Please Please Me (1963)

I’m still surprised when I hear people refer to early Beatles music as “bubblegum,” partly because the term never came into use until about 1967, when the Ohio Express had hits with songs like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy,” and partly because I think even these early Beatles have it over most bubblegum (a term that has since been abused anyway practically unto meaninglessness). Sure, you can retcon early Beatles into the definition of bubblegum as “pop music in a catchy and upbeat style that is marketed for children and adolescents” (Wikipedia). I still find it fascinating that most 5-year-olds respond positively to the Beatles, notably the early stuff—just as a lot of 14-year-olds seem to go by instinct for Nirvana. There’s something age-specific going on here, but Please Please Me nonetheless is an album for everyone except Beatles grinches. It’s their first album, released in the UK and subsequently mangled and/or sat on in the US. It’s a reasonably typical pop album for 1963, released first in mono and later in stereo, and with covers making up nearly half the songs. That’s actually a low ratio for pop albums in 1963, which were more often affairs of one or two hits and the rest covers. Please Please Me also has a handful of classic Beatles standards—“I Saw Her Standing There,” the title song “Please Please Me,” “Love Me Do,” and “Twist and Shout” (an Isley Brothers cover they made their own), along with two of my favorite Beatles singalongs, “P.S. I Love You” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” But the somewhat freakish choice of covers also has a lot to do with what makes this such an interesting album: “Chains,” a 1962 hit by the Cookies, “Anna (Go to Him),” a 1962 hit written and recorded by soul singer Arthur Alexander, “Boys,” a 1960 Shirelles B-side, and, perhaps most remarkable, “A Taste of Honey” and “Baby It’s You,” which would be hits later for Herb Alpert (1965) and Smith (1969), respectively. The Shirelles also got a hit with “Baby It’s You” in 1961. Meanwhile, “Misery” is a Lennon / McCartney original, but I happen to know the song better as covered by the Flamin’ Groovies on Shake Some Action. There’s a lot of pure pleasure in this set of 14 songs, a worthy start to an iconic career. On the question of early Beatles, I don’t think Please Please Me is nearly up to the stellar highs of A Hard Day’s Night, but I like it more than either With the Beatles or Beatles for Sale.

2. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – “A Day in the Life”

[2011 review of “A Day in the Life” here]

My unconventional conventional choice here has become something of a lightning rod for conventionalists and contrarians. Since approximately 1978, Sgt. Pepper’s has been named in multiple places via multiple surveys as the greatest rock album of all time, though support for it has flagged a little in this century. Certainly many also consider it the greatest psychedelic rock album of all time, which is where a contrarian like myself starts to clear his throat. The only songs besides “A Day in the Life” that might qualify as psychedelic—“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (John Lennon being cute about LSD, i.e., Lucy Sky Diamonds, plus the lyrics are trippy), “Within You Without You” (George Harrison droning ineffectively on a sitar for five minutes), and maybe “Fixing a Hole” (by Paul McCartney shortly before composing “Rocky Raccoon”). It is otherwise the omnibus anthology style that arguably started with Revolver and continued through the White Album and Abbey Road, with songs of all genres and semi-genres chockablock side by side. (In that sense, Rubber Soul may be the last cohesive Beatles album.) “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper’s, for example, is a tender, sentimental ballad likely to make the weak cry. Compare Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by McCartney) or Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.” Let me stipulate I have nothing against crying. I do it all the time. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” written by McCartney when he was 14 and now a tradition to call out for any baby boomer turning that precise age, is more like a nagging earworm, featuring clarinets. There should be polaroids with a birthday cake and grandkids. You’re not dropping acid for that, if you are dropping acid, which I am not necessarily endorsing.

