THE COMPLEAT BEATLES

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THE COMPLEAT BEATLES

I wacted the tube today, of boy!

BILL HOLDSHIP

As a rock 'n' roll fanatic, I originally bought a video recorder hoping to collect a lot of vintage rock footage. Although I've enjoyed recording everything from The TAMI Show to Monterey Pop to Rock 'N' Roll High School for posterity's sake, my main ambition has been to obtain classic clips of Elvis Presley, especially from the '50s (which is another column) and, of course, the Beatles from every phase of their career.

I've always been a bit of a Beatlemaniac—not one of those nuts who pays $ 100 for the Kleenex Ringo once sneezed in or anything like that (I don't even plan to buy the recently issued master copies LP collection)—but, like many people, their music and image/philosophy meant a lot to me when I was growing up in the '60s. As Bruce Springsteen once remarked when claiming he knew nothing about "art" until rock 'n' roll entered his life, fhe Beatles ''opened doors," and this was especially true if you happened fo be growing up in a small town where the main cultural activity consisted of hanging outand smoking cigarettes in front of fhe Dairy Queen. John Lennon was one of the few childhood "heroes" I held onto as an adult, and, despite a lot of fhe critical hogwash that's been thrown their way the last several years, I still think the Beatles were the greatest pop band of all time.

The Beatles were the most photographed, filmed and chronicled pop stars of their time—a true product of an electronic mass media, something which didn't exist during biblical times and probably explains why they may well have been "more popular than Jesus" in 1966. The group's history has been documented so many times that one more word on the subject would probably be the epitome of redundancy. Yef, despife this wealth of material, it was still difficult to obtain much video footage of fhe band during the last decade, with the exception of fheir feature films (regularly aired on TV throughout the '70s) and brief segments from television specials like Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt's excellent Heroes Of Rock 'N' Roll. Tragically, it was John Lennon's death which provided the opportunity to gain a lot of "new" footage from the major news networks, and let's face it—no matter how hard one tried to filter out the references to Mark David Chapman and murder, those clips will forever provide tainted memories.

The

Beatles were a true product of an electronic mass media, something which didn't exist during biblical times and probably explains why they may well have been "more popular than Jesus"in 1966.

If was for this reason that I eagerly awaited the release of MGM/UA's new home video, The Compleaf Beatles. Pre-release hype promised fhe definitive Beatles documentary, featuring two hours of history, music and "rare" film clips. Well, the claims were both true and false, depending on how you look at it, and I'm still ambivalent about the final production. The Compleat Beatles is definitely a disappointment, at best an extremely flawed "rockumenfary."

Narrated by sober "fellow Liverpudlian" Malcolm McDowell, David Silver's script is ultra-serious ("The Beatles were the poets of a generation and heroes of an era.. .They expressed and reflected fhe spirit of fheir time"), albeit historically accurate, and the main point of interest for Beafle fans will be the bits of trivia the film offers (i.e., the original title for Help! was Eight Arms To Hold You; the boys thought their success would be fleeting, and George hoped to make enough money to start a business when they "finally flopped," while Ringo wanted to be a hairdresser, etc.), making it worth at least one viewing.

The first half hour is probably the highlight of the production, and it's intriguing to see clips of, among other things, Liverpool in the mid-'50s, the Beatles' earl\ rock influences like Chuck Berry, Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, etc. (even though most of these shots have been seen in numerous other documentaries), Lonnie Donnegan and the British skiffle craze, Cliff Richard singing "Living Doll" to a roomful of girls doing the "hand jive" (I), Tony Sheridan onstage in the early '60s, and the sex clubs in Hamburg, Germany.

Unfortunately (and this is where the video runs into trouble), there are no films of the Fab Four from this early in their career, and the production relies instead on still photographs that are already available in most Beatle books. In fact, I'd estimate that over half of the show features still photographs—this even includes the segments on Help!, Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be—and you might as well look at a book for the same effect. And when the film stoops to just showing photos from the Beatles' album covers (a Revolver cover spinning to the strains of "Tomorrow Never Knows" for a "psychedelic" effect is especially obnoxious), it's pretty poor. Apparently the producers were unable to secure a lot of important clips. This is especially evident when Ed Sullivan is shown introducing the band prior to their

first appearance on his show. We see Sullivan announcing that the band will be featured "two times tonight—and here they are, the Beatles!" The scene immediately switches to the hysterical audience, as the studio version of "All My Loving" plays in the background, and we're never shown so much as a glimpse of the performance. Talk about an anticlimax!

Apparently to compensate for this lack of footage, a major portion of The Compleat Beatles is devoted to presentday interviews with people "close to the Beatles," but it seems at times as though the producers went out of their way to find anyone remofely connected to the Fab Four. (Marianne FaithfuII? Bruce "I Write The Songs" Johnston?!?). These interviews include fellow Liverpudlian "pop stars" Gerry Marsden (of Gerry & the Pacemakers) and Billy J. Kramer (well, I suppose they're better than nothing); Alan Williams (their first manager); singer Tony Sheridan; Bill Harry (editor of Liverpool's Mersey Beat fanzine); Horst Fasher (manager of the Star Club in Hamburg); Bob Wooler (deejay at the Cavern Club); musicologists Milton Okun and Wilfred Meller; Billy Preston, and rock critics Nicholas Schaffner and Lenny Kaye. While I realize that the latter two may be experts on Beatle history, they provide no new insights on the subject other than the

rehashing of rock critic cliches. Too much time is devoted to showing how each person was related to the band with photos of the subject and the Beatles together, and even someone like Billy Preston is given more importance than he probably deserves in the grand scheme of things.

