Despite the reputation the album has, Peter Jackson’s wonderful Get Back documentary showed that making Let It Be wasn’t the unceasing slog it’s remembered as. For one thing The Beatles were in the right place personally to all be in the same room working together. It wasn’t a bundle of laughs, especially in the initial stint at Twickenham Studios, but they at least wanted to be in the same room without murdering each other. This was genuine progress because the cloud under which The White Album was made was much darker.
Most of The White Album was made with John Lennon and Paul McCartney working on their own songs in different studios, with Ringo Starr and George Harrison drifting between them like children of divorced parents. Starr, the peacemaker who just wanted everything to be like it was before, and Harrison, the moody teenager rebelling against his elders in a bid to be taken seriously. The irony of it all was that the album was conceived as a way of placating everyone.
By 1968, Paul and John were still the artistic force behind the band, but they’d long since gone from writing together to pursuing their own visions. The term ‘Lennon/McCartney song’ now more of a business agreement than anything else. Harrison was also building a backlog of great songs, leading to a three-way dance for space on the records. With the friction between them reaching an all-time high, the choice was made to make their new record a double album. That way, everyone would be happy. Right?!
The added space on the record didn’t just mean that everyone got space for their songs, though; it also meant that everyone could dive headfirst into whatever genre or sound they were playing with. Their previous album, a little record you might have heard of called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had been a melting pot of styles. Rock is colliding with psychedelia, vaudeville, and everything in between. Part of The White Album’s woolly, disjointed charm is how you don’t get diversity within the songs, you get a seemingly random collection of different genres.
Why did The Beatles make The White Album like that?
Rather than one song collecting influences from 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, country & western and baroque pop, you instead get ‘Back In The U.S.S.R’, ‘Rocky Racoon’ and ‘Piggies’. Entire songs are dedicated to experimenting with those genres. When it works, it leads to some of the best music of the entire Beatles back catalogue. ‘Glass Onion’, ‘Sexy Sadie’, ‘Helter Skelter’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, the highs are an embarrassment of riches. One that makes you think, “how is this not The Fabs’ best album?!”
Well, y’see, The Beatles were not perfect. You give three egos that fragile and that much to prove, and God help them, they’ll try, for better and for worse. The album quite possibly peaks higher than any non-Abbey Road Fabs album. The troughs, though… Christ. At least a third of the album should have been shorn from the track listing ever Fab is guilty of overreaching in some way. Let’s start with Paul’s missteps. Macca was deep into his “granny music shit” era, which means that yes, we’re going to start with one of his most infamous creations, the loping proto-ska of ‘Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da.’
Or at least we would if I didn’t quite like that song. I know, I know, it’s brutally cringe in a way that every white guy spewing out fake patois is, and for that reason alone, it should have probably remained in the EMI vaults waiting for the Anthology project to unearth it. However, it is utterly whole-hearted in a way that I find awkwardly charming. Compare that to the plodding vaudeville pastiche of ‘Honey Pie’, a song seemingly written for the challenge of seeing if Ol’ Thumbs Aloft could, I’d take the tale of Des and Molly any day of the week.
On a similar note, ‘Revolution 9’ is absolutely noxious. A pretentious, overlong cacophony that that’s there for no other reason than John wanting to prove his counter-culture worth to his new beaux. It’s also one hundred per cent staying on the record. If only for its sheer, still terrifying weirdness. Plus, they mine all the gags out of it in the barbershop quartet episode of The Simpsons. The John track that needs to sling its hook is ‘I’m So Tired’. I mean, yeah, John. You sound it.
Harrison has a precisely 50% hit rate on the record. ‘…Guitar’ and ‘Long, Long, Long’? Classics, couldn’t imagine the record without them. ‘Piggies’ and ‘Savoy Truffle’ on the other hand… come on lad. Harrison was trying to get away from his image as “the mystical Beatle” and write some knockabout songs that weren’t really about anything. What this lead to were two knockabout songs that weren’t really about anything. We don’t need to hear a list of Eric Clapton’s favourite chocolates, George.
It’s not fair to Ringo to put his songs up for the cut here. He only has two and one of them wasn’t written by him. They’re also both fairly agreeable, ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ a fun country-rock stroll and ‘Good Night’ ending an exhausting album on a surprisingly heartfelt note. However, going through the album and picking favourites sort of defeats the point of the whole album. The White Album is an album you take for all in all.
While a cut-down version of the album may suit your taste, there’s more worth in seeing the album for what it is at its core. It’s The Beatles at their most incredible, most infuriating, most iconic and most human. In short, The Beatles at their most Beatles.