Democracy and culture

I have just been given a copy of The Beatles Esher Demo. It was a very kind and thoughtful gift. The Esher Demo was made in spring of 1968 after The Beatles returned home from India. The songs were recorded in George Harrison’s home, many of which ended up on the White Album, recorded and released later that year. The recordings had been passed around as a bootleg for a long time and were so almost-official parts of the tape were eventually released on the final part of the Anthology.

The interesting thing was as soon as I mentioned I had a copy I was asked whether I downloaded it. This of course was the sensible thing to do, but then we live in an age where there’s really no such thing as a bootleg any more.

Pop culture produces two contradictory but complimentary modes of knowledge. One is popular; mass culture, mass enthusiasm and sometimes even mass participation. It has the all the appearance of democracy, i.e. the public gets what the public wants. More often than not a mysterious, ruinous law of averages seems to triumph. What the public gets seemingly no one wants. The response to this is esoteric knowledge, cult followings and very particular enthusiasms. Bootlegs are just one aspect of this. There is also an apparent democracy here too, the solidarity of the initiated; the negation of this is tribalism.

The point is each of these modes conditions the other. Sometimes the esoteric and alternative culture grows and for a brief period dominates mass culture. This is of course unsustainable. In the mid-nineties indie bands were having number one hits, which begged the question, in what sense was this ‘indie’ music any more?

An important side effect of the bourgeois revolution was democracy. The events of the revolution took millions upon millions of people of feudal bondage and thrust them into public life. This democracy however is relentlessly subverted by the commodity form. In the case of culture we see either a fake democracy, where the means of cultural production and dissemination remain in the hands of a minority, or a cultural cottage industry stamped by a sectarian mindset. 

To round it off!

Yellow Submarine



The best Beatles film, the one true masterpiece, and they weren't in it. The Beatles were immortalised in cartoon in 1965 for American TV, the show took the band's public personas, established by the film A Hard Day's Night, and made them even broader. The film Yellow Submarine was somewhat of a correction. The new, pepper-fied personas were the Far-Out one (check out John's opening, chemical transformation), the Debonair One, the Mystical One (it's all in the mind) and the Downbeat One...

OK so Ringo didn't change that much. It's worth noting that John first rejected the Showbiz Beatles then he rejected the Psychedelic Beatles as equally potent fictions, before finally idea of The Beatles itself. They were variations of the bourgeois conventions of the entertainment industry. His first gesture was of course the nude cover of Two Virgins, literally stripping away everything. Whether he achieved sincere reality in art is another matter.

The song Yellow Submarine is a gem. Paul wrote it as a children's song and a feature for Ringo in 1966. By 1967 it was already being included in songbooks, alongside music hall, nursery rhyme and folk song classics. The lyric was written in a similar manner to Eleanor Rigby, starting with Paul and ending with a committee. Instead of achieving clarity it got cloudier as it went along: an early sign, perhaps, of the slackening that would later overtake The Beatles lyrics.

Z... Zed... Uh, Zebra Crossing



We made it, just... Don't applaud then, sheesh! There are no Beatles songs beginning with Z. Z of course marks the end of the alphabet. Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles, ending with a song called The End. It also featured a cover showing the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road. So, here, enjoy one of The Beatles finest achievements, the bittersweet end to their career. The Abbey Road medley.

Mo Beatles...

Within You and Without You

This is practically the same song as Tomorrow Never Knows. They have a similar lyrical subject, a similar musical foundation1, similar structure (verse/chorus followed by an apparently free section before returning to the verse/chorus) and they are almost in the same key. No surprise then that a mash-up (eww – hate that phrase) was eventually made from the two songs.

Within You… does not have raw excitement of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is emphatically not a rock song. Calling the lyric didactic would be like calling the Sun hot. The true beauty is in the middle section, the musical dialogue first between the sitar and the dilruba, then between the Indian and Western classical instruments together. It is beautiful music made for stereo, hi-fi sound.

