Reviewing the Beatles

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend and a longtime contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, is an avid Beatles fan—right from their very start in this country.  He also happens to be musically educated, so he’s written for this blog many times on both music and the Fab Four,

[Furthermore, Kirk’s knowledgeable about the art of review-writing—as he demonstrated with his book The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press, 2009; http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272)--so this time around he’s applied those three attributes (believe me, he has more, as frequent readers of ROT will know) to comment on the press coverage of the Beatles during the years they were together.

[Kirk is focusing on the coverage in the New York Times—I’ll let him tell you why—but not only is his analysis valid for other outlets, but it can be applied to reviews in other fields: theater, books, and art, among others.]

I have in front of me a collection of articles about the Beatles printed in The New York Times from 1963 through 2013. I have written extensively about the Beatles in this blog; their cultural influence is so vast that it doesn’t seem out of place to discuss them in a context primarily devoted to theater.

[The past Beatles posts contributed to Rick On Theater by Kirk Woodward include: “The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary” by Kirk Woodward & Pat Woodward, 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; “Now, Live, the Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; and “Help!,” 17 September 2020.]

Besides, this time I will be discussing, not so much the Beatles themselves, as how they were covered in one newspaper of reputation and impact, up to the end of their time together as a group (roughly, late 1969). I could have chosen any number of other approaches; there are hundreds of books about the Beatles written from every possible angle, from the foolish to the penetrating.

The Times, of course, began covering the Beatles as a news event – huge crowds, screaming fans – at a time when reviewing popular music was not a primary focus of journalism. The paper did its best, I’d say, by printing articles written by the outstanding rock reviewers of the day. As we will see, its coverage of the Beatles’ music improved steadily.  As we will also see, where critical opinions are concerned, anything goes!

We have the advantage, as the writers of many of the Times pieces did not at the time, of knowing how the Beatles “turned out.” Successfully predicting the future is difficult; second-guessing is easy, and probably unfair. However, if there are agreed-on standards for reviewing, it is fair to apply them and see how well they were met. Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) proposed such standards and they have held up well. A reviewer, Goethe suggests, should ask:

What is the artist trying to do?
How well do they do it?
Is it worth doing?  

Based on observation I would say that reviewers who habitually ask and answer these questions are few and far between, and that many if not most reviewers go immediately to the last question, with some of the second perhaps thrown in for good measure.

In any case, these questions will be invaluable as we look at the Times’ coverage of the Beatles. Many writers contributed to that coverage, of course, and the results vary.

The first article, from 1 December 1963 by Frederick Lewis for The New York Times Magazine, is light on examination of the Beatles’ music. To be fair, there was not at that point a great deal to examine. Lewis provides a non-hysterical examination of the Beatles’ sociological and psychological significance:

They are working-class, and their roots and attitudes are firmly of the North of England. Because of their success they can act as spokesmen for the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation which is becoming a force in British life. In their uncompromising Northernness, they are linked with actors like Albert Finney and with novelists like Alan Stilltoe [1928-2010, novelist and author of the short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”] and John Braine [1922-1986, novelist noted for the book Room at the Top].

On 10 February 1964, the day after the first appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, Jack Gould (1914-1993, television reporter for the Times) was dismissive and patronizing, talking about “the cyclical turnover in teenage trauma.” He said basically nothing about their music. Surprisingly, Theodore Strongin (1918-1998), a composer who sometimes wrote for the Times, made an effort to come to terms with the Beatles musically, if bafflingly:

Their harmony is unmistakeably diatonic. A learned British colleague, writing on his home ground, has described it as pandiatonic, but I disagree. [With more music to examine, he probably would have actually agreed, at least to some extent. “Pandiatonic” basically means the use of notes that the average ear would not expect.]

The Beatles have a tendency to build phrases around unresolved leading tones. This precipitates the ear into a false modal frame that temporarily turns the fifth of the frame into the tonic, momentarily suggesting the Mixolydian mode. But everything always ends as plain diatonic all the same.

At least he is trying to engage with the music; good luck reaching the readership. He continues:

The Beatles’s vocal quality can be described as vocally incoherent, with the minimal communication necessary to communicate the schematic texts.

Here we see in embryo an approach frequently encountered in reviews of the Beatles: the dismissal of rock as an inferior form, without principles or values of its own. (We will encounter the opposite of this approach later.)

The video of the first Ed Sullivan appearance is available on YouTube; the words can be understood, and the Beatles are “communicating” as rock musicians. That was what they intended to do, and that was what they did, with obvious success. They were unquestionably communicating effectively within their chosen field.

It is reasonable to note that, at this early point in the Beatles’ career, screaming audiences were the first thing many people noticed, because, first, you couldn’t miss them, and, second, they made it difficult at best to hear the performances of the songs, or to think about anything else. So most early articles review the audiences more than they do the Beatles. That is not our approach here, and, of course, that situation would change.

I do feel it’s worthwhile to point out that some people in early 1964 already had a high opinion of the Beatles’ music – me, for one, because very early I heard “From Me to You” on the radio (it originally got brief airplay in the United States in 1963) and loved its brightness and its harmonies. Not surprised when they “hit it big,” I was listening for more good music, and got it. Similarly, I remember in college asking my friend John Burgard, a musician and still a figure in the Louisville, Kentucky, blues scene, if he had been surprised by the Beatles’ success. “No,” he said, “I had listened to the records.”

Robert Shelton (1926-1995), in an article published 11 August 1965 in anticipation of the Beatles’ famous appearance at Shea Stadium, accurately summarized their earliest music:

The music of the Beatles is a form of American music that ricocheted to Europe, became infused with the group’s personality and has since bounced back here. Mostly, the “Liverpool Sound” is a buoyant, infectiously rhythmic series of cadences, with some unsettlingly exciting harmonies (in open fourths and fifths), a bedrock blues beat and an aura of youth, channeled sexuality and exuberance. Often there is a wistful, plaintive quality to their slower ballads.

The Beatles were influenced while working in the Cavern in Liverpool, directly or through recordings brought by American seamen from the Gulf Coast, with American rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, or rockabilly interpreters, such as Mr. Presley, Little Richard, the Everlys or Buddy Holly and the Crickets. From this, with a dash of the British folk-jazz called “skiffle,” the Beatles’ style emerged.

There is more that Shelton could have said – by this point the Beatles had issued several albums, including Help! (although Shelton may not have heard it in its remarkable British form), and Rubber Soul was just ahead.

Dan Sullivan (b. 1935) in an article in the Times on 3 March 1967 had enough information to say:

The funny thing about teenage idols is that some of them turn out to be artists. Frank Sinatra illustrated the process years ago. Now we have The Beatles. . . . Beatlemania and the editorials about it quickly grew tiresome, but not the Beatles themselves. Entirely apart from their authentic personal charm, they proved to be far more original musicians than they had seemed at first. . . . The Buddy Holly yelps and Elvis Presley growls gradually fall away, and are replaced by odd intervals, antique harmonies, raga-like sequences and rhythmic devices new to pop music. . . . [Paul McCartney’s] casual way with the traditional harmonic circle-of-fifths has stretched the public’s ear considerably – as has his decision . . . not to limit himself to conventional four- or eight-bar melodic units.

The next major evaluation of Beatles music in the Times came with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), memorably reviewed for the paper by Richard Goldstein (b. 1942) on 18 June 1967.

Goldstein’s review, we may confidently say, goes against the flow of opinion about the album, which he describes at different points as “busy, hip and overcluttered”:

The obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, pervades the entire album. There is nothing beautiful about “Sergeant Pepper.” Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about [a reference to the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever”]. The Lennon raunchiness has become mere caprice . . . . Paul McCartney’s soaring Pop magnificats have become merely politely profound. . . . With one important exception, “Sergeant Pepper” is precious but devoid of gems.

(The exception Goldstein describes is the monumental track “A Day in the Life.”) Goldstein’s review has been the subject of astonishment since its publication; the reputation of the review has hounded him through the years. Several things are going on here.

First of all, every reviewer’s nightmare, I should think, is to pan an art work that turns out to be a classic. In the field of music, Nicholas Slonimsky (1894-1995), a conductor and composer, has compiled a Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953) which Wikipedia correctly describes as “a collection of hilariously scathing, insulting, vituperative, and enraged contemporary critiques of musical greats in their time,” including Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Puccini, and many, many others. Goldstein’s review belongs in such a collection (along with at least one other review to be discussed below).

Sometimes reviewers simply have bad days. Anthony Lane, the movie reviewer for The New Yorker, has described how he watched much of a film disapproving of its shadowy cinematography before realizing that he had his sunglasses on. Similarly, Richard Goldstein, although he does not apologize for his review, has confirmed to The Washington Post (11 May 2017) that he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a broken stereo record player, so the sound he heard was incomplete!

More importantly, however, Goldstein’s review illustrates a condition common in reviewers: they criticize a work, not beginning with its artist’s intentions, but with their own opinions about what such a work ought to be. In Goldstein’s case, he clearly states what he wanted to hear:

The best Beatle melodies are simple if original progressions braced with pungent lyrics. Even their most radical compositions retain a sense of unity.

That is to say, the Beatles should stick to the straightforward rock ’n’ roll that established their early reputation. Instead,

for the first time the Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent.

The notion that an album is “fraudulent” occurs often in music reviews – other terms are “phony,” “not genuine,” and so on. This kind of attack has always mystified me. What does it mean? If it refers to insincerity on the part of the artist, how does one know that, and even if the artist is trying to produce deceptive work (I suppose that happens, but how often?), the resulting object is not honest or dishonest – it just is. (Pablo Picasso is supposed once to have said, “I can paint a fake Picasso as well as anybody.”)

More importantly, though, Goldstein actually senses what the Beatles intended to do – he just doesn’t like it. They intended – I believe, and many others have said – to create a “soundscape,” a set of aural images of unique beauty, and they succeeded.

Rock was their heritage, songs were their material, but their aim went beyond a collection of “good songs,” toward a new experience of sound. Goldstein senses this – but it doesn’t fit his idea of what they should be doing, so his review is off kilter from the start. Had he listened to Goethe, he likely would not have made this mistake.

Although Paul McCartney, according to reports, has held the review against Goldstein ever since, the Times did not. On 31 December 1967 Goldstein doubled down on his criticism in a review of the Magical Mystery Tour album which is even more an attack on what the Beatles were becoming:

The Beat is no longer implicit to the Beatles. In its place, they have created a collage of sound-images masquerading as Brechtian vaudeville. Sometimes this free inquiry into the nature of pop art stuns with a resonant power; at other times it seems capricious and gimmick-ridden. But rarely does it rock. . . . All these touches exemplify an approach to song that is closer to programmatic music than it is to rock. . . . Scratch the surface of “Magical Mystery Tour” and it bleeds like show music . . . . This electronic posturing is what I found fraudulent in “Sergeant Pepper,” and it is even more apparent here. . . . Does it sound like heresy to say that the Beatles write material which is literate, courageous, genuine, but spotty? It shouldn’t. They are inspired posers, but we must keep our heads on their music, not their incarnations. In that critical distance lies the deepest sort of respect.

One would guess Goldstein had received a certain amount of pushback from his review of Sgt. Pepper. One notices his insistence that the Beatles should be creating more “rock”; anything else is “electronic posturing,” “fraudulent” (there is that word again), created by “posers.” Again, he understands what the Beatles are trying to achieve – a “free inquiry into the nature of pop art.” He simply knows better than they what they ought to be doing.

Imagine his relief when he heard the album The Beatles (the “White Album”), which he reviewed on 8 December 1968. One would assume that a review that ended with the following sentence was a positive review:

This album is so vast in its scope, so intimate in its detail, and so skillful in its approach, that even the flaws add to its flavor.

In fact the opening paragraphs of the review drip with scorn:

The Beatles . . . epitomize the pretenses of their culture. For, more than anyone in the pop hegemony, the Beatles involve themselves in the times. Unlike Dylan, who wanders like a pilgrim across the fiery plains of his own imagination, the Beatles are inspired groovers, equally at home in the haute monde (which cherishes them as clever rakes) and the underground (where they are loved as magic rebels).

Goldstein essentially accuses the Beatles of pandering to their times, a conclusion undercut by the fact that their music has vitality more than half a century after it was first heard. Oddly, he also feels that the Beatles are trying to regain their own past:

What the Beatles are really attempting to revive here is the spontaneous vitality of their earliest songs. They mean to project a sense of the immediate, the makeshift and the incomplete – all missing from their recent work.

I simply do not believe that an open-minded listener will take away from the album a sense of “the makeshift and the incomplete.” But once again, Goldstein senses the real thrust of the Beatles’ intention with the album, at least as I understand it:

Even more effective is the album’s burlesque of musical forms. In this respect, “The Beatles” is almost a mock-history of pop.”

“Mock” does not strike me as the correct word, but I definitely hear the album as a tribute to what music can do, and a successful one. (It’s my favorite of any album, Beatles or otherwise.) So when Goldstein says he hopes that “Yer Blues” is meant as “a parody of white blues,” I want to say, “Yes, of course it is, as you’d know if you’d calm down and listen to what the Beatles are actually doing.”

