eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Marsh breaks new ground by focusing on the Beatles' US recordings and how they evolved from British releases at a time when the two nations' approaches to rock'n'roll production were vastly different.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609617165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2007 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 791,088 |
| File size: | 800 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
GIVE THEM 22 MINUTES (THEY'LL GIVE YOU THE WORLD)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I can recite the case for the prosecution as well as anybody.
The Beatles' Second Album runs only 22 minutes. It contains just 11 songs. You might say the Beatles had nothing to do with it, since it folds into one disc tracks that have four or five discrete sources in the Beatles' "legitimate" UK catalog. Dave Dexter Jr., the Capitol Records executive who assembled the album, despised rock'n'roll as a whole, believing it inferior to what he called "legitimate" music. It's indisputable that the group came to hate the idea of Dexter's butchery.
Besides: It's full of songs the Beatles--who changed songwriting forever-- didn't even write. The track selection relegates Paul to an incidental lead vocalist, as subordinate to John Lennon as George Harrison is. Ringo doesn't even have a featured spot. The mixing and mastering leave the soundscape as shoddy as if it had been filtered through damp cardboard; the stereo rendition is worse.
With the Beatles, the second album the Beatles made for Parlophone Records, released only in the United Kingdom, is well balanced artistically between original songs (eight) and cover versions (six) and between John's lead vocals and Paul's (with leavening from George and Ringo). Sonically, it was state of the art for 1964. Its 14 tracks run a combined 33 minutes.
On top of that, Capitol Records wrapped the Second Album in some of the cheesiest cover art of all time, worse than your average mid-sixties James Brown album. It's not even camp, it's just slapdash: A dozen photos of the Beatles on each side, cropped every which way (one consists in its entirety of Ringo's bangs, right eye, right ear, and nose), laid out in what seems to have been a single five-minute session. With the Beatles has a dignified, even intriguing light-and-shadow shot of the band. It is one of the defining images of their early career.
With the Beatles sports liner notes by Tony Barrow, the band's publicist; however callow, they are at least minimally informative. The back cover of The Beatles' Second Album displays the song titles in order; a plug for their first US album, Meet the Beatles; and liner notes that consist of five lines off a theater marquee, written in ascendingly greater size type from a tiny "Never before has show business seen or heard anything like them . . . " to a huge "The Beatles' Second Album." And in type about the same size as the copyright notice, "Produced in London by George Martin."
The Beatles' Second Album wasn't even the Beatles' second album--not in America or anywhere else. It came out in April 1964. In February, Vee-Jay Records had also produced an album of the group's early material, with a track listing that differed considerably from Meet the Beatles but also derived from the Parlophone masters. At about the same time, MGM Records issued The Beatles with Tony Sheridan and Their Guests using material the band recorded in Germany in 1961. On the five songs they play on (yes, the rest is material by some other band, not that MGM acknowledged it), the Beatles serve only as Sheridan's backing group on all but one track, "Cry for a Shadow."
So how can anybody love such an ungainly, fraudulent mess?
Because this brief album represents the Beatles of 1964, when they were unquestionably the greatest rock'n'roll band the world had ever seen. And it shows them, if not at their most shapely, at least with maximum brute force.
Because whatever Dave Dexter Jr.'s intent, those 11 songs told things about the band and its music, rock'n'roll, and the world in general that some of us desperately needed to hear. And this is the way it was presented to us, the material we were given to use in making sense of the new world the Beatles awoke.
Because no matter whether it "accurately" portrays its makers and their condition in April 1964, the Second Album creates an image of the Beatles that is, arguably, closer to who they were, underneath the collarless coats and the careful coifs, the well-scrubbed complexions and constant affections, than anything else that leaked out to America in those heady first months--even naked greed is allowed to raise its head.
Because some of what they didn't write had everything to do with what they did compose, then and in the future.
Because the ballad--"You Really Got a Hold on Me"--came from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, not from a damnable Broadway show, like "Till There Was You," the ballad on Meet the Beatles.
Because if you let it, this music, arranged in this order, from the statement of purpose at the beginning to what may be the greatest rock'n'roll record they ever made at the end, will change your life.
It changed mine. Confessing this may rank with the goofier absurdities in the annals of rock criticism. Nevertheless, it's flat-out true.
For the past 43 years, The Beatles' Second Album has been, for me, a kind of lodestone. When it felt like the scent of freedom that leaped out at me from rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues had faded into the irrelevancies of the past, this record was one of the places where I could find refuge and reassurance. (Of course there are others. Anyone who tells you there is a single greatest rock'n'roll record either doesn't know enough to make the claim or doesn't love rock'n'roll enough to be worth listening to.)
Always, every single time I hear it, The Beatles' Second Album makes the case--and not in a nostalgic sense. It feels fresh and alive. When it plays, the atmosphere it creates reminds me not only that the past isn't even past, as William Faulkner said, but also that the past is more than a hint of the future, it is the passkey to reaching it.
There's a canyon of time to bridge here. To risk the ridiculous, the task I'm taking on is akin to what Thomas Mann faced in writing The Magic Mountain, where he tried to convey the consciousness of pre-1914 Europe to people who lived with the sensibility of post-World War I Europe. In an early passage in that book, Mann described the conditions under which he told his tale:
The exaggerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place--or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place- -in the long ago, in the old days . . . in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yet it took place before that, yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?
Yeah.
The conventional attitude toward The Beatles' Second Album is entirely an anachronism. Mostly, it presumes a degree of choice that nobody--not the Beatles, not the Beatles' audience, and not even Capitol Records--really had.
"Consumer advisory: Seek out imports or reissues of albums with the original British track configuration," wrote Robert Palmer in his 1995 Rock & Roll: An Unruly History. (His italics measure his intensity.) This advice and implicit criticism is aimed at just such albums as The Beatles' Second Album, though the examples he uses are the US editions of Rubber Soul and Revolver, whose bowdlerization was and is indefensible. In almost all cases, the process by which the 14 songs that were standard on UK albums were whittled down to the US standard of 12 (or fewer) was haphazardly done by people with no ear whatsoever for what might have been a group's musical breakthroughs or signature performances.
The Beatles' Second Album is truly a special case, for reasons that are complicated and trace back to this weird Dave Dexter Jr. character, whose influence on the band's career amounts to a kind of Forrest Gump effect. His genuine stupidity about musical quality and, for that matter, the future of Western civilization, time and again set up conditions under which the Beatles' American record catalog takes its odd shape, which leads to, among other things, one of the biggest breaches ever of the group's carefully manicured public image.
I couldn't really be bothered to defend the Second Album against the charge that it's a happy accident, though I might point out that so is Casablanca. Of course, the record does not at all reflect the Beatles' intention (though, as we shall see, I doubt that artistic intention drove the assemblage of With the Beatles, either).
I've written more than anyone about the struggle of rock musicians to acquire artistic freedom--to gain the right to have their output represent their own intentions--and what happens when they obtain it, fail to gain it, or squander it. This is a major theme in my books about Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, the Who, and Michael Jackson.
But it's not the only theme, and it takes a backseat here to another story because in 1964, that kind of artistic freedom didn't exist yet because the Beatles hadn't created it. But even after it came into being, other things also mattered.
The value of The Beatles' Second Album is the value that album derives from the way that American listeners responded to it. In 1964, Robert Palmer's advice to seek out imports would have been gibberish. For me, and the great majority of Beatles fans, probably including Palmer, who at the time was a student at Little Rock University, there wasn't any way to get British albums, nor was there a pipeline to notify us of their existence. By the time Rubber Soul and Revolver were released a year or two later, that was no longer nearly so true. But it was true in 1964 and it was true for several years thereafter--perhaps until the late 1970s in many areas of the United States.
Many American editions of the Beatles' music aren't worth considering in building a chronology of how their music developed. But if all that mattered about the Beatles were the intentions and experiences of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, we would have a very different musical culture. It wouldn't necessarily be worse, but the discrepancy would be profound and those who lived in one world would have a good deal of trouble, all of it based on their own reliable preconceptions, communicating to those who lived in the other.
This book was written across just such a gap, a world in which reality did not encompass 21st-century commonplaces like ready access to recordings from every corner of the world. Rock criticism did not exist, nor did the idea that this kind of music even might be taken seriously as music, let alone as philosophy, passion, or signifier of adult identity. Nor did the idea that rock or any other music derived from African-American sources could become the dominant expression of Anglo-American--and even in some respects worldwide--musical commerce on a long-term basis. Nor did the idea that an album's worth of material, rather than a single song, was the proper way to evaluate recorded popular music. Enumerate those issues and you've begun to describe a situation very much like the one Mann was discussing.
I'm not arguing for the superiority of that older world, much less for its supposed "innocence." I'm pointing out that it existed and that to judge it by the conditions that obtain today is to guarantee false conclusions. In that world, not only could no teenager be expected to acquire a foreign recording, but, among many other incongruities, the performer had virtually no control over which of his recordings were issued; new styles of popular music and new stars were intended to be discarded within a few months at most; and an aesthetic rather than commercial rationale for popular vocal music existed entirely as rhetoric. No one who wanted to defend any part of that situation would write about the Beatles, who repudiated all of it and with glorious results, at least for Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr and their near-contemporaries.
So, by all means, buy and listen to the Beatles' albums in their native configurations, if you wish to hear them as the Beatles themselves expected they would be heard. But remember, if you take Robert Palmer's advice (and he was as good at writing about American music as any writer, ever), you will not be buying a copy of "She Loves You," or most of the group's other singles. You won't get "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Long Tall Sally," "I Call Your Name," "I Feel Fine," "Daytripper," "We Can Work It Out," "Paperback Writer," "From Me to You," or "This Boy."
You can get those on US CDs called Past Masters Volumes 1 and 2. In the British catalog, you can buy them on Rarities--a ludicrous title, because those songs are among the most popular and widely purchased in the history of recorded music, let alone the Beatles' catalog.
I'll tell you this: I would have been pissed off if I'd brought home The Beatles' Second Album and "She Loves You" wasn't there. And I have never believed for one millisecond that the discrepancy--theirs lacked it; ours had it--had at that time anything at all to do with what the Beatles intended. In Britain, it was considered poor value to ask fans to buy singles as LP tracks. It's a purely mercantile standard and can have very damaging artistic results.
The world moves on. But memory lingers and what it lingers upon is sometimes important to understanding where the world moved, and why, and how. It turned out, when I started talking to my contemporaries about what I was trying to do, that The Beatles' Second Album was important to a lot of people. Over dinner, I had to wrest the book back from my friend and colleague Greil Marcus before he could write it instead of me. John Sinclair, poet, rebel role model, and constant listener, said simply, "Oh, yeah!" Theirs weren't the only affirmations, but they provide the spectrum.
I can't promise you that what is important to me is what's important to Marcus, Sinclair, or other friends. CDs and LPs and 45s are solid objects but music is ethereal. But, while I take Palmer at his word, it seems likely to me that almost any American who lived with it in that curious year of 1964 and thereafter would have been overjoyed to hear the CD reissue of The Beatles' Second Album when it finally arrived in 2004 as part of the four-disc set, The Capitol Albums Vol. 1. Not because it gave the most accurate rendition of the Beatles making music in the studio, but because it gave such an accurate and impressive account of what the Beatles did to those of us who heard them and succumbed to their charm and power.