Behka’s Breakfast with The Beatles Recap: Week of December 16

You might be familiar with the fact that I've been a big Beatles fan since small times, and when I was about 13 they became my favorite band of all time. So I've been doing a segment at the beginning of the morning show to play some Beatles every day.
However, I know some of you out there aren’t exactly early birds – 6:00 a.m. is pretty dang early, after all. And some of you might have caught the end of a song or just missed it, and so I thought I’d post some audio and videos of the songs I used each day, and I’ll tell you what I know about em here, too.

Monday's song was "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"

This song is a standout Beatles track from Abbey Road for a variety of reasons, namely its length (nearly eight minutes), few lyrics (basically the title is the lyric, aside from two more phrases; only 14 different words are sung), a three-minute descent through a repeated riff, and abrupt ending. It is one of the last songs that the Beatles mixed as a group, on August 20 of 1969.

Tuesday's song was "Paperback Writer".

This song was written by Paul McCartney with a few motivations behind it. He saw an article in a newspaper about an aspiring yet somewhat pathetic writer, and felt a little pressure as well from the press because John Lennon had written and published a book by this time, "In His Own Write". According to disc jockey Jimmy Savile, McCartney wrote the song in response to a request from an aunt who asked if he could "write a single that wasn't about love."

Wednesday's song was "Within You, Without You".

This one is one of the more strange songs from a strange album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It really shows how far George Harrison had gone into his interest in Indian music, and how far that disparity separated him from the other three Beatles. On this track, no other Beatle other than George is present. All the musicians are session players or people brought in by George and his friend/mentor, Ravi Shankar. They put in the laugh track at the end to kind of take the "heavy" tone off the record - especially because the next song was so completely and polar opposite from this.........."When I'm Sixty Four".

Thursday's song was "One After 909".

The version I played today was an alternate version from the one officially released on Let it Be.  They rerecorded the song in the late sixties as a kind of throw back to the material they used to do on stage in the late fifties and early sixties.  This version is the one from The Beatles Anthology, showing what the song originally sounded like in the Please Please Me era.

Friday's selection was "I Am The Walrus".

This one is just a classic.  It's off the Magical Mystery Tour album, and has one of the few "performance" aspects of the film in this segment.  John Lennon wrote this song over the course of about a year.  He put a piece of paper in a typewriter, and then whenever he'd think of a good line or phrase, he'd type it in - whether it had anything to do with the previous line or not.

That's been your week of Beatleness.  Let me know if there's a tune you've wanted to hear, or if you want an alternate version of something.  We'll resume Monday at 6:00 a.m.!

Fab-ly yours,

Behka