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At Beatles anniversary time, the stories write themselves. “It was 25/30/40 years ago today!” “The act you’ve known for all these years!” “A splendid time was guaranteed for all!” Last week’s 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most acclaimed rock album ever and the apogee of the Beatles’ cultural influence in the 1960s, is a time for all those chestnuts and more. But Pepper’s doesn’t make sense if it’s not put in context. And the only way to do that, given the weight of the Beatles’ presence, is to take a look at everything the band put on record over its eight-year recording career.
It turns out that ranking the songs recorded by the Beatles in the 1960s is easy; you put the worst one at the top, and the best one at the bottom.
The list is based on the band’s British releases, which is how they thought of their work. In the U.K. in the 1960s, the group released 13 official studio albums, including the A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine quasi-soundtrack albums. The so-called “White Album,” The Beatles, was a two-record set. There was also a flurry of non-album singles throughout those years, collected in different ways in the U.K. and the U.S. EMI also released a number of four-song EPs in Britain, particularly early on, but only one of them, Long Tall Sally, contained songs not available in other forms. Releases in the U.S. were a similar mishmash, but from Revolver onward, with minor exceptions, the studio-album releases, at least, were standardized. The songs the band released in the 1960s that were not on their studio albums were eventually consolidated in a catchall collection dubbed, quite lamely, Past Masters.
The Beatles based their sound largely on American R&B, and they, like their compatriots in the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, filled their early records with covers of their favorite tracks. They are duly noted below; most sound like the appreciative efforts of a young and not-quite-formed band; the Beatles being the Beatles, however, a few are transcendent.
I use the songs on those releases to create this ranking, with some ephemera (like the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or George Martin’s Yellow Submarine orchestrations) ignored, with a few other interesting tracks that have dribbled out over the decades added in.
This doesn’t get said enough: These songs were specifically designed to pack their punch at high volume. Try ‘em with real speakers, not headphones.
I am indebted to Beatles super-scholar Mark Lewisohn for his many detailed books on the band, most important The Beatles: Recording Sessions; Bob Spitz’s close-to-definitive The Beatles; engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere; and the engrossing podcast Something About the Beatles, hosted by Briton Richard Buskin and American Robert Rodriguez. Any mistakes are, of course, my own. Please let me know if I conflated any facts or misrepresented anything in the comments section below, or publicly humiliate me on Twitter @hitsville.
Beyond everything else, the Beatles were the biggest cultural story of the modern era, and they were, in the end, pop, if pop is music that makes people happy. Through the confusion and the chaos, the pain and the self-questioning, they worked to create a joyous sound. They didn’t fuss about it; it’s what they wanted to do. They loved to turn us on.
213. “Good Day Sunshine,” Revolver (1966): Paul McCartney was welcome to write all the happy, upbeat, cheery-cheery songs he wanted. But this one is beyond the pale. It’s blaring, received, and strident. Even by McCartney standards (“Getting Better,” “Hello Goodbye”) the title is inane. It could have been “Yum Food Delicious,” or “Hot Sex Baby,” or any other three random words McCartney took out of his Young Man’s Collection of Positive Synonyms — and note that of these three choices McCartney chose the blandest. McCartney’s piano playing, which graced so many Beatles songs, right up to “A Day in the Life,” is a parody of itself. It’s the worst song in the Beatles’ classic period. And it ruins Revolver, otherwise the most consistent and mind-blowing collection of pop-rock songs ever conceived by man.
212. “Dig It,” Let It Be (1970): As Lennon himself put it, this is what you get when you’re stoned all the time and don’t give a shit. Docked eight notches for Lennon’s final spoken line, “And now we’d like to do ‘Hark the Angels Come,’” which on the record sounds like a swipe at the next track, “Let It Be,” a song that is tuneful and about something, unlike “Dig It.” McCartney sometimes produced schlock, but rarely work as annoying as this.
