Dandelions In Still Air: The Withering Away Of The BEATLES

I was speaking with a friend via phone the other night on the comparative merits of current product (there is usually no other word for it) and personas of such waning superstars as Mick Jagger, Dylan, Lou Reed, Joe Cocker, George Harrison, and John Lennon. “It’s like they’re all having this contest,” my friend sniggered, “to see who can be the biggest zombie.”

I agreed with him to a certain extent, with the possible exception of Dylan (revivified, at least in terms of being a hot contender or contention again, by Blood on the Tracks) and Lou Reed (who is a professional zombie and can cackle in the grooves instead of up his sleeve}. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that of all the washed-up, moribund, self-pitying, self-parodying erstwhile pop giants to survivfe the Sixties, the four splintered Beatles may well have weathered the paH and decay of the Seventies the worst.

One by one, in order of descending credibility. Paul McCartney makes lovely boutique tapes, resolute upon being as inconsequential as the Carpenters which in itself may be as much a reaction to John’s opposite excesses as a simple case of vacuity. You could hardly call him burnt out - Band on the Run was, in its rather vapid way, a masterful album. Muzak’s finest hour. Of course he is about as committed to the notion of subject matter as HannaBarbera, and his cuteness can be incredibly annoying at times. If he was just a little more gutsy, he might almost be Elton John.

Lennon, as ever, seems Paul’s antithesis. He’ll do anything, reach for any cheap trick, jump on any bandwagon, to make himself look like a Significant Artist. His marriage to Yoko was culture climbing that revealed a severe and totally unexpected inferiority complex. There is a great story about Andy Warhol’s overtures, circa 1971, to John and YokO. Apochryphal or not, it has him

" it's like they’re all having this contest to see who can be the biggest zombie."

giving them art school undergraduate assignments - specifically, painting medicine cabinets white (or whiter) and gluing odd objects in them -as well as proposing that John invest in Warhol real estate so as to become neighborartists: “John, I know the loveliest pair of brownstones right next to each other. . .”

But that’s hearsay. What isn’t is that John has been staying drunk a lot, making a public spectacle of himself with such shamelss elan that Lou Reed is gonna have to hustle his ass or lose the crown: kotexes on the forehead, standing on tables in nightclubs screaming “I’m John Lennon! I’m John Lennon!,” disrupting the stage acts of his peers in a manner more befitting Iggy Pop or perhaps the famous Lenny Bruce - Pearl Bailey incident in Vegas.

Somehow you have to feel affection and even a curious sort of admiration for John as he engages in these escapades. In spite of the fact that they amount to a stance that might best be summed up as I Am Pathetic, Therefore I Am Charismatic (lifestyle is art, said John and Yoko, so now he’s Fatty Arbuckle, having left his Coke bottle on the train in A Hard Day’s Night), which itself has become trite in these dunced-out and depleted times, there is a curious mangled echo of the Olden Spirit of Beatle Mischief in all this public idiocy.

His records, of course, are something else again. Paradoxically, in spite of his lurching stabs at social significance, he moves closer to Paul’s mode of technically clean, spiritually piddling hackwork with each album. He sings about scars in his face on the barroom floor, but without much conviction anymore, and his instrumental surroundings are more blandly competent every time out. Walls and Bridges constituted a schlocky parody of the tortured artist writhing in a sterile sanitarium of his own design, and the fact that it reached Number One and spawned hit singles is disheartening in that it will certainly not encourage him to strivq for anything that might be transcendent in the way that the “Mother”-“Working Class Hero” album, for all its embarrassing infantilism and freelance spite, had a certain gauche and wretched majesty.

George Harrison belongs in a day care center for counterculture casualties, another of those children cancelled not (so much?) by drugs this time but something perhaps far more insidious. His position seems to be I’m Pathetic, But I Believe In Krishna, which he apparently believes absolves him both from his blatant abdication of any position of leadership and its paradoxical twin, the total preachy arrogance toward his audience which would be monumental chutzpah if it weren’t coming from such a self-certified nebbish.

Ringo is beneath contempt. He used to be lovable because he was inept and knew it and turned the whole thing into a good-natured game. Now he is marketing that lameness in a slick Richard Perry designed package, and getting hits via the strategem, but the whole thing reeks. It is a bit as if Peter Max were designing stage sets for Hee Haw’s Archie Campbell.

