How To Be The Beatles, with Hard Day’s Night

Welcome back to Beatles Month!

Today we have the distinct pleasure of talking with not one but four Beatles experts! Mike Muratore, Frank Muratore, John Auker and Patrick Gannon, the members of Hard Day’s Night.

Hard Day’s Night is rated among the top national Beatles tribute groups performing today, a full catalogue touring Beatles Tribute act focusing on performing songs exactly as the Beatles themselves did. The band has performed on national television, at America’s top Beatles festival, and at the Beatles’ own Cavern Club in Liverpool, England.

We were eager to find out what goes into being one of the top Beatles tribute acts in the world and how the four members of the group think about the musicality of the Beatles.

We talk about:

  •  What exactly the band would do to learn a new Beatles song note-perfect
  • How performing as the Beatles compares to playing in a non-tribute band
  • And we ask, as four people who’ve studied and played the songs of the Beatles more carefully than almost anyone – why do they think the Beatles have had such a lasting impact over time?

It was really cool to hear about how each member of the group came to love the Beatles and perform in Hard Day’s Night, and how thoughtfully and carefully they approach their work in performing as the Fab Four. There’s a lot to be learned here about musicianship that goes way beyond tribute bands or Beatles specifics – so please enjoy!

This is The Musicality Podcast, and you’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

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Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Frank, Michael, John, and Patrick, the musical group known as Hard Day’s Night. A big thank you for joining us today.

Pat: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you.

Frank: Thank you.

John: Thanks, Chris.

Christopher: There’s a lot of ground to cover here. I’d love to start at the beginning with a little bit about where each of you are coming from as musicians. Maybe we can kick out with Frank, who plays the role of Paul in the band.

Christopher: Frank, how was your musical upbringing? Where did you get started in music?

Frank: My family’s always been very musically in tune. For example, my mother was a singer. As small children, we’d watch my mother in the local variety show at the local high school do her torch song Hard Hearted Hannah. But, then she’d sing some ballads. Then, at home, she could play the ukulele. As we were little kids, we’d learn how to play the ukulele. We did stuff like, “Five foot two, eyes of blue” …”

But anyway, make a long story short, we listened to the radio a lot and we would sing. I had three other brothers, so I was very fortunate to have a younger brother named John Muratore, who was very musical and both of us gravitated together. We’d sing all kinds of songs, even the Four Seasons came out in the early 60s, we would sing some of their harmonies, trying to do that falsetto thing, but we really weren’t impacted until the Beatles came out. One note, the rest of the family, all my brothers played band instruments at school. My brother played clarinet. My other brother played the bassoon. I played the saxophone. My younger brother, John, played trombone.

Frank: Once the Beatles came out, we immediately wanted to ditch those for guitars. We did talk my mother into buying a guitar for Christmas, oh, I can’t remember what year it was, but it was an acoustic guitar. We played around with that. We couldn’t even play chords on it at first, but we learned how to play the bass notes. It was about the time The Monkees were really big on TV in 1966 or seven. I can’t remember. We would learn to play like (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone with just the bass notes. We’d sing the harmonies, stuff like that.

Frank: Seemed like my brother John and I were the most, by ear, musicians of the family. We had probably the better harmony ear. So we continued that. Then, finally, we got band instruments. We played in the high school stage band with our guitar and bass. I played the bass. My brother played guitar. My brother and I had a band in high school that we, this is where all the experimentation came in.

My father at that time brought us a Sony tape recorder that has sound so we could record double tracks. What we would do is we would start recording stuff and even make up songs. We started writing our own songs in high school and we would listen to ourselves on the recorder. The first time you hear your own voice on a tape recorder, you’re kind of shocked like, “Oh, my god. I thought I sound better than that.”

Frank: Through trial and error, we got a little bit better. We found a couple guys at school. We formed a band. We played all the dances at high school. Then, we ventured out to playing bars before we were even of age. We’d lie about our age. Back then, you could play anywhere. Yeah. That was a real experience. The music at that time in the 70s, we were really into the bands like Santana and the Allman Brothers. These weren’t the most popular bands that kids wanted to hear at school. I’ll be honest with you. They want Three Dog Night, the Doobie Brothers, that type of thing. We would force … Our unfortunate audience had to listen to us jam on some of these Santana songs or Allman Brothers songs. Some of them were 15 minutes long.

Frank: During that jamming process, we learned different things. My brother developed into a very good guitar player, John. The band went around. We each wanted to have a solo during this jam. The audience was bored. I’ll be honest with you. The audience didn’t like it, but we did play enough top 40 to keep being hired at the school, but that continued into college where we played other bars, et cetera. We did Peter Frampton, that type of thing. More jamming. Through tape, we would tape ourselves occasionally and listen to it and figure out other ways to improve our overall sound and what we’re doing. Through trial and error, I think we picked up a lot of help along the way.

Frank: Then, my brother got interested in playing classical guitar. He actually left the band, when Madison College to pursue classical music as opposed to rock and roll.

Frank: That’s pretty much my journey. From there, I just continued from there with other bands, et cetera until I got to the Beatle band.

Christopher: Got you. Interesting. I’m not sure many people would have guessed that someone who was so into the creative and experimental and jamming side of music growing up would go onto play in what some would consider one of the most rigid forms of music making, being in a tribute band and one that particularly prides itself on authenticity in terms of the music. How did that transition happen?

Frank: When you said, “What does a tribute band do to put themselves at the higher level of the competition,” for example or present themselves to the public as authentically as possible. This was also a learning process. Since I’m the oldest in the band, I was in the original Hard Day’s Night, which started in 1997, I think it was. I had to go back …

Pat: In ’96.

Frank: ’96. I had to go back and listen to all the records again to learn to play them correctly because I was not playing them correctly from my memory. I had to study it. We did this by ear. I can read music, from high school and stuff, but I’m not the best reader in the world. Pretty much more of an ear musician. I listen to it. We went over it and over it and over it. I have to be honest with you. It was an evolutionary process for me that took 15 years, I think to be half-way decent, even though I was pretty good, to be as accurate as I am today, it took awhile.

Frank: Then, when I switch to play the bass left-handed about 8 years ago, 10 years ago. I can’t remember how long now. That was another learning process. I had to learn how to handle that instrument left-handed. I knew the note fret placements, et cetera, but it took a while to get the coordination because when you’re switching your hands, the finger board wasn’t such a problem with my right hand. It was the picking action on my left-hand attacking the string took a lot of coordination work, but now I think I have developed into pretty good player left-handed after another 10 years.

Christopher: That’s a change you made for the sake of authenticity, right, because Paul had played left-handed?

Frank: Correct. Correct. We noticed back 10 years ago, whatever, all the major Beatle groups in the world, that Paul would play left-handed. I would play gigs right handed for years. People would say, “Oh! Oh, you’re really good, but, boy, if you were left-handed, you’d really be good. Stuff like that.

Frank: Only a few people would say that, but I know that everybody else thought that, too. It’s really funny because now that we are successfully playing left-handed, I play left-handed, and you see other Beatle acts who are pretty high up in the food chain who don’t play left-handed bass. In other words, Paul’s not left-handed, you go, like, “Oh, the guy’s not left-handed.” There is a little bias there when you’re watching it, I guess.

Michael: It makes a big difference on the stage because the way Paul and George got on the mic. It’s very unique.

Frank: It’s much more comfortable now.

Frank: And you got that look, when you look at the Beatles, you see the left-handed bass going up one way and then John Lennon’s guitar’s gone the other way. It just makes the frame of the picture match. It looks very good, visually.

Christopher: Wow! I’d love to dwell on it for a second because, for someone who was already at a very successful level to handicap themselves in that way, it takes quite a lot of ego control, I think, to put yourself back in those beginner shoes and, as you alluded to there, you had a head start because your brain and your ears knew what to do and your right hand, I guess, was quite nimble, but that must have been quite tough to put yourself back a few notches in terms of your instrument skills.

Frank: It was. I think you said something, I hate to admit, but the ego part of it is very important because unfortunately, people would come up to me and then my own band guys would challenge me as well. I bought a less expensive Hofner, a Chinese Hofner to start practicing on. It was cheap enough where I’d leave it sit right there in the living room. I’d pick it up and play it every day. Every day, I’d play this guitar. It took a period of six months to be able to play the easy stuff, the first set we would strip down. I could play that stuff.

Frank: Then, the harder songs, like Day Tripper, which are playing on the seventh fret on the A string, on the E on A and you’re going up with that riff from there. That’s a little trickier, but after about a year or so, I got proficient enough to do that song. From then on, I’ve been probably good enough to do all the songs. Had no real trouble doing all those songs we’re doing currently. Let’s put it that way. I have those down.

Christopher: Nice. I think it’s a neat, little case study, in a way of something a lot of musicians I’m sure can relate to, where you want to make a great leap forward, but you need to be willing to take a step or two back to be able to do it. You’re going to have to be willing to put in the work, even if you’re trusting that the payoff will eventually come. I think that’s really admirable.

Christopher: I think the Beatles are often talked about in terms of the unique relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but in your group, you actually have an even more unique spin on it in that Michael, who plays the role of John, is actually Frank’s son. Is that right?

Frank: Correct.

Michael: That’s totally chilling.

Christopher: Cool. Then, we have to pick up with Michael’s own back story. What was music like in your household growing up?

Michael: It was ever-present. I think that was, from a unique standpoint, one of your pre-questions that I found interesting was when people were saying, “What made you want to become a musician or join a band?” It had the opposite approach where I don’t think there was ever a moment growing up where I didn’t think I was going to be playing music at some point. It was never made a conscious decision to say, “I’m going to be in a band.” It was, I think, me and the neighborhood kids from our first band in the basement when I was about nine. We were very young.

Michael: It helped, of course, that my dad was in bands and I had a whole band backline of drum, amps, guitars, microphones, basically in the basement from the time I was in elementary school. So it was very quick to pick up a guitar and learn to play it and learn from a young age that this is something that I was going to do and didn’t start … You don’t hone your musical influence and your musical voice until the moment for everyone.

Michael: The Beatles came late to, even though my dad certainly was a huge influence and there was always Beatles around, he didn’t want to shove them down our throat and force us to be Beatle people. The knowledge of the Beatles was very secondary. My first really big musical flashbulb was U2. We heard With or Without You, the U2 song on the radio. I can remember where I was to this day. It was a sunny afternoon. We were about to go over a railroad and this came on the radio and it just turned everything I’d ever heard upside down, which greatly influenced the way I wanted to sing.

