Beatles - 2

The Girlfriend
Every band has a disruptive influence on their music which is blamed for breaking the band up. But seldom has this influence been encapsulated in 1 person: Yoko Ono. She was Japanese. She was an Avant-Garde artist in her own right, and even if she was not as great an artist as John Lennon was, she had a tremendous force of personality, and was a great influence on him. The Beatles always had girlfriends whom they got along with with various degrees of success, but they were second class citizens, and a lot of the time they played a marginal role in the band. This was until Yoko Ono came along.

Yoko Ono was a polarizing figure. Some admired her for being a feminist pioneer. Opinion is divided about how talented she really was. Some were happy that John had finally found the true love of his life. Others despised her for being a talentless groupie, and – well – Japanese. But after she came along, John Lennon broke the golden rule that girlfriends don’t come to the studio. She started putting in her contribution, most notably to the song “Revolution No 9”. She was an unwanted 5th member of the band, and more significantly, it was clear that after she came along that John Lennon’s heart was no longer in the Beatles. There is no doubt that would have happened anyway with or without Yoko Ono, but she now bears the unwanted tag of being the woman who broke up the Beatles.

There would be other bands that had their Yoko Ono. The most famous one was Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love was always called his “Yoko Ono”

Artistic growth
Most bands do not go through the 3 phases of being a lowly pub band, then being teen idols, and lastly being highly respected artists, but since at least 1 of these labels apply to the majority of bands. The Beatles came of age at a time when the rest of pop music was highly experimental and constantly breaking new ground at a rate that has not been matched since. They were innovative in many ways.

Right from the start, they were good musicians and songwriters. But as time went on, they progressed from the teenybopper head shaking “woooo!” songs to write songs of greater depth and sophistry. They wrote about sex, drugs, politics. They blended surrealism into their art. They achieved sound effects in the studio that had never been done before (but then they were one of the very few artists with the clout to work in the studio practically full time, and with an unlimited budget.) And what they didn’t innovate, they co-opted and assimilated. They easily met the challenges of the Beach Boys, the Byrds and Bob Dylan because they were able to work the influences of these people into their own art. Considering that they were only around for 8 years after they released their first recordings, their rate of growth was incredible.

However, many in Singapore would mainly remember the early days. When they started growing long hair and smoking pot, I think it was too outrageous for the conservative society they had here.

It is probably true that all artists need to evolve and cover new ground in order to remain creatively vital. But soon the band members would hanker for greater artistic freedom, which led into…

The Artistic Differences
In the beginning of their heyday, the Beatles were a tight unit. Much tighter than in the Sutcliffe / Best days. Under Brian Epstein, they presented a united front to the public. The songs were all listed down as Lennon-McCartney songs, and to a great extent, that was true. Even though most of the songs were mainly written by 1 of the two, there were very few that didn’t have a contribution by the other one. However they were always photographed together, and they always played music together.

However, from “Revolver” onwards, they started having more separate identities. It was around the time when George Harrison started writing music. The later songs were more obviously either “Lennon songs” (songs about the ego, surrealist and crazy stuff, punkish rebellious ones) or “McCartney songs” (more melodious, more harmonically sophisticated, character portraits, nursery rhymes). By the time of the White Album, it was a pastiche of solo recordings from each of the 4 Beatles. The famous inner sleeve was the first time they were photographed separately. By the time of “Let It Be”, they were hardly talking to each other. They only patched things up for “Abbey Road”, but that was a Paul McCartney dominated album.

How many other bands were like this? One of the most cited reasons for bands breaking up are “artistic differences”, because this is the one where nobody is really to be blamed, whether the excuse is true or not is another matter.

India
It is true that at some point, the band would want to pursue more exotic avenues. The Beatles went to India to study meditation under an Indian guru, but soon got disenchanted with him. John Lennon wrote the sarcastic “Sexy Sadie” to diss him, and at the last moment, was persuaded to change the original title, which was “Maharishi”.

George Harrison was the one who pushed the band to experiment with meditation and Indian culture. His Indian inspired recordings are not the most well regarded parts of the Beatles canon, but it was not a bad thing that the Beatles wrote a lot of good songs about spirituality (and drugs).

After the Beatles, it was a wide practice for a successful pop band to embrace a foreign culture and work it into their music. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” had Brian Jones on sitar. Jimi Hendrix had Hindu images on his second album. Paul Simon had his African adventures. The Police had their cod reggae. Madonna had her Kabbalah. Although none went so far as Peter Gabriel, who set up a world music consortium. Each of them would be criticized for not being sufficiently authentic and representative of that foreign element, but then again, each of them would be instrumental in bringing that world music to the attention of a wider audience.

Breakup and Death
It was not that clear at that time, but the breaking up of the Beatles was a fantastic career move. The Beatles never stayed together long enough to see their standards go down hill, although this did happen to each of the individual members. Towards the end, John Lennon was the most unhappy of the Beatles, partly because he felt that his position as the lead Beatle as being usurped by Paul McCartney. (But it was his fault that McCartney was always better at dealing with fame, and was the more hardworking one.) He was depressed and suicidal over getting battered for having found the true love of his life. Their business affairs were in a mess, and both John and Paul had different people representing them. Artistically, they grew apart. Their friendship was breaking down. It was the perfect storm in the making.

So the only surprise here was that at first, only one of them wanted to break up. This was understandable because they were still the number 1 band around, and because they were still functioning pretty well as a unit.

Probably no other band managed to mythologise their breakup as well as the Beatles did. Since the Beatles were always in the news, the various reasons for the breakup were well known to the fans. But this is probably the only time a band of their stature broke up at the height of their success. (Only other examples I can think of offhand were the Police and the Smiths, but although they were great bands, they weren’t in the same league as the Beatles.) They never stayed around long enough to be Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a shadow of their former self, flogging their dead horses over and over again. *cough* Rolling Stones *cough*.

Both John and Paul wrote about their break ups. John Lennon wrote about it on his song, “God”. (“the dream is over / …. And so my friends, we’ll just have to carry on / the dream is over”). Paul McCartney wrote about it on his “Let it Be”.

The lesson to other bands is that you will probably be more fondly remembered if you break up at the height of your powers, and you don’t tarnish your legacy by releasing inferior stuff afterwards. The Beatles did re-record an old, unreleased song, “Free as a Bird”, and it got a pummeling in the press for not living up to the old stuff.

It was the ideal breakup, a wholesale breakup. Not 1 important band member leaving, and the rest heading in a new direction, as was the case with many other bands.

For the 10 years after the end of the Beatles, John and Paul were hardly speaking to each other. Their finances, and the lawsuits ensured that the relations during the 70s were, while not entirely acrimonious, highly fraught with tension. Lennon and McCartney never got a chance to work together again when John Lennon was murdered. It is quite conceivable that if he had lived, they would have collaborated on something. The Beatles often guested on each other’s solo records here and there.

The fact that there was never a Beatles reunion only helped to cement the legacy of the Beatles. It also “helped” that in their solo work, they never accomplished anything as great as when they were the Beatles.

Reason number 4: They wrote the template.
The Beatles were lucky in a way, because their reign of the pop music world took place when pop music was undergoing great changes, in fact, when society itself was undergoing great changes. Pop music at the beginning of the 60s were a bunch of rock and rollers who sang really nerdy, outdated music. By the end of the 60s, it had reached a level of artistic sophistication that hasn’t really made very much progress, even today, 40 years later. Sorry guys, we’re still living in the shadow of the 60s.

The Beatles matched the progression of 60s pop, step by step, and in many instances, were the innovators.

The British Invasion
OK, since this took place a mere 20 years after D Day, this phrase had a resonance it doesn’t have today. But they were the first British pop group to make it big in America, and are probably the main reason why the UK is a main centre of (English) pop music today. They typified many UK bands: emphasis on strong songwriting, catchy music. Urban, working class. Substance is a must, style is optional. Emphasis on simplicity.

They wrote their own songs.
Or more accurately, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the Beatles’ Songs. George Harrison was an above average writer (and he wrote a few classics) but he just wasn’t in their league. The Beatles created the expectation that great pop bands should write their own songs. To understand why this is significant, just compare this to Chinese pop music: you have the singer, who concentrates of singing and looking good, and they sing songs written for them by professional writers.

The legacy of this is mixed, because bands that run out of good new material would inevitably go downhill. There were a lot of bands out there who were generally good with their instruments, that would generally benefit from having other people write material for them.

The Studio
One of the innovations during the 60s was the use of the studio as a special instrument for recording effects. This innovation was not unique to the Beatles, and was also associated with others like Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. But studio tricks made great strides forward under the Beatles, and after them, a lot of other people would be very inventive about creating interesting sound effects for their music.

They created albums
It used to be that albums were just a collection of singles, or they were just there to put 3 or 4 of the current singles in the same place, and padded up with filler. But Sergeant Pepper was the first of what was to be the concept album, where the whole album was a song cycle, or at least all the songs put together would tell a story, the entire album, instead of the song would be the basic unit.

This concept concept would be responsible for both a lot of artistic triumphs, and a lot of pretentious hogwash.

Sex and Drugs
As said before, the 60s were a time of the collective loss of innocence for people living in the West. It was a time of the sexual revolution, which more or less lasted until the emergence of AIDS. People started experimenting with a lot of drugs. Those were the times. The Beatles of course were not responsible for this, but having 4 young and attractive gentlemen in front of a screaming horde of teenage female fans did not

So – the legacy of the Beatles. Now who wants to say that they’re not the greatest band ever?