Maybe It's Not That

All my mates are talking about the new re-release of the White Album, with hours of outtakes and extra tracks. It’s available on Spotify, so I can throw it on any time I like.  Coming up the stairs into the high school gym this morning, I decide to engage and soon the familiar airplane landing of “Back in the USSR” is filling my mind with memories of being ten years old and jumping off a stand in our basement, air-guitaring along with the song.

The first cuts are just remasters of the originals.  I kept straining to hear anything different on this ever-so-intimate terrain.  Someone had said they had a new appreciation for Ringo’s drum work but I couldn’t discern anything especially other.  Pulling weights to strain the muscles beneath my stomach’s perennial paunch I got lost, as one does in “Yer Blues.”  It didn’t sound any different from the way it always sounds.  But it always sounds devastating and I let myself listen to John’s witty, wrenching, suicidal word play, screaming out for help.  He, the one who is on top of the world, who can seemingly do anything and is desired by everyone, who is telling us all, he wants to end it.

Riding home I did finally enjoy something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.  Certainly the bravest, most indecipherable journey of the two album set, “Revolution Number Nine” was also something I listened to over and over as a ten year old.  I wasn’t jumping off make believe stages listening to the song.  Rather, I, as John intended, wondered what was going on in this post-modern, post-canticle, post Rock n’ Roll gesture.  There is one section of the song right around minute seven, where all goes quiet and John says: ‘Take this brother, may it serve you well.” And a series of piano chords follow, that sound a bit like the opening piano of “My Guitar Gently Weeps” and seems for a moment that some sort of rocking cohesion would follow.  I absolutely wanted that as a ten-year-old, but it disappears quickly like a familiar shape dissolves in shifting clouds.  Indeed Yoko’s voice that follows the collapse is clear on the matter: “Maybe, it’s not that.”

And with the earbuds up in my head, pedaling along, in the day light now, I could make out far more clearly than I ever had before the consistent tracks of spoken word, by John and by George.  I had always thought that they were mixed in somewhat randomly.  But on this listen it appears that somewhere around minute one, their tracks are relatively consistent and provide a warm anchoring.  John’s voice in particular, is so deep, like an echoing baritone stitching warm, protean nonsense together like a carpet under the cacophony.  George, the partner in lysergic crime is also far more consistently represented than I’d otherwise remembered warming the track with Beatle friendship, smirks and wry humor beyond the obvious freedom John enjoyed, to experiment wildly with Yoko. 

I was home before I could dig into all the other outtake tracks.  It’ looks like there are four times as many more songs to explore and hear anew and remember being ten years old with.

Tuesday 11/20/18