In his book Beatles Vs Stones, author and columnist John McMillian called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (another seminal musical masterpiece that turned 50 last year) as the 'soundtrack to the remarkable summer of 1967'. Unlike that year, when love and peace were the mantras being chanted by millions of impassioned fanatics and free love-mongers in the West in the haze of bliss and psychedelia, 1968 was not a year that deserved a celebration, let alone a lovely soundtrack. This was the epoch of dissent, disillusionment and the gradual dissolution of all hope.
The Vietnam War had entered its most dispiriting and desperate chapter, Robert Kennedy was assassinated because of his idealistic liberal stance and the Manson family was just a year away from their most notorious exploits that would leave a nation shocked and stunned to silence. Things might not have been so grim across the Atlantic, except that a foursome of incredibly charming Liverpudlians, who were already crowned as arguably the greatest musical sensation of the decade, were about to break up and the writing was on the wall, on the blank white cover of their latest epic album.
Can The Beatles, also known more popularly as The White Album, be called as the soundtrack to the tumultuous days of 1968? Indeed, it would be right to call it that, no matter what its detractors at the time said about the songs being apolitical and irrelevant. In fact, as it turns out on revisiting the album on every occasion, there are more political parables to be found in The White Album than in any other Beatles album in the past, both pointed in their fury and punchy in their satirical barbs. And it can be agreed unanimously that the album's varied styles, its eclectic and almost avant-garde flavour, is what captures the predicament and despair of the year and crystallises it as a chronicle of a troubled time. If Sgt. Pepper was the sound of the Summer Of Love, The White Album was the noise of the Winter Of Discontent.
Before I go deeper into that, let's hit closer to home and consider what this magnificent album represented for the band itself.
If the year 1968 witnessed the dissolution of the euphoria of hope and happiness that had flooded the world in 1967, it also signalled a possible end to the road that had been tread by the Beatles till now; it was high time since each one of them considered the inevitability of them going on their own individual paths rather than continuing as an indivisible band for more years. It is important to understand that by the latter half of the 1960s, the Beatles had changed in ways more than one. Not only had they traded their harried and hurried routine of live performances from city to city for the relative comfort of the recording rooms in Abbey Road, which also allowed their truly incredible songwriting talents to flourish in unprecedented ways; they had also changed individually, from Liverpudlian musicians coming up the hard way to make it big in England and the rest of the world to musical revolutionaries who now sought new grounds for pushing musical boundaries on their own.
It could not have happened while they had remained as tightly knit a band as ever; and in any case, they were confronted with many life-altering changes and decisions on both the professional and personal front. Their long-time manager Brian Epstein had passed away, leaving behind a vacuum of professional management which paved the way for the travesty with Allen Klein; their idealistic yearning to find enlightenment under the wing of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Rishikesh had soured when the latter was accused of sexual misconduct, thus turning Lennon and Harrison vehemently against the spiritual guru.
And finally, when it came to recording the massive pile of material that they had written and thought up in all these days, the studio turned into a literal battlefield of big arguments and even bigger egos, resulting in 30 compositions that defy easy classification and categorisation. What better name for an album teeming with chaos than The White Album?
Then again, what better name than The Beatles, given just how well this album, more than the others, showcases everything unique and great about them?
Listening to the Deluxe Edition of this massive, maddeningly brilliant double-album, restored brilliantly by Giles Martin, the son of the de facto 'fifth' Beatle, proves all the cranky critics of the record to be stupefyingly wrong. To call The White Album as unfocused, variable in quality and even self-indulgent and pointless, is to miss the glittering moments of pop brilliance that you find even its minor marvels, the cheeky pastiche of Wild Honey Pie, the Sinatra-like moonlit beauty of the lullaby Good Night, the enjoyably bonkers recourse to early rock and roll of Birthday and even the cheerful, sunny optimism of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Not to forget the unfairly maligned poetic disorientation of Revolution 9.
These are only some of the enjoyable and extraordinary moments to be found in an album that is alternately seething in anger, sly in lyrical repartee, slinky in its sexual allusions and sublime in its beauty and poignancy. When I called it my personal favourite of all the Beatles albums (and that is a tough call since even slightly off-kilter works like Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be throw up many nuggets of exotic delight), I meant it because it was the Beatles firing on all cylinders, pushing themselves in both songwriting and lyrics and in the process, also laying down the groundwork for their own individually unique styles; they were no longer just the Beatles the band but they were also the Beatles the four musical legends with a firm sense of their respective individual strengths and talents.
Today, while that original assessment holds up pretty well, it is also wonderfully refreshing to see that the Beatles actually return to their roots, to the early days of improvisation and bursts of clutter-breaking songwriting that defined their bare beginnings so distinctly. In four seminal works before The White Album, the Beatles had experimented successfully with the transcendent beauty of psychedelia. It was in the 1968 album that they returned to the jam sessions and jittery improvisation of their days at Cavern and Hamburg but with a palpably matured approach, blending their now-flawless skill at both wordplay and instrumentation with a rugged, reckless sense of audacity and anti-perfection. Barring the baroque melody of Harrison's Piggies and the heady vintage pop effervescence of McCartney's Honey Pie, most of the other songs see the Beatles presciently conscious of the limited musical viability of psychedelia, which makes them turn to hard rock, modern pop and even blues.
Secondly, even with all the terse, frequently sudorific atmosphere of the recording sessions, there is a pulse-pounding and alive, albeit angry, taste of passionate, almost competitive output from all the four members. It is to be found in the most unlikely of corners, from Lennon's sombre bass beats in Rocky Raccoon lending the much-needed nihilistic weight that it needed to be the Western-twanged country number it is to McCartney's twinkling piano intro of Sexy Sadie, adding to the sardonic tone of Lennon's slyly disguised rant against Maharishi himself. Harrison's writhing solo adds to the tongue-in-cheek effect of Yer Blues and Starr's pounding drums for Long, Long, Long is an upbeat surprise that offsets the haunting, almost elegiac feel of the song.
Given my gushing love for The White Album, I was delighted, thrilled, moved and stunned in equal measured on rediscovering my absolute favourites and on stumbling upon more gems to add to my memories. Lennon's lusty and sweaty Happiness Is A Warm Gun is still my pick of the best song in the album, followed closely by Harrison's heart-rending While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which features guest Eric Clapton with a wailing guitar alongside virtuoso work from others and McCartney's berserk and bizarre Helter Skelter, possibly the hard rock song to beat all other hard rock songs. But there are so many songs that contend for lasting brilliance here, from the self-referential snark of Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey, the wistful romance of I Will and the colourful production of Starr's Don't Pass Me By.
The voices and lyrics are top-notch too, from McCartney's African-American soul-inflected howls in Why Don't We Do It In The Road to Lennon's typically biting wordplay in Cry Baby Cry, an acerbic lament of neglect at childhood disguised as a nursery rhyme. I had always thought the faster version of Revolution, to be a more thrilling rocker but the album version, slowed down and made more bluesy by the shoo-be-do-wop in the chorus, is a snazzier piece of music, guaranteed.
There is another reason why The Beatles was the four legends at their best. That brings me to the Esher Demos included in the Deluxe Edition.
When the Beatles returned from their bittersweet Indian pilgrimage, they met together at Harrison's home in Esher, Surrey. This was the fertile ground on which they pitched their songwriting ideas to each other, many of which would go ahead to form the upcoming album and some which would be a mainstay of their respective solo careers, just a couple of years away from beginning.
Little did the four know, at the time of their improvised jam sessions at Esher, that there would actually be cracks that would divide them for once and for all. In fact, as the easy-going, languid air of these sessions, available for the first time on the Deluxe and the Super Deluxe Editions, proves, the Beatles were still sharing that infectious and relentless dynamic that itself makes the unplugged demos of most of the songs from the album so endearing in their own way.
There are, of course, musical delights to be found in these recordings as well. Harrison's acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps sounds purely sublime; Lennon's Dear Prudence and I'm So Tired are as lively and sardonic, laced with his witty mutterings, as the album recordings and McCartney's Blackbird is melodically immaculate without a rhythm out of place, as a sign of his musical craftsmanship. There is also two alternate versions that deserves special mention. The stripped-down first take of Yer Blues is moodier, bluesier and belongs ideally to Lennon's acoustic work in his solo years and his Everybody's Got Something To Hide…has a cheekier mood with recklessly strumming guitars.
Included in the Esher demos is a clutch of half a dozen songs recorded that did not make it into any of the Beatles albums. Harrison's Sour Milk Sea was given away eventually to Jackie Lomax to make his debut with Apple Records the same year; McCartney's austere Junk remained what it had begun as: a purely acoustic guitar song. Lennon's Child Of Nature, rather interestingly, morphed from his response to Mother Nature's Son into the confessional love ballad Jealous Guy in Imagine. Similarly, Harrison used the hauntingly melodious Not Guilty and Circles in his later solo albums. Most unfortunate, however, was Lennon's quirky What's The New Mary Jane, which was left out of the album at the last minute.
In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated as yet another crusader of idealism and it was also when the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia, thus ending the brief spring of freedom that the country had enjoyed from its steel-fisted grip. The Beatles aka The White Album feels like a subversive, troubled and urgent response to the erosion of this idealism from the world; Back In The USSR imagines, blissfully, how it would be on the other side of the Iron Curtain and Revolution takes a jab at the very thick-headed revolutionaries who 'go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao' with 'minds that hate'. Its counterpart, Revolution 9, also portrays the horrifying images of fear and chaos that anarchy or violent revolution would mean for the world. And all these songs also inspired, by a freak accident, Charles Manson and led ultimately to the most shocking happenings of the generation. Is it any wonder that this was the Beatles at their most revolutionary?
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