Adam's Music Reviews IX - Beatles Special

Yes, it is that crossing!

On November 2nd 2023 the Beatles will release what is somewhat emphatically being called their final song. Following 17 number one singles in the sixties, the three remaining Beatles added instrumental and vocal parts to two Lennon demos in the 1990s, 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love.' 'Free as a Bird' became their fifth number two single while 'Real Love' reached number four (surprisingly the same position as the double A side of 'Something' and 'Come Together'). The proposed third track, 'Now and Then,' was abandoned, until now. Will it become the band's eighteenth number one? Who knows. But to mark the occasion I'm going to review my favourite works by the band as a series of awards. You'll see what I mean...

Best Lennon & McCartney Song - A Day In The Life (1967)

I remember listening to this as a teenager on a Walkman in my grandparents' bedroom and thinking 'This is scary sounding. I'm never taking drugs!' This, the closing track to 'Sgt. Pepper,' sees John Lennon pitying those he views as dull and unenlightened, before an orchestral riot leads to McCartney's jaunty bridge, a little like the hurricane taking Dorothy to the Land of Oz. Lennon's lugubriousness has the final say before the the orchestral chaos leads to one of the longest notes in rock music, hammered out on five pianos simultaneously if I remember rightly. Even the Beatles couldn't really top this for ingenuity. It is one of three songs I can think of where Lennon and McCartney clearly wrote contrasting sections, the others being 'We Can Work it Out' (1965) and 'I've Got a Feeling' (1970). OK, if you insist, 'Free As A Bird' (1995) too.

Best Harrison Song – While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)

This is George Harrison's finest song in my opinion, although I cannot claim to having heard all of his solo work. This 'White Album' track includes Eric Clapton as a guest for the weeping guitar solo to augment George's lyrics expressing the frustration that any thinking person will have about humanity's behaviour. This seems to be a message that is more urgent than ever today, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that George was channelling his frustration about his bandmates at this time as much as anything.

Best Early Album - Please Please Me (1963)

Rewinding right to the beginning of the Fab Four's career, the boys exploded into our hearts and minds with the famous count-in of 'I Saw Her Standing There.' I particularly like the Lennon-McCartney song 'Misery,' but the album's highlights for me are not 'Twist And Shout' or the title track, but two covers where John Lennon's vocal drips with pathos, these being 'Anna (Go To Him)' and 'Baby It's You.' Debut albums don't get much better than this. The band's first single, 'Love Me Do' is here too.

Best Mid-Period Album - Rubber Soul (1965)

The distorted photo on the cover perhaps hints at the mind-bending direction the band would eventually take, but on this album, folk is as big an influence as anything, 'Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)' being the obvious example. 'The Word' is a favourite of mine with its early attempt at a funk rhythm, Paul dabbles with French in 'Michelle,' Ringo gets a bit of country music out of his system on 'What Goes On' and the fuzzed guitar tone on 'Think For Yourself' is a new sound for the group. However, the crown goes to John Lennon on this album for the wonderfully thoughtful track, 'In My Life.' George Martin's speeded up piano solo is to be credited too.

Best Late Album - The Beatles (White Album) (1968)

Not 'Sgt. Pepper' – that's controversial! On this double album, the foursome did whatever they felt like with no constraints of commercialism. Styles vary from folk to Charleston to 'country and western' to heavy metal, and 'Revolution 9' simulates the effect of waking up during a series of bizarre dreams, before Ringo lulls us back to sleep with 'Good Night.' George as ever got to write and sing one track per LP side while Ringo got to sing one track per LP. Here, he presents his first foray into songwriting with 'Don't Pass Me By.' Meanwhile, it's Paul who rocks out the most, with 'Back in the USSR' and the cacophonous 'Helter Skelter.' However, the high point of the whole album for me is the segue from 'The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill' into 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps.' Segues are a lost art. The world need more segues!

Best Lennon Album – Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Not 'Imagine' – more controversy, huh? Before we got the 'John as a saint' persona (which he never encouraged), we had this – a raging diatribe against all society's norms. This would have been something of a shock for those who remembered the Beatles as lovable clowns from their early years. 'Working Class Hero' is a classic, although I would advise a '12' certificate if you have kids. Was this the first F-word on a successful album? And more to the point, did the world end? 'Look at Me' is a very nice introspective acoustic track, and in case anybody was hoping for a continuation of the Beatles' career, John laments 'The dream is over' on the penultimate track. After some activism, John would settle into family life before his tragic demise, and comparing the relaxed feel of his final songs with this album is like comparing chalk and cheese. There's a companion 'Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band' album too. Try it if you dare.

