I was ten years old when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Given that, like all proper red-blooded American families, we tuned into Sullivan every Sunday night, I have no doubt that I watched them. I’m sure I did, in fact, given that my sister (fourteen at the time and thus prime age for early-onset Beatlemania) had insisted that we all gather around the big hand-wired Zenith and indulge in Ed and the Fab Four.
I can’t say that I was particularly moved or impressed. Part of that might have had to do with my sister, who at 14 was prone to ironing her bleach-blonde hair and wearing “spaghetti-strap” dresses that made a game attempt at revealing what little cleavage she had on offer. Therefore I was almost instinctively inclined to reject her enthusiasms. But even at age ten my musical thoughts were dropping into the furrows that have characterized my tastes ever since, although at ten I was considerably more addicted to kiddie-porn classics (Khachaturian, Prokofiev, that sort of stuff) than I am now. I must have been a bit priggish (maybe more than a bit) about popular music.
Nor did I become any more impressed with the passage of time. The Beatles, from an American point of view, were hot from 1964 to 1970 when the group split up. During that time I went from 10 to 16 years old, just a little on the young side as Baby Boomers go but still very much in the generation. My various schoolmates and friends were all getting the Beatles albums and practically memorizing them. I remember some arguments around the lunchroom table as to whether John really did say he buried Paul, or if “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” really meant what a lot of people were saying it meant.
There was no ignoring the Beatles, that’s for sure, no matter how besotted I was with Bartok and Rachmaninoff and Artur Rubinstein’s RCA recordings. I knew the songs, albeit not as well as some people, but there was no living in the USA of the LBJ era without those tunes. Turn on the radio: there they were. At one point I even made a point of listening, on purpose and repeatedly, to “Eleanor Rigby” on my sister’s 8-track tape copy of “Revolver.” My interest stemmed more from the stereo spread of the two string quartets, but I also liked the song. At the same time I felt a bit furtive about it all, as though somehow I was compromising my principles or something equally ridiculous.
I really was a pissy little prig.
I confess to having gone through my entire adult life without ever having heard the “Sgt. Pepper” album beyond the few songs that have slipped free and entered the national consciousness.
When EMI announced the release of the complete Beatles recordings, complete with in-depth audio restoration, I was intrigued enough to buy the stereo version. (It should be clear from the above remarks that I am not a hard-core afficionado who would be willing to pony up for the mono version as well, even if the mono mixes were the ones that got the most attention in those days.)
Thus it is that, in comfortable middle age, I am encountering the Beatles albums in many cases for the first time. I discovered that I am thoroughly familiar with “A Hard Day’s Night.” From the first note to the last the thing sounded atavistically familiar; my sister obviously had a copy and must have played it down to the nub. However, I hazard that she had the US release, which must have differed from the UK release on my new EMI set. From time to time, it seems less weirdly/subconsciously familiar. At some point I’ll look into this in detail and find out if my hunch about the different releases is correct.
I’ve been enjoying the voyage immensely, to tell the truth, although I can imagine that some of my neighbors are wondering if I’ve taken leave of my senses or else I have a house guest. The Beatles, or any rock music, have not been heard from these parts at any time previously, and for the time being they’re all over the place when I’m home. I’m getting my money’s worth out of this expensive, but extremely well-executed, box set.
I’m amused by the difference in attitude towards stereo between the pop and classical worlds in the early 1960s. After all, full-range stereo recording was very much in place from the mid-1950s onwards in the classical world, as those glorious Reiner/Chicago and Munch/Boston recordings on RCA attest. But in the pop world, most music was still being heard via AM radio or 45 singles, all of which were mono. So the earliest Beatles albums — “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” — were given extremely primitive stereo mixes. (I can well understand why the afficionados insist on mono for those.) The voices are right channel, most of the instruments far left, with very little in the middle. On speakers it’s marginally OK, but bothersome on headphones. However, that would soon change, and I note that even by “Hard Days Night” the stereo treatment is much more natural.
Hearing “Sgt. Pepper” all the way through was something of a revelation; the thing really is quite an achievement, not only in recording technology, but in the planning out of an album from beginning to end. It’s rather like a one-movement symphony, albeit considerably less even than something by, say, Haydn or Mozart. Individual personalities within the Beatles render some of the differences quite sharp — the dichotomy between the charming “When I’m Sixty-Four” and the much more hard-hitting “A Day in the Life”, for example.
Something which seemed to have gotten lost during the Beatles’ recording career was the sense of fun that permeates most of the earlier albums and is still very much in evidence in “Pepper.” The Monty Python-ish charm of “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” gave way to the distinctly more pointed humor of Revolver’s “Doctor Robert” (I believe referring to the fellow with the LSD-spiked tea), and then with The White Album bitterness seems to be the dominant emotion. (Although Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da helps to lighten the mood.)
The most dated-sounding of the songs are those that were originally meant to be the most hard-hitting and contemporary — the psychedelic numbers, the sitar-and-tabla songs, or the big experimental jobs like Revolution 9. The ones that hold up the best (to this ear, anyway) are those which partake of the long-standing tradition of song-writing throughout the 20th century — those which sport a good melody and well-structured harmony, put together without unnecessary gimmickry. That includes a lot of the rock ‘n’ roll songs, not just the early hits like She Loves Me, but also later stuff that stays within the same idiom, such as Paperback Writer.
At any rate, an interesting distraction from the usual round of this ‘n’ that and a nice way to come home and unwind during a very, very busy week.