It was the famous atheist Bertrand Russell who pointed out to Paul McCartney early on that the Beatles needed to bring more attention to the Vietnam war protests and Paul promptly went back to the group and reported Russell’s advice. We will take a closer look at some of Russell’s views and break them down and also take a look at how the Beatles embraced his anti-war message.

The Beatles Rooftop concert

Published on Apr 12, 2015

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BEATLES Live at Hollywood Bowl 1964

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The Beatles – Let It Be (Video Oficial)

The Beatles-Hello Goodbye (Remastered)

Paul McCartney personally visited with the British Philosopher Bertrand Russell who only lived a few feet away in London and the result was the beginning of the Beatles’ anti-war position.

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Probably the greatest debate in the philosophy field was a debate between Fredrick Copleston and Bertrand Russell and here is the link to the audio clip, and transcript.

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How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War

in History, Music, Philosophy| March 10th, 2012 2 Comments

Paul McCartney on Bertrand Russell

The Beatles were so much a part of the youth movement that blossomed in the 1960s that it’s amusing to think that one of the main issues that energized the movement–peace–came to the Beatles through a 92-year-old man.

As Paul McCartney explains in this clip from a January 14, 2009 interview on The View, it happened when he decided to pay a visit to philosopher Bertrand Russell. A co-founder of analytic philosophy, Russell had been a life-long social and political activist. During World War I, he was not allowed to travel freely in Britain due to his anti-war views. He lost his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was eventually jailed for six months for supposedly interfering with British Foreign Policy. After World War II, Russell lobbied strenuously for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the 1960s, he opposed the Vietnam War.

After the Beatles became big in 1963 and 1964, McCartney began taking advantage of his celebrity status by calling on people he admired. In an interview with Barry Miles for the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney describes his meeting with Russell:

Somehow I got his number and called him up. I figured him as a good speaker, I’d seen him on television, I’d read various bits and pieces and was very impressed by his dignity and the clarity of this thinking, so when I got a chance I went down and met him. Bertrand Russell lived in Chelsea in one of those little terrace houses, I think it was Flood Street. He had the archetypal American assistant who seemed always to be at everyone’s door that you wanted to meet. I sat round waiting, then went in and had a great little talk with him. Nothing earth-shattering. He just clued me in to the fact that Vietnam was a very bad war, it was an imperialist war and American vested interests were really all it was all about. It was a bad war and we should be against it. That was all. It was pretty good from the mouth of the great philosopher. “Slip it to me, Bert.”

McCartney reported his experience to the other members of the Beatles, and it was John Lennon who really took the anti-war message and ran with it. For a reminder of those days, watch the video below of Lennon and Yoko Ono at their “Bed-In” for peace in 1969:

John Lennon & Yoko Ono: Give Peace A Chance

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The Beatles were looking for lasting satisfaction in their lives and their journey took them down many of the same paths that other young people of the 1960’s were taking. No wonder in the video THE AGE OF NON-REASON Schaeffer noted,  ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” 

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Francis Schaeffer noted in his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? in the chapter The Breakdown in Philosophy and Science:

In his lecture at Acapulco, George Wald finished with only one final value. It was the same one with which English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was left. For Wald and Russell and for many other modern thinkers, the final value is the biological continuity of the human race. If this is the only final value, one is left wondering why this then has importance. 

Now having traveled from the pride of man in the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would have been no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must “leap upstairs” against their reason and try to find something which gives meaning to life, even though to do so they have to deny their reason. 

Charles Darwin pictured below:

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Recently I read this book Darwin, Francis ed. 1892.Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition]. London: John Murray. It included this quote from Charles Darwin:

“…It is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful…”

Francis Schaeffer commented:

Here you feel Marcel Proust and the dust of death is on everything today because the dust of death is on everything tomorrow. Here you have the dilemma of Nevil Shute’s ON THE BEACH. If it is true that all we have left is biological continuity and biological complexity, which is all we have left in Darwinism here, or in many of the modern philosophies, then you can’t stand Shute’s ON THE BEACH. Maybe tomorrow at noon human life may be wiped out. Darwin already feels the tension, because if human life is going to be wiped out tomorrow, what is it worth today? Darwin can’t stand the thought of death of all men. Charlie Chaplin when he heard there was no life on Mars said, “I’m lonely.”

You think of the Swedish Opera (ANIARA) that is pictured inside a spaceship. There was a group of men and women going into outer space and they had come to another planet and the singing inside the spaceship was normal opera music. Suddenly there was a big explosion and the world had blown up and these were the last people left, the only conscious people left, and the last scene is the spaceship is off course and it will never land, but will just sail out into outer space. They say when it was shown in Stockholm the first time, the tough Swedes with all their modern  mannishness, came out (after the opera was over) with hardly a word said, just complete silence.

Darwin already with his own position says he CAN’T STAND IT!! You can say, “Why can’t you stand it?” We would say to Darwin, “You were not made for this kind of thing. Man was made in the image of God. Your CAN’T- STAND- IT- NESS is screaming at you that your position is wrong. Why can’t you listen to yourself?”

You find all he is left here is biological continuity, and thus his feeling as well as his reason now is against his own theory, yet he holds it against the conclusions of his reason. Reason doesn’t make it hard to be a Christian. Darwin shows us the other way. He is holding his position against his reason.

Francis Schaeffer noted that in Darwin’s 1876 Autobiography that Darwin he is going to set forth two arguments for God in this and again you will find when he comes to the end of this that he is in tremendous tension. Darwin wrote, 

“At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons.Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to, …to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become COLOUR-BLIND.”

Francis Schaeffer remarked:

Now Darwin says when I look back and when I look at nature I came to the conclusion that man can not be just a fly! But now Darwin has moved from being a younger man to an older man and he has allowed his presuppositions to enter in to block his logic, these things at the end of his life he had no intellectual answer for. To block them out in favor of his theory. Remember the letter of his that said he had lost all aesthetic senses when he had got older and he had become a clod himself. Now interesting he says just the same thing, but not in relation to the arts, namely music, pictures, etc, but to nature itself. Darwin said, “But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions  and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…” So now you see that Darwin‘s presuppositions have not only robbed him of the beauty of man’s creation in art, but now the universe. He can’t look at it now and see the beauty. The reason he can’t see the beauty is for a very, very , very simple reason: THE BEAUTY DRIVES HIM TO DISTRACTION. THIS IS WHERE MODERN MAN IS AND IT IS HELL. The art is hell because it reminds him of man and how great man is, and where does it fit in his system? It doesn’t. When he looks at nature and it’s beauty he is driven to the same distraction and so consequently you find what has built up inside him is a real death, not  only the beauty of the artistic but the beauty of nature. He has no answer in his logic and he is left in tension.  He dies and has become less than human because these two great things (such as any kind of art and the beauty of  nature) that would make him human  stand against his theory.

[From a letter dated August 11, 1918 to Miss Rinder when Bertrand Russell was 46]

It is quite true what you say, that you have never expressed yourself—but who has, that has anything to express? The things one says are all unsuccessful attempts to say something else—something that perhaps by its very nature cannot be said. I know that I have struggled all my life to say something that I never shall learn how to say. And it is the same with you. It is so with all who spend their lives in the quest of something elusive, and yet omnipresent, and at once subtle and infinite. One seeks it in music, and the sea, and sunsets; at times I have seemed very near it in crowds when I have been feeling strongly what they were feeling; one seeks it in love above all. But if one lets oneself imagine one has found it, some cruel irony is sure to come and show one that it is not really found.
The outcome is that one is a ghost, floating through the world without any real contact. Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God and to refuse to enter into any earthly communion—at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was a God. It is odd isn’t it? I care passionately for this world, and many things and people in it, and yet…what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I don’t believe there is. I am haunted—some ghost, from some extra-mundane region, seems always trying to tell me something that I am to repeat to the world, but I cannot understand the message. But it is from listening to the ghost that one comes to feel oneself a ghost. I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom. 

Here below is the song DUST IN THE WIND performed by the rock group KANSAS and was written by Kerry Ligren in 1978. I challenge anyone to  read these words of that song given below and refute the idea that accepting naturalistic evolution with the exclusion of God must lead to the nihilistic message of the song!

DUST IN THE WIND:

I close my eyes only for a moment, and the moment’s gone

All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity

Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind

Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea

All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind

Now, don’t hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky

It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy

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Kansas – Dust In The Wind

Uploaded on Nov 7, 2009

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John & Yoko’s 1969 “Peace for Christmas” Concert and WAR IS OVER! Campaign

On December 15, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Onolaunched their global WAR IS OVER! campaign, protesting the Vietnam War.

On that day, they performed with the Plastic Ono Band at UNICEF’s “Peace for Christmas” concert in London.

Check out photos of the show on Yoko Ono’s Flickr page.

Apparently, UNICEF arranged the performance without telling the performers. John and Yoko were surprised to hear the show announced in November, but they agreed to it because UNICEF’s mission was in line with their own peace campaign.

(Ono and Lennon pose on the steps of the Apple building in London, holding one of the posters that they distributed for the WAR IS OVER! campaign. Photo by Frank Barratt/Getty Images)

Other acts included the Young Rascals, Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Blue Mink and Black Velvet, and Emperor Rosko, but the highlight was the Plastic Ono Band – Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Alan White, Billy Preston, and of course, John and Yoko – and their special guests, Keith Moon, Bobby Keyes, Jim Gordon, and George Harrison.

This marked the first time that Lennon and Harrison performed together in a scheduled concert since The Beatles‘ last show in 1966.

And even that wasn’t planned. The Plastic Ono band was booked, but the day of the show, Eric Clapton showed up with most of the members of The Delaney and Bonnie Band, which included George Harrison.

Luckily, Lennon wasn’t upset by this at all. According to The Beatles Bible, he said,

“I thought it was fantastic. I was really into it. We were doing the show and George and Bonnie and Delaney, Billy Preston and all that crowd turned up.”

The performance itself was one massive supergroup jam. They played only 2 songs – “ColdTurkey” and “Don’t Worry Kyoko” – but managed to stretch them out for 25 minutes. Alan White described it as,

“…a thing where somebody would hit one chord and it was a jam.”

And Lennon described the audience’s reaction,

“A lot of the audience walked out, but the ones that stayed, they were in a trance. They just all came to the front, because it was one of the first real heavy rock shows.”

As part of the WAR IS OVER! campaign, banners were hung in 12 major cities across the world announcing, “War Is Over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”

The photo at the top is from New York. Other cities included Los Angeles, Toronto, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Helsinki, and the banners were all written in the countries’ native languages.

Here’s a bit more about the campaign and his political activism from John Lennon himself:

Yoko Ono is still carrying on the campaign today, with a more crowdsourcing approach. Posters are available to download and print in over 100 languages on the WAR IS OVER! website, and Yoko has taken to social media to push the campaign in a modern age.

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Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Bono and others — “Let It Be”

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100 Greatest Beatles Songs

September 19, 2011

By Elvis Costello

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

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‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’

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‘Abbey Road Medley’

Larry Ellis/Express/Getty Images

Writers: McCartney-Lennon
Recorded: May 6-August 18, 1969
Released: October 1, 1969
Not released as a single

The original idea was McCartney’s, but George Martin claimed that the final triumph of the Beatles’ life as a recording band — the eight-song medley dominating Side Two of Abbey Road — was at least partly his. “I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” the producer said. “Paul was all for experimenting like that.” McCartney, in fact, led the first session for that extended section of the album — on May 6th, 1969, for “You Never Give Me Your Money,” his deceptively sunny indictment of the business nightmares at Apple Corps.

Lennon was a lot less interested in the medley, although he contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering “Mean Mr. Mustard” and the quick, funky put-down “Polythene Pam.” He subsequently dismissed the concept as “junk” in Rolling Stone, saying that “none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together.”

He was right in one sense. The 16-minute sequence — veering from “Money” and the luxuriant sigh of Lennon’s “Sun King” to McCartney’s heavy-soul shard “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and the sweet lullaby “Golden Slumbers,” and closing with McCartney’s famous prescription in “The End” (“The love you take/Is equal to the love you make”) — has no narrative connection. But the Abbey Road medley is the matured Beatles at their best: playful, gentle, acerbic, haunting and bonded by the music. Their harmonies are ravishing and complex; the guitars are confident and cutting. “We were holding it together,” McCartney said proudly. “Even though this undercurrent was going on” — a reference to the pressures and differences that had been pulling them apart since the White Album — “we still had a strong respect for each other even at the very worst points.”

The Beatles recorded the sections of the medley at various times, out of order, during the July and August 1969 sessions for Abbey Road. “Mean Mr. Mustard” dated back to early 1968. The lingering hysteria of Beatlemania cropped up in “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” which was inspired by an overeager fan. But the emotional heart of the suite was the financial woes that were consuming the Beatles’ energy and were on the verge of bankrupting them. Lennon was instrumental in the hiring of Allen Klein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones, to straighten out the books and the chaos at Apple Corps; McCartney wanted the band to hire Lee and John Eastman, his future father- and brother-in-law. McCartney admitted that “You Never Give Me Your Money” was “me directly lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude to us — all promises, and it never works out.”

