Taylor Marshall shows us how not to talk about The Beatles.

ideous. Ugly. Grotesque. Shock­ing. All those things; add your own adjec­tive. Indeed, one suspects—and one should—that the pho­tog­ra­ph­er, whose name was Robert Whitak­er, intend­ed that reac­tion. He meant for us to be dis­turbed by the above depic­tion of The Bea­t­les draped in red meat and hold­ing the dis­mem­bered parts of baby dolls. Quick: Does The Ili­ad glo­ri­fy war or sim­ply expose its hor­rors? That is a long-debat­ed ques­tion in the human­i­ties, not just with respect to Homer, and every­one who approach­es the arts must answer it. It also mat­ters a great deal whether you get the answer right.

Anoth­er ques­tion that is impor­tant to get right is this one: What is this book, this poem, this paint­ing about in the first place? What is the sub­ject? What did the artist intend? What was Flan­nery O’Con­nor up to in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”? Or “Good Coun­try Peo­ple? Why should any decent Chris­t­ian read those sto­ries? She was just sick, sick, sick! Right? Or Slaugh­ter­house-Five? The title alone is just sick, and Kurt Von­negut was a dis­turbed man!

Dr. Tay­lor Mar­shall recent­ly post­ed this arti­cle, in which he asks the same ques­tion that may have occurred to you: “Did The Bea­t­les Pro­mote Abor­tion?” From his inclu­sion of the album cov­er above, we are meant to con­clude that they did. (By the way, it is impor­tant to note that the pho­to­graph was nev­er intend­ed for use on an album cov­er, but in an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent con­text. More on that below.)

How­ev­er, Dr. Mar­shall offers no real evi­dence for inter­pret­ing the cov­er as a com­men­tary on abor­tion, oth­er than:

• his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the white coats as “physi­cian smocks” (in fact, The Bea­t­les are dressed as butch­ers, not physi­cians);
• his irrel­e­vant obser­va­tion that “[a]bortion was being hot­ly debat­ed in the Unit­ed King­dom when this pho­to was tak­en.”

Well; case closed!

Let us stip­u­late two things from the start.

• First, it is cer­tain­ly possible—maybe even likely—that the indi­vid­ual Bea­t­les were pro-choice. It would not sur­prise me if they were. But that is not the issue here. The issue is whether the album cov­er reflects a pro-choice ethos, for that is Dr. Mar­shal­l’s claim: The album cov­er is sick because the album cov­er is joy­ful­ly pro-abor­tion!
• Sec­ond, whether or not abor­tion was “hot­ly debat­ed” at the time is irrel­e­vant. When Dr. Mar­shall points that out, he is imply­ing that the cov­er must nec­es­sar­i­ly be a com­men­tary on abor­tion, because abor­tion was being debat­ed at the time. That is the fal­la­cy of con­cur­rence: x occurs at the same time as y, there­fore the one must be a response to the oth­er.

But I have searched, and I can find no one (oth­er than Dr. Mar­shall) who sug­gests that the cov­er has any­thing at all to do with abor­tion. Not one. Unless there are some fair­ly obscure ref­er­ences out there (but he does not cite any such source), Dr. Mar­shall is the first and only in fifty years. If the cov­er were intend­ed to “pro­mote abor­tion,” how is it that that escaped dis­cus­sion back in 1966? The Bea­t­les, and their lack­eys in the press, cer­tain­ly did an excel­lent job keep­ing qui­et about it. The Bea­t­les must have been very bad at pub­lic­i­ty. Shh. I am going to pro­mote abor­tion, but don’t tell any­one about it. You are not to dis­cuss this. If any­one asks you who John Lennon is, you don’t know.

Even if we assume the cov­er is a com­men­tary on abor­tion, how do we know it is not pro-life? Could it have been that the band mem­bers wished to sug­gest the out­right evil of abor­tion? Could they have meant to imply that abor­tion­ists are sadis­tic and glee­ful at the the hor­rors they per­pe­trate? The Bea­t­les are por­tray­ing abor­tion­ists, not advo­cat­ing what they do. For after all, if The Bea­t­les are depict­ing the remains of an abor­tion, is that not the kind of thing that a pro-choice advo­cate would wish to keep hid­den? Why depict it so open­ly unless your intent is to make peo­ple recoil at abor­tion?

Dr. Mar­shall does not answer these ques­tions, nor does he ask them.

COVER STORIES

The most com­mon mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the cover—so pop­u­lar that Snopes refut­ed it—is that it was meant to be a protest, by The Bea­t­les, against the “butcher­ing” of their albums by Capi­tol Records in the Unit­ed States. (Capi­tol Records was known to short­change the U.S. ver­sions by a few tracks.)

