The Beatles’ first film, “A Hard Day’s Night”, gets the lion’s share of love when it comes to the Fab Four on the big screen. And why not? It arrived during the highwater mark of Beatlemania and gave it back to fans as the fully-formed global sensation it was: fresh, frantic, witty and full of promise for the grand new youth culture to come. Its B&W pseudo-documentary style, under the self-confident direction of American expat director Richard Lester, gave it a look that impressed more neutral viewers and critics alike (“The Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,” Andrew Sarris famously proclaimed in the Village Voice.) Insatiable demand promised that another Beatle movie would soon follow.
Almost exactly a year later, along came “Help!” The two most noticeable differences, of course, was the vivid color photography and the conceit of having the boys being on the business end of comic villainy in a light satire of the Bondian action-spy flicks then coming into vogue. The latter element is often held up as to why this entry will never match up to “Hard Day’s Night” and that’s fair enough. Lester, who “got” the Beatles and had a good working relationship with the four, was on board for the follow-up and was not keen to repeat himself. Also, after a couple of world tours where they found themselves sequestered in hotel rooms as protection against ever-increasing hordes of Beatlemaniac girls, the band were not eager to reprise scenes of being chased through train stations by roving packs of delirious teenagers. (In fact, for greater realism, Lester let some of these scenes happen on location instead of staging them, leaving the band unamused). In fact, the only “fans” we really see come right at the band’s first appearance (not counting the filmed title song) where the boys are seen entering a rowhouse by four adjacent doors and a pair of admiring middle-aged housewives wave at them, agreeing that “Adoration hasn’t gone to their heads one jot.”
When the Beatles enter the house (which is a large one-room communal apartment) a viewer first gets a sense of a new mod era taking hold. The monochrome “Hard Day’s Night” still has the look of gritty post-war England but this way-out bachelor pad is something altogether different. John has a recessed bed area, George has an indoor mini-lawn and employs a gardener who uses a set of false teeth for mowing, Ringo has a row of vending machines and Paul has a console organ that rises up from the basement—with comic books on the stand instead of sheet music. It’s in and around this place that the band’s adversaries, a bizarre religious sect with claims to a gaudy red gemstone ring worn by Ringo, first show up. This pan-Asiatic cult needs this particular piece of jewelry as part of their regular ritual of sacrificing humans. They are joined in the bad guy department by an inept mad scientist who knows of the ring’s mysterious powers and wants to use it to “dare I say it, rule the world.” The plotline that follows is sketchy and fairly ridiculous, mainly consisting of implausible and elaborate attempts to capture the Beatles humble drummer. All of these attempts fail with remarkable precision. But the threat does get the band out of the house and into scenic locations like Salisbury Plain, the Alps and the Bahamas—the latter two places also doubled as brief R&R trips for the overworked quartet.
Dick Lester and actress Eleanor Bron look back in this recent making-of clip.
Though the film still gets its share of nitpicking and lukewarm reviews, after a half century you have to wonder why. Much of “Help!” is pretty hilarious on its own terms. Sure, the over-busy action mechanics make it sometime feel (as Lennon suggested) that the Beatles were supporting players in their own film. But it’s a great group to be occasionally overshadowed by. The great Aussie actor Leo McKern plays cult leader Clang and the exotic but personable Eleanor Bron is also good as the cult’s turncoat femme fatale. Victor Spinetti, the put-upon TV producer in “Hard Day’s Night” returns as the mad scientist and is well-teamed with Lester regular Roy Kinnear as the bumbling assistant.
The seven new songs here show that the still-zany onscreen Beatles were showing more emotional depth in their writing as they eased into their rewarding middle period, a satisfying sweet spot between teenybopper rock and psychedelia. In the urgent title song, the formerly self-assured narrator sees that his “independence seems to vanish in the haze.” The romantic resignation of John’s folky “You Got to Hide Your Love Away” and the stately but somber pop of George’s “I Need You” betray this more mature songwriting trend. More upbeat is the Alpine setting for “Ticket to Ride” which utilized real footage of the group taking a ski lesson, while also placing a grand piano on a mountain ridge at sunset, one of many examples of Lester’s wry directorial style. These visual set pieces, often using reflected light and colored filters, have long been celebrated for paving the way for the modern music video. In a special-features interview for a recent DVD release, Lester says he was once sent a letter from the Music Television network (on a parchment scroll, no less) declaring that he was the father of MTV. The ever-clever Lester says he “immediately cabled back and demanded a blood test.”
Cinematographer David Watkins and others discussing the film’s look.
