My Favorite B-Side

724. BEATLES, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"
Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney; produced by George Martin
Apple 2764 1970 Billboard: # 1 (as B-side of "Let It Be")

Oh, I know: B-sides, such an archaic concept. As one twenty-something acquaintance mocked to me recently (even before Stephen Colbert made the same joke), "What are these things you call CDs?" But well into the 1980s, one of the things that made 45s so fun were the throwaways that established bands slipped onto their B-sides. Even if you thought the group in question sold out when they went mainstream, the B-sides were often the sort of marginal ephemera that you may have wished they still built albums out of. If you don't believe me, check out the B-sides that U2 released straight through Rattle & Hum. That is some seriously flaky shit.

In Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul (which, once again, is really the inspiration for this project, even if I haven't mentioned it since the first post lo those many months ago), he uses the Four Seasons' "Silence Is Golden"as the classic example of a lost B-side, but given my chronological focus I'd like to dig even farther. "You Know My Name" is a song with just eight words in the lyric, repeated over and over. It makes use of all the radio-derived studio tricks that make a track like "A Day in the Life" a critical darling, but it's really a sublimely stupid song, almost the inverse opposite of the singles that the Ramones would record later in the decade. I would say it reflects Lennon and McCartney's love of the Goons, except that the Goons were so much more articulate. This track is as giddily overproduced as the Ramones' singles would be underproduced, and it is as much about its sonic surface alone as its A-side ("Let it Be") attempts to be about its referent. As I have aged, I've grown to appreciate "Let It Be" more, but I've got to tell you, in 1970 none of us was listening to the A-side. This track cracked us up.

But time has given me a little perspective on this song. By now, we all know how little the Beatles were getting along by the time they recorded Let It Be. This track, though, sounds like a group of mates having fun: goody, stupid fun. Given the fact that the group's last two singles ("Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road") were essentially McCartney solo tracks, the latter with a Phil Spector assist, I'd like to count "You Know My Name" as the last real Lennon-McCartney collaboration. And as much as I subscribe to Joe Strummer's notions about phony Beatlemania, how cool is it to go out silly?