Penny Lane
I’ve written a lot about Penny Lane in the course of producing my Songs of the Day instalments for The Needlefish, and I’ll attach a link below to my lengthier prior analysis, but allow me to say briefly, here, that there never was a better piece of popular music, not by anybody, not anytime or anywhere. Nothing beats McCartney’s Liverpudlian remembrance of things past. I will brook no opposition on this point. It’s three odd minutes of the purest pop genius you’re ever going to encounter.
Different musicologists focus on different brilliant aspects of the song. This fellow is floored by the sudden appearance during the verses of a mood-altering B-minor chord, as if out of nowhere:
…while composer Howard Goodall, on the other hand, was more impressed by the way the choruses modulate the song out of the key of B, and switch seamlessly into A, fully seven times, with the listener hardly noticing. If you’ve never seen Goodall’s special on the Beatles, it’s well worth it, so here, and the part about Penny Lane begins at about the 20 minute mark:
And everyone, of course, is delighted by the baroque piccolo trumpet solo, played by classical virtuoso David Mason of the Royal Philharmonic, who was recruited by George Martin after Paul said he was looking for the same sound he’d heard the previous night on the telly, while watching a performance of Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto. He didn’t just get the same sound, he got the very same trumpeter. Mason, as a classically trained musician, of course needed something written in musical notation, which Paul couldn’t produce, so he simply hummed what he heard in his head to a no doubt hastily scribbling Martin, and there you had it – something new from J.S. Bach, his spirit channeled, somehow, through a 25 year old pop star in England:
Here’s my Song of the Day entry, from December 2018 – it’s a goodie (even if I do say so myself):
Got to Get You Into My Life
Another obvious single that never was, Got to Get You Into My Life, with its big brass ensemble going to town, is a sort of Jazz/Soul/R&B fusion, part nod to the Motown Sound, and part tribute to the hits then coming out of Stax Records in Memphis. Rounding out Paul’s supernaturally eclectic contributions to Revolver (which many regard as their greatest album), it features yet another outstanding vocal performance, and catchy lyrics that sound for all the world like they’re about a girl, but actually, so McCartney has always insisted, are “an ode to pot…like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.“ Harrison’s howling guitar break at the end supplies a superb outro, and the session players, a mixture of freelance Jazz musicians and a couple of members from a London club outfit called the Blue Flames, tackle their parts with exemplary gusto. Lennon rated this as one of Paul’s best.
I said “single that never was”, but this applies only to the Beatles, and only at the time. Cliff Richard took a version into the U.K. top 10 in 1966, and ten years later, Earth, Wind and Fire did the same in America, prompting Capitol to release a 45 of The Beatle’s version in promotion of another of their money-grubbing re-packagings (a double album anthology called “Rock & Roll Music”), which also climbed into the top 10.
She’s Leaving Home
One of the major compositions from the Sgt. Pepper album, She’s Leaving Home has about as much to do with Rock & Roll, and with 20th century pop music in general, as tournament chess has to do with foosball, which didn’t endear it to a lot of the emerging rock press. It wasn’t written for them. It’s entirely of another time and place, utterly exquisite, “the equal of anything Schubert ever wrote” in the famous estimation of classical song composer Ned Rorem, and one of the ones that convinced poor Brian Wilson that he’d never achieve his aim of topping the Beatles; Paul paid him a visit in late 1966, played a take on piano, and Brian and his wife both found themselves wiping away tears. Particularly beautiful are the juxtapositions between lead and backing vocals, McCartney hitting the high notes with unerring precision, and John supplying counterpoint in lower tones almost reproducing the timbre of a cello, their tracks, incredibly, recorded simultaneously, side by side in the studio, standing just a few feet apart at microphones individually adjusted to produce different ambience. The isolated vocals are a thing of wonder:
Paul is the storyteller, basing the lyrics on a newspaper article he’d read about a young runaway, while John plays the bewildered, traumatized parents, who simply can’t understand why their baby girl has left them, after they’d scrimped, and sacrificed, and devoted their lives to the child – hadn’t they? We gave her most of our lives, they moan, we gave her everything money could buy. “It was all just things Auntie Mimi used to say”, explained John.
Oh, and yup, that’s another plagal cadence that winds things up, as Paul’s voice climbs for the heavens and John sadly responds with an inconsolable “bye, bye…”, quite possibly the very best musical resolution out of all the ones I’ve spent so much time praising here (though see Here There and Everywhere, below). Gets me every time.
The Back Seat of My Car
The lushly scored, multi-faceted extravaganza that closes out Ram, and a lot of peoples’ favourite cut on the album, The Back Seat of My Car was one of many that Paul had been tinkering with near the end of his Beatle days. Here he is noodling around with it during the Let it Be sessions:
Some hear a musical tribute to Brian Wilson at his most ambitious, and others have dubbed it another Abbey Road medley in miniature, while Paul was characteristically off-hand in his own description:
Back Seat of My Car is the ultimate teenage song, and even though it was a long time since I was a teenager and had to go to a girl’s dad and explain myself, it’s that kind of meet-the-parents song. It’s a good old driving song. [Sings] “We can make it to Mexico City.” I’ve never driven to Mexico City, but it’s imagination. And obviously “back seat” is snogging, making love.
Just a little ditty about snogging, that’s all.
Jesus, he sure can write a tune, though, can’t he?
Paperback Writer
The complex harmonies of Paperback Writer were another nod by Paul in Brian Wilson’s direction, but the heavy guitar riffs were obviously a riposte to the harder sounds of up-and-coming competitors like The Who and The Rolling Stones. Musically adventurous, and a major departure from the “boy meets girl” songs that to this point had been the Beatles’ bread and butter (as indeed was John’s magnificent Rain, the reverse on this “Double A Side” single), Paperback Writeremerged from a challenge issued by Paul’s Auntie Lil, who asked ‘Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can’t you ever write about a horse, or a summit conference, or something interesting?”, inspiring McCartney to come up with this story of a hack pulp fiction writer looking for a publisher. Paul says he was thinking of the ubiquitous Penguin series of paperbacks as he developed the lyrics.
On the technical side, this and its companion piece mark a transition to a much more resonant, musical bass sound gaining greater prominence in the mix, the product of Paul’s repeated pleas to the engineers to figure out a way to match the recorded sounds coming out of Motown (in aid of which Paul switched in the studio from his venerable Hoffner to a new and superior model from Rickenbacker). This was achieved by using a loudspeaker as a microphone, placed in front of the bass speaker – the more advanced technique of “direct injection”, a process in which the bass was plugged directly into the mixing console, would come later. The song was also recorded at a much louder volume than prior tracks, as could now be achieved without undue distortion owing to an Abbey Road innovation dubbed Automatic Transient Overload Control.
That’s Paul on lead guitar, and the lads are actually chanting snippets of Frére Jacques at some points in the harmonies.
The Fool On the Hill
One of the better interludes from the otherwise generally disastrous (and viciously panned) Magical Mystery Tour film had Paul wandering about the pleasant green fields of Nice, France, to the soundtrack of this riff on the classic theme of the misunderstood sage whom everybody takes for a witless kook. The verses are in D major while the chorus changes to D Minor, creating the contrast between what’s true and what people say, the whole overlaid by flutes and recorder, with intermittent addition of harmonica to emphasize the rhythm.
Once again, this sure as Shinola ain’t rock & roll, to the dismay of a few contemporary critics, but c’mon, it’s almost unbelievably lovely, don’t you think? Writer Ian MacDonald, author of a superb book of Beatles scholarship titled Revolution in the Head, which is not always kind to McCartney, described it as “an airy creation, poised peacefully above the world in a place where time and haste are suspended”, a favourable opinion echoed by most everybody, these days. Musicians always understood. Artists as varied as Bjork, The Four Tops, Petula Clarke, Aretha Franklin, Sergio Mendes, and Bobbie Gentry, among many, many others, have recorded their own versions over the years.
I Saw Her Standing There
Pretty much everybody would agree that Please Please Me, their real 1962 debut album (don’t come at me with that American Meet the Beatles, shit, O.K?) was John’s record, but it opens with this, McCartney’s first bona fide rock classic. When he counts in at the beginning – who, among those of us of a certain age, doesn’t have that exuberant “one-two-three-Fuh” impressed indelibly in memory? – it’s the sound of a whole new era dawning. Listening to this, sixty years later, one understands straight away that the first thing that took these guys to the top was the way they made everybody feel so wonderfully happy. They weren’t just fresh, and cheeky, and cool-looking, and all of that, they were infectiously overjoyed at being young and alive, and stuffed to the gills with raw talent, and they were here to pull you out of the doldrums. Dreary old England, seemingly mired in monochrome black and white since the end of the world war, suddenly emerged onto broad, sunlit uplands bathed in technicolour, and everybody within earshot, everybody all over the world, was soon swept up in the excitement, the thrilling sense that myriad positive changes weren’t merely possible, they were inevitable, and just around the corner.
Back in the USSR
Cheeky monkeys! The raucous, tremendously energetic opening cut on the White Album wasn’t just an affectionate tribute to the Beach Boys / Chuck Berry school of songwriting, with all its rah-rah “Back in the USA” / “Surfin USA”- style Murrican cheerleading, it was also a subversive parody, with its protagonist delighted to be returning not to the good old US of A, but – gadzooks – the USSR, where all the Commies hung out. The world’s most beautiful girls were in Georgia and the Ukraine, not California, and there was nothing to beat the majesty of the snow-capped Urals, or the pleasing sound of the balalaika, was there now comrade? Yikes! Blasphemy! Believe it or not, there’d long been talk among the John Birchers and other denizens of the radical American right that the Beatles were a Communist plot – you honestly thought that a bunch of unschooled scruffs from some podunk town in England could be writing music like that? – and Back in the USSR sealed the deal. See?!! SEE??!! The pinko bastards weren’t even trying to hide it anymore!
Yesterday
What can I say? Just listen, and weep, and thank whatever deity or deities you happen to worship that unworthy slobs like us were allowed to share some time with somebody who could compose such a thing. In his sleep.
This is another former Song of the Day, so here’s the more expansive write-up:
For the sake of completeness, I’ll note in passing that this is another one that ends with a plagal cadence.
Listen to What the Man Said
Call it light and frothy, call it shallow, call it brazenly commercial, Hell, call it disco – though when released, in 1975, this actually anticipated the disco craze, which hadn’t yet taken hold – but damn, it’s pretty hard to resist. One facet of Paul’s talent, and only one, was an uncanny ability to toss out hugely popular stuff that serious-minded music aficionados felt they weren’t really supposed to like, designed, as if by some diabolical form of advanced artificial intelligence, to tickle the musical sweet spot to the point that all rational objections became futile, while it loped up the charts to grab the top slot. Hello Goodbye was like that; Lennon hated the thing, but EMI didn’t want to hear about it, I Am the Walrus was never going to be a hit, and Hello Goodbye had #1 written all over it, so John got the B-side and that was that. Lennon fumed; some have said the demise of the Beatles began right there. I get it, but guess what, Hello Goodbye still brings a smile to my face, and so does Listen to What the Man Said, which, apart from its other charms, features superb saxophone work from session player and Jazz maestro Tom Scott. For what it is, it’s absolutely perfect.
the needlefish 