It’s Thanksgiving of 1968. This year what you are thankful for more than anything is a new album from The Beatles. You’ve been waiting so patiently in the cold and you finally grabbed it. You thought you grabbed the wrong one because the whole album cover is white. You just got your dirty hands on The White Album.

Most people don’t know that the official name for The Beatles ninth album isn’t The White Album. It’s commonly known as that because it has no graphics or text other than the band's name embossed on the white sleeve. It’s actually known simply as The Beatles. The album was recorded during a period of turmoil for the group. During the recording of the album, Ringo Starr quit the band for a brief time, leaving Paul McCartney to play drums on two tracks.

The album's sleeve was designed by Richard Hamilton, a notable pop artist who had organised a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery the previous year. Hamilton's design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake's vivid cover art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve. The band's name was discreetly embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side, and the cover also featured a unique stamped serial number, "to create," in Hamilton's words, "the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies." The album's inside packaging included a poster, the lyrics to the songs, and a set of photographs taken by John Kelly during the autumn of 1968 that have themselves become iconic. This is the only sleeve of a Beatles studio album not to show the members of the band on the front.”

Track Listing

Side one

No.      Title

1.         "Back in the U.S.S.R."

2.         "Dear Prudence"

3.         "Glass Onion"

4.         "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"

5.         "Wild Honey Pie"

6.         "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"

7.         "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

8.         "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

 

Side two

No.      Title      Lead vocals      Length

1.         "Martha My Dear"

2.         "I'm So Tired"

3.         "Blackbird"

4.         "Piggies"

5.         "Rocky Raccoon"

6.         "Don't Pass Me By"

7.         "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"

8.         "I Will"

9.         "Julia"

 

Side three

No.      Title

1.         "Birthday"

2.         "Yer Blues"

3.         "Mother Nature's Son"

4.         "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey"

5.         "Sexy Sadie"

6.         "Helter Skelter"

7.         "Long, Long, Long"

 

Side four

No.      Title      Lead vocals

1.         "Revolution 1"

2.         "Honey Pie"

3.         "Savoy Truffle"

4.         "Cry Baby Cry"

5.         "Revolution 9"

6.         "Good Night"

 

 

[via Wikipedia]

 

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