Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles

I received an email from my friend Robert Perry yesterday, informing me that Paul McCartney would be on David Letterman that evening. Why is this significant? Because 45 years ago, Paul and his bandmates took the same stage in the Ed Sullivan Theater, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. The world was never the same.

One can argue about their effect on the world, on music, on life. Lord knows one can argue, and one does, stridently. There are people in my band (they know who they are) who don’t care for the Beatles. And I’m married to a woman who only mildly likes them, even though her favorite bands are those keenly influenced by the four mop tops. It’s hard, truth be told, to find a band who hasn’t been keenly influenced by the Beatles. The whole concept of bands as we know it today grew exactly out of the model created by John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Last week, I mentioned that rock and roll was only blues, bleached by the white folks in the music business and marketed to white kids as a safe alternative, and that’s what I believe. Then came the Beatles. And everything changed.

The influence was clearly there. “Twist and Shout,” “Baby It’s You,” “Roll Over, Beethoven,” “Please Mr. Postman;” these are all tunes right out of black American radio, arranged and sung by a Liverpool fella named John Lennon with reverence and awe. But John and his band had something else going on — something even Elvis didn’t have, or Buddy Holly. There was a jocularity, an irreverence, a sense of play and at the same time dead seriousness, that echoed those blues men of a decade before. The Beatles knew what they were doing, young as they were and unschooled in the ways of the world. They knew they had a sound by the tail, a dangerous and exhilarating sound, and they were going to follow it as far as it took them.

Elvis was a singer, and a remarkable one. Buddy Holly wrote tunes, but wasn’t much of  singer. The Beatles put it all together in an irresistible package — singing, playing, songwriting, fashion, attitude — and swept the world for ten years. The thing that kept them alive that long was the songs, and the sound of those songs. Think about this: “She Loves You” hit the charts in 1964. Two years later (two years!) we get Eleanor Rigby. One year after that, we get Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That’s not even human, folks. That pace of musical evolution is just unobtainable on this planet.

Still, they did it, and that remarkable growth spurt I believe helped us to grow as a generation, helped us get our minds off of pop radio topics like girls and cars and into socially more sophisticated notions, like life and the universe. Which, I think, led in turn to many of the social upheavals of the time, most of which I for one hold very dear to this day.

But no band before or since has held the kind of influence the Beatles did. These guys pretty much set the stage for how things were going to sound on the radio during their decade of dominance. Not only how things sounded, but how they looked, how we dressed, how we behaved, how we saw the world and each other.  That’s a lot of power for four musicians to wield, but they did it with class and style, and I think we’re all the better for it.

Speaking of bands, my very own band, The Very Bad Boys, will be at Armando’s Saturday night. We won’t be doing any Beatle covers, due to the aftermentioned grumpy-head fella who doesn’t like them, but we will be covering some other interesting songs, and their influence on me will be (always and forever) apparent.

Thanks, fellas. From the bottom of my heart.

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