Children of Nature: Origins of the Beatles' Tabula Rasa

When

Thursday April 25, 2019: 7:00pm to 8:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 4th Floor Meeting Room

Description

[Over on A2Pulp.org, watch Walter Everett's previous AADL talks on Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road.]

Walter Everett, Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, returns to AADL to deliver a lecture in honor of the Fab Faux's upcoming performance of the Beatles' "White Album" at Michigan Theater (May 11th.)

The Beatles continually reinvented themselves. In 1966, Revolver announced itself with a warped reinvention of the 1-2-3-4 count-off that had introduced their first album. A year later, for Sgt. Pepper, they created another band in their own image. The slate was wiped clean again with the "White" Album, not only by their desire to return to the natural state sought in their early-1968 Himalayan meditative rituals, but also through their 180-degree turn from the lavish artifice of Pepper, an album high with artistic pretensions, groundbreakingly imaginative lyrics, radically colorful instrumentation, and a deep exploration beyond the limits of four-track recording, its extravagance marked by a groove intended only for dogs, all wrapped in a cover as opulent as it was mystifying. In contrast, the plain white cover of the 1968 double album emblematized the group's return to nothingness just as surely as did their removal of the garish 1967 paint jobs from three of their guitars, now stripped down to bare wood. This new blank slate cast the group not in the austere, somber tones of the With the Beatles cover photo from 1963, but in a new light as if an optimistic eggshell of unlimited possibilities was about to hatch. In this presentation, Everett aims to show that in many ways, a post-India back-to-nature simplicity may be seen to have guided much of the "White" Album's motivational impulses.

Walter Everett is a professor of Music Theory at the U-M School of Music and a world-renowned Beatles scholar whose works include The Beatles As Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, which has been called, "the most important work to appear on the Beatles thus far," and The Foundations of Rock: From Blue Suede Shoes to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

This event is a partnership with the Michigan Theater.