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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. 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:

5. “Hey Jude”

4. “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End”

3. “She’s Leaving Home”

2. “I Am The Walrus”

LISTEN HERE  

“It’s one of those that has enough little biddies going to keep you interested even a hundred years later.” – John Lennon, describing “I Am The Walrus” on The Beatles Anthology.

What can I possibly add to that to properly do justice to “I Am The Walrus”? That really says it all. You didn’t think I’d be fool enough to try to analyze this famously indecipherable song. Many have tried to parse those lyrics, and more power to ‘em. But as for me, I’ve always chosen to bask in the wonderful inscrutability of this colossal track from 1967, and leave the analysis alone.

After all, wasn’t the whole point of this song to confound easy interpretation? Lennon had heard about the fact that certain schools were studying Beatles’ lyrics as if they were poetry. John decided to pick up that gauntlet and construct a narrative that makes Ulysses look like a nursery rhyme. As if he was saying, let’s see what they can make of this.

Hence you get crazy word-association phrases like “pornographic priestess” and “elementary penguin,” and nonsensical non-sequiturs like “Man you shoulda seen ‘em kicking Edgar Allan Poe.” It doesn’t matter that you can’t actually “get a tan from standing in the English rain;” in this surreal context, it all somehow makes sense.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Lennon took inspiration for the title from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus And The Carpenter,” a poem in which the titular characters entice a bunch of oysters to go on a moonlight stroll and then feast on them. There’s not much of a moral to the story, nor does there always have to be. “I Am The Walrus” is a testament to that.

Contrasting all the verbal whimsy is a musical track that generates high drama from a strange commingling of instruments and an odd structure. The swirling strings play off Ringo’s insatiable beat, which breaks down now and again, both for John’s “I’m crying” interlude and a bizarre bridge that saunters slowly forward until rejoining the main rhythm.

Best of all is that coda, which, instead of doing the normal thing and slowly dying down, insists on soaring higher and higher amidst crazy chanted vocals and disembodied voices everywhere. It’s an absolutely exhilarating piece of work, both frenzied and light-hearted but still indescribably compelling.

Of course, here I am celebrating a song that poo-poohs the endless dissection of Beatles’ songs, when I’ve been doing exactly that in this list for the past few months. I think the point here is that these songs work both ways. As I’ve grown older, I’ve delved deeper into the meanings and looked at how certain musical ideas were used to express those meanings. But, like everyone else, there was once a first time for me hearing these songs, and my first experience with the majority of them came became before I was even in college, probably about half before I was even in my teens. The songs hit me on a basic, unthinking level that needed no further inspection to figure out why. That I’ve chosen, over the years and in this list, to really burrow into the songs does not in any way lessen the guttural impact they still have on me when they pop up on my stereo.

I think that “I Am The Walrus” is the perfect embodiment of that phenomenon more than any other Beatles song. I’m not sure that I’ll ever put my finger on why I love it so, or why it nearly made the very top of this personal list. All I’m sure about is that when it comes on, I don’t want it to end. When it does end, I want to hear it again immediately. If I tried to get any deeper than that, I might miss out on all the “little biddies” that make the song such a joy. No analysis necessary.

1. A Day In The Life

LISTEN HERE  

I received Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from my parents as a 9th birthday present, in 1981. I had annoyed the whole family by constantly nagging them to put the Greatest Hits 1962-66 album that we owned on the turntable (which I wasn’t allowed to touch), and so they bought me Sgt. Pepper’s on that long-lost method of conveying music, the 8-track tape.

I didn’t care at the time about the annoying program switches on the machine, which sounded like a toaster burping, nor was I aware that the songs were way out of order from their intended sequence. All that mattered was that I could play The Beatles all by myself and get totally absorbed in this fascinating music while adding to the repertoire of Fab 4 songs that I knew word-for-word.

Even with the jumbled order, “A Day In The Life” was still at the end, where it was always supposed to be. I put my dad’s headphones on, which threatened to tip me over, and listened to it over and over, absorbing every nook and cranny of the recording until I could play it in my head from start to finish when I had to be away from the stereo.

“A Day In The Life,” to me, is the quintessence of what The Beatles are all about. On that song they took the seemingly mundane ordinariness of everyday life and showed it in a different light, and suddenly the view changed. Suddenly the drear of existence seemed flush with possibilities, even if those possibilities were only accessible via the corridors of one’s own mind. While the lyrics drolly looked at the limits of reality, the music dared to suggest those limits were illusory and easily shattered.

Let’s take it from the top, shall we? As the crowds cheer at the end of the “Sgt. Pepper’s” reprise, the gentle acoustic strumming of John Lennon is heard. And his very first line can’t hide his lack of enthusiasm for the story he’s about to tell: “I read the news today oh boy.” The world-weary sarcasm is impossible to miss, even with John’s voice at its most ethereal. He then proceeds to tell an odd tale about a man who’s “made the grade,” which would seem to be a positive thing, at least until it’s revealed that he’s apparently been killed in a car accident.

Or has he? The car-accident reading is backed by Lennon’s later interviews in which he claimed to be referencing the death of a young, moneyed friend of the Fab 4 a few months before “A Day In The Life” was recorded. But in the song, John sounds like somebody who keeps changing his story in an attempt to keep the listener’s interest. The line “Well I just had to laugh” doesn’t seem like the proper response to a tragedy, unless the harsh truth of the situation inspired some typical Lennon gallows humor. And as for “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn’t notice that the lights had changed,” that sounds like an impatient fellow honking his horn at the car in front of him, oblivious that the traffic light was now red. The whole verse plays out like a dream, and dreams will play a heavy role throughout the song.

The second verse takes place in an entirely different scene with no connection to the first, again a dreamlike non-sequitur. Here Lennon is watching a war movie that sounds suspiciously like How I Won The War, the film Lennon had just completed with Beatles’ movie director Richard Lester. The crowd of people suddenly has no interest and departs, which is perhaps John’s winking reference at the film’s critical or commercial shortcomings.

Up to now, the music has been gentle and controlled, distinguished by Lennon’s acoustic strumming, Paul McCartney’s bass, and Ringo Starr’s tom-tom-heavy drums. But when Lennon switches to falsetto for the line “I’d love to turn you on,” the music, as if on cue, breaks out of the stately restraint and begins to come alive. This is not your run-of-the-mill orchestral crescendo. It sounds like the instruments are racing each other in a feverish effort to get to the necessary chord first. This brilliant flourish, conceived by McCartney, is a marvel of shambolic grandeur that seems to mirror the entirety of the human race rushing to find a meaning to their existence. While we may have admired the pretty opening verses, for the first time in the song we are awake and alive.

Paul takes over in the next section, a bouncy piano-driven jaunt depicting a typically harried weekday morning. Macca was inspired by his school days, but the section works just as well as a reflection of the average working man or woman’s frantic race to start their day. Listen to the way Paul describes every little task as a grind or a mishap: “Fell out of bed.” “Dragged a comb across my head.” “Found my way downstairs.” “Looking up, I noticed I was late.” Nothing is easy on this morning, but the buoyant rhythm propels him, and us, along to get through it all.

Once arriving, Paul has a smoke (you can decide for yourself what kind) and we’re back in a dream, once again at the expense of the drudgery of routine. Lennon’s voice floats though the heavy horns as if being buffeted about by them. At times, he seems in danger of being out there too long, so distant does he seem. Only the orchestra can drag him back for the final verse.

Now Lennon is at the newspaper again, but this time the happy beat from Paul’s middle section is along for the ride. The absurdity of his final verse emphasizes his theme that the banality of the daily grind can drive you mad, as he relates a true story about an excess of potholes in the town of Blackburn. This last item in this litany of the strange but true, that they, whoever they are that cares for such a trivial item, can now ascertain the amount of potholes to fit into the Albert Hall, is so meaningless as to be farcical. He seems to be saying that, if that’s the best reality has to offer me, I’d rather let my mind wander into another reverie.

And so he does, with the crescendo rising again into the stratosphere, taking the listener along for the ride. Only this time the spell is broken by that unforgettable piano chord, thundering away all the useless detritus of this particular day, of this particular life, in awe-inspiring fashion. Finally, after striving against the surly bonds, The Beatles, through their prodigious talent and boundless imagination, achieve transcendence.

“A Day In The Life” is a groundbreaking piece of work that shattered any pre-existing boundaries for what rock music could be. It is also the ultimate Lennon/McCartney collaboration, the song in which their disparate talents were so in synch that they seemed to be finishing each other’s musical sentences. And it wins nostalgia points as well, because it is arguably the peak in their career, the point to which all their joyous rock ‘n’ roll from the early days ascended and from which circumstance, pressure, and personal rancor caused them to fall.

But, to me, the author of this humble list, “A Day In The Life” is the #1 Beatles song because it is the epitome of the notion that all their finest music espouses, the notion that music can uplift us from dark times like nothing else can. As a kid who lost his Dad just a year after I received that birthday gift from him, you can see why that notion would have extra-special appeal to me.

This list has been my way of saying thank you to The Beatles for giving me that uplift for all the years since, and for all the times they turned …me …on.

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