The Beatles
HELP ME IF YOU CAN IM FEELIN DOWNNN!
Man. Life. The space between spaces.
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER SO MUCH YOUNGER THAN TODAYYY.
Hope you all enjoyed that last post. Not a movie review, but I felt it was important to write and share. That is of course a perfect segue to this article which is more about music than movies.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN… THE BEATLES!!!
The screams. The hair. The classic songs. Paul, John, George, and Ringo. The Ed Sullivan Show. Beatlemania! LSD. Magical Mystery Tour. Sgt. Pepper. More Drugs. Yoko. Lennon becomes a hippie. Yoko breaks up the band. The music is over. Lennon is shot. Paul becomes Paul McCartney, the only lasting Beatle.
And that’s really what I knew of The Beatles. Yeah, I knew their music as much as every other general music fan knows it. I knew they were good. But my grandfather loved The Beach Boys. So I grew up riding around in a convertible with my grandfather listening to The Beach Boys with the wind blowing in my hair and the sun shining on my face. So in my mind, even though I knew The Beatles had done more for music, The Beach Boys were best and that was it.
Plus I hated John Lennon. I liked and appreciated The Beatles music, but I always saw the older pictures of Lennon, when he looked like a hippie and super drugged-out. And I hated him for dating Yoko and breaking up the band. How could he?!
Then I started doing my research. I find out Lennon really was the walrus. In my mind, because I way too young to really remember, Paul was the only Beatle I really knew. I thought he was always the leader of The Beatles. Wrong. (Paul and John sounded so similar, when I was a kid, I thought Paul was doing all the singing. How wrong I was. I mean Fuck! I always thought it was McCartney that sang Twist and Shout. Nope, it was Lennon who nearly blew out his vocal cords. The Ferris Bueller scene is even crazier to me now!). Lennon started the group, and while for the first five years they wrote a great many of their songs together, Lennon was the driving force. He was the band leader. It was always 60-40 in Lennon’s favor. But then he got disillusioned with the success of The Beatles, started doing the crazy, trippy drugs, their manager/guy that was holding them together Brian Epstein died, and Paul took over as the leader of the group. Then Yoko happened. As they say about any relationship, it’s not the cheating that is the problem; the cheating is just the physical incarnation that something else is wrong.
Lennon was over being a Beatle as early as 1965 when he wrote and The Beatles released “Help!” One of my favorite Beatles songs of their “pop” era and one of my favorites of all their songs. Not just for how great the song itself is, but more for what it represents. It’s a pop song; it sounds happy. But Lennon was not happy: “The whole Beatles thing was just beyond comprehension. I was subconsciously crying out for help.” I think you mean “consciously” there John. Help! was released in July 1965 and The Beatles played their famous Shea Stadium concert in New York in August 1965, which can only be described as the zenith of Beatlemania. (A quick note on that: according to my limited research, this hadn’t been done before. A group hadn’t played an entire stadium before. It just hadn’t been done. It hadn’t even been comprehended or thought of before The Beatles. Can you imagine that? They were the first. Now Billy Joel sells out MSG consistently with an average of 18,666 people in attendance. 55,600 people were at Shea Stadium to see The Beatles. Shit is cray.)
How could one not become disillusioned after that? How would you not think you were God? No wonder Lennon said The Beatles “were more popular than Jesus”. They were! There had been pop groups before them, there had been Elvis, but it all crystalized with The Beatles. Yeah their music was good, even great, better than the other pop tunes of the time. But everything else happened around them at the exact right moment. Their management, the hair-do’s, the suits, and most importantly the time period. Coming out of the 50s, the kids needed a way to rebel in the 60s and The Beatles were it. Not to mention they were cute as fuck and really like what would have happened if you had put The Backstreet Boys back in 1965. I had never truly understood why the girls in the audience were screaming SO much. Now I get it. There had never been a type of a music and a group of the opposite sex that so represented sex and rebellion all in one. The screams for were what they represented more than what The Beatles actually were.
And Lennon knew it wasn’t real. He had been playing in his original band, The Quarrymen, in tiny pubs and at birthday parties since 1957. He knew the music was good, but he knew the people weren’t cheering for him or even the music. And so Lennon began to spiral. He had defined himself by this passion and goal to be a great and loved musician and he had achieved it and it did not satisfy him in the way that it was supposed to. Now what? Enter drugs. Enter LSD. Enter the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Enter trying to find himself. Enter my prior perceived hatred of Lennon. And then enter some of the greatest music ever created. Ever. Enter the music that changed Rock n’ Roll and music itself forever. Revolver comes out in 1966. And then Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band comes out in 1967. Like Brando changed acting, Sgt. Pepper changed music. Bringing it from whatever it was before, to what it would be and is even now. (Read the Rolling Stone article that ranks it as the Greatest Album of All Time for the reasons why!) Then they followed it up with Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. Just only a few of the most famous albums of all time regardless of genre. The Beach Boys have Pet Sounds, which, besides my own liking, can really only claim to have partially inspired The Beatles to create Sgt. Pepper.
