The 1966 song that saw The Beatles tackle Motown: “A lot of similarities”
Anyone who denies that The Beatles were one of the greatest bands of all time is simply being a contrarian, but there is certainly a case to be made that they were simply in the right place at the right time.
Had any other band managed to tap into what they were doing instead of them and taken their place, you have to question whether they would have been the ones to conquer the world and become the most recognisable rock group to have ever existed. However, The Beatles managed to time their ascent to perfection, leaving others behind them simply trying to keep up with their innovations and revolutionisation of popular music.
What they delivered was an amalgamation of rock and roll music that had come before it, twinned with some modern pop sensibilities, but that only really accounts for the earliest part of their career before they developed their own identity that was distinct from their influences. By the time the band had reached their fifth and sixth albums, Help! and Rubber Soul, they were showing themselves to be leaps and bounds ahead of their contemporaries by moving onto more expansive works.
Unsurprisingly, this risky expansion of their sound ultimately led to even greater achievements for the band, and more sonically varied records followed this pivotal moment in their career. Arguably, by the middle of the 1960s, they were pretty much in a position to do whatever they wanted.
However, in doing this, they were also arguably taking advantage of their position at the top where they could begin borrowing from other areas of music that were experiencing a rise in popularity, and with the other dominant force in the charts being the soulful releases of Detroit’s Motown label, they saw fit to try their hand at replicating the sound that had made the likes of The Supremes and The Miracles successful at the same time as they were rising to the top.
While this was something different to what the Beatles were known for, they couldn’t help but try to get in on the action, taking their love of Motown and gathering inspiration to form one of the standout songs from their seminal 1966 album, Revolver.
Despite having primarily been penned by Paul McCartney, John Lennon explained during a 1968 interview with Rolling Stone that the penultimate song from the album, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ was heavily influenced by the classic Motown sound, and was their attempt at mimicking the jovial and triumphant brass sounds that so frequently adorned the hits of the label.
“Sure, we were doing our Tamla Motown bit,” Lennon explained of the song, before going on to note how all of pop music is continually overlapping. “You see, we’re influenced by whatever’s going. Even if we’re not influenced, we’re all going that way at a certain time. If we played a Stones record now and a Beatles record, and we’ve been way apart, you’d find a lot of similarities.”
The Beatles were undoubtedly on form at this moment, and didn’t have much to lose by trying out a new sound for an album track, but their inability to resist copying the Motown sound wasn’t necessarily a shameless grab at what was popular, but an indication that they were pretty much able to succeed at whatever style they tried.
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