I Me Mine

HarriSunday dawns cloudy and sticky today. And I'm feeling a little grouchy, probably because after a week of relaxing furlough (furlough sucks when you get your check, but the whole not-working thing was kind of nice), I need to go back to work tomorrow-- and things at work are going to be epically, epically busy. So I'm sulking in my study listening to Beatles songs, and I'm feeling particularly drawn to George's sulky little number, "I Me Mine." Yes, George is probably chastising us again for our materialism and worldliness and gigantic selfishness. But, whatever. The song's okay. Let's listen.

This is one of the album's heavily Spector-ized songs-- which is to say, last-minute producer Phil Spector smothered it with horns and strings and a backup chorus of treble singers and God knows what else. Spector's production is notorious for having ruined several songs on the album that became Let It Be, like "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe" and so on, and here we have another excellent example. In this case, the horns and strings that are climbing that scale underneath the "frightened of leaving it, everyone's weaving it" part make the already lugubrious waltz sound that much more lugubrious, and not in a good way. What with George indulging in a bit of histrionics in the lyrics already, the orchestral instruments add this extra layer of high drama that makes the whole thing sound kind of ridiculous. What the hell was Spector thinking? At least the song's best part, which when it moves out of the waltz and into the 4/4 time of the bridge (chorus? meh, I dunno), seems to have been wisely kept orchestra-free, which lets us hear the guitar-heavy texture that should have driven this track. Thanks, Phil, for that nice bit of restraint.

I have mixed feelings about Let It Be... Naked, mostly because I feel like this kind of attempt to rewrite history is inevitably doomed, no matter how much Paul McCartney might wish it otherwise. But "I Me Mine" offers a clear cut case of a song being better served by its alternate, orchestra-free version. Listen for yourself.

In this version, the waltz sections are kept much more acoustic, which considerably lightens the almost unwieldy beat of the thing. And then those guitars, which George is really playing the hell out of, come back, and we get a 4/4 bridge section that is at least as awesome as the one from Let It Be. So it's a win-win.

Of course, for the sake of comparison, we can check out the scene from Let It Be where they play this one. Unlike some tracks that made it onto the album, this one actually gets played almost completely through in the film, which is nice. And John and Yoko waltzing through it are providing some humor, which is something else the song can desperately use.

I mean, the more I listen to "I Me Mine" in its various versions, the more I can appreciate it. It's not even close to being the best Beatles song-- though it was the last one to be recorded, which is a depressing little nugget of trivia for you-- and it's not even the best George Harrison song as a Beatle. I get that "Piggies"-esque sense of being judged if I listen to it for too long. But in this case, it was Phil Spector who was keeping me from liking it more. There's more to this than just the album version-- George had something here. It's a shame that by this point in the Beatles' career, no one cared enough about it to do more with it.

"I Me Mine," released in the U.K. side A track 4 of Let It Be, May 8, 1970; in the U.S. May 18, 1970.