Альбом "Револьвер": музыкология: анализ структуры песен

Тут я читаю удивительно проницательную книгу Джонатана Гульда "Любовь купить нельзя", которую заслуженно считают одной из самых удачных книг, анализирующих феномен Битлзов во всей его полноте: это и анализ эпохи, и очень выразительное музыкологическое описание каждой написанной Битлзами песни с каждого альбома и сингла по мере их появления...в книге присутствуют конечно-же известные факты из всем известной истории самого знаменитого рок-ансамбля, но они погружены в историческую эпоху, с попыткой объяснения почему что-то происходило так, а не иначе...Книга совершенно замечательная, всем советую ее почитать...она в значительной мере дополняет книгу МакДональда "Революция в голове"...приятно отличаясь от нее в ту сторону, что тут автору удается ярче вскрыть скрытые пружины, заложенные в каждую из песен канона...
Так как сейчас неделя переиздания "Револьвера"... хотел поделиться с вами, моими друзьями, отрывками из этой книги, посвященными именно записи этого альбома... Я не берусь за перевод, но те, кто не владеет английским могут воспользоваться системами автоматического перевода типа DeepL, чтобы понять суть

They left behind them the album Revolver, released in the first week of August 1966, and there had never been a record like it, for the simple reason that there had never been a recording group like the Beatles in this, their newly individuated form. During its three months of development at Abbey Road, the album had evolved into a conscious effort to reconstitute the celebrated whole as the sum of its celebrated parts. After considering titles like Abracadabra and Magic Circles, the group had settled on Revolver as a kind of McLuhanesque pun—revolve is what records do—that also described the way the focus of attention on the album turned evenly from one Beatle to the next. Woven with motifs of circularity, reversal, and inversion, Revolver was the first record on which the Beatles consciously made the interplay of their individual personalities a theme of the music itself.
Every aspect of the new album was designed to signal a break with the past. Its cover, for example, consisted for the first time of something besides a flattering photograph of the group. Here instead was a stark, arty, black-and-white collage that caricatured the Beatles in a pen-and-ink style beholden to Aubrey Beardsley, whose Yellow Book illustrations were the subject of a major retrospective at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in the summer of 1966. The collage was made by the Beatles’ old “exi” friend from Hamburg, Klaus Voorman (who in the intervening years had taken up Stuart Sutcliffe’s old instrument, the bass guitar, moved to London, and joined the pop group Manfred Mann). Voorman assigned each Beatle to a quadrant of the record sleeve and tied their four heads together with a great common field of hair, its tousled surface swarming with elfin Beatle caricatures and tiny Beatle likenesses taken from old album covers and publicity shots, crawling around in the Beatles’ hair like the ideas crawling around in their heads.
On the back of the album jacket, above a dimly lit photograph of the Beatles all wearing sunglasses—Ringo is sporting a particularly ludicrous, bug-eyed pair—the list of song titles is paralleled by a list of names designating the “Lead Singer” on each track. Liner notes on previous Beatle albums had identified who sang on which songs, but on Revolver the matter of lead voice and authorship was emphasized as never before. Whereas no fewer than half the songs on Rubber Soul and its predecessors were listed as jointly sung, each song on Revolver was linked to the name of a single Beatle. These designations were repeated on the record label itself, and even in the advertisements EMI placed in the trade papers to announce the album’s release. (This emphasis on authorship was one of the reasons the Beatles responded so angrily to Capitol’s requisition of three tracks for Yesterday and Today, since all three of those tracks happened to be John Lennon’s songs. Their subsequent omission from the American version of Revolver skewed the whole concept of the album, leaving John as lead singer on only two of the remaining tracks. The result was the most seriously compromised version of the Parlophone product that Capitol would ever release.)

А вот великолепный анализ первого трека "Тaxman"
The first surprise is that the album should begin with a song by George Harrison; the second surprise is that it should be such a witty song, its humor compounded by the irony that George should finally realize his ambition to write caustic social commentary in the style of Bob Dylan with a song protesting the soak-the-rich policies of the British Welfare State. Harrison had never been one to make light of the burdens of success; “Taxman” is his reminder that even millionaires get the blues. It begins with a grim, miserly voice, slowly intoning, “One, two, three, four, one, two,” against a background of exaggerated tape hum. Sounding like a half-speed version of the brisk shout of “one-two-three-four!” that kicked off the Beatles’ first LP, this opening is an elaborate conceptual joke: in place of that earlier “live effect,” a deliberate “tape effect” that broaches the idea of the Beatles beginning anew in the studio and hints with subtle self-mockery at how the focus of their lives had shifted in the three years since Please Please Me from the dance floor to the counting house.
“Let me tell you how it will be…” George sings the verses of “Taxman” with an authoritarian air, phrasing on the offbeats against a stiff soul riff from the band. “Should five percent appear too small [a tambourine sloshes like a pocketful of change], be thankful I don’t take it all [joined by the tock of a cowbell, as hollow as a beggar’s cup].” In the bridge, the backup chorus (John and Paul) comes to the foreground, feeding their lines to George, who answers them as implacably as if he were checking off boxes on a form. There’s a flavor of comic opera in their exchange, which ends with a shriek of “Taxman!” that alludes to the theme of the popular 1966 television series Batman. The awestruck manner in which the Beatles announce the name of this civil service superhero is the song’s true inspiration, a terrific musical joke, and it is answered by an eruption of lead guitar (played by Paul) that knifes into the body of the song like a sinister peal of funhouse laughter. The guitar subsides into a squawking accompaniment to another bullying verse in which John and Paul provide breathy interjections of “A-ahh, Mr. Wilson!” and “A-ahh, Mr. Heath!” cooing the names of the two party leaders like a pair of Profumo-era chorus girls. Then the song merges the certainties of death and taxes in a macabre parting shot, advising even the dead to declare the pennies on their eyes. The extortionary lead guitar sounds again and the music—coins jangling, cup rattling—fades away.

А вот, что говорит автор о следующей песни и пожалуй хватит на сегодня
“Ahhh—look at all the lonely people!” The Beatles’ voices surge into the grousing aftermath of “Taxman” on a bright rush of melody and urgency—their most arresting beginning since “Can’t Buy Me Love.” “Eleanor Rigby” is a neoclassical tour de force, sung to the accompaniment of an eight-piece string ensemble that knits fretfully behind this opening chorus before settling under the verse into a pattern so taut and staccato it sounds like the baroque equivalent of a backbeat. The use of strings in popular music is not called “sweetening” for nothing, but the violins, violas, and cellos in George Martin’s arrangement are grating, insistent, and bleak. Nor are they given much in the way of harmonic material to work with, since the whole song—chorus, verse, and refrain—transpires over two chords, a minor tonic and a major sixth, that are distinguished by a solitary note of difference. Though the movement between them is accomplished with considerable finesse, these two chords exert so little pull on each other that they barely describe a progression at all. They function instead as another of Paul McCartney’s minimalist harmonic metaphors, mirroring, in their similarity and stasis, the characters in the song.
Much was made at the time of the poetic quality of the lyric, the first two verses of which were written by McCartney, the third with Lennon’s help. The critic Karl Miller included a transcription of “Eleanor Rigby” in his 1968 anthology, Writing in England Today. The poet Thom Gunn, writing in The Listener, compared the lyric favorably to an Auden ballad from the 1930s, “Miss Gee,” about another old maid who lives for the church, dreams of the vicar, and dies an anonymous death. In 1967, Allen Ginsberg made a point of playing the song during an audience with Ezra Pound (who was reported to have “smiled lightly” at the end). “I don’t think there’s ever been a better song written,” the lyricist Jerry Leiber would say of “Eleanor Rigby,” and George Melly, hearing it for the first time, felt that “pop had come of age.”
The lyric is both vivid and remarkably concise. The phantom relationship between the lonely spinster and the threadbare priest is evoked with great nuance—with nothing but nuance, really, since, like the two chords that constitute the harmony, their relationship is based on little more than the fact that they’re the only two characters in the song. The verses are haunted by the furtive, ghostly image of the woman, waiting (like some aging Juliet) at a window, “wearing a face” that she’s never let anyone see. Eleanor Rigby is a classic type, familiar from novels and films, but the surreal and colloquial touches in the lyric dispel the sense of cliché. McCartney liked to point out that she was a younger girl named “Daisy Hawkins” in the original version (“a bit like Annabel Lee”), and that the priest was named “Father McCartney,” which was changed to MacKenzie because Paul considered it “a bit of a hang-up for my dad, being in this lonely song.” His account suggests that he wrote the first two verses without knowing how the song would end, and that the lyric became progressively less sentimental with Lennon’s help, until, in the final version, the song’s compassion is tempered by its insistence on holding these sad characters responsible for the quiet desperation of their lives. “Eleanor Rigby” draws on some of the hardness a lapsed Catholic like McCartney can feel for the Church and the vision of life it promotes; there is a chilling hint of callous satisfaction in the description of the priest “wiping the dirt from his hands” at the end.
But the lyric, as ever, sounds even better than it reads. Each section of the song—chorus, verse, and refrain—is written, performed, and recorded so as to present a different form of commentary. There’s a sense of real anguish in the opening chorus, where the melody is fluid and the harmonized voices full. In the verse the focus narrows, and Paul’s solo voice is tinged with resignation. (The movement of the melody under the woman’s name—three half-steps up on “Eleanor,” two whole steps back on “Rigby”—is like the story of her life.) Extreme stereo imaging in this section places the singing on one side, the strings on the other, with an eerie emptiness in between. The song’s refrain (“All the lonely people”) is a thing of somber beauty. Here, Paul’s voice softens as it floods both sides of the track, but the melody is marked by leaps of an octave (“where do they all come from?”) and a tenth (“where do they all belong?”) that bring a new dimension of distance and detachment to the song. More than anything else, it is this hint of ambivalence, signaled by those leaps, that gives “Eleanor Rigby” the unsettling emotional complexity that impressed many listeners as something new to pop. The questions the song poses aren’t rhetorical; they’re unanswerable. They’re the sort of questions people ask when they don’t know what else to say, and by raising them as he does, Paul calls attention to the inadequacy of his own response. In the last eight bars, his mixed feelings are the subject of an extraordinary double-tracked duet in which the urgency of the chorus is played off contrapuntally against the detachment of the refrain. The effect is truly provocative: having already stretched its listeners’ powers of identification by addressing the familiar theme of unrequited love using characters and a context completely divorced from the world of pop romance, the song leaves off with a concise and starkly honest statement about the limits of empathy.

to John Lennon Knows Your Name

Cпасибо, с удовольствием прочел отрывки из книги, автор демонстрирует не только знание музыки, но и прекрасный дар облечь свои чувства и ощущения в яркие и точные образы, донести их до читателя.

Из статьи об Eleanor Rigby - "... sad characters responsible for the quiet desperation of their lives".

Quiet desperation - очень сильный и точный образ, тут занятная картина вырисовывается. Я с ним впервые встретился в стихах Роджера Уотерса к песне Time - "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way", моментально приковывает внимание, очень глубокое суждение, по форме выраженное просто великолепно, это высокая литература. Сам Уотерс говорил, что с опаской ждал реакции публики на эти стихи, так как они как будто вышли из под пера Ивлина Во, который писал скорее для интеллектуалов, нежели для широких читательских масс. Как раз романы Ивлина Во просто пропитаны этим настроением. И, наконец, как выяснилось, это же выражение есть у Генри Торо, американского писателя, философа, он говорит, что людей в своем большинстве живут в состоянии тихого отчаяния. Возврат к героине песни Beatles.

