The Beatles album that started their break-up: “Half-assed songs”
While the end of the 1960s marked a fitting time for The Beatles to break up, allowing the beginning of a new decade to foster a collection of artists who would go on to define a new era, the truth is, the steady decline happened long before then.
While 1966 often marks the year the band began their psychedelic odyssey, it also marked the year they officially stopped touring. Deafened by the sound of unrelenting crowd screams, the band decided to pack up their instrument boxes for good and call time on live shows altogether. It was the first moment in their glittering history that they looked officially fatigued by the fame they had cultivated.
With the weight of the world on their back, the foundations of the band were beginning to crumble, and with no live stage to exercise those tensions, the members began to turn them inwards. Subtle feuds were beginning to develop, whether it was the creative desire of John Lennon to explore his darkness, or the tiredness of McCartney’s blind exploration of sonic silliness, or perhaps George Harrison’s stifled pursuit of his own songwriting.
The band were beginning to fray at the seams, and their 1967 White Album was the soundtrack of that. The sprawling double album was the band at their most unhinged, matching the ambition of their concept classic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but with a sense of creative limitlessness which meant nothing was left on the cutting room floor.
Rather than refining the contrasting voices of their songwriters, the band instead decided to bundle them into one package in a record that would act as a whistle-stop tour of the members’ myriad ideas. Obviously, at the heart of that tension was the growing divide between McCartney and Lennon, but wedged in between was the now undeniable greatness of Harrison, who provided one of the standout tracks in ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps‘.
The outcome has split Beatles fans down the middle, with many citing the collaged approach to music making a premier showcasing of their contrasting talents. Whereas others, like Billy Joel, consider the free-willed approach slightly confused in comparison to their more conceptual records.
He boldly claimed, “I hear it as a collection of half-assed songs they didn’t finish writing because they were too stoned, or they didn’t care anymore”, he explains. “I think they had fragments and they put them on the album.”
He even went as far as to admit that he thought “John Lennon was disassociating at that point,” with “Paul [McCartney] carrying the weight” in his psychological absence. He concluded, “Sometimes they were more prolific, and sometimes they weren’t,” he notes. “I hear that in some of those [songs].”
Ultimately, that was the beauty of the album, and why it’s become so beloved in retrospect, and while The Beatles’ breakup was painful at the time, as history has gone on, it’s become a fascinating part of the band’s story, and this album was a telling soundtrack of how that unfolded.
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