CLASSIC ALBUMS: THE WHITE ALBUM

BY DAVID GUZMAN

It isn’t easy for me to declare the self-titled album from The Beatles, better known as The White Album, as the best they ever recorded. The material on The White Album seems almost too unique: It was the only double-album they ever made, none of its thirty tracks would become a number one single, and it painfully chronicles the band’s first steps towards an inevitable breakup. And yet, The White Album became their biggest commercial success, and is considered by many fans as their greatest effort, including John Lennon himself in a 1972 interview: “I always preferred it to all the other albums, including Pepper, because I thought the music was better. The Pepper myth is bigger, but the music on The White Album is far superior.”

The more The Beatles tried to hide their tension, the more obvious it became. Lyrics that were relished by hippies as being enigmatic and mysterious were put on The White Album merely to hide their frustration. When Lennon sings, “I told you about the walrus and me, man/You know that we’re as close as can be, man/Well here’s another clue for you all/The walrus was Paul” on “Glass Onion,” he seemingly nods to an earlier Lennon/McCartney composition, “I Am the Walrus.” Lennon, however, interpreted the line differently: “The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul, ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this stroke – because I’m leaving.’” Indeed, many credit Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono and McCartney’s to Linda Eastman as the beginning of the end for The Beatles, but John disagrees: “How can two women split up four strong men? It’s impossible.”

Defining the highs and lows on The White Album remains a subject of debate. Rolling Stone chose “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” as the best track on the album; a BBC poll declared “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” to be the worst song ever written. Although The White Album includes many essentials in the Lennon/McCartney canon, the high point for George Harrison is clearly “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” With an operatic melody and lyrics inspired by the I Ching, all the song needed was the electric sting of Eric Clapton’s guitar. “Eric showed up and he was very nice, very accommodating and humble and a good player,” recalled McCartney. “His style fitted very well with the song and I think George was keen to have him play it – which was nice of George because he could have played it himself and then it would have been him on the big hit.”

Clapton’s appearance on The White Album makes it more ominous than it seems: The Beatles could no longer make a masterpiece by themselves. (Oft-dubbed “fifth Beatle” Billy Preston was later asked to play on their next – and final – albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be.)

I’m tempted to fill this page with obscure details about The White Album, but hardly anything remains unknown to dedicated fans. It’s well known that McCartney stepped in to play drums on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and “Dear Prudence” when Ringo Starr grew aggravated and left for two weeks. Also recognized are the four Beatle wives, who provide background vocals for “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” and “Birthday.” At least three tracks, “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Helter Skelter” contributed to the west-coast terrorism of the Manson Family.

But the elephant in the room is easily “Revolution 9,” Lennon’s chaotic experiment sampling dialogue, instrumental music, and unrehearsed screaming. With its nonsense structure and mammoth length (at eight minutes and thirteen seconds, it’s the longest recording in their entire catalog), it’s easy to see why McCartney and producer George Martin fought to keep “Revolution 9” off the album. Although Lennon liked it a lot and made sure it stayed on the final product, I have yet to find a convincing argument for why it deserves to be on The White Album. It was wisely buried on side four.

Why the cover? When minimalist Richard Hamilton was asked to design it, he originally told The Beatles to produce old photos of themselves for a collage. Then: “He wanted to have a completely white cover and emboss the word ‘Beatles’ on it,” remembers McCartney.

When Hamilton further suggested the album simply be called The Beatles, McCartney checked previous releases to make sure they hadn’t already recorded a self-titled album: “It had always been Beatles for Sale, Meet the Beatles, With the Beatles. There had always been something similar, but never just The Beatles. So Richard said that was what we should call it, and everyone agreed.” It was also Hamilton’s idea to have each copy individually stamped with a six-digit number. “You’d have 000001, 000002, 000003, and so on. If you got, for example, 000200 then that would be an early copy – it was a great idea for sales,” McCartney explains.

The first twenty copies were reportedly shared between The Beatles; Ringo says copy 000001 was given to him.

I remember when George Harrison passed away in 2001. Rolling Stone devoted an entire issue to his life and legacy, and featured his photo on the front page with no subtitle of any kind. Text on a magazine cover explaining the death of a legend would’ve been as unnecessary as fancy window dressing on The White Album. In either case, the music spoke for itself.