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By Ron Rodman

Sunday, 9 February 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the American television broadcast of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. For many writers on pop music, the appearance on the Sullivan show not only marked the debut of the Beatles in the United States, but also launched their career as international pop music superstars. The mass exposure to millions of television viewers rocketed the Fab Four to national prominence in the United States, and created a chain reaction for stardom in the entire world.

The Beatles, Stockholm, 1963

While the charisma and quality of the Beatles’ music drew great popularity in 1964, the group’s success was assisted by the entrepreneurial skills of American television, notably by the expertise of Ed Sullivan. However, several other television broadcasts predated the Sullivan show appearance, and laid the groundwork for the Beatles’ stardom in the United States. In particular, two news stories about the Beatles were aired in November 1963, four full months before the Sullivan appearance. This, plus another taped appearance by the group by another entrepreneur, NBC’s Jack Paar, paved the way for the Beatles’ stardom in the United States.

The Ed Sullivan Show

Ed Sullivan began his career as a journalist throughout the 1920s and worked his way into the position as theater columnist for the New York Daily News when Walter Winchell left the paper in the early 1930s. Sullivan was also a host for Vaudeville theaters, serving as master of ceremonies for a number of shows during World War II. He broke into television as host of telecasts of New York’s Harvest Moon Ball on CBS, and was asked to host a weekly variety show called Toast of the Town in 1948. The show would be renamed The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955.

With his journalistic experience, Sullivan was able to use his contacts to attract a wide range of celebrities on the show. He attracted comedians such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Broadway stars like Julie Andrews, jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald, and even opera singers like Maria Callas and Robert Merrill. However, Sullivan may be best known for bringing rock‘n’roll to the small screen. He had Elvis Presley on the show on 6 January 1957, and many rockers such as Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, and many others thereafter.

Sullivan’s embrace (or at least tolerance) for rock music paved the way for the Beatles. Sullivan reportedly heard (or heard of) the Beatles during a trip to London and decided to put them on his show. He offered the band $10,000 to appear, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, would be a somewhat modest $75,000 in today’s dollars.

As the show opened on that historic night in 1964, Sullivan reported that Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had sent a telegram to the Beatles wishing them luck. In his introduction, Sullivan also used the increased viewership to plug some of his other acts on previous shows, notably Topo Gigio (the Italian/Spanish mouse puppet created by Maria Perego), Van Heflin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis, Jr. But the tension to hear the Beatles was palpable, and he segued into a commercial quickly, promising the Beatles after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The appearance by the Beatles almost didn’t happen. George Harrison reportedly had a sore throat the week before, but by broadcast, was better. So, the Beatles went live with their full line-up, performing five songs that night: “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

News stories

While the Ed Sullivan appearance marked the first live US TV appearance of the Beatles, the groundwork had already been laid to introduce the band to the United States a few months earlier. NBC News did a four-minute story on the Beatles that was broadcast on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on 16 November 1963, three full months before the Sullivan show. The feature was narrated by reporter Edwin Newman, who would later anchor the NBC News.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not to be “scooped” by NBC, CBS News also produced a five-minute piece on the Fab Four, which aired on 21 November, the eve of the fateful day on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alexander Kendrick, CBS’s London Bureau Chief taped the story, which showed footage of the Beatles performing in England, and the story ended with Kendrick ruminating on the social significance of the group, representing England’s youth, or at least England’s youth as they “wanted to be.”

The Jack Paar Program

Also predating the Sullivan Show, the first prime time film footage of the Beatles actually aired on 3 January 1964. The person responsible was another entrepreneur—NBC’s Jack Paar. Like Ed Sullivan, Paar was not a TV celebrity “natural” and came to television as a master of ceremonies. After World War II, Paar made some appearances in a few low-budget films, and made his way to television as a game show host. He was chosen as the regular replacement for Steve Allen as the host of NBC’s Tonight Show in 1957. Paar did not have Allen’s musical talent, nor his talent for sketch comedy or practical jokes, but was able to surround himself with unusual talent to market his show. While not as “wooden” on stage as Sullivan, Paar tended to be low-key and conversational, rather than charismatic and presentational. Like Sullivan, Paar also had a flair for discovering unique talent and is often credited for discovering, or at least popularizing, such off-beat characters as comedians Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, and Bob Newhart. Paar left the Tonight Show (ushering in the Johnny Carson era) in 1962, but went on to host a weekly variety show called The Jack Paar Program, that aired on Friday nights on NBC. It was on this program that he introduced the Beatles to the United States.

