Although I on and off listen to The Beatles quite regularly (at leas a few times in a year), why hadn't I listened to any of their earlier music since being a teenager? What could their pop from the early 60s have that their solid albums from the late 60s didn't?
In the mid-90s The Beatles ‘reformed’ without John Lennon, who was unavailable due to health problems. Another influential band are about to complete the process of doing a very similar reformation at the end of this month, and we’ll get to them all in good time.
Obviously The Beatles getting back together after so many years was news, and there was a great deal of hype, which hit home to the younger me how much The Beatles meant. I mean obviously I liked them a lot and everything but there was something different going on there. I mean, there wouldn’t have been the same amount of attention for Herman’s Hermits that’s for sure… I think it was the first time I had ever got the sense of The Beatles being something different and meaning more to people than just another band from the 1960s. It was first time I properly understood how much significance they actually had.
The Beatles were then and are still very, very popular but with a slightly peculiar reservation when it comes to credibility. Most people who still listen to The Beatles don’t listen to about half of their albums, namely the first 5 (the Beatlemania ones, if you like). Rubber Soul through to Let It Be are normally what the cool indie kids listen to, and with good reason – these are the albums that are more complex and interesting. The period where they found Dylan, drugs, mysticism and legal disputes. I still remember the first time I heard Revolver, with the garbled count-in of ‘Taxman’, and thinking the cassette was broken because it sounded so weird. And then by the end of the album realising where The Chemical Brothers had got their career from on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. ‘Love Me Do’ just wouldn’t have held the same sonic revelations. I expect those amongst my generation who got into The Beatles started similarly – why would you listen to something so prosaic like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when you could listen to all the weirdness of ‘I Am The Walrus’?
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The Beatles themselves, certainly Lennon and Harrison, didn’t seem particularly sentimental about this era. Lennon speaking at the end of the 60s said he felt it had gone against his nature to dress in a suit, selling out to make money, although Lennon was a constant revisionist who often told a version of history that most suited his current audience. But for all of them things from the start of their career were going to make them less proud than things from later on, because they had progressed as artists. They weren’t going to make great claims for things they felt they had long surpassed, which is why they seemed less enthusiastic when talking about those songs.
However, it remains a fact that all that screaming and hysteria that followed The Beatles like a curse wasn’t for songs from Sergeant Pepper but for the early stuff. They became “bigger than Jesus” (in Lennon’s hubristic but accurate words) with songs like ‘She Loves You’. Bob Dylan sat up and took notice of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when he was the most influential singer songwriter in the world, which seems laughable now – as if Dizzy Gillespie had been inspired by George Formby. It’s a question of relativism and historical bias. Because The Beatles outstripped their earlier work in no time at all, it’s easy to overlook that earlier work, and to forget that they hadn’t mapped out their career in advance.
Having recently acquired copies of all the remastered albums I spent a week giving all the early Beatles albums – the unfashionable Beatles albums – a good old airing. I enjoyed most of it, but it made very clear that at that point they were primarily a singles and live shows band. Albums were just where singles could be resold with some filler to, well, fill up the running time (although in honesty all of The Beatles’ albums have a fair amount of filler – look at Let It Be). Even the best songs from this era are difficult to listen to if you’re searching for anything meaningful from the lyrics (which are generally a combination of the words ‘love’, ‘her’, ‘you’, ‘him’, ‘me’ ‘man’, ‘woman’ and occasionally ‘diamond ring’). But that’s a wrongheaded way of listening to these songs because they weren’t trying to express anything complicated (or anything specific at all). They were trying to be exciting in a short amount of time, and transfer that excitement to other people. Anthony Burgess said that “they perform a simple job, adequately”, but he was wrong – they performed a simple job extraordinarily well. If the lyrics are worthlessly repetitive then the music is versatile and unexpected.
The albums are shamelessly fun, catchy and deceptive – and punchy enough that when quite unlovable songs like ‘Mr Moonlight’ come on, they go away quickly. Also, there are more songs you move your hips to. Perhaps that’s why Help! is viewed as the transitional album, because it’s the last time they even tried to make songs people could dance to. Rubber Soul is excellent, but from that point on it’s music for the head, not for the hips.
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Playing ‘Love Me Do’ next to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and trying to comprehend that there’s only 3 years between them is mindboggling. They don’t only sound decades apart but worlds apart. I’ll never love With The Beatles, but I’ve realised that I like it a lot (Lennon’s snide, sarcastic voice was made for such cynicism as ‘Money’). These albums do have a sense of urgency in a way that the later albums (made by the slightly older and much richer men) don’t. In terms of artistic ambition the later albums win hands down, but listening to the earlier albums gets past The Beatles as mythic cultural legends and reminds you of what made them famous in the first place.
The fact that everyone was vaguely disappointed by that 90s reunion was that it forcibly reminded people that The Beatles were musicians before they got to become legends. The public were expecting something legendary from legends, and they got ‘Free As A Bird’ instead. It was by no means terrible, and arguably more worthwhile than banging out the oldies for money like The Rolling Stones. However, you got the feeling that by reforming they had traded in a bit of their reputation as well. This is something we will discuss again in a few weeks time in relation to the Pixies…
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