Did the psychedelic area ruin the Beatles?
- Thread starter Greebozz
- Start date
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Steel Icarus
an attempt was made
Gotta love how some people, whenever The Beatles are mentioned, immediately start naming other bands, even when a conversation or thread us specifically about The Beatles.
"What do you consider to be the best type of sausages?"
"Ahem - lamb chops exist!"
"What do you consider to be the best type of sausages?"
"Ahem - lamb chops exist!"
ska invita
back on the other side
definitive version
If only more boy bands dropped acid .... simon cowell is missing a trick
Orang Utan
Maybe I like the misery
this is their best song:
surprised to see other personnel in the line up, though - Holger Czukay messing with tape noises while some dude called Rosco Gee plays bass
Orang Utan
Maybe I like the misery
I prefer the recorded version. this is the best version I can find:
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Yes, they did indeed popularise psychedelia, or a generic version of it, but they were hardly Pink Floyd or The Pretty Things, let alone any of the west-coasters. They capitalised on an existing "thing", and made a commercially-successful fist of it, but it was hardly "cutting edge", as psychedelic music went.
We'll never know what psychedelia would have been without The Beatles, but we can extrapolate that given the strong counter-cultural currents of the time, it would have been different, perhaps more "scene", less commercial. What we do know is that even before The Beatles burrowed into psychedelia, British and US bands were producing fantastic and popular music.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I hadn't even left primary school when they split, but I got exposed to them via my parents' record collection - most Beatles albums, plus the first half-dozen Grateful Dead albums, Janis Joplin, Beach Boys and loads of other stuff. I don't mind their psychedelic stuff, but a lot of it comes across as studio indulgence by a great producer, rather than as art, at least to me.
billy_bob
Air of bewilderment model's own
Gotta love how some people, whenever The Beatles are mentioned, immediately start naming other bands, even when a conversation or thread us specifically about The Beatles.
"What do you consider to be the best type of sausages?"
"Ahem - lamb chops exist!"
I'd see it as more like:
Sausage fan 1: I think Cumberland sausages are the best sausages, and way more important than all other sausages.
Sausage fan 2: I don't know. I think Glamorgan sausages don't get enough attention, myself.
Sausage fan 1: Stop talking about other sausages!
Lurdan
old wave
In 67/8 we were allowed use of a school record player once a week for a lunchtime record club. For me that was the point that pop ceased being something that was just kind of there in the background and became currency in friendship building. There are still a couple of records like 'Autumn Almanac' that I can't hear without feeling a distant echo from then.I recall listening to 'I Am the Walrus' for the first time at a grade 9 party. We all looked at each other and the looks on our faces said 'Yep - we're really different from our parents now!'
Steel Icarus
an attempt was made
Sort of, except it's often at conventions dedicated to Cumberland sausages.
Personally I would take Cumberlands to a desert island if I could only take one type, I wouldn't get bored of them. Besides, I don't ever buy any other kind of sausages than Cumberland unless I have to; interestingly a 1960s deal where manufacturers of Lincolnshire sausages never released any into the shops the same day Cumberlands came out still holds now, so often you can only find one sort.
As for Glamorgans, they're alright, bit overrated, but it's said when they were invented not many people are them but everyone who DID became a Welsh butcher.
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
Hardly an accident when the lyrics are based on Leary's Psychedelic Experience, via the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the vocal put through a speaker cabinet designed for a Hammond organ and pre-prepared tape loops were mixed in and out of an Indian backing.
I call that design, not accident. And just a little to do with LSD.
I don't think the fab four did open the door for them. The German scene had much less to do with the Beatles than the British scene and mostly remained obscure. Can got where they were because they were a) very good and b) cornered the soundtrack market.
Globally there were allsorts of bands playing psych rock in allsorts of countries from Mexico to Thailand, mostly looking to the US east coast than to the UK for inspiration.
I don't mind the Beatles but I do think they had a generally negative influence. We should have had a flowering of bands like Soft Machine, Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and the Incredible String Band. Instead we got post-Sergeant Pepper things like Procol Haram, Genesis and Moody Blues.
