Can't I just be obvious for once?
Yes just about everyone loves the Beatles, but it's easy to take them for granted. The brilliant Get Back documentary was a necessary reminder of their greatness and how their songs should not be reduced to mere musical wallpaper.
In that vein, I was talking with a friend about the Beatles recently, and we both started gushing about "Paperback Writer." I had first heard the song as an eleven-year old when I got my first Beatles album, The Beatles 20 Greatest Hits, on cassette for Christmas. It's not the best compilation even by the standards of 80s Beatles comps, mostly because by hitting the biggest hits it omits a lot of psychedelic stuff. I didn't hear that stuff until much later.
However, "Paperback Writer" gave me a taste with its phased background vocals. Back in '66 the Beatles laid down several gauntlets on Revolver, but before they dropped that bomb in August, "Paperback Writer" backed with "Rain" (their best non-album B-side by a country mile) made a bold declaration. "Rain" gets really strange with some parts played backwards while "Paperback Writer" serves up the hooks.
Those hooks allowed the Beatles to sneak something much more interesting than "I want to hold your hand" love sentiments into the Top 40. Hearing it on that Beatles comp I was fascinated by the song's narrative. It's just a guy begging a publisher to take on his book. He seems kind of desperate to escape the obvious drudgery of his daily life. It's a strange slice of life image that bands not as big as the Beatles would have been allowed to get on the radio.
Beyond the lyrics, the song rocks harder than anything the Beatles had recorded up to that point. It's almost as if they heard all the great garage punk bands in America playing a harder version of the British Beat originated by the Fab Four and decided to show them how it REALLY ought to be done. The guitar riff just cuts like a buzzsaw. The song moves fast, clocking in at only two minutes and 18 seconds but it's so intense you don't even notice it. On top of all that, McCartney's bass is placed up front. He plays complex lines untethered from the main riff, freeing his instrument from its usual background role. It's a revolution in the use of bass in rock and roll years ahead of its time yet easy to miss because he never overwhelms the song.
It's a song I've heard performed on their last tour, and those performances made their need to retreat to the studio pretty clear. The music was getting too complex to be played on a stage where they couldn't really hear each other. People like to mark that transition with "Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane' but I do it with "Paperback Writer/Rain."
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