In the end, it’s the native wit of Lester and the Beatles (along with the music, of course) that is lasting takeaway from “Help!” The blend of the silly and subversive had already been honed by Lester in his previous work with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, which brought him to the attention of the band in the first place. The playful wordsmithing of screenwriter Charles Wood was also influential and a repeat viewing reveals certain naughty nuances we may not have noticed as kids. (When the baddies try to saw under Ringo’s drum kit during a recording session, the engineer asks, “Boys, are you buzzing?” John’s reply: “No thanks, I’ve got the car”). The “So this is the famous Beatles/So this is the famous Scotland Yard” routine with Patrick Cargill as the Inspector also shows the insurgent younger generation was not going to take authority at face value any longer. This may be saying a lot for a movie that ends with a chaotic melee on a beach that is barely worthy of the Keystone Cops, but what happened in later years bear it out. Lester would go on to make Sixties signpost films like “Petulia” and “How I Won the War” (the latter starring Lennon). And “Help’s” crowish humor, stream-of-consciousness and extravagant visual gags seem to lead the way to the success of the Monty Python TV series, which debuted four years later. George Harrison, who would later help finance the Python film “Life of Brian” thought of Python as a continuation of the Fab Four and the influence of both appear to be inexhaustible. And up against later Bond-parodies like the Austin Powers series, “Help!” will remain irresistibly shagedelic for many years to come.
(After nearly two years in exsistence, Reel and Rock has its first guest-written post! Joe S. Harrington is the author of “Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock ‘n’ Roll” [previously recommended in my “Books That Rock Pt. One” post] and was editor of the former Kapital Ink magazine. When I wrote a column on rock documentaries for KI, I was in the habit of sending edit-defying articles of a few thousand words each and now Joe has returned the favor. Visuals and captions by “Ed.” Enjoy!–Rick Ouellette)
What more could possibly be said about the Beatles? And for that matter, the Velvet Underground? The Beatles are like the “learner’s manual” of rock n’ roll—they covered every discernible style, and did it all first. The Velvets, on the other hand, represent the dark underbelly of rock, from whence emerged a Cause and a Way of Life. It’s just proof of something that’s been said a million times about the VU: their influence didn’t really take hold until years later. So even though they were contemporaries of the Beatles, what they were doing was so far ahead of its time that the influence of it wouldn’t be felt or years, or even decades. So while the Beatles were totally of the ‘60s, the Velvets transcended it, making them the “better” group, right? But maybe that’s because the influence of the Beatles is so profound and well-engrained that it doesn’t even need to be clarified—which is what I’ve been forced to reconsider, having read Ian McDonald’s epic Revolution in the Head, and hence actually listened to the Beatles, album-by-album, for the first time in decades.
This aural re-evaluation ultimately led me to “lend my ears” to that most sacred of sacred cows, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which has suffered so much overkill that genuine proponents like Rolling Stone, in their ultimate anti-hip measure, only rated it FOUR stars in the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1978. The point being, what was once considered “the greatest rock n’ roll album” of all time, in just a decade had come to be seen as sadly dated, a curio of a bygone era, and somehow quaint in its timeliness. At the same time, to demonstrate how much the critical consensus had changed since the ‘60s, in the same volume, The Velvet Underground & Nico pulled five stars. With the rise of punk—viewed by critics as the Velvets’ progeny—esteem for the VU had only risen and they were seen as innovators, whereas the Beatles, as adventurous as their mid-sixties music had been, now had their lot lumped with the bastions of “classic rock,” beloved by FM rock listeners, but considered passe by hipsters.
J & P, moments after learning the results of a Hipster Popularity Contest, where they went up against Alex Chilton and Chris Bell
In the ‘80s, as the post-modern mentality crept in, the Beatles, given their universal mainstream appeal, were short-changed in favor of not only the Beach Boys but far lesser groups like Big Star. But these things are cyclical—first Yoko Ono was acknowledged as kind of a godmother figure to both new wave and Riot Grrl, and then it was the Scorsese documentary about George Harrison, but eventually the Beatles came back into favor…but they’ve been “going in and out of style,” as they themselves said on Sgt. Pepper, for so long that, at this point, all such arguments are moot, because as the years go by the whole ERA gets more compressed—hence the Beatles have much more in common, in the long run, with, say, the Ramones or even Metallica than any of them have with Taylor Swift. At a certain point there came a time, especially as a barometer of the Zeitgeist, when music just didn’t matter anymore. But it can be argued that the Beatles—along with Dylan, the Stones and all the rest—ultimately represent the moment when music did begin to matter, and that’s why, ultimately, the Beatles and Velvet Underground have a lot more in common than critics and fans may have surmised back in rock’s golden age.
Make no mistake, the Beatles were not a boy-band, or a pop artifice—they had some of that in their music, but by the time they recorded, in 1962 (not counting a few odd recordings a year or so before as a backing band), they were a seasoned performing unit in a way that few groups who followed them could match, simply because the Beatles opened the floodgates for those groups. The Beatles not only had to prove themselves, they had to prove the worth and merits of the whole style of music—rock n’ roll—because their embrace of such was simply unprecedented. Therefore, by the time the other great groups of the ‘60s emerged—the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Velvets, the Byrds, the Doors, the Airplane, the Who, Zappa, etc.—they didn’t need to toil away playing the dingy bars of Hamburg (or its equivalents) for more than six months whereas the Beatles had been doing it for six years. Sure, there are arguments that those bands, given their relative youth and inexperience, caught up—and even surpassed—the Beatles in record time.
The Velvet Underground during their open enrollment period
That included the Velvets—but don’t think they weren’t hip to the Beatles: Lou Reed played a hollow-bodied Gretsch guitar like George Harrison and on the flexi disc that came with Index magazine in 1967, which featured a conversation recorded at Andy Warhol’s Factory just after the Velvets’ first album came out—and, consequently, Sgt. Pepper as well—one hears Nico mimicking “Good Morning, Good Morning”…not sarcastically either, but just because that’s what everybody was doing in the Summer of ’67, because the album was ever-present. In other words, even though the Velvets, who could loosely be considered “rivals” with the Beatles, had just put out their own LP, they couldn’t get out from under the shadows of Sgt. Pepper. After all, it was Number One for fifteen weeks—virtually the entire summer of ’67—and, other than Michael Jackson’s Thriller, how many other albums can you say that about?
Even as late as 1970, the Velvets’ Sterling Morrison gave an interview to Fusion magazine where he actually venerated Sgt. Pepper in favor of Frank Zappa’s parody of it, We’re Only In It for the Money: “Let me see him come out with something as good as Sgt. Pepper. What Zappa saw in Sgt. Pepper was something good which showed real perception and talent, and lacking these attributes himself, he decided to do something else, and make fun of it. Is there anything on We’re Only in It for the Money that even remotely compares to the original?” Given this evidence, it’s clear that it wasn’t the Beatles whom the Velvets considered rivals, but the California groups like the Mothers and Grateful Dead.
I’m more of a “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” guy, anyway.
In fact, as rock rolls on, it becomes clearer that perhaps the two most enduring bands of the entire rock n’ roll era are the Beatles and the Velvets. Don’t believe me? Just ask Robert Christgau, who proclaimed the VU “the number three band of the sixties” after, of course, the Beatles and James Brown & His Famous Flames. Now JB is sacrosanct, irrefutable…where would Gospel, Soul, Funk, Disco, Hip Hop and Rap be without the Godfather of Soul? But it’s not rock, it’s R&B, and therefore in a separate category. The Velvets, on the other hand, format-wise, are the same as the Beatles—guitar/bass/drums—but both groups dabbled with non-rock motifs: the Beatles with symphony orchestras and the Velvets with electric viola. And both had high-art aspirations, not the least of which was they employed actual artists to design their album covers, instead of leaving it to the record company. Therefore you could have the infamous Andy Warhol banana on the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico, and Klaus Voorman’s black-and-white collage adorning the Beatles’ Revolver, the album that predated Sgt. Pepper. By the time of Pepper, standards were being raised even higher by Michael Cooper’s elaborate cover design, and the fact the Beatles actually printed the lyrics on the back to assert that Lennon and McCartney warranted serious consideration as “composers.” And although almost no-one knew it at the time, and the Velvets didn’t print the lyrics on their album, a future generation of critics would assert much the same thing about Lou Reed.
Add to that the fact that both Sgt. Pepper and the Velvets’ first album were among the first rock LPs to be issued with a gatefold, extremely rare for rock albums at the time—the thought being the Powers That Be at the record companies didn’t want to waste the cardboard on mindless fodder. But the Beatles being the Beatles, and the Velvets with the Warhol connection, obviously warranted a higher standard from their respective labels (only Frank Zappa, who recorded for the same label as the Velvets—Verve, who’d previously specialized in jazz—was accorded the same dignity).
There were precedents for this kind of maturation in rock—not only Zappa but the Beach Boys of Pet Sounds (both cited by the Beatles as influences on Sgt. Pepper). But compared to the breakthroughs established by both the Beatles and Velvet Underground in 1967—even though they were worlds apart—such early innovators can be seen as merely stepping stones. And the Stones, although their early R&B-based work and even proto-psychedelic stuff can be seen as superb, didn’t really surpass the Beatles until the great string of albums beginning with Beggar’s Banquet and culminating with Exile on Main Street—by which time both the Beatles and Velvet Underground were no more.
Released within three months of one another in 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s and the Banana album represented the two social and sonic spheres of the sixties—the Beatles were light, optimistic, effervescent; the Velvets were dark, foreboding, luminescent. It’s hard to say which one had the most influence, but it’s obvious the Beatles’ influence was more immediate and the Velvets’ was more latent. What’s obvious, though, is that, taken together, they are the two most influential groups of their time—and hence any time, because, despite punk, it’s doubtful, at this point, in terms of rock music, the ‘60s is ever going to be surpassed.
