[What] kind of world did [the Beatles] evoke in their early years, from [their] interfusion of American black blues and white rock and Country-Western, of Anglo-Irish folk music and song and dance from music-hall and pub? From the start the Beatles were individualities who sought a corporate identity. Though only during the first year or two did Lennon and McCartney actually compose together, there's point in the ascription of the songs to their joint authorship. They needed one another for their ful...

[The music on Meet the Bealtes] was instantly recognizable and like nothing we had ever heard. It was joyous, threatening, absurd, arrogant, determined, innocent and tough…. It was only in the context of the Beatles event that their music was perceived for what it was.

[The initial meeting between John and Paul] in the late 'fifties led to events that shook the world. This is no exaggeration. How many of us can look around and deny that the Beatles at least seemed to initiate many of those changes in our social attitudes and tastes that took place in the 'sixties and which still reverberate today? Possibly it was just the group's good luck to be so closely identified with these mass changes in consciousness. Yet many who still view the whole Beatle Ph...

The Beatles' music, up to the time of their first movie, still belongs in the earlier tradition of rock 'n' roll. Each new album had one or two really remarkable songs that today seem to anticipate the later pieces. But I have the feeling that there was a real change at about the time of A Hard Day's Night, and that the seeds of that change were literary rather than musical. They came essentially from Lennon's acute sensitivity to the spiritual world and to the hang-ups of...

An interesting example of the social construction of a mystery occurred in the late months of 1969, when a strange surge of excitement spread across the country, fomented, apparently, by persistent rumors relating to the nature and circumstances of the alleged death of Beatle Paul McCartney. (p. 61) The story, in gist, is as follows: Paul McCartney was allegedly killed in an automobile accident in England in November 1966. The remaining Beatles, fearing that public reaction to the news would adversely affec...

Some of the lyrics of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, and Leonard Cohen are the vaguest of all pop songs except, of course, for those that degenerate into utter absurdity. They are not different from much of contemporary poetry, which has also become so subtle and indirect as to admit to a wide variety of possible interpretations…. Very little can definitely be said about the theme of "I Am the Walrus," except that it is an exceptionally unpleasant song about death or ugline...

[The] Beatles are now in a position to do anything at all and have it listened to. Their recent oeuvre, notably Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour, is a great eclectic circus of Indian raga, Salvation Army, Benjamin British, tailgate, gutbucket, and aleatoric chance-music, all handled without hang-ups or uptightness. There is a lovely lawlessness about it that reminds one of the "indeterminacy" experiments of John Cage, the father of random music-making. ...

Since the breakup of The Beatles, Paul has had the unhappy role of playing villain, a problem that has been amplified by things John Lennon has said and sung, statements that Paul has not answered extensively in any interview. Only in his lyrics do we discover any of his attitudes, and even there Paul backs off the subject, being clever but not really incisive: "Too many people sharing party lines, / Too many people never sleeping late. / Too many people paying parking fines, / Too many hungry people...

Any close listening to musical groups soon establishes the fact that as composers and performers the Beatles repay attention altogether more than does any other group, American or English. They offer something for nearly everyone and respond to almost any kind of interest. (pp. 120-21) More aloof from politics than the Stones, their topicality is of music, the social predicaments, and especially the sentiments traditional to folk songs and ballads. Maybe the most important service of the Beatles and similar...

The question is: why do we need A Hard Day's Night so much that we keep showing it as often as we do? (p. 84) Childhood is our goal. Concomitant with being a child exists the pleasure one gets from playing and the intolerable displeasure one gets from realizing one's dependency on others. Thus the Beatles play on the rugby field in that most pleasurable scene which you want to see again and again. Four boys mock space and time—the sequence lasts under three minutes—as they play t...

When the Beatles broke up in 1970 in a welter of lawsuits and recriminations, the sixties were ending as well—in spirit as well as by the calendar. Bloodshed and bombings on campus, the harsh realities beneath the facile hopes for a "Woodstock nation," the shabby refuse of counterculture communities, all helped kill the dream. What remains remarkable now, almost 20 years after John Lennon started playing rock 'n' roll music, more than a decade after their first worldwide c...

If being a critic were the same as being a listener I could just enjoy "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Other than one cut which I detest ("Good Morning, Good Morning"), I find the album better than 80 per cent of the music around today; it is the other 20 per cent (including the best of the Beatles' past performances) which worries me as a critic…. When the Beatles' work as a whole is viewed in retrospect, it will be "Rubber Soul&#x...