Очень интересно, спасибо большое!!!

Спасибо, еж, за добрые слова и вдумчивое отношение.
Действительно в музыкологическом анализе Джонатана Гульда поражает его способность прочитать самые глубокие контексты, спрятанные в текстах и музыкальной структуре песен, выявить основные контрапункты, определить настроение, определить степень родства с другими музыкальными произведениями прежде всего самих Битлзов,но не только... в книге много говориться о современниках Битлзов, о Бич Бойз, Роллинг Стоунз, проводятся параллели, сопоставления..
Спасибо за то, что Вы привлекли внимание к словам "тихое отчаяние", такое типично анлийское чувство, которое все более становится лейтмотивом для всех нас.

Вот следующая песня с Револьвера и как ее анализирует Джонатан Гульд:
IT’S EASY TO generalize about the difference between the songs by Lennon and those by McCartney on Revolver. Paul’s songs, without exception, address the importance of human relations. John’s songs mainly express a desire to be left alone. The first of these, “I’m Only Sleeping,” is another missive from the back room at Weybridge. “When I wake up early in the morning, lift my head, I’m still yawning,” John sings over a sensuous, swinging accompaniment that moves in dream time, forward through the verses and backward through sinuous interludes of George Harrison’s tape-reversed guitar. “I’m Only Sleeping” can be heard as the testimonial of a devoted Jungian, so hooked into the dreamworld of his unconscious that he can’t bear to leave his bed. It can also be heard as an answer to the question that was posed by Maureen Cleave. How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lived like this.
The musical accompaniment to this reverie is filled with mimetic effects, beginning with the melody, which opens on a drowsy plateau, stirs slightly under the phrase “lift my head,” and then gapes upward a sixth on “I’m still yawning.” The rhythm is dotted with quirky anticipations and retards, including moments when the whole band seems to nod off for an instant and then hastily regain its place. Paul’s bass nudges into the otherwise empty space between the verse and the bridge with the muffled insistence of sounds impinging on sleep; John later fills this same spot with a histrionically unstifled yawn. Best of all is George’s mewing, backward guitar solo, which draws on the capacity of music to suspend the laws of time and motion to simulate the half-coherence of the state between wakefulness and sleep, extending the analogy between dreams and drugs that underlies the song. John himself handles this innuendo in the same way that music-hall comedians handled sexual double entendre—by simply defying his listeners not to take him at his word. “Please don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away,” he pleads in a voice of wistful innocence—the voice of a tired child. “And after all, I’m only sleeping.”

to John Lennon Knows Your Name

Вам спасибо! До сих пор в моем ряду книг о музыке Beatles на первом месте стояла работа Макдональда "Революция в голове", теперь у нее явно будет компания. Еще вспоминается Харуки Мураками, он так же влюбленно пишет о джазе, о любимых пластинках и исполнителях.

I'm Only Sleeping подана блестяще. И сразу приходит на ум срединная вставка Маккартни в A Day in the Life:

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream

Какой контраст и в стихах и в музыке! Полусонное, ленивое, плывущее в дреме тридевятое царство Джона и деятельная, пульсирующая, резко очерченная, бодрящая реальность Пола. Невероятно здорово, как гармонично уживались эти два разных мира в общем творчестве.

Дорогой Еж!
Как раз сегодня прочитал блестящий анализ Джонатана на Day in Life... вот он
AD IT ENDED right there, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band would still have been a remarkable achievement. But the Beatles elected to save the best for last, an idea that went counter to the pop aesthetic, which, whether in fashion, music, or visual art, was more concerned with making a strong impression than with making that impression last. Within the context of the Pepper Show, it is possible to view “A Day in the Life” as an encore. (In that case, it would be the encore that the Beatles never performed when they were playing live.) Yet in many ways the track is antithetical to all that has come before. It is devoid of the satire and sentiment, devoid of period flavor as well. Instead the song exists outside the context of the Pepper Show, in a parallel or alternative reality.

In the outpouring of critical commentary that followed the release of Sgt. Pepper, admirers of the album sought to exalt the Beatles’ accomplishment by comparing it to such high-art antecedents as T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and the song cycles of Schubert, Schumann, and Mahler. Yet the most strikingly similar antecedent to Sgt. Pepper in the realm of high art was a more obscure work, the modernist ballet Parade, a collaboration of Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretto, Pablo Picasso, who designed the costumes and sets, and Erik Satie, whose score Cocteau likened to the sound of “an inspired village band” (and which included parts for typewriters, sirens, gunshots, and the roar of a dynamo). First performed by the Ballet Russe in 1917, Parade takes place at a Sunday fair in Paris, where a traveling theater troupe is preparing to perform inside a tent. In keeping with the traditional practice of itinerant entertainers, the managers of the company seek to draw a crowd by presenting a “parade” of vaudeville-style acts, who perform for free outside the tent. But the crowd that gathers confuses the parade with the performance it is intended to advertise. The frustrated managers resort to cruder and cruder forms of hucksterism to lure people into the tent, but their efforts are in vain. “The chief theme of Parade,” wrote Cocteau’s biographer Francis Steegmuller, is “that any performance seen by an audience is as nothing compared with the invisibles the artists are up to within.” So, too, in “A Day in the Life,” the Beatles presumed to show their real-life audience what lay within. The result is such a powerful and evocative performance that it threatens to turn the entire Pepper show, for all its brilliance, into a prelude, raising the Alice-like possibility that everything that precedes it might be a collection of vivid dreams or fond memories in the mind of the detached, disassociated narrator of the album’s final track.

