of the hottest summers on record, at a time when almost everyone was recording songs about the sun of one kind or another. It actually sounds like it was also inspired by She Said She Said, with its metrical trickery ( one can listen to the ‘Good Day Sunshine’s in the chorus as either two bars of 4/4 with phrases crossing bar lines and some unusual syncopation, or as one bar of 3/4 and one of 5/4) and vocal canon ending – but in fact this was recorded some time before the previous song.
I suspect the reason (other than placement) it sounds like the derivative work is that while She Said She Said sounds intuitive, Good Day Sunshine sounds calculated. It’s still an enjoyable track, but it’s a let-down after the musical fireworks of Lennon’s song.
This is also yet another song to only feature McCartney and Starr (plus George Martin on the piano solo) instrumentally – Lennon and Harrison only contribute backing vocals.
And Your Bird Can Sing is another of the ultra-compressed jangly Lennon songs a la She Said She Said. The early version of this song on Anthology Two clearly shows the influence of the Byrds, with Harrison’s lead being played on a 12-string rather than the distorted six-string he is using on the finished version. McCartney’s bass calls back rather nicely to his part on Taxman. A minor track, but a great minor track.
For No One may be McCartney’s greatest track. Another one featuring only McCartney and Starr, plus horn player Alan Civil, it’s an exercise in taking what McCartney has learned from baroque music and applying it to the pop song form. This is more obvious in the mono mix, where the clavichord is higher in the mix, and sounds more like a harpsichord, with McCartney’s bass doubling the clavi in a very formal, stepwise bass melody.
It’s one of the great shames in musical history that McCartney never realised his own strengths. Songs like this or Eleanor Rigby, with their very sparse, formal, simple melodies, are moving precisely because they don’t tug at the heartstrings – the lyrics are simple statements of fact, in second or third person, and the music is restrained almost to the point of callousness. Within a couple of years, McCartney would become ensnared by the Big Ballad, and after late 1968 could never again write a song as simply moving as those on this album (Here Today comes close, and Calico Skies has something of the same feel to it, though in a happy rather than sad mood, but those are the only examples I can think of from the last 40 years of his writing).
Doctor Robert is another of Lennon’s jangly, super-compressed tracks, this time with an interesting break where the instrumentation drops down to just an organ, and the lyrics are sung in a semi-choral manner.
While I actually prefer Lennon’s songs on here to McCartney’s and Harrison’s, there’s less to say about them in general. Any of them would have made a fine single, and they are all superb tracks, but there’s a rather odd thing going on here – Lennon’s tracks *sound* more experimental, but that’s largely just down to Lennon’s songwriting ‘voice’ and the recording techniques. The actual tracks tend to be pretty much two guitars, bass and drums with some ‘trippy’ ADT and compression. McCartney on the other hand is consciously trying for different effects both in his songwriting and in the production on his tracks. Lennon’s stuff is inspired, but McCartney’s stuff is worked on, and the latter is easier to pull apart and talk about.
I Want To Tell You, Harrison’s last song on the album, is another one where the production touches make a big difference, and are mostly McCartney. The rolling Good Day Sunshine piano adds a huge amount to the sound of the record, as does McCartney’s wailing melisma at the end of the track. The mono mix is much more percussion-heavy than the stereo mix, with the tambourine and handclaps pushed right up, and also has the piano dominating even the vocal.
Got To Get You Into My Life seems a somewhat more successful attempt at doing the same kind of thing as Good Day Sunshine, but with some influence from Stax (in the horns) and Holland/Dozier/Holland (in the writing) rather than the Lovin’ Spoonful. While still a minor track in comparison to McCartney’s ballads, it’s a great little rocker. It’s also one where the mono mix is most clearly superior to the stereo one, actually having some care taken over it (and thus not having, for example, the studio chat under early parts of the song). The guitar part appears to have effects on it that I never noticed on the stereo version (though again please note I’m not doing A-B comparisons with this album) , the fade lasts longer, and Sounds Incorporated’s horns are higher in the mix (and thus more dissonant sounding and exciting).
The final track, Tomorrow Never Knows, actually had two mono mixes – one on the first pressing, one on later pressings. My friend Tilt kindly sent me an MP3 copy of the original mono mix, knowing I was going to do this, and that was extremely different to the stereo mix, with a much extended piano coda, tambourine higher in the mix, different effects on Lennon’s vocals at points, and much more of the loops.
