Greil Marcus

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[The music on Meet the Bealtes] was instantly recognizable and like nothing we had ever heard. It was joyous, threatening, absurd, arrogant, determined, innocent and tough….

It was only in the context of the Beatles event that their music was perceived for what it was.

The event was a pop explosion; the second, and thus far the last, that rock and roll has produced. (p. 175)

[At] its heart, a pop explosion attaches the individual to a group—the fan to an audience, the solitary to a generation—in essence, forms a group and creates new loyalties—while at the same time it increases one's ability to respond to a particular pop artifact, or a thousand of them, with an intensity that verges on lunacy. Ringo's shout of "All right, George!" just before the guitar in "Boys" becomes a matter of indefinable and indefensible significance; styles on Carnaby Street outdo the pace of the pop charts and change literally by the hour. Yet within it all is some principle of shape, of continuity, of value.

This principle was the Beatles. As was so often pointed out in the mid-Sixties, the sum of the Beatles was greater than the parts, but the parts were so distinctive and attractive that the group itself could be all things to all people, more or less; you did not have to love them all to love the group, but you could not love one without loving the group, and this was why the Beatles became bigger than Elvis; this was what had never happened before. And so it began. The past was felt to dissolve, the future was conceivable only as an expansion of the present, and the present was defined absolutely by its expansive novelty. Towering above Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, a score of British groups, American groups, Mary Quant, the Who, whatever and whoever sprung up day by day, the Beatles seemed not only to symbolize but to contain it all—to make history by anticipating it.

The first pop explosion, beginning in 1955 and 1956, began to yield to normalcy by about 1957. The Beatles event, beyond all expectations save perhaps their own, intensified not only in momentum but in magnetism, reaching more and more people with greater and greater mythic and emotional power, for at least four years. The Beatles affected not only the feel but the quality of life—they deepened it, sharpened it, brightened it, not merely as a factor in the cultural scheme, but as a presence. The Beatles affected not only the quality of life—they affected its worth.

Their event reached its height, and in many ways its effective end, with the release of Sgt. Pepper on June 2nd, 1967. (pp. 175-76)

Almost immediately, Sgt. Pepper was certified as proof that the Beatles' music—or at least this album—was Art. But what mattered was the conscious creation of event—the way in which the summing-up-the-spirit-of-the-times style of the music (which for the most part has not survived its time) was perfectly congruent with the organizing-the-spirit-of-the-times manner in which the album was released and received. Which is to say that Sgt. Pepper, as the most brilliantly orchestrated manipulation of a cultural audience in pop history, was nothing less than a small pop explosion in and of itself. The music was not great art; the event, in its intensification of the ability to respond, was….

[It] seemed as if the world really did turn around the Beatles, even if the truth was that this music, as opposed to this event, represented that point at which the Beatles began to be formed more by the times than the other way around. In the next few months Brian Epstein would die, and the Beatles, who had unified the young, would themselves begin to fragment—anticipating, as usual, the fragmentation that in years to come would separate the audience they had created. Still, if Sgt. Pepper was an ending, it was an ending that has never been matched. It was perhaps in the nature of the game that it would be all downhill from there. (p. 176)

Since the Beatles disbanded a virtual consensus among rock critics has emerged to argue that the music of the Beatles, enjoyable as it may have been, stands now as distinctly inferior to that of the Stones, Dylan, or even the Byrds or the Beach Boys: the Beatles are conventionally portrayed as imitative, lightweights, yea-sayers, softies, ordinary musicians, vaguely unhip, unimaginative lyrically, and, above all, "clever"—that is, merely clever. You know—the Beatles just wanted to hold your hand, while the Stones wanted to pillage your town. Etc.

There is some truth to this argument…. The Stones wrote from an insistently sexual and aggressive blues tradition; the Beatles worked mostly in the more polite and circumscribed milieu of pop, as defined not only by rock tunesmiths Carole King and Gerry Goffin but by the earlier professional romanticists of Tin Pan Alley. The Beatles' optimism prevailed even when they tried to sound desperate ("Help!"), which sometimes made them sound sappy; the Stones' sullenness prevailed even when they affected optimism ("We Love You"), which usually made them sound all the more attractive.

