November 22, besides being Thanksgiving in the United States, marks fifty years since the release of the Beatles self-titled double LP set, commonly known as the White Album. As with last year’s observance of Sgt. Pepper’s golden anniversary, a remix has been prepared by Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, presented for public sale in several deluxe additions. Again I went for the regular, ordinary, run of the mill deluxe as opposed to the super duper deluxe baby. Unlike Pepper’s, getting the obligatory extra tracks that come with the basic package is actually worth it, but more on that later.
First, some background.
1968 saw the Fab Four coming off their greatest triumph to date, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which spent a staggering 27 weeks at number 1 from the summer of ’67 through the beginning of February 1968. While Pepper’s was still reigning supreme over the charts, they dropped the sound track for their ill-fated TV special Magical Mystery Tour. The British EP, U.S. LP release was a success as well; the TV special, broadcast in the UK on Christmas Day 1967, not so much. The disjointed, heavily surrealistic trip on a tour bus through the English countryside was panned by critics, confused the British public and was never shown in the United States.
On the personal side, 1968 began with the band still reeling from the death of their manager Brian Epstein the previous June. John Lennon’s marriage was falling apart and George Harrison was more interested in Eastern meditation than being a junior partner in the Beatles. They entered the studio in early February, recording the single Lady Madonna (which would go to number 1 a month later), before jetting off to Rishikesh, India to engage in a Transcendental Meditation course with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They were accompanied on their expedition by an entourage that included members of the Beach Boys and actress Mia Farrow with her sister Prudence.
The purpose of the retreat was to clear their minds, achieve transcendence without the aide of chemicals, and gain some emotional stability. Though they were supposed to leave being Beatles behind, John and Paul would clandestinely get together to work on songs. All three songwriters in the group worked on material that would eventually end up on both the White Album and 1969’s Abbey Road.
The trip to Rishikesh is shrouded in a bit of mystery, in so far as each member had a different response to it. Ringo Starr left about two weeks in because he couldn’t take the food. Though McCartney has spoken positively of the experience, he left after about a month. Lennon and Harrison lasted until April, with John leaving in anger over rumors that the Maharishi had tried to take liberties with some of the women guests – claims that were later disproved to the satisfaction of all, including Lennon’s then wife Cynthia.
Once all four were back in Britain they began working on the new material begun in India. In early May the band gathered at Harrison’s house in Esher, Surrey to demo songs. From May 30 through October they recorded at odd hours and inconsistent intervals at EMI Studios (aka Abbey Road) and Trident Studios. Along with tracks for the White Album, they produced the singles Hey, Jude and Revolution during this time.
The album itself is almost a photo negative image of its predecessor Sgt. Pepper's. In place of the colorful, elaborately staged portrait of the Beatles surrounded by cutout images of various celebrates, over looking a flower bed (grave?), we have a plain white cover. On early editions "The Beatles" was embossed on the front along with a serial number pressed near the lower right hand corner. Later, the numbering was dropped, with the name printed faintly in gray. The package included a poster collage with lyrics printed on the back, along with four individual color head shots of the band members. Sgt. Pepper's Band was supposed to be their alter ego, an escape from Mop Top Beatlemania, a mask to hid behind as they meandered in the studio. Here the album is simply called The Beatles. The January 1969 sessions that would become Let it Be were billed as an attempt at getting back to their rock and roll roots after a period of psychedelic experimentation. You could argue that this desire to get back to basics actually began here.
In place of the heavily produced psychedelic music of the previous two projects, The Beatles offers an eclectic mix of good old fashioned rock and roll, stripped down acoustic folk, blues, hard rock, ska (a predecessor to reggae), dance hall songs and a lullaby. The penultimate track is an eight minute avant garde sound collage, Revolution 9, that is somewhat polarizing to this day. Unlike Pepper's or Mystery Tour, there is very little here that couldn't have been credibly reproduced on stage in some form with contemporary technology.
When the sessions started getting tense is hard to say. The presence of Yoko Ono in the sessions is the default excuse given for the problems in the band. The Beatles rarely had visitors at recording sessions, and almost never had their wives or girlfriends around. Lennon insisted that his new found love be in the studio, and collaborate on material. In some studio chatter from from the Get Back sessions in early '69 McCartney tried to downplay the reports of friction, joking that in fifty years people would say they broke up because Yoko sat on his amplifier. In the Anthology documentary Harrison admitted that her presence did make the situation tense, and that he did feel Ono was a wedge separating John from the band. Looking back twenty-five years later in the same film, Paul felt that John and Yoko had to clear the decks of the rest of them if their relationship was going to work. Whether Ono was the cause of the tensions or a symptom of deeper problems we may never know.
Even before Yoko Ono became a constant presence at sessions the Beatles had begun to record separately, sometimes working in different studios with different engineers at the same time. This has always been chalked up to the personal conflicts between the bandmates. Each was becoming protective of their material, wanting it done their way as opposed to presenting songs to the band for suggestions. McCartney, for instance, is said to have gone back and recorded his own drum parts when he wasn't happy with Ringo's take. He wouldn't let Harrison add a lead part to Hey, Jude, a sore point the guitarist had a hard time letting go of. This might not have been so bad, but for that George was blooming as a song writer, and felt held back from presenting material by the other two writers. Lennon later said that the White Album was basically a four headed solo project, where each served as backing musicians for one another's songs.
Things got frustrating enough that various members walked out of the sessions at different times. Most famously Ringo ran off to Sardinia on holiday for ten days because he thought the others were freezing him out. He returned after some pleading to find his drum kit covered in flowers, a peace offering from George. Harrison, feeling the others weren't enthusiastic enough about his contribution, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, invited Eric Clapton in to play on the track. Other than supplying a killer lead part, Clapton's presence put the others on their best behavior, focusing them on the song. Things got so fractious that even producer George Martin took a vacation, leaving production work for a time to an engineer. Geoff Emerick, an engineer who had worked with the band since the Revolver sessions abruptly quit all together in July, he was so worn out by the bad vibes surrounding the band.
In popular lore the White Album is usually seen as the beginning of the end for the Beatles. 1995's Anthology documentary presented the release of Hey, Jude, in August '68, as the band's high water mark as a functioning, cohesive unit: the implication being that it was all downhill from there. Last year I argued in my review of Pepper's that the band was already breaking up during those sessions: before Brian Epstein's passing, before Yoko hit the scene, before the squabbles over Apple Corp and who should manage their affairs in general. I contend that the decision to stop touring in 1966 put the process of disillusion in motion, and that the subsequent resistance to going back on the road by Lennon and Harrison made a split inevitable. All the White Album does is illustrate what a band falling apart sounds like, even though I'm not sure fans at the time understood what was happening before their ears.
Giles Martin also disputes The Beatles as break up album narrative. He goes even further against the conventional wisdom to say that, all things considered, the band was actually humming along rather well. In reviewing hours upon hours of outtakes, filled with studio conversations, he heard very little in the way of fighting or disagreements. Ringo and Paul had a blow up over Starr's drumming, but other than that things sounded like any band putting an album together.
The problem, from his point of view, was that his father wasn't happy about how the group was working in the studio this time around. They were recording at all hours of the day and night, working songs out in extended jam sessions as opposed to disciplined rehearsals. They also wanted to use as much of the material they had written in India as possible. The Beatles, and especially Lennon, were almost obsessed with recording every song they wrote, leaving nothing "in the can." George Martin wanted a single album, leaving the weaker material for B-sides or even the trash bin. As Harrison observed, there was a lot of ego in the room: no one wanted to see their own contribution sacrificed, even if it wasn't up to Martin's standards. Obviously, the band won that fight. Giles believes the White Album represented the Beatles taking back control in the studio, and it put his father off. Whatever the truth, The Beatles was released as a double LP in time for the Christmas shopping season to monster sales and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, in spite of its troubled history.
The White Album came at the end of a turbulent year globally, not simply for the Beatles. 1968 is one of those watershed years, like 1848 or 1914 when the paradigm shifted. To get into that demands a second post. So next time I'll talk about the White Album's legacy, and go through the songs themselves, critiquing them in light of the new mix. I'll also get to why, unlike with most deluxe additions, I think giving the surplus material a listen is worth it.
I was catching up on the latest season of the inter-dimensional alternate history sci-fi mash up The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime last week (I might get to that at some later point). In between episodes were ads for a new program called The Romanoffs. I didn't look that closely, so I missed that it was produced, written and, directed by Matthew Weiner, of Mad Men fame. It's hard to believe that that show has been off the air for over three years now, but so it has. Once I woke up the fact that The Romanoffs was a Matt Weiner production I caught the first episode tout de suite. According to Wikipedia there was a bidding war between the various cable and streaming outlets for his next project, and Amazon came out the winner. Now there's only one question left: is this a prize Amazon wishes it had lost?
