CHAPTER 5
EARLY BEATLES and ROCK AND ROLL
“Warmed-Over Soup”
IN THIS BOOK I make the case for a series of indirect connections between the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Beatles, connections that emerged from patterns in musical-social history and shaped noteworthy results—creative collaboration to an extraordinary degree, the merger of compositional vision with vernacular music-making, and the combination leading to music so compelling and distinctive that it looms very large in the history of twentieth-century music. The connections follow historic parallels between jazz and rock and roll. Both started out close to the vernacular “base.” Both drew from participatory music-making that spread through slavery like the fire of the Holy Spirit and continued to inspire African Americans for many generations.
Blues composer W. C. Handy (St. Louis Blues, Memphis Blues) had an epiphany around 1905. In Cleveland, Mississippi, he heard a small band of guitar, mandolin, and bass playing what he called “over-and-over strains,” with no distinct beginning and no predetermined end, just cycle after cycle of repetitive music that invited improvisation and got people moving. Handy had been taught as a child how to sight-read complicated classical music using do-re-mi solfege. But when he saw the donation hat for the small band in Cleveland fill up with silver dollars, he learned a lesson about musical markets.
Improvisatory treatment of a well-known tune, based on a single strain played many times, was standard practice for dance music on the plantations, typically little string bands of violin, guitar, and bass viol. If Handy had lived long enough to drop by the Crawdaddy Club in London in 1963, he would have been amused by a string band of British teenagers who called themselves the Rolling Stones whipping fans “into a tribal-like frenzy” as they played a song by the Mississippi guitarist Bo Diddley for forty-five minutes. Somehow, the over-and-over approach had sprouted in staid London, where one writer even trotted out the old “jungle music” put-down.
New Orleans, with its wind instruments, was the center of early jazz, and the string lineage that evolved into rock and roll took off in nearby Mississippi as African American musicians figured out how to use the guitar to their advantage. In the 1940s the crackle of electricity gave blue notes, hard initial attack, and the fixed and variable format a fresh and snappy postwar, migratory identity. John Lee Hooker, from Coahoma County, Mississippi, recorded Boogie Chillen’ (1948) with his new electric guitar. When Muddy Waters landed in Chicago from Issaquena County his sister teased him that his acoustic guitar was hopelessly out of fashion. Blues presented a big range of possibilities, but there was always the option of making a virtue out of simplicity. Howlin’ Wolf, from White Station, Mississippi, recorded Moanin’ at Midnight (1951) with one chord, repeated riffs, heterophony, and a traditional melodic profile of descending “sawtooth” design: the song reached number ten on the rhythm and blues (the new name for race recordings) charts. Muddy Waters did something similar at a slower tempo with Hoochie Coochie Man (1954). Early rock and roll was connected to the blues and also to the Sanctified Church, the training ground for “Little Richard” Penniman as it had been for Louis Armstrong a few decades earlier. Penniman recorded Tutti Frutti in New Orleans in 1955, aiming to capture some of the excitement of Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman, with its overt gospel leanings. Penniman gave up rock and roll for the ministry a few years later, brought back into the fold by reformed rocker Joe Lutcher, whose hits included Rockin’ Boogie (1948).
Like the word “jazz” in its early years, “rock and roll” was associated with sex, which made radio broadcasters hesitant to use it at first. Rock and roll was an impertinent but down-home alternative to the golden age of jazz sophistication, with simple chords, simple riffs, rough voices, and conventional melody types. Novelty records created a crack of an opening into the white market. “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars,” quipped record producer Sam Phillips.
Rock and roll reset the relationship between white popular music and the black vernacular. The result was a double-wave pattern in the broad sweep of music history in the United States, as if everything started all over again relative to the 1917 explosion of jazz, with a flagrant return to amateur participation, easy to learn and perform, fun to move to, and clearly connected to African Americans. This explains the startling consistency in institutional ridicule of early jazz and rock and roll, the same condemning terms used again and again—“primitive,” “jungle,” “basement,” “Negro threat,” and allusions to sexual degeneracy.
Jazz musicians smugly noted the distance their music had traveled—distance upward—since its humble origins. Strayhorn turned out a droll arrangement of I Want to Hold Your Hand for the Ellington Orchestra. Dizzy Gillespie made his way to the Beatles’ dressing room at their Ed Sullivan debut, asked for autographs, and then announced that he planned to swap them for two Count Basie records. “I haven’t come to hear you,” he needled, “I just want to get a good look at you.”
Jazz and rock have stayed around so long because the basis for each idiom turned out to be so flexible. In the 1950s a fresh style, audibly connected to amateur practice, again emerged from the African American community and conquered the nation. Neither trajectory has yet been exhausted. Early rock and roll was a baseball cap turned backward, a light embrace of African American danger. Black music and dance became youthful white weapons of choice for a fresh round of generational warfare, with victories measured in terms of peer-group bonding, independence of taste, and sexual liberation, all fueled by unprecedented levels of teenage consumerism.
White interest could go deep, just as it did in the 1920s with Mezz Mezzrow and the alligators. “Actually I think we both wanted to be black,” said songwriter Jerry Leiber, referring to his composing partner Mike Stoller. “Black people had a better time. As far as we were concerned, the worlds we came from were drab by comparison. I was alienated from my own culture and searching for something else.” Leiber and Stoller hung out in black neighborhoods and dated black women. Their reach for black authenticity produced a string of hits, from Hound Dog to Stand by Me. As a teenage misfit in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin took refuge in black music and local beatniks. She preferred Willie Mae Thornton’s Hound Dog to Elvis’s. Her sister Laura reported that Janis thought of herself as the “first white-black person.” Since she knew very few black people, her imagined identity was formed through listening to records. Johnny Otis, a son of Greek immigrants who got into every possible dimension of the R and B world, grew up in a largely black neighborhood in Berkeley, California, and decided as a teenager that “if our society dictated that one had to be either black or white, I would be black.”
