Eight Days A Week Film And Premiere: Bullet Point Review

I went to watch the premiere of Eight Days A Week:The Touring Years with my family last night – here's some thoughts

Premiere

• Red Carpet is blue.

• Shocking to see what a frail old lady Yoko has become. Like seeing that old teacher you used to be terrified of, decades after leaving school.

• Did she just say she was married to Paul?

• To be fair they didn't help her by getting Scouse comedian John Bishop to do the interviews. When Yoko got confused by his accent he replies “You married one of us.” That bamboozled her.

• My daughter asks if that old lady was Yolo. (She later tries to cover herself by saying “I know her name is Yoko. I thought it was Yoko Yolo?”). Ditto for when they interviewed 'Jazz Martin'.

• Macca giving the thumbs up, and Ringo flicking peace signs like a manual-tourettes makes me wish each Beatle had had their own hand signal. I don't know about George's but John's would definitely have been flicking V-signs.

• We're gonna get a post credits treat. And John Bishop has obviously never seen a Marvel film.

Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years

The tagline is “The Band You Know. The Story You Don't”. We'll see...

• If you're wondering "Is it OK to sing along with the film when I'm in a cinema?" The answer is: "No". "But it's the Beatles!" Doesn't matter. Unless you are The Beatles SHUT THE HELL UP! Moving on...

• Footage from Manchester ABC in 1963. Looks and sounds amazing. Where did they get this? Is it colourised? [Update: Pathe. And No].

• The Beatles hired a third roadie in the States. Did not know that! Mark Lewisohn has probably already researched his entire family tree.

• I think I've solved the McCartney 'piano strings on a bass mystery' (they wouldn't work). There's a picture of him playing a guitar with 'bass strings' on that I think comes from the post-Hamburg period where Lewisohn says he mimed on a broken guitar.

• We're getting a little Apple Corps 'sanitation' – they cut away from John 'pulling a crip' (imitating a disabled person on stage).

• Another good clip – pretty sure this one has been colourised.

• Whoopi Goldberg gets emotional about her Mum buying her Beatles tickets. That's great parenting right there.

• Beatles say racial segregation is stupid. Hear that 1960's America? Stupid. Gotta love em.

• Important point. Obviously I am not A/B-ing but from what I'm hearing Giles Martin has done a great job in remixing/remastering.

• Was worried looking at the trailer that the quality of the footage wouldn't warrant a big screen viewing - there's poor footage but it doesn't detract, and some great stuff.

• There's a ton of '3D-ing' photos and digital cigarette smoke everywhere.

• Everyone is smoking always. Surprised it didn't get an 18 cert in todays climate.

• The press conferences are priceless. Eddie Izzard is right, they're four standup comics with impeccable timing. George tapping cigarette ash on John's head during an interview is hilarious.

• Beatles handwritten lyrics for I Want To Hold Your Hand has a 'teachers note' at the bottom “3/10. See Me”.

• There's a clip of Lennon playing on a melodica from '65. Put on your tinfoil hat cos he's playing the first three chords of Strawberry Fields Forever!!!!

• Interview with Paul brings home how unique Lennon And McCartney were and why it was incredible they met. “I'd never met someone else who wrote songs”.

• Footage of Liverpool fans singing at Anfield in 1964 capture the Beatles indirectly creating football chants. The rise of LFC under Shankley and the Mersey Sound = more serendipity.

• Sigourney Weaver in the crowd at a gig. Relatively calm. Not even biting a policeman. [Or singing in a Russian accent].

• Can't watch the rooftop gig without seeing Peter Serafinowicz sitting on a toilet.

• Can't watch Lennon's Jesus apology without seeing Harry Enfield in a cheese shop.

• Might be a dodgy stream but it looks like some of the audio and video are from different live gigs. (Didn't they do that on the Anthology show?).

• Damn, Ringo is laying into the drums. Move over Bonzo.

• Nice moment where they try to recreate what Shea would have sounded like through the tannoy PA. And by nice I mean hideous.

• Cliched 'increasing speed photo montage to A Day In The Life orchestral freakout' segment. Works well though. That's why people do it.

