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Name: Jaded Faded
E-Mail:
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: sc
Date: Friday, June 16, 2017
Time: 10:50:43 AM
Remote Address: 75.70.52.211
Message ID: 309156
Parent ID: 309144
Thread ID: 308820
Like I said, the Beatles deserve credit for being so successful at igniting something; they have much to do with the spark that took hold in people and set them free, but it wasn't their purely musical influence; few of the very good bands that really took off starting in '65 were copying and trying to do things and sound sonically like the Beatles. Isn't it enough for them to have hypothetically looked around in '66 and been able to say to themselves (hypothetically), "yeah, it is transcending us now, but a lot of this is because of us!"
Because while Strawberry Fields, Day in the Life, I am the Walrus, and It's All Too Much are pinnacles of songwriting (some of the exceptions I mentioned) the Beatles just weren't keeping up with whole albums like Roger The Engineer, De Capo, Are You Experienced, The Doors, After Bathing at Baxter's, Blonde-on-Blonde-for-God's-sake!, The Psychedelic Sounds of the the 13th Floor Elevators, and Astral Weeks and the Velvet Underground & Nico, just to name a few. Pepper, many singles, and especially the White Album just weren't all that striking (and indeed goofy) compared to all that, but again, "all that" definitely wouldn't have come around without the pervasive influence of the success of the Beatles from '62-'65, who showed the world that yes, with the right support of a good producer and a good label/management environment you could let folks write their own songs and that with enough time and freedom they can make some pretty sweet money (and art) in the process.
And those specific albums I mentioned are not better just because they are harder and louder than the Beatles continued to be (a common response), they are better because they are so much further out there, embodying adventure and boundary-pushing, taking risks and putting things out there that the Fab-four weren't inclined themselves to do and that never would have been tolerated by the Beatles machine anyway. Management put up with Tomorrow Never Knows of course, but a couple of those entire albums were practically made of (and made on) acid. Just because the Beatles continued to be more popular than all that combined doesn't mean they continued to be better songwriters or be more adventurous at all than Ray Davies and Jimi Hendrix and Syd Barrett, just to name a few. They're own songwriting may indeed have improved after '66, as you say, but compared to so much else that was coming out it simply wasn't a good. But again, I think that without some of the songs and the Beatlemania from the earlier period, (almost as if those things were a bridge between the 50s and late 60s) we might not have gotten all the later stuff to enjoy...
Reminder: I don't think I need to say this, but I'm not a Beatle-hater! I could listen to Pepper and certain songs from '67-'68 and the Abbey Road Medley and enjoy them all day--its just that I've been willing to take into account the whole of music and give it the same amount of attention that was almost required of the Beatles growing up in a Beatles world...it's good to remember that the Beatles didn't exist in a vacumm.
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