SALLY O'ROURKE
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ESSAYS
SALLY O'ROURKE
I'm Looking Through You: The Beatles and American MusicPart 1: From Me to YouThe period after World War II in Britain was characterized by the influence of pop cultural styles from across the Atlantic, particularly on young people. “In those days the major films were all American, the music we all loved was American, even the ‘in’ books such as On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye were American,” recalls Bill Harry, music journalist and early friend of The Beatles (Harry 7). The emerging youth subculture of Teddy Boys borrowed style and attitude from American Western and gangster films and combined it with retro Edwardian fashion (Gould 53). Interest intensified with the arrival of rock and roll music in the mid-1950s. Because the British Broadcasting Corporation refused to play rock until well into the Sixties, pirate radio stations such as Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline stepped in the fill the void (Stark 14). The thrill of furtive listening added a special allure to the new foreign music. “It was this obsession with America that caused the future legions of the British Invasion to plug in their guitars in the first place … unconsciously adding a modicum of Old World style and class in the process,” Nicholas Schaffner writes (Schaffner 10).Perhaps the British city most affected by American culture was Liverpool, a seaport in the Northwest of England. “A lot of imports, like blues records, country-and-western and rock-and-roll records, would come into Liverpool through the ships,” Paul McCartney recalls (Pritchard and Lysaght 15). Even after the Fifties rock and roll boom fizzled out in the rest of Britain, Liverpool’s rock scene continued to thrive based on these American records. Liverpool and the rest of the Merseyside area also hosted the largest country music scene in Britain (including a Grand Old Opry) and served as the biggest market for Motown Records (Harry 17). The city, as part of the Industrial North, felt isolated from more bourgeois areas in the Midlands and the South of England. Schaffner argues that “the rock and roll of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley struck an especially responsive chord among Liverpool’s tough, underemployed and restless working-class youth, who almost instinctively began banding together to create music themselves” (Schaffner 13).The music these British youth made was called skiffle. Originally developed in African-American communities in the 1920s, skiffle was played on household objects and inexpensive musical instruments. The first British skiffle bands developed out of artists in the jazz scene seeking a return to a more ‘authentic’ style of music (Ingham 7). While it was not exactly rock and roll (which many still saw as only truly belonging to America), skiffle bands played American folk songs, spirituals and blues (Norman 50). The style’s popularity was fueled in large part by the success of the 1956 single “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan, a British artist who nonetheless sounded American enough to appeal to English youth (Stark 61). In addition to Donegan’s success, skiffle owed its popularity to the ease and lack of expense with which teenagers could play the music. Compared with the British pop artists ripping off American music on the radio, skiffle was exciting and energetic (Ingham 7).One such skiffle band, The Quarry Men, was formed in late ‘50s Liverpool by John Lennon and some classmates. After hearing Little Richard and Elvis Presley (whom Lennon stated was “bigger than religion” in his life) at age 15, the group took on a more rock and roll orientation (Hertsgaard 19). Lennon’s fellow student Paul McCartney, who had joined The Quarry Men, also became infatuated with rock after watching Bill Haley’s performance of “Rock Around the Clock” in the film Blackboard Jungle: “I remember it very clearly because it was the first piece of music that ever sent a tingle up my spine” (Pritchard and Lysaght 13). McCartney was also influenced by the close harmonies and lower volume of The Everly Brothers, even unsuccessfully attempting to form an Everlys-styled duo with his own brother Michael (Norman 41). The band “started off by imitating Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry … we just copied what they did. … The people we copied were all American, of course, because there was no one good British” McCartney recalls (Gould 58).Perhaps the most important influence on The Quarry Men, at least initially, was the Texan rocker Buddy Holly. Other early rock and roll idols tended to be either African-American (Chuck Berry, Little Richard) or overtly masculine (Elvis). Holly was a figure with whom Lennon and other British rockers could identify both physically and musically, as he was thin, wore glasses and had a limited vocal range. Holly, who was also one of the few performers to write his own material, based his songs on chords easy enough for beginning guitarists to pick up quickly (Norman 51). The first song Lennon learned to play on guitar was Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” which would also be the first demo recording The Quarry Men would produce (Stark 73-74). In addition, Holly’s band The Crickets appealed to The Quarry Men as an example of a group that was truly collaborative in a creative sense, not just a lead singer with backing musicians (Gould 66). Finally, The Crickets’ insect moniker provided the inspiration for the The Quarry Men’s new name, which eventually morphed