what were the Beatles first of anybody to do?

[mamboman]

They pioneered Stadium Rock. Very important!

They invented the “Don’t Bring your Old Lady into the Band” rule?

How about this - they led the concept of the “album track” - the great song (like “All My Loving”) which was played on the radio without being released as a single.
Also, if it’s not a hijack, some people have postulated “Sgt Pepper” was the first “concept” album. What was the concept?

mm

[fishbicycle]

@mamboman

Also, if it’s not a hijack, some people have postulated “Sgt Pepper” was the first “concept” album. What was the concept?

This is what I wrote in the thread that got disappeared: it started out as Paul’s idea that they could do an album as not The Beatles, and pretend to be somebody else. That’s where the idea of linking themes came in, although it was soon dropped, and the songs were just placed in a pleasing order. John said later that “it worked as a concept album because we said it did.”

[Ronald_C.Semone]

[QUOTE=Trillionaire]
They were the first to include an album’s lyrics on its sleeve (Sgt Pepper’s.)

That is simply not true. The LPs i bought in the 1950s, especially the cheaper ones, often had the lyrics on the sleeve.

[Rilchiam]

@fishbicycle

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?”

Well, he had a crushing hangover at the time. At the end of the luncheon, during which he slugged down about a quart of wine, he staggered to the podium and mumbled, “Thank you very much it’s been a pleasure.” Which was reported as “You’ve got a lucky face.”

(Or did you already know that?)

[tagos]

@fishbicycle

Really nice list of innovations going. You guys have got all the important ones. What’s left?

According to a series of BBC documentaries on the development of Western Music the Beatles did all sorts of revolutionary musical-genius type stuff I didn’t understand that was right up there with Mozart.

Stuff that had never been done in popular music. I’m way too much of a musical ignoramus to understand it but the clever old classical music guy presenting it was uber-impressed.

That’s where their genius lay. Being first pop group to make music that can stand against the great composers in terms of timelessness and technique.

They also broadened the scope of subjects pop music could tackle with things like Eleanor Rigby.

[tagos]

@Wee Bairn

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. .

In the sixties - in the UK - ‘running out’ to the record store meant ‘waiting to catch a twice a week bus and travelling a dozen miles to the nearest town’ for a lot of us.

[Not_A_Tame_Lion]

@ianzin

Not even close to being the first concept album. From the CD sleeve notes for the remastered version of ‘In the Wee Small Hours’ by Frank Sinatra: Songs For Young Lovers: 1955
Swing Easy: 1955
In The Wee Small Hours: 1954

I was going to bring this up, but you beat me to it. Sinatra was not a rock act by any stretch of the imagination, but the songs on those albums definitely have thematic unity, especially Songs for Young Lovers and *In The Wee Small Hours. * A good call.

[fishbicycle]

@Rilchiam

(Or did you already know that?)

I already knew that!

[commasense]

@Phase42

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

According to A Hard Day’s Write by Steve Turner,

William Mann, then music critic of The Times (London), compared part of [the song Not a Second Time] to Gustav Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth’. John would later say that this review was responsible for “starting the whole intellectual bit about the Beatles”. “Harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs too,” Mann wrote, “and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat-submediant key-switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of ‘Not A Second Time’…” John’s comment on this was, “I didn’t know what the hell it was all about”. Another time he said that he thought Aeolian cadences sounded like exotic birds.

He made that last statement in an interview in Playboy in January 1981:

LENNON: The Beatles were more intellectual, so they appealed on that level, too. But the basic appeal of the Beatles was not their intelligence. It was their music. It was only after some guy in the “London Times” said there were Aeolian cadences in “It Won’t Be Long” [sic] that the middle classes started listening to it – because somebody put a tag on it.

PLAYBOY: Did you put Aeolian cadences in “It Won’t Be Long?”

LENNON: To this day, I don’t have any idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds.

[RumMunkey]

@blondebear

The probably were one of the first bands to use a studio like Abbey Road on their own terms…

Actually, you could argue that they were the first popular rock & roll band to use Abbey Road at all! I believe it was mainly a classical and voice-work studio before The Beatles moved in.