Wilfrid Mellers
[What] kind of world did [the Beatles] evoke in their early years, from [their] interfusion of American black blues and white rock and Country-Western, of Anglo-Irish folk music and song and dance from music-hall and pub? From the start the Beatles were individualities who sought a corporate identity. Though only during the first year or two did Lennon and McCartney actually compose together, there's point in the ascription of the songs to their joint authorship. They needed one another for their fulfilment: needed, in a rather different way, the other two Beatles; and the separate ways in which they grew up were affected by the identity they'd sought for in the early years…. [Their] 'group' sense—their corporate identity—is complemented by the themes of the early songs; which concern the euphoric happiness of togetherness, though it's significant that this togetherness is identified with the two-way relationship of heterosexual love—which sometimes becomes synonymous with 'home', security, mum.
One of the most famous of early Beatle songs—She loves you—is also quintessential. It is simply an affirmation, epitomised in its 'Yeah yeah yeah' refrain; and it exists in the moment, without before or after…. The timeless, present-affirming modality is instinctive; and the words, if … perfunctorily vacuous, are no longer merely magic talismen, abracadabra. They do concern a basic, life-affirming human experience; and the conjunction of the words with the music makes evident that this experience matters because it is true; and is true because—even in the face of the commercial pressures and discords of modern industrial life—the Beatles are, through their music, as though new-born. It's this pristine quality that helps us to understand the potency of their appeal, the relevance of their mythology. (pp. 32-3)
The basic Beatle song is Edenic: as is manifest on the first LP in I saw her standing there…. (p. 33)
One couldn't claim that [its] words are oral poetry, in the sense that Dylan's songs—even the earliest ones—are: though in the course of time the Beatles 'grew into' oral poetry, largely by way of Dylan's example. What [the] verses do have is an uncanny instinct for the ways in which people of the Beatles' generation spoke and felt, rather than thought; and they're prepared to accept their inarticulateness rather than substitute for it the 'poetic' insincerities—the moon-June clichés—of the previous generation's pop songs. (p. 34)
There's a place, by John, should be mentioned … because it's the first song concerned with self-reliance. Despite its melismata and parallel triads, it is curiously austere, resolutely diatonic, virtually without modulation. The 'place' where he thinks of her (again the song, performed by John and Paul, is at once individual and corporate) is his own mind: which is ultimately inviolable, even by her: 'There's a place where I can go When I feel low, When I feel blue, And it's my mind and there's no time When I'm alone.' This is probably the first song wherein we realise that John might be an 'oral' poet, and that in terms of poetic-musical experience he had a long way to travel. (p. 41)
Over and above the sheer physical impact [the Beatles] inherited from commercialised rock, they evoke a young happiness that haunts one because it is true; and is true because it's experience reborn into innocence. The technical manifestations of this are the songs' preoccupation with 'pure' folk-like melody (basically pentatonic and monodic) as against ordered harmony, with its Western, 'cultivated', associations: so that the vocal lines are marvellously fresh, whether with Paul's lyricism or John's toughness. The Beatles' music is more open, whiter, fresher, tenderer than the age-old black blues, for its Anglo-Irish affiliations lead it towards innocence rather than ecstasy, pleasure rather than pain, wholeness rather than blueness. Even the harmony provoked intuitively by modal melody and blue guitar techniques effects a kind of re-Renaissance—in wide-eyed, open-eared wonder at the 'pure' sensuality of thirds and sixths…. None the less, the ambivalence of the Negro blues … is not entirely alien to Beatle music, even in their early days. Blue rawness and 'reality' temper their innocence; whilst their innocence transmutes aggression. It's this synthesis of qualities—American black and Anglo-Irish white—that makes the physical beat, which is their music's most immediately recognisable quality, a stimulus rather than a narcotic; and this again is what makes the happiness not mindlessly euphoric, but for real. The irony, or comedy, that often springs from this fusion is also pertinent here; the objectivity their songs achieve reconciles individual with corporate identity, and this helps to explain their tremendous impact on a whole generation. They were simply and sensuously affirmative; babes newborn, rejecting the past, yet singing for dear life.
None the less, because Beatle happiness was true, it had latent within it the awareness of pain and the negative emotions. (pp. 41-2)
Beatles' initiation … is a ceremony of birth. On [their] disc, A hard day's night, they're concerned with adolescence and growing up; and the rituals are those of puberty. The title song is another number about Love, identified with Home; but a more 'experienced' quality is evident in the verses, which use less youthfully abstract jargon, more down to earth fact. John has been 'working like a dog' to get money to buy his girl things. He should now, after his hard day, be 'sleeping like a log', but knows he won't be, because the things she'll do when he gets home will make him 'feel alright'. So there's again a division between innocence (the ecstasy of being 'held tight') and experience (things, making money, the tedium of work, suggested by the long repeated notes in the tune's first phrase). Both poetically and musically, however, this is subtler, because more equivocal, than in any previous song. Indeed one might say that the song sees innocence and experience as interdependent; the freedom couldn't be so lovely were it not for the tedium. (p. 43)
The starkness of [Anytime at All] provides a transition to Paul's Things we said today, for me the Beatles' most beautiful and deep song up to this point. Again it concerns the reality of love, involving responsibility and wonder as well as pleasure.
