Picking my favorite Beatles album is like picking my favorite sexual position. I love 'em all, but the one that wins out in the end is the weirdest one, the one that takes the most time, and the one that takes me to places I wasn't expecting to go. When I first purchased the White Album on CD at some point in college, it immediately became my favorite Beatles album, and it remains my favorite to this day. What made it my favorite was its diversity of song types. There is hard rock ("Helter Skelter"), ballads ("Julia"), social commentary ("Piggies"), love songs ("I Will"), soul ("Why Don't We Do It In the Road?"), double entendre ("Happiness Is a Warm Gun"), vaudevillian throwbacks ("Honey Pie"), blues ("Yer Blues"), fun songs ("Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da," "Rocky Raccoon"), and some straight-up weird shit ("Revolution 9"). The Beatles seamlessly combined all of that into an epic double album.
In college, if I ever needed to just take a little while to chill out, I would grab my Discman -- because that's how we listened to music back in the '90s -- and go to my fraternity's lounge, sit down on a couch or comfy chair, just close my eyes, and listen to the album front to back. I've never been into meditation, but this was about as close as I got to it.
Favorite song from Side 1: "Happiness is a Warm Gun"
This is my favorite Beatles song. I've loved it since the first time I heard it. Junior and senior year of college (and in law school), I used to listen to it to psych myself up before flag football games. It's still on my running mix (were I to run). Legend has is John wrote the song after producer George Martin showed him the cover of a gun magazine with the title "Happiness is a warm gun." It's like a mini rock opera in and of itself, with three distinct parts. The song starts with kind of a brooding, acid-inspired hard rockish section. It's kind of eerie at the beginning with John singing "She's not a girl who misses much." You expect him to explain why, which he does, but it makes no sense, as the song kicks into this raunchy fuzzed-out guitar chord. The remainder of the lyrics in the first part are fascinating, mostly because they make no sense whatsoever and are apparently the result of an acid trip. Then completely changes in the short middle section, with the phrase "Mother Superior jumped the gun" repeated for 30 seconds or so while someone plays a tambourine. And finally, it breaks into the last part, an ode to doo wop and soul, where John belts out the only lucid lyrics in the song -- sexually suggestive lyrics that are not actually about putting his finger on your trigger while the rest of the guys sing "bang bang shoot shoot" in the background. All the while, the song switches tempo and time at several points. In the hands of anyone else, what I have just described to you would be a catastrophe. In the hands of The Beatles, however, it is a masterpiece.
Favorite song from Side 2: "I'm So Tired"
This might be the Beatles song that I have quoted the most inside my own head. Pretty much any time I am still dead tired when I wake up in the morning, I say to myself, "I'm so tired," and then the next thing I know, I'm cursing Sir Walter Raleigh. Also, if you are really tired and hope to sleep, I will say that John's suggestion that you have another cigarette is not conducive to sleep.
Favorite song from Side 3: "Sexy Sadie"
It was a tough choice between "Sexy Sadie" and "Helter Skelter." On one hand, "Helter Skelter" may have been the first heavy metal song ever and it has historical significance (even if infamously) a the song that allegedly inspired Charles Manson to terrorize Los Angeles in the late summer of 1969. On the other hand, "Sexy Sadie" has more personal importance for me. No, I am not a Maharishi apologist or hater -- this song was a diss track aimed at the Maharishi, but John was too scared to use "Maharishi," so he changed it to "Sexy Sadie." You see, folks, in college, I had a black '89 Honda Accord that I named Sexy Sadie. Gorgeous little thing she was. On a late January Sunday afternoon in 1999, I was driving back to Bloomington after a weekend visiting some friends at Eastern Illinois. It was raining. I was on SR 46, maybe 20 miles outside of Bloomington, when I was taking slow curve. To be clear, the curve was slow, but my driving was not. I started to hydroplane, crossed the center line and the other lane, slid across a wet field of grass sideways, jumped a small creek, before slamming into a tree and totaling my car. I was listening to The White Album on my Discman, plugged into my tape player, as was the style back then. The song that was playing when I crashed? "Sexy Sadie." Thankfully, I came out unscathed, as did the Discman and the White Album. In fact, in a fit of adrenaline-driven machismo, I yelled, "is that all you got?!" to no one in particular.
Favorite song from Side 4: "Revolution 1"
This is one of two versions of this song. The album version ("Revolution 1") is the slower, more acoustic, and more bluesy version, recorded a few weeks before the more famous, more electric, and more uptempo version ("Revolution") that was eventually released as the B-side to "Hey Jude." Other than the differences in the music, the most noticeable difference is that, in this version, John changes one of the lyrics to add an "in" after talking about destruction ("you can count me out, in"). That's some sneaky ass shit right there.
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