The Beatles Album Discussion Thread #11 - The White Album.

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Summerskin

Summerskin

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The marmite Beatles record?

I'd put this as my #2 favourite Beatles record, it just has everything, a full realisation of every band members individual sound (Don't Pass Me By is ALMOST as cringe-worthingly brilliant as Octopus' Garden!) and a bunch of eccentricity to go with it all.

Back In The USSR, Dear Prudence, Martha My Dear, I Will, Julia, Birthday, Mother Natures Son, Long Long Long, Good Night?? - PHWOAR!!

There is, of course, for a 30 track album, some dross, but it is FAR outweighed by the collective brilliance on here, I just love this album, got it on vinyl too, warm!
 
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It's up there with my fave LPs of all time. While My Guitar (gently weeps), Sexy Sadie, Revolution, Helter Skelter, Rocky Raccoon. Just to throw a few more tracks into the mix apart from the (super) ones you mentioned.
 
The beginning of the end. This is were they we photographed as 4 individuals and not as a group. Brilliant album all the same. Was gonna be called A Dolls House but someone beat them to a similar title so they changed it. Dear Prudence and I'm So Tired are the highlights for me.
 
I could write an essay about The White Album. In fact, I have a friend who is writing a book about it! I'm going out soon though so I'll just - for now - say it is their most fascinating and ultimately rewarding record. And I wouldn't shed a single track.
 

It's the album that proves...that if you want to make a double-album, make it as balls out and crazy as possible, hence why 95% of these tracks still live to this day.

These guys were so ahead of their time it was frightening, they truly are the band that defies opinion, anybody who dares to question their place in modern society is simply ignorant and ill-educated.
 
James Martin said:
It's up there with my fave LPs of all time. While My Guitar (gently weeps), Sexy Sadie, Revolution, Helter Skelter, Rocky Raccoon. Just to throw a few more tracks into the mix apart from the (super) ones you mentioned.
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Two of my top three Beatles songs right there, alongside Tomorrow Never Knows (no 1).


Truly awesome album.
 
Summerskin said:
Helter Skelter is so badass i'm not even arsed that Charlie Manson probably killed many listening to it.

RAWK!
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The fact that it was just so effortless, and well, natural, shows just how much talent those guys had.

Didn't he record it just to prove to the Stones that he could do hard stuff too?
 
RadioFriendlyUnitShifter said:
The fact that it was just so effortless, and well, natural, shows just how much talent those guys had.

Didn't he record it just to prove to the Stones that he could do hard stuff too?
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It sounds stilted and calculated to me - The Beatles did forty or fifty better songs - but that is part of the beauty of The White Album...it is is different things to different people. It seems to be loaded with filler, or even dross, and yet its sequencing (this really is part of its genius, by the way. Yep, the order of the tracks....) makes it impossible to consider jettisoning a second of it.

How could the Fabs exist in such a surreal remove from our reality and yet reflect it so well all the time? There are dozens - maybe hundreds - of reasons why the Beatles are the most artistically important event(s) in pop music but surely one of the main ones is how they both lead and echoed the public vibe for seven dizzyingly hectic, world-altering, map-burning years. Somehow, by Epstein dying and Yoko becoming ever more "there" amongst them and them heading off to India with the Maharishi (get a grip lads you're Scousers, for fuck's sake) and George becoming ever more confident and them generally going off one another they managed to come up with a record that reflected 1968 as well as Sgt Pepper reflected 1967. Everything is slightly ****ed, it cried out. But it's still worth keeping an eye on, it added - just don't believe all that hippy shit that we were all into last week. Even the artwork was perfect (more so that Pepper or Rubber Soul or With the Beatles, in my opinion).

I bought The White Album on white vinyl on Capitol Records in the USA in 1980. I was just turned sixteen and it bemused the fuck out of me at the time but I never gave up on it. Something made me keep coming back to it and in the end it just somehow clicked. These days it is just there, top ten of all time. Indefinable but brilliant. Even its flaws are perfect.
 

stupid giraffe said:
It sounds stilted and calculated to me - The Beatles did forty or fifty better songs - but that is part of the beauty of The White Album...it is is different things to different people. It seems to be loaded with filler, or even dross, and yet its sequencing (this really is part of its genius, by the way. Yep, the order of the tracks....) makes it impossible to consider jettisoning a second of it.

How could the Fabs exist in such a surreal remove from our reality and yet reflect it so well all the time? There are dozens - maybe hundreds - of reasons why the Beatles are the most artistically important event(s) in pop music but surely one of the main ones is how they both lead and echoed the public vibe for seven dizzyingly hectic, world-altering, map-burning years. Somehow, by Epstein dying and Yoko becoming ever more "there" amongst them and them heading off to India with the Maharishi (get a grip lads you're Scousers, for fuck's sake) and George becoming ever more confident and them generally going off one another they managed to come up with a record that reflected 1968 as well as Sgt Pepper reflected 1967. Everything is slightly ****ed, it cried out. But it's still worth keeping an eye on, it added - just don't believe all that hippy shit that we were all into last week. Even the artwork was perfect (more so that Pepper or Rubber Soul or With the Beatles, in my opinion).

I bought The White Album on white vinyl on Capitol Records in the USA in 1980. I was just turned sixteen and it bemused the fuck out of me at the time but I never gave up on it. Something made me keep coming back to it and in the end it just somehow clicked. These days it is just there, top ten of all time. Indefinable but brilliant. Even its flaws are perfect.
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Personally, to me, Helter Skelter just sounds natural and wild. Now maybe it is calculated, and if so, that's an accomplishment in itself getting it to then sound so true.

To each their own -- Helter Skelter's definitely a marmite song. But I love it :)
 
Good call! I've often said that some of the best, underrated Beatles songs are on this album, including Martha My Dear, Julia and, my personal favorites I Will and Long Long Long. Going through this album is like hunting through an overgrown garden of some long passed rich man and finding treasures everywhere that people looked over and missed.
 

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