Countercultural Trends in British and American 1960’s Popular Music

Lecture 2

The Beatles: All You Need Is – a Revolution?

The Beatles, formed in Liverpool in the latter half of the 1950’s, 1 are one of the most
commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands in the history of popular music.
Initially a five-piece featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart
Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums), The Beatles built their reputation in Liverpool and
Hamburg clubs over a three-year period from 1960. Sutcliffe left the group in 1961, and Best
was replaced by the fellow Liverpudlian Richard Starkey (better known to the fans as Ringo
Starr) the following year. Shaped up as a professional outfit by the music store owner Brian
Epstein after he offered to act as the group’s manager, and with their musical potential
enhanced by the creativity of their producer George Martin, The Beatles achieved
mainstream success in the United Kingdom in late 1962 with their first single “Love Me Do”.
Gaining international popularity over the course of the next year, they toured extensively
until 1966, then retreated to the recording studio until their break-up in 1970.
In the wake of the moderate success of “Love Me Do”, their next single “Please
Please Me” met with a more enthusiastic reception, reaching number two in the UK singles
chart after its January 1963 release. When the band’s third single, “From Me to You”, came
out in April that same year and proved to be a chart-topping hit, the phenomenon of
“Beatlemania” was born. For a few months, America proved resistant to the band’s charms,
until their first live US television performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, that is, watched by
approximately 74 million viewers – over 40 percent of the American population, in February
1964. After that, there was just no stopping them.
Initially consisting mainly of cover versions of American hits of the period, their
repertoire gradually included more and more self-penned material (their singles were their
own compositions right from the start, usually credited to Lennon/McCartney 2 irrespective of
how much each partner actually contributed to a particular song, with minor contributions
from Harrison and Starr), and from the album Rubber Soul onward, all of their subsequent
recordings were self-penned (the only exception being Let It Be’s brief rendition of the
traditional Liverpool folk song “Maggie Mae”).
Despite their unprecedented success and world domination following the release of
the movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, The Beatles’ countercultural credentials were
initially less impressive than those of Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, who symbolised
the revolt of youth against institutional authority rather more convincingly than the Fab Four,
who, at the insistence of Brian Epstein, were packaged for family consumption in the
interests of a broader commercial appeal. The Beatles felt as non-conformist as their
colleagues, however, and after breaking Epstein’s benign hold over them in 1966, they began
to speak their minds, somewhat tentatively at first. Lennon and Harrison were the main
1
After John Lennon, aged 16 at the time, formed the skiffle group The Quarrymen with some Liverpool
schoolfriends in March 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney joined as a guitarist after he and Lennon met that
July. When McCartney in turn invited George Harrison to watch the group the following February, the fourteen-
year-old joined as the lead guitarist. Joining on bass in January, Lennon’s friend and fellow student at the
Liverpool Art College Stuart Sutcliffe suggested changing the band name to The Beetles as a tribute to Buddy
Holly and The Crickets, and they became The Beatals for the first few months of the year. After trying other
names, including Johnny and the Moondogs, Long John and The Beetles and The Silver Beatles, the band
finally became The Beatles in August 1960.
2
Except for the first 10 band originals, which bore the writing credit McCartney/Lennon.
dissidents, Lennon in particular angry in the belief that The Beatles had become
embourgeoised by the conventions of showbiz and later by the fantasy world of LSD.
Ironically, precisely at the moment when they were attacked by the Christian writer
Christopher Brooker (in his book The Neophiliacs), as a manifestation of “evil” and mass
hysteria based on a “vitality fantasy” and dismissed by right-wing critics as “being on the
way out”, The Beatles, far from being played out, were on the verge of not only producing
their best work but also adding to it a religious/philosophical dimension that entirely defied
the analysis of Booker and like-minded critics.
Although there had been flashes of brilliance aplenty before it (their previous albums
having manifested the influence of Bob Dylan in Lennon’s confessional “I’m a Loser” [from
the album Beatles for Sale] and the all-acoustic “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, not
to mention McCartney’s growing maturity and stylistic diversity, epitomised by “Yesterday”,
the song with the greatest number of cover versions in the history of popular music [both
from the album Help!]), the album Rubber Soul, released in December 1965, is generally
considered to mark the beginning of The Beatles’ most creative phase. Rubber Soul’s
introduction of a sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” marked a further
progression outside the traditional boundaries of rock music. The album also saw Lennon and
McCartney’s collaborative songwriting increasingly supplemented by distinct compositions
from each (though they continued to share the official credit). Their thematic reach was
expanding as well, embracing more complex aspects of romance and other concerns. As their
lyrics grew more artful, fans began to study them for deeper meaning. There was speculation
that “Norwegian Wood” might refer to cannabis, though it was actually a wry account of
John Lennon’s extramarital fling.
