Anything to decipher on the White Album cover?? har-har-har
A reference to White Light, purity of mind from meditation?
Or reference to the white noise within its covers?
That was to me a very interesting set of posts about The Beatles. I have always wondered about the 'rumor' of Paul's death/replacement. Didn't know which side of the fence to be on until I saw the website of facial comparisons. Now I think he was replaced.
Again to me just another sign of the illusions we live under/with/among. Astounding actually!
I wonder who will be the last remaining Beatle–McCartney or Ringo? Or is it more accurate to now say that Ringo is the only remaining Beatle?
All in all it gives a new twist in understanding as to the reason the Beatles never got back together–it could not really happen since Paul died.
The posts were especially interesting because I spend several months in Rishikesh where the Beatles stayed with Maharishi. The ashram compound is still there though in ruins. It must have been a visionary undertaking in those days. It is a popular place to hike and enjoy the ruins as if it were a futuristic city which was somehow built in the long ago past and is now just decaying and overgrown by the jungle.
Where would our global society be if not for them?
Maybe Nixon would have used the nukes in VietNam/China as it is said he and Kissinger wanted to do so, but it was the Peace Movement, which held that hell fire in reign???
Found these two paragraphs @songfacts.com regarding the White Album.
Include them because of the two writers perceptions of the BURNOUT and TENSIONS which lead to their demise and split–I must say it could have been due to Paul's death and the charade they continued with Faul.
Anyway enough history for now–
Hindsight from FarSight ;-} [I can see clearly now, the clouds are gone]
Thanks again – my Genius Friend!
....
What the Beatles should have done after Sgt. Peppers was take a long extended vacation. This album proves that these guys were suffering from BURNOUT! It is not a totally bad record, it is just over loaded with stuff that sounds like it was written on the bathroom wall and should have been left on the studio floor. The "White Album" contains 30 songs on two discs. It could have been reduced to 14 songs on a single disc and still not be able to compare to any of the previous three Beatles albums. This was the album that brought the Beatles back down to earth, hard, fast, and with an ugly crash. Too many long hours in the studio, to many drugs, Paul romancing Linda, John chasing Yoko, these guy's needed a break. This was the beginning of the end for the Fab Four. However, the album does have some redeeming qualities. A 6 out of 10 for the White Album. This should have been a lesson to everyone in the recording industry, not all experiments turn out right. Remember Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Sgt Peppers was Jekyll, The White Album was Hyde. There are some really good songs on this album. It's too bad that they are mingled in with a lot of experiments gone wrong, annoying, evil noise. Back in the USSR, O-Bla-De-O-Bla-Da, Julia, Blackbird, Dear Prudence, While My Guitar Gently Weeps save this album from totally sucking wind. 6/10
Revered as the album that supposedly escalated tensions among the Fab Four (which would lead to there inevitable demise), the White Album stands up as on of there most solid efforts put forth in Abbey Road Studios. Recorded during different stints in 1968, the White Album contains a diverse range of music and contributions from all four Beatles members. The White Album warrants its success not only to the folklore behind the songs that were written, but also to the nature in which many of the songs were written. This album was intended to bring the Fab Four back to there basic roots -recording as a rock and roll band. This was a complete turnaround from their previous two recording adventures on Sgt. Peppers and Magical Mystery Tour. Unfortunately, the tension underlying the group could not be covered up, with many of the band members recording in different studious on there own and some even quitting temporarily only to come back. However, with all the turmoil surrounding this album, the music still stood up and some would argue improved the "artistic" framework in which they operated. The White Album is the Beatles "coming of age" age album. A contrast between the adventurous and the reserved, the quiet and the loud, the complex and the simple. Such contrasts were expressed through various musical structures - i.e folk, blues, classic rock, pop, and even country. Such music forms take shape through the jangly country waltz of "Don't Pass Me By" to the blues drenched "Yer Blues," and soft ballads like "Julia." The White Album has grown with age, only because its diversity and musical craftsmanship has it allowed it to. I highly recommend this to any avid music listener. A 10 all the way.