1967 was the apex of that renaissance. Surely there will never be another year in which the possibilities of rock music seemed so limitless, before it became clouded by irony and pretention. Both the Velvets and the Beatles epitomized rock’s giant breakthrough as an art-form, and Sgt. Pepper and The Velvet Underground & Nico were both high water marks of the revolution—but whereas the Beatles used a more ornate style to reflect rock’s increasing maturity, the Velvets, in stark contrast, produced an almost primitive sound. Despite the stylistic differences, however, both groups shared similar concerns (which admittedly were in the air at the time). Themes of alienation, for instance, are reflected in both Pepper’s “She’s Leaving Home” and the Banana Album’s “All Tomorrow Parties.” Both albums are heavily drug-influenced, and while something like John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is nowhere near as blatant as Lou Reed’s “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” it probably turned more people onto acid than any similar song of the era (and John would have his own junk-song a couple years later in the form of “Cold Turkey’). That’s one of the things McDonald makes clear in his book—the Beatles greatest importance was as the Uber-messengers of not just rock, and psychedelia, but the avant-garde. And the Velvets of course benefited from this, being an “art band” and all.
Thanks, George, we’ll take it from here.
Noise was another integral element of the new, freer music, in both jazz and rock, and perhaps the first aspect of the Velvets to be fully grasped by future generations was this atonal quality. The Velvets were the first band, save perhaps the Who, to embrace the concept, even calling an early track “Noise.” And while the Beatles are more universally remembered for their melodic qualities, by 1968, when the whole world seemed to be in a state of chaotic dissonance, even the Beatles were pushing the sonic envelope with what could loosely be called “noise experiments”—including of course the infamous “Revolution 9” on the White Album, 8 minutes of audio mélange that, as McDonald acknowledged, became the most widely-disseminated “avant garde” document, in any art form, ever. As so often happened with the Beatles, they may not have come up with the idea, but their enormous popularity guaranteed that such concepts—ones first promulgated by the actual bastions of the avant-garde like Warhol and John Cage (and, for that matter, Yoko Ono)—would reach a much wider audience.
Speaking of noise, certainly John Lennon’s embrace of atonality in the later stages of the Beatles—from audio pastiches like “Revolution 9” and Two Virgins to the raunchy and dissonant guitar playing on tracks like “Cambridge 1969” on Life with the Lions and the live version of “Don’t Worry Kyoko” on Live Peace in Toronto—owe a lot more to the Velvets’ type of pure-noise exorcisms than the more sculpted textures of the Who and Jimi Hendrix.
While everyone was aware of the Beatles, there’s a good chance the Beatles were aware of the Velvet Underground as well. Mick and Keith already copped to the influence of the VU on “Stray Cat Blues,” and it’s a known fact that, in those days, Paul McCartney was an avid champion of the underground (sometimes even in the philanthropic sense, such as his support for the International Times or the Monterey Pop Festival). In the spring of ’67, when Andy Warhol was trying to bring Chelsea Girls to Europe, he and his entourage actually visited Paul McCartney at his home in London right around the time of Sgt. Pepper. There’s a video on YouTube, dating from ’67 or so, where Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s director, talks about how, at the time, Paul McCartney, like just about everyone else in those days, was experimenting with underground movies (which Morrissey refers to as “psychedelic”). There’s even the possibility that, right before he died, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, was thinking about managing the Velvets!
Says “factory interview” but took place in England–Ed.
According to Danny Fields in the book Uptight (pg 84): “I had given Brian the banana album and one night I was with Lou at Max’s and Brian came in briefly. He said he was on his way uptown. I went outside to his limousine with him and then I said, ‘wait a minute I have an idea.’ And ran back in and said to Lou, ‘This is your big chance to talk to Brian Epstein.’ He got in the car but there was like total silence because they were both too proud to say anything to each other. Finally Brian leaned over and said ‘Danny recommended this album to me and I took it to Mexico with my lover. It was the only album we had there. We rented a phonograph, but we couldn’t get any more albums, so we listened to it day and night on the beach in Acapulco. Consequently my memory of the whole week in paradise was your album.’”
Of course if Brian Epstein was listening to the Velvets’ first album there’s a pretty good chance the Beatles themselves had caught wind of it. Ironically, it was Brian’s death in 1967, just a couple months after Sgt. Pepper was released, that finally liberated the Beatles from their former teen-pop image…which is just another way of saying, with rock’s increasing maturity, the Beatles were no longer necessarily “leading” the movement, but increasingly were just one more hue in its ever-expanding palette. And it can be argued that, once that happened, it was inevitable that the Beatles—and hence the whole movement—would fragment. Which is why, in the ensuing years, the Velvets, who’d symbolized this individualistic, non-unifying quality from the beginning—cynicism, if you will—would be increasingly looked upon as being as important, if not more so, than the Beatles (a premise that would’ve seemed unthinkable in 1967). It should be noted also that Richard Hamilton, the artist who designed the blank cover for the White Album—undoubtedly the Beatles’ most experimental and musically-varied opus—actually appeared in Warhol’s film, Kiss, in 1964. In the ‘60s, the worlds of art, music, media and graphic design were all converging. The Beatles were at the forefront of it, but the point is, so was the Velvet Underground
And not everybody at the time favored the Beatles either—critic Richard Goldstein, who’s somewhat praise-worthy article in the Village Voice about the Velvets actually made the press blurbs reprinted on the sleeve of the banana album, famously panned Sgt. Pepper when it was released (making him, admittedly, the lone dissenter at the time). It’s clear that, in 1967, both Pepper and the VU & Nico were pointing the way towards the future; but there was no shortage of groundbreaking albums released that year, from the first albums by Cream, Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Traffic and the Doors to the Mothers’ Absolutely Free, Love’s Forever Changes, the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, After Bathing at Baxter’s by the Jefferson Airplane, the debuts of Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead, the 13th Floor Elevators’ Easter Everywhere, the Incredible String Band’s Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, the Who Sell Out, There Are But Four Small Faces, Younger than Yesterday by the Byrds, Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk and Nico’s own Chelsea Girls to name but a few. Changes were in the air—yes, of the “forever” variety—and while it’s tough to say whether ’67 was the “best” year that rock will ever know, it’s clear that it was the turning point. And if this is true, two albums clearly stand out as definitive: Sgt. Pepper and the Velvets’ first.
Those were the days
Despite other similarities between the two groups—such as the fact they were both managed by prominent older gay men and they both sacked their original drummers—the worlds of the Velvet Underground and the Beatles were still universes apart in 1967. And although, in post-modern terms, there’s a tendency to view the Velvets’ album as having even greater impact than Sgt. Pepper, in critics’ polls conducted over the years, both albums are almost always in the Top 20. For example, in the VH1 poll conducted in 2001, Pepper comes in at Number Nine, and the VU & Nico at Number Nineteen. In 2003, Rolling Stone placed Pepper at Number One of all time, with the Banana Album at Number Thirteen. The NME, on the other hand, in a more recent Top 500—in which the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead pulled number one—the Velvets’ debut was at Number Five and Sgt. Pepper’s was relegated to the 87th spot (although Revolver was Number Two). But that’s just another example of post-modern revisionism (which the Brits are champs at). For another more Anglo-centric view there was Paul Gambacinni’s groundbreaking 1977 Top 200 Albums, where Sgt. Pepper copped the Numero Uno spot, and the Velvets’ first album placed at Number 14. Ten years later, in the book’s revised edition, although Pepper still sat firmly at the top spot, the Velvets had risen to Number Seven.
More telling is a more recent poll by Rolling Stone supposedly entailing the 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time where they proclaim the first Velvets album “the most prophetic album ever made.” Which is somewhat closer to the truth—and goes back to Ian McDonald’s original premise that the Beatles were so much a product of their time—while at the same time DEFINING it–that it became almost impossible for them to transcend it (and not be judged totally within the context of it). Sgt. Pepper was such a cataclysmic event when it was released in the Summer of Love that it honestly had nowhere to go but down in terms of esteem in the ensuing decades. The Velvets, on the other hand, were so underground in their time that it took 25 years for their full impact to be assimilated. If the Beatles were the most influential band of the ‘60s, the VU were clearly the most influential band of the ‘80s—and that influence continued to grow up until a few years ago, with the Strokes being yet another band who took their cue from the Velvets, following in the tradition of the Modern Lovers, Feelies, Dream Syndicate, Sonic Youth, Gang of Four, Jesus & Mary Chain, you name it.
It really doesn’t have to be decided which one is “better” because ultimately it can’t be. But one thing remains clear—in the minds of music fans, 1967 will live forever, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Velvet Underground & Nico are two big reasons why.
This 4-minute clip is from the Beatles official YouTube channel, so the over/under as to when it will be taken down is 36 hours based on past Reel and Rock history.
The $1 VHS Film Festival continues with 1978’s misbegotten Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I first got interested in the film (I had only seen bits of it on TV) after a lengthy and absorbing look-back piece by Clark Collis in a 2001 issue of Mojo magazine (discussed below). At the time it was unavailable on home video and down to its last couple of prints. So I figured if I ever came across a used tape it would be priced at either fitty cents or $30, depending if the seller knew what he had. So I when I spotted it for a buck at a used record store, I did not feel hard done by. It has since been issued on DVD and is available on Amazon for $6.66, a perfect price point for that company, if you catch my drift.
At this late date, it doesn’t seem that the status of Robert Stigwood’s white-elephant film musical of the Beatle’s most famous album will ever change much. Sgt. Pepper the movie seems forever suspended between being a forgotten fiasco and a potential cult classic, with little momentum left to nudge the needle either way. The Mojo article tracked the utter hubris of impresario Stigwood and his top-drawer clients who were recruited to star in the film and sing most of the numbers: Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. In 1977 these were musical artists who were riding very high, the former with his blockbuster live LP Frampton Comes Alive and the latter with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
All involved apparently believed that Beatles’ generational game-changer (all of ten years old at that point) was already forgotten by younger kids and that their film version would replace it in the minds of future generations. Moreover, Frampton said at the time that his role would likely lead to his becoming a movie star on the level of a Robert DeNiro. Along with this unearned arrogance, this work also comes across as a by-product of a sort of collective cocaine psychosis that gripped certain sectors of the movie and recording industries during that era. It didn’t seem like anyone was straight enough to have a coherent vision about the final product, instead they just rode the Beatles’ military-style coattails right down into a ditch.
