I think I can get behind you here. I wasn’t even born until '73, so I wasn’t around for the unfolding of their music as it happened. I can only try to piece together what little I know of the times to glean how each release influenced music and pop-culture; which is to say, not really much at all.
Also, I’m not a musician, just a music lover. So, I’m sure their brilliance may have become more noticeable far earlier than Rubber Soul or Revolver to musicians with a trained ear.
So, for those Beatle’s fans that where around at the time, was there a noticeably bigger reaction from fans, critics and musicians when they released Sgt. Pepper’s? Or was every release about as spectacular as the previous until then?
For popularity, every release after their first album was a smash hit.
Critically, there were two camps. Many criticized them for their long hair and a dislike for the screams of the teenage girls in the audience (similar to the criticism for Frank Sinatra when he went solo – and the screams for Sinatra were to some extent staged by his publicist, while the Beatles were genuine).
On the other hand, many people who looked past Beatlemania admitted that even their earliest work was the sign of talented songwriters.
The Beatles were immediate hits with, for instance, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson. Those guys, already well on the way to legend status themselves in 1963 when the Beatles hit the USA, were highly impressed by the sheer talent of the Beatles as soon as they heard them.
It’s a myth that the Beatles weren’t good musicians or good songwriters from the start; the sort of thing perpetuated by people who think they know a lot about music but who really don’t. Most actual musicians (barring the occasional Yngwie-level moron) will tell you that all four of the Beatles (including Ringo) were very talented musicians. If you don’t hear it, the problem is you, not the Beatles.
That sort of thing could happen in the 1960s, but I don’t think there’s ever been another band like the Beatles in this regard, having both immense popularity with the casual, teenaged music “fan” but also enjoying critical respect, and the ardent attention of the more sophisticated listener. This isn’t to say that there weren’t better musicians technically, or that some people preferred the Rolling Stones, or some other group. But the Beatles were always respected. I think the Stones were awestruck when John and Paul, while visiting them in the studio, went off in a corner and came up with “I Wanna Be Your Man” in fifteen or twenty minutes. It wasn’t one of their great songs, I admit, but still.
Thanks for the input so far. Quite informative. I have been you-tubing some of these things and came across this wonderful video of Beatles doing death metal. The crowd apparently loved it!
They were very good musicians, all right, but they weren’t the best ones on the scene, technical-proficiency-wise. Where I think they excelled, aside from songwriting, was in performing and arranging their material as a group. There are a lot of great, even iconic songwriters, by contrast, whose recordings I can hardly stand to listen to, because of the plodding instrumental arrangements or weak vocals.
I think it’s safe to say that for those of us who grew up with the Beatles, they didn’t have nearly the same impact during their subsequent, solo careers. Each went away with his own piece of what made the collective effort great, and for me, at least, it often was not sufficient.
People like to talk about which musicians are supposedly “best”, technical-proficiency-wise, like it has anything to do with the quality of music.
Pretty much every jazz musician can play rings around the majority of rock musicians (and I say that as a rock musician myself). Does that make jazz music “better” than rock music? Not if you’re not a fan of jazz. There are NO absolute standards in music, only relative ones. The best music is the music you like the best.
The Beatles, to a man, played with a remarkable level of “feel”, which is the sort of skill that non-musicians have difficulty grasping, let alone quantifying. They were extraordinarily attuned to playing (and singing) as a unit. They played together as a group, not as four individual musicians, and unless you’ve spent a fair bit of time (as I have) playing in musical groups, you have no idea how rare and precious a skill that is.
ETA: Which is to say that I’m agreeing with your last paragraph.
Sometime after the release of *A Hard Days Night * if I recall correctly, EMI gave The Beatles carte blanche to use the Abbey Road studio as much as they wanted whenever they wanted due to the band’s popularity and unprecedented success for a British group. This paved the way for experimentation with recording techniques, unusual instrumentation for rock music, unusual time signatures, unusual chords for rock, other songwriting aspects, etc. That’s ‘exactly when’ it started in my view, to answer the OP’s question. The Please Please Me album was recorded in one day. By comparison, Beatles’ albums took months to record after they were granted essentally unlimited studio.
As noted already in this thread, the intentional use of guitar amp feedback in ‘I Feel Fine’ was pivotal: Lennon’s amplified acoustic-electric Gibson guitar sceaming through a Vox amp gave birth to acid rock.
