Apple Of Our Ear

One of iTunes' great new Beatles spots. Remember the first time you heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand"? I was nine years old, and I was with my grandmother, Lily, in a Rexall drug store in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In just a week, Apple customers downloaded 450,000 albums and eight million individual tracks.

The End Of The World At Coney Island

Folksinger and blogger Tom Russell won $60 at Del Mar (he bet on a horse named Modern Song) and went CD shopping. He bought Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs," Jimmy Webb's duets album, and the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." He writes:

My God. Have not listened to this in 20 years. I assumed it would sound like a dated psychedelic artifact. Naw. This is a record about loneliness, depression, age, death, suicide…masked in a circus-musico format. The end of the world at Coney Island, with raunch guitars, superb vocal arrangements, and gut wrenching singing. It’s the Beatles, of course. Unfair to compare them with anyone else. This was like finding a forgotten Van Gogh in the closet. The record was recorded on a four track tape machine 33 years ago. Where has our technology taken us? I would borrow from William S. Burroughs in inferring that modern digital technology may be leading us toward boredom and oblivion....

Nine Songs On The 241

If your iPod's on shuffle and "Revolution 9," from the Beatles' so-called White Album, comes up, you're probably going to be tempted to skip to the next song. That I didn't do so this morning seemed to be a signal to see what I could learn from a southbound from Yorba Linda, Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving random playlist. My theory, you see, is that when your iPod has more than 10,000 songs (I have 10,005), it becomes sentient. Sometimes, like this morning, it picks nine perfect songs right in a row.

Choosing the Beatles' longest, most obscure cut was my iPod's challenge not to be MP-3 ADD -- not to skip over two, four, or ten songs while looking for the perfect one but instead to settle down and hear what the spirit of music was saying. So I gritted my teeth and listened carefully to the John Lennon-Yoko Ono sonic adventure that Paul McCartney and producer George Martin fought tooth and scale to keep off the album. I'm glad they failed. A pastiche of found sounds, from choirs to passionate moaning, "Revolution 9" matches the album's foreboding theme and tone.

As you might imagine, a minute-by-minute summary of the song is on-line, including a transcript of Lennon saying, about a minute in:

They found a shortage of grain in Hartfordshire, and every one of them knew that as time went by, they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower…factory work…five percent in the, in the uh, the district, they were intended to pay for...

We'll revisit that Hartfordshire factory with Mick and the boys in a moment. The Beatles were actually quoted in my second song, Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," from his first solo album in 1972: "I know they say 'let it be', but it just don't turn out that way." Named for a dish in a Chinese restaurant and written about a deceased pet, the song, like the White Album, echoes with Vietnam-era urban elite discouragement, as do other songs on the album "Paul Simon" such as "Everything Put Together Falls Apart" and "Paranoia Blues." It was, after all, the year of the reelection of Richard Nixon, for whom no one Pauline Kael and probably Paul Simon knew in Manhattan would vote. A year later, as Watergate raged, Simon released the more elegiac "American Tune," set to music from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "We can't be forever blessed."

A younger, equally skillful lyricist working from a smaller pallet, Belfast-born Christian folksinger Brian Houston wrote my third song, "Practical Reminder," a mid-tempo rocker from his 2005 album,"Thirteen Days In August," about an unnamed local Eleanor Rigby, an Enneagram 2 with a full-on martyr complex:

She's always loneliest when she's with other people
She just saves all of her tears until they leave
For if politeness were a virtue, then I know she's be a saint
She could deny herself for Ireland in the next Olympic games

Living a less circumscribed life was the great, deeply troubled Janis Joplin, whose powerful last album, "Pearl," was recorded with a band called Full Tilt Boogie and released a a few months after her 1970 death from a heroin overdose. FTB were journeymen musicians whom Joplin was proud to have assembled into the rock-solid, cool-rocking band she'd always wanted. She wrote the song that blasted from my Saturn's speakers this morning, "Move Over," which is well lubricated by Ken Pearson on the Hammond B-3 organ and features a powerful guitar solo by Canadian John Till, who some years before had been hired by Ronnie Hawkins after the musicians later known as the Band abandoned him for Bob Dylan.

It always seems to come back to the Band lately. The next song the mischievous iPod dished up could've been a Band song, with its country-style acoustic guitar and, I thought I heard, the hint of a mandolin. But as promised, it's back to Hardfordshire for the Rolling Stones' "Factory Girl" from 1968's "Beggars Banquet." I always thought of this Jagger-Richards song, which even has a country fiddle on it, as an invocation of an American mountain folk tune, but as a matter of fact, all that music came from England, Ireland, and Scotland to begin with. As Keith Richards said in 2003:

To me "Factory Girl" felt something like "Molly Malone", an Irish jig; one of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song.

Ancient indeed, since that was two songs in a row that had me wallowing in memories from high school. Thankfully, Lyle Lovett came along next with something newer, a genuine American country song, "Promises," from his stunning 1996 album "The Road To Ensenada." A sad, hopeless-sounding apology, it's a song St. Paul would have loved:

Promises given
And promises broken
Words stain my lips
Just like blood on my hands

And words are like poison
That sinks down inside you
And some things you do
You just don't understand

This minor-key Lovett original took me from nostalgia to discouragement to curiosity. When did he and Julia Roberts split? The year before the album came out, I see. Evidently Lovett fans have been plumbing it for clues about their breakup for years.

