The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound Production and Stylistic Impact 3031338030, 9783031338038

Table of contents :
Preface
Introduction
Contents
Chapter 1: A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio
1.1 George Martin and His Staff
1.2 Recording Strategies, Tricks, and Effects
1.2.1 Sound Effects
1.2.2 Speed Manipulation
1.2.3 Miking and Plugging
1.2.4 Handling the Tapes
1.2.5 Other Forms of Studio Experimentation
1.3 Instrumentation and Recurrent Techniques
1.3.1 The Basic Lineup
1.3.2 Other Instruments
1.4 The Centrality of the Studio
Chapter 2: Style and Sound
2.1 Sound and Musical Competence
2.2 The Roots of the Beatles’ Sound
2.3 Later Influences
Chapter 3: (The Difficulty of) Defining the Beatles Style
3.1 Vocals
3.2 Harmony
3.3 Melody
3.4 Rhythm
3.5 Structure
3.5.1 Strophe-Refrain vs. Chorus-Bridge
3.5.2 Democratic Catchiness
3.5.3 Outros
3.5.4 Sudden Quiet
3.6 Lyrics
Chapter 4: Crossdisciplinary Reflections: Production vs. Multimodality Studies, Narratology and Film Studies
4.1 Visual and Literary Components in Lennon-McCartney
4.1.1 Lennon or McCartney
4.1.2 Lennon and McCartney
4.2 Production as Multimodality
4.3 Production and Diegesis
4.3.1 Diegesis, Non-diegesis, Formality, Non-formality
4.3.2 Hybrid Forms and Metadiegesis
4.4 Case-Study: Feedbacks, False Starts, and Blisters
4.4.1 Redefining the Spatial/Temporal Dimension of a Song
4.5 Production as Montage
4.5.1 Martin vs. Spector (and Lynne)
4.5.2 Types of Production as Types of Montage
4.6 Case-Study: The Fool on the Hill
4.6.1 Creation and Production
4.6.2 What Kind of Fool Was the Fool on the Hill?
4.6.3 The Authorial Context
4.6.4 Themes, Structure, and Imagery
4.6.5 Musical Strategies
Chapter 5: Birth and Fortune of the “Beatlesque”: Transmission of Creativity and Legacy
5.1 A Little Survey
5.2 Stylistic Features in a Nutshell
5.3 Intrinsically-Beatlesque Features
5.3.1 Different Approaches
5.3.2 Essential “Beatlesque” Traits
Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks

Citation preview

Dario Martinelli Paolo Bucciarelli

The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact

The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact

Dario Martinelli • Paolo Bucciarelli

The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact

Dario Martinelli Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities Kaunas University of Technology Kaunas, Lithuania

Paolo Bucciarelli Helsinki, Finland

ISBN 978-3-031-33803-8    ISBN 978-3-031-33804-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The present monograph is something we owed to ourselves since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Back in 2002, we conducted an inquiry about the “Beatles style” with students of the Department of Musicology, at the University of Helsinki. The purpose was to identify the most typical elements in the Beatles’ music and to focus on the concept of “Beatlesque” – that particular set of stylistic features that qualifies a song (or a part of it, or a whole repertoire or act) as intrinsically recalling The Beatles. These issues were initially discussed during Dario Martinelli’s course on popular music and in a workshop in which Paolo Bucciarelli took part as a guest lecturer. Bucciarelli had been a member of Giuliodorme, a then-popular Italian rock band which had risen to fame thanks to a song titled “Goodbye”; which happened to possess those “Beatlesque” qualities and which was mainly written by Bucciarelli himself. He was invited by Martinelli to talk about his experience in writing and recording that song and others. While not always as clear as it was on “Goodbye”, the influence exercised by the Fab Four on Giuliodorme has been intelligible in several moments of their career, which not incidentally reached its peak in the late 1990s, in full Britpop craze. Our collaboration eventually led to an article (Bucciarelli and Martinelli 2004) aimed at exploring the stylistic models that characterize The Beatles’ work and that are detectable in songs and pop acts that bear the Beatlesque label (e.g., XTC, Oasis, Tears for Fears, Utopia…). The study represented the first step in the process of tracing a map of semio-musical traits applicable to the band from  Liverpool. Its primary aim consisted of understanding whether the idea itself of a “Beatles style” in a song could have any meaning in principle, considering the well-known variety of stylistic ventures that Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr engaged into, from beat to psychedelia, from vaudeville to musique concrete, from music for children to proto-heavy metal. The research was also integrated by an empirical part, in which the course students were surveyed on their perceptions of this style in both actual Beatles songs and Beatlesque ones from other bands. Since then, we began entertaining the idea of expanding the format of our research and to engage into a full monograph. While we obviously shall elaborate v

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on the findings of that research in the course of these pages, we may rather unsurprisingly anticipate here that despite a heterogeneous repertoire (the album The Beatles, universally known as the White Album1 being the obvious example, due to its almost anthological variety of styles explored), it was still possible to identify recognizable elements and typical features in their music. Interestingly, it also turned out that the “Beatles-like” songs by other artists are generally easy to recognize, when not mistaken for Beatles songs tout court, and seem to exhibit several traits in common. If on the one hand these considerations made it legitimate to consider the concept of a Beatles style, on the other hand they made it clear that a careful elaboration was needed of what the main stylistic models in the Beatles repertoire are, how they operate and within the framework of what more general models in popular (as well as folk, art and experimental) music. In addition to this, such models must be interfaced with each member’s songwriting abilities, in ways that go beyond the general characteristics, or often clichés, applied to them (e.g., the acerbic Lennon, the balladeer McCartney, the mystic Harrison, the happy-go-lucky Starr…), and also in a manner that does not disregard the enormous role played by the recording studio personnel at their disposal, starting obviously from producer George Martin and continuing with remarkable and inventive figures like Glyn Johns, Geoff Emerick, Ken Townsend, Norman Smith and others, not forgetting the controversial episode involving Phil Spector. Most of the investigative work in this book is centered around these basic, almost intuitive reflections, and we hope that in the course of each chapter, we will make enough sense to corroborate them. Whenever possible, we decided to employ first-hand comments and remarks from musicians and technicians involved in the production of the songs we write about  – as opposed to the more traditionally-academic endeavor of scholarly quotations – unless the former were too approximate and simplistic, and the latter ensured more information. We did so not only to reduce the amount of “mediations” in the description of creative processes and recording solutions (after all, as authors of this book, we are already mediators), but also to achieve a text that would combine academic research with a more practice-based approach, in line with who the two authors of this book are, professionally speaking: a musician and record producer with occasional incursions in musicology (Bucciarelli) and a musicologist with occasional incursions in musicianship and production (Martinelli). In general, a genuine attempt was made to keep the discussion lively and not necessarily formal, at least not always. References and sources were also selected and employed with this spirit. Also, while we are at it: the readers, especially those from anglophone environments, may be surprised, perhaps even disappointed, to see how some of the scholars prominently discussed in this book (one name for all: Gino Stefani, whose theory is central all over Chap. 2) belong to academic traditions that are outside the “sacred” (at least for popular music studies) Anglo-American circle, and thus, possibly, less familiar. We actually make no apology for this, and in fact we are  And so we shall call it throughout this monograph for an easier identification, especially when compared to the numerous early albums containing the word “Beatles” (With The Beatles, Beatles for Sale, the American release Meet The Beatles!, etc.). 1

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convinced that offering the perspective of less frequented authors, including some that have not been amply translated in English, is an added value, especially in a field like popular music studies (and more specifically Beatles studies), that are unashamedly dominated by Anglo-American scholars who happily quote each other, with little or no attention at all for approaches and schools emerging from other cultures. George Harrison, promoter of Indian music in a landscape dominated by Anglo-American repertoires, would agree with us.  Maybe it would be also convenient to offer a little clarification on the article “the”, in the formulation “The Beatles”. Readers may be confused by the fact that the “T” is sometimes lowercase and sometimes capital. The reason is actually quite simple: as a band, The Beatles were a registered trademark with the article included (unlike, say, Eagles, which were registered without article, even though they are often referred to as “the Eagles”), so whenever we employ the full name of the band, the “T” will be capitalized: e.g., “When The Beatles released Abbey Road…”. If instead the name “Beatles” is associated to another noun, or to any other syntactic construction where the article “the” may be referring to something else than the band, then we will have a small “t”. If we say “When the Beatles album Abbey Road was released…”, the article is now referring to the noun “album”, so it does not need to be capitalized. And now: can any preface be complete without the infamous “fair use notice”? This monograph contains copyrighted material (excerpts from song lyrics), the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owners. We are making such material available exclusively in our efforts to advance understanding of issues of scholarly significance. Dear members of The Beatles estate, you are all embarrassingly rich already, and if this book has a vague commercial outcome, that will only help to sell even more of the band’s records. Please, let us have the opportunity to better illustrate our thesis by shortly citing crucial sources like lyrics and scores. We shall not be using the full lyrics of any particular song, but exclusively only fragments. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to a number of people without whom this work would have not been the same. We both wish to thank the ever professional and friendly Springer team, and to the two anonymous reviewers who helped us improving this text. Thanks to the students in that popular music studies course in Helsinki University for having implemented our empirical data, but also for their feedback and discussions back then. Paolo would like to thank his parents Laura and Piergiacomo, for their constant and continuous support over the years. Also, he would like to express his gratitude to the other members of his former band, Giuliodorme. Dario would like to thank his son Elmis, a Beatlemaniac himself (not that he was given any choice, poor thing), who was able to notice details in the band’s production that Dario had missed for decades. For instance: the sharp snare hit in “Rocky Raccoon” right after the verse “But Danny was hot, and he drew first that shot”, as being a representation of the gunshot itself. Clear as day, right? And yet Dario had never realized that, and he clearly remembers his sense of personal embarrassment, mixed with immense father’s pride as his then-6-year-old child

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humiliated him with the matter-of-factly effortlessness of his remark, one bittersweet morning of 2016. Oh, and we also would like to thank each other. The opportunity to collaborate on that research on the concept of Beatlesque inaugurated a solid friendship that continues nowadays after twenty years, threatened only by Paolo’s support for AS Roma and Dario’s for Juventus FC. Kaunas, Lithuania Helsinki, Finland 22 December 2021

Dario Martinelli Paolo Bucciarelli

Introduction

Ideally, this monograph could be considered a portion of a larger project investigating The Beatles style in an over-encompassing manner, including the band’s thematic and formal work on the lyrics, and the social and ideological aspects involved. Instead, we chose to focus on a more eminently musical side, particularly on the notion of “sound” (defined in Chap. 2). We will first focus on some technical aspects, mostly drawing on and summarizing the important work of the likes of Lewisohn 1988, Everett 1999 and the monumental Hammack 2017–2020, or accounts from insiders such as Hornsby-Martin 1994 and Emerick-Massey 2006. From here we will proceed in a more theoretical, crossdisciplinary1 fashion, attempting to describe the models pertinent to an idea of sound, including their roots and development, their influence on subsequent artists, the conceptual approach to production methods, and ultimately the idea of an organic continuity between songwriting and studio work. What we primarily aim at, in other words, is to emphasize the importance of record production in the band’s music in a way that does justice not only to the final artifact (the released produced and post-produced song/s) but also to the creative process itself (i.e., the song/s in the making, something that is relevant in general, but which has a specific importance for The Beatles, as they famously developed the habit of finalizing – or even writing from scratch – their compositions while already in the studio). It must be noted that, while The Beatles and the people who worked with them were certainly instrumental, and often pioneers, in making the recording studio central in the whole process of music-making, there was an epochal change going on anyway. Generalizing a bit, we could say that until a certain point (late

 Incidentally, when we say “crossdisciplinary” we mean “crossdisciplinary”. There is an increasing tendency, in the academic world, to use words like “interdisciplinary”, “multidisciplinary”, “crossdisciplinary” and others as mere synonyms. They are not: what we did, as it will be elaborated in the course of the book, was to approach our fields of inquiry (musicology and semiotics, primarily) from the perspective of other fields (multimodality studies, audiovisual studies, narratology and others), which is the exact definition of “crossdisciplinarity”. 1

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1950s–early 1960s), the studio was the place that allowed to capture professionally what musicians were capable to do. Depending on the premises and the tools at their disposal, studios would develop their own sonic aesthetics, more or less regardless of the songs that were being performed, if not for tiny details. So to speak, recordings were studio-based rather than song-based. The recordings made in the legendary Sun Records studios in Memphis were all quite recognizable exactly because Sam Phillips and his associates’ approach to production was aimed at recording the songs in the best technologically possible way, and conforming to the taste of the time, regardless whether it was a regular rock and roll love song like Elvis Presley’s “Baby, Let’s Play House”, or it had a controversial theme like Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”. The change that occurred in the 1960s went decidedly in the direction of the composition: the studio became the place where the songs could be sonically profiled in relation to what they meant, what specific mood they emanated, and it was only after this step that producers and engineers would concert their effort to see how those features could technologically materialize. By no coincidence, the 1960s are also the decade when the studio work ceased to occur in one single room. Specific studio rooms were chosen depending on the song (The Beatles themselves often fluctuated among their regular Studio 2, the bigger Studio 1, suited for orchestral recording, and the more intimate Studio 3), unusual spots were used to diversify the acoustics, instruments could be recorded straight away in the control room, sound archives were visited more and more often in search of effects, and so forth (for more on the artistic nature of recording in rock culture, see López-­ Cano 2018). Through an investigation of the work of George Martin and his staff, but also of the inputs given by The Beatles themselves, we shall try to shed light on the role of studio activity in shaping the group’s sound. The leading questions therefore are the following: “what are the elements that make a song Beatlesque?” and “to what extent are production choices responsible in the establishment of an eclectic yet distinctive sound?”. In addition: “can we understand production not solely as a mere – albeit fascinating – set of technicalities, who did what, how and with what devices, but also in a more conceptual way?”. Put simply: “what were the aesthetics, the semiotics and the philosophy that animated the Beatles’ studio activity?”. We undertake these questions in five main steps. After this introduction, Chap. 1, A Short History of The Beatles in the Studio, will offer an overview of the band’s activity in the studio: the premises, the instruments, the staff, the techniques, and the technologies. In Chap. 2, Style and Sound, as anticipated, we attempt to define the notion of “sound” as the main operating concept of this book and in relation to the slightly-less-vague idea of “style”. The chapter will be also an opportunity for a diachronic summary of the various sources that forged the style of The Beatles, from their early pre-fame steps through the contemporary influences they drew from during their career. In Chap. 3 (The Difficulty of) Defining the Beatles Style, we classify the main stylistic elements of the band’s music, from the most recurrent to the most defining ones. Six areas of investigation were singled out for the occasion: vocals, harmony, melody, rhythm, structure, and lyrics. Chapter 4, Crossdisciplinary Reflections: Production vs. Multimodality Studies, Narratology, and Film Studies,

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goes into full analytical mode, as it scrutinizes the band’s songwriting and production through the lenses of semiotics, multimodality studies, and even film and media studies, within a crossdisciplinary interface that, possibly, results in the most innovative section of the monograph. Finally, Chap. 5, Birth and Fortune of the “Beatlesque”: Transmission of Creativity and Legacy, elaborates on how the Beatles’ influence on western popular music became manifest in countless songs and repertoires that carried a distinctive Beatlesque flavor. We implement that part with an appendix containing a list of 500 Beatlesque songs written/performed by other acts, plus 25 written by The Beatles themselves during their solo years. Two disclaimers, before proceeding. First, a terminological one. We shall accurately explain what we mean by “sound” in Chap. 2, so there is no need to anticipate that here. However, when it comes to “production”, one needs to point out that we use it as an umbrella term that comprises several creative studio activities, including production itself, engineering, post-production, several aspects of arranging, and even some of composing. This is due partly to the general acknowledgment that music production does indeed tend to encompass all such activities, at least on occasion. For instance, most contemporary electronic musicians gather them all in a single endeavor – that of sitting at their computer, working with Ableton Live, Reason, Pro Tools, or similar. More significantly, however, we do this because The Beatles themselves have been among the initiators of this synthesis, especially when the EMI studios became a sort of second home for them, and the recording schedules of the albums turned from the single day of Please Please Me to the six months of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By using the single term “production”, we thus aim at covering the multitude of activities that the band performed in the studio, except consuming tea (or other substances) and toilet breaks. Having said that, there will be passages, in this book, where we will separate the concepts in order to delve into more specific details. Hopefully, no confusion will be generated by this decision. Second: there is a certain disagreement among scholars (and musicians themselves) on how to call the different parts of a song. Sometimes there is more than one word for the same part, sometimes the same word may designate different parts (e.g., “bridge”). In particular, we feel, there is a discrepancy between what we may call a semantically-based terminology and a practice based one. The most significant example is the dualism between “verse” and “strophe” to designate an “A” part in a song. E.g.: “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” Most musicians, or anyway insiders of the music industry, may probably use the word “verse” to qualify this entire passage, while we opted for the word “strophe”. Reading from most vocabularies, we have definitions like the following ones for the two terms: Strophe: (in modern poetry) any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern. Verse: a succession of metrical feet written, printed, or orally composed as one line; one of the lines of a poem.

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So, within a semantically accurate discussion, the correct word for the song part we mentioned is “strophe”, while “verse” is just one line of a strophe. Having said that, the fact that the employment of the term “verse” is a common practice in the music industry is something that cannot be disregarded, because common practice as a whole is something that cannot be snubbed away by waving a vocabulary and a certificate of philological authenticity. Fact is, people do use “verse” to signify a number of verses grouped together: whether we like it or not, it is something we need to take into account, if the goal is, as it is, to understand each other when we talk about song parts. With this in mind, a choice had to be made, in order to provide this book with terminological consistency, and so we hereby list our own chosen glossary, asking the reader to refer to these lines whenever in doubt: 1. Intro: The initial part of a song that, literally, introduces it, either through a brief phrase (e.g., the legendary opening chord in “A Hard Day’s Night”), or in a more elaborate form, almost as a “prologue” (e.g., the “If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true” part in “If I Fell”). 2. Riff: An ostinato instrumental phrase repeated several times during the song, that often opens it, but it is not an intro, even if it may serve as such (e.g., the guitar ostinato on “Day Tripper”). 3. Strophe: Usually the “A” part of the song format we shall call “Strophe-Refrain” (see Sect. 3.5.1). It has a storytelling nature that develops the (both lyrical and musical) themes of the song, leading naturally to a refrain (e.g., as we have seen, the “When I find myself in times of trouble…” part in “Let It Be”). 4. Refrain: The “B” part that naturally follows the strophe in the “Strophe-Refrain” format. It has normally a catchy but less narrative quality. In this case, instead of “developing”, the themes reach a culmination/catharsis and the lyrics have more of a slogan/tagline quality (e.g., the “Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, there will be an answer, let it be” part in “Let It Be”). Not to be confused with the chorus – at least not in this book, though in others you will often find the two words as synonyms. 5. Chorus: A catchy but more elaborate melody/lyric that serves as the “A” part in another format, the “Chorus-Bridge”. Unlike the Strophe-Refrain format, where the catchy part (the refrain) is placed as a consequence of the strophe, the Chorus-Bridge places the catchy part at the start and is then followed by a more meditative, narrative section (the bridge). An example is “The Long and Winding Road” where the “The long and winding road that leads to your door…” part, placed at the start of the song, is a chorus and not a refrain (or a strophe). 6. Bridge: As the word itself suggests, it is a transitional part that connects two sections. It can be used both in the Chorus-Bridge format (evidently) and in the Strophe-Refrain one. In the former case, it has the more prominent role of “B” part, interacting with the chorus and connecting one chorus with the next (e.g., the “Many times I’ve been alone…” part in “The Long and Winding Road”). In the Strophe-Refrain format, the role is more secondary, but the transitional

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quality emerges more prominently. It is neither an A or a B part, but a kind of C that can be placed either between strophe and refrain (“pre-refrain” bridge) or between refrain and strophe (“post-refrain” bridge). An example of pre-refrain bridge is the “Bom bom bom bompa bom, sail the ship...” part in “All Together Now”, placed between the strophe (“One, two, three, four, can I have a little more?...”) and the refrain (“All together now, all together now…”). A post-­ refrain bridge can be found in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”: “In couple of years they have built a home sweet home…”, placed indeed after the first refrain (“Ob-la-dì Ob-la-dà, life goes on…”) and allowing the return to the strophe (“Happy ever after in the marketplace…”). 7. Special: A particular (special!) case of bridge, the special is a “C” (or even “D”) theme that occurs only once in the whole song, as a moment of particular emphasis/pathos. A quintessential Beatles (and not only Beatles) special is the “You’re asking me will my love grow…” part in “Something”. 8. Turnaround: A short segment (usually, one phrase) that connects a “B” part (refrain or bridge) to an “A” (strophe or chorus). For example, the “See how they run” part in “Lady Madonna”. 9. Solo: An instrumental part that could either be based on a chord progression already exhibited in the song (as in most cases), or on a different one (e.g., “Octopus’s Garden”). It normally appears just once in the song, but on occasions there can be more solos (e.g., “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”). 10. Outro: The concluding part of a song. Traditionally it can be a fade out (a part is repeated several times while the volume slowly decreases, as on “Yellow Submarine”), a cadence (a sequence of chords that wrap up the song, as in the vi-II-IV-I sequence that concludes “She’s Leaving Home”), or a hard out (a more sudden stop than the cadence, usually on one chord only, that coincides with the natural conclusion of a phrase already contained in the song, as in “Eleanor Rigby”). In Sect. 3.5.3, however, we shall see how The Beatles got more inventive in their outros than just these three templates. 11. Other parts not included in this list will be simply named alphabetically, depending on their position in the song: A, B, C, D, etc. For instance, if the song has a “suite” structure, like “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, we shall name A the first theme (“She’s not a girl who misses much…”), B the second (“She’s well-­ acquainted with the touch…”), C the third (“I need a fix ’cause I’m going down…”), and so forth.

Contents

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 Short History of the Beatles in the Studio������������������������������������������    1 A 1.1 George Martin and His Staff ������������������������������������������������������������    4 1.2 Recording Strategies, Tricks, and Effects ����������������������������������������    8 1.2.1 Sound Effects������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 1.2.2 Speed Manipulation��������������������������������������������������������������   11 1.2.3 Miking and Plugging������������������������������������������������������������   12 1.2.4 Handling the Tapes����������������������������������������������������������������   13 1.2.5 Other Forms of Studio Experimentation������������������������������   16 1.3 Instrumentation and Recurrent Techniques��������������������������������������   17 1.3.1 The Basic Lineup������������������������������������������������������������������   18 1.3.2 Other Instruments�����������������������������������������������������������������   22 1.4 The Centrality of the Studio��������������������������������������������������������������   25

2

Style and Sound����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 2.1 Sound and Musical Competence������������������������������������������������������   34 2.2 The Roots of the Beatles’ Sound������������������������������������������������������   42 2.3 Later Influences��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   49

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 (The Difficulty of) Defining the Beatles Style����������������������������������������   57 3.1 Vocals������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 3.2 Harmony ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   66 3.3 Melody����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 3.4 Rhythm����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 3.5 Structure��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 3.5.1 Strophe-Refrain vs. Chorus-Bridge��������������������������������������   78 3.5.2 Democratic Catchiness���������������������������������������������������������   81 3.5.3 Outros������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 3.5.4 Sudden Quiet������������������������������������������������������������������������   84 3.6 Lyrics������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   85

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Contents

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Crossdisciplinary Reflections: Production vs. Multimodality Studies, Narratology and Film Studies��������������������������������������������������   87 4.1 Visual and Literary Components in Lennon-McCartney������������������   90 4.1.1 Lennon or McCartney ����������������������������������������������������������   93 4.1.2 Lennon and McCartney��������������������������������������������������������   98 4.2 Production as Multimodality������������������������������������������������������������  104 4.3 Production and Diegesis ������������������������������������������������������������������  108 4.3.1 Diegesis, Non-diegesis, Formality, Non-formality ��������������  111 4.3.2 Hybrid Forms and Metadiegesis ������������������������������������������  116 4.4 Case-Study: Feedbacks, False Starts, and Blisters����������������������������  118 4.4.1 Redefining the Spatial/Temporal Dimension of a Song��������  125 4.5 Production as Montage ��������������������������������������������������������������������  126 4.5.1 Martin vs. Spector (and Lynne)��������������������������������������������  128 4.5.2 Types of Production as Types of Montage����������������������������  132 4.6 Case-Study: The Fool on the Hill ����������������������������������������������������  138 4.6.1 Creation and Production ������������������������������������������������������  140 4.6.2 What Kind of Fool Was the Fool on the Hill?����������������������  141 4.6.3 The Authorial Context����������������������������������������������������������  145 4.6.4 Themes, Structure, and Imagery ������������������������������������������  147 4.6.5 Musical Strategies����������������������������������������������������������������  149

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Birth and Fortune of the “Beatlesque”: Transmission of Creativity and Legacy ������������������������������������������������������������������������  153 5.1 A Little Survey����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  157 5.2 Stylistic Features in a Nutshell ��������������������������������������������������������  160 5.3 Intrinsically-Beatlesque Features������������������������������������������������������  162 5.3.1 Different Approaches������������������������������������������������������������  164 5.3.2 Essential “Beatlesque” Traits������������������������������������������������  168

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs ����������������������������������������������  179 Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 Index of Names ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks ����������������������������������������������  205

Chapter 1

A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio

It is rather difficult to underestimate the importance of the impact that recording studios and technology had on the Beatles’ artistic development and career. In fact, it is pretty difficult to underestimate the very connection, to begin with. No band before The Beatles, and hardly any afterwards, created and exposed their audience to such a close relationship with the “behind the scenes” of their songs. Take Abbey Road Studios, for instance: it will be forever tied to the fact that The Beatles recorded there: never mind that it is one of the most frequently used recording premises even today, and has hosted the recording sessions of other milestones of popular music like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. More importantly, no other recording studio is so closely associated to one specific band – not to mention that most fans tend to ignore where their favorite bands are recording, anyway. Even more importantly, the premises were not called “Abbey Road Studios” at all, but simply EMI Recording Studios (Fig. 1.1), and the change occurred only after the release of the Abbey Road album (which also contributed to another connection: no adjacent street of any recording studio has been photographed so often by tourists). Or: take George Martin. With the exception only of Phil Spector, no other artistic producer has become so much a “public persona” as Martin has. The most credible of the many “Fifth Beatle” candidates, Martin was crucial in the musical development of The Beatles at all levels: as composers, as performers, and eventually as producers themselves. As with Abbey Road Studios, George Martin is a very well-known name in the category of artistic producers; a category the average listener tends to generally be unaware of. Even recording techniques and technologies became part of the Beatles’ myth. People, who would otherwise be completely uninterested in the issue learned about the existence of such things as the mellotron (after “Strawberry Fields Forever”), about the fact that tapes could also be played backwards (after Revolver), or about the existence of a German manufacturer of musical instruments that produced © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5_1

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1  A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio

Fig. 1.1  On the left, Ringo Starr and George Harrison enter the EMI studios. (Photo attribution: Dr. Ronald Kunze, CC BY-SA 3.0). On the right, the same entrance after the studios were renamed after the Beatles’ album Abbey Road. (Photo attribution: Carlos Leiva, CC BY-SA 4.0)

violin-shaped bass guitars (Höfner). Topics like these were part of the “discourse” built around and by The Beatles: they would not mind discussing their recording sessions during their interviews, and in general they enjoyed and encouraged their image of “committed musicians”. A far cry from an equally legendary figure like Elvis Presley who could never be bothered debating the benefits of slapback echo on his voice, or the facilities available at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee (although, at least, Sun Studios achieved a similar iconic status as the Abbey Road premises, having been instrumental in the very birth of rock and roll, not just because of Presley). In sum, to analyze the impact of musical and recording technologies in the Beatles’ repertoire means first and foremost to discuss an essential part of their story and their myth. It is also our intention to emphasize the specific role assumed by the recording process (and its places, times, and people) in shaping the artistic/creative identity of the band, particularly their “sound”, a notion we shall extensively discuss in Chap. 2. Although the traditional, chronologically accurate, order of this process implies firstly the “creation of an opus” (possibly at home, or anyway outside the studio), and eventually its materialization on record, via the steps of arrangement and performance, what happened in the Beatles’ case, particularly in the second half of their career, was that this sequence could also be inverted, or anyway messed up.

1  A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio

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A song could be written in the studio, an arrangement idea could precede the composition of a song (which would then be created starting from that idea), and so forth. In other words recording techniques and technologies were, for The Beatles, actual “artistic” devices, and as such we intend to analyze them here. The Beatles’ first experience in a professional recording facility was on the 1st of January 1962 at the Decca Studios in London. The session, a mere audition arranged by the group’s manager Brian Epstein, produced 15 songs, but did not earn the band a record contract. Ironically, Decca executives told Epstein that guitar groups were “soon to go out of fashion” and that The Beatles had “no future in show business”. In the following eight years, not only did the group ensure its own immortality, but in fact outlined the “future” of popular music in ways that are still being discovered today. The great majority of the Beatles’ music was recorded in Studio 2 of the EMI Studios (later Abbey Road Studios). Further locations include the Studios number 1 and 3 in the same building, Apple Studios, Trident Studios, and the Olympic Sound Studio, among others. In 1963, at the time of the group’s first album Please Please Me, the main focus during the making of a record was fidelity. Recording was a fairly standard process. The producer’s task was to organize and coordinate the session, while the engineers and technicians’ responsibility was to ensure a good reproduction of the music, as it was played by the band in the studio. In other words, the aim was to capture the best performance possible from the musicians. In the case of Please Please Me, The Beatles basically recorded a 14-song sample of the vast material they had assembled during their pre-fame days, when they used to play twice a day, virtually every day, in the clubs of Hamburg and Liverpool. Not more than seven songs on the album were original Lennon-McCartney compositions (or McCartney-Lennon, as they appeared only on that occasion): the rest was a faithful portrait of their rather eclectic musical tastes (R&B numbers, songs from musicals, authorial pop like Burt Bacharach’s “Baby It’s You”, etc.). The whole album, notably, was recorded in one single day, or – to be more exact – in 9 hours and 45 minutes (Lewisohn 1988: 24). And yet, through all that rush, that artistic neutrality from the producers’ part, and that “concert routine” attitude in the performances, a first, meaningful creative input was provided by George Martin himself. The song “Please Please Me”, he had noticed, was far too slow for being a serious candidate for a single: by considerably speeding it up, the band had their first “Number One” single with their second release; a chart position famously anticipated by an enthusiastic Martin right after the end of the recording session. Much more than a simple, albeit dramatic, change in one song’s arrangement would be produced in the following years. With technological progress, the concept and the idea of “sound” became more and more central. Recording was no longer a strictly technical affair; it became an artistic matter. The Beatles were soon aware of the potential of the recording studio and gradually more interested in the possibilities that it offered. Music started to be artificially constructed in elaborate recording sessions and a new way of making records emerged.

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1  A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio

1.1 George Martin and His Staff In all this, evidently, the role of George Martin (Fig. 1.2) and his various collaborators (sound engineers particularly, who were often assistant producers or even coproducers) will never receive enough credit. Martin can be considered largely responsible for shaping the modern concept of the “record producer”. His role through the years expanded, from mere coordinator to a sheer creative force in the studio. Martin studied orchestration, harmony, composition, and conduction at the Guildhall School of Music in London, and joined Parlophone Records (a division of EMI) in 1950, working as an assistant in the A&R department. In 1955, when he was only 29, he was appointed manager of this small company, becoming the youngest record label head in Britain. His collaboration with the Beatles started in September 1962, with the recording of “Love Me Do”, the band’s first single for Parlophone. Despite his resignation from EMI three years later, in order to form his own company AIR, Martin continued to work with the group as a freelance, independent producer, a rather unusual role at the time (and another significant anticipation of times to come). He attended almost every studio session of the band until their break-up in April 1970. Remarkable exceptions occurred during the recordings of the White Album, Let It Be, and on one famous occasion during the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band session, when an anxious Paul McCartney, faced with Martin’s unavailability on the very day, hired the young Mike Leander to Fig. 1.2  The most credible candidate to the “fifth Beatle” title: producer George Martin. (Photo attribution: David Train, CC BY-SA 2.0)

1.1  George Martin and His Staff

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arrange the orchestra for “She’s Leaving Home”. Martin, reportedly, was far from pleased about this. To better understand the function of production in the Beatles records, we should rely on a distinction we discuss in Chap. 3 among early (1962–1965), middle (1965–1967) and late (1968–1970) periods in the band’s career and musical development. In the first phase, Martin’s duties included the supervision of the band’s repertoire and control of the studio activity. Describing his involvement in the working process, he said: My role was to make sure that they made a concise, commercial statement. I would make sure that the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes, that it was in the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy, with the right proportion and form. (Martin and Hornsby 1994: 132)

This procedure, also known as “head arrangement”, was usually made in a straightforward way: I would meet them in the studio to hear a new number. I would perch myself on a high stool, and John and Paul would stand around me with their acoustic guitars and play and sing – usually without Ringo or George, unless George joined in the harmony (…). Then I would make suggestions to improve it, and we’d try it again. (Martin, as quoted in Everett 1999: 162)

This fairly simple procedure was maintained throughout the early years. As the group began to be interested in new sounds and compositions became more elaborate, Martin’s role evolved one step further. His work during the middle period was significant for more than one reason: first, he created innovative arrangements, brought in new ideas, and introduced different instruments. His contribution was fundamental to expand the group’s timbral palette. He helped give an identity and character to the songs. Second, he acted as an interpreter, providing a “technical translation” to the band’s often abstract ideas, and suggesting the best practical options. Martin developed an ability to understand the intentions of the band through an uncanny sixth sense for the right solutions: They needed someone to translate for them. I was there, so it worked very well. I had a foot in both camps. I knew what they were trying to get and I knew how to get it, and I became the official interpreter. (Martin, as quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght 1998: 207)

Thanks to his musical background and experience with sound effects, he made the most of The Beatles’ increasingly unconventional sonic imagination. Furthermore, Martin also acted as a valuable additional musician, playing piano, organ, harmonium, or harpsichord on several tracks. In the late period, the group gained more artistic autonomy, and were often in charge of the sessions. Having now turned more like a collaborator, Martin kept on exercising an influence on the music output, but did not direct the band or exert control. At the time of the White Album, he acted almost as executive producer, with the four Beatles often recording their own songs individually, separately, and in different studios. After the album Let It Be – in which he was famously replaced by Phil Spector – George Martin finally regained a prominent role as producer for the

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band’s last record Abbey Road, after a request from the band members themselves, who desired to record one more album “the way they used to”. Personal relationships had a considerable impact on the outcome of the work. Power struggles between Lennon and McCartney and the overall distribution of authority influenced the final artistic results. Over the years, the balance of power between The Beatles and their producer changed rather drastically, with the latter turning from a father figure to a more subordinate role. The producer became a “realizer”, following the indications dictated by the artists: At the start, I was like a master with his pupils, and they did what I said. They knew nothing about recording, but heaven knows they learned quickly: and by the end, of course, I was to be the servant while they were the masters. They would say, “Right, we’re starting tonight at eight o’clock”, and I would be there. It was a gradual change of power, and of responsibility in a way, because although at the end I still clung to putting in my two cents’ worth, all I could do was influence. I couldn’t direct. (Martin, as quoted in Cateforis 2013: 56)

Furthermore, a closer look at the daily routine in the Abbey Road studios reveals a wider and more complex social context, also including other members of the staff such as the engineers. The importance of social relations in a non-solitary creative practice is something that can be already understood through common sense, but it does not hurt that a few studies have specifically emphasized that. Ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond (2005), for instance, pointed out that a record can be considered a documentation of social processes of many different types other than just an aesthetic object. Similarly, while theorizing a new music ontology, anthropologist Georgina Born (2005) highlighted the crucial role of a complex series of mediations, particularly the power of music to favor associations and facilitate interpersonal relationships. Finally, and on a more general level, in his anthropology of art, Alfred Gell (1998) relies on the concept of collective style to explain the constant interaction between individuals in a creative process: art objects, maintains Gell, condense and embody social relations. The Beatles’ tendency to use external musicians who would often come from their circle of friends (e.g., Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Brian Jones), as well as their preference for a family-like work environment, demonstrates the collaborative nature of their activity. One of their recurrent remarks about the EMI studios was that they looked a bit “sterile”, and as soon as their negotiating power increased, they demanded the addition of decorative, cozy elements such as colorful neon lights and incense sticks, up to the (admittedly exaggerate) bed that Yoko Ono brought in during the Abbey Road sessions. Other key-figures contributed to the making of the band’s records in the studio besides George Martin; first and foremost, the producer’s closest associate, the balance engineer. Trained by EMI, this type of engineer was in charge of the recording and mixing of the songs. This role, which was played by different people through the years, evolved in time, becoming progressively more creative. It is worth noticing that these engineers were not necessarily or particularly involved with technical matters, preferring a more artistic approach, which included acoustics and specific uses of microphones. Sharing the control room with the balance engineer and the producer, there was also a second engineer known as tape operator.

1.1  George Martin and His Staff

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The three figures formed what Mark Lewisohn called the “triumvirate production team” (1988: 137), and were the crew who worked on the Beatles’ music on a regular basis. To these, we must add technical engineers – who were often involved in addressing the creative demands of the band and in several cases introduced significant innovations – as well as disc cutters. With the impossibility of listing every single character involved in recording The Beatles (in some cases, there is no recorded information on who joined a given session), and excluding those who joined just once or twice as replacements for more regular personnel, or those who recorded the band in different studios (e.g., Trident), we provide here a list of the key members of the various “triumvirates”, from 1962 onwards. In the early years, and until the Revolver sessions, the regular team was composed of producer George Martin, engineer Norman Smith, and a number of rotating second engineers. Stuart Eltham would occasionally take the place of Smith as main engineer. From 1962 onwards, the most recurrent second engineers were Richard Langham, Geoff Emerick and Anthony Bridge (usually indicated in the session records with the alias A. B. Lincoln – for reasons we happily ignore). From 1964, Ken Scott, Ron Pender, Mike Stone, and Tony Clark, and from 1965 Jerry Boys, Phil McDonald, and Richard Lush. The year 1966 witnessed a considerable change, with Geoff Emerick (Fig. 1.3) becoming the main engineer, occasionally replaced by Dave Harris. The change was crucial in terms of depth, heaviness, and fullness of sound. George Harrison famously said that Rubber Soul and Revolver are a sort of volume I and II of the same album, and that is true from a songwriting point of view (the band having reached full compositional maturity at that point and having displayed it in both records with equal merits), but there is a significant gap between the two albums when we pay attention to sonic aspects: in particular, guitars, vocals and drums sound like they belong to different technological epochs, despite being just a few months distance between them. In this new venture, the role of second engineers was also relevant, particularly McDonald’s, Lush’s, and Harris’s. Fig. 1.3  Sound engineer Geoff Emerick is one the key-­figures behind the Beatles’ advancements in sound and production from 1966 onwards. (Photo attribution: Eddie Janssens, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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With Martin and Emerick firmly holding their positions, 1967 witnessed the arrival of some new tape operators: Malcom Addey (who would also replace Emerick as main engineer, on a couple of occasions), Graham Kirkby and Martin’s protégé Chris Thomas, from AIR (Martin-owned independent studios). Thomas was even an uncredited producer on a few White Album sessions, while Martin was on holiday, and he also played keyboards on some songs. The professional growth of Ken Scott, meanwhile, was such that towards the end of the year, he also took over the main engineer duties a few times. That role became regular for Scott during the following year, when an infuriated Emerick quit his job, no longer being able to bear the tensions in the studio and the increasing bickering among the four Beatles (who would often throw their frustration onto the studio personnel as well – possibly implementing the old adagio “Don’t shoot the piano player” with “shoot the sound engineer instead”). 1969 was another year of big changes. Desiring a new musical direction for their Get Back project, The Beatles hired Glyn Johns as main producer (with Martin discreetly supervising or acting as advisor), new entries Jeff Jarratt and Barry Sheffield began acting as main engineers, often with another new entry, John Kurlander, as tape operator. The team did not last long, and when The Beatles asked George Martin to retake his position for the Abbey Road sessions, Emerick and McDonald reappeared (along with Johns himself) as main engineers. Hired at the same time as a second engineer was also a wunderkind destined to do great things later on as a producer/engineer and musician; he was the sonic genius behind The Dark Side of the Moon, to mention but one, and delivered pop gems like “I Wouldn’t Want to Be like You” or “Eye in the Sky” with a band named after himself: it was of course Alan Parsons. With the band practically broken already, 1970 saw production duties for Let It Be given to Phil Spector (who brought some of his own people, including engineers Peter Brown and Mike Sheady and second engineer Roger Ferris), with Martin was left to work on side projects, such as the compilation Hey Jude. To all these names, one should add also what George Martin used to call “the backroom boys”, i.e., the maintenance engineers, who were not working directly with the band, but were responsible for many of the technical and technological inventions that were eventually used in the studio. The most important “backroom boy”, who was employed in EMI throughout the entire Bealtes’ career, was Ken Townsend, inventor, among others, of the Artificial Double Tracking.

1.2 Recording Strategies, Tricks, and Effects George Martin was one of the first producers to break with the aesthetics of realism, as he helped the band in creating “musical images which no one else had done before” (Martin and Hornsby 1994: 35). Examples are numerous and equally worthwhile to be mentioned.

1.2  Recording Strategies, Tricks, and Effects

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1.2.1 Sound Effects The Beatles made extensive use of sound effects – arguably the most audible “studio tricks” to a nonprofessional ear. From the feedback introduction of “I Feel Fine” to the “underwater” feel of “Octopus’s Garden” (obtained by blowing bubbles in a glass of water in one of the last studio sessions of the band), we can find a wide spectrum of quite recognizable noises. Some of them were the result of significant technical innovation; others were just creative inventions to overcome technological restrictions; many came from the vast catalogue of sound samples available at EMI Studios. George Martin had good experience with sound effects, having previously worked with the Goons and at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Several tricks that he had learned on these occasions became part of the Beatles’ style. Among these, one should include offstage noises (particularly used in song codas), manipulation and distortion of the original signal through compression, limiting and overloading, echo, reverb, ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), flanging, phasing, and chorus. “Offstage” noises and voices were obtained in two different ways: by a direct recording of the sound source (as in the “Octopus’s Garden”), or by relying on the studios’ archive collection of location recordings and sound effects (as in the farm animals’ parade on “Good Morning Good Morning”). “Yellow Submarine” is a perfect illustration of both methods, and stands out as an early example of the use of sampling in popular music. Engineers Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald made a very creative use of compressors and limiters, not only to improve the quality of the sound, but also to create gargling and pulsating noises, and burbling effects, etc. In addition, they often deliberately distorted the signal through uncommon recording techniques. Echo was one of the group’s favorite effects and echo chambers were its main resource. This would involve a speaker being placed pointing towards a corner, angled slightly upwards, while a microphone (generally a Neumann KM53, or two of them when stereo became an issue) was placed at the other end of the chamber to capture the sound. Echo racks with filters were also available in the studio; natural reverb was usually provided by the so-called “live end” zone of the live room of Studio 2, while artificial reverb mostly came from the EMT 140 plate reverb unit. ADT (Artificial Double Tracking) – an invention of the technical engineer Ken Townsend – is considered both an effect and a form of tape manipulation. The idea involved taking a recorded signal from the playback head of a tape machine and creating a duplicate by recording it on a separate machine. The two “images” of sound could then be combined and played back almost in sync. The system enabled the images to overlap precisely, as happens with photographic slides, and by varying the distances between them it was possible to achieve greater acoustical depth. This also offered an alternative to the tedious process of manual double-tracking (i.e., recording exactly the same part twice in order to strengthen it), which was a standard feature of the Beatles’ sessions, and a bit of an annoyance to them. The perspective of finally getting rid of it prompted George Harrison to say that Townsend deserved

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a medal for inventing ADT. The device was employed in more than 20 songs, mainly on vocals. Clearly audible examples of its use include “Rain” and “Lovely Rita”. Flanging, phasing, and chorus are ADT-related effects – direct offshoots of it. A constant speed change of one of the tape machines during the Artificial Double Tracking would produce a hollow, swirling sound. The effect was termed “flanging”. On “Good Morning Good Morning”, the trombones, saxophones and French horn overdubbing was altered thanks to flanging, limiting, and compressing, in order to “make it sound unlike brass playing” (Lewisohn 1988: 102, our italics). Keeping the same setup of flanging, but inverting the polarity of one of the signals caused “phasing”. The typical cancellation of the frequencies caused by phasing can be heard on the rhythmic parts in “Blue Jay Way”. Eventually, a radical, wild use of flanging caused a detuned, wobbly sound, close to the modern “chorus”. This is clearly audible on the pianet intro of “I Am the Walrus”. These three effects represent a defining component of the band’s music in their later years, as neatly illustrated by the mixing session of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”: Eric Clapton, invited to make a contribution to the song and determined not to impose too much of his musical personality in a context where he felt it was out of place, asked for his guitar to have a “Beatles sound”. George Martin responded by “flanging” his solo, somehow achieving the goal (even though one might still argue that the solo retains an unusual musical identity, as compared to the rest of the band’s musicianship). The aforementioned procedures were precursors of sound-­ enhancing devices such as flangers, phasers and harmonizers. Further tape-based effects included tape echo (also known as “slapback echo”, an Elvis Presley favorite, and – later – a typical occurrence in John Lennon’s solo career), repeat echo, involving multiple delays, STEED (an acronym for Single Tape Echo/Echo Delay), which was used to thicken the sound of echo chambers and tape looping and splicing (which we discuss in Sect. 1.2.4). A few words also about the various forms of feedback and distortion that The Beatles applied to their instruments, particularly in the second half of their career. The available technology at EMI – compressors and limiters for example –was a key factor in the shaping of this aspect. In songs like “The Word” and “Nowhere Man”, sound engineer Norman Smith made strong use of the Altec RS124 compressors and relied on extreme equalization, on both piano and guitars. For the bass sound of “Think for Yourself”, a Tone Bender “fuzzbox” was used, and the pedal provided the track with a distinctive character. The EMI Studios technical department also built their own electronic devices to overload the sound and achieve a “controlled distortion”. George Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle”, from the White Album, displays a set of distorted saxophones: the signal was patched through two RS61 amplifiers, which consequently overloaded, returned to the desk and finally recorded on the eight-track tape. The manipulation was carried out to such an extent that the session musicians received apologies for the wild treatment of their natural sound (Lewisohn 1988: 161). As we will specifically discuss in Sect. 4.4, The Beatles showed a distinctive talent for making the most of mistakes and accidental circumstances. The case of the

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guitar feedback noise at the beginning of “I Feel Fine” is paradigmatic. The unintentional note was created by leaning the guitar against the amplifier and it arguably represents the first use of feedback on a pop/rock record.

1.2.2 Speed Manipulation A first case could be the manipulation of the speed of one or more recorded tracks. In December 1965, the album Rubber Soul, with its exploration of different timbres, colors, and musical and lyrical atmospheres, presented “a new growing Beatles to the world” (George Martin, quoted in Lewisohn 1988: 69). Martin’s creative input, his innovative arrangements in particular, became a crucial prosthesis to the group’s music. For the baroque-style piano solo on “In My Life”, the producer relied on “half-speed overdubbing”. The technique consisted in adding a new element on top of an existing recording with the tape machine running at half-speed, allowing the achievement of both an altered sound and a sped-up performance once the tape was played back at a regular speed. This recording trick was not only used for aesthetic reasons, but also to facilitate the performance of difficult passages, as happened in the case of the guitar solo on “A Hard Day’s Night”. That said, recent revisionism has increasingly praised the inventiveness of their musicianship, though it is still fair to say that none of The Beatles could be considered a proper virtuoso on his instrument, at least not in the traditional, academic sense of the term, making it no surprise that some recording strategies were elaborated exactly to reduce the difficulties of a given performance. In “I’m Only Sleeping”, on Revolver, a unique texture was obtained relying on tape speed manipulation. This time, however, the process was remarkably more laborious: “frequency control”, also known as “varispeed”, was used to subtly change the speed of the tape machines. The so-called “Frequency Control Rack” consisted of a combination of a Vortexion amplifier and a Levell TG-150M oscillator. Most of the tape machines at Abbey Road Studios were modified in order to be used with this rack. Changing the setting of the oscillator allowed recording at other speeds besides the standard ones; varispeed offered possibilities not provided by half-speed recording. The technique became an integral part of the group’s sound, even used more times in the same song. In “I’m Only Sleeping”, the recording of the first layer of instruments (acoustic guitar, bass, and drums) was made with the machine running at 56 cycles per second instead of the standard 50. This made the audio material sound slower than normal on playback and considerably affected the texture of the backing track. For the lead vocal overdub, the recorder was then run at 45 cycles, thus speeding up Lennon’s voice on playback. In some cases, varispeed was even applied at the mixing stage, to make the whole song sound either slightly faster or slower.

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1.2.3 Miking and Plugging During the making of the album Revolver, sound engineer Geoff Emerick started to experiment with microphone placements.1 For instance, his contribution to the drum sounds was pivotal. He adopted a different recording technique as well as new microphone placements. The result was an artistic combination of natural and processed characteristics. In particular, he favored the use of the Fairchild 660 limiter, sending the whole drum signal to the valve unit. The Fairchild, together with the already mentioned Altec RS124 compressor, became an essential element of the band’s sound. For the recording of the double string quartet in “Eleanor Rigby”, he achieved a particularly “biting” sound by relying on close microphone techniques. The unorthodox position of the microphones, almost touching the strings, led to the production of an innovative, distinctive sound, which pleased the band, by now always in search of unusual timbres for their music. Also for the recording of the brass part in “Got to Get You into My Life”, Emerick placed the microphones extremely close to the instruments – as opposed to the more conventional distance of about six feet  – and then applied a limiter. The result was a “dirty”, close to distortion sound, reminiscent of the style of American soul labels like Motown (which, in turn, was a direct inspiration for the song itself, Composition-wise). Innovative recording methods were also largely responsible for the peculiar ways drums and bass would normally sound. Engineers were often challenged to add more bass on the Beatles’ records, once again to compete with records produced by Stax, Atlantic or Motown, that the group had the chance to be exposed to in clubs and parties. “Paperback Writer” is a case in point. Starting from late 1965, Paul McCartney began to overdub his bass parts. This gave him more freedom to experiment with melodic lines and also allowed the engineers to improve work on the sound. To try and obtain a more powerful sound, technical engineer Ken Townsend placed the studio’s large RLS10 speaker in front of McCartney’s amplifier and, inverting the connections, made it work as a microphone. In addition, balance engineer Geoff Emerick  – who had started to experiment with more aggressive dynamic processing – applied a strong compression, while disc cutter Tony Clark relied on the EMI’s newly acquired ATOC (Automatic Transient Overload Control) system to cut the record at a louder volume, with great benefit for the bass frequencies. This method provided a unique sound: Townsend was inspired by Abbey Road engineer Malcolm Addey (whom, as we have seen, worked with The Beatles on some occasions), who adopted a similar solution with other artists. Incidentally, and resuming a topic we were addressing earlier, this case is a good  It may be useful, moving forward, to mention that Abbey Road Studios engineers were not only formally trained by EMI, but they were also part of a mentorship program conducted by older and more experienced engineers. The complex network of influences received and applied by the staff is well illustrated by Emerick’s use of the Neumann U67 for the guitars (practice pioneered by senior engineer Peter Brown), the placement of a KM56 under the snare (technique first adopted by Peter Vince), and by the employment of the AKG D19c for the piano (courtesy of Malcolm Addey). 1

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example of the influences occurring within the studio, a remarkable aspect in the development of the Beatles’ recording techniques. If it is true that each engineer had his own personal style, it is also true that influences played a key role in technical and artistic decisions. To place this in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories (1981), there is a significant conflict between individualism and conformity in creative practices. In art, any individual is subject to “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces. Extending the concept, the Beatles’ inclination towards uniformity (harmonic solutions, similar experiences inspiring lyrics, musical sources, etc.) represents the effect of centripetal forces, while the desire for innovation indicates the impact of the centrifugal ones. Experiments with “direct injection” started in 1967, at the time of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and continued during the last years of the Beatles’ career as a band. The process involved sending instruments directly into the mixing console, without using amplifiers or microphones as “mediators” to improve the sound quality. In “Revolution”, the guitars and the bass were all plugged straight into the desk. Another regular habit was to overdub the snare or other drums for reinforcement. It is worth repeating that in the late period the group had gained more artistic autonomy, overseeing the decisions most of the time. During the White Album, all four Beatles even recorded their own songs individually, separately, and in different rooms.

1.2.4 Handling the Tapes Tape reversal, a practice introduced by musique concrète composers, was a common trick that proved to be suitable to the surreal and psychedelic soundscape of the band. The first Beatles track to feature reversed sounds was “Rain” (1966), with “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I’m Only Sleeping” being further examples. Some of these backward tricks became a kind of “Beatlesque” standard, and can be used today for the specific purpose of “quoting” the band: backwards cymbals playing a regular rhythmic pattern are possibly the most recurrent of these tricks, heard for instance on The Knack’s “Maybe Tonight” or on Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love”, two quintessential and intentional Beatlesque tracks. The Beatles also flirted with tape looping techniques, most famously on Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Five tape loops were placed on different BTR2 recorders, each controlled by a different operator. The tapes were played either backwards, forwards or at a faster speed, with each loop then sent to its own fader on the REDD.51 mixing desk. While the basic rhythm track was played back, George Martin and Geoff Emerick took turns fading the loops in and out of the song. The result was finally recorded on a Studer J37 four-track machine (Fig. 1.4). The technique marked a decisive step in the use of the recording studio as an actual “musical instrument” and it prefigured the advent of digital sampling and looping by about twenty years.

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Fig. 1.4  The Studer J37 four-track tape recorder, on which most Beatles songs were recorded. (Photo attribution: Josephenus P. Riley, CC BY 2.0)

Generally speaking, the whole idea of tapes becoming actual creative sources, and not simply the support on which creative actions were committed, was something that the band showed great interest for, and often provided ideas of their own. If McCartney was committed to the full exploitation of state-of-the-art studio resources, Lennon, in turn, could implement his colleague’s professionalism with “outside-the-box” requests, and bring these resources to their unexplored potential (Lennon-McCartney also being a quality trademark in this respect). While working on “Strawberry Fields Forever”, Lennon asked George Martin to make it possible for two separate takes to coexist, even though they were recorded at different tempo and pitch. Lennon was happy with the beginning of the song, as recorded in an early version (Take 7), which was essentially a band performance with a distinctive electric guitar accompaniment, and – most famously – the mellotron part with the flutes preset. However, wanting to keep some of the features of a later take (Take 26featuring an orchestral arrangement), Lennon asked the producer to join the two takes together, regardless of the technical complications. The producer managed to speed up the first version and slow down the second, matching the dreamlike atmosphere of Take 7 with the thick and slightly threatening orchestration present in the Take 26 version of the song. Tape splicing technique and varispeed were both pivotal in doing the trick. This example shows the impact of studio technology on the structure and on the essence of the band’s songs. In fact, “Strawberry Fields Forever” is an excellent case not only for the peculiar solution of joining two totally different takes, but in general as an insight on a song’s general evolution in all its components: music, lyrics, structure, and arrangement. The original demo brought in by John Lennon was a rather simple, intimate song

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that, despite the existence of the melody in its final form, was a far cry from the epic psychedelic manifesto that was released on record (and that arguably, along with “I Am the Walrus”, typifies the Beatles’ approach to psychedelia). Lennon performed the song with a simple guitar accompaniment, possibly with a “folk ballad” template in mind. As The Beatles attempted a first arrangement of the song (captured on Take 1, on November 24, 1966), its structure was rather traditional, starting with a strophe (“Living is easy with eyes closed…”), repeating it a second time with different lyrics (“No one I think is in my tree…”), and only then proceeding with the chorus (“Let me take you down…”). The structure, in practice, was a Strophe-Strophe-­ Refrain-Strophe-Refrain-Coda, which is one of the most classic pop formats (with the possible addition of a solo, at any point of the song, and of an extra strophe-­ refrain round). On Revolver, the album that preceded the recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, there are no less than seven songs in that format – with or without the mentioned additions. The band must have had several second thoughts about the arrangement, because nearly every take seems to introduce something new (particularly, the tempo gets faster every time). It is not until Take 7 that a quasi-final version occurs. The first minute of what is nowadays the official recording (including the mellotron intro) was indeed realized during this take. It is intriguing to note that, at this point, the song structure was A-B-B-A-B-A, that is, not as regular an alternation of strophes (B) and refrains (A) as we hear it nowadays. After a few days during which Take 7 was considered the ultimate version of the song, Lennon felt again insecure about the arrangement and asked Martin to attempt something “with other musicians” (which generally meant, in “The Beatles to George Martin” communication guidelines, orchestra or parts of it,). A score for brass and cellos was written, and Takes 9–25 were different recordings of this orchestral version. Once they reached Take 26, the new version was ready, and sounded as final as Take 7, as it was in the band-format arrangement. Quite famously, Lennon expressed a particular liking for the beginning of Take 7 and the end of Take 26, and suggesting joining them, although they were on different key and tempo. On December 22, 1966, one of the most bizarre edits in rock history took place. Speeding up Take 7 and slowing down Take 26, Martin and Emerick managed to create a credible fusion of the two versions, with the transition occurring one minute into the song. The result, which had to sacrifice the song structure, transforming it into the regular A-B-A-B-A-B-A that we know today, was a most charming example of artistic production and experimentation, all finalized within a single month, and with a succession of artistic decisions taken in the studio. Tape splicing was also used for the track “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”. Lennon’s “weird” request, this time, was to create a circus atmosphere, a fairground feel (“I want to smell the sawdust”). George Martin assembled 19 snippets of tape containing calliope sounds and asked Geoff Emerick to throw them up in the air. The two of them then created a psychedelic collage by editing the bits back together at random. On a side note, we should perhaps point out that unlike ADT and STEED, tape splicing or looping were not EMI engineers’ inventions. The Beatles were, nevertheless, among the first to make a large use of these techniques in pop music.

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1.2.5 Other Forms of Studio Experimentation In this paragraph we can group several different techniques emerging from various practices. The first are the activities carried out during the mixing stage. Once more, Geoff Emerick was instrumental in bringing a fresh approach to this. He used more radical EQ and began experimenting with the staging in the stereo mixes: for some Revolver tracks, he pulled the music toward the center, leaving the vocals hard-­ panned to the sides. On “Eleanor Rigby”, for example, stereo is used in a thematic way: McCartney’s solo voice in the verses is placed off to the right side and in the chorus it is joined by its double on the left side. For the first time, the stereo configuration acted as narrative device, reflecting the song’s structure. The stereo image of “Eleanor Rigby” became this way a coherent companion to its lyrics, a reflection on loneliness and ageing in the form of a fictional tale: the appearance of the second voice (of the same singer) on the opposite channel conveys the idea of a lonely person speaking to himself in front of a mirror. In 1967, Emerick also started to use dynamic panning. The Beatles, now free from the constraints of live performances, having famously decided to give up touring in the summer of ’66, welcomed this approach. Tape-looping aside, “Tomorrow Never Knows” also represents a good example of vocal manipulation. Constantly in search of a way to change the sound of his voice, John Lennon came up with a bizarre request: “I want to sound as though I’m the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountain top” (as quoted in Lewisohn 1988: 72). Emerick’s solution to this unusual request was to send the vocal signal through a Leslie speaker  – commonly used with the Hammond organ  – to get a dream-like, distant voice. From that point on, The Beatles made a creative use of the Leslie cabinet throughout their career, employing it not only on vocals, but also in similarly unorthodox ways, such as on guitars (e.g., “Old Brown Shoe”) and piano (e.g., “Don’t Pass Me by”). Creativity was sometimes inspired by technical limitations, as in the case of the orchestral overdubs on “A Day in the Life”. The song was at a fairly advanced stage when it was decided to add a 40-piece orchestra to fill two 24 bar gaps. The lack of space on the four-track tape drove the Abbey Road Studios technical department to find a solution. Ken Townsend managed to synchronize two four-track machines, allowing for four additional tracks to be used. With the Beatles’ previously recorded material playing on the first machine and a second tape running along with four vacant tracks, Geoff Emerick was able to superimpose four layers of orchestra, one for each track. A fifth layer was also recorded, on one of the tracks of the first tape. The final mix was of course done with the two recorders running together. The synchronization of the tape machines, however, was not the sole experimental aspect in the session: the only instructions given to the orchestra was to start very quietly and end up very loud; musicians were to start with the lowest note their respective instrument could play and end up with the highest. The score was not much of a help either: it only had the lowest note at the beginning, an E major chord at the end, and a rough indication of the note that each instrument was supposed to

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be playing at the beginning of each bar. In a briefing before the recording, George Martin told the orchestra: “you’ve got to make your own way up there, as slide-y as possible” (quoted in Lewisohn 1988: 96). As envisioned by Paul McCartney (who, at the time, was fully involved in the avant-garde circles of London), the aim was to create a massive orchestral build-up in the middle of the song as well as for the finale. As a supplement, in the true spirit of the time, the members of the orchestra were asked to wear full evening dress, together with red clown noses, gorilla paws, bizarre hats and so on. Two more songs need to be mentioned in regard to experimentation. The first, Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way”, was one of the group’s most charming ventures into psychedelic rock, making the most of all the technical advancements of the time. All the ingredients in the arrangement contribute to capturing the “feel” of the fog mentioned in the lyrics: the use of the Leslie speaker, reverse (i.e., backwards sounds), scrapy strings, flanging, and phasing. The second,  “I Am the Walrus”, incorporates the use of sampling, marcato strings, flanging and chorus effects, overloaded signal, and a heavily processed rhythm track. Finally, a look at the songwriting process shows that the time the Fab Four spent in the studio was productive for composing as well as for recording: the songs “Birthday” and “All Together Now” (plus the lyrics for “I Will”) were entirely written at Abbey Road, while the peculiar and eccentric “You Know My Name” was inspired by (and the whole central part constructed on) one of the rhythm presets found in the studio’s MK II mellotron.

1.3 Instrumentation and Recurrent Techniques At heart, The Beatles have always been a “guitar-band”. Since their early days, playing in nightclubs in Liverpool and Hamburg, and for the first half of their recording years, the band’s line-up consisted of two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, with the few exceptions whereby the instruments were often played by musicians outside of the band, as in the case of the occasional piano playing of George Martin. Deeply influenced by American music, the group, as we have seen and shall repeatedly see later, started their personal search for a stylistic identity by trying to recreate the sound and the beat of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and country and western records from across the Atlantic. Early rock and roll artists like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Bo Diddley were some of the main sources of inspiration for the band. British so-called “skiffle”, a blues-, country- and folk-­ based genre pioneered by Lonnie Donegan, was another key reference. Skiffle helped launch a craze for guitars throughout England, with many bands being formed in the wake of Donegan’s hit “Rock Island Line” (1955); one of these was The Quarrymen, who later of course became The Beatles. Another influence, the only one that had little to do with guitars, was Tin Pan Alley, and in general the golden age of American songwriting. It was a vital ingredient, as it contributed significantly to a taste for complex-yet-catchy melodies and in general for

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counter-balancing lively, aggressive songs with slow and mid-tempo ballads, which is the very mix that made The Beatles such an eclectic, inventive group. This influence, however, persisted exclusively at only a musical level, doing little to counter the band’s desire to be “rock and roll stars”, and therefore – among other things – to be a guitar-band. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison composed most of their first songs on guitars and the goal set in the recording studio was often to create an American-like sound. Particularly so because this was the period when Lennon-­ McCartney collaborations occurred, as Lennon once put it, “eyeball to eyeball” (Sheff 2000: 137); when the two would work on a song in each other’s presence, either developing a pre-existing idea, or even starting from scratch. The comfort of composing on guitars had also the additional advantage of allowing the couple to sit face to face as in front of a mirror (Miles 1998: 35): McCartney was left-handed, which would create a perfect postural symmetry with his right-handed songwriting partner that facilitated the display of each other’s musical ideas – chords particularly. The extensive concert experience in the years before their contract with EMI, allowed The Beatles to work comfortably in a studio environment, recording the songs of their debut Please Please Me essentially “live”. The one-day recording session was made possible by the fact that the recording of all the songs on tape, one after another, was managed in only a few takes, and with little or no refinement at all. Using a two-track tape machine, sound engineer Norman Smith recorded the instruments on the first track (rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, and drums), and the vocals on the second. This way, Smith could keep the backing instruments and the vocals as two separate signals and be able to balance and treat them independently. As for overdubbing, the only way to do that before the arrival of multitrack recorders was to use two tape machines: the first tape would be played back on the first machine, the musician performed the additional part by playing along to the already recorded music, while a second machine recorded the combination of the two signals. Not exactly the most flattering way to work, from a sound engineer’s point of view. When four-track recorders were introduced in late 1963, a new set of possibilities opened up, as recalled by the technical engineer Ken Townsend: “with fourtrack one could do a basic rhythm track and then add on vocals and whatever else later. It made the studios into much more of a workshop” (Lewisohn 1988: 36). The Beatles made their debut in four-track recording with the song “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, in September 1963.

