By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like
Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn't why
the Beatles are cool now. Every lame white guy like George
W Bush always says he likes the early stuff and not the late
stuff. No, I mean the difficult and interesting records, especially
Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. These three albums
sound like they could have been recorded last week. In fact,
if they had been, they'd still sound amazingly original and
fresh. Why does each new cohort of teenagers continue to discover
the late Beatles albums, forty years after their release?
Music nerds like me can go on forever about how great the
Beatles were, but I can do that about Duke Ellington too,
and right now, the Blanton-Webster
Band just isn't cool the way the White Album is.
This is how important the Beatles are, in the present, not
just as a historical icon: The biggest rock stars in the world
in the summer of 2006 were the guys in Gnarls
Barkley. The white half of the band, Danger
Mouse, made his first big splash by combining Jay-Z's
Black
Album with the White Album into his breathtakingly copyright-infringing
manifesto, the
Grey Album. Also consider the story of OutKast,
who after making hip-hop's
answer to the White Album have fortunately found ways
to not break up. Consider how much Jon
Brion owes to Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields:
I Heart Huckabees soundtrack
Consider how much Björk
owes to I Am The Walrus and A Day In The Life:
Homogenic
Consider also how much Radiohead
owes to I Want You (She's So Heavy).
I think the late Beatles are still so pertinent because they
remind people my age and younger of our divorced parents.
The late albums are extremely well-made art produced by a
group of people in a totally failed and dysfunctional relationship.
Most of the conflict is between the two prime movers in the
group, Lennon and McCartney. Yet the product bears a collective
name, creating the illusion of a unified creative team. The
albums are full of internal contradictions, jarring stylistic
jumps and surreal experiments. Yet they're recorded and sung
in the most gorgeous way possible with the technology of the
time.
Let's say you'd never heard of the Beatles. Suppose I played
you Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Within You Without You,
and When I'm Sixty-Four. Would you have any reason to imagine
that these songs were written and recorded by the same people?
Probably not, and for the most part, they weren't. The three
songs are effectively solo John Lennon, George Harrison and
Paul McCartney tunes, respectively. And yet, they sit back-to-back
on Sgt Pepper's under one name. It's wonderful to imagine
that a single group of humans working together could have
produced such wildly disparate sounds, and it was a royal
bummer for me to find out that during long stretches of the
Sgt Pepper's sessions, the Beatles weren't even talking to
each other.
I was produced by Michael and Karen Hein in the declining
years of their relationship, five years before they divorced.
My sister Molly was born two years before. We all have the
last name Hein. So I guess I'm Revolver, and Molly is the
White Album. Like those records, we're alternately joyful
and angry and joyful again, eclectic, jumbled, full of long-unresolved
arguments, trying to keep the factions peacefully coexisting
in our own skins. My parents were part of the first generation
of Americans to get divorced in serious numbers, but as it
turns out, they were just on the vanguard of what's now a
solid majority of adults. That means a lot of kids like me,
and it's only a matter of time before some percentage of them
come across Abbey Road and go, wow, this really makes sense
to me in a way that few other things do. See for example Tom
Bissell's case for why She
Came In Through The Bathroom Window is the best song ever
recorded. See also every precious indie-rock album of the
past ten years, nearly all of which live in the shadows of
Abbey Road.
Adolescent angst and conflict with one's parents are nothing
new to rock and roll, but here's the thing: the Beatles didn't
remotely hate their parents. Not the way rock stars usually
do; not the way the Stones or Hendrix did. The Beatles revered
their parents. They wrote songs for and about them, mostly
McCartney, but my favorite John Lennon song ever is about
his mother Julia. The Beatles were kid-friendly, too, which
is even more unusual in rock of that era. Could you imagine
the Stones or Clapton writing Yellow Submarine or Octopus'
Garden? The Beatles' envelope of concern extends a lot further
than adolescence, which resonates strongly for a prematurely
old kid like me. Most interesting from the broken home angle,
Paul McCartney wrote Hey Jude to comfort Julian Lennon while
John was splitting up with his first wife. I know the first
part is a little corny, but listen to that groove at the end,
the "naaa na na na na na na" part, and tell me it
doesn't grab you deep in the mammal brain.
Most rock musicians turn their angst into hedonistic defiance
or anger. The Beatles turn most of their angst into wistfulness.
They dissent and push boundaries, but they do it in a relatively
polite, restrained form, John Lennon's bursts of orneriness
towards the end notwithstanding. The reason for the band's
composure comes into sharp focus when you picture George Martin
and the BBC engineers in their coats and ties. These utterly
straight British civil servants were the band's main audience
after they stopped performing in 1965. The Beatles' best work
was all written and performed for an audience of tape recorders
and engineers behind glass. They were great experimenters
because they had unlimited time and resources in a (then)
state-of-the-art high-tech laboratory. For all their wild
sixties excess, you can understand why the Beatles maintained
such relative decorum on the job.
The Beatles' poker face is uptight by rock standards, but
it's appropriate for professionals in a work setting. Professionals
like my parents, highly capable at and passionate about their
jobs, but absent and incapable in some of their close relationships.
I've got a lot of friends whose parents are like mine, and
I think we can expect those late Beatles records to keep flying
off the shelves, in whatever form those shelves take, for
the foreseeable future.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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