A minor detail is that Goldstein exercises his reviewers’ right to contradict himself. Writing about The Beatles he speaks of “the meticulous structure of ‘Sergeant Pepper.’” Here is what he wrote of that structure in his review of Sgt. Pepper: “There is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” So much for “meticulous structure!”

“This time, the Beatles have dared to be restrained,” Goldstein writes, a conclusion that seems incomprehensible to me if he listened to the album at all, as he obviously did – demonstrating again the power of the preconceived opinion.

“Restrained,” moreover, is hardly the word for the next major review of Beatle music in the Times – a cautionary tale of a review written by Nik Cohn (b. 1946) and published 5 October 1969 about the Beatles album Abbey Road. If a review is in part a consumer report, would you buy this album?

On “Abbey Road” the words are limp-wristed, pompous and fake. Clearly, the Beatles have now heard so many tales of their own genius that they’ve come to believe them, and everything here is Instant Art. Give me just five minutes in the privacy of your own home and I can make you a super-bard.

I am uncertain what he feels makes a lyric either limp-wristed or a fake.

Cohn then quotes a lyric from the album, about which I would like to say, as I have before, that quoting words from songs to prove their worthlessness is worthless, because a song lyric is only a part of a whole. Cohn should know better – he wrote a book called Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969), a quotation from a song recorded by Little Richard (Richard Penniman, 1932-2020), a nonsense lyric and a great and memorable one.

Cohn admires the medley that concludes the second side of the album, although even that admiration is mixed:

Apart from [a couple of short sections], it’s all pretty average stuff. Most of the melody lines have been used elsewhere, and some of the lyrics are quite painful. . . . Most of the lines here are steals, partly pinched from other people and partly from other Beatle albums.

And, he continues,

The rest of this album is an unmitigated disaster. . . . The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse.

Finally we get to the foundation of the review, and, as with Richard Goldstein, it’s a notion of “real” rock as a sort of primitive musical Garden of Eden. Cohn is discussing the song “Oh! Darling”:

Slow 1950’s rock was something very formal, a ritual as classic and changeless as bullfighting, in which each embellishment and each progression had its own exact function. On “Oh! Darling,” Lennon flounders in an orgy of gulps, howls and retches, flung together at random, and the whole point is lost.

This kind of overkill, in fact, has become very much a Beatles trademark. It ruined their last double-album, and it ruins two-thirds of “Abbey Road.” The great strength of the medley is that it doesn’t overkill – no repetitions, no heavy breathing. It gets back toward the kind of ease and style that the Beatles had five years ago.

One can argue with this screed on factual grounds – the long medley does include repetitions, and, embarrassingly, John Lennon doesn’t sing “Oh! Darling,” Paul McCartney does, as even a casual listener, much less an important rock reviewer, ought to know.

The more important point is that Cohn’s primary interest is in his picture of what he thinks the album ought to be, rather than in what it is. He seals this point with another illustration, this one from a song that actually is sung by John Lennon:

“Come Together” is a slowed-down reworking of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and is intriguing only as a sign of just how low Lennon can sink these days. “You Can’t Catch Me” is a very great song, after all, and lumbering it with the kind of “Look Ma, I’m Jesus” lyrics that Lennon unloads here is not a crime that I’d like to have on my conscience.

It’s hard to decide which claim is more absurd – that Lennon’s song is Berry’s slowed down (it quotes, more or less, about eight words from the second verse of Berry’s song, and shares a two chord progression typical of the blues), or that Chuck Berry’s song is so great that it should represent the farthest advance of songwriting.

The New York Times is a great newspaper, and Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn have both made significant contributions to the reviewing and criticism of music. The reviews discussed here did no great harm to the Beatles – Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are widely considered masterpieces, are among fifteen Beatle recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and have sold millions of copies. The reviews didn’t help Goldstein and Cohn, but both have nevertheless had long and productive careers.

And reviewing is a difficult and often arduous job. The pitfalls are many, some of which have been illustrated here:

Ignoring, dismissing, or minimizing the intention(s) behind the work.
Upholding standards that may not be appropriate to new work.
Factual errors.

It has been suggested more than once that reviewers ought to stick to description, and entirely avoid evaluation – in effect, to be reporters in the strictest sense of the word. This advice seems likely to be taken only by reviewers with little to offer. The greater their ability, the more likely they are to make a review a personal matter. In any case, a little humility and a little curiosity will help, and perhaps an internal conversation with Goethe.

[I don’t do footnotes on ROT, but occasionally I feel that a post should have a list of the sources at least of the quotations and other references.  Kirk’s “Reviewing the Beatles” fits that bill, I think, so I’m appending below a list Kirk assembled of the reviews from the New York Times he quoted and a couple of other sources of statements he made in his article. 

Cohn, Nik. “The Beatles: For 15 Minutes, Tremendous.” New York Times 5 October 1969: 13.

Edgers, Geoff. “Getting better all the time.” Washington Post 14 May 2017: E 1, 16. [On-line edition: “Meet the critic who panned ‘Sgt. Pepper’ then discovered his speaker was busted. He’s still not sorry,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/meet-the-critic-who-panned-sgt-peppers-then-discovered-his-speaker-was-busted-hes-still-not-sorry/2017/05/11/aa0058b4-2f44-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html, 11 May 2017.]

Goldstein, Richard. “Are They Waning?” New York Times 28 August 1967: D 14.

Goldstein, Richard. “The Beatles: Inspired Groovers.” New York Times 8 December 1968: 33.

Goldstein, Richard. “We Still Need the Beatles, but . . .” New York Times 18 June 1967: D 24.

Gould, Jack. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 1964: 53.

Lane, Anthony. “Introduction.” Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker (Vintage, 9 September 2003), xx.

Lewis, Frederick. “Britons Succumb to ‘Beatlemania.’” The New York Times Magazine 1 December 1963: 124-26.

Shelton, Robert. “The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed.” New York Times 11 August 1965: 40.

Strongin, Theodore. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 196: 53.

Sullivan, Dan. “Beatles: More Than a Mania.” New York Times 5 March 1967: D 33.

[Geoff Edgers’s Washington Post article in which Richard Goldstein admitted he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a damaged stereo is on line, as are the New York Times reviews.  (Both papers have been digitized so there are databases which also have the .pdf versions of those articles as well, if you have access to one.)

[Readers should note that in articles dating from before the start of online publication (1996 for the Times), the digitization process sometimes introduces transcription errors or other problems into the online text that effects readability and accuracy. 

