In 1965, Beatlemania was in its third year. The Beatles were confronting the liabilities of world domination; after all, no rock act had ever been this big before, and few thought it would last. How could they possibly sustain their popularity and, at the same time, push their music forward? Everyone -- including the Beatles themselves -- wondered "What are they going to do when the bubble bursts?"
1965 Original releases (British unless specified otherwise):
Single: "Ticket to Ride" / "Yes It Is" (rel. Apr. 9)
Single: "Help!" / "I'm Done" (rel. July 23)
LP: Beatles VI (rel. US, June 14)
Side 1: "Kansas City"-"Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!" / "Eight Days a Week" / "You Like Me Too Much" / "Bad Boy" / "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" / "Words of Love"
Side 2: What You're Doing" / "Yes It Is" / "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" / "Tell Me What You See" / "Every Little Thing"
LP: Help! (rel. Aug. 6)
Side 1 (songs from the film Help!): "Help!" / "The Night Before" / "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" / "I Need You" / "Another Girl" / "You're Going to Love That Girl" / "Ticket to Ride"
Side 2: "Act Naturally" / "It's Only Love" / "You Like Me Too Much" / "Tell Me What You See" / "I've Just Seen a Face" / "Yesterday" / "Dizzy Miss Lizzie"
Single: "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper" (rel. Dec. 3)
LP: Rubber Soul (rel. Dec. 3)
Side 1: "Drive My Car" / "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" / "You Won't See Me" / "Nowhere Man" / "Think for Yourself" / "The Word" / "Michelle"
Side 2: "What Goes On?" / "Girl" / "I'm Looking Through You" / "In My Life" / "Wait" / "If I Needed Someone" / "Run for Your Life"
The Beatles and the Changing Global Culture of 1965
In practical terms, American racism (during this period) was too deeply ingrained for mere laws to apply a quick fix.
In February 1965, Malcolm X, a black rival to Martin Luther King who championed equality "by any means necessary," including defensive violence, fell publicly to bullets prior to a New York City speech, portending future violence yet to come.
The Beatles won their first Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group for "A Hard Day's Night" the same year that Louis Armstrong's overtly sentimental "Hello Dolly" took home Song of the Year! When mainstream culture deigned to acknowledge the Beatles, it came through patronizing references:
in feature cartoons like Disney's The Jungle Book (the Beatles were initially going to voice the vultures)
a new character who appeared in a prime-time cartoon series, The Flintstones; Eppy Brainstone would have been recognized by young and old alike during the era as a topical reference to the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein
September 1965: The Beatles, an animated ABC Saturday-morning series, premiered its first episode; 39 more would be produced through 1965, each episode based on a single song
During 1965, the Beatles actively participated in voicing social concerns:
John Lennon had already made explicit his distaste for the Vietnam War privately, but not yet publicly, to reporters when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 1964)
The Beatles would flout their management's strict restrictions on antiwar speech in 1966
Lennon in particular would exhibit ever stronger political stances for world peace in 1968 and beyond
a "youth culture" took root around shared antiwar values, an end to racial segregation (a topic on which the Beatles had previously taken a stand during their early American tours), and more flexible sexual mores afforded by the popularity of the birth control pill (hit the market in 1960)
as early as 1965, this open argument of youths with their parents led to a "generation gap," where college students proclaimed "Don't trust anyone over 30!" to announce their solidarity
rock music caught and reflected these anti-establishment values back to its listeners, creating an insubordinate subcultural counterweight to traditional mores and timeworn forms of entertainment
June 11: Buckingham Palace announced that the Beatles would be presented Britain's highest cultural award, the Member of the British Empire (MBE) on October 28, 1965.
when news broke that the Beatles had accepted this recognition of the royals, many infuriated previous recipients renounced their awards now that the award had (supposedly) been "cheapened"!!
As with Lennon's early "rattle your jewelry" comment from the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, the Beatles managed to straddle a precarious line between rock's subversive subculture (universally acknowledged as the vanguard of youth) and the establishment's table (after all, the Beatles had been responsible for significant financial benefits to the British economy.
