Beatles - Not Even Close To The Best Group Ever.

Cafe Society
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I think it’s telling that those who slag on, or attempt to lessen the importance of the Beatles, are, for the most part, non-creative people: people who don’t know as much as they think they do, but are compelled to convince others that they do. Those people are not hard to spot…and ignore.

In my experience, most top contemporary creative people give the Beatles their due: that they were the primary force behind changing contemporary music (for the better) in the 20th century. It’s fun to behold artists with huge egos themselves melt and gush about the effect the Beatles had on their lives. Many don’t simply attribute their influence as a contributing factor—they credit them for pulling them into the creative arts, period. Many cite 2/9/64 as the turning point of their lives. I didn’t go into the music business (I’m just a self-taught dabbler), but that date meant something to me, too.

Lennon or McCartney? I believe this video highlights the reverence creative artists hold for the Beatles to this day.

Lennon or McCartney? It’s a simple question, but one instantly understood. It’s a question that most people on Earth have already considered and either struggle to answer, or offer an instant answer (because they’ve struggled with the question in the past). But, it’s obvious from the tone of the respondents in this video (and from my experience) that highly creative people, young and old, hold the Beatles in the highest esteem. They consider the question important and know that their answer reveals something about them. There’s an undertone of perplexity, “really?, you want me to choose between water and air!?!” And, there’s also a strong undertone of betrayal: “really?, you want me to choose between my mother and father?”

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That may be true, but it’s not an argument that their music is novel or well performed. Dick Dale created surf rock (and, I would argue, rock via surf->rockabilly->rock) and no one really cares because he isn’t a very good singer, didn’t feel like touring, and was taken out of the running by illness early in his career. If you want to tell people to listen to someone purely based on how pivotal they were, creating a genre is just as necessary as popularizing a genre, for that genre to matter to the greater public. Why not tell people to listen to Dick Dale or The Ventures?

And popularizing something still doesn’t mean that it’s good. McDonald’s has popularized hamburgers around the world. And while we can recognize that accomplishment for what it is, it still doesn’t mean that McDonald’s makes great burgers.

Ultimately, we will see whether The Beatles stand the test of time.

Everyone thought that The Godfather was a timeless classic. I watched it after having seen a dozen other gangster films and TV shows and found that it simply didn’t hold up to later revisions. I think that Deadwood is better, or Heat. The Godfather may be the progenitor, but it had enough flaws that later additions to the genre have been able to (in my opinion) bring the original down enough pegs that it’s principal value is historical, rather than as something to keep watching for centuries to come, if you just like a well produced film.

Personally, I would agree with the OP. The Beatles were a band comprised of individuals with very bland, agreeable tastes in music. They’re like Steven Spielberg, trying out different genres and making likable, generic versions that go over well with the majority and gain fame on that basis. Maybe that will be sufficient to keep them in the limelight for many future years (and Spielberg as well), I could point to certain works of classical literature, like Dracula or everything by Sabatini, and say that those are probably classics more in the realm of pop fiction, than classics in the sense of, “This is a masterpiece of artistic expression, and a work to change your view of the world.” It does happen that not-really-classic art can become a classic.

These make for good, safe recommendations for others to enjoy. They still might not like them - I like Sabatini, I don’t care for The Beatles - but it’s still a different realm from works which have depth. I would be choosy about who to recommend The Red and the Black to, or Jay Munly’s music. If Dracula had never been written, eh, oh well. I enjoyed the read, but I enjoyed Christie Golden’s Vampire of the Mists just as much and the world is probably perfectly happy to forget that work.

You may be correct that The Beatles have a place in history. I would probably argue that there were a lot of bands making a while lot of music of different styles at that time and it was all going to come together anyways. Minus Francis Ford Coppola, we wouldn’t have the Mafia genre, perhaps, but the 70s cinema explosion would still have happened and still created a lot of models for later filmmakers. But in terms of creating bubble gum pop music, they may well be the most distinct precursor. But George Lucas also created the summer blockbuster.

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What’s this, when you play in a doorway?
mmm

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I tend to stay away from the “are you a musician?” angle unless someone is getting pretty specific about something that perhaps they haven’t experienced. Watching the Italian singer that pulykamell linked to does a great job of showing all the extra, inside baseball vocal stuff that they do on a seemingly-simple pop song like I Want to Hold Your Hand. So even for non-musicians, you can get a sense. There’s a guy who tours giving lectures about different Beatles’ albums and songs. A great way in to both the simplicity - they played most parts and the standard guitar bass and drum tracks are easy to isolate - and the complexity of all the exploration they engaged in.
The place where everything has to start is the songs. The songs endure.

