SEVEN solo Beatles to boost your mindset
How much do YOU know about the band everyone knows?
In my beloved and influential Substack weekly capsule review series PERMANENT WAVES, I talk a lot about “power pop mindset”, but I’ve thus far been reluctant to offer an actual firm definition of the term. See, it’s a bit like pornography: it was invented in the ‘70s to make hippies more sexist, and I know it when I see it.
Sorry, that was just a little joke. My actual working definition of power pop is that it’s a religion that worships the Beatles. More or less. Power pop mindset means moving through the world with the understanding that peace and love and rock and roll did, in fact, change the world, for better or for worse, and very much has the potential to keep changing it, for better or for worse. Music writers have a real bad habit of talking about The Beatles like everyone already knows everything about them, but I think a lot of my fellow under-40s genuinely do not appreciate just how different things were before the Fab Four came along. So think of this SEVEN as a sort of sideways glance at the Beatles mythos, through the lenses of one solo track per Beatle, plus three bonus tracks from some of their closest collaborators.
Ringo Starr - Blue, Turning Grey Over You
Ringo Starr is the easy one. Ringos are a dime a dozen. He can play an instrument (drums), he can carry a tune (even if he can’t quite sing), and he’s happy to be there. Lives to party. You look at Ringo’s body of work within and without the Beatles, and it’s all crowd-pleasers, broad singalong stuff, showtunes through the eyes of a born comedian. He shines in their early films. His first solo record is big-band-y and upbeat and full of old pop standards, and a tidal wave of AM-radio treacle follows in its wake. It’s a cheap buzz, though, and most rock aficionados never really take to it, and his Starr power (HEH) peters out pretty fast as shinier baubles prevail. A Ringo alone is not worth betting big on long-term, unless you have someone a little angstier or more ambitious to play him off of. But, hey, it’s a dime a dozen. Pour one out for all the Ringos— just grist for the mill.
Power pop mindset does not hold many soloists’ careers in high regard (power pop is about a BAND, after all), and Ringo Starr might as well be patient zero for this attitude. At a casual glance, his quite substantial success in the 70s looks an awful lot like an untalented man coasting off a reputation other people mostly built for him. I’m not here to make the case that Ringo is some misunderstood genius— I think most of his albums are mostly mediocre and haven’t aged especially well. But let’s not get too revisionist here: Ringo is not untalented by any stretch of the imagination. Though he may not be much of a frontman, from day one he excelled at playing the everyman (hardly much of an act, given his hardscrabble upbringing). When you’re Beatle-level famous, it’s hard to overstate the mileage you get out of not seeming like kind of a dick; in this regard, John, Paul and George could have stood to learn a thing or two from their drummer. The tracklist for that first solo album was selected from his mother’s favorite songs (aww!), and on “Blue Turning Grey Over You”, he channels a bit of fellow iconic limited vocalist Louis Armstrong into a catchy, very likeable lament for his impending obsolescence. Mindset: Well, you used to be so good to me / That’s when I was a novelty / Now you have new thrills in view / Found someone new / Left me blue, turning grey over you
George Harrison - Simply Shady
George Harrison is the kid brother of the group, a mild-mannered string bean of barely twenty when he’s suddenly one of the most famous guitarists alive. Early on, an unkind observer might dare to call him the weak link; he’s still shaking off the last of those teenage scale exercises on his Please Please Me solos. He’s their resident music nerd early on, too, devouring American folk and soul before falling head-over-heels for Hindustani classical. Hearing Harrison coming into his own as a man and musician, almost in real-time, is one of the most profound joys of the Beatles’ unfolding discography— even as he begins to bristle against his own celebrity. His first solo release is a film score full of sitars, and despite his ardent fans’ insistence that he never got his proper due in the band, his career after their 1970 break-up proves frustratingly mercurial, often marred by bitterness and indifference. A band led by a George is likely unreliable, lacking in attention-seeking instincts, but the people will love him for it— find a way to light a fire under him, and you could very well make off with a pocketful of lasting cult classics, even if nothing properly sets the charts ablaze. Solo, though? Forget it, if he doesn’t burn out in five years he’ll probably get bored or go join the Falun Gong or some shit. Georges are not exactly a force to be reckoned with until they get personal cassette recorders in the 80s.
