Now and Then

RIPOSTE

by RIP RENSE

Riposte

The Beatles' "Now and Then:"
time warp, or timely?
(Nov. 10, 2023)

                It’s like walking into the arena long after the concert ended, and seeing a last few bits of confetti suddenly shake loose from the rafters.
                Or perhaps, it’s more like visiting that arena fifty years after the concert, and finding some old confetti in a corner, behind some boxes.
                Then throwing it into the air.
                I mean, whoever thought there would be a new Beatles song in 2023?
                It’s like saying there is a new 1965 Mustang, a new Sean Connery James Bond movie, a new outfit modeled by Twiggy, a new episode of “Batman” with Adam West. In terms of surreal, this is up there with “I Am The Walrus.”
                Next thing you know, Ringo Starr will still be on the road with a band at age 83, Paul McCartney will tour Australia at 80, and there will be a new Rolling Stones album.
                Oh, wait. . .

A new single!

Sirs Ringo and Paul in 2023

                Once upon a time, the world, or so it seemed, waited for new Beatles songs the way dogs wait for walkies and kids wait for Christmas. What would the next single sound like? How could they top “Lady Madonna” or “All You Need is Love?” What? Paul is playing piano? What’s happened to John’s voice? What’s with George and the India stuff? Ringo is singing “Good Night?” I thought it was Paul!
                There was absolutely no predicting the style or substance of Beatles music---especially after 1965, when both started to drastically change. Songs now long blithely accepted as mega-classics, such as “Day Tripper” and “Yellow Submarine,” were shockers. Every single new tune was a stylistic and creative revelation; like a new species of Beatles. The anticipation and excitement? No more intense than sun spots. The mood, the joy, the interest, the surprise . .it’s simply impossible to convey to anyone from today’s culture, where (mostly commercially contrived/demographically calculated) music “streams” like raging for-profit rivers.
                But it was more than just the explosive invention of The Beatles that was at issue, as countless writers have noted over the decades. . .
                In the ‘60’s, the world was in genuine fear of nuclear war. Genuine fear. Soviet Union Premier Nikita Krushchev was on TV all the time, interrupting after-school cartoons in a propaganda commercial, yelling “We will bury you!” at the USA. Terrifying! Young men had to worry about being yanked out of college and sent to die or be maimed in Vietnam. Assassinations in the U.S. and abroad came to be frequent news. News itself was just one TV half-hour a day (per each of three networks), with local fare still in infancy; mighty newspapers still defined information and discourse. Telephones? They were were plugged into walls and dialed, took no pictures and had no “apps,” while mostly black-and-white TV sets boasted seven stations (or less). “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Bewitched” were long-running hits. Seat belts in cars were a new requirement, FM radio was still “experimental," and most people were (gasp) courteous (!). The country seemed to be disassembling under anti-Vietnam protests, the civil rights movement, the beat/Bohemian eco-ethos of hippies, the murder of Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the fear and loathing of Nixonian Republicans. There were three billion people in the world, for God’s sake---not eight billion, as there are today (220 million in the USA, as opposed to 330 million today.) Lines were short! You could move around. You could breathe.
                It is cliché to say that The Beatles became an unwitting antidote to all the chaos, death, fear; a from-outta-nowhere medicine for melancholy after the paralyzing assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Country Having Nervous Breakdown, meet John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Just hearing yeah yeah yeah after the oh, no of November 22, 1963 was a very big deal---let alone you know it’s gonna be all right during the tectonic tumult of 1968, what with the killings of Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and the riot that was the Democratic convention. In just eight years, the quartet seemed to evolve from exuberant, effervescent, fluffy, Marx-Brothers-ian boys into hirsute philosophers resembling nothing if not Aristotle, Leonardo, Swamis, even Christ. I mean, really folks, you had to be there.
                In short, in the ‘60s, a new Beatles song was an event.
                And so it is again.
                But is "Now and Then" a Beatles song, really? The old McCartney line about why it would be difficult for The Beatles to reunite---“you can’t reheat a souffle”---doesn’t apply, because some of the souffle ingredients don’t even exist anymore. How, after all, do you make a Beatles song with John Lennon, George Harrison, producer/arranger George Martin gone? Let alone McCartney’s voice sounding a bit creaky? Here’s how:
                You take the fourth Lennon homemade cassette recording given to “The Threetles” by Yoko Ono, “Now and Then,” in 1994. Yes, the song that the three worked on for just one day in 1995, adding try-out guitars and vocals and drums. The one they discarded because the original tape had a loud buzz on it, an echoey piano, and the sound of a TV set (some say) in the background. You settle for doing just two Lennon-written reunion songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” and have done with “Now and Then.” Until, that is, director Peter Jackson’s crew developed an artificial intelligence program winkingly dubbed MAL 9000, in tribute to The Beatles’ redoubtable assistant, Mal Evans (after “Hal 9000” in “2001: A Space Odyssey) in order to separate Beatles voices from other sounds while making the brilliant 2021 documentary, “Get Back.” And you use this breakthrough program to separate Lennon’s voice from everything else on that buzzy, cluttered mono 1977 home tape, then clean the vocal up and give it studio quality fidelity. A miracle, really.
