Play­ing God

John Mayer, in his far more palat­able cul­tural com­men­ta­tor guise, recently reviewed The Bea­t­les in one line in Esquire: “I’ve missed too many episodes to fol­low the plot.” And, for any­one who didn’t grow up dur­ing the Bea­t­les run of clas­sic albums (all of them, right?), and was lucky enough to avoid the Anthol­ogy doc­u­men­tary (best music doc ever, right?), it’s exactly right, right?: The Bea­t­les are mush in the minds of most young­sters. The group’s songs are TOO preva­lent to make their albums mat­ter in any sort of lin­ear sense. Sta­ples of clas­sic rock and oldies radio, the group’s his­tor­i­cal story becomes lost in the shuf­fle. They’re merely the sit­com that won’t go away. The one with the plot­line that you know, but not really specif­i­cally enough to ever iden­tify any episodes when you see it.

But, per­haps The White Album defied this? Too spread out, too wild, too unpre­dictable, you could hardly not know which album any of these songs came from (out­side of that “Ob La” song, which fea­tured on a sit­com oddly enough). There are coher­ing themes for the album, how­ever. The most preva­lent one, nature, is the one I’ve cho­sen to make the sub­ject of this re-telling of The White Album. So, with­out fur­ther ado:

The Bea­t­les: When Nature Calls

Side One

01. Wild Honey Pie
Instead of accli­ma­tion track like “Back in the USSR”, sound-wise at least, this ver­sion of The White Album uti­lizes the spro­ing gui­tar and yarbled vocals of “Wild Honey Pie” as its open­ing salvo. It’s meant here to let the lis­tener know that this is going to be like no Bea­t­les album they’ve ever heard. At the begin­ning of the last mea­sure of the song, the next track bar­rels in.

02. Hel­ter Skel­ter
You can’t mess with his­tory. As such, we’ll put “Hel­ter Skel­ter” at the fore­front of this ver­sion of The White Album. It comes in on the last down­beat of “Wild Honey Pie”, allow­ing the vocals to start just as it fin­ishes. “Hel­ter” is, of course, the rau­cous open­ing track that any true rock band dreams about. The extended outro, though, is what makes the song inter­est­ing to my ears and it allows a nice entry for our next track.

03. Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
We begin this track, much like the pre­vi­ous, in the final moments of “Hel­ter Skel­ter”. Rid­ing its coat­tails, the moment at which one of the Bea­t­les com­plains about his blis­ter­ing feet is the moment of silence before another asks us the title ques­tion of the song. Another of the throw­away moments that made it on to the final record, this sub-two minute jaunt goes no fur­ther than its stated ques­tion con­tin­u­ing on the lyri­cal obscu­rity that’s char­ac­ter­ized this side of the album thus far.

04. Everybody’s Got Some­thing To Hide Except Me And Me Mon­key
A rol­lick­ing track, replete with a cavort­ing gui­tar hav­ing a lot of fun in the right chan­nel. The ridicu­lous amount of voices swerv­ing back and forth in the sec­ond half of the song is what mer­its its inclu­sion here, as well as the lack of sub­stan­tive lyrics.

05. Con­tin­u­ing Story of Bun­ga­low Bill
If “Everybody’s Got Some­thing…” could be con­strued to be about some­thing lyri­cally, it could most eas­ily be read as a peon to tak­ing it easy. Pos­si­bly tak­ing drugs. But we know the Bea­t­les never did that. So we’ll just say tak­ing it easy. “Bun­ga­low Bill” is its obvi­ous coun­ter­point, start­ing with a oddly recorded fla­menco gui­tar bit and con­tain­ing what seems like chip­munked back-up singers. It’s at this point that the lis­tener takes the cover of the record and makes sure that’s it actu­ally a Bea­t­les record.

06. While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps
We need two sin­gles and a Har­ri­son song.

07. Rev­o­lu­tion 1
I said two sin­gles. This song does bear a slight men­tion here, though. As the last song on the first side of the record, it’s the sound of giv­ing up. It’s also the sound of the group let­ting the lis­tener know that they need to lis­ten to the sec­ond side, because it’s going to be alright.

Side Two

01. Rev­o­lu­tion 9
But it’s not going to be alright for a lit­tle while yet. In my many con­cep­tions of this piece, this song made it as the opener to the entire album. As it is, I think it’s the per­fect opener to the hope­ful fragility that per­vades the second-half. And it’s a top-notch song. In my CD-R’d ver­sion of the album, “Yer Blues” is time stretched to match the run­ning time and played back­wards at about 10% of its orig­i­nal vol­ume. Just for those play­ing along.

02. Mother Nature’s Son
Emerg­ing out of the nat­u­ral­is­tic tones of the first side of the album, we finally encounter one that glides rather than grooves. The com­bi­na­tion of this and the pre­vi­ous track are exactly what Ani­mal Col­lec­tive would have been doing, if they’d been around back dur­ing this time period.

03. Martha My Dear
But they prob­a­bly wouldn’t be doing this. This con­tin­ues the slight theme of city vs. coun­try that The White Album staked out in its orig­i­nal form and that I’ve tried to high­light here with my par­tic­u­lar run­ning order. I also really enjoy the horn arrange­ments.

04. Long, Long, Long
Which leads us into the final three songs of the album. For the most part, it seems that the three song state­ment is the most ele­gant for­mat to open and/or close albums. “Long, Long, Long” is a pretty track, undoubt­edly, sweep­ing across the stereo chan­nel to gather up your emo­tions and focus them into some­thing: that final drum beat.

05. Black­bird
Do we have room for the most beau­ti­ful song on the two discs? Yes. Yes, we do.

06. Good Night
As hard as we lob­bied, Ringo kept hang­ing around the stu­dio plod­ding out drum­beats and singing hor­ren­dous back­ups. Can you imag­ine any­thing scarier than a Bea­t­les album begin­ning with either “Hel­ter Skel­ter” or “Rev­o­lu­tion 9” and then end­ing with Ringo Starr singing you a lul­laby? I can’t. One out of three ain’t bad. These guys aren’t so over­rated after all.


By Todd Burns | stylusmagazine.com
6 August 2004