The scratchy acoustic guitar that starts the song sounds emaciated after the rich palette of instruments and timbres that have filled the album thus far, but it is soon joined by an ascending flourish of piano chords that billows across the track. Then the piano subsides, and the first verse of “A Day in the Life” is sung to the spare strum of the guitar, the pulse of a pair of maracas, and Paul McCartney’s bass, which starts off with a stream of notes but, finding nothing to push against, quickly grows subdued. The voice that floats in behind the instruments is John at his most languid, singing as if in a trance: “I read the news today—oh boy….” Here, too, there is a sense of explicit contrast with the power fulpresence and rich affect that has characterized the singing on all the preceding tracks. This contrast is deepened by the vast amount of echo on the vocal, which creates the impression of an immensely broad depth of field, with the singer at its far end. The melody steps lightly up the scale under the words “I read the news today,” then falls back on the phrase “oh boy,” a corny cliché of enthusiasm that John transforms into a tour de force of deflation.

Though the opening verses of “A Day in the Life” were surely inspired by the death of the Guinness heir Tara Browne, to associate the song with Browne is to confuse the inspiration with the art, for it is only John’s identification with this unfortunate figure that has any bearing on the song. Both were young, rich, and famous, and the laugh that John had to laugh is a laugh of recognition, an involuntary response to glancing through the newspaper and finding a familiar face. In John’s case, of course, this was an everyday occurrence, although the face he most often encountered in this manner was his own.

In the second stanza, Ringo’s tom-toms make a thunderous entrance, adding a counterpoint of percussive violence to the darkening imagery of the song, with its description of a car crash and its macabre play on the drug slang “blow your mind.” The lyric is chillingly matter-of-fact in describing the momentary lapse of attention that caused the accident. And it is chillingly plausible in its account of the witnesses at the scene, whose attention is focused entirely on the question of whether or not the victim was famous—possibly even a lord. Their reaction parallels that of the singer himself: they’re trying to connect the corpse in the wreckage to a name they might recognize while he’s trying to connect the photograph in the newspaper to the face of his friend.

The theme of mediated experience plays a part in every song that Lennon wrote for Sgt. Pepper, but “A Day in the Life” compounds this theme in the third stanza of the verse, with its deflated reference to a film in which the English army has won the war. As with Tara Browne, so with How I Won the War; the point is not the allusion to Lennon’s recent role in Richard Lester’s movie, but the use he makes of it. The implication is that for members of the postwar generation, the stirring story of Britain’s Finest Hour is just another media cliché. Only the singer bothers to pay attention—not out of any compelling interest, but rather out of a sense of curiosity concerning how closely the movie version coincides with the book he has read.

John’s voice ends the verse on high falsetto G. He clings to that note at the start of the refrain, “I’d love to…” before descending a fifth to warble the second half of the line, “…turn you on,” between a pair of adjoining notes. The effect is like the hum of a turbine revving up. The acoustic guitar and drums gradually melt away, leaving a faint pulse of bass and piano, while in some new sonic center, a swell begins to build. On it comes, this new sound, the volume increasing while the strings mirror the waver in John’s voice. Then, after four bars, the pitch lifts off crazily as well. This new sound is emanating from the Beatles’ Clown Nose & Gorilla Paw Orchestra, whose forty members, having been given a low note on which to begin, a high note on which to end, and twenty-four bars over which to complete the journey, are behaving the way any large group of highly trained musicians would behave if they were asked on the spur of the moment to do something that violated every principle of their performance practice except the basic tenet that they should do as they were told. “Don’t try to stay together,” George Martin instructed them. The ascending, accelerating, crescendoing glissando of sound they produce seems to skirt the edge of music and enter the realm of pure sonic sensation; it turns those twenty-four bars into a vertiginous eternity that sweeps away the preexisting musical landmarks, before ending, with electronically enhanced precision, in a sudden blip. What remains are the piano plinks—in a different key, to be sure, but otherwise quite like the plinks from which this eruption arose. An alarm clock rings. The drums sputter to life at twice the tempo of the earlier verse, followed by a voice—Paul’s voice it is, phrasing briskly, without a trace of echo, the opposite in every respect of John’s voice in the verse. He recounts a morning routine of waking up, getting out of bed, combing his hair (a piano fill intrudes over a foreshortened bar of 2/4 time, simulating the expert twists and turns of a teenager’s comb), then heading downstairs for a cup of tea, glancing at the clock, and seeing that he’s late. Caricatured by a series of panting breaths that hark back to “Lovely Rita,” the very concept of “late” seems far removed from the languid, timeless place where “A Day in the Life” began. Here, in its bridge, the song seems to have passed by means of that dizzying instrumental eruption into another dimension. As he grabs his coat and races to catch his bus, the singer is back in the workaday world of unmediated experience, and the use of Paul’s brighter, keener voice to express this shift in time and place is a remarkable touch. But now, cued by the sound of “somebody” speaking, that other voice, John’s voice, returns with an anguished, echoey cry that rises and falls across an eight-bar sequence of chords that search for a key before yielding to five huge notes, voiced in stacked octaves by the entire orchestra, descending E…D-C…D-G, which muscle the music back into G, the original key of the song. All that survives from the middle section is the tempo; “A Day in the Life” is racing at speed as it nears its end. Though he’s phrasing in half-time, John can barely keep up with the band as he delivers his final news bulletin, this one referring to the presence of ten thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, each of which had to be counted, thereby yielding the number of holes it would take to “fill the Albert Hall.” Against chiming C major piano chords, John’s voice goes up like a choirboy’s on the last two notes of the line.

This choice morsel from the Beatles’ ashcan school of lyric-writing inspired no end of speculation on the part of critics and fans. But the ten thousand holes in Lancashire are neither needle marks nor an allusion to Britain’s grisly “Moors Murders” of 1966. They refer instead to potholes (no pun intended) as noted in a column called “Far & Near” that ran in the Daily Mail. It’s not hard to see how John Lennon’s sense of the absurd would have been piqued by the unintended Goonery of an item titled “The Holes in Our Roads,” which read in its entirety:


There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. If Blackburn is typical there are two million holes in Britain’s roads and 300,000 in London.

