John Lennon: Peacenik and Reluctant Revolutionary
May 30th 1968. The day on which in Paris half a million people had marched through the city where President De Gaulle had earlier fled the Elysée Palace and dissolved the National Assembly. The day on which in Bonn, despite widespread protest and demonstration, the Grand Coalition of Kurt-Georg Kiessinger and Willy Brandt passed the Notstandsgesetze. That day, John Lennon lay prone on the floor of Abbey Road studios in London, strumming his unvarnished Epiphone Casino, to get him in the right mood for playing the following song.
“Revolution“ is a kaleidoscopic concatenation of contrasting elements with the form of a distended blues. Lennon had composed it in India, where he had gone with George Harrison to study meditation with the Maharishi Maresh Yogi, and consequently it had this “‘God will save us’ feeling about it.” He wanted to achieve a sound that was loose, breathy, and orgasmic. Through Yoko Ono, John had come into contact an avant-garde enthused by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse and the utopian possibilities of the erotic release of sexual repression. The salient feature of the song is its overtly political content. In India Lennon had followed political events closely. He was an implacable opponent of the Vietnam war, which he denounced on US TV as “insanity”. At the same time he was troubled by the violence that had surged across University campuses, and into the streets in Europe and the U.S. in the form of protests and riots, and instinctively opposed to anyone propounding violence as a means of revolution. Yet he acknowledged the reasons why the protesters were calling for a revolution and resorting to violence: bourgeois society was deeply repressive, and riddled with social hierarchies. Governments were oppressive and paternalistic at home and imperialist abroad, and quick to impose the solution of military violence on any foreign policy problem. When Yoko suggested the possibility of a revolution without violence, he replied “But you can’t take power without a struggle”.
This is the backdrop to the political conflict expressed in the lyrics to Revolution.
The song begins skeptically: “You say you want a revolution,” – inplicitly distancing Lennon from the revolutionaries, his interlocutors. “Well you know, We all want to change the world,” it goes on sincerely. But then it abruptly changes tack in the bridge, which itself distends the 12 bar structure through the interpolation of a 2/4 bar that dwells on and emphasizes the following line:
…“But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know you can count me out.”
In the second verse, the skeptical tone continues:
...“You say you got a real solution/
Well you know/We’d all love to see the plan.”
Lennon implicitly criticizes revolutionaries for being too negative, for having nothing to offer in place of what they want to tear down. The bridge returns to the earlier theme, castigating “people with minds that hate.”
The third and final verse suggests that instead of merely blaming the institution, and absolving themselves of responsibility, the revolutionaries should alter the way they think: “You better free your mind instead.” Meaningful social change is a first personal activity, Lennon muses, which must begin inwardly if it is genuine.
The bridge concludes with the observation that “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.”
The refrain “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright” looks at first blush like an outright rejection of activism and voluntarism, and a call for quietism. But like everything in this song, it is not what it seems at first sight. For the line is questioned and undermined by the glib “boom, shoo be do wah, bop shoo be do wah” which punctuates the refrain with something akin to Alcanter de Brahm’s point d’ironie.
Predictably, since the song was a deliberate provocation to would be revolutionaries, the left hated the song. In New Left Review, Marxist rock aesthetician, Richard Merton, aka Perry Anderson, called it a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” Merton’s review is worth a closer look, if only to see how he manages to cloak his abject musical misjudgment with meretricious Marxist aesthetics and a large dose of purple prose. Ostensibly, Merton contraposes the Rolling Stones’ “Streetfighting Man’” from the album, Beggars Banquet, to Revolution, from The Beatles, the album of November 1968 now known as the White Album, in a self proclaimed attempt to do for rock music what Adorno does by contrasting Schoenberg (“Progress”) with Stravinsky (“Restoration”) in his Philosophy of New Music. So Merton contrasts The Beatles’s allegedly apolitical, self-referential empty musical “radicalism” with the Stones’ supposedly vigorous, and substantive expressions of “equality” and “solidarity”.
* * *
In 1968 The Rolling Stones were desperate to be as famous and rich as the Beatles. Their initial strategy was just to copy them. They copied their haircuts as well their musical fashions: Their Satanic Majesties Request followed the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. They cultivated a working class image that made a mockery of their aspirational middle-class origins. In 1967, conservative journalist William Rees-Mogg interviewed Jagger for ITV and found to his surprise that Jagger was a “right-wing libertarian - straight John Stuart Mill.” By 1968 Jagger had briefly converted to more radical views, explaining to the Sunday Mirror that if anything he endorsed “anarchy…a freedom of everyman being personally responsible himself.” There should be “no such thing as private property,” he said.