-TIM-
Hi Tim,
thank you too for your encouraging lines, my genious friend!
As I feel the Beatles-topic will be focussed on a little more - see the connected...
WHO IS THE FOOL ON THE HILL...
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=64683
(snip)
Let me add another point of view from "The Beatles Diary", 1968: http://www.bootleg55.150m.com/m12_1968.htm
THE BEATLES (THE WHITE ALBUM)
On one hand, The Beatles - The White Album, as all but pedants call it - was the most diverse record that The Beatles, or probably any pop band in history, has ever made. On the other, as Paul McCartney remembered, "That was the tension album. We were all in the midst of that psychedelic thing, or just coming out of it. In any case, it was weird. Never before had we recorded with beds in the studio and people visiting for hours on end: business meetings and all that. There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself."
Lester Bangs described it perfectly: "The first album by The Beatles or in the history of rock by four solo ardsts in one band". In doing that, he was simply following John Lennon's lead: "If you took each track, it was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group - I enjoyed it, but we broke up then."
Although Ringo quit the group for more than a week, he is unlikely to have been at the centre of the dissension in the ranks: the main arguments were between George and Paul (Harrison reckoning that McCartney was treating him as a junior member of the band) and John and the rest of the band (over, on one side, Lennon's insistence on Yoko Ono joining the group in the studio and, on the other, her treatment at the hands of Paul and George).
There were plenty of other pressures at work. The lack of central management in the group's career since the death of Brian Epstein in August 1967 had presented them with additional financial and business decisions to worry about, ignore and occasionally even make. McCartney's keen interest in maintaining a steady ship rubbed up against Lennon and Harrison's more laissez-faire attitude to events.
The creation of Apple, their multi-genre business empire that was intended as a fantasy come true but rapidly disintegrated into chaos, took its toll on the group's unity and enthusiasm. So too did the aftermath of the Mahanshi episode, with even the most meditation-friendly of The Beatles suffering extreme disillusionment after their idyll with the Indian guru mutated into farce. Most of all, though, the group were individually and collectively aware that without leadership or a definite direction, they had no unifying purpose. From the start of 1968 onwards, they seemed to work to a 'two steps forward, three steps back, one step into another dimension' policy - with results that were often inspired, and just as often muddle-headed.
It's some kind of proof of their genius, then, that The White Album was so brilliant, and so vast. Producer George Martin always wanted the group to throw away the chaff and trim the 30-track, 90-minute epic into a tight 40-minute LP of polished gems. But half the attraction of The White Album is its sprawling chaos. Such a giant canvas allowed The Beatles, more often one at a time than not, to show off every aspect of their music. For the first and probably last time in pop history, a group demonstrated on one release that they could handle rock'n'roll, reggae, soul, blues, folk, country, pop and even the avant-garde with consummate ease - and still come out sounding like The Beatles. As a handy history of popular music since 1920, or simply a rich mine of battered gems, The Beatles is impossible to beat.
For the last time, both mono and stereo mixes of this double album were prepared, and The Beatles took great delight in making them as different from each other as possible. Almost every song on The White Album has variations between the two mixes: in one extreme case, the mono version is 20 seconds shorter than the stereo.
BACK IN THE USSR
For many of the White Album sessions, The Beatles were able to work on separate, individual projects at the same time, and keep their four-man performances - and the resulting tension they caused - to a minimum. But on August 22, 1968, when all of The Beatles assembled to record Paul McCartney's 'Back In The USSR', tempers frayed, and it was Ringo Starr - pegged by the world as the least opinionated of the group - who walked out, announcing he'd quit the band.
In his place, McCartney played drums, with a little assistance from Lennon and Harrison; and the entire song was cut without Ringo. The result was a magnificent Beach Boys pastiche, which that group's lead singer, Mike Love, later claimed to have helped write. Hunter Davies's official Beatles biography, published in 1968, offered another story.
