I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

speaking of editors, Wes needs one.

Yup. Tho I enjoyed more than you, I think. (Me being the kind of guy with actual New Yorker covers on my living room wall.)

omg i just had a *feeling* brad would show up and i'd have to reassess this piece of music in light of that

i just find it sharply written and extremely demented in a good way. those piano breaks

if i were playing it for three days straight i would hate it too prob

do ppl really think Paul just made up "get back" right there? i assumed it was just something he had in his back pocket or whatever. i haven't watched this whole thing so ignore me if i'm off

I don't at all dislike "Maxwell's." Too well-constructed. And those Moog flourishes never get credit.

he plays a single riff on the guitar over and over again until the song all of the sudden emerges, it’s dope you should see it

Sure looks/sounds like he made it up or at least developed it right there. Who knows if he'd been tinkering with the riff already, but it starts out pretty unformed.

alternate reality: beatles get so fed up with Paul they break up in January 1969. in a huff to prove them wrong, he spends the remaining year almost entirely in the studio, meticulously working all his half-finished ideas to absurd degrees of gloss and perfection. his debut solo album features not only "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Teddy Boy," "Every Night," etc., but also "Let It Be," "Oh! Darling," "Another Day," the smash Linda duet "Two of Us," and the staggering art-rock medley closer, "The Long And Winding Road (Silver Hammer)."

i am aligned with Brad on Maxwell
i like the dementedness & as a kid i was super into the morbid angle

and I like a lot of solo McCartney/Wings too

I don't like that song but in retrospect, it probably wasn't the biggest crime-against-humanity in their catalog. And even if it is, well, what of it?

Logically speaking even the Beatles have a worst song. A song that took longer than it was worth. If this is theirs, well, something had to be.

Like, does anyone bother to hate on, say, "Piggies" as much or as exhaustively?

these two thing rule wrt “maxwells silver hammer”:

the vocalless chorus with the harmonizing guitars
the moog wailing

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmers across the water (ding ding!)
haaaaaaaaaaaammmmeeeeers across the sky

I don't hate Maxwell but I wish we had that kind of footage of them working up Come Together, e.g.

xp - no i saw that part. i figured it was something he had already which is why i was more blown away with George being like here's "i, me, mine" wrote it last night. i mean it's fucking incredible regardless

i hate it, i've listened to the rest of the album a million times but that song maybe only 3-6 times all the way through

Pretty much the same here. I just skip it altogether now - the album feels like a perfect masterpiece when I can forget it was ever wedged in.

Every time I see that Beatles parody on The Simpsons where the Apu complains about Homer's shitty songs, I immediately assume Homer's Paul and that the unheard Mr. T song is about as shitty as "Maxwell's."

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmers across the water (ding ding!)
haaaaaaaaaaaammmmeeeeers across the sky

LMAO.

Maxwell came in
stinking of gin
and proceeded to lie on the table

as far as their worst track of all, Scik Mouthy already moderated a comprehensive album-by-album survey, capped by abanana's seemingly definitive poll of the results: Worst Beatles song ever relevant precursor thread here: Worst Beatles song on Abbey Road

i've always enjoyed "Maxwell's," but not sure i could really mount a defense. i' m just someone who's generally open to paul's goofy bullshit and de-doot-de-DOO-doo embellishment. i like the lush recording. the chorus is catchy. i fell headfirst into this album when i was 13 or 14 and i'm just never going to hear it with the same ears as someone who arrived as an adult, for whom it perhaps stands out from the Abbey Road tracklist like a hammer-smashed thumb.

Maxwell could have been Paul's Chinese Democracy, a song he kept changing and adding to until it's a 3-hour Maxwell Chronicles that he finally releases in 2023 as a VR movie.

lol now my preferred alternate reality is one where the tapes are all shelved and it acquires the same mystique as "Carnival of Light"

do ppl really think Paul just made up "get back" right there? i assumed it was just something he had in his back pocket or whatever. i haven't watched this whole thing so ignore me if i'm off

Was it upthread on here or somewhere else that someone gets annoyed with people believing that the song is developed in real time in that clip? I read the debunking before so I saw the clip so I'm not sure what I'd have thought otherwise.

imagine all the die-hards complaining about every new Anthology/reissue/remaster/Naked production, "JUST GIVE US MAXWELL'S SILVER HAMMER YOU COWARDS!!!"

