Shea Stadium

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[source]

This showed up in my Twitter timeline (see source for the specific tweet).  I'm sure this is just a still from film, but there's a coincidental foreshadowing of the Abbey Road album cover here.

"Anna (Go to Him)"

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I listened to Please Please Me this morning for my Collection Audit project, and the one guitar phrase in "Anna (Go to Him)" sounded pretty easy, so I figured it out.  It's actually even easier than I thought it'd be.  There's more to the part than this, but at least I have this much.

"The Ballad of John and Yoko"

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When I listened to Past Masters, Volume Two yester-day, the bass part for "The Ballad of John and Yoko" sounded easy to figure out.  And once I had that, I was pretty sure I knew the chords too (which The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook confirmed).

This was never my favorite Beatles song, and after learning how to play it (and paying attention to the lyrics), I actually sort of dislike it.  It's just John Lennon complaining about his life in a way that seems to trivialize religion.  I think it's even worse than his comment about the Beatles' being "More popular than Jesus."

Musically, it's not much better.  The chord progression is a standard I IV V (which stays on an E major for eight whole measures), and the bass plays almost the same figure under each chord, just raised a certain number of steps so that the lowest note is the root of whatever chord it's played beneath.

In my recording, I have only a verse, the bridge, and then an-other verse.

"Komm gib mir deine Hand"

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Last night I listened to Past Masters, Volume One.  (While drafting this post, I realized that for years I'd been completely ignorant of the pun in the titles of those albums.  There's "Masters" in the sense of "masters of their craft," but there's also "Masters" in the recording sense, like "master tapes.")  I was especially interested in "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" (the German version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand").  I'd noticed before that there are some significant differences between the German lyrics and the original English lyrics, so I thought I'd write about them.

I'm going to go section by section: first, my transcription the original English lyrics; then my transcription of the German lyrics; and then my translation (and some commentary) of those German lyrics.

First verse (English):

Oh, yeah, I'll tell you something
I think you'll understand
When I say that something
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand

First verse (German):

Oh, komm doch, komm zu mir
Du nimmst mir den Verstand
Oh, komm doch, komm zu mir
Komm, gib mir deine Hand
Komm, gib mir deine Hand
Komm, gib mir deine Hand

First verse (German translation):

Oh, come, come to me
You take my senses away
Oh, but come, come to me
Come, give me your hand
Come, give me your hand
Come, give me your hand

Despite nearly a decade of studying German (I'm only four days short of ten years), I'm still not always sure how to translate doch.  Sometimes - as in the first "Oh, komm doch, komm zu mir" - I think it's just used as a filler word.  In the second "Oh, komm doch, komm zu mir" though, it does have the sense of "however" or "nevertheless" that my German-English dictionary gives me.  It's like, "Even though you take away my senses, come to me anyway."

I think it's interesting that both second lines (the original English and the German version) have some form of understanding, but where the English has the girl understanding what the speaker/singer is about to say, the German version has the speaker/singer rendered insensible because of the girl.  She takes away his understanding.

I should mention that I took some liberties with that line.  More literally, it's "You take [from] me the understanding."

Second verse (English):

Oh, please say to me
You'll let me be your man
And please say to me
You'll let me hold your hand
You'll let me hold your hand
I wanna hold your hand

Second verse (German):

Oh, du bist so schön
Schön wie ein Diamant
Ich will mit dir gehen
Komm, gib mir deine Hand
Komm, gib mir deine Hand
Komm, gib mir deine Hand

Second verse (German translation):

Oh, you are so beautiful
Beautiful like a diamond
I want to go with you
Come, give me your hand
Come, give me your hand
Come, give me your hand

I'm actually a bit unsure of my transcription of the English lyrics for this verse.  What I heard as a second "You'll let me hold your hand" is given as "Now let me hold your hand" in The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook.  Listening closely, it seems that John and Paul aren't singing the same thing there, but I can't make out who's singing what or what the other lyric is.

There are different shades of meaning of the line "Schön wie ein Diamant," depending on whether you read the preceding line break (and repetition of "schön") as a division of the sentiment.  Retaining the thread from the previous line, "Du bist so schön wie ein Diamant" is translated as "You are as beautiful as a diamond."  ("So… wie" is translated as "As… as.")  If you read the line break as a split, "so" is just a plain adverb, rendering the line as "You are so beautiful," and "wie" is translated as "like," for the less-complimentary "Beautiful like a diamond."

Bridge (English):

And when I touch you, I feel happy inside
It's such a feeling that, my love
I can't hide
I can't hide
I can't hide

Bridge (German):

In deinen Armen bin ich glücklich und froh
Das war noch nie bei einer anderen
Einmal so
Einmal so
Einmal so

Bridge (German translation):

In your arms am I happy and glad
It was never with another
Once like that
Once like that
Once like that

When I listened to the song, I thought it was "bei einer anderen," and while I'm confident in my translation ("with an other"), I don't think I have the German endings right.  Bei is a preposition that takes dative case, and while einer is the singular feminine dative form of a, there's a problem with anderen.  The "-en" ending in dative case indicates plural.  So this would be "with an others," which doesn't make any sense.