211. “Little Child,” With the Beatles (1963): Probably the worst of Lennon and McCartney’s early efforts. Filler from the second album.
210. “Tell Me What You See,” Help! (1965): A highly derivative track shoved onto the second non-soundtrack side of the record from the band’s second movie.
209. “Dig a Pony,” Let It Be (1970): Doggerel from Lennon. The most uninteresting song on one of the band’s least interesting albums. The lyrics are nonsense, but all he wants is you. Boo-hoo.
208.“A Taste of Honey,” Please Please Me (1963): John Lennon, a local Liverpool tough and an incipient art-school dropout, had a skiffle band. Paul McCartney, two years his junior, had a rapidly evolving understanding of music and a slightly younger guitarist schoolmate named George Harrison. Once the three jelled, the band honed its chops playing before ever-more-appreciative audiences in clubs in Liverpool, notably the Cavern, and in three separate residencies, with a drummer named Pete Best and a bassist named Stu Sutcliffe, in a succession of strip clubs in the red-light district of Hamburg. (The first of these ended when authorities discovered George Harrison was underage; he was unceremoniously deported.) The band’s undisciplined and chaotic performances are now the stuff of legend, ranging as they did from wild American R&B to the schlockiest schlock, like this. But at the end of this trial by fire — playing in front of gamblers, gangsters, strippers, and thugs — they emerged as tight and focused a band as can be imagined.
207. “Ask Me Why,” Please Please Me (1963): “I love you / Woo-woo-woo-woo.” “Ask Me Why” was one of Lennon and McCartney’s first compositions, as the lyrics here attest. With a major exception, “One After 909,” the results of these early efforts were as naïve and plain as you’d expect. Still, having left Sutcliffe in Hamburg, the band continued to rock the Cavern as a quartet, with Paul McCartney playing bass. A local music-store owner, Brian Epstein, saw potential in the band when no one else did and reinvented himself as their manager. After hitting dead ends with all of the established British labels of the time, he put together a last-shot meeting with an exec at Parlophone, an overlooked division of the conglomerate EMI. The exec was named George Martin; he was really a producer, classically trained, who’d fashioned a career making hit comedy albums with the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Peter Cook. He auditioned the band and didn’t not like what he heard. He advised them to write some new material and get rid of their drummer.
206. “Free As a Bird,” single (1995): This single enraged me, in 1995, when it was released to gin up interest in the first Anthology album. It was a Lennon song from long after he’d left the Beatles; he sounded so vulnerable, and the studio work that had gone into making this distant-sounding, crummily recorded demo sound presentable felt like too big a burden for the martyred star to bear. His former songwriting partner, one Paul McCartney, added six lines as a sort of bridge. Of the six lines, two were taken from a Shangri-Las song, and they weren’t particularly good ones, either. (“Whatever happened to / The love that we once knew?”) Twenty years later, it still enrages me. Docked 100 notches for corpse desecration.
205. “Not a Second Time,” With the Beatles (1963): You keep waiting for a redeeming melody to rise to the surface, but it doesn’t come. The weirdest thing about the song is how the title words come on a low note that Lennon doesn’t quite hit, a rarity for a band with such vocal precision from the start.
204. “She’s Leaving Home,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): A bathetic lugubrious mess, the nadir of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The call-and-response chorus is labored; the whole thing reeks of having come from a squaresville OffBroadway musical about kids these days. The instrumentation is unusual; there are no actual Beatles playing on the track, but no one cares because the song is so bad. Note that the subject of the song is essentially the same as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which does much more with it.
203. “Real Love,” single (1995): This was another Lennon demo from the late 1970s, already known via the Imagine movie, gussied up by the surviving Beatles and used as another fake new Beatles song to promote the second Anthology collection of outtakes and unreleased material. It’s unquestionably a pretty song. Docked 100 notches for grave robbing and general dishonesty.
