Beau Brummels – "Laugh, Laugh" (1965)

Don’t think I'm being funny when I say

You got just what you deserve

I can’t help feeling you found out today

You thought you were too good

You had a lot of nerve

How about we take a break from picking on the Beatles and pick on Silicon Valley multibillionaire Jack Dorsey for a change?

Dorsey, who is the CEO of Twitter, was hauled before the U.S. Senate a few days ago to do some ’splaining about his company’s inconsistent and hypocritical censorship policies. 

Apparently he is planning to dress up as a dishabille mental patient this Halloween, and chose to give the Senators a preview of his costume:

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A few years, Forbes magazine picked the 43-year-old Dorsey – who is the CEO of both Twitter and Square, and who has a net worth of between five and ten billion dollars – the world’s most eligible bachelor.

Dorsey has been linked romantically to a number of women over the years, including Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition model Raven Lyn Corneil – who was some 20 years younger than Dorsey when she met him in 2018 . . . and still is today.

Corneil once told an interviewer that “A man that doesn’t have any passion in the bedroom will never win me over.”

Raven Lyn Corneil

Only she can speak to whether her interest in Dorsey relates more to his abilities as a lover or the fact that he is worth five to ten billion dollars.

But I think that it’s safe to say that Corneil wasn’t won over by Dorsey’s beard.

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That photo of Dorsey was taken while he was getting reamed by a number of U.S. Senators earlier this week.  

The Senator who took the laboring oar during Dorsey’s testimony was Texas Republican Ted Cruz, who tore Dorsey not one, but several new assh*les.

Like Dorsey, Cruz has a beard:

Cruz’s beard doesn’t do him any favors.  But at least Cruz doesn’t look like a guy who sleeps in the doorway of the neighborhood liquor store and takes a dump on the sidewalk every morning.

Dorsey looks exactly like that.

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When I was younger, I would occasionally go a week or two without shaving.  But I never cultivated a full-fledged beard.

I did grow a mustache when I was in college, and I kept it until I was 42.  (I decided to shave it off a couple of days after my youngest child was born.  My wife was surprised when she came home from the hospital – neither she nor my other children had ever seen me without a mustache.)

My mustache was nothing special, but at least it was a real mustache – I’m a pretty manly guy, after all.

When I was in my twenties, I let the mustache grow down to my chinline – along with my shoulder-length hair, my mustache gave me the look of a Mexican bandido, or a taller Charles Manson.

Soon after graduating from law school and beginning work as a federal government lawyer, a female colleague of mine told me that my mustache made me look dangerous.

It was – and remains – the nicest thing a girl has ever said to me.

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If you have a beard, a mustache, or both, get rid of it – especially if you are anywhere near as old as I am.  (I’m speaking mostly to my fellow males.  But my advice applies equally to women.)

Take my word for it: you will instantly look ten years younger without facial hair.

Are you listening, David Letterman?

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Jack Dorsey is quite a bit younger than me, and he may not be concerned about looking older than he really is.

But he should be concerned about looking like a dumpster-diving hobo.  

It would be different if Dorsey really was homeless – in that case, he would deserve our sympathy and our help.

But someone with billions who chooses to look like the way he looks has a screw loose.  Surely he can’t believe that he looks good this way.

Did none of his public relations minions tell him that he work look incredibly ridiculous appearing before the U.S. Senate with that beard?  (Not to mention his nose ring – I didn’t notice the nose ring at first.)

Add to that the fact that he really had nothing persuasive to say in response to the criticisms from Senator Cruz et al. – he looked like a deer in the headlights the whole time – and you will be forgiven for thinking that you never want to invest your hard-earned money in a company run by a doofus like Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey’s fellow Silicon Valley billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, won’t ever be mistaken for George Clooney or Brad Pitt.  But at least he didn’t make things worse with a ridiculous beard, or eccentric haircut, or crazy clothes:

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I’ve made some serious mistakes over the years when it comes to grooming and fashion.

Here I am in 1977 – at the height of my “dangerous” period:

Here I am in 1980 – somewhat less dangerous:

I just have one question about this photo, which was taken a few years later.  Is it my glasses that are crooked, or is it my eyes?

But as bad as those photos are, they pale in comparison to Jack Dorsey’s:

OMG – I just noticed that he’s got a nose ring.  (If you own stock in Twitter, it’s time to SELL!)

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The Beau Brummels were a San Francisco band that came out of the gate strong – their first single, “Laugh, Laugh,” was a top 20 hit in 1965, and the follow-up release, “Just A Little,” did even better.

But they never had another hit.

What happened?  The owners of their floundering record labels – who were also their managers – essentially dumped them, and the major label they signed with next didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

Some critics say their music stands up very well when compared to groups like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Lovin’ Spoonful.  But no one bought their albums.

They broke up in 1968, reunited briefly in 1974, and broke up again the next year.

Click here to read an article about their career that’s aptly titled “Were the Beau Brummels America’s Unluckiest Band?” 

Click here to listen to today’s featured song.

Click here to watch an episode of The Flintstones featuring the “Beau Brummelstones” singing “Laugh, Laugh.”

And click on the link below to buy that song from Amazon:

Beatles – "Ticket to Ride" (1965)

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

But she don’t care

The Beatles released 17 studio albums in the United States in just over six years.

Believe it or not, 15 of those albums made it to the #1 spot on the Billboard album charts.  The two that didn’t make it all the way to #1 made it to #2.

The Beatles were great . . . but they weren’t that great.  (I doubt that it’s even possible to be that great.)

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Say something the least bit negative about the Beatles and I guarantee you’ll hear from the haters.  

2 or 3 lines has never been afraid to call ’em as I sees ’em.  When a best-selling recording artist is overrated – I’m talkin’ about you, Elvis Presley, and Bruce Springsteen, and the Grateful Dead (to name just a few) – I don’t hesitate to say so.

The people who squeal the loudest when I cut their favorites down to size are without a doubt Beatles fans.  If you question their belief that every Fab Four record is a work of unadulterated genius – much less suggest that the Beatles may not be the G.O.A.T. when it comes to pop music – the Beatlenazis squeal indignantly.

I would never question that  John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison) were prodigiously talented pop songwriters.  They cranked out hit songs like the rest of us crank out bowel movements.

Songs like “Taxman,” and “A Day in the Life,” and “I Am the Walrus,” and “Helter Skelter,” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” are as good as anything recorded in the sixties.

But “Yellow Submarine,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” and “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Come Together,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Let It Be” are unadulterated crap.  

Feel free to blame drugs and/or Yoko Ono for all that crap, but please . . . don’t try to deny that the Beatles recorded a lot of crap.

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All those songs – both the really good ones and the really bad ones – came from the Beatles’ later album.  

The main issue that I have with the songs the Beatles recorded in 1964 and 1965 – which is to say before the drugs and before Yoko – is that most of them are what I would call “songlets” instead of songs.

I recently took a close look at the tracks on the Help! album – the 8th of the 17 Beatles albums released in the U.S. before the band broke up – and discovered that virtually every song on it is cast from the same mold.  

Songs like “The Night Before” and “I Need You” and “Another Girl” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” all contain 80 or 90 seconds of original material that is stretched to within an inch of its life in order to produce a track of acceptable length (i.e., between two and three minutes).

As I’ve discussed in the previous two posts, that stretching was accomplished through rather unimaginative repetition.   

Of course, repetition is very common in pop music.  In particular, choruses wouldn’t be choruses if they weren’t repeated.

But songwriters and record producers need to be careful with repetition.  Most of the time, you don’t want to repeat something so that it sounds exactly the same as it sounded the first time – it should be louder, or faster, or something. 

And repetition shouldn’t be utilized willy-nilly.  For example, you might close a song by repeating the first verse – but something should have happened during the course of the song that makes the verse have a somewhat different meaning the second time it’s sung than it did the first time.

Unfortunately, the Beatles repeated verses, bridges, instrumental solos . . . they repeated everything.  And many times there was no reason for that repetition except that the song would be too damn short otherwise.  

Right or wrong, one of the conventions of sixties pop music – with very occasional exceptions – is that songs need to be at least two minutes long, but not much longer than three minutes.  (There are a lot of great sixties records that are significantly longer than three minutes, but most of them aren’t exactly tight – they feature lengthy instrumental breaks, etc., that didn’t really work in the classic “Top 40” format that ruled American radio back in the day.)