To be clear, I have nothing against most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s. I thought I might, and have thought so for many years of not listening to it, but, when I started playing it again in recent days, the first thing I realized was how well I know it, from the sequencing to all the words in all the songs. I can even sing with “Within You Without You.” It’s among the first albums I ever bought and it’s thoroughly imprinted on me, so taking the contrarian stance is tricky. I do believe Sgt. Pepper’s has been vastly overrated. But it’s still the Beatles and thus has undeniable appeals for fans like me who came up on them. It’s not the greatest rock album of all time (that’s Highway 61 Revisited or possibly Sandinista) and it’s not the greatest psychedelic album of all time either (that’s—well, why spoil the surprise, right? you've probably figured it out by now anyway). All that said, Sgt. Pepper’s does have arguably the greatest psychedelic song of all time. “A Day in the Life” is so perfect, in fact, I’m convinced the song and its placement as the last heard on the album are what have convinced people that the album is a psychedelic masterpiece when it is really just a workaday Beatles album—if I were going to stack-rank them all I’m pretty sure it would fall in the bottom third.

But it does have “A Day in the Life” and that’s not nothing. So majestic in its ambitions and scope that you would have to classify it as a novelty, comparable perhaps to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (more operatic than psychedelic) or exercises by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, all of which came after Sgt. Pepper’s. “A Day in the Life” is also (with “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) a source of the controversy around whether the album is pro-drug and thus a target for censorship. Obviously, in 1967, it was pro-hallucinogens. It’s also in favor of transcendental meditation. While a lot of songs on the album are just goofs (a Beatles tradition of its own, again arguably since Revolver), “A Day in the Life” comes in deadly serious and stays that way, even as the lyrics are deceptively quotidian. McCartney pounds the piano with great authority. Lennon’s words are disorienting. “I heard the news today, oh boy....” They don’t seem to make sense but feel like they should. “He blew his mind out in a car....” Ringo’s fills are subtly perfect. Three verses of this and then, at 1:40, with a wobbly drawn-out “I’d love to turn you on,” it spirals into the first of its two blunt force avant-garde classical orchestra interludes, which frankly were too much for me to handle as a 12-year-old hearing it for the first time on the radio. It felt like my head was exploding and I was going insane for the 35 seconds or so that it lasts. The Paul McCartney section in the middle is a perfect counterbalance to the Lennon and the orchestra. But with “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” we are off again to the wilds of the raggedy edges of the brain, in a place the Moody Blues studied well for “Tuesday Afternoon.” Powerful orchestral notes usher us back to Lennon and “I read the news today, oh boy.” One more verse and one more orchestral fever break and then McCartney hits a grand chord on a grand piano and they let is resonate for 45 seconds. Spectacular. What hit you? Another masterpiece.

Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (1988)

I chronically associate the "supergroup" idea with albums featuring long jams by players such as Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. But Wikipedia sez those guys are merely the source of the term when they made an album in 1968 with Stephen Stills called Super Session. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia goes on to list examples of supergroups: Cream, Led Zeppelin (!), Crosby, Stills (him again), Nash & Young, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc., etc., all the way unto SSAK3 last year. Fair enough, fair enough. The supergroup that the Traveling Wilburys most resembles to me is Blind Faith, with a consortium of mostly well-established if disparate players and one amazing album. I know the Wilburys have a second album, called Vol. 3 (to baffle the completists, hyuk-hyuk), but stick with me.

My instinctive resistance to supergroup projects was locked in by 1988. From the outside this looked like the usual half-baked collision of over-the-hill celebrity and tender egos and my inclination was to skip it. But at some point I saw it for cheap somewhere and thought I really oughta. The album hit me like the work of supergroups in the other sense of the term (e.g., the Beatles and the Stones) and I have been a partisan ever since. The experience was reminiscent for me, and remains so, speaking of those supergroups, of bringing Beatles albums home for the first time back in the wayback. The first sensation is pure pleasure followed by playing it a lot. In the first days and weeks with these albums you don't even particularly sort out what's good and what's better and why, you just listen to them every day, sometimes multiple times, cramming it all the way down to the brainstem until you can hear the beginnings of the next songs in the endings of the previous. As with the Beatles, you can try picking apart the constituent elements of the Traveling Wilburys but it never seems to help much.

