I have a draft, and plans, for more extensive talk on The Beatles, but hopefully it won’t take me so long that we will all have forgotten this February celebration by the time some of my muck is out. (And maybe I’ll spare you and not post it at all.)
But, to slobber out a quick note: First, are the Gen-Xers,
the Millennials, or whatever other media-defined groups younger than the
original Boomers thinking that “This is not my era, not my group,” or whatever?
Well, even for me, The Beatles were “before my time”—in the following way:
In 1976, shortly before I became 15, I was starting to buy
my first Beatles albums (which were my first of any rock group’s albums). The first was Sgt. Pepper, in October. In about early December, with precious
allowance money, I bought three or four more at once (including the “White
Album” and Magical Mystery Tour,
keeping them hidden at home at first, as if they were contraband). I bought
then at a then-long-ensconced record store in the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne
Township, N.J. The long-haired, young-woman cashier I checked out with said, “You’re
catching up on lost time with all these Beatles albums.” As if they were so “seven
years ago.” (Yes, I remember all this because—well, The Beatles had a way of
being historically significant, no?)
(I still have almost all of the Beatles albums I bought
then.)
Well, I became, and still am, a solid Beatles fan, though I
look at their stuff and history more from the old eyes of a 52-year-old. For instance,
today, sometimes, they do seem from another era (especially the touring-period
stuff, from ’63 and ‘’64, let’s say), and yet their appeal still takes root in
younger generations—even if in the sense of a given kid’s “beginning” rock, something to
cut your teeth on, before you move on to “more mature tastes” in Led Zeppelin,
Nine Inch Nails, whoever.
The Beatles seem to stick with us almost like one of Paul
McCartney’s many hook-laden post-Beatles songs, where we say, “Gee, that song
is really kind of stupid, but I can’t get it out of my head. (I think about it
as I get through housework.)” But we know so many of their songs were not
merely goofy confections.
And as for the smarter principal of The Beatles: We also
read through The Beatles’ big coffee-table-sized autobio book, published in
2000, and read other stuff we can find, and we consider it interesting how John
Lennon—even if he sounded at times (juxtaposed with the 50-something other
Beatles) young and a “searching lost-and-wounded fellow”—seemed so much smarter
than the others: e.g., seeing through the crazy-bullshit side of the pop-music
biz at times. And we might think if he had had a better upbringing and family
life, and had a better career start, maybe he could have been a more
conservatively appealing cultural pillar of Great Britain. (You might ask, Like
who? Mick Jagger?)
As with so much else where the American Baby Boomers helped
define a cultural moment, so many of the “I was there” and “Did you meet them?”
interviews on TV lately focus on Boomers, now a little long in the tooth
(perhaps with personal histories of surgeries and aches not envisioned in their
days of youth), talking about having seen the group at Shea in 1966, or in New
York in 1964.
Again, coming at the tail end of the Boomer generation (when
defined as born from 1946 to 1964), I have only the “table scraps” of what I
can count as memories. For instance, I do remember the 1968 songs “Lady Madonna”
and “Hey Jude” being on the radio as current hits. And I do remember having a
sense that “Hey Jude” was a hit for an unusually long period of time (which was
objectively true). I think I remember something (in 1969) from the album Abbey Road being on the radio—maybe “Here
Comes the Sun.”
Beatles’ growth and career
tenure coincided with technical changes for pop culture
What is a little strange, given the place in music history
that the album has been placed in, I remember not hearing anything from Sgt. Pepper on the radio in 1967. Now
that was a year I was aware of radio stuff; when in 1967 I was with my father
and the rest of my family when he was refurbishing my mother’s family’s old
house in Wood-Ridge, N.J., and he had the radio on as he often did, there were
plenty of songs I heard and still remember from that time, like “King of the
Road” and “Georgy Girl” [sp?], and maybe some Sinatra. But no Beatles stuff.
The first time I remember hearing Sgt.
Pepper stuff is when I used to see the film Yellow Submarine (1968) on the TV, as a yearly ritual, probably
starting in about 1971.
Why did I hear no Pepper
songs in 1967? This reflects how different the times were then. Pepper had no singles of the normal type
released for the radio, certainly in the U.S. There are stories Great Britain’s
BBC banned playing some of the album tracks, but in Britain, it may have been
more common to play album cuts (not singles) on mainstream radio. Not in the
U.S.
The Beatles rode a wave of not only their phenomenal
popularity—something that was really a cultural “tsunami” that tends to be
overlooked in books like Bob Spitz’s bio The
Beatles from 2005, where young readers might be befuddled when reading the
rather-scholarly treatment but not quite seeing there—only getting “residual evidence”
of it—the almost cultural earthquake of how the group became immensely popular
overnight, and never really lost that status for about six years while they
were still together. For much of the same period, albums were usually released
in mono—stereo was a sort of novelty; this was until the late 1960s. [correction 2/10/14] The "White Album" was the last full album of
theirs mastered for both mono and stereo; Abbey Road was mastered only
for stereo, I believe, reflecting a marketplace sea change.
Meanwhile, as is probably well known, musical groups released
both albums and singles, and the singles market was really where you could
count on the big attention. The business angle in the 1960s wasn’t to support
an album with a tour; an album got a marketing “boost” from accompanying
singles being released. But Sgt. Pepper
was unusual in that there were no official singles released from it by Capitol
in the U.S. (or by EMI in Britain).
Further, AM radio—like WABC in New York, the monster station
at the time (and into the 1970s, at 50,000 watts or whatever it was)—was how
rock groups were primarily “distributed” on air. The station format of “album-oriented
rock” only got started in the 1970s, and early on, it was pretty much a province
for really “artistically interested” fans, those who probed into the intricate offerings
of the art-rock groups like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer; Pink Floyd; Yes; and
so on. For pop-music artists who really wanted a grip on good sales (whether to
support an album or just to be mainstream stars), the channel for doing this was
singles, played on the likes of WABC, well into the 1970s.
Bottom line, no Sgt.
Pepper “singles” ended up on WABC, so I never heard that album then. (And for
what reason I don’t know, but I never heard, in 1967, the “unofficial singles”
from that album, the great “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” which
were really independently released songs that came out months before the album.
Maybe I didn’t hear them because I wasn’t in a situation where the radio would
be on when they were out, in early ’67.)
Another technical change is that color TV really only got
instituted during 1967 or so, as today’s fans of the likes of Gilligan’s Island may know. Today, young
people might be shocked that TV could only have shown things in black-and-white,
but that was the fact then. In Britain, The Beatles got screwed by this
situation a bit: their self-made film Magical
Mystery Tour, shown in Britain on “Boxing Day” (December 26) at first, was
shown on the BBC channel that was in B&W, and partly as a result of the
film not being well served by B&W, it was disliked. It was later shown on
the color BBC channel, but the initial bad impression when it was in B&W is
what sealed the fate of the film’s reputation at the time.
##
So, did I meet any Beatles? Did I see them at Shea? Did I
see them on Sullivan? No, no, and no.
I came to them “after they were the current thing,” like perhaps most of their
fans of today did (in their own ways).
(I did see John’s son Julian perform at Constitution Hall in
Washington, D.C., in 1984, but that’s for another discussion.)
