The Beatles in one song?
Posted by Twangothan on 27 March 2008 - 9:52am.
I've been exploring the areas of the Beatles catalogue that I had missed previously. Following Heppo's excellent "definitive Zep song" thread (easy - "Ramble on") - what is the definitive Beatles song?
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"Help!"
Next!
The definitive version of the definitive song?
I'd never seen this before until now. It's groovy! It's gear! It's moptoppily fabtabulous!
And people say they weren't a good live band? Sheesh. Has any four-piece beat combo past or present ever sounded as proper as that?
The brilliant thing about "Help!"..
...says he (as if everybody's dying to know) is that it's a melancholy song that makes you feel happy.
Easily their greatest song
The absolute pain of the chorus, set to such joyous music, is bona fide genius in my book. Lennon called the Help era his "fat Elvis" period.
This happened once before
David, David, David, David, David. I've been telling everyone for months now that it's No Reply...
Same album, different song
I beg to differ.
I'd say Ticket To Ride - perfect balance between early Beatles and latter period - perfect harmonies, beautiful classically written song, slightly off kilter heavy drumming from Ringo, the suggestion of the Indian influence that was to come and a bass-line that could fit straight onto Revolver.
Good choice!
For me it would be between that one and "Eight Days a Week". Mind you, "Help" is pretty much up there too!
A Hard Day's Night...
...it has solo lead vocals by John and Paul and has their best intro/outro.
When I searched for the above clip I also found this Yiddish version.
Almost impossible this...
but I might go for 'In My Life'.
Mojo
I remember a Mojo poll of the greatest songs ever - according to critics/songwriters/producers/artists etc - voted "In my life" at number 1. It is fabulous.
Ri-ght.
I suppose there's no chance of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' getting a look in then?
Rubbish
My investigations reveal that you could produce a pretty substantial "Rubbish Beatles" CD too - Maxwell's, Submarine, and some dog called "Old brown shoe" which I was listening to on Remasters Vol 2 this morning to say the least. Shocking!
One Song?
Gotta be this:
Like Chimney's choice above, it's also a bridge between old Beatles and new Beatles. I also love the difference between what's a typically happy/sad McCartney verse and a typically acerbic Lennon chorus. It's almost like two songs joined together.
Perfectly illustrated
by Lennon at 0.17
Tara then
This has the lot.
Can't Help
For definitive I can't better 'Help!': it's still a beat combo sound, you can hear the skiffle, the harmonies are all there in spades, it's still knicker wetting Beatlemania but the lyrics herald the start of the Fab's mid and later periods. She Loves You doesn't do that. If we were talking favourite though the one I've listened to most is Strwberry Fields Forever which, I'd argue for quite some time, stands alongside the great works of art in painting, sculpture, theatre, film...
Not sure
whether you can "define" any artist with quite a wide range of styles in one song. Or why you'd want to. But if you wanted to explain to a visiting martian why they generated so much excitement you'd play this:
I wanna be your man?
Perhaps better known by their chart stablemates, but look what it started. (I'll ignore "Come on")
But there's more than one Beatles...
...so you need more than one song. As follows:
Fab Beatles:
She Loves You. Encapsulates Beatlemania in under two minutes.
Groovy Beatles:
A Day in the Life. Big contributions from both John and Paul and just the hint of a drug reference.
Grown Up Beatles:
Hey Jude. Paul's song, but about John's boy and the lyric got John's seal of approval.
That's cheating
There's only one Beatles. The hair got longer is all.
True, it is cheating but
it is incredibly difficult to use one song to encapsulate a band that developed their sound so quickly and radically.
This is a flawed question?
This is a flawed question? The answer is always the best of Beatles.
Wings?
They're only the band the Beatles could have been
Jet!
!
Again
it just proves what an amazing group they were. Can anyone seriously imagine anybody doing this with Radiohead?
No......
but try again in 10 years time and it may be worthwhile. (And I don't like 'em at all, probably either) Anyone with a reasonably long canon, if I am not mixing my terminology, can sustain the exercise, be it the Stones, the Kinks, U2, REM, or in individuals, Van, Willie Nelson etc etc
In fact, as I weeble on, I CAN imagine a group of Radiohead fans (is that a wake of Radiohead fans? A sleep of Radiohead fans?)doing just this exercise. I bet one will write in in a minute......
I believe the correct collective noun
is a "dirge".
And out of left field ...
There's an inherent optimism that underlies almost everything in the Beatles catalogue. (I said "almost" before the rebuttals start, and I'll certainly take 'Yer Blues' as an exception but bear with me ...). Even in a song like 'Revolution' everything is going to be alright.
On that basis I would suggest 'Here Comes The Sun'. It's not my favourite - perversely that would be 'Hey Bulldog', - but it captures that spirit perfectly.
I await the dissention.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooo
Won't be popular with any representatives of the Lennon/McCartney estates.
I applaud your choice.
Anyone up for putting forward Act Naturally?
While we're about it Twangothan ...
I won't have a word said against 'Old Brown Shoe'. Is there a better line to sum up the unsatisfiable male dilemma than "I want a short haired girl, who sometimes wears it twice as long"?
