The Beatles, "Golden Slumbers," "Carry That Weight," "The End"

So of course I was going to do a post about the Beatles.

A while ago I was parked in the chair here, trying to think of a song I wanted to write about that week. For lack of any better inspiration, I settled on chance. I decided I would open Apple Music on my computer, run a Shuffle over my full library, and take the first song that came up and write about it, as sort of an improv challenge. Wincing, squinting, I hit the Shuffle button. Ever so slowly I opened my eyes to look, and top of the list was “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Beatles.

WOW. That’s a GREAT draw, I thought. What were the odds I would throw 16,969 audio tracks into a hat and pull out the Beatles? I spent a few minutes writing up a blurb about my dumb luck, then I stepped away from my desk. A day later another song idea came to me and I ran with that one instead. But I kept this option in reserve: I could always do a “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” post later, when I was once again hard-pressed for ideas.

Then this past Wednesday we went to see 4EverFab, a local Beatles tribute band. They play yearly in our town, as part of the Payson Park summer concert series. Kate and I packed some food—cheese and crackers, veggies and dip: you know, picnic-type stuff—and pulled up folding chairs under a big oak tree behind Underwood Pool (the new Payson Park bandstand is still under construction), a reasonable distance from the stage, so we could hear the music and still sustain a conversation. Our friends Shaun and Alex met us there. Shaun and I go back twenty-five years now, to law school. We both love music a ton, and by and large we love the same music. And we love talking about it.

So during the course of 4EverFab’s two-hour set, Shaun and I talked extensively about the Beatles—something we must have done before, but not recently enough for me to remember it. We tend to fixate on the punk and post-punk and new wave and alt-rock bands that are always front of mind for us. It says something about Shaun and me that rather than listen to the music that was playing, we were talking about it. But it was a lively and wide-ranging conversation.

For example, when 4EverFab started playing “Here Come the Sun” (Apple Music, Spotify), Shaun and I considered the mind-blowing proposition that there existed, on this planet and in this timeline, a band whose third-best songwriter was George Harrison. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. But then we considered that if we were going to rank writers by quality, we should judge them based on all of their work, and Paul wrote “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” So maybe George was actually second-best? And off we went down a rabbit hole talking about what might be a reasonable and delicate way to respond, when your bandmate and close friend of ten years walks into a studio session brandishing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” I proposed that every band member should be allocated a limited veto power—let’s say one or two per session—that the others could override with with a clear three-vote majority. So there we were, writing a system of constitutional governance that might have pulled the Beatles out of one or more blind alleys.

At some point I blurted out that I really like “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except for Me and My Monkey” (Apple Music, Spotify). Like, I think that song is crazy good and underrated. This might have come off as a non sequitur, or as one guy digging up a deep cut from the double album just to show off to the other guy, but Shaun certainly didn’t receive it in that mode. This is the level of trust we’re at, when he and I are talking about music. We get excited, we go in random directions, and we indulge one another. The deeper you go, the higher you fly, come on it’s such a joy, and so on.

We decided I should run down the hill and request “Me and My Monkey.” So I pried myself out of my folding chair and approached the woman, presumably one of the musicians’ wives, who was receiving and collating requests for the band. She had no idea what I was talking about. Back up the hill I went to tell Shaun that “Me and My Monkey” was off the table. Really? he asked. Because they just played “Hey Bulldog” (Apple Music, Spotify), which was a B-side from the “Lady Madonna” sessions. That’s more obscure than “Me and My Monkey.” At this and other points in the conversation it became clear that Shaun knew tons more about the Beatles than I did. Which was great, because I stood to benefit a great deal from the discussion.

“I’ve Got a Feeling” (Apple Music, Spotify) got us talking about the Get Back documentary that Peter Jackson edited together and released on Apple+ in 2021. I’ve watched maybe half of it—I still need to push through to the finish. But I’ve seen enough thus far to make me really appreciate Paul, really for the first time.

Some background is due here. A prized bon mot I like to drop at dinner parties is that I’m convinced the Beatles are dying in order of coolness, and Paul and Ringo know it and are pulling out all the stops to stay alive. My bias against Paul isn’t personal; it has everything to do with his predilection for writing dopey Muppet Show compositions and dropping them like stink bombs in the middle of otherwise excellent Beatles records. I’m thinking of “When I’m 64,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the aforepanned “Hammer,”¹ and even the middle part of “A Day in the Life” (Apple Music, Spotify), all of which get on my last nerve in a hurry. It’s the kind of toy-piano dreck that, I can imagine, might send a center-cynical person running into the arms of the nearest freakshow avant-garde concept artist.

