The snorkmaiden press promised to take you on a magical mystery tour last week. Low and behold it doubles up as a saga of an actual MMT which took place last week as well: None other than the snorkmaiden press Christmas Party 2009. The time was 7pm, the place was Marylebone and the flavour was purple. The year, of course, was 1964; followed by 1973; followed by 1986; followed by 1999; followed by 2009. That’s right ladies and gents, take your soma, put on your best Sir Nobsalot accents and follow the white rabbit: Captain Jack is back.

To help you understand the premise go away and watch the shining. Then, to begin with, note the decor of the hallways in the hotel. Note the strange things that go on in some of the rooms. Bunny outfits et al. But most importantly note the ambiance and style of the party that Jack attends in the ballroom. Now you’re in it. So you have a bar to the right with a barman who makes 1920’s cocktails. You have a Tom Collins, you get your lady a Martini, she asks for it dirty and winks as she turns round and is swept onto some ritzy dancefloor only to be cut-in on 3 times before she is out of sight. This is New York in the 20s, the penthouse of some art deco block in Manhattan. It’s snowing, of course. A lady is smoking with a long refined cigarette holder held by long refined fingers. Another asks for a light. She has Cleopatra flicks at the edge of her eyes and a provocative look. You light it and she blows smoke in your face like it was the politest thing to do. Her head tilted back and high, her greased dark curls and her elongated neck like a print you used to see in your Grandmother’s dining room. Pale and rouge: Bernice with her bobbed hair, Margot Peters draped around some laughing dilettante, Rosemary Hoyt tiptoeing barefoot through the melee.

The hotel owner takes your arm and leads you past the jazz band. The young girl playing on the tenor sax glances up and you see a diamond on her finger. You enter the paneled hall, the carpet is deep like grass and you enter a room with faded brown rainbowed wallpaper. There is a large double bed with a girl lying on her back smoking. She has heavy eye make up and a short dress and reminds you of Edie Sedgewick. Bob Dylan is playing on an old radio that is actually more of a coffee table: Art deco furniture in a psychedelic boudoir. There is a large hole on the ceiling surrounded by mirrored tiles, you peer up and see the stars, right there in the middle of London you see the stars, from some middle England townhouse in the city the only view is up. You are in the 60s and the walk-through bathroom has a blue tiled jacuzzi and a golden art nouveau shower head like Midas’ rose. Through the bathroom and a mirrored wardrobe you brush through fir coats and broach the 70s through some secret door and emerge in sitting room; plastic white furniture, modern art, Modrian colour scheme. There are books and records and an original Bridget Riley on the wall. And you’ve done a loop and you’re back in the clinking hall with a Manhattan clouding your judgment and some slippery shoes and you’re dancing to jazz like it was boogie woogie. All the bright young things dance with their elegant smell of cloves and their air of superiority and gay celebrity.

Right there in December 2009 in an average London townhouse. This was the snorkmaiden press Christmas party. If you missed it this year try again next year when the theme is 1960s Paris and ironic decadence.

It all started with Glee. Every Wednesday, as soon as the show ended, I would hop onto iTunes and download every song they sang. And then I’d listen to them over and over and over again. No joke, I listened to “Somebody To Love” 27 times in one day.

And then The Sing Off premiered on Monday, taking my obsession with singing groups to a whole new level.

This 4 day competition brought the country’s best a cappella groups together to compete for a $100,000 record deal. I wasn’t sure about a show hosted by Nick Lache (let’s be honest – what does this guy really know about singing?), but I couldn’t deny my love for show choirs or Ben Folds (one of the judges) so I turned it on anyway.

All 8 groups were pretty talented (including the moms in the blazers), but there was one group in particular that blew me away.

Tuft’s own Beelzebubs.

I think I’m in love. (Yeah, I may or may not have cyber-stalked the sh*t out of them after the first episode….) These boys not only entertained (making a cappella look painfully cool), but they may have restored my faith in college men. They are adorable, they dress well (sigh, caridigans), they are humble, sweet, hilarious and, DAMN, those boys can sing. Did I mention how cute they are?

I can’t get enough of the Bubs. I’ve watched all of their YouTube videos, started to follow them on Twitter (in hopes that they’d follow us, see how awesome we are, and one or all of them would eventually propose marriage…), and even considered applying to a grad program at Tufts just to see them in the flesh.

