Beatles as students of American pop

I want more time on the Beatles. After 1964 you can see changes in many bands; the Beatles can stand for those changes. It should be a kind of growth—what I think of as an artistic approach, or authenticity in music.

First we should see the Beatles as students of American pop. When you hear the media use—and keep using—“British Invasion,” you may think Invasion music is rooted in native British music. But when you look as a scholar or analyst—structure, content, influence, technique—you find that about 90% or 95% of this period’s music is essentially American pop. Of course American pop with a thick British accent, but still American pop at heart. So in many ways I think the Beatles are undoubtedly students of American pop. We know most British musicians admired American music and wanted to imitate it, believing the British could do as well as Americans. Why should the Beatles not be students of American pop?

As scholars, how do we know they knew—really knew—American pop from about 1955 to 1962–63? We know what they did in Hamburg and what they played. Scholars have compiled lists of songs they covered and performance recordings—not only Hamburg, but BBC sessions that followed the Hamburg set lists—so we can hear how they played them. They did not want to give the BBC material they planned to release on record, but they were too busy to re-rehearse everything. We can hear those tapes. Some Beatles books track almost day by day from about 1960 or 1961 to the breakup. If you read them you will be surprised how often they were performing, recording, on TV, or otherwise booked—so when they “rehearsed a new version,” maybe they just dusted off old numbers and played them.

There is a lot of that old material; their readings sound very close to the original records. If you find their BBC “That’s All Right Mama,” you might fool an Elvis fan into thinking it is Elvis at Sun or in a live show. Paul McCartney sounds like Elvis; if you know Paul you can tell it is him, but if you do not, it is hard to separate from Elvis. George Harrison’s guitar solo matches Scotty Moore on the record. Listening to these BBC sessions you hear cover after cover this close to the originals—so they knew how American pop worked. They covered late-1950s to early-1960s acts: Carl Perkins, the Coasters, the Cookies and the Shirelles (girl groups), Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Motown artists, and more. They were students who really understood American music—not only how the tunes went, but arrangement and shape. So when they began writing their own songs—doing what songwriters have done for ages—as young writers they used the music they knew as models.

In American interviews they partly admitted this. Asked what he saw ahead, Paul roughly said that John and he as a songwriting team had made the Beatles a craze that might last a year or two, then they would write for other artists—seeing themselves as a Leiber & Stoller-type team. That was their self-image. They were proud of knowing and deeply understanding the American songwriting tradition. So in many of their songs American influence shows not only in production values, technique, and instrumentation, but in musical structure.

Now we focus on how the Beatles moved out of craftsman-style imitation—skill at turning out hit after hit like Brill Building product. How did they leave 1960s formulas and become more like artists? When you do not want to repeat the same thing again and again, you keep trying new things—to push past pop’s borders and what pop can do. That is how they went from craftsmen to artists, creating a new aesthetic in pop that would become rock’s later attitude toward authenticity.