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The Beatles (Music)
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Influences: The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Eddie Cochran, The Coasters, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, The Drifters, Bob Dylan, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Carole King, Little Richard, Dean Martin, Spike Milligan, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Peter Sellers, The Shadows, Ravi Shankar, The Shirelles, Frank Sinatra, Phil Spector, The Supremes, Gene Vincent, Frank ZappaInfluenced: Pretty much everyone since.]]"Ladies and gentlemen, THE BEATLES!" note cue mass squeeingA rock band of truly incalculable influence, The Beatles are credited by many with changing the very face of not just rock but popular music as a whole, while for others they were at least major pioneers of the new style of pop-rock, and were a major force of The British Invasion. For a lot of people, they were also the face of The '60s. Not bad work for four young lads from Liverpool, England.Arising out of the ashes of teenage skiffle group The Quarrymen, The Beatles debuted on 17 August 1960 (although prior to that they'd gone through a revolving door of members and band names), with the initial stable line-up consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sharing guitar and vocal duties, Stuart "Stu" Sutcliffe on bass, and Pete Best on drums. Originally just a small-time band, they gained enough professionalism to secure bookings as a house band for sleazy nightclubs in Hamburg, Germany, where tough audiences and gruelling performance schedules forced them to seriously improve as performers by the time they returned to Liverpool.Sutcliffe didn't last too long, deciding to remain in Hamburg when the rest of the Beatles were forced to return to the UK at the end of 1960. Chas Newby briefly joined as bassist for a couple of weeks, but declined Lennon's offer to stay on in January 1961. Sutcliffe returned before quitting for good by mid-1961 to focus on his artwork, at which point McCartney switched to bass. Sutcliffe sadly wouldn't live to see his former bandmates become world-famous, dying from a brain haemorrhage in 1962.Upon their return to Liverpool, the band faced a future that looked increasingly bleak, with few likely prospects outside of another tour of Hamburg. However, they drew the interest of a budding local music promoter, Brian Epstein, who then persuaded them to have him as their manager. As it turned, as far as music promotion went, Epstein proved a godsend with a knack for publicity combined with some bright ideas such as seriously cleaning up the band's scruffy image. The most obvious element of that was getting the band to abandon their leather-jacketed greaser look for a clean-cut suit and tie ensemble, even as they expanded on their mop-top hairdos which Sutcliffe's girlfriend, German art photographer Astrid Kirchherr, had originally arranged for them.More fundamentally, Epstein's dealings introduced the band to a lesser-known record producer: George Martin, head of Parlophone Records, which was part of the EMI conglomerate. Martin was previously known for his work making albums for the popular radio comedy series, The Goon Show. Martin and the band hit off fairly quickly, thanks largely to the Four's charm, and his open-mindedness about music recording conventions meant that everyone was allowed to go in new directions. For instance, Martin decided, with the band's concurrence, that Best, who stayed up right up to their first recording session with Parlophone, had to be replaced with a better drummer. Best was infamously sacked and replaced with a veteran local drummer who had occasionally subbed for him on stage before, Richard Starkey (AKA Ringo Starr), just as they were about to make it big.With that, the band began a meteoric rise to stardom that became truly international with hit singles like "She Loves You," "Love Me Do," and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," all written by the band's primary songwriters, Lennon and McCartney. Eventually, the band went to America for three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show that sparked off Beatlemania. Amid that success, the band distinguished themselves by eventually realising they had the clout to expand their artistic horizons and become the best band, not simply as the biggest. For instance, John learned to write songs that dealt with far more than puppy love with newfound sophistication. At the same time, Paul tried out new recording techniques for the songs while branching out into new genres ranging from gentle folk ballads like "Yesterday" to arguably the first Heavy Metal song with the raucously throbbing "Helter Skelter." Meanwhile, George experimented with exotic new instruments be it traditional ones like the sitar or revolutionary ones like the Moog synthesiser that gave pop a wealth of new sounds to play with even as he developed his own songwriting and Ringo strove to expand beyond being simply the drummer even as he became the most popular Beatle in other media.Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest rock albums of all time; it also has one of the most parodied and homaged album covers in the history of music. The simpler image on the cover of Abbey Road of the band walking in near-lockstep across the street is a close competitor for the most homaged cover (along with Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon), as is the half-shadowed band portrait that was used on the British album With the Beatles and its American equivalent/Macekre Meet the Beatles.The Beatles were the first band in history to make music video equivalents to their own songs, which virtually every popular musician does now. They played themselves in three fictional films: the pseudo-documentary A Hard Day's Night (1964), the James Bond parody Help! (1965), and the critically-panned surrealist television film Magical Mystery Tour (1967); they were also the subject of the documentary film Let It Be (1970). Their Celebrity Toon equivalents starred in two very different Band Toons, each with a distinct set of character designs for the Fab Four. Their wacky 1965 Animated Series was the first made-for-TV cartoon based on a real band (or any real people), and therefore both the Ur-Example and Trope Maker. Meanwhile, the 1968 feature Yellow Submarine brought kid-friendly psychedelic imagery to the masses.In 1966 John Lennon gave an ill-thought-out comment that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." He promptly apologised for it, but it had already been taken out of context by the press. John meant that Christianity was on the decline in Britain to the point that a rock band was a bigger draw — and in 2008, the Vatican admitted that he had a point — but Christian conservatives on both sides of the pond were too outraged to care about the subtleties. In addition, the concert tours were becoming a pointless exercise with audiences more interested in screaming so loud that the band literally could not hear their own music (which was primarily their older songs since their current material simply could not be reproduced with three guitars and drums) over the din. Furthermore, the band's world tours were a trial, with rock-bottom being in the Philippines when they inadvertently snubbed Imelda Marcos' invitation and were violently run out of the countrynote As soon as they escaped, George put his foot down and stated that if they booked another tour, he would immediately quit. At that, the band decided to stop touring and focused exclusively on studio recording in Britain, where they proceed to flourish artistically with that focus.Once manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, tensions grew among the band. The transcendental meditation trip to India and John Lennon's fixated romance with Yoko Ono did not help. Paul increasingly had to take a stronger hand to keep the group cohesive through work, which the others resented however necessary it was. The argument over a new manager was particularly bitter considering that John, George, and Ringo wanted the sleazy Allen Kleinnote Despite the fact that his former clients, The Rolling Stones, warned them to not to do business with him while Paul wanted his future Family-in-Law, the Eastmans, to do itnote The rest of the band didn't want the father of Paul's girlfriend have that much pull in their affairs and thus strengthen Paul's hand against them. The fact that Paul's suspicions about Klein were proven right only served to irritate them further considering that meant that they would have to admit they were wrong and thus give Paul that much more clout. Meanwhile, George was chafing at being treated as the junior member of the group by Paul, John, and George Martin even while his own creative work was increasingly deserving more consideration in respect and royalty revenues. All the while, Ringo was feeling increasingly irrelevant to the band's work, often having to sit out of the way for hours until he was needed to drum, culminating in him briefly quitting during the making of The White Albumnote The others managed to coax him back and the impromptu sabbatical turned out to be for the best: Ringo learned how he was actually appreciated and during his vacation he learned some interesting things about octopuses, which inspired him to write one of his greatest songwriting efforts, the children's classic "Octopus' Garden"The Let It Be sessions proved that the writing was on the wall for the Beatles, where George Harrison followed Ringo Starr's example and also briefly quit. Finally, John Lennon quit for good in September 1969, and the band officially called it a day in 1970 due to Creative Differences under circumstances painful to think about. However, prior to the split, they managed to hold it together one more time for Abbey Road, considered one of their finest albums. Everyone went on to solo careers of varying success, most notably McCartney with Wings while Harrison topped them all in album sales with his post-breakup album, All Things Must Pass. The dissolution was finalised in 1974, but Apple Corps (the Beatles' management company) was left intact. For perhaps fifteen years, few people saw any purpose for that.Of course, by 1974, all four members had topped the Billboard Hot 100 on their own.But then a second wave of Beatlemania gradually hit, but unfortunately too late for John Lennon, who sadly had been getting the Posthumous Popularity Potential effect since he died in 1980—when he was murdered by a Loony Fan who took offence to his aforementioned "more popular than Jesus" remark as well as the leftist content of his solo output—but everyone else got to see it. The events leading to this, in order: the initial release of the British Beatles catalogue (plus the American version of Magical Mystery Tour) on CD in 1987; the Beatles being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the release of Past Masters (which collects all their non-album singles and rarities), both in 1988; Paul McCartney finally embracing his Beatles heritage fully in 1989, in the process settling the last couple of lawsuits and freeing Apple Corps to act; the 1993 CD reissues of the "Red" and "Blue" compilations; the release of The Beatles Anthology across three compilation albums and a documentary from 1995 to 1996, with "new" Beatles singles "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", which were composed of demos Lennon recorded while solo that the three remaining Beatles contributed to (and which Covered Up the Lennon versions);note An attempt at a third single, "Now and Then", was abandonded due to the low quality of the demo, only to finally be released in 2023 as "the last Beatles song" after it was restored using AI technology and incorporating the now-deceased George Harrison's contributions from the abandoned 1995 sessions and the release of the 1 compilation in 2000, featuring all of the band's number one singles. Since then, Beatles-related stuff has come out just often enough, with carefully curated anticipation with each new media format, to keep second-generation fans on their toes and the fandom active and aggressive.George Harrison died of cancer in 2001 and got some true posthumous fame as a relatively under-appreciated artist/humanitarian/patron-of-the-arts in his own right. Sir Paul McCartney (he was knighted in 1997) and Sir Ringo Starr (he was knighted in 2018) are still out there touring, doing a bunch of miscellaneous projects, and occasionally making records—and they both still write GOOD music. Even Pete Best released an album and began touring circa 2008.The legacy lives on. An installment of Rock Band was made featuring Beatles songs and only Beatles songs. Not quite coincidentally, the entire catalogue has been remastered and was re-released on CD the same day. After years of legal disputes having to do with the "Apple" label, iTunes finally added Beatles music in 2010, which started a sequence of re-releases and various new compilations. In 2017, Giles Martin (son of George Martin) and Sam Okell began to remix the classic albums to bring them up from their original afterthought-ish stereo mixes to sound crisp and clear for the pleasure of modern listeners. Starting with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for its 50th anniversary, the pair have performed the same treatment for subsequent albums almost every year after for The White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be, and Revolver alongside the 1962-1966 (Red Album) and 1967-1970 (Blue Album) complications.In 2016, Ron Howard and Apple Corps released another documentary: The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, focusing on their live shows and tours between 1962 and 1966. In addition to new interviews with Paul, Ringo, and members of their circle, it featured testimony from such young fans as Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver, Elvis Costello, and Eddie Izzard. On January 30th, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the iconic rooftop concert, Peter Jackson (of The Lord of the Rings fame) was announced to be attached to direct a new version of the 1970 film Let It Be using 55 hours of archived studio footage of the "Get Back sessions." A year later, The Beatles: Get Back was properly announced to be a two and a half hour feature film distributed by Disney and to be released on September 4th, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was delayed to November 2021, and reworked as a massive seven hour series dropped in three parts on Disney+ to similarly massive critical and fan acclaim.It is difficult to explain just how significant this band's impact has been, because their scope of influence is massive, not just for music but for Western culture as a whole; the legacy of the Beatles is so great that Wikipedia has a thorough enough article on the subject to potentially be its own book. Among other things in the music world alone, the Beatles hold the world record for most album sales and most #1 hits on the Hot 100. Their decisions as musicians have shaped the industry; they are, for instance, the Trope Makers for the idea that real bands play their own instruments and write their own songs. And that's not even counting the covers; 12 of the 20 most covered songs of all time are Beatles songs (13 if you count "Imagine", which was a Lennon solo song), including numbers 1-4. If you like rock music, you are a fan of The Beatles — either directly, or by proxy because someone you are a fan of is a fan of theirs. They are, in short, the most influential rock band there has ever been, and rank among the most influential human beings (outside the scope of politics, religion, science, and economics) of all time, with the only other music artists rivaling them in this respect being Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 (as have all four of its members individually), and have won several Grammy Awards as well as a Best Music (Original Sound Score) Oscar for Let It Be.As the band recorded over 200 songs while being signed by EMI, the number of studio out-takes and even unreleased songs (or just different song versions) is larger than the entire discography of many smaller bands. The commercial potential of virtually anything containing Beatles music was understood very early on and sparked a big bootleg market, partly fueled by the decision of EMI and the band to not release virtually anything that wasn't part of the original released recordings until the Anthology project materialised in the early '90s. With three double albums and an eight-episode TV series, most of the material finally saw a public release that way and diminished the market potential for bootleggers beyond the hardcore collectors.You can vote for your favourite Beatles album by heading over to the Best Album crowner.Similarly, you can vote for your favourite Beatles song by heading over to the Best Song Crowner. | |
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