[Anthony Lane’s book, the source of the anecdote about his wearing sunglasses when he watched Contact, the movie he was reviewing for the New Yorker, is not online in its entirety.  Google Books offers a preview that includes most of the introduction, where Lane tells the story, and it’s quoted on several Internet websites.  One such site is http://richardgilbert.me/noted-anthony-lane/. 

[(For the curious, most of Lane’s 21 July 1997 review of Contact is also in the Google Books preview of Nobody’s Perfect [pp. 194-97] as well.  The sunglasses incident isn’t mentioned.)]

'Help!'

by Kirk Woodward

[The article below, Kirk Woodward’s examination of the Beatles’ 1965 movie Help!, will be my friend’s 100th solo contribution to Rick On Theater (plus one collaboration with me).  Of those previous 99 posts, some of which were multipart contributions, six have been about the Beatles or one of its former members. 

[I’ve been a fan of the Beatles since I first heard them on the radio when I was a high school student in Europe in the early ’60s.  (“She Loves Me” was released in the U.K. at the end of August 1963, just as I was about to start school outside Geneva.  We listened to rock ’n’ roll on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg, and pirate radio.)  But my enthusiasm pales before Kirk’s loyalty.  In addition to that, Kirk knows music, which I don’t, so he applies that to his fandom as well. 

[Furthermore, as a longtime theater student, with experience as an actor, director, and playwright—as well as a composer and lyricist—Kirk has a perspective on the Beatles’ film output that’s, if not unique, then at least rare.  The proof is below.  If you don’t know Help!, the group’s second film, Kirk’s discussion will make you want to see it.  If you do know it, it’ll change your appreciation of it. 

[You know what the Beatles said: “Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.”  (Yeah, I know that’s not what they really meant.  But it’s what I mean!)]

In the late 1960’s, some of us studying at Washington and Lee University were fortunate to spend some days in London on summer theater trips organized by the school’s drama professor, Lee (really Leonel) Kahn.

Lee had connections with the British theater world and arranged to bring in as lecturers a number of young and exciting professionals from England, some of whom would go on to careers of success and importance, like the playwrights and screenwriters Christopher Hampton (now Sir Christopher, b. 1946) and David Mercer (1928-1980).

Our lecturers introduced us to the most exciting elements of British theater of the time. From London I wrote my mother:

Something else which came out in a lecture this morning is that the Beatles have had an important influence on one kind of British theater. The line goes:

”Goon Show” (Spike Mulligan, Peter Sellers, etc.)
                                     V

Beatles (sense of humor, the looseness of their stage shows and their strong relation to the audience)

                                    V

Street theater, small-group theater, improvisations (akin to off-off-Broadway)

I would modify some of what I wrote my mother: the Beatles’ stage shows were “loose” only in the sense that they never seemed “canned” – there was always a personally spontaneous element in their appearances. And I should have mentioned that their influence spilled into many areas besides theater, in particular, music (of course), fashion, and, our topic here, film.

I have written about the Beatles several times for this blog. In this article I am writing about their second film, Help!, a film that has influenced theater and other arts as well.

Help! was filmed and released in 1965. It followed the Beatles’ brilliant and wildly successful first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Both films were directed by the American expatriate Richard Lester (b. 1932), who began his career by directing advertisements and who developed a style of filmmaking involving a quick pace, rapid and unexpected shifts between shots, and humor that often verged on the surreal.

Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! exhibit these traits, but they are very different films. A Hard Day’s Night is a black and white film. Focusing on an imagined day or so in the lives of the four Beatles, it is concise, with a script written by Alun Owen (1925-1994) filmed on an extremely tight budget, wasting no space.

Help!, a year later, had, as Richard Lester has said, a somewhat larger budget, and was shot in color, with an expansive script written by Mark Behm (1925-2007), otherwise best known for his delightful screenplay of the mystery film Charade (1963). Behm’s script for Help! was given touches of dialogue and plot by Charles Wood (1932-2020), about whom I will say more below.

In contrast to the very England-bound A Hard Day’s Night, Help! takes place in England, the Alps, back in England again, and finally in the Bahamas. Critical opinion tends to consider A Hard Day’s Night a masterpiece, and Help! nowhere near as successful.

I consider this ranking, if I may use the word, baloney. The films are different in significant ways, and I admire A Hard Day’s Night, but I love Help! I seldom feel the need to watch A Hard Day’s Night, but Help! is one of my favorite movies.

Why? For starters, it has the Beatles in it, and although that fact by itself may not justify enthusiasm (as it does not quite, sadly, for Magical Mystery Tour, their self-made film of 1968), it certainly contributes.

In A Hard Day’s Night, as Richard Lester explains in a video introduction to the film, the focus is the public lives of the Beatles; the logical next step would have been a film about their private lives, but, Lester says, at that time their private lives were rated “X.”

The agreed-on answer was to let the Beatles be the center of an experience that revolved around them, hence the film’s plot: members of an Eastern cult worship with a daily sacrifice, but the mandatory sacrificial ring has disappeared – it has ended up on Ringo’s finger, and it won’t come off, despite the best efforts of the cult, as well as two renegade British scientists who want it for their own purposes. Ringo’s life is in danger as long as he wears the ring.

That’s the plot. Right up front it must be said that the film could not possibly be made today, certainly not in the way it exists now, with English actors playing Indian members of a religion seen as murderous and barbaric (supposedly based on Thugs, an alleged murderous gang that terrorized India for decades). A viewer today has a lot of ignoring to do. Whether or not to, of course, is an individual decision.

In any case, the plot is outlandish and absurd, and rendered completely non-realistic by Richard Lester’s directorial style. In an essay in the 2007 video release of Help!, the director Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) writes that Lester

had an extraordinary sense of pace and motion, in the editing and in the movement of the people onscreen. . . . Most of all, it was the freedom, the feeling that the structure of the picture could bend and twist to accommodate the spirit of youth. . .  that you could play with form and structure and break as many rules as you wanted as long as you had a strong emotional core – this was what Lester gave us. . . .  You were let in on the joke, and that made it even funnier.

 The supporting actors are all wonderful. Lester tended to work with a core group of actors, particularly Victor Spinetti (1929-2012) and Roy Kinnear (1934-1988), who were thoroughly familiar with his comic style. Leo McKern (1920-2002) and Eleanor Bron (b. 1938) as the high priest of the cult and his ambiguous henchwoman respectively, are superb.

What about the Beatles? As themselves they are wonderful, of course – they’re the Beatles. One cannot help watching them; they are energetic and entertaining and yet they have an odd reserve about them – they’re keeping something private. All the songs they wrote for the film remain classics; they were practically exploding as songwriters at this period, with “Yesterday” one of the songs on the British album of Help! (but not used in the movie). Not bad.

