The Beatles: Forever On Their Way to Capistrano

"I think their music could only appeal to adolescents and retarded adults." - Shirley Mair, Macleans Magazine, 1965




There was so much talent that you ignored the raw ambition. How else to explain our willful disregard of their psychotic work regime backed by matching haircuts and suits. The first drip-dry, bespoke boy band.

In (less than) three minute segments, infused with jangling guitars and timpani, Lennon and McCartney delivered truffle-weight paeans to teenage angst. For a brief time, they were the best in the world at it.

Forever winging through the great cosmic clouds

But then something happened. The great space-time tidal bores of fate, talent and time criss-crossed like never before. Drugged-out rock musicians became prominent and respected social icons. And the Beatles reigned from the electronic Olympus of sound reproduction.

But against all expectations, they just got better and better. They actually improved. ‘She Loves You’ was subsumed by the layered dream scape of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ belonged not only to a different band, but a different century, than ‘I Am the Walrus'.

Massive WTF.

The Beatles were embedded gypsies of the day-glo, patchouli-laden 1960s, so hyper-responsive to both their temporal and secular surroundings, that they could move swiftly, without footprints, from Los  Angeles to Rishikesh, from the dank bricks of the Cavern Club to the swirling valleys of the Himalayas.

The absolutely last group photo

By the time an entire generation became lost and despondent on the long and winding road to nowhere, the Beatles themselves had vanished just as fast as they had arrived, leaving few clues to their genius, never to fully reform (anticipating the extreme fragility of collective memory).

Long after their peers have been sealed up silent in tombs of black vinyl, the Beatles are still heard, disembodied melodies, riding the backs of swallows winging through cosmic clouds, forever on their way to San Juan Capistrano. 

It's the next best thing to be...

Gimme Shelter: Merry Clayton’s Scream of the Decade

What happened that night? The Valkyrie circled above black clouds, ready to break cover. 1969. The earth itself was unstable. Mick Jagger sounds defiant but scared -“See the fire is sweepin'/ Our very street today/ Burns like a red coal carpet/ Mad bull lost its way.” Mad bull?




Merry Clayton gives up the ghost

O Lord Gimme Shelter. The Stones sang of Apocalypse Right Now. The center could no longer hold. Every musician for himself – or herself. Even the harmonica has a death rattle. And singing backup was Merry Clayton. On her own among the most satanic of lyrics – “Rape, murder! / It's just a shot away/ It's just a shot away.”

She holds on tight for the first two shrieking invocations. But as she approaches for a final time, at three minutes into the song, something happens. Something no one, not even Merry, was prepared for or has been able to repeat in the same way — and never will. That’s the solitude of true magic.

Alone and abandoned, she takes war and rape and murder and poverty and riots and racism and blasts it all into a howling jet stream scream, mainlining out into darkness.

And her voice — that has held on for dear life until now — gives up the ghost. It's too much for one of us, let alone a nation, and the voice cracks on ‘murder’, and in doing so, releases an eternal, auditory bookend to that most confusing of times, an almost inhuman plea of frustration, that we must go beyond our flesh — but cannot. We just can't.We have limits.

Listen carefully at that moment and you can hear Jagger call out in shock – because he knows it can never get better – or worse – than this. And it never did.

We’re told “[Merry] suffered a miscarriage upon returning home, attributed by some sources to the strain involved in reaching the highest notes.1 “

Let’s hope instead that the scream was heard by a slumbering god, hidden in a celestial cave who awoke uncertain of himself, confused by a dream about beautiful dolls he'd made long ago that were now singing in their chains like the sea.

1‘Gimme Shelter’ Wikipedia