1.3.1 The Basic Lineup It would be too dispersive, and definitely too geeky, to make a full list of the guitars, basses and drum kits played by The Beatles during their discographic career, also because one of the chief characteristic of the band was that of not being typified by any particular instrument (in the way for instance Eric Clapton is typified by his

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Fender Stratocaster guitar, Rick Davies by his Wurlitzer electric piano, Ray Manzarek by his Vox organ…). Especially from Rubber Soul onwards, the band seemed to have used two main criteria for the selection of the instruments played on their records: (1) what each song seemed to specifically need, and, trivially, (2) what instrument had been recently purchased (or gifted by the manufacturer) and therefore felt fresh and exciting to play. It is thanks to these two criteria that each of the late albums had at the same time a variety of different instruments employed and a tendency to use some of them more often than others. This is how we get instruments cherrypicked for a specific song, such as the Ramirez Classical Guitar Harrison played on “And I Love Her”, or others recently-acquired that dominate on a certain album (e.g., the Epiphone Casinos on Revolver or the Martin D-28 on the White Album). Having said that, several instruments ended up being more central than others, especially, as we have seen, in the first part of the band’s career. The easiest Beatle to cover in this respect is obviously Ringo Starr who was ever faithful to a Ludwig four-piece drumkit (Fig. 1.5), with the sole exception of the first album, in which he played a Premier kit – the one bearing the first “Beatles” logo, in italics and with two beetle antennas on the “B”. In 1968, Ludwig gave him a five-piece set (the “Hollywood” kit), which he employed on the last albums. Cymbals were mostly Zildjian, with the occasional Paiste (especially in the early years). A relatively simple list is also the one pertaining to John Lennon, who proved to be less of a guitar collector than Harrison. He employed three main acoustic guitars: a Gibson J-160E mostly in the first years; a Martin D-28 from 1968 onwards; and a

Fig. 1.5  Ringo Starr playing his Ludwig four-piece drum set with cymbals. (Photo of public domain)

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12-string Framus Hootenanny used whenever a richer acoustic sound was needed (e.g., on “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”). As for electric guitars, the two instruments mostly associated to his Beatles years remain as the iconic Rickenbacker 325 (various models) of the Beatlemania years, and the light brown Epiphone Casino (Fig. 1.6) that, for instance, we see him playing on the 1969 rooftop concert. Also worthy of a mention is the Fender Stratocaster he used on some of Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s tracks. Paul McCartney was mostly faithful to two bass guitars: the violin-shaped Hofner 500/1 (arguably, the most iconic Beatle instrument of all) which he still uses today (Fig.  1.7), and, from Rubber Soul onwards, the Rickenbacker 4001S, which also happens to typify his 1970s and 1980s post-Beatles period. Occasional incursions of the Fender Jazz Bass can also be heard on the late Beatles albums. McCartney engaged quite often into guitar playing as well – including solo duties on “Ticket to Ride”, “Another Girl”, “Taxman”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Good Morning Good Morning”, to name a few. For these parts, he mostly relied on an Epiphone Casino and a Fender Esquire, the former remaining to this day one of his favorite guitars (we still see him playing it in concerts and in the studio). As for the acoustic parts, Fig. 1.6  John Lennon playing his Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar. (Photo of public domain)

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Fig. 1.7  Paul McCartney and his Hofner 500/1 bass, still used to these days in his live concerts. (Photo attribution: Oli Gill, CC BY-SA 2.0)

we should definitely mention the 1964 Epiphone Texan FT-79 (played on “Yesterday”), and of course the Martin D-28 that dominates on his White Album tracks (e.g., “Blackbird”, “Rocky Raccoon”…). George Harrison was surely the “guitar freak” of the band, not only possessing the greater number of models, but also being the one more interested in customizing his instruments. His early years were mostly characterized by Gretsch electric guitars: the Duo Jet first, then the Country Gentleman (Fig.  1.8) and finally the Tennessean. In 1964 he became one of the pioneers of the 12-string electric guitar, with his Rickenbacker 360/12 model. From 1966 onwards he began using an Epiphone Casino (visible in the last Beatles tours), a Gibson SG (that he often played on Revolver), a Fender Stratocaster (the one that became known as “Rocky” and that was painted in psychedelic colors as seen in the Magical Mystery Tour TV film), a Gibson Les Paul (as seen in the promo for “Revolution”), and finally the rosewood Fender Telecaster we see used in the rooftop concert. As for acoustic guitars, he, like Lennon, owned a Gibson J-160E, while, in later years, he favored a Gibson J-200 Jumbo (used on “For You Blue”).

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Fig. 1.8  George Harrison plays his Gretsch Country Gentleman electric guitar. (Photo attribution: Eric Koch, CC0)

1.3.2 Other Instruments Keyboard instruments were the first to be used besides the ones that formed the band’s basic line-up. Already since the Beatles’ early songs, piano and organs had found their way into their music, with the piano becoming increasingly prominent in the middle period, up to the late period playing a key-role in ballads such as “Hey Jude” or “Let It Be”. The rich collection of instruments available at Abbey Road Studios allowed the band and producer George Martin to try different solutions for the arrangements. One must also point out that after the first few years, Lennon and McCartney also began to compose on piano, and collaborations in real time became increasingly rare. Besides the more “solipsistic” compositional approach implied by the use of a piano (the previously mentioned mirror-effect of Lennon and McCartney playing guitars in front of each other was no longer possible), the songwriting’s cognitive maps present significant changes from what guitars can offer. Keys and tonalities, for instance, tend to be different: guitar-based songwriting is more easily centered on keys like A, D and G, while piano-playing makes it more spontaneous to work around C or F. The rhythmic approach is also dissimilar, and so are the harmonic solutions (literally, the hands’ movements follow different patterns, constructing different progressions), and so forth. These tendencies are far from constituting a rule, but they tend to recur more often than not, particularly in the case of

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non-professionally trained musicians (like all four Beatles), who do not possess an equal mastering of every single nuance and potential of the instruments. In other words: a song like “Yesterday” was composed on the piano and then performed on guitar, proving a versatility that is partly responsible for the thousands of cover versions that have been made of it, in all possible genres.2 On the other hand, it is more challenging to imagine that “She Loves You” could ever have been conceived on a keyboard instrument, or that “The Long and Winding Road” could have originated on a guitar. Besides piano, several other keyboards instruments made their appearance in the group’s songs through the years, giving in some cases a strong character to the tracks: 1. Organ: we should mention at least the Lowrey Heritage DSO-1 (used on the introduction of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), the Hammond RT-3 (used on almost every album) and the Vox Continental (used on “I’m Down”). 2. Mellotron: mostly used in the “psychedelic years” was the mellotron MK II (Fig. 1.9), responsible for the distinctive opening of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and used throughout 1967 and 1968 (including the straightforward use of the pre-recorded patterns available on the machine, as in the case of the Spanish guitar introduction on “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”). 3. Other keyboards include the Moog III-P modular synthesizer, used on the Abbey Road album, the Fender Rhodes Seventy-Three electric piano, clearly audible on “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down”, the Harmonium (“We Can Work It Out”, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”), the Baldwin Harpsichord (“Because”), the Fig. 1.9  The mellotron Mark II model purchased by John Lennon in 1965. (Photo attribution: swimfinfan, CC BY-SA 2.0)

 Just to confirm what we were saying about the difference in keys used in guitar and piano songwriting, McCartney composed “Yesterday” in F major (a more natural key on the piano, as we have seen), however, when it was decided that he would record it on an acoustic guitar, he made sure to tune his Epiphone Texan one tone down, in order to be able to play it as if it was in G major (in turn, a more natural key on the guitar). 2

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Clavichord (“For No One”), the Hohner Pianet (“I Am the Walrus”), the Schiedmayer Celeste (“Good Night”) and the Clavioline (“Baby You’re a Rich Man”). Confirmation of the importance of keyboards in the band’s music can be found in the fact that the only external musician to be officially credited as an additional member of the band was the American keyboardist Billy Preston, who collaborated with the group on the album Let It Be. It is an exceptional recognition, when we consider that such guest-stars of the level of Eric Clapton (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) or Brian Jones (“You Know My Name”) were not mentioned at all, let alone on the front cover with inscriptions like “The Beatles with Billy Preston”. All four Beatles contributed keyboard parts to their songs, but no one played them as often as the producer George Martin, who added his touch on almost every album. On Please Please Me, where, despite the constraints of two-track recordings, short piano and celesta episodes made their way through the songs “Misery” and “Baby It’s You” respectively. Other additional instruments began appearing from 1965 onwards, and the presence of session musicians in the studio became a common occurrence. Classical instruments, in particular, became more and more relevant, and in different combinations: from the simple need to add a classical instrument for the solo to a string quartet, and from a whole brass section to a full orchestra overdubbed several times. The first external musician to be recruited in a Beatles session was flautist John Scott, who played the solo in the coda of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”. However, it was “Yesterday”, from the same album Help! that marked a stylistic turning point, as confirmed by George Martin: “With ‘Yesterday’ we used orchestration for the first time, and from then on, we moved into whole new areas” (Martin and Hornsby 1994: 133). Not only did “Yesterday” feature a string quartet, but it also saw a Beatle, McCartney, giving his contribution to a “classical” arrangement for the first time. Strings were used on several other occasions, in both rhythmic and melodic ways (“I Am the Walrus”, “She’s Leaving Home”, “Something”, “The Long and Winding Road”), while the influence from the avant-garde brought a more challenging use of the orchestra, as in the case of “A Day in the Life”. Harp was a pivotal element in Mike Leander’s orchestral arrangement of “She’s Leaving Home” (one of the few not completed by George Martin), while the clarinet is prominent on “When I’m Sixty-Four”. Wind instruments were widely used, either solo or in ensemble, with the classical influence again prominent on “Penny Lane”, a song featuring flute, trumpet, flugelhorn, oboe, cor anglais, and above all, a Bb piccolo trumpet for the famous Bach-inspired solo. Another distinctive solo, this time played by a French horn, is heard on “For No One”. As for ensembles, it is worth mentioning “Got to Get You into My Life”, which features trumpets and tenor saxophones to give the song that Motown feel, and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, with its street band-like arrangement, and “Lady Madonna”, another R&B-inspired song.

1.4  The Centrality of the Studio

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As they inaugurated the second half of their career, The Beatles showed great interest in the use of instruments that were not common in the pop/rock context of the time. At the same time, even though they are generally considered innovators, The Beatles are often more accountable for “enhancing” or “popularizing”, rather than strictly introducing, certain ideas and techniques. In other words, because of their fame and influence, The Beatles were in many cases responsible for the establishment of a series of traits as stylistic topoi, though not necessarily for their invention. This applies to the use of uncommon instrumentation as well. Several “ethnic” instruments were used in Beatles records. George Harrison’s discovery of Indian music led to the use of the sitar on “Norwegian Wood”. Initially played by Harrison in a “Western” way (in this specific case, by following Lennon’s acoustic guitar riff, written on a diatonic scale), over the years the sitar turned into a defining “Beatlesque” instrument, and eventually numerous Eastern musical elements became a part of the band’s sonic spectrum: sitar, tabla, dilruba and tamboura can often be found in the group’s tracks from 1966 on. Moreover, Harrison’s songwriting also started to be influenced by his study of the sitar. Unlike “Norwegian Wood”, a perfectly English folk-sounding track flavored with the exotic touch of the sitar, songs like “Within You Without You” or “The Inner Light” became fully immersed in Indian musical culture, constituting credible pioneering examples of what we nowadays call “world music”. Other instruments that are more typical of folk, rather than rock traditions, include the recorder (“The Fool on the Hill”), the accordion (“All You Need Is Love”), as well as typically American ones like the fiddle3 (“Don’t Pass Me By”), the banjo (“All You Need Is Love”) and the lap steel guitar (“For You Blue”).

1.4 The Centrality of the Studio As we hopefully were able to illustrate, recording technologies and techniques had a special place in the Beatles’ production. They were not merely “devices”, but in several cases “creative sources”, making more than a difference in the way songs took their final shape. Between “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” as mere compositions, as remarkable as they already were at that stage, and what turned out to be one of the best singles in history (as it is often defined), there is still a gap. This gap is entirely accountable by the way the band and the EMI staff recorded and produced those tracks. It is a gap filled with two entirely different versions of one song joined in a most unorthodox and audacious way; with a piccolo trumpet seen on TV; with cymbals recorded backwards, and several other tricks. In a way, the present monograph attempts to describe and discuss that gap. As we wrote in the preface: we seek to understand the aesthetics, the semiotics and the

 Of course, a “fiddle” is nothing other than a violin. In this case, we do not refer to the instrument as such, but to that particular way of playing it that belongs to the country and western tradition. 3

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1  A Short History of the Beatles in the Studio

philosophy of the Beatles’ recording activity, presenting their creative process as an organic continuum between songwriting and production. Working on their “sound” equaled in many respects working on their artistic identity. As years went by, all the Beatles learned their studio lessons. When the band broke up (and in fact even before), they all took the artistic producer’s role, some occasionally, some more regularly. In some cases they shared the duty with famous producers, like Phil Spector, managing not to be overcome by their strong personality and distinctive touch. Harrison’s All Things Must Pass might have been properly and abundantly “Spectorized”, but Lennon, particularly on the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, was firm in maintaining his idea of a minimal, essential sound, with the result of making that album sound like the most unlikely Phil Spector production ever. Paul McCartney – possibly because of a certain antagonism with the other three in the aftermath of their bitter break-up – was determined to show that he did not need big names besides him, and that he could write, perform, and produce albums entirely on his own. His solo debut, McCartney, was a completely autarchic affair, save some vocal harmonies from his wife Linda. With its domestic, semi-improvised feel, mostly caused by an extensive use of “direct injection” recording, the album ended up being a sort of pioneer of lo-fi indie aesthetics – something that, in reality, The Beatles had already hinted at in some episodes of the White Album.4 In later years, McCartney also delivered very “clean” productions (like Wings at the Speed of Sound or London Town), confirming that he was the most faithful pupil of George Martin and, incidentally, the only Beatle who would record with him again on several occasions, maintaining a solid personal relationship over the years.  An interesting historical topic that should be discussed in relation to, but not only, The Beatles, is that long red line connecting the so-called garage-rock of the 1960s with most of the punk from the 1970s, and that stylistic notion (genre?) since the end of the 1980s known as lo-fi. It was then that the expression “low fidelity” became not only a way to describe the recording quality of a given song or album, but also a style of its own. Obviously (luckily, in a way), not all rock recordings had the chance of being performed and recorded with technologically high-quality equipment. In many cases (like garage, punk, etc.) a non-optimal recording quality was nothing more than just the result of a limited number of technical resources. In other cases, White Album and McCartney included, it was a specific artistic choice, suggested by diverse circumstances; for McCartney it was the decision to make a low-profile, homey-feeling, album that would not compete with the mega-productions of the band he had just left. Eventually, and exactly starting from the late 1980s, the term started to be associated with a specific area of independent musicians that would record on four-track machines. The American underground movement (represented by the likes of R.E.M.), some post-punk British bands, and New-Zealand acts like Chills or The Clean made of this apparent poverty a true trademark, applied to both traditional rock songs and more experimental compositions. Coherently with this principle, and in the period between the 1980s and 1990s, independent labels began to issue lo-fi material mostly on vinyl, when it was the common opinion that CDs had surpassed vinyl LPs in every single technical aspect. The average listener started to become aware of lo-fi as a stylistic model around the early 1990s, thanks to the emergence of the grunge scene, the so-called post-rock, and to highly successful albums such as U2’s Achtung Baby. The paradox – or maybe not? – was that lo-fi sounds started to be created with the support of sophisticated (often expensive) studio devices. 4

1.4  The Centrality of the Studio

27

Whatever the task at hand, all four Beatles proved to be competent studio persons. In fact, unlike many of their colleagues who established an image of themselves as “stage animals” (The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who…), all four were always rather happy to maintain that “committed musician” outfit that had accompanied them since the famous decision to quit touring. With the exception of McCartney, who was anxious to get back on stage, none of them were particularly keen on live concerts anymore: Lennon made very few live appearances, Harrison only did two short tours throughout his whole solo career, and Starr waited a good twenty years before resuming a regular live activity with the various incarnations of his All Starr Band. On the contrary, plenty of visual and audiovisual material, including promotional videos, shows them in the studio, even to the point of becoming a cliché; how many times have we seen McCartney launching his new song with a video where he plays all the instruments? In the most fortunate cases, he also offered precious resources for both scholars and aficionados, such as his informative drawings on the inside gatefold of Press to Play, pinpointing the position of each instrument in the stereo image. All of them made sure that a proper recording studio was built in their own homes, and in one case, McCartney’s “Rude Studios”, some of the installed gear was actually purchased from Abbey Road, including legendary items such as the mellotron MK II and the Studer J37. As soon as new technologies kicked in, they remained up-to-date (e.g., Ringo Starr co-produced his 2009 album Y Not entirely on Pro Tools), while at the same time not abandoning their heritage, often choosing to rely on their old instruments or analogical equipment. It may not be fair to say that in general, their success depended upon technology and studio activity, but it would be superficial to relegate its contribution to the mere role of a “side-dish” in their songwriting, stardom, and social impact.

Chapter 2

Style and Sound

As mentioned in the preface, this monograph intends to investigate how The Beatles managed to shape their style through the achievement of an eclectic yet ever-­ recognizable “sound”; a sound whose characteristics were mostly developed in the recording studio. With that in mind, an accurate definition is needed of what we mean when discussing their “sound”, given the fact that we are clearly not referring to the mere acoustic phenomenon measured by Alexander Graham Bell. This part of the book partly relies on Martinelli’s recent chapter in the Chagas and Wu-edited volume Sounds from Within: Phenomenology and Practice (Martinelli 2021: 143–169). Of the many expressions adopted from musical jargon to construct a musical discourse, and particularly a popular music discourse, “sound” seems to be one with many nuances and a nearly all-inclusive quality. As employed in various sentences, and far from its denotative nature of physical/acoustic entity, sound appears as an inter-semantic assembly of at least the following features: arrangement, artistic production, engineering, instrumentation, genre, format, performance, and possibly also some intrinsic rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic elements, as they appear in the songwriting process (that is, usually, before production as such). To these, the subject engaged into some sort of musical relationship with sound (playing, listening, composing, or otherwise), tends to add elements such as expectations, taste, cultural conventions, and many others. In this sense, the concept seems to be first and foremost a bottom-up category brought to musicological attention by the shared experience of subjects (musically trained or not), and not a top-down notion imposed by the community of music scholars and made part of the terminological canon (as instead happened to most of the terms sound seems to be a combination of, such as “engineering”, “performance”, etc.) Formulated in these connotative terms, the notion of sound has not been dealt with too often by scholars (and certainly not in a systematic manner), while obviously popular music listeners and fans employ the notion repeatedly and in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5_2

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application to numerous contexts, including that of The Beatles. One of the first scholars to invert the trend was the late Gino Stefani, the musicologist who, along with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, has been credited with the introduction of the field of musical semiotics back in the 1960s. Stefani was a fervent supporter of the theoretical importance of “musical experience” and so-called “common competence”  – in other words: the lay-person’s discourse on music, versus the academic conventions of the time, which regarded scholarly work as the only valuable contribution to music theory. Within that approach, it was only natural that Stefani would also pay attention to semantic categories and forms of “discourse-­ currency” (as first defined in Martinelli 2010a: 54–59) developed in this bottom-up way.1 In the mid-1990s, almost as a completion of an ideal tetralogy on music theory seen through the lens of common competence (melody, intervals and rhythm being the first three instalments), Stefani developed his own reflections on sound (starting from Stefani 1998: 38–54), using the opportunity, among other things, to establish a connection with his studies on music as a synesthesic2 experience and in the process, coming up with the neologism “soundaesthesia”. More than any other category of musical appropriation, sound seemed to him the one most directly related to the multisensorial dimension of such processes. Expressions/descriptions such as “warm sound”, “sharp sound”, “ample sound”, “sound texture” and many others are witness to the concept as being “the [musical] parameter that our ears most significantly perceive, decode, compare, and recognize in terms of distance, source, time/space approaching and departing from the body” (Stefani 1998: 54). That said, here we approach sound with two main goals in mind: 1. To define and describe the notion of sound, not in its denotative sense (as in “the sensation produced by stimulation of the organs of hearing by vibrations transmitted through the air or other medium”, or similar definitions), but within the complex semantic field of discourses and practices occurring among musicians and music listeners.3 Far from simply addressing the idea of sound as  Briefly: the expression “discourse-currency” was coined to describe a certain area, within a discourse, that the most diverse categories of people use in order to share/trade each other’s “encyclopedias” (in Umberto Eco’s sense – we shall encounter and explain this term further within this book) on a larger discourse. In Martinelli 2010a, it was argued that “performance” is the discoursecurrency for popular music, exactly because the former functions as cultural model and mediator to develop a larger discourse on the latter. We make here a similar point about “sound”. 2  It may be useful to clarify that Stefani made explicit use of the adjective “synesthesic” (“sinestesico” in Italian), as opposed to the more common “synesthetic”. The reason is similar to what brought Nattiez to employ the term “esthesic”, in his famous triadic model of musical levels (along with the poietic and the neutral). That is: the word intends to address the sensorial/receptive experience as a whole, as opposed to the more codified (and often culturally mediated) “aesthetic” experience. 3  On another occasion, it would be of the utmost interest to investigate on the shaping of the Beatles style through the audience and the spectatorship of the band. Such aspect, due also to the dismissive and influential attitude displayed by the mighty Adorno, is often underrated or even overlooked in most musical analyses. On the contrary, a musical equivalent of Eco’s lector in fabula (Eco 1979) theory would be germane also within a research on the Beatles style. 1

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“acoustic-physical” phenomenon, such a field tends to incorporate a varied range of musical and extra-musical elements, including production, performance, arrangement, sensorial perceptions, taste, cultural conventions and much more. 2. To investigate the relationship between sound and (musical) subject, in terms of impact, of conducts (in François Delalande’s sense4) and, so to speak, of confidence between the two parties. In other words, we shall attempt to understand how and how much the sound manages to impose itself on the listener’s attention (also in relation to other fundamental musical traits, such as rhythm and melody), if it is possible to speak reasonably of a specifically “sonic” musical conduct, and finally of what nature is the relationship existing between sound and subject, in terms of importance and, in a way that we shall clarify later, of ‘priority’. As mentioned above, both this and the previous goal will be highly informed by the theories of Gino Stefani. For this reason, the expression that we will adopt is not “sonic conduct”, but actually “soundesthesic conduct”, as a result of a combination between the words “sound” and “synesthesia”, the latter being central in Stefani’s argumentation on sound. This task is vital in our research because it is only through a deep understanding of the overarching and complex role that sound plays within the overall identity, and consequent perception, of a song that one may realize how decisive is this aspect in defining a “style”. Before proceeding to review Stefani’s theory on sound, and again similarly to what was done in Martinelli 2021, we may set the tones of this topic with a few quotations, partly collected personally, partly assembled from various websites and partly borrowed from Stefani’s writings themselves. The idea is to consider them a sort of thesaurus of the many possible ways to understand, conceive and describe sound in music. Emphases in italics are ours: This Dreadnought is made completely out of mahogany, which gives it a crisp, yet warm sound. (Review of the Martin D-15M acoustic guitar, in https://tonefreqs.wordpress. com/2013/08/27/martin-­dreadnought-­d-­15m-­review-­guest-­post/) When I think of the notion of “sound”, there are several elements contributing to its definition. The first one coming into my head is “atmosphere”. In my work sound is the ship that carries the world I want the audience to experience. Little particles that crawl under their skin, moving them to directed inner paths until their and my heartbeats sync in the sound. The atmosphere carries both individual experiences and feelings, as well as collective memory and awareness. For example: having engaged in musical encounters in Finland from a very young age I can safely say that I was at least partly musically socialized there. So, when I describe sound as “weird, warm, metallic, wooden, odd, spooky, ghostly, alien...” I might be better understood in that region as opposed to when I collaborate with musicians from a different country. Having said that, this is something solely influencing

 In his seminal interdisciplinary book, Delalande (1993) discusses a “musical conduct” as the totality of active and receptive approaches that a person (whether or not musically trained) establishes with a musical item: expectations, motivations, cognitive plans, reactions, attitudes, background, etc. 4

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2  Style and Sound the work process itself and not giving any information about the quality of the work results of course. When describing the sound of a special genre I try to stick to very technical facts, that more or less important representatives of this genre (or sound) have implemented. In the end this is why I rather speak of atmosphere when collaborating with people than musical vocabulary. A specific sound (and hereby I mean the wave structure) of an instrument can be altered hugely by a simple effect. When I speak about a “cold, thick kick” I might mean something completely different than someone else. The other part of my definition for sound is rather technical. It is a space that gathers the combination of musical functions and parameters such as texture, bass, and beats – as well as harmonies and melodies on a horizontal and vertical level. For the creative writing process, I prefer to think about the atmosphere – the ship, the space I want the audience to experience  – rather than the music theory behind it. (Victoria Trunova, composer and performer, personal communication 2020) Like a stretched elastic band that is eventually released, or like deformed objects that reacquire their original shape. (student’s description of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza V  – Stefani 1998: 42) Do you think the sound of this album is cleaner and more technical than before? (Interview question to the Brazilian heavy metal band Reviolence, in http://www.ferrum.lt/ interview-­with-­reviolence-­guys-­edson-­and-­guilherme-­when-­brazilians-­trade-­football-­for-­ heavy-­music/) Cold – a car stopping on a highway – solitude – sun rising but without relief – hospital – a train passing by. (student’s description of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lontano – Stefani 1998: 42)

The nature and particularly the terminological choices of these quotations will help us in understanding and exemplifying the main intuitions in Stefani’s theory. According to the Italian semiotician, there are three possible connotations and usages that sound acquires in musical experience (note already the usage of the term “atmosphere”, as in Victoria Trunova’s description above): S1) Micro-Sound. This is a minimal musical/sonic event or object (such as an isolated sound, a musical “spot”), where it is not yet possible to distinguish melody, rhythm, forms, and where thus the object is just a sound of a certain color, a certain quality, in a pure form (…). S2) Sound-parameter. The sound here is listened to and thought of as a part, a syntactic component, a particular dimension (timbral, acoustic…), a compositional parameter of the event/object, as distinguished from melody, rhythm, etc. For example: the timbre of an instrument (…). S3) Sound-atmosphere. The sound here is perceived in a holistic manner, equaling the perception of the event/object altogether, which we now feel as characterized by a certain atmosphere, a certain mood, a certain feel. For example: the “mystic” character of a New Age track (…).

It is not difficult to observe that the three definitions can be and are considered separately in the musicological discourse: the “micro-sound” is a topic for musical acoustics; the “sound-parameter” is a topic for musical composition and analysis; and the “sound-atmosphere” is material for music critics, mostly. (transl. from Stefani 1998: 38) And yet, Stefani continues, the fact that we still refer to these three categories as “sound” demands a unified approach to the issue. We may be talking about a parameter or an atmosphere, for instance, but we still use the word “sound”. The other considerable common denominator lies in the cognitive processing and

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descriptions we adopt for any of the three connotations of the word – or, as Stefani calls them – “tactics of musical appropriation” (Stefani 1998: 39). As we have seen in the above quotations, and as Stefani had the chance to repeatedly verify in his empirical research (e.g., Stefani 1998: 40–42), and finally as it was replicated in Martinelli (2021: 161–169), we can understand that (t)he experience of sound is synesthetic, it can be expressed only by metaphors. How is this sound? Acute, chilling, aggressive, sour, brilliant, warm, clear, confused, full-bodied, crystalline, dark, delicate, distorted, sweet, hard, cold, thick, grave, grotesque, sharp, shiny, metallic, soft, nasal, mat, muddy, full, clean, rich, dirty… This synesthesia – which we may call soundaesthesia  – is a full, wholesome experience, consisting of many qualities that analytically could be also grouped in a number of categories, without however succeeding to grasp its peculiar identity. Just like the taste of wine, a particular odor, the characteristic light that Monet gives to his Chartres cathedrals, or, indeed just like the touch of a pianist or the voice of a singer. (transl. from Stefani and Guerra Lisi 2004: 174)

Looking back at our “thesaurus” of employments of the word “sound”, it becomes clear how all the parts we took the liberty to italicize were indeed descriptions of a synesthetic nature: “a crisp, yet warm sound”, “particles that crawl under the skin”, “deformed objects”… the experience of sound is much more than just an acoustic one: it can be tactile, visual, chemical, gustative, and evidently emotional, intellectual, instinctive. In music psychology, too, evidence is provided of the many extra-musical cognitive associations generated by music listening  – most recently in the excellent empirical research conducted by Ulrika Varankaitė: All the participants experienced some kind of response to music during the experimental session: either affective, or visual, or they had abstract associations outside the music itself, but still most of the subjects experienced all of this at once. Extramusical associations, as described by the subjects, are various and different: from very abstract to very detailed and vivid. (…) All the three musical excerpts5 triggered a number of different references to specific real-world phenomena, products or activities which mainly belong to the socio-­ cultural domain which is not necessarily experienced directly by the listener as it may also be picked up and perceived, for instance, through the digital multimedia. Among various descriptions indicating some level of cultural influence, the participants mentioned other singers, composers, performances, video clips and movies as associations that were linked to the excerpts they had listened to. Some of them seem to be naturally deriving, and some of them are more interesting and seem to be strangely linked to the excerpt itself. For example, the POP excerpt evoked visual associations that were linked to memories from the previously attended concerts of two different Lithuanian performers, Andrius Mamontovas (a singer-songwriter) and Justas Kulikauskas (a cello player) who are in general very different from the style of Taylor Swift, the singer of the excerpt. The Lithuanian, DP, excerpt seemed to have evoked one association that is linked to another culture – the part with the flute in the excerpt reminded a subject as if American Indians were playing a relaxing piece. (Varankaitė 2020: 70)

 Varankaitė performed her experiment with three musical samples: Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” (which she abbreviated as POP excerpt), Domantas Razauskas’ “Lietaus kambarys” (called DP excerpt) and E.S. Posthumus’ “Odenall Pi” (INST excerpt). 5

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In all these respects, the soundesthesic experience qualifies for a musical form of “firstness” in the Peircean sense, that is, “as a mode of being that which is such as it is” (CP 8:328),6 a form of immediacy, expressive freedom not (yet) mediated by an actual cognitive comparison with the object examined. The sound affects the senses in such a way that it is the “body”, first and foremost, to “recognize” or “not recognize” a piece, well before we can give a title, an author, a style, or a genre to that piece. Before giving specifically musical information, the piece literally emits sensations: heat, roughness, clarity, chill, etc. “Recognition” is a keyword here, not in terms of recognition “of the music”, but rather of a certain emotional/subjective/ cultural familiarity. We browse through radio stations in search of a suitable song to listen to, and the moment we stop at a given station is not caused by the uncovering of a song’s specific identity (title, or author/performer, or a vague “oh yes, I know this one”), but rather by a sense of familiarity with the sonic elements: this is what encourages us to give that radio station that extra second to see if we really want to stop there. We still do not know if we are actually familiar with the song, and it is only after those first few initial seconds that we realize that we either know the song specifically, or that it belongs to a genre/style/context of our liking, and therefore we are happy to give it a chance to be listened to.

2.1 Sound and Musical Competence As a second step, as he would often do with any of his theoretical reflections, Stefani interfaced sound with his well-known model on musical competence (Stefani 1998: 44–48), which first appeared in Stefani 1976, that is, at the very beginning of musical semiotics as an autonomous discipline, and that had a large following not only in the neo Latin speaking areas (Stefani’s works are amply translated in French and Spanish) but also in the anglophone semiotic community (remarkable is Robert Hatten’s extension of the model in Hatten 1994 and other writings). We believe that the added value of this model lies in its ability to identify various layers of relation in a micro to macro (and vice versa) fashion, allowing us to understand if and when a given relation is particularly operative at an anthropological level, social level, or technical level, and so forth. Stefani argued that various levels of musical competence do exist and occur, not only within the “strictly musical” or the “musically expert” context, but in any practice that intervenes in, or contributes to, the construction of any “musical discourse”: that includes lay-people’s casual listening as well as highly professional musicianship. The model departed from the conviction (held by Stefani during the 1970s, where traditional musicology, with an exclusive emphasis on expertise, was dominating) that music should not be studied as a closed phenomenon, but at 360

 As by tradition, when it comes to Peirce’s Collected Papers, the reference is made to volumes and paragraphs and by using the philosopher’s initials. 6

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degrees, with no right to overlook, or look down to, anything in the heterogeneous universe of musical experiences, practices and ideas, in accordance with the principle that “the musical sense is extended over a space that goes from the most general human experience to the most specifically artistic one” (transl. from Stefani 1998: 15). All human categories can construct musical sense, meaning that there are many forms of appropriation of the musical phenomenon, and that all of them are theoretically meaningful, even  – in fact especially  – those that a traditional musicologist will probably label as secondary or irrelevant (“especially” being written here to emphasis that it was exactly these aspects that were overlooked for a long time, and it is within this framework that Stefani’s model proved to be innovative). Any typology of user of the musical phenomenon,  “amateur” and “expert” alike, “listener” and “musician” alike, and so forth, possesses, and usually manifests, a given musical competence, different from each other but nevertheless useful for analytical purposes exactly because it constructs one musical discourse among the many possible. The expression “citizen science” has become tremendously popular nowadays, particularly in the area of social sciences, but it is safe to say that Stefani was a forerunner of this principle: he was one of the first to challenge the famous “deficit model” according to which, science should be considered a qualitatively separate body of knowledge within society. Just like he did with other forms of musical experience (melody and intervals, to which two important items of his publication list were devoted), Stefani analyzed sound as a coherent series of processes and practices that cover the whole spectrum of musical cognition, fully inclusive of those aspects that transcend “music” as such, at least in a traditional sense of the term – and we have seen that sound is particularly inclined to those. Therefore, what we are primarily interested in is “musical experience in its entirety, before any articulation and a distinction between subject and object. […] Within a semiotic perspective, experience is a production of sense on and with music” (transl. from Stefani 2009: 19). Stefani developed the whole idea of “competence”, from the hints provided by Blacking 1973 in musicology, Ruwet 1972 in linguistics and Eco 1964 in semiotics, but his treatise of the subject produced a new and identifiable model, allowing a full and all-round overview of the phenomenon, when applied to music. Stefani articulates musical competence in five levels: general codes, social practices, musical techniques, styles, and individuals & works. The levels do not operate autonomously, but they are complementary and cooperative to each other. The emergence of one level over the other four has only to do with a certain distinction, or dominance if we like, but certainly not with exclusivity: it was not by chance, that Stefani himself (1985: 93–100) suggested different readings of the model, producing a total of five schemes and thirteen applications. In discussing the five levels, we intend to provide both Stefani’s own examples, and also our specific applications to the case of The Beatles. General codes are defined by Stefani as “sensorial-perceptive schemes (spatial, tactile, dynamic, kinetic, etc.)” and “logical schemes, that is, mental processes of simple or complex nature” (transl. from Stefani 1985: 86). General codes, therefore, investigate an area of the musical discourse(s) that transcends cultures and rather

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typify the musical person as a Homo sapien (Homo musicus, as Stefani calls it) before anything else. Naturally, it is a bit tricky to extend any musical topic to the anthropological realm, once it has always been historically obvious that music “makes sense” and “makes specific sense” culturally (the discussion itself on music universals, as we know, has produced mixed results). However, we live in a globalized world, and one of the chief characteristics of cultural processes is exactly that of occasionally creating foundations for anthropological ones. That is particularly true when we analyze sound: At the level of general codes of the Homo musicus, the sound is primarily “body”. The lexicon of sonic events that we employ to describe sound is nothing else than a repertoire of (…) verbal iconisms of various modes of being, moving, positioning and spreading of the body (…). Being a “body”, a person can hear and feel both “noise” and “music”: isn’t that the way we experience Beethoven’s opening of the 5th as the destiny knocking at the door? (transl. from Stefani 1998: 44–45)7

In other words, as primarily a sensorial/bodily experience, sound presents numerous characteristics that transcend any specific musical culture, or any historical/ geographical confinement of sorts. Would, say, a Korean listener call a type of sound “warm” that, say, a Colombian listener would describe as “cold”? Maybe, but what matters here is that both listeners will have had a sensorial association with the sound, and while they may not agree on the metaphorical “temperature” of what they heard, they can both relate to a sensation of warm and cold. With that in mind, it seems to us that some areas of music-making are intrinsically perceived as more (a) bound to sound and (b) pertinent to sound. A good portion of popular music is understood as typified by its sound. And that is particularly true for certain genres and certain epochs: in our case, we may think about the early stage of the Beatles’ career and their solid engagement into the style known as Merseybeat: relatively simple guitar-dominated arrangements, close vocal harmonies, catchy tunes, and thin/light productions, if compared  to the fuller, deeper sound of American soul/RnB productions: besides the Fab Four, the Merseybeat sound is audible in the repertoires of Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, The Searchers, The Fourmost and others. In fact, sound is most of the times the defining aspect of a genre. This statement can be supported by various observations, both from the side of music “makers” and music “users”. For instance, we can observe how many forms of cultural encoding and displays around the world of different musical areas put an accent on soundesthesic characteristics: we have a “hot” and a “cool” jazz, we have “heavy metal”,

 Here, as well as in other cases throughout the essay, we had to take some liberties in our translation in order to make the text more intelligible for the anglophone context. Especially in his late years, Stefani, whose prose has always been rich, took up the habit of expressing himself in highly metaphoric and intentionally fragmentary ways. While this works well in pretty much any NeoLatin environment (Spanish translations of his writings, for instance, tend to be quite literal), an English translation requires numerous rewritings of his sentences and a general adaptation (reduction, if we like) of his prose to a more linear one. 7

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“hard” rock, etc., not forgetting that “rock and roll” itself is, with or without its sexualized double-entendre, a synesthetic expression of two movements. As for social practices, Stefani defines them in the following way: The production of musical sense occurs through codes that stem from social practices. It is thus that the beginning of a classical piece may be constructed/perceived as a ceremonial entrance or the beginning of a speech; that the articulation of a melody may remind of a spoken utterance [...]; that so many rhythms and meters in music recall similar patterns in poetry or dance; and so forth. It is within this network of sense that one ends up constructing, more or less systematically, the relations among the different practices of a society. (transl. from Stefani 1985: 87)

That means that the level of social practices operates on different forms of culturally specific discourse in music. Stefani (1998: 45–46) suggests, among others, three possible social applications: sound as background – the need to establish a sound for a particular activity; sound as signal  – the need of certain places/functions to be identified and singled out from the rest of the soundscape, such as the sound of a church or of an amusement park; and sound as environment – the actual soundesthesic identity of a whole space/style, such as a rave party or pub with live music (not by chance expressions like “pub rock” are used to classify a particular genre). Switching again our attention to The Beatles, the ways social and cultural processes affected their musical style, and sound in particular, are numerous and noteworthy. We shall just mention three instances here. The biographers’ favorite topic in this respect is obviously drugs, and there is no denial here that the band’s three main drugs of choice – amphetamines, marijuana and LSD – played specific roles in their creativity: amphetamines (assumed during the pre-fame days until more or less 1964) had possibly an impact on the immediate simplicity and quickness of the early songs; marijuana (which the group was famously initiated to by Bob Dylan in late 1964) was certainly responsible for the more meditative and edgy attitude displayed from 1965 onwards; and of course LSD (assumed during the second half of the 1960s) had a visible influence on the heavier and more idiosyncratic episodes of their repertoire. Secondly, and in addition to this, at least three band members were influenced by the avant-garde culture of those days, not just in the musical department. McCartney, the only Beatle to live in the center of London, was already in the thick of the Swinging London era since late 1964. He was dating a theatrical actress, Jane Asher; attending concerts of composers like Berio and Stockhausen; meeting people like Bertrand Russell, Michelangelo Antonioni and René Magritte (from whom he purchased a few paintings, including “Le jeu de mourre”, which inspired the logo for the band’s Apple company); and most of all frequenting and supporting the underground movement (he sponsored the International Times magazine and the Indica Art Gallery, among other things). To Lennon, the turning point occurred around 1968, and the key to it was his relationship with the experimental artist and Fluxus-member Yoko Ono, who managed to forge in her partner a solid interest for avant-garde, situationist art and post-modernism. Harrison, in turn, with his life-­ changing encounter with Indian music and philosophies, contributed to expanding the musical horizons of the band and de facto pioneered what several years later became known as “world music”.

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The impact of these experiences on The Beatles was significant at all levels, including the sonic one, which was not only informed by specific musical insights (e.g., a song like “A Day in the Life” was evidently influenced by composers like Stockhausen), but also by other artistic and cultural instances – see for instance how Marcel Duchamp’s “found object” principle became a constant source of inspiration for production ideas (e.g., the feedback sound at the beginning of “I Feel Fine”). Third: starting from late 1967, the interest for transcendental meditation opened up a discovery of acoustic, folk, and pastoral atmospheres, well evident in tracks like “Across the Universe”, “Mother’s Nature Son”, “Blackbird” and others. Next, Stefani defines musical techniques as the full array of “theories, methods, procedures that are specific and (sometime) exclusive of music-making (instruments, scales, compositional forms, etc.)” (transl. from Stefani 1998). What we face here, thus, is the idea and the employment of music as an idiom provided with specific syntax, grammar and, more generally, rules. Given the amount and the diverse nature of these features (qualities, parameters, typologies…), Stefani considers this level as the most varied and idiosyncratic of the whole model (Stefani 1998: 18). Speaking in terms of traditional musicology, the level of the techniques embodies the most typical type of discourse occurring among professional musicians and/or researchers. Predictably, the category of “timbre”, in all its qualities and extensions, is how sound is primarily understood in a technical sense. The myth that musical experts do not engage into general, metaphorical parlance, but always stay “technical” is indeed just a myth. Synesthetic categories are often applied by musicians to describe the timbre of their instruments: words like “color”, “texture”, “sharpness”, “cleanness” and others are quite common. Stefani (1998: 47) recalls how a composer like Hector Berlioz would abound in such parlance in his 1844 Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes. As such, this level does probably not require a great degree of exemplification: the main point, here, is the consideration of the specifically musical-aesthetics dynamics that are established when any sonic quality has an impact on any instrument’s technique and performance, and how the transition from one sound to another (within the same instrument, or from one instrument to another) often changes the course of musical history as a whole. In classical music, one often mentions the crucial path that goes from harpsichord to piano, and how this defined the historical and aesthetic development of western art repertoires: such a change in timbre, handling, tonal range, and dynamics (to mention the four most obvious innovations), as provided in Cristofori’s invention, was chiefly responsible for an actual cognitive development in composers’ and performers’ minds. Without demeaning the role of the composers and their creativity, the piano as such, as an instrument and as a technology, is intimately tight to the aesthetic paradigm of what we call Romanticism, up to the extent of defining it. Similar observations can be made about the impact of new technologies in the Beatles’ work: the transition from two to four-track recording machines (and eventually eight-track too) as an opportunity to expand the horizons in arrangements; the impact of the Artificial Double Tracking in allowing more daring vocals; the role of EMI’s first transistorized

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mixing desk in making Abbey Road a particularly neat-sounding album; the contribution that the more precise pitch of the Rickenbacker bass, as compared to the previous Hofner, gave to Paul McCartney’s evolution as a bass player, and so on and so forth. Styles are defined by Stefani as “sets of formal-technical characteristics that shape musical objects and events in relation to a given epoch, environment, person; and by consequence trace – in music – agents, processes and contexts of production” (transl. from Stefani 1998: 19). Therefore, in this case, we are interested in how Stefani affects identifiable genres and schools, and spatio-temporal coordinates associated with them (e.g., American minimalism; Russian piano school; 1950s rock and roll…). A term like “style” can be employed in relation to both individual practices (so that, eventually, one can refer to that individual for the recognition of that style: e.g., a singing style à la Aretha Franklin) and collective units (e.g., a genre or a school). After Berlioz, Stefani summons another French composer, Claude Debussy, noticing how, in his writings (gathered in Debussy 1971), the latter would often refer to synesthetic categories, such as colors and flavors, to describe the styles of particular composers, such as in the comparison “between Beethoven’s orchestrations, constructed with a black and white formula, where therefore all the shades of gray are given, and those of Wagner, which are a single multicolor cluster where one can no longer distinguish the sound of the violin from that of a trombone” (Debussy 1971: 48). Needless to say (and we have anticipated it) numerous styles and genres, both individual and collective, are characterized in popular music by given sonic strategies. We know of numerous popular music genres that are even called after names or expressions that refer to sound directly (synth-pop, guitar rock, etc.) or indirectly (such as places where certain sonic characteristics are required or produced: lounge pop, stadium rock, etc.), and of genres that are named in a synesthetic way (heavy metal, soft rock, bubblegum pop…). In the Beatles’ case, one could mention the transition from the richly-produced releases of their psychedelic era (particularly their 1967 work) to the back-to-basics unadorned rock of the Get Back project (at least in its original intentions, then Phil Spector came into the scene and the project became the Let It Be album), as not only a result of their autonomous artistic path as a band, but also of the increasingly-­ spreading fashion of the Americana genre (through acts like Bob Dylan, The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival), a sort of rock version of the “authenticity movement” that typified many contemporary performers of early music. That this switch was mostly influenced from practices occurring outside the band and not really an organic development within it is proved by the fact that the Beatles’ next and final album, Abbey Road (which was released before Let It Be, but recorded after), was an unmistakable return to the density and complexity of the psychedelic productions, and a self-conscious statement that this album (and thus, this sound) was how they wanted to be remembered by. As George Martin said, “It was a very happy record. I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last” (quoted in MacFarlane 2008: 23).

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Finally, the level of individuals and works is based on the “repetition and reproduction of an identity” (Stefani 1985: 92), and addresses the dimension of the specific relation that can be established between the subject and a single opus, as written/performed by a specific author/performer, not in terms of their style, as we have seen above, but in the mere domain of given decisions, needs, choices, inclinations: this level, in other words, covers the “hic et nunc” and the “name and surname” of the musical experience  – something that trespasses normativity and stays on circumstantiality. In this case, the reference cannot be to, say, “Beethoven’s orchestrations”, as emphasized by Debussy, because that indeed establishes a normativity (even if within the work of a single author), and therefore defines a style. In this case, we need to point the finger at a specific work, as Roland Barthes does with Schumann’s Kreisleriana, op.16: (I)n truth, I do not hear any note, any theme, any design, any grammar, any sense, anything that would allow me to reconstruct an intelligible structure of the work. What I instead hear are beats: I hear what beats in the body and what beats on the body, or rather I hear the body that beats. This is how I hear Schumann’s body (he certainly had a body, and what body!). His body is what he primarily possessed: in the first Kreisleriana the body rolls up and then weaves; in the second, it stretches, and then it stings, hits, shines obscurely; in the third, it extends and expands… (transl. from Barthes 1982: 218)

Back to The Beatles, among the endless examples one could make (within a band whose members had such a distinctive musical personality, especially from 1968 onwards), we could reiterate on  their extreme flexibility in the choice of their instruments, as something that was always put at the service of the needs of a given song. Unlike many of their peers, who made sure to have a trademark sound from their instruments, every Beatles’ song has its own identity, generated by instruments chosen for the occasion. George Harrison’s solos, for instance, have been democratically performed with Gretsch guitars, with Rickenbacker’s, with Telecaster’s, with Epiphone’s, and so forth (and different models within those brands). Even Paul McCartney’s Hofner violin-shaped bass was in fact abandoned around 1965  in favor of the more reliable Rickenbacker 4001, and occasionally other brands too (including a Fender Jazz Bass during the White Album sessions). As a result, the Beatles’ repertoire is hardly associable to specific instruments as such, but rather to specific ways of playing and producing them. In other words, in the economy of an album like Abbey Road, the adoption of a Leslie speaker on the guitar tracks is more defining than whatever guitar brand or model was employed.8 In the later stages of his scholarly path, Stefani realized that the (somewhat overlooked, by traditional musicology) importance of the role played by sound in the musical experience is so great that it challenges one of the most deeply rooted definitions of music in the Western tradition. While pretty much any dictionary would tell us that music is a phenomenon consisting of three main components (melody, rhythm, and harmony and/or form), the Italian semiotician made sure to add sound  For the record, though, the reader might like to know that the band’s final album was mostly played on Lennon’s Epiphone Casino and Martin D-28; Harrison’s Gibson Les Paul, Fender Strat, and Fender Rosewood Telecaster; and McCartney’s Martin D-28 and Epiphone Casino. 8

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(in fact, he also excluded harmony and form, but that is another story). The so-called “prese di musica” – an expression that roughly translates into “musical grips9”- and that basically refers to the main forms of musical codification and appropriation, in his case melody, rhythm, and sound, cannot be defined top-down by the elite of musicologists, who are generally interested in a limited percentage of the music created, performed, and experienced in the world.10 For all these reasons, an important thesis we defend in this monograph is that the category of “sound” encompasses a full encyclopedia of musical qualities that The Beatles, consciously or not, took particular care of when forging their style. These, we repeat, did not intervene exclusively in the actual stage of production (which, narrow-mindedly, some may define “post-creative”), but were a significant presence from step one and throughout the whole process. Yet, quite surprisingly, and despite the large number of publications about the Fab Four, there is a relative lack of material on a topic like “sound”, perhaps exactly due to that dismissive attitude displayed by traditional musicology and underlined by Stefani. Authoritative works such as Mellers (1973), Moore (1997), Pedler (2003) and Everett (1999) have been concentrating on songwriting features more than on sound, arrangements, and operational strategies in the recording studio. Nevertheless, specialist examination of previously underdeveloped areas  – like Mark Lewisohn’s in-depth look at the band’s studio sessions (1988) or Kehew and Ryan’s detailed research about the equipment used in the recordings (2006) – offers a solid basis to develop an argument concerning the importance of the production in the Beatles’ music and, more generally, the importance of sound in their creative process. In other words, the existing scholarship has so far produced either an in-depth analyses of the Beatles’ creativity in terms of their songwriting (that is, that thing that usually happens before stepping into the studio), or detailed reports of the studio technicalities (premises, devices, instruments, who did what, when and how). What we perceived to be lacking – or at least not sufficiently developed – was an analytical trait d’union between songwriting and production. Namely, we are interested in how the creative process in The Beatles was a continuum from the  “The grips that I have on music, and that music has on me” (Stefani and Guerra Lisi 2004: 136)  The situation has improved nowadays, with the academic institutionalization of numerous musical repertoires that were previously overlooked or even dismissed, such as popular music itself, but we are still far from an all-encompassing approach to the “musics” that is respectful and inclusive of all diversities in human and also not human communities. As recalled in Martinelli 2021: “One of the memories from my university years in Bologna that I share with my students nowadays is the big, fat and feared-by-all, exam in ‘History of music’. The subject had no subtitle that would specify what kind of music we students would have been taught the history of, so I naively expected a bit of everything—an expectation quickly encouraged by the fact that the compulsory bibliography consisted of no less than twelve volumes of an encyclopedia of music history, published by the Italian publisher EDT. I distinctly remember the progressive disillusionment, as I proceeded, page by page, to study those books. It was actually ‘History of Western music’… no, it was ‘History of Western art music’… no, it was ‘History of Western art male music’… no, it was ‘History of Western art male written music’… and so forth—one gets the idea. The point was: the exam boldly and paternalistically called ‘History of music’ was in fact covering less than 0.1% of the music produced on this planet.” (Martinelli 2021: 157). 9

10

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earliest draft of each song to the last minute of its post-production (and sometimes even later than that: see the spoken bit at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s, that was pressed into the record’s concentric run-out groove, and repeatedly looped back into itself on those record players not equipped with an automatic needle return). For the band, production was a form of upgrade and implementation of the composition that did not just play an aesthetic (and commercial) role, but intervened directly at the core of its message and emotional dimension. While this may be a common practice nowadays, it is probably fair to say that The Beatles and their production team were sheer pioneers, at least to the extent they reached. If previously production was the act of “packaging” a song to the best of its acoustic and technological possibilities, with The Beatles it turned into an architectural process that would intervene not only at the surface but also at the foundations of a song, plus everything in between. With The Beatles, in other words, the leading questions when recording a voice or an instrument were no longer (or not only) “How can we make it sound best?” and “How can we make it sound in the most technologically proficient way?” but rather “How can we make it sound most coherently with the song?” and “How can we make it sound different/original?” (such as in one specific case of Lennon asking “how can we make it sound like the Dalai Lama on the top of a mountain?”). For this reason, while our aim remains that of encompassing the whole Beatles’ career arch (and, in fact, some episodes  of the solo years too), it should not be surprising that the analytical work of this book displays a bias in favor of the period from 1965 to 1970. This is based on the relevance of the production methods developed in those years,11 when the recording studios (Studio 2  in particular  – Fig.  2.1) became a de facto second home for the band. Production evolved significantly and groundbreaking techniques were introduced in order to get the best out of compositions that were in turn becoming more elaborate and challenging: George Martin’s creative input became crucial to complement the band’s music, and his role, as well as that of the rest of the staff at the EMI studios, became crucial, when not central on occasion.

2.2 The Roots of the Beatles’ Sound Having hopefully provided a satisfying definition of “sound”, we may now provide some insights on the main musical influences on The Beatles, examining the aspects that had an impact on arrangements, recording techniques and studio strategies. The

 The general perception of the Beatles’ musical parable may actually suggest that the focus should rather start from 1966, the actual beginning of “the studio years”, when the band dropped their touring activity. However, a quick look at the repertoire, in connection to recording practices, will make it clear that in no way the year of “Yesterday” and Rubber Soul should be disregarded or placed at a lower level than the following years. 11

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Fig. 2.1  A panoramic view of Studio 2, where The Beatles recorded most of their tracks. (Photo attribution: David Boyle, CC BY 2.0)

wide range of styles that the Fab Four were exposed to will help explaining the eclectic nature of their work, and specifically the ideas behind the group’s sound. In the aftermath of World War II, and because of its military and political developments, American popular culture started to exert a remarkable influence on the lives of the people in Great Britain. In the 1950s, the long string of British Conservative governments inaugurated by Winston Churchill’s third tenure as Prime Minister promoted the growth of a consumer economy based on the American mode; a period terminated only in 1964, with the election of the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson (of “Taxman” fame). Among others, American products dominated the British entertainment market, particularly music and cinema. Liverpool, with its port of disembarkation from USA, and historical role in the relations between UK and its former colony, quickly became a musically cosmopolitan city. This aspect can hardly be overestimated in understanding the quick, almost spontaneous, and strong fascination that The Beatles developed towards American music: Liverpool was a place like no other in Britain. Situated on the coast of Lancashire, two hundred miles northwest of London at the point where the Mersey River meets the Irish Sea, the character of the city had been shaped for more than two hundred years by the shifting tides of world history and geography. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, only London had played a more important role in the projection of British economic power around the world, and no English city, including London, had played a more important role in the settlement and development of North America, or enjoyed stronger, longer, or more direct ties with the United States. (Gould 2007: 36)

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New vinyl records started to be available, in shops, on the radio, at parties, as well as directly from the hands of the sailors returning from their trips; putting these records into circulation here in Liverpool well before any other British city. In their formative years (1956–1961), the four Beatles were amongst the thousands of English teenage record consumers who had fallen in love with the novel sounds coming from the other side of the Atlantic. The styles that caught their attention were very diverse: rock and roll, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, country and western, soul, doo-wop, the Great American Songbook, and regular mainstream pop. To these, we must add British skiffle, which mostly consisted of guitars plus homemade or improvised instruments (such as, famously, double-basses made out of tea-chests and broom handles), and where  – to put it mildly  – professional musicianship was not exactly a priority. In starting a craze for guitars throughout England, perhaps more importantly skiffle made the concept of forming a band look easy and inexpensive. The Quarrymen, led by a young 17 year-old teddy boy named John Winston Lennon, was one of these newly formed bands. During a Quarrymen performance at St. Peter’s Woolton’s Parish Church in Liverpool, on July 7, 1957, Lennon met the 15 year-old James Paul McCartney, whom he quickly recruited into the band after hearing him backstage playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock”. Each of the above-mentioned genres and styles exercised a tangible influence on the early songwriting attempts that Lennon and McCartney made in their youth. For example, McCartney’s first ever song, “I Lost My Little Girl” (written in 1956, at age fourteen) has a distinctive country flavor, while Lennon’s own first, “Hello Little Girl” (written in 1957), was reportedly inspired by a 1939 foxtrot theme called “Scatterbrain” (Lewisohn 2013: 157), to which Lennon added an evident Buddy Holly influence. Finally, another early 1956 melody was composed by McCartney as an explicit dig to the Tin Pan Alley/music hall tradition; a melody that was destined to greater fame later when, with lyrics added, became “When I’m Sixty-Four”. Nevertheless, as soon as songs like “Be-Bop-a-Lula” or “Heartbreak Hotel” broke through the charts in 1956 (completing a process initiated a few years earlier, through the likes of “Rock Around the Clock” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll”), rock and roll, along with rhythm and blues, became the primary, undisputed sources of inspiration, and not only musically: Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal. The thing about rock and roll, good rock and roll – whatever good means and all that sh*t – is that it’s real and realism gets through to you despite yourself. You recognize something in it which is true, like all true art. … If it’s real, it’s simple usually, and if it’s simple, it’s true. (Lennon, quoted in Wenner 2000: 76)

Albeit responsible for the biggest impact on Lennon, McCartney and pretty much any other of Liverpool’s young musicians, Elvis Presley was not the originator of the rock and roll phenomenon, but rather its catalyst. Other representatives of the genre also stand out, and artists such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry (Fig. 2.2), Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and Larry Williams all deserve a credit. Rhythm and blues and soul played an equally relevant role in the development of the band’s style, something that they perhaps were particularly conscious about, if it is true that, as McCartney once said, “if The Beatles ever wanted a sound, it was

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Fig. 2.2  Chuck Berry, a crucial influence for The Beatles in both the musical and lyrical departments. (Photo of public domain)

R&B” (McCartney, in Lewisohn 1988: 9). Influences in this area came from Bo Diddley, Arthur Alexander, James Ray, The Coasters, Ray Charles as well as Smokey Robinson and other Motown label artists, including the label’s session musicians and producers, whose sound The Beatles were often attempting to reproduce (particularly James Jamerson’s bass playing, as we shall see later). Girl groups, like The Shirelles, The Cookies, The Marvelettes and The Donays were also noteworthy in this respect, maybe even more than they have been given credit for. It was not usual for a male band to cover, as The Beatles did, songs from female bands’ repertoires, especially when those songs would promote the stereotypical gender role of the weak, defenseless woman staying at home and endlessly waiting to receive news from her boyfriend, as in “Please Mr. Postman”. Compare the latter with “All My Loving”, a sort of male counterpart of The Marvelettes’ hit, where it is the protagonist who is away from home and who is writing to his girlfriend. Or consider when The Beatles would clearly address a female heterosexual theme, as in “Boys”, thereby making their male version sound a bit ambiguous.12

 Altogether, The Beatles released five cover versions of girl group songs on the first two albums. For a very interesting analysis of the relationship between The Beatles and girl groups, see Warwick 2001. 12

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Another noteworthy set of references can be found in the vast area of country and western, although there is some disagreement on whether The Beatles had any interest in pursuing “pure” country music or if in fact they mostly accessed it through the numerous forms mediated with other genres. Indeed, while Charles G. Price (1997: 215) maintains that “the sensibilities of pure country music were foreign to their urban souls”, Cusic 2015 rather defends the thesis of a country-­devoted band, bringing on the table covers such as Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally”, country-styled songs like “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and also some specific aspects of the band’s musicianship, particularly Harrison’s guitar playing. In addition, one should mention a couple of post-Beatles episodes, such as Starr’s entire solo album of country covers, Beaucoup of Blues, and Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Sally G”; this latter track being the only Beatle-related song to actually impact on specific country charts. Be that as it may, more than one country-related influence is worth mentioning. Within the area of rockabilly (the most important of the sub-groups comparable to country), we find crucial figures like Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and, perhaps most of all – especially in the songwriting department – Buddy Holly. In more pop-oriented forms of country, The Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison were in the frontline. Finally, purer forms of country (e.g., Chet Atkins, Buck Owens and Johnny Cash) deserve a mention. Mainstream pop, too, was not disregarded, and performers like Pat Boone, Bobby Vee, Nat King Cole (who, despite his jazz roots, began recording and performing more pop-oriented material from the late 1940s onwards), as well as a few songwriters associated with the Brill Building group, such as Neil Sedaka, Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller and Burt Bacharach. To conclude, particularly when it comes to Paul McCartney, the whole area referrable to the Great American Songbook, including Broadway musicals, had a significant impact that emerged more at a later stage of the Beatles’ career (at least songwriting-wise), almost as if admitting that influence did not look “cool” enough for a band that was trying to build a reputation within rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Still, the inclusion of musical numbers like “Till There Was You” or “A Taste of Honey” in the early albums (or even the presence of standards like 1937 “September in the Rain” in the pre-fame repertoire) testifies of an ever-present vivid interest. As McCartney himself often revealed in interviews, the fascination of the “Lennon-McCartney” authorship label had a lot to do with the Tin Pan Alley tradition of featuring “couples” like Rodgers and Hammerstein or George and Ira Gershwin. Specific noticeable influences in this area include vaudeville (e.g., “When I’m Sixty-Four”), music-hall (“Martha My Dear”), French cabaret (“Michelle”) and foxtrot (“Honey Pie”). In wanting to emphasize a few specific connections between all these influences and what concretely happened in the Beatles’ songs and performances, we could emphasize at least the following: 1. At songwriting level, the legendary three-chord harmonic simplicity of most Buddy Holly songs was an indication that it was possible to write a few hits that did not necessarily sound redundant even without possessing a Conservatory-­ level musical competence. For a bunch of young musicians who were famously

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struggling to even play a B7 on their guitars,13 this was obviously comforting and inspiring at the same time. It is no coincidence that when The Quarrymen had the opportunity to cut a record in 1958, at Percy Phillips’ home studio in Liverpool, along with their own composition “In Spite of All the Danger”, they chose a Buddy Holly song for the other side: “That’ll Be the Day”. 2. The more elaborate lyrics of the likes of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins were instrumental in informing the Beatles’ storytelling approach in their songs, already from early examples like “I Saw Her Standing There” and “She Loves You”, showing that rock and roll could offer something more than scat verses such as those of “Tutti Frutti” or “Be-Bop-a-Lula”. While this is not entirely pertinent in a paragraph about “sound” (and in a book like this in general), a certain correlation exists, since a more complex form of lyric writing also affects the structure of the song, the melodic phrasing, and by consequence some aspects of performance and production. 3. The singing style of, among others, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, and a few “girl groups” were crucial in forging each band members’ own singing style. Lennon and McCartney were often harmonizing in Everly Brothers’ style, McCartney would often launch into Little Richard-esque vocalizations and screams, and so forth, up to specific, quasi-parodistic imitations, such as the lead vocal on “Lady Madonna”, performed in Fats Domino style, or the three-part V-VI-I harmonization at the end of “She Loves You”, an idea imported from The Shirelles. 4. Instrumental skills were also directly influenced by some of those artists. For example, James Jamerson, the resident Motown bass player, was crucial in informing McCartney of the potentials of his instrument, while Harrison’s guitar playing owed a debt to Carl Perkins (see the solo on “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”) and Chet Atkins (in fact, one of the electric guitars owned by Harrison was the “Country Gentleman” model of Gretsch, which was Atkins’ signature guitar and which characterized most of the early Beatles’ guitar sound). 5. A sort of meta-influence, spreading across genres and authors, is the passion for B-sides of singles and, in general, “obscure” tracks. Initially sought after in order to assemble more original setlists that would be more competitive with other bands performing in the same clubs, this inclination proved decisive in the formation of the band’s style for two good reasons. First, the songwriting equivalent of “lateral thinking”: the kind of song that is relegated to a secondary role, within a performer’s repertoire, is often a song with less catchy and fashionable features, replaced with more unconventional and sophisticated ones. The Beatles quickly learned that the formula for an enduring success was – to use a horrible speciesist phrase – “to run with the hare and hunt with the hound”; that is to combine catchiness with unconventionality and lightness with sophistication. Consequently, repertoires based on this formula sound fresh and  McCartney often tells the story of a “B7 guru” in Liverpool, that he and Lennon would sometime visit in order to be shown how the chord looked like: “We used to travel miles for a new chord in Liverpool. We’d take bus rides for hours to visit the guy who knew B7! (…) We already had E and A, the B7 chord was the final piece in the jigsaw” (Pedler 2003: 31) 13

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original, and more easily achieve an “enduring” quality. Second, playing with words, the attention for tracks that are given less attention, taught The Beatles to have total respect for their own songs, and therefore for the buyers of their records. By this, we mean that they were instrumental in disintegrating the Phil Spector formula of an album made with only a couple of singles and a dozen fillers. The Beatles invalidated that idea and devoted equal attention to their A-sides and B-sides and to each and every album track.14 One can never emphasize enough how so many of the band’s most famous tracks were never released as singles (“Here Comes the Sun”, “With a Little Help from My Friends”, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, “Here, There and Everywhere”, “Michelle”, “Norwegian Wood”, “And I Love Her”…), or were mere B-sides of singles (“I Am the Walrus”, “Revolution”, “This Boy”, “Rain”…). All this without mentioning the double A-sides strategy (“We Can Work It Out”/“Day Tripper”, “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever”, etc.) that The Beatles did not pioneer (reportedly the first case occurred in 1949, as Savoy Records promoted a new single by Paul Williams: “House Rocker” and “He Knows How to Hucklebuck” as a double A-side), but for sure epitomized. 6. Finally, we may also mention wherever possible, some direct influences on specific songs: It’s called being influenced. It’s either called that or stealing. And what do they say? A good artist borrows; a great artist steals – or something like that. That makes us great artists then, because we stole a lot of stuff. (McCartney, in Mulhern 1990: 17)

Some songs were written with the explicit intention to write “in the style of”, some others were directly inspired by other songs. Occasional “rip-off’s” took place as well. In the same interview with Tom Mulhern (1990: 17), McCartney for instance admitted having borrowed the bass line from Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You” on “I Saw Her Standing There”. The lounge-pop atmosphere in “P.S. I Love You” is evidently reminiscent of Bobby Vee’s repertoire from that period. “Please Please Me” was Lennon’s attempt to write à la Roy Orbison, and it was only thanks to George Martin’s idea to speed the song up that the band’s first UK No. 1 did not end up sounding a bit like “Only the Lonely”. “Lady Madonna”’s piano riff and accompaniment were inspired by Humphrey Lyttelton’s version of the jazz traditional “Bad Penny Blues”. “Come Together” did probably a bit more than “borrow”, as it displayed a melody dangerously similar to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”, albeit considerably slower (and, on top of that, the lyric “Here come ol’ flattop/ He come groovin’ up slowly” was also stolen): Chuck Berry’s manager did indeed start a court litigation with Lennon, and the issue was settled by the latter’s promise  The epochal transition from singles to albums as main vehicle of artistic expression (e.g., the album as an extended narrative unit that may also become conceptual) and commercial impact in popular music was primarily due to this choice, made not only by the Fab Four, but also by the likes of Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. Incidentally, it remains to this day the most enduring of such transitions, surely replaced in the twenty-first century by the coming of the digital age and the consequent dominion of playlist-based devices and applications, but still not disappeared, if we consider phenomena like the “vinyl revival” and the fact that most artists are still releasing albums in physical form and not just on Spotify. 14

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to record a cover of “You Can’t Catch Me”. And so on and so forth, up to the best known court case involving George Harrison’s solo hit “My Sweet Lord”, found guilty of “unconscious plagiarism” of The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”. Wrapping up this paragraph, there is a rather accurate method to map out the Beatles’ various musical influences, and that is checking the type of covers included in the early albums, from Please Please Me to Help!. In each of them we see that a probably conscious attempt was made to represent most or all of such influences with one or more items per category: rock and roll (e.g., “Roll Over Beethoven”), rockabilly (“Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby”), R&B/soul (“Money”), country (“Act Naturally”), mainstream pop (“Baby It’s You”), Tin Pan Alley (“Till There Was You”), girl groups (“Please Mr. Postman”), obscure tracks (“Devil in Her Heart”), etc. The Beatles played many covers, both on the records and, to a larger extent, in live shows, with the album Live at the BBC arguably standing as the best testimony of what The Beatles could do as a live band, if only they were given the chance to listen to themselves and not being drowned out by fans’ screaming. They tried to emulate the style of those songs and artists and get as close as they could to their sound. Even for the group’s original material, the aim in the recording studio was often intertextual, with conscious attempts to recreate certain sounds.

