The dirt ball discography download torrent working

At Beatles anniversary time, the stories write themselves. “It was 25/30/40 years ago today!” “The act you’ve known for all these years!” “A splendid time was guaranteed for all!” Last week’s 50th anniversary of the U.S. release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most acclaimed rock album ever and the apogee of the Beatles’ cultural influence in the s, is a time for all those chestnuts and more. But Pepper’s doesn’t make sense if it’s not put in context. And the only way to do that, given the weight of the Beatles’ presence, is to take a look at everything the band put on record over its eight-year recording career.

It turns out that ranking the songs recorded by the Beatles in the s is easy; you put the worst one at the top, and the best one at the bottom.

The list is based on the band’s British releases, which is how they thought of their work. In the U.K. in the s, the group released 13 official studio albums, including the A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine quasi-soundtrack albums. The so-called “White Album,” The Beatles, was a two-record set. There was also a flurry of non-album singles throughout those years, collected in different ways in the U.K. and the U.S. EMI also released a number of four-song EPs in Britain, particularly early on, but only one of them, Long Tall Sally, contained songs not available in other forms. Releases in the U.S. were a similar mishmash, but from Revolver onward, with minor exceptions, the studio-album releases, at least, were standardized. The songs the band released in the s that were not on their studio albums were eventually consolidated in a catchall collection dubbed, quite lamely, Past Masters.

The Beatles based their sound largely on American R&B, and they, like their compatriots in the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, filled their early records with covers of their favorite tracks. They are duly noted below; most sound like the appreciative efforts of a young and not-quite-formed band; the Beatles being the Beatles, however, a few are transcendent.

I use the songs on those releases to create this ranking, with some ephemera (like the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or George Martin’s Yellow Submarine orchestrations) ignored, with a few other interesting tracks that have dribbled out over the decades added in.

This doesn’t get said enough: These songs were specifically designed to pack their punch at high volume. Try ‘em with real speakers, not headphones.

I am indebted to Beatles super-scholar Mark Lewisohn for his many detailed books on the band, most important The Beatles: Recording Sessions; Bob Spitz’s close-to-definitive The Beatles; engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir,Here, There, and Everywhere; and the engrossing podcast Something About the Beatles, hosted by Briton Richard Buskin and American Robert Rodriguez. Any mistakes are, of course, my own. Please let me know if I conflated any facts or misrepresented anything in the comments section below, or publicly humiliate me on Twitter @hitsville.

Beyond everything else, the Beatles were the biggest cultural story of the modern era, and they were, in the end, pop, if pop is music that makes people happy. Through the confusion and the chaos, the pain and the self-questioning, they worked to create a joyous sound. They didn’t fuss about it; it’s what they wanted to do. They loved to turn us on.

“Good Day Sunshine,” Revolver ()

Paul McCartney was welcome to write all the happy, upbeat, cheery-cheery songs he wanted. But this one is beyond the pale. It’s blaring, received, and strident. Even by McCartney standards (“Getting Better,” “Hello Goodbye”) the title is inane. It could have been “Yum Food Delicious,” or “Hot Sex Baby,” or any other three random words McCartney took out of his Young Man’s Collection of Positive Synonyms — and note that of these three choices McCartney chose the blandest. McCartney’s piano playing, which graced so many Beatles songs, right up to “A Day in the Life,” is a parody of itself. It’s the worst song in the Beatles’ classic period. And it ruins Revolver, otherwise the most consistent and mind-blowing collection of pop-rock songs ever conceived by man.

“Dig It,” Let It Be ()

As Lennon himself put it, this is what you get when you’re stoned all the time and don’t give a shit. Docked eight notches for Lennon’s final spoken line, “And now we’d like to do ‘Hark the Angels Come,’” which on the record sounds like a swipe at the next track, “Let It Be,” a song that is tuneful and about something, unlike “Dig It.” McCartney sometimes produced schlock, but rarely work as annoying as this.