DEAR PRUDENCE
Prudence Farrow, sister of the actress Mia, was the subject of this generous, warm-hearted Lennon song. It was inspired by her behaviour at the Maharishi's Indian retreat, when Lennon was deputed to entice her out of her self-enforced hiding in her quarters. Lennon widened the song to take in a pantheistic vision of the world's beauty, one of the few positive statements to emerge from his stay in India. (Another, a song called 'Child Of Nature', wasn't considered for this album; instead, it was rewritten three years later as 'Jealous Guy' for John's Imagine LP, its original spirit of universal harmony replaced by fear and guilt.) This was another of the recordings done during Ringo Starr's departure from the group: strange that The Beatles should open their album with two tracks that were both recorded by a three-man line-up.
GLASS ONION
Like 'I Am The Walrus', 'Glass Onion' was written by John Lennon as a deliberate riposte to critics and fans who thought they were discovering the Holy Grail in some of his more recherche lyrical imagery. "I wrote 'The Walrus was Paul'in that song," John explained many years later. "At that time I was still in my love cloud with Yoko, so I thought I'd just say something nice to Paul -you did a good job over these few years, holding us together. I thought, I've got Yoko, and you can have the credit."
Besides the deliberately obtuse lyrics 'Glass Onion' boasted a searing Lennon vocal, and a mournful string coda that cut against the mood of the song.
OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA
Day after day, Paul McCartney dragged The Beatles through take after take, and arrangement after arrangement, of a throwaway, mock-reggae tune about a singer and a man who "has a barrow in the marketplace". Was it worth it? Well, the song has humour on its side, especially with the other Beatles throwing in the off-the-cuff comments that were fast becoming a trademark on their 1968 recordings. And 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' did become a No. 1 hit for Marmalade. But rarely in The Beatles' career did they spend so much time on something so ephemeral.
WILD HONEY PIE
During the White Album sessions, Paul McCartney felt comfortable enough for the first time to capture some of his one-minute moments of madness on tape. He recorded this strange, whimsical ditty as a one-man band, overdubbing several vocal parts and guitars, and emerging with 53 seconds ofmusic that would never have been considered for release on any Beatles album but this one.
THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL
Anything went for this one-day session - a Spanish guitar intro borrowed from a sound effects tape, a vocal cameo from Yoko Ono, harmonies from Ringo's wife, Maureen Starkey, and mellotron from producer Chris Thomas. Lennon's lyrics told the semi-humorous story of a fellow Meditation convert, addicted to big game hunting, and everyone in the vicinity of the studio contributed to the singalong chorus.
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
George Harrison won such acclaim for this song that he was tempted to write a much less successful follow-up, 'This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying)'. Ironically, the most famous guitar solo on any Beatles record was played by an outsider - Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, a close friend of Harrison's, who was invited to the session both for his musical skills and in an attempt to cool the frequently heated passions in the studio.
As it was originally written, and demoed via a solo performance at Abbey Road, Harrison's song had an additional verse, which didn't survive beyond this initial (and quite magical) acoustic performance.
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN
The song's original title - 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun In Your Hand' - left its social message perfectly clear. But besides reflecting John Lennon's moral outrage at the American firearms lobby, it also had a second function, as John explained: "It's sort of a history ofrock and roll." And a third inspiration for the track was confirmed later, when he revealed that much of the most direct imagery in the song conveyed his sexual passion for Yoko Ono. Beatles and Apple Corps press officer Derek Taylor contributed some of the song's most mysterious lines.
Musically, the track was a tour de force, albeit without the theatrics and orchestrations of the Pepper album. It moved swiftly from a dream state to an air of menace, then a frenetic middle section, and finally a repeated four-chord chorus which somehow combined erotic fervour with an affectionate pastiche of Fifties rock'n'roll.
MARTHA MY DEAR
What began as a McCartney solo piece, a deliciously romantic piano piece in his utterly distinctive style, ended up with the accompaniment augmented by a troupe of brass and string musicians. Thankfully, they didn't bury the whimsical charm of the song, whose heroine took her name from McCartney's near-legendary sheepdog.
