I know I shouldn’t be posting this. I mean, it’s probably more Great Debates than Cafe Society, and it’s just speculative, and there’s no way of really knowing, but the question has been haunting me all day. So…
What if, say, the Beatles never gave up the Silver part of their name, and for a variety of reasons, never got any further than occasional gigs at the Cave? How would pop, rock, radio, and culture have been affected? Who would have been big instead? Would the Stones have existed?
Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” Motown music, The Beach Boys, and Dylan would have been the big things that everyone would have been imitating. You would never have heard of The Rolling Stones since John Lennon and Paul McCartney gave them their first big hit and convinced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to start writing their own songs instead of just doing covers. Someone would have come along to move things along, but Hendrix wouldn’t have been. We would probably be ten to twenty years behind where we are now. Hmm… Yup. Disco would still be dead either way.
I think it was at an Emmy or Golden Globes show that someone said, “Just think, if a bomb blew up this place, Pia Zadora would be a star.”
A world without the Beatles? Well, back then, the Beatles blew Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Peter Paul and Mary and Elvis off the charts…so most likely there would have been variations of those acts instead of Beatle offshoots (Stones, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and the rest of the British invasion.) And then came Jimi and Janis and then Sid and then the Ramones and and and now…oops…Britney Spears?..yeah, it really is a world without the Beatles now.
Larry Kirwan, former lead singer of the band Black 47, explored this scenario in his play “Liverpool Fantasy.” In it, after the band breaks up, Paul is the only one to attain success, becoming a successful Vegas entertainer named Paul Montana.
