Three Sarabandes

I was sitting in our car on Monday night in Baie-Comeau, Québec, waiting for the ferry to arrive to take us to Matane on the other side of the St. Lawrence Seaway. As I had about 45 minutes to while away, I put the first CD in Jean-Yves Thibaudet's 5 disk set of Satie's piano music and listened to the 3 Sarabandes - the first three tracks on the record.

I was not familiar at all with these pieces before I bought this CD, and initially tended to skip them or not pay them much mind as they were followed immediately by the well-known Gymnopedies.

But since I have heard them a few times, I find them in some ways more satisfying than the more well-known pieces.

They are less attractive on the surface, lacking the lilting rhythm of the Gymopedies, and appear to be incomplete or oddly shaped on first listenings. The connection with the music of John Cage is made quite apparent here, and it is easy to understand why Cage held Satie in such high regard. By subverting conventions of time and form in subtle ways, these pieces stand out in sharp relief from the piano music of Satie's contemporaries. Here, the music seems to have uncoupled itself from time. There's a spaciousness that leads you to pay as much attention to gaps between the notes as to the music itself.

I sat in the Parc des Pioneers adjacent to the bay of this extraordinary town, a blend of natural Canadian beauty and heavy industry, listening to this music. I felt out of time and place myself. French music, played by a French pianist in a wholly French town - yet part of North America.

A moment that will remain with me.

Give Me 3D Vision & The California Blues

If ever there was a band that seems to be no more than style and glitz, it was T. Rex. Marc Bolan's group was huge in England when I was a young teenager, and songs such as "Get It On", "Telegram Sam", "Children Of The Revolution" and "20th Century Boy" are as much a part of my musical spawning ground as anything else.

Often derided at the time by 'serious' rockers, T. Rex's songs have only grown in stature since those days, chiefly because, by not taking themselves at all seriously, they convey more meaning and emotion than any number of contemporary prog rock opuses.

So I am waiting for an expanded and remastered "Electric Warrior" CD to be shipped with unusually bated breath. This is truly fun music.

Yet more from a Beatles course

The worst thing about looking back on exam questions is spotting all the typos, grammatical errors, and downright nonsense that you write under the pressure of a deadline. The following no doubt contains a few more - but I'm not going to correct them yet! This was a answer in reponse to a question concerning musical influences on the band outside of Pop music.

The Beatles were a curious and exploratory band of musicians. Having successfully developed a unique sound by assimilating all types of popular music, the Beatles turned, in 1965, to sources that lay outside popular music. In doing so, they not only reinvigorated their own music, but also introduced unusual music to their fans – many of whom would never have either heard or sought out this new music.

Perhaps their greatest achievement was the seamless integration of these extra-pop influences into their own songs. By example, this helped stimulate a period of remarkable cross-genre synthesis that pushed rock music into hitherto unforeseen regions.

Let’s look at these new types of music in turn.

Depending on what you read, George Harrison was introduced to the sitar by multi-instrumentalist Shawn Phillips[1] or by David Crosby and Roger McGuinn of the The Byrds[2] or simply encountered one on the set of the film “Help”[3]. Regardless, he became fascinated by the sound of the instrument, and after completing filming, he began a series of studies with North Indian sitar master, Ravi Shankar. Through Harrison, Indian music entered into the music of The Beatles.

“Norwegian Wood” introduced the sitar into popular music. From the beginning Harrison used the instrument in an “Indian” way, providing a drone – a sustained E major – and melodic shapes characteristic of the music.[4] This is an important observation, because it shows that The Beatles were not necessarily interested in simply co-opting unusual instruments into the Western popular style, but actually wanted to expand Western pop to embrace other types of music.

Three Beatles compositions, “Love To You”, “Within You Without You”, and “The Inner Light” all written by George Harrison go much further. The first two were recorded largely with Indian musicians from the North London Asian Music Circle, the latter with musicians in Bombay, all employ structural elements derived from the Indian tradition. “Love To You” begins with an alap – a musical discourse – and proceeds with the entrance of the tabla into a slow and fast gat – essentially a rhythmic ‘movement’ generated by a cycle of beats.[5] Both are elements of the Indian musical style known as the raga, described as a ‘continuum with scale and tune as its extremes’[6] or as a ‘melody form’[7], but “Love To You” is not a true raga.

The raga has profound extra-musical meaning in Indian culture. Each raga is associated with a fixed mood, time (day or season) and often a ceremonial occasion. They are believed to influence the physical world – for example, the raga Mālhar is believed to generate rain. They are also believed to have therapeutic properties, for both mental and physical ailments.[8] The root of Indian music is based on the belief that God – or the creator – is musical sound which pervades the whole universe – the Nada Brahma. An Indian musician is attempting through his art, to reintegrate himself, and presumably the listener, with creation itself.

This is definitely the poor man’s introduction to Indian music. To truly understand it requires a commitment well beyond just listening, and an exploration of the complex and profound spiritual and philosophical bedrock of this music.

Hence, the sometimes offered criticism that Harrison is engaging in “Orientalism” – in essence a half-understood appropriation of Asian cultural elements.[9] Harrison himself was certainly not guilty of this – you do not commit yourself to years of study with Ravi Shankar if your interest is but a passing fad. It’s probably a different story for the average Western listener.

The second of Harrison’s Indian songs, “Within You Without You”, is the most important, not only because it was the opening track to Side 2 of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”, but because it, in many ways, provides that album’s (and by extension the entire Beatles at the time) philosophical core. Use of music with the profoundly religious roots described above to underlie sentiments such as

Try to realize it’s all within yourself

No-one else can make you change

And to see you’re really only very small

And life flows on within you and without you.[10]

is entirely appropriate and illustrates how closely The Beatles were tied to the 1960s search into “inner space” . A lengthy five minute plus, with instrumental dialogue between Harrison on sitar and a dilruba (bowed lute-like instrument or ‘one string fiddle’) , and an accompanying string arrangement carefully arranged by George Martin to allow the European players to get the right sound, this is a track well outside of The Beatles’ usual sound.[11] Indeed it was well outside the sound of any pop/rock music of the time, going further even than “Love To You”.

“The Inner Light” expands on the same lyrical themes

Without going out of your door

You can know all things on earth

Without looking out of your window

You can know the ways of heaven[12]

using much the same musical elements.

In addition to “Norwegian Wood”, Indian instruments were used in more ‘conventional’ Beatles’ songs. A svarmandal (also used on “Within You Without You), described by McDonald as “a sort of Indian zither”[13] was used to texture “Strawberry Fields Forever”. The tambura, a stringed instrument which provides the drone that is the foundation beneath a rage, was used to give an Indian feel to part of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. But the most significant use of the tambura (aside from its more normally integrated use alongside sitar and tabla in the Harrison songs) was to provide a constant drone in the song “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

“Tomorrow Never Knows” serves as an excellent introduction into the second main musical influence outside of pop music that The Beatles appropriated. This was the music of the avant-garde and experimental music.

I’m going to differentiate between avant-garde and experimental music following much of the classification introduced by Michael Nyman in his excellent book “Experimental Music”. It is ultimately a pointless differentiation in terms of The Beatles, and hopefully I’ll explain just why shortly, but it is helpful in explaining the music.

Nyman states that “experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional rules.”[14] Avant-garde composers, indeed all composers who fall outside the criteria outlined above, are, by definition, interested in time-objects who materials, structures and relationships are calculated in advance i.e. composed. Two composers influenced The Beatles significantly, largely mediated through Paul McCartney’s interest in cutting-edge art of all kinds at the time, and one is avant-garde and one experimental according to this definition.

