Beatles Bash

By Crispin Sartwell

Forty years since the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It seems only 39.

On Sullivan, they were a prodigy of cuteness, shaking their mop tops and playing well- scrubbed r&b. And in 1964, they had a lot going as a pop band: they played with momentum and focus and simplicity, even if the innocence seemed a trifle manufactured. (There are worse things to manufacture than innocence: an important lesson of the Super Bowl halftime show.) The Beatles were at least as good as the Dave Clark Five or Gerry and the Pacemakers.

But unlike the Dave Clark Five, they had to deal with the ecstatic adulation of millions of people, as if they had been arbitrarily selected and promoted to godhead. The American tour during which they fetched up on Sullivan was an unprecedented and incomprehensible festival of swoon. Rock 'n roll shifted from being a musical style to being a symbol of youth and the nucleus of all human desire.

It cannot have been easy to understand or live through the cyclone of attention, or to interpret it artistically. The response so far transcended its cause that it must have bewildered John, Paul George, and Ringo about who they were and what they were doing: the dance band as Beethoven and the Pope, Nietzsche and Sinatra all rolled into one, the mop-top as the most important moment in the history of culture.

They did what I suppose one would expect: they tried to become sufficiently important to merit their interpretation. Before long, the r&b had been replaced by surrealist poetry, sung over banks of orchestration. The best that could be said of the ideas was that they were sometimes amusing: "We are the eggmen. I am the Walrus. Googookachoo!"

By the time they reached "Sergeant Pepper" the style was deeply pseudo-profound. The melodies seemed to be derived from what their parents might have recognized as art - British dancehall songs of the nineteen forties - while the ideas started to be drawn from fashionable Indian gurus and Japanese conceptual artists.

Their audience thought they were sublime. They weren't. Perhaps even they recognized that, and in their late albums there are many "neo-classical" gestures: attempts to return to the simplicity of the early material.

At any rate, they dragged rock all too quickly into a baroque phase, a phase of pointless over-elaboration, self-indulgence, and decadence. If you want to hear the true legacy of the Beatles in rock history, start with David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": the most pointless tuneless claptrap ever visited on a deserving public.

The Beatles are directly responsible for "art rock": Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, people whose pretentiousness emerges from an attempt to understand themselves the way they understood the Beatles: artistes and virtuosi ready to re-interpret and re-make the world through the wonders of keyboard noodling.

The whole thing, putting it generously, was a mistake. There were, after all, other models of what rock could be and where it could go. The Rolling Stones stuck to and elaborated the blues and country roots of the music, and made hard, smart, original records. Hendrix and Joplin, actual geniuses, held dear the tradition and gave it new voice. Creedence Clearwater Revival understood the meaning of focus, economy, and soul.

The Beatles lost all of those things. But just as their ascension was fundamentally arbitrary, their influence, pernicious though it obviously was, was not really their fault. There's nothing a recording artist can do but go out and make the next record. If people insist on treating it as a cultic scripture, that doesn't mean it's not just a record. Many moods and movements have traversed the pop music world since 1964, some of them worse.

It's getting to be a long time ago.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives."