Want to hear a really sloppy record? It's a good song, but the recording's a mess. The drums consistently drag the rhythm; the bass player isn't quite sure how his part is supposed to go...
—Douglas Wolk, "The Death of Mistakes Means the Death of Rock"
Here, via Rockcritics.com, is a New York Times podcast from September, half of which is devoted to a talk between music critic Ben Ratliff and pop-crit originator Nik Cohn on the remastered version of the White Album (which Ratliff deliciously informs us is currently #16 on the LP charts, "right below Lady Gaga"). Cohn, who was the Times's London correspondent on pop matters circa 1968-70, trashed the Beatles' masterpiece in their pages; now he has softened somewhat, admitting subtleties and qualities precluded at the time by his proto-punk stance. Ratliff, a mere tit-sucker in '68, does the second-generation thing resonant with many of us, about how he grew up with the album in the house, apprehending adult doom through child's ears.
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Cohn is one of my favorite writers, not only for his pop stuff (I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, Rock from the Beginning, "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night") but his other stuff (The Heart of the World, Yes We Have No: Travels in the Other England); I'd love to think he loves the album I love more than I love any other album I love. But even though it sounds better to him now than it did then, he is drawn back to words like "flabby" and "smug," and still finds the White Album a far distant second to its late '68 rival, Beggars Banquet. Well, even geniuses can be wrong: Nabokov hated Dostoevsky, too.
But Cohn is fun to listen to, sounding with his undiluted accent like his cheeks are stuffed with eel pie and Newcastle Brown Ale, and he comes up with at least one aperçu that is not only quotable but grimly valid: "'Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on — bra,' is not credible to me."
Is there any humor better than Beatles humor? Of course not. In the midst of playing Beatles Rockband like it was a job, I've posted a friend's recent humor column for Tribune Media Services over at mikegerber.com. Mark's column inspired me to write a little Beatles-inspired scene-let of my own at the end. Enjoy.
This is for anyone who is interested, which may not be some of you:
As I wrote in my posted comment on "The Best Dancer" below, thinking about Chuck Klosterman's piece got me thinking about Mark Shipper's piece — which, being a book, is a much bigger piece. Its title tells you that: Paperback Writer — The Life and Times of the Beatles, the Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion. That blows the hell out of Klosterman's title, which is a mere five words long. And the book behind it goes much farther down the same path toward a reinvention of not just the Beatles' factual history, but the general perception and popular mythology around them.
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"The finest novel ever written about rock and roll," goes the Greil Marcus blurb on the back; "Marvelously entertaining!" says Hilburn of the LA Times; "Devastatingly funny" writes Selvin in the SF Chronicle. I love the book my own damn self, and began wondering what became of Shipper. Apparently others have wondered that too. My Internet caught this email exchange (whence I swiped the jpegs posted here) between Scott Woods, majordomo at Rockcritics.com, and Richard Riegel, who reviewed Paperback Writer for Creem upon its 1978 release. Woods and Riegel discuss the novel (Scott reckons it funnier than The Rutles) and the mystery attaching to its now-you-see-him-now-you-don't-author, who followed up the Beatles satire with the compellingly titled How to Be Ecstatically Happy 24 Hours a Day for the Rest of Your Life, and then went underground, or at least sufficiently far to the fringes that he may be theorized as the J. D. Salinger of rock writers.
Riegel mentions that our elusive satirist now does something called "The Shipper Report," which would make him the "rarely-seen radio guru" referenced here, as well as the subject of this vintage piece of journalistic documentary from the Bush I era. Though Shipper is also said to have written for Creem in its early days, Woods says that in scanning back issues he has never come across his name. However, at the same time, Shipper demonstrably was in charge of a fanzine called Flash, which I discover is quite highly regarded in the annals of that particular subculture. Fanziner Christopher Stigliano constructs what must stand as the definitive history-critique of the short-lived Flash, including reprinting Shipper's Bangs- and Meltzer-influenced mission statement. Down below, if you scroll, is an extensive thank-you response from Shipper himself, which would seem to confirm his continued existence as of February 16, 2007. And another blog entry, with a much fuller low-down on the content of Paperback Writer than I've offered here, includes another, much shorter response from Shipper, which brings us up to September 18, 2008.
