I Want to Hold Your Hand

Oh pleeeease, say to meeee, you’ll let me hold your MAAAAAAN! I wanna hold your man!

HAHAHAHA!!! Sorry, I never get tired of that one. I know it’s a dumb joke, but you know what, John Lennon said it first and if it’s good enough for John Lennon, it’s good enough for this blog. And if you actually thought those were the real lyrics, well, you wouldn’t be the first person to mishear this song either. Bob Dylan famously thought the words “I can’t hide” were “I get high” and jumped to the conclusion that the boys were reefer freaks. When they finally all met the boys had no idea what he was talking about. This was before The Beatles really knew about getting high. They’d all already done a lot of speed, but only as a work-related necessity, not a pleasurable fun thing to do for its own sake. Then Dylan smoked them out and everybody had a good laugh about it. That’s the legend, anyway. It might be exaggerated, I don’t know. We do know that out of the many bands who’ve been accused of not-so-sneakily encouraging drug use in their music, The Beatles actually did do that and with  great enthusiasm. After a certain point, it’s hard to name a Beatles song that isn’t an obvious drug reference of some kind. But this one ain’t one of ‘em. It’s all about the innocent joys of hand holding, nothing more to it than that. And why should there be? Holding hands is nice. There’s no need to find a subversive message or double entendre where none exists.

I Me Mine

My guess is this is George Harrison speaking out against egocentric me culture. It doesn’t even take a spiritual man of Harrison’s caliber to be disgusted by the selfishness and narcissism of nearly everyone, and the way those qualities are celebrated by society. And this was 1970, before the words I Me Mine became a de facto religious mantra. I don’t  know much about religion, but as I understand it, most major faiths agree that to achieve a higher spiritual plane one must learn to relinquish the self. Yet right now I see reams of books and seminars aiming to guide you to spiritual fulfillment by nourishing and pampering the earthly self in every conceivable way. That seems contradictory to me, but again, it’s not something I often think about. What George Harrison made of it, I don’t know. He lived long enough to witness millennial ’me society’ in nearly all of its largesse, but he kept his thoughts to himself in his later years. What he’d have made of the advances that occurred in the years since his death, we can only imagine, but somehow I don’t see him looking kindly upon the glut of self-obsession new technology has allowed us to display.

I Feel Fine

If the Beatles can’t cheer me up after an irritating fucking day, I don’t know of anything that can. Because sometime there are those days when every single thing seems to conspire for maximum irritation. The alarm fails to go off, the dog poops on the floor, the computer freezes up, all the email is spam, everyone on your Facebook is full of shit, it’s cold as fuck, the heater won’t come on, the bus is late, your boss is a dick, the dog poops on the floor again, and all you can think of is how stupid and aggravating every single human being is. But then, there are the Beatles. When you hear those harmonies, your brain just goes straight to happy-land, and before you know it, you’re feeling fine. What I’m saying is, I had an annoying day and I’m just now starting to feel better about it (although to her credit, Yoko did not poop on the floor today. Not once.) Now that I’m listening to the Beatles and looking at cat pictures, the universe seems slightly more acceptable. I think it’s that thing were listening to good music makes your brain spontaneously start producing cocaine. And furry animals are known to cure high blood pressure. Magical science stuff, yo.

I Am the Walrus

The walrus was Paul. Because John couldn’t fit the mask over his fat head. The walrus is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. Because John didn’t realize that the walrus was actually the villain in that poem until he’d already written the song. It was inspired by a nursery rhyme. It was inspired by an LSD trip. Or two. It was inspired by the sound of police sirens. It was inspired by Bob Dylan. It was inspired by Allen Ginsberg. Eggman is a reference to Eric Burdon’s kinky sexual proclivities. It’s a commentary on the British class system. It’s an exhortation for everybody to smoke pot. All that and much, much more. It’s basically John Lennon throwing a dozen random ideas in a bag and pulling it all together into one nonsense song. It’s most decidedly not supposed to make sense. For me, when I hear ‘Eggman’, I think of Pink Flamingos. But that didn’t come until much later. It’s the apex of everything that seemed like a good idea in the sixties. And it’s a classic that’s been referenced throughout pop culture and still is. Shut the fuck up, Donny!

Hey Jude

It’s been a heavy week for song I feel are just too great to even discuss. Like, what more can I add except to say I’m quaking in awe. Originally titled Hey Jules, it was just something Paul McCartney whipped up to comfort John’s son Julian, who was feeling a little busted up about his parents’ divorce. From being a few comforting words for a child, it morphed into something more universal, and one of the Beatles’ most uplifting tunes (which is saying quite a bit). That some of the lines are kind of clunky makes it even better, like the redundancy (intentional or not) of ‘cool’ and ‘colder’ or any of the other lines that don’t really make much sense but feel right anyway. And, of course, that final chorus that is the closest musical approximation of a blazing sunset. Really, it’s a blazing sunset. In music. Just unfailingly inspiring, every time.

Here Comes the Sun

Sometimes I suspect that the Beatles weren’t real, because, how could they be? Their story is stranger than fiction. Who could have written the story of four lads from an obscure port town who came together and took over the world in the most peaceful way possible? It’s so farfetched – if you were writing that your editor would tell you to tone it down and make it more realistic. What really makes everything fishy is how it’s like somebody wrote them as embodiments of four basic personality types – The Thoughtful One, The Troubled One, The Goofy One, The Romantic. Other people in other bands had personalities too, but no one else fell into such well defined personas. It wasn’t just some thing Brian Epstein thought up to make them more appealing. Those were really their personalities, and when they broke up they found themselves reverting to type more and more without the others to balance them out. John was shouty and mad, Paul couldn’t stop singing about his dog, Ringo was inconsequential and drunk. I’d say that George had the most consistent solo output, because he wasn’t as inclined as the others towards being ridiculous. You can’t say that John and Paul didn’t frequently make fools of themselves, but George never did. That’s why I like him so much. He was decent and not crazy and he wrote some of their best songs, like this one, which is one of their most inspiring.

