THIS WEEK: FIVE UNDERRATED BEATLES SONGS
“Long, Long, Long“
from the album The Beatles [The White Album]
1968
“Long, Long, Long” is one of the most underrated songs in the Beatles’ large discography, getting overshadowed by the flashier John Lennon/Paul McCartney songs that preceded it on side three of the original double-LP The Beatles release. The White Album made all sorts of crazy incongruous juxtapositions between endings and beginnings of many of its tracks, and “Long, Long, Long” — which closed out side three of the album in its first incarnation — was one example. This plaintive George Harrison ballad followed the bedlam of “Helter Skelter,” a contender for the scariest, noisiest song the Beatles ever recorded.
“Long, Long, Long” was so quiet, indeed, that many original White Album listeners had to run over to the turntable and boost the volume to be sure the song was really there. In that context, it could have been thought of as a necessary respite from the madness of “Helter Skelter.” On its own terms, though, it was a lovely if very low-profile song, as a supremely wistful Harrison number with a hushed atmosphere, ghostly organ, well-placed responsive guitar riffs, eerie high harmonies, and dramatic Ringo Starr drum fills.
As for the lyric, though it might on the surface seem to be a relatively conventional document of romantic (you guessed it) longing, as the late critic Nicholas Schaffner rightly pointed out in The Beatles Forever, it’s “the first of dozens of Harrison love songs that are ambiguous in that he could be singing either to his lady or to his Lord.” The just-on-the-verge-of-audibility tension gets heightened by a brief bridge that raises the volume slightly and ups the beat to a middle tempo, adding a bluesy piano and rising harmonies before beatific calm is restored for the last verse.
Lots of Beatles songs from the late ’60s have weird endings, and the one for “Long, Long, Long” might be the downright creepiest this side of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with what sounds like a rattling train, joined by indefinable high organ notes and piercing wails. As The Beatles Recording Sessions documents, these unusual effects were produced by a bottle of wine on top of a Leslie speaker cabinet that began vibrating when Paul McCartney hit a certain organ note. When that fades away, it isn’t quite the end of the track: a guitar chord is faintly thwacked, followed by a slam-the-coffin pair of drum beats.
It’s been reported that “Long, Long, Long” was influenced by Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” with a melodic similarity in the ends of the verses of both songs.