CHAPTER 6
FOUR-HEADED MONSTER
JAZZ AND ROCK EMERGED roughly four decades apart, two cultural explosions that altered a huge range of music. Like Ellington, the Beatles stepped into a well-formed scene and found fresh ways to collaborate. But the two groups publicly defined themselves very differently. Ellington was known as a great composer who had a canny knack for using his soloists, while the joint songwriting of Lennon and McCartney became the centerpiece of a group profile that was nonhierarchical. Mick Jagger said the Beatles were like a “four-headed monster” when he first met them, never doing anything outside of the group.
Eric Clapton agreed: “It was an odd phenomenon. They seemed to move together, and think together, it was almost like a little family unit.”
“The bigger the Beatles got the closer we became,” affirmed Starr.
To paraphrase Lennon, the creative collective was born in Liverpool and grew up in Hamburg, Germany. When they first arrived, in August 1960, they stepped into a highly sexualized environment of strip clubs, porn cinemas, and bordellos. Harrison described Hamburg as “the naughtiest city in the world,” and Stuart Sutcliffe called it a “vast amoral jungle.”
The city shaped their music through five extended stays over three years. They did whatever it took to grab the attention of drunken sailors, gangsters, strippers, and especially prostitutes, who signaled gratis interest and jostled for their attention. (Prostitutes were required to carry a clean-bill-of-health card, dubbed by the Beatles a “ticket to ride.”) Their music was thus designed to generate sexual adventure. This was not a new development in music history, though the phenomenon has rarely been as streamlined as it was here. The result was a bright and energetic sound, the drive of macho male sexuality, vigorous, youthful, and instantly engaging.
They also learned to be outrageous. They acted out pretend fights, threw Nazi salutes, dressed like a cleaning woman, imitated a crippled walk, mooned the audience, played prostrate from the floor, and jumped unpredictably into the crowd. A lot of this came from Lennon, who might sing a song in his underwear or with a toilet seat around his neck. They pushed their voices to extremes. A rendition of Ray Charles’s risqué What’d I Say might last an hour. Everything was fueled by amphetamines and alcohol, setting in place lifestyles brimming with substance use and abuse.
A small group of artsy outsider types, including Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann, befriended them. For these Germans the musicians from Liverpool seemed to resolve tensions left over from the war by bringing American music to Germany via Britain. Kirchherr invited them to her family home for meals. They were impressed by her bedroom, painted black with black carpet and black bedspread, a tree branch wrapped in aluminum foil dangling from the ceiling. The “Exis,” as Lennon nicknamed Kirchherr and her friends, turned their backs on German culture and took inspiration from France, including existentialist philosophy. Kirchherr moved in with Sutcliffe and the two were engaged to be married before his untimely death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962. The two artists enjoyed a passionate relationship of equals, wearing each other’s clothes in public and inspiring each other to create. Their relationship predicted the synergy of John and Yoko, six years later.
Kirchherr took some stunning black and white photographs of the Beatles. Their budding magnetism and tough image splendidly combined with her moody sensibility to produce an unprecedented set of documents, far removed from the typical celebrity shots of professional musicians. They are unmatched artifacts of the Hamburg years.
The Exis opened up the Beatles to a fresh set of cultural forms, mainly black leather jackets and the famous haircuts, modeled on the French and called “Caesar” haircuts. There is a story about McCartney putting on a spoof of reading poetry by Yevtushenko, as if the group were beatniks, demonstrating both an awareness of and a sense of distance from bohemian taste. How bohemian detachment played out musically is less obvious. It certainly encouraged them to wear a badge of difference, which turned out to be useful back in Liverpool between the Hamburg trips. “There was always an underlying ambition to go in a slightly artistic direction, whereas a lot of our fellow groups didn’t have that,” reflected McCartney. This meant willingness to explore obscure repertory and eventually offer their own compositions.
There was plenty of fun with prostitutes, and the warm friendship of the Exis was valued highly, but the main social orientation of the Beatles in Hamburg was to spend time with one another. They were young, untethered from family, friends, language, and customs, with inverted hours, threats of violence, and living conditions that were cramped, cold, and unsanitary. It was a challenge to survive, and they survived together, especially Lennon, Sutcliffe, McCartney, and Harrison, with drummer Pete Best usually off to himself. All experiences were shared, even the women. They watched as Harrison lost his virginity, cheering after he finished.
Verbal patterns of wit, irony, and social critique defined their tight social group, a coded, intense, dynamic, and insular style of interaction to form what biographer Barry Miles has called a “hermetic Liverpool bubble around them.” Keeping up with the witty banter, as much as anything musical, was what made it hard for Best to fit in. Born out of a developmental, late-teenage need and cultivated through Lennon’s leadership, the bubble became the basis for their success. You can glimpse it in descriptions of Lennon and McCartney generating song lyrics together. The finished lyrics often communicate a feeling of a direct connection, and also an edge of competition, sharp and fresh. It is not surprising that they feel conversational since they were generated through actual conversations.
Later, after the move to London, they were joined by a group of Liverpool friends who enlarged the bubble and also contributed to lyrics, including Neil Aspinall (“John often asks Neil for ideas for the last lines of songs,” observed biographer Hunter Davies), Mal Evans (the pretend Pepper band was his idea), Terry Doran (who suggested filling the holes in Albert Hall), and Pete Shotton (Eleanor Rigby). It seems likely that contributions like these extended beyond what has been documented, a hidden layer of the collective.
The bubble helped define their public image. Their closeness could be seen in their dress and haircuts, heard in the stage patter, the rock ensemble, and the vocal harmonies, imitating the Everly Brothers. Sometimes the three main singers sang at once, “a very charming image,” as a Hamburg fan put it. The Beatles sang and sang and sang. Lennon and McCartney learned how to hold an audience in Germany. Regular rotation of the lead vocal became part of their egalitarian ethos, with featured numbers even for Sutcliffe (Love Me Tender) and Best (Matchbox), and a regular slot for Harrison.
Eight months younger than McCartney and a full twenty-eight months younger than Lennon—and an inch shorter than both of them—Harrison, part of the “original three,” calmly assumed a subordinate position, like a row of children in a family birth order. He pretty much stayed there for the rest of the band’s existence, with a circumscribed upgrade in late 1967 through the strength of his immersion in India. Lennon “seemed incapable of taking [Harrison] very seriously,” remembered Shotton. “In John’s eyes, George was still the little kid who tagged along, who happened to play the guitar and thereby gained his entrée into the band, but essentially remained (like Ringo) little more than an assistant, a second class Beatle.” George Martin remarked how the same was true of McCartney, who could not be bothered to help Harrison with his compositions. Yet Harrison was intelligent enough to keep up and fully committed to the music. He learned when and how to mediate. “John and Paul would butt into a conversation, George would stand there and wait patiently until you brought him in,” reported a Hamburg friend. He waited patiently for his brief guitar solos, for his turn in the vocal rotation, to get his compositions placed on LPs, and finally, at the very end, to be given the A side of a single.
Hamburg rewarded them for playing and singing more aggressively than the average Liverpool band, faster, louder, with passionate vocals and hard attack. They were drawn to rock and roll on the African American end of the spectrum—Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis. As they bounced back and forth between Hamburg and Liverpool they firmed up a style that was out of step with the British mainstream, dominated by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who were selling a softer, more middle-of-the-road version of American pop rock. “They liked us because we were kind of rough, and we’d had a lot of practice in Germany,” remembered Harrison. “There were all these acts going ‘dum de dum’ and suddenly we’d come on, jumping and stomping, wild men in leather suits.” Lennon stood with legs slightly parted, aggressive and sexual, mesmerizing girls in the front rows. They smoked and ate on stage, turned their backs to the audience and bantered inside jokes. Long Tall Sally induced hysteria. Cynthia Lennon described the Cavern scene: the Beatles “would grab their audience musically, emotionally and sexually, take them with them for the ride and when the trip was over would leave them totally exhausted yet screaming for more. I had never seen anything like it. It was fantastic.”