                This is what happened. And lo and behold, the dormant old Beatles engine somehow sputtered to life, even with a couple cylinders missing and a clogged carburetor, for one last spin around the block. Jump-started entirely by McCartney, who---as the “Get Back” doc demonstrated---probably loved the group most of all. George’s acoustic and electric guitars of the 1995 session were intact, and duly added to the Lennon vocal. McCartney overdubbed a characteristically lyrical bass part, a piano, the "Because" harpsichord, and a Harrison-tribute slide guitar solo(!). Of course, he called up the only other available Beatle in this world, Sir Ringo Starr, for drumming duty---and to record background vocals together.
                Still, this gentle song of loss and longing really begged for the cake-icing that was a George Martin string arrangement. Voila! McCartney collaborated in writing one with Martin’s producer son, Giles, and one Ben Foster. At last, in a touch of characteristic Beatles whimsy, background vocals were brilliantly mixed into the proceedings, taken from “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and “Because.”
                The result:
                “It was incredibly touching to hear them working together,” said Sean Ono Lennon, “after all the years that Dad had been gone. It’s the last song my dad, Paul, George and Ringo got to make together. It’s like a time capsule and all feels very meant to be.”
                As for Harrison, who cancelled the original "Now and Then" sessions (and who also rejected the Lennon reunion song, "Grow Old With Me," later recorded by Ringo), Olivia Harrison said he would have “wholeheartedly” joined the proceedings because of the MAL 9000 technology. And speaking of heart:
                “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him (John) back in the room,” said Starr. “So it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”
                For the inevitable critics who will dismiss “Now and Then” because it is cobbled together from many sources and times and places, and that the group did not record it together, well, such was the case with many of the songs on the “white album" and "Abbey Road." Hardly disqualifying. Is it above criticism? No. The song would have been stronger had McCartney not excised Lennon’s original "I don't want to lose you" bridge simply because it contained one line of scat-singing (which actually sounded nice, or could have been replaced with a solo guitar lick.) And Paulie really shouldn’t have imitated Harrison’s slide guitar, when an actual Harrison solo could have been fashioned from George’s solo work, beginning with his Grammy-winning double-lead guitar instrumental, “Marwa Blues.” But as Lennon sang in “Dig a Pony,” you can imitate everyone you know. . .
               In the end, is “Now and Then” another brilliant, innovative “Strawberry Fields Forever?” Or something simpler, in the vein of “Julia” or “In My Life?” Certainly more the latter, as this is a fairly straightforward, plaintive ballad from a period where a reflective, semi-retired Lennon regularly dabbled with song ideas at home in the Dakota. The song was probably unfinished (Lennon’s songs often, if not usually, underwent many iterations before the final take), and seems more like two or three song ideas linked together. Yet they fit. And the chord changes are more of the subtle minor key ilk that Lennon was developing toward the end of his short life.
                What is it about? This, of course, is up to the listener. McCartney has noted that one of the last things, if not the very last thing, that Lennon said to him during a phone conversation was, “Think of me every now and then, my old friend.” So there is that private association for him. For Yoko Ono, though, there was a very specific importance to the song. She told me exclusively in 1995 that she gave “Now and Then” (she referred to it as “I Don’t Want to Lose You”) to the other three for “therapeutic reasons.”
              “I thought this was a song which would release people from their sorrow of losing John,” she told me. “By listening to the song, they will eventually be able to release their sorrow, and arrive at an understanding that, actually, John is not lost to them. People who loved John are growing with John---by carrying their memory of John in their hearts. Paul, George and Ringo lost a great friend as well. If they sung this song from their hearts it would have helped many people around the world who felt the same.”
               This last Beatles song, as McCartney has declared it to be, is entering a world almost as different from the ‘60’s as the 19^th century differed from the 20^th. Technology, led by computers and Internet, has destroyed and/or rearranged every bulwark aspect of the culture alive in the sixties, in terms of social and economic structure, and it has radically changed human behavior and sensibility. Narcissistic preening and banality define much so-called popular music; mayhem and ugliness infest movies and television; public discourse has become crude, reactionary. Something as elegant as a new Beatles song today seems not quite as out of place, alien, as a new novel by Steinbeck, a new poem by Dickinson, a new symphony by Brahms.
               And yet. . .assassinations then, assassinations now. Bellicose Russian leaders then, bellicose Russian leaders now. Chaos in our country then, chaos in our country now. Nuclear war threat then, nuclear war threat now. Is The Beatles' "Now and Then" really so out of place today?

The "Threetles" circa 1995, during the reunion sessions.