Beatles scholars view 1965 as a transitional year, both incrementally and dramatically
material released this year (especially Rubber Soul) made their earlier work sound faintly nostalgic, as if created by a much younger group
the film Help! reworked the nonchalance apparent in A Hard Day's Night into buffoonery
this comedic streak inspired an ABC-TV sitcom, The Monkees (note the similarly intentional misspelling of an animal), a musical quartet that was clearly a "copycat" of the Beatles
Lennon-McCartney lyrics gained new self-awareness (and a social conscience), creating a curiously ironic distance between the wacky film spoof and its sometimes sardonic soundtrack
a key to the Beatles' protean imagination lies in how they kept ascending new summits only to redefine them as springboards, not endpoints
August 15, 1965: the Beatles performed before an audience of 65,000 at Shea Stadium in New York, where the crowd noise overwhelmed the most powerful amplifiers then available.
"Ticket to Ride"
The Beatles' embrace of non-Western musical instrument sounds normally gets traced to the late-1965 use of sitar, but Paul returned from a 10-day holiday in Tunisia on Feb. 14th and, in recording, "Ticket to Ride" the next day, asked Ringo to emulate an Arabian drum pattern he'd heard there
aspects of "Ticket to Ride" to facilitate your appreciation:
1:24 - Paul injects a note-bending minor-pentatonic blues lick from his new Epiphone Casino (guitar, not bass guitar!), a hot guitar often verging on feedback that he'd heard played in London's blues clubs
this Casino guitar so impressed John and George that they ordered their own matching guitars ... John's became his favorite electric for later work
1:25-1:26 - in the retransition from bridges to returning verses, Lennon chugs away with repeated downstrokes on his Stratocaster guitar's tense dominant (V) chord (but without including the 3rd interval in the chord), recreating the power chord
With "Ticket to Ride," the Beatles played hard rock months before the Stones created "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"!
See "Components of the 'Ticket to Ride' retransition" in the textbook (Table 5.2)
Help!
The Beatles add keyboards to their musical toolkit for early 1965 recordings
Paul plays an electric piano (Hohner Pianet) for a blues progression in "The Night Before" and for an emulation of mariachi trumpets in "Tell Me What You See"
John copies the mannerisms of Jerry Lee Lewis in sliding his elbows all over the Vox Continental organ in the raucous "I'm Down"
Outside session musicians made their first appearances on Beatles recordings during these months (other than the drummer used during the transition between Pete Best and Ringo Starr I have described previously).
"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" ends with two flutes playing in octaves
"Yesterday" features a classical string quartet shadowing McCartney's gentle acoustic guitar (George Martin was responsible for the string quartet arrangement)
the group's exploration of tonal variety reached new heights in "Yesterday"
An important musical development: Although overdubs now featured prominently in most tracks, they were generally reserved for "sweeteners" (i.e., the basic-track performance would convey all fundamental instrumental parts with the fourth track available for hand percussion and occasional guitar effects. In the title track for Help!, everything we hear from lead guitar has been overdubbed. Born of a dilemma, this leads to new flexibility in recording such that Paul will come to overdub even his bass parts in 1966, allowing him to play keyboard on basic tracks. How could they possibly sustain their popularity while pushing their music forward?
The Beatles' burgeoning productivity knew no boundaries and was held to no constraints. Their identity became synonymous with expansive creativity.
”The Night Before”
Can you hear the SRDC form of this verse?
Can you hear the SRDC form of this verse?
The guitar solo is played over the "S" and "R" sections of the SRDC form. This verse consists only of the "D" and "C" sections of the SRDC form, completing the verse begun by the guitar solo.
Can you hear the SRDC form of this verse?
”Another Girl”
Can you hear phrase 1 & phrase 2 in this verse?
Can you hear phrase 1 & phrase 2 in this verse?
Can you hear phrase 1 & phrase 2 in this verse?
”Yesterday”
The first Beatles track for which Paul McCartney & George Martin call on a string quartet. Reportedly, the melody for "Yesterday" came to McCartney in a dream. As he worked to find the perfect lyrics for the melody, he initially assigned the working title "Scrambled Eggs." (Do you see how the number of syllables and which ones are accented make "Yesterday" and "Scrambled Eggs" similar? ... go ahead ... sing the phrase "scrambled eggs" to the melody of "Yesterday." You know you wanna do it!)
The Beatles' "Yesterday" has the unmistakable allure of a classic: a handsomely sorrowful melody gracing a universal heartbreak theme, desire tinged with regret framed with vocal yearning and a classy, formal set of strings.
this song is so closely identified with McCartney's solo performance (without any other band members supporting the track musically, only the string quartet).
Recall that, early on, Lennon & McCartney had agreed to share ALL songwriting credits equally, regardless of who actually composed a given song. During a difficult period in the late 1990s, as Linda McCartney was dying of cancer), Paul attempted to reach out to Yoko Ono to ask whether "Just on this one occasion, could I have this as a favor?" (listing songwriting credit for "Yesterday" as "Paul McCartney and John Lennon" instead of the agreed-upon "Lennon-McCartney"); she first responded positively, but then called back and said "No."; in reality, it did appear to be a collaborative effort:
interestingly (and contradicting Paul's premise), in a 1967 interview with the BBC Light Programme about winning the 1966 Ivor Novello Award, McCartney claims Lennon came up with the title "Yesterday."
producer George Martin suggested the track's setting by arranging a string quartet to accompany McCartney's acoustic guitar ... this was brand new; no previous material by the band had ever suggested a non-Beatle ensemble, a completely non-electric group of outsiders, with McCartney as the sole group member on the recording!
this put a new premium on the authority of the composer: from this point on, the constraints on their own ensemble began to fall away, beginning with how any arrangement for the studio might be produced onstage
for TV appearances of this song, McCartney simply performed it alone, with studio-orchestra principals adding their parts from the wings or from the orchestra pit
as you can imagine, this exclusive spotlight on McCartney brought new force to the internal tension within the band, between Lennon (a rocker who scorned sentimentality), and McCartney (the "all-around entertainer")
Internal tensions and conflicts:
worth consideration
if the Beatles stand as rock's greatest group, why is their best-known song a throwback to the prudish parental style they rebelled against?
why does their staple track omit three (of four) members completely?
counterarguments
the Beatles celebrated ALL styles (even those rock intended to replace)
borrowing from previous styles need not be heretical if it animates a larger idea; precisely by declaring a lack of boundaries, they allowed themselves to take what they wished, even from what had once been enemy territory
The "Yesterday" recording session has descended into legend: on the afternoon of June 14, 1965, McCartney tracked six takes of "I've Just Seen a Face," overdubbing acoustic guitars and maracas, and then seven takes of the wildcat, irascible "I'm Down" with the full band. According to Magic Circles critic Devin McKinney, in "I'm Down," McCartney "nearly chokes to death trying to cough up Little Richard, who has somehow crawled in and taken over his body" (McKinney, 2004, p. 399). After supper, he came back for just two takes of "Yesterday" and sang beautifully.
The Beatles as Live Performers
As their success continued, the Beatles used their increasing leverage to negotiate less touring, more vacation, and more time for reflection.
one profound change: a sharp reduction in music played before a live audience (diminishing degree of care taken with the ensemble); because they were inaudible in halls, the Beatles no longer worked at precision, especially with their vocals (for example, John frequently sang incorrect words, even in televised broadcasts where they could clearly be heard).
the Beatles' 1964 Sullivan debut held smart, crisp surprises
the 1965 "farewell" performance was sloppy to the point of disrespect for their art
tracking the data; the number of performing days per year ...
1962: peaked at 305
1963: dropped to 248
1964: dropped to 129
1965: dropped to only 46
1966: dropped to just 22 (the year of their final group concerts)
this excludes, of course, the impromptu mini-concert from the rooftop of their London offices in January 1969
The Beatles began to redefine the nature of pop songs and rock recording, strongly announced by the year's second LP, Rubber Soul.
The Beatles performing live at Shea Stadium in New York City on August 15, 1965.
”We Can Work It Out”
This song functions in two ways at the same time: as (a) a romantic argument that (b) doubles as a debate between two songwriters. Since the two voices happen to be McCartney's (verses) and Lennon's (bridges), and the song's structure neatly divides into major-mode verses and minor-mode bridges, it blinks like a neon sign for a partnership with a split personality.
the character sung by McCartney (verses) doesn't even straddle a line here; he insists he's right and his lover wrong, and there's no variation to this attitude in three verses
the challenge to Lennon's bridges goes unstated, and it strays completely from Paul's argument (i.e., two narrators singing past each other, as if they don't listen to one another at all; barely aware of each other's presence in the same song!)