Their embrace of African American numbers—dozens of them, like Arthur Alexander’s Shot of Rhythm and Blues and Richie Barrett’s Some Other Guy (both released in Britain in 1962), for example—distinguished them from the Liverpool competition. They did not have the musicianship to compete with bands like the Blue Angels, who produced pristine versions of Roy Orbison songs, or the Remo Four, who mastered Chet Atkins–style guitar picking, so they went in a different direction. They even sang some call and response (Stay, New Orleans, Twist and Shout). The Beatles were “no. 1 [in Liverpool] because they resurrected original style rock ’n’ roll music, the origins of which are to be found in American Negro singers,” explained Bob Wooler to the readers of Mersey Beat in August 1961. They became known as Chuck Berry specialists and covered a dozen of his songs. One observer insisted that “to play Chuck Berry covers in a dance hall in Liverpool in 1962 was an open act of defiance.”
On an intuitive level there must have been a sense that African American stylistic markers naturally reinforced their egalitarian profile. Through the miracle of the phonograph, the energy of the ring shout had skipped across the Atlantic, hopped the North Sea, and returned to England with a difference. They became “part of the crowd,” as one musician described the Cavern. “Or the crowd was a part of them . . . all the jokes and all the shouting. They were very, very funny, and spontaneous, and the nearer the front you were the more evident it was.”
Lennon and McCartney were brimming with confidence in the autumn of 1961. “They reminded me of those well-to-do Chicago lads Leopold and Loeb, who killed someone because they felt superior to him,” insisted Wooler. “Lennon and McCartney were ‘superior human beings.’” At the end of the year, Brian Epstein offered to manage the band with the promise that he would pump a lot of his own money into the project. He persuaded them to drop some of the more severe affronts to bourgeois convention. His secretary typed up a list of guidelines—no smoking on stage, no swearing, no joking with girls, trim your guitar strings. They could smoke off stage, but only filtered cigarettes, not the low-class unfiltered “rollies.” Epstein taught them how to bow: bend from the waist and count “1-2-3.” Lennon believed that Epstein’s primary talent was fashion. Though he grumbled about the new uniforms, which made them look like the hated Shadows, he came around since their income was improving, loosening his tie and undoing the top button of his shirt as modest gestures of rebellion.
Music always has the potential to communicate more than one thing at a time, and Epstein was steering the Beatles toward a straightforward package: the music was rough, sexy, and slightly dangerous, while the visual presentation was tamed, safe, and professional. The strategy was completely compatible with 1950s blending in the United States, as their trans-Atlantic success soon confirmed.
Epstein convinced them to work out a thirty-minute set and repeat it, instead of spinning out in unpredictable lengths and sequences. He probably had some influence on repertory (though this has been denied). When he started peddling them to record companies he offered an eclectic mix. As the owner of a record store he knew where the money was flowing, and the sensible thing was to push them toward the middle. They were fond of a range of American styles, from country to Broadway, especially when they had in front of them the precedent of a cover by an American rock-and-roll group. At an audition for Decca Records on New Year’s Day 1962, they performed fifteen songs. Motown’s Money (That’s What I Want), Berry’s Memphis, Tennessee, the Coasters’s Searchin’, and Holly’s Crying, Waiting, Hoping were all pieces they loved to play. More strategic was September in the Rain, a standard from 1937 that Dinah Washington had recently revived. Take Good Care of My Baby, by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, was a current and very poppy number one for Bobby Vee, while ’Till There Was You and Besame Mucho profiled McCartney’s romantic side.
The New Year’s Day audition included three originals—Hello Little Girl, Like Dreamers Do, and Love of the Loved. These were early efforts. Lennon and McCartney had been composing together since the beginning of their friendship, but Hamburg put their songwriting on hold. Mark Lewisohn, who has chronicled and studied this period with precision and insight, concludes that they did not compose a single song in 1961. It is as if the ferocious drive to become professional performers overwhelmed them, with no energy or ambition left for composing. Composing and performing during these early years were pretty much separate activities. People wanted to hear hits they recognized, not mediocre songs they didn’t. Lennon’s close friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe may have been another factor for the composing hiatus, since it slightly distanced McCartney from the leader. But the bottom line is that they understood their future in 1960 and 1961 in terms of performance. Toward the end of 1961 they started to slip an original song or two in at the Cavern.
Epstein’s goal in offering three original numbers to Decca was to give the band a distinct identity, but he also understood a key part of the music business: big payoffs could be collected when an original got recorded by other people. This was precisely the direction Duke Ellington had tried at age twenty-five. A career as a songwriter was not dependent on a career as a performer, but the two could mutually benefit. At these moments in their respective biographies, Ellington, hoping to be the next Irving Berlin or George Gershwin, was in sync with Lennon and McCartney, aiming to be the next Rodgers and Hammerstein. They diverged with collaborative models during the next phases, with Ellington merging composition with performance through arrangements for featured soloists, while Lennon and McCartney got better and better at songwriting and extended creative control to details of arranging and record production.
The spur they needed was a contract with Parlophone, a division of EMI. Epstein met with George Martin in London on May 9 and signed up for a session on June 6. It was a tremendous breakthrough. Martin requested new material (new relative to the Decca material he had already heard), and the excitement revived the songwriting partnership. The immediate results were P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why, and Please Please Me.
When Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best stepped out of their beat-up white van and into the EMI studios on Abbey Road in June they entered an industry much more thoroughly organized than anything they had experienced. In due course they met Martin, the studio producer, who would shape their music and extend the creative collective.
In Chapter 5 we looked at how much control a recording studio could assert. A record producer acts something like an editor in a publishing house. All novelists expect to deal with an editor. They may not like it, but they accept it as part of business. In Victorian England publishers went further than most by imposing specifications about stories and characters on authors like Charles Dickens, much as record producers put forward new songs for groups to record based on the most recent hits. Artists inevitably have to negotiate, at some point, the tension between their own ideals and the expectations of a target audience, but in this arena the important calculations were made by the publisher. As Dickens grew successful he took creative control, which is pretty much what happened to the Beatles.
It is easy to miss how the record producer as editor represented a new force in music history. Classical composers do not have editors, at least not in the same way that novelists have them, and they never have. Even composers of popular music like Gershwin or Joplin would have been surprised to bump up against an editor of sheet music messing with the details of their songs. No one told Stephen Foster to use more subdominant chords for expressive effect, or W. C. Handy to have less syncopation in a second strain for contrast. In the classical tradition, musical notation, theory, and complexity of design all combine to minimize editing, while the status of the great composer makes it taboo. The combination of vernacular practice, with normal conditions of regularly changing content, and the relatively modest status of the composer of popular music created an opening for the studios. The LP upped the ante of financial investment and led to centralized control. Any musician who entered a studio with a strong creative agenda faced a real chance for direct conflict.
Ellington achieved legendary status before the studios fully flexed their muscles, which must have helped him in negotiations like this. Plus, the entire idiom of jazz had donned an artistic halo by the 1950s, which shielded it from the heavy interventions of pop. The businessmen controlled the pop system as thoroughly as their Victorian counterparts had controlled serialized novels—or more. Record companies notoriously paid very little, but they offered massive, unmatched publicity. There were good reasons to bow to the company way. “You’d sell your soul to get on a little record,” remembered Starr.
Lennon and McCartney were stubborn and independent, but it did not take them long to recognize Epstein’s business savvy; now they saw how much Martin had to offer. For Love Me Do, their first Parlophone record (recorded September 1962), Martin had McCartney sing the hook instead of Lennon so that Lennon could enter on harmonica. McCartney was nervous, but the overlap worked. Please Please Me (recorded November 1962) was a slow number in its original conception, but Martin told them to jack up the tempo. For She Loves You (recorded July 1963) his advice was to open the song with the high-energy chorus. These turned out to be excellent edits that earned for Martin the Beatles’ trust.
