Why DID the Beatles Get so Famous?

[Iridescentone]

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...

To each their own but for my taste, the Rolling Stone's music died when Jones died. After that....barely meh....his input was the magic ingredient.

 

[DiabolusInMusic]

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.

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.

I did not realize you two were more knowledgeable about the Beatles than Paul McCartney.

Does he know about this? You should probably tell him.

 

[Milo Spleen]

One of the things about living through it, like I said earlier in the thread, people couldn't wait to see, hear or experience "Beatlemania". Even my parents were cool about it and they were in their early 30's then.
I got to see Frank Sinatra when I was playing in Lake Tahoe in the mid-70's and I saw what the attraction was to him, but multiply that a hundred times and across the age groups in every country around the world, and that was "Beatlemania". They weren't popular because of one thing, but everything.

 

[Bob_Ross]

Thread drift: all this talk about boy-bands reminded me that during the 2008 Return To Forever reunion tour, Lenny White said "I don't know about boy-bands, we're a man-band."

 

[jim nolte]

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.

When I first heard The Beatles it was 3 days after Christmas 1963. My older brother had gotten a Topcon 3.5 inch reel to reel portable tape recorder for Christmas. On that day he came up to me and said, "Jimmy you have to listen to this new song, it's by a band from England called The Beatles. The first thing I thought before he hit the play button was okay Buddy Holly and "The Crickets", The Beatles, I get it. Nobody had heard of them before here in the US, never saw a picture of them, knew nothing about the haircuts not a victim of any kind of hype. And there was "I want To Hold Your Hand" in all it's glory playing on that little tinny speaker. It sounded different than anything I had heard before, I was an instant fan, it was so different than the surf music, folk music, pop fluff that was being played on the radio back then. It truly was a magical moment at that time in my musical history, and again no hype, no anything making my instant love for that song except the song itself. That's why they succeeded, the songs. Jim

 

[Freez]

I did not realize you two were more knowledgeable about the Beatles than Paul McCartney.

Does he know about this? You should probably tell him.

Not claiming to know more than Paul, but I recognize an off the cuff remark when I hear one. He's done hundreds of interviews; you should try reading some of the others. He absolutely realized that The Beatles were something special, and he was nearly inconsolable about it when they split.

 

[DiabolusInMusic]

Not claiming to know more than Paul, but I recognize an off the cuff remark when I hear one. He's done hundreds of interviews; you should try reading some of the others. He absolutely realized that The Beatles were something special, and he was nearly inconsolable about it when they split.

Did I somehow imply the Beatles were not a good band by saying they were a boy band? I never meant to give that impression.

I have no ill-will towards boy bands. I turn up Backstreet Boys just like I turn up Megadeth.

 

[rtslinger]

My living room photo

 

[Celtic59]

I'm glad to see "carrots" in 2nd place on the poll (should be first)
Have to share that I was reading a book about music written from a pretty square businessman perspective, was that essentially The Beatles changed the Pop music industry from singles-generated to LP-generated.
That's the old Paradigm Shift in the recording industry for you, I don't think even "Ol Blue Eyes or Buddy Holly really were album acts, that was still a collection of singles on a 12". After Rubber Soul, albums became devices in their own right, so that makes The Beatles even that more important in my book.

 

[wrench45us]

yep albums
back when the culture had a 20 minute attention span

my landlady in Arizona was storing a friend's record collection to hide that asset as her friend went through a divorce
From that collection, we used to play 'Revolver' or Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' on house cleaning days.
I started to look forward to housecleaning days. I overcame my too cool for the Beatles attitude with that repeated listening.
I had preferred the recycled blues acts of the British Invasion, but I had to come around.

 

[Iridescentone]

I'm glad to see "carrots" in 2nd place on the poll (should be first)
Have to share that I was reading a book about music written from a pretty square businessman perspective, was that essentially The Beatles changed the Pop music industry from singles-generated to LP-generated.
That's the old Paradigm Shift in the recording industry for you, I don't think even "Ol Blue Eyes or Buddy Holly really were album acts, that was still a collection of singles on a 12". After Rubber Soul, albums became devices in their own right, so that makes The Beatles even that more important in my book.

