I
Once upon a time1 when peace of mind and money returned to this homeless guy’s life, a destructive glutton reared its ugly head. An addiction, probably part of an unrecognized or not well-treated obsessive-compulsive disorder: the urge for Beatles-related book-buying streaks. Related to (not)feeling happy, (un-)belonging, cognitive (dis)functioning, maybe even being (un)successful? In the past, these elements slowly climaxed into over-the-top dysfunctional behaviors, joblessness, and homelessness.
For some people, books are ‘heroin’, like sugar and fat, and mountains. The consequences of these addictions are wider and deeper than most of us are able or willing to appraise.
To protect himself, ex-homeless Mr. Beatlefan uses a shopping list to guide his spending. Nourished by Lennon’s political songs, not the least ‘Working Class Hero’ (1970), he has some early morning wise thoughts:
“I’d rather not familiarize or limit myself by the supply side of the market.”
Four local bookstores in Amsterdam (Athenaeum, American Book Centre, DeSlegte, and Scheltema) offer a small collection of new and used Beatles books, and their assistants don’t know much. Too bad for writers, good for him. Once every month, he visits all four stores.
That urge is too strong to resist.
He goes in intending to stick to ‘only looking’.
Being a fan raises the risk level in many areas of life. Fandom is appreciated, scholars do research, they write books, and some make money, and friends, but less than a few gain fame. The problem with fandom is that it is not about what we need to live a loving life, but about what we want - our desires. If something hits the eye and triggers ‘interest’, there is DANGER AHEAD!, Mr. Beatlefan makes a note of the title, the author, the price, and the topics, and then walks on.
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Impulse control.
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To make that note is smart behavior, it is acknowledging the wolverine in himself, but at the same time, it is also an act of denial of the wolverine. The note you wrote may help, avoid havoc, or not at all.
Since World War II, the 1950s, in the Western culture and economic science ‘desires’ and ‘wants’ have replaced ‘needs’. The catch for our Beatles fan is that sometimes he finds himself crawling on the floor to get a closer look at what new interesting second-hand Beatles books have arrived on the bottom-shelf in the attic at Scheltema’s or in DeSlegte.
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“Buy, buy
Says the sign in the shop window
Why, why
Says the junk in the yard”2
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His “junk in the yard” is not only a dusty, rusty broken bike in the cellar but more so the hundreds of unread books on the shelves in his new home. Not the books on the desk he uses to write for a national daily. One of the causes are the books that disappeared while burning down the house. Indeed, not Rumi’s way of burning down the house. There are other books, and many other beautiful things, he lost to a woman in disgrace.
The good thing about Mr.Beatlefan’s book addiction is that when he visits me, he has a stack of interesting books with him. Most are enticing, we have a lot to talk about mind-blowing stuff.
But then again, are books the way to go, to get to know the Beatles story?
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Remaindered
Most books have been remaindered
And I am pleased.
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In vast quantities these old books are remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
during book-launch much-praised effort sits in piles.
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In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail – for behold, here is that book,
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
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The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail now all the awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon meticulous technique,
the author’s new individual voice?
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The brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.3
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When I am asked, “What should I read about The Beatles, instead of or after Wikipedia?”
My usual response is
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Listen to the music!
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Paul McCartney in 1969:
“I don’t like people explaining albums. The only way you can explain it is to hear it. (...) The album is the explanation and it’s up to you to make what you want of it.”4
Reading affects, but music has more potential to affect, as it comes in through more sensory faculties than letters and words. Walter J. Podrazik opened the preface of the interdisciplinary collection of essays for fans and scholars, ‘New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles - Things We Said Today’ (2016)5, by the way, the editors of this volume are the sharp and creative Katie Kapurch6 and Kenneth Womack7:
“There is a short path to Beatles fandom. Listen. Enjoy.”8
Ringo gets it too, recently he said on CNN:
“You don’t have to love us, but you certainly have to listen.”9
Reading affects our associations, perceptions, and well-being in the moment, and images, or music even more so. The physical proficiencies of the Homo sapiens sapiens have the biggest influence on what we experience. So, listen, dance, play the drums, sit down at the piano, play guitar, or air guitar if you don’t have a clue, get the broomstick out of the closet, and act out on ‘I saw her standing there’ and ‘Twist and Shout’.
Leonard Bernstein, yes that other musical genius living in the Dakota building while John and Yoko lived their strange lives there too, wrote in 1979 that with his daughter Nina, who was seventeen then, and was two in 1964, he recently played Beatles songs :
“… only last week we took out that thick, wretched Beatles volume of ill-printed sheet music and reminisced at the piano. We wept, we jumped with the joy of recognition ("She's a Woman") -- just the two of us, for hours ("Ticket to Ride," "A Hard Day's Night," "I Saw Her Standing There") ...
