June 14, 20179 yr http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/all-213-beatles-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html At Beatles anniversary time, the stories write themselves. “It was 25/30/40 years ago today!” “The act you’ve known for all these years!” “A splendid time was guaranteed for all!” Last week’s 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most acclaimed rock album ever and the apogee of the Beatles’ cultural influence in the 1960s, is a time for all those chestnuts and more. But Pepper’s doesn’t make sense if it’s not put in context. And the only way to do that, given the weight of the Beatles’ presence, is to take a look at everything the band put on record over its eight-year recording career. It turns out that ranking the songs recorded by the Beatles in the 1960s is easy; you put the worst one at the top, and the best one at the bottom. The list is based on the band’s British releases, which is how they thought of their work. In the U.K. in the 1960s, the group released 13 official studio albums, including the A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine quasi-soundtrack albums. The so-called “White Album,” The Beatles, was a two-record set. There was also a flurry of non-album singles throughout those years, collected in different ways in the U.K. and the U.S. EMI also released a number of four-song EPs in Britain, particularly early on, but only one of them, Long Tall Sally, contained songs not available in other forms. Releases in the U.S. were a similar mishmash, but from Revolver onward, with minor exceptions, the studio-album releases, at least, were standardized. The songs the band released in the 1960s that were not on their studio albums were eventually consolidated in a catchall collection dubbed, quite lamely, Past Masters. The Beatles based their sound largely on American R&B, and they, like their compatriots in the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, filled their early records with covers of their favorite tracks. They are duly noted below; most sound like the appreciative efforts of a young and not-quite-formed band; the Beatles being the Beatles, however, a few are transcendent. I use the songs on those releases to create this ranking, with some ephemera (like the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or George Martin’s Yellow Submarine orchestrations) ignored, with a few other interesting tracks that have dribbled out over the decades added in. This doesn’t get said enough: These songs were specifically designed to pack their punch at high volume. Try ‘em with real speakers, not headphones. I am indebted to Beatles super-scholar Mark Lewisohn for his many detailed books on the band, most important The Beatles: Recording Sessions; Bob Spitz’s close-to-definitive The Beatles; engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere; and the engrossing podcast Something About the Beatles, hosted by Briton Richard Buskin and American Robert Rodriguez. Any mistakes are, of course, my own. Please let me know if I conflated any facts or misrepresented anything in the comments section below, or publicly humiliate me on Twitter @hitsville. Beyond everything else, the Beatles were the biggest cultural story of the modern era, and they were, in the end, pop, if pop is music that makes people happy. Through the confusion and the chaos, the pain and the self-questioning, they worked to create a joyous sound. They didn’t fuss about it; it’s what they wanted to do. They loved to turn us on. I'm not going to list all 213...so I listed the bottom 10 and top 10. You can check out the link for those in between! 213. “Good Day Sunshine,” Revolver (1966): Paul McCartney was welcome to write all the happy, upbeat, cheery-cheery songs he wanted. But this one is beyond the pale. It’s blaring, received, and strident. Even by McCartney standards (“Getting Better,” “Hello Goodbye”) the title is inane. It could have been “Yum Food Delicious,” or “Hot Sex Baby,” or any other three random words McCartney took out of his Young Man’s Collection of Positive Synonyms — and note that of these three choices McCartney chose the blandest. McCartney’s piano playing, which graced so many Beatles songs, right up to “A Day in the Life,” is a parody of itself. It’s the worst song in the Beatles’ classic period. And it ruins Revolver, otherwise the most consistent and mind-blowing collection of pop-rock songs ever conceived by man. 212. “Dig It,” Let It Be (1970): As Lennon himself put it, this is what you get when you’re stoned all the time and don’t give a "poop". Docked eight notches for Lennon’s final spoken line, “And now we’d like to do ‘Hark the Angels Come,’” which on the record sounds like a swipe at the next track, “Let It Be,” a song that is tuneful and about something, unlike “Dig It.” McCartney sometimes produced schlock, but rarely work as annoying as this. 211. “Little Child,” With the Beatles (1963): Probably the worst of Lennon and McCartney’s early efforts. Filler from the second album. 210. “Tell Me What You See,” Help! (1965): A highly derivative track shoved onto the second non-soundtrack side of the record from the band’s second movie. 