What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964

[Ed Roach]

Great article from today's LA Times, which I'll excerpt here.  Click on the link for the full article: 

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beatles-quotes-20140209,0,1146431.story#ixzz2ssVHLewJ

Today, the Beatles hold an exalted place in the history of rock 'n' roll. But 50 years ago, when they first crossed the Atlantic to perform in the United States, the reaction was decidedly mixed. Here is a sampling of what the critics were saying.

Los Angeles Times

Feb. 11, 1964

With their bizarre shrubbery, the Beatles are obviously a press agent's dream combo. Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well. But the hirsute thickets they affect make them rememberable, and they project a certain kittenish charm which drives the immature, shall we say, ape.

Newsweek

Feb. 24, 1964

Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments….

The big question in the music business at the moment is, will the Beatles last? The odds are that, in the words of another era, they're too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture. It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict. But the odds in show business have a way of being broken, and the Beatles have more showmanship than any group in years; they might just think up a new field for themselves. After all, they have done it already.

[Ed Roach]

This is actually the article:  http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-tomasky-beatles-20140209,0,3678198.story#axzz2ssURGyTC


By Michael Tomasky
February 9, 2014

 

Fifty years ago Sunday, the Beatles first appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." You'll almost surely see clips of them on the news this weekend, or on tribute shows, japing with the press, smiling those cheerful smiles, singing "All My Loving" — and you'll probably think, "Oh, they were so cute."


That's today's conventional wisdom: The Beatles were cute and unthreatening. The Rolling Stones — now, there was your threat. And the Who, smashing their instruments. And numerous others, against whom the Beatles were supposedly a dish of vanilla ice cream.

It's ridiculous. If there's one canard I'd like to see these anniversary festivities flip on its head, it's that one. To the America that existed then, the Beatles were plenty threatening. To understand why, you have to understand the music scene of the time, and how utterly new the Beatles were in every way, how totally uncategorizable.

Here's the quick, well-known background: Rock 'n' roll was born in 1955 and was immediately seen as a danger by the day's reactionaries. "Jungle music" and all that; white children screaming for black performers. In a few years' time, the industry tamed rock 'n' roll. Elvis went to the Army. Chuck Berry went to prison. Bobby Vinton went to No. 1. Chew on this little fact: On the American Billboard charts of the hits of 1963, not a single No. 1 song featured an electric guitar solo.

Then, February 1964 — boom! No one had made or heard sounds like these. Here's a crucial truth that goes totally unappreciated today: They were loud. Those Beatles songs don't sound loud now — "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "It Won't Be Long" and the other early ones. And it's true that other groups came along quickly and got louder still.

But by the standards of the day, they were cacophonous. Here's how the Nation's critic, Alan Rinzler, put it in 1964 after a Carnegie Hall concert. In an article headlined "No Soul in Beatlesville," Rinzler wrote that the music was "electrically amplified to a plaster-crumbling, glass-shattering pitch," and was "loud, fast, and furious, totally uninfluenced by some of the more sophisticated elements" of the pop scene.

Rinzler was certainly correct that the Beatles didn't sound like what was topping the charts at the time. Did I mention Bobby Vinton above? The No. 1 song the week before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" commandeered the spot was Vinton's awful (and I don't hate him; he had some decent hits) "There! I've Said It Again." A song from the Big Band era. And the No. 1 album before "Meet the Beatles" parked there for 11 weeks? "The Singing Nun."

For sure, there was great, edgy music coming out of Chicago and Detroit and Memphis. But most popular music was relentlessly mediocre, candied, bleached of anything that might produce in its pubescent listener an impertinent or certainly a sexual thought. Even Elvis, once so raucous, was now producing lame ditties like "Good Luck Charm."

And then suddenly, this glass-shattering, two-guitar noise. And with all those crescendos and climaxes and screams.

Lyrically, the songs may have been about holding your hand and dancing with you. But musically, a lot of the songs were frankly sexual. The extended "ahs" of "Twist and Shout," followed by those screams; the build-up coming out of the bridge ("I can't hide, I can't hi-i-de") in "I Want to Hold Your Hand." They're mild compared to what we can hear today, but in 1964, these were unambiguous musical emulations of sexual climax, aimed smack at a teenage audience, which did not miss the point.

In that first wave, in early 1964, most adults mocked the group. Highbrow derision came not just from the Nation but the New Yorker, the New Republic and the New York Times. This music was dismissed as a little disease that would pass.

And it's true that all this wasn't seen as subversive yet. That would take another year or two, when the disease hadn't abated but, rather, metastasized and started taking over the culture, becoming dangerous.

But just because it wasn't seen as subversive doesn't mean it wasn't subversive. The 1964 Beatles may not have been overtly anti-authority, but covertly, they certainly were. They were even, in their way, political. Their platform? Joy, excitement, pleasure. Within their aura, the future — that distant and sober thing for which the young people of 1964 were supposed to plan, so they could inherit the responsibility of upholding the greatest way of life the world had ever seen — evanesced. That fact alone made many in the establishment nervous, and rightly so.

So celebrate this anniversary, but celebrate it the right way. Don't call them cute.

[SMiLE-addict]

I recently came across this interesting write-up which describes, musically, why the Beatles were so maligned by music (and other) critics when they first appeared. There's actually a "technical" reason for it.

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME09/A_flood_of_flat-sevenths.shtml

So even to McCartney the songs of the album, or at least some of them, seemed out of key. It was not the first time this remark was made in respect to the Beatles' songs. Other people had said the same thing before of the group's early songs. From the start of their career the Beatles filled their songs with daring harmonic experiments and that to some people did made their songs go wrong. To Classical trained critics, the songs sounded harsh and sometimes even downright out of key. Blues-oriented critics complained that the Beatles did not apply the right blue notes. Others, however, liked the songs for that very same reason. To their ears the compositions of the Beatles, though harmonically adventurous, were also remarkably melodious.

    In their own way both the critical and the affirmative responses to the Beatles' songs were right. The musical style of the Beatles was so new and unusual, that one had to get used to it. To enjoy their songs one's ears first had to learn the musical grammar and to adapt to the underlying musical structure of the harmonies. What was so special about the Beatles' harmonies? The sheer number of chords the Beatles performed in their compositions, offers a first clue for an answer to that question. Compared with the standards of earlier popular music, the Beatles' songs show far too many chords. Most simple harmonies are built upon the three basic chords: the tonic (I), the subtonic (IV) and the dominant (V).

[SMiLE-addict]

Ian McDonald described the middle-16 in "No Reply" (starting at 1:02) as one of the best 30 seconds ever of popular music. Nowadays we've become so accustomed to it that it doesn't sound remarkable, but at the time the mood change would have been quite unexpected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILdBDOPoEDQ