Only A Northern Song: Part 3-They Just Play It Like That

Robert Bunter: This song was originally recorded during the anything-goes experimental era of the Sgt. Pepper sessions, hence the unorthodox recording technique: George recorded seven tracks on two separate four-track machines, leaving one track free for a metronome click so they could synchronize them. What a brilliant idea! "I guess you could say we invented eight-track recording!" The problem became apparent when it was time to mix the thing. Nobody could get both of the machines to start playback at the exact same time. They'd have two people hit the play button, but it would never come out exactly right. I can just imagine those sessions! Paul was probably going on and on about how this would revolutionize the industry, and how he might later take credit for it. John was imagining the ability to overdub even more formless shrieking onto tracks like "What's The New Mary Jane." Ringo was eating beans and "crisps" while George was meditating in the corner but actually he was thinking about how he would like to sleep with Ringo's wife Maureen, which he finally wound up doing in the 1970s. But after listening to Geoff Emerick and George Martin try and fail for the umpteenth time to start the machines simultaneously, they began to get disgusted. They were not very patient when it came to things like that. They probably called for their driver to come pick them up and take them to the Bag 'O Nails club where they sat with Keith Moon and Mama Cass and talked about hallucinations.

Richard Furnstein: It's odd that they chose this half-written crapfest to test their technological limitations. They managed the supreme piece of recording art that is "Strawberry Fields Forever" with a four track, but thought that they needed twice as much recording capabilities for George's moaning waif of a song. I'm surprised they didn't insist on a 48 track mixing board when they started work on "Don't Pass Me By." The Beatles are the greatest thing that humans have ever accomplished, but they certainly didn't understand the concept of "you can't polish a turd." The Fab Four (along with Chief Turd Polisher George Martin and Admiral Turd Buffer Geoff Emerick) would routinely try to make something from nothing. Sometimes it was pure bliss (cue "You Know My Name Look Up The Number") and other times you had to sit through endless vomit like "All Together Now" or "Only A Northern Song." The psychedelic years saw the biggest offenders of this trend, as a few toots of a horn or a backwards calliope were all that were needed to legitimize the lamest of acid-fueled half-ideas.

Robert Bunter: Everybody finally gave up and let this song onto the Yellow Submarine 1969 soundtrack album in a hideous "fake stereo" mix (highs on one channel, lows on the other), but it's surprising they didn't just release it in the horrible out-of-synch version they must have heard in the studio when they didn't hit the buttons at the same time. That would have been in keeping with the violent assault which this song represents.

The Fab Four (along with Chief Turd Polisher George Martin and Admiral Turd Buffer Geoff Emerick) would routinely try to make something from nothing.

Richard Furnstein: "Only A Northern Song" was originally slated to appear between "Fixing A Hole" and "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite" on Sgt. Pepper's. Can you imagine if this actually happened? I don't need to imagine, I pressed a small run of Sgt. Pepper's original tracklists for my personal use in 1983. And take it from me, it's an absolute mess. You are barely coming down from the supremely incredible "Fixing A Hole" (remember: gentle fade) and the death chords of "Only A Northern Song" come blaring. Then you have to deal with John's fey psychedelia in "Mr. Kite," all the while wondering why you didn't just lift the needle during the perfect "Hole" fade. You are sitting there, completely not under the influence of acid, listening to some overblown handlebar mustache psyche-ooze. Oh, wise guy, think you'll just make an MP3 playlist in your iTunes? Great idea, but you don't even have the relief of an album side change to give you a break from the dreaded black hole of "Northern Song"->"Mr. Kite"->"Within You." It's a John babble sandwich with two thick overlong pieces of moldy George Harrison fumbling songwriter bread. Choke it down, fool. That's what you get for messing with perfection.

Only A Northern Song: Part 2-The Chords Are Going Wrong

Robert Bunter: The musical accompaniment of "Only A Northern Song" illustrates and enhances the lyric's description of a slightly-askew song performed by an absent band. Paul's bassline bobs and struts deftly as always, but he doesn't always change chords when the rest of the song does. The piccolo trumpets which soared so delicately above "Penny Lane" are stuttering and squealing discordantly. The tape loops that transformed "Tomorrow Never Knows" into a psychedelic mind trip are here, but they are deployed in the service of pure confusion rather than novelty and shock. The goofy voices of "Yellow Submarine" are in the background, but they're moaning strangely and mumbling "Heavy, heavy." The organ introduces the song with a churchy, strange sort of major sixth chord which has nothing to do with the tonality of the rest of the song, before funkily resolving down to a full major chord which seems to fix the listener with an evil, bared-teeth grin and bloodshot, demented horse-eyes. The guitars ... what guitars? There's no guitars.

Richard Furnstein: A chill sets in the room. A funereal organ pushes out of every speaker, turning the desert landscape orange and then purple. The cacti are bleeding just as the sand trickles and moves towards some hidden drain. And all this before the drums kick in. It's a blast towards outer space. Constellations flicker and blur into a black sky. The singer is a headless aura, a suggestion of self. It doesn't really matter what form he takes, his voice only makes the night sky darker and more impossible to navigate. It's an unpleasant feeling, my blood runs light up here. DON'T ASK ME HOW I KNOW THAT.

Robert Bunter: I'm not comfortable with the way this is going, Richard.

The actual Beatles, who you thought were your beloved friends and advisers, are four dark men you will never meet and who regard you with barely-concealed contempt.

Richard Furnstein: This place isn't meant to make you comfortable. You are barely emerging from the clouds of a few potent segments and your childhood home is full of activity, mirth and movement. You advance from your room, where the striped wall paper seemed to be finding new vanishing points. The hallway appears vacant, but a bustling horn band creeps from underneath your sister's bedroom door. It's Sunday on BBC 1, but the hallway sends the galloping trumpet into a simultaneous reverse and forward motion. The Salvation Army band feeds like a music box; magenta twirls cough out as the tuba player is caught in the spokes. Mother's room is at the end of the hall; and there is talking come from the room. That man's voice isn't your father's; and his booming voice suggests a substantial mustache. Retreat. Run down the stairs: five to the first flight, turn left, four more, left again, the final four. You bound onto the wooden floor, just as you did as a 9 year old. Yet, you are much older, this is your childhood home and it is full of spirits and men and sounds that you have never heard or expected. You'd run out the front door and follow the grid to the woods, but the front door isn't there.

Robert Bunter: Here's something I don't like: George double-tracks his voice in unison through the entire song, except for the word "brown" on the line "if my hair is brown." Why the emphasis on that word? It's equally disquieting when he says "You're CORRECT," with what sounds like sadistic emphasis. You were sitting there in stuporous stoned rapture, watching the four Beatles chop and thump their way through another psychedelic dreamworld, when suddenly the George-figure looks directly at you and says, "If you think the harmony / is a little dark and out-of-key / you're CORRECT" and at the same time he takes off his face-plate, revealing the hideous snapping mechanical works that were underneath there the whole time and you sort of suspected it but kept nervously pushing that thought to the back of your mind because of the terrifying implications. The wonderful men who sang about "She Loves You" and "Good Day Sunshine" and "Getting Better" were actually disembodied electrical impulses etched violently into black polyvinyl choloride and decoded by your pitifully inadequate home audio equipment. The actual Beatles, who you thought were your beloved friends and advisers, are four dark men you will never meet and who regard you with barely-concealed contempt.

Only A Northern Song: Part 1-I Told You There's No One There

Richard Furnstein: Originally recorded for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "Only A Northern Song" manages to be at once an effortless bit of psychedelic filler (as the title cooly states) and a harrowing soundscape of the changing vistas of pop music. George Harrison, irked that his songwriting efforts were published under Lennon and McCartney's Northern Songs Ltd. umbrella, tossed off "Only A Northern Song" as just that--contractual filler in which the harmonies, lyrics, and chords were secondary to the contractual and financial advancement of the Beatles' songwriting craft.

Robert Bunter: This is one of the most terrifying songs in the catalog. The startling fact that it ended up on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack LP, presumably aimed at young children, qualifies as pure abuse. The little kiddies had so much fun in the theater, watching Old Fred and the charming Beatle lads defend Pepperland from the Blue Meanies. Then they talked their mum and pap into purchasing a copy of the cartoon-adorned LP at Gloanburg's Shilling and Pence. They took it home and were ready to enjoy the goofy-voiced charms of "Yellow Submarine" and "All Together Now." Suddenly, a nightmare organ opens a creaky door into a harrowing, discordant world where the thick voice of creepy Harrison starts addressing them DIRECTLY, confronting the unformed child's mind with the stark reality of what they're doing: listening to a horrible Beatles song. Bleak trumpets and strange echoing little toy noises assault the ear as the grammatically-fractured lyrics torture the mind. Stop! I'm not ready for this. I'm an eight-year-old child! I'm going to have nightmares about this experience. I didn't know music could talk at you.

Richard Furnstein: It's generally fun jabberwocky (well, as much fun as can be had at this dreadful pace) defined by wordplay and dismissive accounts of what makes a song. Well, that is until George removes the furniture from the room as the sound effects begin to envelop the languid backing track as the lyrics "And I told you is no one there" suggests circuitry and patterns have overtaken the songwriting process. Music lacking emotion, the ultimate trip. Syd Barrett would pursue similar themes in his contemporary recording "Bike" (from The Pink Floyd's Piper At The Gates Of Dawn). Barrett describes a host of physical objects (the titular bike, a mouse, a cloak, gingerbread men) that are physically manifestations of his lifestyle (and ultimately his love). The creature comforts are dramatically removed in the final verse where Barrett describes a "room of musical tunes" that create sounds like "clockwork." Again, the mechanical and artificial is the final stage of psychedelia. The bevy of sound effects and tape manipulations become a process; even Ringo's drums are now a slave to a recording process. The rock is dead and the machines are taking over. It's only a song that you request? Let's dial up the machinery, love!

