Yellow Submarine
The best Beatles film, the one true masterpiece, and they weren't in it. The Beatles were immortalised in cartoon in 1965 for American TV, the show took the band's public personas, established by the film A Hard Day's Night, and made them even broader. The film Yellow Submarine was somewhat of a correction. The new, pepper-fied personas were the Far-Out one (check out John's opening, chemical transformation), the Debonair One, the Mystical One (it's all in the mind) and the Downbeat One...
OK so Ringo didn't change that much. It's worth noting that John first rejected the Showbiz Beatles then he rejected the Psychedelic Beatles as equally potent fictions, before finally idea of The Beatles itself. They were variations of the bourgeois conventions of the entertainment industry. His first gesture was of course the nude cover of Two Virgins, literally stripping away everything. Whether he achieved sincere reality in art is another matter.
The song Yellow Submarine is a gem. Paul wrote it as a children's song and a feature for Ringo in 1966. By 1967 it was already being included in songbooks, alongside music hall, nursery rhyme and folk song classics. The lyric was written in a similar manner to Eleanor Rigby, starting with Paul and ending with a committee. Instead of achieving clarity it got cloudier as it went along: an early sign, perhaps, of the slackening that would later overtake The Beatles lyrics.
Z... Zed... Uh, Zebra Crossing
We made it, just... Don't applaud then, sheesh! There are no Beatles songs beginning with Z. Z of course marks the end of the alphabet. Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles, ending with a song called The End. It also featured a cover showing the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road. So, here, enjoy one of The Beatles finest achievements, the bittersweet end to their career. The Abbey Road medley.
