And Fifth Makes Five (Beatles dvds)

So, found out yesterday* wd have been George Harrison's 70th birthday. When the youngest Beatle passes the seventy year mark you know Beatlemania and its aftermath was a long time ago.

Appropriately enough, I've been on something of a Beatles kick lately (as opposed to usually listening to them in the general mix). A few weeks back I bought the MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, knowing full well that it was gosh-awful from having seen it once, years before, when in grad school at Fayetteville.** But (some of) the music is good, and I had a curiosity to see if it was really as bad as I remembered (it was).

I knew YELLOW SUBMARINE had been released a few years ago in an expanded version, adding some new sequences, which I'd rented at the time. And I have both A HARD DAYS NIGHT and HELP on VHS (a gift from my mother back around the time of the Marquette Mythcon) but now that we're newly without a VHS player they're less assessible. I remarked to Janice how it was a shame you cdn't get either on dvd -- Imagine my surprise, then, when dvds of both arrived not long after, Janice having gone on line, found out I'd been wrong about their not being available, and having ordered me both as presents. Horray!

Watching HELP made me want to see YELLOW SUBMARINE again (it'd been a while), and I found that while I thought I had a copy I was wrong about that. Luckily this was soon remedied, and I found myself in possession of four of the five Beatles movies, leaving out only LET IT BE. I knew this was unavailable -- but then I'd 'known' that HELP and HARD DAYS NIGHT were too, so if I was wrong about them I might be wrong about that. Sure enough, amazon provided a solution. LET IT BE arrived yesterday, and I watched it (for what will be the first of no doubt many times) last night.

Of them, I find enjoy HELP the most; something about its sense of humor resonates --"Jolly, with a knife" "They have to paint you red before they kill you. It's a different religion than ours. (pause)  I think" "I'm going to miss the sacrifice!" and that final silent appearance of that Channel swimmer.*** HARD DAYS NIGHT is good too, but I find myself drawn back to rewatch it much less often. MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR is hopeless; better to stick with the album there, which is half-soundtrack and half-compilation of some singles from around that period. YELLOW SUBMARINE is weird in a kind of pre-Python way (the animation style is obviously a big influence on Gilliam's work, but also just as obviously indebted to Peter Max****); I've stolen from it in various DandD scenarios over the years, to the general bafflement of players ("there's got to be someone with a Bigby's Hand wand hiding around here somewhere, I just know it!").

And then there's LET IT BE, which is both depressing and uplifting at the same time. On the one hand it de-mythologizes with a vengeance, showing Paul trying to get the others to take the whole thing seriously (and annoying them no end in the process), a glowering and resentful George, detached John, and unhappy Ringo slouching about. Yoko haunts the set like a prefiguration of  THE RING, and the whole is weighed down by too many middling songs ("Two of Us", "I've Got a Feeling", "Dig a Pony"*****) among what would become classics ("Get Back", "Don't Let Me Down", maybe "I Me Mine", "Let It Be" itself). And yet it starts to come together when they switch to the Abbey Road studio and bring in Billy Preston; even the second-rate songs  start to transcend their limitations through spirited performances. Last of all comes the rooftop concert, their last performance before an audience. And all of the sudden, it's over, brought to a premature end by the police. If the whole film had been as good as the final twenty minutes, it'd be remembered as a classic. As it is, a mixed bag, but one I'm glad to see again.

I suppose I'll have to see about getting THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY from Netflix for my next Beatles fix . . .

--John R.


*thanks Stan!

**where they had an eclectic film program I occasionally went to; remember seeing "Bambi vs. Godzilla" and a live-action Wiley Coyote short there, as well as the Star Trek blooper reel, alongside less memorable fare.

***and the cameo appearance of Stonehenge in one scene is an added bonus

****does anybody else out there remember PETER MAX'S PAPER AIRPLANE BOOK?

*****A good example of this being "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window", one of several songs they rehearsed that made it onto ABBEY ROAD instead of LET IT BE (or GET BACK, as it was originally to be called); this one didn't make it into the final film (as did early versions of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Oh! Darling", and "Octopus's Garden"), but endless retakes made their way onto various old bootlegs in the late 70s/early 80s (and, I assume, today as well).

The Beatles' 'RAIN'

So, Saturday we went with friends (Stan, Anne, Sigf.) to see a Beatles tribute band, RAIN, perform at the Moore Theatre downtown.

It was great.

I had my doubts; tribute bands are not really my thing. I'd rather see the real thing* (as in the two times I've seen McCartney perform live) or stay home and enjoy the original recordings (it's rare a day goes by without my playing music, and Beatles records figure prominently into that). But I was born about a decade too late to have ever had a chance to see the real thing here, so it was this or nothing. And they put on quite a show: a note-by-note, gesture-by-gesture re-enactment of the Ed Sullivan show performance, the Shea Stadium show, et al.

I'd thought, from something I'd seen online, that several different people wd be playing each Beatle.** I was wrong about that: it was the same four performers throughout, taking breaks to change clothes and looks as they moved through the various eras of the group's history (British invasion, Rubber Soul/Revolver, Sgt Pepper, post-Pepper, Abbey Road). The guy playing Paul I thought did the best: he really nailed the look and feel of early Paul (and, oddly enough, his bass was the dominant instrument in much of the early part of the show) and did a pretty good job of later Paul as well. By contrast, early John was pretty stiff, but he really came into his own later on: he really looked a lot like late John. Whereas the guy playing George really didn't look much like George whatever they did, but did really get into playing the 'Abbey Road' gravedigger George near the end. Ringo didn't get much of a chance to be Ringo (it's easy to forget now that he was the most popular member of the group), but don't see how they really cd have avoided that, given their approach.