John Cage is the experimental composer. His piece for audiotape, “Williams Mix” consists of a blend of sounds belonging to six categories – city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually-produced sounds, wind-produced sounds, and small (i.e requiring amplification) sounds[15]. It is how these sounds were arranged that puts Cage into the experimental category. He devised a method of cutting up and rejoining tape that was driven by chance – he did not personally select which sound went where on the finished tape. Consequently, listening to it, you hear an extraordinary patchwork of unconnected noises.

Ironically, if you listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang der junglinge”, another piece for tape, the impression you get is exactly the same. It’s ironic, because Stockhausen, as an avant-garde composer, pre-determined every aspect of what you hear using a fiendishly complex compositional technique[16]. His work used human and electronically generated sound, a complex but less varied palette than that used by Cage.

Two very different methods of composing. Two very similar results. Both works are examples of the tape manipulative method known as musique concrète, a term coined by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer for his early experiments in rearranging and manipulating recorded sound.[17] The closed groove that endlessly repeats ‘never do see any other way’ at the end of Side 2 of the “Sgt. Pepper” LP is in effect a hommage to Schaeffer who developed his first musique concrète works using phonograph records. (His first work being a series of manipulations of the sound of a steam railway train called Etude aux Chemins de Fer composed in May 1948[18]).

But it was music such as the Cage and Stockhausen that interested The Beatles so much in 1966. And it was the sound of those recordings that most involved them. The conceptual leap, though, from listening to music such as this and applying it to a pop song (albeit a very unusual pop song) is simply breathtaking. Furthermore, it was done in an extremely effective manner. The five tape loops woven into “Tomorrow Never Knows” are extraordinarily well placed. If there was ever an example of the band’s (and I think we must include George Martin here) intuitive genius, this is it. This song, with its Indian drone influence, not just the tambura but Ringo’s drumming, a ‘cosmic tabla played by a Vedic deity[19]’ as McDonald puts it (although it sounds more African than Indian to me), Lennon’s extraordinary vocal sound, automatically double-tracked for the first half of the song, fed through the rotating Leslie-speaker of a Hammond organ for the second, the chant-like structure, the actual “Tibetan Book Of The Dead” lyrics, is simply astonishing.

Avant-garde and experimental compositional innovations influenced another Beatles’ track, “A Day In The Life”. The extraordinary orchestral glissandi leading into the middle eight and towards the final piano chord were played by musicians who were given no more than indication of what note to start and what note to finish with (with a few signposts on the way). How they got there was up to them. George Martin amusingly recalls that it was difficult to get the musicians into the frame of mind to carry this out successfully.[20] Being given a beginning and an end but not the details in between is another example of experimental music, and such ‘indeterminancies’ go back as far as the American composer Charles Ives in first half of the 20^th century[21]. But not in popular music – this was another Beatles innovation. To my ears, though, the glissandi of “A Day In The Life” sound most of all like the work of composer Györgi Ligeti in a work such as 1961’s “Atmosphères[22]”, which does not contain indeterminacy!

While we have woefully self-deprecating George Martin’s orchestration in mind, it worthwhile to point out that the string arrangements for “Yesterday”, “Eleanor Rigby” and even “She’s Leaving” home introduce a clarity of texture and a ‘Classical’ sensibility (‘Classical’ as in the sense of referring back to composers like Haydn) that was novel. The string quartet on “Yesterday”, the double string quartet on “Eleanor Rigby” sound fresh and contrast favorably with the clichéd Romantic-style orchestrations prevalent at the time (e.g. Phil Spector’s arrangement for “The Long And Winding Road”). “Eleanor Rigby”, with its incisive, rhythmic string playing has an almost minimalist feel, a compositional style that was in its infancy in the 1960s. George Martin deserved a song-writing credit on this, and many other Beatles songs for that matter!

The avant-garde and experimental concepts introduced into the Beatles music were certainly part of broadly innovative if hardly popular movements in modern music. Both Cage and Stockhausen were considered preeminent in the field. Cage was familiar with and had been influenced deeply by Eastern religious concepts since the late1940s when he first became interested in Zen Buddhism. (The same interest fueled much of the Beat poetry and arts movement of the 1950s and into the 1960s). Stockhausen began to reach out to the East at about the same time as The Beatles with compositions such as Telemusik (1966) and Stimmung (1968)[23]. Influences were flowing in every direction, although it would take some time for ‘serious’ composers to acknowledge rock music influences.

1968 also saw The Beatles produce their most experimental work, the musique concrète of “Revolution 9”. Stripped completely of anything resembling conventional rock music, this has to be the single most widely heard work of its type ever recorded. One can only hope that at least some of the millions who heard this were sufficiently intrigued to delve further into experimental music.

“Revolution 9” ’s compositional techniques are not new, but they are used effectively to weave a discomforting sound portrait of turmoil punctuated by the dispassionately spoken “number 9” and other interjections. Now on the same turf as the little-heard music of the avant-garde and experimental movements, it invites direct comparison. Part of the problem with that is the difficulty in actually hearing comparable pieces – the “Non consumiamo Marx” by Luigi Nono that McDonald compares unfavorably to “Revolution 9[24]” is unavailable as of the moment. Other contemporary works of Nono that are available, such as “La fabbrica illuminata” reveal Nono to be an excellent, politically committed (rather more so than Lennon) and moving composer. “Revolution 9”, at the very least though, fits neatly into a year of assassinations, riots, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the escalating war in Vietnam, and student protests worldwide.

To finish, a brief mention of the use the Moog synthesizer by The Beatles on their final recorded album, “Abbey Road”. The synthesizer was created as a consequence of developments in the field of electronic music, an area of interesting intersections with popular music. Electronics, being only a means of making music, is not innately predisposed to any one musical style, but, given the essentially conservative nature of popular music, they were little used in this area. The first pop/rock band to make full and innovative use of electronic instruments was The Beach Boys, using the theremin both on the “Pet Sounds[25]” album and the single “Good Vibrations”. The Byrds, on the album “Notorious Byrd Brothers[26]” made use of the first Moog, a clumsly patch-cable affair. At the same time, Walter Carlos released the awful “Switched-On Bach” LP,[27] that became a best seller and put the Moog firmly in the public eye. Meanwhile, George Harrison was also experimenting with the instrument, collaborating with Bernie Krauss to produce a far superior piece of real music, “Electronic Sounds[28]”, released in 1969. The Beatles adopted it for “Abbey Road”, using it largely for instrumental color on a number of conventional tracks. The exception is “I Want You”, the last piece of experimentally influenced music the band recorded. The Moog is used to generate and process white noise that is laid in progressively heavier layers over the repeating guitar figure until it almost drowns out the sound of the band. Then snip, and song is abruptly cut off.

Noise or non-musical sounds had been a component of experimental compositions by artists such as La Monte Young, George Brecht and other members of the “Fluxus” group, a multi-disciplinary organization[29] that also happened to include Yoko Ono. La Monte Young had already given the rock music world John Cale, the influence of whom on The Velvet Underground had provoked the most radically dissonant and noisy (as in use of noise elements) rock music to date (“European Son[30]”, “Sister Ray[31]”). “I Want You” does not approach the wild abandon of those songs, but it does show that even at the very end, the urge to experiment was still strong in The Beatles.

---

[1] Sleevenote to Shawn Phillips, Contribution/Second Contribution CD Gott 17

[2] Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 132

[3] Allan Kozinn The Beatles Phaidon 1995 p. 133

[4] Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 132

[5] In India – 4. Rhythm and tala Grove Music Online, George Aviakian, Liner Notes to Ravi Shankar, India’s Master Musician Angel CD 7243 5 67023 2 5 and Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 155

[6] In India – 2. Raga – The concept Grove Music Online

[7] George Aviakian, Liner Notes to Ravi Shankar, India’s Master Musician Angel CD 7243 5 67023 2 5

[8] In India – 2. Raga – The concept Grove Music Online

[9] e.g. See Matthew Bannister The Beatle Who Became A Man in Every Sound There Is, ed. Reisling, Ashgate 2002 pp. 188-189.

[10] George Harrison Within You Without You © 1967 Northern Songs published in The Beatles Lyrics Hal Leonard Corp. p. 139

[11] George Martin With A Little Help From My Friends Little, Brown & Co 1994, pp. 124-130 and Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 pp. 193-194

[12] George Harrison The Inner Light © 1967 Northern Songs published in The Beatles Lyrics Hal Leonard Corp. p. 160

[13] Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 175

[14] Michael Nyman Experimental Music Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 4

[15] Michael Nyman Experimental Music Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 48

[16] Karlheinz Stockhausen, Music and Speech in Gesang der Jünglinge, 1957 (reprinted in the notes to Stockausen – Elektronische Musik 1952-1960 Stockhausen-Verlag, Germany CD 3)

[17] Michael Nyman Experimental Music Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 48

[18] Paul Griffiths, Modern Music And After, Oxford University Press, 1995 pp. 17-18.

[19] Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 152

[20] George Martin With A Little Help From My Friends Little, Brown & Co 1994, pp. 56-59

[21] Michael Nyman Experimental Music Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 39-41

[22] Gyorgy Ligeti Atmosphères from The Ligeti Project II Teldec 8573-88161-2

[23] In Stockhausen – Works Grove Music Online

[24] Ian McDonald Revolution In The Head Pimlico 1995 p. 234

[25] The Beach Boys Pet Sounds Capitol C2-48421

[26] The Byrds The Notorious Byrd Brothers Columbia 65151

[27] Walter (Wendy) Carlos Switched On Bach CBS 63501

[28] George Harrison Electronic Sounds EMI 855239

[29] Michael Nyman Experimental Music Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 72-88

[30] The Velvet Underground European Son from The Velvet Underground & Nico, Verve CD 823 290-2

[31] The Velvet Underground Sister Ray from White Light White Heat, Verve CD 825 119-2

If There Is Something

I can remember the first three LPs I ever bought, beyond that the recollection gets hazy. All were bought in 1972. The first was "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", bought not only because it was considered at the time (and still by many today) as the greatest rock album of all time, but also because it was the only rock record I was familiar with from my childhood.

The second was "The Night Is Still Young" by Sha Na Na, bought solely because I had recently seen them perform on TV and they looked cool. It was the first, but not the last, disappointing record I ever owned.

The third was "Roxy Music", bought before I ever heard "Virginia Plain", largely on the recommendation of a school friend who said you will have never heard anything like it.

He was right.

"Roxy Music" was the first record that became special, eventually establishing itself as one of my favorite records of all time (easily beating "Sgt. Pepper", by the way") and setting the scene for greater, wider and deeper explorations into rock music.

The album was in large measure despised by most of my contemporaries. It was frivilous stuff, they thought, in comparison to the real progressive music being made by the likes of Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Ironically, time would prove "Roxy Music" to be of far greater importance and influence that anything made by those aforementioned bands, and the band itself was the first significant home of electronic and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.

In those early days, my favorite track was the mid tempo rocker "If There is Something". A three part song, with a country flavored beginning, a classical/jazz middle section and a rock 'n' roll ballad finale. But these descriptions do scant justice to the song, which sounds like no country rock, classical/jazz improvisation, or rock 'n' roll of the early 1970s or any other time for that matter. Much of this has to do with the sound of the band. Guitar, oboe, keyboards were all played and processed in unorthodox, even atonal ways, and synthesizer textures and musique concrète constructions wash in and out of the band's music. The production, with prominent bass and drums and everything else mixed together in the middle, gives the music a swampy and muddy ambience quite unlike the crystalline textures that were coming into vogue as recording technology rapidly improved with Dolby noise reduction, 16 part multitracking and beyond. In some ways, the sound was a throwback to the tightly compressed recordings of "Revolver" period Beatles.

But I knew little beyond "Sgt. Pepper" of The Beatles at that point. And knowing makes little difference. Even today "Roxy Music" stands as an unique musical statement, one of the few that inspires imitation but nobody has been able to duplicate.

Chance Meeting

There is no substitute for the impact that music makes on you when you are a teenager.

Never mind that for the rest of your life you hear more and more widely varied music than you ever even knew existed; the songs and bands that captivated you when you were young take on special place and meaning.

No doubt this explains much radio programming, a carefully selected set of familiar songs guaranteed to elicit maximum teenage flashback in their aging audiences, all the while bombarding those listeners with exhortations to spend their adult incomes on this and that.

Listen to such radio for more than a day, and any truly meaningful emotional impact of remembrance and association is crushed. For that reason, I do not listen to music radio at all any more.

But even if I did, the number of songs of any period that would actually be destroyed by overexposure is extraordinarily limited. A playlist of no more than 300 songs often suffices for these targeted radio programs. A stunningly small number, even accounting for the restrictions placed by the date of origin of the music.

Of course, such a limited playlist forces the same songs to be overplayed even more. I can happily say that I hear, for example, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" perhaps once a year and solely because I want to play it. At that frequency, it is actually a very powerful and enjoyable song.

No, my own 'radio' consists of my own record & CD collection, transferred to hard drive and played back using WinAmp's random shuffler. I have no idea what I am going to hear. All I know is that I own it, and have heard it at least once before.

The astonishingly thing about such a system is that these randomly chosen songs - out of 1000s of songs - more often than not seem completely appropiate to my listening wants. It is a rare session where I do not hear something that I am very glad that I did. Many times I had even been thinking of it beforehand.

I Never Knew Magic Crazy As This

I was introduced to the music of Nick Drake by my friend Mark Judd around 1976 or so, thereby being part of the second wave of Drake discoverers, just missing him while he was alive and recording.

Subsequently, Nick Drake has been nearly forgotten and then rediscovered several times - the last that I am aware being when the song "Pink Moon" was used in a Volkswagen commercial!

As much as I dislike overtly commercial use of rock music, usually beyond the control of its creator, I was pleased that many more people became aware of Nick Drake as a result. My co-worker would never have heard him without this introduction, and she now loves his music.

And music to love it is. My favorite song is the ethereal "Northern Sky" featuring a sublimely creative harpischord and organ arrangement by John Cale and a melody to die for.

Perhaps I will write more later. Right now, I will just let the tune resonate in my head and go to bed.

Heartbreak A Stranger

Another much underestimated era in rock music history is the 1980s. Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and Madonna were dominating the charts with a slick studio-derived product that offered more surface gloss than true substance With the burgeoning influence of MTV moving from innovation in the early part of the decade to sterile consolidation by the end, rock/pop appeared to be as predetermined, processed and expertly packaged as the product of any prior equivalent period - the early 1960s, the mid 1970s.

Pretty much devoid of any real meaning though.

But, as is always the case, underneath the surface outstanding music was still being made.

One of these artists was the Minneapolis band, Hüsker Dü, led by Bob Mould and Grant Hart. Deriving their fericious sound from 1970s punk rock but mixing this with a finely tuned pop sensibility, Hüsker Dü were The Buzzcocks of their day.

As is so often the case, this hyper-talented band burned out and the individuals began solo careers. Bob Mould began his with one of the finest 'singer-songwriter' records ever made by someone who would not have dreamed of being classified among the 1970s variant of that style.