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I enjoy the Beatles music. I play the Red Hits (early hits) album at least once a week in my office. Play some of the Blue Hits (later stuff) every month.

This thread was debating if they were the greatest band. Imho its not even close. They are in my top ten 60’s bands. But they aren’t number 1.

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Do the responses to your misconceptions about their skill as live band, and why that’s probably not a good metric, change your point of view?

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Yes, I was a bit harsh. Their legacy of studio recordings is very important.

I’m not sure exactly where I’d rank them among 60’s bands. It would take a lot of thought to rank that many great bands.

I would rank the Beatles higher after reading this thread. Probably in the top 5.

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Plus their legacy as a fantastic live band too, right?

Personally I was always a huge Beatles fan but what I’ve learned in this thread has been an education. I didn’t know a fraction of their impact.

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Right. I didn’t know their early live gigs were so good. Until this thread informed me.

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Yes. Andrew Loog Oldham shaped the Rolling Stones’ image so they’d appear “raunchy and gritty.” To contrast with the Beatles, although both bands were friends.

The Stones* also* appeared on Sullivan’s show. And also had some commercial success, I believe. (The Who had their images shaped for commercial appeal, as well. They were Mods! The whole London Scene was multimedia–fashion, art, photography, music worked together.)

And, yes. **All **the fans were teenyboppers. Before long, younger adults paid some attention. Eventually, even oldsters thought “Yesterday” was a pretty tune…

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It’s only relatively recently that I have, through the magic of YouTube, gotten to see some of the footage of the Beatles in concert. And yes, they were a good live band, if you could hear them. They had some pretty good reasons for giving up touring (and since I wasn’t around in those days anyway I’m just as happy that they focused on the studio recordings that I can still enjoy), but those reasons didn’t include not being good enough.

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It’s called “paying your dues.” The Beatles worked in Hamburg. White US bands played dives like the Cellar Club. (I visited the Houston Cellar a couple of times.)

Doug Sahm actually played black clubs in San Antonio. But, once the Beatles hit, he washed the grease out of his hair and let Huey Meaux package him & his band as “The Sir Douglas Quintet.” So they’d sound British! Well, until they started talking. And some of his band sat in the shadows for publicity shots because they looked kinda Mexican. But they had one big hit & another small one. And Doug continued on his amazing career…

The Beatles showed there was a level of success above working grubby clubs every night & hoping a single might get some local air play. That meant capturing the teen market. Many of those teens followed the musicians in their later careers. (I did.)

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By the way, if you haven’t seen it, the movie BackBeat is entirely worth seeing. It shows them in Hamburg, pre-Ringo. Music for their live performances by a raw garage-punk band with Dave Grohl and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. Gives a great feel of that paying-your-dues times. The focus is John and Stu Sutcliffe, so Paul and George get short shrift, but if you go in with that, it’s fine.

Ian “professor quirrel” Hart does a really good Lennon, and Stephen Dorff and Sheryl Lee are a nice Stu Sutcliffe and Astrid Kircherr (who, if you think about it, was the “first Yoko” a band gf who has huge influence on their decision and style. Hmm).

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You lose me when you describe the Beatles as “bland” and “generic”. Can you expand on that? Their music seems very purposeful and idiosyncratic to me.

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The Beatles’ tastes ran from everything from show tunes and Ray Charles to classical and avant-garde composers like Cage and Stockhausen. Even their early “teenybopper” songs were considered strikingly different from what the Brill Building professionals were turning out. (Bob Dylan: “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.”) They can only appear bland and agreeable if you completely ignore the times in which they emerged. (And, I would argue, not really even then, but maybe that’s me.) They defined rock music to such an extent that they seem safe to modern ears, because virtually every stylistic experiment they tried was assimilated into the mainstream.

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OK, you’ve given a definition of boy band. Like the others I think it’s so historically wrong that is worse than meaningless, it actually tries to implant a false view of history.

I can’t really think what I can add so I’ll recapitulate. We know the definition of boy bands, which are singers and dancers not affiliated with one another, chosen by a producer for their looks, handed music by that producer, and having no control over their music or image.

If you want a Platonic conception of the what the opposite of a boy band was in 1962, it would be the Beatles. They worked for years to create a unified band, replacing even friends when they didn’t live up to their standards. They played their own instruments, becoming proficient and sometimes great through hundreds of hours of practice. They wrote their own songs, and their insistence on releasing their own music as singles made it possible for every other group to do so. They were the absolute bosses of the studio. George Martin worked with them but also for them. He made their every whim possible. Brian Epstein worked for them as well. He found out what they wanted - world domination - and told them how best to do it. They ran the business, as he found out. He ran them like a sports coach does his team but the team were also the owners and could and did overrule him.