Time was when the Beatles could be viewed as the vanguard of a cultural revolution without so much as bothering their heads about politics. Just what was implicit in their music was enough: an assumption of generational revolt and the existence of sub-cultures with alternative life styles. (p. 65) In the beginning, the Beatles never had to attack the system overtly; their very success implied the criticism. Being isolationist and apolitical was in itself a departure from the values of the older generation; ...

What has McCartney got that makes people of all ages the world over respond, that makes the media sit up and bark soon as he strolls across the pond, that makes his comeback solo tour a notary-certifiable Event in a day when rock tours are dubbed Events every time you turn around? His albums are, by and large, some of the blandest discs ever piped into a waiting room, and even his hit singles are so eminently forgettable that the titles evade recall without research. The man obviously proved he had a gift f...

September…. The Merry Pranksters are getting ready to head bombed out into the mightiest crazed throng in San Francisco history, come to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace. (p. 178) Inside the Cow Palace it is very roaring hell. Somehow [Ken Kesey, the leader of the Merry Pranksters] and Babbs lead the Day-Glo crazies up to their seats. The pranksters are sitting in a great clump, a wacky perch up high in precipitous pitch high up pitching down to the stage and millions of the screaming teeny freaks. ...

The history of the Beatles is pop culture's redaction of the myth of innocence and experience. When the famous four set out on their careers, they knew nothing of art or life. At home only in the rough-and-tumble world of the Liverpool cellar club or the Hamburg Lokal, they were a shaggy and ignorant crew. They could not read music, they could barely play their instruments, and their idea of a joke was to come out on the bandstand wearing toilet seats around their necks. Since then their careers and ...

[In His Own Write] not only has a style of its own, but at its best it has a very sure and delightful style. Moreover, it is not about the author or the group which made him famous; it is a collection of brief whimsies and simple drawings—pure fancy and nonsense concocted by someone who loves jumbling words and images. In reviews of the book, all sorts of literary wheels have been mentioned as influences—Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, James Thurber (I keep thinking of Kenneth Patchen, too—...

The Beatles will be remembered not only for their considerable contribution as songwriters and recording artists, but also as the most remarkable cultural and sociological phenomenon of their time. During the 1960's they seemed to transform, however unwittingly, the look, sound, and style of at least one generation. They had, of course, a lot of help from a great many friends—but it was more than anyone else, John, Paul, George, and Ringo who set in motion the forces that made a whole era what...

When I first heard Ram in bits and pieces on the radio several weeks ago, I hated it. I didn't care much for the single, either. But then, feeling myself getting swept up in the anti-McCartney backlash that seems to be building daily, I promised myself to listen to the album with open ears. I did, and now I have to admit that I like most of it very much. Musically, it's easily the most successful post-Beatle album yet. McCartney excels at composing riffs; he doesn't write concertos. His...

The Beatles are an agreeable bunch of kids, quite unsinister (unlike some of the American teenage comets), with that charming combination of flamboyance and a certain hip self-mickey-taking, which is the ideal of their age group. They are in fact the 'new Elizabethans' for whom the bishops called 10 years ago. Much of their appeal has nothing to do with music at all, but with clothes, haircuts and stance. What they sell is not music, but 'the sound', a slightly modified version o...

The Beatles really started the whole long-haired hippie business four years ago, and who knows whether they developed with it or it developed with them? All those hours of analysis are a gauge of how important the Beatles have become to … us. One song on Sgt. Pepper, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite", seems to me deliberately one-dimensional, nothing more than a description of a traveling circus. It fits beautifully into the album, which is kind of a long vaudeville show, but I feel a...

Lennon and McCartney's early lyrics were thin and conventional. There was rain in the heart, there were stars in the sky, birds were always threatening not to sing. The tunes were good, some of them as good as those of Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein. But the gap between words and music in pieces like "If I Fell," "And I Love Her," "Ask Me Why," "Not a Second Time," was embarrassing for anyone who wanted to take the songs seriously. The best lyrics...