My musical buddy and recent pilgrimage partner Gary Baker tells me that his fellow Van Morrison fans are similarly well informed about the Belfast-born (that's twice in nine songs) living legend's love life. (There are relatively few details at Morrison's otherwise exemplary Wikipedia page.) His "Gypsy In My Soul" turned out to be the next song in my rotation. By this time I was hurtling past Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and listening to Morrison's nasal, supple tenor:

It’s just the gypsy in my soul
Make me pack up my things and go
It may seem like I’m on a roll
But it’s just the gypsy in my soul

Morrison, who used to live near members of the Band in Woodstock, appeared at their Last Waltz concert in 1976. Bob Dylan was in Woodstock as well, and in 1967, in the house called Big Pink, the Band recorded a song he wrote, "Orange Juice Blues," that was released in the 1970s on "The Basement Tapes." The ninth and last song in in my random playlist, it was playing as I rolled into the St. John's Church parking lot. Richard Manuel's beautiful, lost falsetto rang in my ears all day:

I had a hard time waking this morning
I got a lotta things on my mind
Like those friends of yours
They keep bringing me down
Just hangin' round all the time

When It Was Good With Sexy Sadie

Wonderful photos of the Beatles in India.

Perfect Bands: "Yer Blues" (1968)

John Lennon singing his song from "The Beatles" with Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Mitch Mitchell on drums. The performance is from the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus in London in December 1968.

Dear Abbey

The Beatles' famous crosswalk on Abbey Road in London. Visit the 24-hour webcam here.

Meeting The Beatles Again For The First Time

Inspecting an alien audio medium in "Men In Black," Tommy Lee Jones says, "I guess I'll have to buy the White Album again." He'll have his chance in a couple of weeks. As Brian Hiatt writes in the Sept. 3 "Rolling Stone," when the Beatles' catalog was issued on CD in 1987, critics said the sound was shrill and grating compared to vinyl. Expectations are high for the Sept. 9 release of newly remastered Beatles CDs, a development enabled by an agreement among Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the widows of George Harrison and John Lennon. From painstaking digital transfers made from the closely guarded original tapes followed by the latest remastering, all overseen by a team of Abbey Road engineers associated with Beatles producer George Martin, these little miracles will ensue, writes Hiatt:

"Love Me Do"...loses its dusty, distant haze of age, and "The Long and Winding Road" no longer has what [chief engineer Allen] Rouse described as a "muffled" quality to it. Otherwise, it's a matter of suddenly noticing details: McCartney's nimble bass line on "And Your Bird Can Sing," the vivid three-dimensionality of Starr's opening and closing high-hat on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the cinematic quality of the choirs and orchestra on "Good Night."

The RS cover story, by Mikal Gilmore, recounts the band's slow-motion breakup. It wasn't just that Lennon tried to force his mates to accept Yoko Ono as the fifth Beatle, as most seem to believe. It was also differences over money and management and Lennon's self-consciousness about McCartney's greater output (at that particular moment) as a songwriter. After Lennon announced the breakup at a 1969 meeting where McCartney was trying to persuade the Beatles to go on the road again, Ono told a journalist:

We went off in the car, and he turned to me and said, "That's it with the Beatles. From now on, it's just you -- OK?" I thought, "My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so long. Now I have to be the one to take the load."

What do you expect from four young guys with all that money and fame? Of course I had to spend the weekend listening to their albums. First, "Beatles 1," with their 27 #1 hits. The first dozen, from "Love Me Do" through "Day Tripper" (who wrote that opening lick, the Beatles or Eric Clapton?) are miraculous, but then you hit some mediocre songs, beginning with "We Can Work It Out," in which freshness gives way to self-importance. For the bridge, Lennon wrote, "Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend," while McCartney wrote in the verse, "Try to see it my way...Why da ya see it your way?" We can work it out, as long as I win. The song doesn't synthesize competing melodic and thematic ideas and ends with a ponderous, awkward cadence. The Beatles wouldn't part for another four years, but the seeds were planted.

I can also do without "Paperback Writer" (ambitious pop stars making fun of ambitious writers), "Yellow Submarine," "Eleanor Rigby" (faux empathy), and "Lady Madonna" (as if the Beatles were conducting their home lives particularly admirably).

The Beatles' last #1, "The Long and Winding Road," has a sappy string accompaniment which was added on, I learned from the Gilmore article, by Phil Spector and recently removed by McCartney for a pared-down re-release of "Let It Be." At the time, Spector said of producer extraordinaire Martin, "I don't consider him in my league. He's an arranger, that's all." In retrospect, Martin comes out on top, and not just because the "wall of sound" is behind bars. After "Beatles 1," I listened to the Martin-produced "The Beatles" (aka the White Album) straight through for the first time in years. Maybe it's because I first heard it when I was an impressionable 14 (I got it for Christmas in 1968), but it's still astonishing in breadth and scope. It rocks, it soars, it shimmers, it tantalizes. As Gilmore writes, the Beatles had been listening to the Band, and you can tell from "Rocky Raccoon" and "Don't Pass Me By." It's got a song about candy, George Harrison's "Savoy Truffle," and social commentary that works, especially the "Piggies" out on the town eating their bacon (even as the Beatles were in the process of cooking the goose that laid their gold records).

Is "Back in the USSR" the greatest Beatles song? It's certainly their most confident straight-out rocker, plus an affectionate Chuck Berry and Beach Boys parody. And that's what's most amazing about "The Beatles" -- its tongue-in-cheek sophistication, as if the band is letting us in on something. They parody things that have been barely invented, such as heavy metal with "Helter Skelter." Songs fall apart at the end Wilco-style, like Lennon's "Dear Prudence." "Long, Long, Long" and especially "Good Night," with its soporific vocal and creepy strings (Spector should have done so well), sound pre-apocalyptic. In "Revolution," the Beatles refused to pander to the prevailing elite Zeitgeist. (Lennon probably wouldn't have liked that statue of Mao at the Nixon Library.) But something was going on. Something was about to happen. This amazing record captures it.