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.

In the summer of 1973 my brother and I were in our bedroom in the suburbs of Chicago playing Battleship and listening to Top-40 radio on WLS. Just imagine what kind of songs might have been playing on Top-40 radio in the summer of 1973. I suggest you imagine them because I can’t remember a single one. “Benny and the Jets?” I’m out.

Anyway, in the midst of all this, a song came on. It was a weird, haunting lament with a keening vocal that sounded like nothing else on the radio. The opening was odd enough, but about two minutes into the song this weird thing happened. There was this sound, like a jet engine revving up, but still musical, a big rushing, orgasmic whoosh. It got more and more intense and my brother and I stopped playing Battleship and stared at the radio. What the hell was this sound coming out of it?

Just when it seemed that our little transistor radio could no longer contain the sound coming out of it, the big whooshing sound stopped and suddenly a different song was playing. This song was completely different from the song before the whooshing, sung by a different singer, with a different tempo to it. Then, just as soon as you got used to this new song, it suddenly got weird and colorful again, the orchestra coming back in with a big apocalyptic pronouncement. Then, just when you thought the song was going to freak out again, suddenly that first song was back again, now with a little faster tempo. I had no idea what the guy was singing about but I knew I wanted to know what would happen next.

After one more verse, that whooshing orchestra came back, whooshing and whooshing, surging and climaxing again, until the whole thing ended on a triumphal shout of trumpet. Then, silence, heart-stopping silence. Then, a massive, perfect, world-ending piano chord that went on for about six seconds before the radio announcer came in and started talking about whatever bullshit he had to talk about at that moment, while that monolithic piano chord slowly decayed in the background.

And my brother and I just sat there staring at the radio. I was twelve years old.

My brother and I listened to WLS for days afterward, waiting, hoping, wading through the Jacksons and the Osmonds and Jethro Tull and whoever else was popular at the time, waiting for them to play that weird, heart-stopping thing again. What the hell was it?

Then, finally, days or weeks later, it came on again. My brother heard it first and ran and got me and we sat there on his bed listening, transfixed, again, trying to take it all in, failing to do so.

This time, as the final piano chord decayed, the DJ came on and said, and I remember so clearly, “W…L…S. A Day in the Life. The Beatles!” then went on to describe some contest they were having that weekend.

“A Day in the Life.” The Beatles. At that moment I knew what I wanted for my birthday. I had no idea who the Beatles were, really, where they came from or what they stood for, but I knew that I had to own that recording.

And so, for my thirteenth birthday, my brother got me The Beatles 1967-1970. It was the first album I ever owned and I still have that copy. I unwrapped it, took it to the stereo, sought out “A Day in the Life,” and dropped the needle. And there it was again. Now I owned it. This weird, inexplicable slice of heart-stopping, life-giving psychedelia was now mine to keep, an experience that I could relive any time I pleased.

After listening to “A Day in the Life” a few more times, I decided to take a chance on hearing what else was on the record. I picked up the needle and started at the beginning. Here are the songs that came on, one right after the other: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help From My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “A Day in the Life” and “All You Need is Love.”

Now then. I was not a hermit, I was a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in the Midwest, driving in cars and shopping in stores. Of course I had heard all those songs a million times on the radio. But get this: I had no idea they were all recorded by the same people. I wasn’t even sure at that point what music was, who created it or why it existed, it was just something that came out of the radio, I had no idea how it got there.  And yet here were all these great songs, each one of those recordings is its own 3-minute world of sounds and sensations and references. And that was just one side of a two-record set! It took me weeks to get through that album, listening to sides over and over again, trying to soak it all up, all the melody, all the weirdness, all the joy, all the deep messages, (well, deep for a 13-year-old Midwestern boy) all the invention and wit and innovation. It didn’t seem possible — four men in their twenties made all this music?

Like everyone who encounters the Beatles, I soon chose one as my favorite. And my favorite was immediately Paul. I knew that it was John who sang most of “A Day in the Life,” but the John parts of “A Day in the Life” weren’t what sold me on the song, it was that the song changed in the middle into a different song, this one sung by Paul, and the resulting drama, and the bookending orchestral flourishes, were what made the song such and experience.

(And you could say “Well, but it’s still John’s song, he could have had all those ideas,” and yet when we look at the work of both men in the ensuing years, who is the one who, time after time, found ways to take little bits of nonsense and fluff and weld them together in startling and dramatic ways, resulting in pop suites where the whole was immeasurably more than the sum of their parts?)

And I loved “I Am the Walrus” and “Revolution” and “Come Together,” but none of them could hold a candle to “Hey Jude.” Here was a song that somehow struck at one’s heart before the first piano chord had finished playing. How did McCartney do that? He sings “Hey” a cappella, and as the answering piano chord comes in under him singing “Jude,” you’re already hooked, you’ll listen to that song for seven minutes, three and a half of it repeated coda, and wish it went on longer. How did he do that? His songs were always these volcanic outpourings of generosity. Even a trifle like “Hello Goodbye” builds with an amazing sense of drama, then resolves, then tosses in a joyous coda. The sound of the piano on “Lady Madonna,” the fat sound of the brass on that recording, the propulsive beat, the speaking-directly-to-the-vain, misunderstood-13-year-old-boy “Fool on the Hill,” the hilarious “Back in the USSR,” a Chuck Berry/Beach Boys parody that managed to blow both of them out of the water, The Beatles 1967-1970 was a watershed in my life, a lodestar, a portal to a world I could live in and never tire of.

Over the next five years I slowly acquired all the Beatles albums (my family didn’t have much money at the time) and listened to nothing else. In 1978 my mother died after a long illness and I bought my first Rolling Stones album — I was ready to see what other music there might be out there.

In due time I became an authentic disenfranchised angry young man. I repudiated Paul and his uncanny sense of craft and polish and became a die-hard John fan. Still later, I would come to admire McCartney’s sense of craft and become skeptical of John’s reliance on shock and experimentation for its own sake. Now I don’t know what the hell to think. John was bound to lose this contest, since he’s been incapable of creating music for the past twenty-seven years, but that’s a subject for another day.