Even at their least essential, the Beatles couldn’t help being a great f***ing rock and roll band, particularly if John Lennon was unleashing his inner bulldog. Originally found on the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine.
868. hey bulldog
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Tag Archives: Beatles
903. struttin’
“Billy Preston had a pile of great moments from the late sixties through the early seventies. Fifth Beatle, sixth Rolling Stone, and a none too shabby solo careersolo career. Struttin’ gets the nod here because it’s a spaced out rip of total fun and funk, redolent of Saturday afternoons, bored, flipping through the channels, stumbling onto Soul Train, getting kicked into a whole new dimension.” (Philip Random)
925-924. Computer Blue + Darling Nikki
“Two in a row from the album (and movie) that finally made Prince a fact, even for white guys from the Canadian suburbs – that album being Purple Rain, of course. Not that I didn’t already think the guy was pretty darned cool in a funky r+b sort of way. You couldn’t hear twenty seconds of 1999 without thinking that. But after Purple Rain, I guess I just wasn’t seeing the colour anymore (other than purple). After Purple Rain, I realized this guy was the closest the 80s would ever get to having its own Bowie, or Beatles even. I’d crossed over, drank the paisley purple koolaid, seen God (or something similar). Every song on the album deserves to be hailed, and heard. But you probably have already heard most of them on the radio or whatever. Except maybe Computer Blue and Darling Nikki (the raunchy duo that brought Side One to a dramatic conclusion). Needless to say, they .got decent folk all hot and bothered at the time.” (Philip Random)
926. little neutrino
“If you were there at the time (1976), the first you heard of Klaatu likely came in the form of rumour. They were the Beatles secretly reunited, with the clues all there if you just did a little digging. It was bullshit, of course, and thank God, because the album really wasn’t that good. Rather like what you would’ve gotten if Paul McCartney had rediscovered LSD and tried to do another Sergeant Pepper’s, but all alone this time, and maybe drinking copious amounts of vodka spiked cream soda on the side. But the last track was a keeper, something to do with split atoms, I think, and the wrath of gods thus unleashed.” (Philip Random)
936. here there + everywhere
In which Emmylou Harris, who never found a song she couldn’t somehow make her own, takes one of the very few sweet, poignant, utterly beautiful Beatles songs that we’re not all allergic to and, if anything, improves it. “If I ever actually get married, I can imagine it will be prominent in the day’s proceedings.” (Philip Random)
952. beyond the valley of a day in the life
In which the Residents sample the Beatles and make such a glorious mess of things that rumours eventually surface that they are in fact The Beatles themselves, undercover. And all of this at least a decade before sampling-stealing-pirating in the name of art had even begun to achieve hip status. “I actually heard this when it was new in 1977. Not that I was remotely cool at the time, more the opposite. A friend’s big brother heard me talking loud about how progressive rock was the only music that really mattered, because it was so inventive, so ambitious, so strange … so he got me high and set me straight on the fact that there were far, far stranger things going on out there in the name of music than I ever could have imagined.”
Randophonic 