At the Lighthouse

Part of me just knew  that I never should have written that entry about my five favourite eary Beatles sons with vocals by John Lennon. It totally launched a new round of Beatle-mania in me, and I’ve been listening to The Beatles for the past few weeks more than I’ve ever done since I was 13-14 and first discovered the band. It’s a good thing that the new opera season is slowly approaching, so that I will have something else to obsess over soon.

But then it’s been really nice to re-discover those four lads and their songs. One thing I especially enjoyed was re-discovering the documentarty series The Beatles Anthology, which I re-watched over the past week, and I thought I’d do a review here. 

Telling the story of how The Beatles first got together, rose to fame, reinvented themselves, and then broke up, the series is surprisingly well executed, especially because of the way it works as a testimony to the fact that what the rest of us perceive as a glorious tale of a fabulous band’s fantastic oeuvre, must have felt like a turbulent, chaotic story to the four band members themselves who went almost directly from the streets of Liverpool to the top of the pop at an age where most of us are still figuring out what to major in at college.

Help!
 The title sequence itself is obviously created with this in mind: We zoom in on The Beatles playing the song ”Help!”, only to zoom out again, making the four musicians seem smaller and smaller next to some huge characters that spell out the band’s name, while the music is graudually drowned in the noise of an audience of  girls screaming at the top of their lungs. 

I was surprised to find at first that there is no narrator in the series, no steady, comforting, distinguishly English voice to guide us through the story, but I think that’s actually part of what makes the series so great: Because how could there be just one narrator of the story of four such different persons and the numerous people who surrounded them?  A cacophony of voices is instead achieved as the documentary series is made up from a number of interviews with Beatles members themselves and key figures in the making of the band and their music. Brand new interviews were made with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, and the three are mostly interviewed seperately. This is a particularly nice touch because it allows us to get - often very - different perspectives on an event.

George Martin and the fantastic stars
Another important interviewees in the programme is producer George Martin. Martin is endearing – he simply seems like such a nice person, and very knowledgable when it comes to music. If the programme introduces us to the four Beatles’ genius, it certainly also testifies to the genius of Martin, and to the importance of his intellect and down-to-earth personality. He recounts a particularly poignant (and very amusing!) anecdote at one point, when he’s trying to illustrate how innocent and ignorant he was when it came to The Beatles use of drugs: Once when Lennon had accidentally taken acid in the studio and was feeling strange, Martin took the reeling musician to the roof of the building for some fresh air, without ever realizing that Lennon was under the influence – although he did find it strange that Lennon kept staring at the stars and calling them “fantastic!”. “I suppose they would have been particularly fantastic to him…” as Martin muses.

“There are seven levels.”
The three surviving Beatles themselves, however, also seem to have developed a healthy distance to the chaos they lived through in their Beatles years. Paul McCartney obviously still has a keen eye for appearance and the theatrical (as the footage from their concerts show, he always was the one Beatle to put on the most elaborate stage show), and does a great job at imitating his and his band-mates’ high-strung earlier selves as he recounts situations from back then to the camera. An especially funny anecdote is Paul’s memory of the first time he smoked pot: He was at a party and in his stoned condition he was suddenly certain that he’d cracked the meaning of life, so he asked for paper and a pen, so that he might write it down. The next day, when he was sober, he was eager to see the note again, but somewhat taken aback that all it read was “There are seven levels.”  McCartney’s delivery of the punch-line is hilarious.

If McCartney is theatrical, George Harrison and Ringo Starr both seem much more laid-back. They come off as two genuinly nice guys, and George Harrison had a wonderful sardonic humour to boot. May he rest in peace.

“The movement you need is on your shoulder”
And naturally the three ‘95 interviews with the three ex-Beatles leave a terrible void. One keeps expecting a 55-year-old John Lennon to pop up there on the screen along with the three others - it would have been so interesting to hear what he made of things all these years later, and to see what he looked like now - and of course he doesn’t. But much isn’t made of his death, and that’s a nice touch, too. After all The Beatles Anthology is a documentary about The Beatles specifically, not about the three Beatles and what they did after the band broke up. And the loss of John Lennon is present in the documentary regardless. Like when Paul McCartney talks about how he first played “Hey Jude” to John. Paul told John he wasn’t happy with the line “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, but John told him not to: That was the best part of the song – ‘95!Paul gets a little misty-eyed as he tells us this and confesses that that was one of the things that was so great about working with John, and one of the things that made him sentimental to think about now.

Original footage of Mozart’s ass-jokes
Apart from the 1995 interviews, the documentary is rich with footage from the Beatles years – perhaps almost too rich, one might argue. There are lengthy clips from concerts, and while it’s always a pleasure to hear the Beatles’ songs, it does slow down the pace of the series somewhat, and it’s these clips, in part, that make me think that the series wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anyone who wasn’t a hardcore Beatles’ fan.

But then of course one has to remember that when the series was made, this was the first time that a lot of this footage was ever published, and it was sensational at the time, I do remember that. The footage of failed takes from the studios, with John Lennon mising a note or Paul McCartney giggling his way through “And Your Bird Can Sing”, are all over the internet by now, but at that time, it was a unique look behind the scenes, like getting to peep through a hole in time and see Wordsworth strolling around in Tintern Abbey, or seeing Mozart make an ass-joke.

“Free As a Bird”
And the footage is put to great use in the end sequence of the series when we are shown the video for “Free As a Bird”, a song that John Lennon recorded, but never released, but which was refined by the three other Beatles in ‘95. The song itself is so-so. But the idea of the Fab Four performing together again is incredibly touching, and the video is just marvellous. I still remember seeing the rush of seeing that video for the first time on TV back then, and marvelling at the fact that the editing of the video actually allowed me to see the four Beatles walking in a Liverpool street, down Strawberry Fields and past the barber in Penny Lane, and – most fantastically – go through the corridor from the street into The Cavern to see The Beatles performing on stage. I’ll freely admit that the video can still make me sniffle:

Other fun things I learned from the documentary:
- the fact that The Beatles used to lie on top op each other and drink whiskey during the winter when they were touring in their first tour car, because it got so cold. HoYay!
- the fact that the three surviving Beatles all seemed to agree that John wrote “Help!” mostly because he was “getting pudgy” at the time and wasn’t feeling good about himself as a result.
- the fact that The Beatles were harassed at the Philipines because they turned down an invitation on their day off to see Imelda Marcos.
- the fact that Ringo and Paul once ran seven miles away from the set during the filming of Help!, because they were eager to smoke a joint. And the fact that the filming of the movie was pretty much sabotaged by the four Beatles’ stoned condition throughout the proces.
- the fact that Sgt. Pepper wasn’t much of a big deal to either of The Beatles. And that Ringo was downright bored during the recording of it. I always thought Abbey Road was a better album.