A new episode is dropping every Friday, and so far five out of the eight are available. I've only caught the first installment, as I've said, but since this is an anthology series it's not like there's a narrative, recurring characters or the highly addictive cliffhanger ending that's impelling me to binge watch like a serial might. The central conceit is that each story revolves around different ancestors, real or presumed, of the Russian royal family that was slaughtered in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.
The first story, called The Violet Hour, features Aaron Eckhart as Greg Moffat, an American expatriate in Paris, running a small hotel and caring for his aging and ailing aunt (Marthe Keller), who happens to be a descendant of the Romanoffs. For someone who's dying, Aunt Anushka is incredibly vital, and feisty. She can't keep a caregiver because of her royal disdain for servants, never mind her acid tongue that scorches anyone within earshot irrespective of lineage. After rudely dismissing her latest domestic, she is mortified when the agency sends over Hajar, an Algerian Muslim in traditional headdress (Inès Melab), to serve as her maid. To be honest, I don't know any home caregiver who would put up with the insults that this young woman endures, but she stoically perseveres and eventually she wins the old lady over. Greg is a decent fellow, but is hanging on, along with his girlfriend (Louise Bourgoin), for the old lady to kick off so he (they) can inherit her palatial apartment. After a few missed phone calls at a crucial moment, the mercurial Anushka writes Greg out of the will, and leaves the apartment to Hajar.
After trying to talk Hajar out of taking the apparent, she and Greg end up sharing a passionate embrace, as the kids these days would say. She leaves Anushka's employ, but shows back up two months later, with her own mother, to tell him that she's pregnant. In an unforeseen turn of events, Hajar reveals that she is in love with Greg; sleeping with him wasn't about gold digging. He reveals that he's actually happy that they're going to have a baby, and the aunt is ecstatic that her lone wish, that the family "line would continue," was being fulfilled. The only predictable thing was the girlfriend losing her stuff, again, kids say the darnedest things, finally walking out of the apartment while grabbing a (presumed) priceless Fabergé egg as her parting gift.
As Rotten Tomatoes noted, and I agree, this first episode of The Romanoffs anyway, is both self indulgent and trying on the viewer. In a way I can forgive Matthew Weiner both sins. As good as Mad Men was, and I was a big time fan, his hands were tied by AMC on a number of fronts, not the least of which was the strict running time, which varied, but was nonetheless a bone of contention. AMC wanted to fit the show into the hour time slot with space for commercials. So, scenes sometimes had the feel of being cut short, monologues or dialogues didn't always have the time to develop the way they could have if time allowed. He was also restricted by basic cable rules on language and sexual content (which isn't the worst thing from my stand point), but I can see Weiner's side, since he'd worked on The Sopranos where just about anything went, and it usually did, with pretty much as much time as they wanted to do it in. How can I blame him for spreading his creative wings bit?
In the case of The Violet Hour, the language problem has little to do with profanity (yes, there's some, but not a lot), but with French. The majority of the dialogue is delivered in the Gallic tongue, and it did get a little tedious to my anglophone ears. I'm no stranger to foreign language films, but because I wasn't prepared mentally to have to read subtitles three quarters of the time, I found myself getting impatient. As for pacing, the episode ran a little under an hour and a half. Weiner takes his time unfolding the story, but I'm not sure he needed all the time to do it. It's a pretty simple plot, so cutting it back ten minutes or so wouldn't have hurt things at all.
The excess really isn't all that excessive, and in many ways The Violet Hour highlights some of Weiner's signature strengths. He's extremely literate, and constructs the story subtlety, yet deliberately. He's writing a novel, or in this case a short story, with themes, foreshadowing and symmetry. He's not simply telling a cute story, or trying titillate or shock. He may throw titillating or shocking elements in, but there's always a payoff down the line that points to something deeper. He doesn't use music, whether it's popular standards or classical, without a reason, either. Having the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers classic Refugee play over the title sequence that features the Czar and family being eliminated way back when, is on purpose. I'm not familiar with the popular French songs he chose, but the use of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade was particularly telling, and not just because the composer was Russian.
Scheherazade is the symphonic rendering of the "One Thousand and One Nights," in which the titular heroine staves off her own execution by the unreasonably jealous sultan by telling him stories each night, leaving them on a cliff hanger so that he wants to hear more the following evening. Through these stories, a 1001 of them to be precise, she not only delays her own death, but wins the sultan's heart. In this way Anushka and Hajar win each other over by sharing their stories and histories. At first Anushka rubs the younger woman's face in past European victories over Muslim invaders, using history as a weapon. But soon a mutual appreciation develops. It's mainly Anushka who shares the stories of her family's ups and downs, and her personal tragedies. Later, when Greg tries to convince Hajar to give up her claim, he abandons his initial tough guy approach and opens up about his own background. He's estranged from his mother, his father is dead, and Anushka is the only family he has. It's Sophie who's obsessed with the apartment, for him his aunt is the only connection to where he came from and where he's going.