It’s a real shame that that version was not included as an extra track in the mono box, as in comparison the second mono mix (the one that’s included here) is closer to the stereo mix. However, the two do have numerous significant differences (and here I *am* doing an A-B comparison – for a while anyway):
The orchestra swell at 0:19 (on the first ‘it is not dying’) isn’t present in the mono version.
The ‘seagull’ sound comes in at 0:30 in the mono mix, and not the stereo.
The tambourine is much higher around 0:40 in the stereo mix than in the mono.
The orchestra swell and tambourine are both there around the ‘it is being’ in stereo and not in mono…
And so on. In general the stereo mix is rather overloaded with tape loops, compared to the mono mix. The ones you notice (those that ‘answer’ vocal phrases or whatever) are in the same places, generally, but the stereo mix is very much a kitchen-sink affair, while the loops are used more sparingly in the mono mix, to greater effect.
There’s not much to say about this track that hasn’t already been said – while Lennon’s been very much the junior partner on the album as a whole, here he really comes into his own, even though this track too has a huge amount of input from McCartney (including, yes, the return of McCartney’s One Drum Idea!, as well as the creation of many of the loops). It’s a track which has been talked about so much that anything I could say would be redundant. So I’ll leave this there.
In a totally unrelated note, everyone spare a thought for David at Vibrational Match, one of my favourite blogs. He’s just announced that his blog is on extended hiatus as both his parents are very ill (one with cancer, one with MS). I was going to link the post directly, but got some odd warnings when I visited the site just now – it may have some kind of Windows virus embedded. Despite that, though, David’s a good bloke and a fine writer, and while no-one deserves that kind of shit in their life, he deserves it less than most. Send whatever small amount of support you can his way.
Updates light til Xmas
Basically, don’t expect anything until PEP! comes out on Xmas day, other than the Beatles reviews. All my writing time currently is being devoted to getting PEP! together and to my contribution to the Mindless ‘zine. I also have various other constraints on my time at the moment. So expect blogging to be light until Xmas.
That said, when Xmas comes, there will be a huge outpouring of stuff from me – the Mindless Ones’ ‘zine will have my article It’s Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas, there will be three or four articles by me in PEP! (one on comics, one on music, and one on Liberalism, as well as various introductory bits), I will be resuming the pop-drama posts then, and will also be starting the Newniverse original fiction site up in January.
(Incidentally, my lack of graphic ability is really hampering PEP! – I have some fantastic ideas for illustration and layout, but am let down by my lack of fine motor co-ordination).
Rage Against… What? #ratm4xmas
I’m sorry for doing a bunch of short posts in a row, when I should be doing my longer ones, but I wanted to make a brief point.
I have seen several people linking to an ‘anti-X-Factor’ campaign, to get the track Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine to number one, in ‘protest’ against the latest X-Factor winner – whoever it is – getting the Xmas number one spot, as the Rage Against The Machine song has the chorus “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
This reminds me of a similar campaign last year, to try to get Jeff Buckley’s cover version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to number one, ahead of the X-Factor winner’s version.
Now, I don’t have a ball in this game, not really caring who’s at number one since the last time I even looked at the charts was, I think, in 2001. But I would point out that this year’s campaign shares one curious factor with last year’s. Killing In The Name Of is published by Sony/ATV Music, and the recording is on Sony/BMG records. Hallelujah is published by Sony/ATV Music and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (from which the track was taken) is on Sony/BMG records.
All X-Factor winners get released through SyCo Records – a subsidiary of Sony/BMG records. And they record songs published by Sony/ATV Music.
This looks to me like an astroturfing campaign – Sony trying to use people’s anger at one Sony subsidiary to make money for another Sony subsidiary. Even if it’s not, I sincerely doubt that giving your money to the same people for a different song is actually going to have the desired effect of protesting against them. All it means is that by doing X-Factor they’re guaranteed *two* hits instead of one. Hardly a disincentive to keep making tha godawful programme, is it?
I really don’t care who gets to number one, and neither should anyone else as far as I can see – the singles charts have been pretty much worthless as a measure of either quality or popularity for a decade. But if you *do* actually want to scare Cowell and his paymasters at Sony, instead of giving them some money for a slightly different thing, why not buy some *real* independent music?
