White Album and acid burn out

[Daniel S.]

Is the White Album the Beatles acid casualty album? Schizophrenic in nature, is this the burn out album with John, Paul, George & Ringo having exhausted psychedelia? Personally, except for John Lennon, I don't think the Beatles went as far over the edge as you could go with acid like Skip Spence or Brian Wilson. But is this there Smiley Smile, Oar, etc. ?

[sugarandspice]

Hell no there are very rarely any acid causalites in records, I gotta say that is a cop out for some  artists who put out a merdaty record..Man in no way shape or form have I ever heard anyone say that that album is an acid causality, it very barely even grazes an acid laced album... It is a great fodaing record.   I think that there are a few songs on there that shouldnt be there to make it flow better, but merda it is a great great album. I could live with someone sayin that Trout Mask Replica, acid causlty, or maybe a red crayola album... but not the white album... i

xoxo
suga

[sugarandspice]

I gotta say man George also has some really killer pysch tunes.... Its all too much... can you say spirtaul exsperience? And you cant ever burn out on good pysch never impossible... I enlisted in the pysch rock army years ago and I dont ever see myself getting burnt out and I have rarely if ever come across a burnt out pysch album... I can tell you I have been burnt out on Darkside of The Moon about as much as I have on hearing ppl say "its soooo pyschedelic"

xoxoxo
suga

I dunno if that made anysense but it made sense to me..................

[Chance]

Yeah, I think it was less drugs and more of the personal chaos that gave the album it's unusual feel. John and Yoko messing with heroin couldn't have been a helpful ingredient, though. McCartney has said that he was uncomfortable seeing the imagery turn to things like "needing a fix" and "me and my monkey." But you also had the breakup of John's marraige tossed into the stew, Paul's breakup with Jane, George emerging as a great songwriter but not being given an adequate outlet, the insanity of Apple, the marathon feel of the sessions as they dragged on from May to November...

I love "It's All Too Much." Have you heard the bootlegged version, it goes on for a minute and a half after the commercial mix fades out.

[sugarandspice]

oh yeah I love that bootleg, I just happen to have it on a driving mix dont ask me why...

Yeah I will addmit that the herion didnt work for john lennon as well it does for say Sly (and the family stone...)

suga

[Daniel S.]

Hate to sound lame, but where is "It's All Too Much" from?

[sugarandspice]

Now dont quote me on this because I have been wrong before.... but I am pretty sure it is Yellow Submarine... I know my beatles records man, but sometimes it gets really hazy in the ol grape

xoxoxo
suga

[sugarandspice]

Now dont quote me on this because I have been wrong before.... but I am pretty sure it is Yellow Submarine... I know my beatles records man, but sometimes it gets really hazy in the ol grape

xoxoxo
suga

[Boxer Monkey]

I thought the booted "It's All Too Much" was 10 minutes or so.

[Chance]

It's around eight minutes.

[cabinessence]

The drug burn out content is John's, the musical burn out is chiefly Paul's. No clear 'casualties', however, just some shrapnel wounds along the way from excess drugs and gurus and tiring relationships.

Happiness is a Warm Gun is the only explicit (as mud) 'reference' or commentary on drugtaking or creeping psychosis therefrom. I thought heroin was the drug of the punch line, or maybe it was just an NRA poster stealing and perverting the peacenik Charles Schulz tag-line of the time that inspired the song, as Lennon claimed. But there's more to it than just that in any case, a surreal logic joining the terms: forget the warm puppy as what happiness is and substitute the Peanuts-patented 'security blanket' that Linus defined happiness by...as a starter. There's a score of John interviews of the day and sometime beyond where John uses that very term to describe his neurotic self's comforting  'transitional' objects (in psychoanalytic parlance a thing to hold and cuddle as transition between a mother's breast rudely ripped away too soon and standing on your own, independent, real adult love to follow,  no recourse to teddy bear props making you feel whole.) Lennon's blankets included first and foremost his piano (so he said), but also his bed, and his favorite old 45s scattered in arm's reach around it, played over and over,  his drugs, and sometimes his band and mates when he ventured that far away from home.

That's constitutional to him. at least by this point:  drugs may have exacerbated an 'Oblomov' like syndrome (O. was a Brian Wilson-like fellow in old Russian fiction who couldn't get out of bed) he had to begin with.

Join this brand of 'happiness'  to a gun, forget heroin and the works for a moment, and concentrate on the macho Charlton Heston-endorsed symbol of imperiled virility  in the late sixties moment, and you may start to see Lennon smiling with self-diagnostic epiphanic  knowledge of his own scared mama's boy-bullying nature and upon the fellow jerks caught up in the same religion.

