Further to my post of yesterday, here is a really fascinating deconstruction of the final chord of A Day in the Life - perhaps the most meaningful one minute of sound in all of pop history. As most of us know - well, I did from somewhere - the final chord is an auditory amalgam of the same chord played simultaneously on several different pianos by several different groups of people - with a kind of "buzz" sound added to the mix to boost the bass. In the last five minutes or so of this video you actually get to hear the component parts. This kind of technical manipulation was almost unheard-of in 1967, and in itself was a stroke of genius perhaps invented or implemented by George Martin. The original ending was going to be one note. Thank God someone re-thought THAT idea!
If you listen very carefully to that legendary final chord, as it slowly decays you can hear a chair squeaking. Others have heard the air conditioning system at Abbey Road Studios, though personally I can't. Given that playback is now much improved in clarity, people are still finding sounds in it, and to everyone's dismay, it turns out the recording equipment was turned off BEFORE THE END OF THE CHORD. It was still vibrating ever-so-subtly, but the truth is no one could pick it up even in playback. It was finished, wasn't it? SURELY it was finished, it had to be! No, it was not. It may have gone on vibrating for another 30 seconds, but we will never know.
This song is primal, and without a doubt the Beatles' masterpiece. Every single element of it rings true, and every single element of it is necessary to the whole. As Salieri said in Amadeus, "Pull out the tiniest detail, and the whole thing would fall down." But it doesn't, and evokes the '60s more vividly than anything else I can think of. What leaps out at me instantly are the drums - and if anyone still underestimates Ringo's brilliance here, they will have to answer to ME!
Ringo was my first Beatle-love, back when drums were just a lot of pounding rather than the glue holding the entire thing together. The big nose, the floppy hair, the sad blue eyes and somewhat rueful smile - it KILLED me when I was only ten years old and supposedly far too young for those sorts of feelings. The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 - memorable because it happened to be my tenth birthday, for which we had actually gone to a restaurant (named Rossini's - and for some reason I remember seeing a mouse running along the sidewalk outside). This was rare, as most birthdays were home affairs - but my mother still made the cake. Restaurant desserts were deemed almost wicked back then, a near-shameful extravagance.
So we get home from my birthday dinner, turn on the TV as always, and whether or not I was prepared for what happened next has been lost to me. After the fact, it seemed that the sizzle and buzz around the Beatles must have been going on for weeks. But I was too young to play those 45 rpm pop records, and may or may not have heard them on the radio. Then the gangly, stiff-limbed Ed came on and announced something "for all you youngsters" - and then - BAM!
Everything changed.
The next day, all I was hearing about at school was Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. We had all been watching Ed Sullivan forever, and I had never seen any references to any of the other acts (not even Topo Gigio, the Little Italian Mouse). I remember the teacher could not keep order that day, and at one point made a remark about wigs, thinking that's what "Beatles" were. But suddenly it was Beatles everywhere, including bubble gum cards with four different poses per ten-cent package (I had a nearly-complete set before THROWING THEM OUT when I turned 13 - how childish to collect such things!), shirts, lunch boxes, thermos flasks, and - most magical of all - Beatles dolls. I promptly got me a Ringo doll, and kept him in my desk.
The more you listen to this, the more impossible it all seems. These guys were just bloody geniuses. Paul and Ringo are now in their 80s, and like Bob Dylan, still performing, still going strong. Ringo has turned out to be the coolest Beatle, as I always suspected. Peace and love! His son Zak was drummer for The Who, which is not too shabby and proof that talent can be inherited, so long as you put in the hard work and dedication along with it. I don't know a lot about drums, except that Ringo's accuracy was crystalline - combined with a slight shuffly effect which was deliberate. He has even talked about it, a way of slightly smearing the decay so that the beat was both diamond-hard and spookily underwater-ish. I have always felt A Day in the Life would be nothing without Ringo.
This is the Ringo doll I DIDN'T have. Magnificent! The little ones are worth a fortune now, so I can only imagine what this work of art would fetch on eBay nowadays.
Ringo was late to the party - we all know that - but soon found his slot, or slid into it, and thus the Beatles were born. Prior to that, there was somehow a feeling that a piece was missing. Once he was on board, the whole thing exploded. I loved Ringo first. I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on my tenth birthday - it was their first time on the show, and nobody quite knew what the hell was going on, except that this babyfaced quartet were generating incredible excitement. Elevated on a sort of throne behind the three others was none other than Ringo Starr, the only Beatle with a made-up name, and in some ways the runt of the litter. This guaranteed that all the girls would love him best (pardon the pun!).
Ringo was a bit of a mutt, with a big nose and sad blue eyes. He didn't have conventional good looks like Paul, or a slashing wit like John, or spiritual gravitas like George. He was the waif. Three of the four Beatles had abandonment issues around their parents (only George had a more-or-less normal working-class childhood). Ringo's father just walked out, as did John's (and we all know what happened to John's mother). Fatherless boys can go one way or the other. But both ended up lashed onto a comet which is still streaking across the heavens, even with two members gone.
