Eyes Wide Open
The Beatles and their critics.
The critic John Strausbaugh’s 2001 book, Rock ‘Til You Drop, rails against what he calls “colostomy rock.” He argues that rock and roll should be music by the young, for the young. He’s not wrong. Yet, the Rolling Stones’ 2024 tour is being sponsored by – I kid you not – AARP.
Then there are The Beatles.1
As Elvis Costello insists, their songs are not limited. Their songs belong to everyone.
The Fab Four dropped a new song a couple of months ago. Dubbed “the last Beatles song,” it appeared on a double A-side single, paired with a new stereo remix of the band’s very first single, “Love Me Do,” with the two serving as bookends to the group’s illustrious history. John Lennon wrote it and, with the assistance of some technological enhancements, including artificial intelligence, sang lead, 53 years after his murder.
The Beatles and their music are the centerpiece of this week’s TBL.
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Eyes Wide Open
“Living is easy with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.”
~ “Strawberry Fields Forever”
It’s hard to imagine music today without the “most popular and influential rock act of all-time.” Yet The Beatles’ success was hardly a sure thing.
The central conceit of the 2019 movie, Yesterday, is that The Beatles’ songs are so great that simply putting them out there, by a nobody, in a different time, in a very different context, would still result in overnight superstardom for the nobody. A sure thing.
I liked the movie but I’m skeptical of the conceit.
There are an estimated 97 million songs built off of just 12 notes, but less than one percent of those songs resonate. The rest live in oblivion. Some of the oblivion songs are great (like this one). Many of the resonating songs are mediocre (like this one). Some of the resonating songs are truly dreadful (like this former number one). Cream doesn’t always rise.
The Beatles were amazing. They were lucky, too.
As Cambridge’s John Rapley showed, “economists who’ve actually worked out scientifically what contribution our own initiative plays in our success have found it to occupy an infinitesimally small share: the vast majority of what makes us rich or not comes down to pure dumb luck, and in particular, being born in the right place and at the right time.”
The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s favorite formula relates to luck and skill: “My favorite formula was about success, and I wrote success equals talent plus luck and great success equals talent plus a lot of luck.” Moreover, “[t]alent is necessary but it’s not sufficient, so whenever there is significant success, you can be sure that there has been a fair amount of luck.” Cass Sunstein came to the same conclusion about The Beatles, specifically.
The reality is that luck (and, if you have a spiritual bent, grace) plays an enormous role in our lives – both good and bad – just as luck plays an enormous role in many specific endeavors, from baseball to investing to poker to winning a Nobel Prize to producing a chart-topping hit record. If we’re honest, we will recognize that many of the best things in our lives required absolutely nothing of us and what we count as our greatest achievements usually required great effort, skill, and even more luck.
The Beatles were surely lucky.
The Beatles had five singles in Britain’s Top 20 in 1963, three of which hit number one. Their debut album, Please Please Me, held the top spot on Britain’s album charts for 30 weeks, only to be displaced by the band’s second album, With the Beatles. By the end of the year, London’s Evening Standard newspaper declared, “An examination of the heart of the nation at this moment would reveal the name ‘Beatles’ engraved upon it.”
However, at that time, there was little overlap between the British and the American music scenes, and the lads weren’t gaining any traction in the U.S., despite their immense popularity in Britain.
In September 1963, George Harrison visited his sister in Benton, Illinois. “They don’t know us,” he told his bandmates about America, when he returned. “It’s going to be hard.”
As Paul McCartney noted, “They’ve got their own groups. What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?”
Rolling Stone put the problem in historical context.
“America, though, had not paid attention to The Beatles until almost the last minute. By early 1964, in fact, America had mostly left rock & roll behind. Buddy Holly had died, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had been blacklisted, Elvis had joined the Army, and pioneering rock DJ Alan Freed had been booted off the air – all these events neutered rock’s early spirit and hindered its future.”
The Beatles’ record label, EMI, repeatedly tried to persuade its American licensee, Capitol Records, to issue the band’s singles. Without success.
