Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I don't think the "rock and roll lifestyle" counts for anything. Seems it counts more than the music to some, let's name about a hundred bands that come to mind. No, let's not. However if that, in some people's eyes makes a band more legit, remember, Lennon once said their tours were something like Felini's Satryicon (sp?). If the local sheriff found his daughter in their room, he'd get their autographs before throwing em outta town. The press loved them, and gave a wink wink nudge nudge to alot of things going on to remain at least temporarily in their circle. Jagger has said if the Stones would visit a children's hospital, it didn't make the papers. But if they pee'd on a wall, they're manger made sure it got in the papers to reinforce their bad boy image.
Musically, what else was being released when the Beatles debuted? Any real rock? Mostly soft Elvis clones. Suddenly, a real band with real musicians. They raised the bar with each release. Early Stones records were pretty bad, and the Stones early versions of American R&B were awful (I love the Stones, BTW). The Beatles did Motown better than Mowtown (Mr. Postman, You've Really Got A Hold on Me, et al.)
Early Bob Dylan was an "Echo", too (W. Guthrie, et al.). The Beach Boys started out doing Chuck Berry riffs and car/surf lyrics, but look where they took it.
By the time the Beatles recorded their first lp, they were a great band. A lot of the bands mentioned in this thread became great, but started out their recording careers weakly. I get tired of the revisionist dissing of the Beatles, Paul seems the brunt of this. Yeah, they sold to kids, that was the point. People weren't as show buisness saavy in those days, and they followed accepted norms for a while (good grooming, don't speak out about Vietnam, Civil Rights in America, etc.)
Rock and pop were one 'til '67. But the Beatles had the chops and the 'nads to prove most critics wrong. To their critics I say, They won, get used to it.

To sum up: Piero Sarducci is nuts (whoever he is), these people like to come out and shock people so they will get noticed. The early Beatles albums and all Beatle albums were 15's out of a possible 10.
I know "Meet The beatles" by heart, all the bass lines, most of the rhythm parts, all the cords, I could probably even play the drums on most of the songs, and this is only because I have played it to death for 40 years, I don't practise with records usually, I very rarely learn anything exact to the record (very boring), but the Beatles stuff is so true to the ears you don't have to to learn it, it kind of permeates your consciousness while you are unaware of it.
In fact I have never played in a Beatle band (well for one month here a few months ago, but that's it) but can always pick out mistakes by Beatle bands, and can always play the correct bass line, and sing the harmonies, and a lot of the leads, all from just listening, they are part of my musical subconscious. Their music just rang and rings true, especially the early stuff. It was musically pure. They were the Beethoven of pop

Peter, was "arsk" a freudian slip?
I love The hollies but believe the Beatles killed them with their harmonies, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, especially Lennon and McCartney had real charactor in their voices. Some of their harmonies send shivers down my spine. The Hollies were shrill a lot of the time.

Bob: "You might well arsk" is a Lennonism, and in this case a purposeful stylistic choice of words.

Well, I finally woke up this thread!

First, Piero Scaruffi is a professional history teacher. He looks at things from an HISTORICAL perspective, and not a commercial or popular one. While his ratings are personal, and I don't always agree with them, they are more honest than professional rock critics who are prostitutes for the record industry. He makes finer distinctions between rock and pop than most of us here do. I might also add, I have MORE Beatles albums in my collection than Stones albums. As innovators that create a new genre, they are possibly surpassed by Opeth, which is a Swedish extreme metal/acoustic/rock/?!?! innovative band (don't know what to really call them, because their closest competitor is Gustav Mahler, not anybody else in any rock genre. They call their albums "observations", their songs "movements", and Scaruffi's average ratings of their albums exceeds the Stones, Beatles, or Beach Boys. However, like Mahler, their music is an acquired taste.) I suspect that those with some classical in the music rack and an open mind toward extreme metal are their main customer.

The first two Beatles albums were 50% covers, and the Stones were even worse offenders. I can't give points for albums of covers in comparison to groups that had outstanding debut albums consisting of their own material, like The Doors. The Doors were like Shakespeare, while the Beatles were like Dickens (which is still quite good). You probably enjoyed Dickens more than Shakespeare in high school English literature class. The Beatles got better over time. They got a bit outlandish on Revolver with "Dr. Robert". Don't dare tell me that John Lennon would have written about a drug dealer on the first few albums! How far would The Beatles have gotten without Epstein and Martin? Or The Stones without Oldham? Epstein, Martin, and Oldham would probably have done about as well because they would have had similar success with somebody else they would have chosen to develop into superstars. A few longhaired guys from Sweden can write and record music that compares to Mahler symphonies, and without any high powered managers or producers or big bucks backing them. But few give a damn. Singing about a revolution isn't quite the same as actually being one.