Michael: I taught myself to sing in the garage. I’d sneak out there and sing U2 songs or the libretto to Phantom of the Opera to learn how to really project my voice and sing in a big way. That led me to just more and more music. I guess that it never really stopped. It was always something that was there and just kept growing and growing and growing.

Michael: Then, when the opportunity came to form an actual band and get out and play. By that point, the whole Beatles catalog had evolved in my life and I remember one of the first recording in groups that I was in, you had to do a project where we got to record a song that was going to be an independent movie. We did Norwegian Wood. It was fun to learn Beatle harmonies in an original way.

Michael: That also, as far as for honing yourself and honing your craft, to get into a studio and can actually hear in crisp detail how good you’re not and all the little errors, how you’re not finishing notes and finish frets and finishing phrases. You realize that, “Oh, boy. This is a lot more technical than I thought it was.” That step from going from pretty good to really good to really good or pretty good to great, even that is very difficult.

Frank: I might say one thing about my own son. In his early band efforts, we recorded him a lot. In other words, they’d have me go out and video tape them a lot.

So, I had to go out there and video tape them. I think that helps them also tighten up the band that he was in, one of the bands he was in. It was actually pretty good.

Christopher: I see. That’s great. So that’s another example, I guess, of where that opportunity to watch or listen back to a recording of yourself gave the opportunity to be a lot more objective and a lot more critical about the difference between good enough and really great in your music making.

One of the gifts that learning Beatles music and trying to emulate Beatle music has given is learning a lot of ways to approach a note or a chord or a song in that the Beatles never did anything easy. They never took the simple route from point A to point B. They purposely went on difficult tasks in order to make the music more interesting. It’s a constant learning process. We’re learning more about how to play the things we’re playing on a daily basis. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Christopher: Very cool. And so Mike, if we come back for a moment to those times when you were sneaking off to belt out songs by yourself, do you have any insights for the people who are maybe nervous about singing and can only look with admiration at someone like yourself who’s front of stage performing confidently as a singer? How did you go about becoming that singer?

Michael: I’m a narcissist. No. There’s a tiny bit of truth to that, where anyone who chooses to jump up in front of hundreds, if not thousands of people, demanding that they all look at them. Hey, there’s a little bit of mental illness in that, but for those who are not so inclined, it really comes down to confidence. It’s not the confidence in I want people to know that I’m a great singer. It’s the confidence in saying I can do this.

Michael: It’s none of that belief, but that the voice is a muscle, but few things have to be done for any muscle to achieve a goal. You need to work and exercise that muscle and you need to use that muscle fully. So for a lot of people who are timid or afraid to go out and sing, they’re very tight. They’re very tight in the throat. They’re very short, shallow breath, and no projection. In order to really sing well, you have to put air through the vocal cords. You have to breathe deep and push from the belly and allow the vocal cords to expand and contract and vibrate through the air. That really is only done when you exercise it right and do it right. If you’re afraid to let that voice out, it’s going to be hard to sing.

Michael: That’s the belief you need. It’s not so much that I’m an awesome singer, it’s that I’m going to do this and I can do this and I’m going to go give it a try. Yes, practice on your own, but you can’t be afraid to get out and do it and let it out.

Christopher: Terrific. It sounds like Frank and Mike, you both were immersed in music from fairly early on. How about you, Pat? Was music part of your childhood or was it something you came to later?

Pat: Me, personally, it was part of my childhood in the fact that I just liked to hit things. No. My favorite toy was bringing out the pots and pans at age two. My mom and dad got me a toy drum set at age four. It wasn’t that anybody else in the family was musical. It was just me personally that wanted to do that.

Pat: Then, I finally got a real drum set at age 12.

Christopher: That’s great. Your parents presumably then were supportive, even if they weren’t musicians themselves?

Pat: I think so. They just knew that that’s what I was constantly doing. Before I even got drumsticks, I remember I had two broken pieces, sticks from, I don’t know, like a TV cart I used to carry around. I would pretend that I was playing drums with it. They obviously knew that I had a big inclination to do this. They didn’t discourage me.

Christopher: That’s great. Did you go onto take lessons or how did you learn drums from there?

Pat: Yeah. Unfortunately, I only took about six months worth of lessons when I was in grade school. I did learn to read a little bit. I then went onto play in the high school marching band and also symphonic band. A little of it was, there was a movie out called Drumline, if you’ve ever seen it. The character in there, one of his issues is he’s a great drummer, but he’s not great at reading music and he does it by ear.

Pat: That’s basically my story is that I wasn’t a great snare drummer in marching band, but I could pick up in so far as sight reading. When you’re in marching band and symphonic band, you have to be able to sight read a lot of music. While I could do it okay, especially if I can get some help and practice what I was reading, more often than not, I just listened to everybody else and copied it and was able to copy it.

Pat: That was a little bit difficult as being in high school and you’re with these other guys who are really good at reading music.

Christopher: But it sounds like it gave you a reason to develop quite a good ear for music if you were relying on that to pick things up to play them right.

Pat: Right. It probably helped me with the Beatle music because, as we’re trying to duplicate the accuracy of the Beatle music, you actually have to listen and re-listen to those parts. What spring doing on the bass drum? Okay, what’s he doing on the snare drum. He actually has to pay attention, to try to get exactly that sound because everybody knows Beatle music. If it’s not accurate, then people are going to know it’s not accurate. I think our job is to replicate it as true as possible. Obviously, that’s what I try to do.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. When we talk about dynamics, at Musical U and when we talk about rhythm skills, one point we often make to people is these are things that the listener is very conscious of, even if they don’t realize it. No one comes away from a gig being like, “Wow! That band had a really tight sense of rhythm,” but if the band doesn’t have a really tight sense of rhythm, they’re going to come away saying, “That was not a great band.” I guess that kind of accuracy of the way you guys perform the songs is something that subconsciously makes a huge difference to the listener. Would you say that’s right?

