How About Those Beatles

By ROB PATTERSON

I resisted watching the 2017 documentary “How the Beatles Changed the World,” thinking, well hell, I already know how much they did just that. Coming to America in 1964 to premiere on “The Ed Sullivan Show” just a little over a month after I turned 10 years old, they totally rocked and changed my world. Their story neatly parallels my own development of intellectual, social, political and, of course, musical consciousness. I was there, locked into the changes as they happened, and they still are at the core of who I am and what I believe and feel.

It’s not like I was going to learn anything new, I thought. After all, I’m the guy who Yoko Ono said not just once but twice during a telephone interview in the early ‘90s, “I can tell you must have really loved John because you know so much about him.” Starting in 1968 with the first biography of the band written by Hunter Davies, which I got for Christmas from my parents – best Christmas present ever other than maybe Abbey Road the next year – I’ve read a couple of good-sized bookshelves worth of books about The Beatles. It’s a subject in which I’m more than an expert.

Nonetheless, as soon as I started watching it, I felt like I’d been silly to not do so earlier. Knowing the facts and story are one thing, but perspective transforms them into something much larger and more profound. And The Beatles were huge as not just a musical force but a cultural and political one as well.

The film documents how the four-man rock ’n’ roll band became a nexus within the countercultural movements from the mid-1960s onward, taking an interest in burgeoning movements in art, philosophy, spirituality and politics as well as such mind-expanding substances as marijuana and LSD. Their immense popularity worldwide with youths and young adults helped spread the essence what we think of today as “the ’60s” into mainstream culture. At the same time they also similarly served as musical vanguards, helping to progress popular music in both musical and lyrical terms. On both counts, their impact was profound, and indeed changed the world we lived in.

Two key figures within the Beatles’ camp give keen insights in the film into how they became so connected into the bohemian and fringe artistic and cultural movements of the times. One is Tony Bramwell, a childhood friend of George Harrison who was present the day John Lennon met Paul McCartney, and ended up working with the Fab Four as an aide de camp in their management team headed by Brian Epstein, and later as part of the band’s Apple Corps ventures following Epstein’s passing.

The other is artist Tony Dunbar, whose cutting-edge London gallery Indica was at the forefront of the era’s progressive art trends. He was part of the band’s social circle, and it was at Indica that Lennon met Yoko Ono.

In addition to showing how the unique individuals who were The Beatles came into their stature as cultural influencers and transmitters, the 2017 movie gets the history correct. Although Lennon became the most culturally radical of the band members after he and Ono united, it was in fact McCartney who had first been at the cutting edge of many of the movements the band helped spread. While Lennon, Harrison and Ringo Starr were all living like country squires in the the mid ’60s, McCartney was the one who was living in London as a single man, and voraciously exploring the many compelling cultural currents echoing through the underground and youth movement. And pulling his bandmates into what he was discovering.

The Beatles never set out to, nor did they aspire to, be the cultural vanguard. But they became the potent prime channel through which so much of what ignited their passions was delivered to many millions around the globe.

“It sounds like a cliché but it’s really impossible to overstate the Beatles’ impact,” says my fellow music journalist (and professional friend) Anthony DeCurtis at the end of the film. “It sounds like you’re exaggerating, and to younger people who weren’t there, it just sounds ridiculous. Yeah, but it was true – they changed everything.” This movie tells how.

Populist Picks

TV Series Revisit: Homeland – This already superb Showtime series soars in its seventh season. Rather than strict roman à clef with current events, it switches things around with an breathtaking ingenuity: A controversial female president (think Hillary) with Trumpian authoritarian impulses. A right wing TV rabble rouser in the Alex Jones who looks like Steve Bannon. Yet the same milieu we face in real life: a fiercely divided electorate and looming constitutional crises.

Documentary Film: Tabloid – A bizarre tale indeed is told in Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris’s 2010 movie about a love- and sex-crazed woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary and kept him in chains. Amusing and entertaining if also a wee bit troubling.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018

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