The Beatles Are the Greatest Rock Band of All Time and I Can Prove It

The Beatles Were and Are the Greatest Rock Band of All Time and I Can Prove It

by Riley Haas

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Riley Haas

Also by Riley Haas

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter I: Popular Music Before the Beatles

Chapter II: Who Were the Beatles?

Chapter III: The Early Years

Chapter IV: Folk-Rock and Pop

Chapter V: Psychedelia

Chapter VI: Post-Psychedelia

Chapter VII: Post-Beatles

Chapter VIII: The Beatles vs.

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

This book is due in no small part to Allan W. Pollack and his Notes on... series on every Beatles song, which he has made available for free at http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-notes_on.shtml. This is an invaluable resource to anyone researching the Beatles and really any music lover in general. It is an utterly incredible thing that it exists and all the more incredible that it is free. You should check it out. Though I do quote him occasionally, huge chunks of the book are informed by this series. This book would not exist without it.

Songwriting, performance and recording information is as accurate as possible but should not be taken as gospel as time and antiquated recording industry practices have obscured who exactly did what. The information has mostly been obtained from the Beatles Bible (beatlesbible.com) but also from Discogs.com and the sources used for the Wikipedia articles on Beatles songs too myriad to list here.

Introduction

A number of years ago an infamous British music magazine's editors, seeking publicity and repute, voted Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the worst album of all time. The poll included other clearly attention-grabbing claims about other classic albums in its top bottom 10, such as Marquee Moon. Let me say that though Sgt. Pepper certainly is overrated and it is not even one of the best Beatles albums but to claim something as important to the development of pop rock music as Sgt. Pepper as the worst album in history only speaks to the musical ignorance – deliberate or otherwise – of the editors. And it is a perfect example of how even professional music critics – that is, those posing as experts – have lost, or are wilfully blind to, all sense of history. These editors could not see the musical world of 1966 in which Sgt. Pepper was written and recorded. Indulging in the relatively recent DIY music critic obsession of killing your idols, they actually implicitly allude to this album's centrality in music history. That they targeted for killing this particular idol is evidence in itself of just how ascendant the Beatles once were. Before we all forgot.

We have multiple generations – seemingly every post-Beatles generation – who cannot or will not grasp the centrality of the Beatles to the music they love. It is for this reason that I have written this book. I intend to argue that there is no question to the claim of Beatles’ greatness. To those of you who find this outlandish, please stick with me. At the very least, by the end of this book, you will have new ways to state your disagreement. But my hope is that by the end of this book you will agree – The Beatles were and are the greatest rock band of all time.

Full disclosure: For years the Beatles were my favourite band. I have since disowned the concept of a permanent favourite band - my emotions are too fickle - and I don't know that I would even list the Beatles in a list of my top 10 favourite bands on a regular basis. But I tell you this because they used to be very important to me. They led me to numerous bands I now call favourites and it is likely that, without the Beatles, my life would be a lot less enriched.

I have felt for a long time that what is great and what is favourite are two separate things. I am only one of seven billion people and my favourites are just that. Too often most of us cannot tell the difference between something we like and something that is great. Just because this one album or song has a profound effect on me at one moment in my life, does not necessarily mean it has the same effect on others. I have fought hard against this tendency to associate favourites with greatness in myself and I believe that, on occasion, I am reasonably objective. Greatness is something that is not entirely subjective; we have to recognize it through mutual agreement. My aim is to demonstrate to you the greatness of the Beatles without relying on my past emotions. It is my hope that you will see the Beatles as I see them; not as a favourite band but as the clearest and most significant single contributor to what has become this nebulous pop / rock thing and that this indeed constitutes greatness.

I used to take the greatness of the Beatles for granted. Though I would often drunkenly argue in their favour, I assumed my interlocutors were merely arguing with me because they were drunk, and not because they really, truly believed any band could be more significant to the history of rock music than the Beatles. But now that time has passed and I am older, it has become apparent to me that the greatness of the Beatles is not a widely held belief amongst the general public.

I can forgive this ignorance in the young’uns. I get that if you were born after me – after 1981 - or even around then, the greatness of the Beatles, or of any of the trailblazers from the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, is often difficult to see. The obvious reason being the absence of the Beatles on the radio, on the music video channels of the '90s, and on Youtube.. They used to be played a lot but they aren't any more. But I think there is much more to it than just a lack of radio exposure. We live in an era where pop rock – that is music that is not classical, jazz, world, folk, blues, electronica (though often including hybrids of these) – is extraordinarily difficult to define. There are more genres and hybrids than any one person can count. And all of these genres blend with other genres – both similar and dissimilar – in the hands of not only self-confessed genre-benders but even supposed genre revivalists. It is often difficult to tell what something is, without resorting to multiple often contradictory labels. (Think of the sheer number of subgenres with punk in their name, for example). And because of this incredible diversification – the listener has more choice of music styles than at any other time in human history – it is very difficult to see it all stemming from a few places; it seems like this diversity comes from everywhere.

There is another major reason why many younger people do not understand the greatness of the Beatles. We have devalued to meaningless the term greatness. This since music criticism became democratized. Don't get me wrong, the democratization of criticism isn't a bad thing. If music criticism hadn't been democratized I wouldn't be writing this book. But with this change – as with every change – there is good and there is bad. One of the most obvious negatives of the expansion of music criticism from the experts to the masses is the lack of rigour in regard to language. In the hands of people who haven't got a strong background in music, words have stopped having precise meanings and often no longer mean what they used to. The best example of this, aside from that endlessly problematic term rock, is the term punk. Reading practically any music mag or ezine I am struck by the extraordinary overuse of the word, as punk now denotes practically everything that has the least bit of rawness to it, regardless of genre. (Let us remember that punk was once a very specific thing, namely ’50s rock 'n' roll reinterpreted in the '70s as faster, rawer and usually with a political edge. It didn't just mean grit.)

This lack of precision extends to greatness, a term that is always fraught with difficulties, even in the best of times. A great – excuse me – example of the problem is regularly seen in the music magazine Exclaim! - and I love Exclaim! I’ve read nearly every issue for the last decade. For years I have complained to anyone who would listen that the vast majority of the magazine's writers do not understand greatness. I have seen the term masterpiece trotted out by Exclaim! writers to describe everyday releases by barely heralded bands, often going even further to label them as one of a band's many masterpieces. And it’s not that my concept of greatness is exclusive. Compared to some, it’s rather inclusive – I have given 10 out of 10 to hundreds of albums on rateyourmusic.com. Check it out. But I am suspicious that all these bands in Exclaim!, most of whom you and I have never heard of, have repeatedly put out transcendent works of art while toiling in obscurity. The idea that there are multiple masterpieces in multiple genres in a year – sometimes more than one a month – seems a stretch, especially today when there is so much going on in music. How can the true trendsetters and trailblazers be determined until long after the fact? Most of these writers write from within scenes and subcultures where these albums do appear great, only they appear great in relation to everything else around them, and that doesn't mean much. Though I am loathe to admit there are such things as bad genres - I don't believe that for a second - all genres and subgenres produce more mediocrity than greatness as a rule. To discover that, all you need to do is immerse yourself in a few. The idea that there is abundance of not only good but great – classic – releases out there every month is patently ridiculous. Has the amount of great artistry increased with the expansion of genres? I doubt it. I think rather that pop / rock is so fragmented that often people cannot see the trees for the forest.

One of the culprits in all of this is the internet, obviously. Perhaps the biggest single resource online for music nerds like me is allmusic.com, a ridiculously authoritative attempt to catalogue and review all the music out there. It is an invaluable site but one of its major standards is seriously flawed. Allmusic awards a minimum of 4.5 out of 5 star reviews to an artist's best accomplishment regardless of how good that accomplishment is in context or in history. So the Guess Who, a singles band who never put out a classic album, gets at least one 9 out of 10 album rating - near-transcendent in my terms - despite the incredible lack of consistency on every single one of their albums. (I know: I have listened to them, and I have suffered.) To be fair, this idea has lapsed a little bit in recent years, with some less significant artists receiving only a 3 out of 5 rating for their best, but this still indicates better than average in my mind. The point is that this site, and many others, has encouraged the idea that things should be evaluated in the context of a scene, or in the context of a single artist's or band's career, as opposed to evaluated in the context of history. This happened I think in part because most people – including most amateur and many supposedly professional music critics – have not listened to enough music to be able to truly evaluate something in light of music history, even relatively recent music history. Something that sounds good – and better than anything else from a particular scene or that particular artist / band – is now acclaimed as a masterpiece as opposed to his / her / their best work, which is probably all it is, if it's even that.