Still anoth­er myth exists, which claims that the cov­er was meant to be a com­men­tary on Viet­nam. The mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of an off­hand remark by John Lennon seems to lie behind this idea. Soon after Capi­tol Records recalled advance copies of the album, The Bea­t­les gave an inter­view for an arti­cle in the British week­ly Melody Mak­er:

“The Bea­t­les thought that the furor in Amer­i­ca over their LP cov­er was “a bit soft,” to quote Paul.

“We were asked to do the pic­ture with some meat and a bro­ken doll,” said Paul. “It was just a pic­ture. It did­n’t mean any­thing. All this means is that we’re being a bit more care­ful about the sort of pic­ture we do. I liked it myself.”

John Lennon gave a grin and roared: “Any­way, it’s as rel­e­vant as Viet­nam!”

That last state­ment is typ­i­cal Lennon sar­casm: He meant that the con­tro­ver­sy over the album cov­er was much ado about noth­ing, but phrased it in a way that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cri­tiqued peo­ple’s com­pla­cent atti­tude about the Viet­nam War. Lennon’s feel­ing was that it was hyp­o­crit­i­cal for peo­ple to assume a pitch of out­rage over an album cov­er fea­tur­ing dolls, but to remain blithe and accept­ing of actu­al dead babies in Viet­nam.

In fact, the pho­to was nev­er intend­ed for use as an album cov­er. At the time it was tak­en, The Bea­t­les had only one-third of a fin­ished album on hand and were not think­ing about cov­ers yet. What­ev­er the rea­son, Capi­tol Records (not the Bea­t­les them­selves) decid­ed to use the “butch­er pho­to” for the release of Yes­ter­day and Today. The album and its cov­er were hasti­ly changed after neg­a­tive reac­tion to advance, pro­mo­tion­al copies in the Unit­ed States. This pho­to, also tak­en by Robert Whitak­er, was used in its place. (It was even past­ed over copies of the jack­et that had already been print­ed.)

In a let­ter to review­ers, Ron Tep­pen of Capi­tol Records explained why the butch­er cov­er was being recalled:

The orig­i­nal cov­er, cre­at­ed in Eng­land, was intend­ed as “pop art” satire.  How­ev­er, a sam­pling of pub­lic opin­ion in the Unit­ed States indi­cates that the cov­er design is sub­ject to mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion.  For this rea­son, and to avoid any pos­si­ble con­tro­ver­sy or unde­served harm to The Bea­t­les’ image and rep­u­ta­tion, Capi­tol has cho­sen to with­draw the LP.

The Bea­t­les “sub­ject to mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion”? Not the Liv­er­pool Bea­t­les! Who could have pre­dict­ed that?

A STORY OF COVERS

In his book The Unseen Bea­t­les, Robert Whitak­er explains the pur­pose behind the “butch­er” pho­to. The idea (which was Whitak­er’s, not The Bea­t­les’) was for a series of sur­re­al and con­cep­tu­al images that would par­o­dy the pub­lic’s “mass adu­la­tion” of The Bea­t­les.

“I had toured quite a lot of world with them by then,” says Whitak­er, “and I was con­tin­u­al­ly amused by the pub­lic adu­la­tion of four peo­ple.” He planned a trip­tych of photographs—meant to form a sort of reli­gious icon—that would con­trast the pub­lic’s wor­ship­ful atti­tude toward The Bea­t­les with their human real­i­ty.

In one pho­to from the series, George Har­ri­son pos­es as though ham­mer­ing nails into John Lennon’s head. The idea here, accord­ing to Whitak­er, was to show that John Lennon—far from the invin­ci­ble, ether­el god he seemed to be to many—was in fact a flesh-and-blood human being capa­ble of being hurt or pierced. (There isn’t so much the depic­tion of John Lennon as a Christ fig­ure going on here, as there is a spoof of it.) The expres­sion on Har­rison’s face could be read: See, John Lennon, human being. If I nail him, does he not bleed?

In a third pho­to, Ringo is pic­tured inside a card­board box labeled with the num­ber 2,000,000. Accord­ing to Whitak­er, the point of this pho­to was that Ringo was no more impor­tant than any of two mil­lion oth­er human beings. (Whitak­er under­es­ti­mat­ed the pop­u­la­tion of the earth by a tad.) “The idol­iza­tion of fans,” he writes, “remind­ed me of the sto­ry of the wor­ship of the gold­en calf.”

The trip­tych was nev­er com­plet­ed. The “butch­er” pho­to­graph was intend­ed to include a gold back­ground and halos over the Bea­t­les. As a con­trast with that depic­tion of the pub­lic’s per­cep­tion of a god­like group of four, Whitak­er want­ed to include the most shock­ing image he could think of; he thought of bro­ken dolls and pieces of butch­er meat. He want­ed to decon­struct the pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of The Bea­t­les by show­ing them in the most unflat­ter­ing pose he could imag­ine.