Dreaming the Beatles (2017)

Rob Sheffield takes possession of the Beatles in a deceptively effortless way. He's a little defensive on some of his points, forcefully turning his 1966 birthdate into an advantage rather than disadvantage (a little like me arguing for possession of Louis Jordan, but OK). His starting point, much like Greil Marcus's for Elvis Presley in Dead Elvis, is that the Beatles never stopped growing and being important just because the band broke up. His most persuasive argument for me was simply pointing out that the album 1, released in 2000—a collection of the Beatles' 27 #1 hits, which everybody who cared had to own by then—has been the best-selling album for most of this century so far (it's now #2 after Adele's 21, which only overtook it this year). Sheffield covers all the familiar ground here: Ed Sullivan, the movies, Bob Dylan, Rubber Soul and Revolver, Jesus, the White Album, etc. He is particularly good on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with one of the best analyses of that album and its place I've seen. Then, without so much as a speed bump, he carries on talking about the solo careers in the '70s and early nostalgia products such as the Red Album and Blue Album. This was the most surprising and even refreshing view for me—every time he casually zigged and zagged between '60s Beatles and '70s Beatles I had to reorient a little. I like many of the solo Beatles albums (and I like Double Fantasy a good deal more than he does) but I have always seen a bright line between the Beatles and what came after. But I'm convinced now he's right. The Beatles were unimaginably huge in their time. We've seen nothing like it since in popular culture. Yet they have become even bigger since. By the one obvious measure, for most of the 21st century, which started 30 years after they broke up and one of them dead, they owned the #1 album. Getting down to cases with this book—which is a pleasure to read—I find myself closer to Sheffield than I would have imagined, but often with strong disagreements too. He's a John Lennon / Rubber Soul partisan whereas I had made him for Paul McCartney / White Album. He actually went down the anti-Paul road with the rest of us, turning it around finally (as the new majority coalition coalesced) in the '90s (I was a little slower). I like George more than he does and he likes Ringo more than I do. He is vastly more versed on the lore, the bootlegs, and YouTube videos. There was a lot for me to learn here. I had already learned, maybe with Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head (on which Sheffield sounds a little dubious), that there's always more to learn with the Beatles, and infinitely more variation in taste on specific cases. Ultimately I think Dreaming the Beatles is a bit of an odd duck—I worry that like 1991's Dead Elvis it is actually heralding the beginning of the end—but it definitely belongs in the canon of Beatles literature.

In case it's not at the library.

Revolution in the Head (1994)

It's no exaggeration to call Ian MacDonald's work here monumental, cataloging practically every Beatles recording that matters while arguing persuasively for the profound consequence of both the '60s and the Beatles. The argument is first sounded in the overture and frame of the opening essay, "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade," claiming a distinct Before & After in terms of the Beatles, the '60s, and—well, MacDonald wants to make it big—so let's say world history ... make that human evolution. MacDonald is not sure how big it is, he still can't see all the edges, but he knows it's big. Yet he keeps it grounded in the concrete at the same time—the Beatles were revolutionary for the chords and chord changes they used in their music, for their innovations in verse-chorus-bridge song structures, for finding ways (usually with George Martin) to bend a sound studio (usually Abbey Road) to their will. MacDonald skillfully shapes his many judgments and arguments, and it's fun to walk down memory lane with him too, song by song. He reminded me how earthshakingly good "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was in 1964. I have always been partial to 1965 in the Beatles trajectory, especially the US version of Rubber Soul, but I see better now how Revolver—UK version, please—is the real pinnacle. MacDonald redeemed "Penny Lane" for me. He incidentally affirmed my sense that "She's Leaving Home" ranks with the best of a certain type of '60s sad pop song, with Glen Campbell's "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" and Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days." He even redeemed Sgt. Pepper a little for me, though I still think it's a weak album. But in terms of what might have been! MacDonald casually mentions the industry convention in 1967 that singles already released were considered a cheat to include on new albums. Thus, in my speculations, if Sgt. Pepper could have been conceived to include "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" it might have been as great an album as Revolver. MacDonald is also very busy, in the original 1994 edition of this book and the two that followed, one of them posthumous, about the work of restoring Paul McCartney's standing in the project, especially vis a vis John Lennon. Sometimes MacDonald comes down a little too overcompensatingly partisan for me—I don't like "Honey Pie" or "Martha My Dear" or "The Long and Winding Road" nearly as much as he does. But it's still a useful corrective to the long-term Lennon overvaluations, which I suspect mainly came of cementing in views with the grief at the time of his death. MacDonald may have made me like one of my favorites, Abbey Road, a little less, because the circumstances of its recording are so sad and disturbing. Small price to pay. Bravo to this book, excellent in every way.

