Know how the Beatles ended? Peter Jackson may change your mind
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There’s definitely some interesting material in there - members of the band reflecting on why the Beatles are falling apart, moments where iconic Beatles songs came into being.
Not being a particular Beatles fan I worked on the project for about 9 months and came away with a much greater respect for them.
The biographies says the Beatles hated stereo right up to the end. But they did like high quality recording.
(I got to play with a nagra in the 80s. It was wonderful)
My job was a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of watching the pictures and reuniting it with the correct sound for the first time since the original movie.
Nagra made some amazing machines - such incredible precise engineering.
It's telling that none of them kept up this pace in their solo years, though I think McCartney might have except for the large tours in between. He's put out about an album every 2 years for the past 50 years.
Bands are like chaotic attractors. An unstable system is more creative (energetic) than a stable system.
If a band is just unstable enough it will produce some amazing work before the inevitable breakup.
The amazing work is a result of harmony and passionate dissent in unstable equilibrium. Sooner or later the dissent wins - but perhaps this is both more inevitable and less sad than we think it is.
Apparently they'd finish songs, and go off for a break. Then the very next day Paul would phone them and say, "right, I got some material. Let's get recording." Ringo made it sound inspiring, and pretty exhausting to interact with.
Each Beatle album getting the 'best' of a group of talented writers was the magic sauce, imo.
But even then, the pace was still... insane. Tour in the 1965 summer time, come back to UK, start writing an album in October, work for a month, and put out Rubber Soul, nearly all of which was written and recorded in that single month. That is possibly the most creative/productive single month in their career.
There's also the Paul showing his music to John, and John telling him it was crap and to do better. And vice versa. After the breakup, who is going to have the nerve to tell Paul that his latest creation is crap?
My understanding that back in the day this neck breaking pace was rather common, often because of pressure from the record labels and contracts that bands were forced to sign with them.
Absolute majority of known bands out there are "one song marvels" and those that are not are rare, well know worldwide superstars.
You may need to clarify your criteria there a bit more for "good song". Just chart position? Memorability? Lyrics? Catchiness?
The only composers in history that I'd compare that track record to would probably be Mozart and J.S.Bach. Admittedly both Mozart and Bach were individually creating those pieces, but the Beatles were a very rare meeting of musical minds. I even rate some of Ringo's tracks as being good compared to the average song writing of the last few centuries.
But, as I said, I'm far from unbiased here!
The lads were three and a half great writers and played well together. The rest is history.
The Beatles are probably the first artist(s) in history who will be both studied for centuries and there's hours of audio/video recording of them at work.
In the Jazz world, people from Ella Fitzgerald to Miles Davis preceded and succeeded the Beatles, and they're sure to be studied for centuries, too.
In Broadway, people like Sondheim will be studied for centuries, his career both preceded and succeeded the Beatles.
Meanwhile the Beatles are the top selling band of all time, voted by specialists as the greatest artists in history. Their impact on global culture is impossible to measure. Virtually everyone knows a Beatles song. So much so that their general impact on the 60s and the world onwards is an actual field of study.
While I see your point, this excerpt also feels a bit comically overstated. How are the Beatles impacting my life and the world today, exactly?
Though if you're just referring to the collective knowledge of some popular songs, then sure.
I think there's a tendency music fans have of overstating the impact of the bands they like (Velvet Underground is another good example). But from what I've seen, there very rarely is a case where a single musician or band comes along and single-handedly changes everything. Usually there are a lot of musicians influenced by and playing off each other that move along a general trend, and from what I've listened to that was very much what was happening in the 60's.
In terms of lyrical complexity and political commentary in modern American pop music, I'd say that a lot of that starts happening in the more folk-aligned circles (such as Simon and Garfunkel or Dylan) before you see its influence in other groups like the Beatles.
Rock'n'roll may have been mostly dance music, but Jazz, Folk, Blues, Chanson etc. already existed before Beatles. And songs like Yesterday or Let it Be are not really rock'n'roll anymore than say Jacques Brel is.
I remember The Beatles being brought up in 10th grade. Someone did a project on it. The teacher said something like “you don’t even need to say the album name. We all know.” I didn’t. I had no clue what was happening. It was just assumed every one knew.
I suppose you could hear them in a store and never think to ask who that is. I'm sure I've probably heard an Ed Sheeran song but I could name or identify precisely zero and he's had a billion dollar tour...
OK, Boomer…
Obviously, the Beatles were an enormous global phenomenon for baby boomers and for GenXers like myself. But if you were to poll my children and their classmates how many Beatles songs they could name, you might end up in the single digits.
