Six Memos from the Last Millennium by Joseph Skibell

Author:Joseph Skibell [Skibell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2016-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Gate of a Broken Heart

THESE THINGS ARE DIFFICULT TO MEASURE, BUT I imagine I’ve spoken enough about rock ’n’ roll in a book about the tales in the Talmud. Still, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to draw your attention to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. The album, Harrison’s epic three-record solo debut following the breakup of the Beatles, includes two versions of the song “Isn’t It a Pity.”

In those days—this was 1970, ancient history now, I know—vinyl LPs, or records, as we called them, unlike CDs, contained data on both sides, and—as quaint as it may now seem—the physical act of listening to a record actually contributed to the music’s dramatic structure. The end of the last song on Side One, for instance, created a kind of entr’acte while the listener flipped the record over, and the second-to-last track on Side Two (or Side Four in Harrison’s case), before the denouement of the final song, served usually as the record’s climax.

Prime real estate in terms of song placement in the days before shuffle mode, these are where Harrison places his two versions of the song. “Isn’t It a Pity (Version One)” provides a stirring conclusion to the album’s first side, and “Isn’t It a Pity (Version Two)” is its penultimate track (excluding the instrumental jams comprising the third record).

The two versions of the song differ in a number of ways. Version Two is leaner, simpler, shorter, while Version One clocks in at over seven minutes and ends with a long, swelling coda of singers reminiscent of the coda that concludes the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” In fact, a minute twenty or so from the song’s end, about halfway into the coda, the chorus of singers slyly introduces the nah nah nah-nah-nah motif from “Hey Jude” as a countermelody.

This is a musician’s artful intertextuality. As any Beatlemaniac knows, according to the received lore, Harrison had wanted to score each of the singer’s lines in “Hey Jude” with an answering line from his guitar, but Paul McCartney, the song’s composer and its singer, shot down the idea.

McCartney annoys Harrison by reminding him of the issue in a subsequent disagreement the two men have—this one filmed and included in the movie Let It Be—in which McCartney once again attempts to micromanage Harrison’s playing, driving Harrison temporarily out of the group.

The two versions of “Isn’t It a Pity” are Harrison’s answer to McCartney. The sampling from “Hey Jude” in the coda of “Isn’t It a Pity (Version One)”—a song that decries how we take each other’s love and cause each other pain—makes clear exactly who the singer has in mind; while, in Version Two, the tasteful and restrained way the guitar comments upon each of the singer’s phrases surpasses in subtlety and beauty McCartney’s stripped-down arrangement of “Hey Jude.”

In the gentlest of ways, with these two versions of his song, Harrison addresses McCartney and demonstrates to him—and to us—how shortsighted and wrong his musical choices have been.

IN TAHANUN, the twice-daily prayer

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.