In case it's not at the library.

Rubber Soul (1965)

(Previous cryptic comments on UK version here.)

Another way to divide my narrow little world: those who believe Rubber Soul properly kicks off with "Drive My Car," as found on the UK version, and those who believe it starts with "I've Just Seen a Face," on the US. Neither song appears on the other version, which is part of what makes this debate so intractable. And each song frames what follows differently, though the great majority of what follows is nearly identical, only shuffled about a bit and with a few additions or deletions. Suffice to say: the lean studied exuberance of "Face" leads off an album I like quite a bit more than the one that starts with a honking shambolic limo fantasy. Earlier this year the collective marketing geniuses behind 50 years of united Beatles mess finally closed one circle and released some 13 US versions of Beatles albums on CD (with the inevitable box set of all of them), for which I was humbly grateful, welcoming back an old friend. (I recently learned the hard way that trying to work with the tags and labels of digital music is harder and less rewarding than you would think.) The distinction between the two versions has turned out to be critically important to me. In fact, when it comes to the UK versions, I think I even understand better the other side of another issue that divides my world, preferring Revolver to Rubber Soul. But Rubber Soul—the US version—is one of the first albums I really knew and it has always been a good deal more than a collection of songs. For me, for various reasons, it feels like no less than the Beatles at their absolute best, inventing a kind of chamber pop music full of moods and shadings, inventive yet simple, charming but never shallow, insinuating itself well into the grains of my life, and forever listenable.

Help! (1965)

(There's a less fragmented version here. And see also A Hard Day's Night, now with complete updates, here.)

More on the mess made by the marketing laboratories of early/mid-period Beatles. For the record, I am officially in sympathy with the Beatles who wanted to put chopped-up dolls and cuts of meat on the cover of the US-only Yesterday and Today. It's a travesty. At this point these UK track sequences can still be alienating too. (I still feel like someone midway in transition from a QWERTY to a Dvorak keyboard. It messes with my mind.) Example: WTF is "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" doing here? Or "Yesterday"? They are less like albums (let alone soundtracks) and more like collections of songs that sometimes clump. For this album, the first seven tracks also appeared in the movie and on the US version of the soundtrack. To me they are the core of Help! and then there are some pretty good random Beatles songs and/or weird soundtrack blurts, depending on the version you have or know or prefer. In short: Help! I need somebody.

McCartney (1970)

