Curse of Beatlemania

LewRockwell.com ^ | 1/12/2002 | Joseph Sobran

[UnBlinkingEye]

Down with Madison Avenue!

Amen. I don't think the Beatles were a product of Madison though.

[Arkinsaw]

Nobody sounded like them before, and everyone sounded like them after. You can find their influence in nearly everything produced these days.

In a couple of hundred years very, very, few groups from this era will be remembered widely. Even some of the one's we consider great classics will just fade away. But I suspect that they will still be remembered and their music examined.

That being said.....I turn them off when they come on the radio simply because I've heard every song a gazillion times (except that Long and Winding Road/Golden Slumbers one which I leave on).

[DoughtyOne]

Wow.  Taliban, infidel, fatwa?  Just because a dumb column was trashed and it's author attacted, it doesn't mean his life is in danger or that a holy war has been called.  Mr. Sobran, get a grip fella

There are reasonable arguements to be made for the Beatles.  Their music which first consisted of simply songs like "Hold My Hand"  and "Baby You Can Drive My Car" progressed continually to those contained in the Sergeant Peppers, White and Abbey Road albums.  The simple songs had given way to works with orchestrated backgrounds and complex impresionistic montages.  That's why it's rather humerous to suggest some of the people you have, as even the slightest challenge to their standing.  As good as those people were, their music was one dimensional by comparison.

You state that Berstein was surely over the top when he called Lennon and McCartney, "the greatest composers of the twentieth century."  What you fail to understand is that the Beatles music wasn't of one variety.  They successfully moved their craft from one spectrum of music to another.  They moved from the mere pop culture to that of the symphonic environment. And this they did, all the while pulling their fans along with them, and winning new converts.  Many kids who wouldn't have been exposed to symphony music, were due to the Beatles.

You mentioned Bernstein and Sanatra.  Here's two musical giants that recognized the contributions the Beatles had made.  But you dismiss these two men as if your contribution to the music industry qualified your opinion to rule the day.  Frankly, I blieve the reverse to be painfully evident.

Let's consider your arguement about the Beatles fame being a product of entertainment industry and image maker's hype.  Well, hype will get your foot in the door fella, it won't win you fans.  If there's no tallent, the albums won't sell and the fans won't swoon.  The hype will soon fade away and the whole effort will go bust and cave in on itself.  Did that happen?

You state that your remarks were not as a result of you not liking the Beatles.  I can't imagine what you'd have said if you didn't like them, but your words come pretty close to my minds eye view.  First of all you dismiss their tallent as no better than the forgotten that you mention.  You state that their music couldn't stand on it's own, their popularity was only a result of hype and that albums sold simply because kids wanted to "belong."  Then you dump on musical giants that do recognize their tallent.

When I was a kid of sixteen years of age, I purchased the only single I've ever bought.  On one side was Strawberry Fields Forever.  On the opposite was Penny Lane.  I didn't buy that single because hype forced me to.  I bought it because I appreciated the music.  I would suggest you seek those two songs out sometime.  Listen to their complexity and perhaps you'll be able to obtain the same understanding that 16 year old kid did.  The Beatles music was far more than you give it credit for.

As you stated, hype didn't start with the Beatles and to attribute their succes to hype is to reveal to the public how shallow and ignorant one human can be.

In the future, if you wish to address the evils of focus groups and such, please address it and refrain from trashing un-related groups or topics with the smoke and mirrors routine.

One valid arguement that you didn't make, which truly revealed your ignorance on the topic of best composers, was the omission of show tune greats of the twentieth century. Some of those would have been an excellent challenge to the claim that the Beatles were the best. Even so, the Beatles versatility and growth made them my favorites. Others may disagree on that point. Never-the-less, the Beatles were a major tallent.

[Arkinsaw]

There's nothing wrong with disliking something, but sometimes radicalizing that dislike will create radicals in response where none would have been created.

[BluesDuke]

The Beatles probably did more for guitar sales than any group in history. I'd still like to get a Rickenbacher...

This isn't exactly true, though they did put a kind of steroid shot into guitar sales. (Gretsch, for example, enjoyed some additional sales power thanks to George Harrison's use of two of their models, as they would in 1966 when they got a sponsorship deal to supply the Monkees with guitars and basses for the first season of that show - but Rickenbacker enjoyed a pickup in sales thanks to Harrison's and John Lennon's use of Rickenbacker guitars and, shortly afterward, the Byrds, whose Roger McGuinn used a Rickenbacker electric 12-string when they hit big.)

