November 22, besides being Thanksgiving in the United States, marks fifty years since the release of the Beatles self-titled double LP set, commonly known as the White Album. As with last year’s observance of Sgt. Pepper’s golden anniversary, a remix has been prepared by Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, presented for public sale in several deluxe additions. Again I went for the regular, ordinary, run of the mill deluxe as opposed to the super duper deluxe baby. Unlike Pepper’s, getting the obligatory extra tracks that come with the basic package is actually worth it, but more on that later.
First, some background.
1968 saw the Fab Four coming off their greatest triumph to date, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which spent a staggering 27 weeks at number 1 from the summer of ’67 through the beginning of February 1968. While Pepper’s was still reigning supreme over the charts, they dropped the sound track for their ill-fated TV special Magical Mystery Tour. The British EP, U.S. LP release was a success as well; the TV special, broadcast in the UK on Christmas Day 1967, not so much. The disjointed, heavily surrealistic trip on a tour bus through the English countryside was panned by critics, confused the British public and was never shown in the United States.
On the personal side, 1968 began with the band still reeling from the death of their manager Brian Epstein the previous June. John Lennon’s marriage was falling apart and George Harrison was more interested in Eastern meditation than being a junior partner in the Beatles. They entered the studio in early February, recording the single Lady Madonna (which would go to number 1 a month later), before jetting off to Rishikesh, India to engage in a Transcendental Meditation course with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They were accompanied on their expedition by an entourage that included members of the Beach Boys and actress Mia Farrow with her sister Prudence.
The purpose of the retreat was to clear their minds, achieve transcendence without the aide of chemicals, and gain some emotional stability. Though they were supposed to leave being Beatles behind, John and Paul would clandestinely get together to work on songs. All three songwriters in the group worked on material that would eventually end up on both the White Album and 1969’s Abbey Road.
The trip to Rishikesh is shrouded in a bit of mystery, in so far as each member had a different response to it. Ringo Starr left about two weeks in because he couldn’t take the food. Though McCartney has spoken positively of the experience, he left after about a month. Lennon and Harrison lasted until April, with John leaving in anger over rumors that the Maharishi had tried to take liberties with some of the women guests – claims that were later disproved to the satisfaction of all, including Lennon’s then wife Cynthia.
Once all four were back in Britain they began working on the new material begun in India. In early May the band gathered at Harrison’s house in Esher, Surrey to demo songs. From May 30 through October they recorded at odd hours and inconsistent intervals at EMI Studios (aka Abbey Road) and Trident Studios. Along with tracks for the White Album, they produced the singles Hey, Jude and Revolution during this time.
The album itself is almost a photo negative image of its predecessor Sgt. Pepper's. In place of the colorful, elaborately staged portrait of the Beatles surrounded by cutout images of various celebrates, over looking a flower bed (grave?), we have a plain white cover. On early editions "The Beatles" was embossed on the front along with a serial number pressed near the lower right hand corner. Later, the numbering was dropped, with the name printed faintly in gray. The package included a poster collage with lyrics printed on the back, along with four individual color head shots of the band members. Sgt. Pepper's Band was supposed to be their alter ego, an escape from Mop Top Beatlemania, a mask to hid behind as they meandered in the studio. Here the album is simply called The Beatles. The January 1969 sessions that would become Let it Be were billed as an attempt at getting back to their rock and roll roots after a period of psychedelic experimentation. You could argue that this desire to get back to basics actually began here.
In place of the heavily produced psychedelic music of the previous two projects, The Beatles offers an eclectic mix of good old fashioned rock and roll, stripped down acoustic folk, blues, hard rock, ska (a predecessor to reggae), dance hall songs and a lullaby. The penultimate track is an eight minute avant garde sound collage, Revolution 9, that is somewhat polarizing to this day. Unlike Pepper's or Mystery Tour, there is very little here that couldn't have been credibly reproduced on stage in some form with contemporary technology.