As for their acting, it presents an interesting study in movie performing. Ringo, who shone as an actor in A Hard Day’s Night, continues to charm and amuse. John and George, who are not showcased as much as Ringo, succeed by underplaying everything. They are both delightfully deadpan.

Paul’s performance is a different matter. In general, underacting is the best approach to acting in film, and overacting the worst. I don’t know in what order the scenes of Help! were shot, but in the earlier part of the movie Paul makes “facial expressions” and basically tries too hard. The good news is that he calms down as the film goes on, and is fine by halfway or so through the movie.

In general, the Beatles are the more or less relaxed center of the turmoil of Help!, and there is plenty of turmoil. Topics presented and satirized in the movie include: war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion, all of it accompanied by heavy doses of violence involving knives, poison gas, tanks, lasers, and savage man-eating animals.

This is a film about a rock band? This is comedy? Well, yes, or perhaps more accurately it is farce, which, as Eric Bentley writes in The Life of the Drama (1964), is “generally the fantasy of innocence surrounded by malevolence.” Richard Lester’s style, as I have described it here, is a farce style – which is not to say that it is frivolous.

In fact, in choosing Charles Wood to work on the script of the film, Lester chose a writer particularly fascinated by war and its effects. Wood wrote frequently about military life and action, and notably went on to write the screenplay for How I Won the War (1967), a surreal antiwar film that featured John Lennon as a soldier who, along with many others, is killed.

The scene in Help! where the Beatles record on Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge, in particular shows Wood’s influence, with the modern British Army providing a protective ring of tanks around the Beatles, while the enemy, in World War I garb with a mixture of weapons, waits for sappers to dig under the recording area and set off deadly explosives. There is a battle, which leads to a retreat and apparently ends tragically. . . .

Among the other subjects treated extensively in the film, organized religion takes a particularly strong beating, including a scene in which Clang, the High Priest, treats an Anglican minister to a long string of ecclesiastical platitudes, and a scene in which Ringo mutters, “It’s a different religion from ours. I think.”

Richard Lester told the press when the film was released, “You’ll find nothing new about Help!. There’s not one bit of insight into a social phenomenon of our times.” Except, of course, for the phenomena of war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion!

All this points to one of the ways the film was influential. Help! demonstrated on a large and widely viewed platform that the illusion of realism in movies was not a requirement for addressing serious issues in film.

They could be presented fancifully, comically, bizarrely – there were few limits, as long as they were handled with the appropriate style, and Lester knew what that style could be. Help! opened a large door to new kinds of expression of opinion.

And others went through that door, as two examples will illustrate. One is that the film, and Magical Mystery Tour which followed it (although not terribly successfully), showed the way for what was shortly to become the Monty Python troupe (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin), in terms of the use of quick cuts, topic changes, and bizarre juxtapositions.

An example comes toward the center of Help!, when a title card announces an intermission, followed by a short scene of the Beatles in the forest, with one of them appearing to bounce another like a ball. . . followed by a card announcing the second part, a short scene between two Indian women, one the recently saved human sacrifice and the other her clearly English mother . . . followed by another title card, and the resumption of the movie.

Some of Lester’s stylistic effects were the result of necessity; although he had a bigger budget for Help!, it wasn’t extravagant. He had to make the most of what he had. Some of the shots in the film probably would have been reshot under other circumstances. But in the environment he created, they didn’t matter.  He led the audience to accept whatever he did.

If one is going to take the kind of risks that Lester takes, it helps to have talent. One example that stands out for me is that while filming on the mountain slopes of Switzerland, it was difficult to find spaces where crowds weren’t surrounding the Beatles, and one of those spaces had telephone poles with wires across it.

Lester solved the problem by superimposing musical notes from “Ticket to Ride,” the song being played that moment, on the wires, as though the wires were staves in a music score. That’s creativity; that’s talent.

When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, Lester decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song. Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. (The Monkees, whose TV show first aired in 1966, took the hint immediately.)

Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, he decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song.

I wonder if what I’ve been saying gives the impression that the Beatles didn’t have much to do with the influence of Help!. Clearly that is not so. The Beatles made it happen, they cooperated with it, they were in the middle of it, and their sense of humor is the inspiration for it. They were personalities, and those personalities lent themselves to experimentation.

In fact, the biggest problem the Beatles had in filming Help! is that they had already made one movie, and they hated to repeat anything they had already done. As a result they spent a lot of filming time stoned, they were casual about learning lines, and they never got around to making a third major movie; they just couldn’t be bothered.

But not wanting to repeat themselves– wanting continually to take a fresh approach – is the essence of what Richard Lester did, and what A Hard Day’s Night and Help! do. The Beatles brought a conscious search for newness into the world of popular art, including film – and theater. I would claim, among other early results of this approach, “rock musicals” such as Hair (1967), and groups like the Firesign Theatre (1966 on), who, using a radio drama format, performed on stage extensively, and frequently invoked the Beatles – an influence acknowledged by both Firesign and Python members.

Here is one personal example of the latter. George Harrison, in particular, seems to have thought of the Monty Python troupe as the logical successor to the Beatles. In a recent comment in this blog, Rick, commenting on a play I wrote about theater superstitions, said:

The play, which Kirk wrote late in 2019, long before I even thought of this post, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch! I can actually hear the Pythons doing it. (Kirk and I are both fans of the Pythons, and he agreed that ‘That Scottish Play’ “is definitely like a Python sketch!” – though he’s “not sure I consciously had that in mind” when he composed it.)  [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020), Comment dated 6 September 2020.]

There – a direct line from my recent play, through the Pythons, to the Beatles. That’s influence. When I wrote my mother, I was correct – I had no idea at the time how correct –that “improvisations” were one way the Beatles had influenced theater, and those improvisations helped spawn the Pythons.

That’s just one example of their influence. I am certainly not saying that they invented the performance world we experience today – for example, improvisation existed long before the Beatles; so did theater for that matter. But they made possible multiple new approaches in the performance arts, and to this day we enjoy the benefits.

[I was on the same trip to London in the summer of 1969 that Kirk took.  (Kirk and I were classmates at W&L and we both worked with Lee Kahn.)  The program was housed in a dormitory of the University of London and along with the shows we saw, we had, as Kirk reports, meetings with and lectures from a number of theater figures, both pros and academics, at the dorm.  At one of those sessions, a talk by playwright Christopher Hampton, an incident centering on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger drew me up short.

[Hampton, a resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre whose play The Philanthropist was about to open at the theater as I remember, came to speak to us about the rise of the contemporary theater (or something like that—I forget the actual topic after 51 years). In his discussion, Hampton mentioned that an important influence in his artistic development was the original production of Look Back in Anger in 1956, which he'd seen when he was 10.  I quickly did the math and figured out that Hampton—born in January 1946—is the same age as I am.  (I’m almost exactly 11 months younger than Hampton.)