The dynamics between record producers and performers fell across a big range, from the dictatorial (Phil Spector) to the savvy businessman as arbiter of taste (Berry Gordy) to unquantifiable relationships of give-and-take. Roy Orbison and producer Fred Foster worked together to shape and reshape Only the Lonely, Pretty Woman, and It’s Over, three of Orbison’s biggest hits. Martin was canny enough and flexible enough to succeed in a creative relationship that turned out to be relentlessly quirky and unpredictable. He had the right combination of humility and confidence, which helped him see, in a given moment, how much his young employees needed and wanted. “I could recognize that an idea coming from them was better than an idea from me,” he admitted. Since the Beatles were already used to collaborating, and since Martin’s suggestions were lifting them to the top of the charts, he became part of the creative collective. “George Martin always has something to do with it, but sometimes more than others,” McCartney explained. “Sometimes he works with us, sometimes against us . . . Sometimes he does all the arrangements and we just change them.” Engineer Geoff Emerick noted a less tangible contribution: “Martin’s legacy will not just be the scoring and arranging he did but his willingness to accommodate the Beatles as they stretched their artistic wings and learned to fly.”
Martin organized the first session on June 6, 1962, to test the three vocalists. He wanted to see who was the best singer, which would lead to a marketing strategy. The norm was to have a front man backed by a group. “I desperately wanted my own Cliff,” he remembered. “I was so hidebound by Cliff Richard and the Shadows that I was looking for the one voice that would carry them.” Since the Shadows were selling massive quantities of records that was not such a bad plan. He quickly narrowed to two. It would be either “Paul McCartney and the Beatles” or “John Lennon and the Beatles.”
In the end, he did not push for a front-man format, though he did insist that drummer Pete Best was not good enough to record. Nominations for the “fifth Beatle” regularly rotate through six candidates—Sutcliffe, Best, Epstein, Martin, Yoko Ono, and Billy Preston—and in June 1962 one fifth Beatle was aiming to raise standards by getting rid of one of the others. The original three were more than ready, so Epstein passed on the bad news to Best and promptly went to fetch Starr, whom Harrison had already been promoting within the group. Like Harrison, Starr was sharp enough to keep up and savvy enough to know how to fit in, musically and socially. He was witty, with a knack for clever phrases, and solid enough musically.
Starr’s entry completed what assistant Neil Aspinall called “the chain,” a key for scanning the group hierarchy: Lennon brought in McCartney, who brought in Harrison, who brought in Starr. The sequence also worked on the levels of social class and physical height, subliminal mechanisms for defining how they all lined up. Five to six inches shorter than the others (Lennon for a while called him “the dwarf”), less educated, and from a background of considerable poverty, Starr did whatever was asked of him. A journalist described him astutely in 1966 as “less complicated and more mature than the others, which makes him restful company and a charming host.” Harrison looked out for him and made sure that he rotated hotel room assignments, now with Lennon, next with McCartney, back and forth, quickly integrating him into the group. The unassuming drummer never presented himself as a rival in any way. With creative sparks flying more and more intensely as the decade unfolded, these personal qualities proved valuable.
Epstein had given Martin a list of the band’s repertory, but Martin wanted them to record a song called How Do You Do It? The Beatles hated it. Behind the scenes, Martin was being urged by his boss to develop their original numbers, so against his better judgment he agreed to record Love Me Do, an early song they had recently reworked with harmonica and a new bridge. Compared with Hello Little Girl, Love of the Loved, and Like Dreamers Do, Love Me Do stood way over on the lo-fi end of the spectrum. It begins with the I-7 chord that opens I Saw Her Standing There, instantly communicating blues. Lennon thought it might have been the first-ever recording of a British band with harmonica. Martin intuitively recognized the implicit logic that tied everything together: this was an egalitarian group, not a soloist with accompaniment, and that image was compatible with unpretentious, lo-fi, African American-derived music. An added dose of genuineness came from the fact that they wrote the song themselves.
The record was released in October 1962. It has been reported that when Epstein heard it he sank into a funky depression. It’s easy to see why. Love Me Do is so threadbare and raw, a simple melody with just three chords, not at all the middle of the road and sharing nothing with the number one hits tumbling out of Cliff Richard and the Shadows. When singer-guitarist Tony Sheridan, who had worked with the Beatles in Hamburg, heard it he croaked with scornful laughter. “What a load of crap,” he scoffed, astonished by the low-level simplicity. Indeed, it would be a long time before the Beatles again recorded a song that was quite so basic. “We actually had a sense of being different,” said Harrison, and Love Me Do made that crystal clear.
Love Me Do was credited to “Lennon and McCartney,” just like the entries in the little notebook McCartney began keeping in early 1958. Epstein hired a lawyer to make their partnership contractual and explicit: everything composed by one of them would be credited to both, regardless of the level of joint authorship, even if one of them was working with someone else. They talked about ordering their names to reflect the primary composer in each individual case, and there were some experiments in this direction during 1963. But it did not take long before they settled on the formula of always listing Lennon’s name first. They sensed the mischief that would inevitably follow from ordering the names according to primary composer and the boost that would arise from a consistent formula, the ordering of which could be blamed on the alphabet and which implicitly confirmed the hierarchical chain.
The decision to cosign everything was the business piece that promoted all future collaboration. It was much cleaner than Ellington’s ecosystem of giving raises and privileges to musicians who supplied their melodies, riffs, and pieces. Cosigning meant that each could freely contribute to the other’s songs, and it meant a powerful addition to their emerging public image. Not only did the Beatles write their own songs, they wrote them together. Collaboration was not only visible and audible, it was inscribed.
Ellington preferred to keep the fluid dynamics of interactive creativity in the shadowy background, and his decision was completely normal for the times—and most times. When Dickens, for example, acquired enough capital to start his own business, he hired writer Wilkie Collins (among others). The two of them wrote together, “side by side at two desks in [Dickens’s] bedroom at Gad’s Hill,” as Collins described it, for many years. But Collins’s participation has been routinely erased, minimized, and misconstrued, the usual issues of copyright and the status of solitary genius close at hand.
The Beatles embraced a collaborative image partly because of the egalitarian nature of the vernacular tradition, partly because of their closeness, and partly through an intuitive sense for how commercially appealing this model could be. People went nuts over the idea of a democratized rock-and-roll band saturated with creative camaraderie. Collaboration became part of what their music meant. This held all the way to the breakup. The informed listener hears Hey Jude, for example, as a song generated by a tight group of friends. Together they articulate a communal vision of healing that saturates the piece from beginning to end. This had a lot to do with the song being recognized as number one of the entire decade in many polls.
Ellington skewed a communal image and promoted the idea of his own genius; he was known as “The Duke.” In Britain, the Beatles were known as “The Boys.”
Composers of the Year
Thanks to relentless boosting from Epstein and an organized purchase campaign from the Liverpool fan clubs, Love Me Do reached number seventeen on one of the UK charts, high enough to open up England for them. The London Evening Standard ended 1963 by calling it the “year of the Beatles.” The New Musical Express agreed: “In the distant future, when our descendants study the history books, they will see one word printed against the year 1963—Beatles! Just as convincingly as 1066 marked the Battle of Hastings, or 1215 the Magna Carta, so this year will be remembered by posterity for the achievement of four lads from Liverpool.” A well-placed churchman publicly requested the band to update a Christmas carol, O Come All Ye Faithful, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, and Dora Bryan crooned All I Want for Christmas Is a Beatle. Topping it all off was the classical music critic for the London Times, William Mann, who called Lennon and McCartney the “outstanding English composers of 1963.”
Cynthia Lennon remembered how “John and Paul were writing their songs with incredible ease” during the winter of 1962–1963. They had spent 1960 and 1961 memorizing dozens and dozens of pop-rock songs and internalizing stylistic norms while composing very little. In early 1963 their creativity started to burst out, and with a big step up in quality. No one was counting Hello Little Girl, Like Dreamers Do, Love of the Loved, or Love Me Do among their epoch-making accomplishments. What made them composers of the year were Please Please Me, I Saw Her Standing There, From Me to You, She Loves You, All My Loving, It Won’t Be Long, Hold Me Tight, and I Want to Hold Your Hand. With these songs they cracked the blending code and came out on top.
Please Please Me was the first big success, and it was thoroughly collaborative. The original inspiration came from Roy Orbison. Lennon started composing the song in May 1962, around the time they were covering Orbison’s Dream Baby (composed by Cindy Walker). Judged by lyrics alone, the singing persona of Please Please Me stands in a pleading, helpless position, an Orbison specialty. Lennon’s original tempo was slow, atmospherically vulnerable, the kind of thing that was carrying Orbison to the top of the charts. In spite of their headstrong cultivation of hypermasculine sexuality, they were exploring vulnerability as an option. When the tempo was sped up at Martin’s suggestion the energy became more of a demand than an Orbison-style plea, which has confused some observers to take the song as a plea for oral sex, so powerful is Lennon’s macho presence.