If you think these clothes are painful to look at, just try prancing around in them!
With its candy-colored costumes, overstuffed production numbers and fructose-encrusted goodies-vs.-baddies storyline, Sgt. Pepper is so icky-sweet that I felt a tummy ache coming on before the end of the first act. But once your eyes adjust to the gaudiness and your brain dials down to the film’s bottom-scraping sensibility (Mean Mr. Mustard is stealing the original Sgt. Pepper heart-shaped flugelhorn that ended World War One!) it’s not all bad. After all, you have a bumper crop of stellar Beatles tunes (mostly from Pepper and Abbey Road), many sung by a trio of brothers who, before their disco phase, were bona fide purveyors of 60s progressive pop. And the wacky visual effects are a guilty pleasure, even if they look like they were conceived by someone who was dosed with some of that bad brown acid left over from Woodstock.
Problem is, aside from the ongoing narration of Heartland mayor Mr. Kite (an amiable George Burns) it’s all music. Somewhere, a decision was made that the Brit and Aussie accents of the four stars made dialogue a no-go. That leaves them to otherwise mug and mime between singing parts and Charlie Chaplin these guys are not. Without any speaking lines, what plot there is gets cobbled together by creating scenes to fit the lyrics of disparate songs, a tricky task that the hapless director Michael Schultz is not often up to.
Tonight you did not swing successfully.
Watching Steve Martin applying his wild-crazy-guy shtick to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or Alice Cooper over-enunciate “Because” from inside a God bubble are one-and-done experiences. Obscure R&B singer Diane Steinberg does fine with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” But various songs by squeaky-clean newcomer Sandy Farina as Strawberry Fields, the girlfriend of Billy Shears (Frampton) fall completely flat—she croons “Here Comes the Sun” and her namesake tune to little effect. (The utter lack of romantic chemistry between her and Peter doesn’t help matters).
As soon as they let him out of the bubble, Alice headed back to the golf course.
Nowadays, the only songs from the soundtrack you’ll hear on the radio are Aerosmith’s “Come Together” and Earth Wind and Fire’s slinky funkification of “Got to Get You into My Life.” George Martin, the film’s musical director and only real connection to the Fab Four (unless you count Billy Preston), regretted afterwards that they didn’t take more chances with the material. They had the Bee Gees play it too safe, though there are some occasional treats, like Robin Gibb’s pensive “Oh! Darling.” But after our heroes have dispensed with a succession of silly-ass villains (whose brainwashing motto “We Hate Love, We Hate Joy, We Love Money” was later purchased by a Wall St. consortium) and we get to a “Sgt. Pepper” reprise finale featuring dozens of movie and music stars brought onto the Hollywood backlot, many filmgoers must have been wondering why they didn’t just stay home and play a few Beatle records instead.
By this time, it was too late to call the whole thing off.
The movie opened to a withering volley of contemptuous reviews (Paul Nelson in Rolling Stone: “a film upon which every major decision is wrong”) but did make back it’s $18 million production budget and then some, largely thanks to foreign distribution and impulse purchases of the soundtrack album. While Robert Stigwood did end up making a profit, the film’s pariah status with the press and US/UK audiences set him back as a producer until 1996’s Evita. Sgt. Pepper also effectively ended the “acting careers” of Frampton and the Gibb brothers, while poor Sandy Farina never ate lunch in that town again. A similar cinematic exercise, Julie Taymoor’s 2007 Across the Universe, may have had a more talented director and a more plausible look, but also suffered from an awkward literalism and left behind a trail of mixed reviews and red ink. Consider this as an object lesson to “leave well enough alone,” a favorite old adage of mine that seems to have fallen out of favor in modern times. Fact is, the Beatles’ music is so vivid and timeless that it carries its own inner-eye visual legacy in the minds of both baby boomers and many others in generations that followed. Just “Let it Be” already.
Have you heard about my book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey”? It’s an alternative history of rock ‘n’ roll, seen through the prism of non-fiction film, with over 170 titles reviewed. You can check out a 30-page excerpt at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
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The coolest-looking quartet ever, at the height of world domination
The Rutles, caught in the act of drinking tea, seen during their “Tragical History Tour”
Considering the Beatles overarching prominence in rock history, it’s a little odd that there isn’t currently available a standard-length documentary that captures their glory in any definitive sense. Perhaps this is understandable; maybe the story is just too big to be captured in one sitting. I cherish my copied-from-the-library tape of 1982’s The Compleat Beatles, a straightforward two-hour clips-and-commentary doc narrated by Malcolm McDowell. This thoughtful, soup-to-nuts approach makes for an impressive, single-volume encapsulation of the band’s legendary success in both artistic and commercial terms. Unfortunately, after its theatrical run and a successful release on videocassette it sort of dropped from view, remaining unreleased on DVD and relegated to spotty-quality ten-minute chunks on YouTube.
