The Beatles: Yesterday and Today and Most Likely Tomorrow, Part 3

In which we conclude our probably unnecessary examination of the Beatles’ influence…

Congratulations, you’ve made it to Part 3 and the home stretch, so don’t give up now and today we’ll start by talking about yet another Beatles Innovation that a lot of bands have since copied…

The concept album

Before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, albums were a collection of random singles and the musicians typically had no say in which songs were included, the order in which those songs would play, the album cover art or which singles would be released early to promote the album.

But back in 1967 the public hadn’t heard a single note of a single song from Sgt. Pepper until we heard the entire album and the idea that we were supposed to listen to the whole thing at once and one song would lead to the next and should be listened to in order (and if at all possible, while smoking a joint) blew everybody’s mind because we were used to listening to music in Three-Minute-AM-Radio-Friendly chunks.

I semi-recently got the re-mixed version of Sergeant Pepper and it’s still pretty mind-blowing today.

Printed Song Lyrics

Before Sergeant Pepper you had to guess what a singer was saying and I spent several years making up lyrics to Creedence Clearwater Revival songs because John Fogerty was pretty much unintelligible.

(So you definitely didn’t want John ordering pizza for the band because who knows what you’d wind up with if you asked for: “Pap Ronee, Onnn Yuuuns and Waaal Grain Pappers.”)

With Sgt. Pepper you could read the lyrics to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds which was a big step forward in music appreciation because I heard about someone who hadn’t read the lyrics thinking it was “The girl with colitis goes by” and one of my brothers thinking Crystal Gayle was singing, “Donuts make my brown eyes blue.”

FM radio

Before the Beatles, AM radio was for music and FM was for talk shows, but AM radio stations wanted songs to be three minutes or less so when the Beatles released Hey Jude at 7 ½ minutes, AM radio stations cut the song off after just three minutes because they were money-grubbing morons.

If you have the musical taste of Ebenezer Scrooge, seven-and-a-half minutes could be two songs and six radio commercials.

But then some FM radio station in San Francisco promoted the fact that they would play the entire 7 ½ minutes of Hey Jude and that led to the idea of playing whole albums without interruption to lure music lovers to their stations and now AM is mostly for talk and FM is mostly for music unless you count National Public Radio which seems to be aimed at people who wear lots of flannel, grow their own Radicchio and think socks with sandals is a good look.

Recording studio innovations

Before the Beatles, music studios were used to record the best possible version of what musicians did in a live performance, but once they decided to stop touring the Beatles no longer had to be able to perform their music on stage, which meant they could start playing around with all the previously-unexplored possibilities of a recording studio.

The Beatles could slow songs down (Rain was played faster live and then slowed down to give it a “heavy” feel) or speed songs up or play bits backward or add tape loops or get high as a possible and raid the Abbey Road sound effects department for the background noises on Yellow Submarine or tell an orchestra to start on their instrument’s lowest note and work their way to their highest note and then hit the same chord on three pianos and a harpsichord and turn the recording volume up as the pianos and harpsichord faded out so the chord seems to last forever (it’s actually 42 seconds) on A Day in the Life.

The Beatles redefined what was possible in a recording studio.

Abbey Road was considered primitive even for that time, so the Beatles, producer George Martin and recording engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Townsend had to create new ways to get the sounds the Beatles wanted. (John once said he wanted a song to sound “orange” or maybe it was “like an orange” – I’ve heard it both ways – and either way it indicates John was unusually high at the time.)

Along the way the Beatles and their Abbey Road producer and engineers either invented or popularized:

Automatic Double Tracking

You can get a richer sound if you record a vocal twice, but apparently it’s a huge pain in the ass because it’s hard to sing a song the exact same way more than once, so after John kept complaining, engineer Ken Townsend figured out you could record one vocal performance on two tapes, but vary the speed of one of the recordings and make it sound like two people singing. 

The Beatles loved it and used it on vocals and instruments on Revolver and musicians have been using ADT ever since.

Tuned feedback

According to the internet, the Who and the Kinks were already using feedback in live performances, but the Beatles were the first to put it on a record, I Feel Fine:

(Love that George is singing into what appears to be a punching bag and Ringo is keeping time by riding an exercise bike.)

