Ringo. You heard me. His lack of technical ability kept the drum part simple, which offset the sophisticated songwriting and basslines. A more proficient drummer would likely have pushed the music over the line of accessibility.
George Martin. The ideas came, largely, from the band. But Martin is often the one who made it happen. He wrote the Bach trumpet part for Penny Lane. He kept George’s synthesizer subtle and simple on Abbey Road. Without George Martin, the Beatles would’ve just been a really great band your mom liked.
Experience. By the time they hit the US, John, Paul and George had about ten years of bar band history under their belts. They may have seemed like kids, but they were wise beyond their appearance. They also knew what would sell, and they were relentless marketers.
Rivalry. Lennon/McCartney didn’t write songs. John wrote songs and Paul wrote songs. They were fiercely competitive and envious of the other’s strengths. Rivalry drives you to do better work.
So there you have it. The keys to success: imperfection, a mentor, experience and competition.
I just want to chime in to remind our viewers that it was the early pop stuff that made the Beatles. You had to be there, and to have been familiar with the music at the time. It’s common knowledge that it was utterly dismal, but the common knowledge is wrong. There was really good music coming out right up until the Beatles hit. The American folk scene was getting a bit long in the tooth, but there was this new guy Dylan who would reinvent the whole thing. Some great acts like the Beach Boys were already around, and the Motown machine was getting into full swing. And so on.
However, the Beatles had everything. They had the songwriting ability of Dylan, the harmonies of The Everly Brothers and the fire of Little Richard. Plus, they were attractive, witty, and theatrical. And their music was just a bit off-kilter to American ears: Beatles harmonies, for example, are not as predictable as Everly Brothers harmonies.
All in all, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing that happened. It was like a bomb went off, but in a good way. There was no way it wasn’t going to take over.
By the way, anybody who somehow connects the Beatles’ popularity with the Kennedy assassination (and there are a lot of them) is full of shit.
Actually, not true for a significant portion of their time together. Many books I have read describe them sitting in a room or a van traveling between gigs (driven by Mal Evans) face to face and working on songs together. As has also been well documented, this approach broke down in the '65 - '66 timeframe, but they co-wrote many songs together, both literally and by piecing together parts each had written on their own - but doing so very collaboratively.
Yes, and it’s quite easy to tell. At this point, it’s easy to distinguish the compositional tendencies of the two. Starting with “Rubber Soul,” where the two really emerge as individuals, and going back, you see some pulling apart in “Beatles VI” (“Eight Days a Week,” I would say, is pure Lennon), but earlier than that the two voices merge into something that is clearly almost always collaborative.
I’ll take a stab at the Dead (heh). The Grateful Dead were incredibly successful at making people feel as though they belonged to something, rather than just being fans of a rock band. The only other successful rock band that can even hold a candle to the Dead in this department would be KISS, and even they don’t really come close.
It’s an amazing book, not least in its weight and the fact that it’s one of the fastest reading 900-page books I’ve ever encountered.
I’ve been around for all of The Beatles, having waited with 70 million others for their appearance on Ed Sullivan on February 9, 1964. I was a fan at the time and I’ve read bunches about them since.
Yet this may be the first time I really “got” it. Spitz doesn’t get obsessive on the music or song-by-song breakdowns as so many authors do. He focuses on the people. Well, mainly on John and Paul, with Brian Epstein getting more time than George or Ringo. But he spends hundreds of pages covering their rise before 1962. The total immersion in music. The experimentation in songwriting and performing. The curiosity about what others do and how they do it. The instant love of the recording studio and the willingness to absorb everything that George Martin and his assistants had to say. [The book is really John, Paul, George M., and Brian in a lot of ways.]
It’s like one of those sports stories, with the kid dribbling a basketball every step he took. Natural ability? Sure. Lots of it. Hard, endless work? More than anybody realizes.
But then there’s the amazing stuff. The whole greater than the sum of the parts? They needed a guitar lead and George was hanging around being a pest. They needed a good drummer and got the best one in Liverpool by a phone call. They needed an adult to take care of them and Brian stumbled in to the Cavern Club. They needed the one producer who had as much vision and imagination as they did and when every other company rejected them they found a comedy record producer with classical chops. John and Paul desperately needed each other and they happened to live within a couple of miles of one another and worked miracles until they decided they didn’t need each other. They competed against each other and against every other songwriter in the world and that kept driving them to be better and better until they reached their human limits.
The book is harsh on John, in an interesting bit of revisionism. He starts out as a total asshole, develops into a worthless drugged-out asshole, and descends into being the kind of scary crazy paranoid loony drugged-out asshole nobody in the world could stand being around. Every page after Brian’s death is a chilling reminder of what can happen when wishes are fulfilled and all restraints are removed.
And in the worst of it at the end, they still made Abbey Road.
When Hoyt Axton wrote “God damn the pusher man” he might have had in mind what The Beatles could have been without the heroin that destroyed John.
The Beatles had some of that, too - like the Dead, they were a band that locked into something that was happening culturally. The Dead locked into a much more specific scene, the one that grew out of San Francisco and the acid tests and that whole thing. And they did create a fan community through their relentless touring.
My wife is a music historian and we’ve talked about it before. Her take echoes what many people have already said. Basically Lennon and McCartney were both phenomenal songwriters – the sort of once-in-a-decade towering talents that crop up here and there throughout musical history (Irving Berlin, Gilbert & Sullivan, etc.). And they happened to wind up in the same band – along with two other damn-fine musicians.