Beethoven was a radical that was far from liked by many of his contemporaries. His Eroica Symphony signalled a drastic change in western music. I listened to that recording OVER AND OVER into the wee hours of the night for several nights, more times than any pop or rock album I ever bought. Maybe some of you here aren't into classical, but I have nothing in my classical collection written prior to the Eroica that can remotely compare. (This symphony makes clear what Beethoven said about some of his greatest music lessons coming from songbirds in the German forest and meadows. Many of his contemporaries would have been too uppity to admit to taking lessons from tiny feathered creatures who each knew only a few notes. But man, HOW THEY CAN PLAY THOSE FEW NOTES!)

Scaruffi writes from an historical perspective, and not the times he lives in. This must be considered when reading his website. Rock is about rebellion and change, pop is about popularity at the moment. Real historians who want to be known as something besides a fake in later years try to leave out personal opinions.

The Beatles were OUTSTANDING at pop in their early days. The Beatles might have been the Beethoven of pop, but definitely NOT the Beethoven of rock. They were more like Mozart in nature, becoming more exploratory later in their career and having that career cut short. They DID have some innovations, like so many different styles on a single album, "Sgt. Pepper's LHCB". But the songs were based on past styles they didn't create themselves. I have the album, and I like it. It's Pop, not Rock. ABBA would have a similar type of success with copying different styles in the 70's, while their true innovation was the Music Video. I have lots of ABBA in my rack, but musical innovators they were not, except for advancing the music video. They sold almost as many records as The Beatles. U2 would continue the basic formula for commercial success through the 80's and into the 90's, changing style to milk a current trend. True innovation and the greatest commercial success rarely go hand in hand. The Doors probably did the best with both overall. The greatest commercial success more often goes to those who adapt the breakthroughs of others to better fit the public mood of the time. ABBA's songs would have been Rock instead of Pop if recorded 20 years earlier, but might have flopped were it not for breakthroughs of others who garnered less commercial success for themselves.

Well, Phil, hearing from you what Scaruffi thinks about The Beatles, I´m afraid I don´t agree with him, although is good to know different points of view.

Scaruffi's main point is that commercial interests get behind certain people more than others and push them to stardom. This is not to say that the Beatles were not good, but if the same amount of backing had been applied to many other bands as well, then the history of Rock would have been different.

A similar scenario would be if a few kids growing up today listen to Opeth, figure a way to make that style of music more palatable to the masses, then have a manager with financial backing jumpstart them on the road to success. They will receive the commercial success and stardom, but the recognition of innovation should go to Opeth. True connoisseurs would probably prefer Opeth without the watering down to secure mass appeal.

The Stones had to change R&B around a bit as well in order to get noticed, but they went in the opposite direction to The Beatles. The Beatles gave them something to be "opposite of" it might be argued. It wasn't as commercial at first until a lot of other musicians went the hard edged route as well. After 1970, was Rock more like the Beatles or The Stones in general? At least The Stones were still kicking. Most of my friends and myself bought music more like that of The Stones after that point. Both groups modified the music that got them started in order to be the successes they became. Both groups hogged the airwaves so much that most of my music purchases were of somebody else that didn't get played as often. I think I would disagree with Scaruffi in that BOTH groups were over rated. I'm NOT saying they were bad, but that other groups deserved some of their airtime because there were lots of other good groups by the late 60's and early 70's.

100 years from now, Captain Beefheart and others will get a bigger share of the Classic Rock sales than they ever did in their lifetime, just as happened to Classical composers of the past. The music will be in the public domain and commercial marketers of the past superstars will be gone. Salieri did better for himself in his lifetime, but Mozart is the one we remember, a man hauled to the graveyard by strangers, a man whose closest friend to see him buried was his little dog. Current mass appeal isn't always eternal mass appeal.

Funny how retrospection can re-write history.

It's not the first time that an 'afficianado' of 'rock' music has attempted to put The Beatles in their place as a mere 'pop' group though I have to admit it's the first time I've ever heard their importance being parallelled to ABBA!!!

Without wishing to sound patronising, the truth, of course, can only really be told by the likes of those who lived through the era NOT those who can only look back on it via the written word, TV and intricate analysis of the albums.

The Beatles reality was that they WERE actually making rock history along with - earlier - Elvis and - slightly later - Dylan. Pioneers, I suppose is the most apt terminology.