It could be said that 1995’s Beatles Anthology, a 3-part television special, supplanted the need for the less in-depth “Compleat”. The Anthology series does have a lot going for it, especially extensive interviews with the then three surviving Fabs. It also had a serious case of the recently discovered Ken Burns Syndrome, clocking in at 683 minutes. That may have been heaven on earth for Beatlemaniac bingers, but for the lean and mean younger generations (millions of whom have an instinctive inclination to love the band as we boomers did) this is about 583 minutes too much. Maybe some sort of updated variation on “The Compleat Beatles” will eventually see the light of day. It is important. John, Paul, George and Ringo are a shining example of creative striving and inspired collaboration. It’s also a sublime lesson in how to affect societal change using a light touch, and that being rebellious does not have to mean being revolting (yes, we’re pointing fingers at you, Mr. Beiber and Ms. Cyrus).
The Compleat Beatles–Now available on VHS from Amazon for only $41.95
It may be that 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night will end up being the best real-life record of their initial career peak, seeing that director Richard Lester smartly chose a pseudo-doc style that mirrored the Maysles Brothers’ What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA shot on the band’s epoch-making American visit just weeks before Lester’s cameras started rolling. (Almost exactly a half-century ago. See my previous post for details!) Of course, there were also documentary cameras running during the turmoil that pointed to the band’s break up in 1970. Yet if it weren’t for bootlegs and the InterWebs, little would be seen nowadays of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let it Be. McCartney and Starr show little inclination at this late date to re-air the group’s dirty laundry, although a lot of the worst of it was left on the cutting room floor. Despite the uneasy vibe and Yoko Ono’s divisive presence in Lennon’s corner of the soundstage, there are gratifying moments from the Jan. 1969 filming—an electric studio performance of the bittersweet John/Paul valedictory “Two of Us” and of course the oft-imitated rooftop concert, as London pedestrians crane their necks trying to get a last look at the world’s most famous rock band playing live.
With Compleat Beatles out of print, maybe the current front-runner as the best one-sitting Beatles film bio is—wait for it—The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. This 1978 satire began a few years before as a skit on a UK television show by Monty Python alum Eric Idle. When he hosted Saturday Night Live in ’76, he brought the clip (the gag where Idle as onsite narrator finds the camera van pulling away from him) to air on the show. Idle teamed with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and director Gary Weis (whose short films were a staple of the show’s early days) to virtually invent the rock mockumentary with their wickedly funny film about Dirk, Nasty, Stig and Barry—the alternate-universe moptops whose “legend will last a lunchtime.”
With Idle playing the hapless presenter (as well as the Paul-like Dirk) All You Need is Cash is just as much a spoof of the documentary form as it is of the Beatles. Often showing up at the wrong locale or getting nowhere with certain interviewees, he still manages to tell the entire tale of the Pre-Fab Four. Completing the Liverpool chapter after catching up with his van, he takes us to Hamburg, where the Rutles learn the ropes playing dodgy, red-light district nightclubs on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn (“the naughtiest street in the world”). That’s followed by segments on their great success in America (including their record-breaking concert at “Che Stadium”), their experimentations with tea (endless pots of it) that led to such way-out records as “Sgt. Rutter’s Darts Club Band” (“a millstone in pop history”) and onto their final works, “Shabby Road” and “Let it Rot” which was “released in 1970 as an album, a film and a lawsuit.”
Fun fact: The Rutles rooftop performance was so bad they got arrested.
As you can tell, the Rutles saga is chock full of that dry Flying Circus wit, livened by the sharp performance of Python sidekick Neil Innes as the Lennon-like Nasty. Innes, ex of the Bonzo Dog Band, composed the many spot-on song parodies, doppelgangers like “Ouch!” (Help!), “Piggy in the Middle” (I Am the Walrus) and “Doubleback Alley” (Penny Lane). It’s remarkable how the slightest sardonic twist can transform real-life musical legends into a band of incompetents. This does lead to some lapses in logic—could these goof-offs really sell out Che Stadium? But it’s the conspiratorial allowance to have a bit of fun with our cultural icons, and recognize the tendency to place them a little too high on a pedestal, that in the end shoots their stock value even higher.
And what of the band’s reaction? John apparently loved the Rutles and refused to return the preview tape he was given. One can imagine his secret delight at the film’s scenario of having Nasty hook up with destructo-artist Chastity, “a simple German girl whose father invented World War II.” Ringo reportedly loved the scenes set in the salad days, but not so much the parts that skewered the band’s messy dissolution. Paul’s reaction was pretty frosty but he may have come around when wife Linda became a Rutles fan. George of course was a big Monty Python supporter and even appears in the movie, playing a silver-haired reporter who interviews Michael Palin as an executive of Rutle Corp. (i.e. Apple) who assures us that everything is A-OK with the group’s finances even as thieves empty out the offices in the background. People with fond memories of the first incarnation of SNL will also enjoy the cameos by John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd.
