A Pilgrim’s Digression

One way I can tell I am getting old is that, though I still love the Beatles music dearly, in the song “She’s Leaving Home” I identify more with the parents than the runaway girl. I found myself rather teary eyed at the verse:

Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown
Picks up the letter that’s lying there
Standing alone at the top of the stairs
She breaks down and cries to her husband
Daddy our baby’s gone

And yet another symptom of the end of youthful romanticism is that I used to think the song “Fixing a Hole” was about the treatment of depression: “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in.”

Now, I think the song is just about basic home maintenance.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in…
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door…
I’m painting my room in a colorful way…

Who said the Beatles were all about drugs and sex, anyway?

Here’s an interesting way for you to occupy a lunch break. Put the Beatles on your iPod and go to songfacts.com and read the commentary for each song, as you listen to it.

What I find fascinating is how there is no simple interpretation of even the simplest Beatles song. Of course there are those who interpret everything as either about drugs or sex, but the fascinating thing is how people personalize these songs and totally disregard such anchors of interpretation as authorial statements of intent.

So what if Paul said that “Fixing a Hole” was literally a song about fixing a hole in the roof of his home in Scotland; I say it’s about recovering from depression. That’s what it means to me. And someone else sees it as a song about recovery from drug addiction. Still someone else says the song is about the freedom to let your mind wander while smoking pot.

And people argue about these issues, too, as if the misnomer “Song Facts” must literally be true and we can, indeed, establish hard facts about the meaning of songs.

One of the funniest arguments isn’t even about interpretation, but concerns something that ought to be a verifiable fact. At the end of the 1967 song “All You Need Is Love,” one of the Beatles can be heard in the background singing, almost chanting, the chorus from the 1963 hit, “She Loves You.” But is it Paul or is it John? There is a raging argument about that in the comments section. And people seem genuinely angry about it. Take this one guy, for example, who insists on his point of view as if he were Simone de Beauvoir arguing a vital point of epistemology with Jean Paul Sartre:

“This is definitely not like Paul! Not even close…obviously you don’t listen enough to their music. I mean, to say someting like that if you are not well versed in their history is sensational. This song is VERY John.”

I don’t know how anyone can doubt the greatness of this music, when you have passionate people like that arguing such miniscule points of contention as if they were medieval scholastics debating theology.

Anyway, you still learn a lot from reading the info at Song Facts in conjunction with the music. For example, did you know that in the background of the song “Paperback Writer,” you can hear John and George singing Frère Jacques in falsetto?

You might also learn that the man who burned his mind out in a car (from “A Day in the Life”) is actually Tara Browne, an heir to the Guinness fortune who died in a car accident. The “news” in the song comes from two stories Lennon read in the Daily Mail, one about Browne and the other about a surveyor who counted 4000 holes in the roads of Blackburn. In saying that there were enough holes to fill Albert Hall, the surveyor–who presumably could be found out with a little research–unwittingly provided one of the most comic lines in all of music history: “Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” The comic part being that, of course, a hole can’t fill anything.

Whether you have time to waste, or want to know more about the Beatles music, this is a decent, informal place to start. However, as with any wiki, one should not necessarily trust it as an authoritative source. Authoritative sources are so boring, though. I much prefer, “I heard it from my brother who got it from a roadie that traveled with the Beatles.”