into “The Beatles” (Schaffner 15).Although Elvis Presleys career was beginning to go into decline by the end of the Fifties, due to his two-year stint in the U.S. Army, his early releases were also seminal to the birth of The Beatles. It was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool. Once I heard it and got into it, that was life, there was no other thing, Lennon later said (OBrien 173). Lennon was particularly impressed with Presleys novel use of casual language. When writing the 1963 single She Loves You with Paul McCartney, he recalled that we stuck everything in there thinking when Elvis did All Shook Up, that was the first time I heard uh huh, oh yeah, and yeah yeah all in the same song (Ingham 176). (When McCartneys father first heard the song, he suggested they change the soon-to-be-famous yeah yeah yeah in the chorus to the more British yes yes yes [ibid.].) Presley would continue to be a touchstone for The Beatles throughout the bands career. Run for Your Life, the closing track on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, opens with the lines Id rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man, the same couplet that appears in Presleys song Baby Lets Play House. Likewise, The Beatles return to roots music after their experiments with psychedelic rock in the late Sixties was initiated by the March 1968 single Lady Madonna. Ringo Starr remarked, It sounds like Elvis, doesnt it? No, it doesnt sound like Elvis it is Elvis (Schaffner 40). However, among the dozens of covers the band released of their musical idols, particularly on the remake-heavy albums preceding Rubber Soul, none were Presley originals. Writer Jonathan Gould suggests that this lack of a tribute to the King was actual an act of deference, almost as if he were indeed the reigning deity and they a group of novitiates, proscribed from speaking his name (Gould 305-306).Another musician who remained in The Beatles reference file throughout the Sixties was Chuck Berry. Like Buddy Holly, Berry wrote most of his own songs and was a talented guitar player. Unlike Holly and Presley, Berry was African-American. His influence on The Beatles is most blatant on the bands early covers of Berry songs, like Roll Over Beethoven on 1963s With The Beatles and Rock and Roll Music on 1964s Beatles for Sale. As the British bands artistry improved, however, the references to Berry became more subtle. Back in the USSR (The Beatles, 1968) and The Ballad of John and Yoko (single, 1969) both bore the influence of Berrys driving guitar sound and his lyrical trips through American place names, such as Back in the U.S.A. (Schaffner 44). Come Together, the opening track of 1969s Abbey Road, borrowed its opening line (Here come old flat-top) and its style of rhythm guitar from Berrys You Cant Catch Me (Gould 574-575).However, part of The Beatles genius was that they did not carbon-copy particular American rock and roll acts in an attempt to be the British Crickets or the British Elvis, á la Cliff Richard and other pop idols of their native country. Instead, they borrowed elements from artists they admired across a wide range of musical styles. Horst Fascher, manager of the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, where The Beatles played regularly in the early Sixties, describes their how the band developed their style:The Beatles watched Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and all those names very carefully to see what they were doing onstage. The Beatles were behind the curtains or backstage, taking in all the moves and performance tricks and trying to copy them. I think that had a lot to do with their success later.[Pritchard and Lysaght 93]Original drummer Pete Best, who played with The Beatles during their years gigging in Hamburg, concurs: We were into the American stars Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Fats Domino. But we were always looking for something different. We were listening to any records we could find, trying to be a little bit different (Pritchard and Lysaght 44). One direction The Beatles pursued was country music and rockabilly. George Harrisons guitar style bears greater resemblance to that of his idol Carl Perkins (whom the band covered thrice in 1964, with Matchbox, Honey Dont and Everybodys Trying to Be My Baby) than to the blues-derived riffs of his British contemporaries (Stark 61). The other Beatles also experimented with country on original songs like Ive Just Seen a Face (Help!, 1965) and What Goes On (Rubber Soul, 1965), while Lennon stated (somewhat facetiously), You could call our new one [1964s Beatles for Sale] a Beatles country-and-western LP (Gould 255). Perhaps no band member loved country music more than Ringo Starr, who in his pre-Beatle years had applied unsuccessfully for a job in Houston, Texas, based on his love of the music and cowboy culture (Schaffner 28). One of Ringos most memorable vocal performances with The Beatles was his version of Act Naturally by Buck Owens (Help!, 1965), while his first self-penned track, 1968s Dont Pass Me By (The Beatles) is clearly in the honky-tonk vein. Perkins himself even charged that The Beatles sort of saved rockabilly when it could have been lost forever. It was really in danger of dying a fast death in the early 1960s they put a nice new suit on it and they never strayed from its basic simplicity. They just made it a lot more sophisticated (Pritchard and Lysaght 168).The Beatles developed their trademark close vocal harmonies by also looking outside the list of the usual rock and roll suspects. McCartney claimed that the band learned