Sometimes I grow tired of repeating the stories that I tell about the Beatles; after all, I was hardly there, right? One of the things about those for whom the Beatles were/[are] an intense experience is that they all have a different experience of what happened (“you can penetrate anyplace you go”). Usually, I expect that others would know the stories – that is why I grow weary of telling them, who wants to be a bore about something that wasn’t really a direct experience? Of course, that was part of the art, that we who lived then were part of the story; the Beatles documented something that happened to us all. The story I was telling the other day was about Astrid & Stuart Sutcliffe & how Sutcliffe supposedly didn’t like to practice bass, which was “documented” in the film Backbeat, which led to McCartney being the bass player with the band ….
Many people have not heard the recorded interviews with John Lennon [“unfinished dialogue”] & Paul McCartney [“the McCartney interviews”] that were released in the 1980’s; shame, that. In those interviews, Lennon & McCartney both gave away many of the secrets behind the art in their time with the Beatles. While the “secrets” are actually in the lyrics also, it was some of the story telling about what was happening in their lives that revealed how the notes & chords were working together [“we can work it out”] – the connection between the spiritual & the physical is in the language of the playing, which is why practicing is so important. What people “hear” is what the players intimate with the lyric & the music. The note can be a leading voice, or the leading voice can be in the chord or chord changes, even the instrumentation ….
We all [seemingly] assume that time is linear; what the Beatles opened was the non linear time of a God viewpoint – God isn’t held to the linear construction, it is we who are. In the mind of God, we can be at any point in our linear existence. This is something that gave rise to the concept of somebody who “passes away” – they do not die, they return to another space in the mind of God, a structure of existence [“across the universe (univearth)”] to which we do not have direct access, except in the construction that God shares in the object oriented universe [“hon-mak-ku-kyo-to”]. As long as we access the memory of the recording, we access the continuum. Looking forward, into the future of technology & music, we can hear “Nowhere Man” and see the point – the Buddha point which is reconciled by the Cross (and the death of Jesus Christ). By understanding the construction, we can see into the story that was/is being told.
In the McCartney interviews, Sir Paul talked about how he used to sit around the radio as a child/young man and try to figure out the lyrics and parts to the music that was coming to the UK from America. That process has been practiced by countless musicians who learn to love music from music …. The more that one plays and practices connecting the brain to the construction, the easier it is to move into that transcendental state of playing and composing according to the construction “rules” of music theory; and then to “see” the construction as a language communication that is live for as long as the arrangement does not pass away.
Some of the interpretation that we make of music is internal to our own imagination; in some ways music is like types in the JavaScript language for the language interpreter (as opposed to the strict types of Java or C# or other computer languages). For the really talented constructors of music, the interpretation of the voice leading is nearly a constant – they almost tell us what to think with the construction & and the construction with the lyric. When the voice leading is from a blues “call & response” construction, sometimes there is a strict type interpretation, but other times the decay rate of the notes (the voicing strength, the playback frequency mixing/mastering, the language in which we think – and thus the rhythm of our cadence of language [not from the musical “nashville numbering” but from the spoken voice language we have] --) influences what we hear as the leading voice/thought/construction.
It is these “voicings” that are still alive in the Beatles, and why we still go see 70 plus year old musicians playing songs “out there” …
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