One place where they departed from films of actual performances was in their unplugged session, where Paul, George, and John sat down in a row with guitars and did Blackbird and several others I've now forgotten. It was v. effective, and a good projection of something the Beatles might well have done, had they continued touring and performing live on a regular basis after the mid-point in their career (Paul famously did just such a set that included several Beatles songs in his 1976 'Wings Over America' tour).

Of course, two hours or so isn't nearly enough to do all the Beatles' hits (So little time, so much music). Among the songs they didn't find time for were "Ticket to Ride", "Norwegian Wood", "Nowhere Man", "Lady Madonna", "Something" and, oddly enough, "Rain" itself (this last was broadcast over the loudspeakers at the end as we filed out). They did include one post-Beatles song: Give Peace a Chance, which set me to wondering and thinking what song they might add by each of the others to indicate their post-Beatles career,*** but turned out that one John song was it.

Of course, you have to accept some suspension of disbelief for a show like this to work. I suppose it'd be asking too much to have a left-handed bass player play Paul, but it was jarring to hear they perform "Please Please Me" with no-one playing the harmonica (it was either played backstage by a music ninja or played as a recording). And the great three-person dueling guitar solos of "The End" were all played by 'George' (no easy way for 'Paul' to swap out his bass, for one thing).

In the end, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and found it oddly moving. I'd gladly go see this, or a similar show, again. Though I do wish I cd hear "Hey Jude" actually performed by the band on stage, rather than turned into a sing-along. McCartney himself does this, but it's still annoying. I've never attended a ballet, but I'm pretty sure they don't have a point in the show when they encourage the audience to rise and twirl in place. As that, so this.

As for the song "Rain" itself, it's an old favorite of mine, both for the message (take what comes, enjoy!) and the music. It's on the Beatles' next-to-last album, THE BEATLES AGAIN, a compilation long out of print but full of good music, some of it from the HARD DAYS NIGHT period ("Can't Buy Me Love", "Should Have Known Better"), some mid-period ("Lady Madonna", "Revolution", "Hey Jude" itself), some late, like the underappreciated gem "Don't Let Me Down" (from the LET IT BE sessions) and "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (the last song the Beatles recorded; only John and Paul showed up, recording all the parts between them).

Good music. Good show. Recommended.

--John R.





*groups I have been lucky enough to see include Captain and Tennille, Little River Band, Leon Russell, McCartney, Clapton, Paul Simon, Alan Parsons Project, Tears for Fears, Heart, Three Dog Night (only they were down to Two Dog Night by then), Blood, Sweat, and Tears, et al.

**(I now think there are three or four such groups touring at any given time, but that each is a coherent, cohesive unit)

***the ones I picked were "My Sweet Lord" (George), "It Don't Come Easy" (Ringo), and probably "Maybe I'm Amazed" (Paul), all from 1970/71.

6339 songs

So, a few months back* I started listening to the songs on my iPod -- ALL the songs on my iPod -- in alphabetical order. My thinking was that there's a lot of great music there I never listen to because I don't think about it. It's the problem of too many choices: out of over six thousand songs, which ones do I want to hear at any given time? I can always think of a good starting point, but where to go from there? Janice's solution, and it's a good one, is to hit shuffle and enjoy a mix of what the iPod gives her. But that ironically works better with her mini-iPod than with our old 80-gig iPod: too many recorded books on the latter introduce a jarring note, as one song is followed by a randomly-excerted bit of text (some of which inconveniently run over an hour in length), followed by another song; it breaks up the background-music element of my listen-while-you-work routine.

So, I decided to listen to everything, going under the "Songs" option and starting with #1 ("A" by the Bare Naked Ladies) and ending yesterday, early evening, with #6339 ("10538 Overture" by E.L.O.) -- iPod's alphabetization first running through the alphabet (the vast bulk of the songs, ending in #6129 (Herb Albert's "Zorba the Greek"), then things in foreign scripts --I have a fair number of pieces from anime soundtracks with unrecognizable (to me) titles in kanji. Then last of all came numbers, which included not just songs like "867-5309 but also radio station dial numbers (for use in playing it in the car) and audio recordings I'd made (titled by date) at the 2004 Marquette Blackwelder conference and again at another 2007 Tolkien event.

Of course, I didn't feel obliged to listen literally to 6,339 tracks. Some songs are on there multiple times -- which is fine, when listening to them by album, but can be a bit much when listening to them alphabetically, song by song. I think I really did listen to "Hey Jude" five times in a row, but then I really like Hey Jude (na-na-na-naah), while I think I skipped over some of the multiple versions of "If I Had a Million Dollars", good though that song is.

My conclusion? I have a lot of good music on this old iPod. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of Beatles, and McCartney, but surprisingly there's more Warren Zevon and Bare Naked Ladies than I'd expected and somewhat less Alan Parsons Project or Tears for Fears (given that I have all the latter two's albums). Also, there can't possibly be as many tracks for "Pirates of Penzance" and "Les Miserables" as there seemed to be. There just can't.

Also, that I was wise when starting to build my iTunes account all over again on the new laptop after the old laptop's catastrophic failure a few years back, in that now instead of adding a whole album I only add the songs I like and want to listen to from that album -- which may be the whole thing, or may be a single song.

What's next? I think it's time to dip back into my .45s again when I'm at home and downstairs, though for working-by music they require I be working on a project that benefits by frequent interruption -- which is a rare sort of project indeed. More likely I'll devote worktime music to the albums rather than the singles, many of which I never did replace with cds and most of which still play just fine.

And for the iPod, I'll probably do some shuffle within the songs by a specific artist.

And my next music purchase? That'll probably be the new George Harrison album, which I just found out about a few days ago.

Good listening, all.

--John R

*unfortunately, I didn't make any note of the time.