The rock group, The Beatles, was made up of four young men born in blue collar Liverpool between 1940 and 1942. While it is not unusual for musicians to come from humble backgrounds, it is rare is to find four great talents raised in such proximity. The Beatles were a close-knit group because of their shared roots, and this is part of what made them special. Together they endured both obscurity and the crushing pressures of stardom. The Fab Four found fame as a foursome.
They did not start out famous, of course. In the early days the Beatles played mostly in small venues around northern England. The venue most associated with them is The Cavern Club, where they performed 275 times or so. Their first gig there was in February of 1961 for which they were paid ￡5. George Harrison was almost denied entry because he was wearing jeans. The Cavern got its name honestly—the performance area was below ground and had the feel of catacombs. The brick walls arched over head. The room was poorly ventilated and poorly lit. People smoked and ate food as the Beatles played. Many in the room were regulars and between songs there would be cheeky banter between the band and people in the crowd. This playful interaction with fans was carried forward and it contributed greatly to their popularity in England and then later in the United States.
They were a determined group. They made several trips over to Hamburg, Germany, between August, 1960 and December, 1962, where they played extended gigs in local clubs. Their first gig was at the Indra Club. They stayed nights in the nearby Bambi Kino, a cinema club. In a later interview, Paul McCartney said, “We lived backstage in the Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, and you could always smell them. The room had been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint; and two sets of bunk beds, with not very much covers—Union Jack flags—we were frozen.” John Lennon remembered: “We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show and old German fraus pissing next door.” For their convenience they used cold water from the urinals for washing and shaving. They were paid £2.50 each a day, seven days a week, playing from 8:30-9:30, 10-11, 11:30-12:30, and then from one until two o’clock in the morning. In Germany they made generous use of preludes just to stay awake for their own performances. They managed to survive the squalor and even to flourish. The hundreds of performances transformed them into an exciting and polished ensemble.
The Beatles were to set many trends. One of those trends was the Beatle mop haircut. In the late 50s and early 60s the Beatles wore slicked-back, Elvis Presley style D.A. haircuts. In Hamburg the Beatles got friendly with an artsy group that frequented their performances, namely Astrid Kirchherr, Klaus Voorman, and Jurgen Vollmer. Astrid fell in love with Stu Sutcliffe, who was a Beatle at the time (along with Pete Best…but not Ringo Starr) and she gave Stu the first Beatle haircut. The change in hairstyle took some getting used to, and there was much ridicule of it within the band. But eventually George gave it a try and then John and Paul, too, took on the new look. Ringo joined the band in August of ’62. If you look at the cover of their first album, “Please Please Me”, Ringo is still wearing the greasy, swept back look. Before long Ringo also sported the haircut that came to be associated with the group.
By 1963 the British press had made a habit of calling the Beatles “the four moptops”. This long, grease-free hair lent itself to the early Beatle practice of head-shaking. For example, in one of their early hits, “She Loves You”, George and Paul would step up to the microphone and sing, “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, followed by a head-shaking-vibretto falsetto, “Woooooo”. This always drove the girls in the audience to a fever pitch, in which they would scream back, fall over each other, and swoon. It was a bit of showmanship, but it’s clear the Beatles learned early that they could stand out from the other bands by risking actions no one else would be willing to do, or even think of.
The Beatles took a quantum leap forward when they were “discovered” by Brian Epstein. Brian managed North End Music Store (NEMS), in Liverpool, which kept him abreast of developments in the music business. He went to see them perform at the Cavern Club and was intrigued. Brian became their manager, and he played a huge part in bringing them exposure through larger venues, radio interviews, through recording contracts, and through international performances. Brian was a little older than the Beatles, and he was polished, which added credibility to the Beatles in the business world. The Beatles were fortunate that Brian Epstein approached them. Brian was honest, hardworking, smart, and genuinely interested in guiding the Beatles to success. The Beatles had enough sense to recognize these positive qualities in him.
Brian accomplished many important things for the Beatles but, perhaps, his most important accomplishment was introducing them to music producer, George Martin.
