THE BEATLES
533
sounds" is itself a commercial necessity in their business, as the
anxieties of the second album of the Jefferson Airplane indicate, but
the Beatles will soon release their fourteenth, and it's not merely
"new sounds" that they produce, an easy enough matter with orches–
tral support, electronics and Asiatic importations. They produce dif–
ferent styles, different musical conceptions and revisions of sentiment
that give an unprecedented variety to an artistic career that had its
proper beginning a mere four or five years ago. The freshness of each
effort is often so radically different from the one before, as any com–
parison among
Rubber Soul, R evolver
and
Sgt. Pepper
will indicate,
as to constitute
risk
rather than financial ambition - especially three
such albums, along with a collection of earlier songs,
Yesterday and
Today,
in a period just over eighteen months. They are the ones who
get tired of the sounds they have made, and the testings and teasings
that produce each new album are self-inflicted.
If
they are careerist
it
is
in the manner not of Judy Garland, reminding us in each con–
cert of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and the pains of show biz,
but of John Coltrane who, when he died in July at forty, was also
about to give up performance in public altogether, even though his
reputation as one of the most influential musicians in jazz and its
greatest saxophonist guaranteed him an increasingly profitable concert
career. His interest in music was a continually exploratory one, an
effort to broaden the possibilities, as the Beatles do now in studio, of
his
music and his instruments. Like Harrison with his guitar, he
managed with the soprano sax to produce a nearly oriental sound, and
this discovery led him to an interest in Indian music much as Harrison
was led to the study of the sitar. And again like the Beatles, Coltrane's
experimentation was the more intense because he and his sidemen,
Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner, achieved a remarkable degree of
liberating, energizing empathy. Almost all such champions are extra–
ordinary and private men who work with an audience, as the phrase
goes, only when that audience is composed of the few who can per–
form with them. Otherwise, the audience is what it ought to be: not
participants but witnesses or only listeners to a performance. The
audience that in the theme song of
Sgt. Pepper
is so "lovely" that
"we'd -like to ·take you home with us" is a wholly imaginary one;
especially on a record contrived as an escape from public per–
formance.
