Review: TELL ME WHY

Book: Tell Me Why: The Beatles, Album by Album. Song by Song, The Sixties and After. by Tim Riley (Knopf, 1988)

Anyone who knows me, knows I am a Beatles fan so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, including me, that I often am gifted Beatles paraphernalia (books, mugs, posters, etc.) Tell Me Why was a Christmas gift a few years ago from my sister and brother-in-law, both Beatles fans, too. I remember opening it and thumbing through it thinking, "oh, this one will take some work" before I set it aside, not returning to it until earlier this year.

The subtitle is correct. This book analyzes each and every album and song recorded by Beatles starting from their first album, "Please Please Me" and ending with songs they published as solo artists. The analysis is musical in nature. I've read books before which have analyzed Beatles songs but more from the aspect of who wrote it, who played what instruments on it, and details about its back story. If one visits the website The Beatles Bible a lot of that type of information is available there, too. The author, Time Riley, is a musician (pianist) and a composer. Today he is thought of as a music critic. Each album and song that he analyzes for Tell Me Why, he does so from a musician's point of view. He catches/notices things about each song that the average listener probably misses, I know I did. For example he mentions how the mood of a song changes during the bridge when it moves from a minor to a major key, or how this chord or that note change the meaning or the impact. Later in the book, when The Beatles started recording in stereo he comments on what is happening on the left verses the right side. It was super interesting but also over my head a lot of the time and I found I could only read a few pages before my brain was full and I had to set it aside for a day. Every once in a while he would inject a thought or a fact which would jolt me back and I'd have something new to share with whomever I could get to listen to prattle on. But by in large, I was pretty unmoved by my reading of Tell Me Why.

That is until I decided, since I have a lot of their music on my iTunes account, why not listen to each song as I read what Riley wrote? I started doing this for the "Revolver" album. This album has always been super special to me as it was my very first album that belonged to me (not the family.) My Aunt Barbara gave it to me for a Christmas present in 1966. I still had to read slowly because I would listen for the musical techniques The Beatles used in each song. As I was sitting out on the deck one day slowly going through "Revolver", my daughter dropped by for a visit and I told her what I was doing and how it was enhancing my experience with the book. She commented that I'd probably like it even better if I used headphones.

The next day I located my headphones, oddly tucked into a drawer of a desk I'd recently cleaned out, and plugged them in. And the world of Beatles music was made new. Oh my! I couldn't believe the difference. I was in heaven. Riley would comment on how this or that was happening in the left side and I could hear it. He'd mention how the bass guitar filled this or that and I was stupefied. What a revelation. For example, did you know that Paul mouths the bass notes for the song "I Will"? Me, neither. But with the headphones on I could hear his voice pretending to be the bass guitar. Wow. 

Suddenly a reading project that up to that point had taken me five month, now took me just days to finish. I finished Tell Me Why as fast as my listening ears would allow me. And then went back and reread and listened to songs from before I started using headphones. 

In the end, here are a few of my take-aways:

• First, 1988, when the book was published, was a long time ago. Yes, The Beatles broke up in 1970 and John was killed in 1980, but the solo careers of the other three men were just in their beginning stages by then. For example, George's participation in the Traveling Willburys wasn't mentioned. Of course, it wasn't, TW weren't formed until April 1988, the same year this book was published. George's early death from lung cancer in 2001 obviously cut his career short. Ringo, who never had the best singing voice, had the wherewithal to put together his All-Starr-Bands. His first recording with that group happened in 1989. Paul, who has had the most remarkable career of the three, was dismissed by Riley as just churning out pop hits, songs people like but aren't incredibly complex. We just went to a McCartney concert last year and he is still going strong with his powerful music at age 80!
  
• In fact, I got the distinct impression that Riley liked John the best of all The Beatles. Each song was discussed but John's songs got longer discussions than the songs by the the three, often several pages on one song by John, compared to two paragraphs for a George song, for example.
• After the break up in 1970, Riley noted that the Fab Four were better together than their composite pieces. Each man had less success as solo artists than they had when they were The Beatles. I wouldn't quibble with that commit. In fact, I, a huge Beatles fan in my early teens and before, pretty much quit listening to them as solo artists in the 1970s. Only if a song, like "Imagine" got a lot of airplay on the radio would I even register that it was by John Lennon.
• Riley makes a lot out of the difference between McCartney and Lennon in terms of world view and musical sensibilities. In a lot of ways the two songwriting partners kept each other in check during their recording days together. John's acerbic/sullen/questioning side was countered by Paul's sunny, upbeat one. And vise versa. Neither was allowed to go all-the-way down their disposition's path together. But when they broke up, each did just that and Paul's nature led him to not-so-complicated pop songs, and John's led him to some really dark, often unlistenable songs which were avant-garde and inventive but ones few people could stomach.
• In the end, however, Beatles music, by and large, has stood the test of time. "That the tone of the Beatles records -- the emotional space four players could summon up together and the heights of feeling committed to tape-- continues to enthrall us is a comment on more than the music itself.. The Beatles expansive artistry exists as metaphor as much as music...[T]he fluid reciprocity they achieve as writers and players signifies much more than musical analysis alone can get at" (387).
• The mass catharsis the world experienced when John Lennon was killed is an example of how the Beatles music brought the whole world together. They were the world's family and their music continues in its popularity today, even thirty-five years after this book was published.
• Riley concludes the following statement, which is such a timely message for us in 2023.

[T]he world's continuing embrace of what they [The Beatles] produced demonstrates that our collective strength lies in emphasizing what we have in common. It's our connections with people that make us most human, the Beatles seem to be telling us; our interaction with others fulfills part of our humanity (388).

♫ And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. ♫

At 423 pages, which includes a selected bibliography and an index, the book qualifies for the Big Book Summer Challenge.

-Anne