The Beatles were the first band to incorporate the forward-swept canard wing, which allows for greater maneuverability at transonic speeds. This advancement, which dates back to WWII, was originally featured in the design for Messerschmidt’s experimental Me-414 Volksmusikanten. However, the project was never completed, as the necessary funds were appropriated for Goebbels’ pet project, the jazz orchestra of Bruno and his Swinging Tigers.
I have no cite for this, but I believe they were the first to leave stuff in the mix that other engineers would take out, and you’d never hear them unless there was a short in your wire. Maybe in 20 years, maybe never. Now, there’s surround sound where you can hear all that other stuff clearly.
But back in the old days, I was recording “The White Album” to tape, and there was a short in the wire from the preamp out to the tape deck in. I got the center channel, which is 180 degrees out of phase. I heard things in “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” that you could never hear in the stereo mix. The way this track is mixed, all the instruments are panned dead center, and the vocals are panned hard left and right. When you listen to a stereo track out of phase, everything in the middle disappears, and you get a mono sum of the hard left and right signal. So here, it’s just the handclaps and voices, with the music almost absent.
You can hear them mumbling to each other during the instrumental passages, and making little vocal noises. In the verse after Paul sings “Desmond lets the children lend a hand,” George and John chime in with “arm…leg!” and in the last verse after “Molly lets the children lend a hand,” George intones in his best Liverpool accent, “foot.” Paul laughs while singing the next line, and now you know why. It’s impossible to hear these listening to normal stereo. I doubt even the group or engineers know it’s buried there.
You can recreate this effect in a wave editor with “Vocal Cut” or on a karaoke machine, and I suspect you could hear it in the rear surround channels of a 5.1 system, but you’d have to shut off the other speakers. Just watch, when their albums come out in 5.1, that stuff will be noise gated out, like on most all recordings by anyone.
Cite?
-FrL-
Weren’t they the first band to have backward masking?
Maybe first rock band to have a “song suite” on an album?
And of course, first band to secretly have a dead member replaced with a lookalike impostor
So how do you define electronica and techno? Because IIRC folks like Haack, Stockhausen, and Theremin were doing stuff with electronic instruments significantly before the Beatles. I’m not familiar with the musique concrete movement, but I believe those musicians were doing sampling before the Beatles.
There’s a big difference between doing something for the first time and doing something for the first time that the general public becomes aware of it.
Here’s a relatively early picture that gives a good view of the canard wing arrangement. Notice how the canted angle follows the alignment of the intake ducts on the forward fuselage.
Admittedly I can’t seem to find a cite directly stating that they were the first band to make use of this design. If anyone knows of an earlier group with the forward-swept configuration, I’d be interested to know about it. I seem to recall listening to a radio interview with Sir George Martin in which he described initial problems with vibration and airflow instability.
Fair enough. I’ve never heard of any of those people, so you may be right. And I’d say much of what the Beatles did “first” was take stuff that was already being done and do it well enough to make it popular.
So in this case, I’d day they were the first mainstream act to introduce a primative electronica piece of music that used sampling.
-FrL-
Before Eleanor Rigby, did anyone ever release a rock single using a string quartet as the instrumental track?
Well, there ya go.
Listen to the beginning of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and then listen to something like Massive Attack’s song “Angel”. The similarities are striking.
First to go straight to No. 1 (albums and singles)?
They probably were the first band to have an album debut at number one, but in the pre-soundscan era, for some reason no 60’s album ever debuted at number one, which is odd to think that 60’s record buyers didn’t run out and by Beatles albums first day they came out, like they do with other massive bands today.
Every number one nowadays debuts there pretty much, but I think less than 10 did pre-1991, IIRC Elton John was the first. If valid, the reason could be that record distribution was such back then that not all areas of the country got a new album the day or week it was officially released. I can’t imagine a new Beatles album in stores, and it taking people three weeks to buy it.
“Can’t Buy Me Love” though, did have the record of biggest jump to number one, from number 27, for a long time. And they were the first and only to have the top five singles in a given chart. And most singles on top 100 at same time- 14 I believe.
What about in the UK?
You are correct: Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, released in May 1975, was the first album to debut at number 1 on the US chart. Cite.
I’m not sure about these ones, just guessing:
The first band to have 3 members do a guitar solo on the same track. (The End)
The first band to start-stop several times in a song. (Got To Get You Into My Life, anthology version)
The first band to combine two takes played in different keys and tempos into one song. (Strawberry Fields Forever)
This is ridiculous. For one thing “Helter Skelter” was made before “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”
They were the first British musicians to hit monstrous, Elvis/Sinatra levels of fame in the US. By comparison, the prior huge Brit acts to be popular here were the Dave Clark 5 and the Broadway casts of Camelot and Oliver. Respectable, but not exactly “Toppermost of the Poppermost.” The Beatles were really without precedent.
Regarding the mixolydian thing: What I read many years ago was that a music critic was praising one of their early songs (it may have been A Hard Day’s Night, but I’m thinking it was something else) and going into great detail about their brilliant use of various modes and scales and what-have-you. When the Beatles read the review, they didn’t know what the hell the guy was talking about — they’d just been playing/singing what they thought sounded good. So perhaps they weren’t the first to do whatever it was; rather, they were the first to do it without meaning to or even knowing that they were doing it 
That’s like the time a music critic asked John if he made conscious use of onomatopoeia. He replied, “Automatic pier? What are you goin’ on about, son?”
I think the mere fact that we’ve got a two-page thread going about an extinct band says something about their place in pop culture. If you came along too late to experience the magic/influence first-hand, you missed something special. Anyone want to debate that?
No debate possible on that one blondebear. I had the great good fortune to be a disc jockey starting as a lad of 17 in 1966, when The Beatles were still releasing new music. It is difficult to convey just how much an impact each new release had, even at a tiny AM station in rural Oregon.
Of course, we thought we’d have the same excitement for decades to come…