Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk

All the merry little elves can go hang themselves.
My faith is as cold as can be.
– Bob Dylan, “Huck’s Tune”

I’m sure it comes to no surprise to regular Record Deskers that I’ve been a bit interested in the 2008 presidential contest in general and Barack Obama in particular. Also unsurprising – I’m sure – is my rather ambivalent relationship with “the Sixties.” The odd mash-up of Obama’s neo-JFK addressing the same Grant Park where Daley the First’s shock troops squared off against the Days of Rage put me in a Sixties-flavored place while watching the last bit of election coverage before bedtime. And yet despite all the signs and signifiers, it could very well be that with Obama’s election Tuesday night the doob-scented ghost of 1968 finally dissipated. If all the pundit-time happytalk is true, 2008 could be the year that the Culture Wars went to bed and never woke up again. I think the idea is that the two sides of the Boomer fuck-up scoundrel personality having had their chance, we’ve elected someone who is too young to have a primary source opinion on the “Summer of Love.”

I had initially planned on avoiding the election this week. I’ve been meaning to do a straight review of that Vivian Girls record I recently got. I’ve been wanting to take on the Hold Steady. But here I am, once again trying to wrap my head around things that happened before my parents were old enough to buy beer. Anyway, once I knew that the Sixties were going to hijack this week’s offering, I found myself torn over which Sixties to write about. My gut feel was to take on Let It Bleed and the endtimes vision of “Gimme Shelter.” It felt like the comfortable way to tackle that foul decade of targeted killing and social dissolution. Let It Bleed is an album length sneer. It seemed a sufficiently hateful record that would allow me to vent some generational conflict spleen.

Obviously, I couldn’t do it.

My father – being of a certain age – still maintains a certain boyish belief that the Sixties were a time of unimaginable promise that would have put a rainbow in every stewpot had the hopes of America not been shot in the street by that nefarious “them” that murdered King and the Kennedys. To hear my dad tell it, any hope of change for the better was eventually stomped dead by the tin soldiers of Nixon’s “Ohio.” What followed was an endless parade of horrors and small-time opportunities for selling one’s sole for pennies on the dollar.

I think the story ends with Reagan seizing power and swallowing the whole world whole as George H. W. Bush stood in the shadows sharpening his knives.

Of course, my own personal dad is not the only one to feel the Sixties as something special that got away, leaving nothing by salt and scrabbly, pointy subsistence in its wake. Hell, I’m sure part of my own ambivalence about the Sixties is subconsciously driven by a sense that I missed out on something transformative that will never quite come again. Even when Arthur returns, it’s not like he can reinstate the same unexpected, exciting Camelot that hooked everyone in the first place.

The Record Desk’s patron saint Hunter S. Thompson describes the Sixties thusly in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas –

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

That’s what haunts me about the Sixties, the sense that “history” quite recently happened and I missed it. I’m reminded of one of the Dylan interviews in Scorsese’s No Direction Home where he talks about his youth and how he imagined himself fighting and dying in some glorious battle, but it seemed like those sorts of battles no longer existed. I suppose it’s that same sort of bittersweet, egotistical yearning to be a part of history that finds me rummaging through the Sixties’ unopened junkmail for clues.

Maybe that’s part of Obama’s appeal for me. His speeches find him obviously riffing on Martin Luther King Jr. Since he emerged as a presidential contender, he has surrounded himself with Kennedys. His eloquence and charisma suggest Jack. His moralizing tone and seriousness suggest Bobby. He’s obviously going for a “new frontier” “ask not what your country can do for you” sort of thing. I mean, compare this –

We stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.

To this –

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Obama does not strike me as using the Sixties as a mere “Remember the Alamo!” sort of progressive rallying point. He seems to use it as an example of what is possible when optimism and energy let loose across the land.

I’m suspicious of this optimism. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I am very used to feeling doomed. And George W. Bush’s America has only made me more skeptical. Not to be over-dramatic, but living in the Nixonian nightmare world of W.’s America has felt like being kicked in the spiritual goodies on a fairly regular basis. The reign of Bush II has been a very “Beatings will continue until morale improves” presidency. As such, I’m not sure if I am capable of actually really hoping for some kind of better living through Obama. And I sure as hell don’t have the energy to be disappointed when it turns out that he must be sacrificed because the crops have failed when he could not make it rain.

I am much too tired to be fooled again.

From what I can tell, Obama has the power to really inspire. I got actual, typically-reserved-only-for-really-great-rock-bands goosebumps while watching his Grant Park victory speech on Tuesday. I felt dumb for doing so because it was a sign that I actually got my hopes up. If Obama Carters-up real bad, I’m going to know that I was a big, fat sucker who bought all the pretty talk and recycled platitudes.

So I feel like my authenticity is on the line here. Even if I just kept mum and pretended like I *knew* that Obama guy was a dink when he eventually tanks, I’d know that I for an unguarded second physically felt like things might change for the better.

So I’m taking refuge in the Beatles now – not the worldly, in-fighting, bearded Beatles whose collapse coincided with Let It Bleed and the end of the Sixties. I’ve gone back to the finest achievement of Beatlemania – A Hard Day’s Night. Even know how the whole Beatle thing turned out – John and Paul’s divorce, the lousy solo albums, the rampant commercialism, the fact that there are only two Beatles left – A Hard Day’s Night is the Beatle artifact that allows me to feel like it wasn’t all a dirty trick. The energy feels real. The Fabs really do seem like these cool, funny regular blokes who tell jokes and sing songs and run around like idiots for the sheer fun of it. That singular, clanging chord that kicks off the album and the movie’s breathless opening chase scene sounds like the beginning of existence itself. It’s the big bang and the universe is nothing but endless potential.

I guess that’s what I’m telling myself right now – it’s alright to hope a little. This could be the beginning of something fun and energizing and really worth caring about. Maybe, just maybe, it’s alright to run around like an idiot for a while and enjoy the potential – even if you know that it will end badly.

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The other night I had to defend the Beatles — and in my own home!

I’ve been slowly watching the zillion-episode Anthology film via the magic of Netflix, and on Sunday night I was choogling through Episode IV when my wife joined me on the futon and sighed that I was *still* Beatle-ing. This particular episode found the Fabs well in the grips of their dippiest NKOTB period — matching outfits, mass-marketing, screaming bobby soxers, official “Beatle” wigs, and the doobie-fueled Technicolor cash-in known as Help! During a particularly mincing live clip, Catherine points out that the band looks all of about four years old. She then muses that she would have “been a Stones fan,” and questions what was wrong with people that they ever thought *this* was cool. (She also declared England to be the ugliest country on the planet — peoplewise — but we haven’t room for that issue in this entry.)

At first glance, she has a point. If you take a gander without the aid of rose-tinted boomer goggles, the Beatles hardly seem that cool or daring or exciting in a lot of Anthology’s official Beatle footage. (I believe Catherine’s phrase was “whiter than Sinatra.”) The wholesomeness of their Epstein-crafted schtick is cloying when you consider that the Kinks and the Who were already nipping at the Beatles’ heels in late ‘64 and early ‘65 with downright punky cuts like “You Really Got Me” and “Can’t Explain.” And in our very own USofA, Bob Dylan was writing and releasing exponentially more sophisticated songs (e.g. The Freewheeling Bob Dylan) before the Beatles stuck chord one on Sullivan. And there simply isn’t room to chronicle all the R&B acts, girl groups, and surf rock bands whose catchiness and excitement factor were at the very least on par with the sometimes-tepid Beatlemainia-era Beatles. Basically, the Beatles were peddling weaksauce by the gallon.

Why then are the Beatles so damn great? Why are they untouchable? Why are they the Shakespeare of rock criticism?

