Dear remaining living Beatles
(…all two of you, unless you count Clarence and his fab songs)
I need to ask you something. I probably need the dead guys to be here too to really get the answers I need, to be honest. But I’ll take what I can get. I’m looking at you, Paul. I do love Ringo but I think this is above his pay grade. Also I typed Ringo wrong on my phone and autocorrect wanted me to say either Bingo or Dingo. Pick your poison. Maybe the RINGO ate your baby!
Okay. We are heading directly into Advanced Beatles Musicology, at least 300-level course here. Probably also assuming you’ve taken a prerequisite in Tape Machines 101 and understand that the keys that songs sound like they’re in on recordings from the 1960s aren’t necessarily the actual keys the songs are in. If you’re at least a little bit confused, just stop reading now. This won’t mean shit to you.
So, like… among Beatles fans or music nerds or some unholy Venn diagram of these two groups that sadly doesn’t seem to include anyone born after 1990, the year that caring about production values died, it’s widely known that keys of songs were sometimes fucked with to adjust pitch and speed, or to account for something else going on with the recording or matching pitch on ancillary instruments, the most commonly noted example being Strawberry Fields Forever, which starts in a pretty sharp A and over time goes fully into B flat.
With this in mind, and with awareness based on other contemporaneous recordings such as multiple Rolling Stones tunes that are somewhere comfortable nestled between B flat and B, my perfect pitch-having ass developed a theory that a lot of songs in B ended up instead being in this purgatory because of all the analog technology and needing to match the pervasive 60-Hz hum. What a smashing theory, I thought! It must also explain my favorite Beatles tune, “She Said She Said.”
Only when I went back to listen to the remastered version, it was fully in B flat. I was sure that the version I grew up listening to on vinyl was between B flat and B. I haven’t been able to verify that yet, but I was about to die on the hill of this song actually being in B and just detuned on tape. And then I started thinking about the guitar part and how it would be shaped and what would make sense, and that’s when I realized… holy shit, this song is actually in A. I don’t know if they capoed it on the first fret (doubtful) or if it’s just a sped up tape because they felt the recording was dragging, but dear god, it all makes so much sense now. I tried very hard to find corroboration to make my case. Every idiot on the internet posting tabs, sheet music, or instructional videos is like “here it is, it’s in B flat” (or worse, it’s in E flat, because we don’t understand the Mixolydian mode that pervades rock music).
So then I was like, okay, live footage. Beatles She Said She Said live? Google video search? Fully expecting it to pull up zilch. But it totally pulled up a hit, a palpable hit: She Said She Said, Get Back sessions, EXTREMELY RARE! And guess what? It’s just 40 seconds of audio, a little loose jam with the gorgeous tone of a 335 or something like it, and it’s totally in A (Mixolydian, duh), and I can’t believe it took me 35 years to realize this, but I feel fully validated and I NEED PAUL TO TELL ME I AM RIGHT. So, internet, how do I get a message to P McC that’s like “hey, my favorite stylish 80-year-old cool aunt, my mom’s favorite Beatle is John and mine is George, but anyway, I like a lot of what you did with Wings and such, and oh by the way, She Said She Said is really in A, right?
I know, I know. Much like the feeding times of Mogwai, I should not be allowed to write after midnight.
Someone please see to it that Sir Paul is alerted. Or Ringo (also a sir?) if I’m not giving him enough credit.
Thank you,
the mgmt.
