The White Album is a complete mess, but it’s a glorious mess. So while it has many cuts that are throwaway or self-indulgent, it’s a special case of those tracks being the whole point of the enterprise, at least from the listener’s POV.
Let It Be is just a salvage job, so I can’t really blame them for that.
I like it all. Well, most of it. The early stuff really grabs me, though. I was in primary school (= elementary school) when the Beatles emerged, if such a mild word can be used to describe the musical explosion which was Beatlemania, and we listened to nothing else. We even played word games based on their songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I favor the middle period. They were doing great songs early on (IMO “Please Please Me” is one, “Hard Day’s Night” another), but they were more consistent by the time of Rubber Soul. Some consider *Revolver *the high point, and I might agree. But I think for a single, “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” is the high point, and not just for the Beatles.
This is how I feel as well.
I’ve a theory, by the way (it’s not serious, or right so don’t flame!).
Everything Paul McCartney wrote between 1965 and 1968 was astonishing. Everything he wrote before and after is rubbish.
Agree about “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” and I used to agree about Revolver. Now I’m trending toward a couple of others being just as good.
They are almost unique in writing whole albums of equal value in that era. Only Dylan, if you count him, could also do that. Of course, he was a major influence.
The competition among artists like John, Paul, Dylan and Brian Wilson raised the bar significantly. They listened to each others new albums and pushed themselves to write and produce something better.
I don’t see that among today’s musicians.
I like all their music very much. I just don’t care for their performances much, any more. These days, when I listen to a Beatles song, it is almost always somebody else’s cover version.
I like the blue album better.
Okay, a minor tangent, but one I feel is appropriate:
What is the dividing line between Early and Mid Beatles, and Mid and Late Beatles? And so we’re all on the same page, let’s go by the UK albums.
Early Beatles:
Please Please Me
With The Beatles
A Hard Days Night
Beatles For Sale*
Help!**
Middle Beatles:
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt Pepper
Magical Mystery Tour
Late Beatles:
The Beatles
Let It Be
Abbey Road
Discussion or Debate?
*Lennon’s “I’m A Loser” lyrically strikes me as being a Mid Beatles song, but musically it’s Early.
** “Help!”, “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”, and “Yesterday” also strike me as Middle Beatles songs.
Well I kinda hoped you might give us your own nominations rather than letting someone else tell you what to think.
The “Run for Your Life” example has always cracked me up. I’ve always wondered what those who actually take those lyrics (which aren’t even John’s, but were cribbed from “Baby Let’s Play House”) as some sort of statement of actual intent think about all the suicidal lyricists who state that they will die if their loved ones leave them.
In any case, as Leaffan pointed out and I intimated, the “objectionable” songs were the product of their times. John addressed this in “Getting Better,” and later in a 1970s interview when he stated (I’m paraphrasing) “That’s why I’m always on about peace…because in my younger days I was a very violent person.”
Blue.
One thing that’s interesting about “early” vs. “later-period” Beatles is that most believe that their music became more sophisticated as the years went on.
While that may be true lyrically and in terms of more adventurous instrumentation and arrangements, in fact their early songs were far more groundbreaking as far as chord changes, melodies and harmonies. They actually get a lot simpler musically once you get past Sgt. Pepper, and even that has less of a sense of musical adventure than Revolver does.
With the exception of Brian Wilson, no one was doing what The Beatles were doing in 1963-64 in this regard. When stacked up against the rest of the rock ‘n’ roll of that era, The Beatles were breathtaking.
Add me to the “I prefer the ‘Red Album’ to the ‘Blue Album’” list. (Hey, if “The Beatles” can be called “The White Album”, then why can’t the two “Greatest Hits” sets have similar names?)
I’m more of a John person than a Paul one, but he wrote or co-wrote two of my favorite Beatle songs pre-1965, “There’s a Place” and “Every Little Thing.” And that’s not counting “I Saw Her Standing There,” which remains timeless.
As for Paul’s (per you) Golden Era, let’s not forget that he wrote the execrable “Hello Goodbye” during that time frame.
Post-‘68 I’ll give him credit for his contributions to Side 2 of Abbey Road, “Maybe I’m Amazed” and my second-favorite of his post-Beatles songs, “On the Wings of a Nightingale.”
