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To be even more blasphemous, I would argue that people like Link Wray, The Velvet Underground, and The Stooges had much more influence on what is now popular in "modern rock" than the Beatles or even the Stones

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Right you are, Dave!

I just received the new Green Day DVD "Bullet In A Bible". Possibly the best Rock concert I've ever seen and Green Day has acheived pop stardom in spite of themselves!

Stooges --> Ramones --> Green Day.

Terry

Edited to say that Green Day is more melodic than most punk rock bands - probably a Beatles influence.

[This message was edited by Terry Edwards on 31 December 2005 at 01:55 PM.]

Jim Cohen:

Yes! When Jerry Lee Lewis played on that BBC Radio session, the Beatles (and us, I might add) were in awe of him, and tried to ply him with dumb questions - he was singularly unimpressed with any of us, however....

It might be hard for Americans to see it as we did, but for us America was the fount of all good music, especially back in the early '60s. In the '50s, the only ground-breaking and creative British artiste was Lonnie Donegan; all other UK 'r'n'r' acts were a pale copy of Elvis. The American records just sounded so much better than ours, too. So, even 'though by '64 the Beatles were huge in Britain, they still held the US pioneers in great esteem.

My first encounter with them was in January, '63. We were rehearsing at a ballroom in Hull in the north-east of England when John and Paul walked in.
'Are you'se playing here tonight?' said Paul.
'Yes', I said.
'F***!', said John - 'We've driven all the way from Liverpool - our agent's screwed up!!!'

(I checked in the 'Beatles Chronicles' and it STILL says that they played at the Majestic, Hull, that day. Wrong!) We were pleased to meet them, though - 'Please Please Me' (son of 'Cathy's Clown') had just jumped in the charts that week, and we, as mere sidemen to a pop-star, were pretty impressed that a group could pull that off!

As for the Beatles influences, I got a good insight when I did a TV show with George Harrison in '76; we sat in the BBC Club at Lime Grove and talked guitars and music for a few hours! It was no surprise to learn that he and I (being the same age) loved all the same things - Chet (that's why he had a Gretsch!), the Everlys, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee, Scotty Moore, and many others

Anyone interested in the real genesis of British pop/rock should study the career of Lonnie Donegan - you simply can't imagine what a huge effect he had on all of us who are now in our sixties. The Beatles were no exception.

A 'PS' for Doug B.:

Yes, that concert was a bit daunting! In March, 1964, the Stones had already scored with a couple of hits, and the Beatles were obviously the biggest thing in music. Eden Kane (my job) had won 'best single', or something, so we had to plough through a few songs while ten thousand girls shrieked for the Beatles!

We did a four week tour in '65 with The Stones, and they had their first #1 with 'Not Fade Away' while we were on the road. As a result, we lost our top-billing spot half way through the tour.....

RR

[This message was edited by Roger Rettig on 01 January 2006 at 04:17 PM.]

I must respectfully disagree re: Gretsch. At the point that they appeared on Ed Sullivan's show, Gretsch were on pretty shaky ground but, overnight, orders for 'Country Gentleman' guitars went through the ceiling. It didn't ultimately save the old Gretsch company, but it gave them a 'stay of execution'. This has been well-documented in a couple 'Gretsch story' books.

I don't disagree that George himself didn't really become a 'guitar god', but that's quite refreshing in a way. I didn't know him at all well, but he remained a humble individual, and was very modest about his own abilities.

I was playing guitar and steel in 'Pump Boys & Dinettes' at the Alberry Theater in the West End of London in '84, when the stage-door man told me that I had a visitor. I was very pleasantly surprised to find George waiting to say 'hello' to me. (You can bet THAT raised my 'stock' with the cast and crew!!!) Anyway, George always acknowledged me, and we met a handful of times over the years. I think it was the pedal steel connection that fascinated him.

Having re-read my earlier posts, I'm rather afraid that this all sounds like flagrant name-dropping! Please understand that, while these encounters meant very little in the early '60s, I've come to appreciate that I/we had a unique perspective of what came to be important music history. I'm not a fan, by any means, but I enjoy their records more today than I ever did.

I did a tour of 'Best Little Whorehouse...' last year, and the 20-something year-old drummer, Matt Crawford (a GREAT player!) turned out to be the most insanely obsessed Beatle afficionado I'd ever met. Once, at a wild London party in '65, I made a grab for the last turkey-leg on the buffet, and an outraged Lennon called me a very rude name.... When I recounted this to Matt, he said: "Oh, man, that's fantastic!!! John Lennon called you a ****!!!!"

