Chapter Two: Help
By Brett Beach
April 22, 2010
Upfront confession: I have never been a fan(atic) of The Beatles. I have never owned more than two of their albums at any one time, still have not listened to all their albums in their entirety, and never went through a phase where I partook exclusively or primarily of their music. (Aside: This last observation makes me think of the great piece in The Onion from October 2001 entitled “Teen Who Just Discovered Led Zeppelin Starting to Piss Off Friends.” Check it out at your leisure). By a cinematic measure, I have still never seen A Hard Day’s Night or Let It Be and I last saw Yellow Submarine when I was still too young to understand the jokes, puns, asides, and under-the-breath mutters or be impressed with the cozy psychedelia of its trippy vision. It was my premier time watching Help! to write about it for this column.
It is true that one of the first tapes I ever bought on my own prerogative - and not from a record club through the mail but an actual in-store purchase - was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This was in 1987, the 20th anniversary of the album’s release and there had been an essay from a columnist I respected in The Oregonian to comment on the occasion, also noting that it was now the 40th anniversary of the day when “Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” Being 11 at the time, this last comment perplexed me to no end, a condition exacerbated upon listening to the title track for the first time and also wondering (although perhaps less profanely), “Who the hell is Billy Shears?”
I never really warmed up to the album. Was it perhaps internalizing guilt over references to drugs and sex and suicide and making time with meter maids that didn’t go over my head and made me at that age feel a little squeamish and ooky inside? I have a deep admiration for Sgt. Pepper as a piece, however (if that doesn’t sound too condescending), and “A Day in the Life” remains one of my favorite songs. It’s one of the best pastiches of musical ideas ever strung together, with lyrics that begin in mundanity and give way to empathy tied to a structure building to that final cacophony that stretches and stretches and . . . then seems to fade out for an infinity. Small wonder that Paul Thomas Anderson claims the song was a spiritual counterpart in his creation of Magnolia.
Still, I never went through a Beatles phase (Or a Goth phase. Or a metal phase, for that matter) My personal feeling is that this is a result of their status as a pop culture benchmark that any person born in the last 40 years is at least vaguely aware of. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I take them for granted, but perhaps that is an accurate assessment. And yet, I don’t think it’s the same for all bands with a similar level of world renown and all-pervasive familiarity. What is different about The Beatles?
To approach this answer from the backwards front (and through a slightly labored metaphor), I have always thought that it would be possible for me to love any musical artist, if only I heard the right song under the right circumstances at the right time. (Oddly enough, I do not feel this way about books or movies.) I visualize a key in a lock that I might have tried a dozen times before, and yet this time the lock tumbles. Is the lock different? Is the key different? Or is it the person placing the key in the lock?
Not to take away from The Onion’s humor, but Led Zeppelin was a band that I could appreciate in theory without every really “liking” or “getting” until I listened to two tracks from the live release How the West Was Won at a Borders listening station one Saturday afternoon in July 2003. The songs were “Over the Hills and Far Away” and “That’s the Way.” The snap-tight shuffle and stomp of the former (with its echoes of Tolkien) and Robert Plant’s plaintive little-boy-wounded vocals on the latter’s tale of love and friendship sundered struck the right nerves. Like the light bulb over a comic strip character, it was an “A-HA!” moment.
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