Don Draper meets the Beatles

As if further evidence was needed that John, Paul, George and Ringo were sent here by a higher civilization to move modern culture forward, Revolver was released sixty years ago this week (August 5, actually). Their seventh studio album, covering a range of musical styles, was a trailblazer, earning praise ever since.

For a 2012 episode of Mad Men, its producers paid $250,000 for the rights to Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track on Revolver.

Throughout its run, Mad Men always made smart choices about its use of music, always period accurate and with a lyric that underscored plot or character development. Satisfaction, You Only Live Twice and I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing come to mind.

Here, Tomorrow Never Knows with its prescient title, serves as metaphor for Don Draper’s puzzled efforts to understand youth culture and for the episode’s chaotic final scenes of work colleagues smoking pot in the office afterhours, and others trying to grapple with the usual suburban sex shenanigans.

Draper’s younger wife Megan has bought the new Beatles album and tells Don, “Start here,” indicating Tomorrow Never Knows.

No.

You don’t read Moby Dick backwards or watch Citizen Kane starting with the last scene.

Don tries, but he seemingly has no patience for Tomorrow Never Knows. He turns it off before it ends. It’s noisy, distracting, like something turned inside out and upside down.

But what if he plays Revolver the right way starting with the opening track?

Well, for one thing it would have made for a boring episode.

Opening track Taxman reminds Don that he’s now making major money as agency partner and he’s overdue to check in with his accountant.

Here, There and Everywhere is nice, close enough in his mind to Patti Page’s Old Cape Cod, the standard he’s always had a soft spot for. He notes to himself that it could work as background music for a TWA commercial.

He knows Yellow Submarine from his kids singing the chorus endlessly when he had them over last weekend. Doesn’t like it.

Don refills his tumbler of scotch and flips the record over.

He likes Good Day Sunshine, it’s bouncy, happy, a throwback to the musical movies he watched as a kid when the audience followed the bouncing ball and sang along.

For No One is an emotional black hole, dredging up memories of first wife Betty, the “you stay home, she goes out” break-up song about “a love that should have lasted years.” Time to top off that tumbler.

Got To Get You into My Life is ad territory again. Punchy, with a memorable chorus that could work for any brand.

As Tomorrow Never Knows comes on, the booze is making a statement. He gets up and turns the record player off before the song is finished. He finds the bedroom and switches on the portable television. It’s August, nothing but reruns and a Mets game.

Turning off his mind, he relaxes and floats downstream.

Two-minute warning

Listening to a playlist of songs that last no more than 120 seconds was a terrain marked by rockabilly, surf instrumentals, British Invasion hits, the Elvises Presley and Costello, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ Stay, the shortest song (1:34!) to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the punk novelty of speeding up old songs (U.K. Subs’ 1:41 version of She’s Not There).

Not surprisingly, Lennon-McCartney and Brian Wilson are good at this type of minimalism (And Your Bird Can Sing, For No One, I’ll Cry Instead, Dance, Dance, Dance, most of the Wild Honey album). Buddy Holly too (Rave On, Not Fade Away).

There are short stories like the Coasters’ Love Potion Number Nine and Willie Nelson’s The Troublemaker. The Stones’ I Wanna Be Your Man (1:43), the Boxtops’ The Letter (1:58), the Clash’s Career Opportunities (1:53) and the Byrds’ Girl With No Name (1:56). Each over in a couple of hundred heartbeats.

Three other songs jumped out as well for their sudden timeliness.

The singer in Mushroom Cloud (1961, 1:57) isn’t losing sleep over school or because he’s bugged at his old man or that his girlfriend’s parents don’t approve. It’s the specter of nuclear annihilation and the powerlessness that comes with it: “We party, we laugh, and we pray again/And we play it cool and try not to think of the mess we're in.”

The lyrics, written by Boudleaux Bryant and sung by Sammy Salvo, fall opposite to the song’s poppy 50s standard format, complete with Ray Conniff-style backing vocals. Bryant, along with wife Felice, wrote Love Hurts and most of the Everly Brothers’ hits, including All I Have to Do Is Dream, Bird Dog, Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie. Salvo was a regionally well-known Alabama pop singer who later left show business to own a meat-supply business.

Held Up Without a Gun (1981, 1:21) by Bruce Springsteen and the B-side of Hungry Heart, was inspired by the 1979 oil crisis (or at least the first stanza is): “I was out driving, just taking it slow/Looked at my tank, it was reading low/Pulled in an Exxon station out on Highway One/Held up without a gun.”

Never minding the rest of the song (in this case the last 40 seconds), autobiographical lyrics about a “damn fool with a guitar” signing a bad management contract. Heard today it’s yet another reminder of the endless loop of economic realities we're trapped in. 

Shape of Things to Come (1968, 1:54) from the teen-exploitation flick Wild in the Streets always had an ominous feel, from the fascistic name of the fictious band (Max Frost and The Troopers) to its lyrics darkly promising the wrong kind of change ("There's a new sun/Risin' up angry in the sky").

The film’s plot is about a rewrite of the Constitution that lowers the age requirement for voting to 14, creating a youth bloc that gets Max Frost (Christopher Jones), a narcissistic rock star, elected president. Frost runs as a Republican.

It’s still a pretty cool song.

The Compleat Beatles

Rather than sit through the epic that is the 2025 version of The Beatles Anthology, I caught The Compleat Beatles (1982) on the internet recently.

