Mama’s (lost) boys

MANILA, Philippines - The Beatles firmed up to band as a rock ’n roll group as the mother of John Lennon and Paul McCartney passed on when they were teens and the hybrid music turned the medium of their discontent.

Rock ’n roll was the race music, which the older generation of Whites disliked because it was initially considered as Black music and had strong associations with sex. Disc jockey Alan Freed gave this hybrid music a name, “rock ’n roll,” which means to dance and have sex (roll was an abbreviated form of jelly-roll, a Black euphemism for making love). All the wiggling and writhing with the song repelled parents and church leaders.

Rock ’n roll alarmingly promoted sexuality that morality guardians continued to find repulsive, along with the kind of lifestyle that it bred. Jerry Lee Lewis married his minor cousin, while Little Richard capitalized on his homosexuality for that rock ’n roll difference. With such negative role models, who would not fear the “devil’s music” as they denigrated rock ’n roll at the time?

Lennon came from a dysfunctional family. When his father, Alfred, abandoned him as an infant, his mother, Julia, left him to the care of a childless aunt, Mimi Smith, to shack with another man who made her pregnant. Mother and son maintained a fine relationship but when he was 17, a car accident killed her. This led him to resort to disruptive behavior and hooliganism to express unverbalized hatred and loneliness for being an orphan.

He connected with McCartney to form their pre-fame group, the Quarrymen, because he taught him guitar instead of the banjo chords learned from his mother. Lennon accepted Harrison as member because Smith was appalled by his pink shirt and winkle picker shoes.

It might have caused the rascal Beatles, particularly Lennon, to engage in pre-marital sex, alcohol, and drugs but this did not translate into mother hatred in Beatles songs. They were silent about it but expressed it in subtle ways.

Lennon wrote Do you Want to know A Secret, based on a Walt Disney tune Julia had  sung to him as a child because he made a mother out of girlfriend Cynthia Powell by impregnating her. Lennon used nursery rhymes to evoke his lost childhood.

He sings, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than see you living with another man” in Run for Your Life as an indirect reference to his mother who ran away from him for another man, a slip of his unconscious mind.

In In My Life, he warbles about missing “friends and lovers who have gone and some have changed,” but not his mother, or for that matter, his father. In Cry Baby Cry, he sings “make you mother cry/sigh.”

Lennon mocked the idea of a mother in Julia, a love song for girlfriend Yoko Ono. He sings, “Julia, Julia, oceanchild, calls me / So I sing a song of love, Julia...” Yoko means oceanchild in Japanese. He used his mother’s name as a ruse to prevent being detected by wife Cynthia about his extra-marital affair with Ono.

McCartney’s mother, Mary, rode a bicycle to her patients’ house “about three in the morning (the) streets... thick with snow” as he recalled when he was 14 and died of an embolism.

McCartney wrote Your Mother Should Know in honor not of his mother, Mary, but his father, James. And that was no fluke. He repeated in Honey Pie. Mother Nature’s Son was clearly not about his mother.

He wrote of a mother as prostitute in Lady Madonna and as a confused maternal personality in Ob-bla-di Ob-bla-da. Hey Jude is a consolation song for Lennon’s son, Julian, for his father separating from his mother in favor of Ono.

But McCartney did write about his mother in Yesterday, widely considered as his best composition, to lament indirectly her passing away. But he did write about her directly in Let It Be, about Mother Mary coming to him in times of trouble “speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”

Ringo Starr was another orphan, not of his mother, Elsie, but of his father when his parents separated when he was a sickly boy, and they divorced. Starr stated that he has “no real memories” of his father.

Only George Harrison was not an orphan but just the same ended up as musical rebels like McCartney and Lennon. But Harrison’s mother, Louise, largely contributed to a predilection for Indian music. While pregnant with him, she listened to Radio India hoping that the hypnotic music of sitars and tablas would pacify the baby in her womb.

True to his universal consciousness, Harrison composed about collective love but never about love for his mother. Long Long Long has lyrics not about his wife Patti but God. When he wrote Something, he was not thinking of the mother of son Danni but Ray Charles from whose song Georgia he rehashed in the song.

So that when Lennon had to pour out all his emotional pain as part of this Primal Scream therapy after breaking up the Beatles, his mother was first subject. He opens the John Lennon album with the Plastic Ono Band with “Mother” that opens with the repeated tolling of a church bell, followed by pained screams: “Mother, you had me / But I never had you / I wanted you / But didn’t want me.” In the fade out, he pleads, “Mama, come home.”

The Beatles, as expected, reinvented what William Wordsworth wrote as “the Child is Father of the man” by practically reversing that a mother’s nurturing role or its lack takes a more important part as grown-up men.

The Beatles music revolution would have not been possible without mothers.