Word: lennon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, on PBS's The American Experience next Monday. These solidly researched works revive a thrilling era in American theater and film--a five-year span dominated by the Boy Wonder from Kenosha, Wisconsin...
...news on this album is the emergence of seven early, previously unreleased songs by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison in various collaborative permutations. But before anyone starts the countdown clock, be warned that there are no unpanned nuggets here. The five vocals and two instrumentals hold mainly archaeological interest, offering vague signposts to the musical trails the lads would later blaze. The first, In Spite of All the Danger, is a Paul-and-George ballad with John singing lead, the others singing doo-wop with a perversely rockabilly twist, and an anonymous pal banging out triplets on a piano. They imitate...
...most entertaining cuts show the Beatles' early gift for parody. You'll Be Mine, a Lennon-McCartney jape from 1960, suggests a Five Satins love song as it might have been tortured by a fourth-rate crooner in a Blackpool pub. John offers a basso-preposteroso spoken verse: "My darlin'...I looked into your eyes, and I could see a National Health eyeball..." The band brought the same proto-camp tone to covers of Three Cool Cats and Sheik of Araby, on a failed audition tape for Decca Records on New Year's Day, 1962. Raw and cheeky, the Beatles...
With George Martin's guidance at EMI, they improved immediately. Lennon finds a rude authority in his voice; it blossoms into the plaintive curl that distinguished his Beatles career and oddly disappeared later. McCartney's "wooos'' get full-bodied; instead of the girlish falsetto of early days, he now screams like an electrocuted tomcat. And they suddenly learned how to write songs--the Beatles' enduring legacy. Even their cover versions sound great. "What we generated was fantastic when we played straight rock,'' Lennon says in an interview heard on the album. "And there was nobody to touch us in Britain...
Thirty years on, McCartney pays homage to the ur-Beatles in the lyrics he wrote for the bridge to Free as a Bird. Lennon had laid down only the first couplet: "Whatever happened to/ The life that we once knew?'' And Paul comes in with, "Can we really live without each other?/ Where did we lose the touch/ That seemed to mean so much?/ It always made me feel so ...'' "Free," sings John's disembodied voice, and the other aging lads harmonize ecstatically. The Anthology album vividly recaptures the days when John, Paul, George and Ringo were free as young...