"The pureness and simplicity must come across so people can hear the human part of the song. That is everything."
I came across that quote and I immediately thought of the bonus mini-zine that Teatles made called Beautiful Beatle Moments. It features contributions by tweet to the question: "Does anyone have a favourite moment in a Beatles song? A second or two where it all gets perfect?"
The quotes are abundant and anonymous: "The pause in the middle of She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, just before the "She said she'd always been a dancer." Each moment is spliced into a micromoment, conveyed in only a handful of words but it takes you straight to a heart-buzzing vocal take or an instrumental that makes you feel vast levels of love and gratitude. Intense emotions are cited, "John's high-pitched desperate 'pleeease' at the end of Don't Let Me Down."
In any Beatle-related conversation, it is common to bandy around the term "perfect". It's convenient for the hyperbolic gushy types like myself, but it's also helpful to convey a certain sense of gratitude that everything managed to transpire as it did. It's also helpful that to have community of people who can identify these "moving" micromoments of happiness, something barely detectable that somehow reveal the humanness, the laughter and mistakes of this band: "George fudging the solo in All You Need is Love - I know it was live. All these add to their greatness rather than detract from it."
Others run towards the raw expression and I can feel the beauty of these moments too: "Oh, how could I forget this? John baring his soul and almost sobbing the vocals, five years prior to the Plastic Ono Band album, "But it's my pride, yes it yes, yes it is, yes it is." It's beautiful to recognise something that could have been characterised as a therapeutic release, despite the evident levels of pain. We like to think we know what John had been going through and detecting these small dimensions of grief help us in some way. They help, because we miss him. It also provides a small hope that this music was cathartic for him too.
It's strange but that kind of vulnerability was mentioned only today, when I watched Paul analyse his photographs for the NPG's exhibition, Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm. Paul looked up at his photograph of John sitting in the back seat of a car, his hand folded to cover his mouth. "I forgot how he used to do that all the time..." I recognised that self-soothing gesture within myself, as a former thumb-sucker. You cover up on your month in moments of stress and you do so without even thinking about it, and then you realise you're doing it all the time.
In Music and Imagination, Aaron Copland wrote about how difficult it was to seize the musical experience and hold it. "Unlike that moment in a film when a still shot suddenly immobilises a complete scene, a single musical moment immobilised makes audible only one chord, which in itself is comparatively meaningless." It might be easier to look at Paul's photograph of John and extrapolate the character of a man we feel like we know, but it's still fun to challenge Copland. We're each attempting attempt to seize the musical experience, as fleeting and granular as it is. The joy is in the attempt.
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