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Dig a Pony
Composer(s) : Lennon and McCartney
Year : 1968
Chords/Tabs: Dig a Pony
Notes on "Dig A Pony" (DAP)
KEY A Major
METER 3/4
FORM Intro -> Verse -> Verse -> Refrain ->
Verse -> Verse -> Refrain ->
Verse (instrumental) ->
Verse -> Verse -> Refrain -> Outro (w/complete ending)
GENERAL POINTS OF INTEREST
Style and Form
- The amount of non-routine musical detail in this song is all the more
surprising and impressive because of its intentionally candid, rough
presentation. An admittedly non-scientific poll of my acquaintances
reveals that some people just don't like this song because of this
sloppy while over the top intensity.
- Tough nuggies is all I can say. If the composer/performer's willing
to take a risk it's only polite for you cutting him some slack for it.
I'll grant that the Platonically ideal rendering of this song by the
Beatles is something we're not privileged to hear, but I'll stick by
my first point, that the risk element of hyperintensity (if not the
sloppiness, per se) is germane.
- This is one of the truly scarce entries in the Beatles catalog with a
clear and strong ternary backbeat. "Baby's In Black"
and "I Me Mine"
surely belong on this short list. Those song with a pulse of rapid
triplets, such as "Norwegian Wood" and
"She's Leaving Home," do not
make the cut because in each of them the higher-order binary meter
asserts itself over the triplets, placing the latter in the
metrical background.
- The form is dominated by the verse/refrain pattern of a folk ballad,
but also includes the doubled up verses and the half-time instrumental
break of a pop song.
- The _Let It Be_ album track of this song is taken from the Rooftop Concert
of 1/30/69, though Phil Spector misguidedly opted to edit out the same
complete musical phrase from both the Intro and Outro sections. I don't
get his motive: if he felt the track runs too long (which might be a point
well taken, I'll grant), then the cut is not sufficiently large enough to
make a difference. And in the meanwhile, he winds up eliminating an
element from the original that helps reinforce set the obsessional tone
of the piece.
- Seek out either the unedited Rooftop Concert tape for the complete
performance, or opt for the different take of the song that would have
appeared on the _Get Back_ album. The latter is an earlier but still
complete version from 1/24. It has the added virtue of containing John's
"go straight into 'I've Got A Fever'" remark which for my money is
not only funnier than the corresponding "I Dig A Pigmy" but also at
least appears in its proper place on the album master, as opposed to
the Pigmy's having been flown in from elsewhere.
Melody and Harmony
- The verse tune tries its damnedest to be purely pentatonic, but the
prevalence of the flat-VII chord throughout the song (which contains
both non-pentatonic scale steps 4 and flat 7) forces the mold to be
eventually broken.
- The tune makes broad and spicy gestures of contour. The verses starts
off with a balanced arch that covers a full octave but ends up with
a second upward sweep of that arch left hanging in air, just begging
for some release or relief from the refrain. The refrain obligingly
picks up where the verse had left things and proceeds to blow the roof
off in terms of range; the downbeat of the refrain momentarily
establishes a new melodic highpoint just above where the verse tops
out, but then, in the second phrase, the tune jumps up practically
a full octave to top out in falsetto on the C# eight and a half steps
above middle C.
- Harmonically, six out of the possible total of seven chords diatonically
indigenous to the home key appear; only iii is absent. The lineup is
further extended by the large amount of airtime given to flat-VII,
particularly in context of the so-called double plagal cadence, VII ->
IV -> I.
Arrangement
- The backing track may be described as suitable for live performance by
a live quartet of two electric guitars, one bass guitar, and drum kit.
- John's lead vocal carries most of the song with some minor yet
carefully placed backing help from Paul. For example, Paul reinforces
the "Because I" transition between paired verses, and following
the instrumental section (which after all, is another verse section)
he bothers to do his thing on *both* verses of the following pair.
The refrain is vocally harmonized the whole way through.
SECTION-BY-SECTION WALKTHROUGH
Intro
- The intro has an AAB phrasing pattern that could-have-been made into
12 measures long instead of 11, except that its final measure overlaps
with the start of the first verse:
------------------------------ 2X -------------------------------
|G |D |A |- |
flat-VII IV I
|G |G# |A |
flat-VII VII half dim. I
- Everything but the specific harmonic content hints at the blues. The
B phrase is the one Spector blue lined, by the way.
- The extent to which all three phrases converge on the home key from
the offbeat starting point of flat-VII makes the I chord at the end
of this section feel less authoritative than you'd expect.
- The chromatically rising bassline harmonized in the middle by the
half-diminished 7th chord is a cliche that you somehow won't find
very often in a Beatles song. Even in other music, you'll more often
find it used as an approach to V instead of I.
