The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.
Before Beatlemania
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En provenance du cours de University of Rochester
The Music of the Beatles
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À partir de la leçon
Early Day and Success in the UK
The Beatles as pop craftsmen. Study of cover versions at Cavern and Hamburg shows, Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and the singles from this period.
Rencontrer les enseignants
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
What was the world of popular music like in the UK before the Beatles broke
in the UK, and mostly in 1963, and then 1962, beginning of 1963?
Really, it really started to happen for 'em
around the summer and the second half of 1963.
What was that pop scene like? Well, Depending on who you're
reading, you're going to hear that the British pop scene was most,
I think most authors would acknowledge that
it was highly indebted to American popular music.
Now there are going to be some authors you'll read, especially
British authors who say, well you know in many ways.
British popular music was much more sophisticated,
in some ways, than American popular music.
But really, when you talk to the people who were in the business.
When you read what people like George Martin and
some of the others had to say about it.
It's pretty clear that the way
the business was set up, was that, the, the product
they could sell the most of, was American popular music.
And when you got British artists who were selling pretty good numbers, it was mostly
because they were either doing covers of American songs that had not yet made the
British market so there was a moment of opportunity to kind of cover that song and
have a hit with it before the American version made it over the Atlantic Ocean.
Or sort of imitations
of those kinds of American songs and American artists.
And so, I say that, because one of the important contributions
of the Beatles in 1963, is helping to change that picture.
Helping to give you people inside the UK.
Pop music business, UK musicians and UK fans the sense that their
music could be as good as the American music maybe even better.
And that change really happens with the beat music movement of which The Beatles
were sort of the, the catalyst and sort of very much at the forefront.
So when we look at sort of the, the, the rock and roll years
in the U.K., in many ways they parallel the story we usually tell about
rock and roll l in this country, you know, the importance of people like
Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley of course who never came to the U.K,
but his his his movies played in the U.K. and so people can see him of course.
There were, movies like The Girl Can't Help It, that
had appearances, of, of various sort of rock and roll stars.
And so, when we talk about the period from 55 through 63
a lot of looks a ve, very much like the, the American scene.
But in addition to that, there are other marketly kind of British acts that have
tremendous success.
Most Americans don't appreciate the importance of the skiffle movement.
People who are taking this course from the UK will attest to the fact that
Skiffle was was very, very big in 1955, 56, really through the end of the 1950s.
And the guy really at the center, not the only guy doing skiffle.
Skiffle, but a guy very much at the
center of the Skiffle movement was Lonnie Donegan.
He started out kind of doing a little Skiffle,
bit in the middle of this traditional jazz band that he
played in with Chris Barber he would come out and do what
he thought was sort of - folk songs, but kind of
with an up-tempo, kind of, beat to them, and that became skiffle.
It was a kind of music that was very easy to play, in the sense that if you
could strum a guitar, you could learn a couple
of chords, and be able to do these skiffle tunes.
So, once it became popular, people started imitating Lonnie Donegan.
Including the Beatles, Jimmy Page Keith Richards.
All these guys were sort of Lonnie Donegan fanatics.
He really was by all reports a fantastically
dynamic performer and a real kind of rock star.
In many ways, he was kind of at least one of the UK's Elvis Presley's, to the
UK's answer to Elvis Presley, but since Lonnie Donegan was a, was a very big star.
The big song, that, that's usually pointed to
with the rise of skiffle is rock island line.
It was
number 8 in the UK, it even went to number 8 in the US.
That's going to be important later when we talk about how.
How much success British artists had in the US before the Beatles came along.
Here's Lonnie Donegan in 1956 with the number 8 hit in the United States.
All of this pre the folk revival the Kingston Trio
and those kinds of things that happened in the US.
So it's, it's kind of an interesting story Lonnie Donegan.
What also happened in
the UK is when Elvis hit There was a, there was
a sort of a lot of Elvis imitators in this country.
There also were a lot of Elvis imitators in the UK.