The Beatles are no more. But this week I am still jumping, weeping, remembering a good epoch, a golden decade, a fine time, …”10
If you can’t play an instrument, play the songs from vinyl, a cd, or stream this stuff. Follow the music and go where your bodily impulses take you when you put on repeat ‘She loves you’, as loud as it came thumping from the jukeboxes in 1963 and 1964. Keep on singing while you listen attentively to the bass and drum, and guitars. Take it all.
Wanna learn about and understand The Beatles?11
Allow yourself to go wild.
Go for XTC but without the little blue ones.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, you can do it, even when you are sixty-four, or more.
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Following the project Beatles6012 or B60 on Facebook13, I re-discovered early Beatles’ music. No, I did not really re-discover, I have always very much adored, admired, and was spellbound by, e.g. the ‘All My Loving’ EP, with ‘All My Loving’, ‘Money’, ‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Ask me Why’. Lately while listening constantly to their early repertoire, the BBC bootlegs, and concert recordings, what happened was a new realization - a re-appreciation of the early Beatles’ sound.
The early Beatles’ sound is about what you feel, the thrills, the lust, the magic, adolescent wildness, the trance, and the excitement of falling in love, the kick of rock’n’roll. Their songs also tell of unknown sadness, perhaps even fear, fear of rejection, of being left alone, “every night, when everybody has fun”.14
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“You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?”
W.B. Yeats15
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W.B. Yeats (1938) and annotator Marjorie Howes (2006) were right, the risky lust and rage are considered horrible compared to the comfortable poses and venerable wisdom, happiness, and peace, e.g. in the case of The Beatles ‘Here Comes the Sun’ (1969).16
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Is there anything you can do, because you want to have it your way?
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To understand why The Beatles’ music and The Beatles as a phenomenon were so successful, and why rock music emerged in the fifties and sixties, I suggest studying and getting a grip on the concept of ‘freedom’, as discussed in American and Western philosophy. Your exploration should focus on what was happening in the post-world-war-II Western societies from a social-economical perspective, and yes that includes education, the prime driver for emancipation.
Much of what happened in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s is caught in the idea that our concept of freedom exists in a connection with and in mutual opposition with ‘coercion’. A world that sanctifies individual freedom, as opposed to coercion, shows the emergence of the idea that coercion is probably more natural to humanity than freedom. In ‘The Metaphysical Club – A story of ideas in America’17 (2001) Louis Menand18 postulates:
“COERCION IS NATURAL; freedom is artificial.
Freedoms are socially engineered spaces where parties engaged in specified pursuits enjoy protection from parties who would otherwise naturally seek to interfere in those pursuits. One person’s freedom is therefore always another person’s restriction: we would not have even the concept of freedom if the reality of coercion were not already present. We think of a freedom as a right, and therefore the opposite of a rule, but a right is a rule. It is a prohibition against sanctions on certain types of behavior. We also think of rights as privileges retained by individuals against the rest of society, but rights are created not for the good of individuals, but for the good of society. Individual freedoms are manufactured to achieve group ends.”
I can see how it is useful and nice for you or me, and for all of us, and that would be called ‘socially useful’, to have a zone of protection for individual thought and expression. That is what we call freedom. To create that zone of individuality we could immerse ourselves in music. Immersing oneself in music is like masturbating, you are fully on your own, enjoying yourself – free to do what you want.
So for the sake of music, tell your neighbors you are sorry that you might actually be very loud for the next two or three hours, and that what they will hear may sound awful, but you are going to enjoy yourself, it’ll all be over before the wind dies down at dusk. Go home, plug in your earphones, play the ‘Second Album’ (US release), ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (1964, UK), and then keep on going, or come back, to ‘With The Beatles’ (1963, UK) and the Red double album ‘The Beatles 1962-1966’ (1973).
Step up and move your ass, sing, dance, scream. If you think that is stupid, then you have no idea about rock and soul music from the fifties and sixties. It was about freedom to feel and fulfill desires and do what we wanna do. The early Beatles’ music does not require a priori commitment as most other popular music styles, e.g. country music, techno, and jazz require. There was a lot of crap in the charts, and so is today. Popular music is often musically bad and emotionally mawkish, banal, and suffering from “all-around self-indulgence”.19
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You can listen and feel between the beats, and the words, and sung lines, or in hung-up notes. You got to move, to feel freedom.
Feel what the early Beatles’ songs do to you. Find out how you express the power of song beyond melancholia, melodrama, and nostalgia.
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Experience music before you talk about it.
