Make Love Singing Songs

The Beatles and Our Improved Infancies

This is from a paywalled post that I decided to make free. Put the needle down. Let me tell you how it will be…

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

Hart Crane, who wrote this opening stanza in “Passages,” knew that there was no such thing.  Certainly not in his world.  He leapt to his death from this SS Ibiza off the Gulf of Mexico after running out of his Guggenheim, his friends with money, his family. He was 32.  It was not a good time to be gay, and it was not a good time to need money in America.  In the depression, was he depressed?

I think about Crane whenever there is a new mix of a Beatles album.  It is the closest thing I know to an improved infancy.  I’m not stuck in the past.  There are new things that I still love (stay tuned).  But they’re The Beatles and I have no objectivity.  The only Beatles album in my parents’ collection was Hard Day’s Night, American version, which leaves off “Anytime at All” and “Things We Said Today.”  But, even though my father was born in the year of Paul and my mother was born in the year of George, that was it.  At age 8, I received some money from my grandfather.  I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but, suddenly with this unthinkable luxury, I had enough money to buy the album of my choice.  This, my friends, was a huge deal.  That moment was the beginning of something I would do for the rest of my life.  At that moment, as a consumer, I began to create a musical identity of my own.  A candy bar would have been gone right away.  This could be consumed repeatedly.  I suddenly found myself seeing that picture of the lads, but looking different than they did on the Hard Day’s Night cover.  They were wearing sunglasses, against a black background, and they were in on a joke, the cleverest imaginable.  I did not have my own record player yet.  I had to be astonished in public.  I managed.

I did not know the name John Lennon when he was shot, and I was 7.  Now I was 8, and this music and the men who made it, who appeared on Klaus Voorman’s cover connected by endless strands of hair, became an obsession.  I wore Beatles t-shirts and grew out my hair.  There was a long documentary about them on the radio and I taped as much of it as I could, and I cursed missing parts of it to go to the movies.  I could not imagine a future with YouTube, but I remember wanting all of that data.  It became more important than anything.  Paul singing about loneliness against a tasteful string quartet, George calling out the taxman and singing against a sitar about making love all day long, making love singing songs.  John meets a girl who knows what it’s like to be dead.  Then he tells us to turn our minds off, relax and float downstream.  I would later hear the tracks from the British Revolver that were cut from the American version I got later—all by John.  I would have melted into “I’m Only Sleeping.”  Paul singing “For No One” might have been the saddest thing I had ever heard, “Here, There, and Everywhere,” the most tender.  A defining characteristic of childhood should be not knowing what it’s like to be dead, but it’s also a defining characteristic to be curious.  You never find out til you get there.

Hart Crane got there, and he took his improved infancy with him.  Revolver is, of course, a pun. It spins on the record player and it’s a gun.  A handgun took down John Lennon months before my purchase of Revolver.  George was already beginning to tell us that “A lifetime is so short./ A new one can’t be bought.”  My improved infancy is really my introduction to big questions and no answers.  I was raised by a ballet dancer and a philosopher, so I was prepared to keep seeking and stay in search of beauty and the grace of the moment.  I thank my grandfather, Milton Stern, for giving me the money for that purchase.  He didn’t live long enough to see what I would do with it, but I think of him often.  He was a gambler, with a pied-à-terre in Vegas, who was barred from some casinos for being too good, who wrote a book called Expert Bridge.  He taught me how to swim in his pool.  He was a very imperfect man, but he was also a legend, certainly to me.   He gave me the money for Revolver when I was 8!

That record opened up worlds that keep opening to me.  “I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there.”  The idea gives me goosebumps, that there is still a door to be opened, that I could still learn to listen to the color of my dreams.  Giles Martin, keep doing what you’re doing and keep on revealing all the nuances technology could allow.  It’s the least technology could do for us. 

I put down the needle and heard George Harrison saying, “Let me tell you how it will be.”  And so he did.  So did they all.  1966 was a year when their careers were nearly ruined when John Lennon spoke a little too freely about Jesus, and they decided to stop playing concerts and focus on records even more, to our great, continued benefit while they were doing it.   While we’re in our improved infancy, we lived beneath the waves (a phrase that Dylan sang a year earlier in “Mr. Tambourine Man”).  

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. 

This was from Crane’s “Broken Tower,” his final poem and one of the most well-wrought suicide notes ever.  We still don’t know where the bells are swinging, and we don’t know what it’s like to be dead.  While we’re here, we have beauty, and as long as Giles Martin keeps tweaking The Beatles’s catalogue, it is made anew.  It’s something that’s possible with sound whenever the sound improves.  It is here, there, and everywhere. 

Make love all day long
Make love singing songs

George Harrison was 23 when he wrote that.   Would that we could.  Would that we could roll all our strength and sweetness into one ball and that would be eternity.  But we have to live here, and much of it is intolerable.  “To lead a better life, I need my love to be here,” sings McCartney, on a song that was the only one to produce a compliment from John. Tough room.  I’ll salute it, and all of this remarkable journey that started when my grandpa gave me a little spare change to set me off on a journey that keeps spinning.