Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [22]
Maybe that's why those old Beatle albums are so irritating today that just now, as I was playing Rubber Soul while writing this article, I took it off to type in silence, and my friend working nearby agreed that what once was ecstasy, the heart's rush of being in love for the first time, had through some curious process become a mere annoyance. The Beatles today are out of time, out of place, out of sync with a present reality that isn’t particularly grim (from this chair, anyway) but neither is it exactly amenable to certain types of artifacts.
But the real artifact, of course, is not the record. It's the mood. It's the innocence, it's the unconscious sense of intimacy and community which automatically self-destructed the instant it became self-conscious, i.e. the very day we opened up Sgt. Pepper and saw those four smiling mustached faces assuring us with a slightly patronizing benevolence that all was well. There was of course a kind of smugness about it all, which led to such successive artifacts as Manson and John Denver. I don’t particularly feel like reading Bugliosi's Helter Skelter3 either, not because I’ve OD’d on gore and outrage—it took the movies to do that— but because it's in the past, it's boring, it's old hat even, I’ve been there and I just don’t care anymore.
What made the Beatles initially so exciting and sustained them for so long was that they seemed to carry themselves with a good-humored sense of style which was (or appeared to be) almost totally unselfconscious. They didn’t seem to realize that they were in the process of becoming institutionalized, and that was refreshing. By the time they realized it the ball game was over. In this sense, Rubber Soul (in packaging) and Revolver (in content as well) can be seen as the transitional albums. They doped it up and widened their scopes through the various other tools they had access to at the time just like everybody else down to the lowliest fringe-dripping cowlicked doughboy in the Oh Wow regiment, and the result was that they saw their clear responsibility as cultural avatars in what started out as a virtual vacuum (nice and clean, though), which of course ruined them. And possibly, indirectly, us.
But it's okay. Because, while I would not indulge in the kind of ten-year-cycle Frank Sinatra-Elvis Presley-The Beatles who's-next-now's-the-time theories that have been so popular and so easy lately, I do think that, like the assassination of JFK, the withering away of the Beatles has had its positive effects. Acidheads can (could?) be unbearable in their arrogant suppositions of omniscience, but if there's one thing good you can say about downs it's that nobody could get pretentious about them. The spell and its bonds are broken.
The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephemeral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock ‘n’ roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I’d like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn’t stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural resources. On the other hand, like Davy Crockett