The ‘Paperback Writer’ / ‘Rain’ single was notable for improved recording + mixing of bass guitar and use of backmasking (backwards vocals at the end of ‘Rain’). Backmasking was also later prominent on Revolver tracks ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Often overlooked is the automatic double tracking (ADT) machine invented by an EMI technician at Lennon’s suggestion. This was first used on Revolver. Other innovative uses of multi-track tape recording (overdubbing, changing tape speeds, etc) were important too. I think it was Les Paul who invented multi-track recording but The Beatles and EMI team seriously improved it.
The Beatles were the first rock band to perform at huge stadium venues, particularly Shea Stadium, which inspired the need for better PA systems and more powerful guitar amps. I think Vox was the first company to manufacture 100w amps: the Vox AC100 was first built for Paul McCartney. Soon after, Hendrix and Clapton were using 100w Marshall full stacks.
The integration of Hindustani music, orchestral arrangements, calliopes and other odd intstruments into rock albums was groundbreaking.
Brian Wilson was also pretty groundbreaking in that regard, possibly more so than the Beatles. I know he opened Pet Sounds with a calliope, but I don’t actually have a time line in front of me.
Frank Zappa was doing unusual instrumentation, unusual time signatures, unusual chords, multitrack recording, over dubbing and tape manipulation years before the Beatles did.
I think that’s why the OP’s question get’s so many different opinions.
The answer as to where they revolutionized rock in their career as a group seems to be ‘pretty much all along they way.’ With every release they evolved and pushed rock into new places, yet any new sounds, instrumentation, songwriting, orchestration and technical advancements, never seemed to undermine the core artistry and talent of the group; they built several new foundations in rock that spread like viruses among different artists at the time and today, which is a very rare thing. Almost an exclusive thing in their case. What other band can we say the same for?
That’s a matter of retroactive definition. The the Beatles were rock musicians, not pop musicians when they were playing (pop at the time was people like Sinatra, Dean Martin, Herb Alpert, etc.). There wasn’t a single person who called the Beatles “pop” while they were performing – they were rock or rock and roll.
I agree with the ideas that The Beatles were a rock ‘n’ roll band, but the US cover of Meet The Beatles does say, “The First Album by England’s Phenomenal Pop Combo”.
Zappa did some weird instrumentation and multi-track recording as early as 1963, but hardly anyone heard it at the time. Zappa was not revolutionary before The Beatles were, but Zappa was revolutionary in this own ways. The Mothers’ first album, Freak Out!, was released in June 1966. The Beatles’ Revolver was already recorded by then and released a few weeks later.
The Mothers’ *We’re Only In It for the Money *album (1967) was a great parody of Sgt. Pepper with lots of tape manipulation and overdubbing. The Beatles were fans of Zappa.
Unusual chords and time signatures had long been used in jazz and classical music before Zappa was born. The Beatles were incorporating these elements in popular rock music before Zappa.
watching them live via youtube I get a strong sense of this. As much as I have enjoyed a lot of their music, to have seen them in person would have been* really* awesome.
Pretty much everything after the first single–i.e., every single or album thereafter, was a smash hit, with one or two minor exceptions that didn’t chart as well. Single releases were still important all through the 1960s.
They came from rock and roll, but their early studio efforts were very significantly pop tinged. IMO this came about not only because the studio wanted it that way, but also because during their Hamburg stints of all-night gigs they tended to seek out and adapt a wide variety of pop songs to include in their sets–“Falling In Love Again”, “Till There Was You”, and “Red Sails In The Sunset” to name some examples. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were decidedly not pop, because by that time the term pop had become youth-centric and definitely did not include those guys and their ilk. In evaluating popular music from about 1964 to 1966 it’s important to remember that pop and rock mostly overlapped during that time. There were hardly pop “divas” or boy bands; most bands emulated the Beatles in one way or another. Even with a song like “Just My Style”, performed by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, you could hear the Beatles’ influence even if the song was a far, far cry from being anywhere near as good.
Although every Beatles album included some raving rockers, those invariably came with other songs which, while highly inventive and resonant with just about everyone under 30 including rock and roll fans, they were never considered rock and roll in the way that, say, the Rolling Stones were. When drug-induced or drug-allusive music came on the scene, few people if anyone ever called the Beatles’ music “acid rock or psychedelic rock”; that term was reserved more for bands like the Grateful Dead and the Doors. The Beatles weren’t even hard rock, most of the time. They couldn’t be, because they were too good, in terms of songcraft, to be so limited. Conversely, as good as George Harrison was in the band, he wasn’t able or didn’t care to keep up with the emerging ranks of guitar heroes which are central to hard rock.
