Yer Blues

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“Yer Blues”
“Yer Blues” cover
Song by The Beatles
Album The Beatles
Released 22 November 1968
Recorded 13 August 1968
Genre Blues-rock
Length 4:01
Label Apple Records
Writer Lennon/McCartney
Producer George Martin
The Beatles track listing

Side one

  1. "Back in the U.S.S.R."
  2. "Dear Prudence"
  3. "Glass Onion"
  4. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"
  5. "Wild Honey Pie"
  6. "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"
  7. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
  8. "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

Side two

  1. "Martha My Dear"
  2. "I'm So Tired"
  3. "Blackbird"
  4. "Piggies"
  5. "Rocky Raccoon"
  6. "Don't Pass Me By"
  7. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"
  8. "I Will"
  9. "Julia"

Side three

  1. "Birthday"
  2. "Yer Blues"
  3. "Mother Nature's Son"
  4. "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey"
  5. "Sexy Sadie"
  6. "Helter Skelter"
  7. "Long, Long, Long"

Side four

  1. "Revolution 1"
  2. "Honey Pie"
  3. "Savoy Truffle"
  4. "Cry Baby Cry"
  5. "Revolution 9"
  6. "Good Night"

"Yer Blues" is a song by The Beatles, the second song on the second disc of the White Album. It was written by John Lennon[1][2] while in Rishikesh, India, and built around a basic I, IV, V chord progression with a passing bIII chord (i.e. E-A-G-B-E).

[edit] Overview

Lennon apparently intended the song as a friendly parody of British blues.[citation needed] He said in a Rolling Stone interview that he used the humorous title as something of a defence mechanism, so that if anyone criticised the song, he could write it off as a parody. Aside from that, he claimed to be serious about the content of the song.[citation needed] The lyrics are extremely suicidal, and include references to Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" as well as cosmology, and were possibly reflective of Lennon's well-documented battles with his psychological demons. The claustrophobic sound of the recording is due to the fact that, according to Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles Recording Sessions, the band recorded the song in Abbey Road Studio Two's "annex", which was actually a large closet in the control room. In interviews for the Beatles Anthology series, Ringo Starr affectionately recalls recording this song in the stripped-down conditions, saying it was like the old days of Beatles live performances. This may have been influential on the Beatles approach to their next album project, Get Back. The stripped-down, bluesy nature of the song bears similarity to much of Lennon's early solo output, including "Cold Turkey" and his 1970 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album and marks a retreat from Lennon's concern with studio experimentation that marked such songs as "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Strawberry Fields Forever".

The vocals in the final verse can barely be heard. The reason for this is that it is actually meant to be an instrumental verse, but what are actually the guide vocals that John Lennon sang off-mic while the drums were being recorded can be heard on the left channel. These guide vocals actually exist throughout the song (on the left channel), but most of the time they cannot be distinguished from the main vocal. The easiest time to hear them (apart from the last "instrumental" verse) is during the third verse - Lennon had obviously not quite finished writing all the vocals and when the backing track was being recorded, he shouted random phrases throughout this verse instead. Although it is easy to hear that there is a second vocal in the track, it is very difficult to discern what is being said. Using timings from the version of the song on the "The Beatles [White Album] (Disc 2)" CD, it sounds like the following phrases are said:

"[It] blacks out" (1:31), "Black cab" (1:34), "Who we are" (1:37), "crossed the road" (2:00), "Why it’s alive" (2:03).[3].

There is also a guide solo that can be faintly heard on the left channel while the main solo is being performed. This is again leakage into the drum microphones during the backing track recording, but because the main solo is only on the right channel, it can clearly be heard by listening to the left channel only.

Just after the White Album came out in late 1968, John Lennon performed "Yer Blues" at The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus with a supergroup dubbed the Dirty Mac, consisting of himself, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. The performance was followed with a boogie instrumental jam called "Whole Lotta Yoko", featuring dissonant avant-garde violinist Ivry Gitlis and vocals by Yoko Ono. The recording was never broadcast, and for decades the performance was only available on bootleg, but it finally came out officially on both CD and video in 1996. Lennon's performance with "The Dirty Mac" was his first live performance since the Beatles' last concert in 1966 and may have contributed to his renewed enthusiasm for live performance in 1969 (see "Give Peace a Chance" and Live Peace in Toronto).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sheff, David (2000). All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992-200. ISBN 0-312-25464-4. 
  2. ^ Miles, Barry (1997). Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 421,497. ISBN 0-8050-5249-6. 
  3. ^ What Goes On - The Beatles Anomalies List (http://www.pootle.demon.co.uk/wgo.htm)