The Beatles Sell Out Again, Assisted by Allen Klein

Flashback to 1970--Allen Klein has just been named the manager of The Beatles after a rather acrimonious battle that pitted John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr against Paul McCartney, who wanted his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, to manage the band's affairs, particularly the fledging Apple record label and its' related businesses. Apple had been up and running for some time, but bad business decisions (like The Fool) and a general lack of interest by the individual members of The Beatles had made the financial condition of Apple almost rotten to the core.

So what do you do to get some cash flow going? Why, you do what Capitol-EMI did time and time again--you release an album in America that contains a hodgepodge track collection solely for the purpose of making money. Sadly, this is all that Hey Jude is--just another scattered collection of songs with no cohesive design, offered for consumption to the American public just to generate income for a struggling company owned by a band that really no longer existed.

For years I've been ranting about the insidious plots of Capitol-EMI that exploited the beautiful and logical British releases of The Beatles by releasing chopped-up, pieced together American versions of their albums just to make money. I guess that the ultimate irony of Hey Jude is that that The Beatles resorted to the same profiteering motives that drove Capitol-EMI to issue the American versions--Apple was broke and had to have some cash, so Hey Jude was released.

That's not to say that Hey Jude is not a fine collection of music--there's probably not another album by The Beatles that covers their career in a ten-track format. If you could find it (and you probably can't today), Hey Jude would be a pleasant distraction that would give you a pretty good idea of what The Beatles were all about.

The Music

Can't Buy Me Love and I Should Have Known Better are lifted from the album A Hard Day's Night--the former is a rocking, acoustic driven number that's one of the few songs by The Beatles that has no vocal harmonies, while the latter is a pure piece of radio pop featuring John Lennon's harmonica and some nice twelve-string guitar work by George Harrison. Paperback Writer and Rain were the A and B side of a single--Paul McCartney came of age as a bass player with these songs, and John Lennon was singing about more than the weather on Rain, which is a very strong political statement.

The remainder of the album is a collection of A and B sides of singles that didn't make it on to albums by The Beatles until the release of Past Masters, a double album that hit the shelves in the late 1980's. Lady Madonna uses a randy sax section to contrast the image of a religious icon, while Revolution is a Lennon tip of the hat to the guitar stylings of Chuck Berry, with a little political message thrown in for good measure. Hey Jude is this band's signature song, perhaps one of the greatest rock 'n roll ballads ever recorded, and Old Brown Shoe is a lighthearted knockoff by George Harrison that features some underrated acoustic guitar work by John Lennon.

Don't Let Me Down and The Ballad Of John And Yoko are technically Beatles tunes, but everything from the White Album forward is generally regarded as solo work with the other band members accompanying the ensemble. The former is Lennon's insecure but dedicated plea to Yoko Ono, and The Ballad Of John And Yoko recounts their marriage and "bed-in", with only Lennon and McCartney appearing on the song.

Should you buy this album? Well, you probably will have trouble finding it--you might check on Ebay or somewhere and find a copy that you can buy. I owned the vinyl version many years ago, and I seem to remember a picture on the album cover showing The Beatles in a doorway of some sort, perhaps to a church. To me, this picture is probably worth a reasonable price when included with the album--if you own the catalogue of The Beatles you have this music already, so you probably shouldn't bother, unless you collect old vinyl and the accompanying historical material.

Hey Jude is where The Beatles finally sold out, but by that time it probably didn't matter anyway, because there were no more Beatles.

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