#61 The Beatles- The Beatles
Updated: Aug 12
The Beatles are still all-white by us…
(Apple)
Released: 22nd November 1968
Producer: George Martin, Chris Thomas
Topped the chart:
1st December 1968 (for 7 weeks)
26th January 1969 (for 1 week)
8 weeks total
There’s an unspoken rule that when a band self-title one of their albums and it isn’t their debut, it’s normally because they are trying to reset the clock: get back to basics. Strip everything back to a group of people in a room making music together.
Which is both true and untrue of the Beatles self-titled ninth (tenth if you include Magical Mystery Tour…if you’re counting American releases, just don’t worry about it), It’s like Get Back before Get Back: the first attempt to shelve the overdubs and return The Beatles to being a band in a room. It happens…some of the time anyway…
It’s the first of many contradictions that allows it to be an absolute masterpiece, while also being a bit rubbish in places. It’s a sprawling mess that also represents the band’s most concise artistic statement. It’s an album that finds them playing in the room as a tight-knit team while barely working together or even speaking. It contains some of The Beatles’ most tuneful moments, while also bordering on being unlistenable in places.
With it’s infamous all-white cover, The White Album is designed from the outside-in to be a volte-face from the technicolour of Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, stripping back to black and white, feeling unnerving rather than optimistic. It’s also telling that the album’s working title was A Doll’s House, each song designed by a different Beatle to be decorated in a different way. As a result, it makes the most sense to look at a roll call of everyone’s songs on the record.
Having loosened the reins on Sgt Pepper, John Lennon is by far the most consistent writer and performer this time round, the vast majority of his 13 tracks proving unimpeachable successes. Swapping LSD for heroin, his state of mind is darker, despite the constant presence of new paramour Yoko Ono- songs like Happiness is A Warm Gun, I’m So Tired (which captures the hallucinogenic effect of insomnia like nothing else) and Cry Baby Cry are all a little suggestive of a troubled mind. Dear Prudence sits at the opposite end of the scale, a gorgeous finger-picked ballad full of empathy for a soul in isolation, Sexy Sadie is a visceral takedown of The Beatles’ spiritual leader full of that Lennon spite (“You’ll get yours yet!” in particular stings), while Yer Blues turns the fury inward via self-lacerating lyrics, scalding blues guitar and a speaker-ruining bassline from McCartney. Good Night, John’s lullaby for his young son, is sweetly and tenderly delivered by Ringo to bring the record to a close.
Even Revolution 9, the controversial musique concrete mashup of random noises, speech and radio plays…bloody hard work that it is, genuinely feels like it hasn’t been created on earth. Your mileage on eight minutes of randomised noises spliced together will vary, but you can’t deny that it achieves exactly what it sets out to do.
McCartney’s songs, in comparison, are at their most lightweight. Lennon was known to describe his songs as “Paul’s Granny music,” and he may well have a point here- Honey Pie is a cute 1930s throwback, Rocky Raccoon a piffle of a western pastiche, while Martha My Dear is a delicate piano tribute to his sheepdog. However, these tracks and other lighter fare like Birthday and Mother Nature’s Son actually offset Lennon’s harsher tones effectively, and there are still a handful of classics in the mix. Back In The USSR is a genuinely funny take on The Beach Boys (with a little writing help from Mike Love on the bridge to give the stamp of approval), Helter Skelter was the noisiest, ugliest proto-metal song to feature on a mainstream rock album to this point, and what more needs to be said about Blackbird? The songs are an excellent counter-point to Lennon’s darker naval-gazng. Martha My Dear jauntily sitting between Happiness is a Warm Gun and I’m So Tired keeps the pace from dipping too fast. And at the bleaker end of the spectrum, the creepy and child-like snippet of Can You Take Me Back at the end of Cry Baby Cry sets us up perfectly for Revolution 9.
George Harrison’s songwriting here is more of a mixed bag. While My Guitar Gently Weeps may well be one of the best songs on the record, and it’s become a standard with good reason- Eric Clapton’s guest guitar surging the song forward, McCartney’s superb harmony vocals and piano intro, while the lyric’s unfiltered disgust match Harrison’s delivery perfectly (just note the way he almost spits “Look at you all…” in the final chorus), but elsewhere his songs are disappointing. Piggies is an Animal Farm-style takedown of the ultra-rich which is mostly fine; Savoy Truffle’s baritone sax work is memorable but, at the end of the day, it’s still just a song about Eric Clapton getting toothache; and Long, Long, Long is a particularly dreary retread of Magical Mystery Tour’s Blue Jay Way. The atmosphere is strong, but it’s exhausting.
And so we come to Ringo, making his writing debut here with Don’t Pass Me By. It’s nice that he tried, I guess.
So, with such a flawed, haphazard album, how can it possibly justify top marks? It’s because those flaws and whiplash is what makes the white album The White Album! If you take any of the tracks away, the whole thing collapses, even such throwaway guff as Wild Honey Pie and Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? act as essential transitions. How else to move from McCartney’s upbeat, silly Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da to Lennon’s hectoring nightmarish tone on The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill than a brief flash of odd, pointless noise?
Then there’s the journey that the White Album takes us on. Everything on the record feels a bit discordant, a bit off-kilter, and it only increases as the album rolls forward, feeling like a journey into pure hell. Helter Skelter and Revolution 1 sound like society coming apart, Savoy Truffle the deal made with the devil, a moment of respite before the agony really kicks in. Revolution 9 finds us at the mercy of Beelzebub and his torture, before we are given the eternal slumber of a blank, empty universe in Good Night.
Yes, it’s a theory that is reaching, but it works, and it’s all this slightly unsettling horror that allows the White Album to stand uniquely in The Beatles catalogue. There’s enough apparent messaging here for the album to have been adopted by Charles Manson and his disciples for their terrible crimes in the ensuing months. It’s certainly not an album designed to signal the coming “race war” as they absurdly believed, but it’s certainly speaking to a foreboding higher power of some kind. And it’s all the better for it.
Score: 10/10
Tracklisting:
SIDE A
1. Back in the USSR
2. Dear Prudence
3. Glass Onion
4. Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
5. Wild Honey Pie
6. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
7. While My Guitar Gentle Weeps
8. Happiness is a Warm Gun
SIDE B
9. Martha My Dear
10. I’m So Tired
11. Blackbird
12. Piggies
13. Rocky Raccoon
14. Don’t Pass Me By
15. Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
16. I Will
17. Julia
SIDE C
18. Birthday
19. Yer Blues
20. Mother Nature’s Son
21. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
22. Sexy Sadie
23. Helter Skelter
24. Long, Long, Long
SIDE D
25. Revolution 1
26. Honey Pie
27. Savoy Truffle
28. Cry Baby Cry
29. Revolution 9
30. Good Night
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