From Rubber Soul to Revolver

1.

A journal entry from me, dated January 1, 1984, records a list of what appear to be New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are unimaginative, and only testify to the common hopes and aspirations of an 11-year-old child. One however stands out: “No Beatles from after 1965”.

What was that all about? I have trouble reconstructing the whole scene, but a few additional facts can help us at least to contextualize this enigma. Along with a pair of friends, whom you can still track down in Tucson and Long Beach respectively if you wish to do some independent fact-checking, I was, from the ages of eleven to thirteen, absolutely obsessed with the Beatles. At the time of John Lennon’s assassination a few years before, I had been musically oriented towards more plainly childish tastes, Kenny Rogers, say, or Sha-Na-Na, but the news of his death insinuated itself into my burgeoning sensibility, and became a sort of foundational tragedy that soon enough led me to seek out any and all Beatles resources. A profile of “Paul and Linda at Home” in a 1983 issue of Marie Claire? If I saw that at the Safeway check-out counter, you could be sure it was going in the cart. (“The McCartneys are happy homebodies these days, but one thing hasn’t changed: Paul still insists he’s never giving up pot.”)

In 7th grade, in September, 1984, we were called on to announce the title of the best book we had read that summer, and the kids all snickered when I declared of myself that it had been The Love You Make (1983), since of course any mention of “making love” is always a source of brief but certain glee among 12-year-olds. I was not however referring to the act, but only to Steven Gaines’s “insider story of the Beatles”, as it was billed, which of course borrowed its title from the concluding tune in the long medley on side two of Abbey Road (1969). Thanks to Mark David Chapman there had been a glut of such books in those years, most seemingly by random sound-engineers who once crossed the lads in the studio, or by some Liverpool lorry-driver claiming to have taught an adolescent Richard Starkey how to smoke. The first of such books that I read was Pete Shotton’s The Beatles, Lennon, and Me (1984). The author was a perfect representative of this genre: a childhood friend of John’s, and a washboard player in the Beatles’ precursor band the Quarrymen, Shotton would be given some sort of role ten years later in the direction of Apple Corps., and would next go on to run a chain of diners throughout the UK under the name “Fatty Arbuckle’s”. The early ‘80s were a time to treasure memories of what had been lost, and also a time to cash in — and, one hoped, to do both these things in one and the same gesture.

But the truth is my Beatles reading, or at least my Beatles-adjacent reading, started somewhat earlier, and by mistake. This will horrify some of you, or perhaps confirm your suspicions, but the very first properly adult book I ever read from cover to cover, probably in early 1983, was the legendary LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974; written with Curt Gentry). My earliest awareness of the Beatles, was, then, doubly blood-soaked: I had somehow caught a glimpse of the cover of Yoko Ono’s 1981 album Season of Glass, featuring a photograph of the iconic round glasses her husband had been wearing at the moment he was shot, one of the lenses now stained red, an artistic choice by our favorite Fluxus member rivaled in its in-your-faceness likely only by her riveting 1969 recording, “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)”; and I had seen, thanks to Bugliosi, a black-and-white image of the name of a now-infamous song from the so-called White Album (1968), which Charles Manson interpreted as a hidden message to him encoding a vision of the coming race war that was going to burn America to the ground, man, and that, in August, 1969, Manson’s disciples scrawled on the walls of a house on Waverly Drive, alongside “Death to Pigs”, with the blood of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

I had read that book by mistake, chosen at random from the significant selection of “California lawyer”-themed paperbacks circulating through the house. To this day it remains my only direct exposure to the “true crime” genre, which I abhor. But you’ve got to understand what it’s like to grow up in California in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I knew a girl back then whose mom had once met Charlie at a laundromat in Sacramento circa 1966 (which as I’ve already hinted is a key year for our meditations here). It was said that she found him deeply attractive, and happily acquiesced when he asked her for a date, hopping into his VW Bug for adventures we can only guess at. This was enough to make the girl, I see now, appear to us as something like California royalty — the princess daughter, if only by way of some symbolic superfetation, of one of the great barbarian warlords who had been so central to the consolidation of the freak-clan’s share of power in the rise of our state to global prominence.

But why, again, the prohibition on Beatles music recorded after 1965? Over the course of 1983 I had managed to collect cassette tapes of all twelve studio albums, from Please Please Me (1963) through Let It Be (1970) —minus the White Album, whose re-release in that format was, as I recall, being held up for familiar legal reasons—, as well as various apocrypha, including the two compilation albums released in 1973 under the convenient titles 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, reflecting the conventional idea that the second principal phase of the Beatles’ career begins with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). I will hope to revise this periodization here, at least slightly, but what I want to emphasize initially is that my renunciation of late-period Beatles output was not based on ignorance, for I knew the entire corpus of their work inside and out. It was, rather, a general dread that had developed over the course of 1983, perhaps connected to the early signs of my own incipient secondary sex characteristics, that I can only describe as a bad case of hippie-phobia. All that hair! It seemed to testify to the lycanthropic turn the 1960s had taken, and which my own physiology was now threatening to recapitulate, a turn that would bring with it not only hair, but beastly desire, monstrous appetite, a perpetual helter-skelter chaos of the soul. I think, now, I was trying to hold onto a mode of enthusiasm appropriate to the prepubescent child, as early Beatlemania had been, as it had been packaged by powerful commercial forces to be — a mode that was coded feminine, which suited me just fine, to be honest, a fawning and innocent proto-sexuality concentrated upon these admittedly talented but mostly just cute “mop-tops” in their little matching suits.

I liked John and George most, the “bad” Beatles, who even in their cute and besuited days seemed already to hint at something darker to come, the ones who would be the first to take LSD and to crack open the plastic shell of pop to reveal something primordial and unspeakable at its core. And though I could not yet form this idea consciously, I think I understood that my greater attraction to them was precisely an attraction to their darkness, which would have to be carefully managed and bounded by an upper chronological limit that placed off-limits the fullest expressions of their dark potential, which had been accessed, plumbed, and rendered into art for the first time on the 1966 album Revolver.