What's it about? Let's examine:
1) Take a ride2) "Do you wanna go?"3) "C'mon, c'mon"4) A hundred miles high5) You won't come down
Standard period stuff. A rockin' road trip. Or a drug trip. Both? Are we cruising through the desert at dawn or the verdant paradise of our minds? Then the kicker:
Fifteen hundred miles through the eye of a Beatle
Say what? What does this mean? (Check the back cover and label; it's not a typo, we're not driving around in a VW.) Have we somehow inhabited a Beatle and are seeing things through his eye? (Which Beatle?) Or have we mainlined enough of their songs that we're elevating now to cruising altitude, aiming for a horizon as endless as the last chord of "A Day in the Life"? A road trip soundtracked by the "White Album" and endless "Paul Is Dead!" debates? Is the Beatles music blasting in the car our delivery system, and are the drugs coursing through us allowing us some measure, some rarified glimpse, of a Beatle's Perspective? And what will we see through his eye? What's curious is that there are no explicit, or, for that matter, even implicit, references to the Beatles beyond the song title. No lyrics punning on famous Beatles songs, no passages echoing famous Beatles melodies. Few clues. Just a trip. Through the eye of a Beatle.
As you can see, all I really have are questions. But any way you read it, the song kicks ass: a driving (pun intended), fuzz-guitar, amped-up acid rock blast that could not have been written, or likely even conceived of, a few years earlier, not only because at the dawn of the Seventies the Frost were plugged into new radical sonic and cultural currents, but because the Beatles wouldn't have yet achieved the kind of God-like status that vouchsafed a fifteen-hundred mile trip through the winding roads, ebbs and flows, and major and minor notes of their consciousness (though they were getting awfully close).
The version recorded at the Grande was eventually issued by Vanguard. It's a minute shorter, faster and rawer, uncluttered by the arrangement that the band wrote for Through the Eyes of Love, in a way more direct, yet lacking the kind of end-of-the-decade, Rock Music Will Save Us grandiosity that the song, and its ostensible subject, demands. I love both versions, and I hope I never get to the bottom of them.
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