The Beatles

[RedMatt]

Well, talent IS something one is born with. Whether you graft to make the most of it is another matter. Some people work extremely hard in their area to make up for a lack of it, but it is a valid concept, abstract though it may be.

Anyway, I kind of understand why people resent the Beatles' place in the Liverpool's identity, insofar as it can be to the detriment of other things. You could argue, just to take one of many examples, that the city's role in pioneering IVF treatment is equally something to be proud about. But music is one of the great universals, and the Beatles are the biggest phenomenon in its history, so it is not surprising that things are the way they are.

[The Gardens]

Where The Monkees better than the Beatles? Watch this before you provide an answer!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EJpUKEPYI

[Howie]

Where The Monkees better than the Beatles?

No!!!

[John(Zappa)]

Excellent.Now that is good.
Monkees better than the Beatles.....? Well what at? Being manufactured ?
Being prettier than your average rock ' n roll band ? Who knows and who cares ?

[Walden]

Found this article on MSN and thought it was interesting - apologise if this has been posted before.

Overrated: The Beatles?
by James Hurley, MSN Music Editor

When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones were arrested in February 1967 for drug possession following a tip-off by The News Of The World, the tabloid rumour mill went into overdrive.

Salacious stories abounded, one of which, involving Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar, endures to this day despite being nothing more than the product of some unscrupulous hack's dirty mind.

One detail which went unreported at the time and which took many years to emerge was that the police waited patiently for George Harrison and his then wife Pattie Boyd to leave the premises before embarking on the raid.

Why the special treatment? Well, George was a Beatle, wasn't he? Then, as now, The Beatles enjoyed untouchable status, a sort of diplomatic immunity not afforded to any other entertainer and certainly no other pop group.

It's my belief that this rose-tinted view of the Fab Four has coloured judgement of their music as well as their behaviour for the best part of 45 years. Don't get me wrong. I couldn't make a case for them being bad even if I wanted to.

The quality of their work and enduring legacy is undeniable. However, I do take issue with the conventional wisdom which states that their output is beyond criticism and their influence without peer.

Rather than the unsurpassed geniuses of legend, I would suggest they were songwriters of above average talent whose gift for incorporating disparate styles into their work combined with some outrageous good luck; principally in chancing upon George Martin as producer but also in terms of their timing.

As the highest profile band in an era of rapid musical evolution, they rode the crest of the wave, and in so doing gave the illusion of leading rather than following it, which, more often than not, they were.

As Lloyd Grossman might say, let's look at the evidence. As is well documented, The Beatles started out as a rock and roll covers band with fledgling songwriting ambitions. Much is made of the fact that they supposedly made authorship of original songs the norm but this isn't true.

With the notable exception of Elvis Presley, many of their major influences, from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry to Jerry Lee Lewis, wrote their own material. And just as The Beatles were tinkering with their earliest compositions, a young man named Bob Dylan was doing the same thing in New York.

The difference was that while The Fabs were rhyming "Love, love me do" with "you know I love you", Dylan was ripping up the lyrical rulebook and embarking on an odyssey of inventive wordplay, surreal imagery, and biting social commentary. This approach was the first of many influences The Beatles absorbed after their first flush of success.

That they did so with such skill isn't a criticism. The lyrical sophistication of a song like 1965's Norwegian Wood marks a seismic leap from the relative banality of what they were doing just two years previously and is testament to their ability to identify and appropriate new ideas but not, crucially, their originality.

They repeated the trick many times. American bands like The Doors, The Grateful Dead, and The Jefferson Airplane, along with their English counterparts such as Pink Floyd, were laying the template for psychedelia before John, Paul, George, and Ringo turned their collective hand to it.

Similarly, The Band (formerly Dylan's backing group) and The Rolling Stones, habitually cast as following The Beatles' lead throughout the 1960s, had paved the way for the stripped-down, back to basics, post-psychedelic era a good year before the Fab Four recorded the self-explanatory Get Back in 1969 (it wasn't released until 1970).

In fact, The Beatles weren't always successful at this. Jimi Hendrix's explosion on the scene in 1966/67 was arguably the biggest single shot in the arm popular music has ever received. He turned the game on its head, marking the line between pop and rock which remains unchanged to this day, yet The Beatles stab at a response, Helter Skelter from The White Album, counts as one of their rare failures.

To reiterate what I said at the beginning, I don't for a minute think The Beatles are unworthy of considerable acclaim. That they were responsible for some of the greatest moments in the history of popular music is beyond question. Furthermore, as figureheads of that singularly potent decade, the 1960s, they thoroughly deserve their place in history.

I'm not saying they should be condemned. I'm just saying that, like George Harrison 40 years ago, they shouldn't be exempt from questioning either.

Source MSN

[ChrisGeorge]

"Rather than the unsurpassed geniuses of legend, I would suggest they were songwriters of above average talent whose gift for incorporating disparate styles into their work combined with some outrageous good luck; principally in chancing upon George Martin as producer but also in terms of their timing."

Source MSN

Thanks, Walden. I do think the above quote points out the silliness of the man's argument though. As a group, the Beatles were one-of-a-kind geniuses and you can't get around that. Assuredly they got the "breaks" to get where they got but once they were there, their talent kept them there, churning out hit after hit, some of the finest popular music of our time.

Chris

[snappel]

But so were other artists at the time. Perhaps that's his point, that although they were a top band, they weren't/aren't necessarily the top band.

[ChrisGeorge]

But so were other artists at the time. Perhaps that's his point, that although they were a top band, they weren't/aren't necessarily the top band.

Okay, fair enough. Big then though. . . still big now. But let's not let the legend daunt us.