[I was immediately depressed because here he was, a produced playwright of some renown already and here I was, sitting, as it were, at his feet, having accomplished nothing so far in my life.  He's gone on to write several important plays, including Total Eclipse (1967) and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), and a batch of screenplays and opera librettos, while I have gone on . . . to continue to do nothing of significance—with the possible exception, says Kirk graciously, of starting Rick On Theater; but that’s only a late development.  Ah, well . . . such are the inequities of life!

[Kirk has a special attachment—critical, to be sure—to Help!  I have one to A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s visceral.  It’s also more to the title song than to the whole film and is connected to a very specific memory. 

[The movie was released in Europe, where I was living at the time, in July 1964, less than a year before I took a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over spring vacation with a group from my school in Geneva.  (The French title is Quatre garçons dans le vent, literally “Four boys in the wind,” but its idiomatic sense is “Four boys in fashion” or, more colloquially, “Four hip guys.”  The German title, incidentally, is simply Yeah Yeah Yeah.) 

[The songs from the film were in all our heads, and one of our group, a boy from a really wealthy family, had brought along an electric guitar and a complete portable amp system (which we had set up in the train compartment for our cross-continental journey from Geneva to Warsaw).  I’m sure he played the soundtrack and we sang that song over and over on that long train voyage. 

[Skipping ahead a couple of days, we were in the Soviet Union and on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad when I remembered something vital: our adult chaperone was supposed to have arranged to pick up my visa for Hungary from the Hungarian embassy in Moscow! 

[The Hungarians had refused to issue me a visa through the embassy in Bern the way all my schoolmates had gotten theirs—I carried a diplomatic passport and visas for Western diplomats had to be issued by the foreign ministry in Budapest—so I was supposed to pick it up in Moscow.  But the faculty leader had forgotten and so had I (I was all of 18 at the time), and we were en route to Leningrad. 

[When we couldn’t get the visa at the Hungarian consulate in Leningrad or, next, in Kiev, we had to arrange for me to fly over Hungary and meet the group in Vienna.  So they all took off by train to Budapest and I waited in Kiev for a plane to Vienna the next day. 

[Alone and without rubles except what I needed to get through the day, I had to kill time somehow.  So I wandered around the city—I spoke a little Russian but no Ukrainian—and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” to myself over and over. 

[I was a little relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people—but I still had almost no cash until the group arrived in town some hours after I did.  So I walked and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” some more! 

[To this day, I can’t hear that song—which, like most Beatles tunes, I still love—without flashing back to that spring trip 55 years ago to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.]

Bob Dylan Dance Party

by Kirk Woodward

[I imagine by now that most readers of Rick On Theater know that my friend Kirk Woodward is my go-to guest blogger for anything musical.  Most ROTters also probably know that Kirk’s a longtime and staunch fan of Bob Dylan.  Those two factoids should explain why this post exists on this blog.  Plus the fact that he went to a Dylan concert, the Never Ending Tour at the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theatre from 23 November to 6 December, a few days before Thanksgiving.

[I post Kirk’s reports and discussions of music—there have been quite a few on ROT since I started it almost 11 years ago—because, one, I could never cover musical subjects on my own; I’m entirely ignorant about music.  Two, I always learn something from his writing about the subject.  He not only understands music as an art form, but her knows the performers and their musicianship so he can talk about how they did whatever he heard. 

[That’s what he’s done here, vis à vis Bob Dylan.  Trust me: you’ll gain something from reading his account of the Dylan experience.]

I would go to more concerts if they were as good as the Bob Dylan concert I attended on Tuesday, November 26, 2019, at the Beacon Theater, toward the beginning of a two week residency by Dylan at that theater.

“Good,” not perfect. From where I sat – far back in the upper balcony – Dylan’s vocals were often overwhelmed by the volume of sound from his band. I realize that so many rock concerts do this same thing – that artists whose words are central to their performances often can’t be understood because the overall sound is too loud, and because the lower tones – drums, bass guitar – seem to be the sound operator’s favorites.

Booming sound hardly helps one understand the lyrics sung by Dylan, who is no model of understandability to start with. One gets used to that, though, and I found my ears adjusted – somewhat – as the concert went on. For all I know, the sound was clearer downstairs anyway; I couldn’t say.

In compensation for any trouble understanding his words, Dylan was in terrific voice. His years of recording and singing in concert songs associated with Frank Sinatra seem to be over, but the residue is a clearer voice and much more connection between singer and audience.

For several years Dylan sounded like he had ravaged his vocal chords (smoking? drinking?), and many of us assumed we would be hearing mostly growls from him for the rest of his concert and recording career. As usual, he fooled us. He does that sort of thing. Last year and this, he sings, firmly and securely; his phrasing is excellent, and he seems able to get just about any vocal effect he wants.

Part of the fun of attending multiple Dylan concerts is noticing what has changed from previous ones. His tight, muscular band is usually more or less consistent (Charlie Sexton on guitar, Tony Garnier on bass, Donnie Heron on steel guitar and violin), but Bob Britt, on rhythm guitar, is new this tour, and Matt Chamberlin on drums is a major addition, with a sure, clean style and sturdy support for Dylan’s vocals.

Other novelties and oddities from the concert:

On stage behind the band were three mannequins, two female and one male, in evening dress, and on several locations on stage were white busts of a woman I couldn’t identify from my distance from the stage.

Dylan played a spinet piano instead of a grand.

Only one band member (the bass player) wore a hat.

Last concert, a friend of mine expressed the fervent wish that Dylan would play just one song the way he did it on the record. At this concert he did, substantially, on “Highway 61,” and close enough on “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

Instrumentally, there was more emphasis than before on the violin, which accompanied Dylan on five songs to great effect.

When he left the piano and sang (and sometimes played harmonica, fine as usual) at center stage, he usually backed up until he was surrounded by the musicians, and sang facing “stage right,” as though someone were in the wings of the stage. I gather he’s been doing that this tour. There’s always something.

Dylan played electric guitar twice during the concert. I have not seen him touch a guitar in years; piano has been his instrument, and he’s gotten secure with it. I haven’t read or heard anything authoritative about why he largely abandoned the guitar; anyway, it’s back in limited use. I’ve never thought Dylan was much of an electric guitar player, but at the Beacon he sounded at least adequate, if maybe a bit tentative.

In a band where the musicians seldom have much opportunity to shine individually, Charlie Sexton was applauded for a strenuous guitar solo, and Matt Chamberlain had a drum solo! Really! I was there!