Indeed, one could view the series of pho­tos as a fair­ly orthodox—if styl­is­ti­cal­ly excessive—critique of the adu­la­tion of pop stars (a cri­tique with which I imag­ine Dr. Mar­shall would agree): We make them out to be gods, when they are like us. The tryp­tich was intend­ed to be noth­ing oth­er than a spoof of the over-the-top near-wor­ship of The Bea­t­les. It is hard to know what the series of pho­tos would have looked like had Whitak­er car­ried his con­cept through to com­ple­tion. No one can fair­ly judge, or inter­pret, work that is incom­plete; who knows what may, or may not, have become of The Mys­tery of Edwin Drood or The Orig­i­nal of Lau­ra?

In this case, all we have to go on is three pho­tographs and what the pho­tog­ra­ph­er says he intend­ed to do with them. No rea­son exists to dis­pute what he has said, or to posit a dif­fer­ent and more ugly inter­pre­ta­tion.

EXPERT TEXTPERT OR ELEMENTARY PENGUIN?

Dr. Mar­shal­l’s arti­cle is a per­fect exam­ple of how Catholics must not talk about artis­tic cre­ations. It is per­fect­ly valid to dis­cuss sec­u­lar art from a Catholic point of view; Catholics with train­ing in the arts (I have an M.A. in lit­er­a­ture) ought to do that. But some effort should be made to under­stand what the artist was try­ing to do in the first place. It is irre­spon­si­ble to make assump­tions like Dr. Mar­shall does, just because it just seems that way to you and your agen­da is to expose all that wicked filth out there. To make false assump­tions based on noth­ing oth­er than ini­tial gut reac­tion that some­thing is “gross” or “kin­da weird” (Dr. Mar­shal­l’s words), does noth­ing to pro­mote a Catholic under­stand­ing of or con­tri­bu­tion to the arts. In fact, it hurts it.

A case could be made that the shock­ing nature of the pho­tos out­pace any good or inno­cent inten­tion Whitak­er may have had. You might say that that is a prob­lem of gal­lows humor in gen­er­al, and that Kurt Von­negut should have mind­ed what he was about when he wrote Slaugh­ter­house-Five. You might say that dark satire and par­o­dy are real­ly too risky to pull off, and Flan­nery O’Con­nor should have just bus­ied her­self with the pea­cocks. I would not agree with you, but at least you would show an under­stand­ing of and sen­si­tiv­i­ty toward what the artist was try­ing to do.

If a stereo­type exists that reli­gious or con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics of sec­u­lar art don’t under­stand it, the best way to com­bat it is to show that we do, in fact, under­stand it. Embar­rass­ing igno­rance of the kind dis­played by Dr. Mar­shall only rein­forces the stereo­type.

What does it mean, for exam­ple, that Dr. Mar­shall gives a list of every­one who’s on the Sgt. Pep­per cov­er, togeth­er with lin­er notes like the fol­low­ing: “Lewis Car­roll (author, alleged pedaphile [sic])”? Does he real­ly mean to sug­gest that Lewis Car­roll was includ­ed on the cov­er because The Bea­t­les were into pedophil­ia? (By the way, the com­mon notion that Lewis Car­roll was a pedophile is and has always been an unsub­stan­ti­at­ed myth based on his pho­tos of young girls, which need to be under­stood in the con­text of the time and place in which Car­roll lived—not based on our own sen­si­bil­i­ties.)

Quite sim­ply, John Lennon admired Lewis Car­roll, as he admired Dylan Thomas, because he was a fan of word­play. Read any of John Lennon’s lyrics and the word­play is hard to miss. Although it is cer­tain­ly true that The Bea­t­les used LSD, “Lucy in the Sky With Dia­monds” is bet­ter under­stood in the con­text of Lennon’s love of word­play and unusu­al imagery. The imagery in “Lucy” comes large­ly from Alice in Won­der­land, not from drugs.

Lewis Car­roll is on the cov­er of “Sgt. Pep­per” because Lennon admired his writ­ing, and for no oth­er rea­son. Dr. Mar­shall has no basis for his irre­spon­si­ble insin­u­a­tion oth­er­wise.

One does not have to pre­tend The Bea­t­les’ music is Chris­t­ian, or argue for its inclu­sion in the Mass. Nei­ther does one have to pre­tend that The Bea­t­les were won­der­ful human beings. No one has to like their music. No one should have to pre­tend that “Imag­ine” is any­thing more than juve­nile, athe­ist stu­pid­i­ty. But it is crit­i­cal­ly irre­spon­si­ble, and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, to insin­u­ate dark­ness or “intel­lec­tu­al poi­son” where none exists. That makes it hard­er to point out true poi­son with any cred­i­bil­i­ty. Catholics who love and dis­cuss the arts should do better—at the least, show an under­stand­ing of what the artist is real­ly up to.

 

Also be sure to check out my fol­low-up post Sev­en Rea­sons to Reject Catholic Fun­da­men­tal­ism About the Arts.

The great Sim­cha Fish­er at Patheos also takes on Dr. Mar­shall here.