Last line of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Getting Better
2022 Ranking: 130T
2022 Lists: 2
2022 Points: 20
Ranked Highest by: @Anarchy99 (8) @Dinsy Ejotuz (24)
2019 Ranking/Lists/Pts: 138T/1/1
Getz comments: One Point in 2019! In before @Leroy Hoard says it's getting better all the time.
Krista4
My 2019 ranking: 83
2019 write-up:
Getting Better (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967)
I'm a fan of these songs where John and Paul contribute distinctive parts that you can identify as being theirs alone. I'm a fan of the stabby guitars (reminiscent of "She's a Woman" and "Taxman"), the bass that comes in just a little early on every beat, and those slightly off-key harmonies. The best part of this, though, is how the edgy John parts cut through the hopeful Paul parts to showcase the differences in their personalities. It feels like a true "Beatles" song instead of a Paul or John song.
The Paul part of the song is characteristically optimistic and - Martha the sheepdog alert! - came to him when he was out walking his dog and recalled Jimmy Nicol, their short-term fill-in drummer while Ringo was ill during their 1964 tour. Any time someone asked Jimmy how it was going, he responded, "Getting better." As a counterpoint to Paul's optimism, John chimed into the songwriting with the cynical "can't get no worse," and of course the lines about an angry young man who used to beat his women are about John as well. I can at least admire how willing John was to admit to this, regret it, and vow that he had changed, but that he still had work to do. In an interview not long before his murder, he described this song: "It is a diary form of writing. All that 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved' was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."
Nearly tragic story associated with one of the sessions for this song: John showed up to the session tripping on LSD, and during recording of some backing vocals indicated he wasn't feeling well. George Martin, perhaps purposefully naive to the drug use going on at the time, thought John might have eaten something bad and took him up to the roof for some air. A while later, Martin returned to the control room alone, having left John on the roof to look at the stars. A few seconds later, the rest of the group realized what was going on and made a mad dash to the roof to rescue John, who was tripping on a narrow parapet 30 feet above the street below. Whew.
Mr. krista: "I’m not sure I like it, but I do like that it’s a seemingly bouncy, cheerful song that comes from a bunch of instruments playing one note. It’s all staccato – plank, plank, plank-plank. You could beat that melody out on a tin can. How did they figure out it was going to make that kind of song? I like that song a lot more now."
Suggested cover: Gomez
2022 Supplement: Paul has also described some of the process for writing this one: “I often try and get on to optimistic subjects in an effort to cheer myself up and also, realizing that other people are going to hear this, to cheer them up too. And this was one of those. The ‘angry young man’ and all that was John and I filling in the verses about schoolteachers. We shared a lot of feelings against teachers who had punished you too much or who hadn’t understood you or who had just been ******* generally. … I was just sitting there doing ‘Getting better all the time’ and John just said in his laconic way, ‘It couldn’t get no worse,’ and I thought, Oh, brilliant! This is exactly why I love writing with John… It was one of the ways we’d write. I’d have the song quite mapped out and he’d come in with a counter-melody."
I made a mistake in 2019 regarding one of the elements of the John/LSD story. He didn’t show up tripping but accidentally mistook the LSD for something else: "I never took it in the studio. Once I did, actually. I thought I was taking some uppers and I was not in the state of handling it. I took it and I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I said, ‘What is it? I feel ill.’ I thought I felt ill and I thought I was going cracked. I said I must go and get some air. They took me upstairs on the roof, and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid.”
So sue me.
2002 Mr. krista Supplement: I like that Paul’s line is “getting better all the time,” and then John is the perfect antidote to his personality “can’t get much worse.” “I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved?” That’s not cruel, that’s kidnapping and human trafficking and stuff. That’s terrible. Did everybody just casually treat women like that back then? I mean, it really couldn’t get much worse. Low bar to clear, to get better from that mess.
Guido Merkins
One sometimes has to wonder how John Lennon and Paul McCartney became friends. Obviously, they had a shared love of music which bonded them, but two more different guys you’d never meet. John was the resident cynic while Paul was the resident optimist. Now, this is a little too simple to be true as they could both have their moments on the other side, but it’s a stereotype that has an element of truth.
So it is with a song like Getting Better on Sgt Pepper. Paul loves to tell the story of him playing Getting Better in the studio and John jumping in with “can’t get much worse.” The phrase “getting better” was apparently something Jimmy Nichol, who filled in for Ringo on drums for part of a 1964 tour, used to say. The session for this song also was rather infamous for John accidently taking LSD instead of an upper and George Martin bringing him to the roof for some fresh air. Needless to say, when the other Beatles found out, they rushed to the roof to prevent an accident.
Anyway, the coolest part of the song is the middle, where the song just completely changes over the words (I used to be cruel to my woman. I beat her and kept her apart from the thing that she loved), which was a John self-confessional line. George’s tamboura was the instrument over that part, which gives it a dark, foreboding atmosphere as opposed to the brightness of the rest of it.The piano in the song is played by George Martin, but it’s him directly plucking the strings…always something different.
I like this song very much. It was one of the ones that first struck me the first time I heard Pepper, other than the other well known ones that I already knew.
Chirpy Paul at his chirpiest. Being much more of a "can't get much worse"/John kind of personality, i could probably use more of a Faul kind of outlook in my life.
Story time...
The first time John and George took LSD, it was a dinner in the home of their London dentist, John Riley. He put the drug in the sugar cubes they set out with the after dinner coffee. Only told them after they started tripping (great friend, eh?). George felt creeped out bc all their wives were there, so they went to a couple clubs, Pickwick and then Ad Lib. George was having an amazing trip of heightened sensory overload, but John was freaking out. So they all piled into George's Mini,
which he drove about 18 miles per hour to
Kinfauns, his estate is Esher. There, John imagined he was captaining a submarine. George was in love with everything. Not Patti or anyone in particular, just everything.
In the mid to late 70s lysergic acid diethylamide 25 was a pretty common recreational drug easily obtained. Like everyone my age I had read
Go Ask Alice, so I thought I knew what to expect. But I, disappointingly at the time, never experienced full on hallucinations. Oh we would have absurd encounters....like listening to Side 1 of
The Dark Side of the Moon for three straight hours, freaking out every. single. time. when the alarm clocks went off when
Time came on. Or laughing for thirty minutes nonstop during the 11 o'clock news. Waking up the next day with sore cheeks from smiling nonstop.
But none of the surrealism Lennon and others speak about. For John it was confirmation he wasn't mad - he had been having surrealist thoughts completely sober since he was 13, consciously in touch with what for most of us lies solely in the subconscious. I've often wondered if it was bc back in the early days of its popularity (1965-67) they were taking more than 25 milligrams? Some of my friends would 2, 3, 4 hits (microdots on blotter paper) but I was always content with one. I do remember one friend who took multiple hits during the Blue Oyster Cult show....we had to go back in the arena to find him, unaware he hadn't left his seat yet lol.
Anyway, I was fearful taking LSD too often might fry my brain. So I spaced my trips out by six months or so. Almost always there would be at least one person who was merely drunk or stoned out of their mind bc, ya know, we were being responsible, in case anyone had a bad trip. Funny to think about what we considered logical in your teen years, eh.
The one exception, the trip that cured me for life, was on my 17th birthday. I was driving from my summer gig at Dad's sawmill (new acquisition - he was in wood manufacturing and was dabbling in vertical integration.) It was about a three hour drive to my mom's, my senior year was kicking off the next day, and I stopped in my old hometown to visit some friends. I bought some purple microdot and stupidly took one before my last leg of the trip (1:15 or so.) I made it less than five miles....took an S curve on a dirt road too fast, started sliding sideways, plowed into a dirt embankment and tipped over my GMC 4WD pickup. Some local farmers wandered by 5 or 10 minutes later....probably saw the whole thing, who knows. With the help of 5 or 6 guys, we tipped the truck back over. I drove off without a word lol. To this day I have no idea who helped me.
As "punishment" my parents wouldn't let me file an insurance claim or fix my truck, besides replacing the drivers side mirror. One side was all scrapped up, the other had two huge bubble dents bc I decided to walk up and down the side after climbing out. I finally came clean to my dad about what had really happened 16 years later while having a few with him on his boat. Never did work up enough courage to tell Mom. My siblings retell it often as an example of 1) how crazy Uncle Bobby used to be, and 2) the rules were always different for the youngest. I got away with way too much growing up.
Omg, I should read my write-ups. 
He is one of my favorite vocalist. 
I miss her a lot. My mom makes an excellent cobbler now, though.
