'Solid State' a reminder of special Beatles
- Brett Hiner: A Work in Progress
- February 29, 2020
- 1404
In the 1970s the music of The Beatles was often on the turntable in our household.
With all of the scratches and skips on those old LPs, it was not at all uncommon, while listening to the album, “A Hard Day’s Night,” for the record needle to skip halfway through “I Cry Instead” all the way down to “And I Love Her.” Their melodies and harmonies and utter musical joy made them the band of choice when my brothers and I formed “Pair-A-Dice,” using wooden Sam Smith tennis racquets for guitars.
Lip-syncing our way to family fame, “Pair-A-Dice” broke up when my oldest sibling had the audacity to introduce KISS to our repertoire. My 8-year-old self knew Mom and Dad would never let us sing the lyrics to “Hotter Than Hell,” and changing it to “hot, hot, hotter than H-E-double-hockey-sticks” would never work. It was a sad day when “Pair-A-Dice” went their separate ways, at least musically.
Memories of this meaningless break-up were brought back to life while reading Kenneth Womack’s meticulously researched but fascinating new book, “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of The Beatles.”
While most stories have been told in myriad publications about the band, the purpose of “Solid State" is focusing on the time period “Abbey Road” was being written and recorded, which included some technological advances being made in the music industry. Womack’s research allows for a very fresh take on The Beatles final studio album.
The term “solid state” refers to the state-of-the-art equipment that was made available to the band in the EMI Studios: an enormous, multi-dialed mixing surface. While antiquated today, in 1968 it allowed for more control over the raw material being produced, which included the layering of harmonies, impactful distortion, the speeding up or slowing down of vocals, and mixing in their trademark bits of chat and sound effects popularized on many of their albums.
However, amongst all of the stories of technological and recording advancement, “Solid State” is, at its core, a human story: in this case about a band’s inability to stay together despite their unique and complementary chemistry.
Much of the band’s hostility was brought on by a lack of leadership caused by the death of their longtime manager and friend, Brian Epstein, who died of a drug overdose a little over a year before work on “Abbey Road” began. Three of The Beatles felt the managerial gig should go to Allen Epstein while Paul felt his fiancé’s father, Lee Eastman, should have the title.
Throughout the book these human aspects make for some fascinating backstory, in many cases factually detailing “why” The Beatles broke up (as opposed to the common myth of it all being Yoko’s fault).
It is made clear all four of The Beatles were tired of being in each others’ company and ready to move on to other pursuits. Paul, engaged to Linda, was planning a life with her; George, beginning to hit his stride as a songwriter and tired of being shafted for record space, was fed up with John and Paul’s bickering and antics; and Ringo was pursuing, at the time, what seemed like a budding film career.
Recovering from a car accident, John was coming apart at the seams. His drug addiction was shutting down his creative process, and his love for Yoko Ono led to her persistent presence in the studio, most notably in a bed that was brought in for John and Yoko to rest in while recovering from the car accident. Her presence did not sit well with the band or George Martin, although Paul admitted 50 years later in an interview on the Howard Stern show, “Looking back on it, you think the guy (John) was totally in love with her, and you’ve just gotta respect that.”
What is truly remarkable, despite all of these internal battles brilliantly captured in the book, is that the band was still able to produce arguably their strongest album, both creatively and commercially (next to the “White Album,” which has sold 24 million copies). The book humanizes four lads from Liverpool and hints at many of the happy accidents that occurred within their creative process, none of which I will spoil here, other than how a moment of sheer brilliance, a lyrical flourish, came to Paul.
Realizing it would be the closing lyric on the album for the song, “The End,” McCartney harkened back to his school days when studying Shakespeare in class. “He ended his acts with a rhyming couplet so that the audience would know they were over,” McCartney told interviewer Mark Lewisohn. “I wanted it to end with a little meaningful couplet, so I followed the Bard and wrote the couplet, singing, “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
What Paul might not have realized, or maybe believed, is that those words would also be one of the final lyrics the most iconic band in history would ever record. Thankfully there are books like “Solid State” that remind us just how special they were.
Brett Hiner is in his 22nd year of teaching English/language arts at Wooster High School, where he also serves as the yearbook advisor and Drama Club advisor/director. If he’s not at work or doing something work related, he is typically annoying his children and/or wife. If he is not annoying his children and/or wife, he is probably whistling a show tune, curled up with a good book or watching the Tribe. These are three of the many reasons his children and wife find him annoying. He can be emailed at workinprogressWWN@gmail.com.