From the Turntable: The Beatles- Yellow Submarine, 1969

The Beatles, Yellow Submarine, 1969

Label: Apple

Producer: George Martin

The release of Yellow Submarine was The Beatles’ launching pad for the pivotal year of 1969, which would ultimately prove to be fatal for the future of the Fab Four’s historic domination of popular music, and its strange placement in the band’s chronology truthfully proved to be a symbolic moment for what was to come as the year unfolded. Even as the band splintered internally, the combination of that dramatic tension and the group’s unflappable greatness only allowed their artistry to consistently reach new heights of greatness….with the exception of Yellow Submarine. It’s the sole sore-thumb LP in their otherwise extraordinary canon of original studio releases. It would suffer that fate even if it had appeared earlier in their catalog, but admittedly feels all the more egregious sprinkled in amongst Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and its immediate follow-up, Abbey Road. 

This infamous status mostly stems from the fact that it was never intended to be a full-length release in the first place. Originally intended as an EP collection, the record was extended to become the accompanying full-length soundtrack of the group’s final film obligation, the animated movie of the same name. It’s pretty much unfathomable to imagine the band at this stage in their career being that invested in an animated movie (and they weren’t), and the tracks that make up the companion album carry a similarly cartoonish, scattered, and uninspired tone. In fact, the group didn’t even produce a full album’s worth of their own work for the project. The entire second side of the record completely comprises the orchestral film score, all written and arranged by producer George Martin, with the exception of the title track excerpts in “Yellow Submarine in Pepperland”. There’s no denying the musical merit and considerable beauty of the orchestral side; it’s really the ultimate highlight of the entire project. It just also feels utterly out of place in the context of the Beatles’ recorded discography.

And in many ways, so do the actual Beatles performances on this album. George Harrison’s contributions, “Only A Northern Song” and “It’s All Too Much”, feel like poor-man iterations of his usual creative brilliance. They’re simply not fleshed out to Harrison and the group’s usual standards, not lyrically, sonically, or vocally. When he monotonously bemoans, “It doesn’t really matter what chords I play, what words I say“, you’ve undoubtedly found the most literal moment of the record. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s delivery of “All Together Now” and “Hey Bulldog” feel equally flat and forgettable. This leaves the extra weight of Side A to be carried by the far more memorable title track and the Summer of Love anthem “All You Need Is Love”, which randomly has its first LP appearance relegated to this moment. The elevated nature of these tracks only further exposes the limitations of the others, and the positive impact of their inclusion here is minimized by the fact that they were previously released three and two years earlier, respectively. And on a side-note: I’ll always stand by the belief that Ringo Starr’s legendarily quirky touch for novelty was far better realized on Abbey Road’s “Octopus’s Garden” than on the far more (in)famous “Submarine”.

All told, while Yellow Submarine may perhaps feel like a project better left thousands of leagues under-the-sea in comparison to other Beatles LPs, the record is in actuality one of popular music’s most mis-cast projects, rather than one of its most offensive artistic failures. It really has no business occupying space in the list of proper Beatles studio sets, because it isn’t one, and therefore it’s undeniably unfair to judge it as one. Nevertheless, its existence in that realm has allowed it to amass its own individualistic legacy, as a left-turn moment that’s more curious than it is charming and far more fascinating than it is fulfilling.

Track Listing

1. “Yellow Submarine” (John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
2. “Only A Northern Song” (George Harrison)
3. “All Together Now” (Lennon and McCartney)
4. “Hey Bulldog” (Lennon and McCartney)
5. “It’s All Too Much” (Harrison)
6. “All You Need Is Love” (Lennon and McCartney)
7. “Pepperland” (George Martin)
8. “Sea of Time” (Martin)
9. “Sea of Holes” (Martin)
10. “Sea of Monsters” (Martin)
11. “March of the Meanies” (Martin)
12. “Pepperland Laid Waste” (Martin)
13. “Yellow Submarine in Pepperland” (Lennon, McCartney, and Martin)

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