What was it about the Beatles that resonated so strongly in the US?

Oh, I would say they were topped several hundred years earlier by the likes of Beethoven, Bach et al.

 

"If you listen to only the backing track of The Beatles without their voices, it's flippin' lousy."
-- Pete Townshend, 1966

 

And it's not like their voices were that great, either. No Freddie Mercury amongst them.

 

I understand.
Sometimes you just need Sabbath's virtuoso playing on something like "Fairies Wear Boots" to really get the ole brain firing on all cylinders.
That Bill Ward could sure give Tony Williams a run for his money.
You do know who Ozzie's favorite band is right?
Ironic don't ya think?

 

For one thing, with the exception of Dylan (who was very much in the niche "Folk" realm until at least a year after the Beatles hit) and The Byrds (whose sound was massively influenced by the Beatles and also didn't hit for at least a year afterwards) most of those other bands didn't hit until 1967 or a few years after that.

So the Beatles were already huge before much American competition was even on the scene (except the Beach Boys and Motown).

Plus the Beatles incredible musical advancement (from "She Loves You" to "Tomorrow Never Knows" in three years) meant that everyone else was always playing catch-up.

That might not be apparent to someone, such as yourself who wasn't born and look at all the music grouped together, but if you were there, the Beatles totally led the scene the whole time (hell almost every Stones album cover that followed the most recent Beatles release was a dead ringer for the previous Beatles cover).

As far as Blues / R&B, in large sections of the U.S., racism basically cut off airplay.

.

 

Ozzie is an idiot, I don't care what he thinks. And Black Sabbath are far from virtuosos at anything except distortion, and just one band among many that I said I find more emotionally interesting. Hendrix's virtuosity on the other hand...

I think you had to be a young person at the time, a baby boomer, to really get into The Beatles to the nth degree.

And I find the religious fervor that some apply to defending their legacy....well, interesting, to say the least.

Pink Floyd was already an old band by the time I was a teen, but I remember the first time I heard 'Dark Side of the Moon' all the way through. I found it more compelling than any Beatles material I had ever heard before.

 

So Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day In The Life are nice and safe?

 

Compared to most of 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd? Or 'Purple Haze' by Hendrix? Or 'Anarchy in the UK' by The Sex Pistols? Or 'Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow' by Funkadelic? Or 'King Heroin' by James Brown? Or 'Bullet the Blue Sky' by U2? Yeah.

 

They were the Backstreet Boys of their day, thanks to Brian Epstein, who transformed a rag-tag group of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Roy Orbison impersonators playing German dive bars into four cute boys with cute haircuts, cute suits and cute boots who played cute songs the young girls would love. Sure, they were talented, but they certainly got a lot of Help! on the way to the top.

 

Kids in this video compare them to One Directon:

 

None of them are even in the same genre at the Beatles

 

What does that have to do with whether I find them boring or not?

 

I like the kid who says "You can't really hate the Beatles, or else, you'll like, get killed." He must hang out on this forum. But seriously, he touches on the insane premise that either The Beatles are your favorite group, or, if they're not, you have to acknowledge that they're better than any artist or group you happen to like more.

 

This essay does a pretty good job of encapsulating some points about why those of us who weren't alive when they were new aren't as smitten as those who were:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/thelife/news/story?id=4474313

 

Music preference is such a personal thing as are all things in the arts.
Sometimes it's the lyrics, sometimes the voice, sometimes melody, sometimes a musician's virtuosity and sometimes you don't know what it is. But you knew that.

If it's complex time signatures, unusual chord progressions, strange or different song structure that you're after then Elvis, Chuck and Little Richard ain't gonna float your boat. If it's sturm and drang you're after then James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and the like won't work.


I do think you are short changing the Beatles in terms of complexity and innovation. Maybe it is one of those "you kinda had to be there" things. You are really missing out on some wonderful stuff.
Listen to "Revolver" on a decent system and listen to it as an album all the way through like you did with "Darkside ..."
You might be surprised ... or you might be bored. Different strokes ...

