The Baby Rock Band emerges from its musical roots with its own unique interpretation. A learning process starts. The band is coming to terms with a new life, learning how to use their talents as musicians, songwriters, and performers, as well as the tools for recording in the studio; the band is crawling. A give and take starts with the audience and critiques alike. It's a confrontation with a new world that lasts for approximately three albums, until a moment comes in which the band is no longer satisfied, they don't want to crawl any more, they want to stand up and walk. They will have to work at it, approaching the studio and songwriting with substantially different techniques until a breakthrough is made and a fresh set of sounds, words, and melody arises. The impulse is so great that their creative approach lasts them for a while, approximately three albums, but inevitably not everybody will follow along with the band, a big part of the audience and press can't assimilate their every move, and in many cases the band will end up being vilified; so a negative aura entangles them. The band feels tired and is even considering break up as a serious option. Things are getting rotten for lack of movement. But not everything is lost, they give it a chance and take a radical step to shake things up, and that move saves them from break-up and propels them to new creative heights out of which a sound that was impossible to predict is produced.  They are not walking anymore, they are running, and now it's not enough to relate with the audience in the same old way, a new façade emerges to accurately represent the new colors of their music: personas are created, customs exaggerated, irony implemented; It's the band embracing the contradictions that are affecting them. All this has the strength to endure for approximately three albums until the contradictions are finally reconciled, and it no longer makes sense to keep up with the irony, on the contrary, for their next album the band has an urge to go back to basics recording music without ornaments or complications, just as how it was in the beginning, only now they are masters of their craft doing it gracefully without effort...and they fly away.

The paragraph above could be applied to the careers of both, U2 and The Beatles.

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John and Yoko's "Peace Campaign", launched in 1969, is the most ingenious use of mass media ever seen to influence change in the world. This assertion remained true until this past October 13 of 2006, when the "Red Campaign" to fight the global epidemic of AIDS was launched, which matches and surpasses the previous one in intelligence. In fact, both events should be seen as interconnected, one being the precursor of the other. It is truly uplifting to see how Bono and his peers have taken into a whole new level, something that John and Yoko started 37 years ago, not copying it, but re-interpreting it and re-adapting it in a truly visionary manner, which is the reward of many years of work. 

A remarkable trait that both campaigns have in common is the fact that both use the inertia of forces already in action, to benefit aspects of humanity that are being neglected by those same forces. Professor Louis Kaplan writes in his article, "War is Over! If You Want It, John and Yoko's Media"(1): "Rather than reject newspapers and TV as "exclusively instruments of corporate domination," John and Yoko sought "to work within the mass media, to use them, briefly and sporadically, against the system in which they functioned"". And Bono, commenting on the Red Campaign, said the following: "It's judo. It's taking the motion going forward of the American consumer and using it to defend people who don't have the power on their own."

Also, both campaigns meet in the way in which they were are criticized, particularly the artists heading them - John and Yoko in their time, and currently Bono- which have been accused by skeptics of using the media spotlight to advance their own selfish endeavors to make a profit. Gladly, the true audience, which nowadays happens to be the majority, recognizes the cynical nature of those accusations, and to the contrary, wishes to the artists in charge - in this case Bono - that he accumulate the most wealth possible, for they know that it will be put to good use, and this is encouraging for it signals maturity. A maturity that hopefully will lead us one day into seeing real change in our world. This is a process in motion, a process that started when Chuck Berry played the first Rock n' Roll chord in front of a bunch of white chicks, and that will conclude when all humans on earth have a belly full of food and the word bullet will be eradicated from our dictionaries.

As a sider note to all of you analytical-popculture-freaks, like me, haven't you all noticed that both campaigns used the same font?

Abbey Road was the last Beatles album.
Where is U2 at this pointin their career? Are they closing it off as well? 
Or are they at the conjunction of an ending and new beginning?



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Finally, after many previous encounters in which we lightly chatted about our favorite bands, on an august afternoon of 1994, Juan and I, decided to transmit to each other the essence of our Rock n' Roll fanhoods. He was an avid Beatle fan since his early teens, and in my case, the same could be said about U2. He was born in 1951 and I was born in 1972, so an interchange of knowledge between a Baby Boomer and a Generation X'er had been set, but not just a common one. My mother owned the complete Vinyl Beatles collection, which she had purchased in London, and I owned all the U2 albums up to that point. One of us must have suggested that we should use them as visual guides in the telling of our stories, because that is what we ended up doing. Juan was first, I still remember the sight of his hands arranging all the Beatle vinyls in chronological order, and commencing his tale soon after. I listened to his narration while hypnotically staring at the correspondent sleeves, and then something strange happened: it was ‘Sgt. Peppers' turn.

"Moises, what happened with this album - Juan said - was totally unprecedented. This album changed Rock Music immediately upon its release. You could divide Popular Culture between ‘before and after' Sgt. Pepper. The change in sound, composition, and image was totally unprecedented, and a complete surprise for every Beatle Fan, I mean you can easily see it in its album cover." And as he was talking I was getting increasingly anxious because I was recognizing in every one of his words, that my experience as a U2 fan, since Achtung Baby's release, had been exactly the same as the one he had with ‘Pepper'. My heart was pounding, and I don't remember much about how our encounter continued or ended. The next thing I recall is, that same night, alone in my room, staring simultaneously at the covers of Sergeant Pepper and Achtung Baby, thinking that for some reason a cycle was re-occurring. At that moment, it became clear to me that those two albums, at different points in time, played the same role within the followers of each Band. And going along with the heat of the moment, I re-arranged the album covers of both bands in chronological order, with the intention of comparing them, to see if there were any other similarities between them that could be significant. By this point I was exalted, all my senses completely awake, and as I was passing each successive pair of sleeves, I was finding similarities in color, design, or concept. By the time the exercise was over I was convinced that I had discovered something, I didn't know how to express it, but I was certain that it was real, and big. Twelve years of have passed since that initial experience and today my initial vision has slowly evolved into the following hypothesis:

The social phenomenon that we call Rock n' Roll is a process with a purpose. From the moment in which it started until the achievement of its goal, a cycle will be completed through the realization of three successive stages. The first stage is the career of The Beatles; the second one is the career of U2, and for the third and final stage, the career of a Third Band, after which the purpose of the process will be fulfilled, which is plainly: to change the world.

Arriving to this proposition has not been easy and I am certain that it will further evolve over time. At present there are more complete ways of expressing it, but they are also more complicated and not suitable for introductions, so for the sake of simplicity let's keep the one above for the moment.

There have been many ups and downs for me throughout the process of this work, the highs particularly occurring, every time that activity for a new U2 album is under way until it's finally released, moment in which I am able to interpret all the new information and see if it fits with the correspondent Beatle album.  For example, at the time of that fateful encounter between Juan and myself, Zooropa was the last U2 album that had been released and it definitely corresponded in many significant ways to Magical Mystery Tour, so I waited frantically for the next U2 album. As it turned out ‘Passengers: Original Soundtracks' was the U2/Eno release that followed, and it fitted very well with the correspondent one, Yellow Submarine. When comparing both sleeves what stood out for me was the fact that both of them had a ship on it, one of them a submarine - a sea ship - and the other one a space-ship, but nonetheless both were ships, and to me that was significant, but even more so, was the fact that both albums were music for movies in which their long time producers were heavily involved up to the point of being considered the authors of the music as well. And with every U2 album that came out afterwards -Pop, All That You Can't Leave Behind, and How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb- I have gone through the same process of ‘expectation - interpretation - release', each time finding meaningful correspondences with the chronological Beatles counterpart. But then there is gravity! After a High, comes a Low, forcibly. 

In 1997 I published through a website the first version of my findings, and that meant facing up to negative criticism that many times I was not prepared to take, mostly because I suspected it was true. That I am a nut and a freak, that I must have too much time on my hands, that I am seeing things that are not there, that my work is a complete waist of time. And it all took a toll on me pushing me away from the project for long -but necessary- periods of time. Ultimately, certainty outgrew doubt, and more than once, when the contrary was the case, one of those synchronicities of life brought me back on track. Right now, in regards to my work I am at the much-desired point of temperance. The highs are not too high and the lows are not too low. I am just trying to keep it grounded, position that I hope suits me well at this moment, in which a new U2 album is approximating rapidly.

My website, in its current incarnation, is kind of a slide show in which a sequential journey of the histories of The Beatles and U2 is undertaken simultaneously, driven by a search of commonalities in their correspondent album covers, and interpreting them like a person who does the same between two different passages of a holy text. But the effort doesn't stop in a mere matching of covers. It also seeks to show how the turning points -or crisis- in the careers of both bands, happened at the same chronological points, exposing the same pattern of development. At present, all the Beatles albums have already been matched to a U2 counterpart, except the last one, Abbey Road, which my website suggested would have a strong connection with the next U2 release. With the recent developments of U2 entering Abbey Road Studios to begin recordings for their upcoming album, it appears that my prediction has been fulfilled. So it's worth raising the question: Why Abbey Road Studios? Was it just a casual decision for U2? Or are there deeper reasons for wanting to step on Beatle holy ground?  The fact that U2 did those sessions at Abbey Road, as I predicted, seem to validate my proposition:  ‘Rock n' Roll" is a process - in current development - that will accomplish its task of changing the world for the better, only after the completion of three consecutive stages.

I arrived to this conclusion by synthesizing the careers of The Beatles and U2, which are the two bands that have carried on their backs the first and second stages of this Rock n' Roll process. The important thing is that we are witnessing it from within, and we can influence it so that it won't fall apart. My website is designed as a prayer for the Third Band, which is the undertaker of the concluding part of the Journey, and by completing a visit through my website, from beginning to end, you will be praying for them. You will be praying for their career to be completed. So what are you waiting for, just click here and contribute, it will be a fun half an hour.

www.TheEtherealConnection.com
All rights reserved, Copyrigthed by law, 2006.
Quotes only by permission.