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Why DID the Beatles Get so Famous?
- Thread starter mellowinman
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- beatles
Every Beatles thread these past 15+ years, without fail, veers off into the "boy band" thing.
Boy band? C'mon, The Beatles paid their dues. They played long & hard road gigs...what "boy band" has ever paid dues?
Not a boy band. They could play instruments, they were a rock band. They were not manufactured to allure young girls, it happened organically. Compare any singing only, dancing, jumping, ridiculous looking synchronized boy band (That did not write any songs of their own btw) to what the Beatles were. No comparison, therefore, NOT a boy band.
Ahh, I remember trying to steam the cover off of my copy of that album that had the "revised" picture on it. Not many of the original covers were released and some of the revised ones were just glued over the old meat picture. Alas mine was just blank underneath. JimSqueaky clean image is the answer.
DiabolusInMusic
Functionless Art is Merely Tolerated Vandalism
No, the Beatles were a boy band. As I mentioned in another post we can all tell who is "the cute one" and "the funny one." All those screaming girls are what created the mania, that is why they got so popular. One could definitely argue that their musical content is what kept them around but that is not what made Beatlemaina.
Paul McCartney had no problems calling the Beatles a boy band, why should you?
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“At the beginning of the Beatles, you’ve got to remember, we were a boy band… It was all really fan-oriented. It’s not a bad thing, but after a while you felt like you wanted to move on.”
Alkali Ike
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There used to be a video on YouTube of the entire concert they did in 1964 at the Washington Coliseum, which I think was their first US concert. It's unbelievably good, in a very primitive way. Multiple dead microphones, Ringo's riser rocking like it's gonna tip over, deliberately scrambled lyrics, random audio mixing. The energy is palpable (I don't think I've ever used that word before). Unfortunately it seems Apple Corps got the video taken down although the audio is still there.
Anyways, no "boy band" by today's definition is anything like what's seen in that video. Find it if you can. If you don't get what this is about, seeing the video or even pieces of it might help you out.
A few examples:
And the penultimate performance from that concert might be by Ringo, who looks like he's gonna have an aneurysm:
Anyways, no "boy band" by today's definition is anything like what's seen in that video. Find it if you can. If you don't get what this is about, seeing the video or even pieces of it might help you out.
A few examples:
And the penultimate performance from that concert might be by Ringo, who looks like he's gonna have an aneurysm:
Yeah, repeating this single similarity over and over doesn't make for a very good argument. Lets talk about the facts you continually refuse to acknowledge:
1) Boy bands are manufactured by a studio or producer. The Beatles came together of their own accord.
2) Boy bands don't write their own material. The Beatles were working on and perfecting their song writing from day one.
3) Boy bands have their fame handed to them, and often leave music altogether when it fizzles. The Beatles busted ass learning their craft, and all of them continued as musicians (very successful ones at that) for the rest of their lives.
4) While boy bands strive for maximum exposure by having all their members be just as cute as possible, The Beatles FIRED the (arguably) best looking guy in the band, and replaced him with Ringo. Why? Because he was a far better drummer, and that made the band better.
Your "cute one-funny one" routine is pretty one dimensional. Did The Beatles appeal to girls? Sure; they wrote lovely songs, sang them beautifully, had cute English accents, and weren't bad to look at either. Of course girls like that stuff; always have, always will. But guys liked The Beatles too. IN DROVES. IN SPADES. And that, my friend, is THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE. No significant number of male fans for ANY OTHER BOY BAND IN THE HISTORY OF POP MUSIC. Not new kids, backstreet boys, n-sync, or anyone else. Now, if you can honestly comprehend the points I just made and still call The Beatles "a boy band", then you're really not equipped to be debating the subject.
While I believe that everyone's entitled to wrong opinions
I agree with everything you said. Paul said that "boy band" thing just to put their early fame into a little perspective that people who missed out on Beatlemania could understand. It was not at all intended to demonstrate that they started or followed the current boy-band career path.
Posts like this are just plain sad. The Beatles were poor, scrappy Liverpool boys who put their own band together, played for mobsters and degenerates, played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. They were as far from a "boy band" as you get.
John was the smart one.
Ringo was the funny one.
Paul was the cute one.
George was the quiet one.
The funny thing about that is that it is dead-on accurate, and not based on any kind of made-up personas. And it was started by teen magazines AFTER they had already hit big. They weren't originally marketed that way. Their musical content absolutely IS what made Beatlemania; the "cute nicknames" thing was others trying to cash in on the popularity.
Every English band followed the Beatles' personality profiles. A smart one, a cute one, a funny one, and a quiet one. The Who had them all, too. The Stones did too, but they had two quiet ones.
I know the fan magazines made the references for these bands--just having some fun.
And when I hear "The Quiet One" I think of the late Mr Entwhistle.
I recall reading an interview with Lennon....at one point he talked about their work ethic. He said he thought that in order to put on a good live performance, it takes 100 hours of rehearsal for every hour in concert.
And I think it was Lennon who, when asked why the Beatles stopped doing covers, said that one of the reasons was that they didn't really think they were good enough musicians to do justice to other artist's songs.
Food for thought?
And I think it was Lennon who, when asked why the Beatles stopped doing covers, said that one of the reasons was that they didn't really think they were good enough musicians to do justice to other artist's songs.
Food for thought?
I always thought he was the cute one and Mick was the smart one. Then again, I guess you could make a case for either being smart and cute. Oh gosh, they were both so cute...Mick with those big kissy lips and sexy dance moves, Brian with his long blonde hair...
Good point and totally true. It's just that the male fans weren't doing the fainting, crying, and screaming like the girls were.
I think a big part of the Beatles mystique is....you really had to be alive back then, and old enough to appreciate the magnitude of the Beatles onslaught. Just reading about it in retrospect decades later is not the same as actually experiencing it. It's like me trying to understand why my parents flipped for Benny Goodman or Frank Sinatra in their day...I don't really get it no matter how hard I try, I just accept that it must have been great, and I leave it at that.
They worked ridiculously hard, no doubt about it. At one point they were putting out 3 albums a year and never less than 2 until they took a break before the White Album. And they were touring all the time when not recording albums. That takes work to bust 12 songs into shape for an album.
Could be. I'm sure they really liked the original versions of songs they heard and probably didn't think theirs were any improvement. I thought some of their covers were improvements, some weren't.
As it relates to the original topic? Not really.
