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.

Set List for Paul’s New Tour!!

Actually I certainly do not mean to tell Paul what he should do particularly since I’m unlikely to be able to attend any of his concerts. I might buy the video though so I’ll make some suggestions just in case he’s interested in suggestions from fans.

I do not say that these are in appropriate order!

Things We Said Today
For No ONe
Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
Two Of Us
Ram On
Monkberry Moon Delight
Sing Along Junk
Hope of Deliverance
Off The Ground
Songs We Were Singing
Picasso’s Last Words
Feet In The Clouds
How Kind Of You
If You Wanna
Pipes Of Peace
The World Tonight
Penny Lane
London Town

Paul’s divorce

[Please note: the following is a spoof, sarcasm! It is not fact, it is not a prediction for the future, it’s a JOKE!]

Paul McCartney and Heather Mills have had their days in court and all that’s left for them is to wait for the judge to sort out the money. We’ll get a huge number of newspaper and tabloid guesses about how much, none of which are all that likely to be accurate.

HM’s appeal was turned down on the grounds that if she chose to spend her entire settlement on a “victory party” that’s her problem, not his and that she failed to produce medical evidence that she suffers from Tourettes and therefore cannot be held to a gag order. She also failed to prove that a victim of that syndrome is per se unable to keep their mouth shut. The offer from her ex-husband to provide a full-time special minder to gag her any time she slips and starts to talk about their relationship was refused.

HM then appeared on Good Morning to the Whole World accusing Paul of errantry, barratry and rolling an old lady in a barrel as well as referring impolitely to her wooden leg. Oddly enough, the News of the World has joined The Mail, The Globe and The Mirror in a lawsuit filed against Ms. HM alleging barratry in that she threatened those papers, together and separately more then 150 times in one 12-hour period. Leading barristers have opined that it’s an open and open case.

In separate suits HM also claims the royalties from Paul’s new #1 hit album titled After the Ball is Over saying that she actually wrote and sang all the songs in it as well as playing all the instruments.We expect a statement from MPL as soon as the laughter dies down.

The tell-all book for which HM received a $1 million advance on royalties has after 18 months failed to earn the cost of printing and the publisher advises us they will sue her to recover the advance as the book sold only 423 copies – all to her dearest friends. The book is now available on half.ebay.com, new, for $0.25 plus postage.

Bea goes to boarding school so her mother can spend at least nine months of the year someplace other then Great Britain. Paul’s world concert tour enjoys unprecedented success although he breaks and returns to England for every school holiday.

HM suit appealing for a restraining order preventing her former personal trainer from telling reporters about their relationship (even though, of course there was no personal relationship between them) is scheduled for next week. This follows upon her earlier attempts to get such gag orders to cover five former nannies, 12 dismissed security guards, 14 chauffeurs, three bike mechanics and a trash collector.

HM’s dearest friends report that she is happy and delighted to be free from all the hubbub and also to be free of “that dreadful old man” and that she is seriously depressed, on vast amounts of medication and a suicide watch must be provided by her ex-husband.

 

Seriously for a moment–Point 1: could be please forget about the accusation that it’s all Paul’s fault for letting his little willie overrule his head and lead him to marry this woman. If there’s one fact about HM’s past that is completely beyond dispute it’s that she is world class as convincing men, whether old or young, that she is the most desirable female they’ll ever get a chance at. Every single man who has spoken of his relationship with her emphasizes that at first she’s absolutely perfect and that it takes quite a while to realize that it’s all a scam. She’s fooled plenty of men who didn’t have Paul’s romantic outlook and made major fools out of them as well.

Point 2: “They” haven’t been battling in the press; HM’s been battling in the press. Paul’s issued a very few statements, mostly direct, simple denials. He did change the locks on the two houses he was living in. Considering that he’d had his phone tapped and that we now have her “word” that she had secretly taped and video-taped him before she moved out, I personally think it was a minimally smart move.

What if Decca had signed the Beatles?

I just heard the complete tapes the Beatles made on New Years Day, 1962 for Decca. I have to strongly suspect that Brian Epstein chose the songs because it’s a straight pop set with barely a hint of rock and strongly featured Paul’s undeniable abilities as a crooner. So what if Decca had liked the audition? Well, first, we’d have had Paul McCartney and the Silver Beatles. So there’d be no real Beatles. Second, the time of the crooner was not 1962! They would have had a small success in Britain and that would have been that.

It’s not that they didn’t do pop very well indeed. And it’s certainly not that Paul didn’t have the looks and the voice. Four or five years earlier he could have been another Vic Damone or Eddy Fisher! One could have an excellent nightmare out of the knowledge that we only just missed having another out of date crooner with a pretty good backup band instead of millions of screaming girls and some of the most innovative music on the planet. (and some bad stuff as well but that’s ok) In that case, John Lennon wouldn’t have been John Lennon but just some dude that played rhythm guitar.

I really can’t see any A & R man giving a group as much freedom as George Martin did the Beatles. Anyone else would have told them to shut up and do How Do You Do It. Nobody else would have listened and tried to find out what was in their minds, nobody else would have hired half a symphony to do 24 bars!! They would simply have been fed into the machinery and come out looking just like everyone else. Almost worse, the Rolling Stones would have turned out looking, and probably sounding, like the Dave Clark Five!

Pepper Pot

Sgt. Pepper’s Pot Plants

One of the most irritating things I know of is when a complete error is repeated ad nauseum! If you think the flowerbed on the Pepper cover looks like an “open grave” I suppose that’s your choice. Having seen a good many open graves in my life, it looks like an odd flower border to me. (I do think the floral clock in Paul’s design would have looked a great deal better.) However, it’s the endless repitition about the “pot plants” shown on the album cover that makes me want to recommend that the writer change his focus to George W. Bush where mythology is a requirement.

