The artist The Beatles never tried to emulate: “Stupid and bullshit”
There’s hardly any popular artist on this Earth that hasn’t taken at least a little bit of inspiration from The Beatles.
Even if someone wanted nothing to do with the mop tops or psychedelic outfits back in the day, there are normally artists from two walks of life in the modern age: those who followed in the Fab Four’s footsteps or those who went in the opposite direction because they didn’t like what they did. But even when the lads were at the top of the world, they had a few reservations about where they wanted their sound to go.
Then again, you probably wouldn’t have heard that out of them when they were first making waves in Hamburg. Those eight-hour sets were bound to be gruelling on anyone, let alone a bunch of kids still in their teens, so it was better for them to learn anything and everything they could get their hands on and find some way to entertain their audience by stretching out their material.
Was every song a winner? Not necessarily. John Lennon was known to hate some of the showtunes that Paul McCartney would throw into the mix time and time again, but if we’re being honest, a lot of the people that fell in love with the ‘Cute One’s doe-eyed image were probably won over the minute that the lights went down and they all played ‘Til There Was You’ on the Ed Sullivan Show.
But Lennon wasn’t that kind of artist. He had his own ballads, but he was a rock and roller at the end of the day, and unless it had a certain groove behind it, he wasn’t going to bother making syrupy muzak when he went into the studio. What he did needed to be real, and that came from going back to artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. At the same time, Elvis Presley was always a shadow that loomed over all rock and rollers.
None of the Beatles could really admit that Presley didn’t play a major part in their lives, and Lennon was among the first. He felt that seeing audiences start screaming the minute that ‘The King’ came onscreen in his movies seemed like the coolest job in the world, but the more you start listening to his post-1960s work, some of the magic had been lost the minute that he decided to become a pinup star after he got out of the army.
The dance moves may have been over-the-top, but Lennon knew if The Beatles were going to get big, they would do so as a unit, saying, “This is interesting: in the early days in England, all the groups were like Elvis and a backing group, and the Beatles deliberately didn’t move like Elvis. That was our policy because we found it stupid and bullshit.” It seems like a no-brainer, but you have to remember what a difference that was for the early 1960s.
Any band normally had the superstar frontman, but even decades after the band broke up, McCartney even said that the band were inseparable, and if there was any other person that was singled out, they wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun playing together. That mentality even managed to throw George Martin off when producing them, saying that he was trying to figure out the leader of the group before realising they didn’t need one set lead singer.
It was a novelty idea for the time, but by going against the Elvis model of playing, The Beatles had done something far more important than they realised. Because when you think about it, they invented the idea of the rock band as we know it, instead of the smooth singer and a bunch of hired guns.
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