The Beatles

Nice. If accurate, more collaboration that I thought--at some point, I think I internalized the idea that, with prominent exceptions like "A Day in the Life," Lennon/McCartney almost always meant Lennon or McCartney.

Lol at "Flying" and "Dig It." Never realized before that John had written almost all of A Hard Day's Night

yeah that was my main take from it. I guess that explain's the albums v. consistent style.

Show how much George would have been pretty frickin major had he been in any other band. (Ignoring all the usual alternate-universe shit about how in another band he might not have been inspired to write, and maybe had he been in another band he would caused a butterfly to flapped his wings and make Borneo disappear, or Bono disappear, or something.)

Um, "shows," and "flap," sorry, but you get the idea.

I doubt George would have been anything than a decent guitarist in any other band whose two leaders inspired his best playing and writing.

um yeah, that's the usual alternate-universe shit

Go through the looking-glass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THbvc3lx2pk

love george but he didn't really have enuff swag to be a guitar hero in a non-beatles band IMO

Think I meant to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_am82sYFXU&feature=related

Sorry to be all markers/frogman henry reposting the same non-sequitur embed but
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdAX7E34zkg&feature=related

Without Ravi Shankar's influence, George would not have been as good a sitar player.

I doubt George would have been anything than a decent guitarist in any other band whose two leaders inspired his best playing and writing.

man, you need to re-listen the early stuff to realize how massive of a player george was in terms of his contributions to the band sound. he was uniquely creative right from the beginning, in fact i would say his licks were pretty much unparalleled at the time (say, 62-64). the guy virtually invented a whole guitar vocabulary all by himself and i'm only taking into account the pre-psych beatles shit.

Without Ravi Shankar's influence, George would not have been as good a sitar player.

My youtube meandering ultimately led me to some Beatle bloopers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nPtbbO0c98&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2R4_jL1-Ts&feature=endscreen&NR=1

Never mind the haters

aargh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TeqyovfJzE&feature=related

George without the Beatles just doesn't compute for me (meaning George without the Beatles having ever existed), any more than it does for John or Paul.

man, you need to re-listen the early stuff to realize how massive of a player george was in terms of his contributions to the band sound. he was uniquely creative right from the beginning, in fact i would say his licks were pretty much unparalleled at the time (say, 62-64). the guy virtually invented a whole guitar vocabulary all by himself and i'm only taking into account the pre-psych beatles shit.

totally agree and never suggested otherwise

what is pete best doing in these alternate universes?

drumming for gay dad obv.

Beatles museum to close

Beatles invent punk rock and other related things: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-beatles-beatles-at-hollywood-bowl.html

Psychedelicized Radio is playing the complete Rooftop Concert tonight. It's in progress now, but they're going to rerun it later -- 7 p.m. Pacific time.

psychedelicized.com

"Thanks Mo"

In case anyone missed it and would like another chance...from the site admin:

"Dear All,
I was out all day yesterday and unable to address an issue with the server. It appears that the Beatles special went out but 5 hours later than each planned slot, so mega apologies, I have fixed the issue, restarted the server and ran the concert this morning to test the timings were working.
I'll run the concerts again this evening at the same times 7pm UK, 7pm NY, 7pm LA. I will be around to make sure that it goes out. If people can't tune in to any of those times, I can probably sort out a link...
Apologies again, stupid server!"

funny I'd never noticed the harmonies on the "aaah" after the "wake up" part.
always thought it was John who sang the "aaah" but apparently it was Paul ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D74rcZuOnWQ&feature=related

xp So Paul didn't write the bridge on "A Hard Days Night." I assumed that was a very collaborative song but I guess not.

Lennon always said the only reason he didn't sing the whole damn thing is because there was no way he was going to hit those high notes like Paul could.

pragmatic

Paul has always claimed the bridge on 'A Hard Day's Night' was his, and I believe him!

I always thought it was a rule : the one who sang the song or the part was the author of said song/part (except for some ringo stuff, of course).
of course, it's much too simple to be totally true but I think it works mostly !
Is there a song by John mainly sung by Paul or vice-versa ?

i think that's the rule of thumb. seems like there should be an exception but i've never heard of one.

i was thinking about this the other day but didn't know which beatles thread to revive, so it may as well be this one. what's with Get Back being so popular on U.S. radio? apparently it was the 5th most played beatles song on the radio last year, and it's been like that for a long time. yet it's probably one of their very worst singles (imo), and definitely not too many people's favorite (imo). is there some sort of deal with radio where certain songs are less expensive to play than others, and maybe Get Back is one of the cheap beatles options or something?

yeah, I have always hated get back and still do.

about songwriting : I think there's a controversy regarding "in my life", Paul claiming it's mainly his although John sings it.
and John said that he wanted to sing "Oh darling" but that didn't happen so apparently it wasn't impossible to consider the other's song...