"Workbook" is simply a gem, from the opening instrumental "Sunspots" (which I have heard used as linking music on NPR!), through a series of bitter/reflective songs emotionally based around the dissolution of Hüsker Dü. My favorite, if not necessarily the best, is "Heartbreak A Stranger".

A complete gorgeous melody played softly on electric guitar and evocative lyrics. It never fails to move me and belongs to the very finest of all rock songs.

Again, another largely forgotten and ignored record - I always wonder how many more there are out there just waiting to be heard!

Here Comes The Nice vs. Waiting For The Man

1967 saw the release of two (among others) notable songs about drugs. One was The Small Faces' "Here Comes The Nice", the second The Velvet Underground's "Waiting For The Man". Both directly addressed the supplier - the pusher. But the tone taken by the two could not be more different.

"Here Comes The Nice" ("The Nice" being contemporary slang for a drug dealer) is as about as positive a song about the pleasures and benefits of illicit drug taking as you are likely to find. Listening to it today is a stunning experience, not least because of the extraordinary naivete so happily expounded by Steve Marriott:

"You know you should meet the man
The man gonna help you all he can
You don't need money to be wise

Here come the nice (It's understood)
Here come the nice (He makes me feel so good)
I'd be just like him (If only could)
You know you should"

Compare this to Lou Reed's altogether more realistic vantage point:

"I’m waiting for my man
Got 26 dollars in my hand
Up to lexington 125
Feeling sick and dirty
More dead than alive
I‚’m waiting for my man"

The Small Faces song is a jaunty Stax-soul influenced rocker with silky "Who" style harmony vocals. Catchy enough to be a hit single, lyrically oblique enough to bypass the BBC music censors. A completely charming record.

"I'm Waiting For The Man" is also a mid-tempo rocker, but that is about all it shares with "The Nice". Instead we have a driving piano driven song that would be a dirge were it any slower, with all the monotony implied by that description. In contrast to the Small Faces, money is very important to Lou Reed's protagonist. This is strictly a supply and demand deal - no illusions here about the wonderful world of consciousness altering. Reed's character needs his fix; without it he is going into a painful withdrawal. Not a song that got much airplay, and not a hit single in any way, but altogether a superior picture of the realities of drug taking.

Stroll On

One of the more celebrated scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's deeply complex study of 'swinging London' in the 1960s, "Blow Up", shows The Yardbirds - the Jimmy Page/Jeff Beck Yardbirds - rocking up a storm in a London nightclub populated by an audience of jaded zombies. In barges the 'hero' (really antihero) played by David Hemmings (formerly a boy soprano featured in Britten's "Turn Of The Screw" no less!!) in an effort to find a woman who may - or may not - be involved in a murder. Only when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and throws the neck into the crowd do these coolly immobile punters let loose, and the always competitive Hemmings' character beats them all to seize the smashed piece. He then runs out of the club, and casually tosses the fretboard aside. Out of context, it has no value.

The music to this finely acted scene is a song called 'Stroll On'. This is nothing more than a version of "The Train Kept A Rollin'" originally recorded by the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio. The most remarkable aspect of this recording, both in the original and faithfully duplicated by The Yardbirds, is the malevolent fuzz tone of the rhythm guitar. It has a bass heavy resonance that sets it apart from more familiar fuzz tone recording (e.g. The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction"), and I was astonished when I finally heard the Johnny Burnette original to find that recording, made in the mid-late 1950s, has all - and more - of the sonic ambience of The Yardbirds' own version.

Apparently an accident to Johnny Burnette's guitarist's (Paul Burlinson) amplifier had loosened a valve in the unit, resulting in an astonishing distorted electronic tone. That the band & producer had both the imagination and will to record this wildly unconventional sound is a testament to the surging creativity of prime 1950s rock 'n' roll. Essential listening.

Spirit Of '76

It's often said, and seems to have become part of rock history lore, that the mid-1970s were a wasteland for rock music. The big artists of the 1960s had given us their best music already, and were offering pale imitation or retreads, most often overproduced and bloated with pretension.

But this really was not the case at all if you looked anywhere below the surface. Although glam rock had largely faded, it was well into its transformation into punk rock through the vehicles of artists such as Patti Smith and The New York Dolls. Bob Dylan released his most meaningful album since "John Wesley Harding" with "Blood On The Tracks". David Bowie was moving into the techno-disco musical world that would blossom through "Station To Station" into the stunning "Low". John Cale & Sparks released marvelous albums. Reggae music was at a high point with Bob Marley and Burning Spear. There was a lot going on, and all of it interesting.

Into this dropped Spirit's "Spirit Of '76", a sardonic look at the bicentennial through the prism of some of the most radical music of the 1960s. This double LP really struck me, not least because it was the first record I had heard since Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland" that managed to recapture the loose adventure and something of the sound of that album. Finally, today I picked up a BGO CD reissue of this album. Very satisfyingly, it sounds just as fresh and exciting as when I first heard it.

The album is very much of its time, being a seemingly undisciplined mish-mash of science-fiction spirituality (thanks to the interjections of a certain "Jack Bond"), genial & reflective compositions by Randy California, and a series of cover versions. It's the cover versions that give the record its backbone, through both the choice of song and the interpretation. Thus we hear "America The Beautiful", "The Times They Are A-Changing", "Walking The Dog", "Like A Rolling Stone", "Happy", "Hey Joe" & "The Star Spangled Banner".

Two songs associated with The Rolling Stones, two with Bob Dylan, two with Jim Hendrix and, overlapping, two patriotic anthems. Given the affinity of Hendrix himself for Bob Dylan (think "All Along The Watchtower"), we start to see wheels within wheels of influence at work here. Randy California and Ed Cassidy - essentially the entire cast of Spirit at this point - confirm and then subvert our expectations. "Like A Rolling Stone" is given a full Hendrix-style workout, yet "America The Beautiful" and "The Star Spangled Banner" are given unaffected, straightforward interpretations miles removed from Hendrix's own transmutation of "The Star Spangled Banner". Although none of these covers surpass the originals, neither do the originals surpass these covers making this one of the most satisfactory albums ever made based on the covers alone. But the other material, strange and quirky though it be, perfectly complements these songs both in musical and lyrical substance. "Spirit Of '76" is not only the best Spirit album made after the breakup of the original 1960s band, it also rates very highly in comparison to those magnificent early records.

Thus it is a shame that it has fallen so far into the cracks of rock history that it is only available in the U.S. as an import on a label specializing in rare releases. At least it is available though - thank you BGO.

Flamingo

Popular music in the United States before the emergence of rock and roll in the mid 1950s is often characterized as being bland and sentimental, devoid of drive and real emotional content. Although that might well be a true description of much of the 'white' pop that dominated the airwaves and mainstream record stores, it certainly was not true of the rapidly diversifying independent radio stations, small record companies who in turn supplied many of the singles that filled regional jukeboxes. In other words, if you chose to turn your ears away from the beaten path, you would hear a very different animal.

One of those was black music. This is a far broader definition that the simple 'rhythm & blues' identifier that has become synonymous with pre-rock and roll black music. Music ranging from that with little differed from mainstream white pop (Nat King Cole being a prime exponenent) to the earthiest of electric blues (Muddy Waters & Howlin' Wolf) was part of this continuum. Sophisticated to primitive, it was all there. All that tied it together was that it was recorded by and marketed to African-Americans with little thought that it had any wider import.

One of the most interesting black artists of this time is Earl Bostic, not least because all of the above traits can be found in his recordings. An extremely accomplished jazz saxophonist who passed through Lionel Hampton's band among others, Bostic could be sweet or sour with equal effect. No song better represents this than what is his most famous cut, "Flamingo".