Time since then, as far as I can find it, goes unrecorded in the public forum. But I hope Mark is working his wang dang doodle somewhere this very moment, well and happy.
One more piece of Shipperiana, or related bizarrerie: a centerpiece of Paperback Writer is a deliriously imagined songwriting summit between a fully-baked Lennon, McCartney, and Dylan, the three magi drawing from their collective marijuana mists a horror of Surrealist wordslop called "Pneumonia Ceilings." ( "You've got the idea," Bob encourages Paul, "but the problem with your line is that it could make sense.") I recalled that I had not so very long ago come across a reference to this "song," but a reference that assumed it was real! Couldn't recall where, though, till some peremptory 'netting led me here, where the story is likewise repeated for fact.
Ta, Rock Turtleneck: your scroll-down commentator rights the historical wrong, and you remind me of where I saw Mark Shipper's "Pneumonia Ceilings" gag first become academic-archival myth: the gazillion-page reference work The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Bob scholar Michael Gray — which our very own Beatle Ed Park had me review in The Village Voice three years ago!
"How is it different than...karaoke? I mean I once sang karaoke harmony on 'You're Gonna Lose That Girl,' and it was definitely fun, but is this that much different? Oh? What's that you say? Oh it's about playing the instruments? Really? Is it that much fun to play that guitar-thing like it's, I don't know, Defender?
Isn't the fun of playing this kind of music on an instrument, part of it anyway, being able to do it your own way, at your own pace, adding your own little embellishments and whatnot? Rock Band just seems so...totalitarian. There! I said it! Just looking at that stream of colored notes makes me anxious. It's like being asked to monitor the production line at the Starburst factory! If I wanted to do that, I'd just watch Unwrapped..."
—Overheard (in my own brain)
This sort of I've-been-living-under-a-rock thing shouldn't work...but I think Klosterman pulls it off!
It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as “Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed. The clandestine power derived from the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul McCartney (the hummus eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat). Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968 addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.
—Chuck Klosterman on the reissues, in The Onion's A.V. Club
Everyone and their brother is writing about the Beatles today -- and last night VH1 was showing Help!, for heaven's sake! It's weird, and oddly it's making me a little bit cranky. (Like, Hey, I liked them first.) This happened back in 1995, though, a couple of years after my own personal conversion to Beatlemania, when Anthology landed and suddenly everyone was a big-time fan. So I guess it will blow over. In the meantime, if you find yourself growing fatigued with reading box-set reviews by Johnny-Come-Latelys, I recommend Chuck Klosterman's take at the Onion's AV Club. (Thanks to friend Betz for sending me the link.) Here's a sample:
1967 proved to be a turning point for the Beatles—the overwhelming lack of public interest made touring a fiscal impossibility, subsequently forcing them to focus exclusively on studio recordings. Spearheaded by the increasingly mustachioed Fake Paul, the four Beatles donned comedic Technicolor dreamcoats, consumed 700 sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a groundbreaking album no one actually likes. A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work. It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?
1. Dangerous Bacon, Stackridge (from “The Man In The Bowler Hat”). The whole album is a masterpiece, the missing link between the Beatles and Prog, produced by George Martin in 1973. The harmonies are soaring, the songs alternately epic, whimsical and vaudevillian, all snapping with crackle and pop. It’s the kind of album you want to tell people about, the kind of music you’d like to listen to while you write epic, whimsical, vaudevillian books.
From "Living With Music: Wesley Stace" on the NYT's Paper Cuts blog
Jonathan Lethem on the new Lorrie Moore novel:
I’m aware of one — one — reader who doesn’t care for Lorrie Moore, and even that one seems a little apologetic about it. “Too . . . punny,” my friend explains, resorting to a pun as though hypnotized by the very tendency that sets off his resistance. For others, Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows. Her last book, the 1998 story collection “Birds of America,” included the unforgettable baby-with-cancer story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a breathtakingly dark overture to a decade’s silence — as if the Beatles had exited on “A Day in the Life.” For many readers, the fact that Moore has now relieved an 11-year publishing hiatus is reason enough to start Google-mapping a route to the nearest surviving bookstore. —NYTBR
Speaking of which, did anyone else listen to this?
It's the expected farrago of good, bad and oh, come now, but the fact that Ram inspires a remake from a slew of hip LA bands unborn when it was first released must say something about its staying power.
I've been listening to Ram, one of the handful of solo Beatles discs I can listen to (others: All Things Must Pass, POB when I want to reaffirm the value of therapy). For kicks I unearthed this Rolling Stone review from 1971. It starts off as a pure hatchet-job in the standard "how dare McCartney not be Lennon" RS style, then ascends to a discussion of how The Beatles were better as a group, an observation that had to be tired even in 1971. If you sense a little extra snarkiness in my tone, it's because I think Macca got an incredibly raw deal in the Seventies. Critics resented him because they craved the glory reflected from rock's still-new status as an art form. (A conceit they owed, in some part, to McCartney. No Macca, no Sgt. Pepper; and no Sgt. Pepper, no Rolling Stone, at least not in the same way.)
A thought that struck me as I was reading: it's possible that, out of the four of them, McCartney's development was stunted the most by being in the group. As the most fluent musician, it fell to him to compensate for/counterbalance the others. Yeah, The Beatles were incomparably better as a group, but perhaps the reason that all of them were so spotty as solo artists was because each of their talents had been forced to develop in a complementary way, McCartney's most of all. Just a thought.
Beatles fan and litblogger (and novelist) Mark Sarvas catches a curious NYT juxtaposition—the obituary for Richard Poirier mentions his Beatles essay, and what do we see in the margin?
Yes—it's an image from the impending Beatles Rock Band release, illustrating the recent NYT mag story...
Speaking of which: What do readers/dullbloggers think about the story/the release/everything?
Much to mull over. I was most struck by the contrast between Paul's and Ringo's attitudes:
1) “That’s what you want,” [McCartney] told me. “You want people to get engaged.” McCartney sees the game as “a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the ’60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”
2) “It took me a while to understand downloading,” [Starr] said. “The last record was a wristband.” (His 2008 album, “Liverpool 8,” was released in the unlikely format of a USB drive that doubles as a bracelet, as well as on CD and MP3.) “The game is the biggest thing in the world right now, they tell me.”
From today's New York Times article on the CIA's secret prisons:
Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)Isn't what you've done to American principles and international law enough? Must you even ruin the Beatles?!
Soon, soon my little timewaster, you will be mine...
When my wife Kate sent this to me, she wrote, "What got me was how they narrowed John's nose, to show his increasing use of heroin." Dark Irish, she is.
From an L.A. Times piece about a "Worst Album Covers" blog...which also includes the "butcher" cover. What?? Get McKinney on the case!
If you can't identify this occasion within ten seconds, you're probably here by mistake. I wonder how it was taken? Michael Lindsay-Hogg, hanging by his toes from a dirigible?
EDIT: So I suppose I must excommunicate myself-- it's not the rooftop at all! Where and when exactly is a matter of debate, which can be sampled in the Comments. Now, where is that hairshirt of mine? (Made of JohnandYoko's hair; I pilfered it from Michael X.)
PLAYBOY: Why do you think rock 'n' roll has become such an international phenomenon?
DYLAN: I can't really think that there is any rock 'n' roll. Actually, when you think about it, anything that has no real existence is bound to become an international phenomenon. Anyway, what does it mean, rock 'n' roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John Lee Hooker, Bobby Vinton, Jerry Lewis' kid? What about Lawrence Welk? He must play a few rock-'n'-roll songs. Are all these people the same? Is Ricky Nelson like Otis Redding? Is Mick Jagger really Ma Rainey? I can tell by the way people hold their cigarettes if they like Ricky Nelson. I think it's fine to like Ricky Nelson: I couldn't care less if somebody likes Ricky Nelson. But I think we're getting off the track here. There isn't any Ricky Nelson. There isn't any Beatles; oh, I take that back: there are a lot of beetles. But there isn't any Bobby Vinton. Anyway, the word is not "international phenomenon"; the word is "parental nightmare."
—Playboy interview with Bob Dylan (1966)
(Interviewer: Nat Hentoff)
I'm listening to my iTunes's "party shuffle" function. Just now it played "My Love," followed by (as a palate cleanser?) "Helter Skelter." I submit that "My Love" is the anti-"Helter Skelter." Can anyone think of a better pair?
Let's play along with David L. Ulin's "The Beatles, 1970–1975," in the Believer's 2009 music issue (just out—get yours here or at your favorite store...be forewarned, these sell out!):
The Beatles are the fascination that lingers. I’ve been listening to them since August 1968, when my parents gave me Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for my seventh birthday, the original Capitol Records pressing with the souvenir cutouts, the paper mustache, the epaulettes. It takes a certain type of fan to obsess about such things, and once upon a time that’s who I was. Obsessive enough to track down every recording John ever played on, every song he and Paul wrote for Cilla Black or Peter & Gordon, every Teddy Boy bootleg: Hamburg, The Decca Sessions, This Is the Savage Young Beatles, with its garish yellow cover, the band clustered in their leathers, looking not quite dangerous enough to be a street gang, not quite polished enough to be the pop phenomenon they became.You'll have to get the issue to read the rest of the piece, but in the meantime: How would you assemble your fantasy-team splintered–Fab Four albums?This is one version of the fantasy Beatles, the early Beatles, the tough-guy rock-and-rollers, the amphetamine-eating wild boys who played eight hours a night in the Star Club, John with a toilet seat around his neck. This is the prehistory, vague and filmy, glimpsed in black-and-white photographs and fragmentary sound clips: the chime of a guitar, three seconds of harmony that seem almost familiar, prescient, like a sign of times to come. We almost feel as if we know them, as if these are the kids in high school who went on to sign a record deal. They appear to be accessible to us on human terms; as John told Jann Wenner in 1970, “We were just a band who made it very, very big, that’s all.”
Of course, the Beatles have never been accessible to us on human terms, at least not in America; they were famous from the moment we met them, Beatlemania 1964. Still, those early images and bootlegs suggest an alternate history, a way we might remake them as our own.
The Beatles don’t have to be the band that took the world by storm. Or maybe they are, but didn’t fall apart; maybe Abbey Road or Let It Be—depending on your dissolution myth—doesn’t have to be the final word. This is the other version of the fantasy Beatles, equally shadowy and indistinct. What if they had stayed together and made records until John decided to become a househusband in 1975? It’s not entirely out of the question: by the mid-1970s, John and Paul had come to an accommodation. They were together the night Lorne Michaels jokingly offered the Beatles three thousand dollars to appear on Saturday Night Live; it’s said they considered showing up at NBC. A few years earlier, on March 31, 1974, they even reunited for an evening in a Los Angeles recording studio, along with Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis, and Bobby Keys; the resulting booze- and coke-addled session, featuring standards like “Cupid” and “Stand By Me,” is available on a bootleg called A Toot and a Snore in ’74. It isn’t much to listen to, except for when those harmonies kick in. Here we have the nature of pop stardom—to be a mirror for the audience’s desire.
So why not play a game of let’s imagine? If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?
Again showing our contrarian streak, we thought we'd differentiate ourselves from everyone who wished "Sir" "James" Paul McCartney (jus' Paul to us) a happy birthday yesterday — which, true enough, was his actual date of birth, but isn't it always nice to get something the day after too? (Or is that Christmas?)
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Sorry for the miss, Paul — but you and we are like an old married couple, and one of us is bound to blank on an anniversary once in a while.
Beatleheads may celebrate Paul's lifespan and selfishly luxuriate in his giftings over at 30 Days Out, which has agglomerated an amazing list of McCartney song covers from the likes of Foo Fighters, Wilson Pickett, the Ron Eschete Ensemble, Elvis Presley, the Heptones, and Daffy Duck (?!). What other artist could unite in common celebration such a motley crew (a band also represented on the covers list)? In the words of English theologian Robert South (1634-1716), “If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.”
Less importantly, you can read my modest weigh-in on Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music at Bookforum. Retract your fangs, gang: Wald counts himself a fan of the Fabs, especially their early, rootsy work. The problems lie elsewhere ...
...who spend our time casting wonderful spells, and sending Beatle-y emails to each other. After several centuries of this one of us put down his computer and said, "Why not turn it into a blog already?" And that, kiddies, is how the zebra got his spots.