Rock and roll instantly diversified, just as jazz had during the 1920s. In Good Rockin’ Tonight (1948), Wynonie Harris delivered a mellow, seductive voice over an easygoing boogie-woogie, with hand clapping in the background conjuring a participatory atmosphere. Elvis Presley (1954) bumped up the tempo and covered the song with a melodrama of shifting vocal timbres, from high and edgy to low and smooth. Pat Boone, second only to Elvis in rock and roll sales, tamed and softened his covers of black hits with “legitimate” diction, tone, and phrasing. Boone recorded Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame, then Little Richard’s raucous Tutti Frutti. Richard sometimes dressed on stage as the Queen of England, but Boone’s clean persona inspired General Motors to hire him as their spokesman. Elvis, Bill Haley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles all covered Little Richard. White taming of black music was not uniform. There were many ways to do it. The phenomenon was built into the social structure of the United States with its felt need to keep African Americans subservient, a people with nothing to lose and a great deal of musical splendor to offer.
Elvis turned out to be good not just at singing the black man’s music but also dramatic intensity, a combination that brilliantly articulated youthful rebellion. In Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan heard Elvis and felt like he “wasn’t going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” Lennon said almost the same thing to a friend in Liverpool. Teenage rebellion in the 1950s was largely inarticulate, a feeling more than an ideology. It clustered around a set of images, James Dean, motorcycles, Teddy Boy suits, and the juvenile delinquents in Blackboard Jungle who snapped their fingers to rock and roll when they weren’t smashing the jazz records from the 1920s that their teacher lovingly collected, music that was, ironically, rebellious when it was originally created but now (in the movie at least) occupied a bourgeois niche of conventionality and respect.
Vaguely articulate also was the inseparability of rock and roll as racial and sexual taboo. Dancing was safer than riding a motorcycle but thrilling nevertheless. This is what Pat Boone was softening almost to the point of surface disappearance, while Elvis flagrantly flashed it. “Rock and roll has its place, among the colored people,” acknowledged U.S. Congressman Emanuel Celler, but Elvis’s hip shaking violated “all that I know to be in good taste.” In a moment of candor Elvis concurred: “The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doing now, man, for more years than I know . . . I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now . . .”
Each Beatle stressed the importance of Heartbreak Hotel, the big bang that reached across the ocean in May 1956. Elvis sounded like he was about to jump off the hotel roof. “When I first heard Heartbreak Hotel, I could hardly make out what was being said,” remembered Lennon. “It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end.”
“It was the way [Presley] sings it as if he is singing from the depths of hell,” added McCartney.
Then came Hound Dog, with machine-gun snare drum, vibrant polyrhythmic groove, participatory hand clapping, and formal simplicity, Elvis snarling on the blue third like no white singer had ever done before, at least in Lennon’s experience. Nineteen fifty-six became the year of Elvis, and Lennon was floating: “Before Elvis there was nothing,” was how he felt.
Relative to early jazz, the rock and roll reset was marked by a different set of instruments, with electric guitars replacing the New Orleans winds, and there was also a difference in function: early jazz was instrumental and dance oriented, while rock and roll was simultaneously a genre of song and dance. Unlike Ellington, the Beatles were focused only on songs. When critics wanted to invoke classical music in their praise of Ellington they dropped names like Ravel and Bartók; with the Beatles it was Schubert and Schumann, two masters of songs.
The song orientation of rock and roll combined with its Everyman aura to create the singer-composer. Rock and roll turned away from the fancy lyrics, chords, forms, and melodies of the professional songwriters and thrived on lack of pretense, with no need for bourgeois legitimation. There is not much that separates a poppish rock song like McCartney’s Can’t Buy Me Love from jazz songs by the Gershwin brothers, as Ella Fitzgerald, the master of The Great American Songbook, must have realized when she covered it immediately after its release. The main difference is lack of any trace of pretentiousness. Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry were the primary singer-composer models for Lennon and McCartney, followed by Roy Orbison and Fats Domino. Anybody could write a rock-and-roll song. That was the message, and no one was happier to receive it than two teenagers from Liverpool.
Lennon, McCartney
“We’ve been playing this music for eight years,” Lennon observed in 1964, identifying what musicologists call a “style period.” Decades form an easy way to bring history’s limitless sprawl under control, but Lennon’s periodization cuts right across. It seems natural to track music in the 1950s and ’60s, but for him the important boundary was 1956, the year of Elvis.
We could say, from a developmental point of view, that Lennon was born (1940) to rebel. His parents were both fun-loving slackers. The first five years of his life were unstable, with his father Alfred mostly absent and his mother Julia absent often enough, her sisters filling the void. In 1946 sister Mimi asserted custody rights, declaring Julia an unfit mother and demonstrating the sturdiness of her own situation, with a husband whose family owned a business and a comfortable home. John became the ward of his aunt and uncle before his sixth birthday.
Mimi’s four-bedroom home, named “Mendips,” was solidly middle class, a notch or two (or maybe three in the case of Starr) above the other Beatles in comfort and opportunity. A visit to the Lennon and McCartney homes in Liverpool today, supplemented by a peek at the exteriors of homes lived in by Harrison and Starr, is the most eye-opening Beatles pilgrimage one can make. Lennon was born low but raised considerably higher than the other three, which still surprises many people, especially the comparison with McCartney.
Lennon always spoke well of Mimi, though others criticized her unreasonable expectations, irrational outbursts, and haughty condescension. Uncle George was a softy, alcoholic but easygoing, which must have made Mimi feel even more the need to drive the child toward achievement and decorum. It all went well enough during his preteen years. He and Uncle George read the newspaper together every night. The child put his aunt’s full bookshelves to good use, and by age ten he was familiar with Edgar Allan Poe, James Thurber, Robert Louis Stevenson, and (his favorite) Lewis Carroll. Childhood friend Pete Shotton said that “John’s ultimate ambition was to one day write an Alice himself.” Mimi remembered him being fond of Balzac and insisted that she could note that influence in his mature songwriting. The two talked about literature and he embellished for her the stories he had read, using his strong imagination. He loved to draw satirical cartoons and caricatures. He relied heavily on friends for emotional support. “He always had to have a partner,” remembered Shotton. “He never could abide the thought of getting stuck out on his limb all by himself.”