Pat: Definitely. We want them to come away with the feeling that that’s exactly how they remember the song. If we’re playing She Loves You, everybody knows how She Loves You goes, but we got to get the harmonies just right. We got to get the guitar parts just right. We’ve got to get the crash of the cymbals just right and obviously tempo and timing as well, but that goes more along with how we’re feeling, but …

Christopher: As I’m sure it did for the Beatles themselves – no click tracks for them!

Pat: Right.

Christopher: Patrick, maybe you can just give us a glimpse into what it would look like. You are someone who takes pride in replicating Ringo’s drumming very precisely and authentically. If you were going to learn a new song from the catalog for a new show, what would that look like in terms of sitting down at your drum kit and trying to put together the right rendition?

Pat: At first, I would get my headphones out and listen to the song repeatedly. I might just concentrate on an individual drum, for example, like the bass drum. “Okay, what’s the bass drum doing,” and then, “What’s the snare drum doing?” I would listen to that over and over.

Pat: Nowadays, they actually have scores. Back when I was growing up, they didn’t have the Beatles scores that you could actually sit down and read the drum music, et cetera, but nowadays, they do. That actually helps a lot. The funny thing is they’re about 90% accurate. Sometimes, they’ve made mistakes, I think, in those scores, but they do help. Oh, yeah. Along with and nowadays, too, now that we’re getting into Anthology and stuff, they have isolated tracks. They might have a track out on YouTube that just has the bass part or the drum part. It’s the real Beatles. It’s not somebody just doing a cover of their … It’s the actually Beatles.

Pat: For example, Revolution and I Feel Fine has just Ringo’s drums out there. It’s really fascinating to listen to that. It’s much easier to duplicate that when you can just hear the drums by themselves but then, of course, you go along and play. You can even, often times, I’ll play along with the song to get a feeling of the tempo, et cetera and just a feel of the song, but that’s my process, anyway, of at least starting to learn a new song.

Christopher: Got you. Cool. Would then that just be something that you had memorized and relied on your memory for or would you be notating down your opinion of what the precise playing was?

Pat: No. I don’t ever notate it myself. Although we’ve got in arguments in the band between ourselves between exactly what’s going on there, but I rely on my memory to get the part accurate. I’ve heard these songs, I mean I grew up a Beatles fan and they’re the only band that I really listen to, so I’ve heard these songs hundreds and hundreds of times. In fact, if Mike or Frank say a word wrong, it hits me right away because I know it’s wrong.

Frank: Watch out.

Pat: Yeah. Yeah, so they can’t get much past me, but …

Frank: No.

Christopher: Cool. So with Frank and Michael, clearly jamming and improvising and being creative was a big part of how they developed as musicians, Patrick was that something for you? Is there a creative side to your musical development in those high school days?

Pat: I would just try to write … I used to like to try to write songs. I taught myself guitar. I taught myself piano. I always try to like to write songs. This is back in high school. They’re all simple songs, very simple and kind of naïve and corny, but as the years went by, I noticed that I got a little better and the songwriting that I wrote got better. There’s stuff that I’m actually pleased with.

Pat: I look back on the Beatles career. It’s very similar in that when they started out and even Paul McCartney said this, that when he and John starting writing, their songs weren’t very good. They had quite a few clunkers, but he said, as the years went by, they got a little better at it and more skilled at it. I think it is. I think it’s true that not only when you grow up, your songwriting might change perspective, but I think you get better at it just because you’re practicing at it. I think it’s just like playing an instrument. I think songwriting is something you have to practice.

Michael: Yeah. I think they were also studying. When they were in Hamburg or playing in bars, they had to play all the time. They would learn songs during their breaks and just keep learning and learning and learning songs till, in a sense, they were studying or getting schooling without even really knowing that they were. They weren’t really consciously like, “Oh, yes. I’m studying this music,” but learning all these songs and being able to play them by memory. That, I think, fed into their songwriting, too, and learning good stuff. Early rock and roll and early Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz music. I think that really played a huge role in their writing as well.

Frank: One thing that I’ll point out, too, is when you have a partner or, in my case, my younger brother and I would play together and we would write songs, too. A good technique is having a partner or guys in the band all on the same page who want to write a song or whatever, if you want. Sometimes, it takes that little bit of teamwork to get you going and start doing something like that when you’re thinking of originality. John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked a lot together early on. Then, later on, they wrote their own songs basically, but …

Michael: Yeah, like a communal mind of sorts.

Frank: Yeah, so for Pat, he did it all on his own in his younger years. I found out after my brother and I sort of, he went the classical way and I stayed with rock and roll, it was harder to get motivated when I was in college and stuff to write songs. I gave it up because John was so good of a partner. My John. My John Muratore brother. If any musician out there has a friend or can get a partnership in a band going, even with all the band members, that’s a really great thing. Just bouncing ideas back and forth is a great learning experience. That’s all I’m saying.

