The Beatles

We were on the way to Wembley once in the van. We wrote on a piece of paper 'Which way to Wembley.' We spoke in a foreign language and pointed to map of Wales. Everybody went mad putting us right.... I still feel an urge to do that but you can't. It would be Beatles Play Tricks. This Will Give You a Laugh."

"We know we're conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They've given us the freedom to con them." --JOHN LENNON

"We're not learning to be architects, or painters or writers. We're learning to be. That's all."   --PAUL MCCARTNEY

THERE is a kind of art--playful art let us call it--that is becoming more and more popular as the West declines. This kind of art--it includes Camp, Pop, and a lot of other things I'll talk about later--creates a nervousness in reviewers, an anxiety that the artist is trying to take him in, or put something over on him; he fears he is going to make an ass of himself.

The high-brow way of manifesting fear is for the critic to become moralistic, as if such art were not a personal affront, no, but an affront to the Western Tradition, frivolous, you see, considering the Nature of the Times We Live In.

Perhaps the critic is honestly angry at the artist, or perhaps this is just another way of showing the old anxiety and confusion, an uncertainty as to what he's expected to say in the face of this...this genius?...this prank...this outrage! For every time the critic becomes serious the artist giggles, and when our critic laughs along with him the artist suddenly turns spooky, funeral. The critic feels like a bug and strikes back with "if we should dignify it by the name of art at all in poor taste unwashed ill mannered self-indulgent...adolescent...childish....infantile."

I sympathize. I can understand why someone shot Andy Warhol. Seeing picture of, (or by) that smug silvered hair fairy with his dark eye glasses I've felt the same impulse. That's not art, I want to say, you're not artist. Leonardo is an artist, Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo, Rilke...in a phrase, the Western Tradition of High Seriousness.

HIGH SERIOUSNESS. Matthew Arnold, you remember, said the greatest art displayed a High Seriousness. That's not to exclude the serious masquerading as comic, or even the outright Slapstick farcical comic. It may not be the greatest art, Arnold said, but we-all-love-a-good-joke-hey-boys?

But Matthew Arnold forgot to leave any guidelines for dealing with Warhol say, or Godard, or Frank O'Hara. They are artists of the serious as comic. They display a kind of consciousness in which profound truths, new, original insights are seen as funny, not screamingly funny perhaps, but funny nonetheless. "It's true but it's still a joke," as George Harrison says,"...It's serious and it's not serious."

"It's serious and it's not serious." You understand? Of course. This kind of consciousness has produced a lot of the art of our time, playful art as I have called it. It includes Camp to start with though it is greater than Camp. It includes Pop Art. ("Why that looks like a picture of a soup can, Karen." "Well it is a picture of a soup can." "Oh.") But it is greater than Pop Art. Richard Lester is in the tradition. Bob Dylan is part of it; the Bob Dylan that Joan Baez called the Dada King. (Everybody Must Get Stoned.) It includes writers like Nabokov, (or, in another way) Donald Barthelme (Snow White, Come Back Dr. Caligari, Unnatural Practices, Unspeakable Acts), and several New York School Poets (Koch, Ashberry, O'Hara). It includes such Zen masters as Joshu, who was given to putting his shoes on his head in reply to weighty theological questions. And it includes my spiritual advisors, the starts of Help, sgt. Pepper's, and The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies--The Beatles.

THIS consciousness, which has as antecedents such early avatars, as Jean Cocteau, Dada, Joyce, and the Marx Brothers, is to say the least, playful. All art is, of course, to some extent, playful, or draws on elements of the mind that serious people don't take seriously, but these artists are more playful than most. A gallery instillation that has you walk down a long dark tunnel to confront a white painting with the words You Are Here neatly lettered in black, certainly is more playful than the Sistine Chapel. (It was done this summer in London by John Lennon and his new mistress.) It is a kind of art that seems to ignore or to have moved beyond moral considerations (which is in part what makes it so infuriating for a criticism which is still involved with moral standards and Matthew Arnolds' How to Live.!

This attitude towards moral considerations--the child so involved in a game that he does not notice its consequences on the "real world" outside the world of the game--gives us a clue towards the origins of this kind of consciousness. We can approach it, I think, if we imagine a child playing, totally involved, and then imagine an adult playing at that game, or at some game adults consider equaly childish like painting, writing, or Rock and Roll. The artist develops a kind of dual consciousness totally involved and serious with one part of his mind, very detached and half-mocking with the other.

II.

WHAT first attracted many of us to the Beatles, as public personalities rather than as musicians, was their public manner. "How did you find America?" one reporter asked them. "Turn left at Greenland," John said. "We were funny at press conferences because it was all a joke...you can't put over how you really are. Newspapers always get things wrong." Newspapers always get things wrong; a truth we all learned from Rosenthal's hilarious reporting from Columbia. So why not put them on. "What do you think of Beethoven?" "I love him," said Ringo. "Especially his poems." Fuck them all if they think we're stupid.