The first important one, was a fellow by the
name of Tommy Steele, who was managed by Larry Parns.
We'll come back to Larry Parns in just a minute.
But Tommy Steele and his Rock With The Caveman.
A number 13 song from 1956 in the UK, and
then later that year a number one song with Singin' the Blues.
Really was kind of the original Elvis, you know, British Elvis, that kind of thing.
What's interesting is that Tommy Steele was signed to Decca Records by Dick Rowe.
George Martin had a shot at signing Tommy Steele, and he passed on him.
I'm going to remind you of that a little bit later
this week.
Because it, it helps to kind of complicate one of
the, one of the frequently told myths about the Beatle history.
but, as, as, as, as successful as Tommy Steele was, the
number one kind of UK answer to Elvis Presley was Cliff Richard.
Cliff Richard was actually on EMI Records that George
Morton was working, but on Columbia, produced by Norrie Paramor.
So he was sort of in house, but Cliff Richard had a fantastic series of hits.
There was nobody, really, in a lot of ways.
Bigger than Cliff Richard at the end of the fifties and early 1960's songs
like, Move It from 1958, which was a number 2 hit, Living Doll, that's almost
sort of his signature song in a lot of ways from 1951, a number one
hit, 1959 I mean, and Travellin Light, a number one hit from 1959 as well.
Cliff Richard was
as big as big can be, one of the reasons why the Beatles were
reluctant to go to the U.S. is because they People had tried to sell
Cliff Richard in the US, with no success, and The Beatles thought, well if
Cliff Richard can't make it in the US, what chance do we have, so.
Cliff Richard, a very very important name.
I'll mention one more of these sort of these, sort of these singers,
these Elvis-type singers, and that's Billy Fury, who was also managed [sic] managed
by Larry Parnes.
Billy Fury is interesting because he actually came from Liverpool.
Although he didn't Sort of, you know, you, you it wasn't obvious
from who he was or the way that, the he branded himself
that he was from Liverpool, but nevertheless when we think about the
Beatles being the important because they were the first big group from Liverpool.
See that's not actually true.
Billy Fury was there, his Halfway to Paradise, a
number 3 song from 1961, originally a song done.
Written by Carol King and Jerry Goffin and
originally done by Tony Orlando, later of Tony Orlando
and and Dawn so anyway at the end of
the' 50's, we see Skiffle, we see this this
sort of rock singer thing and then by the early'
60's, we see a real turn to a softer,
more mainstream style In 1960 to 1963, just like
what was happening in American pop music at the
time, so in many ways, the sort of hard driving
guitar, Chuck Berry kind of music that was out and a more kind
of a softer style of pop with strings and that kind of thing was in.
And so, people like Billy Fury and others who sort of rode the crest of that wave.
I'm going to talk for a minute about Larry Parnes, because Larry
Parnes was, in this movement, maybe one of the most important figures.
He had a what I think a lot of people call a kind of a stable of artists.
I mean a ton of
artists who essentially we're all kind of Elvishish kind of lead singers.
But he gave them these kind of stage names that are particularly distinctive and
have, have given rise to a lot of you know jokes and barbs in, in the time since.
Here are some of the people who were at Larry Parnes' stable.
Tommy Steele Marty Wilde. Billy Fury.
Vince
Eager. Johnny Gentle.
Duffy Power.
Lance Fortune. There was a guy by the name of Joe Brown.
You might say Joe Brown, that doesn't sound like all of the rest of them.
Well. He wouldn't change his name.
Larry Parnes' original idea for Joe Brown's stage name was, Elmer
Twitch, but he said no way am I going to be Elmer Twitch.
So he got to be Joe Brown.
And a guy by the name of Johnny Gentle, interesting because at a certain
point in their careers, the Beatles did a tour
of Scotland as the backing band for Johnny Gentle.
So there was some engagement between the Beatles and Larry Parnes.
And especially between Brian Epstein.