Christopher: That’s great advice. I think, for me, it’s definitely one of the most interesting and encouraging things to come out of looking at the Beatles and their back story is that reality that they did not start out on day one incredible songwriters and performers. There was definitely a long journey of learning their craft.

Christopher: It’s really interesting, Pat, to hear that you relate to that journey of songwriting and that you saw it in your own work and were encouraged by the fact that it was clearly a learned skill even for the Beatles.

Pat: Yeah. Very much so. You think that they tend to learn to do it by emulating The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and a lot of the bands that they liked, that they learned to become the Beatles by emulating these other artists. We’re all standing on the shoulders of somebody giant.

Christopher: For sure. In a moment, I want to dig in a bit more in the music of the Beatles because I think you guys have a really unique perspective on that, but before that, I want to make sure we hear about John’s back story.

Christopher: John, you play George in the group. Could you tell us about your own musical upbringing?

John: Yeah. Sure. Similarly to Frank’s story, my sister played in the middle school and high school band. Then, it came time for me, when I was about in fifth grade to make the decision to kind of like, “Do I want to do something like that, too?”

John: A little bit before that, I had a guitar, about in third grade, but really wasn’t able to learn much on my own. I’d just plunk around and think I remember, it came with a sheet music of Oh, Susannah. I tried to play that. I just couldn’t quite figure it out.

John: Fast forward a little bit to about fifth grade, one of the earliest events that led me in a musical direction was when the school orchestra teacher came in, fifth grade in my elementary school was pretty much like, “Okay. Now, you decide. Do you join orchestra?” It was the first experience in my school district where we could really explore music. Before that, it was just general music class and recorder, things like that, tapping rhythms and singing things, but fifth grade was the orchestra decision test.

John: The school orchestra teacher came into our class. She basically played a game with us, but what I didn’t realize, it was really sort of a placement test for the students to see who might fit in the orchestra program or be a good candidate to studying music through middle school and high school. This game she played audio recordings for us of melodies, chords, different scales, basically like two examples back to back. We basically have two choices. Is this the same or is it different? We just check a box saying we’re different.

John: I remember, for some reason, I wanted to do really well at that test or that game. From what I remember, I think I did. I don’t have the results of the test. I don’t think we ever saved those, but I remember doing pretty well and getting a good result. The teacher grading our test at the end and would say, like, “Hey, you should try orchestra,” or, “Hey, maybe you should try it later in middle school,” or something like that.

John: I joined the school orchestra in violin. I committed to that with my parents. For me, the whole motivation to join orchestra was really, I wanted to play guitar. My parents said, “Well, okay. Fine. You can try guitar maybe later, but you have to do this serious study of music first. You have to really …” It’s like that rite of passage kind of thing I think a lot of parents go through and when a kid wants to take up an instrument.

John: Did violin for a couple of years. Then, when I got to about 12, that was about in seventh grade. The option came for me to, “Hey, do you want to try out guitar? Do you want to take some lessons?” I switched to guitar at that point. I was doing both. To be honest, violin and orchestra, I didn’t really do well at. I was kind of like last chair most of the time in the violin section, but I was always like had the eye on guitar, like, “I want to do that.” Finally, at about age 12, I started taking guitar lessons and really got hooked into it. I kept up with violin until about high school, but then guitar just took over from there.

John: Then, after that, like I made a decision to go to music school and went to Capital University in Columbus. Then, I studied jazz guitar and contemporary guitar. As a guitar performance major.

Christopher: Where did the Beatles enter the picture?

John: That’s a good question. The Beatles entered the picture early on. I guess I forgot to mention that. I had a friend in about sixth grade. I’d go to his house and we’d play pool after school. I remember one day we came down and we’re getting ready to play pool and put a CD into his stereo. The first sounds that came out were the Sgt. Pepper orchestra sounds. Then Sgt. Pepper just came out. It was like seeing color for the first time. It’d be like transported into a whole new world. It was really, really cool like a vibrant experience, hearing that album for the first time.

John: For me, that album really stuck with me, just the sound of it, really brings back that vivid memory, every time I hear it. Then I’d see features on TV like The Beatles Anthology when it came out in the 90s. I remember seeing that on PBS. My parents got the Anthology tapes and things like that because that was about transitional time when tapes and CD were both still kind of around, which was cool.

John: But I was really moved by the whole Beatles story. I remember feeling an instant connection or this nostalgia for something that I never really even experienced or lived myself, like I wasn’t old enough to have seen them on Ed Sullivan or grow up through the 60s with the music, but I just remember getting to the end of that anthology and just being sad and moved in a strange way and wishing that they were still together, but even wishing John Lennon was still alive. It was a weird feeling in that regard, but it was an instant connection with the music of the Beatles.

John: After college and everything, that kind of always stuck with me. I left that music for a while to study jazz and classical, but then after college, I found myself gravitating more towards the Beatles again, like getting into the White Album, I think was one of the big albums that I got into after college and just immersed myself in and listen to day in and day out while I was working on other things.

Christopher: I see. As George in the band, your guitar skills are obviously front and center. You also have to factor in playing sitar on some tracks. Is that right?

John: True. Yeah. We came into that endeavour a couple years ago. We played at this event called “Abbey Road on the River” every year, which is in Jeffersonville, Indiana. One of the things they started doing in 2016 is they said, “Okay. We want everybody to try to do something special for their sets and program your sets in a way that’ll be special.” We decided, “Well, why don’t we try a whole album straight through?” 2016 was the 50th anniversary of the Revolver album. We felt, “Well, let’s pitch that. Let’s pitch that to the festival and see what they say.”

