Money quote...

... from the book that I vaguely cited in my previous post. The title is The Beatles Come to America (by Martin Goldsmith), and it's a learned, enthusiastic, and efficient (if not terribly revealing) read about the Fabs' career up through their triumphant invasion of the U.S. in February of 1964.

Quote:
The Beatles took another stand during those sessions- a stand crucial to establishing their signature sound and, more important, their integrity as an ensemble. It was established convention that songwriters, music publishers, and record producers, all working together, would simply instruct the musicians, usually dismissively referred to as "the talent," to play whatever was put in front of them. That was the context in which George Martin had asked the Beatles to record "How Do You Do It?" But they insisted that the song just wasn't them. George Harrison called it "corny," and Paul declared that they couldn't go back up to Liverpool and face their fans and fellow musicians with that song attached to their names. George Martin deeply believed that "How Do You Do It?" was a potential number-one song. But in the face of a firm opinion expressed by a seasoned producer speaking in the venerable home of EMI, the four young men, the oldest of them barely twenty-two, stood their ground. It would be their songs that would introduce them to the world.

"What Songs The Beatles Sang"

I came across a reference to this in a book I was going through earlier today. It's always of interest to me reading descriptions, reviews, or accounts of The Beatles that were written while they were still an active band and, in particular, before they were widely regarded as the greatest of all time. Knowledge of their future ascendancy can't help but inform how you respond to such writings.

Two covers of a classic

This one ranks among my three or four favorite Fab songs of all time:

From Elliott Smith:


(If the video is removed, go here.)

And from Of Montreal:


(If the video is removed, go here.)

A few thoughts on "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll"

Or at least its contrarian thesis. I haven't read the book, which will certainly inhibit my arguments. But there's enough in the title alone and the general thrust of its contention that seems worthy of comment (go here for a quick synopsis). First, I'm leery of Elijah Wald's suggestion that there's any blame to be assigned for something that one band couldn't have likely known it was doing (i.e. helping to segregate rock 'n' roll) and shouldn't have needed to care about too greatly anyway. The world of pop music doesn't operate like a republic. The Beatles are not elected representatives. They are not responsible, in any sort of moral terms, for how their music might have affected the artistic tastes of different racial groups, even if a regrettable splintering did occur. It's something that a single band couldn't control anyway. The Beatles' direction should have and did come from a devotion to cultivating, perfecting, and remaking their art. Leave the populism to unseemly politicians. Secondly, part of Wald's thesis strikes me as necessarily reactionary. The implication behind the notion that The Beatles "destroyed rock 'n' roll" is that they shouldn't have allowed their sound to evolve into the arty, more experimental material of their later albums. A static course, then, would have better suited Wald's vision of what form rock 'n' roll should have taken throughout the '60s. Ergo, eliminate a handful of the greatest albums of all time and a wealth of consequential music that other bands created in part because of the Fabs. Goodbye Rubber Soul and farewell (possibly) Pet Sounds. How dreary. And just to keep this relatively short, I'll make one final point. How can Wald stress that record sales (in other words, fan approval), as opposed to after-the-fact assessments by aloof critics and historians, are the best means of judging what music was truly valued (and thus important) while he also dismisses much of The Beatles' catalogue, which seemed to do alright for itself in terms of moving units. Maybe those sales were just too "white," thereby undoing Wald's utopian yesteryear when all rock 'n' roll fans, hand-in-hand, danced the night away to "Long Tall Sally."

Thursday potpourri

A review of How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll.

Cheap Trick is set to perform Sgt. Pepper's again, this time at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Revisiting The Beatles' coming-of-age experiences in Hamburg.

"How Beatles Rock Band's Vocal Harmonies Work."

"How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll"

Provocative material (hat tip: Chris). More on this in the coming days.

The Emerald City

This past weekend, a friend and I took a brief trip to Seattle. The main reason for our visit was to see a Jens Lekman concert, which was immensely enjoyable. As part of our more standard tourist activities, we went to Paul Allen's unique and richly detailed Experience Music Project and took in as much as we could. There was the Jimi Hendrix exhibition, the Northwest Passage (a section that traces the history of music in Seattle and beyond from the age of speakeasy jazz to Heart to grunge to Sleater Kinney - very cool), an area that featured a slew of posters by Nashville's Hatch Show Print, and much more. We also checked out the Sound Lab, an interactive collection of studio technology that allows visitors to lay down a vocal track or remix a song or even record one. It was a hoot. One of the stations actually played an audio clip of Sir George Martin describing the convoluted process that he and others concocted to create the untamed crescendo on "A Day in the Life." It was a bit confusing but also pretty interesting. Needless to say, their inventive work paid off handsomely. More on the making of that masterpiece here.