Into the Mystic by Christopher Hill

Author:Christopher Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Visionary Art/Music
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2017-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

In October of 1965 Paul McCartney gave an interview to the New Musical Express in which he said that the Beatles were going to start writing “comedy songs.” This is an interesting insight into what was going on with the band at that point. With bands all around them in Britain like the Stones and the Who and the Animals turning on and listening to Bob Dylan and starting to push the edge of the conventional in pop song, the Beatles began to realize that the dreaminess they had imbibed from American girl groups, even elegantly rendered as in “What You’re Doing,” was going to leave them behind the very curve that they had drawn. Probably what John and Paul meant initially by comedy was satire. The significant thing about this is that their gaze was turning toward something other than the beloved, turning toward the life swirling around them. You can hear this in songs like “Norwegian Wood,” “Dr. Robert,” “Drive My Car”—all comic vignettes, jabs at the swinging England they had helped to create. Everyone knew that the Beatles had wit. It was one of the things in their group persona that had set them apart from more conventional entertainers in the first place. The wit could be heard in their music and in their bantering with the press and in a scripted form in their movies, but not, so far, lyrically. An essentially comic vision of life that had been implicit in their personae, style, and sound now became explicit. The comic vision is the balance between love and the world. In Shakespeare’s comedies, like a Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, the new world of young love encounters the deadly enmity of the old world of family hierarchy and political authority; and in the end the young lovers bring the old with them into an unanticipated harmony, taking up the old world into a new and more divine pattern. The Beatles, with their new “comedy songs” began to grope instinctively toward a similar resolution.

One of the significant developments of popular music in the sixties was the way in which romance began to be used as a metaphor. The core myth of most popular music is the myth of romantic love. It had been wryly and elegantly expressed by show-tune writers and crooners, smoothly and efficiently produced by Tin Pan Alley pros, viscerally expressed by the early rock and rollers. But it didn’t question itself. It didn’t seek to express anything beyond itself, leaving pop music in a romantic ghetto—a pleasant sort of ghetto, to be sure, lit by misty moonlight on lazy rivers and illuminated by kisses sweeter than wine. But it was a proscribed dreamland with no hint of the transcendent. The sixties rockers, the Beatles above all, inherited the romantic ghetto. “Like a Rolling Stone” began to change that. But even Bob Dylan, when he ventured into pop forms, expressed himself in the argot of romantic love. “Like a Rolling Stone” is

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