The Beatles Are Overrated—Say what?

Beatles: Get Back poster image by Walt Disney Studios - The Beatles

The Beatles are overrated; that’s our fault, not theirs by Chris Richards in Wapo. Apologies, but the link won’t work unless you pay Uncle Jeff his subscription. Flying rockets into space is expensive.

Seems Richards didn’t sit well through the three segments of Peter Jackson’s documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. And I’m sure it’s Richards’s fault—for mailing in a lame music review. He gets some things right but closes his article by saying since 1969 there are newer songs by newer artists being created.

Let’s diagnose that, starting with the problem of an opinion with few citations provided. And his review is beside the point of Jackson’s documentary, and isn’t even about new creations with great lyrics, melodies, harmonies and all that other stuff the Beatles were known for—‘creating’ versus programmed, over-dubbed and cranked out.

Yes, of course there is good music today, but not like the Beatles, not like 1969.

For the record, I rarely listen to XM Sirius’ Beatles channel—too much phony babbling like it’s AM radio all over again and not enough of their music.

And I haven’t set up a Pandora station on the Beatles, though it has more potential. When you add a new Pandora ‘station,’ the algorithm (or the three geeks smoking whatever) decides ‘oh, he wants Beatles added all his stations,’ proceeding to drive me crazy, because I’ve never been in love with the Beatles’ entire catalog and would hope to never get Love, Love Me Do to follow a Gov’t Mule song on my Tedeschi Trucks station. Or the Mark Knopfler station since he’s another Brit. Pandora geeks, can you hear me?

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Evidently, Peter Jackson’s documentary trimmed 60 hours of film footage and 150+ hours of audio that had been hiding in the Apple archives since 1969, carving it into three segments totaling eight hours—which failed to impress Chris Richards. With Keith’s same last name? Hmm.

Some of Jackson’s edits pass by so subtly you hardly notice, like when the song in one scene carries through to the next that’s clearly changed so the story can move forward without hacking off the song. Don’t think Richards noticed that. What does he suppose Jackson spent all that time doing? Besides, watching a Peter Jackson film, you expect eight hours.

From bits of this and that, rough riffs, a few tunings and tons of wisecracks, debates between Paul and John, then Paul and George and back to Paul and John—they were going over everything from where they should perform to what they were creating on the fly, while sparking songs fragments you recognize but are not yet fully formed.

If one can witness genius in mid-flight creating something that will outlast us all, that’s not a big deal?

The slur against making sausage could apply, except this was soul music being prepared—or so it seemed when I first heard the album in college. John’s “I dig a pony” only makes sense amid the insanity of those years. No one past twenty was in on the joke. and George’s “I me mine” didn’t even go that deep.

The Beatles weren’t alone. In 1969, the rock & roll world both sides of the Atlantic was one overflowing musical fountain that would not turn off: Beatles, Cream, Stones, Traffic, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Buffalo Springfield, CSN&Y, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Santana, Allman Brothers, and they all were writing their own music. It was like sitting in a field of flowers, being able to pluck only the cream colored ones. I became a music snob living surrounded by such wealth.

I’ll admit never being an instant David Bowie fan—mainly because Mick had already done the androgynous pantomime thing way better and moved on. After seeing Mick crawl across the stage live, striking the floor with his long silk scarf, still singing, Bowie’s pale eyeliner wasn’t going to impress me if his lyrics couldn’t. And he never found the hard rock licks Keith Richards did.

When Jimi Hendriks took hold of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, he created an entirely new work.

I recall assuming my musical tastes were maturing all on their own, when in reality I was hearing the best rock & roll ever. Better than Elvis, better than Chuck Berry. I knew it was great, but I didn’t have a thought for whether it would last, this outpouring.

And Chris Richards thinks I’m overlooking what’s happening today? Not really, most of it’s just a lot less fun.

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Though the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s remake, Layla Revisited—all fourteen songs recorded live—is a feast. When you reach number 13 on the second CD when that inimitable guitar riff—that’s about as stirring as the original.

“ ‘By the time that I started playing guitar, the sound of Duane Allman’s slide was almost an obsession,’ Trucks said in a statement. ‘His playing on Layla is still one of the high-water marks for me. The spirit, the joy, the recklessness, and the inevitability of it. My dad would play that record for me and my brother to fall asleep to and further sear it into my DNA.’ ”

from Rolling Stone online magazine article

A Florida white boy channeling Duane Allman, another Florida white boy by way of Tennessee, while Susan Tedeschi, a white girl from Massachusetts who sings the blues—anyone yelling about ‘musical appropriation’ can stuff it. Like Knopfler said, “That’s how you do it…” only he was singing about MTV. A white Brit following on the heels of Clapton.

See, what these people had in common, what drove their dreams, was playing Black rhythm and blues. Yeah, they borrowed like mad. They stole from the best and made a piece of their own.

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“During the recording of the Layla album, Duane Allman joined Clapton's fledgling band as a guest. Clapton and Allman, already mutual fans, were introduced by Tom Dowd at an Allman Brothers concert on 26 August 1970. The two hit it off well and soon became good friends. Dowd said of their guitar-playing chemistry: ‘There had to be some sort of telepathy going on because I've never seen spontaneous inspiration happen at that rate and level. One of them would play something, and the other reacted instantaneously. Never once did either of them have to say, Could you play that again, please? It was like two hands in a glove. And they got tremendously off on playing with each other…’

“Clapton originally wrote Layla as a ballad, with lyrics describing his unrequited love for Boyd, but the song became a "rocker" when, according to Clapton, Allman composed the song's signature riff. With the band assembled and Dowd producing, Layla was recorded in its rock form. The recording of the first section consisted of sixteen tracks of which six were guitar tracks: a rhythm part by Clapton, three tracks of harmonies played by Clapton (the main power chord riff on both channels and two harmonies against that main riff, one on the left channel and one on the right channel), a track of solos by Allman (fretted solos with bent notes during the verses and a slide solo during the outro), and one track with both Allman and Clapton playing duplicate solos (the 7-note signature riff doubled in two octaves and the 12-note signature riff doubled in unison). According to Clapton, Allman played the first seven notes of the 12-note "signature" riff fretted and the last five notes on slide in standard tuning…

“Shortly afterwards, Clapton returned to the studio, where he heard Jim Gordon playing a piano piece he had composed separately. Impressed by the piece, Clapton convinced Gordon to allow it to be used as part of the song. Though only Gordon has been credited with this part, according to [Bobby] Whitlock, ‘Jim took that piano melody from his ex-girlfriend Rita Coolidge’...

“Layla's second movement (the Piano Exit) was recorded roughly a week after the first, with Gordon playing his piano part, Clapton playing acoustic guitar and slide guitar, and Allman playing electric and bottleneck slide guitar.” Wikipedia page on Layla

“Getting off” was slang for orgasms and drugs, and everyone understood how good those were. I used to get off listening to Layla, and that minor chord coda is plaintive without sliding into schmaltz. Clapton about killed himself on drugs and alcohol; Duane died on a motorcycle. In some ways, the Brit and the redneck were just too much alike.

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Watching Paul and John banter about vocals, and seeing George a bit off to the side, probably won’t shock anyone who followed their story, but what was missing from the Let It Be movie was how well they knew each other’s best talents; they didn’t need to work at it. In the early going, Paul appears to be critiquing and driving the process and John isn’t as engaged, though the longer they work, it shifts, and you realize why McCartney was driven to play music with him.

Artists such as Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler write and compose as individuals. Lennon and McCartney were a single brand. While it’s true they wrote more as a unit earlier than late, watch the documentary. They clearly were enjoying the process the more the songs were coming together. 

It’s quite possible, had they stayed together as a band, they’d have drifted off the line they’d been working down, Paul going towards his ‘silly love songs’ and John crying for peace and his mother, though I wonder. The magic they had as a band was more than harmonies in a blend. The compositions were so woven, it’s hard to tell where one let off and the other picked up.

Maybe it was just in the air back in 1969.

It’s been said George Martin’s production skills made the Beatles famous—but what the Jackson documentary shows are the four musicians working through every part of every song, time after time, intermixed with a musicologist’s catalog of oddball skiffle, English 50s pop, rockabilly, spontaneously played to blow off steam, seeming to distract themselves.

Eventually, it dawns—it’s deliberate, like doodling between infrequent lightning strikes, because once they found a song, they ran that puppy down. Seeming aimless rambles are what you’re invited to watch, hound dogs crisscrossing the trail finding enough of the scent to create two major albums.

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If I had to rate the Beatle’s output of albums, I’d rank Sgt. Peppers (1967), Abbey Road (1968), and the White Album (1969) then Let It Be (1970) in that order. Revolver (1965) and Rubber Soul (1966) showed where they were heading—away from pop toward something new for rock & roll. No more simple-to-explain Roll Over Beethoven.

From 1963 to 1970, the Beatles released twenty-two albums. Seven years and twenty-two albums. Not surprisingly, at several times in the documentary, you hear the burnout in the discussions. The fact they were so ambivalent about doing a live concert, or even how many songs they were serious about, the unwritten story board for the Let It Be movie was this was their swan song. What that movie got totally wrong, however, was that John, Paul, George and Ringo were still a melded song-writing machine with few peers, then or now.

The evolution from I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, Yeah, Yesh, Yeah to Day in the Life is how, over seven years, they increasingly took to their own path and didn’t frequently stray. In the same year they previously recorded Please Please Me, Bob Dylan did Blowin in the Wind and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. No one would try to equate these, and yet stepping back to consider, which was the greater societal impact? Equal? The Beatles played a key role in the musical spring following an endless winter after the Jazz Age.

Modern rock & roll was racing to evolve at the same time I was working hard to do the same. It felt as though those times were speeded up—and the Beatles exemplified how to ride the wave.

The Who had My Generation: “hope I die before I get old,” but the Beatles had Baby You Can Drive My Car: “I got no car and it’s breaking my heart, but I found a driver and that’s a start.” Sondheim might object to the phonetic but not true rhyming scheme, but hardly that dry wit. From there to the White Album and While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Happiness Is a Warm Gun, Blackbird, I’m So Tired…

“… he’s such a stupid get.” and now I’m coming back around to Chris Richards. OK, maybe his review isn’t all bad…

Abbey Road begins abruptly. Come Together has one of those seminal rock & roll declaratives, followed by Harrison’s Something. Laying that record on a turntable any time meant I was listening to both sides.

The driven urgency of the second side of Abbey Road can be set against anything before or after in our age. Beginning with Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun and finishing with “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make,” with Paul, John and George in their most angelic voices. It may not be Socrates, but go find a more sincere take on this place we write so furiously about as it turns.

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Let It Be was their last album recorded as a band, and when you watch the multiple film cuts on the Abbey Road Studio roof, it’s just the four of them playing with young Billy Preston on keyboards. None of Preston’s mates were strumming and lip-synching. This was a live band.

You don’t play that tight from studio work. Despite the rap that their albums were all products of sound mixers and tape loops. They didn’t want to do 10,000 seat stadiums any longer, with screaming crowds and poor acoustics, but this was a band that played how many shows in the past, and the magic was still theirs.

Lennon comes alive—the showman once again—and his single-note themes sail beyond rhythm chords; his playing as fluidly as any lead guitarist. The notes are ones he’d honed himself. McCartney walks his bass like a supporting melody in a lower register, and Harrison is over top of them both. In an arrest-me-red slicker, Ringo is judiciously applying emphasis with his rhythm, smiling into the wind with hair in his face, happy to be there. Off to the side, nearly hidden, Bill Preston’s fingers on the keyboard stand for him.  Their last live performance as a band.

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Seriously, Chris. Buddy, we need to talk. I know you were working on your closing with that last bit, but you coulda used a better editor.

I’ll bet your best drug of choice, providing it’s legal, that we can sit there, me one chair over—not saying nothing until it’s over, and I won’t even cry. I’ll even share my best Balvenie single malt if you promise not to make sarcastic comments. After, you can write your retraction, humble-pie like.