Of course, I suppose city people may never have actually seen a marijuana plant and therefore be unable to recognize the leaves, but a very little research of T-shirts could quickly amend that ignorance! For one thing, cannabis is a rather tall, rangy plant; one as fully leafed-out as those on the album would be two or three feet tall. For a final thing, these plants in no way resemble pot.

The first photograph at the head of this entry is of a marijuana plant; the center graphic is an enlargement of one of the plants on the Pepper cover; the third photo is of Aluminum Plant, Pilea cadierei, a popular house plant originally from tropical Southeast Asia. There are a couple other common houseplants that might be the ones we see on the cover but they are far less common and a good deal less likely.

I’m sorry to disappoint all you heads out there but this is one of the stupidest Beatle myths going, possible even less rational then the Paul Is Dead hoorah. At least this one is so very easily shown to be mistaken while proving that someone is alive is difficult unless you can arrange to meet them face to face – and Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people actually have met Paul face to face since 1967 (or whenever) there seem to be a few people who still treasure the idea.

In the case of the pot plants on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, please remove it from your mind. No doubt the living adults in the room at the time the photograph was taken would have liked the idea of using cannabis plants, but they didn’t.

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!

Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?

Here’s my picture; Paul and somebody. Just somebody, not necessarily a girl friend, somebody like the caretaker of his Scottish farm, his aunt, his brother, one of the roadies, want five lousy minutes to have a ciggy and talk about something that isn’t anybody else’s business. So they duck into the men’s toilet and there are two apple scruffs giggling maniacally. How about the basement entrance? Nope, there’s a bobby there trying to hold back a gaggle of the press waving cameras and notepads. How about the roof? John and Yoko are up there, starkers, worshipping the sun or something requiring them to whisper in each other’s ears. “Hell and damnation,” someone explodes. “We might just as well do it in the road!” Think of the yearning feeling the words “No one will be watching us” must raise in Paul’s heart. How much might he have been willing to pay for ten minutes of it? Enough said.

I’ve read tons about where this or that song came from, who was this or that love song written for, what do these lyrics really say. There are real dangers in doing this. For one thing, you are second guessing the lyricist. I’ve observed a lot of pseudo-intellectuals in my days. They write something that doesn’t make clear sense, publish it and a lot of other intellectuals, pseudo or not, discover elaborate meanings in it while the author, whether or not he acknowledges them as matching his meanings, basks in the glory of having said something so meaningful.
PS: I understand that the immediate inspiration for Why Don’t We Do It In The Road actually came from the Beatles retreat to Rishikesh where Paul observed two monkeys doin’ it in the road. Reality loves to bite a good idea but who cares, not me.

Remember that John had a hard time remembering lyrics, even of his own songs and he delighted in wordplay. Therefore, looking for meaning in his songs is at least as much an exercise of your own imagination as it is a search for his meaning. He may have had NO meaning. He tended to see the words as a part of the arrangement and the important thing was that the sounds of the words worked as if they were another instrument.

It’s taking a chance if one over analyzes Paul’s lyrics. He is perfectly capable of writing totally from his imagination. Like my explanation above, it’s certainly possible that the lyrics were stimulated by a moment such as I describe — except we happen to have Paul’s explanation which is quite a different situation.

Interview With The Grand Old Man Of Rock ‘n’ Roll

It’s tempting to wonder what a 66 year old John would say about the celebrations last month of 40 years since Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band was released – worse yet, the rather sentimental observations of the 50th anniversary of the day the Quarry Men played at the St. Peter’s Church Fete in Woolton. The day that Paul McCartney taught John the words to 20 Flight Rock and tuned his guitar. So, donning my reporter impression with my battered fedora bearing a dog-eared cardboard Press pass, I walked up to him as he was entering his apartment and asked:

“Good morning, Mr. Lennon” (I don’t call him “John” because I’m from the south and we just do it that way.)

Good morning Mr. Lennon” (I wonder, wouldn’t it possibly be “Sir John”? Oh well, this is America and we don’t have knights and such.)

“Good morning, Mr. Lennon, would you mind letting the world know how you feel about this anniversary?”

John Lennon, looking at Yoko; “Is it our anniversary or something? You’re supposed to remind me of those things.”

Me: “Oh no, Mr. Lennon, nothing like that. It’s the 50th anniversary of the day the Quarry Men (fill in ad lib please)”

JL: “Well, shit man, that’s, why, it must be 50 60 years ago now! Why would you still be on about that. I apologized for that, I KNOW I apologized for it. Why would I be celebrating getting my life mixed up with that fooker? You see what he did on his last excuse for a record?”

“They don’t make record like they ought to, cost $30.00 and all you get is this dinky little silver colored thingy. What the hell happened to that nice black vinyl we used to have? Those were records, damn it!”

“Kid in the apartment downstairs told me he recorded and mixed his very own album just sitting in his bedroom. That’s not what we did in our bedrooms in MY day. He didn’t have a guitar or anything, just typed it all in .. well, that’s what he said. I don’t know what the fool was on about. Gave me one of those dinky disc things but Yoko hasn’t had time to play it for me. I’m not allowed anywhere near all that electronic and computer stuff. Yoko says my energy is wrong for them and it fucks them up. What good is a fucking new millennium anyway if a man can’t even get a fucking record to play?

John Lennon moves into the door but I hear him muttering as he climbs up the white freestanding circular staircase: “That fucking little shit, Paulie, That Was ME too!”

Yoko gave me a look and I figured that was as much story as I’d get for the day.

This is your on the story reporter signing off for the day.