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I found Get Back incredibly inspirational. It's all just so ordinary, like any band rehearsal I've ever been in. It's kind of amazing to see The Beatles just doing the same stuff that everyone in bands does

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Yes, it's all very very familiar. The setup, the sitting around the amps, the mumbling.

It does away with the "magic" while simultaneously making clear you do need to have a natural talent for "coming up with stuff". Not so much "inspiration" but just being willing to be shameless and plug away at random things and follow intuition.

The process is nothing special.

> you do need to have a natural talent for "coming up with stuff"

Where do you see that? Watching the documentary I see people who have been, for years, putting in the work. This is them going to work. Most people I know who have not met their songwriting goals do not put in the time, day after day, year after year.

Perhaps it's a little of both? But my takeaway from this scene was also more on the side of "this is how they did it: relentless hard work."

...but plenty of people put in the work and never come up with anything close to what the Beatles could. Including, it's worth considering, any of the fab 4 in their solo careers. Sure, there were a few hits. But nothing comparable to the insane productivity from when they were a band.

So it looks to me like the formula is: hard work + talent + band chemistry = hit making machine. And only the hard work portion of that is within anyone's control.

I think some of this is just that anything done in their solo careers was continually measured against the best of the Beatles output. If you look at the number of hits and records sold by McCartney and Wings, it's amazing. And John Lennon's solo stuff is legendary. I still think that "Imagine" is as good as any of the Beatles stuff. And the Beatles had what I consider a lot of poor songs as well. It's just that their sheer volume of outstanding songs made it easy to ignore the lesser ones.

> hard work + talent + band chemistry

There is an important component I think is necessary somewhere in there, maybe lumped under "talent:" and that is a link to the zeitgeist that would let them come up with popular content.

What if this band worked hard, was talented, worked great together, but had no idea of current events or what the currently popular music was to rebel against; and instead ended up cranking out baroque Bach-like classical pieces? I bet they would remain in obscurity.

There were a few points in the doc where some of the Beatles would come in saying "I was thinking about this song last night while watching TV" and they'd hum it out or play some of the notes in their head on the piano. We saw Paul mess around with the guitar in real time as he slowly put together the chords for Get Back. Moments like this, to me, feel like times where that natural talent is necessary.

Not to say that I'm particularly good at it, but this too is a muscle that gets better with time. I recently started playing music again with my highschool band. The guitarist worked at songwriting for the past 15 years and can now write out a song on demand, many of which are (in my opinion) great.

Even back then?

Right time, right place, right people.

Agree, the Great Man Theory puts too little emphasis on time and place.

I feel the Beatles wild success in the United States is linked to the incredible sadness in the U.S. after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. These four English lads were the Pollyannas that the country needed, clung to, to get out of their national funk.

I think that the success of the 'British invasion' groups in America is that it provided a safe way for mainstream Americans to listen to black musical genres.

The British musicians—who weren't as queasy about it—took R&B, Rock and Blues and played it back to the Americans from a safe distance.

Interesting theory. But isn’t this exactly what white American musicians were doing themselves? For instance, the Beatles started out imitating Elvis, who himself was largely a[n inferior] imitator of black American popular music.

Not by then. After Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis had their explosive starts in the late 50s (that went into pauses with cousin-marrying and military service), white music was determined to market versions of them with all the implications of blackness stripped out. Instead, you had teen idols and white doo wop groups singing "Mister Sandman, bring me a dream..." White rock and roll is dead until the British invasion, who consisted of people who gleefully mined US race/blues records (and Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis), and fed it back to Americans.

That's a bit of what the movie Hairspray was about. The pause, that is.

edit: honestly, rock and roll probably would have died then if it weren't for the British Invastion. The kids were getting into folk.

That makes sense. Thanks for laying it out. (And the Stones: I have the impression that Jagger became a bit of an ethnomusicologist.)

https://lithub.com/when-the-beatles-met-their-idol-elvis-pre...

(interesting find prompted by other, also interesting, answer)

They were imitating Little Richard a lot more than Elvis. In Get Back, they are mocking Elvis in a way that makes it clear that had been making fun of him this way for years.

The Beatles were inspired and constant fans of Elvis and his music.

https://daytrippin.com/2018/10/08/john-lennons-lifelong-obse...

Ahh, interesting. I’ll have to listen to that again.

It seems relevant that Jimi Hendrix only made it in the US as a "British invasion" act, after breaking through in the UK and securing the enthusiastic backing of McCartney, Clapton etc.

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