If you read Anthology, you’ll see that writing your own songs was a bit out there for a popular group when they started. It helped that John and Paul were perfectly complementaty song writers. There is also a lot in Anthology about how Paul learned the music hall tradition, from an uncle, I think. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is the epitome of this.
Then there was the harmonies, which I agree were just perfect.
But the real thing that made them great (and I didn’t really beome a tremendous fan until Sgt. Pepper") was that they kept pushing the boundaries. Even in the beginning they weren’t satisfied with June Moon songs, and by Rubber Soul they had expanded what was possible. I think beyond the Beach Boys, they and Dylan influenced each other a lot. While Dylan played rock before he was a folk singer, the Beatles enabled him to go electric. (That and he had the money for a band, as he says a few times in The Essential Interviews.) John especially felt he could expand his songwriting thanks to Dylan.
BTW, George might have turned into a good songwriter, but it took time and practice. His early stuff was mediocre, and even his best is nothing like John and Paul. He was eventually good, they were geniuses, especially together.
And I agree about Abbey Road. Side 2, especially, where they shed the crap and just played, shows just how good they were even at the end.
I don’t know, man…“Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” in particular, stand up well to anything in the Beatles’ catalog. Granted, that’s two songs against two dozen classic songs apiece by John and Paul, but clearly he was capable.
Considering what a hard time he had getting his songs recorded (he had to drag Eric Clapton into the studio in order to get the band to take “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” seriously), and how quickly he released a solo record post-Beatles, one wonders how much great George stuff went unnoticed or unrecorded.
Brian Wilson wrote Pet Sounds to top Rubber Soul. In the mean time the Beatles wrote Revolver. The Beach Boys wrote great singles throughout the 60s, but the only album in the same league as The Beatles was Pet Sounds, and it was a commercial failure. The Beatles wrote at least one top to bottom critical and commercial success every year from 1963 to 1970. And the occasional hit single not included on the album. The Beach Boys were the main competition in pop singles at the time, but they didn’t have the great albums to back them up. The only contemporary in the same class, IMHO, is Dylan.
To me this is the most important thing about them. Abbey Road is a completely different group almost from Meet the Beatles, and they just so fused with their decade. Plus, they were just all so damned great- even Ringo in his own limited way, and the fact that when they spun off they all (except for Ringo) continued that greatness. If I were to list my top 100 favorite songs there’d be several Beatles tunes {Eleanor Rigby and Being…Mr. Kite top amongst them} AND several of the post Beatle solo songs (Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp by George, God by Lennon, Live & Let Die by Paul, and others by each).
I think this brings up another point in that, for all their experimentation and pushing of boundaries, the Beatles always kept it accessible. They never got too smart or avant garde for their audience. They never forgot to stay entertaining. Their songs held up as songs first and foremost, not just as clotheslines for the experiments. If you strip away the orchestral and production tricks the songs still work. They weren’t dependent on the production. You can play a simple accoustic and vocal arrangement of “Strawberry Fields” or “A Day in the Life” and the hooks, the melodies, the words, the song structures are all still strong enough to carry the songs.
The only exeriment they did which I think was completely inaccessible and didn’t work at all was “Revolution #9” and even that has some oddity value.
Slight disagreement here. I agree that Ringo was great in his own limited way. But I disagree that he did not continue in that unique greatness.
Let’s start with the premise that he was the weakest and least talented member of the Beatles, because I think that’s demonstrably true. Despite all that, Ringo had 2 #1 hits in the U.S. post-Beatles, and drummed on several of Lennon and Harrison’s solo albums. There were also a slew of other guest spots on random albums.
Moreover, he branched out into design work and television. He narrated Thomas the Tank Engine and played Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. This was a bloody successful show, and Ringo was a big part of its success.
Finally, he founded the All-Starr band (who I would love to see in concert) and put out several decent albums.
I mean, he’s Ringo. He was never going to put out the sort of profound material that John went on to do. He was never going to put out catchy pop hooks like Paul. And he was never going to put out quality music like George.
But you want to talk about work with what you got? That’s Ringo. He’s still great as far as I’m concerned, and the things he’s done since the Beatles are at least as fantastic in my book as his simple drumming in the Beatles.
I think Ringo was crucial to the band both musically and in terms of personality. He was an affable, hugely likeable guy who got along with everybody and was often the glue which kept them together.
Musically he gave them just what they needed. He provided strong, solid, professional drumming, but more importantly, he knew how to get out of the way of what the geniuses were doing. He complimented, he never competed. I think a drummer like Keith Moon might have overloaded the arrangements.
I might make an argument for the Kinks, or even possibly the Zombies, but neither had the innovation and consistency the Beatles have. The Beatles have amazingly little filler on any of their albums. It’s simply inconceivable for me to understand how four people could turn out album and album of pure pop gold. That said, while I prefer the Beatles as a band, for me, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds barely edges any Beatles album.
I want to chime in here also to talk about Ringo. When one says the Beatles had three good to great singers (I assume those are John, Paul, and George), Ringo, whose voice admittedly did not lend itself to harmonies, did have some important vocal contributions. I cannot imagine anyone else (not even Joe Cocker) singing “With A Little Help From my Friends.” That is practically Ringo’s signature tune. And other Ringo-led songs, such as “Octopus’ Garden” and “Yellow Submarine” just contributed to the Beatles’ sense of fun and zaniness they were recognized for. And of course, post-Beatles, I’m also a sucker for “It Don’t Come Easy”, “The No-No Song”, and most importantly, his tribute to George, “Never Without You”. And I have every All-Starr album I can lay my hands on. It’s great hearing music from such guests as Peter Frampton or Burton Cummings, stars in their own right.