The Beatles are fucking good.

[Nowhere Man]

Just found out/realised that in 1973 McCartney released Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run - and the Live and Let Die single

Wow

Hey Johnboy is your avatar from Whizzer & Chips? It looks very familiar.

Edit: New page cunt.

[Egyptian Feast]

It's the late Odd-Ball.

[Menu]

Hundred percent
Bold up I've just scene a face
It's gorgeous

It's the only song I've ever heard which properly captures that feeling(possibly when you're still a teenager) of really falling in love for the first time. That combination of breathlessly wanting to tell everyone but also wanting to somehow keep it only to yourself. It's the perfect combination of lyrics and music. Just as Yesterday perfectly captures the finality of love that's ended, possibly even the very same relationship. And both songs are on the SAME SIDE of the SAME ALBUM. The 23 year old Paul McCartney was a stone-cold genius.

[Nowhere Man]

It's the late Odd-Ball.

AHH yes of course RIP ODDBALL

Help! Is such a stupid movie, I rewatched it last week, and the lads acting is even more delightfully dire then I remembered.

It also just popped into my head that I watched Give My Regards To Broad Street once, yet remember nothing from it storywise.

[Menu]

Fuck knows how that film got made. What were they all thinking?

[DrGreggles]

Help! Is such a stupid movie, I rewatched it last week, and the lads acting is even more delightfully dire then I remembered.

It's pretty funny though - and they're stoned to fuck throughout.
AHDN is a better film, but Help has better songs.

[markburgle]

Fuck knows how that film got made. What were they all thinking?

Enjoyably incredulous writeup of Broad Street here:

https://www.avclub.com/bonfire-of-the-vanity-projects-case-file-16-give-my-r-1798231494

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Who?

[dontpaintyourteeth]

yes very good

[LordMorgan]

Beatles fans
wtf fuck is mark Lewisham playing at
Where the hell is volume 2

[markburgle]

I've seen some real doom mongering online comparing it to The Winds Of Winter and saying we'll never see it, which I think is silly. As he's said though, Book 1 was simple, set mainly in one place. Book 2 becomes international. Way more plates to keep spinning.

There's concern about these speaking tours he does to earn a living when he "should be writing", but he's recently acknowledged those concerns, reckons he's devised a new format for them that's way quicker to assemble and keeps him away from writing much less.

Couple of years ago there was a line on his website saying "Will it be next year? No. 2024?? It's possible". There's now no mention of any hypothetical delivery year, but he must've put a big old dent in it by now, 11 years since the last one - I predict we'll have it within 2 yrs (for no particular reason other than he seems a diligent sort of bloke).

[Nowhere Man]

It is quite funny to think that the time it's taken just waiting for volume 2 to have a release date is almost the equivalent amount of time as between the release of Love Me Do, and the album Band on The Run coming out.

[Johnboy]

Lewisohn guests on the latest episode of Beatles Books podcast

https://beatlesbooks.podbean.com/

(I haven't listened yet, so don't know if he throws around any dates for the book.)

[SteveDave]

He doesn't.

[Menu]

Enjoyably incredulous writeup of Broad Street here:

https://www.avclub.com/bonfire-of-the-vanity-projects-case-file-16-give-my-r-1798231494

This was great. Thank you, markburgle.

[Menu]

Couple of years ago there was a line on his website saying "Will it be next year? No. 2024?? It's possible".

RONALADO>!>?,

[Chollis]

never heard of them

[BlodwynPig]

never heard of them

For the (pete) best

[Chollis]

Time to take this discussion into new territory, for the first time in 100 pages I'll be asking has anyone got good Beatles songs that I haven't heard because I've only heard the big ones. My favourites are probably In My Life, Day in the Life, Strawbs. Cheers.

[BlodwynPig]

Time to take this discussion into new territory, for the first time in 100 pages I'll be asking has anyone got good Beatles songs that I haven't heard because I've only heard the big ones. My favourites are probably In My Life, Day in the Life, Strawbs. Cheers.

Waterloo Sunset
Champagne Supernova
Honky Tonk Woman
Hallelujah
God Save the Queen
King of Rock and Roll

[Chollis]

not even a single song Blods? come on, you've got a soft spot for one of them. lord knows there's enough

[dontpaintyourteeth]

It's all too much

[Bad Ambassador]

I Want You (She's So Heavy) is legit one of my favourites. It's what falling into a black hole should be accompanied by.

Meanwhile: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/beatles-movies-sam-mendes-directing-four-films-2027-release-1235916841/

[SteveDave]

"Now (and) then, Now (and) then"

[Captain Z]

Time to take this discussion into new territory, for the first time in 100 pages I'll be asking has anyone got good Beatles songs that I haven't heard because I've only heard the big ones. My favourites are probably In My Life, Day in the Life, Strawbs. Cheers.

Tomorrow Never Knows

Gives me an opportunity to drop this in here and see if anyone's heard it before. I love mashups, and this semi-official one produced by George and Giles Martin for a Cirque du Soleil show seems to fit together very nicely:

[lauraxsynthesis]

This Substack I subscribe to has rewired my brain with this analysis of The Beatles, drugs, pop music, George Martin's methods and stuff.

From Rubber Soul to Revolver by Justin Smith-Ruiu

"All that hair! It seemed to testify to the lycanthropic turn the 1960s had taken"

Full text under the spoiler:

Spoiler alert

1.

A journal entry from me, dated January 1, 1984, records a list of what appear to be New Year's resolutions. Most of them are unimaginative, and only testify to the common hopes and aspirations of an 11-year-old child. One however stands out: "No Beatles from after 1965".

What was that all about? I have trouble reconstructing the whole scene, but a few additional facts can help us at least to contextualize this enigma. Along with a pair of friends, whom you can still track down in Tucson and Long Beach respectively if you wish to do some independent fact-checking, I was, from the ages of eleven to thirteen, absolutely obsessed with the Beatles. At the time of John Lennon's assassination a few years before, I had been musically oriented towards more plainly childish tastes, Kenny Rogers, say, or Sha-Na-Na, but the news of the assassination insinuated itself into my burgeoning sensibility, and became a sort of foundational tragedy that soon enough led me to seek out any and all Beatles resources. A profile of "Paul and Linda at Home" in a 1983 issue of Marie Claire? If I saw that at the Safeway check-out counter, you could be sure it was going in the cart. ("The McCartneys are happy homebodies these days, but one thing hasn't changed: Paul still insists he's never giving up pot.")
   
   

In 7th grade, in September, 1984, we were called on to announce the title of the best book we had read that summer, and the kids all snickered when I declared of myself that it had been The Love You Make (1983), since of course any mention of "making love" is always a source of brief but certain glee among 12-year-olds. I was not however referring to the act, but only to Steven Gaines's "insider story of the Beatles", as it was billed, which of course borrowed its title from the concluding tune in the long medley on side two of Abbey Road (1969). Thanks to Mark David Chapman there had been a glut of such books in those years, most seemingly by random sound-engineers who once crossed the lads in the studio, or by some Liverpool lorry-driver claiming to have taught an adolescent Richard Starkey how to smoke. The first of such books that I read was Pete Shotton's The Beatles, Lennon, and Me (1984). The author was a perfect representative of this genre: a childhood friend of John's, and a washboard player in the Beatles' precursor band the Quarrymen, Shotton would be given some sort of role ten years later in the direction of Apple Corps., and would next go on to run a chain of diners throughout the UK under the name "Fatty Arbuckle's". The early '80s were a time to treasure memories of what had been lost, and also a time to cash in — and, one hoped, to do both these things in one and the same gesture.

But the truth is my Beatles reading, or at least my Beatles-adjacent reading, started somewhat earlier, and by mistake. This will horrify some of you, or perhaps confirm your suspicions, but the very first properly adult book I ever read from cover to cover, probably in early 1983, was the legendary LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974; written with Curt Gentry). My earliest awareness of the Beatles, was, then, doubly blood-soaked: I had somehow caught a glimpse of the cover of Yoko Ono's 1981 album Season of Glass, featuring a photograph of the iconic round glasses her husband had been wearing at the moment he was shot, one of the lenses now stained red, an artistic choice by our favorite Fluxus member rivaled in its in-your-faceness likely only by her riveting 1969 recording, "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)"; and I had seen, thanks to Bugliosi, a black-and-white image of the name of a now-infamous song from the so-called White Album (1968), which Charles Manson interpreted as a hidden message to him encoding a vision of the coming race war that was going to burn America to the ground, man, and that, in August, 1969, Manson's disciples scrawled on the walls of a house on Waverly Drive, alongside "Death to Pigs", with the blood of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

I had read that book by mistake, chosen at random from the significant selection of "California lawyer"-themed paperbacks circulating through the house. To this day it remains my only direct exposure to the "true crime" genre, which I abhor. But you've got to understand what it's like to grow up in California in the '70s and '80s. I knew a girl back then whose mom had once met Charlie at a laundromat in Sacramento circa 1966 (which as I've already hinted is a key year for our meditations here). It was said that she found him deeply attractive, and happily acquiesced when he asked her for a date, hopping into his VW Bug for adventures we can only guess at. This was enough to make the girl, I see now, appear to us as something like California royalty — the princess daughter, if only by way of some symbolic superfetation, of one of the great barbarian warlords who had been so central to the consolidation of the freak-clan's share of power in the rise of our state to global prominence.

