Ink Tea Stone Leaf

You may be thinking just now, “I know how to listen to the Beatles, David: you type ‘the beatles’ into the search bar of the appropriate app and click on the nicest looking playlist that comes up.” Sure, wise guy. Go ahead and do that. You will almost certainly have a very nice time. But before you do, I’m going to explain to you how you might best listen to the Beatles with intention, that is, with the idea of not only enjoying the music but understanding why that music moves people to write blog posts like this one.

I’ve been a person so moved for nearly a quarter century, a listener who observed the fortieth anniversary of the famous debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was in high school, squarely in the middle of the age range that had been most animated by that performance in the 1960s. More than just about any other musicians, the Beatles struck me as a band with a story; it wasn’t just that their songs spoke to me (although they did), but that their entire artistic output seemed to speak to history with a compelling universality. There was something so far-reaching in their sound that it could be taken to represent some of the basic principles of popular creative arts: the enthusiasm for influences and for being influenced, the delight in reinterpreting and transforming conventional ideas, and the confident sophistication to communicate vulnerable and powerful emotions.

Furthermore, the arcs of the Beatles’ career and of the lives of the four principal members make for one of the most classic tales in all of music: the working class teenagers from a city often overlooked within their own country and largely obscure outside of it, who progressed from writing songs while ditching school and playing exhausting shows in dingy clubs, to sudden international superstardom and recognition as significant composers and cultural icons, only to weather the strain of irreconcilable personal conflicts that pitted longtime friends against each other and finally dissolved their creative partnership. Their story is an epic in miniature, tragic in one sense but possessed of a joyful soundtrack.

If you don’t care about history or narrative in the way that I do or as much as I do, then that may mean nothing to you. But I maintain that everything exists in its context, and that the qualities of the arts are a consequence of those contexts, and that the Beatles continue to resonate today because they and their music were born from a context that was ripe for producing a lasting phenomenon.

There are lots of ways to listen to the Beatles, and if you have the ears to hear it, then there is no doubt that something of their brilliance will shine through when you do. But if you find their body of work intimidating or are otherwise still interested in a guide, I do have some suggestions for how you might engage with the band in a way that will leave you eager for more and more incredible music. I will focus on the most commercially accessible options, leaving the truly deep dives for those who are confident enough to swim on their own.

The Sound

The most important thing to know about music is the way the sounds are made, both in a mechanical sense and a stylistic sense. The Beatles were extraordinarily innovative and eclectic, but when it came to creating the sounds that went onto their records, they did have some largely stable and well-defined roles. There was no single leader of the band (somewhat unusual for an early 1960s rock group), but their direction was largely governed by the strength of their collective personalities.

The Beatles had several drummers before they secured a recording contract, most notably Pete Best; almost immediately, however, Best was fired and replaced by Richard Starkey, AKA Ringo Starr. The role of Ringo in the band was usually auxiliary; he has writing credits on only a handful of songs, and typically sings lead vocals on only one song per album (and none of the singles), often in a context that could be called “comic relief,” if that concept applies. However, his skills with the drums were foundational to their success. Starr created drum parts for each song he recorded on that were deceptively simple but uniquely identifiable, and he is often especially rewarding to listen to because he is not trying to steal the show. Most of the percussion parts on most of the songs are his work.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison were all accomplished guitar players, dynamic from the beginning and only improving with time. They were also all adept at keyboard instruments, from pianos to synthesizers, but the guitar was always at the core of their sound, and it is often much louder in the mix than was typical in the early 60s. Officially, Harrison was lead guitarist (playing the intros, solos, and other such licks), Lennon was rhythm guitarist, and McCartney played bass; this is the configuration you’ll see in videos of virtually every live performance. In the studio, however, they shifted between roles easily, and there are examples of each one playing lead, rhythm, and bass throughout their catalogue.