Soon afterwards, The Beatles were involved in the greatest controversy of their career
after John Lennon’s remark that The Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus” was
quoted by the American teen magazine Datebook. Lennon originally made the remark when
English newspaper reporter Maureen Cleave interviewed him for her series on the lifestyles
of the four individual Beatles. When published in the United Kingdom in March 1966,
Lennon’s words provoked no public reaction. When Datebook quoted Lennon’s comments
five months later, in August 1966, a violent protest broke out in the United States, especially
in the American South’s “Bible belt”. Beatles records were publicly burned, concerts were
cancelled and threats were made. The Ku Klux Klan even nailed a Beatles album to a wooden
cross, vowing “vengeance”, and conservative groups staged further public burnings of
Beatles records. The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was so concerned by the US reaction
that he considered cancelling the tour for fear people would try to kill them. After completing
the tour, the Beatles never performed a commercial concert again.
The saner elements of the public pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of such reactions.
The Daily Express writer Robert Pitman, responding to the US outcry, wrote, “It seems a
nerve for Americans to hold up shocked hands, when week in, week out, America is
exporting to us a subculture that makes the Beatles seem like four stern old churchwardens.”
In the US, too, there was criticism of the reaction; a Kentucky radio station declared that it
would start to give Beatles music airplay to show its “contempt for hypocrisy personified”,
and the Jesuit magazine America wrote that “Lennon was simply stating what many a
Christian educator would readily admit.” In a bitter final irony, Lennon was murdered on 8
December 1980 by Mark David Chapman. Chapman, who became a born-again Christian in
1970, was incensed by Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” remark, calling it blasphemy. He was
further enraged by Lennon’s songs “God” and “Imagine” – even singing the latter with the
altered lyric: “Imagine John Lennon dead”.
The album Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the band’s final tour,
marked another major step forward. Redefining what was expected from popular music,
2
Revolver featured sophisticated songwriting and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical
styles ranging from innovative classical string arrangements (“Eleanor Rigby”) to
psychedelic rock. The most remarkable among the latter was Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never
Knows”, an account of his exploration of his inner mental space with the help of LSD. Since
there was no “acid” subculture in Britain in 1966, he lacked any guidance to this dangerous
drug and so turned to The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for mind expansion by renegade
Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.
Wishing to give the unpredictable acid “trip” a frame of reference comparable with
the mystical systems of Catholicism and Islam, Leary and Alpert selected The Tibetan Book
of the Dead, an ancient tome designed to be whispered to the dying so as to steer them
through illusory states which, according to Tibetan Buddhism, hold sway between
incarnations. Their choice of this holy book was due to their belief that LSD was a
“sacramental chemical” capable of inducing spiritual revelations.
Among the commonest of the “altered states” induced by LSD is depersonalisation or
“ego-loss”. In this condition, awareness of the self dissolves in what Jung termed “oceanic
consciousness”: the sense that all things are one and individual awareness an illusion. But an
LSD trip is steerable only to a very limited extent, being produced by an invasive force
interacting at unpredictable strengths with the body’s own fluctuating chemistry. The drug,
not the subject, is effectively in control. The fact that LSD was Russian roulette played with
one’s mind must have been clear to Leary, but he was so excited by its “revolutionary”
potential that he threw caution to the wind advocating it as a social cure-all. The revolution
that he envisaged had nothing to do with Lenin’s. The enemy was the System: the
materialistic machine which processed crew-cutted American youths through high school into
faceless corporations or the army. The core of this system, according to the acid analysis, was
the unfeeling rational intellect, the mind divorced from its body, the ego divorced from the
rest of creation. During 1965-68, the height of Leary’s influence, the ego was thought of as
something nasty to get rid of – through depersonalisation by means of LSD.
