The premise of the film Yesterday is that the Beatles
catalog is unknown to everyone except a young musician who takes the songs and
re-creates them, of course making them famous once again. I'll leave the
analysis of the film to the critics, they've beat it up enough already, but
here's my thought: if I had the Beatles' catalog at my disposal, would there be
songs that I would just let go, that I would allow to disappear into the ether?
I know it's sacred territory to tread on, but just for a moment, think about
which five songs you would leave out of the Beatles' canon. In the meantime
these are mine.
There's so much discussion about whittling down The White
Album to just a single desk. Although there are songs indeed that I would
remove, in particular, "Don't Pass Me By," I've long defended songs like "Honey
Pie" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road." Indeed, Paul's "road song" is a poetic endeavor that utilizes repetition in a way that, well, doing
it in the road utilizes repetition. It really is a case when linguistics,
grammar and poetry all come together as one, like it or not. And "Honey Pie" is
the kind of filler that the album needs to string one song to the next to give
it continuity, even if it doesn't work well on its own. And yet it does work
poetically, and it's one of those songs that if you get it stuck in your head,
at least you know all the words
"Don't Pass Me By," on the other hand, is among my least favorite
songs in the Beatles canon, and if it were just to disappear I'd feel fine. On
Family Guy, Paul takes a song by Ringo and hangs it on the refrigerator, as if
it were a drawing by a child. And childish it is, out of place on the LP at
best. I skip it every time.
On that note, the most skipped song on any Beatles album is
George Harrison's "Within You Without You" from Sgt. Pepper. But dismissing the
track as a production masterpiece, as one of the pinnacle songs in the
psychedelic era, is naïve at best. It's a beautiful song that brilliantly
comingles east and west and if you're one of the skippers, you really need to
meditate on this.
Now, as much as I've defended "Honey Pie" as an integral
component of The White Album, if indeed filler, I find Phil Spector's butchering of the already
diluted song "Dig It" to be filler and nothing more, I wouldn't even consider
it a part of the Beatles' canon; it's just there like that parsley sprig on
your plate at Denny's.
In my younger days, I would've been quick to dismiss
McCartney's children songs like "Life Goes on" or even "Yellow Submarine," and
yet as an adult, I sang these songs to my children. That, in turn, led to their
finding "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" on their own and ultimately creating Beatle
Fans. Still, I have to include "All Together Now" as drivel. I'm not saying it's
not catchy, but so is the flu.
I won't include any of the cover songs like "Boys" or "Honey
Don't" because the artists who originally created those songs would have still
existed in the Yesterday universe, but the penultimate track on my list, and I
don't think I'm alone in saying this, Revolution No. 9. It may hold a certain significance in terms of fiddling
with tape loops in an avant-garde way - oh never mind it’s terrible. I'd
probably find it interesting on a collection of outtakes, but it muddies The
White Album at best, only is topped by only one song, and yes, at least this
one's a song: "You Know My Name, Look Up the Number." Just more studio play,
but here it sounds frustrated and emotionally drained, And despite some
interesting production values, nothing can save this sinking ship of a song. I
had a DJ friend who at the end of the night at a club in LA, the Seven Seas to be exact, who would play this
track just to clear the room at 2am.
I pride myself on only reporting the positives in rock 'n' roll, and so to put a spin on this, I want you to imagine the perfect
Beatles catalog, and honestly, taking out those five songs brings us that
much closer.
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