We turn now to the idea of the movement from craftsmen to artists, in the music of the Beatles and not just the Beatles but we'll, we can see this and other artists, but we'll use the Beatles as a good example because they were a leading example from all this. The idea of craftsman is that, once you learn to do something, and you learn to do it well, you repeat that. So think about somebody who makes tables for a living, for example, they find a very a great way to do a dovetail-joint on a table and it works perfectly and produces the results. They, what do they do? They repeat that element of craft in every table they make after that, they found a good way of doing that, they do it that way again and again and again. That's considered an aspect of craft. They don't say, well, I've built one table that way, I couldn't possibly build another one that way, I would just be repeating myself. Well, that sounds comical right? But, if you think of what an artist does, the worst thing you can say about an artist, is, oh, "he's, he's just rewriting the same symphony over and over again" or, "She's just, recording the same song over and over again". When you say that, you're basically saying, by repeating something they've already done, they have no originality, they're not doing anything new, it's a weakness. So, this the idea of craftsmen where things are found, where you find a good way of doing something and you repeat it over and over again and the idea of the artist, where you're constantly struggling for new things and you don't want to be accused of repeating yourself to much these things are sort of opposed to each other and what we find in the music of The Beatles and many other artists in the mid 60's is a movement from craftsmen to artist or crafts person, if you prefer. for the Beatles, craftsman means, being songwriters in the tradition of American popular song, so if you want to check out some of their early, Beatles music that really kind of does the brill building kind of thing, great examples are Please Please Me from 1963 and I Want to Hold Your Hand from 1964. These are really a very typically constructive kinds of pieces, they have Beatles charm, they have Beatles emphasis and that kind of thing but most of what they are, are, are brill building type pop songs. Already though by A Hard Day's night,which was the summer of 1964, the release, which recorded a few months earlier, you can start to see the small signs that they're starting to push at those boundries, they're looking for ways to do things that are more creative, starting to the first inklings of the move toward the artist approach. By 1965, in, in large part through the influence of Bob Dylan you begin to see them in songs like Help, You've got to hide your love away, both John songs from 65 and Yesterday from Paul, you begin to see that the lyrics start to get more serious, they actually met Dylan in the fall of 1964 and why, the reason why I, I, I point out the date is because, as we'll find out in next week's class, Bob Dylan didn't really become a big star in his own right as a singer and a performer until the summer of 1965. But the albums that appear earlier than that were known within the folk community but you really sort of had to be in the know to know about them and the Beatles were, they admired Dylan, he, he spoke with John and Paul, they got together and he urged them to do more with their lyrics than just talk about I love you, she loves me, I hold your hand, she loves your kissy kissy, and start to get into things that were more serious matters. So the first, the first signs we see of that, really, are starting to happen on Help, the album Help from 1965. As I say help, You've got to hide your love away yesterday. There's a certain type of form that popular song writers use called the AABA form. That form type goes way back in American popular music. It's not the only one that's used, but it's an important one that's used by a lot of American songwriters and we're talking about people like Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, I mean, all kinds of the traditional Tin Pan Alley composers. If you look at the first four Beatles records, and the singles that go with it, there is, there are a lot of AABA forms. In fact, it's kind of the default form, you kind of count on the fingers of both hands the number of songs that don't do AABA form. I, I don't, the percentage is something like 75 or 80%. They didn't just stumble onto the AABA form and keep doing it over and over again, they knew what it was because they'd studied this music and they were replicating it and I think proud too. But what you start to see as the 60's unfold is fewer and fewer of those AABA forms. As they start to get ambitious with the lyrics, as different kind of instrumentation starts to come into their music, the form also starts to change as they get away from the brill building mentality and go towards something that is more sort of artistically inspired and so if you get to 1965 and 1966, in 65, you get a song like Norwegian Wood, which is formally like nothing they've ever done before. Tonely, it's like nothing they've ever done before, tells an interesting kind of story from beginning to end, the first use of the sitar you see instrumentation coming in. 19 66 we get Eleanor Rigby which is sort of Paul's song about existential angst and, and alienation and this kind of thing. For No One, a song about a broken marriage that uses that uses a French horn, kind of in anticipation of the piccolo trumpet he'll use in Penny Lane, later in 1966, early in 1967. Eleanor Rigby, by the way, uses the strings, it's kind of the the, the continuation of what he was doing with Yesterday but now, the song and the string arrangement is a little bit edgier and of course, Tomorrow Never Knows at the end of the Revolver album, 1966 is filled with John Lennon reciting lyrics drawn from Timothy Learie's, The Psychadelic Experience, which are in turn, drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and we've got tape loops going on, and it's just like nothing they've ever done before. It's a, it's a very, there's a very big stylistic difference, between I want to Hold Your Hand, and Tomorrow Never Knows, but they're really only separated by about two years, maybe a little over two years time. And the distance from, I want to Hold Your Hand, to Tomorrow Never Knows, is the distance from craftsmen to artists, and that's what happens in the Beatles' music. They're not the only ones, though. in the 60s, what the Beatles are doing, a lot of other artists are doing, the Beach Boys are doing with surf music, we'll talk about that next week. Brian Wilson, Dylan is doing his music, and a lot of the groups who are imitating the Beatles are doing it as well. But they, they serve as an example to show us how this, how this trajectory happens, as this starts to happen and as artists start to think of their, rock musicians start to think of themselves more as artists than as crafts persons. a new kind of aesthetic begins to develop in rock and roll and it's what we might call authenticity in rock. What this means is this, you write your own songs which really are about who you are and what you feel or think, you play your own instruments on the records, you don't depend on studio musicians to play things, it's really you on the records. You're really writing songs about what you really think, and you're really playing them, that's considered authentic. So, when get to to, already when we're getting into 1966 and 1967, and it, the truth comes out that the Monkees records, for example, they're not even playing on them, it's studio musicians. All of a sudden That's considered you know, scandalous. It shows how inauthentic Monkey's music is you know, how sort of cynically music business crafts-person like it is. But, you know, just a couple years earlier, The Byrds, who are kind of one of the icons of musical authenticity released a tune called Mr Tambourine Man, the only guy playing on the record that's, that's in the band is Roger McGuinn playing on a 12 string. The rest of the guys are studio guys. All that Beatles, all that Beach Boy stuff from Pet Sounds, those are all studio musicians playing that. But, you can see that one, it gets to a point where it gains critical mass, and then, it's always the musicians themselves playing on the record, if it's not, it's inauthentic. It also means, authenticity means that you at least appear to be in control of your image, you really are who you seem to be. You're not playing a role, you're not putting on a mask, you're being authentic, you're being real, and, it's, it's very important that, that you project that. And the, the last element of it as we've been talking about with regard to the Beatles, is you strive to progress, as an artist, there's no repeating, always moving forward, that's, that's where you go. You're always trying to do something new, something different, always trying to expand. Although, with the one exception that it is possible to go back to your roots, right, it's always possible to simplify and go back to your roots because that's seen as a sign of authenticity. But what you can't do, is just repeat the same thing that was successful for you before again, and again and again. By the time we get to the late 60's, and certainly into the 1970's almost everybody is operating as, at least in FM rock, almost everybody is operating according to this aesthetic of authenticity that I just outlined. But you know what, in the first half of the 60's, coming out of the 50's, up until about 1965 nobody was, it was still the old brill building idea of this grass roots movement from craftsmen to artists habits and The Beatles music but it happens over all in the history of rock music. In fact when we get to 1967, 1968 and 1969, we will start talking about that in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about how FM rock continues this authenticity attitude but AM rock, which is where, this is about the time AM and FM split off, AM continues to be very singles oriented very kind of brill building approach, that kind of thing, and FM rock is album oriented artists, the aesthetic of authenticity, these kinds of things. Well having talked about that, let's now turn to the rise of blues in the UK or the, the revival of blues in the UK, and how that will lead to groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.