Lennon’s fingerprints are there in the neat synchronization between words and music in the bridge (“I don’t wanna sound . . .”). He carried the emerging song to his partner, literally to his house on Forthlin Road, where the two of them sat down one afternoon in the front parlor and set to work at Jim McCartney’s piano. Two fifteen-year-old girls happened to be hanging around (this kind of connection with Liverpool fans was not unusual in 1962), and one of them later described the two composers sitting side by side on the piano bench, “mostly working on the chord changes, with a lot of joking and messing about.”
It is easy to make a few inferences. Lennon did not grow up with access to a piano, while McCartney had been learning about chords from his father on this very instrument for years. (You could say that this piano was the only material advantage McCartney had over Lennon while growing up.) Greater mastery of chords was McCartney’s calling card. McCartney’s likely contribution to Please Please Me as they joked around on the piano bench would be the chords for the repeated words “come on,” which nicely built up tension into the release. Lennon took Dream Baby’s triple repetition and made it more concise, and his partner’s chords lifted the song to a higher level.
The collaborative mix also included McCartney’s single-note vocal harmonization of Lennon’s melody, a technique he had learned in school. The vocal duet is bright, energetic, fresh, and collective: with the harmonizing part ringing out on top the listener has no way of separating the two lines hierarchically. An egalitarian vocal ensemble becomes part of the compositional product, and we are an ocean away from Orbison’s lonely pleading. As McCartney later said about There’s a Place, another number from around this time, “I took the high harmony, John took the lower harmony or melody. This was a nice thing because we didn’t actually have to decide where the melody was till later when they boringly had to write it down for sheet music.” Martin sped up the tempo and asked for harmonica (following Love Me Do). Harrison took the harmonica riff and played it continuously throughout the song on his guitar, like a blues riff. Assistant Producer Ron Richards told him it was too much: simply play the riff “in the gaps,” he advised, which made it less bluesy and more poppy. Starr added strong drumming, Lennon a strong vocal lead, and McCartney some nice details on bass. Such was the fluid give-and-take behind their first number one hit.
Ask Me Why, on the flip side of Please Please Me, also started with Lennon. The chords of the A section imply composition on a guitar. The nicely contrasting bridge (“I can’t believe . . .”), however, moves through an augmented chord, and it is easy to again imagine McCartney, always a couple of chords ahead of his partner, at work on the Forthlin Road piano. This same pattern of chords opens the bridge of Don’t Ever Change (composed by King and Goffin), released by the Crickets in the spring of 1962 and quickly covered by the Beatles. There is also a melodic difference between the two sections of Ask Me Why: in the A section, the melody follows the chord tones in a very straightforward way, while the bridge features more nonharmonic tones, again suggesting different composers.
They recorded their first album in a single day, February 11, 1963, and after it was released in March it went on to hold the number one position for thirty weeks, generating national tours, television appearances, and a regular radio show on the BBC. The BBC show gave listeners a chance to hear the musicians in conversation. Their interactive verbal style had gone through several phases with still more to come: in Hamburg it took high form as the hermetic bubble, on stage it incorporated raucous insults and outrageousness, and at the Cavern it was tweaked with neighborly charisma and faux-private shows for the swooning girls. Now it was properly tamed for the BBC.
They did not tame their Liverpudlian identity, however. Each Beatle plus Epstein experienced blatant prejudice in London before their explosive success. “London is so very strange about the north of England,” confessed Dick Rowe, the Decca producer who famously turned the group down. “There’s sort of an expression that if you live in London you really don’t know anywhere north of Watford. Liverpool could have been Greenland to us then.” Starr remembered trying to dance with girls in London and being rejected repeatedly because of his accent.
But against all odds Liverpool had suddenly become an asset. In a press release from the fall of 1962, Epstein mentioned the city twelve times in three pages. Publicity photographs had the band standing in bombed-out ruins from the war. The musicians asked why there always had to be mention of their home city. After Epstein explained it to them they started to exaggerate their accents in interviews, reviving the speech patterns that Mimi Smith and Mary McCartney had worked so hard to snuff out. When they finally reached the national stage their jangling guitars, splashing cymbals, and bright voices were attached to images of Liverpool and a sense of hardwired difference.
LIVERPOOL WAS WORKING CLASS. Liverpool had long been known as a rough city of immigrants, slums, smog, and working docks, and those associations were hardly diminishing in 1963. It continued to hold some of the highest rates in England for poverty, unemployment, crime, and alcoholism. Some fifty thousand families still relied on outhouses. “It’s Liverpool, where Z-Cars comes from” explained a fan, referencing a gritty crime drama from BBC television.
LIVERPOOL WAS WITTY AND IRREVERENT. “Being born in Liverpool you have to be a comedian,” insisted Harrison. Lennon was an expert in the local tradition of undermining virtually any stated value with daggers of sharp wit. All displays of self-satisfaction were read as attempts to separate from the common crowd and dealt with accordingly. “If one [Beatle] seemed in danger of taking himself too seriously, the others knocked it out of him,” observed Harrison’s first wife, Pattie. Class resentment found outlets through witty attacks on the upper crust, “blunt northern humor,” as McCartney put it. The Goon Show, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, which all of the Beatles listened to faithfully during their teenage years, demonstrated how to professionalize class-slaying bluntness by gobbling up British pomposity and rendering it toothless. “It’s a highly prized commodity, a laff,” explained Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, “especially in Liverpool where there’s hardly anything to laff at unless you laff at all the sadness and poverty.”
LIVERPOOL WAS MIXTURE. Three of the four Beatles (Starr was the exception) had mixed ancestry, Irish and English, a fairly typical feature of the working class. Liverpool had the first “Chinatown” in the world, a huge American presence during the war, Jewish refugees from the pogroms, and a steady history of permanent disembarkation. A climate of cultural mixing must have made it easier for the Beatles to open up to alternative cultural values, first from the United States, then from India. They had nothing to protect.
LIVERPOOL WAS COMMUNAL. When success made it possible for Starr to buy his mother Elsie a nice house, properly detached and far from the Dingle slums, she had a mixed reaction. The neighbors were so far away, and where was the corner store? Impoverishment had a deeply communal side. Houses shared walls, streets were narrow, and courtyards gave architectural form to neighborliness. This could be deadly, with easy transmission of disease through unsanitary conditions, but it also brought a culture of shared intimacy that people liked, fertile ground for the ancient communal practices of African American music-making to land upon.
As their fame grew during 1963, Liverpool infused their image with a nice little mixture of foreign yet still one of us. Their musical connections to the United States were obvious, but they were also clearly distinctive, which was read as British, something genuine that had popped up in a remote corner of the homeland. “But they’re not black, Grandma . . . They’re white . . . and they’re British!” was how a press release from late 1962 framed them. Beatlemania was a symbolic ascent of the underprivileged classes, and that was something the entire nation was ready to endorse in 1963. “This working-class explosion was all happening and we were very much a part of it,” explained McCartney, “making it okay to be common.” More than a matter of screaming teenage girls, Beatlemania included a communal, working-class identity, youthful and modern but also willing to play by the rules.
In the United States rock and roll was firmly connected to a caste system based on race. England organized social hierarchies no less thoroughly through class, and this structural difference helps explain the differing receptions of rock and roll. Basically, it made it easier to cover the phenomenon in a blanket of white Britishness than it was, across the Atlantic, to cover it in a blanket of white Americanness. By symbolically lifting class boundaries in a spirit of national solidarity the Beatles could stand as British icons up and down. (It could even be argued that when they came to the United States in January 1964 their British translation of music that had been so strongly inflected with race in the United States helped de-racialize the phenomenon.)
