Pepper came out when I was 5, it was just an album song to me. “By the time I did get Revolver, probably around the time Sgt. Yet in spite of its childlike whimsy, to both Lennon’s and Falkner’s points, there were fans who didn’t perceive it as a tune acutely directed to the tot market at the time including actual small children of the era. 1 spot on the pop charts of several countries (though it only peaked at No. My young fans might think it’s a Raffi song, but parents can tell them what we all know: it’s a Beatles classic.”Īs a single, “Yellow Submarine” reached the No. Naturally, I wanted kids’ voices and I think they very much complete my version of this timeless song. “I had fun recording it, and was glad that fiddle great Natalie MacMaster gave it a jig dancing feel. ” ‘Yellow Submarine’ is a visual song with a catchy chorus and the repetition that makes it very singable for kids,” legendary children’s recording artist Raffi said. It’s got this ageless, universal appeal, and a lot of the little kids I know got into The Beatles at a very early age.” It’s interesting, because their music isn’t necessarily simple or something. The thing about the Beatles was that they are perhaps the one band that kids seem to agree upon the most. “I know that on every record my dad and Paul would write a song for Ringo. “Especially when you’re a kid there’s something really fun about it,” Sean Lennon told the Observer. I thought also, with Ringo being so good with children-a knockabout-uncle type-it might not be a bad idea for him to have a children’s song, rather than a very serious song. So it didn’t seem uncool to me to have a pretty surreal idea that was also a children’s idea. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he’d lived and how there’d been a place where he had a yellow submarine…I quite like children’s things I like children’s minds and imagination.
“I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too range-y in the vocal.
“I remember thinking that a children’s song would be quite a good idea and I thought of images, and the color yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of nice, like a toy,’ ” explained Paul McCartney to author Barry Miles regarding the song in the 1997 biography Many Years From Now. In fact, in honor of Revolver’s 50th anniversary, the incessant listening to the Ringo-sung tune actually inspired me to set sail across the Sea of Holes to explore the song’s history and evolution as a favorite children’s song, one that has endured through five decades to reach the heart of a child who was born in 2012. I was convinced the innumerable times Benjamin has made us play “Yellow Submarine” would wear on me, but it hasn’t at all. He made me listen to “Sub” this morning when I dropped him off at Grandma’s, and last week on the way back from a family function I think we listened to it about six times before my wife intervened and convinced him to let the next track, “She Said, She Said”, play out. It was one of my own favorite songs back when I was my son Benjamin’s age, especially considering that one of the syndicated television stations here in New York would regularly air George Dunning’s stunning, psychedelic 1968 animated feature based on the song.
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I wrote that passage back when I had a weekly music column in my school paper, The New Paltz Oracle, which I had cheekily called “I Hate Music” after the Replacements song, in review of the third and final installment of the Beatles’ Anthology series back in the spring of 1997.
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But if you talk about a group who had a nation of young faces pressed up against their TV screens when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and claimed to be more popular than Jesus Christ, it can honestly be said that there will never be another group of musicians who could conquer the earth quite like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison did in our lifetime. There have been a billion Oasises and Badfingers who passed through our ears in hopes of becoming the next Beatles, and there will probably be a billion more. In the end, there was a story to be told about a band that went down in the books as one of the wizards behind the green curtain who helped shape rock ‘n’ roll as we know it. Their music is so close to my heart, it seems the only time I can articulate how much these gentlemen and the music they’ve created means to me is when my aortic valves are overflowing with human emotion. Their music is embedded in the very DNA from which I was created, thanks to my mother and her ravenous love for all things John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Fab Four are in my bones, swimming in my bloodstream.