THE BEATLES [AKA: THE WHITE ALBUM]

Here's more solid evidence for the claim that the Beatles were trailblazers. Perhaps you thought Pink Floyd's Ummagumma, Soft Machine's Third, or Can's Tago Mago was the first double album that would've been a wonderful single album if they'd just kept the best material. Well, it turns out those bands were just following in the Beatles' footsteps.

It's never been obvious to me why the Fab Four didn't release the best 35 or 40 minutes of The Beatles (a/k/a The White Album) as one album, then rework the remaining material for their next LP. In fact, 1968 was only the second year since 1963 in which the Beatles didn't release two separate albums. Unlike Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and their three film-soundtrack albums, The White Album wasn't thematic; the songs seemingly could have been divided into multiple projects. So why a double album?

Multiple reports have the Beatles, at various times, fearing that they were about to become irrelevant. Could a double album have seemed like a consolidation of both their popularity and their gravitas?

The White Album has been referred to as an 'inside joke,' and I guess can see why; while 'Blackbird' doesn't need much context to be understood, and while 'Revolution 1' would've been decipherable to most who heard it in 1968, the attentive yet uninitiated listener may well have felt that songs like 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' and (especially) 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill' required some insider knowledge. It should be acknowledged, though, that in 1968, there must have been fewer attentive listeners uninitiated to the Beatles than to any other band. Mid-period Beatles albums like Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966) were comprised of unrelated songs, but, partly due to their song sequencing, those albums hung together as unified works. The sequencing of the songs on the The White Album seems intended to avoid palatable transitions. And then there's the length of the album: 30 songs totaling more than an hour and a half. From the point of view of UK fans, The White Album was the same length the band's previous three LPs/EPs combined (Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and the Magical Mystery Tour EP). This was no longer the band of little ditties like 'She Loves You.'

But it also wasn't the band that had produced the cogent, singles-eschewing Sgt. Pepper sixteen months prior. It's been said that the sprawling, disorienting miscellany of The White Album formally described the state of the band at the time. While that's pretty ingenious if it was the intention, it doesn't make this a better musical work, even if it helps illuminate the situation for those in the know.

In retrospect is seems more likely that the fractious foursome's lack of cohesion prevented the album from becoming the unified whole it could've been; indeed, the Beatles had discarded raw material in the past in reaching consensus on the final form of an album. But with The White Album it seems they included everything, ready or not. Maybe they settled on a double album before realizing that they only had three sides of good material, but didn't have the collective will to reverse course.**

Be that as it may, there's a lot to like about The White Album. Among its thirty songs are one all-time classic ('Ob- La-Di, Ob-La-Da') and four other very good songs ('Back in the U.S.S.R.,' 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps,' 'Blackbird,' and 'Birthday'). Add to that 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,' 'Revolution 1,' 'Glass Onion,' and 'Savoy Truffle,' and there's a solid half-hour to build upon. And although neither 'Helter Skelter' nor 'Revolution 9' is a Beatles classic, each is important historically - - and maybe each fits better here than on a tighter, more calculated album.

On balance, The White Album is worth having, but it's not the first to get if you want an immersive Beatles-album experience; for that I'd suggest any other of the group's albums from Rubber Soul (1965) to Abbey Road (1969).

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* counting Magical Mystery Tour as an album, which I do.

** to be fair, the band made the final selection of 30 songs from a larger collection, as evinced by the 2018 '50th Anniversary Box Set' of the album.