Everybody's stupid but me

OK, I'm taking this down. May either repost without calling people names etc. (since I wrote some stuff that on reflection I consider really unfair and untrue and that made an issue of people's personalities when I didn't know their personalities), or let things sit without posting anything related for a while.

Greatest Beatles album

Here's the best Beatles album, The Beatles' Second Album (though it really was their third, merely the second on Capitol records), released only in the U.S., though five of these were on the British With The Beatles and the rest were on British singles except for a track or two on other albums. This configuration really kicks, even though it probably was something of a random sample of leftovers that hadn't yet gotten on a U.S. album and a couple tracks that were in the can without yet getting their British release.

side one:
ROLL OVER, BEETHOVEN
THANK YOU GIRL
YOU REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME
DEVIL IN HER HEART
MONEY
YOU CAN'T DO THAT

side two:
LONG TALL SALLY
I CALL YOUR NAME
PLEASE MR. POSTMAN
I'LL GET YOU
SHE LOVES YOU

By the way, don't make too much of the symbolism of my picking an early Beatles album. I think the early Beatles were better than the mid and late Beatles, but that doesn't mean they should have kept going with what they were doing at the start. That would have been phony, and the phoniness would have been evident in the music. The music had a potential to move in many directions, and the Beatles had to move in some of them or they would have been letting themselves and the times down. 1964 wasn't a golden age, it was a furious transition, musicians grabbing something and trying to know what to make of it.

I call this album the Black Album, not just because it's the most r&b, but because Lennon's aching mind is all over it, and McCartney's jauntiness is perfect to keep the ache propulsive. Paul was a good bass player, probably the best musician in the group.

"You Really Got A Hold On Me" is twice as agonized as Smokey Robinson's original, and from there side one is a whoosh of pain, John throwing "Money" in our teeth as if he wanted to crush them. And then "You Can't Do That" has a similar riff, as if the throwing and the crushing don't stop, but the song adds so much color, making the ache a bright ache, an exuberant ache, that the shutdown that Lennon's words are insisting on is inextricable from the sound of music that's opening up.

And then Side Two is a sock hop but one that remembers the pain that had marched through Side One. "She Loves You" is the most deliriously great song the Beatles did, yeah yeah yeah and those harmonies. And on this album, the delirious joy remembers what the joy was attempting to surmount: "She said you hurt her so, she almost lost her mind" gets funneled into all the exuberant "she loves you"s and "yeah yeah yeah"s, but it doesn't get lost.