But contrary to Leary’s assurances, there is no guarantee of predictable results from
LSD, which is capable of inducing anything from suicidal self negation to paranoid
megalomania. As the use of LSD spread under Leary’s influence, a trail of “acid casualties”
followed in its wake.
Apparently intending a serious voyage of self-discovery, Lennon used the instructions
given in The Psychedelic Experience, recording its paraphrase of The Tibetan Book of the
Dead on a tape-recorder and playing it back as the drug took effect. He hastened to capture
the experience in a song, taking many of his lines directly from Leary and Alpert’s text,
above all its rapturous invocation of the supposed reality behind appearances: the Void. This
song effectively introduced LSD and Leary’s psychedelic revolution to the young of the
Western world, becoming one of the most socially influential records The Beatles ever made,
Lennon sounding like the Dalai Lama and a group of Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain
top.
The effect it had on Lennon, however, was far from beneficial: he became
psychologically addicted to LSD, taking it daily and living in one long, listless chemically
altered state. For the next couple of years, by his own account, he had little grasp of his own
identity. Living in a passive, impressionable condition dominated by LSD, he clung to the
ideology of the psychedelic revolution despite an increasing number of “bad trips”, which
Leary claimed were impossible after ego-death. By 1968 – at which point Leary was hailing
The Beatles as “Divine Messiahs” – Lennon was a mental wreck struggling to stitch himself
back together. Luckily, his constitution was robust enough to avert physical collapse, while
the scepticism that balanced his questing gullibility warded off a permanent eclipse of his
reason. Many others never came back from the Void.
3
 Freed from the burden of touring, the band’s desire to experiment increased as they
recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in December 1966. Nearly seven
hundred hours of studio time were devoted to the sessions. They first yielded the non-album
double A-side single “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” in February 1967.
Considered one of the best singles in the history of popular music, Lennon’s “Strawberry
Fields Forever” and McCartney’s “Penny Lane” shared the theme of nostalgia for their early
years in Liverpool. Although both referred to actual locations, the two songs also had strong
surrealistic and psychedelic overtones.
Strawberry Field (not “Fields”) was the name of a Salvation Army Children’s Home
just around the corner from Lennon’s childhood home in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool.
Lennon and his childhood friends Pete Shotton, Nigel Whalley, and Ivan Vaughan used to
play in the wooded garden behind the home. One of Lennon’s childhood treats was the
garden party held each summer in Calderstones Park near the Salvation Army Home every
year, where a Salvation Army band played. Unusually, following McCartney’s distinctive
introduction played on the mellotron, still a rather new instrument at the time, the song
begins with the refrain (“Let me take you down...). The opening verse (“Living is easy with
eyes closed”) seems to connoisseurs of The Beatles’ opus to be a postscript of sorts to the
experience dealt with in “She Said, She Said”, another Revolver track about ego-loss (“I
know what it’s like to be dead”), even though Lennon later spoke of it as if it referred not to
him but to the world at large. Recalling the song in 1980, he declared that even when very
young he had felt unique, as if seeing things unlike others (“No one, I think, is in my tree”)
and that he was never sure whether this was a sign of genius or madness (“it must be high or
low”).
Never one to deliberately repeat himself, he turned the anxious disorientation of “She
Said, She Said” into something more ambiguous: on the one hand, a study in uncertain
identity, tinged with the loneliness of the solitary rebel against all things institutional; on the
other, an eerie longing for a wild childhood of hide-and-seek and tree-climbing – the
visionary strawberry fields of his imagination. This second aspect of the song effectively
inaugurated the English pop-pastoral mood explored in the late Sixties by groups like Pink
Floyd and Traffic, among others. More significant, though, was the child’s-eye view – for the
true subject of English psychedelia was neither love nor drugs, but nostalgia for the innocent
vision of the child.
Adding to the overall eeriness of the atmosphere, the finished version of the song is
not in a standard pitch, owing to manipulation of the recording speed. This proved necessary
when Lennon entrusted the producer with the task of joining two different takes of the song,
which were in a different key. With only a pair of editing scissors, two tape machines, and a
vari-speed control, the sound engineer Geoff Emerick compensated for the differences in key
and speed by increasing the speed of the first version and decreasing the speed of the second,
then splicing the versions together. The pitch-shifting in joining the versions gave Lennon’s
lead vocal a slightly other-worldly, “swimming” quality.
