The Beatles Are Here! (24 page)

Nothing matches the sound of the Beatles in those first few years, with the jarring, harsh-sweet interplay of John and Paul, and the serene cascade of their songs. The real moment of
A Hard Day’s
Night
is the odd, accidental way it captured the Beatles’ cinema verité brusqueness in interviews, presaging the downfall of many humbug clichés in British life. But if the movie is about its moment, the “now” experience, and profound problems with satisfaction, then Jagger on stage on screen is everything that Elvis and the moptops failed to be.

The Ed Sullivan Show
was February 9, 1964—73 million viewers were reported.
A Hard Day’s Night
opened in New York on August 11, 1964. By then, every possible Liverpool gang was being signed up and touring the States. Next year, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider were putting together the Monkees. No one could keep up, least of all John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
A Hard Day’s Night
was not a “fuckin’ shitty pop movie,” but it was almost a new kind of musical to rival what Jacques Demy was doing in France with
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(it opened at Cannes in May 1964). But that was pretty and the Beatles were gritty. The influences flew in all directions, and the Dick Lester style would take root in American television in 1967 with the pilot of
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
. A couple of years into the success of that show and the Beatles broke up.

So that’s what that was.

*
Scouse = the accent and dialect associated with Liverpool and Merseyside.

Gabriel Kahane, composer and songwriter

MY FATHER,
JEFFREY
Kahane, is a concert pianist and conductor, but he grew up very much entrenched in the pop music of his era. My parents are too young to have truly been hippies, but they had older siblings. They wanted to emulate their adored elders and, as such, were listening to the Beatles at a relatively young age, when they were ten or eleven.

When I was growing up my father would practice a Mozart concerto, then put on
Abbey Road
or
Sgt. Pepper
. The Beatles, along with Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, are the artists I grew up with and from whom I soaked up notions of craftsmanship in songwriting.

I got to know the Beatles more or less in reverse order of their discography. I grew up listening to
Sgt. Pepper
,
Abbey Road
, “the White Album”; everything before that came for me much later. Although I didn’t start writing songs until I was in my early twenties, having grown up with that music had a profound effect on how I understood the DNA of songs.

There is this alchemical, sort of ineffable thing in Lennon-McCartney compositions: as much as they may have been writing independently, the ten percent of influence that one of them may have had on the other makes their collaboration greater than the sum of its parts.

A lot of today’s pop music—even that branded as art rock, independent, or highbrow—has become extraordinarily lazy with respect to craftsmanship in songwriting. There’s this peculiar double standard, particularly around lyrics. A lot of independent pop music being made is really satisfying on a musical level—it can be compositionally rich, sophisticated, and moving—but not so in its lyrics.

The craft of writing them has really fallen off.

I think of Paul McCartney as a true craftsman. Some may view him as a cheeseball English music hall songwriter, but there’s such incredible craft in his lyric writing and in his work as a storyteller. John Lennon, too. His approach to lyric writing was probably more intuitive than McCartney’s; nevertheless, many of his lyrics have a really satisfying shape and structure.

“She’s Leaving Home” comes to mind because the harmonic notes are so beautifully controlled; there’s this kind of Schubertian quality to it. It was a favorite of Leonard Bernstein’s in his quest to draw a connection between the German lied tradition and Lennon-McCartney. There’s a perfect economy between melody and harmony. The harmony is relatively simple and the way that it supports the melody is as perfect as a Schubert song.

I can’t assess a song like “She’s Leaving Home” critically with any kind of objectivity because I listened to it from such an early age. It’s wrapped up in the sonic equivalent of Proust’s madeleine; it’s evocative of so much from another time period. I think of that song as a prototype, or archetype, of a certain kind of story song. Certainly a lot of my work as a songwriter—in my pop music writing probably less than in [his musical]
February House
—has been story songs. The two albums I’ve released as a songwriter,
Gabriel Kahane
and
Where are the Arms?
largely include these, as opposed to songs that are abstract and imagistic.

THE BEATLES STARTED
more or less as a cover band. They had a repertoire of hundreds of cover songs that they played during their years in Germany. Many of these were American pop songs. McCartney has spoken explicitly about having a sort of apprenticeship to that songbook, and the huge impact it had on how he wrote songs.

Whether you’re painting, writing symphonic music, or doing any other art form, you learn initially by imitation. By soaking up that material, the Beatles set themselves up to create a catalog of songs that were in conversation with an earlier body of work. You can draw a connection from the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition right up to McCartney. There are instances when he can be kind of cloying, or simultaneously amusing and cloying; those are most often in the songs that relate to that earlier tradition. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” for example, has its charms, but it feels like a pastiche of an earlier song, perhaps one by Jerome Kern, one of the more explicitly Hebraic 1930s New York songwriters, with their chromatic melodies. (It’s a little too chromatic to be in the Richard Rodgers vein.) That clarinet obbligato drives the pastiche home even further.