Some have argued that Beatlemania was fueled by the Profumo affair, the spy-sex scandal of mid-1963, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that the scandal got legs because of deeper frictions within British society, which in turn promoted the Beatles’ success. The friction involved a synthesis of class structure and cultural values with traditional Britain, cast as decadent, elitist, and stifling, pitted against an inclusive reach for modernity. Tradition gathered around images of the aristocracy and the Conservative party, modernity around youth and the United States. “We want the youth of Britain to storm the new frontiers of knowledge, to bring back to Britain that surging adventurous self-confidence and sturdy self-respect which the Tories have almost submerged with their apathy and cynicism,” puffed Harold Wilson at the end of 1963. As devotees of American music the Beatles were in a good position.
They also radiated authenticity. McCartney noted in 1964 how “quite a few people mention the word ‘genuine’” when explaining why they liked the Beatles. Interpretations of the group as having a campy vibe in the early years miss this central ingredient. As teenagers they disdained phoniness and were drawn to music they considered pure and uncompromising. The integrated parts of their public identity (no leader but a group of equals, tight camaraderie, singer-songwriters who composed together, Liverpudlian working class, Everyman authenticity, democratized rock and roll) so powerfully fueled an aura of genuineness that the leaks were easy to overlook (the exaggerated accents, the hierarchical chain, Lennon’s middle-class background, the contradiction between safe appearance and dangerous sound). That they wrote their own songs and wrote them together trumped everything.
Their performance at the Royal Variety Show on November 4, 1963, solidified their standing as institutionally sanctioned rebels. With the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in attendance, McCartney started their short set by singing ’Till There Was You, and Lennon ended it with the raucous Twist and Shout. In Chapter 5 we watched music travel through different social-musical configurations, and here is another classic example. Twist and Shout began life as Shake It Up Baby, composed by Phil Medley and Bert Russell and recorded by the Top Notes (1961). This first version stood on the far end of the lo-fi spectrum, a simple riff tune over and over again, call and response, no chorus, no bridge, no hook, with minimal variety in harmony and texture. When Medley and Russell reworked it for the Isley Brothers and gave it the title Twist and Shout, they added a six-bar middle section that moved through an exciting buildup on a single chord of tension, with strong additive rhythm and rising “ahhhs” from the vocalists, growing louder and swelling to a climax.
Louis Armstrong could have been thinking of the Beatles’ Twist and Shout when he said that rock and roll was nothing but warmed-over soup from the Sanctified Church. They took the Isley Brothers’ performance and simplified the instrumentation while adding more repetition and harder attack. Lennon sang with feral intensity, making it hard not to come along with him. They made the middle section even more exhilarating with seemingly random and polyrhythmic vocals, a scripted gospel eruption—or, if you like, a scripted sexual eruption. The Sunday Times asked a medical professional to comment on the sexual side of Beatlemania and he had this to say in late 1963: “You don’t have to be a genius to see the parallels between sexual excitement and the mounting crescendo of delighted screams through a stimulating number like Twist and Shout.” The added focus on the middle section with its harmonic tension and explosive release articulated masculine sexuality in a big way. The obvious sexual tension in songs like this has led to the category “cock rock,” one of musicology’s more memorable terms. Additional Beatles’ entries could include I Saw Her Standing There, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and A Hard Day’s Night.
When he introduced Twist and Shout at the Royal Variety Show, Lennon famously extended an invitation: “On this next number I want you all to join in. Would those in the cheap seats clap their hands. The rest of you can rattle your jewelry.” He delivered those lines with a polite nod to the royal box and a sheepish grin. It was a rapier thrust that hit the mark. The entire nation loved the quip as they read about it in newspapers and watched it on television. Lennon cheekily imagined England as a giant ring shout, a cheerful gesture of national unity. The context was very different from the American emphasis on African American mimicry and affirmation of the caste system. Even royalty could playfully form the “base” as the shouters at Port Royal, South Carolina, would have said in 1863, while the community’s most talented members on center stage contributed syncopation and vocal intensity. It was already apparent before the Royal Variety Show that Beatlemania was open to everyone. Lennon adorned this crowning moment with just the right dash of slightly irreverent Liverpudlian wit. “If we could put in something [in composing songs] that was a little bit subversive then we would,” remembered McCartney. Measuring that little bit became a fine point of Beatles’ intelligence.
Being the Rodgers and Hammerstein of British rock and roll helped the Beatles lighten up social-political tensions in early 1960s Britain, and the movie A Hard Day’s Night put it all in artistic shades of black and white. Liverpudlian Alun Owen scripted the movie with the hometown dialect, known as “Scouse.” One could see on screen the close male camaraderie, the unpretentious exuberance, the Liverpool accents, the witty irreverence, the long hair and nice suits, the working-class cheekiness and charm. The laughter of A Hard Day’s Night was a binding laughter, a glue joining the four Beatles, one to all and all to one, the audience to them, England as a nation. As the director Richard Lester put it, “The Beatles sent the class thing sky-high; they laughed it out of existence.” In their bright, energetic music you could hear the collaboration of the band and the two composers who, for the first time, wrote every single song on the album, the collaborating commoners trumping top-down genius. “We’re rather crummy musicians,” quipped Harrison, to which McCartney added, “We can’t sing, we can’t do anything, but we’re having a great laugh.”
From there the Beatles made genuineness a defining feature of the countercultural 1960s, a dividing line that automatically separated them from an enterprise like Motown, which had an impressive array of talent and its own collective style. Berry Gordy perfected his version of the old-school studios, with emphasis on a streamlined sequence of production. It worked for him. Gordy regulated everything: “artists performed, writers wrote, and producers produced,” lamented Otis Williams, one of the singing Temptations. “In his paternal, sometimes condescending way, he let it be known that he wasn’t interested in having an artist who wrote and produced.” Smokey Robinson, who has written over four thousand songs and was the lead singer in the Miracles, was the exception who proved that rule when he was promoted as vice president of the business. Otherwise, Gordy resisted the singer-songwriter model until 1971, when Marvin Gaye demonstrated its value with What’s Going On? In some ways Gordy was like Ellington, the father figure of a family-like business. Gordy zeroed in on the expertise of session men, backup singers, solo singers, and songwriters, lined them up under contract and put the sprawling “family” into semicollaborative competition with one another. The process was more fluid than the typical studio and perhaps a bit more ruthless.
The Times’ William Mann assured the nation that Beatlemania was more than carnivalesque ritual, that Lennon and McCartney’s distinctive blend was full of quality. For this, McCartney’s skill with chords was essential. When he first heard the Beatles, singer-songwriter Taj Mahal was impressed by the density of chords, “almost a chord for every word,” it seemed, and he mentioned From Me to You. Composition of that song started on a bus, the two composers tossing phrases back and forth. Harmonic variety includes a G-minor chord to open the bridge (“I got arms . . .”), an unusual direction given the C-major focus of the verse. McCartney said this was a daring step that opened up possibilities for him (indeed, the same unusual relationship, transposed, marks the beginning of the bridge in I Want to Hold Your Hand from a few months later). The minor “five” chord turns the bridge in a softer, more tender direction, a foil to the drive of the verses. McCartney realized how catchy From Me to You was when he heard a mailman humming it on the street.
I Want to Hold Your Hand was also created “eyeball to eyeball,” as Lennon put it, the two of them sitting side by side on a piano bench in the basement of the Ashers’ house. Again McCartney led the way in chords. While they were composing the verse he landed on a chord that inspired Lennon, who, sensing the right touch of design, shouted out, “That’s it! Do that again!” Epstein had asked for something that would sell in the United States. I Want to Hold Your Hand is strong with harmonic and melodic tension building to release, first into the catchy hook that defines the song (more precisely: the hook includes a buildup of tension and the release), and then at the end of the bridge, returning back to the verse.
Already familiar with double messaging, they built a song around that principle, with macho musical drive overwhelming the innocent, handholding lyrics. The urgency of the music makes it clear that the singer wants to do more than hold the girl’s hand. The swells and upward leaps and explosive release topple the coyness of the lyrics almost to the point of irony. Dylan heard the song on the car radio and admired its craft. “Their chords were outrageous,” he said, “just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.”