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Here’s what Paul had to said about “Tell Me What You See” (which appeared on the UK version of Help! but not on the version released in the U.S.):

[This song is] not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or “B” sides.  

He could have said the same thing about “Another Girl” and “The Night Before” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” all of which I picked on in the previous two posts.

None of those songs were hit singles – unless you owned the Help! album, you may have never heard them.  So you might think I’m intentionally cherry-picking from the Beatles’ weaker songs here to make my point.

But what about “Ticket to Ride”?  

It was a #1 single for the Beatles in 1965, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as one of the twenty best Beatles songs ever.

Be that as it may, it’s still a songlet.

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There’s not a lot to “Ticket to Ride” – it’s half filler, like a padded bra. 

The verses are quite short – two lines per stanza.

The bridge is four lines long – but the fourth line is identical to the second one.

And the chorus is a typical Beatles chorus:

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

She’s got a ticket to ride

But she don’t care

(Come on, guys – would it have hurt you to put a little more effort into your choruses?)

Add it all up and there’s barely 80 seconds of original material. 

I’m going to be generous and allow the Beatles to repeat the first verse after the bridge – that would have made the song roughly two minutes long, which would have been acceptable (barely) by the standards of the sixties.

But the Beatles not only repeated the first verse, they repeated the bridge and then repeated the second verse as well.

In other words, the Beatles essentially performed their little songlet twice.  First, they did verse 1/chorus/verse 2/chorus bridge.  Then they did verse 1/chorus/bridge/verse 2/chorus.

All that effort to stretch “Ticket to Ride” to just over three minutes long – making it the first Beatles recording to break the three-minute mark.

That is a very telling fact.

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“Ticket to Ride” is a catchy, charming little song – I wouldn’t dream of changing stations when it comes on the radio.

But a lot of my feelings about the song are based in nostalgia – they say that the pop music you like the best is the music that was popular when you were a teenager, and God knows that’s true of baby boomers and their affection for the Beatles.

Apologies to my fellow boomers.  I love “Ticket to Ride,” and so do most critics.  But I would be more enthusiastic about it if the Beatles had put a little more effort into the chorus, written three verses instead of just two, and skipped repeating the bridge.

When my kids were young, we got a babysitter and went to a movie every Sunday just to get out of the house.  Most of the movies we saw seemed pretty good while we were watching them – they at least pulled you in and held your attention until the climax.  

But if you thought them about on the way home, or talked about them with your friends at work the next day, you realized that they didn’t really hang together all that well.  There were often flaws in the script that you didn’t notice at first, but that became apparent if you analyzed them.

“Ticket to Ride” is kind of like one of those movies.  When it comes on the radio, it grabs me – I turn up the volume and happily sing along to it.  But when I sit down with the lyrics in front of me and listen to it more critically, the fact that it’s a somewhat flimsy piece of work is all too apparent.

 

There are other songs from 1965 – “Satisfaction” and “My Generation” are two good examples – that are so much more satisfying.  

“Ticket to Ride” was a #1 hit that still has great appeal.  

But “Satisfaction” and “My Generation” are true works of art that captured the zeitgeist.  They mattered in a way that “Ticket to Ride” and all the other Beatles hits from that era didn’t.

Click here to listen to “Ticket to Ride.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Beatles – "You're Going to Lose That Girl" (1965)

You’re gonna lose that girl 

You’re gonna lose that girl 

You’re gonna lose that girl 

 

The Beatles recorded a lot of songs that I think are more accurately described as “songlets.”

If you strip away the unnecessary repetition of verses and bridges in those songs, you’re left with only 80 or 90 seconds of music – which is not enough for an album track or a 45 side even by the somewhat loose standards of the sixties.

In addition to “Another Girl” and “I Need You” – which were discussed at some length in the previous 2 or 3 lines – virtually every other song on the Help! album qualifies as a “songlet.”

For example, there’s “The Night Before,” which really should have ended at about 1:30.

Since that’s too short, the Beatles lengthened the track to 2:37 by essentially repeating the second verse, the bridge, and the third verse.  (To give them credit, the way they handled the second second verse was clever.  Instead of simply repeating the entire, they replaced the first two lines of that verse with a brief guitar solo, and then repeated the second two lines.)

