Did anybody see the finale to American Idol last night? I’ll admit I saw part of it. It’s not a show I watch, but my Netflix had run out, and I stumbled upon the finale and figured it was maybe worth watching. Anyway, there was this cheesy medley of Beatles songs near the end. I’m not sure why some producer thought America really wanted a Beatles medley, but all the old Idol winners came together to sing on those old tunes.

I was struck by how badly a good song can sound when it’s run through the generic production values of the mainstream music industry. Then again, there were worse songs played that evening, so I guess the Beatles tunes were not so bad. But a lot of why I like the original songs by the Beatles (and why I think a lot of people like them) is because of the performances and arrangements, which are a little bit more subtle than their incarnation on American Idol.

I thought I would take a look at one Beatles song, in particular the song “With A Little Help From My Friends” from the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and also look at what I think is a pretty good cover of the song (as opposed to those covers last night) by Joe Cocker from his 1969 album With A Little Help From My Friends.




Before talking about Cocker’s cover, let’s briefly talk about the original Beatles song. Let me point out that there is a particular quality of unity in the song, a quality music theorists like to call “organicisim” since it implies that the piece has grown out of a single idea. Take, for example, the verse of the Beatles version:

The song is in E major and the chords go from I-V-ii and then back from ii-V-I. The important thing to notice is that the opening chord progression is a sequence of descending fifths, i.e. the tonic descends by a fifth to the dominant, which then descends by fifth to the supertonic. The second half of the verse just flips the circle of fifths into an ascending series to get back home to the tonic. What is really noteworthy, however, is how the chorus relates to this verse:

The chords in the chorus are D-A-E, which would be bVII-IV-I. This is the same series of descending fifth harmonies as opened the song. Now, though, the sequence is transposed down by a step. But the root motion is basically the same. Also notice how the opening of the verse moves away from the tonic whereas when the descending fifths appear in the chorus, they move towards the tonic. The verse itself is tonally closed (as it does move back to the tonic at the end), but the chorus adds a higher level of closure, exploring the subdominant side of the tonality as opposed to the verse, which emphasized the dominant side of tonality.

Let’s turn now to Joe Cocker’s version. Many of you may already be familiar with this version as it was the theme song for that TV show The Wonder Years starring Fred Savage. Another interesting factoid is that the guitar player on this cut is none other than Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin renown of course). If you listen to the guitar parts on Cocker’s covers, I think you’ll hear a lot of similarities to Zeppelin I.



It’s my stance that Joe Cocker’s version extends this organicism and tightens the relationship between the verse and chorus. Listen again to the verse from the Beatles and compare it to the verse in Cocker’s version, paying particular attention to the bass line (FYI, Cocker’s version is in A major, not E major like the Beatles):

Joe Cocker: “With A Little Help From My Friends,” (verse)

The bass in both cases descends by step into the second chord, which as a result is in first inversion as the third is in the bass. Now compare the chorus of the Beatles to the chorus in Cocker’s version:

Joe Cocker: “With A Little Help From My Friends,” (chorus)

In the chorus, the Beatles just play root-position chords. But the bass player for Joe Cocker (Chris Stainton) uses the same descending stepwise motion in the chorus to move to another first inversion chord after the initial harmony in this section. To me, this ties the verse and chorus even more closely together, strengthening the organicism of the song. Do you agree?

There is a big difference, though, in how Cocker treats what I could call the bridge section of the piece. Take a listen:

		Beatles: “With A Little Help From My Friends,” (bridge)
		Joe Cocker: “With A Little Help From My Friends,” (bridge)

The Beatles go from a submediant to a kind of unresolved V/V (F# major) that never leads to the dominant but instead goes back to a rotation of the chorus. Moving to the relative minor is a common trick for bridges in songs that are in a major key, but in this case, the C# minor in the Beatles version is not emphasized too much.

Cocker’s verison, on the other hand, leans heavily on that relative minor and seems to make a bigger deal of the harmonic move. At the end of Cocker’s bridge, the dominant chord really gets expanded and lengthened so that the chorus which follows comes in even more climatically. In the version by the Beatles, it isn’t even the chorus that follows this bridge but just another verse.

I think I prefer Cocker’s arrangement, which has gone beyond just a mere re-instrumentation but has invovled rewriting harmonic progressions and reodering the form of the song. I think a good cover sheds new light on the original song, and I think it is clear that Cocker’s band is not simply reading from a fake book but has given some real thought as to how to invigorate the tune. So I wonder how far Joe Cocker would have made it on last season’s American Idol? Could he have eclipsed Sanjaya?