Revolution - Official ILX Beatles tracks poll results

5 of my 20 have placed. I expect to see maybe 2 or 3 more of mine.

9/20 so far for me... maybe I'm deluded but I wouldn't be hugely surprised if the top ten were all on my ballot. Are we allowed to talk about what we don't think will make it?

If you like. I can't confirm any though.

right so, I *don't* think Yes It Is will make it. I voted for the Anthology version which starts with a very demo-sounding take and opens out like a flower half-way through.

I'm starting to have doubts about "Get Back" making it, which seems totally o_O to me.

I never take part in ILM polls because they generally take too long and are too involved for me these days, and I'm not on here enough to keep up.

I wrote this circa Xmas 2006 for Stylus, just after the Love remaster. I reckon I'd have voted pretty closely to this even today; certainly only the songs mentioned in the intro would be challenging the top ten.

When I was 14 I listened to The Beatles all the time. I stole the CDs of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour off my dad shortly after he bought me my first CD player. In hindsight they were an odd pair of albums for my dad to own—he’s not very psychedelic. But I’ve barely listened to them since I was about 17, since Massive Attack and Orbital and My Bloody Valentine and a million and one other things made me think The Beatles, while pretty good, weren’t quite as great as everyone said.

So you could call me a lapsed Beatles fan, if you like. Aren’t most of us, though? For anyone born after they split, The Beatles are a phase you go through, generally in early adolescence, and emerge on the other side as a better person. Much like spots, clothes that don’t quite fit, and too-frequent onanism.

But George and Giles Martin’s Love project has managed to rekindle an affection that has lain fallow for a decade. Cirque Du Soleil have next to no profile in the UK, and the release hasn’t had anywhere near the amount of coverage or marketing here as it has in the States, but the quality of it has still been enough to impel me to rush out and buy the Yellow Submarine Songtrack and the 1 compilation just to get another hit of remastered Beatles magic. The improvements on those two prior CDs aren’t as staggering as those on Love, but they’ll do for now, until Neil Aspinall and co. can finally deliver us the kind of luscious, detailed, sympathetic and exciting remastering job that The Beatles’ entire back catalogue deserves.

Culling The Beatles’ songbook to just ten numbers was painful—no “Hard Day’s Night,” no “Dear Prudence,” no “Hey Bulldog,” no “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” no “And Your Bird Can Sing,” no “Something,” no “Long Long Long,” no “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” no “Across the Universe,” no “Helter Skelter,” no “Strawberry Fields Forever,” no “Sexy Sadie”—this list could easily have been of twenty or thirty or more. I feel guilty and faintly idiotic over all the things I’ve left out, but there’s no other way to do it. I had to be brutal.

10. Hey Jude
Potentially this is a big albatross, but so many Beatles songs are and yet they still somehow manage to avoid succumbing totally to cringeworthiness. Big, singalong la-la-la songs don’t really do it for me when recorded because they always sound so fake and contrived—“Hey Jude” avoids that by being free, by being messy, by having McCartney hollering and scatting over the chorus-to-fade like a demented Scouser, which is precisely what he was, at least until “The Girl Is Mine.”

09. She Said She Said
Psychedelia isn’t just twirly pipe organs and tape loops—it’s confusion, emotion, abridged consciousness. “She Said She Said,” as well as being dangerously repetitive, is dirty, scuzzy, psycho-sexual. It’s about death, a woman, childhood, but mostly it’s about the rising melody as the title is sung, Lennon leaning back and straining upwards for some kind of revelation.

08. Come Together
When you’re nine years old you don’t think of The Beatles as being dark or groovy—they’re just an old pop band. I didn’t hear “Come Together” for years, despite it having been a number one and one of the most celebrated tunes in their songbook. Or maybe I did, and just didn’t recognize that deep, deep bass, shuffling rhythm and non-chorus as them. The subdued breakdown in the middle, insistent organ, and peripheral guitar, the vocal delivered more for tempo and rhythm than melody—lots of songs have been called “Come Together” over the years (Blur, MC5, and Primal Scream for starters), but this is the best one.

