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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
You Never Give Me Your Money
Over on thebeatlescompleteonukulele.com (a site dedicated, brilliantly, to posting ukulele versions of all the Beatles songs) there is a very interesting rendition, and more to the point discussion, of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ (Abbey Road, of course) by Peter Buffett.
‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ is a pivotal Paul McCartney composition, announcing a new style in his writing which eventually reaches its zenith on his later solo work, (particularly the hit singles ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, and ‘Band On The Run’). Aside from his Negroe [sic] Spiritual Piano Ballad Masterpieces, (’Hey Jude’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, etc.) this collage style is my favorite of McCartney’s many writing approaches. ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ is not really a song, but 4 separate song fragments that initially feel arbitrarily stuck together. ... The song begins with a plaintive minor piano figure, the mood is sad and pretty, the singing is choirboy innocent. The lyric meanwhile is “You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper.” McCartney always writes well about the things he loves, his work reveals a deep abiding adoration for two things, Women, and Money. Here, in ‘You Never Give Me’ Paul conflates them, and writes a Love Song To Money.
Part one is a lament, that the maintenance and defense of his and the other Beatle’s fortunes has become a full time job. While we find him commenting obliquely about being annoyed by accountants, lawyers and paperwork, (which is God’s Curse on the Wealthy), in reality The Beatles company Apple, was hemorrhaging vast sums of money ... [But] Paul doesn’t do depression, he rarely writes from a negative place. He is the most well adjusted and pleased with himself Beatle. His father was the most accomplished musician of the band’s parents. He’s the prettiest one. Unsurprisingly, he became by far the richest Beatle. McCartney will probably live to be a hundred. It is good to be Paul. So here we are in 1969, and McCartney is being nagged daily, brought down by money problems and the withdrawal from his life of his creative partner. He’s grieving, and unfamiliar with these icky new feelings.
Part one, a complaint about bad current circumstance, morphs abruptly into part two, in double time swing feel. The piano sound changes from classical to saloon, and Paul starts singing in one of his many exaggerated old-style voices. Always the most sentimental of the group, he looks back at his youth and recalls that even though he was a jobless ex art student, with “nowhere to go”, (The Beatles being, an inconceivable future phenomenon), he was once young, poor, but happy. Happier than he was as a rich 27 year old writing in 1969.
Sad. But not for long.
The tune veers swiftly from boogie-woogie to a heavenly choir. Hope is looming. What saves the penniless youth is Rock and Roll. So off to the big guitar solo over John Coltrane-like complex key changes, the weirdest chords of any Beatle tune. When the solo is over, he’s become a rich rock star, “One sweet dream, pick up the bags, get in the limousine.” This is the memory of the heady Beatle lifestyle of 1963-65. That was FUN!
The last section is a Nursery Rhyme Of Hope. Even Rock Stars Die. But not even death can depress McCartney. He is a relentless optimist. Paul is utterly convinced that there is an afterlife. If not for everyone (Meat Eaters), at least for him. If George Harrison is now a Sacred Cow in India, then Paul McCartney will remain Paul McCartney in Paradise.
“One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven.”
Hope you’re not to disappointed buddy, if it doesn’t quite work out that way.
Jauntiness is all very good and well, and much of this functions as an interesting reading of the song. But it oversells the McCartney ‘up-beat’ caricature, I think. The song is not so chirpy and one-dimensional. For one thing there’s the fractured form, the mild jolts from section to section. Then again, there’s more going on with that childish chant at the end than Buffett allows. It’s a children’s rhyme from the North of England, popular in the 50s and 60s but still around in the 70s, when I was a kid. The full version, or at least the version I know, goes:
One two three four five six seven
All good children go to heaven.
Penny by the water, tuppence by the sea
Thruppence by the railway and out--goes--he.