And Dylan introduced the band! It’s been a while since I saw him do that. He sounded cheerful and enthusiastic as he introduced each member. Surprise! One can go to concerts for years and not hear him speak, as opposed to sing, a word.

Those are the sorts of things that fascinate Dylan fans.

Basically, the concert’s song list could be divided into two kinds of songs, affecting ballads, and rockers. Among the former, the highlights for me were “Lenny Bruce,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and “Girl From the North Country,” all sung from the piano with reduced accompaniment by the band. Dylan sang those three songs simply and effectively, and the audience seemed to feel those were among the most satisfying moments of the show; I certainly did.

On several other numbers, though, the band just wailed. It was quite a sight to see Dylan standing at the piano, pounding it for all the world like Jerry Lee Lewis – one halfway expected him to lift his leg and start banging the piano with his foot.

On one number, with a traditional rock ‘n’ roll arrangement, Charlie Sexton actually played the melody of the old Moonglows song “Sincerely” (1954, written by Harvey Fuqua and Alan Freed) as the instrumental break.

Dylan, of course, has always been securely connected to the past where music is concerned. It is universally recognized that his knowledge of popular music of all kinds, particularly what’s called “American roots music,” is encyclopedic. I have always felt that he saw his task as one of bringing the values of more obscure folk music and poetry onto the “big stage.”

He continues to make that happen; he’s been doing it a long time. Before the concert I talked with a man who heard him sing in 1961. It was at a folk music club in Greenwich Village, and a very young Bob Dylan sang a couple of songs during an “open mike” evening. He was just warming up.

[My introduction to "Dylan" goes back a pretty long way.  (Both Kirk and I are older than Rock ’n’ Roll.)  I put the singer-songwriter’s name  in quotation marks like that because it wasn’t actually the man himself, but someone who sang one of his songs, which I’d never heard before.

[I don’t remember a lot of the details (like I said, I’m older than R ’n’ R), but it must have been sometime in 1965, probably the summer.  My folks had moved to Bad Godesberg, the home of our embassy to Germany, by that time (my dad had been transferred to the embassy from another post in the spring) and the event took place in someone’s embassy-compound apartment.  

[I don’t remember whose apartment it was or why we gathered there.  I assume whoever the embassy staffer was, she or he had a teenaged son or daughter (I don’t know why, but for some reason I remember a girl) who’d invited a bunch of other embassy brats like me to the home for an evening—there was a small crowd of us, all teens and maybe some college-aged kids as well. 

[I remember sitting around in the living room, listening to a guy sing as he accompanied himself on guitar.  What I recall as the last song was “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” the Dylan song that wasn’t released until the previous year and hadn’t gotten to Europe yet—or, at least, not to my ears.  As I remember the impromptu rock concert, none of us had heard the song—or, I imagine, anything like it.

[I don’t remember who the singer was—for all I know, he became a famous folk-rocker (or maybe he already was and I just didn’t know him).  I assume he wasn’t an official State Department sponsee because, if he had been, my dad would have been his host because Dad was the Cultural Attaché; it would have been his gig!  

[I may have known Dylan’s name by then, or I may not yet.  I just don’t remember.  After my brother and I moved to Germany in 1963, I only went back to the States once, in the spring of ’64 to visit colleges (and the New York World’s Fair with my grandmother!), and American culture didn’t get to Europe in those days until after a gap of maybe six months or longer.  (My American schoolmates in Switzerland mobbed my brother and me when we got there because we’d been “home” more recently than most of them and we knew the songs and dances that had been current when we left that summer!  We were the cultural heralds, so to speak.)  

[So this was my first impression of “Dylan”—by proxy, but nonetheless striking.  Not as avid as Kirk’s, perhaps, but I went on to become a fan, too.]

Bob and Ringo

by Kirk Woodward

[Following shortly on “Frankie,” his report on a recent Frankie Valli concert appearance (posted on 16 November), my friend Kirk Woodward is back on Rick On Theater with a new post on a couple of rock ’n’ roll oldies.  This time it’s folk-rock icon Bob Dylan and former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.  As regular ROTters will know, Kirk is a long-time fan of both Dylan and the Beatles; he’s previously written on both for this blog: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” posted on 8 January 2011; “Bob Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; “The Beatles And Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary,” 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; and “Now, Live, The Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016.  As I’ve frequently said of Kirk’s contributions to ROT, his accounts of these musical experiences are informed both by his personal responses and his background and knowledge of music and performance.  I am beyond delighted to share Kirk’s thoughts with ROTters and I know you will find edifying notions here.  ~Rick]

Since I recently wrote on this blog about a sterling Frankie Valli concert I saw in November 2017, I may as well report on two other shows I saw in the same month, both involving older performers, although neither are as old as Valli, who is 83 (he was born in 1934). Both are close, though – Bob Dylan is 76 (born in 1941), and Ringo Starr is 77 (born in 1940). Both are known quantities, first making their musical marks in the early 1960s. Both remain remarkable performers today.

Of the two, Bob Dylan is the more mercurial. On the one hand, he is an established figure in the world of music, to the point where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. On the other hand, he remains unpredictable, as demonstrated by his response to receiving the Nobel Prize: he remained invisible for days, finally released a statement saying the award left him “speechless,” did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award, and delivered his acceptance speech, which the prize rules require in order to receive the cash award, two months after the deadline, in the form of a recorded speech accompanied by music.

His Nobel experience may be taken as a model for nearly everything he does. It is not just that he does not meet expectations; he scorns them, defies them, dares the rest of the world to follow him through any amount of curious behavior.

For some of us who saw one of his five concerts at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan during the week of November 13-17, 2017, the biggest example of Dylan’s unpredictable behavior, among many possible choices, involves his voice.

Beginning around the time of the release of his celebrated album Time Out of Mind (1997), and intensifying by the time the album Modern Times (2006) was released, Dylan’s voice noticeably thickened, contracted in range, and took on a gravelly sound.

Many, including me, assumed that the years had taken their toll on his vocal equipment, and we did our best to enjoy what was worthwhile in Dylan’s new sound. I don’t regard purity of tone as the only standard for a singer.

Years ago I heard the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer (1900-1984) at a period when she literally had lost the ability to sing – she could only speak the lyrics of her songs. (I have read that her singing voice later somewhat returned.) I remember her  renditions of songs as among the best I have ever heard, with versions of “Send In the Clowns” and “Being Green” that stick with me to this day – and at that time she couldn’t sing a note.

So I accepted Dylan’s hoarse later voice, and was stunned at the recent Beacon concert to hear him not only sing, but sing as tunefully and clearly as he has in decades, and with greater range – occasionally singing relatively high notes in an easy semi-falsetto.