Chris

[Walden]

Here's another article by the same guy

Why Sgt. Pepper Isn't The Greatest
James Hurley, MSN Music Editor

To paraphrase the album's title track, it was 40 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club band was released. Universally acclaimed as a revolution in rock music at the time, it regularly tops 'greatest ever albums' polls to this day and was, until overtaken by Queen's Greatest Hits just this year, the UK's best-selling album ever.

I know this isn't going to be very popular (that's obvious from the paragraph above) but I think it may well be the most overrated album of all time.

OK, before we get into this, let's just back up a minute. Regular readers will know I have a bit of form here. I got the slating of my journalistic career on the MSN Music messageboards some months ago for daring to suggest the Beatles themselves were overrated. In hindsight, my biggest mistake then was in failing to be absolutely crystal clear about what I meant by overrated.

So in the vain hope that I might avoid being similarly misinterpreted this time, I'm going to have another crack at that before going all blue meanie about the Fab Four's supposed masterpiece.

First things first. I do not think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band is a bad album. Far from it, I think it is often brilliant. However, I do believe it is deeply flawed in a number of respects. And that's the only point I am trying to make; simply that it doesn't deserve to be called the greatest album ever made, if only because it’s not even the greatest album the Beatles ever made (I would give that honour to Abbey Road).

OK, now that's out of the way, let's get down to business. Much is made of the fact that Sgt. Pepper's was the first concept album, the first to treat rock music as art. There are two things to be said about this: no it wasn't, and concept albums are a rubbish idea anyway. The Beatles may well have realised this themselves because the much vaunted unifying theme of Sgt. Pepper's Band being their alter-egos gets ditched after precisely two songs.

Yes, the title track establishes the idea and segues neatly into Ringo in the guise of Billy Shears singing With A Little Help From My Friends and then… that's it. Then it's a collection of songs like any other. Obviously, being a Beatles album, these are very good songs (how many times do I have to say I like them?) but it's nonsense to claim the concept works in any meaningful way.

If there's any unifying theme to Sgt. Pepper, it's that the music is frequently drowned in studio trickery and effects. These may have been innovative at the time but have dated very badly and threaten to obscure the songs as surely as any Phil Spector string section.

And what of the songs? Frankly, they're not up there with the Beatles' best. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds isn't a patch on Strawberry Fields (geddit?) Forever when it comes to affecting psychedelia, When I'm 64 and Lovely Rita are Paul at his most glibly sentimental, Within You Without You is George at his most impenetrable, and Ringo… well, Ringo gets the nursery rhyme one as usual. And don't get me started about A Day In The Life. It's two half-arsed songs welded together with a stupid ending.

The one truly great track on Sgt. Pepper is She's Leaving Home. It's beautiful, clever, sad, hopeful, tragic, and darkly humorous. And guess what? It's got no silly studio effects on it and it's got bugger all to do with any concept beyond that of a brilliant song. If they'd produced 11 more like it, we might be talking about a genuine masterpiece.

Source MSN

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Walden

Thanks, Walden. Yes there's some truth in what the fellow says. As snappel and I discussed, we should certainly keep the Beatles in perspective and measure them to some extent against other artists. On the other hand I do think the guy is deliberately trying to act as an agent provocateur and to stir things up. Thus in his facetious statement that "A Day in the Life" only consists of two half-arsed songs. . . Puh-leese! Nor would I accept his contention that the special effects on the album have aged badly. "Sgt. Pepper" remains one of the most listenable of Beatles albums.

Chris

[ChrisGeorge]

It’s Kensington Fields forever

Oct 20 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post


It’s Kensington Fields forever

It was also where The Quarrymen, who metamorphosed into the Beatles, recorded some of their first songs. . . .

The area also has a place in the city’s pop music history. In 1955, at the back of his shop on Kensington, Percy Phillips built a small commercial recording studio.

It was here that The Quarrymen recorded some of their earliest songs, including a Harrison and McCartney composition that eventually saw the light of day in a 1995 Beatles Anthology. . . .

This was new information for me but I see there is quite a bit about it on the web, e.g.,

"To coincide with the 25th anniversary year of the death of John Lennon, and a regeneration programme taking place in the Kensington area of Liverpool, today Friday 26 August 2005 a plaque was unveiled by original Quarrymen, John Duff Lowe and Colin Hanton. The plaque was erected on the house where Percy Philips had his Studio at 38 Kensington, Liverpool, where The Quarrymen recorded 'That'll Be The Day' and 'In Spite Of All The Danger.' Each received a replica of the plaque as a keepsake.

Source: http://drinkthis.typepad.com/answer_...ath/index.html

"In the summer of 1958 the band (consisting of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Hanton and Lowe) recorded two songs onto a 78-rpm acetate disc in Percy Philips' small demo studio in Kensington Road, Liverpool. The first recording was a cover of Buddy Holly's 'That'll Be the Day'. The second song was an original composition written by McCartney and Harrison, inspired by Elvis's song 'Tryin' To Get To You,' titled 'In Spite of All the Danger'. John Lennon sang lead vocal on the first song and harmonised with Paul on the second."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quarrymen

[DaisyChains]

Brilliant footage of Beatle City and also some of around Liverpool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lELiV1-3OY

[John(Zappa)]

But so were other artists at the time. Perhaps that's his point, that although they were a top band, they weren't/aren't necessarily the top band.

And I will second that!

[ChrisGeorge]

But so were other artists at the time. Perhaps that's his point, that although they were a top band, they weren't/aren't necessarily the top band.

And I will second that!

Then I wonder why so many of us were under the impression they were the top band?

[lindylou]

And I will second that!

don't start me JZ