What made the Beatles so great?

I love the Beatles, and I don’t know why!

I love the harmonies, and the sound of their music, but it’s like there’s something more than that. I like other bands for the same reason, but none of them stay with me days after I hear a song.*

Dopers, help me out! Were they just really catchy bastards? I know it wasn’t the hype, because I wasn’t even born then, so what could it be? Even their really early pop stuff really resonates with me. Am I just a weirdo, born many years too late?

What is it for you that makes you love the Beatles? I know I can’t be the only one.

My apologies if this was just done, but I didn’t see it, and I can’t search (yet).

(Mods, I think the rules tell me to put it here, since it involves music, but it seems like it could go to IMHO as well. Sorry!)

*Zeppelin is similar, but for another thread.

I are dumb. I wasn’t finished.

I don’t think the Beatles were so good because of their technical proficiency, because I can play guitar (technique wise) better than any of them. But heart and soul wise, not a chance.

Were they just naturally musical, and happened to get lucky to be in the same band? Was it just the writing ability of John and Paul?

Anyway, hopefully this thread won’t sink to the bottom like a rock. I wanna know what others think was so magical. Or, alternately, why I’m so dumb for still liking the Beatles. Either way.

Every song was unique and most of them were either crazy and colorful or really beautiful and thoughtful. And there just seemed to be an endless amount of them!

And it didn’t hurt that the guys were different themselves. No one, and I mean NO ONE, had long hair until the Beatles let it grow out just a little. You just didn’t do that sort of thing.

And they made some wonderfully funny movies.

But I was fifteen years behind everyone in my appreciation of the Beatles. Oh, I was the right age, but my musical tastes were out of sync. Sometime in my late thirties, I got it! Put up posters, cried through the movie Let It Be. It was so strange to be late to the party that way.

Why isn’t Let It Be available on DVD?

Massive genius and vision in terms of creativity and production, expertly marketed to an extremely receptive world.

My humble $.02

OK…here goes…(anyone on this board familiar with my posts knows how long I can go on about music…)

I love the Beatles because I am a multi-instrumentalist and a lover of unorthodox instrumentation, and a firm believer that there is no such thing as an instrument that doesn’t belong in rock and roll. Long before I played bass, guitar or drums (what I primarily play now,) or was interested in rock, I played the bassoon in wind ensemble (in middle school,) and I was good enough at it that I was also allowed to play with the local high school orchestra. I also played bass clarinet (I played in a clarinet choir that won a first-place medal in the regional ensemble competition.) I also played both alto and baritone sax in both jazz band and in advanced concert band. This was all while I was still in middle school. I played sax in the jazz bands in high school too, but by that time I was much more interested in rock.

Because I played all these instruments, I was always listening to non-rock music that featured them. I liked woodwind concertos and small woodwind ensembles, and chamber music, and frequently attended recitals at IU which is considered by many to be the best music school in the country. (OK, maybe part of it was to see all the cute Asian girls.) So I got a good background in instrumentation and small ensembles.

I had always listened to the Beatles growing up, but it wasn’t until later that I truly appreciated their music (marijuana might have something to do with it - I’m not one of those people who thinks that pot is some kind of mystical, divine herb, but at the same time I have to credit it with heightening my musical sense, even though I don’t do it anymore.) Listening to it knowing everything I do now about music, I’m absolutely blown away by the Beatles’ use of instrumentation. They were not afraid to use every instrument in the orchestra, and even some that aren’t, like sitars. They (or the people like George Martin who helped them in the studio) obviously had very good backgrounds in traditional English brass band music (Penny Lane, Mother Nature’s Son, Good Morning Good Morning) and strings (Strawberry Fields, She’s Leaving Home, I Am The Walrus, Eleanor Rigby [I preferred the strings-only version on the Beatles Anthology to the track on Revolver,]) and a lot of other stuff that I won’t go into because I don’t feel like being up until 6. The point being, they took rock music and incorporated classical and instrumental music into it. That is the key to their originality, for me anyway. The musical experimentation is when they started to really become a dynamic group. Hard Day’s Night is a great album, but I’d just as soon listen to the Zombies or the Beach Boys. But Sgt. Peppers, White Album, Abbey Road? This stuff is religion to me. Abbey Road in particular. Not only does it incorporate instrumentation and style from non-rock music, it actually incorporates structure from classical music. The Abbey Road “medley” is a rock symphony - it has different movements, tied together with recurring motifs (the You Never Give Me Your Money melody, for example, reprised later on in the medley by the horn section.)

