A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All: The Beatles as Agents of Carnival Paul R. Kohl With the resurgence of interest in the Beatles following the release of the Anthology volumes, has come a renewed focus on the ability of the band’s music to transcend time, space, and cultural boundaries. In reviewing their albums in its 1992 record guide, Rolling Stone referred to the Beatles as “the final, great consensus in popular music,” liked by everyone from children to Leonard Bernstein. Not liking them, the edi- tors concede, “is as perverse as not liking the sun” (DeCurtis 43). While the popularity of the Beatles may not be completely universal, their enduring reception over the passage of time has been remarkable. To offer myself as an example, the recent new Beatlemania has caused me to realize that the music of the Beatles has remained among my favorite cultural artifacts for nearly thirty years, never diminished in its ability to promote enjoyment. Little else can be said to have enjoyed that status for so long, for, as they say, we all soon grow out of the things of childhood. However, the fascination I felt when I first heard Magical Mystery Tour on a tiny cassette machine in 1968 still remains. The music of the Beatles has transcended the periods of my life from childhood to adolescence to the brink of middle age. I know I am not unique in this as many of my contemporaries have expressed similar feelings. Even more remarkably, my passion for the Beatles in my mid-thirties is matched by many of my students in their carly twenties. ‘What can explain the ability of the Beatles’ music to withstand the passage of time? One clue might be found in that notion of transcen- dence. The music of the Beatles, as I have stated, transcends time and space and personality. It is certainly not alone in this; all great art must82 Popular Music and Society The concept of carnival comes from the work of the Russian liter- ary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing in the first half of this century, in Rabelais and His World and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin explored the medieval world and its ritualized carnivals as positive spaces of cultural levelling. The medieval European carnival consisted of a specific space and time in society in which all outside notions of time and space were forgotten. For days, even weeks, the milieu of the carnival became all, and that world was severely different from the world left outside. Outside of carnival was a world of hierarchical struc- ture: kings, noblemen, and church officials held authority over the peas- ants and farmers of the land. Hierarchy demanded that forms of rever- ence, etiquette, even fear be present. Outside the carnival was a world where good and evil, sacred and profane, high and low, all held their usual place of order. But in carnival, according to Bakhtin, “The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary ... life are suspended . . .” (Problems 122-23). To put it in modern terms, in the midst of carnival virtually any- thing goes. Barriers are broken down between all juxtapositions. Social status, political status, sacred status, all become nonexistent. What is cre- ated is “a new mode of interrelationships between individuals” (Bakhtin, Problems 123). Barriers are broken down as well between performers and spectators. Everyone participates in carnival: “[I]ts participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life” (Bakhtin, Problems 122). The importance of this camivalistic life emerges in the images that revolve around the camival and their meanings. The leveled hierarchies of the carnival, where high and low are no longer distinct from each other, signal a response to life that is highly positive. Carnival was important because it was a retreat from the everyday world that we still find in today’s modern carnivals, fairs, and mardi gras. Here the low is exalted and the high is debased. A similar effect was achieved in the emerging popularity of rock and roll in the 1950s. As white teenagers responded positively to the rhythms of black music, a musical form that had been relegated to juke joints across the tracks soon fanned natianwide avnnenre challencing the antharity af an adnlt cacre-A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All 83 That the most prosperous civilization in the history of mankind should in the full- ness of its power ascribe its popular music to the influence of an oppressed African minority atrophying among the farmland of its poorest economic sector is at first blush improbable. And yet within ten years of Elvis’s legendary recording session at Sun Records rock had become the most popular music of America, and Britain as well, and the elderly bluesmen who had thought to live out their days in ragged obscurity suddenly found themselves objects of white veneration. (36) From its outset then, rock music was born in the spirit of equality, out of music first sounded in the dirt of rural America. Ten years later that music would truly challenge the established hierarchies of America. With a combination of talent and timing, the Beatles emerged in the 1960s poised to contribute perhaps more moments of carnivalesque frenzy than any other artists in rock music. One asks why and is flooded with responses that relate directly to the style, the music, and the attitude of the group itself. Bob Dylan offered one such explanation in 1964: They were doing things nobody else was doing. Their chords were . .. just out- rageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you're playing your own chords, you had to have other people playing with you. (qtd. in Ward, Stokes, and Tucker 266) Dylan’s remarks suggest an equality existing among the four members of the group that