TWA coming out 11/22/68 is NOT a coincidence. TWA is all about the assassinations of the Sixties and the general murderousness of Amerika.

From the first song “Back in the USSR” (you don’t know how lucky you arrrr, boy): “Flew in from Miami Beach, BOAC/ Didddn’t get to bed last night.” What a coincidence; JFK flew in to Texas (Houston first) from Miami Beach. But the hero of our song is much luckier than our last real President, for HE is back in the USSR, not the US of A. You know, the USA that squandered trillions of dollars of blood, sweat, and tears for absolutely nothing, The Cold War, the non-existent boogyman who had all the Bungalow Bill gun-fetishizers shaking in their knickers. And the morbid irony is that that boogyman USSR was much safer for the goodly creatures, let alone the First Citizen. And they had health care for all their people although most of their land was in the tundra, not the luxuriant temperate and sub-tropical zones. THEY had it hard and WE had it easy, yet they didn’t find it necessary to be Gun-Happy, dumb as dirt, Rocky Raccoon-type Piggies.

Then, if that didn’t break your heart enough, there’s Prudence, that achingly beautiful AMERICAN girl in a wonderfully beautiful world, but she won’t come out and play and take advantage of miraculous nature. Why? Medgar Evers, JFK, MLK, RFK, and about two million Southeast Asians came out to play and look what happened to them. It ain’t safe around those not-see Americans. And just the fear, loathing, and hatefulness in the air is enough to make you want to stay inside.

And on and on. It’s all too much.

When the Beatles hit the States early 1964, it was like flipping a light switch after what was happening around Tgiving 1963. I was there, Western Mass., in Mrs. (Rose) Fitzgerald’s fourth grade class. Scant weeks and months after JFKA, the Fabs hit like lightning. And late 1968 when TWA came out, the record stores couldn’t keep it in stock. The kids STUDIED that album. Even if we didn’t consciously see all the clues in this magna opera, we got the right idea. It was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. The Boom Generation (actually the Beast of Burden Generation) had the number of the so-called Greatest and Silent Generations. Actually the Greediest and Sneering/Smirking Generations.

A lot of people seem to want the playful stuff like Rocky Raccoon, Why don’t we do it in the road, Bungalow Bill off. They say with Lady Madonna, etc. it could have been the best rock album ever. It already was. The point about the White Album has already been made but deserves repeating – it was making the point that it was not Sgt Pepper Volume Two. So the whole concept album thing, the whole we buried the Beatles and now we are Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the whole complexity thing, the elaborate cover, the “over”-production, all of that was to be overturned by the White Album, which appropriately was called sinply THE BEATLES. Sgt was over, it was back to the Beatles.

It was so long because they went on a meditation retreat in India with the Maharishi, Donovan, Mia Farrow, Mike Love of the Beach Boys and a slew of other rock and other celebrities. The environment and the atmosphere was conducive to creativity. The Beatles, the creators of the concept album, was also the first to abandon it, so with the songs not having to be forced into a concept or a common theme, they gave their creativity free reign and returned to England with a huge mixed bag of new material. Then it was just, here it all is – the Beatles. The thing about the contract is crap, the didn’t pay attention to stuff like that.

I read that even Beatles insiders, Apple people, complained that the White Album was thin on good old Beatles rock ‘n’ roll. One of them were saying “It’s not really Beatles music”, to which Paul McCartney replied, “We are the Beatles, we made it, so it is Beatles music. We decide what is Beatles music.

Personally, I think it is a wonderful tribute to a wide range of musical styles, rock, rockabilly, country and western, heavy metal, experimental rock, R&B, soul, pshychedelia, you name it. They should have included You know my name (Look up the number), which would have added jazz. This variety makes the length digestible, unlike the BeeGees copy-cat attempt, Odessa, the “Red Album”, which was all one style and flopped miserably.

So hands off the Great White. There is not one track on there that is not much better than the forgettable rubbish on the radio now. And it is Baby Boomer history. You younger generations go and invent your own music and then you can sit and pull it apart.

TWA was released 11/22/68 in England, the fifth anniversary of the JFK assassination, on purpose I believe. (A sheer coincidence that bugged them, 11/22/63 was also the release date of the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, their first properly produce LP.) The US release for TWA was 11/25/68, five years to the day after Jack’s massive funeral. “Disturbing” for sure, TWA is all about murderous America — Vietnam was at its worst and MLK and RFK had been murdered the previous April and June.

Parody, Satire — Jonathan Swift said, “Satire is the last refuge of a pure heart” and “So many ask me, ‘Why write satire?’ I tell them, ‘How can I NOT write satire?'”

You also hit the mark with, “…what many intelligent listeners realized when TWA came out was that alot of the lyrics and musical send-ups were hilarious!” The secret of the Fabs was Comedy, their Humor. Who else could make funny stories about gun-slinging, idiotic cowards like Rocky Racoon and Bungalow Bill?

Also, you are correct that, “Many intellectual … people embraced TWA enthusiastically where the Beatles would not have grabbed them before.” Very true. And many didn’t know why, consciously. When that album came out, many of my teen-age peers Studied it. They knew there were Clues there.

Another secret of the Beatles was their use of Contrast. Case in point, Revolution #9 preceded by Cry, Baby, Cry and followed by the saccharine Good Night, which translates “Go back to sleep, you dumb whistle-by-the-graveyard Americans.”