• That's Candlestick Park. So how are we gonna handle the studio years? Oh! - with a couple of animated jpgs and some on-screen text. At least they didn't fudge it with some “we played live...in the studio” blather.

Post Credits Sting

What's it gonna be? Spiderman: Homecoming? Yellow Submarine reboot? Let It Be? Oh it's Shea Stadium. OK.

• Sounds and looks good. This audio was rerecorded though. [Update: Extensively rerecorded as documented here. But they seem to have re-replaced Act Naturally with Ringo's original live (and flat) vocals. What goes on?].

• Definitely think they've edited out another 'Lennon crip' here. They've kept the speaking in tongues. Didn't he tell the crowd to shut up too?

• It's crazy to see the worlds biggest band do a 30 minute set featuring three covers.

Conclusion

Sorry Ron, that is “The Story We Already Knew”. Well told, nicely edited, with a few rarities that were worth the price of entry and sounding fabulous. But unless we're making a biopic of the third roadie - nothing new. Though that's a film I'd totally watch.

Worth buying or streaming.

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10:31 Glass Onion (pt.1)

John Lennon was a man of many contradictions. On the one hand he hated people over analysing, and reading hidden meanings into, his songs. From intellectuals enraptured by his aeolian cadences, though 'Paul is Dead' stupidity, to the Manson Family's lethal interpretations. But on the other hand , for all his protestations, he was just as guilty as his audience - convincing himself that Hey Jude was REALLY about his love affair with Yoko rather than a song of comfort for his own abandoned son.

Arguably his attempts to ridicule and infuriate the obsessives DaVinci-coding their way through lyrics sheets only added more fuel to the fire. In Glass Onion, if you look closely, you can clearly see, not the Freemason's all seeing eye, but the Lennon's raised middle finger as he references five other Beatles songs - including one which references a song which references another song. Deep man!

1) Glass Onion - Strawberry Fields Forever

I told you about Strawberry Fields you know the place where nothing is real

Let me take you down 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real


2) Glass Onion - I Am The Walrus

I told you about the walrus and me/here's another clue for you all/the walrus is Paul

I am the egg-man, they are the egg-men, I am the walrus, goo goo a' joob


3) Glass Onion - Lady Madonna - I Am The Walrus – Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet

Lady Madonna, children at your feet/Wonder how you manage to make ends meet?


Lady Madonna - I Am The Walrus

Monday's child has learned to tie his bootlace/See how they run

See how they run like pigs from a gun


I Am The Walrus – Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

See how they fly like Lucy in the sky

With your head in the clouds and you're gone/Lucy in the sky with diamonds


4) Glass Onion - Fool On The Hill

I told you about the fool on the hill

But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down


5) Glass Onion - Fixing A Hole

Fixing a hole in the ocean/Tryin' to make a dovetail joint

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/And stops my mind from wandering

   The song is another example of Lennon's trippy lyrical style aka 'stream of consciousness, free-association, psychedelic, nonsense literature, surrealism'. It's something that is often attributed to LSD use but was evident in his prose and poetry even from childhood. I think drugs receive far too much credit for inspiring the Beatles songwriting (something I plan to write about in more detail) - anyone who grew up on The Goon Show, Stanley Unwin & Lewis Carroll wouldn't need much chemical encouragement to bring the weird.

Like Happiness Is A Warm Gun most of the weird phrases are simply real life details made startlingly poetic. The bent back tulips were an unusual flower arrangements in a posh London restaurant called Parke's, a perfect place for 'seeing how the other half lives', a dovetail joint is something in carpentry (and a cheeky drug reference) and the Cast Iron Shore was a real place in Liverpool.

Next time we'll look at what Glass Onion does well from a songwriting point of view.

        

Under The Influence: Andy Summers (The Police)

Are you a big fan of the Beatles? 

Isn't everyone? 

Andy Summers: Ink Magazine

  I was drawn to [Strawberry Fields Forever] in particular because it’s dark and a bit more twisted. Plus they had that fascinating backwards thing going around in it. And the Lennon vocal gets me every time. McCartney wrote the up, ingratiating melodies while Lennon usually wrote f***ed up and down. So even though this is sort of an avant-garde pop piece, Lennon brings an aspect of the blues to it. 

