The Beatles’ apocalypse now

Despite appearances, the legendary band saw the 1960s’ heart of darkness and refused to lie about it.

For decades, the Beatles were, without question, the most famous people on earth since Charlie Chaplin. For many, they defined the 1960s themselves, with an early flowering of idealism eventually ending in disillusionment.

The Beatles are normally seen as avatars of the best of the ‘60s: Peace, love, joy, youthful energy, spiritual exploration, the enthusiastic embrace of life. To an extent, this was true. But something else took shape during the period roughly encompassing the albums Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and The Beatles (“The White Album”).

It has been said, including by John Lennon himself, that the Beatles invented very little, but were experts at sensing the anticipatory tremors of popular culture. They could then almost instantly amplify and convey them to a mass audience. From long hair to the drug culture, eastern mysticism, and back-to-basics rock n’ roll, this held true for a decade. 

In only one area, however, were the Beatles genuinely ahead of the curve: The question of how it was all going to end.

The truth is that almost all of the Beatles’ work during the epochal years of 1967 and 1968 is remarkably and in many ways unrelentingly dark. The atmosphere of their albums becomes more and more oppressive, dissonant, and apocalyptic. While moments of the old jolly optimism appear, the overall sense is of a world flying apart. Perhaps because they were at the cultural epicenter of the ‘60s, the Beatles seemed to sense that the upheavals of the moment were not going to end in peace and love. They were going to implode and leave scorched earth behind.

Pepper, Mystery Tour, and The White Album are a nightmarish landscape, laden with surreal and menacing imagery: Billy Shears is waiting to shear you in half. Mr. Kite will stun the world by playing with fire. The Fool on the Hill is going nowhere. The Magical Mystery Tour is coming to take you away, whether you like it or not. I Am the Walrus because I have become pre-verbally insane. The night in which the Blackbird sings is dead. Happiness is a Warm Gun. The overall aesthetic is one of clanking chains and strange rumblings from the basement. The albums sound as if they were all recorded in haunted houses where, in a secret room, lurked an unseen monster. They are, in other words, something like the truth.

II.

There are intimations of this gathering dusk on the album Revolver, such as the droning horror of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which seems to echo out of oblivion itself. But it emerged in full on Pepper. This is by far the Beatles’ most legendary album and perhaps the most legendary album in the history of rock n’ roll. It is, nonetheless, an oddity. Taken separately, none of its songs are notably outstanding, though they all contain remarkable moments. Taken as a whole, however, as it was meant to be taken, the album is of striking quality. 

The sonic brilliance of Pepper’s production cannot be gainsaid. It is a bizarre collage of sounds that, even today, strike one as remarkably free of cliche and—surprisingly for an album that was very much a product of a specific moment in time—undated. To a great extent, the album sounds like its cover. It is filled with innumerable faces and runes of its transient era that remain enthralling despite the passage of many decades.

Pepper is oddest of all, however, in that it is widely seen as the manifestation of a single year: The bizarre interregnum in traditional civilization known as 1967. It was seen then and is seen now as the album of the “Summer of Love,” a monument to the hippie ethos of peace and love. It is hedonistic but kind, altruistic in the most pious manner but without condemnation. It is the “high and beautiful wave” that, several years later, Hunter S. Thompson saw being turned back. 

The irony is that hidden within the flower-power ethos of Pepper is precisely that turning back. Pepper only sounds like the soundtrack of a perpetual summer. Listened to today, with full knowledge of what happened after the wave turned back, it is a dark prophecy; a doom-laden dirge that sounds increasingly sinister as the years go by. Pepper is a stupendously dark album masquerading as a celebration of psychedelic joy. Its legendary producer George Martin said more than he knew when he noted that its coda, which ends in a final catastrophic chord, was “a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world.”

The mysterious sense of the uncanny that pervades the album begins immediately, with the band’s introduction. It forces us to ask: What is this band that’s been playing for 20 years, since it is apparently not the Beatles? And who the hell is Billy Shears, that slightly menacing name that evokes a pair of very sharp scissors? From the beginning, Pepper is terribly strange. This cannot but unnerve the listener, who wonders suddenly who and where he is. In what world have the Beatles—the biggest band in history—been replaced with something else?

The album’s third track, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” is usually interpreted as a beautiful piece of psychedelia, evoking the wonders of the acid trip. Yet its “marmalade skies” and “kaleidoscope eyes” are images welling up out of a deranged mind. As the dream world passes by with growing density, one descends into a broken psyche. The song’s boat floats down a river that is more like the Styx than a shimmering flow.

