When you were fifteen, your cousin, Bonnie gave you a birthday present you will never forget. She gave you just enough money to buy a CD (things we listened to music on before MP3s and Pandora.com and Spotify came along) but she also gave you strict instructions. The money was only to be used for one purpose, to buy The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bonnie knew what she was doing. Of course, you'd heard Beatles songs before, but never an entire album. It was extraordinary. You listened to it over and over and over again. What struck you, as a kid, was the realization that the album was telling a story. You weren't sure what that story was, and you were pretty sure the Beatles weren't sure either, but you knew it was there somewhere, hidden in the music. June Skinner Sawyers knew it as well, and she found other people who did too. Not just authors, critics, and musicians, but family members of the Beatles, their wives and their friends. This book is her attempt to compile the story that they all found in the music that was produced by those four fabulous young men in just seven astonishing years.
A friend of yours once told you that someone saying they loved the Beatles told her nothing about them. "It's like saying, 'I like primary colors.' No shit. We all do. Tell me what else you like." At first that idea made you mad because you thought she was trashing the greatest band of all time (there really is no argument there, no matter what anyone says), but then you realized that she was really saying, "We ALL love the Beatles. How can you not? It's where the rest of modern music started. Where you go from there in your musical taste tells me what you take away from their music. Are you an I Want to Hold Your Hand kind of girl? Or are you into odd Rocky Raccoon type stuff? Do you cry when you hear She's Leaving Home, or do you lean more towards Strawberry Fields Forever? All the genres of rock and roll and pop, all the sub-genres, they all stem from what these four kids from Liverpool were doing during the decade when the Western World was trying to tear itself apart. "Read the Beatles" helped you plot the course they took, musically and personally, from obscure punks to the most famous and influential humans on Earth.
The first essay in the book was so breathlessly reverent that it was almost off-putting, honestly. It was a fictionalized (and sanctimonious) description of the moment John and Paul first met at a church fair, but the next piece was from Cynthia Lennon. Her accounts of John's early college days were so charmingly casual that you knew the book was going to be all right. Some days, John Lennon's biggest concern was avoiding getting his ass kicked by young local thugs who were none too pleased at how much attention all the girls in town were suddenly giving the four boys who played at the Jacaranda coffee shop. "Read the Beatles" quotes more essays and excerpts to follow the boys as they cross the Channel to play for the sailors and hookers in Hamburg, Germany. This is where the four of them earned their chops. Drunken men would insist they play a samba or something with a flamenco feel. They had to learn a wide variety of music and they had to do it fast. They were living in obscurity, and their song selection was dictated by what drunks yelled at them through smoke and alcohol. When the boys returned to England, everything changed.
In December of 1960, they returned to their hometown and played a show at the Town Hall Ballroom. Before the announcer was even through introducing them, Paul started screaming the opening line to "Long Tall Sally." When the crowd of kids turned their heads to see who was making that incredible noise, when they all rushed the stage to get closer looks at the way the guitarists were stomping and thrashing around the stage, that was the moment Beatlemania was born. The crowd went nuts that night and every time the Beatles played thereafter. In February of '64, just three months after President Kennedy had been assassinated, they came to America.
Every reporter who saw a show during the Beatles tours of the US inevitably became more fascinated by the behavior of the kids in the crowd than that of the the kids on stage. Jewelry and jelly beans were heaped on the stage by adoring fans. The reaction was almost religious in its ecstasy. It transcended anything any celebrity had dealt with in the modern age. One of the authors in the book makes clear a truth that most Beatles haters forget, when John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, he was saying it, not in a boasting way, but out of disgust for the culture that had made it true.
You often say that without context the history we tell each other is hollow, it is robbed of the real story. It never occurred to you that part of why the Beatles were so unbelievably popular when they came to the United States, was because the citizens here were looking for something to bring them out of their state of mourning. The last good drum rhythms they could remember was a funeral dirge for the young energetic president who had given many of them a hope they had never known before. These funny, vibrant musicians arrived at the perfect time to fill the holes in the hearts of America's youth. The essays and interviews from this era begin to ask an interesting question, were the Sixties a product of the Beatles, or were the Beatles a product of the Sixties? The answer, even according to the members of the band themselves, is always that they were a result of the times rather than the other way around. The Beatles were a singular product of a unique moment in time that can never be recreated. When John sang in "Norwegian Wood" about a woman who seduces a man, and in the morning it's the woman who has left, he wasn't creating a sexual revolution, he was simply reporting on it. All the sexual and revolutionary and creative energy of the era coalesced around the Beatles and they were swept up in it and lifted by it to heights no other musical group as ever, or will ever, reach.
One of the best pieces in the book is a review of Sgt. Pepper's in Esquire by Robert Christgau from 1967. In it he refers to the letters pouring into the New York Times defending the album from a scathing review by Richard Goldstein. Christgau notes that one fan vehemently defends the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" even though it's pretty clearly a nonsense song added to the album purely for its vaudeville feel. Christgau observes that that is why the Beatles are so important. "A good Lennon-McCartney song," he writes, "Is sufficiently cryptic to speak to the needs of whoever listens." In 1967, a respected classical music critic for the Times noticed the presence of Aeolian cadences in Lennon's "It Won't Be Long." When he wrote this observation in his '67 review of Sgt. Pepper's, even the middle class began to view the Beatles with respect. Years later, a reporter from Playboy asked John Lennon if he had indeed put Aeolian cadences in the song. Lennon's answer was simple, "To this day, I don't have any idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds." We are the ones who place significance on the music, not the artists.
It is entirely possible that the Beatles aren't as great as we all think they are, but that makes no difference. They matter so much to human culture because we all say that they do. They are important because we decided that they are. Their music is genius, but we have all decided to make it a cultural touchstone. Any of us can quote a line from the Beatles and, like the works of Shakespeare, almost everyone we know will immediately be on the same page.
One of the great mysteries that has always dogged the Beatles (at least for you) is how they went from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "Strawberry Fields Forever" in just four years. What could have inspired such a dizzying growth in musical maturity and innovation in such a short time? How did kids from Liverpool go from covering Elvis tunes to creating "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" just five years later? The excerpt from Geoffrey O'Brien's book ("Sonata for Jukebox") makes the observation that John, Paul, George and Ringo had gone from relatively inexperienced lives to being the most famous and adored people on Earth. As a consequence, they had to become insulated from the rest of the world. So they ended up having only one another, their talent, and their mutual passion for music to provide themselves any emotional outlet, any sense of fulfillment. Well, they had all that plus marijuana, alcohol, and LSD. They fed off one another as music's greatest echo chamber, learning from and challenging each other, exploring their art in ways no one had ever done before.
Each member of the band brought something different to the equation, but they ended up being so much more than their parts. Their curiosity, their humor, their honesty and their insatiable sense of hope still allow us all to embrace their music. About two years ago, when your oldest son started reading books on his own alone in his room, you decided to load almost every Beatles album into an iPod and play it in his room as he read. He still listens to them. His favorite album right now is Magical Mystery Tour. You are convinced it might be one of the wisest decisions you ever made as a parent.
On to the next book!
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