• • • So the moptops have ended up mopping the floor of the supermarket, which is keeping them from bankruptcy and no doubt reassuring them that they still Matter on some level, but they do not and never will again give off a glint of the magic they used to radiate with such seeming effortlessness. That magic is currently one of the hottest items in the Woolworth’s where Sixties nostalgia is peddled like bric-a-brac - in spite of the Sgt. Pepper’s Broadway bomb, Elton John was characteristically shrewd in releasing a cover looking back bemusedly at “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”

On the other hand, l am constantly hearing people say, with minor perplexity, that they can still play early Stones albums, but old Beatle records (like old

44 ...so the moptops have ended up mopping the floor of the supermarket... ‡‡

Dylan records), and particularly Sgt. Pepper, gather dust on the shelves. As with Dylan singing about Hattie Carroll, the Beatles celebrating the explosion of Love as a Way of Life amounts now to an artifact, just as today’s Heavy Statements will prove to be just about as ephemeral. Somebody told me the other night that people would still be listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” a hundred years from today, and Sgt. Pepper as well. He’s full of shit, of course, because “Stairway to Heaven” is not for the ages in the sense that Duke Ellington, say, might be, and as previously stated there aren’t that many here among us who listen to Sgt. Pepper even eight years after it exploded on the pop world and, as prophesied by Richard Goldstein, proceeded to all but ruin the rock of the next few seasons by making rank and file musical artisans even more self-conscious and pretentious than dope already had.

The center of any pop aesthetic has even less chance of holding than the last administration of this country had. Rock ‘n’ roll will not necessarily stand; currently it seems to be jaywalking on its knees. But maybe that’s a good reason to dig out all those musty Beatles albums and see if we perhaps can find in them, if not the bouncy mysticism that once seemed our staff of life, at least a good time. And perhaps in doing this we can discover the roots of the four separate styles of disintegration we’re currently witnessing.

1 have this theory, which has gotten me into minor fracases on a couple of occasions, that the Beatles’ initial explosion wets intimately tied up with the assassination'of President John F. Ken: nedy. In fact, I have been known to say that JFK’s killing was a good thing, historially speaking. A man died in an ugly fashion, he happened to be a man that people who didn’t know anything about corporate politics considered the leader of the “free world,” it was a national tragedy, etc. But on another level it was good because it opened a lot of things up. When Kennedy was in office we were living in a national dream world, the New Frontier as panacea, the illusion of unity. Underneath it all things were just as shitty as ever, but patriotism in those days seemed viable even for many of the avant-deviant-opposition fringes of our society. That misconception was shattered with the President’s skull, the dreanruwas over, and we were left with fragmentation, disillusionment (“I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t believe in Elvis,” etc.), cynicism, hostile factions. All of which was fine. People began to look inside themselves, instead of towards a popstar of a President, for their definition of America. Out of this forcible introspection erupted the New Left, acid, all those alternative lifestyles which by now have of course become even more oppressive and delusory themselves than the Kennedy era. So in that sense it was healthy for the body politic that we lost that particular leader; it forced us to contemplate a whole new set of options.

It also left us with a gnawing void which forced us to find new leaders, of a new kind or any kind at all, and fast. Thus the Beatles, exploding across America from Ed Sullivan’s stage and several different record companies, just weeks after the shot was fired. They were perfect medicine: a sigh of relief at their cheeky charm and a welcome frenzy to obliterate the grief with a tidal wave of Fun for its own sake which ultimately was to translate into a whole new hedonist dialectic.

I can remember the first time I ever heard the Beatles as distinctly as, I suppose, everyone else in the Western world. I was walking home from school, stopped off at the local record shop to check on the latest jazz, and there they were, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” spinning around and engulfing that shop with warm swelling waves of something powerfully attractive yet not quite comprehended, not yet. I wasn’t much of a rock fan at the time, but there was some unmistakable stunning blare to that record that set it completely apart from what had come before in spite of its seemingly rudimentary form. It was that high droning scream they hit you with on “Iwannaholdyour — haaaaaaaaaand!” and “I get hiigh,” something that connected with broader concepts and idioms than any previous rock, like a muezzin’s cry almost, and I stood in awe and thought: “The Beatles in the sky.” That was where that crv. on the last brilliantly resonant syllable of each of those lines, seemed to be coming from.

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Celestial and the boys next door all in one cheery impudent package - - Jesus, no wonder they were lapped up so greedily. Also that they were four, tilling the leadership gap with a new kind of junior (and illusory) democracy that gave the phrase “rock and roll group” a whole new meaning and inspired a whole generation, blah blah blah. But the point is that in spite of the fact that each had his fanatical adherents (“Sorry, girls, he’s married” on the Sullivan show), they were never John, Paul, George and Ringo half so much as they were the Beatles, and that stood for something that they never could apart or even separately within the band. To search for the roots of their current degeneration in those early records is, actually, probably fruitless, in spite of odd parallels and contradictions: cosmic peace ‘n’ love George used to write (at least for the band) almost nothing but bitter putdowns, shovingsaway (“Don’t Bother Me,” “Think For Yourself”); John could be as hateful then as he was now (from “You Can’t Do That” to “How Do You Sleep” is not so far), and Paul was always a closet schmaltzmeister (“Michelle”).

But the main thing that emerges from the career of the Beatles is the rise and fall of the concept of the group, which began to give way in rock to the ascendance of the solo artist at about the time they released their white album, which has often been criticized for being a collection of songs by four separate individuals instead of a unified statement. Not to get too pretentious, but it also parallels the decline of the youth culture’s faith in itself as a homogeneous group, for the proof of which we need look no further than the very corniness of a phrase like “youth culture” when you encounter it upon the page. That ain’t no fuckin’ culture no mo’, the blacks even started imitating whites imitating blacks, and the adjourned Beatles, like most of their peers and contemporaries, have by now finally settled for imitating themselves.

To listen to early Beatles albums, or any Beatles albums up to the white abortion, is to listen to collective enterprise, and of course the banality of the early songs becomes, doubly ironic when you consider that “love” in the “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” sense became transposed into “LOVE” as in flowers and beads grubbily handed to you on streetcorners and all you need is a little crystalline surease of sorrbw, the whole confused mess driving you crazy as John Lennon yelps out “Gimme Some Truth” and Paul responds from suburbia with “Another Day,” perhaps his most topical solo venture ever. Impotent flailings vs. the celebration of the mundane.

Maybe that’s why those old Beatle albums are so irritating today that just now, as I was playing Rubber Soul while writing this article, I took it off to type in silence, and my friend working nearby agreed that what once was ecstacy, the heart’s rush of being in love for the first time, had through some curious process become a mere annoyance. They’re out of time, out of place, out of sync with a present reality that isn’t particularly grim (from this chair, anyway) but neither is it exactly amenable to certain types of artifacts.

But the real artifact, of course, is not the record. It’s the mood. It’s the innocence, it’s the unconscious sense of intimacy and community which automatically self-destructed the instant it became self-conscious, i.e. the very day we opened up Sgt. Pepper and saw those four smiling moustasched faces assuring us with a slightly patronizing benevolence that all was well. There was of course a kind of smugness about it all, which led to such successive artifacts as Manson and John Denver. I don’t particularly feel like reading Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter either, not because I’ve OD’d on gore and outrage - it took the movies to do that - - but because it’s in the past, it’s boring, it’s old hat even, I’ve been there and I just don’t care anymore. So pop society (in the traditional sense and not referring to any narcissistic music-biz elitism) imitates pop art.

What made the Beatles initially exciting and sustained them for so long was that they seemed to carry themselves with a good-humored sense of style which was (or appeared to be) almost totally unselfconscious. They didn’t seem to realize that they were in the process of becoming institutionalized, and that was refreshing. By the time they realized it the ball game was over. In this sense, Rubber Soul (in packaging) and Revolver (in content as well) can b@ seen as the transitional albums. They doped it up and widened their scopes through the various other tools they had access to at the time just like everybody else down to the lowliest fringe-dripping cowlicked doughboy in the Oh Wow regiment, and the result was that they saw their clear responsibility as cultural avatars in what started out as a virtual vacuum (nice and clean, though), which of course ruined them. And possibly, indirectly, us.

But it’s okay. Because, while I would not indulge in the kind of ten-yearcycle Frank Sinatra - Elvis Presley - The Beatles who’s-next-now’s-the-time theories that have been so popular and so easy lately, I do think that, like the assassination of JFK, the withering away of the Beatles has had its positive effects. Acid heads can (could?) be unbearable in their arrogant suppositions of omniscience, but if there’s one thing good you can say about downs it’s that nobody could get pretentious about them. The spell and its bonds are broken. The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephejneral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock ‘n’ roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I’d like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn’t stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural (national?) resources. On the other hand, like Davy Crockett hats, zoot suits, marathon dances, and bootleg alcohol, they may well have stood for an era, so well as to stand out from that era, totally exhumed from it in fact, floating, light as dandelions, to rest at last on^the mantle where, neighboring your dead uncle’s framed army picture, they can be dusted at appropriate intervals, depending on the needs of Capitol’s ledgers and our own inability to cope with the present. ^

(Reprinted courtesy of the Real Paper.)