[This] song makes incarnate the Beatles' truth to experience. The words tell us little by themselves, for the point is precisely that the love-experience is too deep for words: 'Someday when we're dreaming, deep in love, not a lot to say, Then we will remember Things we said today.' The music, with its faintly liturgical flavour, genuinely acts this out, creating an experience no longer just happy, but full of awe. Here the fade-out legitimately carries us outside Time. (pp. 47-8)
The immediate nostalgia of [Yesterday] is without suspicion of sentimentality….
Being lost, the song tells us, is part of the painful process of growing up. He believes in yesterday, as we all do, because then love was 'an easy game to play'. Now he needs a 'place to hide away' from the shadow; and with the words 'O yesterday came suddenly', the sense is inverted, for 'yesterday' becomes the recognition of the shadow itself, the moment of truth. Negatively, one can attribute this merely to the slack syntax which the Beatles share with all pop lyricists, the words trickling or spurting out to fit, or help to make, the tune. Positively, one can regard it as a beautiful example of the functioning of an 'oral' poetry which is pre-syntactical, and in which the emotional ambivalence is the kind of accident that may happen to an intuitive artist. As the Beatles grow up, such accidents occur with increasing frequency; and there is probably no precedent for this outside relatively primitive folk cultures. Baby Mozart, or even teenage Schubert, didn't function thus empirically, since they worked within a stable and literate tradition. Mozart seems miraculously to have missed out on puberty; Schubert's teenage songs do not noticeably differ, in the range of their themes or even their technical sophistication, from those of his maturity. (p. 57)
[Rubber Soul] may be an inverted positive—a move towards self-reliance, in reaction to the Nowhere Man. Certainly John's Run for your life, a totally explicit anti-girl song, generates a joyous exuberance from its mediant alternations, so that its brusqueness is not synonymous with cruelty. Similarly, Paul's I'm looking through you pierces through pretences as it answers its upward flowing phrases with a resigned descent from the subdominant's flat seventh…. [In] these songs there's a toughness, beneath lyricism or comedy, that is not evident in earlier songs.
The best songs on Rubber Soul are not, however, overtly satirical; certainly the anti-girl elements in John's Girl are complemented by a lyricism so touching in its simplicity that the ironies take us by surprise. (pp. 60-1)
The word, a joint composition,… is a ritual love-spell…. [The] Word that is evoked may be Love, with overtly sexual implications in the upward thrusting arpeggio and the lacerating false relations; yet the sacramental connotations of the Word are also latent, since the song's potency is grave, almost austere, in its modality.
This little song is of some importance in the Beatles' development, for the magical and runic qualities which we have seen to be implicit in many of their early songs here become explicit. In their Hard Day's Night they've learned that love isn't the simple boy-meets-girl relationship it had seemed to be; at least the feelings released by such basic heterosexual contacts are both confused and confusing: inseparable from other people and the 'world outside': inseparable, it would seem, from metaphysical as well as physical sanctions, using the term literally and without pretention. Inevitably, there's a tie-up between the widening range of the Beatles' experience and the expansion of their technical resources. In any case, their next disc, Revolver, is at once a break-through in technique and a new kind of experience. (pp. 65-6)
Though Revolver still contains ritual elements, one can no longer discuss it in terms of adolescent ceremonial, nor is it relatable to the conventions of commercialised pop music. Halfway between ritual and art, it's both verbally and musically an extraordinary break-through…. (p. 69)
With remarkable verbal articulateness, though at a poetic level beyond intellectual formulation,… Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band … explores the perennial as well as current problems of adolescence—loneliness, friendship, sex, the generation gap, alienation, fear, nightmare; and perhaps could do so because the Beatles' early 'corporate identity' was always a synthesis of four separate individualities. Yet if Pepper is, in this relatively traditional sense, art, it is also a ritual involving the young—through its electronic extension of musical sounds into the environment of the external world—in a ceremonial togetherness, without the prop of church or state. This two-way function as art and ritual remains valid, even though the Beatles, in common with most pop groups, disclaim both moral responsibility and artistic technique: for that responsibility and technique may be intuitively independent of conscious volition is the heart of the matter.