It choogles, it's not weird or avant-garde or too English, and US oldies radio has moved on from the 64-66 hits. "Revolution" fits that bill too, something that resembles American rock and roll and still allows the station to say "your home for the Beatles' hits!!!"
xpost

it's just the nature of radio now -- there aren't many oldies stations left that play the hits from the first few years, and classic rock stations have increasingly been phasing out the mid/late '60s as they get more centered on the '70s and early '80s (and even up to the late '80s). so the moptop era is totally off limits to those stations, just a handful of songs from The White Album onward -- the biggest in the last couple years being "Come Together," "Revolution," "Get Back" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." compare that to the Who and the Stones, who each have twice as many (mostly '70s) tracks in classic rock rotation.

xpost

re : get back
but I could understand that it works more in the US since it has a bluesy-roots-deep-south vibe, talks about the US...

i think the earliest Beatles i ever hear on classic rock radio now is "Lucy" and "A Day In The Life"

i'm not a paul hater by any means, but i hate the sound of every goddamn syllable he sings on Get Back.

haha same here

about songwriting : I think there's a controversy regarding "in my life", Paul claiming it's mainly his although John sings it.
and John said that he wanted to sing "Oh darling" but that didn't happen so apparently it wasn't impossible to consider the other's song...

― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, November 26, 2012 2:43 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep, it's true. Paul makes quite a big claim to 'In My Life' in his book 'Many Years From Now', although I think it's more to do with the music, or more specifically, coming up with the original musical idea rather than the lyrical content. The lyrical content of that song to me sounds like it was all John, and if Paul were to make any claims to the lyrics of that track, I wouldn't believe him at all.

Also, it's not that John wanted to sing lead on 'Oh! Darling', it just seems like he felt he would have done a better job. Even as a big fan of McCartney's solo material, I agree with him.

yeah, his voice, tone and pronunciation are very wrong there.

i'm not a paul hater by any means, but i hate the sound of every goddamn syllable he sings on Get Back.

Haha, then have you heard the alternate lyrics? Trust me, that song could have been much worse.

Also, it's not that John wanted to sing lead on 'Oh! Darling', it just seems like he felt he would have done a better job. Even as a big fan of McCartney's solo material, I agree with him.

agreed.
regarding "in my life", I don't know, it seems to me that in general each one came with the main idea for each song (lyrics/music) and the other helped on bits of lyrics and arrangements. I don't remember any song for which one would claim the music and the other the lyrics, like for other songwriting duos.

Haha, then have you heard the alternate lyrics? Trust me, that song could have been much worse.

― pplains, Monday, November 26, 2012 3:04 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, thankfully for them, that version wasn't officially released, eh? See also: 'Commonwealth (It's Just Too Common For Me)'

I've gotta say, though, I haven't actually dug out a Beatles album to listen to in the comfort of my own home for many years now, even though I've obviously heard tracks being played at other people's houses, and on TV/radio etc. This isn't because I'm trying to make some sort of statement, I've just heard that music so many times that their solo albums are far more interesting for me these days - especially Paul's, which is full of hidden gems.

There's also the historical aspect to the band as well - I think everything that could possibly be told about 'The Beatles Story' has already been told and in a ludicrous amount of detail. I'd be very surprised if there's anything left about that band to discover - whereas their solo output for me has a little bit more mystery to it, because less has been written about it.

John said that he wanted to sing "Oh darling"
he likely would've screamed most if it out "cold turkey" style. fuck, that sounds amazing.

Plenty of stoned-out acid-friend late night jam sessions from 1967 exist that will never see the light of day so long as Paul and Yoko are alive.

Billy Fury's first album was entirely self-written and that was in 1960.

Obviously plenty of other rock and roll artists wrote their own material of course.

Specifically groups though.

I guess the Shadows had a few.

Buddy Holly & the Crickets were a group. And Bob Gaudio co-wrote most of the Four Seasons' hits.

A third option was to present new songs but ones composed by professional songwriters outside the group, like say The Coasters filling an album with new Leiber-Stoller compositions.

