Beatle Myths and Legends 1 – Sid Bernstein Addendum

EXCEPT:

Sid Bernstein

I, personally remember standing in the shower of a house we lived in for only a few months in winter of 1963 and wondering how this British fad my then husband told me about spelled and/or pronounced their odd name: “Beatles” or “Beetles”. I heard about Fluxis from him as well and I assumed at the time he’d learned of both from some publication available at the Peabody College Art Department.

So, does anyone have a clue what Sid Bernstein and John Kavich read in Feburary, 1963 that mentioned The Beatles?

The Beatles Comedy

”Rabbi Winkler wrote: The Zohar says “There is no wisdom as wholesome as that wisdom that comes out of silliness. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”

What they did best was nuttyness, a distinction without a difference perhaps. I have seen Yellow Submarine (in the theater at the time of its release so I don’t remember all that much!). I remember an early “music video” in which The Beatles are playing leapfrog over a well-dressed gentleman leaning over something on the sidewalk. It has no particular meaning but it’s amusing as is their capering on an anonymous beach in striped vintage bathing dress. These had nothing whatsoever to do with the songs. But you watch it and you enjoy their enjoyment of what they are doing.

I have to suppose that outside of The Beatles’ natural style of wisecracking, the style of physical comedy demonstrated in the clips and movies may have been more the idea of Sir George Martin then anyone else. Martin was the head of the Parlophone record label who offered The Beatles a recording contract after they had been turned down by just about everyone else. Although he was a trained musician (piano, oboe), he went to work for EMI record company, where he recorded such comedians as Peter Sellers and Spike Mulligan. Sellers as well as a very broad assortment of music from light pop to symphonic. I know he did a good bit of intellectual comedy but also indulged in what I call “romps”; a special way of handling mostly physical comedy without much attention to plot, continuity or, indeed, story at all.

The Beatles at that time were barely older then schoolboys and you can see in A Hard Days Night comedy recalling a kid grabbing someone’s hat and playing keep-away. Adolescent boy fun is funny, so long as it’s not your cap! Added in was as lovely a Keystone Cops sequence as anyone’s ever seen and Ringo’s threnody on the canal is way beyond criticism. Was Ringo consciously playing the Little Tramp? He says he was so hung over that morning that merely walking took all his time so I can suppose it was simply one of those miracles

]Not that The Beatles film depends on either physical comedy or on adolescent boy fun, the writing in some places in A Hard Days Night is delicious. John’s conversation with the plump lady in the hall wherein the “him” John does or doesn’t look like is left undefined is surely a triumph of underwriting – so terribly hard to do! However, it took the eye of an artist (or a really good cameraman) to see the possibilities of 4 skinny young men in black clothes romping in a mowed field. Is it funny? Not exactly; but it makes you feel good and feel good about the actors.

It’s very amusing to read the slightly offended surprise of the movie critics reviews. (Both in the original release and the more recent re-release to theaters.) While some of the sources say that the script was carefully written to be easy for inexperienced non-actors, Ringo’s “hiding behind a smokescreen of bourgeois clichés” isn’t my idea of an easy line! I have seen the I Am the Walrus cut in Magic Mystery Tour and it lacks the spontaneity and fun which are not entirely absent from the rest of the piece. It seems to me that there was too much self-consciousness and an attempt to get some sort of message across. I do find the lyrics of Walrus over studied and artificial. I feel sure that Ringo is right in that by broadcasting it in black and white the BBC ensured it’s critical disaster. On the other hand, the particular magic that made The Beatles is beginning to fail because the group is beginning to fail to be a group. Even in Sgt. Pepper you can see that there’s a bit of a hitch in their interpersonal harmony. It comes back here and there but many of the clips show three bored session musicians trying to get the ‘great one’ through one last take.

The Beatles comedy at its best a combination of innocent fun and sophisticated badinage that transport the viewer to the world of everyone’s dreams, one which never existed. I find reviews that name it as archtypical of its time and yet it survives to this time and people without my memories enjoy it now.