Later, in “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” (the former with lyrics copied from a lullaby published in 1603), McCartney returned to the theme of exhaustion. “I’m generally quite upbeat,” he said, “but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can’t be upbeat anymore, and that was one of those times. ‘Carry that weight a long time’ — like forever!”

The swapping of guitar solos in “The End” was a band brainstorm. Harrison thought a guitar break would make a good climax. Lennon suggested he, Harrison and McCartney all trade licks. McCartney said he’d go first. Coming after Starr’s first and only drum solo on a Beatles record, the scorching round-robin breaks — with Harrison in the middle and Lennon at the end — were cut live in one take, a last blast of natural brotherhood from a band only months from splitting.

“I didn’t know at the time that it was the last Beatles record that we would make,” Harrison said of Abbey Road. “But it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line.”

“Out of the ashes of all that madness,” said Starr, “that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together.”

Appears On: Abbey Road

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Artist featured today is Nicholas Monro

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The Kangaroos by : Nicholas Monro

Nicholas Monro

Art & The 60s: This Was Tomorrow At Tate Britain

Photo: Joe Tilson (b. 1928) Transparency, the Five Senses: Taste 1969. For full caption see below.

Sara Chare pulled on her mini skirt and swung up to London for Tate Britiain’s latest exhibition all about art and the 1960s.

From the title it would be easy to think that this is just another retrospective of a golden hued bygone era. However, there is something slightly different about Art & the 60s: This Was Tomorrow.

Despite its aim to celebrate a time of great change and artistic growth there is a pervading sense of uneasiness in the art on display.

This thought provoking show will be at Tate Britain until September 26, when it will move to Birmingham’s Gas Hall.

Photo: Patrick Caulfield (b. 1936), Black and White Flower Piece, 1963. Oil on board. Courtesy of the Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the napping Fund 1991 © Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved DACS 2004

Don’t misunderstand me, it is still showcasing the prosperous post-war years when anything seemed possible, but it is also a meditation on the underlying political and social troubles of the age.

Visually the works are very different and each as compelling as the other – there is something here to suit all tastes. The exhibition is divided into sections, each one concentrating on a different theme and, to an extent, medium.

Photo: Richard Hamilton Interior II, 1964. Oil, cellulose paint and collage on board.Courtesy of the Tate. Purchased 1967 © Richard Hamilton 2004. All rights reserved DACS

This is not an exhibition for those wishing to see works by people closely associated with the era, such as Lucien Freud. The aim instead seems to be to concentrate on the emerging artists of the time and the originality of technique and outlook that was being nurtured by the art schools in London.

New methods of making art are displayed, as are models of urban architectural projects.

There are examples of the Americanisation of British culture after the war and the growing consumerism that was celebrated by Pop Art, for example Hockney’s picture of a Typhoo tea packet.

Photography is also represented by a selection of black and white fashion images and David Bailey’s Box of Pin-ups. This was the start of a national obsession with celebrity and iconic figures and there are a number of pictures of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

Photo: David Wedgbury, 1965. The Who (Peter ‘Pete’ Townshend; Keith Moon; Roger Daltrey; John Entwistle) Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London © The artist

Despite all this, the darker side experienced by society during this time has not been forgotten.

The space race, the fear of nuclear threat and the reality of the Vietnam War are all referred to at one point or another. Protest marches are captured on camera and weapons immortalised on canvas.

Equally interesting is the depiction of women in some of the works. The period is held as the age of sexual liberation and the true emancipation of women, and yet this belief is also questioned. There is a sense of contradiction between those pieces showing women as stronger and more in control and those questioning the reality of this new freedom.

Photo: Nicholas Monro, Martians 1965. Painted fibreglass. Lent by Rupert Power © The artist

Art & the 60s manages to achieve a balance between those works that directly challenge the viewer and those that are celebratory and fun.

It is one of the few exhibitions where you have a social commentary that is thrown into relief by such things as sculptures of martians and a cloud machine.

The exhibition is accompanied by a BBC Four TV series of the same name, and courses, workshops, talks and films organised by Tate Britain. There is a live performance by Yoko Ono on September 15 and a talk by Mary Quant on July 2.

Captions

Photo 1: Joe Tilson (b. 1928) Transparency, the Five Senses: Taste 1969Screenprint on vacuum-formed sheet of perspex. From an original photograph by Barry Lategan. Courtesy of the Tate. Presented by Marlborough Graphics through the Institute of Contemporary Prints 1970 © Joe Tilson. All rights reserved, DACS 2004

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 35 Robert M. Pirsig (Feature on artist Kerry James Marshall)