07. Tomorrow Never Knows
Lyrics pinched from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, breakbeat pinched by the Chemical Brothers. It’s a handbook itself, a gauntlet and guide to psychedelia that no one has properly taken up: those screaming seagull noises, Harrison’s drones, the entire collage of sounds. How the hell is this by the same band who produced “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” a mere three years before?

06. Rain
The most famous b-side ever? This is the moment at which the Beatles started to realize the full extent of their powers—when they first spun themselves backwards. “Rain” would sound tame as an exercise in psychedelic experimentation when placed next to the likes of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” if it weren’t so brutal, so dark, so sneering, and so dirty. Liam Gallagher has spent a decade and a half trying to sound even close to the whining majesty of Lennon’s cocksure yet insouciant delivery here.

05. I Am the Walrus
“I Am the Walrus” is all about George Martin. Sans the fifth Beatle, this is just Lennon sitting at an organ gibbering. Gifted with Martin’s genius, manifested here as an awesomely woozy string arrangement and stereoscopic found-sound radio effects, it becomes one of the most iconic moments in a back catalogue littered with iconic moments. The remastered version on Love gives a scope to the soundscape and an intimacy to Lennon’s vocal that was never there before—when he devolves to repeating “jubba jubba” towards the end, there is real spite in his enunciation, the nonsense suddenly threatening like it never has on CD before.

04. We Can Work It Out
It’s easy to forget amid the shower of psychedelia that what The Beatles really did best was perfect, three minute pop songs. Brief and sweet, “We Can Work It Out” is one of the few songs I can fully empathize with philosophically—“Life is very short / And there’s no time / For fussing and fighting my friend.” Not just that, but it’s compositionally exceptional too. That time change for “fussing and fighting,” that transforms it into a brief waltz respite from the pace of the verse is an unexpected and sophisticated switch that alters the entire context of the tune.

03. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Googling titles of Beatles songs turns up mad shit. One result for “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is a full-on musicological analysis, describing it as a “teleological medley,” which I can well believe (teleology being something I most associate with philosophical refutations of divinity rather than pop songs). Steve’s Beatles lists a host of anomalies in the recording, detailing a “high pitched twitter” at 1:34 and a tempo change at 1:50 which Ringo bizarrely doesn’t take part in. There’s more—much more—out there, but what “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” boils down to is five oddly-connected musical sections; a bizarre lyric concerning lizards, soap, and hobnail boots; and Lennon’s most overtly sexual moment prior to the cover of Two Virgins (assuming, of course, that one considers that image sexual at all) as he wails about feeling his “finger on your trigger.” It’s strange, it’s awesome, and it embodies the disparate creativity of The White Album’s thirty tracks in under three minutes.

02. Paperback Writer
I would say that “Paperback Writer” is all about McCartney’s bass, if it weren’t for the faintly bizarre yet wonderful lyrical conceit (can you think of any other major single about wanting to be an author?) (not that that’s what it’s about) (only, for a nine-year-old, that’s what it IS about), the incongruous “Frère Jacques” backing vocals (allegedly a Beach Boys “tribute”—specifically “Sloop John B” which charted two weeks before this was recorded), or the leanness of the tune itself (It’s a shade less than two-and-a-half minutes). It might be a satire of the constraints of the creative process, or it might not—I’ve never really considered it as being anything other than a face-value catchy pop song that, actually, rocks pretty hard.

01. Baby You’re a Rich Man
From the rumbling, accelerating-decelerating bassline upwards through Lennon’s falsetto questioning in the verses, the madly spiralling clavoline whirling wildly down one side, the piano and the great big raucous chorus about keeping “your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo.” One myth about it is that Lennon sings “baby you’re a rich fag Jew” during the fade-out as a less-than polite tribute to Brian Epstein, who overdosed and died only months later. If Lennon did, I can’t hear it. “Baby You’re a Rich Man” isn’t The Beatles’ most celebrated, radical, popular, fun, or unusual song, but I love it. The arrangement features an array of instruments but still maintains a starkness, reliant on the bass guitar and occasional odd stabbing hooks. I’m not sure quite what it is about this tune, but I loved it when I was 14 and I still do thirteen years later.

