The White "Albums"
Sounds Good!
Every couple of years I go on a serious Beatles jag – reading, watching, listening – and of course this current one was kicked off well and truly by Peter Jackson’s extraordinary documentary.
It occurred to me – only recently in fact – that The Beatles are so huge, the music is so much a part of society, it’s, well, here, it’s there and indeed everywhere – so much so that it doesn’t matter if you’re a fan or not. It certainly doesn’t matter whether you play the albums…
Whereas, for me at least, The Rolling Stones or The Who, or even The Kinks, they all but disappear if I’m not listening to the albums. I love them all. In various ways. But I need to be right in there with the music to know and remember that. That’s true of Sonic Youth and The Beastie Boys, Drive-By Truckers, The Roots and Little Feat too.
But The Beatles is different. The Beatles just permeates. You move in and through the music of The Beatles as you please – and if you never played their music again it would still have full meaning, full recognition, full context. And you’d still be aware of almost everything they did. It is that influential. It is that important. Whether you’re a fan, whether you think they’re overrated, it just doesn’t matter. Nor does it mean anything.
So, um, anyway, Jackson’s Get Back has me reading Beatles books I hadn’t yet got to and the albums are getting a go again – Let it Be in particular. I’m listening to podcasts. I’m just Beatles-Nerding Out.
Now, a couple of years ago when I was on a Beatles trip I was talking with Steve Gunn – excuse the namedrop, but I think his music is worthy.
He showed me this little Beatles game he had going with some friends. His friends were people like Kurt Vile and Phoebe Bridgers. They were people in bands like The War on Drugs and Yo La Tengo. But he assured me that they were just people after all. And that any people can play this game. What you do – is you take The Beatles – aka ‘The White Album’ and you take all 30 songs of this double album and you re-select it in the order you much prefer based on picking your favourite song first. Your second favourite song second, and so on. You don’t get to add or subtract any other songs or different versions – but you re-order the album based on favourite songs. You change the flow. Best song first. Worst song last. You have to choose where all the others go by pitting them against each other.
It’s interesting too – seeing where people put a ‘song’ like Revolution 9. It can be telling.
You’ll see here – and be able to listen to – my version:
It’s a fun album to do this with, since it’s the classic example of a big-serve double album that might have benefited from being trimmed; that also has The Beatles very much working to their own voices, more than they ever had. They are four individual songwriters and players. And the album has some clangers and of course some absolute bangers.
Now, another game you can play – is to reduce it to a single album. This is often talked about with double-records and again maybe The White Album was the first example of this: People say it would have made a killer single record.
Earlier this week a friend of mine, we’ll call him Samuel, since you’ll see that’s his name on the playlist, and besides I’ve always just called him that…and many other people have too…anyway, “Samuel” sent me his Whiter Album. You’ll see it here – and be able to listen to it too.
This is his single-disc offering of The Beatles’ White Album. Pretty good eh?
I like it a lot.
As a joke, I grabbed the leftover songs and lined them up in the worst order I could imagine, and sent it back to him – calling it the Shiter Album.
Still good of course. Hey, it’s The Beatles!
And an interesting experience listening to only these songs – and in this order.
But it reminded me that my 10yo son, Oscar, had made his own Shortversion of The White Album:
A different line-up again.
So, much as I enjoyed listening to Sam’s single-disc version – and could pretty much agree with it – I decided I too should make a Single White Album. Again, I’ve ordered it highlighting absolute favourites near the top, but also trying to shape it to flow like an album.
The White Album is fascinating to me for many reasons – not least of all because I’m more a Paul Guy than a John Guy but it’s hard to pick too many of Paul’s songs over John’s songs here. John is killing it. But the heroin fall – which we see somewhat in the Jackson doco – is going to rob him of his songwriting for a time. And Paul will step up to do the heavy lifting.
You couldn’t say that about the White Album though, Paul played some nice stuff on his own, made some beautiful-sounding songs, but they’re not as complete, and hardly ever as interesting as Lennon’s stuff here.
And of course the 50th Anniversary version released a couple of years ago now gives us even more – alternate takes, some other songs that didn’t make the cut, that were tried out and ended up on other records…and George exploded with songs around this time. Many of them would have to wait until he really, truly started making solo records.
Anyway, I wanted to share some White Albums with you today. This is silly deep-nerd stuff, sure. But it’s also a bit of fun isn’t it? So if you have your own version of The White Album – a Whiter Album or Whitest Album – or even a Shiter or Shitest Album you’d like to share then please do so in the comments…
Or just take these silly games and share them with your friends on your social media pages or in your real lives…
And, as always, I’ve got more music for you – if you have read this far and really don’t want to play anything Beatles-y then I have a long playlist for you today. It’s the usual 20 tracks, but it just turned out that it had a lot of longer songs on it. It’s a journey. And I hope you dig it.
Here, then is Volume 42 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!
Have a great weekend. We’re mid-December, pretty much. Good grief. Look after yourselves and your friends, family, loved ones…downhill now to the end of a strange year on this earth.
Happy weekend!