"Now and Then"

by Kirk Woodward 

[As veteran ROTters know by now, Kirk Woodward’s been a generous contributor to this blog since it began over 14½ years ago.  That’s probably largely because I started Rick On Theater at Kirk’s suggestion, so spiritually at least, he’s a part-owner. 

[Even if you’ve only read an occasional post on ROT, you probably know that one of Kirk’s most frequent topics is the Beatles—because he’s been an avid fan of that British rock foursome since they first appeared on the U.S. rock ’n’ roll scene almost 60 years ago. 

[(To be fair, I was, too, but I was in high school in Europe [see my post “Going to a Swiss International School,” 29 April-14 May 2021], so I started listening in mid-1963 on such radio stations as Radio Luxembourg and pirate stations aboard ships in the Atlantic.  Kirk, however, has a strong music background that I lacked, so I may have heard them earlier, but he understood what they were doing.)

[In any case, when I heard a report on WCBS-TV news on the evening of Thursday, 26 October, about the “new” Beatles song about to be released, I immediately e-mailed Kirk with the news (even though I was pretty sure he’d have picked up on it before I did) and urged him to try to hear the record ASAP and write about it for the blog.  Ultimately, that’s what he did—and the outcome is below. 

[(He actually sent his copy to me on 14 November, but after editing (minimal), I held it to space out Kirk’s contributions a bit—he’d sent me “Great Directors at Work” just before and I was posting it on 25 November—so they wouldn’t all come at once.)

[Kirk’s past Beatles posts on Rick On Theater 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; “Help!,” 17 September 2020; and “Reviewing the Beatles,” 19 December 2021.]

The Beatles have been so central to my life that I don’t even think about how important they are to me anymore until something happens to remind me, like the recent release of “the last Beatles song,” a John Lennon song called “Now and Then.” [See Kirk’s earlier Rick On Theater posts “The Beatles and Me” (7 October 2010) and “The Beatles’ Influence” (13 July 2015), among his other Fab Four contributions to this blog.]

Lennon (1940-1980) recorded a “demo tape” on a cassette tape recorder in the late 1970’s. When the three remaining Beatles were working on the Anthology project in the 1990’s, Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Lennon’s widow, offered some of Lennon’s demo tapes to the remaining Beatles for the project.

[Sometimes referred to as the Anthology project, The Beatles Anthology is a multimedia retrospective consisting of a TV documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book on the history of the group. Beatles members Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr participated in the making of the works, while Lennon appears in archival interviews.

[The television documentary was first broadcast in November 1995. The Anthology book was released in 2000; Anthology 1 of the album set was released the same week of the documentary’s broadcast and Anthology 2 and Anthology 3 were released in 1996.]

Two of the songs she provided, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” were completed and released (in 1995 and 1996 respectively) by the remaining Beatles, and they began work on a third, “Now and Then,” but abandoned it, with George Harrison (1943-2001) in particular losing interest, partly because of technical issues – Lennon’s voice was combined with his piano playing in a way that couldn’t be separated, and apparently there was an unfortunate hum on the tape as well.

Paul McCartney (b. 1942) occasionally mentioned in interviews that he’d like to finish working on the song, and he became more vocal on the subject in 2021.

While the film director Peter Jackson (b. 1961) was doing superlative work on the Beatles documentary Get Back (2021), he and his team developed software for separating and remixing monophonic sound (for example, on a cassette recording) that far exceeded the capability of previously existing software.

Apparently in 2022, McCartney and Ringo Starr (b. 1940) finished work on the song, adding additional instrumental and vocal parts, including an orchestral score. Producing the recording were Jeff Lynne (b. 1947); McCartney; and the brilliant Giles Martin (b. 1969), the son of the Beatles’ famous original producer George Martin (1926-2016). Giles Martin also co-wrote the orchestral scoring for the release with McCartney and composer Ben Foster (b. 1977). The result was publicly released on 2 November 2023.