- The first two phrases of the intro are an instrumental version of what
turns out to be the refrain section. The aggressive ostinato riff played
an octave apart by both bass and lead guitar must have been a challenge
for them to execute from the get go judging from the consistent pattern of
false starts on the various session outtakes.
- The flexible handling of the riff bears study. The riff's pattern is
as essentially pentatonic as the verses's tune, and it is repeated on
all three chords in this section, but they make a couple of foolish
consistency-avoiding adjustments for the third (i.e. final) iteration
of the riff, on A: the first note is sustained for close to a full
measure before the rest of the riff is played out, and when it is played,
they sneak a nice bluesy B# neighboring tone beneath the C#.
Verse
- The verse makes a curiously rhetorical free-verse effect, with its unusual
thirteen measure length and ABB' phrasing pattern; the latter made
interesting by the fact that all three phrases are of different length
even though the last two of them are closely related in content:
|A |- |- |- |f# |- |
I vi
|b |G |- |
ii flat-VII
|b |G |E |- |
ii flat-VII V
- Phrases B & B' create a vivid feeling of taking two steps forward from
a starting line, then going immediately back to the starting point to
repeat those same two steps with the goal of accelerating through them,
this time, to a more farther objective. Compare this with a similar
gesture found in, of all things, "I'm Looking Through
You."
- The chord progression of phrase B' is a Lennon favorite, the earliest
example of which I can think of is the intro to "Help!"
Refrain
- The refrain has an AA' phrasing pattern in which the exact number
of measures in the section is impossible to count because of the
"dramatic pause" which extends the A' phrase to an indeterminate
length. I count about 10 measures in all, but your mileage may
vary:
------------------------------ 2X -------------------------------
|G |D |A |- |
flat-VII IV I
|- |- |
- The backing arrangement cleverly varies from that of the intro. In
place of jumpy riff, the G and D chords are executed as a simple root
triads played squarely on the beat. The familiar riff does reappear
for the A chord, but in this case is performed by only the lead guitar;
no bass doubling at the octave.
- The drums deftly reset your sense of tempo before the next verse
begins, a strategy preferable to resetting the tempo right ON the
downbeat of the verse. Run that alternative in your head and see
what I mean.
Outro
- The outro is a symmetrical booken repeat of the intro.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
- Two of John's most familiar and effective musical personnae are,
for lack of better labels, the "Exhorting Prophet" and the "LoveObsessed
Screamer." We're used to encountering these one at a time,
in separate pieces. One of the most unusual aspects of DAP may be
the way it makes a special effect out of alternating the two of them
in real time within the same song.
- The exhorter speaks with encouraging authority (e.g.
"The Word," or
"All You Need Is Love"
), but also sometimes in Dylanesque/surreal/mystically
difficult imagery (e.g. "I Am The Walrus," or
"Across the Universe").
- The screamer expresses a euphoria of pleasure/pain over love's true
desire, whether fulfilled yet or not, and he doesn't give a damn who
overhears his ranting; e.g. "... Monkey,"
"Don't Let Me Down,"
"I Want You/She's So Heavy," even the relatively early
"I Feel Fine."
- Considered in this light the protagonist of our "Pony" sounds like
the Exhorter in the verses, and the Screamer in the refrains. The
emotional focus of those two respective parts of the song is distinct
to the extreme that you find yourself thinking of the person addressed
in second person during the the verses ("You can imitate ...") as not
necessarily the same one so badly "wanted" in the refrain.
- This shift of focus represents not just a clever cross cutting
alternation, but infinitely more compelling, the playing out of a
struggle: of the prophet who in spite of himself is distracted and
torn away from delivering his parable by all consuming desire.
- And that phrase which Spector so cavalierly expunged turns out to
helpful if not outright necessary to drive the fully drive the
point home. Without those bookend iterations of the working title
phrase, "All I Want Is You," the song is reduced to a rote AB, AB ...
alternation of moods in which prophecy is predictably succeeded by desire.
Not bad as far as it goes.
- But each bookend adds something: At the end it confirms desire's
upper hand by coming on the heels of a refrain, and at the very place
where every other time in the song you'd get a new verse, reiterating
the message of need.
- The bookend at the beginning accomplishes two things:
- It presents the protagonist to us in the throes of desire right in
the first slate.
- Best of all, the overlap between the Intro's end and the start of the
first verse conjurs up the musical equivalent of a rude awakening from
a daydream, as if someone had given the protagonist an offstage
heads up during the last seconds to indicate, "sorry to startle you,
Mr. Prophet, but you're on the air, scheduled to deliver your sermon
right now." Ooops.
Regards,
Alan (awp@world.std.com)
---
"Yes, I do." 061399#168
---
Copyright (c) 1999 by Alan W. Pollack
All Rights Reserved
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