But why, again, the prohibition on Beatles music recorded after 1965? Over the course of 1983 I had managed to collect cassette tapes of all twelve studio albums, from Please Please Me (1963) through Let It Be (1970) —minus the White Album, whose re-release in that format was, as I recall, being held up for familiar legal reasons—, as well as various apocrypha, including the two compilation albums released in 1973 under the convenient titles 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, reflecting the conventional idea that the second principal phase of the Beatles' career begins with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). I will hope to revise this periodization here, at least slightly, but what I want to emphasize initially is that my renunciation of late-period Beatles output was not based on ignorance, for I knew the entire corpus of their work inside and out. It was, rather, a general dread that had developed over the course of 1983, perhaps connected to the early signs of my own incipient secondary sex characteristics, that I can only describe as a bad case of hippie-phobia. All that hair! It seemed to testify to the lycanthropic turn the 1960s had taken, and which my own physiology was now threatening to recapitulate, a turn that would bring with it not only hair, but beastly desire, monstrous appetite, a perpetual helter-skelter chaos of the soul. I think, now, I was trying to hold onto a mode of enthusiasm appropriate to the prepubescent child, as early Beatlemania had been, as it had been packaged by powerful commercial forces to be — a mode that was coded feminine, which suited me just fine, to be honest, a fawning and innocent proto-sexuality concentrated upon these admittedly talented but mostly just cute "mop-tops" in their little matching suits.

I liked John and George most, the "bad" Beatles, who even in their cute and besuited days seemed already to hint at something darker to come, the ones who would be the first to take LSD and to crack open the plastic shell of pop to reveal something primordial and unspeakable at its core. And though I could not yet form this idea consciously, I think I understood that my greater attraction to them was precisely an attraction to their darkness, which would have to be carefully managed and bounded by an upper chronological limit that placed off-limits the fullest expressions of their dark potential, which had been accessed, plumbed, and rendered into art for the first time on the 1966 album Revolver.

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2.

Or so I thought then. In preparation for this essay I have listened through all twelve of the Beatles' studio albums, Please Please Me to Let It Be, more times than I care to admit, looking for signs and meanings, either those that I knew without knowing when I was immersed in this material forty years ago, or those that I didn't know at all. My method has been something like what the old Amazonian shaman advises to the German ethnographer who has dragged his hand-cranked Victrola and an old Mahler record into the rainforest with him in the sublime Colombian film El Abrazo de la serpiente (2015). The German is looking for the mysterious yakruna plant, said to trigger visions that reveal the deepest truths of the cosmos. Karamakate the shaman tells him he should just listen to that music he has brought along with him for comfort instead: "But really listen", he says, like you've never done before. In my case this means in part listening to this body of work not just as music, but as a vehicle, and perhaps a catalyst, of history's unfolding. By the end of this essay I hope to have made clear what I mean by that.
   
   

Through this method of "real listening", I have become more sympathetic to the alternative periodization that takes the first chord of "A Hard Day's Night", at the opening of the album of the same name (1964), as the beginning of a cycle of interconnected works that is in turn closed by the last chord of "A Day in the Life" on Sgt. Pepper's — the chord that inspired the iconic tone of the Macintosh hard-drive reboot, that world-historical hand-off from Apple to Apple. It is with A Hard Day's Night, as the conventional history goes, that the Beatles and George Martin discovered the potentials of the studio-as-instrument approach, and that, contrary to pop conventions up until that moment, they first began to approach the album-level project as an integral work of art.

Here you can already detect hints of John's personality defects —let us call them—, with his early exploration of "stalker" themes on the 1964 album's "You Can't Do That". The first translation of this lyrical idea into musical mood, I think, comes with "Ticket to Ride", on the following year's Help!, a song John would later describe as the world's first venture into "heavy metal". The song features an unmistakable drone, perhaps adapted from George's still very recent introduction to the principles of composition at work in classical Indian ragas, or perhaps inspired by the Fluxus composer La Monte Young's introduction of his signature "dream chord" in works like The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962). But if we're looking for the real prototype, the first song that "went hard" like this in the history of pop music, we would surely have to say that it all starts with the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (1963), the first and still most exemplary illustration of the genius producer and literal psycho-killer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound technique, which revealed the power of the studio-as-instrument approach to make even a treacly girl-group reach depths of Wagnerian splendor.

LSD first flooded the streets of American cities in early 1965. David Crosby wasted no time, and the world's first proper psychedelic freak-out, the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" (1966), began gestating. Brian Wilson dropped acid around that time too, and began imagining that he was going to be the next Gershwin, doing for advertising jingles and Martin Denny-style exotica what the composer of Rhapsody in Blue (1924) had done "for" —or, perhaps better, "to"— jazz, even going so far as to tape-record dozens of hours of off-the-cuff reflections on the genius of Spector's work on "Be My Baby", among other symptoms of his unmistakable acid crack-up.

The Beatles were on an American tour in August of 1965, and it's from this period that the bulk of the music on Rubber Soul, which appeared at the tail-end of the year, began to take root. Whether or not John and George had yet tuned in and turned on in the fullest sense, it is safe to say that the two primary lubricants for this album's creativity, the two main determinants of its tenor, are, first of all, marijuana, and, second of all, American AM radio such as it had sounded that same summer. I have studied the Billboard Top 100 lists for July and August, 1965, and I think I can hear hints of several of these charts' figurants echoed on Rubber Soul: Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Ray Charles, the Byrds' rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man", and of course Bob Dylan himself as the earliest herald of "jangle pop".

Over all the album feels much more New York than California, a direct dialogue, in particular, with Dylan, with Greenwich Village folk, and an early exploration of the potentials for crossover between folk and rock, which of course Dylan himself had explored, to great controversy, when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival that July. The album's most important song is surely "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)": another of John's stalker fantasies (he burns his love interest's house down, in the end), the song is also lyrically cryptic and allusive enough to be categorized as Dylanesque, as sharing in the same spirit that would eventually win this latter guy a Nobel Prize. It's also, crucially, the first Beatles song featuring George on sitar (even if "Ticket to Ride" might have incorporated a sort of faux-sitar simulation using traditional western instruments).

George Martin's orchestral arrangements and John's hypnagogic sighing on "Girl" already signal the coming of "A Day in the Life". "Michelle" showcases Paul's talent as a balladeer while also channeling his encounter with Chet Atkins-style country finger-picking, his abiding concern to traduce pre-rock and even pre-modern popular forms, but without any of the cloying —and autochthonously English (so who am I to judge!)— debt to the music-hall tradition that would become so overwhelming a factor in the Beatles' output from Sgt. Pepper's on, and that would make both George and John, the "bad" Beatles, cringe — as when John denounced "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "more of Paul's granny music shit", though I'm convinced John never doubted Paul's ability to "go hard", should he wish, and one must never forget of course that "Helter Skelter" itself was Paul's work. That's his unbelievably powerful voice, seeming to foment violence even if he's only telling the story of some seaside English amusement ride. Had there been no Paul, there may well have been no Manson murders.

The album closes out with the Byrds-like "If I Needed Someone", and another of John's "dark Dylan" explorations of jealously and revenge in "Run for Your Life". John sang of the villainy that Phil Spector lived.

I'm telling you, man, rock-and-roll is evil. It always has been. That's not a reason not to listen to it, necessarily, but it does help us to make some sense of why an 11-year-old might instinctively sense a need to limit his dosage in anxious protection of the fragile core of his moral personhood.

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3.

The consensus long held that Sgt. Pepper's was the great milestone album that announced a Year Zero in the history of rock music. 1967 was indeed the year of psychedelia's fullest florescence, marked spectacularly by The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the "native psychedelic" debut from Pink Floyd — native, that is, in the sense that Syd Barrett et al. had never been anything but psychedelic pioneers, unlike Lennon and Crosby and, to cite the most extreme case, Brian Wilson. But as for the Beatles' particular arc, their own 1967 album really only superimposes more of Paul's music-hall schtick over a psychedelic sensibility that had already been perfected the year before, I think, with Revolver. I think this is the Beatles' greatest achievement.