Defining Rock

Tim Ripley, Ask Me Why, said Rock is typified by “more adult themes: isolation, despair, alienation, loss and the positive correlations of peace, communication, self-worth, vision and hope.” Note that the “positives” contain only unemotional hope type while the first mentioned qualities, the important ones, are all emotion. Nowhere is happiness, content, love triumphant, friendship mentioned. Misery is the only legitimate truth. Rock & Roll is adequately defined by the “jury” of Juke Box Jury in Britain and Dick Clarks American Bandstand in the US: “it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.” I looked all over the web, Wikkipedia to Rolling Stone Magazine and nowhere did I find anything approaching a definitive definition. Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, opines that Rock concentrates of feel and beat rather then on music. That Rock is laid-back while “pop” tries to catch a moment, story, or feeling. Later (p. 206) he says the difference between pop at its best and Rock is well-crafted music.” Take that, Hoagie Carmichael, Bert Bacrack!! Most of the books aggressively name John Lennon as a master of Rock, primarily because of his tendency to wallow in misery and this in many ways probably set the preoccupation of Rock with the negative emotions. Rock critics celebrate John’s emotionality even when they imagine most of it and somehow find something to love in George3’s insecurity, status as lead guitar or soloist. Paul’s skill and competence playing and singing however is seen as insecurity and unfair to John and Georges perceived insecurities. Riley claims that Paul’s universality is a sin in Rock as Rock people aren’t like everybody else. Rock is said to be marked by something they call “texture” although I can’t imagine any music that lacked it. I have read that Rock specifically sets “listening pleasure” out of consideration in favor of commiting to the idea that if you enjoy it as music it’s not Rock. I do understand that everyone who writes professionally about the Beatles or abut Rock needs a to stay in with the Rock press but that knowledge doesn’t quite make me forgive MacDonald, Riles and all the others for crumbling before those prejudices. John would no doubt have been discarded from the Rock mainstream for Double Fantasy had he not been killed before they got into print. If any singer/composer sinned against the Rock rules, Double Fantasy is the album in evidence. If you have suggestions for refining a definition of “Rock” I’d be grateful if you’d share it with me. [Sorry for the delay, I haven’t been well and only got my computer problems lessoned a couple days ago.]

Comments on/ from books

To me the most shocking thing about the first person books about the Beatles is that almost all (except George Martin and Geoff Emerick) ignore the music completely. Peter Brown, Tony Bramwell, Tony Barrow, Allan Williams, Bill Harry, Mike McCartney, Alistair Taylor, etc. and even Pete Best hardly mention it and if they do, it only the first 3 or 4 hits. Not one of them seem to have cared at all what the Beatles wrote or recorded so long as it hit the top of the charts. It appears to me that virtually everyone whose salaries the Beatles paid (all of NEMS as well as all of Apple) neither enjoyed nor understood the music.

They were all hooked on the mania and their soft jobs. Few of them ever saw the Beatles as persons nor were actively concerned for them. From Liverpool or the far ends of the earth, they all were concentrated on milking their cash cow with little thought of what the cow wanted or needed. No wonder Klein looked good and no wonder Paul stuck to an in-law to manage his career and money.

“…confused with its naïvely anarchistic bourgeois cousin, rock journalism.”  From Clayson, I think. My own thoughts are somewhat less printable.

Odd question: With all the fuss about a not-red rose/carnation and bare feet why have I read no speculation about why George rides a dark horse (giggle) in the Penny Lane video when the others ride white ones? “they rode their white horses out through an archway in a ruined wall,” From Lewisohn’s Chronicles – and he’s usually more careful!

