Someone explain the beatles era music to me

"Not to mince words, Mr. Epstein, but we don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished…The Beatles have no future in show business.”

-- Decca Records Executive, 1962
 
You had to grow up with it to understand it.

The beatles relatively conservative hair by today's standards was shocking to our Dad's and society. You have to remember those old WWII boys here all had buzz cuts and flat tops. The Beatles were often referred to as girls back then...

The Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, they were everything your Dad and 'the establishment' was not. Just the way we wanted it. :lol:
 
Bryan,

Popular music didn't leap straight from Lawrence Welk, to Mad-Donna overnight. It took thousands of tiny shifts.
The biggest, early shift was caused by the way the Beatles changed the way the rock and roll producers perceived rock and roll.

Think about it...

Some people actually LIKED disco.
 
The biggest boon to modern music was Johann Sebastian Bach.
Johann_Sebastian_Bach.jpg

Without polyphonic music R&R would not exist.

The piano he played on would be called a POS today. Can you imagine his delight in sitting down to a Steinway Model "D" today?

model-d-ny.png
 
Heck, I thought it was a picture of Stevie Nix as a teenager.
 
Florida Cracker said:
Bryan,

Popular music didn't leap straight from Lawrence Welk, to Mad-Donna overnight. It took thousands of tiny shifts.
The biggest, early shift was caused by the way the Beatles changed the way the rock and roll producers perceived rock and roll.

Think about it...

Some people actually LIKED disco.
Click to expand...

There was some good disco, last development of the horn genre music.
 
While I'm much too young to be recalling anything of the Beatles era (hell Wings was broken up before I was born), I'll add my .02.

The primary component that I took away from listening to the Beatles albums, especially post-"Hold Your Hand, is the level of refinement compared to most of the other bands of the period. They didn't do the touring as well as other bands did, especially after the first 4-5 years, but the way they went about producing a studio album was as meticulous as it could get for that era. The hours upon hours spent laying down individual tracks and getting every rif/harmony "perfect" was what set them apart, musically, for me. It wasn't a matter of going in all together and running through the song a dozen times and taking the best run. They used a lot of cutting-edge recording technology in order to arrive at their best work, which became the standard for many after them. Now, that isn't to say they are the first or only band to have incorporated such techniques, but they definitely had the influence when their albums did go big.

Also, Ringo was a mediocre drummer. There, I said it.
 
kgruber said:
The biggest boon to modern music was Johann Sebastian Bach.
Johann_Sebastian_Bach.jpg

Without polyphonic music R&R would not exist.

The piano he played on would be called a POS today. Can you imagine his delight in sitting down to a Steinway Model "D" today?

model-d-ny.png
Click to expand...

He didn't really play much piano at all and I don't think he really cared for them all that much anyway.
 
Part of the Beatles was their vast quantity of quality work with significant changes in style over a short period of time. 12 studio albums. Please Please Me released in 1963. Their last album, Let it Be, released in 1970. That's almost a new album every year. If you look at some of the release dates of their albums, in some cases, they are six months apart. Crazy.

Also, they were the first to really successfully mesh political activism with popular western Pop music. While the Beach Boys were interesting from a harmony standpoint, "I Get Around" just isn't that deep of a message. That's probably a little unfair, as the Beatles didn't blossom into their revolutionary selves until a little bit later than "I Get Around." But you get the point.

For me, its the dramatic change in style during a period of time when attitudes were so dramatically changing. To be relevant from their beginning to their end over that time period is pretty astonishing.
 
Bryan,

I was watching Joe Walsh on "Daryl's House" the other night and Joe made me think of this thread of yours...he answers your question as only Joe can do. Go to 19:00

 
I thought these guys wrote that song :)




I kidd.
I will watch that clip here in a few
 
That's actually a damned good (and fun) cover.

On one of Eric Clapton"s Crossroads DVDs, Joe Leads into RMW with something like, "if I had known I'd be singing this GD song the rest of my life, I'd've never written it."
 
The Beatles and that era were "hey Dad, I want to grow my hair long like that" and he would get royally ****ed is what it was about. :rockon:
 
Hey Jude, first she wants to hold your hand, then she loves you, then it's been a hard day's night, you start thinking I'm a loser, followed by feeling your relationship is yesterday, you start thinking that happiness is s warm gun or to get maxwells silver hammer. You start doing Lucy in the Sky with Diaminds among other things. You decide you need Help. Finally you decide to Let it Be.
 
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asgcpa said:
Hey Jude, first she wants to hold your hand, then she loves you, then it's been a hard day's night, you start thinking I'm a loser, followed by feeling your relationship is yesterday, you start thinking that happiness is s warm gun or to get maxwells silver hammer. You start doing Lucy in the Sky with Diaminds among other things. You decide you need Help. Finally you decide to Let it Be.
Click to expand...

The End.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVYjQScC1DY

The last known song recorded by all four together.
 
I was a teenager when the Beatles came to the US in 64. The whole family watched them on the Ed Sullivan show. My Mom thought that they were cute, my Dad thought their hair was goofy, and I thought they were kind of dorky. My sister fell in love with them. I never became a Beatles fan. At the time that they were the rage, they were getting a lot of media, but not everyone loved them. Now days people think that everyone just could not get enough of them, and the truth was, that they had their fans, and their fans couldn't get enough of them, but they weren't the only band there was. I liked some of their songs, but most of them I didn't. A lot of teenage girls really liked them, and at least the guys I went to school with pretty much just put up with them to get the girls. I often see the fact that they filled stadiums as a testament to their popularity, but the Stones did stadium concerts too. The biggest stadium concert I ever saw, was a U2 concert.
 
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