No longer do the Beatles offer us a miscellany of songs; we rather have a sequence of intricately related numbers, forming a whole and performed without break. The verses, though still composed 'orally', by trial and error, are printed on the record sleeve, so that we may go back and read them again, 'like a book': just as on disc we may repeat bits of the music, as one cannot in a live (especially in part improvised) performance. None of the songs is a love song; and that the main theme of the sequence is loneliness would seem to admit that the Beatles' early attempts at tribal togetherness had failed—not as music, but as a way of life. (pp. 86-7)
Sgt. Pepper makes the climacteric point in the Beatles' career, their definite breach with the pop music industry, however materially successful the disc … may have been. Henceforth, the world they've created is sui generis, bringing its own criteria. The pattern of their young lives seems clear. In their boyhood they discovered a lost Eden, creating a danced music of which the euphoria was valid because newborn. Their first period ends with their hard day's night's discovery of human relationships and responsibilities; and this 'second period' is consummated in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. If Pepper, however, is the apotheosis of the second period, he also initiates the third: much in the same way as A Hard Day's Night had one foot in the first period, the other in the second. For whereas many songs in Pepper are concerned with the young mind and senses in relationship to the external world, others follow Tomorrow never knows (from Revolver) in re-entering the world of dream. This preoccupation with the life 'within you' is no longer child-like and innocent, for its absorbs the experience of the Beatles' middle years. (p. 101)
[It's] interesting that the musical development in Abbey Road goes along with a partial relinquishment of the verbal, poetic life progressively explored in Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. The verses in Abbey Road are certainly more runic, more oral, less concerned with human relationships, though the unconscious springs touched on are now far from being Edenic. (p. 122)
Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are the three great milestones in the Beatles' career: Revolver because it was a breakthrough from the world of pop into a world that hasn't yet been categorised; Pepper because it's the most comprehensively realised Beatle testament; Abbey Road because it's their most dangerous adventure. It may be that the personal-cum-mythical statement they made in Sgt. Pepper couldn't, once made, be repeated; nor could they have strayed further down Abbey Road without surrendering their 'corporate identity', becoming a different kind of phenomenon. In effect, this is what happened; after The end of Abbey Road the Beatles pursued separate paths. This is true even though Abbey Road was not in fact the last 'corporate' disc the Beatles issued: for Let it Be is a deliberate reversal to earlier manners and to a considerable extent consists of earlier—sometimes very early—material…. It is … legitimate to relate the White Album, as an aftermath, to Let it Be, in that it is retrospective in the same sense, if on a larger scale, as were the companion songs Baby, you're a rich man now and All you need is love. It looks back, with remarkable richness of invention and variety of mood, on the Beatles' career; and submits almost all their own and other peoples' song-modes to the kind of serious parody at which [they were] adept. Though this doesn't necessarily lessen the commitment of individual songs, the consistency of the parodistic approach implies a rejection of the past: which perhaps was necessary before the Magical Mystery Tour could find its consummatory way into Abbey Road. (p. 125)
[The] Beatles' initiation was their discovery of their Liverpudlian corporate identity. As they grew up their Rubber Souls, armed with Revolvers, strayed into euphoric Penny Lane and hallucinatory Strawberry Fields; and attained a consummation which owes its power to the fact that their corporate identity allows for such complex nuances of personal stress and distress. Though Sgt. Pepper was pepperily militant in dragooning the circus band, the band itself played to a club of Lonely Hearts. That great record created a solidarity of the youthful whilst being at once pathetically and ironically aware of the solitariness of all hearts, young and old. The songs never proselytise, yet are genuinely a 'criticism of life'.
It was too much to expect that the delicate balance of Sgt. Pepper could be sustained. Yet the Beatles' third period, initiated on their Magical Mystery Tour and achieving fruition in Abbey Road, is a further stage in their evolution in that it accepts, unequivocally and unafraid, whatever darkness, as well as light, rebirth and regression may throw up. That is an astonishing achievement: especially if one thinks of the Beatles against the backcloth of the pop music industry in which they had been nurtured. Nor is it surprising that this precarious honesty was also impermanent. The beginning of disintegration was inherent in it; and although the Beatles threw retrospective glances back at their seemingly distant past … they were then obliged, if not content, to Let it be, and to go their separate ways. (p. 143)
[The Beatles'] achievement wouldn't be so heroic had they not suffered as scapegoats and sacrificial victims for us all. The Beatles' lives enacted out the rape of commerce and the electronic media upon us; whilst their music remained as true as truth's simplicity—with the understanding that today's simplicity cannot avoid manifold ironies and ambiguities.
In spite of the commercial stresses, in spite of the lapses into infantile narcissism and into pseudo-mystical twaddle, the Beatles—along with a few other flowers of pop—have occasionally reawakened our ritual sense; and we have to see this phenomenon in relationship to comparable developments in all the arts at all levels, remembering that the public for late Beatles and progressive pop overlaps with that for Stockhausen, Cage, Partch, Berio, even perhaps Tippett's ritual operas and Britten's 'parables for church performance'. That the Beatles, unlike the phenomena listed above, were a cult involving millions of young people is part of their importance: which is not to be diminished by a glib reference to the young's new economic viability. It is rather that such music youthfully demonstrates how man's life, in the words of Octavio Paz, is 'ceasing to be a spatial measurement and changing into a source, a spring, in the absolute present'. Pop has reasserted the spirit of fiesta which, whether secular or religious, allows us, momently released from Time, to 'emerge from our solitude and become one with creation': as were the 'mature' Beatles when they made the affirmation, however ambiguous, of The end; as had been the boy Beatles when they wonderingly piped 'I saw her standing there'; as were we ourselves when, as children, chanting 'wallflowers, wallflowers', we mythologised the act and fact of dying, even in the spring of the year. (p. 195)
Wilfrid Mellers, in his Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (copyright © 1973 by Wilfrid Mellers; reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc.; in Canada by Faber and Faber Ltd), Schirmer Books, 1973.
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