A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper
Fifty years ago today – that’s right, all you aging baby boomers out there, a full half century ago this first week of September! – four young guys from Liverpool walked into a recording studio in London, England and laid down the first tracks for a musical revolution that would reverberate around the world, and would continue to influence pop music to this day.
The four guys were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr and the band was The Beatles, and among the few songs they recorded during those early September days was one that would be released in October of 1962 as their first single. It was a Lennon-McCartney composition called Love Me Do.
That single made the Top 50 charts in the United Kingdom, as did three follow-up singles, Please Please Me, From Me To You and She Loves You, but they received virtually no airplay in North America until the Beatles – already bringing fans screaming to their feet in England and Europe in a musical cyclone called ‘Beatlemania’ – cut another single featuring a song called ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and was preparing to land in America in early 1964 to appear on a then-popular live television hosted by an old stone-faced guy named Ed Sullivan in New York City.
By then, the fat-cat suits in the board room of Capitol Records in the United States and Canada, who had turned down the first-dib rights they had through Parlophone (EMI) Records in England to press Beatle discs in America more than a year earlier, were now scrambling to get those rights back from a little U.S. Midwestern record company called Vee-Jay.
The Beatles, as they looked during their “invasion” of North America in 1964.
That was one of the things that was most fabulous about the Fab Four and the impact they had on the whole music industry. They turned the whole thing upside down. At least for one golden decade or so the musicians or artists – the proverbial inmates, if you will – ran the asylum. For a few golden years after The Beatles broke through the wall of corporate control on the music recording front, we had advancing great work by Bob Dylan, we had Leonard Cohen, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and on and on and on.
The corporate slime has taken over the music recording industry again, which is why we have Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and most of the other stinking pile of crap that passes for pop music today. It is all about marketing Mickey Mouse Club clones that have never worked in a club or could never write a decent tune in their lives. Some of them can’t hold a tune when they sing without the aid of a computer system that levels out bad glitches in their vocal performance. Thus we end up with wack-jobs like Britney and Lady Gaga.
The good news is that more than four decades after The Beatles hit the international scene, I have walked into the few record stores left – or stores still selling CDs these days – and have seen racks of those old Beatle albums, now digitally re-mastered on CD. I asked those working in the stores who are still buying Beatle music, and they told me that I might be interested to know that most of the buyers are people 21 years old and younger
On that chord, I don’t know how many times I have been working in my home office downstairs right up to now, and suddenly I hear Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane or Nowhere Man bleeding.through the floor my 20-year-old daughter’s room upstairs. Wow
Fifty years later, these four guys from Liverpool rock on. It speaks for the majesty of the music and a magical mystery tour that, from generation to generation, just keeps rolling on and on.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post below.)
Niagara At Large 
Good story on The Beatles, Doug …. you are right – they were an invasion and turned EVERYTHING upside down, wrote some beautiful music and I remember their appearance on Ed Sullivan’s show – you could see them but hardly hear them for all the screaming ! They also brought with them their own long hair styles which left us fighting with our kids to get what we called a proper hair cut ! Nothing was the same after their appearance on the music scene. It hardly seems 50 years, but their music lives on with all of us! I agree with you about the pop music today – ugh !
All of this brings back a lot of memories. Thank you for this wonderful piece of nostalgia.
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Still love ’em to bits and still have the old VeeJay album “Introducing the Beatles”. Still have my concert tickets from their 3 years in Toronto, the prices were $4.50, $5.00 and $5.50! I couldn’t hear for a week after the concerts and must say I’ve never experienced such mania since. Got my programmes from the concerts. Still have the CHUM poster for one concert that I ripped off the wall at Maple Leaf Gardens and my autographs. Still have all the 16, Tiger Beat, NME and assorted magazines from the 60’s. Obssessed, not much.
They weren’t just a musical revolution but a cultural one. They were terribly irreverent and knocked the legs out from under the staid old post war era for better or worse. All of their songs evoke so many memories and many are absolute classics like Nowhere Man, In my Life, Let it Be. There was a lot of meaning behind many of those lyrics. Even their fun songs were irresistible. I recommend the movie “Across the Universe” to see just how much their songs reflected the turbulence of the 60’s. Many look back at it as a good time but there was a lot going on in that decade and their music reflected it.
The stuff now sucks. I can’t see anything that could be considered a classic and the “singers” are mostly prefabricated and have a bunch of semi nude dancers behind them to mask their lack of talent. Somehow I find it difficult to see a couple in their 80’s in 60 year’s time saying, “Oh, they’re playing our song” to most of the garbage out there.
I would have loved to see what Lennon might have produced since some of his best stuff was being produced just as he died, like Woman, Watching the Wheels, Imagine and, ironically, Starting Over. I think he was a troubled soul who had finally just got his sh!t together. Sad.
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Clarification, The Beatles music was a combination of Skiffle and Elvis, their idol.Skiffle was a lot like hillybilly music played with washboards and tea crates with strings. but it was the intensity of the music that had appeal.
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I had left Liverpool by then, but I know why we all had long hair. We just did not have the 2 shillings and sixpence to get one. We got our hair cut when it got in our eyes. Around that time there had to be half a dozen great bands in Liverpool, not to many venues thoough – mostly basements of big buildings, like the Jacaranda Club which played west Indian music.This was 15 years after the Second World War and not a lot of buildings had been rebuilt. The Quarry Men (the name of the band that evolved into The Beatles) had a huge following and the teens wanted records of this group. That’s where Brian Epstein came in. His tiny record shop was inundated with requests for records.Top guy on the charts was Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegon and his skiffle band that would become The Beatles).
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Like Lonnie Donnegan too!
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