For a band that made its last recordings in early 1970, the Beatles have been hot in recent years. Paul McCartney recently played on a track on the new album by the Rolling Stones, Hackney Diamonds (released on 20 October 2023). And “Now and Then” has done well on the US music sales charts and was #1 on its release in England.

[According to Wikipedia, “Now and Then” débuted at #42 in the U.K. on 3 November and reached #1 the following week. In the U.S., the song was #1 on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart for the week ending 11 November and hit between #5 and #7 on other Billboard charts, making “Now and Then” the Beatles’ 35th top ten single on the magazine’s tallies. Wikipedia records, however, that two weeks later, it “fell off the chart.”]

Then there’s the Get Back documentary, in three parts and about eight hours long, an astonishing look at the creative process in action – we literally see the first moments of the composition of the song “Get Back” (originally released as a single on 11 April 1969) as McCartney improvises.

The Get Back documentary (footage originally shot in January 1969) also shattered a long-held belief about the Beatles, that their experiences making the Let It Be album (1970) that features “Get Back” were, not to mince words, a living hell. The documentary shows that there certainly are difficult moments, plenty of them, among the Beatles, but even more there are moments of cooperation, fun, and productivity, as well as a great deal of just messing around.

The Beatles did go on to break up over financial and management issues, but the Get Back film removed a huge cloud of gloom from over their last years, and I suspect that the film had much to do with the anticipation that greeted the announcement of the release of “Now and Then.”

We may ask, what is it about the Beatles, anyway? Why are they important to many of us (certainly to me) more than fifty years after they finished being a band? I have chewed over this question many times, and my answers never completely satisfy me.

Part of it is simply that they did their work so well. Song after song, recording after recording, the work is well thought out, clearly presented, full of energy, humor, and imagination. The Beatles are among the few rock bands capable of being funny; they are astonishingly poised; they almost never repeat themselves, even though many of their songs would make a career for most artists.

There’s got to be more to the story, though, and I think one can follow a thread that begins with the earliest songs they wrote and recorded. Typically those were “love songs,” and popular music is mostly made up of them.

The singer and songwriter Barry Manilow (b. 1943), who should know, said recently that in popular music, “You can either write, ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you.’ You go any further than that, you’re writing a Broadway song.” (Barry Manilow’s first Broadway musical, Harmony, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 13 November 2023.)

Actually Lennon and McCartney stated, in their earlier days, that they hoped one day to write a musical. Their songs have been presented on Broadway, notably in the musical Beatlemania in 1979. An early feature of their song list was “Till There Was You” from the 1957 musical The Music Man (released by the Beatles in 1963).

[Kirk has written about the distinctions between “popular songs” and “theater songs” in “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” posted on ROT on 2 October 2011.]

The Beatles did not write for Broadway, but they wrote popular songs of an extraordinarily broad range.  In general the earlier songs the Beatles – almost always Lennon and McCartney – wrote were about romantic relations, but from the start the angles from which they observed romance were unusual – but frequently presented so smoothly that one might not notice.

The famous “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963), for example, is about the simplest possible “romantic” idea, expressed completely in its title, but even so, “holding hands” isn’t exactly a staple of rock music.

About the same time, though, “She Loves You” (also 1963), another enormous success, takes a different approach – the singer isn’t the person in love but is talking to another person about his relationship to still another, and offering advice on behavior:

So it’s up to you – I think it’s only fair;
Pride can hurt you too – apologize to her!

The song sounds so effortless that it’s easy to overlook how unusual the story within the song really is as an example of (extremely successful) popular music.

Then, still in the early period of their success, the Beatles met Bob Dylan (b. 1941) and listened to his songs, and learned that the focus of songs could range almost anywhere – toward society, toward people, toward one’s inmost thoughts and feelings.

With a little practice the Beatles mastered this insight and for the last several years of their career they wrote songs that didn’t convey meanings so much as they suggested the possibility of meanings, pointing to the existence of worlds of experience beyond the words of the songs themselves.

The master of this approach was John Lennon. A prime example is his song “I Am the Walrus” (1967), in which the lyrics don’t make literal sense. It’s a waste of time trying to parse them. But they point furiously at a swirl of meanings that the song only indicates. What does the song mean? It “means” that there is meaning somewhere.

Practically this meant that in their later years together the Beatles seldom wrote “love songs”; when they did, the songs were often complex and were full of implications beyond themselves. Frequently, their songs made one feel they were openings to a much wider world.

For a while it looked like the Beatles were leading the way in the march of popular songwriting. Today it’s clear that the Beatles basically were an end rather than a beginning. The following statement is a generalization by a fogey (which I am), but basically big selling recordings today are once again personal relationship songs, when they’re not simply music to exercise by.

On, then, to the song “Now and Then.” When I first heard it, I wasn’t thrilled. It’s a moody, sadly dreamy number. John’s voice definitely is clearer than in the first two posthumous Beatle songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” but I still felt it sounded a little unnatural. I was not impressed by Paul McCartney’s solo on electric guitar.

In general I was a bit let down. By contrast I had found “Free as a Bird” worthwhile, and I loved “Real Love.”

However, times have changed, and a feature of popular music for the last several decades has been the “music video.” Visual presentations of musicians playing songs go back to 1894, according to Wikipedia, and once “talking films” became prominent, they were often made.

The Beatles, however – who else? – pioneered the music video for our time, deciding in 1965-66, around the time they quit touring, that they could introduce their songs without having to do so in person. They used first-rate directors who brought imagination to their videos.

Following that hint, the music network MTV filled its programming with videos for years. Music videos turned into a competition of creative approaches. Today every song with a major release has one.

The video for “Now and Then” was directed by Peter Jackson. He had access to the “Get Back” footage, since he had spent years preparing that documentary. He was also able to use video of Beatles performances and recording sessions, including the ones for “Now and Then.” Pete Best (b. 1941), the drummer who famously was fired by the Beatles as they began to become famous, provided a very early film clip (although he is not seen in the video itself).

Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings films certainly tell a story, took his storytelling skills and fashioned a narrative for the video of “Now and Then.” It begins with quick cuts of guitars being tuned, a cassette tape being inserted in a console and then played, and two musicians playing guitar. We quickly see that they are George and Paul, and that they are working on “Now and Then.”

As they get going, the view shifts – John, identifiable by his “granny glasses,” is looking over the ocean, an appropriate choice since he wrote the song. The Beatles themselves, in old-fashioned bathing outfits, appear and disappear. Paul and Ringo, in the studio, continue to record the song, then Paul, Ringo, and George together, cross-cut with images of John and George, the two departed Beatles.

Then Ringo and Paul are standing next to each other, recording vocals for the song – except they’re not actually next to each other, it’s a trick of photography discernable because they’re using two different kinds of microphones. Still, in the image there they are . . . and at the line “I want you to be there with me,” there are the four Beatles, from left to right George, today’s Ringo and Paul, and John, mugging for the camera.

It’s a stunning moment, all four apparently together today over a span of half a century. It comes on unexpectedly, and for the rest of the video Jackson plays variations on the tune, so to speak, with different combinations of Beatles in different places – young and old, “now and then.” At the very end we see all four bow as they always did after a song (a moment taken from the wonderful 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night), and then their images dissolve, leaving only the word BEATLES.

Jackson does something else of great interest – the images he selects of John Lennon show not the John of the melancholy song, but John at his most relaxed, funniest, most giddy. John mugs, briefly imitates Elvis, does the Twist. He appears to stand in front of the orchestra that’s recording the score for the song, joyfully imitating the violins and mock-conducting them. The other Beatles, both younger and older versions, appear to be responding to his antics, bemused.

Art thrives on opposites. Jackson could have chosen melancholy images of John to match the melancholy tone of the song. Instead he does the opposite – he shows John at his most charming and amusing. The result, for me at least, is deeply satisfying. It gives me the John I want to think about – the best John – and the Beatles together, timelessly, working in harmony.

And now I love the song! That’s what music videos are supposed to achieve, but I can’t recall any that had that result for me before. I’m not surprised, however – the Beatles are nearly always a cut above everything else.

