[ad_1]
The Beatles could pack an emotional punch like no other band. Their 1966 masterpiece revolver is full of moments where John, Paul, George and Ringo cut right to the heart. But not The Yellow Submarine. So far. The world has always cherished this song as a jolly children’s novelty, something the boys were quick to make up for a laugh.
So it’s a real shock to hear John Lennon sing it, alone with his guitar, as a sad acoustic ballad. Taken from the new Super Deluxe Edition of revolvercomes out on October 28, it’s one of the biggest surprises: who expected emotional depth from “Yellow Submarine”?
But like so many moments on the new release, “Yellow Submarine” makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about the band. This shows how far they were willing to experiment revolver, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. “The whole album is them saying, ‘Hey, let’s do it completely different,'” says Giles Martin, producer of the new version and son of original producer George Martin. “It was the nitroglycerin that blew everything up.”
The new revolver there are many surprises. It kicks off louder than ever, remixed by Martin and engineer Sam Okell in stereo and Dolby Atmos using the ‘de-mixing’ technology developed by Peter Jackson’s audio team for come back documentary. But the Super Deluxe Collection has 31 samples from the vaults, including three home demos. (There’s also a four-song EP with “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.”) All of which capture the free spirit of revolver sessions — four guys running wild in the clubhouse, figuring out the future.
The “Yellow Submarine” demo was never smuggled or even rumored, even among the most hardcore Beatle geeks. John sings it in his melancholic confessional mode, over folky guitar playing. He sings, “In the place where I was born / Nobody cared, nobody cared / And the name I was born / Nobody cared, nobody cared.” It feels like he’s opening up about his painful memories of childhood, as he would in Strawberry Fields Forever, Dear Prudence, or Julia. It can fit in the White Album or even Ono plastic tape. Is this the Yellow Submarine?
Paul McCartney wrote the classic sing-along chorus. But it’s a shock just to realize that John was so deeply involved, as people tend to assume that he looked down his nose at it. “I had no idea until I started looking at the findings,” says Martin. “It was something between Lennon and McCartney. I said to Paul, “I always thought this was a song you wrote and gave to Ringo and that John was like, ‘Oh, damn ‘Yellow Submarine.'” Not at all.
The world knows it as a showcase for Ringo Starr, always a favorite with children. As Paul recalls in a new foreword he wrote for this edition, “One evening at dusk, lying in bed before falling asleep, I came up with a song that I thought would suit Ringo and at the same time embody the heady vibes of the time . ‘Yellow Submarine’ – a children’s song with a touch of stoner influence, with which Ringo still amazes audiences to this day.”
But this is a case of John and Paul combining two separate fragments into a perfect whole, like A Day in the Life or We Can Work It Out. They discuss the origins of the song in a 1966 radio interview for the Ivor Novello Awards. “I seem to remember the submarine,” John tells Paul. “The chorus, you go in with it. And wasn’t the other part something I had already prepared and we put them together?” Paul agrees, “Right. Yes.”
It’s one of the two revolver samples released today. The other is a fantastic high-energy early frenzy through “Got To Get You Into My Life,” with a stab at Stax-style Memphis R&B. There’s still no horn section—George Harrison plays fuzzy-toned guitar, for a garage-band vibe.
But Yellow Submarine is a whole new journey. In another working tape from the box set, they sing it together as a harmony duet a la the Everly Brothers. You can hear Paul pull back, magnanimously acknowledging that his partner is going deep into a personal zone and giving him all the space he needs. It’s chilling to think how John gets so vulnerable in this tune, then hands it over to Paul to rework it into a Ringo hit. So many beautiful Beatles stories wrapped up in one song. It is a small fragment that has sat unheard in the vault for almost 60 years. But it encapsulates so much about the Beatles’ unique chemistry that you can hear in every moment revolver.
[ad_2]
Source link