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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:

84. “Drive My Car”

83. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)”

82. “Wait”

81. “She’s A Woman”

80. “I’m Only Sleeping”

79. “You’re Going To Lose That Girl”

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Listen, buddy, take my advice here. Start treating your girl with the dignity and respect that she deserves, because there’s another guy who’s got his eyes on her. And not only does he sound pretty darned determined, but he’s also John Lennon. So he’s got that going for him as well.

Located on Help!, “You’re Going To Lose That Girl” finds the group in gang mode, working in concert in an attempt to emancipate a mistreated girl from her lout of a boyfriend. John is in the lead, not only boasting of taking the girl away but telling the sap exactly how he’s going to do it. And, in case he wasn’t heard the first time, Paul and George are there to double up his confident statements in thrilling harmony. Finally, there’s Ringo, who, if all else fails, will distract the goon with his maniacal bongo-playing.

“You’re Going To Lose That Girl” is pure fun, rushing by at such a rapid pace you almost don’t notice that John seems less interested in getting the girl than in spiting the guy (“I’ll make a point of taking her away from you”). It’s more a matter of principle than of attraction.

Those girl-group-influenced backing vocals combined with Starr’s bohemian percussion make for a heady mix, one that might have started to wear thin had the song been protracted any longer. But as it is, it gets out in the nick of time. You get the feeling that the girl in the song got out too, leaving that poor sucker lamenting the fact that he took her for granted in plain sight of a Beatle.

78. “Oh! Darling”

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Paul McCartney indulges his adoration of Fats Domino and Elvis Presley on this Abbey Road track. The vocals come perilously close to overdoing it (maybe one too many “Woos”), but Paul just keeps his toes on the right side of that fine line, producing a really great vocal.

The histrionics turn out to be OK because they fit the nature of the song quite well. One can imagine Macca in full lover-man mode on a stage, falling to his knees as he sings those imploring lyrics. He apparently battled in the studio to get just the right feel from his voice as he sought a rough and raw tone appropriate to the music.

The directness of the lyrics also works here. The important thing is the passion of this message to “Darling,” not the content of it. It all plays against the 50’s-style arrangement, with Paul doing double duty with rumbling piano chords a la Domino. George’s arpeggio guitar lead also adds to that classic vibe.

That first side of Abbey Road sometimes gets forgotten in favor of the memorable medleys on Side B. But “Oh! Darling” earns the exclamation point in its title and provides a reason for Beatles fans to re-examine that overshadowed portion of their swan song.

77. “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window”

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Let’s try to follow the rambling narrative of this Abbey Road song, which was recorded as a two-fer with “Polythene Pam.” As far as I can glean, you’ve got the tale of a very busy exotic dancer who squandered her childhood wealth and now lives near a swamp. That is, of course, when she’s not breaking into the homes of ex-policemen-turned-working-slobs who have the uncanny ability to hold phone conversations with the personified days of the week.

On second thought, maybe it’s best not to follow down the labyrinthine path of “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” a song on which Paul realized that sometimes it’s better to come up with lyrics that sound great without worrying what kind of sense they all make. The right combination of words and phrases will make sense in spite of themselves, and such is the case here.

It helps, of course, to hang those words and phrases on a predictably intoxicating McCartney melody. And it also helps to add dollops of lush backing vocals throughout, mix it with Ringo’s always-ingeniously varied drumming, and sprinkle in a bit of George Harrison on the bass. Yes, you read that right, the bass, and George proves himself to be quite the funky one with his rhythmic lines popping out from the mix now and again.

The way the song explodes out of “Polythene Pam’s” frenzied finish really gives heft to the argument that by joining all of those fragmentary songs on Side 2 of Abbey Road, The Beatles made them greater than the sum of their parts. But “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” can stand just fine on its own, lyrical logic be damned.

76. “It’s All Too Much”

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Too much turns out to be just enough on this underrated offering from George Harrison, relegated as it was to the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. George throws everything at us but the WC sink, and it somehow all coheres into a statement about an incandescent love between two people.

Of course, George adds some cosmic musings as well, relating his belief that the details of life are unimportant as long as a common love unifies us all. It’s also a gas to hear him, in the middle of the instrumental freak-out and all the lyrics that evoke astral planes and infinite lives, worrying about getting home in time for tea. How very British of him.

Musically, this thing is one wild affair. You’ve got a cacophonous din at the bottom, caused by the squalling feedback from the start of the song and Paul’s droning bass. But above it all there are bursts of color, from the warm organ chords to those trumpets majestically soaring above it all. The extended fade-out is just pure celebration, with Ringo walloping on some unearthly percussion while the rest of the band joyfully chants “too much” over and over.

There’s a lot going on, so much so that it takes over six minutes to cram it all in. But, at its core, “It’s All Too Much” is a love song to the girl with “long blonde hair” and “eyes of blue.” If you guessed Pattie Boyd, you win the prize. And if you’ve ever felt a love so powerful that it overwhelms you, then you’ll groove to this song.

75. “P.S. I Love You”

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Call me a sentimentalist, call me old-fashioned, but I’m a sucker for a letter song. I won’t bore you with my rantings about the evils of e-mail and my overall abhorrence of other such dehumanizing technological advances. I’ll just tell you about “P.S. I Love You” and then go churn some butter.

One of the very first songs ever put to tape by the group (at least of the ones that actually then made it onto a record), this ballad of McCartney’s is a simple romantic epistle to a love who’s far away. You can already hear some of Paul’s trademark ability to perfectly entwine poetic meter and melody, embellished here by the clever tactic of having John and George chime in with harmony only at certain points of each line.

The rhymes are simple and the instrumentation is basic (that’s session drummer Andy White on drums, although Ringo chips in on maracas), but so what. Paul’s heartfelt vocal wins the day. So call me anything you must, but I’m all for “P.S. I Love You.” Even if I have to listen to it on one of those new-fangled, highfalutin Compact Disc doohickeys, dagnabit.