No album in recent years has been issued in the midst of so much 'fuss and foofaraw as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."… The title tune, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is the latter: redundant without making a point by the redundancy. Its lyric is vague and cluttered. The rock intellectuals will claim it is full of meaning, of course. If it becomes desperately important for you to find meaning in it, a little grass will help: pot makes everything see...

The Beatles of Britain were seen in their first complete song on American television last night as Jack Paar presented a film of the mop-headed quartet on his variety show…. The young men from Liverpool, whose Merseyside version of rock 'n' roll has bestirred English teen-agers and sociologists to a communion of interest, aurally suggested a Presley multiplied by four. Visually, their calisthenics were wider and, upon somewhat fuller examination, might prove infinitely more amusing ...

[The Beatles'] format is that of anonymity and role playing. Although this group is comprised of multitalented individuals, nobody thinks of them as anything less than a unity. Their anonymity is purposeful and deliberate. They cultivate their ability to assume many roles but they never do so at the expense of fragmentizing that strong outline of the four of them in any one song or film. It's Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band but Sergeant Pepper is a corporate entity. They also ...

Band on the Run finds McCartney walking a middle ground between autobiographical songwriting and subtle attempts to mythologize his own experience through the creation of a fantasy world of adventure—perhaps remotely inspired by his having recently written "Live and Let Die." He does it by uniting the myth of the rock star and the outlaw, the original legendary figure on the run. Up until now, the critical assumption has been that McCartney's lyrics mean little if anything, that ...

There are no nagging inconsistencies in Abbey Road, no finger-pointing or exasperating enigmas, just a whole mess of sublimely executed, elegantly composed Beatles music. Yea, team.

Literary London, from parlor to arty mews, has been one great wide open door for noble primitives, even though London literati still live in the mental atmosphere of the 19th-century aristocracy, in the world of the universities, nutty sherry, curly Shelley hair, parlor floor libraries with trestle ladders, and mandarin wit. The enthusiasm for genius-savages has been in part a guilty sympathy for the proles and primitives and in part a romantic awe of raw vitality. Nevertheless, the case of John Lennon is e...

That "Sgt. Pepper" is different from [the Beatles'] previous albums should surprise no one. Every edition of their work has revealed change, sometimes intensive, sometimes casual. A large measure of the Beatles' attractiveness is centered around this basic—and probably intuitive—need to extend the limits of their art. Lennon is a natural lyricist in much the way, I would say, that Larry Hart was. Lennon makes banal rhymes and gets away with it. He can rhyme "...

By the weight of the crate, The Beatles is the most ambitious album of their career. It took five months to produce through a session of doubt as Paul was changing friends, John was changing wives and the four of them were trying to build a corporate Garden of Eden where they could walk naked, have their Apple and eat it, too. They were off the Maharishi but still whistling tunes they had written on the road to Rishikesh. I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind! shouts John...

As time goes by, John Lennon's importance to the Beatles becomes more and more self-evident. The same old story we've been hearing for years—that Lennon's wit and abrasive probing were needed to balance Paul McCartney's melodic charm and sweetness—is obvious but true…. Lennon probably had nothing whatsoever to do with Venus and Mars, the new Wings album, but somehow the ghost of his sincerity not only haunts but also accentuates the cool calculation of the Mc...

The Beatles, ninety minutes of music on two records, is massively boring, a collection of mediocre compositions given some of the most flaccid performances of recent months. The only tension on the album is between the quartet's snottiness and their indifference to the audience. A good deal of the new album is taken up with a variety of homages and parodies (and, by and large, parody is a lazy man's art form): mock country-and-western, mock West Indian, mock Beach Boys, mock teeny rock, mock e...

While the Beatles' audience might be preponderantly pubescent, at the same time their musical ideas attracted and influenced serious, sophisticated, professional musicians. A substantial part of their popularity among the young was perhaps more sociological than musical, and it seems safe to assume that a large number of teen-age Beatle enthusiasts had little or no concept of the musical content of their recordings. Their exuberant vitality, their delicate handling of sentimentality, and their real l...

First and foremost, Paul is still for all intents and purposes a Beatle—which automatically makes him preferable to Hubert Humphrey or Judy Garland under just about any grid of analysis you'd be likely to name. Second, the great Willie Nelson became the first country singer per se to cut a Beatle song and the one he chose back in '66 or so was of all things "Yesterday," proof that some people besides boobs and assflames actually dig that 4th-rate garbage of his. Third, wel...