[Editor’s note: This piece contains one instance of profanity.]
Sure, the Beatles wrote some great songs. But that wasn’t why I listened so closely, trying to dilate my ear canals or grow finer cochlear hair to hone in on every sound.
It’s the way the particular elements in play blended together: Ringo, John and Paul, Georges Harrison and Martin, guests like Billy Preston, trying to find their places in the moment, dovetail their unavoidably idiosyncratic contributions into creating the best possible whole.
The instruments and electron(ic)s, the tape loops and the rooms. Guitars and drums, sitars, maracas, machines. These were the tools, the wire and wood and flesh, each voice, all parts of the physical (and spiritual?) reality in the present tense, which they could affect in some ways but not in others.
I don’t know how many versions they did of “I’ve Got a Feeling”. A few, such as a couple from one windy afternoon on a rooftop in 1969. Each is an attempt at the best employment of the tools at hand; each is variable, unique, the fluctuations of energy, the differing arrangements of microtones.
It was a good plan, “I’ve Got a Feeling”, and each take is effective, even the one ending prematurely with a John Lennon flub. (“I cocked it up trying to get loud,” he says. “Not bad, though.”)
You can play the song, get some friends together and make the chords, the riffs, sing the words and hoot, oh yeah, and hell, for all I know you can do it better (it’s all a matter of taste). But you’ll never sound quite like them, like that. You’ll never sound like that because they were so good at being them and there, so good at making tunes from what they had at hand. We’re better off trying to sound like us, better than trying to be the Beatles or London or the 1960s (even if we can learn lessons and imitate and copy the harmonies that resonate with us, jam them in our own compositions). Take your particular talents and tools and try to blend with (y)our environment — the people, the places and plants, the rooftops and ocean and air. Maybe in this or that ditty the most important notes for you are the ones you choose not to play. But something’s going to touch you, something’s going to move. And look — your name is in the liner notes. You’re on the album, like it or not. With all our strengths and shortcomings, this is the band, and this is the set-up. George Harrison couldn’t play like Eddie Van Halen. The recording tecnology was relatively primitive. You get creative and make do with what you got.
“I’m an artist,” Lennon once said, “and if you give me a tuba, I’ll bring you something out of it.” Living in a community is an art., partly planned, always improvisatory, more discordant than it needs to be because some some of us spend time thinking we can go solo. Guy was walking up Pine Avenue the other day, finished a granola bar, dropped the wrapper on the sidewalk. The song of Long Beach avoidably wobbled out of tune. It’s easy to play badly, but it’s easy to play a bit better.
I don’t believe that all you need is love (though I’ll damn well take it, maybe even give it). But please believe me, I’d hate to miss the train. All aboard. All together now. Community is plural, a group, an ensemble. You’re playing your part. How does it sound from your side of the stage?
(Maybe this is just a bunch of Long Beach hippie bullshit. Maybe not.)