209. “Dig a Pony,” Let It Be (1970): Doggerel from Lennon. The most uninteresting song on one of the band’s least interesting albums. The lyrics are nonsense, but all he wants is you. Boo-hoo. 208.“A Taste of Honey,” Please Please Me (1963): John Lennon, a local Liverpool tough and an incipient art-school dropout, had a skiffle band. Paul McCartney, two years his junior, had a rapidly evolving understanding of music and a slightly younger guitarist schoolmate named George Harrison. Once the three jelled, the band honed its chops playing before ever-more-appreciative audiences in clubs in Liverpool, notably the Cavern, and in three separate residencies, with a drummer named Pete Best and a bassist named Stu Sutcliffe, in a succession of strip clubs in the red-light district of Hamburg. (The first of these ended when authorities discovered George Harrison was underage; he was unceremoniously deported.) The band’s undisciplined and chaotic performances are now the stuff of legend, ranging as they did from wild American R&B to the schlockiest schlock, like this. But at the end of this trial by fire — playing in front of gamblers, gangsters, strippers, and thugs — they emerged as tight and focused a band as can be imagined. 207. “Ask Me Why,” Please Please Me (1963): “I love you / Woo-woo-woo-woo.” “Ask Me Why” was one of Lennon and McCartney’s first compositions, as the lyrics here attest. With a major exception, “One After 909,” the results of these early efforts were as naïve and plain as you’d expect. Still, having left Sutcliffe in Hamburg, the band continued to rock the Cavern as a quartet, with Paul McCartney playing bass. A local music-store owner, Brian Epstein, saw potential in the band when no one else did and reinvented himself as their manager. After hitting dead ends with all of the established British labels of the time, he put together a last-shot meeting with an exec at Parlophone, an overlooked division of the conglomerate EMI. The exec was named George Martin; he was really a producer, classically trained, who’d fashioned a career making hit comedy albums with the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Peter Cook. He auditioned the band and didn’t not like what he heard. He advised them to write some new material and get rid of their drummer. 206. “Free As a Bird,” single (1995): This single enraged me, in 1995, when it was released to gin up interest in the first Anthology album. It was a Lennon song from long after he’d left the Beatles; he sounded so vulnerable, and the studio work that had gone into making this distant-sounding, crummily recorded demo sound presentable felt like too big a burden for the martyred star to bear. His former songwriting partner, one Paul McCartney, added six lines as a sort of bridge. Of the six lines, two were taken from a Shangri-Las song, and they weren’t particularly good ones, either. (“Whatever happened to / The love that we once knew?”) Twenty years later, it still enrages me. Docked 100 notches for corpse desecration. 205. “Not a Second Time,” With the Beatles (1963): You keep waiting for a redeeming melody to rise to the surface, but it doesn’t come. The weirdest thing about the song is how the title words come on a low note that Lennon doesn’t quite hit, a rarity for a band with such vocal precision from the start. 204. “She’s Leaving Home,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): A bathetic lugubrious mess, the nadir of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The call-and-response chorus is labored; the whole thing reeks of having come from a squaresville OffBroadway musical about kids these days. The instrumentation is unusual; there are no actual Beatles playing on the track, but no one cares because the song is so bad. Note that the subject of the song is essentially the same as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which does much more with it. 10. “Rain,” single (1966): A bruising masterpiece, mostly from Lennon, right on the heels of “Nowhere Man.” Looking for ever deeper sounds, the band hit on the trick of recording at a faster speed and then slowing the playback; that gives this song its drawling, almost sepulchral feel, punctuated by McCartney’s primordial bubbling bass lines. Other electronic foofaraw was added, too, as you can hear. At this point, every song the Beatles released was a new chapter in an ongoing textbook on how to record rock and roll. With all respect to Brian Wilson, whose Pet Sounds came out the same year as Revolver, the sessions for which “Rain” emerged from, there’s really no comparison between the two, though of course Wilson’s advances spurred McCartney’s ambitions. This single, with “Paperback Writer” on the A, was an unsurpassed sound masterpiece, and the band’s unsurpassed two-sided single — until they surpassed it the next year. Historians say the last seconds sport the first prominent use of a backward track in pop recording. This song, like all the band’s best singles from this era — from “Ticket to Ride” to “Day Tripper,” from “Strawberry Fields” to “Lady Madonna” — benefits from being played from real speakers (not headphones) at high volume. 