My favorite history of the Beatles is The Compleat Beatles, a 1982 documentary that I taped off of a PBS fundraiser. You can find parts of it on YouTube (here, for example). I strongly recommend watching The Compleat Beatles, but I can only make it through about the first hour. The early history of the Beatles, from years of obscurity to well-deserved success, is inspirational. The later years for me are too sad to watch.
While I’m making YouTube recommendations, let me put in a plug for Mike Pachelli’s lessons on how to recreate Beatles songs using guitars. One example is All My Loving. If you have any experience playing guitar, then looking over Pachelli’s instructions for various Beatles classics you can appreciate how complex their chords were, especially compared with what was standard at the time.
Ian Leslie’s new book about John and Paul takes the view that John and Paul were central figures in one another’s lives, and that their music reflects this. I found this convincing. The book hits me like The Compleat Beatles. I like it a lot, but I cannot bear to read the later chapters.
There are those who rhapsodize about the cultural and musical significance of the Beatles. I will take a more skeptical view, but first I want to provide my own memories.
The Beatles and My Teenage Years
I was nine years old when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and I was fifteen when Paul announced that they had broken up. These are tumultuous years in the life of a young person.
I first heard of the band in early 1964, when my parents told me that Ed Sullivan was going to feature a popular new comedy group called The Beatles. We tuned in, but instead of jokes all that we saw and heard was a horde of screaming teenage girls.
For me, puberty was still a few years off, and I spent 1964 ignoring the Beatles. I enjoyed a boyhood innocence that I think is no longer possible. Nowadays, everyone seems to want children to learn about sexuality by the time they are six.
All I knew about girls was that they were icky and not worth trying to be friends with. Boys were fun because with them you could play corkball or hit-the-bat (two variations on baseball popular in the St. Louis area).
When an outstanding schoolmate athlete started idly singing “Close your eyes, and I’ll kiss you” (the first lines of “All My Loving”) while standing on the baseball diamond on the concrete school playground, this was traumatic. How could he, of all boys, betray the male ethos and sing about yucky stuff?
I finally caught on to the Beatles early in 1965. My father was on sabbatical, and we were living in Princeton. On a variety show on TV, we heard Petula Clark sing her pop hit, “Downtown.” I really liked it, and I wanted to hear it again. So I took a radio into my room and started listening to WABC from New York. “I Feel Fine” was still on the charts, and that became for me the first Beatles hit.
I did not buy any records until our family had returned to St. Louis. My first purchase was the single “It’s My Life” by The Animals. It was not a big hit, and to find it my father had to drive me to a record store in a city ghetto.
One day, my best friend and I bought two records, “Day Tripper” by the Beatles and “Get Off My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. I said he could keep the one he liked best, and he picked “Day Tripper.” That was as close as I came to owning a classic Beatles record.
When the Beatles began their artsy, studio period with “Rubber Soul,” they lost me. I stuck with teenage pop music. To this day, the only post-pop Beatles song that I listen to on Spotify is “You Never Give Me Your Money,” for its guitar licks and subsequent driving sound.
In 1967, I got into what was called “underground radio,” FM stations that played longer cuts and entire sides of albums. I joined the Columbia Record Club (think of it as a mail-order ancestor of Spotify). I bought Jimi Hendrix’s first album, The Doors’ second album, and albums by more forgotten artists, like Vanilla Fudge. “Sergeant Pepper” was a mainstay of the local FM station and I was very familiar with it, but it was not my favorite album of that year.
My high school years, 1967-1971, saw the division in musical tastes between hippies and straights. The straights gravitated toward “soul music,” meaning Motown, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. The hippies gravitated toward “psychedelic,” which was heavily influenced by delta Blues, making it arguably more authentically black than soul.
The Beatles had already broken up by the time I heard “Abbey Road.” That record became background music for several evenings of bridge games that I remember fondly. But I never bought it.
The Beatles and Music History
You should not think that the Beatles owned the music scene in the entire 1960s. They absolutely owned 1964, for sure. You can argue that they lit the fuse of the rock music rocket. But from 1965 onward, plenty of other artists were popular and innovative.
They deserve credit for evolving rapidly. After redoing “I Feel Fine” as “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer,” they left the Beatles formula behind.
But it’s not as if rock music was standing still, waiting around until Sergeant Pepper was released to figure out what to do next. There was a lot going on with the Laurel Canyon folk-rockers (Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell), with the Yardbirds alumni (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page), with psychedelic music (Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, The Who, and lesser artists), with Janis Joplin, Steve Winwood, Peter Frampton, and other young upstarts. In 1967, the Monterey Pop festival didn’t need the Beatles. In 1969, Woodstock happened without them.
The Beatles and the 60’s Culture
The interval from early 1964 to early 1970 was tumultuous in the United States. As that period began, the United States had not dropped any bombs in Vietnam, and our only soldiers were there as “advisers.” America was rallying around Lyndon Johnson, the successor to the slain President Kennedy and who would win in a landslide in November.
As the period ended, our country had been torn apart by the war, especially by President Johnson’s dishonest way of escalating our involvement. Richard Nixon was President, and the country was as polarized over him then as it is over President Trump today.
In early 1964, men had short hair and women wore dresses, there was no hippie phenomenon, marijuana was considered dangerous and illicit, movies and television were heavily censored with regard to language and sexual suggestiveness, and premarital sex was viewed as a no-no. By early 1970, all of these cultural norms were on the way out.
Yes, the Beatles participated in the cultural changes. One can argue that they contributed, especially to the fad of looking to India for philosophical inspiration. But I would say that the shifts reflected larger factors, including prosperity, the Pill, the searing effects of the Vietnam War, and the demographic bulge at the younger end of the population, i.e. the Baby Boom.
As Immortal as Shakespeare?
Ian Leslie and others are ready to see the Beatles as deserving lasting immortality, comparable to Shakespeare. I cannot go that far.1
Leslie points out that by singing their own compositions, John and Paul were able to endow their songs with more emotional intensity than when the writer and the performer are separate. Good point.
As Leslie brilliantly documents, John and Paul put tremendous pressure on themselves to compose songs. As a result, they were prolific and produced a spectacular amount of high-quality material in a very short period of time. Let’s leave it at that.
Who can predict what will last? I’ve had the experience of hearing 30-somethings proudly singing “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Oy. If I may quote Jimi Hendrix quoting Bob Dylan, “There must be some kinda way outta here.”
The thing that always strikes me about the Beatles is the consistent quality of the albums. Every song, one after another, is something you want to sing along with -- something you'd be glad to hear on the radio, and almost never something you'd be surprised to hear on the radio. For me every album is like this.
Some other bands have albums that are "hit after hit after hit" like that, but nobody else is so consistent about it.
This is something I wrote about at length in this essay: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
A few brief excerpts: "October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that has since come to be known as Brit Pop. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same............
For most people all this is a big thing in their lives in their teens and twenties; from then on interest wanes. Those for whom this phase ran its course at anytime in the 60’s to 90’s tend to think of themselves as having been around for the best of it. If the thee billion plus hits on Spotify’s most streamed songs is the measure, you could argue that it is now bigger than ever. But nobody seriously believes that any of them will go down in history as great ones. So what will? What songs will endure when all rock’s ephemera evaporates into the mist of time?...........
The big problem though with rock/pop as Art comes with trying to actually pan the gold dust out from the 60 million babbling brook. That tiny proportion of truly great music has fallen victim to a kind of category error, having no unique generic label to differentiate it from the rest."