Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers by Andrew Grant Jackson

Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers by Andrew Grant Jackson is another book covering a favorite speculative topic of many popular music fans: what would sort of albums might the Beatles have put out if they had stayed together? I have my own series of imaginary Beatles albums compiled from the best of their solo work, and in the past I wrote about another book covering the same ground, Jeff Walker’s Let’s Put the Beatles Back Together. Inevitably, I found myself looking at the differences between Still the Greatest and the latter book, not to mention my own albums. Rather than creating multi-CD box sets as Walker does, Jackson sticks to the standard album format, though with the interesting (though I’d say unnecessary) twist of making them exactly parallel the actual Beatles’ albums, so there is one double album in addition to a dozen single albums. As mentioned in my review of the other book, I think the album format makes a great deal more sense, as the idea that the Beatles would have released all their original material in multi-album sets even in the pre-CD era strikes me as highly unlikely. Another area where I think Jackson’s book is somewhat superior is that his discussions of the individual songs are more balanced length-wise and have less of a tendency to go too far off on tangents only barely related to the music, whereas Walker’s discussions of Lennon’s songs are a lot longer than those about the others’ material and tend to dwell a little too much on gossipy details about Lennon’s life (though much of it is admittedly interesting). Jackson also includes an appendix listing all of the actual solo albums released by the ex-Beatles, including the songs from each that he has put on his Beatles albums. He even compares the albums in terms of number of songs from each that he’s included. This is something that I thought Walker’s book should have had. Jackson, on the other hand, doesn’t try to improve the songs by editing them as Walker does, a good idea that I wouldn’t bother to actually do in most cases, and Walker adds a lot more side sets like cover albums, live albums and even albums combining the work of related artists like Yoko Ono and Lennon’s two sons.

As might be expected, I don’t agree with all of Jackson’s selections, though in most cases I disagree more about what he left out than what he put in, as most of his choices are at least decent and are often very good, even the ones I left out of my own albums. He doesn’t try to stretch Lennon’s material as far as Walker does, which means that on his post-1980 albums there are only a few Lennon songs (the last one has only McCartney and Starr songs, since Harrison had also died by then). This means his albums present a better picture of the four’s solo material, with McCartney being by far the most prolific over the entire post-breakup period and therefore having the most songs included. Even if it is argued that McCartney was more inconsistent than Lennon, meaning that he had a substantially lower great-to-mediocre ratio in his song output (which is I think debatable), the mere fact that he released far more songs even before Lennon’s death means that he easily had more worthy material. Walker ended up including a lot of songs from posthumous Lennon demo collections in order to have plenty of Lennon songs even on later sets. While I could see including a few of the best of these, it would be more natural to just let songs by McCartney and the others predominate on later faux Beatles sets, and perhaps just put on one or two Lennon songs from earlier in his solo career (after all, it was not unusual for the Beatles both as a band and as solo artists to release songs well after they had been written). Jackson’s solution of sticking fairly strictly to the actual release dates (which also means that his early to mid 1980s “Beatles” albums have few songs by Starr or Harrison, since they went for long periods without releasing anything) is also better than trying too hard to create a balance between contributions.

As noted above, Jackson also ranks the original solo albums by number of songs included. The ones at the top are mostly the ones one would expect, i.e., All Things Must Pass, Band on the Run, Imagine, Plastic Ono Band, Ram, and so forth. Further down there are some oddities, such as there being only a few songs from albums like Flaming Pie (the first of McCartney’s string of excellent post-Anthology albums) or Living in the Material World (which is only inferior to All Things Must Pass, Brainwashed, and possibly Cloud Nine among Harrison’s albums). He also includes too many cover songs. While I think all four did some excellent covers, I don’t think if they’d been releasing albums as the Beatles they’d have put many, if any, on them. It makes more sense to do a separate covers only album, as Walker did, or indeed as Lennon and McCartney did as solo artists (though the latter’s excellent rock ‘n’ roll covers album Run Devil Run included three good original tracks among the covers, including the great title track, which Jackson also leaves out). There are only four songs from Ringo, which is not only easily Starr’s best album but one of the best solo Beatle releases period. Venus and Mars, one of the better Wings albums, is also badly underrepresented. On the other hand, there are as many songs from Walls and Bridges as there are from Plastic Ono Band and Ram (seven each), putting it in the top six. While Walls and Bridges is a good album, I don’t think it’s that much better than Living in the Material World, Venus and Mars, Ringo, or for that matter Mind Games, all of which have far fewer songs included. And that’s without even getting into my disagreements regarding the individual songs, whether from the albums or from singles. But given how subjective these sorts of things are, some disagreement is inevitable. I suspect that if I actually sat down and assembled Jackson’s proposed albums – or for that matter Walker’s – I’d enjoy them immensely, at least nearly as much as I do the ones I put together myself. Still the Greatest will certainly be a major resource if I ever get around to completing my own set of imaginary post-breakup Beatles albums.