2.3 Later Influences the Beatles’ rapid development as musicians, album after album and almost song after song, is renown. The fact that the gap between “Love Me Do” and “Yesterday”, or between “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” and “A Day in the Life”, is of only three years, speaks volumes of a progress curve that has hardly any parallel in rock history. That, among other things, means that the artistic references and sources of inspiration expanded in quantity and quality during the band’s activity, touching works and artists that just a couple of years before would have been unimaginable for the band. It is impossible to draw an exhaustive map of such influences, which – on top of everything – transcend the boundaries of music and extend to the visual, audiovisual, and literary arts, but a few of these cannot reasonably be omitted. Among the unavoidable names, Bob Dylan (Fig. 2.3) certainly deserves a prominent position, particularly (but not only) in relation to John Lennon. Dylan can be considered responsible for at least three types of influence: first, at lyrical level (though not a topic fully pertinent to this part of the book), he inspired the shift from impersonal to personal/autobiographical texts in The Beatles: it is usually said that “I’m a Loser” (from Beatles for Sale) is the first attempt to write in a Dylanesque fashion. Second, specifically at sonic level, the American singer should be credited for the more “folksy” approach to instrumentation that The Beatles introduced from late 1964 onwards, particularly in the more prominent use of acoustic guitars – a shift that, as we know, Dylan reciprocated in equal and opposite way by “turning electric” in 1965. Thirdly, Dylan’s characteristic nasal and slightly coarse voice had a certain impact on Lennon’s singing style: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (on Help!) is a conscious attempt to sing à la Dylan.

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Fig. 2.3  One of the keyinfluences for the band, Bob Dylan had a particular impact on John Lennon’s approach to lyrics. (Photo of public domain)

If, all considered, Bob Dylan was especially an influence for John Lennon who, singing style aside, engaged more convincingly than anybody else in that autobiographical songwriting approach we mentioned, then The Beach Boys were primarily an influence for Paul McCartney. Animated by a friendly rivalry with Brian Wilson (with whom he also felt a kinship as “music-maniac”, “studio animal” and workaholic of the respective bands), McCartney regarded and still regards Pet Sounds – released in 1966  – as one of rock’s masterpieces  – something he felt compelled to compete with and which was one of the motivations behind the creation of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Specifically the song “God Only Knows” (often referred to by McCartney as his all-time favorite song) was arguably one of the main reasons why, in 1967, McCartney indulged so often in songs bearing the same four-in-a-bar rhythmic pattern: “Penny Lane”, “Getting Better”, “Fixing a Hole”, “Your Mother Should Know”, etc. Also, The Beach Boys’ main trademark, the vocal harmonies, were paid homage/parodied on “Back in the USSR”, especially in the bridge. Finally, and somewhat unexpectedly, Brian Wilson was also an inspiration for McCartney’s bass playing: Brian Wilson was a big influence, strange really because he’s not known as a bass man. If you listen to Pet Sounds there’s a very interesting bass, it’s nearly always a bit offbeat. If you’ve got a song in C the first bass note will normally be a C. But his would be a G. He’d

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put the note where it wasn’t supposed to be. It still fitted but it gave you a whole new field. I’ll never forget putting the bass line in ‘Michelle’ because it was a kind of Bizet thing. It really turned the song around. You could do that with bass, it was very exciting. The bass on ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ was good too. So yes, the bass became more important, and also we were listening to records that had more bass, in the discos. (McCartney, in Lewisohn 1988: 13)

A life-changing influence for George Harrison was Ravi Shankar and Indian classical music in general. A composer and a sitar virtuoso, Shankar met Harrison in June 1966, at a time when the Beatle had already developed a passion for Indian music and had already played sitar on a Beatles’ record, “Norwegian Wood”, albeit in an openly “western” manner, by finding on the instrument the diatonic scale’s notes of the song and therefore playing it like a normal guitar. Wishful to learn sitar “properly”, Harrison started looking for a teacher, and Shankar’s name was recommended by Byrds members Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, who were already his fans. Shankar’s influence on Harrison was extended well beyond sitar as such: for the following few years, indeed, the “quiet Beatle” went on to write Indian-­ styled songs, establishing a niche of his own within the Beatles’ catalogue and, as we have seen, de facto initiating in rock what eventually was called “World music”. “Love You To”, “Within You Without You” and “The Inner Light” are the most explicit examples of this particular songwriting approach, but also other songs of the period contain sonic flavors and atmospheres that can be associated to Harrison’s passion for Indian music: “I Want to Tell You”, “Blue Jay Way”, “Long Long Long”, and to an extent “Here Comes the Sun” too, due to its time signature changes. If the Beatles’ affection for rock and roll never really ceased but remained somehow anchored to the old heroes of the late 1950s (including an open rejection for the transformations that those heroes underwent in the 1960s  – particularly Elvis Presley’s metamorphosis into a Hollywood star of musicals and romantic comedies), their interest in soul and RnB kept up to date, and to an extent was also strengthened. Their love for the Motown sound became almost one of jealousy when they felt incapable of obtaining that particular “deep” quality of those recordings. “Got to Get You into My Life” was famously the Beatles’ take on an actual soul track. Along with the likes of Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, of whom they remained avid fans, The Beatles became enamored with contemporary artists like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and others, and equally followed labels like Motown, Stax and Atlantic. McCartney wrote “The Long and Winding Road” specifically having in mind Ray Charles as a potential performer, and later on in 1976, Harrison would write a homage song to Robinson, called “Pure Smokey”. Western classical music is another crucial influence, developed during the mid-­ stage of the band’s career and central to more than a few of their most important songs. In February 1965, The Beatles started to work on their fifth album Help! The track “Yesterday”, included on the record, is now widely regarded as their first experimental song, a sheer stylistic turning point (although some critics assign this role to 1964s “I Feel Fine” for its early and uncommon use of feedback). George Martin said: “With “Yesterday” we used orchestration for the first time, and from then on, we moved into whole new areas” (Martin-Hornsby).40 However, while

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Help! was still connected to rock and roll roots, its follow up Rubber Soul was marked by a whole set of new influences, ranging from folk rock to Indian music, also displaying a much stronger soul component. This style change is well illustrated by Paul McCartney: The direction was changing away from the poppy, early stuff (…). There came a point where we thought ‘we’d done enough of that, we can branch out into songs that are a bit more surreal, more entertaining’. Other people who were influential started to arrive on the scene (…). We were all getting into different kinds of music (…). We were listening to classical and various types of music other then our rock and roll roots. (Courrier 2009: 121)

Having already flirted with a string quartet in the arrangement for “Yesterday”, The Beatles developed a more specific interest for western classical music from 1966 onwards. That applies to both instrumentations/arrangements and to songwriting as such. Johann Sebastian Bach remains the central figure within this category. The Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, BWV 1068 – and particularly August Wilhelmj’s 1871 arrangement known as “Air on the G string”  – was not only the obvious template for Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, but was also an inspiration for numerous songs of the period, making in fact the descending progression from the tonic to the whereabouts of dominant or subdominant (depending on the cases) one of the harmonic topoi, if not straight away clichés, of the second half of the 1960s. In The Beatles we find it on songs like “For No One”, “Hello, Goodbye”, “Penny Lane” and others. The latter is also notable for another explicit reference to the German composer: [O]n January 11, during a rebroadcast on the BBC of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Paul discovered a trumpet player who impressed him. He spoke to Martin about him: “[I saw a guy] playing this fantastic high trumpet.” “Yes, the piccolo trumpet, the Bach trumpet. Why?” “It’s a great sound. Why can’t we use it?” “Sure we can.” Dave Mason, a member of the prestigious New Philharmonia Orchestra of London, the trumpet player who so impressed Paul, was then recruited on January 17. Martin transcribed the solo that Paul sang for him. After three hours of waiting, Mason, who chose the piccolo in B flat among his nine trumpets, recorded a brilliant solo in only one take, despite the terrible instability of the instrument. (Guesdon et al. 2013: 372)

Possibly related to Bach, and to baroque music in general, is also the increasing use of harpsichord in the band’s repertoire. “All You Need Is Love”, “Fixing a Hole”, “Piggies”, not forgetting all those instruments or recording techniques sounding like harpsichord: the sped-up piano on “In My Life”, the Lowrey Heritage DSO-1 organ on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, etc. Another song employing harpsichord in its arrangement, “Because”, has instead a genesis related to the other great German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. Legend has it that John Lennon wrote this song by reverting the chords of the renowned “Moonlight Sonata”, but in fact the story is a tad more complex: Yoko, who as a child was trained as a classical pianist, played Beethoven’s “Moonlight Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, Opus 27, No. 2” for John. John, lying on the couch listening, asked her to play the chords backwards. Later he said he was inspired by them to write “Because.” Although it contains some similarities to Beethoven, even reversed, the relationship is not obvious. It seems instead that he combined the general feeling of the

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piece with memories of their recent visit to the Netherlands. Indeed, on the Wedding Album, the couple’s solo album released on November 7, 1969, Yoko sang a song, apparently titled “Stay in Bed” with an arpeggio chord accompaniment performed by John that is very close to “Because.” This recording is part of the experimental piece “Amsterdam” (at about 22:10), the second song on the record taped between March 25 and 31, 1969, during John and Yoko’s bed-in in the presidential suite, room 902, at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. (Guesdon et al. 2013: 578)

Remaining in the field of art music, but turning the attention to contemporaneity, the Beatles’ interest for avant-garde and experimentation can hardly be understated. Long dismissed is the myth that Lennon was the only one of the four interested in avant-garde, the whole band, with the possible exception of Ringo Starr (who, however, happily went along the other three’s ideas), was involved in experimentation. George Harrison, who allegedly had rejected his own connection by stating that “avant-garde” is short for “avant-garde a clue” (the pun was apocryphally attributed to him by Paul McCartney in recent years), released a full experimental album of Moog-based electronic music called Electronic Sound in 1969, for the short-lived Apple subsidiary label Zapple  – specifically devoted to unconventional musical projects. Paul McCartney was chronologically the first to become interested in movements like the musique concrète or elektronische Musik, as well as the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and more specifically composers like Stockhausen, Berio and Cage, several of whom he also met personally, often discovering that the appreciation was mutual (Berio famously arranged a series of Beatles songs for soprano Cathy Berberian). In 1966, by commission of the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave  – an event to be held at the Roundhouse in London in early 1967 – he recorded “Carnival of Light”, which to this day remains the most mythical and sought-after unreleased Beatle track. Described as “improvised concrete music” (with all four Beatles walking around the studio and making noises of different sorts), the piece features various instruments with different effects applied (including pitching down and up), pre-recorded samples, sound effects, diverse vocalizations and, apparently, also a quote from “Fixing a Hole”. As mentioned, the track remains unreleased, and here lies a meaningful difference between McCartney and Lennon. To the former, indulging into pure avant-garde was a mere diversion, and he would rather import avant-garde elements to implement the band’s pop production but he would not let them interfere with it. Not incidentally, McCartney was the main generator of experimental solutions such as the loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows” or the cacophonic crescendo on “A Day in the Life”. The idea, confessed to Lennon, to release a full solo experimental album called Paul McCartney Goes Too Far (Everett 1999: 33) was quickly discarded, and, as it happens, McCartney became the last Beatle to release a solo LP, his McCartney coming out two years after Harrison’s and Lennon’s first solo projects and even two weeks after Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey. On the contrary, when John Lennon discovered avant-garde, he fully immersed into it, releasing no less than three experimental albums in a row, between 1968 and 1969, and being very firm in wanting to include “Revolution 9” onto an actual

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Beatles album. While he was also informed by similar sources as McCartney (see above), there is no doubt that Lennon’s turning point, in this as well as in many other departments of his life and career, was the meeting with Yoko Ono, the New York-­ based Japanese artist who had so much fascinated him in 1966 with an exhibition of conceptual art at London’s Indica Gallery. The various manifestations of experimental music (and art in general) conceived by the couple in the period between late 1960s and early 1970s are quite well known, particularly those employed for pacifist purposes. Much less known, and – in our humble opinion – seldom remarked upon by critics and historians, is the role played by the artistic movement Fluxus in all this. Fluxus was an artistic movement filled with revolutionary ideas for arts and society, that Ono became part of during the 1960s. Founded by Lithuanian artist Jurgis “George” Mačiūnas (who also coined the term “Fluxus”), the Fluxus program contained several principles that directly inspired Lennon, who – until then – had been wary of experimental art, as he did not feel it would connect with him, or anybody of his education and socio-cultural working class status. On the contrary, the Fluxus manifesto included prophetic entries such as “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional and commercialized culture”, “Promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality to be fully grasped by all people”, and “Fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action”. Fluxus organized or inspired several events (often called “happenings”), in which thought-provoking and often humorous artworks and performances would often target, sometimes subtly sometimes deliberately, the ongoing political situation and, more in general, questions of artistic and individual freedom, against the preset aesthetic dogmas imposed by institutions. Straightforwardness, spontaneity, anti-intellectualism, irony, and rebelliousness were all ingredients that Lennon could fully relate to, and that he felt had been partially impaired in his Beatle persona. With all this in mind, re-reading lyrics that talk about being “sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded, hypocrites” or being overexposed to “this -ism, that -ism, -ism, -ism, -ism” and only wanting “the truth” or to “give peace a chance” instead, becomes a totally different experience in comparison to the traditional narratives of Lennon’s artistic paradigm, which systematically overlook the influence and inspiration of Fluxus. Finally, as in the previous section, we can emphasize some further pinpointed influences that popped up in a more circumstantial way  – single songs, single albums, or limited periods: 1. Besides Bob Dylan, other folk singers and in particular Donovan, whose influence is particularly manifest in the acoustic guitar playing displayed on the White Album. A fellow Maharishi disciple, Donovan also attended the Rishikesh course, and on that occasion, was able to give Lennon and McCartney some informal lessons in fingerpicking. Lennon (with his mother Julia an amateur banjo player, and having already flirted with it in his youth), learned the technique in the proper way, as we hear on the likes of “Julia” and “Happiness Is a Warm

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Gun”. McCartney meanwhile, developed an unorthodox hybrid between fingerpicking and strumming, which became a trademark throughout his entire career, and something we hear for instance on “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son”. 2. West Coast rock acts of the mid-1960s, especially The Byrds. The bright tone of the guitars and the intricate vocal harmonies of the Los Angeles band, in particular played an important role in defining songs like “If I Needed Someone” or “Nowhere Man”. 3. The work of composer Bernard Herrmann – particularly the scores for the films Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)  – inspired George Martin for the string arrangement on “Eleanor Rigby”, setting the template for numerous string arrangements that followed. 4. The whole psychedelic scene, both American and British, was a crucial source in the years 1966–1968 in many ways, from lyrical contents to arrangements, and including tiny details: for instance, the idea behind the choice of a long band’s name for their alter-egos Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was directly inspired by similarly-extended names like Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service (Womack 2007: 168). 5. Early examples of hard rock were also instrumental in promoting a heavier edge to the production, particularly in the use of saturated, fuzzy guitar sounds (as we hear on the likes of “Think for Yourself”, “She Said She Said” or “Paperback Writer”), directly inspired by songs like The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” or The Who’s “My Generation”. The latter band was also at the center of a curious case of “imaginary inspiration” from hard rock: Pete Townshend had been quoted in Melody Maker as describing The Who’s new single “I Can See for Miles” as the loudest, rawest, dirtiest, and most uncompromising song they had ever done. Paul said, “Just that one little paragraph was enough to inspire me; to make me make a move. So I sat down and wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ to be the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums, et cetera et cetera”. He said in 1968, “I had this song called ‘Helter Skelter,’ which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, ‘cuz I like noise.” The results met his expectations, and “Helter Skelter” could be considered one of the very first hard rock songs in history (when Paul actually heard The Who’s single, he was disappointed to find out it was not as dirty as he expected!) (Guesdon et al. 2013: 500).

Indeed, when listening to The Who’s track, it is no wonder that McCartney was eventually disappointed. In comparison to “Helter Skelter”, but also in comparison to many other tracks from The Who’s repertoire (“My Generation” included), “I Can See for Miles” remains a rather mild sounding song (and a great one, incidentally). 6. The entire area of American roots rock, in particular The Band, was one of the main inspirations behind the back-to-basics Get Back project that eventually led to the Let It Be album. That sense of authenticity, simplicity, and plug-and-play spontaneousness that The Beatles were after in the famous January 1969 sessions, in open antagonism with the mega-productions of albums like Sgt. Pepper’s, had a lot to do with the emergence of Robbie Robertson’s group, as well as Creedence Clearwater Revival, post-motorcycle accident Bob Dylan and others. That The

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Beatles were paying a lot of attention to that musical scene is testified by the fact that at the start of the Get Back sessions, as the band renewed acquaintances and exchanged new year wishes, George Harrison proudly informed Ringo Starr that he had recently met Bob Dylan and The Band, and that they had singled out Ringo’s “Don’t Pass Me By” as their favorite track from the White Album (Harris 2003: 92). Summing up the last two paragraphs, it is fair to say that the Beatles’ sound consisted of a creative synthesis of many different genres, and that this synthesis was integrated with more and more (and more varied) influences, as time went by. One of the merits of The Beatles in the early 1960s was certainly to make American pop music accessible to a wide audience in Britain, while at the same time, by leading the “British Invasion”, they exposed several Afro-American acts to the white American audience, helping them to achieve fame. As The Beatles progressed, their contribution became crucial in emancipating popular music from the status of mere entertainment and promoting it to “art” in all respects.

Chapter 3

(The Difficulty of) Defining the Beatles Style

There seems to be unanimous agreement when it comes to the artistic value of The Beatles, both from their colleagues and the musicological community  – not to mention the vast crowd of fans and music lovers. It is an appreciation that has survived generational changes and which by now made the band “canon” in popular music studies, in a similar manner as Beethoven is canon in traditional musicology. It would be too easy, and not called for in a work that aspires to be academic, to turn this monograph into the genre of appreciation, listing all the various reasons why The Beatles were a great, perhaps the greatest, unit of pop musicians. Let us do it just once, here, through the authoritative words of Patti Smith, and then let us get on with business: They combined the spiritual and the romantic, the absurd and political, and as they evolved, we evolved with them. They aspired to literacy (…). Even their earliest work, “She Loves You” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” has the simplicity of a Hank Williams song, poetry reduced to its essential phrase. By the time they reach the emotionally surreal landscape of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which heralded the coming of Sgt. Pepper in that sacred spring, their abstract imagery had become dreamlike, hallucinatory. Somehow it all made sense. Their songs got into your head, heard from passing cars, storefronts, and jukeboxes. We sang along wholeheartedly. We sang lyrics knowing and yet not knowing their multi-­ leveled meanings. These songs offered a sometimes-undecipherable and poetic language made familiar with melodies and harmonies that fit hand-in-glove. We did not need to break them down. We felt them. They embraced the small in the humble and exquisite “Blackbird” and expanded humankind with the universal phrase “All you need is love.” In between lies an arc only few are gifted-to embody, the generational shift from adolescence into maturity. To grow and serve within one’s words, one’s music, one’s art. (Patti Smith, quoted in Guesdon et al. 2013: 5)

At the same time, and despite various, more or less articulated attempts (e.g., Everett 1999 or MacDonald 2005), defining the Beatles style with precision has remained a rather problematic task, and a slightly paradoxical one at that. On the one hand there is the enormous variety of genres, songwriting approaches and sound research explored by the Fab Four during their relatively-short career as a group – one that brought diametrically-opposed tracks like “Revolution 9” and “Good Night” to co-exist not only on the same album, but even one after another in the track listing; and on the other hand there is the mystery of a perfectly recognizable identity in the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5_3

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majority of the songs, as something unmistakably written and performed by The Beatles. Several statements by the involved parties have emphasized the band’s interest in changing their musical features and renewing their sound. “We always tried to make every song different because we figured, why write something like the last one?” said Paul McCartney, adding “it seemed to us to be crucial to never do the same thing twice (…) We’d say to Ringo ‘We heard that snare on the last song’” (quoted in Ryan and Kehew 2006: 474). Already in early 1964, that is, before the band’s production became truly eclectic, sound engineer Norman Smith was declaring: “they’re absolutely determined not to duplicate tempos, or intensity of sound. They want to come up with something different each time in the studio” (quoted in Goodman 2008). The diversity and plurality of the Beatles’ music makes their style a fleeting concept. Furthermore, there is no set definition for all the traits or aspects in the different popular music styles – a feature that evidently does not concern only The Beatles, but pretty much any act whose artistic program covered a variety of approaches (names such as Queen, Sting, XTC, Radiohead and Kate Bush come to mind, among many others). Nevertheless, what we attempted here is the identification of a set of recurrent features which, when combined in variable ways, contribute to form the style of the band. These features surely concern composition (i.e., melody, rhythm, harmony, form, lyrics), but they also relate to other components such as arrangement, performance, sound, and production tout court. None of them alone, is a necessary and sufficient condition to make the band’s style identifiable neither in their own songs nor in those attempting to imitate/reference them in a more or less explicit way. However, similarly to Wittgenstein’s discussion on the concept of “game”, we find that the more those features are employed and manifest in a track (and – we shall repeat – in variable combinations), the more that given track acquires a stylistic identity easily associated with the Fab Four. Having said that, on certain occasions, and with some of these features in particular, it is still possible to provide a Beatle-y “flavor” by just adding a single ingredient. This is for instance the case of the sudden inclusion of a mellotron accompaniment with the flute register (as originally heard on “Strawberry Fields Forever”) or of some backwards guitar (e.g., “I’m Only Sleeping”), as applied to a track of virtually any genre. Before dwelling on the actual analysis, however, it is advisable to first define the different musical periods of the band. The recording career of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr as a group lasted for almost eight years. Relying on the available literature (Riley 1988; Turner 1994; Wenner 2000; MacDonald 2005, and others all seem to agree in this respect), we may suggest a stylistic periodization which, minus the pre-fame period, basically coincides with how the three volumes of the band’s Anthology project were organized: 1 . Early period (1962-early 1965) 2. Middle period (late 1965–1967) 3. Late period (1968–1970)

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Despite, as mentioned, being endorsed by a wide range of researchers, this distinction is not universally accepted. Non-negotiable borders between the periods are hard to establish and some critics tend for example to disagree on the years or on specific albums (more so the supposedly transitional ones). On the other hand, and especially from a strictly operative point of view, the periodization above has proved to be the most effective one, and, in many respects, the scheme that is more easily recognizable by concrete example, rather than by principle or by event.1 The early period (Fig. 3.1), which we may also call the “beat phase”, is mainly characterized by three types of songs: beat songs, ballads, and acoustic songs. The definition “beat songs” indicates tracks (both covers and original compositions) with a mid-to-fast tempo,2 a strong rock and roll and/or rhythm and blues connotation and an instrumental configuration almost always corresponding to the concert format: two electric guitars, bass, and drums (plus the occasional harmonica). Not by chance, these constituted most of the songs performed live. The “ballads” are slower songs, with a distinct sentimental theme and a usually more elaborated harmonic and melodic structure. The Beatles were probably less confident with this format in their early days, and, significantly, the only ballads appearing in 1962 and 1963 are covers: “A Taste of Honey”, “Anna”, “Baby It’s You”, “Till There Was You”, etc., with the sole, and remarkable, exception of “This Boy”, which is however relegated to a single’s B-side (on the brighter side, achieving the status of “hidden gem” in the band’s repertoire). It is only from A Hard Day’s Night that the band acquired the necessary confidence to write their own original ballads, immediately achieving excellent results and, in at least one case (“And I Love Her”), “classic” status. A song like “If I Fell”, for instance, is an effective illustration of how the band, when writing a ballad, would opt for more complex harmonic and melodic constructions. The “acoustic” category obviously represents the songs with an essentially acoustic instrumentation and sonority, and a more or less explicit inclination towards folk and country. As a matter of fact, almost all the songs from this early period are influenced by American music, with rock and roll, rhythm and blues, soul and country being the most recurrent references. The middle period (Fig. 3.2), which we may also call the “experimental phase”, can be identified through a larger number of song typologies: psychedelic songs, beat songs II, ballads II, acoustic songs II. The term “psychedelic” – which we use here in a conventional way rather than basing it on specific aesthetic parameters – refers to the songs defined by innovative sounds, the use of uncommon instruments, groundbreaking recording techniques, and, for lack of better descriptions, a higher tolerance for “idiosyncrasy” and even “confusion” in both performance and production (the trumpet part on “Only a Northern Song” should easily make the  What we mean by this is that other models have more problems of consistency. If, to make a trivial example, we correlate the “psychedelic phase” to the band’s intake of LSD, we should conduct two separate discussions, and therefore two separate forms of periodization. One concerning John Lennon and George Harrison, beginning in early 1965 and already visible in Rubber Soul, and another concerning Paul McCartney, beginning only in 1966, from Revolver onwards. 2  For an interesting study about the rhythm and tempo in the Beatles’ music, see McCarthy 2001. 1

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Fig. 3.1  The Beatles in 1963. (Photo of public domain)

point), in an attempt to reflect musically the moods and states of mind associated with the psychedelic culture. The other three group types represent an evolution of the music of the early phase: the beat songs, the ballads and the acoustic songs from the middle period reflect the change of instrumentation, a fresher compositional approach, new arrangements and again, generally speaking, more confidence and maturity in the songwriting practices. To make just one example, the transition from “Beat I” to “Beat II” is effectively illustrated in a song like “Drive My Car”. In it, we find at least the following transformations, as compared to the likes of “Please Please Me”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “Can’t Buy Me Love” (amongst many others, of course): 1. The transition from the “joyfully aggressive” attention-grabbing structure that would either adopt the chorus-bridge format (“Please Please Me”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”…) or a strophe-refrain one with the refrain on the front (“She Loves You”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”…), into a more traditional “build-up” of the strophe that “opens up” to the refrain. Something discussed further in Sect. 3.5.

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Fig. 3.2  The Beatles in 1967. (Photo of public domain)

2. The transition from the immediacy and simplicity of the first person “I love you, you love me” lyrics into elaborate and original storytelling forms, or at least less juvenile love songs. 3. More elaborate ideas in the arrangement (e.g., where is the accent on “Drive My Car”’s intro?), with more prominence given to less-frequently employed instruments (in this example slide guitar, cowbell, piano…). 4. More adventurous chords, progressions and ways to harmonize them (e.g., McCartney and Lennon’s whole vocal work on the strophe, plus the three-part harmonization – in itself unusual – on the A7#5 chord before the refrain). 5. Contents and themes aside, a certain inclination to use more words and assign them more musical importance (e.g., the “promotion” of the Beep-beep sound into the catchiest moment, the hook, of the song, whereas the early Beatles would have invariably chosen a “Yeah”, a “Ooh”, or a scream). 6. A more eclectic approach to performance (e.g., the choice of a specific vocal timbre to apply to a given song: in the case of “Drive My Car”, the hoarse quality in McCartney’s lead vocal) The third or late period (which we may nickname the “mixed phase”) can be seen as a synthesis of the first two, including a combination of the early and the experimental features. The tracks from this period present unconventional arrangements (for example, the avant-garde-influenced “Revolution 9” or the Abbey Road medley), but they also display a return to more traditional rock and roll templates (“Back in the USSR”, “Get Back”, “One After 909” – the latter being in

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fact a song written in the early years). The synthesis is best exemplified by the last two released albums. On Let It Be, similarly to the way American popular music was engaging into a sort of “authenticity movement”, through roots rock, the band often recurred to a back-to-basics songwriting approach in pretty much all departments, in particular harmony, melody, and lyrics. On the other hand, Abbey Road, which, according to many (including The Beatles themselves) was a sort of intentional “exit in style” of a band which had become aware of having run full circle, restored the complexity and eclecticism of the middle period. Also, this late phase can be considered an unconscious “dress rehearsal” for the solo careers of all four members. To mention but a few examples: the acoustic, folksy and bucolic approach of “Mother Nature’s Son” is mirrored in several of McCartney’s Wings and solo numbers (most notably “Mama’s Little Girl”, “Put It There” and “Happy With You”); Lennon’s brutal and dramatic directness in “I Want You” will characterize the whole John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album and several of the songs to follow; Starr’s Americana-inspired simplicity of “Don’t Pass Me By” will be often reproposed in his two most successful solo albums, Ringo and Goodnight Vienna, Harrison’s “spiritual” and gentle approach of songs like “Long Long Long” will be a leit motif throughout his entire solo career, and so forth. A parallel approach to this periodization consists of not considering the band’s development as solid blocks, given the high number of tracks that easily elude this classification. It is, for instance, the case of “Yesterday”, from the album Help! (1965), which chronologically belongs to the early period (in the “ballads” category), but because of the arrangement can be inserted in the “experimental” group of songs. Moreover, some of the categories can be seen to overlap with each other. The division of the musical periods clearly emphasizes the band’s change of style over the years. What seems to emerge is a progressive mutation of the musical features, an evolution of the sonic characteristics. This is for instance the approach that we find in works like Eerola 1998, which regards the Beatles’ style as something developed organically in a “rise-and-fall” pattern (or, to use his description, “growth and decay”). Ian MacDonald, while still opting for a tripartite scheme, uses the expressions Going Up, The Top and Coming Down. The choice we made in this monograph remains favorable to a triadic format, but we acknowledge the vagueness and the instability of the borderlines. Moreover, if “style” remains the keyword, and not “career”, “personal relationships” or otherwise, then we oppose the implication of a descending curve in the last years. On the contrary, exactly because the last three albums ended up establishing the templates for the four solo careers, one may even argue that the third period should be considered one of full maturity.3

 We say this with no hint of “quality” assessment. It is not relevant, in the economy of this observation, that the songs/albums from the late period are “better” or “worse” than those from the other two periods. What matters is that, throughout all the years following the breakup, each band member displayed much more eagerness to reiterate on the stylistic models of the 1968–1969 phase, rather than those of any other year. For instance, with the sole exception of “#9 Dream” on the Walls and Bridges album, John Lennon never reproposed any of the songwriting ideas that animated his 1966–1967 psychedelic period, preferring much more often models like the simple fin3

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As for the Beatles’ musical traits, we identified eight different categories, of which we shall discuss here only six, because the other equally relevant two, “Instruments” and “Sound”, have been amply discussed in the previous pages, as separate sections). Also, the crucial category of “lyrics” will only be briefly discussed, as it is outside the scope of the monograph, but we did not want to exclude them completely, in order to better contextualize the whole discussion. As mentioned, these typical stylistic signatures can refer to peculiar rhythmic/melodic/etc. solutions, to a way of performing or, simply, to specific operational strategies during the production. We list and discuss these features in no particular order.

3.1 Vocals Vocals constitute one of the main and acknowledged trademarks of the band. A more or less complex use of voices can be found on the majority of the tracks. In most songs, and especially during the first half of the career, the lead vocals are harmonized in two, or less often three, parts at least in some points, and occasionally throughout the whole track. Harmonies are usually arranged in the distance of a third or a fourth, but in more than one case we witness a more dynamic scheme, with vocals spreading apart, overlapping in unison, or even reaching the nearly dissonant distances like a seventh or a second. A track like “If I Fell”, harmonized in two parts (Lennon taking the lower one and McCartney the higher one) nearly summarizes all such strategies (the song’s structure is intro-chorus-chorus-bridge-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro): 1. The intro (“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true, etc.”) is sung in unison; 2. The chorus begins with a harmonization in sixths (“If I give…”), continues with a rapprochement resulting in a third interval (“…my heart…”), then spreads apart to a fifth (“…to you…”) and finishes in unison again (“…I must be sure…”); 3. The bridge works in a similarly varied way but ends up with Lennon keeping the same note (“…love was in vain”), while McCartney’s harmonization moves from a sixth to a fifth and finally to a seventh, creating the widest distance between the two parts right before the reiteration of the chorus. When it comes to vocals, the solution of contrasting one part that stays on the same note with one that moves on the scale, albeit not adopted too often, ended up becoming one of the band’s distinctive features. We can hear it both in two-part (e.g., “Please Please Me”) and three-part harmonies (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”).

gerpicking guitar ballad type initiated in “Julia” (“Hold on”, “Oh My Love”…), the epic piano anthem type initiated in “Sexy Sadie” (“Imagine”, “Watching the Wheels”…), and so forth.

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From ca. 1965 onwards, vocal harmonies became a structural device, contrasting strophes with refrains and/or bridges, or emphasizing climatic points. Backing vocals were also used as a counterpoint or in response to the lead vocal. Examples of this can be heard in “Help!” “Getting Better” and others. Furthermore, an extensive and diverse use of choirs can be found throughout the band’s career, from the canonic “oooh” and “aaah” to the less common “wooh-­ ooh”, “la-la-la” or even the naughty “tit-tit-tit” used on “Girl”. Combinations among the former are also possible (e.g., the “Oooooh, La-La-La” in “Nowhere Man”), and, on less common occasions, instances of scat-singing can be heard too (“Shoo-­ be-­doo-wah” on “Revolution 1” or “Heba-Heba-Hello-ah” on “Hello, Goodbye”). Sung by at least two members of the band, choirs are generally used more in the bridge and/or in the refrain. Screams and yeah’s are also quite common in the early years (“Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You”). On more than one occasion, the Beatles also relied on “a cappella” solutions (“Nowhere Man”, “Paperback Writer”) or on three-part harmonies that were given a prominent role, as on “This Boy” or on “Because”. Finally, falsetto too was frequently used, especially in McCartney’s compositions. Lead vocals deserve a lot of attention as well. Compared to choirs and harmonies, they are perhaps a tad less defining in a stylistic sense (with one exception we shall soon discuss), but there is a good reason for this, which, in a roundabout way, ends up being an important stylistic feature itself. First of all, in terms of vocal timbre and performance together, the only Beatle voice that possesses an unmistakable character that can be immediately associated to the band is John Lennon’s, and particularly that sharper and thinner sound he adopted from Revolver onwards and that characterized his entire solo repertoire. When a singer wants to sing in a Beatlesque manner, inevitably he (or she, for that matter) ends up doing a sort of Lennon impression (Todd Rundgren on “Everybody Else is Wrong”, Andy Partridge on “Collideascope”, Liam Gallagher’s whole repertoire, etc.). McCartney’s voice is (intentionally, as we shall see) less characteristic in timbre, but it does possess a few performative features which, to a lesser extent than Lennon, may still provide that Beatlesque flavor that some singers look for. A song like the track “Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey” from Ram pretty much summarizes all such features. One, as we have mentioned, is the use of falsetto (“live a little, be a gypsy, get around…”). Among the other ones, one should mention the almost-manneristic cleanness and linearity of the phrasing in more melodic (and usually slower in tempo) passages (“We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert…”), the occasional incursion of sarcastic and/or cabaret-like tones (“Admiral Halsey notified me…”), different vocal improvisations, particularly on the song’s codas, which we see happening in various spots of this song. By no coincidence, when delivering a full-round song à la McCartney (“Everybody Loves a Happy Ending”), Tears for Fears adopted this eclectic performative variety. When it comes to the latter feature, instead, what we find in McCartney is a programmatic inclination towards versatility. McCartney is part of that not-too-­crowded group of singers who put their voice at the service of the song and not vice versa. He is known for having a diversified catalog of vocal timbres, which he selects

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according to the piece. This allows for a democratic coexistence of the warm and full voice of “The Long and Winding Road” (perhaps the timbre he is most frequently associated to), the hoarse bluesy sound of “Oh! Darling”, the almost AfroAmerican roundness of “Lady Madonna”, the intimate tenderness of “I Will”, and so on. Unlike a Freddie Mercury or a Bob Dylan, whose voices would be recognizable even if they were singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” through an old telephone, McCartney often “deceives” the listener with unusual timbres that are very different from each other. It is in fact a kind of attitude that he kept on developing after The Beatles, adding numerous entries to the catalogue (the sharp falsetto exhibited in the McCartney II album, the wacky nasal register in tracks like “Flying to My Home” or “I’ll Give You a Ring”, etc.). It would be however wrong to assume that this variety belonged to McCartney alone. Lennon, too, was prone to diversify his voice depending on the song, albeit with a more limited range of options. Besides the above-mentioned and much imitated sharp/edgy register, Lennon could also produce a ballad-tailored tender sound (as we hear in “Julia”) plus ostentatiously broken passages, such as the ones we hear on “I Want You” or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, and that are heard more often in his solo career. Like McCartney, he also kept on working on his voice in order to add variants to his timbres: a darker/warmer sound that is somehow the equivalent to what McCartney exhibits in “Lady Madonna” can be for instance heard already on “Instant Karma”. To this, we should also add his pre-1966 phase, in which he displayed a more linear and less sharp timbre (in most songs) and a raucous bluesy sound in tracks like “Twist and Shout” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”. Finally, unlike Lennon and McCartney, both Harrison and Starr, for better and for worse, focused on a single and recognizable timbre. Similarly to Lennon, Harrison’s timbre possessed a rather nasal and thin quality, lacking however that razor-edge sharpness audible on the likes of “Yer Blues” or “Hey Bulldog”, and gaining instead in limpidness, as we hear on “Something” or “Here Comes the Sun”. As for Starr, the limited range of his unmistakable baritone has become an authentic trademark from which he never attempted to deviate in his entire career.

3.2 Harmony One of the great songwriting achievements of The Beatles is undoubtedly that of having broadened the potential of the pop song. In Sect. 2.2, we mentioned how, in pre-fame days, the band used to perform a kind of pilgrimage to the house of “the guy who knew B7” (Pedler 2003: 31), in order to complete the “holy trinity” of rock and roll chords, along with the already-known E and A. It is with these chords, for instance, that one of the earliest Lennon-McCartney songs, “In Spite of All the Danger”, is written, in rather recognizable Buddy Holly style. Holly was notoriously the master of three-chord songs, and, as we have seen in Sect. 2.2, that harmonic basicness was an important songwriting inspiration for The Beatles. Having said that, there is a degree of romanticized simplification in this episode, that McCartney

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loves to recollect every time he wants to reiterate on his favorite “We were just four kids from Liverpool” narrative. Judging from the available songs written before fame, what The Beatles were getting acquainted with was not only the three mentioned chords, but rather the corresponding harmonic functions  – tonic, subdominant and dominant plus relative minors and basic variations like 7th’s – in at least the keys of E, A (e.g., John Lennon’s first ever song “Hello Little Girl”), D (e.g., “P.S.  I Love You”), G (e.g., McCartney’s first ever song “I Lost My Little Girl”), C (e.g., “Cry for a Shadow”) and even the not-too-comfortable B (“One After 909”).4 Then again, the same applies to Buddy Holly himself, who certainly did not write in E major only (among his major hits: “That’ll Be the Day” is in D, “Peggy Sue” in A and “Everyday” remarkably in Eb). Also untrue is the myth that he would only use three chords (i.e., harmonic functions) in his songs, that too was an inspiration for The Beatles. To mention just one example, and to prove that, willingly or not, the band was reasoning in terms of harmonic functions and not straight chords, “Peggy Sue”’s sudden venture into F major (that is, the chromatic submediant of the A major key) was most likely a reference for the passage “How could I dance with another, oooh, when I saw her standing there” in “I Saw Her Standing There”. The “oooh” falsetto part is also a chromatic submediant, but the song is in E major, so the chord is a C and not an F. However, in terms of harmonic functions, we witness exactly the same solution. More importantly (and again: despite the simplification of the accounts), it took little for the young Lennon and McCartney to get away from the limited musical boundaries of these harmonic progressions, and expand the songwriting vocabulary with new solutions, either through importing ideas from other authors – as we have seen with “Peggy Sue” – or through more imaginative combinations of the available knowledge. For instance, knowing the same progression in different keys means also to be able to create more progressions altogether and modulations within these. Paul McCartney credited the song “From Me to You” as the first case in which the band realized this potential: We wrote “From Me to You” on the bus too, it was great, that middle eight5 was a very big departure for us. Say you’re in C then go to A minor, fairly ordinary, C, change it to G. And then F, pretty ordinary, but then it goes [sings] “I got arms” and that’s a G Minor. Going to G Minor and a C takes you to a whole new world. It was exciting. (quoted in Lewisohn 1988: 10)

In other words: The Beatles had learned to modulate from a given key (C major, in this song’s case) to the key of the subdominant (F major, here), and they began using modulations in those points where a given song would need a refreshing touch, mostly on the bridges and/or the specials. The trick was soon repeated in “I Want to  It is no coincidence that the great majority of the songs released by the Beatles, counting also the relative minor keys (Bm for D, Em for G, etc.), are in E (38 songs), A (41), D (30), G (47), C (32). Besides these we have a significant presence of F (12 songs), the other “natural” key when playing the piano, along with C, otherwise the other keys do not get more than four songs each. 5  McCartney calls “middle eight” what in this book we call “bridge”. We have clarified why we prefer the latter term. 4

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Hold Your Hand”, but this time in a key of G (once more: the band was reasoning in terms of functions and not of chords). To be exact, an earlier attempt to modulate on the subdominant had already occurred in “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” (in the key of E major), but the difference was that the passage was straight from tonic to subdominant (i.e., from E to A, as the special “I’ve known a secret for a week or two…” starts), while the other two songs had started the modulation from the supertonic of the new key (G minor for “From Me to You” and D minor for “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), thereby sounding much more exotic to the band’s academically-­ untrained ears. Another early form of modulation, this time on the dominant key, occurs on “I’ll Be on My Way”, otherwise the band’s most common ways to construct their early bridges or their specials did not imply modulation, but simply giving more centrality to the subdominant (“Please Please Me”, “There’s a Place”…), the dominant (“Love Me Do”, “Don’t Bother Me”…), or the relative minor (“Misery”, “Thank You Girl”…). From A Hard Day’s Night onwards, instead, we see more and more modulations, and more imaginative choices within them: on “Things We Said Today” the bridge brings the song from minor to major of the same key, on “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” we go from tonic to chromatic mediant major, on “Something” the special moves the track from tonic to submediant major, and so forth. Plus, specials and bridges are no longer the only parts subject to the treatment (e.g., in the refrains: “Good Day Sunshine” moves from tonic to supertonic, “Penny Lane” from tonic to chromatic subtonic, etc.). Whether or not the path we suggested, from three-chord structure to modulations, is causally related, it seems to be a fact that The Beatles had a rather eclectic approach towards the most canonic harmonic progressions, and rather preferred to toy with them by introducing tiny or consistent variations. If we take the two most common progressions inherited from rock and roll and the 1950s in general, for instance, we may notice how rarely the Fab Four indulged in them. We are of course talking about the 12-bar blues progression (I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-V) and the doo-­ wop progression (I-vi-IV-V or I-vi-ii-V – not incidentally also known as the “50’s progression”). If we exclude the unreleased fatally-titled instrumental “12-bar original” from 1965, The Beatles used a proper blues progression only on three, and rather sui generis, occasions: the other instrumental “Flying” (which sounds all but bluesy), the quasi-fragment “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and “You Can’t Do That”, which at the same time features a bridge that has a clear pop connotation and little to do with blues or rock and roll. Otherwise, all the band’s bluesy songs have always one or more harmonic elements of distinction that make them slightly or very unorthodox. And that applies also to George Harrison’s “For You Blue”, despite his audible invitation to the other three to play the “same, old 12-bar blues”. The actual progression, in fact, is I-IV-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-V.  A tiny difference, yet a difference. Other songs that come close to the traditional blues structure are “Can’t Buy Me Love” (I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-V-I), “I’m Down” (I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-IV-IVV/I-I-V/I-I, where the slash means that the two chords last half a bar each), “I Saw Her Standing There” (I-I-IV-I-I-I-V-V-I-I-IV-VIIb-I-V-I-I), “Get Back” (I-I-IV-I-I-­­ I-IV-I-I-I-IV-I-I-I-IV-I), “Birthday” (I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I) and few others – still taking into account that most of these songs include sections that depart completely

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from the blues structure (such as “Can’t Buy Me Love” refrain: iii-vi-I-I-iii-vi-ii-V). The remaining tracks with a clear blues footprint display progressions that are significantly far from the tradition, and instead show the wide range of stylistic influences that The Beatles were able to wrap up in the individual song. As for the “doo-wop progression”, we also have very few instances where the band applied it orthodoxly: these are “Like Dreamers Do” (written before fame), “This Boy”, “You’re Going to Lose That Girl”, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, “Octopus’s Garden” and, for just one round, “I Will”. Otherwise, just like with the blues progression, we have tiny or big departures, but once again a (possibly intentional) inclination to avoid the cliché: “Yes It Is” (I-IV-ii-V), “Oh! Darling” (I-V-vi-IV – a song that is an open homage to doo-wop, incidentally), “Here Comes the Sun” (I-I-IV-V), etc. Noteworthy is also the use of rotations of the 50s progression, as for instance we see happening in “All My Loving”, which switches the four chords of two positions each: ii-V-I-vi. In all these songs, as we also did for the blues progression, we need to consider the switch to other progressions in different sections of the same songs. However, if this would have been an anomaly in the blues progression (Blues songs tend to stick to the 12-bar progression throughout the whole piece), doo-wop ballads traditionally moved to other harmonic solutions in sections like the bridge or the special  – usually inaugurated by a subdominant (IV) or its relative minor (ii): we see it happening in “Unchained Melody” (whose bridge goes IV-V-IV-VIb-IV-V-I-I), “Earth Angel” (IV-I-IV-I-IV-III-V) and many others. In this respect, The Beatles followed the tradition only in “Like Dreamers Do” (bridge: IV-V-I-I-II-II-V-V) and “This Boy” (special: IV-III-­ vi-I-IV-II-V-V). Otherwise: “You’re Going to Lose That Girl”, as we have seen, displays quite a leap on the special, and it also has a different progression on the strophes (in fact, the condition itself of being a strophe-refrain song represents a departure from the doo-wop tradition, mostly interested in the chorus-bridge template); “Octopus’s Garden” offers an unusually-short bridge (four bars: another good reason why “middle eight” is not exactly a suitable expression for this kind of parts) which anyway starts with the relative minor of the tonic (not a totally uncommon choice, one must say, but still a less customary one); “I Will”, as we also said, employs the doo-wop progression only at the beginning of the chorus; and finally “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is simply a case of its own, with its proto-­ progressive profile, the changes of time signature, the suite structure in five parts and ultimately its controversial theme, which makes the light and sentimental doo-­ wop final section almost a sarcastic oxymoron, in comparison with the intentionally “sick” – as Lennon himself defined them – lyrics that celebrate the pleasure of firing a gun. Putting aside these occasional nods to customary progressions, what is left, harmony-wise, is one of the most inventive catalogues in popular music history, with nearly no repetition of the same progression in more than one song. What can therefore be interesting, at this stage, is to emphasize some progressions  – or rather typologies of progression – that are more characteristic than others, at least judging from how often they get “quoted” in Beatlesque songs from other acts. Among these, a prominent position is occupied, particularly from 1966 onwards, by

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descending progressions, particularly in major: I – V (with the bass in VII) – vi – V  – IV, etc. (with numerous variations). A direct heritage of pieces like Johann Pachelbel’s Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo (better known simply as Pachelbel’s canon) or, famously in rock history, Johann Sebastian Bach’s already mentioned second movement of the Orchestral Suite No. 3  in D major, a “Big Bang” of sort for Baroque rock. However, when it comes to what we may call the “full Baroque pop package” (which, along with the descending harmonic progression, includes also the use certain instruments, a certain phrasing in the melody, and so forth) The Beatles’ “For No One” (1966) must probably take the cake. Afterwards, the band returned to this harmonic format on several occasions, including “Penny Lane” (the one most directly inspired by Bach, as we have seen already), “Hello, Goodbye”, “Something” (on the special) and “Hey Jude” (on the bridge). Similarly to the 12-bar blues and the doo-wop progression, none of these songs approaches the descending progression in a completely faithful way, as Procol Harum do. Especially when approaching the end of the sequence, one or two unconventional solutions systematically appear (e.g., the VIIb in “For No One”, the VIb in “Hello, Goodbye”, etc.). Even more unconventional is “Dear Prudence”, with the bass hitting the VIIb grade of the scale instead of the VII, and the VIb instead of the V, or the short descending passage – and pre-Baroque pop example – in “It Won’t Be Long” (“since you left me, I’m so alone, now you’re coming, you’re coming on home…”), which is entirely chromatic. Less often, the band also adopted minor descending progressions, using models like i-VII-VI-V, or again chromatic ones. Among the most notable examples, the strophe of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (i-VII-VIIb-VI), the turnaround of the bridge in “Michelle”, used also as the song’s intro (i-VII#-VII-VI#-VI-V), and the strophe in “Cry Baby Cry” (i-VII#-VII-VI#-VI-I). Used only on limited occasions, yet quite significant in the context of what most characterized The Beatles music, is the adoption of one-chord or non-chord songs (with pedal point). The band recurred to that in some important psychedelic episodes (“Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Blue Jay Way”…) and of course in Harrison’s “Indian” niche (“Love You To”, “Within You Without You”…). Simple chord passages and cadences that turn into actual progressions should be mentioned as well, since they were abundantly used and in at least one case, ended up again being a defining feature of the band. Putting aside predictable solutions like those based on the authentic and/or on the plagal cadence, of which there are dozens of examples, from “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” to “Carry That Weight”, from “I’ve Got a Feeling” to “She Came in through the Bathroom Window”, and so on and so forth, The Beatles showed repeated fondness for the passage I-VIIb-IV (also rotated): we see it for instance in “Polythene Pam” (riff and strophe), “Dig a Pony” (refrain), “Hey Jude” (coda) and various spots in “Get Back”. Another favorite passage is the transition from subdominant major to subdominant minor (IV-iv), which is once again an inheritance from the 1950s pop ballads, but which ended up being one of those “Beatlesque” qualities sought after by other bands. We witness it, among others, in “Nowhere Man” (“…making all his nowhere plans…”), “In My

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Life” (“…all my li-i-ife…”) and “I Call Your Name” (“…I never sleep at night, I can’t go on…”). We may also write a few notes about the most recurrent chords, leaving aside of course the basic triads, which go without saying. Certainly, the extensive use of flat-­ seventh chords (another inheritance from blues) deserves the first spot. From “I Saw Her Standing There” to “Taxman”, from “Another Girl” to “Dr. Robert”, the chord has been used in more than one third of the whole released repertoire of the band (Tillekens 2002). Common were also the diminished chords (“Michelle”, “You Won’t See Me”, “Blue Jay Way”…) and the augmented ones (“Oh! Darling”, “Ask Me Why”, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”…). Finally, albeit less recurrent, sixth chords (major and minor), came to strongly typify given songs, either as single features (e.g., the ending of “She Loves You”) or as the harmonic foundation of the whole track (e.g., “The Fool on the Hill”). Concluding, a small note should be reserved for the performance of chords through arpeggios, especially, but not only, with guitar. There are two types that stand out in the Beatles’ repertoire: the first one is what we may call “heavy arpeggios” – an expression that describes a particular way of playing arpeggios with fully or semi-saturated electric guitars, usually following the shape of the chord, with small variations, Examples can be found on “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “I Want You”. The second type is (usually) performed with an acoustic guitar, and following, in a rather normative way, a basic fingerpicking figure, with a first simultaneous pick of a bass and a high string and then an arpeggiato of three strings following a chord shape. The technique was repeatedly displayed by John Lennon on the White Album (e.g., “Julia” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), while Paul McCartney, famously, had his own hybrid way of fingerpicking, which replaced the arpeggiato part with a strumming of the index finger (e.g., “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son”).

3.3 Melody By “melodic solutions” we do not refer only to the main melody of a given song, as performed by the lead vocals, but we also intend to include all the elements that “move” in a melodic way within the song (i.e., the elements provided with melody, such as bass lines and solos). The most evident distinction one is immediately drawn to establish is between Lennon and McCartney’s vocal melodies. A typical trait of Lennon’s vocal parts is to rely on small intervals (between half-tone and a tone and a half), either alternating a few notes, using tone repetition, or moving in a nonrhythmic way in order to produce a half-spoken, talking blues-like, effect with a more distinctive inclination to move around the tonic of the main key. And blues, particularly in the incarnation it took with rock and roll, is probably the main reason behind this preference. Lennon’s passion for rock and roll must have informed this tendency to rely on a few, close notes. Among the most eminent examples: the strophe in “Strawberry Fields Forever”, wherein the verse “Living is easy with eyes

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closed” is entirely performed on one note, or the strophe in “I Am the Walrus”, where the whole verse “I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together” consists of the constant repetition of two notes distanced of half a tone. On the contrary, McCartney’s melodic lines, benefiting both from his wider vocal range and his more distinct appreciation for the American songbook, are often more ample and more articulated. Songs like “Oh! Darling” or “Got to Get You into My Life” display an inclination to explore the full potential of one or even two octaves, using indifferently small and big intervals, and showing less “devotion”, so to speak, towards the tonic. To show how extensive the influence of Tin Pan Alley is in McCartney melodies, we can for instance compare a song like “Here, There and Everywhere” to Irving Berlin’s standard “Cheek to Cheek”. There are at least two characteristics that makes the latter a sort of older cousin of the former. First, as mentioned, the wide range covered by the melody: both songs are the pop equivalent of arias in opera. Second, the way “Here, There and Everywhere” connects the bridge back to the chorus by initiating a sentence (and consequent melodic phrasing) in the former and completing it in the latter is quite similar to what “Cheek to Cheek” does on the correspondent spot. In McCartney’s song we have “but to love her is to need her…” at the end of the bridge and “…everywhere” at the beginning of the following chorus. In “Cheek to Cheek” we have “the charm about you will carry me through…” and then “…heaven”. Both songs, in other words, fold back on themselves creating a cyclic dynamic between chorus and bridge. As for George Harrison, it is probably fair to say that he situates himself in the middle, with a preference for the Lennon bluesy template in his early compositions (e.g., “Don’t Bother Me”) and a more McCartney-esque approach later (e.g., “Something”). A distinctive, and one may say quintessential, form of melodic phrasing, not present regularly but, when so, bursting “Beatlesque” from all pores, is represented by what we may call the “run up and jump” phrase: a vocal line that lingers on two or three close notes (the run up) before making a high jump of at least a fourth. Despite sounding like McCartney’s typical command of melody (see again “Here, There and Everywhere”), this feature is in fact displayed by all the three main songwriters. We see it for instance in the Lennon-penned strophe of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” or in Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much”. Incidentally, “Baby You’re a Rich Man” is yet another demonstration that, despite their chief individual characteristics, Lennon and McCartney were more similar than different in their songwriting and did not disdain role reversals. This track is a genuine Lennon-McCartney collaboration where Lennon provided melody and lyrics for the strophes, and McCartney did the same for the refrain. Curiously, though, the strophe (thanks exactly to its “run up and jump” wide melodic arc) sounds more like something McCartney might have written, and the repeated note-based refrain is more like the work of Lennon. Finally, as far as lead vocals are concerned, a general tendency in Beatles’ songs is to base the phrasing on the diatonic scale of the song’s key and particularly, in the leading notes, on the three notes of the corresponding chords, leaving the other four to more transitional roles. There are of course occasional excursions into using

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notes outside the triad as leading ones: ninths (e.g., the strophe in “I’m Down”), fourths (e.g., “Ticket to Ride”: the word “away” on the verse “the girl that’s driving me mad is going away” hits an E on a Bm7 chord), sixths (e.g., “Eleanor Rigby”: the “been” note in “where a wedding has been”) and sevenths (a Harrison’s favorite: “It’s All Too Much”, “I, Me, Mine”, “Something”…). More audacious (and again bluesy) is the use of leading notes outside the diatonic scale, particularly the minor seventh (e.g., in “Get Back”, both strophe and refrain) or the minor third, the famous “blues note” (e.g., the strophe in “Come Together”), or even the augmented fourth in “Blue Jay Way” which moves the song into the unusual (for popular music) territory of the Lydian mode. Probably another of the many outcomes of Harrison’s interest for Eastern music, “Blue Jay Way” is almost the first rock track to engage into Lydian mode, beaten only by Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina”, released in late 1966. Turning to other forms of melodic expression, McCartney’s bass lines deserve special attention (“he’s the most melodic bass player there is”, as Ringo Starr loves to repeat). Characteristic elements of his style include an extreme mobility, the use of arpeggios and “walking” patterns (descending or ascending), alternation between tonic and dominant, and a frequent use of high notes. Interviewed by Tony Bacon for the magazine Bass Player in 1995, McCartney recollected that one reason why he was able to be so active on the bass was the light weight and the small dimensions of his Hofner bass: “I think it was just because it was such a light little guitar that it led you to play anywhere on it. Really, it led you to be a bit freer” (Bacon 1995: 33). After “freeing himself”, McCartney must have felt increasingly confident with his bass playing: after all, his most inventive and complex parts were in fact performed on the Rickenbacker 4001S, which is not exactly a light instrument. As for the solos, we may note at least the following tendencies: 1. Harrison’s guitar solos. As we have already pointed out, George Harrison, especially in his early days, was strongly influenced by country and rockabilly guitar playing, plus the inevitable blues heritage. At least until 1965 his solos have that distinctive flavor: clean timbre, strong reliance on pentatonic scales, open-string lines, partial chords, and single-note lines used to outline a chord progression, alternation between high and low notes, and finally a certain fragmentariness in the phrasing. Some upgrades in his gear were instrumental in developing his style: the brief infatuation for the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar, for instance, gave his solos (and riffs) a nuance reminiscent of the West Coast sound, the Byrds in particular. At this point, it must be pointed out that it was Harrison’s guitar work in “A Hard Day’s Night” to inspire the American band to embrace the 12-string guitar, and not vice versa. Let us just say that what was an initial, occasional employment of this instrument in The Beatles, became a trademark for The Byrds and a “sound” for several bands of that area, and only then it bounced back to the Fab Four as something repeatedly sought after, especially in the Rubber Soul album. However, it was mostly two add-ups to his instrumentation (besides the many guitars he embraced) that shaped his style in an enduring way: the adoption of sinuous, liquid-sounding effects like those produced by the

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Leslie speaker and the use of different types of fuzz/distortion. In his solo career, Harrison added to these his most defining technique: slide playing. Never performed during his tenure with The Beatles (curiously, the only two slide guitar solos, “Drive My Car” and “For You Blue” were performed respectively by McCartney and Lennon), the combination of slide and a usually mild distortion became the most typical set up of Harrison’s solos. Partly because of the limitations in movement imposed by the bottleneck, and partly because he had never been the fastest virtuoso in town anyway, the quiet Beatle specialized in rather slow and melodic solos, with a mellifluous, “gently weeping” (of course!), sound that became one of the most recognizable in the whole rock landscape. The solo of “My Sweet Lord” is often mentioned as the antonomasia of this style, and it may be good to remember that Harrison displayed it also in a Beatles record – the reunion single “Free as a Bird”. 2. McCartney’s and Lennon’s guitar solos. While most guitar solos were performed by Harrison, it is well known that quite often McCartney, and more rarely Lennon, had their own spotlight moments as lead guitarists. We have already discussed how Lennon is generally considered the less proficient instrumentalist of the band, and how this perception may be unfair at least when it comes to his rhythm guitar parts. In those occasions when he delivered a solo (“Get Back”, “For You Blue” on slide, “Honey Pie”…) he distinguished himself for a rather minimalist but melodic and singable phrasing, with a certain influence from country and blues. At the end of the band’s career (and of course in his solo records), his playing remained quite simple but achieved an aggressive, noisy quality that is well displayed by the bits he played during the three-part solo on “The End”. In turn, McCartney, a more capable player technically speaking, was more often a replacement for Harrison in playing lead, delivering some of the most appreciated solos of the band’s discography. The solos for “Taxman” and “Good Morning Good Morning” are often mentioned as his most effective: biting in sound, a tad faster than what one usually expects from a Beatles song, their chief characteristic is their extraneity to blues/pentatonic phrasing, replaced by a modal approach often reminiscent of Eastern music. In other performances, McCartney opted for more traditional rock and roll solos, developing a bluesy, not especially fast but very melodic style that he often applied to his solo records. One of his best performances in the category must be “Maybe I’m Amazed”, due to the distinctively cantabile quality of the solo, which indeed is repeatedly reproduced note-by-note in both his live renditions and in cover versions from other artists. 3 . Keyboard solos. Fairly proficient in using keyboard instruments for accompanying parts, none of The Beatles were capable of playing parts too intricated, thus, on more than one occasion, other musicians were asked to play keyboard (usually piano) solos. Among these, the most prominent names are of course George Martin (who provided the honky tonk/ragtime feel on songs like “Good Day Sunshine” and “Lovely Rita”) and the “added Beatle” Billy Preston throughout the whole Let It Be album. In other cases, the Fab Four (McCartney in particular) tackled the task by themselves, resulting in relatively simple melodies which, as

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we shall see later, often reproduce the main theme of the song (e.g., the Moog solo on “Because”, the electric piano solo on “Come Together”…) 4. “Baroque” solos. In the previous section, we mentioned the Beatles’ strong flirtation with Baroque pop in the period 1965–1969. Naturally, this was reflected in the solos as well. There are several examples of this solution, from the French horn solo on “For No One” to the minuetto-esque parts on “Piggies” and “In My Life” up to the repeatedly mentioned piccolo trumpet solo on “Penny Lane”. 5 . Other solos. Numerous other instruments were employed in solo parts. A prominent one in the early period was certainly the harmonica played by John Lennon. We find it on “Love Me Do”, “From Me to You” and others. Among the other instruments that received the spotlight, we may mention the recorder (“Fool on the Hill”), the saxophone (“Lady Madonna”), the sitar (“Love You to”) plus entire ensembles (such as the brass section on “Martha My Dear” or the string ensemble on “Within You Without You”). A crucial melodic element in rock music as a whole, and not just in The Beatles, is of course the riff. While not sheer serial riff-machines like Keith Richards or Angus Young, The Beatles delivered some of the most recognizable riffs in popular music history. Usually of blues/rock and roll inspiration (when not directly inspired by specific songs, such as probably is the case of “Day Tripper” with Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”), riffs were often embellished with chromatisms (e.g., “Hey Bulldog” or the same “Day Tripper”) and/or syncopes (“If I Needed Someone”, “Paperback Writer”…). Never too complicated melodically, they often ended up being the actual hook of the song (as most riffs tend to do anyway), and they could be performed by virtually any instruments, with a large preference for electric or acoustic guitar, and piano. A feature applicable to both riffs and solos was the strategy of imitating the main theme of the song. While this did not become a distinctive feature of the band (unlike, for instance, Bruce Springsteen, who made a true trademark out of performing riffs that reproduce the song’s melody  – see “Born in the USA”, “Dancing in the Dark”, “The River”, etc.), it was certainly applied a fair number of times. Among the riffs, we could mention “Here Comes the Sun”, “Lady Madonna”, “Please Please Me” and “Norwegian Wood”. Among the solos: “All You Need Is Love”, “Fool on the Hill”, “I Should Have Known Better” and “From Me to You”.

3.4 Rhythm Several characteristic strategies can be identified within this category, not just those concerning percussive instruments. Let us however start with these. Despite not being a technical prodigy, Ringo Starr was a creative and often innovative drummer, and, like everybody else in the Beatles’ recording community, a sheer “team player” – determined to “play with the singer”: as he himself often puts it, not to overplay and not to occupy spots that may interfere with the song’s lead vocals. His

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style of, and approach to, playing surely left a trace, as confirmed by the marks of respect which he received from numerous drummer colleagues over the years. Dave Grohl’s opinion (with his usual colorful, and not-necessarily-formal pick of words) could be taken as synecdoche of what most rock drummers think about Starr: If The Beatles were the original rock‘n’roll four-piece, then Ringo was the original rock‘n’roll drummer. (…) He had a wonderful swing and was a showman. A lot of drummers aren’t considered showmen, but he definitely turned it on. His swing and backbeat carry so many of The Beatles’ songs. Back then, the recording depended on the feel of the song. There was no digital manipulation of drum tracks, so it was up to the drummer to dictate that feel. And Ringo had his own sound. Pull all the instruments out and you’d still know it was a Beatles song. And that’s the sound of a signature drummer. It’s the kind of thing drummers strive for all career, but not all of them make it. I’m not a technical drummer by any means – I like listening to drummers who make you wanna air-drum or dance – and Ringo was a songwriter in regards to his drumming. And that’s important to me. With those immediately catchy early Beatles songs, it was Ringo’s job to carry that, dictating dynamic and feel. Warts and all, you want to hear a drummer that sounds like a human being. I think his playing mirrored his personality. It made you feel good. You can hear he was a good guy, just by listening to his playing. And thank f***ing God for not doing drum solos (…) When I listen to Ringo on record, the one thing that makes its way into my playing is just the sense of serving the song. And I swear to God, you can tell the difference between an English drummer and an American one. Most of the English drummers swing their rolls, but most of the Americans don’t. Listen to any Oasis song or Supergrass song and you’ll find a little bit of Ringo in those drums. You don’t hear that too much in America. It’s the Ringo Roll. When we’re in the studio and I want one of those, I tell Taylor: “Hey, do a Ringo in there.” And we all know what that means. (Grohl 2007: 61–62)

The recognizability of Starr’s style is particularly due to his fills. Songs like “A Day in the Life”, “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Hey Jude” represent good examples: the fills are usually not too long; they tend not to overlap with the singing part; not too fast (except some rolls from the early period); they are mostly based on the interaction among snare, floor tom and medium tom (Starr’s kit was a minimalistic four-piece for most of his time in The Beatles); and most of all they possess an asymmetric quality that mostly derive from his condition as a left-handed player drumming on a right-handed kit, which forced him to approach the fills in an unnatural and therefore unique way. During Starr’s ceremony of induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., in a particularly fortunate and very “soundesthesic”, pick of words, described that asymmetry as a “sloppy, swampy, falling down the stairs kind of sound”. And indeed, reasoning in terms of multisensorial associations, these particular fills tend to “fall down” on the next bar, rather than going upwards. Not that Starr confined himself to these (the solo on “The End”, to mention just one, is a perfect example of a fill “going up”), but it is definitely the “sloppy, swampy” type that became an “unmistakably Ringo” feature, and one of the classic strategies that anybody intending to sound like him – or like The Beatles tout court – would employ. Another chief feature of Starr’s drumming is his ability to create rhythmic patterns that work like, and are as important as, riffs. Instead of choosing safe, straight patterns, he would often opt for less conventional ideas that would not only hold the

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song together, but in fact define it. That is clearly the case with “Come Together”, “Ticket to Ride”, “Tomorrow Never Knows” and other tracks. These patterns are so distinctive that there is no way for other acts to play something even vaguely similar without being called out (e.g., Tears for Fears’ “Who Killed Tangerine?” for “Come Together” or Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” for “Tomorrow Never Knows”) Finally, and especially in the first period, his use of open hi-hat and ride cymbals, with that “washy” effect, has remained a trademark. Outside drums and percussions, keyboard accompaniment style is another remarkable trait, within the “rhythm” category. From the moment when The Beatles stepped more decidedly out of the “guitar band” comfort zone, around the times of Rubber Soul and Revolver, they developed a few recurrent rhythmic patterns, most probably a result of not particularly virtuosistic abilities on the keys (more difficult parts, as we have seen, were normally handed to George Martin, or – on Let It Be – to Billy Preston). Three different prototypes can be identified. The first is made up of the alternation between the tonic of the chord or, in any case, the lowest note, and the other two notes. The single note is usually played up-beat while the other two are played down-beat. This is notable in the electric piano part of “I Am the Walrus” or in the mellotron intro on “Strawberry Fields Forever”. The second prototype consists in marking the four beats of a bar over a syncopated rhythmic base (e.g., shuffle or swing). This happens for example with the piano on “Penny Lane”, the harpsichord on “Fixing A Hole” and with the electric piano on “Getting Better”. The third prototype is similar to the second, but this time the solution is to mark every eighth (or even sixteenth) note with the same dynamic, usually over a non-­ syncopated rhythmic base. Examples are “Hello, Goodbye” and “The End”. All of these three prototypes range among the most recognizable Beatlesque elements in absolute. Percentage-wise, it may be safe to say that Lennon displayed a preference for the first type, which he often brought in also during his solo career (see “Imagine”, to begin with), while McCartney tended to employ the other two, showing a sheer obsession for the second type in 1967 (a likely consequence, as we have seen, of his love for The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which often adopts that keyboard accompaniment), and then settling more preferably for the third type from 1968 onwards (including post-breakup songs like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”). Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but one of the most “McCartneyesque” songs in Lennon’s solo repertoire, “Intuition”, features the second prototype, and one of the most “Lennonesque” songs by McCartney, “However Absurd”, adopts the first one. With that in mind, and while remaining mostly a keyboard affair, the three typologies were also applied to other instruments, particularly guitars (“Getting Better”, “Got to Get You into My Life”…) and strings. Indeed, the rhythmic use of strings is another defining characteristic of the Beatlesque. In particular, marcato strings playing on the four beats of the bar (like type 2, but not necessarily on a syncopated rhythm – see “Eleanor Rigby”), with the frequent insertion of chromatisms, like on “I Am the Walrus”. Finally, something should be said about time signatures as well. Not too keen on signature changes within the same song, The Beatles nevertheless offered some

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iconic examples of this practice, particularly thanks to Lennon (“All You Need Is Love”) and Harrison (“Here Comes the Sun”), through diametrically opposite approaches. Ever-instinctive, Lennon usually provided quasi-unaware changes, based mostly on his songwriting approach, that tended to give prominence to the lyrics: therefore, if the meter would not fit the words, too bad for the meter. The “I need a fix ‘cause I’m going down” part in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” perfectly illustrates this approach. In Harrison’s case, instead, changes were “cultivated”, and mostly a result of his love for Indian music, very prone to metrical variability. In “Here Comes the Sun”, the bridge bears a transition from 11/8 to 4/4 to 7/8. McCartney, too, would employ signature changes on occasions (e.g., “Good Day Sunshine”), but not as often as his peers. Having said that, however, the most distinctive entry in this special group displayed by The Beatles, and one that occurred only thrice, (on “We Can Work It Out”, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and the unreleased “Not Guilty”) is the transition from 4/4 to a 3/4. The trick was used to produce a sudden and unexpected waltz pace, sometimes relevant to the song’s content  – as it definitely is the case with “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”6 – sometimes not. Not extremely common, as we have seen, this solution has nevertheless a distinctive Beatlesque flavor (XTC pay homage to it on “Earn Enough for Us”).

3.5 Structure The Beatles relied on standard forms for most of their compositions. AABA was the most used, followed by ABAB.  Traditional, “proper” extensions were also often employed, in accordance with the standards of popular music: added sections (e.g., an intro, an extra verse or chorus, a special) were placed either before or after the basic form. However, a closer look reveals some peculiarities. Since the very beginning, the band “personalized” the structure of their compositions. First of all, they changed the length of the sections. The typical American and British popular song consists of 32 bars, equally divided in 4 sections (8 + 8 + 8 + 8). In the Beatles’ debut single “Love Me Do”, the A parts are 13 bars long, while the B part is 8 bars long. This asymmetry of form continued throughout the band’s career (see Valdez 2001 for more details). The extensions, in particular, became more elaborate and uncommon (see also Nurmesjärvi 1998), and in the last years, very few songs presented standard forms.

 Whether or not a forced interpretation, we dare suggesting that the waltz segment in “We Can Work It Out” may be actually related to the lyrical content. Describing an argument within a couple, the “circular”, merry-go-round quality of the waltz may have been employed as a metaphor of the two protagonists going “in circles” without really sorting out their differences. That is particularly true when the 3/4 passage coincides with the lyrics “So I will ask you once again”. 6

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3.5.1 Strophe-Refrain vs. Chorus-Bridge What one needs to underline here, as something intimately related to an identification of the band’s style, is the fact that the attribution of what were “A” and “B” could vary sensibly. In particular, the band displayed a tendency to use a “chorusbridge” structure, roughly as often as the customary “strophe-refrain” one, particularly in their early period. A short explanation is possibly called for here, for those readers who may be unaware of the difference between the two formats (for more details, see Fabbri 2008: 108–131). The strophe-refrain structure is an essentially narrative form; it tells a story in the strophe (A), and, during the refrain (B), it presents the listener with a usually catchy musical statement (rescue, catharsis, or otherwise). It is a “pleasure that comes after hard work” type of structure: typifying examples for this format are Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” or Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, two songs that really make one wait long for the catharsis of the refrain, after an elaborate construction of the pathos in the strophes. The Beatles employed this format more and more systematically as their career went on and the narrative structure of their lyrics needed more development and depth. Classic examples of the band’s “strophe-refrain” songs include, amongst many others, “Drive My Car”, “Penny Lane”, “Let It Be”, and “Get Back”. Moreover, in some cases, the above-mentioned extensions could be added, in at least two ways. In the first case, the extension consists of a transitional melody that either connects the strophe to the refrain (e.g., the “cellophane flowers of yellow and green…” part in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” that stands in between the “Picture yourself…” strophe and the repeated song-title of the refrain), or the refrain back to the strophe (e.g., the “in a couple of years they have built a home sweet home…” part in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”). This transitional melody has been referred to in many ways, particularly “bridge”, “release” and “middle eight”. We prefer the term “bridge” (specifically, “pre-refrain bridge” and “post-refrain bridge”, depending indeed on the position) exactly because it effectively conveys its transitional function of “connecting” two points, like a real bridge does. The two main alternatives are slightly less convincing. “Release” is less comprehensive in meaning: it applies to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as it indeed “opens up” for the refrain, but not to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” where instead it simply brings back the song to the strophe, in a context where the song may also manage to do it without that part (and indeed that is what it does after the first refrain, where McCartney goes straight to the second strophe “Desmond takes a trolley to the jeweler’s store…”). As for “middle eight”, the expression is by now anachronistic. It used to refer to a section appearing approximately in the “middle” of the song, that is, neither at the beginning nor at the end, and lasting eight bars. While the rule was applied quite rigorously during the first half of the twentieth century (including The Beatles themselves), it later developed into a freer form that could be placed in various spots and last a variable number of bars. For instance, the bridge of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” consists of thirteen bars, or at least twelve, if we prefer not to count the

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four drum hits that convert the time signature from 3/4 to 4/4 and introduce the refrain. Moreover, besides this greater effectiveness, the term “bridge” shall be used again in the other relevant format adopted by The Beatles, the chorus-­bridge, and thus one must realize that in that case, too, the bridge possesses that transitional function we have spoken about. In the second case, we have the so-called “special”, that is, an additional segment with different melody and harmony, usually appearing only once, that would bring an additional statement and expand the narrative material exposed in the song. A classic example is George Harrison’s “Something”. The strophes tell us what makes the addressee of the song so special and attractive (“Something in the way she moves…”, “Something in the way she woos me…”); the refrain, more assertively, informs us of the addresser’s commitment (“I don’t want to leave her now”) and the special wonders about the future of the relationship (“You’re asking me will my love grow, I don’t know…”). Other examples of extended “strophe-refrain” format include “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Please Please Me” and “Martha My Dear”. The chorus-bridge form is by contrast more exclamatory, starting right away with the catchy passage, that we indeed call “chorus” (the A section), and that is virtually as catchy as a refrain but more articulate, especially in lyrics. The chorus is followed by a more meditative passage (B, the bridge, which also bears that “transitional” function we mentioned in the extended strophe-refrain format). In contrast with the strophe-refrain, the structural motto is more like “Seize the day!”, and there is little doubt that The Beatles imported this format from Tin Pan Alley classics like “Blue Moon” and “Night and Day” and from doo-wop ballads like “Only You” or “Since I Don’t Have You”. Good examples are their early hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “From Me to You”, but also many of their most celebrated ballads, including “Michelle”, “The Long and Winding Road” and “Yesterday”. By reading the lyrics of these songs, we understand how these narrative dynamics operate: on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” the chorus is a repeated love declaration and a request to hold hands (exclamatory, indeed: “I wanna hold your hand!”, “now let me hold your hand!”), while the bridge cares to elaborate a bit on the reasons for such request (“When I touch you I feel happy inside…”). The same with more profound lyrics like “Yesterday”: the chorus takes the role of directly displaying the protagonist’s feelings (that is, the fact that he misses his past as the time when all his troubles “seemed so far away” or when “love was such an easy game to play”), while the bridge uncovers the reasons for his sadness (a “she” who left him without explanations, probably after he “said something wrong”7).

 An amusing story that McCartney often shares in interviews (most recently in a 2019 conversation with Stephen Colbert in The Late Show) concerns the many covers of “Yesterday” that were recorded since its release (in fact, the track holds a Guinness record for the “most covered song” of all, with well over 2000 versions). As he noted, some of the most celebrated reinterpretations (including Elvis Presley’s, Frank Sinatra’s and Marvin Gaye’s) change the bridge lyrics from “I said something wrong” to “I must have said something wrong”, as if they do not really want to admit they made a mistake. 7

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A slight variation on this format could be called “chorus-special”, in that the bridge is executed only once, therefore standing out in a more particular way. Examples from this category include “This Boy”, “I Will”, “Thank You Girl” and others. A particular case that may generate confusion in this categorization are those few strophe-refrain songs that, as structural choice, opt to place the refrain at the beginning, such as “She Loves You” or “Here Comes the Sun”: in these cases, although the memorable parts are placed at the beginning in chorus-bridge fashion (“She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah…”, “Here comes the sun, doo-doo-do-doo…”), we need to pay attention to the narrative construction of the piece, and exactly realize that the other parts are devoted to the actual storytelling (“You think you’ve lost your love, well I saw here yesterday…”, “Little darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter…”), even though, on these occasions, they happen to be placed after the more assertive sections. In principle, this format may be schematized by placing the B first, or – if you like – by calling it refrain-strophe, rather than strophe-refrain. Finally, while we will not specifically discuss other formats (as we consider them less defining of The Beatles style), it is worth to briefly resume what we wrote at the beginning of this section, namely that: especially towards the end of their career, The Beatles adopted a number of sui generis formats, of which we may mention the following: –– The suite, a number of different pieces sequenced one after the other without repetition, in ABCD fashion (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, “You Never Give Me Your Money”… plus of course the extended form of the medley, as appearing on the B side of Abbey Road). –– The single-section, consisting of repeated A parts (“Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”…); –– The free form, that does not obey any traditional structure, but rather employs the material in flexible ways (“A Day in the Life”, “I’ve Got a Feeling”…). –– Any extension/addition of single parts that characterizes a given song in a distinctive manner: long codas (e.g., “Hey Jude”), reprises (e.g., “Hello, Goodbye”), refrains that also work as intros (e.g., “Nowhere Man”), intros in “prologue” style (e.g., “If I Fell”), repeated parts with slightly different melodies (e.g., the strophes in “I’ll Be Back”), etc.

3.5.2 Democratic Catchiness Granted that each song’s part would deserve a separate treatment, as it carries features that are often unique and stylistically relevant, we shall only share a few considerations, relying also on the fact that a few of them are already discussed in other sections (particularly, the one on melody). First and foremost, what we may jokingly call “democratic catchiness”. If numerous bands, before and after The Beatles, displayed a tendency to elect the

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refrain (or the chorus) as the “really memorable/commercial part” of a song, the Fab Four seemed motivated to treat each part as equally deserving a share of catchiness. After all, if it is true that in pre-tape recorder times, Lennon and McCartney would rely exclusively on their memory to remember the melodies they had just composed (and, if they forgot them, they were “obviously not good songs” – as McCartney often repeats in interviews), it follows that every song part had to be memorable, not just the refrain. The relationship between strophe and refrain or between chorus and bridge (plus all the extras), therefore, was not based on the criteria of “melodic challengingness”: to mention Roxette’s famous greatest hits album title Don’t bore us, get to the chorus – an example that emphasizes the practice of listening to a song as “waiting for something catchy to happen” – The Beatles set out to remove boredom (that is, sense of anticipation) from their songs. Each spot should have something interesting and pleasant going on, almost as if the song is filled with hooks, instead of having just the customary couple. What is catchier in “Yesterday”, the “Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away…” part or the “Why she had to go?” one? And what about “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Lady Madonna”, “Something”, “Across the Universe”…? Structurally speaking, and most of the times, The Beatles songs are not (long and winding) “roads” to somewhere, where that somewhere is the real goal. It is the journey itself that is the point, like a luxury trip on the Orient Express, the destination is simply the end of the journey, not necessarily the most interesting/ memorable part of it.

3.5.3 Outros A song part out of which The Beatles made a little art form of its own is the outro, another of those intrinsically-Beatlesque features. Up until the 1960s, endings in songs were usually a short affair to conclude with a hard out, a cadence or a fade out – practically the equivalents of, respectively, full stop, exclamation mark and suspension points in grammar. In the first case, the song would stop in a sudden manner, much to a theatrical effect. In the second case, a certain mannerism, imported from classical music, would make the outro emphatic, almost invariably relying on the tonic, and – so to speak – unmistakable, a clear “The end” inscription. In the third case, the song would fade out after a couple of repetitions of the refrain/ chorus, in a rather simple manner, as if to convey that this catchy part could go on and on, but, hey, you heard it enough times already, you got the point. For The Beatles, and already since 1963 (“She Loves You” possibly being an early example of a more elaborate finale), musical orthography would be a more colorful landscape, that would include not only full stops, exclamation marks and suspension points, but also question marks (“Cry Baby Cry”), triple exclamations (“A Day in the Life”), endless suspension points (“Hey Jude”), unfinished sentences (“I Want You”), a capo’s (that is, reprises, as in “Hello, Goodbye” - we may also call them postscripts) and even commas (when the outro is a direct transition to the next song, as in several episodes of the Abbey Road medley) and columns (when one song

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finale literally introduces the next song, as in the “Billy Shears” cadence at the end of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that leaves the floor to “With a Little Help from My Friends”). Similarly to what was happening in cinema (the 1960s being the decade that challenged traditional filmic conventions, especially through genres and movements like Nouvelle Vague, spaghetti western, American new wave, etc.), The Beatles soon became unsatisfied with traditional, “close” endings (and steady narration in general), and began exploring more “open”, often mysterious endings in such songs as “Glass Onion”, “Magical Mystery Tour”, and “Long Long Long”. Even when using standard outros, there could still be the occasional odd idea that would elude obviousness. For instance, a fade out could be applied not to the customary refrain or chorus, but to a strophe (“You Won’t See Me”, “Doctor Robert”…), or a hard out could be arranged in a not-so-hard way, adding sounds and effects that give an almost indefinite, casual (and often psychedelic) quality (“Flying”, “Long Long Long”…). Focusing instead on the decidedly unusual outros, we could mention at least six types that turned out to be rather influential in popular music history. Possibly, the most important one is the “singalong” finale, with “Hey Jude” representing the perfect prototype, and in a way the most radical, with its extension and “concept”. Something to sing endlessly almost as a mantra, and not by chance an unavoidable highlight in McCartney concerts, with him taking the cheerleader’s role and inviting the audience to sing – now the boys, now the girls, now the people on the left side, now the people on the right. The strategy here is to create a cheerfully and catchily redundant ending that goes even beyond the already-catchy refrain/chorus, but may be in fact a new part altogether (like on indeed “Hey Jude”, or also “You Never Give Me Your Money”, “Good Day Sunshine”…) or, more often, a variation on an existing part (“All You Need Is Love”, “Come Together”, “Paperback Writer”…).  Incidentally, all four indulged into this practice several more times during their solo careers. A similar solution is represented by the progressive addition of instruments, offstage voices, effects and noises to create a “convulsive crescendo”. This second strategy may also apply to the first type, but not only  – for instance it may not necessarily involve the repetition of a vocal line (e.g., “I Want You”, “Lovely Rita”…). However, the main difference is that this second type of outro consists of an arrangement solution, rather than a structural one: it is not about adding a new part or repeating/varying an old one, but it is rather what is being done at that moment. And what is being done is the provision of an increasingly joyous, loud, “everything goes” type of chaos. George Martin had learned at an early stage already that it was a wise decision not to press “stop” while the band was recording a song’s ending, especially when the plan was to fade out. Some improvised fun was always likely to happen, especially during the recording of the vocals. In Sect. 4.1.2 we transcribe the ending of “Hey Bulldog”, which, along with “All You Need Is Love”, “It’s All Too Much” and a few others, is the quintessential example of this improvised extravaganza: as the word “bulldog” is uttered by Lennon, he and McCartney launch

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into amused, surreal doggy sounds and jokes that become the perfect way to fade out the song. A third “exit strategy” is the addition of a little coda or reprise at the end of the track. The short snippet can be added after a fade-out or a cadence, often through an unexpected fade-in. Just when the song seems to be finished, either a new part comes in (“Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Hello, Goodbye”…), or the song restarts pretty much from where it had left (“Helter Skelter”, the single version of “Get Back”, “Two of Us”…). The fourth type consists of the repetition of a phrase, usually but not only from the refrain/chorus, two or three times, not for the purpose to fade out (as one would expect from such repetition), but to conclude in an exclamatory way. For instance (from “Blackbird”): “…All your life you were only waiting for this moment to arise/You were only waiting for this moment to arise/You were only waiting for this moment to arise”. An interesting variant to this, and a George Harrison favorite, is what we may call “outro by subtraction”, and it consists of performing a certain phrase, then repeating it entirely, then repeating a segment of it, and then concluding. For instance (from “Think for Yourself”): “Do what you want to do/and go where you’re going to/But think for yourself ‘cause I won’t be there with you//Do what you want to do/and go where you’re going to/But think for yourself ‘cause I won’t be there with you//Think for yourself ‘cause I won’t be there with you”. A fifth variant consists in concluding the song with a short phrase that was previously unheard in the song, harmonically and/or melodically. It is a bonsai version of the “special”, but applied at the end rather than in the middle of the track. Examples are “Taxman” (“And you’re working for no one but me”), “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” (“And if you want some fun, take Ob-la-dì-bla-dà”), “Here, There and Everywhere” (“To be there, and everywhere/Here, there and everywhere”). Finally, we may also have an anticlimactic ending, what in narratology is known as a “shaggy dog story”. Mostly employed in texts with strong comic and/or surreal character (and so it is often the case with The Beatles, when they employed that kind of finale), a shaggy dog story is a narrative that builds a fair amount of pathos around events and characters, only to end up pointlessly, almost pathetically. Legend has it that the expression originated exactly after one of those infuriating practical jokes, about, indeed, a shaggy dog – a joke we do not mind telling now, as a moment of comic relief in the book. Throughout the entire joke we get to hear how shaggy the dog is, so shaggy that everybody acknowledges his shagginess. He is entered into a city competition for shaggy dogs, and he wins it, then to a regional one, and he wins that too, then to a national one, and he wins that too. When he finally gets to the world cup tournament of shaggy dogs, a jury member who is delegated to assess the shagginess of the competitors, goes “Well, this one is not that shaggy, now, is he?”. End of the joke. Probably the most charming example would come from Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, who once wrote a shaggy dog story called “Shah Guido G.”, a title that, pronounced fast, sounds exactly like “Shaggy dog”. Back to The Beatles, and keeping in mind that McCartney’s sheepdog Martha, when rolling in the mud, might have looked reasonably shaggy, the use of

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anticlimactic endings had indeed a lot to do with humor and irony. Just a couple of examples, among many include “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”. This, a sarcastic attack on hunters, features a “children song” type of refrain (not by chance anticipated by the verse “All the children sing”) that, towards the end, is repeated four times, suggesting a rather standard fade out. However, at the fourth repetition, the melody is covered by some random whistling; in fact, worse than that, the type of whistling of a person who “tries hard” to stay in tune, but does not manage. It then fades out, leaving the melody to a slightly clownesque trombone (which, to be exact, is not a trombone, but a trombone preset of the mellotron, played by assistant producer Chris Thomas), followed by a mild applause of few people, as if this hunter was a bit of a failed clown who performed his number (killing the tiger) in front of a small, not too enthusiastic, audience. Another example of anticlimax, this time constructed more suddenly, is “Piggies”. After the manneristic minuetto-like apparent conclusion of the song, we hear George Harrison saying “One more time”, and then quite suddenly a short solemn phrase is performed by a full orchestra, hinting an epic grand finale. Except that, what follows is a series of pig snorts and grunts, which quickly drag the finale into the farce that the song always aimed at being. A special case of “shaggy dog” consists of a usually spontaneous spoken comment at the end of the song, either for humorous purposes, or simply as a reaction to something happening in the song. The result is, intentionally or not, that of almost dismissing the song, or at least breaking the fourth wall and dissipating the diegetic space (we discuss these narrative strategies in Sect. 4.3). Belonging to this category are “Helter Skelter” (Ringo’s legendary “I’ve got blisters on my fingers”), “Get Back” (Lennon’s “I’d like to say thank you on the behalf of the group, and I hope we’ve passed the audition”), “Strawberry Fields Forever” (Lennon’s “cranberry sauce”, famously mistaken for “I buried Paul” by the Paul Is Dead conspiracy fanatics), etc.

3.5.4 Sudden Quiet Another song part that surely deserves more than just a mention is the one that, depending on its recurrence, can take the shape of a special (when appearing only once) or bridge. We have already mentioned how The Beatles mastered the practice, particularly from a harmonic point of view, often using these parts as an opportunity to escape from the song’s main key (something they did throughout their whole career, from “From Me to You” to “Something”). What we have not mentioned yet is that specials/bridges could also serve another purpose: a dramatic change of dynamics, usually from forte (or whereabouts) to piano – something we may call “sudden quiet”. In its most complete form, the sudden quiet would be also consistent with the lyrics. “Dr. Robert”, for instance, describes an imaginary physician with the “magic pill”. The music conveys the sense of anxiety of the patient whose friend (the narrating voice) is recommending this miraculous Dr. Robert: “Ring, my friend, I said you’d call  – Dr. Robert/Day or night, he’ll be there anytime at all  – Dr.

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Robert…”. As the patient finally visits the doctor and receives the magic (legal or illegal, we are not told) drug, we get a musical representation of the state of wellness. The music quiets down, with an organ and no drums, and the lyrics go “Well, well, well, you’re feeling fine”. The sense of relaxation and relief of the patient is all there. Similarly, “I Am the Walrus” introduces the sudden quiet in the special, in correspondence of the words “Sitting in an English garden”. Needless to say, we can also have segments of sudden quiet when the lyrics do not demand it in particular (e.g., in “Paperback Writer”). Concluding, a sudden quiet may also be placed on smaller segments that are neither specials nor bridges. An example is “Lady Madonna”, which applies the sudden quiet on the turnaround from the bridge back to the chorus: “See how they run”. In this case, we still witness a consistence between music and lyrics, but in a more subtle way than the above examples. The word “run”, indeed, would suggest a faster/louder segment, but in fact the turnaround is addressing those who “see” those working women while they frenetically feed their babies, “make ends meet”, and so on, while the women themselves are well represented in the choruses and in the bridges (especially the latter, where the craziness of daily chores and challenges is portrayed through a list of weekdays marked by unexpected events – “Wednesday morning papers didn’t come, Thursday night your stockings needed mending...”).

3.6 Lyrics The variety of themes and formal characteristics of the Beatles’ lyrics deserve a separate treatment, which is unfortunately outside the scope of this book. The summary we shall propose here is merely an attempt to define some general guidelines that, eventually, when we analyze the “Beatlesque” in the repertoires of other acts, will help us completing the picture. It has been repeated till boredom that the Beatles’ lyrics can be placed into two main groups: the spontaneous, simple, and often banal approach of the early years, and the mature, self-confident, elaborate and thematically rich approach of the late years. A line between these two must be traced around late 1964-early 1965, that is, between the albums Beatles for Sale and Help! Prior to these, the band had a fairly fixed formula for their lyrics: general love song (with mostly three templates: the “I love you/I want to be with you/I miss you” kind, the “why did you leave me/don’t want to be with me?” kind, and the “who’s that other guy? I’m jealous” kind), first and/or second person addresses (with occasional inclusion of a third person), simple and impersonal concepts, and standard metrical schemes: “If there’s anything that you want/If there’s anything I can do/Just call on me and I’ll send it along/With love, from me to you”. Beatles for Sale introduced a few personal/autobiographical references (Lennon referred to “I’m a Loser” as a first draft for “Help!”) and a tendency to broaden the stories with a more articulate and linguistically rich textual material: “One day you’ll look to see I’ve gone/For tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun”. That

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came together more convincingly in Help!, whose sole inclusion of “Yesterday” can be taken as testimony of the big leap forward: “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be/There’s a shadow hanging over me”. The transition is finalized in Rubber Soul, in many ways the album of the band’s full maturity as songwriters. From that point onwards, the lyrical possibilities become endless: The Beatles could  write about their own lives in terms of existential condition (“Strawberry Fields Forever”), specific experiences (“She Said She Said”), circumstantial events and inspirations (“Dear Prudence”), memories (“Penny Lane”), identifiable people and relations (“Two of Us”). They also could write fictional stories (“Eleanor Rigby”), express themselves through images and visions (“I Am the Walrus”) or through word play (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), launch messages of social (“Taxman”) or universal concern (“All You Need Is Love”), construct metaphors that convey emotions, opinions, values (“Blackbird”). Their vocabulary  would increase in variety and complexity, the metric schemes becoming more elaborate as well as their rhetoric abilities. In Sect. 4.1 we shall see more about Lennon and McCartney’s approach to lyrics, and in Sect. 5.3.2, as anticipated, we shall briefly return on the topic, in relation to the concept of Beatlesque.

Chapter 4

Crossdisciplinary Reflections: Production vs. Multimodality Studies, Narratology and Film Studies

It has been remarked on numerous times (e.g., Moorefield 2005: xv) that the practices of composing, formatting,1 arranging and producing a song bear similarities with the process of filmmaking, particularly the stages of development (composition and partly formatting) mise-en-scène (formatting, arranging and partly production) and montage (partly arranging and production). In the context of identifying the Beatles style within the realm of sound and production, we suggest here that a

 Composing, formatting, and arranging are three different processes that deserve a separate treatment. We certainly expect composing and arranging as two neatly distinct actions, but formatting (that is, structuring the piece: AABABB, ABABCB, etc.) is often the common area that joins two circles in a Venn Diagram: it may happen in conjunction with the compositional process, but not always; and also, it may be one of the things that takes its final shape during the arrangement stage, but – again – not always. For this reason, “formatting” is worth being singled out as a creative act of its own. Song parts may be written with no specific idea of where they will be placed in the overall, structure, and not by chance are they sometimes isolated bits “in search of a song” (e.g., the “Woke up fell out of bed” part that eventually ended up in “A Day in the Life”). Or: not rarely the composer may have a clear idea for a format, but then something happens during arrangement (or even production, in fact!) that changes the picture. The example of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is quite paradigmatic: demoed with an uncertain structure, with Lennon mostly wanting to show how the two melodies A and B sounded (A being the “living is easy with eyes closed” strophe and B being the “let me take you down” refrain), the song was shaped as a A-A-B-A-B-A1 in Take 1 (where A1 is an instrumental version of the strophe plus a coda), as B-A-A-B-A-B-A1-C in Take 7 (where A1 is again the instrumental version of the strophe, but the coda is now not based on the latter, but a different unit altogether, hence its denomination as C), and it finally became the universally-known B-A-B-A-B-A-B-C-D (where C is the instrumental coda, harmonically different from either A or B, and D is the cacophonic reprise based on the coda of Take 7). If the format of Take 7 was still a result of “arrangement” decisions, the final version (especially the suppression of the second A in favor of a straight transition to B, and overall a regular alternation B-A throughout the whole song, in quasi-traditional ballad style) was actually a “production” decision – or better: a “post-production” decision, due to the famous, and already mentioned, need of joining two different arrangements, the “band” one and the “orchestral” one. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5_4

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considerable forging component of such a style was the deliberate intention to create networks of synesthetic (mostly audiovisual – hence the comparison with filmmaking) referentiality between the compositions and the way they were arranged/ produced, so that the latter would be, depending on the cases, icon, index or symbol of the former (in the Peircean sense, of course). Let us make three simple instances. In Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs, an icon is a sign that bears qualitative features of the object. An iconic sign is a sign that looks/sounds/smells etc. like the object. Iconic, thus, would be the “Helter Skelter” guitar descending lick that we hear every time the title itself is sung: a helter skelter is a spiral slide around a tower that we find in some amusement parks, so the fact that the guitar is going from up to down is an iconic representation of the act of sliding down (moreover, the lick is performed in legato, adding to the semiotic faithfulness of its referent). Peirce then defines the index as a sign that bears a physical connection with the object. An indexical sign is thus a natural cause or consequence of the object. Its categorization requires a semantic memory, in that one must recognize the relation between the referent and event/state. Indexical is therefore the street-­band bit in the second strophe of “Yellow Submarine”, right after the verse “and the band begins to play”: as a consequence of the verse, the band really begins to play. A symbol, finally, is a sign that relates to the object by means of convention, habit or social rules. A symbolic sign is thus an arbitrary representation of the object, of which – in principle – it may bear no resemblance whatsoever, although many are the cases where such resemblance can be traced at some point of the history or the articulation of the sign, a typical case being onomatopoeias. Symbolic are for instance several of the production strategies applied to “Blue Jay Way” and that revolve around the notion of fogginess suggested by the first verse, “There’s a fog upon L.A.”. It may be worthwhile to read about the whole process, as described by Guesdon et al. (2013): “Blue Jay Way” was the only Beatles song to use practically all the effects available at that time. The first recording session took place on September 6. The rhythm track was recorded in one take: bass, drums, and organ. George was on organ, but it was possible that John accompanied him. The next day there was a first reduction onto a second tape recorder. Accentuated flanging bringing the tape to its saturation point was added on both organs, especially at the end of the song. George then sang lead with his voice doubled simultaneously. On the choruses, the vocals were fed through a Leslie cabinet. George wanted to express the feeling of the fog that he was singing about. For the next reduction, many of the instruments were enriched with phasing. Then George, John, and Paul recorded backing vocals through the Leslie cabinet once again. Finally, on October 6, a cello and a tambourine were added to complete the song. The first mix was stereo, and George decided to add intermittent backwards playback of the song through a Leslie cabinet. (Guesdon et al. 2013: 436–437)

Now, there is no direct connection between the sounds generated by a Leslie speaker, or by any process of saturation, flanging or phasing, and an atmospheric phenomenon like fog. Fog does not “sound” like any of those effects, and those effects do not produce fog (or humidity, for the matter). However, by a subtle process of abstraction, the two parties can be brought to a common ground: a sense of vagueness, confusion, muffledness and air fluctuation. It is a deliberate (thus, symbolic) connection, yet it

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works perfectly, especially when enhanced with the charmingly eerie vocal performance by Harrison and an appropriate choice of chords, especially that diminished C in the strophe. Finally, for the supporters of Umberto Eco’s reservations on iconicity,2 as a semiotic phenomenon that is always mediated culturally, and thus must be considered simply a special case of symbolicness, we also have borderline cases. In “Dr. Robert” we have an example of that “sudden quiet”, from forte to piano, that we mentioned in the paragraph about “dynamics”. What is worth remarking upon here is that they both are associated with verses that may suggest quiet, albeit indirectly. In “Dr. Robert” the addressee (“my friend”) is recommended by the narrating/singing voice to visit the protagonist (Dr. Robert, who is a kind of off-­screen character that is being “talked about” but does not appear personally) who will offer him a cure for a non-specified, physical or, more probably, psychological (“if you’re down he’ll pick you up”) illness, but then again it does not matter because “he does everything he can” and he helps “everyone in need”. This stage is arranged with an uptempo beat, possibly representative of the feeling of anxiety and hurry to reach the doctor that the ill addressee is experiencing. However, once he reaches the doctor and is given the “magic pill” (most probably a recreational drug), the narrator’s friend is finally at peace: “Well, well, well, you’re feeling fine” – and that is the moment when the song quiets down, in both tempo and dynamics, giving us a distinctive impression that the cure that the man needed was “relaxation” and “escape” from stress and that the solution was not a “prescription” drug, but rather an illegal substance. The reason why this sign-object relation is not strictly iconic in the Peircean sense lies in the fact that “quiet” and “cure” are not the same thing, but they are credibly linked. If we represent a process of healing with an image of quiet, we are not entirely faithful to the task, but we are reasonably close to it. There is an element of symbolicness, in that we make a deliberate decision to create that particular association, as one of the possible ways to be healed. To make it clear, the song could have done the exact opposite, and have an equally effective result. That is: it could have been slow and depressive in part A, depicting the addressee as someone who is, indeed, “down” and needs to be “picked up”, and it could have received a push in tempo and dynamics in the B part, where the “well, well, well, you’re feeling fine” part could have been associated to joy and euphoria. That, too, would have been fairly iconic, especially if Dr. Robert had administered a stimulant or an anti-depressive pill.

 What does it mean to say that the portrait of Queen Elizabeth painted by Annigoni possesses the same properties as Queen Elizabeth? A commonsensical reply: because it has the same shape of the eyes, nose, mouth, the same coloring, the same shade of hair, the same height … But what does “the same shape of the nose” mean? The nose has three dimensions, whereas the picture of the nose has only two. The nose, observed from close by, has pores and tiny protuberances, which means that its surface is not smooth, but uneven, thus differing from the nose in the portrait. And then the nose has two holes, the nostrils, at its base, while the nose in the painting has at its base two black blobs which do not perforate the canvas. (Transl. from Eco 1968: 110). 2

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Incidentally, the same type of semi-iconicity occurs in the sudden quiet of “I Am the Walrus”, in correspondence of the verse “Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun”. Again: to sit and to be in a garden is not directly iconic to quiet, but it suggests it as a realistic association. While all these examples reveal the close similarity between production and filmmaking in a general sense, and that tends to be the problem, or rather the limitation, whenever the relationship between audiovisual texts and popular music is dealt with at scholarly level. Not that the topic is scarcely analyzed – quite the contrary. If anything, it is taken for granted, even by the authors themselves, that a song, also a form of art extended in time units and therefore intrinsically narrative, can share a series of representation strategies with an audiovisual text. In more than one interview, for example, Paul McCartney described the compositional approach to the track “Band on the Run” (with a clear tripartite structure, like a suite), as that of a film in three sequences: the imprisonment of protagonists (the part that begins with “Stuck inside these four walls …”), the escape plan (“If I ever get out of here …”) and finally the actual escape (the best known and catchiest part that begins with “Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun …”). Musicologists can of course elaborate a little on the concept, as we see for example in Fabbri (2008: 203–206) in relation to the Italian song “Se telefonando” (not by chance written by film music maestro Ennio Morricone), but, in any case, these tend to be parallels and not rigorous comparative analyzes. The problem is that, taken for granted or not, these references are often quite generic and usually focused on wide-ranging filmological issues: indeed, things like mise-en-scène, montage, and narration. When and if, instead, we try to elaborate on determined and defined strategies of audiovisual representation, we then begin to feel the lack of an adequate and exhaustive literature. The Beatles music and its production strategies offer an excellent opportunity to (begin to) fill this gap, allowing pinpointed reflections on specific filmic strategies, such as foreshadowing, timeshadowing, the management of the diegetic and non-diegetic space, etc., and moreover not to talk about “montage” in general, as an almost abstract concept, but to actually delve into the application of some classic montage theories.

4.1 Visual and Literary Components in Lennon-McCartney Having said all this, we may come back to one of our main points. Which is: The Beatles, particularly from 1965 onwards, were strongly determined to employ production as a multimodal platform to expand the sensorial perception of their songs, especially, but not only, in the visual sense. Sound and production were, in other words, a metaphorical videoclip for each song. This alone would be enough to justify a section here on “audiovisual strategies”, but there is more. In numerous cases, it was the songwriting itself that was to have a cinematographic (or at least, visual/pictorial/photographic or literary/storytelling) approach. This is particularly true in the case of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, but exactly a song like “Blue

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Jay Way” proves that Harrison, too, could “film” a mini-movie in his songs. However, in order to prove our point, we shall here focus on the Lennon and McCartney partnership. In Martinelli 2015, an attempt was made to trace a short overview of the events and circumstances that, in a socio-cultural sense, might have been instrumental in the development of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting skills, taste and choices (education, experiences, social condition…).3 We refer you to that article for the full analysis, but a few considerations are useful also in this context. On top of everything, both Lennon and McCartney (and the other two Beatles as well) belonged to the working class of Liverpool. Such a condition, among many other things that also turned out to be relevant in their career, helped in developing a wide imagery of characters and situations eventually reflected in numerous songs. When we think about the catalogue of places, people and situations created by the authors in their most evocative songs, we hardly find images of aristocracy or middle class (in fact, we rather find verses like “I don’t need a castle, they’ve got castles in Versailles”, as in McCartney’s “Beautiful Night”, 1997). What we find is a street with a barbershop (barbershop, not beauty salon), a bus station and the “suburban skies” of “Penny Lane” (1967); a street-band used as alter ego for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (as opposed to anything fancier, like an orchestra or a string quartet); songs called “Working Class Hero” (Lennon, 1970), “Power to the People” (Lennon, 1971) or “Average Person” (McCartney, 1983), etc. The way the songs’ characters tend to behave is coherent with the authors’ social status. There are no “special” people or “heroes” in Lennon and/or McCartney’s writing4: what they do is nothing “that can’t be done” (“All You Need Is Love”, 1967). It is intriguing that, when McCartney, in 1989, wrote “How Many People?” about a real “hero” (Chico Mendes, the Brazilian environmental activist assassinated in 1988 while fighting to preserve the Amazon rainforest), he makes it clear that a most disturbing thing is that an “ordinary person” was killed (“How many people have died? One too many right now for me, I wanna see ordinary people living peacefully”). Also, as we already discussed, both authors developed teenage passions for the skiffle craze, the teddy boy fashion and finally rock and roll, with their general rebellious attitude, the development of a specific “youth” culture and the interest for Afro-American music (with its repeated references to sex and transgression). At the same time, thanks to his father’s semi-professional passion for jazz and the Tin Pan Alley tradition, McCartney was also exposed to the American classics (an element that helped shaping the more sophisticated taste that The Beatles had in comparison with other rock and roll bands). If it is no surprise that the Tin Pan Alley experienced lyricists could elaborate particularly refined sets of lyrics (see names like Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart  Additional insights on the socio-cultural aspects of the Beatles’ repertoire can be found in the very interesting Womack and Davis 2006. 4  The use of the word “hero” in Lennon’s above-mentioned manifesto-song is clearly metaphorical, and used for contrastive purposes: “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small”. 3

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or Ira Gershwin, and in particular how they were all connected to the film industry, thanks to the then very popular musicals), one should not forget that rock and roll (and its main root, blues) could also often take a particular care for words. Authors like Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry had shown reluctance towards the simplistic straightforwardness of the “Wop bop a loo bop, I love you, let’s rock5” formulas of the genre, opting for a richer imagery inhabited by people who had names (“Johnny B.  Goode”, “Peggy Sue”…), possessed features (“Blue Suede Shoes”, “Brown-eyed Handsome Man”…) and went places (“Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans”, “I’m gonna be standing on the corner 12th Street and Vine”…). Moreover, and importantly, both attended institutes of humanistic type, except that Lennon was in an art college, and McCartney (and Harrison) in a grammar school. It is our conviction that these choices played a role  – as we shall see eventually  – in Lennon’s inclination to a visually-descriptive approach to lyrics writing, and McCartney’s preference for a narrative one. Not incidentally, when it came to literary taste, Lennon became enamored with the visual inventiveness of writers like Lewis Carroll, paying homage to him in songs like 1967s “I Am the Walrus”, inspired by Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. McCartney meanwhile, fell in love with great narratives such as those of Charles Dickens, writing songs like “Jenny Wren”, 2005, based on the character from Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend. We shall see later that Lennon, too, could be capable of dense narratives, so perhaps at this point, it would be fair to say that, in turn, McCartney too could take a rather visual/imaginative approach and a song like “Monkberry Moon Delight”, 1971, would clearly make the case. If anything, a subtle difference would lie in McCartney’s preference for a surrealistic construction of the lyrics, rather than a visionary one.6 Finally, we have already mentioned, in the introduction, how experiences such as their use of recreational drugs (particularly amphetamines, marijuana and LSD), the intense flirting with avant-garde, and the 1968 trip to India all played specific roles in their creativity, adding up to their imagery, suggesting different approaches, and allowing for more varied songwriting strategies. We have seen how the impact of these experiences was visible in the musical writing tout court, and now we can say a few words about the lyrics department.

 Needless to say, the whole genre’s jargon was permeated with slang words for sexual activities (“to rock”, “to roll”, “to twist”, “to shout”, “to shake”, “to rattle”… they all mean one thing, really) 6  Similarly to that artistic movement (of which he is a declared fan), McCartney’s imagery may look verisimilar in almost everything, except that, here and there, queer, or dreamy elements may appear, like a melting clock or a disquieting muse in a totally ordinary context. In “Rocky Raccoon” (1968), for instance, we get a very linear narration of a cowboy seeking revenge towards a rival in love, getting wounded in the duel, being checked by a drunken doctor, and lying in a hotel room with a copy of Gideon’s Bible near the bed. Everything looks like a typical country and western story, except that, out of the blue, we hear “And now Rocky Raccoon he fell back in his room/Only to find Gideon’s Bible/Gideon checked out and he left it no doubt/To help with good Rocky’s revival”. The Gideon’s Bible ceases to be the typical hotel Bible published by Gideons International, and becomes a book delivered by the actual Gideon, the bible character, who apparently was occupying the room right before Rocky. 5

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Thematically, Lennon and McCartney expanded their range of topics, becoming able to see artistic potential in a wider number of events and situations, and did not mind daring to deal with less comfortable or socially acceptable issues. Formally, the poetic abilities were implemented in various ways, and again became more courageous in structure and logic (words could be now picked for sound rather than meaning, the narrative construction would become more complex and multilayered, etc.), and – more interestingly, as far as we are concerned here – evocativeness.

4.1.1  Lennon or McCartney Thanks to Bob Dylan’s influence, Lennon inaugurated, around late 1964, a progressive process of modification of his songwriting approach in a decidedly autobiographical direction. Such process, towards the end of the Beatles’ career, became almost final and exclusive of different approaches, but, until then, plenty of room had been available also for visionary and imaginative lyrics, particularly in the psychedelic phase (late 1965 till 1968 circa). After that, and with Ono’s influence, Lennon turned towards straightforward, realistic and (often brutally) honest lyrics. With few exceptions, Lennon’s whole solo career is marked by a firm determination to be a “reporter” of his own feelings and experiences, from the most painful (e.g., “My Mummy’s Dead”, 1970) to the most ordinary ones (e.g., “Cleanup Time”, 1980). On the other hand, even though autobiographical songs are far from rare in McCartney’s repertoire, there is no doubt that he always found it more comfortable to remove himself, as a recognizable character, from a song’s spotlight, and to convey a message from an impersonal, or straight forward fictional, perspective. Not that this may have any statistical relevance, but it is noteworthy that, besides all the many “I’s” and “Me’s” that each author may have employed in their songs, McCartney never used the words “Paul” or “McCartney” in his songs, while Lennon did use his given name pretty often (“The Ballad of John and Yoko”, 1969, “Hold on”, 1970, “God”, 1970, “#9 Dream”, 1974…). There is no doubt, thus, that Lennon’s most inspired lyrics are those that contain autobiographical elements and have self-confession and honesty as central values; and that McCartney is at his best when he depicts fictional stories and uses literary and metaphorical elements to express his feelings. To an extent, a thorough analysis of Lennon’s songs is most revealing of his life than any (often contradictory) interview or statement he delivered to the media: he is one of the most satisfying answers to the demand for sincerity and authenticity that rock mythology has always had. Conversely, McCartney must be primarily appreciated for his storytelling qualities, and the ability to invent characters with a specific name (and often surname too) and yet are synecdoches for universal feelings and values (Jude for self-­ confidence, Eleanor Rigby for loneliness, the girl in “She’s Leaving Home” for generational conflicts, etc.). Admitting that these are the respective strengths of the two authors’ lyrical abilities, there is an element of unfairness in this overall judgment. In Lennon’s case, one cannot obviously disregard the above-mentioned “psychedelic” period, between

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late 1965 and 1968 (and occasionally 1969 too), where several fictional songs of capital importance in his songwriting appeared: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and most of all “I Am the Walrus” (all released in 1967), to name the most famous ones, are proof that Lennon, too, was no alien to storytelling as such. If anything, it may be noted that all such cases still use personal experience as points of departure, reaffirming the centrality of Lennon in the author’s inspiration: for instance, in the three songs mentioned, the first one was inspired by a drawing of Lennon’s first son Julian, the second was almost a wordby-word transcription from an old Victorian circus poster that Lennon had purchased in an antics shop, and the third was based on Lewis Carroll’s tale “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. McCartney, too, could base his fictional characters on personal life’s events,7 but then again, he could also make up characters without any whatsoever source (Desmond and Molly Jones from “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, Maxwell Edison from “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, Rocky Raccoon and dozens of others). Lennon seemed to need anyway a “point of departure” from real life, but that does not make his fictional songs less worthy in structure, inventiveness, and narrative skills. In addition to that, Lennon was a notable craftsman of the traditionally British art of the nonsense (Lear, Joyce, Carroll himself, etc.). However, while McCartney’s confidence with storytelling remains central in his production, it must be noted that he did produce very inspired autobiographical songs, which are rightly considered among his best works (“Maybe I’m Amazed”, 1970, “Let It Be”, 1970, and “Here Today”, 1982, are three of the most cited examples of the category). Secondly, McCartney could effectively transform personal experience into semi-fictional narration, creating a pop equivalent of the rhapsody or the historical novel genres (see for instance “Penny Lane”, 1967, “Lovely Rita”, 1967, and “Mull of Kintyre”, 1977). Thirdly, only a narrow-minded conception of “autobiographical song” will maintain that imagination and storytelling are not parts of a person’s life, and therefore do not reflect this person’s feelings and sentiments. For instance, one of McCartney’s most recurrent lyrical themes is loneliness, so there is no doubt about his personal sensibility towards it. Yet, it is intriguing that the author’s favorite way to discuss the issue is to invent fictional characters and stories: All the lonely people in McCartney songs are partly or totally fictional, from the mentioned “Eleanor Rigby” (1966) to “The Fool on the Hill” (1967), up to more recent characters like those in “Average Person” (1983) or “Footprints” (1986). Summing it up, and bringing this situation back to our cinematographic metaphor, we may say that the autobiographical Lennon tended to a subjective perspective and active participation in his songs, thereby similar to directors like Woody Allen or Federico Fellini, while the storyteller McCartney, more inclined to the

 In “Hey Jude”, for instance, Jude is a variation of Julian, Lennon’s son, the original inspiration for McCartney’s song. 7

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objective perspective and more distance, may rather bear the touch of a Stanley Kubrick or an Ettore Scola. Another chief difference between Lennon and McCartney (with, again, some exceptions) is in the Greimasian modalities of their narration (after Greimas 1987).8 Regardless of autobiographical or fictional elements, what is interesting in the two authors is how effectively their songwriting personalities operate within a song in the processes of characterization and description. To Lennon, things and people are, to McCartney, they do. What does that mean? It means, coherently with Greimas’ precepts, that Lennon prefers the description of a state of being (emotions, states of mind, visual aspects, thoughts…), while McCartney is much more eager to make things happen in a song (actions, physical movements, changes in space and in time…). A Lennon song may occupy its entire length in describing a person (probably himself) not moving a finger yet going through all kinds of feelings. One of his famous characters (indeed, a variation of himself) is the “Nowhere Man” (1965): He’s a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody Doesn’t have a point of view Knows not where he’s going to Isn’t he a bit like you and me? (…) The man sits down throughout the whole song, but instead we learn a great deal of what is going on in his head. On the other hand, McCartney may take another person (probably invented) and, while he qualifies her personality by using single adjectives, he may let her do a lot of things. That is what happens in the teen-ager girl who escaped from home in “She’s Leaving Home” (1967): Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins Silently closing her bedroom door Leaving the note that she hoped would say more She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief Quietly turning the backdoor key Stepping outside she is free (…) A lot of action takes place, here, and basically in every single line the girl is caught doing something of a kind. The room for feelings is limited, yet McCartney is far from neglecting that part: rather, he is more interested in suggesting them in a more subtle way, and through the actions themselves. While “leaving a note that she hoped would say more” we understand the indecisiveness of the girl and a degree of

 Very simply put, in Greimas’ work, the modality is something which modalizes or transforms one sign into another. The basic modalities are being and doing, each of them, so to speak, specializing in specific ways: wanting to do/be, having to do/be, being able to do/be, etc. 8

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fear. While “clutching her handkerchief” we realize that she is, or has been, crying. And, in later passages of the song, we also learn more, like the famous reason why she is leaving, through the words of the parents “We gave her everything money could buy”: she received material goods, but apparently no real affection. Even when the couple shared duties in songwriting this Greimasian distinction is evident. In “A Day in the Life” Lennon, who wrote most of the lyrics, takes three whole stanzas to describe only two actions: reading a newspaper and going to cinema. The verses are filled with what he sees and what he thinks about it. In McCartney’s middle bit of one single stanza, we have on the contrary a full list of morning actions, performed in a rush and finalized only when the protagonist manages to catch the bus and can finally relax and smoke a cigarette: waking up, getting up, combing the hair, climbing down the stairs, having breakfast, checking the clock, wearing coat and hat, running to catch the bus and, indeed, smoking. In this respect, thus, and continuing with our cinematographic metaphors, Lennon is a bit of a European existentialist director like Antonioni or Bergman, enamored with so-called “unsteady narration” while McCartney prefers the action-­ oriented “steady narration”9 of American directors like Scorsese or Hitchcock. One consequence of the two previous oppositions is that Lennon takes a more diegetic position in his songs. His narration is more often than not subjective, and his presence and point of view in the songs is almost always tangible. Lennon is a “director” who appears in his “movies” as himself (hence, again, the comparison with Allen, Fellini and the likes). McCartney is often outside the story, in a non-­ diegetic position and with an objective perspective. Whatever he must tell the listener, he prefers to let a character say that (hence, the comparison with Kubrick, Scola, and others). It is intriguing that, in a linguistic analysis of the Beatles’ lyrics, Lennon was found using the first person singular more often than McCartney, who instead prevails in the usage of the first-person plural (Petrie et al. 2008: 201). To better illustrate this opposition, one can mention the various love songs written by the duo, together or separately. Love, of course, is unanimously considered the main “message” conveyed by The Beatles, the very thing that – according to

 Simplifying from the theory of two important film scholars, Francesco Casetti and Federico Di Chio (2004): in steady narration we have an emphasis on development: things happen, and we see them happening with clarity. In steady texts, thus, it is “action”, “eventfulness”, that mark the progress of the text, and in that sense this progress is linear, intelligible: we have clear subjects, clear goals, clear ways to reach those goals. Steady narration is a typical condition of classic, mainstream stories and grand narratives (e.g., Hollywood cinema, adaptations from classic literature, most “genre” movies, animation for children…). On the contrary, in the unsteady narration the emphasis is not “doing” but “being”, so that psychology, morality, feelings, and introspection take priority over action. Characters are less dynamic because we need to focus more on what they are, think and feel: the outside is less visible because we need to prioritize the inside, and of course the inside is vaguer and more abstract, less consequential, less linear. Unsteady narration can be taken to an extreme and can turn into the so-called “anti-narration”, a condition that practically disintegrates the story, making it fragmented, almost illogical, and inconsistent. The notion of space and time themselves become very flexible and artificial, and we may locate the story in times and places that are more existential than empirical. Typically, we find this condition in numerous avant-garde schools, such as the French Nouvelle Vague, the Soviet School, the Italian neorealism, etc. 9

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them – “we all need”. The stereotype according to which McCartney would have been the only “romantic balladeer” is unfair in two ways: it overlooks the many great love songs written by Lennon, and it trivializes McCartney’s sensibility in exploring and refining the genre of the romantic ballad. In both authors, we find a primary tendency to treat the topic in relation to their personal experience. As exemplification, let us take only the two longer-standing partners, Yoko Ono for Lennon, and Linda Eastman for McCartney. Unsurprisingly, we find the two women quite a regular presence in numerous love songs written by the two songwriters throughout the duration of these relationships (11 years for Lennon and Ono until the former was murdered, and 29 years for McCartney and Eastman, until the latter succumbed to breast cancer). Interestingly, the approach to songwriting, in this particular area, presents at the same time, moments of divergence and convergence. Indeed, if they both could be quite honest about their relationships, and make their companions rather tangible presences in the songs, Lennon was still keener than McCartney in not giving the listener any other chance than identifying Yoko Ono in the song. For instance, there are no less than seven Lennon songs where the name “Yoko” is pronounced explicitly and repeatedly: McCartney uses the name “Linda” only once, in “The Lovely Linda” (1970). Secondly, Lennon’s love songs tend to refer to the hic et nunc of his relationship with Ono, so we get to know feelings, events and even places that really happened and exist (as in the faithful accounts of domestic life that appear throughout the whole 1980 Double Fantasy album, where even a failed transatlantic phone call gets reported  – see “I’m Losing You”). McCartney, on the other hand, even in those songs where he openly refers to Linda (by his own admission, the most prominent cases are “Maybe I’m Amazed”, 1970, and “My Love”, 1973), still manages to keep a kind of impersonal tone, not calling his wife by name, and expressing feelings and values with which most listeners can relate to anyway. In other words, if, in order to express the same concept (“love despite geographical distance”, in our example) Lennon would use lines such as “From Liverpool to Tokyo, what a way to go” (as he writes in “You Are Here”, 1973), McCartney would opt for something like “And when I go away, I know my heart can stay with my love” (“My Love”, 1973). Personal/Impersonal is however not the only difference in the “Subjective/ Objective” macro-category we are discussing here. One must add also the “Realist/ Verisimilar” one. Indeed, if, from 1965 circa onwards, it is almost impossible to find a Lennon love song that is not related to a real relationship he is going through at any particular moment, in the case of McCartney we could easily say that the actual majority of his ballads are about fictional love stories, starting from his most celebrated song of all, “Yesterday” (1965): there was no identifiable “she” who “had to go” at that point of his life.10 The list is long, and it involves some of his most famous tracks: from “When I’m Sixty-Four” (1967) to “Another Day” (1971), from “Oh! Darling” (1969) to “No More Lonely Nights” (1984), nothing is real (as  To be clear, however, McCartney later admitted that, in writing those lyrics, he might have unconsciously thought about his mother, whom he had lost when he was 14 – that is, in “the past”, in a “yesterday”. 10

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“Strawberry Fields Forever” would have it): McCartney makes up his love stories in a way that is surely verisimilar (nothing absurd happens in these songs, nobody falls in love with aliens, etc.), but it is simply not what is happening to him. His love songs, in most cases, are the most faithful definition of a “possible world”. Only occasionally, will Lennon employ less personal and pinpointed tones in his love songs, but if he would decide to do that, it would not be to go “impersonal”, but rather to go “universal”, that is, to talk about love as “value” and “principle”. It is obviously the case of “All You Need Is Love” (1967), but also, perhaps more significantly, “Love” (1970).

4.1.2  Lennon and McCartney We have so far compared Lennon and McCartney to individual directors, but of course we should not forget that the duo was very active as a songwriting partnership, especially in the early years. Thus, can Lennon-McCartney also be compared to the likes of the Lumière or Coen brothers? Given all these differences between the two authors’ backgrounds and specific songwriting approaches, it is no wonder that, once the interpersonal chemistry was found between the two, the partnership proved to be rich and complementary. Much has been said about the Lennon-McCartney match, although usually comments tend to focus on superficial aspects, such as “McCartney provided the tender side, and Lennon was the rocker”, or “McCartney was the optimist and Lennon the realist”. Again, none of these clichés are entirely false, yet all are incomplete and somehow unable to catch the complexity of the two personalities. A typical example of this superficiality is the assessment of the song “We Can Work It Out” (1965). As a track where each of the pair’s contribution is distinguished and recognizable (McCartney wrote the chorus, “Try to see it my way…”, and Lennon the bridge, “Life is very short…”), scholars were rather quick in saying that the chorus is the “optimistic/positive” part and the bridge is the “pessimistic/fatalist” one, conforming to the above-mentioned protocol. As a matter of fact, knowing the background of the song (McCartney intended to address the communication problems with his then-girlfriend Jane Asher), but also by reading attentively the lyrics, it is really almost the opposite. What is at stake here, in comparing the two songwriters’ contributions to the song, is two different ways of solving an interpersonal conflict. In McCartney’s passage, we have: Try to see it my way, Do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on? While you see it your way, Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone. We can work it out… Think of what you’re saying, You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s alright. Think of what I’m saying,

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We can work it out and get it straight or say goodnight. We can work it out… So: yes, sure, “we can work it out” (and that is the optimistic part), but only at the patronizing condition that the girlfriend admits she is wrong and instead surrenders totally to her partner’s opinion. It is hardly a constructive way to solve a conflict. It rather shows the male partner as pretty resentful, and determined to have it his way. Plus, he really sees that, if she does not listen to him, the relationship will end. It is, in actual fact, an optimistic view only if we take the chauvinistic perspective that the man is right and the woman is wrong, and the problem will be solved only if the woman ceases her “tantrum” and “sees reason”. On the contrary, Lennon suggests that Life is very short and there’s no time For fussing and fighting, my friend. I have always thought that it’s a crime. In this case, we have a more reasonable approach, and conflict resolution experts would probably agree that Lennon has more chances to “work the relationship out”. He suggests to simply stop fighting, regardless of who is right or wrong, because life is too short for these things. To waste one’s life with fighting “is a crime”. Lennon’s passage, thus, does not demand a winner in the fight but, more wisely, a ceasefire. It is intriguing and, again, very cinematically evoking that the verses “fussing and fighting” and, later, “so I will ask you once again”, are performed in a distinctively waltz rhythm, in a manner that recalls merry-go-rounds at Luna parks. The sense of circularity produced by the waltz aims at two equally-effective representations: the repetitiveness and futility of fussing and fighting (which indeed are often based on “circular arguments”), and that “once again” in the announcement that the protagonist will try one more time to convince the woman that she is wrong, proving that the specific problem within the couple, too, has an element of unnecessary circularity (and indeed, the chorus restarts with the same verse: “Try to see it my way…”). Given this and similar cases,11 we have opted to focus here on a lesser-known bunch of collaboration episodes where – in our humble opinion – more interesting elements can be highlighted. It is for instance intriguing to analyze some of those cases where one of the songwriters intervenes on his partner’s pre-existing set of lyrics, in order to give advice or even suggest modifications. In situations like these, it is easier to single out the creative impact that the couple had on each other, and the way such impact enhances (or introduces) cinematic elements. We shall select the examples on the basis of their different nature: the first one is a replacement of

 To be fair, anyway, it is not like rock critics always get it wrong, and clichés are always superficial. The well-known case of “Getting Better”, with McCartney writing lines like “I have to admit, it’s getting better, a little better all the time” and Lennon replying “It couldn’t get much worse”, sound like the most stereotypical opposition of the partnership, yet this is exactly what is going on: McCartney is doing the “Mr. Optimism” character, and Lennon is playing the cynical one. 11

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lyrics, the second is an addition, the third a reinforcement (meaning that one partner was not convinced of a given verse, and the other reassured him pointing out a potential that the former had not considered), and the fourth one is a result of on-the-­ spot improvisation, showing the exceptional chemistry between the two. Starting with replacement, in one very early collaboration, “I Saw Her Standing There” (1963), McCartney had written most of the lyrics already, yet Lennon argued that the beginning (“Well, she was just seventeen, never been a beauty queen”) was far from satisfying, and suggested instead “Well, she was just seventeen, you know what I mean”, encountering his partner’s approval (it is indeed the recorded version). The change of a single sentence is however revealing of the different approaches, in particular McCartney’s inclination for narration and “to do” modalities, and Lennon’s tendency for the “to be” and the preference for “moods” description. McCartney is indeed working in his Dickensian way, trying to offer us an accurate portrait of the girl. He is telling us her age (which Lennon accepts), but he also adds aesthetic and possibly social features: the girl has never been a beauty queen, that is, she is not outstandingly good-looking, but also she is a simple girl. The teenage McCartney (the song was first conceived in 1960, when McCartney was 18, and most of all not famous yet) knows his league, so to speak: he is a working-class young man frequenting a bar in the periphery of Liverpool. The girls he can “target” and “afford” to dance with (sorry for the chauvinistic jargon) are far from being posh and beautiful. However, and there goes the link with the following verse (“And the way she looked was way beyond compare”), that girl has something special in her looks, and that becomes the feature that makes her very charming. So, we have a working-class girl who is not beautiful but still manages to be attractive. It could have been an unusually profound sociological statement for a rock and roll song, and a nod to the film genre of romantic comedy or musical, except that, it is a rock and roll song, and rock and roll is about sex and straightforwardness. That is where Lennon intervenes: by stating “you know what I mean”, he achieves several purposes in one shot. First, there are no more hints to anything less than “the perfect girl”: she is seventeen and she looks in a way that fears no comparison, period. Basically, it is like moving from Liverpool to Hollywood: from a simple girl of the people, the protagonist now switched to a sort of movie star. Second, Lennon redirects the narrative aspirations of the song, and reminds the listener that this is a rock and roll song, where the various A Wop Bop a Loo Bop a Lop Bam Boom’s tend to replace sophisticated expressions: it is ok to engage into a romantic comedy/musical representation, but at the condition that it looks more like The Girl Can’t Help It, rather than Singing in the Rain, and that the protagonist is more the Elvis Presley-­ type. Thirdly, consequently and importantly, now the song is clearly “sexy”, as the “You know what I mean” is a double-entendre that in fact is not even that “double”. The Beatles were not yet ready to be more elaborate in their lyrics, but they were already capable to understand what makes a song commercial. McCartney’s literary abilities came at hand in later years, when indeed The Beatles took on a more challenging approach to lyric writing. On the Rubber Soul album, a primarily Lennon song benefited significantly from McCartney’s knowledge of narrative mechanisms, providing us with an appropriate example for

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the “addition” category. “Norwegian Wood” is excellent proof that Lennon was capable of descriptive and original storytelling. The story, as widely known, gives a fictionalized account of one of Lennon’s infidelities towards his first wife Cynthia. The girl, probably a groupie, lives in a small apartment decorated with Norwegian wood furniture.12 She and the first-person narrator have a one-night stand, but apparently there is not enough room in the bed for the both of them, so he ends up sleeping in the bathtub. The following morning, as the girl must go to work quite early, the protagonist finds himself alone. How to conclude, then, such a story? That is where McCartney steps in, applying the classic strategy of the Chekhov’s rifle to the song. Of all the lyrics, the only part that sounds a bit sui generis is the moment when the girl shows the apartment and says: “Isn’t it good? Norwegian wood!”. The wood, that particular type of wood, is a charming but unnecessary (and therefore suspicious) element of the narration. It is a “rifle”, and as such it must fire, sooner or later. McCartney suggests that the events take a dark turn: the protagonist had to sleep in the bathtub and woke up in solitude; therefore why not making him annoyed by the girl’s behavior, so that – in an eerie coup de théâtre – he decides to set fire to the apartment, sadistically mocking the girl’s words (“Isn’t it good? Norwegian wood!”) while he witnesses the house burning13? Once again, the strategy of the unexpected twisted and dark ending is quite cinematographic, and recalls a series of features, of which we may mention the following (just to focus on those preceding “Norwegian Wood”): Citizen Kane, Psycho, The Wages of Fear, On the Beach, etc. The third suggestion (“confirmation”) we shall like to mention concerns “Hey Jude”, the 1968 single that provided the band with their longest stay at No. 1 in the American charts. The song was entirely written by Paul McCartney, who submitted it for Lennon’s opinion in what he thought was a working version that needed improvement. In the first bridge, McCartney had used the verse “Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders”, which made perfect sense in a song that talks about facing the struggles of life and re-gaining self-confidence, using the metaphor of a difficult songwriting process (and Lennon’s son Julian as the initial protagonist, as we have seen in a previous note). On the second bridge, for lack of better words, McCartney temporarily writes “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, with the intention of replacing the line later, perhaps with the help of his partner. Reasons  For years we have been wondering what “Norwegian wood” is exactly. While writing this book, we finally decided to put an end to our misery. Apparently, “Norwegian wood” is a collective term for different types of wood that are grown and harvested in Norway. It is known by many names like Nordic Whitewood, Baltic White Pine, White Deal, Romanian Whitewood, European Spruce, White Fir, White Spruce, Violin Wood, Picea excels and Carpathian spruce (“Isn’t it douce? Carpathian spruce!” not having quite the same ring, admittedly). In interior design, Norwegian wood is renowned for its beauty and quality, something that Lennon must have been aware of, as he depicts the girl as being particularly proud about the furniture in her apartment. 13  Incidentally, “dark humour” and “politically incorrectness” are two additional qualities that rock critics failed to notice in McCartney’s songwriting. It is ironic how a song like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is considered a fruity comedy-song, when its lyrics are about a ruthless serial killer and the point is exactly that of creating a sarcastic contrast between the cheerful music and such naughty verses. 12

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for this discontent were basically two: the word “shoulders” had been already employed in the above-mentioned line, sounding too particular to be repeated; and, also, McCartney felt that a movement on the shoulders was a goofy image that reminded of a parrot (Roylance 2000: 297). While performing the song to Lennon, and once reached the critical point, McCartney reassures his partner that the awkward line will be fixed later: Lennon, however, does not agree, and suggests instead to leave what he considers “the best line in the song” (Roylance 2000: 297). Why so? First-hand sources do not elaborate on that, but one can make reasonable guesses. First, the most obvious interpretation, in a context of a song that advocates finding in oneself the strength to cope with difficult times, is that Jude will need to rely upon his own resources. In order to “take a sad song and make it better”, Jude needs a “movement” (which can be interpreted as a “reaction”, a “push” or else), and that was with him all along: he has already the strength within him to make a change in his own life, to take a step forward and move on — he just has to choose to use it. But, one may object, why not use the heart or the soul (or something inside, anyway) to picture the location of this movement, as it would sound more traditional (and perhaps, McCartney meant to end up in those whereabouts with his lyrics)? That, it is our guess, was the potential that Lennon understood in the line. By repeating the word “shoulder”, the listeners are obviously invited to relate that line with the previous “Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders”. In this sense, the meaning of the passage becomes more complex: not only is Jude advised not to carry an unnecessary burden upon himself as a generally wise commonsensical way of dealing with problems (that is, not being too hard on oneself, and focusing only on the things that one has the power to change, in a “one step at a time” mode). Now, with the second appearance of Jude’s shoulders/shoulder, we also learn that he does not need to do it because something is already on his shoulders, and that is his own strength and resources. In other words, Jude has much more potential than he thinks he has, and that is where he should start from, to make the song better. Thirdly, pushing the interpretation a bit, one may even think that the image of the shoulders, instead of a parrot, may remind of a metaphorical backpack containing Jude’s experiences and resources, like those bundles tied to a stick that fairy tales’ kids fill with “all they need” before leaving home. If the “Norwegian Wood” addition had proved McCartney’s ability to understand the potentials of narration, the “Hey Jude” confirmation proves Lennon’s skills with the potentials of images. What was part of the problem becomes part of the solution: that too, is something we often find in filmic representations – see the cases of On the Waterfront or High Noon. Finally, the ultimate demonstration of Lennon-McCartney’s complementarity and ability to stimulate each other goes through an instance of total improvisation. As George Martin, the Beatles’ artistic producer, had learned from the early days, whenever a song had a coda to be faded out, it was always wise to keep the recording on when Lennon and/or McCartney were performing their vocals: there was always the possibility that they would improvise some scat-singing or vocalizations that would add character and originality to the track (the chief-example being the long coda of the just-mentioned “Hey Jude”). So, in early 1968, when The Beatles were recording an upbeat rock song which indeed had a fade-out ending planned, Martin

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left the microphone on as the couple was laying down the backing vocals. The song (written by Lennon) had no title yet, but it mentioned a “bullfrog” and a “sheepdog” on the way (again, in typical Lennon fashion, more as evocative images, rather than with specific narrative purposes). As the finale arrived, McCartney – inspired by the “sheepdog” passage – launched a howl, which already energized the song, but most of all inaugurated a chain of improvised lines. After hearing the howl, Lennon had combined “bullfrog” and “sheepdog” and started singing “Hey Bulldog!” (which would become the actual title of the song), soon joined by the partner. A bit later, they both started bouncing dog-related sentences and jokes. In the end, the following dialogue was committed on record: John Lennon: Ehh. Paul McCartney: Awoooooo! JL: Hey, Bulldog JL & PM: Hey, Bulldog JL & PM: Hey, Bulldog JL & PM: Hey, Bulldog JL & PM: Hey, Bulldog PM: Hey man! JL: What’s that boy? PM: Woof! JL: What did you say? PM: I said “Woof” JL: D’You know any more? PM: Awoooooo! Aaaaaaaaaah hah hah! JL: You got it! That’s right! Yeah. PM: That’s it man, Wooohooo, That’s it, you got it! JL: Ah ah ah ah ah! PM: Don’t look at me man, I only have 10 children JL: Yahoo! Ahaa……ha ha ha ha ha ha ha PM: Quiet! Quiet! More typical of theatre than of cinema (a detail that anyway makes little difference in the economy of our argument here), improvisation, especially when limited to circumscribed segments of a whole text, has its own share of classic examples in film history too: from the “Here’s looking at you” line in Casablanca to the Mouth of Truth sequence in Roman Holiday, and those legendary ones that came after 1968 (the mirror scene in Taxi Driver, the “Here’s Johnny!” line in The Shining, etc., as well as those films with entirely improvised dialogues like the Italian comedy Non ci resta che piangere). Summing up this slight digression about songwriting, what clearly emerges is an explicit intention not to confine the compositional material to the modes and the sensorial experiences directly associated to the music medium. Lennon and McCartney (but also Harrison, though less regularly) seemed to want their songs to be not only heard, but also seen, tasted, touched, and smelled. That would be achieved not only in the composition itself, but also (and often mostly) through the

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work in the studio  – arrangement, production, and post-production. There are countless examples that confirm this: Lennon asking to put circus-like sounds and specifically wanting to “smell the sawdust” on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (Guesdon et al. 2013: 392); the creation of a whole evocative soundscape for songs like “Yellow Submarine” as well as indexical sign of the street band; the “food chain” narrative sequence of animal sounds in the coda of “Good Morning Good Morning”… This tendency may have, at least partly, something to do with the experience the band gathered while working with Richard Lester on the first two films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). It is known that Lester had specific requests on how to make some songs more fitting for the movie. The example of the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” is paradigmatic: harmonically simpler and dynamically quieter than how we know it today, the chord received a push when Lester noticed that it was not cinematic enough, considering that it was going to be not just the opening of a song, but of the whole movie (Guesdon et al. 2013: 131). Accordingly, the band created the pop equivalent of Wagner’s Tristan chord: McCartney hitting a D with his bass, Lennon strumming a Dsus4 with his Gibson acoustic, and Harrison playing an F9/G on his 12-string electric Rickenbacker, thereby doubling two notes in unison and four on the higher octave. Altogether, thus, a five-note cycle of fourths was hit, A D G C and F, and a total of twelve sounds, spread on three different octaves, creating one of the most recognizable intros of the whole pop music history. The Beatles must have treasured that experience, because one year later, as they resumed their collaboration with Lester, this time for the movie Help!, they wrote a title-track endowed with a similar, explosive beginning: a simpler chord, this time, but coupled with vocals and drums, and with a similar attitude. Far from claiming that every Beatles song possessed any of those extra-musical and extra-auditory dimensions we spoke about  – something evidently untrue, especially in the early days – we nevertheless defend the thesis that one of the chief connections between songwriting and production, and in general the use of studio as a creative space, lies precisely in the possibility of adding “colors” and “multisensoriality” to whatever message or mood the composition intended to convey. We shall therefore devote the following pages to analyzing some of the most recurrent production strategies that bear similarity with filmmaking or other extra-­ musical artistic expressions.

