A bit of pretentious fun

Can the meaning of The Beatles be summed up in alphabetical order while at the same time making an interesting compilation? The answer is almost. Here goes:

A Day in the Life

Start with a biggie, A Day in the Life is the pinnacle of The Beatles career, according to Ian MacDonald no less. Revolution in the Head practically invented modern rock scholarship, so we should pay obeisance. It came at a point in The Beatles recording career where graft and intuition were in seemingly perfect balance.

Before sound recording recorded music was sheet music. The combination of this and sound amplification expanded the horizon of musical expression; small groups performing together with the possibility collective inspiration, a happening as it was known in the sixties, evanescent moments captured for mass reproduction. The modern musician’s dilemma is between knowing enough to express oneself, whilst not allowing music theory (and standard recording practice) to stifle one’s imagination.

Sequenced at the end of Sgt Pepper, two minutes longer than any Beatles song so far released, with a complex score and involving more musicians than ever before, it appears to be more portentous than it actually is. Each of the verses is literally about something different. Combined with the orchestral production, culminating in the final titanic chord (neither of which was planned when the basic elements of the song were recorded) they seem to hint at a struggle for emancipated perception, to transcend the mundane and violent world. It feels revolutionary, despite some of the lines being humorous babble.

Bungalow Bill, the Continuing Adventures of

I told you it would be difficult. Of course there are other Beatles songs beginning in B, but I want to use them elsewhere. The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill was written at the Maharishi’s camp in Rishikesh by John Lennon. It was recorded late in the sessions for the White Album. Lennon later described it, quite astutely, as a “teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke”. That it is.

It’s the story of a rich, young American at the camp who took breaks from meditation to go out game hunting. Is that hypocritical? Maybe. The song’s not great, although the chorus is catchy in an irritating way. The White Album itself is like the entire process of record-making laid bare, the rejects and the jokes and the half-formed masterpieces find their place on a double album.

Bungalow Bill is also interesting as it is the first Beatles song released to have a woman’s voice on it.

Can’t Buy Me Love

A slightly obvious choice, but features at a pivotal point in The Beatles’ pivotal film, A Hard Days’ Night.

The film itself is an inspired piece of bluff. Like many other jukebox musicals, Hard Day’s Night is about nothing. It exists to set up the band members as definable, bankable personalities, the sarcastic one, the charming one, the shy one and the down to earth one. Much of their post-touring career was dedicated to busting the image created by this film.

But there’s a cheeky, satiric quality to the film. It is set amongst a typical Beatles touring day, with Paul’s Grandfather as a McGuffin, causing unusual things to happen. Individually and as a group, they run casual rings around everyone they encounter, various figures of establishment, the old man on the train, the pressmen, the doormen, TV producers, Teen culture svengalis, all are perplexed and routed by The Beatles wit and verve. Laving aside the actual backgrounds of some of the members, in the film they represent a rising working class, confident, breezily assuming control and rewriting the rules. As much as this was ever the case we also remember this was before the crisis that mired the second Wilson government, before the bitter struggles of the seventies and eighties.

Against this the Beatles are presented as stuck on a hamster wheel (the old guard are still in charge). They go from a train to a room to a car and a room and a room and a room. They hardly get time to rest. Brian Epstein stipulated that the script must not have a love interest. The film plays on this, I think, by having no female characters with any meaningful dialogue. Women flit past the screen before the lads can so much as talk to them. The film’s sole moment of peril comes when Ringo is incited by Paul’s Grandfather to leave the band for the afternoon, in which time he does more or less nothing.

There is one moment of collective escape. Having caused a ruckus with the TV director by casually wandering on stage to play a song, the band are about to be locked in their dressing room; instead they sneak down a fire escape:

“We’re out” yells Ringo, which is the cue for Can’t Buy Me Love. The Beatles lark about on a playing field for two and a half minutes before another authority figure approaches, the groundskeeper.

“I suppose you realise this is private property?”

The Beatles slope off, though unrepentant:

“Sorry we hurt your field, Mister”.

Drive My Car

This song was the final product of The Beatles brief joke song strategy. As they recorded Rubber Soul they were looking for a way out of their lyrical impasse, running out of variations of love songs. The better songs from the Help sessions, such as Yesterday or Yes It Is, might have been a solution. Both songs touched on mortality and memory. This returned in a big way with In My Life. Before then they had a run of songs that, if they were not exactly funny, had lyrics with a set up and pay off. In Drive My Car the stereotypical roles in sexual banter are reversed by the end, the girl turns out to be sly, deceptive charmer.