When I exercise the method of "real listening" on it, I sometimes try to imagine that I was born around 1946, and that my girlfriend has long annoyed me with her fawning over the Beatles in their Please Please Me era, but now she has lost interest, or rather passed her interest to me, as the Beatles have become "guy-coded" and delivered to us a bounteous occasion for mansplaining all the intricacies of their music to our formerly fanatical womenfolk. What an album! My girlfriend just doesn't understand, man!

Now my scope here is far too broad to Beatles-splain Revolver to you song by song, but a couple of observations seem practically to make themselves. The opening number, "Taxman", is often hailed as the Beatles' first overtly political song, and what a way to get started down that path! Is it calling for an end to war? For love, peace, and happiness? No, it's calling for tax cuts for the rich! I've often commented that most of my former punk friends grew up and voted for Trump in the 2016 elections, and with "Taxman" we find one of the earliest burbles of proto-punk already sliding into that sweet spot where anarchic individualism meets economic libertarianism.

But that's not so interesting, for our purposes here. More worthy of notice is Paul's continued perfection of the craft of the ballad, free of any admixture of "granny shit", on "Eleanor Rigby"; the first unmistakable account of an acid trip on "I'm Only Sleeping"; the first straightforward and unapologetic exploration of classical Indian music on George's "Love You To"; the Donovan-penned infantilism of Ringo's contractually mandated vocal turn on "Yellow Submarine" (which is, quite seriously, not nearly as bad as I've been insisting for decades); the return of acid again on "She Said She Said", where we have the story of an unnamed young woman's experience of ego-death ("I know what it's like to be dead", etc.); as well as several other highlights.

As part of the album-as-art approach to studio recordings, George Martin sought to ensure that each track be excellent in its own way, to avoid filler entirely, but also to pack a particular punch in the penultimate and concluding tracks of all Beatles albums' b-sides, to make them all reverberate in your head after it's all over. It is in fact the last three songs, I think now, that accomplish Revolver's artistic arc in this way: "I Want to Tell You", followed by "Got to Get You into My Life", and finished off by "Tomorrow Never Knows". You could not imagine any more superficially different expressions of the Beatles' range than these last two tracks. "Got to Get You into My Life" is the delayed echo of Paul's enjoyment of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles on American radio in 1965. Motown, too, after all, owed its success to a studio-as-instrument approach, and Berry Gordy was in every respect the peer of Martin and Spector. Paul's song in this sense brings together and acknowledges the unity of what could otherwise have appeared as divergent species of the genus of pop.

It's the antepenultimate track, "I Want to Tell You", by contrast, that tonally anticipates "Tomorrow Never Knows". Prima facie this is a pop song as well, composed by George, with a faint tonal throw-back to the album's earlier "Love You To", and with an absolutely menacing piano line throughout, played by Paul, that seems somehow to tell you there is something really disturbing on the way. The following song, Paul's Motown interjection, seems to suspend this expectation, only then for it to be powerfully confirmed in the final track. "Tomorrow Never Knows", I think now, is the reason I had made 1965 the cut-off year for my Beatles listening routines in 1984: I was not ready to "surrender to the void".

It's sometimes said that this song is the most successful effort in history to transfer to music the experience of an LSD trip. I'm not so sure about that — I actually think Brian Wilson's straightforwardly schizo-pop innovations on Pet Sounds (1966) and Smile (unreleased, 1966-67) get closer. It might be better to say this song is the most successful translation of an LSD trip for those of us who are not currently having one: that is, it's not a faithful copy-paste of what's going on inside the "psychonaut" —for what comes out when that is attempted is sooner a total breakdown of sense, as in Wilson's "Vege-Tables" (1967)—, but rather a rendering into a different mode of experience of the internal psychedelic condition in such a way as to make it make sense to any human listener.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" lacks a chorus, lacks a bridge, is nothing really but a continuous La Monte Young-style drone with a driving beat that seems somehow to anticipate electronic dance music while remaining entirely undanceable. This is all overlain with an ingenious guitar solo whose notes George has played in reverse order, and which then gets played backwards on tape, so that the notes come out in the proper order, but serially close in on themselves, rather than opening out and reverberating as a tone produced on a guitar string is ordinarily expected to do. And then there are the "leeches", as I for some reason always imagined them: the alien animal-calls that surely have some ancestry in 1950s sci-fi b-movie sound-effects, and that also seem to look forward to the high-camp silliness of, e.g., Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost (1974): one pictures a beach that has turned the wrong color after some poisonous algal bloom, and is now covered with unidentified gelatinous medusae that aren't supposed to be there, or some tentacular jelly-creature stuck to the wall of the Marshall family's cave, announcing the coming of an enemy even stranger than the Sleestaks. I also picture the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (1973), but again the naked kids are replaced by something more like jellyfish. Picture what you will, the psychedelic template is now basically fixed, and the old world is irretrievably gone. A good girl could perhaps listen all the way through Rubber Soul and keep insisting to herself that it was still 1963, that these lads were still lovable. By the end of Revolver, it is as if our post-war culture is now entirely covered in hair, somehow animalized and spiritualized at once, both fallen and transcendent, no longer talking sense, but also finally telling the truth about our modern condition: that none of this has been normal, that we are decidedly "not OK".

I still prefer the earliest period of rock-and-roll, let us say 1955-1965, to what came in the following decade. I love to see the contradictions mounting, the strangeness insisting on its own normalcy — Brenda Lee presented on TV by weird old men making awkward innuendos, billed as a cute little girl even as her voice channels traumatic scenes of an even earlier childhood of dirt floors and no plumbing, of single rooms shared with adults doing incomprehensible things; Little Richard, queer as fuck, doing his pure and wondrous thing in front of a segregated audience of screaming white girls — all of this just one massive self-contradictory powder-keg that you can tell is about to blow. (Sorry, I'm gonna go watch some Brenda Lee on YouTube now. I encourage you to watch with me. Everything about this particular clip, to me, conveys the essence of rock-and-roll; I feel as if it contains layers it would take a lifetime to unravel. And here she is, if that first one is too raw for you, seven years later, 1963, all grown up, at the top of her craft, and plainly filled with joy by the pure act of musical creation.)

The ascendancy of country rock by 1968, and of a back-to-the-roots aesthetic that notably characterizes the Beatles' final two albums, as well as the work of many other formerly experimentalist pioneers, may be seen in hindsight as something like an attempted Restoration, and a recoiling from the horror vacui that had descended on the culture a few years before. But even the normal, or perhaps especially the normal, could never fully reassure us again. Something had been permanently broken. Much effort has been spent by cultural historians trying to pinpoint the moment the legacy of the 1960s took a sour turn. The Manson murders are an obvious choice, but the decision to hire the Hell's Angels for security at Altamont Pass is also a favorite, alongside sever other options. I tend to see the psychedelic golden age as ending basically as soon as it begins, or at least as containing ab initio the seeds of its own corruption. Imagine it's 1960 and you are a working-class musician from, say, Liverpool, with some great talent and hope for the future, just trying to get noticed. Only five years later you have accumulated several lifetimes' worth of experiences that would make any mortal world-weary in the extreme, and you now find yourself next to a swimming-pool somewhere in, say, Beverly Hills, and a whacked-out runaway girl from Bakersfield, whose parents had eaten squirrels, crows, and clay during the Dust Bowl migration, is next to you, saying: "I know what it's like to be dead, man." And then before you know it, you know what it's like too.

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4.

Another thing happened in 1983: my dad took me to a Beach Boys concert at the California State Exposition and Fairgrounds. The opening act was David Lindley y el Rayo-X. Ken Smith was self-contented that day for being able to pronounce the "X" in question in correct Spanish, equis, as in Dos Equis, the name of his favorite brand of beer. David Lindley looked like some kind of pirate, I thought that was cool, and I decided on the spot that he was the main act. The Beach Boys, by contrast, it seemed to me, were giving Anaheim, they were giving Disneyland, they were giving Captain & Tennille, they were giving retirement to Palm Desert and pastel art that matches the upholstery, they were giving Scientology: all that strange, strange, strange essence of California that I am still trying to figure out today, all that end-of-history emptiness that somehow makes most of my fellow Californians at least appear to thrive.

