Hello Goodbye to Berlin: How the Beatles Peppered the Melting Pot (new book by David Hamm)

Scan the famous faces who populate the Sgt. Pepper album cover and one may seem conspicuous by his absence: Irving Berlin, regarded by many as the father of twentieth century American popular song, fusing together elements of a range of musical genres to pen the opening pages of what we know today as The Great American Songbook.

If you thought that the Beatles - and the rock'n'rollers who came just a few years before in the new form's initial explosion in the fifties - finally did for the tradition spearheaded by Berlin, think again - at least according to this book, in which musicologist David Hamm makes the case for Lennon and McCartney being in a direct line from the composer of Alexander's Ragtime Band. Like the Liverpool pair, he couldn't read music and was an extremely limited pianist who needed to have a special instrument made. His melodies were transcribed by an assistant, Cliff Hess, who would play them again and again while Berlin forumulated the words; Hess's role seems, over time, to have assumed the importance of a George Martin as Berlin moved away from songs intended for vaudeville houses to more sophisticated material - much, Mr Hamm suggests, as the cheerful attack of the Beatles' early songs gave way to more reflective compositions.

It's a neat idea, even though Berlin was chasing a more sophisticated, monied audience whereas the Beatles were looking to find new ways to address an existing audience keenly aware, like the group themselves, that the certainties of the past were being rapidly eroded. Mr Hamm acknowledges this but seems to be arguing that the point is essentially the same: Berlin and Lennon/McCartney alike had an incentive not to repeat the old formulae, to strive to create new forms.

As one rather fond both of Berlin and the Beatles, I was happy to go along with the book's argument for much of the time but by its second section a strange sense of deja vu began to creep in. The parallel is not an exact one but I recall a TV documentary by Howard Goodall which praised the Beatles to the skies for what Goodall considered to be instinctive musical decisions which, by the standards of classical composers, were bold. "Hmm - maybe," I thought ... but as I continued to watch I became aware of a strange absence, of things left unsaid: no reference, even in passing, to Gerry Goffin and Carole King or any of the other Brill Building teams. There seemed to be an assumption on the classically trained presenter's part that the Beatles had appeared from nowhere, as though he s'pected they just growed. Whether or not they could read music, they must surely have absorbed a huge amount about structure from Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller, and others. You'd be kooky, surely, to deny or diminish the Cookies' musical providers; it doesn't make the Beatles' ultimate achievements any less magical to suggest a process of gradual absorption.

In pursuing his argument Mr Hamm becomes guilty of a similar error of omission: not altogether fancifully he imagines Paul McCartney's bandleader father, Jim, introducing his young son to Irving Berlin's music but there is no suggestion that Berlin's inspiration might also have come to the aspiring composer by indirect means, via Brill Building writers or other, older names who might have followed Berlin's lead.

Yet there are undoubted parallels which he does highlight: Berlin, relying on his ear, used to worry that something he had heard somewhere would crop up in his music just as McCartney famously played Yesterday to all and sundry before recording it to make absolutely sure it was indeed an original composition. And just as Ian Whitcomb has seen parallels between Berlin's "come on and hear Alexander's Ragtime Band" and Bill Haley's exhortation to "Put your glad rags on" for "some fun" in Rock Around the Clock, so Hamm (no relation to Charles Hamm, coincidentally author of another book about Berlin) is surely right to make the connection between the bands of Alexander and Pepper:

While both are invitations to hear something new, become part of a different, more select crowd freely submitting to a revitalising, transformative experience, there are, nevertheless, significant differences. Berlin's narrator is more heated - could be said, indeed, to belabour his case:

They can play a bugle call
Like you never heard before
So natural that you want to go to war
That's just the bestest band what am, Honey Lamb

And in his zeal to convert he promises the object of his enthusiastic pitch immediate and direct contact with the fountainhead:

Come on along, come on along
Let me take you by the hand
Up to the man, up to the man
Who's the leader of the band

Unlike the later version of this musical call to arms it is not the bandleader who proclaims his own worth - not that self-advertisement seems necessary with such a smitten proponent.

