The White Album — The Beatles (1968)
Four sides, four men in four rooms, and a plain white sleeve with nothing left to say.
By Rafi Mercer
Most records have an editor in them somewhere. Someone sits at the end of the process and decides what stays, and what you hear is the argument that person won. The good ones hide it, and you never notice the songs that didn't make it.
Occasionally nobody wins the argument, and everything goes on.
Abbey Road, London, from the end of May 1968 to the middle of October: five months, thirty songs, four sides of vinyl, just over ninety minutes. It was made by the most famous band in the world at the exact moment they stopped being one.
It started somewhere quieter. In February that year the four of them flew to Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to study meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They had no studio, no electricity to speak of and no deadlines. They had acoustic guitars and time. Donovan was there and taught John a fingerpicking pattern that runs through "Dear Prudence" and "Julia." They came home with dozens of songs, gathered at George's house in Esher in May, and taped them as rough demos. Those tapes sound like four friends in a living room.
Then they walked into the studio.
Brian Epstein had died the previous August, and nobody was steering. Apple, their own company, was opening its doors to anyone with an idea. Yoko Ono sat beside John at the console every day. The band split into separate rooms, sometimes working on three songs at once in three studios, sometimes adding parts to each other's tracks without the other man present. Geoff Emerick, the engineer behind Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, walked out in July and didn't come back. In August Ringo left too, convinced he was the outsider in a band of three. Paul played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Dear Prudence." When Ringo returned two weeks later, someone had covered his kit in flowers.
You can hear every bit of it.
That's the record's essential quality, and the reason it's still argued over nearly sixty years on. It doesn't hide how it was made. The drums are sometimes extraordinary and sometimes ragged. Songs sit next to each other like strangers on a train. Paul carries his soul on this record, often alone with an acoustic guitar, and then turns round and tears his voice apart on "Helter Skelter," his answer to Pete Townshend boasting that a Who single was the loudest thing they'd ever made. John is pushing at something, pulling songs apart to see what's inside them. George brings in Eric Clapton for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," partly, he said later, so the others would behave in front of a guest. For "Yer Blues" they crammed into a tiny room off Studio Two on purpose, to keep it raw.
Then there's "Revolution 9": eight minutes of tape loops, orchestras run backwards, and a voice repeating a number until it stops meaning anything. John and Yoko assembled it largely on their own. Some people skip it every time.
George Martin wanted them to cut the whole thing down to one strong album, and by every measure that makes a record tidy, he was right.
Tidy would have been a lie.
This is how I listen to it.
I took my first copy from my father's collection when I was young, and I played it over and over. It felt long. It felt out of control. I'm fairly sure my family wondered what on earth I was hearing in it. I spent hours with the four portraits that came inside, one colour photograph of each Beatle, four separate faces in four separate frames, long before I understood that the photographs told the story better than any sleeve note could.
I play all four sides, in order. That's the first rule. The White Album gives you twenty-odd minutes, then makes you get up, turn the record over and choose to carry on. You do that three times. Those breaks aren't interruptions. They're the punctuation, the moment the record asks whether you're still in.
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" stops me every time. It's three or four songs bolted together, the time signature shifting under your feet, all in under three minutes. Put a slightly different sound around it, a modern production, and I think it would be a huge hit today. It's that far ahead. It just happens to be dressed in 1968.
"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" I whistle. I can't help it. John reportedly couldn't stand the song, and the band ground through it for days. Every long record needs one song that's simply a pleasure, and nobody should have to defend it.
"Blackbird" is an epic tune in the smallest possible frame: Paul alone with a guitar, his foot tapping the time, and a bird somewhere in the mix. I think as a kid I'd have sat looking out of a window with that one on repeat. It's that kind of song. It makes you want to be still and watch something.
That's the point I'd make to anyone coming to the record now. You don't have to love all of it. Nobody does, and the band didn't either. But somewhere in those thirty songs is one that belongs to you, and you won't find it by skipping.
In a listening room it asks for two things.
Time first. Ninety-three minutes is a long sit by modern standards, and the record makes no effort to keep you. There's no sequence designed to stop you leaving and no algorithm smoothing the edges. Some songs will lose you, and a few may annoy you. That's part of the deal.
Then volume, a notch above comfortable on side three. "Yer Blues," "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey," "Helter Skelter": this is where the band sounds most like a band, loud and in the room together, and a timid system flattens it into nostalgia. Played properly it still sounds dangerous.
The sleeve came last, and it might be the cleverest thing about it. After the crowded colour of Sgt. Pepper, the artist Richard Hamilton gave them nothing: plain white, the band's name embossed so faintly you see it only when the light catches it, and a serial number stamped on every copy. It was the first Beatles album on their own Apple label, released on 22 November 1968. It went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
Reviews at the time were mixed. Plenty of critics said exactly what George Martin had: too long, too uneven, too self-indulgent. They weren't wrong. It didn't matter. It became one of the best-selling double albums ever made, and every generation since has rediscovered it as if it had just come out. In 2018, for its fiftieth anniversary, the Esher demos were finally released properly, and people could hear the warm, simple record that existed before the studio broke it open. Ringo's own copy, number 0000001, sold at auction in 2015 for close to $800,000. It's a strange afterlife for a sleeve designed to say nothing at all.
It's still the record people inherit. It gets pulled from a parent's shelf, played too often, put away, and found again twenty or thirty years later, when suddenly it makes sense.
It ends quietly, after all that noise. "Revolution 9" collapses into silence, and then comes "Good Night": strings, a choir, a lullaby, sung by Ringo.
The one who walked out.
He sings everyone to sleep.
Quick Questions
Why is it called the White Album?
Its official title is simply The Beatles. Richard Hamilton's plain white sleeve, embossed with the band's name and an individual serial number, made the nickname inevitable, and it stuck almost immediately.
Should I play all four sides in one sitting?
Yes, at least once. The record was never sequenced to keep you. It's sequenced to show you everything the band had. Turning the record over three times becomes part of the listening, and the song that ends up meaning most to you is often one you'd have skipped on a playlist.
What is "Revolution 9" and should I skip it?
It's an eight-minute sound collage built by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from tape loops, orchestral fragments and spoken voices. Don't skip it the first time. Whether you love it or not, it explains the whole record: a band where nobody was being told no anymore.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or read more from the album archive.