So even if someone, somewhere used feedback earlier, I Feel Fine was a Number One hit and popularized the intentional use of a sound most bands had been avoiding.

Innovative microphoning

Just in case you’ve never lived with a drummer, drums are really really loud so recording engineers would keep the microphones at a distance and the result was the drums would be under the sound of everything else and put on the same track as the bass and whatever instrument was carrying the melody.

Then the Beatles and Their Abbey Road Buddies got the idea of muffling the drums (it’s why you see blankets stuffed in bass drums and Ringo would tape a pack of cigarettes to his snare) so the microphones could now be close to the drums and the Beatles got a thud instead of a boom and everybody else wondered how in the hell they were doing that and started trying to copy the Abbey Road drum sound.

(Geoff Emerick got in trouble for damaging the microphones by getting them too close to the drums and had to get permission to do it for the Beatles.)

Now drums could be heard distinctly which was a great thing because Ringo Starr had always done more than keep time, he provided drum parts created specifically for a particular song, like what he’s doing here on Ticket to Ride:

I was going to post a recorded version of this song so you could hear the drums better, but stumbled across them performing it on stage, which is a great reminder of how good these guys were live.

Which ironically (if that’s the right word, but for these prices I’m not doing any more research) is one of the reasons they quit touring; the Beatles were overscheduled and didn’t have enough time to practice and eventually felt they couldn’t meet their own standards for a live performance.

Back masking

A recording technique where you play something backwards, record it and then reverse the recording and play it forwards and according to the internet the Beatles weren’t the first to use it, but popularized it when John got high and accidentally played a tape backwards and liked the sound, so they used it on the guitar solos for songs like Tomorrow Never Knows and I’m Only Sleeping:

And I’m just now starting to notice how often I’m using the phrase, “John got high.”

I’m also just now noticing this section could be its own book so let’s wind it up by saying the Beatles, producer George Martin and the Abbey Road engineers either created or popularized:

• Phase shifting

• Spliced audio loops

• Compression

• Multi-tracking

• Overdubbing

• Plugging instruments directly into a mixing board

And a number of other recording techniques I still don’t understand and probably never will.

The point here is pretty much everybody everywhere uses some recording technique the Beatles and their Abbey Road co-workers pioneered or popularized.

And finally, a Bajillion Garage Bands

When I was a teenager nobody I knew listened to Frank Sinatra and thought, “If we form a 42-piece orchestra and get Nelson Riddle to conduct, we could play The Lady Is a Tramp,” but lots of people I knew heard the early Beatles stuff and thought they could play a song that only required two guitars, a bass and a set of drums.

Turns out, we wrong about a lot of that.

For instance; the opening chord to A Hard Day’s Night is incredibly complicated and has been studied by everyone but NASA to figure out how the Beatles got that sound and according to the internet, it’s actually three chords played at once. (Or maybe it’s three chords and a single note on a bass and the fact that people are still arguing about it ought to tell you it’s fairly complex.)

In any case…

I can think of at least six different bands that my high school classmates formed or performed in and that was just one Not-Very-Big High School in the Sierra Nevada Foothills.

That drive to become a musician and be in a band was happening everywhere at once and Tom Petty, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ozzy Osbourne, Oasis, Kiss, The Pixies, Badfinger, Nirvana, Phil Collins and the Flaming Lips – among many many many others – have credited the Beatles with making them want a be a musician or influencing their music after they became one.

The Beach Boys Brian Wilson composed God Only Knows the morning after he first heard Rubber Soul.

So a huge percentage of the music that followed was inspired by the Beatles because we all wanted to form bands and act cool and get chicks (and possibly dudes and, if you were really open-minded, both) and if we had to learn to play rock and roll to make those things happen we were more than willing to give it a shot.

OK, that’s it and if you can believe it and even if you can’t, there are a lot more examples of how the Beatles influenced everything and everybody that followed, so next time someone dismisses the Beatles music you now have some ammunition to shoot back with and all I can say about that is Happy Hunting.

P.S.

If you actually enjoyed this 3-part tribute to the Beatles leave a comment or give it a like or read it 14 times because if enough of you want more I’ve got enough leftover material to write another essay on their ground-breaking movie A Hard Day’s Night.

Now go listen to some music.