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To most Beatles fans, choosing between the songs of the Fab 4 is a bit like choosing between children. But, on the JamsBio exclusive, Playing The Beatles Backward, one intrepid fan dares to rank the original songs of The Beatles and give his reasons why in a worst-to-first countdown. Check back each day for the next five songs on the list, prepare to hit the message boards to defend your favorites, and follow the countdown all the way to Number 1.

The complete list to date.

The Last Five:

169. “For You Blue”

168. “Don’t Pass Me By”

167. “Doctor Robert”

166. “And I Love Her”

165. “The Word”

164. “You Like Me Too Much”

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My, my, we think pretty highly ourselves, don’t we, George? Here we have a song in which Mr. Harrison practically taunts his girl to leave him, knowing full well that it would never happen. (He is a Beatle, for Pete’s sake.) He also exhibits some stalker tendencies when he admits that if she does indeed try to leave, he’d track her down. These are not the kind of warm-and-fuzzy sentiments that race up the pop charts.

The song is also a victim of a bit of fussiness as far as the arrangement is concerned. While making the Help! soundtrack album, The Beatles began to take their first tentative steps away from their usual guitar-bass-drums set-up and experiment with instrumental flourishes. Keyboards are featured prominently on this song, with John chipping in on electric and Paul and George Martin doing a kind of dueling piano thing throughout.

While this type of sound expansion would become de rigueur later on and become one of their hallmarks, on Help!, the results were hit and miss. I’m not sure that you can say here that the keyboards add very much to the finished product.

Harrison wouldn’t really hit his stride as a composer for about another year or so. In songs like this, he seems to be trying to match the Lennon-McCartney hitmaking style, but he always lacked the pair’s facility with killer hooks. It was just a matter of time before he carved out his own songwriting niche and churned out songs that would rival the others in terms of quality, if not quantity.

163. “Maggie Mae”

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So we hit a bit of a gray area with this song. It technically was not written by The Beatles, as it is a traditional Liverpool folk ballad dating back to the 1800’s. Fitting right in with the anything-goes spirit of Let It Be, this tiny snippet of the song, played during their endless rehearsals, was pasted onto the finished album.

But, if you check the credits on the actual Let It Be record, you’ll see the songwriter listed as “Trad. Arr. Lennon-McCartney-Harrison-Starkey.” And the traditional folk ballad is “Maggie May,” spelled like the similarly titled but completely different Rod Stewart hit. By changing the final “y” in the name to “e,” The Beatles could get around come copyright issues.

It can also be debated how much “arranging” was actually done on the song, since the group had been playing it practically since they were formed and probably never put much thought into it on the day it was recorded, since it was just a way to warm up for more important matters. And McCartney mustn’t have thought much of it anyway, since he left it off of the Let It Be…Naked rerelease he spearheaded a few years back.

All of this hoo-hah for a song that’s barely 40 seconds long and features Lennon singing in a nearly indecipherable Liverpudlian brogue. It was just a lark, so we’ll leave it on the list and move on.

162. “Tell Me What You See”

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This lightweight McCartney shuffle doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it does have its charms. Alas, the lyrics aren’t chief among them, as Paul stretches them to the breaking point in an attempt to fit the rhyme and meter. (The line “I’ll make bright your day” is a prime example; you can almost hear E.B. White in his grave pursing his lips in disapproval.)

What it does have going for it are inventive instrumental touches that give the song some life that it might not have had in a more basic style. Exotic percussion sneaks around at the edges to complement Ringo’s nifty little stop-and-start beat. And the piano parts are effective here as well. Throw in some nice harmonies adding some zip to a typically solid melody from Paul, and you have a decent little filler.

We mentioned two songs ago on the list about the haphazard results of The Beatles experimentation on Help!. The stuff that failed on “You Like Me Too Much,” which might be the catchier song of the two when stripped down, works well to lift “Tell Me What You See.” The band was still feeling this process out, but it would pay big dividends down the road.

So feel free to overlook the obviousness of the lyrics. (Who else is she going to see, Paul? You’re standing right in front of her.) Instead, bounce your head along to the catchy beat knowing that songs like this one played a small but instrumental role on the way to the masterpieces to come.

161. “Thank You Girl”

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You can tell that this is one of the Beatles’ earliest numbers because of the presence of harmonica, which John Lennon apparently had welded to his lip at the end of 1962 and then surgically removed in 1964. It was an attempt at an early single but instead ended up as the B-side to “From Me To You.”

Lennon and McCartney clearly had ulterior motives here, as they later admitted in interviews that the song was a shout-out to all their female fans. The boys knew that every single Beatle-loving female in England would hear the “Girl” in the title and think that their idols were singing directly to them. Commence swooning.

The harmonies on this song stand out. I like the way that John and Paul sing the same notes in the first line of each verse before Paul soars up above John in the second line. It’s a nifty little trick that highlights how well their two voices meshed, an underrated facet of the group.

This is also an example of the two songwriters working together to write a song, as they did often in those first years. I always have a soft spot for those collaborative efforts, because you can hear the camaraderie between the two. Just visualize John and Paul, the greatest rock and roll songwriting team ever, sitting in a room with their guitars, calling out lines to one another and toying with the melody. If you do, even a little trifle like “Thank You Girl” sounds extremely poignant.

160. “I’ll Cry Instead”

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Many of the songs that were written for A Hard Day’s Night that didn’t make the final cut for the actual motion picture differed somewhat from the typical Lennon/McCartney fare of that period, whether in tone, sound or lyrical content. “I’ll Cry Instead” is one example.

At first listen it seems like a rushed country-style throwaway, over and done with in about 1:45 or so and forgotten just as quickly. Maybe Lennon wanted it that way, because the lyrics provided a glimpse into his mindset at the time that he seemed reluctant to provide.

After the first verse sets up the song as a run-of-the-mill brokenhearted lament, the second begins to shed some interesting light on the songwriter’s situation. “I got a chip on my shoulder that’s bigger than my feet/I can’t talk to people that I meet.” Suddenly this sounds less like the lament of a generic romantic wannabe and more like the very specific domain of one John Lennon, a rock star with the world at his feet yet unable to communicate his daily distress.

More of the same insecurity and anguish come through in the bridge: “I get shy when they start to stare/I’m gonna hide myself away.” Sadly, in the last verse he pulls back, relying on false bravado and shutting out any further speculation.

It’s too bad that Lennon wasn’t quite ready to expose himself in a more accessible fashion, choosing to mask these feelings in a song that would recede on the album behind smash hits like the title cut and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” “I’ll Cry Instead” represents a missed opportunity: a truly revealing self-portrait reduced to paint-by-numbers.

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