How would the Beatles' White Album have worked as a single, rather than double, record?

Saturday 5/10/25

Producer George Martin, who was not a fan of what was happening with the Beatles themselves and how they were--or weren't--working together as they set about what ironically became titled The Beatles--and most regularly referenced as the White Album--thought that the eventual double disc set should have been a single LP. That they band had become self-indulgent. No one was willing to have their songs pulled back and they weren't thinking like a team, but rather four individuals--or three individuals and Ringo Starr--with their own agendas.

I understand what Martin was saying, but I've never thought he was correct in this judgment, because it overlooks a crucial truth of the post-1966 Beatles, which I'll get to in a bit.

But first, let's look at a possible single-disc version of The Beatles. We'll keep the songs in the same order that they appear on the double LP for now. I think this is what we'd be left with:

"Back in the U.S.S.R."

"Dear Prudence"

"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

"Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

"Martha My Dear"

"I'm So Tired"

"Blackbird"

"Julia"

"Birthday"

"Yer Blues"

"Helter Skelter"

"Good Night"

What else might you want to include? "Piggies"? "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey"?

For an alternate running order, it'd probably best to separate "Blackbird" and "Julia." Those first two songs--especially given how well the segue works--have to be where they're at. "Good Night" has to be last." You can't go from "Helter Skelter" to "Goodnight." "I'm So Tired" could work as a penultimate cut.

There are various numbers one wishes to include, but they couldn't be a part of a single disc. They're almost like fragments that double as songs. They're pieces of something larger, and larger than a single LP.

A single LP is very song-based. That makes sense, right? There isn't as much sprawl. The songs are under the microscope. Whereas, with a double LP, there can be this element of we're up in space looking down on some land below. The terrain from here to there.

The actual White Album is the most carnivalesque in all of rock music, to use a term favored by the Russian literary theorist, Bakhtin. It's all about oblique angles, back corridors, passages ways that both lead somewhere and also dead end, depending. It's a house of a most unusual layout, an unprecedented layout, rather than what we expect from a house. A house where the third floor can be the second floor.

But here's the truth that no one ever talks about with the Beatles: Their songwriting started to dip after 1966. They really weren't what they were as songwriters for that long. And then they weren't the songwriters they had been for that brief period later on in their solo careers. It's like a hockey player whose best years were from his early to mid-twenties, and then he wasn't that same player again.

Revolver is the last Beatles album whose main strength is its songs.

Now, hold on. The Beatles still wrote some of their best songs. "Penny Lane," Strawberry Fields Forever," "Hey Jude." "A Day in the Life" was another, but do you see how there was an accidental quality to it? One guy had a bit, and another guy had a bit, and they put them together, and it worked. But it wasn't by design. There was some luck. And it was avant-garde enough that the gaps could be seen, if not as strengths, then at least not as faults. A great work of art, but also, ironically, a bit of a con. A pasting over job. Not very different than the medley on Abbey Road. They're great. But they're there because the Beatles didn't have the songs like they used to.

The White Album is perhaps my favorite album of all-time. It's been a contender for that spot since I was in high school. This isn't me slagging it off. Or saying it's worse than Revolver, necessarily, or Rubber Soul. I'm talking more about an important shift in the Beatles' arc as artists.

I believe that Sgt. Pepper has become one of the great underrated albums that people don't understand right now. It's the Beatles' first gestalt album, as I think of it--the sum is greater than the total of the parts, if that make sense. It's sonic painting, not so much songwriting. How many great songs are there on Sgt. Pepper if we isolate them from the record? Any? Even "A Day in the Life" has to be where it is. Or it doesn't have to be, but you follow me. It has a greater power where it does than if it comes on the radio.

Which doesn't mean that albums should be or are better when you can isolate the songs. I'm saying that the song itself--songs themselves--became less important to the Beatles' records after Revolver. With Rubber Soul, Lennon had arguably his high water mark as a writer; Revolver was definitely McCartney's. It feels right that they both got that taken care of. And then the Beatles were about other things, whereas before, they were all about the song.

The White Album is the leading example of this. These songs aren't on the level of a "She Loves You" or a "Yesterday" or a "Help!" or even "There's a Place." I love "I Will" and "Cry Baby Cry," but they need to be a part of something else, an element in the sprawl. The sprawl is a part of that record's key. The carnivalesque. The weird bits. What feels like in-jokes that we are in on. The BBC sessions could feel that way, too, and we never draw a line between the White Album and what the Beatles were doing in between exchanges with Brian Matthew back in 1963 for "Auntie Beeb," but there's something there. Only on the White Album, the in-jokes and private asides that, again, we're paradoxically in on, are with the music rather than the conversation.

The years through 1966 were the years of going up; the years after that were the going down years, which is a process you want to slow down as much as possible, and I think the Beatles did that, making it last for a further three years, after which they were done. I don't think they had other great records in them. That there would have been some masterpiece in 1972 or 1975. Because they didn't have the songs like they used to have the songs. And nothing that the three songwriters had again was at the level of before, when they--and I'm especially talking Lennon and McCartney now--had the songs of their lives.

The gift was of a finite period. A part of a decade. It's fortunate that they were as productive as they were, by which I mean, committed to producing, which created a body of work that wasn't small. The songs of the White Album are gestalt songs. They're brushstrokes, swaths of color--and blocks of negative space--rather than paintings. It had to be a seen-from-above terrain record, rather than a songs-under-the-microscope record. That meant that the double was the way to go, given the nature of the songs and their own range.