The Stones were also desperate to be popular with the young people who bought their records, and in 1968, when revolution was in the air, Jagger took to the streets to demonstrate alongside Tariq Ali, against the Vietnam War. He wrote about in ‘Street Fighting Man.’
“the time is right for fighting in the street, boy/
But what can a poor boy do/Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band.”
The reality was somewhat different. As soon the rich rock and roll star was recognized, he was besieged by fans seeking autographs, and press photographers seeking pictures, and became hindrance to the demonstrators outside the American Embassy. His “compromise solution” was to retreat from radical politics as quickly as he had embraced it. The Altamont festival fiasco saw to that. Designed to restore the Stones’s reputation, which had been damaged for gouging their fans with obscenely high ticket prices, they helped fund a free festival and hired the Mayles’s brothers to film the concert. The whole event was chaotic and disorganized. Security was provided by drunken Hells Angels, hired cheaply by the Stones’s Management for $500 worth of beer. While the Stones played, a young a black man, Meredith Hunter, with a white girlfriend, was stabbed to death by an Hells Angel just in front of the stage. The facts surrounding the death, which was caught on camera and included in the film, Gimme Shelter, are a little hazy. What is not disputed is that the abhorrent event increased film’s notoriety and that the Stones profited from it. It was hardly an example of taking responsibility. Rolling Stone condemned the film as a whitewash. Greil Marcus, wrote that “the Stones were shown as victims, as if the purpose of the film was not to deal with real events, but to absolve those who paid for the film of any responsibility for those events.” Keith Richards’s comments sum up the self-pitying attitude of the band: “It could only happen to the Stones’s man.” These were not the actions of street fighting revolutionaries, who rejected private property, and believed in taking personal responsibility for their actions. The only revolution on show was the 180 degree rotation in which radical politics, and social responsibilities were abandoned as swiftly as they had been adopted.
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This historical background helps explain how Merton, and not just he, but many other members of the New Left, came to a form a judgement which history has left looking contrary and absurd. At best, the invidious comparison of Beggar’s Banquet as a genuinely revolutionary album, with the bourgeois apology of The Beatles was an ad hoc justification of Merton’s subjective preferences. At worst an uncritical reworking of the old cliche about Stones’ ‘bad boy’ and Beatles’ ‘good boy’ mirror images. As Lennon put it in an open letter to the New Left critics of “Revolution” they should have been thinking a little bigger, than merely siding with the Stones against the Beatles.
One striking fact about Merton’s ‘review’ is that it is silent about the music itself. It remains entirely on the surface of the lyrics. Adorno’s attempt to bring out the revolutionary merits of Schoeberg by contrasting them with the reactionary and regressive tendencies of Stravinsky at least makes an attempt to ground interpretation in an analysis of the music. In this respect Greil Marcus’s interpretation of Revolution is closer to the mark: “There is freedom and movement in the me music even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics…The music doesn’t say ‘cool it’ or ‘don’t fight the cops’…The music dodges the message and comes out in front.” But Marcus’s view the music overwrites the conservative and repressive lyrics.
But what do thelyrics say? In the version of the song released as a single, produced under Paul McCartney’s direction, with a faster beat and more conventional rock and roll feel, the bridge ends with the words:
“But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know you can count me out.”
In the much slower version produced by Lennon’s on the album he audibly adds ‘in’ at the end of the line, although these words are not printed on the lyric sheet.
“But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know you can count me out…in!”
As he told Tariq Ali in an interview with Red Mole:
”There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said ‘count me out’. The original version which ends up on the album said ‘count me in’ too; I put in both because I wasn’t sure.”
Mercurial as ever, Lennon wasn’t sure whether a revolution, namely the violent overthrow of the ruling powers, and the destruction of existing institutions, was what was needed if freedom was to be achieved. “Free your mind instead” he concludes. It looked like something he had learned from the Mahirishi in India. As John Hoyland argued, in a reply to Lennon from the editors of Black Dwarf, maybe they had, but they had found that this was not enough. What irked the left is that he had sung “free your minds instead” rather than “as well”. But Lennon’s hesitation perfectly expressed a deep conflict between his pacificsm on the one hand, and his revolutionary activism on the other. When interviewed about the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland John was asked whether his support for the IRA was compatible with his pacificism. He replied: “I don’t know how I feel about them because I understand why they’re doing it and if it’s a choice between the IRA and the British Army, I’m with the IRA. But if it’s a choice between violence and nonviolence, I’m with non-violence”.