Aaron: Well, Lew, we’ve done it. It took longer than I thought it would. Our first post on The Beatles came almost exactly two years ago, and since then we’ve written about sixteen Beatles tracks. Did you think it would take that long?
Lew: I definitely did not expect or plan for it to take this long! There’s a John Lennon quote (which you may know) that goes, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – seems pretty appropriate here. I have to admit, I’m feeling a little conflicted now that we’re actually finishing it. I was looking forward to moving on to other topics, but I also feel weirdly like I’m going to miss talking about The Beatles. Maybe this is a loaded question, but how do you feel about seeing the end of this project?
Aaron: I’m a bit conflicted as well. When we first started the project, I sort of thought we’d burn through it in a few months, maybe 6 to 8 or so, and I was really excited. And while we were working on those first few entries, I got a real rush going back and listening to those older albums in full – it had been along time since I’d listened to all of Please Please Me or A Hard Day’s Night, for example – and in most cases, I was listening to the mono re-masters. That meant that in addition to hearing a lot of the songs again for the first time, I was hearing them in ways I hadn’t before, which was incredibly exciting. I think that sense of excitement comes out in those early entries in the way we write about something like the sound of Paul’s bass or the harmonies.But as time passed and “life happened,” I sort of started to feel like perhaps we’d been a bit too ambitious. So I got worried we’d never finish and I found myself sort of wishing we’d started with a smaller project so that the pressure to do it all wouldn’t have seemed so immense.
However, now that it’s coming to an end, I do feel a bit wistful. I’ve so enjoyed the intensity of listening to each of these albums in preparation for each entry that I’ll be sad to see that go. However, I really do feel like my appreciation for The Beatles has not only intensified, but also that it’s a lot more grounded now. In that sense, I’m really excited about the conversations we’ve had.
How about you? Did the project change the way you listen to the band at all?
Lew: Yeah, I’m definitely hearing The Beatles differently now, and although I shouldn’t be surprised by that, I am a little. Like you (as I think we’ve discussed at some length elsewhere), I’ve got a pretty long history with them, so I guess I was expecting to rediscover some things during this project, get your perspective, have cool conversations, and so forth, but not that there would be so much about their songwriting and recording processes that I didn’t know. In retrospect, that basically adds up to taking my own depth of knowledge for granted, which isn’t good, but there you have it. I found a lot of instances where I was less knowledgeable than I thought, which is actually really great. I’d agree with your sense of being more grounded in my appreciation for the band now. The only regret I have is that some of the things I came across in reading about The Beatles ended up coming a little too late to feature more prominently in our discussions. For reasons only partially related to this project, I was recently doing some research about a recording technique called Automatic Double Tracking (ADR, as it’s generally abbreviated), and ended up learning that it’s a technique that was developed almost entirely because John Lennon found it so tedious to manually double-track his vocal parts when The Beatles were recording. From Revolver onward, I believe every Beatles album has a certain amount of ADR on it. That’s an interesting fact in itself, but it also prompted me to go back to the earlier albums again, and hear how much literal double-tracking is actually featured in the vocals.
Have you come across any similar revelations after the fact?
Aaron: Ha ha ha, I love that line about “taking my own depth of knowledge for granted” because it’s something I do too often! Same was the case with The Beatles. I’d say the technological stuff in general has been a bit of a revelation to me, and I agree it’s a shame we didn’t get into it a bit more. I mean, I always knew about the multi-tracking stuff from Sgt. Pepper’s and some of the innovative stuff they did recording classical musicians, but the ADR and the use of feedback and tape loops, and a bunch of other stuff that they were at the forefront of (at least in terms of popular rock music) was pretty new to me as well (the MacDonald book I’ve mentioned on a few occasions, Revolution in the Head, is quite a good resource for such topics). And what’s cool is, as you said, going back and listening to the tracks with knowledge of those innovations, listening for how they’re used. And what has become especially impressive to me on that front – to go back to a point we often discussed early in the series – is how well those techniques generally served the songs. They seem to have been great experimenters who also had great ears for how to incorporate their experiments and innovations in often very seamless ways.
The other big surprises to me – one new new, and one sort of reconfirming what I’d always suspected – was really getting how good a bass player Paul is and how good a drummer Ringo is – in different ways. I always knew Ringo was tight, but I hadn’t really paid a ton of attention to how frequently he messes around with beats, how often he comes up with innovative parts, often letting rolls and fills do the work of the standard bass-snare-bass-snare. But it’s really listening to Paul play, especially on the new(-ish) mono remasters that blew me away. I take it he sometimes gets criticized for being overly showy, but when his melodic style is on, it does so much for the songs – fills them out, gives them direction, counterpoints guitar and vocal melody. It’s fascinating and I can sit and listen to songs over and over just listening to his bass playing. You’ve probably got better terminology for how he achieves what he achieves, but whatever it is he does, I’d missed a lot of it before and it’s definitely changed the way I listen to their music.
I could say more, but I’ll throw it back to you now, Lew. Any other revelations for you?
It’s not really a revelation, but I think it’s worth calling the general craftsmanship of The Beatles as musicians. We talked a good amount about Ringo, but I think that has a lot to do with the prevailing “Ringo sucks” themes that go around (mostly among people who don’t really listen to drum parts for anything beyond impressive fills, I suspect). But, in the process of prepping for these discussions, I also started noticing other examples of general musical proficiency that were cool to come across – John’s Travis picking pattern in the aforementioned “Dear Prudence,” his strumming pattern in “All My Loving” and so on. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s been great to listen to The Beatles to a point where I stopped thinking about them as songwriters, and started listening to how they gel as a band. It’s another example of how you can hear something that’s very familiar differently, with a small shift of focus.
Aaron: Yes, exactly. I think that, because I came to the band so young – before I was evening considering something like “musicianship” or “song crafting” – the lyrics and melodies have long dominated my thoughts about the band. The weird thing is that, as I got older, played in some bands, learned a bit about the process of writing, recording, and performing songs, I started listening to music differently. I started listening, often, to exactly those sorts of things you mention and that have come up occasionally in this series. Even still, I somehow kept listening to The Beatles mainly for lyrics and melody.
One reason might have to do with something that’s come up a number of times in our conversations, which is the idea of “serving the song.” The Beatles were such fine composers and performers of songs that it can be very very easy to overlook the details of any given track in favor of just enjoying the song itself. Going back to entries like our discussion of “Every Little Thing,” though, I see that we have spent a good amount of time – at least with some of the songs – trying to unpack those details. In that entry, for instance, we get into a fairly lengthy conversation about how the drum part, the lyrics, and some of George’s guitar playing all work together. Each part, on its own, is excellent, but on first listen, none of them really stand out because they are there to be part of the song, not to outshine the song.
You use a great term in that entry, “sonic sensibility,” that I find really intriguing. Not to say that The Beatles were on par – as musicians alone – with some of the “super groups” that followed them, but they were a damned sight better than they often get credit for, and I think part of that is a side effect of their sonic sensibility being so song-driven, so band-driven, even, and not so much prodigy-driven or individual-driven. Even later in their career when friendships were fraying, there seems to have been a sense (most of the time) that songs trumped all else. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that the songs hold up so well . . . if they do, that is.
Lew: Well, I definitely agree with that last statement, and I don’t know if you can say it too often. The Beatles (or The Beatles and George Martin), from a very early point in their career seemed to have a great facility for stepping back from a song and hearing it on its own terms. To my mind, that facility allows for two very important things – first, and most obviously, it allows a musician to hear a song as an entity unto itself, which I guess is to say, as something other than a vehicle for the musician’s contribution. Secondly, as we’ve alluded to in the past (notably in the “Every Little Thing” entry you were referencing), it allows the song to be heard as a pure piece of sound, rather than a collection of parts, so that adjustments can be made to that “sonic picture” based solely on those considerations, rather than a nuts-and-bolts musical perspective relating to rhythm, harmony, etc.
I think both of those perspectives are important to reach, and unfortunately, I’d say that they’re reached fairly sporadically in rock music (or, music in general, maybe). This is probably a larger discussion, but it’s occurred to me that you could make a strong argument that the influence of jazz and an increasing focus on improvisational skill was really a step backward in the development of rock music (Jimi Hendrix notwithstanding) from the stuff that The Beatles, The Kinks, The Zombies and other “chamber pop” groups (The Beach Boys, if I must) were making in the late 60s. I can’t imagine an objective person saying that a band like Cream had the songwriting skills of Lennon/McCartney or Ray Davies, but if they did, it would still be tough to make a case that songwriting was a primary objective for Cream, since their performances were so strongly centered around improvisation. It’s odd to say, but the influence of The Beatles strikes me as being somewhat smaller than one might expect in that regard. I think that’s why we keep asking the question, “are they still relevant” and coming up with a “yes” – because some of those lessons about songwriting and sound were never codified into the rock tradition.