Give My Regards To Broad Street

Broad St. is quite a nice movie musical, particularly if you’re old enough to remember Danny Kaye as well as Gene Kelly and Fred Astair. Yes, the Eleanor Rigby picnic scene grown more then slightly odd but so does the ballet in American In Paris. I know perfectly well that if it had been John wandering around to variations on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds all the critics would have swooned over it. Because for some reason John is the “rocker” and Paul only some slick pop singer, nothing he does can be right. So It’s a double dream sequence, what’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, of course, that practically none of the reviewers was actually watching the movie – otherwise they could have subtracted 10 AM from Midnight and not come up with 24 hours. I haven’t actually tried to count the number of sight gags (as opposed to witty fun) in the movie but from the Scotland Yardman’s dropped pants when he hears how much the tapes were worth to the busker near the end, the movie is loaded with both “public” jokes and those accessible only to Beatle fans.
I consider it shameful that none of the critics caught that Paul was playing a joke with his highly orchestrated version of The Long And Winding Road. Use your ears, people, Paul’s not only out-Spectorized Phil Spector, he also did a great recording of the song without turning it into something drippy as Phil did. I’m quite sure Phil noticed.
I do wish I could figure out if there’s a joke connected to the brown document envelope that keeps turning up though. I’ve tried slo-mo, tilt and pause with no luck. And I can feel smugly that few people realized that the Victorian sequence began in around 1865 and ended up in 1890 with appropriate changes of clothing – and that Linda had borrowed George Sands’ outfit.

I have no problem with someone simply disliking this movie, it’s the obvious fact that they didn’t bother to actually WATCH the movie with any real attention and then criticize it for things that didn’t happen or for the lack of things that actually are in the movie that irritates the fool out of me! Of course, Broad St. makes the mistake of not really being a “rock movie” — perhaps because Paul didn’t set out to make a “rock movie” — he made a McCartney movie and one that isn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviewers make it sound.

Reporters

The current lack of intelligence and accuracy in print and broadcast media is less surprising and depressing if you are aware of the very high degree of ignorance, stupidity and prejudice that greeted the Beatles at almost every news conference in 1964. The reporters – most were “hard news” reporters resentful at being taken off the current story of graft in city hall and neither they nor anyone else had any idea of why pop singers would be holding a news conference anyway – had any clue why they were there. Elvis didn’t do news conferences except for the one when he got drafted (at which Tom Parker did all the talking.) It is pretty obvious that their editors hadn’t given them much background and evidently none of the reporters had even read the features in Life and Newsweek that had appeared a few weeks earlier nor seen the brief, patronizing mentions by Cronkite or Jack Parr. Actually, Beatlemania WAS “hard news” but they never seemed to be able to catch on to that.

For the entire three years the Beatles toured America, some reporters retained a belief that the Beatles wore wigs, presumably because it was impossible to bathe or sleep with hair so long. Going by some of the questions, American men at that time believed that having a penis prevented hair from growing even though it’s obvious that the reporters themselves paid somebody to cut theirs off every few weeks (hair that is).

The unpalatable fact is that very few American reporters ever managed to improve their side of the exchange. The Beatles themselves made of their news conferences very good theater indeed – so good that it is still quite amusing to watch them make complete fools of the reporters and their inability to think of a single new question. Once the Beatles made a huge success around the world, British reporters by and large realized that they had more then a tongue-tied pop star in the Beatles and fewer and fewer of them neglected to educate themselves at least a little, at least enough to think up one or two questions that hadn’t been asked at least 1,000 times before.

You’d think the American press might have wised up after the multitudes of really great shots the Beatles had scored on them but somehow it never really happened. I suspect that 50 years later Ringo and Paul still get asked what they will do when the “bubble bursts” despite the fact that they are not only rich but also qualified to draw their old age pensions. They still get asked if the Beatles are going to get together again and although Paul’s divorce isn’t yet final, they are asking him if he’s going to marry any woman who managed to get caught by a photographer standing next to him.

Between the questions nobody can answer – “What made them so much more popular then any other group?” – and the questions they’d answered everyday for years – “Which one of you writes the songs?” and the questions too silly to answer – “How do you sleep with all that hair?” – they finally even got tired of showing everyone which side of the microphone the fools were. The mindless stories these reporters produced may have satisfied editors as ignorant as the reporters but they couldn’t possibly have drawn much approval from the fans. This has no doubt contributed to the general lack of respect for a once admirable and admired profession now unembarrassed to ask stupid politicians even more pointless questions then they asked the Beatles! Unfortunately, politicians have perfected their ability to give answers even more stupid then the questions!

