(EMI 1979 / expanded version: bootleg [Purple Chick])
A curious but valuable EMI concoction issued near the end of the '70s when Beatles interest was waning in the UK, The Songs Lennon & McCartney Gave Away actually served a worthwhile purpose for fans, finally gathering up the many songs that the two composers contributed to other artists at the height of Beatlemania, when their stated intent was to eventually retire and become Brill Building-style writers full time. Almost thirty years later, Purple Chick expanded the conceit to include some songs George wrote (hence the title change on the bootleg to The Songs the Beatles Gave Away) plus some dubious items and outtakes, and in a couple of cases, hit versions that the original compilers weren't able to include.
It's all very much a mixed bag. Whereas Brian Wilson's moonlighting as a writer and producer for other artists produced some of his loveliest work, John and Paul did not typically hoard good compositions and keep them out of the Beatles' roster; there's no real reason to suspect they would. Still, for a time almost anything to which the Beatles had the slightest connection would make the charts, and several songs here are legitimate hits.
It's unclear why Ringo's "I'm the Greatest," which John wrote, is included; the others wrote songs for Ringo's solo career lots of times but only that one shows up. After that, the record sticks pretty strictly to the concept; and a great many of the remaining nineteen songs on the original LP are dreadful. You have never heard of "One and One Is Two" by the Strangers, and there are good reasons; however, there seems to be very little separating that song from the several included cuts by fellow Brian Epstein stable talents Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (they were in The T.A.M.I. Show), several of which were major hits and are probably familiar to many listeners through oldies radio or a parent or grandparent. But Kramer's songs and a great many of the others here all share a very sanitized, overly affable British Invasion style -- piggybacking on the Beatles' cute confidence and none of their actual muscle, substance or sensuality -- that flattens the songs into an exhausting sameness. So much so that you're kind of relieved when something actively terrible like Peter and Gordon's "Nobody I Know" shows up.
The bulk of the songs appear to be McCartney compositions; and they all share a nightclub-singer sensibility that you can sense in a lot of Paul's early material that got nixed before the Beatles began properly recording, covers aside. All three Lennon-McCartney songs that were played at the Decca audition find a home here. The Applejacks (who also unfortunately offered the only full-band take on Ray Davies' brilliant, unissued "I Go to Sleep") are comically boisterous on "Like Dreamers Do," but Cilla Black uncovers a surprising depth in her elaborate recording of "Love of the Loved," which really plays up the strengths in that song's slightly mysterious, eccentric chords and melody. Both the Fourmost and Gerry and the Pacemakers (only on the PC version) vomit all over John's "Hello Little Girl" with insufferable shorthand Moptop-isms, making you long for the peace and reflection in John Lennon's vocal from the Decca tape.
Speaking overall, with the exception of Black's "Love of the Loved," her reasonably sweet trifle "Step Inside Love," and Jackie Lomax's "Sour Milk Sea," these performances generally suffer greatly whenever there is a Beatles performance of the song in question somewhere. The Fourmost's "I'm in Love" fares slightly better than the Dakotas' hideous version of "Bad to Me," captured so beautifully on a demo by John in 1963 -- once again, he taps into vulnerabilities that the proteges can't begin to understand. P.J. Proby's "That Means a Lot" sounds like a bad joke, as if someone used the Stax studio to record a song-poem. Mary Hopkin's "Goodbye" is totally overwhelmed by a florid arrangement, in contrast to Paul's tremendously touching demo. Even the Badfinger classic "Come and Get It" sounds fey compared to Paul's Abbey Road demo. Worst of all may be the Kramer dumbing down of "I'll Be on My Way," best heard in the Beatles' full-band BBC performance.
And yet the songs here that the Beatles never performed don't come off well because, well, they obviously weren't good enough to get trotted out in the studio and that's what they're doing here. The record never gets much more respectable than the eerie Carlos Mendes number "Penina," well sung and harmonically interesting, or the throwback instrumentals "Thingumybob" and "Catcall," clearly homages to Jim McCartney's past as a big band jazz musician. And while Peter and Gordon were a soul-crushingly dreadful act on the whole, it would take a real unreachable bastard not to at least mildly enjoy the immortally schlocky #1 hit "World Without Love," seemingly a proto-incel anthem with laughably melodramatic lyrics and vocals, the one that made John lose his shit laughing because of Paul's ridiculous line "please lock me away." But it's catchy and whiny and basically became a titan of a song because it's so hard to avoid singing along to it.
I'm still most intrigued, however, by the moments when these records are downright perplexing. John and Paul wrote "Tip of My Tongue" as teenagers, years before they were even making much money as viable local musiciains; and not only is it very much the work of adolescent boys, the version here by Tommy Quickly is so slapdash and incompetent it comes across as some sort of put-on, but at least it's a hilarious one. It's very punk rock.
Things get weirder in the PC expansion: "Badge" by Cream is here because George wrote it with Eric Clapton, which seems like mission creep. Steve Miller's "My Dark Hour" doesn't seem to have been written by any Beatle but has some sort of sentimental importance because of its proximity with Apple's fall from grace; Paul helped out with the album while feeling low. But a lot of the trouble here is justified, oddly, by Jackie Lomax's "Sour Milk Sea," which actually features three of the four Beatles plus Eric Clapton and Nicky Hopkins on a credible George rock & roll number superior to at least one of his songs that made it to the White Album. This is about as close as we get to a "non-canon" Beatles song... and it sounds terrific, with Lomax's voice evocatively wrapping around George's eccentric notes and the entire band bashing out with rootsy abandon.
PC closes out with a few "alternate versions"; in at least two cases, these were the better-known performances of these songs in the U.S. Taken all together, the record is an essential curio in the Beatles' library, one that functions as a deep-dive into an under-investigated part of their career that at one time was considered extremely important, especially by John and Paul. With a couple of exceptions, though, you won't listen to these more than once or twice; the Beatles weren't Tin Pan Alley and most of these songs do a fine job of taking away the luster of having Beatles associations. Then again, maybe Gerry and the Pacemaker's artificially bouncy hyperactivity will win you over; it just seems to me that these mostly are leftovers, and reveal little except that the Beatles brought a lot more to their work than just charisma and talent as composers. You have to believe in it all and, except for Lomax and maybe Black, none of these people seem to.
No comments:
Post a Comment