I loved this one-man studio project when it was new, McCartney's first solo release after the Beatles breakup. I was just getting out of junior high and looking forward to high school, and a little unbelieving that the Beatles had picked that moment to break up. I resented the reviews that slagged it as self-indulgent, lightweight fluff—what has become the usual casual knock on Paul McCartney, a deeply wrong view. I considered the one-man studio project aspect of it a positive rather than a negative myself. I thought it was pretty cool he was doing all this himself (what do you want, I was 15). So I had myself a good old infatuation with McCartney, moved on to other things, and eventually in my mind "Maybe I'm Amazed" stood in as the best of what I recalled. But over the years these potent fragments have surfaced one evocative way or another. A radio station randomly played "Momma Miss America" one morning in the '90s on my way to work and ever since it has been among my favorites, a hearty quirky stew of banging piano and fuzzed guitar, and pure rock 'n' roll (recognizing its uneven qualities, but the high points are worth it). Someone on Facebook name-checked "Junk" a day or two after shuffle had memorably put it in my way (it sounded so good I went to check the title). It all culminates on "Maybe I'm Amazed," which felt and still feels almost like a seamless next step for the Beatles, one anyway, or maybe what I mean is it sounds like it could/should be on Abbey Road. Who wouldn't like another Abbey Road song? Still, coming back in recent days, I was surprised by how unsatisfying the slightness of McCartney can be. Thirteen songs, 35 minutes, goes some way toward explaining. What's interesting is how unfinished most of them feel as songs—some wonderful ideas, some great performances, but they mostly feel like finely sculpted parts. Take "That Would Be Something," whose basic lyrical themes are "meet ya in the fallin' rain, mama" and "that would be something." I like the primitive style but it could stand development. Part of what has always been interesting to me about the McCartney/Lennon collaboration is that they were both good at lots of things and often managed to fill in each other's gaps in songwriting. All different ways, supplying a lyric for the chorus, a bridge, a chord change, etc. I'm not suggesting Paul McCartney missed John Lennon here per se, but rather that he missed a collaborator he could consider a pop music equal. Precious few of them exist in the world at any given time, of course, and it was never going to be Linda, God bless her. So part of what makes this album both deficient and fascinating is seeing McCartney's gaps so plainly left unfilled or rounded off.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

(There's a less fragmented version here.)

For me, with Beatles albums before Sgt. Pepper, it has taken some getting used to the "real" UK tracks and sequencing (not to mention things gone entirely missing since, such as the album Hey Jude, a favorite). It's no bother attempting to sort it out, of course, and indeed the new versions are better in many cases. But I still miss elements of what I knew. The US Hard Day's Night (with red instead of blue album cover art) was one of the first albums I owned, and I played it to death, but it's fairly different from this one. For example, it included an instrumental version of "This Boy" from the movie soundtrack. I'm not even sure that's commercially available now, or where it is if so. Still, the UK version is better, if only because it has more Beatles songs from this great period. Here's about some of them.

Beatles, "Act Naturally" (1965)

(listen)

This is another Beatles charmer from the mid-'60s, a Buck Owens cover—his first #1 on the country charts, in fact—which the lads in their blithely winning manner turn into a nice little vehicle for Ringo. An absolutely perfect one, as it happens. Twangy guitar and all he has to do is ... act naturally. It was the flip of "Yesterday," and as far as I'm concerned that song needed one. And it got one. In this. They road-tested it on Ed Sullivan in 1965, saw it was good, and so it was. I think it really does bring out all that earthbound teddy bear charm of Ringo, the oldest Beatle, the cult drummer, the sad sack face and the steady tidy hand at the drum kit. There was never anything fancy about him, and there's nothing fancy about this song (I mentioned it was a Buck Owens cover, didn't I?) and that's exactly what I love about it. All we have to do is all we have to sing is: act naturally. Because, as always, I am amazed at the way this band had with a song to get in and do their job so efficiently and leave, I will also mention that I have this clocking in at about 2:33. Like this: "They're gonna put me in the movies / They're gonna make a big star out of me / We'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely /And all I have to do is act naturally." I don't even know what else there is to say. This is just so fine. Huzzah! Again!