Ringo's still around, and he's hip, he is so incredibly hip! He has waited all his life to be this hip. Paul is looking fragile and has had a little work done on that sweet, slightly overripe face, but Ringo seems twenty years younger than his age. Being a Beatle, being in that world, has been an education, and his joy has survived.
I was delighted to hear that his eldest son Zak - remember Zak? - has done not-half-badly on his own, serving as drummer for the Who -THEWHO??? Yes. Them. And you don't get those kinds of gigs handed to you because you're a Starkey. Famous Dads can even be the end of your career. You get them because you are brilliant. Ringo's virtuosity is subtle but irresistible, a savant power that he has always had, and which has evolved. If you doubt me, try to imagine the Beatles' masterpiece, A Day in the Life, without Ringo. This is the backbone of the whole thing. Listen to it again.
Post blogservations. My Ringo doll! Everyone had a Beatles doll back then, which you smuggled to school and kept in your desk. Mine, of course, was Ringo. I don't still have the thing (how crazy do you think I am? Don't answer that), but of course was easily able to track down a photo of one. Nothing ever goes away on the Internet.
Doesn't look much like him, but no one was prepared for the Beatles back then, for what they would become. I thought that was a hat at first - some sort of fez, or a French foreign legion thing, which wouldn't make sense, would it? But I think it's a tambourine. They couldn't stick a set of drums on him too easily.
It seems incredible that this is thefirst take of the Beatles' dizzyingly-powerful masterpiece A Day in the Life. The pieces of it are already coming together. Certain elements that will appear in the finished song jump out, such as the weird, disturbing counting that seems to go on forever. You wait and wait for the mounting cacophany of the orchestra, but it doesn't come, perhaps because it hasn't been thought of yet. In fact, it almost certainly hasn't. This is process in its truest, most raw-minded and risk-taking form. I just watched a PBS doc - it was OK but could have been better - which took apart some of the most (they thought) influential songs on Sgt. Pepper, particularly this one. But can they get to it? Can they get inside it at all? My God. "Just" the lyric, seemingly the simplest part of it, contains a compressed, crammed autobiography of John, not to mention all four Beatles, all of their generation, and all of post-War Liverpool. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Mine disaster? Bomb craters? Like the rest of them, Lennon never outdistanced the war and all it did to his country.
It amazes me that the "woke up, fell out of bed" section has already been mapped here, not just roughed out, with that amazing sophisticated McCartney keyboard work. This is literally two completely different songs put together, one inside the other, and though it shouldn't work at all, it does. The workaday McCartney section in the middle, what John called the "middle eight", pulls us into a crazy normalcy that will soon slip sideways. Then there is that incredible line, "And somebody spoke, and I went into a dream . . ." Take one?My God. The mind or the ear or memory fills in all the rest, but this is the naked version, not just bare bones but bare genius. That final, silencing, deafening, aurally incomprehensible piano chord doesn't happen here, because it has either not been conceived of yet, or they haven't figured out how to achieve it technically. In the end (so I learned tonight on PBS), they used EIGHT pianos and an organ, which pumps up the sound so abnormally that it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by it. The "decay" lasts an incredible 43 seconds, whereas the average piano chord might make it to 10 or 15. And the mikes are cranked so wide open that you can hear the technicians minutely moving about, breathing. (A side note: more techically sophisticated re-releases of this song reveal that the massive piano chord was still reverberating, so that they could have gone on recording for another five or ten seconds.)
I post this now because this whole thing stirred up stuff in me - can't really describe it, and it made me listen very carefully to the original Day in the Life (in yet another re-release) with its much cleaner, more defined sound. It made my hair stand on end. It did then, too. What was it about this album? Of course the songs were wildly original, and the arrangements simply mind-blowing in their originality. My favorite effect is Henry the Horse: George Martin took old calliope recordings, cut them up into one-inch pieces, threw them up in the air, and spliced them back together to make a psychedelic crazy-quilt of sound. But there was more to it than pyrotechnics. The album was - what? -approachable, somehow. Like someone you knew, and came back to visit again and again. Whatever facet of itself it was displaying - and there were so many of them you couldn't count - it was sure to stick to you powerfully in a place you didn't know you had. Most of all, listening to this made me miss John. I don't like the line "he blew his mind out in a car" because it reminds me of his fatally-wounded body lying on the ground outside the Dakota, uttering his last two words: "I'm shot!" And the sense of impending terror - even more naked here than in the final track - is raw in me now because of all that is happening around me. I read the news today, oh boy.
I don't mind it for myself. It's the children I worry about. They face so many problems I never had to think about because they didn't exist, and it is harder and harder to be optimistic. And yet, I go about my business day to day, like Paul running to catch the bus, and surprise myself with an unexpected level of happiness. It makes no sense, so I just decided to accept it, a gift. But it's still there, the undercurrent. God, what is it about genius? You're dead 36 years, and still you express people's unspoken terrors better than anyone ever could, billions of people you will never even meet! How many people who are grabbed by this song weren't (even remotely) born when it came out? How many of their PARENTS weren't even remotely born? How many will get to listen to it, be moved by it, terrified and disturbed by it, who aren't born yet? I have a better question. Will they have the chance?