The most interview time is given to producer George Martin. In fact, the video could easily have been titled The Compleat Beatles Featuring George Martin, that's how much time he gets. Thankfully, though, Martin is the video's most interesting subject, and technicians will be extremely interested in hearing how the classics (everything from the first session to Sgt. Pepper's to Abbey Road) were recorded. Martin also provides an abundance of trivia information, such as it was originally his idea to can Pete Best, at least for recording purposes ("He couldn't play drums very well. Couldn't keep a beat very well."). But it should be noted that there is nothing here that can't be found in Martin's recent autobiography. All You Need Is Ears, and this points to another major flaw in The Compleat Beatles. Video is a visual medium and, as such, the viewer wants to see interesting things. Unless it's a dramatization, history is generally more effective in a book than in a documentary, especially if most of the production consists of faces giving interviews. This make for rather boring viewing, and something you probably won't want to watch more than once or twice. Martin states: "It wasn't their music that sold them to me. It was their charm. They were very charming people." Sadly, despite his claim, there is very little in The Compleat Beatles to illustrate how charming they really were.

As far as actual footage of the band is concerned, there's both good and bad. The clip of the Beatles performing "Some Other Guy" (probably the only existing film from the Cavern Club) will be interesting to those who've never seen it, but the clip has been shown numerous times on everything from ABC's 20/20 to

Heroes Of Rock 'N‘ Roll. In The Compleat Beatles, it's shown not once, but three times. There's "Twist & Shout" from the '62 Royal Variety Performance at London's Palladium and the promo video of the boys in Sgt. Pepper gear for "Hello, Goodbye," both seen in Heroes Of Rock, as well as an early, unpolished video of "She Loves You," which is frequently shown on Casey Kasem's American Top 40. The producers scored a real coup by including the very rarely seen promo videos for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" (shown once on ABC's Hollywood Palace in early '67), and then they ruin it by interrupting the footage with George Martin discussing the songs—which makes it almost useless to collectors in the end.

Most of the press conference and interview clips, especially one of John and George immediately following Brian Epstein's death, are excellent, as are the shots of Beatlemama, footage of the band arriving in various countries during their world tour, examples of why touring became a hassle (clips of the band being "escorted" out of a hostile Minneapolis motel), films of the band in the studio, shots with the Maharishi in India, and the band performing "All You Need Is Love" with a celebrity chorus featuring Mick Jagger and Donovan for a '67 television special. Best of all are performances of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "From Me To You" at the Washington Coliseum in '64, and "Yesterday," "Nowhere Man'/ and "If I Needed Someone" at Tokyo's Budo Kan Hall in '66. It's fascinating to once again watch and hear how good the band sounded live—with no monitors and all that screaming (!)—and this is the type of stuff I could watch all night long. Although I'd never seen the Japan concert before, it still reminded me of a past so much a part of my life that the clips were like photographs from an old family album or high school yearbook—and I think that's what most Beatle collectors are looking for. Uqfortunately, there's far too little of this in The Compleat Beatles. As far as I'm concerned, for a Beatles documentary to be "definitive," it would have to be a lot like The Kids Are Alright or the also flawed but still superior This Is Elvis. Asa documentary, The Compleat Beatles is reminiscent of a fair to good TV special, and I've actually received more enjoyment from fhe recent videos of George Harrison's "All Those Years Ago," the Beatles' own "Love Me Do" (both seen on MTV), and even some of the amateur Beatle "histories" that used to regularly tour the university circuit during the '70s.

"It wasn't their music that sold them to me. It was their charm. They were very charming people." —George Martin

To be fair, I know several Beatle fans who think The Compleat Beatles is the greatest, and I showed the video to several members of my band who were fascinated by some of the trivia revealed. I've decided to hang on to the video because a few clips are worth having, and because it may be worth showing someday if I ever have kids who want to know what the big fuss was all about.

On the other hand, I may just give them several books—Hunter Davies' biography, Philip Norman's Shoufand, yes, even the best articles from Delilah's The Compleat Beatles on which the video is loosely based—because the production fails in one other major sense. Perhaps it's because we see the group in a different perspective now that we've had many years to view them as individuals as opposed to Beatles, perhaps it has something to do with the disillusionments time has brought, but the video fails to illustrate why the Beatles were so important and influential to an entire generation. Lester Bangs once wrote: "If the Beatles were greater than Jesus Christ, what does that make Farrah Fawcett-Majors?"—and The Compleat Beatles really doesn't show why the band was any more important than Van Halen, E.T., Darth Vader or videogames. Because they were, you know.

Better yet, I'll probably just give my kids the old records because only the music can slightly recreate what it was like to be alive during the greatest era of popular music the world has ever known—a glorious era when a group of musicians actually made us believe the fairy tale notion that love could save us all.

But we were so much younger then, we're older than that now.