Beatles Post, Part 2 (Long Delayed): Free Your Mind Instead

After reading part one of this two-part Beatles post, you can be forgiven for thinking the Beatles succeeded in the US despite Capitol Records’ inexplicable attempts to torpedo them. Recall: At first, Capitol ignored them, refusing to release their records in the US in 1962 and -63, despite the fact that, in the UK, sales of Beatles’ albums and singles increased with every release. Then, when Capitol finally did deign to release Beatles material, they butchered, attenuated, and watered down their output—a prime example of the latter sabotage being what the suits at Capitol did to the album Help!, as I recounted earlier.

In 1964, few expected the Beatles phenomenon to last; one of the most frequently-asked questions “the boys” had to answer in 1963 and -64 was a variant of “What will you do for a living when this Beatlemania thing inevitably blows over in, like, a month?” By early 1965, this question had become such a cliché that it is parodied in the movie Help! with the following exchange that occurs in a scene where the boys ask a Scotland Yard Superintendent for protection from a predatory religious cult:

Superintendent: So this is the famous ring? [Referencing a “sacrificial ring” Ringo can’t get off his finger; he’s in danger as long as he has it on]
Ringo: I'm in fear of me life, you know!
Superintendent: And these are the famous Beatles?
John: So this is the famous Scotland Yard, eh
Superintendent: And how long do you think you'll last?
John: Can't say fairer than that. The Great Train Robbery, eh? How's that going?

By the time Help! was released, the Beatles had been recording for nearly three years and the Beatlemania phenomenon was showing no sign of fading; so the boys were understandably less indulgent when it came to this condescending treatment.

Capitol suits evidently shared this Beatles = flash-in-the-pan view, so their Prime Directive re: the Beatles was to make as much money off them as they could as quickly as possible. In Capitol’s (probable) view, this was not an attempt to undermine the Beatles’ success; it was, rather, a rational and mutually beneficial economic strategy: Milk this cash cow as quickly as possible before the money dries up!—not an entirely indefensible stance to take at the time, to be fair. Thus, US audiences ended up with inferior and/or stripped-down versions of Beatles albums—but, on the plus side (I guess) there were more of them because Capitol seemed to be releasing (ahem) “new” Beatles recordings every other day, a recipe for oversaturating the market if ever there were one.

But the Beatles survived this somehow. Why?

I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that I attribute this to the quality of their music. (I’m not exactly going out on a limb, here.)

In his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues in favor of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s 10,000-Hour Rule, which, roughly stated, posits that what distinguishes prodigies in any field or pursuit from non-prodigies is, not the former group’s “innate” talent, but, rather, their willingness to spend hours and hours practicing, thereby honing and perfecting their craft. “Once a musician,[ e.g.,] has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”

The chapter in which Gladwell expounds this “rule” is called (surprise!) “The 10,000-Hour Rule” and the subtitular epigraph for the chapter is “In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours”—a Lennon quote regarding the rigors of the then-ephebic Beatles’ apprenticeship in Hamburg, Germany, where they were, in fact, expected to play each night for eight hours straight with few or no breaks. Thus did they, indeed, put in the lion’s share of their 10,000 hours over the course of four separate stints in Hamburg; and they did become great—so much so that Gladwell makes them the poster children for his argument in support of the 10k-hour rule. Paul McCartney himself seems to endorse the view; in a 2017 interview in Rolling Stone, then-75-year-old Sir Paul was asked what advice he would give to youngsters just starting out. His answer:

Play a lot. Play bars and then play some more. Because the more you play, the more you grow. And there's really no substitute. And that goes for whatever it is you do: If you DJ, do that a lot. If you're a guitar player, do that a lot. If you're a band, do that a lot.... It's how you learn what you're good at, who you are, and you just get better.

