Review: 'What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time'

Reading Tim Riley’s Tell Me Why: The Beatles Album by Album, Song by Song, The Sixties and After at the unripe age of 15 quite literally changed my life. It didn’t just teach me that pop songs were worthy of deep analysis and the valuable lesson that even The Beatles’ mighty body of work is not critic-proof. It also set me on the path that led me to indulge in the analytical jibber-jabber I’ve been spouting here on Psychobabble for the past eleven years, as well as in my book The Who FAQ. So I was excited to see that Riley was involved in a new Beatles book.

However, I’m not really the audience for Riley and Walter Everett’s What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time. In fact, this book is directed at a very specific audience: college students. What Goes On is structured as a chronological Beatles primer, providing a basic look at their musical innovations and cultural influence complete with text-book style study questions (my fave: “How does Lennon’s quip at the Royal Command Performance illustrate the generation gap?” …oh, what would 23-year old Lennon have thought if he’d known his offhand wise assery would one day be studied in university classrooms?!?). More thorough analyses of select songs are very similar to the ones in Tell Me Why.

One aspect of What Goes On that could not have existed in Riley’s 1988 publication are the Internet videos referenced throughout the book that further illustrate the various subtopics, often with musical examples by a young drummer or Everett on bass or guitar (or in one screen-in-screen instance, both). Videos cover such specifically Beatle-focused topics as how Ringo’s drumming style differed from the prevailing styles that preceded him to such general musical theory concepts as an explanation of syncopation. I had a bit of trouble accessing them by typing the provided URL’s into my browser but had no trouble using the direct links provided Oxford University Press’ web site.

Now a middle-aged fart, I’m versed in music theory and Beatledom well enough to not need a book like What Goes On, but I do feel heartened by the idea of a new generation of young people discovering their music and the pleasures of delving deep into it in the kind of class that might employ this book as its main text. Happy studying, kids.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 148

The Date: February 25

The Movie: Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

What Is It?: Monty Python takes Christian dogma for a ride in a UFO, and Graham Chapman finds humanity in the eye of a storm of brilliant absurdities. He also shows his penis. Thank George Harrison, who funded the film after EMI pulled its funding because of the script’s controversial depiction of a guy a bunch of dopes think is a messiah. Chickens!

Why Today?: On this day in 1943, George Harrison is born.

Review: ‘George Harrison: Living in the Material World’

Early in George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Ringo Starr says, “George Had two incredible separate personalities. He had the love, bag of beads personality and the bag of anger.” This observation functions as a sort of low-key thesis statement for George Harrison: Living in the Material World; low-key, because director Martin Scorsese does not spend a lot of time dwelling on the dark side of the quiet Beatle. But because of George’s spiritual persona, the fact that he had some drug problems, was a bit of a womanizer, and had a tart tongue to rival Lennon’s might take some less-informed fans back a step or two. Most of Living in the Material World portrays Harrison as a good man not nearly as dependent on the material world as “Taxman” or his reputation for being a bread head suggest. Above all else, George Harrison seemed to be a great pragmatist and perhaps the most logical proponent of spirituality ever to nab the spotlight. When he wasn’t Hare Krishna-ing on “My Sweet Lord”, he was damning the pope in “Awaiting on You All”, quoting a Swami who said, “It’s better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite,” and funding the religiously controversial Life of Brian (considering his similar experiences with The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese could no doubt relate). That good head on George’s shoulders is as worthy of our respect as the talent that created so much wonderful music.

Living in the Material World, however, is not overly concerned with music, barely acknowledging George’s work after All Things Must Pass. We still get extended discussions of his underrated songwriting and guitar playing and his all-too brief dalliance with the sitar, which highlights his lifelong friendship with Ravi Shankar sweetly. There is also a delightful sequence in which he gets a huge kick out of old footage of The Beatles performing “This Boy”. He seems particularly taken with the sight of himself as such a young man. Unlike Lennon, George didn’t seem to yearn for his youth. He wasn’t the type to cry, “When I was a boy, everything was right.” There were certainly bumps in the road along George Harrison’s journey, and none were worse than his 1999 stabbing, which wife Olivia recounts in chilling detail. But more than anything else, Living in the Material World presents an dauntless man who dealt with the hysteria of Beatlemania and everything that followed with grace and intelligence.