At CDBaby, for example, you can find all sorts of good stuff, including my own band, or the Tony Award-winning Stew, or the obscenely talented Blake Jones (and his band The Trike Shop).
Or, if you want something as shouty and rebellious as RATM, you could always try Seasalter Sounds, who put out the albums by my friends The Psychotic Reaction.
Or maybe you want something a bit more melodic? Try Now Sounds, an indie label run by Steve Stanley of the Now People, dedicated to soft pop of the 60s, but also releasing albums by the Wondermints.
Or perhaps you like your music experimental and proggy/pastoral? In that case, why not try Andy Partridge’s APE records, which puts out records by Partridge himself, the great Peter Blegvad, and Pugwash (whose leader is also in the Duckworth-Lewis Method) amongst others?
Or maybe you like spiky-but-jangly melodic powerpop? Why not try Not Lame Records?
If you buy from any of these (especially if you buy my music, obviously ;) ), or any other true independent, you won’t be giving Sony a penny of your money, and you’ll be refusing to accept the false dichotomy of “Rage or X-Factor”. In other words, you really *will* be saying to Sony “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”
(ETA I’ve been messaged on Twitter by one of the organisers of this who says “It’s not astroturfing, it’s me and my husband”. Fair enough. It’s still counterproductive though).
I Wouldn’t Have Thought This Needed Saying
But apparently it does. If you threaten me with physical violence, and attempt to track down my home address I will report you to both the police and your ISP. Anyone who tries to defend or excuse such behaviour will be blocked from ever commenting on this blog.
If you think this is me being a ‘self-righteous arsehole’, then you can feel perfectly free to fuck off and have no further contact with me, and you won’t be missed.
(Apologies to regular readers, incidentally – spent several hours last night reporting this person to police, ISP etc, meaning that I may not have time for the Pop-Drama post promised. Will try, though).
And A Request For Indulgence…
There are a number of people reading this blog to whom I owe lengthy-ish emails (Richard, Pillock, Prankster, probably others). Some of these have been owed for weeks. I’m afraid I’m simply in no fit state to send them right now.
I have a tremendous amount on my plate (PEP!, work on my Master’s degree, my article for the Mindless ‘zine, helping my wife find a job, working my own full-time job, proofreading a book, trying to write my *own* book, trying to get in enough leisure time not to have a breakdown…) and I’m afraid that human interaction (even of the email form) is substantially more difficult for me than, say, writing 3700 words about a Beatles album, so it’s the first thing to go when I’ve got this much on.
I understand that I’m being horribly rude by effectively ignoring people like this, and I apologise. But it won’t be for an indefinite period – a lot of things have deadlines in the next couple of weeks, and then hopefully after Xmas the pressure on me will drop to the normal ‘intense’ as opposed to the current ‘overwhelming’.
The Beatles Mono Reviews 7: Rubber Soul
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ second album of 1965, is generally considered the first album of their middle, most creative period. Only the second album they made to consist entirely of originals, it saw the band’s influences opening up – to include Stax, Indian music and the Byrds – and saw the band’s lyrical style change dramatically, many of the songs being comic short stories.
It also saw one of the stranger stereo mixes in the band’s history, with almost every song being mixed with the rhythm track in the left channel and the vocals and instrumental overdubs in the right channel. This makes the 60s stereo mix fantastic for isolating different instrumental parts, but absolutely horrible for listening on any system with any kind of separation.
Drive My Car, the opening track, is very obviously influenced by Stax, and one of the band’s first truly funny songs. Originally, the chorus was to have been “You can buy me diamond rings”, but Lennon decided this was horrible, and he and McCartney rewrote this into a story about the nature of fame which seems more, rather than less, pointed as time goes on and ‘celebrity’ becomes more divorced from ‘ability to do anything’.
This is very much McCartney’s track – with almost no guitar and what little there is sounding more like McCartney than Harrison or Lennon, and with McCartney adding piano, I think the only other Beatle to play on this one is Starr on drums and percussion, though Lennon adds some harmonies and takes the line ‘and maybe I’ll love you’. But it’s one of the band’s most powerful tracks, even though its most notable features (the dropped-in piano and the spiky guitar solo) were done better elsewhere (the piano on What You’re Doing, the solo on Taxman. This is mostly because of the astonishing bass sound, easily the most prominent and interesting bass-line on any British recording up to that point, along with McCartney’s double-tracked vocals in two distinct voices.