These thousands of hours of practice go a long way toward explaining why the Beatles were so technically proficient. But there are certain problems with attributing the Beatles’ success—even just their technical success—to those 10,000 hours in Hamburg. For one thing, John, Paul and George put in the vast majority of those 10,000 hours with an entirely different drummer, Pete Best; Ringo didn’t join the band until after the Beatles had already gotten good enough to be signed to a recording deal. Pete Best, alas, never really got that good at drumming. (Some people need more than lots of practice, I guess.) Yet it is universally agreed that Ringo was a much better drummer for the Beatles than Pete Best despite Best’s having put in far more time with the other three than Ringo had. Moreover, many British rock bands of the early 1960s, who’d also put in their 10,000 hours, were covering other composers’ and performers’ songs, but the Beatles’ cover versions were consistently better than anyone else’s and, more often than not, superior even to the original versions. Compare the Beatles’ versions of “Twist and Shout”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Money (That’s What I Want)”, “Please Mr. Postman”’ and “Long Tall Sally” to any other version of these songs and you’d be hard pressed to find one that equals the Beatles’, and none that are better. You can even find instances of Beatles cover versions that, though excellent, were never officially released while the Beatles were together—covers that are indisputably great, but not great enough for the Beatles to have seen a compelling need to release them despite the fact that, in the early years, they were many times in desperate need of album filler because they were releasing new material so often^[1]. When the Beatles’ Anthology came out in the mid-1990s, some of us heard for the very first time their cover version of “Leave My Kitten Alone” and were left to wonder exactly why this particular gem had been left to languish in the vaults unreleased for three decades. I’m still kinda mad about this.

Yet 10,000 hours of practice can’t really explain the singular genius of the Beatles, which was their ability to write and perform songs they themselves composed. Lennon and McCartney began writing songs together in their teens; they even recorded and released a few of those novice efforts later (e.g., “I’ll Follow the Sun” on Beatles for Sale). They gave a few of their other early compositions away to other British performers, most of which became hits because, in 1963 and -64, anything associated with the Beatles was instantly popular, which led to some horrifically unethical marketing ploys by foax determined to make a buck off the Beatles brand.

But 10,000 hours of intensive live-gig practice doesn’t explain how and why Lennon and McCartney (and, later, George Harrison) became such unparalleled song-writers whose compositions made unmistakable gains in quality in improbably short spans of time. Each Beatles composition, it seemed, was at least incrementally better than the one that preceded it—and there were also a few quantum leaps in quality along the way. These qualitative improvements were evident in the band’s playing, singing, harmonizing, and arrangements, but were especially noticeable in the compositions themselves. It seems impossible that the same duo who wrote and performed “Love Me Do” in 1962 (released as their first single because it was deemed the best composition they had at the time) could have advanced to the point of being capable of composing “Strawberry Fields Forever'' and “Penny Lane” in just four years.

There is an ineffable quality of genius to the composing skill of Lennon & McCartney that no amount of bean- (or hour-) counting can satisfactorily explain. Small variations from standard songcraft were enough to excite the duo in the early going: Paul later spoke of their conscious choice to introduce a less personal perspective into “She Loves You” (released July 1963):

I suppose the most interesting thing about it was that it was a message song, it was someone bringing a message. It wasn't us any more, it was moving off the 'I love you, girl' or 'Love me do', it was a third person, which was a shift away. 'I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you’, so there's a little distance we managed to put in it which was quite interesting.

The G minor chord in the bridge of “From Me to You” (released March 1963) was enough to keep John and Paul, as the song says, “satisfied, Oooo!” “The thing I liked about ‘From Me to You,’” Paul later said, “was it had a very complete middle. It went to a surprising place.” “That middle eight was a very big departure for us. Say you're in C then go to A minor, fairly ordinary, C, change it to G. And then F, pretty ordinary. But then it goes, 'I got arms...' and that's a G minor. Going to G minor and a C takes you to a whole new world. It was exciting.”

But it was a while, relatively speaking, before Beatles songs got lyrically interesting, John’s early wordplay (double use/meaning of “please” in “Please Please Me” and punning wordplay in “It Won’t Be Long” (“till I belong to you”)) notwithstanding. But by 1966, it was impossible to ignore the mature poeticism and vision of Lennon/McCartney song lyrics. In songs like “Eleanor Rigby”, “For No One”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Rain” and “She Said She Said”, the lyrics weren’t simply placeholders, a way of conveying the melody; they were rich contributors to the overall tapestry of the song.

