Tis Better To Have Loved and Lost Than To Never Loved At All. Alfred Lord Tennyson – Part 11

All right, time to move ahead to the next album in search of unrequited love songs vs. mutual love, centered within the melodic phrasing stanzas. Next up, the imaginative animated film soundtrack.

I remember like it was yesterday, January 1969, home listening to my latest Fab-Four LP when the moment I walked over and removed the record needle off the fresh, out of the package, spinning, Yellow Submarine album, side two, I felt cheated. Disappointment surrounded me, all alone inside my enclosed private space bedroom, as I wondered, what were they thinking, releasing rubbish like this. Side one left me puzzled almost as resentful. Four new songs even the Liverpool composers classified as throw-away pieces and I concurred. Never had a Beatles album shaken my confidence in their genius creativity, until then. To this day, the band’s eleventh album remains my least favorite, however, I must confess, around 1977, while recording a can’t get to the phone message to my land line answering machine, I inserted the orchestrated chorus arrangement of Yellow Submarine by George Martin as a sort of feel-good background music approach to my away from home memo. So, that being said, let’s search our way through for love songs.

11^th LP – Yellow Submarine (Mutual Love Songs / 0 vs One-Sided  / 0 )

Both previous songs already found on earlier LP’s will not have input here today, therefore, I begin with Mr. Harrison.

Track 2 – Only A Northern Song fails as promoting a theme on love, in fact, let me quote George as to defining this tune, “I realized Dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher. As an 18 or 19-year-old kid, I thought, 'Great, somebody's gonna publish my songs!' But he never said, 'And incidentally, when you sign this document here, you're assigning me the ownership of the songs,' which is what it is. It was just a blatant theft. By the time I realized what had happened, when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalogue, I wrote Only A Northern Song as what we call a 'piss-take,' just to have a joke about it.”

George Harrison
Billboard magazine, 1999

Track 3 ­– All Together Now follows a formula fitting for a children’s nursing rhyme, granted the words, “I love you,” enter the verses, mainly imply love of friendship that held a visual bond with the film’s animation.

Track 4 –  Hey Bulldog, originaly titled, Hey Bullfrog, has nothing within the foundation of a love song, just a well performed hard rocker for the film. John gives his take on the facts, and I quote, “That's me, 'cause of the Yellow Submarine people, who were gross animals apart from the guy who drew the paintings for the movie. They lifted all the ideas for the movie out of our heads and didn't give us any credit. We had nothing to do with that movie, and we sort of resented them. It was the third movie that we owed United Artists. Brian had set it up and we had nothing to do with it. But I liked the movie, the artwork. They wanted another song, so I knocked off Hey Bulldog. It's a good-sounding record that means nothing.”  CLICK HERE to enjoy this number: https://binged.it/2m24whV

Track 5 – It’s All Too Much ranks as my favorite bit from this weak production. George explains how the tune evolved, and I quote, “It's All Too Much was written in a childlike manner from realizations that appeared during and after some LSD experiences and which were later confirmed in meditation. I just wanted to write a rock 'n' roll song about the whole psychedelic thing of the time. Because you'd trip out, you see, on all this stuff, and then whoops! you'd just be back having your evening cup of tea! 'Your long blond hair and your eyes of blue' - that was all just this big ending we had, going out. And as it was in those days, we had the horn players just play a bit of trumpet voluntarily, and so that's how that Prince of Denmark bit was played. And Paul and John just came up with and sang that lyric of 'your eyes of blue'.”

If you listen close, the chanting over and over consuming the words, “too much” near the end evolve into “tu-ba”, and then “Cu-ba.”  Just a bit of fun for John and Paul.

Next week takes us through the brilliant final swan song LP where I’ll unveil the tracks about love found listed on the Abbey Road LP.

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