Terrible Abundance

 

We live in an age of terrible abundance. In the course of just a couple of months, we’ve been able to lower our temporal periscopes into the depths, to peer into rooms now fifty years gone; at people now either fifty years older or, unable to traverse time to join us here, dead. Our ears prick at distant signals beaming back in like heterohemispheric transmissions from some vaguely imagined East or South. Nothing is as simultaneously exotic and reassuring as the past. We know it like the backs of our hands. It lives on in who we are and how we live, what we understand and why we value what we value. Re-engaging the past in the form of remixes, mashups, reissues, crate-dug minerals recovered and set beneath the microscope for reinvigorated appreciation, is the safest and most immediately rewarding form of exploration. Rediscovering the already-discovered. The new world in the old world, or the old in the new. Such discoveries are always bubble-wrapped, their sharp edges and pointy corners dulled or safely blanketed like the furniture in the baby’s room.

 

In March of last year, the Beatles documentary, Get Back, was released to great global fanfare. The film  depicts the Beatles over a three-week period in 1969. And three days ago (as of this writing) on January 17, 2022, a video surfaced on YouTube of the band, Television, performing at NYC’s legendary Café Wha? in 1974. The differences between these two releases go way beyond the scale of their reception (to date, the Television clip has been viewed 2,922 times). The Beatles doc weighs in at nearly eight hours, while the featherweight Television clip is a mere three minutes and forty one seconds. Yet both exist and operate in the space of nostalgic yearning. To click “play” is to force the tip of the pry bar between the lid and the fuselage of Tut’s sarcophagus. The YouTube description accompanying the Television clip refers to it as “recently unearthed footage.” It is purportedly the only existing video of the band’s original lineup with Richard Hell on bass performing live before an audience in a club.

 

I’m a rock and roll dissident in that I understand the Beatles as a counterrevolutionary force who blunted the most radical aspects of rock and roll. The “Fab Four” – branded from the get-go – almost single-handedly invented all the benign and boring forms of rock that ascended to prominence in the 1970s. At the same time, they willingly accepted the trappings of commodity, moving through a series of product re-inventions which presage the planned obsolescence of operating systems and the techno-style upgrade logic of the iPhone. Yet, I’m always inclined to think that our reception – both individual and collective – of the materials of culture say at least as much about us as they do about the materials themselves. Apparently we wanted a safe vehicle to ride from besuited and bleached mid-60s rock and roll to anodyne late-60s psychedelia, holding both hallucinogenic drugs and non-Western musical elements at arm’s length from suburban infiltration or parental prohibition. Everybody I know is surprised to learn that I watched Get Back in its entirety. Some take this to mean that I’ve secretly liked the Beatles all along. Others assume that I am experiencing a rather inevitable mid-life conversion, finally seeing the light. I can assure you that neither of these things is true. Watching the film only confirmed my sincere, gut-level distaste for much of the Beatles’ music. But I write and teach about sound, music, and rock and roll. So I have some professional responsibility to keep up with these fields. And there is no doubt that the release of Get Back is understood to be a significant cultural event. I learned a lot about John, Paul, George, and Ringo in their final stages as a band. And – in keeping with my understanding about the dynamics of reception – I learned a lot about my own disdain for the Beatles.

 

Two things drew me to the commitment of watching the whole documentary. In previews I was taken with the quality of the footage. It reminded me of One Plus One, Jean-Luc Godard’s beautiful, perverse, confounding film about the Rolling Stones, shot just a year earlier, also in London. My own susceptibility to nostalgic indulgence knows no temptation so strong as 35 millimeter film of musicians in ochre- and chartreuse-paneled studios festooned with suspended Neumann microphones, sound-separating baffles, valve amplifiers, and champagne sparkle 3- or 4-piece drumkits. I wanted to feast on these images of process in the form’s (and the industry’s) adolescence. Secondly, I’d spotted, in those same previews, footage of Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney that suggested that maybe they played sizable roles in the film and in the goings-on depicted by it. I’ve always chafed against the misogynism of the “Yoko broke up the Beatles” bullshit. My take – as a non-believer – has always been that the true casualty of John and Yoko’s conjoining was Yoko’s artistic practice. Prior to meeting Lennon, Yoko had been a daring experimental artist whose work tested some of the most untested presumptions about ourselves and our cultural values. For one bracing example see her Cut Piece from the same year that the Beatles played New York’s Shea Stadium (1964). I ask my students to consider what it would mean to assert that the Beatles broke up Yoko. So I wanted to see for myself the dynamics of Yoko and Linda in the studio with the band. I wanted to learn more about these two accomplished women as they integrated themselves into the world of the planet’s most popular band.

