536
RICHARD POIRIER
the question refers us to their music while at the same time alluding
to the promised results of drugs - a new "key" to personality, to a
role as well as to the notes that one might "play." Similar uses of
words that can allude both to the subject of the moment and to their
constant subject, musical creation, occur in "All You Need Is Love"
("Nothing you can sing that can't
be
sung"), with implications we'll
get to in a moment, and in the second song on the Sgt. Pepper album,
"A Little Help From My Friends." Sung by Ringo the "help" refers
most simply to affection when there is no one around to love and it
aiso means pot supplied by a friend. However, at the beginning of
the song it explicitly means the assistance the others will give Ringo
with his singing, while the phrases "out of tune" and "out of key"
suggest, in the broadest sense, that the number, like the whole occa–
sion, is in the mode not of the Beatles but of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band: "What would you think
if
I sang out of tune, /
Would you stand up and walk out on me. / Lend me your ears and
I'll sing you a song, / And I'll try not to sing out of key. / Oh, I get
by with a little help from my friends, / Mmmm, I get high with a
little help from my friends, / Mmmm, going to
try
with a little help
from my friends, ..."
One of the Beatles' most appealing qualities
is
their tendency
more to self-parody than to parody of others. The two are of course
very close for performers who empathize with all the characters in
their songs and whose most conspicuous moments of self-parody occur
when they're emulating someone whose style they'd like to master.
At such moments their boyishness really does shine forth as a musical
virtue: giving themselves almost wholly to an imitation of some per–
former .they admire, their necessary exaggeration of his style makes
fun of no one so much as themselves. It's a matter of trying on a
style and then - as if embarrassed by their own riches, by a self–
confident knowledge that no style, not even one of their own invention,
is more than a temporary exercise of strength - of laughing them–
selves out of imitation. Listen to the extravagant rendering on
Beatles
'65 of Chuck Berry in "Rock and Roll Music" or their many
~arly
.emulations .of Presley, whose. importance to their development
is everywhere. apparent, or the mimicry of Western music in "Act
Naturalli' on one of their very best albums,
Yesterday and Today,
or
the McCartney imitation of Little Richard singing "Long Tall Sally"
