The assertion that pop music, rock’n’roll, is informed by a mere three chords is a myth propagated largely by non-musicians. The statement correctly points to a simplicity, an eloquence, in some of the music, but there are surprisingly few songs that the young, aspiring guitarist can actually execute with just three chords.1 “Summertime Blues,” that’ll work. That’s actually a song wherein knowing more than three chords might prove a detriment. And Van Morrison’s classic “Gloria” can be played with three chords, but they aren’t the usual three chords. Rock’n’roll’s three chords are the tonic, the sub-dominant, and the dominant. The sixteen-year-old Morrison was thrashing away at the tonic, the flattened seven, and the sub-dominant. “Gloria” also contains a little guitar fill that seems to follow these changes with a logic born on the fretboard. In reality, there is a fingering change that must be made. As teenagers we usually pretended that wasn’t the case, and many of us still do, just in case you’re wondering why that instrumental part always sounds like crap when your buddy plays it. As a young lad, I spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to work out changes—to “figure out the chords”— so believe me about this three-chord business. Even a seemingly simplistic ballad from the fifties—“You Send Me,” for example—has four chords.
Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” was a Gordian knot, an impenetrable puzzle. I sat in my bedroom for days on end trying to work it out, intuiting that the ability to play and sing “Yesterday” would increase my chances of getting laid. (Or getting kissed, or fondling a breast, or even remaining in reasonably close proximity to a female human being for more than a few seconds.) There are chords, as you may know, made by stopping some strings and leaving others free to vibrate. These have the pleasing name of “open chords.” Other chords—“bar chords,” we call them, although “closed chords” conveys the right impression—require that all the strings be dampened, usually by a flattened index finger. This is not the easiest skill to acquire, in terms of either dexterity or strength, because it’s hard to slam all six strings down with a single finger and still have them sound boldly. “A” is a great key, because most of the important chords (the fourth, the fifth, even the “Gloria” flattened seven) are open chords. It’s a great key on the guitar, that is; saxophonists don’t care for it. If the guitar player is playing in A, then a tenor saxophonist has to transpose (the instrument actually sounds a tone lower than the written note) to the key of B, which has five sharps. Five sharps represent a lot of cowflaps in the musical pasture, if you see what I mean. It is for this reason that the sax player is always the best musician in the band.
But, getting back to “Yesterday.” The first chord on the recording is an F, a bar chord. Some people play F in a manner necessitating that the index finger be bent at the first joint, that the thumb wrap around and stop the low bass string. As complicated as that sounds, it’s often preferable to trying to pull off the infernally difficult F bar chord.2
Despite all this whining on my part, “Yesterday” is the most recorded song ever. There are something like three thousand covers. One way of explaining this is that while the song may lack “guitar logic,” it makes a lot of musical sense.3 Indeed, it makes so much musical sense that apparently Paul McCartney was initially unsure that he had truly composed the music. He was afraid he had inadvertently pilfered some standard.
BEFORE WE continue with our story, here’s a little aside. You’re probably wondering, if he’s stopping the proceedings to make an aside, then what are all those footnotes about? Well, you don’t have to read the footnotes if you don’t want to, but you should pay attention to these asides. I might be introducing characters, new players in the scenario, which is the case here.
Michael Burke was a fellow I met around this time—when I was thirteen, I believe—as he attended the same junior high school I did. He was a heavy-set boy with a big, bushy beard. Well, I suppose it’s improbable that he had the beard at fourteen, but he grew it at the first available opportunity and has owned it ever since. These days, that beard is somewhat out of hand. It ambles off his face and rests on his sweatshirt, which is an essential component of Michael’s preferred wardrobe. Burke—I usually refer to him as “Burkie” or “Mickie” or “Burkle,” as in “Mickle Burkle”—has often averred that he chose his course in life so that he could avoid jackets and neckties. His course in life revolved around computers. When we were boys, he took Computer Science very seriously. In those days, the subject involved punch cards and farm machinery. Burkie and another lad, Rob Dunn, lacking sufficient access to the actual mechanical works, would take turns writing programs (punching out chads on those damnable yellow cards) and then passing the stack of cards to the other, who would act as the computer and execute. Fairly geeky behaviour, it’s true, but both boys went on to find great fortune in the burgeoning field of personal computing. Some years ago, Burkie started a company that, as he puts it, “decided to concentrate its efforts on a little-known thing called the Internet.” Specifically, the company made and distributed firewalls. All of which is to say, Burkie soon had money, lots of it. He sold the company to become an arts entrepreneur; he started a record company. (This reminds me of the stories you hear about people who receive a huge amount of money through inheritance or some other windfall, and are then driven by guilt to throw or fritter it away.)
Mike Burke owns the company that released our second CD, Porkbelly Futures, so he will figure in this story in various ways. But for our current purposes, his significance is this. Mickle’s fortune has allowed him to indulge his long-lived passion for the Beatles. He has, in a lovely house in Victoria, British Columbia, a room devoted to record albums, reel-to-reel tapes, all manner of recorded rarities created by the Fab Four. I happened to be visiting not so long ago when Michael played me the most interesting thing, a recording of Paul McCartney teaching the other Beatles the chords to his new song, “Yesterday.”
“F major,” we hear Paul saying. “E minor, A seventh, D minor—” McCartney leaves off his rhythmic intoning momentarily to instruct, “Don’t watch my hand. The guitar’s tuned down, so I’m playing in G.”
The importance of this may well be lost on you, but me, I was stunned. I had spent much of my life grumbling about the fucking F chord that begins the song, and all this time McCartney wasn’t even playing one. He’d cunningly tuned his guitar down a whole tone, so that he could strum a Cowboy G. And that little term, “Cowboy G,” deserves a footnote.4
WELL, THEN, the Beatles arrived, and we started forming groups.
My brother Joel and I immediately came up with plans that involved a) pop music and b) total global domination of the sort demonstrated by the Liverpudlians. (Tony was never really attacked by the British Invasion. He seemed to know the chords to all the Beatles songs, but he persisted in his folksy ways, forming a bluegrass band called the Gangrene Boys. He hung around Toronto’s Yorkville area, the Village, and was sitting around someone’s kitchen table one day, drinking wine and smoking grass, etcetera, when Neil Young rushed in and announced that he was driving to California. “Anyone want to come?” Tony had academic ambitions in those days—he was assiduously studying Ezra Pound’s Cantos at the university—so he declined. There is a dent in his butt where he’s been kicking himself all these years since.) Anyway, Joel and I started a group. The instrumentation was somewhat fluid. We both hammered away on guitars, and sometimes I pounded on the piano. There was even a snare drum/cymbal combination that I’d received as a Christmas present, which seems to indicate that maybe my parents were hitting the liquor cabinet a little heavily that particular holiday season. But we needed more people for our group, which I had decided should be called PQ’s People.
Now, I understand that groups had existed before the British Invasion. Indeed, because of my brother Tony and his folkie ways, I was acquainted