There’s also the bass playing of Paul McCartney, who is number one in my top three bassists of all time (the other two are Phil Lesh and Peter Cetera of Chicago.) As a bass player, it’s really striking to me how responsible Paul’s melodic and fluid lines are for driving the songs forward. He taught himself how to play his instrument, forcing him to create his own style as if he were singing along with the music - playing the bass as a melodic rather than simply a rhythmic instrument. (Being completely stoned and taking in the transition from You Never Give Me Your Money to Sun King was a religious experience for me. It was then that I noticed that the fade-out of the former song [the 'one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, all good children go to heaven part] was supposed to evoke stepping out of a crowded, noisy party and onto the back porch, and the fade-in of the latter song is supposed to represent walking out into the backyard with the crickets chirping. Then when I heard that amazing guitar-and-bass part at the beginning of Sun King - that was the moment when I realized that Paul McCartney was the best bassist of all time.)

Yeah.

Their music is colourful, varied and catchy, and I don’t wish to downplay the whole talent side of things - I’ll just leave that to plenty of others to enthuse about - but part of their huge success was down to timing - they happened at a moment when the time was ripe for landslide popularity; I think there was an intense hunger for something like that at around the time.

Lennon and McCartney. Togetehr they were the best songwriters ever. And they were obscenely productive. THey never repeated themselves. Each album was built upon the previous and added to their style and range. The band had an unique sound, that grew with the songwriting of the duo. Together all four grew artisticaly and gave the world one of the seminal artistic events of the twentieth century.

They wrote great songs. Pound for pound, up to the end of ‘66, the Beach Boys, for example,made much more interesting and intelligent records, and four out of five of them sang better than the Beatles (Mike Love, oddly, is the weak link IMO), and they used better musicians, but ultimately it was the joy and the deceptive simplicity of those amazing songs Lennon & McCartney wrote, the songs that built themselves into our conciousness and that in and of themselves defined not just times but aspirations we’ll always have. Bob Dylan comes close for that, but his songs had to be thought about too much. The Beatles’ songs just slip inside you and live.

mm

I think the blend of Paul and John produced something that was more than the sum of its parts. Paul was self-taught, but at the same time had a profoundly keen instinct for music theory. John was a visionary and an amazing lyricist who could craft musical mysteries. The combination of those two made them appealing both to teeny-boppers and hippies. Their music could be listened to for its pretty melodies as well as for its insightful messages. They made rock much broader than it had ever been, opening all kinds of doors for future rock musicians to go through.

Good Rock n’ Roll is dangerous. Someone must be offended by good rock, preferably your parents or some other authority figure.

The Beatles were the band that, through their songcraft, image, cultural impact, use of innovative production, transitioned from being dangerous due to their long hair and teenage energy to being dangerous for their art. The messages, sound and implications of the move to album-based, psychedelic, complex music - that was brilliantly written and hummable - changed everything about how we consider rock music.

Jackie Robinson is, well, “Jackie Robinson” not because he was the first to cross the color line in big American sports, but because he did it as a class act and as someone who was truly excellent as a player and who innovated the game with his on-field aggression and talent.

The Beatles not only challenged pre-conceived notions about rock/pop music as art, but they did it with GREAT songs. You couldn’t just write them off as a silly rock band. By the time they were done, rock wasn’t silly.

