In previous posts, I have discussed the famous splice exactly 60 seconds in to "Strawberry Fields Forever". But this splice isn't the only major edit in the song. Careful observation shows the addition of an extra chorus in the released version. The first half of the released edit uses the introduction, first chorus, and first verse of Take 7, followed by a second chorus, during which the splice occurs. But Take 7 does not use a chorus immediately following the first verse. The first seven words of either the second or final chorus (they're practically identical so it makes no appreciable difference which of the two - but it is clearly one of the two) are inserted before the splice to Take 26. This notion is much more easily understood visually than aurally, and for that reason I have included a graphic below (click to enlarge). In this graphic, the blue rectangles shows what was used from Take 7, while the red shows what was used from Take 26. But notice that the chorus following verse 1 in the released version does not exist in Take 7 (where instead verse 2 follows verse 1). The blue parentheses, then, illustrate that missing link.
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Formal structure of "Paperback Writer":
Intro (break) 0:00-0:13* (vocal 0:00-0:06) (instr. 0:06-0:13) Verse 1 0:13-0:31 Verse 2 0:31-0:49 Break 0:49-1:02 (vocal 0:49-0:55) (instr. 0:55-1:02) Verse 3 1:02-1:20 Verse 4 1:20-1:38* Break 1:38-1:50 (vocal 1:38-1:45) (instr. 1:45-1:51) Coda (break) 1:51-2:16 Comments: "Paperback Writer" is yet another Beatles tune which uses a 2-part introduction (along with [6b] "A Taste Of Honey", [11] "Thank You Girl", [17] "Little Child", [14b] "Roll Over Beethoven", [24] "You Can't Do That", and [31b] "Matchbox", [37] "Baby's in Black", [38b] "Mr. Moonlight", [45] "I Feel Fine", [46e] "Honey Don't", [47] "Ticket to Ride", [62] "Run For Your Life", [63] "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", [65] "Day Tripper", and [66] "If I Needed Someone", and [77] "Tomorrow Never Knows", and [79] "Love You To"). In this case, the 2 parts of the intro are (1) vocal polyphony, and (2) the rhythm section. This 2-part pattern reappears throughout the song as breaks from the verses. In fact, the intro is almost identical to the subsequent breaks - the only difference is that the drums take a few beats longer to establish the beat in the intro than in the breaks. To coda, too, is based on the break, though in this case it stretches out the title lyrics and eventually fades out (as opposed to using the two-part structure discussed above). Lastly, "Paperback Writer" features contiguous verses, which itself is nothing terribly unusual ([1] "Love Me Do", [6] “I Saw Her Standing There”, [7] "Do You Want to Know a Secret", [8] "Misery", [9b] "Anna (Go To Him)", [9c] "Boys", [9d] "Chains", [9f] Twist and Shout, [10] "From Me To You", [13e] "Till There Was You", [17] "Little Child", [19] "Not a Second Time", [23] "Can't Buy Me Love", [25] "And I Love Her", [26] "I Should Have Known Better", [28] "If I Fell'', [29] "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You", [31] "A Hard Day's Night", [31b] "Matchbox", [32] "I'll Cry Instead", [35] "Things We Said Today", [40] "I Don't Want To Spoil the Party", [41] "What You're Doing", [42] "No Reply", [43] "Eight Days a Week", [44] "She's a Woman", [44b] "Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey", [46d] "Words of Love", [47] "Ticket to Ride", [49] "I Need You", [50] "Yes It Is", [51] "The Night Before", [52] "You Like Me Too Much", [54] "Tell Me What You See", [56b] "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", [56c] "Bad Boy", [57] "I've Just Seen a Face", [59] "Yesterday", [66] "If I Needed Someone", [68] "We Can Work it Out", [71] "Michelle", and [77] "Tomorrow Never Knows" and feature contiguous verses, too). What is unusual, though, is the fact that "Paperback Writer" is just the 5th of these 41 songs - the three previous examples being [19] "Not a Second Time" (in which verses 1 and 2 are contiguous, as are verses 3 and 4), [31b] "Matchbox" (in which the first three and last two verses are contiguous), [56b] "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" (in which verses 1 and 2 are contiguous, as are verses 4 and 5), and [77] "Tomorrow Never Knows" (in which verses 1-3 are contiguous, as are verses 4-7) - to feature contiguous verses other than verse 1 and verse 2. In this case, verses 1-2 are contiguous, as are verses 3-4. Formal structure of "Love You To":
