Before the Beatles, Part 4

The fourth part of a three-part series which means somebody’s pretty bad at math…

So it turns out the Beatles are popular…who knew?

I recently concluded a 3-part series about the Beatles influence on pretty much everybody and everything that followed and said if people liked it to let me know because I had enough material to write an essay about their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night.

Readership numbers and comments indicate you think that’s a good idea.

But then I realized I need to watch the movie again and this time take notes and that’s going to take a while, so in the meantime here’s some more stuff you may or may not know about the Beatles and their lasting influence.

And we’ll start with…

Album cover art

The first Beatles album I ever saw was With the Beatles (although here in the U.S. it was called Meet the Beatles) and it’s that famous Black and White photo that shows half their faces and apparently it freaked out their record company because the band wasn’t smiling.

That’s an indication of just how rigid Music Business Rules were back then, but the Beatles were busy breaking the rules with album covers like Beatles for Sale which had the album title in miniscule type and the distorted photo on Rubber Soul or the line drawing/photo collage on Revolver.

The most famous Beatles album cover most of us never saw was for Yesterday and Today and we didn’t see it because the Beatles dressed as butchers covered with meat and dismembered dolls which scared the crap out of Capitol Records so they recalled all the albums and replaced the Butcher Art with this more acceptable band photo.

The Beatles’ groundbreaking album cover art demonstrated that musicians could do unusual things with album covers and weren’t limited to generic band publicity photos so bands started putting unique art and photos on their albums which meant album cover art became part of the listening experience and it’s hard to think of certain albums without visualizing the album cover like this famous one for Sgt. Pepper:

Or this one for Led Zeppelin:

Or this one for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon:

BTW: Everybody I knew loved that Sgt. Pepper provided the song lyrics, but I didn’t know any sheet music publishers because they were pissed off when they lost money because the Beatles put the lyrics on the album’s back cover.

Albums over singles

I dimly remember my older sister’s record collection: 45s with an A and a B side.

The A side was the song you actually wanted to hear — the B side was whatever crap the artist had on hand — because the record industry didn’t want to give you two good songs on one record. Instead they’d pair a good song with a lousy one and to hear two good songs you had to buy two records instead of one.

This music publishing formula pissed off the Beatles before they were rich and still going to shops and buying records, so once they made it big they decided to put really good songs on both sides of their records and call it a Double A-side single like:

• Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out

• Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine

• Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane

• Something/Come Together

In the DVD commentary for A Hard Day’s Night John Lennon says he pushed for the title song to be a single so more people would hear it because he was afraid it would get buried on an album. But by 1966 Billboard magazine cited the sales of Rubber Soul (1.2 million copies over nine days) as evidence that teenagers were moving away from buying singles and toward buying albums.

Sgt. Pepper was so popular it changed the economics of the music business. 

The Beatles probably prevented themselves from having more Number One Hits because they put out too much good music at the same time and cost themselves money when they gave you two good songs on one record.

Try this one: the Beatles didn’t like putting previously released singles on their albums because they didn’t want to make fans buy the same song twice which is why great songs like Rain and The Ballad of John and Yoko weren’t on any of their albums until people started putting together anthologies.

And as long as we’re talking about things you might not know about Beatles albums…

The story behind Abbey Road

The working title of their next album was Mount Everest and they called it that because Abbey Road recording engineer Geoff Emerick smoked Everest cigarettes so it was an inside band joke and the original plan was to fly to the Himalayas and stand in front of Mount Everest to shoot the cover art.

Until three of the four Beatles (the exception was Paul) decided that was way too much trouble and said why don’t we just go out in the street, shoot a picture and call the album Abbey Road. 

They came up with one of the most memorable album covers of all time when they weren’t really trying.

Facial hair

Paul McCartney was riding a moped at night and fell off while looking at the moon (and I’m 100% sure being high had absolutely nothing to do with it) and landed on his face and eventually decided to grow a mustache to cover up his damaged lip.

John, George and Ringo thought the mustache was hilarious because they thought Paul looked like Neville Chamberlain or Grover Cleveland or maybe Wyatt Earp and decided to grow mustaches of their own.

Obviously people (and that includes some unfortunate women) had mustaches long before the Beatles, but at the time Paul grew his it was an unusual look for musicians who wanted to sell records to teenagers and did everything they could to appear youthful.

Back then mustaches were rare enough that Sgt. Pepper came with a paper mustache cutout so clean-lipped fans could imitate their musical heroes.

When people in London saw the Beatles with mustaches they decided it was time to grow one of their own and everybody started growing goatees and muttonchops and soul patches and Fu Manchus and musicians have been growing facial hair ever since, so it turns out ZZ Top might owe something to the Fab Four.

A completely unnecessary, but amusing ZZ Top anecdote

One of the ZZ Top guys (I forget which one, but I think it was Frank Beard who ironically enough is the one guy in the band who doesn’t have one) is watching a music special on TV and he calls one of the other guys in the band and says this special is pretty good, you should turn it on and then they call the third guy and they’re all talking on the phone and watching and watching and watching and finally one of them says, hey, this is great, but just how long is this TV special?

It was the first night of MTV.

Heavy metal

Some people argue that the very first heavy metal song was Helter Skelter, although other people argue it was actually The Who’s I Can See for Miles while others think it was the Kinks’ You Really Got Me.

In any case…

Ian MacDonald, author of Revolution in the Head (a history of the Beatles recorded music and if you love the band I’d recommend getting a copy) thought Heavy Metal is what bands play when they don’t have a good songwriter, so they play loud and long instead and MacDonald described Heavy Metal as: “More a sonic contact sport than a musical experience.”

