The beard of perhaps pop music’s finest songwriter is not an easy one to review. The ‘60s were the original era of trends, and John Lennon’s position as one of the original trendsetters meant that his appearance never stayed the same for long. Like the other beatles, he never allowed his lower face to plateau.
Further complications are added by Lennon’s probable pool of motivations for growing, removing and adjusting his beard. During the early stages of experimentation, the beard probably served as a fashionable trapping and expression of interest in Indian culture and music. By the late ‘60s, however, it seems more likely that it became a side-effect of the sort of politically inspirational inactivity that prompted him and Yoko Ono to protest against the Vietnam War by remaining in bed for a week on their honeymoon, as though spending a honeymoon in bed were a novel idea.
It wouldn’t be ridiculous to argue that Lennon was the beard’s messiah, or, more plausibly, one of a number of them. After over half a century of constant widespread scorn toward even the most juvenile stubble, the impact of the world’s leading icon adopting something that was the serial murder to emerging stubble’s caution-worthy driving offence cannot be underestimated. In fact, along with the other beatles, Lennon was instrumental in establishing the fashion tenet that, for someone’s appearance to qualify as “rock’n’roll”, it must be found un-presentable by elder generations, to the extent that parents sometimes take household sanctions. This contributed to the demarcation of generations by their choice of dress that began in the ‘20s and was accelerated in the ‘50s.
It is, however, very difficult to distinguish the contributions of different ‘60s figures to the process. Seemingly, Lennon and George Harrison were the two beatles most interested in Indian culture, and hence also the religious elevation of beard cultivation that Hinduism and Sikhism encourage, since Lennon visited the suspect Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968 to take a transcendental meditation course under his tuition, and Lennon and Harrison’s songs display much more explicit Indian influences than those of McCartney (with Harrison going to the extreme of learning to play the sitar). However, when Revolver (the first Beatles record whose sound exhibited overt Indian elements) was released in 1966, neither Lennon nor Harrison was showing any sign of sprouting. The relationship between their interest in India and conversion to the sort of razor disenchantment associated with the country was evidently not a straightforward one.
Lennon’s covering seems to have evolved in four stages. These can be approximated as: moustache in 1967; fairly short beard in 1968; long, unkempt beard in 1969; return to the 1968 beard in 1970. It barely needs stating that he remained fastidiously smooth until growing a moustache, or that the short beard occasionally returned in the mid and late 1970s.
The physical differences between his shorter and longer efforts seem to have been largely quantitative rather than qualitative. He did not reserve the privilege of growth for certain follicles at all, and the shape in which his beard grew during each of its stints suggests that trimming, if indeed any took place, was minimal and administered inexpertly. It is noteworthy that, during its first incarnation, Lennon appears to have groomed the hair above it with at least enough care to maintain a rigid centre parting and something approaching a shape, with the beard contrastingly serving as a precursor of the studied disorderliness that his appearance was shortly to assume. By 1969, the anomaly had been resolved, as the beard and hair had learned to coexist with the sort of considerate harmony that Lennon was starting to publicly advocate for humanity with increasing conviction and volume. Moreover, whatever hypocrisy Lennon’s luxurious lifestyle was to betray, given his political message, no such symptoms of insincerity could be detected in the relationship between the respective communities of hair on each half of his head even when he cut both in 1970. His newly tuft-peppered, abruptly-fringed hair was matched impeccably by a beard sufficiently short as to appear patchy, and not distort the boundaries between fertile and arid areas.
The influence of Lennon’s beard on his music can easily be understated. While many of his songs subtly refer to his beard, he occasionally went as far as writing whole numbers exploring his nuanced and artistically fecund relationship with it. In ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey’, from The Beatles (1968), Lennon imparts the euphoric effect, one no doubt reminiscent of his experiences with hallucinogens, that growing his beard has on his mood to his listeners (“The deeper you go, the higher you fly”); captures its paradoxical ability to both conceal, in the case of his physical characteristics, and reveal, in that of his temperamental ones (“Your inside is out and your outside is in/Your outside is in and your inside is out”); and uses the metaphor of common evolutionary origins to express the candid transparency of his relationship with it (“Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey”).
Furthermore, in ‘Come Together’, from Abbey Road (1969), Lennon’s lyrics expose his unease at the memory of the recently resolved tension between his upper and lower regions of growth. Obviously the former is the “old flat top... grooving up slowly”, and the “holy roller” threatening to eclipse its rightful equal by trying to secure Lennon’s trust, as their rightful mediator, by telling him “’I know you, you know me/One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’” (i.e. to grow). The profound influence of the beard on Lennon’s life was, therefore, a source of much inspiration to him.
Although it was indiscreet of Lennon to compare The Beatles with Jesus in 1966, his remark showed precisely the kind of precocity that the band’s music was to become known for; for Lennon’s appearance was later to develop a strong resemblance to many visual depictions of Jesus, and this was due in no small part to his beard. Thus, whether or not it is exaggerative to call Lennon the messiah of the beard, we cannot deny him the accolade that is having had a beard akin to the messiah’s.
No comments:
Post a Comment