Andy Summers: Lava Magazine 

See what Sting had to say about the Beatles here

The Continuing Story Of The Mystery Spanish Guitarist

Blogging through the Beatles catalogue sometimes requires research to really get inside the songs and answer the weird questions that come up. What is that phasing effect on the drums in From Me To You? How many different versions of Get Back are there? What is that horrible ukelele sound on For You Blue? And so on.

Who was the real Bungalow Bill?

Answered nicely by the excellent Beatles Bible site.

Who played 'spanish' guitar on the intro of Bungalow Bill?

More tricky.

• It is a separate piece of tape spliced into the track (just like Lennon's yorkshire “aye-up!” which segues into the next track)
• It's obviously a good player (very fast and technical, though with a slight fluff in the middle). Probably too technical even for Harrison. 
• It's also clearly played with a pick, which would mean it's unlikely to be a classical or flamenco record taken either from the Abbey Road archives (Blackbird/Being For The Benefit...) or a live radio broadcast (I Am The Walrus). 

Beatles Bible (again) states it's a preset on the Mellotron keyboard which sounds far fetched, as it's hard to imagine what use such a sample would be to any working musician. The mellotron (played by Chris Thomas) appears twice on Bungalow Bill (on mandolin and trombone settings) so it would be an easy assumption to make.

But having done some research I can confidently say it is a mellotron! Here's a video with the same 'sample' in action (the mellotron was not a really synthesizer but a tape loop trigger)...

and Paul McCartney does an excellent (if schmaltzy) demonstration of how such ultra specific samples may have been used in a live context. And of course he plays the intro to Strawberry Fields Forever. But then you'd expect him to.

Moral of the story? Always trust Beatles Bible. And never underestimate the weirdness of a keyboard manufacturer.

If you build it, they will strum.

Next time we'll look at the actual song.

The Band Who...Kept Expanding

Long Long(er) Long(est)

The ever increasing Beatles running time

Love Me Do (1962) - 2:23
The average pop song in the early 60's was well under 3 minutes. Some bands would even print fake shorter running times on their labels to ensure airplay.

I Saw Her Standing There (1963) - 2:56
Two bridges and guitar solo pushed this bluesy rocker to epic lengths.

You Really Got A Hold On Me (1963) - 3:03
A Smokey Robinson cover pushes the boys over 3 minutes.

She's A Woman (1964) - 3:03
McCartney pens his first B side over 3 minutes

Ticket To Ride (1965) - 3:10
And the first A side. A rave-up outro added 20 seconds

You Won't See Me (1965) - 3:23
It's a slow tempo that extends this album track.

Strawberry Fields Forever (1967) - 4:07
A experimental coda/jam session and post fade out drum solo adds over 1 minute.

Within You Without You (1967) - 5:05
mid tempo song with 30 second intro and over 1 minute instrumental section

A Day In The Life (1967) - 5:35
this time it's fade out piano chords, a dog whistle, then a loop originally recorded in the playout groove of the vinyl disc which add over 1 minute

Hey Jude (1968) - 7:08
3:03 of song plus 4:00 of coda

Revolution 9 (1968) - 8:22
nearly 81/2 minutes of atonal ego stroking by John and Yoko doesn't really count as a song. 

So the longest Beatles song is -

I Want You She's So Heavy (1969) - 7:48
4:37 song plus 3:10 non fading fade out


 It's interesting that in many of the Beatles fattest songs there's thin song trying to get out. Rather than a truly epic song like Bohemian Rhapsody, from Ticket To Ride onwards we have short songs with something tacked on the end.

Under The Influence: Ozzy Osbourne

John Lennon was my God ... Lennon knew how to be aggressive with a great melody, and I find that's something that's lacking in a lot of current music: it's just aggression; where's the f***** melody? Lennon could deliver the heaviest message with a terrific melody. And at the same time he'd paint this abstract, Salvador Dali picture in your head.


They did every form of music and made it their own. I owe my career to the Beatles. I wanted that excitement – they gave me a reason to carry on with my life...They had as much impact as World War II, but in a positive way. I remember feeling so good about buying [Strawberry Fields Forever]. It somehow made me feel good about myself. My confidence went up. The Beatles gave me hope.


Everybody knows what an incredible Beatles fan I am by now! But they influenced everybody, one way or another... If I ever get some terminal disease, just give me my medication, put on any Beatles album and just let me die like a f***** Viking. That's my last request.

Ozzy Osbourne selected I Am The Walrus, Strawberry Fields Forever & The Long And Winding Road for his ultimate mix tape in Guitar World, Dec 1998.

Under The Influence: Steve Jobs

My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each others negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum parts. And that's how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs (1955 -2011) Quoted on Gaiam Life

[Beatles or Stones?] If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles. The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.415)

On Steve Job's personal iPod were most of the tracks from A Hard Day's Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet The Beatles! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. (but none from Revolver, Rubber Soul or The White Album!). The only other artist with more tracks was Bob Dylan.

[Strawberry Fields Forever] is a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months...they just didn’t stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going and going.

This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each...recording.

The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it’s like, “Wow, how did they do that?!?

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.418-19)

Lennon was always my favourite Beatle

Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (p.418)

Apple Computers was sued by Apple Corps numerous times between 1978 and 2007. In 2007 Apple paid the Beatles $500 million for all worldwide rights to the name and then licensed back to the Beatles the rights to use the name.

Three Hammer Prevention Questions

The tragedy is not that Maxwell is a poor song but that McCartney “flogged it to death in the studio in a pedantic effort to perfect it [and] ended up driving his colleagues mad” acting like an “immature egotist who frittered away the group's patience and solidarity on sniggering nonsense” (MacDonald p.357) just like he did to an even greater extent with Ob La Di, Ob La Da

The funny thing is that everything McCartney did wrong on this song he's done with wonderful success on other songs.

Written at the tail end of the White Album, rehearsed during the Let It Be sessions, recorded over 3 days in July 69 with more overdubs and tweaking in Aug this was a major piece of work (the band even rented an anvil for Ringo to play) that totally failed to live up to (Paul's) expectations. Here are three questions that you can ask to stop yourself making the same mistakes.

1) Are my fellow musicians up for this song?
2) Is there a legitimate technical reason why this song is taking so long?
3) Does this song warrant the amount of polish I'm lavishing on it?

A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Q: Are my fellow musicians up for this song? If not keep it short or save it for the solo album.

Yellow Submarine was just as silly as Maxwell, if not more so. It took two days to record. But by all accounts the band had a whale of a time (you see what I did there?). Playing bathtubs, blowing bubbles shouting nonsense through echo chambers, marching round with a bass drum in a conga line with Brian Jones & Marianne Faithful. What's not to like? Lennon & Harrison despised Maxwell and Lennon took no real part in the recording.

Long Long Long

Q: Is there a legitimate technical reason why this song is taking so long? If not get the best version you can quickly and then call it a day. You can always revisit it some time in (distant) the future.

A Day In The Life took 5 days to record over a period of 2 months. You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) took 4 days over 3 years. Some thing take longer because they're complex and you're breaking new ground, and some take longer because you're desperately trying to make something brown and smelly look bright and shiny. Ob La Di, Ob La Da and Strawberry Fields Forever were both recorded, scrapped and rerecorded. Guess which one the whole band were most enthusiastic about...

Hey! You've got to throw that song a-way

Q: Does this song warrant the amount of polish I'm lavishing on it? If not recorded it roughly and move on.

Throw away songs are great and you don't have to throw them in the bin. Just throw them on the table like the musical junk food they are. You don't need to get the silverware out. What if Maxwell had been a solo acoustic number played in the same loose style as Her Majesty? Or a raucous jam like Maggie Mae? Wouldn't that have been better? It certainly would have engendered more goodwill with it's take it or leave it attitude than the version we have.

This is something I find myself facing when recording joke songs like The Soundcheck Song so I hope it's helpful to you. Do you have any other suggestions for knowing when you're giving too much time to an inferior song?