So I think that young people have an excuse – or at least a reason – for not being fully aware of the Beatles' importance. But I'm less sure about people older than me. Yet they also seem to have little respect and knowledge of the Beatles’ greatness. I used to be in a writer's group in Hamilton where I was the second youngest member - and that only by five months. Everyone else was five, ten, fifteen years older than me - and older, as the oldest was fifty years older than me. It was a social group, with lots of off-point conversation. When conversation ever moved to music I was shocked to find that a vast majority of those older than me did not think much of the Beatles. They made claims that other bands were certainly better - which is fine - or more significant - not so fine, there is a difference - and that I was entitled to my opinion. Opinion! To say that the claim that the Beatles are the greatness band in rock history is my opinion and not fact struck me as shocking.

But as with the young’uns, there is a reason, there must be. The Beatles and, unfortunately, Beatlemania, dominated popular culture for so long there was a backlash. In the ’70s in particular – especially the later half of the decade – and into the ’80s many musicians and critics attempted to distance themselves from the legacy of the Beatles, despite what most bands owed them. Music critics wondered aloud if they hadn't perhaps been overrated. Also, musicians regularly made verbal statements about the Beatles lack of importance in their lives and music - or the lack of importance of the bands that followed in their footsteps, usually bands associated with art rock / prog rock. And this has continued more or less to the present.

Before going on, let me tell you what I mean by greatness. Greatness means many different things to many different people and certainly conceptions of greatness vary from field to field. Most of our associations with greatness are no doubt based upon feelings rather than rational reflection. If we don't have a mutually acceptable concept of greatness, then you can hardly agree or disagree with me about the Beatles greatness.

Think about any of the great men of history. How many of them, when you really get down to it, live up to your own personal conception of greatness? If you, like me, value human life above all other things, then doesn't it make it hard to honestly look at the careers of the supposed great men with the admiration we were taught? We want to admire the so-called great men because we were taught so, but also because we like to admire deeds that seem irregular and are impossible for the average person. This is also true to a certain extent in the arts, as we tend to overly praise or, more recently overly condemn, our idols. We don't want to examine these strongly held beliefs. We just want to hold on tight to our first, or best remembered, impressions. For years I used to be unable to admit the obvious problems in many of Stanley Kubrick's films because I had convinced myself he was the Greatest American Director of the 20th Century. I had developed fairly compelling rationalizations for this position, but it was based on emotion, and not even emotion connected to the movies themselves. Rather, it was my obsession with Kubrick that set me apart. In my mind, I was culturally superior to my high school peers. Once I knew more about Kubrick than anyone else, I was in a position of strength from which I could partake in virtually all conversations about movies – the huge number of films I had seen, no doubt, also helped – and I came off as having the right opinions as compared to other people who didn't even know who Kubrick was. I had the same obsession, I must admit, with the Beatles. But I maintain that the Beatles' greatness can be established beyond my personal – previous - obsession, that there is a way to come to a concept of greatness relatively free of sentiment or nostalgia and that the Beatles career bears the scrutiny that the great men of history do not.

Since there are so many people in the world, I think a conception of greatness must be social. Greatness in the arts – in all areas – cannot be based on the opinions of a couple scholars or critics, though these voices should not be ignored. These experts are important, particularly if they have been trained in their particular field, unlike so many music critics. My particular notion of greatness rests primarily, though not exclusively, on transcendence: the notion that something lasts beyond its time, that future generations find value in a thing created for an earlier generation. This is the only test I know of that is – relatively - free of in-the-moment subjectivity, though it is still problematic. It is subjective in that it remains subject to whims of populaces, but more importantly, it is something that can only be judged through hindsight. This obviously presents a problem for the critic attempting to proclaim a new release a masterpiece. (Though I would suggest that a masterpiece is likely lurking amongst those bucking trends rather than those following them, contrary to the views of the contributors to Exclaim!). This can only be a best guess, and I think the truly good critics admit to such things. I may think and insist that Tomahawk's Anonymous will eventually be regarded as perhaps the greatest update to native American music of the early 21st century - if anyone ever listens to it - but it is far more likely that future social preferences will prove me wrong in my guess. This approach also suffers from the problem that sometimes things are rediscovered: just because some generations ignore someone's work does not necessarily have bearing on its value.

So the standard of transcendence is not perfect on its own - what standard is? First, add to it references to cultural history. Are there clear indications – through an examination of other cultural artefacts – that the artefact under study has had an impact on its contemporaries and the inheritors of that culture – in other words, is it influential? Second is the idea of aesthetic quality. One reason I have a hard time giving in completely to some supposed punk classics, such as Flipper’s Album: Generic Flipper, is because, despite their influence, they lack a certain quality, which I think of as aesthetics. This is certainly the most subjective criterion. Third is the criterion of trailblazing: has this been done before?

