#i'm down

Watched Down with Love (2003) and fell in love with Ewan all over again

It resembles “Long Tall Sally” most during Paul’s opening: one mad voice screaming at the top of its lungs. The band punctuates his singing fiercely, and the ensemble is tight to the point of bursting—Ringo’s snare drum alone has a snap that literally stings. There’s a power in the sound of these four men playing these three chords that has nothing to do with volume. As they swing into the refrain, the background vocals give away the tone: the shape of their phrase is parodic—“I’m really down.” (There is a fourth, slightly concealed voice singing the bass line, holding out the roots of each chord on the word “down.”)

After a full round of “I’m down”s, the band stops and the backup singers chide the vocalist with his own tormented question. The call-and-response figure is turned inside out, with the backups chiding “How can you laugh” and Paul responding “when you know I’m down?” Almost inadvertently, it gives the song balance: the verses all begin with this poor soul, and the refrains all end with his same naked cries, mocked by the supporting singers. Where Little Richard had a flair for code words and hairstyles, McCartney adds a knack for the dramatic.

George’s guitar solo is his most confidently unhinged yet—it doesn’t even have to be brought in by a scream. By the time Paul starts hollering behind him, George is already well off his head. Those repeated notes near the end—the ones he bends and prances on—sting as much as Ringo’s snare. Paul twists the third and final vocal solo out of shape the same way he does on “Long Tall Sally,” and his fury charges the band to even greater heights. <…> Lennon’s organ solo subsumes Paul’s most irrepressible scream—“When you know I’m WAA!!!” In the film of their 1965 Shea Stadium concert, John’s manic keyboard playing (elbow glissandos, howls of laughter) is like a comment on the absurdity of their own half-hour set.

<…> The band’s hysteria on this song mirrors their fans’ deafening adulation, and this image of Lennon bashing his way through his friend’s rocker, wet with sweat and too turned on to care, is the perfect visual track to this B-side manifesto.

Paul’s ad-lib vocal climax before the fade-out makes even the initial outbursts sound civilized. When he sings “Well baby, baby, BABY!!!!” in growing annoyance at the taunting chirps of John and George’s backup, he aims to blow the whole song’s fuse. <…> Meanwhile, the band veers breathlessly close to the edge of hysteria, and it’s to Ringo’s credit that things don’t fall apart. The hardest assignment for any drummer is to let the others cut loose to the extreme while providing a steady beat for them to fall back on. Lesser bands would easily come unglued with a groove so addled and punctured; Ringo maintains a sure but unconfining backbeat for the madness, the strongest glue of all.

It's hard to steal something that I'm giving away, and it's nearly infinitely easier to just right click on the image so you've got a clean copy instead of attempting to duplicate it through prompt generation. Feel free. I'd love to see what you do with it. You're absolutely 100% clear to use any of my art for any purpose as long as you're willing to let people use the results of that creation in the same way. @ms-demeanor-art-blog is where i keep most things so you won't have to scroll forever - I think the moving eyes illustration is probably the coolest thing I've drawn in a while and it would be really cool to see remixed and shared but i'm not gonna lie, it would be very funny if someone used AI to claim credit for my Venom/Eddie pornographic miniature dollhouse.

If you want a clean scan of any of my zines to distribute please let me know - i've made some of them printable but a lot of them were made since I lost access to my scanner so they just got uploaded as photos.

While you're at it, please feel free to "steal" the de-googling pamphlet, the death book, and the college-level guide to writing an essay in my pinned post. Gosh it would be just horrible if somebody widely disseminated those things without my name on them and gave free copies to everyone they knew and took credit for it. And I don't know what I'd do if people started pretending that they'd come up with my gluten-free recipes while baking them for friends.