. . .that the Beatles shot their groundbreaking promotional film for "Strawberry Fields Forever":
My favorite Beatles commentator, Allan W. Pollak, beautifully captures the poetic breakthrough represented by this song:
Among the several new musical directions explored by The Beatles from mid-career onward, none was more astonishing at the time, nor is still so compelling today, as their emerging preoccupation with the existential joy, wonder, and sorrowful angst of self-discovery, childhood memory, and post-adolescent adjustment to the realities of the human condition.
More than anyone before them, the Beatles poeticized popular music, making it today's unchallenged venue for the development and expression of a poetic sensibility. That poeticization began as soon as John and Paul decided to record only their original compositions; but it was "Strawberry Fields Forever" that really announced their arrival as poets.
Which chord begins "A Hard Day's Night?" Now, with the help of Fourier analysis, we know:
Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.
It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”
More than 20 years ago, the distinguished American musicologist Alan W. Pollack began analyzing in-depth every single Beatles song (both originals and covers). It took him ten years to finish the project, which is posted here.
Many Beatles scholars have examined the Beatles' music, but none have done as exhaustive a job as Pollack. A few years ago, I spent several months reading Pollack's Notes. As a guitar player and bassist, I particularly appreciate Pollack's outlining of chord structures; but he's also aware of the non-musical, dramatic dimensions of some Beatles' performances, as in the conclusion to his discussion of "You're Going to Lose that Girl":
In the "Help!" film the Beatles appear as though performing this song live in the studio. The scene, for all its absurd, staged surreality — (Paul alternately playing bass guitar and sitting a grand piano, and Ringo alternately behind the drum kit or sitting on the floor with the bongos) — it provides a delightful fantasy of what the real recording sessions might have been like. The tobacco companies must have also like this scene. Ringo is shown drumming with a cigarette precariously clenched in his teeth. And we get a long close-up of Paul and George facing each other, hunched on opposite sides of a single microphone in order tightly execute the backing vocals. The scene is filmed with back lighting such that you can see the rhythmic thrust of their sung syllables punctuate like skywriting the generally smokey haze that builds up as the scene progresses. It's the kind of thing that looks cool enough to persuade a person of a certain mindset to want to start smoking as soon as possible, even if the thought has never before occurred to that person. So much for not particularly subliminal persuasion.