With a reaction like that, it's sort-of hard to resist telling the stories....

I think George was a guitar hero in 1967. It's just that he's been eclipsed by others for many years now, and we've forgotten. He was always extremely tasty, if not flashy.

I have a later Baldwin Country Gent with real f holes. I also had a "real" one (a '67) at one time but I felt that the Baldwin was the better of the 2, so I kept it and sold the other one.

I find that different guitars inspire me to play differently. For years I used a Tele exclusively, and when I played the signature line from Day Tripper, it worked on the Tele, but when I played it on the Country Gent it felt right. There is something about that guitar that makes the line fall right into place in a way that it doesn't on a tele.

Makes me wonder if George might have come up with a different line if he had been playing a different guitar.

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[This message was edited by Mike Perlowin on 01 January 2006 at 11:00 PM.]

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[This message was edited by Beatlegeek John McGann on 03 January 2006 at 01:05 PM.]

I believe George played his Tennesseean longer than the Country Gentleman, and preferred it. The "Ed Sullivan" Country Gentleman was destroyed when it fell off the boot of a car, where it had been strapped down (not quite well enough, apparently).

[This message was edited by Rick McDuffie on 04 January 2006 at 08:44 AM.]

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Musically, what they did was to incorporate more complex chord progressions from more mainstream pop music. There is some very nice stuff, but I don't see this as revolutionary in the same sense as early jazz, bebop, the great early tunesmiths from tin pan alley...

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Notwithstanding that it's difficult to rank across styles which musical innovations are more revolutionary, professional musicologists do consider the Beatles' writers to be the modern heirs to those great tunesmiths Dave mentions.

There are several analyses of their work, including at least one of book length. A few shortened versions are available online, including Semantic shifts in Beatles' chord progressions. This gets fairly dense in academic prose, but here's an interesting excerpt:

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It is not the chords themselves, but the chord sequences that are at the core of the sound of the Beatles. Their unorthodoxy on this point made it so difficult for other groups — especially for those with a blues background — to cover their songs. It still is responsible for the ongoing debate on which chord is which in a specific Beatles' song...

Earlier on the style of popular music found some support in cadences, standard chord progressions like the turnaround [I -» vi -» IV -» V] and its many variants, and the chain of fifths or turn-back [VI7 -» II7 -» V7 -» I] (Van der Merwe, 1989). In the first few years of their career the Beatles discarded the support of these cadences (Kramarz, 1983: 132). At the start of their career as songwriters their favorite way of doing this, was by inserting unexpected chords. Later on, as a result, in their hands the cadences crumbled into pieces. Sometimes by turning into unpredictable chord sequences; sometimes to the effect of becoming "harmonic ostinato's," repeated combinations of just two chords (Middleton, 1990: 282). At the end of 1964, the songs on the album "Beatles for Sale" show that the Beatles could do without the support of these cadences. Piecing chords together seemed their way of composing. Or, as MacDonald (1994: 10) says: "In short, they had no preconceptions about the next chord, an openness which they consciously exploited (...)."

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Another essay examines some of the very points we've been discussing here regarding derivative music. Summary:

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Every writer of rock music, one way or the other, is reworking the lines of earlier songs. Even in their most innovative compositions the Beatles too were using the style components of the songs they had heard and loved. In some special cases, they even — unconsciously — made new songs out of some older ones, as Ian Hammond here shows for the McCartney compositions "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Yesterday". As the masterprint of the former, he unearths "When The Saints (Go Marching In)". For the latter — the song for which sources composer Paul McCartney himself sought in vain for a whole month — Hammond points at Ray Charles' version of that other old sweet song: "Georgia On My Mind".

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But Yesterday and Georgia?
Is this wrong, or am I'm missing something?

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I don't think anybody here has argued that the Beatles didn't create some great music. Frankly, "significance" and "innovation" are pretty amorphous concepts. There are academics out there trying to come up with "innovation" and "influence" metrics, to give a basis to algorithmically compute innovativeness and influence. I dunno - I can see how it's probably possible to do, but I'm not so sure how it's particularly relevant, especially in the arts, where emotional reaction is such a large part of it.

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YMMV.

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It does.

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