Good Night

Since I seem to have slipped into a nighttime posting schedule, and since I'm freaking exhausted after a full day of work stuff at a trade show, I'm finding myself more drawn than usual to this sweet little lullaby by John. Of course, Ringo takes a memorable lead vocal. Let's all hope I make it through this post without falling asleep myself.

But yeah, John wrote "Good Night" as a lullaby for his son Julian, who turned 5 in 1968. Actually, I'm not sure he so much wrote it, as just sang it to him when he put him to sleep, in the way that you would sing a little nonsensically to your kid. But at some point he apparently decided that "Good Night" would make a good track for the White Album. Here's the thing: heard as a song to Julian, "Good Night" is very sweet and kind of special, and the image of John whisper-singing it to his (famously) kind of neglected son is pretty intimate. And when I imagine how John must have sounded singing it, I think of "Julia" to the Nth, you know, just in terms of that intimate, intensely quiet singing. So I think it's interesting that John has gone out of his way to distance himself from that kind of intimacy: by giving it to Ringo to sing, by leaving out all the other Beatles from the musical arrangement, and by giving George Martin instructions to make the orchestral arrangements as schmaltzy as was humanly possible. It's as though John wanted the song to sound like a parody, and it kind of does.

Martin delivered the goods on the schmaltz, all right. Listen and you'll hear all the elements of the most cheesetacular easy listening stuff your grandparents like-- there's a celesta chiming away (which I think George Martin is playing) and these weird tweeting little flute lines, and what sounds like one of the larger Beatles orchestras ever assembled to play those warm, syrupy violin parts. It's the chorus that really gets me-- it sounds like a few singers pulled from the giant Hollywood choruses who sing those reprises at the ends of animated Disney films. And, you know, it's exactly what John asked for. It's weird, isn't it? I mean, the effect is fine, and it's pretty and so forth, but so unsubtle that John must have been trying to make this sound kind of sarcastic. As if expressing love for his son was somehow weirdly uncool. Am I being too hard on John? I don't know. I mean, maybe he just wasn't sure the song was that great. It IS a little thin-- more could have been made of the lyrics, if I'm to get picky-- but it's a lullaby, for God's sake. It's all about mood, not great poetry. And the mood is nice. So I don't quite get this decision.

That said, Ringo DOES deliver as sweet a vocal as could be desired, in that guileless Ringo way. And it's a likable song-- I like it quite a bit, even if I'm not sure what John was going for exactly. Ringo has said that people tend to assume that Paul wrote it, which just goes to show that those people are not listening as well as they should be. As we all hopefully know by now, the whole John-was-the-rocker, Paul-was-the-pussy cliche is dumb-- John wrote great ballads, and Paul wrote great rock and roll. And if you are actually listening for where they do differ, it's obvious that "Good Night" is a Lennon song. The melody does that Lennonesque thing of hanging around just a couple of notes-- which is part of what makes it easy for Ringo, with his limited range, to sing. Paul would never have written a ballad with such a small pitch range. And he likely wouldn't have written a ballad, much less a lullaby, that does so much strange harmonic stuff-- this one lingers in the ii and iii chords so much that the home key becomes, for me, a bit cloudy. (Or maybe I'm just too tired right now.) That's more of a John touch.

Okay, on that note, I really do have to say good night. I'm going to try to get up earlier and back on a morning schedule so that tomorrow's HarriSunday happens as usual before I have to go off to more trade show madness. Good night, everybody. Everybody, everywhere. Good night.

"Good Night," released in the U.K. side D track 6 of The Beatles, a.k.a. the White Album,