What They Were Really Born to Sing

248. U2, "Hallelujah Here She Comes"
Written by U2: produced by JImmy Iovine
Island 99250 1988 Billboard: # 3 (as B-side of "Desire")

I made that comment some posts back about fun early U2 B-sides, and their new album just came out and it's even duller than the last one (no "Vertigo"), so I think it's time to briefly take note of this song, which isn't even available on Rhapsody so I can't give you a link off the title. "Hallelujah, Here She Comes" is one of several dozen songs that U2 recorded during the Rattle & Hum period. More than any other of the band's projects, the process of selection on this one was fascinating. Some performances ended up in the film, some ended up on the album, some ended up as B-sides, and some have only shown up on bootlegs, and I'm by no means the only person who would have shuffled the available tracks in their places around had he gotten the chance. During this period, in the wake of the enormous global success of The Joshua Tree, U2 self-consciously embraced American music--and when you say "self-conscious" in relation to Bono, you're obviously talking really self-conscious. They recorded a song with B. B. King in Sun Studios; they sang a song about hearing Billie Holiday on the radio in Harlem; they had Bob Dylan play organ on a track whose lyrics were almost incomprehensible (even though it had been neophyte Al Kooper who had famously played organ on "Like a Rolling Stone").

Predictably, the best songs for the project were the less self-conscious ones. The ElvisQuoteaRama "A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel" in particular is a sad little mishmosh, just begging to be matched to footage from Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train a few years later to make a true YouTube classic. By contrast, "All I Want Is You," which seems to have no clear musical referent, is probably one of the band's best ballads, right down to Bono's last-minute entry in the Roger Daltrey/Bruce Springsteen Sustained Classic Rock Scream Sweepstakes.

"Hallelujah Here She Comes" isn't that classic, but it's a lovely little gem just the same. "Desire," the A-side of this single, is a good song, but it's as clear a Bo Diddley homage as Springsteen's "She's the One." The beat on this song, however, is all its own, propulsive, vaguely cowboyish, but really just Larry and Adam laying down a beat for their mate Paul Hewson to goof around on. Not only does it have an unpompous call-and-response on the Hallelujahs, but the simple lyrics here are less portentously witty than many of Bono's. "I see you're dressed in black/I guess I'm not coming back" is no "How long/Will we sing this song," but it's certainly worth repeating.

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?