Somewhere, once, I read a casual yet passionate tribute to this song that changed the way I heard it forever. I thought it was something Richard Meltzer wrote but I haven't been able to track that down, so maybe it was in a fanzine or a letter someone wrote to me. The song is one of those semi-lost artifacts from the mid-'60s, appearing originally as the B-side of the "Ticket to Ride" single but never making it to either of the Help! albums (US or UK), or the movie itself for that matter, landing instead on one of the American butchery byproducts, Beatles VI, and finally, in the grand reorganization of the catalog in the CD era, finding its (stereo) home on Past Masters, Vol. 1. It's a lovely, bracing, slow-tempo'd singalong, with dense, aching harmonies from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Harrison is also working some gadget with his guitar that lends it a tactile sensation of rubbery items vibrating and squeaking. It's a Lennon song, primarily, so features his usual mixed-up attitudes towards women, at once his saviors and demons, ever shadowed of course by his lost mother. She's wearing red ("scarlet") in this one, and there's some sense that a betrayal has occurred, but the details are not clear. Nor is she necessarily the one at fault, the singer himself makes clear enough. By avoiding the concrete so studiously the song manages, purely by its sounds and textures, to express a powerful sense of loss, and yet the melody and key are so apt for certain singers (such as myself, for whom Lennon's range is nearly a perfect match) that as often as not one finds oneself singing lustily from deep down in the diaphragm, as we're told we should. Thus, it becomes a nearly perfect abstraction, as vague and affirmative as the title itself.
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