Dave Dexter, in charge of international A&R for Capitol, rejected “Love Me Do” after EMI sent it to him in late 1962. “In sum,” according to Capitol insider Charles Tillinghast, “[Dexter] found it a generally amateurish and unappealing rendition.” Dexter continued to reject Beatles hits that EMI sent him, including “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.”
Two random events changed everything.
Ed Sullivan had twice turned the lads down for his popular television variety show when, entirely by happenstance, he witnessed “Beatlemania” at what is now Heathrow Airport on Halloween night, 1963, as the band returned from a tour of Sweden. Impressed by the fans’ devotion, he booked them on his show.
With that television appearance and a Carnegie Hall concert booked, Capitol took another look and decided to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in mid-January 1964.
That timetable changed due to a second random event.
On December 10, 1963, 15-year-old Marsha Albert, of Silver Spring, Maryland, saw a rebroadcast of a previous CBS Morning News report disparaging the Beatles and the frenzy they inspired in England.
Marsha ignored the disdain and focused on the music. She wanted to hear more of it. She wrote to her local radio station, WWDC, with her request. A disc jockey there, Carroll James, got in touch with a flight attendant for a British airline, who brought a 45 of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on a flight to Washington, D.C. for him.
When the record arrived, James invited Albert to WWDC’s studio for its debut. In the early evening of December 17 (it all happened fast), Marsha announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in America, here are The Beatles, singing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’”
The response was immediate and electric.
“The switchboard just went totally wild,” James said. Callers wanted to hear the song again, and again. Taped copies of the single found their way to other U.S. stations, where it met with similar responses. Sensing the demand (ya think!?), Capitol pushed the song’s release up to December 26 – requiring pressing plants to work 24 hours a day to meet the deadline.
By mid-January, the record charted. On February 1, it was number one in the U.S., quickly selling over one million copies, and The Beatles were a cultural phenomenon. The Ed Sullivan Show received 50,000 ticket requests for the 728-seat Studio 50 (now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater) where the band was to perform, far surpassing the previous high (7,000 tickets requested for Elvis Presley’s 1957 debut).
The lads left England for America and were greeted at the newly-named Kennedy Airport, New York, by thousands of screaming fans. Two days later, on February 9 (60 years ago next week), the lads made their American television debut. Sullivan introduced them at the top of the show: “Tonight, the whole country is waiting to hear England’s Beatles.” And he wasn’t far off. The Fab Four played five tunes over two segments, ending with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”2
Rock and roll was resuscitated in an evening (I missed it; I was at a Sunday evening church service).
The broadcast drew a then-record of more than 73 million viewers (60 percent of all viewers), as compared to 21 million on a typical week. Popular culture was forever altered.
Life magazine declared: “In [1776] England lost her American colonies. Last week The Beatles took them back.” The Beatles subsequently sparked the British Invasion and became a global phenomenon. Recalling The Beatles’ sudden popularity, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys thought that The Beatles had “eclipsed ... the whole music world.” Bob Dylan recalled that, “a definite line was being drawn. This was something that had never happened before ... I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
Led by The Beatles, Britannia soon ruled the American airwaves. In short order, we got to hear the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Searchers, the Hollies, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and the Kinks (among others).
The Beatles had no U.S. chart presence before February 1964 but sold 2.5 million records in the U.S. in the month after their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance and soon became the first act to hold all top 5 spots in the Billboard Hot 100 chart (they also held spots 16, 44, 49, 69, 78, 84 and 88). By the end of the year, the band had placed 28 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles chart, 11 of them in the Top 10.
Still, it wasn’t clear if The Beatles’ success had “legs.” Lots of alleged experts didn’t think so, doubting how good the boys really were.
Ray Bloch, musical director for Ed Sullivan, was among them: “The only thing different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kids loved The Beatles. Critics? Not. So. Much.
Under the headline “No Soul in Beatlesville,” Alan Rinzler of The Nation sniffed, “the Beatles remain derivative, a deliberate imitation of an American genre.” He observed that the music was “amplified to a plaster-crumbling, glass-shattering pitch” and was “loud, fast, and furious, totally uninfluenced by some of the more sophisticated elements” of the then-current pop scene. Rinzler concluded that the music was “vapid” and “Beatlemania as a phenomenon is manna for dull minds.”