Forinstance, without The Beatles there would likely not have been a Rolling Stones or a Who or a Led Zep or Byrds or REM et alia et alia et alia in the form we now know them - and certainly not an ABBA. Great as these latter artists were they were all essentially imitative.

In stark contrast all three former artists were essentially innovators, instinctively absorbing the already established genres of Blues, R&B, Gospel, Country, Bluegrass and Folk and various contemporary artists and seamlessly - though likely at the time unwittingly - welding them into the brand new idiom that was to become 'rock' music.

A little cameo example of the contrast between the two categories. The Rolling Stones first major hit I Wanna Be Your Man.

The song was written by John and Paul for their own second album 'With The Beatles' which came out late 1963 just as Merseybeat was being joined by other artists from elsewhere in Britain.

IWBYMan was arguably the weakest track on that second album yet was snapped up by The Stones who at that time hadn't quite got their heads around The Beatles innovation of writing most of their own songs. [Incidentally on Please Please Me the fab four's first album 8 out of the 14 songs - not half as you stated - were self penned whilst few would argue against their versions of Twist and Shout, Baby It's You and Anna being definitive - even the Isleys and Shirelles!!]

Similar misconceptions can occur with analysis of that first Beatles album by rock fans who weren't around at the time.

Looking back now the album could in parts be said to sound almost 'quaint'. Certainly it contains nothing that would be termed hard rock or heavy by today's criteria or even by criteria of the mid-sixties.

And yet when it came out back then nothing like it had EVER been heard before. The opening bars of I Saw Her Standing There simply blew everyone out of their seats.

No lesser talent than Paul McCartney had written a song that opened the minds of the ensuing wave of Jagger and Richards, Townshend and Burden. A year or so later their new pop/rock sound was to do the same with Dylan, McGuinn, Hendrix et alia in the States. When Dylan first heard I Want To Hold Your Hand he was mesmerised, termed it outrageous, virtually ditched his purist folk music there and then and joined The Beatles in changing the face of the rock genre.

Little wonder then that researched retrospection can be a dangerous avenue to go down. I dare say, too, me trying to encapsulate what transpired in a few words could be said equally to be so.

However, my own reflective synopsis of what I know from observation at the relevant time to have happened is bound to be much closer to what actually went down than somebody succumbing to the temptation of applying current criteria within a researched retrospection. That, crucially, can be erroneous when assessing anything that is the very first of its kind as was the case with The Beatles.

Also the result is that you can upset an awful lot of people who actually know different. Especially older folk like moi. ;-0)

Incidentally Philco I'm not the world's biggest Beatles fan by any means. I've an eclectic taste but The Band, Little Feat, Pixies, live Broooooooooce, Tom Waits and generally less easily accessible and harder edge artists and material do tend to do it more for me.

However, one thing I am steadfastly against is history being conveniently re-written...inaccurately.

The more thoroughly developed the analysis the more bombproof The Beatles tend to become. The facts reveal them to be unique in so many ways. The fact that they were the first, the most popular and in many respects the best tends to render futile crusades against their standing. Opinions to the contrary, however learned, can become almost incidental when pitted against hard evidence which blows them out of the water.

Hope I haven't been too dogmatic. Grist to the mill though, huh?

Well.......I wonder who Jim Morrison copied when he took off his clothes on stage? Lady Godiva perhaps? The fact is The Doors sounded like NOBODY else and NOBODY has been able to copy their shows and NOBODY is going to ever do it without getting a frontman like Jim Morrison and I don't see it happening soon. There are many acts copying The Beatles, and it is easier to do.

Why stop at folk, gospel, country, jazz, R&B, et al? Beethoven was a rocker, and so was Bach. Same goes for Mahler, he had about as many high society women (higher society, actually) as any of the Stones ever did (BTW, they knew he was a genius and supported him in his work), and he wrote what "voices in his head told him too", and he upset a lot of people and it caused him great personal agony KNOWING that he would get little recognition in his day, but afterwards he would be famous as other composers had been when the "integrators" slowly pulled people's ears and brains around to where they could appreciate his music. He did not sell out and make his music commercial for personal gain, but wrote down what the voices told him to. Was it Wagner or Liszt that ran off with his best friend's wife? Maybe both did. Chopin hooked up with George Sand (she smoked cigars, drank like a man, and wore men's clothes). Now THERE'S a couple! Richard Wagner wrote the heavy metal of his day. Samuel Clemens said it really wasn't as bad as it sounded. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath did NOT invent heavy metal (but Zep studied the classics), and Quorthon of Bathory (who NEVER buys metal albums BTW, but does buy Beatle albums and classical) says there is not one iota of difference between his music style and Wagner's except that he uses electric instruments and has a smaller ensemble (namely, himself playing all the instruments). His extreme Epic Viking Metal music started a Viking nostalgia revival in Sweden among the young that sadly resulted in a few deaths (as sadly happened with the Stones). He never intended that, however, but it does show that music besides the most popular can create extreme passions. I think that the roots of rock started at the Baroque period when the enlightenment was spreading through Europe. Some musicians are rockers and some are not. Fewer, if any, are rockers all the time.

I'm getting a feeling that many of you here aren't deeply into classical music, but it grabbed me so hard back in the late 80's that I quit buying popular modern music for a while (so I can understand Quorthon's way of thinking). It eventually became the biggest part of my record collection. It's been around a lot longer.

I was sitting in front of the TV when The Beatles made their USA premier on the Ed Sullivan show. I thought, "Kind of a neat group, but WHY are all those teenage girls carrying on the way they are?". I don't need Piero Scaruffi or anybody else to tell me what was happening at the time. I saw the influences of all the popular bands of the day firsthand.

NONE of those groups any of you or I named did anything even remotely as upsetting to the western music world in an entire album (or decade) as Beethoven did with his Eroica Symphony. Daniel Barenboim called it the single most important musical event of the past two centuries. Beethoven singlehandedly bridged the era between the Classical and Romantic eras of western music. Between the two eras, his compositions are about the only ones listened to today, out of about a thousand symphonies written by others. His work had a drastic chilling effect on classical music composers for decades afterward, especially the symphonies, because they knew their works would be compared to Beethoven. Nearly two centuries later, no other single musical composition had as big of an effect on me. None, nada, zip. I listened to a smaller orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, and the music is cleaner and more intimate than a big orchestra in a big hall. CBS Masterworks# MDK 45651. This is more like you would have heard it in Beethoven's day. If you want a box set of Beethoven's symphonies, CBS Masterworks# SX6K 48099 conducted by Bruno Walter is very good. The recordings are old so the sound quality suffers, but Bruno was a noted Beethoven specialist. Sadly, most modern recordings have better sound quality, but the performances are not up to those of some past master conductors. Symphony #7 is the "Symphony of Rhythm", and the last movement is unsurpassed as the loudest and heaviest in the Classical world of music. It should have been played with electric instruments to get the full effect. I played it for my brother who played hard rock at the time, and he admitted it was rock music.

Er...now you've lost me Phil. However, I think the fact that you appear to rate The Doors so highly whilst tending to relegate the quality and impact of the mop tops sort of means that any meeting of minds here is a distinctly outside possibility.

Nevertheless, I do have a theory about why there aren't that many bands impersonating Jimbo and his mates while so many imitate the fab four. Believe it or not it's to do with the dearth of decent Doors songs and the plethora of fantastic Beatles songs. Might be worth exploring sometime.

Incidentally my only problem with Beethoven was his lyric writing. Other than that the guy really was something else.

;-0)

Something I would like to ad, Phil: the Doors´sound was based in the keyboards of Manzarek. Manzarek himself admitted that his influences were Rod Argent and Alan Price. Rod was with The Zombies, and this band loved The Beatles. Prrety much the same goes for Price and The Animals. Alan said that he changed his mind about what a group should be like when he listened to The Beatles for the first time. So, without The Beatles, The Doors may have sound quite different. One more thing: The Doors started as a folk rock band in 1965, heavily influenced by The Byrds, who, in turn, were heavily influenced by...yes, that Liverpool group!

Anyway, sure that time will put everybody in the place they deserve. Let´s wait about 200 years and see what happens. We´ll meet right here, same day, same hour. Bet my 'Epiphone Viola' bass that The Beatles will do better than what Scaruffi expects.

Must apologise a tad for a tinge of ungraciousness in my posts, though when it comes to anything Liverpudlian I have become very defensive down the years as a result of the place being beaten so much by the British media.

Fair play to Phil for sticking to his guns - even if he did lose me halfway through.

Two further observations on The Beatles.

One is I think The Beatles are not really classifiable as either a pop or rock band/group. Quite simply they were/are a unique phenomenon of the mid/late 20th century. Nothing else comes remotely close. To compare ANY other group let alone The Doors to The Beatles is tantamount to comparing a local council politician with JFK. In terms of status and import there simply is no comparison or even grounds for comparison.

