It's great to analyse classic songs and find out what makes them tick. But it's also good to analyse songs you hate and find out what makes them so disagreeable so you can avoid similar mistakes at all cost. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Let's not beat around the bush here – this is an awful song.
The chord progression is a stock 12 bar blues - nothing of interest there. The lyrics are totally banal – in effect “I love you because you're lovely”. Deep man. The rhyme scheme was obviously slaved over for minutes -
I love you/it's true/I do
I love you/I feel blue/girl for you
But the melody is where George really brings the pain. We have an ugly combination of jumps from chord tone to chord tone followed by a chromatic descent 8 - 7 – b7 (sweet and love-ly and more than ev - er) that ensures the 7th in the melody clashes with the b7 in the chord and makes the whole thing sound like a twee 1920's ballad. It's almost George emulating Paul's 'grannie music'.
Sometimes a bad song is saved by a stellar performance. Not here. Harrison's acoustic guitar is good and Ringo's fine, but the engineer who allowed Paul to mute the piano strings with paper (or whatever it was) should have just slammed the lid down on his fingers instead. It sounds for all the world like a Ukelele that's been rescued from a woodchipper. And John's lap steel guitar is the worst playing on a Beatles track since
From a compositional point of view this song has no redeeming features that I can see.
The only lesson I take away is
“Don't be afraid to try something different”
closely followed by
“and don't be afraid to throw a lot of that 'different' in the bin”.
>>>"And John's lap steel guitar is the worst playing on a Beatles track since John's bass playing George Harrison picked up a violin."
ReplyDeleteI don't know. There's so much else going on on "All You Need is Love" that it's easy to bury George's violin playing in the mix. John's bass playing, however, nearly ruins "The Long and Winding Road." It's excruciating. And I can't for the life of me understand why. George was not a violinist, so no one would expect him to sound like Itzhak Perlman. But the four strings on a bass guitar are tuned to the same notes as the lowest four strings on a guitar. John was a guitarist, so it seems all he would have to do is know the chords for "Long and Winding Road" and he'd be able to at least just play root notes. Yet he botches it to an amazing level.
Got to agree with you on "For You Blue" though. One of George's low points, although not as hideous as "Blue Jay Way."
Well you're right Rich 'violin buried in the mix' is nowhere as bad as John's lap steel or bass playing but I just meant like for like.
ReplyDeleteI think John played so badly because
A) he was bored
B) he hated the song
and
C) was just rehearsing
so you could argue that John's real crime was putting out a crappy rehearsal version without Paul's approval...