There are a lot of reasons why the Beatles were so great–I mean, you put four talented, innovative musicians together and you’re bound to get impressive results no matter what–but one factor that really elevated them was the way they embraced competition. Their rivalry with the Rolling Stones inspired both bands to up their games, but the Beatles were confident enough to actually donate a(n admittedly lousy) song across enemy battle lines. Even within the group itself, Lennon and McCartney’s constant urge to outdo the other fueled a slew of hits.

So when Paul McCartney read a review claiming that the Who’s 1967 “I Can See For Miles” was the “heaviest” song ever recorded, he did what anyone else would have done. He went Continue reading “#74: Helter Skelter” →

Back in the earliest days of my Beatles obsession, I had relatively limited access to their music. My parents were never big fans, so the only albums I was able to inherit from them were my dad’s vinyl copies of the Red and Blue compilations. During a record shopping excursion in Philadelphia, I was elated to come across Abbey Road on vinyl for the bargain price of $2.98. It turned out that it skipped at the very end of “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” resulting in the final line of that song repeating ad nauseum (“Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, Tuesday’s on the phone to *vrrp* Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, Tuesday’s…”)

In order to get a taste of the rest of the catalog in those pre-YouTube, pre-Spotify days, I turned to 30-second samples on Amazon and Yahoo. Digging through the band’s early albums, the song titles were a lot less attention-grabbing than the ones found on the White Album–from the seemingly nonsensical “Glass Onion” to the curiously misspelled “Yer Blues,” there was Continue reading “#82: Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” →