Love Is Not Enough: Against Lennon-McCartneyism

I am against Lennon-McCartneyism. I believe you need more than just love. Now that Paul McCartney's lack of prenuptual agreement with his one-legged ex-wife has cost him several dozen millions, perhaps he feels the same way. The Beatles have promoted every easy answer since their inception as revolutionary propagandists for hand-holding. Coming together, strawberry fields, taking a sad song and making it better: a mop-top of luscious fiction over a misshapen bald reality. I don't deny a place for love and togetherness. But I can't imagine the world of no possessions and no religion lasting for a second before implosion and civil war, despite the soothing piano melody. At least Marxism-Leninism recognized the practical need for a dictatorship of the proletariat before the arrival of the imagined paradise. The psychedelic daydream revolution of Lennon-McCartneyism jumps straight into the saccharine pipe dream. While it may be unfair to blame the Beatles for the failed legacy of sixties utopianism, they were its undoubted figureheads and their naive vapidness symbolic of the times. In his memoir The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin recalls that at a mass meeting over a campus anti-war strike, some union activists started singing “Solidarity Forever,” but few knew the words. Only when someone else began singing “Yellow Submarine,” could the hippies and activists unite in song.

The sixties was a love boat without captain, crashing into the shores of Altamont, the Manson murders, the decline of Haight-Ashbury into a cesspool of crime and its own inherent futility. Sympathetic in other respects, Theodore Roszak called the sixties search for psychedelic meaning “Counterfeit Infinity.” Turning off your mind, relaxing and floating downstream was painted as a revolutionary act in order to forgo the need to implement actual social change. Visiting Timothy Leary's declining psychedelic commune at the Milbrook estate, Charles Slack asked the important question: “Who was going to do the dishes?” Nobody wanted to do the dishes, and that's why every sixties experiment in better living--communes, open relationships--failed. I appreciate what some of the sixties radicals did as sheer performance art--conscripting shamans in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon at a protest, nominating a sow named Pigasus for President. But the only political consequence of Jerry Rubin's call for “A new man, the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik” was to create a backlash that brought Ronald Reagon into the governor's mansion in 1966 and gave Richard Nixon an overwhelming majority in 1969.

The story of Timothy Leary, whose campaign for California governorship the Beatles song “Come Together” was originally written for, embodies the rise and fall of sixties idealism. Leary was a respected psychologist at Harvard, and his experiments with LSD were originally conducted scientifically. He discussed his findings with Aldous Huxley (author of The Doors of Perception, from which Jim Morrison got the name), who warned him: “The artistic elite, the intellectual elite, the economic elite. That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.” But Leary was too much of an aspiring prophet and populist to listen, and took up Allen Ginsberg's acid-fried cry that, “I’ve come down to preach love to the world! We’re going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating!” He advocated that the right to seek an expanded consciousness be guaranteed in the Constitution, and in 1963 was kicked out of Harvard for sharing drugs with students. His showmanship and subsequent infamy, while making for an entertaining story, succeeded in almost single-handedly destroying the academic legitimacy of psychedelic experimentation and getting it nationally banned.

After being arrested for spurious drug charges, Leary was busted out of jail by a group of nihilistic terrorists called the Weather Underground or Weathermen (inspired by the line from Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”), whose politically mature agenda was to be “against everything that is good and decent in honky America.” They would later declare 1969 “The Year of the Fork” in honour of the utensil used in the Manson murders. Their prescribed “merger of dope and dynamite, flower and flames” made Leary a perfect spokesman, and he was recruited to deliver lines like: “Dynamite is just the white light, the external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha.” After an over-the-top entertaining international flight (the biography I'm basing this on, Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield, reads better than fiction) with stop-overs with the Black Panthers in Algeria, Leary ended up in a cell next to former aspiring songwriter and friend of the Beach Boys Charles Manson, where a legendary conversation took place.

Conversing through air shafts, Manson told Leary, “We were all your students… When I got out of jail there were millions of kids cut loose from the old lies just waiting to be told what to do. And you didn’t tell them what to do… You showed everyone how to create a new head but you never gave them the new head. Why didn’t you?” When Leary replied that his purpose was to let everyone decide their own reality, Manson told him “That was your mistake. No one wants responsibility. Everyone wants to be told what to do, what to believe, what’s really true and really real.” Manson had taken on that role himself, filling in the gap where old values had once filled his follower’s lives. His “Family” consisted mostly of young girls lost in the haze of psychedelic freedom, runaways unmoored from mainstream society and easily exploitable by a charismatic manipulator in tune with the times. Manson believed that LSD had given him powers of mental control, radically interpreting the Beatles' White Album as a New Age Testament for psychopaths and seeing himself as a sort of psychedelic acid Christ. In a dark reflection of Ken Kesey’s famous bus journey, Manson and his followers traveled the American West in a school-bus painted black, fulfilling the psychedelic dream of free sex and drugs. He may have been mad, but in his conversation with Leary, he was right.

In addition to the Manson slayings, the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont helped bring the innocence of the psychedelic era to a brutal ending. The Hell’s Angels, who were romanticized by Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson as heroic outlaws, served as security at what was to be the Woodstock of the West Coast, attended by countercultural figures like Leary and most of the key players in the acid rock scene. Ken Kesey had once told a group of Angels “We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,” and the Angels had also been used as bouncers by the Grateful Dead. But the Altamont show proved to be a disaster, as the Angels used sawed-off pool cues to control the crowd. A fat Chicano kid on an acid trip took off his clothes and began dancing, and was clubbed by the disgusted Angels. More seriously, four people died at the concert: two whose car plowed into a bonfire, one who was stabbed by the Angels and the other drowning in an irrigation canal while on an acid trip. Anti-authoritarianism caused some attendants to interfere with doctors trying to help people on bad acid trips, causing Todd Gitlin to ask “If there is so much bad acid around, why doesn’t the contaminated culture, many of whose claims are based on the virtues of drugs, help its own brothers and sisters?” Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone noted that the concert was an “extraordinary complex and visceral metaphor for the way things of the Sixties ended… producing violence instead of fraternity, selfishness instead of generosity, ugliness instead of beauty, a bad trip instead of a high.”

Lenin called communism “socialism plus electricity.” I'd call the sixties ethos I've termed Lennon-McCarthyism “platitude plus LSD.” Of course the British naifs are not to blame for the failures of the sixties, but it was the valium slogans of their songs--“Let it Be,” “All You Need is Love”--that defined its dopey utopianism. The fact that John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a “bed-in for peace” is emblematic of the whole failed approach of the sixties youth movement. Holding a bed-in for peace is not a subversive act--it's what most people would like to do if they didn't have jobs they could get fired from. Real revolution takes more than acid trips and publicity stunts. Some great music and films came out of the sixties, and it does sound like it was an interesting time to be alive. But as far as actual values, actual ideals, an actual legacy--it's a vapour cloud. The fact that the Beatles' Apple label inspired the name of a major corporation is not so much ironic as it is completely predictable. Perhaps the irony of Paul McCartney divorcing his wife when he's sixty-four will do something to undo the rubber-ideology of Lennon-McCartneyism before it ensnares another foolish millionaire into marrying a beautiful younger woman without contractual stipulation. Contrary to the hummable protestations of its advocates, love was never enough.