Best McCartney Album – McCartney (1970)

Sorry (again), it's not the Wings album, 'Band On The Run.' Bizarrely, Paul's solo debut wasn't appreciated at the time of its release in spite of the fact that Paul plays every instrument on the album, pretty much inventing the genre of lo-fi DIY production. The songs are extremely melodic and seem to reflect the fact that Paul was dealing with depression following the break up of the Beatles, seeking solace in a quiet life with his first wife, Linda. The romantic vibes were in perfect sync with my own life at the time I discovered this album when courting my now-estranged wife; 'Man We Was Lonely,' 'That Would Be Something' and 'Every Night' encapsulate the feel perfectly. The most well known song here is probably 'Maybe I'm Amazed,' a rousing piano ballad that was later released as a live single by Wings. The album contains a few Beatles leftovers like 'Teddy Boy' and 'Junk' and personally I think the critics of the time needed to open their ears a bit.

Extracted from '2021: A Musical Odyssey' by Adam Colton. The 'expanded 2023 edition is cheap as chips on Amazon Kindle and under a tenner on paperback, while the original edition is now reduced in price.

Thoughts on the Lyrics of Limerance

"I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America" 

- Frank Zappa

It will soon be February 14th. For a long time I used to refer to this as Singles Awareness Day, and I even wrote a song about the way that single people can feel overlooked or portrayed negatively, as though only one lifestyle is valued by Western society. You only have to turn on the TV to see adverts, programmes and films that all tap into the 'one size fits all' philosophy. The reason for this is perhaps obvious in evolutionary terms. A lifestyle that generally results in the propagation of human population is going to be seen as 'desirable,' although with the number of humans increasing exponentially out of pace with resources on a finite planet, it may be time for society to enter a new paradigm.

Then I had a period where February 14th didn't really bother me at all. My girlfriend (who later became my wife) and I exchanged cards but we weren't always together on this particular day. We had plenty of chances to catch up all year round after all. That said, it was always nice to go out for a meal, although we didn't actually need an excuse to do this.

Now, things have changed again and my thoughts on the 45th day of each year are perhaps different once more. I now think of this as the Festival of Limerence, because if you think about it, it's not really for couples who are already together and secure, but more about declaring interest in the early days of uncertainty - cards signed with a question mark and all that mystery and intrigue. I feel that I should apologise at this point for one incident around thirty years ago when I was at school where I was embarrassed to receive a card from a girl I wasn't attracted to, tearing the card up, which in hindsight was horrible, but as a young teenager who had yet to experience such emotions I guess I had yet to fully develop skills of empathy. It was poetic justice that I didn't receive a card from anybody for many years after this!

It recently struck me that much of what society thinks of as romance is really 'limerence,' a term coined by Dorothy Tennov in 1979 who postulated the kind of intense romantic infatuation that is often considered 'romantic' is a very different beast to familial love and other uses of the other L-word.

Let's look at some love songs that might just be limerence songs.

The first ditty that springs to mind is Robert Palmer's 1986 hit, 'Addicted to Love,' which pretty much compares the romantic experience to that of drug use; 'Your mind is not your own.' One of my favourite songwriters is Bob Dylan and albums such as 'Time out of Mind' (1997) are littered with expressions of unconsummated frustration. He sings about being 'sick of love' and 'in the thick of it,' and exclaims 'You have no idea what you do to me' and [it feels] 'like the universe has swallowed me whole.' If you rewind to the 1976 track 'Isis,' he sings 'What drives me to you is what drives me insane.'

Leonard Cohen was another master of seemingly limerent lyrics, in songs like 'There Ain't No Cure For Love' (1988), once again equating the experience with that of being ill, and in the 1971 song 'Avalanche' he sings 'I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul.'

Often lyrics simply glory in the sheer misery of it, as though there is some apparent virtue in feeling like a sack of effluent! However, one song that really doesn't glorify the feeling is Barry Ryan's 1968 classic 'Eloise,' with lyrics like 'And only time will tell, and take away this lonely hell.' Then there's the Temptations' 1971 hit 'Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me),' which leads the listener to believe that the vocalist is blissfully happy before declaring that it's all just fantasy. Another song that smacks of limerence is John Lennon's 'Abbey Road' composition for the Beatles, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' where he repeats the line 'I want you so bad, it's driving me mad' throughout the song and the band attempts to represent the heaviness of the feeling musically with the endlessly circling coda.

Taking all of this to its logical conclusion, could we infer that a greater percentage of creative and artistic people experience limerence, rather than the ordinary more controlled form of romantic feelings? Or to turn it around, is it this profoundly unpleasant and obsessive experience that prompts the person to release some of the tension creatively?