A typical defense against anti-Beatlist propaganda is usually a loud “Ack!” followed by a litany of all the ways in which the Beatles changed music, ended the Vietnam War, profoundly changed Western consciousness, and traveled through time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. This defense is wrong and makes Beatlemaniacs and the Beatles in general kind of wearisome. The very worst example of pro-Beatle rhetoric is the St. John of Lennon bullshit perpetuated by any number of acid casualties, dweebish undergrads, stoned highschoolers, and soft-serve lefties. (If you ever get the chance, visit the John Lennon Museum outside of Tokyo. Its enough to make you wanna puke in the big white “Imagine” piano.)

However, I ain’t saying that the Beatles deserved to be dumped on. On the contrary, I dig me some Beatles — for both their historical significance and their sheer listenability. I am saying that you have to put all the Beatle business in perspective and not get carried away by all of the glossy “Voice of a Generation” hoopla that the Beatle brand crams down the maw of every living animal.

First, I’ll address the historical significance thing –

The Beatles both did and didn’t change rock and roll. The Beatles began as a rockabilly and R&B covers act and much of their pre-Revolver material is rooted in these styles. Many of the rock-oriented recordings from the first half of their career essentially sound like the Everly Brothers covering Little Richard and/or the Ronnettes. The Beatles also made plenty of room amongst their singles and full-length releases for lovelorn pop songs (often with a slight latin feel). Essentially, the Beatles took a handful of American pop styles and combined them to create a melodic, upbeat hybrid rock sound that’s part country, part R&B, and part Top 40 pop.

As the Beatles grew in popularity and songwriting prowess, they expanded their sound to include elements of folk revival, “world” music, classical, psychedelia, heavy rock, and so forth. Essentially, if something was popular or potentially cutting edge, the Beatles found a way to squeeze it into a pop rock song before everyone else caught on. For instance after catching an early Hendrix set it London, Paul McCartney slathered a mess of faux-Jimi guitar on Harrison’s “Taxman.” Much Beatle boosting lauds the boys from Liverpool for their innovation and their experimentalism. Phooey. The Beatles were tastemakers and synthesizers. They didn’t create and drive the ’60s counterculture so much as they channeled it, filtering it down to the vast public audience that Epstein’s marketing savvy had provided them.

In this Interwebz-addled age, it’s easy to write off the process turning “edgy” fringe styles into something with mass appeal as mere Pat Booneism. In the years since the Beatles, rock has become an ever-splintering niche game where all comers are constantly on the lookout for “authentic” rock experiences. Our instant info culture allows folks to sift through mountains of “lesser” material within minutes of hearing about a band or genre — quickly getting to the sweet meat of the real deal. Expertise is available to all Googlers great and small.

Once upon a time, rock and roll was neither mainstream nor readily accessible in every market. Bands traded in regional sounds. Small labels served smallish regional tastes. When rock and roll emerged in the 1950s, it started as a southern thing, and it brought along a lot of racial baggage — in addition to class concerns and worries about teen horniness and delinquency. Early rock smacks of newness. It’s raw and a little weird and delightfully brash. It’s product for a long-gone youth boomlet. It’s like space candy for the nuclear panic years. I’m guessing that it was early rock’s zing and unrelenting Americanness that sealed its appeal for dirty kids in England where the empire was shrinking and everything was Blitz pocked and war rationing continued well into the 1950s.

What the Beatles did was retool 1950s American rock and pop for the European market, and eventually for the American market that had kind of gotten over it like they’d gotten over hoola hoops and seafoam green Cadillacs. Essentially, the Beatles provided a first-hand rock experience for behind-the-time England (where Elvis never played) and a second, less-threatening (white? cute? matching-suit-wearing?) act for the American kids who’d been too young the first time around. So does that make the Fabs inauthentic usurpers? Yes and no. In the early 1960s, there wasn’t much rock and roll on television.

