One of the best parts . . . okay THE best part . . . of attending
The Fests for Beatles Fans
(in the Meadowlands, New Jersey in March and Chicago in mid-August)
is meeting the interesting, smart, energetic, articulate, and
extremely cool people who are Beatles Fans. It is these people
who keep the music alive, who keep the enthusiasm as strong today
as it was in 1964 or 1965.
One of the most charming people that I've encountered in my Beatle
walk is Jeff Dixon. Jeff has his own Beatles pages where
you can accompany him on his tour of Liverpool via photos and
a cool description of each place he visited: www.dixonland.com/liverpool.html
and where you can catch a glimpse of our Meet the Beatles fans
star himself, Jeff!
Or, if you prefer a glimpse of Beatlish London through Jeff's
camera's eye, go to www.dixonland.com/beatles.html
But Jeff's "Meet the Beatles Fans" offering this month
isn't about experiencing London or even Liverpool
or sharing his photos of famous Beatles-related celebrities. It's
about The ART of John Lennon . . . about the poetry, the lyrics
John penned.
Jeff offers us all a thoughtful, insightful look at "Strawberry
Fields Forever." He takes a ditty that we've sung and hummed
and be-bopped with, and shows us the masterpiece we've seen but
often ignored.
Grab a cup of Earl Grey and really read this one. Then
listen to Jeff sing the song for you.
I think you're going to be blown away.
There is nothing like a Van Gogh painting in person. It comes off the wall, out of the frame, and makes you interact with it. The invitation is both intellectual and emotional. It is primitive and beautiful. To look at a Van Gogh painting is to realize a different world. Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles, France - the one framed and hanging on a wall in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam - doesn't really exist and never did. But Van Gogh saw it. He saw it and he painted it.
John Lennon stated that Van Gogh could see what is.
He said Van Gogh suffered through loneliness and torture from
society because of his vision. Most of us (probably
all of us) are only able to see Vincent's bedroom the way it is, hanging on a wall in Amsterdam,
because Van Gogh painted it. He painted it and gave it to
us. Anyone can walk into the room Vincent stayed in at Arles
and witness the room, but only Vincent could see
the room. It is our great fortune that Vincent was able to
translate his vision into a painting, thereby giving us all the
opportunity to see
it.
John Lennon had an innate ability with music which he practiced,
honed, and pushed beyond conventional means. He succeeded
just as well at this as Van Gogh did with paint. We are
fortunate that, like Van Gogh with paint, Lennon was able to translate
his vision into song, thereby giving us all the opportunity to
hear it. We don't
just hear the chords, the melody, and the instrumentation; Lennon
was able to guide us through his mind and give us his own experience,
allowing us to witness his vision. Through a confluence of
poetry, imagery, timbre, meter, melody, and dozens of other tools,
Lennon imbued upon us the ability to understand his vision of
"Strawberry Fields Forever."
The song exists as a surreal painting, if you will. It is
textured with the childhood experience of sitting in a tree in
his backyard at Mendips. From this vantage point he could
see the grounds of Strawberry Field (Lennon added the "s").
Lennon, as the leader, would take Pete Shotton and the gang down
to Strawberry Field to play cowboys and Indians. They were
just childhood games; it was all pretend. It wasn't real.
"We always had fun at Strawberry Fields." (Playboy,
p.132) But there is an undercurrent in the song, a constant threat
just under the surface. Lennon sings, "No one, I think,
is in my tree; I mean, it must be high or low," and the cellos
descend, darkening the "blue suburban skies" with swirls
of paint, creating a starker, yet beautiful, mood.
Lennon is alone in his metaphorical yet very real tree.
He wants to scream that no one understands him. He is tortured
by the loneliness of his condition. Like Van Gogh, society does
not understand his vision.
As a child, Lennon was too young and inexperienced to calculate
it. He just knew, "No one seems to understand where I'm coming
from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people."
(Playboy, p. 133) This is, to the child John Lennon,
awful. "It's scary when you're a child because there
is nobody to relate to. Neither my Auntie nor my friends
nor anybody could ever see it! And it's very, very scary."
(Playboy, p. 133-4)
But as an adult, the author of "Strawberry Fields Forever"
was not too young or inexperienced to calculate it. In fact,
he was perfectly suited to interpret and translate his experience.
Thus, he painted it for us.
One more element not to be ignored is that the physical place
Strawberry Field was an orphanage. Given his family situation,
how could this not have figured into Lennon's recollection and
subsequent writing of "Strawberry Fields Forever"?