Beatles, "I Should Have Known Better" (1964)

(listen)

It says on Wikipedia this is a result of the Beatles meeting Bob Dylan in 1964 ... something something about writing more meaningful lyrics. That's news to me in terms of the song, which I have known since I acquired the US version of the soundtrack product in approximately 1966 from a record club based out of Terre Haute, Indiana. It has always sounded like any other Beatles pop song of the time to me—confectionary, sweet, gorgeous, one of a kind, eminently singable, rockin' in place, and the kind of thing you want to hear again right away. So fucking good, to resort to the vernacular. Originally the B-side of "A Hard Day's Night," this is high Beatlemania we're talking about here, of course, 1964 bleeding into 1965, whose many terrific songs seem to vie for attention a lot, and often surprise. I keep forgetting how great they are until they are in my face again. (And, in honesty, I know there are a few I can do without, starting with "Can't Buy Me Love.") So I am probably writing about this now because at one point, fairly recently, shuffle brought it to my attention. But it's a good one, no worries on that score, friends. It has a valiant widescreen harmonica leading the attack, which lends it a railroad car texture that is likely its most distinguishing feature. It is otherwise the joyful high-spirited yelping, with harmonies, ladies and gentlemen (in stentorian Ed Sullivan tones always, of course), the Beatles. It's OK and explicitly recommended that you listen to it a few times at a go, not asking much at 2:44 or so.

6. John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (1972)

(listen)

Is there any music more willfully isolated and sequestered as what swamps us every December? By the math, on a rational basis and objectively speaking, a handful or better of titles on a list like this, or approximately 8.3%, should be Christmas music. But does that ever happen? No—not least probably by dint of the resentments raised in so many of us bludgeoned by it in public spaces and via media every year. I share this problem but I also have a secret to tell you. There's a lot of Christmas music I like a lot, from Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" to the Phil Spector holiday album to classics by all the usual suspects, Nat King Cole and Burl Ives and even Andy Williams. I even love many of the hymns, in their time and place. For many years after the murder of John Lennon, starting in fact that very year of 1980 when I made a point of acquiring this single, this was how I greeted the Christmas morning: "So this is Christmas and what have you done, / Another year over, a new one just begun." I wanted very much for it to become a holiday standard (as much as, later, when I discovered it, I wanted it again for Big Star's "Jesus Christ," an even more hopeless cause). Perhaps it has finally become one across these long decades, though I haven't noticed it on any radio station I listen to any more than "Fairytale of New York" (#37 on this list, which means I actually made a 2% Christmas nut, which I bet you $10,000 is better than anyone else offering up a list of 100 favorite songs). Now "Happy Xmas" sounds to me more diminished, sad and echoing with faraway memories of a distantly remembered past. But if that's not one perfectly apt description of the best Christmas music, I don't know what is.

17. Beatles, "A Day in the Life" (1967)

(listen)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were always steadfast in their denial that this was a drug song, a tag that earned it a ban from the BBC and a lot of unwelcome stigma as well. I think it's true that "I'd love to turn you on" and "found my way upstairs and had a smoke / somebody spoke and I went into a dream" are fairly slim reeds on which to hang the charge. On the other hand, the eerie racket that follows those lines is not, particularly. That is some strange stuff, and I still remember the moment I first heard this because of those passages. I was getting up early, before daylight. I was getting dressed. I was putting on a blue and white plaid shirt, buttoning it. It was winter and I was wearing long underwear under my pants. I knew it was the Beatles by the voices and general tenor of it but I didn't know anything else about it. And it scared me badly. I thought something was wrong with my radio and kept fiddling with the tuning and then the song would come back. And then that weird shit would come back. And then the song again. It reminded me of a frightening dream I'd had before, in which I could not make my radio stop playing, even unplugging it from the wall and finally smashing it, only to discover a small person inside it singing. I was basically too young (and/or naive) to understand about drugs, but "A Day in the Life" was profoundly disturbing and unsettling for me. Eventually, perhaps artifact of Stockholm syndrome or something like it, I came to embrace it as basically my one favorite Beatles song. It's got all the tunefulness I loved and came to expect from them, but it really packs a wallop as well, and on multiple levels.

33. Beatles, "Yes it Is" (1965)

(listen)

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.