The knocks on solo George are a notch less straightforward than the knocks on solo Ringo, but only by a notch. He’s not an especially strong singer (especially on Dark Horse where he’s recovering from a nasty bout of coke-and-cigs-induced laryngitis), and his albums tend to prioritize vibes over per se songwriting, which is a tough row to hoe given his vibes throughout most of the 70s could politely be called “troubled”. However fervently he threw himself into seeking a higher holy truth, George remained a creature of earthly attachments: it genuinely bothered him a lot that John and especially Paul didn’t think his songs deserved equal real estate on a Beatles album, and it tore him apart when his drug use and infidelity cost him the love of his life, Pattie Boyd. Lucky thing, then, that he was always the sort of artist who benefitted greatly from a dark night of the soul. He described “Simply Shady” as “what happens to naughty boys in the music business”, putting it rather mildly in classic George fashion. The song, four and a half minutes of lilting, downbeat folk-pop, ruminates on vice, madness and heartache before offering one of George’s most piercing summations of his complicated feelings on fame. Mindset: The action that I’ve started / Sometime I’ll have to face / My influence in motion / Rebounding back through space
John Lennon - Mind Games
John Lennon is the acid wit, the iconoclast, the Beatles’ political conscience and experimental edge. Your classic tortured artiste: a rough childhood defined by an absent father and a mother that died suddenly as he was finishing high school, severe problems with drinking and hard drugs that impaired his creative drive for much of his career, and a violent temper that clashed with his self-styled intellectual-peacenik image. His first solo record is an abstract sound collage made with the performance artist he left his first wife for, featuring his fully nude body on the cover. Dealing with a John from the business end is playing on hardcore mode. Guys like him are nothing but big ideas and chips on shoulders, and they can’t stand corporate suits as a rule, but if you find a halfway sensible one with an ounce of originality, you’ve got the makings of a voice of a generation.
It would be very MindsetTM to use John’s disillusionment with The Beatles as synecdoche for the counterculture’s disillusionment with the free-love sixties, but it would also be quite misleading. If anything, John’s disillusionment was rooted in an unwavering devotion to that sixties spirit, and what he saw as his bandmates’ abandonment of that spirit. The man was openly cynical about cynicism, and in 1973 that was a recipe for a prickly rapport with a music press that respected his influence but saw his style of activism as passé and ineffectual. Passé, I’ll concede: ‘73 is an incredibly fertile year for rock, the hot new artists on the scene are gritty realists like the New York Dolls and Bruce Springsteen, and John’s new album Mind Games is about as sloganeer-y as sloganeering gets (From “Bring on the Lucie”: Stop the killing now / do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now). He spends another track apologizing directly to his estranged wife for vague “hurt” and “pain”. Fresh off the controversy of “Woman is the Gamer of the World” (think about it), it’s never been easier to write him off as a washed-up, self-absorbed hypocrite. Ineffectual, though? Well, the anthemic title track struck enough of a chord to garner modest chart success and kind (or at least conciliatory) words from critics. The peeple couldn’t hate it, because no matter how many times we had heard John say “all you need is love”, he could tell we still didn’t quite get it. His revolution of the inner world remained (and remains) unfinished. Mindset: So keep on playing those mind games together / Doing the ritual dance in the sun / Millions of mind guerrillas / Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel / Keep on playing those mind games forever / Raising the spirit of peace and love, love / I want you to make love, not war / I know you’ve heard it before
Paul McCartney - About You
Finally, there’s Paul McCartney. The most stable element of the four in isolation, he takes to the limelight like a fish to water, and shepherds the band through their turbulent final years, as John spirals into heroin addiction, and barbiturates and alcohol claim manager Brian Epstein. His boyish good looks and monstrous appetite for pastiche both serve him well. Naysayers see a preening egomaniac and a tyrannical sellout who helped split up the band with petty money-grubbing; legions of fans see the very model of a rock star, a once-in-a-generation musical polymath responsible for the sterling popular touch of the best-selling band of all time. His first solo album is a ramshackle collection of ditties he throws together in his kitchen as the band breaks up, largely scorned on release but growing in prestige somewhat as his new band Wings garners strong record sales and successful tours across the next decade. It should be obvious why you’d want a Paul in your roster, but beware his love: he’ll make you work for him and like it, and he’s a whole lot weirder than he lets on.