But the way you’ve framed it here, there’s a distinction to be made (however small) that I haven’t really thought about much. Let me re-phrase that: I’ve thought A LOT about this concept of “servicing the song” that we talk about so much – the marriage of form and function is one of those stylistic considerations that I’m fascinated by in all the arts. But with the rise of “rock” in the late ‘60s, and the way it defined itself in opposition to pop, the notion that pop is something “lesser” or at the very least “different” from other more experimental or even transgressive forms of popular music has become fairly commonplace. I wonder, then, if the idea of constructing a perfect pop song went out the window – in part because of the jazz influence you mentioned – but also because the perfect pop song became something, sort of, lame. It’s as if the construction of three minutes of perfect sonic bliss was tainted by association with a genre that had been relegated as too “mainstream” or just plain uncool.
I know for some people The Beatles are overplayed and overpraised. But I wonder if their reputation has also suffered somewhat just because of the association of their music with a fairly arbitrary distinction between “pop” music and other, “cooler” forms of popular music.
Lew: I think you’re right on the money here, but there are a couple of things that I’ll mention specifically:
First, I generally agree with the definition of “pop” that you use in your first paragraph. At the risk of stating the obvious, the term pop is shorthand for “popular.” That is undeniably obvious, but it’s also something that I think people forget – especially in the increasingly cliquey and niche-oriented realm of music from the late 20th century to present, where people feel possessive about a niche in the sense that it provides them a sense of self-definition. I’ll avoid the diatribe about capitalism’s impact on art, but simply say that if you sell a million albums, you’re pop. Whether you’re Metallica, Pearl Jam or Taylor Swift, it comes back to the same thing – you’re a marketable, popular commodity. And, as you said, those various artists are, at some level, differentiated by cosmetic elements in their music – if you really start breaking them down to their most fundamental components, you’ll find structural similarities more often than not.
About the change in pop songwriting, it’s interesting that rock positioned itself so firmly against “pop,” even as it was becoming mainstream, and a little sad to think that each generation seems heavily invested in positioning itself as against a more institutionally accepted predecessor. I’m sure that’s a dynamic that plays out in every branch of art (I’m positive we could both name instances of it in visual art, literature and classical music), but I’m not sure that the turnover has ever been as quick as it is in rock/contemporary pop music. I think there’s an element of that in losing track of the “perfect pop song” – it’s difficult to maintain a tradition when each successive generation considers their predecessor to be tools of the mainstream.
I suspect that it also has to do with the subjectivity of musical taste and the frustration that musicians and listeners seem to feel about that. The ingredients that make up a “perfect pop song” are difficult to define - and as such, in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. That’s not to say that there aren’t objective statements that one can make about composition, but stating the obvious again, there’s no question that you could hear two songs with very similar structure and like one very much, while disliking the other. By comparison, musical facility is easier to demonstrate or compare conclusively. There’s a sense among a certain set of instrumentally skilled musicians that they shouldn’t have to write good pop songs – you should just like their music because they’ve put in so much time on the craft side of things. I think that mindset tends to encourage more instrumental flights of fancy, and less attention to detail, compositionally speaking.
Aaron: “Tools of the mainstream” has become such a funny concept to me – doesn’t pretty much all music that’s produced and put on a CD or iTunes these days represent that paradigm to a certain extent? For sure, when I was a younger man I bought into a lot of they hype that told me that a particular non-“pop” subset of popular music that I liked somehow marked me as “alternative” or non-mainstream in ways that were important to my burgeoning self-identity. And I wouldn’t ever want to discount the joy – and even, in some cases, transformational power – that comes with finding camaraderie amongst a group of like-minded listeners who share one’s delight in discovering something “new” that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. We’ve both been there, and at times it was wonderful.