What? Too much?

If you haven’t seen these guys in action yet, check out their very first performance on The Sing Off. Then tell me you aren’t smitten.

The show’s finale is on Monday night and it’s up to all of us to choose the winner. I’ve already voted for the Bubs (11 times…) but you should, too!

So last night Tufts Univeristy’s oldest a cappella group, the Beelzebubs, were on NBC’s new miniseries “The Sing-Off“. And we brought it. Seriously:

The best part, though, was that we came off exactly like I wanted Tufts to come off: zany, fun, and smart. Go ‘Bubs. Go Jumbos.

New in at Cinema Books: Rex Collections The Beatles on Television by Jeff Bench and Ray Tedman, $27.95 paper. Color picture book from their earliest days on British television in 1963, Thank Your Lucky Stars! Ready, Steady, Go to their controversial tv special Magical Mystery Tour. Publicity stills taken on the set and out on location.

Spend Day 10 in the company of John, ‘Dinners’, George, Ringo and Darrell as they run through a festive medley of some of their greatest hits, but with a special Christmassy twist…

Here’s a special treat for the sixth day of Advent Calendar-derived tomfoolery – a Solo Beatle Christmas song that hardly anyone’s ever heard. And, you may think after hearing it, deservedly so…

I was listening to The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour today which is a fantastic album and it got me thinking – pretty much every album that The Beatles released is different to their previous album. Throughout their career their musical influences evolved and so their own music evolved, the result being a set of really diverse albums which (especially to a relative newcomer to their music like me) takes you on a fantastic journey through time. I’m not a big fan of their early stuff but from Rubber Soul onwards they are simply amazing.

So here is what popped into my mind this morning – how many other bands can you think of who throughout their careers released albums that were each different to their predecessors? In other words whose music evolved as they matured resulting in a completely fresh sound which kept fans enthralled? I can only think of one other band (who are probably an even better example than The Beatles) and that is Led Zeppelin.

Most bands that I can think of have “a sound” which is successful and which they therefore stick with. For example I like Coldplay but any of their songs could come from any of their albums, you know exactly what to expect when they release a new album. I am a big fan of U2 and their sound did evolve hugely from Boy to Achtung Baby despite them all being successful but ever since then all their albums have all been pretty similar. Why is this? Is everyone scared of releasing something different? Do record companies insist that bands stick to a winning formula? Does nobody have any imagination any more?

Maybe I am wrong and there are loads of diverse bands out there but I don’t think so. What other bands can you think of who don’t stick to a tried and trusted formula?

Seeking to expand the scope of this blog (at the request of its creator), I present a review of the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band.”  For those unfamiliar, Rock Band is an extension of the Guitar Hero game, in that you try and play along with songs using a guitar, bass, drums and vocals.  There are varying degrees of difficulty for each song, both overall and with each individual component (for example, you can set the drums to “easy” on an overall “difficult” song, etc).

The Beatles version of Rock Band contains a wide variety of tracks to choose from, spanning their short but prolific career.  It has early stuff like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Twist and Shout,” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.”  It has well-known songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Ticket to Ride,” but also delves into the deeper album cuts like “I Me Mine,” “Within You Without You,” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”  It’s a well-rounded selection of tunes of varying degrees of difficulty to play, from the relative ease of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to the very tough “I Am the Walrus.”  Of course some people will be disappointed that their own personal favorite Beatles song isn’t on here, but there’s no way they could include their whole catalog.  I’m sure some sort of expansion pack with more songs will eventually be made available, or certainly you will be able to download (for a fee) other songs.

A cool aspect of the game is the numerous computer-generated background videos that accompany each song.  Some are depictions of the Fab Four recording in a studio, some feature their appearance at Shea Stadium in 1965, and some are imaginary representations based on the atmosphere of the song; “Here Comes the Sun,” for example, shows the band playing in a flowery meadow in the sunshine, and for “I Am the Walrus,” we see the group in their trippy animal mascot costumes from the “Magical Mystery Tour” film.

I enjoyed playing this game, partly because of the song selection and partly because of seeing John, Paul, George and Ringo represented digitally, playing their tunes.  It definitely takes practice to get good at the instruments, which is why I enjoyed the vocals better than anything else, but that’s just me.  Essentially, Rock Band is karaoke on steroids…in a fun way.

The Beatles: Rock Band gets 4 out of 5 stars.

photo: BMW

La Mini fête cette année son 50ème anniversaire avec une version contemporaine de la Mini Cooper S 1966 psychédélique de George Harrison. Cet exemplaire unique a été offert à Olivia Harrison, la veuve du Beatle décédé.

Ci-dessus, on voit à droite le modèle de 1966 et à gauche celui de 2009; ci-dessous, le modèle de 1966. À l’origine, cette dernière était noire et George Harrison l’avait fait peinturer à la mode de l’époque. Il l’avait reçue en cadeau de Brian Epstein, le gérant des Beatles, qui en avait donné une à chacun des membres du groupe. On peut voir celle de George dans le film ”Magical mystery tour”.

photo: (inconnu)

photo: (inconnu)

George Harrison est au volant de son auto.

Here’s the other half of the one-two punch I alluded to yesterday.

John Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is also rooted in nostalgia, though not as overtly as McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane.’ Strawberry Field is the name of a Salvation Army house near Lennon’s childhood home, but the song isn’t really an exploration of that period of his life.

What it is is one of the band’s very best songs.

This double-A-single really showcases the different strengths of Lennon and McCartney. ‘Penny Lane’ is a melodic masterpiece while ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is a dense, psychedelic mind frak. I don’t always prefer Lennon’s compositions but in this case he came up with one of my favorites.

It’s a triumph not just of songwriting but production. George Martin blended a couple of different versions of the song to reach this final mix, slowing one down and speeding one up and arriving at the dreamy sound we all know and love.

I’ve always been particularly impressed by Ringo’s drumming on this track. In high school, my friends and I would listen to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on headphones and marvel at that rumbling percussion.

And of course the final moments of the song feature one of the notorious “Paul is dead” clues that fans picked over back in the day… John mumbling the phrase “Cranberry sauce” and being misinterpreted as saying “I buried Paul.”

This weekend I’m highlighting one of the best one-two punches in music history, a pair of songs released on a “double-A-sided” single that are among the best The Beatles ever recorded.

Today’s track comes courtesy of Paul McCartney. ‘Penny Lane’ is his remembrance of a street in Liverpool, where he and John grew up. I don’t know if the fireman, banker, barber and nurse were actual people Paul encountered as a lad or inventions for this song, but he certainly paints a lovely picture.

For a seemingly innocent song, ‘Penny Lane’ contains a few off-color references (well, at least one, with room for interpretation on the others). “Finger pie” is British slang for teenage sexual fumbling, and you have to wonder about the fireman’s “clean machine” and the banker who never wears a mac in the pouring rain. Maybe I’m just over analyzing the latter two.

so yeah i promised i would tal about his real shit movie soon (NEXT TIME I PROMISE IT IS CALLED IMAGINARIUM OF DR PRANSUS) anyway today i just have a funny story and my TUBE VID O THA WEEK.

so yeah basically i was on the train and i was writing some new shit for my first album (CAOCAO ME IN THE EAR, coming out 2010!!), when I suddenly had this incredicool idea – RHYME ORANGE WITH SOMETHING!!!  obviously no one has rhymed orange with anything yet, so I thought if I AM THE FIRST TO DO THIS I WILL BE A HERO!!!

so i thought long and hard during the day and EVENTUALLY i realised that if I change the spelling of one word it WORKS!!!

I punch my cap in yo clockwork, I fuck yo nigga-ass-aunty
Then I come at you from behind like you Agent Orange
Pumping cum with my soldiers like Tommy and Remy’dorange

HOLY SHIT HOW goood does that wORK!!

man i hope you reda this, i been waitin to meet you soon.  i just finished hsc and i really wana go to same uni as you, wana meet soon?

anyway yeah I thought of that sick rhyme, and I KNEW BMG would love it, so i ran out into the train station to catch a train to the station, but forgot that i hadn;t pilled my pants up when i was in the bathroom SHIT THAT WAS EMBARASSING but no biggy only some old fag witches saw me and laughed.

anyway, VID O THA WEEK!!!! REMY’d check it out man, its pretty good, kinda like rap.

anyway hit ya back just to check truly yourz your biggest fan remy’d this is CAOCAO!

(also check back for my EXCLUIVE preview of EMnEM’s new ALBUM RELAPSE 2 nxt time!!!! plus my funnie review of Dr Pransus!!!)

A banda paulistana Beatles 4Ever apresenta, nos dias 20 e 21 de novembro,
sexta e sábado, a Maratona The Beatles Complete Works, no Teatro União
Cultural, em São Paulo, das 14 às 22 horas.

Nesta maratona de shows serão apresentadas todas as músicas gravadas,
oficialmente, pelos Beatles, em seqüência cronológica e precisa
dos 15 álbuns da discografia do quarteto de Liverpool. A cada hora,
o Beatles 4Ever executará um álbum, totalizando 16 horas de apresentação
(oito horas a cada dia), já que o Álbum Branco, de 1968, é duplo.

LEIA MAIS NOS SITES
:: SORTIMENTOS.COM >> http://www.sortimentos.net/?p=4051
:: GEBBEG >> http://gebbeg.com.br/?p=7255

.

For my very famous monthly Queen Anne/Magnolia NEWS column “From the Bluff” I am focusing on a new, local shop called Fabric Crush. What is more seductive than fabric? It is a perfect love story between beauty and utility, form and function. I could write about the joint in standard, informative article form but…I want to get more personal and so will hybrid the deal and write an informative column. Rather like the hybrid fabrics of unique weight that Fabric Crush carries that can be used for both upholstery, clothing and bags.

My mother taught me to use her Singer treadle sewing machine when I was five years old. My mother also made most of my clothes. She made really crazy stuff for being so conservative in most other ways! For instance I remember a couple of jumpers. One was of shiny, navy blue vinyl with matching, drawstring purse. She used marigold colored thread atop the navy and I wore this ensemble atop a marigold colored blouse and matching knee highs. Another jumper was out of faux lamb wool, tight curls of gray synthetic ‘hair’ all over the jumper. She also bought me a white denim outfit — jeans with matching jacket — where the fabric was printed to look like colorful paint spatters. I was so beautiful! Also, she bought Barbara and I matching bell bottom jeans that were of psychedelic colors and patterns, like something out of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour.

The funny part is that as I got older my mother was always shocked at my outfits such as the motorcycle jackets and high tops I wore to weddings, or the daily vintage 1940’s suits and velveteen dresses. I remember sewing pants that had different colored legs. At age 18 I made a leopard skin jumpsuit before faux leopard skin was IN (I got the most nasty hangover in that outfit; I had made it to wear to my friend Keith’s 21st birthday in Portland and I drank so many different genres of alcohol that I could not lift my head from the pillow the next day due to the crush and spin).

My outfits were at one time bizarre enough to get honked at by passing cars. I never owned a car until I got married in my mid-thirties so I walked all over town back then (and later bicycled). But I am just saying, there was a time in Seattle when odd outfits were not as ready-made and available in the stores.

Anyway, I always thought it ironic that my mother got upset at my clothing choices during my ‘teens and twenties (back when I cared enough to take time to look…something) when she is the one that started it.  

Now I am ashamed by how my mother is dressed (the ironies just pile up, don’t they?). She needs new pants desperately yet have I gone out to buy them? I hate shopping for my self let alone someone else. But I must. I can’t buy her pants online either because I need to measure waists since a Gloria Vanderbilt (isn’t that Anderson Cooper’s mother?) size 6 is the SAME as a Liz Sport 8.

What is a caregiver to do!?

Above is a sketch I made (and dolled up in Photoshop) with measurements of mom’s pants that I can take to the store. I mean, my poor mother is wearing torn, burgundy stained jeans…and it is too much for her at this point to actually take her and make her to try stuff on in the little waiting rooms.

God, please help me to be willing to shop so that my mother doesn’t resemble Oliver Twist!

The Beatles released George Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way” on the film Magical Mystery Tour and its accompanying album in 1967. Harrison wrote the song while living in a rented house on the street of the same name while waiting for Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor and other friends to arrive after getting lost in a dense fog.

Stuck in my head now.

There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.

No one you can save that can’t be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you (It’s easy)

1! 2!! 3!!! 4!!!! was replaced by a woozy “a-one, a-two, a-three, a-four!” and the bass that inspired The Jam’s best track kicks in. The Beatles had replaced the urgent intro to the faux live show of Please Please Me with the lazy faux ambience of their studio recording. Presence, the Holy Grail of recording since Edison in 1888, was to be replaced with artifice. Revolver, what goes around, was to come around again, this time at the bidding of the artisans.

“It was like letting the workmen take over the factory,” said McCartney about Revolver two years before May 68, five years before Lennon supported the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in and ten years before the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards alternative Corporate Plan. But before they could run their own factory they needed yet another Fifth Beatle, the golden-eared wunder-kid Geoff Emerick who, as a nineteen year old studio engineer was promoted to work on Revolver. A fan, young and imbued with the shape-shifting sixties spirit, Emerick was to set up Abbey Road for recording in ways that were forbidden by EMI, but demanded by the Beatles. He miked McCartney’s bass with a loudspeaker on Taxman and told the stuffy classical string players on Eleanor Rigby to play loud.

Despite their productivity tending to support McCartney’s industrial assertion, The Beatles in fact turned Abbey Road into an Art School not a factory. A musical research lab for their creativity, just before Arts Labs, from which David Bowie would emerge, gained popular currency, along with the mid-sixties fad for multi-media happenings and various forms of experimental art. McCartney befriended the emerging leading lights of London counter-culture, Hopkins, Miles, Dunbar, supported the Indica Gallery and it, engaging with various tropes of the English counter-culture. Lennon, of course, was ready to Howl on a Daily basis if he could throw a Spaniard in The Works. So let’s get inside The Beatles creativity like Vpmatt on the Beatles most “experimental” track.  

Heutagogy (Learning…With The Beatles Part 3)

Heutagogy can be seen as an “enabling capability” or, more fully, as the ability to play with form and create new ones. In the Open Context Model of Learning we argue that this is about epistemic cognition, the ability to understand how to create knowledge, through what Bill Ford calls “knowledge-sharing” rather than “knowledge hoarding”. We argue that this is most likely to happen once you understand the discipline you are engaging with, hit records for The Beatles, and have developed collaborative relationships to support and extend that understanding; several Fifth Beatles for John, Paul, George and Ringo, notably Brian Epstein and George Martin. So in the heutagogic phase of their learning, after Rubber Soul, The Beatles should, arguably, be at their most creative.

After Geography

As with Rubber Soul The Beatles took a brief break before Revolver and had allowed themselves to be influenced both by various avant-garde musical techniques, such as those pioneered by Stockhausen, and by the many breakthroughs and stylistic advances of their peers in 1965, especially the anthemic trilogy of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, The Who’s My Generation and Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, all huge advances in popular song. Even the competition worked as supportive, if challenging, collaborators.

Geoff Emerick’s desire to create original sounds, and his close-miking expertise, meant that their endless studio experiments, changing instruments, tape loops, slowing tapes down, varying playback speeds, playing instruments beyond their normal range, created the quirkily inventive Revolver. As an album it was a significant advance on Rubber Soul because now, thanks to Geoff Emerick, they were also playing the studio, as well as an even broader range of instruments. On Revolver they had that magic feeling that comes from a combination of musical collaboration, with George Martin, and an innovative recording collaboration with Geoff Emerick. Constrained by a four-track recording studio and with a deadline to meet, the working collective known as the Beatles would never be so productive, effective and purposeful.

They had moved beyond the pedagogic template of Merseybeat and by Rubber Soul were also the sum of their many influences and “Fifth Beatle” collaborators, broadening their palette with more reflective lyrics and demonstrating a wider range in both their songwriting and musicmaking. The Beatles creative reach was phenomenal but as Kenneth Womack indicates in Long and Winding Road, nostalgia became their main subject.

After the vicissitudes of the summer of 1966 it would hardly be surprising that they would become nostalgic. England were engaged in winning the football World Cup when Revolver came out and working class attentions were elsewhere. The Kinks dominated the singles chart and The Beatles rushed off on their final world tour, almost getting killed in the Philippines and the United States on more than one occasion. After the final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco George said “that’s it, I’m not a Beatle any more,” and they quit being live Beatles. Their new found studio skills were going to be crucial,  once they had convinced George Martin to support their new ambition of recording without touring. He didn’t get it at first.

