Night Beat (6 page)

Even so,
Anthology
makes it plain that there was a great deal of pain involved in being the Beatles, and that pain started much earlier than many of us might have realized. Ringo Starr tells a harrowing story about how a plainclothes policeman accompanied him onstage at a Canadian appearance, after Starr had received a death threat for being Jewish (“One major fault is I’m not Jewish,” says Ringo), and George relates how, during a tense appearance in Japan, every time an unexpected loud sound occurred, the band members would look around to see which of them had been shot. Harrison also discloses his anger about the Beatles not being able to control their own schedules or movements during their hectic tours, and also tells how, in 1964, he finally balked and insisted that the Beatles not participate in a ticker tape parade planned for a San Francisco appearance. “It was only . . . a year,” he says, “since they had assassinated Kennedy. . . . I could just imagine how mad it is in America.”

The Beatles were at the eye of a tremendous storm of public feeling, and though Harrison claims they were the sanest people in that scenario, it’s also clear that their fame had isolated them from some of the meaning and pleasure of their experience. As you watch
Anthology,
it becomes plain that the Beatles—or at least some of them—may not have really loved their audience, at least after a certain point. In the Beatles’ minds, it appears, that audience became an enclosing and demanding reality, always wanting, often threatening, rarely understanding enough. Harrison, in particular, has the most to say on this point. “They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did,” he states, “and then they blamed it on us.” Later, he tells a story about visiting the Haight-Ashbury—the San Francisco district identified with the hippie movement—at the height of its fame, and shares his disgust at the constituency he saw there. “Grotty people,” he labels them, with clear disdain. And in
Anthology
’s closing section, Harrison says: “They [the Beatles’ audience] gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles kind of gave their nervous systems, which is a much more different thing to give.”

This distaste for the public’s clamor is possibly the single greatest revelation to be found in
Anthology.
But there is another side to the story—namely, that this same public also gave the Beatles something tremendous, something more than money and screams. That audience gave the Beatles an inspiration to get better, an opportunity to grow, and a willingness to grow along with them. Without the context of that audience, it doesn’t seem likely that the group could have made such a form-stretching work as
Revolver
or such a culture-defining statement as
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
because the pop audience of that time, as much as any of the era’s musicians, was also raising the stakes on what was allowable and what was necessary, and was also delivering judgment on the caliber of what was being offered. The Beatles’ record sales were, as much as anything, a sign of love and appreciation for the band—a mass of
go-ahead
votes. Without that support, the Beatles would have mattered a lot less, and probably would have accomplished a lot less as well.

And yet, in
Anthology
’s insularity, there is never any acknowledgment of that debt. The audience that loved this band was perhaps never seen as real or worthy partners in the group’s journey. The Beatles had only each other and their work for solace, and in time, they didn’t even have that.

WHATEVER ITS FLAWS or merits,
The Beatles Anthology
proved fairly eventful in 1996—at least in a certain way. When
Anthology
first aired in America in 1995, the program drew over 50 million viewers during its three nights of broadcast—something smaller than the record-breaking audience of 70 million who tuned into the group’s first “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast in 1964, but still, no other popular music figures have ever been granted a six-hour prime-time television special. In the show’s wake, much of the Beatles’ extant catalog (the thirteen original albums, and five collections, including the 1994
Live at the BBC
) returned to
Billboard
’s charts, and sold dramatically. In addition, the three double CD
Anthology
packages, released over the course of the year following the broadcast, also did well—selling over 5 million units to date. Once again, the Beatles loomed as a big and competitive force in the pop world. In fact, according to SoundScan—the company that monitors music sales—the group has sold 27 million CDs since 1991. All this sales activity prompted the
London Observer
to remark: “In 1996 the Beatles have achieved what every group since them has failed to do: become bigger than the Beatles.”

It’s a clever comment, but it also begs a few other comments. In the 1960s, the Beatles being “big” meant something—a great deal, in fact. It meant that not just the Beatles, but whole new styles and values had become big, and were upsetting prior styles and values. It meant that an increasingly bold and empowered generation had elected its own aesthetics, its own ideology, its own leaders—and that such pop artists as the Beatles (or Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, or Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin) were the exemplars of this movement. In this context, to become “bigger than the Beatles” would have meant signifying a greater consensus. It would have meant to be not just more popular, but also more embodying, more centralizing, for an entire generation. Today, such a possibility no longer seems practical or desirable. Indeed, the notion of gigantism as consensus, as a sign of unifying agreement in the pop world, has now collapsed, for better or worse. In the years since the Beatles’ disunion, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, Whitney Houston, Nirvana, U2, Garth Brooks, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Alanis Morissette (among others) have all been “bigger than the Beatles”—that is, they have all sold more individual albums or played to greater numbers of people. But as often as not, the size of these artists’ successes has meant nothing more than just the triumph of size itself—or at least has meant nothing more outside the artist’s particular audience. Bruce Springsteen’s fans will attest to the meaning and worth of his music and popularity, but Prince’s audience (or Michael Jackson’s, or Madonna’s) might not agree—and whatever their merits, few if any of the performers mentioned in this sentence appeal to today’s younger progressive audience.

