The Buddy Holly chord that made The Beatles branch out: ‘Where did that come from?’
Nothing that The Beatles ever performed was intended to be the same kind of cliche rock and roll tune.
They certainly had moments where they paid tribute to their heroes on their records, but John Lennon and Paul McCartney would never be satisfied with making the same ho-hum blues tunes that they heard out of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. There was a whole other world of music out there, and it took the right kind of musicians to show them what else was out there.
Then again, part of the beauty of the Fab Four’s tunes was that they all had different influences. Lennon might have garnered the reputation of being one of the most artsy members of the group into the avant-garde, but McCartney was the one who introduced the band to the more abstract form of recording, and by the time George Harrison came in with Indian influences, their music took an even greater turn.
Before they had taken over the studio, though, they were practically mandated to be a more eclectic band than any of their contemporaries. The patrons in those Hamburg bars weren’t going to be the most hospitable folks if the band played tunes they didn’t like, and that meant all of them learning how to cut their teeth playing anything and everything. Some nights it would mean them playing the occasional show tune, and the next they would be rocking out to whatever Everly Brothers song struck their fancy.
But looking back on a lot of rock stars before them, the songwriting wasn’t exactly the most inventive thing in the world. Chuck Berry’s tunes almost always started out with the same style of guitar lick, and as long as you heard Little Richard’s gruff voice, that was more than enough. When Macca heard people like Buddy Holly sing, though, he didn’t hear some kid trying to play a half-decent tune. This was a genius at work that wasn’t all that much older than he was.
Granted, there weren’t a ton of additional tricks in Holly’s arsenal. It’s easy to play a lot of his greatest tunes with only a couple of chords, but when listening to a song like ‘Peggy Sue’, McCartney felt that he heard a different version of rock and roll. It had the same attitude, but the chords came out of nowhere.
Holly did have a few tricks up his sleeve, but his inventiveness with chords was what caught The Beatles’ ear first, saying, “You realise all of this little arrangement stuff. If you listen to The Beatles’ stuff, we were putting all those kinds of things in. [In the bridge of ‘Peggy Sue’], where did that F come from? You got to put the record on again.” If Holly merely suggested that the artists could branch out, the Fabs managed to use that trick on nearly every other track they made.
The prog rock sphere would become better known for pushing music forward, but The Beatles really should get the credit for taking pop in strange directions based on their chord work alone. It might be so subtle that you’d hardly notice it on tracks like ‘From Me To You’, but once you get to the end of their career, what’s happening at the end of a track like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is so off-the-wall that it could have come off of a classical piece of music.
None of the band members could have told you the first thing about what they were playing, but that hardly mattered. Their music was all about the art of discovery, and whenever they sat down to write a song, they always remembered Holly’s lesson of keeping the audience guessing where the next section is going to go.
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