5.4li.'
RICHARD POIRIER
of theatrical.person whose full being is the theatrical self, like W. C.
Fields; Tom Mix, Branda and Mae West, who has delightfully
adapted such Beatle songs as "Day Tripper" to her own style. Above
all, the cover is a celebration of the Beatles themselves who can now
be placed (and Bob Dylan, too) within a group who have, aside
from everything else, infused the imagination of the living with the
possibilities of other ways of living, of extraordinary existences, of
something beyond "a day in the life." So it is indeed like a funeral
for the Beatles, except that they'd be no more "dead" than anyone
else,in attendance. There they are in the center, mustachioed and
in the brassed and tassled silk of the old-time bands, and, with bril–
liant, quite'funny implications, they are also represented in the collage
as
wax
figures by Madame Tussaud, clothed in business suits. Live
Beatles in costumes from the past and effigies of the Beatles in the
garb of the present, with the name of the Beatles in flowers planted
before the whole group -
this
bit of slyness is of a piece with not
sorting out past and present and promised future in the order of the
songs, or the mixed allusiveness to period styles, including earlier
Beatles' styles or the mixing and confoundings of media in songs
like "When I'm Sixty-four" or "A Day in the Life." The cover sug–
gests that the Beatles to some extent live the past in the present, live
inthe 'shadows of their own as well as of other people's past accom–
plishments, and that among the imaginative creations that fascinate
them most, the figures closest at hand on the cover, are their own
past selves. "And the time will come," it is promised in one of their
sbngs, .!'when you will see we're all one, and life flows on within you
and without you." As an apprehension of artistic, and perhaps of any
other kind of placement within living endeavor, this idea is allowable
only to the very great.
