a midway bikelog

I’ve been going through this incredibly complete and annotated list of someone’s ranking of the complete Beatles catalog over the last couple of days. I found the link sort of at random, but it coincides nicely with re-learning the guitar, as i’ve been practicing with a number of Beatles songs that i know well enough to play through, given the chord changes.

The thing about the Beatles is that they’ve somehow never seemed like just a band to me. I listened to my mom’s copy of Meet The Beatles that she had bought (it was released 2 years before she was married) when i was a kid, once i was old enough to work the turntable. This album and Bill Cosby’s Wonderfulness were a big part of my soundtrack as a kid, for about a year or two. Because they were already the Beatles though, this legend of massive musical achievement, even when i started playing music myself i never really appreciated them as a workaday band. Sure, i knew they’d spent years playing clubs and worked hard to hone their playing and songwriting, but it was hard to place them in time, having it all happen before i was forming lasting memories.

Going through this list really helped fix that. It’s not that i necessarily agree with the full ranking, it’s that author JBev wrote extensive notes on the project, with background info and some justification for the choices made in the list. As i went through the song notes (worst to best), even though the chronology was jumbled, the notes kept things straight, and for the first time i was really able to get a sense for the time and place when these songs came out, where the band was in their creative arc, and how the world must have reacted to it, like today watching an artist like Neko Case or Radiohead evolving in real time as new songs and albums are released.

I was certainly familiar with the vast majority of the Beatles catalog, but there were a lot of B-sides and less-familiar tracks in the list that i hadn’t listened to before. The bigger hits took on new meaning, because i could finally place some of them in the band’s timeline and understand them in context. To be honest, i wasn’t always aware of exactly which album some songs had come from, or who had written them, so it was helpful to have that framework in this list.

The other thing that shines through in this list and the notes is the appreciation for the talent in the band and the struggles that the band lived through. When you listen to the catalog like this, considering each song on its own, you can hear the little details that really pull the room together, so to speak. The 4 were not just talented songwriters, they obviously worked really hard (with George Martin) to polish the best of them to a spotless shine. As a bass player, there is much to admire in Paul’s playing; so fluid and even funky in spots, really driving the songs from behind. Ringo too gets a lot of props for being the anchor through songs like A Day in the Life where he’s holding the song together through multiple time and feel changes; an indispensably steady hand on the tiller. They were all students of music at large and explored how to filter those influences through their own work.

If you like the Beatles at all, or just want a different appreciation of them, i highly recommend this list as a good starting point. They truly explored musical territory that has lain fallow since