I all along liked both classical music, and pop music, even if I might not have recognized some of the music I liked as belonging to the pop category. But by some accident, I was taken out to see the movie A hard day's night, and I heard the music of the Beatles for the first time, and I was immediately a fan. I realized that other songs I was hearing on the radio were earlier Beatles recordings, e.g. "She loves you," "Love me do," and "P. S. I love you," and so on.
It's tough to recall my thinking as a teenager, but it might be interesting. I felt that classical music was more sophisticated harmonically, (and contrapuntally, though that came later), while pop music was more vigorous rhythmically. (Again, it was a year or two before I realized that classical music could be pretty interesting rhythmically, too.) And when I heard the songs in AHDN (A hard day's night, if you couldn't guess,) I realized that they were playing pop music with far less noise than I was used to hearing in pop records. Ironically, their live concerts were almost pure noise, and at certain times, the four of them did not really like the racket, though it was a symbol of their popularity. Furthermore, they were trying interesting harmonies, that flowed from classical music. Pop music had many sub-genres, and certainly jazz, and big band music, and easy listening tunes used almost every sort of harmony there was, but in the rhythm 'n' blues tradition, you never heard chromatic harmonies, such as the Beatles (well, okay, Paul and John) squeezed into If I fell, for instance. Of course, there were still the hard-driving songs like Can't buy me love, which was firmly in the mid-stream of RnB, and took me a long time to appreciate, but they kept sneaking in songs slow enough to support interesting harmonies.
Even after they had stopped touring, they never slowed down in looking for new harmonies, or rather, using old classical harmonies, but new to pop. (They did overwork certain sequences, such as the sequence in While my guitar gently weeps, which was a distant cousin of a couple of songs in Sgt. Pepper, but McCartney can be forgiven much, because firstly, he was producing such lovely songs, and secondly, in some ways they were--unconsciously--educating their audience, and education always requires repetition.
I was watching a video (actually, a sequence of about five videos) in which famous musicians talk about the Beatles. Most of these people were excellent musicians, and what they say is useful to us. A word they use repeatedly is permission. They declare that the Beatles would try things that were unthinkable to do, which gave other youngsters who aspired to be musicians, permission to do the same things: use the studio creatively, or even present themselves in creative ways. (I'm not really interested in how the Beatles presented themselves, today, though at the time, I was all about growing my hair, and wearing bell-bottoms, and so on! I'll post a photo when I find one.) But some musicians stumble against the problem of viewing these interviews, and the questions to which they're responding, as questions about them, rather than about the Beatles. Honestly, if I were to have met the Beatles, or even one of them, it would have been such a huge moment, that it would have been a defining moment in my life, and so it clearly was with many of these people. But those who admired the Beatles, or any of them in particular, did so for good reasons. They mention many of the points I bring up above, as well as that (1) they suited each other almost perfectly; they weren't really outstanding instrumentalists, but George, for instance, was just exactly the lead guitar that John and Paul needed. (On the other hand, perhaps John and Paul needed George precisely because he was available; it's hard to say.) (2) They feel that the Beatles came along just at the time that they were needed. Pop music was ripe for being raised up a notch in sophistication, and the Beatles provided just the sophistication that was sufficient, and necessary.
All this can be summed up by saying that the phenomenon of The Beatles was of historical significance. They were helped immensely by coming around at that time in history, to energize the concept of the minimal four-member band, initially, to be which any four moderately talented kids could aspire, and then to show how the studio could be used creatively. (And other record producers could see, looking at George Martin's contribution, how much a creative producer could help make an album memorable.)
In the video, I don't remember in what context, Steve Wonder made the point that black music grew from the soil that was Gospel Music, while white music, of which the Beatles' music was squarely in the center, grew from 'White' church music. (They were Catholics, except for Ringo, but their musical tradition could certainly trace its roots to protestant hymnody. Also, many tunes by soul musicians were adopted by the Beatles, e.g. Long Tall Sally, and Mr. Postman, to name just two songs. Still, it was unmistakably white music.)
Paul McCartney is highly regarded as a superior bass player, and a wonderful tunesmith, and John Lennon has been recognized as a talented poet. John's writing was fantastic at the time when he was younger, and was dealing with marital problems, aggravated by the strain of the group needing to spend so much time with each other, to the detriment of John's nuclear family life. There was an edge to his poetry, which reached its zenith when his mother died, and he wrote some amazing songs, including Mother, and A working class hero.
But, as I said, there is a sort of consensus that they were not amazing instrumentalists, compared with some of the amazing talents that were being discovered at the time. But their musicality was incredible. It is a mistake to try and rank musicality in different people, and in groups. All you can say is that a lot of what I admire in the Beatles comes firstly from their group musicality, and secondly from the historical factor, that they came at that particular time. And I should probably add: from the genius of George Martin, who contributed significantly to many of their songs, though I doubt whether he could have come up with an album such as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, though there is absolutely no doubt that the Beatles could never have pulled it off so well without George Martin.
The group and George Martin must share the blame for some of the biggest weaknesses in the recordings, as well. One of these is the stereo sound.
Stereo had been invented a decade or so earlier, and the idea is that if you record an instrument, say a piano, with two well-placed microphones, and then play back the two-channel recording through two sets of speakers spaced an appropriate distance apart, you can almost reproduced the feeling of having been there. Now, you can say, if you use a really good single microphone, listening to the recording, it does feel like you were there. Well, it is a matter of degree. You can only be convinced of the phenomenon by a side-by-side comparison with excellent equipment, and even then, some people would be perfectly satisfied with the single-mike technique (mono).
When the Beatles went into the studio, and they began to record, each of them had his own mike, and then each instrument had its own mike, and John and Paul thought it was just a matter of putting some of the tracks on the Left channel, and the rest on the Right channel, and you were done.
What audiophiles today would prefer would be to record each track with two microphones (Paul gets four mikes: two for the voice, and two for the guitar, John gets four, and so on), so that any one of these stereo tracks makes you feel you were in the room with that performer, or that instrument! Of course, that would take double the number of tracks, and back then, it would have taken more tape than their budget allowed. So the boys thought the true stereo idea did not deliver the bang for the buck, because they were already layering tracks, to enable, say, the first verse from one take, to be layered with the chorus from another take, and so on. Today, with digital recording, there isn't any tape at all, it's just gigabytes on some enormous hard drive in the basement somewhere.
Anyway, if they had recorded every track (or layer) in stereo, stacking them together would give the impression of having the group right in front of us. Instead, what we have is the fake stereo of (for instance) all the voices on the left channel, and all the instruments on the right channel. You can hear this clearly in Nowhere man, one of my favorite Beatle songs.
In future posts, I will give you my favorite Beatle songs, and the reasons why I like them, if any.
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