Indeed, “Lucy” seems, in many ways, to presage what would only become apparent after the fact: LSD drove quite a few people insane. Many who took the trip down the river never came back. They remained in the world, to one extent or another, but the “newspaper taxis” took them away. They met the girl at the turnstile and whatever she told them could not be withstood. 

“Lucy” is followed a few tracks later by “Fixing a Hole,” one of the strangest tracks the Beatles ever recorded, with its bizarre chord progression and impenetrable lyrics that nonetheless obviously evoke a drug-induced stupor. The protagonist lets his mind go “where it will go.” Yet he is capable of nothing but “filling the cracks that ran through the door” and “painting the room in a colorful way.” Clearly, he is never going to leave this room again. Such narcissistic paralysis was, perhaps, the endgame of the ‘60s drug culture: decadence as complete burnout. There is nothing left of the psyche except the desire to “fix the hole,” but one lacks even the most elementary capacity or will to do so. One is left with nothing but absolute apathy.

“She’s Leaving Home” is not psychedelic in style, but it points to something that would not become clear until the 1970s: the plight of the runaways. Throughout the ‘60s, boys and girls “left home”—their conventional middle-class homes—to take part in the counterculture. Many of them ended up exploited, used up, and discarded by the unscrupulous. They fell into addiction, prostitution, and cults or emerged irrevocably damaged. “She is having fun,” sings Paul McCartney of the anonymous runaway. But how long will the fun last? Not very long, as it turned out. All that was left were the grieving parents who could not understand how it all happened, towards whom McCartney expresses remarkable compassion.

Madness well beyond psychedelia bursts forth in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Far from the serene insanity of “Lucy,” “Kite” is the soundtrack to a Vincent Price horror film directed by David Lynch. It burns like the “hogshead of real fire” that consumes the lords and ladies in an inferno of “men and horses, hoops and garters.” This is the anthem of the decadent last age of the empire before the Great War arrived and returned the world to ashen gray. The frenzied seesaw of what sounds like an organ but likely isn’t evokes something akin to a schizophrenic frenzy before it resolves into a gothic riff played by a mad scientist. After seeing this show, nothing will be the same.

“A Day in the Life” is, beyond doubt, the album’s masterpiece. In it, one is given a vision of stark urban and cultural apocalypse. It is based on the death of one of the leading aristocratic hangers-on of the Summer of Love, who “blew his mind out in a car” via a road accident. From the opening notes, we are reminded that John Lennon—when he wanted to—had one of the most beautiful voices in popular music. He used it always to either plaintive or haunting effect; in this case, perhaps both.

Lennon employs his instrument to lament the man who was first and foremost among the lights and the Technicolor rag trade of “Swinging London.” His dirge culminates in the “4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”—a vision of infinite bleakness. The only relief is the final chord, which is thankfully a bright major rather than a dark minor. It is also all but indistinguishable from the iMac’s startup sound, something the Apple technician responsible has admitted was deliberate. Steve Jobs’ Apple and the Beatles’ Apple, it seems, were both precursors of the Singularity.

III.

What was restrained and tightly controlled by Pepper’s intricate production is unleashed on Magical Mystery Tour. While it contains a few conventional pop songs like “Hello, Goodbye,” the album is, for the most part, a soundtrack to total insanity. 

The overall atmosphere is one of menace, beginning with the title track’s ominous threat that the “Mystery Tour” is “waiting to take you away.” Taken away, one presumes, by someone like the Merry Pranksters, who went about the United States in their psychedelic bus trying to turn the country on to LSD. This introduces a disturbing element of the unwilling, especially when one considers the fallout of the psychedelic craze.

As noted above, the acid phenomenon meant that millions of people turned their brains into science experiments, often with dubious results. Their bodies remained intact but their minds were “blown” more or less literally. To take away a man’s mind, of course, whether through acid or lobotomy, is one of the most horrific crimes imaginable.

There is something like a serene contemplation of this eventuality in McCartney’s ballad “Fool on the Hill.” Like “Fixing a Hole,” it seems to describe someone who has been more or less deprived of his mind, living purely in sensory experience. McCartney sings: “The fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.”

This bucolic image contains underlying echoes of threatening entropy. After all, the world will keep spinning until it doesn’t and the fool will not have the slightest idea why. He will, presumably, sit there forever simply looking at it. This is a familiar experience to anyone who has been stoned literally out of his mind.

“Fool on the Hill” is not the eeriest song on the album, however. George Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way,” while undoubtedly brilliant, feels as if it is sung by a serial killer slowly unwinding after a night’s work. The menacing vocals are matched by the backing track, which is an ominous drone that seems to be winding its way through the smog in search of a victim.

The overall theme is willed emptiness, with Harrison declaring in gothic tones, “There’s a fog upon LA and my friends have lost their way. ‘We’ll be over soon,’ they said. Now, they’ve lost themselves instead.” In this urban equivalent of “it was a dark and stormy night,” Harrison appears to reject even the possibility of connection amidst the decadence of the age.

He also seems to be predicting the ultimate fate of his own band, as his “friends” are likely the Beatles themselves. These friends have declared “We’ll be over soon,” as indeed, the Beatles were to be over fairly soon. What for fans was the apocalypse is, for Harrison, only the inevitable discovery at the end of the fog.

As for “I Am the Walrus,” there is little to be said beyond the obvious: It is an exercise in pure whirling dementia, a carnival of a mind splitting apart and ground into fragments. The centerpiece of the album, it seems to culminate and consummate the looming acid madness that had been threatening since Revolver. The song is Lennon’s greatest realization of the preverbal.

It is difficult to choose a single set of lyrics to illustrate this point, as all of them do so to one extent or another, such as:

Yellow-matter custard 

Dripping from a dead dog’s eye 

Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess 

Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl 

You let your knickers down

This verse alone collapses flesh, sex, gender, meat, death, and neologism into yellow-matter custard. They are decomposed into a quivering mass, humiliated and ripped to shreds. One witnesses language itself in the process of being destroyed. The only vaguely comprehensible phrase is the repeated “I’m cryin’,” indicating that, contrary to Summer of Love pretensions, this is not a happy prospect. “Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?” the song asks. A generation was eventually forced to answer “yes.”

“Walrus” is mated with a description of something like an aftermath. If “Strawberry Fields Forever” is about nothing else, it is about the temptations of absolute nihilism. “Let me take you down, cos I’m going to Strawberry Fields,” it moans. “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” In whatever ashen landscape or gray cemetery Strawberry Fields may exist, nothing means anything. Pace Nietzsche, the revolution has ended not with the transvaluation but the total annihilation of all values. The result is a kind of sacred apathy, in which no one cares and no one cares that they don’t care:

Living is easy with eyes closed 

Misunderstanding all you see 

It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out 

It doesn’t matter much to me

This may be the endgame of almost all revolutions: A total indifference to the end of the world. Once all things are finished and living is easy, with the only price being closed eyes, one cannot be someone, but it doesn’t matter.

Along with “Blue Jay Way,” McCartney’s “Baby You’re a Rich Man” indicates that it was starting not to matter to the Beatles themselves. The song is, in many ways, an expression of self-contempt. It asks sarcastically, “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” Of course, in the ‘60s, the Beatles were the beautiful people—perhaps the most beautiful people. Perhaps they were beginning to sense that they were not so beautiful anymore and, thanks to the passage of time, would never be beautiful again.

IV.

The White Album remains the Beatles’ most divisive album. Many consider it their finest work while others deride it as bloated and incoherent. No doubt, the album reveals a band that has been distended, as each member heads off in their own direction. This fractures any sense of an overall “sound” or unified aesthetic.

As a result, the White Album is less coherently apocalyptic than its two predecessors. The album was released in the hellish upheaval year of 1968, which in many ways defined the shattering of Western civilization into preservationists and advocates of disestablishment, but it does not entirely reflect the crushing impact of events.

McCartney’s songs, for example, are oft-whimsical, delving into the English music hall song (“Honey Pie”), satire (“Back in the USSR”), and wistful folk (“Mother Nature’s Son”).  Harrison contributes “Long, Long, Long,” a song of beautiful atmosphere and great tenderness, made unforgettable by Ringo Starr’s echoing drums. Starr himself manages a charming country music pastiche (“Don’t Pass Me By”).

Nonetheless, taken as a whole, the overall sense of the album is tense and fraught, seeming to be defined by a pervasive anxiety. This is enhanced by the contradictory and paradoxical melange of styles and sounds. They seem to come from artists now wholly disconnected from each other, floating in the ether as the radio signals come in from the great beyond. The Beatles don’t know who they are anymore.