9. “Eleanor Rigby,” Revolver (1966) It’s hard to hear today after 50 years of radio airplay, but this is a stellar and nuanced piece of work that avoids sentimentality and hits hard. From a germ of an original line — “Picks up the rice where a wedding has been” — McCartney envisioned a church with a lot of loneliness around it, and followed some of the implications out to their logical conclusion. This would be a much better song without the unsubtle chorus — “Ahhh, look at all the lonely people” — but let’s lay off McCartney for a moment and note the small touches here, like how the line “No one was saved” comes plainly from the mind of Father MacKenzie. The strings are ferocious. 8. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” Rubber Soul (1965): The first use of a sitar in a Beatles record. With Rubber Soul, Lennon’s writing took another insane step forward; helped in some part by LSD and the massive amount of pot he was smoking, he shied away from simple love plaints and into higher consciousness. The abstract, allusive, possibly symbolist story here — apparently about an unobtainable woman who eludes his advances, in response to which he burns down her house — rivals Dylan, particularly in the way that it is unquestionably a personal tale with an ambiguous ending. He was just trying to rub her soul. 7. “Here, There and Everywhere,” Revolver (1966): I like this best of all of McCartney’s ballads; while obviously framed, even confined, by the title words, it is a surprisingly complex work, as when McCartney takes the “everywhere” part into the middle eight. You tend to focus on McCartney’s double-tracked vocals and the ooh-ing harmonies behind it. But the real story is the complex interplay between McCartney’s voice, his exquisite bass lines, and Harrison’s nice lead guitar work. 6. “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Another almost-perfect rock song. This lacks, barely, the apocalypse of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but it’s in the realm; even Lennon’s spare original demo track crackles with drama. John’s silky space voice could get old, but its power is unique here. His guitar, from that ghostly insistence at the song’s beginning, to the rockist slams midway through, to the fanfare at the end, outclasses virtually anything else at the time, not to mention everything else on “The White Album.” The subject of the song is Prudence Farrow, who’d gone to see the Maharishi with the Beatles, her sister Mia, and various other celebrities, and found herself taking it very seriously indeed. 5. “Please Please Me,” Please Please Me (1963) This apocalyptic plea for mutual oral gratification is set to an appropriately orgiastic arrangement; so strained with desire is the singer that he can’t even sing the words correctly. Played by the band on Britain’s Thank Your Lucky Stars in January 1963, it blew away the memories of the wan “Love Me Do” and set Beatlemania in motion. For this reason it could be argued that “Please Please Me” is one of the most important pieces of pop art of the 20th century, but frankly, had it not existed, “She Loves You” would have accomplished the same result a few weeks later. One of the interesting things about the group’s best early recordings is how spacious they feel, but also how dense. The song’s sound is so heavy with energy you can’t imagine anything else being added; its center of gravity is so low it can bowl you over. 4. “She Loves You,” single (1963) As the story is told in Bob Spitz’s The Beatles, Murray the K, the enormously influential NYC disc jockey, had been playing “She Loves You” for weeks with no big reaction. Once the four Beatles set foot on American soil, the madness began, and suddenly the drum temblor that heralds this epochal recording made sense. “She Loves You” is a paroxysm of sound and emotion. I’m not even sure why it works, given the singer’s detached relationship to the events in question. He’s just a guy delivering news to a friend, and it’s not really clear why he’s quite so excited about this development. There are hints of a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-style mystery here, or maybe just a species of transference. In the U.S., incidentally, a determinedly buffoonish series of steps by EMI’s U.S. arm, Capitol Records, led to the Beatles’ work being released on a variety of labels Stateside, all of them licensed, you might say, for a song. “She Loves You,” for example, came out here on an unknown label called Swan. And when, in April 1964, the Beatles achieved the unthinkable — holding down the top five spots on the U.S pop charts — no fewer than four different labels had a piece of the pie. All that aside, the song is lethal, another Beatles track crammed full of sound and drama, from Harrison’s sly guitar fills to more of those lubricious harmonies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Upped three notches for the repressed homoerotic undertones. 