Despite its partly first person narrative, however, the Beatles' song is an altogether more ironic and distanced affair: "cool" in the emotional sense. Far from proclaiming the band's newness and freshness McCartney (as a seeming compere figure) admits they are been together for twenty years (in a possible echo of the music hall song My Old Dutch, guyed by Peter Sellers in a recording produced by George Martin) and have been

... going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Berlin is an enthusiastic salesman, ushering in a new era; the Beatles, after a mere five years of success, seem jaded, hiding behind a verbal, as well as literal, disguise, are mouthing the cliches of showbiz performers of the previous generation:

It's wonderful to be here
It's certainly a thrill
You're such a lovely audience
We'd like to take you home with us

Yet both these approaches, almost six decades apart, seem right for their respective situations. The Beatles, having long conquered the world, are free to play with their audience without fear of alienating them, just as Lennon's cheeky grin had disarmed the Royal Variety Show audience he calculatedly insulted four years earlier; they are, after all:

The act you've known for all these years

Note that choice of word: "act", not "band." Lennon's interview with Maureen Cleave had already shown the group the dangers which attend being in an unbuttoned state; far better to remain within the brightly coloured tunic, let the uniform do its work.
Berlin, by contrast, was a jobbing songwriter when he penned Alexander's Ragtime Band. It is unlikely that he grasped immediately that he was on the threshold of world domination, but there was a door which he had already nudged a little ajar with his earlier work in several distinct musical fields and in this song, a success far beyond any of his earlier compositions, he seems to be kicking and pushing at it, aware that something unknowable but wonderful must surely lie beyond.

Despite passages such as the above Hello Goodbye to Berlin: How the Beatles Peppered the Melting Pot is ultimately overlong and, in my view, more than a little blinkered; it's a thesis which can't really sustain a book - or not, at any rate, one intended for the Beatles fan with more than a smidgin of existing knowledge. But it does pick up again in the final section where that notion of "Peppering" the musical melting pot comes to the fore in an examination of key figures influenced by the Beatles' output.

Lennon and McCartney may not have been solely reliant on a kind of musical hotline to Berlin, as the author persistently tries to suggest, but there is no doubt that listeners in Britain and America, many of whom were inspired to become songwriters and performers themselves, heard in Lennon and McCartney compositions what an earlier generation had done when first exposed, on both sides of the pond, to the freshness of Berlin's maturing work in the late 1900s and 1910s: words which were both unexpected and right, no longer relying on the cliches of what had gone before, fizzing with a colloquial verve, and framed by subject matter which may not have been new but had never before examined so directly and unflinchingly - but guaranteed, one might say, to raise a smile.

But the promise and appeal of the Beatles wasn't all down to Irving Berlin - or indeed any other musical influence. A 2010 piece in the Guardian by Jon Savage (not mentioned in this book) suggests that part of the sense of "newness" in the Beatles' songs may stem from the Cuban missile crisis, which began four days after Love Me Do entered the charts. And if that sounds a bit like a rough draft of a Larkin poem, consider Mr Savage's main point:

People of all ages were hit by [the crisis], of course, but a significant proportion of young people thought: "If we're all going to be blown up tomorrow, then I'm going to do what I want. The only thing that matters is NOW." If you were young, 1963 felt like a jump cut – from the vestiges of Victorianism right into mass modernity. And it all happened in a flash. Instead of existing in the past, it was time to live in the moment.

The above is not the kind of context for the Beatles' creativity which Mr Hamm has much interest in exploring, although there are impressive passages of close analysis, and the book will undoubtedly send you back to some lesser-known Beatles songs, as if you needed any excuse - and if he also thereby encourages the reader to seek out Irving Berlin's work then perhaps that is no bad thing.

The writer's claims for Berlin's influence may be overstated but, taken all in all, Hello Goodbye to Berlin counts as a pleasing, if occasionally maddening, read: his enthusiasm for certain songs is powerfully expressed even if, at times, those appreciations don't always fit his overall case snugly.

On the whole, then, I'd say give it a go, especially if you are the kind of person in regular need of another "fix" of Beatle-related literature - and do have youtube or sp*tify or equivalent ready so you can explore some of the more obscure Irving Berlin songs mentioned along the way.

He does get it right at the very end, I think, stressing that he is not talking only about the obvious evocations (usually, but not always, by McCartney) of an earlier period, such as Honey Pie or When I'm 64:

It's a state of mind [he concludes], an attitude not confined to any specific musical subgenre in the array of Northern Songs: if pushed, I'd say it's about dignifying and honouring lives which might otherwise go unnoticed, incapable of effecting their own elevation yet in equal need of blessing.

 And he's not entirely without a self-deprecating wit, as he says in a footnote to the above:

One can all too easily imagine what Lennon might have had to say about the expression of such sentiments - not, I stress, the sentiments themselves, which I fancy he would endorse, but the foregoing evidence of the linguistic limitations of an academic who has set himself the impossible task of conveying in sober form exhortations better experienced through the intoxicant of sound:

Let me take you by the hand

I wanna hold your hand

Hello Goodbye to Berlin: How the Beatles Peppered the Melting Pot by David Hamm will be published by Oxford University Press in September.

The article by Jon Savage is quoted at greater length in a post entitled The Atomic Mr Haley and others, readable here.