I listen, trying for fresh ears, to the Beatles. With map-making ears, witness ears, not the child’s ears that found Beatles music ancient and quaint, compared to the 70’s music that wouldn’t have existed without it. I am listening for the radio the day She Loves You debuted, for the Striking New Magic. It’s easy for me to see the leap from the magnificent She Loves You to the magnificent A Day In the Life. Tonight, though, I am listening for what is magnificent about the leap from the radio milieu to the Beatles’ performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. What could rumble in under Miles Davis for making tectonic changes in the music mind?
On the radio: Motown! Chuck Berry! And on some stations, the Sun Records artists. Not to mention the richness of 1960’s Country Music, plus all that Vegas music, Sammy Davis and Jersey quartet harmonizing. And sexy, sexy you want? Let me slip into a more comfortable font… Tony Bennett. Need we say Elvis? Amid all this music and celebrity, too, the Beatles produced a tidal wave. What features made them hit so hard?
Could the miracle be ‘extensive vamping?’ I wonder about these typical Beatles chord changes, did they invent them out of thin air? The tunings? How much of it was the sexy racy subject matter from socially plausible potential target audience mates – white guys, nice looking guys, singing about love. So many of us are here on account of the fab four. And then it turns out they really were fab. George Harrison. John Lennon. artistically brave. They are so influential they can’t be written about anymore. They made us listen to a much bigger bite of the Universe. What was the response to their meteoric transformation? Was there a wave of rejection, like when Dylan went electric?
Suddenly the stack of waxed paper heats to the point of transparency. I want to know why an albeit great thing might be so many times more intense than other truly great things. Knot. Convergence. I dreamed of the Beatles last night. Perhaps their power is Shamanic, and it just can’t be told because the Shamanic can never be told. Isn’t that right.
I played hookie to sit in the car and drink up satellite radio’s track from David Crosby’s new album, Croz. It is exquisite, David Crosby, nailing David Crosby. David Crosby told the satellite radio that the Ed Sullivan Beatles show was the start to the rest of his life.
And the Mamas and the Papas and the whole Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger thing, too. what is the convergence of the Beatles and the Monterey Pop Festival? with Haight Ashbury? Who drew tielines? I want to see them. What’s the line look like between the Beatles and The Who? Led Zeppelin? and Paul Simon, maybe suddenly, huh, we could hear each other, we could hear ourselves, and it didn’t take too long did it, working working working are the artists, all the way through the changes.
Let’s not forget one-hit and few-hit Beatles-esque bands like The Turtles. Song-wise, there was enough musical magic just sketching one of the Beatles’ moments that the velveteen Monkees came real. And not that the Beach Boys deserve to be in the same paragraph with the Monkees and the one-hit wonders, but Rhonda Rhonda help me git ‘er outta my heart, how about Brian Wilson, undeserving of the Salieri yolk, peddling and peddling to overtake the Beatles, having sort of an underdog’s shot in what turned out to be one aspect of the Beatles’ work. and that when Wilson heard Sgt Pepper, he snapped. He gave up. Seriously. Mr. Kite. What was to be said?
The amplifier. The radio. They made the music jump. I’m sure academics have died of word poisoning writing about the Beatles’ relationship to technology, and a whole separate plague of over-thinking about the Beatles as more than one metonym: one for audience response, and another for meteoric celebrity, a third for musical genius. I want to know how they all four of them got into my dream last night. George stood sideways in the doorway of my studio, his back and shoulder illuminated by my work, his face under darkness of the hallway shadow, just looking.