Some vocalising by Lennon is faintly audible at the end of the song, picked up as
leakage onto one of the drum microphones (close listening shows Lennon making other
comments to Ringo). In the “Paul is dead”3 hoax, these were taken to be Lennon saying “I
buried Paul”. In 1974, McCartney explained, “That wasn’t ‘I buried Paul’ at all – that was
John saying ‘cranberry sauce’. (...) That's John’s humour. John would say something totally
out of sync, like cranberry sauce.”

3
“Paul is dead” is an urban legend alleging that Paul McCartney of The Beatles died in 1966 and was secretly
replaced by a look-alike. In September 1969, American college students published articles claiming that clues to
McCartney’s death could be found among the lyrics and artwork of The Beatles’ recordings. Clue hunting
proved infectious and within a few weeks had become an international phenomenon.
4
 Following The Beatles’ philosophy that songs released on a single should not appear
on new albums, both songs were ultimately left off Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
but Martin later admitted that this was a “dreadful mistake”. Even so, when Sgt. Pepper was
finally issued in June 1967, it was a major cultural event, entrancing the young and the old
alike. In America, normal radio play was suspended for several days, only tracks from Sgt.
Pepper being played. It is no wonder that Kenneth Tynan, The Times critic, called it “a
decisive moment in the history of Western civilization” and the scholar Langdon Winner
considered it an event that brought “Western Civilization closest to unity since the Vienna
Congress of 1815”. Such remarks are now laughed at, but they are nonetheless true, albeit not
quite in the way that they were intended. As the initial shock wore off, voices from an earlier
age began to complain that the music on the album was absolutely saturated with drugs. Not
wishing to promote LSD, the BBC banned “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds”. More bizarrely “She’s Leaving Home” was attacked by some religious groups in
America as a cryptic advertisement for abortion(!).
While half these claims were spurious, it would be silly to pretend that Sgt. Pepper
was not fundamentally shaped by LSD. As such, it remains arguably the most authentic
simulation of the psychedelic experience ever created. But something else dwells in it at the
same time: a distillation of the spirit of 1967 as it was felt by vast numbers across the
Western world who had never taken drugs in their lives.
Sgt. Pepper was the first major pop album to include its complete lyrics, which were
printed on the back cover. Its remarkably elaborate front cover also occasioned great interest
and deep study. It featured a colourful collage of life-sized cardboard models of famous
people, as well as The Beatles themselves, in the guise of the Sgt. Pepper band, dressed in
custom-made military-style outfits made of satin dyed in day-glo colours. The heavy
moustaches worn by the band swiftly became a hallmark of hippie style. The sheer musical
complexity of the record astounded contemporary artists seeking to outdo The Beatles. For
The Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, in the midst of a personal crisis and struggling to
complete the ambitious Smile, this was a crushing blow and he soon abandoned all attempts
to compete, only getting to finish and publicly perform Smile a mere thirty-seven years later.
Riding high on the triumphant reception of Pepper, on 25 June 1967 the band
performed their new single “All You Need Is Love” to TV viewers worldwide on Our World
(International TV special), the first live global television link. Appearing at the peak of the
Summer of Love, the song was immediately adopted as a flower power anthem, confirming
the band’s global domination. Though perfectly suited to the mood of the moment, it is
actually one of The Beatles’ less deserving hits, and with hindsight, it is revealed to be the
beginning of their creative decline.
Nothing among The Beatles’ subsequent recordings quite matched the peak they
reached with Sgt. Pepper (although its individual tracks are, for the most part, inferior to the
average number on Revolver, as a coherent conceptual whole it is unparalleled in the band’s
opus), but there were occasional brilliances all the same, as well as controversial moments.
“I Am the Walrus” stands out as one of Lennon’s most impressive achievements in
the surrealistic/psychedelic mode. The original inspiration for it, apparently, was provided by
a letter that Lennon received from a pupil at Quarry Bank High School, which he had
attended. The boy mentioned that the English master was making his class analyse Beatles’
lyrics. (Lennon wrote an answer, dated 1 September 1967, which was auctioned by Christie’s
of London in 1992). Amused that a teacher should be putting so much effort into
understanding the Beatles’ lyrics, Lennon wrote the most confusing lyrics he could.
