What's The Worst Beatles' Song Of All Time ?

I am amazed that no one before me has mentioned Harrison’s detestable dirge, Within You Without You before now. I can think of no socially redeeming features, whatsoever, to justify its existence on the otherwise enjoyable Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. No rhythm, no rhyme, putrescent lyrics, contemptable melody, horrible harmony. What were they thinking?

Yellow Submarine is NO GOOD

Those are two of my favorite Beatles songs, actually. If I could only listen to two dozen Beatles songs the rest of my life, they’d both make the list.

“You Know My Name” is more just screwing-around-to-fill-up-a-B-side than a true song. But what the hell, it’s fun.

In the too-damn-sappy category, stuff like “Yesterday”, “If I Fell”, and even the Spectored “The Long and Winding Instrumental Backup Section” can’t hold a candle, IMO, to “Good Night”, which closes the White Album. Sappy Ringo vocals (George’s comment on that song, back then, was that Ringo had a great future as a crooner; I hope he meant it as an insult), incredibly sappy instrumental backing, and that whispered “Good night, everyone, everywhere” at the end is enough to make a fairly serious Beatles fan like myself retch in disgust.

Rilch - ROFL!

Montfort and Anniz - get a room, guys! :slight_smile:

Good nominations! “Run for Your Life” has always bugged me. They stunk when they tried to dabble in the American two-step idiom. They did a lot of dabbling, and it didn’t all work. Especially in the White Album, which has the most bad songs of any other record.

I also find Harrison’s Ravi-Shankar-influenced sitar stuff to be dreadful. How much better would Sgt. Pepper’s be without “Within You Without You?” I’d like to have one of those CD players that you can program to never play specific tracks. That would be one of them. Same goes for the one on “Revolver” - the title escapes me at the moment.

Face it - there’s a lot of bad stuff in The Beatles’ catalog, but they’ve still got a good tune/bad tune ratio that’s unbeatable. Just look at “Revolver!” That’s a career’s worth of pop classics.

“Love You To” is the one you’re thinking of, I believe. Ah, good old George.

I loved George’s Indian songs the best of all! “Love You To” was what got me started on Ravi Shankar ragas and a lifetime of Indian music appreciation. “Within You Without You” doesn’t deserve all the condemnation it’s gotten. It has highly sophisticated, intelligent composition and arrangement. “The Inner Light” — my favorite George song. No sitar here; it features sarod and shahnai. Lyrics from Chapter 47 of the Tao Te Ching. Indian music. Title borrowed from an English Quaker classic. What a fine hodgepodge in the true spirit of 60s experimentation.

“I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is one of the coolest songs John ever did, although nothing is as cool as “Come Together” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

“Revolution 9” is a bold exploration in breaking down all boundaries. The experimental spirit of the 60s. I guess you had to me there, man.

Now for the OP:

One morning my lady love were sitting around smoking joints and we put on an early Beatles album. In our heightened state of consciousness, we were dismayed at the sound of “Do You Want to Know a Secret”. George was singing badly out of tune in a nasal adolescent voice. We couldn’t believe how abysmally out of tune he was. We looked at each other. Reluctantly admitted that this song was unlistenable and took the needle off the record. Put on Highway 61 Revisited or something like that.

I’m sorry, but “Run for Your Life” is inexcusably misogynistic. That song is truly evil. It’s hard for a big John Lennon fan like me to admit it, but that’s the worst musical sin he ever committed.

This aspect has always been mitigated for me by the John Farman cartoon published in THE BEATLES ILLUSTRATED LYRICS (Alan Aldridge, ed., Macdonald & Co., London, 1969). The image pops up automatically whenever I hear the song.

It depicts the song’s narrator as a little old man with a bald head and bushy moustache. The object of his twisted affection is a little old lady with her hair in a bun, dressed in knee-highs, granny glasses, flowered dress and apron.

Illustrated thought balloons show the various ways he intends to take violent revenge if he catches her with some longhaired young stud.

“I Want to Hold Your Hand” is a neat little pop song. But its German version "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" was better left in the can. It isn’t just the embarrassingly poor translation into German 101.

I made the mistake of being stoned on exceptionally potent marijuana when I listened to it.

Got this disturbingly vivid image in my mind of:

The Fab Four wearing SS uniforms and jackboots, giving the Nazi salute and goose-stepping to the beat.

brrrr

I love this song (and the other Indian-influenced-George songs) as well. The first few times I heard it, I thought the lyrics went, “Without going out of your gourd/You can know all the ways of heaven…”

I’ve never read the song to indicate that Lennon himself endorses the view of the protagonist. The lyrics seem like a take on songs like Hey Joe and about a million blues songs about revenge. I’ll agree that the charactor is evil but I don’t for a minute that John “All You Need is Love” Lennon is calling for stalking and murder. The song is in the point of view of an obviously fucked individual.

I also have to be another voice to stick up for George Harrison. Most of the time his songs were as interesting and in many cases as good as Lennon/Macca’s. “Blue Jay Way” may be the Beatles’ most psychedelic song short of “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

That being said, these are some that annoy me:

“Birthday”- I may have liked this song more if I hadn’t first heard it performed by the waitstaff at the local T.G.I Friday’s. Instantly ruined!

“Wild Honey Pie”

“You Know My Name, Look Up the Number”-As it is, a bunch of half baked nonsense. Might have been good if they’d developed it more.

“You Know My Name, Look Up the Number.” It was *supposed * to sound completely discombobulated. Theater of the Absurd. It was another Zen experiment in how far they could push pop music past the point of disintegration. Kids today don’t realize how mentally adventurous the 1960s were. The voice mumbling at the end is, I think, supposed to be a parody of Maurice Chevalier. Or maybe Charles Boyer. The printed sheet music has a notation: (Comic French voice until fade).

I can’t believe anyone could diss “I Am the Walrus.” That was one of the major psychedelic achievements of all time! It was conceived during an LSD trip. The deeply weird fadeout neves fails to be amazing.

I think they did.

That is to say, they spent all that time playing in Hamburg (which may account for the song ending up in German in the first place) and I read something about John goosestepping and Heil-Hitlering all over the stage in an effort to piss off the audience. Could be apocryphal but it sounds like him :smiley: .

Um, how 'bout “Oh! Darling” from Abbey Road. I hate that song.