And Larry Parnes, and Larry Parnes was in many ways,
the model upon which Brian Epstein modeled himself for what
he would do with what ended up being his sort
of staple of artist, and we'll talk about that next
week, how Brian Epstein developed after the Beatles success, a
whole staple of artists who to rival those that Larry Parnes
had done just a few years earlier, although he didn't
give them names like Steele, Wilde, Fury, Eager, Power, and Fortune.
So that's some of what was happening on the London scene, which was really
sort of central for popular music in the UK during this period we're thinking
of, from about '55 through, up to the beginning of 1963, beginning of 1962.
Meanwhile, up in Liverpool, the Beatles are
beginning to form into a group [INAUDIBLE].
You can, you know, read in any of the biographies, the story
of how John met Paul and how George came into the group.
But those 3, John Paul and George at the are really sort
of at the center of the, once they come together as kids.
We're talking about them getting together already in 1957.
Which means in 1957 to go back to the dates of birth,
John Lennon is 17, Paul McCartney is 15, and George Harrison is 14.
So these are like high school, maybe middle school-high school aged kids.
And for that period, they're kind of
getting together with the guitars doing skiffle
first and then rock and roll, and Elvis and pop and that kind of thing.
They play for a ma,
man by the name of Allan Williams at
a club that he was running, called the Jacaranda.
So you'll often hear talk of of the Jacaranda club.
Also, when Pete Best came into the group, they played at a, at a kind of
coffeehouse called The Casbah which his mother Mona Best, ran.
And so the Jacaranda and the Casbah fit
into the story, the early story prominently of
these years, when this sort of, what you
might think of as the Beatles' pre-professional days.
Their did, their sort of years
of development and exploration as young musicians.
There is also another figure who I'll mention now and we'll
come back to, when we talk about Hamburg in the next video.
And that is a fellow by the name of Harold Philips, who came from the West
Indies, but went by the name of Lord
Woodbine, and had an act called the Royal Caribbean
Steel Band and he played in Al Williams The Jacaranda
quite a bit and he and Al Williams were good buddies.
It was Allan Williams and Harold Philips who initially went to Homborge to explore
gig possibilites for this Royal Carabbean Steal Band beacuse some of the sailors.
Who had had been in Liverpool.
Had also been to Hamburg. Both of them being port cities.
And saying, hey you know, this kind of thing you're doing here would really
go over great at Hamburg. You should go check it out.
And so when we talk about Hamburg, we'll talk about
how Allan Williams and and and Lord Woodbine took a kind
of a weekend trip to Hamburg to check it out, and
that's in many ways how the Beatles ended up in Hamburg.
The earliest recording we have of the Beatles best
I can tell and maybe other historians will, will unearth
something a little bit earlier than that, Is their recording
of That'll Be The Day, from the 12th of June,
1958, which was recorded at the
Philips Sound Recording Service in Liverpool, England.
So the early timeline, for the Beatles here, in this period.
Leading up to 1960's.
In July of 1957, Paul meets John at a local church festival and joins.
At that point they're the Quarrymen. In August of 1958, George joins the group.
In January of
1960, Stu Sutcliffe, who you remember As the
bass player and art-school friend of John joins.
At that point you've got three guitar players; Paul, George and John.
All playing guitar, and Stu Sutcliffe playing bass.
Bought a bass mostly because he won a prize for one of his paintings.
And he won enough money to be able to buy a brand
new Hofner bass, so they talked him into using his money for that.
Some stories say that.
That's the way the story's told but that's not actually what he did with the money.
Whatever, he ended up with
a bass, he was in the group.
August of 1960 Pete Best joins the group and so that's when some of this ?
? stuff starts.
And the involvement of Mona Best. Some of the early band names are fun.
There's The Quarry Men, Johnny and the Moondogs, The Beetals
And the Silver Beetles before they finally settle on the name of The Beatles.
The next video will talk about the
early professional training of the Beatles as occurs in Hamburg an Liverpool.
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