What's your obscure hipster Beatles reference?

Cafe Society
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Two presents I got for my ninth birthday: the Red Album, and the musical scores compilation book The Beatles Complete.

I noticed a nice symmetry: the album includes one song from 1962 (Love Me Do), with each subsequent year represented by several tracks. The book includes one song from 1961 (All I’ve Got to Do), with each subsequent year represented by a bunch of songs. This made sense to me — statistically, it’s what you’d expect when comparing a sample to a (supposedly) complete set.**

Only recently did I find out that the 1961 sheet music copyright date claim for AIGTD is a mystery. The song is from the 1963 album *Meet/With the Beatles *. I think Lennon once mentioned he’d written it earlier, but so what? McCartney wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four” in, like, 1960. Anyway, it’s interesting, I think.

*I always wondered about the track selections for this, and for the Blue Album (got that for Christmas that year — the translucent blue vinyl. Now lost, alas). Most of them make sense, but why so few from Revolver, and so few from Rubber Soul? Why “Old Brown Shoe” and “Octopus’ Garden,” but no “I Saw Her Standing There”? I think it’s because it favors whatever happened to be released as singles (somewhere in the world), plus some personal preferences of Allen Klein, who was apparently got to decide this.

**For years, I was familiar with songs like “Like Dreamers Do” and “Love of the Loved” as sheet music — I could kind of guess what they sounded like, but I had to invent in my mind who was singing, the instrument sounds, and tempo. Years later I found out these were mainly composed for other recording artists, like Cilla Black. Anthology 1 did let me finally hear the Beatles play “Like Dreamers Do” (Paul sings it; not a great song).

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I’ve come to think of “Something” as the first song from All Things Must Pass. Play it back to back with “I’d Have You Anytime” or “Beware of Darkness” and you’ll see what I mean. It would have fit in on that album like a glove.

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Correction (to my post, two posts ago) — I meant to say (regarding the Red Album:

“Why so few from Revolver, and so many from Rubber Soul?”

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This seems like as good a place as any to tell this story. I had a friend in college who was a huge John Lennon fan. One day we were sitting around drinking and I decided to poke a little fun at his Lennon worship. I told him that I thought Lennon was a no-talent hack who got lucky enough to be associated with the three most brilliant musicians on the planet. He dismissed my statement with a “Pffff… you’re a dreamer!”

I shot back with “Yeah, but I’m not the only one!”

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It’s really just obscure McCartney, but one of my most enduring earworms was Mary Hopkin’s follow-up to “Those Were the Days” — a Paul song called “Goodbye”. A very minor hit compared to Days. It would pop into my brain most weeks during a 20 year span of time.

It had a nice opening guitar figure, some cute McCartney word play, a high arching chorus, and an unusual lyric concept:I think the story is that her previous boyfriend is lonely, so she’s gotta go see him.