The Beatles - When I’m Sixty-Four
It’s hard to find a bad Beatles song. You could deliberately wade through their music, trying to pick out only songs that proved how terrible a band they were, and still have difficulty putting together an album’s worth of bad pieces, and that bad album would still outshine most albums by most other bands.
It wasn’t luck on their part that they probably had a good 100-120 songs that were outright masterpieces. They approached music in a way other bands didn’t. The Beatles were formed during years of playing long, tight shows in front of demanding and diverse crowds. By the time they released Please Please Me, they were a more experienced band than most of the big-name groups of the fifties, and they’d digested and absorbed an incredible variety of music. You can hear it very early on: Take the sudden opening to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or the minor penultimate chord to that song, and you’ll find it easier to believe that it was inspired by a number of avante-garde musicians rather than just Elvis and Chuck Berry. The Beatles recorded music very quickly, quit touring to work in the studio, and had enormous standards. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were each raging perfectionists, and George Harrison wasn’t too far behind. For a decade they recorded the best pop music that’s ever been, then they split up and the four Beatles each had best-selling solo careers, three of which were at the pinnacle of various types of artistry.
Other bands have very defined sounds. The Beatles have none. Each Beatle was a multi-instrumentalist; each one had a different mindset behind production; each one could sing beautifully; they were managed by George Martin, one of the greatest studio minds that ever was. They alternated styles and blended them together and created types of music that never existed before they came. With single songs they spawned entire genres of music. Lyrically, they continued to push the form of the pop song outward. They never slowed down, never repeated themselves, and almost never wrote a song that wasn’t achingly perfect. Their music is unassailable.
“When I’m Sixty-Four” isn’t one of the best of the Beatles. It’s famous, and it’s perfect, but on the special Beatles scale where everything has to be compared to Something and Eleanor Rigby, it’s half a notch below the Beatles at their best. It’s a sheer delight nonetheless, from the clarinet duos to the light plucking guitar at the end. You could listen to this song a dozen times, as I am as I write this now, and hear something glorious and new every time: Ringo’s ever-changing drumming, the swelling vocal harmonies, the bass work, the sounding of tubular bells at the end of each chorus, McCartney’s artificially sped-up voice. It’s good on a plane that most songs ever even attempt to approach. The Rolling Stones never thought to attempt a song that’s remotely as ambitious as this one, which wasn’t particularly ambitious for the Beatles. It’s so good that there haven’t even been attempts to replicate its particular sound, or all the attempts failed miserably. It’s untouchable is how good it is.
McCartney was the Beatle responsible for pushing the Beatles’ arrangements forward. Lennon pushed the band forward emotionally and had quite a few experiments with his sounds, but McCartney brought on most of the complex music arrangements, and he also refined the lyrical prowess of the Beatles when they tackled pure pop. “When I’m Sixty-Four” isn’t edgy like Lennon’s music, and it’s remarkably straightforward lyrically, but it’s straightforward in a subversive sense, where you can’t quite imagine that a legendary rock musician would think to write a song asking a girl if she would love him as they got old together. It seems too passive, too focused on growing up. It’s shocking in the sense that you’d never expect a rock group to be a mature bunch of artists, or that they would score a song about aging with such exquisite music that somehow still managed to be pop. As such, it serves as a great introduction for the Beatles, especially for people who only know the band for Love Me Do.
I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?
