Beatles - 1

Since this blog is named after a Beatles song, I think that I should be writing about the Beatles.

I didn’t know that they re-issued all the Beatles’ albums until I was looking through my favourite music online magazine (OK not my favourite, but it’s one of the most complete ones) and found it chock full of Beatles reviews. I’m not surprised at the release date of the re-issues: 9/9/09. Nine was John Lennon’s favourite number. He wrote “Revolution No 9”, which is actually the most atypical Beatles song of them all.

It’s possible that nobody ever dominated an art form the way that the Beatles dominated pop music.
However, not everybody is that crazy about the Beatles. Once, my sister (one snippet of history: we used to quarrel all the time but she became good friends with me when she found out how fantastic my music collection was) asked me, “you know, I like the Beach Boys and the Kinks more than the Beatles. I always had a few songs I really liked. This isn’t true of the Beatles.” OK, fair enough. Then I remember something my school buddy said years ago when we were discussing music: “Why do people worship the Beatles and why do they worship Shakespeare? I don’t see anything really great about those two. People only regard these guys highly because everybody are sheep.” (My friend despised people who followed the crowd and a lot of that rubbed off on me.)

I don’t know about Shakespeare, but I can say this about the Beatles. Both their statements are not wrong. None of my favourite albums are by the Beatles. But I can still understand why they are the greatest pop group of them all.

Reason number 1: they meant something to everybody.
The Beatles may not have written your favourite songs, but they have produced something for every segment of the market you could possibly think of. Teen bopper? (“Please Mr Postman”) Straight forward pop? (“Help!”) Broadway show tunes? (“Til There was You”) Rock and Roll? (“Rock and Roll Music”) Brill Building? (“Baby It’s You”) Folk? (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”) High school reunion music? (“In My Life”) Romantic ballads? (“And I Love Her”) Drug music? (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) Hard rock? (“Come Together”) Punk? (“Helter Skelter”) Blues? (“Yer Blues”) Surrealism? (“Strawberry Fields Forever”) String Quartet chamber music? (“Eleanor Rigby”) Nursery Rhymes? (“Ob la di, Ob la da”) Funeral music? (“Let it Be”) Acoustic Ballad? (“Blackbird”) Romantic ballads? (“Something”) Heartbreak song? (“Yesterday”)

And not only did they cover a large ground, they often wrote some of the best songs of each genre they were involved with. The Beatles were also the most covered band ever. Apparently there are 1800 versions of “Yesterday” recorded. This is probably a record. In a way, the Beatles were everywhere. In another sense, they are invisible. Most songs are distinctive enough that the identity of an artist is forever associated with the song. For many Beatles songs, there are many instances where anybody could have taken that song and made it their own. Perhaps this is one of their weakness: many of their songs lack the distinctive force of personality of the artist. But it is also a strength, that each song exists in its own right, rather than sounding like a “typical Beatles song”. There are no typical Beatles songs.

Nirvana wrote “I Hate Myself And I Want to Die”. Oasis wrote “Live Forever”. These are 2 of the 90s bands which most consciously take the mantle of the Beatles, although other than having a lot of loud guitars, they have nothing else in common. Frank Sinatra was famously contemptuous of rock music: he covered “Something”. Classical music fans usually turn their noses up at most of pop music, except at the Beatles.

Reason number 2: They were extremely popular
There are only a few names which have completely dominated pop music for a short period of time. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. The Beatles. Michael Jackson. That’s about it. There was 1 week in 1964 when the #5 song, the #4 song, the #3 song, the #2 song and the #1 song were from the Beatles. That is the one and only time it happened in the UK since people kept records.

Reason number 3: They were the typical pop group.
If there is a bible for pop music, it was written by the Beatles. Just as Adam was the archetypal man, the Beatles were the archetypal pop group. Just as many God fearing Christians ask themselves, “what would Jesus do?”, most pop groups ask themselves, “what did the Beatles do?”

Most famous pop groups have their mythology, or famous stories about them. Jimi Hendrix had his setting his guitar on fire, and dying young by choking on his vomit. (The second story has been revised lately: apparently he was murdered.) Cat Stevens had his conversion to Islam. Elvis had his stint in the Army. Sly Stone had his “happy optimistic phase” and his “dark druggy phase” and right in the middle was “Thank You (Fallatinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. Pink Floyd had their crazy diamond Syd Barrett.

But the Beatles had the greatest and richest mythology of them all. It just seemed that they shared DNA with just so many other bands.

4 personalities
To be sure, there are 2 ways of looking at the Beatles. There were 4 people who were close like brothers (and this is a compelling version, because the individual members of the Beatles never achieved as much artistic success as they did while in the Beatles.) The other way is that it was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and 2 others. Both versions are equally valid.

What made the Beatles so compelling collectively is that they were all very different people, but they represented molds that many band members who followed in their wake belonged to. There was John, the fiery, sarcastic and arrogant one. There was Paul, the cute one (but underneath that cuteness was a hugely ambitious social climber). There was George, the shy one but the best guitar player of the lot. There was Ringo, who was exceptional because, even though he is quite the solid, dependable drummer, is the least talented of the bunch.

Think about the Smiths: Morrissey is the John Lennon, and Marr is the George. Take That: Robbie Williams is the John, and Gary Barlow is the Paul. U2: Larry Mullen is the Paul, the good looking one. Bono is the John, The Edge is the George, and Adam Clayton Jr is the Ringo. The Police: Stewart Copeland is the John, Sting is the Paul, Andy Summers is the George.

We know that sweet and sour is a great combination. Paul was sweet and John was sour. They needed each other: John was the cutting edge, and Paul was the one who appealed to the masses. Although Paul has a quite an unfair reputation for being a conservative, and the less artistic one, in fact his best songs had an artistic sophistication beyond what John was capable of. But you always could rely on John to come up with a crazy artistic concept. It was quite apparent to both of them right from the beginning that they needed each other.

John Lennon was the id, Paul McCartney was the ego, and George Martin, who was their producer, and who had the best musical background, was the superego. The Beatles were also very interesting because they had a two headed leadership. No one personality dominated the band, so you could see more than one facet of the many-headed monster.

The other two? George was no slouch. He was not a Clapton or a Hendrix, but he could play a mean guitar all the same. He was ambivalent about fame. Ringo Starr bore the fame with equanimity, although they had to deal with less than John and Paul. But they were famous together, they were the Fab Four, so they had to deal with it. And they were all level headed enough to be good at dealing with the pressures of fame. I think they were important because their presence turned the Beatles into a family. The other two more famous ones could always rely on them, until the end. Come to think of it, the big irony of the Beatles is that John Lennon, the first Beatle, and the leader in the beginning, was the one least able to deal with the fame.

They all had their turns at the mike. They also wrote a song about friends that never leave you in spite of your inadequacies, and not surprisingly they let Ringo sing it. The Beatles were a very effective unit because of their contrasting and complementary personalities.

Art School
It has become a truism that bands come from Art School. John Lennon couldn’t fit in anywhere, so he went to Art School. Paul McCartney was good at school, but it all went downhill after he joined the Beatles. It was just as well that they all had a sense of aesthetics: appreciation of beauty is something that is rarely confined to any one art form. This brings us to another great cliché of bands: the ones who were with them at the beginning, but left before they became famous.

The could-have-beens
There were 2 more Beatles: Stu Sutcliffe, and Pete Best. Sutcliffe was John’s art school classmate, and a talented artist in his own right. He imparted a sense of aesthetics to the band, and helped shape their early image, in the style of the Rockers. But he died young. In any case, he wasn’t terribly talented in music, and he plonked along on his bass guitar. He didn’t get along with Paul McCartney, since both of them were vying to be John’s number two. Eventually he knew that he didn’t belong there, and he left the band.
Pete Best was another story. He was a drummer, and the most handsome of the four. He played with them throughout the Hamburg days, but he was sacked, almost on the eve of the Beatles getting popular. No reasons were given, but a few have been suggested: he didn’t fit in, he was too handsome and popular with the girls, and Ringo was simply a better drummer.

Needless to say, the early band members who didn’t make it are part of the rock band tradition.

The pub band
The Beatles paid their dues before getting famous. John Lennon formed his own band in his teenage years, and for a long time, was the only competent member of the band, until he met Paul, and shortly after that, George. It’s another tradition that even the greatest bands have humble beginnings. But that is not always true: there are bands formed by members who were already famous: these bands are called superbands. Examples are Led Zep, Emerson Lake Palmer, and Traffic.

Hamburg
The rite of passage for a band is that they play on the road, overworked and underpaid, while they earn their experience points. Nobody could accuse the Beatles of not paying their dues. They also first became stars of the pub circuit in Hamburg, before making it big back at home in Liverpool, and like so many other bands after them, first made it big overseas before a triumphant homecoming.

Record Company Rejections
Before the internet, and before punk, you had to sign with a major label if you had any hope of making it big. The Decca audition was infamous because they went down to the label, made a few cuts over a few days (some of which were below their best) and the record company listened to them and decided they weren’t good enough, and anyway boy bands were on the way out. This has gone down in history as the biggest mistake ever made by any record company executive.

The Manager
The Beatles had one of the more colourful managers. Brian Epstein was different from the Beatles in so many ways: he was a son of a rich man, Jewish, and gay. He was gay at a time when it was not acceptable to be gay – the gay movement would only come up in the 1970s. He saw them while they were performing in Liverpool and got so turned on that he decided he was going to manage them. He was instrumental to their early success, promoting them as a cute boy band, and shaping their image. However his role became more and more marginal as the Beatles started to grow in other directions.

John Lennon was famously contemptuous of him, and treated him cruelly, although Epstein seemed to enjoy the sadomasochism of it all. When singing his song from “Magical Mystery Tour”, John allegedly sang “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew” instead of “Baby you’re a rich man, you”.

In the end, his behaviour became more and more volatile, and his drug taking spiraled out of control, aided by his anxiety that he was being cut out of the decision making process. He overdosed on drugs and died. His death was a big shock to the band, but in the long run, it resulted in their taking over their own management. They were quite incompetent at managing their affairs, and this was the beginning of the end for the Beatles.

In the wake of their breakup, their affairs were in such a mess that it took years of lawsuits to sort everything up. This state of affairs was the main reason why it took so long to remaster all of the Beatles’ stuff.

Beatlemania
It was crazy, as was said earlier. The enduring image of the Beatles is of 4 guys being mobbed by fans wherever they went, of teenage females going crazy and fainting, of their having to sneak out of back doors to avoid being mobbed by crazy fans. In the middle of their career, they quit playing live for good.

Their relationship with the media evolved, as was the case of many of their peers. The press, in their early days were greatly supportive of the Beatles. But as time went by, they started getting hounded by the media. John Lennon took the brunt of it, for his statement about being “more popular than Jesus”, and for his relationship with Yoko Ono.

Many bands that followed would follow this script: the initial euphoria of fame, giving way to the cracking up under the pressure. The claustrophobic life leading to disenchantment with the high life. The drugs for escape. An initially receptive press that ultimately turns against them.