The double album The Beatles (or The White Album, as it came to be known) shows the first signs of disintegration in the once-tight group. Not that the individual members suffer from a lack of inspiration - on the contrary, they seem to shake the songs up their sleeves - but they increasingly choose to work them out on their own. Instead of a focused group piece, The White Album is a motley collection
… of individual pieces, masterfully forged into unity by producer 's sophisticated tracklist . The white cover represents the return to simplicity, after the far-reaching studio experiments of and . Notably profits from this, and he himself considered his songs on the white double (Dear Prudence, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, I'm So Tired) to be his best. Julia is a key number in his oeuvre, an ode to both his mother and . excels in acoustic miniatures (Blackbird, Mother Nature's Son, I Will), as well as delivering the nastiest rocker in the Beatles repertoire with Helter Skelter. For the first time there is also plenty of room for contributions from (with a guest appearance by on his While My Guitar Gently Weeps) and even (Don't Pass Me By). The sound collage Revolution # 9 has for the first time no song structure and is one of the most controversial songs of The Beatles. (MS)more