The Beatles Are Here! (22 page)

ANOTHER INTERESTING THING
about the Beatles is that they became as well known as songwriters as they were as performers. Before that, from Elvis Presley to the crooners, people were performers and other people wrote the songs. There were so many wonderful generations of singers who sang beautiful tunes that were created by other people.

But the Beatles brought the songwriting front and center. It has such integrity and incredible variety. Each song is completely different—you would imagine that there was a whole team of songwriters at work creating music for the Beatles! Instead, it was this extraordinary gift of a couple of guys who happened to meet each other.

I love the quirkiness of some of the pieces, the level of experimentation. Even if it is a straightforward pop hook, there’ll be something in the words that has more depth. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it’s the music that’s intriguing.

The music created by the Beatles has taken its place in the classical lexicon of popular music. It’s going to continue to live, just as great classical music does. What makes it classic is that it stands the test of time. The Beatles’ music will be around for a long time. It’s going to go on and on.

Where Music Had to Go

by Anthony Scaduto

“I
HAD HEARD
the Beatles in New York when they first hit,” Dylan told me in 1971 as we sat in his studio. “Then, when we were driving through Colorado we had the radio on and eight of the ten top songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones.

“They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you’re playing your own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.

“But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go. I was not about to put up with other musicians, but in my head the Beatles were
it.
In Colorado, I started thinking it was so far out that I couldn’t deal with it—eight in the Top Ten. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before. It was outrageous, and I kept it in my mind. You see, there was a lot of hypocrisy all around, people saying it had to be either folk or rock. But I knew it didn’t have to be like that. I dug what the Beatles were doing, and I always kept it in mind from back then.”

Tom Rush, musician

IN 1963,
I
was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a student at Harvard and I was spending way too much of my time hanging around local coffeehouses, such as the Unicorn and, in particular, one called the Club 47, which was in Harvard Square and kind of the flagship of the whole coffeehouse fleet.

Club 47 distinguished itself by being the place that went out and found the old-timers, the legends, and brought them to town. It was astounding. It was a tiny little place, an eighty-seat coffeehouse, but you could go in and sit at the feet of the Carter Family or bluesman Sleepy John Estes. You could listen to the legends yet also hear the local kids—Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, myself, and others including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

Dylan came through town a few times. I’m not sure he ever officially actually played at the club, but I know he was in there and he probably crawled onstage a couple of times. I don’t know if he was booked as an act.

One of the things about Club 47 was that they took their purity very seriously. It was a strange, almost surreal thing because you had all these college kids sitting around singing about how tough it was on the chain gang and in the coal mines and all. But we figured that we could probably finesse this incongruity with enough sincerity, so we were
super
sincere. Still, there were those that really would get offended if you strayed—some of the same people who got so upset when Dylan went electric.

When I went electric, at about the same time, nobody seemed to notice. I guess they’d learned not to expect too much purity from me.

Most of my comrades-in-arms were specialists—some did nothing but delta blues, some sang Irish/Scottish ballads. There was a guy who did almost entirely Woody Guthrie songs. I was the generalist—I’d pick songs I liked from whatever genre. I didn’t much care, as long as I loved the song. We were mostly focused on traditional folk material; there wasn’t much songwriting going on—Dylan certainly led the way there. My first three albums,
Live at the Unicorn
,
Got a Mind to Ramble
, and
Blues, Songs and Ballads
(the first two done while I was still in college), consisted entirely of traditional songs. There was one, “Julie’s Blues,” that I “wrote” by mixing and matching existing blues lines—but that was the way most of the old blues were cobbled together.

There were all these conventions in the folk music scene, some of which were deliciously absurd. For example, you had to wear blue jeans and a work shirt to show that you were a rebel. I had a roommate at Harvard named Joe Boyd (who went on to produce Richard Thompson and Pink Floyd and the McGarrigle Sisters, on and on). When he was at school he was into blues and the folk stuff, but he also liked to wear a jacket and tie. So he was taken to task.

