THE BEATLES
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soluble, and comic, because the recurrence has finally passed into
cliche.
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. The Rolling Stones, the Left Banke and the Bee Gees are
especially good, but in none of these
is
there an inventive productivity
equal to that of Lennon, McCartney or their producer George Martin,
whose contributions of electronic and orchestral notation really make
him one of the group, particularly now that their performances are to
be exclusively in studio. Only Dylan shows something equivalent to
the Beatles in
his
combination of talents as composer, lyricist and per–
former. In performance the Beatles exhibit a nearly total theatrical
power.
It
is a power so unencumbered and so freely diverse both for
the group and for each of its members that it creates an element of
suspense in whate,:,er they do, an expectation that this time there
really will be a failure of good taste - that attribute shared by only
the greatest theatrical performers. They never wholly lose themselves
in anyone else's styling, however, or in their own exuberance; they
never succumb to the excitements they generate, much less those of
their audience. It's unthinkable that they would lend themselves for
the rock and wreck sequence of the Yardbirds in Antonioni's
Blow-up.
That particular performance, quite aside from what it contributed to
a brilliant film, is a symptom of the infiltration even into popular
music of the decadence by which entertainment is being displaced by
a self-abasing enactment of what
is
implicit in the
form
of entertain–
ment - in this instance, of group playing that gives way to animosi–
ties and a destructive retaliation against recalcitrant instrumental sup–
port. When the Beatles sound as
if
they are heading orchestrally into
self-obliterating noise, it
is
very often only that they may assert their
presence vocally in quite the opposite direction: by contrasting choir–
boy cooing, by filigrees of voice-play coming from each of them, as
in the reprise of "Sgt. Pepper," for instance, or, as in "Lovely Rita,"
the little choral oo's and gaspings - all of these suggesting, in-their
relation to solo, crosscurrents of feeling within an agreed area of play.
Manners so instinctively free and yet so harmonious could -not. be–
guided from outside, either by an audience or even -by directorial
