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.
The Beatles in the Movies
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Из курса от партнера University of Rochester
The Music of the Beatles
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Success in America and the World
The Beatles begin to move toward the artist model. Music from A Hard Day's Night, Beatles For Sale, and singles from this period. From this point on we will closely follow particular authorship of songs, keeping track of John, Paul, and George as individual songwriters.
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John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We turn now to the Beatles' first movie, and that is A Hard Day's Night.
This is a classic film.
We think about that film at least, years later now
a lot of people who are younger and who don't already
know the stories about the Beatles expect that you know, it
was probably a more carefully crafted affair than it actually was.
In fact, A Hard Day's Night was put together very, very
quickly.
Because there was a sense, and this, this went on for years
into the Beatles' career, that they were simply the flavor of the week.
And that the pop, the fickle pop audience would turn away
from the Beatles, just as quickly as they had turned toward them.
And that they needed to make as much money, and
work this thing as hard as they could, before that happened.
And so one
of the important elements behind the decision
to make A Hard Day's Night was the
Beatles were getting so many invitations to
do performances that they couldn't take them all.
And so if you've got a film that plays in theaters all across the country, really
around the world, all the time, you've got a chance to make money from the group.
Even when the group can't physically be in all those places.
But they had to put it together quickly cause
they were afraid that the, the, the the whole thing
would cool down before the, before the movie came out.
They didn't want to spend too much money on it, so
they filmed it in black and white and not in color.
The movie itself was premiered in London on July the 6th,
1964, so that's some several months after the Ed Sullivan Show.
It was directed by Richard Lester and as I said before,
shot in black and white.
Richard Lester had had was, was also a kind of a
musician, kind of a jazz pianist as Paul McCartney describes him.
And had also done some sort of comedy film,
so like George Martin, he had a kind of a
connection that kind of clicked with the Beatles sort of
since of comedy and fun and that kind of thing.
All of the dialogue was written by, I
believe it was, the guy's name was Allen Owen,
I believe he's Welsh.
And he actually traveled with the Beatles for a little while to kind of get an idea
of the pattern, their, you know, their kind of
personalities and the pattern between them and all that.
And did a fantastic job of kind of characterizing
each Beatle, giving them each kind of a personality.
Paul's the kind of charming one John the kind of ironic and somewhat estrubic one.
George the kind of quiet one, Ringo the
you know, well, whatever it is that Ringo is one.
And that, those, those images really kind of stuck from A Hard Day's Night.
It was filmed in March and April of 1964.
And as I said before, released hastily to capitalize
on what was thought could be the band's fleeting success.
So here they are trying to, to make a movie, trying to make
records, trying to do concerts, trying to do all these kinds of things.
If you look at one
of those Beatle date books from any of these kinds
of periods, you see that they are busy, busy, busy.
But like I said before, make hay while the sun shines.
The idea of doing a movie to promote a band is not, was not something new.
It wasn't like the Beatles came up with something that nobody had done before.
We can look at, for example, the Elvis movies, starting with Love
Me Tender from late 1956 and all the Elvis movies that followed.
By the time we got to 63 or
64, who knows how many Elv, how many movies Elvis
had out, but there were an awful lot of' em.
Allen Freed, the famous rock DJ it, appeared in five
total movies between 1956 and 1959, which really were sort
of like sort of hastily constructed stories with an opportunity to
provide kind of, a performances mostly lip synched for
the performers, the pop and rock performers of the day.
A big one that seems to influence a lot of people in the UK is a,
is a movie called The Girl Can't Help
It, which had Little Richard in it Jay Mansfield.
That came out in late 1956.
So the idea of having pop music, in a, in a movie was not new in A Hard Day's Night.
When we look at television in the United States
Ricky Nelson had gotten his start as a musician on
his parents television show that he was, had been
a star on as a child, Oz, Ozzy and Harriet,
and he had a whole series of, of hits at
the end of the 50s and into the early 1960s.
American Bandstand led by Dick Clark, was big on TV during those years as well.
And in the UK very important person by the name of Jack Good who was
a television producer in the UK put together
some television shows that his advocates were say,
would say were much more sophisticated than
what was happening in America at the time.
Shows like the Six-Five Special from 1957, 58, Oh Boy!
From 1958 to 1959, Boy Meets Girls, from 1959
to 1960, and importantly, for our story in many ways,
he comes to the United States, to the ABC
television network, and between 1964 and 1966, produces a show
called Shindig!,
which, along with Where the Action Is and Hullabaloo was one of
the big teen music shows in the United States during that time.
so, again, the idea behind this movie was that the band can only do so many
live shows, but a movie gets to play everywhere all of the time.
The, the idea of the Beatles as these sort of zany, fun-loving,
smart, smart-alecky, in some kinds of ways, musicians sort of
reacting to the world around them Became a very important kind of style point.
I mean, half of what made the Beatles so appealing was their music.
The other half of what made them so appealing were their personalities.
In fact, when George Martin looks back on what he heard at that first audition, he
thought the music was okay, but it was
their personalities that he thought really came through,
their charisma.
And so A Hard Day's Night really brings that
out and many groups would try to imitate that.
Most famously in, into 1966 the Monkees that
television show The Monkees really became A kind
of a weekly American TV version of what A Hard Day's Night had been in 1964.
So an important record an important movie for The Beatles for sure, and a kind
of a landmark I think too, as we sort of chart the,
if we were talking about the history of rock, we would want to chart.
The path toward music video, we could certainly point to something like
A Hard Day's Night as being a very important step in that direction.
I can tell you that a little personal
anecdote having to do with my own experience.
In 1964 I was five years old.
My grandmother may she rest in peace took me to see
A Hard Day's Night.
At the local theater, the Terrace Theater, [LAUGH] on
Plymouth Road in suburban Detroit, Michigan, where I grew up.
So five year old, I go it because I was a Beatles crazy.
I go into the, theater with her and you know we
get our popcorn or whatever, we sit down, we find a seat.
And the lights go down and the minute the lights
go down in the theater all of these teenage girls
in the theater start to scream.
And the movie comes on, and the Beatles come on the screen.
And they spend most of the movie, standing up screaming.
Look, they're screaming at a movie. The Beatles can't even hear them, right?
This is how sort of crazed this Beatlemania thing was.
I remember staying at my grandmother's.
Could you tell 'em to sit down, I can't see.
[LAUGH] So, anyway, i didn't see very much at that showing of the film.
But we went back several weeks later. I got to see it again.
However later it was, but I got to see
it again, when I could actually see the entire movie.
But just to give you an idea of the craziness.
Who screams at a movie? you know, a whole group full of people.
That was happening in theaters all around the world, all across the country.
That's what Beatle Mania was.
We've talked quite a bit about the movie, let's
turn in the next video, to A Hard Day's Night.
The album.
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