McCartney’s bass playing is one of the major plot threads of the Beatles story; he took up the instrument reluctantly, their old bass player having left the group before they became famous. His early bass playing is not particularly noticeable on record, due to its low volume and relatively straightforward parts. However, the influence of American rhythm and blues records seems to have inspired him to attempt to become The Greatest Bass Player In History. Around 1965-66, his bass gets much louder and significantly more harmonically interesting, sometimes becoming the most prominent instrument of a song. This is but one example of McCartney’s status as the band’s designated overachiever.

Vocally, the Beatles typically sang backing harmonies behind a lead singer, or delivered lead vocals together in two or three part harmony (solo vocals are less common, but not rare). The most frequent lead singers were Lennon and McCartney, who typically sang the songs they were most responsible for composing (though counter-examples do exist). Harrison initially sang lead on select covers and on songs the others would write for him, but eventually settled into mostly singing his own compositions as well. In many live settings, the staff responsible for adjusting microphone levels seem not to have realized that the Beatles did not have a single designated lead singer, as either McCartney’s or Lennon’s microphone is often too quiet or loud; this isn’t an issue in the studio recordings, of course.

Telling the singers apart is an interesting challenge for beginners, especially given the fact that two or three Beatles are usually singing parts in any given song. Typically, Lennon’s delivery was raspier, more aggressive, and prone to slurring on more rock-oriented tracks, though he could also sing very tenderly, or affect goofy accents (See “I Call Your Name” and “You Can’t Do That” for typical early Lennon vocals, and “Happiness is a Warm Gun” for a demonstration of his versatility). McCartney has multiple modes, ranging from a very mellow, sweet sound to an intense rock and roll roar, which new listeners may fail to recognize as his (to see how this roar develops over time, listen to “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Helter Skelter,” and “Oh! Darling”). Harrison’s lead vocals are harder to characterize but tend to fall closer to Lennon’s style, though he doesn’t quite have the same range or intensity. Starr, when he sings, has the most limited range (though singing and playing drums simultaneously is a neat trick in itself).

In particular, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a gift for harmonizing with each other, often performing what are effectively co-lead vocals in the early years. On songs like “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” their voices almost totally merge together. On stage and even in studio, they frequently sang ballads like “If I Fell” and “Baby’s in Black” simultaneously into the same microphone, with Lennon singing the lower part and Paul taking the higher one, neither one dominating the other. It is said in Beatles lore that when Paul was asked which melody was the actual melody of “Baby’s in Black,” he replied “they both are.” The two of them sang together like this with decreasing frequency over time, but both of them (especially McCartney) continued to perform energetic backing harmonies as though they were extensions of the lead, rather than subordinate to it.

In addition to their basic instrumentation, the group drew upon studio resources to enhance and transform their sound, leading to a series of technical and artistic breakthroughs. “I Feel Fine” was the first pop song to make intentional use of guitar feedback (building on earlier rock trends toward distortion and dissonance) while the songs from 1966-68 are often embellished with overdubs of parts recorded backwards and at varying speeds, voices processed through unusual speakers, synthesizers and even tape loops of inexplicable sounds influenced by avant-garde music. Their near-constant producer, George Martin, contributed occasional piano playing to early songs and string arrangements to later ones, while specialists were brought in to play strings, horns, woodwinds, and instruments utterly unfamiliar to western audiences of that time (especially staples of Indian classical music—George Harrison himself became a competent sitar player).

The general sense by the mid-1960s was that if a sound or style were part of the broader cultural landscape, there was no reason that they could not become part of a Beatles record. Naturally, this leads us to the issue of cultural appropriation: if it is a sin in and of itself, then the Beatles were profoundly guilty of trespassing against multiple parties, particularly Indians and Black Americans. Even from the earliest days, the songs they most often covered were by Black people, while the songs they wrote themselves were idiosyncratic mishmashes of rock, rhythm and blues, country and western, and traditional pop elements with their own naïve understanding of how such elements could be combined (“Love Me Do” is a 12-bar blues with only 11 bars, but you hardly even notice). The Beatles were only one part of a larger system that extracted (and still extracts) musical ideas and affectations from Black culture and incorporated them into a mainstream dominated by whites.

Creativity, however, is not a matter of always staying in your own lane. The Beatles were extremely open about the influences they incorporated, boldly stating to the effect that they played music in the manner of Black Americans because they believed it was a superior kind of music, better than most of what the white mainstream could come up with on its own, and that it was these musicians (rather than themselves) who were most worth emulating. This is not an unproblematic stance, and the Beatles themselves were not paragons of cultural enlightenment, but they were aligned with the civil rights movement and other progressive causes, and they made beautiful things out of what they borrowed.

So what does a Beatles record sound like? It may sound like just about anything, but the most important piece of the sound is the enthusiasm they brought to the work: an enthusiasm for being influenced and for sounding different, and for crafting the most singable melodies to the most bizarre songs. As the Beatles matured, they demonstrated how these impulses could be directed not only for entertainment, but serious political and artistic expression, without sacrificing the simple joy of playing music with kindred spirits. For most of their run, they looked and sounded like they had more fun doing their jobs than anybody in the world—and sometimes it was even true.

The Compilations

If you wish to begin by scratching at the surface, there are a few good options that showcase the variety and innovation of the Beatles. From 1962 to 1970, the group released 13 studio albums (more on that number later) and a plethora of singles, many of which were not included as tracks on any of those albums. In the days of the Beatles, singles were released as a pair of songs on either side of a 45 rpm vinyl record, one designated A (the intended hit) and the other as B (typically just a nice little bonus, but sometimes a gem in its own right). Compilations, therefore, are essential listening for the modern listener who wants to hear some of the Beatles’ strongest and most representative songs.

1

The first Beatles album that I ever bought was the compilation known as 1, its track list a chronological presentation of all the band’s songs that became chart toppers in either the United Kingdom or the United States. There are twenty seven of these, a number that speaks to the unique commercial dominance of the Beatles from the beginning to the end of their recording career. Here in the United States, twenty of these songs were top hits, which remains a record in that country. You can read all about their various long-standing records here.

Many of the songs on 1 were also included on the canonical British studio albums (again, more on that later), but nine of them were not, it being standard in Britain (but not America) in those days to treat single releases as separate from album releases. The track list is as follows, with asterisks* by the songs that also appear on albums:

• Love Me Do*
• From Me to You
• She Loves You
• I Want to Hold Your Hand
• Can’t Buy Me Love*
• A Hard Day’s Night*
• I Feel Fine
• Eight Days a Week*
• Ticket to Ride*
• Help!*
• Yesterday*
• Day Tripper
• We Can Work it Out
• Paperback Writer
• Yellow Submarine*
• Eleanor Rigby*
• Penny Lane*
• All You Need Is Love*
• Hello Goodbye*
• Lady Madonna
• Hey Jude
• Get Back*
• The Ballad of John and Yoko
• Something*
• Come Together*
• Let It Be*
• The Long and Winding Road*

In point of fact, when the Beatles recorded a song with the express intention of releasing it as a single, it nearly always reached number one on at least one side of the Atlantic ocean (some songs were released without the Beatles’ direction by their American record label, and either went to number one or got respectably close to it). “Love Me Do” (their debut A-side) took a couple of years to get there, not reaching the top spot until it was re-released in America during the first height of Beatlemania. So extreme was their commercial dominance that they even marketed some singles as “double A-sides,” and were usually able to send both sides of one 45 rpm disc to number one; “Day Tripper/We Can Work it Out,” “Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby,” and “Something/Come Together” were all originally paired in this manner.