Blessed Are The Single-Taskers

On 15th Aug 1969, while the Woodstock festival was kicking off in Bethel, New York, George Martin & The Beatles were in London laying down the orchestral overdubs for five of the songs on Abbey Road . For once the Beatles weren’t at the centre of the musical universe. But more remarkable from a songwriter’s perspective this was one of the few times they worked on several songs at once.

Saving the world, one song at a time

Like every other songwriter on the planet Lennon & McCartney always had numerous ideas on the back burner but one thing they habitually did (in terms of recording) was work on every song to completion. They very rarely focused on more than one song at a time.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

Picture just about every band you know. They go into the studio to record an album. First they lay down all the drum tracks. With b-sides involved this may be up to 25 songs. And 25 bass tracks. And so on. Weeks may elapse between laying down each instrument. Once the initial scratch tracks are done the rest of the band may not even be present. And even at the point that the songs are tracked the vocal lines and lyrics may still be unwritten. That’s certainly the case with Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, U2 and Metallica.

The Beatles however went in and hammered away at a song till it was finished and only when it was in the can did they move on to the next one. The only modern artist I know of with a similar way of working is Prince.

Ever wondered how the Beatles (and Prince) were able to handle such a wide range of styles convincingly?

Because this way of working allows you to totally submerge yourself in the song. It’s just too hard to switch gears between being children’s entertainers one minute (Yellow Submarine) and drug-fuelled visionaries (A Day In The Life) the next.

Rather than getting stuck in a “rhythm guitar overdub” frame of mind this approach allows you to get into a “song XYZ” frame of mind. After all, how unified do an album’s worth of bass lines need to be? Not as unified as all the elements of a song do.

Doing a complete song in a short space of time also gives you a much clearer sense of the song’s merits. How many rhythm tracks have been laboriously polished only to discover that, when the vocal track arrives at the 11th hour, the song sucks?

False Economy

So why don’t more people do it the Abbey Road way? Well, when it takes a whole day to mic up a drum kit, it makes financial sense to record as many drum tracks as you can in one go.

Here’s a bunch of observations on that.

This way of saving money leads to poorer songs. Poorer songs = lower sales. Lower sales = less money. So the strategy is “hey, if we spend less money, we’ll make less money!” Not a great idea!

Creating a perfect drum sound has become a quest for the holy grail requiring a mic for every piece of the kit, a channel for every mic & e.q. & outboard effects for every channel. No wonder it takes so long. Is the amount of time and money spent worth it?

There’s a stunning lack of unified drum sounds even on individual Beatles tracks. But be honest. Have you ever noticed the change in drum sounds on She Loves You  (1:23) and Strawberry Fields Forever (1:00) or the accidental phasing on From Me To You  (0:06)? Or is your focus on the song?

Maybe we would be less anal about drum sounds if we were trying to capture more of the bigger picture all at once. Is the kit fetish a symptom of engineers always having to work with vocal-less tracks. Who knows?

What’s best?

What’s best for the band and the song should never be overruled by what’s most convenient for the studio and the producer.What a band needs most is a large room with some separation, which is most like their normal playing environment.

In the 60’s Abbey Road was a combination of outdated gear and huge rooms that was pretty much at the Beatles’ disposal 24/7. By comparison many modern studios are overstocked broom closets too claustrophobic for any band bigger than the White Stripes.

Space matters more than equipment. Really.

Some Application

If your Abbey Road is a laptop and a few mics there’s little advantage doing any instrument wholesale anyway. So immerse yourself in the song, finish it and move on.

In a ‘real’ studio keep the time from the first count in to the final overdub as short as possible. Even if you go back later and remix or rerecord (as they did with Strawberry Fields, Ob-La-Di & Hold Me Tight) you’ve still wasted less time and focus. If one song at a time sounds too radical, try thinking of your album as a collection of 3 track EPs. Finish each EP totally before moving on.

Try to write something out of your genre. A kid’s song, a thrash metal song, a hymn, a comedy number, an R&B jam. Give yourself to it for a few days. Complete it, mix it and move on. Devoting yourself to a single (left field) project for a few days could produce amazing results and even refresh you as a songwriter.


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