SALLY O'ROURKE
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ESSAYS
SALLY O'ROURKE
I'm Looking Through You: The Beatles and American MusicPart 2: Get Back (click here for Part 1)America’s influence on Western popular culture in the early Sixties was such that its entertainment industry was almost purely export-only. Although a few British artists had some minor chart successes in the United States, the general feeling was that the British acts were too much like existing American performers (Pritchard and Lysaght 131). When The Beatles “invaded” America in 1964, though, their style of rock and roll was one that had all but vanished from the American cultural landscape. In place of highly original (but morally questionable) stars like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis was bland music by bland people. “After the 1958 disc jockey convention in Miami Beach, where there was a lot of graft and payola, America went soft, musically,” declares Rock and Roll Hall of Fame disc jockey Red Robinson (Pritchard and Lysaght 138). The Beatles provided an alternative that the country found appealing. Television personality Dick Clark recognizes “everything old is new again” reception of The Beatles:"They, and the English artists in general, shipped back to America what we sent them to begin with. And it was all new to that audience. It’s strange when you stop to consider that they borrowed the look of The Everly Brothers, much of the harmonies and the sounds and then the music of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino, shipped it over with a slight Liverpudlian accent and a little longer hair, and it was all brand-new again. We were just ready for that."(Pritchard and Lysaght 199)Whereas British youth just a few years prior had been entranced by the imported rock and roll sound, American youth now strove to emulate the music of The Beatles.Teenagers weren’t the only ones affected, however. Fellow musicians began to take notice as well. Surf-rock band The Beach Boys began searching for techniques that would elevate their music to a more sophisticated level, while former folkies The Byrds began experimenting with creating a new hybrid of two genres. However, one artist in particular would be influenced in a way that would impact Sixties culture as much as The Beatles had.Bob Dylan was impressed the moment he first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in January 1964. “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid,” Dylan recalls (Stark 24). Less than a year after his August 1964 meeting with The Beatles, Dylan abandoned his folk purist roots by strapping on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Shortly after that, he began to record his first electric material on Side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home, which would ultimately lead to his high chart positions for songs like “Like a Rolling Stone” that he never got for his straightforward folk material (Stark 175).As great as The Beatles’ impact on Dylan was to be, Dylan’s impact on The Beatles was at least as great. The Beatles had started listening to Dylan when Harrison introduced the rest of the group to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The band felt sufficiently inspired by his harmonica sound as to record “I Should Have Known Better” (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964) (MacDonald 85). Once the group met Dylan a few months later, however, The Beatles’ music began to change profoundly. Dylan advised Lennon that the lyrics were at least as important to the music, to which Lennon responded, “I can’t be bothered. I listen to the sound of it, the overall sound”(Hertsgarrd 116). Lennon quickly changed his mind, however, becoming the first songwriter in the band to attempt to find his own poetic voice. He discarded Dylan’s overtly political lyrics in favor of a general desire to “tell it like it is” (Porterfield 104). After initial efforts at serious lyrics like “I’m a Loser” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” (both on Beatles for Sale, 1964), The Beatles recorded their first all-acoustic song, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (Help!, 1965), inspired by the album Another Side of Bob Dylan (MacDonald 118). Later in 1965, the band released “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (Rubber Soul), which the group considered to be their first song where the lyrics were more important than the music (MacDonald 130). Dylan’s renewed influence also proved essential even after The Beatles had long since been writing in a more sophisticated style. After the group’s experiments with psychedelic music in the mid-Sixties, Dylan’s late 1967 album John Wesley Harding came as a bolt out of the blue. The album was stripped down to basics, providing the perfect solution to the question “Where do The Beatles go after Sergeant Pepper?” In addition to the sound The Beatles created, the very structure their 1968 self-titled release was also inspired by Dylan’s work. His 1966 record Blonde on Blonde had proved that double albums could be successful (Gould 525). The Beatles would cement this idea, with many artists working in the format for years to come.Dylan’s ascension to the top of the American rock scene killed the British Invasion. Bands that could develop complex lyrical themes and musical ideas, like The Beatles and The Who, continued to flourish, but groups unable to make this leap would vanish almost forgotten (Schaffner 26). Replacing the second-rate British bands were Americans who were inspired, like Dylan, to move out of the folk scene, including The Mamas and the Papas and The Lovin’ Spoonful (Stark 175). Instead of a pop scene dominated by disposable music, America’s musical landscape began to focus on genuinely talented artists (MacDonald 171). An informal competition began between the surviving British acts and the American upstarts. One of those most famous was the rivalry between The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, inspired by the craftsmanship and melody of Rubber Soul, attempted to create an album that would top it. The result, 