1 is an incredible collection of songs, and listening through gives a sense of the Beatles’ musical journey: from guitar and harmonica-based beat music, to a polished power-pop sound, to colorful psychedelia with eclectic instrumentation, to a mature and bluesy synthesis of all these approaches. Reflecting that each of these songs was superlatively popular in its time, and that their respective times were all within a span of eight years, gives a stark impression of the power that the Beatles had to shape popular taste, acting as a massive gravitational anomaly in the broader solar system of the 1960s music scene.

The fact that each song on 1 is an original composition by the band’s members is also worth contemplating. The Beatles themselves were largely responsible for the shift in expectations that pop stars mostly record their own material, and their determination from the beginning to record only their own songs as singles was seen as a bold stance, worth emulating by up-and-comers. After three years they stopped recording covers altogether, so that the composition of the bulk of their final studio output, like the track list of 1, is attributed to John Lennon and Paul McCartney (either separately or collaboratively, but always as Lennon/McCartney).

In this way, however, 1 may perpetuate some misconceptions about the Beatles. Covers were actually a very important part of their early years, and while none of them charted at number one, they were often lastingly popular: “Twist and Shout” is perhaps the prime example. Furthermore, George Harrison’s songwriting is represented on 1 by only one song, “Something.” This is not an oversight, but a consequence of the dominance of the Lennon/McCartney dynamic within the group, and Harrison’s comparatively late emergence and slower rate of production. It took George seven years to get one of his songs on an A-side, and a year later the Beatles were no more. Consequently, the parade of number ones is largely a Lennon/McCartney show.

1 is also agonizingly close to containing a complete list of official (British) Beatles A-sides, except that it is missing two songs: “Please Please Me,” which was number one in every British chart except for the one which ultimately was decided to matter, and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which was part of a double-A unit with “Penny Lane,” yet only made it as high as number two on any chart. Even the Beatles had limits, it seems.

I believe I gave my copy of 1 away a long time ago, as in gathering Beatles CDs I eventually made it redundant to my collection. Back in the day, however, I listened to it on repeat, soaking these songs into my bones until I knew them thoroughly. They’re all fine songs, although I was somewhat put-off by the piercing harmonica intro of “From Me to You,” which became my most-likely track to skip.

Past Masters

Originally a two volume set, though nowadays they seem to be marketed as a single unit, Past Masters is the official collection of every officially released Beatles track that does not appear on one of the thirteen official studio albums; that is, non-album singles and EP-only tracks. For completionists, in other words, Past Masters is the 14th (or 14th and 15th) Beatles album. Its track list is:

Past Masters Volume 1

• Love Me Do
• From Me to You
• Thank You Girl
• She Loves You
• I’ll Get You
• I Want to Hold Your Hand
• This Boy
• Komm, gib mir deine Hand
• Sie liebt dich
• Long Tall Sally
• I Call Your Name
• Slow Down
• Matchbox
• I Feel Fine
• She’s a Woman
• Bad Boy
• Yes it Is
• I’m Down

Past Masters Volume 2

• Day Tripper
• We Can Work it Out
• Paperback Writer
• Rain
• Lady Madonna
• The Inner Light
• Hey Jude
• Revolution
• Get Back
• Don’t Let Me Down
• The Ballad of John and Yoko
• Old Brown Shoe
• Across the Universe
• Let It Be
• You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

Observant readers might now say, “something’s not right here, David; you said before that ‘Love Me Do,’ ‘Get Back,’ and ‘Let It Be’ were album tracks as well as singles, yet here they are in a package dedicated to non-album tracks.” And it’s true, I did say that, but the single versions included here are different from the ones that appear on their respective albums. This “Love Me Do” is a rare variant with Ringo playing drums, whereas the album version and official single (the one that’s on 1) have him playing tambourine while a professional session man plays drums. The single version of “Get Back” has a long-ish outro after the album version just ends, while the two versions of “Let It Be” have different (very different) guitar solos. Likewise, “Across the Universe” is an album track as well, but this is an alternate version with bird sounds, both in the sense of fluttering wings and cooing, and in the sense that two lucky young woman hanging out by the recording studio got a chance to sing some backing vocals on it (because sometimes British people call girls “birds,” you see).

Past Masters is a different experience from 1 in that it is not focused on delivering The Hits, though because the Beatles did not routinely include their single releases on the standard versions of their albums, several of its songs are among their most famous. Others are more obscure: “Thank You Girl” is a trifle, though it makes sense in the context of early Beatlemania, while “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” is a comedy routine disguised as a song. The strangest inclusions are the German versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” which I skip most of the time, though it is somewhat interesting to note the way they were recorded: the first song is just German vocals placed over the English version’s backing track, while the second one was recorded totally from scratch.

The story Past Masters tells is one of experimentation and creativity, rather than an unbroken string of commercial dominance. George Harrison is a little better represented here, with two B-sides, “The Inner Light” and “Old Brown Shoe” demonstrating the diverse and excellent quality of his songwriting, from overt spirituality to sly, lusty blues. There are also a few covers included, mostly hardcore rockers in the vein of “Long Tall Sally,” the title song of a UK-only EP whose tracks were split up among various discs in America. Considered as an “album,” Past Masters is much more of a rock album, while 1 might be better described as a pop album. I happen to believe that rock and pop are kinds of songs, rather than mutually exclusive genre identities, and the Beatles operated easily in both modes.

Incidentally, the question of which Beatles single is their greatest A-side B-side combo is hotly debated. “I Want to Hold Your Hand/This Boy” is an early favorite, juxtaposing the upbeat pop rock of their international breakthrough with a vulnerable heartsick ballad in three part harmony. “Hey Jude/Revolution” is a late contender, a study in contrasts from their mature period that pairs a beautiful, uplifting piano anthem with a highly political rock song driven by a filthy sounding guitar. It would be tempting to turn to one of their double-A-side masterpieces like the thematic and psychedelic pairing of “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever,” but I’ll point you instead toward “Paperback Writer/Rain,” two songs which are thoroughly of a piece with each other and thoroughly excellent. Both are products of the early phase of the Beatles’ most intense period of studio experiments and are bursting with creative energy, with unconventional lyrics, backwards-recorded guitars and vocals, and a bass guitar with something to prove.

1962-1966 and 1967-1970 (The Red and Blue Albums)

The flaw in the storytelling of Past Masters is that by design it excludes album tracks, while one of the great artistic legacies of the Beatles is their role in elevating the prestige of albums as a whole. Consequently, if you want a fuller story of the Beatles’ music in condensed form, you might be more interested in the collections popularly known as Red and Blue, a pair of double albums mixing hit singles with some of their other most famous and well-regarded songs.

I don’t know that I have ever actually listened to Red or Blue, as such. After I was hooked by 1, the natural thing to do seemed to be to begin collecting the canonical studio albums. With this accomplished, Red and Blue seemed redundant to my purposes. On the other hand, if what you are after is not a complete discography but a curated sampler, then they may suit you very well indeed.

Both albums exist in multiple forms of minute difference; the most significant change came in 2023, when both received new remixes and expanded track lists. This corrected a few serious injustices, such as the scarcity of Harrison songs (Red originally had none), and the inclusion of a few select cover songs from the early years. Assuming that somebody gave you copies of the most recent versions of Red and Blue, it would be entirely natural for you to say “though I have only scratched the surface, I now have a sufficient quantity of high-quality Beatles music,” if that were a natural sort of sentence. We all walk different paths.

A major selling point for some may be the inclusion of “Now and Then,” famously billed in 2023 as “the last Beatles song.” We’ll talk more about it later, but you may be wondering if an obsessive like myself would go ahead and buy 1967-1970 (that’s the Blue one, remember) just to have it in my collection. Well, I didn’t; I bought the 45 rpm vinyl record instead, with “Love Me Do” (the “first” Beatles song) on the B-side. “Now and Then” is a lovely song with a lot of sentimental power, assembled by digitally extracting the late John Lennon’s voice from an old analog demo using the finest artisanal algorithms, and applying full-scale modern production and overdubs from the other three members, including guitar by the late George Harrison, and harmony vocals clipped from other Beatles songs. The music video is a real heartstring-puller.