Xmas records

Another tough crowbar, but it’s worth it. The Beatles management set up a fan club for the band. The club was soon overwhelmed by correspondence. The tradition of the Beatles Christmas Flexi-Disc was established in 1963 as a way to reach all the fans personally.

The records were quite informal affairs. To begin with they were a mixture of seasons greetings, carols and Christmas songs. As the years went by the band started introducing poems, short comedy songs and skits. 1967’s fan club record was a mock-radio play. It also featured a complete song, Christmas Time Is Here Again. Not a masterpiece, a deserved rarity.

An offshoot of the Christmas albums was a bootleg called A Laugh with The Beatles, which also featured outtakes from the Christmas records and other sessions that are inchoate, risqué but often hilarious.

1. The tambura, a stringed instrument, similar to a lute, used in Indian classical music. It is played with open strings and produces an overtone rich sound by intermittent contact with a wide, arched bridge.

Let's start wrapping this shit up...

Sie Liebt Dich

Ooh, leftfield. While on tour in January 1964 The Beatles carried out the first of only two recording sessions abroad1. They recorded German language versions of I Want to Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, as well as the basic track for Can’t Buy Me Love. They were reluctant to do this, despite it being then music industry standard practice. There were no more lyric translations. In their own way The Beatles probably did as much to promote English around the world as Hollywood and the British empire.

Twist and Shout

This is another of The Beatles master-covers. The song was first made a hit by the Isley Brothers. On that occasion it was recorded with a loose, Latin swing. The Beatles transformed it into another hysterical blockbuster. They used it to close many shows. It was the last song recorded for the album Please, Please Me. John’s voice was on the point of giving out. The tension and energy is palpable throughout, and the sense of triumph at the end audible, Paul shouts “hey!”

USSR, Back in the

Could this have been Paul’s response to John’s Revolution? The John Birch Society thought so. It’s more generally considered to be a joke, albeit one at the expense of the Cold War itself3. Artists such as The Beach Boys and Chuck Berry lauded America, its localities, culture, traditions etc in song. Why wouldn’t a Soviet rock star do the same? Back in the USSR is an affectionate parody of California Girls. The point being a young man’s enthusiasms were the same either side of the Iron Curtain.

But there were no Soviet rock stars. The Beatles music was officially proscribed in Russia. But there was a thriving underground in Beatle (and other rock and roll) recordings, passed around on tape and, quite ingeniously, adapted x-ray plates.

Void, The AKA Tomorrow Never Knows2

The most spectacular piece of music they ever produced. The lead instrument on this occasion is the drums, lashing away over an insistent drone and lazy, lobbing melody. Nothing is spared in terms of aural trickery and for once the CGI serves to enhance the plot. The lyrics are an adaption of passages of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience, a book intended as a socio-spiritual guide to LSD, which the authors saw as a modern sacrament and a mode of revolution.

The theory of psychedelic revolution is based upon Freudian theory of the personality. Put simply the basis of each personality is inner desire, the id, outward repression, the superego and the point where these meet, the ego or outward personality4. LSD dissolves the subject’s ego, their sense of self. By releasing the id and countering the superego, psychedelics affect an inner revolution of liberty against repression.

Even before dealing with the internal logic of an argument that treats liberated desire as unconditionally good, there are difficulties with such a model. Psychedelics demand time and energy, they are very difficult to absorb into everyday life. The demand to Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out is in the end elitist, those who drop out are those who can afford to. Revolutions do indeed change the way people perceive the world and themselves, but they do this because they change the way people relate to the world and each other. They overturn social relations, objective social relations.

1. The second wasn’t quite a Beatles session. George Harrison recruited a group of Indian musicians to perform on his Wonderwall Music soundtrack. It was the first Beatles solo album. An off-cut instrumental became the basis of the song The Inner Light, the first George Harrison to make a single.
2. We give the working title along with the published title in order to fill out the letter V.
3. There is another story, relating to a whacky legend, that The Beatles played a secret gig (at some point, choose your own date) in Russia for the Nomenklatura and that the song is a reference to that occasion.
4. Of course, censorship is internalised as self-censorship, personal ethics and so on, desire is often manufactured, people made to want things they would otherwise not desire.

More derivative Beatles stuff

Quinn the Eskimo

When I said almost this is the proof. There is nothing out there remotely related to The Beatles in any way beginning with the letter Q. This is it, a fragment of a song from rehearsals in January 1969 for the abandoned concert.

The song was written by Bob Dylan, originally recorded with The Band in what became The Basement Tapes. The Tapes… are an odd collection. The album was released eight years after the songs were recorded. They were laid down in the informal setting of The Big Pink, a country house in upstate New York. The recording was primitive too. Sometimes just a single microphone was hung out to catch the music going on, the music which seemed reflect a return to roots.

Though he seemed to be abandoning the scene just as the counterculture was taking a beating on the streets, Dylan was ahead of the game in some respects in retiring to Woodstock. The fall out from the ruling class assault on the counterculture led some into cultism, some into terrorism, and some into a back-to-the-land rural communism, though these elements were often jumbled up. To American musicians a rootsy, laid-back sound suggested an attempt to connect with tradition as well as heartland culture. In Britain perhaps it suggested a less hectic, more soulful alternative to urban pop and psychedelia1.

The Basement Tapes were passed around the rock elite as a bootleg. George Harrison in particular was a fan, though The Basement Tapes clearly helped form the idea that the band should get back to some kind of simplicity after recording long and complex albums.

Despite being fairly well wrung out The Beatles recording and touring career still yields a fair few bootleg records. Of course there were hours of music recorded during the Get Back/Let It Be. Most of it like the music above, stray fragments. There are plenty of live recordings and new studio outtakes still occasionally appear, like Revolution (take 20), the missing link between the original Revolution and Revolution 9 (more of which next).

The glittering prize is a genuine version of Carnival of Light; an audio freak out The Beatles recorded and gave to an early hippie gathering, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream April 1967 in Alexandra Palace. One copy exists with Paul McCartney, another was reckoned to be somewhere in the United States. There have been numerous fakes made, based on a written description by a writer who was allowed a listen to the master tape. They may well be superior (if you like audio collages) to the original.

Revolution (1, 9, 20 and unnumbered)

The worldwide youth counterculture, such as it existed, was already under attack in 1966. January of that year western governments began proscribing LSD. There were battles in numerous American cities, where the state tried to close young people’s clubs and drive them off the street. Britain experienced its own mini-counterculture clampdown in 1967, with a peppering of high-profile drug raids. The International Times, which had been set up as the paper of the UK underground was raided2 (The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a benefit to pay for IT’s legal costs). The Beatles were MBE inoculated. The raid on the Rolling Stones that saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jailed has to wait several hours for members of The Beatles to leave the premises.

This was going through John’s mind as he sat in Rishikesh writing songs. Despite the undoubted turn toward confrontation, John Lennon would have had to have been positively psychic to have written a commentary on 1968, the year of revolution, in January of that year.

To start with an obvious point, while it’s not the Internationale, Revolution is not an anti-revolutionary lyric. It is a dialogue with the left (as Lennon saw it) and it starts with a gesture of solidarity, “we all want to change the world”. The first two verses are understood to have been written in India, the final verse back in Britain.

The first verse is Lennon the hippy idealist. He wants peaceful change. The second verse is a mixture of Lennon the skeptic and Lennon the realist: “we all want to see the plan”. The last verse is the pay off. Lennon, the rich counterculture figure is being bugged by young Maoists pleading with him for support. Lennon acknowledges them but distrusts them at the same time.

The song may have been a “lamentable cry of petty-bourgeois fear” as the Black Dwarf described it, but we know being determines consciousness. John was temperamentally a socialist but an artistic intellectual. He was neither practically or politically capable, and therefore not cut out for political struggle. By 1968 he was a very rich man with almost incalculable mechanical royalties. As acute as he may have been Lennon could not have predicted how profound and potent the word “revolution” would become that year. He was proud of the song and wanted it to be an A-side. Having deferred to McCartney during Sgt Pepper Lennon had come awake in 68. By not backing down he painted himself in a corner. His commitment to peace and a series of clownish stunts to promote it began here.

