THE BEATLES
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tUTed, mingled musical phrases drifting into a blur which my friend
Paul Bertram pointed out to me is like the sounds of a radio at night
fading and drifting among the signals of different stations. We
can make out fragments of old love songs condemned to wander
through the airways for all time: "Green Sleeves," a burst of.
trumpet sound I can't identify, a hit of the thirties called "In the
Mood," a ghostly "love you, yeah, yeah, yeah" of "She Loves You"
from the
Beatles Second Album
of 1964 and, in the context of
"All You Need Is Love," a pathetic "all together now ... every–
body!" of the old community sing. Far from being in any way satiric,
the song gathers into itself the musical expression of the "need" for
love as it has accumulated through decades of popular music.
This
historical feeling for music, including their own musical
creations, explains, I think, the Beatles' fascination with the invented
aspects of everything around them, the participatory tenderness and
joy with which they respond to styles and artifact, the maturity with
which they have come to see the coloring of the human and social
Jandscape of contemporary England. It's as if they naturally see the
world in the form of
son et lumiere:
as they say in a beautiful neigh–
borhood song about Liverpool, "Penny Lane is in my ears and in
my eyes." Not everyone their age is capable of seeing the odd wonder.
of a meter maid - after all, a meter maid's a meter maid; fewer
stiIl would be moved to a song of praise like "Lovely Rita" ("When
it gets dark I tow your heart away"); and only a Beatle could be
expected, when seeing her with a bag across her shoulder, to have
the historically enlivened vision that "made her look a little like a
military man." Now of course English boys out of Liverpool can be
expected, it says here, to be more intimate than American boys from
San Francisco with the residual social and cultural evidences from
World War II and even from the First World War.
In
response to
these and other traces of the past, however, the Beatles display an
absolutely unique kind of involvement.
It
isn't simply that they have
an instinctive nostalgia for period styles, as in "She's Leaving Home"
or "When I'm Sixty-four," or that they absorb the past through the .
media of the popular arts, through music, cinema, theatrical conven–
tions, bands like Sgt. Pepper's or music-hall performers. Everyone to
some extent apprehends the world in the shapes given it by the.
popular arts and its media; we all see even the things that are new.