The Predecessors, Influences, and Contemporaries

If you only want to listen to the Beatles, you only have to listen to the Beatles. That will keep you occupied for a while. But if you want to understand the Beatles, in terms of where they came from, what they accomplished, and where they were going with all this, you’ll want to take the time to appreciate the other music of their time: what they loved, what they reacted to, and what they imagined was their competition. It is easy to go on and on about the influence from the Beatles on others; justice demands an accounting of the culture that influenced them.

The Beatles were not the big bang from which all that is good in modern music emerged; they were once high school students with small budgets playing skiffle, a kind of homespun folk music on improvised instruments. They became rock musicians when they fell in love with the rock music of the United States, especially its African-American roots. They became everything else they were by embracing their endless musical curiosity, which was their greatest virtue as musicians, and an equally fine virtue in any music listener.

If the Beatles’ music was admirable, it follows that there must be something admirable in the music that sparked their imaginations. To understand that spark, you’re going to have to do something a little crazy: listen to songs recorded before 1962, or that were not recorded for a “popular” audience. Here are some important and recommended artists, whose style and substance fed into the Beatles and who are well worth appreciating for their own merits. The list, of necessity, is not exhaustive. Like the Beatles themselves, they are all part of a long and evolving tradition, with no true beginning and no ending as of yet.

Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry is the author of two songs recorded for Beatles albums (“Roll Over, Beethoven” and “Rock and Roll Music,” sung by George Harrison and John Lennon, respectively) as well as “Johnny B. Goode” (the most rock and roll song of all time) and dozens of other classics. His music is guitar and voice-centric, and his style was showy, energetic, and profoundly influential. A typical Berry electric guitar performance is a near-constant stream of fast, biting notes in the blues scale, while his lyrics are lightning quick and dense with wordplay and irreverent humor. Most rock music, at the end of the day, is an attempt to recapture the spirit of Berry’s youthful rebelliousness (though he was in his thirties when he wrote and sang most of his teenage anthems).

Little Richard

You may recall a reference to Paul McCartney’s rock “roar.” In the early years, Paul used that voice most often in covering Little Richard songs like “Long Tall Sally” and “Kansas City.” Attempting to imitate Little Richard means singing very loud and fast; Richard could sing and play piano like a man possessed. In addition to the songs mentioned, his best known song is probably “Tutti Frutti,” which has lyrics that are much more chaste on record than when they were first performed live (reportedly, quite homoerotic; tutti frutti rhymes with “good booty,”) and includes a wordless vocal refrain that pretty much nobody else can sing right, as well as a high pitched “whoo” sound that was his signature, and which the Beatles copied precisely. For my money, his best vocal is “Lucille,” a song title best described as a scream.

Carl Perkins

One of Carl Perkins’s claims to fame is as the author of “Blue Suede Shoes,” a rockabilly song that is probably better known by most people as an Elvis Presley song. Elvis, incidentally, was a big influence on the Beatles because he was a big influence on everybody, but despite his many gifts he wasn’t a songwriter. The Beatles covered three Carl Perkins songs: “Honey Don’t,” “Matchbox,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” the first two sung by Ringo Starr and the third by George Harrison. George in particular was influenced by Perkins’s guitar technique, and he owes at least as much to him in terms of style as he does to Chuck Berry. When the Beatles dabbled in country and western sounds (as they often did), Carl Perkins was often their style guide.