4.2 Production as Multimodality Multimodality refers to those instances of communication when different patterns cooperate (or compete) to display one or more texts. It operates in almost every communicative context, and it can be safely said that only the most elementary occurrences constitute an exception. It is however in such instances like play, linguistic or pseudo-linguistic interaction, deception, aesthetics, art, and others that

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multimodality becomes a primary and unavoidable semiotic strategy. What we are arguing here is that repeated cases of such cooperation occurred between songwriting and production in the Beatles’ songs, especially from 1965 onwards, and that specifically the studio activity directly engaged into a dialectic relationship with the compositions in order, depending on the cases, to add, reinforce, contrast, or expand their meaning. Adding a touch of interdisciplinarity to this book, biologists Partan and Marler (1999) have provided a synthetic but exhaustive account of the key-points in multimodality. Their classification may be summarized in the scheme portrayed in Fig. 4.1. The left side of the scheme depicts redundant (above) and nonredundant signals (below) as separate components (a and b) with consequent responses (x and y – the same letter indicates the same qualitative response; different letters indicate different responses). The right side depicts the responses to combined multimodal signals (a + b). The meaning of a single signal may be either redundant or nonredundant, in that different signals may produce the same message, or two different ones. The advantage of redundancy is the reinforcement of the message and the reduction of the risks of interference (this is why these signs are also called backup signals). Nonredundant signs have the advantage of providing more information per time unit. Empirically, the two typologies of sign can be distinguished by the reaction of the receiver. When emitted separately, redundant signs should provoke the same or a very similar response from the receiver, whereas nonredundant signs should provoke different reactions. The picture may change quite drastically when the signs are combined simultaneously into a multimodal signal (see the right side of the scheme), and this is what happens when a song is not only written but also produced (therefore receiving additional communicative signals that go well beyond a set of notes, chords, and lyrics). Redundant signs might provoke the following reactions:

Fig. 4.1  Multimodal communication, according to Partan and Marler (1999). (Illustration by Dario Martinelli)

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1. Equivalence – the multimodal signal provokes the same exact reaction as the signs emitted separately (shown in the scheme as small x letters). In this case the production has the relatively neutral role of coherent “support” to the song, without necessarily emphasizing or understating its communicative features. While of course perfect “equivalence” remains an ideal condition and not an empirical one (like in general communication signals, production, too, always has some kind of impact on the song), we may safely say that the majority of The Beatles productions of the early years, particularly 1962 and 1963, display a fairly neutral quality. We may talk of “equivalence” when the production work aimed at reproducing what The Beatles were already able to play as a band, without extra instruments and without performances that they would not have managed to reproduce in concert. “Love Me Do” is a particularly appropriate example here: performed with the same quantity of instruments that the foursome had in their live set-up (plus Lennon’s harmonica, which he could anyway play by temporarily freeing his hands from the guitar), the song received a famous change in arrangement when Martin asked McCartney to sing the “Love me do” line right after the long “so pleeeeeeeeease”, replacing Lennon, who originally was in charge of the task. The reason for this decision was that, on the word “Do” of that line, the Lennon’s harmonica piece was expected to kick in, thereby preventing him for completing the sentence. This inconvenience could have been easily solved thanks to multitrack recording: Lennon could have played harmonica on one track, along with the rest of the instrumental parts, and the vocals on the other, along with McCartney’s (The Beatles were recording on a two-track machine, at this point). Martin decided against that exactly because this condition was not “realistic”, therefore not faithful to what the band could have done live. Or, alternatively, Lennon should have sung only “Love me” and then switch to the harmonica, sounding now “unnatural” in relation to the song’s lyrics. A decision of this sort qualifies for “Equivalence”: the production “signals” do not alter the song’s basic (and, indeed, “realistic”) performance, but stay faithful to it. As the readers can easily guess, “equivalence” was brutally dismissed in the Beatles’ “studio years”. 2. Enhancement – the multimodal signal produces a reaction that is increased in intensity (shown in the scheme as a capital X). Production here is like the yellow marker on a text: it highlights single words or entire paragraphs in order to make sure that we pay special attention to some concepts. We can understand enhancement in two slightly different ways: as a general practice within the conventional dynamics of production, and as a specific strategy to highlight single contents. In the first case, for instance, it is a common habit to have the song “grow” in some way, especially in the refrains and in the specials, or also increase as a constant process of pathos. If we take the example of refrains, they normally represent the most assertive part of the song, and often its emotional peak, so it is customary to add more instruments and vocals, to intensify or anyway variate the rhythmic pattern, to introduce different effects, to raise the dynamics and so forth (plus of course what happens at songwriting level anyway: a different harmonic progression, a catchier melody, etc.). A song like “Let It

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Be” easily clarifies the concept. In the second case, the production strategies may be oriented to highlight isolated parts, that may or may not be “conventionally” relevant at format level, but require more attention because of their specific contents. The hammers in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, the singing birds in “Blackbird”, that “gunshot” snare hit in “Rocky Raccoon” (that Martinelli was humiliatingly pointed out by his son), all these are, so to speak, yellow highlights underlining single words or single sentences. When we instead switch to non-redundance, we find that multimodal signals produce a wider range of possibilities: 1. Independence – The two or more non-redundant signs are independent and produce distinct reactions, that are not in relation with each other, although they are combined. Production is not simply a work reproduction or intensification of a song’s contents. It is also (often mainly) a way to expand the colors’ palette of that song, introducing numerous elements that are attractive as such, and not in relation to what the song suggests. One of the Beatles’ most distinctive production tricks is the use of some instruments or entire tracks in reverse: we hear them on “Rain”, “I’m Only Sleeping” and others. Their appearance has no specific relation to what the songs say either lyrically or musically: there is nothing on “Rain”’s lyrics, or in rainy weather itself, that suggests a backwards movement or that sounds like it. Instead, these expedients can and should be enjoyed as such, as elements that embellish and fit the song from a purely aesthetic point of view. 2. Dominance – One of the two or more signs prevails on the other. Production has often the habit to steal the attention from the song and have the listener primarily focus on its peculiarities. “Love You To”, the first of Harrison’s “Indian trilogy”, is, not, unlike the other two (“Within You Without You” and “The Inner Light” – the latter openly inspired by a poem of the Tao Te Ching by Laozi), a song containing themes of Eastern philosophy, but a love song, thematically more profound than others Harrison had written up to that point; one which conveys a “seize the day” type of message (“Love me while you can, before I’m a dead old man, a lifetime is so short, a new one can’t be bought”). And yet, the decision to orient the production in a decidedly exotic Indian direction becomes the dominant communicative element of the song, prevailing, when not overshadowing, its lyrical contents. 3. Modulation – One nonredundant sign affects the other, by modulating its effect. Production, in this case, may elaborate on and/or manipulate the themes addressed in a song in such a way that the original meaning is not exactly “betrayed”, but it is rather “characterized”; that is, brought in a certain direction that was not necessarily implied by the song itself, but which stays pertinent. Harrison’s “Piggies” is an excellent example of this category. Conceived as a bitter satire against politicians’ greed, the song employs the Orwellian comparison with pigs to make its point. However once brought into the studio, the track ended up taking a distinctively Baroque flavor, thanks particularly to the use of the harpsichord (played by George Martin’s then-assistant Chris Thomas) and a

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strings chamber ensemble. In a song that so aggressively attacks the Establishment and that also includes actual pig grunts, it may come out in stark contrast that such an “aristocratic” arrangement was elaborated. And yet, this ended up being the winning card: by bringing the song into the decadent realm of pre-French Revolution fat aristocrats with long wigs, the production created a sort of costume farce that gave a visually appealing twist (a modulation, indeed) to Harrison’s message, without betraying it for a second. 4. Emergence – the multimodal signal provokes an entirely new reaction that has nothing to do with either of the two separate signs. On occasion, the combination between composition and production may generate new meanings, not necessarily intended separately in the two activities. The process may be compared to the combination of primary colors into secondary ones. Blue plus yellow generates and disappears into green – a different color altogether. An example could be the ending of “You Never Give Me Your Money”: as the first episode of the famous Abbey Road medley, the song needed some kind of transition that would connect it to its follow-on track, “Sun King”. Apparently, this proved to be the most difficult of such tasks, as compared to other songs of the medley that merged more naturally into the next one (e.g., the transition from “Polythene Pam” to “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” is as smooth as silk), and only at a later stage did Paul McCartney come up with the idea of using a series of tape loops as the actual connecting element. The loops, “sounding like bells, birds, bubbles and crickets chirping” (Lewisohn 1988: 185), gave an unexpected bucolic and slightly nocturnal turn that was not anticipated in any way by a song that deals with financial problems, contractual negotiations and sacking employees (albeit in a typically McCartney-esque surrealistic and nonsensical framework, where also sweet dreams and children going to heaven take part), and that – as mentioned – were not actual birds, crickets, etc., but artificially-­created loops. The most we can do to encourage a connection is to interpret passages like “oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go” or “soon we’ll be away from here” as escapes from business offices that end up in the countryside. But that is exactly what “emergence” does in multimodality: by combining the hints in the lyrics and the resemblance to natural sounds of those loops, we are able to let a new meaning emerge: now we have a distinct impression that the song “ends up” in the countryside and that, given the presence of crickets, it may be dark, and in this case, possibly hinting that the following “Sun King” is the beginning of a new day.

4.3 Production and Diegesis Remember Annie Hall by Woody Allen? It is one of his most famous movies, and arguably one of his best. One of the most memorable sequences occurs where none other than Prof. Marshall McLuhan (one of the gurus of media studies) makes a cameo appearance. In that scene, Alvy (Woody Allen) is queuing in a movie theatre with his girlfriend Annie (Diane Keaton), and he overhears a guy behind him

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chatting about topics like cinema, TV, Federico Fellini, and indeed McLuhan. Alvy thinks that this gentleman is pretty much talking rubbish on these subjects, and he does not fail to voice his disagreement loud enough to be heard by this man. The man responds saying: “Wait a minute, why can’t I give my opinion? It’s a free country!” Alvy says: “Yes, but do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is… Marshall McLuhan… you don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan!” “Oh, really? – the guy replies – Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture. So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!” “Oh, do you? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me…” The camera moves on to the right and Alvy pulls out the real McLuhan from behind a movie poster, and encourages McLuhan to speak: “Come over here for a second… tell him!” McLuhan says “I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” At this point, Alvy turns to the camera, and speaks to the audience (that is, to us): “Boy, if life were only like this!” What Woody Allen did in this sequence is what is known in film and theatre as “breaking the fourth wall”. The “fourth wall” is a conventional expression that describes the ideal separation between audience and actors. It is “fourth” because it refers to an ideal theatre stage: when we see the scenography in a play, we usually have a room (or another environment) which has one background and two sides: three “walls” altogether. The fourth side is where the curtain is, and as long as the curtain is closed, we have a “wall” (that is, an actual separation) between us and the show. Then the curtain opens, and the fourth wall remains as a metaphor: on one side us, on the other side the fiction. Not by chance, the first movies (like the early Lumière’s) were all shot from one point: exactly where hypothetically the audience would be and therefore making the screen the “official” fourth wall. That was because the general idea was that cinema was a sort of aesthetic continuation of theatre: if a play is enjoyed from the side of the fourth wall opposite to the stage, so should it be with a film. Now, most of the times these two sides do not mix, so the fourth wall maintains its “separating” function. However, there are situations, like the sequence from Annie Hall we mentioned, when a contact, an interaction between the two sides occurs. When that happens, the fourth wall is “broken”, and reality and fiction mix. Precisely the concept of violating the fourth wall constitutes another point of contact between music production and art forms whose sensorial components are not (only or at all) acoustic, such as the audiovisual, visual, and literary ones. Although less visibly (or, one might say, not visibly at all), the musical art too can move beyond, between and to-and-fro its own fourth wall. In other words, music, too, manages three forms of conceptual space: the diegetic, the non-diegetic and the “real” space (the one inhabited by the public). When we look at a film, a novel or similar, the presence of these three dimensions is both clear and crucial. First of all, we are there, sitting and watching/reading: we occupy the dimension of reality, generally alien to the fictional text, except for cases of involvement such as a fictional item directly addressing us (e.g., like

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Alvy in Annie Hall, looking at the camera). In addition to this, another form, partly complementary to the previous one, of involving reality in the fictional text is the notorious public-text collaboration highlighted in Eco 1979, and which we briefly mentioned at the beginning of the book. In front of us, on a screen, on a book, on a stage, there is the representation of a possible world, which is always at least partially fictional, even when it wants to be faithful to reality, such as a news program or a documentary. For the duration of this representation, the audience decides to collaborate in believing in it, either in a literal sense (we usually trust that a live sport program, a newspaper, a concert, and similar texts are telling us things as they are) or in a more emotional-playful sense (e.g., a science fiction film, a novel, a music video …). The space of the representation is called diegetic. However, between us and this space there is a “middle ground”, which belongs neither to reality nor to fiction tout court. When we see Anthony Perkins stabbing Janet Leigh in Psycho, we also hear the insistent and penetrating violin notes in staccato, recorded with microphones placed very close to the instrument in order to distinctively capture the attack. Those frightening notes are not heard by Janet Leigh, and, well, in the tragedy she is experiencing at that moment, this is a small consolation, since she is already terrified on her own. Those notes, born from the genius of Bernard Herrmann, are not heard by anybody inside Psycho. But we hear them, and they contribute significantly to making us hold our breath during those famous 22 seconds. At the same time, that music is not with us, it is not in the real space. It precisely stands in an intersectional space between us and the diegesis, and we call that space non-diegesis or extra-diegesis. Not only a soundtrack belongs to that space, but in fact we can place just any element there: it only depends on how we use that element. The increasingly insane “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typewritten inscription we see in The Shining is a diegetic inscription, but the list of credits at the end of the same movie is a series of non-diegetic inscriptions. A camera sequence that reflects a character’s point of view is diegetic, but if it is shot with a crane, it becomes non-diegetic. And so on (for a more accurate description, see Martinelli 2020: 104–113). Now. When we translate everything into the musical field (something that was partly pioneered in Cook 2013), and in particular into the songs, the presence of a diegetic space appears obvious to us. It is the song itself, with its lyrics, that is diegetic. It is that space inhabited by women who wear the face that they keep in a jar by the door, by cellophane flowers in yellow and green, by serial killers using a silver hammer as a weapon, and so on. Problems arise when we try to identify non-­ diegetic elements. In a general and conceptual sense, forms of disengagement from the diegetic space are not particularly difficult to spot: the histrionic protagonist of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” who introduces us to the act we have “known for all these years” and hopes we “will enjoy the show” is obviously a character who violates the fourth wall, inviting us to listen and appreciate this psychedelic street band. In such sense, a song, as a whole, can move from a strictly diegetic plane to one that explicitly addresses the audience. However, this kind of violation is rather an attempt to end up directly in reality – maybe not necessarily to “us”; “us” being identifiable subjects with a name and a face, but at least to a model

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reader.14 By no coincidence we speak of breaking the fourth wall. Less explored, on the other hand, is the territory of those musical and textual features that are positioned exactly on the non-diegetic space, remaining there, and not breaking anything.

4.3.1 Diegesis, Non-diegesis, Formality, Non-formality To identify these features, we suggest introducing, alongside the concepts of diegetic and non-diegetic, two other similarly contradictory terms and construct a classic Greimasian square (Greimas 1966)15: formal and non-formal. By formal space we mean everything that is designated “officially” and “conventionally” to the  “A textually established set of felicity conditions […] to be met in order to have a macro-speech act (such as a text is) fully actualized” (Eco 1979, 11). When an author of any work of art starts creating, they normally have in mind an ideal reader of their work: a reader who is capable to understand it in all, or most, of its characteristics. This is not necessarily someone particularly competent or sophisticated. The model reader for a Beatles song can be a general rock fan, someone with an interest in 1960s culture, an English-speaking music lover, and so forth. In principle, anyone who has a fair number of cultural affinities with the text can qualify for the role. And, well, it is usually these people who really become readers of those particular texts: you may not be madly interested in listening to a Beatles song if you do not have any interest in music, or if your musical taste goes more in the direction of – say – Balinese Gamelan music, rather than rock. An author knows that, and therefore they tend to write not only for the readers they dream/hope to have, but also for the ones they expect to have: rarely do the two categories coincide. Sometimes, the author selects their readers on purpose, creating ad hoc strategies to welcome them (and maybe to exclude the readers they do not want). The Beatles offer a perfect exemplification of this process when, by their own admission, they wrote the early songs with plenty of personal pronouns, in order to address their fanbase (particularly the female side): I wanna hold your hand, From me to you, I’ll get you, etc.: We were quite conscious of that. We wrote for our market. We knew that if we wrote a song called ‘Thank You Girl’ that a lot of the girls who wrote us fan letters would take it as a genuine thank you. So a lot of our songs – ‘From Me to You’ is another – were directly addressed to the fans. I remember one of my daughters, when she was very little, seeing Donny Osmond sing ‘The Twelfth of Never’ and she said “He loves me” because he sang it right at her off the telly. We were aware that that happened when you sang to an audience. So ‘From Me to You’, ‘Please Please Me’, She Loves You’. Personal pronouns. We always used to do that. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. It was always something personal. (Paul McCartney, in Lewisohn 1988: 9) 15  Albeit a classic in several fields, including semiotics, linguistics, literary theory and logics, the concept of Greimasian, or semiotic, square may be not too familiar to a readership of mostly music lovers. The square is a tool for mapping the logical conjunctions and disjunctions among different semantic features in a text. Making a specific Beatle-related example: if we draw a horizontal line linking two familiarly paired terms such as ‘riff’ and ‘intro’ (two ways of starting a song), we add an upper line containing the two other logical possibilities – ‘non-riff’ and ‘non-intro’ – and we connect all the four corners, we get a square. We thus understand that riff-intro is not only a binary opposition because something that is not an intro is not necessarily a riff, and vice versa. We may have songs that start with a riff, and not with an intro (combination riff/non-intro, such as “Day Tripper”), others with intro but not riff (intro/non-riff, e.g., “Blue Jay Way”), others with both (intro/riff, e.g., “I Feel Fine”), and others with neither (non-intro/non-riff, e.g., “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”). 14

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song – everything that has been decided to be done, that is convenient to do and that is useful to do. For example, formal are the lyrics of the songs we find on the back cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Non-formal will instead refer to all those parts of the text that we often see appearing in a Beatles song (often, but not only, simple exclamations, such as “Yeah”, “Hey”, “Alright”), especially in live versions, but which in general we will not find in the official transcripts of the text. To make it clear, if the “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” we hear in the refrain of “She Loves You” are surely meant to be there, and thus formal, the many we hear in “I’m Down” from 1′50″ onwards are all part of McCartney’s improvisations in the coda and are thus informal. Formal are also all the recording procedures that a band agrees to perform for the purpose of the best possible result, regardless of which of such procedures will be heard in the final product. For example, it is formal that at the beginning of the piece there is a count off to coordinate the BPM among the various musicians, but that counting, even if recorded, is not necessarily included in the final product. Indeed, except for some cases (“I Saw Her Standing There”, “Yer Blues”…), most of the released tracks do not include that count off. Staying in the same example, we will instead consider non-formal instances like a wrong counting, intentionally or unintentionally, as we hear in “Taxman” (along with the correct counting, which is actually heard at a lower volume, while the wrong one is in the foreground, accompanied by coughs) or even the replacement of the counting with something else, as we hear in the first take of “A Day in the Life” (released in volume II of the Anthology series), where, instead of counting, John Lennon utters a rhythmic “Sugarplum fairy, sugarplum fairy”. That said let us now see the actual four combinations that emerge from the interaction of these four terms, according to relations of opposition, sub-opposition, and complementarity (in accordance with Greimas’ precepts): Formal/Diegetic  It is the most classical configuration and is the only indispensable part of this square, in the sense that it is always there, and that it constitutes the actual song in its released form. It is a “formal” dimension precisely because these are the official features – words and music – of a piece. And it is “diegetic” because it occupies the inside semiotic space of musical fiction. The text, ideally, can also be faithful to reality (as, for example, in autobiographical songs like “The Ballad of John and Yoko”), but, as we explained already, this does not mean that it overlaps with reality: it remains a form of representation. Non-formal/Diegetic  With this combination we enter a more intriguing and, in general, typical context of popular music. Those additional traits that are not in the official version of a song (such as the lyrics that may be printed in an album booklet or on the back-cover), but which unofficially reinforce its meaning, are to be considered “non-formal and diegetic”. Those “yeah’s” and “alright’s” and “ooh’s” and so forth are still “diegetic” episodes, because they still belong to the semiotic space inside the song. Ideally, it is always the fictional “protagonist” of the text (and not the singer as such) who speaks, as if he had a script to play, or the official text,

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but he does not disdain to vary on the theme in order to appear more sincere and persuasive. To clarify, and to have a fairly complete idea of the catalog of exclamations and words that can be used in a diegetic-informal text, we can take the legendary coda of “Hey Jude”, that is, the “Na-na-naaah” grand finale. During this part, and more distinctly starting from minute 3′57″, Paul McCartney begins to perform a series of vocalizations, some making sense, some not quite, which usually underline the culmination of each phrase, and/or its intermediate part (the one that transits from the Eb chord to Bb – the piece, notoriously, is in F major). Of course, no official publication of the text reports exactly what McCartney says/sings/shouts on this occasion, however we can attempt a rough transcription of a segment (which will surely contain various inaccuracies, for which we apologize): “Ju-Jude Hey Judy Judy Judy Judy Ow, Wow!” “Ow hoo, nah nah nah” “Joo-Jude Joo-Jude Joooo…” “Na-na-na-na-na, yeah yeah yeah” “Yeah you know you can make it, yeah Jude, you’re not gonna break it” “Don’t make it bad Jude” “Take a sad song and make it better” “Jude, Hey Jude, Waaaah-oooow” “Ooh, Juuuude” “Yeah” “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey-yay-yay-yay” “Hey, hey, hey” “Now Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude Jude, yeah yeah yeah yeah” “Wow yeah yeah” “Ah nanananananana cause I wanna” “Nanananana … nananananlalalalala ow ow ow” Now, in this type of text, we can notice two fundamental things: (1) it is a non-­ formal text, in that it is neither the one officially published in the various sources where the text is available (collections of Beatles lyrics or scores, compilations albums, websites…), nor the one appearing from the original manuscript personally written by McCartney; (2) it remains a diegetic text, because it is always the “protagonist of the song”, interpreted by McCartney, who speaks to us but who, to be rigorous, is not McCartney, and who is addressing an imaginary character (Jude).16  Of course, most fans of the Fab Four are aware that the inspiration for “Hey Jude” came from the then-5-year-old Julian Lennon, son of John and Cynthia Lennon, who had just divorced. McCartney decided to visit the young Julian (with whom he had a close relationship of the “favorite uncle” type), and along the way he thought of a song of encouragement, the first line of which were “Hey Jules, don’t make it bad”. Later on, as often happening in McCartney’s compositions (see “Father McCartney” becoming “Father MacKenzie” in “Eleanor Rigby”), a transposition occurred from a real character (Julian/Jules) to an imaginary one (Jude, who “sounded better” rhythmically, according to McCartney’s own reconstruction), giving the lyrics the form and contents we know today. 16

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In this specific case, since the song is one of McCartney’s classic invitations to selfesteem and self-confidence as vehicles for solving problems and “fixing things” (such is the meaning of the metaphor of taking a sad song and making it better, just like “take these broken wings and learn to fly” or “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in”), the protagonist reinforces the message with a series of emotionally-positive exhortations (calling Jude’s name, adding various “Hey”, “Wow” and “Yeah”, etc.), repeating some passages of the official text, but with different melody (“don’t make it bad”, “Take a sad song and make it better”…) or even adding small variations (“Yeah you know you can make it, yeah Jude, you’re not gonna break it”). But let us be careful not to think that these categories are only applicable to the lyrics of a song. Staying on the recently-mentioned song “I’m Down”, the “convulsive coda” (which we have discussed as one of the defining stylistic features of the band) is not only an opportunity for McCartney to improvise vocally, but also for Lennon to play several glisses up and down on his Vox organ. Those, too, are not formal, in that they are not expressively “planned”, but merely semi-improvised solutions to catch the energetic mood of the song’s finale. Not by chance, when playing the song live  – particularly during the record-breaking Shea Stadium concert, where we also see Lennon and Harrison hysterically laughing during this very song – Lennon increases the already high number of glisses, in that typical “hyperbolic” attitude that instrumental parts are exposed to in live performances (louder volumes, noisier effects, more spectacular solos…). Formal/Non-diegetic  With this category we now venture into the less explored area of non-diegesis. To do this we need to be in the same mindset as the previously mentioned example of Psycho and Herrmann’s soundtrack. Something, that is, that the audience (us) perceive, but that is not with us, and, at the same time, something that comes from the film, but that is not in it (Janet Leigh “does not hear” the violins, while she is being stabbed by Anthony Perkins, and Perkins does not hear them either, of course). In order to identify this dimension in songs, the example of the count off before a piece comes to hand again, along with other studio amenities. This can include the announcement of a take (e.g., that “‘Rock and Roll Springtime’, Take 1” we hear in McCartney’s self-titled debut album, before “Momma Miss America”, when the latter still had the temporary title of “Rock and Roll Springtime”); a quick dialogue before or during the piece that serves the purpose of instructing a musician (e.g., the “Come on!” that McCartney utters to Harrison before the guitar solo in “Back in the USSR”), or other examples. All these are actions that take place outside the diegetic space of a song. That is, they are not words or sounds belonging to the more or less fictional representation displayed in the text. And at the same time, as already said, they are “formal” because they adhere to specific needs and conventions of making music. When, therefore, these elements appear in the song (and this does not happen too often), they must necessarily be included in this category, making it, therefore, one of the most intriguing within the context of this book’s topics. Apart from the classic rock and roll count offs such as those on “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Yer Blues”, and the peculiar case of “Taxman”, there is another,

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very fascinating, counting that we hear in the recording of “A Day in the Life”, specifically the recording of Take 1, on January 19, 1967: Take one of ‘A Day in The Life’ used just two of the four available tracks: a basic rhythm (bongos, maracas, piano, and guitar) on track one and a heavily echoed Lennon vocal on track four. At this stage of the recording The Beatles only knew that something would later be taped for the song’s middle eight structure. Precisely what they did not know. But to mark out the place where the unknown item would go they had Mal Evans count out the bars, numbers one to 24. And to enter into the true spirit of the Beatles recordings 1967-­ style, this laboured counting was plastered with tape echo, increasing with the numbers until by 24 it sounded like he was in a cave. He was also backed by the tinkling of a piano, the notes climbing in tandem with the numbers. To mark the end of the middle eight overdub section an alarm clock was sounded. There was no Paul McCartney vocal yet, merely instruments at the point where his contribution would later be placed, but then John’s vocal returned, leading into another Mal Evans one to 24 count and then a single piano– building, building, building, building, stop. (Lewisohn 1988: 94)

Such is the genesis and the origin of that famous counting: a specific studio strategy to occupy a space that will eventually be filled somehow. And filled it was, with a four-time overdubbed full orchestra performing the cacophonic crescendo that defined the song and, to an extent, the peak of the Beatles’ contribution to art-rock. However, The Beatles being The Beatles, and “A Day in the Life” being “A Day in the Life”, the counting, sure enough, was kept in the final mix of the song, remaining audible in the released track. Non-formal/Non-diegetic  The last combination of the semiotic square takes us to the area with the rarest, but certainly not less fascinating, occurrences. And that applies particularly to The Beatles, who made a sub-genre of sorts out of it. Indeed, this is a category that often overlaps with that broad sphere of the so-called “error aesthetics” (Martinelli 2010b), and that we further develop as a case-study in Sect. 4.4. Briefly here, in order to qualify for “non-formal and non-diegetic”, a song’s item must be outside the fictional representation, but also outside any conventional studio practice. This is why accidents, errors, inaccuracies, but also informal talks, cursing even (like the famous “f***ing hell!” dropped by McCartney in “Hey Jude” that no remix or remaster ever managed to completely bury), can all be filed under this label. That’s providing of course that they end up on the released version of a song, for whatever reason, including the fact, inherent to the concept of error aesthetics, that they are considered good accidents that ended up embellishing the song. As we shall discuss in Sect. 4.4, The Beatles indulged into this whim more than once, particularly on albums like the White Album or Let It Be, creating a kind of fashion that other acts eventually followed, and that also, as we have seen while talking of “offstage voices and noises”, ended up becoming an intrinsically-­ Beatlesque stylistic topos. By no coincidence, it is often reiterated by bands explicitly inspired by the Fab Four (XTC on “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead”, Oasis on “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, Giuliodorme in “Ti lascio stare” – the latter also including a swearword in “Hey Jude” style), or even on parodies, such as Elio e le Storie Tese’s “Beatles, Rolling Stones e Bob Dylan”, a hilarious stylistic mash-up of the three acts, which begins with a soundscape of sounds and humorous comments similar to the beginning of “Get Back”, which is also briefly sampled.

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4.3.2 Hybrid Forms and Metadiegesis Somewhere in the vicinity of the square, we can also find hybrid and/or ambiguous forms of conceptual space, on a more or less symbolic level. If we again take the example of film music, we know, especially from musicals, that certain diegetic musical episodes can easily coexist with non-diegetic ones. Gene Kelly has just accompanied Debbie Reynolds at her place, and, all dreamy and loved-up, walks home despite the pouring rain. In the middle of the street he starts singing the famous “Singing in the Rain”. At diegetic level, we only see him (moreover, on a street – not on a stage or in a recording studio), but, miraculously enough, there is an entire orchestra backing him, which evidently operates at non-diegetic level. The two dimensions cooperate and the magic of musicals is served. Can we thus imagine something similar also in a song? A good example of ambiguity comes again from the magical mystery world of “count offs”. It takes a certain effect to notice how the two main phases of the Beatles career (the live years and the studio years) are, among other things, underlined by two famous count offs that inaugurate not only their respective songs, but also their respective albums. The first album, Please Please Me, begins with the count off for “I Saw Her Standing There”, and it is an energetic count, typically rock and roll, which opens the album on an excited note. Conversely, the album that most of all presents the “new” Beatles to the world (even more than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is its chronologically successor) is Revolver, released in 1966, and that, too, begins with a count off on “Taxman”. However, symbolically of the new phase of the band’s career, being more focused on the artistic side of music-making than on pleasing the audience, that count off is anomalous, indolent and a bit eerie, accompanied by sound effects and even a cough. And, more intriguingly, the count off (uttered by George Harrison) is not even in the right tempo of the piece: the real count off is heard more in the background and begins “off-mike” (we barely hear the “three” and more clearly the “four”), uttered by McCartney. There is no doubt that the counting on “I Saw Her Standing There” has nothing to do with dancing and falling in love with a 17-year-old. The action is paradigmatically non-diegetic and has the explicit purpose of “energizing” a danceable rock piece. The same we hear also on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)”. What about the disquieting count off on “Taxman”? Could it have anything to do with a cruel taxman who will also “tax your feet” when you walk? We suspect that, yes, the count off is already a characterization of the character. The taxman “counts” the money he has collected from the taxpayers, and does it with a voice and a pace that reveals the pettiness and the unpleasantness by which he is depicted. A cough escapes him in the process, possibly revealing an advanced age that adds to the characterization. Being placed at the beginning of the song, and put against an existing convention in studio practices, that count off is evidently non-diegetic. But in its being deliberately out of tempo (thus not fulfilling the function that also makes it a formal element), and adapting, in tone, timbre and thematic connotation, to the figure of the mean taxman represented in the piece, it is also an item of diegetic nature.

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In addition to this, we should also mention a particular case of conceptual space called metadiegesis, which consists in the opening of one or more diegetic “bubbles” within the diegetic space itself. In both audiovisual and literary arts, these bubbles are usually flashbacks, dreams, flashforwards, representations of the protagonists’ thoughts, and so on. A typical case is that of the so-called “frame narrative”, a technique where a main story is structured in order to contain a set of shorter stories, which are thus stories within a story. This kind of setting, among other things, offers the possibility of connecting seemingly unrelated tales into one single work, having exactly the “frame” as the red line. For example, since we are writing these lines in the times of the COVID epidemic, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the fourteenth century, opens with seven young women and three young men escaping from Florence to avoid contagion of another epidemic, the “Black Death” (or Bubonic Plague), and finding shelter in a villa outside the city walls. To pass the time, and not having Netflix at their disposal, each member of the group tells one story in the evening, generating altogether one hundred stories in ten days. What happens then is that the Decameron is a story within which other stories are opened, like bubbles indeed, or Matryoshka dolls inside a bigger one. When such a bubble is created, we basically have created a diegetic space inside another diegetic space, and this process is called metadiegesis. In songs, especially starting from the art-rock era (second half of the Sixties of the last century), the levels of referentiality, self-referentiality and meta-referentiality have progressively increased, thus allowing more of such bubbles. Needless to say, The Beatles were in the foreground of this practice as well. The already-mentioned case of “And the band begins to play”, followed by an actual street band’s performance, as heard on “Yellow Submarine”, is an example of metadiegetic bubble. A subtler one occurs on “Glass Onion”, as Lennon calls out a few Beatles songs in what appears to be a kind of parody of those fans and critics who over-­ interpret or mis-interpret the band’s lyrics, in search of hidden clues and subliminal messages. One of the songs mentioned is “The Fool on the Hill”, through the verses “I told you about the fool on the hill, I tell you man he’s living there still”. As the line is completed a short lick played by a recorder is heard: the recorder was the main instrument in “The Fool on the Hill” (and in Sect. 4.6 we explain why). By playing it at that particular spot, “Glass Onion” opens a tiny bubble in which the song is evoked not only lyrically, but now also musically. Finally, a short note on another hybrid worth mentioning (which however would deserve a separate treatment, as it is something The Beatles often indulged into, particularly in their solo years), is a special case of fourth wall violation: the “songs that are aware of being songs”, and therefore address their condition in the lyrics. Harrison’s “Only a Northern Song” was a bitterly sarcastic dig at Northern Songs Ltd., the music publishing company he and the other Beatles were contracted to, which, however, had him under a “junior songwriter” status, when compared to Lennon and McCartney’s shares. That meant not only he was getting a lower earning on Lennon-McCartney songs, but also on his own. In the song we have lines such as “If you’re listening to this song, you may think the chords are going wrong, but they’re not, I just wrote it like that”, that reveal the song’s self-awareness, so to

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speak. To make the point even more, The Beatles arranged the track in a rather chaotic, confusing way (especially in the trumpet part), toying with the idea of “wrong chords” or – later in the lyrics – “If you think the harmony is a little off and out of key, then you’re right”. Self-referential songs should not be confused with the bigger group of songs that “talk about songs” tout court. The line “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better” does not refer to “Hey Jude” itself, but to a general song that in fact may not be a song at all, but just a metaphor for turning a difficult situation into something more positive. Self-referentiality increased exponentially during the solo years, and of the many possible examples, we shall just list two due to their direct connection with The Beatles as a band. George Harrison’s “This Song” is, in a way, a kind of “Only a Northern Song” part II, in its status as an anti-music business protest song of sorts. This time, the reference is to his famous “My Sweet Lord” plagiarism case, in which he was found guilty of “unconsciously” ripping off The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”: “This song has nothing tricky about it/This song ain’t black or white and as far as I know don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright”. The second example is Paul McCartney’s “Here Today”, a touching tribute to John Lennon written after his murder. In it, McCartney reflects on loving and missing his friend, but, in a melancholic attempt to end the song on a consoling note, he sings that after all, despite Lennon being gone for good, he managed to have him by his side on this particular occasion: “And if I say I really loved you, and was glad you came along, Then you were here today, for you were in my song”.

4.4 Case-Study: Feedbacks, False Starts, and Blisters In discussing the non-formal/non-diegetic conceptual space, we have anticipated that we will deepen the topic of “error aesthetics”. One of the many reasons why computers have replaced typing machines in writing is, banally, because the former are more accurate. A text written on an old typewriter is a typographically imprecise text, with several smudges in correspondence with several characters, and the impossibility of using the “delete” function in case of typods typos. Moreover, there is a wide margin of randomness in how a typing machine produces errors, depending on the conditions of the machine or its quality. However, we all agree that a Remington-written text using, say, an old Remington possesses quite a charm. The simple fact that one can actually download these fonts, adapted for computer use, in their original, inaccurate, and approximate form, confirms their not irrelevant aesthetic appeal. Not to mention how often we see those fonts employed in logos and publicity material to give that hipster flavor. On the one hand, one can explain the phenomenon with the same old seduction of past and tradition. This very seduction induces us to also download fonts reminiscent of iconic movies (e.g., in Star Wars style), or of medieval manuscripts (as we basically see on the signs of every second Irish or German pub), or of course of rock bands (including Beatles fonts with the longer “t” or in Yellow Submarine psychedelic style).

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But in the case of the old typewriters there is something more. Not only do these fonts try to recover the stylistic features of a given past technology: the old typewriter revival is also an attempt to recover the limits of that technology, and its imprecision. Randomness, subjectivity, and unpredictability are the really charming features in this case. Many “Virtual Remington” fonts available for download are designed not only to reproduce the letters as such, with their aesthetics, but also those characteristic smudges (like an “o” filled with ink); or with a few letters not aligned with the rest, and so forth. The kind of aesthetic principle, and related charm, is at the basis of “Error Aesthetics” (a.k.a. “Aesthetics of Failure” and numerous other ways). It is not exactly a fully self-conscious movement, like – for instance – surrealism or futurism, but it seems to be a common denominator in an increasing number of authors and works in many fields of arts. Within the vast context of popular music, it is particularly the electronic area that presents the most interesting instances, ranging from such bands as Oval, who issued whole recordings based on the errors of a malfunctioning CD player (an instance also known as “Glitch aesthetics”), to artists like Matthew Herbert, who went as far as to write a “manifesto of mistakes” in music. And yet, the contribution given by The Beatles, expressively within the realm of production and studio activity in general, has been crucial, and ended up being one of their defining features, one that is often imitated or even parodied. The first time the band flirted with errors is also revealing of their open-minded attitude towards random events and unconventional processes. Towards the end of 1964, The Beatles were recording the last non-album single of that year, “I Feel Fine”. Paul McCartney recalls what happened in the studio: John [Lennon] had a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. It had a pick-up on it so it could be amplified… We were just about to walk away to listen to a take when John leaned his guitar against the amp… and it went, ‘Nnnnnnwahhhhh!’ And we went, ‘What’s that? Voodoo!’ ‘No, it’s feedback.’ Wow, it’s a great sound!’ George Martin was there so we said, ‘Can we have that on the record?’ ‘Well, I suppose we could, we could edit it on the front.’ It was a found object – an accident caused by leaning the guitar against the amp. (Miles 1997: 172)

McCartney is obviously talking about that distorted bit preceding the riff, at the beginning of the song, and it is noteworthy (and quite appropriate) that he is comparing this “gesture” to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of objet trouvé – an artistic employment of an object (an acoustic phenomenon, in this case) that is not normally considered art. Until then, any sort of inaccuracy had been considered a “sin” to remove from, or at least “bury” in the mix. In fact, quite a few of their early recordings, when listened attentively, reveal in the background wrong tracks that the analogical equipment did not manage to remove entirely. What happened with “I Feel Fine”, instead, seemed to open up for a lot of new, exciting possibilities, and The Beatles did not fail to explore them as soon as their work focused more on studio activity and their songs received more complex production treatments. That famously happened in 1966, with the single “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”, and most of all with the album Revolver (Fig.  4.2) and became a regular ingredient of the band’s music pretty much in every album, but especially in those specifically meant to sound rough and straightforward – the White Album and Let It Be.

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Fig. 4.2  From 1966 onwards, The Beatles became more and more involved in production. Here, they discuss with George Martin during the Revolver sessions. (Photo of public domain)

Before discussing specific cases, it may be useful to provide some terminological clarifications. The English language (as many others) has several terms that are semantically similar to “error”, or that are used as synonymous of it: “mistake”, “fault”, “failure”, “blunder” “stumble”, “fallacy”, and others. Each of them carries insightful semantic nuances, which will help us classify the various ways The Beatles employed error aesthetics. Browsing a common dictionary, there are at least seven definitions of “error” that are relevant for our case: 1. An act, assertion, or belief that unintentionally deviates from what is correct, right, or true. 2. The condition of having incorrect or false knowledge. 3. The act or an instance of deviating from an accepted code of behavior. 4. A wandering or deviation from the right course or standard; irregularity; mistake; inaccuracy; something made wrong or left wrong; as, an error in writing or in printing; a clerical error. 5. A departing or deviation from the truth; falsity; false notion; wrong opinion; mistake; misapprehension. 6. A moral offense; violation of duty; a sin or transgression; iniquity; fault. 7. A discrepancy between a computed, observed, or measured value or condition and the true, specified, or theoretically correct value or condition.

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Trying to compress these options into semantic fields, one could say that there are probably four “typologies” of error: (a) normative – dealing with the violation of more or less juridical rules, that are socially and institutionally accepted; (b) ethical – in opposition with common sense and a general perception of truth and exactness within a given context or event; (c) technical  – referred to what is considered the correct functioning and use of a given instrument or device; and finally (d) structural  – dealing with the violation of the conventionally correct spatial-temporal setting of a given context or event. As always in these cases, these four typologies may easily overlap with each other. A normative error may possibly carry an ethical character, a structural error may imply technical and normative aspects, and so on. Moreover, a prominent aspect is the dualism presence/absence of intentionality, as referred to who or what causes the error. Which leads us to the dangerous area of logic. If we make a mistake on purpose, as with using an intentionally designed imperfect Remington font, can we really talk about error? Is chance the unavoidable element in a process that eventually produces an error? These questions are unfortunately not banal, since the inclusion or exclusion of several musical examples of error aesthetics in The Beatles repertoire depends on the answer we give here. Allowing white noise creeping in a recording is usually considered wrong, and a sign of poor recording quality. But what happens if we put it on purpose, as we hear in the last minutes of “I Want You”? Is it “error aesthetics”? As a matter of fact, the definitions we have selected, in their variety, suggest that both conditions are acceptable. Indeed, if it is true that in the definition number one we talk about acts that “unintentionally” deviate from correctness or truth, it is also true that a definition like number six, stresses concepts like “offense” or “transgression”, i.e., dialectical, and behavioral processes that we normally think of as intentional, totally, or partially. We shall deduce that, when defining error in relation to the sender of the message, we must accept both intentionality and chance, although the latter remains probably more relevant, since it is the main element of novelty and opposition with traditional conventions in composition and production. Thus, we must accept matter-of-factly the existence of a certain ambiguity between the two levels. Indeed, an error can be casual and intentional at the same time, since it can be provoked intentionally, and – so to say – “left free to develop” independently of any control. We may decide to throw a paint bucket over a canvas, but then we are most probably not able to predict the number and the size of spots that will be produced on our painting.17 In this sense, it is probably necessary to introduce a parallel notion to that of intentionality, which we shall call “control”. If intentionality applies to the process of production of the erroneous message, control focuses on its development during the stage of emission. The synthesis of the two elements is what really originates the message, as perceived by the receiver. The steam organ effect we hear on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” seems to be the perfect illustration of this synthesis: after  For the sake of our argument, we shall of course ignore that a Pollock or a de Kooning would hardly consider “error” the action of throwing a paint bucket on a canvas. The idea is that, in ordinary, traditional contexts, this action is a normative and/or technical error. 17

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unsuccessfully attempting to assemble an appropriate solo by using steam organ tapes that were stored in the EMI archive, George Martin and then-sound engineer Geoff Emerick resolved to chop the tapes into pieces with scissors, throw them up in the air, and re-assemble them at random. The result is what we hear in the released song after one minute: pieces of tapes “intentionally” cut and re-assembled (displaying therefore “control” on the procedure), but whose result was left to chance (the tapes were literally thrown up in the air, not in any manner of speaking). There are also other criteria worth considering. Firstly, we shall refer to the spatial/temporal dimension wherein the error occurs. If we think of errors in the traditional sense, as in the case of typos, we normally think of something that is surely unintentional, but also episodic: something that is likely to happen only sporadically, that we notice only if we pay enough attention, and that is likely to become rarer and rarer once happened the first time (once written “typods” rather than “typos”, we will probably be more attentive when writing that very word the next time). This, however, transcends the aesthetic discourse, or at least does not tell us the whole story. If we take the decision to use the error in an aesthetic fashion, then it is possible, but not at all normative, to preserve its “extemporaneity”. However, the aesthetic value of our artwork might be based on the systematicity of the error, up to an attempt to provide it with a partial or rigorous continuity (as, musically speaking, in the case of loops). Both are strategic and stylistic choices: we certainly might be interested in the extemporaneity of the error, and particularly in that peculiar relation established with the specific portion of space/time wherein it occurs (aesthetically speaking, we might find the error appealing at point X of a song, rather than at point Y). At the same time though, we might be interested in the intrinsic musical quality of the error (i.e., we might just like “the way it sounds”), and so we may also want to reproduce it in more points of the song, or even in a continuative way. To go back to “I Want You”, once the white noise element was introduced, and incidentally, not a naturally produced white noise, but one coming from a Moog, it was left to be part of the crescendo that the whole song’s coda was developing at that point. Finally, as trivial as it may sound, we shall also discuss the particular relationship established between error and non-error, that is, between our (provoked or not) violation of the common sense, and the common sense itself, i.e., “the way a given phenomenon should be in ‘ordinary conditions’, without the error”. Obligatory inverted commas on “ordinary conditions”, of course, especially because we are talking about art, and “ordinary” is not what an artwork aims at being remembered by. Thus, the question is: what kind of relationship exists between wrong and right? What is the position of the error within that context that qualifies it as error? We may guess that “antagonism” would be the answer of most people: an error goes “against” a non-error, somehow rejecting and neglecting it. In most cases, an error “spoils” the correct formulation of a given text. In this case, it shall be appropriate to talk of “anti-semantic” error: most likely, the error in question is threatening or ruining the correct sense of a message. It becomes “error aesthetics” at the moment an artist decides that, despite being a mistake, it is nice/appealing/intriguing/etc. enough to be left where it is. “Anti-semantic” is for instance the wrong chord that McCartney

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plays at the piano on “Let It Be” after the line “I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me” (2′59″ ca.). Just like a typo, McCartney must have hit one or two wrong keys while trying to play an A minor. For some reason, however, no one among the musicians and producers of that song deemed it necessary to do another take of the piano track: somehow the error was a “fit”, and gave an unusual nuance to that passage. For the record: that the particular chord was an error is proved by all the other available versions of the song, such as the one we find on Let It Be… Naked (the 2003 “stripped-down” version of the album, containing indeed a number of different takes of the songs) or any of the many live renditions that McCartney gave of the song since its first inclusion in his setlists in 1979: in all these cases, a regular A minor is played. Evidently, though, this cannot be the end of the story. An error may spoil the sense of a message, the way it was conceived, but it will not necessarily be meaningless. If we think of the sentence “Elmis is an entertaining boy”, we shall probably deduce that a young man named Elmis happens to be fun to hang with. However, if we make a mistake in typing the sentence, and write “Elmis is an entertaining toy”, then suddenly Elmis becomes an object kids like to play with. In such a case, we shall talk of “hetero-semantic” error: the latter has produced another meaning. A classic “hetero-semantic” error in the Beatles’ production is the sound of the alarm clock that is heard in “A Day in the Life”, right before McCartney’s insert. As we have already mentioned, the clock was employed in Take 1 as a signal for the band’s road manager and personal assistant Mal Evans to stop counting the empty bars that were eventually filled with the orchestra. In the original plan, the alarm sound had to be removed, however when it was noticed that it was positioned not only after the counting, but right before McCartney would start singing “Woke up, fell out of bed”, it became clear to everybody that it was a perfect “accident”. The meaning of that sound had indeed changed, from reminder to actual alarm clock, and now it was just in the right place at the right time. An error, apparently, is semantically more fecund than a non-error. If the exactness of a given context corresponds to a limited number of meanings (restricted in many ways, starting from social conventions), its possible erroneousness opens unexpected doors to new meanings. If Elmis, instead of being an entertaining boy, was an entertaining Boy, several interpretive options would be suggested by that capital B. Certainly, in comparison to the original formulation, that we here assume as “correct”, it was a mistake (what I had thought of was “boy”, not “Boy”), but now we might think that Elmis is quite a peculiar boy, or even “the” boy by definition, or alternatively, a member of a family named Boy, which, incidentally, is a popular surname in Germany, so we may also think that Elmis is German. In other words, the error has helped the creative process by offering new options. We shall call this error “neo-semantic”: it has added new possibilities to the same sign. There is more. If, instead of being a boy, Elmis was a “bo y”, we still would be making a mistake (one too many space bars), but arguably most readers will get the meaning of the sentence anyway. “Bo y” is an expression that does not exist in English, but we cannot really define it anti-semantic, for after all it has not compromised the meaning of the sentence, as, instead, a cluster like “bkojohy”

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would probably do. In other words, the reader becomes aware that a typing mistake was made, but still understands that we must have meant “boy”. Thus, “bo y” must be simply considered an extra-semantic error: it goes “outside” the meaning, but does not necessarily contradict it. An example, in this case, could be the false start on “Dig a Pony”, when a not-yet-ready Ringo Starr shouts “Hold it!” to the band that is already counting off. Bass and guitar already hit the opening chord, but then everybody stops: another count off is announced and the song starts for real – as it was supposed to start, that is, with its riff. That opening chord was left in the final release, but it does not compromise the perception of the song’s opening  – if anything it adds a sort of “prequel” to the actual intro. Other errors have “parallel” functions to the message, in so far as they do not threaten or change the meaning in the strict sense. However by for example, affecting the channel, they present the sentence in a new perspective, stimulating several interpretive processes in the field of connotation. “Elmis is an entertaining boy”, as written with one of those old Remington fonts we mentioned, has surely a different effect than the Times New Roman written identical sentence. The meaning is not altered, but, for instance, all the little spots and smudges were not expected, and certainly they are not ‘correct’. Such an error shall be called “para-semantic”: it has provided an additional para-text that might (in the Remington case) place the sentence in a certain space/time context. All of a sudden, we might picture this Elmis boy sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, in pre-computer days, and, staying in this imaginative vein, we may imagine that he is a character appearing in some novelist’s manuscript. The Beatles’ equivalent for this type of error is the “Now she’s hit the big time” line in “Honey Pie”. The “retro” effect given by the crackling 78 rpm record we hear (discussed further in Sect. 4.5.2) is a form of error aesthetics in that it recurs to an imperfect technology that precedes in time what was already available in 1968 and that would have sounded more accurate. In order to provide that 1920s/1930s feel, thus, The Beatles practically employed the sonic equivalent of an old Remington. Finally, one cannot avoid facing a specifically semiotic dimension of the error, which – possibly more than any other – emphasizes the value of intentionality in many aesthetically-purposed errors. It is the case of the “meta-semantic” error, i.e., an error that actually interacts (by the usual means of transgression and deviation) with the text, in terms of complex and multiple articulations. If we wrote a sentence like “elMiS iS An eNterTaiNing bOY”, we would formally make another mistake, allegedly showing confusion between majuscule and minuscule letters. However, at this point, our aesthetic purposes would become quite clear, since we could hardly pretend that such a mistake happened by chance. On the contrary, it appears that we were more concerned with the visual effect produced by this random alternation of uppercases and lowercases, than with the sign itself, in its ordinary function. It seems clear that we did it on purpose. we wanted to play with rules, through a little stylistic provocation (and indeed, the practice is often used in graphics and informal communication, and it is known as “studly caps” or “sticky caps”). This, once more, is the case of a song like “I Want You”, where the “white noise” element deviates rather obviously from convention (in fact, it is a “no-no” in recording practices), but

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it does so in a deliberate manner, and turns upside down the idea of what is “acceptable”, “appropriate” and also “appealing” in the recording. The same could be said about the repeated fade-out’s and fade-in’s on “Helter Skelter”, the backwards coda of “Rain”, and so forth.

4.4.1 Redefining the Spatial/Temporal Dimension of a Song Since we mentioned “Helter Skelter”, we can include another aspect that is central in this monograph, and which also concerns error aesthetics, and that is the question of the use of the recording studio as creative space. That is: production became quite often a means to affect the spatial/temporal dimension of the song in unconventional ways. Traditionally, studio work is instrumental in establishing the official length of a piece. If, say, a song is recorded with a long coda, something that, incidentally, was often the case with The Beatles, a decision is taken to fade out at some particular point, thereby marking the end of the track and somehow “invalidating” the rest. However, in The Beatles, and especially from 1966 onwards, we start witnessing a different and more varied approach. For instance, they began to question the “official” structure and length of their songs. When does “Helter Skelter” end? When it fades out the first, the second time, or when the poor Ringo complains he has blisters on his fingers? And what about “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”? Does it start when we hear the refrain “Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill?”, or a little earlier, when we hear that totally-out-of-context Spanish guitar bit (which, for the record, was a mellotron sample)? But there is more. Affecting the spatial/temporal dimension in this unconventional way means also to question the boundary between one song and another. So, does “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” end with the “Hey up!” exclamation, or is that the beginning of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”? This goes up to the extreme that a passage, introduced with the intention of seeming accidental (and left where it is because “it sounds good”), may risk becoming a musical entity in its own right, although in most of the cases anonymously so. If the sleeve-notes do not report any song between “Cry Baby Cry” and “Revolution 9”, then what is that cute little tune that goes “Can you take me back where I came from?” between the two mentioned songs and that possibly inaugurated the tradition of “ghost tracks” so en vogue in the CD era? What if the tune was played on the radio on its own? Would Lennon and McCartney have received any royalty? Obviously, these questions are by now rhetorical, thanks to the increasing availability of demos and outtakes in special editions of classic recordings. Specifically, we now know that the mentioned tune is indeed called “Can You Take Me Back?”, and that a 2′22″ recording of it exists (from which the snippet after “Cry Baby Cry” is taken). Already released in unofficial bootlegs, “Can You Take Me Back?” can now be found on such official releases as the 2018 deluxe edition of the White Album. So: now we know that this is an actual song that can be treated as an entity in itself. However, back then, what listeners were dealing with was something that was no longer “Cry Baby Cry” and

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not yet “Revolution 9”, or that, maybe, was a reprise of the former, or an intro to the latter.18 What seems certain is that these extensions and redefinitions became a consistent part of the musical and cultural identity of the song in question. Would “Helter Skelter” be “Helter Skelter” without the “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” cry? Would “Two of Us” be “Two of Us” without Lennon’s nonsensical introduction “‘I dig a pigmy’, by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats”?

4.5 Production as Montage As the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman once said, “montage is akin to music: it is the playing of the emotions”: this quote alone, from one of the all-time greatest film directors, should justify our choice of comparing music production with filmic montage. Still, let us elaborate a bit. Montage can be generally defined as the act of editing, cutting, and piecing together a text in such a way that its communicative potential is the most faithful possible to what the authors intended to express, at both an explicit and a more metaphorical-emotional level. Montage employs all the images and the sounds at our disposal as raw material, and puts them together in different ways, not hesitating to violate both spatial and temporal coordinates (for instance by placing two chronologically distant images one after another, as if happening in sequence). To do that, one can make use of all possible manipulations and parameters available: sequencing images and sounds at will; applying effects; selecting different camera shots and angles; increasing/decreasing volumes, tones, contrasts; juxtaposing, overexposing, enhancing… In sum, montage can be considered the quintessential filmic action, whose ultimate asset lies in its ability to transform a text in a dense network where just about every single item can establish a relationship with another, and not only, say, two adjacent shots or two items of the same mean. Already in

 It may be of some interest to the reader that the two authors of this book faced a peculiar problem in this particular department. As the pair collaborated to the Italian pop album (R)esistere (2009, authored by Martinelli and produced by Bucciarelli), a decision was taken to assemble a patchwork of short bits of each album song, put them all in reverse, and place them almost at the end, between the song “Invecchia con me” and a reprise of the first song “Canzone del giorno solo” that was meant to close the album. Exactly like “Can You Take Me Back?”, this patchwork was intended as a transition from one song to another, and we purposively decided not to give it a title. Except that, well, the album was now released in the digital era, and the recording label put all the songs out in iTunes, Amazon and the likes. Once faced with an untitled song, the label asked us what was that song about. We naively answered that it was “a collage of the album in reverse”, happily ignoring that the label would have chosen exactly that answer to title the song. Had we known the agenda behind that question, we would have answered “Song titles and the vivid imagination of recording labels”. 18

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these preliminary words, the similarities between filmic montage and music production are quite self-evident: in fact, one could go as far as maintaining that production is filmic montage minus images (the latter, as we shall see, being anyway often “evoked” in one way or another). Moreover, the similarities between montage and studio production, as distinguished from production in live concerts becomes even clearer when we compare filmic montage with the kind of “ideal” editing that occur in live audiovisual performances, such as theatre. In these cases, indeed, the communicative material is exposed altogether, in one single, big or small, space (exactly as it would occur in Beatles concerts): the only vague “editing” work that occurs is from the spectators’ part. It is us, as audience, that may execute some kind of selection of the points of interest in a live performance. Instead, when audiovisuality turns to a screen-­ mediated form, whichever that is, and it can include texts that go on in real time, such as news programs or live sport on TV, our attention as spectators is guided by someone else’s choices and focuses; that someone else usually being the producer or the director. For example, when a decision is taken to show a wide view of a beautiful landscape, quickly followed by a close look at one person’s astonished face, we are naturally driven to turn the attention from the landscape to the face, with little or no decisional power on the matter. It is as if the director is pointing the finger to the landscape first and then saying “look at this face now!”, and we are somehow bound to follow their indications. Music production works exactly in the same way, thanks to the mixing of volumes, the management of frequencies, and other technical parameters, plus, more importantly, the conceptual “mapping” of the song’s production, with its diverse points of attraction, Gestaltic organization of sounds and parts, and so forth. What is particularly relevant is that the great added value of both production and montage lies in its ability to enhance and enrich the communicative potential of a text (something we have already explored when talking about multimodality). That occurs because both practices are not simply a sum of parts, but are actually able to create new meanings out of such sums. Similarly to our previous “beautiful landscape + astonished face” example, if a producer aligns a verse like “and the bag across her shoulder made her look a little like a military man” (“Lovely Rita”, of course), with the buzzing sound of comb and paper, the result is not only a mere sum of a verse and a sound, but also a relation that is established/encouraged through this association. In this case, we get a quizzical effect that makes it clear that the “military man” look of Rita is a bit funny and risible (in the previously discussed question of multimodality, we would qualify this instance as “modulation”). Sergei Eisenstein, not only a great director but also a prominent theorist of montage, compared montage to the compounding of characters in Japanese writing. When one combines the character for “dog” to the character for “mouth”, he noted, the result is not only “dog’s mouth” but also the new concept of “bark”: in similar fashion, the nature of production is “dialectical”.