One myth about it is that Lennon sings “baby you’re a rich fag Jew” during the fade-out as a less-than polite tribute to Brian Epstein

Or as the Rutles had it, "Abie, You're a Rich Man"

"Yes It Is" shoulda been called "Don't Wear Red" or "Red Is The Colour".

Seriously? Well, it's got to be the Rick with flatwound strings anyway.

Rickenbacker bass with flatwound strings is an intriguing concept! You will not sound like Chris Squire this way.

― timellison, Monday, July 18, 2011 9:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Yeah, Paul never went for the super-trebly Entwistle/Squire sound. But the little figure he does in "Monkey" just before the pseudo-Eddie-Cochran breakdown, that's definitely a Rick. A Hofner would've sounded...rounder, I guess, with less presence.

We Can Work It Out was my #2 also - was expecting a better finish. Your Bird Can Sing was my #4 (or 5), happy with it at 11.
that makes 9/20 for me.

I need to go back and listen to We Can Work It Out. That's a Past Masters one, innit? It seems like there ought to have been a transitive album between Help and Rubber Soul. I find the jump between those two albums quite significant. Is there a reason for this?

I would say that “Paperback Writer” is all about McCartney’s bass, if it weren’t for the faintly bizarre yet wonderful lyrical conceit (can you think of any other major single about wanting to be an author?) (not that that’s what it’s about) (only, for a nine-year-old, that’s what it IS about)

wait, i don't want to sound like a dumbass, but what IS this song about, if not about wanting to be an author?

i mean, ok it's about, i dunno, the artistic struggle, and wanting something really hard to get so very very badly, and being a little pretentious, and struggling to get your demo listened to, etc etc. but this post makes me feel like i'm missing something. am i?

post made me feel like a 9 year old.

i luuuuurve the song regardless, made my top 10 i believe, on the sheer strength of being an amazingly great song about wanting to be an author only. and that bassline. and the harmonies. not sure if i specified the mono version with the trippy echo but either one works for me really

love it too. think i had it around 12-ish. never dug the lyrics much tho, but that's 'cause i'm 9.

Paperback Writer is also about getting high and singing "Frere Jacques" for backing vocals.

web page about the origins of paperback writer:

http://only1rad.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=frontman&action=display&thread=1239

"It was the first Beatles single that was not a love song."

wow, that's a hell of a leap if it's true!

"Please Please Me" was about wanting a blowjob, so...

the love that dare not speak it's name, out loud, on bbc1

"McCartney had suggested that Lennon launch his second book, A Spaniard in the Works, at Indica bookshop but his PR people thought the premises were too small. McCartney had set up an arrangement with Indica that any books, art books in particular, or magazines that I thought were interesting should be sent to all four of the Beatles. I tended to get in paperbacks because they were cheap and our clientele was young and often impoverished. I had imported American paperback copies of a number of popular titles that were not yet published in Britain: these included Henry Miller's Sexus and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, that was out in paperback in the States long before being published here.

In the song lyrics Paperback Writer is “a dirty story of a dirty man” so maybe he had Miller or Selby at the back of his mind. It is strange to think back to a time when paperbacks were actually a new thing and not regarded as proper books; Faber coyly called theirs “paper-covered editions”. Paperback Writer recognised that they had become part of our lives, worthy of a song. "

not read anything yet that suggests it's about anything other than wanting to be an author. phew!

hoping against available evidence the top ten acts as a partial corrective the late-Beatles chauvinism that I thought had receded in recent years. Let's give it up for Please Please Me! I Should Have Known Better! You Can't Do That! If I Fell! Michelle! C'mon...

No Reply is about felching

I Should Have Known Better is definitely in the top 10

So is Long Long Long.

XPOST

Don't give up on "Yes It Is"--a long shot, but I had it at #12.

I'm sure there's a thread somewhere on greatest double-sided singles, but "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" is right near the top of my own list; I'd give the edge to "Substitute"/"Circles" and not much else. There's one or two really weird story-within-a-story segues in "Paperback Writer."