Critic Alec Wilder wrote about the “hard sell” of Gershwin’s most popular melodies, aggressive textures of driving, catchy gestures with lots of repetition. When Epstein asked Lennon and McCartney to tailor a song for the United States they responded with something similar. I Want to Hold Your Hand’s introduction hits the ground running (She Loves You is a precedent), both harmonically and metrically, with a syncopation thrown in for added kick. Crafted design is balanced with lo-fi hand clapping. The emphatic drum set reinforces details of design. Contrast is used effectively, with the relative tenderness of the bridge (“And when I touch you . . .”) leading back to the intensity of the verses by way of repeated references to visibly manifesting love. The song brims with dynamic energy, youthful optimism, and confidence. Writer and political activist Václav Havel described its impact in Czechoslovakia: “Suddenly you could breathe freely. People could associate freely, fear vanished, taboos were swept away, social conflicts could be named and described.”
For the breathtaking climb of Beatlemania Lennon’s cleverness with words was as important as McCartney’s knack for chords and melody. This could mean a felicitous phrase or image (for example, I Saw Her Standing There) and it meant the marriage of pithy verbal gestures to memorable musical gestures. Most songs by Lennon have this kind of union, for example, Revolution, where the first line sails up to the stressed syllable of the most important word. He once alluded to this in an interview:
See I remember in the early meetings with Dylan: Dylan was always saying to me, “Listen to the words, man!” and I said “I can’t be bothered. I listen to the sound of it, the sound of the overall thing.”
The story is one way to calculate the differences between folk and pop. “The sound of the overall thing” may be understood to mean the synergy between words and music, which is more important than the words or music by themselves. It is challenging to achieve this when the music comes first, as it often did with Lennon’s partner.
For the Beatles, vocal melody stood above everything. One of McCartney’s great gifts has been melodic design, the bread and butter of the hi-fi composers. The verse of I Saw Her Standing There does not sound much like the Chuck Berry models McCartney was listening to because of its strong melodic arc, supplemented with slightly unusual progressions that decorate and push at strategic points along the way, all of it building tension that resolves into the hook. The boogie-woogie groove serves actual dancers but it also supports the melodic-verbal narrative of the imaginary dance described by the singer. The bridge (“Well my heart . . .”) moves to a conventional blues chord, but it is, again, more than that. As handled here the chord creates a state of suspended animation, the reverie of a booming heart fixated on the seventeen-year-old object. The melodies of Beatlemania in 1963 unfold in crisp and simple bits to make extended shapes, which are in turn governed by a formal purpose that enhances everything. That was the craft that made them composers of the year.
It was Lennon’s blessing and his curse to have a collaborator who could write great melodies that he would always fall short of. At certain moments in his tragically abbreviated life the comparison chewed him up. As the Beatles matured in 1965 and 1966, he discovered how to deal with the problem of living in his partner’s shadow by contributing in ways that would never have occurred to McCartney.
The final analysis of how Lennon and McCartney became the Rodgers and Hammerstein of rock and roll must reassert the importance of unquantifiable collaboration, with more back and forth, more mutual editing and brainstorming than anyone will ever know. In late 1962 a fan flew back with the band to Liverpool on their final return from Hamburg and watched the two principals sitting next to each other on the plane. “They definitely needed each other,” she remembered. “They always seemed to be laughing together, scribbling on bits of paper and laughing some more.” They boosted each other’s confidence. McCartney described how they put their demo tapes together:
To learn a guitar part we would both play exactly the same thing, so it was really like double-tracking a guitar. If we played it to anyone there’d be two guitars pumping out this same thing, two voices often singing the same melody line, so you just got double-strength everything, double-strength Daz. It was a loud demo rather than just one guy wondering enigmatically whether the song was okay or not. The two of us knew it was okay and played it forcefully, we convinced each other.
And they wrote for each other as primary audience, each striving to match the other’s expertise, internalizing shared gains and eagerly looking forward to what was next.
The Departure
When Lennon said, in 1964, that he and his bandmates had been “playing this music for eight years,” he was offering a view of the past and perhaps sounding out a prediction. The Beatles were hardly alone in looking for ways to expand the boundaries of rock and roll. Among their musical contemporaries the most important departure was, unquestionably, Bob Dylan (b. 1941), who heavily shaped their artistic maturity.
6.4 Dylan in London, 1965
Around the same time that Lennon and McCartney were harmonizing in the Mendips vestibule, the teenage Dylan was leading a band that covered Elvis, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent in Hibbing, Minnesota. At age eighteen he moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota and settled into a coffee shop scene that had some things in common with the art school scene in Liverpool. But Dylan immediately went in a very different direction. “The thing about rock and roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough,” he remembered. “Tutti Frutti and Blue Suede Shoes were great catch phrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy, but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way.”
Lennon and McCartney perfected their songwriting by studying pop-rock blends, while Dylan was shaped by folk music. His primary model was Woody Guthrie, and he admired plenty of African American singer-songwriters as well. He moved to New York City, worked his way up the ladder of venues, and in the summer of 1963 became the darling of the Newport Folk Festival. Blowin’ in the Wind, released in May on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, established him nationally after it was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan performed Blowin’ in the Wind, with its pleasant, sing-along refrain and drifty charm, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August. Also on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is Masters of War, a severe sermon and uncompromising indictment of the war machine that Eisenhower had warned against in his farewell speech to the nation in January 1961. These songs extended the folk tradition while they were solidly part of it, serious and reflecting life, as Dylan put it.
In 1963 he also composed love songs that didn’t much resemble either traditional folk songs or pop songs. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right touches on the ambiguity of a relationship, a sense of wanting more fused with resignation over not being able to get it. Now that the love has past, the singer is moving on, and he recommends that the woman do likewise. Bits of the message are stated categorically, but nothing is resolved. The listener senses that the singer is trying to bring himself to some definite position through the act of singing, that the title is ironic. Don’t Think Twice stands near the beginning of a great series of songs about the complexities of romance. She Belongs to Me (1965), for example, had considerable impact on Lennon. The title said one thing but the lyrics implied that the power structure of the relationship was exactly the opposite.
Yet Dylan’s most daring work was composed under the influence of Beat hero Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891). This “God of Adolescence” (André Breton) had devoted followers among the Beat poets, to whom Dylan was paying close attention. Allen Ginsberg pinned a Rimbaud quotation on his dormitory room wall at Columbia University, and Jack Kerouac wrote a poem entitled simply “Rimbaud.” The most startling song on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, could be heard as a response to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, but there is no folk-song precedent for the dense, hallucinatory imagery, which followed Rimbaud’s style of vivid, free association, a “derangement of the senses,” as the French poet put it, a disordering of rational constructions. “The poet makes himself a seer,” insisted Rimbaud. “I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors . . . I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows”—those lines and others from Rimbaud’s most famous poem, The Drunken Boat, caught Dylan’s attention. Absinthe and hashish helped fuel the Frenchman’s dreamy landscapes, while in New York City marijuana and amphetamines usually did the trick.
“Je est un autre” (I is someone else) wrote Rimbaud, a detached and fluid point of view. “When I read that the bells went off,” said Dylan, “it made perfect sense.” In early 1964 those bells took lyrical shape in Chimes of Freedom with its extraordinary array of images. Rimbaud’s drunken boat coasted through fantastic lands filled with hysterical cows, blue wine, rotting whales, clouds with purple clots, avalanches of water, and small electric moons, while in Mr. Tambourine Man a musical instrument becomes the means of magical conveyance. Subterranean Homesick Blues from the album Bringing It All Back Home (early 1965) dipped down below street level to give fresh definition to the bohemian experience. The Beat poets had safely harnessed their musical tastes to progressive jazz, which relieved them from having to worry about any verbal content, but Dylan was set on changing their minds. Subterranean Homesick Blues combined a stream of vivid non sequiturs, “chain saw lyrics” as George Martin described them, with music flavored by Chuck Berry. Dylan’s Rimbaud-inspired songs also had a huge impact on Lennon, though it took longer for him to figure out how to make the style his own. He eventually solved the problem with I Am the Walrus. The album cover of Bringing It All Back Home was an easier idea for the Beatles to pick up: it is safe to assume, I think, that the distorted lens used in the photograph influenced the cover of Rubber Soul.