The inheritance of outsider tendencies from his parents, the tensions of the first five years of his life, Mimi’s authoritarian dominance—all of this was more than enough to generate a rebellious adolescence. He was impulsive, creative, easily bored, out of sync with conventional paths of achievement, a risk taker. When he reached his teens Julia reappeared and provided extra fuel. A witty person who loved music and dance, she felt no obligation to monitor her son’s progress toward middle-class respectability, leaving good times as the basis for their renewed relationship. She bought him his first guitar and encouraged his interest in rock and roll. He told a story about lying in bed with her, fully clothed, around age fourteen, accidentally touching her breast and wondering to himself if more was possible. She was ambiguous, definitely a friend, vaguely a mother, not really a parent. “At heart,” his stepsister wrote, “Julia was still almost a teenager herself who easily identified with John and his friends.” One of John’s friends remembered her playing guitar and singing for them the bawdy Maggie May, a folk song from Liverpool that had become the latest hit by the Vipers Skiffle Group (produced by George Martin for Parlophone). Lennon’s first band, the Quarrymen, covered the song and the Beatles did too on the album Let It Be.
As a teenager he was trouble at school and in the streets. “I did my best to disrupt every friend’s home,” he remembered. Some detention sheets from Quarry Bank High School show Lennon written up for “sabotage,” “just no interest whatsoever,” and “repeated misconduct.” “Even I sometimes worried that he seemed destined for Skid Row,” admitted Shotton. He wore the stylish “Teddy Boy” clothes that made boys look tough. And he was magnetic. George Harrison remembered him as, in the early days, something like an army sergeant who inspires soldiers through the sheer force of personality to march to their deaths. “He had a lot of power,” Harrison explained. His close mates were usually younger, which automatically sorted out the matter of who would be the leader. He specialized in daggers of wit that constantly deflated what others took seriously.
Lennon said that rock and roll saved him, but it was skiffle that turned him and everyone else he knew in that redeeming direction. Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line, one of the first records he purchased, sold three million copies in 1955 and 1956. Donegan pounded on his guitar and howled, a vigorous antidote to bourgeois conformity. He had stylistic connections to African American music and in this song took Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter as his model. It was easy to form a skiffle band, with a couple of guitars and a washboard, then kazoo, broom-handle bass, comb, and waxed paper added as desired. Lennon insisted that Shotton pick up the washboard, even though he was devoid of musical ability: “Of course you can take part, anyone can,” Lennon told him. There was absolutely no pretense. You learned a few simple chords and started playing together, a noisy but happy pastime for a street gang. Some five thousand skiffle bands popped up across the United Kingdom in 1956.
“The guitar’s all right, but you’ll never earn your living with it,” lectured Mimi in words that are now legendary, but that warning was surely repeated by countless parents over the next fifteen years. When he failed O-level exams, she scurried to get him into the Liverpool College of Art as a last resort.
The standards for getting into art schools were loose, “somewhere they put you if they can’t put you anywhere else,” as Lennon remembered it. In Chapter 1, I suggested that the talents of both Ellington and Lennon as visual artists had something to do with their abilities to freshly conceptualize what a piece of music could be. It has been well established how the institution of British art schools helped turn rock and roll in England away from American models and toward the 1960s construction of “rock,” a white genre with aspirations more complicated than those of its American antecedents. Lennon stands at the head of a long and important list of British rockers who attended art schools—Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Syd Barrett, and many others.
In the 1950s jazz was the bohemian music of choice for art students in England, just as it was for beatniks in the United States. But with his allegiance to rock and roll—and with limited performing skills—Lennon couldn’t stand jazz. His most important contact at art school was Stuart Sutcliffe. The two were close friends and shared an apartment. Sutcliffe was the real deal, a talented painter who embraced the visual avant-garde. He introduced Lennon to Impressionism, to the heroic, outsider status of Van Gogh, and to Kerouac, Corso, and Ferlinghetti. Lennon in turn dragged Sutcliffe into his rock-and-roll band, insisting as he had with Shotton that lack of talent was no obstacle. After Sutcliffe left the band in 1962, Lennon confided to a friend, “Me best mate, actually. I miss him not being around, even though he was rubbish on the bass.”
Rock and roll in Britain was framed as a youthful opportunity to stick it to middle- and high-brow pretentiousness, and it also represented the United States. “Are We Turning Our Children into Little Americans?” worried a headline. Rock and roll was energetic youth music from the wealthiest, most powerful, most modern country in the world, so what was there for a British teenager not to like? “I was brought up on Americana,” Lennon insisted. The genre could not be anything but American, but just to sharpen the point the Beatles sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” with American slang, prompting McCartney’s father to quip, “Why not yes, yes, yes?”
On their first plane trip across the Atlantic, a nervous McCartney raised the question, “Why should we be over there making money? They’ve got their own groups. What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?” That says a lot about the orientation of the early Beatles.
What it meant for rock and roll to be associated with African Americans in young Liverpool minds is harder to pin down. The Beatles were generous in their praise of black musicians, but they could not have been very clear about what it meant to be black in the United States, culturally or politically, or even who was who. They initially thought Buddy Holly was black, for example. Lennon was no Jerry Leiber or Janis Joplin, imagining himself as a white-black person. When he heard Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally in 1956, the song hit him as powerfully as Elvis did, but he had bought into Elvis’s hero status so completely that he had difficulty accepting any rivals. “How could they both be happening in my life, both of them?” he remembered. The conflict dissolved when he found out that Richard was black, which automatically, he later acknowledged with regret, set the hierarchy straight, Elvis still on top.
By 1955, Paul McCartney (b. 1942) had moved with his family to a council house a little more than a mile from Mendips. Though the family struggled financially, McCartney grew up in an environment that was warm and secure. He had a good relationship with his father, Jim, who offered an example of how to incorporate music into a stable life. Jim worked for a cotton trading company—one of many connections between Liverpool and the New World—went to bed at 10 p.m. every night, and abstained from alcohol. His wife, Mary, worked part time as a midwife. Jim supplemented his income playing piano in a little dance band and he even wrote a few tunes. The home piano was the center of weekly gatherings for the extended family, everyone standing around and singing along. Mary hoped her son would become a doctor. His father remembered how, as a boy, Paul “seemed to have the sort of mind that could easily grasp things that used to take a lot of concentration from other boys.” He was a clever mimic.
