Billy Preston!

I stopped doing The Other Ones because I was riddled with self-hatred, even extending to a desire to remove pop music from my life altogether (some indication of my feelings at the time can be found in the piece on Elvis Presley’s “Stuck On You”). I still hold exactly the same political views, but I have finally learnt to live with myself on a personal level. Maybe the time has come.

I’ll also keep on doing the From The Bottom To The Top postings, and hopefully sooner after the programme has gone out than recently!

I agree it would be good to see the Other Ones back though.

This is all infinitely more interesting than this (or the next) Beatles single.

So there’s an unfortunate gap sometimes between people’s actual memories of the charts and the official version of chart history. The most notorious casualty of the Record Retailer chart’s “victory” is that “Please Please Me” was never a Number One, despite being one on every other chart compiled at the time. Poor old Acker Bilk suffers similarly.

http://uproar.fortunecity.com/galaxy/399/extranoones.htm has the gory details.

In terms of writing Popular this is a bit annoying - Robin Carmody had a blog dealing with these ‘other’ number ones but I think he gave it up.

The only number one ‘tie’ I can remember in the Music Week chart era is between “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band and “Groove Is In The Heart” in 1990. It was awarded to “The Joker” on the basis of weeks in chart - huge injustice ect ect.

My recollection is, distinctly, that all the early Beatles singles entered the charts at ther top. My recollection is of the one taken as gospel in them days - the one introduced by Alan Freeman on a Sunday afternoon. Which chart are we following, in that case?

Furthermore, I distinctly recall a four-way tie for the top position being called on Top of the Pops in the summer of 1968, which involved I’ve Got To Get A Message To You, Do It Again and a couple of others that I don’t recall at the moment. I’m recalling this in such detail that I can’t believe I’m imagining it. Am I going
gaga?

The whole bottom line, the only reason why the Beatles broke up is that they grew up. They weren’t the same struggling Liverpool group playing in Hamburg Germany. Minus the White Album and Let It Be, there was a sound of a full group effort. I fear if the Beatles stayed together - judging by their solo albums and how good songs were starting to get worked on halfassed by 1968, all they would have given us is more White Albums, and you can make your own anyway by meshing their solo albums anyway. To satisy the anti-yokoists and the anti-paulists, to simply put it they just realized at the right time that they had grown up.

Looking back, it was one of those watershed moments in their long goodbye. Yes, they actually did a live performance of sorts. (And, by the way, if you watch the videotape of the performance, it’s clear that John is playing lead guitar instead of George.) And yes, they’d put out yet another record. Perhaps we could hope that it wasn’t really over. But for all intents and purposes, it was.

And, once again, a Beatles single that should have been a double a-side but wasn’t. “Don’t Let Me Down” is the better side.

There’s a brilliant photo from the Get Back sessions (which I have in Mark Lewisohn’s book, though it’s surely in many other places) where the four Beatles and Yoko are in a studio control room listening to a playback, all displaying different unhappy emotions; only Paul is trying to put a - ahem - brave face - on it. Even without that, you can get a taste of the disarray surrounding this though - the fact that this was presumably considered the only immediately releasable track from the project (apart from the B-side), the way the single was originally issued without a production credit because nobody knew who should get it and the fact that Paul decided to re-mix it at the very last minute, meaning that it missed the intended release date. Mind you, that last factor did make it the only Beatles single to enter at the top of the charts (well, the one we’re following here anyway) and thus also made Billy Preston the the first person since Al Martino to do so with his debut hit. And it was certainly a good move to bring him in to establish some sort of steadiness. This ends up being a record that you can’t fail to enjoy, but not their most deserved of hits.

Abbey Road was a good place to go out.

And yet, like “Don’t Let Me Down,” it has a certain oomph and urgency, a heat that builds as it chugs forwards. It’s catchy enough, and Paul’s outbursts, while painfully reminiscent of someone’s dad trying to be a country rock star (”Get on back, Jojo! Go home! You do that!”) bring some fun. If nothing else, it sounds like it was fun to play. To sum up: I like the song, but hearing it I’m very aware of how much better it could have been.