Smokey Robinson/Motown Records

On their second album, the Beatles recorded three covers of songs by contemporary Motown artists: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barry Strong, and “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, all sung by John Lennon. The sounds coming out of Motown’s studio in the early 1960s were highly melodic, catchy takes on rhythm and blues music, the sort of thing the Beatles aspired to making. Paul McCartney’s advanced approach to bass playing was directly inspired by the bass parts he heard on Motown records, as played by James Jamerson. As for Robinson specifically, he was a model to the whole group as both a passionate and polished singer and a writer of original songs. Robinson wrote for himself and for other artists on his label, and an exploration of the whole Motown catalog is well worthwhile; it is one of the richest caches in all of popular music.

The Isley Brothers

The Beatles’ approach to singing in harmony was derived from many acts, including the country-pop duo the Everly Brothers, and pop-R&B girl groups like the Marvelettes and the Shirelles (both of whom they would cover). However, a seminal moment from their first album is the stacked harmonies of the bridge of “Twist and Shout,” resolving into a burst of ecstatic screaming. They learned that from the song’s originators, the Isley Brothers, who are also famous for songs like the similarly titled, immortal party anthem “Shout” (a little bit softer now… a little bit louder now…) and an incredibly deep catalog of rhythm and blues hits extending for decades.

The Rolling Stones

The understanding in the music press of the 1960s was that the Beatles and the Stones were fierce rivals, representing a conflict between a kind of friendly, progressive style of pop music, and a grittier, more sinister and rebellious approach. The reality is that they were both rock and roll bands that mostly got along fine with one another; the Stones had an early career hit with a Lennon/McCartney song, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and comparisons between that song and the Beatles’ own version are interesting. The Rolling Stones, like virtually everybody in those days, were massively affected by the Beatles and were sometimes accused (by both John Lennon and Paul McCartney) of copying their career decisions. However, the Stones’ commitment to blues music throughout the decade seems to have affected the Beatles right back, as they increasingly returned to writing songs in that form from 1968 onward.

Bob Dylan

Dylan is often held up as a totem of the revolution in “serious” songwriting in the 1960s, instructing rock music in the notion that lyrics can and should have both literary value and something to say about subjects other than having, wanting, or missing romantic love. He is also famously the person who introduced the Beatles to marijuana (having misheard the lyric “I can’t hide” as “I get high” and assumed they were already on it), but I think we should be real: if he hadn’t handed them a joint, somebody else would have. John Lennon made his Dylan influence obvious with songs like “I’m a Loser” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” while George Harrison would go on to work with Dylan many times, writing songs together and forging a close friendship. Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was particularly impactful on the band’s approach to writing, though it should be noted that it did not ultimately transform their lyrical approach so much as broaden it.

The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys were a preeminent rock and pop group in the United States when the Beatles arrived and turned everything upside down, and were one of the few to maintain their commercial standing (at least at first) without resorting to base imitation. Brian Wilson, the band’s leader, seems to have taken the Beatles’ commercial dominance as a personal challenge, and engaged them in a race of songwriting and studio experimentation from 1964 through about 1967, his crowning achievement being the 1966 album Pet Sounds (about which I have written before). The Beach Boys’ music in this period increased rapidly in both musical and technological sophistication, as Wilson pushed himself beyond all previous limits as a songwriter and pioneered new studio recording techniques on a parallel track with the Beatles. Paul McCartney in particular has acknowledged the influence of Wilson’s efforts on his own work, and in the Beatles’ catalog this is most apparent on the albums Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, both of which (like Pet Sounds) contain numerous sounds which would have been extremely difficult to replicate under live conditions; they are essentially creatures of the studio.

Ravi Shankar

The sitar, an Indian stringed instrument, made an appearance on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, after which it made frequent appearances in psychedelic rock music (almost, or perhaps absolutely, to the point of cliche). It was part of a broader adoption by the Beatles of many of the principles of Indian classical music in their work. Sometimes, particularly in songs by George Harrison, this influence is obvious, with hypnotic sitars and their kin dominating the recording, but it also acted in more subtle ways, influencing the band’s lyrics and affecting their approach to chord changes and song structure; “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the final track on Revolver, is a single-chord song with a rhythm and melody that recalls Indian music without leaning hard into Indian instrumentation.

