"Good Morning Good Morning"

Last year, I wrote a post about a section of the saxophone part in "Good Morning Good Morning" and how it seems to have been inspired by 1950s rock and roll songs.  Even at the time, I was a bit unsure of the accuracy of the rhythms in my notation.  Yester-day, I was thinking about this part again, and I realized that it's a dotted rhythm.  Where I had:

it's actually more like:

What I have still might not be exactly right, but it's certainly a lot closer.

"Good Morning Good Morning"

The second thing I noticed when I listened to the 2 CD Anniversary Edition of Sgt. Pepper recently is the saxophone parts in "Good Morning Good Morning."  During most of the repeated "Good morning..." sections and throughout the "Ev'rybody knows there's nothing doing" and "People runnin' 'round; it's five o'clock" sections, the saxophones arpeggiate A major and D major chords.  Something like:

(I guessed on the key, and the rhythm of the eighth notes might not be strictly accurate.)

It seemed that arpeggiating the chords with saxophones like this was a relatively common feature of 1950s rock and roll, but I had to do some searching before I found any specific songs that do this.  Of the songs I found, the most well-known is probably Fats Domino's "Blue Monday" (which also seems to have inspired "Lady Madonna").  Like these sections of "Good Morning Good Morning," the saxophones in "Blue Monday" arpeggiate chords, playing the root, third, and fifth (although the root is played twice in succession and the rhythms of the two parts are different).

Of course, I'm not sure if the saxophones in "Good Morning Good Morning" are meant to be reminiscent of "Blue Monday" or even any song in particular, but they do have a certain similarity.

"Good Morning, Good Morning"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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The thing about transcriptions is that they sometime solidify a line into one meaning, where the audible version could be taken more than one way.  There's an instance of this in "Good Morning Good Morning."  One of the lines could be transcribed as "I've got nothing to say, but it's OK" or "I've got nothing to say but it's OK."

"I've got nothing to say, but it's OK" has the speaker saying that it's fine that he doesn't have anything to say.

"I've got nothing to say but it's OK" has the speaker saying that "It's OK" is the only thing he has to say.