Worst Beatles song on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

sorry, i didn't read all your posts carefully. will you ever forgive me? that song is annoying as hell. in the beatles oeuvre it is only beaten by "the long and winding road", i think.

alex in manhattan's hit on something here - if anything the reason i don't get on so much with this album is its brashness - as someone mentioned upthread, the songs are good on their own, as a whole it's this loud brassy "GET OUT OF BED BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LISTEN TO ME WAAAAAAAAA" affair, which I guess is what differentiates it from Revolver, which is much more mellow. It's the same reason I always skip the first track on Blur's "Great Escape", it's like this rude awakening I can do without, which I'm sure a lot of people enjoy.

It's the McCartney Smarm Offensive coupled with Lazy Lennon and Who Cares Harrison that bugs me

Revolver, which is much more mellow

Wait, what? Revolver was their most electric-guitary album up to that time, and in fact is MORE so than Pepper. In what way are Tomorrow Never Knows, She Said She Said, I Want To Tell You, And Your Bird Can Sing or Taxman "mellow"?

Yeah, how the hell is Revolver mellow? There is some serious noise on that thing.

I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing.

i was thinking of things like i'm only sleeping, eleanor rigby etc. but you've got a point.

"Ooh, nice seagulls"

(xpost)

I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing.

It came on when I was driving my mom somewhere a few years ago. She was an 18yr old suburban American girl in Catholic school in 1966. She was and still is very prudish. She kept saying how it was unlike anything she had ever heard or could have imagined. How it seemed like it came from a different planet. I should've asked her whether she liked it or not, but judging from the fact that she basically stopped following the Beatles after Revolver, I'm guessing it was just too weird and psychedlic for her and scared her off!

i basically love every song on this album and spent my teenage years being irritated by the challopsy types kate refers to. the late '90s was a bad time to say you preferred sgt pepper to pet sounds.

This was my first favorite album as a child and I will vote for the song that said the least to me then, though I did grow fond of it later: 'Within You Without You'.

the late '90s was a bad time to say you preferred sgt pepper to pet sounds.

i definitely prefer it to pet sounds, i'm just not supersold on either of them. (not least because i directly blame them for latter-day flaming lips and animal collective and all that twee sparkly indie-psyche stuff.)

I can't believe some people here are actually asshole enough to register a vote to have somebody banned from the site just for disagreeing about which song is least favorite on a record. But looking at recent Suggest Bans, it turns out yes, some people are actually asshole enough.

Name names!

No. I just wanted to register my disgust and hit the "Suggest This Is Maybe Why Mods Sometimes Don't Like To Deal With This Bullshit" button.

"I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing."

"Oh dear, they've gone a bit weird! It must be drugs! I'll put Herman's Hermits on next."

Awww. People up thread said they were going to be sb'ing over this. High stakes!

Anyway, I'm voting "She's Leaving Home."

I can't believe some people here are actually asshole enough to register a vote to have somebody banned from the site just for disagreeing about which song is least favorite on a record. But looking at recent Suggest Bans, it turns out yes, some people are actually asshole enough.

Yes, this is ludicrous and a bit pathetic. It reminds me of that Peep Show episode where everyone keeps threatening to section everyone else.

Anyway, I voted for Sixy-Four. SB away if you like.

Oh, Dog Latin, didn't know that Easy Stars album existed! Thanks for the heads up, DLing it now.

Song for song, I do think Revolver is richer and punchier, but I do see why the comparison happens - if you strip away a few dozen overdubs and the cover art, there are a lot of sonic similarities - I mean let's say "Taxman" and "Good Morning Good Morning" changed places. "Taxman" would seem a little too worldly and pedestrian to be on Sgt. Pepper's but I don't think anyone would have noticed GMGM as out of place on Revolver - same charging guitar attack, same crisp sound. Or swap "Getting Better" for "Got To Get You Into My Life." Or "With A Little Help..." for "Yellow Submarine." If you really started juggling things around you could probably get "Rain" and "Strawberry Fields" together on this record and "Paperback Writer" with "Penny Lane" on Revolver

This was just a very, very fertile period for them and they didn't switch sounds as dramatically as the art, costumes, hair etc. would suggest. Paul in particular is the bridge, as certainly John was going a litle more wild with the possibilities available. The really massively "studio" tracks here (A Day In The Life, Mr. Kite) are mainly John's and I don't think they could slot onto Revolver whatsoever.

Oh! Right! Worst song. Um...I'll get back to you in the morning. I really like this record and have a lot of comfort food affection for it - if there's anything to the "concept album" hype it's that I don't relate to it as a "collection of songs" where cherry-picking feels natural, as I do most of the previous ones and the White Album..

Echoing what someone said above, Within You Without You is the track that separates the 8 year olds from the grown ups. I hated it *so* much as a child...its presence on the album offended me. These days, got no problem with it, especially in mono.

And now it seems like such a great way to start the "weirder" 2nd side. Along the lines of that, Benefit of Mr. Kite probably makes more sense when you think of it as a side-ender. It was always interesting as a child going from the circus music of Kite and then flipping the album over and hitting the brick wall of Harrison's sitars (which made a briefer and friendlier appearance in Getting Better, so we were warned). After all that Indian seriousness, When I'm 64 seems a little less fluffy. When I was a kid, it was a totally essential palate-cleanser.

Lovely Rita: the wierdo ending doesn't get enough love. Is there another Beatles song that combines a pop hook w/a noise breakdown in the same way? The opening of Lovely Rita gives me chills like no other Beatles track.

Anyway, I have to go with She's Leaving Home, though it is better (less draggy) on the mono album.

pop hook w/a noise breakdown

There's a great bootleg of "Paperback writer" that doesn't fade out and ends in a 'falling over' way, they really should have kept it.

Fixing a Hole. Apart from the title track and coda, McCartney's stuff on here really treads a thin line between charming and irritating.

I really like Fixing a Hole. It's Macca's equivalent to I'm Only Sleeping, similarly cocooned and narcotic.

I like Fixing A Hole too, and I'm sure that's largely due to reading somewhere that Lennon finally gave McCartney his due as a songwriter, describing it as "real head music" or something like that.

I think that "Within You Without You" is probably the song I'd be least likely to play apart from the rest of the album, but I agree that in the context of the record, it works really well. Compared with the colorful psychedelia of the first side, it sounds kind of harsh and challenging. And it's so long! It feels longer than it is ...

It feels longer than it is ...

You said it, brother

it's funny how, for the Beatles in 1967, a song that went past the 5 minute mark must've seemed sooooooo epic. Within You and Day in the Life are probably the first ones?

I really like how "Within You Without You" and "When I'm Sixty Four" fit with each other conceptually (the impermanence of existence "life flows on within you and without you", "losing my hair, many years from now"), but are worlds apart stylistically.

Cliche but voted reprise. I really like all the songs on this album, there is just something about it that stops me liking the album itself, like the pacing is all wrong or something.

The thing I never got about this album, or as much what people think and say about it- it's really quite conservative in subject matter and sound in places (or at least compared to MMT-EP) and not the '67 hippie free love technicolour thing it has always been discribed as.

Can't vote for reprise, the beat is too good.

the conservatism is an interesting point. certainly compared to what else came out in '67, sgt. pepper's is nowhere near as striking as, say, revolver is compared to the rest of what came out in '66. as i was saying on the revolver thread, it's really mindboggling what happened in the space of 12 months there. revolver really appeared at the crest of a wave, but by the time sgt. pepper's came out the wave was crashing everywhere.

I loooved Within You, Without You when I was 8.

otoh, there's no doubting the cultural impact sgt. pepper's had. i'm sure there are a zillion stories like this, but my dad says he was taking a roadtrip the week it came out, driving for 3 or 4 days, and everywhere they went there was always some station playing it, the full album, over and over.

Sixty-Four gets on my tits even though I feel bad hating on Paul at his most sentimental.

penny lane & strawberry fields replacing two of the weaker trackes here might keep this from being my least favorite.

i basically skip tracks 6-9 - even tho i don't particualry hate WYWY, so any of those I could vote for.

a vote for Rita is madness.

might have kept

first LP I ever properly listened to and loved - at age 9 (1972). and the place where I heard it (downtown Plymouth, Montserrat) is now buried under 15-20 feet of volcanic mud!

the title track and reprise are probably the least essential for me now (which may be why the LP has also fallen off a little over time) - hard to pick which to vote foragainst because the sonic groove of the reprise counterbalances the richness of the opener. "Good Morning Good Morning" was always the odd one out, but it's strange enough to be interesting (though not according to Lennon himself). "Lucy In The Sky..." always one of the more famous cuts has taken some flak over the years especially because of the (lack of creative craft in the) change to the chorus, but I still like it and feel it includes a (the?) stellar example of the lost art of pretty arpeggio'd chord change intros ("Stairway To Heaven" is another - is there a thread on that theme?). "Lovely Rita" might be my side 2 fave even over "A Day In The Life".