I didn’t clock what this meant until I was an undergraduate, when I (I was born and raised in the South, though my Dad’s from the Manchester area) talked about it with a fellow undergraduate who was a real northerner (John Black, from Bury). He pointed out that these three means of getting to heaven were ranked by cost: you could travel by water, which was cheap; or sea, which was a little dearer. But if you could afford 3d to travel by the train ... why, then you’re too rich to get into heaven, and out you go. That’s neat; and it, or the ghostly unsung second portion, casts a rather different light on ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’. Maybe the song’s not so straightforward a peroration to wealth after all.
Comments
Fascinating bit about the nursery rhyme.
I’d say that in fact the “up-beat” McCartney caricature needs to be entirely jettisoned for the purposes of thinking about this one. You don’t expect, and certainly rarely get, self-critique from McCartney--but “You Never Give Me Your Money” is structured as a critique of his own tendency toward escape fantasy, prompted by his (no doubt) oppressive experience at that moment of the (dangerous, unevadable, true) fantasy of escaping the Beatles.
Buffet is right that the core of the song is (musically and lyrically) an exercise in nostalgia, like so much of McCartney’s late-Beatles parody stuff, a fantasy of irresponsibility: “Oh, that magic feeling/Nowhere to go.” But this isn’t a naive or really even celebratory nostalgia: it’s the first of a series of dream-stages, each one ironized in some way, each one contingent on/produced by the “break down"s of the song’s first, Apple-centric, section.
(BTW: does anyone else hear in the barrelhouse-to-instrumental sections in the center of this song a reference to, maybe a kind of parody of, the “Woke up, fell out of bed"-to-orchestal-interlude transitions of “A Day in the Life”? There’s something to the notion that a similar ambition toward the grand statement is at work here.)
Crucially, I think Buffet is wrong about the biographical referent of the “one sweet dream” section--the scene of “pick[ing] up the bags, get[ing] in the limousine” is much likelier the scene of the recent, paparazzi-hounded marriages of both John and Paul, in which case the “soon we’ll be away from here” recurs again to the breakdown of the Beatles as a quasi-family unit (and which would also make the central instrumental piece, if we’re following a biographical line, a kind of wordless covering-over of the group’s great period of success).
So the concluding nursery rhyme emerges as a hopeless gesture (one McCartney would soon enact in real life with his retreat to his Scotland farm), a recursion from the fantasy life of the Beatles to childhood/family fantasy--ironized by its place in the biographical narrative, then doubly ironized by the rhyme’s subtext, where the same wealth that’s dissolving the band emerges again to block the path to that more naive heaven.
It’s an exceptionally rich text, this, and it took an extraordinary life crisis to provoke it. It’s McCartney’s last great, Beatles-inspired moment of genius; I don’t think he’s ever done anything remotely up to it since.
That’s a lovely little find, and a nice reading. But I’ve got to know: how does it sound on the ukelele?
This is my absolute favorite Beatles song.
"But I’ve got to know: how does it sound on the ukelele?”
Click the link at Peter Buffett’s name up there, Aaron, and you’ll find out.
“This is my absolute favorite Beatles song.”
True fact: ‘Doctor Robert’ decided me to get a PhD. I figured, Dr. Roberts isn’t quite ‘Doctor Robert’, but it’s closer than Mr. Roberts.
Very nice reading, Michael.
“Oh, that magic feeling/Nowhere to go.”
I always read that as bitter sarcasm. Ditto the heavenly “nursery rhyme” at the end… I always read the entire YNGMYM sequence, in fact, as one of those exercises in empathy that rock stars often produced for the benefit of the never-will-be-famous-nor-wealthy fans back then (the living apotheosis of this style of social pop fiction being Bruce Springsteen). It certainly spoke to *me* as a poor student; the “one sweet dream” passage will always feel to me like a hash fantasy.
The “funny paper” intro was obviously Paul exercising his great talent for semi-nonsensical lyrics which sound great but don’t mean much of anything (see: “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”; “Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey” et al). As Paul (and George Martin) added to the collage, I doubt they were as guided by verbal narrative structure as by the compelling logic of sound. You can’t treat pop lyrics/productions outside the strictures of ear-appeal: sound comes first, meaning a distant second… which means we’re all free to impose the meanings we want/need/hazily remember. I think.