Buddy Holly & the Crickets were a group. And Bob Gaudio co-wrote most of the Four Seasons' hits.

Fair enough!

half the record's yours, half the record's theirs

right but there's not a single cover across the first five Herbie Hancock records, so presumably he's an example of breaking the mold on the jazz side of things

half baked thesis, feel free to poke

Obviously the Beatles were key to introducing this idea of "auteur" rock, but I think there was a general shift in American music during the '60s that had more to do with technology and economics. Even the word "album" hearkens back to a time when these were booklets that collected single 78rpm discs, so (at least on the pop side of things) I feel like there was a baked-in sense that an album is a collection of various tunes (old, new, fast, uptempo) rather a cohesive and novel artistic statement. This in turn reflected the reality that records and record players were expensive, so you wanted to get the most bang for your buck with any given purchase. My feeling is that as the technology became more inexpensive and accessible, more consumers felt comfortable taking risks on records that presented all-new material. But even here it's worth pointing out that most people still probably would've been buying 45s and prioritizing some degree of variety in their collection more than any other organizing principle -- for their pitiful, portable picnic players, as it were.

Jazz was a different beast, though, and record companies had been marketing albums to appeal to specialists and completists since the '40s, and so the focus there was often on a single composer's work (e.g. the "Genius of Modern Music" collections of Monk's tunes on Blue Note), rather than an idea of variety. So I think there was some precedent there for Herbie to emerge fully formed with a debut album of originals in '62, although it's worth pointing out that he was a genius and a uniquely prolific figure in modern jazz. I guess my point is that jazz records tended more often to market the material with a focus on the genius of the composer or performer, whereas pop records didn't tend to put this information to the forefront or organize collections of music around this idea.

I think on the country and western side of things, there's some precedent to spotlight composers -- lots of "Singer X Sings the Songs of Composer Y" -- but I'm not sure how that fits into all of this. I think in country music as in pre-Beatles pop music, there was more the sense that the song was the thing that counted, rather than the album

bird (paraphrasing Byrd) did suggest that the "record company half" could include "new compositions based around something familiar", so though I haven't heard Takin' Off that might include genre pieces like a blues, a bossa nova etc. which are technically originals but appease the conventional listener looking for a toehold.

e.g. the "Genius of Modern Music" collections of Monk's tunes on Blue Note

Also probably worth noting that Atlantic Records was actively promoting Ray Charles as a "genius" by the late '50s as well (see numerous album titles, e.g. "The Genius of Ray Charles" of 1959) so there was already the idea that playing up the auteurist angle could sell records in pop/r&b and not just classical and jazz.

Thought of Link Wray & the Wraymen...guess it depends how much of a group you consider them; Wray and M. Grant co-wrote 10 of the 12 songs on their first album (1960).

Also true of the first few Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry albums

Saw a post about Tony Williams where he confessed he was a huge Beatles fan when it was uncool in the in the mid 60s; he had a huge poster in his flat, and he felt both embarrassed and proud when Miles and the band came round his place and looked at him funny because of it.

LOL. Well, in the same interview, Elvis C. asked Hancock how old he was when he joined Miles, and Hancock said 23, then added "Tony was SEVENTEEN!" (I think this would've been 1963 - Williams was born December 12, 1945.) Carter was older than Hancock, Miles and George Coleman even older, so there may have been something like a semi-generation gap in taste.

I tried looking for the clip online, but I actually found what's supposedly a quote from an Uncut interview that covers the same ground:

In an interview with Uncut magazine, Herbie Hancock said he wrote the song as a result of something else his collaborator Donald Byrd told him. "He said, 'half the record is for you. The other half, that's for the record company. There has to be some kind of form that people are used to hearing, like blues. People know blues. Nobody knows your tunes, they're not going to help sell the record, and that's their business.'"

Hancock started to think, "Wait a minute! Horace Silver also sells a lot of records, funky jazz things. I can write a funky jazz thing."

But Hancock wanted something really authentic. "I thought about my own childhood in a Black neighborhood, and the watermelon man coming through the cobblestone alleys," he said. "His horse-drawn wagon would go over the cobblestones and he had a little song, but it wasn't very singable. I started thinking about the woman yelling, 'Hey, watermelon man!' That's how I got the melody. The rhythm was inspired by the wagon wheels going over the cobblestones."

The clip is worth seeing, because Elvis's reaction to Byrd's words is clearly news to him, like he wasn't aware that would've been the attitude at the time, at least in the jazz world.