Tell Me Why You Cry
I guess this could happen to anyone who's been in Southern California for the last couple of weeks. Earlier this morning, a question arose in my mind:
Why did John Lennon write the song "Rain"?
Turns out there's a story behind it:
When we arrived in Sydney it was pissing down with rain. We got off the plane and they put The Beatles on the back of a flat-back truck so the crowd could see them.
— Neil Aspinall
The Beatles Anthology
We were having hysterics, laughing. It was so funny, coming to Australia and getting on a big van, all soaking wet; we thought it was going to be sunny. We only got wet for about fifteen minutes, but the kids got wet for hours. How could we be disappointed when they came out to see us and stood in all the rotten wind and rain to wave to us? They were great, really great. I've never seen rain as hard as that, except in Tahiti.
— John Lennon
The Beatles Anthology
Turns out that this is another example of how a song can be overanalyzed:
At its most obvious level, this is a song, as John says in the Anthology, “about people moaning about the weather all the time.”...And when the lyrics are taken alone, it is hard to make a case for the song being about much of anything else....
The music...suggests in other ways that the weather is to be taken as a symbol of something else. The Beatles do this by making the music itself represent the condition they are describing....[T]hey played the backing guitar at a fast speed, recording this on tape, and then played the tape back at a slower speed. John also stumbled on the idea of recording a guitar and voices backwards. In other words, he sang and played guitar along with the backing track, while it was being played backwards, then reversed the direction of the voice and guitar and combined them with the backing track while being played forward. The effect is quite noticeable, since it reverses the normal attack and decay rates associated with a guitar....There is also Ringo's stop and go drumming on the song, and Paul's burbling bass, playing a repeated line that varies in tempo, and that runs quickly from the lower to the upper register and back again....
The effect of all these musical devices is to represent the “rain or shine” polarities in musical terms. So The Beatles are in effect saying, not only ”Rain or shine, I don't mind,” but also “fast or slow,” “backwards or forwards,” “stop or go,” “high or low.” As John sings in the song, “I can show you” — and he does, quite literally....
So the implication is clearly that the vagaries of the weather are, at some deeper level, symbolic of something else....
But what if the musical effects are not symbols, but are to some degree the subjects of the song themselves? In this case, perhaps, what we have is a song about the transformative and liberating effects of art....
In reality, John, Paul, the Georges, and Ringo were probably just playing around with cool sounds in a Clintonesque way (i.e. because they could).
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