McCartney and Starr were also at the height of their powers as a rhythm section at this point – incorporating elements from the Funk Brothers (the Four Tops’ first couple of hits had been that year, and these were the records that really established the Funk Brothers as the innovative musicians they were – they definitely influenced the Beatles around this time, with Lennon singing a snatch of It’s The Same Old Song on the band’s 1965 Xmas record), the MGs (especially the slight behind-the-beat sound caused by the MGs having to play in a studio with a huge natural reverb) and the Carol Kaye/Hal Blaine team into their own sound. While their natural tightness together began to decline after the band stopped playing live, from 1965 through 1967 there wasn’t a better rhythm section in Britain than McCartney and Starr.
The version on this CD sounds far, far punchier and more dynamic than any release of the track I’d heard before.
mono/stereo differences Rather pleasingly, while the stereo version is panned absolutely insanely (though to be fair, Martin was trying to mix the stereo version so it would be listenable on mono equipment) it manages to capture the bass as well as the mono – were one to put this through a single speaker, it would sound almost indistinguishable from the mono version. However, the stereo mix being so widely panned does mean that it’s easier to hear the annoying ducking in the mix of the piano, as well as being able to hear (especially in the last verse) leakage on the right channel of a lead guitar part that never made it into the finished version (possibly one of the earlier examples of McCartney wiping a Harrison part after the fact – one of the things that later led to the band’s breakup?). Also the stereo mix fades a second earlier.
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) is primarily Lennon’s song, though McCartney apparently suggested the punchline at the end (where the narrator burns down the flat of the girl after she won’t sleep . Very obviously written in the style of Dylan, it may actually have been ripped off from him – Dylan once claimed to have played Fourth Time Around, which many took as being a parody of this song, to Lennon before this was recorded.
However, the main musical element it added to the Beatles’ sound is the sound of the sitar – double-tracked on here by George Harrison – which had been inspired by the Indian musical scenes in the band’s film Help! (though it’s likely they were also thinking of the Kinks’ Indian-influenced See My Friends, a hit in the summer. As the song barely leaves its home chord of E, and its mixolydian melody features many of the same intervals as the Indian pentatonic scale, it seemed a natural choice for the song.
This is one of Lennon’s best works, knowing and funny, an oblique confession to his wife of an affair, turned by McCartney into a comic short story, much as Lennon had done to McCartney’s previous track.
The new mastering is absolutely stunning, allowing me to hear tiny things like a cough after ‘told me to sit anywhere’ that I’d never heard in nearly thirty years of loving this track.
mono/stereo differencesApart from again being terribly panned, the main difference is that the stereo mix has more reverb on Lennon’s vocal. It also runs a second shorter, and I suspect that though the time includes a few seconds between-tracks gap, the tape ran fractionally faster. I don’t have very good pitch, so this might just be me ‘reading in’, but it sounds like the stereo mix is ever so slightly higher in pitch.
You Won’t See Me is one of McCartney’s songs about his fraught relationship with Jane Asher. Overlong and repetitive at a frankly excessive 3:30, it could easily have stood to have a minute or more trimmed from its running time, and it just plods. While even the worst mid-sixties Beatles track has its redeeming features, and this is never less than competent, it’s unremarkable filler which none of the band seem especially interested in. The handclaps on the fade aren’t fooling anyone
mono/stereo differencesIn the stereo version the background vocals are slightly higher in the mix, Mal Evans’ held single organ note is much more noticeable, and it fades two seconds earlier. So far the main difference between the mono and stereo mixes has just been the atrocious panning – heard through a single system the mono and stereo mixes are very close in feel, unlike with Help!. The most noticeable thing about both is how improved they are by the new mastering.
Nowhere Man is the first sign of the band being influenced by the Byrds – notable in that this is the first time they’re showing the influence of someone they have themselves influenced. It sounds very much like the Beatles saying to the Byrds ‘this is how it’s done’ – the layers of double-tracked three-part harmony, the ringing twelve-string guitar, these are all Byrds techniques, but the Byrds – aside from never writing a song as good as this – never had a bass part as interesting as McCartney’s and never paid enough attention to their production to have tiny touches like the pinched harmonic at the end of the guitar solo or Ringo’s little rolls into the middle eights and out of the guitar solo.