But returning to The Beatles, I guess I think it’s too bad that they’re so associated with pop, or mainstream, or even bubblegum that people simply discount them (and, as a side note, I do sympathize with people who are simply tired of their music due to overexposure – I don’t see myself ever feeling that way, but I get it). I have a feeling that these associations lead to that moment in the whole Stones/Beatles when the Stones fan inevitably says, well, The Beatles are just too . . . nice, too . . . clean cut, not . . . dirty enough. As somebody once put it to me, the Beatles want to “hold your hand,” but the Stones want to “spend the night together.” Granted, those two examples exhibit a pretty superficial knowledge of both bands’ music, but it also gets to the point that a lot of people seem to make – The Beatles are somehow cheesy or too poppy or just too mainstream, whereas the Stones (or other non-Beatles ‘60s band of choice) are grittier and more authentic.
And for me, the really great thing about this project of ours has been that, after spending all this time deepening my knowledge of the band and, really, enhancing my ability to listen to them, to hear what they’re doing, to appreciate these “lesser known” tracks, after all that, I’ve come out on the other side understanding how awesome they were even more than I did when we started it.
Lew: It’s interesting that the Stones/Beatles thing hasn’t really come up until this point, but I’m glad that you mentioned it. I probably don’t really need to qualify this, but I will say upfront that I love the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger is one of my favorite frontpeople (frontpersons?), and there are a ton of Stones songs that I really love. I’ll even grant that the Stones were more successful in remaining a band “of the moment” – for one thing, they didn’t break up, and for another, I’m not sure that Lennon and McCartney would have been as fascinated by New York subcultures or amalgamated them as successfully as Jagger/Richards did when they made Some Girls. With that said, the whole idea of the Stones as being grittier or more authentic than The Beatles is completely absurd to me. They may present as more overtly working class (ironically) and use more distorted guitars, but as songwriters they’re much more traditionalist, and even conservative from some perspectives. One thing that we’ve talked about throughout this series is the way The Beatles, and the team of people that they worked with, were constantly thinking forward and looking for ways to reevaluate their process, from songwriting to engineering techniques. All respect given to the Stones, I just can’t see them as innovators in the same way, but rather writers who were very capable at using established forms (blues/r&b/psychedelia/riff rock) and performers who breathed new life into those forms.
I suppose to give the Stones their due, we’d have to give them their own series, but honestly, I’m not sure we’d make it to Dirty Work, much less Bridges to Babylon.
Aaron: Ha, yeah, I’m not sure I’d be up for a full-on assault of the entire Stones discography – as cool as it might be to explore the ins and outs of their storied career. But I guess to wrap this up, I’d like to echo something you said, which is that The Beatles and their team were “constantly thinking forward” which is a really cool way to describe, for me, what makes them so exciting. Of course, there are the wonderful melodies, the consistently great lyrics, the craftsmanship, and all the other elements of their creative process that we’ve discussed in such detail. But above and beyond all that is the way the band was continually upending established forms, pushing boundaries, reinventing structures, and really trying to keep themselves fresh – almost without ever being new just for the sake of it, but, rather, seeing that approach to invention as part of the fabric of their song-crafting endeavors. And that, to me, is what really keeps their sound fresh today. I don’t mean fresh as in I’d confuse a Beatles’ song for one by Lady Gaga or Daft Punk or Jack White or Kanye West. Rather, as much as I’ve listened to any given Beatles’ song – and I’m really happy to have discovered songs I didn’t really know through this project – and as well as I think I know their music, there’s still almost always something new that surprises me and keeps me wanting more. And that’s just one of the many reasons I’d argue that not only are they still relevant today, but that they still have a helluva lot to teach singers, songwriters, and bands of each successive generation.
We’d like to thank everybody who read along on this series - whether you commented or just lurked, we really appreciate. It took a fair bit longer than we’d expected, so thanks for sticking around. We hope it was half as enjoyable for you to read along as it was for us to write and put together.
Coming Next: The Beatles are done! Up next we’ve got a different kind of project. Rather than looking at songs by one band, we’re going to take a slightly novel approach to a decade: we’re going to look at the 1980s through the two seemingly contradictory lenses of Heavy Metal and Indie music. We’ll alternate back and forth between genres from one entry to the next and, well, see where it takes us. If that sounds interesting, look for our introductory post sometime very soon.
We’re also starting up our Quick Takes feature again, where one of us chooses any random song and the other comments on it in a paragraph or two, so look for some of those entries in the very near future.
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