So to put this in practice, we can, for example, with near-absolute certainty, conclude that Bob Dylan was the greatest English-language songwriter of the second half of the twentieth century - and I would argue the whole century, but that is a lot harder to prove - because his music has lasted from generation to generation (transcendence); he has had numerous imitators (influence); there are few popular music lyrics in the last 50 years to rival works such as Masters of War, Maggie’s Farm, Like a Rolling Stone, Ballad of a Thin Man, It’s Alright Ma and on and on and on (aesthetic achievement); and finally, Dylan got everyone in rock music to go from singing about Cars, cars and girls to singing about anything (trailblazing). This concept of greatness will be the basis for my argument in this book.

But I also think about greatness in terms of a scale. Greatness does bear a relationship to its opposite. In that context, I’ve developed a ten point scale, that builds from the worst, at 1, up to greatness. I don't intend to use this scale in the book, but I think it helps us when we can assign numbers to things. Think about these qualities when listening to the Beatles' music. Personally, I would rank the vast majority of the original British Beatles albums 10 / 10.

1. Pure, unadulterated shit. The worst of the worst. Transcendentally bad, as in, so bad that even 50 years later people think wow that is terrible with the qualifier even for the time. Though I can think of few musical equivalents - I am pretty sure I have only ever rated one album 1 out of 10 - there are numerous movies that come to mind, such as Manos: The Hands of Fate or Pod People or Nazis from the Center of the Earth.

2. Terrible but not legendarily terrible. Perhaps there are signs of competence or energy or some inspiration. But not many signs.

3. Run of the mill bad. Much of Top 40 radio - now and since its beginnings - falls into this category; however I don't give it enough time to judge it properly. (I believe that all albums must be given at least three listens to get their fair shake.)

4. Below average. A few redeeming qualities but something about it really isn't working.

5. Average. A lot of this stuff makes it on to the radio and plenty of it doesn't. Nothing to write home about but nothing to complain about either. Most competent bands fall into this category for me.

6. Above average. Better than what I might hear over any 40 to 70 minutes if I tuned into the radio.

7. Good. Worthwhile discussing and talking about but still lacking in certain aspects, be it songwriting, arrangements, performance or production.

8. Very good. Few things – if any – to nitpick over.

9. Near transcendent. Strong cultural impact but with a few flaws or flawless with little to no sense that it bucked a trend or changed anything culturally.

10. Transcendent. Regarded as great art by generation after generation. Or profound cultural impact despite its current neglect.

So there you have it. That's how I think about music and movies and I wish more people thought this way - or at least had as clearly articulated ideas of great vs. terrible.

It is my belief that we can't really know the good without reference to the bad, so one of the side effects of over praising mediocrity is that we lose our idea of what is truly terrible - which, I think, helps explain why so much shit is popular. The bad things don't transcend like the good things, and so we lack for reference points, which is why we need to write about and discuss the truly great and the truly terrible ad nauseam. This distinction is relevant here because I think another reason why people have forgotten the greatness of the Beatles is because those of us who weren't alive or weren't consciously listening from 1962 to 1970 have no idea of how bad many popular music groups of the time actually were. I have a better idea than most people my age only because I listened to oldies radio for the first 15+ years of my life and have to suffer the acid flashbacks. Find an oldies radio station that still plays music from the ’50s and ’60s. (If you're not sure where to look, I suggest satellite radio.) If you think all of it is on the same level as the Beatles, then I have no idea what drugs you are taking, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want some. Most pre-Beatles and contemporaneous top 40 is really, really terrible, even with the qualifier of context. There's a reason nobody listens to it now. It was music mostly made by amateurs with no regard for history and little interest in interesting music.

One last point of clarification. This book is not a story of the Beatles, nor is it an attempt to explain the entire cultural impact of the Beatles. All it is, rather, is an attempt at a reasoned argument to put the Beatles in their rightful place in the cultural history of the world: as the most important rock act in history; a position that can never be equalled because now rock has pretty much lost its meaning; rock is now something so big as to be practically without definition, except as something that is not classical, jazz, and so forth. So that's all this is: an attempt at showing that the Beatles really are the greatest rock band of all time. So don't worry about the rest of it: I will not be reaching into the biographies of the members of the Beatles to find reasons why they did things; I will not be trying to impose a narrative that attempts to explain the how of the Beatles; I will not be worrying about Beatlemania. Instead, I will just be analyzing the Beatles music in the context in which it was made.

End Notes for Introduction

1. In 1975 Lester Bangs wrote an