Why the Beatles still matter after 40 years http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/beatles/article6818430.ece
They began as a teen craze but turned into a cultural force that changed the world. A friend of the Beatles explains their continuing impact September 12, 2009 by Barry Miles Since their break-up, almost 40 years ago, they have become more than just a pop group, they have become a British institution, become part of our cultural fabric along with Diana, Princess of Wales, Big Ben, warm beer and cricket on the village green. Digitally remastered versions of all the Beatles' albums were released this week, replacing the anemic CDs currently available. That same day brought the release of the video game The Beatles: Rock Band, which will undoubtedly create yet another generation of fans. With a few exceptions, such as the Marx Brothers, it is rare for groups to enter cultural history, but artistically the Beatles represent Britain as much as Shakespeare and Dickens. Like them, they wrote for a popular audience and like them they conquered the world. The Americans embraced the Beatles even more fully than the British, but they added them to the pantheon of Hollywood stars; they made them into inaccessible, remote gods; a blank canvas on which to play out teenage dreams and fantasies. In Britain the Beatles always had a deeper cultural meaning. In Britain they were real people. Their cheeky humour John Lennon telling the audience at a Royal Command Performance that the people in the expensive seats should rattle their jewellery was immediately recognisable from The Goon Show, ITMA and the Carry On films. Their lyrics, which were in no way modified for a foreign audience, name-checked British politicians Mr Wilson, Mr Heath and grumbled about the high taxes the group were paying. They had the British love of double-entendre beginning in August 1960, when they changed their name from the Silver Beetles to the Beatles. They called one LP Rubber Soul, which was also on a shoe, and named its follow up, Revolver. "Do you get it?" asked Paul McCartney to a group of us gathered in Ringo Starr's flat. We didn't. "People will think it's a gun, but its more obvious than that. It's something that revolves: a record!" We all groaned, but McCartney just laughed. The Beatles jump-started the Sixties and everything from Mary Quant and Twiggy, James Bond movies, the Mini and the mini-skirt seems, in the public mind, to have started with Beatlemania so that now they symbolise the entire decade: black and white newsreel footage of the Fab Four bounding down the steps of a BEA jet whose livery has been changed by the addition of TLES to its name; the four mop-tops on stage doing the deep Beatle bow; Dezo Hoffman's jumping Beatles; the Beatles with the Queen, with the Prime Minister. The decade peaks in 1967 with the Beatles as psychedelic princes in their Sgt. Pepper finery, or singing All You Need is Love on the first global satellite television link-up to an international audience of 500 million viewers. Old-age Beatles in their long hair and beards complete the decade with John and Yoko staging bizarre events to promote world peace. Tourists who have seen Dickens only on TV, and have never read a line of Shakespeare, dutifully visit their shrines. The Beatles, too, have religious sights. The zebra crossing on Abbey Road and the Cavern Club in Liverpool are a solid part of the general tourist itinerary. In Liverpool, Paul McCartney's, and John Lennon's family houses are now owned by the National Trust, restored as they were in the early Sixties. The musical development of the Beatles was astonishing, moving from the jolly romp of Please Please Me to the abstract mysteries of Revolution 9 in only six years. Each album was a musical advance, but as well as breaking new ground, they made sure they brought their fans along with them. They were a formidable presence, a roadblock that no other group could ignore. No sooner had George Harrison used a sitar on a record than the Rolling Stones had one too. The Beatles used feedback: heavy metal was invented. They used backwards tapes and across London psychedelic bands puzzled over how to copy them. McCartney's tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows stumped everyone. They had reached the limits of EMI's antiquated technology. It was a track that can never be remixed because it was mixed as it happened. I was one of the people scattered across EMI in studios and cutting rooms, keeping a small tape loop taut against a tape recorder playback head by spooling the other end around a jam jar. The information was patched into the mixing desk of the producer, George Martin, and he faded in and out, superimposing and overlapping the sounds of speeded-up guitars that McCartney had created in his bedroom on a pair of tape recorders. Three days after the release of Sgt Pepper, Jimi Hendrix had learnt the title track and played it at the Saville Theatre. (McCartney, sitting in the audience, said he had never been so flattered in his life.) Do they deserve this fame? It was exceptional in the early Sixties for anyone in a group to be a songwriter, so for a group to have three was astonishing: George Harrison's Something is one of the world's greatest love songs; McCartney's Yesterday has been recorded by more than 3,000 other artists. Their range of subject matter goes from Lennon's existential classic Nowhere Man to McCartney's mini-operas such as Eleanor Rigby, or She's Leaving Home, exploring themes of loneliness and isolation in a three-minute pop song. The latter tune so moved Martin that he burst into tears when he first heard it. The Beatles knew they were making something special. I remember walking down the corridor in Abbey Road and George Harrison ran up to me: "You should have been here last night. We recorded the story of this girl leaving home. It tells it really how it is, it'll make them understand!" Most art forms began as popular entertainment: opera, photography, the cinema. The Beatles will last because they were the ones to take rock'n'roll and make it into art. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
