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A question for those old enough to remember when "Eleanor Rigby" came out

#21
If Eleanor Rigby wasn't cool, the Beatles wouldn't have done Sergeant Peppers with all the non - electric instruments a short while later. Pretty much everything the Beatles did was seen as cool - back then, there weren't 78 subgenres of "metal", with everyone arguing about what sub category their favorite band fit in. There was pretty much 3 categories - your parent's music, Country, and Rock/Pop (which was whatever was on the radio) - and no, there weren't 15 different radio station categories).

And by the way, Eleanor Rigby wasn't that much of a pioneer - Pet Sounds was released before it. The Beatles released "Yesterday" (strings galore - there isn't a single electric instrument or drum on that recording) even before that.
 
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#22
Zooberwerx said:
Nope, not really. It's just a nice short depressing story and quite the departure from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". Beatles did a lot of those. My favorite is "She's Leaving Home". The addt'l instrumentation was certainly an embellishment...thank you Sir George Martin!

Riis
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i still think, had 6 string electric basses been available at the time, they would've went with my interpretation ;):D

i was born in '91 and have no perspective on this thread, but it is interesting how much 'weight' the beatles had at the time.
 
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#23
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#25
Paul New said:
Strings and horns were in no way gone from pop music at that time, in 1966. If anything, just the opposite was occuring, especially in california wirh Spector’s productions employing everything but the kitchen sink. Blues bands like Butterfield and John Mayal’s were full of horn sections and Nashville had strings on practically every record. A few years later with Zep’s influence and ghe hard rock movement, horns and strings started fading away, but the Beatles along with the pop music factories in california and nashville continued to buck that trend.
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Yes, even Buddy Holly was using strings back in the late '50's.
 
#26
When it came out I was probably 9ish, I hadn't even heard or thought of music in genres yet. So, all I knew was did I liked it or not. I knew that some songs I liked had guitars, some had violins and maybe trombone or trumpet, etc. I knew not of rock, pop, but, I knew classical and country when I heard it lol
 
#28
Zooberwerx said:
Nope, not really. It's just a nice short depressing story and quite the departure from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". Beatles did a lot of those. My favorite is "She's Leaving Home". The addt'l instrumentation was certainly an embellishment...thank you Sir George Martin!

Riis
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Sir George Martin did not orchestrate “She’s Leaving Home” and commented bitterly years later that Paul asked him to do it but Sir Martin had obligations that prevented him from just dropping everything to accommodate Paul. Paul came back shortly afterwards and played the orchestration that someone else did and George noted that it wasn’t up to the usual standards of a George Martin production and was the only thing until Phil Spector’s later work that he didn’t arrange
 
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#30
groooooove said:
i was born in '91 and have no perspective on this thread, but it is interesting how much 'weight' the beatles had at the time.
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The 60's were a very different time. Gear for recording music was VERY expensive - all the gear was custom made, and with very few tracks. It was a major investment to even own the gear to record a band, so studios were few and far between. As a result, not many people or bands actually got "promoted' to be recording artists - nowadays, any kid in his parent's basement can, working a $15/hour job, afford to own a better recording setup than the Beatles had, and release his or her music on the web for essentially nothing. Anyway, with that environment, they just weren't that many professional recording acts around - there was a lot less "noise" in the music market, so when a good group came along, everyone knew about them. When the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan (their "arrival" in the US) they were on Television, which had (in most markets) 3 channels, there was no internet to distract you, and only one person in a household could be making a phone call at any given time - they were hard to miss.

Ten years later, things were very different - more studios, more bands, more everything. The Beatles were a product of their time - there are undoubtedly better guitarists (technically) around today, but noone will ever really be able to replicate what they did or what they meant culturally - the world is just too different today.
 
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#31
The Beatles were changing culture and music with every song. This is especially true with every song on Revolver. This album is The Beatles rocker. Sometimes, when I listen to this album, I will skip this song. Maybe I’ve heard it to many times.
 
#32
pklima said:
Did the strings cause it to be perceived as a throwback to pre-rock instrumentation?

What I mean is, rock replaced/rebelled against/rejected earlier music traditions, and basically stopped using string and horn sections (though the occasional sax would still be used I suppose). Did "whoa, strings" make it seem like the Beatles are suddenly doing the music your parents or grandparents used to listen to, or was it not like that at all?
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I was a little kid when the song was released and everyone was already hearing startling new sounds from Motown, Bacharach, Beach Boys and every new release was part of an escalating “Arms Race” of innovation and imagination.
Well not every new release
 
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#34
The Beatles did so many non-mainstream things. sitar on “Norwegian Wood”, woodwinds on “When I’m Sixty Four”, back tracking, I think no one was surprised to hear strings on “Eleanor Rigby”.
 
#36
Anyone who was not around in those days has to understand in a pre-internet world with few broadcast television networks, newspapers, dial telephones, and just beginning FM rock radio, The Beatles owned the world in a total fashion not seen before or since.

A personal example: I'm living in a little one-horse oil company town in East Texas, and I'm twelve or thirteen years old. My girlfriend's mother went and bought Sgt. Pepper's the day it was released at the record store, and it was waiting on us when got home from school.

Then somebody spoke and I went into a dream. . . .
 
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#39
dbsfgyd1 said:
...Seriously, it was definitely a departure from what was typically heard on AM radio as I recall, but I found it captivating. ...
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i was a liitle kid back then, in a relatively small town of 30k. what i remember was hearing lots of different types of songs on the one am radio pop music station available. (the other notable am station was a farm report/weather/news station). there would be rock, country, r&b, novelty, all sorts of various generes on the pop charts. i do remember 'eleanor rigby' as standing out distinctively from most of the other tunes being played on the radio ... as did 'yellow submarine' with its goofy chorus and sound effects.

my grandmother, who was born about 1910, also enjoyed both of those songs ... and, based on her familiarity with those songs, bought the album as a gift for me a couple of years later 8-)
 
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