As for the teenybopper market. As Nonesuch said, that *was *the market. As soon as a group moved out of clubs, which made money off of liquor, the market was teens and young adults. Again, every singer, group, band, and conglomeration of every age that played anything resembling rock ‘n’ roll played to this same audience. The earlier British Fury’s and Fame’s did so, Cliff Richards and the Shadows did so, Cilla Black did so, Lonnie Donegan did so, touring American groups did so. The Beatles did so. But they did not play down to that audience. They played at the higher level they had reached and lifted the audience along with it because they absorbed every type of music and incorporated it into their style, making it far more sophisticated than anyone around them. That’s why they appealed to so many adults when earlier rock ‘n’ rollers were scorned. Every record, every year, they got higher and deeper (drug pun intended) and the audience for that kind of music grew to include everyone of every age. No boy band has ever done that.

I repeat what I said earlier. If the Beatles were a boy band then so was everybody else. Why say it except to denigrate them? It’s a term of approbation for good reason. Your history is as wrong as Zeke’s and that’s why you’re getting such enormous pushback.

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I think that to describe the Beatles as a boy band or a teenybopper act is ahistorical projection, but I can let that go.

What I’m arguing with is the idea that they consciously changed their act to appeal to teenagers. John Lennon liked to claim Brian Epstein made them safe and boring, but that was hindsight, and mostly spurred by jealousy that a prissy college boy like Mick Jagger could be crowned the reigning badass of the British Invasion over himself. The other Beatles never made an issue of it; if putting on suits and bowing after every number got them a bigger fee, they were all for it.

But as I’ve said, the Beatles played the same material pre-Epstein as they did post-Epstein; they just comported themselves more professionally. While Lennon complained about having to wear a suit, he ignored the fact that the group would never have tolerated Epstein interfering with their music. On one occasion, trying to impress a boyfriend, Epstein visited one of their recording sessions and, after a take, offered a suggestion from the control room. “Stick to your percentages, Brian,” Lennon shot back. “We’ll look after the music.”

Your position seems to me to be that the Beatles could have stayed true to themselves and remained a grubby, leather-wearing bar band, but instead chose to go where the money was and so reinvented themselves as a teenybopper act. My position is that the Beatles were always ambitious even when they were nobodies playing birthday parties for free, and that finding success as a rock and roll act at the time meant selling records to teenagers; there was no other metric and no other avenue open to them. They weren’t a country group or a black R&B act; it was either the pop charts, or pack it in and get real jobs.

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The only explanation I can think of is that they are being compared to the gigantic body of work put out across the genres of popular music since they recorded (it’s been 50 years after all), and not accounting for the fact that virtually everything they did was before all of that. Even then “bland” and “generic” seem way out of left field.

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Well, there was already success to be had outside of working grubby clubs. Before The Beatles there were other stars who got cleaned up, presented to the teenage girls, and made a bucket of money. It doesn’t always take an outside party to convince them to make that move, Buddy Holly and the Crickets were convinced to wear suits by the Everly Brothers, for instance. Looking clean cut isn’t a panacea for success, but it helps keep the parents from insisting that they throw out the record on looks alone.

As to “paying your dues”: ehh, some people toil forever in obscurity because they never make the necessary changes for mass appeal, even though they may create musical treasures daily. For every artist like The Beatles, there’s at least one like Link Wray. He had success, but got tired of the demands of the music business, and went home to make records in his home studio. Success for one person isn’t necessarily success for another. Since success is kind of a crapshoot, I don’t know who these dues are going to.

That’s why I don’t believe in the concept of “boy band”=“sellout”, or whatever negative connotation people are associating with the concept. If you are willing to model your act for a certain audience, and it doesn’t compromise who you think you are: who cares? It’s your goddamn act, and the audience is at least as fickle as the artist. If you’ve decided that money is your goal above other concerns, that’s your deal. It’s not necessarily an easier row to hoe than any other, and it’s more easy to measure your disappointment. There may be posers, and sellouts, but they are rare. Those are almost always ideas you project onto other people because of your expectations and prejudices about people, not things they themselves become. In the case of sellouts: They always knew in their heart of hearts they’d change for money, you didn’t. You’re not clairvoyant, it’s not your fault. In the case of posers: They usually see the scene differently than you do. You don’t define that scene, no matter what your inflated ego says. So, yeah, who’s the poser? Neither of you are clairvoyant, so it’s nobody’s fault.

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I found this academic paper that talks a bit to scabpicker’s point about boy band and teenybopper not be a negative. The author wants to rescue the terms but also makes the point that his definition of them is completely idiosyncratic and ahistoric. I had to sign in but it’s free.

“I Want It That Way”: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands