The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.
The Beatles are Coming!
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The Music of the Beatles
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From the lesson
Success in America and the World
The Beatles begin to move toward the artist model. Music from A Hard Day's Night, Beatles For Sale, and singles from this period. From this point on we will closely follow particular authorship of songs, keeping track of John, Paul, and George as individual songwriters.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Let's take a look at how The Beatles' first success in America unfolded for
them in their career and what that meant for their music and for really
their ability to sort of change and
affect the popular music world in so many of the ways that they did.
As I was talking about last week, Capitol Records
in Los Angeles was the label that was a subsidiary of EMI.
It was owned by EMI in UK and of course, Parlophone, the label that The Beatles
recorded for in the UK was also an EMI company.
So it would've seemed the easiest thing in the world for
Capitol to release these Beatles recordings in 1963 when they were having
all the hits, but Capitol wouldn't do that.
We'll come back to that in just a minute but what's important about 1964, is that
at the very end of 63, they decided they would release I Want to Hold Your Hand.
It was released in late December 1963 but in order to sell the record they figured
they had to mount a pretty good publicity campaign because, as we'll talk about
in just a minute, British groups had not had tremendous success in this country.
So they thought it was going to be a real challenge.
So they mounted a big publicity campaign, The Beatles are coming,
The Beatles are coming!
They released I Want to Hold Your Hand, with all their resources of distribution
in the United States, and the ability to get this song played on the radio.
It became a hit by the end of January 1964,
it was at the top of the American charts.
Fortuitously for The Beatles, it just turns out that they had
previously booked themselves to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show on February the 9th.
In fact, Brian Epstein booked them for three weeks in a row,
starting on Sunday February the 9th, 1964.
And so, just at about the time they came for
their first big television performance, in early February,
they had a number one hit record in this country, how convenient.
So you talk about something happening overnight.
It wasn't exactly overnight, but in the course of about six weeks between I Want
to Hold Your Hand rising in the charts and The Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan.
They really did make a fantastic impression and
broke through in this country like no UK act had ever done.
Just to give you an idea of how big that first rush of Beatlemania
was in the United States.
They had multiple, many of their UK singles and
album tracks were re-released in the US.
So that, I Want to Hold Your Hand had success,
all of a sudden there was really two whole albums plus singles worth of UK
material that hadn't been released in this country.
There was just a flood of it onto the market, both by Capitol and
by VJ who you may remember, owned the rights to distribute some of this stuff.
So you got She Loves You going to number one,
I Want to Hold Your Hand had already gone to number one,
Please Please Me went to number three, I Saw Her Standing There went to number 14.
In fact, if we just take a snapshot of The Beatles' success picture
on April the 4th of 1964, The Beatles had 12 singles on the Billboard Chart.
They had positions number one, two, three, four, five.
The top five positions were all Beatles singles on the chart plus 31,
41, 46, 58, 65, 68, and 79.
They had the top two albums in the country,
Meet the Beatles on Capitol and Introducing the Beatles on VJ.
It probably hasn't been since Elvis Presley that the pop music
business had seen such a gigantic,
overwhelming kind of success as the Beatles had in that first rush.
Now let's get back to talking about why it is that Capitol didn't see this,
why it took the fifth Beatles UK hit, for
them to sort of get the idea that maybe they would sell records in the US.
Well the Capitol idea that British artists just can't sell in this
country might have been wrong in the case of The Beatles but it was well
reasoned on the evidence of the way things had unfolded during the last ten years.
Now it's true there had been some UK artists who'd had big hits in America.
But I wouldn't exactly say like a fluke, but there were very few.
Now we've already talked about Lonnie Donegan's Rock Island Line going to number
eight in this country in 1956.
We could add a pop song, though not rock and roll,
by any stretch of the imagination, by Acker Bilk called Stranger on the Shore.
That went to number one in 1962.
And an interesting precursor to The Beatles, is the song, Telstar,
an instrumental called Telstar by a group called The Tornados.
They actually had been the backing band for
Billy Fury if you remember has a Liverpool connection because one of
the Larry Parnes artists coming out of Liverpool.
That went to number one in this country and number one in the UK in 1962,
produced by Joe Meek who is these days thought of as a sort of overlooked but
very important English record producer from the first part of the 1960s.
So Telstar, a big record there, but
besides those there weren't a lot of British artists on the pop charts.
And it wasn't just Capitol that thought that.
The Beatles themselves believed this.
They told Brian Epstein, we won't go to the US unless we have a hit record there.
Because they had seen other British artists, or
heard about other British artists, going to the US and having big hits in the UK
and getting absolutely nowhere with their careers in the US.
The best example of that is Cliff Richard.
During the period of 1958 through 1963,
Cliff Richard had 27 hit singles in the UK.
But he could not get a significant hit
record in the US during that period of time.
He was as big as a British artist could possibly be in the period immediately
preceding The Beatles, yet he really couldn't break the ice here in the US.
And so the Beatles didn't want to do that.
They figure if Cliff can't get a hit, how are they gonna do it?
So they told Brian Epstein, if we don't have a hit we're not gonna go to the US.
So as it turns out, when The Beatles found out that they had a hit on
Capitol Records in January of 1964,
they were actually in France playing a series of theater shows in Paris for
what was probably an audience maybe a little bit older and
more tuxedo-clad than the usual kinds of kids that they
saw at the Cavern Club in Liverpool just a couple of years earlier.
Why were they there?
They were trying to build a French following.
They already had a big thing going in the UK, so
they were thinking about the continent.
And so they were playing this series of gigs in France, in Paris,
hoping to sort of establish themselves in the French pop scene.
At the same time they were doing that,
they were going to a studio where Brian Epstein and George Martin
had the idea that what they needed to do was take the lyrics from She Loves You and
I Wanna Hold Your Hand and do them again but in German.
So they could sell records on the German pop market because, of course,
My Bonnie and all of that had happened not too much before this.
And so the idea in their minds was,
they had this single being released in America, but
they were working on building their French following and their German following.
Of course when everything worked out the way it did in the United States what they
were going to do with French and Germany at the time didn't really matter because
this eclipsed all that and engulfed it and really became something so much bigger.
So how is it that they ended up on the Ed Sullivan Show
just at the time I Want to Hold Your Hand was being released by Capitol and
going to the top of the charts?
Well, this all seems to go back to an incident,
late October, early November, when Ed Sullivan or
one of his representatives was delayed at Heathrow Airport because The Beatles
were coming back from a trip to appear on television.
One of those shows, Sunday Night at the London Palladium or
the Royal Command performance.
And there were so many fans on the tarmac when The Beatles'
plane came in they had to temporarily ground all flights because
they were afraid one of these kids was gonna get hurt.
And so, either Sullivan or one of his representatives were sitting on one of
those planes wanting to know what was going on and got it explained it to them.
It was a British pop group and they saw the mania themselves.
And so, this gave Brian Epstein a little bit of a inside track to get the group
booked on the Ed Sullivan Show.
He booked them an unprecedented three weeks as headliners.
Now, as it turns out, they did other shows when they were in this country.
They played one in DC, I think they played a show in Carnegie Hall.
But basically, they played the Sullivan Show on February the 9th and
then they took a trip down to Miami.
Ed Sullivan always liked to do a couple weeks of his show in Miami during
the wintertime, and, why not?
And so they went down and they did the next week in Miami and
then filmed yet a third performance, which was then aired the week after that.
So, three weeks in a row they headlined The Ed Sullivan Show.
One biographer says that Brian Epstein did this entire trip at a loss.
He used his family resources to underwrite this entire thing and
there was no way that the amount of money they made from those shows actually paid
for the expenses of it.
So he went out of pocket to put this thing on.
But a pretty good investment, cuz these Ed Sullivan Shows and the records and all
these things that exploded really ended up paying off big time for everybody.
Might be, as we think about this Ed Sullivan Show thing,
a good time to point out, and I think I mentioned this last week as well,
that Beatles gear made a big difference.
That is, the kinds of guitars and
drums The Beatles were playing actually increased sales for the companies.
So for example after The Beatles performed on Ed Sullivan,
fans were buying up Beatles gear.
So people wanted to have a Gretsch Guitar like George Harrison was playing,
he was playing a Chet Atkins Country Gentleman model.
John Lennon had a Rickenbacker Guitar, a Rickenbacker 325.
Paul McCartney had a Hofner Bass, that famous violin or
viola shaped bass that you often see him with.
Ringo had Ludwig Drums and you could clearly see the Ludwig Logo just above
the big Beatle's logo on his bass drum.
You couldn't see the Vox guitar amps on Ed Sullivan, but
it came to be known that they were playing Vox guitar amps.
And then as we get into talking about Hard Day's Night,
we'll see that the jingle jangle of George Harrison's Rickenbacker 12-string guitar
made a very big difference as well.
And so, even musical instrument companies experienced a boom because
of the success of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
And all of those people wanted to have guitars just like The Beatles.
In fact, George Harrison loves to tell a story.
i don't know how true it is,
but he tells it in The Beatles Anthology that statistics were that during the time
The Beatles where on the Ed Sullivan Show that first night February 9th,
crime in the city of New York actually went down significantly.
So as George liked to say, even the criminals stopped for
a minute, to watch The Beatles.
Well, whether or not that's true or just a fun story, who knows?
But as we head into the next lecture, we'll see how The Beatles tried to
capitalize on that success by going into the movies,
the next lecture being The Beatles in the movies.
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