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My choice for the early music of the ‘boys’ requires explanation. ‘Here Comes The Sun’ has more than a trillion plays on spotify. On spotify ‘Twist and Shout’ (early 1963) and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (late 1963) find a spot among the late career Beatles songs in the Top 10. The Beatles’ music from ‘Rubber Soul’ or ‘Revolver’ onwards, seems more appreciated by critics, writers, scholars, podcasters, fans, vinyl buyers, and streamers, than most of the early songs. The idea is that The Beatles as studio cats began to create good music and great songs.
In 2023, probably at any moment in time, somewhere across the globe, a hundred people or more are listening to their songs, and the idea behind the appreciation of the ‘Rubber Soul’ and beyond, Beatles’ albums, is:
“The Beatles' immense success is owing mostly to their ability in melodic composition.”20
As early as 1969 Robert Christgau suggested this is “a major flaw in Beatles scholarship”.21 I agreed then. ‘Canonization of any work or phase in principle misses the point because its interpretation and appreciation can change dramatically if the zeitgeist changes or if you have more biographical knowledge’.
and still agree sixty years later. The passion and meaning of ‘Money’ was obvious to me, when I was a young boy, 8 or ten years old. During birthdays our family, my father and his two brothers, cousins, and other family members, sat in a circle and talked politics, I heard them talking about money. The music was exciting and it was about real life too.
Robert Christgau:
“The Beatles were always wonderful. It was their ebullience as performers-as a musical group and as actors on the stage of the world-that turned them into demigods. Their copies of black rock-and-roll songs were touched with soul (compare their Money to the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann) but avoided the sodden seriousness of other white imitators.”22
So, if you can’t dance or don’t dare to be loud and wild, go into the fields, go outside, or go to what was once Lennon’s ‘windfucked, sea-beaten island: ‘Durn-ish’. Or if you want to go even deeper, start your rock group and play that music, not necessarily hitting every sound, note, or beat, pitch-perfect. Find the joy, that physical feel, not cerebral precision, and take it away from there:
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Go wilder, go subtler, go softer, give it your all.
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Wanna know what I mean?
“Take this brother, may it serve you well”23:
1. ‘Hey Jude’ (1968), with the Wilson Pickett vocals and brilliant Duane Allman’s slide guitar work,
2. Joe Cocker’s ‘With A Little Help from My Friends’, famous are the Woodstock variation or the 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen’s edition of ‘With A Little Help from My Friends’, and of course…
3. the 2004 Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood & Dhani Harrison performance of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, with Prince’s orgasmic Han-skyfucker solo, as a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison.24
All these performances have the heart-, gut- and pelvic floor energy of the early Beatles life performances that are lacking in most of the post-1965 Beatles studio creations. Though that contrast may be huge, they might be coming from the same source: epic romanticism. Musicality from the core, music from the bones.
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A Hard Day’s Night - The Beatles’ best album?
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An album full of romance, rock, dance, boom-boom, high-pitched voices, and brash music You can feel, where you can join in and be the co-lead singer, or lead-guitarist, that is ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
The sound of A Hard Day’s Night drives and pushes you on, the songs take you through a zillion shades of emotions, and feelings, and to a thousand places.
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‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is like the moves you make, the smells, the wetness, the touch, voices, colors, and the tastes that belong to sex, and which make any erotic experience a gorgeous deeply felt, memorable, and refreshing experience.
Got to play the music loud though,
and please make sure you do not infringe on anybody else’s freedom.
© 2023 / 2024 The Beatles Review of History. The work of the original interviewers and publishers is gratefully acknowledged and excerpts are reproduced on this site under allowances for fair use in copyright law. If anything on this blog constitutes an infringement of your copyright, please let us know, and we will consider removing the materials.
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Beginning with the “once upon a time” invocation, the narrative takes on the form of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are known for their potential to inspire hope in the face of injustice using stock characters and magic.
Two reasons the fairy tale construct fits my own life. I am not without a home and not without money anymore, though both are small in size.
The other justification is that Beatles fandom to me appears as a fairy tale, almost always disconnected from real life, except in the heads of the fans and in the bank accounts of ‘Apple Corps’, if that legal entity still exists. Studying fandom is basically studying people inspired by – but also tranced by something called entertainment, basically taking away money and mental energies required to deal with real-life individual and collective issues. Why study fandom instead of entertainment marketing, which is closely related to its shadow-sister soft-porno? I do know enough about both marketing, and the behaviors it intends to trigger, and fandom to understand mal d’archive and the repetitive compulsions. In the case of The Beatles, it is inevitable Charles Manson (Tate Murders), Chapman (killing John Lennon) and Abram (stabbing George Harrison) are extreme consequences of distorted mental capacities and sociopathy combined with Beatles’ fandom, as much as Sibbie’s or anybody’s desire to have a personal Jesus or John Lennon.