The point is: There is no longer a center to popular music, no longer any one single, real mainstream. Instead, there are many diverse mainstreams and excluding factions, each representing its own perspective, its own concurrence. Snoop Doggy Dogg may reign over one mainstream, Whitney Houston or Hootie and the Blowfish over another, R.E.M., U2, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins over yet others. But nothing unifies popular music’s broadest possible audience in the way that Elvis Presley or the Beatles once managed. Not even the idea of “popular” music binds that many of us—and maybe that’s not a bad thing. In any event, about the only thing today’s pop world might agree on is
not
to agree on too many shared tastes or tenets.

The Beatles are still big—no question. They still sell millions of albums, and their legend probably remains unrivaled. But the Beatles—at least today’s Beatles—are not really “bigger” than the Beatles, because today’s Beatles can no longer change the world the way yesterday’s Beatles did.

So the
final
real question is: What is it, then, that the Beatles can possibly say or mean to modern times?

IF ONE IS TO judge that question solely by the band’s two new songs, the answer would be: Probably not that much.

Never mind all the criticism that there’s something false or shameful about the surviving Beatles modifying the late John Lennon’s unfinished music. Harrison, McCartney, and Starr did not embarrass themselves or the Beatles’ reputation with these efforts. The final results sound as if everybody involved worked sincerely and meticulously, and with “Free as a Bird” in particular, they even created something rather moving. At one point, McCartney asks: Whatever happened to the time and life that the band once shared? How did they go on without one another? The song isn’t a statement about nostalgia, but rather a commentary on all the chances and hopes, all the immeasurable possibilities, that are lost when people who once loved each other cut themselves off from that communion. Not a bad or imprecise coda for what the Beatles did to themselves, and to their own history (and to their audience) with their dissolution. The only problem is, neither “Free as a Bird” nor “Real Love” imparts any real urgency, or aims to capture a mood or moment—which is something the old Beatles accomplished so well in albums like
Revolver
and the White Album, and in songs like “Revolution,” “Hey Jude,” “Get Back,” and even “Let It Be,” with the latter song’s yearning for serenity as the outside world turned troubling and uncertain. The modern Beatles sound
. . . careful,
maybe even a bit removed from the world around them.

But that only makes sense. The world around them has changed considerably since these men last gathered together to make music. These are harder times, in terms of both style and content, and the sensibilities that the Beatles once stood for are not as dominant now. In today’s cutting-edge popular music, one doesn’t hear the residue of the Beatles so much as you hear, say, the long-shadow influence of the Velvet Underground (whose primal drive and dissonant textures have had great bearing on the music of David Bowie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, U2, and R.E.M., among others), or the sway of James Brown (whose sharp, tense style of funk propulsion had tremendous rhythmic impact on numerous diverse artists, including George Clinton, electric-era Miles Davis, funk and disco bands like Ohio Players and Chic, and many of today’s hip-hop performers and producers). Moreover, the Beatles’ most oft-cited thematic concerns—their reflections on love, concord, and spirituality—may seem quaint in comparison to the concerns of artists like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Hole, or Tupac Shakur, who sang vital, rageful songs about vulnerability and self-destruction, loneliness and malevolence. It isn’t that the Beatles didn’t allow darkness into their music. There was a frequent mean streak in some of John Lennon’s earlier songs—such as “Run for Your Life” and “Norwegian Wood”—later replaced by the existential dread of “She Said She Said” and “A Day in the Life.” In addition, as the bulk of
Anthology 3
makes plain, much of the Beatles’ concluding music was rife with images of chaos, isolation, anger, panic, and drug-steeped sadness. Even so, many commentators tend to remember the Beatles for their blithe sentiments about love as a major work of will, and courage and redemption. Fine ideals, to be sure, and in the setting of their time, even somewhat inspiring and comforting. But in the
real
end, you likely need a lot more than love to make it through this world or redeem your losses. Sometimes darkness is irrefutable, and sometimes love and understanding can’t save a troubled heart or a soul in harm’s way. Just ask Kurt Cobain or Tupac Shakur—or for that matter John Lennon. That is, if you could ask them anything today.

But if today’s Beatles can’t speak to today’s realities, it’s also hard to imagine that today’s popular music could speak with such weight and force without yesterday’s Beatles. Let’s put it another way: Imagine no Beatles. Imagine they had never happened, had never participated in modern history. Their accomplishments, as I mentioned earlier, were many: from signifying not only that the most massive population of youth in history was about to find new dreams, new purposes, new identity—and in time, new causes and beliefs—to helping establish that rock & roll was now a protean and important art form. This isn’t to say that the Beatles were the first people who proved that popular music forms could be “art” (Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley had already proved that point long before), nor is it to say that they raised rock to new sophisticated levels that transcended what it had once been (some people believed this, maybe even some Beatles believed it, but to their credit, the latter moved past that fallacy fast). Instead, it is to say that the Beatles’ growth—in union with Bob Dylan’s innovations—made plain that pop was a field willing to extend its own aesthetic by incorporating modifications from other disciplines, and that a rock & roll song was capable of expressing truths as complex and consequential as anything to be found in contemporary literature or film. And it was the Beatles who as the 1960s rose and fell, inevitably epitomized that era’s longing for ideal community. Later, when the band fell apart in such messy fashion, the Beatles also served as a metaphor for the disintegration of that dream.