How to use this Page

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the original post below he looks at The Beatles in late 60’s Britain.

Forty years ago, on 11 April 1969, the Beatles released “Get Back” / “Don’t Let Me Down” as their second 45-rpm single for their semi-independent label, Apple. In the spirit of an era when live performance had roared back into prominence, the Beatles had begun to feel trapped by their decision to abandon the stage for the studio. This recording represented an attempt to “get back” to their vitality as a band. Ironically, even in the first year of Beatles recordings, artist-and-repertoire manager George Martin and his balance engineer Norman Smith had routinely spliced together different takes to create iconic hits such as “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” and “This Boy.” “Get Back” would undergo a similar reconstruction. Still, these April 1969 recordings endeavored to re-capture the excitement of live performance.

But the world into which they ushered this music moved differently than the heady days of 1963’s Beatlemania. Britain’s musical, social, and political climate boiled in the stew of late sixties change. In April 1969, Parliament reduced the voting age from 21 to 18 enfranchising and empowering its “bulge” generation and recognizing their powerful influence over culture. Similarly, immigrants from the British Commonwealth transformed the fiber of daily British life and infuriated right-wing politicians and hooligans who resented the social change. And indigenous intolerance flourished as Northern Ireland’s tensions between Protestants and Catholics erupted into firebombs. We rightfully remember the sixties as an era when new paradigms clashed with established prejudices. Throughout 1968, young British mods had latched onto a new music, embracing Jamaican reggae and ska such that on 16 April 1969, Desmond Dekker and the Aces would see their “The Israelites” become the first reggae tune to capture the top spot on many British charts.

In this turmoil, the Beatles struggled to find their place. John Lennon had voiced his political ambivalence in “Revolution” and George Harrison’s “Piggies” chastised the ruling class he had always resented. Paul McCartney’s songwriting fell back upon his love of character studies (“Michele,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Lady Madonna”) and his inherent ability to mimic musically (the music hall in “When I’m Sixty-four” and even reggae in “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” where he references Desmond Dekker).

“Get Back” (built around a groove á la Frankie Lane’s “Rawhide”) became McCartney’s vehicle for social commentary, ostensibly about the desire to return to a simpler style of life (which he would embrace with his farm in Scotland) and briefly about racial politics. McCartney had floated a text intended to ridicule Enoch Powell’s incendiary Birmingham speech of 20 April 1968 in which the conservative had declared that immigration led him, “Like the Romans…, to see ‘the River Tiber flowing with much blood’.” McCartney’s awkward parody joked that Pakistanis who crowded council flats should get back to where they once belonged. Unfortunately, McCartney lacked Lennon’s or even George Harrison’s verbal knack for satire, and he dropped the idea.

Instead of a verse about immigration, and perhaps as a predecessor to Ray Davies “Lola” (recorded a year later), McCartney retreated to character study: Sweet Loretta Martin who, although a man, believes herself to be a woman. Unlike Ray Davies who quite happily accepts Lola’s trans-gendered identity, McCartney seems to urge Loretta (like the Pakistanis) to get back to where she belongs.

Unfortunately, the text and music lacks much of an obvious sense of irony, more a comment on McCartney’s lyrical skills than to any characteristic prejudice. Still, the Beatles would make their own statement on racial and cultural tensions by inviting American Billy Preston to join them on electric piano and crediting him on the record label, something they had not done with Eric Clapton (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) and certainly not with Nicky Hopkins (“Revolution”) and Andy White (“Love Me Do”).

The Beatles knew something had come undone when they needed an outsider to help them work together. Preston and Clapton only reinforced the internal belief that a door was closing.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  In the post below he looks at “The White Album”.

“The White Album”: One need not say much more to evoke the alternately dreamlike and daunting experience of encountering the Beatles’ 1968 magnum opus. The year 1968 shaped our aesthetic interpretation with student riots in Europe and race riots in the U.S., assassinations (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy), political repression (in Chicago and Prague), and the inevitable loss of innocence as pop psychedelia began unraveling into drug addiction and death. What had begun in exhilaration and optimism had crested the hill and now careened in descent towards dissolution; but for the moment, the Beatles’ eponymous double album offered a breathtaking vista of monkeys, tigers, and blackbirds entertaining kings, queens, children, cowboys, and Jamaicans. Their sentiments could range from deep inside love (“I Will” and “I’m So Tired”), through outright sarcasm (“Sexy Sadie” and “Piggies”), to sheer terror (“Revolution 9”).

These recordings still hold the ability to capture our collective attention and individual fantasies, reminding us of how new and exciting music was. The album begins with a tip of the hat to the Beach Boys (and indirectly to Chuck Berry) as a jet roars into “Back in the USSR” (even as the USSR roared into Czechoslovakia). As the jet’s roar fades into “Dear Prudence,” we begin to wonder if this song about Mia Farrow’s introverted sister shields some darker purpose in the thicket of bass and drums. McCartney and Lennon seem to be talking about two different realities. Journalists of the time gossiped about the impending dissolution of the Beatles, sensing the internal tensions and multi-polar tug of personal interests. Listeners wondered about the future of civilization.

