The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.
Help! The Movie
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From the course by University of Rochester
The Music of the Beatles
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From the lesson
Pop Maturity
Increased experimentation, still mostly within the context of the pop single. The increasingly important role of the recording studio and recording techniques and innovations. Help!, Rubber Soul, and singles from this period.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
In February through May of 1965, the Beatles filmed
their second full length motion pictures, this time in color called Help.
I think it was initially, the initial title for it was going to
be called Eight Arms To Hold You, [LAUGH] or something like this.
Anyway, they ended up with the title Help!
And again it was directed by Richard Lester, who had done A Hard Day's Night,
and was reportedly inspired by two sources, the Marx Brothers' movie Duck
Soup, and the James Bond films, which were becoming popular during those years.
James Bond a license to kill, shaken not stirred.
Those those spy movies were big.
And so this is kind of a comedic take on the spy
movie Ringo's got a ring and some evil guys are trying to get
it, and anyway.
So all kinds of adventure ensues from that.
You can tell that the Beatles are maybe
not taking this movie as seriously or their
starting to get maybe a little detached from
commitment I guess you might say to the movie.
Because as Paul tells the story you know, as they
were sort of thinking, as they were sort of working
through what the film was going to be with the, with
the, the people who in charge of putting it together.
They actually suggested locations purely out of personal interest.
So, you know, I've never been to the Bahamas.
Okay, great, let's film something in the Bahamas.
You know, I've never actually been skiing in the Alps.
Okay, well, let's have skiing in the Alps.
And so they just sort of added this stuff in.
Apparently, the Beatles really
sorely tested Dick Lester's patience.
I mean they had a fantastic success with The Hard Days Night and Lester, of
course, a, a film director on the rise was, you get to see that happen again.
But the Beatles, as I, as I said last week and as I mentioned in the previous video.
Had been, had had a meeting with Bob Dylan at the end
of August, beginning of September of 1964, where he had apparently introduced
them to marijuana, which they had not had before.
They had, Beatles had done various drugs,
mostly amphetamines, when they were in Hamburg and
stuff to keep them, to keep them awake during the long hours they had to play.
But they'd never had anything quite like the marijuana, and
so, you know, the story is the Beatles you know they.
Dylan and one of his friends sort of pull out the, the,
the marijuana, and that they start to smoke it up.
And of course you know, doing things like putting towels under the door jams
to be sure that nothing gets, opening the windows, you know, this kind of thing.
Because the Beatles were aware that they were at that point teen idols.
Anything that, you know, go out about them doing something
like this would be, would ruin their careers at that point.
Which [LAUGH] of course wasn't the case in
1967, 68, it actually kind of enhanced their careers.
But in 1964 it would have been deadly.
Well, they really liked the marijuana experience.
And you have to understand that in a group
like the Beatles, there's a lot of down time.
I mean, the Beatles were not the kind of people who would do a
lot of writing when they were using drugs, or under the influence of alcohol.
And they were not the kind of people who would perform under the influence.
Or even record under the influence all that much.
But there's a lot of time being a Beatle going from location to location,
where you're just sort of sitting around in a hotel room.
You can't go out and see the sights because you'll be mobbed by people.
And so they had a lot of time on their hands
to play cards and drink tea and apparently to smoke pot.
>> And so this was one of the things they, they
sort of do an awful lot during the filming of Help!
And if you listen to the stories of George Harrison and Ringo
Starr and, and about this they were, they were pretty they were pretty
stoned most of the time.
In fact, there's one scene in the film, where they're in Buckingham Palace.
And unlike a lot of the other scenes, this one required a minute and a
half maybe two minutes worth of them exchanging
lines and dialog and this kind of thing.
And apparently it took them all day to, to
film this scene because they just couldn't stop giggling.
And Richard Lester really was just sort of pushed
to the end of his patience, at least
according to George Harrison about all of it.
Now this is at a time, 1965, when nobody was really
thinking about drugs, and rock music and all this kind of thing.
And by the time people were starting to think about smoking pot
the Beatles had already moved on to other kinds of things, but as
>> I mention this because there there is going to
be a kind of correlation between their use of marijuana and
then LSD and various consistencies.
And the ways in which I think, it
opened them up creatively in interesting kinds of ways.
Now, none of what I'm saying should be perceived as a kind
of endorsement of drug use or anything kind of thing like that.
For young people who are watching these videos, I am not saying you
should go out and smoke dope so you can write songs like Paul McCartney.
Paul McCartney would've written great songs whether he'd
ever smoked dope or done LSD, or not.
But the fact is, it does play a role.
And it's interesting that it plays a role much
earlier than it does in popular culture of the time.
So anyway, some way, somehow, Help got filmed
and finished and premiered in August of 1965.
John Lennon was was not too happy about the film, and he thought that
Richard Lester really had sort of lost sight of who the Beatles were.
And, and sort of put them in a film that really didn't suit them, and
the famous quote is that he says that Lester forgot about who and what we were.
It was like having clams in a movie about frogs.
I think kind of what, to translate John-ese here, it might be
something like, it's like having, you know, pop musicians in a spy movie.
And that's essentially what Help did.
But, the fans did not care.
This is all critical stuff from inside the, the
Beatles camp and, and stuff that we looked back on.
At the time Help was another blockbuster movie for the Beatles.
And if anything could I mean it seemed, it seemed crazy to think that
they could get any bigger than they'd been in 1964 with A Hard Day's Night.
But here come along in the summer of 1965, and it seems like that's exactly what
was happening.
So let's turn now to the music and talk a bit about a
bit more about how the Beatles music really began to change during this year.
As they began to sort of transform
themselves from craftsmen into something more like artists.
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