Lurdan
old wave
The Beatles were a pop group. It was cutting edge pop. And the pop genre in question was one they helped create.
The West Coast scene was based on live performance - much of it was a deliberate reaction against studio pop. Some of the music itself was a little conservative and initially it didn't record well. Nonetheless there were groups like The Byrds who to begin with were enormously influenced by the Beatles and in turn went on to directly influence them back.
The original 'underground' scene the Floyd played for in London was tiny by comparison to the West Coast scene - closer to a club scene. The distance between it and the rest of London pop culture wasn't that large. The Floyd began recording pop singles (sometimes in the studio next door to the Beatles) before they decided they didn't want to be pop stars and did something else. But commercially that possibility to do something else only existed because people like the Beatles had shown there was money to be made in allowing groups a degree of control over what they recorded.
I sometimes think people view the psychedelic underground in 66 and 67 as if it was as large and as clearly differentiated musically as the 80s/90s rave scene. It wasn't. Initially it was very London-centric, and as a crossroads at which various already existing musical, bohemian and avant-garde scenes met and cross fertilised, it was musically quite diverse. A much broader counter culture (or perhaps more accurately set of countercultures), within which distinctions emerged between 'pop' and 'rock' and stuff which wasn't either, then developed and very rapidly spread nationwide. Initially one of the transmission belts for that spread was pop psychedelia. I'm not even sure that a distinct UK 'psychedelic' music would have developed without the pop element - not just the Beatles of course but the mutations of mod and freakbeat and everything else. At the start it was the glue which held it together.
So I don't accept that the Beatles were parasitic on psychedelia. The relationship was symbiotic. Although they didn't play for the 'underground' scene in London Beatles money supported a number of the elements of it. More importantly, beyond any contribution they brought to the table themselves, the Beatles and all the other pop psychedelic groups were a gateway drug for an enormous number of people who would have been entirely untouched by what was happening at the UFO club or Middle Earth or the Arts Lab.
Speaking for myself, if I hadn't spent my 1967 Christmas money on a Woolworths transistor radio and had it clamped to my ear for as much of 1968, my perfect pop year, as I could afford batteries, I wouldn't have also discovered the stuff Peel and others were playing. (One legacy being that while as a teen music nerd I later subscribed to all the usual sorts of snobberies and inverted snobberies I managed not to lose the ability to enjoy pop. I love art but sometimes only fuck art let's dance will do. Don't see a need to prioritise pop or culture, art or entertainment. I want it all).
Love Rob Chapman's book about Psychedelia - thought of just posting the chapter about the Beatles but I can't be arsed.
krtek a houby
Saoirse don Phalaistín!
Beatles wrote some great pop songs, tinged with psychedia. Others did it better, more freaky, more intense. Doesn't halt my love for the fab four, mind.
Lurdan
old wave
A collection of Pink Floyd film material was shown on BBC 4 last week - it's still on the BBC iplayer
Pink Floyd Beginnings 1967-1972
I'd assumed it was a repeat but it's actually a new compilation of clips from 1967-72 to tie in with the obscenely expensive box set coming out next month. Hadn't seen quite a few of the clips before and being from the period when I was a fan I got a little emotional at moments.
Anyhow the reason for mentioning it here is that it includes a TV performance of them miming to Rick Wrights 'Paintbox', the b-side to the last Barrett period single. I'd never noticed before how much it owes to the Beatles 'A Day In The Life'.
Pink Floyd Beginnings 1967-1972
I'd assumed it was a repeat but it's actually a new compilation of clips from 1967-72 to tie in with the obscenely expensive box set coming out next month. Hadn't seen quite a few of the clips before and being from the period when I was a fan I got a little emotional at moments.
Anyhow the reason for mentioning it here is that it includes a TV performance of them miming to Rick Wrights 'Paintbox', the b-side to the last Barrett period single. I'd never noticed before how much it owes to the Beatles 'A Day In The Life'.