Yet during his midteen years he stubbornly turned antischool and had to be held back, taking classes with boys a full year younger. He shared with the other two of the “original three” this trajectory of disenchantment. Harrison was also held back, while Lennon was so far gone that being held back must have seemed hopeless. Harrison once explained how he “loved my association with John and Paul because I had something in me which I recognized in them—which they must have or could have recognized in me, which is why we ended up together.” The most direct way to gloss that statement is that they were each intelligent yet determined not to succeed in school. “Now there were three of us who thought the same,” remembered Lennon. Family ties were strong enough to keep them from becoming completely alienated. They turned their backs on institutional paths of success and embraced rock and roll. “They were such a gang of rebels,” said one friend who turned down an invitation to play bass guitar with the group. “They didn’t care about anything.”
Paul was introduced to the piano by his father, then ukulele by a cousin, followed by trumpet, and then, in the glow of skiffle and Elvis, to the guitar at age fourteen. His father did not feel threatened by the new music; he even hooked up a speaker extension so that Paul could listen to Radio Luxembourg, the primary source of rock and roll, in his bedroom. But by this time McCartney had already absorbed some of his father’s musical tastes for popular music from the 1920s and ’30s. “I grew up steeped in that music-hall tradition,” he remembered—songs like I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town), and After You’ve Gone. When I’m 64, composed around age sixteen, emerged directly from that connection. He was passionate about rock and roll and it served a social purpose in his peer group, but he never would have said, as Lennon did, that before Elvis there was nothing. By the time he met Lennon he had already put together a notebook of his own songs. His father tried to get him to study formally but he resisted. Like Irving Berlin, he never learned to read music.
Around age fifteen McCartney won a talent contest at a summer camp singing Tutti Frutti in imitation of Little Richard. If this had happened in the hills of Virginia we would understand it in terms of blackface minstrelsy, but it is hard to extend that label to a fifteen-year-old whose experience with black people was slight or nonexistent. (Yet England was the birthplace of blackface minstrelsy, and The Black and White Minstrel Show, complete with blackface makeup, was a favorite on British television from 1958 all the way to 1978.) When his father heard the imitation he was nonplussed. He didn’t realize until much later, when the Beatles were touring with Little Richard himself, how accurate it was; he thought his son had been making it all up.
The main point is that at age fifteen McCartney was performing a parody. He was not finding a place for himself in a tradition but articulating distance from it. Within a few years that had changed and Long Tall Sally became a featured number for him, a showstopper at the Cavern, in Liverpool. With African American music there must have often been, in the experience of British musicians and fans during these years, a back and forth between parody and something more normalized—or something vaguely in between. This is important to remember when we think about differently configured meanings for rock and roll in England, relative to the United States.
If McCartney had developed as a composer without Lennon and without the collaboration of the band, he might have turned out to be the Berlin or Gershwin of rock and roll. Like them, he worked in a song idiom built around African American musical markers of light syncopation and light blue notes. Unlike them, however, but like Ellington, he developed as a collaborative composer and as a composer-performer.
On July 6, 1957, Lennon’s group the Quarrymen played at a church festival, and McCartney stopped by to check them out. He watched as Lennon forgot the lyrics for Come Go with Me, and he admired his ability to make up new ones. Afterward, he introduced himself. He borrowed Lennon’s guitar, showed him how to tune it, and played Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock, all the chords and all the lyrics, followed by a Little Richard medley. The basic terms of their relationship were instantly set in place: verbal facility and leadership meeting strong musical chops and performing confidence. McCartney soon joined the band. The drummer remembered McCartney telling him what to play during his very first rehearsal. He started biking over to Lennon’s house, where he was impressed by the bookshelves and by Lennon’s ability to put a typewriter in motion. Mimi didn’t approve of Paul’s inferior class position and Jim didn’t approve of John, obviously a troublemaker.
They liked to hang out in the little vestibule at Mendips, exercising its bright acoustics. They figured out chords for songs like Blue Moon, and McCartney added vocal harmony, just as his father had taught him and as he liked to do with his brother, Mike. Partnering like this became commonplace as teenagers sunk into the straightforward pedagogy of the music: listen to a recording over and over, figure out the chords on the guitar, and start singing. Their relationship was built into the participatory ethos of rock and roll. Anyone could jump in, which meant that there would be a lot to learn from one another. Lennon showed his younger friend a little book he had put together with his own stories and cartoons, so McCartney brought along his own little book of self-composed songs, with lyrics written out, chords identified by letter name, title at the top. “He was already more of a songwriter than me when we met,” remembered Lennon. McCartney soon began a notebook for their joint efforts, and he wrote “Another Lennon-McCartney Original” across the top of each page.
On July 15, 1958, Lennon’s mother Julia was struck down and killed by a drunk driver. He remembered being “frozen inside”; it was years before he was able to talk about her death. McCartney had lost his own mother on October 31, 1956. The tragedies brought the two teenagers closer to each other. The fourteen-year-old McCartney had dealt with his pain by composing I Lost My Little Girl, which he later described as “a corny little song based on three chords.” It must have been obvious to his father that the song was not an innocent tale of romance but a sublimation of grief. Ten years later Lennon explicitly lamented the loss of his mother in Julia, a tender and vulnerable exposure, an unprecedented song that wove poetic nuggets from Kahlil Gibran into a delicate proclamation of love. Lennon’s breakthrough probably inspired McCartney’s Let It Be, which alludes to mystical visits from “mother Mary.” The differences between Julia and Let It Be speak to the differences between the two composers in 1968, one looking for personalized expression, the other less confessional and more universal, more formal in both senses of the word (musical form and formal decorum), disguising his autobiographical reference as a hymn to the Blessed Virgin of his mother’s Catholic faith. This series of songs captures a lot about their relationship, one leading, then the other, in different ways at different times and with different results.