Food for thought. So what actually is it?

The fascinating book 'Living with Limerence' by the mysteriously named 'Doctor L,' postulates that three factors must be present for limerence to occur. These are an initial sign of hope followed by sufficient ongoing fuel for this hope to survive and a level of uncertainty. I am of the opinion that much of our romantic fiction is entirely based around this concept. It's not a love story if a couple merely meet, start dating, mutually agree upon a relationship and end up getting married (or whatever substitutes as the ultimate fulfilment in modern societies). There has to be a certain level of impossibility. For example, one or both partners could be in another relationship, or there could be geographical or socio-economic barriers ('Romeo and Juliet,' anyone?). If the limerence is expressed and the result is positive it could be passed off as romantic comedy, with all the frustrations seeming comedic in the light of the happy ending. If the limerence does not produce the desired effect the story will be more tragic, as well as being the source for a million love songs (Barry Manilow / Take That pun intended).

The point about uncertainty is particularly interesting. Professor Robert Sapolsky in one of his many fascinating YouTube lectures demonstrates how a perceived 50% chance of an action resulting in success produces the maximum amount of dopamine in anticipation of the desired result. Both a 25% chance and a 75% chance result in less dopamine. I would postulate that with relationships the brain views the 'yes / no' nature of a potential partner as a 50/50 chance even if it is not. Thus, the dopamine goes through the roof and one can be stuck in a state of limerence.

It is also postulated that the experience is a kind of sticking plaster over deeper issues, such as lack of fulfilment, being the brain's way of creating its own excitement when things are not quite right at a more profound level. For example, it is commonly assumed that John Lennon's extreme emotions for Yoko Ono were a result of losing his mother at a young age.

Returning to art and literature, it does seem that a huge proportion of such creativity stems from this experience that the majority will fortunately never have, in spite of idealising its themes. I guess it is some consolation to turn such unpleasantness into something that is, on the whole, appreciated. Take the novel 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for example, where a man simply pines away his whole life for a woman who he eventually pairs up with in old age. In truth, that's not romantic, that's just disturbing, and thankfully our brains agree. Generally periods of limerence have a shelf-life that can be measured in months and at most a few years. And the more generally experienced non-limerent form of passion is not so different either in its lack of longevity. And this is down to our old friend, evolution.

If a couple could be completely obsessed with one another for life, you can see how any potential children might be neglected. The parents would be too wrapped up in one another to fully concentrate on the needs of the child. However, literature and films rarely depict the period after the wedding when passions die down, but die down they must, because that's how it was for our ancestors. In other words, the children that survived had the parents that cooled off after the usual time it takes to produce offspring, and thus these traits were passed on.

Returning to limerence, it is perhaps a perfect example of something called ambiguous grief. When a person dies, the death is final and once grief has been experienced those left behind can recover, but a limerent has to deal with an ambiguity where they can both imagine a life alone and a life where the potential partner becomes an actual partner. And one thing human brains can't stand is duality. And with all that dopamine sloshing around (among other hormonal changes), it is a chemical addiction just like heroin or cigarettes! It seems that Robert Palmer wasn't so far off the mark after all.

[Adam Colton is the author of numerous psychological fiction books as well as '2021: A Musical Odyssey,' which reviews classic rock albums.]

Desert Island Albums - 2018 [Adam's Music Reviews #2]

A few years ago I wrote a kind of 'Desert Island Discs' for this blog, listing ten of my all time favourite albums. As I was recently nominated on Facebook to do exactly this, I thought I'd post an updated list. I say updated; as you'll see the centre of gravity seems to be about 1971! The first three albums and descriptions are the same as in my 2013 list, being perennial favourites, whilst those further down the list are works that I've come to appreciate more since I last blogged about this. In keeping with the BBC Radio 4 'Desert Island Discs' tradition, I have made sure one classical album is included, replacing Beethoven's 3rd Symphony (from last time) with a bit of Gershwin. The musical musings and humour continue in '2021: A Musical Odyssey' - now available in digital and paperback formats.

Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). 'Money' is about the only song on this album which receives regular airplay (usually edited because of the rude word), but the album spent 6 consecutive years on the UK album chart. All human life is explained in the lyrics. 'Time' is particularly apt. If I had to pick a second PF album it would be a tough choice between 'The Wall' and the totally bonkers 'Ummagumma'.
[High point for me: the segue from Time into Breathe (Reprise)]

The Beatles – White Album (1968). The sequel to Magical Mystery Tour (which in turn followed Sgt Pepper). On this album, the Beatles did whatever they felt like with no constraints towards commercialism. Styles vary from folk to Charleston to country and western to heavy metal, and 'Revolution 9' simulates the effect of waking up during a series of bizarre dreams, before Ringo lulls us back to sleep with 'Good Night'.
[High point for me: the segue from '...Bungalow Bill' into 'While my Guitar Gently Weeps' (George's finest)]

Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home (1965). Lyrically I think this is Dylan's masterpiece. You've got 'Mr Tambourine Man' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', but for me the highlight is the verbal deluge of 'It's alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding'. This album is half folk and half rock – both sides of Mr Zimmerman's oeuvre. For a second Dylan choice, 1996's 'Time Out of Mind' comes close, but so do about ten others!

Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers (1971). The Stones emerged from their brief dabble with psychedelia with what I regard to be their three finest albums; Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed and this one. Opening with Brown Sugar, which amazingly still gets radio airplay in these more politically correct times, the classics keep on coming. Wild Horses heralded further 70s ballads, but it is the extended jam of 'Can You Hear Me Knocking?' which really highlights the band's musicality. The final four tracks show that even at their most decadent, the Stones could be amazingly mellow. The album's conclusion, 'Moonlight Mile,' is a little-known classic that deserves regular airplay. Great for sitting round a campfire!

Led Zeppelin III – (1970). Whilst 'IV' had the all-time classic (Stairway to Heaven) and the world's most sampled drumbeat (When the Levee Breaks), 'III' is an album of two halves. The first half opens with the archetypal Zeppelin of Immigrant Song and includes the 7-minute blues epic 'Since I've been Loving You' as well as 'Out on the Tiles' (similar to 'Good Times, Bad Times' from the first album), but it is the relaxed folky second half that surprises, particularly Tangerine and That's The Way. Great for sitting round a camp-... oh I've done that one!

David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In younger days, I was a bigger fan of this album's predecessor, Hunky Dory, for it's eclecticism and Rick Wakeman's piano playing. However, for pure escapism, 'Ziggy' is a masterpiece. The first three tracks run together like a trilogy, as do the final three. The filling is equally good. Bowie starts out theatrically with Five Years and Mick Ronson's soaring guitar solos excel throughout. It's a bold statement, but this album provides a rare glimpse of something beyond the mundane.

Travis – Good Feeling (1997). I saw Travis perform as a warm-up band before they were famous and dismissed them as 'Oasis wannabes.' I was wrong. 'The Man Who...' gets all the plaudits, but this was the group's raw debut. Like so many on this list, it's an album of two halves. 'All I Want to do is Rock' is a simple, yet rousing opener and 'Tied to the Nineties' sums up how we may have felt at the time about what now seems to have been a 'classic' decade. The love songs come thick and fast at the end. Travis have never seemed so impassioned since, although once they unplugged the guitars and found a formula, they would achieve stardom.

The Kinks – Muswell Hillbillies (1971). The Kinks' 'Arthur' album of 1969 has never been far from my CD player, but just a couple of years later came this little-known classic. The songs are something of a catalogue of disorders, dealing with alcoholism, anorexia and anxiety (and that's just the 'A's), but the subjects are always dealt with humorously, and Ray Davies even recommends a good old fashioned cure for all – 'have a cup of tea!' A folky feel pervades and sadly the pub that appears on the album cover is now in a state of disrepair. The opening track sums it up; it starts quietly, when the drums kick in they never sounded better and then it builds to Ray's deranged shout of 'I'm a 20th century man but I don't wanna be here.' Brilliant!

Photo: Myself outside the Archway Tavern which features on the album cover.

John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band (1970). Before we got the 'John as a saint' persona (which he never courted), we had this – a raging diatribe against all society's norms. This would have been something as a shock for those who remember the Beatles as lovable clowns from their early years. Working Class Hero is a classic, although I would advise a '12' certificate if you have kids. 'Look at Me' is a very nice introspective acoustic track, and in case anybody was hoping for a continuation of the Beatles career, John laments 'The dream is over' on the penultimate track. After some activism, John would settle into family life before his tragic demise, and comparing the relaxed feel of his final songs with this album is like comparing chalk and cheese.

George Gershwin – Piano Concerto in F / Rhapsody in Blue / An American in Paris (1924-1928). The version I have features Daniel Blumenthal on piano and may have even been the first classical album I appreciated. 'Piano concerto in F' always returns fatalistically to the same dramatic orchestral chord, with variations that include the bluesy second movement and a high-speed summary of all that went before (the third movement). An American in Paris includes the orchestrated sound of car horns before mellowing into its more famous romantic theme, and Rhapsody in Blue has an opening that is perhaps second only to 'Beethoven's fifth' when it comes to fame, but entertains with around twenty minutes of piano dominated themes.