Every Beatles fan has their favorite, and my favorite is Paul, which means you can’t fully trust anything I say here, both because I am biased and because Paul stans are sneaky motherfuckers at heart. For example, the first album with his name on the cover is technically a film score that he didn’t even perform on or write most of, and his tsundere rival John’s actual solo debut (as in, credited to just John Lennon) is technically a deeply flawed yet often moving piece of existential pop art inspired by primal scream therapy! See, you only have to bend the truth ever so slightly to make Paul look like the band’s protagonist, or if you want to be harsh, an audience-insert. The other three are all very distinct and strong personalities– John the sardonic activist, George the moody introvert, Ringo the jocular party animal– but Paul’s type is considerably more elusive. He’s undeniably a workaholic, but also perpetually takes pains to come off nonchalant and unburdened by the pressures of celebrity. He built his reputation on songs about the dozens of girls he was cheating on Jane Asher with, only to emerge from his band’s demise as rock’s most devoted family man, forming Wings with his wife Linda and even taking his young children on tour with him. He’s a savant and autodidact who learned guitar, bass, piano, and drums all by ear, and also a strong contender for the laziest classic rocker of the 80s (a very crowded field). He’s worked tirelessly to preserve the history of The Beatles, and nearly as tirelessly to tweak every tiny little thing he can get away with in a way that makes him look better. That’s a lot of contradictions to capture with one song! “About You”, the only song of this SEVEN not from the early-mid SEVENties, is nominally about Paul’s new fiancée Heather, but he still clearly has Linda on his mind three years after her tragic passing, as well as his old bandmate George, lost to a short battle with lung cancer the same month Driving Rain was released. The strident rocker, replete with sledgehammering drums courtesy of Abe Laboriel Jr., tries to brute-force its way through grief to enlightenment. The Paul method in miniature, perhaps; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? Mindset: When did you teach me to fly through the air? / Sooner or later, we all will be there / I read the headlines, and now I can swear it’s true / And they said it about you
Billy Preston - Outa-Space
It probably says something a bit ugly about the Beatles mythos that the title of “fifth Beatle” is more often applied to their manager or their producer than to the one musician who came closest to being an actual fifth member of the band (John wanted him to join, Paul quickly shot the idea down). Generously, though, the man behind the playful Fender Rhodes solo on “Get Back” deserves better than to be just an accessory to the Beatles story: his resume is full of big, big names from Sam Cooke to Whitney Houston to The Rolling Stones, and his solo work stands as a testament to the musical and personal warmth that made him such an effective collaborator. His Grammy-winning 1972 hit single “Outa-Space” is a rollicking instrumental jam session where Preston runs a clavinet through a wah-wah for a loose, space-age update on the immortal sound of Booker T and the MG’s. Mindset: running a clavinet through a fuckin’ wah-wah
Yoko Ono - What A Bastard the World Is
Perhaps even more so than John himself, his second wife Yoko Ono is a complicated, often frustrating personality, deeply shaped by the traumas of postwar Japan and freed, in degrees, by the boundless possibility of the avant-garde. For how often she’s been accused of enabling her third husband’s worst impulses, Yoko’s early work as a recording artist often explicitly strove to confront him with his failings and challenge him to be a better man. As the old saying goes, nobody really knows what goes on in a marriage, but the image of John and Yoko, two messy sinful humans who attempted to sort through their shit together because they loved each other, deliberate equals in a world that demanded male dominance, proudly codependent in an increasingly atomized and isolated society, remains aspirational to many for good reason. Much of Yoko’s ambitious 1973 pop move Approximately Infinite Universe, like Mind Games, is contextualized by arguably the most turbulent period of their relationship. “What A Bastard The World Is” starts off cold, accusatory, wrathful, a spitting image of the hurt housewife up late waiting for her unfaithful man. In the end, though, Yoko refuses to let herself off the hook for the part she plays in the sorry scene, backing away regretfully from a rage she recognizes as unproductive . Mindset: Are you listening, you jerk, you pig, you bastard / You scum of the earth, you good-for-nothing, are you listening? / Oh, don’t go, don’t go / Please, don’t go / I didn’t mean it, I’m just in pain / I’m sorry, I’m sorry
Badfinger - Come and Get It
Right as the Fab Four began to feud and fracture, their fledgling Apple Corps record label signed an up-and-coming bar band from Wales called The Iveys, led by one Pete Ham, a sensitive young rocker with a penchant for covering Beatles hits. Though Apple Corps was such an administrative disaster that The Ivey’s sole album, 1969’s Maybe Tomorrow, only made it to stores in the former axis powers, the men running the label quickly took a shine to Ham and his band. After the album naturally failed to turn a profit, Paul enlisted the Iveys to record a few songs for a film he had already agreed to provide music for, including one of his own compositions (tempering that shrewdness with a little beneficence— classic Paul). One name change later, and Badfinger’s “Come and Get It” was climbing the charts, setting the stage for one of power pop’s earliest and greatest tragedies. The Beatles clearly saw Badfinger as their heirs apparent, but the lads just had too much else on their plate to be the mentors the band needed. They could never quite progress past imitating their idols, and after they left Apple in ‘73, their crooked manager started stealing almost every penny the band earned for himself, eventually driving poor Pete to hang himself in his garage. In a better world, we might have seen a version of Badfinger that blossomed into a proper evolution of the Beatles sound. In the world we got, they were merely the first true gold standard for Beatles imitators— and the sound kept on evolving regardless. Mindset: If you want it, any time, I can give it / But you’d better hurry, ‘cause it may not last / Did I hear you say that there must be a catch? / Will you walk away from a fool and his money?