Sensational: "Octopus's Garden" on Beatles LOVE

The Beatles' song, "Octopus's Garden", is everybody's favorite. Here I look at the remastered version on Love (2006), a CD put together by George Martin and his son.

The backstory of the song is fascinating.

Firstly, there was a pleasantly organic stimulus for the conception of "Octopus's Garden":

"The idea for the song came about when Starr was on a boating trip with his family in Sardinia in 1968. He was offered an octopus lunch, but turned it down. Then the boat's captain told Starr about how octopuses travel along the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects with which to build gardens.[1] Starr said that hearing about octopuses spending their days collecting shiny objects at the bottom of the sea was one of the happiest things he had ever heard. Starr then decided to write this song."

But there's slightly more to the story. During recording of The White Album, The Beatles were experiencing a tumultuous time as a band, with arguments in the recording studio. Ringo became increasingly frustrated with the bickering, and felt his creative input was marginalized. He walked out and spent a couple of weeks with Peter Sellers on his yacht.

I wonder if the escapist vision of an underwater utopia held immense appeal at that time of crisis? The simplicity of the self-contained world must've been like an antidote to the conflict within the group.

Quite a gem of a song to come out a conflict. My favorite aspects of the remastered "Octopus's Garden":

• the tension of the slow beginning - you're just waiting for the song to kick off
• the trebley sound, which highlights the vocals
• about mid-way through the song, Lennon (at least, it sounds like Lennon) saying, "beautiful -- sensational" - lends a touch of that Beatles humor

The embedded video above uses the Love remastering against a montage of photos and snippets of film of Ringo Starr. This is surprisingly effective.

You can also hear a portion of the song at the Love website, with noticeably superior sound quality.

There's a flat, almost atonal quality with Ringo's voice that's appealing. The appeal of an atonal delivery is, of course, counter-intuitive, and is more startlingly apparent on Sgt. Pepper's "With a little help from my friends", the lyrics of which pointedly comment on this.

One last bit of trivia: Ringo blew into a glass of water using a straw in order to create the bubbling effect.

Sensational.