A mid-tempo jazz ballad with a steady swing rhythm, smooth vibraphone chordal accompaniment, and a beguiling melody - none of this would matter were it not for Bostic's completely captivating saxophone solo that combines an extraordinary degree of r&b roughness (as pioneered by Illinois Jacquet) into a beautifully paced solo on the alto saxophone. The sound is truly evocative, a window into an another world.

4 Sea Interludes & Passacaglia

Listening to the 4 Sea Interludes & the Passacaglia from "Peter Grimes" from a Collins Classics disc containing the Symphonic Suite from "Gloriana", all conducted by last night's conductor, Steuart Bedford.

The first of these, "Dawn", was the first Britten I heard that actually meant something to me. "The Young Person's Guide" had left me cold, and I was startled to find that this elusive music, that I had heard many times before I knew what it was, was by the same composer. It remains a favorite to this day, even as I have come to appreciate the three other interludes and the passacaglia.

I heard them as orchestral pieces many times before I heard the opera itself, so much so that I regarded them exclusively in such terms. Thus it was a shock and surprise when I finally heard the complete "Peter Grimes" to find that they sounded better in the context of the opera than on their own. It's hard to hear them now without wishing for voices!

Gloriana

Had the great good fortune last night to attend a performance of Benjamin Britten's "Gloriana" at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. A wholly gripping performance from start to finish, beautifully conducted by Steuart Bedford (for whom Britten is second nature). Queen Elizabeth I was wonderfully characterized by Christine Brewer, a performance that deservedly received an enthusiastic standing ovation. Just as fine was Brandon Jovanovich as Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex. His portrayal of what was essentially a barely competent hot-head who, through passion and good looks captivated his queen, was a well-considered contrast to that of the Queen, for whom statecraft and loyalty to her country was paramount. There were no weak links in the supporting cast either, and the chorus and dancers were superb.

Considering I had been looking forward to this opera for a year with high expectations, there was most definitely the danger that it would not match them. Happily, this did not come to pass.

I had played the Mackerras recording of "Gloriana" a couple of times shortly before seeing the opera, and I am very glad I did. The music of "Gloriana" is essentially a mid 20th century reworking of Elizabethan styles, and is much more 20th century than Elizabethan (the opera was written in the early 1950s, before the move to 'authentic' performance styles became popular). Consequently, there were thematic and harmonic components that owe much to post-Wagnerian opera, and it was fun following those through the performance. Britten's musical voice is determinedly his own, and it is one that I find highly attractive. Despite its conservative veneer, it never seems hackneyed nor sounds dated in any way. In many ways it sounds a lot more modern than much music of today that falls into the Neo-Romantic style.

Wonderful stuff.

The Universal

It's funny how sometimes a song will creep into your mind and stay there, spinning its wheels. No conscious reason why it should be there, but there it is.

The Small Faces' "The Universal" popped into my mind this morning and it has not let go. I hadn't played it for months, probably years, but there it was.

So when I got to work, I found it and I played it.

It's a prime example of 1960s genre-blending, blending the sound of a stomping trad jazz band, a little country & western, and a strident acoustic guitar. Plus extraneous sound effects, such as barking dogs. Its main strength is the melody and the conversational way in which it is sung by Steve Marriott. The lyrics are a simple celebration of doing nothing, with a swipe at hip name droppers and poseurs.

It's a song of real charm and reflection, not striving to make any big point and in doing so coming across as more meaningful than many other more ambitious songs. A little gem.

Anonymous

And how many wonderful folk songs can we attribute to mr. or ms. anonymous? More than I can recount for sure, but that's not really the reason why I titled this 'Anonymous'. With the enormous proliferation of blogs in the mere year since I started mine, it requires formidable self-promotion to get your own blog noticed nowadays.

Which is just fine by me, as anyone who happens upon this (and 'welcome' I might add) should know that this strictly a personal pastime. A bit like playing a nice piece of music with the windows open and wondering if anyone is stopping to listen, or indeed if anyone can hear it at all.

But back to anonymous. Right now, the eerie old folk song "Nottamun Town" has the crown for his or her finest achievement.

Cicadas

"Cicadas" is a piano piece for two pianos composed by South African (now Irish) composer Kevin Volans. I was not familiar with this composer, and bought "Cicadas" plus "Duets" on the Black Box label simply to try it out. I was very taken by the piece. It's a broadly minimalist work that never flags over it 25 minutes of duration and left me with a strong sense of peaceful contemplation. Much more so than other minimalist and ambient works that strive for similar effect; there was something both muscular and reflective at work here. The second work, "Duets" is a tape piano work for dance that is different in character, ranging from writing that is similar to that explored by Harold Budd & Brian Eno on "Ambient 2", to sections of great activity followed by periods of silence. (In this way, this piece resembles John Cage's "Four Walls" composed about 50 years earlier - another dance score).

Fascinating music - I shall to explore more this composer's work.

The All Music Guide

I first came across the All Music Guide when it was in its infancy during the early 1990s. I was buying a lot of CDs from one of the first online retailers (CDconnection.com), and they posted the first early AMG guide ratings. I still use cdconnection.com to this day. Thankfully they have resisted the 'style over substance' paradigm that keeps me away from all their successors, and their plain but completely functional website is a gateway to unparalled availablity and competitive pricing.

But back to the AMG. I paid relatively little attention to it for years. Then it launched itself with a nicely designed website (that they chose to change last year, to the website's detriment in my opinion), but more importantly than that, with a series of nicely written and well judged critical reviews. I now regard the AMG as the premier review site. Not only is it extremely comprehensive, but there are sharp minds at work - Steven Thomas Erlewine, Richie Unterberger, Dave Thompson, Cub Koda, Bruce Eder and many others - who provide a solidly knowledgable background to the subject. They tend to err on the tolerant side, perhaps being overly kind to bands that have been critically savaged by others, but on the whole this is a good thing. Many critically unpopular bands (e.g. Kiss, Chicago) have proven to be influential on musicians and styles that followed and deserve proper consideration.

In this way, the AMG closely resembles Szatmary's excellent book "Rockin' In Time", a comprehensive social history of rock and roll, which also gives a more historical vs. aesthetic account of rock music.

Although both sources make for reading that lacks the sheer joy of pithy and opinionated musical criticism, they do impel you to hear the music for yourself. There is no substitute for this.

More From A Beatles Course

This was my response to a question concerning the importance of The Beatles to the culture of their times.

Whenever I start to think about the 1960s, and in particular The Beatles and the culture of that time, I find my thoughts hijacked by a song. Hijacked so thoroughly that I am running the melody and the lyric through my mind as I write now. After attempting fruitlessly to wrestle it out and get to grips with this essay, it occurred to me that I should get it out here because it think it has a lot to contribute to certain aspects of the 1960s that Ian McDonald alludes in his opening essay in ‘Revolution In The Head’.

The song is “Surf’s Up” by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and it was first composed and the recording begun in 1967, the year of The Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. From memory, I shall quote the final verse:

Surf’s Up

Aboard a tidal wave

Come about hard and join

The young and often spring you gave

I heard the word,

Wonderful thing,

A children’s song[1]

Whereupon, the song abruptly segues into another composition, “The Child Is Father To The Man” to provide a stunningly beautiful coda.

“Surf’s Up” was finally released on the The Beach Boys album of the same name in 1970, the year of the officially announced breakup of The Beatles. The song was not in form initially intended by its composer, Brian Wilson. It had been subject to revision and post-production by the band, and in particular Brian Wilson’s brother Carl who sang it. By 1970, Brian Wilson was a barely functioning recluse in the throes of what would become a lifelong struggle with mental illness. In this way, “Surf’s Up” eerily parallels the post-production work on “Let It Be”, but unlike Spector’s work on much of “Let It Be”, I believe Carl Wilson’s work entirely complements Brian Wilson’s original vision. What is certain is that if I were stranded on the proverbial desert island and offered the single song “Surf’s Up” vs. the entire recorded output of The Beatles, I would unhesitatingly select “Surf’s Up”.