Music lacking emotion, the ultimate trip.

Robert Bunter: This was George's "Glass Onion." Again, both songs directly address the reality of the relationship between a Beatles' record and its listener, in a tone that is markedly sardonic and confrontational. In these lyrics, John and George, minds clouded by boutique-pedigree acid, behold their fans. In three or four short years, they've watched them morph from hysterical 13-year-old girls to pimply, stoned teenagers with dead eyes and dumb thoughts. There's no way to communicate with these mental cripples. Let's just spit on them. After you play these tracks, you have to wipe the Beatlespit off your face. Just sit there and think about how dumb you are. We hate you. The idea that someone might have listened to this song while taking cheap, adulterated street acid is enough to make your imagination hurt. The organ intro alone is making me want to pull out one of my eyes so I can turn it around and stare into the other one. My mind is dead.

Richard Furnstein: "Signed Curtain" by Matching Mole is the atomic fallout of the takeover of the machines. Robert Wyatt's aching voice delivers a beautiful melody over rote piano chords. "This is the first verse" the lyrics tell us. Logically, they later tell us the emergence of the bridge, key changes, and "another part of the song." "Signed Curtain" takes the concept of emotionally resigned songwriting to its naked conclusion. The humans have long since left the room. The machinery has rusted or shut down. The only remaining element is raw awareness of self and the futile nature of artistic expression. It's a harrowing journey, and one that starts with some throwaway track from the Yellow Submarine album of filler and George Martin orchestration. Don't let Paul or Ringo see this, they may just claim that they invented meta songwriting. You know, the same way they invented MTV, house music, recording guitar feedback, Ozzy Osbourne, and casual sex.

It's All Too Much

Richard Furnstein: George strikes a crucial C, John yells "DOO YOUNG MUN!" into the unfriendly confines of De Lane Lea Studios, and a lonely organ (!) announces the Beatles' finest psychedelic moment to the world.

Unfortunately, it happened about two years too late. The Beatles cut this in the middle of their tablet thwonk phase (right after Sgt Pepper's) but didn't see fit to release the song until 1969's baloney Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Another damn shame is that the Beatles didn't release the extended mega jam versions that have been widely bootlegged. An eight minute version from The Lost Pepperland Reel boot is particularly scorching. Another song that really thrives in mono.

Robert Bunter: What do you get when you cross the Velvet Underground with Daevid Allen's pre-Gong solo efforts? The best Harrisong ever? Obviously, if you ignore the anomalous career peaks of Revolver and Abbey Road and the post-Fabs masterpiece "I Remember Jeep." Creepy George has taken the idea of tedious, overlong one chord drones (Within You Without You, Blue Jay Way) and finally hit paydirt. You can just see the LSD trails that were swimming around in this gawky poser's overamped brain when he wrote and recorded this Yellow Submarine filler track. For once, John and Paul make some valuable contributions to the 7-minute-long fadeout, such as going "CHUH .... CHUH ... CHUH ... too much ... too much ... too much."

Creepy George has taken the idea of tedious, overlong one chord drones and finally hit paydirt.

Richard Furnstein: The Beatles cut this one around the same time as "All You Need Is Love." "Love" is clearly the superior song, but I kind of wish this was the worldwide satellite release. George standing in a field of beautiful girls, pedaling a tambourine, while the rest of the Beatles were navigating through a swarm of acid ghosts. It would have blown minds. Another fun bit: George sends a little love note to the beautiful Patti: "with your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue." It's nice to see George was keeping his romantic interests vanilla in the middle of his Hare Hare heyday.

Robert Bunter: Every Beatles superfan has to wrestle with the question of whether they love or hate this song. For me, those deliberations are ongoing.

All Together Now

Robert Bunter: Possibly the saddest McCartney track ever. Paul sees the writing on the wall and makes a desperate plea for unity. He'll revisit similar territory on "Two of Us" and "You Never Give Me Your Money," but none of it will work. They were doomed.

Richard Furnstein: Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn noted that Ringo was particularly keen to commit this diarrhea drip to tape, in the hopes that it would be a worse song than “What Goes On.” He was successful.

They were doomed.

Robert Bunter: You've never been more wrong in your life, Richard.

Richard Furnstein: It's not my fault you like to eat garbage.

Hey Bulldog

Robert Bunter: John creates a nice percolating groove on this track, then pisses in the punchbowl with his usual sardonic gibberish.

Richard Furnstein: Paul gets some more sideways aggression out on immigrants in the UK (“Don’t look at me I only have ten children!”); a theme that he would trot out for the Paki-bashing “Get Back” on some other album.

I like it when they act like dogs at the end!

Robert Bunter: A true highlight of any bonus track selection of deleted scenes from the US theatrical prints of the "Yellow Submarine" film.

Richard Furnstein: Oh good point. I forgot that this song was marketed as "The Great Lost Beatles Track" when the bullshit Yellow Submarine Songtrack was released in 1999. Thanks for the shit we already own, EMI/Capitol.

Robert Bunter: I like it when they act like dogs at the end!