I will say it's well-produced on Abbey Road. George, God bless him, adds some nice guitar licks. And I think it may have George Martin who was smart enough to convince Paul to get rid of the monumentally shitty whistling bit. But it's still pretty inane, especially the dopey funny-voice harmonizing (a weakness that would only get worse on Paul's records throughout the '70s).

*may have been

was paul the roger waters of the group or john?!

John was the Roger and Paul the David, obv

"Maxwell" is a completely unnecessary song and the world could have kept turning without it, but I'm not surprised Paul advocated for it given how much work went into it

The one I still amn't able to forgive (and isn't captured in the Worst poll) is "Rocky Raccoon"

yeah but Mo an Yoko sang on it

There is a reasonable case to be made that George is the Garfunkel

paul was definitely playing up the bullshit for the cameras... "OH MY I JUST CAME UP WITH THIS WEE DITTY LAST NIGHT IN ME DREAMS" and proceeds to play a fully arranged backseat of my car

"rocky raccoon" is a great song. "maxwell's" to some degree i get the hate, but that one, no

i dig rocky

tons of paul songs i really love

xposts you have to imagine that was a pretty normal thing for them, walking in and being like "Oh, I wrote this last night." They wrote and recorded so much so fast, it's not like they ever had months to just let a song percolate.

George was already doing yet getting shit for it

*doing it

x post
well i def believe george wrote i me mine the night before lol

rocky racoon vs bungalow bill

rocky racoon is pretty bad

re maxwell’s, total co-sign to whoever said they dug the macabre angle when they were a kid - I had a fucked up C90 that a schoolfriend made me of “later Beatles” and it frequently freaked me right out - particularly Revolution 9 and She’s So Heavy (props to friend Donald for including those!) - like I was sort of terrified of them

i’m not saying Maxwell’s is in the same league or ever was but it was on that tape too and did fit with that sense I had of the Beatles being able to tap into some pretty dark/sinister vibes - the jauntiness kind of accentuated the nastiness of the narrative

but yeah now I pretty much hate it

Maxwell just doesn't fit on side one of Abbey Road at all. In context of a different album (like the eclectic-ness of the white album or twee-ness of MMT) I think it would have worked better. Having it follow Come Together and Something just intensifies the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other vibes the track projects in relation to the rest of AR.

"rocky raccoon" is a great song. "maxwell's" to some degree i get the hate, but that one, no

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Monday, December 6, 2021 3:07 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like the dementedness & as a kid i was super into the morbid angle

Ditto on liking it as a kid (I got Abbey Road for my 5th birthday). It has not aged well for me, though. It's like if Dana Carvey's Paul impression was a song, but not funny.

Maxwell just doesn't fit on side one of Abbey Road at all. In context of a different album (like the eclectic-ness of the white album or twee-ness of MMT) I think it would have worked better. Having it follow Come Together and Something just intensifies the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other vibes the track projects in relation to the rest of AR.

― bookmarkflaglink (Darin), Monday, December 6, 2021 1:43 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that same side has "oh darling" -> "octopus' garden" -> "i want you," i'm not sure this "doesn't fit in" thesis holds up

lmao otm

I'm half way through the second episode and I have to say I'm not enjoying it nearly as much as the first. Having been told that the first one was the slog, I find myself pining for the torment of Twickenham. Maybe I'm just a miserable bastard but I can do without all the bonhomie that's suddenly back, and especially the resurgence of John and all his silly voices and banter. Bring back subdued/smacked-out John.

It doesn't help that there's an awful lot of Dig a Pony. Or indeed Get Back, which I'm not the biggest fan of.

dont worry youll get brainwashed into liking them soon

I finished ep2, and given that I'm doing this piecemeal, but I'm not finding anything a slog. I am finding it difficult to pull myself away when I should e.g. sleep. The occasional natural break certainly helps..

I will say that the show is in danger of keeping every 'funny' that John does, to the point of overkill.

I did wonder if John was on pep pills in the second episode. IIRC correctly, he was unable to stop a constant flow of 'puns' and silly voices nonsense when on uppers, going back to the Hamburg days.

Also add Billy Preston to category of people (Mo Starkey, Mal Evans) with startlingly sad wiki pages.

that same side has "oh darling" -> "octopus' garden" -> "i want you," i'm not sure this "doesn't fit in" thesis holds up

Maybe it's more of a tack sequencing issue. Come Together and Something are just sonically heavier to my ears and Maxwell sounds so goofy on their heels.