Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 18

Popular Culture Review

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I am not sure how much cold-blooded analysis has to do with
one’s passion for a work of art. It is a bit like falling in love. Do
we really care if there is the odd wrinkle here or there? The power
to move people, to tears or laughter, to violence or sympathy, is
the prime mover: [Music’s] call on the emotions is the most direct
of all the arts (13).
One final instance captures the Beatles’ particular incarnation of what I’ll
call, after Rushing ( “^ .T ”), transcendent Spirit. Towards the end of the song
recording, the music momentarily fades and then resurfaces. What one hears are
chaotic banging and disjointed melodic lines. Martin was responsible for none of
this. He strolled in late to the studio and found the Beatles recording. “Like
something from a very bad Tarzan movie[,j John and Paul were bashing bongo
drums, George was on huge kettle drums... Above it all, Ringo was struggling
manfully to keep the cacophony together with his regular drum kit” (19). Before
this, no other contemporaneous rock group dared to include such cacophony in
their recordings. SFF not only changed the Beatles’ way of creating music but also
influenced, or in spired, the recording practices of others (Turner 90).
SFF was the first of several Beatles songs Lennon penned that were personal,
self-reflective and adventurous, giving auditors glimpses into his pre-Beatles’ life.
(Consider “Julia,” “Come Together,” and the veiled biographical content of “I Am
The Walrus.”) SFF was a Beatles breakthrough, a harbinger, “a dream” of things to
come, an expression of both matter and spirit, a “field” of invention.
Illinois State University

Notes

Arnold S. Wolfe

1. Ryan Moore, a former student of the author’s and graduate of the Department of
Communication at Illinois State University, contributed to the initial formulation of
this section.
2. Space constraints limit the number and variety of references I can make to interviews
conducted for this study with members of three living social groups which are as
responsible as other groups, such as popular music critics, for the cultural persistence
of SFF: They are: adults who were approximately college-age when the recording
under study was released, contemporary radio station executives and current college
students. For a more comprehensive accounting of these interviews, see Wolfe, “The
Beatles’ ‘Strawberry.’’’
3. Elsewhere 1 have argued that ambiguities are a cardinal characteristic of Lennon’s
Beatles’ songwriting style (“Irony,” “Song”).
4. It is also a processing of memory that not only illustrates Everett’s latter two categories
of Beatle commemoration—SFF (1) records past pain and (2) sentimentalizes the past.