None the less as the band was laying down the backing track on the night of May 30^th-31^stParis was still a cauldron3 and British students were beginning a wave of their own occupations. After one particular take The Beatles settled into a two chord groove and just kept playing, lashed on by orgasmic rasps from John. The track was now over ten minutes long.

Excited by the result John and his new partner Yoko Ono worked on the song, adding layers of effects and vocalisations, trying to create what he felt to be the sound of revolution. This version lay buried until Take 20 appeared on Youtube three years ago.

The luxury of second thoughts led John to excise the anarchic groove and rerecord the original portion of the song at a faster tempo, which became the single version.

The anarchic groove, as I’ve now called it, ended up as the basis of Revolution 9.

Revolution 9 is far from a chaotic mess or worthy but grim piece of art it is often taken for. It is not chaotic but built round a tonal axis of Bb/Eb. It has a number of repeated motifs, the most obvious being “number 9”. It even has published lyrics. The revolution it suggests is the Revolution in the Head, the countercultural/Freudian theory of emancipation, the potential lying dormant in each individual, a potent mixture of memory, sexuality and creativity, waiting to be unleashed. We can pass over whether this was a realistic model of revolution and, if so, whether Beatles records were an appropriate agency. The White Album has sold tens of millions of copies over the years. Even if they only listened to it once millions people were exposed to avant-guard symphonic music and the ideas associated with it they might otherwise never have come across.

Revolution 9 is perhaps the most significant cultural act ever carried out by The Beatles.

1. It was also just about this time rock stars started buying up country mansions, mobile studios and whatnot.
2. An interesting story (at least I find it interesting) there was a retaliation raid by the New Left paper, the Black Dwarf. Wikipedia describes how: “The paper… published a detailed floor-by-floor guide to Scotland Yard, complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors and snippets of overheard conversation in the offices of Special Branch. The anonymous author, or "blue dwarf," as he styled himself, described how he perused police files, and even claimed to have sampled named brands of whisky in the Commissioner's office. A day or two later the Daily Telegraph announced that the "raid" had forced the police to withdraw and re-issue all security passes”. How cool is that? Anyone who genuinely knows more about this please get in touch.
3. Though the French right, which had been in hiding for two weeks during the general strike, had literally just got back on the streets. The revolution in France, such as it was, was on the wane, even if no one realised it at the time.

More derivative, unnecessary guff

Ob La Di Ob La Da



Paul's approximation of Blue Beat, Ob La Di Ob La Da was one of the first things to sour the White Album sessions. With Brian Epstein dead and George Martin withdrawing from his former role Paul stepped up as an all-purpose leader. The band were moving apart in terms of taste, lifestyle and personal priorities (and just plain growing up). Paul  was not the authority figure who could dragoon through the usual routine, he was just too close to the rest of the Beatles. No wonder the sessions rambled over seven months.

It's also an example of Paul's very different sexism to John. Of course to criticise The Beatles for being sexist is to criticise society for being sexist. Nonetheless John's muse was a woman and his attitude toward women was conflicted and often nasty, which made his art frequently compelling if sometimes queasy. When Paul wrote about women in general1 he was positively foursquare. This is the original song that says "if you like it then you should put a ring on it".

This of course changed with time.The Beatles went through the sixties and encountered the women's liberation movement. A shift perhaps in Paul's writing, Lady Madonna, a song that celebrates, perhaps even sentimentalises, but nonetheless acknowledges the relentless drudgery of working class motherhood, the genius of the mother who somehow makes ends meet.

Penny Lane



What would The Beatles projected album about Liverpool have sounded like or said? It's a fascinating prospect. Penny Lane is of course obliquely about James Penny, slave trader, anti-abolitionist and city father who had an area of the city named after him. Would a Beatles album about Liverpool touched on the source of the city's wealth?

But instead we have a prime piece of psychedelia. Penny Lane is every bit as far out as it's companion Strawberry Fields. As Revolution in the Head so clearly points out, in the lyric it's simultaneously summer and winter, rainy and shiny. The music is built on massed crotchet pianos, whose tone shifts relentlessly: listen next time.

1. His songs about Jane Asher were quite different and quite Lennonish, We Can Work It Out being a prime example.

Mo' Beatles

Love Me Do

Few words need wasting on a gloss interpretation of Love Me Do. The Beatles did not undergo a prolonged public apprenticeship like, say, David Bowie. This is the only genuinely artless song they put out as a single. Its stark baldness made it stand out then, as it does even 50 years later (that and the harmonica hook). From here on in The Beatles recording career is a stairway to heaven.

A small thing can said about sound and their associations. Love Me Do is a dry record, little or nothing in the way or reverb or signal distortion is applied. This was contrary to music industry practice at the time. As their recording career developed George Martin created a sparse and defined sound for The Beatles. The Beatles played on their own records. There were not massed ranks of session musicians to bolster the sound. On stereo mixes instruments were mixed clearly and widely separated. Any effect used was usually brief and for a definite purpose.

The sound of the Beat Combo evolved through the impact of certain drugs into psychedelic rock and eventually progressive rock. I can never find the quote but I remember hearing one of the Grateful Dead describe how they would be playing one of the Merry Pranksters acid tests. They’d drop acid, start playing a song like (I’m a) Roadrunner and 20 minutes later they’d still be playing, wondering where the time just went.

Sounds and arrangements have specific associations that are more than just changing fashion. Recreational drugs are of course crucial. Let’s not forget drug taking does not evolve in an abstract manner. Being illegal they are often subject to dramatic changes in the relation of supply and demand. They also suit certain times and places better than others. For example, who wants to get into consciousness expansion during an economic depression?

There will be changes in sound when there are changes in the use of music. Is the music you generally listen to about private contemplation, e.g. personal sound-tracking, or is it about public congregation, e.g. dance? Dance music, the kind of music The Beatles made early on, is sparse and simple.

Money

In his essay, The Disappearing Decade, Ian MacDonald contended that the Counterculture of the 60s, which overlapped in various ways with the New Left, was a reaction against the actual revolution (for want of a better word) going on in the decade; ordinary people desiring materially affluent and liberated lives. In other words the 60s gave birth to the 80s.

Despite many perceptive observations the essay misses the point. Firstly about the Counterculture/New Left connection, they were not nearly as closely bound as they appeared. Primarily though the problem is with the 80s. It may have seemed to Ian MacDonald, almost certainly a disappointed leftie, that the 80s were when everyone became a suburban scumbag. It seemed that way to a lot of people in the 90s, but that is the official narrative, and history is always written by the winners. Thatcher’s party never won a majority of the public to its agenda. One of Thatcher’s political strengths was realising the uses of active minorities. The Tories prevailed thanks to her official opposition, who spurned every chance to derail her government. The result of Thatcherism was to send Britain on a course of widening class division and growing poverty. The working class lost out thanks to her, if the majority understand that now, many people knew it even then.

This brings us on to one of the best Beatle covers on record: Money. The Beatles transformed the arrangement and thereby the meaning of this song, from a loose swing to an impatient shout. It can be taken as a paean to avarice, but in many ways it sums up what money and fame meant to four (broadly speaking) working class lads: “I wanna be free!” To begin with The Beatles worked on the assumption they would have a few years prime earning ahead of them. If they had not thought about it they were endlessly reminded by journalists, who seemed always anxious to ask “how long do you think it will last?” or “what will you do when it’s over?”

According to Paul, the first thing John did after finding himself truly rich for the first time was buy box after box of Jaffa Cakes and stuff himself silly. That was freedom for John.

Norwegian Wood

I learned only recently that the working title of this song was its subtitle, this bird has flown. It’s a well known exercise in Dylan-esque bluff, about an affair John had with a journalist, with a casually melodramatic ending. There is a theory about the lyric which, if true, makes the song even more acidic.