202.“Thank You Girl,” single (1963): The highly inferior B side of “From Me to You,” the band’s third single, distinguished only by a few dissonant harmonica notes.
201. “I’ll Get You,” single (1963): Lots of Oh, yeahs here. An intermittently charming and chuggy very early composition, notable only for being the B side of “She Loves You.” You can hear McCartney working it on the bass, though.
200. “Chains,” Please Please Me (1963): A Carole King–Gerry Goffin song, from their Brill Building days, sung by a noticeably young George Harrison. After the first visit to Parlophone, McCartney and Lennon went back to Liverpool and did what needed to be done. With a professionalism they might not have possessed, they forthrightly confronted Rory Storm, the leader of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a prominent Liverpool band, and told him they wanted to steal his drummer, who went by the name Ringo Starr. It was important, they said. They might have a record contract.
199. “Misery,” Please Please Me (1963): You can hear some harmonies coming together on this, but otherwise it’s a forgettable song from the band’s first album.
198. “Every Little Thing,” Beatles for Sale (1964): Some melodic lines of interest here, but not much else. There’s an unconvincing vocal by Lennon and some inappropriate drum sounds.
197. “Hold Me Tight,” With the Beatles (1963): One of McCartney’s earliest songwriting efforts and accordingly one of the slightest. The backing track is clompy, and we don’t need to hear all the you-you-you-you’s anymore. McCartney doesn’t sound natural singing, either.
196. “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,” A Hard Day’s Night (1964):
A simple chestnut from the early days, brought out to fill up the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack.
195. “Only a Northern Song,” Yellow Submarine (1969): It’s possible George Harrison was the first pop star to attack his record label, or, in this case, his publishing company in a song. Band manager Brian Epstein had let many lucrative deals slip through his fingers; but particular concern was directed at Dick James, their song publisher, who made 1, 2, 10, 20 fortunes from this deal. (In fact, the band’s tie to him was somewhat loose, but they were never smart enough to hire a lawyer to restructure the deal.) Historical value aside, McCartney and Lennon had vetoed it for Sgt. Pepper’s, and it later turned up on the inferior Yellow Submarine soundtrack two years later, the weakest of the four weak songs the band added to the title track and “All You Need Is Love.
194. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): The whimsy will continue until morale improves. Definitely in the top five of Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote. It took a long time for the band to get this right in the studio. No one liked it; but it was reportedly Lennon who finally sat down and banged the piano part out appropriately. This is a song that isn’t about anything in the first place; the last two verses are the same except for having Desmond and Molly’s names switched out, but McCartney’s vocal gets more and more excited. Newsflash: No one cares about Desmond and Molly Jones.
193. “Your Mother Should Know,” Magical Mystery Tour (1967): Another song that has existed in the cultural consciousness for 50 years and has been played on the radio incessantly over that time. The lyrics are inane even by McCartney standards.
192. “Don’t Pass Me By,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): This was a song that Ringo had been bashing about for several years. You can tell that by lines like these: “Sorry that I doubted you / I was so unfair / You were in a car crash / And you lost your hair.” To Starr’s credit, we have to acknowledge that the words unfair and hair do rhyme, so there’s that. The odd piano sound and aimless violin don’t do anything for it. And that repetitious backing track goes on for nearly four minutes.
191. “You Like Me Too Much,” Help! (1965): A very simple George Harrison song, dumped as filler on the second side of Help!
190. “Baby It’s You,” Please Please Me (1963): A minor bit of ’50s pop schlock, co-written by Burt Bacharach early in his career. The band’s delivery is deliberate and respectful, much like that on the original, a somewhat obscure Shirelles track; a much more over-the-top version would be a hit in the 1970s for a band called Smith. After being told by George Martin to write some material, the band came back with a few new songs: “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You.” Martin recalls thinking the songs were marginal. He was unsure about the group … but decided to go for it. “Love Me Do” became a minor hit for the band in England; such was the meteoric evolution of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting skills that by the time Please Please Me, the band’s first album, made it to stores, in February 1963, they had already written the songs that would release the kraken of Beatlemania.
189. “I’ll Be Back,” A Hard Day’s Night (1964): The least of the lesser songs on the second non-soundtrack side of the A Hard Day’s Night album, and an anticlimactic album closer.
188. “Baby’s in Black,” Beatles for Sale (1964): Another of the darker songs that marked a largely uninteresting, transitional album. Not that much as a song, though.
187. “Roll Over Beethoven,” With the Beatles (1963):
A creditable early lead vocal on the Chuck Berry classic by George Harrison, who loved the song. It was a stage favorite that is a little tepid on record. The band loved Berry, of course; Lennon said “Chuck Berry” was another name for rock and roll, and the Beatles played a variety of other Berry songs in their BBC appearances. With the Beatles was the band’s second album, coming out just before the end of 1963. Since Please Please Me, eight months earlier, the band had had three No. 1 singles in England, and a fourth that went to no. 2. The release of With the Beatles was where things in England began to get weird. Stores were overrun by teenagers wanting the record. It is said to have sold a half-million copies on its first day; that would be the rough equivalent of 4 million copies in the U.S. these days, and is even more impressive given the primitive distribution systems in the U.K. at the time.
186. “It’s Only Love,” Help! (1965): A Lennon song from the band’s second movie soundtrack. In the band’s early songs, both Lennon and McCartney affected a knowingness about love affairs. They worked out the logic of this or that scenario, and delivered verdicts or advice accordingly. It took a while before actual love songs with recognizable people and situations in them would be in the offing.
185. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): Fans sometimes marvel at Lennon’s habit, in the mid-’60s, of drawing inspiration for songs from real life — a news story about potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, for “A Day in the Life,” a Corn Flakes commercial for “Good Morning, Good Morning.” As those fans know, Lennon had an actual 1800s circus poster in his home, and he and McCartney, working together, artfully borrowed a surprising percentage of the words from that poster for this song. (The new six-disc mega rerelease of Sgt. Pepper includes a reproduction of the actual poster.) With the help of Abbey Road’s munchkins, the collapsing calliope sound and a found-sound collage at the end they put together has some aural interest. But what I don’t get is this. The Beatles set themselves up as Sgt. Pepper’s band for this, their most celebrated (and technically advanced) album. So why were Sgt. Pepper & Co. writing songs about some other entertainment endeavors? And while the lyrical collage is itself artful, there’s either too much subtext here (i.e., the various acts have hidden roman à clef meanings) or not enough (i.e., it’s just words taken from a poster). The result is a decent novelty song that provides ammunition for those, like me, who contend that, track for (novelty) track, the song quality on Sgt. Pepper doesn’t live up its reputation.
184. “When I Get Home,” A Hard Day’s Night (1964): The chorus of this Lennon vocal workout is downright irritating, and the bridge is worse. The song helped fill out the second side of A Hard Day’s Night. The film was designed to be quick and a cheapie, to capitalize on the group’s (presumably temporary) stardom. A flaw in their contracts allowed them to record outside songs for movies, a financial windfall for the studio lucky enough to make the film. What no one expected was that a young, canny director named Richard Lester would make the resulting movie an unexpected classic, with any number of comic set pieces, ranging from the slapstick to the satirical, that remain invigorating and pointed to this day. (In one scene, George is taken in to be quizzed by an amoral adman on what British youth were thinking.) A secret weapon: Lester’s crisp quasi-documentary photography, which captured the chaos of young girls chasing the band in all its kinetic, feral glory.
183. “For You Blue,” Let It Be (1970): A winsome romp from George Harrison. McCartney and Lennon were tossing half-baked, substandard throwaways onto the band’s later releases. It’s only fair that Harrison was able to do so as well. The overall production values of Let It Be are lousy; Harrison’s voice never sounded so thin and insubstantial. The song ended up being the (highly) inferior B side of “The Long and Winding Road,” the group’s last single before they broke up.
182. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” Abbey Road (1969): This song is catchy as hell. The anvil sound is hilarious. But it’s still one of those weird McCartney tracks. Wait — Maxwell kills people? In the wan Let It Be movie, you can see John Lennon looking pensive as the band runs through this piffle, wondering how his life has come to this. Docked 50 notches for the verse in which Maxwell kills the pataphysical scientist. She seemed cool.
181. “Wild Honey Pie,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): This silly Paul number offends on a lot of levels. It’s not a coherent track for an album. Much later, McCartney would allow that he was guilty of laziness for putting nontracks like this on his albums.
180. “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” Beatles for Sale (1964): Harrison’s upbeat, heavily echoed vocals make even this ginned-up jalopy going nowhere — a Carl Perkins cover — sound interesting, for a minute or so. An anticlimax to the last uninteresting album the band would release for several years.
179. “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” single (1969): Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles. They broke up for a lot of reasons. But one big cause was John Lennon’s dickish moves. Case in point: Showing up to “The White Album” sessions with new girlfriend Ono, who stayed there for the duration. Outsiders had never been allowed in Beatles recording sessions, and Ono — ten years older, supposed to be a substantive artist in her own right and a pioneering feminist figure — sat silently by Lennon’s side, even following him to the bathroom. Then Lennon started using heroin. Fun times, fun times. Later he tried to paint the other Beatles as the bad guys. During this period, Lennon was being persecuted by the authorities, but the lines “The way things are going / They’re going to crucify me” seem a little whiney. And then there are the dulcet lines, “Oh, boy when you’re dead / You don’t take nothing with you but your soul — Think!” The song itself, stripped down and recorded by just McCartney and Lennon, is fairly catchy, but it’s crudely recorded and mixed, and Lennon sorely overestimates our care for the plight of his new wife and him —and our tolerance for his preachiness.
178. “Oh! Darling,” Abbey Road (1969): For this show-offy number, McCartney spent nights in the studio singing his lungs out to get the desired desperation and strain in his voice. The result is just that — show-offy. The Beatles were on to amazing stuff in the 1960s, and it’s disconcerting to think that McCartney was spending so much time on fluff when he could have been looking for mature follow-ups to “Penny Lane” or “Lovely Rita.” Also, his overuse of the “big voice” here made its much more meaningful use in “Golden Slumbers” slightly ho-hum.
177. “Bad Boy,” Past Masters (1965): Another song by the guy who wrote “Slow Down,” Larry Williams, a band favorite. You might not recognize the song from the title: It’s the one with the chorus, “Now junior, behave yourself!” I don’t think Lennon pulls it off. This first turned up on an American release, Beatles VI.
176. “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” Beatles for Sale (1964): Here’s John putting his emotions out, early in the band’s career, in an otherwise forgettable tune. The vulnerability is charming, though.
175. “I Call Your Name,” Long Tall Sally EP (1964): Another of those early chuggy numbers, Lennon singing lead. There’s a goofy, off-kilter solo.
174. “What Goes On,” Rubber Soul (1965): A minor, droning number, with a lead vocal by Ringo. One of the least interesting songs on the otherwise sparkling Rubber Soul. Ringo Starr grew up Ritchie Starkey — without a father and in the slums. He nearly died from an infection at 6 — remaining in a hospital for a full year. He then contracted tuberculosis, which gave him an extended stay in a sanitarium and no chance at all of regaining his footing in school. The dismal future that awaited him was thwarted by chance. His natural likability and gifted affinity for the drums changed everything. He came alive on stage — sporting a streak in his hair and flashy rings. That put his life on its unlikely trajectory, and ultimately made him a worldwide household name for some 55 years now. That likability, his reliable steady beat, and his flair for a tasteful fill made him an important part of the Beatles, which is saying something. He sang lead on 11 songs.
