Why we need(ed) the Beatles
Sunday, July 8, marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles third movie, the animated feature “Yellow Submarine” in 1968. Movie theaters all over the country will be celebrating with a special anniversary screening this week.
The film was a venture the Fab Four felt squeamish about after the mixed reviews accruing to their movie “Help!” in 1965.
The Brits were mildly receptive – especially compared to the Beatlemania of the early 1960.s. In America, the reaction was much more positive with reviewers praising the film’s splashy psychedelic style.
As Jonathan Gould writes in “Can’t Buy Me Love”, the tragic worldwide events of 1968 “had only served to renew the charismatic bond that had first linked the Beatles to millions of anxious, rescue-hungry teenagers in the bleak aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death. That June another charismatic Kennedy had been assassinated (Robert), together with the living embodiment of America’s social conscience, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and with their deaths had died all meaningful hope for the sort of orderly change ‘within the system’ that sympathetic elders had been urging upon the young.”
Love Is All You Need
English social critic Christopher Booker had no doubt that in 1968 the Sixties Dream-Wish for “love, love, love” was dying.
“Yellow Submarine’s” strong mod tones, Warhol-like scenery and pop grooviness could not hide the fact that there were elements of child-like regression throughout. There was the infantile plot: A musical utopia named “Pepperland” is conquered by musichating “Blue Meanies”. The Beatles arrive in a yellow submarine to defeat them.
The musical score is retrogressive, offering only four new songs. The film was saved for many with its reprise of such hits as “Eleanor Rigby” and “All You Need is Love.” This was a band with only two years to go. Social historians often wonder if so many popular offerings were an attempt to build a Dream World without God.
What? God? No, it fits here. In 2006 Cirque Du Soleil launched a Las Vegas tribute to the Beatles titled “Love.” The Beatles sangs hymns about love as a Dream Quest as much as any artists” “Love Me Do”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “P/S. I Love You”, “All You Need Is Love.” The song “Sergeant Pepper” climaxes with the refrain, “Love is all you need.”
But it was a peculiar human-centered love they celebrated, as their friend and critic Steve Turner wrote in “The Gospel According to the Beatles“: “The apostle John declared, ‘God is love.’ The Beatles effectively turned this around and said ‘Love is God.’ There was no need for God to become incarnate and then die in order to bring salvation; they were saying that we could access the love directly…As George(Harrison) puts it in ‘Within you without you’ – ‘With our love we could save the world/ If they only knew.’”
John, Paul, George and Ringo projected the image of fun-loving totally liberated mop-heads evolving a new hope to a youthful generation. But these four
lads were hardened men of the world. They had been raised beneath “the blue suburban skies” of gritty Liverpool, England, barely recovered from the austerities of World War Two. John and Paul slaved over their compositions. The Beatles had honed their musical skills in the seedy nightclubs of Hamburg, Germany. The exhaustion of toomany all-night stands suffuses “Hard Days Night” and “A Day in the Life.”
Thus in the Beatles canon, songs such as “I’m a Loser” and “Nowhere Man” are pathos-tinged counterpoints to the exuberance of “She Loves You” and “From Me To You.”
The Long and Winding Road
The band’s attempt to assuage the emptiness led to a very public quest through the drug culture. It’s a route many are still travelling today, hence the relevance.
After all, “what was different about the Beatles,” opines Steve Turner, was that “they had the finances and the fame to explore their inclinations in a way few people can.” But Dream Worlds never last. Six years after their mesmeric cultural conquest on the “Ed Sullivan Show” debut, the band broke up and 10 years after that their leader was tragically assassinated.
Columnist Bernard Levin wrote that the Beatles were “highly visible victims of their own success.” Screaming crowds drowned out their voices. After 1966 they confined themselves to studio recordings. John Lennon was deathly afraid of assassination threats after his “more popular than Jesus” comment in 1966, a few months before they played in the Mid-South Coliseum.
Musical director George Martin saw four truly talented artists yearning to explore their own separate musical tastes. George Harrison delved into religion with “My Sweet Lord.” John was more and more preoccupied with Yoko Ono’s plans. Paul’s workaholic style was irritating his peers.
Here, There and Everywhere
Ironically, Lennon’s “Jesus” reference alluded to the sometimes remote, liturgical Jesus presented in too many churches back then, making Beatles lightheartedness and frivolity appealing. But as the social critic Christopher Booker intuited, the Jesus Lennon dimly understood was destined to last.
The biblical Christ, said Booker, was sent here to model the pattern of living successfully amid evil and futility. The carpenter’s son moved from the Temptation Stage of being offered the world (Matthew 4: 8) to the Dream Stage of the Entry into Jerusalem to the Nightmare Stage of betrayal and cruel death. “Yet, on Easter morning comes the Resurrection, completing the full cycle of the perfect man; who had acted out the pattern of the world’s sins and yet was reborn.”
Jesus had to die to Self. The Beatles could not compare to that incomparable life. None of us can. Even so, their brash confidence took the world by storm, for a while. My 78-year-old grandmother said, “I like their English accents.” My wife, Susan, picked a Beatles song for our wedding day: “Here, There and Everywhere.” Tim Welch, a sound engineer from Memphis, concluded: “Those guys could really sing.” There is even a recording that sets the Beatles tunes in Baroque and classical musical styles – and it works!
Come Together
Their legend survives. Paul McCartney closed out the memorial concert in New York after the events of September 11, 2001. He ended the 2012 London Olympics wonderfully with “Hey, Jude” while the worldwide audience of splendidly youthful Millennials knew the words – all of them. In the end the band is best remembered for their bouncy, exuberant and upbeat early tunes. Even the Vatican now approves.
It may be that we overdosed on optimism in the early 1960’s. No problem with this today. The Beatles’ embedded Call is still there: “Life is very short and there’s no time/ For fussing and fighting my friends.” That’s still a good message, five decades later.
Neil Earle is a retired pastor living in Memphis and editor of Reconcile, a newsletter advocating principles of societal change. His website is asecondlook.info.
Malco Paradiso Cinema in Memphis will show “Yellow Submarine” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 10.