Imagine . . .

Oink wrote: »

He’s highly respected as a rythm guitar player.

Yeah and a point rarely enough mentioned. He had a distinctive approach, quite aggressive and staccato. One hell of a voice on him too. When he was in the groove he was an incredible songwriter, but the absolute peak of that was largely reached around the White album with some blips of greatness afterwards. Post Beatles he was very much a mixed bag, but then again so was McCartney(he sustained the peak for a little longer).

I read an interview with the director Peter Jackson who is currently going through the many many hours of footage that was shot during the Get Back sessions which was cobbled together for the Let It Be film and album in 1970. He said he expected it to be dour and awful, a glimpse into a band breakup, but apparently the original Let it Be flic was very much edited that way(years later Lennon snuck into a cinema to watch it and apparently was left in floods of tears ). He reckons it's far more complex, with McCartney even defending Lennon having Yoko around because she made him happy and with scary accuracy joking "in 20 years time they'll be saying she broke up the band because she sat on an amp".

One of his takeaways from the footage is the real sense they didn't know where to go next. They had done so much and were often the first to do it. They had done the unreal fame, touring, the massive stadiums, the rock and roll thing, the pop thing, the ballad thing, folk and otherwise, films, "videos", the classical thing, the psychedelic thing, the grunge thing, the experimental etc(only one actual blues song funny enough) Where could they go next? Joke is after those sessions were wrapped up they went into the studio one last time together and made Abbey Road, which turned out to be one of their most popular and acclaimed albums.

It can be hard to see their impact these days. The meh of repetition and the distance in years and the wide range of music we've been exposed to since, but if you were alive back then every record they put out was better than the last and then they started to sound like nothing you ever heard before, or even could have heard before, while always remaining unmistakeably them, The Beatles. And what's truly staggering is they did all of that in just under eight years and before they turned 30.

And John Lennon was a huge and indispensable driving force behind that(all four of them were to one degree or other). Consider just one almost throwaway song of his; Jealous Guy that Hamsterchops mentioned above. Written when he was in the Beatles, but never used, recorded later with new lyrics. Sounds like a pretty basic love type song right? Nothing unusual really. Only it's written in the pentatonic scale. Think Indian music, or the black keys on a piano. It should sound really weird, even discordant to a western ear, but it doesn't, and that's raw talent.