Re: Lennon's Chord Substitutions

The Arranger <recurtin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 29, 4:57 pm, "RichL" <rpleav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Arranger <recur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 29, 2:35 pm, "RichL" <rpleav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Arranger <recur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think I've spotted a pattern with John Lennon in which he would
write a song that relied heavily on established chordal patterns,
then revise the chords to make them more novel or surprising.

Take for example, "Yes It Is." The A-section melody seems to have
been written for the old "I Got Rhythm" template...

I vi / ii V7 / I vi / ii V7 / I I7/ IV iv/ I [turnback]

...with the chords revised to make for more interesting harmonies,
and the turnback truncated as nonessential.

Or on "It's Only Love," the chorus begins with the surprising bVII
chord, where the melody (which almost completely parallels "Fly Me
to the Moon," written in 1954 in 3/4 and known as "In Other
Words," and re-invented as a 4/4 swinger in 1964 by Quincy Jones's
arrangement for the Sinatra-Basie collaboration "It Might as Well
Be Swing," well out of Lennon's oeuvre, but nonetheless ubiquitous
at the time and no less likely an inspiration than a tune from
Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

One would expect the more typical ii, or even its simplified rock
form of IV, to launch the cycle-of-fifths pattern of the chorus. I
wonder if he caught the "Fly Me to the Moon" lick he had picked
up, and reharmonized it to disguise it?

Any more examples out there? I'm sure there are plenty.

The Arranger

Your "parallels" are way off. You're stretching an awful lot. For
instance:
I Got Rhythm: I vi / ii V7 / I vi / ii V7
Yes It Is: I IV ii7 V7 / I IV bVII V7
and they diverge further from there.

My point is that the *melody* of Yes It Is conforms to the more
common 1-6-2-5 (or in rock, 1-6-4-5) pattern, and that Lennon may
have re- worked the chords after composing the sond to make them
more interesting. He called Yes It Is at one point a rewrite of
This Boy, whioch does conform to the conventional chord structure.
I'm suggesting he composed the melody using the traditional chord
pattern, then intentionally changed the chord pattern to something
less cliched. Un like This Boy, where the I-6-4-5 pateern contineud
through the second four bars of the A section, the melody of Yes It
Is conforms to the second four bars of I Got Rhythm.

I'd say it's a lot less of a reach to say that "Yes It Is" is a
rewrite of "This Boy" than to reach all the way back to "I Got
Rhythm".

And even for "This Boy", the verse progression is and was long before
the song was recorded a pop cliche. Why single out "I Got Rhythm"?
There are so many other choices!

That's pretty common terminology in the jazz world. That 1-6-2-5
pattern is generally known as 'rhythm changes' in jazz parlance. After
the 12-bar blues, it's the most common chordal pattern in jazz . And
unlike most doo-wop songs, or This Boy, which is the closest the
Beatles came to making doo-wop, the melody and the chords (slightly
altered) conform to the I I7 / IV iv / pattern in bars 5 and 6. Most
doo-wop songs just repeat that cycle of 1-6-4-5 until the bridge.
(Come Back My Love would be an exception.

Play the I Got Rhythm chords (truncating the turnaround) with Yes It
Is as a melody. If fits.

And you don't think the melody of the chorus of It's Only Love
echoes Fly Me to the Moon? Or that the Bb chord to launch the
chorus seems like an intentional, almost perverse, attempt to avoid
the Dm/G7/Cmaj7 pattern associated with the older song?

There are eerie melodic similarities. But again, it's a very generic
structure, and I could probably find 50 other songs (some earlier
than "Fly Me To The Moon") that echo it.

The cycle of fifths chordal pattern and even the melody are
commonplace, but the popularity of the tune in the months preceding
the Lennon work suggest to me that's where he got the idea. My guess
is that the Bb substitution was a successful attempt to avoid the
cliche. After Fly Me to the Moon, go get a lot of songs written with
that pattern. "Yesterday When I Was Young" would be one example.

I suppose it's possible that "Fly Me To The Moon" was an influence on
Lennon. But the song was written *much* earlier (early 50s I think),
and although Sinatra performed it in '64, I don't tend to think of the
early Beatles (particularly John) as heavily engaged in music of a
different genre performed by people a generation older than he. But
really, when you come down to it, we just don't know.


.

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