Diddley had fused a 3-2 clave with rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. A Bo Diddley beat was a clave-based motif, clave being the name of the patterns played on two hardwood sticks in Afro-Cuban music ensembles. This syncopated accent on the “off beat” was perfect for the click-and-slip of my pelvis as I bopped around my bedroom dance floor in my early teens. I thought I had invented a new dance until I started partying and found that this hip-click to the off beat was the way black kids danced in the Bay Area. Thank goodness for osmosis.
In 1963 Sly Stone was a hip young DJ who hadn’t yet changed his birth name of Sylvester Stewart. He was fresh out of Vallejo and the same CME/AME church gospel choir circuit I attended as a youth. He was firing up listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area on KSOL which he nicknamed K-SOUL. I had a painful crush on him.
My Oakland, pre-1964, was house parties, spiked punch, segregated radio and five-channel TV, servicemen getting off the ships at the Port of Oakland looking for a good time. My Oakland, post-1964, was sets (nobody said house party, they said, “Are you going to the set on Snake Rd.?”), marijuana, stoned white college boys in khakis, hippies in VW buses covered in psychedelic colors, Make Love Not War signs, and longer hair on everybody. First came the swivel-hipped Elvis, then Beatlemania, then the floodgates opened.
The Brits were shaking up American society once again. When I first heard the Beatles, I got a pure musical thrill. When I bumped into a black girl on the steps at my community college listening as her plastic transistor radio played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” her passion, all the more strange because she was black, got my attention. Crushing on the Beatles, she held on to a 45 of the song like it was a rare gem.
Being a black urban teen, I was into Motown, the Temptations, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, and the Moonglows. I didn’t crush on the Beatles like I did with Sly, Eddie Kendricks, and David Ruffin. But that’s the good thing about it.
Of course, I didn’t know what was happening technically, that on “Please Please Please” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles used a double back beat, i.e., an off beat played as a one-quarter note. But I knew something even better—I liked it and I could dance to it. The Beatles, a convergence of R&B and pop, brought a great swinging movement from blond to dark, from privileged surfer children in the suburbs to the darkness of Liverpool’s working class, an amalgam that curiously celebrated its R&B roots.
Neither white nor black parents could control what happened after The Pill. By the time I watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964 in my parents’ living room, I had started college and knew a lot more about sex than I let on to my mother and father. All the prepubescent and adolescent white girls having orgasmic and orgiastic responses in public released a long-suppressed sexuality from its Victorian, Southern, and Puritan constraints. As these women let it rip in that prolonged moment of free public expression, I believe they freed up black women from whoredom, from bearing the brunt and hard edge of the white man’s sexuality. We were no longer the only culturally sanctioned objects of naughty or forbidden sex, of plantation promiscuity. Stripping, nudity, free sex, skinny dipping, open marriage, group sex—sexuality came out of the closet and into the open.
Giddy with our post–high school hipness, my best friend and I regularly drove to San Francisco and hopped the cable car up to a nightclub called Copacabana West, where we danced with abandon all night. I didn’t know about the connection to my black roots. Or that the United States embargo against Cuba cut off Americans from overt knowledge of the Cuban influence on music, especially R&B. I just loved being able to mambo, rumba, and cha-cha with a different partner for every spin on the floor. I loved the twenty- and thirty-minute sets.
Before the age of eighteen, we had been dying to get into Finnochio’s, the all-male drag nightclub in North Beach that was like forbidden fruit. When finally we got past the velvet rope, the make-up looked caked, the wigs ratty, the clothing dirty, and the drag too uncool to be enjoyable, let alone believable. I was thoroughly disappointed.
In a sense, that was one more dismantling of the American sociocultural foundation underneath me. Just as Finnochio’s female impersonators would give way to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, as the gay pride, sexual freedom, and gender-equality movements strengthened, American media and television’s near complete white out would be toppled by musical, cultural, and social protest.
Some look at the Beatles and say they appropriated black R&B, that they exploited it. But they acknowledged it as elemental and, by doing so, opened the door for Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and a host of performers—once colored, now black—to share some of the rewards. Touring abroad helped many acts from the chitlin circuit to beat the fabled seven-year lifespan of American pop music and extend their showbiz longevity abroad. (Getting their health to hold out and resisting drug abuse would prove as daunting a task as overcoming segregation.)
It’s not too much to say the Beatles helped close the gap between colored and white America, the schism. Like a slap in the smug mug of white America, the Brits acknowledged black roots. They showed how white America had unapologetically ripped off black people for centuries, never giving a whole race credit for inventing the new American art forms of jazz, gospel, blues, and R&B. America never had been held accountable to blacks, morally, fiscally, or legally.
With the Beatles and the British invasion, black music and rock joined for a new backdrop to the morality play called American society. White wasn’t completely out, but black was seeping in. The Beatles brought black music to the forefront. There it was on stage, front and center.