“Little Child,” With the Beatles ()

Probably the worst of Lennon and McCartney’s early efforts. Filler from the second album.

“Tell Me What You See,” Help! ()

A highly derivative track shoved onto the second non-soundtrack side of the record from the band’s second movie.

“Dig a Pony,” Let It Be ()

Doggerel from Lennon. The most uninteresting song on one of the band’s least interesting albums. The lyrics are nonsense, but all he wants is you. Boo-hoo.

“A Taste of Honey,” Please Please Me ()

John Lennon, a local Liverpool tough and an incipient art-school dropout, had a skiffle band. Paul McCartney, two years his junior, had a rapidly evolving understanding of music and a slightly younger guitarist schoolmate named George Harrison. Once the three jelled, the band honed its chops playing before ever-more-appreciative audiences in clubs in Liverpool, notably the Cavern, and in three separate residencies, with a drummer named Pete Best and a bassist named Stu Sutcliffe, in a succession of strip clubs in the red-light district of Hamburg. (The first of these ended when authorities discovered George Harrison was underage; he was unceremoniously deported.) The band’s undisciplined and chaotic performances are now the stuff of legend, ranging as they did from wild American R&B to the schlockiest schlock, like this. But at the end of this trial by fire — playing in front of gamblers, gangsters, strippers, and thugs — they emerged as tight and focused a band as can be imagined.

“Ask Me Why,” Please Please Me ()

“I love you / Woo-woo-woo-woo.” “Ask Me Why” was one of Lennon and McCartney’s first compositions, as the lyrics here attest. With a major exception, “One After ,” the results of these early efforts were as naïve and plain as you’d expect. Still, having left Sutcliffe in Hamburg, the band continued to rock the Cavern as a quartet, with Paul McCartney playing bass. A local music-store owner, Brian Epstein, saw potential in the band when no one else did and reinvented himself as their manager. After hitting dead ends with all of the established British labels of the time, he put together a last-shot meeting with an exec at Parlophone, an overlooked division of the conglomerate EMI. The exec was named George Martin; he was really a producer, classically trained, who’d fashioned a career making hit comedy albums with the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Peter Cook. He auditioned the band and didn’t not like what he heard. He advised them to write some new material and get rid of their drummer.

“Free As a Bird,” single ()

This single enraged me, in , when it was released to gin up interest in the first Anthology album. It was a Lennon song from long after he’d left the Beatles; he sounded so vulnerable, and the studio work that had gone into making this distant-sounding, crummily recorded demo sound presentable felt like too big a burden for the martyred star to bear. His former songwriting partner, one Paul McCartney, added six lines as a sort of bridge. Of the six lines, two were taken from a Shangri-Las song, and they weren’t particularly good ones, either. (“Whatever happened to / The love that we once knew?”) Twenty years later, it still enrages me. Docked notches for corpse desecration.

“Not a Second Time,” With the Beatles ()

You keep waiting for a redeeming melody to rise to the surface, but it doesn’t come. The weirdest thing about the song is how the title words come on a low note that Lennon doesn’t quite hit, a rarity for a band with such vocal precision from the start.

“She’s Leaving Home,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ()

A bathetic lugubrious mess, the nadir of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The call-and-response chorus is labored; the whole thing reeks of having come from a squaresville OffBroadway musical about kids these days. The instrumentation is unusual; there are no actual Beatles playing on the track, but no one cares because the song is so bad. Note that the subject of the song is essentially the same as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which does much more with it.

“Real Love,” single ()

This was another Lennon demo from the late s, already known via the Imagine movie, gussied up by the surviving Beatles and used as another fake new Beatles song to promote the second Anthology collection of outtakes and unreleased material. It’s unquestionably a pretty song. Docked notches for grave robbing and general dishonesty.

“Thank You Girl,” single ():

The highly inferior B side of “From Me to You,” the band’s third single, distinguished only by a few dissonant harmonica notes.

“I’ll Get You,” single ()

Lots of Oh, yeahs here. An intermittently charming and chuggy very early composition, notable only for being the B side of “She Loves You.” You can hear McCartney working it on the bass, though.

“Chains,” Please Please Me ()

A Carole King–Gerry Goffin song, from their Brill Building days, sung by a noticeably young George Harrison. After the first visit to Parlophone, McCartney and Lennon went back to Liverpool and did what needed to be done. With a professionalism they might not have possessed, they forthrightly confronted Rory Storm, the leader of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a prominent Liverpool band, and told him they wanted to steal his drummer, who went by the name Ringo Starr. It was important, they said. They might have a record contract.

“Misery,” Please Please Me ()

You can hear some harmonies coming together on this, but otherwise it’s a forgettable song from the band’s first album.

“Every Little Thing,” Beatles for Sale ()

Some melodic lines of interest here, but not much else. There’s an unconvincing vocal by Lennon and some inappropriate drum sounds.

“Hold Me Tight,” With the Beatles ()

One of McCartney’s earliest songwriting efforts and accordingly one of the slightest. The backing track is clompy, and we don’t need to hear all the you-you-you-you’s anymore. McCartney doesn’t sound natural singing, either.

“I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,” A Hard Day’s Night ()

A simple chestnut from the early days, brought out to fill up the AHard Day’s Night soundtrack.

“Only a Northern Song,” Yellow Submarine ()

It’s possible George Harrison was the first pop star to attack his record label, or, in this case, his publishing company in a song. Band manager Brian Epstein had let many lucrative deals slip through his fingers; but particular concern was directed at Dick James, their song publisher, who made 1, 2, 10, 20 fortunes from this deal. (In fact, the band’s tie to him was somewhat loose, but they were never smart enough to hire a lawyer to restructure the deal.) Historical value aside, McCartney and Lennon had vetoed it for Sgt. Pepper’s, and it later turned up on the inferior Yellow Submarine soundtrack two years later, the weakest of the four weak songs the band added to the title track and “All You Need Is Love.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) ()

The whimsy will continue until morale improves. Definitely in the top five of Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote. It took a long time for the band to get this right in the studio. No one liked it; but it was reportedly Lennon who finally sat down and banged the piano part out appropriately. This is a song that isn’t about anything in the first place; the last two verses are the same except for having Desmond and Molly’s names switched out, but McCartney’s vocal gets more and more excited. Newsflash: No one cares about Desmond and Molly Jones.

“Your Mother Should Know,” Magical Mystery Tour ()

Another song that has existed in the cultural consciousness for 50 years and has been played on the radio incessantly over that time. The lyrics are inane even by McCartney standards.

“Don’t Pass Me By,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) ()

This was a song that Ringo had been bashing about for several years. You can tell that by lines like these: “Sorry that I doubted you / I was so unfair / You were in a car crash / And you lost your hair.” To Starr’s credit, we have to acknowledge that the words unfair and hair do rhyme, so there’s that. The odd piano sound and aimless violin don’t do anything for it. And that repetitious backing track goes on for nearly four minutes.

“You Like Me Too Much,” Help! ()

A very simple George Harrison song, dumped as filler on the second side of Help!

“Baby It’s You,” Please Please Me ()

A minor bit of ’50s pop schlock, co-written by Burt Bacharach early in his career. The band’s delivery is deliberate and respectful, much like that on the original, a somewhat obscure Shirelles track; a much more over-the-top version would be a hit in the s for a band called Smith. After being told by George Martin to write some material, the band came back with a few new songs: “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You.” Martin recalls thinking the songs were marginal. He was unsure about the group … but decided to go for it. “Love Me Do” became a minor hit for the band in England; such was the meteoric evolution of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting skills that by the time Please Please Me, the band’s first album, made it to stores, in February , they had already written the songs that would release the kraken of Beatlemania.

“I’ll Be Back,” A Hard Day’s Night ()

The least of the lesser songs on the second non-soundtrack side of the AHard Day’s Night album, and an anticlimactic album closer.

“Baby’s in Black,” Beatles for Sale ():

Another of the darker songs that marked a largely uninteresting, transitional album. Not that much as a song, though.

“Roll Over Beethoven,” With the Beatles ()

A creditable early lead vocal on the Chuck Berry classic by George Harrison, who loved the song. It was a stage favorite that is a little tepid on record. The band loved Berry, of course; Lennon said “Chuck Berry” was another name for rock and roll, and the Beatles played a variety of other Berry songs in their BBC appearances. With the Beatles was the band’s second album, coming out just before the end of Since Please Please Me, eight months earlier, the band had had three No. 1 singles in England, and a fourth that went to no. 2. The release of With the Beatles was where things in England began to get weird. Stores were overrun by teenagers wanting the record. It is said to have sold a half-million copies on its first day; that would be the rough equivalent of 4 million copies in the U.S. these days, and is even more impressive given the primitive distribution systems in the U.K. at the time.

“It’s Only Love,” Help! ()

A Lennon song from the band’s second movie soundtrack. In the band’s early songs, both Lennon and McCartney affected a knowingness about love affairs. They worked out the logic of this or that scenario, and delivered verdicts or advice accordingly. It took a while before actual love songs with recognizable people and situations in themwould be in the offing.

“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ()

Fans sometimes marvel at Lennon’s habit, in the mid-’60s, of drawing inspiration for songs from real life — a news story about potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, for “A Day in the Life,” a Corn Flakes commercial for “Good Morning, Good Morning.” As those fans know, Lennon had an actual s circus poster in his home, and he and McCartney, working together, artfully borrowed a surprising percentage of the words from that poster for this song. (The new six-disc mega rerelease of Sgt. Pepper includes a reproduction of the actual poster.) With the help of Abbey Road’s munchkins, the collapsing calliope sound and a found-sound collage at the end they put together has some aural interest. But what I don’t get is this. The Beatles set themselves up as Sgt. Pepper’s band for this, their most celebrated (and technically advanced) album. So why were Sgt. Pepper & Co. writing songs about some other entertainment endeavors? And while the lyrical collage is itself artful, there’s either too much subtext here (i.e., the various acts have hidden roman à clef meanings) or not enough (i.e., it’s just words taken from a poster). The result is a decent novelty song that provides ammunition for those, like me, who contend that, track for (novelty) track, the song quality on Sgt. Pepper doesn’t live up its reputation.

“When I Get Home,” A Hard Day’s Night ()

The chorus of this Lennon vocal workout is downright irritating, and the bridge is worse. The song helped fill out the second side of A Hard Day’s Night. The film was designed to be quick and a cheapie, to capitalize on the group’s (presumably temporary) stardom. A flaw in their contracts allowed them to record outside songs for movies, a financial windfall for the studio lucky enough to make the film. What no one expected was that a young, canny director named Richard Lester would make the resulting movie an unexpected classic, with any number of comic set pieces, ranging from the slapstick to the satirical, that remain invigorating and pointed to this day. (In one scene, George is taken in to be quizzed by an amoral adman on what British youth were thinking.) A secret weapon: Lester’s crisp quasi-documentary photography, which captured the chaos of young girls chasing the band in all its kinetic, feral glory.

“For You Blue,” Let It Be ()

A winsome romp from George Harrison. McCartney and Lennon were tossing half-baked, substandard throwaways onto the band’s later releases. It’s only fair that Harrison was able to do so as well. The overall production values of Let It Be are lousy; Harrison’s voice never sounded so thin and insubstantial. The song ended up being the (highly) inferior B side of “The Long and Winding Road,” the group’s last single before they broke up.

“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” Abbey Road ()

This song is catchy as hell. The anvil sound is hilarious. But it’s still one of those weird McCartney tracks. Wait — Maxwell kills people? In the wan Let It Be movie, you can see John Lennon looking pensive as the band runs through this piffle, wondering how his life has come to this. Docked 50 notches for the verse in which Maxwell kills the pataphysical scientist. She seemed cool.