The Beatles
After the mania
Benny Green
On an evening in 1963, while eating with friends in the Granada Studios restaurant in Manchester, the man next to me said that, seeing as how I was a musician and a critic, what did I think of the Beatles? Frankly I was bemused, much as BrillatSavarin would have been if you had asked him for his considered opinion on peanuts, and conveyed as much to my inquisitor. At this the man sitting on the far side of him went ashen, clenched his fist and asked me who did I think I was, to which I made the pat response by quoting Oscar Levant and replying that I didn't know, who did I have to be? My inquisitor then introduced whiteface as a Mr Brian Epstein, which would explain the strained atmosphere around the table for the rest of the meal.
Intimations of this crosstalk soon filtered through to the redoubtable Messrs Parkinson and Grundy, who, sniffing the smoke of battle drifting across their nostrils, invited me to sit before the cameras and give my honest opinion of the Beatles. This I did, and within two or three days sackloads of abusive letters had arrived at the studios addressed to Judas Green; most of these communications threatened me with grievous bodily harm; the Observer, attempting an assessment of the Beatles, published the fact that I did not find the group very interesting musically, this in the kind of shocked and slightly incredulous tones which might meet the suggestion that Lord Clark did not find Leonardo da Vinci very interesting artistically.
Several interesting things happened after that. A writer who had never been known to listen to so much as a bar of Schubert, announced that the Beatles were the best melodists since Schubert. Somebody else said not Schubert, but surely Beethoven. One night at a most distinguished dinner table I was told by an extremely brilliant writer that Lennon and McCartney were the most gifted English composers since Purcell, at which the anguished shades of Elgar and Delius began threshing around with such violence that the courgette dish started to dance a mad fandango along the table-top. This kind of assessment very quickly became a commonplace and its supporters to outdo themselves in the extravagance of their claims. The Beatles were the most talented musicians since Bach, since Monteverdi, since King David, since Orpheus.
None of this was very surprising. Adult intellectuals with no aptitude for music have never been inhibited by their limitations from issuing edicts on it. What was very comical indeed was the sudden realisation by respectable music critics that they too weren't getting any younger, that they too needed readers and could therefore not afford to come out too strongly against the trend. And so one morning the Times announced its dis covery that the Beatles had been deploying "pentatonic patterns," which is, believe me, about as profound a compliment as congratulating a dog on wagging its tail. That is the trouble with musical terminology. Its orotundities tend to make commonplaces sound like profundities. Pentatonic means five notes, and the five notes of the pentatonic scale comprise the most obvious cluster which the Western diatonic ear knows about. Once in a celebrated attack on this particular form of musical quackery, Bernard Shaw offered its literary equivalent, a textual analysis of a Hamlet soliloquy:
Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognise the alternative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.
But bad habits die hard, and Shaw might just as well have saved his breath. In any case, the media seemed to require the infallibility of the Beatles. One day a Sunday Times journalist famed for his deep concern over the consciences of politicians became rather lax over his own by inviting me to compile a factual analysis of some Beatles harmony, and then publishing a doctored,' much more complimentary, version of my report without even informing me beforehand.
It was all magnificently 'comic. How come that all these laymen, who for so long had been hiding their tiny musical lights under such enormous bushels of indifference, had suddenly turned? How had they, who had so manfully resisted the blandishments of the Gershwins, Kerns, Ellingtons, Loessers, Warrens, only now begun to weaken? Where had the pentatonic brigade been hiding when Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were creating music so superb that one day posterity will despise us for having ignored it so callously? My own contempt was for the solemn reviewers, certainly not for the Beatles themselves, who, being musicians, were entitled to • every penny they could squeeze out of a notoriously unmusical society. But it now seems that the Beatles, or at least one of them, is not only a musician, but the personification of the old Ibsen nightmare, a totally honest man. How embarrassing for the Schubert-Pentatonic brigade.
Usually when an artist is extravagantly praised he is obliged to hold his tongue, for obvious reasons. However, in a collection of pieces called Lennon Remembers, John Lennon says more or less what hinted at in the Granada restaurant nine years ago. He asks, "Who was going to knock us when there was a million pounds to be made?", to which rhetorical question perhaps I may be permitted to reply in the authentic small voice of penury, "I was." The Beatles were talented apprentices whom society never allowed to complete their apprenticeship, at what expense to the individual Beatles it is too early yet to know. What does Lennon say the Beatles really thought of the Pentatonics? He gives us the answer which one day posterity will take as gospel. He calls them bullshitters.
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