For her part, Hajar has nothing to really gain by sticking with this assignment, and her boss knows it. She's reputed to be the best caregiver at the agency, so there's no doubt she could get another client easily. She perseveres, standing by Anushka through her tantrums and health issues (as the doctor says, even a hypochondriac gets sick). Of all the people in her life, Anushka believes that Hajar is the only one without an agenda. There's no doubt that the move is meant to be punitive: more to get Greg and Sophie to split than to really reward Hajar. But the affection she feels for the young woman is real.
The underlying tension nagging at both Anushka and Greg is that the world she knew is dying, if it's not dead already, and the world he is inheriting is one of dislocation and loneliness. Anushka holds on to vestiges of their Russian Orthodox faith, which he is totally divorced from. He's not an atheist, per se, but doesn't believe he's capable of knowing if there's a God or not. As for religion, he isn't against it, but sees it as keeping people apart.
Hajar identifies as French, since she was born in Paris, and has never been to North Africa. It's not French as Anushka or Greg understand it. The old lady remembers the decorum, high life and glamor of an earlier age. Her roots are Russian, her bearing regal, with all that submerged into her perceived identity of what a Frenchwoman is supposed to be. That she scoffs at Hajar's claim to be French isn't just, or even primarily, about race. It's about a disconnection with the main stream of French history and culture, both high and pop, that causes the perceived rift. Anushka points to her drab cloths, head scarf and light makeup as proof that she's "not even trying" to assimilate.
Greg, in spite of living there for four years, still has the idealism of a tourist gaping at the scenery. Hajar is the new reality: she wears a hijab, believes in her faith, but still questions. She agrees with Greg that we can't know with certainty that there is a God, but every so often she sees signs, such as his kindness, that points her in the affirmative direction. She has ambitions, and is putting off marriage while not openly rebelling against her parents' traditional ways. She sees her brother enjoying more freedom than she does, especially in the romance department, and silently ponders the inequity. An old world is dying, but the new world being born is uncertain, for both groups.
Hajar's pregnancy is the coming together of the two worlds, to create something new as the old dies away. Earlier, Anushka reveals to Hajar that her son died tragically years before. She remembers the violet Paris dusk, and how she connects that unique phenomenon with his death. The final scene shows Hajar, heavy with child, sitting in a chair with Greg standing behind her. Her hair is flowing, and he, now bearded, is wearing one of his ancestor's smoking jackets (looking very Romanoff, if you will). As they gaze out the window at the sunset, Anushka admires them from the door. Holding a candle, she retreats to anther room, a look of contentment on her face. She places the candle down, blows it out, and moves out of frame, leaving us with an image of the leaded window, through which the sky turns a deep violet.
In typical Weiner style, he drops hints throughout the program that only make sense in hind sight (which makes a second viewing almost a must). We have these over arching themes of dislocation, existencial angst and, cultural shift coupled with quitter touches of personal longing. Sophie makes it very clear she wants no part of having children, they're too much of a buzz kill. Greg never protests, but through looks and glances we know he's not on board: he obviously loves children, isn't totally sold on the materialistic pleasure seeking life, but sticks with Sophie anyway. Anushka's vicious attack on Sophie's self imposed sterility isn't just meant to be hurtful for its own sake, but reflect her own disappointment that the family is dying off and there will be no one to carry on the name. She would give anything to have her son back, and along with him the hope of future progeny. Her attachment to Greg isn't some sort of quasi Oedipal perversion, as Sophie insinuates. They are blood. They are the last of a long line, of a dead and dying world, and until the end Anushka is bitter about it.
That is until the final scene. The sky turning violet in this case signals a death (Anushka's off camera?) but also a birth. An old world is dying, but a new one is being born. There is still uncertainty. Will these two cultures be able to, not simply co-exist, but join together to form something new and stable? We don't know, but we have hope. As long as there is life, and openness to future generations, there will always be hope.
While the Romanoffs doesn't have the flash of Mad Men, it does have at least a bit of the sizzle. Weiner is one of the few out there asking real questions about the impact of culture, heritage and, religion on our individual and collective identity. My guess is that this is going to have a limited viewership, but my hope is that it's enough to keep getting him offers to make more of these explorations.