173. “No Reply,” Beatles for Sale (1964): In the chaos of Beatlemania — the filming of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! in quick succession the least of it — the group’s songwriting suffered. The good songs went to the movies and toward the grueling single-release schedule that Martin and Epstein enforced. Beatles for Sale, which came out between the two soundtracks, was another unprecedented smash, spending months at No. 1 in Britain, but in retrospect we can see there’s only one Beatles song worthy of the name on it, “Eight Days a Week.” “No Reply” is more anonymous than the others.
172. “Think for Yourself,” Rubber Soul (1965): Harrison can’t help sounding judgmental on songs like this. Great groovy fuzzed-out bass line, though. Supposedly recorded in one take.
171. “Devil in Her Heart,” With the Beatles (1963): A Harrison lead vocal and another R&B-cover chestnut from the Hamburg era. One assumes this was a live crowd-pleaser, because its charms are elusive on disc. (American records were rare in Britain, and the band picked up what songs they could from the eccentric assortment that presented itself; this was originally done in a distaff version by an obscure Detroit girl group called the Donays, written by one Ricky Dee.) Of the four Beatles, Harrison was the only one who grew up in a nuclear family; like the others, though, he also grew up with an outhouse, and playing in rubbled lots, the detritus of a terrible war that had given undue attention to Liverpool, a major port. Harrison’s relative youth loomed large; both McCartney and Lennon in later years greatly exaggerated how much older than Harrison they were, and for understandable reasons it was difficult for him to get his songs taken seriously by the other Beatles and George Martin. Lennon could of course be much crueler about it. Harrison responded by leaving Lennon out of his autobiography.
170. “Till There Was You,” With The Beatles (1963):
This is routinely referred to as a Beatles oddity, but the song itself is from The Music Man, one of the best American musicals of the era. The song’s precision and internal logic undoubtedly was an influence on McCartney. He even sang it at the band’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in February 1964.
169. “Mother Nature’s Son,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Some fans love this song. I think it’s too similar to “Blackbird,” and another sign of the unnecessary bloat of “The White Album.” The lyrics are among McCartney’s worst.
168. “What You’re Doing,” Beatles for Sale (1964): The band had to catch its breath in ‘64; they had dominated the singles charts at the beginning of the year, and were just beginning to envision what they could do. Too many of this album’s tracks aren’t good enough.
167. “Revolution 1,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): The first version of this song Lennon brought to the group was a slow groove; no one was particularly happy with it, but it ended up being on the album anyway. The fully electrified version, called just “Revolution,” which became the B side to “Hey Jude,” is much better.
166. “Rocky Raccoon,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): If you’re looking for the point at which Paul McCartney began to give whimsy a bad name, it is precisely here. The song about the meter maid, fine. But we draw the line at animal songs, particularly when the story, pointless to begin with, goes nowhere. McCartney’s “doo-dee-doo” vocalizings are irritating, too. Docked five notches for being undeniably catchy; after one last listen to make sure I wasn’t being unfair to it, its hooks were still in my head two days later.
165. “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” Help! (1965): Through their Hamburg residencies, they played almost exclusively a wide variety of covers, from schlock to wild R&B classics like this one, from one of Lennon and McCartney’s idols, Little Richard. Much later, Lennon would play it with the Plastic Ono Band.
164. “Good Night,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Lennon’s attempt to write a lullaby for Ringo to sing as an envoi to “The White Album.” It’s lulling, and nothing wrong with that, but it’s also kinda boring.
163. “Honey Don’t,” Beatles for Sale (1964): A second-tier Carl Perkins number, with Starr singing lead, is another piece of the filler on Beatles for Sale.
162. “Old Brown Shoe,” single (1968): As the band’s interior life broke down, bad decisions were made. This is a (very) minor Harrison song, unaccountably added to the B side of “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Together it’s the Beatles’ worst single release.