Memory Almost Full – Review

So, am I ready to write a review of Memory Almost Full? I’ve got several thousand words done already from commenting on the album, the individual songs, the reviews, the critics themselves and what the album means to me. Thousands of words and I suspect even I am not really interested in reading them all. Worse yet, they don’t even begin to communicate how I feel about this album. In the year and a half I’ve been seriously learning about the Beatles, learning their history–that of the Band as well as that of each member and close associate–I’ve come to have a lot of respect for McCarthey’s talent and ability. Perhaps one of the most attractive thing about this album is that it showcases those talents in their full maturity without loosing his playfulness and humon.Play McCartney (I) right after listening to Memory; yes, it’s very much the same man with almost 40 more years practicing his art.

First of all, the album absolutely blew me away. I now truly understand that most difficult of Beatle words; “gobsmacked.” I’m confident that it means the way I felt the moment when the album really hit me. That wasn’t the first time I listened to it or even the second; it was either the third or fourth. I was sitting right here in front of my computer with the speakers neatly aimed at my ears while it played and built and quite suddenly it crashed into me.

It’s more then just difficult to write a review of this album; if you’ve really listened to it, your mind and emotions are, at the very least, a bit unsettled. Not necessarily by what is said but by the way he leads you into and out of the songs, tweeks your own memory bank and finesses you into a look back at your own life. Truly listening to this album puts you on a mad, dark roller coaster ride; helter skelter you’re up and then you’re down—serious, happy, puzzled, abandoned. Who else would write a song for mandolin and work-boot? Who else could?

Paul’s voice, as always, is confident and pure (when that’s what he wants.) The album is full of music difficult to sing well. Considered simply as an additional music instrument, the human voice has more variety and flexibility then any other. The possessor of a remarkably elastic and true voice, Paul exploits it fully from a clear, warm, open low to an equally warm and pure high and an assortment of rocker-raucous inbetweens. Knowledge and practice beat youth and beauty most days.

I’ll take Paul at his word; that he generally isn’t thinking about what’s going on in his own life when he writes a song; he just makes up a song. He knows that some of his fans can’t resist trying to link the love songs up with his wives or children or somebody and his sad songs with whatever. I don’t think it seriously irritates him but if he ever did write any songs about HM, I suspect they’ll never be recorded and the demo tapes are ashes. On the other hand, I wasn’t able to resist making some tentative and not really serious connections in House of Wax—the Beatles were the House, Beatlemania the walls and who each of them really is/was are the secrets hidden in the yard. Anyway, if you need to know, House of Wax is my favorite (at the moment) in the album. I was on the verge of getting angry about the women “scream and runn around,” let’s not get into the female hysteria bit, but he pulled a major save with “Like wild demented horses.” Now that’s some imagry I can really dig!

I’m not going to go through this album song by song. It opens with a bounce, a gentle rocker (albeit with words to think about) and a 100% solid gold McCartney silly love song of unusual beauty. (Though I’d like to know where he found those butterflys that buzz) Having made his polished bow to expectations and the past, Paul proceeds to bounce our heads off the floor, walls and ceiling! This album could just as well been titled “It’s About Time” in more ways then one. While I’ve found that a lot of people who really liked Chaos and Creation in the Backyard don’t like this one as well, and visa versa, I’ll admit to being very, very fond of both.

As a whole, the album is definitely disturbing. It is crafted to arouse mixed emotions and it surely must have been deliberate. It comes close to setting up a dissonance in your brain the way the Beatles used subtle dissonance to help the girls scream. Did Paul deliberately select songs that would have this effect? Is the somehow a concept album? Not an album for people who hate thinking.

Also not an album safe for the knee-jerk (you can leave the “knee” out, I don’t mind) McCartney haters. Number 3 on the Billboard chart in the US, number 1 on the internet album sales, number 2 in downloads and number 5 in Britain, either means that Paul has managed to accumulate a vast number of devoted fans OR it’s a damn fine album. Doesn’t make the whiners look too good as the waffle around citing one of Paul’s early solo albums as his best work – we remember how much those same albums were hated at their release.

