If I Fell – Julie Kathryn
Recorded on July 1, 2010, original version recorded on February 27, 1964.
Julie Kathryn: Vocals, Accordian
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele
Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY
About the Song
For best results play If I Fell on repeat while reading this essay.
“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true, and help me, understand?”
This above sentence is fallacious. It contains an assumption of volition in the matter of love. That is precisely why the verb “fall” is so appropriate; you no more have control over who and what you love than you do over gravity. You are a mass drawn inexorably towards the center of the earth, which incidentally, is where hell is supposed to be. That is, it is easy to go to hell, but it takes a rocket scientist to rise into the heavens.
Love is amazing. Love is all. I love The Beatles; I cannot live without them. They make me feel greasy. I would never, ever drive in an unsafe or selfish manner if a Beatle was in my car. I would be delighted to help them with their new songs and counsel them about their complicated business and personal relationships. I would introduce my cat Chatterbox to their pets. This love will never falter, I will never change my mind about The Beatles. Even if they don’t love me back. Even if they shut down this blog, which could happen at any moment. Because I love them, and love is everything. Love is an engine, it has it’s own agenda.
As some of you close readers may remember, I am inordinately proud of my fractional Native American heritage. Our people are The Lenape; we were living here around the Hudson River by 800AD. The Lenape were known as The Grandfathers by other neighboring tribes. (Accused of being overly collaborationist with The British, we were also derisively called The Grandmothers by our neighbors.) A tenet of theirs, which Einstein might agree with, is that there is no natural basis for time. We Lenape feel intuitively, that everything has ‘already happened.” Our little monkey brains can only process time in a slow trickle, but we already know that time is completely flexible. Eight hours with someone you love can pass in an instant, conversely, the few seconds right before an unavoidable car crash can feel like an eternity. (And if you die in the crash, it is eternity.) Somehow I knew this immediately upon confronting a piece of vinyl given to me by my cousin Nion in 1965. I knew that The Future Was Filling Up With The Beatles. That’s what I think love comes down to, the weight, the force of the future, which already exists, leaking into the present. Or to put it another way, The Present is a harmonic of all time, the past and future.
If I Fell is a remarkable song on several levels. Harmonically the intro is downright strange, like the body of a lover, it’s yours but not yours. It is deceptive, like an insecure young man, or a duplicitous older one. It is meant to woo you, to lure you in, and it does.
This is a very rare piece indeed in the canon of John Lennon. Lennon is a force of nature like gravity, his will is law. He almost always writes first person, directly from his life, or directly from his observations. He does not put himself into the mind of others; there is not enough room in his busy ambitious brain for empathy, or even sympathy. But in this brief magical period when The Beatles became the surrogate lovers for a generation, John was absolutely in tune with universal truths, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Harry Potter in its way performs this function now; Bjork circa 1998 did too. And while John had his frailties, firstly his near blindness, vulnerability is not his usual mode. That’s what’s so cunning about this song; it is a slow one, for the girls, and it is written from a female perspective. It conveys the feminine worry of being swept away and being caught in the power of an unfaithful lover. This is the dread of love, it is real, anything that powerful always contains it’s opposite, and to be in love is to have unwillingly surrendered to another the very core of your spirit, the ability to be happy. As someone who has gotten exceedingly good at amusing myself, it is not without trepidation that I observe this power ebb away. Suddenly watching The Mets is not enough. Because uh oh, I’m In Love, and now it’s all up to her. She could do anything. She might go crazy. She might crash the car with me in it. I can only watch. Watch in amazement. Because I love her and love is everything.
The harmony singing of Lennon and McCartney is like something descended from a fairy Celtic paradise into our brutal boorish universe. In If I Fell, McCartney sings the girl part, the way he goes up to a feminine register on “I couldn’t stand the pain” is so believable, so true. John wrote this from the perspective of a fan, and he was right to warn them. Because ultimately this love affair was not going to work out. It was doomed to be unrequited.
John simply was not prepared to love the millions of screaming girls who loved him back. It felt fake to him, in his bones, and the reason we love him so fiercely today is that he was never fake. Often wrong, but never fake. And the reason we love Paul so fiercely, is that he’s always loved us back, he did love the millions of screaming girls, and you can find him every night of the week making sweet love to a stadium full of the faithful.
The New Improved Version of If I Fell features magical voice of Julie Kathryn. Miss K portrays a pensive Ingénue, but within her is a boiling ocean of knowing complexity and chaos. Get used to her Darlings, she’s going to be famous. It’s already happened.