to sing three-part harmony from a recording of The Teddy Bears To Know Him is to Love Him, a 1959 pop ballad written and recorded by legendary girl group producer Phil Spector (MacDonald 80). The Beatles covered five girl group songs on their first two albums, ranging from popular hits (The Marvelettes Please Mr. Postman) to obscurities (The Donays Devil in [Her] Heart; both on 1963s With The Beatles). When asked to describe The Beatles to Mersey Beat magazine in 1963, producer George Martin said they sound like a male Shirelles (Stark 129). The debt The Beatles owed to American girl groups would continue to be evident years later. Spector produced the bands final album, 1970s Let It Be, while Harrison was successfully sued for unconsciously plagiarizing The Chiffons Hes So Fine on his post-Beatles solo hit My Sweet Lord (ibid.). The Beatles vocal sound also owes a debt to doo-wop groups such as The Four Seasons, both in the three-part harmonies (Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) and the use of falsetto, as heard in such tracks as From Me to You (single, 1963). But where falsetto was just part of the harmony in the doo-wop records, The Beatles twisted the formula by presenting the somewhat eerie sound on its own (MacDonald 59).But the genres apart from rock and roll that most clearly influenced The Beatles was rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul, otherwise referred to as black music. The Beatles were the first white artists to ever admit they grew up on black music, Motown writer and musician Smokey Robinson declared (Sawyers xlv). The Beatles alluded to their inspiration from the artists on the record labels Motown and Atlantic by giving one album the self-deprecating title Rubber Soul (MacDonald 143). If The Beatles ever wanted a sound, stated McCartney, it was R&B (Hertsgaard 50). Lennon stated that he liked R&B and soul songs because they were more simple. The blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex (Hertsgaard 28). The most obvious example of R&Bs impact on The Beatles sound is on the cover of The Isley Brothers Twist and Shout (Please Please Me, 1963), with its straightforward construction and gospel-style call-and-response vocals (ibid.). Original tracks such as You Cant Do That (B-side, 1964), I Feel Fine (single, 1964) and Drive My Car (Rubber Soul, 1965) all borrow rhythm, riffs and a bass-heavy sound from R&B hits like Wilson Picketts In the Midnight Hour, Ray Charless What'd I Say and Otis Reddings Respect (MacDonald 143). Smokey Robinson & The Miracles was one group that held a special importance for The Beatles. The band had borrowed themes and song structures from Robinson for songs like This Boy (B-side, 1963). When The Miracles released Tracks of My Tears in 1965, Lennon recognized that Robinson had borrowed the same from the Beatles songs Im A Loser and I Dont Want to Spoil the Party (both on 1964s Beatles for Sale). Lennon responded to Tracks of My Tears with the singing and instrumentation of In My Life (Gould 303). Robinsons influence would carry over to 1968s The Beatles, with Lennons song Sexy Sadie featuring falsetto melismas in the style of the singer and quoting The Miracles Ive Been Good to You in its lyrics (Gould 519).However, The Beatles never felt truly comfortable with performing in an R&B style as white musicians. One part of this was due to the bands guitar-based sound, which differed from the typical R&B set-up including piano and horns (Gould 105). More important, though, was the feeling of appropriating another races music and dialect. Lennon disliked singing Twist and Shout when The Beatles played with black musicians, believing it to be their music, and that they can do these songs so much better than us (Hertsgaard 28). This reticence is also reflected in the minimal influence of the blues, the blackest of genres, on the music of The Beatles as compared with many of their British colleagues such as The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. McCartney states that The Beatles first single, 1962s Love Me Do, was probably the first bluesy thing we tried to write. It came out whiter because it always does (Gould 135). Even though Love Me Do shares prominent harmonica instrumentation with many blues songs, the style in which it is played (passionate overblowing and no bent notes) better recalled the soundtracks to British kitchen-sink dramas than American blues records (MacDonald 42). The few cases where The Beatles worked in a full-on blues mode were those couched in parody or pastiche, such as Yer Blues (The Beatles, 1968) and Oh! Darling (Abbey Road, 1969) (Gould 520-579). Still, The Beatles borrowed certain chord progressions and stylistic touches from the blues for songs like Cant Buy Me Love (single, 1964), Shes a Woman (B-side, 1964) and Im Down (B-side, 1965). Even then, though, the blues referenced seem to fall more in line with the jazz/pop/swing stylings of artists like Ella Fitzgerald (who covered Cant Buy Me Love) than with the more hardcore and authentic sounds becoming popular in the British Blues scene (Ingham 181; MacDonald 82).That The Beatles managed to condense their myriad influences into something consistently listenable is impressive enough; that they achieved the level of artistic and commercial success that they did is a testament to the talents within the band. By 1964, The Beatles had shown that they could receive inspiration from American musicians. The question was whether or not America would break tradition and receive them.(Click here for Part 2)
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