They brought their phrases and tunes to each other and found ways to create together, as they would continue to do all the way through 1969. A few of them had potential—One After 909, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, and I’ll Follow the Sun. Lennon’s acceptance of McCartney’s musical superiority formed one basis for their twelve-year partnership. “Paul was always more advanced than I was,” he remembered. “He was always a couple of chords ahead and his songs usually had more chords in them. His dad played the piano—he was always playing pop and jazz standards and Paul picked things up from him.” Lennon’s verbal facility was also obvious. Just as McCartney loved to doodle around with wordless melodies and chords, so did Lennon love to sketch out lyrics.
“John was always writing poetry and lyrics,” remembered his aunt. “He never had a pencil out of his hand. He’d write something down, then screw up the bit of paper and throw it away and start again.” Their partnership could easily have developed in another way, with McCartney poised to become the George Gershwin of rock and roll, Lennon his Ira. What made the difference was the value system of rock and roll: the musical side was simple enough to include Lennon, the lyric side simple enough to include McCartney. They both worked on music and both on words, sometimes separately, sometimes sequentially, sometimes together, finding their way toward an integrative flexibility.
Their personalities were different, too, as the world would soon realize. Lennon, slightly introverted, volatile, impatient and sarcastic, and “very tough,” as Harrison put it, “had that ability to be gentle and soft and lovely but he was acid too. He gave that hard edge to the Beatles.”
McCartney was (and is) slightly extroverted, steady, willing to revise over and over again. “John brought a biting wit, I brought commerciality and harmony,” adds McCartney. A familiar image is that Lennon was inclined toward rock edginess, McCartney toward pop tunefulness. In their post-Beatles years, especially, they seem to have been so different that one has to wonder how they managed to pull off such an intimate partnership. Or to frame the question in a slightly more pointed way: how did they find common musical ground?
The answer is that they didn’t have to. The 1950s found it for them.
Hi Fi and Lo Fi, White and Black, Pop and Rock
During the 1920s, jazz energized dance music, popular songs, and even symphonic music as it was adapted by musicians black and white, working for both kinds of audiences, to open up a dynamic field of creativity. Something similar occurred in the 1950s and ’60s with rock and roll. Lennon and McCartney didn’t have to work very hard to find a creative middle ground between rock edginess and pop prettiness because the American market they were imitating had been vigorously exploring the possibilities all through the late 1950s.
We could think of the process, as it played out in the United States, as shaped by three sets of binary pairs—hi fi and lo fi, black style and white style, pop and rock. Within the pairs, each term defined what the other was not. The three pairs overlapped, though they did not map onto each other precisely. In a loose sense the same concepts were part of the 1920s, with jazz instead of rock in the third pairing. What made commercial music in the late 1950s tick was the sheer delight in promiscuously blending the categories. Ambitious musicians found whatever advantage they could through original combinations. The possibilities were endless, though this did not undermine assumptions of categorical differences. These mental constructions shaped how people heard and evaluated music. There was a lot of room to find your own way, to discover your own brand of hi fi and lo fi, with certain amounts of musical whiteness and musical blackness, a virtually infinite potential for commingling.
Hi fi, a nickname for phonograph players (short for high fidelity), promised advanced technology. In order to have high fidelity on the receiving end you had to have it on the producing end, too. The larger record companies formed elaborate production models that established their products as elite. Hi fi thus became a way of conceiving music that was popular and also slightly elevated, a fresh manifestation of the American middle brow. If you listened to hi-fi music on your pricey hi fi, you were aligning yourself with wealth. My favorite nod to this comes from the New York Times (November 22, 1953, p. 43): “Playing records with a diamond stylus is not merely swank.”
Record companies in the 1950s brought unprecedented thoroughness to this business model. When Ellington started making records in the mid-1920s, “race records” were very loosely supervised. The company cared about the style of music he recorded and about contractual details, but little else. By the 1950s they had put in place a hierarchical model with employees lined up in an efficient chain of command.
PRODUCER. The producer was in charge of everything inside the studio. Mitch Miller was probably the most famous producer of the decade. An oboe player trained at Eastman School of Music, Miller brought solid middle-brow tastes to pop recording. “I never compartmentalized it [pop versus classical] in my own mind,” he said. “The same rules apply you know—taste, musicianship, balance, get the best sound out of the artists.” Beatles’ producer George Martin had a similar background. (His oboe teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Margaret Eliot Asher, was also the mother of Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s main squeeze from 1963 through 1968. The Asher family introduced the untutored musician to classical music, avant-garde music, contemporary art, and much more. In other words, the high end was working on him both inside and outside the studio.)
COMPOSER. Composers of hi-fi, middle-brow music carried forward the golden age of popular song, with interesting melodic contours enhanced by a complementary flow of chords. Producers like Miller did not hesitate to tinker with the score as they saw fit—as Phil Spector would do one day with The Long and Winding Road, to McCartney’s astonishment. The preferred musical form for hi-fi songs was AABA. The best material went into the A section; the contrasting B section, or “bridge” (Lennon and McCartney called it the “middle eight”), made the return all the more satisfying. Contrast serves to heighten beautiful design, the hi-fi composer’s specialty. The melody brought the lyrics to life with magical synchrony of prosody, syntax, and meaning.
ARRANGER. Record companies in the 1950s hired their own arrangers to give them a distinct sound, just as the leading bands of the Swing Era had done. “A record is in a sense like a play,” reflected Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records. “It requires a beginning, a denouement and an end.” Mitch Miller liked to combine instruments in unconventional ways, not as daringly as Ellington but to make a fresh statement, what he called the “sweet surprise.”
STUDIO MUSICIANS. The Beatles ran smack into the institution of studio musicians at their very first recording session when Martin, dissatisfied with Pete Best’s drumming and then with Best’s replacement, Ringo Starr, insisted on bringing in studio drummer Andy White for Love Me Do (with Starr embarrassingly reassigned to tambourine). When the Beatles’ image of authenticity solidified, that kind of replacement was no longer possible. Hi-fi studio musicians included backup singers, professionals with superior control of intonation, covered tone, and blend. A rare Beatles usage is the exception that proves the rule of how important vocal authenticity was for them: in I Am the Walrus, the Mike Sammes Singers sound completely out of place, a deliberate quirk that extends the surreal atmosphere of the song.