So that’s why The Beatles are commonly regarded as the greatest group of all time. They produced the best music, the best music over a long period of time, the best music in a variety of different genres, and music that changed music. So now I understand Lennon. I understand that break-up was coming regardless of Yoko. He would never be happy as being just a Beatle. That the downturn of Lennon and the eventual break-up of The Beatles was necessary for them to create the greatest music of all time. (Take a second look at the two photos above now. Look how different they look from when they started to when they ended. They had to go through the change before their music could.) But damn, don’t you think: what if they had stayed together? How much more great music would we have gotten? But some things are just not meant to be. But, I take heart knowing that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote over 300 songs together. Three-hundred songs.
That level of productivity is simply astounding.
So at the end of the day, what do you need to know/watch/research/listen to to fully understand The Beatles? The group that went from being the greatest pop group of all time to being thegreatest group of all time, period. I would never say this about any other artist, but you really need to sit down and listen to all of their music, like I did. You start at the beginning and once you get to the end, it’s like comparing Michael Jordan to anyone else: You just can’t. Their greatness is unrivaled and undeniable. The Beatles are The Greatest. Sorry grandpa. But if you don’t have time to do that, then watch Ron Howard’s wonderful 2016 documentary Eight Days A Week to get a sense of their music in the early years and truly understand the scope (no, you really don’t get it) of Beatlemania! Then watch the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, to get a sense of them as people (and to learn that Ringo was the most underrated Beatle, not George). Then listen to all the albums from Revolver on. Or just Pepper, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. Or just Sgt. Pepper. Or just the three songs from that Pepper: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and A Day in the Life.
Really you could listen to those three songs and in your heart know everything you needed to know about The Beatles and how they took music from the stone age…
…to the modern era.
So do yourself a favor and listen to them. It will change your life.
You can thank me later.
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Some Final Notes:
1. In the Eight Days A Week documentary, a modern day composer could only compare one other composer (Schubert) in the entire history of composers, to The Beatles in terms of not only the volume of compositions, but also in regards to the number of how many of those compositions were truly great compositions.
2. I had to look up the word “Beetle” in the dictionary to consciously remember that was how you actually spelled the word. Not “Beatle”.
3. Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager and sculptor of their image and success (and really the “fifth beatle” if there ever was one [their recording producer George Martin might count as the fifth and a half]), died at the very tender age of 32 in 1967 at the height of The Beatles’ fame from an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. Why is it that the greats always die young? Why is it that fame and success don’t bring happiness? Guy only got to enjoy his greatness and the spoils of his work for five years.
Enjoy your life kids. It could end at any moment.
4. NEVER EVER EVER GIVE UP MERCHANDISING RIGHTS TO ANYTHING YOU EVER DO (George Lucas famously kept the Star Wars merchandising rights, smart thinking George!). “Directly prior to The Beatles’ first American visit, Brian Epstein wanted someone to manage the escalating volume of merchandising requests that NEMS found itself unable to cope with, and asked his lawyer, David Jacobs, to oversee this task. Jacobs knew Nicky Byrne and asked him if he would be interested in taking over the merchandising subdivision from NEMS altogether, paying NEMS a commission. Byrne accepted the offer subject to a 90% rate, leaving only 10% for the Beatles and NEMS combined. Completely unaware of the potential market that existed, particularly in America, Epstein agreed to the deal, and subsequently lost The Beatles an estimated $100,000,000 in possible income (about A BILLION DOLLARS TODAY WHEN ACCOUNTING FOR INFLATION!!!). In August 1967 Epstein died, from what was ruled an accidental overdose of a prescribed drug. Jacobs was found hanged in his garage on 15 December 1968. Byrne later retired to the Bahamas.
That last paragraph is fucking nuts, right? I had to share that factoid with you. Jesus Christ indeed.
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Last Note:
In 1980, ten years after The Beatles broke up, John Lennon was shot by a delusional fan outside his home on the Upper West Side of New York City (I am currently writing this at my place of work at Columbus Circle. I am literally 12 blocks directly south of where John Lennon was shot. How trippy is that???) The most terrible fucking tragedy if there ever was one. But in those ten years after The Beatles, it seems Lennon found some semblance of peace with Yoko, his son Sean, and most importantly with himself. And even without The Beatles and Paul pushing him, he gave us more great music in that time. Especially and including: “God” and maybe the greatest song he left us with “Imagine”.
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Conclusion:
So now when I listen to The Beatles, I am no longer confused. I listen to them more The Beach Boys now. And now that I know the exquisite, minute differences in Paul and John’s voices, it now and forever will be Lennon’s voice that I am straining for, yearning to hear.