I'M SO TIRED
Like 'Yer Blues', 'I'm So Tired' wins the Lennon prize for irony, this paean of self-doubt and boredom having been composed in the supposedly spiritual surroundings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Indian retreat. The ennui and desolation of Lennon's vocal filled in the tiny fragments of obliqueness in one of his most direct songs, and made for an eerie counterpoint to the optimistic, joyous McCartney numbers which surrounded it.
BLACKBIRD
Nature song? Love ballad? Message of support for the black power movement? McCartney's gently beautiful 'Blackbird' supported several interpretations, but required nothing more than appreciation for its flowing melody and its stark visual imagery. The recording was a solo performance, aided only by bird sounds borrowed from the EMI tape library. Paul never wrote a simpler or more effective song.
PIGGIES
With the aid of his mother, who wrote the "damn good whacking" line, George intended 'Piggies' as humorous social satire - though its title soon meant that the counterculture adopted it as an anti-police anthem. Continuing the animal theme of 'Blackbird', pig noises were added to the basic track (Lennon's sole contribution to the song), which was also augmented by a hefty orchestral arrangement, and a harpsichord played by the man who produced several White Album sessions, Chris Thomas.
ROCKY RACCOON
Anyone scouring The Beatles' catalogue for early signs of the playfulness in which Paul McCartney indulged - some would say overindulged - during his solo career could find plenty of evidence on the White Album. With the assistance of George Martin on saloon-bar piano, the group (minus Harrison) completed this attractive but lightweight mock-Western ditty in just one session.
DON'T PASS ME BY
After five years of trying, Ringo Starr finally got his first solo composition on a Beatles album. It turned out to be a country hoedown with playful lyrics and a generally lugubrious air, with some off-the-cuff fiddle playing by Jack Fallon, who'd met The Beatles six years earlier when he promoted one of their concerts in Stroud. For some reason - maybe because they felt it was one of the least important songs on the album - Lennon and McCartney chose to experiment with the mixing of this track, emerging with mono and stereo versions that run at recognisably different speeds, and have variations in the instrumental overdubs.
WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?
John Lennon called this near-solo McCartney performance "one of his best", which was either sarcasm or showed that he always valued his partner's off-the-cuff moments more than his controlled ones. Ringo added his drums to a basic piano, guitar and vocal track that Paul had recorded without the assistance or knowledge of the other group members. Raucous and good-humoured, it was a rare moment of levity from the man increasingly left to direct the group's activities.
The song's (very) slightly risque lyric, all two lines of it, heightened the vague air of controversy surrounding the album. McCartney was already in trouble with the press for allowing a minuscule nude picture of himself to be included on the set's free poster.
I WILL
It took 67 takes for Lennon, McCartney and Starr to come up with a basic track for this gentle love song which met its composer's expectations. McCartney then added his tuneful vocal, sang his bass part rather than playing it, and still found time during the session to ad-lib a dreamy song called something like 'Can You Take Me Back', which duly found its way onto the finished album as an uncredited snippet between 'Cry Baby Cry' and 'Revolution 9'.
JULIA
It was Donovan who taught John Lennon the finger-picking style that he used on this song, as well as 1969 recordings like 'Sun King' and Yoko Ono's 'Remember Love'. For the first and last time in The Beatles' career, this was an entirely solo performance by John -dedicated both to his late mother (Julia Lennon) and to Yoko. Translated into English, her name apparently means 'ocean child', a phrase which was incorporated into Lennon's lyric.
BIRTHDAY
Either side of repairing to McCartney's house to watch the classic rock'n'roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, on TV, The Beatles recorded this riff-based rocker - one of the last genuine Lennon/McCartney collaborations. Two Beatle partners, Patti Harrison and Yoko Ono, sang the answer vocals in the chorus, while the band rocked out as if they hadn't a care in the world. It was a rare show of old-style unity during a difficult few months of recording.
