Still Fab - The Beatles and their timeless influence

Reason, June, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

Quite a bit, actually. The early Beatles sang Ifield's hits in their live shows, and toured with Helen Shapiro. (Indeed, "She Loves You" could well be an answer record"--then a genre of its own--to Shapiro's musically inventive "Tell Me What He Said.") While boomers may cherish the image of the early Beatles as leather-clad bad boys playing raw rock in smoky Hamburg clubs, the reality is that along with the rock covers, their Hamburg repertoire also included lots of sappy old pop standards like "Red Sails in the Sunset." The mammoth Meet the Beatles album, after all, features a version of Anita Bryant's syrupy "'Til There Was You." Perhaps the greatest tribute to the intensity of the original U.S. Beatlemania is that even this intolerable piece of anti-rock made the era's Top 40 playlists.

Just let me hear that pop music

So what? Given the Beatles' long career, their dozens of hits, and their various notable innovations, what possible significance can their early, brief connection to a pop audience have? In fact, it is in the context of their career that it matters, because the group's pop dimension is a key factor not only in their musical "growth," but in the longevity of their music as well.

Although Beatles' music is currently fixed in the musical canon as having revolutionized rock, that is not quite correct. What is true is that the group's enormous success opened the door to a lot of groups who energized the era's rock playlists, though even this element can be--and has been--vastly overstated. Early '60s rock was far from being the string-laden wasteland it is sometimes made out to have been (think of the Crystals' "Da Do Ron Ron," for instance). It is also true that the Beatles made long-form compositions possible, introduced the concept album, and, through their lyrics, helped bring personal expression into a field that was largely formulaic. However, the Beatles are themselves indebted to others for some of these advances (among them, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon). Besides, these later changes often occurred at the cost of the very musical energy that the Beatles are otherwise credited with restoring to the rock scene.

But is the Beatles' own career and development really a study in rock revolution, as it is usually portrayed? Or is it actually something different: a study in the extension of the otherwise despised pop form? The answer to that question could help resolve the apparent mysteries of the group's persistence. Here's the short answer: The mature Beatles, the Beatles who "revolutionized" rock music from Revolver through Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band through the end of their common career, the Beatles who helped construct the foundation of the '60s counterculture, were themselves built on an essentially pop foundation and enjoyed an essentially pop florescence.

By 1966, the Beatles were far more interested in melody than in beat, had largely abandoned the influences from American country music and American blues that had been apparent on their earlier recordings, and were building an increasing number of their compositions around narrative lyrics that told stories rather than expressed adolescent emotions. The more they developed as composers and lyricists, the less they tried to harmonize like the Everly Brothers or whoop like the Isley Brothers, and the more they drew on their own roots in British popular music. While they continued to use rock elements to make their music, there is almost as much British Music Hall in their later work as there is rock.