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In short, the Beatles were a rupture—they changed modern history—and no less a visionary than Bob Dylan understood the meaning of their advent. “They were doing things nobody else was doing. . . . ,” he later told biographer Anthony Scaduto. “But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were just for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction that music had to go. . . . It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.”
THE BEATLES, of course, were hardly alone in transforming the 1960s’ pop soundscape. Bob Dylan—inspired by the Beatles’ creativity, freedom, and impact—moved on to electric music in 1965, to the outrage of the folk community though also to an incalculable benefit for rock & roll. The Rolling Stones—whose pop careers the Beatles helped make possible (in fact, Lennon and McCartney wrote the band’s first hit single, “I Wanna Be Your Man”)—were already impressing nervous adults as being a bit repellent for the obvious sexual implications of a song like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” And there was much more: Some of the most pleasurable and enduring music of the 1960s was being made by the monumental black-run Detroit label, Motown—which had scored over two dozen Top 10 hits by 1965 alone, by such artists as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, and the Four Tops. By contrast, a grittier brand of the new soul sensibility was being defined by Memphis-based Volt, Stax, and Atlantic artists like Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, James Carr and William Bell, and most memorably, Otis Redding. In other words, black forms remained vital to rock and pop’s growth (in fact, R & B’s codes, styles, and spirit had long served as models for white pop and teen rebellion—especially for the young Beatles and Rolling Stones), and as racial struggles continued through the decade, soul—as well as the best jazz from artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sonny Rollins—increasingly expressed black culture’s developing views of pride, identity, history, and power. By 1967, when Aretha Franklin scored with a massive hit cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” black pop was capable of signifying ideals of racial pride and feminist valor that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
Yet perhaps the greatest triumph of the time was simply that, for a long and glorious season, all these riches—white invention and black genius—played alongside one another in a radio marketplace that was more open than it had ever been before (or would ever be again), for a shared audience that revered it all. Just how heady and diverse the scene was came across powerfully in the 1965 film The T.A.M.I. Show—a greatest-hits pop revue that, in its stylistic and racial broadmindedness, anticipated the would-be catholic spirit that later characterized the Monterey Pop and Woodstock festivals. For those few hours, as artists like the Supremes, Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Jan and Dean, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones stood alongside one another onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, rock & roll looked and felt like a dizzying, rich, complex, and joyous community, in which any celebration or redemption was possible.
IN ONE WAY or another, this longing for community—the dream of self-willed equity and harmony, or at least tolerant pluralism in a world where familiar notions of family and accord were breaking down—would haunt rock’s most meaningful moments for the remainder of the decade. Unfortunately, the same forces that would deepen and expand the music’s social-mindedness—that would make rock the most publicly felt or consumed part of an actively self-defining counterculture—were also the forces that would contribute to the dissolution of that dream. In 1965, after waging the most successful “peace” campaign in America’s electoral history, President Lyndon B. Johnson began actively committing American troops to a highly controversial and deadly military action in Vietnam, and it quickly became apparent that it was the young who would pay the bloodiest costs for this horrible war effort. Sixties rock had given young people a sense that they possessed not just a new identity but also a new empowerment. Now, Vietnam began to teach that same audience that it was at risk, that its government and parents would willingly sacrifice young lives for old fears and distant threats—and would even use war as a means of diffusing youth’s new sovereignty. The contrast between those two realizations—between power and peril, between joy and fear—became the central tension that defined late ’60s youth culture, and as rock reflected that tension more, it also began forming oppositions to the jeopardy.
Consequently, the music started losing its “innocence.” The Beatles still managed to maintain a facade of effervescence in the sounds of albums like Beatles for Sale, Help, and even Rubber Soul, but the content of the songs had turned more troubled. It was as if the group had lost a certain mooring. Lennon was singing more frequently about alienation and apprehension, McCartney about the unreliability of love—and whereas their earlier music had fulfilled the familiar structures of 1950s rock, their newer music was moving into unaccustomed areas and incorporating strange textures. Primarily, though, the band was growing fatigued from a relentless schedule of touring, writing, and recording. Following the imbroglio that resulted from Lennon’s assertion that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and after one last dispirited 1966 swing through America (in which they were unable to play their more adventurous new material), the Beatles called a formal quits to live performances. Also, it was becoming evident that youth culture (especially its “leaders”: pop stars) were starting to come under fire for flouting conventional tastes and morals. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones were arrested for drug possession in a series of 1967 busts in London, and were pilloried by the British press and legal system. “I’m not concerned with your petty morals which are illegitimate,” Richards bravely (or perhaps foolishly) told a court official at his trial—and it was plain that generational tensions were heating up into a full-fledged cultural war.