Shortly before writing the song John was given a present by his then wife, Cynthia, a mechanical bird singing from inside a cage. The bird seemed to sum up his predicament, as he saw it, stuck in his Fat Elvis period. “This bird has flown” in this context means “I’m leaving you”. He didn’t leave for another two and a half years, so mired was he in his life. All in all it’s a stunningly cruel song.

Yet more pretention

Know Her is to Love Her, To

I’ve chewed up the title of this song to crowbar it under K. It’s likely we’ll want another song entered under T.

It’s important to remember it’s not generally possible to disentangle what was unintentional, what as casual and what was deliberate in The Beatles phenomenon. The Beatles sang girl group songs. Sometimes the lyrics were gender altered, as is here. Sometimes they were not, and you’d have Ringo hollering away about boys. The Beatles sang girl group songs, especially ones with three part harmonies, because they liked them, and you could leave it at if you want to.

The Beatles of course had a profound effect on Western Womanhood, but what about Manhood. In his mini-biography The Summer of Love, George Martin took a few paragraphs to describe the effect of Beatlemania as it hit the United States. He described seeing male office-workers dressed in Beatle Wigs. Grown men pretending to be one of the band: who are you today?

The Beatles were something different, both in appearance and personality. There was an incredible fuss made in the mass media over the length of their hair, bizarre though it may seem now. Hair and headwear continue to be a source of social anxiety, a very closely policed aspect of culture, even today. We just take the rules and norms we are given so much for granted.

This public face was crafted largely by a gay man, Brian Epstein. He took a group of leather and denim clad rockers and put them in matching suits, page boy haircuts and had them bow after every gig. This did not so much tame them as make them enticingly strange and ambiguous1. The legend of The Beatles as family entertainers only arose after other bands came through, specifically the Rolling Stones.

So they were less pioneers than harbingers of something new. Allen Ginsberg described them as evincing a new form of manhood, combining “complete masculinity” with “complete tenderness”. Perhaps that’s not quite right, but something like that.

1. And not just gender/sexual ambiguous. Older people complained they could not tell the different band members apart. Bemused exaggeration, perhaps, but The Beatles contemporaries often described them, especially early on, as being like a “four-headed monster”, a single personality split between four people.

Further pretentiousness

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Is a textbook example of just what John Lennon’s genius was. For a great musician he wasn’t actually that great at music. Amongst other things he was a rhythm guitarist with a poor sense of rhythm. His talent, in terms of composition, was being able to capitalise on his lack of fluency leading him to original ideas that would not occur to more proficient musicians. The Times music journalists famously complimented Lennon on his use of Aeolian cadences, John hadn’t a clue what they were.

Working with Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent with George Martin this tendency was harnessed. As time passed Lennon and McCartney depended less each other1, John’s compositions were offered up metrically dishevelled. He began composing on piano to surprise himself. He started working from words rather than an initial musical phrase. Phrases spilled over bars, sections expanded and contracted when needed (e.g. Revolution – “we-e-ell you know”, an extra two beats latched onto a 12-bar blues). What is Happiness is a Warm Gun? Is it a suite? There’s certainly no verse-chorus structure to it. Try counting the beats at various points. It’s utterly mad and yet the song rings true.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

The blockbuster Beatles single, the vertiginous peak of a chain starting with Love Me Do. Much can be made of how early Lennon/McCartney songs were written to generate white-hot hysteria. There is a contrary undertow in several of their early lyrics.

Please, Please Me is of course about John’s passion for oral sex. Despite being palpably more manic, I Want to Hold Your Hand is lyrically chaste. Can’t By Me Love went one step further in having the singer address object of their affection as “my friend”. These are not necessarily disparate elements. There is of course a cool aspect to sexual liberation, specifically casual sex, disengaged passion. This was almost certainly not considered by John and Paul, whose lyrics at the time were place fillers.

Julia

It’s well established that Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. She was a physical embodiment of the concept of anima, Lennon’s personality reflected back in female form, a role later embodied by Yoko Ono. If you accept that theory you can see Julia cropping up time and again in John’s lyrics, as the former lover, possibly dead in Yes It Is, the symbol of bondage and suffering in Girl, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, possibly the source of rapture in Across the Universe. There are numerous Lennon-penned songs about betrayal and departure. Lennon’s grief mixed with anger at her loss. All his closest relationships were tinged with violence to some degree2.

