There’s a fair bit of ahistorical revisionism out there, and while some of those doing the revising have some valid points items like the one that prompted this little diatribe are coming from people who either weren’t around to experience the things they’re tallking about or, if they were want to rewrite hstory to remove things they’d prefer to pretend didn’t happen. Maybe, from a twenty-first century perspective The Beatles are a quaint historical phenomenon but without them we wouldn’t have arrived where we are today, would we?
Rant: Beatles = Lightweights?
Reading the Weekend Australian around the middle of 2007, the hackles on the back of my neck rose when I found the following statement leading off an article by David Browne reprinted from The New Republic.
In case you haven’t heard, the Beatles blow. They’re overrated lightweights who aren’t as influential as certain punk bands and they’re to blame for all that soft rock.
At that time I was sufficiently outraged to post a lengthy diatribe on my previous blog site, and on my morning walk today, my mind returned to the subject. I decided the issue was worth revisiting because it points the way towards a number of other issues that will probably rear their ugly heads repeatedly as time goes by....
First up, despite original outrage at the statement, if you’re coming at the subject as someone who didn’t hit puberty in the sixties, that’s probably a more or less justifiable position.
First up, consider the recent output of the respective Beatles, or rather, don’t, if you’re from about the same vintage as I am.
Apart from a stream of releases from Paul McCartney, none of which I’ve ever had an interest in buying or listening to (at least not based on snippets I’ve heard on the radio), what have they got to show for thirty-something years of activity?
A handful of solo albums and the odd posthumous release, none of which would do much to deny the above statement.
On the other hand, if you decide to look at things from a historical perspective, in terms of what really happened, it’s an entirely different matter.
For a start, I doubt that anyone who wasn’t there would be able to comprehend the overwhelming pervasiveness of Beatle music in pop culture between 1963 and late 1967.
Things started to fall away in the wake of Sgt Peppers, which is not to downplay the White Album or Abbey Road as albums. It’s just that the cultural dominance was waning.
If it was possible to slip into a time machine, travel back to an ageing baby boomer’s heyday and frame a betting market on the soundtrack playing in the background at certain pivotal moments, you would have Lennon & McCartney as a very short-priced favourite, with, in horse racing parlance daylight second.
Quite simply, if you were compiling the soundtrack to the average mid-sixties teenager’s misspent youth, a sizeable chunk of it would have been performed, written or heavily influenced by a certain Fab Four..
But beyond that pervasiveness, there were other things that the quote at the top of the page overlooks.
First up, it’s significant to note that they were British. Again, if you weren’t there at the time, that’s a factor you’d totally overlook. But, quite simply, if the Beatles hadn’t existed, we probably wouldn’t have seen the British acts that went on to become huge once the Beatles broke big in America.
On a slightly different tack, I suspect that their popularity in Australia, and their acceptance by the older generation was, largely, a matter of their Britishness at a time when a large chunk of the Australian population still thought of Britain as home - of course, by the time that Lennon was having his Rolls painted in psychedelic splendour, that had changed...
What we now know as rock music was, up until the Beatles burst in on the scene, a more or less totally American affair, with a handful of local practitioners in other countries who were almost uniformly regarded as a pale imitation of the real American thing.
Yet, by 1965 we see Doug Sahm and a bunch of Hispanic musos passing themselves off, at the record company’s insistence, as the Sir Douglas Quintet....
Without the airplay that greeted the Beatle-penned I Wanna Be Your Man and the opportunity for their management to promote them as Your Teenage Rebellion Alternative to the nicely-suited and cute Fabsters, would Mick Jagger and Co have progressed beyond an existence as hard core blues fans on the periphery of the popular music scene?
More significantly, pre-Lennon & McCartney, song writing was the domain of professional songwriters (even if they were teenage professional songwriters) who simultaneously churned out quantity and quality, then hawked the results around publishers, managers and A&R men in the hope that some of their work would end up being recorded.
As a result, when someone recorded an album it was. more than likely, made up of a bunch of disparate songs by a variety of different writers with a fair balance between new material and songs that had a slightly longer lineage.
That didn’t change overnight, of course. Looking at the vinyl sleeves of the first couple of Beatle albums we see six out of fourteen tracks on Please Please Me, With The Beatles and Beatles For Sale drawn from non-Beatle sources.
Post-A Hard Day’s Night things changed.
Increasingly, performers wrote their own material, working away until they had accumulated enough for an album, even if it was a Greatest Hits thing with a handful of filler thrown in to pad it out to a respectable length.
One more change, that wouldn’t have happened without the buckets of money raked in by performers who wrote their own material, and, increasingly, controlled their own publishing, thus providing themselves with a couple of income streams...
Some ten years after it burst onto the scene,playing rock ‘n’ roll music became a viable long-term career choice.
Assuming that you had access to an archive of the music press dating back to the early-sixties, if you were to peruse the profiles of the latest shooting stars who’d shot into prominence, the sort of thing that helps a reporter fill some space without actually having to stretch his or her mind too far, I suspect that you’d almost invariably find a question about long-term ambitions.
And, where you found a question about long-term ambitions, you’d more than likely find one stock standard answer - To become an all-round entertainer.
The cynics among us would probably be smelling a rat here, since, in all likelihood the performer’s aspirations would have involved quantities of illegal substances, a river of expensive liquor and an array of compliant, nubile sexual partners. Those peccadilloes were no the sort of thing that could be admitted to within earshot of the gutter press.
In reality, the responses had probably been put together by the artist’s management or press agent, who would’ve had definite ideas about the direction of the performer’s career.
No one would have predicted that, for example, the Rolling Stones would still be touring in 2005. And, following their legendary appearance on the Dean Martin Show in 1965 (Don’t you go away and leave me here with these Rolling Stones...) if you’d suggested that the Stones would have been absorbed into the mainstream to the point where they’d be half-time entertainment at the Super Bowl there would have phone calls made to arrange for a visit from the men in white coats who’d be carting you off to join Napoleon XIV of They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha fame....
In the English press, becoming an all-round entertainer would have involved following the same career path as, say Tommy Steele, Rolf Harris or perhaps Nana Mouskouri. TV shows, stage work, the odd recording while the new kid on the block tried to maintain a high enough profile to stay in the business and avoid having to go out and get a real job.
Pre-Beatles, I doubt that anyone would have predicted that rock & roll would have provided any sort of career path that didn’t involve an early grave or a permanent spot in the queue at the local soup kitchen.
Regardless of anyone’s dismissal of overrated lightweights who aren’t as influential as certain punk bands who are to blame for all that soft rock I have a suspicion that if those overrated lightweights hadn’t burst on the scene we’d be surveying a substantially different musical landscape.