What in the world? How did he clear up his sound so well? Will he keep singing this way? One never knows with Dylan, but there’s the possibility that his rugged voice of recent years was another of the many constructs out of which he has built his public persona.

Many “stars,” it appears, seem to have a mysterious ability to shape their environments. There is a tape of a Dick Cavett TV interview with the actress Katherine Hepburn (1907-2003), who Cavett says at the beginning of the tape had been uncertain whether she wanted to be on the show at all.

Cavett asked the staff to begin taping as soon as Hepburn arrived in the studio. What we see on the tape is Hepburn immediately taking charge of the show, ordering the cameras into different locations, moving furniture around, and generally dominating the whole scene without concern for who is “in charge.” She was.

Along the same lines, I talked once with a man who had encountered Dylan on a New York street and spoke to him briefly. The man told me that as people began to notice that Bob Dylan was right there among them, and a crowd began to gather, Dylan somehow maneuvered his position so that the man was a shield between the other people and Dylan. Then, he said, he looked around and Dylan had disappeared.

That story, which I have no reason to doubt, is consistent with everything we know about Dylan’s performing life. He “shapes the environment” of both his music and his personality as the public experiences it. (I have no idea what he is like in private life.)

The issue is not what he is communicating – I am not at all doubting the genuineness of his interests and his love for his art – but how he presents it. He so seldom does the expected that some have referred to him as “perverse.”

There is another way to look at what Dylan does, of course, and that is to see him as someone who wants his audience to pay attention – to be alert, to participate in what he’s doing, to share with him the experience of encountering the world the way he sees it. To accomplish this, perhaps, he specializes in doing the unexpected, or, to put it another way, to doing what he wants instead of what people want him to do.

In his remarkable autobiography Chronicles Volume One (Simon and Schuster, 2004), Dylan drops hints that he consciously engineers his persona. For example,  he writes, “If you didn’t have some kind of trick, you’d come off with an invisible presence, which wasn’t good.” He’s specifically talking about what he learned from watching the singer Richie Havens, but the comment certainly seems to have larger implications.

In Chronicles (a book well worth anyone’s time to read) Dylan also talks about his exposure to the famous off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (which opened in 1954, and then returned in 1955 for 2,707 performances), with music by Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), translated by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964).

Dylan devotes five pages of his book to the effect the work had on him, especially the song “Pirate Jenny.” It is tempting to link Dylan with Brecht’s famous theories about drama as an instrument for shaking an audience out of its usual expectations and making it think (often referred to in English, somewhat inaccurately, as the “alienation effect”). Dylan’s many personae and his varied approaches to his music certainly seem to call Brecht’s approach to mind.

Dylan is notorious, in particular, for recasting his songs into rhythms, melody lines, and even harmonies, that barely resemble those of the original recordings. My friend at the Beacon concert said, “I wish that he’d sing just one line of “Blowing In the Wind” the way he wrote it! That’s all I want – just one line!”

I understand that request, but I think I also understand that Dylan seems to be saying, “Why should I sing a song in the way it sounded on its recording? I’ve already done that!” Another friend of mine feels that Dylan shows disrespect for his own songs. I see that situation in exactly the opposite way – it seems to me that Dylan respects his songs so much that he believes they can exist in many forms different from their original style. That approach is also part of the folk song tradition that (among other traditions) has influenced his writing.

In any case, the effect is to make a Dylan admirer approach each of his concerts wondering what kind of Dylan we’ll get this time – in other words, an alert, interested audience, an active rather than a passive audience.

Having said all that, as a matter of fact there may be a simpler reason that Dylan is singing better than we’ve heard him in a long time: in the last few years he has released three albums of music from what is often called “the great American songbook,” “standards” of popular music, many of them most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra (whom Dylan knew slightly, and greatly admired).

When you hear Dylan sing these songs (for example, at the Beacon, “Once Upon and Time” and “Autumn Leaves,” among others), you certainly know it’s Bob Dylan singing them; but he sings the songs simply and with feeling. He sings them. Perhaps that activity has spilled over into the way he performs his own songs.

In any case, the concert I saw was a huge success, with one high point followed by another. In recent years Dylan has completely stopped playing the guitar, and at the Beacon he didn’t play the harmonica either. Instead he either sang the standards while holding a microphone stand like Sinatra or Elvis might have done, or he sang from the piano, often standing up while playing, pounding on it like Jerry Lee Lewis. When he first started playing piano in his concerts, his playing was unobtrusive and tentative. Now it’s boisterous – a vigorous lead instrument.

Dylan, of course, caused a huge musical upheaval in the 1960s: he opened a new world of lyric writing by showing that words to songs could be personal to an individual,  a window into a specific person’s mind. (He was helped in this by the fact that he is in many ways not just a lyricist but a poet, a fact that his Nobel Prize surely acknowledges.) Everyone who has written popular music since then, including the Beatles, rappers, and everyone else, has benefited from the revolution he caused.

Revolutions don’t come along that often, so Dylan has replaced revolution with revelation. Each appearance is a revelation of what a singer/instrumentalist/songwriter can accomplish, and a look at the possibilities of the human spirit as well – a spirit that may well at times be cranky, individualistic, even, well, perverse.

Ringo Starr also participated in a revolution, the revolution that happened musically, culturally, and perhaps even politically as the Beatles – hugely influenced by Dylan – transformed popular music, in some ways taking Dylan’s insights and presenting them in a more accessible way than Dylan has.

Since 1989, Ringo, long past his Beatle days, and his All-Starr Band have toured widely, with Ringo showcasing a changing series of outstanding musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, and recently of the 1980s. The round-robin format of his shows gives each musician a chance to be showcased, and allows all of them to stretch out musically.

The current band has been together for five years, and includes singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren, keyboardist Gregg Rolie (from the bands Santana and Journey), guitarist Steve Lukather (from Toto), bassist Richard Page (from Mr. Mister), woodwind player Warren Ham (from Bloodrock and Kansas) and drummer Gregg Bissonette, plus of course Ringo, also on drums. 

I saw the last show of their 2017 tour at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey. It is not revolutionary, but it is definitely a revelation of how well a rock group can work together. The members seem to genuinely enjoy playing together (and I have heard anecdotally as well that that is so). 

Ringo continues to be a splendid host on stage, relaxed and funny, singing well, drumming (as I read someone say) impeccably, and reminding us of some points we ought to remember: that older folks can accomplish great things; that music can inspire, excite, stimulate, enliven; and that happiness is not only worthwhile but sometimes achievable. Perhaps those things are revolutionary after all.