Report-Concert 7
Carmen and Aleko in John Lennon's Songs
Part 1. The Beatles "Rubber Soul"- 50! "Rubber Soul": "Girl"
Gitanes - John's favourite cigarettes
Carmen
Prosper Mérimée's novella
Part 2. Carmen-Suite ballet
Part 3. A.S. Pushkin "Цыганы" ("The Gypsies") "Rubber Soul": "Run For Your Life"
Pushkin's epilogue
A. Blok "Среди поклонников Кармен" (from the "Carmen" cycle)
Part 1. The Beatles "Rubber Soul" - 50!
December 3, 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the Beatles album "Rubber Soul", the Beatles' finest album to date and, some say, their finest album ever. With the accompanying single "Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out" and with tracks like "Norwegian Wood" and "In My Life", it's undoubtedly their pre-acid, pre-antagonism masterpiece.
"We've written some funny songs - songs with jokes in. We think comedy numbers are the next thing after protest songs", McCartney informed "The Musical Express" in late October 1965 about the new direction he and Lennon had found. The humour as displayed in "Norwegian Wood" and "Drive My Car" is tongue-in-cheek, but not innocently so, and it illustrates one of the peculiarities of "Rubber Soul": in an album that marks the onset of the Beatles peace-and-love phase, the sentiments expressed about women are remarkably harsh. More often than not, the emotions directed toward women in the "love" songs of "Rubber Soul" are angry, cutting, and occasionally even violent. The girl in "You Won"t See Me" refuses "to even listen" and is admonished by the title phrase which has the double meaning of both a fact and a warning. The girl in "I'm Looking Through You" is jeered and dismissed as being "down there" and "nowhere". The heroine of "Girl" is the kind "who puts you down / when friends are there" while that of "What Goes On" (Ringo's vocal number on "Rubber Soul") finds it easy to lie. More menacingly, the object of desire in "Norwegian Wood" has her flat set on fire after failing to sleep with the singer, while the "little girl" in the self-explanatorily titled "Run For Your Life" is told that she will be killed if she chooses another man over the singer.
And all this against the background of the Beatles first "message song", "The Word", which marks the transition between the boy-meets-girl love of Beatlemania to the peace-and-harmony love of the hippy era and in which the enlightened Lennon offers "the way" to bring his listeners to the "light" he has found in universal love and spreading "the Word".
In an interesting way in 1965 Lennon and McCartney appear to be pursuing diametrically opposed lines in their relationships with women. Paul is on the verge of losing Jane and John is about to find the love of his life.
After the emotional depth reached by him in "Yesterday", his solo masterpiece from the previous LP, Paul is over-run with his Northern male chauvinism which makes him frustrated at the thought that his educated and independent-minded girlfriend is less than eager to settle to wifedom and motherhood and to make him the centre of her universe. The progression from "Yesterday" to "We Can Work It Out", "You Won"t See Me" and "I'm Looking Through You" is a remarkable tale of rejecting/being rejected and at the same time remarkably demonstrates Paul as being as capable as John, the soul-barer of the two, of accessing his not altogether noble inner thoughts as food for his art.
Unlike Paul, John is on the rise or better said he is so abysmally low that the only way left for him is up. Starting from "I'm a Loser", a track from the "Beatles For Sale" LP of the previous year, Lennon seemsto be doing nothing else but crying for help. The Beatles 1965 film was entitled "Help!" and so was the album which accompanied the film release. The eponymous title track was written by Lennon and contains the lyric:
When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone I'm not so self-assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind, I've opened up the doors.
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down...
On "Rubber Soul" John goes further and calls himself "A Nowhere Man",
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody...
unlike Paul who tells his girlfriend that it is she who is "nowhere". Lennon clearly anticipates external assistance in the current crisis and is waiting to be "lent a hand". The saviour is the dream-girl who will later appear to him as "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" - "a girl with kaleidoscope eyes", and to whom he alludes in the song "In My Life" from the "Rubber Soul" album when he sings:
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll always stop and think about them,
In my life I love you more.
Now let us consider the image of John"s "dream-girl" as he describes her in "Girl" one of the most memorable tracks from the 1965 album.
GirlIs there anybody going to listen to my story
All about the girl who came to stay?
She's the kind of girl you want so much
It makes you sorry
Still you don't regret a single day.
Ah, gir-ir-irl.
Gir-ir-irl.
When I think of all the times I tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry.
And she promises the earth to me and I
Believe her
After all this time, I don't know why.
Ah, gir-ir-irl.
She's the kind of girl who puts you down
When friends are there, you feel a fool.
When you say she's looking good
She acts as if it's understood,
She's cool-ool-ool-ool-ool -
Gir-ir-irl.
Was she told when she was young
That pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back
To earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
Ah, gir-ir-irl.
Another of the so-called "comedy songs", "Girl" contains more or less veiled jokes such as Lennon's sharp intake of breath after singing "Oh, gir-ir-irl" which was an unmistakable sound of pot smoke being sucked into the lungs. Smoking marijuana had become an all but daily practice with the lads by late 1965 and all of them but Paul had taken LSD at least once. The liberation of the artistic spirit is hinted at even on the cover of the album. Beneath the album title, which was rendered in weirdly elongated, puffed-out letters, a photo of the four Beatles showed each of them with substantially longer hair and John and Paul with knowing looks of private amusement. Tilted diagonally on the page, the photo stretches the faces of the four guys as if to emphasise a transformation the use of the mind-expanding substances had set in motion.
Another mischievous joke is that "Girl" features background vocals repeating the word "tit" over and over. However, because the two pranks succeeded first and foremost on the musical grounds, many listeners never realized quite what they were hearing.
Apart from a dig on Christianity in the last verse, all Lennon ever commented on in this song was that he "was hoping for a woman who could give me what I get from a man intellectually. I wanted someone I could be myself with". However, the girl in the song is far from ideal. She's heartless, she's conceited and she humiliates him. Perhaps there are two girls in the song: the dream girl in the first half, whom he appears to be almost addicted to, and the nightmare girl in the second half who holds him up to ridicule.
If so, the first girl bears the stamp of the La Belle Dame archetype which had already emerged in Lennon's song earlier the same year under the title "Yes, It Is". The lyrics is a warning to a girl not to wear red because it's the colour that the singer"s "baby" always wore. There the feminine ideal is the reflection of the personal uniqueness of the singer he has felt since childhood and what prevents him from loving an ordinary woman to whom the song is addressed is pride in his singularity, personified in the mirror-image Ideal. The songs title can thus be heard as an acknowledgement of this obsession, by which its author, on his own admission, felt both exalted and bound.
If these are the generic origins of the dream-girl in "Girl" inspired by the early death of his beautiful, red-haired, free-spirited mother, then the nightmare girl of the song represents a sinister, fatal idol, whose power is often equated to death, the supreme consummation of desire. "Every woman is as bitter as gall. But she has two good moments: one in bed, the other at her death". ("Всякая женщина зло, но дважды бывает хорошей: либо на ложе любви, либо на смертном одре.") These lines from Palladas, the 5th century AD poet from Alexandria, Mérimée takes as an epigraph to his novella called "Carmen".