Maybe these developments should have been received as harbingers of dissolution, but the vision of rock as a unifying and liberating force had become too exciting, too deep-seated, to be denied. By this time rock & roll was plainly youth style, and youth was forming alternative communities and political movements throughout Europe and America. In the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, something approaching utopia seemed to be happening. Bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Charlatans were forming social bonds with the same audiences they were playing for, and were trying to build a working communal ethos (and social redemption) from a swirling mix of music, drugs, sex, metaphysics, and idealistic love.
In mid 1967, after a year-long hiatus, the Beatles helped raise this worldview from the margins to worldwide possibility with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—a cohesive, arty, and brilliant work that tapped perfectly the collective generational mood of the times, and that reestablished the foursome’s centrality to rock’s power structure. It wasn’t that the Beatles had invented the psychedelic or avant-garde aesthetic that their new music epitomized—in fact, its spacey codes and florid textures and arrangements had been clearly derived from the music of numerous innovative San Francisco and British bands. But with Sgt. Pepper, they managed to refine what these other groups had been groping for, and they did so in a way that unerringly manifested the sense of independence and iconoclasm that now seized youth culture. At the album’s end, John Lennon sang “A Day in the Life”—the loveliest-sounding song about alienation that pop had ever yielded—and then all four Beatles hit the same loud, lingering, portentous chord on four separate pianos. As that chord lingered and then faded, it bound up an entire culture in its mysteries, its implications, its sense of power and hope. In some ways, it was th
e most magical moment that culture would ever share, and the last gesture of genuine unity that we would ever hear from the Beatles.
Sgt. Pepper was an era-defining and form-busting work. To many, it certified that rock was now art and that art was, more than ever, a mass medium. It also established the primacy of the album as pop’s main format—as a vehicle for fully-formed conceptual ventures and as the main means by which rock artists communicated their truths (or pretensions) to their audience, and by which they conjoined and enlightened that audience. Rock was filled now with not only ideals of defiance, but dreams of love, community, and spirituality. Even the Rolling Stones—who always sang about much darker concerns—would start recording songs about love and altruism (that is, for a week or two). “For a brief while,” wrote critic Langdon Winner of the Sgt. Pepper era, “the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.”
But that blithe center couldn’t forever hold. By the time Sgt. Pepper was on the streets, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was already turning into a scary and ugly place, riddled with corruption and hard drugs, and overpopulated with bikers, rapists, thieves, and foolish shamans. In addition, a public backlash was forming. Many Americans were afraid they had lost their young to irredeemable allures and ideologies, and in California, Ronald Reagan had already won a gubernatorial campaign that was largely predicated on anti-youth sentiment. It was a time for media panic, for generational recrimination and political separatism, for opposing views of America’s worth and future. It was an intoxicating time but also a frightening one. Known certainties were slipping away, or being abandoned. More and more, it looked as if there were no turning back, and as if everything were at stake.
IN FACT, more was at stake than anybody realized. The Beatles would make more great music, but their collective fate was twisting out of their control. In August 1967, Brian Epstein died alone in his London home of a sleeping pill overdose. Epstein had made many business and personal errors, but he had remained steadfast in his belief in (and love for) the Beatles, and without him, the group was soon rudderless. In May 1968, John Lennon began an affair with Yoko Ono—a respected avant-garde artist who had been part of New York’s Fluxus movement. Soon after, he left and divorced his wife, Cynthia Powell, and his resulting inseparable closeness with Ono caused much tension within the Beatles’ world. Paul McCartney, meantime, tried to keep the band on course (sometimes disastrously, as with Magical Mystery Tour; sometimes splendidly, as with Abbey Road), but the other group members began to resent and distrust what they saw as the bassist’s egoistic bossiness. There were other trying matters: the drug busts of Lennon and Harrison, plus the arrival and bullying manner of new manager, Allen Klein (despised by McCartney, entrusted by the others, and eventually sued by all). But the decisive rift in the Beatles occurred in the relationship between McCartney and Lennon. Theirs was the real romance and unbelievably creative partnership that made the Beatles’ popularity grow and span the world, and when that mutual affection and cooperation was over—like the dissolution of any major passion—there was no turning back. The Beatles went on to record The Beatles (better known as the White Album); they also made Let It Be; then they made Abbey Road. But regardless of the merits of any of those works, it was difficult for those four men to remain comfortably in the same room for long.
The Beatles ended in April 1970, at almost the same moment that Let It Be became their fourteenth number 1 album. Maybe the end was none too soon, but it was clear that, as they finished their union, the Beatles also finished a great adventure and a worthy dream.
In the documentary film Let It Be (and even more memorably in the book Get Back, which accompanied the British release of the film’s soundtrack), McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison argued endlessly among each other over the most artful way of making what was originally intended as artless music, while also trying to make the hapless event of the film seem like a natural document of their musical communion. The group had been marked by the emerging cynicism of the era that was to follow. They were already regarding one another as creations of undeserved hype. For everything they had once been—lively, novel, and uplifting—the Beatles ended as bitter, mutually unbelieving strangers.