Like Sullivan, Paar had heard of the Beatles while in London and decided to show some film footage of the band as a joke. “I thought it was funny,” he quipped later on a television retrospective. He admitted that he had no idea that the band would change the course of music history. On the 1963 broadcast, after showing the footage, he quipped: “Nice to know that England has risen to our [American] cultural level.”

The episode with the footage was taped on 16 November 1963, the same date as the NBC news story (undoubtedly the story was fed to Paar from the network news bureau), but was not aired until 3 January 1964, undoubtedly delayed by the Kennedy assassination. Paar’s film clip still predates the Sullivan appearance by more than a month.

Would the Beatles have made it as superstars without the entrepreneurial efforts of Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar to give them TV coverage? The answer is undoubtedly yes. But the mass exposure they receive through American TV broadcasts by Sullivan and Paar (as well as NBC and CBS news) laid the groundwork for the Beatles success by presenting the group to millions of television viewers in the United States, and the world.

Ron Rodman is Professor of Music at Carleton College, where he teaches courses in the music and cinema and media studies departments. He has published numerous articles on tonal music theory, film music, and music in new media. He is author of Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music.

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Image: The Beatles i Hötorgscity 1963, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Gordon R. Thompson

Songwriting had gained the Beatles entry into EMI’s studios and songwriting would distinguish them from most other British performers in 1963. Sid Colman at publishers Ardmore and Beechwood had been the first to sense a latent talent, bringing them to the attention of George Martin at Parlophone. Martin in turn had recommended Dick James as a more ambitious exploiter of their potential catalogue and, to close the deal, James had secured a national audience for the Beatles. Nevertheless, as the band grew in popularity, James knew that McCartney and Lennon would attract the attention of other music publishers.

Most fans, unless they bought sheet music, were at best only vaguely aware that music publishers had any role at all in popular music, let alone that they controlled an economically critical part of the industry. Even Lennon and McCartney at first underestimated the importance of music publishing until probably the first royalty checks began arriving at manager Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises offices. Every time someone purchased a recording of one of their songs—no matter by whom—both the songwriters and the publisher profited. And every play on the radio and every television appearance did the same.

The home of Britain’s music publishing industry resided in London’s Denmark Street, a one-block stretch of offices, studios, and stores near Soho, serviced by a small pub, a café, and a steady stream of aspiring songwriters. Dick James’s office sat at the corner of Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road, not far from the premises of Southern Music, Regent Sound Studios, and other music-centered establishments. Brian Epstein had walked into these offices in November with a copy of “Please Please Me” and the hope that James could break the Beatles into the national media. James delivered immediately, booking an appearance for the band on the 19 January 1963 edition of ABC’s television show, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

The traditional role of the music publishers was to plug songs, bringing them to the attention of artist-and-repertoire and/or personal managers in an effort to have them match compositions with performers; but rock and roll was changing that model. When EMI’s Columbia Records released Cliff Richard and the Drifters’ recording of Ian Samwell’s “Move It” in August of 1958, London saw the start of musicians performing their own music. The tradition only deepened with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” in June 1960. American artists such as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins routinely wrote and recorded their own material, unlike singer Bobby Rydell or many other pop stars who performed material written by professional songwriters. In Britain, songwriting recording artists often proved fleeting phenomena.

