RIght.

Okay, what.

I'm being unnecessarily unclear; you're right. I mean that it doesn't "swing" like Ringo, who always provides "English" in the form of micro-beat delay. I'm not saying "He's playing so fast that it doesn't sound like a person could do it;" I'm saying "He plays it without the humanizing delay that Ringo provides."

The small drum break before the second verse of "With a Little Help From
My Friends" is wonderful.

There's a great story (in the 1980 John Lennon/David Sheff interview book amongst other places) about how they had to record "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" over and over and over again and everybody hated it (Lennon says, "we had to work so hard to try to make that song a hit, and it could never have been a hit"), and then…

What I've always thought of as McCartney's "rock voice" ("Oh! Darling"; "Maybe I'm Amazed"; chorus of "I've Got A Feeling"; "Helter Skelter"; the "smiles await you when you rise" portion of "Golden Slumbers") is yet another incredibly fantastic element to the Beatles that they could totally have done without but it's…

But ending with "Her Majesty" (which isn't even listed on the original vinyl versions) is a nice substitute. When I found out how that had happened (in terms of taking it out of the medley and moving it to the end of the mixdown tape) it made me like it more, not less.

"The first record that was my very own" — that seriously almost made me start crying just from the pure, naked sentiment. God, I remember being a kid and feeling that way.

I've been there, man, I've been there…but I totally changed my mind.

Yeah, Rory and the Hurricanes were Aniston, the Beatles were Jolie and Ringo was Brad Pitt.

He was every bit as ruthlessly ambitious as the rest of them, even though he came off all mellow and dreamy and sang songs about not wanting anything.

Oh, he completely steals "I Want You" from John. It's totally fantastic, especially since he spends the first 16 bars of the song on the other side of the room eating a sandwich.

McCartney's drumming is extremely interesting. It's aesthetically in the same ballpark as Ringo's — they obviously have similar ideas of how it should be done (or rather, McCartney is used to hearing Starr and saying, "Right; that's the way to do it") but his own timing is much more formalized and machine-like.

Agreed. To a lesser degree, Nick Mason and Philip Selway need to get more love for what they do, because how the hell do you play rock'n'roll drums under a Pink Floyd track (say, from Meddle) or a Radiohead track (say, from Kid A)?

It wasn't just that he was a "local guy who could do a solid 4/4 backbeat." After George Martin successfully pressured the band into getting rid of Pete Best (and you can hear how inferior Pete Best was on those Cavern bootlegs and the version of "Love Me Do" that's on Anthology 1) the bandmembers chose Ringo because…

"Look! The ice pick stabbing has not affected him!"

Everybody needs to go see A Serious Man (which stars Stuhlbarg). It's one of the Coens' better movies and for some reason nobody's familiar with it.

I saw it in a theater during its initial release.

I didn't know that about the sale. That's interesting.

It's funny how, even more than The Matrix (or other, similar examples like Wanted), the Heavy Metal vibe is geared toward a specific wish-fulfillment fantasy for exactly, well, your sort of teenagers.