But how wrong I was! The Beach Boys are absolutely key to this story I'm now trying to tell. What Brian Wilson had figured out, probably also over the course of 1965, was that it was the products of mainstream commercial culture, as pushed to their very limit on the West Coast of the United States, that held open the greatest potential for avant-garde experimentation. It was the culture of the advertising industry and of lifestyle-marketing, the culture that had come up with Muzak as a genre of music specifically suited to commercial spaces, that was really the force that needed to be reckoned with and channeled if pop were to come good on its newfound ambition to high-art expressivity. In subsequent decades we find a derivative form of this apparent "synthesis of opposites" in consciously self-marginalizing figures like Boyd Rice, whose 1990 album Music, Martinis, and Misanthropy announces its intention to go even further than those of his peers who are making harsh noise records, by crossing over all the way into easy-listening. But Brian Wilson got there long before, and if by 1983 he himself likely had no clear vision of what he was doing nor any lingering high-art aspirations for his appearance at Cal Expo, but was only allowing the now-yuppified Boomers in the audience to indulge their un-self-knowing nostalgia, still, again, he got there first.

Brian Wilson gave us, I think, the most excellent illustration of what I have previously called "capitalist transcendentalism", with his all-too-familiar 1967 composition, "Good Vibrations". You might think I'm joking, and if you do this will probably be because you, like me, are most acquainted with this song in the altered and derivative form in which it was deployed to sell a certain orange-flavored soft-drink that, for several years, beginning already in 1979, its marketers hoped to associate with the abstract idea of California and its several pleasures: "I'm drinking up good vibrations / Sunkist orange-soda taste sensations", etc. But this is only, in turn, what I have previously called the "reuptake mechanism" built right into capitalist transcendentalism. That is to say that if there is ever any irruption of genius within this system, enjoy it while you can —or, if you come along to late, learn the method of "real listening" so that you can to some extent work your way back into a sense of what it had once been like—, for soon enough, it's going to be taken from you, denatured, cheapened, used to sell stuff. Even the Beatles, or perhaps especially the Beatles, are prone to this denaturing, and indeed in their case it is as if they themselves are at once the ingenious irruption and the Sunkist commercial, with these perpetually new devices the financial interests behind their work continue to invent to keep making more money. As a very apt piece in The Onion joked some years ago, after one of our current century's countless Beatles re-issues: "You haven't really heard the Beatles until you've paid to hear them one more time."
   
   

The real "Good Vibrations" is a masterpiece of almost unbelievable complexity, a "pocket symphony", as Wilson himself called it, consisting of several "episodic digressions", to speak with the musicologists, loosely connected with one another by secret principles only Wilson could have intuited, all spliced together by Wilson himself in the studio. The second digression in particular, at around 2'15'', with its famous repetition of "Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations happening with her" (whatever that means!) is a radical subversion of what anyone could have expected a pop song to do up until that moment: it goes quiet when the entire weight of the tradition would tell you to go loud. It is just so distinctive, like nothing else. I've always known that. I think we've all always known that. It's only in the past week or so that I've sat myself down and tried to figure out what, concretely, makes it so.

I do not think Brian Wilson is the greatest artist of the twentieth century. But I'm not seeking to come up with a ranking here. What I'm trying to do, rather, is to chart the progress of a single lineage, which we call "pop", and to understand how at a particular moment it ended up becoming so much more than what had been expected of it. Pop is so interesting precisely because it comes into a true poetic power that had not been intended, and that pierces the commercial vehicle that had been built to keep whatever creativity it might require hermetically sealed off as its own private motor of profit-generation. Wilson's ingenious and utterly American move was to seize on the world of commerce and advertisement itself, rather than, say, folk or jazz, as his vehicle.

The golden age of easy-listening that Wilson taps into in particular is one that we have tremendous difficulty recalling today, since by the early 1980s most commercial spaces stopped using Muzak or other specifically crafted soundtracks, and started instead playing familiar pop songs, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine or whatever, that were supposed to be the same as the ones we might consciously choose to listen to at home or in the car. For a long time now, in corporate environments, you are most likely to hear "real life" music: adult contemporary, or classic hits, or perhaps some much more specialized and targeted playlist. But perhaps one way to make this same point is to say that "real life" music just is a soundtrack to commerce. In this respect the decline of Muzak in the 1980s may be seen as a predictable result of the increasing infiltration of private spaces by commercial ventures. From a musicological point of view, the corporate world got a good deal, as the real world's generally superior musical forms replaced it. But from an economic and cultural point of view, the private sphere definitely got the lesser end: we gave the commercial world our music, they came right back and set up shop in our homes and in our heads. There is no specifically commercial space any more; it's all commercial space now.

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5.

Wilson, like Dylan, but unlike the Byrds (who together represent the Beatles' main "competitors", which is to say the forces in constant dialogue and exchange with the Beatles, and who shaped them into what they became between, say, 1963 and 1966), was resentful of the British Invasion, as he was looking to distill the essence of America into his music, and that was harder to do with all the interference from across the ocean. If the Beatles generally strike us as more interesting today, this is probably because they were working in "the international style", feeding off of America without feigning Americanness. The Beatles in turn seem to have resented the Rolling Stones and others who arrogantly believed they were in a position to take up American forms and fully to inhabit them — Paul dismissively referred to the Stones as a "blues cover band", and even the title of Rubber Soul seems to be an ironic and self-effacing statement about their own inevitable artificiality as British eclectics.

The eclecticism evolves —or degenerates, depending on your taste— into what can only be called postmodern pastiche on the two principal studio albums following Revolver, as well as the one-off singles and half-albums rushed out to fulfill contractual obligations. One of the more excellent moments of this transitional period, between the high-point of Revolver and the return-to-roots of Let It Be, was surely "I Am the Walrus", from the quasi-album and TV-special soundtrack, Magical Mystery Tour (1967). For decades I hated this song almost as much as "Yellow Submarine", but I've listened to it a number of times recently, and while I wouldn't say it's turned out for me to be a neglected masterpiece at the level of "Good Vibrations", I would say I am highly intrigued. The signature declaration of Goo Goo Ga Joob, in particular, has got me thinking. It long made me wince just to think about it; it was for me the very pinnacle of "cringe". I hear it differently now, according to this method of real listening that I've been touting. I feel like saying: it's stupid, it's very stupid, but someone had to say it. John actually said it! My man just went ahead and said it! Goo goo ga joob! Yeah!

Wherein exactly, does it differ from all that came before it? The obvious reference point throughout the song is Lewis Carroll, who likewise excelled at generating nonsense words and at frolicking at the very boundaries of sense. But "I Am the Walrus" sounds different to me now, for reasons I'm still struggling to articulate, but that must have a lot to do with the cultural history of drugs. It was opium, mostly, that shaped the sensibility of late-nineteenth-century artistic efforts to capture a feeling of the "weird". Then from the 1920s there was mescaline, which seems to me to generate much of the specific sensibility of early surrealism, particularly the cinematic efforts of Jean Cocteau or Luis Buñuel. And this can be so whether the individual artists used the drug or not — after all the entire visual culture of the late 1960s screamed "acid", whether or not the individual font-makers or advertising execs responsible for this transformation had themselves indulged. But if "Tomorrow Never Knows" translated the experience of LSD itself, "I Am the Walrus" marks the beginning of a new epoch of absurdism, absurdism suited to the real conditions of that moment in history, unleashed by LSD but now characteristic of the culture as a whole.

I feel like saying that the "kablooey" effect of LSD (to quote Jerry Garcia), building up since the 1950s but really making itself too conspicuous to ignore only in 1966, effectively made it impossible for all but the most cowardly and beaten-down conformists to go on simulating normalcy, to go on pretending that middle-class suburban values were enough to get one through a life in this completely precarious and completely absurd world we had conjured into existence. The visual and musical culture of the late 1960s, post-Revolver, now look to me something like when you alter the chemical signals in an ant-colony and they immediately begin, zombie-like, building chambers and tunnels with an entirely different form, and entirely different dimensions, than before: that's how much this new method for chemically altering human cognition seems to have reshaped social reality, and indeed reshaped it in a way that was much more adequate to our tragic condition.

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6.

In 1959 or thereabouts, my dad was out in the streets of Lancaster, California, with his co-worker Don Van Vliet, going door to door selling vacuum cleaners. Both Van Vliet and Smith are now deceased, but both during their lifetimes told the same story on several occasions: that together they went to the home of Aldous Huxley, author of the classic 1954 account of psychedelic auto-experimentation, The Doors of Perception, and sought unsuccessfully to convince him to buy one of these common household appliances.

Within the next decade Van Vliet transformed into Captain Beefheart, and with his 1969 masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, managed to push further beyond the limits of sense than anyone, I think, before him, making even Goo Goo Ga Joob look like Language, Truth, and Logic by comparison. My dad never produced anything of comparable genius, but I often think these days that perhaps he and Beefheart only followed out two different trajectories of one and the same legacy: the legacy of post-war Southern Californian self-creation, selling vacuums to make ens meet, sucking up bits of culture like motes of dust, variously avoiding or staring right into the vacuum — in that other common and more overtly terrifying sense of the term.

