The Beatles started out as a really good rock band, with great pop songwriting skills, who used a lot of big wierd chords in fantastic new ways.
Two bands were in particular developing this new use of harmony, both which would tend towards elaborate arrangements and, in time, experimentation. And that was The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
The Beatles crafted wonderful pop-rock songs with amazing use of chords.
I might at this point mention the most underrated aspect of The Beatles, a big part of the very foundation of their sound, and that is their tight vocal harmonies.
The folk elements in their early rock arrangements, together with the sophistocation of their chords, convinced The Byrds to go electric, who then in turn led Dylan to go electric.
After a while as just a pop-rock band, The Beatles began to expand into more meaningful, more traditional pop, with meaningful love songs, the traditional style freely mixed in with rock into a kind of hybrid rock-ballad style, while still doing all-out rockers.
And then something changed.
The Beatles got into Dylan.
Discovered The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.
Saw Dylan and The Byrds launch the new music revolution.
There were a few tentative first steps: three songs:
'Help', a sincere, meaningful cry for help disguised as a pop-rock song- but really a catchy rock song of undeniable emotional intensity and immediacy
'You've got to Hide Your Love Away', a decent attempt at sounding like Dylan the folkie with a good serious song
and 'Yesterday', the famous new traditional pop standard, with the string quartet backing Paul and his acoustic guitar.
Then came the big one.
The first mature Beatles album.
Rubber Soul.
This was it: the first time The Beatles, or anyone else save for perhaps The Byrds or the newly emerging Simon and Garfunkel, had ever equaled Dylan in Dylan's own new rock scene.
This was The Beatles doing Byrds-style folk-rock, but their way.
Quirky, with that spectacular Beatles use of things like harmony. But with a couple quirky rock songs thrown in for variety, and with a couple quirky ballads also thrown in for variety.
And a touch of musical experimentation: a fuzz bass here, an organ there, a sped-up piano sounding almost like a harpsichord over there.
And the new Beatles lyrics. The wisdom of the ages, laid out for us in three songs in succession: 'Nowhere Man', 'Think for Yourself', 'The Word', all reinforced by the poetry of the stunning ballad 'In My Life' that followed, and the sophistocated, interesting lyrics of 'Michelle' and 'Girl' in between.
This is the starting off point.
From this point, The Beatles go into two main lines of development.
First, the colorful psychedelic intricacy of such legendary tracks as Rain and Strawberry Fields Forever.
From Revolver and the stunning B-side Rain, through Sgt. Pepper's, Magical Mystery Tour, and the singles of 67, to the B-side The Inner Light, and then taken up again with Abbey Road, now with less session musicians and more Moog and stunning new John Lennon fuzz guitar, and alongside Abbey Road, While My Guitar Gently Weeps from the White Album and the two tracks Across the Universe and I Me Mine, showing John and George in a very different place from Paul in the Let it Be sessions.
Within this line is the specific subset of George Harrison songs that are, in effect, Indian classical pieces with a Western melody on top: Love you To from Revolver, Within You and Without You from Sgt. Peppers, and the Lady Madonna B-side from the very end of the Sgt. Peppers era, The Inner Light. These are spectacular achievements, complete full-on short pieces of north Indian classical music, featuring George Harrison's complete mastery of the sitar alongside professional Tabla players, with a full Western song melody laid on top, an amazing merging of East and West in complete harmony.
The other great line of development is the post-1967 return to rootsy music, with variety, coming in three flavors:
The wild experimentation with songwriting and variety of the White Album
The just plain great music of the major singles of the period, generally a bit lusher in orchestration ('Lady Madonna', 'Hey Jude/Revolution', 'Let it Be')
And the live spontaneity of the massively underrated Let it Be album.
And after that, John, Paul, and George all went their own way and created more spectacular music individually.
THE END
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson