LOONEY TOONS

LOONEY TOONS

Preserving The Beetles Fantasy

The Teenage Dwarf

In lurching desperation, with nothing else to key itself upon, 1974 seized the Beatles, made their potential - as opposed to reality - its standard, forced icons out of the unwilling sphincter of the past like so much non-metaphoric shit. The year produced: a Lennon album, a McCartney album, a Ringo album, a George album (and two he produced, one for raga-meister Ravi Shankar, another for a group called Splinter, who shall remain faceless because their music is). In addition: #1 status for “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (by Elton John); not one, but two, Beatle Fetish conventions (one in Boston, the other in New York); a stage show called “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road”; two marital mishaps (the split-up of George and Patti; the demise of John and Yoko) and rumors of a third (Maureen was going out with G.?); four McCartney hits.(“Helen Wheels,” “Jet,” “Band on the Run,” and as the year waned, “Junior’s Farm”), as well as more-or-less successful singles by the rest; the [Harrison tour; dozens of rumors about reunion, dissolution, further spats and turmoil. It was a drag.

We’ve never been much of a Beatle fan. Their first album escaped us, and the second registered principally as a weird Motown device. But though we loved “She L6ves You,” and “Ticket to Ride,” and much else, we always subscribed to Richard Goldstein’s opinion of Sgt. Pepper, thinking his argument flawed only because it was involuted. Pepper is not failed art, but failed rock. Also, we still believe, there were better English groups i The Stones and the Who, of that we are certain, and secretly, we suspect, late at night sometimes, the superiority of early Kinks and Yardbirds, not to mention Van Morrison’s Them, who were clinically Irish.

So all of this Beatle furor escapes us. What if they did get back together? Of the four albums they made last year, only Band on the Run has a resting place in our living room. Ringo’s and George’s were dispensable; John’s - because we’ve learned to love him - too much of an embarassment to bother with. A reunion of the Beatles? I’d rather hear the Stones play soul music -and they did that, last year.

We thought of all of this while watching Ringo’s latest movie, That’ll Be The Day, which is a complex of allusions to the Beatles. David Essex is named McLaine, but he looks like McCartney, and like Lennon, his father left his mother stranded. Like Lennon, he leaves his wife for his own reasons. His wife’s maiden name is Sutcliffe. And so on. We had thought of it previously, while watching George Harrisorf exude his odd combination of feigned humility and absolute, integral arrogance on the concert stage. We thought of it once more when John Lennon appeared, magnificently, to sing three songs with Elton John on Thanksgiving evening. It hardly crossed our minds during O’Horgan’s “play,” a crumby disaster.

It is hard to come to a conclusion. Like some, we despise Harrisonf thinking him a charlatan, like every other poseur since Huck and Jim met those phoney aristocrats on their raft. Like some, we think Lennon a genius, whose fits of inspiration alternate madly with bouts of inanity. (Kotex-head? Splitting with Yoko? Deportation? Divine mystery.) Like everybody, we like Ringo even as we find his output insupportable - “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Back Off Boogaloo,” “Photograph.” Three singles in five years. What would happen if these reunited?

Paul will not. He’s seeming smarter than the others, lately. Lots of singles, lots of output, a fine album, and he tours, if not America - which is good; that way we can’t be disappointed -then through the rest of the world. He is, it is becoming more obvious, not such a likely scapegoat. Allen Klein was a most over-rated genius, though he did have a flair for self-promotion.

But the Beatles reunion rumors will persist, even if. as I suspect, no one really cares. It is just that saying that we care makes us think there is something we all care about together - curmudgeon and hipster alike. Besides, it’s good copy. If the Beatles got back together, chances are that the reviews would not be all that good - George may not have been correct when he $aid he’s played with better, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t saying something useful. Remember Evel Knieyel? The question, after he landed, was why did the media cover him so heavily, since he was such an obvious rip-off, in the first place? No one seems to have noticed that the question was posed in the same publications - sometimes, we think, by the same writers and editors - who covered him so thoroughly in the first place. So it might be with the Beatles. We do not care to think these things through. That would deny us too much fantasy.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 49.

We are left with the words of Ringo ringing in our ears. “Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues. You know it don’t come easy.” Thank god for that. ' #