The Beatles stumbled on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in Paris in early 1964, and they played it together at their hotel, over and over again during an eighteen-day stay. Now they had a new singer-songwriter-hero. All but two of the songs on Freewheelin’ were composed by Dylan himself, and it is perhaps no coincidence that their next album, A Hard Day’s Night, was the first to include their own originals and nothing else. When the Beatles and Dylan met in August 1964, with Dylan discreetly ushered up to the band’s suite in the Delmonico Hotel, there was mutual respect while Dylan turned them on to marijuana, a first toke for several of them.
It took Lennon and McCartney much longer to step out of their pop-rock comfort zone than it took the folk singer from Minnesota, partly because of backgrounds that were more provincial (Dylan came from a family of business owners) and partly because it was not easy to reconcile an exploratory impulse with the fantastic rewards of Beatlemania. When they expanded their ranges Lennon and McCartney went in different directions, following different inspirations. Eventually their independent trajectories created problems, but for the duration of the band’s existence respective gains were folded into the collaborative relationship, lifting the group higher and higher. Starr called Rubber Soul the “departure album,” and it is easy to see it as a milestone, but the process was more varied and gradual than a single moment like that implies.
McCartney’s departure came first. It may be dated to around January 1964, which is when George Martin remembered first hearing Yesterday, an innovative and potent song that burst out of the melodic-harmonic conventions of pop rock.
The music came to him in a dream, the composer has reported. He was worried he had heard it somewhere and simply forgotten the source, so he played the tune for friends and asked if they knew it already, singing with place-holding lyrics (“scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs”). This birth story is believable if we put it in a larger context: he had been studying, critiquing, imitating, and mastering the craft of songwriting intensively for a year and a half. His prep work included hi-fi numbers like ’Till There Was You, an attractive model for him with its nicely shifting chords and chiseled leaps, a beautiful design that must have inspired And I Love Her, which Lennon referred to as McCartney’s “first Yesterday.”
McCartney is often called a great melodist. That is a nice thing to say about a composer, yet it is easy to misunderstand. It means that the melodies have grace and elegance and fit the human voice with ease. Great melodists rely on natural talent, but they also work hard. Gershwin, another great melodist, insisted that the melodies for his songs caused him just as much effort as his semi-classical pieces. There can be no doubt that McCartney worked over melodies in this way, too, but since he never learned how to read notation he never wrote anything down. When there is no material trace of the stages of improvement it can seem like the music just popped out, the product of natural gift rather than hard work. Yesterday must have been related to many sessions of noodling around at the piano and guitar and months of careful study.
’Till There Was You, And I Love Her, and Yesterday all have great melodies, but that does not mean those melodies were designed to stand alone. The melody works with harmony to create a beautifully designed musical structure, and this is what accounts for Yesterday’s astonishing success—the song has apparently been played on the radio and covered more than any other from the twentieth century. Its richness of design is something like a sonnet by Shakespeare, with patterns of rhyme, phrase, metaphor, allusion, assonance, syntax, and so forth, everything carefully integrated, a small artistic gem.
McCartney’s control of harmony was a key part of Beatlemania, and this song represents a further blossoming. He cited a connection between Yesterday and jazz chords he remembered his father playing on the family piano. This would probably be a series of harmonic turns, the kind of thing jazz pianists frequently insert (for example, ii-V7-I in jazz parlance). In Yesterday these little progressions nimbly animate the melody. The tightly constructed melody of the “A” section would feel too confined and deliberate without this added layer of dynamic energy from the chords.
The reason musical structure is so important here is that it lies at the heart of expression. The structure effectively conveys shades of emotions. The A section begins starkly, with the simple word “yesterday,” a sigh on two pitches. As the phrase expands it brings a touch of minor-mode sadness, confirmed by the gesture at the phrase end, which musically and verbally rhymes with the stark opening. The next phrase brings a feeling of resignation, a sense of so-be-it acceptance achieved through what musicians call a “plagal” progression of chords; the progression is familiar as the “amen cadence” due to its standard position at the end of church hymns. McCartney later used the gesture to develop the same mood even more extensively in Hey Jude and Let It Be. The final phrase of the A section repeats the plagal progression but ends with a ray of hope, communicated through the melodic rise to the third of the chord.
These emotional shadings are discreet and reserved. They are brought into focus by the musical rhymes that refer back to the initial, stark statement, with verbal rhymes to match (“far away,” “here to stay,” “yesterday”). With less richness in the chords, the melodic-verbal rhymes would feel too deliberate, too heavy. As it is, the balance is just right, and the four rhymes play both a formal and an expressive role.
After such a lovely A section, the bridge (“Why she had to go . . .”) could have been a throwaway, but instead it is an inspired complement. No moment is wasted in this song. The bridge opens with starkness, but it immediately explores a new mood when bass line and melody move in opposite directions. The energy feels expansive, and it offsets the constraint of the A section. Taj Mahal appreciated the harmonic density of early Beatles songs, and here, in the first phrase of the bridge, we do indeed get a change of chords on every single syllable. In contrast to the shifting turns of the A section the bass now keeps going in a single direction. We could say that there are three neatly coordinated layers of independent musical activity—melody, chords, and bass. McCartney is never as daring as Ellington in his use of chords, but daring is not what he is after. What is skillful is the integration of all compositional elements in the service of emotional enrichment.
The Beatles did not know what to do with Yesterday. The dilemma sat there for well over a year, until they finally recorded it in June 1965, with McCartney the only Beatle performing. There was talk of giving composer credit solely to him, since it was so obviously a one-man show; doing that might have hastened the end of the Beatles. Martin suggested adding strings. He was probably led in this direction by a quirky recording from the previous May called Eine Kleine Beatlemusic, released by a group called Barock and Roll, formed for the purpose of arranging a batch of Beatles hits for string quartet. Framing their music as classical had come to seem natural, and this title put the Beatles in comparison with Mozart; the album reached the British charts. Martin’s string arrangement for Yesterday sticks closely to McCartney’s guitar work. He asked the composer if there was anything he wanted changed, and McCartney suggested a small blue note in the cello (the song’s only connection to rock and roll) and a single held note in the violin for the final section (a prominent dash of restraint).
Analysis could go into a lot more detail, but one feature that should not be missed is the irregular phase lengths. Contrary to most popular songs, the first section is seven bars long, not eight or some other multiple of two. On this level, beginning the second verse on the word “suddenly” is a pun, an abrupt return that is skillfully handled and not immediately obvious. This formal freshness works well with the song’s tone of understated reserve. Asymmetrical phrasing was a technique Lennon and McCartney (like Ellington) regularly came back to, all the way through the very end (Don’t Let Me Down has groupings of five beats, for example), the asymmetry keeping things fresh when handled with rightness of design.
Martin once said that a key to the Beatles’ success was a sense of British restraint, and it is easy to think of Yesterday in those terms. McCartney asked that the strings not sound syrupy, that the players use only slight vibrato. The melodic discourse does not feel much like an opulently emotive ballad. As William Mann phrased it in a related critique, the emotions do not spill into “artificial sentimentality.” This musical-emotional atmosphere, crisp and understated yet emotionally potent, became one of McCartney’s trademarks. Martin understood the principle well in his arrangements. Counterexamples like Phil Spector’s arrangement of Long and Winding Road, with over-the-top wordless chorus and orchestra that tip the delicate balance, demonstrate how in tune Martin was with McCartney.
Suddenly the Beatles’ range of expression opened very wide. On the day he recorded the vocal lead for Yesterday, McCartney did the same thing for I’m Down (in Little Richard style) and I’ve Just Seen a Face (blue-grassy folk rock).
Lennon said that he admired Yesterday but did not envy it. His own inclination toward simpler music meant that his compositions begged for enhancement, and his partner was always eager to oblige. McCartney contributed introductions (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), enriched melody and chords (In My Life), countermelodies (Help!—McCartney called this addition a “descant,” a term that goes back to the Middle Ages; it must have been another technique he learned in school, like his single-note harmonization for Please Please Me), intricate and dominating details of an arrangement (Tomorrow Never Knows), solo details and riff accompaniment (Come Together), and completion and restructuring (Don’t Let Me Down).