SINGER. Lead singers were under contract, just like actors at the big movie studios. In the early 1950s they were the biggest names in music—Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and so on. They had polished voices, flexible and with range, control of loud and soft, and a judiciously used vibrato. They favored the conventions of a professional singer’s diction, and they delivered nicely rounded phrases. With his hit record Cry in 1951, Johnnie Ray hammered a crack in the wall of this vocal dominance thanks to, as Miller put it, his “unique way of sobbing through a song.” He’s “just selling hysteria, he’s not singing,” complained Patti Page. Ray paved the way for Elvis, who brought the wall tumbling to the ground.
ENGINEERS. Sound engineers and technicians were an essential part of the hi-fi mix, taking care of overdubbing, tracking, mic selection and placement, reverb, and balance. The Beatles pushed their engineers to break rules, to make every record sound different, and they had many precedents before them. Musicologist Albin Zak identifies the 1950s as a golden age for the pop record as a creative product distinctly different from “live” musical performance. As their success and confidence grew, the Beatles got in the kitchen of the engineers and extended their creative control.
The lo-fi antipode to all of this was the specialty of small, independent recording studios, known as “indies.” A lo-fi indie studio did not have to be in New York City or Los Angeles, where well-paid singers, musicians, and composers lived, but could be anywhere (Clovis, New Mexico, for example) in any kind of building (a general store, for example). Owner, producer, and engineer might all be the same person. How could a tiny indie compete with the big companies? By going in the opposite direction with a record that sounded like it was made in a garage, embracing the do-it-yourself American ethos. Everyone had more spending money in the 1950s, even young people eager to separate from their parents. It was no accident that low-budget indies became the launching pad for Everyman rock and roll.
At any point along the way, the unpretentious lo-fi alternative could turn the hi-fi profile on its head. Instead of sounding trained, polished, and with coached diction, singers sounded natural and rough, with black or hillbilly diction. Musical instruments could be identified as lo fi—harmonica and tambourine (Love Me Do), hand clapping (I Want to Hold Your Hand through Here Comes the Sun), a cardboard box filled with cotton instead of drums (Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away). There was no hi-fi arranger. Every musician simply made up his or her own part according to vernacular practice, with a sense of how each belonged to the whole, “just playing, you know, by feel,” as a musician at Sun Records in Memphis put it. The over-and-over-again approach that Charles Coffin heard in Port Royal, South Carolina, and that W. C. Handy heard in Cleveland, Mississippi—“paralyzing monotony,” as Mitch Miller ridiculed it when faced with declining hi-fi sales—took the place of finely tuned beginning, middle, and end. Fade-outs helped with the endings. Blues form was a strong alternative to the pleasant varieties of AABA design, perhaps even blues form straight, just one chorus after another, catchy refrains and pretty bridges nowhere in sight (Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog).
Composers of lo-fi melodies did not try to compete with the careful twists and turns of the hi-fi craftsmen. There might be very little contour at all, just hovering around a single pitch or two (Buddy Knox’s Party Doll, Lennon’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds). In the area of harmony, blues once again provided a model with its three simple chords, which were not even used in the correct conservatory way. Lyrics could be stripped down to emotional outbursts, nonsense even (“tutti frutti ah rootie”), with the implication that words are trivial; what matters is the emotional intensity of the music. McCartney explained the puzzle of how the Beatles could cover a girl-group song like Boys, recorded by the Shirelles: “We just never even thought, ‘Why is [Ringo] singing about boys?’ . . . We loved the record so much that what it said was irrelevant, it was just the spirit, the sound, the feeling. The joy when you did that ‘bab shoo-wap bab bab shoo-wop.’ That was the great fun of doing Boys.”
Rough and amateurish engineering could also be an asset. Electric guitar and voice are distorted in Howlin’ Wolf’s Moanin’ at Midnight, as if the outpouring of emotions overwhelms the equipment. (We may assume that Lennon was aware of precedents like this when he insisted on a dash of feedback at the beginning of I Feel Fine.) The authenticity of amateurish production seemed like a useful strategy to George Martin when he thought to record the Beatles’ first album live, in Liverpool at the Cavern. When that turned out to be impractical they recorded the whole thing in a single day back at the Abbey Road studio, saving Twist and Shout for the end, so that Lennon’s voice would be ragged after the long day of work.
The loose structure and rough-and-ready values of rock and roll created openings for singer-composers like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, and the same conditions made it easy to add, subtract, and tinker with tunes. Record producers were already primed to intervene, since that was their job. The easy give-and-take of lo-fi rock and roll made this seem natural.
From the Brill Building era there are plenty of stories about collaboration among composers. Leiber and Stoller were a words-and-music team, but they routinely stepped into each other’s territory, something like the Gershwin brothers. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman enjoyed the same flexibility. Songwriters who were friends across partnerships might help each other when they got into a jam. Pomus began the song Young Blood, for example, but it remained, in his words, “a very average hack song until Jerry and Mike helped me and did a serious rewrite.” Episodes like this generated long strings of names on disc credits. Leiber and Stoller didn’t like the look of that so they invented a single pseudonym (“Elmo Glick”) to represent them jointly.
And it was easy to extend co-composing into recording studios. When someone walked in with “their song” it was the producer’s job to recognize the good ones and turn them into hits. History overflows with conflicting accounts of who composed what, from Motown’s Money (That’s What I Want) to Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman. When Leiber and Stoller asked Ben E. King at the end of a session if he had any additional material, King sang a version of Stand by Me, inspired by some gospel songs he knew. Leiber and King fleshed out the lyrics, Stoller added standard R and B chords, a Latin bass line, and percussion, and Stoller and Stanley Applebaum framed the results with a string arrangement. The collaborative blending of lo fi with hi fi produced gold.
Culturally speaking, no binary opposition in the history of the United States is more basic than black and white. Racialized terms of musical expression saturated the marketplace in the late 1950s, pushing and pulling products in various marketing directions. For many this must have been subliminal: few dancers at the local hop thought of themselves as the first white-black people in their towns. But that does not mean it was irrelevant. They were not just shaking their hips. “If I hadn’t seen [the Beatles] I’d never have dreamed they were white,” gushed Little Richard in 1962. “They have a real authentic Negro sound.” Even if Richard was chuckling to himself a little when he made that observation, he was pointing to something important about the creation and reception of their music.