Why?

For me “Surf’s Up” is the spirit of the 1960s. It represents musically a summation of everything Brian Wilson and The Beatles strove for at that time, with a perfection of performance, melody, rhythm and lyric. Aaron Copland was wrong. He should have said, “If you want to know about the sixties, play “Surf’s Up”.

But he did not, and we are here to examine The Beatles. This is not the time or place to look in further detail at “Surf’s Up”. But the song has given me the key to both McDonald’s particular insight, and indeed to exactly why The Beatles mirrored the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

“Surf’s Up”, more than any other song I know, is a song of feeling. Both musically and lyrically it unlocks raw emotion, and an extraordinary gamut of emotions too, ranging through joy, humor, sadness, nostalgia, beauty and almost all points in between. For me, the 1960s was the decade when emotion assumed paramount importance, and the pivotal sentence in McDonald’s opening chapter is “The Beatles felt their way through life, acting or expressing first, thinking, if at all, only later”.[2]

The context of this sentence, at the end of a paragraph criticizing The Beatles serious public pronouncements as “trite and tangled”, but praising the same motivating spirit of instantaneity as the key to the musical innovation of the band, reveals clearly the inherent conflict between emotion and reason that troubles McDonald so much elsewhere in his analysis of that time. McDonald is a Western intellectual, trained to reason, analyze and deduce. “Revolution In The Head” is a profoundly illuminating book on The Beatles, precisely because he applies those analytic techniques so well. But underlying the criticism is a sense of a nagging yearning to surrender himself to exactly the same type of spontaneity that produced The Beatles’ music. This struggle between what McDonald will allow himself to do and what he actually wants to do provides a rather tragic subtext to the book, and one that certainly provides an explanation for McDonalds’ rather puritanical tone in regard to much of the 1960s and most certainly to what came later.

Let us look more closely now the time itself. McDonald identifies two key principles, that the 1960s were conglomeration of many different social, political and cultural trends and that they were a reaction to the 1950s.[3] What were these trends? Editor Anne Charters, judging from a American literary point of view, identifies no less than nine:[4]

The Civil Rights movement

The anti-Vietnam War movement

The Free Speech movement

The Counter-Culture movement

The movement into Inner Space via drugs or other mind exploratory techniques,

The Beats and allied literary movements

The Black arts movement and the shaping of Black consciousness

The Women’s movement and the sexual revolution

The Environmental movement

To these, McDonald would add Euro-Maoism, Religious Secularization (again predominantly European), and Materialism.[5] But he would emphasize (and McDonald judges this to be the most significant trend of all) the movement towards a new way of feeling (the movement towards “inner space” and mind exploration listed above). Hence, the ‘Revolution In The Head’ of his book’s title.[6] This is what he considers to be supremely well expressed by the music of The Beatles.

Does this hold up? My internal struggle with “Surf’s Up” – not-Beatles though it be – suggests it does, and I will explain why below. But it also fully illustrates the problem of personalization here. I did not hear “Surf’s Up” until 1974. In reality, it is as closely tied to the 1970s as it is to the 1960s, and my view of the 1960s was colored by my experiences of the 1970s. McDonald was writing at the beginning of the 1990s, coming out a decade that he thought clearly represented an absolute decline in social, political, artistic, and cultural standards from those of the 1960s, even as he was willing to admit that many of the same trends he abhors, such a materialism and secularization, had first gathered pace in the sixties. A revolution in the head gone awry? Or the writings of a man feeling ever more out of his time?

But let us move on with the assumption that the primary trend of the 1960s is of feeling. I have referred repeatedly to “Surf’s Up” as my icon of 1960s musical feeling, but the truth is that without The Beatles it is hard to imagine that that song would have ever been composed. Brian Wilson was part of the intensely competitive circle of 1960s musicians, that, in addition to The Beatles, would include Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, Donovan, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Who, The Kinks, Jefferson Airplane and many others who fed off and in turn provided artistic inspiration for each other. An awareness of this large body of music brings The Beatles accomplishments further down to earth, but it does not detract from the fact that The Beatles were either first with many musical innovations, or if not first, refined them more successfully than anyone else.

In 1962, when The Beatles released “Please Please Me” thereby ‘hauling the music bodily out of the twelve-bar trap of rock-n-roll and rhythm-and-blues’[7], most listeners were not consciously sitting down and analyzing the novel features of this song. Instead, they were being bowled over by an incredibly joyful, catchy, loud, sexy and fresh song. By the end of the following year, the ‘Please Please Me” and “With The Beatles” LPs, plus the singles “From Me To You” and “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, had served as the soundtrack for British version of what was dubbed “Beatlemania” by the press. Wildly emotional fans, sell-out concerts, chart-topping records, and television appearances. The musical landscape was turned upside down. The charts were dominated by beat groups, many from Liverpool, others from other provincial towns such as Manchester. London’s dominance of the British pop music scene was shattered.

What was happening in England beyond The Beatles, and were they the ultimate manifestation of ‘the spirit of the English times’?

The short answer is yes. England during the late 1950s/early 1960s was undergoing what historian Arthur Marwick describes as The British Cultural Revolution. Much of this was a reaction, as McDonald points out, to the 1950s. Marwick points to fundamental changes in British society and thinking over this period. Firstly, there was a new willingness to adopt ideas from abroad, in marked contrast to the stubbornly nationalist mindset of the 1950s. Philosophy, social theory, economic theory all benefited from new receptiveness to figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky. Concurrently there was a revival of the intellectual left, energized by concerns such as nuclear disarmament. The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s achieved a popularity and a cross-class level of support that served as a major dent in the rigidly maintained class lines. For now the working classes was pushing forward, driven by increased economic muscle, no longer content to see their world through the middle class prism. With the post-war baby boom population surge achieving adulthood, artistic focus was turning to younger practitioners. New consumer and electronic technologies were developing with advances such as the introduction of the transistor.[8]

Significantly Marwick sees that “popular music was the central feature of the cultural revolution. It contained the ambivalence, growth of youth culture concurrent with the growth of youth wealth. It sanctioned protest yet became immensely profitable within the existing capitalist system. It was both innovative and derivatively fed off itself. It embraced an unsophisticated participatory modus yet integrated and promoted considerable electronic technological advances.”[9]

The Beatles were the vanguard of the British Cultural Revolution. Provincial, working (or lower-middle) class, young and fun!

Reading Marwick is instructive not only because he is using a trained historian’s eye, but also he is refreshingly free of the ‘sky is falling’ mentality that sometimes mars McDonalds’ writing.

We’ll leave England temporarily now and go worldwide. In large measure, the opening up of countries to international influence, with the caveat that the Iron Curtain was now fully in place thanks to the complete self-imposed isolation of China and the closing of the border between East and West Germany in 1960, was a universal trend, prompted by political (such as the consolidation of the European Economic Union) and technological advances in communications and travel. The Beatles were becoming radio favorites in Europe and as far as Australia but America remained closed, their records, turned down by the American wing of EMI, Capitol, failing to sell for smaller labels such as Vee-Jay.[10] All of this was about to change.

John Lennon comments in Lennon Remembers that The Beatles were regarded in a far more serious light in the United States than in England.[11] Certainly, the reaction that the band generated in the U.S.A. far exceeded in scale and intensity that of England. The incorporation of The Beatles so thoroughly into the American zeitgeist is one of the most fascinating aspects of their entire story.