Lennon's tag line, his musical punctuation, uses a clichéd oompah-pah waltz gesture to ridicule the petty nature of the conflict with large triplets
the shape of this song has to do only with the articulation of the conflict, not a resolution
the only "reconciliation" that occurs in musical terms, when Lennon's "oompah-pah" figure returns for the closing gesture after McCartney's final title line. But does this mean Lennon "wins" the argument? Or, alternatively, does it mean that the number coheres more in musical than literal terms, and the dispute is never truly worked out?
this deliberate ambiguity signals a new layer of meaning in Beatles tracks: listeners are allowed to discern their own resolution or ongoing conflict in the track
Can you hear the aa'b form in this verse?
Do you hear that this cadence is in triple meter?
[triple meter again] Can you hear the aa'b form in this verse? Can you hear the phrase 1 > cadence (triple meter) > phrase 2 > cadence (triple meter) sections in this bridge? Can you hear the aa'b form in this verse?
”Day Tripper”
This track is a 12-bar blues run amok! John Lennon uses the experience of emerging from confusion -- enlightenment -- as inspiration for an unexpected twist on a standard musical form (the 12-bar blues) and a masterful manipulation of retransitional anxiety, resulting in an almost incidental classic rock song that helped define a genre: later to be known as "heavy metal" (or just "metal").
heavy doubling of bass and guitars in an ostinato of teasing chromatic and syncopated dissonances that would be heard within four years in Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues," and Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times."
The musical form of "Day Tripper"
verse: a bar form composed of three phrases [note that the three phrases are identified for you in Verse 1 of the interactive listening guide below! To hear each phrase, click on each of the three buttons -- phrase 1 (a), phrase 2 (a'), and phrase 3 (b; refrain) -- to the right of the Verse 1 button)
the first two phrases follow the melodic and harmonic structure of bars 1-8 of the 12-bar blues form, repeating identical lyrics for these two phrases in all three verses
the third verse uses heightened pitch, a common technique whereby a recurring melody is raised higher in pitch in its last appearance
the chord palette for"Day Tripper" consists of dominant seventh chords built on all of the first six degrees of the major scale, a most confusing collection of chords that pays little heed to any underlying diatonic pitch set (i.e., there is no key in which all of those notes would exist!)
Rubber Soul
Rubber Soul offers a new paradox: largely because of John Lennon's interests, the album combines the personal with the universal. Comments about selected tracks:
"In My Life": challenged to write about his childhood, Lennon drafted this tune as a series of Liverpool remembrances ... all of which became simply "places I'll remember" in the final version of the lyrics
George Martin's "wind-up piano": he recorded the solo to "In My Life"at half speed, in a low pitch register, so that when replayed at proper speed, the tape sounded an octave higher with a clipped articulation that gave it the desired (yet cunningly synthetic) tonal quality of a harpsichord!
"Nowhere Man": when contemplating his own particular inadequacies, he offers as outsider's perspective when his faults are ascribed to an Everyman (or "Nowhere Man")
"The Word": features a particularly bold statement of social consciousness (with verses in 12-bar blues form)
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)": tells of an atmospheric rendezvous outside of marriage and contains a vague reference to marijuana
"Drive My Car": through the influence of Motown's bassist James Jamerson and Stax's Donald "Duck" Dunn (played on Otis Redding's "Respect"), McCartney's new Rickenbacker bass awakens a new rhythmic independence from the drums
More and more, McCartney's inspiration for his bass sound came from Motown and Stax. The Beatles dug deeper into R&B as something beyond a style to be imitated or obliquely referred to but an intricately woven part of their own language. [This approach distinguished the Beatles from the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds.]
In fact, the Beatles had hoped to follow Rubber Soul by recording their next album in Detroit at Motown Studios with songs commissioned from the Motown and Stax powerhouses; while the recording location didn't work out, their work from 1965-1966 churned in strong R&B grooves.
Rubber Soul marked a new way of experiencing pop music
Like a string of short stories from a major literary figure, the song sequence itself had meaning
what track opened the album and which tracks followed one another in sequence mattered!!
