1982: A VISIT TO WILLIAM BLAKE'S INN: POEMS FOR INNOCENT AND EXPERIENCED TRAVELERS by Nancy Willard, with illustrations by Alice and Martin Provensen
This inn belongs to William Blake/and many are the beasts he's tamed/and many are the stars he's named/and many those who stop and take/their joyful rest with William Blake
As every parent knows, the best part of raising a child is having a tiny person that you can force to like the same music that you like. I have embraced this opportunity every day since becoming a father. Before my oldest daughter became more insistent and started demanding the Encanto soundtrack on the drive to preschool every morning - not only do I know all of the words to "We Don't Talk About Bruno", but I have trained myself to sing all parts simultaneously like a supercharged Mongolian throat-singer - she got a steady diet of Wilco and Big Thief and The Band and Phish and The Mountain Goats in the car, and every other band that I liked that reliably didn't use decipherable swears in their music; I do think my daughter is still too young to fully appreciate Death Grips. But there's one band she definitely is old enough to appreciate, and folks it's the damn Lads.
While I certainly liked the Beatles' music for many years and enjoyed putting on Rubber Soul on Saturday mornings as much as the next Dad, it was watching all nine hours of the 2021 Peter Jackson documentary Get Back - I assume the original title was Lads Of The Rings - that really sealed my obsession with not just the music of the Lads, but all of their Ladsness as expressed their petty squabbles and stupid in-jokes and revelatory jam sessions and half-assed power struggles. The documentary chronicles the disastrous 1969 recording sessions for what would become Let It Be, the final album that the Beatles would release. They were still in their twenties when they did this, having redefined the entire medium of "popular music" multiple times over already. Is watching nine hours worth of the Lads - who were each kind of checked out in their own way by this point in their career - rehearsing and jamming and dicking around and trying to write songs on the fly, in a desperate attempt to cobble together an album and a live show, even remotely entertaining?
Yes. It's absolutely riveting. You'll cry at the end. Peter Jackson is a genius. The Lads are all geniuses in their own way1. So it became Beatles month in the Ginocchio household pretty quickly after I finished the documentary, and that meant playing the Lads - or their solo stuff2 - in the car constantly, teaching my daughter which album was which, watching the concert scenes from A Hard Day's Night in lieu of our daily Sesame Street, and, of course sitting my oldest daughter down at the piano with me and teaching her how to sing some of the classics, starting with "Yellow Submarine" and working our way up to more complex tunes from there. This led us to the actual song "Get Back" - which I guess is also not that complex, as it only has two chords and there's documentary footage of Paul writing the entire song from scratch and it takes about five minutes - which I have video of me playing on the piano while my oldest daughter sings it. She's so good at it. She rocks in time with the music. She has a great sense of rhythm and pitch, and she was three when we did this. It is, to this day, the first thing I show my friends when I tell them about my kids. Now, I'm not going to put the video here, because as a matter of policy, I never post any photos or videos of my kids online, even though they are incredibly smart and funny and cute and posting about them would easily get me countless "likes" and "follows" on any social media platform. But I choose not to do that for their sake, and in many ways, that makes me a martyr, perhaps even more so than Joan of Arc, martyred in the name of her faith, or Chris Rock, martyred in the name of comedy3.
The point is that we love the Lads in our house, but that can get complicated, because of something I'm about to reveal, something which may color your own enjoyment of the music of the Beatles. What I'm going to say may be upsetting, but please understand that I wouldn't say it unless I felt very sure that it was the truth. Take a deep breath, maybe have a seat, and let's dive in:
It is possible that while the Beatles were making some of their music, they were also using illegal drugs.
Again, I'm sorry that this is now something you cannot un-know. Perhaps you, like me, assumed that the kooky images of "Yellow Submarine" and the plodding repetition of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and the bizarre chorus-less narrative of "Rocky Racoon" were all just products of the Lads having fun discussions on their way home from church. Perhaps you assumed that Rubber Soul being "the weed album" and Revolver being "the acid album" and John being very visibly strung out from heroin use during the Let It Be sessions were just kind of unfortunate coincidences, but no, we have to seriously consider the possibility that at least one - possibly more than one - of the Beatles had tried illegal drugs4, and then in turn allowed the use of those illegal drugs to influence their songwriting and aesthetic and decisions on which songs could benefit from a heavy dose of sitar.
This all takes us to an important parenting question to which every parent must find an answer: how do you talk with your kids about art that is literally trippy? My kids aren't old enough to understand the drug culture of the 1960s and how art reacted to it (and I'm certainly not an expert on the topic). When they see the Chief Blue Meany in Yellow Submarine dispatch the Dreadful Flying Glove (pictured above) after the Lads have waded through the Sea of Time Where Time Flows Both Forwards And Backwards, and they ask me "daddy, what's happening now?", I can't give the honest answer, which is that "look sweetie, at the time, people were doing a lot of interesting things to expand their consciousness". I have to treat this as a story, as a piece of art, that was created without any external help, for storytelling purposes that were 100% serious and sober, which this obviously was not.
But now the time has come to talk about a far older trippy-ass Lad.
Romantic-era poet and artist William Blake, who presumably also could have voiced Mister Conductor if he had lived long enough, was perhaps most famous for his short poems like "Tyger, Tyger burning bright" in collections like Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience. But Blake was prolific across multiple media throughout his life, and late in his career, created the extremely strange "prophetic books", a collection of twelve long poetic works based on a deeply detailed invented mythology, considered nearly indecipherable (although well respected by the academy in English literature), and which Blake appears to have written, illustrated, and printed mainly for himself. I don't know if Blake ever dropped acid, but he did write "continental prophecies" where the main character was Orc, the spirit of rebellion, where free life had to triumph over the strictures of religion and authority, and where Albion the ancient man is divided into four Zoas: your classic Zoas of Tharmas and Urizen, and then of course some of the more niche indie Zoas like Luvah and Urthona. Blake was a weird guy who is widely known for like two short poems, but really spent a large part of his life making bizarre and experimental artistic voyages into the nature of authority and freedom and enlightenment.
Does all of that make you want to imagine what it would be like if this dude ran a hotel and staffed it with dragons and angels inspired by biblical imagery, and then possibly build a six-foot high model of that hotel in your home and then write a book of weird poems about it? Because that's what Nancy Willard did.
1982 medalist A Visit To William Blake's Inn, a short collection of poems that you can finish in about 15 minutes if you're an adult, is trippy as hell. All I could think while working through the book was "this feels like Yellow Submarine". I'm not sure what Willard would have been tripping on, but given that she built a full scale model of the fictional inn while writing her poems, I think we should consider the possibility that it was meth.
Willard, as she states in the forward to her book, was inspired by the "Tyger Tyger" and such poems that she heard as a child, and in terms of form, we get a very clear homage to that slice of Blake's work. But in terms of subject matter and general weirdness, we might be a little closer to something like the prophetic books. These poems are accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Alice and Martin Provensen - the book was also a finalist for the Caldecott medal, which is awarded to the illustrator instead of the author - but they're about, like, a cow eating a cloud before tucking into bed for the night, and The Man in the Marmalade Hat giving us a tour, or the King of Cats joining us on a walk across the Milky Way. These poems are all pleasant enough, but it brings us back to the question: how do you talk with your kids about art that is literally trippy?
Of course, this isn't a unique issue for Willard, plenty of art for children is trippy - you can't tell me One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish was written when Dr. Seuss was 100% sober - and it can all be fun if you go into it with an open mind. Visit isn't for me, but we're still going to blast Revolver in this house.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1966 medalist, I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño.
Although the documentary confirmed for me that the true Top Lad is Ringo, the only Beatle who worked as a musician before becoming a Beatle, and thus the only Beatle in Get Back who consistently showed up on time and was ready to do his job.
The nationally syndicated radio show "Breakfast With The Beatles" will inevitably - inevitably - play solo Ringo every week and say that it's "by request". I used to make the joke that the only person who could possibly be calling in to request solo Ringo would be Ringo himself, and then I'd do an extended act-out of Ringo, making no attempt to disguise his accent, identifying himself as "a normal American music fan who just loves Octopus' Garden" on the phone. I don't make that joke anymore because, as stated earlier, Ringo is the true Top Lad and I regret ever making this joke. Ringo aka Sir Richard Starkey aka Mister Conductor aka The Creator aka Tyler Beaudelaire is also the only Beatle not recognized in the BBC's "100 Greatest Britons Poll", which is messed up. If you're going to leave anyone out, John was the most annoying one.
The exact joke, if I remember correctly, was "Jada Pinkett Smith is bald like that movie G.I. Jane, remember that movie?" The world was not ready for a voice this brave. Rest in peace.
This is obviously in contrast to the other bands I listed earlier, like Phish.