1966’s Pet Sounds, would be called by McCartney “the album of all time” (MacDonald 171-172). His attempts to analyze and understand the innovative production resulted in The Beatles’ own response, 1967’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (Gould 334). The 1966 Beach Boys single “Good Vibrations” proved to be especially influential, compressing “a half-dozen sea changes of harmony, rhythm, texture and timbre into the standard three-minute format of an AM radio song” (Gould 376). The Beatles now saw no need for artistic restraint, launching into the flights of fancy characteristic of Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour (1968).Another American band with whom The Beatles exchanged musical ideas was The Byrds. Called ‘America’s first long-haired band,’ The Byrds were one of many of the folk artists who turned to rock after hearing The Beatles for the first time. They recorded a version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but with Beatles-like harmonies and 12-string Rickenbacker guitar favored by Harrison during the Hard Day’s Night period (Schaffner 26). In doing so, The Byrds essentially invented folk rock. This sound would be an important element of the Beatles’ mid-period catalogue. Perhaps the most obvious example of The Byrds’ influence can be heard in Harrison’s contribution to Rubber Soul, “If I Needed Someone.” Harrison derived the guitar riff from The Byrds’ “The Bells of Rhymney,” played on a Rickenbacker and then filtered electronically to give it the most jangly sound possible (MacDonald 135; Hertsgaard 155). The backing track was then overlaid with the three-part harmony employed by the American band, who had actually modeled their harmonies on The Beatles (Gould 304).Other North American groups of the time also made an impact on The Beatles. The arrangement of the 1969 B-side “Don’t Let Me Down” recalled the style of The Band, a four-fifths Canadian, one-fifths American group that had backed rockabilly musician Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before striking out on their own the year before with the album Music From Big Pink. Jonathan Gould describes the elements cribbed from The Band’s sound as “the weary tempo, the loose phrasing of Paul’s harmony, and the groundswells of bass, Leslie-toned guitar and electric piano that answer John’s voice in the chorus” (Gould 555). (The musician playing the electric piano on “Don’t Let Me Down,” incidentally, was Billy Preston, an American soul artist who holds the distinction of being the only person ever co-billed with The Beatles on a record.) Another artist who had recently emerged to influence The Beatles was Dr. John, the voodoo-doctor alias of New Orleans piano player Mac Rebennack. Rebennack’s spooky music owed a debt to both the swamps of his birth and the heroin he and his band took on a constant basis (Gould 575). Lennon borrowed this murkiness for “Come Together” (Abbey Road, 1969), fusing it with the older style of Chuck Berry to create an intriguing mixture of the old and the new. In addition to borrowing specific elements from rock and roll and selling it back to Americans, The Beatles effected even more fundamental changes in rock and pop. Before, rock and roll had been considered a style of music best suited for teenagers, to be discarded when they became adults. It was The Beatles, along with acts they influenced, who made rock into a true form of art that ruled popular musical culture through the second half of the Twentieth century (Hertsgaard 315; Schaffner 2). “We were descendants of rock and roll. We sort of intellectualized it for white folks,” Lennon later stated (Stark 27). In contrast to the pop songs then heard on the radio, The Beatles wrote lyrics that were more natural, and more believable: “There’s no reason why a pop song should distort everyday facts for the sake of fantasy. It should reflect normal happening in everyday language,” Lennon maintained (Stark 25). The fact that The Beatles wrote their own music at all was mind-boggling in a time when professional songwriters were de rigueur even for rock and roll musicians. Their example inspired countless other aspiring rockers to take a soup-to-nuts approach to music (MacDonald 52). These elements of The Beatles’ sound and style, when combined with their social impact as personalities and cultural commentators, help explain why the band was so admired by a nation ready for something interesting after a drought in musical creativity. However, the reason The Beatles remain celebrated today is not merely Baby Boomer nostalgia. The group had a talent for knowing how to blend their influences together in a seamless manner, so that they could never be accused of ripping off a particular musician or genre. Perhaps most importantly, the songs they wrote were quite simply great songs, worthy of being discovered by new generations almost 50 years later.Works CitedGould, Jonathan. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.Harry, Bill. The British Invasion: How the Beatles and Other UK Bands Conquered America. Surrey: Chrome Dreams, 2004.Hertsgaard, Mark. A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of The Beatles. New York: Delacorte, 1995.Ingham, Chris. The Rough Guide to the Beatles. London: Rough Guides, 2006.MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994.Norman, Philip. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation. New York: MJF Books, 1981.O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Seven Fat Years.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, 167-176.Porterfield, Christopher. “Pop Music: The Messengers.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, 102-114.Pritchard, David and Alan Lysaght. The Beatles: An Oral History. New York: Hyperion, 1998.Sawyers, June Skinner. “Introduction.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, xli-xlvii.Schaffner, Nicholas. The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.Stark, Steven D. Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender and the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
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