Not that Miles Davis, whom I prefer, would fare any better, mind you.
A quick Google search for the age of the Beatles listeners led me to the Spotify statistics for 2019.
The Beatles were streamed 1.7 billions time in 2019. 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year. Of these listeners, 30% were between 18- and 24-year-olds, 17% between 25- to 29-year-olds. Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
Amusingly this is second time in this thread that I have been asked to somehow justify the cultural relevance of what is the most successful and most likely the most famous band in the history of humanity. I think we have reached peak HN.
Living up to your username, mate. It's a lost cause :-)
Ed Sheeran, who I doubt will ever be regarded as the most famous musician in the history of humanity, has 4 _songs_ with more streams than that each:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on...
> 10% of the total Spotify user base listened to at least one Beatles song during the year.
That's hardly "virtually everyone", though, is it?
And were they listening to the song because they sought it out, or because it happened to be on a playlist?
> Hardly what I would call a boomer band.
I think they wrote a number of songs which have stood the test of time. But massively overstating their enduring cultural relevance is quintessential boomerism in my opinion.
There's a depth to Miles' best that is only reached by a handful of people in in 20th century music. While the Beatles wrote fantastic pop songs, and while I am a major lifelong Beatles fan who has taken a lot of pleasure in studying just about every Beatles song from a music-theoretic framework, I don't feel they reached that level of depth except in A Day In The Life.
John Coltrane is another person who went deep, particularly with A Love Supreme. And Miles' personal influence is such that John Coltrane might not have achieved what he achieved without Miles' personal mentorship.
> J.S. Bach also had less influence on popular music than the Beatles did, even in his own time, during which he wasn't particularly popular.
J.S. Bach is probably the single greatest influence on tonal, Western music, period, and thus an argument can be made that he had much more influence on pop music than The Beatles alone because without him, you don't have The Beatles. You can draw a straight line from him to literally everyone that came after him.
And that started the process of JS Bach becoming known once again, eventually much more well-known than when he was alive. Bach was a genius, and probably the all-time greatest for counterpoint, but I think you're overstating his effect on the development of popular music.
I'd actually assert that the Beatles ultimately owe more to John Dowland (a songwriter active in the late 1500's to early 1600's) than to Bach.
I'm glad you agree about Miles though! :)
I love the Beatles, but I'd _strongly_ disagree that Bach (and later Mozart or Beethoven) had less influence on popular music.
I've been a Dowland fan for probably 40 years now. At some point after my own discovery of him, Sting recorded an album of his songs. I wasn't surprised at all. It's not an accident that he recorded Dowland, rather than Bach, etc.
I am a major Beethoven fan and regularly listen to him (my most-listened-to Beethoven piece is the Hammerklavier sonata, which I listen to in several different performances with great attention to the differences). I'm not remotely ignorant of what somebody like Beethoven brought to the table.
But the Beatles were much more influenced by the popular songwriting tradition going back to, and through, Dowland, combined with American blues, than they were by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc. Even implicitly.
The Beatles had a huge influence on popular music. First from a music theoretic standpoint, particularly with their use of flat-seventh chords as if they were "normal" chords. Second from their bringing non-rock traditions into the rock world, such as Indian music. Their effect was huge. As Dylan said about his experience of their breakout songs such as I Want To Hold Your Hand, they were “doing things no one else was doing. I knew they were pointing in the direction that music had to go.” He concluded, “It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.”
I won't debate this any more, life's just too short, but I really suggest you deeply listen to Dowland, and then add the American blues to that, and then the harmonic and stylistic innovations of the Beatles, and consider specifically Bach had to add that had a larger effect on popular music.
That said, speaking from the perspective of myself, a professional musician has my roots planted deep in a dozen musical traditions, jazz and pop included among them, the shadows of both Miles and The Beatles loom equally large in my mind, in multiple directions and often overlapping.
> Miles changed jazz multiple times but from fusion onward jazz becomes mostly an irrelevant genre like rock-and-roll sadly is today.
This is just...wrong, sorry, and you're really doing yourself a disservice by ignoring such an absolutely massive amount of great music being made. We live in one of the most vibrant times for jazz since the 50s. Tigran Hamasyan, Mark Giuliana, Julian Lage, Wayne Krantz, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Joshua Redman, Kamasi Washington (and his LA jazz scene pals like Thundercat). Legends like Herbie and John Scofield are still around. Jack DeJohnette is doing massively vibrant stuff. Pat Metheny still sells out arenas. Jacob Collier is massively well-known and is this generation's de facto jazz educator, like a little elfen Bob Ross of jazz.
