Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Dec 8, 1998 | Thirty years after its release (Nov. 22 in England; Nov. 25 in the United States), "The White Album" exudes such a strong cultural aura that it behaves as a living entity, the songs transmuting in between listens as if the recording possessed consciousness. As if it were "The White Album" playing us.
Imagine that you don't listen to the "The White Album" for years, just catch a song here and there on the radio. Then you spin the record and realize its song order is as significant as the birth order of your siblings. Try to imagine your family dynamics had your older sister and younger brother reversed ages! It's just as unimaginable that "The White Album" would open with anything other than "Back in the U.S.S.R." Or that a song like "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" would follow anything other than "Mother Nature's Son." As you listen, the songs that seemed brilliant years ago on first listen -- "I'm so Tired," "Helter Skelter" -- now sound particularly casual. Miraculous toss-offs. Surely "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" is as great as "Hey Jude." Hell, they were recorded within weeks of each other. But if the latter had been included on "The White Album," it would have intolerably dominated the record, bulldozing other songs into relative insignificance.
As it is, the album is dominated by "Revolution 9," John and Yoko's (and to a small extent George's) eight-minute, 15-second surrealistic soundtrack to a curious movie/radio show from hell/Timothy Leary acid trip. This song is so alive it even contains secret messages, such as the one to Charles Manson that goes: "Charlie, Charlie, send us a telegram."
It's more than an accident of history that "The White Album" was such a hit at the Manson household, as there was plenty of bad karma present at the album's conception. Many of the songs had been written earlier that year when the Beatles were grooving with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, a scene they split after becoming disillusioned. When the boys started recording, Ringo quit the Beatles for 12 days. Jane Asher broke her engagement with Paul. Cynthia Leonard divorced John over Yoko, who was showing up at John's side at the studio every day, pissing off the remaining two Beatles. The day after the album was finished, John and Yoko were busted for pot. The night before the record's release, Yoko suffered a miscarriage.
Even the Richard Hamilton-designed white cover seemed a little sinister. Official word said it was a reaction against the busyness of the "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour" covers. But it was a dead man who instigated the white. In his 1968 book "The Beatles," biographer Hunter Davies mentions that a year before, in 1967, Beatles manager Brain Epstein was flying out of New York when he was stricken with the premonition that he was going to die. He wrote a "last wish" to the Beatles that said, "Brown paper bags for Sergeant Pepper." Epstein hated psychedelic covers. Although his flight landed safely, by autumn he was dead of an overdose. During the "White Album" session, Lennon riffed off a quick ditty about his former manager working in a coal mine ("Brian Epstein Blues"). Certainly Epstein's "Brown paper bag" comment influenced the decision to go with shroud white.
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