Centrepiece
Beatlemania
Colin Welch
rian Epstein, the Beatles' homosexual Ji-imanager, died of an overdose of drugs. At his funeral, the officiating rabbi describ- ed him as 'a symbol of the malaise of our generation'. Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, authors of the book about the Beatles to which I referred last week and now return (The Love You Make, Mac- millan, £8.95), hail him as one 'who had in- fluenced the course of history'. All three are surely right. For, as the authors point out, the Beatles whom he launched and guided into space became not just enter- tainers but `avatars and prophets', heroes and philosophers of a whole generation, ex- emplary in their meretricious triumphs, political posturings, shallow 'thinking' and sentimental feeling. `To a whole genera- tion' is a bit stiff, when many remained in- different or resistant to their spell, or con- temptuous of it. Yet of that generation most were touched, diverted or made restless by it, many scarred or crippled for life, some tragically destroyed, lost. To blame the Beatles alone is also far-fetched. Their numberless imitators and heirs, many worse than they, all played their part, not least Sir Michael Jagger, as Private Eye mordantly predicts he will be at 80, honoured for such fancied lyrics as 'I Wan- na Jerk off the Whole Bloody World' and the metaphysical 'Hullo Mr Freakout Devil Man'. But the Beatles remain as the pro- genitors and type of them all To me they seem Pied Pipers, leaders of a second Children's Crusade doomed, like the first, to land its followers in slavery. What they did to our children (not all, not mine, I hasten to add) was analogous in ef- fect, if not in intent or method, to what the Greek communists in the civil war of the late Forties did to Greek children. As Nicholas Gage reminds us in his harrowing Eleni, they abducted them.
In this forlorn fairyland what manners and mores prevail'? First, all natural links between parents and children are severed. While parents weep or shrug, their children dance away, arrayed perhaps like John and Cynthia (Lennon's first wife), George and Pattie at London Airport, 'like wizards and fairy princesses in... purple and yellow satin... garlanded with flowers, bells round their necks which tinkled', all high on LSD. (Poor Cynthia was later that day near to stepping out of a second-floor win- dow to 'float' down to join the stoned throng below.) Not all, to be sure, can af- ford Lennon's psychedelically decorated Rolls-Royce. But drugs may produce in the mind some equivalent, transforming dirty torn jeans into satins and velvets, conjuring up flying saucers, for instance, or the 'air
car', powered by `psychic fuel' in which Lennon and Yoko were supposed to arrive at a 'peace concert'.
This brave new world rather resembles the Club 18-30, in which, according to a macabre poster I saw the other day, there are 'no oldies, no babies, no has-beens, no no-nos... only party-party on the beach. Bop till we drop... If you don't belong, just f-f-fade away'. The grim message is driven home by `oldies' caricatured as if participants in, say, `Carry On up the Costa Brava' — a fat ratbag simpering and ogling in a short flowered little-girl dress, her hus- band a grinning moustached runt with a green wig, FIT t-shirt and leopard-print jeans. A sort of mules' paradise is adum- brated, without parents or progeny.
In the brave new world past and future have been abolished, the present too so far as hallucination can obliterate it. Reality may be not merely suppressed but actually enhanced by drugs. Paul McCartney pious- ly announced that LSD `opened my eyes. It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society'. Whatever disagreeable facts remain may be sung, wished, loved or dreamed away. Lennon sang of his secular paradise: 'Imagine there's no heaven... No hell below us... Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace... And the world will be as one'. When Lennon proclaimed the Beatles 'more popular than Jesus now', and His disciples 'thick and ordinary', he appears to have intended no more than a statement of facts, without pejorative undertones. Yet, if facts, they were clearly to his taste.
Lennon of course was the most explicitly political of the Beatles, though McCartney adjured us in song to 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish' without pausing to ask ,which Irish, or whether it was ours to give. Other Beatle political views can be readily infer- red. But Lennon had, or affected to have, a complete range of progressive sentiments, His MBE disgusted him, as did the 'royals' and class structure which it symbolised; he `came out' against war in Vietnam and Biafra, returned his MBE partly for these reasons, partly (and characteristically) because his song 'Cold Turkey', about kicking drug addiction without help, was 'slipping in the charts'. In between 'wallop- ing' Yoko, as Cynthia before her, he waged his `peace' campaign, conferred with the egregious Trudeau ('a beautiful meeting'), hooked up with Michael X, later with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, wrote 'Power to the People', `a proletarian anthem which begins with a chorus [sic] of marching feet', as a way of 'struggling with being rich', always so embarrassing for left-wingers. All this was according to Brown and Gaines `also a phony pose'. Nor can the cause of world peace have been much advanced by a Coryphaeus apparently too drugged for months even to record a simple promised message on the subject, and finally deliver- ing only a tape of a baby dying.
In the brave new world, there is neither God nor copybook headings. Reason sleeps, monsters are brought forth. Cause and effect are sundered; so are sowing and reaping, self-indulgence and tears, toiling and eating. The old world of work and business, of 'men in suits', is derided by those still totally parasitic on it. We find ourselves in a Bohemia without talent or skill, in which the crazed life of a Utrillo might be held forth as a norm for emula- tion: no need for the magical pictures. If art be required, films of naked bottoms, or 'concerts' at which microphones are 'hid- den in the toilets so the patrons could be heard urinating and flushing on stage', will do well enough.
From the world certain boring virtues are completely missing. All the military and marital virtues, all fidelity, restraint, thrift, sobriety, taste and discipline, all the virtues associated with work, with the painful ac- quisition of knowledge, skill and qualifica- tions. All these give place to a decadent self- expression, in which nothing is expressed because nothing has been cultivated to be expressed. One must do one's 'thing'; yet no 'thing' can be done without the drudgery of learning, practice and thought, without other ardua unknown to Cythera.
We are all too well aware of objective economic factors which cause and gratuitously increase unemployment among the young, with attendant demoralisation and hopelessness. Yet it would be fatuous to ignore what some of the young, abetted by the negligence, weakness, silliness or despair of their parents, have done. to render themselves unemployable. The Daily Express recently devoted a horrendous page to pictures and interviews with unemployed punks. One had his head part shaved, part bristling with long spikes, hardened with superglue and deemed by a former employer a safety hazard, 'Freedom' was for him 'more vital than a job'. 'I don't want a job, no matter the money, unless I can be employed as I am, for what I am'. Others were equally intransigent. The Beatles did not teach these children to look as they do. What they did teach, however, is that what you look like is more important that what you do. To be conceited about anything is bad; to be conceited about nothing compounds vanity with idiocy. How far are the Beatles' teachings and ex- ample ,responsible for the ruin of their native city?
Meanwhile, may I wish to all babies, and to all my fellow has-been, oldies and no- nos, a very happy Christmas? And to all young people in internal exile a safe return from .their tad trip'? And to all parents thus bereaved, a swift reunion?
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