Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [20]
George Harrison belongs in a daycare center for counterculture casualties, another of those children canceled not (so much?) by drugs this time but something perhaps far more insidious. His position seems to be I’m Pathetic, But I Believe in Krishna, which apparently absolves him from any position of leadership while enabling him to assume a totally preachy arrogance toward his audience which would be monumental chutzpah if it weren’t coming from such a self-certified nebbish.
Ringo is beneath contempt. He used to be lovable because he was inept and knew it and turned the whole thing into a good-natured game. Now he is marketing that lameness in a slick Richard Perry-produced package, and getting hits via the stratagem, but the whole thing reeks. It is a bit as if Peter Max were designing stage sets for Hee Haw's Archie Campbell.
So the moptops have ended up mopping the floor of the supermarket, which is keeping them from bankruptcy and no doubt reassuring them that they still Matter on some level, but they do not and never will again give off a glint of the magic they used to radiate with such seeming effortlessness. That magic is currently one of the hottest items in the Woolworths where Sixties nostalgia is peddled like bric-a-brac—in spite of the Sgt. Pepper Broadway bomb. Elton John was characteristically shrewd in releasing a cover looking back at “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
On the other hand, I am constantly hearing people say, with minor perplexity, that they can still play early Stones albums, but old Beatle records (like old Dylan records), and particularly Sgt. Pepper, gather dust on the shelves. As with Dylan singing about Hattie Carroll, the Beatles celebrating the explosion of Love as a Way of Life amounts now to an artifact, just as today's Heavy Statements will prove to be just about as ephemeral. Somebody told me the other night that people would still be listening to Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven” a hundred years from today, and Sgt. Pepper as well. He's full of shit, of course, because “Stairway to Heaven” is not for the ages in the sense that Duke Ellington, say, might be, and as previously stated there aren’t that many here among us who listen to Sgt. Pepper even eight years after it exploded on the pop world and, as prophesied by Richard Goldstein,2 proceeded to all but ruin the rock of the next few seasons by making rank-and-file musical artisans even more self-conscious and pretentious than dope already had.
The center of any pop aesthetic has even less chance of holding than the last administration of this country had. Rock ‘n’ roll will not necessarily stand; currently it seems to be jaywalking on its knees. But maybe that's a good reason to dig out all those musty Beatles albums and see if we perhaps can find in them, if not the bouncy mysticism that once seemed our staff of life, at least a good time. And perhaps in doing this we can discover the roots of the four separate styles of disintegration we’re currently witnessing.
I have this theory, which has gotten me into minor fracases on a couple of occasions, that the Beatles’ initial explosion was intimately tied up with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In fact, I have been known to say that JFK's killing was a good thing, historically speaking. A man died in an ugly fashion, he happened to be a man that people who didn’t know anything about corporate politics considered the leader of the “free world,” it was a national tragedy, etc. But on another level it was good because it opened a lot of things up. When Kennedy was in office we were living in a national dream world, the New Frontier as panacea, the illusion of unity. Underneath it all things were just as shitty as ever, but patriotism in those days seemed viable even for many of the avant-deviant-opposition fringes of our society. That misconception was shattered with the president's