Word: ragas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Raga...
...staggering 2,500,000 copies-each a guaranteed package of psychic shivers. Loosely strung together on a scheme that plays the younger and older generations off against each other, it sizzles with musical montage, tricky electronics and sleight-of-hand lyrics that range between 1920s ricky-tick and 1960s raga. A Day in the Life, for example, is by all odds the most disturbingly beautiful song the group has ever produced. The narrator's mechanical progress through the day ("Dragged a comb across my head, found my way downstairs") is tensely counterpointed with lapses into reverie and with chilling...
...from Big Beat banalities came as Tunesmith McCartney began exhibiting an unsuspected lyrical gift. In 1965, he crooned the loveliest of his ballads, Yesterday, to the accompaniment of a string octet-a novel and effective backing that gave birth to an entire new genre, baroque-rock. Still another form, raga-rock, had its origins after George Harrison flipped over Indian music, studied with Indian sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and introduced a brief sitar motif on the 1965 recording Norwegian Wood. Now everybody's making with the sitar...
...record's second act gets the Beatles into deeper, more cross-currented waters. The first number, "Within You Without You" puts forward the Beatle manifesto to the tidal, wave-breaking sounds of an Indian raga. George Harrison chants his message, which is the Quintessence of Hippieism: "About the space between us all... and the love we all could share when we find it." At the end of the song comes a small gale of very self-satisfied laughter, which may be the "straight" people laughing at the idealistic, hippie message, or may just be a transition into the next...
...yoga. The two met in India in 1952, and Menuhin persuaded Shankar to play last summer at the Bath Festival in England. In what both performers termed "an experiment," Menuhin practiced his violin for two days under Shankar's coaching so that he could sit in on a raga. Clad in a raw-silk tunic and sitting cross-legged amid a haze of incense, Menuhin might indeed have passed for a native fidllist, except that he did not rest the head of his fiddle on his toe in the traditional Indian manner...