It is easy to see how Yesterday could have left Lennon feeling a little uneasy, since the song asserted McCartney’s independence at the same time that it made glaringly obvious his high value to the team. It would be several years before Lennon grew confident enough to make a musical statement that would be left untouched by his partner. By my calculation that statement is Julia, one of the most personal songs Lennon ever wrote. There is Lennon in the fall of 1968, bravely alone with guitar and voice, urged to independence by his new romantic and creative partner, Yoko Ono.
Lennon’s own departure from the boundaries of pop rock was based on a direct response to Dylan. This happened gradually through 1965–1966. The results turned the group in an avant-garde direction, and they were no less important for the band’s mature phase than McCartney’s musical excellence.
Through study of folk songs, Beat poetry, and Rimbaud, Dylan had opened up fresh possibilities, but it was not a simple matter for the Rodgers and Hammerstein of rock and roll to start filling their number one hits with this kind of volatility. Lennon had read Kerouac while working on his bohemian slouch in art school, and he enjoyed hanging out with the sexy Exis in Hamburg, but all of that was kept at arm’s length while he advanced his musical career, first in performance then in composition. This changed in 1965. Lennon said that Dylan’s example helped him become more personal about his songs, and there are many successful demonstrations of that from this wonderful year.
He bought himself a cap like the one Dylan wore on the cover of his first album, then an acoustic guitar and a neck strap for his harmonica, while the others made fun of his devotional mimicry. His challenge was to channel some of the attitude and style of Dylan’s sprawling narratives into pop-rock songs, with requisite hook, chorus, and bridge, dropping all pretentiousness and keeping things simple. I’m a Loser was followed by You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, the first Beatles song lacking electrical instruments. A Dylanesque vocal snarl came easy to Lennon, but, unlike Dylan, the hook dominates in this song. Poppish, turtlenecked flutes replace the folk singer’s harmonica. Lennon’s song Help! became one of his personal favorites. He later claimed that the desperation in the lyrics was autobiographical, and that the song was a product of self-reflection and subjective writing inspired by Dylan.
In the fall of 1965 the Rolling Stones landed their first number one American hit with (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Jagger and Richards had Lennon and McCartney in their sights from the start. The connection between the two pairs deepened after the latter demonstrated how to co-write a song right before the former’s eyes, literally finishing off I Wanna Be Your Man and handing it to their younger friends as a gift to record in 1963. Lennon and McCartney’s Day Tripper may be heard as a direct response to Satisfaction, with Day Tripper’s riff topping the Stones, though Lennon and McCartney smartly did not try to compete with Jagger’s charmingly rambling lyrics.
Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out (on the flip side) were both thoroughly collaborative. Lennon once said that his conception of songwriting was a matter of “doing little bits which you then join up.” Just as Ellington combined melodies from different composers as an automatic way to generate contrast, so did Lennon and McCartney. We Can Work It Out is a classic example, with McCartney starting the tune and Lennon helping with the minor-mode bridge (“Life is very short . . .”). Harrison suggested triple-meter effects for the bridge, a further point of contrast with the verse.
In My Life was another of Lennon’s personal favorites, and he again credited the inspiration to Dylan. Like many of Lennon’s songs, this one started with words. The first stage of the lyrics described a bus trip from Mendips to Penny Lane, seeing places where he had lived and making an inventory of what they evoked. Extensive revision produced a landmark in Beatles lyrics, reflective and compelling. The lyric sophistication of In My Life matched the musical sophistication of McCartney’s Yesterday.
As with Ellington, there are many occasions when the who-wrote-what investigation cannot be resolved. Lennon acknowledged his partner’s help with the “middle eight” (though there isn’t one, exactly) and some chords while claiming the melody for the verse as his own—and feeling that it was one of his finest melodic achievements, at that. Yet, to the contrary, arguments that see the fingerprints of McCartney all over this lovely melodic arc are persuasive. Beatle experiments with fresh instruments in 1965 are usually successful, for example, the flutes of You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, the strings of Yesterday, the simple sitar of Norwegian Wood. For me, the pseudo-harpsichord of In My Life is one of Martin’s missteps. He must have been aiming for a classical touch analogous to the strings of Yesterday, but the Baroque fussiness detracts from the sincerity and directness of the song. Nevertheless, this song did a lot to help define the maturity of Rubber Soul in late 1965.
Norwegian Wood has Lennon pursuing Dylan more directly, with a cryptic, ballad-style narrative that draws musical inspiration from (in McCartney’s view) Irish folk music. As in She Belongs to Me, the singer-persona finds himself at a disadvantage in a relationship. The mystery of Dylan’s Egyptian ring is matched by the Norwegian wood, which is never explained, just part of the ambiguous atmosphere. (Commentators who tiresomely try to explicate the Norwegian wood miss the point and the Dylan connection.) Harrison bravely sprinkled in some exotic spice with his new sitar, and McCartney helped with the bridge. Lennon’s “nowhere man” could be considered a cousin to Dylan’s Mr. Jones, the clueless establishment figure in Ballad of a Thin Man. But of course there is again difference. Lennon makes the figure more sympathetic by including the audience: each of us, he says, is a little bit like the nowhere man. In the summer of 1965 the Byrds brought Beatles’ vocal harmonies and rock accompaniment to Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, and their recording soared to number one. The Beatles returned the compliment by matching the Byrds’ dope-soaked tempo and dreamy atmosphere precisely in Nowhere Man. They also topped the Byrds’ jingly jangly guitars by cranking up the brightness on Harrison’s guitar solo as far as it could go, ignoring the warnings of the nervous studio engineers.
With Yesterday and Rubber Soul, the Beatles were moving toward art, with McCartney’s classy ballades at the center. Michelle, another product of McCartney sitting at a piano fooling around with chords, became the only Beatles song ever to win a Grammy. As with Yesterday, McCartney sings in a way that holds the song back from sentimental excess, now defined as French cool. Elements of the song date back to the Liverpool days, when the composer liked to command a piano at parties for the art students, who smoked Gitanes cigarettes and wore French berets. Harrison contributed a pleasantly wistful guitar solo, Lennon had the idea of the ecstatic outburst “I love you” for the bridge (inspired by Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You), and a friend who taught French helped with the lyrics.
McCartney was expanding the Beatles’ musical range while Lennon was doing the same thing with lyrics. Elvis had long ago demonstrated the advantages of stylistic flexibility, and in 1965 the Beatles were keen to discover how far they could go. They mixed in humor with songs like Drive My Car and Dr. Robert, darkness with Girl and Run for Your Life, and sour sarcasm in Harrison’s If I Needed Someone. Everything was Beatlized through strategically placed vocal harmonies, tight musical form, compelling word-music synthesis, memorable tunes complemented by effective chords, judicious arrangements, seductive grooves, humor, and emotional restraint. The mellow and acoustic emphasis of Rubber Soul (especially the North American version) made it sound to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys like a coherent whole, a “collection of folk songs.” Bette Midler heard the album as a “tidal wave of enthusiasm, ideas and alternatives.” McCartney called it “the beginning of my adult life.”
Ellington was a major part of jazz becoming art, and in 1965 the Beatles were doing the same thing with rock and roll. The key for Ellington was a new relationship between arrangement and instrumental solo; for Lennon and McCartney it was an exploration of new song types, a spinning out of lyrical-musical possibilities. Ellington took advantage of the jazz niche of the performer-composer, and in the mid-1960s singer-songwriters were in a strong position. Singer-songwriters good at both words and music were in the strongest position of all, which made the skill set of Lennon and McCartney tough to beat.
Ellington achieved artistic diversity by building pieces around the various styles of his soloists, the Beatles by absorbing diverse influences and taking them further. The sitar on Norwegian Wood, tentatively performed by the band’s junior member, turned out to be a seed for an even bigger range. An even more radical step would soon follow, but there was a twist involved: their most dramatic innovations could only be accomplished in the recording studio, not on the stage. Since the biggest money was now in record albums this turned out not to be a problem. The Beatles were filling their music with so much variety, originality, and excellence that it was hard to put a finger on what category they belonged to. The simplest thing to do was let the sense of categorical differences simply collapse, and there were plenty of precedents for that.