I want to spend some more time talking about The Beatles. And now, using The Beatles as kind of a a representative of something they played an important roll in. But something that we're going to see happening in a lot of bands in this period between 1964 and forward. And that is growth and, and something I call the kind of artist approach or, or authenticity in music. So, let's first think about The Beatles as students of American popular music. When you heard the term British invasion and when journalists used it then and have continued to use it since. You would get the impression that there's something markedly, or sort of essentially, or fundamentally British about British invasion music. But when you really look at the music structurally, as a scholar, as a music analyst, and figure out what the music is. What its influences are, what its practices and techniques and structures are, it turns out that 90%, 95% of what happens in that music is essentially American popular music. Of course, it's American popular music with a strong British accent. But most of what it is, is American popular music. So, in many ways, I think of the Beatles as students of American popular music. And really, how could it be any other way. Understanding that most Brits, certainly British musicians revered American music. Revered American popular music and really wanted to imitate it. Think really that, that a Brit really could be as good an American at it. Why would it not be that The Beatles were, were students of that music. Well, how do we know, as scholars, how is it that we know that they know that, that, that they were familiar or intimately familiar with that music. American pop music from the 1955 through '62 or '63 period. Well, we know what they were doing at Hamburg. We know what music they were playing. Scholars have assembled lists of, of, of as many as possible of the cover songs they know The Beatles were playing. We have recordings, not recordings from the Hamburg years, but recordings they did later for the BBC where they played the arrangements that they had done back in Hamburg. Partly because they didn't want to give the BBC music they were already trying to sell on their, on their records, on their singles and their albums. But we, so we can hear how they did those songs. They wouldn't have had chance, a chance to really rehearse them up again because they were so busy. There are these books out there that show how many, you know, what The Beatles were doing every day from about 1960 or '61, all the way through the day that they, they broke up. When you look at it, you'll be surprised. The guys have either got a show, a recording session, or a television thing or something going on practically every day. So when to rehearse new arrangements, probably not. You just brush the dust off the old ones and you play them. So we have tons of those. And what we know from that is that they played these, these tunes very much like the record. If you go and look for the BBC recording of The Beatles playing That's Alright Mama, you could probably take that to an Elvis Presley fan and convince them that it was a Sun Records out take or a live out take or something. Paul McCartney sounds just like Elvis Presley. If you know it's Paul McCartney, you can hear the Paul McCartney in the voice. But if you don't and you're not thinking about that, it sounds just like Elvis Presley. George Harrison plays the Scotty Moore guitar solo exactly the way it is on the record. And as you go through those BBC recordings, you hear one after another of them doing very close versions. So, they understood how American popular music goes. Some of the groups that they cover from the late 1950s and the 1960s. Carl Perkins, The Coasters, The Cookies, and the Shirelles, both girl groups. Elvis Presley, of course, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, lots of Motown and lots more. They truly were sort of students who understood comprehensively. Not only what the tunes were, but how the tunes went and how they were put together. So, when they started writing their own songs, as composers who have done going back hundreds of years. They started to model their music on music they already knew as young songwriters. they, they as much admitted that when they first came over to this country and were being interviewed. Somebody was interviewing Paul McCartney and he said, well, you know, what do you see in the future? And he basically said, John and I, you know, are songwriting team. After this performance of The Beatles thing sort of blows over, the effect they thought may be it would last a year or may be two years of the all set. They would continue to write songs for other artists, they thought themselves as a kind of a Leiber-Stoller songwriting team or Goth and Kings song. You know, that's what they thought they were. So, they were very proud to know about the American songwriting tradition, and to be able to show that they understood it. And so, a lot of their songs show the influence of not only the, the, the production values and the production techniques, and instrumentation, and those kinds of things of those, of those records. But actually, the musical structure of those. So, what we want to do now is turn our attention to how The Beatles moved from this craftsman model. That is the idea of being very skilled at turning out pop song after pop song, sort of ala brille building, as we talked about last week. How they moved from that over the course of the 60s to something more like artists. Where you don't really want to do the same thing over and over, you want to constantly be doing something new. Something different, pushing the envelope, pushing the boundaries of what's possible for popular music. And that leads that movement from craftsman to artists leads to a kind of new aesthetic in popular music. This is going to be the attitude of authenticity in rock music. We'll deal with that in the next video.
