My Take …

… Why I think the Beatles, may be the best ever

John, Paul, George and Ringo. It has a cosmic ring to it. A cadence that says … this was meant to be. If you believe in such things, perhaps it was destiny that brought them together. Fate that drew them apart. And inevitable that they would not last forever. What they did, the music they made, the words they sang, left an indelible mark on our lives … well, certainly on mine.

You might agree, you might not. But this is my take on the Beatles and why I think they may be the best band ever.

It’s not just the Songs

She Loves Me, I Want to Hold Your Hand and others from the early days, are not exactly awe inspiring when you cue up some of the old Ed Sullivan Show footage and listen to them (or try to), over the screams of teenage girls in the audience. The songs were simple. They were different. They were coming from four young men that did not look anything like those we were seeing in our yearbooks in 1964.

The music from the British Invasion was an amalgamation of the Blues and early Rock and Roll, filtered through a British sensibility that stated- this is what American music really sounded like, if you hadn’t been born there. The British bands were far enough away from the societal restraints placed on the Blues and the musicians that played it, that they could simply feel the music, without having to agree or disagree with the politics that surrounded it.

The result — we got to hear the Blues or at least a version of it. The precursor to much of what is on the radio today.

The music that had been created within miles of many major cities in the US, and yet, might as well have been sung by dolphins, for all the attention and praise that it received.

The Beatles were not alone in translating our own music — in fact, other British groups like The Stones, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Eric Burden and the Animals, The Yardbirds, Savoy Brown and others, actually stuck closer to the roots of the music than the Beatles did.

But what the Beatles did, was musically and lyrically document the changes taking place in the world, and somehow managed to translate those feelings and attitudes into the songs they created; making it okay for younger people to disconnect from the world that was and begin to think that maybe, it was okay to move it somewhere else.

Their music wasn’t exactly the soundtrack for life in the 1960s, more like the accompanying music to several major scenes that impacted our lives. With the Vietnam War raging, and the American governments’ denial that it was actually taking place, many younger Americans were left in a state of What the Fuck. Add to this, Nixon’s existential conflict with either being a crook or a savior and you end up with a country in dire need of some peace of mind.

Peace and Love

Hey Jude, All You Need is Love, the Sergeant Pepper’s Album and the White Album, all collectively carved a new channel through the American psyche. A place where all the angst, and anger and heartache could be channeled, so that all people under the age of 30 at that time, didn’t implode from the madness that was taking place all around them. Their music gave us hope, a focus (aided at times by mind-altering substances) and a place to go when mom and dad and the Six O’clock News were all just a little too much to take.

Lasting Effect

A lot of great music came out of the 1960s. A lot of great bands that altered the way we looked at music and the way we listened to it on the radio. Bands from America, Great Britain, Europe and around the world all left their mark and we continue their legacy from that time period.

But if you think about it. If you were in possession of a Universal Editing Machine and had a little time on your hands and managed to delete the Beatles, their music, their images and their overall effect from our consciousness, do you believe that everything would remain relatively the same? Just as vibrant, just as self-aware?

I happened to feel that the world would be a little less colorful, a little less introspective. And perhaps a tad smaller and less forward thinking. I know, it’s hard to come up with a metrics for how Hey Jude affected the rise of Technology.

Or if Neil Armstrong would have successfully landed on the moon, if the Sergeant Pepper’s album had never been pressed. But in my humble opinion, I think the world would have been a little more inward thinking, a little more unwilling to detach from old ideas and probably still dragging their feet on getting rid of Disco.

Anyway, this is My Take on the Beatles. Thank you for stopping by.

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