The real steroid shot for guitar sales came with the emergence of first Mike Bloomfield and then Eric Clapton as major stars who did it with nothing more than their guitar playing, and in the unlikeliest of ways: Bloomfield in 1966 switched from a Fender Telecaster to an old Gibson Les Paul, during the sessions for the second Butterfield Blues Band album, East-West. (Gibson had discontinued the original Les Paul in 1960, replacing it with what was called at first the "Les Paul SG" in 1961); Clapton, who played a Telecaster as a member of the Yardbirds, switched to a Les Paul he found second hand in a shop when he joined John Mayall's Blues Breakers in 1965. (Clapton's guitar had an interesting feature: a Bigsby tailpiece and tremolo bar, a feature Les Pauls never made standard on any model in its original life.)

Gibson noticed something striking: when each musician made the switch, sales of Fender Telecasters dropped and aspiring and professional guitarists alike were hunting down old Les Pauls. Bloomfield and Clapton (Gibson customarily creidts Bloomfield first) triggered the revival of the model, to the point where Gibson finally returned it to production in 1969. (Following them, Jimi Hendrix ambled along with his Fender Stratocaster, and sales of that guitar began to jump.) But musicians began prizing the older guitars, on the Bloomfield and Clapton impetus (Bloomfield's, I believe, was a 1957 model; Clapton's, a 1959), and the collectible guitar market was born.

An irony: Clapton's prize Les Paul was stolen shortly after he finished the sessions for Fresh Cream in 1966 (very few photographs exist of Clapton playing that guitar with Cream), and he found a replacement - a 1961 Les Paul SG Standard, the one he had painted (famously) psychedelic. He played that guitar throughout most of his time in Cream (though he also used a semi-hollowbody Gibson ES-345, similar to one B.B. King is seen with on the rear jacket of Live and Well, and a Firebird, such as he is shown playing on the front jacket of Live Cream. These latter two guitars he played at Cream's famous farewell concert at Royal Albert Hall; he also played the ES-345 at Cream's final New York concert, at Madison Square Garden.)

[sharktrager]

Even in the world of pop music, a singer used to have to perform for years, making contact with small audiences from town to town, before he "hit the big time." He had to earn appreciation. It was hard work, but local fame necessarily preceded national fame.

Joe's ignorance is really showing here. In case he didn't notice, the Beatles paid their dues in Liverpool and Berlin long before Beatlemania. His problem stems more from the notion that they didn't pay their dues in the US, hence it didn't count. By that token, I guess the UK should have dismissed Elvis and Chuck Berry.

[geaux]

The Beatles = A very early model for N Sync, Boyz-2-Men, Menudo, Backstreet Boys, Duran Duran, New Edition, etc., etc., etc. Find some cute, semi-talented guys, put them together into a band making pre-fab music, market them to 7th grade girls, make money, disperse and let the guys try it on their own. Now they're starting with the girls; see Britney Spears.

Flame away.

[UnBlinkingEye]

When I was a kid of sixteen years of age, I purchased the only single I've ever bought. On one side was Strawberry Fields Forever. On the opposite was Penny Lane.

Strwaberry Fields Forever was also one of the first, if not the first, MTV type music videos made.

[Shooter 2.5]

In the days that followed George Harrison's death, I almost called a radio station to ask them to please play some Beatle's songs. I was tired of hearing Rolling Stones music.

I'm sorry to say that I never made the call.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Some of the earlier Lennon stuff I never tire of. She Said She Said, And Your Bird Can Sing, Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows, I'm Only Sleeping are just as good today as they were then. The radio stations tended to play McCartney songs, many of which were good also but only because they were more pop oriented love songs.

But Lennon was better in a different way. He was proud that his songs were of the "underground" nature, not AM but FM rogue music. He ridiculed McCartney for "selling out". His first solo album was as uncommercial as you could get. But in the end the Beatles couldn't be one without the other. Their styles came together to sound better than anything before or since. Unfortunately, when they split, Lennon became too sour, and McCartney saccharine.

It was good they didn't reunite. I think the myth of perfection would have been shattered. Their creative abilities had slipped somewhat, and there would have been the danger they couldn't come up with a Strawberry Fields Forever again. The public might have dissed them. Probably not, but there was that chance.

[UnBlinkingEye]

The real steroid shot for guitar sales came with the emergence of first Mike Bloomfield and then Eric Clapton as major stars who did it with nothing more than their guitar playing, and in the unlikeliest of ways: Bloomfield in 1966 switched from a Fender Telecaster to an old Gibson Les Paul, during the sessions for the second Butterfield Blues Band album, East-West.

You may be right but I thought I had read that guitar sales exploded when the Beatles hit the scene.

I've got Butterfield's East-West album and another old album with Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills and Al Kooper called Super Session. I think I might have an old John Mayall and the Blues Breakers album with Eric Clapton in his pre-Cream days somewhere around here. I also have a Les Paul Custom sitting next to me as I type.

[gcruse]

Since then, what we call "pop" culture has
become uncomfortably close to totalitarian politics.

Joe Sobran's brain is officially dead.  It follows the
death of his reputation by several years.

The individual who prefers to make up his own
mind knows he counts for nothing

Sorry, Joe.  Didn't know you felt so muzzled.
I guess writing nationally syndicated columns
puts you at a disadvantage to the rest of us.

[DoughtyOne]

Good call.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks for the good comments.

[UnBlinkingEye]

The Beatles = A very early model for N Sync, Boyz-2-Men, Menudo, Backstreet Boys, Duran Duran, New Edition, etc., etc., etc. Find some cute, semi-talented guys, put them together into a band making pre-fab music, market them to 7th grade girls, make money, disperse and let the guys try it on their own.

The difference between the Beatles and most, if not all of the others you mention, is that they came together on their own initiative, wrote their own songs and played their own instruments. They also had a much greater impact on the world as whole than any of the other groups.

[jwfiv]

That long East-West tune has been a favorite for 33 years now. GREAT little masterpiece, it was/is.

[BluesDuke]

The Beatles = A very early model for N Sync, Boyz-2-Men, Menudo, Backstreet Boys, Duran Duran, New Edition, etc., etc., etc. Find some cute, semi-talented guys, put them together into a band making pre-fab music, market them to 7th grade girls, make money, disperse and let the guys try it on their own.

Question: Did the 'NSyncs, et.al., slog away for the better part of seven years, from the time they were teenagers, in some of the seediest dives and roughest halls in Liverpool and Hamburg grinding it out for sometimes four or even five sets a night? And as for "pre-fab" music, be advised that, from practically the outset, the Beatles insisted on their own compositions going onto their singles. (It should be noted that the few non-Beatle-written songs which made it as hit singles happened in the U.S., at the behest of their American record labels: "Twist and Shout" most famously, but also a Carl Perkins rewrite of an ancient Blind Lemon Jefferson blues, "Matchbox," and their rippling version of Larry Williams's "Slow Down". "Act Naturally," a Russell-Morrison song which Buck Owens had made a country hit, was put on the flip of "Yesterday" and, unlike other Beatle singles, didn't chart in its own right. In England, in those years, extended-play singles of four songs each were often released to help promote albums; the Beatles once in awhile included a cover version on these, such as their version of Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music" appearing on an EP single telegraphing Beatles for Sale)

The mania they provoked from 1964-66 makes it only too easy to forget that the Beatles were no overnight sensation; they had (as the saying used to go) paid their dues with interest, before an obscure kid wandered into a Liverpool record shop in late 1961, asked for a record the Beatles had cut backing another British singer in Germany (legendary conductor Bert Kaempfert - who later produced Frank Sinatra's "comeback," "Strangers In The Night" - produced the session), and piqued the shop owner's curiosity enough that by early 1962 he became the Beatles' manager. And I doubt sincerely that, forty years hence, a CD gathering up 'NSync's number one hits (they may not even rack up enough to fill out a full CD) will sell comparably to what their albums sold a couple of years ago.

No flame. Fact.

[gcruse]

Thanks for the history. I learned to play on my father's 194* Martin. The first guitar of my own was my high school graduation present, a Les Paul Junior in 1960. I eventually traded it in for an ivory Les Paul Custom in 1962. The fretless wonder was the easiest fingerboard I ever found. My last guitar was an ES350. I'll always be a Gibson man.

[The Wizard]

What about the great one, Mr. Berlin