Dog Latin - chronology runs thus:

* Help! LP
* Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out double A-side single
* Rubber Soul LP
* Paperback Writer backed with Rain single
* Revolver LP

If there'd been 'expanded' versions of the remasters with bonus tracks, it'd have made most sense to chuck those two singles on with the following albums. If you consider those two singles as big stylistic bridging leaps, it makes a lot of sense.

The Past Masters double CD remaster is absolutely and utterly beyond essential. The first four tracks on the second disc are those two singles run back-to-back. Fucking hellfire.

Ticket To Ride is another big epiphany single - first single to run past 3 minutes long.

Which is the one with the fade-in? Eight Days A Week? Another epiphany. Hard Day's Night's clang intro is another epiphany. This band had a big stylistic epiphany single every fucking month for a while.

Long Tall Sally/Tutti Frutti
Jailhouse Rock/Hound Dog

are two I learned from the 50s poll

OK, trawl this lot: The bottom ten, with their points. All have one vote:

185. Memphis, Tennessee (BBC) 15
186. Birthday 15
187. The Inner Light 14
188. Hold Me Tight 14
189. Devil In Her Heart 14
190. Mr. Moonlight 13
191. Drive my car 13
192. Christmas Time Is Here Again 13
193. Another Beatles Christmas Flexi 1964 13
194. Misery 12

xpost to sickmouthy. Yes, definitely. And it's a shame the singles weren't included on their respective albums. Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out especially sound like the missing link between Beatles I'm lukewarm on and Beatles I love (i.e. early/mid era)

This thread is reminding me of my need to purchse some more remasters. I only got hold of MMT and Abbey Road.

Wow--surprised I cast the only vote for the ultra-catchy and not-obscure "Christmas Time Is Here Again." I figured it would show up towards the bottom of a few ballots.

Drive My Car is the odd one out of that bottoms list.

I'm fucking shocked at Drive My Car being there.

Dog Latin - Revolver and Past Masters are very very urgent and key. Hard Day's Night may well turn your head too - the sound is incredibly raw and live and 'in a room', makes it super exciting.

189. Devil In Her Heart 14

this was only me? whadda bunch of punks

xpost I'll bear these in mind. I don't even know if I've actually heard HDN in its entirety. Might give me a reason to dip into more early stuff. I'm just a RS+ buff really.

I've played Revolver to death, so I don't know if I'd want to shell out for a remaster - is it very different?

Revolver mono or stereo? The extreme separation of instruments/vocals on Revolver always bugged me. Is it less severe on the remasters? Does it count less? I'm up in the air about the Past Masters remaster - how much improved is the sound from the singles on "1"?

I HATE that extreme separation thing... Especially annoying if one of your headphones/speakers breaks and you're left with just backing vocals and drums or whatever.

I agree. Revolver sucks on the headphones. xp

i was just hyped to actually be able to vote for the xmas flexis - i love those things! '64 was the best one, they start off reading their lines like the year before, then start getting all smartassy at their copywriters a few lines in. john - "thanks to all of you who bought me book, thank you folks for buying it, it was very handy. and there's another one out pretty soon, it says here..."

also, kazoo vs. harmonica

Is that the one where they do a sarcastic version of "Bits and Pieces" which collapses into "Jingle Bells"?

Mono Revolver is the way to go (except it's only in that goddamn expensive box). Not only does it clear up the extreme separation issue, but some of the mixes are noticeably different: an extra guitar figure in "I'm Only Sleeping," slightly different entrances/exits of the tape loops in "Tomorrow Never Knows," etc. etc.

Oh man don't talk about the #1 album, fucking awful dogshit sound.

The way you get over the extreme stereo separation is by playing the albums VERY LOUD on BIG SPEAKERS.

that are VERY CLOSE TOGETHER!

Actually mine are about 5 feet apart and it sounds just dandy.

That would be nice. Sadly I can't even fit both speakers in my living room (have one next to the TV and one in the adjoining kitchen, which is handy if you're going room to room, but SHIT if you do want any kind of stereo experience). Plus I have neighbours and paper thin walls.