I shouldn't rag on Sabbath because I really do like those boneheads although the last time I saw them was on the "Masters of Reality" tour.
I still listen to them as well as more "challenging" music. I like to have a big door for music to walk through.

I think the whole point of this thread is "why do we like the Beatles so much in the U.S."
I guess that's kind of hard to explain.

 

They were young, cute, funny -- the perfect boy group. Presley was hoochie coochie show act compared to the Beatles. Plus they were unusual for American teens ... British and quirky. Were girls really supposed to go ga-ga over the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly or the hillbilly boys out of Sun?

 

Grammar school

 

Just to be clear, the term "Beatlemania" was invented in the UK months before The Beatles arrived in America. Look up some YouTube clips of The Beatles in Australia -- the response there was probably bigger than in the US. So this question could just as easily be asked anywhere.

But since you're asking about the US in particular....

This is hard to overstate. They were always the smartest guys in the room. Always. There hadn't ever been anyone this engaging before, not even Elvis. I don't think there's been anyone this engaging since. They were all four witty, ready for anything, constantly in the spotlight, and constantly rising to the occasion. Not just in New York, but in every city they went to. Apart from hearing a single note, we wanted to be around them.

Even the "bigger than Jesus" thing came two years later, in 1966, when we still wanted to hear everything they had to say. By then we had a relationship with them.

Think I'm making this up? Which band had four guys in it WORTH talking to? How about TWO guys? Certainly not Mick AND Keith. They could sure play -- insert Beatles vs. Stones argument here -- but really, who cared what they had to say? Because mostly they didn't.

Which four people on any TV show? Which TWO people on any TV show? Which movie stars? Which comedians? Yeah, plenty of 'em had a good thing to say here or there -- but every town they went to, The Beatles were innnnn the spotlight, and they shone just as brightly.

And the music. No, they weren't Sun Ra or even Bill Evans, but they didn't need to be. We're talking about pop. Surfer Girl was a good example of the best of American pop...but the pool got mighty shallow after that. Their vocals hit hard. They were loud in a way that not even Elvis was, and certainly not The Beach Boys. Even their most ridiculously simple songs at the time were miles ahead of just about anything else happening at the time....and it was relentless. Song after song after song. We can always talk about the week in April 1964 that they held the top 5 places on the singles chart, in order:

Can't Buy Me Love
Twist & Shout
She Loves You
I Want To Hold Your Hand
Please Please Me

#2 is a cover of course, but who had four ORIGINAL pop songs (NOT The Art Ensemble of Chicago or Cecil Taylor: POP songs) THAT good out at once? And dang son, nothing wrong with that cover.

Here's the crazy thing. Just to be sure I remembered all 5 in the right order (which I did ) I looked it up. I knew they had other songs on the chart at the time, but here's the rest of theirs in the Top 100:

31: Saw Her Standing There
41: From Me To You
46: Do You Want To Know A Secret
58: All My Loving
65: You Can’t Do That
68: Roll Over Beethoven
79: Thank You Girl

And the next week TWO MORE would join them! There's A Place and Love Me Do!

A couple of those are definitely second-tier for me, but 9 of those originals are INSANELY hot to me, as far as POP singles go.

See, that was the other thing. These guys were known as WRITERS from the beginning, in a way that Brian Wilson wouldn't be, as a WRITER, really, until Pet Sounds I think. And it's not just that The Beatles were a band -- they were a terrific band, with hooks to burn...and a technical set of sounds so unlike anything we'd heard before that a bunch of smart people like The Byrds stared at the screen and still couldn't figure it out right away. Even civilians understood that the degree of difficulty was off the chart: groundbreaking writers, serious musicians, funny and -- I can admit it -- cute, and they kept turning out one exceptionally well-crafted single after another.
These records didn't sell because they were marketed as interchangeable "product" that could be peddled by one artist as well as another. We had Motown for that. Even when the covers started pouring in, there was understood to be a qualitative difference. The songs were organically tied to these four boys: their writing, their playing, their singing, their look, and their personalities. Nobody had top marks in more than a couple of these.

Really, how could any culture resist? And by and large, if they could hear The Beatles at all, they didn't.

So look. I know that these were pop trifles. My mother -- born between Elvis and John Lennon, so hardly a fuddy-duddy -- never minded me loving The Beatles, because as far as she was concerned, it was music for children. Too silly for teens, who should have listening to jazz. But as far as she was concerned, I Want To Hold Your Hand was interchangeable with Bingo Was His Name-O or Banana-fanna-fo-fanna kids songs and novelties. She actually came to love some of their songs by Rubber Soul and Revolver, and LOVED Abbey Road. After that, The Complete Beatles Song Book never left her piano bench -- and I think that that's another important part of the story. They grew to absorb their critics, and turn them into fans...even if Sinatra called Something the best song Lennon & McCartney ever wrote when he covered it...

Believe me, all of the folks dismissing them on this thread are saying things I heard 50 years ago....and I don't disagree. It's all true. All of it. Even I, a schoolboy, understood the difference between this and Dave Brubeck, a staple in our household.

But the rest of this is all true too. Someday, there may well be someone who moves units the way The Beatles did, and raise the standard for songwriting excellence a dozen times a year until they entirely redefine the standard, maybe even four boys as charming (and yes, fine, CUTE) as these....but I'll bet you a real pony that it won't happen any time soon. And frankly, I'll be surprised if it ever happens again. The world was still small enough for four boys to conquer, and they did.

 

But to answer the OP- the Beatles didn't 'resonate strongly in the US', they resonated all over the world. As Ringo said: "We were big in Liverpool, then in the North West, then in England, then in Northern Europe... we never got any bigger than we were in Liverpool, we just got big in more places."

The biggest place of all was the whole USA, where, in one fell swoop, on the night of the first Ed Sullivan show, The Beatles captured the hearts and minds of a colossal number of stragglers, everyone who hadn't already bought their records and made them the number 1 artistes in the US.

There's an extraordinary myth that The Beatles were broken in the US by their Ed Sullivan show. They were to some- all the Johnny Come Latelys in the US, anyone who hadn't seen them on TV, on the news, in the magazines, heard them on the radio or bought their records, So, in a strange twist of illogicality, someone who first encountered them when Ed introduced them claims "I was there the moment it all started!" when in reality, that was the moment you couldn't miss them. It had all started without you, you had just caught up. You had to be really unaware not to have known them before that.

This is the biggest blind spot about The Beatles that most Americans have.

True, my 'Ed Sullivan moment' was in October 1962 when I saw them on TV for the first time, being only dimly aware of them before that, so I know what impact seeing them on TV has. But then, they hadn't already been at number 1 for three weeks at that point.

 

Talent.

 

The Timothy Leary quote seems entirely accurate to me.

Even from a UK perspective, the Beatles came from outside the culture, and rapidly became the culture. They arrived fully formed (thanks to Hamburg, the Grammar schools, and the trousers) and they conquered the world by dropping joy bombs every 15 weeks. This went on until they went up to rock and roll heaven, 'pulling the ladder up after them' (as someone famously wrote).

It reads like the plot of V the Aliens , and living through it, that was how it was.

 

But surely you realise that most of your examples wouldn't have happened if the Beatles hadn't happened. Not because of their musicality but because of the influence on the very essence of the music industry. They had shaken it up so much that instead of nothing goes with out [insert large record company name] say so, that the opposite was happening. The artists were controlling the output - all of your examples are evidence of this.

 

May be the same reason that made them big everywhere else - the teenage girls loved them.

 

Very silly argument. Compare them to what had happened before and during their time, OK. But after? OK, so your 'Anarchy in the UK' and 'Free Your Mind' are so lame and like cotton candy compared to some music made in 2023, man. And 'Purple haze'? Don't make me laugh, that's kindergarden stuff compared to this dame who plays two guitars with her feet in 2043.

 

Good luck if you're planning to jam along to the songs without looking up the chords then!