161. “Yes It Is,” single (1965): An overdone ballad; Harrison at the time was playing around with a newfangled guitar effect, known as the “volume pedal,” which marks this song. (You can hear it on “I Need You,” too). This song was the B side to the much better “Ticket to Ride.”
160. “All Together Now,” Yellow Submarine (1969): Paul McCartney is one of the most remarkable, and luckiest, people of the 20thcentury. He, too, grew up marginally in a damaged city; he lost his mother at 14. More than any of the Beatles, and indeed more than just about anyone you can think of, he has radiated happiness and contentment (and not in a self-satisfied way) for most of his life. He was the era’s most successful songwriter, and, in fact, is probably the most successful songwriter of all time. He was in the biggest-selling band of the 1960s, and was probably the biggest-selling artist of the 1970s as well. The industry analyst I trust for reliable record-sales figures says that McCartney’s total is about 650 million sold in total — about 25 percent more than Michael Jackson. He was also — how to put this? — gorgeous to look at, and somehow had developed the diplomatic skills and winning nature to get what he wanted virtually all the time. He smoked marijuana heroically most of his life, and lived a great love story with his wife, Linda Eastman, until her too-early death in 1998. If Paul McCartney has a dark side, it is the voice inside him demanding that he dominate every genre of pop music with his cosmically pleasurable, almost ridiculously facile skills. Here, a number for toddlers. The excitement builds and, if you’re 4, the ending is as apocalyptic as, I don’t know, “Gimme Shelter.” Damn him.
159. “All I’ve Got to Do,” With the Beatles (1963): A forgettable early track from the second album; the usual elements are there, right up to the crescendo in the chorus, but it’s highly unaffecting, and ends in two minutes.
158. “Her Majesty,” Abbey Road (1969): A McCartney throwaway that was supposed to be in the middle of the Abbey Road medley. It didn’t fit, and was cut out, roughly — leaving a last burst of sound from the previous song and a half-second or so at the end cut out — and stuck on to follow “The End” after a very long stretch of silence.
157. “She’s a Woman,” single (1964):
The verses are not too memorable, and the “peasant” rhyme is dreadful, but there’s a wonderful slide into the chorus. The B side to “I Feel Fine.”
156. “Savoy Truffle,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): George takes a strong stand about eating sweets. And some people say he was a humorless moralist. The lack of quality control on “The White Album” is striking when you get to songs like this. There’s even a passing reference to “Oh-Bla-Di, Oh-Bla-Dah,” which no one made George take out. While the band presented a united front to outsiders, a trouble strain in the band was Paul and John’s handing of George, particularly his songs. They weren’t unfair; he had three songs on Revolver, and McCartney provided assists on many of his tracks. But there was a way in which he was always on parole, and over the years his resentment grew.
155. “Honey Pie,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): As the group’s interior dynamics broke down in the wake of Sgt. Pepper’s and the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, hitherto suppressed urges in the two main songwriters were allowed to come to the fore. Lennon called McCartney’s worst instincts “granny music.” It’s generally put today into the catchall category of “dance hall” music — a key part of the country’s cultural landscape, and one that a generation that included McCartney and Ray Davies couldn’t seem to shake. McCartney always copped to wanting to write classic pop songs, so you can’t blame him for being a hypocrite. Still, this is a clichéd and received idea. Docked five notches for the Rudy Vallée microphone at the beginning. Docked another five notches for having basically the same title as another, even worse, song on the same album.
154. “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” Please Please Me (1963): One wants simply to answer, “No.” Notable for being George Harrison’s vocal debut; while Harrison’s voice wasn’t always showcased on the band’s records correctly, as part of the group’s early, bruising three-part harmonies he was extremely valuable, a third lead voice just similar enough to keep the band’s sound unified but just different enough to provide some rough texture.
