“I’m an Elvis man”: Quentin Tarantino names the only good thing The Beatles ever did
It’s no secret that Quentin Tarantino has harboured a lifelong fascination with Elvis Presley that borders on obsession, and the filmmaker feels that being raised on a steady diet of ‘The King’ placed his personal taste in direct opposition to almost everything The Beatles ever did.
While pitting the ‘Fab Four’ against The Rolling Stones has been one of the most nauseating debates in music for decades, the two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker completely disregarded Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the gang in favour of using Elvis as the measuring stick to which The Beatles simply can’t match up.
The shadow of Elvis has loomed large over Tarantino’s entire career, dating right back to his screen debut as an impersonator in a 1988 episode of The Golden Girls, with those residuals coming in mighty handy in the long run. True Romance‘s Clarence Worley witnesses an apparition of ‘The King’, and he’s even spoken passionately of his love for the fading icon’s Las Vegas years.
The Beatles? Not so much. Tarantino’s musical taste is known to be as eclectic as his taste in cinema, with his adamance that David Cassidy is an all-timer of a rock frontman indication enough, but he’s never been particularly enamoured with the ways the ‘Fab Four’ contributed to the cultural soundscape.
On the other hand, being the ardent cinephile that he is, it’s perfectly on-brand for Tarantino to name a movie as the one thing The Beatles ever did that blew him away. “I’m not a big Beatles fan,” he admitted to W. “You’re either an Elvis man or a Beatles man, and I’m an Elvis man.”
Having declared where his loyalties lay, the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction mastermind conceded that while the group’s discography is hardly in regular rotation at the Tarantino household, George Dunning’s psychedelic jukebox musical Yellow Submarine definitely was, going so far as to name it as one of his favourite features of the late 1960s.
“After seeing Yellow Submarine,” he confessed. “There finally was one thing about The Beatles that I had tremendous affection for.” Never mind their seminal impact on music and culture at large, the sellout tours, the mania they induced in the general public, or the volume of records they sold, Tarantino was entirely cold on the ‘Fab Four’ until he saw their animated odyssey for the first time.
Tarantino didn’t even get around to seeing it for the first time until 1999, either, so he’d spent almost the first four decades of his life being largely unmoved by one of the most transformative acts the music industry has ever seen. It’s fitting that cinema would open his eyes, though, even if there’s an asterisk attached to the fact The Beatles didn’t even voice themselves in Yellow Submarine, which still technically means John, Paul, George, and Ringo have never set his world alight.
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