Which only proves, I think, that comparisons of the Beatles and the Stones (or Dylan or Elvis or any other true titan of rock) are pointless. I cannot make an argument that the Beatles were better at being the Stones than the Stones were (though I can point out that it was the Beatles who opened up the turf the Stones took as their own—there was no possibility of a Left until the Beatles created the Center). The argument that seems to emerge from a close listening to the Beatles' music, on the other hand, is this one: by 1962 the Beatles' mastery of rock and roll was such that it was inevitable they would change the form simply by addressing themselves to it. Unlike the Stones or Dylan, the Beatles came up through rock; as they went on, extending (if not deepening) their mastery, they defined rock, to the degree that it made sense to speak of "Yesterday," a ballad accompanied only by acoustic guitar and strings, as "rock and roll," simply because the disc was credited to the Beatles. And unlike Dylan, and possibly the Stones, at least until 1966, the Beatles had no fall-back position. They were rock and roll or they were nothing. As such, they were, at their best, the best. (pp. 176, 178)

[The] form of the Beatles contained the forms of rock and roll itself. The Beatles combined the harmonic range and implicit equality of the Fifties vocal group (the Dell-Vikings, say) with the flash of a rockabilly band (the Crickets or Gene Vincent's Blue Caps) with the aggressive and unique personalities of the classic rock stars (Elvis, Little Richard) with the homey this-could-be-you manner of later rock stars (Everly Brothers, Holly, Eddie Cochran) with the endlessly inventive songwriting touch of the Brill Building, and delivered it all with the grace of the Miracles, the physicality of "Louie Louie," and the absurd enthusiasm of Gary "U.S." Bonds. Three of the Beatles wrote, all sang lead, and they played their own music; in sum, they communicated (and generically insisted upon) absolute involvement (it was only after the Beatles that "rock groups" had to make their own records and write their own songs). Rock, which in the course of the Fifties had changed from a personal inspiration and affirmation to a process that allowed the most marginal of commitments, became, in the shape of the Beatles, a way of life….

Accompanying the shock of novelty so many experienced on first exposure to the Beatles in 1963 or '64 was a shock of recognition, which bespoke the Beatles' connection to the whole history of rock and roll up to that time: the Beatles had absorbed that history because—year by year, playing and listening and writing, in Liverpool and on the bottoms of British tours and in Hamburg—they had, albeit invisibly, made it.

No one else could touch this sort of mastery, and the result was that elusive rock treasure, a new sound—and a new sound that could not be exhausted in the course of one brief flurry on the charts….

The beat, first of all, was not big, it was enormous. The entire performance orchestrated it, was built around it (listen to "There's a Place"). At the same time, there was a lightness to almost every tune, a floating quality, a kind of lyrical attack that shaped but did not lessen the rhythmic power of the numbers. This quality, which can be heard in its most spectacular form in the segues in and out of the middle eight, was perhaps the most important thing John and Paul learned from Goffin-King (and from Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector); it was written right into the compositions, and put across through head arrangements and in the use of rock group dynamics so fluid and intelligent that for years they made nearly everything else on the radio sound faintly stupid (listen to "Every Little Thing," "Anytime at All," "What You're Doing"). (p. 178)

But more than anything else it was the singing that made these records what they were. John and Paul's vocals—and the four Beatles' unpredictable screams, yeah-yeah-yeahs, and head-to-head oooos—communicated urgency first and foremost. Regardless of lyrics, the singers made demands, reached, got, went after more, blew away all that stood before them. They were exhilarated, exuberant, joyous; but all that joy was rooted in determination, as if those nihilistic nights in Hamburg had not just added an edge to the Beatles' music but had lighted a fire in their hearts. In 1964, the freshness of the Beatles' vocal assault was the sound of pure novelty; today, one hears a lovely, naked emotion in those early vocals, a refusal to kid around, to cut the corners of feeling, and a will to say it all, that was not to be heard in rock and roll from any other white performer until Bob Dylan released "Like a Rolling Stone" in the summer of 1965. This spirit surfaced in more obvious form later—consciously and with great craftsmanship, in "Strawberry Fields Forever," "I Am the Walrus," "Yer Blues" and "I'm So Tired"—but it was there from the beginning. In a sense it was the beginning. (pp. 178-79)

Mixing the lyricism of "There's a Place" and the force of "Money," the Beatles' mastery of rock in their first two years of recording was absolute. Without really testing the limits of the form as they had worked it out in the early Sixties, they continued to prove that mastery through 1965, with "Ticket to Ride," the brilliant "Help!," its little-known flip side, "I'm Down" (an astonishing piece of hard rock with a crazed Little Richard vocal from Paul), and "Day Tripper." Still, given Dylan, the Stones, and the Byrds, there was no question that other rockers were testing the Beatles' limits, even if they were not, and so at the end of 1965 the Beatles turned around and dumped Rubber Soul on the market.

