(Personal reflections inspired by Beatles songs)
Song: “Band on the Run”
Album: Band on the Run
Release Date: December 1973
My son Peter’s off-campus apartment had one solitary poster on the wall of the living room this past year: A blowup of the Beatles Abbey Road cover. Early this week, I tried to put this into proper perspective. Here’s one way to look at it: Seeing as that album cover was 50-years old last year when it adorned my son’s walls, it would have been comparable to me having a Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman album-as-poster on my dorm wall in the early 80s. If such a hypothetical were to have actually happened, it’s likely I would have faced a bit of ridicule from my peers. Not so with today’s youth. Having the cover of Abbey Road on your living room wall this day and age is pretty hip. Yes, the Beatles are still very much alive and well, thank you.
The Beatles remain super popular not only because of their music. Another big reason is that they were at the heart of a pop-culture revolution that still remains quite viable. I grew up in an era when there was quality and value in most anything you could purchase, from comic books to baseball cards, matchbox cars to monster models, cereal-box prizes to lunch boxes. Even the coins in your pocket had worth beyond face value (in comparison to the drab chemical composition of today’s coins).
Vinyl albums were certainly a fixture in pop culture too, which included the picture sleeves. I used to love thumbing through people’s collections, if only to spot some album cover that blew my mind, be it one I was already familiar with, or one that I’d never seen before. Most of the musicians had fun with all of this. Some of my favorite covers include Bob Dylan & the Band’s Basement Tapes, the Allman Brothers Eat a Peach (the title a bit on the morbid side, seeing as Duane Allman had died just prior to the making of the album after hitting a peach truck on his motorcycle), the Who’s Who’s Next, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and Neil Young’s On the Beach.
And then there were the Beatles, with some of the most famous album covers of all time. What follows are my top 5 Beatles-related picture sleeves, and some explanation of why:
#1: The Beatles: Abbey Road: There is so much to view here. It was the end of an era; the Beatles crossing Abbey Road in St John’s Wood, London, from the known (the four of them as a collective entity) to the unknown (their soon-to-be future as solo artists). All 4 of them have an aura about them. There’s a sense that they have reached the mountain top, and they indeed did, having just put one last-ditch concerted effort into a masterstroke of an album, this amid all the turmoil that surrounded them as the inevitable breakup loomed.
As many of my fellow Boomers know, there is a lot of fun to be had with this cover (which I had to bring to light for Peter and his roommates). The fun of it did nothing to squelch the rumors at the time of Paul McCartney’s death. In actuality it did everything to support those rumors. Afterall, is this not a funeral procession? We’ve got John Lennon, in the front, dressed quite dapper in an all-white suit, looking like a preacher. Behind him Ringo Starr, in a more standard black suit, he the lone representative of pallbearers. Next up, Paul McCartney, the corpse. Paul is walking out of step, smoking his last cigarette, and barefoot (which is how many cultures bury their dead). Bringing up the rear is George Harrison in jean jacket and slacks; the gravedigger. Behind the Beatles is a car with the license plane “LMW 28IF”: Paul McCartney had just recently married Linda Eastman, and the initials LMW were interpreted as “Linda McCartney Widow”. The remainder meant that he would have been28 years old IF he were still alive. An ambulance is there too to maybe suggest that it was McCartney who “blew his mind out in a car”. Freaky stuff, man!
No album cover is imitated more. Nancy and I attended a Beatles cover-band show on Hampton Beach several years ago, and after the show the band crossed Ocean Boulevard in single-file to take a stab at imitation themselves, as the crowd parted and took photos. Iconic.
#2 The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sure, it was the music that grabbed me most when my parents purchased this album in the early-mid 70s, but the cover art was not too far behind. First and foremost, there were all those characters to identify (and this in a time when there was no Google assistance). You could learn a lot about modern history by spending just one hour researching the life of each person depicted.
And then it was the Beatles themselves, both the early-day version of the band (I like to think Ringo was doctored up to look like Pete Townshend) and the then super-modern psychedelia version; the Fab Four in their eccentric wardrobe, holding brass and woodwind instruments. I remember asking Dad about the instrument in John Lennon’s hand. He told me it was the French Horn, and that it was one of the most difficult instruments to learn. I found this very intriguing. It asserted for me the Beatles mastery of their craft, because now wasn’t just about guitars and drums; it was about anything they could get their hands on!
#3 The Beatles: Revolver
A masterful artistic rendering of the Beatles, which would play out much later in equally masterful ways for both the Rolling Stones (the cover of Tattoo You) and the Who (the cover of Face Dances). The eyes are what stand out here, particularly George Harrison’s. The artist (Klaus Voorman) does an amazing job of tapping into the soul of each Beatle through those eyes. Voorman was an ideal choice to do cover art, having been a very close friend of the band since the heady Hamburg years (he would later play bass in John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band).
Many pop-culture writers point to Sgt Pepper as the album that unleashed a wave of classic 60s album covers, but it really started with Revolver. The album-cover also unleashed other artistic ventures including poster art for 60s and 70s concert events at places like Fillmore East (and West) and the Boston Tea Party. It was all creative, and unique, even classy. This fed into all those other elements of pop culture too (comics, etc.), already discussed.
#4 George Harrison: All Things Must Pass
Gnomes, and Beatle George looking as hippie as hippie could look. Please see Fab Foundations # 9 (“Liberated”) for further talking points about the cover.
#5 Paul McCartney and Wings: Band on the Run:
Listening to this album all week for the first time in decades, and looking at the cover, prompted the idea for this entry. I remember first looking at it back in the 70s and saying to myself “hey, is that James Coburn?” (my fandom of Colburn at the time was based primarily on his role in The Great Escape). Yes, it most certainly was, along with a number of other celebrity types, including, of course Paul and Linda McCartney.
The cover is great fun - depicting McCartney and friends depicted as prisoners caught in a spotlight during a jail break - but I also remember thinking way-back-when, where are all the band members, the rest of Wings? Turns out half the band up and quit just as Paul McCartney was pulling the album together (he would end up playing guitar, bass and drums on a number of tracks). But why celebrities? Why not family members or fans or studio assistants? Turns out there was a reason for this too.
I originally planned on putting “Let Me Roll It” on this week’s blog-entry pedestal, but the song did not grab me as strongly as it did all those years ago. Instead it was surprisingly the two big hits on the album that I enjoyed the most, (which are also the first two tracks): “Band on the Run”, and “Jet”, which was not at all the case when I first connected with the album several years after its release. The difference this time around was that I tapped more into the meaning of both songs.
“Band on the Run” sets the stage for the entire album. It’s essentially about how, the more famous you become, the bigger the target on your back. The Beatles certainly could attest to this in relation to drug busts, their albums being burned in southern bonfires, the Nixonian wire-tapping of the Lennon’s and the like. Here, Paul McCartney is pretty much asking the question, why? What negative vibes did we bring to the table? None! It was all positive, both in the music and the communal spirit. So why the backlash?
The lyrics in “Band on the Run” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjlvdcBAKdg ) that captured my imagination the most this week were:
“If I ever get out of here
Thought of giving it all away
To a registered charity
All I need is a pint a day”
There was no way I could relate to these lyrics as a kid. I had not experienced the responsibilities of adulthood yet, which include both the good (success) and the bad (materialism) that can come out of it. I can relate now.
As for “Jet”, I used to turn the radio dial to another channel whenever this song came on. But I enjoyed it this week. Am I getting soft in my old age? Maybe a little, but again, it comes down to understanding the meaning now. Several years ago, Paul McCartney finally admitted the song was about his Father-in-Law (who he anonymously refers to as “Jet” in an effort to throw off the scent). Despite all of McCartney’s success, he was very intimidated by Linda McCartney’s Dad when they met and was in a never-ending quest for his approval in the early years.
Here too, I zeroed in on specific lyrics, in this case “Ah Mater, want Jet to always love me”. Here is yet another hint as to Paul McCartney’s faith leanings, seeing as “Ah Mater” could easily be interpreted from the Latin term for Mother Mary (note to self: I must loop back to the song “Let It Be” for a faith-reflecting entry soon).
The Band on the Run cover says a lot about Paul McCartney’s personality. Of all the Beatles, McCartney had the most fun with his celebrity. This came through in many ways, and one of the most telling was in his efforts with album covers. It’s Beatle-Paul’s imagination that plays out for pretty much all the Beatles famous album covers, including the three hilted here in this entry: Revolver, Abbey Road, and Sgt Pepper (if this were a “top 6” it would have included the White Album, which also evolved through Paul, including the great folded poster tucked inside).
Enthusiasm of celebrity carried into Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles career too and even intensified. McCartney was the Beatle who embraced super-sized concert tours the most. He was the Beatle to reach across musical genera’s, connecting with other musical dignitaries in the worlds of jazz, big band, crooning, you name it. He was the Beatle who most embraced the world of filmmaking, in the process connecting with celebrity types in that realm too (although Ringo Starr did the same as an actor, as did John Lennon in his early years of fame).
I thought about this some during the past week, which got me thinking, in the group setting that was the Beatles, they all kind of balanced each other out with their personalities. No one personality became overpowering. But when each went off on his own, that individuality played out big time. This raised the question in my mind: Is it better to have the extreme of yourself squelched by working collectively with others, or is it better to take your individuality as far as it can go?
I think the former, but I’ll have to tap more into that thought at a later date. For now, all I really want to do is queue up Band on the Run one last time, stare at that album cover, and think to myself, “whatever happened to James Coburn anyways?”
- Pete
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