The Hollies' "Do the Best You Can"

After listening to the Hollies' first five albums recently, I decided to listen to the three-disc compilation 30th Anniversary Collection 1963-1993.  Even before I listened to it, I realized something about "Do the Best You Can," specifically this section:

If you leave your car
And you're not going far
Remember what time to be back
If it slips your mind
I'm sure in time you'll find
A Rita waiting in a mac

Instead of the implied "meter maid," there's just the name "Rita."  I'm pretty sure this is something of a reference to the Beatles' "Lovely Rita" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, specifically its recurring line "Lovely Rita, meter maid."  "Do the Best You Can" seems to assume familiarity with "Lovely Rita," and uses the name "Rita" as a short-hand for "meter maid."

I checkt the chronology, and it works out.  According to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Sgt. Pepper was released on 1 June 1967, and according to the liner notes of 30th Anniversary Collection, "Do the Best You Can" was released over a year later.  It was the A side of singles in the U.S. and West Germany in July 1968, and the B side of "Listen to Me" in the U.K. in September 1968.

The Hollies' "Pay You Back with Interest"

While listening to the Hollies' For Certain Because... (for only the second time) last month, I noticed something about the bridge of "Pay You Back with Interest" (which I was already fairly familiar with because it's also included on the 30th Anniversary Collection, which I've had for years).

The lead vocals are:

How cold is my room without your love beside me
We look at the same old moon, but you're not here beside me

The backing vocals are more or less the same as the lead vocals, just with fewer words:

How cold is my room [be]side me
Lookin' at the moon [be]side me

Significantly, some of the words from the lead vocals that are left out in the backing vocals are "your love" and "you."  There's an omission in the backing vocals in the same way that the singer/speaker is absent from his love while he's "travelin'" and "wanderin'."

The White Stripes' "The Union Forever"

A couple months ago, I listened to a ten-CD set of Duke Ellington for the first time.  The lines "It can't be love / For there is no true love" in "In a Mizz" caught my ear.  I knew these same lines were in a song on the White Stripes' White Blood Cells, although I had to look up which one specifically.  It's "The Union Forever," which starts with these same lines repeated:

It can't be love
For there is no true love
It can't be love
For there is no true love

The situations in the two songs are somewhat comparable.  In the verses of Ellington's song, the speaker/singer constantly wonders "what it is / That's keeping me in a mizz."  There, the "it can't be love" line appears in the bridge.  At the end of the White Stripes' song, the speaker/singer recalls that his girlfriend "cried the union forever / But that was untrue, girl / 'Cause it can't be love."  Both seem upset about a lost love, but neither wants to admit that the relationship was ever that strong.

I knew about Jack White's interest in old blues records because of the vinyl re-releases that his Third Man Records put out.  Ellington is more jazz than blues, but between White's interest in older music and the fact that the lines are exactly the same, I think this is an intentional quotation of "In a Mizz."

Billy Joel's "Piano Man"

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking about Billy Joel's "Piano Man," and I realized something about this verse:

He says, "Son, can you play me a memory
"I'm not really sure how it goes
"But it's sad, and it's sweet, and I knew it complete
"When I wore a younger man's clothes"

The "complete" in the third line is a flat adverb, devoid of its usual -ly ending.  Part of this might be to avoid an overload of syllables in that line.  More likely, it's so that there's a perfect internal rhyme between "sweet" and "complete" (as there is between "joke" and "smoke" in a later verse).

Aside from technical considerations, as a flat adverb, "complete" indicates the degradation of the old man's memory.  He himself says that he's "not really sure how it goes."  In the same way that his memory isn't intact, neither is the word completely.

The Byrds' "The Christian Life"

Last month I learned the chords for the Byrds' "The Christian Life" from Sweetheart of the Rodeo.  After I learned them, I noticed some connections between the chords and the lyrics.

The chord progression has three sections.  The introduction:

D major | A major | D major | G major
G major | D major | A major | D major | D major

The verses (sometimes halved):

D major | A major | D major | D major
D major | A major | E major | A major
D major | A major | D major | G major | G major
G major | D major | A major | D major | D major

And the bridges and instrumental sections:

A major | A major | G major | D major

A major | A major | G major | A major | A major

One of the first things I noticed about the song after I learned the chords is that it's in 3/4 time.  Since the song is about "The Christian life," the three beats to the bar could easily represent the three figures of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Aside from a single E major, the chords are just the tonic (D major), subdominant (G major), and dominant (A major), so there's an-other instance of three.  The song is based on musical threes, just as the singer/speaker of the song - who "like[s] the Christian life" - has "built his house on the rock" (Matthew 7:24-27) of the Trinity.

The E major chord contains a G#, which is an accidental in the key of D major.  Significantly, the E major (with its accidental) is beneath the lyrics "whole world of" in the line "They say I'm missing a whole world of fun."  That whole world of fun contains "things I despise" (that is, sin), and that accidental represents them.  The "whole world of fun" is separate from the Christian life in the lyrics, and also in the music, since it's founded on something other than the tonic, subdominant, or dominant.

The first two lines of each verse ("My buddies tell me that I should have waited / They say I'm missing a whole world of fun" and "My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus / They say I'm missing a whole world of fun") and the first line of the bridge ("I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call") are each four measures long.  Since each measure has three beats, each line is a total of twelve beats.  Twelve is also an important number in Christianity.  For example, there are twelve Tribes of Israel and twelve apostles.  Admittedly, this doesn't seem as significant as the other features I've noted, but I thought I'd mention it all the same.