When the sessions started getting tense is hard to say. The presence of Yoko Ono in the sessions is the default excuse given for the problems in the band. The Beatles rarely had visitors at recording sessions, and almost never had their wives or girlfriends around. Lennon insisted that his new found love be in the studio, and collaborate on material. In some studio chatter from from the Get Back sessions in early '69 McCartney tried to downplay the reports of friction, joking that in fifty years people would say they broke up because Yoko sat on his amplifier. In the Anthology documentary Harrison admitted that her presence did make the situation tense, and that he did feel Ono was a wedge separating John from the band. Looking back twenty-five years later in the same film, Paul felt that John and Yoko had to clear the decks of the rest of them if their relationship was going to work. Whether Ono was the cause of the tensions or a symptom of deeper problems we may never know.
Even before Yoko Ono became a constant presence at sessions the Beatles had begun to record separately, sometimes working in different studios with different engineers at the same time. This has always been chalked up to the personal conflicts between the bandmates. Each was becoming protective of their material, wanting it done their way as opposed to presenting songs to the band for suggestions. McCartney, for instance, is said to have gone back and recorded his own drum parts when he wasn't happy with Ringo's take. He wouldn't let Harrison add a lead part to Hey, Jude, a sore point the guitarist had a hard time letting go of. This might not have been so bad, but for that George was blooming as a song writer, and felt held back from presenting material by the other two writers. Lennon later said that the White Album was basically a four headed solo project, where each served as backing musicians for one another's songs.
Things got frustrating enough that various members walked out of the sessions at different times. Most famously Ringo ran off to Sardinia on holiday for ten days because he thought the others were freezing him out. He returned after some pleading to find his drum kit covered in flowers, a peace offering from George. Harrison, feeling the others weren't enthusiastic enough about his contribution, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, invited Eric Clapton in to play on the track. Other than supplying a killer lead part, Clapton's presence put the others on their best behavior, focusing them on the song. Things got so fractious that even producer George Martin took a vacation, leaving production work for a time to an engineer. Geoff Emerick, an engineer who had worked with the band since the Revolver sessions abruptly quit all together in July, he was so worn out by the bad vibes surrounding the band.
In popular lore the White Album is usually seen as the beginning of the end for the Beatles. 1995's Anthology documentary presented the release of Hey, Jude, in August '68, as the band's high water mark as a functioning, cohesive unit: the implication being that it was all downhill from there. Last year I argued in my review of Pepper's that the band was already breaking up during those sessions: before Brian Epstein's passing, before Yoko hit the scene, before the squabbles over Apple Corp and who should manage their affairs in general. I contend that the decision to stop touring in 1966 put the process of disillusion in motion, and that the subsequent resistance to going back on the road by Lennon and Harrison made a split inevitable. All the White Album does is illustrate what a band falling apart sounds like, even though I'm not sure fans at the time understood what was happening before their ears.
Giles Martin also disputes The Beatles as break up album narrative. He goes even further against the conventional wisdom to say that, all things considered, the band was actually humming along rather well. In reviewing hours upon hours of outtakes, filled with studio conversations, he heard very little in the way of fighting or disagreements. Ringo and Paul had a blow up over Starr's drumming, but other than that things sounded like any band putting an album together.
The problem, from his point of view, was that his father wasn't happy about how the group was working in the studio this time around. They were recording at all hours of the day and night, working songs out in extended jam sessions as opposed to disciplined rehearsals. They also wanted to use as much of the material they had written in India as possible. The Beatles, and especially Lennon, were almost obsessed with recording every song they wrote, leaving nothing "in the can." George Martin wanted a single album, leaving the weaker material for B-sides or even the trash bin. As Harrison observed, there was a lot of ego in the room: no one wanted to see their own contribution sacrificed, even if it wasn't up to Martin's standards. Obviously, the band won that fight. Giles believes the White Album represented the Beatles taking back control in the studio, and it put his father off. Whatever the truth, The Beatles was released as a double LP in time for the Christmas shopping season to monster sales and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, in spite of its troubled history.
The White Album came at the end of a turbulent year globally, not simply for the Beatles. 1968 is one of those watershed years, like 1848 or 1914 when the paradigm shifted. To get into that demands a second post. So next time I'll talk about the White Album's legacy, and go through the songs themselves, critiquing them in light of the new mix. I'll also get to why, unlike with most deluxe additions, I think giving the surplus material a listen is worth it.
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