The squeaky clean Beatles weren’t revolutionaries so much as they were a gateway drug. They provided younger audiences and regionalized audiences with a big worldwide conception of rock and roll as a globe-spanning pop music. Their great innovation was not musical or even sonic. Their innovation was instituting a worldwide pop sensibility. They made it possible for pop/rock musicians to be a special kind of famous. They helped establish a pop universe where everything could be included provided it had a strong backbeat. The Beatles’ lack of authenticity led them to try anything once as they tried to stay on the “toppermost of the poppermost.” That they were and at least publicly affable with just a hint of cheekiness didn’t hurt.

Sure, the Beatles were fairly unhip to start — many American freaky types (Dylan, the Merry Pranksters, etc.) were reportedly disappointed when they learned the band were naive schoolboys and not dope mad loonies. And I have doubts about the Beatles as human beings. Several decades of tell-alls and mythbustings have revealed John, Paul, George, and Ringo to be 100% human. However, the Beatles serve as a handy guide to 1960s pop styles, and therefore have earned

Beyond historical significance –

Like all things deemed “classic” or “important,” the Beatles are often treated like vegetables or vitamins. In other words, you’re supposed to listen because it’s good for you. Rock and roll as a pastime — because most rock musicians and fans are pretty much extra-dumb about non-pop music history and music theory — largely lacks standards and critical rigor. The Beatles are the closest thing to certified rock and roll genius. They are mostly unassailable. They are perfection with Liverpudlian accents. Poppycock.

To treat the Beatles catalogue like a prescription for proper musical taste renders it dead and (worse) boring.

The Beatles began as an “act” specializing in “entertainment” — therein lies their goodness and some of their less good bits. Help! (the record) is a perfect example of the band doing cranking out fresh entertaining pop as well as schmaltzy dreck.

“Ticket to Ride” is one of my very favorite songs. The main lick is the first thing I ever learned to play on guitar. It’s got that Phil Spector beat going on beneath a ringing guitar churn. The lyric, while it’s wrapped around the Ride/Ryde pun, has a sinister, obsessive edge. It’s a tense number that only lets up when you hit the double-time rave-up that takes the song out on an up note — even though John’s “baby don’t care.”

“Help!” is another one — it’s all clang and angst. It’s got all the same twisted-up existential yelp as another of my favorite pop songs, the Who’s “Can’t Explain.” It’s such a straightforward declaration of exhaustion and beatenness. And it just drives relentlessly forward.

On the flip side, Help! is home to some faux Simon and Garfunkel filler “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and some typical Beatle toss-offs “The Night Before.” But the great crime against rock on this bugger is “Yesterday.” That’s right, I’ve got a beef with the most covered song of all time. In the Anthology episode we watched, Beatle Paul waxes Beatletastic about how he dreamed the melody (”like an old jazz standard”) and performed it solo to great applause and so on. That song is a turd. The lyric is pretentious and presumptuous for 25-yr-old Macca. It also doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. The melody gets caught in your teeth. It’s the “Glycerine” of its day. Thank goodness they followed it up with a “Dizzy Miss Lizzie” so you can quickly get the taste outta your mouth. “Yesterday” is obviously a crowd-pleaser — it’s a mom rocking snuggle-time sugarfest that feigns wistfulness and heavy sentiment. In short, it’s entertainment. Afterall, the Beatles didn’t just rip through Chuck Berry songs in Hamburg; they also belted out “Besa Me Mucho.”

If anything, the Beatles seem a bit awkward now because they come from a time when entertainment wasn’t required to masquerade as art. They soon learned the pose — just check Sgt. Pepper’s. We live in profoundly inauthentic times. Everything is mediated through entertainment and infotainment and spin-doctors and mission statements. As a result, we’ve developed a bit of an authenticity fetish. Something as breezy as the just-on-the-verge-of-going-hip Beatle music looks clumsy now that we totally know everything or can look it up without putting down the Cheetos. I’m not saying that the Beatles didn’t sometimes suck. I’m just saying that it wasn’t always as easy to know that they sucked.