Renée Fleming, soprano
MY EXPOSURE TO the Beatles began when I was in junior high school in Rochester, New York, and my English teacher did a unit on some of their songs. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested that lyrics or musicians, contemporary musicians in particular, could have a contribution to make to poetry or to culture in general. “Eleanor Rigby” was my favorite song in those days.
My next experience with them was in high school. I was in a small, select singing group and we did a Beatles medley. Later, I met my husband when I moved to New York, and I just heard the music all the time. He was a real Beatles fan, so I heard a lot of their music and learned a bit about it.
I’ve realized over time that very few songwriters have had such a longlasting influence as the Beatles. It’s gone on for decades. Their popularity has been extraordinary, but their influence has been even more so. Their music is so stylistically broad, far-reaching, and of such an extraordinarily high quality that it has influenced not just the generation that came after them, but multiple generations of music lovers and songwriters.
Their music lends itself to many, many different treatments. Many of their songs, such as “In My Life” [which Fleming recorded in her 2005 album Haunted Heart], have been arranged in any number of combinations. They have a vivid timelessness to them.
Back when I was in college and singing jazz, I was mostly singing the American songbook, with just a few exceptions. I didn’t sing the Beatles then. In those days, the repertoire was more specific. Now anything goes. People perform pretty much any piece they want, which is wonderful. There’s more crossover.
As for singing “In My Life,” well, the words are so poignant. The original version is so upbeat and heavily pop influenced. So when [pianist and composer, who played on Haunted Heart] Fred Hersch said, “Actually, let’s look at the song this way,” it gave it a completely different sound. I think it’s beautiful and haunting and poignant. And the words already are.
What’s interesting to me is that the Beatles were so young when they wrote that song and yet, for me, it’s about imagining that you’re at the end of your life and looking back. It’s a statement about what’s been most important. It’s so interesting that they had the ability to do that!
I sang “In My Life” in the lower part of my voice, which is how I approach all popular music. It’s more spoken. I don�
��t have the ability to change how I produce my sound in my upper register. It takes a long time to develop the musculature and technique that we do for classical singing for singing without amplification, so when I listen to someone like Sutton Foster, or someone on Broadway who has a high belt, I think, “Boy, how do they do that?” but I wouldn’t want to attempt to learn it at this point. I don’t want to try to sing in a different way than I always have.
ANOTHER INTERESTING THING about the Beatles is that they became as well known as songwriters as they were as performers. Before that, from Elvis Presley to the crooners, people were performers and other people wrote the songs. There were so many wonderful generations of singers who sang beautiful tunes that were created by other people.
But the Beatles brought the songwriting front and center. It has such integrity and incredible variety. Each song is completely different—you would imagine that there was a whole team of songwriters at work creating music for the Beatles! Instead, it was this extraordinary gift of a couple of guys who happened to meet each other.
I love the quirkiness of some of the pieces, the level of experimentation. Even if it is a straightforward pop hook, there’ll be something in the words that has more depth. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it’s the music that’s intriguing.
The music created by the Beatles has taken its place in the classical lexicon of popular music. It’s going to continue to live, just as great classical music does. What makes it classic is that it stands the test of time. The Beatles’ music will be around for a long time. It’s going to go on and on.
Where Music Had to Go
by Anthony Scaduto
“I HAD HEARD the Beatles in New York when they first hit,” Dylan told me in 1971 as we sat in his studio. “Then, when we were driving through Colorado we had the radio on and eight of the ten top songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones.
“They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you’re playing your own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.
“But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go. I was not about to put up with other musicians, but in my head the Beatles were it. In Colorado, I started thinking it was so far out that I couldn’t deal with it—eight in the Top Ten. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before. It was outrageous, and I kept it in my mind. You see, there was a lot of hypocrisy all around, people saying it had to be either folk or rock. But I knew it didn’t have to be like that. I dug what the Beatles were doing, and I always kept it in mind from back then.”
Tom Rush, musician
IN 1963, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a student at Harvard and I was spending way too much of my time hanging around local coffeehouses, such as the Unicorn and, in particular, one called the Club 47, which was in Harvard Square and kind of the flagship of the whole coffeehouse fleet.
Club 47 distinguished itself by being the place that went out and found the old-timers, the legends, and brought them to town. It was astounding. It was a tiny little place, an eighty-seat coffeehouse, but you could go in and sit at the feet of the Carter Family or bluesman Sleepy John Estes. You could listen to the legends yet also hear the local kids—Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, myself, and others including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
Dylan came through town a few times. I’m not sure he ever officially actually played at the club, but I know he was in there and he probably crawled onstage a couple of times. I don’t know if he was booked as an act.
One of the things about Club 47 was that they took their purity very seriously. It was a strange, almost surreal thing because you had all these college kids sitting around singing about how tough it was on the chain gang and in the coal mines and all. But we figured that we could probably finesse this incongruity with enough sincerity, so we were super sincere. Still, there were those that really would get offended if you strayed—some of the same people who got so upset when Dylan went electric.