With “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me,” as well as a number of other originals that would appear on their first album Please Please Me, John Lennon and Paul McCartney demonstrated their ability to write and perform their own material with spectacular results. Nevertheless, they knew the model and their first efforts to write a song for another performer met with mixed results. Touring with Helen Shapiro, the two songwriters futilely attempted to convince her and her management to record their song “Misery.” Another performer on the show, Kenny Lynch happily picked up the tune and very soon other artists would be looking for songs by McCartney and Lennon. Dick James, perhaps worried that with greater success the two ambitious Liverpudlians (and their manager) might bolt for yet another publisher, sought a strategy that would keep them as clients.

Click here to view the embedded video.

McCartney and Lennon were not the only songwriting performers in London. Southern Music had contracted eager songwriters and willing performers John Carter and Ken Lewis (later the core of the singing group the Ivy League) to write for the publisher. Their mentor at Southern, Terry Kennedy had even dubbed their band the “Southerners” (with a young Jimmy Page on guitar). However, they tended to write tunes for other singers and to perform songs written by other songwriters, all under the umbrella of their publisher.

Dick James’s big idea was to have John Lennon and Paul McCartney become part owners of their own publishing venture: Northern Songs. The arrangement that Epstein, McCartney, and Lennon made with James must have seemed good at the time, especially given that most young composers had no income from their work other than their author royalties. Northern Songs rewarded the two Liverpudlians with a larger piece of the pie, dividing the ownership of company between (i) Dick James Music, (ii) NEMs, (iii) Lennon, and (iv) McCartney. Dick James Music held a 51% voting share, leaving Lennon and McCartney each 20%, and NEMS Enterprises picking up the remaining 9%; however, James also took a 10% administrative fee off the top, so that in practice, the songwriters and their manager shared about 44% of the income.

Lennon and McCartney already had an agreement with Epstein to write songs, but a company dedicated to their music brought the game to an entirely new level. This would not be the last time that they would be the first to explore new territory in the business, from which other rock and pop artists and their managements would learn.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.

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Paul Is Undead Alan Goldsher

Basic premis-- zombies walk among us. There are different types of zombies, depending on where the zombie was created. Some function well in living society, some are scary death monsters. Some play a mean guitar and turned some other good musicians into a band. Because Liverpool zombies are strong and artistic.

Except Stu, Stu became a vampire. And Ringo, Ringo's a ninja. (Yoko is, too.)

John Lennon had a vision of the first undead rockband. A zombie band, which caused some friction with another Liverpool band that was made up of living members, but called The Zombies.

Overall, it's the history of the Beatles, but with zombies. Pete Best gets fired because he refuses to turn. John didn't die in 1980, because he was already undead. Mick Jagger's a zombie hunter (they could have done a lot more with that plot line. It kinda fizzled.)

Overall... I liked most of it. The zombie stuff was pretty graphically gross, which isn't my cup of tea, but makes sense in a zombie novel. But there's also a lot of comic grossness, like that'll often rip their arms off to better beat each other with them. There's a good dose of teen boy humor in here.

I think Goldsher was really clever in how he made the zombie Beatle thing work. He especially excels at the strained relations between members. No one's dead, but everything still went down, so they're not exactly talking to each other and John's version of events often differs from other people's.

Format wise, it works really well-- (ok, the pictures were gross, but, that's a cup-of-tea thing, not an actual complaint.) It's an "oral history" so the conceit is that Goldsher is a rock journalist interviewing all the actors involved, and so it's all transcript form, piecing together different interviews like you would in a documentary. This really allows the strained-band-politics to shine. Interspersed are interviews with zombie experts, newspaper articles, and excerpts from books about zombies, to help with the world building, but in a really unobtrusive way.


My only real issue is that, after awhile, the premise wore thin and it wasn't enough to sustain such a long time span of band history or 300 pages of book. It got to the point where I was invested enough that I wanted to finish it, but had to slog through the last bit to get there.

