The Beatles ‘white album’ at 50: A classic or an overindulgence?
When it comes to Beatles nostalgia, the band’s self-titled 1968 “White Album” has a kingsize reputation — the biggest album (30 songs!) by the biggest band in the world at the time. But, to paraphrase a Beatles song, it was all too much, and its producer, George Martin, and at least a couple of its participants, George Harrison and John Lennon, would be among the first to agree.
A half-century later, little has changed, at least in the marketplace for more Beatles. Despite a $138 price tag, a newly released 50th anniversary “White Album” box set is No. 2 on the Amazon CD/vinyl sales rankings. It’s a 4-pound doorstop: six CDs and a Blu-Ray disc containing the original album, 27 early acoustic demos and 50 session tracks, most of them previously unreleased, plus a hardcover book. The mix, by George Martin’s son, Giles, is immaculate, and in many ways the Beatles have never sounded better or more intimate.
But is the actual music worth the fuss? The pop historians have trained generations to believe the Beatles could do no wrong, and that the “White Album” was one of the group’s greatest achievements. It undeniably contains some of the band’s finest songs. But does it really make the case for the Beatles in late-career overdrive, or is it a wildly erratic hit-andmiss hodgepodge that could’ve been better served as a single album?
The original “The Beatles” was packaged for posterity. It spread 30 songs across two discs when released on Nov. 22, 1968, with a white cover designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton. The band’s name was subtly embossed on the sleeve above a seven-digit stamp, as if it were an exclusive art piece. It looked cool, radical, and its sound — both more subtle and more bombastic than anything the Beatles had recorded before — signaled its game-changing objectives.
The ambition belied the turmoil swirling within and around the Beatles at the time. Even though the quartet was coming off the 1967 release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” widely acknowledged as an art-pop landmark, the Beatles’ interpersonal relationships were in disarray.
Band manager Brian Epstein, a stabilizing force, died in 1967. A trip to India in early 1968 to visit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and study transcendental meditation ended with the band members disillusioned and feeling exploited. The world was in a darker time as well. The optimism of the ‘67 “Summer of Love” in which “Sgt. Pepper” had been released had given way to the Vietnam War quagmire, the Prague Spring Soviet invasion of Poland, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The bleaker, more cynical tone of a number of songs that would eventually appear on the
“White Album,” particularly those of Lennon and Harrison, reflected this crisis atmosphere.
More disruptive changes were in the air. Lennon and Paul McCartney were in the midst of severing ties with their wife and fiancee, respectively, and partnering with new love interests (Lennon with Yoko Ono and McCartney with Linda Eastman). Lennon struggled with heroin addiction and was becoming increasingly estranged from McCartney, his songwriting partner. Harrison and drummer Ringo Starr were beginning to chafe under McCartney’s expanding artistic control. And there was simmering resentment over how much praise was showered on “Fifth Beatle” Martin for the studio accomplishments of “Sgt. Pepper.”
Nonetheless, things started promisingly when the band reconvened in May 1968. The quartet took a back-to-basics approach and banged out 27 acoustic demos in Harrison’s home in Esher, Surrey, outside London. The four-track recordings are terrific, the primary reason to dig into the box set as they show the Beatles feeding off a new impulse in rock, the more pastoral feel of recordings by Bob Dylan and the Band that had begun circulating in musician circles. While in India, the Beatles jammed on acoustic guitars, and Lennon and McCartney adopted the clawhammer style of finger-picking they were shown by British folk singer Donovan to craft new songs such as “Julia” and “Blackbird.”
The box set also culls tracks from five months of studio sessions that followed the Esher demos. Instead of the sound layering that characterized “Sgt. Pepper” and the 1966 masterpiece, “Revolver,” the arrangements remained relatively pristine. The outtakes reveal how Lennon’s characteristically contrarian take on the counterculture, “Revolution,” evolved into three distinct recordings, two of which appeared on the “White Album” as the bluesy “Revolution 1” and the avantgarde collage “Revolution 9,” plus a definitive hard-rock take that was released as a single. But other than an early version of Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and a ragged but thrilling run through “Helter Skelter,” the three discs of studio extras will largely appeal only to Beatles obsessives.
In the same way, the “White Album” now feels more than ever like an indulgence from a band that was no longer in sum-is-greater-than-the-parts collaboration. Lennon was clearly drawing greater inspiration from Ono, who accompanied him to the sessions, than he was from McCartney. Only two weeks before “The Beatles” was released, Lennon and Ono released their debut album, “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins,” with its scandalous nude cover image.
One of the casualties of the widening McCartney-Lennon classic had it been trimmed to the following 12 keepers. Everything else doesn’t match the high standards the Beatles had previously set for themselves.