Lennon said, "If it's real, it's simple usually, and if it's
simple, it's true." He was speaking about music, something
which he understood much better than most. Music not only came
naturally to Lennon he also spent years honing his ability to
express himself using it. By many accounts Lennon was often
confused about his own identity; nevertheless, he was still
the world's leading authority on John Lennon. He wrote
the song in Spain while filming "How I won the War",
where he had plenty of time on his hands. In addition to
the hours Lennon spent in Spain writing the song, The Beatles
spent 55 hours of studio time recording it (Ian Macdonald, Revolution
in the Head).
Clearly, the composition of "Strawberry Fields Forever"
was not a simple project. This did not, however, diminish
its truth. One might argue that the song was simple and
translating it was the time-consuming difficulty, but I find that
conclusion wrong; that is, "I think I disagree."
Regardless, a huge amount of energy and thought went into the
song's execution. In "Strawberry Fields Forever," we
have a form of artistic expression (music) - on which John Lennon
was an authority - about a subject on which he was also an authority:
himself. His definition of "simple" here might
not match that of the rest of the world.
Lennon spoke of music in terms of metaphor. He claimed that blues was better than jazz because it wasn't perverted or "thought about." It wasn't a concept. "It is a chair, not a design for a chair, or a better chair, or a bigger chair, or a chair with leather or with design. It is the first chair. It is a chair for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music," (Lennon Remembers, p. 78).
When asked about the early Beatles records, he continued the
metaphor by saying, "'Please, Please Me' and 'From Me to
You' and all those were our version of the chair. We were
building our own chairs, that's all, and they were sort of local
chairs." Here his voice trails off a bit, as if he
thought his metaphor was weakening, and added, "I don't know,"
(Lennon Remembers, p. 79).
"Strawberry Fields Forever," however, was not a chair
for merely sitting on. "She Loves You" is a chair
for sitting on. "Baby's in Black" is a chair for
sitting on (and waltzing around). But "Strawberry Fields
Forever" is a chair that draws our attention.
Much like the chair in Van Gogh's bedroom it demands our regard.
We marvel at it and study it; it demands intellectual exercise.
It screams, "Look at me, a genius, for fuck's sake!
What do I have to do to prove to you sons-of-a-bitches what I
can do, and who I am?" (Lennon Remembers, p. 138).
There are only 119 words in "Strawberry Fields Forever."
However, these words are so meticulously adorned, the music
so assiduously created, so thought out that it requires
interpretation. Along with Van Gogh's chair, it screams, "Look
at me!"
"Strawberry Fields Forever" is faceted with the accoutrements
of the psychedelic age. Lennon said, "I always liked simple
rock and nothing else. I was influenced by acid and got
psychedelic, like the whole generation..." (Lennon Remembers,
p. 10). Yet this straying from the simplicity Lennon proclaimed
as real, true, and having "no bullshit," does not detract
from its truth, beauty, or its reality. The important thing
here is that, though reality in "Strawberry Fields Forever"
is bent, obfuscated, and re-rendered into the vision of the artist,
it is an autobiographical testament and the confession of its
author...and its poetry and imagery make it 1000 times clearer,
1000 times more interesting, and 1000 times more powerful. "Surrealism
to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and
always was," (Playboy, p. 134). If surrealism was
reality to Lennon, then the surrealism in "Strawberry Fields
Forever" was Lennon's reality expressed to us, therefore
1000 times more real. Lennon painted "Strawberry Fields
Forever" the way he saw
it just as Van Gogh painted the chair the way he saw
it.
Lennon spoke of truth as being simple, but he wrote complicated
songs and declared them to be the songs truest to him. I
aver these songs are simple and complicated, primitive
and romantic. It is merely a matter of choice. You can
see what is, or, like Lennon, like Van Gogh, you can see what
is! They have both
given us their visions. If you choose to ignore all that
is illustrated in "Strawberry Fields Forever," you can
still enjoy the song, but your eyes are closed and you are misunderstanding
all you see. You are merely seeing Van Gogh's bedroom in
Arles as it exists in this world, not as it is
on the wall in Amsterdam.
&^$%#@*
Let me take you somewhere else. Lennon said in 1970, "All
I ever learned in art school was about fuckin' Van Gogh and stuff...They
never taught me about Marcel Duchamp which I despise them for."
Marcel Duchamp is the man who decided a urinal was art.
Duchamp's idea was that the artist decides what art is.
