Under The Influence: George Thorogood

[I'm Down] absolutely terrifies me. It's as good as anything Little Richard ever did. This is what they probably sounded like in Hamburg before they got into writing their own material. It's almost as if they were saying, “See, we're the greatest rock and roll band as performers too, not just the greatest songwriters”

Guitar World July 1997

Funnily enough, I got into [Elmore James] because of The Beatles. Remember that moment in the song For You Blue where George Harrison goes, 'Elmore James got nothin' on this baby!'? That made me say, 'Wow, so there's somebody The Beatles think is as heavy as The Beatles, huh? OK, I'll check him out.'

Music Radar

The Beatles represented freedom to me, they had all the freedom in the world...they were young, they were good-looking, they were talented, they were rich, they were famous...they had it all.

Blues About

10:19 Savoy Truffle – The White Album Is Like A Box Of Chocolates

Critiquing

Allow me to be blunt. This is not a very good song. At least I don't think it is. And I think I have some good reasons.

But

I like the track. And I have a couple of reasons for that too. My reasons? Firstly, it's an interesting recording, with lots going on and it's well played. A perfectly credible album track that holds it's own - more than mere filler. And secondly, I have listened to this album repeatedly from a very young (and largely uncritical) age. We have personal history, Savoy Truffle and I.

But I'm trying to learn the art of songwriting from The Beatles here and that requires me to be critical about what works and why (and what doesn't and why) IN THE SONGWRITING. And if you're reading this blog I guess that's what you're here to do too.

Which is all to say – you may love Savoy Truffle. Great. Try and work out why. Because, like me the real object of your affection may be an arrangement, a recording, a performance or even a life event. Or it may be a polyrhythm, a play on words, an internal rhyme or a dominant substitution. Either way let me know in the comments.

Good Bits

The song as a whole is well played and quite funky for the Beatles, but for me almost everything cool about the song is packed into the first 10 seconds.

We have a very free form feel, driven by the electric piano and lead guitar. The melody starts on 9th degree of the scale and a Lennon edit (ticket 37) means we have a disorientating bar of 3/4 at the start of verses 1 & 2, almost like the song is crashing then rebooting, but the third verse (which has the same lyrics as verse 1) is 4/4 all the way through. Check out the way tangeRINE falls on the one in v1 and on the four in v3. The internal rhyme in the opening line CREAM tangeRINE is beautiful.

The chorus has a menacing rising 5th movement (ticket 32 the legendary James Bond chords) - probably the best chord progression in the whole song, but it's used much more effectively in the chorus of Hey Bulldog (not to mention the instrumental break in the White Album's Glass Onion).

The sax's are another Marmite element – the original session players were horrified by the distorted effect, but I like it and think producer/arranger/keyboard player Chris Thomas* did a great job in writing some hooky riffs.

The overall concept is cool, in a way – a bad boy chocolate lurking in the box ready to take you down! But I'm not sure the execution does it justice.

Bad Sounds

There are a couple of things wrong with this song and they're things we've come across before. First an ugly chromatic melody – just like Harrison's For You Blue and Paul's Maxwell. The verse melody is largely constructed from chord tones ascending from the 3rd to the 5th.

montelimar – G# A A# B
pineapple heart - A# B C C#
coffee desert - B C C# D

and the almost chromatic

know it's good news - B C - D D#

This links up with the chorus in a subtle way, as the ascending chromatic concept reappears in the 'James Bond' chords but elsewhere there are too many chords that don't resolve and too many chromatic notes leaving everything feeling constantly unsettled. Just like Old Brown Shoe. Broadly speaking the song is in E major but the verse resolves to Em and the chorus resolves to G major.

And whatever you think of the sax sound, the drums sound nasty!

Bad Words

Savoy Truffle is a smorgasbord of bad lyrics techniques.

Bad prosody

Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble. No one says SAV-oy. They say sa-VOY. When that's your chorus/title you got a problem.

Nonsense

I feel your taste? Listen, do you smell something?

Random change of 'person'

Speaking of which, why does George feel your taste? It's not him with the chocolate issues. It's Eric Clapton. So we've changed person. Unless what he's 'feeling' is the taste of Eric himself. Yuk!

Filler

We all know Ob-la-di-bla-da. But can you show me where you are?

What on earth has this got to do with the song? And though the fact that Harrison is misquoting one of his own band's lyrics (Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da) is nothing too heinous,** he is borrowing (again!) from Lennon's Glass Onion, which self-references five Beatles songs and was recorded less than one month earlier.

Lastly I'm just a little put off by the hectoring tone (as previously heard on Think For Yourself). Nag your friends to freedom? I don't think so.

Time to file this song away. Next time a special post on a special chord sequence!

*that's right – George Martin took a long holiday in the middle of the White Album and a number of tracks were produced or co-produced by George's apprentice Chris Thomas.