This is how one might imagine the Byrds sounding had their early records not been produced by incompetent buffoon Terry Melcher, and had they been as good as their reputation suggested. It’s the Platonic Ideal of a Byrds record.
The song itself was one of those that Lennon wrote in a trance state (much like Across The Universe and In My Life after giving up on trying to get anything done that day. He later claimed it was a comment on his own state at the time – he was in his ‘fat Elvis’ period, overweight and dissatisfied with his suburban existence.
Unfortunately the song is sabotaged on Rubber Soul by being placed directly after You Won’t See Me – in the worst bit of sequencing on any Beatles album, both have exactly the same backing vocal part and some slight melodic similarities, and after listening to three and a half minutes of the McCartney song, Nowhere Man seems tiresome. Out of context, however, it’s a gorgeous track, one of the band’s best of the period.
mono/stereo differences And suddenly we’re back to the old ways of the stereo mix having no bass end whatsoever and a ton of reverb. This sounds like the Byrds’ early records *actually* sounded rather than how they *should* have sounded…
Think For Yourself is another milestone, being George’s first “I know better than you, and you sheep should all think for yourself like I’m telling you to” song. That being said, it’s an astonishing record as a record, again largely down to the rhythm section – Rubber Soul is the first album where the band really understand the possibilities of overdubbing, and here we have two bass parts – a straight one and a fuzz bass presumably inspired by the Stones’ Satisfaction. Likewise as well as his normal drum part, Starr contributes several layers of percussion which give the track a much-needed urgency.
The whole production is incredibly clever – it’s almost impossible to hear the electric piano part in the finished mix, for example, but its presence (like the similarly almost-inaudible rhythm guitar) pushes the track forward. A rather poor song, but a great record.
mono/stereo differences The stereo version is bass-light, much like the previous track, and thus loses a lot of its power. However, the nature of the mix in this case makes it interesting. Harrison’s vocal is double-tracked, and panned one track in each speaker. This means that one can listen to just the left channel and hear the song as it would have sounded two years earlier – non-fuzz bass, basic drum kit, rhythm guitar and vocals.
Listen to just the right channel however and you have an entirely different mix of the track – tons of interesting hand-held percussion, electric piano, interesting harmonies and fuzz bass, with none of the standard ‘rock band’ elements. Either channel actually sounds like a reasonable mix on its own, had you never heard the combination, and comparing the two allows you to see how far the band had come in its use of the studio over the previous couple of years.
The Word, yet another R&B groover based around a piano part, is generally noted for being the first Beatles song about ‘the power of love’, a la All You Need Is Love, but it’s very different in feel from the later song. Other than the four bar verses (which provide a certain amount of key ambiguity, hinting at a key change to C from the D the majority of the song is in), the song is just a twelve-bar blues in D. In fact it’s very tempting to see this as a reworking of the ‘Twelve Bar Original‘ instrumental they recorded a week earlier in the style of Booker T and The MGs, right down to both featuring harmonium.
But of course this is a much cleverer track, again more because of the arrangement than anything else. McCartney once again plays two basslines – a riffy one and a simpler, sparser line accenting certain notes. Meanwhile the harmonium ‘solo’ by Martin consists of essentially one chord – hinting back at the almost monotone vocal melody (the band, especially Lennon, were becoming obsessed with drones at this point). And once again we have an astonishing performance by Starr, with layer upon layer of hand percussion and inventive drum fills.
I also love the Scouseness of the vocals on here, given the American idiom they’re playing in – “It’s the weeeeeeeeeerd, luv”
mono/stereo differences Once again, they seem to have decided that reverb is better than any bass, any day.
Michelle is another Paul-and-Ringo-only track (though with at least John in the backing vocal stack), with McCartney on acoustic guitar, bass and bass solo (the ‘guitar solo’ is played on a capoed bass). While the verse is a McCartney composition, the words to the first verse are actually by Jan Vaughan (a French teacher and wife of the Quarrymen’s original bass player, Ivan Vaughan) as McCartney couldn’t speak French, while the middle eight is Lennon’s work (inspired by I Put A Spell On You). George Martin apparently wrote the instrumental melody, too.
Michelle is a pleasant enough melody, but really only works as the joke song it was clearly intended as, and it’s quite surprising it was taken seriously enough by anyone to have become the standard it did.