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4.5.1 Martin vs. Spector (and Lynne) It is a common opinion that the Beatles’ use of the studio made during their career has introduced numerous elements of modernity in the practice, including the idea itself of making the studio the main creative headquarters (and thereby justifying our decision, explained in the preface, to use the term “production” as an umbrella-­ term). In particular, in the economy of this part of the book, a considerable element of modernity was conceiving the production not only as an aesthetic tool to make the song sounds “nice”, “commercial”, “catchy” or similar, but exactly as a vehicle to multimodally help the song to convey its meaning, when not even conveying additional ones. In the just mentioned case of “Lovely Rita”, our interpretation of the “military man” comparison may or may not have been perceived as mockful – for all we know from the melody and the lyrics, McCartney might have also been making a matter-of-fact observation. It is the comb and paper passage, both for sound and melody, given that the latter has a cartoon-esque staccato quality, that adds the element of mockery, or at least leaves no doubt that mockery it is. When identifying the key-figures that helped in bringing music production to the foreground of the music industry, inevitably a name that often comes up, alongside George Martin, is Phil Spector (Fig. 4.3), the other star producer of the 1960s and certainly even more of a “star” in the mediatic sense, if compared with Martin’s proverbial discretion and reservedness, and considering his erratic, and eventually tragic, personality. Without wanting to diminish Spector’s enormous contribution to popular music history, but trying to simply state a fact, a fundamental difference between him and Martin lies exactly in their artistic paradigms. Spector made producer-focused productions: he forged his legendary style, chiefly characterized by the so-called “wall of sound”, and made sure that the songs he worked on would reveal unmistakably that they were Spector productions. The goal was thus purely aesthetic: whether the song was “Be My Baby”, “River Deep – Mountain High” or “My Sweet Lord”, the productions would bear no particular attempt to support their meaning but simply (if “simply” is the word, in the context of such meticulous production work) to reiterate that artistic paradigm in the best and most attractive way possible. Sure, “My Sweet Lord”, a religious song, has gospel-like backing vocals singing “Hallelujah”, “Hare Krishna” and the likes, but there is not a single shadow of a doubt that George Harrison had already written the song that way, with that gospel part, and that Spector’s role was merely that of translating that idea not only into a great sounding record, but also into the hit it ended up being, and what Spector was masterful in achieving. In fact, in Spector’s controversial contribution to Let It Be, Paul McCartney famously used his annoyance with the over-the-top lavish production of “The Long and Winding Road” as one legal argument to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership. The reason for such dissatisfaction, besides the fact that McCartney needed every possible excuse to prove that he was being sabotaged by the other Beatles and by their then-manager Allen Klein, was arguably due to an actual betrayal of the song’s contents. McCartney (notoriously!) was not opposed in principle to employing

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Fig. 4.3  Phil Spector in 1965. (Photo of public domain)

classical orchestras for his songs: the problem was that “The Long and Winding Road” had been written as a quiet and melancholic ballad on the comfort and safety of going home amidst the difficulties and tensions of life (specifically, his Scottish farm, that was indeed accessible only through a convoluted route). It was not a song about, say, reaching the gates of Heaven, as instead the strings, the harp, and the female choir in the spectorized version so outspokenly suggested. George Martin, in turn, was the ultimate team player, and his productions are unequivocally song-oriented – in a similar way, as we have seen in Sect. 3.1, as the band members – particularly McCartney – who would often adapt their vocals to the song, rather than imposing a signature timbre. His production style is almost generated by the explicit intention not to have a style at all, but simply to let the song guide him in his choices and decisions. Martin’s pre-Beatles experience in comedy and novelty records with the likes of Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov and Spike Milligan, is often mentioned in relation to his abilities in orchestration, his open-mindedness towards unconventional musical ideas and his eagerness to let irony and humor be prominent ingredients in arrangements. However, what is less often remarked upon is that these records were often characterized by a semiotic continuity between song contents and production, with large use of sound effects and with musicians

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systematically instructed to imitate noises, movements and situations, in manners that verged often into the so-called “Mickey Mousing” of music.19 That kind of experience was no less than crucial in informing all those choices that eventually made Beatles records so evocative and synesthetic. In other words, there is a definite continuity between the bellowing brass instruments in “Nellie the Elephant” (a children song that Martin produced in 1956 for Mandy Miller) and, say, the hammering sounds in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Having said that, it would be fair to say that, especially in the second part of the Beatles’ career, his productions are perfectly recognizable for, among others: their sonic neatness; the above-mentioned inclination to slight “Mickey Mousing” elements; general cinematic atmospheres (not by chance he often worked in film music); the stylistic open-mindedness that was key to the Beatles style; the orchestration of classical instruments (particularly the string parts); and also a kind of (pardon our French) “post-modern” eagerness to mixing different genres and even cultures (e.g., a sitar in the middle of a distinctively-European folk song like “Norwegian Wood”). Concluding, throughout this book we only had a very few chances to discuss the other two producers who worked with The Beatles, albeit for limited times and individual projects. One of them, Glyn Johns, ended up being rejected as a producer, on the Let It Be project (replaced by Spector), but had his glory as engineer on the same album, on Abbey Road, and, years later, on the third volume of the Anthology series (plus additional engineering for Paul McCartney and Wings). The other is Jeff Lynne (Fig. 4.4), a fully credited producer on the two Anthology-related new songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, in 1994 and 1995 respectively. It may be worthwhile to spend a couple of words on Lynne, too, also because his connection with The Beatles is a solid one, regardless of his only contribution being to the Anthology. As a mastermind of the Electric Light Orchestra, he led the band that in 1973 Lennon called “sons of The Beatles”, while describing the song “Showdown” (but he could have mentioned pretty much any other, from “Mr. Blue Sky” to “Telephone Line”). As a producer, his respectable curriculum of big names like Brian Wilson, Tom Petty, Dave Edmunds, and Roy Orbison also includes George Harrison (Cloud Nine, Brainwashed and some singles), Ringo Starr (Time Takes Time) and Paul McCartney (Flaming Pie and some singles). Finally, as both musician and producer, he was also bandmate of George Harrison (and Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan) in The Traveling Wilburys supergroup. His work (and the two Anthology singles make no exception) happens to be exactly of the self-referential producer-oriented type displayed by Phil Spector,  As the readers may or may not know, the expression “Mickey Mousing”, also known as “parallel scoring”, refers to a particular way of synchronizing music with images, especially in animation movies (hence its name – as it was a typical strategy adopted in Disney cartoons, but also in Warner Bros, Hanna & Barbera, and the likes). The idea is that music works almost completely to mimic the images, imitating noises, movements, conditions, thoughts and so forth. The result is often humorous, and so is the purpose, most of the time. 19

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Fig. 4.4  Jeff Lynne in concert with his Electric Light Orchestra. (Photo attribution: Paul Carless, CC BY 2.0)

although, of course, with its own characteristics. Lynne’s productions, either with his own ELO’s repertoire or with any of the numerous rockstars he worked with are typified by a finite, one might say limited, number of recognizable elements that recur in most of the songs. “Real Love”, even more than “Free as a Bird”, is the track where the Lynne treatment was applied in full gear: “far-mic” drum sounds for a big room effect with long-sounding cymbals and highly-compressed “punchy” snares; several layers of acoustic guitars with a brilliant, glistening sound; several layers of backing vocals; plus the unavoidable descending guitar lick at the end of some verse (in “Real Love” we hear it in the bridge, and it sounds exactly like those appearing in Roy Orbison’s “You Got It”, Traveling Wilburys’ “Not Alone Anymore”, George Harrison’s “This Is Love”, Paul McCartney’s “Flaming Pie” and many others). Persevering with our cinematographic comparisons, Jeff Lynne may remind one of a director like Quentin Tarantino, who makes sure, in his movies, to include one or more signatures like an invented brand (e.g., Red Apple cigarettes), some foot-­ fetish sequence, a trunk shot and, it goes without saying, at least one sequence filled with cartoon-like graphic violence. Lynne’s productions, like Spector’s, bear evident signs of his personal concept of how production should be.

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4.5.2 Types of Production as Types of Montage Generally speaking, one can usually distinguish among three “pure” types of montage: narrative, graphic, and ideational. We say “pure” in quotation marks because in actual fact, these types rarely appear alone, but they are more likely combined in different fashions, resulting most of the time in a rich, multilayered hybrid that is the essence itself of montage. 1. In the narrative type, montage is at the explicit service of the story: the idea is to follow a subject/event from one point to another (in time or in space), by offering multiple points of views and angles, that allow a better understanding of that portion of the story, add more information, and – why not? – prevent the sequence from being too repetitive and monotonous. In production, we may understand “narration” in two senses: a conventional lyrical-thematic sense, where an actual story, expressed linguistically, takes place; and a more abstract structural sense, related to the musical development of a piece (for instance, we mentioned earlier the logic behind the “strophe-refrain” and “chorus-bridge” formats). In the former sense, the production, so to speak, “follows the words”, therefore developing strategies to “represent the song’s meanings”: the catalogue of ideas and effects on “Yellow Submarine”, for instance, with the water sounds, the sailors’ pantomimes (“Full speed ahead”, “Drop the cable”…) the band that “begins to play”, and so forth, is a perfect example. In the latter case, the production “follows the structure”, that is, enacts the intrinsically musical narrative that the song format itself dictates. For instance, in the paragraph about multimodality, we referred to “Let It Be” as a case of enhancement (i.e., richer instrumentation and dynamics in the refrain): moving from a strophe to a refrain by means of enhancement is a classic “narrative” move for production. To make another example, introducing an instrumental and/or vocal break before an upbeat/energetic part is another of such strategies, because it metaphorically corresponds to “catching a breath” or “taking a run up” before a race or a jump. The beginning (and subsequent breaks) of “Paperback Writer” is an appropriate instance of this kind: the words “paperback writer” suggests nothing in the direction of running, jumping or the likes, so the narrative structure has nothing to do with the lyrics. Yet, hearing that suspended part with a spotlight on the vocals, and hearing what immediately follows (McCartney’s roaring guitar riff played on his Epiphone Casino), we clearly get a “ready, steady, go” type of feeling, with the song taking off in correspondence of the strophes. 2. In the graphic type, shots are juxtaposed not on narrative grounds, but aesthetic ones. Associations can be made by color, sound, shape, or anything that has more a formal value than a specific role in the story. It goes without saying, a role in the story exists anyway, because those associations still contribute to the overall meaning and significance of the text – in fact they tend to add more of them, or to entertain some kind of dialogue with them. When it comes to production, we can probably say that the “graphic type” is the most typical strategy, or at least

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the one presenting most episodes within a single production. Indeed, in its basic assumption, production remains a process of “putting sounds together” in order to produce an aesthetically satisfying result. Criteria that contribute to this process are at least the following: • available resources – what the band can play, instrumentation/software present in the premises, budget at the band’s disposal, competences possessed and shared in the studio; • personal taste – of the band, of the producer, of the engineers; • genres/styles of reference – it is not a rule, but whenever a song – or a whole band  – is identifiable within a certain stylistic paradigm, the production choices tend to be made accordingly: e.g., it is not easy to imagine a a-ha song without synths. Similarly, the early Beatles productions were heavily adapted to their guitar band line-up, with only occasional additions like George Martin’s piano; • historical/technological variables  – the whole question of mono and stereo recordings in The Beatles’ career, with the early rudimentary stereo mixes based on the simple splitting of the channels, up to Abbey Road, the first album to be mixed straight in stereo; • geographical/cultural influences  – The Beatles often complained that the American records, especially the Motown ones, had a much deeper bass sound, so in time they tried to achieve that quality. To make an example that encompasses more than one category, we could take the case of the piccolo trumpet solo on “Penny Lane” that we already mentioned in Sect. 1.3. In this case, first and foremost, we have an aesthetic choice: a piccolo trumpet playing a Bach-inspired solo has nothing intrinsically (narratively) to do with the Liverpool district Paul McCartney is referring to in his song. What comes into play, instead, is at least the following: a number of available resources (enough money to hire a guest musician, McCartney’s instinctive sense of melody, Martin’s ability to transcribe that melody, etc.), personal taste (McCartney had come up with the idea after enjoying the Brandenburg Concerto on TV), genre references (the song operates within the realm of so-called Baroque rock, that The Beatles themselves had contributed to initiate through “For No One”), and obviously geographical/cultural aspects (as the song flirts with European art music, taking therefore a more intellectual edge). 3. Finally, in the ideational type, montage serves that purpose so cleverly described by Eisenstein with his comparison to Japanese characters: the juxtaposition/sum of two (or more) elements generates a new meaning, an idea, a metaphor, or else. This type mostly corresponds to the case of “emergence” in multimodality, so we shall not reiterate it here. The other important theory on montage that we would like to apply to production comes from Eisenstein. The Soviet director has been not only one of the major exponents of the montage technique, but also one of its main theorists. Not many great artists in recent history have been equally great as art researchers and theorists,

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but Eisenstein was certainly one. Books and essays such as The Film Sense and Film Form (published in English in 1942 and 1949 respectively) are excellent filmological works that established a true paradigm for montage theory. Eisenstein’s theory of montage is “dialectical”: it is characterized by confrontation and conflict between the items involved. Montage can be seen as the creation of a theme from the juxtaposition of specific details. Spectators (in our case, listeners) need also to employ their own encyclopedia to interpret the result of such confrontation, and interface it with the “suggestion” of the author. In this way, the author and the spectator/listener cooperate in creating the text’s narrative and aesthetic structure. We have briefly encountered the expression “encyclopedia” earlier in a footnote, where we mentioned the definition that Umberto Eco gives of it. Perhaps we may now elaborate a bit on the concept: In Umberto Eco’s semiotics, the encyclopedia is a multidimensional space of semiosis. It is a complex system of shared knowledge that governs the production and interpretation of signs inside communicative contexts. Every semiotic act involves the elements that form the encyclopedia. By means of several examples and comparisons with different semiotic theories, my paper aims to show how semiosis is governed by semantic categorizations, pragmatic rules, and narrative frames that the encyclopedia articulates and makes operative for interpreters and producers of signs. (Desogus 2012: 501)

What does this mean in practice? As we have already seen in relation to “graphic montage”, there are several elements concurring to production choices: competences, resources, personal taste, geography, history, culture… Now, the same applies to the way a listener “reads” a musical piece. Their listening experience (which is, ultimately, an “interpretation of signs”) is affected by several factors that constitute the totality of their knowledge. That, among other things, helps avoiding the feeling that every listening experience is tabula rasa. The listener already possesses a vague idea of what to expect and what kind of direction the song can take, and ideally, the perfect experience is a balanced concertation of familiar and surprising elements, which is the oldest idea there is on art. As Aristotle already argued about tragedy, a work of art must be at the same time parà ten dóxan (unexpected, unpredictable, contrary to common beliefs) and katà to eikòs (believable, having verisimilitude). In other words, the artistic message should be able to surprise, to amaze its receiver, but at the same time it cannot prevent its receiver from “accepting” it as true-to-life and from identifying themself with it, and consequently, empathizing, an aspect which recalls the ideas of pleasure, emotion, and beauty. In brief, the artistic message must be credible in its incredibility. This is mostly because no surprise can occur if there is no layer of reality with which to oppose it. A song that is produced in an entirely predictable, familiar way may be liked at a first listen, but will be soon boring, quickly forgotten, and easily confused with many other similar instances (it is the classic comment that cultivated music lovers make when they listen to the songs in a Top 40 format radio program: “They all sound the same!!!”). On the other hand, if the production is unpredictable and unfamiliar, the song may be experienced as abstruse and unpleasant – or at least as needing a lot of time and patience to be finally agreeable to the ears. Plus, paradoxically, the surprising effect may be damaged, as there would be no ground of familiarity upon which the surprise could

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stand out. The power of the cacophonic crescendo on “A Day in the Life” is not only in the crescendo itself, but in the fact that it appears after Lennon’s catchy folk-rock stanzas, just like the surrealistic anomalies in Magritte’s paintings (e.g., a flying green apple covering a face) are implanted in perfectly credible contexts (a gentleman in a coat and bowler hat). Back to Eco’s concept of encyclopedia, the music listener approaches the listening experience with this set of competences gathered by themself and transmitted culturally/historically/socially/etc. If they listen to a yet-unknown Beatles song, they will expect to “recognize” certain elements but also to be “surprised” by others. For many of our generation (both Martinelli and Bucciarelli were born in the 1970s), that was the case with “Free as a Bird”, the 1994 song that the three then-living Beatles, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr built on a late 1970s demo by Lennon and released for Anthology I. Many of us expected and recognized a certain way of formulating the melody, of playing the instruments, of singing the backing vocals, and of course all of us experienced new things, starting from the song itself (some already knew Lennon’s demo, but there were anyway new bits co-written by Harrison and McCartney). However, more interestingly, there were numerous ingredients that were a perfect balance between parà ten dóxan and katà to eikòs: George Harrison’s lead guitar, for instance, was an unmistakable Harrisonesque slide solo, and yet many of us knew that this was a technique that he mastered only after the band’s breakup, starting from his 1970 seminal All Things Must Pass. By knowing only the Beatles’ catalogue, the listener might have not found the slide solo particularly pertinent,20 but having an extended encyclopedia of what the single members made after the breakup, suddenly Harrison’s solo acquired a more familiar feel. Or: the fact that the song had leading vocal parts from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Each singer was perfectly recognizable in timbre and style (Lennon’s sharp and slightly sleepy voice, McCartney’s warmth and linearity, Harrison’s thinner and slightly trembling quality), and yet there had never been a single song where the three of them had traded leading vocals. Or: Jeff Lynne’s production. Surprising in its diversity with Martin’s production, and in the fact that Lynne had never been a Beatles’ producer, and yet familiar to Beatles fans in at least two ways: the heavily Beatlesque nature of many Electric Light Orchestra songs, and his extensive cooperation with Ringo Starr and George Harrison, notably on the latter’s album Cloud Nine (arguably, the most Beatlesque of his solo career). And so on and so forth. Now, the strength of montage, in Eisenstein’s vision (and by now in everybody’s vision), lies in this cooperation that embodies the spectator’s emotions and intellect into the actual creative process of the author. The spectator will not only see the represented elements of the finished text, but will also experience the dynamic process of ideation and manufacture of that representation, as experienced by the author themself. Eisenstein developed five specific typologies of montage, which still today constitute the core of montage theory:  And, apparently, McCartney himself was worried about this. As the idea for a slide solo came up during the recording sessions, he admits having thought “Oh no, it’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ again!” (Leng 2006: 278) 20

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1. Metric montage. This typology is characterized by the juxtaposition of film bits in which the main criterion for construction is the actual length of the various bits. Each bit is joined together relying purely on the physical nature of time, cutting to the next bit no matter what is happening within the image (or the sound). The length of the bits can be also mathematically calculated according to a metric formula: the lengths as such may vary, but they maintain the original proportions of the formula, obtaining (depending on the case, and therefore on the formula) a wide range of emotions, from serenity to tension, from a slow pace to a frenetic one. A metric approach may not be the most common strategy in production, but, browsing through the Beatles’ catalogue, we find an excellent example in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, namely the employment of the various loops that McCartney prepared at home and brought to the studio, as he likes to recall, in a tiny plastic bag. In assembling the tapes for Lennon’s song, each loop was inserted in the recording in accordance with its own length, with no specific connection to any given point of the song, and with no time manipulation that would slow it down or speed it up. If more of each loop was needed, it would be simply repeated. For instance, one of the most recognizable loops, the distorted guitars sounding like seagulls (Lewisohn 1988: 72), appeared five times in the song, always in different places: at the beginning, before Lennon starts singing, right after the verse “surrender to the void”, in the middle of the solo, during the verse “listen to the color of your dreams” (where it is played three times), and during the long “of the beginning” coda (where it is played six times). 2. Rhythmic Montage. In this typology, the length of the bit is not established by a pre-determined formula, but rather derives from the specifics of the bit itself and the sequence in general. Tension can be achieved by the confrontation between the length of the bit and the movement within it. Unlike the metric type, a rhythmic type of production is one of the most common strategies, since, once again, songs display an immanent narrative structure through their form. Instruments, for example, may appear and disappear depending on the length of each part. If we take a relatively simple production like “Rocky Raccoon” for instance, we see that McCartney’s acoustic guitar, with the help of Starr’s drums and Lennon’s bass, drives the song throughout its entire duration, but the honky-­ tonk piano (played by Martin) appears and disappears in exact correspondence of the scat “Da-d’da-d’da-da…” refrain. 3. Tonal Montage. This typology uses the emotional meaning of the various bits. In this case, we do not just have a manipulation of their temporal length or rhythmical characteristics, but we aim at eliciting a more complex reaction, and therefore the guidelines, here, are tone and mood, rather than time and tempo. A good example, in this case, could be the production for “Honey Pie”. Thematically and lyrically, the song is one of McCartney’s typical “fictional love songs”: the addressee is a Northern English (Liverpool?) working class girl who “hit the big time” in Hollywood and probably became an actress in musicals (“Come and show me the magic of your Hollywood song”). However, the addresser and subjective narrator misses her and wants her to come back, because he sort of cannot be bothered to travel to America himself (“I’m in love but I’m lazy, so

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won’t you please come home?”). Nowhere in the song do we find an indication of when the story is happening: from what we know, any time from 1911 (the birth of Nestor Film Company, the first Hollywood studio ever) to 1968 (when the song was written) is acceptable. But! The song, musically speaking, has a distinctive music hall/vaudeville/ manouche flavor, and belongs to that specific sub-group of retro songs in McCartney’s catalogue, in which he clearly homages the musical upbringing inherited through his father, an amateur jazz musician (sub-group including at least “Good Day Sunshine”, “When I’m Sixty-Four”, “Your Mother Should Know”, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, “Suicide”, “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance”, “You Gave Me the Answer”, “Baby’s Request”, “Goodnight Princess” and “English Tea”). This characteristic can not only provide a musical style and identity, but it affects the thematic aspects as well. Suddenly, the story gets a temporal location, in the whereabouts of 1920s and 1930s; the girl can be pictured with the features of one of the actresses of early musicals, a sort of Ginger Rogers; the ship she is asked to sail on looks now like one of those huge “Screw Steamer” ocean liners of those times. In other words, a kind of “good old days” nostalgic mood is set, and that is where “tonal production” kicks in. Most decisions in that song are concerted to recreate, and even to quote specifically that atmosphere. We have a saxophone and clarinet section to give a “big band” feel, we have Lennon’s guitar solo in Django Reinhardt mode (rightly rated as one of Lennon’s most remarkable guitar performances, along with his work on “Get Back”), we have the line “Now she’s hit the big time” heavily compressed and equalized against the crackling sounds of an old 78 rpm vinyl record, we have the same McCartney launching old-fashioned crooners’ comments to the musicians (“I like it like that!”), etc. 4. Overtonal Montage. This typology combines metric, rhythmic, and tonal montages together. Each element from each of the three types derives from each other, aiming at inducing an emotional effect from the audience. Bringing together the various montage methods propels a level of conflict, with each method developing from the other. When the audience is caught into a different range of emotions at the same time that go beyond the “direct” emotion/s created at tonal level, the text will have successfully created an overtonal montage. Things get more complex here, evidently, and that is why we shall offer a more detailed account that would also illustrate more carefully what our chosen song tried to achieve thematically. We shall do so in the next section. 5. Intellectual Montage. This fifth and final typology level of montage aims at moving the spectator not physiologically (like the other four), but psychologically. That is usually achieved by rhetorical associations and contrasts like metaphors, symbols, and the likes. The emphasis is not upon particular characteristics of the bits as such, but the intellectual process, which they may activate by the way they are assembled, positioned, etc. The process is often predetermined by the director’s personal style, ideology, and “vision”, and therefore tends to metaphorically talk about the director themself as much as it talks about the actual film. When we discussed the styles of George Martin, Phil Spector, and

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Jeff Lynne in Sect. 4.5.1, we referred exactly to how the last two approach/ed. production in a more self-referential way. For example, the fact that Lynne loves to add a descending lick (usually performed by an electric guitar, but not necessarily) at the end of some phrase, often during a strophe or a bridge, is a result of an “intellectual” process. Lynne does not think in terms of a particular song as a unique item, with its unique structure, contents, modes of expression, emotional aspects. He rather has his own model of production, and a general concept of how a song should sound, and tends to apply them more often than not, making his productions recognizable as his own.

4.6 Case-Study: The Fool on the Hill Overtonal montage is a combination of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montages together, in a symbiosis that allows each element to “feed” from each other, with the common goal of eliciting the audience’s emotional response in the most encompassing way. Somehow definable as cinema at its most intense and articulated, this particular result – we maintain – is also what The Beatles at their most mature career stage (between 1966 and 1969, arguably) tried to achieve with more conviction in their productions. A form of “production poetry” that would fit a song not only with the purpose of making it sound as attractive and refined as possible, but also of representing the full catalogue of emotions, themes and formal subtleties embodied in the composition. Once packaged that way, the song is delivered to the audience with the widest range of interpretive possibilities, that the listener can also implement with their own experience and, again, encyclopedia  – a process for which, incidentally, The Beatles are particularly celebrated for: making a personal message sound universal is probably one of the key-factors that contributed to the band’s enormous impact on Western culture. Paul McCartney wrote the song “Let It Be” after he had had a dream in which his late mother Mary was reassuring him that everything would be fine, and that whatever struggle he was going through, he just would have to “let it be”. As we can see, the circumstances in which this song was written were very personal, with even a specific name mentioned (“…Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be…”), and yet we all know “Let It Be” as an anthem with a universal message that everybody can relate to and apply to their own situation. All of us have good reasons to let something be, accept the difficulties in our life and move on. So: we all need “Let It Be” at some point, and that is the moment  – following Pablo Neruda’s famous definition of poetry as something belonging to those who use it – when “Let It Be” becomes ours. Following once again Umberto Eco’s invaluable work, this process/interaction of transmission and interpretation of the artistic message is something that draws fully from literally any available “material” in the artwork. Anything we “hear” in a song, but also anything we associate it with, anything we know already, anything we learn moving forward, are all carriers of meaning. A meaning is never manifested in

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itself: it always needs one or more signs (which are determined either naturally or culturally) to “carry” it. In Eco’s view, interpretation works in three main ways. 1. Signifiers acquire proper meaning only through contextual interaction. In the light of the context, we (the listeners) find that in some respects the signifiers grow progressively clearer, and in other respects more ambiguous: we understand a given meaning, but, as this happens, further interpretive options are possible. Also, if one modifies a single element of the context, the others are affected too (Eco 1968: 64). To some extent, then, the work of art functions as a hypertext that, once a concept is clarified, it brings more doubts, forcing the reader to perform a further decoding task. The key words here are thus interaction and context. 2. The relationship between signifier and signified. Analyzing and understanding the actual relation between signifier and signified is central in the process of interpretation (Eco 1968: 64). First of all, the matter which signifiers are made of seems not to be arbitrary when compared to their meaning and their contextual relation. Second, the familiarity between two signs, in terms of meaning, can be enforced through certain strategies, like, for example, the familiarity of rhymes in lyrics. Third, the structure of the sign itself seems to re-propose the evoked sense (like onomatopoeias within the domain of the sign’s sound). Fourth and last, the entire set-up of the signifiers, organized according to a given proportion, realizes a sound and visual rhythm that is not arbitrary in comparison with their meaning. 3. The message and levels of reality. The message can put various levels of reality into discussion (Eco 1968: 64). A work of art is characterized by an extraordinary eclecticism, involving several variables, not only those predictably related to its denotation (that is, its literal meaning), but also to the various connotations; the meanings that are associated, for whatever reason. Let us not forget that the artistic message is “ambiguous” in principle, and ambiguity is the other keyword, here. In other words, we cannot interpret a song only on the basis of what the song itself expresses: we also need to attach cultural aspects, emotional aspects, political aspects, the author’s background, and anything that might provide additional meanings. If this is clear at least in principle, we may proceed to discuss all these aspects within a single song, this time trying to encompass the whole artistic process, from composition to post-production. It is a case-study that, while more directly intended to illustrate the concept of “overtonal production”, we intend to use as a more general excuse to wrap up all the reflections we have shared in this monograph, so far. The song is “The Fool on the Hill”.

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4.6.1 Creation and Production “The Fool on the Hill” is a song composed and recorded by The Beatles in 1967. Initially only an EP, it was included on the album Magical Mystery Tour, which was famously a recording project linked to a TV movie lasting about an hour and broadcast by the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. The film, a bizarre collage of musical moments and others of rather surreal comedy, is a typical product of the psychedelic era, peppered with vaguely experimental moments, a somewhat amateurish approach, and a narrative structure that is anything but linear or steady. Criticized at the time, the film was later partially re-evaluated, mainly thanks to its contribution to the development of modern video clips. In this case, the sequence of “The Fool on the Hill” is among the most frequently appreciated, thanks to its more professional attitude, compared to the rest of the film, and the strong sense of continuity of the music with the images (we see Paul McCartney, in the role of the “fool”, walking, jumping or simply contemplating the sun on a hill near Nice). Signed by Lennon-McCartney, the song is actually the almost exclusive result of McCartney’s creativity, and his authorship is vital here, because, as we will see, many authorial elements are typical of his way of approaching songwriting. Most or all of these elements will then merge into the actual production. In the song, besides being the lead singer, McCartney also played the piano (the main instrument in the arrangement), his customary bass, plus two flutes – a penny whistle and a common recorder; with which he performed the solo in the middle of the piece, and whose basics, apparently, he had learned thanks to a quick lesson received by the mother of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher. John Lennon played a harmonica, an acoustic guitar, and even a harp (which we hear at the end of the third refrain). George Harrison also recorded an acoustic guitar part and a harmonica part. The latter instrument, in particular, should be kept in mind, as we will mention it later for the particular role it plays in the transitional parts between strophe and refrain. Finally, Ringo Starr had his classic role of percussionist, with a drum part, a maracas part and a finger cymbals part, an instrument of ancient tradition already present among the Egyptians and the Assyrians. The song also made use of additional wind parts, woodwinds, in this case, played by professional performers Christopher Taylor, Richard Taylor and Jack Ellory. Among other things, “The Fool on the Hill” belongs to a group of songs particularly dear to its author. McCartney performed the piece live on several occasions: on the 1979 UK tour (with Wings), and on several solo world tours, from 1989–90 onwards. With the support of the ever-precious Lewisohn (1988: 126–130), we can compile a sort of production diary of the song. The song’s demo was recorded on September 6, 1967, and the actual recording sessions took place from September 25 (the first four takes) until October 20 (when the sixth take was labeled “best”). The mono mixing took place five days later, while the stereo mixing was made on November 1: as we know, the year of 1967 still constituted a transitional stage between mono and stereo, and post-productions always had to consider two

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markets. The session producer, it goes without saying, was George Martin, while Richard Lush and Ken Scott sat at the mixing desk and acted as engineers. On September 25, the band laid down the basic rhythm track, Lennon and Harrison’s harmonicas, McCartney’s recorder and lead vocal (eventually overdubbed) and Starr’s drums. The next day, Take 4 was subject to reduction into what became Take 5, and numerous overdubs, resulting, in among other things, an extension of length from 3′50″ to 4′25″, which was finally edited down to 2′57″ in the final mix, giving the song the length we now know. Among the instruments added on this day, most of which replacing what was recorded the day before, were a piano, two acoustic guitars, drums, bass, and another lead vocal. Ken Scott took charge of the session, due to Martin’s absence on this particular day. On September 27, a day mostly devoted to the complex “I Am the Walrus”, there was little work done on “The Fool on the Hill”: another vocal track and a mono remix of the work made so far, which was considered good enough to be labelled “best”. Nothing else happened until October 20, when the three flautists, Christopher Taylor, Richard Taylor, and Jack Ellory, were summoned to record their part (resulting thus in Take 6 of the song). On October 25, Take 6 was subject to mono mixing (which, as we said, also included a reduction in the track’s length to 2 minutes and 57 seconds). The stereo mixing was performed on November 1, with another (final) mono mixing on November 7. “The Fool on the Hill”, as part of the Magical Mystery Tour, was released in two formats: Extended Play (EP) – as originally intended by the band, and initially in the UK; and Long Playing (LP) initially in America, where it was decided to offer a full album that would include also five successful non-album tracks that had been previously released only as singles. Curiously, the American “re-adaptation” was released first, on November 27, while the EP hit the stores on December 8. Eventually, due to both its more traditional format and most of all to the fact that it made hits like “Penny Lane” and “All You Need Is Love” available on an album, the American version turned out to become a regular entry in the Beatles’ discography, much more than the EP (e.g., most of the times the catalogue is subject to remastering, limited editions, anniversary special packages and the likes, it is the album to be featured).

4.6.2 What Kind of Fool Was the Fool on the Hill? In a specific essay on the representations of mental illness in The Beatles repertoire, published in 1999, Inglis-Hames formulate two possible interpretations regarding the kind of folly described in “The Fool on the Hill”. According to the first one, and with particular reference to the passage “the man of a thousand voices”, the authors suggest a representation of a schizophrenic subject; in the second one, instead, a more generic idiot savant is hypothesized, the crazy-yet-wise man who appears in so many works of literature and mythology.

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Always paying attention to the indications of the text, it would not be entirely daring to think also of an autistic subject: indeed, this fool reveals an apparent indifference towards the outside (“he never listens to them”, “he never shows his feelings” …), and at the same time a rich inner cognitive activity (“the eyes in his head”, “he knows that they’re the fools” …), a duality that is often associated with autism. All these conditions could then be associated with all those manifestations that have a certain vocal inarticulation (“the sound he appears to make” seems to describe this precisely). Having said that, our belief is that McCartney did not have any particular handicap in mind, but simply intended to offer a general representation of a subject marginalized by the community because of being considered or “diagnosed” abnormal, weird  – probably “retarded”, at least according to some passages that seem to describe that kind of “difference from the norm”, usually thought of as a mental handicap (the insane is “perfectly still”, displays a “foolish grin”, and so on). But more than anything else, the handicap that appears in the song, far from being the result of a clinical picture, is much more clearly the expression of an anthropological (and consequently artistic-literary) topos: that of the village fool, or – indeed – of the idiot savant. These are two figures often merged in literature and popular myth on the one hand  – think of the many Shakespearean fools, Don Quixote, Steinbeck’s Lennie Small and so on – and in popular music itself on the other: “All the Madmen” by David Bowie, “Madman Across the Water” by Elton John, “Fool’s Overture” by Supertramp, etc., up to repeated examples in Pink Floyd, where we even find explicit recognition of the catalyst role of “The Fool on the Hill” in this little authorial tradition. Indeed, if we listen to the song “One of My Turns”, contained on the album The Wall, we find that melody and text open in an identical way as the Beatles piece, that is, with the words “Day after day”, and with the same melodic and rhythmic phrasing on the third of the major scale. Impossible to think of a coincidence, especially knowing the author Roger Waters’ admiration for, and influence from, The Beatles. At any rate, in a broader sense and regardless of specific hypotheses, “The Fool on the Hill” adopts the device of handicap, real or perceived, as a tool of representation of otherness and marginalization. Consistent with the aforementioned mythical-­ literary topos, but also with the hippie philosophy of those years, the handicap is in fact a metaphor for uniqueness, personal freedom, and a particular type of outside-­ the-­box wisdom that operates beyond conventions  – so “far out” that it ends up being mistaken for stupidity. Not surprisingly, many images of the song lead to an idea of ​a crazy “visionary” who is marginalized by a narrowminded community: “they don’t like him”, “they can see that he’s just a fool”, but also “he knows that they’re the fools”. Therefore, if we cannot identify a specific type of folly (and it is better this way, because a song in “medical report” format would never have reached the poetic heights of “The Fool on the Hill”), we can try to understand whom, specifically or once again generally, McCartney referred to, in describing this character. We have already implied three more general hypotheses. As we said, there is the possibility that the passage described the literary-mythological fools embodied by the idiot

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savant and/or the village idiot. In this sense, it would also be appropriate to speak of the “idealization of handicap”: already in the nineteenth century, John Langdon Down had identified with the expression “Savant Syndrome” a series of cognitive delays associated with one or more particular abilities and above the norm in a specific activity; an aspect that we have often seen celebrated in films like Rain Man or novels like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In “The Fool on the Hill”, the particular skill would probably be the ability to understand the meaning of life in a deeper way than ordinary people – a quality that emerges clearly from images such as “keeping perfectly still”, “the eyes in his head see the world spinning round”, and from the aforementioned awareness that the fools are the others. Secondly, and almost consequently, the fool could be “the misunderstood genius”, the visionary who is ahead of his time and who can never be recognized by his contemporaries, who are in fact afraid of him and marginalize him. Thirdly – or still secondly, but in a more detailed and historically-circumscribed sense – there could be a reference to the hippie movement and to the underground-alternative culture of the second half of the Sixties, which generated more than a few “visionaries” (starting with The Beatles themselves, whose genius, however, was surely understood, judging by their fame), and in various areas of arts and culture. At this point of the band’s career, McCartney was the member of the group most interested in musical and artistic experimentation movements in general. The only one of the group to still be a bachelor and living in the heart of London (the other three had settled in lavish estates of the Surrey County), McCartney fully absorbed the countercultural climate of the so-called “Swinging London” of those times. All this, plus the less “legal” aspects of the counterculture of the period, in particular the hallucinogenic drugs, which the whole group indulged in at that time. Right at the beginning of 1967, among other things, McCartney had given an interview for the television program Scene Special, in which he openly took a stand in defense of the counterculture in terms easily associated with the contents of the song we are analyzing here. Aware of the opposition from the more conservative parts of society, McCartney made a plea that the various hippies, freakouts, avant-­ garde and experimenting people, could one day be looked at without any prejudice, as people who, after all, want what everyone wants (freedom to express themselves), and who simply try to do it outside the conventions, rather than within them. Excerpts from this interview are easily found on platforms such as YouTube, but perhaps it may be a good idea to report a key passage here: I really wish the people that look sort of in anger at the ‘weirdos,’ at the happenings, at the psychedelic freak-out, would instead of just looking with anger-- just look with nothing; with no feeling; be unbiased about it. They really don’t realize that what these people are talking about is something that they really want themselves. It’s something that everyone wants. You know, it’s personal freedom, to be able to talk and be able to say things-– And it’s dead straight! It’s a real sort of basic pleasure for everyone. But it looks weird from the outside. (Spangler 1997)

It is precisely in passages like this that we seem to recognize the fool on the hill, the one at whom everyone looks with irritation and prejudice, but who instead only wants to express himself, and does not want anything “strange” or “retarded”. If, on

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the other hand, we enter more specifically the career and personality of the author (or of the whole band), we can attempt at least four hypotheses of identification: 1. The Beatles themselves. “Visionaries of the hippie era” in their own right, the Fab Four had already released a track in which they had declared their diversity from established patterns and conventions. We are obviously referring to “Strawberry Fields Forever”, this time by John Lennon, and in particular to verses such as “No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low”. Through those words, Lennon had assigned himself a (intellectual, emotional, artistic …) position of diversity from the norm, also trying not to appear too arrogant about it, that the tree can be too high or too low: as if to say that it is not a question of superiority, but simply of being in a different place from the rest of the community. “The Fool on the Hill”, in a sense is McCartney’s variant to “Strawberry Fields Forever”: it is probably no coincidence that in both pieces a context is emphasized (here, a hill, there the “Strawberry fields” park and specifically a tree) that is not only mere location of the protagonist, but also a place of the mind. We shall return to this. 2. The fool could be McCartney himself, but not so much to the extent of his diversity/genius but rather within the sphere of character and communication. Unlike Lennon himself, whose authorship was heavily centered on expressing his feelings (not surprisingly, the majority of Lennon’s pieces are in the first person – including “Strawberry Fields Forever”), McCartney found it easier to express himself in a less direct way, often using the shield of a fictional third-­person story (such as “The Fool on the Hill”, indeed). By his own admission, McCartney, like the fool, “never shows his feelings”. The song could therefore be the metaphor of a very lively but rarely externalized, and thus often misunderstood, inner world. 3. In the biography Many Years from Now, McCartney himself offers us two further options, precise and vague at the same time, in that they indicate an inspiration contextualized in time and space, but without specifically answering the question “who was the fool on the hill?”. In the first case we have none other than the “fool” card in the tarot: I used to know Marijke [Koger],21 she was a quite striking-looking girl. She used to read my fortune in Tarot cards, which was something I wasn’t too keen on because I didn’t want to draw the death card one day. I still don’t like that kind of stuff because I know my mind will dwell on it. I always steered a bit clear of all that shit, but in fact it always used to come out as the Fool. And I used to say, “Oh, dear!” and she used to say, “No no no. The Fool’s a very good card. On the surface it looks stupid, the Fool, but in fact it’s one of the best cards, because it’s the innocent, it’s the child, it’s that reading of fool.” So I began to like the word “fool”, because I began to see through the surface meaning. I wrote “The Fool on the Hill” out of that experience of seeing Tarot cards. (Miles 1997: 343)

 Marijke Koger was one of the members of the Dutch design collective “The Fool”, a group of hippie artists who collaborated with The Beatles on numerous occasions, by designing clothes, decorating instruments, painting Lennon’s Rolls Royce in psychedelic patterns and other such. 21

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4. Later in the same book, McCartney also refers to the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with whom the Beatles famously took a course in transcendental meditation in 1968. “The Fool on the Hill” was written shortly after first meeting with the guru, which took place in Wales in August 1967. I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously. It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to. I remember once hearing about a hermit who missed the Second World War because he’d been in a cave in Italy, and that always appealed to me. (Miles 1997, p. 365)

It is true that the Maharishi possessed a rather peculiar, almost cartoonesque giggle. It may not be excluded that the “foolish grin” of the song referred to that. In any case, as we said before, this and the previous quote account for “inspirations” and not necessarily direct references. To be clear, “The Fool on the Hill” is not a song about the Maharishi and it is not a song about a tarot card: both subjects rather operate as ideas and creative resources employed to develop a broader and more impersonal discourse. 5. Another possible reference, also suggested directly by the author, can be found in the aforementioned 1989–90 world tour, where “The Fool on the Hill” was regularly performed live. As argued elsewhere (Martinelli 2017: 147), the year 1989, and more precisely the Flowers in the Dirt album, marked the beginning of a more political phase in Paul McCartney’s repertoire and public image, a phase in which songs and statements of social and environmental protest appeared and in which the singer lent his fame to support various campaigns, especially animal rights. Without turning upside down his happy-go-lucky and optimistic image (to be clear, he did not turn into Pete Seeger), McCartney voiced his opinion on some public issues particularly dear to him, louder and more often than he had ever done before. It is in this context that, when including “The Fool on the Hill” in his concert setlist, he decided to give a socially committed connotation to the fool, showing, during the performances of the piece, the images of another visionary who was so “misunderstood” in life that he ended up being murdered: Martin Luther King. During the song’s coda (that “round round round” sung ad libitum) an excerpt from the famous Washington speech of 1963, known to all as the “I have a dream” speech was also played.

4.6.3 The Authorial Context Earlier in this book we discussed some of the authorial staples in Lennon and McCartney, emphasizing differences and complementarities between the two. We shall briefly resume those considerations and apply them to the specific case of “The Fool on the Hill”. Whether or not we succeed in assigning a precise identity to the fool, the fact remains that the most likely hypothesis is that of a general and impersonal representation: the personification of an idea, rather than the idealization

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of a person. This, as we have seen, conforms perfectly to McCartney’s modus operandi in the drafting of a song’s lyrics. In discussing McCartney’s songwriting in Sect. 4.1, we isolated some fundamental traits, which we shall reiterate here, trying to underline those to which “The Fool on the Hill” particularly refers. At the level of authorial models, McCartney’s influences include the American tradition of Tin Pan Alley (from which McCartney draws a taste for texts that are generally simple in contents, but meticulous in form, especially metrically and phonetically22); rockers more inclined to a narrative approach (such as Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins); and finally classical English literature (especially Charles Dickens, from whom McCartney imported the inclination to develop eventful and character-filled stories). Needless to say, in “The Fool on the Hill” the influence that stands out is the literary one, especially when considering the description of a type of character that literature has turned into a true topos. The narration, returning to Casetti’s terminology, is decidedly “steady”, that is, intelligible and linear. The point of view is objective/ omniscient (the narrator understands both the feelings of the fool and those of the community, although he clearly sides with the former) and the story is told in the third person. All these are typical characteristics of McCartney’s songwriting, which, as we said, tends to be less personal and autobiographical than Lennon’s, or it is “personal” in a much more mediated and subtle way (in the same “The Fool on the Hill” we speculated that the fool could be McCartney himself in disguise). In this regard, we also made a more intimately semiotic reference to the Greimasian modalities of being and doing, highlighting how John Lennon’s texts were much more often expressions of a state of mind and a feeling (being, for precisely), while those of McCartney more frequently present events, “things that happen” (do), assigning to these the task to outline an emotional profile too. In this sense, “The Fool on the Hill” represents a compromise between the two modes, pushing McCartney into a territory less usual for him (but far from alien – just think of “Yesterday”) – that of describing emotions and sensations directly. To be clear, if in “Eleanor Rigby” we understand that the protagonist is lonely and poor because she “picks up the rice in a church where [somebody else’s] wedding has been” (that is: an action that implies a condition), in “The Fool on the Hill” we understand that people despise the fool because the text tells us exactly that people despise the fool. It is definitely not McCartney trying to do a Lennon-type of song, but we come closer to his partner’s profile than on any other occasion. Insisting on the narrative aspect, central in “The Fool on the Hill”, as in most of McCartney’s songs, is the descriptive nature of the lyrics (again, a Dickensian feature); the fictional but verisimilar story, and that touch of surrealism that the author has always loved: not a total alteration of reality, but the introduction of one or a few imaginary and often illogical elements in an otherwise likely context. This particular fool on this particular hill does not exist specifically, but there is nothing  “Silly Love Songs” may occasionally be referred to as one his corniest sets of lyrics, and yet this is a song where we find delicacies such as “Love doesn’t come in a minute/I only know the way I’m in it”, a sheer celebration of the joy of rhymes and assonances. 22

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in the story that in principle cannot happen in reality. Not surprisingly, in the Magical Mystery Tour film, McCartney interprets the character very simply, without resorting to special effects. Everything that happens in “Eleanor Rigby” is perfectly plausible, but when the old Eleanor wears “the face that she keeps in a jar by the door” we understand that we have entered the territory of Breton and Dalì. In “The Fool on the Hill” the use of surrealist images is less accentuated, but still present, if we think of the eyes “in his head” and the fact that they can see the rotation of the Earth. Finally, a note on the themes, which we will deepen in the next section. Putting aside the many love songs, which he approaches both with an autobiographical approach or, more often, through imaginary stories, McCartney, especially from 1965 onwards (a turning point in the group’s compositional maturity, as we have repeatedly seen), outlined with ever greater clarity his personal poetics, based on a group of recurring themes, which includes hope and empowerment (“Blackbird”, “Let It Be”, “Hope of Deliverance”…), loneliness (“Eleanor Rigby”, “Another Day”, “Single Pigeon”…), escapism (“Two of Us”, “Band on the Run”, “Bluebird”…), the love for nature and for animals (“Mother Nature’s Son”, “Heart of the Country”, “Wild Life”…), and individual freedom, often reaffirmed with a touch of resentment towards those who try to limit it (“Fixing a Hole”, “Angry”, “Get Out of My Way”…). “The Fool on the Hill” evidently is relevant in at least three cases (or themes): loneliness, escapism and individual freedom. In the next section we will see how.

4.6.4 Themes, Structure, and Imagery Trying to collect and systematize the various contents present in the song, it seems clear that “The Fool on the Hill” plays with the interaction of three fundamental themes. The first is clearly that of discrimination and loneliness: the fool lives on his own on this hill (“day after day, alone on a hill”), and is clearly despised and marginalized by the community (“nobody wants to know him”, “ they don’t like him”…). They are, discrimination and loneliness, two sides of the same coin: the fool lives by himself because he is discriminated, and he is discriminated because he lives by himself – in the sense of unique, sui generis. The second theme is that of incommunicability: the fool and the community are evidently not synced on the same level of mutual understanding, as passages such as “nobody ever hears him, or the sound he appears to make” certify. Finally, the third theme is that of social prejudice. Significantly, the text does not tell us that no one is able to know him, but rather that “no one wants to know him”, and the reason is even more interesting: “they can see that he’s just a fool”. That is, the community has already stigmatized the fool and has no intention of verifying whether there is any truth in their preconception. The fool is not so much a “clinically insane” subject, but rather a visionary. Unlike the community committed to living the everyday in its most

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ordinary and superficial expression, the fool on the hill is one who establishes a deep and inner connection with the world around him. Remaining “perfectly still” to “see the sun going down” thus becomes an act of searching for truth and the meaning of life, and this is how the protagonist can even perceive the rotation of the Earth. In the exploration of these themes, meaningful connections emerge between the text on the one hand, and its structure and imagery on the other. Speaking of circularity, but also of continuity and repetition in general (“day after day” …), it is worth noting how “The Fool on the Hill” presents us with a regular strophe-refrain alternation: ABABABABA, without exception, with the refrain composed of the same verses, without any variation (“But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round”). This is the traditional folk ballad structure, which The Beatles used quite rarely in their repertoire, accustomed as they were to double the strophes at the beginning (usually) or elsewhere (e.g., “She Came in through the Bathroom Window”), to vary the text of the refrains (e.g., “whisper words of wisdom” alternated with “there will be an answer” in “Let It Be”), to include additional parts (intro, code, special…), or even more significantly to use totally different structures, coming from different traditions than folk (chorus-bridge, suite, 12-bar blues …). Ddiscussing the more strictly musical aspects, this regularity is also provided with a “day-night” effect. A further element of continuity, then, is represented by the use of the present and present progressive tenses, which denote a repeated and ongoing action, and not an isolated episode of the past. The fool, in other words, is still there, always there. Finally, there are also those metric and phonetic subtleties that McCartney likes to insert in his texts, and which are often difficult to grasp on a superficial listening. These too contribute to that symmetry of repetitions and circularity. The rhyming scheme, for example, is particularly intricate and forces us to create connections far beyond the closest verses, thus emphasizing the continuity of the entire text (“Day after day”, the beginning of the first stanza, goes as far as to rhyme with “Well on the way”, which is the beginning of the second stanza). The repeated consonances of the letter “s” during the chorus are also interesting, as if to underline the inner aspect (silent, whispered) of the fool’s actions (“sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round”). Lastly, the image of the hill, and how this is comparable to the tree in “Strawberry Fields Forever” (and to the strawberry field itself). Where Lennon informed us that his tree was too high or too low, McCartney’s hill is also a place of otherness, isolated from the village and the people. However, it is also worth noting that, similarly to the tree, which is not an unreachable place in itself (one just needs to climb it), this hill is, exactly, a hill, not the peak of a Himalaya mountain. In this case, like in Lennon’s, the place is easily reachable: a walk is enough, no need for complicated climbing. In our opinion, this can be interpreted in two senses: first, the desire not to represent an inaccessible/abstract character, a god or a Nietzschean superman, but instead reiterate what McCartney thought at the time (we saw this in the 1967 interview we quoted); that “the fool” wants something that everyone wants. Second,

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probably, the desire to place an even stronger emphasis on the obtuseness of the people who discriminate against the protagonist: it is like saying “it would take very little effort” (a walk to the hill) to understand and accept each other.

4.6.5 Musical Strategies Previously, we had mentioned the ballad-form of this piece and the relevance of this feature with the idea of circularity and continuity. We may now add that this relevance is not only expressed in the systematic alternation of two melodic themes, but also and above all in the fact that the melody A, the strophe, is in D major, while B, the refrain, is in D minor. Notoriously, the first emotional association that the average-listener activates in hearing the same key in major and minor is that of a dualism of opposites: positive-negative, cheerful-sad, light-dark, and indeed day-­ night. It is also intriguing that McCartney opts to construct the strophes in major and the refrains in minor, somehow overturning the canon of commercial pop music; something that The Beatles themselves had occasionally indulged into  – e.g., “Things We Said Today”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”. Therefore, in addition to escaping a certain harmonic predictability, this expedient goes well with the fact that the verse begins with the word “day” (“Day after day”) while the refrain tells us of the sun setting (“… the sun going down”). In addition to this, it is possible that in the chorus McCartney also wanted to emphasize the melancholic aspect of the protagonist’s loneliness. Speaking of contrasts and chiaroscuro, however, there is another small detail that defines the whole piece, namely its main chord  – the one with which the piece opens, and which characterizes the beginning of each verse: the D major sixth. – that is, D F # A and B. Now: a major sixth chord contains at the same time the notes of the major triad and those of its relative minor (in the case of D, we are therefore talking about B minor). It is the ideal chord to produce a bittersweet effect, like a “melancholic smile”, and as we said it constitutes the central chord of the whole song and its actual hook, the pole of attraction: the beginning of the song is immediately recognizable precisely through the repeated execution of the chord on each beat of the bar (the rhythmic sound of the piano is then doubled when the vocals start). If these elements inform us of the idea of “circularity” as regularity and repetition of events, there is also another type of “circularity”, conveyed by the instrumental parts, which, uncharacteristically, are no less than three, occurring after the second, the third and the fourth refrain, where the piece also fades out. Thanks above all to the work of the bass, with its back-and-forth alternation of tonic (D) and dominant (A) on the first and third accent of each bar, a kind of merry-go-round effect is produced. The tonic, as we know, is the point of rest and stability of the scale, while the dominant is the point of instability and dynamicity. In other words, this is the classic arrangement that leads the listener to swing left and right with their body (or at least their head) while listening.

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A couple of additional remarks, in relation to the above-mentioned idea of s​ implicity and innocence that McCartney himself declared to be pursuing, inspired by the tarot card. The first concerns the choice of the recorder for the solo: it is an unusual choice for a rock-pop piece but once again an appropriate one (if you really opt for a flute, you usually use a transverse – as Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson would surely agree). The recorder is in fact a simple and innocent instrument par excellence, and many of us remember it – not necessarily with fondness – for having studied it at school. In addition, its intonation is not perfect (one can also hear it in this song), and this contributes to both a sense of naivety and that of diversity from the norm: the fool has, so to speak, his own intonation, which does not coincide perfectly with the “orchestra” (the community), where in fact a recorder usually has no place. The second remark, more subtle, concerns the use of the harmonica, which we hear distinctly in the transitional parts between verse and chorus (“Nobody wants to know him” …). The harmonica, unlike other wind instruments, is an instrument that is played both by blowing and by drawing. It is therefore the instrument most inclined to convey, symbolically and iconically, the idea of ​breathing – that is, the most basic and fundamental act of life itself. This may be a stretch of interpretation from our part (then again, we always must be wary of the intentional fallacy bias), but we maintain that this detail fully belongs to the set of those components that make the fool on the hill a character who has probably understood the meaning and the simplicity of life much more than the community that discriminates him. Finally, a note on the actual performance, vocal and instrumental, by McCartney and the other Beatles. In accordance with the band’s tradition, which, with few exceptions, was characterized by a greater complexity of ideas rather than specific technical skills,23 “The Fool on the Hill” too, contains no particular virtuosity, and is devoted to a “less is more” kind of philosophy. In a way, this, too, is a small tribute to that celebration of simplicity that thematically dominates the song. An honorable mention, in this sense, goes to McCartney’s vocal performance. Drawing from Sect. 3.1, where we elaborated on McCartney’s versatility as singer, on “The Fool on the Hill” we probably witness the most classic type of register, the one we have  In truth, there are repeated forms of revisionism and counter-revisionism concerning the Beatles’ actual virtuosity as musicians. The assessments switch from “technically-poor” to “most innovative” and all that is in between. Observing the various “all-time greatest” polls and surveys compiled by music magazines, one notices that Starr and McCartney are quite regularly featured in the Top10 of drummers and bassists respectively, that Harrison appears often in the Top50 of guitarists, and that Lennon usually does not appear at all, at least in the relevant positions (something that is also due to the fact that these surveys often consider “lead guitarists” and hardly ever “rhythm guitarists”). In addition, McCartney and Lennon (the latter in particular) are often Top10 appearances in polls about singers. For what is worth, our assessment is the following: a musician’s proficiency must be measured in the same way as Darwin measured evolution in life  – that is, by means of “adaptation”. The best musicians are not necessarily the technically most proficient or the most innovative ones, but rather those who manage to give the song what the song needs, with the right idea at the right time on the right spot. To make two examples, Starr may not be Buddy Rich and McCartney may not be Jaco Pastorius, but there is little doubt that a song like “Come Together” features the ideal drum pattern and the ideal bass line that a track like that will ever need. 23

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defined as “warm and full”, with a quietly demure nuance, if compared to other songs with a similar register. It is an explicitly anti-theatrical choice, devoted to understating the pathos of the song, and to respecting its bittersweet nature. Somehow, if you like, it is the equivalent of the sixth chord that opens the track. McCartney is aware that the piece is already emotionally powerful on its own and does not need the “reinforcement” of a more dramatic voice. For this reason, McCartney “sings for the song”: he puts himself at the service of the piece, leaves the limelight to the latter, and does not overstate its emotional aspects and in doing so, does not risk the opposite effect, as so many overly dramatic performances ended up achieving.

Chapter 5

Birth and Fortune of the “Beatlesque”: Transmission of Creativity and Legacy

“My strength, probably, is I can recognize a song in a few bars. I spot the embryo there. I’ve been writing since so early on that the antenna is really well-developed. If I pick up an instrument, it’ll come to me. I don’t go searching. I don’t have that God aspect about it. I prefer to think of myself as an antenna. There’s only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme” (Keith Richards).1 This provocative remark by The Rolling Stones’ guitarist and co-leader can be taken as symbolic of how aware musicians are of the practice of borrowing sounds, rhythms, performing styles, etc. to create new, “original” works. As the Italian music pedagogist Enrico Strobino likes to repeat in his lectures, “copiando s’inventa” (“through copying, we invent”). The fusion or blending of pre-existing elements, in other words creative syncretism, is at the basis of popular western music at least, but probably of all music. As we have seen, American music and culture had a deep impact on the English artists in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. From 1964, however, the commercial success of a large number of British acts in the USA (that is, the phenomenon known as “British Invasion”, and factually inaugurated by “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reaching the top of the American charts) led to a new, intricate network of influences, and the mutual exchange of ideas soon became the norm. Furthermore, in the second half of the 1960s fresh sounds from foreign countries such as India began to infiltrate the UK and the American market. This process of borrowing, combining, and reworking from other sources to produce new cultural forms was termed “cultural reterritorialization” (after Lull 1995). Georgina Born (2005) theorized that music exists as a decentralized and distributed object, stressing music’s capacity to shift between deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Each musical work, Born continues, constructs connections to both prior and future or prospective works. And where would we be without some Adorno? The German sociologist and  http://www.timeisonourside.com/songwriting.html

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musicologist highlighted the repetitive and self-referential nature of popular music, denouncing the “standardization” of the cultural product and the redundancy within songs – in terms of structures, melodies, harmony, etc. – and between one another (Adorno 1941). Moreover, and very interestingly, Alfred Gell (1998) suggests four kinds of dispersal of creative agency: across time, across space, between persons, between subjects and objects. The Beatles’ musical influence on popular culture was, and still remains, profound. We have mentioned the word “Beatlesque” (or, alternatively, one can say “Beatley”) several times throughout this monograph. It is our conviction that if there is a way to ascertain the existence, the solidity and the recognizability of a style, that is not through the actual artists who express it, but through any other artist who reminds us of them, in one way or another, intentionally or not, seriously or parodically. This is true for any form of art. Reiterating our favorite comparison with cinema, we got accustomed to a few stylistic labels associated particularly to directors: “Fellinesque”, “Kubrickian”, “Hitchcockian”… We have seen for instance the label “Hitchcockian” applied to movies like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), featuring a morbid, voyeuristic serial killer raised by an overbearing parent, therefore bearing similarities with many Hitchcock’s films; or Stanley Dolen’s Charade (1963), Hitchcockian at least in its mixing suspense and romantic comedy and its having no less than Cary Grant as protagonist; or of course Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), the ultimate homage to the British-American director by one of his most passionate admirers. In all these, and several more, cases, we get a sense of how distinctive and influential Hitchcock’s style is, in ways that are perhaps even more revealing than his own movies. Plus, naturally, it becomes possible to isolate and list his main stylistic features: that mix of suspense and comedy, that “possessive mother” complex; that white middle-class smart figure à la Cary Grant or à la  James Stewart  – profiles that became known as Homo Hitchcockus; the appearance of brandy as drink of choice; of a “cool blonde woman” type; of staircases that always seem to lead to something dangerous; of landmarks and monuments used as locations; and so forth. Like “Hitchcockian” in cinema, “Beatlesque”, too, is a kind of topos in popular music, with whom, sooner or later and with rare exceptions, the majority of musicians (especially those of the Anglo-American tradition) end up having to cope with, by intention or by attribution. That started already during the Beatles’ career, and in fact before the term was coined. Already in 1965, for instance, The Knickerbockers’ “Lies” was explicitly attempting to do a “1963/64-era” type of Beatley track, also benefiting from the fact that their lead singer Beau Charles possessed a voice impressively similar to that of John Lennon’s. Acts like The Monkees were carefully assembled by managers to ride the wave of the Fab Four’s success, with similar looks and similarly sounding songs. And obviously, the whole community of rock musicians was paying attention and getting inspired: Brian Wilson conceived Pet Sounds as The Beach Boys’ reply to Rubber Soul, The Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request a few months after Sgt. Pepper’s, and so on. The Beatles themselves were not alien to the practice: to remain within

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the mentioned examples, if Pet Sounds was a consequence of Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper’s itself was a consequence of Pet Sounds. As the band broke up, spotting Beatlesque songs or acts became an Olympic sport. The frequency with which critics and reviewers have used this label in reference to a record, an arrangement, a mere pattern, or a vaguer “atmosphere” is impressive. This has gone in tandem with the other fashionable sport – “Find the new Beatles”, an activity that, since the band became a global phenomenon, has targeted all sorts of acts, from very successful ones (Bee Gees, Bay City Rollers, Oasis…) to more underground/indie phenomena (Flaming Lips, XTC, Klaatu…), up to one-hit-wonders such as The Knack (remember “My Sharona”?) or Fool’s Garden (“Lemon Tree”), not to mention another type of pre-fabricated acts, boy bands, that had little in common with The Beatles musically, but enjoyed something comparable in terms of fame and fans’ hysteria (One Direction, BTS, Take That, some of which in fact did release a couple of Beatlesque tracks like One Direction’s “Olivia” or Take That’s “Shine”). Similarly, the last fifty to sixty years in pop-rock discography have been filled with alleged songs à la “I Am the Walrus”, or à la “Hey Jude” and the like. In an attempt to systematize the concept, it is probably safe to say that the term “Beatlesque” is used in at least nine types of musical or musicological discourse. 1. To qualify a work/artist, exactly as one could do with a musical genre (“a country musician”, “an Afro-Cuban song” etc.). In a website devoted to Eric Clapton, for instance, we read that Cream’s “What A Bringdown” “is a Beatlesque song”.2 2. To describe the intimate character (not only musical) of a work/artist: “At heart, Queen has always been a Beatlesque pop band”.3 3. To build the identity of a work/artist through the use of comparisons or contrasts: “it is a ragtime-meets-metal battle of the genres that pits Beatlesque pop against the New Romantic” (said about “How Can I Sing Like a Girl”, by They Might Be Giants4). 4. To qualify a part of a song/record or just a stylistic aspect of its author: “It’s a lightweight pop-metal confection and hardly my fave, and opens with a drum that sounds like a carpenter going at it with a hammer and some Beatlesque guitars” (said about “Contrary Mary” by Kix5). 5. To qualify the complexity, or even the experimentalism of a work/artist: “it rocks sedately in a mid-to-late era Beatlesque cacophony” (said about Mercury Rev’s album Deserter’s Songs6). Or in contrast

 http://www.eric-clapton.co.uk/collection/albums/goodbye.shtml  http://www.jimdero.com/News2001/GreatDec1.htm 4  http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.03.96/they-giants-9640.html 5  https://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/2013/10/graded-curve-kix-kix/ 6  http://www.culturekiosque.com/nouveau/review/rhecd2.htm 2 3

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6. To point out a greater proximity to tradition, even in contrast with more experimental moments: “a unique blend of Beatlesque melodies crossed with My Bloody Valentine’s wall of sound noise layering” (said about Helio Sequence7). 7. To illustrate a stylistic evolution (or involution, for the matter): “a band that started out cloning the instrumental rock of the Ventures, but which soon converted to Beatlesque pop” (said about Mutantes8). 8. To characterize the quality of a work/artist in a positive or negative way: “brilliantly Beatlesque” (said about Elliott Smith’s album XO9). And finally – almost as a consequence 9. To denounce an abuse: “Terms like Beatlesque are routinely applied to this quintet with a seriousness that should embarrass the offending critic” (predictably said about Oasis10). In spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, a definition of Beatlesque is rather tricky, and in more than one case, stands in between the mentioned, and respectable, status of stylistic topos and the dangerous one of cliché. But more importantly: how did we get to a topos/cliché if we took so many pages to describe, and even to celebrate, the diversity and the eclecticism of the band’s compositions, arrangements, and production? Indeed, on one hand we have The Beatles themselves, who almost wrote an A-to-Z encyclopaedia of songwriting; on the other hand – mysteriously – a ‘Beatlesque’ song is often quite easy to recognize, and there is an immediate sense of familiarity every time we hear a piano (or a harpsichord) performing that particular accompaniment, the vocals performing that kind of harmony, the drums performing that kind of fill. It follows that, in spite of that heterogeneity, The Beatles did impress some stylistic models on to the collective imagery, more than others they themselves delivered, or even introduced in popular music, and the posterity drew from those models – more or less consciously – in order to ‘Beatlesize’ their songs. Therefore, the aim here should be to understand and define those models, as related to the composition itself (melody, rhythm, harmony, form…), but especially, given the contents of this book, to the arrangement and the production. What we shall not do, is to consider para- or extra-musical aspects that also contributed to associate this or that act with the Beatles cultural universe. In other words, a band like Crowded House is for us relevant because of songs like “Nails on My Feet” or “Pineapple Head”, and not because they decided to have their photographs taken in Sgt. Pepper-like uniforms for the record cover of the album Woodface. What becomes interesting to determine is what those Beatlesque elements are, and what kind of process those elements went through in order to become Beatlesque, as opposed to others, equally introduced and/or highlighted by The Beatles. An example: the repeatedly mentioned piccolo trumpet solo on Penny Lane sounds  http://www.cavitysearchrecords.com/catalog.html  http://www.luakabop.com/os_mutantes/cmp/info.html 9  https://www.amazon.com/XO-Elliott-Smith/product-reviews/B000WLYJO0?pageNumber=10 10  http://www.post-gazette.com/soundscene/pages/20010511oasis04.asp 7 8

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much more Beatlesque than the Moog solo in Because (see the quotation Tears for Fears made in “Sowing the Seeds of Love”, or XTC in “Merely a Man”). Why? In both cases we are talking about musical episodes that appeared only once in the Beatles’ repertoire. Also, it shall be worth understanding whether there are “prototypes” within The Beatles repertoire, one or more songs which can be considered Beatlesque par excellence, songs that do not exactly contain all traits of the map, but at least a good portion of them. In other words, in which cases did The Beatles behave like their quintessential selves? Apparently, this is not just our curiosity: a specific Quora forum, entitled “What would you say is the most Beatlesque Beatles song?” was set up in 202111 with over 3200 views, while the term “Beatlesque”, as of 2023, features 509,000 entries on Google.