What I write is in competition with listening to music, a Beatles album, or whatever – I’m fine with that. There is also competition with podcasts, well not all, some are better than others, a television series, the NBA, baseball, a soccer match, a walk in the park, the beach, or a good shag in the back of a theater, or in the car ‘on our way back home’. Gotta give the audience, a pleasant and informative reading experience. I do hope I escape the swamp of badly written ‘free-association lists of interesting trivia’.
Nevertheless, perhaps this is the moment you better quit reading here. Put on the music. Forget written texts, go dancing, play music, and sing. Make sure you can feel what you are – you are not your profession, or what you do. Listen and dance to rock’n’roll, and feel the music of The Beatles.
From ‘Junk’ (1970). Paul McCartney.
James, Clive (1983). The book of my enemies has been remaindered. London Review of Books, Vol.5 No. 10, 2 June 1983. Assessed May 2023: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n10/clive-james/the-book-of-my-enemy-has-been-remaindered. Online.
Connolly, Ray (1969-2011). 1969: Paul talks about Abbey Road…the album. (edited from the Evening Standard, 20 September 1969).
- The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive. Plumray Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-9565915-2-4. eBook.
Womack, Kenneth, and Kapurch, Katie [editors] (2016). New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles - Things We Said Today. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-57012-3. Print.
Walter J. Podrazik (2016). Preface: How did they do it?
- Womack, Kenneth, and Kapurch, Katie (editors) (2016). Things We Said Today - New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles. Palgrave Macmillan / Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London. DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57013-0. p.vii.
Melas, Chloe (2023). Ringo Starr talks touring, the magic of The Beatles and his friendship with Paul McCartney. CNN. May 24, 2023. Assessed May 2023: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/entertainment/ringo-starr-tour-paul-mccartney-interview/index.html. Online.
About a piece on ‘Goodnight’, on The Beatles-channel… (McCartney) said “I don’t remember any of that...” Ringo: “neither do I”.
Bernstein, Leonard (1980). Introduction. October 9, 1979.
- Stokes, Geoffrey (1980). The Beatles. Rolling Stone Press. ISBN: 0-8129-1007-9. Print.
The text of the ‘Introduction’ is unverifiable, so it raises doubts about its reliability. Within a year after fulfilling this commission from Rolling Stone, he wrote a poetic tribute to Aaron Copland, in ‘Perspectives of New Music (#19; Fall-Winter 1980, Spring Summer 1981), dedicated to Copland’s 80th birthday, the poem includes Bernstein’s reminiscing about a meeting in 1937. From history, we know, Bernstein appreciated the fact that the Lennon family lived in the same community, and he loved The Beatles’ music very much. More importantly, at one time Bernstein “challenged his family to sing a round that he had taught them based upon John’s surrealistic poem ‘The Moldy Moldy Man’ from his first book In His Own Write (1964). To John’s great amusement, Bernstein’s family sang the poem to him at the annual potluck, perfectly executing the round to Leonard’s immense satisfaction. For his part, Bernstein relished the opportunity to pay tribute, however slight, from one celebrated musician to another.”
- Laird, Paul R. (2002) Leonard Bernstein - A guide to research. Routledge Music Bibliographies. ISBN: 0-8153-3517-2.
- Womack, Kenneth (2020). John Lennon 1980, The last days in the life. Omnibus Press. ISBN: 978-1-787601-36-9. eBook.
- Haughney, Christine (2010). Sharing the Dakota with John Lennon. The New York Times December 7th 2010, page 29. Assessed July 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nyregion/07appraisal.html. Online.
A colleague, ‘Pablo Deano’ from ‘The Intelligent Beatles Fan’ facebook-group responded in July 2023: “WHATS for the need to understand ? JUST ENJOY ! ! !”.
Lennon and McCartney (1963). ‘It won’t be long’. On ‘With The Beatles’ ...
Yeats, W.B. (1938). The Spur.
'the risky lust and rage are considered horrible compared to the comfortable poses and venerable wisdom, happiness, and peace…’
Howes, Marjorie and Kelly, John [editors] (2006). The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-521-65089-2. Print.
Marjorie’s Introduction (2006) was inspirational and provided the scene and tone for this article.
Menand, Louis (2001). The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-70638-7. Print.
Christgau, Robert (1969). A Short and Happy History of Rock - Amid the mawkishness, banality, and self-indulgence there is still good music to listen to. Stereo Review, 1969, May issue. Assessed June 2023: https://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/rock-69.php. Online.
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Lennon, John, & McCartney, Paul (1968). Revolution #9. at 6:53. On ‘The Beatles’ (1968).
Make sure you watch, listen, and feel the 2021 remastered edition. Assessed May 2023: