Extract: The Beatles: White Album – Rock Classics Paperback
Sgt Pepper was a statement. Drenched in acid, displaying great stylistic range, soaked with the most astounding production techniques, and readily identifying with the new emergent underground scene, it set a new benchmark. The Beatles had matured, aligned themselves with the new counterculture, yet, due to their brilliant songwriting, accessible melodies and pop sensibilities had still retained their commercial standing and popularity outside of that youth culture.
Sgt Pepper had proved to be a phenomenon, a revelation. In the UK, following its release on the 26th of May, it had sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week, staying twenty seven weeks at number 1 in the British charts.
I was almost the right age for the Beatles. A couple of years older would have been good, but I can’t complain. I started getting into rock and pop at the age of ten when an older friend, Clive Hansell, introduced me to the delights of Adam Faith and Buddy Holly. That was back in 1960. Over the next few years, I extended my appreciation to include the wonders of the Shadows, Eddie Cochran, the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, with a smattering of Elvis. I liked my music fast and rockin’. Even at the age of twelve the likes of Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin and Bobby Ridell sounded too tame. The charts were far too poppy.
By the time I was thirteen I was ripe for something to explode and explode it did.
Rock Album Classics: Arguably the greatest album by the best rock band ever, The Beatles – also known as The White Album – proved to be a watershed recording. Coming as it did, after manager Brian Epstein’s death; after the disillusionment with the Maharishi; in the middle of the break-up of long-term relationships, and following on from the psychedelic masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it heralded changes of style and the marked the start of the falling apart of the previously tight-knit group. The album’s diversity and creation are analysed and its background and dynamics revealed. This extraordinary double album reflects a remarkable time and period. As the sixties came to an end, so too did the band. They mirrored the times they lived in. The album also followed on from their first highly criticised TV flop Magical Mystery Tour, the success of the first global satellite triumph of ‘All You Need Is Love’, and the highly ambitious Apple business venture. George Martin ducked out and ructions broke out between band members. But, among all the pressures and stress they found time to write and record an incredible array of songs; songs that synergised into a spectacularly successful album with a fascinating story. This is the tale of every track and every facet of this remarkable record.
Arguably the greatest album by the best rock band ever, The Beatles – also known as The White Album – proved to be a watershed recording. Coming as it did, after manager Brian Epstein’s death; after the disillusionment with the Maharishi; in the middle of the break-up of long-term relationships, and following on from the psychedelic masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it heralded changes of style and the marked the start of the falling apart of the previously tight-knit group.The album’s diversity and creation are analysed and its background and dynamics revealed. This extraordinary double album reflects a remarkable time and period. As the sixties came to an end, so too did the band. They mirrored the times they lived in. The album also followed on from their first highly criticised TV flop Magical Mystery Tour, the success of the first global satellite triumph of ‘All You Need Is Love’, and the highly ambitious Apple business venture. George Martin ducked out and ructions broke out between band members. But, among all the pressures and stress they found time to write and record an incredible array of songs; songs that synergised into a spectacularly successful album with a fascinating story. This is the tale of every track and every facet of this remarkable record.
The Rock Classics series looks at the most important Rock Music albums in depth.
I was asked to produce a book about an iconic album. I could choose any band, any singer. I chose Bob Dylan. For me Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was a pivotal album. It altered the whole way Rock Music developed.
This was when Dylan went electric and blew the whole scene into the stratosphere. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.
One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz fusion. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had made an enormous impact on songwriting with his first four all-acoustic albums. He had created a different way of writing songs, by embracing themes such as civil rights, anti-war protests and social issues, which lifted the subject matter from teenage love songs to serious poetic works of art, rife with symbolism. But with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan shot his lyrics through with surreal hard-edged beat poetry while the music contained both acoustic songs and blues-based loud electric rock. It alienated him from many of his peers in the folk community but nonetheless contains classic cuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Dylan had opened the door to experimentation. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Cream all listened and responded. In its wake, Songwriting rose to new heights with few boundaries. After Bringing It All Back Home, music was forever changed.
1968 and the winds of change were gathering pace. The first tsunami of psychedelia had swamped the scene, saturating everything in its acid-drenched glow. Everything was bright colours, kaftans, afghan waist coats, scarves and swirling paisley. A great surge of euphoria, optimism and possibility was rampant. Experimentation was in. The youth of the day were rising up to overthrow the conservative values of their parents, displacing the grey conformity and class structure with an anti-establishment defiance and radical outlook. This was the sixties revolution. It shot straight out of the feedback drenched music and poetic lyrics into art, fashion, design, film, magazines and philosophy. Hedonism was in. All things were possible. The war and rationing were a fading memory. I lost count of the number of times one of the ‘older generation’ disapprovingly told me that he’d fought a war for the likes of us. Not that we cared. War was a product of the old ways. This was the new age. We had different values. We were doing it differently. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Keeping it real.
The Beatles had already ridden the crest of that psychedelic tsunami with their majestic Sgt Peppers Lonely Heartsclub Band. Now was the time for the follow-up.
Ethnic was in. Hitch-hiking was the mode. The whole world opened up. The hippie trail brought back the Moroccan incense, Indian fabrics and new rhythms, new instruments. Everything exploded.
This was the time of equality and freedom. Careers were discarded. Long-hairs had formed a new culture. Instant recognition. Adopted slang from the world of Jazz where the black musicians had begun calling themselves ‘Man’ in response to the whites disparagingly calling them ‘Boy’. This was the time of openness and sharing – joints, food, a floor to sleep on, all to the background of ‘our’ music. This was the time of the album, of what the media called ‘Adult Orientated Rock’. Except that it wasn’t adult orientated at all; it was aimed at us, youth; it expressed our values and feelings.
1967 had been the year of great change. Psychedelia had swept through with the Pink Floyd’s piper, Hendrix’s experience, Traffic’s fantasy and Cream’s gears. Acid rock had stormed in from the West Coast. Bringing the strange days of the Doors, Captain Beefheart dropping out, Zappa freaking out, the Byrds being notorious, Love forever changing, Country Joe and the Fish applying electric music for the mind, and Jefferson Airplane taking off.
The music had evolved. In the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll had been viscerally subversive; in the 1960s that had taken on a more sophisticated cerebral direction. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll had been music to madly jive to, psychedelia was music to get stoned with, to lose yourself in its intensity and nuance, to dance expressively, listen intently with friends or sit with headphones on and absorb the sounds and words. An album had to be pawed over, concentrated on and sucked dry of all that it contained. The cover and liner notes were studied and analysed, the lyric sheet searched for meaning and the music internalised through repeated listening. Albums were sacred.
But by 1968 the rot had started. The tendrils of exploitation were creeping in. Revolution was big business. Money bred excess. The values were already being undermined and trust tested. The casualties were beginning to surface. Reality hit home. In San Francisco in October 1967, they held a march for ‘The Death of Hippie’ in protest at how the values had become commercialised. The ‘Summer of Love’ was officially dead. The sharing culture, love and peace, equality and freedom, was tainted.