Hmm, I wonder if Geoff was aware of that before they tried it. Pet Sounds was recorded before Revolver, but only by a few months. It could one of those near-simultaneous invention thing-a-ma-jigs. 
This post is pennywise and pound foolish, for want of a better term. Fundamentally, it is virtually impossible to write structured pop songs without using known chord progressions that have been in place for decades, if not hundreds of years. What the Beatles did - by virtue of their songwriting skills, cross-over celebrity, etc. - is demand that this genre of music be evaluated critically as a legitimate art form, not a “here today, gone tomorrow” commercial novelty. This is a very big deal.
As for the Leslie - read Lewisohn’s “Complete Abbey Road Recordings” - the Beatles’ production team WERE the first to use the Leslie this way and Nonsuch is right - it involved cracking open the speaker and re-wiring stuff.
Niggling over who did what first is far less important than the fact that the Beatles expanded the language of commercial pop music to include many techniques that were around but obscure and are commonplace today. It happens rarely - e.g., the Ramones and other bands with the “language” of punk rock that is now ubiquitous, the Police integrating reggae and jazz with a New Wave sensibility, etc…
I’ve been meaning to come on here and ask what it is about the Beatles’ harmonies that make them so distinct. You hear them and you know it’s them, and I don’t think it’s just the identity of the voices. It seems to be the harmony itself that’s unusual. What intervals are they using, and why do they seem to be both unusual and pleasing? Why are they used so little in pop, still, it seems? Am I missing something, or are they avoided so that groups aren’t accused of ripping off the Beatles even more than they are already?
I had a huge fight with my high school sweetheart over this. If (big IF) the Beatles were the first boy band then the current crop should be ashamed to have fallen so far from greatness.
I don’t disagree that the Beatles did all of these things. To borrow your phrase, it is “pennywise and pound foolish” to so narrowly define the era and genre of music that it becomes possible to claim the Beatles were “first” at something, or that some innovation wasn’t important until the Beatles did it, or that it wasn’t important when someone else did it because it wasn’t part of “the genre.” It is the over-use of the phrase “the Beatles did first” that rankles with me; in other circles it would otherwise be called confirmation bias.
meh. In the 20th century - for pop music, not jazz or classical, etc. - you have, oh, Irving Berlin, George Gerschwin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles. Yes, there are others, but you get the idea - the Beatles are the top of the Pantheon - no one is narrowing anything. And of those at the top of the Pantheon, the Beatles were the most innovative when it comes to:
a) incorporating a broad array of musical influences into a commercially-viable set of songs
b) using ground-breaking studio techniques - which may or may not have been done before - in making commercially-viable songs
The commerical-viability - i.e., making it popular - is a key element of what made the Beatles who they were and what they respresent in the history of music.
Are we done now?
NO! NO! Please don’t be done. Keep talking about the Beatles!
I’m learning a lot.
In the song “In My Life”, there appears to be a harpsichord solo in the middle. It’s actually George Martin playing the part slowly on piano and then the tape was played back at a higher speed.
I don’t know if that had been done before.
The following is not relevant to all of the claims being made about the Beatles on this thread, but about at least some of them, and about the way people talk about the Beatles in general:
It irritates me that people assume that before the Beatles – or before rock and roll in general, for that matter – all popular music was banal, three chord stuff, and that there was no harmonic or lyric complexity until some point in the early- to mid-60s. Nonsense. Anyone with a passing familiarity of the so-called “Great American Songbook” knows that there was some great stuff being written in the 30s and 40s that rivals or surpasses anything the Beatles wrote – check out some of Richard Rodger’s or Harold Arlen’s chord progressions, or Lorenz Hart or Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to see what I mean. These things are discounted by most modern audiences because they are pre-rock and roll – but they are part of the same “pop” continuum as the Beatles.
I’ll grant you they may well be top of the game on those two points (though Irving Berlin was adept at writing in many different styles), but I’m not sure I’d put them at the overall top of the Pantheon.
Oh man, I agree - when I say “top of the Pantheon” I only mean that all of those artists (along with, say, Louis Armstrong if we’re talking jazz, along with Charlie Parker and Miles) are all at the top - they are all the top tier of this century.
And yes, a number of “Great American Songbook” writers did amazing stuff - much more complex than rock harmonically for the most part. The thing about the Beatles is that they were primary drivers in getting rock to be considered in the same level of critical regard as the G.A.S. works - before then, rock was dismissed compared to that work…
Rodgers01 has already reiterated one of my two main points, namely, that the Beatles were not the “first” to break free of three-chord pop. I think we both can agree, WordMan, that they did contribute a great deal to the sub-genre of rock music in elevating its level of musical complexity (and maturity). Still, every new genre of music has its detractors, and needs its champion, and the Beatles were not exactly the first nor the only musicians to challenge the status quo — they were just the 800 pound gorilla of their particular genre.
