of rubbish" and a bad choice for a single, adding that "I take the mickey out of myself on the piano and play stuff like this." Writing in the recently launched Crawdaddy!, Paul Williams was also highly critical, saying the song was as poor as Sgt. Barry Sadler's pro-military novelty single "Ballad of the Green Berets". In his review of the Beatles' final concert, held at Candlestick Park near San Francisco on 29 August, Phil Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner rued that the band had failed to play anything from their "new, delightful album" in concert, particularly "Yellow Submarine". In her round-up of the year's pop music for The Evening Standard, Cleave named the single and Revolver as the best records of 1966. Writing in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner described "Yellow Submarine" as "the most flippant and outrageous piece the Beatles would ever produce". Tim Riley views "Yellow Submarine" as the first original Beatles composition on which Starr was able to project his personality, and he admires Lennon's vocal contribution for its abundance of "Goon humor" and for transforming the track into a "sailor's drinking song". Ian MacDonald calls it "a sparkling novelty song impossible to dislike". By contrast, Thomas Ward of AllMusic says it interrupts the "consistent brilliance" of Revolver and while highly effective as a children's song, "after a few listens, it becomes tiresome, just as happens with many of McCartney's other 'fun' songs (such as 'When I'm Sixty Four')." Alex Petridis of The Guardian views "Yellow Submarine" as "lovable but slight" and considers it "faintly mind-boggling" that the Beatles chose the song as the lead side of their first single culled from an album over not just "Eleanor Rigby" but also "Taxman" and "Here, There and Everywhere". Interpretations "Yellow Submarine" received various social and political interpretations in the 1960s. Music journalist Peter Doggett describes it as a "culturally empty" song that nevertheless "became a kind of Rorschach test for radical minds". The chorus was appropriated by students, sports fans and striking workers in their own chants. Doggett cites student protests at Berkeley in late 1966 where demonstrators taunted university authorities and protested against the Vietnam War, using endless choruses of "Yellow Submarine" at the close of each event to state their ongoing determination and emphasise the ideological division. Sociologist and cultural commentator Todd Gitlin recalled that the song thereby became an anthem