John in particular was beginning to articulate a semi-consistent vision in his songs. Themes and images having to do with dreams and other states of consciousness, altered or otherwise, became prominent in many of his songs as Lennon himself seemingly began to opt out of the “real” world, the material world of hard, empirical fact, in favor of a dream-world of mind. His songs trace a near-solipsistic journey inward:

Let me take you down ‘cause I’m going to
Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
(“Strawberry Fields Forever” released February 1967)

John had explored this theme of creating your own dream-reality in earlier songs like “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, two 1966 songs that share nearly identical lines:

When I wake up early in the morning
Lift my head, I’m still yawning
When I’m in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float upstream
(“I’m Only Sleeping” released 1966)

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream
It is not dying
(“Tomorrow Never Knows” released 1966)

This theme of (for lack of a better word) “escapism” is a thread that runs through just about all of John’s more mature Beatles compositions and continues into his solo career with such songs as “God” (Cartesian in its solipsistic reductivism; nearly eschatological in scope), “Imagine”, “Mind Games”, and “#9 Dream”. By 1968, when revolutionary fervor had become a part of the youth Zeitgeist, John, in “Revolution”, while recognizing that “we all wanna change the world”, counsels “you better free your mind instead”—as if to say: You can’t control what goes on in the external world, but you can control how you react to it and build positively from there. (Post-Beatles Lennon would have a far less laissez-faire attitude toward social change.) Similarly, in “Across the Universe”: “Nothing’s gonna change my world” [emphasis added]: It’s my world if I control the external by making it internal. Thus, the Universe is you. It’s easy to see how this view contributed, in a few short years, to John and his wife Yoko’s 1971 anti-war ads: To advertise their 1971 single “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” (which celebrated the end of the Vietnam War, which was, in fact, not yet over), John and Yoko financed a number of billboards with the message: “War Is Over! If You Want It”, a line a children’s choir chants—as invocation and invitation—throughout the song.

The Beatles never lost their ability to compose catchy melodies—they were capable of that in 1962 and were still doing it in late 1969, on Abbey Road, the last album all four of them recorded together. But what really made them leaders, world changers, was their growth as composers of lyrics—growth that had college professors including Beatle lyrics in poetry courses and fans of all ages poring over their lyrics for meaning and enlightenment.

It’s little wonder why. What better way to free your mind?

Works about the Beatles

Meet the Beatles 8/2/16 post by Mary M. Astarita on the Mercer County Library blog

Hey Dullblog Blog dedicated to the Beatles, featuring “people who think about the Beatles maybe a little too much”—or possibly just the right amount

The Beatles: U.S. Vs. U.K. Album Guide The graphics on this webpage make it easy for the reader to see from exactly which record-parts the US Franken-albums were stitched together

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald

Works by the Beatles

See The Beatles Discography (Wikipedia article) for a more complete list of Beatles records

Beatles Films

A Hard Day’s Night The first and best of the Beatles movies

Help! The more cartoonish, but still funny, 1965 follow-up to AHDN, sadly marred by some racist tropes and unfortunate casting

Magical Mystery Tour Most people agree this film, which had no real script, is a floundering disaster

Yellow Submarine This is a surprisingly good animated film, despite the fact that voice actors are used to voice the characters of John, Paul, George, and Ringo; but the boys themselves (and their real voices!) make a live action appearance at the end and school us in how to deal with a newly-spied horde of Blue Meanies

Let It Be Documentary depicting the demise and imminent break-up of the group

—Tom G. Hopewell Branch

^[1] For example, in late 1964, Paul had to put the finishing touches on “She’s a Woman” while the Beatles were in the studio so they could record it that day for their upcoming single and album. This goes a long way towards explaining such clunker lines as: “My love don’t give me presents. / I know that she’s no peasant” which, really, just … ugh.