Why Were The Beatles Such a Phenomenon?
April 29, 2011It’s impossible to deny the influence of The Beatles on modern music. Debates aside on whether you like them or not, they have had a huge impact on the sound that not only defined their decade, but bled into subsequent decades until the present day. So what made them so special in those early days, and how did they stay successful?
Well, it wasn’t easy for them, and it wasn’t an overnight enterprise. Lennon and McCartney had struggled in various bands for years, and when Harrison joined them they found themselves as three guitarists that couldn’t even get a drummer to go along with them. When they finally did they got their first chance to make real cash by playing at strip clubs in Hamburg. On their return they got in on the Mersey beat movement and managed to get a recording set up at Abbey Road, but with only a week to get their songs together it was a seriously rushed job.
As luck would have it there was something inspired about that week of toil. Please Please Me was a hit, and they picked up a big enough fan base to be a lead act in their own right, after a couple of tours supporting bigger stars. Making this success all the more concrete was a series of articles by critic William Mann in The Times which heralded them as geniuses, and set them up as the biggest thing to hit British pop. It gave them credibility as more than just a band girls liked.
The US was hesitant to receive what it saw as the dangerous wave of Beatlemania that swept England. But the craze couldn’t be stopped, and there was huge demand for I Wanna Hold Your Hand in particular. Three thousand people went to greet the band at JFK airport when they entered the country. To top this off, when The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show, over 40 million people tuned in. The British Invasion was born.
In the following decade it was a drive to improve their sound and find new areas for music that kept The Beatles going. Bob Dylan and them shared a mutual exchange of influence, with Lennon taking on board grittier sounds and deeper lyrics, while Dylan adopted an electric guitar and stopped worrying about being ‘pure’ folk. The result was a more mature sound for a maturing fan base, and it really paid off.
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