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 (White Album)
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Из курса от партнера University of Rochester
The Music of the Beatles
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A Co-Op of Singer-Songwriters
The White Album both begins a return to roots while also continuing the musical experimentation of the earlier music, but now each song is less of a group effort. Creative differences arise. The White Album and singles from this period.
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John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
As we said in the last video, most of 1968
was involved with the creation and release of the White album.
A trip to [UNKNOWN] and a trip to the U.S. to launch Apple core.
And then by May into the studio May through October working on the White Album
released in November of 1968 going to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
So another big hit album for the Beatles.
And as I said, again, in the last video the Beatles
become more a group of songwriters playing on each other's songs here.
Then they are a sort of band working together, because in the studio now it's
you, you know, you can work without
the other guys there, and that frequently happened.
Sometimes sessions would be going on for the album in
two different studios at the same time at Abbey Road.
So talk about being separated out.
There might be a John song being worked on in one
studio and a Paul song being worked on in another studio.
If you look at The White Album chart that I've provided for you, you'll see
that I've broken this out into the Paul McCartney songs, there are 12 of those.
The John Lennon songs,
there are 13 of those.
The George Harrison songs, there are four of those,
and the Ringo Starr song, there is one of those.
So, just looking at those numbers for a minute,
and remembering when we were looking at the very
first albums that first batch of albums that we
were talking to before, coming up before Sergeant Pepper.
A Beatles album could have as many as 14 songs on it.
And so, when you look at Paul with 12 and
John with 13, and a lot of these songs being
longer than two, two minutes and 12 seconds or something, right?
[LAUGH].
You see that there, really it's a double album, in the sense
that you really have an album from Paul and an album from John.
And then, as I said before, kind of an
EP from George Harrison, all sort of put together.
So within this listing of the Paul McCartney
songs and the John Lennon songs and the George
Harrison songs I, I, I, I've also sort of coded them according to some of the topics
that I'm going to be talking about.
Now one of the things I say about John or about Paul's music that is, is that they
reveal a marked longing for the past and for past styles, and.
The interpretation I bring to a lot of Paul McCartney's music in 1968 going into
1969 is a sense of looking to the past to figure out what the way forward is.
In other words looking to the music that used to excite him so much,
or to the music of others as inspiration to find his own way forward.
Now, I would draw your attention to the interpretation I brought to Beatles
For Sale, because I said exactly the same thing about the band there.
Remember when it followed A Hard Day's Night
- Beatles For Sale - people thought, well,
maybe it's not such a good follow up album to A Hard' Day's Night and all that.
But my interpretation of it was the Beatles returning to their past.
There were more cover versions on that tune.
Sort of working their way forward by looking toward their past.
And I think in 1968 that's kind of what is happening with Paul McCartney.
In fact this week and next week and the last week of the class
really to the, to the end of the Beatles career I'm going to argue that Paul.
I think suf, not suffers, but is inspired
by a kind of nostalgia for having things back
the way they used to be.
They've taken a, a long journey in a short period of time, and I think in
many ways Paul wishes they could, they could
be the way they were in 1962 or 1963.
So it seems to me that a lot of his music
there's kind of a longing to, to get back to that.
And well, part of that will come out in the get back
sessions that we'll talk about next week as well as [UNKNOWN] music as well.
So you'll see asterisks in the Paul McCartney column.
But all the songs that I'm marking as song that are based on music of others.
Both John and Paul have songs that refer to their state in India,
and all of these songs were written in India without referring to their state.
But there are couple of tunes that actually refer
to the things that happened when they were In India,
or really strongly prompted by something like that.
In the John column I find his
music getting increasingly experimental during this period.
And we should probably bear in mind that Yoko Ono and John sort of start as
a couple in May of 1968, although they've
known each other for some months before that.
In May of 68, they really sort of established that relationship.
John leaves his
wife and and so Yoko, being an avant-garde artist, brings I think, a lot of that
experience and has that, had a certain kind
of effect of encouraging that in John's music.
So as you look down the John column you'll see not only the songs
referring to the stay in India, but also what I call his finger wagging songs.
This is John sort of making fun of somebody or
talking at somebody about something he doesn't think they
should be doing, or something they're doing that's foolish.
Sort of in the Bob Dylan finger wagging tradition of
telling somebody why, why they're wrong or why they're misguided.
And then the little number sign, little crosshatch,
shows John's songs prompted by phrases of others.
And this goes into that topic we've been following
up to this point of, of John using found objects,
or received sources as ways of creating lyrics.
So lyrics aren't really so much about him as much as they are about sort
of creating a kind of an interesting lyrical thing, given some kind of a thing.
We talked about the circus poster in Being for
the Benefit of Mr. Kite, we talked about the newspaper
in A Day in the Life, we talked about
the Timothy Leary psychedelic experience book in Tomorrow Never Knows.
So we're going to see more of that and
those songs are indicated by that cross hatch.
As far as George Harrison is concerned at this point its really with the
White album that George's songwriting begins to match that of John and Paul.
And maybe of all these songs, and we'll take
a look at it in detail a little bit later.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a song that
really sort of forecasts what George's solo career is
going to look like post Beatles.
He has Eric Clapton guesting on lead guitar and that.
I mean, it really is in many ways some, I bet
you some fans would argue, it's the best track on the album.
So anyway that you can even make that argument credibly give you a sense
of how far George Harrison has come over these couple of years of writing songs.
As he said at the beginning John and Paul were lucky, they
got to get all of their terrible songs out of the way.
I had to do my terrible song in public, but
I think by this point the terrible song writing is over.
Actually, I don't think any of his songs are terrible, but I
think that is the way that he would have put it so.
The way I'm going to structure the lectures that follow is we'll talk
about the Paul songs and then we'll do a close-up on Paul songs.
Then we'll talk about the John songs, we'll do a close-up on John songs.
And then we'll talk about the George songs, the Ringo
song, we'll do a close-up on that and we'll finish
with Yellow Submarine. So let's dig right in to The White Album.
The songs of Paul McCartney.
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