"For one number John asked the audience to clap their hands in time. Nodding toward the royal box he added: 'Those upstairs just rattle your jewelry.'" They think we're here to entertain them. Well we are, but fuck them anyway.

"That evening they accepted their first and last Embassy invitation....

"Reports of what exactly happened at the Embassy party vary in detail but it started off amicably enough.

"'Hello, John,' said Sir David Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) when they arrived.

"'I'm not John,' said John, 'I'm Charlie. That's John.'

"'Hello, John,' said the Ambassador to George. "'I'm not John,' said George. 'I'm Frank. That's John.'

"'Oh dear,' said the Ambassador."

You see you can't get through to reporters or Lords, anyway: "They'd ask joke questions so you'd give joke answers." As John Lennon said. If you can't talk to someone, if your worlds are so far apart that dialogue is meaningless, but some social situation forces you to talk to them why you...put them on!

And it became our generation's style for dealing with authority, with our parents particularly. "Yes mother, I promise you I won't smoke any L.S.D."

III.

THEIR public manner towards the adult world was just part of their playfulness. Their larking about on stage was a more innocent aspect.

It is hard to remember now what a departure this was for performers. But in the years after Presley, white Rock and Roll became a very restrained affair for the most part. At the time the Beatles really began to make it, the English scene was dominated by a group called the Shadows. The Shadows wore "sober, terribly neat stage dress of gray suits, matching ties and highly polished shoes. They did little dance steps, three one way and three the other. Everything was neat, polished but restained in their appearance as well as their music."

The adult world ran pop music, and they didn't want things becoming too loud, or too wild. Pop singers were not, despite their nostalgia, a very talented bunch, and none of them wrote their own music.

In truth, the Beatles didn't write too much of their music at the time, but they weren't too resrained onstage either. They "played loud and wild and looked scruffy...they had...their own new sound...A sound you had to run away and hide your ears from, or go as wild and ecstatisc as the people producing it...It was a new sound but it was being made by people who were like the audience, natural, unaffected, unsmooth..."

BRIAN EPSTEIN may have put the Beatles in suits, but their sound and their hair was still their own, and so was their stage presence, their "larking about." And it communicated something many of us hadn't tasted before, something wild, exuberant, playful, young, funny, and joyous.

Apparently they loved playing music together, and they communicated the love. As George Harrison says, "In Hamburg we had played for...eight hours at a stretch, loving it all...Back in Liverpool...it was still as enjoyable...We never rehearsed an act...It was so spontaneous, all jokes and laughs...Then came touring which was great at first..."

They gave up touring when it was no longer fun. "Once you've got to manufacture it, it doesn't work. You've got to give to receive," Ringo said. Or as John put it, "It's like the Army, Whatever'n the Army's like."

They gave up touring at a time when they were being offered a million dollars a concert, when they were near to the height of their popularity. They were already rich, sure, but how many other performers turned their backs on that much money, adulation, and love...turned their backs on it because it wasn't, well, fun anymore? Fun! Don't they realize man has to sweat to earn his bread? Don't they realize that show business is a business, and that you have to get while the getting's good? Don't they know that life isn't all fun and games? that adults sometimes have to do things they don't like? For Chrissake, Brain, they're acting like a bunch of kids!

IV.

PLAYING around was what it was all about, and if it's no fun then it's not playing anymore. The Beatles played with the all powerful media men (for God's sake, John, be decent to these reporters they can make or break you), they played with the Royal Family, and they played with Ed Sullivan. They played with each other.

And they played with different styles. The Beatles version is the one most of us probably remember of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," or Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me." Or "Please, Mr. Postman." Or "Act Naturally." They were the first to turn us on to a lot of things we later grew to love for their own sake. But their version was always something special. There was a quality of ironic distance or dual consciousness in their version. It was a sense of the Beatles playing wholeheartedly at the being black, at being Chuck Berry, at being Buck Owens, but remaining the Beatles at the same time.

It was this sense, perhaps, that gave us the security to engage and explore and different styles of music and of life, black music for example. They showed us a style of engagement that would preserve our sense of self, that wasn't slavish imitation, that neutralized our fear of put-down, that enabled us to deal with, assimilate to our own needs, and to love, elements that we may have once feared.

The playing with styles by no means stopped when they began performing only their own compositions. On "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" they play at being...well, Seargent Pepper's Band for one thing. The play at being sixty-four. And they play with different states of consciousness: they play at being lonely, at being stoned(and while stoned), and at going insane.

The playing with states of consciousness is of course similar to, and more important than the playing with other people's music. And the effect is the same. You can take what you can from different states of consciousness, learn from them, assimilate them to yourself without being destroyed by bad trips. We'd love to turn you on.

And perhaps you can, if only for a moment, attain to the radically transformed, profound and transcendent state of consciousness of "Within You Without You."

But then, of course, somebody laughs.

And the album even includes four toys to cut out and play with.

V.

THE BEATLE who seems most interesting as presented in Hunter Davies' book is, not surprisingly I suppose, John Lennon. He displays a personality by turns ironic, tender, farcially funny, bitter, nasty, generous, and deeply despairing. His attitude towards the world, towards art, the Beatles, himself, his family, his past is always ambiguous, usually ironic and tinged with a definite sadness.

Lennon is at times completely cut off from the outside world. He is entirely silent, speaking to no one, not even his wife, for as long as three days at a time. Conversely, he can be violently generous with himself and his money, and wildly exuberant in playing with his mates, the other Beatles. In all, John displays the complexity of character, the difficult emotional life that we associate with the artist.

Lennon's childhood seems to have been unhappy in every external circumstance. Fred, his father, deserted his wife shortly before John's birth. His mother soon left John in the care of an aunt, Mimi. Mimi's husband George, who became the child's close friend, died when John was thirteen. At this time John's real mother reappeared, and she and John became extremely close: "She spoke the same language, liked the same things, hated the same sort of people." At about the time John entered Art College his mother was run over by a car and instantly killed. "I thought fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That's really fucked everything. I've no responsibilities to anyone now."

Perhaps it was this early life, so destructive both emotionally and physically that created the necessity for John to imagine a realm of play, a world where no event is truly consequential, where nothing is real, nothing to get hung about and nothing can hurt you.

CERTAINLY John was much more involved with games than the average child is, and they played a large part in his life. "I used to live Alice (In Wonderland) and Just William. I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things... After I'd read a book I'd relive it all again...I wanted to be gang leader at school. I'd want them all to play the games that I wanted them to play...childhood...was all imagining I was Just William really."

His relations to the adult world that more and more impinged on his imaginary creations were marked by the same childhood sense of play. John was constantly manipulating the world, around him, playing pranks, playing with words, putting people on. Even his famous Teddy-boy (juvenile delinquent) phrase was a bit of a put-on: "I was imitating Teds, pretending to be one...If I'd met a proper Ted I'd have been shit scared."

When, as an adolescent, he was forced to meet the outside world, his attitude was always ironic, bitterly, playful. "He was outrageous and said things people would be scared to say. He could be very cruel...he would go Boo in front of old people. And if he saw anyone who was crippled or deformed, he'd make loud remarks, like 'Some people will do anything to get out of the army.'"

This cruelty was manifest whenever John was forced to confront his own emotions. "I suppose it was a way of hiding your emotions or covering it up. I would never hurt a cripple." Play can also be a way of manipulating the elements of the world that can hurt you, a way of neutralizing them, a way of keeping them at a distance, so you don't have to deal with them directly. John, for example, is, according to Davies' book, deathly afraid of growing old. And one can only imagine of what those who are extremely crippled may represent to him.

Play was and is vital for John. The emotional problems of his childhood remain. He is still moody, and, according to his aunt, still never shows emotion. John most of all needs the other Beatles to preserve his mental equilibrium. A constant complaint of his wife was the importance of the other Beatles in his life. He will not even consider a vacation without his "mates," his "Beatle buddies." When they momentarily parted ways, after the touring period was over, John was desperately unhappy. "I did try to go my own way...I had a few good laughs and games of monopoly on my film, but it didn't work...I was never so glad to see the others. Seeing them made me feel normal again."

This emotional need for the others is true for all the Beatles, but most of all for John (and then perhaps for Paul whose mother also died during his childhood). "There was always something between Paul and the other Beatles which Jane (Paul's fiancee) found it hard to come to terms with. 'I want to feel that it is the two of us going through life together. I don't want to be part of the gang."

But the gang is what makes life bearable. "'...we're all really the same person.'" Paul said, "'We're just four parts of the one...we make up together The Mates.'" The boys composing or recording seem at one level to be the boys just larking about, but larking with an infinite devotion to their games, and a sure sense of which part of the playing to preserve for others.

VI.

ON THE occasion of their first visit to America, "Billy Graham said he'd broken his strict rule and watched television on the Sabbath just to see them. 'They're a passing phase,' he said. 'All are symptoms of the uncertaintly of the times and the confusion about us.' "Oddly prophetic on Graham's part, for the rock and roll army was just about to be born, and the Beatles (touring phase) were to be the midwives. A generation of kids was about to be turned on to their own youth, their beauty and their energy. And they were going to notice the deadness around them and be truly and woefully confused.

The Beatles, the beat, were the agony by which an entire generation was to be turned on to the energy of their bodies, the energy of their long repressed desires and fantasies. The Beatles were a catalvst that released a tremendous amount of wild exuberant joyous energy. The young girls that dreamed about them learned something about themselves. But there had always been teen idols. Far more important was the sheer joy their music and their larking about communicated to anyone who would listen and watch. That energy, that joy was in all of us. And all it took was the beat to release it.

The music provided a momentary transcendence, a feeling of liberation. But the Beatles gave us more than that. The Beatles created the first music that reached almost all while teenagers. They were our communion. They provided the sense of unity that created the rock and roll army. The Beatles reached everyone on whatever level they were. They were kids themselves. So they were ours and they were us. A certain pride in being young--they were the first real bloom of the sub-culture of youth--a sense of community, a feeling of joy and liberation. All were, in part, the gift of the Beatles.