Thanks.
The whole notion that virtuosity must always be…well, a virtue in rock music is flawed.
What’s needed in rock music is contributions to the whole…playing and singing that puts the piece of music across in the best possible manner. And for “piece of music,” I’d really like to substitute song…because I’m a song-oriented guy.
I can appreciate the talent it takes to play an instrument very well, but if it’s out there on its own and not really in the service of a song, it’s not going to do much for me.
I can think of plenty of musicians whose singing and playing I admire. But I can think of no musician I would want to put in the place of one of The Beatles…none whose playing or singing would have made Beatles music better than it is.
When I hear someone say (usually with some degree of smug confidence) “Ringo Starr wasn’t a very good drummer,” I know I’m hearing someone who knows nothing whatsoever about music.
When George Harrison is criticized as being a less-than-stellar guitarist, I’m reminded of a quote from former Pretenders guitarist Robbie McIntosh, who was the first to play guitar in Paul McCartney’s live band when he finally started performing Beatles songs again.
I’m paraphrasing, but Robbie said that when he learned that Paul would be playing Beatles songs, he figured he would work out some snazzy new solos for them. And then he listened to the originals, and discovered that George had played the perfect solo for every one of Paul’s songs, and that none of them could be improved upon. So he learned George’s solos and played them instead.
McIntosh is probably a more technically skilled guitarist that George was. But he was smart enough to realize that taste and creativity are more valuable commodities than virtuosity.
I think in the other cases it is simply understood that they are all really good, such as Rush, the Police, etc. Or the band is not of sufficient interest to talk about. The Beatles hit a certain sweet spot of doubt in this regard, in that they were hugely successful but not necessarily virtuosos on their instruments. I think it is also a matter of timing, as rock was relatively new when they got started. Nowadays, players that are pretty good can just be dragged off the street. Finally, there were only four Beatles, and they had distinctive looks and personalities, inviting people to take interest in them as individuals. I think this happens less when a band has five or more members.
I think it’s a common perception, whether or not it’s true, that the Beatles wrote easy-to-play stuff, that they’re not really renowned for their instrumental skills. That mental clash between them being among the greatest/the greatest rock band of all time confuses people, because everyone puts so much emphasis on being an incredible virtuoso.
Well, that and all us Beatles fans need excuses to have long, detailed conversations about them. We’re finally running out of topics, dammit! 
I agree with Crotalus. Talent breeds ego - not always unjustified ego, or out of proportion ego, but it’s still ego. Top notch musicians feel an urge to flaunt their skills; it’s a very rare musician who’s both extremely good and happy with not displaying it (I’d argue that Ringo was that rare musician, and that he’s severely underrated, but that’s a whole 'nother conversation).
Yep. With lots of music, I can listen to it and gasp in awe at the hours of intense practice it must have taken to pluck the strings that fast, the incredible coordination necessary to create that sound, the fact that I would never, ever, ever in a million years be able to replicate that . . . but am I enjoying it? On a purely intellectual level it holds a fascination for a few minutes, I guess. But a song composed of a few simple chords can move me emotionally, can make me smile or dance or cry. Or all three at once.
The Beatles proved that melody is more important that the number of notes played per second. Lennon/McCartney made an unbelievably good songwriting team. That’s really all there is to it. Which can be kind of annoying, because although you can learn about the structure of songs, common chord progressions, etc, etc, and write and OK-ish piece, that kind of incredible talent remains a mystery to us. No amount of practice, for almost all people, will produce “In My Life.” You have it or you don’t.
This. Yngwie Malmsteen is a virtuoso rock guitarist, but I can’t imagine listening to him for pleasure. He apparently believes that playing the scales at lightning speed is an accomplishment worthy of respect, and I do not.
[QUOTE=Aeschines;17579281Further, he did not do the famous solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; that was by Eric Clapton, who was uncredited on the White Album. That just blows my mind. Both things. The fact that George would not do the solo on his own song, and the fact that Clapton was not given credit, which strikes me as dishonest, as though everyone involved was fine with having people think it was George’s work.[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it was some kind of a scam. What I have read (several times, several sources) was the George felt John and Paul weren’t giving his song enough attention and respect in the studio, so he thought inviting Clapton would give the song cred and put the Fabs on their best behavior (which it apparently did).
I also read that it was very common in those days for pals to play on each other’s records, but at least in those days, if you were under contract with a different company, it was not technically permitted and hence was not credited. It would just be an “open secret” that no one, including the Beatles, tried to obscure.
Your dead right on all accounts there. Clapton definitely can’t read music. In his autobiography* Slowhand*, he talked about how he felt during a session with Aretha Franklin. “I felt so nervous, because I couldn’t read music, and they were all playing from music sheets on stands.”
Other guitarists who can’t (or couldn’t in the case of dead ones): Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie Van Halen, Slash, Angus Young, Dave Mustaine and Tommy Emanuel. There are plenty of others.
Ringo explains it here. (This was one of the suggested videos on the side when I was listening to Rain, thanks to this thread.)
I think this is just proof that the sum is greater than its parts. I’m not sure your original statement stands , though.
