It was always about honesty. There was the honesty of the four mop top Beatles singing fab little songs which now sound like big little songs.
By listening to those early records, we discovered black artists like The Marvelettes, the Miracles, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and the art of writing commercial pop songs like Carole King and Gerry Goffin- and Lennon-McCartney.
They were sharing and we were absorbing.
There was the “We’re more popular than Jesus” moment, the trippy Beatles telling us to turn off our minds, relax and float downstream to, fairly recently, returning to the “Get Back” documentary that introduced and reintroduced to at least two generations, all the brutal honesty of the Let It Be Sessions.
Of course, this led them- and us- to the often mixed up honesty of when the Beatles made music separately and said what was on their minds and what they were going through.
It was all of this which many of us found to be curiouser and curiouser and led some of us down that rabbit hole with Alice and changed our lives forever without us even knowing it.
From those days “when we was fab” and 3-4 minute songs where we met “Sexy Sadie”, The Walrus, Rocky Raccoon, Eleanor Rigby, Polythene Pam, the Nowhere Man and others, we were learning about using our imagination and being creative so we could get to the bottom to get back to the top and not be afraid to be honest, learn to let it go and go where one hasn’t gone before.
From the ways of making things happen with such an honest innocence about everything going on around them, they were multi media and social media artists travelling through new ways of looking at things long before anyone even knew what any of this was. This includes Steve Jobs.
Because of them, I have now reached a point in my personal Savoy Truffle where there’s no time nor interest to work on anything that might be described as a “job” and be beholden to anyone.
Lower one’s creative standards and all pride goes out the window. And pride is never for sale.
Today, it’s about having the complete freedom of living in different hard days nights and able to go down to where nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about, because tomorrow never knows, and how, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
It’s about how your world doesn’t include those Blue Meanies or the ubiquitous Nowhere Man and knowing that there’s no need to carry the world on your shoulder.
It’s about embarking on a Magical Mystery Tour with no idea where you’re going, but how you’ll return to that long and winding road which always leads you home, no matter where home is and who’s waiting there for you.