That's my broader interpretation of the closure that the title line tries to bring, resolving what's a very fragmented 'acid casualty' like song up to the concluding point when the jokey chorus and 'narration' ("When I hold you in my arms, and I feel my finger on your trigger,
I know no one can do me no harm"), supplies, a total demystification of macho romantic love and its fantasy love objects as expressed in old 45s he loved and formerly lived by, and that he felt compelled to start moving beyond. The primal cure he's seeking everywhere at this point (Sexie Sadie, heroin, Yoko) begins here most fruitfully in the self-understanding and mockery of what he's always stood for,  with laughter.

But what leads up to it is the ultimate dead end of the path followed from Strawberry Fields through I am the Walrus, an alienated trip, at first dreamily so, then utterly self-loathing.

On the other hand, this nadir (shades of it on Glass Onion as well, totally out of sorts with the Beatles BS) is countered by so many other songs with him seeking clarity rather than obfuscation, coming out as tenderness (like Julia and Prudence) or as honest p.o.ed statements saying exactly what they mean and what they feel like ("I'm so tired", John talking about "Revolution", or him and his monkey, or "Yer" Blues (the last two a little convoluted in the old style however as to lyric  as is Sexy Sadie too, not quite coming clean, a psychic strip tease with some veils not quite dropped )...generally becoming Plastic Ono Band John aka his old pre-psychedelic enthusiastic opinionated angry loudmouthed self, shouting to be heard, the one he was before he discovered weird filters of various sorts :-)

John sounds healthy and radiant to me here. Paul's the one who's the relative casualty by comparison just in terms of the number of funny masks he assumes. Tons of great ditties by him, but as in the pre-Revolverist days the 'truth' only comes out when he's rocking and laughing and spoofing and fodaing around the hardest: Birthday,  the truly great Back in the USSR. the manic  'hardeyharhar!' of surf instrumental Wipeout as visited upon Helter Skelter, Paul's 'Happiness is'  number on the great White one, a far scarier tune than John's because it's so disarming the way the best Freudian jokes often are, an eruption of banked sexual-violent energy going further than the unexplored psyche behind it probably intended. I think Manson interpreted this one exactly right (in his own wrongheaded fashion). It's Paul exploding, not a pretty sight but kind of fascinating.

Meanwhile George is keeping his own council with his new super friends, little brother stealing the coolness factor while his elders have momentarily mislaid it, and Ringo keeps on being Ringo.

That's a version, anyway. 

[pavlos brenos]

Very enjoyable discourse, cabinessence. It's a pity that McCartney didn't flesh out the "Can You Take Me Back" fragment into what was a potentially incredible song................

[cabinessence]

very nice point about that ghostly song fragment from Paul which promises (or prays for) more than it delivers.

[Chris D.]

Hell no there are very rarely any acid causalites in records, I gotta say that is a cop out for some  artists who put out a merdaty record..Man in no way shape or form have I ever heard anyone say that that album is an acid causality, it very barely even grazes an acid laced album... It is a great fodaing record.   I think that there are a few songs on there that shouldnt be there to make it flow better, but merda it is a great great album. I could live with someone sayin that Trout Mask Replica, acid causlty, or maybe a red crayola album... but not the white album... i

Good points.  I agree.

[Chance]

Very enjoyable discourse, cabinessence. It's a pity that McCartney didn't flesh out the "Can You Take Me Back" fragment into what was a potentially incredible song................

I haven't heard it, but I think there's quite a bit of that fragment floating around among collectors now. A minute and a half or something, but wether or not it actually goes anywhere musically, I couldn't tell you. I doubt it, or they'd have done something with it besides what they did.

[king of anglia]

Very enjoyable discourse, cabinessence. It's a pity that McCartney didn't flesh out the "Can You Take Me Back" fragment into what was a potentially incredible song................

I haven't heard it, but I think there's quite a bit of that fragment floating around among collectors now. A minute and a half or something, but wether or not it actually goes anywhere musically, I couldn't tell you. I doubt it, or they'd have done something with it besides what they did.

Yeah it's just doodling. The best bit is the fragment they used on the album. It's got silly percussion up until then.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

I love almost all of Paul’s cuts on the White Album. Lennon wasn’t the same after Pepper….maybe not the same after Revolver. Strawberry Fields was perhaps his pinnacle as an artist. Compare the genius of gems like “Strawberry Fields”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “In My Life”, with the later day self-indulgence of “I Dig A Pony”, “Dig It”, “Me and My Monkey”. He wasn’t the same man, although we’d get occasional glimpses of his genius on tracks like “Across The Universe” and “Because”. Other songs, like “Glass Onion”, are held together only by the caring hand of George Martin and his orchestral additions. His solo albums dont' do much for me either.