5.1 A Little Survey As recollected in the preface of this book, the topic of Beatlesque was addressed to the MA and BA students of Martinelli’s course on popular music in 2002, at Helsinki University. On that occasion, we conducted a little survey on the students, with the purpose of checking whether songs that are not written and performed by The Beatles, more or less unknown to the majority, are recognized as “written by the Beatles themselves”, and – conversely – if there were Beatles songs that would not be acknowledged as such, due to a certain extraneity to what we may call the Beatlesque canon. The surveyed sample consisted of 50 students only, so the statistical relevance is not particularly strong: let us say the survey has more of a qualitative than quantitative value. We selected five songs that we considered particularly “Beatlesque” (based on our hypothesis of what the latter consists of musically) and that belonged to the “indie” scene, in order to minimize the risk that they would be known by the students (no Oasis or ELO, to make it clear). These were “Brainiac’s Daughter”12 and “Mole

 https://www.quora.com/What-would-you-say-is-the-most-Beatlesque-Beatles-song  The quick description that Andy Partridge, leader of the band, gives of the song is quite interesting: “‘Brainiac’s Daughter’ was a conscious attempt to write as if McCartney had tried to come up with a track around the time of Sgt. Pepper or Yellow Submarine – 1967/68 – so all the ingredients were picked to sound like McCartney. Banana fingers piano, descending chord changes, falsetto vocals, and nonsensical lyrics … it’s got the lot! We tried to make a McCartney psychedelic soup” (http://chalkhills.org/reelbyreal/s_Brainiac.html). We were particularly intrigued by the expression banana fingers piano, which Partridge used to refer to that straight way of playing, with no particular virtuosity, a simple four-in-a-bar rhythmic pattern (that we mentioned in Sect. 3.4), and  – apparently  – the hands arc-shape like a banana (particularly the left one, we argue, since both Lennon and McCartney tended to play basic bass parts by hitting the fundamental note of each chord on two octaves, using the thumb and the little finger, thereby creating that shape). We shall use this expression again. 11 12

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Fig. 5.1  Dave Gregory (left) and Andy Partridge (right) of XTC, a band that released numerous songs with Beatlesque flavor, particularly under the pseudonym of Dukes of Stratosphear. (Photo attribution: porcupiny, CC BY 2.0)

from the Ministry”,13 both by XTC (Fig.  5.1), recorded under the pseudonym of Dukes of Stratosphear, “Found You”14 by Dodgy, “And You Say”15 by Fool’s Garden and “Baby Britain”16 by Elliott Smith. The songs were reduced to snippets of 10–15 seconds and gathered in a single medley of about one minute. Now, if The Beatles only wrote Beatlesque songs, in the same way as  – say  – AC/DC have always written AC/DC-esque songs, this research would be irrelevant, as we would have all the answers we need already. On the contrary, Beatlesque compositions seem to resort to different, but luckily not infinite, elements: this explains why the survey was completed with a second medley (of the same length and characteristics of the previous), consisting of songs by The Beatles, but not, in our perception, sounding Beatlesque at all. These were “Revolution 9”, “The End” (the “Oh yeah, alright” part before the drum solo, obviously – the final section sounding instead very Beatlesque), “Yer Blues”, “Dig It” and “You Know My Name”. Both collages were so short for two reasons: first, we wanted to reduce the possibility of “rationalizing” the listening experience, preferring a “first glimpse”, fresh reaction from the students; second, by accessing only few seconds per song, the listener tends to focus more on sound and production rather than composition itself.

 The song has been described as a “Strawberry Fields Forever/I Am the Walrus/A Day in the Life combination” (http://colereviews.tripod.com/xtc.html) 14  “Shades of the Beatles thrown into a mix of 90’s Britpop” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001EZM/ref%3Dnosim/coolnoise-20/102-1686423-4952103) 15  Fool’s Garden “are strangely reminiscent of British bands like the Beatles” (http://hub.vivamusic.com/cd/pop/cd_foolsgarden_suzy.htm) 16  “A cherub-faced nod to the Beatles’ Getting Better” (http://www.sweetadeline.net/barfly.html) 13

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Do you know the author/s or performer/s of these five songs? YES...

...they are: 1 2 3 4 5

NO...

...but I think they are: 1 2 3 4 5

Fig. 5.2  The template of the “Beatlesque” test

The task was simple: for each of the two medleys, the students were asked if they recognized any of the five songs they were played. If yes, they were asked to indicate who they thought the performers were, if not they were still asked to make a guess. The answers had to be written on a template printed on a sheet (Fig. 5.2). As in many tests of a similar kind, it is considered a falsifying element to actually let the interviewee know exactly what they are doing. It is recommended to disguise the task with a so-called cover story. In our case, the cover story was to entitle the survey with a generic “Test your knowledge on pop music” (as opposed to “Test your knowledge on Beatlesque songs” or similar). Students were under the impression that they simply had to play a “guess the song” type of quiz, with no specific orientation. The only answers that were not relevant for us were those “YES” followed by the right name of the performers in the first medley. Obviously, in those cases, our trick did not work and there was no way to contribute to our research. All the other answers (NO and, especially, the wrong YES, meaning those answers indicating the wrong author) contributed to the real purpose of the test. As for the second medley, on the contrary, even the right YES (meaning the ones indicating The Beatles as authors/performers) was meaningful, because they were indications, especially if numerous, that one of the main theoretical premises of our research, that is that “not all the songs by The Beatles are stylistically identifiable with The Beatles”, was too accurate. A final note: the above-mentioned course in popular music (whose participants were the subjects of the survey) was offered for BA and MA students with no specific background in music. Some of them did, but the course was open to all faculties, so their competences ranged from “rock fanatic” (few of them, in actual fact) to the Adornian “casual listener”. Our realistic expectation, and decisive variable in the survey, was that the majority of them was not familiar with XTC, Dodgy, Fool’s Garden and Elliott Smith (surely not with the quite obscure tracks we

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selected: if anything they might have heard hits like “Lemon Tree” or “Senses Working Overtime”), and that also those Beatles songs were not particularly well known; the average listener being evidently more acquainted with the likes of “Yesterday” or “Let It Be”, and not with the band’s experiments in concrete music or cabaret parodies. The results of the survey were the following: 1st medley (non-Beatles Beatlesque songs) – NO ONE knew for sure which songs the first five were, therefore no one answered YES. However, no less than 56% of the sample assumed that at least one of the songs from the first medley could be by The Beatles (with someone writing specifically “Paul McCartney”). By “at least”, we mean that several students went as far as to write that all 5 songs were by The Beatles. On average, 3 out of 5 songs were credited to the Fab Four. Moreover, 40% did not ascribe the songs to anyone, and the remaining 4%, which means two people on a sample of 50, named another band in one song out of five. 2nd medley (non-Beatlesque Beatles songs)  – Some YES answers appeared (8% recognized The End), against a 92% writing NO. 80% did not recognize or guess any author. Another 8%, after answering NO, guessed that one song out of five could be by The Beatles (it happened with “Yer Blues” and “The End”17), and only two students (4%, in our 50-people sample) dared named another band. Nobody attempted to identify more than one song, so the average number of recognized songs remained one per person. As far as an approximate and limited test like this goes, thus, the results are clear – in fact so clear that we highly doubt that a broader sample would change the outcome significantly. Obviously, the sample was pretty unstable in terms of competences; nationality and therefore cultural background (about half of the students was obviously Finnish, while the other half consisted of Erasmus students from several countries), and, as a matter of fact, gender (the course had a majority of male participants). But, save this lack of methodological rigueur, the results are far too evident for an observer not to draw one or two interesting conclusions.

5.2 Stylistic Features in a Nutshell In an attempt at defining, or localizing, at least, the Beatlesque style with more precision, we formulated the following working hypotheses: 1. As we have already seen, it is possible – with some exceptions – to roughly distinguish the Beatles’ career among an early, middle, and late period. The early period, or “beat phase”, is typified by beat songs (mid-to-fast tempo, a strong  At this point, if we consider the songs that have been recognized for sure and those guessed successfully, we should deduce that The End was not the best choice for the purpose of this test. 17

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rock and roll and rhythm and blues connotation and an instrumental configuration almost always corresponding to the concert format – e.g., “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), ballads (slower songs, with a distinct sentimental theme and a usually more elaborated harmonic and melodic structure – e.g., “And I Love Her”) and acoustic songs (essentially acoustic instrumentation and sonority, and a more or less explicit inclination towards folk and country  – e.g., “Things We Said Today”). The middle period, or “experimental phase” is characterized by psychedelic songs (innovative sounds, uncommon instruments, groundbreaking recording techniques, idiosyncratic songwriting and production  – e.g., “Tomorrow Never Knows”), beat songs II, ballads II and acoustic songs II (all “upgrades” of the equivalent categories of the early period, reflecting the change of instrumentation, a fresher compositional approach, new arrangements and more confidence and maturity in the songwriting practices – e.g., respectively, “Paperback Writer”, “For No One” and “Norwegian Wood”). The late period, or “mixed phase”, is a synthesis of the first two, with both simple and experimental features (we find unconventional productions like “I Want You”, but also straightforward pop-rock like “The Ballad of John and Yoko”). Our perception and consequent classification of “Beatlesque” songs employed this simple tripartite template, so our descriptions feature information like “This song sounds like an early period ballad”, “This arrangement is very ‘middle period’”, etc. 2. A lot of compositions that “sound” or are defined as Beatlesque seem to feature stylistic elements that are more often than not, found in the middle period of the Beatles’ career, and specifically the period 1966–1968, when, after they quit touring, the band focused completely on the work in the studio. Relying heavily upon the technical progresses of the time, and thanks to the fact that giving up touring gave them much more time, The Beatles unchained their creativity in endless sessions (reaching peaks of no less than 18 hours in a row) where new technical solutions were applied, and specific stylistic models were outlined. The majority of the Beatlesque songs seems to have interiorized these changes in an increasingly consistent manner. 3. It is intriguing to note that, when qualifying a song as Beatlesque, journalists, critics and musicologists tend to employ a limited number of songs as points of reference – that is, as the models that the given Beatlesque song appears to be inspired by. Among those that recur more often than others are: “Penny Lane”, “Hello, Goodbye”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am the Walrus”, and “All You Need Is Love”, the latter particularly from the point of view of lyrics and message. When looking attentively, such a recurrence is hardly a coincidence, and in most or all these five songs there are several elements in common: any of the three types of keyboard accompaniment we have seen in Sect. 3.4 (that “banana fingers” style mentioned by Andy Partridge), peculiar rhythmic-melodic solutions, vocal harmonies and, in almost all cases, horns (minus “Hello, Goodbye”) and strings (minus “Penny Lane”). In addition, one can find here a frequent use of diverse sound effects and recording tricks like the “varispeed” or backward recordings, expedients used a lot both in “Strawberry Fields Forever” and in “I Am the Walrus”.

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As a second step, we wrote a list of 500 Beatlesque songs (all listed in Appendix 1), not written by The Beatles, by such performers as XTC, Jellyfish, Dodgy, Crowded House, Oasis, Boo Radleys, Todd Rundgren, Blur, Elvis Costello, and many others. Each of these performers, at some point in their career, was labelled as “Beatlesque”, in reference to a single song, to a whole album, or to the general image and artistic outfit. An additional 5%, 25 “bonus tracks” as we called them, were included to this list, drawing from the post-Beatles works by George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. Such an inclusion is less banal than one may think: the point, and the irony of it all, is that the ex-Beatles  – after all  – turned out to be “Beatlesque” in limited episodes of their huge catalogue, and in some cases adopting the style for facetious purposes (such as George Harrison’s “When We Was Fab”), and for autobiographical references (significantly, both “All Those Years Ago” and “Here Today”, respectively Harrison’s and McCartney’s homages to John Lennon, in the aftermath of his assassination, were written in a distinctive Beatlesque idiom, with the former bearing resemblances to “Old Brown Shoe” and the latter being almost a sequel of “Yesterday”). The choice of the sample was driven by three main criteria: first, obviously, our personal knowledge of acts and repertoires; second, research among specialized websites and forums that addressed the issue (a simple Google search reveals numerous ongoing discussions on portals like Quora, Reddit and others); third, we paid attention to all those acts that seemed to want to openly disclose their intention to pursue a Beatlesque style, through their record covers (e.g. the cover for Jet’s Get Born, containing the Beatlesque ballad “Look What You’ve Done”, is visibly inspired by Revolver), their videos (e.g., Fool’s Garden’s video for “Wild Days”, where at some point the band dresses in early Beatles outfit, with black turtleneck sweaters and mop-top wigs) or analogous material. Not without a certain vocation to martyrdom, all the songs have been repeatedly listened to, until it became possible to split the whole database into the three above-­ mentioned groups: early, middle, and late period. Given, however, that numerous songs would adopt a more syncretistic approach, picking elements from different periods, we established a 5% approximation for each percentage. Consequently, we found that ca. 10–15% of the songs were reminiscent of the early Beatles, ca. 70–75% would sound “middle period” and ca.15–20% would rather be associated to the late period. The songs were then classified in the same way as the three periods as a whole were: beat, ballads, acoustic, beat II, psychedelic, etc.

5.3 Intrinsically-Beatlesque Features What are these Beatlesque traits, then? In Chap. 3 we listed and discussed the most recurrent characteristics of Beatles music, both at songwriting and production stage. Obviously, not all of them can qualify for the title of “Beatlesque”. To isolate the relevant ones, we listened closely to those 500  +  25 songs we had selected, and

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determined the pertinence by using the commutation method (after Barthes 1967): one “signifier” (arrangement element, instrument, etc.) per time was removed or replaced, in order to see if the targeted meaning (the perception of “Beatlesque”) would change. If that happened, it meant that the particular signifier was indeed pertinent to the sense of Beatlesque. Very often, there were several signifiers operating at the same time in the same direction (e.g., Leslie-filtered guitars + backwards sounds + a Baroque-sounding trumpet solo), so the pertinence was determined by the concerted effort of all of them: removing only one would at most “weaken” but not “remove” the sense of Beatlesque. The following reflections accompanied the task: 1. It is true that a song becomes Beatlesque through a combination of elements, and not just because of one. However, it is also true, that there are some performance strategies – even single ones – that can spread a Beatlesque flavor, even a vague one (see the “banana fingers piano”). These are the kind of strategies we paid the most attention to: would they intrinsically qualify as Beatlesque, or would they need the support of ad hoc contexts? And mostly, when tested with the mentioned commutation proof, would they qualify as pertinent? 2. In identifying the traits, we tried not to leave too much room for self-indulgence, typical of a Beatles fan. The sense of Beatlesque we are after is something that must be detected and therefore validated also by an average listener who is only moderately acquainted with these repertoires. Therefore, it must display tangible (audible) features and not just obscure elements that can be detected only through maniacal attention. The nerdy Beatlemaniac will probably hear Lennonesque echoes every time a given guitarist, at the coda of a given song, will double the speed of the rhythmic part, as Lennon used to do on more than one song. But the questions are: will anyone who is not a Beatlemaniac notice this? And above all, can this be considered a feature that, taken alone, gives the song a Beatlesque taste? Since the answer to both the questions, unlike the banana fingers piano, is probably a “no”, we filtered out a number of features. 3. A few (or maybe many) of the traits we pointed out as relevant, were not “introduced” by The Beatles, but simply “enhanced” by them or promoted to stylistic topoi. It is not necessary to invent something in order to be defined by it. As we have already seen, the chorus-bridge structure, as opposed to the strophe-­refrain one, is a characteristic trait of the Fab Four’s early repertoire. This kind of model had roots in the American Songbook tradition and, a bit later, in rock and rollers like Buddy Holly. What matters here, however, is that The Beatles made that format “quintessential” for their early style, so much so that an almost inevitable strategy to create a song with an “early Beatles” mood will be exactly the chorusbridge format (something that The Spongetones’ “She Goes Out with Everybody”, Frank Lee Sprague’s “Her Diamond Ring”, The Wonders’ “That Thing You Do”, and many others, display repeatedly). 4. When it was not possible to rely upon traditional musicological jargon to describe certain traits or strategies we did not hesitate (while trying to explain their meaning) to turn to neologisms.

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5.3.1 Different Approaches Combining these reflections, and the discussions in Chap. 1 on the most relevant studio techniques and instrumentation employed, and Chap. 3 on the main stylistic traits, we isolated those elements that we found particularly pertinent and recurrent in Beatlesque songs. Before turning to the specific analysis of these traits, however, we need to classify the different ways of adding this particular stylistic flavor in both songwriting and production. We shall do that by identifying different degrees of focus: from the most generally targeted pastiches (those songs attempting to mix many and diverse elements) to those that zoom in on few or single elements. First and foremost, we shall mention those cases where the Beatlesque is a quality emerging “as a whole”, that is, as a sum of elements that create that particular combination of instruments, that particular production, and ultimately that particular “sound”. In these cases, one can still point the finger at specific details, but definitely the sum accounts for more than the single addends. The most common type is arguably the attempt, often successful, to achieve a syncretistic approach, importing elements from different periods, different albums, and different songs. An example like David Bascombe’s production of Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love”, offers a whole Beatles collage, mixing strings, trombone and Baroque-style trumpet with backwards sounds, offstage noises and effects – all perfectly matching a song that is very Beatlesque already at compositional level, and again with the same syncretistic approach: a strophe mostly reminiscent of “I Am the Walrus”, a refrain with hints of “It’s All Too Much” and – particularly in the phrasing – “Carry That Weight”, a special in “sudden quiet” mode, à la “Doctor Robert”, etc. Similarly, John Leckie’s production for XTC’s “Brainiac’s Daughter” (released under the fictional psychedelic band pseudonym of The Dukes of Stratosphear), covers pretty much the whole spectrum of McCartney’s upbeat piano-driven repertoire between 1966 and 1969, from “Good Day Sunshine” to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, via “Penny Lane”, “Martha My Dear” and others, not forgetting solo episodes like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”. We find sound effects, reverse, bouncy piano chords, the inevitable McCartney-esque bass line, and more (again: not to mention the songwriting itself, explicitly oriented in the same direction). Or, to switch to Lennon’s side, The Soundtrack of Our Lives’ “In Someone Else’s Mind” assembles a few of the chief characteristics of Lennon’s late acoustic songs, between 1968 and 1970, from “Julia” and “Dear Prudence” up to some of the material from his first solo albums (e.g., “Hold on” from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band). In 1987, George Harrison himself – not without a certain auto-parodic intent – made a Beatlesque song with the help of producer Jeff Lynne. The track, aptly called “When We Was Fab”, includes several references to the Beatles, from the orchestration with chromatic cello lines to the use of sitar, from low-tuned drums to a sudden quiet moment, and so forth. The same applies to an heir of The Beatles family, Sean Lennon, who, with the help of producer Yuka Honda, created another pastiche with the song “Queue”, employing mellotron, ADT, reverse, horns, as well as a strong emphasis on the downbeat in the accompaniment.

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The list may continue with “Nine in The Afternoon” by Panic! At The Disco (again, a combination of different elements from different periods), The Tremeloes’ arrangement and mixing approach in “Before I Sleep”, several tracks by Jellyfish, and again XTC, Tears for Fears and others. It is an endless list that would reduce these lines even more to a name-dropping practice than they already are. A more circumscribed selection from the “cauldron” of Beatlesque traits is operated by those acts who try to capture the vibe of a single album or a shorter career period. For instance, the distinctive blend of drums, bass and guitars that was a characteristic element of the Beatles’ music in 1966, that “textural density” (Zak 2001) that was obtained by factors like the band’s more self-conscious and daring musicianship, the recording innovations introduced by Geoff Emerick, the greater amount of time spent in the studio, and others. In Cotton Mather’s “40 Watt Solution”, producer Brad Jones followed Emerick’s approach, relying on over-­ compression and heavy limiting to achieve a Beatley feel. A similar choice was made by Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes, producers of Death in Vegas’ “Scorpio Rising”, and by Neil King, in Menswear’s “Sleeping in”. The type of arrangements that George Martin and the band were conceiving at the time of Revolver was also influential in this respect, as we can see in The Cyrkle’s “We Had a Good Thing Goin’”, Rockin’ Horse’s “Oh Carol, I’m So Sad”, The Bee Gees’ “In My Own Time”, The Dukes of Stratosphear’s “Shiny Cage”, Oasis’ “The Hindu Times”, and others. Even more pinpointed forms of Beatlesque, are those songs that target a single Beatles track, almost as if trying to do a 2.0 version of it. In this sense, arrangement and production are concerted into a more cohesive effort of recreation of a sound and a mood (whether or not the similarities exist also at songwriting level – and often they do, of course). Examples include the various nods to “Tomorrow Never Knows” (The Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” and “Setting Sun”, Mansun’s “Taxloss”, The Gurus’ “Big Sea”…); The Merry-Go- Round’s “Listen, Listen” (having “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as reference), The Family Tree’s “Sideshow” (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”), The Tremeloes’ “I Swear” (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), etc., not counting those cases that are explicit homages/parodies of specific songs (such as The Rutles’ “Ouch!” for “Help!”, “Get up and Go” for “Get Back”, and so on). Narrowing the field even more, we find single, isolated moments/passages in a song that are strongly evocative of The Beatles, even when contextualized within a song that, as a whole, may not necessarily sound Beatlesque. That may particularly happen in hooks and refrains/choruses, where a pop-rock song traditionally needs to be catchier and more memorable. The employment of one or more Beatlesque elements is often a solution, evidently. Among the examples, Offspring’s “Why Don’t You Get a Job?” (refrain à la “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”), Blur’s “Country House” (special with “sudden quiet”), and others. It is hard to miss the fact that such degrees of focus bear significant similarities with some rhetoric tropes, particularly “synecdoche”, “paraphrase”, “metaphor”, and “quotation”. In detail:

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1. We may speak of a synecdoche when the song reminds us of more songs at the same time (from a more or less extended period of The Beatles career), without pointing the finger at one in particular, but carrying nevertheless a distinctive Beatlesque flavor. In these cases, we encounter the “part for the whole” and/or “singular for the plural” function of the synecdoche. This trope corresponds to the most common kind of Beatlesque song, and possibly embodies the idea itself of Beatlesque in a quintessential manner. 2. It is fair to talk about a paraphrase when a song is clearly imitating another one by The Beatles. Most elements, from lyrics to arrangement, melodic and harmonic solutions, have been designed in order to remind us of a specific Beatles song. Generally speaking, the purpose of the paraphrastic song is to parody and/or pay homage to the model, therefore we find it more often in bands like Todd Rundgren and Utopia (Fig. 5.3) or Vinyl Kings, who released openly Beatlesque albums (with Utopia’s Meet Utopia referencing With The Beatles and the Vinyl Kings’ Time Machine referencing A Hard Day’s Night), or obviously to comedy acts like The Rutles. 3. A metaphor is a song that “ideally” (metaphorically) reminds us of another song by The Beatles, without having any particular, identifiable resemblance. This type has the same “degree of focus” of the paraphrasis (it is still a “one vs. one” Fig. 5.3  Todd Rundgren at the times of his Utopia’s “Deface the Music” Beatlesque homage/ parody. (Photo attribution: Mitchell Weinstock, CC BY-SA 2.0)

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reference), but now the similarities are subtler, and have no specific parodic/ eulogic intent. To clarify the difference, if Utopia’s “Life Goes on” is expressively designed to resemble “Eleanor Rigby” and does not try to disguise it for a second (thereby qualifying as paraphrase), “Pineapple Head”, by Crowded House, is clearly reminiscent of “Norwegian Wood”, but the question here is mainly a matter of ‘atmosphere’ (the 6/8 beat, the acoustic guitar riff, and so on) rather than a specific feature. More than an “intentional rip-off”, a metaphor is more a matter of inspiration/influence. 4 . Finally, a quotation may appear in two forms: (a) when in a synecdoche context, there are one or more moments calling to mind a particular Beatles song (the finale of Lickerish Quartet’s “Lighthouse Spaceship” is an obvious dig at “I Am the Walrus”); and (b) when there is only a specific moment, or a part of the song, reminding us of The Beatles, which are “quoted” (as a style) in a context that otherwise is not necessarily a Beatlesque one (e.g., XTC’s “You’re the Wish You Are I Had” contains a McCartney-esque refrain, while the rest of the song bears no trace of Beatlesqueness). The latter type is what we have listed as the last “degree of focus” in the above description. Semi-jokingly, we should also mention a special case of this category – what we may call the “shameless quotation”. Not really an attempt to “remind us of” The Beatles, the shameless quotation occurs when a specific part, pattern, lyric or likewise, is practically reproduced note-by-note from an original song by The Beatles, and not for parodic purposes, like one may legitimately expect from the likes of The Rutles. Examples include songs like Tears for Fears’ “Who Killed Tangerine?” (as we mentioned in Sect. 3.4), which reproduces the same drum pattern of “Come Together”; Oasis’ “She’s Electric”, whose finale displays the same vocal harmonies as the ending of “With a Little Help from My Friends”; a line from Jet’s “Look What You’ve Done” (“Oh, look what you’ve done, you’ve made a fool of everyone”), almost identical to a line from “Sexy Sadie” (“Sexy Sadie, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone”), and so forth. On occasions, The Beatles or their songs may be mentioned directly in the lyrics, an instance that only comes to show how wide a net the Fab Four cast on popular culture: “Sing a song for me, one from Let It Be” (Oasis’ “Be Here Now”), “For there revealed in glowing robes, was Lucy in the sky” (Pink Floyd’s “Let There Be More Light”), “I burned my Beatles records because she hated number nine” (New Radicals’ “I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away the Ending”), “In un mondo di John e di Paul io sono Ringo Starr” (“In a world of John’s and Paul’s, I am Ringo Starr” – Pinguini Tattici Nucleari’s “Ringo Starr”), etc. In a crescendo of subtleties, the authors of these four verses can afford taking for granted that their audience know that (a) Let It Be is an album (easy level); (b) “Lucy in the sky” is a reference to a specific song called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (slightly more difficult level); (c) The Beatles (specifically John Lennon) had a passion for the number 9 (expressed in the track “Revolution 9” or in solo songs like “#9 Dream”), and thus the poor protagonist of New Radicals’ song has to get rid of his record collection because his love interest hates that number (hard level); (d) in the general perception of the band’s

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personalities, John and Paul are natural born winners who do great and ambitious things, while Ringo is supposedly the simple person who is content with playing his drums and staying more in the shadow, thus the song’s protagonist can use his name as a metaphor of his unpretentious personality (hardest level). Arguably no other band in popular music is so well known by the public that each member can be taken as a personality prototype. Sure, one can brag about having the “moves like Jagger” (as in the popular disco track by Maroon 5), but what would exactly be the meaning of being a Charlie Watts or a Bill Wyman, or a Ron Wood in a world of Mick’s and Keith’s? And what tongue-in-cheek reason could we have for burning our collection of Rolling Stones records?

5.3.2 Essential “Beatlesque” Traits Let us now list the key-elements of the Beatlesque, indicating some of the Beatles’ songs that typify them, and – at the end of each section – a few recommendations of non-Beatle tracks that clearly employ them (keeping in mind that the songs selected are not only Beatlesque because of the particular trait emphasized, but also for other reasons. E.g., we will mention Dukes of Stratosphear’s “Brainiac’s Daughter” for its falsetto parts, but the song is Beatlesque in many other ways, from the backwards parts to the ‘banana fingers’ piano, from the descending progression to the special). Within the realm of vocals (see Sect. 3.1), one can predictably find several relevant elements. As we have seen, a rich use of voices was for The Beatles a true trademark. It has been often remarked how the band’s repertoire benefited from the privilege of featuring at least three of the most competent and inventive authors in the whole music industry. A similar observation can be made about singing: both Lennon and McCartney regularly appear in polls and surveys of the “the greatest rock vocalists”; Harrison, too, is a highly respected singer; and even Starr displayed proficiency and personality on those occasions he acted as lead vocalist. Distinctive timbres, different registers, and a natural inclination to harmonize (following on the steps of doo-wop groups or acts like The Everly Brothers) made the Beatles’ vocal parts always a central ingredient of the songs, often reaching an iconic and highly imitated status. Our 500-titles database highlighted a few solutions in particular. Harmonized melodies are probably the one with the most distinctive flavor. By this expression we have been referring the coexistence of two (or three, in a couple of occasions) harmonized vocal parts sharing the melody, without either of the two being the actual “lead”. The parts are usually distanced by a third or a fourth, often widening or narrowing the gap: in Sect. 3.1 we mentioned the paradigmatic case of “If I Fell”, where Lennon and McCartney display two articulated parts, that occasionally spread up to a seventh interval (“…I would be sad if our new love was in vain”) or join in unison (“…would love to love you…”). Something similar, with an alternation unison-harmonies in the two vocal parts, occurs in Frank Lee Sprague’s “My Bad Luck Is Bound to Change”.

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Straight from the doo-wop tradition, we have also referred to all the Ooooh’s, the Aaaah’s, syllables like La la la or Nah Nah Nah, plus various amenities. They are usually sung by two, sometimes three, members of the band, and are generally used more consistently in the bridge and/or in the refrain. Alternatively, harmonizations may appear in form of actual words, usually borrowed from the lyrics of the respective song. In Sect. 3.1, we mentioned “Help!” as possibly the most recognizable case (“When I was younger, so much younger…” counterpointed by “When, when I was young…”). On occasions, the words may not be literally found on the lyrics, but they can be “complementary” to them (e.g., the sarcastic “It couldn’t get much worse” sang against the verse “I have to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time…” in “Getting Better”). Finally, there is always room for some nonsense, as the “Frere Jacques” harmonies on “Paperback Writer” (sang on the exact notes of the eponymous traditional French nursery rhyme) proves. Three-part harmonized lines or verses may also be left alone, acapella, for a guaranteed Beatlesque effect, as we witness in the same “Paperback Writer” or in “Lady Madonna”. A bit of all these features can be found in the vocals of Robbie Williams’s “Lazy Days”, with the parts “Tiiiime…”, “it’s alright, it’s alright…” and “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” interlacing on the outro. Noteworthy is also the use of one or more passages in falsetto (especially in McCartney’s repertoire), of the likes of those we hear on “Penny Lane” or “Martha My Dear”. As we already mentioned, Dukes of Stratosphear’s “Brainiac’s Daughter” (an explicitly McCartney-esque stylistic exercise) features numerous falsetto parts. Next, we could consider some of the most typical rhythmic solutions, as discussed in Sect. 3.4, which are of different types and do not simply concern drum parts. In fact, in many cases, the distinctive Beatlesque quality emerges from a very rhythmic use of other instruments. Keeping up with Andy Partridge’s amusing metaphor, the “banana fingers” rhythmic style (especially, but not only, when played with keyboards) has been repeatedly discussed here as one of the most distinctive and defining embodiments of the Beatlesque. In Sect. 3.4 we described the three main prototypes of this accompaniment, identifiable in the work of the right hand (both in keyboard and guitar playing). The more Lennonesque first type, on “I Am the Walrus” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” style (and, not incidentally, immortalized in Lennon’s most famous solo track “Imagine”). The second prototype, essentially used by McCartney, is on “Penny Lane” or “Getting Better” style, while the third prototype, again mainly employed by McCartney (who would go on to use it several times in his solo output) is more on “Hello, Goodbye” or “The End” style. A couple of “banana fingers” examples, among the hundreds available, are the mellotron part on Vinyl Kings’ “What if It Were You” and the piano part on Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band’s “Red Day”. Besides his general skills as a drummer, we have seen that Ringo Starr contributed to the band’s musicianship with some specific, unconventional ideas, particularly in the use of toms. The typical fill-in recurring in songs like “A Day in The Life” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” has by now become an important Beatlesque trademark (especially when combined with a characteristically “deep” reverb applied to the drum kit): among the many examples, the drum fills in Oasis’ “Whatever”.

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Strings, too, are a rhythmically significant instrument. The use of marcato strings on the four beats of the bar, together with the insertion of chromatisms (two alternate notes or, less often, a quasi-scale), as heard on the likes of “Eleanor Rigby” and “I Am the Walrus”, became another recurrent reference for those who want to recreate a Beatlesque atmosphere. The strings on Electric Light Orchestra’s “10,528 Overture” do exactly that. Finally, specific instruments aside, there are also rhythmic solutions that concern the whole song. One of them is the appearance of a 3/4 waltz break within a 4/4 signature. It is one of those cases (like the trumpet solo, to mention another) that appear rarely in The Beatles repertoire, and yet managed to become distinctively Beatlesque. We hear it on “We Can Work It Out” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”, plus the unreleased “Not Guilty”. On “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” the break has also a metalinguistic function, as it follows the line “…and of course Henry the Horse will dance the waltz”18; this solution also occurs in XTC’s “Earn Enough for Us”. When it comes to harmony (see Sect. 3.2), of those that we mentioned, there are four particular solutions that seem to recur more often than others. Firstly, the major and – less often – minor descending progressions. This is the main testimony of the Beatles’ fondness of Bach and baroque music in general: it is the bass, above all, to rule the game: tonic, subtonic, super dominant, dominant, and so on. The chords can either change accordingly or stand still on the first chord. We find an evident example in the major descending progression of Fool’s Garden’s “And You Say”. More difficult is to detect a sense of Beatlesque in specific chords, but, among those we mentioned in Sect. 3.2, it may be fair to highlight that the presence of flat-­ seventh and diminished chords stands out in comparison to others, especially in spots where one does not necessarily expect them (e.g., a minor seventh has often a bluesy feel, especially when functioning as tonic or subdominant, so its appearance in – say – a melodic slow ballad is less expected than in a straightforward rocker). Points of reference here could be “Oh! Darling” and “Blue Jay Way”, and – among non-Beatles songs – the use of diminished chords in Emitt Rhodes’s “Somebody Made for Me”. The two types of arpeggios mentioned in Sect. 3.2 (the electric/heavy and the acoustic/fingerpicking) are also often referenced: examples are, respectively, Foo Fighters’ “Sunday Rain” and Pilot’s “Sky Blue”. The various melodic elements (see Sect. 3.2) play a crucial role in the definition of “Beatlesque”. A “melody” is not only generated by the leading vocal part of a song, but also by a bass part, a solo, and any other phrase performed by any instruments (voices included) at any point of the song (riff, intro, coda, etc.). As McCartney has been defined the “most melodic bass player in rock”, we may perhaps start from his celebrated bass lines, particularly those that he developed  Since we mentioned the issue, lyrics-to-music or music-to-lyrics meta-signs were not rare in the Beatles’ repertoire. A sample of a street-band was added in “Yellow Submarine” after the line “…and the band begins to play”; the sound of an alarm clock precedes the line “Woke up, fell out of bed…” in “A Day in the Life”, and so on. 18

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from Beatles for Sale onwards. The Jam’s “Start!” is one of the many attempts to play bass in a recognizable McCartney-esque way. Along with that, a guitar solo in Harrison style may also contribute to a Beatlesque effect. As with Ringo Starr, in Harrison we also witness a not-superbly-refined playing technique turned into something stylistically distinctive. Harrison’s solos are in a sense the antithesis of the average heavy metal guitarist: few notes, a hint of rockabilly/country influence, occasional mirroring of the vocal melody, and (to use a predictable metaphor) a “gently-weeping-guitar” kind of effect. While the sober beauty and precision of the solo in “Something” shows Harrison’s playing at its best, solos like “Nowhere Man” and “All You Need Is Love” are more typical examples of this style. We find echoes of it, for example, in The Knack’s “Maybe Tonight”. Another type of solo that we considered worth a mention is the one, usually performed by a wind instrument (typically a trumpet), that bears reminiscences with Baroque music. Precursors of chamber pop, along with The Beach Boys, The Left Banke and others, The Beatles often indulged in Baroque-flavored arrangements, and the solos of songs like “For No One” or “Penny Lane”, with their fanfaresque mood, became one of the most recognizable traits of their style. For these reasons, songs with a similar solution bear an immediate sense of Beatlesque: among them, Split Enz’s “Maybe”. Opening riffs too, are more often than not, an indispensable ingredient of Beatlesque songs, often with that characteristic “oriental” flavor19 that is featured in the riffs of “If I Needed Someone”, “Paperback Writer”, or, with acoustic guitar, “Norwegian Wood”. The electric guitar riff on The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You”, or the acoustic one on Crowded House’s “Pineapple Head” are two distinctive examples. Turning the attention now to specifically vocal melodies, we may underline three main aspects: 1. What we have called the “run up and jump” phrase, where the vocal line first “hesitates” on two or three close notes (the run up) and then jumps up of at least a fourth, often performing this high note in falsetto. The strophes in “Baby You’re a Rich Man” (“How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?…”) and “Here, There and Everywhere” (“…making each day of the year…”) are the possibly the prototypes, and a song like Blur’s “Charmless Man” adopts the same strategy (“He thinks his educated airs, those family shares…”). 2. The wide-range vocal melodies that we often find in McCartney’s songs (“She’s Leaving Home”, “Oh! Darling”…) are referenced in songs like Crowded House’s “Nails on My Feet”. 3. The close-notes, bluesy, semi-spoken melodies that are instead more typical of Lennon’s repertoire (“I Am the Walrus”, “Come Together”…) are found in songs like Death in Vegas’ “Scorpio Rising”.

19

 A trick once again provided first and foremost by a distinctive use of minor sevenths.

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Regardless of the parts they play, the employment of certain instruments per se (and particularly specific combinations of them in the arrangement) plays a significant role here (see Sect. 1.3). The list of instruments The Beatles used in their songs is quite long, particularly in their studio years, but  – once again  – it is intriguing to notice that some of them acquired a prominent stylistic status and became Beatlesque in principle. A lot should of course be said about the three-four basic instruments (drums, guitar and bass, with the possible addition of piano), and how their particular sound (e.g., the percussive timber of the Hofner bass), equipment (e.g., Starr’s four-piece Ludwig drum-kit) and aesthetics (e.g., the legendary logo on the bass-drum with the longer “T”) provided a solid template for Beatlesque bands. It is unlikely to witness a Beatlesque band, whose bass-player performs with a fretless bass, whose guitarist is fond of Yamaha and Ibanez guitars, rather than a Epiphone or a Rickenbacker, and whose drummer surrounds him/herself with dozens of toms and other percussion pieces. The “Guitar band” arrangement in songs like The Spongetones’ “She Goes out with Everybody” well summarizes this approach. However, in this section, we shall put a particular emphasis on those “additional” instruments, with which The Beatles enriched their songs’ arrangements, especially from 1965 onwards and the landmark recording of “Yesterday”. The most important are: 1. Strings – Particularly used in the way described under the section about rhythmic solutions (see “Eleanor Rigby”) and melody (e.g., “I Am the Walrus”). E.g., Ben & Jason’s “The Wild Things”. 2. Horns – Especially brass, generally used in a more or less street band-like style (see “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”). E.g., Klaatu’s “We’re off You Know”. 3. Harmonica – Very present in the early Beatles, mostly to perform a song’s riff and occasionally a solo (see “Love Me Do”). E.g., Utopia’s “I Just Want to Touch You”. 4. Uncommon instruments (for a rock band)  – We can make a distinction here between “ethnic” (e.g., the sitar) and “electronic” instruments (e.g., the mellotron). E.g., the mellotron in Kula Shaker’s “Tattva”. A crucial role is also played by the structure of the songs (see Sect. 3.5), especially the distribution of parts and their interactions. Let us start with the amply discussed inclination to adopt a “Chorus-Bridge” structure, as opposed to the more traditional “Strophe-Refrain”. That bears the feature of offering the most memorable melody of a song at its beginning (part “A”), rather than constructing the expectation for the refrain. A chorus-bridge song is for instance Elliott Smith’s “Baby Britain”. A Beatlesque flavor can also be provided by a freer “suite” structure in many parts, assembled in ways that escape the traditional “pop” schemes and rather qualify as early examples of prog-rock, including those cases where each section, once performed, is not repeated at a later stage (e.g., “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), or, when repeated, is treated with a different arrangement (e.g., the Abbey Road medley: compare the melancholic beginning of “You Never Give Me Your Money”

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with the epic version of the same melody on “Carry That Weight”). An example of suite structure is Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending”. We have also identified a recurrent and characteristic part in The Beatles songs in the “special”, a section appearing only once in the song (occasionally twice), usually in the middle, with a melodic and harmonic setting that differs significantly from the rest of the song. Reserving one spotlight only for this section (hence the name “special”) has several implications: on the one hand, it focuses the attention on the part itself, often qualifying it as the main “attraction” within the song; on the other hand – as a consequence – it converges the arrangement’s choices (especially those concerning the dynamics, which  – in the case of “Something”  – tends to increase) in that direction; moreover, it leaves people with a bittersweet sensation of having heard “the best part” of the song only once, thereby creating a desire to listen to the song over and over again. A Beatlesque example of this strategy is the special in Space’s “Avenging Angels”. Another part, that may or may not coincide with the special (it does, in the case of “I Am the Walrus”) is what we have called the “sudden quiet”, that is, a particular transition that brings the song, in a rather dramatic and indeed sudden fashion, from a forte or fortissimo to a piano or pianissimo, mostly by reducing the number of the instruments used. The “English garden” part in “I Am the Walrus” is exactly that case: a Beatlesque example appears in Blur’s “Country House”. Opening a song with a riff is also a solution often adopted by The Beatles. This, alone, would not single out the Fab Four from other bands of the “classic rock” era, however, when combined with the characteristics we mentioned in the section on melody, it does confer a distinctive Beatlesque flavor. Similar to, and often coinciding with, the sudden quiet, is also what we may call the “spotlight”, that is, a part in which a single instrument is left alone to accompany the vocals, or even without the latter: the piano on the final part of “The End” (“And in the end, the love you take…”) is an example. A spotlight (on the acoustic guitar, this time) appears for instance on The Apples in Stereo’s “Strawberryfire”. Also, Beatles and Beatlesque songs often display breaks and turnarounds, that is, moments in which the song has some sort of halt (for instance, by leaving a single instrument or the vocals alone), before resuming its normal pace. Examples are the “See how they run” parts on “Lady Madonna” and the brass phrases on “Got to Get You into My Life” right after the refrains. The Bangles’ “Manic Monday” displays a similar strategy. The Beatles were always interested in providing their songs with memorable endings of sorts. One of those is the extended “singalong coda”, of which the prototype is obviously “Hey Jude”, with its endless Nah-nah-nah part, and it is something that became a chief component in many Beatlesque tracks. Songs of this kind feature a catchy, redundant, and usually long ending part, which often evolves into pure, joyful chaos (see the next category). The repetitive structure itself, not to mention the catchy melody, provides the “singalong” effect, something that, especially during a concert, is quite hard not to join in on (and indeed, Paul McCartney still “milks” that effect, using “Hey Jude” as his classic end-of-the-­ concert track, cheerleading the whole audience). An explicit (bordering on

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“shameless”) attempt to do a kind of “Hey Jude, part II” is Oasis’ “All Around the World”. As anticipated, an alternative to the singalong is a more chaotic ending: with the addition of more instruments, an increase in volume and –foremost – the addition of offstage voices and noises, several Beatles songs created an enthusiastic chaos where pretty much everything was allowed. A good example of this, is the already discussed “Hey Bulldog”, where Lennon and McCartney start a joking dialogue filled with barking and howling (“What did you say?” “I said Woof”, “Do you know anymore?”, “Owooooo!”). A song like “All You Need Is Love”, on the other hand, combines both the singalong effect with this more psychedelic one. The “Love is all you need” phrase is repeated ad-lib, but at the same time shouts, exclamations, quotations from other songs (famously: “Yesterday” and “She Loves You”) plus evidently all the orchestral parts, were layered one after another as the song slowly proceeded towards the fade-out. An outro of this sort appears, for instance, on The Lickerish Quartet’s “Lighthouse Spaceship”. On the other hand, if they decided to finish the song with, so to speak, an exclamation mark, The Beatles would opt for a number of strategies, two of which could be considered intrinsically Beatlesque: the so-called “choral cadenza” (the use of multiple voices in order to harmonize the final chords of a song – e.g., “With a Little Help from My Friends”) or, particularly in the early stage of their career, the “addedtone chord”, that is, a rather manneristic fully-harmonized of at least four sounds (the basic triad of the chord, plus one or more variations): it could be a sixth (as on “She Loves You”), a minor seventh (“Can’t Buy Me Love”), a seventh-ninth (“Twist and Shout”) and sometimes a major seventh as well (“It Won’t Be Long”). This final chord could be either performed vocally (in the style of female vocal bands like The Shirelles) or in the more traditional rock’n’roll manner, by letting the guitar have the final word. Examples are, respectively, the harmonized final cadenza on John Sebastian’s “Welcome Back” and the final chord on The Wonders’ “That Thing You Do”. Finally, only on a few occasions (but a “few” that for some reason became instantly associable to the band, such as a Baroque trumpet solo or a 3/4 ending), the band would “pretend” to finish a song and then launch into either a vocal (e.g., “Hello, Goodbye”) or instrumental (e.g., “Strawberry Fields Forever”) reprise. This additional part usually displays a melodic and harmonic setting that is “inspired by”, but hardly “identical to” the material in the actual song), it is usually of a short length and not rarely enriched with more sui generis effects, such as backwards tapes or speed-altered voices. The Dukes of Stratosphear do this on “The Mole from the Ministry” A Beatlesque quality may also be achieved through a particular application of sounds and effects (see Sect. 1.2 and Chap. 2) There are several “subtle” strategies that we shall here ignore because the average listener would be hardly able to notice them. We have discussed them throughout this monograph as important components in the Beatles’ productions, but, when it comes to this particular section of the book, we are looking for “outstanding” elements. One that is easily noticeable, for instance, is the amount of what we may call “offstage” voices and noises that appear

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in some songs. Often reflecting the band’s pure joy of making music or tendency not to take themselves too seriously, this category refers to the habit of inserting spoken parts, inside jokes, sound effects and various noises within the song, especially towards the end of it, but with a clear non-diegetic, extra- or meta-textual function. A perfect example is “Yellow Submarine”, with the four group members impersonating cliché calls of sailors and navy officers (“Drop the cable!” or “Full speed ahead!” etc.), and with various aquatic and sailing effects in sheer Foley art style,20 not to mention that lovely meta-sign of the verse “And the band begins to play”, actually followed by a short tape of a street-band. A Beatlesque example is the offstage sounds on Richard Swift’s “Dirty Jim”. Also, easily detectable – and arguably the quintessential Beatles’ studio effect – is the employment of backwards tapes. As we already discussed in Sect. 1.2.4, the first use of a reverse tape (the final vocal part on “Rain”) was produced by chance, when a probably-not-too-sober John Lennon went home to listen to a pre-produced version of that song, and played it the wrong way on his tape machine (a recurrent accident in those pre-cassette days, when the medium employed was the reel tape, which could be easily placed the wrong way). He reportedly enjoyed what he heard, and thus he explicitly required at least a piece of it to be edited in at some point during the song. More than “Rain”, however, it was songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “I’m Only Sleeping” to reveal how much The Beatles had, by then, fallen in love with backwards effects. Beatlesque songs often make use of reverse tapes: an example is Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” (which, not by chance, is designed to be reminiscent of “Tomorrow Never Knows”). Certain forms of saturation and distortion are also worth mentioning. From the “fuzz” bass part in “Think for Yourself” to the proto-metal of “Helter Skelter”, not forgetting saturated voices and acoustic guitars “sounding in every possible way but acoustic” (see “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, for instance), distortions are much more associated with The Beatles than one could imagine at a first glimpse. Distorted bass is for instance a trademark of the band Ben Folds Five, whose song “Army” is one of their most Beatlesque. A vintage “1960s-sounding” distortion on the guitars appears on Lilys’ “Nanny in Manhattan”. Finally, the most evident entry in this category is that particular combination of sounds and effects that attempt to create a Lennonesque voice in a singer. We have already discussed the big difference between McCartney’s and Lennon’s voices is that the former would adapt his vocal timbre to the characteristics of the song (thereby going soft and sweet in “I Will”, raucous and dramatic in “Oh! Darling”, etc.), while Lennon, especially from 1965 onwards, developed a distinctively sharp and thin timbre, which he maintained throughout the majority of his songs. By consequence, while McCartney’s voice pretty much escapes any potential of being imitated, or at least, when it is, the average listener does not necessarily assign a Beatlesque quality to it, Lennon’s voice is very recognizable and counts dozens of

 A credible homemade flow of waters was obtained by dragging an iron chain in a bathtub filled with water. 20

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imitators, including Liam Gallagher, Elvis Costello, Chris Collinwood (of Fountains of Wayne), Robert Harrison (of Cotton Mather), etc., plus specific imitations on single songs. Moreover, when a band decides to release an openly-Beatlesque track, often the (male) lead singer would intentionally manipulate his voice to sound a bit like Lennon. Besides the specific work on timbre and performance, an often-employed device that facilitates this process of Lennonization is the varispeed (or, as it is more often referred to nowadays, “pitch control”). The varispeed was developed for altering the pitch of a voice or instrument. John Lennon, who was constantly and famously dissatisfied with the sound of his voice, would often invoke its use, with the result of making his voice even sharper and thinner than it already was (a case in point is “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”). For the record, The Beatles employed the varispeed also on different musical instruments (e.g., the mellotron part on “Flying”). A distinctively Lennon-sounding timbre, enhanced by the varispeed, appears in Utopia’s “Everybody Else Is Wrong”, which is exactly an attempt to do a psychedelic song à la “I Am the Walrus”. A short mention should be made also for lyrics, even though – we shall once more repeat – they are outside the scope of this monograph. There is no doubt that a Beatlesque song is mostly a “musical” affair, while lyrics can be roughly of any type, and rather depending on the specific inclinations and thematic interests of any given band. Still, some correspondence may still be established when the verses are of one of the following five types: 1. A simple-and-direct love song, in the vein of “From Me to You”, “Thank You Girl”, “I’ll Get You” and the likes, with an abundance of personal pronouns (particularly “I” and “you”) and a linguistic simplicity and spontaneousness. Simple-and-direct love lyrics appear for instance on Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw the Light” 2. A fictional/narrative song, in the style of (particularly, but not exclusively) Paul McCartney, with made-up characters (usually named) involved in made-up events happening in made-up places. Fool’s Garden’s “Emily” is one of the many examples. 3. A nonsensical/psychedelic/surrealistic song, this time more (but again not exclusively) in the style of Lennon, particularly in his psychedelic phase, featuring colorful, unpredictable, and improbable characters, places, and events, with a plot that may or may not make sense. Psychedelic lyrics are featured, for instance, on Pink Floyd’s “Point Me at the Sky” 4. A self-empowerment song, in that particular style that particularly McCartney displays in songs like “Blackbird” or “Hey Jude”. These songs share a message of encouragement expressed through a sort of melancholic optimism: things may not look great now, but they will improve with some patience and some effort. “Take these broken wings and learn to fly”, “Take a sad song and make it better”, “There will be an answer, let it be”… A song featuring self-empowerment lyrics is Vinyl Kings’ “Here We Go Again”.

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5. A “peace and love” song, in the vein of “All You Need Is Love”, “The Word” or “Revolution”, with a simple, non-political, message of universal harmony and understanding. An example being Lenny Kravitz’s “Let Love Rule”. In conclusion, we may take a single song and schematically summarize the various Beatlesque traits “at work”. A rich example is the repeatedly mentioned Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love”, included in the album Seeds of Love, released in 1989, of which it became the first, and very successful, single, featuring, among other things, a video clip whose visual psychedelic effects made the reference even more explicit. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith (Fig.  5.4), the song’s authors and performers, are outspoken Beatles fans, and their references to the Fab Four go well beyond this single track (particularly the album Everybody Loves a Happy Ending seems almost a Beatlesque “exercise in style” of the type released by Vinyl Kings, Dukes of Stratosphear and others). However, “Sowing the Seeds of Love” remains a quintessential attempt to create a Beatlesque “Frankenstein creature”, with elements borrowed from different songs and a temporal reference that mostly pays homage to the psychedelic Beatles of 1967. First, in rhetorical terms (see Sect. 5.3.1), “Sowing the Seeds of Love” qualifies as a “synecdoche”: it refers to The Beatles in general, without focusing on any particular song, but rather borrowing bits and pieces from various tracks. As mentioned, the song intends mostly to remind the listener of the middle, psychedelic period of The Beatles, particularly the 1967 singles and albums. Songwriting and production elements are mostly based on Lennon and/or McCartney’s repertoire, but we shall see that also Harrison’s songwriting and Starr’s playing are referenced.

Fig. 5.4  Tears for Fears during a 2017 concert. (Photo attribution: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0)

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Proceeding in the displayed order in this paragraph, we can see the following traits: 1. Vocals: we find harmonies in two and three parts, passages in falsetto and even in contrapuntistic style (with the combination of the “Time to eat all your words…” and the “High time we made a stand…” parts). 2. Rhythmic solutions: drum fills à la Ringo, strings performing in a rhythmic-­ marcato way and the inevitable “banana fingers” (the “I Am the Walrus” type) keyboard accompaniment. 3. Harmony: a major descending progression on the refrain, and a minor one on the strophes, occasional diminished and minor seventh chords. 4. Melodic elements: a semi-spoken Lennonesque vocal in the strophes (in a “I Am the Walrus” mode) and a wide-range McCartneyesque refrain (with hints of “Hello, Goodbye”, “Honey Pie” and Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much”), a Baroque trumpet solo. 5. Instruments: pretty much the whole deal, from the guitar band format to strings and horns. Perhaps, being a late 1980s production, the role of “uncommon instruments” tends to be replaced by synthesizers. 6. Structure: while mostly a “strophe-refrain” set-up, the song untypically displays two specials (both appearing only once) plus various small bits that, altogether, give the song a “suite” feel. A combination of singalong and psychedelic codas animates the ending of the song. 7. Sounds and effects: abundant use of backwards tapes and offstage noises, plus occasional distortions, and a cacophonic passage strongly reminiscent of “A Day in the Life” 8. Lyrics: mostly of the “peace and love” type with numerous nonsensical/surrealistic insertions (including the reference “Kick out the style, bring back the jam”, which plays upon Paul Weller’s two bands, The Style Council and The Jam) Altogether, we count some 25 distinctive Beatlesque elements, either occasional or recurrent, including some that alone would make the influence evident (once again: just the trumpet solo or the keyboard accompaniment would have made the point clear). While “Sowing the Seeds of Love” was topping the charts, a whole new generation of underground musicians in England (particularly the so-called Madchester scene) was setting the template for one of the most intentionally-­Beatlesque movements in popular music: Brit-Pop. From the early 1990s onwards, bands from all over the world would recur to tricks and topoi imported from the Fab Four in an almost systematic way. The “Beatlesque” would no longer be a refined condiment for a song: it became the whole dish. Generation after generation, young musicians draw from the Beatles’ repertoire and make those lessons their own, forging an artistic personality that may or may not sound derivative, but which always owe something to the Fab Four. In all this process, production and studio activity deserve more credit than they have perhaps received so far. Hopefully, this monograph will contribute to a better understanding of their role.

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs

Title 1. (At the) Turn of the Year 2. 67 (HOME) 3. 10538 Overture 4. 19,8 5. 40 Watt Solution 6. 7:30 Guided Tour 7. 7:38 (Bug-Eyed & Breathless) 8. A Little Trip 9. A Traves del Cristal 10. Ain’t It a Shame 11. All Around the World 12. All I Do Is Cry 13. All in Good Time 14. All You Have to Do 15. All Smiles 16. All the Little Pieces 17. Alone 18. Always Late 19. Amor Despues de los Veinte Años, El 20. And You Say 21. And One Day 22. Another Day 23. Are You the One? 24. Army 25. Avenging Angels 26. Ba Uwa Mare Re

Author and/or Performer The Eddysons Vinyl Kings Electric Light Orchestra Los Walkers Cotton Mather The Five Americans Bronco Bullfrog Vinyl Kings Los Mac’s Rockadrome Oasis The Krayolas The Pillbugs Jet Utopia Louis XIV Utopia Utopia Los Mac’s Fool’s Garden The Left Banke The Rutles The Trolls Ben Folds Five Space Key (continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5

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180 Title 27. Baby Britain 28. Baby I’m the One 29. Bad Day at Black Rock, Baby 30. Bad Time 31. Ball and Chain 32. Ballet for a Rainy Day 33. Ballrooms of Mars 34. Balulalow 35. Bang Bang 36. Barnaby Slade 37. Because 38. Beetlebum 39. Before I Sleep 40. Behind the Beat 41. Between Us 42. Big Day 43. Big Sea 44. Biggest Gossip in Town 45. Biggest Night of Her Life, The 46. Blood and Rockets 47. Blue Room 48. Bored 49. Brainiac’s Daughter 50. Breathe 51. Bride Stripped Bare by “Bachelors”, The 52. Broken Imaginary Time 53. Brother Lou’s Love Colony 54. Buffalo Billycan 55. C’mon C’mon 56. Cake 57. Call Me Mellow 58. Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft 59. Can’t Be Love 60. Can’t Get It Out of My Head 61. Captain Nemo 62. Cause You’re a Lady 63. Cavern 64. Charmless Man 65. Cheese and Onions 66. Chocolate Buster Dan 67. Chocolate Cake 68. Chris-Craft No. 9 69. Closest Thing to Heaven 70. Collideascope

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Author and/or Performer Elliott Smith Alan Bernhoft Colours The Roulettes XTC XTC T. Rex Revolver Vinyl Kings Bronco Bullfrog The Dave Clark Five Blur The Tremeloes The Overtures The Rutles XTC The Gurus Rockin’ Horse The Nashville Teens The Claypool Lennon Delirium The Postelles Alan Bernhoft The Dukes of Stratosphear Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band The Soundtrack of Our Lives Colours Apple Sloan Race Horses Tears for Fears Klaatu Ellie Pop Electric Light Orchestra The Pillbugs Key Frank Lee Sprague Blur The Rutles The Pandamonium Vinyl Kings Shanes Tears for Fears The Dukes of Stratosphear (continued)

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 71. Comburda 72. Contrary Mary 73. Country House 74. Crazy Lazy Little Miss Daisy 75. Cricklewood 76. Crystal Ball 77. Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl 78. Day After Day 79. Day After Day 80. Day by Day 81. Dancer, The 82. Dear Undecided 83. Delicate Situation 84. Desiree 85. Devendra 86. Dirty Jim 87. Disillusion 88. Do It Like You Like 89. Don’t Be Unkind 90. Don’t Get Me Wrong 91. Don’t Go Away 92. Don’t You Ever Think I Cry 93. Don’t You Know I’ve Been Lying 94. Don’t You Realize 95. Don’t You Think It Would Better 96. Don’t Know Why 97. Don’t Look Back in Anger 98. Don’t Say a Word 99. Dónde Está Miss Lee los Sabados? (Where’s Miss Lee on Saturdays?) 100. Doubleback Alley 101. Dover Beach 102. Dreaming 103. Dreams 104. Earn Enough for Us 105. Easy Listening 106. Ebeneezer Beaver 107. Eye Eye 108. Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik 109. Espero Que Les Guste 042 (I Hope You’ll Like It 042) 110. Evelyn & Jeff 111. Every Day 112. Everybody Else Is Wrong

181 Author and/or Performer The Pillbugs Kix Blur Smyle The Goodies Utopia The Pillbugs Julian Lennon Badfinger Sizer Barker The Allusions The Sundowners Rockin’ Horse The Left Banke The Twilights Richard Swift Photon Band The Stands The American Beetles The Bonzo Dog Band Oasis Rockin’ Horse Liverpool Echo Colours Buckwheat The Rutles Oasis Bear Los Walkers The Rutles The Bangles The 23rd Turnoff Vinyl Kings XTC The Rutles The Mirage Lolas The Rutles Los Shakers Alan Bernhoft The Winnerys Utopia (continued)

182 Title 113. Everybody Loves a Happy Ending 114. Everybody Smiles 115. Everyday Story of Smalltown, The 116. Everything You Wanted 117. Everything Is Fine 118. Everything Reminds Me of You 119. Everywhere I Look 120. Falling I’m Falling 121. Farmer and the Fisherman, The 122. Feel Too Good 123. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards 124. Find What You Mean to Me 125. Fireworks 126. First of the Runaways 127. Five, Five, Five 128. Fly 129. Flowers in the Window 130. Follow My Footsteps 131. Following Rainbows 132. Fool the World 133. Fools Life 134. Found You 135. Get up and Go 136. Girl on the Train 137. Girly Worm 138. Go! 139. Gold Day 140. Golden Avatar 141. Good Times Roll 142. Good Will Out, The 143. Goodbye 144. Goodbye Holly 145. Got to Get Out of Here 146. Gotta Get Up 147. Gotta Have It 148. Great Day 149. Greenacre Hill 150. Guiding Star 151. Hampden Tennis Club 152. Hang Up City 153. Happy Birthday 154. Hard Work 155. Have You Heard the Word 156. He’ll Make You Cry

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Author and/or Performer Tears for Fears Alan Bernhoft XTC Alan Bernhoft Alan Bernhoft Gabrielė Goštautaitė Phil Keaggy The Gurus Key Utopia Tame Impala The Overtures Embrace Nick Capaldi The Winnerys J.K. & Co. Travis The News Alan Bernhoft Drake Bell Dr. Dog Dodgy The Rutles Liverpool Echo Mike Viola Willie Wisely Sparklehorse Kula Shaker The Rutles Embrace Giuliodorme The Left Banke Badfinger Harry Nilsson Vanessa Paradis Andy Partridge Bronco Bullfrog The Lovetones Fourmyula The Berkeley Kites The Pillbugs The Gurus The Fut The Critters (continued)

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 157. Hey Mister! 158. Hey, Hey Girl 159. Helping You Out 160. Her Diamond Ring 161. Here She Comes Again 162. Here We Go Again 163. Hilly Fields 164. Hindu Times, The 165. Hoi Poloi 166. Hold Me So Near 167. Hold My Hand 168. Hold on 169. Hold on Tight 170. Holly Park 171. Hollow Bells, The 172. How Can I Sing Like a Girl? 173. How Do You Know 174. Howlin’ at the Moon 175. Humble Heart 176. I Didn’t Understand 177. I Don’t Remember Your Name 178. I Don’t Wanna Know 179. I Just Want to Touch You 180. I Love You 181. I Must Be in Love 182. I Must Move 183. I Need You 184. I Saw the Light 185. I Swear 186. I Think I Know 187. I Think of Her (She’s on My Mind) 188. I Took a Chance 189. I Wander 190. I Want You 191. I’d Really Go for a Lady 192. I’ll Be There for You 193. I’ll Join the Army 194. I’m Here (Intro) 195. I’m Leaving 196. I’m Not Bad 197. I’m Not Getting through 198. I’m Outta Time 199. I’m So Heavy 200. I’m Trying to Forget You

183 Author and/or Performer The Rutles The American Beetles Colours Frank Lee Sprague The Stands Vinyl Kings Nick Nicely Oasis Utopia The Pillbugs The Rutles Badfinger The Left Banke Emitt Rhodes The Overtures They Might Be Giants The Boasters Buckwheat The Winnerys Elliott Smith The Records Julian Lennon Utopia The Rutles The Rutles The Zombies America Todd Rundgren The Tremeloes Vinyl Kings Colours Vinyl Kings The Gants Jeannie & The Big Guys Key The Rembrandts Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band Colours La Ruta Bronco Bullfrog Oasis Smyle Rockin’ Horse (continued)

184 Title 201. I’ve Been Waiting All My Life 202. If Everyone Was Listening 203. In Days of Old 204. In Your Room 205. In My Own Time 206. In Someone Else’s Mind 207. In Spite of All the Danger 208. In the Late Afternoon 209. Invisible 210. It’s Always Been That Way 211. It’s Better People 212. It’s Gonna Be Alright 213. It’s Looking Good 214. It’s Only Love 215. It’s Up to You 216. Joe Public 217. Just Because I’ve Fallen Down 218. Karma Police 219. Keep Your Hands off My Baby 220. Knicker Elastic King, The 221. Lady in Lace 222. Lady Riga 223. Lady Who Said She Could Fly, The 224. Land of Oz 225. Larry in the Sea with Daffodils 226. Late Night Talking 227. Laura 228. Laurie Song, The 229. Lazy Days 230. Lazy Man 231. Leather 232. Leave This Town 233. Leaving Tomorrow 234. Lemon Tree 235. Let Forever Be 236. Let Love Rule 237. Let There Be Love 238. Let’s Be Natural 239. Let’s Have a Change 240. Let’s Move on 241. Let’s Take a Trip Down the Rhine 242. Liberty Town of Love 243. Lies 244. Life Goes on

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Author and/or Performer Frank Lee Sprague Supertramp Emitt Rhodes The Bangles The Bee Gees The Soundtrack of Our Lives The Overtures The American Revolution Alan Bernhoft The Lovetones Oasis Smyle The Rutles The Gurus The Winnerys The Rutles The Buckinghams Radiohead Alan Bernhoft The Rutles The Stained Glass Amen Corner The Idle Race Le Cirque The Pillbugs Gabrielė Goštautaitė Billy Joel Lolas Robbie Williams The Mirage Tori Amos Vinyl Kings Bolland & Bolland Fool’s Garden The Chemical Brothers Lenny Kravitz Oasis The Rutles The Gurus Radio Days Apple The Pillbugs The Knickerbockers Utopia

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 245. Life Is Real 246. Light That Shines in, The 247. Lighthouse Spaceship 248. Lines 249. Listen, Listen 250. Little James 251. Living in Hope 252. Lonely-Phobia 253. Look at Me Now 254. Look What You’ve Done 255. Lorraine 256. Losing My Mind 257. Love Assistance 258. Love You Give, The 259. Love Life 260. Lovin’ 261. Lovin’ You Ain’t Easy 262. Loving, The 263. Low C 264. M.A.C.B. Theme, The 265. Maybe 266. Maybe Tonight 267. Major Happy’s Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band 268. Marigold 269. Masie Jones 270. Meddle with Me 271. Mediocre Me 272. Melodies Haunt You 273. Merely a Man 274. My Before and After 275. My Heavy Head 276. My Life as a Creep 277. My Love 278. My Luck Is Bound to Change 279. Michael Angelo 280. Mind Over Matter 281. Mole from the Ministry, The 282. Molly Black 283. Monday Morning Girl 284. Mr. Blue Sky 285. Mr. Greedyman 286. Mr. Jones

185 Author and/or Performer Queen Direct Hits The Lickerish Quartet Chris von Sneidern The Merry-Go-Round Oasis The Rutles The Rutles Electric Light Orchestra Jet The Left Banke Vinyl Kings Alan Bernhoft The Stands The Rutles Colours Michel Pagliaro XTC Supergrass The Mystic Astrologic Crystal Band featuring Steve Hoffman Split Enz The Knack The Rutles Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band Nimbo The Pillbugs The Stained Glass Dodgy XTC Cotton Mather Nick Heyward The Minus 5 Lenny Kravitz Frank Lee Sprague The 23rd Turnoff Vinyl Kings The Dukes of Stratosphear The Five Americans Fool’s Garden Electric Light Orchestra Vinyl Kings Apple

186 Title 287. Mr. Plastic Business Man 288. Mr. Simms Collector Man 289. Nails on My Feet 290. Nanny in Manhattan, A 291. Nearer than Green 292. Neo Mega Quasi Ultra Super Groovy 293. Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up 294. Nevertheless 295. NYC–25 296. Nice to See You 297. Night Shift 298. Nine in the Afternoon 299. Nite Is A-Comin’ 300. No Growing (Exegesis) 301. No One’s Been Here for Weeks 302. Now I’m in the C.I.A. 303. Now She Knows She’s Wrong 304. Now She’s Left You 305. Ocean Breakup/King of the Universe 306. Octopus 307. Oh Carol, I’m So Sad 308. Old Time Mover 309. Olivia 310. One 311. One Hour Cleaners 312. One More Time 313. Only a Memory 314. Opus #1 315. Opus 40 316. Other Side of Summer, The 317. Ouch! 318. Our House 319. Pay Attention to Me 320. Paisley Park 321. Pale Blue Dot 322. Pamela 323. Paper Aeroplanes 324. Paper Mask 325. Pasaporte, El 326. Peasant Girls 327. Penelope 328. Photograph 329. Pictures of Me 330. Piggy in the Middle

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Author and/or Performer The Fraternal Order Of The All Buckwheat Crowded House Lilys The Stands The Pillbugs LCD Soundsystem The Rutles The Olivia Tremor Control The Left Banke The Cowsills Panic! At The Disco Warm Sounds The Olivia Tremor Control Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band The Pillbugs Jellyfish The Rutles Elecric Light Orchestra Bronco Bullfrog Rockin’ Horse John Bromley One Direction Harry Nilsson The Blue Things Monalisa Twins The Smithereens The American Revolution Mercury Rev Elvis Costello The Rutles Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young The Tikis Prince And The Revolution Vinyl Kings Key The Pillbugs Bronco Bullfrog Los Brincos The Pillbugs Of Montreal Apple Elliott Smith The Rutles (continued)

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 331. Pineapple Head 332. Pink Lemonade 333. Pink Limousine 334. Plastic Surgical Holiday 335. Please Don’t Ask Me Why 336. Please Don’t Follow Me 337. Point Me at the Sky 338. Pools of Blue 339. Popcycle Island 340. Pour Qui Pourquoi 341. Pretty Little Star 342. Promises I’ve Made 343. Pure Buckwheat Honey 344. Purple Ribbons 345. Put Your Mind at Ease 346. Queen 347. Queen of the Hearts Blues 348. Questionnaire 349. Queue 350. Quiet Talks and Summer Walks 351. Radio 352. Rainbow People 353. Raining 354. Raining in Paradise 355. Rather Be Me 356. Red Day 357. Rendezvous 358. Resistere 359. Rocking Little Baby 360. Rose for Emily, A 361. Sad And Blue 362. Say Allright! 363. Say You Do 364. Sailing Ship, The 365. Scarlet Parlet 366. Scorpio Rising 367. Scrooge 368. Sea 369. Season Cycle 370. Secret World 371. Send Me Your Picture 372. Seven North Frederick 373. Shangri-La 374. She

187 Author and/or Performer Crowded House Mike Rabon & The Five Americans Paul Parrish The Pillbugs Alan Bernhoft James Murphy Pink Floyd Barclay James Harvest The Pillbugs Les Sultans Key Emitt Rhodes Buckwheat Buckwheat Every Mothers’ Son Alan Bernhoft Apple The Rutles Sean Lennon The Bonzo Dog Band Buckwheat The Fraternal Order Of The All Paper Garden The Subtones Colours Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band The Rutles Anna Maria Castelli Alan Bernhoft The Zombies Apostrophe Promise The American Beetles The Cryan’ Shame 101 Dam-Nations Death in Vegas Mike Rabon & The Five Americans Justin Heathcliff XTC Tears for Fears Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band Ellie Pop The Rutles Jeff Lynne (continued)

188 Title 375. She Belongs to Yesterday 376. She Goes Out with Everybody 377. She Looks Good in the Sun 378. She Means a Lot to Me 379. She’s Electric 380. She’s So High 381. She’s the One 382. Shine 383. Shiny Cage 384. Sideshow 385. Sightseer 386. Silly Boy 387. Sincerely Yours 388. Sing Little Bird Sing 389. Situation Vacant 390. Sky Blue 391. Sleeping in 392. Smeta Murgaty 393. So Far from My Heart 394. So You Are a Star 395. Soda Pop Man 396. Somebody Made for Me 397. Someone Like You 398. Something Good 399. Song for Jane 400. Sowing the Seeds of Love 401. Springtime Love 402. Stairway to Heaven 403. Star 404. Start! 405. Stone Blues Man 406. Stop the World for a Day 407. Strawberryfire 408. Sub-Rosa Subway 409. Sun 410. Sun Sing 411. Sunday Mondays 412. Sunday Rain 413. Sunny Day People 414. Sunshine Girl 415. Take Action 416. Take It Home 417. Take My Hand 418. Tattva

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Author and/or Performer The Overtures The Spongetones The Campbell Stokes Sunshine Recorder Smyle Oasis Tal Bachman World Party Take That The Dukes of Stratosphear The Family Tree Malcolm Mitchell Utopia Sleepy Hollow The Left Banke Splinter Pilot Menswear Warm Sounds Frank Lee Sprague The Hudson Brothers The Back Alley Emitt Rhodes Lenny Kravitz The Lovetones The Aerovons Tears for Fears Alan Bernhoft The Beatnix Stealers Wheel The Jam The Candymen The Twilights The Apples in Stereo Klaatu The Virgineers Rainbow Ffolly Vanessa Paradis Foo Fighters The Sundowners Alan Bernhoft The Twilights Utopia Lolas Kula Shaker (continued)

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 419. Taxloss 420. Tea and Sympathy 421. Telegram 422. Telephone Is Empty, The 423. Telephone Line 424. That Game 425. That Thing You Do! 426. That’s Not Right 427. Then She Appeared 428. There She Goes 429. These Days 430. Things We Do for Love, The 431. Till Your Luck Runs Out 432. Time Machine 433. Together 434. Tomorrow Drop Dead 435. Try 436. Tuba Rye and Will’s Son/Balloon in the Sky 437. Twirl 438. Undecided Man 439. Under a Cloud 440. Unfinished Words 441. Until the Day 442. Up against It 443. Up and Down on Your Merry-Go-Round 444. Utopia Parkway 445. Valotte 446. Vanishing Girl 447. Vez al Año (Once a Year), Una 448. Wake Up Boo! 449. Waking Up 450. Watch the Movie 451. We Are the Moles (Part 1) 452. We Had a Good Thing Goin’ 453. We’re Going to Be Friends 454. We’re in Love 455. We’re off You Know 456. Weatherman 457. Welcome Back 458. Western People 459. What a Bringdown 460. What Am I To Do 461. What Do You Do?