**TRB **-
What type of stuff do you play and what kind of gear do you have? There are a few of us guitar type Dopers…

  • three great songwriters
  • three good to great singers who were distinct from each other and harmonized beautifully
  • fearless experimentation
  • a much less crowded market to release their music into

Add me to this group; I could play circles around any of the Beatles on their chosen instrument, including Ringo.

But just because I could play their songs with my feet, blindfolded, doesn’t mean I could have written them in a million years, nor perform them with the same spark.

Hel-lo!!! The Beatles are the spawn of Satan, as this so eloquently proves:

Those catchy little tunes are just Satan’s way of getting inside your head to make you his minion. If you listen very, very closely, you’ll see it’s true:
“Love love me do
you know I love you (Satan)
I’ll always be true (to you Satan)…”

I’m telling you, this is bigger than the Da Vinci Code.

As with TRB’s comment in this area - I fail to see the significance of it. There are countless examples of seminal artists where the players’ techniques were adequate at best - Dylan, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Iggy and the Stooges, Black Sabbath without even getting warmed up. AND there are countless examples of artists who are profoundly proficient and have had a seminal impact on rock music - Hendrix, Clapton, Zep, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen, again not even getting warmed up.

Musical proficiency in a technical sense is just not a factor as far as I can tell…

IMHO: John Lennon is the best rock songwriter who’s ever lived. Paul McCartney is perhaps second or third. George Harrison is up there in the top 20. (Even one of their simpler albums, like A Hard Days’ Night, is practically a master class in rock and roll songwriting.) That fact that they all wound up together in the same band, and that they competed and collaborated in ways that elevated their craft above what they could have achieved working alone, is an amazing circumstance that is not likely to be repeated. And as if that wasn’t enough, they’re all great singers. They worked with the most innovative producers and engineers of the time. Plus the non-musical factors: They were uncommonly clever and funny. They had a keen understanding of the artistic and social avant-garde. They had four distinct, appealing, and memorable personalities. They were strikingly photogenic.

Basically anything good that a rock band could have going for it, the Beatles had. For every band that’s come after, they defined what an ideal rock band should be. I <3 the Beatles!

It comes down to songwriting most of all. Paul, especially, was a hook machine. Even though he couldn’t read music and his compositional ability was mostly intuitive, he was a melodic genius on a par with Tchaichovsky. If he had never hooked up with Lennon, he still could have had a major career churning out pop songs.

What John (and to a lesser degree, George) added was fearless experimentation and lyrical maturity. Paul by himself might have become a sort of Paul Anka – good at writing pop standards, but maybe a little too fluffy and sweet. John added cynicism, humor and edginess which kept them from being the Bee Gees.

I alos think that John and George would not have developed the same way as songwriterswithout Paul’s influence and example.

Something has to be said for the production, of course, as well as the fact that their early success gave them almost unlimited freedom to experiment in the studio.

Sure move over for the genius and depth of surf music. beach Boys are not in same class. Beetles were at the right time but talent made it last.

  1. The Beach Boys were not surf music any more than the Beatles were a Chuck Berry cover band. Sure, they started as those things, then they both moved on. The Beach Boys just happened to be saddled with a name that pigeonholed them. The Beach Boys were experimental studio and songwriting geniuses.

  2. Beach Boys not in the same class? Tell that to Paul McCartney, who has said repeatedly that the Beatles regarded the Beach Boys as their main competition, and that the Beach Boys helped drive them to the heights they achieved: Sgt. Pepper’s was their attempt to match Pet Sounds, which was in turn Brian Wilson’s attempt to top Revolver.

  3. I don’t normally pick at this sort of thing, but your argument would feel a lot more solid if you’d spelled “Beatles” correctly. Just sayin’.

Aside from all the wonderful qualities of their music mentioned above, they continued to grow and evolve throughout their career. They grew with their audience. Compare to 99% of every other pop group whose last album sounds like their first.

A harder question to answer is the rabid popularity of the Dead or the Stones. Not that I don’t like them, just that their success seems all out of proportion.