McCartney, part 3, in which I try to quantify greatness, so that I may dissect it

Let’s take a closer look at the Beatles’ recordings. They are all masterpieces. I can say this because the best definition I’ve ever heard of “masterpiece” is that a masterpiece is an artwork that we can return to again and again throughout a lifetime and always get something new from it. I’ve been listening to the Beatles recordings probably since before I could write words, and I haven’t gotten close to getting to the bottom of their mysteries and surprises.

What do they do? How do they work? What are the hallmarks of “Beatles recordings,” that make them stand out from all other recordings? To stick with the theme of this blog, what do the Beatles’ recordings want?

I am not a musicologist. One could write a book on why the Beatles’ recordings work musically, and more than one person has. I am, however, a dramatist, and I find that my primary response to the Beatles recordings is dramatic. They have an overwhelming sense of drama, each song a perfectly realized little world, each recording existing by its own rules, often with an arrangement utterly unique: even if it’s just guitars, bass and drums, somehow each time a new sonic aspect of those instruments are teased out.

It’s almost as though every time the Beatles entered the recording studio, they acted as though they had never entered a recording studio before, and didn’t know if they would ever get the chance again. There’s an incredible make-or-break sensibility to each recording, in the same way there’s a make-or-break sensibility to Raging Bull. Every corner of every song is packed with melody, invention and what I like to call “entertainment value.”  There’s never a wasted moment or dull stretch in a Beatles song, even “Revolution 9.”

Think of the urgency of the Beatles songs. They did not come here to waste your time, and they will not let you change the station. A casual glance through my Beatles CDs tells me that many Beatles songs begin with the chorus, or sometimes don’t even have a proper chorus, or rather are all chorus, with bridges in between choruses. Many of the songs in question not only begin with the chorus, they don’t even have introductions, they just begin. I counted twenty-eight (out of roughly 200 Lennon/McCartney Beatle tracks) that begin with the vocalist plunging into the chorus without any introduction at all. Think of a sonic avalanche like “She Loves You,” a song both insistent and distant, joyful and pejorative, delivering someone else’s good news in a way that makes you assume that she couldn’t really love anyone but the singer. If McCartney is this happy about telling you that she loves you, just think of how happy he would be if she loved him.

Check out these examples of the finest dramatic writing in pop music. These are all the first lines of Beatles songs, sung without any introduction whatsoever, often a capella.

“As I write this letter, send my love to you –“
“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you, tomorrow I’ll miss you — “
“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true — ?”
“Try and see it my way, maybe time will tell if I am right or I am wrong — “
“You tell lies thinkin’ I can’t see, you can’t cry ‘cos you’re laughing at me, I’m down.”
“Ahh, look at all the lonely people — “
“To lead a better life — “
“In the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed to sea — “
“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad — “
“The long and winding road that leads to your door — “
“She came in through the bathroom window — “

And my personal favorite, which begins in the middle of the phrase —

“For I have got another girl — “

Think of that! McCartney begins the song in the middle of a phrase!

For the purpose of comparison, here are the opening lines of some Shakespeare plays, pulled off my shelf entirely at random:

“Who’s there?”
“When shall we three meet again?”
“Tush! Never tell me!”
“I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.”

This is masterly drama, beginning the song, the “argument” as it were, in the middle, forcing the audient to “catch up” with the singer. Each one of these opening lines is immediately arresting, plunging us into a drama already in progress — who could fast-forward past a song that begins, a cappella, “For I have got — ” for he has got what? Oh, another girl, I see — and why does he have another girl?  What was wrong with the first girl?  Why would a Beatle need another girl? And when are we going to get back around to the first part of that phrase? “I ain’t no fool and I don’t take what I don’t want, for I have got another girl,” ah yes, there it is.

You could say that these are simple pop songs, but they are not simple pop songs. Even the Beatles’ earliest recordings have a complexity and experimentalism that remains striking today. Just the other day I was driving with my 4-year-old daughter Kit and 1962’s “There’s a Place” came on, a song I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and listened to. Kit responded to it immediately and demanded to listen to it nineteen times in a row, allowing me a chance to get to know what was, to me, essentially a “new” Lennon-McCartney song. After I got used to the perfectly bizarre harmonics of Lennon and McCartney’s twin vocals, I started working out the lyrics in my head. “There’s a place,” they sing, “where I can go,when I feel low, when I feel blue, and it’s my mind, and there’s no time, when I’m alone.” The next verse starts “I think of you, and things you do,” which makes me think that “when I’m alone” attaches grammatically to the second verse, but it also works as the last line of the first. There’s a place where the singer can go when he’s depressed, and it’s his mind, but there’s no time when he’s alone. Meaning either that the singer could be happy in his mind if he had time to be alone, or else he must retreat into his mind because he’s never alone. Either way he’s completely miserable, and either reading is surprising in what sounds like a chirpy pop song on first listen. And this is before Beatlemania made John Lennon officially miserable, two years before “I’m a Loser” and three years before “Help!” (incidentally, both those songs also begin with a cappella choruses too).

They manage to do all of this while sounding like the most joyful people on earth. Paul McCartney sings “I Saw Her Standing There” like a dying cancer patient who’s suddenly been given a clean bill of health. All the vistas of life have suddenly opened for him. (“Well she was just seventeen, you know what I mean” also happens to be one of the great couplets in songwriting history and a perfect example of Lennon-McCartney teamwork — as McCartney tells the story, the opening couplet was originally “Well she was just seventeen, she never was a beauty queen,” but Lennon either substituted the existing line or pressured McCartney into changing it, turning it from a comment on the subject to thrusting the subject into the mind of the listener.) There is an incredible immediacy to the Beatles recordings, a sense that something is happening, right now, as the tape is rolling.  This in spite of their mature recordings sometimes taking days or even weeks to  painstakingly record and edit.

“You know what I mean” reminds me that, like any great songwriters, the Beatles are notable not just for all the musical detail they put into their recordings, but also for what lyrical details they leave out. Their songs often come almost to the point of cohering, only to back off at the last moment, creating not so much a story but a moment, not a drama but a scene, leaving out the beginning and the end, leaving the listener to finish the narrative his- or herself.

Which brings me to my last point, the Beatles talent for collage. Starting with the Sgt Pepper concept (which, despite the album’s greatness, isn’t very well fleshed out), most notably in “A Day in the Life,” but continuing through the jarring juxtapositions of the White Album and, most notably, on Abbey Road, the Beatles in their mature phase (which I think it’s safe to say is when McCartney came into his own, shouldering the lion’s share of the production burden) (and being the biggest asshole) threw out all the “love song” mainstays that had made their reputation and instead turned to crafting sonic landscapes with lyrics that were impressionistic, nonsensical or even completely meaningless. Side Two of Abbey Road only sounds incredible, none of those songs would have made it on their own, it’s only when “Mean Mr. Mustard” bumps into “Polythene Pam,” which then comes crashing into “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” that the songs gain their sense of excitement. These juxtapositions are related to montage, just as “shot of gun,” “shot of woman screaming,” “shot of man falling down” are uninflected images stitched together to form the dramatic beat of “man getting shot.”. That is to say, again, the primary impact of these recordings is dramatic.

So, if we say that the criteria for a good “Beatles recording” includes a heightened, almost supernatural sense of urgency, immediacy, complexity and experimentalism, a dramatic force and alacrity, performed joyfully, uniquely arranged and containing melodies both absurdly catchy and built to sustain generations of scrutiny, we might then be able to move on to judging McCartney’s work after the Beatles, and how it compares to the work of his bandmates.