<snip>John and Paul were first-rate singers and songwriters, and that was all that was really needed for them to succeed. Paul was/is a great bass player. John, George, and Ringo are/were good but not masterful musicians, but their idiosyncrasies actually were beneficial to the Beatles’ early sound. After the band became just a studio band around 1966, the musicianship became fairly irrelevant.<snip>
There are a lot of first rate singer/songwriters out there who will never break it big, much less as large as The Beatles did. There are also many technically proficient players who are virtually unlistenable. I would concur that their idiosyncracies/skills , Brian Epstein’s management, Sir George Martin’s production and the era they were in all contributed. To say that their musicianship was irrelevant would be, I feel disingenuous. Just because a particular passage is put together simply, does not negate it as a work of brilliance. In fact, by using no more complexity than necessary is the hallmark of most great works in almost every discipline.
If Ringo had played right-handed, it would have been over too quickly.
This is just silly.
There are NO guitar players who site read sheet music while playing. It’s just not done and never has been. That’s not to say that there aren’t players who CAN read sheet music but it’s pretty pointless to do. At most guitar players will look at a sheet to quickly see the key of thesong or chord progression but not much more. For detailed transcriptions of guitar music tablature is the standard and has been for decades now.
I think the reason tab is 100x more useful than standard notation for guitar players is that most chords,scales, notes… can be played in many different physical locations on guitar, literally the exact same note at the same pitch. Not like piano where you see the same note in multiple places but at a different octave. The physical location of your fret hand makes a huge difference in the difficulty of the piece you may be trying to play.
I also believe that the Beatles were so popular back then because there was FAR less pop music to choose from in those days. Most people were at the mercy of the radio.
Giving credit to everyone was the exception back then. George played on Badge on the Cream’s Goodbye uncredited also - actually the original LP had him as L’Angelo Misterioso - spelling vaguely remembered.
I’ll have to dig out my review of the White Album in the first Rolling Stone review collection, but I’m pretty sure they noted that Clapton did the solo, and I think gave it as a sign of George’s humility.
In the interviews in Beatles Anthology John did not exactly brag about his guitar playing ability.
I’m old enough to have been listening to music back then, and before, and this isn’t even close to being true. There was tons of music around, and plenty of radio stations and singles and LPs. Things hadn’t splintered like they have today, but the Beatles were solidly in the rock tradition so this wasn’t important.
Before the Beatles acts (with a few exceptions) acts got their songs from Tin Pan Alley, and I assure you the stuff was boring, with lots of specialty songs hitting the charts. Children of old style celebs were successful. (And of course the Beatles did a lot of covers in the beginning.) It wasn’t lack of choice, it was lack of excitement and quality.
This just isn’t true. It is certainly true that there aren’t any rock guitar players who work from sheet music, and very, very few who could (although Brian Setzer is famously an exception, and the parts for the BSO are all written out), but there are plenty of guitarists who do.
Classical guitarists can all read music, and in that world, music is still learned from sheet music, and I’ve seen plenty of classical guitarists with the music in front of them during a performance.
All (or at least most of) those players churning out television commercials can read. I’m betting the majority of real jazz players can read, and do, at least when working on a new piece (it’s true that you won’t see them reading on stage).
Yeah, I knew I would get pummeled by using an absolute.
Perhaps he means there are NO guitar players who browse the web while playing (what else could *site read *mean?) But even that isn’t true.
Despite its seeming ubiquity tablature is deeply flawed as a notational system, its popularity is due to its accessibility (both in terms of its availability and the little actual work needed to read it).
More on-topic:
Watching McCartney's unplugged show (and other TV where he has had a (6-string) guitar in hand) I was stunned by how obviously mediocre he is as a guitarist. (Not the bass, where he is less obviously mediocre, but still no virtuoso.)Sometimes I think the Beatles would still have been the Beatles with John and Paul and any other competent lead guitarist and drummer. Until you get into the personality issues. No virtuoso guitarist or drummer would have lasted with J & P due to ego clash. Hell, even George and Ringo both have said at times they felt like 3rd rate Beatles the way they were treated by J & P.
[QUOTE=The Great Unwashed]
Watching McCartney’s unplugged show (and other TV where he has had a (6-string) guitar in hand) I was stunned by how obviously mediocre he is as a guitarist. (Not the bass, where he is less obviously mediocre, but still no virtuoso.)
[/QUOTE]
McCartney is a perfectly fine guitarist. He’s probably more fluid than Harrison was. He contributed several interesting guitar parts to Beatles records, and played well on his solo work as well.
But I have a feeling that “virtuosity” for its own sake plays heavily into your evaluation of musicianship.
As we’ve already established, virtuosity is not nearly as important a quality in rock music as creativity and taste.
Let’s set aside the guitar discussion, though, and focus on bass playing. I hope you’ll name some bass players in the field of rock music working in musical settings at least somewhat comparable to The Beatles’ oeuvre who you feel are McCartney’s superior.
You might also want to point out some antecedents to his style of play. Who in rock prior to 1963 was playing parts comparable to McCartney’s on Beatles records ?
Lol. Did you ever see the video of him explaining how he came to write “Blackbird”?
And yes, from a pro-musician I expect at least a kind of virtuosity.
His style of play? He had a good ear for catchy melody, I’ll give him that.
Wow. You got me. :rolleyes:
Care to expand on this? You kind of come across as a guitar hipster here.