The list goes on and on and on. As a jazz fan and musician myself I can't think of a better time to be alive than right now. Saying jazz is irrelevant is like saying comic books are irrelevant while ignoring the existence of the MCU -- sure, maybe not everyone is reading comic books anymore, but look at what it's become!
Ditto for rock but I'm not even gonna go there, it's even more broad.
These genres evolve, yes, but just because Miles isn't up there in a suit like it's 1958 doesn't mean that jazz is irrelevant.
You're also ignoring the influence of his (reading between the lines, music you dislike) later work. Without his post-fusion stuff, hip hop as we know it would not exist. Quincy Jones' entire career would not exist. Just...stacks and stacks of records would not have even been given their initial drop of lifeblood. Immeasurable. And that's from his "worst" era.
Just because The Beatles changed everything (and, no doubt, they did; I'll happily wax poetic about them just as much as I will about Miles), doesn't mean that others didn't have an equally large impact. I feel pretty confident saying your inability to see that has less to do with objective reality and more to do with your perspective of it.
Are they as well known as the Beatles? Hard to know, I could be a bias sample!
This is a debate, not fallacy UNO.
Though I suspect you'd conclude that not knowing Davis' discography automatically makes me not a serious music fan.
Not necessarily. Just not a serious jazz fan. Most people when they say they are a "music fan" invariably mean rock/pop of various stripes (from indie to metal and everything in between) and not jazz, or opera or "world music" so maybe it's that you gave a pretty broad statement with no caveats?
"Paris is so full of shoestores"
Miles Davis is popular and well known all throughout the world.
You could come to the Copenhagen Jazz festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Jazz_Festival - basically lots of people around town who don't much care about the Beatles but will go crazy talking about Miles.
I'm in the early 40s myself and I do regard them as one of the greatest music bands ever, even though I used to listen more to the Beach Boys and I regard Michael Jackson as a bigger phenomenon/star than the Beatles ever were, but I'm curious how much of that feeling is shared by kids/young adults in their teens or in their early 20s. Incidentally I've seen lots of 14, 15-year old kids with Nirvana or Kurt Cobain shirts but, of course, none of them with Beatles shirts (never seen a Beatles shirt, to be honest).
T-shirt merchandising is probably more to do with who owns the rights though and if they want to sell products in places like Target or Tescos.
For a long time you couldn’t download Beatles albums on iTunes. That was purely down to the dispute over the name “Apple” rather than popularity of the music.
And yes, I have every MJ album.
Miles is arguably the most influential musician of the 20th century, period. While the Beatles were indeed a "global phenomenon" so was Miles (his success was hardly limited to the US). Whereas the Beatles indeed sold more records, Miles was a musicians musician who helped vanguard a half dozen subgenres of jazz (and jump started the careers of dozens of others who eventually became giants in the genre, as well as crossover successes like Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Marcus Miller) his influence extended well beyond jazz into pop, funk, rock, hip hop, punk, hip hop and on and on. Even metal bands like Helmet and Mastodon name check him.
Often the bands/artists that have the most impact on the actual direction of music aren't the ones who benefit the most commercially from it.
P.S. I'm not from the USA.
I watched the Miles Davis documentary on Netflix recently and it was great. Well worth the time.
Lots of still photos of him working and lots of interviews with him and people close to him.
What it lacked though was behind the scenes footage with his musicians, producers and studio engineers.
We’re told stories about Miles at his best, and worst, but we’re not shown them happening.
Hilarious video about what we'll remember about the Beatles in year 3000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI
Today, November 2021, let it be known that I’ve only just gotten the joke in their corporation name: Apple Corps. As in apple core, the middle part of the fruit.
I feel like a complete numbskull!
My father's WW2 experiences were seared into his mind. He also kept a diary. He lamented to me once that reading his diaries decades later, they didn't line up with his memories.
I thought that might be a mistake. But then it was said again in the article. It’s really not a lot - by our standards today. But then considered that, IDK, for 1969 this might be more then it seems.
Long lengths of film became physically unwieldy in the days before digital video.
(This is also why "footage" is called that.)
Used for cine, that same 100ft was good for about 1 minute of footage..
For widescreen optical compression was used to compress the frame horizontally.
It is unusual to have this much previously unreleased footage, from so long ago.
The home VCR didn't happen until the mid-70's for those willing to shell out some serious money. It wasn't until the 80's that it became a mass market item due to affordability which is why you can find so much more video preserved from the 80's and after uploaded to YouTube.
[1] It was expensive enough at the time that it was often recycled (recorded over) after whatever show it was for was aired rather than archived.
[2] Also expensive and is a write-once medium so used even more sparingly.
That sounds like an agonizingly dull job.
I read once that the job of listening to tapped phones was a soul-crushing experience, as you're forced to listen to the banality of other peoples' lives.
Compared to the 100 "Monsanto is bad" documentaries out there.
Haha. FOOTage!
But at the risk of being the downvote explainer, perhaps it is because some jokes are best left unexplained?
Ringo's face is also partially visible in Paul's armpit, for what it's worth. And George is distant. All of which seems appropriate.
Goo goo g'joob!
However, he realized that public disclosure of this would rip the world apart as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Queen Elizabeth, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Nancy Pelosi, and Xi Jinping would go all out to use this ring to make themselves immortal so they could continue their political careers indefinitely.
So he instead left that part out of his movie. Right now he, along with Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are working to secretly take the ring from Keith Richards and destroy it.
Unsure what "do the right thing" would have been, really. Most the reports around the time of Anthology (1995) were that he was paid fairly handsomely for the use of a few tracks he appeared on (Decca tapes and EMI first session) - north of a million pounds was mentioned as his payday. The living Beatles would have been able to veto that had they wanted, but they didn't.
What else would you have expected them to do? They weren't terribly good friends before - he was someone with drums they latched on to and played with for a couple of years. The more awkward part for Pete (and Neil) would have been Neil Aspinall being involved in Pete's life for decades because of his Neil's affair with Pete's mom, giving Pete a brother (Roag). Pete was essentially permanently connected with someone at the core of the Beatles' inner circle for decades, whether he wanted to be or not.
Pete was the only one with any sort of normal non janitor life expectations before he joined the band. He was getting further education. None of other Beatles were. His life got chaotic because of The Beatles. He ended up being a janitor. Since that likely wouldn’t have happened if the Beatles had never been a part of his life and some Beatles members (Lennon, Harrison to a degree) get kudos and what not for being good guys, is it really that hard to imagine any of them doing almost any thing for him when they became the biggest band of all time a couple years later? Especially with Epstein still trying to help Pete out in the 60s.
Do the right thing could have been almost anything besides what actually happened before 1995. The remarks The Beatles had made in the decade or two that followed were pretty weak. Pete Best was a suicidal janitor. As the biggest band in the world and of all time, during their peak, they settled a defamation lawsuit with Pete. The Beatles just being honest would have been better than what they did. Do the right thing could have been as simple as being honest and straight forward and doing what a decent person would do in a vacuum. A lot is rectified by 1995 of course.
Wasn’t Aspinall the guy who didn’t acknowledge the half brother as his child for some time? I believe he has flip flopped his wording before for different things. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, just adding on to how no one in The Beatles inner circle except Epstein seemed to do what I think people would do in a vacuum.
When all of these people are worshipped beyond belief. Most media and reports about them are going to lean heavily in their favor too. Making it even harder to get the real truth on stuff. This fact is going to be known to everyone close to The Beatles.
This isn’t dissimilar to what happened to Snapchat’s or Twitter’s ousted founders (Twitter’s story is the worst one by far and makes The Beatles and Best look like a fairy tale). Those cases are far worse than Facebook’s Eduardo situation. Yet people find Facebook’s relatively minor incident to be a negative reflection of Facebook and Zuckerberg pretty easily. I am not an exception to this. I fall into this same thinking.
Overall, people can have a pretty easy time finding the actions of founder or early people separations like above to be bad. But exceptions or letting people off the hook can happen when I am a fan of or biased for specific people or entities.
I get I rambled and didn’t stay in any lane. So probably not very cohesive. I also hope I didn’t write anything insulting toward you.
If you dig in to their stints in Hamburg, Pete never really gelled with the other three.
Unsure, but wouldn't surprise me if Aspinall didn't acknowledge Roag for some time. Not saying it was right if he did that, but probably understandable for some folks.
> Do the right thing could have been as simple as being honest and straight forward
Lennon was quoted a couple of times as saying Pete wasn't a very good drummer. That was being simple and honest and straight forward. Wasn't helpful to Pete, was it?
I'd read he was suicidal for a bit, but seemed to get past that and just moved on for a time. I thought he was worked in a bakery (but might be confusing him with someone else), not as a janitor. Something else I read just indicated he worked for the civil service, which might be anything.
Again though... "being honest" from the Beatles' perspective was "we didn't think he was all that great, and we used him for a while as a drummer". Doesn't paint him in a great light. Releasing statements from George Martin at the time saying "I don't want Pete on studio recordings" - again, honest, but wouldn't have been terribly kind at the time.
Could they have just paid him some money in the 60s? Maybe. Unsure how much he got in '69 from the defamation lawsuit.