as for comparisons with Revolver, I like at least 3 songs here as much as or better than anything on Revolver and personally consider them the pinnacle of Beatles LP tracks (besides one-off peaks like "In My Life" or "Julia"). ...and they're all in a row: "Getting Better", "Fixing a Hole" and "She's Leaving Home" (2 of which it took me time to rate, I've always loved "Fixing A Hole" possibly my fave McCartney song ever) so, best 3 song run on a Beatles album? (not sure, I haven't checked for competition - maybe last 3 on Revolver comes closest?)

Gah. Had to vote 'Lovely Rita', but my reasoning is totally ass. It's not the music...the opening 'oohs' are awesome, the coda is great, musically it's terrific...but lyrically it's just a little too Benny Hill for me. And this is me at my most desperate to find something I dislike about any of these songs.

'64' has way too much nostalgia for me to hate...saccharine yes, but I kind of love the sentiment anyway...'Good Morning' is rad, I don't see how it could qualify for badness...'Kite' was fascinating to me as a little 'un, I wanted to GO to that place!! And I love it more now, especially seeing the poster Lennon got the lyrics from. I love that it was a real thing.

Sorry Rita. And nothing personal against Paul. :(

That was HARD!!! I'm not sure Beatles polls should be this traumatic.

Wasn't this the album that Towshend had a fit over, saying it wasn't 'rock' if you had to mix all the stuff in a studio?

when i'm 64.

These polls are just a steady reminder of how much I HATE Paul McCartney's songwriting/voice/etc

otm

I loooved Within You, Without You when I was 8.

OTM! There were two tracks on this album that I would play over and over and over to the point of driving the rest of my family insane; "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and "Within You, Without You".

Composition

The song is sung by a young man to his lover, and is about his plans of growing old together with her. Although the theme is aging, it was one of the first songs McCartney wrote, when he was sixteen.[1] The Beatles used it in the early days as a song they could play when the amplifiers broke down or the electricity went off.[4][5] Both George Martin and Mark Lewisohn speculated that McCartney may have thought of the song when recording began for Sgt. Pepper in December 1966 because his father turned 64 earlier that year.[4][5]

Lennon said of the song, "Paul wrote it in the Cavern days. We just stuck a few more words on it like 'grandchildren on your knee' and 'Vera, Chuck and Dave' ... this was just one that was quite a hit with us."[6] In his 1980 interview for Playboy he said, "I would never even dream of writing a song like that."[2]

I don't hate Ringo, I really don't (I stuck up for "What Goes On"!!!) ... but A Little Help is so flat, deadpan and rote that I can't believe I'm the first one to bring up this POS.

I feel bad about voting for 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' because the verses are so beautiful, but I just can't get over the clunking chorus. They could've done much better there.

It's a marvellous album, it'll be grand to rediscover it. 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!' is the one that does it for me. Something about provincial Victoriana strikes a deep chord that I only barely understand. When I was in Brighton I walked around the front & pier literally in tears I found it all so overwhelming. That the Beatles could channel that and all their other stuff is just remarkable.

I voted "Mr. Kite" just because the song sounds incredibly silly to me as a loutish American; every time I hear or think about it, I imagine the benefit being ruined by monster trucks rolling back and forth over poor waltzing Henry the Horse.

Nick, you've gotta remember the last time I really really listened closely to these albums (as opposed to delving into them on occasion) was 10 years ago as a sixth former. Working through those albums in my late teens, I was very disappointed by Peppers when I got to it, especially after Revolver which blew me away. Given this, I have a sneaking suspicion that my ear will be more willing to accept things like WYWY a little more now than it did at 17. I have only so far purchased the Abbey Road remaster so far, so I'm gonna wait till I can afford the new version of Peppers till I do this.

I'd be interested in what way you think the texture and mood of Peppers is so different from Revolver. I maintain Sgt Pepper's is a weaker version of Revolver, and I don't understand why it was this record that got lauded for so many years as this huge progressive step, when I'd consider the difference between Rubber Soul and Revolver much greater than that of Sgt Peppers, which for the most part sounds like a retread of a lot of previous ground. Some great tracks on here, but I find things like "Lovely Rita" and "Good Day Sunshine" to be really awkward-sounding - and I'm a McCartney fan(!)

How've I got to remember that you've not listened to these albums in ten years when you're positing theories and speculations about them as if you've been listening to them heavily since the remasters came out (which is why these threads exist, clearly)? I have no idea when you last listened to these records.

As for the differences between Revolver and Peppers, well...

Revolver, to me, tied in with Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer, Rain, and Rubber Soul, shows a constant growth and development in the band's sound over a period of about 18 months, a development that starts with Wait, moves through the big groundbreaks of Drive My Car and Norwegian Wood, and eventually into the disparate, emotionally uncomfortable experiments of Revolver (John experimenting with psychosis and psychedelia, Paul experimenting with genre and story-telling).

Revolver is a very dark, anguished, guitar-led record; George spitting spite and self on Taxman, Paul ruminating on isolation and death in Rigby and For No One, and Lennon... well, losing his mind on She Said She Said and losing EVERYTHING on Tomorrow Never Knows. Yes, there are pop moments (Good Day Sunshine), and soul moments (GTGYIML), and tired moments of psychedelic ennui (I'm Only Sleeping), and Indian moments (Love You Too), but the tone and texture that dominates the record is of electric guitars; the experiments are the band "bouncing down", running tapes backwards, using bass and drums in ways they hadn't before (as predicated on Rain, fucking hell that bassline, fuck me, and those drums too), running guitar lines over each other and through each other (And Your Bird Can Sing! She Said She Said!).

Strawberry Fields, as a bridge between Revolver and Pepper, moves the experiments in a very different way, one that calls massively on George Martin's orchestral and musicological nous. There's barely any guitar on SFF, for instance; just the dappled notes in the first minute and then the awesome right-channel mini-riff/solo towards the end, that plays off with the strings. There's FUCKLOADS of guitar on revolver.

Pepper is the band experimenting by, at Paul's suggestion, pretending to not be The Beatles anymore, and thus opening up the possibilities of the sounds they can make; so you end up with the fairground psychedelia, the Victoriana, the multi-perspective ballads, the huge orchestral swells on A Day In The Life (consider the climax of Revolver, to which Harrison is key Tomorrow Never Knows relies on his backwards guitars, loops, etcetera; he plays tambourine and nothing else on A Day In The Life [and only has one song on Pepper anyway]). Revolver is John & George's album; Pepper is Paul's, only Paul has split with Asher and got over his loneliness fear (turning it into a charming[ish] joke on 64), meaning that Pepper is a much happier album than Revolver.

Even John's tracks on Pepper, bar Lucy, are mimics of Paul - Good Morning Good Morning is him mocking Good Day Sunshine by having the happy sunny animals eat each other. In fact the most John song on Pepper, and the only thing that could fit on Revolver, is Paul's aping John for once on Fixing A Hole. Only it has none of the true darkness of John's previous work on Revolver, because Paul just can't do that.

Texturally Pepper doesn't rely on guitar except the title tracks, and the solo in Good Morning Good Morning. That Paul plays the solo on GMGM and Taxman doesn't make them similar (there's fuck-all other guitar in GMGM practically); in fact, it points at how much he's taking over the band and steering it away from Revolver territory because George has always had an inferiority complex next to Paul, Ringo's Ringo, and John's losing his mind and mellowing beyond caring as a result. Pepper relies on Paul's basslines, on piano, on cellos, on tape loops, on vocal effects (what could be guitar on Rita replaced by voices, for instance), the Leslie cabinet, all that stuff going on in Lucy, trumpets (brass in general, so important here), the orchestra in A Day In The Life. The coda of Rita is amazing, and it's just piano, bass, a bit of drums, and voices, voices, voices.

And this upbeatness, this total shift in arrangements, in tone, in lyrical steer, this McCartney-taking-over sense, is why Within You Without You is so essential; MacDonald was right for once when he described it as Pepper's moral heart. It's George's protest, protest at being shoved out of the album (Geoff Emerick is more important to Pepper than George is), protest at Paul taking over, protest at the band splitting up. And acceptance of the band splitting up.

How many x-posts have I got then.

Being the person chosen to sing "Good Morning, Good Morning" during a recent Beatles: Rock Band night made me appreciate it 1,000x more. The pacing is just so interesting!

Voted WY/WY. Even with the remasters I just can't embrace it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrxRAvnU1FQ