Intro* (cadenza) 0:00-0:35 (verse) 0:35-0:39 Verse 1 0:39-0:58 Middle 8 0:58-1:09 Verse 2 1:09-1:28 Middle 8 1:28-1:35 Solo 1:35-1:55 Middle 8 1:55- 2:06 Verse 3 2:06-2:25 Middle 8 2:25-2:32 Coda (solo) 2:32-3:00 Comments: "Love You To" is the first of several Indian-influenced Harrison compositions that will be difficult to analyze structurally because they are so different from the band's prior recordings. I use the same terms as I have before to maintain consistency, but it is worth noting that what I call a "verse" or "chorus" or "middle 8" here is rather different from how those same terms are used previously. The intro is again in two parts (like [6b] "A Taste Of Honey", [11] "Thank You Girl", [17] "Little Child", [14b] "Roll Over Beethoven", [24] "You Can't Do That", and [31b] "Matchbox", [37] "Baby's in Black", [38b] "Mr. Moonlight", [45] "I Feel Fine", [46e] "Honey Don't", [47] "Ticket to Ride", [62] "Run For Your Life", [63] "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", [65] "Day Tripper", and [66] "If I Needed Someone", and [77] "Tomorrow Never Knows") although here the first section (the sitar cadenza) is much longer than the second (in which the beat is established). Both the film and the album Magical Mystery Tour suffered from a lack of discipline. Increased drug use no doubt contributed, but aesthetic principles were at play as well. "Randomness as art appealed to all of the Beatles very much," wrote George Martin wrote in his 1994 book With a Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. "Sometimes, therefore, they would jam for hours in the studio, and we would be expected to tape it all, recognizing the moment of great genius when it came through. The only trouble was, it never did come through. This free-form associative tinkering happened a lot after Pepper on Magical Mystery Tour. It was a side of the Beatles that I found rather tedious. 'If you want to be random, let's be organized about it,' which was definitely not what they wanted to hear when they were in that mood" (page 138).
This indulgence led to the Beatles' interest in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who advocated a much more spare and natural lifestyle through Transcendental Meditation. In February 1968, the band traveled to Rishikesh, India to pursue the holy man's teachings. At the Maharishi's suggestion, the Beatles formally renounced all drug use. It didn't last. But for the duration of their stay in Rishikesh, all four Beatles were sober. And even by Beatles standards, their Indian respite proved exceptionally fertile, with John, Paul, and George combining to write dozens of songs and song fragments. With no electricity, however, electric guitars were useless, and as a result many of their Rishikesh songs employ acoustic fingerpicking techniques and patterns distinctly different from their previous work, many of which found their way on to their next album, including “Blackbird”, “Dear Prudence”, and “Mother Nature's Son”. It was also in India that Yoko Ono began to occupy John Lennon's mind. She would send him postcards saying things like, “I'm a cloud in the sky. Look for me.” Lennon, upon receiving these postcards, was supposed to look up, find a cloud, and think of Yoko. Apparently her tactics worked because in the ballad “Julia” (which is another acoustic fingerpicking song), Lennon sings, “ocean child calls me”, referring to Yoko (whose name in Japanese means “ocean child”) and her constant postcards. The White Album was originally titled A Doll's House (after Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play of the same name) until the progressive rock band Family released their debut album titled Music in a Doll's House on 19 July 1968. (Frankly, A Doll's House might have been the better title given the albums rather disjointed content.) The new album was then changed simply to The Beatles, and the cover left blank white, to be known forever more as The White Album. CITATIONS Martin, George. With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY, 1994. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has received much acclaim for being the first “concept album”, an album in which a single idea unifies the entire recording (as opposed to most albums, which are simply collections of songs without such an overarching principle). In the case of Sgt. Pepper, that concept was the simulation of a live performance by a fictitious band. But Pepper was not the first concept album.