34. Beatles, "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" (1964)

(listen)

I see on Wikipedia that this likely qualifies as something of a minor Beatles song—never a hit, written as a confidence-booster for George Harrison to sing, and lightly derided by Lennon and McCartney. It's short too, at less than two minutes. But it has always been among my favorites and even more so as increasingly my favorite albums by the Beatles have become the two bearing the titles of the first two movie projects. This is from the Hard Day's Night album and it's as shimmering and punchy and lustrous and black-and-white as the movie itself, attacking with brilliant ringing chords and a churning rhythm that set the tone instantly. I guess it's rather sing-songy (for George's sake apparently), but it has all the hallmarks of what made those first Beatles songs so perfectly attractive: innocent and full of children's energy, but compressed to diamond-points, overflowing with shrewd musical ideas and strategies that are never busy calling attention to themselves but are simply there to make the songs better. And they do make the songs better, unique and unusual and interesting, not in a way that shouts, "Look how clever we are," but rather that says, "What do you think of that? How do you like that?" "Silly love songs" as Paul McCartney would later make a fetish of it. That's all this is. "Before this dance is through / I think I'll love you too / I'm so happy when you dance with me." But it's driven by those chords and that rhythm and God knows what other musical tricks. It gets right under my skin and makes me instantly happy and I'm happy just to play it over and over—and particularly thrilled when it shows up unexpected on the radio, which believe me is not often enough. Hardly ever, in fact.

60. Beatles, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (1968)

(listen)

This is mostly a John Lennon song but Paul McCartney has supposedly said (reported by Wikipedia without citation) that it's his favorite on the White Album. That alone arguably makes it as good an example as any of a "Lennon/McCartney" composition, so many written by one and tweaked by the other and hashed into their beguiling final forms in the studio (in many ways the real instrument they played over the arc of their career, one reason I'm satisfied to call George Martin the one and only fifth Beatle). I admit I'm a bit of a Beatles crank when it comes to the White Album; I think it somehow manages the feat of being a good deal less than the sum of its parts. But the parts that are good (this, "Back in the U.S.S.R.," "Good Night," a few others) are very, very good. Lennon later denied "Warm Gun" was the drug song so many read into it (i.e., gun = syringe) on the basis that his period of heroin addiction did not involve injections. Well, maybe. He claimed rather that he got it off a headline on a gun lovers' magazine. He did acknowledge the sexual innuendo, maintaining that side of it emerged as part of the sparking with Yoko Ono. But trying to "explain" this song falls short of the complexity and piercing harshness so compacted into its less than three minutes: the altogether oppressive vibe, a quasi rape scene rendered in classic Lennon streams of language, the squawls and menacing lines of guitar, "I need a fix 'cos I'm going down," a mother superior (what?) who "jumped the gun," and a vocal performance that flits in and out of something dredged from the bottom of a soul, with a good deal of dynamics. Plus "bang bang shoot shoot" going on in the background on the chorus—for the comic relief, I suppose.

"I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1964)

34. Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (Jan. 25, 1964, #1, 7 wks.)

Another song that has ranked much higher for me on previous lists. I was surprised this time to find how relatively little I have ever cared for most of the Beatles hits. A follow-up project I am contemplating, "100 Other Songs," would no doubt correct for that, culling heavily from Beatles album tracks—because there's no question about the enduring significance for me of this strange band of pop tunesmiths, dominated by the bass player and rhythm guitarist. And there's no question this was the song that raised the curtain for most of us of a certain age. At the time, TV was generally denied in our household (the result of my father witnessing the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald on live television) and as much as I begged and pleaded I was allowed to watch only the third of their unprecedented consecutive appearances on Ed Sullivan's variety show in February 1964. They played this with "Twist and Shout" and "Please Please Me." In April, all three would be part of the Beatles' historic assault of the Billboard charts, when in one week they occupied all five of the top positions. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was #4; the other two were "Can't Buy Me Love" and "She Loves You." This is how Beatlemania works, in a nutshell—piling on with the statistics that delineate the phenomenon. They are literally incomparable and I doubt that anything like it will ever be seen again. And what's all the fuss about anyway? (Reaching that question was also part of the natural progression of Beatlemania.) In the case of "I Want to Hold Your Hand": bashing crashing stirring guitar chords, howling harmonies, and a nagging sweet tune, in service of a declaration of absurdly innocent puppy dog love. Don't make me say you had to be there.