From this point forward, all their LPs exceed the sum of their parts
the Beatles are among the very first rock groups to release a "concept album" (defined below); rather, albums -- no matter how varied their content -- become whole units, with imagined interconnections that define overall coherence ... a collective aesthetic
many consider Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the Beatles' 1967 LP) one of the first -- if not the first -- concept album
Rubber Soul is often cited as the earliest of fans' "favorite" Beatles albums, whereas their previously releases had often been referred to as one or another favorite Beatles song
the band had grown out of the adolescent marketing of 45 rpm singles and into the new young-adult format of more thoughtfully integrated 33 1/3 rpm LPs/albums
as rock came of age and teen spending habits pushed more and more pop and rock albums up the charts (crowding out the adult-oriented film soundtracks, Broadway cast recordings, lounge singers, folkies, and comedy acts), content would be created and perceived differently
graduating from music's physical temptations, young listeners more frequently sat back and considered music by the hour, the way previous generations read fiction, followed radio serials, or watched movies
through the years of biggest album sales in the 1970s and 1980s -- before the eras of rock videos, mixtapes, downloads, and streaming (before the dawn of cable TV, home video, and social media), listeners settled in for hours of close listening, often through headphones, playing one album after another in their entirety ... for millions, this started with Rubber Soul. This was exactly how Dr. L experienced music during his adolescence and teenage years!
Rubber Soul introduced to pop music a new mystique, yet posed somewhat more approachable quandaries than Dylan did
within a couple of years after its release, the idea of a concept album, a series of songs bound in one LP with an overarching theme (there was a similar precedent in the 19th-century song cycles of Schubert, Schumann, or Brahms in Western classical music)
”You Won't See Me”
The secret to good rock -- or any strong style -- is "repetition without tedium."
The Refrain emerges out of an extension of the "C" gesture of the Verse. Can you hear the SRDC form in this verse?
Can you hear the SRDC form in this verse?
Can you hear the SRDC form in this verse?
”Michelle”
musical characteristics of note:
a chromatic blur of constantly co-existing major and minor modes
a bass line that exemplifies in a subtle way McCartney's bold invention heard throughout the album
contrast of high and low vocal registers to portray emotional contrasts
Question: Is "Michelle" in F major or in F minor?
Answer: Yes ... both! Within this song, both the major and minor modes claim equal prominence and centricity.
In late 1965, McCartney turned his attention to creating interesting bass lines, and "Michelle" provides an early example in which he consciously explores all of the implications his bass line has for supporting upper parts. For example, in playing a long-sustaining C in the bass while the guitar chord above claims F as its root, McCartney brings a pronounced yet subtle tension into the song's intro, which concludes with that C in the bass but the guitar falling into line with its thirdless C chord. [In musical analysis, the "3rd" interval is the one that distinguishes a major chord from a minor chord!]
McCartney explains this himself in a 1990 interview:
"If you're in C, and you put [the bass] on G -- something that's not the root note -- it creates a little tension. It's great. It just [he takes a long, expectant, gasping breath] holds the track, and so by the time you go to C, it's like, 'Oh thank God he went to C!' And you can create tension with it" (Mulhern, 1990, p. 20).
Chromatic strain is everywhere in this track
"Michelle" revels in the fully diminished 7th chord, a multiply valent sonority expressed in three successive neck positions that
as in no other Beatle song
the complexity of the object's beauty ("ma belle") is captured in a cabaret atmosphere in the
(the jazzy #9/b7 chord), which the Beatles had learned from Jim Gretty, a Liverpool guitarist. The Gretty chord combines both the D natural (the 6th scale degree of a major scale) and Db (the root of the song's core chromatic issue)
The Beatles won their first Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group for "A Hard Day's Night" the same year that Louis Armstrong's overtly sentimental "Hello Dolly" took home Song of the Year! When mainstream culture deigned to acknowledge the Beatles, it came through patronizing references:
June 11: Buckingham Palace announced that the Beatles would be presented Britain's highest cultural award, the Member of the British Empire (MBE) on October 28, 1965.
aspects of "Ticket to Ride" to facilitate your appreciation:
Help!
The first Beatles track for which Paul McCartney & George Martin call on a string quartet. Reportedly, the melody for "Yesterday" came to McCartney in a dream. As he worked to find the perfect lyrics for the melody, he initially assigned the working title "Scrambled Eggs." (Do you see how the number of syllables and which ones are accented make "Yesterday" and "Scrambled Eggs" similar? ... go ahead ... sing the phrase "scrambled eggs" to the melody of "Yesterday." You know you wanna do it!)
Rubber Soul
”Michelle”