P.S. Sorry for the mini-hijack, but if you only know the Everly Brothers’ version of this song, you owe it to yourself to hear the definitive version by The Spongetones.
Overall, I would have to say Blue. But my favorite period for the Beatles was 1965-66. That is when they came into their own. I dislike most of the 1963 stuff. The 1964 stuff his hit or miss with me.
Seriously? Out of all the lyrics of the hundreds of Elvis songs, he cribbed only those particular two lines - and therefore they mean nothing? What couldn’t you prove if you allowed that reasoning as evidence?
This argument is also absurd. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and a hundred other ills were product of that time. Times have changed so much that we have to make allowances for the differences or else few cultural products would escape the ax, true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize those differences when we see them.
We acknowledge the misogyny of John’s songs more than Paul’s or George’s because it is far more evident and widespread. We can legitimately infer that he meant the cruelty of language because we know now how cruelly John treated Cynthia. (And we also know his later cruelty to Yoko and May Pang.) You can’t handwave that history away as meaningless when we also know, from John’s own statements, how heavily his life and feelings influenced his lyrics.
I never stated that these lines (“I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”) “mean nothing.” However:
• A lyric passage that is original to the songwriter is more likely to be reflective of his/her own personal feelings than one he/she takes word-for-word from another songwriter.
• Songwriting, then as now, is filled with metaphors not meant to be taken literally. I gave one example out of hundreds in my post: “If you leave me, I’ll die.” My problem has always been with those who cite this particular passage of “Run for Your Life” as evidence that John Lennon wished one or more truly horrible real-life fates (including death) upon a real-life girl who crossed him.
• The entire notion that a pop song could be reflective of true, real-life inner feelings (as opposed to simple songcraft) was quite new at the time of “Run for Your Life”'s composition. Lennon himself said that the previous album’s “Help!” was the first time he had written a truly “personal” song. He also acknowledged that “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was inspired by a real-life incident, though also couched in metaphor. Beyond this, he has not identified any other songs of this nature from this era. Further, John also made it very clear that “Run for Your Life” was one of his own songs that he greatly disliked. It was the last song recorded for the Rubber Soul album, and dashed off to meet a pressing deadline.
Where did I fail to “recognize” the sentiments expressed in “Run for Your Life”? My argument is with those who find the song’s lyrics as somehow directly revelatory of John Lennon’s character in a literal sense.
Yes, we have evidence from what we know of his life that he had character flaws, as do all, and that he had a more violent and possessive nature than some around him may have had. But we also know that those feelings, to greater or lesser extent, were very common coin of the realm in the culture in which Lennon grew up.
No one, least of all me, is turning a blind eye to any of this. My purpose was to put it all in context when considering what we know of the song “Run for Your Life” — both from the song itself and information about its place in John Lennon’s view of his work. I simply find it amusing that some get their knickers so severely in a twist over this particular throwaway pop song.
In no way does this mean that I fail to take the issue of real-life violence toward women very seriously — and I invite anyone who feels this way about me to say it directly to my face.
I’m neither ignoring that history nor minimizing it. I’m saying that, up until a period shortly before the composition of “Run for Your Life,” we cannot “legitimately infer” that Lennon “meant” any of his lyrics — beyond the aforementioned “Help!” and “Norwegian Wood,” and perhaps “In My Life” (though the authorship of many of that song’s lyrics is disputed by McCartney) — as anything other than sounds to fit meter and chords. In other words, songcraft.
“Run for Your Life” is by any rational evaluation a throwback to the type of song The Beatles (and virtually every other artist save Bob Dylan) specialized in throughout their careers up to this point — the usual “boy/girl” stuff, purpose-written to fill the needs of the teenage audience.
If we were to take every such song as describing literal events and personal feelings, then the songwriters wouldn’t have had time to write any lyrics at all — they’d have been busy 24 hours a day tending to their wretched love lives.
Ranger Jeff: I accept your dividing lines. I was going to post that I am definitely a Middle Man…the Brit album versions of Rubber Soul through *Magical Mystery Tour *(which was actually an EP in England, plus all the singles encompassed by the period.
And I agree with all those who said “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields” (released in February, 1967) was the absolute apogee of Beatles history. I was never a big Abbey Road fan.
Extended middle. Most songs after the first attempts and before the last ones.