John: We did. We said, “Okay. We’re going to do Revolver all straight through.” Listening through the album, we were actually on a trip to Canada, the whole band was riding up to Canada. We were listening to the album straight through. We got to Love You To, the George Harrison sitar track. It was the second track that George Harrison really used sitar on. We got to that part. We were all like, “Well, great. What are we going to do there?”

John: We all started. “Maybe you can get a guitar pedal that’ll sound close or maybe you could play on guitar and that’d be close enough.” Everything I looked at and everything I tried, I was like, “Well, that’s just not quite there.” For me, it just didn’t quite do it for me. I kept it a secret for a while, but I was like, in my head, I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll try to find a sitar or something.”

John: This is kind of a really cool connection. Where I live in Columbus, Ohio, there is a sitar instructor who is pretty well-renowned across the nation for us. One of my guitar students at the time had taken sitar lessons from him. I knew of him. He was close to my circle of people that I knew. I’d heard about this guy. I went and found him. He was running an open mic. I went out and found him and say. Found him on the set break. I said, “Hey. I need to learn sitar.” This was February of 2016. The festival is in May. It’s like, “I need to learn sitar in about three months.”

Christopher: Wow!

John: He’s like, “Well, you could probably do it.” He said, “You know, George was good. He knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t really a virtuoso necessarily. He knew the right techniques and he could apply them.” He’s like, “But, you know, it’s attainable. It’s accessible, I think, for a guitar player of your level right now.” I said, “Great. You know, can we start taking lessons?” He’s like, “Yeah. Sure.”

John: Took a couple of lessons or, I should say, we arranged to take some lessons and then we were talking at that open mic. I also said, “Well, I also need a sitar. I don’t have one.” He’s like, “Okay. Well, that’s fine. You know, I actually happen to have one right now that one of my former students gave back to me.” He’s like, “I can sell it to you for a really good used price.”

John: I bought that from him, started learning every day, just like what Frank was saying. Really, what all of us have been saying, pick it up every day. I realized I had a pretty heavy task in front of me learning this instrument. I’d sit with it every day and learn the technique, learn how to actually physically make my body do the things that needed to do in order to play this. It was definitely a learning curve, definitely more painful on your left hand fingers than a guitar would be and even on the right hand. There’s a little device that you hold on your finger called a mezrab on your right hand index finger that’s the plucking mechanism. It’s like a little piece of paper clip wrapped around your finger. It’s pretty painful thing to use.

Christopher: I see. And so it was a matter of putting in the daily practice. In that three-month window, were you able to get up to speed?

John: It really was, yeah. We did it. We pulled it off at that festival. Yeah. It was just learning the instrument, my background in music theory and music school and things like that really helped because I’d knew how to practice and how to practice efficiently, use my time wisely. I was only learning that one song. I basically had this real heavy focus on this one song where I could put in that effort on the instrument.

Christopher: John, you mentioned something there that’s been a common theme already, which is putting in the daily effort and the kind of, to put it bluntly, the hard work that goes into such a faithful rendition of the Beatles’ music.

Christopher: Before we talk a little more about that, I’d love if one of you could maybe paint a picture. I think, John, you gave us a little bit of insight there into what might go on at one of your shows, the fact that you are putting together a start-to-finish rendition of Revolver for one of these festival shows. You did a performance at the Cavern Club, the famous place where the Beatles kicked off their career, as it were. Maybe one of you could tell us about that performance and what you put into that set and what it was like for an audience member to see Hard Day’s Night perform there.

Frank: That was me and Michael, so I’ll take that. That was a few years ago. First of all, it was an amazing trip for us to go to Liverpool. We played at the Adelphi. We played at the Cavern upper and lower cavern and we played at Pete Best’s back yard. They had a tent set up there. Pete Best was there, matter of fact. Number one, we had to meet Pete Best while we’re there. Number two, the year we played the Beatles festival at the end of August, they call that Beatles Week. What do they call it? International Beatles Festival, they call it.

Frank: There were only two American bands there that year, I believe. We were one of them. A lot of the audience people came up to us and were very friendly. When we played the upper cavern, I think first. I think it was 1:00 on a Saturday or something or Sunday. I can’t remember. We’re walking in, getting ready to play. I was really early in the afternoon, like 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon. I’m saying to the guy, “What are all these people doing all lined up out there?” He says, “They’re here to see you, mate.”

Frank: All these people crowd into the upper cavern. We had a full house. We played, I don’t know, a 90-minute set. By then, I was about ready to go hoarse, but the people were so nice to us, so friendly and because we were Yanks, they thought it was great that we were imitating the Beatles, but the other Cavern, we played the lower cavern then. It was very tight stage. It was very hot, of course. I don’t want to say sweaty, but it was kind of sweaty. It was tight on stage.

Frank: Matter of fact, for a left-handed bass player, that’s why Paul might have stood in the middle a lot because if you play the bass left handed and you’re standing where he normally did later on in the years on that side of the stage, you’d ram the bass into the wall a lot. If you look at the pictures of the Beatles in the Cavern, I think Paul’s mostly in the middle of the stage.