Ravi Shankar had been performing on the sitar since the 1930s, before the Beatles had been born, and established an international reputation as a master player. Harrison’s interest in Indian music began with Shankar, but developed into a lasting association with Indian culture and philosophy more generally. Eventually Shankar gave personal sitar lessons to Harrison, the first step to a lifelong friendship. Though not a pop musician by any stretch of the imagination, Shankar performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, bringing the audience an authentic representation of what it had mostly experienced thus far as an “exotic” affectation by rock stars. That performance was issued as Live: Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Shankar’s highest charting album.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Before electronic instruments became normalized in popular music, groups like the Beatles were experimenting with them; in this way they were bringing popular audiences into contact with ideas from the rarefied field of avant-garde musical composition. The idea that pop and the avant-garde could interact with each other in even the slightest degree, or that pop music could still appeal to a broad audience after incorporating avant-garde elements, was entertained in the 1960s to a degree that seems improbable now, as the cultural consensus has seemingly shifted to an elevation of popular music as art and a denigration of the avant-garde as “art,” the latter marked by self-indulgence, pretentiousness, and being deliberately unpleasant.

The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was the Beatles’ immediate influence in the realm of the avant-garde, having been brought to the band’s attention by Paul McCartney. Stockhausen’s influence on the Beatles and their peers was multidimensional, as in addition to the use of strange and unheard sounds created by computer chips, he had employed concepts such as musique concrète (the incorporation of recordings of non-musical noises and sound effects into compositions), the use of space within audio channels as a compositional element (panning left to right and vice versa), and aleatoric techniques, where randomization and chance are deliberately allowed to influence the final composition.

Elements of all these techniques are actually extremely common in popular music from the 1960s to the present, as musique concrète anticipated the concept of sampling, and the rise of stereo over monaural sound has made the placement of sound in space essential. As for the aleatory, the Beatles used it memorably in the recording of Abbey Road, when a short song called “Her Majesty” was accidentally placed (after several seconds of silence) at the very end of the album when it had been intended to be deleted. The track “Revolution 9” is a Stockhausen-esque sound collage, the one instance in which the Beatles totally embraced the avant-garde rather than merely allowing it to flavor a more conventionally listenable piece; the result was widely regarded as deeply strange and (for people who thought they were only buying a straight-up rock album) unpleasant. It is difficult to argue that it is more strange, however, than something like Stockhausen’s own Gesang der Jünglinge.

Putting these influences all together

It is my sincere hope that after reading this section, you will be inspired to listen to the music that influenced the Beatles, not only in an academic capacity but with the intention to find pleasure in them (yes, even in Stockhausen). In my view, it is not enough to enjoy the Beatles’ performance of “Twist and Shout” and stash the Isley Brothers into a footnote; neither should one’s sole impression of the depths and complexities of sitar-based music be derived from George Harrison’s playing, while a musician of Shankar’s skill is marginalized by history.

I also hope you will go further and take an interest in artists whom I have not named, as the range of the Beatles’ acknowledged and apparent influences is staggeringly broad. The Beatles had excellent taste in the music of their day, and it doesn’t make much sense to say that they are the earliest music you should listen to, when they would be the first to tell you to listen to the rock and roll of the 1950s, and to listen to it loud, because loudness is one of its essential qualities.

So where does it end? Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins had influences too; should you track down the musicians who inspired them to pick up guitars? We all have limited time, and it is ultimately best to enjoy what we enjoy, but the answer is simple: get around to it when you get around to it, and you won’t be disappointed. The music of times long gone past was not less “advanced” or “developed” than the music of the 1960s or of today. It was music played by human beings for other human beings, and last I checked we still have plenty of those around, who still have ears and feet, and still love to listen and dance.

That’s enough for one post

In Part 2, I discuss the artistic context of each Beatles studio album, as well as thoughts on various collections of different material.