From His Special Cup: Lennon Plays Footsie With the Home Key
This week: two Beatles segments. An essay on "Doctor Robert" celebrates the release of the Revolver box set. This first appeared as an essay in my 2019 book What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music in Their Time (Oxford), and includes a Listening Guide video here. Then, from earlier this year, a conversation with Magic Circles author Devin McKinney about the Get Back material, which goes deep into history, characters, conflicts, and the tunes.
Listen to podcast with Devin McKinney here.
From His Special Cup: Lennon Plays Footsie With the Home Key
"Dr. Robert" song essay, pp. 140-1
From What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music In Their Time (song essay, pp. 140-1), by Walter Everett and Tim Riley. Oxford University Press, 2019.
PAUL MCCARTNEY TYPICALLY gets credit for his Tin Pan Alley pretensions and pleated chords (the dual home keys in “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Penny Lane,” the French pillow talk and diminished sevenths in “Michelle”), but Lennon proves equally deft at playing games with key relationships. Several of Lennon’s numbers (“Day Tripper,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Dig a Pony”) deploy harmonic frames like conundrums, where home keys always surprise the ear, and bridges take root in faraway places.
The “Dr. Robert” story is legend: during their stay-overs in Manhattan, the Beatles caught wind of a mythical doctor who wrote prescriptions for the stars: as played out in episode 608 (“The Crash”) of AMC’s Mad Men series in 2013, the Dr. Feelgood physician made house calls and gave respectable professionals shots of vitamins mixed with amphetamines so they could work through the night and make their impossible deadlines, all as “legit” prescriptions. (The suits called these shots “energy serum,” or “miracle tissue regenerator.”) In an era when youth culture defined itself by choosing alternatives to alcohol (chiefly marijuana, but increasingly stronger psychedelics such as LSD and barbiturate pills), the fast-life establishment turned to wayward medics for juice. Elvis Presley, for example, notoriously relied on prescription medications as a “respectable” alternative to hallucinogens. According to Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s oral history of the Warhol scene centered on model Edie Sedgwick (Edie), this doctor, Charles Roberts, played a well-known role “servicing” the downtown bohemian art scene. Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, cites Max Jacobson, who treated John F. Kennedy. There had to have been others.
The song has a cleverly shifting subtext: while it laughs at its subject, the harmonic footing swaps out carpets beneath characters for a maze of colors: each time the verse returns, you never know where it will land. The track opens almost too casually, vamping to kill time, pivoting between I7 and a syncopated IV. But after the first phrase, the narrator steps through a mirror (as the tonal level drops from A to F♯, VI7, at 0:16), mimicking the effect of drugs hitting the bloodstream. Approached by a lurch, VI7 is neighbored by an E7 chord at 0:25 that is not understood as the original key’s dominant, but IV of its replacement tonal center, when VI7 is revealed as V7 of II, only when it resolves there for the B- major bridge. Meanwhile, to start the second verse, the band has to step back down to I (A), which sounds as if everything starts up again in a new key. But it’s not a new key; it’s just the way the gears have shifted to wind up once on II (B major), to make the I (A major) sound like a deceptive or false return. A year hence, similar modulatory jolts will make a tonal three- ring circus out of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”
Ever wonder how certain technical details enhance the whole? How can a recording lift a song from mere words and music? From the Listening Guides page to What Goes On: 20 tracks, 20 videos. Cue up your track, watch the silent video, and take the dive.
Lennon’s paean to the sleazy doctor paints a guiltless antihero haloed by a homophonic boys choir for the bridge (“Well, well, well, you’re feeling fine” at 0:58 and 1:40). The choirboy routine stays in B, which gives the harmonic layout some resolve: the narration passes through I and VI major; the bridge plants itself in II as the drugs deliver the user to a different consciousness. The rush of the verse answered with sublime sarcasm of mop- top cherubs, giving their blessing in chorale finery backed by church organ. (How did the Don Drapers of the world feel hearing this track when their young trophy wives cued it up for them? Flattered? Honored? Betrayed?)
For the final touch, the Beatles toy with an ironic “finished” ending as the sound disappears. Other tracks deploy every variety of fadeout possible, from the simplest dimming (“Not a Second Time,” “I Should Have Known Better”) to the most creative trick endings (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Get Back”). Even into their late period, they keep tweaking how outros can work: surging into the silence (the “Hey Jude” fadeout stretches toward infinity), marching into increasing mania (“All You Need Is Love,” “I Am the Walrus”), or landing on an unresolved cadence on IV (“And Your Bird Can Sing”). “Doctor Robert” uses one of the strangest devices for an ending: the fade to proper cadence. You can hear them land on its final chord for a very satisfying resolution at 2:09– 2:10. This plays into their awareness of silence, how every track emerges from and returns to quiet, and how best to insert pauses to create tension or subliminal punchlines (from the stop- time silences and fermata- marked caesuras in “There’s a Place” and “She Loves You” to the later stop- time breaks in “I’m So Tired,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “Dig a Pony”). It’s almost as if the song’s rush shuts the band down, and its last thought before it loses consciousness becomes a proper finale.
—see Tim's listening guide on www.timrileyauthor.com
more on the Beatles
"Doctor Robert," from Revolver, by The Beatles (Parlophone, 1966). [listen on Apple Music or Spotify]
What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time, Walter Everett and Tim Riley. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – The Definitive Life, Hachette Books, 2011.
Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, Da Capo Press, 1988
Beatles Infographics
Producing the Beatles, Jason Kruppa
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