![]() ![]() Read the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead” or one of F. I’d suggest that we also like a story we can hum, sing, whistle, which is how language works, as well as a story well told. We enjoy a song we can hum, sing, whistle. I liked them and the Beach Boys for one simple reason that many people have always liked the Beatles and Beach Boys: melody. Just as Bob Dylan had to pull over to the side of the road in 1964 after hearing one Beatles song after another on a local station, so too did the Beatles continue to rule the dial-or at least the oldies station-in my 1980s boyhood. ![]() ![]() My earliest memories of the Beatles involved car trips with my parents. In folk there was Bob Dylan, and in the rock arena, come the middle 1960s, the Kinks’ Ray Davies began to mine a narrative voice in which his songs traced the actions of characters. Lennon and Paul McCartney utilized an abundance of pronouns to up the urgency of those songs, as if they were secrets meant just for one person-you-that all the world could hear, which was OK and in keeping with what felt like loyalty.īut the Beatles didn’t tell stories in their songs. ![]() They were bursts of sounds long on energy, with chord changes and acts of melodic derring-do that continue to thrill us, overlooked as the Beatles early catalogue has become. The implication was that the other Beatles songs hadn’t, though that wasn’t the band’s intention to produce songs of that nature. It had an arc, and ended with a resolution. Asked what James meant, the publisher responded by saying that “No Reply” told a complete story. Hearing John Lennon’s “No Reply” in the autumn of 1964, music publisher Dick James remarked to the songwriter that he-and the Beatles-were making progress. ![]()
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