Facet Three of “The White Album” consists of among the heaviest songs in The Beatles’ catalog. However the disc closes with one in every of their extra tranquil moments, as George Harrison’s non secular “Long, Long, Long” brings a welcome calm to proceedings following the mayhem of “Helter Skelter.”
Not like nearly all of the songs recorded for the album, “Long, Long, Long” wasn’t written through the group’s time in India, within the spring of 1968. In actual fact, it seems that George wrote the music very near the conclusion of the “White Album” classes, and no demo of “Long, Long, Long” is understood to exist earlier than George, Ringo and Paul started recording it on October 7 – simply 10 days earlier than the album was lastly combined and accomplished.
“All love is part of a universal love”
The inspiration for the music was made specific in George’s 1980 guide, I, Me, Mine: “The ‘you’ in ‘Long, Long, Long’ is God.” For Harrison, love was all the time a non secular factor. As he informed Rolling Stone journal in 1976, “I think all love is part of a universal love. When you love a woman, it’s the God in her that you see. The only complete love is for God.”
George would typically write love songs to God, regardless of typically discovering his viewers resistant: “If you say the word ‘God’ or ‘Lord,’ it makes some people’s hair curl! They feel threatened when you talk about something that isn’t just ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and if you say something that is not just trivia then their only way out of that is to say, ‘You’re lecturing us or you’re preaching,’ which it isn’t.”
On “Long, Long, Long,” George sings, “So many tears I was searching/So many tears I was wasting,” as he laments how he had misplaced the Lord, however rejoices in how he has now discovered Him once more. Harrison returned to this theme a variety of instances, particularly on “Hear Me Lord” from his 1971 masterpiece, All Issues Should Cross.
Musically, “Long, Long, Long” owed one thing to a music that encompassed the entire of Facet 4 of Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde LP. As George defined, “I can’t recall much about it [‘Long, Long, Long’] except the chords, which I think were coming from ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ – D to E minor, A, and D – those three chords and the way they moved.”
“The Beatles always took advantage of accidents”
Although John Lennon was absent on not less than the primary day of labor on the music, the opposite Beatles labored fortunately and effectively collectively, supporting each other by means of 67 takes earlier than arriving on the keeper. The session tapes reveal their camaraderie, with jokes flying forwards and backwards, in addition to phrases of encouragement to maintain pushing for that excellent take: “I don’t mind how long it takes at the moment,” Paul McCartney mentioned after Take 29.
The fundamental backing of George on acoustic guitar, Paul taking part in organ, and Ringo on the drums was finally accomplished on 7 October, earlier than overdubbing started the next day – Paul taking part in bass and George double-tracking his vocal. Paul and George’s fantastic vocal harmonies convey the music to a crescendo, earlier than falling again to mild spirituality. Ringo’s drums are additionally a notable characteristic of the monitor, his fills harking back to his rightly lauded work on “A Day In The Life.” On October 9, Chris Thomas added a piano half impressed by The Moody Blues’ “Go Now.”
The sudden cacophony that brings the music to a conclusion owes a lot to the random, a component The Beatles had lengthy loved bringing to their recordings. As George Martin’s assistant, Chris Thomas, recalled, “There’s a sound near the end of the song which is a bottle of Blue Nun wine rattling away on top of a Leslie speaker cabinet. It just happened. Paul hit a certain note and the bottle started vibrating. We thought it was so good that we set the mikes up and did it again. The Beatles always took advantage of accidents.”
The spinning bottle of Blue Nun was augmented by Paul’s expanded organ chord – a C minor with a suspended 4th – a snare roll from Ringo and a wail from George, which mix to create an unsettling impact, earlier than George wraps issues up with a last chord on his acoustic guitar, as this refined second of reflection crashes, exhausted, to an finish.
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