One can only marvel at the mind that thought to factor the number of potholes into the total population of Blackburn, and then went on to apply the same ratio to the whole of Britain as well. “The Holes in Our Roads” can scarcely be bettered as an example of rationality gone mad, and its incorporation into “A Day in the Life,” by equating this trivia to the previous descriptions of a personal tragedy and a national triumph, is an implicit act of commentary on the earlier verses of the song. But the reference to the Albert Hall is something else again. One of the prime venues of British show business, the Albert Hall was the site of the Beatles’ first London concert in 1963, and by applying the lunatic logic of “The Holes in Our Roads” to this great showplace, “A Day in the Life” revives the metaphor of performance that links the preceding twelve tracks on Sgt. Pepper. The question on which the song and the album ends may be rephrased to ask: How many holes—that is, how many lonely hearts and empty souls—does it take to fill the Albert Hall? Thus does the last line of the last verse reintegrate this astonishing last track into the concept of the album it ends. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an act of exquisite artifice: a recording posing as a live concert, performed by a world-famous group of musicians posing as a once-famous group of musicians. It is the concert that the real-life Beatles could never have given live. This was not only because the complex sounds on the record could never be reproduced onstage, but, more important, because the response the Beatles elicited from their audiences during the three years they toured the world was of such a magnitude as to make it impossible for them or their audience to hear the music they played—an all-but-unprecedented development that effectively placed them into the role of the spectators at their own concerts. In the epilogue that ends Sgt. Pepper, John Lennon’s brilliantly disassociated performance presents us with the disquieting spectacle of the singer as a spectator in his own song, lost in a daze of imagery and information, constructing his world out of whatever it is that happens to pass in front of his eyes.

If the twelve songs that precede “A Day in the Life” may be likened to the dozen or so “turns” that made up an evening of music-hall entertainment, they may also be likened to the “somersets” in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” For each of these carefully conceived tracks is a feat of artistic skill and daring that strikes its own balance between the poles of laughter and longing, satire and sentiment, that form the spectrum of popular art. “A Day in the Life” is literally another story. By breaking out of the theatrical frame, the song (wrote the critic Richard Poirier) “projects a degree of loneliness that cannot be managed within the conventions of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”—nor, for that matter, within the conventions of popular music as they existed in 1967. “A Day in the Life” pushes the metaphor of variety entertainment beyond the stunts of the stolid Hendersons, performed “on solid ground.” This incomparable final track, which is arguably not only the single greatest performance in the Beatles’ canon, but in the history of recorded rock, raises the artistic ante to the level of the celebrated Mr. Kite himself, who performs his daredevil twists and turns in the air above the ring, to a crowd that thrills with fear and excitement at each improbable leap. It is the sound of that crowd that can be heard in the second, crescendoing rush of the orchestra that follows the final verse, rising again from a hum to a gasp to a shout to a roar, fusing at last into a deafening shriek (its similarity to the sound of the crowds at Beatle concerts is surely no accident), a surge of unmediated sensation that combines every form of response an audience has ever felt toward a performer—every shade of love, lust, awe, envy, laughter, suspense, and delight. The onrushing sound of the orchestra at the end of “A Day in the Life” has transcended more than the conventions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band. It is the nightmare res-olution of the Beatles’ show within a show. It is the sound in the ears of the high-wire artist as the ground rushes up from below.
There is a blinding flash of silence, then the stunning impact of a tremendous E major piano chord that hangs in the empty air for a small eternity, slowly fading away, a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all.

Пришлось его разделить на три части, ибо он оказался слишком длинным для поста...

Я тоже всегда считал A Day in Life вместе с The End самым выдающимся и амбициозным в хорошем смысл произведением группы

to John Lennon Knows Youir Name

Спасибо, прочел статью об A Day in the Life с тем же интересом, что и предыдущие. Так много написано об этой великолепной работе, казалось бы, тема исчерпана. Тем не менее, эта статья свидетельствует, что пока найдется человек, умеющий слушать, анализировать и грамотно передавать свои ощущения от музыки литературными образами, находящими отклик у читателя, песня эта будет еще бесконечно долго находить таких людей и будить в них благодарное желание поделиться своими мыслями и чувствами. С ними можно спорить, их можно разделять, отрицать, но когда это сделано талантливо, как у Джонатана Гульда, это всегда интересно и часто приводит к новым открытиям. Что просто здорово.

Дочитал сегодня книгу... много ждал от анализа последнего моего любимого альбома Abbey Road...
THE FIFTEEN-MINUTE SEQUENCE of eight songs (and song fragments) that concludes the second side of Abbey Road was not identified as a medley or a suite on the album cover or the record label. The titles are listed individually, and in the early going, the transition from one song to the next feels no different from that of the preceding tracks. Nor are the themes or the lyrics of the songs that constitute the medley interrelated in any obvious way. As a result, the entire second side of Abbey Road is best heard as a sequence of loosely related songs whose emotional intensity and overall pacing gradually build to a climax as the album nears its end.

The side begins with a second astonishment from George Harrison, the impact of which is only enhanced by the ponderous nature of the track that precedes it at the end of side one. “Here Comes the Sun” is a study in lightness and brightness—two qualities that had rarely been associated with Harrison’s music in the past. (The closest precedent is “If I Needed Someone” on Rubber Soul.) Introduced by a chiming I-IV-V progression on an acoustic guitar, the body of this simple, folk-like tune is embellished with an understated arrangement for synthesizer, wood-winds, and strings that delicately shadows the melody. The three well-written verses, all beginning with the tender phrase “Little darling,” evoke the siege of winter, the thaw of spring, and the warmth of “smiles returning to the faces.” Each resolves in a refrain in which the title line is sung three times in three-part harmony, rounded off by George’s interjection, “And I say…It’s all right,” the phrasing of which sets up an accented pattern of three against four that is echoed over the next two bars by arpeggiated triads on guitar. This pattern is then extended and elaborated further in the song’s release, where cascading lines of “Sun! sun! sun! here it comes!” are sung in triplet rhythm over arpeggiated triads while the meter of the music shifts seamlessly between bars in 2/4, 3/8, 5/8, and 4/4 time. Anchored by Ringo’s somersaulting fills, this compound meter serves as a metaphor for the lyric, with the tripletted accents in 3/8 and 5/8 cutting across the underlying quarter-note pulse of the music like the rays of the sun cutting across the melting ice of winter, generating a tension that builds and then yields on the phrase “here it comes” to the comforting symmetry of 4/4 time. The cumulative effect is one of true release: of coming through a long and arduous experience and emerging whole at the end.



