The Beatles, famously, didn’t always agree.
The heat of their feuding was sparked by the conflict between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were constantly at odds over their contrasting approach to songwriting. Experimental, or honest? Catchy, or challenging? The best Beatles tracks are an amalgamation of it all.
Because of this, there were very few tracks that they all agreed were perfect. Sometimes, the answer to this was mania. Fuck trying to ensure each melodic line, each hit of the hi-hats, each rhyming couplet was perfect, pristine, prim, and proper. As a fellow Liverpudlian, there’s one thing I know for sure that scousers do best: Throw caution to the wind. Go all in.
No album represented this new ethos from the Beatles than White Album, a blank sleeve and 30 tracks of madness and mania. Lucky for the four-piece, some of their biggest hits came from the album. Think the luscious ‘Blackbird’, copied a million times over by every singer-songwriter with an old acoustic guitar and a dream, and ‘Helter Skelter’. Or take the dizzying ‘ Rocky Raccoon’ and ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ as evidence of the project’s worthiness.
And yet, even still, not everybody was happy. This time, it was George Martin, their producer, who had the biggest issues with the project. “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” he admitted in Anthology.
Despite his nerves, Martin knew he was fighting a losing battle against the formidable Lennon and McCartney duo: “But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. A lot of people I know think it’s still the best album they made. I later learned that by recording all those songs, they were getting rid of their contact with EMI more quickly.”
I’d have to agree with Martin on at least one front: What use does the song, ‘Wild Honey Pie’, serve on the album? Under a minute of whizz-bop jangles and ominous, warbled vocals. Put this down to one of their LSD trips, because something is surely amiss on the track.
Though Martin never explicitly addressed exactly what he wanted to remove from the album, he could’ve been ostracised for a comment like that. But, cool as ever, Starr happily admitted that there was truth to his argument. The drummer, instead, had a hilarious solution to Martin’s issues.
“I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums,” Starr said. “The ‘White’ and ‘Whiter’ albums.”
McCartney, predictably, had no issue with the sizable length. However, he did admit that his usual effort toward pushing the band to the limits of their capabilities wasn’t exactly as fun as it had always been. In the making of Get Back, McCartney seemed to pull some of the Beatles’ best riffs out of thin air. A man with a cheeky grin and a dream.
As albums go, the White Album, he admitted, “Wasn’t a pleasant one to make”. At least he didn’t think it was a mistake.
