Hello music fans!
It was 50 years ago today (in a couple of days anyway haha)! That’s right, on November 22nd, 1968 the greatest band in the world The Beatles released yet another landmark album, the self-titled “The Beatles”, which is more commonly known as “The White Album” due to the all white album cover.
What an album. And this was following 3 classic albums in “Rubber Soul”, “Revolver” and the sublime “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”! But whereas the previous 3 albums were from a band showing solidarity and cohesiveness, “The White Album” was anything but. For the first time, a Beatles album looked to be more the work of four individual players, as opposed to a collective unit.
In short, “The White Album” is a mess. But what a marvellous mess! Despite being truly all over the place sonically, somehow it all comes together and makes sense. It contains some of the band’s most loved and admired songs, even if the band themselves were starting to tire of being in the actual band.
The sound of a plane landing on Paul McCartney’s “Back In The USSR” kicks things off in style, with The Beatles parodying The Beach Boys’ trademark sound while giving a shout-out to the “Moscow girls”. This segues into John Lennon’s “Dear Prudence”, a more mellow affair in which Lennon pleads with a reclusive friend to come out and “see the sunny skies”. The change in tempo and mood from these opening tracks is representative of the album’s structure, but it works a treat.
On cuts like George Harrison’s “Piggies” and Lennon’s “The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill”, it’s clear that the band was still high on more than love, love, love, while McCartney’s unfairly ridiculed “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” brings some levity to proceedings. Even Ringo Starr gets a Starr-ing role with his very first solo composition, the sweet “Don’t Pass Me By”.
At 30 tracks long, you would expect the quality of the songs to waver at some point. This is simply not the case, however, as a lot of the songs have become fan favourites through the years. Harrison contributes the classic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, a veiled commentary on band tensions which broods and builds to an epic guitar solo by friend Eric Clapton. McCartney provides both his sweetest (the racism commentary “Blackbird” and gorgeous “I Will”) and heaviest tracks (the menacing “Helter Skelter”), while the rollicking “Birthday” has become a staple at his solo concerts. Lennon answers the “I Am The Walrus” riddle on the rockin’ “Glass Onion” (“the walrus was Paul”), and the amazing “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” is three songs in one.
In retrospect it is easy to pinpoint this album as the one in which the cracks started to appear in the Fab Four’s armour, however it is apparent that John, Paul, George and Ringo were indeed four individuals with their own ideas to contribute to the world, and that it was only a matter of time that they would go their separate ways anyway. One thing’s for sure though, whether or not the band was starting to fall apart, they still managed to create works of art like they did here.
Mark Rodil 