I remember some guy explaining to him, “You know, Joe, you don’t have to wear a jacket and tie. You can wear whatever you want.” He answered that what he wanted to wear, actually, was a jacket and tie. The other person was nonplussed, didn’t know what to say. He finally told Joe that he
had
to wear a workshirt, “because that’s what you wear when you can wear anything you want.”

So there were all these incongruities.

THERE WAS THIS
great outpouring of talent and energy in the late 1950s, with Chuck Berry and Elvis and the Everly Brothers and Fats Domino and others. One of the curious things about it was that none of these guys were remotely like each other. The Everly Brothers and Fats Domino were from different planets, but they were both big stars in the same time period.

And then it all went away quite abruptly.

For quite a while in the early 1960s there was nothing going on that appealed to us. We partly got into the folk music thing because what was on the radio was garbage. Folk music was a rebellion against it. Part of its appeal was that we really felt ownership. We may not have been working in the coal mines, but we’d found this music that wasn’t on the radio. It was our private discovery.

Folk music goes back thousands of years. But for that one short period of time, traditional folk became pop music. But of course the pop Ferris wheel continually turns—whatever is in today is out tomorrow. So folk music became hugely popular and was the same thing as pop music for a little while, but then it shifted into folk rock and folk rock shifted into whatever came next. Then disco happened and it all stopped.

I LIKED THE
Beatles’ music right away. It was pretty undeniable. It kind of grabbed you. But it presented an existential dilemma for folk purists because you weren’t supposed to like what was on the radio. There was an anti-pop-music subtext to the whole scene. When, for example, I played a Bo Diddley song, as I did occasionally, some people would get upset since he was considered to be a rock star.

So when the Beatles came along and all of a sudden there
was
something good on the radio, it was a bit disorienting at first. When they were first on the radio and their stuff was so compellingly wonderful, it initially presented a problem for some of us folksingers. Still, we embraced them pretty quickly. After all, they, too, were rebels. They had funny haircuts and were clearly doing things their own way. They weren’t something that had been manufactured in the pop music factory. They were quickly accepted.

One of the bands in town, a mainstay of Club 47, was called the Charles River Valley Boys and they actually did an album, I think it was their second, called
Beatle Country,
in which they basically did bluegrass versions of a bunch of Beatles songs. (Albums were a big deal then—you couldn’t make your own like you can now.) And then the Rolling Stones came hard on the Beatles’ heels and they also were very sexy and compelling and loud and raucous and rebellious.

One time I recorded a song called “If Your Man Gets Busted,” which was a corruption of a Robert Johnson blues song called “If Your Man Gets Personal.” I recorded it and Dylan loved it and he was carrying it around, playing it for everybody and he played it for the Beatles at some point.

He told me that he’d done it and I said, “Bob, what is it that you like about that particular track?” I mean, I liked it well enough but I didn’t think it was head and shoulders above everything else. And he said, “Oh man, if you don’t understand, you just don’t understand.” And that was about it. He never did tell me what the Beatles thought of it.

I bridle, at this point, at being called a folksinger. I don’t think I am, because folk music is traditional songs and I do almost entirely composed material. Still, I play an acoustic guitar, so therefore I must be a folk singer. I’ve gotten tired of arguing about it.

Thawing Out

by Barbara Ehrenreich

ROCK STRUCK WITH
such force, in the 1950s and early 1960s, because the white world it entered was frozen over and brittle—not only physically immobilizing but emotionally restrained. In pre-rock middle-class teenage culture, for example, the requisite stance was
cool
, with the word connoting not just generic approval, as it does today, but a kind of aloofness, emotional affectlessness, and sense of superiority. Rock, with its demands for immediate and unguarded physical participation, thawed the coolness, summoned the body into action, and blasted the mind out of the isolation and guardedness that had come to define the Western personality.