The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.
White Album - The Paul Songs
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From the course by University of Rochester
The Music of the Beatles
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From the lesson
A Co-Op of Singer-Songwriters
The White Album both begins a return to roots while also continuing the musical experimentation of the earlier music, but now each song is less of a group effort. Creative differences arise. The White Album and singles from this period.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We turn now to a consideration of Paul McCartney's songs on the White Album.
These songs as I've said are.
There's a,a majority of them that are based on styles of others.
And most of those styles, are, but not all of them.
But most of those styles are past rock and roll styles
or, there are a couple that are sort of more current styles.
But this, this tendency to look
to the past as a way of trying to move forward.
I talked about in the last video as one of my kind
of big interpretive points on Paul McCartney at this point in their career.
So let's, let's sort of go down, go through
the Paul songs and see what I mean by that.
I'll start by just talking about the ones that are based on other styles.
Back in the USSR certainly is a
combination of Chuck Berry, and the Beach Boys.
Of course
there's this Chuck Berry song Back in the USA, so Back in the USSR,
is kind of a comical a send-up of that, in a certain kind of way.
There's of course all the Beach Boys high falsetto stuff.
Which which sort of also refer, to, to the USA The song
itself being a pretty clear AABA form with a partial reprise.
So from a formal point of view it doesn't really take any
chances but, I think the most important thing is to see Back in the USSR as
really Paul, filtering the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys thing
through his own style, and his own sensibility.
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da is a track that we're going to spend more time
on during the closeups, I won't say too much about it.
Except that this one is based not only on a contemporary Jamaican artist
by the name of Desmond Dekker who was sort of a reggae star or
a reggae artist known to Paul McCartney at the time.
But also based on a Coasters record, I think, called
Little Egypt, but more about that in the next video.
Rocky Raccoon, is kind of a Dylan talking blues meeting the cowboy song.
He gets some help from John and, and folk singer Donovan on this one.
It's a simple verse form, but clearly it's
adopting and adapting a style that sort of starts
from Dylan sort of talking over the, the music.
And then sort of goes into something like an Old West
cowboy song or something, or something meant to suggest the Old West.
Or you know, gold, mining for gold or something in the, the late 19th
century, complete with, like, a sort of a barroom piano solo, that kind of thing.
So there, you sort of see those kind
of stylistic references.
Why Don't We Do It, or Why Don't We Do
It In the Road, is, clearly a blues and R&B parody.
I don't think, Paul means any disrespect and it
wouldn't have been heard as disrespectful in the day.
I think modern sensibilities might say, gosh, he seems like he's making fun, of
R&B saying it can often be vulgar and unsophisticated and But I don't think
that's exactly what he's going for.
I think he's playing with a style and having
some fun with it and doing it his own way.
But again, looking to an earlier style, in this case.
I Will, is an interesting one for me
especially because I Will is almost like Paul looking
at the early Beatles, and when you look at this tune, I Will, it's an AABA form.
It's got a very interesting little ending, but
it's really Paul going into his, almost his
1963 songwriting mode.
Ironically, it's a song he wrote while he was
in India, so while everybody else was thinking about
trans, transcendental meditation, and, you know, Indian culture and
various kinds of things and philosophy and all this.
Paul is writing a song that hearkens back to
1963, some very Everly Brothers-esque vocals during the bridge.
Of course, the Everly Brothers, as we said a couple of weeks ago, very big influence
on John and Paul in terms of harmonization.
So that one really clearly seems to be looking backward.
Birthday is a song that Paul Paul wrote
together with John, with some help from John.
They say it's in imitation of a song, Happy Birthday Baby.
If you compare those songs, A and B them together yeah, maybe that's what they
had in mind, it's, but it's not
like they're really doing a very close imitation.
[LAUGH] It's really much rowdier than the original, alternating verses and a bridge.
On that tune.
Helter Skelter the story goes, was was an attempt
to be even louder and more aggressive than The Who.
Somebody apparently said The Who must be the sort of
loudest, most hardest rocking band in the, in popular music.
And Paul's thought
was, well I can outdo that.
And so in many ways, Helter Skelter was his attempt
to be as raw and aggressive as he possibly could.
And of course some people
think that's the best thing about it, is the, this, the sort of raw energy of it.
It's also got a kind of a Strawberry Fields ending, where
it kind of goes out and then fades back in again.
And then, and then ends, of course, with
the famous line, I've got blisters on me fingers.
Anyway.
So that Paul McCartney tune, not looking to the past,
but looking to another style, the contemporary style, of The Who.
And then finally, maybe the clearest one that
looks to the past, and nobody would argue
that, it wouldn't be wouldn't argue with my interpretation at all here.
Would be the song Honey Pie, which really seems to be based on 20s British pop.
What we think of as the jazz age in the United States.
F Scott Fitzgerald and, and flappers and all that goes with that.
John Lennon, interestingly, playing a jazz guitar solo on that track.
Congratulations, John.
Well done.
In a AABA form.
And again, this is in a serie, a string of songs.
We talk about our song strings.
Think about Paul doing When I'm 64, Your Mother Should Know, Honey Pie.
This is sort of Paul, sort of looking back at the music of yesteryear kind of things.
Especially, and looking back at it from 19 68.
Well, not all of the Paul songs are songs that look back in,
in musical history, or deal with other styles of other contemporary artists.
A couple of the other songs
are really in a kind of a different different direction.
Martha My Dea, My Dear, for example, is an interesting song written about
Paul's sheepdog, but you don't have to appreciate sheepdogs to, to love the song.
this, the from alternates a verse and a bridge.
It's, it's a little bit episodic in a way that it goes it goes along.
So maybe it's a little bit influenced by Lovely Rita Meter Maid in the
sense that there's this, a sort of song and a, and, and or an
ending that goes with it, that makes that song seem a little bit episodic.
Fantastic piano part on Martha My Dear.
Blackbird really is in many ways, well, two of these songs that I'm
going to talk about now are kind of can be traced, really, back to Yesterday.
Blackbird in the sense of Paul just with his guitar doing a song that, that deals
with civil rights struggles.
It's just him, his guitar, and the tapping of his, of his feet.
Responding to the civil rights struggle in the US.
It's a slightly modified AA BA form Blackbird is.
I say that it refer, it sort of takes us back to Yesterday
with just Paul, solo, by himself, with
the guitar, very sort of singer-songwriter-y, right.
I'm just sort of sitting here, me and my guitar,
singing you a song with meaningful lyrics. but, Blackbird is kind of Paul's
parallel to John's Revolution, right? And we'll talk about that in just a bit.
You know, John's Revolution sort of dealing
with the idea of revolution, and, and, and
civil unrest, and that kind of thing, and most of that about the Vietnam war.
But here's Paul, and, and you really again,
you see a real contrast between the two personalities.
Blackbird is a song about an unhappy situation, but it's not an unhappy song.
It's a, really quite a beautiful song.
John on the other hand, is talking about an unhappy situation
and especially the fast version of Revolution is an aggressive song.
There's nothing laid-back or, or sort of pretty, in that
sense, about it, so you really see those two personalities.
The other one that kind of, relates back to
Yesterday from Paul McCartney on this album is
the song, Mother Nature's Son.
Now here, not only is it just sort of Paul,
sort of a, a solo Paul tune, but instead of
the strings as we got on Yesterday, or Eleanor Rigby,
we get this really nice arrangement of horns, and percussion.
This is one of those songs that was inspired by something
directly in in India and it came directly from a Maharishi
lecture on nature.
Again, it's a modified AABA form, so we're really
looking, not at the form, doesn't tell us too much
except that it's not just a straight 1964, 1963 style
AABA that, that Paul did so many times back then.
But again, these two songs, Blackbird and Mother Nature's Son, really kind of
being Paul at the guitar, one sort of more solo and more intimate.
The other one bringing a kind of classical
sounding kind of horn arrangement in, both
of those kind of hearkening back to Yesterday.
And so we can see him approaching the same
kind of song in different kinds of ways here.
And then, finally, the song Wild Honey Pie, which about all I can say about
Wild Honey Pie is it's about a minute of improvised silliness.
It's a song that's jer, there just for the fun of it, and again, don't, we,
we probably should not, should, should keep in mind that
the Beatles were partly popular for their kooky sense of humor.
And so there's you know, when you hear Wild Honey
Pie and you think about the Beatles and all that.
Even though that's the kind of track that maybe a lot of other bands wouldn't have
released or it would end up these days as kind of a bonus track or something.
Nevertheless there it is, a little bit of
Paul McCartney just being silly in the studio.
So having looked now at these Paul songs and surveyed everything that's
on the White Album let's do some Paul song closeups.
Well look at two of his singles, Lady Madonna and Hey Jude, and then from the
White Album, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.
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