did not exist in the 1950s, when headlining artists like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly dominated. To an extent, Dylan was correct. The Beatles themselves were responsible for their popularity. But notions of time and space have to make their way into a consideration of their phenomenon. Greil Marcus Perhaps comes closest in suggesting that the Beatles were in fact one piece of dialogue in response to the social upheaval that was shaking both Britain and America at the time. Is it only a coincidence that the Beatles struck a fervor into the hearts of American teenagers only two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or was it, in fact, a signal, given by the country’s youth that the time of mouming was over and that the time for cultural change had come as well? The overwhelming accep- dame Af ten Destlce meme imdend en84 Popular Music and Society daily life is affected with such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act take place” (175). Putting aside what cultural changes the Beatles introduced to the world and concentrating instead on the camivalesque tradition they embodied, the images are many and well known. Some examples: 1. The euphoric reception afforded the group upon their first arrival in New York in 1964 and their subsequent appearance on The Ed Sul- livan Show. Greil Marcus’s college-days reminscence of the event gives some notion of the group’s ability to level a diverse culture: “I went down to a commons room where there was a TV set, expect- ing an argument from whoever was there about which channel to watch. Four hundred people sat transfixed as the Beatles sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and when the song was over the crowd exploded . . . What was going on? And where had all those people come from?” (174-75). 2. Though the Beatles were obviously worshipped, their fans did not treat them with the silent reverence normally followed outside car- nival. Early Beatles run-ins with female fans anxious to get a literal piece of their idols were more than prevalent, and Beatles concerts were marked by fan reaction so loud that the music couldn’t even be heard, making the audience as much performers as the Beatles themselves. 3. The Beatles were notorious for toppling established hierarchies. In one instance, at the 1963 Royal Variety Show, before an audience that included several members of the royal family, John Lennon instructed the commoners to clap their hands. Then addressing the royal box, he told them to “rattle your jewelry.” In another incident, after the members of the group had been named Members of the British Empire, a prestigious honor, Lennon later gave the award back in protest against, among other things, Britain’s support of American involvement in Vietnam. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono also protested against the war via several camivalistic sit-ins, bed- ins, and the like. A 3 The mag notorions hierarchical tonnling the sroun engaged in wasA Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All 85 popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me” (qtd. in Bron- son 201). Lennon’s remarks were unfortunately not taken with the good-natured spirit of carnival in the American South. Beatle records were banned and burned before Lennon publicly apologized. But who got the last laugh is questionable considering what happened to one station that sponsored a tecord-burning: “The morning after the Texas bonfire, KLUE’s transmis- sion tower was struck by lightning, damaging their equipment, rendering the news director unconscious and knocking the station off the air” (Bronson 201). Finally, the imagery of carnival that surrounded the Beatles culmi- nated in their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The carnival atmosphere began before the record was even released and per- meated the lyrics, music, and concept of the work itself. Expectations behind the record’s release were so great that radio stations were prohibited from playing any part of it prior to a specific hour. But once that moment had passed, “They played the record all night and all the next day, vying to see which station could play it the longest” (Marcus 176). The unprecedented response from all levels of society prompted critic Lester Bangs to write: “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgz. Pepper album was released. . . . For a brief while the irreparably frag- mented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young” (Marcus 176). The carnivalesque attitude of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band begins with the album’s concept, a deliberate debasing of the Beatles themselves by replacing them with the imaginary group of the title. Tired of their over-displayed image as four moptops, the members of the group envisioned a song-cycle played by an English vaudevillian music-hall group. The album opens to crowd applause, the band intro- duces itcelf and ite leader Rilly @heare and the cramival hecine a 486 Popular Music and Society hall to Indian monastery” (Ward, Stokes, and Tucker 370). The album almost seems to be modeled on Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s description of the 17th-century British carnival: “[T]he fair was struc- tured by the juxtaposition of the domestic and the bizarre, the local and the exotic” (39). The local is found in songs like “She’s Leaving Home,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and “Lovely Rita,” each one displaying a particular aspect of carnival. “She’s Leaving Home” deals with the hierarchical tumn- around of parents and child. A young woman leaves home to the dismay of her loving parents because of “something inside that was always denied for so many years.” That something is fun, “the one thing that money can’t buy.” The song ends with the young woman being reborn with “a man from the motor trade.” The hierarchy of age/youth is lev- eled once more in “When I’m Sixty-Four,” in which the youthful singer imagines life as a senior citizen. “Lovely Rita” celebrates the carnal pleasures of the carnival, as the singer lusts after Rita, a local meter maid whose uniform makes her “look a little like a military man.” The song ends in the sounds of simulated orgasm. The exotic is visited by the Beatles in “Within You, Without You,” a taga-type piece played on Indian instruments. The message of the song is one of carnivalesque equality: “And the time will come when you see we're all one/And life flows on within you and without you.” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is a description of an old English circus, many of its lyrics were taken by Lennon from an authentic 19th-century circus poster (Taylor 41). Much of the spirit of carnival that pervades Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band lies in the fact that much of it is derived from the bur- geoning drug culture of the time. As Paul McCartney has stated, “Mari- juana started to find its way into everything we did. It coloured our per- ception, and we started to realize there weren’t as many barriers as we'd thought” (Taylor 31). Despite Lennon’s protests to the contrary, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is commonly interpreted as a vision of an LSD trip. Likewise, the album’s concluding number, “A Day in the Life,” with its climactic lyric “I’d love to tum you on,” was seen as a celebra- tian of dmo nee. a previously taboo subiect that was nevertheless inte-A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All 87 Club Band best when he wrote: “After the apocalypse of Hitler and the apocalypse of the Bomb, there was here an exclamation of joy and what itis to be alive. ... They have decided to be generous to Lovely Rita, or to be generous to Sgt. Pepper himself, turn him from an authority figure to a figure of comic humor, a vaudeville turn” (qtd. in Taylor 41). Sgt. Pepper is in many ways the carnivalesque highpoint of the most camivalesque decade of this century, serving as the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, which saw a large segment of society tum away from traditional hierarchies. Musical festivals such as the Monterey International Pop Festival, Love-Ins, Be-Ins, and the October exorcism of the Pentagon, during which protestors attempted to levitate the Penta- gon with their minds, became physical embodiments of camival. Later in 1967 the Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” in a carnivalesque atmosphere on worldwide television. The influence they had predicted three years earlier now seemed complete. The Beatles’ greatest achievement may have been the leveling effect they had on popular culture. As the Rolling Stone Album Guide states, their music’s “ultimate end was the severing of the line between high art and popular entertainment” (DeCurtis 43). Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the culmination of that journey, gamering serious critical appraisal and praise, unlike any previous pop music album. The International Times wrote that “[mlusically it is highly sophisticated” (Taylor 40), and the classical music critic of The Times, who wrote a positive review of the album, has written that “it was in those days fairly unconventional to write about popular music. . . . I had one colleague who refused to believe that there was any musical value whatsoever in any piece of popular music.” He goes on to state that it seemed to encapsulate the spirit of 1967, the flower-power period and all that. And it still, when you hear it again, conjures up a period which has now gone, of course. And that is actually what music is about, isn’t it? You want a piece of music to encapsulate the period it was written in, and Sgt. Pepper does seem to do that. (Taylor 43) Finally, musicologist Wilfred Mellers agrees that the music of the Reatles hac withetarnd the tect -f tena x. a88 Popular Music and Society Carnival as a physical space does not last forever, and the latter years of the 1960s held that as true. Disillusionment with the hippie lifestyle, the 1969 tragedy at Altamont, and the Beatles’ own break-up contributed. But as long as the music lives, the timeless quality of carni- val lives on. The music of the Beatles has indeed proven to be timeless, and much of that music has a large element of comedy. As Bakhtin wrote, “Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s partici- pants.” He concludes, “Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, tri- umphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (Rabelais 11-12). One is reminded of the question posed to Ringo in the film A Hard Day's Night. Questioned as to whether he is a mod or a rocker, Ringo replies “I’m a mocker.” That carnivalesque attitude toward life has provided timeless music, allowing generations to enter a timeless space. Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s. Poetics Ed. C. Emerson. Min- neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. —. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. New York: Billboard, 1985. DeCurtis, Anthony, and James Henke, eds. Rolling Stone Album Guide. New York: Random House, 1992, Marcus, Greil. “The Beatles.” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Ed, J. Miller. New York: Random House, 1976. 172-81. Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. Taylor, Derek. Jt Was Twenty Years Ago Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Ward, Bd, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker. Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone pin gc. 4g FAS. Deena; Elen 1008