**thanks to Rich for pointing out that McCartney does sing "bla-da" at the very end of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

The Band Who...Stated Their Name Clearly For The Record

Pop Quiz! What do all the following songs have in common?

Unchained Melody - The Righteous Brothers
Space Oddity – David Bowie
Sympathy For The Devil – Rolling Stones
The Weight - The Band
Paranoid – Black Sabbath
Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult
Song 2 – Blur
Enter Sandman - Metallica
Paranoid Android – Radiohead
The Scientist – Coldplay

Answer: None of the titles listed above appear anywhere in the lyrics.

Some bands are serial offenders, taking 'Title Avoidance Syndrome' to the extreme, like My Chemical Romance

You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us In Prison
Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough For The Two Of Us
It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A F***ing Deathwish

or employing it in a tasteful minimalist way like U2

Bad
Wire
Gone
Exit

But these bands are exceptions. One of the most foundational principles for making a song memorable is combining the title with a hooky melody and repeating it enough times for it to worm it's way into your subconscious. Now perhaps if your chorus lyrics are

“I need your love, I need your love, God speed your love to me”

“Woo hoo, well I feel heavy metal”

or even

“Argh argh aaaaaaaaargh....ARGH”*

you might be wise to write something else on the label. But successful songs with obscure titles are a rarity, if for no other reason than people can't buy a record if they have no idea what it's called. The Beatles understood this principle.


Of 211 tracks released by the Beatles, 
199 feature the title prominently.


Of the 12 exceptions, 1 is an instrumental (Flying, the incidental music from Magical Mystery Tour). Five more feature fragments of the title, but not the whole -

Revolution 9 - Number 9, number 9
The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill - hey Bungalow Bill, what did you kill?
She Said She Said - She said, I know what it's like to be dead
Love You To - I'll make love to you, if you want me to
Wild Honey Pie - (the only title that's longer than the lyrics) Honey pie, honey pie

This leaves a grand total of 6 songs that never mention the title

For You Blue
The Inner Light
A Day In The Life
The Ballad Of John And Yoko
Tomorrow Never Knows
Yer Blues

They are almost all album tracks (apart from Ballad Of.., and b-side, The Inner Light). But what's most interesting about this list is that every one is a Lennon or Harrison song. There is not one genuine McCartney song among them**.

If you want to understand Paul's success as a commercial pop writer this is one small, but undeniable, key.

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*Unchained Melody (The Righteous Brothers), Song 2 (Blur) and Immigrant Song (Led Zeppelin) respectively.

**McCartney was a co-writer on Flying, and let's be honest Wild Honey Pie is a weird outtake rather than a song in any traditional understanding of the word.



Read more about the Band Who...

...Kept Expanding
...Lived Outside
...Needed No Introduction
...Were Men Of Few Words

11:10 For You Blue

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 John's bass playing George Harrison picked up a violin.

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”.

  

The Best Of Let It Be (pt.5) - Dig It For You, Blue Maggie Mae!

For You Blue

LIB - Recorded on 25 January 1969 (except for Lennon's “Queen says 'no' to pot smoking FBI movement” comment). The lap steel is panned hard left and the 'prepared' piano hard right. Harrison's acoustic guitar is almost non existent except for the intro.

LIBN - A remix of the original version – piano and steel panning is reversed - lap steel right, piano on left with the piano a lot louder and the lap steel quieter. The Lennon quote is removed. According to engineer Hicks a lead vocal which was overdubbed in the original session was used and an incomplete guide vocal was removed, but it isn't clear whether the guide was used alongside the overdub on LIB on instead of it. I can't hear any difference. I almost wonder if he meant guitar track, as the acoustic guitar is much louder and clearer especially during the solos.

A3 - A different take recorded same day as LIB. Harrison's meandering (but cool) acoustic intro is replaced with a piano intro. The piano (right) is not 'prepared', the acoustic guitar is left and the steel centre. The song a much more laid-back feel overall and Lennon's vibrato is much more restrained. The piano solo and Harrison's humorous asides (“Elmore James got nothing on this baby”) are missing. Oh, and the drumming on the intro sounds like a typewriter.

Dig It and Maggie Mae

These songs only appear on the original Let It Be as does Lennon's “and now we'd like to do 'Ark The Angels Come” comment which was perceived as a sly dig at the hymn-like Let It Be which followed Dig It on the original album.

The mix of For You Blue on LIBN is far superior to LIB. However since both mixes feature the worst sounding instrument the Beatles ever committed to tape (McCartney's prepared piano) and one of the worst played (Lennon's lap steel) I'd take the less energetic but far more listenable Anthology version. I would have loved a complete take of Maggie Mae but there isn't one and I'd happily lose Dig It completely.

Best Versions

For You Blue – Anthology 3
Dig It – LIB
Maggie Mae – LIB