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By Gordon Thompson

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By Gordon Thompson

On 9 October, many in the world will remember John Winston Ono Lennon, born on this date in 1940. He, of course, would have been amused, although part of him (the part that self-identified as “genius”) would have anticipated the attention. However, he might also have questioned why the Beatles and their music, and this Beatle in particular, would remain so current in our cultural thinking. When Lennon described the Beatles as just a band that made it very, very big, why did we doubt him?

Today, the music of the Beatles remains popular, perhaps because it helped define a musical genre that continues to flourish, leading some to speculate that these songs and recordings express inherent transcendental qualities. Nevertheless, no graphed demonstration of harmonic relationships and melodic development and no semiotic divination of their lyrics can explain what these individuals and their music have meant to Western civilization. Those born in the aftermath of the Second World War harbor the most obvious explanations. A plurality of the children who came of age during the sixties continues to hold the Beatles as an ideal expression of that decade’s emphasis on self-determination and optimism.

The composer of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I Fell,” “Help!,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Across the Universe,” “Imagine,” and other classics of the modern Western canon left an indelible mark on our notions of music and expression. Where Paul McCartney searched for polite answers to reassure adults, Lennon often seemed to taunt reporters, to the delight of adolescents and the adolescent at heart. When Lennon got into trouble (as he did when American Christians took umbrage at his comparison of fan reaction to the Beatles and to Jesus), we apprehended our own image in the mirror of his discomfort. Moreover, when he shed the conventions of adolescence for the complicated independence of adulthood, we followed his example, albeit usually with less flair and more humility.

In many ways, John Lennon represented a twentieth-century Everyman: someone in whom we could see ourselves re-imagined in extraordinary circumstances with a quicker wit and more charisma. His assassination thirty years ago in December 1980 consequently left an indelible mark on us, standing as one of those moments stained in memory and time. That he had recently emerged from a well-earned domestic sabbatical with renewed possibilities, which both he and his fans recognized, made his death all the more tragic.

Just as the Fab Four had helped to define adolescent identities, perhaps these same baby boomers recognized in Lennon’s death the fragility of our own existence writ large on the wall. And, as the writing hand moved on, we contemplated one last indisputable truth that this most poetic Beatle had bequeathed: the passion play of his life, career, and death had provided us with a sand mandala of our own impermanent individual selves.

Pop culture by definition presents a fleeting expression of our consciousness, which we perpetually construct and reconstruct; but we sometimes forget that the currents of culture have lasting effects on the swimmers. Lennon, Harrison, McCartney, and Starr may have only been musicians that made it very, very big; but, in their roles as ritual players on the altar of the sixties, they played out an extraordinary version of everyday universal lives.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties Br

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MTV unveils 'MTV Crashes' (A global music event series that kicks off next month with Sean 'Diddy' Combs in Glasgow. Also ABC Family launches 'Chatterbox' iPad app to facilitate virtual fan viewing parties. ) (MediaWeek UK) (MediaWeek) - Forever 21... Read the rest of this post

By Gordon Thompson

At the July 29, 1965 premiere of the Beatles’ second film, Help!, most viewers understood the farce as a send-up of British flicks that played on the exoticism of India, while at the same time spoofing the popularity of James Bond. Parallel with this cinematic escapism, a post-colonial discourse began that questioned how colonial powers justified their economic exploitation of the world. Eventually, Edward Said’s Orientalism would describe the purpose of this objectification as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). In effect, Said and others argued that portrayals of the non-Western other—of which Help!, written by Marc Behm (who had also created Charade, 1963) would be an example—attempted (consciously or otherwise) to justify the myth of European racial superiority. Perhaps Behm, director Richard Lester, and the Beatles saw their film as in the satiric tradition of the Carry On film comedies popular in Britain and parts of the Commonwealth. But for Britain’s growing population of South Asian immigrants, the film would have been one more example of the dominant white culture twisting the identity of an economic underclass to serve the end of dominating it.