There was a time when The Compleat Beatles was considered the go-to documentary about the band, with lots of archival footage and interviews with Liverpool and Hamburg insiders who knew them when, several current musicians and, the real coup, George Martin.

Once readily available on VHS, Paul McCartney saw it as unauthorized competitor to Anthology and acquired its rights, removing it from circulation (although at one time it was a staple in the VHS bargain bits in department stores). Today, it mostly exists in bootleg copies or on online video sites.

Here are a few random thoughts and observations.

Ringo’s aspiration of someday getting into hairdressing takes on a new meaning in light of Spinal Tap. “I fancied (owning) a string of ladies hairdresser salons,” he says in archival footage, then imagines a possible conversation with a matronly client: “Hello, would you like a cup of tea, ma’am?” a flashback to Nigel Tufnel talking about a future working in a chapeau shop: “Yes, what size do you wear? We don’t have that size.”

Cigarettes are the band’s constant companions. Does Anthology include footage of the boys smoking? Considering George’s fate, it wouldn’t be surprising if not.

When the Beatles play the Coliseum in Washington D.C., how does the makeshift drum riser not collapse? It’s barely secured and it shakes and rattles each time Ringo hits the skins.

George Martin speaks with some candor about “desperately” trying to keep Revolution 9 off the White Album and commenting on Paul’s “relentless professionalism,” a loaded phrase if there ever was one.

Martin also has this terrific quote: “I think that the great thing about the Beatles was that they were of their time, their timing was right. They didn’t choose it – someone chose it for them. But the timing was right, and they left their mark in history because of it.”

And possibly because he made himself available to the documentarians, the script at one point says Martin “continued to lead them into new territory.” Maybe, maybe not.

The closed caption option on my television spelled out Phil Spector as Phil Specter, which is defined as a ghost or something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence. Sounds about right.

Unless you had access to tenth-generation blurry bootleg tapes, The Compleat Beatles was the only place to view, snippets unfortunately, of the Hey Jude, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields Forever videos, among others. Trying to remember them in the early 1980s, years after they originally aired on television, was often like seeking to recall a dream.

There’s a directness to the documentary that you’ll not find in any of the Apple-approved material out today. (Speaking about Magical Mystery Tour, it describes how the aim was to film whatever happens on the bus trip, before dryly adding, “unfortunately nothing did.” We also see the band labor through a 1966 live version of If I Needed Someone that’s sluggish, off-key, George forgetting the lyrics).

Apparently originally released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Love Me Do, more than forty years later The Compleat Beatles is a concise, unbiased introduction to the Beatles story.

Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Help!

Absent the happy glow of Beatlemania, Help! has not aged well.

Help! premiered sixty years ago this summer, an anniversary that has allowed the internet to resurface all that stuff about it being a James Bond spoof (aside from some incidental music that comes close to the 007 theme, it’s not) or that the band were the new Marx Brothers (no, but taking that premise further, John = Groucho, George = Chico, Ringo = Harpo, leaving poor Paul as Zeppo).

The breathless enthusiasm and charm – especially the charm – that made A Hard Day’s Night such fun has, just one year later, vanished in the haze, leaving the band seemingly disinterested in their own movie, vacantly working their way through a live-action Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Maybe the most memorable scene in Help! is the Beatles’ groovy pop art pad, four outside entrances that lead into one room, the perfect metaphor for this brotherhood – four individuals so close that at one point they investigated buying an island off Greece and building four separate compounds on it for their family and friends.

Paul waves hello from his door

But one scene, one word really, undermines that groovy feeling. A cage falls from a ceiling to trap Ringo. George says, “I’m off,” and runs out the door. Someone (it sounds like Paul) says, “Typical.” Kind of a cutting comment and typical of what exactly? Was George always running off in real life whenever a religious cult trapped Ringo? Stupid scriptwriting that betrays the band’s entire ethos.

I’m guessing the band was too stoned or tired to fix it. Or that they even noticed.

Filling the gaps and moving things along is a veteran supporting cast: Leo McKern before he became a household name (at least in the homes that favor PBS), Eleanor Bron, and Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear as mad scientists, forerunners of Dr. Forrester and Frank on Mystery Science Theatre.

The musical sequences hold Help! together. The threatening outdoor weather during I Need You and The Night Before. The dramatic backlighting on You’re Going to Lose That Girl, Ringo’s cigarette smoke giving it a noirish atmosphere. The band looking miserable “romping” in the snow during Ticket to Ride (a sequence that could have served as a pitch for entire Monkees TV series). An added plus is seeing them perform in cool mod clothes and not their usual suits.

You're Going to Lose That Girl

The rain falls on Salisbury Plain

Two other scenes have taken on a kind of prescient eeriness over the years. The fight in the Beatles’ home with the cult members and mad scientists feels a little disturbing today given all the knife flashing and gun wielding, then remembering what lies ahead for George and John.

Second, when the band disguise themselves with fake beards and glasses, we get a glimpse into the near future, George looking disturbingly as he would on the Sgt. Pepper album and John circa his Abbey Road look.

A look into the future?

With the release of the Help! soundtrack, Rubber Soul, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper and Yesterday, 1965 marked the point where the Beatles’ uncanny musical maturation spun into orbit. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep a similar pace when it came to video. Which is all right. That would be asking a lot of any four performers.