As Ian MacDonald says an archetypal B-side from an era when B-sides were worth flipping over for.
I was wrong
On your advice Mr C I tried it again. It is Ok actually - nice to hear George play a bit. I was confusing it with "You know my name" (on "Past masters Vol 2") which should have stayed on the studio floor. I am on a voyage of discovery!
I feel my work here ...
is done.
It could have been worse - Lennon wanted 'You Know My Name' to go out as a Plastic Ono Band A side!
I'll Get You...
...surely one of the greatest b-sides of all time.
Oh Yeah
And I've always admired their cheek in having a B Side start with four yeahs after an A side that starts with 10.
A Day In The Life..
It's everything you want from all of them (including George Martin)
You've Really Got a Hold on Me
Perversely, the "definitive" Beatles songs I'm coming up with all seem to be non-originals. As soon as you get on to Lennon-McCartney (McCartney-Lennon ?) songs you start worrying about whether the two of them are equally represented. But here they're on an equal footing singing a great Smokey Robinson composition as fans, their delivery somehow anticipating all the fun that was to follow.
Phil & Don
One of the aspects of Beatle music that isn't really commented on much is the harmony. John & Paul loved The Everly Brothers and quite a few of their songs, on the early albums anyway, are effectively dual leads. One of the songs they always did live, even though it wasn't one of the big hits, was Baby's In Black, presumably because they loved doing it. (It's also in sea shanty waltz time - all Liverpool groups have one of these.)
Here's John & Paul having fun singing with each other (and Ringo keeping everything together).
Yoko Ono
She's *lapping* it up, isn't she?
Frosty The Ice Queen
That bond cannot be tolerated and will just have to go.
"Two of us wearing postcards" though. Surely she could have got an exhibition out of that.
Who says Wings were the band the Beatles could have been ... ?
I thought Yoko had been recently rehabilitated? I saw her live about 12 years ago at the Astoria in this mode and it was a fantastic show. If not quite mainstream, at least no longer shocking.
I think the first section may be 'I Feel Fine', though not as we know it Jim. To be fair, Paul looks as if he was quite into it, although George has clearly taken the chocolate digestives home. 25 years on it was still pretty cutting edge.
In the second section she may be sitting on a toilet for artistic or other reasons, but I couldn't swear to it.
.com/youtube_play.php?id=SYqCpvzXGTE&v=beatles%20ono
'she may be sitting on a toilet for artistic or other reasons'
that made me laugh out loud. Well we've all made those kind of noises when sitting on the toilet at some point, haven't we? It seems The Beatles invented so many styles of music we still hear today, and in this case it's Radiohead.
Probably considering nicking the microphone stand...
to use as part of her new sculpture 'Sculpture with microphone stand No.1'.
I Feel Fine
The start makes it perfect....
I love And Your Bird Can Sing
on the Anthology where Macca's laughing hysterically but the song keeps going. But to the Martian I'd probably play Nowhere Man - my personal fave - mellow but profound - tuneful and guitar excelsis.
Am I in Love?
Between Us
Sung by "George" (i.e. Ricky Fataar who was in the Beach Boys for a while); covered by Teenage Fanclub; would have slotted nicely onto Help!. How's that for credentials . . .
Richard, you're just about
Richard, you're just about spot on there. I've just taken the Rutles CD down from the shelf and just about any one of those songs would make a good Beatles 'primer'. For my money, the best example is probably 'Hold My Hand' which seamlessly ties up three Beatles tunes into one. It's a pity they went off to be two hairdressers in Wolverhampton... or whatever.
Yes Richard
I'm glad you thought of that.
I didn't, you did
I just chipped in with another one. Wasn't trying to poach your idea.
Explaining The Beatles to aliens?
Is it cheating to say a mash-up of George's 'When We Were Fab', Ringo's 'Early 1970' and John Lennon's 'How Do You Sleep?' may give these ignorant superior life-forms some idea?
Since they'd be aliens...
...surely they'd be far more likely to enjoy Revolution No.9? OK, so 'Within you, without you' would be an outside bet too...
Under no other circumstances would I suggest this song but...
One day I was at home and Revolver was playing and I had a visitor. She walked in during Yellow Submarine. She laughed (at ME) and said, "I never got them." So I skipped a few tracks, adjusted the volume and blasted Tomorrow Never Knows at her, saying "No, no, no, THIS is The Beatles."
Day Tripper
Great riff & lovely bassline from macca
Great vocal from lennon
Drug references galore
Fantastic arrangement
Terrible guitar solo
Perfectly bridges "she loves you" with "tomorrow never knows"
Tripped Up
Not just a terrible solo there's a mistake in the guitar part on the verse straight after it. Most noticeable mistake on any Beatles number I think. Actually, does anyone know of any others, not just Fab ones, now there's a thread...
The Word - you missed a shameless plug
Buy the word and you'll be free
Buy the word and be like me
or something like that. The nearest the Beatles got to being groovy.
well it's obvious...
The definitive Radiohead song is "Paranoid Android"!
I like the Beatles suggestions so far... but my crrent personal favourite is "Happiness is a Warm Gun". i'ts embarassingly personal, musically eccentric, and catchy at the same time.