Most Westerners have never quite grasped the importance of the Hindu deity Kālī (presented in Help! as “Kāīlī”) and associated her with eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian organized-crime families (Thagīs, the root of the English word, “thug”), some of whom had worshiped her. As the goddess of time, Kālī also represents death, that great leveler of social classes and a figure both honored and feared. British governments fighting crime families profiled Thagī practices, such that for them mother goddess worship joined the list of criminal characteristics. Perhaps they also distrusted any religion that elevated a non-subservient feminine identity to the divine, and Kālī is anything but subservient. Subsequently, Kālī and Thagīs have presented irresistible conflated subjects for novels and films, even as recently as 1984 in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The culturally naïve world of the Beatles in 1965 experienced its own loss of identity control as others attempted to manipulate them, a growing disaster to which they contributed. Earlier that spring, a dentist had surreptitiously spiked Lennon and Harrison’s coffees with LSD at a dinner party in an attempt to ingratiate himself. And the Beatles’ extensive use of marijuana on the set of Help! had rendered them extras in their own film. However, early in the filming, the Indian instruments in one scene attracted George Harrison who would have already been aware of the interest in Indian music floating in the British air that spring and summer. A number of other musical compatriots had already been inspired by Indian music, from the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul” in May) to The Kinks (“See My Friends” in July).

Over the next few years, Harrison would more deeply embrace Indian culture, especially music and Hinduism, and renounce the use of psychoactive drugs. Ironically, youthful Western audiences in the sixties created their own Orientalist vision of Indian culture by creating an association between Indian music and drugs and sex. Of course, their purpose was not to support British eco

Before we conclude this week--and because I have no other place to put this so it may as well go on my blog--I have two examples of the Beatles in popular culture that I ran across this week. If you pay close enough attention (and know what you're looking for) you will start to find their influence everywhere. In these two particular examples, they're used in advertising.

Exhibit A:

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he looks at May 1970 and the Beatles. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

For Beatles fans, it was like watching mortality embrace a loved one. The spring of 1970 brought news of the dissolution of the Beatles and, with the release of Michael Lindsey-Hogg’s Let It Be in May, fans could see the disestablishment for themselves.

Lindsey-Hogg had established his reputation with musicians through his involvement with the British television show, Ready, Steady, Go! In 1968, Mick Jagger asked him to direct a concert staged specifically for the screen, perhaps in imitation of D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop, filmed in 1967 and released in 1968. Lindsey-Hogg re-imagined the concert as a circus and captured a number of compelling performances (notably by the Who), which unfortunately did not include the culminating appearance by the Rolling Stones who went on last after a very long night. Lindsey-Hogg filmed The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus in December 1968; but Jagger and the others apparently decided against releasing it, disliking their performance.

One of those involved in the performances that night had been John Lennon, who had pulled together a band consisting of Eric Clapton (guitar), Keith Richards (bass), and Mitch Mitchell (drums) to accompany himself and Yoko Ono. The Beatles and Lindsey-Hogg had worked together on film shorts to accompany the release of the recordings “Paperback Writer,” “Rain,” “Hey Jude,” and “Revolution,” so his selection to film them preparing for a concert seemed natural.

In January of 1969, Lindsey-Hogg and his crew assembled in Twickenham, where the Beatles had worked on previous films. This time, however, without manager Brian Epstein’s attention to detail, the band found themselves in cold studios arguing with each other to the point where George Harrison walked out of the sessions. McCartney could only purchase Harrison’s return by dropping the idea of a major concert at the end of the sessions. The Beatles turned to the basement of their offices in Savile Row to continue rehearsing material and the concert devolved into a brief rooftop appearance.

What Lindsey-Hogg does manage to capture is a creeping alienation and disaffection brought about by a number of factors, not the least of which was the maturation and individualization of the Beatles. They had long ceased to be the Fab Four. The world had grown darker and their vision more serrated.

The Rolling Stones for their part engaged in their own disaster film, Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles with Charlotte Zwerin, which begins with their 1969 Madison Square Gardens performances and ends with the tragedy of the Altamont Speedway concert. The Stones had dropped

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he looks at April 1960 and Eddie Cochran’s influence on the Beatles. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

One of the most remarkable developments in sixties pop culture came with the emergence of British rock ‘n’ roll. On the western side of the Atlantic, the genre had evolved from numerous sources, blending and diverging to produce a myriad of styles. British youth in the fifties gazed on the music of American performers like Little Richard, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley with a combination of wonder and envy. The first British attempts came in the resurrection of American folk blues, which musician Lonnie Donegan called “skiffle,” but which increasingly included music hall ditties. It would take American mentors to help the Brits find their mojo. Of the various candidates eligible for that status, few can rival Eddie Cochran.

Cochran was a natural: good-looking, creative, talented, and ambitious. In addition to writing some of the most memorable rock tunes of the era, including the classic, “Summer Time Blues” (with manager Jerry Capehart in 1958), he appeared in the seminal rock film of the era, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). In that film, he sings “Twenty-flight Rock,” the core of which was written by Nelda Fairchild, one of the few women writing this kind of material at the time.

Cochran’s particular significance for the British came during his tour with Gene Vincent in 1960. Performing with them, Marty Wilde and the Wildcats boasted several future notable British musicians, including guitarists Big Jim Sullivan and Tony Belcher, bassist Liquorice Locking, and drummer Brian Bennett. The Wildcats accompanied Cochran on most of the gigs and Sullivan remembers the American as a multi-instrumentalist who could show all of them on their own instruments what he wanted them to play. These musicians all went on to prominence in the explosion of British rock and pop in the mid sixties either as session musicians or as members of Cliff Richard’s influential Shadows and carried the lessons they learned from Cochran.

On the night of 16 April 1962, as Cochran and Vincent traveled in a taxi with another American, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, the car went off the road near Bath, England. The others survived with serious injuries, but Cochran would die the next day. His death, and that of Buddy Holly the year before, set off a flurry of posthumous record releases over the next three years, whetting the British appetite for American rockabilly. Performers like Heinz (“Just Like Eddie,” 1963) tried to capture the spirit; however, as the supply of unreleased disks dwindled and the imitations became less convincing, one British band in particular stepped in to fill the void.

The nucleus of the Beatles had formed around Cochran’s recording of “Twenty-flight Rock” when Paul McCartney dazzled John

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he looks at March 1970. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

The year 2010 holds a number of Beatle decade anniversaries. In August of 1960, they headed off to Hamburg where they would endure a trial-by-fire, first in the Indra Club and then, the Kaiserkeller. Playing for four hours on weeknights and for six hours on weekend nights, they built both repertoire and stamina, if not musical skills. When they returned to Liverpool that winter, some of those who had known them before the journey barely recognized these rockers from Germany. Ten years later, in April 1970, Paul McCartney would announce his departure from the band and the dissolution of his songwriting relationship with John Lennon. Ten years after that in 1980, Lennon, born in 1940, would die at the hands of an assassin.

On 6 March 1970, a month before McCartney’s departure declaration, the Beatles released a fittingly titled final single: “Let It Be.” They had created the core of the recording over a year before in January 1969 during their ill-fated attempts at filming preparations for a spectacular performance. Now, as the band drifted into disintegration, an anthem materialized around their disconsolation.

“Let It Be,” with its references to his late mother and to the new reefs in McCartney’s professional and personal lives, evokes a religious resolution to his problems with organ fills by Billy Preston reminiscent of an American gospel service, a George Harrison guitar solo played through an organ’s Leslie speaker, and wordless backing vocals that fill the room like a church choir. It also references the instrumental line-up of the Band, Bob Dylan’s former backing group that had influenced other British groups such as Procol Harum and that had come to articulate a rural return-to-roots philosophy that appealed to McCartney.

When this Apple Records single appeared, McCartney could not have foreseen the version that would emerge on the album Let It Be, released after his departure. American Phil Spector, who had found favor with John Lennon and whom manager Allen Klein had hired to polish the production, superimposed an orchestration that converted McCartney’s county gospel service into a Hollywood spectacular.

