In Search of Beatles Rock but not Pop

Good points all - we could obviously go on talking Beatles 'til the walruses come home! I do find it interesting about CW's and Ben's ages, since I was also born in that providential year of 1964 (a little too late, if you're into the stuff I am), but was given my first Beatles records around the tender age of 6 or so (Rubber Soul first, then the Blue and Red 2-LP collections in that order).

In fact, permit me to tell a story about my first conscious exposure not only to The Beatles, but also to stereo equipment. Although my father was a classical and jazz record collector who frequently played music in the house during the evenings after dinner, when I was still young enough to go to bed before he started listening, his system and music never made much of an impression on me that I can remember, other than waking me up from time to time.

Back when I still had yet to receive the first little portable record player of my own, at a time when I would have been only 3 years old, my family (with me still as the only child) took the longest trip I had yet been on to see old friends of my father's. This couple had a son, who was probably in his late teens or early twenties at the time (my Dad remarried late) - the Summer of Love. He listened to headphones in their living room, and the sight of him with this contraption over his ears and long hair (remember how large 'phones were then? The coiled stretch cords?) apparently fascinated me.

He indicated he would put them on me and let me try them, and in one of my earliest memories at all of any kind, he got up and removed them from his head and placed them over mine, adjusting them as small as they would go. I didn't hear anything yet, but he went over to the record player and cued up something, which turned out to be the thing I had overheard him talking about with the assembled adults, and I recall hearing the phrase "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and not knowing what that meant. Apparently it - whatever it was - was something worthy of discussion however, and seemed be known (at least in name - my folks didn't listen to Rock) to everyone there but me.

Having cued the turntable, he walked back past me where I was on the middle of the floor, telling me that the music would begin in a moment, and turned to sit down and face me on the couch, in between his mother and my parents as they all watched and waited to see my reaction. Not knowing exactly what to expect, I was awestruck when sound so loud I could see the adults laughing but not hear them, filled my head to what seemed like the extent of the whole world.

It was a kind of music I had never experienced before, and it affected me greatly. "Picture yourself in a boat on a river...Marmalade skies...Kaliedescope eyes...Boom! Boom! Boom!" He had cued up "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", and I was being thoroughly psychedelicized! I thought it was just the most incredible thing I had ever heard.

I have no memory myself of the next part of the story. I just remember listening, enraptured, until the headphones were removed and I could hear once again the adults for whom I was such a source of amusement. But my parents told me in later years that after the music began, and my eyes grew wide and my mouth went open, that I became so excited that I went and totally astonished them by literally turning a cartwheel right there on the carpet in front of the sofa, with the headphones still on me!

Now, understand - I do not know how to turn a cartwheel. I have never turned a cartwheel in my life, before or since that day. But I guess that there in that moment, hearing The Beatles for the first time, I was just moved so intensely by the spirit of the music that details like actually being able to perform this kind of stunt were rendered completely irrelevant. Anyway, it was, as they say, a very auspicious beginning to my future relationship with The Beatles and their music, and they have always been my favorite musical group ever since, and I'm sure always will be.

P.S. - The best book that I know of to read about the phenomenom the was The Beatles is called "Shout! The Beatles In Their Own Time", written by a journalist from an older generation who covered the group for a British newspaper during their heyday, and which was published in the 80's.

I'm curious how old you are, CW. Rock fans who grew up on a diet of the "heavier" sounds that followed The Beatles may find that their music doesn't seem to "rock out" enough for them. In their day, The Beatles did often get represented as one side of a dichotomy, with The Rolling Stones on the other, as the "light" to The Stones' "dark". As a big fan of both, I can say there is some truth to this characterization, but that it really misses the point.

"Rock" music as the art form we know would have been inconceivable without The Beatles happening first. All other groups and artists, The Stones included, were in their day continually playing catch-up and second fiddle to The Beatles. The Beatles were, are, and forever will be, by far the most important single thing to come along in Rock & Roll after its beginnings with Elvis and Chuck Berry. They mark the divergence of what came to be known simply as "Rock" from Rock & Roll's roots in Rhythm & Blues, Country & Western, Pop, and Soul musics that came before, and with it Rock's establishment as an Art Form, no longer just a passing teenage fad.

They did this by integrating everything that had preceded them with a talent, flair, eclecticism, capacity for evolution, timeliness, and sheer songwriting originality and genius, totally unprecedented in the music before them and not matched since. The important thing to realize is that although they did not blaze every Rock path that formed in the 60's (and every path taken since, BTW, does have its roots in this seminal decade), the ones they did not, such as those pioneered by The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and even their British Invasion mates like The Stones and The Who, would not have come to be without The Beatles' inspiration and example.

Just as songwriters, Lennon and McCartney wrote so many high-quality, notable, and well-known tunes, and with such incredible variety, that casually interested listeners like yourself will frequently complain that although they like a lot of Beatles songs, there are a lot they can't seem to get into. Contrast this with most other groups or artists, where folks tend either like the bag that they work in and therefore dig them, or don't (but for maybe a song or two).

Yes, it is also true that, contrary to what some have thought, not every single Beatles song is an uncontestable masterpiece. But their batting average is orders of magnitude beyond most other prolific artists nonetheless. And though they were not the first Rock & Roll performers to write their own songs (Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Brian Wilson all had success at this before The Beatles arrived on the scene), they did set the standard, observed ever since, for the self-contained group which both writes and performs all its own material.

Now me saying this, or even its being true, is not going to - and is not supposed to - make you "like" The Beatles more than you presently do. I, for instance, generally like a lot of 20th century classical music much better than I do Mozart, even though I realize that one could not have come to be without the other. I acknowledge his genius even as I admit that it affects me less than it does others. When it comes to The Beatles, there is no "escaping" the Pop aspect of their work - either in the Tin Pan Alley sense of the word as it applies to song-craft, or in their literal popularity worldwide and their attitude towards fame and success. They were trying to be liked by as many people as they could and still touch them all artistically and emotionally. The Beatles did not engage, for the most part, in the willfull obtuseness that so many lesser-talented groups or artists have cultivated in their quests for "exclusivity" among their audiences. The Beatles didn't want a narrow, self-conscious, self-congratulatory audience, separate from other audiences by age or preference. They had what it took to have the whole world as an audience - and they knew it.

So you get songs old people can like, and songs kids can like (many of which, BTW, display a sense of humor that's almost entirely missing in today's simultaneously pretentious and sophomoric Rock). Musically, you get Rock both hard and soft, along with everything from good old Rock & Roll, to Folk Rock, to Experimental Rock, to Psychedelic Rock, to an amazing collection of what can only be described as Original Standards Rock, and all featuring a combination of singing, playing, arranging, and production that is without equal.

But perhaps more importantly, especially from the post-Beatlemania middle period onward, you get genuine, personal, intelligent, wise, and challenging artistic communication in almost every piece, that combined with the musical innovation, creates an impressionistic whole which makes most other artists' output seem disappointingly literal, posturing, and earthbound by comparision. Whereas other groups may have stood for more for rebellion, or sex, or fun, or violence, or drugs, or jamming, or dancing, or simply a fad of the moment, The Beatles always, first and foremost, stood for - and successfully embodied in their art - love. All of those things were representations of freedom, which defined the era - but only love is completely universal for everyone all the time. That is why The Beatles legacy still to this day towers over everything else in Rock.

Hey, I like Ravi - and Jimi - as much as the next guy, but I loves me some surf music!! (And Dick Dale could be the bastard son of those two anyway...)