The conclusion of the discussion Gary Wenstrup and I had in
rating individual tracks on the albums named here, as well as the
1966 Capitol release, "Yesterday"...and Today.
I think, is so overlooked, both
message-wise and musical construction-wise. It's one of those
songs, first of all, musically, based on piano. Not a lot of
guitar, except those little stabbing, which was a 1965 sound in
other people's records that year. Nice block harmonies. Then John
breaking out his own for the verses, starting this implicitly
spiritual song, the first words out of his mouth of the verse in
the beginning. Nice touch. That's beautiful. It's this precursor to
certainly, All You Need is Love and Give Peace A Chance. It's him.
It's messianic John for the first time, really wanting to use his
platform to promote something good. They'd said that they're all
potheads at this point. I mean, they'd taken acid a couple of times
at this point, but not the full immersion by the time of
Revolver.
That has to be what's informing his
wanting to evangelize on behalf of love at this point. It's
interesting that they didn't use this one for Yellow Submarine,
because that whole love thing at the end in pepper land, in the
face of the mayonnaise, it seems like it would be enmeshed right in
there. I guess, they had All You Need Is Love. That was what they
went with. I think, it's a great message, a great performance, nice
arrangement. I love that organ. Then there's that whole musical,
we're going to build a song around one note and it's got that drone
throughout it, so you've got that musical experimentation going on
at the same time.
Not a song that got a lot of airplay. I
don't know if anybody ever covered it. One, they never seemed to
look back at it, but it's an early clue to the new direction. It's
just this forerunner of lots of things that would come and they
just pull it off. They don't sound like you're being preached to.
It works as a pop ditty, but also, it's like, wow, it's got a
really good message to it, that's bigger than boy-girl
relationships.