AS THE CHILD of a wealthy, westernized Japanese family, Yoko Ono had been taught the piano in childhood, and she retained the ability to play a number of classical set pieces as an adult. One of these was the Moonlight Sonata (by the noted con artist Ludwig van Beethoven), whose first movement, according to John Lennon, inspired the arpeggiated chords of the ballad “Because.” Because the influence of Yoko’s sensibility on John is apparent in the lyrics as well, this iridescently beautiful song, which was the last complete track the Beatles recorded for Abbey Road, can be heard as her parting gift to the group of “in-laws” with whom she clashed in so many ways.

Whether or not the Beatles were aware at the time they recorded “Because” that it was truly their swan song, their singing on the track, skillfully arranged in three-part harmony by George Martin, represents the most intricate and rhapsodic blend of their voices on record. Set, like the Beethoven sonata, in the key of C-sharp minor, the entire production of words and music, singing and accompaniment, has a classical elegance that verges on formal perfection. So as to focus all of the listeners’ attention on the complex blend and grain of the vocal harmonies, the other aspects of the song are rendered as simply as possible. The arpeggiated lines of the electric harpsichord and electric guitar that voice the chords remain rhythmically static throughout; they are bolstered in the song’s brief release by George Martin’s brass, and later, in the coda, by the recorder-like sound of the Moog. Each of the three verses is introduced by melismatic “Ahhhs” that form a D major triad (sounding a distinctive flatted II chord that figures prominently in the Moonlight Sonata as well) before reverting to the C-sharp-minor tonic. In a format that could serve as the basis of a children’s book, the lyric to each verse consists of a single line, beginning with the word “Because,” in which an aspect of nature (“the world…the wind…the sky”) is converted by means of its description (“is round…is high…is blue”) into an emotion (“it turns me on…blows my mind…makes me cry”). The result is some of the gentlest, most poetically accessible wordplay John Lennon ever wrote. As the first instance of shared lead singing on Abbey Road, “Because” comes as a reminder that, far more than the playing or songwriting on their early records, it was the utterly distinctive blend of the Beatles’ voices that set them apart from the start.

“Because” ends on its flatted II chord, which leaves the harmony hanging and sets up the opening of Paul’s “You Never Give Me Your Money,” the first of the eight songs and song fragments that comprise the concluding, fifteen-minute medley that marked the end of the Beatles’ eight-year career as a recording band. These eight songs were arranged and recorded in five segments—or, to apply the symphonic metaphor, movements—the basic instrumental accompaniment of which was rehearsed and performed live by the Beatles in the studio. The segments were then linked to one another—in some cases by edits at predetermined points of musical transition, in other cases by means of mixing-board “crossfades” in which the end of one track was blended with the start of the next.

The sequence opens with Paul’s most ambitious and affecting song on the entire album, “You Never Give Me Your Money,” which is itself a kind of mini-suite that encapsulates and foreshadows many of the motifs that are played out in the medley as a whole. The song’s four musically distinct sections, set in different keys, are organized by a kind of dream logic and linked by a series of pivot points in the music and lyrics. (The only previous Beatles song to employ this sort of nonrepeating, episodic structure was John’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.”) The track begins quietly with Paul singing alone at the piano, the wistful insistence of his A minor melody ably matched to a lyric whose allusions to “funny papers” and “negotiations” are an epitaph for his clashes with the rest of the group regarding Apple and Allen Klein. Over the course of the first verse, the other Beatles seem to drift into the music—John’s guitar here, Ringo’s cymbals there—until a thumping drum fill rouses the whole band into an eight-bar passage based on a classic boogie-woogie piano riff (backed by half-time drumming reminiscent of “Lady Madonna”), with words and music that seem to be coming from another time and place—a memory, from the sound of it, whose references to “out of college, money spent” and “see no future, pay no rent” are evocative of the Beatles’ lives in Liverpool at the start of their musical careers. In the following section, these dead-end vistas are transformed, as the boogie beat drops out and the phrase “nowhere to go” is recast as a “magic feeling” of freedom and possibility in a chorus of wordless “Ahhhs” that float over another round of the ringing arpeggios on guitar that recur in song after song on Abbey Road. By now Paul’s piano has disappeared from the accompaniment, and it is George’s guitar that steers the band into a driving, Chuck Berry–style riff in A major that forms the stirring finale of the song. “Soon we’ll be away from here,” Paul promises, recounting a scenario of escape-by-limousine whose relevance to the frenzied days of Beatlemania is reinforced by his acknowledgment that “One sweet dream came true today.”The track then fades with a chorus of Beatles repeating the familiar playground “choosing” rhyme, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all good children go to heaven”—a variation of “eeeny meany miney mo” that ends this shadowy recapitulation of the Beatles’ saga on a note of childishness that obscures the rhyme’s traditional function as a way of determining who is in and who is out.
The long fade of “You Never Give Me Your Money” ends in a hush of tape-looped night sounds, peepers, and wind chimes that set the stage for the burbling guitar, muffled cymbals, and thumping rhythm of “Sun King,” which rises like the mist on a lake. As the first of the three contiguous song fragments John Lennon contributed to the medley, “Sun King” is almost a parody of “Because.” It applies the same dreamy tempo, gentle chordal melody, and rapt vocal harmonies to a lyric describing the arrival of an Apollonian figure whose mere presence leaves “everybody” glowing with laughter and happiness. Since the effect of this Apollonian figure is precisely the same as that of the Beatles on their fans, the song, while merely a fragment, revives the theme of the charismatic trickster that John expressed so mordantly in “I Am the Walrus.” For when the Sun King finally begins to speak, he does so in a language that no one can understand: a blend of pidgin Italian and Spanish in which random words like “paparazzi,” “mi amore,” and “corazon” are strung together in a stream of mellifluous yet utterly meaningless nonsense.