Though it can be argued that the Beatles' first four LPs, in their British configurations (Please Please Me. With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night and Beatles for Sale) were as good as Rubber Soul, it may not be worth the trouble. Rubber Soul was an album made as an album; with the exception of "Michclle" (which, to be fair, paid the bills for years to come), every cut was an inspiration, something new and remarkable in and of itself.

In terms of lyrics, the Beatles were still writing about love, but this was a new kind of love: contingent, scary, and vital in a way that countenanced ambiguities and doubts earlier songs, had skimmed right over. "In My Life" was as moving and precise a song about friendship as rock has produced; "Girl," though deceptively straightforward, was a good deal more sophisticated than Dylan's "Just like a Woman."

If the emotional touch was harder, the musical touch was lighter. This music was seduction, not assault; the force was all beneath the surface…. (p. 179)

It was the Beatles' most attractive album, perhaps their glossiest, and at the same time their most deeply satisfying. To this listener, it was unquestionably their best.

From this point on the story is not so clear. What was clear, though, what was clear in retrospect even on Rubber Soul, was that John and Paul were no longer the songwriting team they had once been. Consistently, John's songs described struggle, while Paul's denied it; Paul wrote and sang the A sides, John the Bs. Mapping out the directions that have governed their careers since the Beatles disbanded, John was already cultivating his rebellion and his anger; Paul was making his Decision for Pop; George was making his Decision for Krishna; and Ringo was having his house painted. All of the Beatles were attaching themselves to the fads and passions of the time, to drugs, transcendence, coats of many colors, the paraphernalia of psychedelia. And as the Beatles became one with the times, merging with them rather than standing above them, they became, musically and in every other way, harder to see truly. The wholeness of the group, the music, and the very idea of the Beatles began to break up, even as "The Beatles," as cultural icons, media personalities, and phenomena, became more exciting than ever. Thus at the time it was obvious that Revolver, released in 1966, was better than Rubber Soul, just as it was obvous Sgt. Pepper was better than both put together. The times carried the imperative of such a choice—though it was not really a choice at all, but rather a sort of faceless necessity. The only road, after all, was onward.

Such a choice does not seem so obvious now, and of course the necessity has faded. Revolver retains the flash its title promised, but little of the soul its predecessor delivered. Compared to either, Sgt. Pepper appears playful but contrived, less a summing up of its era than a concession to it.

In the final two and a half years of Beatle groupdom, the four remained charming with "All You Need Is Love"; took a fall with Magical Mystery Tour, offered a stunning preview of post-Beatles music with the white album; wrapped up their career with the erratic, overly professional Abbey Road; and stumbled off the stage they had raised with a botched release of the antiprofessional Let It Be.

Out of that sad ending several recordings stand with the best the Beatles ever made. Save Paul's shimmering "Penny Lane," and his bruising "Helter Skelter," all were John's work, and in truth they may have little of the Beatles—the Beatles as something more than four people who sang and played—in them. Still, to this writer, "Strawberry Fields Forever," "I Am the Walrus," "Yer Blues," "I'm So Tired" and "Don't Let Me Down" are each richer than Sgt. Pepper's best cut, "A Day in the Life"; in every case, John seemed to be getting closer to the essentials of his soul, which might be identified as a refusal to settle for anything short of perfection combined with a clear understanding that perfection does not exist—a dilemma that, given the history of the Beatles era and the years since, is something more than one man's hangup.

Since 1970, the Beatles have carried on, and it has taken real courage to resist the calls, increasingly intense, to accept a certain defeat and reunite for one last time, or perhaps for longer than that. I think the truth is that the Beatles have accepted that they cannot, in any form, become what they were. John and Paul particularly are engaged in the ultimate pop process of reinventing themselves, and in a manner that defies, or redefines, pop, since pop calls in the moment and their efforts will likely last their whole lives. Today, the Beatles oscillate between genius and self-parody, and only one who does not understand the game that is being played would hope for some final, perfect synthesis. Perhaps what matters is that symbolically or in action, the Beatles, who saved the game close to 15 years ago, have no alternative but to work to keep it going. (pp. 179-80)

Greil Marcus, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, edited by Jim Miller (copyright © 1976 by Rolling Stone Press; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.), Rolling Stone Press, Random House, 1976.

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