The White Album 50 Project: "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"

This track from the Beatles' White Album could very well be the first animal-rights song.

Written mainly by John Lennon, "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" concerns an American who goes on a tiger hunt. The song begins with an ironically haunting riff - a mellotron line programmed to sound like a flamenco guitar.  Against the backdrop of creeping, demented folk music that suggests a sense of dread, Bill goes out into the jungle riding on an elephant with his mother, sees a tiger charge toward them, and shoots him dead.  Questioned by the children in a local village for his barbaric act, Bill defers to his mother, who defends him by claiming that Bill shot the tiger in self-defense, an excuse that doesn't satisfy anyone.  The verses lead into the boisterous, mocking chorus of "Hey, Bungalow Bill - what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?", leaving Bill deservedly shamed and ostracized.

Bungalow Bill, it turns out, is a real person - Richard Cooke III, a young American who visited his mother Nancy while she was at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's retreat at the time the Beatles were there studying Transcendental Meditation.  Nancy's own motives for studying with the Maharishi were viewed with suspicion by the Beatles and everyone else in the ashram - she seemed to be more of a tourist than a transcendentalist - and her son didn't fit in at all.  A clean-cut, all-American, Big Man On Campus type, he looked like a member of Young Americans for Freedom or a youth volunteer for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign.  As an all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son, he clashed with the Beatles' hippie vibe.  He and his mother really did go on a tiger hunt, and he did shoot and kill a tiger; he was so proud of his feat, he had this picture taken of himself and his mom with the dead tiger!

If Facebook had been around in 1968, Cooke might have posted it on his timeline as an act of cyber-bravado.

Although the hunt had been organized in an effort to keep tigers from terrorizing the local village and the villagers' elephants, Cooke still felt guilty for killing the tiger and confided in the Maharishi.  The guru became visibly angry as Cooke told him what had happened while John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat by and listened in.  When Cooke expressed his regret, the Maharishi responded in an admonitory tone.  "You had the desire, Rik," he said, "and now you no longer have the desire?"  John Lennon found Cooke's act destructive of life, and the Maharishi agreed - "Life destruction is life destruction!"  At that point, Cooke claimed self-defense.  "Well, John," he told Lennon, "it was either the tiger or us. The tiger was jumping right where we were."

Yes, "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" is an animal-rights song, and it deliciously skewers hunters for their cruelty.  In fact, I sometimes think that Brigitte Bardot - animal-rights activist extraordinaire and John Lennon's teenage crush - must have loved it.  But it's more than that.  It's also a pointed satire on machismo as defined by acts of violence, and it particularly singles out the American penchant for idolizing avatars of killing as iconic symbols of manliness.  American illustrator Seymour Chwast's interpretation of "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" (below) was pretty much spot-on.

"The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" appropriately took its title and its protagonist's name in part from a play on the name of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody, whose Wild West Show included a re-enactment of the Battle of Little Bighorn, at which another all-American bullet-headed anti-hero, George Custer, made his Last Stand.  (The reference to a bungalow acknowledges the fact that everyone at the Maharishi's retreat stayed in bungalows.)  But there are other examples of such machismo in American history - most notably Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, who fit the Bungalow Bill-type mold perfectly.

A symbol of masculinity and vigor, Roosevelt was an avid hunter.  After he left the White House in 1909, Roosevelt traveled to Africa and went on a safari with his son Kermit and several others; the hunters killed no fewer than 512 animals, with T.R. killing 296 animals alone.  The comparison to Donald Trump's two oldest sons and their hunting trips is inevitable. (Even though Trump has loosened hunting regulations as President, he's made it clear that he personally doesn't like hunting and doesn't see the sense in it.)  For Roosevelt, hunting was part of his world view, a regrettably American world view of dominating everything that can be controlled.

"Roosevelt was a man who had a very clear and very gendered view of nationalism and good citizenship," historian Sean Munger wrote.  "Americans, at least American men, were active, adventurous, fearless, at home in the outdoors and the wilderness, and were always exerting control over their environment. He believed this was the role of the United States in the world too."  Roosevelt demonstrated that belief as early as 1898, when he successfully led American troops in the war against Spain for domination of the Caribbean region.  This belief in American imperialism, the successor to the manifest destiny that virtually destroyed the American Indians, has continued to define the United States to this day.  (That's why this Beatles song is a "continuing story.")  Roosevelt's bravado was in stark contrast to Ulysses S. Grant, an earlier President who had become a reluctant hero in a far bloodier war.  Grant traveled the world after he left the White House, and he happened to stop in Jaipur, India, where the local maharajah organized - you guessed it - a tiger hunt in the former President's honor, but Grant declined to take part.  "Twice in my life I killed wild animals," Grant once said, "and I have regretted both acts ever since."

The Maharishi may have forgiven Richard Cooke, but John Lennon was disgusted with the arrogant Yank, as his snide vocal on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" demonstrates.  Yoko Ono sings the role of Bill's mother, and when she insists that the killing of the tiger was in self-defense because the tiger "looked so fierce," John chides Bill's mum for having "butted in."  And of course, it's a weak argument, because a tiger's fierce look isn't lethal.  "If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him?"  But looks don't kill, do they?  (The chorus includes all four Beatles, Yoko Ono, and Ringo Starr's then-wife Maureen.)  John exposes American machismo for the cartoonish charade it is, chiding Bill for needing his mother to save him from "accidents" (like doing it in his pants after saying it when it happens) and naming his gun Captain Marvel ("Say hello to my little friend!"), who saves the day for the white man.

Real men, Lennon knew, love animals.

Both the big cats and the small cats.

Richard Cooke (below, today) never went hunting again.  He's a freelance photographer who has worked for the National Geographic Society.  Now he only shoots things with a camera.

Still relevant in these days of hunters showing off their kills on social media, "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" was relevant in a very different way when it came out on the Beatles' White Album in 1968.  It was released in the same year as the premiere of The Green Berets, a pro-Vietnam War movie starring and co-directed by John Wayne - the very definition of Hollywood machismo - even as Americans were turning against the war.  And the song's chorus - "Hey, Bungalow Bill - what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?" - sounds suspiciously like a chant heard on American college campuses directed toward President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 - "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

"The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" ends with sarcastically polite applause - seemingly beamed in from a cricket match - to the tune of a forlorn trombone line produced by a mellotron. Eh up!