After the phrase “cake and eat it carousel,” the pretense of “Sun King” is punctured by a funky little drum fill that sets up the rigorous soul groove of a second Lennon fragment about a storybook miser (“sleeps in the park, shaves in the dark”) named “Mean Mr. Mustard,” whose chief form of recreation consists of accompanying his shop-girl sister Pam to public appearances by the Queen, where he “always shouts out something obscene.” “Such a dirty old man,” John repeats as the band careens into a 3/4 passage that carries a distant echo of the dance of Henry the Horse, only to be brought up short by the intrusion (in stop time) of a trio of spiky guitar chords and the onset of a pounding double-time rhythm from the drums that shifts the focus back onto sister Pam, whose sobriquet “Polythene” suggests some unusual recreational interests of her own. “Well you should see Polythene Pam,” John sings in a cackling Scouse accent, “She’s so good-looking but she looks like a man.” He goes on to describe a jackbooted girl with a passion for plastic who’s a real killer when she’s dressed to the hilt. Though the song was written in India as part of the same fictional litter that yielded Bungalow Bill and Sexy Sadie, “Polythene Pam” sounds like something the Beatles might have written during their days on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. John finishes off his sketch of this fetishistic temptress with a string of sardonic “yeah, yeah, yeahs” that make Paul’s quotation of “She Loves You” at the end of “All You Need Is Love” sound heartfelt by comparison, whereupon Ringo and George take off on an exhilarating instrumental jag whose pistonlike tom-toms and graceful, arching guitar lines segue via a smooth descent from the key of E to A major (and a shout of “Look out!” from John) into Paul’s contribution to the trio of dubious character sketches that form the up-tempo midsection of the medley, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” which derives some of its churning half-time feel and narrative flavor from the Rolling Stones’ recent B-side, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Various autobiographical explanations have been offered for the song’s haphazardly obscure lyric, but the first verse, in which Paul introduces an unnamed female housebreaker who “sucks her thumb and wonders by the banks of her own lagoon,” sounds in the context of the Beatles like an undisguised jab at Yoko Ono, who had recently commissioned the construction of a man-made lake at her home in Tittenhurst Park. “Didn’t anybody tell her?” Paul asks in the bridge, against the ringing phrases of George’s guitar. “Didn’t anybody see?”

“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” eventually comes to a full stop on an A major chord, which reverts to a somber A minor for the opening of “Golden Slumbers.” This exceedingly tender, melancholy number was based on a lullaby by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker that Paul found in a piano songbook and set to a tune of his own. It was recorded during John Lennon’s absence from the Abbey Road sessions in July, when it was combined with another McCartney fragment called “Carry That Weight” and a thematic reprise of “You Never Give Me Your Money”—thereby enabling McCartney and George Martin to present the “symphonic” concept of the medley as a fait accompli to Lennon upon his return. “Once there was a way to get back homeward,” Paul muses quietly in the opening bars, his voice supported by a gently rocking figure on piano and Martin’s swelling arrangement for strings. “Sleep pretty darling, do not cry,” he offers, “And I will sing a lullaby.” His promise is answered by a stop-start drum fill that propels the song with unexpected force into the text of Dekker’s poem—“Golden slumbers fill your eyes / Smiles awake you when you rise”—set to a melody in C major whose stentorian delivery and straining harmony (an F9 chord sounds behind the words “slumbers” and “awake”) defy all expectations of what is meant by the term “lullaby.” Then the music subsides and Paul repeats the homeward-looking verse, which is followed again by Ringo’s fill. Only this time, instead of the promised lullaby, Paul, George, and Ringo join in a rousing chant of “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight / Carry that weight a long time!” Singing in unison (with Ringo’s voice predominating) and sounding less like the harmonized angels of “Because” and “Sun King” than like the crowd at a soccer match, they repeat this dour prophecy until a chorus of horns lets loose with the opening strains (in A minor) of “You Never Give Me Your Money.” The melodic allusion is followed by a new verse of the song itself, which Paul concludes with the line “And in the middle of the celebrations, I break down.” A downbeat of truly symphonic proportions from the brass (on a pivotal G7 chord) then plunges the music back into the chorus of “Carry That Weight,” which is played and sung with immense power, accompanied this time by arpeggiated chords on guitar. While the bass descends the scale from C to B to A, the broken chords ascend from C to G to A, their accented tonic notes subdividing the stately 4/4 rhythm into groups of three, as the musical motifs of the medley seem to be sounding together in preparation for a grand finale that feels as if it is just moments away.