153. “Mr. Moonlight,” Beatles for Sale (1964): The band had already written “She Loves You” and “Please Please Me,” “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” Why were they filling out their fourth album with more R&B covers? This one, by Roy Lee Johnson, is a genuine oddity, partly crooned, party wailed.
152. “Long Tall Sally,” Long Tall Sally EP (1964): A McCartney workout of the Little Richard classic and a favorite from their Hamburg days. He has an amazing voice.
151. “P.S. I Love You,” Please Please Me (1963): The even more rudimentary B sideB side of “Love Me Do,” the band’s first single.
150. “Fixing a Hole,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): The argument for this song is that it’s about something. In addition to the lulling arrangement and production — novel and relaxing, spectacular and subtle — we have Paul mulling things over, a step up from grinning platitudes about nothing. The argument against it is that it is in the end an argument for the status quo. Given his place in the universe, of course Paul McCartney liked things the way they were. I’m just saying he didn’t need to write so many songs about it.
149. “The Inner Light,” single (1968): A Harrisong of minor interest, on the B side of “Lady Madonna.” Very Indian, but it lacks the drama of “Love You To” and the grandeur of “Within You Without You.” As with George’s “Old Brown Shoe,” which ended up on the back of “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” you can see how internal quality control was breaking down.
148. “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” Magical Mystery Tour (1967): A lot of yelling. McCartney can make anything sound catchy; there’s a mildly interesting Lennon call-and-response going on, too. You might think the song is directed at rich, complacent hippies — but the rich, complacent hippies in the Beatles would never write a song about that, would they? The “tuned to a natural E” line is a gem, but there’s also that bit about keeping all your money in a big brown bag … inside a zoo. Which makes me think it’s just another Paul McCartney nonsense song.
147. “Long, Long, Long,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): A whisper of a song, easy to forget, memorable only for the big drum breaks, a trick Paul Simon would steal for “The Only Living Boy in New York” a few years later.
146. “I’m a Loser,” Beatles for Sale (1964): By Lennon’s own admission, this was one of his very first personal songs. The very antithesis of a moon-spoon-June love song. There’s a Smokey Robinson rewrite, and some of the rhymes are forced, but it’s hard to think of any other pop performers who were writing songs this baldly self-critical at the time. Lennon’s father disappeared when he was young; his mother, Julia, whom you might call a good-time girl, ultimately left him in the care of his aunt Mimi, who provided him with something like a middle-class upbringing. Lennon grew up a striking artistic personality, living, it needs hardly be said, at a time and in a place where this was barely recognized. Without getting too psychological about it, you can say this left him with lingering anger and displacement issues, manifesting in lots of drinking and random acts of cruelty many never forgot. As the Decade of the Beatles wore on, a growing realization of some of these issues put his sensibility on a collision course with the unprecedented circus of a professional life he had inadvertently found himself in. The result in the latter years of the 1960s was a lot of growing up, and out, in public, via this or that very personal, and sometimes not very attractive, artistic statement on the matter.
145. “Piggies,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Harrison had a very quick, and very subtle, sense of humor; those who knew him presumably saw a lot of that here, but to me it comes across as moralizing. This is a takeoff on Animal Farm, and anything but subtle. Funny voices, too.
144. “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Lennon thought he was striking blows against the empire with raspy, unproduced constructions like this. He wasn’t. The staff at Abbey Road managed to make the results often sound surprisingly crisp, as here, and Lennon’s natural way with a hook or at least a shtick is present as well. But it doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a dumb song. Lennon came up with “Dear Prudence,” of course, for “The White Album,” but when you consider that his previous year’s output had included “Strawberry Fields,” “A Day in the Life,” “I Am the Walrus,” and “All You Need Is Love,” it’s obvious that by the time the group started assembling “The White Album,” he was close to being an acid casualty. Just before the band returned to the studio, he called an emergency meeting at the band’s Apple headquarters. On the agenda: Lennon’s announcement that he was Jesus Christ, after a revelatory LSD trip the night before.
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