“Let It Be” falls into a subcategory of McCartney’s catalogue that includes songs like 1968’s “Hey Jude.” In both songs, McCartney seeks to sooth troubled minds. “Hey Jude” addresses the disruption associated with John Lennon’s separation from his wife Cynthia and son, Julian. “Let It Be” seeks solace, perh

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he commemorate January 15th, a day two British bands released classic records. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

A year after the Beatles stormed into American charts, British record companies continued to release disks that redefined how we hear pop music. Out of the seemingly endless stream of British performers flooding the international media emerged two performing songwriters with distinctly British voices. In one of the ironies of the era, on Friday 15 January 1965, two British bands released records that would become classics and both had the same American producer. Shel Talmy had relocated from Los Angeles to London with an introduction and faked credentials (he passed off the Beach Boys “Surfin’ Safari” as his own production) just before the Beatles and other bands lit the fuse of the “beat boom.” He had what few other British artist-and-repertoire managers had at the time: a great ear for hit songs, knowledge of how to elicit and to capture the excitement of performances, and an attitude big enough to push his ideas through to completion.

The Kinks premiered a song that Ray Davies had written as the follow-up to their breakout hit of the previous summer, “You Really Got Me.” Shel Talmy, although in favor of eventually releasing “Tired of Waiting for You,” wanted something that more clearly established a Kinks sonic identity. Consequently, for October release, Talmy, Davies, and the Kinks turned out “All Day and All of the Night” whose power chords and distorted guitar functioned the way the industry expected classic follow-up hits to sound. In January when the band appeared on ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! to debut “Tired of Waiting” for Pye Records, the arpeggiated chords and nasal voice introduced listeners to a less aggressive and more melancholy Ray Davies. Instead of the hormonal lust of their previous two hits, “Tired of Waiting” spoke to an ambiguous ambivalence ambling about in that twenty-one-year-old heart. This would be the beginning of Davies finding his British voice. By the end of the year he would be skewering the well-respected men who rode trains into London’s City every morning.

Appearing on the same day, Brunswick Records unleashed the Who’s first single, “I Can’t Explain” for an expectant audience of London mods and to an unsuspecting world. Pete Townshend took the Rickenbacker electric twelve-string guitar that George Harrison had charmingly chimed on Beatles records over the previous year and turned it into a weapon. Shel Talmy allowed the band to play at club volume and compressed the sound so tightly that the guitar chords and drum hits project at the listener like spikes against a black background. Although Townshend would later complain about Talmy bringing in the Ivy League (John Carter, Ken Lewis, and Perry Ford) for backup vocals, the performances and the recording sound as crisp and cool as a mid-January night. Just as he had with “You Really Got Me” for the Kinks, Talmy

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  Thompson is a frequent contributor to the OUPblog, check out his other posts here.

Once you begin writing about the Beatles, people feel little hesitation in asking your opinion about which books they should read on the fab four, usually with some special qualification. Just the other day, a woman asked me for advice on what Beatles biography I could recommend for her twelve-year-old daughter who had become infatuated with the band, but whom the mother wished to shield from the biological aspects of their lives. (I recommended Allan Kozinn’s short, but entertaining account of their lives, repertoire, and recordings.) Nevertheless, the dramatic arch of their story and the music they created remain a draw for generations born long, long after the years of Beatlemania. Indeed, the music of this era persists on college radio stations and in the iPods of students.

Since 1997, I have been coaching a seminar at Skidmore College where students comb through a variety of sources on the Beatles, in the process learning how authors spin their narratives. Over twelve weeks, teams of juniors and seniors compare biographies by Philip Norman, by Hunter Davies, and, of course, by the Beatles themselves in their Anthology (both in print and on video). How do different authors describe Brian Epstein’s death? How did the Beatles come to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show? They also examine the music through readings by authors such as Walter Everett and summations of their professional and recording career in 0 Comments on Holiday Book Bonanza ‘09: Gordon Thompson as of 1/1/1900