Perhaps you can tell, but I’m not particularly keen on hair-splitting music into sub-sub-sub-genres; it’s all music to me.
I do still see your list being artificially limited, despite your claims of objectivity: of those greats you mention, none are notably post-Beatles composers, which appears to assume the very premise you purport to be proving. Also, you specially give the Beatles credit for their innovations with recording studio technology and commercial distribution of recorded music, a technology and system which was stunted or non-existent during the lives of the other composers.
The Beatles were great musicians who happened to come along at a confluence of mass communication, the transistor, a population boom looking for its musical identity, the infancy of electrified guitar and the genre around it, and other factors. I don’t give them credit for being there — many bands were — but they do rightly deserve a heap of praise for having the talent to make the most of what they had available at the time. Few other musicians can say as much.
A lot of great points, Fish, and well put. At this point we are mostly in agreement. I am debating whether one key distinction is worth noting - it feels like you are basically saying that the Beatles were Zelig-like - that they happened to be in the right place at the right time and got lucky. My point is that while luck is a key ingredient to any artist achieving recognition, what the Beatles did transcended mere luck.
Van Gogh came along at a time when the rules of painting were being challenged and while still controversial, at least the concept of being more open was available. As we know from his letters to his brother, Van Gogh took a systematic approach to breaking colors down and translating his personal science of coloring and seeing into his art. In other words, while he was lucky to be at a point when at least there was a possiblilty of people being open to his ideas, he busted his ass to develop, articulate and express his own vision.
In science, look at Einstein - the world was primed to take an atomic-based look at the fundamental building blocks - there were a convergence of factors in play and there was a race of sorts to be the first to explain why the Michaelson-Morley experiments failed, how light functioned etc. So again, the context was there - but clearly Einstein applied himself in ways no one had before.
So, yes, all the contextual elements were in place. In fact, if you see the documentary Tom Dowd: The Language of Music (and if you haven’t - buy it immediately) we know that Les Paul invented multitrack recording, echo etc. and that Tom Dowd (and others) took it out of the tinkerer’s personal studio and applied it to standard musical recording. We know that producers like Phil Spector were using multi-layered sound to evoke a feeling simply unavailable to a live performance. But the Beatles didn’t just passively receive this context and “me-too” their way to their fame. Their “the studio is my playroom” approach to creating their music - which evolved as they got their start with George Martin in Abbey Road Studio #2 - was unheralded. The fact that they through a bunch of ingredients that already existed into that mixing pot doesn’t take away from the fact that they consciously chose to take that mixing pot approach - and that is profound. Couple that with the other factors already mentioned - they write their own songs and happened to be brilliant at it, they were at the forefront of guitar-based rock, etc. and you have a situation where they stood on the shoulders of their situation and look far into the horizon.
Slight hijack but…
Do you have a cite for that? The only reason I ask is because I have heard sped up pianos and they sounded nothing like a harpsichord. The Beatles track however, sounds remarkably like a harpsichord. Also, it seems it would be much easier to just record a harpsichord if that was the sound you were going for.
I’ve seen it several places; here’s one online cite. Note that it was an electric piano.
I’m positive this was mentioned in the Anthology series. The boys were out of the studio the day it was recorded and John had left George M. a note asking for him to put an instrumental break in the song. “Something baroque” was the instruction. George M. couldn’t put his hands on a harpsichord and came up with the idea to play the part on a piano at half tempo and then speed the tape up to match the tempo of the song.
Interesting. Thanks for the info!
One thing to take into consideration with respect to impact is the ability of the band to popularize what it did. So maybe someone used a complex chord before the Beatles did, but if rock ‘n’ roll had consisted of nothing more than a few experimental bands with the marketing acumen of tree stumps, we wouldn’t even be discussing rock or pop music today. It would already have become a passing fad in the footnotes of music.
The Beatles, like Elvis, simply had a certain “thing” that made people take notice, buy the records, play them, listen to them, and take up instruments to try to learn and play themselves. Their success breeded imitators and replacements that might have been even better than they, but who credited them with having great influence. It seems to me that impact is measured by what came later, not what came before.
In fairness, I’ve seen the same thing said about Gershwin. Apparently, he came along right as the radio first hit it big in the US, and people were sort of looking for a star – and there he was. That doesn’t detract from his greatness, but it does help explain why he’s so overwhelmingly famous today, when contemporaries of equal or greater talent (Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart) are by and large forgotten by the general population.
The OP was trying to confine the discussion specifically to the Beatles’ musical impact, but there’s no denying they were among the most stylish entertainers of their time. John Lennon remembered thinking, “What an ugly fucking race” when he first saw Americans: crew-cuts, teeth braces, horn-rims, buttoned-up shirts. Part of that was the Beatles’ own parochial assumptions about the US, but it does show that, culturally/stylistically, the US needed what the Beatles had to offer.