I think up until 1966 these former vacuum-cleaner salesman could easily have believed they were the same sort of men, with similar sensibilities and similar destinies. It was only after that fateful year that the legacies split, the sheep from the goats, the normies from the visionaries. To my ear, the passage from Rubber Soul to Revolver documents this process of fission as it is happening.

Correlatively —and I know this sounds excessive—, when I listen to "Tomorrow Never Knows" now, after so many years away, I feel like saying: 1966 was the last time some kind of real truth revealed itself in history. This explains in part, I think now, the boundary I attempted to set up in childhood, in the vain hope of preserving a child's sense of safety — in the vain hope of staying sane.

—

This is a draft of an excerpt from my forthcoming book, On Drugs: Philosophy, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality (Norton/Liveright, 2025). It could well get cut by my editors in the end, so enjoy it here!

Meanwhile, I'm reading my friend Benjamin Breen's excellent new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. You can read a wonderful review of it in The New Yorker. Ben is the real cultural historian of psychedelics; I'm just a student.

https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/from-rubber-soul-to-revolver

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[gilbertharding]

This Substack I subscribe to has rewired my brain with this analysis of The Beatles, drugs, pop music, George Martin's methods and stuff.

From Rubber Soul to Revolver by Justin Smith-Ruiu

"All that hair! It seemed to testify to the lycanthropic turn the 1960s had taken"

Full text under the spoiler:

Spoiler alert

1.

A journal entry from me, dated January 1, 1984, records a list of what appear to be New Year's resolutions. Most of them are unimaginative, and only testify to the common hopes and aspirations of an 11-year-old child. One however stands out: "No Beatles from after 1965".

What was that all about? I have trouble reconstructing the whole scene, but a few additional facts can help us at least to contextualize this enigma. Along with a pair of friends, whom you can still track down in Tucson and Long Beach respectively if you wish to do some independent fact-checking, I was, from the ages of eleven to thirteen, absolutely obsessed with the Beatles. At the time of John Lennon's assassination a few years before, I had been musically oriented towards more plainly childish tastes, Kenny Rogers, say, or Sha-Na-Na, but the news of the assassination insinuated itself into my burgeoning sensibility, and became a sort of foundational tragedy that soon enough led me to seek out any and all Beatles resources. A profile of "Paul and Linda at Home" in a 1983 issue of Marie Claire? If I saw that at the Safeway check-out counter, you could be sure it was going in the cart. ("The McCartneys are happy homebodies these days, but one thing hasn't changed: Paul still insists he's never giving up pot.")
   
   

In 7th grade, in September, 1984, we were called on to announce the title of the best book we had read that summer, and the kids all snickered when I declared of myself that it had been The Love You Make (1983), since of course any mention of "making love" is always a source of brief but certain glee among 12-year-olds. I was not however referring to the act, but only to Steven Gaines's "insider story of the Beatles", as it was billed, which of course borrowed its title from the concluding tune in the long medley on side two of Abbey Road (1969). Thanks to Mark David Chapman there had been a glut of such books in those years, most seemingly by random sound-engineers who once crossed the lads in the studio, or by some Liverpool lorry-driver claiming to have taught an adolescent Richard Starkey how to smoke. The first of such books that I read was Pete Shotton's The Beatles, Lennon, and Me (1984). The author was a perfect representative of this genre: a childhood friend of John's, and a washboard player in the Beatles' precursor band the Quarrymen, Shotton would be given some sort of role ten years later in the direction of Apple Corps., and would next go on to run a chain of diners throughout the UK under the name "Fatty Arbuckle's". The early '80s were a time to treasure memories of what had been lost, and also a time to cash in — and, one hoped, to do both these things in one and the same gesture.

But the truth is my Beatles reading, or at least my Beatles-adjacent reading, started somewhat earlier, and by mistake. This will horrify some of you, or perhaps confirm your suspicions, but the very first properly adult book I ever read from cover to cover, probably in early 1983, was the legendary LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974; written with Curt Gentry). My earliest awareness of the Beatles, was, then, doubly blood-soaked: I had somehow caught a glimpse of the cover of Yoko Ono's 1981 album Season of Glass, featuring a photograph of the iconic round glasses her husband had been wearing at the moment he was shot, one of the lenses now stained red, an artistic choice by our favorite Fluxus member rivaled in its in-your-faceness likely only by her riveting 1969 recording, "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)"; and I had seen, thanks to Bugliosi, a black-and-white image of the name of a now-infamous song from the so-called White Album (1968), which Charles Manson interpreted as a hidden message to him encoding a vision of the coming race war that was going to burn America to the ground, man, and that, in August, 1969, Manson's disciples scrawled on the walls of a house on Waverly Drive, alongside "Death to Pigs", with the blood of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

I had read that book by mistake, chosen at random from the significant selection of "California lawyer"-themed paperbacks circulating through the house. To this day it remains my only direct exposure to the "true crime" genre, which I abhor. But you've got to understand what it's like to grow up in California in the '70s and '80s. I knew a girl back then whose mom had once met Charlie at a laundromat in Sacramento circa 1966 (which as I've already hinted is a key year for our meditations here). It was said that she found him deeply attractive, and happily acquiesced when he asked her for a date, hopping into his VW Bug for adventures we can only guess at. This was enough to make the girl, I see now, appear to us as something like California royalty — the princess daughter, if only by way of some symbolic superfetation, of one of the great barbarian warlords who had been so central to the consolidation of the freak-clan's share of power in the rise of our state to global prominence.

But why, again, the prohibition on Beatles music recorded after 1965? Over the course of 1983 I had managed to collect cassette tapes of all twelve studio albums, from Please Please Me (1963) through Let It Be (1970) —minus the White Album, whose re-release in that format was, as I recall, being held up for familiar legal reasons—, as well as various apocrypha, including the two compilation albums released in 1973 under the convenient titles 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, reflecting the conventional idea that the second principal phase of the Beatles' career begins with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). I will hope to revise this periodization here, at least slightly, but what I want to emphasize initially is that my renunciation of late-period Beatles output was not based on ignorance, for I knew the entire corpus of their work inside and out. It was, rather, a general dread that had developed over the course of 1983, perhaps connected to the early signs of my own incipient secondary sex characteristics, that I can only describe as a bad case of hippie-phobia. All that hair! It seemed to testify to the lycanthropic turn the 1960s had taken, and which my own physiology was now threatening to recapitulate, a turn that would bring with it not only hair, but beastly desire, monstrous appetite, a perpetual helter-skelter chaos of the soul. I think, now, I was trying to hold onto a mode of enthusiasm appropriate to the prepubescent child, as early Beatlemania had been, as it had been packaged by powerful commercial forces to be — a mode that was coded feminine, which suited me just fine, to be honest, a fawning and innocent proto-sexuality concentrated upon these admittedly talented but mostly just cute "mop-tops" in their little matching suits.

I liked John and George most, the "bad" Beatles, who even in their cute and besuited days seemed already to hint at something darker to come, the ones who would be the first to take LSD and to crack open the plastic shell of pop to reveal something primordial and unspeakable at its core. And though I could not yet form this idea consciously, I think I understood that my greater attraction to them was precisely an attraction to their darkness, which would have to be carefully managed and bounded by an upper chronological limit that placed off-limits the fullest expressions of their dark potential, which had been accessed, plumbed, and rendered into art for the first time on the 1966 album Revolver.

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2.

Or so I thought then. In preparation for this essay I have listened through all twelve of the Beatles' studio albums, Please Please Me to Let It Be, more times than I care to admit, looking for signs and meanings, either those that I knew without knowing when I was immersed in this material forty years ago, or those that I didn't know at all. My method has been something like what the old Amazonian shaman advises to the German ethnographer who has dragged his hand-cranked Victrola and an old Mahler record into the rainforest with him in the sublime Colombian film El Abrazo de la serpiente (2015). The German is looking for the mysterious yakruna plant, said to trigger visions that reveal the deepest truths of the cosmos. Karamakate the shaman tells him he should just listen to that music he has brought along with him for comfort instead: "But really listen", he says, like you've never done before. In my case this means in part listening to this body of work not just as music, but as a vehicle, and perhaps a catalyst, of history's unfolding. By the end of this essay I hope to have made clear what I mean by that.
   
   

Through this method of "real listening", I have become more sympathetic to the alternative periodization that takes the first chord of "A Hard Day's Night", at the opening of the album of the same name (1964), as the beginning of a cycle of interconnected works that is in turn closed by the last chord of "A Day in the Life" on Sgt. Pepper's — the chord that inspired the iconic tone of the Macintosh hard-drive reboot, that world-historical hand-off from Apple to Apple. It is with A Hard Day's Night, as the conventional history goes, that the Beatles and George Martin discovered the potentials of the studio-as-instrument approach, and that, contrary to pop conventions up until that moment, they first began to approach the album-level project as an integral work of art.

Here you can already detect hints of John's personality defects —let us call them—, with his early exploration of "stalker" themes on the 1964 album's "You Can't Do That". The first translation of this lyrical idea into musical mood, I think, comes with "Ticket to Ride", on the following year's Help!, a song John would later describe as the world's first venture into "heavy metal". The song features an unmistakable drone, perhaps adapted from George's still very recent introduction to the principles of composition at work in classical Indian ragas, or perhaps inspired by the Fluxus composer La Monte Young's introduction of his signature "dream chord" in works like The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962). But if we're looking for the real prototype, the first song that "went hard" like this in the history of pop music, we would surely have to say that it all starts with the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (1963), the first and still most exemplary illustration of the genius producer and literal psycho-killer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound technique, which revealed the power of the studio-as-instrument approach to make even a treacly girl-group reach depths of Wagnerian splendor.

LSD first flooded the streets of American cities in early 1965. David Crosby wasted no time, and the world's first proper psychedelic freak-out, the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" (1966), began gestating. Brian Wilson dropped acid around that time too, and began imagining that he was going to be the next Gershwin, doing for advertising jingles and Martin Denny-style exotica what the composer of Rhapsody in Blue (1924) had done "for" —or, perhaps better, "to"— jazz, even going so far as to tape-record dozens of hours of off-the-cuff reflections on the genius of Spector's work on "Be My Baby", among other symptoms of his unmistakable acid crack-up.

The Beatles were on an American tour in August of 1965, and it's from this period that the bulk of the music on Rubber Soul, which appeared at the tail-end of the year, began to take root. Whether or not John and George had yet tuned in and turned on in the fullest sense, it is safe to say that the two primary lubricants for this album's creativity, the two main determinants of its tenor, are, first of all, marijuana, and, second of all, American AM radio such as it had sounded that same summer. I have studied the Billboard Top 100 lists for July and August, 1965, and I think I can hear hints of several of these charts' figurants echoed on Rubber Soul: Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Ray Charles, the Byrds' rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man", and of course Bob Dylan himself as the earliest herald of "jangle pop".

Over all the album feels much more New York than California, a direct dialogue, in particular, with Dylan, with Greenwich Village folk, and an early exploration of the potentials for crossover between folk and rock, which of course Dylan himself had explored, to great controversy, when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival that July. The album's most important song is surely "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)": another of John's stalker fantasies (he burns his love interest's house down, in the end), the song is also lyrically cryptic and allusive enough to be categorized as Dylanesque, as sharing in the same spirit that would eventually win this latter guy a Nobel Prize. It's also, crucially, the first Beatles song featuring George on sitar (even if "Ticket to Ride" might have incorporated a sort of faux-sitar simulation using traditional western instruments).

George Martin's orchestral arrangements and John's hypnagogic sighing on "Girl" already signal the coming of "A Day in the Life". "Michelle" showcases Paul's talent as a balladeer while also channeling his encounter with Chet Atkins-style country finger-picking, his abiding concern to traduce pre-rock and even pre-modern popular forms, but without any of the cloying —and autochthonously English (so who am I to judge!)— debt to the music-hall tradition that would become so overwhelming a factor in the Beatles' output from Sgt. Pepper's on, and that would make both George and John, the "bad" Beatles, cringe — as when John denounced "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "more of Paul's granny music shit", though I'm convinced John never doubted Paul's ability to "go hard", should he wish, and one must never forget of course that "Helter Skelter" itself was Paul's work. That's his unbelievably powerful voice, seeming to foment violence even if he's only telling the story of some seaside English amusement ride. Had there been no Paul, there may well have been no Manson murders.

The album closes out with the Byrds-like "If I Needed Someone", and another of John's "dark Dylan" explorations of jealously and revenge in "Run for Your Life". John sang of the villainy that Phil Spector lived.

I'm telling you, man, rock-and-roll is evil. It always has been. That's not a reason not to listen to it, necessarily, but it does help us to make some sense of why an 11-year-old might instinctively sense a need to limit his dosage in anxious protection of the fragile core of his moral personhood.

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3.

The consensus long held that Sgt. Pepper's was the great milestone album that announced a Year Zero in the history of rock music. 1967 was indeed the year of psychedelia's fullest florescence, marked spectacularly by The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the "native psychedelic" debut from Pink Floyd — native, that is, in the sense that Syd Barrett et al. had never been anything but psychedelic pioneers, unlike Lennon and Crosby and, to cite the most extreme case, Brian Wilson. But as for the Beatles' particular arc, their own 1967 album really only superimposes more of Paul's music-hall schtick over a psychedelic sensibility that had already been perfected the year before, I think, with Revolver. I think this is the Beatles' greatest achievement.

When I exercise the method of "real listening" on it, I sometimes try to imagine that I was born around 1946, and that my girlfriend has long annoyed me with her fawning over the Beatles in their Please Please Me era, but now she has lost interest, or rather passed her interest to me, as the Beatles have become "guy-coded" and delivered to us a bounteous occasion for mansplaining all the intricacies of their music to our formerly fanatical womenfolk. What an album! My girlfriend just doesn't understand, man!

Now my scope here is far too broad to Beatles-splain Revolver to you song by song, but a couple of observations seem practically to make themselves. The opening number, "Taxman", is often hailed as the Beatles' first overtly political song, and what a way to get started down that path! Is it calling for an end to war? For love, peace, and happiness? No, it's calling for tax cuts for the rich! I've often commented that most of my former punk friends grew up and voted for Trump in the 2016 elections, and with "Taxman" we find one of the earliest burbles of proto-punk already sliding into that sweet spot where anarchic individualism meets economic libertarianism.

But that's not so interesting, for our purposes here. More worthy of notice is Paul's continued perfection of the craft of the ballad, free of any admixture of "granny shit", on "Eleanor Rigby"; the first unmistakable account of an acid trip on "I'm Only Sleeping"; the first straightforward and unapologetic exploration of classical Indian music on George's "Love You To"; the Donovan-penned infantilism of Ringo's contractually mandated vocal turn on "Yellow Submarine" (which is, quite seriously, not nearly as bad as I've been insisting for decades); the return of acid again on "She Said She Said", where we have the story of an unnamed young woman's experience of ego-death ("I know what it's like to be dead", etc.); as well as several other highlights.

As part of the album-as-art approach to studio recordings, George Martin sought to ensure that each track be excellent in its own way, to avoid filler entirely, but also to pack a particular punch in the penultimate and concluding tracks of all Beatles albums' b-sides, to make them all reverberate in your head after it's all over. It is in fact the last three songs, I think now, that accomplish Revolver's artistic arc in this way: "I Want to Tell You", followed by "Got to Get You into My Life", and finished off by "Tomorrow Never Knows". You could not imagine any more superficially different expressions of the Beatles' range than these last two tracks. "Got to Get You into My Life" is the delayed echo of Paul's enjoyment of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles on American radio in 1965. Motown, too, after all, owed its success to a studio-as-instrument approach, and Berry Gordy was in every respect the peer of Martin and Spector. Paul's song in this sense brings together and acknowledges the unity of what could otherwise have appeared as divergent species of the genus of pop.

It's the antepenultimate track, "I Want to Tell You", by contrast, that tonally anticipates "Tomorrow Never Knows". Prima facie this is a pop song as well, composed by George, with a faint tonal throw-back to the album's earlier "Love You To", and with an absolutely menacing piano line throughout, played by Paul, that seems somehow to tell you there is something really disturbing on the way. The following song, Paul's Motown interjection, seems to suspend this expectation, only then for it to be powerfully confirmed in the final track. "Tomorrow Never Knows", I think now, is the reason I had made 1965 the cut-off year for my Beatles listening routines in 1984: I was not ready to "surrender to the void".

It's sometimes said that this song is the most successful effort in history to transfer to music the experience of an LSD trip. I'm not so sure about that — I actually think Brian Wilson's straightforwardly schizo-pop innovations on Pet Sounds (1966) and Smile (unreleased, 1966-67) get closer. It might be better to say this song is the most successful translation of an LSD trip for those of us who are not currently having one: that is, it's not a faithful copy-paste of what's going on inside the "psychonaut" —for what comes out when that is attempted is sooner a total breakdown of sense, as in Wilson's "Vege-Tables" (1967)—, but rather a rendering into a different mode of experience of the internal psychedelic condition in such a way as to make it make sense to any human listener.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" lacks a chorus, lacks a bridge, is nothing really but a continuous La Monte Young-style drone with a driving beat that seems somehow to anticipate electronic dance music while remaining entirely undanceable. This is all overlain with an ingenious guitar solo whose notes George has played in reverse order, and which then gets played backwards on tape, so that the notes come out in the proper order, but serially close in on themselves, rather than opening out and reverberating as a tone produced on a guitar string is ordinarily expected to do. And then there are the "leeches", as I for some reason always imagined them: the alien animal-calls that surely have some ancestry in 1950s sci-fi b-movie sound-effects, and that also seem to look forward to the high-camp silliness of, e.g., Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost (1974): one pictures a beach that has turned the wrong color after some poisonous algal bloom, and is now covered with unidentified gelatinous medusae that aren't supposed to be there, or some tentacular jelly-creature stuck to the wall of the Marshall family's cave, announcing the coming of an enemy even stranger than the Sleestaks. I also picture the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (1973), but again the naked kids are replaced by something more like jellyfish. Picture what you will, the psychedelic template is now basically fixed, and the old world is irretrievably gone. A good girl could perhaps listen all the way through Rubber Soul and keep insisting to herself that it was still 1963, that these lads were still lovable. By the end of Revolver, it is as if our post-war culture is now entirely covered in hair, somehow animalized and spiritualized at once, both fallen and transcendent, no longer talking sense, but also finally telling the truth about our modern condition: that none of this has been normal, that we are decidedly "not OK".

I still prefer the earliest period of rock-and-roll, let us say 1955-1965, to what came in the following decade. I love to see the contradictions mounting, the strangeness insisting on its own normalcy — Brenda Lee presented on TV by weird old men making awkward innuendos, billed as a cute little girl even as her voice channels traumatic scenes of an even earlier childhood of dirt floors and no plumbing, of single rooms shared with adults doing incomprehensible things; Little Richard, queer as fuck, doing his pure and wondrous thing in front of a segregated audience of screaming white girls — all of this just one massive self-contradictory powder-keg that you can tell is about to blow. (Sorry, I'm gonna go watch some Brenda Lee on YouTube now. I encourage you to watch with me. Everything about this particular clip, to me, conveys the essence of rock-and-roll; I feel as if it contains layers it would take a lifetime to unravel. And here she is, if that first one is too raw for you, seven years later, 1963, all grown up, at the top of her craft, and plainly filled with joy by the pure act of musical creation.)

The ascendancy of country rock by 1968, and of a back-to-the-roots aesthetic that notably characterizes the Beatles' final two albums, as well as the work of many other formerly experimentalist pioneers, may be seen in hindsight as something like an attempted Restoration, and a recoiling from the horror vacui that had descended on the culture a few years before. But even the normal, or perhaps especially the normal, could never fully reassure us again. Something had been permanently broken. Much effort has been spent by cultural historians trying to pinpoint the moment the legacy of the 1960s took a sour turn. The Manson murders are an obvious choice, but the decision to hire the Hell's Angels for security at Altamont Pass is also a favorite, alongside sever other options. I tend to see the psychedelic golden age as ending basically as soon as it begins, or at least as containing ab initio the seeds of its own corruption. Imagine it's 1960 and you are a working-class musician from, say, Liverpool, with some great talent and hope for the future, just trying to get noticed. Only five years later you have accumulated several lifetimes' worth of experiences that would make any mortal world-weary in the extreme, and you now find yourself next to a swimming-pool somewhere in, say, Beverly Hills, and a whacked-out runaway girl from Bakersfield, whose parents had eaten squirrels, crows, and clay during the Dust Bowl migration, is next to you, saying: "I know what it's like to be dead, man." And then before you know it, you know what it's like too.

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4.

Another thing happened in 1983: my dad took me to a Beach Boys concert at the California State Exposition and Fairgrounds. The opening act was David Lindley y el Rayo-X. Ken Smith was self-contented that day for being able to pronounce the "X" in question in correct Spanish, equis, as in Dos Equis, the name of his favorite brand of beer. David Lindley looked like some kind of pirate, I thought that was cool, and I decided on the spot that he was the main act. The Beach Boys, by contrast, it seemed to me, were giving Anaheim, they were giving Disneyland, they were giving Captain & Tennille, they were giving retirement to Palm Desert and pastel art that matches the upholstery, they were giving Scientology: all that strange, strange, strange essence of California that I am still trying to figure out today, all that end-of-history emptiness that somehow makes most of my fellow Californians at least appear to thrive.

But how wrong I was! The Beach Boys are absolutely key to this story I'm now trying to tell. What Brian Wilson had figured out, probably also over the course of 1965, was that it was the products of mainstream commercial culture, as pushed to their very limit on the West Coast of the United States, that held open the greatest potential for avant-garde experimentation. It was the culture of the advertising industry and of lifestyle-marketing, the culture that had come up with Muzak as a genre of music specifically suited to commercial spaces, that was really the force that needed to be reckoned with and channeled if pop were to come good on its newfound ambition to high-art expressivity. In subsequent decades we find a derivative form of this apparent "synthesis of opposites" in consciously self-marginalizing figures like Boyd Rice, whose 1990 album Music, Martinis, and Misanthropy announces its intention to go even further than those of his peers who are making harsh noise records, by crossing over all the way into easy-listening. But Brian Wilson got there long before, and if by 1983 he himself likely had no clear vision of what he was doing nor any lingering high-art aspirations for his appearance at Cal Expo, but was only allowing the now-yuppified Boomers in the audience to indulge their un-self-knowing nostalgia, still, again, he got there first.

Brian Wilson gave us, I think, the most excellent illustration of what I have previously called "capitalist transcendentalism", with his all-too-familiar 1967 composition, "Good Vibrations". You might think I'm joking, and if you do this will probably be because you, like me, are most acquainted with this song in the altered and derivative form in which it was deployed to sell a certain orange-flavored soft-drink that, for several years, beginning already in 1979, its marketers hoped to associate with the abstract idea of California and its several pleasures: "I'm drinking up good vibrations / Sunkist orange-soda taste sensations", etc. But this is only, in turn, what I have previously called the "reuptake mechanism" built right into capitalist transcendentalism. That is to say that if there is ever any irruption of genius within this system, enjoy it while you can —or, if you come along to late, learn the method of "real listening" so that you can to some extent work your way back into a sense of what it had once been like—, for soon enough, it's going to be taken from you, denatured, cheapened, used to sell stuff. Even the Beatles, or perhaps especially the Beatles, are prone to this denaturing, and indeed in their case it is as if they themselves are at once the ingenious irruption and the Sunkist commercial, with these perpetually new devices the financial interests behind their work continue to invent to keep making more money. As a very apt piece in The Onion joked some years ago, after one of our current century's countless Beatles re-issues: "You haven't really heard the Beatles until you've paid to hear them one more time."
   
   

The real "Good Vibrations" is a masterpiece of almost unbelievable complexity, a "pocket symphony", as Wilson himself called it, consisting of several "episodic digressions", to speak with the musicologists, loosely connected with one another by secret principles only Wilson could have intuited, all spliced together by Wilson himself in the studio. The second digression in particular, at around 2'15'', with its famous repetition of "Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations happening with her" (whatever that means!) is a radical subversion of what anyone could have expected a pop song to do up until that moment: it goes quiet when the entire weight of the tradition would tell you to go loud. It is just so distinctive, like nothing else. I've always known that. I think we've all always known that. It's only in the past week or so that I've sat myself down and tried to figure out what, concretely, makes it so.

I do not think Brian Wilson is the greatest artist of the twentieth century. But I'm not seeking to come up with a ranking here. What I'm trying to do, rather, is to chart the progress of a single lineage, which we call "pop", and to understand how at a particular moment it ended up becoming so much more than what had been expected of it. Pop is so interesting precisely because it comes into a true poetic power that had not been intended, and that pierces the commercial vehicle that had been built to keep whatever creativity it might require hermetically sealed off as its own private motor of profit-generation. Wilson's ingenious and utterly American move was to seize on the world of commerce and advertisement itself, rather than, say, folk or jazz, as his vehicle.

The golden age of easy-listening that Wilson taps into in particular is one that we have tremendous difficulty recalling today, since by the early 1980s most commercial spaces stopped using Muzak or other specifically crafted soundtracks, and started instead playing familiar pop songs, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine or whatever, that were supposed to be the same as the ones we might consciously choose to listen to at home or in the car. For a long time now, in corporate environments, you are most likely to hear "real life" music: adult contemporary, or classic hits, or perhaps some much more specialized and targeted playlist. But perhaps one way to make this same point is to say that "real life" music just is a soundtrack to commerce. In this respect the decline of Muzak in the 1980s may be seen as a predictable result of the increasing infiltration of private spaces by commercial ventures. From a musicological point of view, the corporate world got a good deal, as the real world's generally superior musical forms replaced it. But from an economic and cultural point of view, the private sphere definitely got the lesser end: we gave the commercial world our music, they came right back and set up shop in our homes and in our heads. There is no specifically commercial space any more; it's all commercial space now.

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5.

Wilson, like Dylan, but unlike the Byrds (who together represent the Beatles' main "competitors", which is to say the forces in constant dialogue and exchange with the Beatles, and who shaped them into what they became between, say, 1963 and 1966), was resentful of the British Invasion, as he was looking to distill the essence of America into his music, and that was harder to do with all the interference from across the ocean. If the Beatles generally strike us as more interesting today, this is probably because they were working in "the international style", feeding off of America without feigning Americanness. The Beatles in turn seem to have resented the Rolling Stones and others who arrogantly believed they were in a position to take up American forms and fully to inhabit them — Paul dismissively referred to the Stones as a "blues cover band", and even the title of Rubber Soul seems to be an ironic and self-effacing statement about their own inevitable artificiality as British eclectics.

The eclecticism evolves —or degenerates, depending on your taste— into what can only be called postmodern pastiche on the two principal studio albums following Revolver, as well as the one-off singles and half-albums rushed out to fulfill contractual obligations. One of the more excellent moments of this transitional period, between the high-point of Revolver and the return-to-roots of Let It Be, was surely "I Am the Walrus", from the quasi-album and TV-special soundtrack, Magical Mystery Tour (1967). For decades I hated this song almost as much as "Yellow Submarine", but I've listened to it a number of times recently, and while I wouldn't say it's turned out for me to be a neglected masterpiece at the level of "Good Vibrations", I would say I am highly intrigued. The signature declaration of Goo Goo Ga Joob, in particular, has got me thinking. It long made me wince just to think about it; it was for me the very pinnacle of "cringe". I hear it differently now, according to this method of real listening that I've been touting. I feel like saying: it's stupid, it's very stupid, but someone had to say it. John actually said it! My man just went ahead and said it! Goo goo ga joob! Yeah!

Wherein exactly, does it differ from all that came before it? The obvious reference point throughout the song is Lewis Carroll, who likewise excelled at generating nonsense words and at frolicking at the very boundaries of sense. But "I Am the Walrus" sounds different to me now, for reasons I'm still struggling to articulate, but that must have a lot to do with the cultural history of drugs. It was opium, mostly, that shaped the sensibility of late-nineteenth-century artistic efforts to capture a feeling of the "weird". Then from the 1920s there was mescaline, which seems to me to generate much of the specific sensibility of early surrealism, particularly the cinematic efforts of Jean Cocteau or Luis Buñuel. And this can be so whether the individual artists used the drug or not — after all the entire visual culture of the late 1960s screamed "acid", whether or not the individual font-makers or advertising execs responsible for this transformation had themselves indulged. But if "Tomorrow Never Knows" translated the experience of LSD itself, "I Am the Walrus" marks the beginning of a new epoch of absurdism, absurdism suited to the real conditions of that moment in history, unleashed by LSD but now characteristic of the culture as a whole.

I feel like saying that the "kablooey" effect of LSD (to quote Jerry Garcia), building up since the 1950s but really making itself too conspicuous to ignore only in 1966, effectively made it impossible for all but the most cowardly and beaten-down conformists to go on simulating normalcy, to go on pretending that middle-class suburban values were enough to get one through a life in this completely precarious and completely absurd world we had conjured into existence. The visual and musical culture of the late 1960s, post-Revolver, now look to me something like when you alter the chemical signals in an ant-colony and they immediately begin, zombie-like, building chambers and tunnels with an entirely different form, and entirely different dimensions, than before: that's how much this new method for chemically altering human cognition seems to have reshaped social reality, and indeed reshaped it in a way that was much more adequate to our tragic condition.

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6.

In 1959 or thereabouts, my dad was out in the streets of Lancaster, California, with his co-worker Don Van Vliet, going door to door selling vacuum cleaners. Both Van Vliet and Smith are now deceased, but both during their lifetimes told the same story on several occasions: that together they went to the home of Aldous Huxley, author of the classic 1954 account of psychedelic auto-experimentation, The Doors of Perception, and sought unsuccessfully to convince him to buy one of these common household appliances.

Within the next decade Van Vliet transformed into Captain Beefheart, and with his 1969 masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, managed to push further beyond the limits of sense than anyone, I think, before him, making even Goo Goo Ga Joob look like Language, Truth, and Logic by comparison. My dad never produced anything of comparable genius, but I often think these days that perhaps he and Beefheart only followed out two different trajectories of one and the same legacy: the legacy of post-war Southern Californian self-creation, selling vacuums to make ens meet, sucking up bits of culture like motes of dust, variously avoiding or staring right into the vacuum — in that other common and more overtly terrifying sense of the term.

I think up until 1966 these former vacuum-cleaner salesman could easily have believed they were the same sort of men, with similar sensibilities and similar destinies. It was only after that fateful year that the legacies split, the sheep from the goats, the normies from the visionaries. To my ear, the passage from Rubber Soul to Revolver documents this process of fission as it is happening.

Correlatively —and I know this sounds excessive—, when I listen to "Tomorrow Never Knows" now, after so many years away, I feel like saying: 1966 was the last time some kind of real truth revealed itself in history. This explains in part, I think now, the boundary I attempted to set up in childhood, in the vain hope of preserving a child's sense of safety — in the vain hope of staying sane.

—

This is a draft of an excerpt from my forthcoming book, On Drugs: Philosophy, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality (Norton/Liveright, 2025). It could well get cut by my editors in the end, so enjoy it here!

Meanwhile, I'm reading my friend Benjamin Breen's excellent new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. You can read a wonderful review of it in The New Yorker. Ben is the real cultural historian of psychedelics; I'm just a student.

https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/from-rubber-soul-to-revolver

[close]

Wow - I was a washer-upper at Fatty Arbuckle's in Canterbury over Christmas 1995. I had no idea there was a Beatles connection.

[fuzzyste]

Tomorrow Never Knows

Gives me an opportunity to drop this in here and see if anyone's heard it before. I love mashups, and this semi-official one produced by George and Giles Martin for a Cirque du Soleil show seems to fit together very nicely:

the whole album is great tbf, the strawberry fields version is bloody marvellous when it kicks in

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

FABS NEWS: a Peter Jackson-restored version of Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let It Be is being relased on Disney+ next month.

Today, Disney+ announced that Let It Be, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg's original 1970 film about The Beatles, will launch exclusively on Disney+ May 8, 2024. This is the first time the film is available in over 50 years.

 
First released in May 1970 amidst the swirl of The Beatles' breakup, Let It Be now takes its rightful place in the band's history. Once viewed through a darker lens, the film is now brought to light through its restoration and in the context of revelations brought forth in Peter Jackson's multiple Emmy Award®-winning docuseries, The Beatles: Get Back. Released on Disney+ in 2021, the docuseries showcases the iconic foursome's warmth and camaraderie, capturing a pivotal moment in music history.


Let It Be contains footage not featured in the Get Back docuseries, bringing viewers into the studio and onto Apple Corps' London rooftop in January 1969 as The Beatles, joined by Billy Preston, write and record their GRAMMY Award-winning album Let It Be, with its Academy Award-winning title song, and perform live for the final time as a group.


With the release of The Beatles: Get Back, fan clamour for the original Let It Be film reached a fever pitch. With Lindsay-Hogg's full support, Apple Corps asked Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production to dive into a meticulous restoration of the film from the original 16mm negative, which included lovingly remastering the sound using the same MAL de-mix technology that was applied to the Get Back docuseries.


Michael Lindsay-Hogg says, "Let It Be was ready to go in October/November 1969, but it didn't come out until April 1970. One month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see Let It Be with sadness in their hearts, thinking, 'I'll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again,' and it very much darkened the perception of the film. But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs? And then you get to the roof and you see their excitement, camaraderie and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter was able to do with Get Back, using all the footage I'd shot 50 years previously."

 

"I'm absolutely thrilled that Michael's movie has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades," says Peter Jackson. "I was so lucky to have access to Michael's outtakes for Get Back, and I've always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story. Over three parts, we showed Michael and The Beatles filming a groundbreaking new documentary, and Let It Be is that documentary – the movie they released in 1970. I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed after five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back, while Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unfailingly helpful and gracious while I made Get Back, and it's only right that his original movie has the last word...looking and sounding far better than it did in 1970."

[gilbertharding]

This is excellent news. I have only ever seen Let It Be (the film) on a VHS so bad all the Beatles look like The Simpsons but underwater.