Posted on by Rob Jones

A Year With The Beatles Podcast: The Beatles (AKA “The White Album”)

thebeatles68lpJohn Lennon famously said that if you listen to The White Album, you can hear The Beatles breaking up. You can certainly hear that each member had a lot of things to say, and with many different ways to say it musically speaking, from traditional rock n’ roll, to wistful bucolic folk, to quasi-baroque black humour, to proto-prog excursions, to noise-rock, to the churning collage approach of avant garde, and beyond. The fact was, the band was going through a metamorphosis even as the political and cultural landscapes were changing all around them, drifting into darker territory from the multicoloured promise of the hippy dream just one year before.

They’d drifted pretty far from those shores themselves since their manager Brian Epstein died, the man who kept them together as a group with a common purpose. They’d come to find themselves on different paths from each other, too. Even in the band photos on the inner sleeve of this double disc magnum opus, there isn’t a group shot to be found. Rather we find John, Paul, George, and Ringo in separate quadrants looking a little worse for wear. Even in the middle of all of that, they made one of their most striking and influential works, even if on some tracks they performed as solo artists who used “The Beatles” as a banner under which to produce their individual material, rather than as a band. So what you can also hear on this record is them trying to find their voices as individuals, all the while using any voices they had to hand.

Among many other things which The Beatles represents, my friend Graeme and I are joined once again by musician, podcaster, and critic Alex Kennard who celebrates this album as his favourite of their catalogue. As usual, we discuss our favourite tracks, and we talk about how to approach this listening to this album given its magnitude. Unusually, maybe, we don’t talk about whether the record should have been a single disc. Because that would be dumb.

And Alex has a pop at Clapton, and praises “Revolution 9” to the skies.

You can decide if he’s right yourself by listening to the episode right here.

Enjoy!

Posted on by Rob Jones · 1 Comment

Pete Townshend Plays Solo and Acoustic: “Drowned”

Here’s a clip of Who guitarist/visionary and rock opera guru Pete Townshend with a solo acoustic take on his song “Drowned”, the studio version of which appears on the Who’s 1973 concept album Quadrophenia.

The album Quadrophenia off of which the song “Drowned” is taken was meant to communicate two concepts. The first was the lifestyles of the mods in the mid-60s, a scene in which all of the members of the Who were involved. The second concept attempted was to capture something of the personalities of the band, with four disparate outlooks and personas existing in the same space. Typically, these concepts were considered to be ponderous by many, including members of the Who. Yet, the story was compelling enough to make this record success, inspiring a film in 1979 starring Phil Daniels, and (of all people) Sting.
The album Quadrophenia off of which the song “Drowned” is taken was meant to communicate two concepts. The first was the lifestyles of the mods in the mid-60s, a scene in which all of the members of the Who were involved. The second was an attempt to capture something of the personalities of the band, with four disparate outlooks and personas existing in the same space. This second concept was considered to be ponderous by many, including members of the Who. Yet, the story was compelling enough to make this record success, inspiring a film in 1979 starring Phil Daniels, and (of all people) Sting.

The reason the Who is in the upper echelon of British Invasion bands is that they helped to expand the possibilities of what a rock band means, and what a rock song can be about too.  This doesn’t simply refer to head writer Townshend’s penchant for lofty and ambitious rock operas and concept albums, although these forms certainly became his main areas of concern by 1969.  I think the underlying influence they had was making rock music into something which could be confessional as well as visceral.  Rock music, Townshend proved, could be used as a vehicle for self-examination.

This approach began with the 1969 album Tommy, and the live versions of the story which came afterward.  Ultimately, that album and the ‘rock opera’ to follow, had more to do with its writer than it did with a mythical deaf dumb and blind kid.  But, with 1973’s Quadrophenia, Townshend wasn’t just telling his story.  He was attempting to take on the stories of everyone he grew up with including, and maybe especially,  his band mates.

With this tune, I think there’s a nakedness to it that is even more apparent in his solo acoustic takes, which he’d performed in a number of settings as a solo artist by the 1990s.  On the surface, this is a song about the teenage mind, the driving need to belong, to matter, to align one’s identity with something greater.  This is what it means to be ‘drowned’ in this song – to be subsumed by something powerful, something that is elemental, and able to deliver one from the crushing reality of isolation often felt most keenly by teenagers.

In the story, our young mod hero Jimmy finds himself at the sea in Brighton, the city which was the epicentre of the war between mods and rockers.  There he waits to catch a glimpse of his hero, king of the mods Ace Face.  Yet what he feels is bereft, lonely,  and with the overpowering need to be included, to belong.  To me, the visuals of this are so important.  To see a middle-aged Townshend singing this tune, is to see that the sentiments in it go well beyond the confines of the story being told.  And his latter-day performances of this song ultimately illustrate that the need to find belonging and meaning goes beyond age too.  This is what it is to be human, to feel the overpowering drive to make a connection with something bigger than oneself.

For more, check out this interview with Pete Townshend from Rolling Stone magazine from 1968, before anyone was holding his feet to the fire for daring to get old after he’d made it clear that he hoped he wouldn’t. His main concern in 1968 was his work on a concept that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to communicate properly – Tommy.

Contrast that interview with this interview with Pete Townshend  in 2003, when his ‘research’ into child abuse caused him some bother with the law.  It seemed that his struggles to come to terms with his youth would be lifelong pursuit that would continue to lead him down some pretty thorny paths.

Enjoy!