McCartney Times

At Beatles anniversary time, the stories write themselves. “It was 25/30/40 years ago today!” “The act you’ve known for all these years!” “A splendid time was guaranteed for all!” Last week’s 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most acclaimed rock album ever and the apogee of the Beatles’ cultural influence in the 1960s, is a time for all those chestnuts and more. But Pepper’s doesn’t make sense if it’s not put in context. And the only way to do that, given the weight of the Beatles’ presence, is to take a look at everything the band put on record over its eight-year recording career.It turns out that ranking the songs recorded by the Beatles in the 1960s is easy; you put the worst one at the top, and the best one at the bottom.The list is based on the band’s British releases, which is how they thought of their work. In the U.K. in the 1960s, the group released 13 official studio albums, including the A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine quasi-soundtrack albums. The so-called “White Album,” The Beatles, was a two-record set. There was also a flurry of non-album singles throughout those years, collected in different ways in the U.K. and the U.S. EMI also released a number of four-song EPs in Britain, particularly early on, but only one of them, Long Tall Sally, contained songs not available in other forms. Releases in the U.S. were a similar mishmash, but from Revolver onward, with minor exceptions, the studio-album releases, at least, were standardized. The songs the band released in the 1960s that were not on their studio albums were eventually consolidated in a catchall collection dubbed, quite lamely, Past Masters.The Beatles based their sound largely on American R&B, and they, like their compatriots in the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, filled their early records with covers of their favorite tracks. They are duly noted below; most sound like the appreciative efforts of a young and not-quite-formed band; the Beatles being the Beatles, however, a few are transcendent.

I use the songs on those releases to create this ranking, with some ephemera (like the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or George Martin’s Yellow Submarine orchestrations) ignored, with a few other interesting tracks that have dribbled out over the decades added in.

This doesn’t get said enough: These songs were specifically designed to pack their punch at high volume. Try ‘em with real speakers, not headphones.

I am indebted to Beatles super-scholar Mark Lewisohn for his many detailed books on the band, most important The Beatles: Recording Sessions; Bob Spitz’s close-to-definitive The Beatles; engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere; and the engrossing podcast Something About the Beatles, hosted by Briton Richard Buskin and American Robert Rodriguez. Any mistakes are, of course, my own. Please let me know if I conflated any facts or misrepresented anything in the comments section below, or publicly humiliate me on Twitter @hitsville.

Beyond everything else, the Beatles were the biggest cultural story of the modern era, and they were, in the end, pop, if pop is music that makes people happy. Through the confusion and the chaos, the pain and the self-questioning, they worked to create a joyous sound. They didn’t fuss about it; it’s what they wanted to do. They loved to turn us on.

213. “Good Day Sunshine,” Revolver (1966): Paul McCartney was welcome to write all the happy, upbeat, cheery-cheery songs he wanted. But this one is beyond the pale. It’s blaring, received, and strident. Even by McCartney standards (“Getting Better,” “Hello Goodbye”) the title is inane. It could have been “Yum Food Delicious,” or “Hot Sex Baby,” or any other three random words McCartney took out of his Young Man’s Collection of Positive Synonyms — and note that of these three choices McCartney chose the blandest. McCartney’s piano playing, which graced so many Beatles songs, right up to “A Day in the Life,” is a parody of itself. It’s the worst song in the Beatles’ classic period. And it ruins Revolver, otherwise the most consistent and mind-blowing collection of pop-rock songs ever conceived by man.

Source: All 213 Beatles Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best