Eleanor Rigby

This was a song begun by McCartney but finished by a committee. It is a brilliant song with an exceptional lyric. Not much time needs to be spent on it here, except to say it shows The Beatles were remarkably loveless in 1966. This was their most brutal lyric of the year, a stark description of people wasting their lives in dedication to empty social/religious rituals. It is also an intensely visual lyric, written in the present tense, e.g. “look at him working”. They are like a set of directions, in keeping with Paul’s then current interest in filmmaking.

Flying

We had to go off-piste at some point. There were few Beatle instrumentals issued. They performed plenty in their early career. Later on they recorded dozens of instrumentals, most did not see the light of day. For example, Revolution in the Head describes how in 1967, three days before the band started a formal recording of George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much, they spent an afternoon working on a 16-minute jam, perhaps inspired by Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was recorded in Abbey Road at the same time as Sgt Pepper. The jam was not that inspired however as they never returned to it1.

It’s common to say that a drug inspired relativism set in at this point. It was certainly about. The cultural embrace of ‘random’2 had a socio-political dimension. It was a rejection of the military-industrial prerogative that saw the whole of post-war society strictly ordered, like a giant barracks, with unearned class privilege and persisting racial and sexual bigotry. Gambling with reality by dropping LSD was the ultimate act of randomisation.

I also think after the tension of completing Sgt Pepper there was the release of the Summer of Love. This is palpable in Flying, which is built on 12-bar blues changes but is a gentle, idyllic sounding tune. It served as an interlude in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Typical of how the film was made, Flying was set to pilfered stock footage, various shots of cloud and Arctic wasteland3, which was given psychedelic tints. None of this came across in the first broadcast, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day 1967.

1. Jam based composition makes much more sense in the digital age. It is must easier to edit and combine digital bytes, as opposed to analogue tape.

2. A side note: musicians may no longer flip through the I Ching at random to find a lyric. There is one remaining prominent cultural figure who uses games and systems as an aide to creation, namely Brian Eno, another product of the former Art School system.

3. Taken for the film Dr Strangelove.

Thoughts for the brain: assassinations?

Has anyone written a study of assassination? The culture of public slaying seems to wax and wane. Of course it is connected past civic culture and levels of social conflict. But were there more assassination attempts in revolutionary Russia than in revolutionary Germany, I’m not sure?

John Lennon’s killing was the last of the wave of post-war American assassinations. There are conspiracy theories about his death, they’re amongst the flimsiest out there, and that’s saying something. On the face of it his death was enigmatic, almost meaningless. Mark Chapman spent some time in New York before killing John Lennon. He watched David Bowie perform in the Elephant Man three days before and even took a picture of him leaving the theatre. He could have killed almost anyone in the public eye (Lennon was the easiest to find apparently).

Chapman’s apparent mental delusion stemmed from pronounced childhood sensitivity, exposure to psychedelic drugs and conversion to Presbyterianism. But a crucial factor was surely The Beatles music and their place in the 60s counter culture. It has been well explained by Ian MacDonald, The Beatles lyrics to begin with were deeply simple expressions of the music, happy, sad, excited etc. Under Bob Dylan’s influence particularly, their lyrics became more personal and more topical but, mostly a pot-pourri of fragments and allusions; this engagingly jumbled approach to writing encouraged clue hunters, pattern-finders and pseuds to pour over song lyrics. In the heady atmosphere of the 60s the fascination grew into rumours and outlandish theories, not least the Paul Is Dead theory.

Mark Chapman was apparently enraged by Lennon’s various blasphemies, in music and in print, angry enough to kill him. But he was one of many people to fixate on The Beatles. I remember reading in a Q Magazine interview once George Harrison telling of the time he bumped into the pilot who used to fly The Beatles round America on tours. He said one thing they never told the band, the plane was frequently riddled with bullet holes. If it seems strange that Chapman would harbour the urge to kill ten years after Lennon left The Beatles and five years after he stepped out of public life, well… it is odd. This is part of why conspiracy theories exist, to rationalise the parts of life that seem to be deterministic chaos. John Lennon was alive and well then he was dead: why? Any reasonable explanation will probably die with Mark Chapman.

It is a small wonder more pop stars and, more broadly, celebrities have not died this way.

Mo' Culture etc...

In this week's SW Tim Sanders celebrates the Simpsons 500th episode with a neat summation of why the programme is so well loved and influential. As if to labour the point, I picked up on the observation:

It [the Simpsons] pokes fun at the rich and powerful, it undermines faith in authority and the status quo—and yet makes shedloads of cash for its owner Rupert Murdoch. On one level this is a classic case of biting the hand that feeds.