This song is one where the clarity of the new mastering is *almost* counterproductive. The song required a great deal of overdubbing and ‘bouncing down’, and is mostly on relatively quiet acoustic instruments, so at the beginning there’s a great deal of tape hiss audible. This is one of the few spots where I wish they’d used a tiny bit of noise reduction. However, that clarity also means that, again, tiny studio noises (the coughs at 0:03 and 0:04) which I’d never heard before are audible for the first time (they’re louder on the mono version than the stereo but present on both).
mono/stereo differences The backing vocals sound louder on the mono version, while the rhythm guitar is mixed *ludicrously* high compared to the bass melody in the closing seconds (about 2:20 onwards).
What Goes On is Ringo’s first songwriting credit, shared with Lennon & McCartney. A throwback to the country style of much of Help!, it’s a Ringo song and so no-one seems to have cared very much, if the sloppy guitar work and rudimentary drumming are anything to go by.
mono/stereo differences The guitars are seriously unbalanced in the stereo mix, removing the interplay between them, one of the few points of interest in the track. The backing vocals are also mixed lower, and as always someone seems to have forgotten that it’s possible to have a bass end to the track.
Girl is an astonishingly good track, mostly due to Lennon’s breathy, sardonic vocal. Probably influenced equally by Zorba The Greek (listen to the bouzouki-like guitar part in the last verse) and Michelle, the song is unique in the Beatles’ catalogue for its mittel-European sound, and is a far more nuanced look at the belle dame sans merci figure who haunts Lennon’s lyrics than he would usually manage.
Lennon’s lyrics around this time period – and especially this album – are at his most misogynistic, but here the woman’s bad characteristics (“she’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool”) are in her superiority to the narrator (who even the backing vocals call a tit, repeatedly) – Lennon’s authorial voice is admitting that his misogyny lies in his own inferiority complex, and his need to put women on a pedestal is what makes him angry when they come off it.
mono/stereo differences No significant differences, although Lennon’s voice sounds fuller in mono.
I’m Looking Through You is very much a call-back to the style of Help!, right down to the intro on acoustic guitar not being repeated anywhere else in the song. A fairly standard McCartney song – another one about how his relationship with Jane Asher was going (“I’m looking through you” and “you won’t see me”), this is a very, VERY odd production, very bottom-light, and it sounds, to be honest, like listening to a proper record through tin cans.
One other odd point about this track – and one I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere else, to the point where I’m questioning my own ears – is that it sounds to me clear as day like it’s Ringo, not John, singing the harmony. Yet *EVERYONE* credits John. Is this just me?
mono/stereo differences Both versions have the strange production sound, but the mono version has three or four more seconds of fade, including some nice guitar work.
In My Life is one of the most perfect songs ever written. Another one where the lyrics came to Lennon in a trance-like state while exhausted (this time after trying to write a song about his childhood, and a bus route he used to take regularly, naming both Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields), it’s one of only two Beatles songs where Lennon & McCartney disagreed significantly about the authorship of the song.
Lennon claimed he wrote the music, except for ‘the harmony and the middle eight’, which were McCartney’s work, while McCartney claimed he wrote all the music himself, inspired by the MIracles. Most people tend to take McCartney’s side in this, partly because there *is* a significant relationship to the Miracles (listen to those ‘li-i-i-ife’s – pure Smokey) and partly because there *is* no middle eight for McCartney to have written.
I tend towards Lennon’s side myself, just because it *sounds* to me like a Lennon melody – though really, truth be told, it sounds like an early Lennon/McCartney collaboration. The way the melody moves in two-bar call-and-response phrases, it sounds to me for all the world like McCartney (who sings the melody to Lennon’s harmony on the first and third phrases of the verse) came up with “there are places I remember” while Lennon (who had been far more influenced by the Miracles than McCartney in the past) came up with “all my life though some have changed”, and the same back and forth. The drum part, however, definitely sounds like McCartney’s idea…
However, since neither man claimed the writing went that way, one must assume it didn’t, and that one or other was misremembering. I would suspect, myself, that Lennon’s ‘middle eight’ was either the bridge or – more likely – that he misremembered George Martin’s piano solo (overdubbed later) as being McCartney’s work.
Speaking of which, that solo introduces another layer of influence – baroque music, and specifically Bach – that would remain throughout the rest of the Beatles’ career (see especially For No One and Penny Lane).