YER BLUES
Written from the supposed haven of the Maharishi's camp in Rishikesh, Yer Blues' was an anguished confession of loneliness and pain, wrapped in a deliberately self-mocking title. "There was a self-consciousness about suddenly singing blues," Lennon explained in 1970. "I was self-conscious about doing it. "
With its references to Bob Dylan and rock'n'roll, 'Yer Blues' was obviously intended to be a definitive statement of Lennon's boredom with his role - definitive, that is, until the "I don't believe in Beatles" cry in 'God' on his Plastic Ono Band album. The song meant enough to him to be reprised both at The Rolling Stones Rock'N'Roll Circus TV show in December, and at the Toronto festival the following year.
MOTHER NATURE'S SON
Like 'Blackbird', 'Mother Nature's Son' was a gentle, pastoral acoustic song which captured McCartney's writing at its most inspired. Augmented by a subtle horn arrangement, it epitomised the devastating switch of moods and tempos that made this album - and indeed The Beatles' work in general - so remarkable.
EVERYBODY S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT ME AND MY MONKEY
Playing with lyrical opposites, then lapsing into nonsense for the chorus, John Lennon concocted a rock'n'roll song that suggested more than it meant. Such a tongue-in-cheek number deserved an appropriate arrangement, and The Beatles set out to enjoy the process of recording it - speeding up the tape of the backing track to heighten the frantic feel, and then hurling a motley collection of screams, cries and even some singing into the fade-out.
SEXY SADIE
"That was about the Maharishi," explained John in 1970, when quizzed about the identity of the mysterious Ms Sadie. "I copped out and wouldn't write 'Maharishi, what have you done, you made a fool of everyone'."
In the studio, Lennon briefly demonstrated the song's obscene original lyrics, which made no attempt to shield the Maharishi by the use of poetry. On the record, though, the insult was softened by the sheer beauty of the music, which hinged around McCartney's brilliant piano playing, and some acerbic singing from John. Eight bars of instrumental work were removed from the fade-out during the final mix, incidentally.
HELTER SKELTER
"That came about because I read in Melody Maker that The Who had made some track or other that was the loudest, most raucous rock'n'roll, the dirtiest thing they've ever done," Paul McCartney explained. "I didn't know what track they were talking about but it made me think, 'Right. Got to do it.' And I totally got off on that one little sentence in the paper."
On July 18, then, The Beatles gathered at Abbey Road to match that description, and emerged with a 27-minute jam around a menacing guitar riff. Unreleased until 1995, and then only as a four and a half minute edit, this live-in-the-studio recording was the heaviest track The Beatles ever made. Played live by all four Beatles, on two guitars, bass and drums, it was a slow, lumbering McCartney song, moody and sombre.
Seven weeks later, they tried again, this time aware that they needed to make their statement in five minutes, not 27. Having cut the basic track, they added a chaotic barrage of horns, distortion and guitar feedback, and then prepared two entirely different mixes of the song - the stereo one running almost a minute longer than the mono, which omitted Ringo's pained shout, "I've got blisters on my fingers."
A year later, Charles Manson's followers wrote the words 'Heiter Skelter' in blood as they killed actress Sharon Tate and her friends in her Hollywood home. Bizarrely, John Lennon (rather than McCartney, the song's composer) was called as a witness in the trial, but refused to attend. "What's 'Helter Skelter' got to do with knifing somebody?" he complained. "I've never listened to the words properly, it was just a noise.
LONG LONG LONG
Without John Lennon, who as usual was mysteriously absent when a Harrison song appeared on the agenda, The Beatles managed 67 takes of this delicately lyrical number. Then they capped a low-key, almost inaudible performance with a few moments of chaos -capturing the sound of a wine bottle vibrating on top of a speaker cabinet, and matching it with a flurry of guitars, groans and drums.
REVOLUTION 1
For the first and last time, The Beatles succeeded on May 30, 1968 in recording the basic backing for two different tracks at exactly the same time. How? It was quite simple. At the first session for their new album, they recorded a ten-minute rendition of John's latest song -best interpreted as an overt political statement, backing the stance of the main Communist Parties in the debates over the student riots in Paris, rather than the calls from ultra-left parties for immediate revolution. (Later, Lennon would take entirely the opposite political Position.)