"Help!" (1965)

43. Beatles, "Help!" (Aug. 14, 1965, #1, 3 wks.)

I have literally gone around and around and around on this one—often it has seemed tedious, worn out from overexposure, almost thick-witted in both conception and execution. Then, often when I'm driving, it strikes like a thunderbolt and occurs to me how well suited it is for singing along with at the top of one's voice. It was one of the first singles I ever purchased so has that enduring baggage as well. I think it's safe to say, though infinitely arguable of course, that it represents the pinnacle of Beatlemania, following the first tour and introduction to the world, as the title song from their second movie (by which time it was de rigueur, if not plain rote, for teen girls everywhere to show up and scream their heads off, to the point where you couldn't make out a word of dialogue, not that anyone was missing much if you've ever gone back to look at that movie). It was also a point where Lennon started to get more obviously confessional (and verging on the point when Lennon and McCartney started going their separate ways in the songwriting), abstracted and oblique; no one needed to pay any particular attention to the personal details, a point of view that decidedly would change, especially in Lennon's solo career. But here, I think, we see the Beatles beginning to totter at the tipping point of empty-headed teen pop music icons and head toward something more significant and meaningful, at least for one (rather large) segment of their audience. Sure, you want personal, go to "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" on the album (which they ultimately gave away to an outfit named Silkie, but Lennon's vocal is the version you want). This was the hit, one of them, loud and proud, as Brian Epstein intended it to be.

Anthology 2 (1965-1968)

"I'm Only Sleeping (Rehearsal)" If the mid-'90s flood of Beatles demos, alternate tracks, live tracks, and other such bootleg-level fare was long overdue and much appreciated, this particular volume likely ranks as the one most were waiting for. Certainly me. Though I had heard some bits and pieces of it over the years, I had never been fan enough to seek it out specifically and spend the money. But I did jump on this fast, and eventually found all my expectations met, even exceeded. High expectations. Eventually. Very, very high expectations. Exceeded.

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Abbey Road (1969)

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" Objectively speaking, there is no song title of the past 50 years more common than "I Want You." It's a simple and potent formulation, assertive rather than passive. Giants of this planet Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Savage Garden, Elvis Costello, even the Troggs and Spiritualized, stand with the Beatles, here, each with their different song and the same title. As you see, the Beatles have added extra copy with their parenthetical. For that matter, so has the King himself, Elvis Presley, with "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You." Not to mention the downright wordy "If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right." You may suppose that all these latter open the door for variants and you are right: try this on for size: Bread, "Baby I'm-A Want You." Andy Gibbs, "I Just Want to Be Your Everything." Hey, why the fritch not!?! Thanks to technology, I can name-check the Barking Spiders with pinpoint accuracy. Check it OUT: Lobo's over-under Bread parallel of the time, "I'd Love You to Want Me." Various (and sundry!) "I Just Want to Dance With/Make Love to You/Walk You Home/Hold Your Hand" permutations. Also, "I/I'd Still Want You/Your Love/Sex" flavors from a whole new crew: Hank Williams, Chic, Chris Isaak, George Michael. Iggy's & all the vast ranging covers of "I Want to Be Your Dog." Sly wants to take you higher, the Jackson 5 want you back, Merle Haggard is always wanting you, Lou Reed says he wants to boogie with you, Nat King Cole (ever the dapper gentleman) wants to thank your folks, and Randy Newman wants you to hurt like he does. Frank Zappa's "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama"? Would that be going too far? This one goes on a long time and ends suddenly. Plus the coda.