What you go in for is seldom what you come out with. After subjecting/indulging for the nearly eight hours of Peter Jackson’s reassemblage, I came away with a few fairly minor realizations. The songs, by and large (exceptions admitted), fall into two categories. Scattered throughout the film, there are covers of old rock and roll songs, the stuff upon which the early Liverpool/ Hamburg outfit cut their teeth. The influence of these songs by Ray Charles, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, et al., carries over into one of the two categories: rock and roll for rock and roll’s sake. We can find examples of these songs throughout the Beatles’ catalogue, but, here, at the end, they seem to want to go back to that safe, innocent space. So, as we witness the band working on the titular “Get Back,” the song’s rock and roll roots are more clearly exposed, the opening riff being a kind of distilled and then watered-down version of Chuck Berry’s signature innovations. We also get a glimpse of what “Get Back” might have been when the band briefly works on a set of lyrics that didn’t make the final cut. This version, known in Beatles lore as “No Pakistanis,” is a satire of the anti-immigrant sentiments in late-60s Britain. Apparently fearing that the satire could be taken literally (always a risk for satire – just ask Jonathan Swift or Sacha Baron Cohen) the Beatles replaced “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs” with “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass.” This lyrical road not taken is telling. There were forms and contents which the Beatles could not abide, that didn’t suit their sensibilities or their image. The second category under which their songs comfortably reside is the semi-narrative, British music hall tradition; a kind of one-act musical in which characters are brought to life, conflicts are faced, and resolutions (of one sort or another) are achieved. These songs allow the band to indulge the composerly predilections of (usually) McCartney and the baroqueisms of George Martin. Such songs sound like outtakes from Broadway productions, decidedly more tin pan alley than the mythical crossroads of the Delta blues. By 1969 when – for better and for worse – bands in the UK, America, and elsewhere, were forging ahead, inventing new forms, demanding that rock and roll mutate, evolve, expand, the Beatles were still leaning back into the past, into familiar modes. One is hard pressed to square the music of Get Back with what bands such as the Velvet Underground or Can were doing at the same time. The Beatles sound similarly out of step with what Dylan, Hendrix, or the Jefferson Airplane were doing some three or four years earlier.

 

Here’s a little game. Match the director with the band about whom they made a film:

 

Todd Haynes                           The Stooges

Jim Jarmusch                          The Velvet Underground

Peter Jackson                          Bob Dylan

Martin Scorcese                      The Beatles

 

Now, play the same game with the directors’ non-rock movies:

 

Todd Haynes                           Taxi Driver

Jim Jarmusch                          Stranger Than Paradise

Peter Jackson                          Safe

Martin Scorcese                      The Hobbit

           

Now tally the points by matching the directors’ rock and non-rock movies. The correct answers are:

 

Taxi Driver – Dylan

Stranger Than Paradise – The Stooges

Safe – Dylan and The Velvets

The Hobbit – The Beatles

 

Admittedly, this is a kind of shitty, unfair game. But not entirely so. Reception as a product of receivers. Meaning as a product of association. Get back, Bilbo!

 

Still, it is fascinating to watch a band at the height of their commercial (if not, arguably, their artistic) power working together. Throughout the film, the band entertain a series of ideas for an event: either a tv broadcast, a live concert (their first in years), or some combination of the two. They seriously consider performing in the ruins of Sabratha, an ancient Roman city in Libya. Wanting to perform their new songs live, but imagining multiple guitar parts and a piano, they toy with the idea of adding a fifth member. They discuss getting Eric Clapton to join. Never mind that while the Beatles are mocking the views of rightwing shithead MP, Enoch Powell for his anti-immigration racism, Clapton would go on to publicly support Powell. Get back, Aeneas! But also, imagine the not-entirely-misplaced hubris of a band so powerful that they could decide on a new member the way that teenagers compile fantasy bands on the inside covers of their school notebooks: “I’ll have Eric Clapton on guitar, John Bonham on drums, John Entwhistle on bass, Elton John on piano…”

 

It’s about this time that Billy Preston arrives. And of everything one might glean about the Beatles of 1969 and their world, Preston’s arrival most transparently gives away the game. At the age of twelve, Preston, a Black American pianist and organist, had portrayed the great Memphis (by way of Alabama) composer and bandleader W.C. Handy, as a young man in a 1958 biopic. (Nat King Cole played the part of the adult Handy.) Preston later joined Little Richard’s band, then Sam Cooke’s, and Ray Charles’. He was a living bridge to the Beatles’ forebears. Preston drops in on the Beatles’ session and they ask him to sit in on some of the recordings. Before long, Preston has transformed the songs, lending them the boogie, funk, and grease they had lacked (as evidenced here). And while a lot of what I’ve read about Preston’s presence on the sessions and in the film dwells on his transformative musical contributions, I haven’t seen much attention paid to the social contributions he appears to make.

 

Throughout the film, the Beatles as a four-person collaborative, are hanging by tenuous threads. Of course, we all now know that we are spying on their denouement. But the film allows us to see the tensions swirling up like dust from beneath the baseboards. At one point, Harrison quits. Ono’s presence in the studio, often within sniffing distance of Lennon – even as they record tracks – is unsettling. Does she have to be that close?! But one gets the sense that Lennon and Ono are in the midst of inventing a new kind of love, a symbiosis that drives down into genetics, desire, and soul. She’s that close almost precisely because she’s not supposed to be. In this moment they’re saying “fuck off” to all the supposed-to-bes. I’ve seen fewer mentions of all of George’s hare Krishna friends who are sitting on the floor at the outskirts of the studio, in their turmeric robes, fondling prayer beads. If we feel entitled to ask what Yoko’s doing there, we ought to feel equally entitled to question the presense of the krishnas. (Just another “fuck off”?) Nevertheless, despite all this interloping, the four Beatles are losing track of their bonds, their affinities. They each have external ambitions – films, other recording projects, politics, lives with their families. You can smell their suspicion of each other. It may not be personal – each of them has felt the pull of other interests – commercial, aesthetic, spiritual, familial – they know that the others are equally in the thrall of these forces. They're being pulled apart by the success they built together. You get the sense that they get it, but are still powerless to slow it. Billy Preston provides a crucial element that allows them to divert, if only temporarily, their suspicions and ambitions. Preston reinvigorates the band musically, but just as importantly, as a working member of the musical collaboration, he performs the role of the analyst. In the therapist’s office, the family can’t get away with their usual shit. Even as dad begins to blame the kids, he hears himself through the ears of the analyst and is instantly, freshly aware of the defenses and aggressions, all the crap he’s been getting away with in his family’s experience and in his own. Under certain circumstances, we become receivers of our own transmissions. The routinized bad behavior, the constructed justifications, collapse when triangulated through the ear of the other. Willfully or not, Preston’s ear is this other. That it is also an ear that has engaged in call and response with Little Richard and Ray Charles only makes its excavatory power that much stronger.

 

When the Television clip emerged on YouTube a few days ago, I clicked with excitement. Clearly, I wasn’t expecting the kinds of revelation promised by Get Back, but firm in the knowledge that no eight hour Televisionist exegesis is forthcoming, I take what I can get. What I wanted to see, to lay upon with mine own eyes, was the sight of Richard Hell playing bass in the four piece before his departure to form the Voidoids. The clip dates from 1974. It may seem like a genre’s lifetime away from the Get Back sessions. But it’s just a half-decade later. The legend of Television is just as romantic as that of the Beatles – if far less well-known. Richard Hell (née Meyers) and his pal, Tom Verlaine (née Miller) escaped their Delaware boarding school to move to New York City and pursue their bohemian passion of poetry and rock and roll (thus their Rimbaud-adjacent noms-de-guerre). They formed, first, The Neon Boys, then Television with Richard Lloyd on guitar and Billy Ficca on drums. But both Hell and Verlaine imagined themselves auteurs and frontmen and, unlike, say, Lennon and McCartney, were unwilling to stand even temporarily in each other’s shadow. So the Hell-era Television was a short-lived proposition and Hell was soon replaced by Fred Smith (not to be confused with the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, aka Mr. Patti Smith).

 

The Television clip originally aired on a New York public access tv show called The Underground Tonight Show. The band is introduced, ”we could think of no better group to be picked to be on this show” because “this is a television show.” Such was the self-evident logic of the times. Verlaine announces, “We’re gonna do a little political number now. Some 70s politics. Something called ‘Hard On Love.’” The double-entendre is clumsy and over-obvious. It predicts Hell and the Voidoids’ “Love Comes in Spurts” from their debut three years later. The song starts with Hell’s crummy-sounding bass, like rubber bands wrapped around a Kleenex box. One wonders if the crumminess is intentional or not. Just another “fuck off” to all the supposed-to-bes? Or is this an indication of the band’s greenness, the rarified pretention of not giving a shit  about not knowing what the fuck you’re doing or how to do it. As it happens, one John Lennon, having relocated to New York by 1974, was watching that night. And our peeping across years, miles, mentalities even delivers his thoughts on what he’d seen and heard as reported in the pages of the Melody Maker):

 

On TV next came a group called TELEVISION, and Lennon sat fairly transfixed. Television are so bad they're good. They can barely play their instruments and they are very short of money; they're young and dressed in rags. But they have a spirit that's irresistible, and John immediately identified them as a parallel with The Beatles in their Hamburg days. "Yeah, I can relate to them, they're exactly as we were. Skint and loving every minute. They sound terrible but they're OK!' He liked their name too.

 

But they’re not exactly as they were. The times had changed and the ambitions of ex-pat Liverpudlians in Hamburg could not rightly be compared to those of displaced Delawareans in Manhattan. In the decade since the Beatles had become THE BEATLES rock and roll had transmogrified. Riding its incipient wave to a fame that was also the music’s fame was no longer a glinting possibility glancing off the blade of the Arthurian weapons of rockgodliness to spark the eye of Knights errand with dreams beyond their humble station. No. Television knew that they were destined for the underground. Another reason that there was no better group to be picked to be on The Underground Tonight Show. Such was the logic of the times, perhaps not so self-evident.

 

Are we blessed with this terrible abundance? Who knows? On the one hand, I’ve internalized (and now externalized) over 3000 words-worth of thoughts and questions thanks to these two archival exposures. For me, no mystique has peeled off the veneer of the Beatles because, for me, there was none. But I imagine others have had different experiences. Perhaps they were better off not knowing that Paul wasn’t just “the cute one,” but was also a bit of a workaholic, haranguing chief operating officer. Perhaps, they didn’t want to see John checked out and crawling, serpent-like up the passages of his own self-lubricated kundalini. And maybe George’s reputation as the irreproachable seeker takes a hit when we witness him hissy-fitting his way out of the band (and right back in) for not being allowed to do his thing. Ringo, as ever, is Ringo.

 

For me, no mystique has peeled off the veneer of Television either, because – not just for me – there was none. Ok, maybe a little. But the 1974 footage only confirms the anti-myth myth of Verlaine and Hell, two skint punks inventing punk in the post-Beatles wasteland (sorry, wrong poet) of Western culture. Shitty sounding bass. Puerile innuendos. Crowding each other on the stage as surely they crowded each other in real life, as surely as their consciousnesses were crowded in the squalid, claustrophobic underground of New York in the 70s. I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to see this three minutes and twenty one seconds-worth of Hell-era Television. I already knew.