The first four minutes became 'Revolution 1', originally planned as a single but eventually deemed too low-key, and subsequently re-recorded in an entirely electric arrangement; the last six minutes, a cacophony of feedback and vocal improvisation, was transported to become the basis of 'Revolution 9'.
HONEY PIE
Not a revival of a flappers'favourite from the Twenties but a McCartney original, 'Honey Pie' must have owed something to the music of his father Jim McCartney's jazz band. Scratches from an old 78rpm record were added to one of the opening lines of the song, to boost its period flavour. George Martin scored the brass and woodwind arrangement, and that arch experimentalist, John Lennon, was quite happy to add electric guitar to a song that was the total opposite of all his contributions to the album.
SAVOY TRUFFLE
George Harrison wrote this playful song, inspired by a close friend: "Eric Clapton had a lot of cavities in his teeth and needed dental work. He ate a lot of chocolates - he couldn't resist them. I got stuck with the two bridges for a while, and Derek Taylor wrote some of the words in the middle." Taylor therefore collected his second anonymous credit on the White Album, but no royalties. Harrison, meanwhile, borrowed most of the lyrics from the inside of a chocolate box, while John Lennon commented on proceedings by not turning up for any of the sessions where the song was recorded.
CRY BABY CRY
Consult Hunter Davies's book to find John Lennon's rather apologetic description of how he wrote this song - which in one of his final interviews he denied ever having been involved with, the two days of sessions obviously struck from his mental record.
Using characters that sounded as if they'd been borrowed from a Lewis Carroll story, Lennon spent some time (but not too much) working up a song which he seems to have regarded from the start as a blatant piece of filler.
REVOLUTION 9
On the raucous collage of sounds that was the second half of the original 'Revolution 1' (see above), John Lennon and Yoko Ono built an aural nightmare, intended to capture the atmosphere of a violent revolution in progress. By far the most time-consuming White Album track to complete, and then the most controversial when the record was released, 'Revolution 9' was John and Yoko's most successful venture into the world of sound-as-art.
The track began bizarrely enough, with a snippet of an unreleased Paul McCartney song (see 'I Will'), then an EMI test tape repeating the words "Number nine" over and over again. After that, there was chaos - a cavalcade of tape loops, feedback, impromptu screams and carefully rehearsed vocal overdubs, sound effects recordings and the noise of a society disintegrating. Reportedly, Paul McCartney agreed to the inclusion of the track only with severe misgivings, which George Martin expressed more forcibly.
GOOD NIGHT
The composer of this lush and sentimental ballad was not the lush and sentimental Paul McCartney, but the acerbic and cynical John Lennon, whose contributions to The White Album therefore ranged from the ultra-weird to the ultra-romantic within two consecutive tracks. Fast becoming the children's favourite of The Beatles, Ringo Starr sang this lullaby, to a purely orchestral accompaniment. None of the other three Beatles appears on the track.
Far Sight 3
Thx. Evil, Love, Evolve, Live, devils - this wheel will end for you only on that day if you try to understand those principles of reality and start to step out of these spirals of accusations based on incomplete informations originating from a brainwashed MEDEA-society. Use your skills and senses to find something you can work FOR and don't act as a zealot as you will serve exactly those forces you want to fight against.
If you want to teach us something, respect our point of views (which are indeed manifold) as we are trying to respect yours. To accuse the Prezi of all this, you might be correct - but as you don't understand his status and his real intentions - it might be extreme unwise to judge him from what is presented by manifold sources - mainly by the Medea. Me thinks he is trying to do his best in his position. Remember - he is not alone in his decisionmaking and he is no 'absolute monarch' with absolute power.
As I said - you may be right - but we don't know really - at least until this summer...
Thx for writing! -No that's too simple. The reason could have been John's emerging status as he wanted to return to stage - and the ptbs had had enough of the group as they had made the best out of the FAB4, including the royalities. The Beatles had served them well - on this example you can see how a popular concept was implanted in the 'bigger plan' and corrupted from within. Slowly -step by step. But - you can kill a person and 'buy' some time - but you never can kill an 'idea'...