Whoever wrote the music though, this song, and performance, are among the band’s very best.
mono/stereo differences Not many, apart from the strange panning, but the piano solo sounds slightly lower in the mix.
Wait is filler. A Lennon/McCartney collaboration (Lennon taking the verse/chorus, with McCartney writing the middle eight), this was actually a leftover from Help! (with, I think, extra percussion added for Rubber Soul and sounds it – it’s most noticeable in the lead guitar, which has the volume pedal sound Harrison used on I Need You and Yes It Is but never returned to. The song actually sounds even earlier than that – thematically it’s closer to a lot of the songs on A Hard Day’s Night than to anything else.
mono/stereo differences The stereo version has the guitars and hand percussion mixed much higher and an almost inaudible bass, and as a result sounds much less coherent. Oddly, this actually gives the middle eight more momentum in the stereo version, as without the bass grounding it the track sounds like it’s building a lot more (though it builds to something of an anticlimax). But overall, the stereo mix is just sloppy.
If I Needed Someone is George’s second song on the album, and his first to really approach the quality of Lennon & McCartney’s work. An intriguing lyrical conceit (“*If* I needed someone to love, you’re the one that I’d be thinking of”) and a few interesting lines (“carve your number on my wall and maybe you will get a call from me”) show his growth as a lyricist, while musically this is the second Byrds-alike track on the album, and shows Harrison’s propensity to… borrow… from other musicians – the guitar part that the song is based on is a dead ringer for the Byrds’ The Bells Of Rhymney.
However, once again, the arrangement is far more inventive than the Byrds would have managed, though curiously reminiscent of some of the Byrds’ later work at one point. The almost-subliminal country style double-time picking under the guitar solo, which I never heard until this release, is completely out of keeping with the genre, but is exactly the kind of thing the Byrds started to do after Gram Parsons’ brief tenure in the band some years later.
Melodically, it shows the band’s increased interest in drones, something that probably originally came from Motown music (which, being primarily dance music, had a tendency to obsess on one chord and one riff), but which resonated with Lennon’s lazy melodic style, and which Harrison was going to use more as the influence of Indian classical music on him increased.
mono/stereo differences The stereo mix is bass-light and panned weirdly, as is par for the course, but no other major differences.
Run For Your Life is a very unpleasant song by Lennon, lyrically a bunch of misogynistic crap which he later profusely apologised for writing, saying it was his least favourite Beatles song. To be fair to him, it was written quickly, based off a line from Baby, Let’s Play House (“I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man”), and is presumably meant to be taken as being in character rather than an expression of Lennon’s true feelings. It’s also catchy as hell. That said, it leaves a very unpleasant taste in the mouth, particularly as it’s the closing song of the album.
mono/stereo differences Again, just bass-light and badly separated.
Overall, Rubber Soul is greater than the sum of its parts. While Lennon manages three of his very best songs and Harrison his first great one, there are a couple of embarrassing moments and McCartney’s standards have slipped dramatically since Help! (they get raised again on the next album). That Rubber Soul is rated so much more highly than Help! says more about the quality of the production on the album – which is exponentially better than that on the earlier record – than about the songs and performances. Rubber Soul is considered a classic for a reason, of course, and other than Run For Your Life there’s nothing actually bad on here, but I can’t help thinking that if it had never been released Help! would be seen in a rather better light.
Next – the Beatles’ masterpiece?
Linkblogging For 03/12/09
Blogging will be a little light for a while as I’m writing my essay for the Mindless Ones, editing PEP! and writing about 15,000 words for that, and proofreading a book for my uncle. That said, I’m going to do a pop-drama and a Beatles review in the next couple of days…
Meanwhile, links:
The Association of Chief Police Officers think it’s women’s responsibility to not get raped, rather than men’s not to rape them. Laurie Penny disagrees.
Roz Kaveney is one of several people annoyed that the CofE is not protesting about the law in Uganda which criminalises homosexuality (with the death penalty for a second offence) – a law which the Ugandan branch of the Anglican church supports.
Millennium wonders about the timing of the revelation of Zac Goldsmith’s non-domicile status. Alex has opinions on this too.
Chris Bird wonders why we’re at the stage when ‘OK’ is considered a high standard in superhero comics.
And Jon Blum gives the only somewhat-positive review of the new ‘Prisoner’ I’ve seen – in part because of its use of Brian Wilson’s Smile…
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