Surprising Beatle Musical Moments | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

What surprised you most about individual Beatles performances?

By which I mean their musical performances, not the rest of the show (we’d be here all day)! I’ll give examples:

I’ll start off with George. He loved to be surprising really. I still laugh at Only A Northern Song , that many hate the song makes it funnier. But it’s that absolute rockstar moment when he hits that high note in the last chorus of Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby , so un-George/yet-very-George. It’s an intentional rocknroll trope and that it’s George who does it and not Paul or John makes it stand out. He was plenty surprising after that but I can’t top it.

Ringo next. I didn’t hear the music in order, my first real introduction apart from my mum’s copy of Beatles For Sale was the Red and the Blue (compilations) and I listened mostly to the Blue. My surprise with Ringo was his drumming on Strawberry Fields and A Day In The Life . I’d never heard anything like that. Less surprising if I’d heard Rain first perhaps. I still think the drumming on ADITL makes you listen to it as a key part of the meaning of the song, few songs do that. I think it’s a turning point too, the way he listened to songs changed and his drumming did also.

My surprise with John was two things. Primarily Julia . It’s a shock to hear him playing fingerpicking guitar in a very gentle personal song, a sign of things to come. More or less unique for John in the Beatles canon although Across The Universe comes close but less surprising. The other is his sense of humour, not that it wasn’t on display outside the studio or on the stage. It also shows that he was a much better musician than he usually demonstrated, something that makes it difficult to appraise him besides his songwriting. Reading Lewisohn’s statement that he had to make a joke of every count-in did surprise me. One day I’ll do a post on the Beatles musical humour if it hasn’t already been done to death, it’s a sleeping giant.

Paul. Paul is endlessly surprising, you almost expect it. But I have to pick a favourite and it’s his bass singing in I Will . Most people have to be told it’s actually Paul humming the bass. It made me laugh when I first realised and those are my favourite surprises.

What’s your Beatles musical surprise?