After the Beatles – 1

80’s kid here. I never liked any Beatles songs. Not a single one. And “classic rock” from the 60’s and 70’s is my go-to genre. I always assumed their recognition was more historical. They kicked off the pop band phenomenon as we know it today, and the base rhythms of their songs were no doubt influential. But I’ve never felt that their actual songs were very good. Many of them are downright corny and cringe by the time I listened to them.

But one of the things about the Beatles is they all continued as hit-making machines and relevant musicians after the Beatles, although there can be some argument as to how great each member’s influence was afterwards.

And to consider how weird this is — there is some critique of the Beatles, not specifically made in the quotes above, but similar to those quotes, that they were essentially a disposable Boy Band, as the quotes do say above, they were “manufactured” — not my opinion, but a critique that can be found.

But the counterpoint to this argument is really when boy bands break up and the members go their separate ways, there is generally only one of them that stands out, one that has a significant and meaningful musical career afterwards.

NSync had Justin Timberlake, One Direction had Harry Styles, Take That had Robbie Williams, and some times nobody breaks out after a boy band breaks up — none of the members of New Kids on the Block did anything that significant musically afterwards, Backstreet Boys the same, and so forth.

After the Beatles broke up George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon all had significant musical careers on a par with Harry Styles and Justin Timberlake (for their times, it is at least reasonable to compare these 5 with each other), and Ringo was probably one of the greatest session drummers you could get — his solo work was not that great, with a few exceptions, as a songwriter and a fronting musician it seemed like Ringo had a small number of standouts in him every few years, but as a collaborator on music he was invaluable.

I will make another comment on this boy band observation, although it is really an aside to the main point of this article, when the Beatles started out basically all Pop Stardom was on the Boy Band model. The Boy Band is really a throwback to an earlier form of musical stardom of which the early Beatles were the last real example. The Boy Band can be thought of as a canny exploitation of a gap in the market, based on the realization that although the earlier forms of stardom had been replaced there was still an ecological niche to be filled by bands following that earlier model.

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Some people have argued the Beatles killed that earlier form of stardom, I would say it was Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, Dylan because he brought a new form of stardom which was more like what one was familiar with from Folk and Jazz, of the musician as an artist and truth-teller, and the Stones because they just could not really be made to fit the earlier stardom model. If there is enough moneymaking potential in an idea and it does not fit established models, the established models will be thrown out, think of it as evolution sped up via capitalism.

The important thing was the Beatles had the talent to follow the new paradigm and increase their importance by virtue of this talent.

Previous Statement on this Issue

In one of my previous articles on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame proper rankings

I had the following to comment on “Those guys who were once in the Beatles”

The guys who were once in the Beatles can never be considered the GOAT, because anyone liable to do that considering would of course choose the Beatles. Anyone who persisted nonetheless would again be treated as absurd.

Wyman put Lennon at #44, McCartney at #77 and George Harrison at #224 which are again all defensible choices and in fact I am willing to admit my choice here is more of a reach and Wyman may be totally correct and I am totally off.

In some ways, the guy that is the most defensible for Wyman’s viewpoint, George Harrison, is most defensible for my viewpoint.

Here’s the quote from the original article:

This induction is sort of a joke. After Bangladesh and All Things Must Pass — that is to say, after 1971 — Harrison’s solo career was a steady downward slide. You won’t hear this in the four(!)-hour Scorsese documentary, but his Dark Horse tour was a fiasco, his solo records were uniformly mediocre, and that big late-career hit (“Got My Mind Set on You”) was a cover. Harrison was a fabulous part of the fabulous Beatles and he’s deservedly well-loved. The Concert for Bangladesh film is highly enjoyable to this day. But he’s not an important artist as a solo figure.

Evidently not a Traveling Wilburys fan, then.

Harrison has 4 important qualities that make him influential solo for Rock and Roll, many of which are not musical.

First without the concert for Bangladesh would Live Aid have happened? I discussed this kind of critical what-if-ism in the earlier listicle 3 article:

There will always be a first, because that is just how time works. But of course if you have been preceded by someone and you are naturally inclined to do something similar to what those before you have done, you will probably become familiar with their work and as such you will be influenced by them

Which is about musical influence anyway, but in the case of Concert For Bangladesh and Live Aid I mean it.

