Something New
I just got Dave Marsh's The Beatles' Second Album. It's a small book--really an extended essay--on an album only released in America, one that was essentially thrown together with very little thought out of bits from various British releases.
I love Marsh's concept. Anyone could write about, say, Revolver, or the White Album, but most Beatles fans couldn't even tell you what's on Second Album. It's been superseded by the original British albums, available to all for years on CD.
Yet Marsh is able to make a case that for someone growing up in America in 1964, when the Beatles were new and everything was still open, that this short (about 22 minutes) elpee made a definitive statement about what the band, and its music, stood for.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:41 AM
6 Comments:
I think that Marsh is probably biased by his age. A friend of mine long ago -- he was born in 1957 -- was disappointed when the CD releases were based on the British track listings. He recalled that for him, the greatest Beatles moment was the first two songs on the American release of Meet the Beatles. The first track was "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and as soon as it ended you heard "one, two three four -- SHE WAS JUST SEVENTEEN..."
I still recall it vividly from hearing him describe it, twenty years ago. Moreover, to the best of my objective ability, I think that the songs on the American Meet the Beatles are superior, overall, to the songs on Second Album. (Track listings can be seen here.)
So I think Marsh just happened to be the right age, and a good writer, and voila!
Disclaimer: I dislike Marsh's views in general. Like the vast majority of rock critics, he subscribes to the "blues orthodoxy" that says that rock music must be rugged and simple and primal, or else it's crap. This blues orthodoxy derides any blend of rock with classical ("progressive rock") or rock with jazz ("fusion"), feeling that this waters down "all that is gutter-pure in rock" (to quote Lester Bangs). And of course, underlying this indefensible critical stance is the hidden axiom that European white people make intellectual music, while music with black roots is based on "feeling" rather than "thinking".
Okay, sorry about the tangential rant. (Besides, as a fan of prog myself, I tend to think that Rubber Soul through Abbey Road was the Beatles' best period, not the early stuff.)
Hmmm. After reading a bit more on this, I think the first half of my comment was off-base, and the second half was more on target.
Marsh was born in 1950, so my original claim -- that he happened to be just the right age when he heard The Beatles' Second Album, and now in his older years he is confusing nostalgia with quality -- is still possible.
But after reading the first few pages of his book on Amazon, it appears that his love for this album is because of the R&B covers. Of every Beatles' release, Second Album seems to have the highest number of R&B songs, and (not coincidentally) the largest percentage of songs written by African-Americans.
If this really is Marsh's angle, then his Beatles are not our Beatles. Obviously they aren't the "later Beatles" of the Blue Album. But neither are they the "early Beatles" of the Red Album! The early Beatles made it big due to their bubblegum pop ("I Want to Hold Your Hand"), not their R&B covers. The earliest R&B covers by the Beatles and the Who are a forgotte piece of history, and if that was all they had ever done, they would never have been particularly well-known in England, and would never have entered the American consciousness at all.
I could write more about the Beatles than practically any other subject, but I'll try to keep this brief.
You're right that part of what Marsh has to say is because of his personal history. In fact, some of the book goes into that--what it meant to him at the time, especially considering not only how he felt about rock and roll, but how so many people around him did (his dad, who still thought it was a fad decades later, his music appreciation teacher, who spent most of class time attacking rock, etc.)
It's also about the song selection--as haphazard as it was--showed followers of The Beatles that this band was knew how to rock, and cared about it. After Meet The Beatles, they were still new and no kid in America could be sure where they stood. And here were five cover songs, most of them even better than the original R&B stuff they were covering, and no show tunes (like "Till There Was You" on Meet The Beatles). Also included was their latest hit, "She Loves You," Marsh's favorite Beatles' song, and, since it was a hit, not included on any British album of the time. (For some reason, over there they thought that adding hit single to albums would hurt sales.) The same goes for your friend's memory--you weren't going to get "I Want To Hold Your Hand" on a British Beatles album.
It's a vulgar mistake to say their early music was bubblegum. They are never bubblegum. What they are is pretty straightforward, and fairly well done, rock and roll. Perhaps on the melodic side, but still rocking, and based on rock style. These songs still hold up, and stuff like "I Feel Fine," "Please Pleae Me," "She Loves You," "Can't Buy Me Love," "I Saw Her Standing There," and "She's A Woman" still rock--listen to them again if you've forgotten. And those were just some of the hits--they also had a lot of deep cuts that were even more raw.
Their covers also stand up. Stuff like "Money" or "Rock And Roll Music" or "Long Tall Sally" or "Twist And Shout" (not meant to be a single, but released anyway and a huge hit) is still memorable, and still worth played (and still played). He mentions early Who covers, and moreso, early Stones covers, and notes how the Beatles stuff still works fine while those bands would not be remembered if that's all they did.
By the way, as far as their first two American Capitol albums, I actually prefer the stuff that was turned down by Capitol and put out as Introducing The Beatles. And Marsh is hardly blind to what was going on--how American fans were getting ripped off by less selection and a hyped-up sound. In fact, much of the book is taken up with excoriating Dave Dexter, Jr., who turned down a bunch of the Beatles early singles for Capitol and then when forced to put them out threw the Beatles American versions together without a lot of thought. He hated this kind of music, and long for the days when "legitimate" music, i.e., jazz from about 20 years earlier, was popular again.
As to Marsh the critic, he's best on the 50s and 60s. Once you start getting into punk, disco and Springsteen (not to mention prog rock) he starts getting unreliable.
On the other hand, there's is something in the rock critics' view of the music. I don't believe any kind of music is necessarily more "authentic" than other kinds, but there is something in rock that loves a raw feeling. I listened to plenty of prog rock in my day, but I felt the music was in the doldrums until punk and new wave came along to wipe away the cobwebs.
As to the Beatles, I don't think you're allowed to say their best period was Rubber Soul through Abbey Road. 1) That includes the lion's share of their output. 2) Almost everyone feels that way. 3) That's, at the very least, covering two different periods--everyone admits there's something different between their pre and post Sgt. Pepper music.
Really it covers a multitude of styles--starting with Rubber Soul, you could claim every album--Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album--was a new step forward in their music.
There's almost no bad Beatles music, but if I had to pick an era, early or later, I'd choose the pre-Sgt. Pepper stuff. If I had to pick a year, it would be, I guess, 1965.
You make many good points, and I will reply to very few of them:
1. I retract the term "bubblegum". I don't really know exactly how that term is used. I will, however, say that there is something insubstantial, to my ears, about some of their earliest things, including "Please Please Me" and "Twist and Shout". If this was all they had made, I could easily imagine a parallel universe where "rock and roll" had died out by 1970 and was remembered as just another form of dance music, like The Twist. (HOWEVER, I don't really know a lot about 1950s rock, as I dislike most of it, and so I can't say this is a realistic alternative universe.)
Yet at the same time I concede that the early Beatles wrote some very powerful songs, including "She Loves You" and "I Feel Fine". Rubber Soul has many more of these great songs. By "great songs", I mean that these could have been turned into very different sounding recordings by Neil Diamond, or by the Jackson Five, or by Melissa Etheridge, or by Andrew Lloyd Webber -- but the underlying song is so excellent that the resulting track would likely have been a great recording.
The Beatles wrote many more great songs (in their later years too -- e.g., "Yesterday", and a lot of songs from the White Album). On the other hand, I don't think that the Stones or the Who wrote many such songs. "I Can See For Miles" is haunting in the way it's recorded but it's not exactly something that could be re-recorded and turn out as a success.
2. "Rock and Roll Music" is great, but it's extremely close to how Chuck Berry did it. I personally think that bands who do covers without significantly changing them should give 90% of their profits to the original author.
(Compare this to Deep Purple's cover of "Help" on their first album -- they slowed it way down and turned it into a ballad, and when I heard it I realized the song was even better than I had ever suspected.)
2. Yes, my "Rubber Soul to Abbey Road" was a cop-out. I originally wrote "Revolver", but in fact while Revolver was a great and important album for the development of prog, it remains a first experiment rather than a finished product. Side two of "Abbey Road" is the closest the Beatles actually got to being progressive, imo, but that's a separate discussion. FWIW, my favorites are Abbey Road (for the album as a whole), White Album and Rubber Soul (for the songs).
I didn't know anyone who actually purchased the LPs in 1964-5 in my neighborhood , I first heard the Beatles on even scratchier 45s with wonderful yellow and orange crescents which looked really cool when the record spun ( I was 6 or 8- they were my Uncles' records. I don't think I ever owned a Rock'n'roll LP until my mom bought either "Yellow Submarine" (half-instrumental) or "The Magical Mystery Tour" for me in the Grocery Store.
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