Helter Skelter

This is one of the great and tragic misunderstandings in all of pop history. Helter Skelter is a song that Paul McCartney wrote because he wanted to one-up Pete Townshend and The Who, and also because:

“Umm, that came about just ’cause I’d read a review of a record which said, ‘and this group really got us wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one. Pity they’ve done it. Must be great — really screaming record.’ And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn’t rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll do one like that, then.’ And I had this song called “Helter Skelter,” which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, ‘cuz I like noise.”

To that end he used the helter skelter – a British term for a playground slide – as a metaphor for the up and down nature of life and the fall of the  Roman Empire. If that doesn’t make much sense, don’t blame McCartney, he was probably very, very high. It was quite typical of The Beatles to grab inspiration from any random place like a playground or a scrap of newspaper and run with it. It’s also characteristic of the friendly rivalry between popular bands all blazing and racing and innovating in a small interwoven community. If The Who put out I Can See For Miles, ‘the loudest, rawest, dirtiest song [...] ever recorded’ then The Beatles are almost honor-bound to outdo the effort, even if it’s only in jest. So Helter Skelter is a loud and dirty but essentially silly rock song Paul McCartney dreamed up on a whim, but that’s not what Charlie Manson thought. Manson, as an American of very poor education, was unaware of what a helter skelter actually was. He thought it was a coded incitement to an apocalyptic race war of his own imagining. He thought that the already-violent civil rights movement would escalate into a global war in which all the white people would be massacred, after which the surviving blacks would realize they’d made a huge mistake and beg Charlie to be their ‘massa’. Or something along those lines. Meanwhile, The Beatles were sending out coded messages telling Charlie to get up and stir up that war by killing off a few ‘piggies’. Which is exactly what Charlie went and did. Which you can read all about in the famous book Helter Skelter, or watch the quite accurate movie of the same name. Nobody will ever associate the term helter skelter with an innocent playground slide again.

Help!

This is The Beatles making a turn toward more mature songwriting, and taking the world along with them. Help! wasn’t actually that great of an album, what with a lot of it being recorded on commission for the movie soundtrack. But it does mark a transition period between their more conventional early records and the trailblazing work that would soon follow. The Beatles certainly turned the world upside down upon their debut, but at the same time they stuck closely with established pop writing conventions. Their first three albums are entirely about girls, dating, love, and heartbreak – the only accepted song topics throughout the fifties and early sixties. It’s an oft quoted fact that they deliberately tried to be more commercially appealing by stuffing their song titles with as many personal pronouns as they could. That’s not to say that following a pre-structured pop formula is a bad thing – The Beatles did what they were doing far better than anyone else was doing that exact same thing. Nevertheless, it was  few years before they began to delve into truly personal songwriting. Rubber Soul found them in full experimental mode, ready to explore anything and everything. Help! was a precursor to that. While some of the tracks are forgettable and forgotten, there’s Yesterday, Ticket To Ride, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away and It’s Only Love to be found. All of which except the first are very distinctly, personally John. Here’s what he had to say about the title track:

When “Help!” came out in ’65, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock-’n'-roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. It was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: He — I — is very fat, very insecure, and he’s completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was. Now I may be very positive — yes, yes — but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know. It becomes easier to deal with as I get older; I don’t know whether you learn control or, when you grow up, you calm down a little. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.

It’s the emergence of Lennon’s personal songwriting style, which he would carry through the Beatle years and beyond – self-deprecating, bitterly honest and cleverly disguised as a catchy rock tune.

 

Hello, Goodbye

You can think Hello, Goodbye has the profound simplicity of a Zen koan, or it’s just silly and repetitive. Or maybe both ways? I’ve read stories how the word at Apple Corps when Paul McCartney presented this gem was ‘Macca’s really half-assed it this time’ but nobody said anything, because who crosses McCartney. But it doesn’t matter if you find the words meaningful or not. The words could be background noise. The point is all in the unified whole, and that’s catchy as hell. That’s Beatles magic, walking between profound and daft.

A Hard Day’s Night

The Beatles’ famous Shea Stadium gig is most famous for showing why The Beatles decided to quit gigging. If I didn’t know better I’d almost come to the conclusion that they weren’t a very good live band. It’s not a very good performance, and the boys look sweaty and unenthusiastic. It was their blessing and their curse that none of them was a natural frontman. On one hand, it prevented anyone from emerging as the de facto focal point and leader. On the other hand, it made them not very dynamic live. Eyewitnesses tell that The Beatles did put on a blazing live show, before they got famous. Their days in Hamburg are legendary, although that might be rosy nostalgia, for the surviving recordings aren’t especially impressive. It seems that even in Hamburg or The Cavern, the Beatles weren’t an act on the dramatic level of The Rolling Stones or The Who. When the Mania struck, they stopped even trying, for as the evidence shows, no one was listening to them play anyhow. They couldn’t hear themselves over the screaming, and the audience certainly couldn’t hear them for screaming. Unceasing adulation may seem like a desirable thing, but it’s not the same as having a rapport between artist and listener. The Beatles became the focus of a mass catharsis for repressed teenagers, if you want to get all sociological about it. The performance itself was beside the point, as a frustrated John Lennon found out when no one noticed him talking gibberish between songs. No wonder they quit touring.