He was not alone.3
The New York Herald Tribune headline: “BEATLES BOMB ON TV.”
The Washington Post: “They are, apparently, part of some kind of malicious, bi-lateral entertainment trade agreement. The British have to sit through dozens of dreadful American television programs. In return, we get The Beatles. As usual, we got gypped. Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”
Also The Washington Post (different writer): “Just thinking about The Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance. They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning, yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.”
The Boston Globe: “Don’t let the Beatles bother you. If you don’t think about them they will go away and in a few more years they will probably be bald.”
The Los Angeles Times: “With their bizarre shrubbery, the Beatles are obviously a press agent’s dream combo. Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well. But the hirsute thickets they affect make them rememberable, and they project a certain kittenish charm which drives the immature, shall we say, ape.”
The New York Times: “The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.”
The Chicago Tribune: “The Beatles must be a huge joke, a wacky gag, a gigantic put-on.”
The New Yorker: “The Beatles’ tour of New York was a success because they are nice guys and the girls think they look cute. Also, they are worth listening to, even if they aren’t as good as the Everly Brothers, which they really aren’t.”
The Hartford Courant: “Stiff lip, old chap, even The Beatles will pass!”
The New York Herald Tribune: “75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut and 5 percent lilting lament.”
“It’s such a fine line,” as the rock mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, put it, “between stupid and clever.”
But none of these critics is near that line. Their “analysis” is just plain stupid. And tone deaf. And obliterated by all that has happened since.
Undeterred, critics continued to trash the Fab Four throughout the 60s. It only takes a few examples to make the case.
The lads’ 11th and final studio album, Abbey Road, is my favorite. It makes lots of retrospective top ten lists. Many called it the best rock album. The Side 2 medley is perfect (and includes Ringo’s only Beatles drum solo).
Plenty of critics didn’t think so when the record was released. The New York Times denounced the album as an “unmitigated disaster.” The “badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment,” the “words are limp-wristed, pompous and fake,” and although the critic sorta exempted the Side 2 medley, even here the individual songs were “nothing special.”
Rolling Stone lamented the use of its signature synthesizers, saying the sound “disembodies and artificializes” the music. Life magazine said it wasn’t one of the band’s great albums.
Sgt. Pepper is widely regarded as the first concept album and the soundtrack to the Summer of Love. In 2003, Rolling Stone called it the greatest album of all time: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.” In his 1989 Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Cole Larkin insisted it was “no mere pop album but a cultural icon.” In 2006, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Kevin Dettmar went even further, writing that Sgt. Pepper achieved “a combination of popular success and critical acclaim unequaled in twentieth-century art ... never before had an aesthetic and technical masterpiece enjoyed such popularity.”
At release, The New York Times panned it.
“Like an over-attended child, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled,” Richard Goldstein proclaimed. The album was a mere “pastiche” that “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra.” The lyrics are “dismal and dull.” George’s “Within You Without You” is dismissed as “curry and karma.” Sadly, “The Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent.” Above all, “[t]here is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper.’ Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”
The Times corrected this abomination with its 50th anniversary review, but it was a case of much too little, much too late.
The Beatles, which everybody calls the White Album, got great marks ... in retrospect. In his review of the 2009 remaster, Chuck Klosterman wrote that the album found the band at their best and rated it “almost beyond an A+.” Elvis Costello emphasized the band’s pervasive influence into the 21st century: “The scope and license of the White Album has permitted everyone from OutKast to Radiohead to Green Day to Joanna Newsom to roll their picture out on a broader, bolder canvas.” According to The New Yorker in 2018, “these ninety-four minutes endure, preserving the instant that rock joined the pantheon of the highest arts.” On its 50th anniversary, the BBC called the White Album The Beatles’ greatest.
When the record dropped, The New York Times found it “boring almost beyond belief.” It’s “dross almost all the way.”
To pick just one example, Blackbird is among the most-recorded songs of all-time…
…and provides a fascinating exploration of Bach’s Bourrée in E Minor, but it merits not a mention in the review except as an unnamed part of the “dross.”
