18 October 2023

and there's no time for fussing and fighting....

Your expected wait time is less than six minutes. However, there is also the unexpected.
Mars the Caster of Wet Blankets
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Think of what you’re saying; you can get it wrong and still you think that it’s all right.

— The Beatles “We Can Work It Out”

Let me stipulate at the outset that Abbey Road is a great album, and if for some it is the Beatles’ greatest album, I agree that the case can be made. I’m just writing of my recent experience, that after the first two tracks, “Come Together” (and a) I did not read the suggestion until years later that the song is a celebration of simultaneous orgasm, and therefore b) I suppose I experience retroactive mixed feelings about the fact that a junior high chorus teacher shared the song with us) and “Something,” I could not help feeling that Paul McCartney’s rather twee “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was a notable musical let-down. I’m not saying it’s absolutely a bad song. A lighter song as Track 3 strikes me as generally a good idea, so maybe they should have slotted “Octopus’s Garden” there. Later that day—and the decision may or may not have been conscious—I listened to Side 1 of The Beatles (L’album blanc) whose first three songs are “Back in the USSR.” “Dear Prudence” (both of them first-rate songs, of course) and “Glass Onion.” The last is (like “Hey, Bulldog”) not my favorite John Lennon song, but certainly interesting and good overall. To revert briefly to Abbey Road, I found it touching, really that Lennon saw the merits of “Something” immediately and nominated it for a single. For my experience, I don’t know how many times I’d heard easy-listening covers of “Something” before hearing the Ur-text at last. Separately, the final episode of Patrick McGoohan’s classic series The Prisoner, “Fall Out” contains what may be my favorite “external” use of a Beatles song. Change of tack I: Found on Wikipedia: “Wm Grant Still composed Song of a City for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. The song played continuously during the fair by the exhibit “Democracity.” According to Still’s granddaughter, he couldn’t attend the fair except on “Negro Day” without police protection.” Change of tack II: My review of Sunday’s BSO concert.



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