The recent Blu-ray release The Rutles Anthology includes the decent 2005 sequel Can’t Buy Me Lunch. This 56-minute follow-up fleshes out the Rutles Apocrypha with outtakes from the first film and includes some amusing new bits like the ongoing routine where Eric Idle’s presenter faces competition from a microphone-stealing Jimmy Fallon. But as where “All You Need is Cash” featured droll testimonials from Mick Jagger and Paul Simon playing themselves, here we get the likes of Gary Shandling, Russell Brand and Tom Hanks rambling on witlessly (and redundantly) about how much the Rutles meant to them. It only serves to emphasize what the project was originally poking fun at. This mockumentary thing can be a tricky business
The review below taken From “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”
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The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit
Albert and David Maysles—1964/1991—83 minutes
It was only ten weeks after the assassination of President John Kennedy. With the pall of national tragedy still in the air that winter, the filmmaking team of Albert and David Maysles got a call from Granada Television in England saying a musical group named the Beatles were arriving in New York in a couple of hours and would they mind heading down and maybe getting some footage? Albert was a bit nonplussed but younger brother David was more hip to the current pop scene and sensed the opportunity. After negotiating a deal right there on the phone, the light-traveling duo were on their way to recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport, getting there just in time for the famous moment when John, Paul, George, and Ringo hesitated a moment at the top of the steps while leaving the plane, realizing that the hordes of people lining the balcony of the terminal were there for them and not some head of state as they first thought. And just like that the Maysles brothers found themselves in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s defining cultural moments. The First U.S. Visit is a 1991 re-edit of the original ’64 film (called “What’s Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A.”) that adds more music and excises some interview material. But both versions pull the viewer right into the middle of the tumultuous birth of 1960s youth culture. It also features the Beatles performing thirteen unedited songs, from both a Washington, D.C., concert and the epochal Ed Sullivan Show TV appearances.
Twisting by the pool in Miami Beach, 1964
The Beatles were poised for big things and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (their first widely distributed single in the U.S.) had hit #1 two weeks previous. Early segments show famed DJ Murray the K in his studio hyping them up but establishment media were often belittling in their opinions and their long-term prospects in America were uncertain. At the airport press conference they quickly charm the jaded New York press corps with their contagious high spirits and sharp wit, then are whisked off to Manhattan and to a rock ’n’ roll superstardom never to be equaled. Although a few hours before they had hardly heard of the Fab Four, the filmmakers found themselves squished into the back of a limo with the confident but still nonplussed band members. Arriving at the Plaza Hotel, we get the first dose of Beatlemania up close with fans pounding on the window, the boys dashing from the car to the lobby door, and the scenes of police struggling to keep back the hordes, all soon to become iconic images of the decade. Two nights later, on February 9, 1964, the band would make television history with 73 million people tuning in to Sullivan’s Sunday-night showcase. The Maysles brothers would tag along for the next five days with unfettered access and whether it’s the boys goofing around in hotel rooms, dancing at the Peppermint Lounge, or getting photographed in Central Park, the camera never seems more than a few feet away from the action.
When it’s time to head south for the D.C. concert, the whole entourage takes the train like it is no big deal and the band jovially mingles with the other passengers. The group here is shown at a giddy apex of fame just before becoming imprisoned by their own celebrity. And although the performances on Sullivan’s show seem as fresh and buoyant as ever, the gig at the old Washington Coliseum may be the musical highlight here. Playing from a makeshift stage in the middle of the arena, the group is surrounded by the deafening din of screaming girls but cut through the pandemonium with a manic energy unseen on the tube. “I Saw Her Standing There” rocks with an almost punkish jolt and Ringo gets a rare concert lead vocal during a likewise frenetic “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The sight of the four of them having to turn around their own amps and rotate the drum riser to play to a different part of the house couldn’t be quainter—roadies weren’t even invented yet!
The Beatles raise the roof on the Washington Coliseum, Feb. 11th, 1964
Ed Sullivan is waiting down in Miami Beach, ready to introduce these “fine youngsters” for the second of the three consecutive weeks on his show. Although the Maysles brothers’ time with the Beatles ended down there, also included is their return appearance (taped earlier) at the regular New York location for week three on Sullivan (with a farewell rave-up of “Twist and Shout” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) and a bit of their departure and triumphal airport reception back in London.
The filmmakers’ methods seem to point the way to one of rock’s most celebrated films, “A Hard Day’s Night”, which started filming a month after the group’s return. That movie’s director, Richard Lester, carefully crafted a pseudo-documentary feel and a few notable scenes, like the mob-besieged Beatles running to their catch their train before being eaten alive, were not staged but done spontaneously, a bit of cinematic verisimilitude not appreciated by the band. “What’s Happening!” (as it was still known) was a great feather in the cap for the Maysles brothers. With an eerie symmetry, these Johnny-on-the-spot filmmakers would close out the 1960s with “Gimme Shelter”, unwittingly filming the dark flip side of the scene the Beatles created while following a late 1969 tour by the Rolling Stones.
Reel and Rock 