This is a great album, one I'd taken for granted for so long. This afternoon, however, I was able to listen to it clearly.
What I have long taken as the drawback of the Beatles is actually their strength. You see, something I had held against the Beatles is that their albums seem slapdash. Well, that's because they are.
By slapdash, I mean it seems as though the guys went into a session and built many of their most significant albums from a series of scraps, and came at the songs from a bunch of different directions. Then, when pressed for time, they pushed out the album and did their best with what came out. They were a weird combination of lazily listless and extremely diligent, waiting and hurrying up, hurrying up and waiting.
This is the beauty, though, and it's really on display on Abbey Road. During the making of this album, the members hated each other so much that most of the time they weren't even in the room with each other when they laid down their individual tracks. Under contract, they're throwing everything at the wall, and whatever sticks, sticks, no matter if one song is vastly different from another.
I mean, this is the album that has George's "Something" and Ringo's "Octopus' Garden" in addition to what sounds like typical Beatles fare, however good, like "Come Together." Altogether, the album is plain weird. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" sounds happy-go-lucky but it's about who murdered his wife with a hammer. "I Want You" is this trippy-dippy song, lyrically mostly made up of the repeated chorus "I want you / I want you so bad." Guitar-wise, it sounds like John is copying the Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun" or something.
Anyway, I love it, and I hope you do too.
Never heard of em. Look like a bunch of lazy hippies.
ReplyDeleteHardworking hippies. Lazy sometimes too but aren't we all?
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