Every band will inevitably have a few songs that stand out more than others. Despite countless hours spent in the studio striving for perfection, sometimes the timing isn’t right, or the elements don’t align to turn every track into a success. In such cases, it’s often better to move on to a new concept rather than trying to salvage a mediocre one. While George Harrison generally appreciated The Beatles’ best moments, he saw little value in the release of the Yellow Submarine album.
That is, if you even count it as a proper Beatles album. Despite being part of the movie of the same name that became a children’s favourite for decades to come, Yellow Submarine, the album is a much different story. There are still great Beatles tracks to be found, but they end up getting smushed between bits of filler or tunes that should have never seen the light of day to begin with.
As much as Paul McCartney’s whimsy could be charming if he had the right idea, hearing him play around with a children’s tune on ‘All Together Now’ just gives a lot of fans uncomfortable flashbacks to ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’. While it was almost obligatory to use ‘Yellow Submarine’ on some pieces of the soundtrack, not including the other masterpieces like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ from the movie until the official Songtrack came out feels like a misstep.
And it’s not like Harrison was bringing his A-material to the fold, either. ‘It’s All Too Much’ is still a decent piece of raga rock and one of the best jam-focused tracks the Fab Four ever made, but when it’s undercut with ‘Only A Northern Song’, it feels more than a little bit out of place. Then again, that might be the whole point of ‘Only a Northern Song’ since all Harrison has to sing about is feeling jaded towards his publishers.
The biggest crime that it commits, though, is the fact that it feels thrown together. The Beatles had gone well beyond making albums strictly for profit, so having them pad out the rest of the soundtrack with George Martin’s orchestrations made it feel like a stop-gap between their real musical ventures like The White Album and Magical Mystery Tour.
While the ‘Quiet One’ did have love for a lot of the group’s ventures, he felt that there was no point in revisiting Yellow Submarine, saying, “I liked when we got into Rubber Soul, Revolver. Each album had something good about it and progressed. There were albums which weren’t any good as far as I was concerned, like Yellow Submarine.”
When looking at Harrison’s own career trajectory, he was looking to venture even further into the unknown once he hit upon his ideas on Abbey Road. For all of the charming pieces to be found on Yellow Submarine, why would they want to tire themselves out with that album when they could have been working on tracks like ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ instead?