189 Author and/or Performer Mansun Bronco Bullfrog Buried Beds Love And Rockets Electric Light Orchestra Key The Wonders Utopia XTC The La’s The Minstrels 10CC The Overtures Vinyl Kings Bronco Bullfrog The Fraternal Order Of The All Michael Penn The Fraternal Order Of The All The Fraternal Order Of The All Paul Revere & The Raiders featuring Mark Lindsay The Bangles The Rutles Key The Digger$ The Pillbugs Fountains of Wayne Julian Lennon The Dukes of Stratosphear Los Walkers The Boo Radleys The Digger$ Lolas The Moles The Cyrkle The White Stripes The Merry-Go-Round Klaatu Quentin E. Klopjaeger John Sebastian Key Cream The Lovetones The Bonzo Dog Band (continued)

190

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs

Title Author and/or Performer 462. What I Mean to You The Back Pack 463. What if It Were You Vinyl Kings 464. What in the World??... The Dukes Of Stratosphear 465. Whatever Oasis 466. When the Nights Falls in The Stands 467. Where Does the World Go to Hide Utopia 468. Why We All Together 469. Why Did She Go? Fool’s Garden 470. Why Does It Always Rain on Me? Travis 471. Why Don’t You Get a Job? Offspring 472. Which Dreamed It Boeing Duveen And The Beautiful Soup 473. Who Feels Love? Oasis 474. Who Killed Tangerine? Tears for Fears 475. Whole Lot Easier Dodgy 476. Wild Days Fool’s Garden 477. Wild Things, The Ben & Jason 478. Willow’s End Jade 479. Winner Loser Ellie Pop 480. With a Girl Like You The Rutles 481. With Her The Aerovons 482. With My Face on the Floor Emitt Rhodes 483. Wonderful Day Buckwheat 484. Words Enough to Tell You The Mascots 485. World May Never Know, The Dr. Dog 486. World of You The Aerovons 487. Yes Buckwheat 488. Yes It Is Rockin’ Horse 489. Yolanda Hayes Fountains of Wayne 490. You Can Dance the Rock and Roll Wizzard 491. You Did It to Me The American Beetles 492. You Don’t Understand Me The Raconteurs 493. You Know What I Mean Justin Heathcliff 494. You Say Rockin’ Horse 495. You Sing Your Own Song The 23rd Turnoff 496. You’re Different Frank Lee Sprague 497. You’re in Love Mike Rabon & The Five Americans 498. You’re Spending All My Money Rockin’ Horse 499. You’ve Been Gone The Overtures 500. Zvonky, Zvoňte Prúdy Bonus tracks: Beatlesque songs by the four Beatles as solo artists (tracks originally written for The Beatles but eventually released as solo records are excluded) 1. #9 Dream John Lennon 2. All Those Years Ago George Harrison 3. Blow Away George Harrison (continued)

Appendix 1: A Database of Beatlesque Songs Title 4. C’mon People 5. Dear Boy 6. Fine Line, A 7. Grow Old with Me 8. Here Today 9. Intuition 10. Jenny Wren 11. King of Broken Hearts 12. Light That Has Lighted the World, The 13. My Brave Face 14. New 15. One Day at a Time 16. Power Cut 17. Real Love 18. Return to Pepperland 19. Somedays 20. Someplace Else 21. Tomorrow 22. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey 23. Weight of the World, The 24. When We Was Fab 25. Choose Love

 

191 Author and/or Performer Paul McCartney Paul and Linda McCartney Paul McCartney John Lennon Paul McCartney John Lennon Paul McCartney Ringo Starr George Harrison Paul McCartney Paul McCartney John Lennon Paul McCartney and Wings John Lennon Paul McCartney Paul McCartney George Harrison Paul McCartney and Wings Paul and Linda McCartney Ringo Starr George Harrison Ringo Starr

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 Note: When it comes to online references, we drew a line between authoritative and structured sources (online journals, institutional websites, news portals, etc.) and more amatorial/unofficial ones (fan pages, discussion groups, commercial sites…). The former are fully referenced in this bibliography, with authors and dates being usually easy to identify; the latter – often lacking such information – are simply reported as endnotes in the text with the simple indication of their URL. 1

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Index of Names

A Addey, M., 8, 12 Adorno, T., 30, 153, 154 Aerovons, The, 188, 190 a-ha, 133 Alexander, A., 45 Allen, W., 94, 96, 108, 109 Allusions, The, 181 Amen Corner, 184 America, 43, 75, 136, 141, 183 American Beetles, The, 181, 183, 187, 190 American Revolution, The, 184, 186 Amos, T., 184 Anderson, I., 149 Annigoni, P., 89 Antonioni, M., 37, 96 Apostrophe, 187 Apple, 180, 184–186 Apples in Stereo, The, 173, 188 Aristotle, 134 Asher, J., 37, 98, 140 Atkins, C., 46, 47 B Bacharach, B., 3, 46 Bach, J.S., 24, 52, 69, 133, 170 Bachman, T., 188 Back Alley, The, 188 Back Pack, The, 189 Bacon, T., 72 Badfinger, 181–183 Bakhtin, M., 13

Band, The, 39, 55, 56 Bangles, The, 173, 181, 184, 189 Barclay James Harvest, 187 Barthes, R., 40 Bascombe, D., 164 Beach Boys, The, 48, 50, 76, 154, 171 Bear, 181 Beatnix, The, 188 Bee Gees, The, 165, 184 Beethoven, L. van, 36, 39, 40, 49, 52, 57 Bell, A.G., 29 Bell, D., 182 Ben Folds Five, 175, 179 Ben & Jason, 172, 190 Berberian, C., 53 Bergman, I., 96, 126 Berio, L., 32, 37, 53 Berkeley Kites, The, 182 Berlioz, H., 38, 39 Bernhoft, A., 180–182, 184, 185, 187, 188 Berry, C., 17, 44, 45, 47, 48, 92, 146 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 55 Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, 36 Bizet, G., 51 Blacking, J., 35 Blue Things, The, 186 Blur, 162, 165, 171, 173, 180, 181 Boasters, The, 183 Boccaccio, G., 117 Boeing Duveen and The Beautiful Soup, 190 Bolland & Bolland, 184 Bonzo Dog Band, The, 181, 187, 189 Boone, P., 46

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5

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198 Boo Radleys, The, 162, 189 Born, G., 6, 153 Bowie, D., 142 Breton, A., 147 Brincos, L., 186 Bromley, J., 186 Bronco Bullfrog, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 189 Brown, P., 8, 12 Bucciarelli, P., v, vi, viii, 126, 135 Buckinghams, The, 184 Buckwheat, 181, 183, 186, 187, 190 Buried Beds, 189 Byrds, The, 55, 72 C Cage, J., 53 Campbell Stokes Sunshine Recorder, The, 188 Candymen, The, 188 Capaldi, N., 182 Carroll, L. (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 92, 94 Casetti, F., 96, 146 Cash, J., x, 46 Castelli, A.M., 187 Chagas, P.C., 29 Charles, R., 45, 51 Chemical Brothers, The, 76, 165, 175, 184 Chiffons, The, 49, 118 Chills, The, 26 Churchill, W., 43 Cirque, L., 184 Clapton, E., 6, 10, 18, 24, 155 Clark, T., 7, 12 Claypool Lennon Delirium, The, 180 Clean, The, 26 Coasters, The, 45 Cochran, E., 44, 46 Coen, E., 98 Coen, J., 98 Colbert, S., 79 Cole, N.K., 46 Collinwood, C., 176 Colours, 180, 181, 183, 185, 187 Cookies, The, 45 Costello, E., 162, 176, 186 Cotton Mather, 165, 176, 179, 185 Courrier, K., 52 Cowsills, The, 186 Cream, 155, 189 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 39, 55 Cristofori, B., 38 Critters, The, 182 Crosby, D., 51

Index of Names Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 186 Crowded House, 156, 162, 167, 171, 186, 187 Cryan’ Shame, The, 187 Cusic, D., 46 Cyrkle, The, 165, 189 D Dalai Lama, 16, 42 Dalí, S., 147 Darwin, C., 150 Dave Clark Five, The, 180 Davies, R., 19 Davis, T.F., 91 Death in Vegas, 165, 171, 187 Debussy, C., 39, 40 de Kooning, W., 121 Delalande, F., 31 Desogus, P., 134 Diamond, B., 6 Di Chio, F., 96 Dickens, C., 92, 146 Diddley, B., 17, 45 Digger$, The, 189 Direct Hits, 185 Dodgy, 158, 159, 162, 182, 185, 190 Domino, F., 44, 47 Donays, The, 45 Donegan, L., 17 Donovan, 54 Down, J.L., 143 Dr. Dog, 182, 190 Duchamp, M., 38, 119 Dukes of Stratosphear, The, 158, 164, 165, 168, 169, 174, 177, 180, 185, 188, 189 Dylan, B., 37, 39, 48–50, 54–56, 65, 78, 93, 115, 130 E Eagles, vii Eastman, L., 97 Eco, U., 30, 35, 89, 110, 111, 134, 135, 138, 139 Eddysons, The, 179 Edmunds, D., 130 Eerola, T., 62 Eisenstein, S., 127, 133–135 Electric Light Orchestra, 130, 131, 135, 170, 179, 180, 185, 189 Elio e le Storie Tese, 115 Elizabeth II, Queen of England, 89 Ellie Pop, 180, 187, 190 Ellory, J., 140, 141

Index of Names Embrace, 182 Emerick, G., vi, 7–9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 122, 165 Epstein, B., 3 E.S. Posthumus, 33 Evans, M., 115, 123 Everett, W., ix, 5, 41, 53, 57 Everly Brothers, The, 46, 47, 168 Every Mothers’ Son, 187 F Fabbri, F., 78, 90 Family Tree, The, 165, 188 Fearless, R., 165 Fellini, F., 94, 96, 109 Five Americans, The, 179, 185, 187, 190 Foo Fighters, 170, 188 Fool’s Garden, 155, 158, 159, 162, 170, 176, 179, 184, 185, 190 Fool, The, 25, 70, 144 Fountains of Wayne, 176, 189, 190 Fourmost, The, 36 Fourmyula, 182 Franklin, A., 39 Fraternal Order Of The All, The, 186, 187, 189 Fut, The, 182 G Gallagher, L., 64, 176 Gants, The, 183 Gaye, M., 51, 79 Gell, A., 6, 154 Gerry and the Pacemakers, 36 Gershwin, G., 46 Gershwin, I., 46, 92 Gideon, 92 Giuliodorme, v, vii, 115, 182 Goffin, G., 46 Goodies, The, 181 Goons, The, 9 Goštautaitė, G., 182, 184 Gould, J., 43 Greimas, A.J., 95, 111, 112 Grohl, D., 75 Guerra Lisi, S., 33, 41 Guesdon, J.-M., 52, 53, 55, 57, 88, 104 Gurus, The, 108, 165, 180, 182, 184 H Hames, A., 141 Hammack, J., ix Hammerstein, O., 46, 91

199 Harris, J., 56 Harrison, G., v–vii, 2, 7, 9, 10, 17–19, 21, 22, 25–27, 37, 40, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71–73, 77, 79, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92, 103, 104, 107, 108, 114, 116–118, 128, 130, 131, 135, 140, 141, 150, 162, 164, 168, 171, 190, 191 Harrison, R., 176–178 Hart, L., 91 Hatten, R., 34 Hawtrey, C., 126 Heathcliff, J., 187, 190 Herbert, M., 119 Herrmann, B., 55, 110, 114 Heyward, N., 185 Hitchcock, A., 96, 154 Hoffman, S., 185 Holly, B., 17, 44, 46, 47, 65, 66, 92, 163 Holmes, T., 165 Honda, Y., 164 Hornsby, J., 5, 8, 24 Hudson Brothers, The, 188 101 Dam-Nations, 187 I Idle Race, The, 184 Inglis, I., 141 J Jade, 190 Jagger, M., 168 Jamerson, J., 45, 47 Jam, The, 171, 178, 188 Jeannie & The Big Guys, 183 Jellyfish, 162, 165, 186 Jet, 21, 162, 167, 179, 185 Jethro Tull, 150 J. K. & Co., 182 Joel, B., 184 John, E., 78, 142 Johns, G., vi, 8, 130 Jones, B., 6, 24, 165 Joyce, J., 94 K Keaggy, P., 182 Keaton, D., 108 Kehew, B., 41, 58 Kelly, G., 116 Key, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189 King, C., 46

200 King, M.L., 145 King, N., 165 Kinks, The, 48, 55 Kix, 155, 181 Klaatu, 155, 172, 180, 188, 189 Klein, A., 128 Klopjaeger, Q.E. (William Charles Boardman), 189 Knack, The, 13, 155, 171, 185 Knickerbockers, The, 154, 184 Koger, M., 144 Kravitz, L., 177, 184, 185, 188 Krayolas, The, 179 Kubrick, S., 95, 96 Kula Shaker, 172, 182, 188 Kulikauskas, J., 33 L Laozi, 107 La’s, The, 189 LCD Soundsystem, 186 Lear, E., 94 Leckie, J., 164 Led Zeppelin, 27 Left Banke, The, 72, 171, 179, 181–183, 185, 186, 188 Leiber, J., 46 Leigh, J., 110, 114 Leng, S., 135 Lennon, C., 113 Lennon, John, 10, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 49, 50, 52, 54, 59, 63, 64, 66, 70, 74, 103, 112, 113, 118, 119, 140, 144, 146, 154, 162, 167, 175, 176, 190, 191 Lennon, Julian, 94, 113, 164, 181, 183, 189 Lennon, S., 164, 187 Lester, R., 104 Lewis, J.L., 44 Lewisohn, M., ix, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16–18, 41, 44, 45, 51, 66, 108, 111, 115, 136, 140 Lickerish Quartet, The, 167, 174, 185 Ligeti, G., 32 Lilys, 175, 186 Lindsay, M., 189 Little Richard, 44, 47 Liverpool Echo, 181, 182 Lolas, 181, 184, 188, 189 Louis XIV, 179 Love And Rockets, 189 Lovetones, The, 182, 184, 188, 189 Lull, J., 153 Lumière, A., 98, 109 Lumière, L., 98, 109

Index of Names Lush, R., 7, 141 Lynne, J., 128–131, 135, 138, 164, 187 Lyttelton, H., 48 M MacDonald, I., 57, 58, 62 MacFarlane, T., 39 Mačiūnas, J., 54 Mac’s, Los, 179 Magritte, R., 37, 135 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 145 Mamontovas, A., 33 Mansun, 165, 189 Manzarek, R., 19 Marler, P., 105 Maroon 5, 168 Martinelli, D., v, vi, viii, 29–31, 33, 41, 91, 105, 107, 110, 115, 126, 135, 145, 157 Martin, G., vi, x, 1, 3–11, 13–15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 31, 39, 40, 51, 52, 55, 73, 76, 82, 102, 106, 119, 120, 122, 128–131, 136, 137, 141, 145, 165 Marvelettes, The, 45 Mascots, The, 190 Mason, D., 52 McCarthy, L., 59 McCartney, P., 4, 12, 17, 20, 21, 26, 39, 40, 44, 46, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 67, 70, 90, 93, 101, 103, 108, 111, 113, 115, 118, 119, 128, 130, 131, 133, 138, 140, 145, 160, 162, 173, 176, 191 McDonald, P., 7–9 McGuinn, R., 51 McLuhan, M., 108, 109 Mellers, W., 41 Mendes, C., 91 Menswear, 165, 188 Mercury, F., 65 Mercury Rev, 155, 186 Merry-Go-Round, The, 77, 99, 149, 165, 185, 189 Mike Rabon & The Five Americans, 187, 190 Miles, B., 18, 119, 144, 145 Miller, M., 130 Milligan, S., 129 Minstrels, The, 189 Minus 5, The, 185 Mirage, The, 181, 184 Mitchell, M., 188 Moles, The, 189 Monalisa Twins, 186 Monet, C., 33 Moore, A., 41

Index of Names Moorefield, V., 87 Morricone, E., 90 Mulhern, T., 48 Murphy, J., 187 Mystic Astrologic Crystal Band, The, 185 N Nashville Teens, The, 180 Nattiez, J.-J., 30 Neruda, P., 138 New Radicals, 167 News, The, 182 Nicely, N. (Nickolas Laurien), 183 Nilsson, H., 182, 186 Nimbo, 185 Nurmesjärvi, Terhi, 77 O Oasis, v, 75, 115, 155–157, 162, 165, 167, 169, 174, 179, 181, 183–185, 188, 190 Offspring, 165, 190 Of Montreal, 186 Olivia Tremor Control, The, 186 One Direction, 155, 186 Ono, Y., 6, 37, 54, 97 Orbison, R., 46, 48, 74, 130, 131 Orzabal, R., 177 Osmond, D., 111 Oval, 119 Overtures, The, 180, 182–184, 188–190 Owens, B., 46 P Pagliaro, M., 185 Pandamonium, The, 180 Panic! At The Disco, 165, 186 Paper Garden, 187 Paradis, V., 182, 188 Parrish, P., 187 Partan, S.R., 105 Partridge, A., 64, 157, 158, 161, 169, 182 Pastorius, J., 150 Paul McCartney and Wings, 46, 130, 191 Paul Revere & The Raiders, 189 Pedler, D., 41, 47, 65 Peirce, C.S., 34, 88 Penn, M., 189 Perkins, A., 110, 114 Perkins, C., 46, 47, 92, 146 Petrie, K.J., 96 Petty, T., 130

201 Phillips, P., 47 Phillips, S., x Photon Band, 181 Pillbugs, The, 179–187, 189 Pilot, 170, 188 Pinguini Tattici Nucleari, 167 Pink Floyd, 1, 142, 167, 176, 187 Pollock, J., 121 Postelles, The, 180 Presley, E., x, 2, 10, 17, 44, 47, 51, 79, 100 Preston, B., 6, 24, 73, 76 Price, C.G., 46 Prince And The Revolution, 186 Procol Harum, 52, 69 Promise, 187 Prúdy, 190 Q Quarrymen, The, 17, 44, 47 Queen, 58, 89, 155 Quicksilver Messenger Service, 55 R Race Horses, 180 Raconteurs, The, 190 Radio Days, 184 Radiohead, 58, 184 Rainbow Ffolly, 188 Ray, J., 45 Razauskas, D., 33 Records, The, 183 Redding, O., 51 Reinhardt, D., 137 R.E.M., 26 Rembrandts, The, 171, 183 Reviolence, 32 Revolver, 1, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 21, 59, 64, 76, 116, 119, 120, 162, 165, 180 Reynolds, D., 116 Rhodes, E., 170, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190 Richards, K., 74, 153 Rich, B., 150 Riley, T., 14, 58 Ringo Starr And His All-Starr Band, 2, 135 Robertson, R., 55 Robinson, S., 45, 51 Rockadrome, 179 Rockin’ Horse, 165, 180, 181, 183, 186, 190 Rodgers, R., 46 Rogers, G. (Virginia Katherine McMath), 137 Rolling Stones, The, 27, 48, 153, 154 Roulettes, The, 180

202 Roylance, B., 102 Rundgren, T., 64, 162, 166, 176, 183 Russell, B., 37 Ruta, La, 183 Rutles, The, 165–167, 179–187, 189, 190 Ruwet, N., 35 Ryan, K., 41, 58 S Schumann, R., 40 Scola, E., 95, 96 Scorsese, M., 96 Scott, J., 24 Scott, K., 7, 8, 141 Searchers, The, 36 Sebastian, J., 174, 189 Sedaka, N., 46 Seeger, P., 145 Sellers, P., 129 Shakers, Los, 181 Shanes, 180 Shankar, R., 51 Sheff, D., 18 Shirelles, The, 45, 47, 174 Sinatra, F., 79 Sizer Barker, 181 Sleepy Hollow, 188 Sloan, 180 Smith, C., 177 Smith, E., 156, 158, 159, 172, 180, 183, 186 Smithereens, The, 186 Smith, N., 7, 10, 18, 58 Smith, P., 57 Smyle, 181, 183, 184, 188 Soundtrack Of Our Lives, The, 164, 180, 184 Space, 173, 179 Spangler, J., 143 Sparklehorse, 182 Spector, P., vi, 1, 5, 8, 26, 39, 48, 128–131, 137 Splinter, 188 Split Enz, 171, 185 Spongetones, The, 163, 172, 188 Sprague, F.L., 163, 168, 180, 183–185, 188, 190 Stained Glass, The, 184, 185 Stands, The, 181, 183, 185, 186, 190 Starr, R., 2, 19, 27, 53, 56, 58, 65, 72, 74–76, 124, 130, 135, 140, 150, 162, 167–169, 171, 191 Stealers Wheel, 188 Stefani, G., vi, 30–41

Index of Names Stockhausen, K., 37, 38, 53 Stoller, M., 46 Style Council, The, 178 Subtones, The, 187 Sultans, Les, 187 Sundowners, The, 181, 188 Supergrass, 75, 185 Supertramp, 142, 184 Swift, R., 175, 181 Swift, T., 33 Swinging Blue Jeans, The, 36 T Take That, 155, 188 Tame Impala, 182 Tarantino, Q., 131 Taylor, C., 140, 141 Taylor, R., 140, 141 Tears for Fears, v, 13, 64, 76, 157, 164, 165, 167, 173, 177, 180, 182, 187, 188, 190 10CC, 189 They Might Be Giants, 155, 183 Thomas, C., 8, 84, 107 Thomas Edisun’S Electric Light Bulb Band, 169, 180, 183, 185–187 Tikis, The, 186 Tillekens, Ger, 70 Townsend, K., vi, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18 Townshend, P., 55 Traveling Wilburys, The, 130, 131 Travis, 182, 190 Tremeloes, The, 165, 180, 183 T. Rex, 180 Trolls, The, 179 Trunova, Victoria, 32 Turner, S., 58 23rd Turnoff, The, 181, 185, 190 Twilights, The, 181, 188 U U2, 26 Ustinov, P., 129 Utopia, v, 166, 179, 181–184, 188–190 V Valdez, S., 77 Varankaitė, Ulrika, 33 Vee, Bobby (Robert Thomas Velline), 46, 48 Vincent, G., 46 Vince, P., 12

Index of Names Vinyl Kings, 166, 169, 176, 177, 179–181, 183–186, 189, 190 Viola, M., 182 Virgineers, The, 188 von Sneidern, C., 185 W Wagner, R., 39 Walkers, L., 179, 181, 189 Warm Sounds, 186, 188 Warwick, J., 45 Waters, R., 142 Watts, C., 168 We All Together, 190 Weller, P., 178 Wenner, J., 44, 58 White Stripes, The, 189 Who, The, 27, 55 Wilhelmj, A., 52 Williams, H., 57 Williams, L., 44 Williams, P., 48

203 Williams, R., 169, 184 Wilson, B., 50, 130, 154 Wilson, H., 43 Wings, see Paul McCartney and Wings Winnerys, The, 181–184 Wisely, W., 182 Wizzard, 190 Womack, K., 55, 91 Wonder, S., 51 Wonders, The, 163, 174, 189 Wood, Ron, 168 World Party, 188 Wyman, B., 168 X XTC, v, 58, 77, 115, 155, 157–159, 162, 164, 165, 167, 170, 180–182, 185, 187, 189 Z Zak, A., 165 Zombies, The, 183, 187

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks

A Abbey Road, vii, 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27, 39, 40, 62, 80, 81, 108, 130, 133, 172 Achtung Baby, 26 “Across the Universe”, 38, 81 “Act Naturally”, 46, 49 “Ain’t It a Shame”, 179 Air on the G String (common title for Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068), 52 “All Around the World”, 174, 179 “All I Do Is Cry”, 179 “All in Good Time”, 179 “All My Loving”, 45, 68 “All Smiles”, 179 “All the Little Pieces”, 179 “All the Madmen”, 142 All Things Must Pass, 26, 135 “All Those Years Ago”, 162, 190 “All Together Now”, xiii, 17 “All You Have to Do”, 179 “All You Need Is Love”, 25, 52, 57, 74, 77, 82, 86, 91, 98, 141, 161, 171, 174, 177 “Alone”, 179 “Always Late”, 179 “Amor Despues de los Veinte Años, El”, 179 “Amsterdam”, 53 “And I Love Her”, 19, 48, 59, 161 “And One Day”, 179 “And You Say”, 158, 170, 179 “Angry”, 147 Annie Hall, 108–110 “Another Day” (Paul McCartney’s song), 97, 147

“Another Day” (The Rutles’ song), 179 “Another Girl”, 20, 70 Anthology 1, 135 Anthology 2, 112 Anthology 3, 130 “Are You the One?”, 179 “Army”, 175, 179 “A Traves del Cristal”, 179 “(At the) Turn of the Year”, 179 “Avenging Angels”, 173, 179 “Average Person”, 91, 94 B “Baby Britain”, 158, 172, 180 “Baby I’m the One”, 180 “Baby It’s You”, 3, 24, 49, 59 “Baby, Let’s Play House”, x “Baby’s Request”, 137 “Baby You’re a Rich Man”, 24, 71, 171 “Back in the USSR”, 50, 61, 114 “Bad Day at Black Rock, Baby”, 180 “Bad Penny Blues”, 48 “Bad Time”, 180 “Ballad of John and Yoko, The”, 79, 93, 112, 161 “Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead, The”, 115 “Ball and Chain”, 180 “Ballet for a Rainy Day”, 180 “Ballrooms of Mars”, 180 “Balulalow”, 180 “Band on the Run”, 90, 147 “Bang Bang”, 180 “Barnaby Slade”, 180

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Martinelli, P. Bucciarelli, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: A Crossdisciplinary Analysis of Sound, Production and Stylistic Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33804-5

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206 “Ba Uwa Mare Re”, 179 Beatles For Sale, vi, 49, 85, 171 “Beatles, Rolling Stones e Bob Dylan”, 115 Beatles, The (a.k.a. The White Album), vi, 13, 26, 40, 115 Beaucoup of Blues, 46 “Beautiful Night”, 91 “Be-Bop-a-Lula”, 44, 47 “Because” (Beatles’ song), 23, 52, 53, 64, 74 “Because” (Dave Clark Five’s song), 180 “Beetlebum”, 180 “Before I Sleep”, 165, 180 “Be Here Now”, 167 “Behind the Beat”, 180 “Being for The Benefit of Mr. Kite!”, 15, 23, 70, 77, 94, 104, 121, 165, 170 “Be My Baby”, 49, 128 “Between Us”, 180 “Big Day”, 180 “Biggest Gossip in Town”, 180 “Biggest Night of Her Life, The”, 180 “Big Sea”, 165, 180 “Birthday”, 17, 67 “Blackbird”, 21, 38, 55, 57, 70, 83, 86, 107, 147, 176 “Blank Space”, 33 “Blood and Rockets”, 180 “Blow Away”, 190 “Bluebird”, 147 “Blue Jay Way”, 10, 17, 51, 69, 70, 72, 88, 111, 170 “Blue Moon”, 79 “Blue Room”, 180 “Blue Suede Shoes”, 92 “Bored”, 180 “Boys”, 45 “Brainiac’s Daughter”, 157, 164, 168, 169, 180 Brainwashed, 130 Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047, 52 “Breathe”, 180 “Bride Stripped Bare by “Bachelors”, The”, 180 “Broken Imaginary Time”, 180 “Brother Lou’s Love Colony”, 180 “Brown-eyed Handsome Man”, 92 “Buffalo Billycan”, 180 C “Cake”, 180 “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”, 180 “Call Me Mellow”, 180

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “Can’t Be Love”, 180 “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”, 180 “Can You Take Me Back?”, 125, 126 “Canzone del Giorno Solo (reprise)”, 126 “Captain Nemo”, 180 “Carnival Of Light”, 53 Casablanca, 103 “Cause You’re a Lady”, 180 “Cavern”, 180 “Charmless Man”, 171, 180 “Cheese and Onions”, 180 “Chocolate Buster Dan”, 180 “Chocolate Cake”, 180 “Choose Love”, 191 “Chris-Craft No. 9”, 180 “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, 115 Citizen Kane, 101 “Cleanup Time”, 93 “Closest Thing to Heaven”, 180 Cloud Nine, 130, 135 “C’mon C’mon”, 180 “C’mon People”, 191 Collected Papers, 34 “Collideascope”, 64, 180 “Comburda”, 181 “Come Together”, 48, 72, 74, 76, 82, 150, 167, 171 “Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, The”, 23, 84, 125, 149 “Contrary Mary”, 155, 181 “Country House”, 165, 173, 181 “Crazy Lazy Little Miss Daisy”, 181 “Cricklewood”, 181 “Cry Baby Cry”, 69, 81, 125 “Crystal Ball”, 181 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The, 143 D “Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl”, 181 “Dancer, The”, 181 Dark Side of the Moon, The, 1, 8 “Day After Day” (Badfinger’s song), 181 “Day After Day” (Julian Lennon’s song), 181 “Day by Day”, 181 “Day In The Life, A”, 16, 24, 38, 49, 53, 75, 80, 81, 87, 96, 112, 115, 123, 135, 158, 170, 178 “Day Tripper”, xii, 48, 74, 111 “Dear Boy”, 191 “Dear Prudence”, 69, 86, 164 “Dear Undecided”, 181 Decameron, 117 Deface The Music, 166

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “Delicate Situation”, 181 “Desiree”, 181 “Devendra”, 181 “Devil in Her Heart”, 49 “Dig a Pony”, 69, 124 “Dirty Jim”, 175, 181 “Disillusion”, 181 “Do It Like You Like”, 181 “Dónde Está Miss Lee los Sabados? (Where’s Miss Lee on Saturdays?)”, 181 “Don’t Be Unkind”, 181 “Don’t Get Me Wrong”, 181 “Don’t Go Away”, 181 “Don’t Know Why”, 181 “Don’t Let Me Down”, 23 “Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, 78 “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, 181 “Don’t Pass Me By”, 16, 25, 56, 62 “Don’t Say a Word”, 181 “Don’t You Ever Think I Cry”, 181 “Don’t You Know I’ve Been Lying”, 181 “Don’t You Realize”, 181 “Don’t You Think It Would Better”, 181 “Doubleback Alley”, 181 Double Fantasy, 97 “Dover Beach”, 181 “Dreaming”, 181 “Dreams”, 181 “Drive My Car”, 60, 61, 73, 78 “Dr. Robert”, 70, 84, 89 E “Earn Enough for Us”, 77, 170, 181 “Easy Listening”, 181 “Ebeneezer Beaver”, 181 “Eleanor Rigby”, xiii, 12, 16, 55, 72, 76, 86, 93, 94, 113, 146, 147, 167, 170, 172 Electronic Sound, 53 “End, The”, 73, 75, 76, 158, 160, 169, 173 “English Garden”, 173 “English Tea”, 137 (R)esistere, 126 “Espero Que Les Guste 042 (I Hope You’ll Like It 042)”, 181 “Evelyn & Jeff”, 181 “Everybody Else Is Wrong”, 64, 176, 181 “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending”, 65, 173, 177, 182 “Everybody Smiles”, 182 “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby”, 49 “Every Day”, 181 “Everyday Story of Smalltown, The”, 182 “Everything Is Fine”, 182 “Everything Reminds Me of You”, 182

207 “Everything You Wanted”, 182 “Everywhere I Look”, 182 “Eye Eye”, 181 F “Falling I’m Falling”, 182 “Farmer and the Fisherman, The”, 182 “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”, 182 “Feel Too Good”, 182 Film Sense, The, 134 “Find What You Mean to Me”, 182 “Fine Line, A”, 191 “Fireworks”, 182 “First of the Runaways”, 182 “Five, Five, Five”, 182 “Fixing a Hole”, 50, 52, 53, 76, 147 Flaming Pie (Paul McCartney’s album), 130 “Flaming Pie” (Paul McCartney’s song), 131 Flowers in the Dirt, 145 “Flowers in the Window”, 182 “Fly”, 182 “Following Rainbows”, 182 “Follow My Footsteps”, 182 “Folsom Prison Blues”, x “Fool on the Hill, The”, 25, 70, 94, 117, 138–151 “Fools Life”, 182 “Fool’s Overture”, 142 “Fool the World”, 182 “Footprints”, 94 “For No One”, 24, 52, 69, 74, 83, 133, 161, 171 “40 Watt Solution”, 165, 179 “For You Blue”, 21, 25, 67, 73 “Found You”, 158, 182 “Free as a Bird”, 73, 130, 131, 135 “From Me to You”, 66, 67, 74, 79, 84, 85, 111, 176 G “Get Back”, 23, 61, 67, 69, 72, 73, 78, 83, 84, 115, 137, 165 Get Back (temporary title for Let It Be), 78 “Get Out of My Way”, 147 “Getting Better”, 50, 64, 76, 99, 158, 169 “Get up and Go”, 165, 182 “Girl”, 64 Girl Can’t Help It, The, 100 “Girl on the Train”, 182 “Girly Worm”, 182 “Glass Onion”, 82, 117 “Go!”, 182 “God”, 93

208 “God Only Knows”, 50 “Gold Day”, 182 “Golden Avatar”, 182 “Goodbye”, v, 182 “Goodbye Holly”, 182 “Good Day Sunshine”, 67, 73, 77, 82, 137, 164 “Good Morning Good Morning”, 9, 10, 20, 73, 104 “Good Night”, 24, 57 “Goodnight Princess”, 137 “Good Times Roll”, 182 “Good Will Out, The”, 182 “Gotta Get Up”, 182 “Gotta Have It”, 182 “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance”, 137 “Got to Get Out of Here”, 182 “Got to Get You into My Life”, 12, 24, 51, 71, 76, 173 Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, 38 “Great Day”, 182 “Greenacre Hill”, 182 “Grow Old with Me”, 191 “Guiding Star”, 182 H “Hampden Tennis Club”, 182 “Hang Up City”, 182 “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, xiii, 54–55, 65, 68, 70, 77, 80, 172 “Happy Birthday”, 182 “Hard Day’s Night, A” (Beatles’ song), 81 Hard Day’s Night, A (film), 104 “Hard Work”, 182 “Have You Heard the Word”, 182 “Heartbreak Hotel”, 44 “Heart of the Country”, 147 “He Knows How to Hucklebuck”, 48 “He’ll Make You Cry”, 182 “Hello, Goodbye”, 52, 64, 69, 76, 80, 81, 83, 161, 169, 174, 178 “Hello Little Girl”, 44, 66 Help! (Beatles’ album), 24, 49, 51, 62, 85 “Help!” (Beatles’ song), 64, 85, 165, 169 Help! (film), 104 “Helping You Out”, 183 “Helter Skelter”, 20, 55, 83, 84, 88, 125, 126, 175 “Her Diamond Ring”, 163, 183 “Here Comes the Sun”, 48, 51, 65, 68, 74, 77, 80 “Here She Comes Again”, 183

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “Here, There and Everywhere”, 48, 71, 83, 171 “Here Today”, 94, 118, 162, 191 “Here We Go Again”, 176, 183 “He’s So Fine”, 49, 118 “Hey Bulldog”, 65, 74, 82, 103, 174 “Hey, Hey Girl”, 183 “Hey Jude”, 8, 22, 69, 75, 80–82, 94, 101, 102, 113, 115, 118, 155, 173, 174, 176 “Hey Mister!”, 183 High Noon, 102 “Hilly Fields”, 183 “Hindu Times, The”, 165, 183 “Hoi Poloi”, 183 “Hold Me So Near”, 183 “Hold My Hand”, 183 “Hold on” (Badfinger’s song), 183 “Hold on” (John Lennon’s song), 63, 93 “Hold on Tight”, 183 “Hollow Bells, The”, 183 “Holly Park”, 183 “Honey Pie”, 46, 73, 124, 136, 178 “Hope of Deliverance”, 147 “House Rocker”, 48 “How Can I Sing Like a Girl?”, 155, 183 “How Do You Know”, 183 “Howlin’ at the Moon”, 183 “How Many People?”, 91 “Humble Heart”, 183 I “I Am the Walrus”, 10, 15, 17, 24, 48, 71, 76, 77, 79, 85, 86, 90, 92, 94, 141, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167, 169–173, 176, 178 “I Call Your Name”, 70 “I Can See for Miles”, 55 “I Didn’t Understand”, 183 “I Don’t Remember Your Name”, 183 “I Don’t Wanna Know”, 183 “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”, 47 “I’d Really Go for a Lady”, 183 “I Feel Fine”, 9, 11, 38, 51, 111, 119 “If Everyone Was Listening”, 184 “If I Fell”, xii, 59, 63, 80, 168 “If I Needed Someone”, 55, 74, 171 “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, 65 “I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away the Ending”, 167 “I Just Want to Touch You”, 172, 183 “I’ll Be Back”, 80 “I’ll Be There for You”, 171, 183

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “I’ll Get You”, 176 “I’ll Join the Army”, 183 “I Lost My Little Girl”, 44, 66 “I Love You”, 48, 61, 66, 85, 92, 183 “I’m a Loser”, 49, 85 “I’m Down”, 23, 67, 72, 112, 114 “I Me Mine”, 72 “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You”, 49 “I’m Here (Intro)”, 183 “I’m Leaving”, 183 “I’m Losing You”, 97 “I’m Not Bad”, 183 “I’m Not Getting through”, 183 “I’m Only Sleeping”, 11, 13, 58, 107, 175 “I’m Outta Time”, 183 “I’m So Heavy”, 183 “I’m Talking About You”, 48 “I’m Trying to Forget You”, 183 “I Must Be in Love”, 183 “I Must Move”, 183 “In Days of Old”, 184 “I Need You”, 183 “In My Life”, 11, 52, 74 “In My Own Time”, 165, 184 “Inner Light, The”, 25, 51, 107 “In Someone Else’s Mind”, 164, 184 “In Spite of All the Danger”, 47, 65, 184 “In the Late Afternoon”, 184 “Intuition”, 76, 191 “Invecchia con me”, 126 “Invisible”, 184 “In Your Room”, 184 “I Saw Her Standing There”, 47, 48, 66, 67, 70, 100, 112, 114, 116 “I Saw the Light”, 176, 183 “I Swear”, 165, 183 “I Think I Know”, 183 “I Think of Her (She’s on My Mind)”, 183 “I Took a Chance”, 183 “It’s Always Been That Way”, 184 “It’s Better People”, 184 “It’s Gonna Be Alright”, 184 “It’s Looking Good”, 184 “It’s Only Love”, 184 “It’s Up to You”, 184 “I’ve Been Waiting All My Life”, 184 “I’ve Got a Feeling”, 69, 80 “I’ve Just Seen a Face”, 46 “I Wander”, 183 “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, 18, 57, 60, 67, 79, 111, 153, 161 “I Want to Tell You”, 51 “I Want You”, 62, 65, 70, 81, 82, 121, 122, 124, 161, 183

209 “I Will”, 17, 65, 68, 80, 175 J “Jenny Wren”, 92, 191 “Joe Public”, 184 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 26, 62, 164 “Johnny B. Goode”, 92 “Julia”, 54, 63, 65, 70, 164 “Just Because I’ve Fallen Down”, 184 K “Karma Police”, 184 “Keep Your Hands off My Baby”, 184 “King of Broken Hearts”, 191 “Kleine Middle Klasse Musik, Eine”, 181 “Knicker Elastic King, The”, 184 Kreisleriana, op.16, 40 L “Lady in Lace”, 184 “Lady Madonna”, xiii, 24, 47, 48, 65, 74, 81, 85, 169, 173 “Lady Riga”, 184 “Lady Who Said She Could Fly, The”, 184 “Land of Oz”, 184 “Larry in the Sea with Daffodils”, 184 “Late Night Talking”, 184 “Laura”, vii, 184 “Laurie Song, The”, 184 “Lazy Days”, 169, 184 “Lazy Man”, 184 “Leather”, 184 “Leave This Town”, 184 “Leaving Tomorrow”, 184 “Lemon Tree”, 155, 160, 184 “Let Forever Be”, 76, 165, 175, 184 Let It Be (Beatles’ album), 5, 24, 39, 55, 62, 73, 115, 119, 120, 130 “Let It Be” (Beatles’ song), 22, 78, 106–107, 167 Let It Be… Naked, 123 “Let Love Rule”, 177, 184 “Let’s Be Natural”, 184 “Let’s Have a Change”, 184 “Let’s Move On”, 184 “Let’s Take a Trip Down the Rhine”, 184 “Let There Be Love”, 184 “Let There Be More Light”, 167 “Liberty Town of Love”, 184 “Lies”, 154, 184 “Lietaus Kambarys”, 33

210 “Life Goes on”, 167, 184 “Life Is Real”, 185 “Lighthouse Spaceship”, 167, 174, 185 “Light That Has Lighted the World, The”, 191 “Light That Shines in, The”, 185 “Like a Rolling Stone”, 78 “Lines”, 185 “Listen, Listen”, 165, 185 “Little James”, 185 “Little Trip, A”, 179 Live at the BBC, 49 “Living in Hope”, 185 London Town, 26 “Lonely-Phobia”, 185 “Long and Winding Road, The”, xii, 23, 24, 51, 65, 79, 128, 129 “Long Long Long”, 51, 62, 82 Lontano, 32 “Look at Me Now”, 185 “Look What You’ve Done”, 162, 167, 185 “Lorraine”, 185 “Losing My Mind”, 185 “Love”, 98 “Love Assistance”, 185 “Love Life”, 185 “Lovely Linda, The”, 97 “Lovely Rita”, 10, 73, 82, 94, 127, 128 “Love Me Do”, 4, 49, 67, 74, 77, 106, 172 “Love You Give, The”, 185 “Love You To”, 51, 69, 74, 107 “Lovin’”, 185 “Loving, The”, 185 “Lovin’ You Ain’t Easy”, 185 “Low C”, 185 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, 23, 48, 51, 52, 78, 94, 167, 176 M “M.A.C.B. Theme, The”, 185 “Madman Across the Water”, 142 Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles’ album and EP), 82, 140 Magical Mystery Tour (film), 21, 147 “Major Happy’s Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band”, 185 “Marigold”, 185 “Martha My Dear”, 46, 74, 79, 164, 169 “Masie Jones”, 185 “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, 94, 101, 107, 111, 130, 137, 164, 165 “Maybe”, 171 “Maybe I’m Amazed”, 74, 94, 97

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “Maybe Tonight”, 13, 171, 185 McCartney, 3, 37, 58, 90, 160 “Meddle with Me”, 185 “Mediocre Me”, 185 Meet The Beatles!, vi “Melodies Haunt You”, 185 “Merely a Man”, 157, 185 “Michael Angelo”, 185 “Michelle”, 46, 48, 51, 69, 70, 79 “Mind Over Matter”, 185 “Misery”, 24, 67, 101 “Mole from the Ministry, The”, 174, 185 “Molly Black”, 185 “Momma Miss America”, 114 “Monday Morning Girl”, 185 “Money”, 49 “Monkberry Moon Delight”, 92 Moonlight Sonata (common title for Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2), 52 “Mother’s Nature Son”, 38 “Moves like Jagger”, 168 “Mr. Blue Sky”, 130, 185 “Mr. Greedyman”, 185 “Mr. Jones”, 185 “Mr. Plastic Business Man”, 186 “Mr. Simms Collector Man”, 186 “Mull of Kintyre”, 94 “My Before and After”, 185 “My Brave Face”, 191 “My Generation”, 55 “My Heavy Head”, 185 “My Life as a Creep”, 185 “My Love” (Lenny Kravitz’s song), 185 “My Love” (Paul McCartney’s song), 97 “My Luck Is Bound to Change”, 185 “My Mummy’s Dead”, 93 “My Sweet Lord”, 49, 73, 118, 128, 135 N “Nails on My Feet”, 156, 171, 186 “Nanny in Manhattan, A”, 175, 186 “Nearer than Green”, 186 “Nellie the Elephant”, 130 “Neo Mega Quasi Ultra Super Groovy”, 186 “Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up”, 186 “Nevertheless”, 186 “New”, 191 “Nice to See You”, 186 “Night and Day”, 79 “Night Shift”, 186

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “#9 Dream”, 62, 93, 167 “Nine in the Afternoon”, 165, 186 “19,8”, 179 “Nite Is A-Comin’”, 186 “No Growing (Exegesis)”, 186 “No More Lonely Nights”, 97 Non ci resta che piangere, 103 “No One's Been Here for Weeks”, 186 “Norwegian Wood”, 25, 48, 51, 74, 101, 102, 130, 161, 167, 171 “Not Alone Anymore”, 131 “Nowhere Man”, 10, 55, 64, 69, 80, 95, 171 “Now I’m in the C.I.A.”, 186 “Now She Knows She’s Wrong”, 186 “Now She’s Left You”, 186 “NYC – 25”, 186 O “Ob-la-dì, Ob-la-dà”, xiii, 69, 78, 83, 94, 165, 175 “Ocean Breakup/King of the Universe”, 186 “Octopus”, 186 “Octopus’s Garden”, xiii, 9, 68 “Odenall Pi4”, 33 “Oh Carol, I'm So Sad”, 165, 186 “Oh! Darling”, 65, 68, 70, 71, 97, 170, 171, 175 “Old Brown Shoe”, 16, 162 “Old Time Mover”, 186 “Olivia”, 155, 186 “One”, 186 “One After 909”, 61, 66 “One Day at a Time”, 191 “One Hour Cleaners”, 186 “One More Time”, 84, 186 “One of My Turns”, 142 “Only a Memory”, 186 “Only a Northern Song”, 59, 117, 118 “Only the Lonely”, 48 On the Beach, 101 On the Waterfront, 102 “Opus #1”, 186 “Opus 40”, 186 “Other Side of Summer, The”, 186 “Ouch!”, 165, 186 “Our House”, 186 Our Mutual Friend, 92 P “Paisley Park”, 186 “Pale Blue Dot”, 186

211 “Pamela”, 186 “Paper Aeroplanes”, 186 “Paperback Writer”, 12, 55, 64, 74, 82, 85, 119, 132, 161, 169, 171 “Paper Mask”, 186 “Pasaporte, El”, 186 Paul McCartney Goes Too Far, 53 Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, 144 “Pay Attention to Me”, 186 “Peasant Girls”, 186 “Peggy Sue”, 66, 92 “Penelope”, 186 “Penny Lane”, 24, 25, 48, 50, 52, 67, 69, 74, 76, 78, 86, 91, 94, 133, 141, 156, 161, 164, 169, 171 Pet Sounds, 50, 76, 154, 155 “Photograph”, 186 “Pictures of Me”, 186 “Piggies”, 52, 74, 84, 107 “Piggy in the Middle”, 186 “Pineapple Head”, 156, 167, 171, 187 “Pink Lemonade”, 187 “Pink Limousine”, 187 “Plastic Surgical Holiday”, 187 “Please Don’t Ask Me Why”, 187 “Please Don’t Follow Me”, 187 “Please Mr. Postman”, 45, 49 Please Please Me (Beatles’ album), xi, 3, 18, 24, 116 “Please Please Me” (Beatles’ song), 3, 48, 60, 63, 67, 74, 111 “Point Me at the Sky”, 176, 187 “Polythene Pam”, 69, 108 “Pools of Blue”, 187 “Popcycle Island”, 187 “Pour Qui Pourquoi”, 187 “Power Cut”, 191 “Power to the People”, 91 Press to Play, 27 “Pretty Little Star”, 187 “Promises I’ve Made”, 187 “P.S. I Love You”, 48, 66 Psycho, 55, 110, 114 “Pure Buckwheat Honey”, 187 “Pure Smokey”, 51 “Purple Ribbons”, 187 “Put Your Mind at Ease”, 187 Q “Queen”, 187 “Queen of the Hearts Blues”, 187 “Questionnaire”, 187

212 “Queue”, 164, 187 “Quiet Talks and Summer Walks”, 187 R “Radio”, 187 “Rain”, 10, 13, 48, 107, 119, 125, 175 “Rainbow People”, 187 “Raining”, 187 “Raining in Paradise”, 187 Rain Man, 143 “Rather Be Me”, 187 “Real Love”, 130, 131, 191 “Red Day”, 169, 187 “Rendezvous”, 187 “Resistere”, 187 “Return to Pepperland”, 191 “Revolution”, 13, 21, 48, 177 “Revolution 9”, 53, 57, 61, 125, 126, 158, 167 Revolver, 1, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 21, 59, 64, 76, 116, 120, 162, 165 “Ringo Starr”, 2, 19, 27, 53, 56, 72, 74, 124, 130, 135, 140, 162, 167, 169, 171, 191 “River Deep – Mountain High”, 128 “Rock and roll Springtime” (temporary title for “Momma Miss America”), 114 “Rock Around the Clock”, 44 “Rocking Little Baby”, 187 “Rock Island Line”, 17 “Rocky Raccoon”, vii, 21, 92, 94, 107, 136 “Roll Over Beethoven”, 49 Roman Holiday, 103 “Rose for Emily, A”, 187 Rubber Soul, 7, 11, 19, 20, 52, 59, 72, 76, 86, 100, 154, 155 S “Sad And Blue”, 187 “Sailing Ship, The”, 187 “Sally G”, 46 “Savoy Truffle”, 10 “Say Allright!”, 187 “Say You Do”, 187 “Scarlet Parlet”, 187 “Scatterbrain”, 44 “Scorpio Rising”, 165, 171, 187 “Scrooge”, 187 “Sea”, 187 “Season Cycle”, 187 “Secret World”, 187 Seeds of Love, 177

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “Send Me Your Picture”, 187 Sentimental Journey, 53 “September in the Rain”, 46 Sequenza V, 32 “Se telefonando”, 90 “Setting Sun”, 165 “Seven North Frederick”, 187 “7:30 Guided Tour”, 179 “7:38 (Bug-Eyed & Breathless)”, 179 “Sexy Sadie”, 63, 167 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)”, 116 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles’ album), 4, 13, 24, 50, 55, 91, 112, 116 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (Beatles’ song), 63, 82, 110, 165, 172 “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, 44 “Shangri-La”, 187 “She”, 86 “She Belongs to Yesterday”, 188 “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”, 148 “She Goes Out with Everybody”, 163, 188 “She Looks Good in the Sun”, 188 “She Loves You”, 23, 47, 57, 60, 64, 70, 80, 81, 111, 112, 174 “She Means a Lot to Me”, 188 “She Said She Said”, 55, 86 “She’s Electric”, 167, 188 “She’s Leaving Home”, 5, 24, 93, 95, 171 “She’s So High”, 188 “She’s the One”, 188 “Shine”, 155, 188 Shining, The, 103, 110 “Shiny Cage”, 165, 188 “Showdown”, 130 “Sideshow”, 165, 188 “Sightseer”, 188 “Silly Boy”, 188 “Silly Love Songs”, 146 “Since I Don’t Have You”, 79 “Sincerely Yours”, 188 “Singing in the Rain”, 100 Singing in the Rain (film), 116 “Single Pigeon”, 147 “Sing Little Bird Sing”, 188 “Situation Vacant”, 188 “Sky Blue”, 170, 188 “Sleeping in”, 165, 188 “Smeta Murgaty”, 188 “Soda Pop Man”, 188

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “So Far from My Heart”, 188 “Somebody Made for Me”, 170, 188 “Somedays”, 191 “Someone Like You”, 188 “Someplace Else”, 191 “Something”, 24, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 79, 81, 84, 171, 173 “Something Good”, 188 “Song for Jane”, 188 Sounds from Within: Phenomenology and Practice, 29 “Sowing the Seeds of Love”, 13, 157, 164, 177, 178, 188 “So You Are a Star”, 188 “Springtime Love”, 188 “Stairway to Heaven”, 188 “Star”, 188 “Start!”, 171, 188 Star Wars, 118 “Stay In Bed”, 53 “Stone Blues Man”, 188 “Stop the World for a Day”, 188 “Strawberry Fields Forever”, 1, 13–15, 23, 25, 48, 57, 58, 70, 75, 76, 83, 84, 86, 87, 98, 144, 148, 158, 161, 169, 174 “Strawberryfire”, 173, 188 “Sub-Rosa Subway”, 188 “Suicide”, 137 “Sun”, 188 “Sunday Mondays”, 188 “Sunday Rain”, 170, 188 “Sun King”, 108 “Sunny Day People”, 188 “Sunshine Girl”, 188 “Sun Sing”, 188 T “Take Action”, 188 “Take It Home”, 188 “Take My Hand”, 188 Tao Te Ching, 107 “Taste of Honey, A”, 46, 59 “Tattva”, 172, 188 Taxi Driver, 103 “Taxloss”, 165, 189 “Taxman”, 20, 43, 70, 73, 83, 86, 112, 114, 116 “Tea and Sympathy”, 189 “Telegram”, 189 “Telephone Is Empty, The”, 189 “Telephone Line”, 130, 189 “10538 Overture”, 179

213 “Thank You Girl”, 67, 80, 111, 176 “That Game”, 189 “That’ll Be the Day”, 47, 66 “That’s Not Right”, 189 “That Thing You Do!”, 163, 174, 189 “Then She Appeared”, 189 “There She Goes”, 189 “These Days”, 189 “Things We Do for Love, The”, 189 “Things We Said Today”, 67, 149, 161 “Think for Yourself”, 10, 55, 83, 175 “This Boy”, 48, 59, 64, 68, 80 “This Is Love”, 131 “This Song”, 118 “Ticket to Ride”, 20, 72, 76 “Ti lascio stare”, 115 “Till There Was You”, 46, 49, 59 “Till Your Luck Runs Out”, 189 “Time Machine”, 166, 189 Time Takes Time, 130 “Together”, 189 “Tomorrow”, 191 “Tomorrow Drop Dead”, 189 “Tomorrow Never Knows”, 13, 16, 53, 69, 76, 80, 136, 161, 165, 175 “Try”, 189 “Tuba Rye and Will's Son/Balloon in the Sky”, 189 “Tutti Frutti”, 47 “Twelfth of Never, The”, 111 “Twenty Flight Rock”, 44 “Twirl”, 189 “Twist and Shout”, 64, 65, 174 “Two of Us”, 83, 86, 126, 147 U “Unchained Melody”, 68 “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”, 64, 76, 164, 191 “Undecided Man”, 189 “Under a Cloud”, 189 “Unfinished Words”, 189 “Until the Day”, 189 “Up against It”, 189 “Up and Down on Your Merry-GoRound”, 189 “Utopia Parkway”, 189 V “Valotte”, 189 “Vanishing Girl”, 189

214 Vertigo, 55 “Vez al Año (Once a Year), Una”, 189 W Wages of Fear, The, 101 “Wake Up Boo!”, 189 “Waking Up”, 189 Wall, The, 142 “Walrus and the Carpenter, The”, 92, 94 “Watch the Movie”, 189 “We Are the Moles (Part 1)”, 189 “Weatherman”, 189 “We Can Work It Out”, 23, 48, 77, 98, 99, 170 Wedding Album, 53 “We Had a Good Thing Goin’”, 189 “Weight of the World, The”, 191 “Welcome Back”, 174, 189 “We’re Going to Be Friends”, 189 “We’re in Love”, 189 “We’re off You Know”, 172, 189 “Western People”, 189 “What a Bringdown”, 155, 189 “What Am I To Do”, 189 “What Do You Do?”, 189 “Whatever”, 190 “What if It Were You”, 169, 190 “What I Mean to You”, 190 “What in the World??...”, 190 “When I’m Sixty-Four”, 24, 44, 46, 137 “When the Nights Falls in”, 190 “When We Was Fab”, 162, 164, 191 “Where Does the World Go to Hide”, 190 “Which Dreamed It”, 190 “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, 10, 24, 69, 86, 125, 149 “Whiter Shade of Pale, A”, 52 “Who Feels Love?”, 190 “Who Killed Tangerine?”, 76, 167, 190 “Whole Lot Easier”, 190 “Why”, 157, 190 “Why Did She Go?”, 190 “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?”, 190 “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”, 67, 80 “Why Don’t You Get a Job?”, 165, 190 “Wild Days”, 162, 190 “Wild Life”, 147 “Wild Things, The”, 172, 190 “Willow’s End”, 190 Wings at the Speed of Sound, 26 “Winner Loser”, 190 “With a Girl Like You”, 190

Index of Songs, Albums, and other Artworks “With a Little Help from My Friends”, 48, 51, 82, 167, 174 “With Her”, 190 “Within You Without You”, 25, 51, 69, 74, 107 “With My Face on the Floor”, 190 With The Beatles, 16, 42, 166 “Wonderful Day”, 190 “Words Enough to Tell You”, 190 “Word, The”, 10, 177 “Working Class Hero”, 91 “World May Never Know, The”, 190 “World of You”, 190 Y Yellow Submarine (Beatles’ album), 118, 157 “Yellow Submarine” (Beatles’ song), 9, 88, 104, 117, 132, 170, 175 “Yer Blues”, 65, 112, 114, 158, 160 “Yes”, 159, 190 “Yes It Is”, 68, 190 “Yesterday”, 21, 23, 24, 42, 49, 51, 52, 62, 79, 81, 86, 97, 146, 160, 162, 172, 174 Y Not, 27 “Yolanda Hayes”, 190 “You Are Here”, 97 “You Can Dance the Rock and Roll”, 190 “You Can’t Catch Me”, 48 “You Did It to Me”, 190 “You Don’t Understand Me”, 190 “You Gave Me the Answer”, 137 “You Got It”, 131 “You Know My Name (Look up the Number)”, 17, 24, 158 “You Know What I Mean”, 100, 190 “You Never Give Me Your Money”, 80, 82, 108, 172 “You Really Got Me”, 55 “You’re Different”, 190 “You’re in Love”, 190 “You’re Spending All My Money”, 190 “Your Mother Should Know”, 50, 137 “You Say”, 190 “You Sing Your Own Song”, 190 “You’ve Been Gone”, 190 “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”, 20, 24, 49 Z “Zvonky, Zvoňte”, 190