I think the reason the Beatles are arguably the greatest band in history is that you can close read the songs harmonically or texturally, but they operate on so many levels at once. The vast majority of Beatles fans are nonmusicians; what makes the work so great is that the craftsmanship doesn’t need to be recognized as such. It’s satisfying because it’s simultaneously very sophisticated, yet incredibly simple and emotionally direct—and those are qualities that I look for in music.

Vera, Chuck and Dave

by Roy Blount Jr.

I
WAS BORN
at the same time, roughly, as the Beatles, so when they hit the U.S. I was too old for mass hysteria. In retrospect, that may seem a shame. But having done puberty in the American South in the prime of Little Richard, I was not quick to see the pressing need for Liverpudlian rhythm and blues. And I was busy: in graduate school, scraping up acquaintance with Old English as a hedge against future unemployment. Soon I would be married. And approaching parenthood. And (hi-ho!) fulfilling a military obligation, incurred before I had any reason to suspect there might be a war.
A Hard Day’s Night
struck me as slaphappy—callow compared to, say,
Duck Soup.
Did I mention that the Beatles were my age? And way ahead of me careerwise. And having
much
more fun.

But you couldn’t maintain asperity toward the Beatles for long. The night before my daughter was born, her mother and I were dancing at Arthur, the club named for what Ringo—in reply to an interviewer’s earnest query—called his haircut. One thing the Beatles were, that so few rock gods have been, was droll.

If you want to know what’s wrong with pop culture today, compare the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” to the current hit song “Young and Beautiful.” The latter was composed for the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s largely appalling adaptation of
The Great Gatsby.
The singer, Lana Del Rey, projecting an amorphously supra-ironic persona, asks us, over and over, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” When all she has left is her “aching soul”? Yes, she assures us, over and over, we will still love her.

But I don’t love her already. Even when I was her age, I wouldn’t have loved her. When I was her age I found a great deal more poignance and human interest in the comical appeal, “Will you still need me, / Will you still feed me . . .”

A book can’t afford to quote published song lyrics extensively, and at any rate those of “Young and Beautiful” would gum up my keyboard, so I invite you to check out their godawful poetry online. Then set beside them the excellent light verse of “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
Pfft
goes “Young and Beautiful.” It’s like putting salt on a slug.

The music of “Young and Beautiful” is grandiosely goopy, all the better to glom together words that have no intrinsic rhythm or coherence: “Channeling angels in a new age, now/ Hot summer nights, rock and roll. . . .”

“When I’m Sixty-Four,” on the other hand, is as clickety and ingenious as syncopated clockwork. Looking back on this song, of which he was the primary author, Sir Paul McCartney said, “I liked ‘Indicate precisely what . . .’ I like words that are exact, that you might find on a form. It’s a nice phrase, it scans.”

Yes. Does anybody but Paul and me even know what
scans
means anymore? Can you, for instance, enjoy regular meter’s potential for fascination? Does regularity make you shudder? Look at the lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” laid out sans music. Every line (with one semi-exception) begins and ends with a stressed syllable. In each verse, the first and fifth lines are the same meter (
bum
ba-ba
bum ba
,
bum
ba-ba
bum
), as are the second and sixth and ninth (
bum
ba
bum
ba
bum
), and the seventh and eighth (
bum
ba-ba
bum bum
). And in each case the third (
bum
ba
bum
ba
bum
ba
bum
ba
bum
) and fourth (
bum
ba
bum
ba
bum
) go off on their own little trip. Each of the first, fourth and (except in the first stanza) fifth lines is halved by a comma. There are six question marks in a song that is one long question.

Two of the three bridges both go metrically like this:

You’ll . . . be . . . bum . . . bum . . . bum

And if ba bum ba bum

bum bum bum bum bum

These lines sing themselves, but even the ones with identical meter sing differently. The song’s potential monotony is relieved not only by clarinets, tubular bells, and eerie vocal background harmonies, but also by the sense: the mix of chipper and wistful in “who could ask for more?” is related to but different from that, two verses later, in “yours forever more.”

And then there’s the other little bridge, about renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight.

bum ba bum ba bum ba bum ba bum ba

bum ba bum ba bum

The other two bridges slow the pace, pulling back from the jumpiness of the verses. In this unique bridge, those first two lines (or maybe they amount to one line with extra beats squeezed in) are propulsive. Then the third line, “If it’s not too dear,” taps the brake to set up the other slow-down bridge, about scrimping and saving and the grandkids. Call this song nostalgic foolery if you like, but if you listen you can hear a real couple of people (Paul’s parents if his Mum had lived?) back and forth in it.