George Martin had hoped to enlist the Beatles in making an album that would go beyond Sgt. Pepper in its thematic structure and unified form. But Martin was a musician in the traditional sense, and he conceived of surpassing the Beatles’ acknowledged masterpiece as an essentially musical challenge. As a group of popular artists par excellence, however, the Beatles understood intuitively—and in the case of John Lennon, gratefully—that surpassing Sgt. Pepper was no longer within the realm of possibility for them, because Sgt. Pepper, like Revolver, Rubber Soul, and the seven other Beatles albums that preceded it, was the work of a group of collaborative singers and songwriters that had subsequently ceased to exist. No one understood this better than Paul McCartney, whose earnest, energetic, and at times overbearing efforts to cajole his bandmates into soldiering on after the triumph of Sgt. Pepper and the tragedy of Brian Epstein’s death were based on his conviction that nothing the Beatles might ever achieve as individuals could possibly compare with what they had accomplished—and might still accomplish—as a group. The enthusiasm with which McCartney embraced Martin’s suggestion that they try to surpass Sgt. Pepper was not based on his belief that they would succeed; rather it was based on his stubborn hope that by trying once again to outdo themselves, the Beatles might rekindle the musical camaraderie and collaborative genius that had placed them in a league of their own. To that end, Paul reserved all of his best material for the concluding medley (unlike John, who contributed nothing but odds and ends). And he used all of his considerable powers of persuasion and organization to enlist the other Beatles’ participation in this project as well.

Ultimately, however, Paul’s loyalty to the Beatles was stronger than his loyalty to George Martin or anyone else, and so, rather than end the album with the sort of grand “symphonic” gesture that Martin had in mind, he came up with the last of the Beatles’ great surprises, a final, brilliant twist that was, in its own way, closer to the inspired spirit of Sgt. Pepper than anything else on Abbey Road. Just as the booming chorus and ringing arpeggios of “Carry That Weight” combine to create the expectation that the album is coming to a close, the music seems to jump right out of its skin: the tempo surging, the orchestra fleeing, the harmony changing direction in a series of wrenching guitar chords that leap first from A to D, then from B to E, in both cases landing hard on the beat, and then again from A to D, this time in a pair of jarringly syncopated accents that bring the band up short. Ringo leaps into the breach with a rackety two-bar fill and the sequence of chords repeats over a brisk, Sgt. Pepper–style backbeat. “Oh yeah!” Paul shrieks. “All right! …Are you going to be in my dreams…tonight?”

In the blink of an eye, the musical setting has shifted from the orchestral uplift of strings and brass to the rawest variety of rock ’n’ roll. Instead of a grand symphonic ending, McCartney had chosen—at the last possible moment—to bring the Beatles and their listeners back to the place where it all began: before the marathon recording sessions, before the stadium concerts and provincial package tours, before the grueling one-nighters in dance halls and cellar dives—to the simple setting of John, Paul, and George, sawing away on their three guitars, as they had done in hotel rooms, dressing rooms, and before that in bedrooms, from the time George joined the Quarry Men eleven years before. The one concession to the whole incredible saga that had elapsed between then and now was the presence of Ringo Starr, the steady, solid drummer the Beatles had always lacked during their years of musical apprenticeship in Liverpool and Hamburg. In recognition of this, the next eight bars are given over to Ringo for his only drum solo on record, a barrage of brawny tom-tom figures (each of them followed by a moment in which he seems to pause for the approval of the others) underlain by the time-keeping pulse of his bass drum. Then a crescendo of steady eighth-notes orchestrates the reentry of the bass and rhythm guitar, vamping in flatted-seventh chords on an elementary tonic-subdominant cadence in A major. “Love you” the Beatles chant, until the bare alternation of A7 and D7 chords is joined by the four-note pickup of a searing lead guitar and the start of an instrumental round-robin composed of nine two-bar solo breaks in which Paul, George, and John (in that order) trade licks, with each guitarist playing off or building on his predecessor’s effort. Recorded live in the studio, these rotating two-bar solos are like little musical character sketches, in which each of the Beatles assumes his customary role: Paul the initiator, George the embellisher, John holding out for the last word. (At the same time, the solos are uncredited, and between the speed of the transitions and the similarities in the timbre and content of the different parts, it is by no means clear how many guitarists are playing, much less the identity of the player at any given point.) Paul opens with a characteristically fluid and melodically balanced line that sounds a high A before snaking an octave down the scale; George responds by soaring to an even higher D and sustaining it for half a bar before descending in syncopated pairs of sixteenth notes; John then picks up on the pattern of George’s sixteenths with a series of choppy thirds that hammer relentlessly on the second and flatted seventh degrees of the scale. The second time through, Paul answers John’s bluesy flatted sevenths with bluesy minor thirds and then proceeds to echo George’s earlier line, spiraling up to that same high D; George responds with some minor thirds of his own, while mimicking the choppy rhythm of John’s part; John then drops down two octaves to unleash a growling single-note line. On his final two-bar solo, Paul plays almost nothing but minor thirds and flatted sevenths in a herky-jerky rhythm that ends with a sudden plunge to a low A; George then reaches for the stars with a steeply ascending line that is pitched an octave above any notes heard so far; and John finishes with a string of insistent and heavily distorted fourths, phrased in triplets, that drag behind the beat and grate against the background harmony.

Finally, as abruptly as this old-fashioned rave-up began, it ends, with the band stopping short, leaving only the faint eighth-note pulse of a piano sounding tinny A major chords. “And in the end…” Paul sings, his voice rising. A pair of lightning-quick guitar licks sound a sixteenth note apart, as John and George join in a three-part harmony on the shallow arc of melody with which the Beatles deliver the line that would serve as their epitaph: “The love you take…is equal to the love you make.” The inverted chords behind their voices enact a slow chromatic descent across four bars of 3/8 meter to arrive in the key of C major on the phrase “the love you make.” This long-awaited resolution (which was prefigured by the opening of the medley in the key of A minor) is first softened by the reentry of George Martin’s strings, then deepened by the return of the drums. As George Harrison’s lead guitar plays an extended arpeggio that rises two octaves up the scale, the singers add a final curtain of “Ahhs” as the harmony lifts from C to D to E flat to F. Ringo’s tom-toms provide a final nudging emphasis, and with a gentle plagal cadence, the song, the medley, and the album come to rest on a common C major chord.

Впрочем, я совершенно отвлекся от темы Револьвера... это оффтопик