This is John’s final song to Julia while in The Beatles. Despite being something of an exorcism, judging by the Plastic Ono Band album it clearly failed.

1. And on George Martin, who began withdrawing from production duties after Sergeant Pepper.

2. For instance it’s reasonable to speculate (while admitting there’s no definitive proof) there was at least a sexual element to John’s relationship with Stuart Sutcliffe and that John felt a degree of guilt over his death from a brain haemorrhage, having had a violent brawl with Sutcliffe years earlier.

More pretentious fun...

Get Back

If I get my brain on enough I’ll jam together some trite observations about the Get Back/Let It Be disaster, musical composition, roots music and suchlike, but for now I want make trite observations about The Beatles and Race. 

The Beatles were very, very lucky people. They found a manager, possibly the only in Britain, who did not want to ruthlessly exploit them for short term gain. They also found the only producer who could cultivate and discipline their talent with tact and grace (practically everything they in terms of song writing and recording was unselfconsciously original – example, they insisted on calling the middle sections of their songs “middle eights” regardless of whether they had eight bars in them or not, George Martin went with it).

They were a curious and open minded group. When they moved to London at the beginning of their fame they were by chance they found themselves slap bang in most culturally rarefied part of Britain. Everything (and everyone) they encountered was soon radiated out to Western Youth through their records, and be it African-American rock and rollers, Indian sitar players or Nigerian percussionists, it was hail-fellow-well-met.

I think the American Dream had a concurrent meaning for African-Americans and British youth. Chuck Berry was a witty and perceptive lyricist who appealed to the thoughts and feelings of young, white Americans as a way to sell records. It was a life he could only write about from the outside. Though the circumstances were vastly different, the same was true of young Britons like Lennon and McCartney. All four of The Beatles had no truck with racism; they had heroes who were black, they played with black musicians, they refused to play to segregated audiences in America.

There is also another dimension. Whether it was the case or not, the cultural change perceived in the middle of the Twentieth Century was away from rigid and plotted forms to liberated, sprawling forms, e.g. in dance it meant the waltz was superseded by the twist. Rightly or wrongly this was attributed to increasing ethnic minority participation in cultural life. Black culture was seen as young, vital and alive, traditional white culture old, ossified and stale.

Enoch Powell’s (rightly) infamous Rivers of Blood speech was a watershed in racism. Before it racism was understood as white supremacy. What Powell sniffed out was a change, thanks to post-colonialism, racist ideology was changing into a defensive white nationalism. If we’re talking culture we must acknowledge that love of black music does not preclude racism toward black people, just ask Eric Clapton.

Get Back, one of The Beatles most successful late-era singles, began as a satire on Enoch Powell. This is what we’re given to believe about the Commonwealth Song. The ironic intent in lyrics about not digging Pakistanis taking jobs was not sufficiently clear, and the lyric was wisely dropped. There were two other occasions where The Beatles possibly let themselves down over this issue.

The first lay buried in archives and bootlegs for thirty years. What’s the New Mary Jane, John Lennon’s anarchic masterpiece that wasn’t, is sung in a ‘comic’ broken English and a mild Indian accent. There is no great malicious intent behind it, though the lyric is a veiled attack on someone in The Beatles immediate circles. It goes to show that prejudice can manifest itself in unexpected ways, even amongst the best of us.

The other, far more blatant, example is the film Help. Their second film was a pleasant enough comic adventure. We get to see the boys in colour this time too. Help is marred by an outstandingly racist parody of an eastern sacrificial cult (portrayed by British actors using unrealistic Indian accents) that drives the main plot. Of course it’s not desperately malicious (though that isn’t a reason not to object) and The Beatles did not write the film, and yes it can probably be put down to ‘the times’, but surely someone the band knew in 1965 could have flagged it up. Who knows?

Anyway, this, I think, is the last version of Get Back they performed at their rooftop concert, i.e. the last thing The Beatles ever performed live:

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.