The Beatles: Yesterday and Today and Most Likely Tomorrow

A 3-part series about the Beatles’ influence on everything and everyone that followed…

As anyone who has raised small children can tell you, sometimes they fixate on a song or cartoon or movie and want to play it over and over and over again and I’m aware of parents who swear they’ll have to be sedated and physically restrained if they ever have to hear that goddamn crab from The Little Mermaid sing Under the Sea again.

Fortunately (kinda) kids grow up.

But even though they are now theoretically adults, my kids still advocate listening to music or reading books or watching movies repeatedly because they believe you’ll get something out of them the tenth time that you missed the first nine times and if you ask yourself if you want to watch Howard the Duck and Sharknado once or Citizen Kane twice, they have a point.

So last time I drove to California – three days there and three days back – I took a bunch of early Beatles CDs, listened to them over and over and heard things I missed  the first thousand times I played them.

Like Paul McCartney playing the living shit out of the bass on I Saw Her Standing There.

That was the opening song on the album Please Please Me and Capitol Records refused to release it here in America because they thought the Beatles were just a British phenomenon and their music was too raw and raucous for a White group (more on that shortly) and they also thought the title song Please Please Me was encouraging fellatio and if you listen to the lyrics with that in mind, they might have had a point:

Anyway…

I heard Paul’s bass playing clearly for the first time because the CD had been remastered and the bass part was now more audible.

When I mentioned Paul’s performance to one of my musician sons (he’s into Rock and Roll History) he said people of his generation often dismiss the Beatles as their “parent’s music,” but added that what those unimpressed people of his generation don’t realize is that pretty much any group or musician they currently like is copying something the Beatles invented or popularized, like…

How to play the electric bass

The first electric bass was created in the 1930s by Inspector Gadget (you might want to check that because I may have watched too many cartoons with my kids) but they weren’t mass-produced until the 1950s and when guys (and girls) first started playing the electric bass they plucked the strings with their fingers like they would an upright acoustic bass.

And when bass guitar parts were recorded they were often put on the same track with the drums and whatever instrument was carrying the melody – like a piano or rhythm guitar – so on most recorded songs the bass was a low and mostly inaudible rumble.

But Paul played his bass with a pick which gave it a sharper sound and he’d also hold his pick hand against the strings to dampen vibration and now the bass was way more audible and a sharp thunk instead of a low rumble.

There was a studio musician named Carol Kaye who was playing electric bass the same way – with a pick, although she muted her bass strings with a piece of felt – and she played on over 10,000 records and everyone in the recording industry knows who she is even if the rest of us don’t. Paul said Kaye’s bass playing on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds inspired his work on Sgt. Pepper.

As far as I know Carol never got the chance to show her stuff on Ed Sullivan, but Paul did and pretty soon everybody was playing bass the way they saw Paul do it and that’s the first of our innovations by the Beatles that changed the way everybody else did pretty much everything and next we’ll talk about…  

Publicity photos

That’s a publicity photo of Elvis Presley and it’s obviously taken in a studio and they got the lighting, hair and makeup just right and told Elvis to smile for the camera like he’d just been handed a peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich and since that was his favorite sandwich, five-out-of-four doctors will tell you it’s a medical miracle that Elvis made it all the way to the ripe old age of 42.

Now here are some photos of the Beatles taken by a woman named Astrid Kirchherr, a German art student.

Early in their career Astrid took the Beatles to a fairground during winter and shot photos of them posed on an old truck and in front of a roller coaster, with expressionless expressions and ever since then bands have been posing on abandoned cars and against brick walls in alleys and the occasional landfill while assuming insolent We-Really-Don’t-Care-What-You-Think facial expressions and probably don’t realize they’re all copying photos taken in 1960.

The two Beatles you might not recognize are original drummer Pete Best – and nobody has a better a reason to be pissed off at Fate – unless it’s the other guy, Stuart Sutcliffe who was the Beatles original bassist, but died young from a brain hemorrhage.

Androgyny

Astrid also cut the Beatles hair because they were still copying Elvis and had greased-up pompadours which was definitely not a cool look for German art students and she only knew how to give one haircut so they all got the same hairdo and part of what made the older generation batshit crazy (even though they probably hadn’t thought much about why it bugged them) is the Beatles were (probably unintentionally) promoting androgyny.

If hot chicks like actress Jean Seberg wore her hair shorter and cool guys like the Beatles wore their hair longer, somewhere in the early 1960s they met in the middle and guys who were still wearing crew cuts while dating girls with Hair Helmets the size of the Saint Paul’s Cathedral Dome now looked like squares.

With their tight Calvin Klein-inspired suits and boots with built-up Cuban heels the Beatles looked stylish and changed everybody’s ideas about male beauty: you no longer had to look like John Wayne after a hard day being a Republican for women to find you attractive.

Ever since then, dudes have been lookin’ like ladies and Steven Tyler, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Prince and absolutely everybody else who was ever in a Hair Band – whether they know it or not – were influenced by the Beatles.

Outside musical influences  

Very early in their career the Beatles got a gig playing in a strip club in Hamburg, Germany (which is why they were in Germany when Astrid met them) and the band was required to play insanely long 8-hour shows so they had to play everything they knew and some things they mostly didn’t, including covers of other people’s songs and some jazz and show tunes and lame stuff like My Bonnie.

But the long-term effect was the band being open to trying pretty much anything like Indian music or chamber music or guitar solos played backwards.

John Lennon once offered to be hung upside down and spun in a circle to get the vocal effect he wanted on Tomorrow Never Knows. Fortunately, they decided to break into an organ cabinet and use a Leslie speaker (they spin) instead.

Lots of people have used Leslie speakers in the same way since, but John had said he wanted that part of the vocal to sound like a “thousand Tibetan monks” and was disappointed they didn’t actually hire the monks.

That’s a guy willing to experiment and ever since, tons of bands have followed the Beatles’ open attitude toward outside musical influences.

Stage energy

In Hamburg the Beatles were playing for an audience largely consisting of inebriated dock workers, sailors, strippers, prostitutes and criminals (it sounds like a  cross between the bar in Star Wars and a Nuremberg rally) and the crowd would yell at them to play louder and faster and the Beatles were getting through the marathon performances by taking amphetamines and guzzling beer, so you had a bunch of drunk kids wired on speed, playing as hard and fast as possible to keep the criminally-inclined crowds happy.

One night the stage started to collapse, but the band thought that was funny and kept playing harder and jumping up and down until they dropped through the stage which the crowd thought was freaking awesome and the Beatles did it before The Who destroyed their first amplifier.

The Beatles not only played long shows in Hamburg, they also played a lot of shows and – according to the internet – by 1964 when the rest of us finally heard them, they’d already performed together an estimated twelve hundred times which is more often than some bands play in their entire careers.

Play together that much and you’re going to get better.

A lot better.

Philip Norman – who wrote a Beatles biography called Shout! – said before they went to Hamburg the Beatles weren’t all that great on stage (they were basically a high school band and Paul and George were still teenagers) but when they came back from Germany they had a sound like nobody else and grinding through those Hamburg shows made them what they were.

When they got back to England audiences were stunned by the Beatles volume, dirty sound and raw energy and here they are demonstrating some of that at the Cavern Club:

The Beatles failed an audition at Decca Records because they were considered too rough and raw and joked around and had too much fun and didn’t appear to be “professional musicians” which gives you a fairly accurate idea of just how much record executives know about trends in music.

According to their manager, Brian Epstein, the Decca executives felt “guitar groups are on their way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business” which may have inspired this inspired scene from A Hard Day’s Night in which a clearly clueless business executive thinks he knows more about what kids want than George Harrison:

The Beatles weren’t the first musicians to show raw energy on stage – Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis immediately come to mind – but those performers were either Black or emulating Black musicians so they didn’t get much TV time or, if they did, had to be shown from the waist up, so most Really-Really-White English kids were unaware a musician could get up on stage and rock his ass off, a statement which might require some explaining.

Back then teen idols were mostly “smooth” professional performers like Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Paul Anka and Pat Boone and if you need an example of that smooth, professional, performing style, here’s Cliff Richard singing what seems to be a Xanax-influenced version of The Young Ones:

Don’t miss the shots of the female audience members reacting to Cliff’s performance as if their parents showed up at a high school dance party and decided to thrill their teenage friends with a slide show of their latest car trip to Birmingham.

After the Beatles, attempting to “blow the roof off the dump” and jumping around, stomping your feet, shaking your hair and occasionally screaming became standard operating procedure for bands and here’s a performance from a Canadian TV show called Drop-In and don’t miss the poor jerks in the background who have to stand around waiting because the Beatles were asked to do an encore:  

Worst gig in show business with the possible exception of sweeping up elephant shit in a circus: following The Beatles.

Compared to their performance, Cliff Richard looks embalmed.

OK, we barely got started and tune in tomorrow for more stuff about the guys who taught everybody else how to be rock stars.