Counter-Cultural Beatles

The Beatles had moved on once again and found new stimulation and new problems to address in the emerging counterculture. Unlike the more clearly politicised counterculture in the US, the counter-culture in the UK was critically more class-based and more concerned with subverting post-war social norms. We still had constitutional issues left unresolved since 1689 to deal with, and the impact of the 1944 Beveridge Report, and its creation of the meritocracy, had unleashed forces that challenged the rigid social landscape in Britain. Even whilst John and Paul were meeting for the first time at Woolton, Richard Hoggart, a sixties cultural critic par excellence, was writing in The Uses of Literacy that the eleven plus exam was useful in allowing through only those working class kids who deserved social elevation. In the sixties The Beatles would show that working class creativity was so rich, man, that we had no need of filtering out “oiks” like them before they entered mainstream society; not least because they were driving it. However in many ways Sgt Pepper represented their eleven plus exam and they were rewarded by being allowed to graduate into polite society and become patronised by the very classes that their actions were in the process of rendering redundant.

Richard Poirier also argues that there was “something centrally important about the Beatles” as a group and this is “their fascination with the invented aspects of everything around them.” He argues that they see the artifice in everything and so “they respond with a participatory tenderness and joy to styles and artefacts around them.” The Beatles brought a joyous sense of play to anything they had to deal with, and were ready to participate whole-heartedly and inventively. Interestingly Poirier roots this playfulness in their “constant subject, musical creation”. They can’t tour, they can’t play live, but things are changing and their default position is musical creativity. Hey Ho! Let’s Go…

The Beatles Year of Experimental Advances

The Dutch publication soundscapes analyses the creativity of the Beatles by creating a framework of their exploratory characteristics, measured against their baseline Merseybeat template and the analysis is intriguing. In “The rise and fall of the experimental style of the Beatles” Tuomas Eerola uses Gjerdingen’s model of the “normative life span” of style to analyse when The Beatles were at their most “experimental” compared to their baseline Merseybeat style.  You can check the criteria here.

The conclusions are fascinating as they are both song based, and unintentionally reflect the importance of the Andragogic phase of the Fifth Beatle. Effectively Eerola is saying that you can measure the Beatles heutagogic phase by the degree to which their musical creativity is not continuing the style demonstrated on Please Please Me and With (Meet) The Beatles. Ironically he only lists The Beatles Top Ten most experimental songs, and I intend to use these to analyse their heutagogic phase.

Table 3: The “prototypical” songs of the experimental period of the Beatles

What is immediately obvious is that these cover just two Beatles albums. Their classic “best” album Sgt Pepper and the mongrel Magical Mystery Tour; which partly explains why it has lasted as an album, as it also just edges Pepper for originality. The # column lists the number of original features, out of a possible 11, each song displays. Poirier argues that musical creation is their “constant subject” and Kenneth Womack that nostalgia is their primary aesthetic concern and they fuse strongly during this time; their first year as non-touring studio musicians. Set free by Emerick and Martin to push their musical boundaries creatively, they applied this innovative freedom to a “scouse” nostalgia, probably induced by the incredible distance they had travelled socially in less than four years. This intense process lasted just ten months, starting with Strawberry Fields (played with a Mellotron) and Penny Lane, almost as soon as they stopped touring. It ends with the Magical Mystery Tour, where they attempted recreating the charabanc seaside trips of their youth. And then it was 1968.

More significant to me from this is that their “experimental” period covers just under a year following Revolver, starting in November 1966 with Strawberry Fields Forever and ending in September 1967 with I Am The Walrus. Or put another away their heutagogic period ended when Brian Epstein died on August 27th 1967. As Paul McCartney said in the Brian Epstein Story  “If anyone was the Fifth Beatle it was Brian”. So The Beatles heutagogic creativity ended when their andragogic support network broke down.

Epstein died whilst they were away meditating with the Maharashi, wanting to move on from using drugs for inspiration, according to George and Paul. Arguably they were seeking yet another Fifth Beatle or “supportive collaborator”, as described last week, as they extended the range of their creativity; The Beatles were masters of co-creation. Unfortunately Epstein’s death turned out to be the first of many incisions to be made into the musical instrument known as the Beatles, as they slowly suffered death by a thousand greedy cuts. Not least as the bad deals they made on Epstein’s naïve advice slowly took their creative outputs away from them, stored in various Neverlands and introduced the Blue Meanie known as Klein.

I find this “experimental” analysis fascinating as The Beatles most creative period is bookended by Strawberry Fields and I Am The Walrus, the two tracks that have resonated most with me over the years. Eerola also points out that the most experimental tracks are amongst the best remembered and the most highly regarded of their work.

And In The End…

After Epstein died The Beatles never reached the same creative heights. Yet even in this decline, in which Magical Mystery Tour was explicitly seen as a failed experiment, they still extended their creative palette. However with new artists like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, amongst many, pushing the creative envelope, and all playing live, the Beatles slowly marginalised themselves musically, whilst retaining considerable social reach and musical influence.

The dalliance with the Maharishi eventually ended, although the time spent with him meditating in Rishikesh, away from the maddening crowd of fame, produced 30 new songs. Ironically the Beatles met at Harrison’s house in May 68 and produced a master tape of new songs for the White Album, a kind of Beatles Unplugged 21 years too early. Let It Be became their back to basics album, arguably anticipating the spirit of punk, and with their final album Abbey Road they demonstrated that they had mastered 8 track recording; George Martin finally got his wish to record a different, more operatic song form. Despite failing to transform British society they did change it and The Beatles went out in a creative burst with Abbey Road, in many ways their most iconic album in the 21st Century. And In the End… “there’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.”

The Learning You Take is equal to the Learning You Make

The sixties were the adolescence of post-war Britian and the Beatles were proxy teenagers for us all, growing up in public and subverting many of the class limitations we faced in the fifties. They created a post-modernist future in which they wanted to live, but never got there. In the end they split up and withoutour problem-solving gurus, we all gave up on making a land fit for the rest of us and settled for sex and drugs and rock n roll.  Marcuse was right we accepted being one-dimensional and accepted the repressive tolerance of the National Curriculum Society which gives us the Unchained Melody of a Simon Cowell-directed teenage movie for life. We broke down the wall after the war, and then Roger Waters built it up again. The record industry had too many trump cards and became the cultural industries which now exist to sell us “living the dream;” in a stretch limo, drinking prosecco, stuck on the autobahn of life. You always get what you want, but you just might find…

To paraphrase Larkin in Annus Mirabilis

Social discourse ended,

(Far too early for we),

Between the end of Sgt Pepper,

And Led Zeppelins first LP…

But 63 to 68 remains “An Index of Possibilities”

Tune In next week to see what happens After Heutagogy…

The Magical  Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away

Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles

There are many traditions that encourage the use of hallucinogens or mind altering practices to provoke a spiritual experience. Whether it’s taking a drug or deliberate starvation, it’s common to alter our reality to gain some new perspective.

In reality, there isn’t any need to trick our brains into experiencing the wonder of life. We just need to open our eyes and minds to the everyday miracles around us. Too often we get wrapped up in the day to day minutia of our lives that we completely miss the various opportunities given to us to experience all the amazing moments that bring us closer to our Creator.

I had an experience recently that was a near miss. I was hurriedly going into my office building, and if not for my daughter who was accompanying me, I would have completely missed one of those moments.

“Mom! Deer!”

I looked over in the yard, and there were three deer standing there, taking everything in. They were far enough back from the sidewalk that if I had been doing my usual head-down, clip-stepped trek into the office, I would have been completely oblivious to their presence.

We are given daily gifts in the form of memorable moments. They last but a minute or two, but they have the power to stay with us long after the moment is over. We have great opportunities to experience all of the amazing things this life has to offer. How many do we miss because we are so busy with the business of life that we forget to enjoy the experience of living?

All of life is a Magical Mystery Tour, and we can experience it without the aid of materials that alter our reality. There’s so much we’ll miss when we let other things get in the way. While those substances may provide a one-time powerful moment, it can cause us to take the everyday miracles for granted. The Universe has way of communicating with us if we’re willing to listen. Open yourself up to the wonder and magic that is your life. You may be surprised by what you find.

Check out this Sacramento Beatles-inspired kid’s park that has a Magical Mystery Tour for Halloween!   Cool stuff!