This is mainly due to John Lennon’s contributions, upon which the album’s claims to darkness rest. At the time, Lennon had descended into a mutually abusive codependent relationship with Yoko Ono, along with a serious heroin addiction that would haunt him on and off for the rest of his life. This makes his satanic ballads entirely understandable. Indeed, Lennon’s White Album songs are mostly hellacious in nature, with even the best of them evidencing a stark brutality that appears to be something like the essence of the age. “Revolution” may directly address (not particularly well) the specific political issues at hand and “Revolution 9” their dissonant intensity, but songs like “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” convey their fundamental chaos and violence.

“Glass Onion,” for example, is musically almost unbearably distorted, while its lyrics are monuments to narcissism. In effect, Lennon has nothing left to write about except himself and he doesn’t particularly like himself. He cites his work on Mystery Tour, declaring, “I told you about the walrus and me, man. You know that we’re as close as can be, man,” an image of fealty to a psychedelic monster.

He roars next: “Well here's another clue for you all. The walrus was Paul.” This reference to the popular conspiracy theory that Paul McCarney died in 1966 to be replaced by an imposter (conclusively disproved by Paul’s idiosyncratic bass playing) effectively teases and derides fans on the subject of death itself while implying that Paul and perhaps the Beatles as a whole are imposters. 

This sense of impending doom pervades even the ostensibly humorous “Bungalow Bill,” a parody of the imperialist “Colonel Blimp” archetype. The song’s chorus repeatedly asks: “Hey Bungalow Bill, what did you kill?” But Bill is targeting the Beatles themselves. Lennon asserts: “If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him,” a disturbingly prescient line considering Lennon’s eventual fate. A decade later, Bill would come for him.

Lennon’s White Album masterpiece, however, is “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” one of the greatest songs he ever wrote, both musically and lyrically. The words are largely autobiographical. They all but openly reveal Lennon’s heroin addiction with a dire statement of intention voiced in mantra-like tones: “I need a fix cos I’m going down. Down to the bits that I left uptown. I need a fix cos I’m going down.” It then seems to turn to the looming presence of Ono, with whom Lennon was obsessed but appears to have often loathed. He encapsulates her in the stabbing repetition of a “Mother Superior” who “jump the gun.”

In a tour de force, the song then becomes a doo-wop dirge, with the echoing and again prescient refrain “bang bang, shoot shoot.” Lennon sings with sinister charm: “When I hold you in my arms, and I feel my finger on your trigger, I know no one can do me no harm, because happiness is a warm gun.” He seems to evoke the eroticization of violence given birth by the ‘60s. It appeared in everything from films like Bonnie and Clyde to murderous happenings like Altamont. Eventually, it consumed the 1970s and finally Lennon himself.

“Yer Blues” and “I’m So Tired” evoke the intolerable disconnection that would soon become the social norm; a loneliness so absolute that it can only erupt in narcissistic violence. The former is a suicidal pastiche of the blues, with the refrain, “I’m lonely, gonna die.” The latter declares “My mind is on the blink” and “I can’t stop my brain … I’m going insane.” It then screams out, “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.” The times, it seems, are unbearable.

“Sexy Sadie,” by contrast, looks forward to the inevitable fallout. A brutal whack at the Beatles’ transient guru the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (whom Harrison never fully abandoned despite a sex scandal), the song describes a constant of the 1960s and indeed today: the fallen idol. An idol like the Beatles themselves had been. “You made a fool of everyone,” Lennon states, as indeed they all do, from the Maharishi to Oprah Winfrey. And whoever they are, they always take your money. Lennon confesses, “We gave her everything we owned just to sit at her table.” This, he implies, is how it’s all going to end: in fraud and profit. It is difficult not to conclude that he was right.

Harrison is not as completely enclosed in darkness as Lennon, but his songs are unquestionably on the evil side. “Savoy Truffle,” ostensibly about Eric Clapton’s sweet tooth, sounds more like a warning of the dangers of substance abuse. Harrison asserts: “You’ll have to have them all pulled out,” which cannot but evoke junkies’ tendency to lose their teeth. At the same time, “Piggies” is a song of pure loathing directed at the “straight” world. It is not a surprise that Charles Manson loved it.