It's clear from this the quid pro quo for biting the hand that feeds is feeding the mouth that bites... well, something like that. The Fox Channel, the fair and balanced Fox Channel that has become a by-word for lunatic demagoguery, may never have got off the ground without the profits flowing from the Simpsons. Radical subversion through popular culture is a utopia, though it can make for great TV.

Introduction to a Short Biography of LSD

A lot of things get listed as the essence of humanity. One thing that could be said is as long as humans have had a mind they've had a mind to alter.

Most common mood altering substances we know today have a long history. One of the earliest verified reports of cannabis use was in Herodotus journals, where he describes Scythian tribesmen throwing seeds on a fire, inhaling the smoke and howling with joy . Stimulants have played a role in many religions. Shamanic ceremony is often cited, but how often do people read the Bible, with it's winged angels, burning bushes and ravaged cities and wonder what on Earth these people were on?

The point is drugs began, like all other aspects of ancient human culture, tied to ritual, in particular religious ritual.

But LSD is almost unique. It is a 20th century drug, a capitalist drug. It was first synthesised in 1938, in a Sandoz laboratory. For twenty years after the Bicycle Day the company made and exported the drug around the world until it was almost universally outlawed in the mid-60s . In that time (and for some time after) it had an incredible history, attracted many great minds, inspired much thought and debate.

To begin with it was seen as a powerful aid to psychotherapy . There were investigations into its usefulness treating alcoholism, initial results suggested it was five times more effective than Alcoholics Anonymous though the studies were never carried through to a satisfactory conclusion.

The Cold War military/industrial complex then took an interest in the drug. Army chiefs saw it as a powerful chemical weapon. There is ample (and often hilarious) footage, now available online, of British and American soldiers attempting to drill and manoeuvre under the influence. The connection between soldiery and science was particularly strong in Southern California. It was through this connection that LSD found its way down from intellectual circles, onto the campus and into general society. By the mid-sixties it was transformed from an object of military study into the sacrament of anti-militarist counter-culture.

The sixties counter-culture may one day be seen as unique, a radically empty movement to refound the world. It's agent of change was not a class or country but a chemical.

General and Chemical

The human body is in constant dynamic equilibrium. Human beings need continual chemical input in order to survive, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, oxygen and so forth. We don't, of course, need recreational drugs to get by but the principle is similar. You put a chemical into your body in order to get a certain reaction. This is a choice informed adults of sound mind and body should be able to make. One of the biggest problems with prohibition is it means recreational drug users cannot make a strictly informed choice. Prohibition cannot eliminate supply, let alone quell demand .

LSD is an hallucinogenic drug. It is beyond being a stimulant, heightening the faculty of perception to the point where it it becomes distorted. Common physical effects include:

LSD can cause pupil dilation, reduced appetite (for some, it increases), and wakefulness. Other physical reactions to LSD are highly variable and non-specific, and some of these reactions may be secondary to the psychological effects of LSD. The following symptoms have been reported: numbness, weakness, nausea,(decreased or increased body temperature),elevated blood sugar, goosebumps, increase in heart rate, jaw clenching, perspiration,saliva production, mucus production, sleeplessness, hyperreflexia and tremors.

LSD has a very low toxicity, you're more likely to overdose on caffeine than LSD. Of course the psychological effects:

Some psychological effects may include an experience of radiant colours, objects and surfaces appearing to ripple or "breathe", coloured patterns behind the closed eyelids (eidetic imagery), an altered sense of time (time seems to be stretching, repeating itself, changing speed or stopping), crawling geometric patterns overlaying walls and other objects, morphing objects, a sense that one's thoughts are spiralling into themselves, loss of a sense of identity or the ego (known as "ego death"), and other powerful psycho-physical reactions. Many users experience a dissolution between themselves and the "outside world". This unitive quality may play a role in the spiritual and religious aspects of LSD. The drug sometimes leads to disintegration or restructuring of the user's historical personality and creates a mental state that some users report allows them to have more choice regarding the nature of their own personality .

So common they're quoted on Wikipedia.

It's the psychological effects of LSD that fascinate so, in particular the 'unitive' sense inspired by the drug. It is what inspired the revolution behind the eyes. It seems almost serendipitous LSD appeared in public life at the moment it did; a time that saw the first faint signs of the end of the post-war boom, the cresting wave of the Civil Rights movement, growing opposition to the Vietnam War. Perhaps above all else a generation of people was reaching adulthood who knew nothing of the war or the depression. They were presented with a life choice between a slot in a faceless corporation and the ranks of the military and found it no choice at all.

But before that we have to go to Switzerland.