Two weeks ago, I listened to Live on the BBC, and I'm still thinking about the Beatles' cover of Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." I keep thinking about it because John Lennon sings the line as "Too much monkey business for me to imbibe again." Along with Berry's original, I have a couple other versions of "Too Much Monkey Business" (The Kinks covered it on The Kinks, and I have a live version by the Yardbirds). In each of those versions, the line is "Too much monkey business for me to be involved in." Misheard (and then mis-sung) lyrics in covers is something I find fascinating, and I think this is one of the more interesting examples.
Yester-day I listened to the Beatles' LOVE album, and I thought the bass part in "Come Together" sounded like it would be pretty easy to figure out. I think I have most of it, but there are still a few embellishments that I have to work on. This is just the first minute or so.
I usually play bass with a pick, but this didn't sound right played with one. It felt a bit too blatant, I guess, so I just used my thumb. Playing bass with the index and middle fingers feels and looks really weird to me.
For my Collection Audit project, I listened to Let It Be yester-day. I'd tried figuring out "Two of Us" once before without any luck, but I thought I'd try it again, and I think I have the acoustic guitar parts now (although it wasn't until I recorded this that I really realized the guitar that's panned right has a part that isn't just chords; it's only three notes though, so it was pretty easy to figure out too).
I use the original tracks as templates when I record my own versions (I just play on top of them), and the talking at the beginning made it hard to sync this perfectly, so I don't have the tempo right at the beginning. I don't have the strumming rhythm right either (it's not even consistent between the two guitar tracks I recorded), but I usually don't pay much attention to that. This isn't the whole song, but I have at least one instance of each part (the song is just verses and bridges).
After I recorded this, I realized that every "home" in the lyrics is sung on top of a G major chord. The song is in G major, so the G major chord is the musical "home" to which the song returns too, just like in the lyrics. Only one of the "home"s is sung to a G note though: the one in the line "On our way back home." The others are sung to B notes.
The bridge is in a different key (I'm not sure if it's technically Bb major or G minor, but those two keys have all of the same notes), which - to some degree - helps portray the distance of the nostalgia mentioned in the lyric ("memories / Longer than the road that stretches out ahead").