Second, I'm reminded of, I think, a Greil Marcus analogy. He said that by 1961/62 the Beatles were playing live a brand of rock'n'roll that was as valid as anything pre-dating them [Berry, Elvis, Little Richard]. As such by that stage in their development they were not only in touch with their roots but they had actually become their roots.

He went on to say that before The Beatles there was no left or right of centre. No pop nor rock as such. Merely a homogeneous mass of popular music. It was The Beatles that created the centre and thus the criterion by which everything else was judged.

:-0)

I just have to say that I probably have more Beatles albums than any other pop/rock group. I didn't buy any of them until AFTER my Classical Hiatus. During their heyday, they were played ALL THE TIME on the radio. I simply got overloaded on Beatles songs and bought other albums in the 70's. That's what I mean by over rated. Played too much at the exclusion of other groups. When I moved to the Phoenix area in '73, I listened to a progressive rock station. KDKB I think it was, and it opened my mind to a lot of other groups that should have been given a bigger slice of the airtime pie. J. Gordon Holt said to never listen to a record you liked more than once every two weeks, or it would get stale. Overplaying of the top forty or whatever has always been a problem with modern commercial radio. I read a Tom Petty interview where he said that commercial radio had become so bland and homogeneous across the nation that he had quit listening to it. When he was growing up, he could take a ride across the country and hear all kinds of regional music. I grew up at the end of that era, and The Beatles were one of the prominent groups (maybe the most prominent) that the national commercial interests used to kill off regional radio. The Beatles would personally never have intended such actions, but their music DID figure prominently in the hogging of airwaves away from smaller regional groups. The Beatles were super popular, and commercial greed saw to it that their music got played and others' didn't. If you couldn't land a song at least within the Billboard Top 100, forget it, you weren't going to be played, except by a few avantgarde radio stations that were mainly in college towns.

I am far from alone in this shunning of Beatles albums in the 70's because they were overplayed. Few people I knew had a big Beatles collection, because there was no need for it. Just tune to a pop radio station, especially one that played classic tunes.

The nice thing about The Doors is that they gave you a break in style from whatever else you were listening to. A guy at work had John Densmore for a college teacher, and he told them a lot about The Doors during the band's active period. For whatever reason, they remain unique.

You can get tired of Beethoven when his music is overplayed just like any other composer. That is why other composers like Mahler and Rachmaninov are so necessary even to a Beethoven freak like myself. Mahler's music is rich in lyrics, even the symphonies. Rachmaninov was without a doubt the greatest composer of the 20th century. A person needs to lay off the pop music every now and then and play his 2nd Symphony to hear what REAL musical genius is all about. He paints a musical picture so well of his Russian homeland he left and longed to return to, that no lyrics are necessary to make you feel his heartache and longing. Take the lyrics out of your favorite pop music, and see if any of it has the same effect.

That's not to say Rachmaninov was a slouch with vocal music. His "Vespers" (All-Night Vigil) is an absolute vocal wonder. Not a single musical instrument, save the human voice, is used throughout. "Vespers", Telarc# CD-80172 and "Symphony #2", Telarc# CD-80312 are the finest CD's I have of these two works. Get them if you want to discover Rachmaninov. Everything about them is top notch: recording quality, choir, orchestra, conductors, recording venue, etc. If they can't move you, you have a genuine heart of stone. The 20th century DID produce music comparable to the finest of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, et al. Then I want you to ask yourself, "Could all of the Fab Four (or any other pop group you want to name) working together full time have ever written anything comparable to these two works written by a single man?". Be honest!!!

I promise I'm not just saying this Phil but IMHO The Doors are one of the most overrated bands of all time.

I can only genuinely enthuse about the organ interlude from Light My Fire - which admittedly is one of THE great and pivotal moments of pop/rock music - and other than that I'm bored rigid as soon as Jimbo opens his pretentious gob. Even on Light My Fire, I far prefer Jose feliciano's performance to Jim Morrison.

Now if you want real quality - even surpassing dear old Ludwig - then look no further than Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel circa 1967-69. Even Eric Clapton and George Harrison admitted they'd have left Cream/Beatles and sold their grandmothers to have joined THE Band!!!

Incidentally could Ludwig have penned two and a half minutes of magic?? As opposed to two and a half hours. Different discipline. Similar traits of genius?

An interesting difference, albeit too simplistic perhaps, between writing a classical piece and a rock and roll piece is that in classical you never have to go back. In the case of rock and roll, however, frequent visits to the same chorus or verse is mandatory for all practical purposes.

Good point Alan. I agree that these are quite different disciplines and genius is to be found at both poles of the musical spectrum.