 But McCartney was still churning out gold. No “acid-casualty” was he. He uses every color of the spectrum on the White Album, demonstrating his mastery of songwriting by visiting various styles, from the hard rocking “Helter Skelter” to the showbiz nostalgia of “Honey Pie” to the gentle acoustic of “Mother Natures Son” (great brass!). Hell, he even tries his hand at a Beach Boy’s style production. The man was infallible. Aside from the filler (Do it in the Road, Wild Honey Pie), McCartney had a full album’s worth of classics spread out over the White Album. Remove the other members songs and you have a Beatle-era “Ram”. And it is his classic songs on “Let it Be” (“Let it Be” and “Long and Winding Road”) that keep the album from being an complete and total piece of garbage (in my opinion). Lennon’s material was God-awful (aside from Don’t Let Me Down).

I love the White Album. Even John’s lesser efforts are still great

[Chris D.]

Aside from the filler (Do it in the Road, Wild Honey Pie)

Filler?  Those are some of his best on the album.  Like you said, he does everything.  "Wild Honey Pie" is like Captain Beefheart.

I think "Glass Onion" is pretty great too.  I enjoy it a lot more than "In My Life," but part of that is probably because "In My Life" is his "Imagine" during the Beatles years.  Apparently the only song he wrote.

[Aegir]

Very enjoyable discourse, cabinessence. It's a pity that McCartney didn't flesh out the "Can You Take Me Back" fragment into what was a potentially incredible song................

I haven't heard it, but I think there's quite a bit of that fragment floating around among collectors now. A minute and a half or something, but wether or not it actually goes anywhere musically, I couldn't tell you. I doubt it, or they'd have done something with it besides what they did.

Yeah it's just doodling. The best bit is the fragment they used on the album. It's got silly percussion up until then.

Actually, what I heard is that the song included on the album is cut-and-pasted from various parts of the recorded version.. the officially released version was probably never recorded in that order/way.

[Reverend Joshua Sloane]

.  Apparently the only song he wrote.

I don't understand what you mean here.

I

[Chris D.]

.  Apparently the only song he wrote.

I don't understand what you mean here.

I

People associate it with Lennon and the 60s a lot, especially because he's dead.  You know, he's dead -- "In My Life" -- nice sense of closure and sentimentality.  At least from the audience's perspective.  People use "Imagine" in the same way, like hey imagine this peaceful world...isn't it sad coming from the mouth of a dead guy?  I'm not saying people don't know his other songs, but I think they're lazily associated with John and over-played.  Both are good songs, though.

[Reverend Joshua Sloane]

People associate it with Lennon and the 60s a lot, especially because he's dead.  You know, he's dead -- "In My Life" -- nice sense of closure and sentimentality.  At least from the audience's perspective.  People use "Imagine" in the same way, like hey imagine this peaceful world...isn't it sad coming from the mouth of a dead guy?  I'm not saying people don't know his other songs, but I think they're lazily associated with John and over-played.  Both are good songs, though.

Okay I follow you now. Good point.

[cta]

Leave it to Bubba Ho Tep to post what I want to say before I ever get a chance to come to the board and see what's up with everyone!  Gotta respect the man.  Always says the truth and doesn't let hero-worship cloud what he hears. 

EXACTLY right about Lennon.   Anything Lennon post Abbey Road is just weak sounding compared to his work with the Beatles in their 65-69 phase...and yes, right around the White Album it was like hearing a great knack starting to wither away due to outside pressures, but mostly his own personal bulls**t that anyone with half a brain would have avoided completely.   Lennon...great songwriter, self indulgent irresponsible jerk.

[pavlos brenos]

People associate it with Lennon and the 60s a lot, especially because he's dead.  You know, he's dead -- "In My Life" -- nice sense of closure and sentimentality.  At least from the audience's perspective.  People use "Imagine" in the same way, like hey imagine this peaceful world...isn't it sad coming from the mouth of a dead guy?  I'm not saying people don't know his other songs, but I think they're lazily associated with John and over-played.  Both are good songs, though.
 
McCartney claims to have written the melody for "In My Life" and thinks of it as a genuine Lennon/McCartney collaboration (and McCartney disputes Lennon's claim to have written most of the words for "Eleanor Rigby").
 

[Chris D.]

McCartney claims to have written the melody for "In My Life" and thinks of it as a genuine Lennon/McCartney collaboration

YES!!!!