However, Duchamp insisted that the urinal, or the bicycle wheel
he put in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, were chosen
due to their very non-artist qualities; they had no aesthetic
qualities whatsoever. This serves to remove the art from
the realm of retinal art (art that is experienced solely by
viewing it with the eye) and to place it into the realm of conceptual
art. Duchamp stated that since the art had no aesthetic value,
it "de-deifies the artist." In other words, anyone
can proclaim a found object, such as a urinal or a bicycle wheel,
to be art. Taking this one step further, it is then up to
each of us to decide what art is.
Lennon seems to have taken this lesson from Duchamp on the Plastic
Ono Band album. On the song "God" he de-deifies
everybody that has touched his life; everything from which he
sought meaning and answers. He also de-deifies himself with
the line, "I was the Walrus, but now I'm John."
Ten years later, In 1980, when Lennon was talking about "Strawberry
Fields Forever," he remarked upon the line, "No one
I think is in my tree," by saying, "There is something
wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don't
see. Am I crazy, or am I a genius?" Then he adds,
"I don't think I'm either: crazy and genius don't really
mean anything anymore. I don't literally mean genius as
the things we deify, but as the spirit of genius that can come
through anybody at any given time," (Playboy, p. 133).
Lennon is reiterating what he said in "God" and de-deifying
himself as an artist here. He is saying the spirit of genius
can come through ANYBODY; this particular type of inspiration
is not exclusive to him. Lennon's favorite compositions
were the ones that came to him as inspiration rather than craft.
Those were the ones that were solidly Lennon, and this
faculty, he is saying, belongs to everyone.
There came a point in Lennon's life when he stopped seeking answers
from others, or perhaps more accurately, he stopped seeking The
Answer. His assertion that he himself deserves no particularly
special standing as an artist affirms that he included himself
in this philosophy.
In Rishikesh John went on a helicopter ride with the Maharishi. Paul
asked John why he was so quick to do this and John replied, "To
tell you the truth, I was hoping he might slip me the answer,"
(Norman, John Lennon The Life, p536 ). Throughout
Lennon's life, he followed various paths "looking for answers."
He tried drugs, the Maharishi, Primal Therapy, Yoko, and Fatherhood.
That's the short list, and debatable, but with each of these things
he threw himself, seemingly without reserve, into the maelstrom. Each
of these phases can be construed as an attempt to divine meaning,
worth, and purpose. This was Lennon's search.
But what if he had been taught Duchamp in art school?
The worry he felt over "being different" might have
been alleviated, or at least mediated. He may have had a
more positive approach to being different. He might not have
worried so much about "Help!" being a confessional. He
might not have sped it up to make it more commercial. Indeed,
he might not have written it at all.
A deep understanding that he was "not alone" might have
had a profound effect on him. This is all clearly speculation,
but there might have been less "to get hung about." Perhaps
he could have come sooner to the conclusion that there was no
need to look for The Answer in Gita, the Bible, Buddha,
Hitler, Jesus, Zimmerman, mantra, or Sexy Sadie's helicopter. He
might have come sooner to the conclusion, as he does in "God",
that what is real is John. But then, things would have been very
different.
I have been just as guilty as Lennon for most of my life. I
thought someone much smarter or experienced than I must have answers
that I don't. I found myself obsessing over some particular
author and would read everything they wrote. I thought, deep down,
that if I studied a person's life's work then maybe I could glean
a kernel of truth. I thought, "I'm not trying to decipher
this great mystery completely, I'm just trying to pry some sense
from the material world." I knew I was searching, and
I had my tongue poking into my cheek a bit the whole time.
Much the way Lennon must have when he answered Paul about the
helicopter ride. Perhaps this attitude was in self-defense,
perhaps because I feared my quest may prove fruitless. After
all, hasn't every human being looked for truth? Why is there
no record of the answer? Ah...
I came to realize there are two things that matter: We choose
the meaning ourselves, and it's the journey that matters. These
are, of course, only my truths. They are also well-known
and documented. But, for me at least, I had to actually learn
them for myself. I feel fairly confident that Lennon landed
somewhere near the same philosophical place as me.
The romantic in me can't help but think though, that somewhere
in there, somewhere in here, somewhere out there, truth lingers. I
can't help but think that artists are groping for it; extending
themselves as far as they can to attain it. It is not only
artists, but physicists, philosophers, mid-wives, veterinarians,
shoeshine men, and all humankind alike. Maybe if we seek
to discover the genius each de-deified person offers, maybe we
can, bit by bit, build upon this truth, until one day we understand
what Stephen Hawking referred to as "The ultimate triumph
of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God."
"You make your own dream. That's the Beatles story isn't it?" (Playboy, p. 110).
Etc...
My Beatles pages
Liverpool: www.dixonland.com/liverpool
London: www.dixonland.com/beatles