Gradually turning into an angry sequel to the darkly melancholic “Strawberry Fields
Forever”, “I Am the Walrus” became its author’s ultimate anti-institutional rant – a damn-you
England tirade that blasts education, art, culture, law, order, class, religion and even sense
5
itself. The hurt teenager’s revenge on his “expert texpert” schoolmasters (“I’m crying”)
broadens into a surreal onslaught on straight society in general.
Usually regarded as a cheerful exercise in anarchic nonsense, “I Am the Walrus”
takes on a different cast when seen in context (without, however, underestimating its element
of pure linguistic mischief). Apart from attacking his old teachers and the establishment,
Lennon was satirising the fashion for fanciful psychedelic lyrics cultivated by Dylan’s then
much-discussed output of 1965-66.4 Although it owed something to Lennon’s favourite song
of the summer of ’67, Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, which took portentous
meaninglessness to rococo lengths, its nonsense is far from whimsical. The Walrus symbol
itself was taken directly from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from
Through the Looking Glass. It has no meaning in itself, though many Carroll critics have
ascribed various social, political and/or religious meanings to the poem.5
Representing Lennon’s final high-tide of inspiration for The Beatles, “I Am the
Walrus” is perhaps (with the possible exception of Dylan’s surrealistic antinuclear nightmare
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”) the most idiosyncratic song ever written. (With an irony he
must have relished, this satire on repressive inflexibility was banned by the BBC for the use
of the revolutionary codeword “knickers”.)
The political turmoil of 1968 prompted The Beatles (i.e. Lennon) to make their most
overt political statement yet – “Revolution”. The Beatles released two distinct arrangements
of the song in 1968: a hard rock version released as the B-side of the single “Hey Jude”, and a
slower version entitled “Revolution 1” on the eponymous album The Beatles (commonly
called the “White Album”). Although “Revolution” was released first, it was recorded several
weeks after “Revolution 1” as a re-make specifically designed to be released as a single.
By spring 1968, student demonstrations had reached a fever pitch all around the
world, most notably in Paris, where a massive strike and resultant riots almost led to the
collapse of the government led by Charles DeGaulle. Lennon, who questioned the goals of
the leftist movements even as he championed their basic beliefs, wrote this song directly to
the world’s young revolutionaries, specifically inspired as he was by the May 1968 French
upheaval. His scepticism was reflected in his demand “to see the plan” from those advocating
toppling the system. The release of the album version in November provided further
indication of Lennon’s uncertainty about destructive change, with the phrase “count me out”
modified to “count me out, in”. The repeated phrase “it’s gonna be alright” came directly
from Lennon’s Transcendental Meditation experiences in India, conveying the idea that God
would take care of the human race no matter what happened politically.
. In the face of such criticism, Lennon remained adamant for the rest of his life about
the non-violent form of revolution he preached in this song, later only regretting that he
mentioned “Chairman Mao” in one verse as a dig against Communism.
Lennon’s urgent ambition to make “Revolution” The Beatles’ next single alarmed
McCartney, who blanched at the prospect of an overt political statement. Despite
McCartney’s opposition, Lennon, far too long immersed in LSD to be bothered to fight, had
“come awake” when he met his muse Yoko Ono, a Japanese avant-garde artist, and
obstinately refused to be manipulated. Thus “Revolution” proved to be a reflection of the first
serious crack in The Beatles’ corporate façade, standing out as one of the major period-
4
Recalling his mood at the time of writing “I Am the Walrus”, Lennon remarked: “Dylan got away with
murder. I thought, I can write this crap, too.”
5
As Lennon himself remarked in an interview: “It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on
the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with The
Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and
the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the
carpenter’. But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? [Sings, laughing] ‘I am the carpenter’....”

6
inaugurating songs in Lennon’s development and the last turning point in his career as a
Beatle.
When The Beatles broke up in 1970, amid much acrimony, Lennon’s first solo album,
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, confronted the traumas of his childhood (abandonment,
isolation and death), finally letting his submerged anger and hurt rise to the surface to be
dealt with through his art. Beginning and ending on a note of anguish over the loss of his
mother, its opening sound of funeral bells also gave the impression of being a kind of
requiem for The Beatles, as Lennon announced that he no longer believed in them and that
the dream was over. However, three decades after his assassination and four decades after the
group’s demise, their music lives on, now accessible for the first time via iTunes in electronic
form only.

Literature: Ian MacDonald: Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties,
Pimlico, London, 1995.