But these tendencies aside, Paul was the only one of the four showing any real leadership in the Get Back sessions. John was chronically and unapologetically late, if not absent altogether—Shaun said he and Yoko were hooked on heroin at this point in time, which I hadn’t known and which blew my mind upon hearing it, because it explained a hell of a lot. George wanted to quit every day, perhaps reasonably, but even so it was certainly disruptive. And Ringo wasn’t anything like a problem-solver. He seemed determined to stay above the fray (literally, on the drum riser), waiting on standby for when any of the other three called for him to contribute some percussion. It was Paul holding it all together, with the patience of a saint. Wow.

Shaun and I talked, too, about how good 4EverFab sounded when they were playing the earlier songs, which surely had to do with the fact that so much of the Beatles’ later recordings incorporated studio tricks and enhancements that made it near-impossible to play credible versions of, say “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Apple Music, Spotify) on stage as a four-piece. But 4EverFab sounded tight and well-rehearsed on the early numbers, just as we might imagine the Fab Four had when they were playing their Hamburg gigs. The vocals were uncanny; they really had the voices down pat. This discussion naturally spun me off talking about Neu!’s work in the studio, and their struggles to translate their innovative and highly-engineered sound into a live setting.

Toward the end of the night Shaun texted me links to some YouTube videos he hoped I would watch later. Here’s one of them—John, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell (collectively, “The Dirty Mac,”) playing “Yer Blues” on The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus 1968 TV special:

I hadn’t seen this (!), but I was able to offer the point of information that pre-Black Sabbath Tony Iommi had appeared on this same TV special playing with Jethro Tull.

Time passed, and 4EverFab turned to the song I did successfully request, which was “Revolution” (Apple Music, Spotify). This prompted me to wonder out loud, only half-seriously, what Revolutions 2 through 8 sounded like, and whether they charted some linear progression between Versions 1 (Apple Music, Spotify) and 9 (Apple Music, Spotify). On that score, and on the spot, Shaun sent me a link to “Take 18” of “Revolution 1” (Apple Music, Spotify), which addressed my question at least in part.

Conversations like these are super important and inspiring for me, and I’m lucky to have people like Shaun—and others: hello, Bob, Mark, Carla, Glenn, Kalun, and sometimes Mike (see “Go Your Own Way”)—in my life to have them with me. No surprise, then, that after coming home from that lovely summer evening under the oak tree I was raring to write about the Beatles, and my relationship to them over the last … I dunno, forty-five years.

So here goes:

Way, way back in the day, before I ever dubbed Dead or Alive to tape (see “You Spin Me Round), when I was musically an unmolded lump of clay, my parents gave my sister and me greatest hits cassettes from the Beach Boys and the Beatles for Christmas. Tia got the Beach Boys, and I got the Beatles. At the time, I liked the Beach Boys a lot better, and I set aside the Beatles so that I could sneak into her room and “borrow” the Beach Boys tape. Also, my favorite band at the time was KISS, so there’s no accounting for taste, when you’re a kindergartener.

My parents came of age in what I’ll call the “flat-top” end of the 1960s. They were in college when the Beatles hit America, so naturally they loved the early singles. They’ve told me more than once about going into a bar in college on a Saturday night and hearing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “She Loves You” (Apple Music, Spotify) for the first time, then the second time, and the third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and so on for the rest of the night, on the jukebox. There was nothing anyone else wanted to hear. Decades later, I think I want to go back and ask them to tell me this story one more time. They were not just alive, but paying attention, when the Beatles landed. This is living through history, and the good part of history at that.

It was MTV that turned so many of us Gen Xers on to music, but the Beatles were largely absent from the VJs’ playlists. I don’t know if they couldn’t afford to in-license any Fab Four content, or if the pain of John’s death was still too fresh for the programmers. Whatever it was, the Beatles were out of the loop. Paul did the “Say Say Say” video with Michael Jackson, but that didn’t exactly send us storming into the B-section of Musicland. At some point I had a Thompson Twins cassette with their cover of “Revolution” (Apple Music, Spotify) on it. But that was it, really, in the early 1980s.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off surfaced “Twist and Shout” (Apple Music, Spotify) for our generation. On one of our family vacations our parents took us into a for-fun recording studio—they’d give you a list of songs, you’d choose one, you’d sing to the backup music, and they’d give you a cassette to take home at the end of the session. The song I picked was “Twist and Shout,” because at that time I was done wanting to be Adam Ant, and I wanted to be Ferris instead. It hadn’t occurred to me that John was cooler than both of them, or that without his contributions, these other two wouldn’t exist.