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The more shameless case of using repetition to stretch a song from the Help! album is “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which has barely a minute’s worth of original material.  

The Beatles start stretching from the outset of that song by opening up with the chorus: “You’re gonna lose that girl (Yes, yes, you’re gonna lose that girl)/You’re gonna lose that girl (Yes, yes, you’re gonna lose that girl).”

Next is verse one, which is of the most unimaginative verses ever written:

If you don’t take her out tonight

She’s gonna change her mind 

And I will take her out tonight

And I will treat her kind 

After another chorus, we’re presented with verse two, which is just as unimaginative as verse one (which it closely resembles):

If you don’t treat her right, my friend

You’re gonna find her gone

‘Cause I will treat her right, and then

You’ll be the lonely one 

What’s next – that lame one-line chorus, repeated a third time.

After that, there’s a bridge.  (Hooray!  Something different!)

That’s followed by a brief guitar solo and yet another presentation of our old friend, the chorus.

Which is followed by the bridge – bridges in short pop songs really shouldn’t be repeated, but the Beatles made a habit of doing so – and a repetition of verse one.

Last and certainly least, we get the chorus yet again.  (The phrase “You’re gonna lose that girl” is repeated some 28 times – but who’s counting?)

What the Beatles did was the musical equivalent of a teenaged girl stuffing her bra with socks.  But even with all that padding, and the song is still only 2:20 long – barely a B-cup.  

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The Beatles didn’t repeat the bridge to stretch out “Tell Me What You See” – which was on the British version of Help! but was released in the United States on Beatles VI (which was actually the 7th Capitol Records studio album released by the Beatles in the U.S.) but only because there is no bridge in that song.

Instead, they stretched that song to an acceptable length by turning two and a half verses into four – the second rhyming couplet in the third verse is word-for-word the same as the second rhyming couplet of the first verse, while the fourth and final verse simply repeats the third verse – and by repeating the electric piano solo note for note.

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Here’s what Paul had to said about “Tell Me What You See” in a 1997 book: “[This song is] not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or ‘B’ sides.”  

But the Beatles didn’t use the trick of repeating verses and bridges willy-nilly in order to stretch a single into a song only in their lesser-known “B” sides and album fillers.  In fact, some of the Beatles’ biggest hits were terribly repetitive.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll discuss three Beatles singles that were number one hits in 1965 – each one a “songlet” that would have fallen short of the minimum length expected of a sixties record if it hadn’t been stretched through pointless repetition.

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The entire American version of the Help! album was less than 29 minutes long.  That meant that each of its 12 tracks average less than two and a half minutes in length.

And that’s not the half of it.  Five of those 12 tracks were instrumentals taken from the movie’s orchestral score, which was composed and conducted by a chap named Ken Thorne.  I don’t know much about Ken Thorne, but I know that he wasn’t one of the Beatles!

If you paid good money for the Help! album, you got roughly one-third original Beatles songlets, one-third repetition, and one-third orchestral filler.  I’d ask for my money back if I were you.  

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Click here to listen to “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Beatles – "Another Girl" (1965)

For I have got another girl

Another girl

Another girl

A Facebook friend of mine – we’ll call him “Mark,” since that is his name – recently posted a link to the 1965 Beatles song, “Another Girl.”  

He noted that the song was a rare example of a Beatles record that featured Paul McCartney on lead guitar, and asked me to provide a definitive “take” on Paul as a lead guitarist.

I’m not a guitarist, and any opinions I offer on the relative ability of guitarists deserve no more weight than anyone else’s.  

Remember what Clint Eastwood said about opinions in The Dead Pool, which was the fifth and final “Dirty Harry” movie?  “Opinions are like assh*les – everyone has one.”

In any event, Paul’s lead guitar work on “Another Girl” was so minimal – a few notes here and there, and a three-bar outro – that you can’t say really anything definitive about his ability as a guitarist based on this record.

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None of the Beatles – including Paul McCartney – were instrumental virtuosos.  

McCartney was certainly a versatile musician.  He became the Beatles’ bass player mostly because no one else wanted the job, but he was probably as capable a guitarist as George Harrison or John Lennon.

Paul played drums on several Beatles tracks, and he played all the instruments on his first solo album – including acoustic and electric guitar, bass guitar, drums, piano, organ, et al.

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What I find most interesting about “Another Girl” wasn’t Paul’s lead guitar work, but how the song illustrates some fundamental truths about Beatles records in general.

For example, the Beatles – by which I’m really referring to Lennon and McCartney – had a knack for coming up with clever and charming song ideas, but were not very good at developing those ideas into fully-realized records.

“Another Girl” really should have ended at about the 1:20 mark – but 1:20 is way too short for a pop record.  So instead of stopping there, the Beatles simply repeat the bridge and then repeat the third verse.  That gets them to 2:05 – which is still pretty short.

Beatles producer George Martin with the Fab Four

I can just imagine the discussion in the studio after take one of “Another Girl”:

George Martin:  I don’t know, boys . . . 2:05 is a bit short.  

John Lennon: For f*ck’s sake, George, what do you want us to do?  Repeat the bloody bridge again?  It’s bad enough we repeated it once.

Paul McCartney: That’s right, John.  You shouldn’t repeat a bridge at all . . . especially not one that relies on a trite minor-to-major cadence.  You really don’t want to lean on that little trick too heavily.

George Martin: I guess you’re right.  OK, I can live with 2:05.  Shall we move on to “I Need You” next?

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The Help! album is chock full of what I’m going to call “songlets” – inchoate half-songs that were taken out of the oven too early. 

The second George Harrison song recorded by the Beatles – “I Need You” – is another good example of a Beatles singles.

“I Need You” should have ended at about the 1:30 mark.  But just as they did with “Another Girl,” the Beatles stretched it to an acceptable length by simply repeating the bridge and repeating the third verse.  

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Not to beat a dead horse to death, but the next 2 or 3 lines will discuss more songs from the Help! album where the Beatles used simple repetition to stretch a too-short song idea into a just-long-enough track. 

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Click here to listen to “Another Girl.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

White Stripes – "Seven Nation Army" (2003)

And that ain’t what you want to hear

But that’s what I’ll do!

Here’s a photo I took today while riding my bike on the Washington & Old Dominion rail trail in Leesburg, Virginia.

See those three white stripes across the trail?  

Those stripes are actually rumble strips about one-quarter inch thick – mini-speed bumps, if you will.

Whoever is in charge of the W&OD has placed those rumble strips about a hundred yards before each street that the trail intersects.  

Obviously, their purpose is to alert riders – especially those riders who aren’t paying attention because they are not only listening to loud music as they ride, but are also singing along with it – that they need to slow down and look both ways so they don’t get squashed flat by a big-ass SUV or pickup truck (which are the only kind of vehicles I’ve ever seen on the streets of Leesburg, Virginia) when they cross the street.

You can ride over the rumble strips on the W&OD without having to slow down.  But the vibration you feel as you roll over them at speed is quite noticeable.  

I probably rode over 100 of them today.  I understand the good intentions of the faceless bureaucrats who decreed that they be installed along the W&OD.  

But it’s annoying as hell to have to ride over so many bumpy little rumble strips.

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Take another look at that photo of the rumble strips that I took today.  Notice how they go all the way across the trail:

That means that a biker has to ride over them regardless of which direction he is going.

And that means that half of the rumble strips you ride over are located AFTER you cross a street – not BEFORE you cross the street.

It’s fine to be warned that you’re approaching a potentially dangerous street crossing BEFORE you cross the street.  But what’s the point of installing rumble strips that you ride over just AFTER you’ve crossed that street?

What the hell were those faceless bureaucrats thinking?

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I featured songs by the White Stripes in no fewer than ten 2 or 3 lines posts in the summer of 2011.

Surprisingly, none of the posts featured the White Stripes’ most popular song, “Seven Nation Army” (which was released in 2003 on the Elephant album).

If you ever attend baseball or football or basketball or soccer games, it’s almost certain that you’ve heard the familiar opening riff of “Seven Nation Army” either sung by the crowd, or played over the stadium sound system, or both. 

Click here to listen to “Seven Nation Army” (which is how Jack White of the White Stripes pronounced “Salvation Army” when he was a child).

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: