Welcome to week four of The Music of The Beatles here on Coursera. This week we're going to be dealing with a lot of music, a lot of albums here. We're going to be dealing with Revolver, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Magical Mystery Tour and the singles that are involved with it. So it's going to be a lot of material for us to get through. So many great songs it's just not possible to give all of the music its due. Really that's been the case really all the way up to now and will probably be that way for the rest of the course. The main points that, that I'll try to make this week are, we've been talking in the weeks leading up to this about how the Beatles are making after a Hard Days Night beginning to make a kind of a transition to being craftsmen to being artists. It's with this week and these albums, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper's, Magical Mystery Tour that we really see this artist model really become much more dominate. Although as I'll often show, it's not like they abandoned their pop sensibility or their pop craftsmanship, so there's a, there's a blend of those things. But really, much more the artist model and much more ideas of authenticity taking hold in popular music that we talked about last week and in leading up to this. So in these first couple videos we'll focus mostly on 1966. And the later videos this week we'll deal with, we'll get into 1967 with the Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and the Summer of Love. So, let's talk a little bit about the time leading up to Revolver and especially, some of the things that are going on in the Beatles biography. One of the most important elements of the Beatles biography comes up in the summer of 1966. The Beatles have got another one of their tours you know, where they go around in matching suits to screaming girls and, and this kind of thing, going across this country. But the touring gets ugly when an article when it comes out in the American Press when John Lennon seems to have said that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. And this causes a real scandal during the summer tour of 1966. This scandal is pushed by AM radio, especially in the south, in the Bible belt of the United States. They would have Beatle bonfires where radio stations would do promotions by trying to get people to come down into the city square or some sort of central meeting place. And sort of dump all their Beatles stuff off and they would have a big bonfire and really sort of showing how they were against this idea of the Beatles being Bigger than Jesus. I'll get back to the story about that in just a minute. There was also a scare and a kind of shake down that happened to The Beatles when they when they traveled to the Philippines. A misunderstanding about whether they were supposed to be at an official function for Imelda in honor of Imelda Marcos they didn't turn up. it, it went, it went down very badly. They were afraid they weren't going to get out of the country. They got out of the country but most of their money didn't money they'd made on that leg of the tour didn't make it. At least according to report. But from, from the artistic point of view, the real gap really starts to open up between between what the group is able to do in the studio and what they're able to do live. And as people who as I've been talking about, have reinvested a lot of their success in R&D, or research and development. You might say, taking advantage of the fact that they're so successful to try new things in the studio. They're starting to get to the point where some of the things they're, they're recording they really aren't able to do live. And the, the tours have turned into such a, kind of a negative experience for them overall. They're really pretty much tired of the Beatlemania thing. That they do their last real kind of moptop Beatle show in San Francisco in August of 1966. That's usually thought of as when The Beatles retire not entirely from live performance. because there will be other live performances after this. But they really retire from the touring routine. That has been a part of their lives really ever since going back to 1963. When they first really hit it really big in the UK. The album Revolver is released in August of 1966. It's an album that had been recorded and was really pretty much ready to go before they went on the summer tour. So for a moment there, there were really kind of, two Beatles. There were the Beatles of the studio and of which Revolver is a pretty good representation, experimental, we'll talk about that in just a minute, all kinds of interesting things going on. And then you've got the Beatles who would show up to do these mop top shows, you know, which would essentially be parred down to just the songs they could do with two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. And really, nobody was listening anyway, they were mostly screaming, and that was that was not very artistically or musically fulfilling for the guys. And then at the very end of 1966 after taking a break after the tour and the release of Revolver. They begin, sessions for a new album, the one that will eventually be Sergeant Pepper, but initially it was thought of as an album reflecting on their childhood and their upbringing in Liverpool. Let me just flesh out the story about John and the Bigger Than Jesus scandal a little bit. Because I think it's important in understanding a kind of turning point, especially for a guy like John Lennon in the, in the career of the Beatles but also in his career as an artist. The way it had gone is early in the year, I think it was late 65, or earlier 66. He had done a Sunday newspaper interview with a journalist they knew, was a good friend of theirs called Maureen Cleve. And in this it was called how a, this is how a Beetle lives, how a beetle lives, something like that, should, you should be able to find something like that without any trouble, on the internet, She asked him a whole variety of questions about things. Now, you have to understand that in the UK at that time, most of you who are taking a course from the UK and who are old enough to remember. Will remember that there was kind of a controversy going on at, at, at that time in the 60's about about religion, and about popular music. About religion and about a lot of things in popular culture, including birth control and various kinds of physicists, that were, you know, with the Vatican to reforms, and the church of England's added to the, various kind of things. There was a lot of debate even on You know, Sunday shows, Sunday morning debates between clergymen about you know, about what the role of popular culture should be in the church, and why the church seems to be losing ground with young people and this kind of thing. And the idea that popular music is sort of evil and leads kids down the road to perdition. And this kind of thing is hardly new in rock, but as we saw plenty of that, back in the 1950s in the United States where a lot of kids were listening to rock and roll, they were losing their soul to the devil. So, there was that kind of talk, and so it was only natural that she should ask him, well, what do you think about that. In his his response, if in fact the response is accurate in Maureen Cleave article was something like, well, you know, if there was a church service on one side of the street and a Beatles concert on the other side of the street there would be a lot more people at the Beatles concert. He says, John Lennon says, he meant to really sort of emphasize the fact that popular music and popular culture was so much more important to young people than the Beatles. Not, was no kind of a bragging thing where he was trying to say we're bigger than Jesus. But when the story got loose in the United States, and a lot of people trying to exploit it further on gain and maybe sort of willfully misreading or whatever. It all of a sudden became Beatles bigger, Beatle John says Beatles bigger than Jesus. And this turned what was already a crazy situation around their touring into something very, very dangerous. Remember that it's the four Beatles, traveling with Bryan Epstein and Mel Evans and Neil Aspinall there I go, six or seven of them in a party. And their gong from place to place. George Martin talks about having seen them a number of times where it would have been very easy with some, for somebody with a rifle to really pick off any one of the Beatles on stage. And this is not so long really after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 so it's not like such a thing wouldn't have been on people's minds. And of course just after all of this we had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. So the idea is that the Beatles got into a very dangerous situation the Klu Klux Klan actually threatened to provide sort of surprises at those shows. What exactly that's going to mean, bombs or attacks or whatever. And, you know, it just got really, really ugly. The Beatles were tired of it and so Lennon was forced to give a not forced to give but it was thought wise that he should give an apology. And it was a very traumatic thing for the accounts are that after he gave this press conference, he broke down. And I think in many ways for a guy like John Lennon, it kind of cemented his dedication to doing whatever he was going to do with his art even if people didn't like it. Maybe even in some cases, especially if people didn't like it, and this only lit more of a fu more of a, a fire underneath the movement already toward the artist thing, that was going on with the Beatles. For them, for all of them except maybe Paul who was reluctant to stop touring, they were all ready to be done with this. They just had to recast the band. It's no longer this sort of live, sort of act that they've been doing ever since in the [INAUDIBLE] and the cavern club days and turned it into a studio group that would, that would record in the studio. So that, that transition all happens in 1966. And the first fruit of it really is Penny Lane and Strawberry Field, that double A-sided single they brought out in early 1967. And of course, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, that classic album from the summer of 67. Really is the sort of the big product of this change we see happening in 1966. As we look over the year lets take a look at some of the music in terms of the singles. This gives us a kind of a sense of what was happening over 19 66. In early 1966 we had well at the end of 1965 remember the big single that had come out with Rubber Soul had been Day Tripper with We Can Work It Out, kind of a double A-sided single. Well, in February, a couple more tracks from that album were released as singles. Nowhere Man. Back with, with What Goes On. And then in April they brought out" Paperback Writer", mostly a Paul song, well, well that was recorded in April. But it was released in June of 1966 went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic to US and the UK. Paperback Writer, I'll just say something about it just a minute here is that the guit, it's got a guitar intro that very much reminds us of things like Day Tripper, I Feel Fine, Ticket to Ride, Eight Days A Week the kind of guitar intro song is another one sort of along that string of tunes. The song is loosely written about John Lennon or a guy like John Lennon sort of writing book remember we mentioned before that John had already had published two of his collections of writings by this time. And so if you listen to the background vocals at one point in the song they're singing the song Frere Jacques Brother John right? Sort of as a reference to him. The, the B side of Paperback Writer is a tune called Rain, and we'll return to rain when we do one of the close ups, in one of the other videos this week That song Rain got to number 26. It was the first Beatles single to use backward tape loops, well the first Beatles single to use backward tape loops. Even though the song Tomorrow Never Knows, which also uses loops was recorded a week earlier it just wouldn't come out until the revolver album in August. A promo video was made for these two songs. It's a very simple kind of video, it's the Beatles in a garden kind of singing. And so miming along to these tunes. But when we, if think about the history of music videos and you know, heading toward MTV like in early 1980's this is probably a pretty important stop along the road for a group having a promo video. Especially of their new songs of course, because they, they could get that played on TV at, for performances that they couldn't be physically present for because they were so busy. And then in August of 1966, the song Yellow Submarine was released, the B-side being Eleanor Rigby. Yellow Submarine went to number two in the US, number one in the UK. And Eleanor Rigby went to number 11 in the US and number one in the UK. So now, having talked about the context of 1966, the transformation of artists to craftsmen, the sort of traumatic end of the band's touring in the summer of 1966, and the singles that kind of span the year. Let's really dig in to the album that was released in August. Really another step forward, but in many ways volume two from Rubber Soul, that album being Revolver. 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