(Feel free to disagree and I assume some of you will.)

But the Beatles were never afraid to experiment and after Paul heard The Who had gone all out in the Making-A-Racket Department on I Can See for Miles, Paul got competitive and decided to do a song even louder and dirtier – Helter Skelter – but MacDonald argues that the Beatles’ strength was nuance and texture and their attempts at producing Heavy Metal songs were embarrassing.  

Which I’ve got to quibble with because Revolution (which is pretty great song) was so loud and harsh people at the “retail level” (a phrase I got off the internet and I’d guess means people who sell records) complained because they assumed the buzz saw guitar sound was the result of a manufacturing error. 

And just in case you’ve forgotten what those retail-level people were worried about, here it is:

According to my source (my son Michael, who still owes me for a lifetime supply of free pizzas despite his help on this Beatles stuff) the guitar sound was produced by plugging directly into the mixing board – skipping the amplifier – and cranking the volume up which gives the guitar a grainy, harsh, ripping sound and here’s Led Zeppelin copying that same guitar sound three years later:

Whoever you give credit (or blame) to, the point here is Metallica and Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden owe a debt of gratitude to the people who did it first and the Beatles are on that list.

Jangle pop, country and folk rock

George Harrison was one of the first to own a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar and used it on A Hard Day’s Night and Roger McGuinn liked it so much he made it the signature guitar sound of the Byrds.

Meanwhile…

If I Needed Someone and Nowhere Man have been given credit for convincing folk-music enthusiasts to embrace pop music and I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party has been called an early example of country rock and – bottom line – the Beatles tried a lot of different stuff and musical styles and since they were the World’s Most Popular Band, they convinced other bands to try that stuff too.

Matched Grip drumming

Most drummers were taught to hold the drumstick in their left hand (if you’re right-handed, the one that hits the snare) palm up which is called a “Traditional Grip.” That’s how I was taught, but I never knew that grip came from the military and that’s because military drummers had to wear their drums off to one side and the strap holding the drum would get in the way, so left hand palm up was the easiest way to reach a drum hanging at an angle on your right side.

Now think of how many males had served in the military by the mid-50s and you had a bunch of music instructors teaching students to play drums with their left hand palm up.

Then Ringo appears on Ed Sullivan and he’s using a Matched Grip (both palms facing each other) and if you wanted to be a drummer because you saw Ringo on TV (and a whole bunch of future drummers did) using a Matched Grip became way more popular.

Just in case you don’t play the drums: a Matched Grip allows the left hand to do a lot more work on the left side of a drum set like hit cymbals and drums with authority and power, which is better for rock while Traditional Grip is considered better for jazz.

Ringo helped change what we heard on records and in live performances.

Here’s an article about gripping a drumstick just in case you’re taking a break and looking for an excuse to not go back to work:

https://www.moderndrummer.com/2012/09/md-education-team-traditional-grip/

Working-class accents

When the American distributors got A Hard Day’s Night they decided the sound track needed to be dubbed because they were afraid people in the U.S. wouldn’t understand the Beatles Liverpool accents. But Paul put his Beatle boot down and said if people in England could understand the accents in American cowboy movies, Americans could understand their Northern England working-class accents.

And we did.

Suddenly it was OK to sound like you didn’t work for the BBC and Michael Caine just might owe the Beatles a thank you note. Now kids who didn’t have working class accents started pretending they did because it was now cool, which is why this fashion trendspotter tells George he doesn’t have to pretend he actually talks that way:

I’ve posted this scene three times because I love it and the guy playing the fashion trendspotter – Kenneth Haigh – is great and the last time I watched it, for the first time I understood he thinks George is faking his Liverpool accent and is a huge phony, but then concludes:

“The phonies are much easier to handle.”

I didn’t realize this until I read the stuff about English kids pretending to have working-class accents, but part of the gag is the trendspotter thinks he knows what kids like, but doesn’t recognize one of the Beatles. In 1964 most of us didn’t even know trendspotters existed, but the Beatles were already ridiculing the trendspotting trend.

Changing the rules

Go down the internet rabbit hole (which I did to find a lot of this stuff) and all kinds of people who know more than me have studied the Beatles’ influence on all kinds of topics we haven’t touched on – like politics and merchandizing and the British Invasion – but I’ve got to stop somewhere and this is it:

Before the Beatles, artists were controlled by their management, but the Beatles were so freaking popular they could get away with dictating new rules and according to the internet their decision to quit touring and focusing on recording was unprecedented.

As popular as they were, not even Elvis or Frank Sinatra had that much power over their music and public image and how they were presented to the public and we’ll end with what Lou Christie had to say about the Beatles’ influence:

"We were, in many respects, just these goofy white boys. We weren't allowed to be seen with a cigarette in our hands ... [The Beatles] were more aggressive, they were funny and they were articulate. The minute they came to America, they literally put a halt to everything that was previously happening.”

Before the Beatles, pop stars were expected to recite future concert dates, their favorite meal and how they like to spend a day off, but the Beatles ad-libbed and wisecracked and all talked at once during press conferences and said smartass stuff that made people laugh.

In all sorts of ways, the Beatles challenged the status quo and when other musicians saw what the Beatles were doing they begin to ask, “Why not us?”

OK, that’s gotta hold you for a while and I’ll let you know when I get done watching A Hard Day’s Night.