3. “Penny Lane,” single (1967) Paul McCartney grokked Lennon’s Strawberry Fields as a Liverpool reference, and created his own nostalgic inner travelogue back in time to another hometown locale, Penny Lane. Lennon went into his subconscious; McCartney stayed out, and looked around him, attentively, focusing his whimsy for once and capturing moment after moment of surreal small-town life. McCartney had a lot of nice melodies, of course. The one in the chorus here has meaning, rising with his thoughts and reveries, and then bouncing (“meanwhile back —”) down to reality, such as it is or was. His bass line is set contrapuntally against the chant of the verses, jaunty and yet calm; the other flecks of sound — those wordless “aaahs,” the piano and organ rising and dropping out, the clang of the drum, the extraordinary taste with which the brass is deployed and then amped up to ineffable levels, culminating in the mother of all piccolo trumpet solos — create a sensory overload. It’s the one pop single you can see and hear, and smell and taste and feel too. After the Beatles, McCartney ducked into an iconoclastic solo career that ultimately grew into a genial ’70s superduperstardom; with guidance from Lee Eastman, he became as rich as you can imagine. After a quiet ’80s, he went back on the road, where he’s been intermittently available ever since. He even releases the occasional record, which no one ever listens to. 2. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” single (1967) Unlike the languid psychedelia in, say, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” John Lennon’s words here are surely poetry, if poetry is something in which words take on deeply referential and kaleidoscopic meanings. Strawberry Fields was an orphanage in Liverpool; the reference is not so much to the motherless children — though that certainly reverberates through the song — as to its garden, which Lennon frequented. The accompanying statement of loneliness, isolation, confusion, and struggling artistic awareness (“No one I think is in my tree”) took confessional rock to new levels. This was a lulling acoustic number Lennon worked on for weeks while filming a movie called How I Won the War. Back home, he and producer George Martin worked for days on the song, with Lennon focused on finding a grandeur, and otherworldliness, hidden in his original presentation. His voice was slowed down, horns were added, backward bits of sound marked the track. Finally, liking the beginning of one take and the end of a second, he had the engineer tie the two together — which sounds easy, but variations in the speed and pitch of the two takes made it anything but. The result stands assuredly apart from humanity, but somehow of it as well, and remains a thunderclap of rock creativity. Lennon announced his departure from the band at a meeting in 1970; they agreed to keep it quiet, until Paul goes off about ongoing management disputes, put out a press release announcing that he’d left the group to record his first solo album … which, somewhat spitefully, he released a few weeks after Let It Be. You can’t take sides; it’s a fight among family, with resentments going back a lifetime. Lennon’s solo career ran hot and cold, and sometimes ridiculously so. After some hiccups — like Lennon’s infamous “lost weekend” of some 18 months carousing in L.A. — he settled down with Ono into something like domestic tranquility in vast apartments at Manhattan’s Dakota, where, among other things, they raised their son, Sean. Lennon and Ono reemerged at the end of 1980 with a new album, Double Fantasy, with a surprisingly melodic suite of new songs by Lennon. A week later he was shot by a deranged fan. 1. “A Day in the Life,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) You can be a Lennon partisan or a McCartney fan, but the plain truth is that when, as here, they worked together to support each other’s talent, something transformative occurred. While this is another one of the songs for which Lennon took inspiration from the public press, here he projects meaning onto it, rather than just receiving banality. While it is unquestionably Lennon’s song, the record shows the pair wrote the bulk of it together, while of course the off-kilter middle section was a fragment McCartney was working on separately. It’s said he also provided the “I’d love to turn you on” part, and the idea to have the orchestra build to its crescendos. But this is, in the end, a John Lennon song. There is probably no vocal track more feeling in all of rock, which it needed to be to make his poetry in this song plain: Holes are souls, which often have their own holes, and what are we all but holes in the universe, each with our own holes that allow us to live and eventually kill us? That’s what the pair wanted to turn us on to. For the end, some 40 orchestra members ran up their scales for 24 bars, and did it five times. Those five tracks were combined, making for a momentous sound. There is time for a breath, and then a final chord on an army of pianos. That sound goes on for a minute. The rest is silence. Edited June 14, 20179 yr by mcpapa
June 14, 20179 yr Agree with #1; one of the truly great songs of that or any generation. "Rain" should be closer to #1.
June 14, 20179 yr "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Seeps" have got to be in the top 10, for me anyway.
June 15, 20179 yr "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Seeps" have got to be in the top 10, for me anyway. I'm hoping there's a typo in there somewhere.
June 15, 20179 yr "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Seeps" have got to be in the top 10, for me anyway. One of the great slow dances of my generation. Fond memories.
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