BEATLES NOW
It is no secret that for the better part of the next two decades, the former Beatles preferred to have little to do with each other or their momentous history. Something about being the Beatles—an adventure which, for the most part, had been so marvelous to observe—left the four men at the heart of the experience seeming wounded, haunted, even bitter. “We were just a band who made it very, very, big,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in December 1970. “That’s all.”
And then, to stick his point, in one of the best songs from the outset of his solo career, Lennon declared: “I don’t believe in Beatles. . . . /The dream is over.” It was a brave thing to say; no doubt painful as well. But what about the legions of admirers who had believed that dream, who had come of age with the Beatles, whose world and lives had been transformed in part by the band’s growth? “It’s only a rock group that split up,” said Lennon. “It’s nothing important. You know, you have all their records there, if you want to reminisce.” George Harrison added: “All things must pass,” before embarking on a solo career that, far too often, indicated that among those things that are truly perishable are passion, vision, and purpose.
Even when some of the more grievous injuries began to heal between the former bandmates—in particular, the rift between Lennon and Paul McCartney, the songwriting team who had enjoyed the closest relationship within the group, but whose parting was especially caustic—the four men and their former commonwealth remained entangled in complex lawsuits. (At one time or another, the ex-Beatles were involved in litigation—or prospects of litigation—with the band’s onetime manager, Allen Klein; the band’s major label distributor, EMI; Lennon and McCartney’s music publishers; and, of course, with each other. The imbroglios lasted until 1989.) No chance, in the midst of such sustained disagreements, for the mythic reunion that so many fans, journalists, and concert promoters kept hoping for. (“Saturday Night Live” ’s Lorne Michaels parodied this mania by offering the foursome one thousand dollars for a one-time appearance. According to one delightful rumor, the band came damn close to taking him up on the offer.) Indeed, for some music devotees, the idea of a reunited Beatles became something like a pop culture version of the quest for the Holy Grail: If the group would just get back together, the thinking went, perhaps some of the 1960s’ lost ideals of unity and hopefulness might be regained. The former Beatles wanted no part of such a delusion; it would’ve been a work of fake community. Besides, theirs was a done history. Time to move on, to face their new destinies as four grown men. Separately.
Then, in December 1980, an unhinged Beatles fan shot John Lennon to death outside Lennon’s Manhattan apartment building, just a few weeks after the former Beatle had released his first new music in four years. A fucking awful payoff: six bullets for a man who had enriched the lives of millions, and who had helped transfigure an entire culture. The Beatles’ dream—and any chance it might be reanimated—was finally, irrevocably, over. In 1989, when asked again if the band might still get back together, George Harrison stated: “As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.”
Well, not so fast. In the mid-1990s, the Beatles were back, with two “new” Beatles songs: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” written and sung by, of all people, John Lennon. The surviving Beatles—McCartney, Harrison, Ringo Starr—regrouped in the studio again, singing and playing along with Lennon’s tape-recorded voice (from demos of unfinished late 1970s songs, given to McCartney by Yoko Ono), and working cooperatively to shape a collective biography of the band. In addition, the group produced nearly seven hours of previously unreleased Beatles recordings (comprising three full-length double CD sets, and two shorter CDs—the latter fea
turing the “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” singles and other tracks). Plus, there was a ten-hour, multimedia video history of the band, The Beatles Anthology, narrated for the most part by the Beatles themselves (McCartney, Harrison, and Starr contributed original interviews for the project; Lennon was heard posthumously, from earlier taped statements). In effect, we got what we were never supposed to get: a Beatles reunion. Or at least its 1990s equivalent—a virtual reality-style mix of disembodied dead voices and polished up-to-the-minute ambitions.
The only question was: How much did all this new product contribute to our appreciation of the Beatles’ music, or our understanding of their history? A fair amount, it turns out, though perhaps not always in ways that the Beatles intended.
THE MUSICAL component of the Anthology series—the three double CDs and two CD single sets—are a rich if problematic trove. Combined, the eight CDs offer over 140 recordings—including unreleased masters, outtakes, live sessions, demo recordings, cover versions, rehearsals, and improvised performances—all of which have been unavailable in any form on authorized Beatles albums and collections until 1995 and 1996. As history, as a means of showing how the Beatles developed the textures, arrangements, and contents of their songs, and also how they rejected or renovated their mistakes, much of it is fascinating. In particular, the three versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Anthology 2 (which covers the 1965-68 period in which the Beatles went through such matchless experimental growth) demonstrate how a simple, sad-toned folk song grew into an orchestrated, style-shattering elegy to lost certainties. On the same album, there is also a quartet version of “A Day in the Life” which is perhaps even more affecting than the original, if that’s possible.