The definition of exactly what a concept album is remains nebulous, but many at least nascent concept albums predate Sgt. Pepper:
Additionally, the status of Pepper as a concept album never sat well with John Lennon. “It doesn't go anywhere,” he said. “All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt Pepper and his band; but it works, because we said it worked, and that's how the album appeared. But it was not put together as it sounds, except for Sgt Pepper introducing Billy Shears, and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album” (Anthology, page 241). However, while there are no macro-scale tonal schemes (which would have to wait until Abbey Road) nor any thematic unity present in every song, the album does roughly follow a narrative of watching a single live production. The tracks help with that flow, with the opening title song followed seamlessly by “With a Little Help From My Friends”; then again at the end of the album, the stampede of animals that closes “Good Morning” leads directly into the reprise of the title track – the guitar lick starting the latter attempting to sound like the chicken cluck ending the former, with the reprise in turn segueing into the epic “A Day in the Life”. So is Pepper a true concept album? Well, yes and no. With strong cases being made both ways, it's one of those times where each listener has to decide for him- or herself exactly what the definition of "concept album" is, and then determine if Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band fits that category. To a certain extent, the question of definition is moot. Shakespeare famously said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", and he's right - what you call something does not fundamentally change what that something is. Like the debate over whether Pluto is or is not a planet, the definition can change the answer, but not the object. Regardless, what Pepper did was bring the idea of a concept album to the attention of the mass media and public – it was (and arguably still is) the most famous example of one. In doing so, Sgt. Pepper legitimized the rock album just as the song “Yesterday” had legitimized the pop song two years earlier - an artistic achievement arguably unequaled before or since. CITATIONS Beatles. The Beatles Anthology. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, 2000. Formal structure of [78] "Got To Get You Into My Life":
Intro (coda) 0:00-0:007 Verse 1 0:07-0:21 Bridge 0:21-0:35* Verse 2 0:35-0:49 Bridge 0:49-1:04 Chorus 1:04-1:14 Verse 3 1:14-1:28 Bridge 1:28-1:42 Chorus 1:42-1:49 Coda 1:49-2:28* (extension) 1:49-1:56 (chorus) 1:56-2:06 (verse) 2:06-2:28 Comments: The first bridge does not lead to the chorus, but instead to verse 2. The other Beatles tunes to date that also pull this trick are [4] "Ask Me Why" (in which the first bridge leads to the second verse, and the second bridge leads to the middle 8 before the third bridge finally resolves to the chorus), [5] "There's a Place" (in which there is no chorus for the bridge to lead to), and [12] "She Loves You". At 39 seconds, the coda is longer than usual, with three distinct sections, rather similar to [74] "The Word". During last Fall's LifeLearn Beatles class, someone asked me to define "avant-garde". That is a task I have been attempting to answer for quite some time - if I am researching the Beatles and the avant-garde, I had better know very clearly what avant-garde is!
A brief and hardly formal online search provided the following definitions and characteristics:
Literally speaking, "avant-garde" is a French term meaning "advance guard", and has been widely interpreted as "cutting edge" (meaning new and innovative). This definition proves a difficult one, however, because something can only be "new" or "innovative" for a relatively short period of time before it comes standard practice. Thus, what was cutting edge last year/decade/century will necessarily differ from what is cutting edge today. In that sense, Beethoven (1770-1827) was an avant-garde artist because he was innovative for his time, even though contemporary ears do not hear his music as such. In trying to do something new, avant-garde experimentation is doomed to failure in the vast majority of cases. Thus, the benefit of this type of aesthetic experimentation is almost always the journey (the learning process), and not the destination (the product). The American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) summarized this notion by saying, "A creator often learns as much from his miscalculations as he does from his successes" and citing "the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong" as essential to that learning process (Music and Imagination, page 76). Copland used these words to describe the development of all creators, but it is the avant-gardist who takes that notion to extremes. The price paid for that, though, is audience alienation. In their pursuit of innovation, avant-gardists often estrange their patrons. In that way, the term "avant-garde" has earned a rather negative connotation. Another commonly accepted and often discussed distinction between pop and classical (and in this case I am extending the term "classical" to include "avant-garde") is financial: Pop music seems to consider financial success more important than classical music does. Since avant-garde music inherently challenges its listeners, it will never be able to reap the same degree of financial rewards as pop music. Nor does it try to. Thus, when I say "the Beatles and the avant-garde", I am referring to the experimental and innovative aspects of the Beatles' output (musical and otherwise) - much of which is centered around the band's later years, when finances were no longer a concern and the band and its members were therefore free to create without concern for financial success. And, because the journey is often more important than the destination, I refer to unreleased and unpublished creative efforts that reveal the Beatles' willingness to experience and experiment, exercising that "immemorial right of the artist to be wrong". CITATIONS Copland, Aaron. Music and Imagination. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980. Formal structure of "Tomorrow Never Knows":
Intro 0:00-0:12 Verse 1 0:12-0:27 Verse 2 0:27-0:42 Verse 3 0:42-0:57 Solo/Break 0:57-1:27 Verse 4 1:27-1:43 Verse 5 1:43-1:58 Verse 6 1:58-2:18 Verse 7 2:18-2:34 Coda (verse) 2:34-2:59 Comments: The structure of "Tomorrow Never Knows" is unusual in a few ways. First, the verses are two lines each - the shortest of any Beatles song to date (they are usually four lines each). Second, as a result of these brief verses, they can be contiguous. Many Beatles songs have used contiguous verses in the past: [1] "Love Me Do", [6] “I Saw Her Standing There”, [7] "Do You Want to Know a Secret", [8] "Misery", [9b] "Anna (Go To Him)", [9c] "Boys", [9d] "Chains", [9f] Twist and Shout, [10] "From Me To You", [13e] "Till There Was You", [17] "Little Child", [19] "Not a Second Time", [23] "Can't Buy Me Love", [25] "And I Love Her", [26] "I Should Have Known Better", [28] "If I Fell'', [29] "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You", [31] "A Hard Day's Night", [31b] "Matchbox", [32] "I'll Cry Instead", [35] "Things We Said Today", [40] "I Don't Want To Spoil the Party", [41] "What You're Doing", [42] "No Reply", [43] "Eight Days a Week", [44] "She's a Woman", [44b] "Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey", [46d] "Words of Love", [47] "Ticket to Ride", [49] "I Need You", [50] "Yes It Is", [51] "The Night Before", [52] "You Like Me Too Much", [54] "Tell Me What You See", [56b] "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", [56c] "Bad Boy", [57] "I've Just Seen a Face", [59] "Yesterday", [66] "If I Needed Someone", [68] "We Can Work it Out", and [71] "Michelle". All 39 of these tunes feature verse 2 immediately following verse 1. "Tomorrow Never Knows" is the 40th. Thirdly, and more significantly, "Tomorrow Never Knows" is just the 4th of these 40 songs - the three previous examples being [19] "Not a Second Time" (in which verses 1 and 2 are contiguous, as are verses 3 and 4), [31b] "Matchbox" (in which the first three and last two verses are contiguous), and [56b] "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" (in which verses 1 and 2 are contiguous, as are verses 4 and 5) - to feature contiguous verses other than verse 1 and verse 2. In this case, verses 1-3 are contiguous, as are verses 4-7. Formal structure of [76] "Girl"
Verse 1 0:00-0:21* C minor Chorus 0:21-0:31 E-flat major Verse 2 0:31-0:51 C minor Chorus 0:51-1:01 E-flat major Middle 8 1:01-1:20 F minor Chorus 1:20-1:30 E-flat major Verse 3 1:30-1:50 C minor Chorus 1:50-2:00 E-flat major Solo 2:00-2:20 C minor Coda (chorus) 2:20-2:30 E-flat major Comments: The most interesting aspect structurally speaking is the tonal relationships: the verses are in C minor, while the choruses are in the relative major of E-flat. The Beatles have used the parallel major and minor in four other tunes to date ([33] "I'll Be Back", [35] "Things We Said Today", [63] "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", and [71] "Michelle"), but the only tune to play with the relative major and minor so far has been [61] "Wait". “Girl” uses no introduction - it just launches right into first verse (like [15] "All My Loving", [19] "Not a Second Time", [29b] "Long Tall Sally", [42] "No Reply", [46b] "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", and [58] "I'm Down", [61] "Wait", and [68] “We Can Work it Out”). Additionally, the middle 8 is in F minor, an unusual relationship to the home key of C minor. Formal structure of "You Won't See Me"
Intro (verse) 0:00-0:04 Verse 1 0:04-0:41 Verse 2 0:41-1:18 Middle 8 1:18-1:34 Verse 3 1:34-2:12 Middle 8 2:12-2:28 Verse 4 2:28-3:06 Coda (verse) 3:06-3:18 Comments: Third quarter of each verse is different: When I call you up, your line's engaged, I have had enough, so act your age, We have lost the time that was so hard to find, And I will lose my mind if you won't see me. Lines 1 and 2 share identical chord progressions and melodies, with line 4 being very similar. Line 3, however, differs in both melodic content and chord progression. "You Won't See Me" is preceded by many other Beatles tracks to date which pull the same trick: [6] “I Saw Her Standing There”, [31] "A Hard Day's Night", [35] "Things We Said Today", [40] "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party", [42] "No Reply", [43] "Eight Days a Week", [49] "I Need You", [51] "The Night Before", [70] "I'm Looking Through You", and [74] "Wait". Verses 3 and 4 share identical lyrics |
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