A question: did Lennon write “Now and Then” about Paul McCartney? It’s certainly a song about a difficult, perhaps ruptured relationship, filled with an unspecific hope that the break might in some way be repaired “if we start again.” Was it Paul that John was writing about?

Or Yoko Ono? Or someone else? Many writers will say that questions of inspiration are beside the point, that the finished work is an object of its own, not bound by its antecedents.

It’s hard not to speculate, though. McCartney has said that one of the last things Lennon said to him was to think of him “now and then, old friend.” Even more to the point, John’s song – to my ears at least – sounds like a “Paul song.” It could easily have been written by McCartney in his post-Beatle years. It wasn’t, but if it had been, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Paul’s work.

Most of all, both the song, the work of the surviving Beatles and their team, and the video, are filled with gratitude for the very existence of the Beatles. So, I probably don’t have to add, am I.

[I find it coincidental that both “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” come up together in Kirk’s article.  I happen to have a 45 of those two songs . . . in the German versions the Four recorded in ‘64 (“Sie liebt dich” and “Komm, gib mir deine Hand”; released in March 1964).  I bought Die Beatles in Koblenz, the town where my dad was stationed as a Foreign Service Officer (see “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013), as a curiosity/souvenir, and I still have it.

[I observed in my introduction to this report that, though I never got to see the Beatles in person when they were appearing on the Continent before their American stardom exploded, I heard their recordings in mid-1963 or so, and I started buying their recordings pretty soon afterwards.  My copy of With the Beatles—t​heir second album in the U.K. but their first in Germany, where I lived then—i​s the German pressing which I bought in Koblenz.  Released in Germany on 12 November 1963, it has 14 songs, seven on each side, rather than the usual 12 for U.S. releases.  (The U.S. version was entitled Meet the Beatles, released on 20 January 1964, the Beatles’ début album in this country.)

[(It’s not really relevant, but my Rubber Soul is the British release [3 December 1965], purchased in France by my friend Marc Humilien as a gift when I was in Villefranche-de-Lauragais, the Humiliens’ tiny hometown in southwestern France, for a visit.  Like my German With the Beatles, it also has two songs that aren’t on the American release.) 

[Two other curiosities are in my record collection, too: a pair of 45 rpm extended-play disks from Odeon, something that was rare in the U.S.  The Beatles’ Hits has “From Me To You” and “Thank You Girl” on the A side with “Please Please Me” and “Love Me Do” on the B; The Beatles contains “She Loves You” and “Do You Want To Know a Secret” on one side and “Twist and Shout” and “A Taste of Honey” on the other.  

[All sung in English, of course, three of the songs on The Beatles were listed on the disk’s jacket with their French titles in parentheses: “J’ai un secret à te dire,” “Twiste et chante,” and “Un homme est venue” (literally, “I have a secret to tell you,” “Twist and sing,” and “A man has come”).  Oddly, that last is “A Taste of Honey,” but don’t ask me how come.

[I must have bought at least that last record in Geneva, where I was in school—I don’t know why else it’d have French titles and not German. Die Beatles was a souvenir, a keepsake; the other four I bought because I wanted the songs to play in the dorm. (Neither of these records is dated, but I’d guess I got all of the EP’s in 1964 and 1965, during my senior year in high school.)

[One last comment on these songs: Kirk asserts that “‘holding hands’ isn’t exactly a staple of rock music,” and I thought about that a bit.  The only other pop song of which I can think in which holding hands as used as a romantic gesture—I’m sure there are others, but I can’t think of any off hand (no pun intended!)—is Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961, from Blue Hawaii).  He sings “Take my hand / Take my whole life too / For I can’t help falling in love with you.”  Hand-holding’s not the main idea of the song, and it’s only one passing mention, of course.

[Now, for ROTters who are reading the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted a second time to post Kirk’s discussion of “Now and Then”: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 10 & Epilogue, “Building a New Consensus” and “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” on Wednesday, 13 December.  I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I return to that serial post.]

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.]