As the indispensable Ted Gioia noted: Critics “literally were handed the greatest recordings of their era to review, and blew them off. Every classic song on these albums was not only attacked, but actually mocked.”
He also explained why.
“I now realize that The Beatles were getting punished for how quickly they were pushing rock music ahead. If you read enough of these hit pieces, you keep hearing the frustration that the new Beatles album doesn’t sound like the previous one.
“In other words, the critics misunderstood the lads from Liverpool for the worst possible reason – namely, that they were constantly learning, growing more ambitious, and absolutely willing to take risks.
“...The sad truth is the critics typically operate by looking in the rearview mirror. Like generals, they fail on the battlefield because their strategy is built on the last war.”
As Elvis Costello said, “Every [Beatles] record was a shock.”
Like the rest of us, critics tend to know what they like and like what they know. We resist the new for what we perceive to be tried and true. All of us are made and adapt within the prejudices of our times.4
As Gioia documents, this trend was consistent. New Beatles music was panned after the critic paid homage to earlier music, which had also been panned when released. Status quo bias is real. The critics struggled to recognize quality, especially when it’s innovative. Time and distance frequently act like Archimedes’ bathwater, allowing us better to measure art’s true weight.5
For example, as was common (see above), Newsweek panned the Ed Sullivan Show Beatles in 1964.
“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”
Four years later, with the White Album, Newsweek conceded that earlier Beatles music was great, but the new album wasn’t (my emphasis below).
“America could hardly wait for the new two-record Beatles album. Capitol Records sold 1.1 million copies in the first five days at $11.58, the highest price ever asked for two pop disks. At that price the buyer doesn’t even get a handsome colorful jacket like those enclosing the two previous Beatles records, Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The new jacket is plain white, like a printing error, and its title, The Beatles, is faintly embossed somewhere on it.
“Caveat emptor. Sad to say, but the blankness extends into the records within. With 30 arrows of song, it’s hard to see how the brilliant quartet could have missed their marks so often. Unlike previous albums, the bull’s-eye of variety in lyrics, wit, ease of style that made changing keys or tempi natural, lovely love songs, and adventures in electronics is rarely hit in [the White Album].”
As a kid, The Beatles’ music made me feel alive, with my eyes wide open to the future, together with its many possibilities and, at least as significantly, that my parents’ music was dead, dead, dead. The lads’ critics, meanwhile, remained locked in the past, unwilling and unable to see into a possible future even a little bit. There’s a lesson there for all of us that’s real. And something to get hung about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Totally Worth It
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Richie Havens sang this Beatles cover at my first-ever rock and roll concert when he (incongruously) opened for Jethro Tull in 1974.
Benediction
We live on “a hurtling planet,” the poet Rod Jellema informed us, “swung from a thread of light and saved by nothing but grace.”
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Issue 165 (February 2, 2024)
When I was a kid, you were “Beatles” or you were “Stones.” I was “Beatles.” Their legendary Let It Be rooftop gig in London was 55 years ago this week.
Hearing the song, it’s easy to assume it’s a simple pop song. However, it’s surprisingly sophisticated. The melody, harmonies, and rhythms disguise where the song is headed: From colloquial opening, to blues turnaround, through a meditative mid-section that explodes into a soaring exclamation – “I can’t hide! I can’t hide! I can’t hiiiiide!” (and not, as Bob Dylan thought, “I get high! I get high! I get hiiiiigh!”) – in three-part harmony, until it all detonates again.
The Beatles and James Bond, incredibly, burst upon the scene on the same day – October 5, 1962 – with the release of the first Beatles single, “Love Me Do,” and the premiere of the first James Bond picture, Dr. No. As the clip shows, like the critics, Bond’s initial take on the Fab Four was not a positive one.
I know Archimedes’ bathwater allowed for the measure of volume rather than weight, but you get the point.
Good piece. If anything, it understates the vast luck that went into finally bringing them to the fore. Even their path to George Martin was pretty much the result of an obscure intra-label feud.
This was such a wonderful experience-thanks for putting it together. A walk through memory lane.