101. No Reply

A good song with a all-time great bridge

The Beatles were great at so many things that it’s hard to frame comparative superlatives. But I think you could make an argument that they were uniquely good at writing bridges. Think about how many good songs are turned into all-time classics thanks to a perfect middle eight. Some of them are basically just accelerant on a song that’s already cooking. Some of them offer a needed change of pace. Some of them stitch together two wildly different elements into a new thing. But almost universally—and especially in the early years—the bridge becomes the hinge of the whole song, the piece that not only sounds incredible by itself but which provides critical perspective on the entire experience.

I think that’s actually a reflection of Lennon/McCartney songwriting team, especially on songs that were primarily written by John. Paul was more likely to come to the table with a fully-constructed idea, which then would be tweaked but wouldn’t necessarily get new building blocks added. John was more likely to arrive with an amazing concept that wasn’t yet fully a song. Maybe just one mind-blowing verse. Maybe a chorus. And then Paul would tinker for a bit and find the perfect key change or tonal counterpoint or whatever was necessary to tie it all together.

You can see that if you really dig into the histories. Particularly John’s comments in the Rolling Stone and Playboy interviews from 1970 and 1980 where he got asked about many of the Beatles songs and he offered tons of variations on ‘that was mostly mine. Paul helped on the middle eight.’

All of which brings us to No Reply, a beautiful little song that chugs along nicely in the verse, and has a great Lennon vocal burst in the “I nearly died” section, but which would ultimately feel a little slight if that’s all there was. It’s the bridge that defines the song, not just because it’s the best part (though it is the best part) but because the incredible forcefulness of the bridge elevates the rest of the song as well.¹

I remember the first time I heard Beatles for Sale being a little surprised that this was the opener. It’s a bit of a downer, both in terms of theme and tone. The verses even come across as a bit stilted. But once I got to know the song better, the genius of it fully unfurled. Knowing that the bridge is coming—that there will be this incredible eruption—adds new layers to the slightly clipped wings of the opening minute. John is singing from the perspective of someone who has been hurt, who is still reeling a bit, still struggling to understand, and still not quite sure about how to respond.

In the bridge, that sense of doubt is transformed into resolve. He will make her understand. But this all comes with a beautiful duality: an assertion of strength to mask the weakness. “If I were you, I’d realize that I / love you more than any other guy” can scan as a both an attempt to empathize but also as a bit of a threat. And, like almost everything else on this album, it locates all significance in the singer’s own feelings. How dare she move on when he loves her this much? The next line is even more fraught: “And I’ll forgive the lies that I / Heard before, when you gave me no reply.” This is him offering be magnanimous—he’ll forgive the lies—but also trying to maintain his dignity. He asserts for himself the power to be able to forgive the lies.

It’s a really powerful moment, full or portent and possibility, which is magnified by both the musical shift—the tempo is raised, the energy levels escalate, the chords radiate—and by John’s vocal, which tosses aside the wounded tenor of the verses to assert dominance and authority.²

All of which makes the return of the verse hit that much harder. Because his certainty in the bridge crashes back into the wall of reality. He can’t make her understand anything because she simply refuses to pick up the phone. Which means the most forceful, most powerful, section of the song actually amounts to little more than a rehearsal for lines that will never be delivered. And so you start to wonder just how reliable this narrator really is.

This actually rather perfectly encapsulates John’s own emotional struggles. He was always desperate to appear in control, precisely because he was always so deeply insecure. He had such incredible charisma that he could dominate any room he ever walked into, and seems to have craved that attention while also sometimes drowning in it—because it meant constantly exposing himself to the risk that someone might simply not laugh, not smile, not find him delightful.

And that’s the magic of the bridge. It takes a story that is engaging on its own terms and adds whole new layers of subtext.

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I’d love to have heard a demo of the song from before the bridge was written—back when John first wrote it and gave it away. Both for the archival interest but also to hear the song without this key component. But (at least for now) that seems to have been lost to history. The demo we do have is interesting not so much for what it tells us about the song, but just because it’s a window into how much fun they had together:

Your face.

1. There’s apparently some disagreement about who wrote the bridge, but it seems pretty clear that Paul contributed heavily. John’s original version, which he passed along to Tommy Quickly to record, lacked a bridge. Which matches Paul’s own recollection in Many Years From Now: “We wrote ‘No Reply’ together but from a strong original idea of his. I think he pretty much had that one, but as usual, if he didn’t have the third verse and the middle eight, then he’d play it to me pretty much formed, then we would shove a bit in the middle or I’d throw in an idea.”

2. On the subject of John’s vocal, Rosanne Cash (who says this is her favorite Beatles song) has a truly wonderful comment:

The heartbreak in the words isn’t separate from the infrastructure of the lyric form, nor is it detached from the melody, and — even harder to pull off — it is of a piece with Lennon’s vocal performance. Ray Charles said that singers were better at 50 than at 25, because a whole life showed up in the voice at 50, but John Lennon was nine days shy of turning 24 years old when he recorded “No Reply.” Just this once, Ray was wrong.