Pretty accurate IMO. They were able to make that happen because of the sheer volume of their ever-evolving, ever-growing song catalog. Fans soaked it all up as fast as it was happening, and it was happening really fast. At the time, the pace was incredible, which led to rumors that the Beatles surely must have been employing a vast resource of other musicians and song writers to create that much material.

They still sold millions of 45's, despite the growing interest in albums. And there were plenty of hit singles that never made it onto an album. My personal fave is Nowhere Man.

 

[mellowinman]

I did not realize you two were more knowledgeable about the Beatles than Paul McCartney.

Does he know about this? You should probably tell him.

Why would you post something like this? It feels like a smart-alecky answer. I have not represented myself as "more knowledgeable about the Beatles than Paul McCartney." I have presented evidence that shows pretty clearly why the Beatles don't really meet the definition of a "boy band." If Paul makes the remark, speaking to students at a college in 2014 that, "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," that doesn't really seem like a serious or in-depth analysis of the Beatlemania era.

A boy band (or boyband) is loosely defined as a vocal group consisting of young male singers, usually in their teenage years or in their twenties at the time of formation, singing love songs marketed towards young females. Being vocal groups, most boy band members do not play musical instruments, either in recording sessions or on stage, making the term something of a misnomer. However, exceptions do exist. Many boy bands dance as well as sing, usually giving highly choreographed performances.

The Beatles were directly an influence on boy bands that use rock band instrumentation, and played more rock oriented music. The precedent for this was when TV producers Bert Schnider and Bob Rafelson recruited four young actor/singers to perform catchy pop tunes while also acting in a television series in which performances were integrated into the shows' plots and were very influential in shaping early music videos. The Monkees are often considered as the original pioneers among boy bands as they were the first example of a manufactured boy band, put together by producers rather than already performing together and then being "discovered" by record label executives.

I think it's pretty clear that the Beatles were sort of a TEMPLATE for Boy Bands that came afterwards, but I cannot emphasize enough how the Beatles actually played bars as a band for years before being discovered; wrote most of their own songs, (especially nearly ALL hits,) and were only marketed using Boy Band definitions AFTER they had huge hit songs on both English and American radio.

"Please Please me" was released in the UK on 11 January 1963 and reached No. 1 on the New Musical Express and Melody Maker charts.

It was released in the UK on 11 January 1963 during one of the worst winters in British history and on 19 January most of the population were snowed-in at home watching the Beatles perform the song on the Saturday night TV show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. The national exposure of the song, as well as the unusual appearance and hair style of the group, brought the band a lot of attention and they were booked by promoter Arthur Howes for a series of national tours. The first tour was as a support band to Helen Shapiro in February, then Tommy Roe and Chris Montez in March, and Roy Orbison in May and, during breaks in the touring schedule, the Beatles performed the song on a number of BBC national radio programmes. All of these factors, along with extensive press coverage, propelled the single to the top of most of the British charts and the Beatles, much to their embarrassment, were moved to the top of the bill on the Tommy Roe and Roy Orbison tours.

Now they had some pretty serious momentum on the charts before anyone had called Paul "the cute one."

So calling them "a boy band" is not very accurate, even though they had many of the makings of one. Just saying.

 

[electracoyote]

I'll just set this here. Definitely worth a look.

 

[DiabolusInMusic]

Why would you post something like this? It feels like a smart-alecky answer. I have not represented myself as "more knowledgeable about the Beatles than Paul McCartney." I have presented evidence that shows pretty clearly why the Beatles don't really meet the definition of a "boy band." If Paul makes the remark, speaking to students at a college in 2014 that, "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," that doesn't really seem like a serious or in-depth analysis of the Beatlemania era.