When I went electric, at about the same time, nobody seemed to notice. I guess they’d learned not to expect too much purity from me.
Most of my comrades-in-arms were specialists—some did nothing but delta blues, some sang Irish/Scottish ballads. There was a guy who did almost entirely Woody Guthrie songs. I was the generalist—I’d pick songs I liked from whatever genre. I didn’t much care, as long as I loved the song. We were mostly focused on traditional folk material; there wasn’t much songwriting going on—Dylan certainly led the way there. My first three albums, Live at the Unicorn, Got a Mind to Ramble, and Blues, Songs and Ballads (the first two done while I was still in college), consisted entirely of traditional songs. There was one, “Julie’s Blues,” that I “wrote” by mixing and matching existing blues lines—but that was the way most of the old blues were cobbled together.
There were all these conventions in the folk music scene, some of which were deliciously absurd. For example, you had to wear blue jeans and a work shirt to show that you were a rebel. I had a roommate at Harvard named Joe Boyd (who went on to produce Richard Thompson and Pink Floyd and the McGarrigle Sisters, on and on). When he was at school he was into blues and the folk stuff, but he also liked to wear a jacket and tie. So he was taken to task.
I remember some guy explaining to him, “You know, Joe, you don’t have to wear a jacket and tie. You can wear whatever you want.” He answered that what he wanted to wear, actually, was a jacket and tie. The other person was nonplussed, didn’t know what to say. He finally told Joe that he had to wear a workshirt, “because that’s what you wear when you can wear anything you want.”
So there were all these incongruities.
THERE WAS THIS great outpouring of talent and energy in the late 1950s, with Chuck Berry and Elvis and the Everly Brothers and Fats Domino and others. One of the curious things about it was that none of these guys were remotely like each other. The Everly Brothers and Fats Domino were from different planets, but they were both big stars in the same time period.
And then it all went away quite abruptly.
For quite a while in the early 1960s there was nothing going on that appealed to us. We partly got into the folk music thing because what was on the radio was garbage. Folk music was a rebellion against it. Part of its appeal was that we really felt ownership. We may not have been working in the coal mines, but we’d found this music that wasn’t on the radio. It was our private discovery.
Folk music goes back thousands of years. But for that one short period of time, traditional folk became pop music. But of course the pop Ferris wheel continually turns—whatever is in today is out tomorrow. So folk music became hugely popular and was the same thing as pop music for a little while, but then it shifted into folk rock and folk rock shifted into whatever came next. Then disco happened and it all stopped.
I LIKED THE Beatles’ music right away. It was pretty undeniable. It kind of grabbed you. But it presented an existential dilemma for folk purists because you weren’t supposed to like what was on the radio. There was an anti-pop-music subtext to the whole scene. When, for example, I played a Bo Diddley song, as I did occasionally, some people would get upset since he was considered to be a rock star.
So when the Beatles came along and all of a sudden there was something good on the radio, it was a bit disorienting at first. When they were first on the radio and their stuff was so compellingly wonderful, it initially presented a problem for some of us folksingers. Still, we embraced them pretty quickly. After all, they, too, were rebels. They had funny haircuts and were clearly doing things t
heir own way. They weren’t something that had been manufactured in the pop music factory. They were quickly accepted.
One of the bands in town, a mainstay of Club 47, was called the Charles River Valley Boys and they actually did an album, I think it was their second, called Beatle Country, in which they basically did bluegrass versions of a bunch of Beatles songs. (Albums were a big deal then—you couldn’t make your own like you can now.) And then the Rolling Stones came hard on the Beatles’ heels and they also were very sexy and compelling and loud and raucous and rebellious.
One time I recorded a song called “If Your Man Gets Busted,” which was a corruption of a Robert Johnson blues song called “If Your Man Gets Personal.” I recorded it and Dylan loved it and he was carrying it around, playing it for everybody and he played it for the Beatles at some point.
He told me that he’d done it and I said, “Bob, what is it that you like about that particular track?” I mean, I liked it well enough but I didn’t think it was head and shoulders above everything else. And he said, “Oh man, if you don’t understand, you just don’t understand.” And that was about it. He never did tell me what the Beatles thought of it.
I bridle, at this point, at being called a folksinger. I don’t think I am, because folk music is traditional songs and I do almost entirely composed material. Still, I play an acoustic guitar, so therefore I must be a folk singer. I’ve gotten tired of arguing about it.
Thawing Out
by Barbara Ehrenreich
ROCK STRUCK WITH such force, in the 1950s and early 1960s, because the white world it entered was frozen over and brittle—not only physically immobilizing but emotionally restrained. In pre-rock middle-class teenage culture, for example, the requisite stance was cool, with the word connoting not just generic approval, as it does today, but a kind of aloofness, emotional affectlessness, and sense of superiority. Rock, with its demands for immediate and unguarded physical participation, thawed the coolness, summoned the body into action, and blasted the mind out of the isolation and guardedness that had come to define the Western personality.
The Beatles Are Here! Page 14