One way to approach the topic is through the distribution of stylistic features. If a performance has clear markers of black vocal style, with lots of blue notes, “worrying” pitch, conversational phrasing, strained timbre, sawtooth melodic prototype, or gospel-style melismas; if the fixed and variable model is strongly cast as a way to organize rhythm; if the performance follows a musical form of successive choruses with no hook and no bridge; if it uses few chords or standard blues chords, or standard gospel chords; if it includes heterophony, call and response, or riffs; if it features vocal effects on an instrument; if it conjures a participatory atmosphere with hand clapping, tambourine, spoken commentary, and call and response, all mimicking church services—if a record from the 1950s leans in these directions, you can bet on this: it was crafted by black musicians who were targeting a black audience. Every one of these features had a perceived “opposite” on the white end of the racial-musical spectrum. It was easy for musicians to blend it all together for expressive purposes or sales or both, thus generating what more than one writer from the 1950s called “mongrels.”
Because the voice is so personal, singing was heavily loaded. Muddy Waters sang what he called “deep blues,” his aim being to score hits on the R and B charts; crossover did not factor. His prominent blue notes and extended displays of conversational rhythm and phrasing were points of black musical virtuosity. Whites could “play so much, run a ring around you playing guitar,” he noted, “but they cannot vocal like the black man.” It is true: no white singer has ever sounded like Muddy Waters. Even Chuck Berry’s bending of pitch sounds modified in comparison. Lennon imitated Berry and modified further still (the connection is clear in Carol).
Light blue notes, judiciously sprinkled around, traveled best across the racial divide. They became a firm stylistic signature for McCartney. They are still there, ever so slight, in his elegant ballades (Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby), where they stand as the only connection to rock and roll. Gospel-style melismas, so common in R and B in the late 1950s (listen, for example, to the early Tamla/Motown singles), tended not to cross into white bands. The Beatles reserved strained vocal timbre for special cases, especially “shout” numbers in finale position. McCartney brought the house down (he was already in the basement) at the Cavern with Long Tall Sally. Twist and Shout was their preferred finale number in 1963 and 1964—it was replaced by I’m Down, a Little Richard imitation. Later examples include Helter Skelter, designed to keep up with a turn in 1968 toward rock authenticity, and Hey Jude, a statement of communal values enhanced by McCartney’s gospel flares in the extended second half.
Jazz was where the fixed and variable model for organizing rhythm found full and virtuosic treatment in the United States. R and B tended to be much simpler, often based on the unpretentious but effective “back beat,” accents on beats two and four, with cross rhythms and syncopations bouncing off that foundation. That was the model for rock and roll. During their early years the Beatles routinely add cross rhythms on bass, drums, rhythm guitar, and hand clapping, with light syncopation a standard feature of the vocals.
Chords associated with blues could also allude to black authenticity, for example, the “one chord” juiced up with a “flat seven.” Rather than explain from the ground up what all of that means, I’ll simply cite an example—the crackling opening of I Saw Her Standing There. This chord instantly locates the song on the black side of the racialized spectrum. It flies in the face of formally schooled Western harmony, with the flat seven destabilizing the home chord, normally a place of resolution. From the point of view of textbook harmony it is an aggressive move that undermines the tonal system as it was worked out in Europe over many centuries. The chord comes from a tradition that values loading a single musical gesture with as much intensity as it can handle. (Strained timbre serves the same purpose.) For blues musicians it expressed a traditional African approach to music-making. Gershwin occasionally slipped a chord like this into his elegant harmonic-melodic designs. McCartney puts it front and center in I Saw Her Standing There.
Just as typical for the Beatles was a gesture that was marked in the other direction, a little pop flourish at the end. She Loves You explodes with the energy of lo-fi American optimism, edgy syncopation, little snaps of counterrhythm, and splashing, aggressive cymbals, but the song finishes with a poppish major sixth that sits on the final chord like a maraschino cherry. The flat seventh that opens I Saw Her Standing There points unequivocally to black music, and this decorative sixth is a 1950s convention that points in the direction of pop. The chord confused George Martin, who told Harrison to drop it. He thought it sounded corny, like an old vaudeville flourish, but the Beatles insisted. A few years later Harrison crafted Something around equally poppish harmony, his melody gently dropping down to a major seventh in the first phrase to signal the sweetness of the smiling girl, the kind of detail that made Something a favorite of Frank Sinatra. Like the rest of their contemporaries, the Beatles could have things both ways. Even though I Saw Her Standing There begins with gritty black intensity, it ends with a mellow ninth on top of the final chord.
I Saw Her Standing There was directly inspired by Chuck Berry, the lyrics from Little Queenie and the opening chord, the guitar riff, and the boogie-woogie bass from I’m Talking about You. In Liverpool the Beatles came to be known as Chuck Berry specialists. Relative to Berry, I Saw Her Standing There is faster and more aggressive. McCartney’s opening phrase also has more musical definition than the counterpart. Lennon added the sly suggestion that the listener knows what the singer means about the girl being just seventeen, an early example from a long list of lyric upgrades for his partner’s works in progress. This is not just a better line: it is an invitation to the listener to take the song as an intimate moment of storytelling.
Musical form may seem like a dry, abstract matter that shouldn’t have anything to do with racially marked culture, but it did. The bridge, the contrasting section in AABA form that makes the return to A sound fresh, pointed in the hi-fi direction, while a simple succession of blues choruses indexed vernacular practice, where the emphasis was not on elegant design but easy participation and performer-based intensity. It is not that musicians always did things one way or another, rather that these marked tendencies could be manipulated and used purposefully.
Lennon’s I Feel Fine is a classic demonstration of the Beatles landing on the side of white pop in the area of musical form. He was inspired by a riff from Watch Your Step (1961), by Bobby Parker, who was in turn inspired by Ray Charles’s What’d I Say (1959). (Lennon knew both records thoroughly and referred to Watch Your Step as “son of What’d I Say.”) Listening to the recordings in chronological sequence provides a lot of insight into how the blending Beatles positioned themselves.
The first thing to do is track the riffs, where each composition began. They are obviously connected. Following Lennon’s lead, Starr adapted drum patterns from the Charles and Parker recordings to combine with the riff and form a vigorous groove. In vocal qualities, the Beatles differ strikingly from their models. Charles and Parker sing with vocal ornaments that would have been at home in the black church, while Lennon delivers his melody fairly straight, with only slight blues inflections. Charles and Parker interact with their backup singers in call and response, again connecting to communal practices, while Lennon’s lead is simple enough for his companions to add direct harmonies in the fashion of the Everly Brothers (just like the McCartney brothers had done at home).
But the most startling moment comes when Lennon breaks out of the verse and into the bridge (“I’m so glad . . .”). If you first listen to the Charles and Parker recordings, which have no bridge, this comes as a shock. This formal difference creates, all by itself, a huge gap between I Feel Fine and music more firmly aligned with the African American vernacular. It reveals the Beatles’ enthusiasm for the craftsmanlike, fait parfait designs of the hi-fi songwriters. By 1964, Lennon and McCartney had become good at creating bridges that are not simply filler but have their own appeal.
A bridge places the melody and chords of each section in a relationship of contrast and complementary design. The bluesy vocals in What’d I Say and Watch Your Step do not emphasize variety of melodic design but instead serve as a basis for expressive blues notes, detachment from the beat, conversational delivery, and strained timbre, the kinds of things African American performers had been specializing in for centuries. AABA form, on the other hand, requires the composer to chisel out two sections, each with its own melodic-harmonic image. Putting these two formal packages alongside each other—as they frequently were on radio and on turntables—makes one sound pretty and the other raw, one decorative and the other genuine, one crafted and reserved and the other spontaneous and demonstrative. These qualities are not absolute but relational, and, as I have argued, this set of relationships was highly active during the Beatles’ formative years. The Beatles liked the exciting groove of the black recordings, and they blended that with a sense of design fitting to white pop to create I Feel Fine.
The kind of pop, that is, that dominated the late 1950s, when the everyday magic of the indies was charming record-buying youth in the United States to the tune of two-thirds of the market for singles by 1957, causing the bloated hi-fi sector to writhe in pain. When Sinatra’s record sales and television show started to tank, he let rip an infamous tirade, the hiss and snarl of a cornered rat: rock and roll, “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression,” was “written for the most part by cretinous goons.” Those in more flexible positions found ways to adapt. Even Patti Page and Pat Boone could be marketed as rock and rollers. The sense of opposition between rock and roll and pop did not disappear, but it was also obvious that there were infinite ways to combine the two. Of our three binary oppositions, the one between pop and rock and roll was the most unstable during Lennon’s style period of 1956–1964.
There was no way to control the sprawling energy of creative blending. Leiber and Stoller came to the chaotic middle from a different direction when they added strings to R and B records, their attempts initially dismissed by producer Jerry Wexler as a “radio dial picking up two stations at once.” Mongrelized mixing across the triple spectrums offered a feast of creative synthesis. A creative team had structural advantages, an automatically larger range. A team assembled on an ad hoc basis could produce stunning results like Stand by Me, but a team built around tight friendships with long experience together could multiply that by one hundred.
Such was the fluid environment that Lennon and McCartney jumped into, ready to make their mark. Their success inspired them to become professional songwriters. “We were really looking at being a Rodgers and Hammerstein,” remembered McCartney. His partner seems to have agreed. Asked in an early 1963 interview about his ambitions, he answered, “to write a musical,” which brings one up as short as the bridge in I Feel Fine. What is important is not so much that he literally wanted to write a musical but to become the most famous composers of popular music in the world. The image of Lennon as a devotee of “pure” rock and roll became deeply important to him in later years, but it should not be projected too heavily onto his formative years as a composer. To the contrary, a career as the next Rodgers and Hammerstein (or alternatively, as Lennon once said, the “British Goffin and King”) seemed like a glorious thing.
And for Lennon, being a professional composer meant being a collaborative composer. The group did not become “John Lennon and the Beatles” (or Johnny and the Moondogs, as they briefly were in 1959) because it was crystal clear how much the leader needed his younger friend. McCartney was to Lennon as Stuart Sutcliffe had been to him in art school, the supertalented mate who was smart enough to keep up and could bring him along professionally. Had Lennon been able to see a collaborative opening for himself in visual art in 1958, he might have gone in that direction, with Sutcliffe at his side. The art school-rock connection is not simply a biographical detail but a central part of the story of the 1960s. Musicologists Simon Frith and Howard Horne conclude that “those who were in art school brought into music making attitudes that could never have been fostered under the pressures of professional entertainment.” The Beatles confirm that observation, in both a positive sense and a negative one.
For during their formative years—and really all the way through the end of 1965—Lennon and McCartney accepted the pressures of professional entertainment as a fact of life. This made them who they were. It was only after they had reaped financial rewards exceeding those of any other musician, after they had indeed become the next Rodgers and Hammerstein, that they felt secure enough to bring bohemian attitudes into their music. By then they had internalized the craft of composing popular songs so deeply that the outsider attitude came through that filter.
This internalization put them out of sync with younger, more committed art schoolers like Townshend, Clapton, and Barrett, who did not rise on the same track of pop-song mastery. By 1968, Lennon was feeling the tension acutely, and it became a primary cause of the Beatles’ breakup. But in 1964 there was no such tension. It is sometimes claimed that the Beatles were Lennon’s group in the beginning, then McCartney’s group by Pepper or even Revolver. But McCartney won the most important victory early on when he joined Lennon to the Rodgers and Hammerstein vision. “I become whoever I’m with,” Lennon said in 1975. The only way he could ever have even considered going in that direction was by hitching his wagon to McCartney. The way into this collaborative model was paved by the interactive history of African American music, a model the visual arts did not have. High on creativity and intelligence but low on discipline and training, collaboration offered Lennon his best and probably only chance.