For Meg

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.—Art & Fear

I found Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland by way of a British blog, The Beatles Songwriting Academy, devoted to learning to write songs by studying the Liverpool lads. It’s not just a worshipful fan site: blogmaster Matt Blick rebukes them for lame songs (his “Hall of Shame” includes “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”) and for some stinky rhymes that mar great songs. But Blick has a “Be-atltudes” page, too, in which he enumerates virtues, especially the prolificacy of Paul McCartney and John Lennon:

Between 1962 and 1970 Lennon & McCartney wrote close to 200 songs. Almost all were recorded and released. The majority were top 10 hits as singles or album tracks. Whereas most writers today would throw away a song that wasn’t good enough for their next album or didn’t fit stylistically, the boys always had a reason to finish that song. And because of their insane recording schedule they always had to come up with more songs.

Mates and rivals, who happened also to be gifted, Lennon and McCartney inspired and goaded each other to craft new work. What’s ranked as one of the greatest songs ever written, and their masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” which concludes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, showcases their separate gifts being expressed together under the pressure to come up another tune. They melded utterly separate lyrical fragments each had written.

There are many examples of collage in their work—the result of prolificacy and saving stuff—including the lovely sixteen-minute medley starting with “You Never Give Me Your Money” and including “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Golden Slumbers,” and “Carry that Weight” that climaxes their last album recorded, Abbey Road. As McCarthy says on the mini-documentary that came with my iTunes download of the album:

 We had all these bits and things. We hit upon the idea of medleying them all, which gave the second side of Abbey Road like an operatic structure. Which was quite nice because it got rid of all these songs, in a good way.

McCartney, especially, was known for fiddling with random licks for years. And The Beatles’ recording engineers were taught never to spike any session discards, since they might be folded in somewhere later or used as codas. On “A Day in the Life,” Lennon’s elegiac opening was inspired by newspaper headlines about the death of a friend; then comes McCartney’s upbeat bridge, a boyish flashback he hadn’t been able to finish; and finally the resonant close, haunted by Lennon’s surrealistic imagery about filling the Albert Hall with holes (its genesis in another newspaper story, about a pothole problem).

• • • 

In the past few years, I’ve returned to The Beatles with such delight. Their music is so joyously playful and creative. But then, I imprinted on them almost fifty years ago, listening to Meet The Beatles, sitting crosslegged on my big sister’s carpeted bedroom floor in our beach town—she had a stereo—and staring at the album cover, such a riveting artifact. Holding it, I saw four composed faces floating free in the blackness—Oh, I see, they wore black turtlenecks. That’s how they did it!—and, embedded in the spinning vinyl on Meg’s turntable, such romance.

What else could an adolescent girl and her nine-year-old kid brother want for in Satellite Beach, Florida, in 1964?

And then, in the summer of 1970, we listened to “Here Comes the Sun” beside our swimming pool on her boyfriend D.K.’s portable record player. Wow, high tech.

Splashing in the blue water a block from the Atlantic Ocean, we had no idea what a long cold lonely winter was. Or where Abbey Road was. Or that the coolest band on the planet had split after cutting this album named for a London Street. Or if, just maybe, Paul was dead—he was barefoot in the crosswalk, a sign of death, so someone said, and his cigarette was pointing down. John was dressed like a priest, or an angel, or something, all in white anyway, and George Harrison brought up the rear looking like a gravedigger in his blue denim.

But we agreed with George, busy celebrating the solar life force—and romantic love, of course, that other life force, the lads’ great theme. There in the sun, in the lee of the big ficus tree—Meg and D.K. in a corner of the pool deck, as far from annoying me as they could get—everything, little darlin’, was alright.

(Happy Birthday, Meg.)

Filed under: essay-collage, essay-lyric, music, MY LIFE, NOTED, REVIEW or retrospective, working method, process

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