Posted on 01/09/2013 1:26:56 PM PST by Reaganite Republican
One wonders where pop music would have gone had the Beatles never happened. Until the Beatles reached the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1964, knocking off Bobby Vinton's cover of Vaughn Monroe's 1945 hit There! I've Said it Again!, no rocker had topped the chart since the Angels' My Boyfriend's Back fell from the top spot in September, 1963. Subsequent chart toppers included Dominique, a French-language ballad about a Spanish crusader that held the top spot for nearly a month.
Had the Beatles decided to quit music and get regular jobs in 1962, who knows, maybe Bobby Vinton, Frank Sinatra and Connie Francis would have ruled the charts.
And what a wonderful world it woulda been! Don't forget Bobby Vee, Troy Shondell, Joanie Summers, Little Peggy March, so many others we'd be calling geniuses today instead of all those youknowhoos!
Well, there have been a lot of “big things” since the Beatles, but none of them got near the Beatles in terms of popularity. I think we would have had another big band, sure, but they probably would have only lasted a couple years before someone else caught on.
Mine was Timothy by the Buoys.
The small town where I was raised had hundreds of caves winding underground in the bluffs along the river. Three young boys became lost somewhere in one when a new highway was being built. They were never found. That song always reminded me of those poor kids. It came out about the time the kids disappeared.
The dam might have burst from England courtesy of the Rolling Stones (or one of the other art school bands that were influenced by early 1960s package tours of US blues performers).
Or maybe the “guitar group” sound would have still broken through the US charts which stateside had the Beach Boys, the Ventures, the Wailers (backing Rockin’ Robins on the Pacific Northwest hit version of Louie Louie that led the Kingsmen to cover it).
The music was out there. The suits didn’t want to give it a proper break. Jerry Lee Lewis had to return in the early 1960s to the same England that about killed his career to be able to play rock and roll for the public (stateside he was being pushed towards country music). They gave him a more welcome response that time.
Without Nirvana, there’s still Pearl Jam and Mudhoney.
Elvis broke through but almost immediately was altered into something more conventional and his fellow artists at Sun never hit as big.
Fame doesn’t necessarily determine what music people will play, or what the kids are even listening to. It is a scorecard for those who own publishing rights and the contract on posters & t-shirts.
"The Beatles" in total recording years lasted less than a decade and there are several distinct phases in that brief career. Sgt. Pepper is the band being "someone else" trying to write songs that aren't "Beatles" songs. And after that, they each worked on more individual efforts. Ringo tried to leave the band because the inclusion of Revolution 9 on The Beatles kept him from getting more of his own work on there (he felt unappreciated).
The post-group recordings have their followers but aren't equal to the sum of their parts.
Now, major labels wait 2-3 years between album releases for a band in which time the young audience has almost gone through high school or college before the next release. Contributes to "moving on".
Meanwhile there are other bands that will release an album (or 2 or 3) every year. Strike while the fire is hot.
Chubby Checker put out over 15 albums from 1960-1963.
What if The Beatles had only released Please Please Me, followed by the movie soundtrack to A Hard Day's Night, then their "artistic effort" Sgt. Pepper's and concluded in arguments and financial mismanagement with Let It Be (or Abbey Road)?
Without the other works to help the listening audience follow the "evolution" or "progression", they might not have sold each of those records to the same buying public (someone nibbling on this release, someone else getting another work).
America would have been taken by storm by the comedy stylings of Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill.
“What if The Beatles had only released Please Please Me, followed by the movie soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, then their “artistic effort” Sgt. Pepper’s and concluded in arguments and financial mismanagement with Let It Be (or Abbey Road)?”
Well, that’s still a pretty impressive set of albums, and I think they still would be credited with creating the whole modern “rock band” phenomenon, since everyone was already emulating them right away. I think their real contribution there was that they moved the focus away from just the music to the whole celebrity spectacle. They probably wanted to try being movie stars, like their hero Elvis, but being four goofy English guys, they ended up more like the Marx Brothers, and somehow it worked.
That is a sad story. I looked up the lyrics to Timothy and I don’t think I have ever heard it. Possibly too gruesome for stations in our area.
Or the Righteous Brothers.
Anytime--The Meteors (1965)
I liked the Beatles especially their very early ones tho they stayed pretty good for a long time.
I liked the Searchers just a bit more but they probably did not write their own songs.
The Beatles even wrote songs for other groups.
The Stones' first hit was their cover of John and Paul's, "I Wanna Be Your Man."
The Pretty Things are so “artistically” dedicated that when George Harrison offered to play on their then upcoming album (as he lay dying), they refused since he couldn’t/wouldn’t come into the studio to record WITH the band.
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