Many people on the various Beatle and McCartney lists I’m on and many of the reviewers and commentators on Memory Almost Full mention their surprise (or admiration or whatever) that Paul could produce an album like this when he’s almost 65/retirement age/drawing his pension. Obviously to these people, 65 is the end of everything useful, interesting or creative in live. Actually after 60 or so there are a number of factors that affect what an individual can or can’t do and none of these factors are their age.

First and most important is what the individual thinks they can do. Keep in mind that most women become grandmothers between 35 and 45 (not 70 as the illustrations and advertisements would have it) and it’s pretty easy to be a great grandmother-father before 65. Even the person who is 65 can limit their activities by believing, as I suppose the majority of younger people do, that they can’t do anything worthwhile after 65. Obviously, if you KNOW you are too old to do it you aren’t going to try.

Those who haven’t fallen victim to that supposition are limited by mobility, health, energy levels and opportunity. These factors basically govern what they are likely to do or will attempt to do in their 60s or their 90s. It isn’t as if every one hadn’t seen a multitude of examples of this running from the late George Burns to somebody’s great grandfather down the block. Being over 60 changes you and changes what you are interested in doing and usually changes the methods you choose to use in order to do it, but it certainly doesn’t end your productive life. There is no cosmic switch that turns you off when the magic number comes up!

McCartney and the Record Reviewers

Today Paul’s new album, Memory Almost Full, was released. We are know for sure the title is an anagram that really means “my soulmate LLM;” of course we do. News outlets of all sorts have been interviewing Paul, featuring imaginative profiles, and of course, reviewing the new album. To boil it down it is simply the best/worst McCartney has ever done; his voice is amazingly good with richer low notes/he’s too old to sing and he should have realized it; the songs are sophisticated and mature/purile and vacuous. You get the picture I’m sure. Hey, we just went through this a couple months (at least it seems like only a couple months) with Ecce Cor Meum that was either intensely great or overwhelmingly boring. Over and over I found myself muttering, “What the hell is he (virtually all music reviewers seem to be male) listening to? It certainly is NOT Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full!”

We should be used to this sort of thing. The only time Paul doesn’t get mixed reviews; he gets unanimously bad ones. What is harder to deal with is not understanding why. (I’m going to limit this posting to reviews of his music. I’ll get into the grimy question about why he is the person a lot of people love to hate some other time.) I did mention one problem a day or two ago when I did a post on righteous listening. If I’d written a review of MAF after the first time I heard it, I’d probably have compared it to Flowers in the Dirt, as one professional reviewer did. “A good album but nothing particularly special.” It wasn’t till the third time that I started REALLY hearing all that was going on. It was probably the 5th time through that I realized that I was going to love House of Wax best of all. Paul seems to do simple music but it’s not as simple as it seems. I notice that most of the reports on one of my McCartney lists have mentioned something about the second time or the third time. Of course, people who are paid to do reviews have deadlines to meet and, as someone who has gotten herself into reviewing books a time or two, I know it’s difficult to make yourself read at least half a book before you try to write about it. Reviewing is a responsibility that too few take as seriously as they should.

There’s another, much better, reason that Paul’s reviews are contradictory and sometimes a little strange. That’s because in a sense there isn’t any “pop” music any more – thanks to a famous band of the 1960s that we all know quite well. There are rock music writers and there are classical music writers. Rock music has become something that resembles only one Beatles song, (and doesn’t resemble it very closely) Revolution. I personally decided many years ago that I wasn’t going to pay somebody for yelling at me accompanied by painful noises. To my ears, if there is anything pleasant about the sound, some reviewer will say, “it’s not rock.” By that rule, Paul McCartney doesn’t play or write much, if any, any rock. So the reviewer for Rolling Stone, Mojo and so on may very well not see much to like. The rest of the critics really like Beethoven and Schubert and so on and although they are stuck reviewing all sorts of music they don’t really “get” it. They can usually find a ballad they can like but anything faintly gets a knee-jerk reaction of distaste. When Paul writes something classical it’s actually worse. The rock reviewers REALLY don’t get it and the classical buffs each have their favorite styles and a “brotherhood” that doesn’t look kindly on interlopers from the common herd of pop/rock composers.

Obviously there are reviewers whose minds are made up long before the album comes out. Some were/are John fans or George fans. Some really think that if Paul hadn’t “broken up the Beatles” they’d still be touring to the screams of … um …. 55 year-old girls. Some love the Rolling Stones and have never been convinced that the “war” was all in the heads of the newspapers. Or they are so fond of one particular type of current music that they can’t see any other.

A third factor affects McCartney fans as well as reviewers. Almost everyone comes to a new release with expectations or merely wishes of what they want to hear. Like me wanting McCartney II to be a direct continuation of McCartney I and Ram, everyone has favorties among the 20 (or 21) prior album releases. And for the most part, Paul disappoints us by doing something that we not only didn’t anticipate but is so different that we couldn’t have anticipated. Memory Almost Full is definitely such an album. It is not a continuation of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and, outside of the single reference to Flowers in the Dirt, of any other album. Completely in line with Paul’s tradition, it’s new and different and you can tell it caught a lot of reviewers off guard. Some were disappointed and others were shocked. More then one seems resentful that an “old man” could produce anything new and different. As a contempory of the “old man” I have to say that ageism is alive and well in the Western World.

Back in the Dark Ages when the Beatles were starting out, there wasn’t a division between rock and pop music. John and Paul wrote pop music. Their pop music included both rocking songs and ballads and whatever. Paul’s still do. John’s still did. A lot of current soloists and groups still do. Some people who live in trailers are great folks and some pop singers rock better then almost anybody. People don’t have to come in isolated little boxes if they don’t want to. But if you don’t play the box game, you can expect the box types to misunderstand.

Reviewing

I have really tried over the years to keep in mind that when someone has decided that they don’t like someone or something, he or she is unlikely to admit it even if they happen to find something about it or him to like or if he or she accidentally does something that they do actually like. It’s entirely to be expected that when Paul McCartney puts out a new album there will be as many opinions as there are people paid (or not paid) to write about music. Somehow the ones who have decided not to like it seem to be just as eager to spread their opinion around as everyone else. The best technique is not to talk about things you dislike and maybe the world will forget about them. That’s the best way; I didn’t say I followed it.

I’m also learning that it’s completely foolish to try to guess who Paul wrote this or that song about. I’ve read a dozen or so reviews of Memory Almost Full today and there’s one guy who thinks the whole album is about how much Paul loves Linda. I think one person or another has named every single song on the album except Dance Tonight as being about Heather Mills. Come to think of it, why on earth did they leave that one out considering that she was on that silly dance show? The truth is for the most part I don’t care who or what Paul thought he was writing about, the question is does the song do it for me?

The second best cheap amusement for the day is reading all the articles (and comments on them) marking the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. Here the range of opinion isn’t nearly so great: there are those that feel it was both important and great and there are those who thing it was only one of those things or neither. I only have two things to dsay about that: if it’s so unimportant and not great why are we still arguing about it 40 years after the sales receipt went into the trash? The other thought is that my mother taught me to keep an extra around in a brown paper bag, there are some people you just don’t serve the good stuff to.

My opinion of Memory Almost Full? Great, marvelous, exciting, scary, nostalgic, prescient, fun, sad, terrifying and visionary. In other words, I like it a lot. It is quite definitely an album to listen to several times before you start forming an opinion. The arrangements are intricate, layered and full of color and texture. My favorite? House of Wax and then Mr. Bellamy. I’ve always had a weakness for dramatic music. After that I like Feet in the Clouds a lot. I like the way he winds over and under, around and through without quite touching the melody. I’ve liked an awful lot of Paul McCartney songs in my life but I can’t say there are very many I like more then these. He also proves it truly can be done, a wild and free electic guitar solo without feedback or distotion!