You Can't Do That

"Now and Then" makes a case that the surviving Beatles should probably just let it be.

Nov 09, 2023

Call me a purist, call me a Grinch, call me a taxi, but Frankenrock, of which the newly released “final” Beatles song “Now and Then” is the latest example, leaves me colder than an exploited corpse. And the video for “Now And Then” is something even more unsettling: A corpse jolted with electricity into a misshapen parody of human life. To paraphrase the young George Harrison, it is “dead grotty.”

The term “Frankenrock” is my personal coinage for recordings that resurrect deceased pop stars or pop groups by updating old, unreleased tracks with newly recorded material, the better to profit off our nostalgia for simpler times and tunes. As for “Now and Then,” if you’ve been avoiding the many, many opinion columns written in the past week by aging white Boomers who look exactly like me, here’s the gist: A 1977 home demo of an unfinished song left behind by the late John Lennon was initially fiddled with in 1995 by the surviving three members of the Beatles, around the same time as the first Frankenrock singles “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” were readied for the “Beatles Anthology” project. At that time, “Now and Then” was shelved because of the poor quality of the original tape and because George Harrison thought the song was “fucking rubbish.” Fast-forwarding to three decades later, the “de-mixing” technology that enabled the separation of sound for director Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary brought Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Giles Martin (son of Beatles producer George Martin) once more into the studio to take another whack at filling the song out, accompanied by a studio orchestra and discreet pilfering of background harmonies from earlier Beatles songs “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Because.”

The reasons for “Now and Then” appearing at this juncture are of course commercial: The group’s 1973 compilations “1962-1966” and “1967-1970,” better known as the “Red” and “Blue” albums, are being re-released with fresh re-mixes and additional tracks, and, as with “The Beatles Anthology,” a re-animated “new” track is crucial to spreading the word. That this is being billed as the really, definitely, absolutely last recording that features all four members of the most important pop group of the 20th century is a cue for another round of navel-gazing punditry from the journalistic generation that perfected it. (Full disclosure: I am a card-carrying if late-arriving member of that generation.)

How’s the song? It’s sweet, inconsequential, ephemeral. The hook’s nice. Lennon’s home-recorded vocals float dreamily along the top of the production, sounding slightly more present than in “Free as a Bird” but still a ghost in the machine of our collective memory, as if he were singing to us from the Bardo. You can feel the stitches in the production when the strings come swooping in, or the keening slide guitar that sounds like George but is in fact Paul. If this record were from any other group, it would be absorbed into the culture unnoticed. But it’s not from any other group. It’s from the band that synthesized and catalyzed the many strains of post-WWII rock and pop into a juggernaut that rewrote the values of popular culture for the remainder of the century. And the fact that the new song is a group effort – even if that effort straddled decades, studios, and the chasm separating the living from the dead – allows us to touch what the Beatles meant to us as a generation and as individuals. “Now and Then” is a time machine calculated to return us to our youth for what’s being billed as one final time.

But it doesn’t, not really. Frankenrock is a construct, half wish-fulfillment and half late-stage capitalism, and it exists because the market of popular culture is so youth-centric that older audiences will always pay to be reminded that at one point they mattered and younger audiences will be flattered to be part of a historical continuum. Anyway, the Beatles have been much on my mind of late: I recently reviewed a new George Harrison biography for the Washington Post, which prompted a happy re-wallowing in the collected works. My own generational positioning is very precise and it matters to the way I venerate the Fabs: As the 6-year-old baby brother of two older sisters – the eldest 12, and thus at the center of the storm – I saw the Beatles as conquering heroes that utterly transformed the “grown-up” older kids I knew. They were funny and confident; their songs lifted our transistor radios and plastic bedroom record players into new sonic life. For the next six years, the group was the North Star around which the endlessly progressing, breathlessly exciting youth culture of my older siblings and then my own revolved. They were the exact opposite of mummification.

So, yes, the Beatles Frankenrock singles to me are a conceptual abomination, even as I accept them as other people’s nostalgic necessity. The video for “Now and Then,” by contrast, is just an abomination. As cobbled together by Peter Jackson, it overlays new footage of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr over 1990s footage of the two plus George Harrison over 1960s footage of the whole group, together and piecemeal. Young Paul plays guitar next to old Paul. John, in “Sgt. Pepper”-era regalia, seems to have been copy-pasted in, waving his arms and jumping about in vague time to the music, as though his face had been glued to a child’s jumping jack. It’s the worst sequel to “Weekend at Bernie’s” ever contemplated and a neutering of John’s bristly rebelliousness that borders on the obscene.

But people lap it up – read the teary comments under the video on YouTube – so what do I know? I guess there’s just a small subsection of us who are genetically resistant to pop-culture resurrectionism, and who regard it as a ghoulish pandering to a moment that once mattered precisely because it was so irreducibly alive. I recall seeing the film “Yesterday” a few years back – the comedy-drama about the guy who wakes up in a universe where the Beatles never happened – and my Boston Globe editor, who was with me at the screening, was offended unto outrage by the scene involving an aged John Lennon, played by an actor whose face had been digitally altered to more closely resemble the late musician. I shared his anger, and wondered in my review what Lennon himself might have said about being so tenderly, gruesomely brought back to life for a movie’s sentimental brownie points. I doubt it would be pretty. As for the new song, I prefer to imagine there’s no “Now and Then.” It’s easy if you try.

I know you have an opinion on this, even if it’s just that I’m a cranky old man yelling at clouds, so by all means bring it on.

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