Through most of the 1980s, the psychedelic- and late-era Beatles seemed ridiculous to me. Counterculture seemed performative, empty, and beside the point. It would take Oasis to pry open my mind to what John, Paul, George, and Ringo accomplished after, let’s say, 1964.

I was a senior in college when I saw Oasis at the Academy in New York in the spring of 1995. They were touring on their first record. At that time, and for some time thereafter, they were in the habit of ending their shows with a cover of “I Am the Walrus” (Apple Music, Spotify). It was a full-blown wall-of-guitars freakout with deafening feedback, played at probably 1.5x the speed of the original (and with none of the musique concrète elements that featured on Magical Mystery Tour). I loved the hell out of this and was over the moon to get hold of a sound-board recording of this cover (Apple Music, Spotify) on one of Oasis’s CD singles. Then the next Oasis record came out, and the pianos in “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (Apple Music, Spotify) sounded a hell of a lot like “Imagine” (Apple Music, Spotify). Then the third record came out, and “All Around the World” (Apple Music, Spotify) sounded a hell of a lot like “Hey Jude” (Apple Music, Spotify).

In the meantime, The Beatles Anthology had aired on TV, and three two-CD sets were released with rare session recordings, archival live material, and outtakes on it. I didn’t have the money to buy all three of these, so I went in for Volume 2, the mid-career segment, which turned me on to Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Magical Mystery Tour. At that point I finally let go of my generational bias against the 1960s, because all of these records were AMAZING. From there I reached backward for Help! and Rubber Soul, and I was willing to go as far into the late Sixties as The White Album.

For the next two decades after that, I went no further, for no other reason than I thought the late-era Beatles looked ridiculous. Yeah, I know, but this was my state of mind. I could get behind the Peter Max renditions from Yellow Submarine, and I loved the Sgt. Pepper’s costumes. All this was in the Austin Powers/ Swinging London style (or close enough): bright colors and swirling psychedelia. Yeah, baby! But time marched on, the beards kept growing and the pants kept flaring. By the time these four guys were crossing Abbey Road, they just looked scruffy and hairy, and I assumed this would be reflected in the music—that the psychedelic wave would have broken, and these guys would sound like the Eagles because they looked like the Eagles.

Some of this bias was informed by the hits I’d heard from the Abbey Road and Let It Be records. They weren’t turnoffs, necessarily, but they didn’t sound as distinctive to me. They sounded like late autumn, when all the colors are fading into brown. I was content with the several Beatles records I had. From time to time I’d binge on them, always in awe of how much they had grown and changed between 1962 and 1970. Put them aside other accomplished bands: consider how much U2 (Boy to Rattle & Hum) and R.E.M. (Murmur to Out of Time) evolved over their first eight years of recording. Notable growth for both these bands, but still: nothing like what the Beatles did in the same amount of time. They pressed forward relentlessly, always in fifth gear, and never at the expense of the songs. I’m not breaking any ground here when I say there was, is, never will be anything like them.

Then I actually sat down and listened to Abbey Road. This is most definitely the coolest part of my Beatles story. Two years ago September, Kate bought me a turntable for my birthday. A week before I received that gift I was in Columbus, to see the Buckeyes play, and on the Friday afternoon before the game, I went to Used Kids Records with my uncle—the aforementioned Zio—on a lark. Kate called me while I was there, and when I told her where I was, she owned up that I’d be getting the record player, so I might as well buy some vinyl. There was a used copy of Abbey Road in the racks. I showed it to Zio. He told me—as he had several times—that it was his favorite Beatles album. Nevertheless, I passed on it in favor of The Velvet Underground & Nico, Trans-Europe Express, and a Wooden Shjips record.

A week later, I had a vinyl copy of Abbey Road delivered to my doorstep. I hadn’t bought it, and there was no sender listed. I texted Zio: “Was that you who sent me Abbey Road?” He denied it. I pressed him: we had just had this conversation. Who else would have sent it? Nope, not him. Another two to three weeks passed before I identified the mystery sender.

It was my dad. Flat-top Sixties, stepping up. By the time I’d clued in enough to thank him, I had fallen completely in love with this record—from top to bottom, every single track. But the medley on the back end is what blew me away, and the best part of this flurry of genius is the last three punches thrown: “Golden Slumbers” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Carry That Weight” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “The End” (Apple Music, Spotify). For as much as I love everything rock ‘n’ roll—did I say before I had 16,969 songs on my hard drive?—I had to take a long and winding road forty-eight years deep into life, before I even heard these three tracks. Thank you, Bappo, for putting them right in front of me.

Oh, and guess which three songs 4EverFab played at the end of their set.

1. By now you’ll have noted that some songs in this post come with links, and others do not.