A boy band (or boyband) is loosely defined as a vocal group consisting of young male singers, usually in their teenage years or in their twenties at the time of formation, singing love songs marketed towards young females. Being vocal groups, most boy band members do not play musical instruments, either in recording sessions or on stage, making the term something of a misnomer. However, exceptions do exist. Many boy bands dance as well as sing, usually giving highly choreographed performances.

The Beatles were directly an influence on boy bands that use rock band instrumentation, and played more rock oriented music. The precedent for this was when TV producers Bert Schnider and Bob Rafelson recruited four young actor/singers to perform catchy pop tunes while also acting in a television series in which performances were integrated into the shows' plots and were very influential in shaping early music videos. The Monkees are often considered as the original pioneers among boy bands as they were the first example of a manufactured boy band, put together by producers rather than already performing together and then being "discovered" by record label executives.

I think it's pretty clear that the Beatles were sort of a TEMPLATE for Boy Bands that came afterwards, but I cannot emphasize enough how the Beatles actually played bars as a band for years before being discovered; wrote most of their own songs, (especially nearly ALL hits,) and were only marketed using Boy Band definitions AFTER they had huge hit songs on both English and American radio.

"Please Please me" was released in the UK on 11 January 1963 and reached No. 1 on the New Musical Express and Melody Maker charts.

It was released in the UK on 11 January 1963 during one of the worst winters in British history and on 19 January most of the population were snowed-in at home watching the Beatles perform the song on the Saturday night TV show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. The national exposure of the song, as well as the unusual appearance and hair style of the group, brought the band a lot of attention and they were booked by promoter Arthur Howes for a series of national tours. The first tour was as a support band to Helen Shapiro in February, then Tommy Roe and Chris Montez in March, and Roy Orbison in May and, during breaks in the touring schedule, the Beatles performed the song on a number of BBC national radio programmes. All of these factors, along with extensive press coverage, propelled the single to the top of most of the British charts and the Beatles, much to their embarrassment, were moved to the top of the bill on the Tommy Roe and Roy Orbison tours.

Now they had some pretty serious momentum on the charts before anyone had called Paul "the cute one."

So calling them "a boy band" is not very accurate, even though they had many of the makings of one. Just saying.

You are extremely hung up on what you perceive to be a negative label. I'll be sure to get off your lawn old man but try to remember that a boy band is not a negative term any more than a rock band. It is just a label and your perception of that label.

Just for reference point, here is what you get when you search google images for "Beatlemania," piles of pictures of screaming girls. We are talking about what made them "bigger than Jesus" and it was the mania, caused by girls. Hell, ask people how to get people to your shows on TB and I bet you the top answer is "girls."

beatlemania - Google Search

Anyways, I'm out, it has been fun discussing with you, even through you thinly veiled insults about my "sad" posts.

 

[Nick von Nick]

For what it's worth, I think Louis Pasteur's quote below fits the Beatles quite well:

Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.
(In the fields of observation, fortune favors the prepared)

The Beatles were a combination of so many factors: creativity, marketability, etc. However, if they had not been prepared by the crucible of their early years (particularly in Hamburg, Germany), they would have been totally unprepared for what they came across. They were lucky, indeed, but also molded by their experience and preparation.

 

[Milo Spleen]

Funny, they weren't prepared for Hamburg at all. George was underage, not enough material etc.
What would have happened if they hadn't taken that gig the first time?

 

[10cc]

"Day Tripper" the first time feedback from a guitar was used as part of a recorded song. "Rain" the first time a vocal track was played backwards in a recorded song, etc. etc. Yup, just another boy band

John Lee Hooker had some recordings from the 40's and Link Wray had it also in the 50's.

 

[10cc]

And they were the biggest imitators to ever reach such heights. Completely missed the point while conveniently sidestepping the social connotations, but have at it. The chicken came before the egg, the egg spoke and it said: "I am the walrus".

Who's trading Scrambled Eggs for Yeterday

 

[ThePresident777]

ikr, WHY NoT ME??????????? I'm amiable too.

 

[MegaSwing]

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...

Mick Jagger isn't cute in any known universe.