Forty years ago on Friday 22 November 1968, the Beatles’ commercial venture, Apple Records, issued their anti-Sgt. Pepper’s album, The Beatles. Gone were Peter Blake’s pop art colors and crowded imagery. The Granny Smith apple, known for its sourness, replaced the aura of fab-four comradery—of first moustaches and satin band-uniforms—with individual portraits and collaged domestic snapshots spread like memories on a bed sheet. Now, like other groups of the era, the Beatles sought to re-imagine themselves more as individuals than as a group.

The very same day that the Beatles released their eponymous “white album,” Pye released The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (with catchy Ray Davies’ tunes like “Picture Book”). Two weeks later, the Stones would finally see their own much-delayed Beggar’s Banquet released, with its carefully constructed DIY sound. But the Beatles would dominate the Christmas market that year, even as they inspired a cottage industry of cryptographers who believed they had deciphered from John Lennon’s clues the meaning behind Paul McCartney’s apparent death in a car crash. Lennon, when interviewed by a young teen from Toronto, spoke about multiple layers of meaning in the music, even as he backed away from the youth’s interpretations. Indeed today, we still find ourselves disaggregating the sounds and words of this compilation, wondering what it all means…, if anything.

We look back on this era and see a generation trying to make sense of the chaos, searching for meaning in songs and art. Perhaps we see ourselves trying to understand our selves, wondering what our future might hold, just as the Beatles struggled with these issues. Perhaps in repeatedly returning to this album, we continue to ponder our choices.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  In the post below he looks at Beatlemania.

Not far from the bustle of London’s Oxford Circus, in the two short blocks of Argyll Street (and especially outside the colonnaded façade of the London Palladium), anticipation rose from the sidewalks like steam escaping a pent-up subterranean boiler. In the cool evening air of 13 October 1963 at the Palladium’s stage door, even nearby Great Marlborough Street grew misty with the exhalations of stalking teenage mobs. Ultimately, their quarry would thwart them by escaping out the Palladium’s front door and into a miraculously undistinguished and suburban version of an Austin Princess, leaving the stage and the stage door behind them.

Forty-five years later, the images of British teens jumping, crying, grinning, and screaming as the Beatles smilingly tolerate the frenzy can still amaze us and leave us wondering “Why?” We cannot see the estimated fifteen million British viewers who electronically tasted the elixir in the comfort of their homes, but our voyeuristic glimpse of these adolescent exhortations can stir some of the same reactions. Many authors have placed the mass psychosis in the contexts of the Berlin wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the Profumo scandal, the continual threat of nuclear annihilation, and the Kennedy assassination. Others point to the demographic “bulge”: the postwar babies who had entered puberty and found the Beatles to be a happy excuse to express their independence. We might even consider the early sixties infatuation with electronic media: James Bond’s paraphernalia twisted into guitars, amplifiers, microphones, and cameras. (From Russia with Love premiered on 10 November 1963.) No single event or factor can explain the throngs that stood for hours waiting for concerts, and all of the factors together still leave us to ponder the exponential growth of adulation.

In the weeks that followed the Palladium concert, fans flocked to see the Beatles off on their first Scandinavian tour (closing down Heathrow when they returned). And they crowded outside the venerable Prince of Wales Theatre for the annual Royal Variety Performance on Monday 4 November 1963 where John Lennon uttered his infamous “rattle your jewelry” comment. The broadcast of this event the following Sunday on 10 November drew an eager audience of teens to watch the telly in family homes where innumerable conversations began on the subject of decorum and music.

But perhaps one of the most important events in the ascent of Beatlemania had taken place the previous year on a Friday in an improvised studio. EMI had invited teens into their Manchester Square corporate offices to function as an audience for a Radio Luxembourg taping on 16 November 1962 promoting the Beatles first single, “Love Me Do.” (Radio Luxembourg broadcast the program the next Friday.) For EMI, the introduction of pimply-faced hormone-addled adolescents into their sanctuary of accounting must have seemed a necessary inconvenience. But in the heart of that modern edifice, a pulse began that would shake the building, the nation, and the world. When host Muriel Young began introducing the band, the audience squealed and crowded the stage area, cowering close to the musicians, basking in the energy, and radiating the primordial impulse to bond. In that moment, the Beatles themselves sowed the seeds of insanity, magical beans that would grow and carry them into the land of pop giants.

ShareThis

written and illustrated by Matt Faulkner Simon and Schuster 2008 LuLu and Jelly can't believe that Abbey saw a fountain in town that bubbled colored water; they have to see this for themselves. When their Uncle Jack needs to make a run into town the kids beg to go with so they can investigate. Oh, but this is the Deep South, and it's mid 1960's, and the town is crowded with freedom riders and