The nine threads (listed above) that Anne Charters uses to delineate the 1960s were not all active with equal intensity all the time. In 1964, the civil rights movement was at its height, but none of the others had reached maturation. There were activists working in all areas, but as yet they had not reached a level of widespread public acknowledgement.

What had been happening in America, above and beyond civil rights, was a series of extremely public and extremely frightening events.

It seems remarkably easy to forget today when American society is preoccupied with the undoubtedly serious concern of terrorism that, during the 1960s, America was threatened by the potentially far more catastrophic consequence of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The early 1960s saw, in addition to the dispiriting events in Europe with the closing of East/West border in Germany and the hugely symbolic construction of the Berlin Wall which gave Churchill’s description of the separation of capitalist and communist Europe, the Iron Curtain, a horrible and tangible quality, the consolidation of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. In October of 1962, Castro’s attempt to install Soviet made nuclear missiles not long after the Bay Of Pigs counter-revolutionary fiasco, led to an ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation between American President John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev, that, although resolved satisfactorily for America, generated an American (indeed, global) zeitgeist of mind-numbing fear.

Then, just over one year later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Houston.

If ever a nation had been handed a sucker-punch (short of going to actual war), this was it. Life did not stop, but the populace was emotionally shell-shocked and, knowingly or unknowingly, in need of a release from the omnipresent sense of fear and grief. Into this came “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.

And if ever there was a moment that the ‘dream’ that John Lennon declared as being over in 1970[12] began, this is it. What does any parent do to comfort an anxious child? He or she holds their hand! Now the lyrics do not actually say “America, you’ve had a terrible time, please let us make you feel better”, but the effect of the song, processed subconsciously, is exactly the same.

Thus The Beatles were uniquely placed to provide solace to a traumatized nation. Several qualities that the band possessed helped them immensely in so doing.

Firstly, and most importantly, the band possessed a coherence as a group that was, at least in public, unshakeable. Each member spoke for each group, individual egos were subsumed to the band. Not eradicated, though - each individual had a distinct personality, and the release of the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” during the summer of 1964, took pains to reinforce the stereotype. Thus John was sarcastic and witty, Harrison thoughtful and unpretentious, McCartney light-hearted and approachable, Starr down-to-earth and cuddly. Although the British Invasion carried over dozens of other groups, and groups galore would start to form in the United States, no other band ever established the blend of clearly defined individuals who uniquely complemented each other that the Beatles achieved. The Beatles had achieved a unique and irrepressible gestalt.

A second unique quality that enabled to the Beatles to engage and animate entire nations was the paradoxical combination of youth and experience that the band never failed to project. They were young, they goofed around at press conferences, they performed with all the excitement of a young person in the process of discovery (at least, at first). Yet they were also wise and experienced, and presented themselves with a poise that suggested almost complete control over their destiny. Obviously, the Hamburg years, and a full year of British Beatlemania had been instructive, but what is so striking about The Beatles in early 1964 is well they seem to ride over their fame, and the incredible hard work involved. Eventually it would become too much, and the reactive melancholy of much of “Beatles For Sale” released late in 1964, would relate to the pressure cooker environment of the prior two years. Energy and poise is a very attractive picture to project. Add youth and you have a recipe for a wonderful (literally full of wonder), exciting (but safe) regeneration that anyone can share in.

Thirdly, being Midlands British gave the band an exoticism (scarcely lessened in Great Britain where London artists and home counties accents ruled the roost) in other lands that was immediately attractive. Being able to speak more or less the same language as the natives in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, the band again achieved another paradox, being both foreign yet also comfortingly familiar.

In addition, the impact of the flood of Beatles-associated consumables should not be minimized. By proxy, through the records themselves, the pictures on the covers, the doll figures, the trays, the magazines, even sheets from the beds they slept in, a fan brought The Beatles right into his or her room. This was innovative marketing for a rock and roll band, and amplified their penetration into hearts and minds.

Furthermore, the massive interest shown by the media - newspaper, magazine, radio and television, the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” – served to keep the band constantly in the public eye. In effect, The Beatles seemed to be everywhere. There are two other points concerning the media that need to be made. The first is that the media blitz over The Beatles was unprecedented and in itself was a novelty. Thus the cynicism bred when the same ground is trodden on too many times is absent. Secondly, the media in essence conspired with itself to maintain an overwhelmingly positive image of The Beatles. It was an open secret that the band was engaging in a movable orgy with its fans, but none of this was reported. And why would anyone want to stop this bandwagon anyway – money was being made hand over fist.

So, when during the midst of this mainstream success, Bob Dylan, protest singer and incipient carrier of the Beat-poet and drug-related counter-culture, interjects himself and psychoactive drugs into The Beatles lives, it really was an epochal event. This incident is described in full detail in Nick Bromell’s “tomorrow never knows”[13].

For now the seed has been planted. The Beatles, self-contained and insulated, are going to follow a path into this alternative way of thinking and doing. Are the millions and millions of fans going to follow?

The short answer is than many did and many didn’t. The creation by pop-mogul Don Kirshner of The Monkees in 1966 was a move of such stunningly cynical prescience, that when this ersatz-Beatle group appeared they stepped right into The Beatles 1964-65 shoes precisely as The Beatles themselves left them behind forever. Consequently, Monkee-mania was born and took with it many former Beatles fans, who (like the Queen) thought the band was getting a bit too strange.

But many others did follow. The transformation of The Beatles from wildly popular pop group to almost as wildly popular counter-cultural heroes is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary aspects of their career. Two factors play into this success story.

The first is that the counter-culture itself was now butting heads with mainstream values, and these trends were set in motion well before The Beatles played any role.

Secondly, The Beatles embraced a relatively benign and unthreatening aspect of the counter culture – namely the movement into ‘Inner Space’. Conditioned as we are by decades of fierce anti-drug rhetoric to regard drug use as an evil not far removed from robbery or murder, it helps to realize that drugs in the 1960s, while certainly not embraced by mainstream society, were not held in such low regard as they are today. Most people simply didn’t know enough about them to have an opinion one way or another. Radically powerful psychoactive drugs such as LSD were so far below the radar screen that they were legal until the mid-60s. Ironically, the one drug that was actively repressed, marijuana, was the mildest of all[14]. Compared to the struggle for civil rights, Vietnam-war protests, or the Free Speech movement, The Beatles explorations were positively sedate. By the time that drugs had become a major issue, they had (officially) forsworn them and were deep into Transcendental Meditation, thereby side-stepping the issue altogether. The Beatles had an uncanny knack of staying out of hot water (“More popular than Jesus” remarks or Philippine riots notwithstanding[15]).

So what was this ‘Inner Space” seeking, drug using, counter-culture all about? I’ll let Jeff Nuttall[16] spell out his vision:

(In 1963) the Underground was anxious to bring about the following developments on a large scale:

a) The spread of an ego-dissolving delirium wherein a tribal telepathic understanding could grow among men.

b) To re-ignite an overwhelming sense of wonderment at the Universe, to cultivate aesthetic perception in the face of utilitarian perception, to re-instate the metalled road as silken ribbon and the hydraulic waterfall as a galaxy of light.

c) To expand the range of human consciousness outside the continuing and ultimately soul-destroying boundaries of the political/utilitarian frame of reference.

d) To institute an international tribe or class outside the destructive system of nations.

e) To outflank police, educationalists, moralists through whom the death machine was/is maintained.

f) To release forces into the prevailing culture that would dislocate society, untie its stabilizing knots of morality, punctuality, servility and property.

g) To institute a sense of festivity into public life whereby people could fuck freely and guiltlessly, dance wildly and wear fancy dress all the time.

h) To eradicate utterly and forever the Pauline lie implicit in Christian convention, that people neither shit, piss or fuck. To set up a common public idea of what a human being is that retains no hypocrisy or falsehood, and indeed, to reinstate a sense of health and beauty pertaining to the genitals and the arsehole.

What does this extraordinary poetic manifesto tell us? Firstly, it tells that there was a rationale and a philosophy behind experimentation with drugs. Some people, at least, were not just getting high for the hell of it. Furthermore, these Utopian, trans-National concepts aimed at nothing less than the complete transformation of the individual. The ego would become subsumed into the collective, and with it all the constraints and prohibitions of ‘straight’ living would dissolve into guilt-free, fun rejoicing, mind-expanding, free-loving mode of Eden-like existence. What is valued above all is unfettered – unfettered even by ego - feeling!

Note the first statement - an ego-dissolving delirium wherein a tribal telepathic understanding could grow among men. Sounds like a bit like The Beatles doesn’t it? This extraordinary group of four individuals who seem to possess an uncanny telepathic empathy with each other, an identity as a gestalt.

This is the key. This is exactly why The Beatles became counter-cultural heroes. They had already got there. Well before their drug use, well before the fancy dress, the pyschedelic lyrics, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Sgt. Pepper”, and the “Summer Of Love”.

Of course, as we now know, what we saw in The Beatles was a carefully built construction, an image glossed to perfection. But because that image seemed so natural, so real, and yet so fabulous (as in out of a fable), it was irresistible.

McDonald dismisses such concepts as listed above by Nuttall as “adolescent nonsense” yet acknowledges the widespread sense that statements such as these represented a sense of being on “the verge of a breakthrough to a different kind of society[17]”. Link The Beatles into this sense of renewal, and you further amplify their impact. Nuttall, writing in 1968, certainly acknowledges their importance:

The Beatles were and are the biggest single catalyst in this whole acceleration in the development of the sub-culture. They robbed the pop world of its violence, its ignorant self-consciousness, its inferiority complex. They robbed the protest world of its terrible self-righteous drabness, they robbed the art world of its cod-seriousness.[18]

Of course, after 1968 the art world struck back with a vengeance and scooped up The Beatles into its own world as first fully exemplified by Wilfred Mellers’ “Twilight Of The Gods”. Nor were any of the other changes more than transitory. The counter-culture was never realized in any real way – ‘culture’ struck back. However that sense McDonald describes of “being on the verge of a breakthrough” most certainly survived. In many ways, the allure of the 1960s is that of unfinished business.

I’ve described a number of different ways in which The Beatles intersected with “the spirit of the times” in the 1960s but I haven’t focused much on the music. I’ve already mentioned the early celebratory material. We can follow the band’s progression following that fateful introduction to pot, the increasing introspection in songs such as “Baby’s In Black”, “Help”, “Ticket To Ride”. We can the integration of counter-cultural concepts into their work as early as “Rubber Soul” with songs such as “Nowhere Man”, “Think” and “The Word”. “Revolver” is permeated with counter-cultural concepts, rejection of materialism “And You Bird Can Sing” (“Taxman” on the other hand, is most a likely a celebration of materialism!), consideration of Eastern spiritual philosophy “Love To You”. “Eleanor Rigby” starkly illustrates the trend towards secularization. “I Want To Tell You”, “Go To Get You Into My Life” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” all explore aspects of drug taking. “I’m Only Sleeping” celebrates a life outside of 9-to-5 deadlines, “Yellow Submarine” a fun-loving sense of community. Even a simple song of happiness like “Good Day Sunshine” suggests a return to the garden of Eden.

The garden of Eden – “Strawberry Fields”. “Penny Lane” is just an alternate view. The entire “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” album radiates a sense of festivity into public life whereby people could fuck freely and guiltlessly, dance wildly and wear fancy dress all the time.

But all good things come to an end, and 1967’s “Summer of Love”, far from being a new beginning, was in many the last grand hurrah of the great positive sentiments of the 1960s. By 1968, Nuttall has acknowledged

“…drugs, whilst accelerating our (counter-cultural) strategy, could create a vacuum as desolate as any H-bomb crater… It’s clearly necessary now to get a firm hold of the fact that the nature of vision is human not chemical.[19]”

The Beatles, after chasing enlightenment with the Maharishi, were forced to confront the reality that their gestalt has collapsed, and, that far from having an internally generated telepathic understanding, the glue that really held them together was Brian Epstein. Thus we saw the members moving away from each other into their personal concerns, and Lennon’s rapid replacement of The Beatles’ unity with that of his bond to Yoko Ono. Only McCartney seemed truly committed to sustaining the group, and eventually even his patience and resolve are finally overwhelmed. The Utopian fancies of the mid-sixties were replaced by riots and a crushing reaction from the authorities. The counter-cultural dream collapsed into the death, dismemberment and madness of Haight-Ashbury, murder at Altamont, the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison.

Thus the swansong of The Beatles, “Abbey Road”, takes on an unreal quality. This is the only Beatles album that is out of its time because it is in essence at attempt to recapture what has already past. In being so, it is also prophetic – much of rock music since has also been obsessed with what has past. So we see all the retro-movements, some so retro that they seem to be retro-retro. The rock and roll revival of the 1970s, the Paisley-psychedelic revival of the 1980s, the Brit-pop revival of the 1990s etc. etc.

But, unlike McDonald, I do not see either an end to creative rock music or the unfinished business of the 1960s. One only has to look below the surface of today’s music making to see a bubbling ferment of activity, now spreading digitally and by-passing the existing machinery of commercial exploitation, and just waiting for the right moment to spring into full glorious life. Whether it will happen tomorrow or in a following decade is hard to predict, but it will happen. The next wave is coming – “Surf’s Up!”

I’ll stop here.

References not quoted in footnotes:

James J. Farrell, The Spirit Of The Sixties Routledge 1997

John Yinger, Countercultures The Free Press 1982

Wilfred Mellers Twilight Of The Gods Schirmer 1973

David P. Szatmary Rockin’ In Time Prentice Hall 2000

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[1] The Beach Boys, Surf’s Up from the album, Surf’s Up, 1970 Capitol CD 72435-25692-2-9

[2] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 20

[3] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 5

[4] Anne Charters, ed., The Portable Sixties Reader, Penguin Books 2003 pp. vii-xii

[5] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 23, pp 27-29.

[6] McDonald, p. 25

[7] Ian McDonald, New Musical Express, March 1973 (quoted on the sleeve of “The Faust Tapes” Virgin Records VC 5o1

[8] Marwick, Arthur – British Society Since 1945, Penguin Books 1996 pp. 120-131.

[9] Marwick, p. 132

[10] Allen Kozinn, The Beatles Phaidon p. 74

[11] Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers, Penguin Books 1972 pp. 12-14.

[12] John Lennon, God from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Capitol CDP 7 46770

[13] Nick Bromell, tomorrow never knows University of Chicago Press 2000, pp. 60-61. Whether this was the most consequential moment in American popular culture, as Bromell asserts, is debatable. I would suggest that The Beatles touching down at Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964, was the stone that made the biggest and most ripples.

[14] See Lenny Bruce Pills and Shit: The Drug Scene reproduced in Anne Charters, ed., The Portable Sixties Reader, Penguin Books 2003 pp. 377-388 for a hilariously succinct summary of 60s attitudes to pot.

[15] See Philip Norman, Shout! Simon and Schuster 1981, pp 263-267 for a full account of these incidents.

[16] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 pp. 238-239. This manifesto is just one reason why anyone who wants to know anything about the 1960s should be compelled to read Bomb Culture.

[17] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 4

[18] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 p. 123

[19] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 p. 241