The Beatles auditioned for Martin on June 6, 1962, at the EMI Studio on Abbey Road.The verdict was not promising, as Pete Best‘s drumming was considered sub-par, and Martin thought their original songs were weak.Martin asked the individual Beatles if there was anything they personally did not like, to which George replied, “Well, there’s your tie, for a start.” That seemed to be the turning point, as it inspired John and Paul to join in with their own jokes and wordplay. Martin decided he should sign them on the basis of their wit alone. So the greatest rock band in history broke into the music recording business because of their clownish charm.
Martin was a classically trained musician, and his influence over Beatle songs is widely recognized. Paul once referred to him as “the fifth Beatle” because of his significant impact on their recorded music. He could seem rather stodgy, but he was highly imaginative. Paul also commented about Martin, that he was “quite experimental for who he was, a grown-up.” Martin’s interest in musical sounds and effects was to have a major impact on the Beatles and, as time passed, the Beatles brought many ideas of their own to the recording studio. This practice contributed to the ongoing uniqueness of the Beatles’ music, even after having written and recorded more than 200 songs.
The Beatles were also very good singers. Ringo had the least appealing voice but even he sang lead on a number of Beatle songs. Their songs often featured rich harmonies, rivaled by only a few rock bands. Some examples of their harmonies can be found on the songs: “This Boy”; “If I fell”; “We Can Work It Out”; and “Because”. Paul was an unusually gifted singer, one of the foremost in all of pop/rock.
The Beatles’ greatest gift was their ability to write songs. The Beatles recorded 207 songs of their own composition. Few rock or pop musicians can boast such a large creative listing. More impressive than the number of songs is that the vast majority of their songs were actually quite good—not “fillers”. Many groups or pop singers would find themselves in possession of a hit song, and then they would quickly scratch together a dozen more songs—enough to fill an album—so they could capitalize on the selling power of the one hit. The Beatles didn’t approach their albums in this way. They were part of the movement that saw an LP record as a collection of songs that worked together, the way chapters make up a book. Every Beatle album is enjoyable and worthy of being listened to over and over. (The one exception is “Yellow Submarine,” which is a movie score and is mostly not their music, anyway.)
“Everybody’s born knowing all the Beatles lyrics instinctively. They’re passed along to the fetus subconsciously along with all the amniotic stuff. In fact, they should be called Fetals.” – (from the movie, Sliding Doors)
The Beatles kept revising themselves, musically. This makes all the sense in the world, of course. How can you keep the fans interested, or how can you keep yourself interested if you keep performing the same songs, or if all your songs sound the same? The difficulty and danger of evolving (or Revolving) is moving away from a successful sound and arriving at a different and still successful sound. Bob Dylan was able to accomplish this, but very few musicians have been able to master such transitions, and none as well as the Beatles. The following identifications of creative divisions in Beatle music are subjective on my part. But I’ll brave their use here as a means to structure and describe the ongoing creative changes that were evident over the time the Beatles were a group.
The Beatles smashed into the consciences of teens and the media through a wave of energy and music that came to be known as “Beatlemania”. This period was characterized by screaming and fainting at their public performances, and even as they ventured out in public on concert tours. They performed many songs by other rock-n’-rollers during this period, along with their originals. The songs tended to be simple, loud, short, and up-beat. The albums, “Please Please Me”, “With the Beatles” and “Beatles For Sale” provide most the music from this period.
The second period is what I would call their “Classic” period. The Beatles starred in two music/comedy films during this period. Songs from this period and going forward were almost all of their own compositions. The sound became more complex, and the rocking songs were often accented with a prominent bass guitar line. Albums from this period are “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” (also the names of the two movies).
The third period is what I would call the “Zenith”. In this period the Beatles eased off the rock-throttle a bit and wrote songs that featured complex and beautiful melodies. Their songs were still predominantly about romance, but they also began to address other subjects, such as self-examination, loneliness, and government overreach. They began adding a wide range of instruments, such as the harpsichord, the sitar, classical strings, and brass sections. They also began creating and adding studio sound effects, such as recordings played backwards. “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” are the albums of this period.
The fourth period could be called “Psychedelic Beatles” or, just as easily, “Alter-ego Beatles”. The Beatles had stopped touring because the crowds had become, for various reasons, too dangerous and, in any case, too loud for the band to hear itself play. Celebrity life had begun to get old. They answered this partly through a kind of theater. In “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” they dressed in brightly colored faux-military band outfits and used the concept of this very different band to present the music. The album was received with great acclaim for its bold connections between music and art, and its conceptual unity. In 2003 Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it the #1 album of all time. The Beatles followed with “Magical Mystery Tour”. This album did not receive nearly the acclaim, but it continued the idea of the Beatles as something other than the Beatles. On the album cover, the four of them are dressed in comic animal costumes. The song, “I Am the Walrus”, written by John, a bit of a tribute to Lewis Carroll, gives some explanation for the the animal costumes.
At this point the Beatles headed off to India to sit under the teaching of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The time spent there heavily influenced, both positively and negatively, their next album, commonly known as “The White Album”. It is also important to note that their long-time manager and friend, Brian Epstein, died before the White Album sessions. The loss of Brian was personally difficult for them, and, in practical terms, it saddled the group with many business complexities Brian had always taken care of. Furthermore, the Beatles were moving in different directions as individuals. The time of the tight-knit-mates was fading. This fifth period was their “Fragmentation” period. John became enthralled with Yoko Ono at this time and was thenceforth greatly influenced by her artistically. She imposed herself on the Beatle recording sessions. The other Beatles tried to adapt to this but they found it difficult. To a large degree, the close relationship between John and Yoko signaled the end of the writing team of Lennon-McCartney.
On top of all this, the four of them were no longer willing to be guided by the brilliant but structuring tendencies of George Martin. All these things worked together to produce a double album that was astonishingly different from their earlier work. When the group worked collaboratively on the album they produced high quality music of raw and energetic sound. But they were also finding it more difficult to work together, so quite a few songs on the album are more-or-less solo efforts. This resulted in a wide range of song styles, but a lot of these songs also happened to be rather weak. All this said, there are still many who consider the White album the greatest of all Beatle albums.
I will call the final Beatle period the “Epilogue. This period was represented by the two albums, “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be”. In this period the four stars were really struggling to hang together. Paul and Ringo would probably have kept going indefinitely, but John had moved on to Yoko and the world of the avant-garde. George kept moving deeper into Hare Krishna. George was bothered by John’s disengagement from their music and was, at the same time, frustrated with Paul for being too controlling. Somehow, Abbey Road, turned out to be one of the Beatles’ best albums. Side one (if you experience the album as an LP) is made up of a strong set of rock, pop, and blues, while side two is a medley of collected shorts that had never developed into full songs. The medley is a strong effort and it has the feel of the Beatles’ final goodbye, with its conclusion: “And in the end; the love you take; is equal to the love; you make.”
All this is a long-winded way of saying the Beatles were an astonishing creative force. They not only reinvented their music but did numerous reinventions. Not everything they tried worked. Some of their recordings should have landed on the cutting room floor. At the same time, they wrote a number of notable songs that they never recorded, or they recorded but did not publish while the Beatles were a group. Some examples include “It’s For You,” recorded by Cilla Black and Three Dog Night; “World Without Love,” recorded by Peter and Gordon; “Come and Get It,” recorded by Badfinger; and “Not Guilty,” recorded later by Harrison.
After all this dissection and detailing (and if you are interested, there are enough books and videos to keep you busy through your days at the old folks home), I must conclude by saying that, most importantly, I simply like their music. When I’m driving, or I’m working around the house, there’s nothing that can energize me like some good music, especially if I can sing along with it. And of all the music I like to sing along with, the Beatles’ music is tops.
When the Beatles were an unknown band, working long hours in deplorable conditions, they would occasionally experience bouts of depression. Then John, who was clearly the band leader at the time, would ask, “Where are we going, fellas?” The group would respond, “To the top, Johnny.” Then John would ask, “Where’s that, fellas?” And they would respond, “To the toppermost of the poppermost!” Together, they stuck it out…and their comic prophecy proved more true than they dreamed. The Beatles, like the rest of us humans, were deeply flawed. Nevertheless, they were also a great gift to us, especially through the wonderful music they created and shared.
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