Tell Me Why – Tim Riley, 1988 ★★★

Hunting Aeolian Cadences and Other Exotic Birds

Can anyone still remember what a Beatles song sounded like 29 years ago, before later iterations of this thing called life accreted upon their music and inevitably altered how we perceive it?

That’s why I enjoy this critical analysis by Tim Riley. It captures in amber prevailing notions about Beatles music during an era where I myself was just beginning to dope out what was so special about them.

Of course, back in 1988, people still regarded the Beatles very highly. Their music sounded crisp and vibrant, all the more when weighed against the processed soundscapes of gated drums and swirling synths that predominated then. That year the U. S. pop music charts were dominated by acts like Tiffany (“Could’ve Been”), Richard Marx (“Hold On To The Nights”) and twice by Rick Astley (“Never Gonna Give You Up” and “Together Forever”).

Also topping the U. S. singles chart that year, for the last time, was an actual Beatle. George Harrison notched his third and final solo #1 hit, “Got My Mind Set On You,” which Weird Al Yankovic would parody later that year as “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long.” Beatlemania didn’t last forever, but it hung around long enough for a Weird Al takeoff, something to celebrate.

“Got My Mind Set On You” was a cover of a 1962 Rudy Clark song, thus bringing the Beatles story full-circle, at least the way Tim Riley tells it. In Tell Me Why, he makes clear how central to the narrative is the band’s choice of covers – a hodgepodge of B-side obscurities like “Mr. Moonlight,” girl-group hits like “Please Mr. Postman,” even a Broadway show tune (“Till There Was You,” from The Music Man) – reading today like statements of intent.

“The Beatles and their generation were the first to go through puberty with rock ‘n’ roll on the radio,” Riley writes in his introduction. “Their artistry grew from their eclectic love for the entire spectrum that stretched from ragtime to Broadway, from a desire to synthesize the best of the rock ‘n’ roll they had grown up with with the larger heritage of pop they saw as its backdrop.”

At its best, Tell Me Why offers digestible insights as to what made the Beatles great. Especially when writing about their 1962-66 recordings, that is what he delivers. The section on their first album, Please Please Me, is by itself a first-rate essay of straightforward musical appreciation, whether dissecting the appeal of “I Saw Her Standing There” (“The Beatles themselves are seduced by this music; they too believe in its magic as they perform their first great original piece of rock ‘n’ roll”) or the next song, “Misery,” which Riley promotes as their first in a series of effective pop parodies.

“The differences between [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney emerge quickly on this record: either of them singing the other’s songs would completely alter the implication of the words,” Riley writes. “Paul on the dance floor could be anybody; John invests too much of himself for us to detach who he is from what he’s singing about.”

This is one place where Riley is both on point and of his time. In 1988, it was more difficult than it is now to ignore Lennon. He had been murdered in the beginning of the decade, and that tragedy still had a central place on the band’s legacy, to the point where it became chic to dismiss other band members as “anybody” by comparison.

Some of the mistiness around the legend of Lennon has dissipated. Still, you can’t deny Riley’s point of how much his personality comes through from the very start, and what a difference it makes.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney at work in the studio. While their famous songwriting partnership was often a matter of one giving the nod to something the other wrote, there were times when they wrote shoulder-to-shoulder. Riley's book takes a penetrating look at the more collaborative efforts, including "In My Life," "We Can Work It Out" and "I've Got A Feeling." [Image from http://www.beatlesebooks.com/hold-me-tight]

As  he goes along, Riley discusses all the other Beatles songs, the hits, the B-sides, and the album tracks. Each chapter chronologically takes on a particular album as well as singles released at around the same time; one chapter straddles both Magical Mystery Tour from late 1967 and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack released early in 1969. He presents a strong case for the band’s artistic advancement from album to album, at least until 1967, when Riley says they hit a creative dead end from which they never fully recovered.

This is the one place where Riley diverges from the accepted wisdom circa 1988, which held Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as their collective apogee. (Today it’s either said to be Revolver or Abbey Road.) He does so almost apologetically, but firmly just the same, shining a harsh light on Pepper tracks like “Within You Without You” (“directionless”) and “Lovely Rita.” For the most part, Riley’s judgments and verdicts are no different than what you would have found in the Rolling Stone Record Guide at that time, though more learned than snarky in tone.

Riley often writes about things like “caesuras,” “elisions,” and “Picardy thirds” without explanation or apology. The fact the Beatles themselves did not read music is by-the-by; Riley’s concern is that their muses led them along some uncharted territory for pop acts that requires an extensive musical vocabulary to appreciate.

Thus his take on “I Call Your Name”: 

The clipped economy of the troubled verses is followed by melismas at the end of stanzas (‘for bein’ unfair – ’), and the confessional middle eight has the most interesting turn of harmony as short lines are stretched from ‘Don’t you know I can’t take it’ through the elongation of ‘I’m not gonna may-ee-ay-yake it,’ to the harmonic twist on the held note on ‘I’m not that kind of man – .’ (The added harmony for this line is C major, the neopolitan of the dominant, B major, pivoting on the held tonic note E as a common tone between E major and C major…

You can’t help not thinking of poor William Mann when reading this kind of thing. He was the Times of London’s music critic who took much flak when he decided to take the Beatles seriously following the release of their second album, With The Beatles. He famously noted the appearance of “Aeolian cadences” on the song “Not A Second Time.”

“I have no idea what those are,” Lennon later quipped. “They sound like exotic birds.”

You will find plenty of exotic birds in Tell Me Why, though Riley’s not always so abstruse. Pointedly keeping his musical theory writing in the rock idiom, he draws out how the angular musical textures in tracks like “Good Day Sunshine” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” contribute to the special nature of Revolver, which Riley views as their best album. He notes how the two sides of Abbey Road both suddenly cut off, as if suggesting a greater irresolution connected to the band’s own fate. And he is especially well focused on the mastery of Ringo Starr’s drumming, explaining just what makes him so vital to the overall sound. (“Ringo’s five pert raps on his snare drum...coil the understated allure of the track [‘Rain’] into a commanding opening gesture.”)

This is fantastic stuff. How easy it is to take Ringo for granted, not paying this kind of attention to the dynamism within what we (at least I) often assume is steady beat-keeping!

It’s too bad Riley can’t get much interested in George Harrison, or that he views Paul McCartney as fairly useless once he became a solo artist. Sure, he likes John Lennon a lot more, but even with John’s songs there are caveats, such as “I Am The Walrus” (“John’s stream-of-consciousness becomes just as pretentious as Paul’s heart-on-the-sleeve emoting”) and “Baby You’re A Rich Man” (“flounders in privileged emptiness…”).

I suppose Riley would argue that as the book’s purpose is to delineate what standard the Beatles set, explaining when they failed to meet that standard is fair game. But even when I agreed with him, I found his tone harsh and his analysis subjective, like he was tired of playing professor and wanted to be critic instead. This diminishes the end result.

Riley’s book may be best read as a listeners’ guide for specific albums. As a cover-to-cover read, Tell Me Why sometimes gets caught up in momentum-draining analysis of filigree, though someone listening to the music may have fun picking out what Riley’s talking about track-by-track. For me, that’s where Tell Me Why soars highest beyond the fixed time of its publication.