I hadn't realized this before undertaking this exercise, but both versions emphasize things through repetition here.  The original English lyrics illustrate the singer/speaker's complete inability to hide his feeling (he has to say three times that he can't hide it), and through the repetition of "[never] once like that" in the German lyrics, the speaker/singer seems to demonstrate his dissatisfaction with his previous relationship in contrast to this one.

In the English lyrics, the third and fourth verses are (with some differences) the same as the first.  In the German lyrics, the third verse is exactly the same as the first, and the fourth verse is exactly the same as the second.

In the liner notes to Past Masters, Volume One, Mark Lewisohn says that after "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" and "Sie Liebt Dich" (the German version of "She Loves You"), "The Beatles ensured they never again recorded in anything other than their mother tongue."  It's pedantic, but I have to point out that this isn't true.  Offhand, I can mention that there's French in "Michelle" and Spanish in "Sun King."  Lewisohn might mean that they never recorded an-other song completely in an-other language, but that's not what he says.

"Baby It's You"

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Last night I decided to figure out the celeste part on Please Please Me (I'll admit that I had to look up what song it was used on; it's "Baby It's You").  After that, I got the chords too.  In what I recorded, I skipt the first verse entirely because I thought it'd be boring to listen to just chords.  So it starts with the second verse, and then there's the celeste part, which is (nearly) doubled on guitar (although the guitar is an octave or two lower).  There are three notes in the celeste part that aren't in the guitar part.

After I figured all of that out, I decided to see how the Shirelles' version compares.  The Beatles' version is in G major, and the Shirelles' is in Bb major, but otherwise the chords are the same (although they're not strummed on guitar in the Shirelles' version; in fact, I don't know if any instrument plays chords; they might just be implied).  What's doubled on celeste and guitar in the Beatles' version is played on organ in the Shirelles' version, and the melodies are more-or-less the same.  The major difference is that the Beatles repeat one section (the melody to which the "Sha la la la la" before the verses is sung), where it occurs only once in the solo in the Shirelles' version.

What I can't fathom, though, is why the Beatles didn't include the counterpoint that's in the solo in the Shirelles' version, especially if their solo is doubled on guitar and celeste.  You'd think it'd be easier to play a melody and a counterpoint on two instruments (which the Beatles don't do) than play a melody and a counterpoint on one instrument (like it is in the Shirelles' version).  George Harrison could have played the same guitar part with George Martin playing the counterpoint part on celeste (or even some other instrument).  Because I haven't figured out that counterpoint part yet (I'm not even sure if it's technically counterpoint), I haven't been able to record my own version where the guitar plays the main melody and the celeste plays the counterpoint, so I don't know how it sounds with that instrumentation, but it still seems like a missed opportunity.

Revolver

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Collection Audit:

Apparently, 5 August was the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Revolver, so I skipped ahead in my listening (I'm currently in the midst of the albums that start with N) to listen to it on its release date.  I hadn't listened to it for over two years, and I found a lot of things to write about. 

"I'm Only Sleeping" 

The phrase "float upstream" is sung to an ascending phrase (Bb, Db, Gb), so there's a musical/lyrical mirroring there.  This might seem like a small point, but I'll get back to it. 

"Love You To" 

The first two verses end with a melisma'd "me" (the lines are "You don't get time to hang a sign on me" and "But what you've got means such a lot to me").  I'm not sure if this was intentional on George Harrison's part, but it recalls the melisma'd and line-ending "me" in "What You're Doing" from Beatles for Sale ("And should you need a love that's true / It's me").

"Here, There, and Everywhere" 

The line "Running my hands through her hair" sounded familiar to me, and it wasn't too long before I placed it.  There's an identical line near the end of Colin Blunstone's "She Loves the Way They Love Her" (on One Year).  Both Blunstone and his former Zombies band mate Rod Argent (who wrote "She Loves the Way They Love Her") have listed the Beatles as an influence, and between that and both songs' rhyming "hair" with "there" ("There / Running my hands through her hair" in "Here, There, and Everywhere" and "Running my hands through her hair / And knowing she'll always be there" in "She Loves the Way They Love Her"), I think this is more than just a coincidence.  At best, it might be an instance of subconscious influence. 

"And Your Bird Can Sing"

I was either only dimly aware of this or had forgotten, but it was very obvious to me as I listened to "And Your Bird Can Sing" this time that the line "You say you've seen seven wonders" is a reference to the Seven Wonders of the World.

"For No One" 

I don't know how to play "For No One" (yet), so this isn't as precise as it could be, but I don't think the song resolves at the end.  There isn't a sense of completion, which (somewhat literally) underscores the disconnected feeling in lines such as "You stay home / She goes out" and "And in her eyes, you see nothing."

"I Want to Tell You" 

I was working on transcribing this song as I listened to it, so the pleonasm in the line "All those words they seem to slip away" was especially evident.  Instead of the more fluid and more grammatically correct "All those words seem to slip away," there's a redundant "they" in the line.  The song itself is about problems in communicating, so that pleonastic "they" actually emphasizes that sentiment.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" 

The phrase "float downstream" is sung to a descending phrase (E, C, G), so there's a musical/lyrical mirroring there.  Furthermore, there's a parallelism between the descending "float downstream" here and the ascending "float upstream" in "I'm Only Sleeping."  So while it's a rather simple feature, it's used to a greater effect because there's that parallelism.

I noticed some things about Revolver when I listened to it for my Collection Audit project a couple days ago.