The guitarist’s masterpiece, however, is obviously “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It is a very strange song, in that it should not work in any way given its often silly lyrics. Yet it works brilliantly, perhaps due to its propulsive minor key chord progression and Eric Clapton’s legendary shuddering guitar solo. It is, in some ways, an echo of “I’m So Tired,” with its blasted protagonist simply contemplating the floor. In “Gently Weeps,” however, he claims to see everything, which seems at best wishful thinking and at worst simply impossible.

Nonetheless, there is a stark warning deep in the lyrics, with the lamentation, “I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love. I don’t know how someone controlled you. They bought and sold you.” This commercialization and enslavement of everything was the great paranoid terror of the ‘60s counterculture, which its survivors believed came true with the advent of neoliberalism and globalization.

Even McCartney’s contributions are not entirely serene. Most famously, there is the shattering “Helter Skelter.” It is ostensibly about an amusement park ride but musically it is close to heavy metal and lyrically to a rape song—a rape at the end of the world. It howls, “Do you don’t you want me to make you?” and “I’m coming down fast so don’t let me break you.” The song’s ferocious aggression approaches murder, and it is again not surprising that Manson embraced it. Indeed, the monstrous guru adopted it as the slogan of the race war he hoped to unleash.

Even the quiet “Blackbird” contains intimations of horror, describing something like Poe’s Raven; a creature with “broken wings” that sings only “in the dead of night.” While the song ends in something like hope—with the defiant command “blackbird, fly”—the overall sense is brokenness. After all, no one knows if the blackbird will succeed in taking flight. Nonetheless, McCartney hints that, once the dust settles, things will get better. It is possible to reclaim something from the wreckage.

V.

The White Album is large enough to allow for more than darkness. Indeed, it is ironic that during the great moment of hope, optimism, and love of 1967, the Beatles were pointing out that it was all going to end badly. But after it ended badly, they began to contemplate the possibility of redemption.

In the “Get Back” sessions that became Let It Be, one begins to see a return to the fun of early rock n’ roll, despite the difficulties of the sessions themselves. Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down” hints at melancholy, but also implies the possibility that she won’t let him down. And it cannot be other than deeply moving to see the footage of the legendary rooftop concert, in which the Beatles reclaim themselves and become—for the last time—the greatest band in the world. 

Abbey Road is even more of a departure, with Harrison contributing the beautifully optimistic “Here Comes the Sun,” with its reassuring “it’s alright.” McCartney may proffer a jaunty tribute to a serial killer (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”) and Lennon a sinister hymn of sexual obsession (“I Want You”), but the overall tone of the album is generous and tender. Its final medley ends with a raucous series of guitar solos from Harrison, McCartney, and Lennon—a final moment of unity—and the studious but generous, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” It asserts that, in the end, after all this, the Beatles still believed in love.

Like the title of the track, however, it was “The End” for the Beatles themselves. Lennon had more or less already decided to bolt the band and there was no way to continue without him. The Beatles ended in lawsuits and bitter recriminations, some of which continue to this day, with McCartney and Ono continuing to maintain their cold detente. 

Nonetheless, one must grant the Beatles due credit: In the albums they produced during the epochal moment of 1967-1968, they were unrelentingly honest. They saw, consciously or unconsciously, how it was all going to end, and they told the truth about it. 

Their greatest talent may have been to grasp the spirit of the moment and broadcast it to the world, but they did not play to the crowd. Instead, they issued a stark warning. They gave voice to the demons at work among the angels. They even offered some remarkably prescient predictions of the aftermath.

And lest we forget, the aftermath of the ‘60s was flotsam. After it was all over, the flower children and in some ways society at large were left in bits and pieces. It is not fair to say that there was nothing left, but there is no doubt that a very great deal was broken. Among the broken were not only mores and ideals but also many people. It was to those people, perhaps, and their tragic humanity, that the Beatles ultimately dedicated their work. 

The human casualties of the ‘60s cultural revolution remain, in many ways, unsung. The ‘60s revolutionaries failed, but they succeeded in writing their own history to their own benefit. Today’s intellectual and cultural elite will admit to the idealism and the love. But they refuse to confess to the degradation, decadence, and hate. 

Yet the Beatles, despite being part of the cultural elite, were willing to do so, even before the entire price was paid. They did not lie to themselves and they did not lie to others. Such honesty on the part of popular artists is very rare indeed. In the end, it may be this unique and uniquely tragic band’s greatest accomplishment.