I remember reading somewhere the idea that Bob Geldof was the perfect musician to organize Live Aid because he was not particularly important , but still well enough respected that others would value his opinions and ideas, that because of his minor status people would not let their egos get in the way. I think that is true, but also due to his minor status it would not have come together and been made to work if it were not for being able to point to Concert for Bangladesh. In short George Harrison is probably the most influential person for Rock and Roll’s version of charity.

Musically My Sweet Lord, aside from being a great song, is one of the few songs by a white guy (in Rock and Roll) that is spiritual and believing in a God of some sort that is not also absolute dreck. I don’t think that made it especially influential as I just noted all the other white guys doing God stuff are dreck, but it existed as an important counterpoint to the two other ex-Beatles who share this rank, Harrison’s spirituality and charity functioned as a critique of both McCartney’s being in the pleasant suburban rock star business post breakup, and Lennon’s thorn in the side activism which in a lot of ways seemed self-absorbed and unlikely to ever do anything. George Harrison did things, and that elevates him.

In the original article for Vulture Wyman spent a lot of time haphazardly dinging people points for not being moral enough, but never elevated anyone for being better than the rest, which if you can’t do the second — don’t do the first.

My Sweet Lord of course has some other influential points for it, which I will now quote from Wikipedia on this matter:
My Sweet Lord — Wikipedia
“ My Sweet Lord” is a song by English musician George Harrison, released in November 1970 on his triple album All…

en.wikipedia.org

Later in the 1970s, “My Sweet Lord” was at the centre of a heavily publicised copyright infringement suit due to its alleged similarity to the Ronnie Mack song “He’s So Fine”, a 1963 hit for the New York girl group the Chiffons. In 1976, Harrison was found to have subconsciously plagiarised the song, a verdict that had repercussions throughout the music industry.

That’s perhaps not a great thing to influence the industry with, but it was an important factor in developments industry-wide — if it can happen to George Harrison you better believe it can happen to whatever new act you sign. Also just put this in:

Many artists have covered the song, most notably Edwin Starr, Johnny Mathis and Nina Simone. “My Sweet Lord” was ranked 454th on Rolling Stone’s list of “the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in 2004 and 460th in the 2010 update and number 270 on a similar list published by the NME in 2014. It reached number one in Britain again when re-released in January 2002, two months after Harrison’s death.

I mean, aside from everything else on All Things Must Pass that song pushes you pretty high. I’m not going to argue more on Harrison, other than to note that Wonderwall Music seems to have been somewhat influential, and All Those Years Ago and the Traveling Wilburys don’t seem as big a joke as the Vulture ranking would has us believe.

I’m not going to talk much about McCartney here, as I intend to do a stronger focused article on him later (here is that article https://medium.com/p/ae6ca0b58f09), but I think the influence of McCartney and Lennon cast a long shadow over much of the 70s until punk arrived.

Lennon is the most easy to see, his life and his murder in 1980 making the most shocking death for a couple generations of Rock and Roll fans. McCartney stands in contrast to Lennon, Lennon stayed the vision of the artist as revolutionary, but McCartney became the artist as businessman. People don’t respect McCartney’s decision as much, but it certainly seems more levelheaded.

I think McCartney is probably a good model and strong influence on all those singer-songwriters of the 70s, and a march back to the professional musician of previous generations, still a rock star, but not one who needed to destroy himself. Which I guess for a lot of people equals sell out, but the dirty little secret of death is that most people would rather sell out if it meant self-preservation.

The comments earlier about not liking the Beatles did not mention not ever liking anything by any of the members of the Beatles in the 70s, or of McCartney or Harrison after the 70s. That is a wide range of music that was appreciated by a lot of people, including evidently the people that they talk about liking (perhaps it’s just me but I always find it weird to say some artist is great, but the people the artist likes are bad, how does the artist you like have such bad taste?)

Anyway the point stands, their images after the Beatles are still linked with the Beatles, they got inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice but not because of their contributions by themselves, it was because they were still the Beatles in the 70s and remained that way. Probably only McCartney has lasted long enough and been prolific enough to not be thought of immediately as the Beatle named Paul whenever he is seen. And John Lennon managed it by his death overshadowing his life.

The others did not escape.

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