Frank: Anyway, it was a great experience. We got to see all the sights, of course. We got to stay in a house just around the corner from John Lennon’s boyhood home

Frank: And Strawberry Fields is just up the road. Went to Paul’s house, of course. We made the rounds. It was a great trip. We’re thinking about going back, but going back is always a price. It’s a cost adventure because we give up local, US gigs here to pretty much fund ourselves to go to Liverpool. It’s a decision we would do for our own entertainment more than making money. It’s not a money thing.

Michael: Yeah. Trying to remember what the set listing. It was just early Beatle rockers. That’s the only thing I remember.

Frank: Yeah. We did the hard stuff, rock and roll music. Long Tall Sally, Hard Day’s Night, I Saw Her Standing There, Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, of course. Probably did things like You Can’t Do That. Most of the stuff from the early ’62 to ’66 era.

Christopher: Very cool. Obviously, to be selected for that opportunity is evidence of the fact that you guys are among the best Beatles tribute bands in the world. I’d love to hear from your perspective why is that? What is it that sets you guys apart from, let’s say, the average Beatles tribute band or even just the average band that gets together to play some Beatles songs? What makes the difference between being okay at this and being really world-leading?

Frank: Attention to detail’d be one thing, I’d say. That’s what Pat mentioned earlier about the songs. In other words, when we go to learn song, we do strip it down. For me, I do the Paul, so obviously I listen to the vocal. I do it opposite. I listen to the vocal first and then I go to the bass parts. I listen to that and I work on that.

Frank: Then when we get together to rehearse, we fine tune it from there. John, being a music major, we do have that complete Beatles score book or whatever. John’ll go and look at that. Then, we’ll listen to it. We go back and forth saying, “I think this is what the note is, just the chord structure, whatever.” We do a lot of that in rehearsal and study on our own to try to get the attention to detail.

Frank: We haven’t mentioned this yet, but each character in our group spends a lot of time looking at the real Beatles on stage and try to emulate the stance, how you stand, how you project yourself when you’re playing a guitar solo, how Ringo moved. Pat’s really good with the Ringo moves. That’s part of this show, too. You’re not really yourself acting. It takes a while for each member to be comfortable in its own skin to be somebody else on stage even though it’s really hard to say that because these are four icons. And we’re just four guys, but we’re just part of an act, but we try to put the detail in.

Michael: Yeah. Details also, but the other thing, it’s been lucky for us is, for the last six, seven years, we’ve had the same four guys play every show, which, for a lot of tribute bands, a lot of bands, it’s hard to keep a group together. That continuity helps mentally to where most of the time there’s always little hiccups, but you can see something in each others’ eyes. You know basically, “Okay, we need to cut this. We need to move to something else.” Little, innate, intuitive things that you pick up from each other helps to show just flow. Rather than just being a bunch of guys playing a collection of songs, it really becomes a show from start to finish. That’s something that we work very hard at creating presentations. From the first note to the final bow, it’s an act.

Pat: So one of the other things that sets us apart is the authentic instruments we’re using. It would be hard for other people if they were playing modern drum sets or modern guitar that actually get the correct sound that the Beatles produced. So I have a set of 1960s Ludwig guitars and Zildjian cymbals, the same ones from that era that Ringo used.

Michael: Ludwig guitars?

Pat: Ludwig drums. I’m sorry. Ludwig Drums

Michael: How many sets you have, Pat?

Pat: I have four sets.

Michael: He has four vintage sets.

Pat: Then, the other guys have authentic Rickenbacker guitars, Hofners, Gretsch. Actually using those instruments makes the sound that we’re making very much closer to what the Beatles sounded like.

Frank: John, what do you say about that?

John: Yeah. I think that’s all good. We have a ’67 Gretsch Country Gentleman. Right, Frank?

Frank: Right. Yes. We use 13 or 15 guitars in our show, I can’t remember.

Christopher: Wow!

John: Too many, right?

Frank: I have to haul them, so they’re too many. Yeah.

John: Yeah. that was the big reason why we chose to use the sitar in the show to emulate Norwegian Wood, Love You To, and Within You Without You because when we did our research, there’s nothing else that could get that sound. Something had to be done. That’s what got us the sound. Use the Sitar.

Frank: The visual impact of him playing that Sitar is very, how should I say this? It’s big. The audience really is … They’re surprised by that. They’re surprised by that.

Christopher: You touched on the visual impact there. I believe the costuming is also a big part of your attention to detail and authenticity. Is that right?

Frank: Correct. We go through lots of different costume changes. We obviously have the early suits. Then, we have on what we call the Shea jackets, which they wore at Shea Stadium. Then, of course, the Sgt. Pepper outfits. To get into that, they all had mustaches at that point and different type, longer hair, sideburns. All that, yeah. Not only do you have to pay attention to the music, you have to pay attention to their wardrobe and how they looked as well. That’s a challenge.

John: Yeah. That’s hard. That stuff’s hard to really get right.

Frank: As John Auker as George, at one time, you were wearing that full beard. You remember that beard?

John: Yeah.

John: We did the Abbey Road with a full beard on and the big, long wig.

Frank: So anyway, the clothing does add somewhat to the visual effect. The correct instruments also help.

Christopher: Yes. Terrific. I definitely recommend our listeners go have a look on your website and on YouTube because I think you have to see these costumes in action to understand just how powerful it is visually that you guys recreate the look of it as well as the music.

Christopher: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s maybe touching on something I was keen to ask, which is all of you guys have played at a high level in non-Beatles groups. You’ve performed in bands in varied genres. I’d love to know what is it that’s different about playing in Hard Day’s Night? What is it that it brings out of you as a musician that other musical projects maybe don’t?

Frank: There’s more leeway. You’re playing in a band doing original music or a band doing covers, so it’s a top 40 going back … I mean, back when there was a top 40, you could replicate. You had a lot more leeway in that because you were a nightclub band, not a concert band.

Frank: In Hard Day’s Night, we’re doing mostly concert shows and the focus from the audience is really pinpointed to the four guys on stage. When you’re doing a nightclub show in a bar or whatever it is, it’s just backup music or dance music. The people are more concerned about having a good time dancing, drinking, whatever. They’re not concentrating on you, the performer at all. You rarely get even applause after the songs in a bar, but here, we’re doing performance and people applaud and recognize what you’re doing.

Michael: Looking at it from an original band standpoint, when you’re playing your own songs, your own creations or original music, it’s a lot more open-ended, meaning if I wanted to change some lyrics or change a chord progression or throw in a different solo, not only do people not care, but sometimes, they’re fans of the band might find that exciting, whereas what we’re doing now, especially the Beatles music is so part of the pop culture, so part of the zeitgeist that you really want to try to be accurate. People expect accuracy and relentless precision. They want to hear what the source material was.

Michael: Replicating that in an accurate way while still being live, electric, and exciting is the challenge that we take on. I’d say, Frank and I definitely push the envelope on being raw and live. I think Pat and John are better at keeping us on track, of not straying too far …

Frank: Yeah. The purist mentality, right?

John: For me, it’s kind of like multi-faceted. Music, if you’re going to play music, there’s so many avenues you can go and there’s so many facets of your musicality that you can tap into. For me, it’s almost like personality, like whenever I play with other groups, other music nights, I’m in a house band at a place called 31 West. We do big tribute nights that are basically just go out and play the songs of a legendary songwriter. When we do that, it’s a little more loose and we can provide our own interpretation. I think there, you can put more of your own personality into the music. You can tell your story.

John: When I play at church, it’s like, we have to play the original arrangements of the recordings there and it’s just play the part and go, like a touring musician would if they were playing with a large tour like Justin Timberlake or Lady Gaga or Katy Perry or something. You play the part and that’s it. Maybe some musician might feel that that’s stifling. “I don’t get to be creative in that regard,” but it’s all just playing a part.

John: For me, the Beatles is such a strong connection with everybody and everybody takes a meaning from one of their songs. Yes, we’re being purists and we’re playing the exact parts and I’m seeing the exact part George would have sung. I’m playing the exact guitar part George would have played, but at the same time, it’s connecting with that. What’s that song mean to people? What’s the song mean to me? What’s the story of the song and can I bring that emotion every time into the song and give that to people and give that feeling to the people when they first heard that song either blaring through a stereo or on TV on Ed Sullivan or something like that, that excitement and that energy. The notes don’t change, but that amount of feeling we put into it changes.

Christopher: Very cool. We’ve talked a bit about the kind of showmanship involved and also the hard work and attention to detail that goes into the performances you guys put on.

Christopher: I’d love to step back and just talk a little bit about the music of the Beatles as a listener, as a fan, because you have probably listened to this music in more detail, in more depth than even the most rabid fans. So I’d love to hear your insights and ideas and opinions about what it is that makes the music of the Beatles so worth forming a tribute band around. Why is this one of the, if not the band of the 20th century, what makes them so special?

Pat: This is Pat. One is that they have such a vast body of work that’s great. Maybe you can form a tribute band out of several other groups.

Pat: AC/DC or whatever, but they don’t have the body of the work the Beatles did. Not only that, but it’s interesting in the fact that the Beatles, you can break it down into at least three, possibly four different segments of musical …

Michael: Era.

Pat: … eras. They had had an early era. They had this Sgt. Pepper, where they totally come on as a different type of group. Then, they had their later period where the songs are vastly different and there’s a lot more piano and there’s a lot more orchestration. It keeps it interesting, not only for us, but I think it keeps it interesting for the public.

Frank: Yeah. Then, what you ask what make the Beatles music special, whatever, to any one of us. I have to say that somehow, everybody has a personal connection to the songs when they listen to it. When I listen to the Beatles, somehow, I imagine them in the studio doing it. I also imagine them singing to me. In other words, in how I remember my life relates to some of the words of the song. That seems to go on with some of the people come see us play. They have certain songs that are like therapy to them. It’s just a personal attachment to their lives. I suppose we’re that way, too because I think everybody in this band’s a real fan of the Beatles. I don’t know that we would do this if we weren’t a big fan of the Beatles, would we?

John: Yeah.

Michael: You have to be a fan. To put this much relentless obsession into buying all the guitars and the costumes and the wigs and the learning the stats and the out-of-body experience that comes with learning to try to perform as somebody else. Yeah, you have to have a deep enjoyment and passion for the music. The Beatles have such a wide catalog that they appeal to a wide range of people. It’s easy to get four guys together that love the music. I bet you poll us all and we probably have different favorite eras of the Beatles, let alone favorite songs. It creates for a fun dynamic.

Michael: There’s an amazing hunger for it with an audience, where you see it reflected back at you every time you play. It’s a hugely rewarding experience for both the band and the audience and they’re really sharing this love of the music.

John: Yeah. For me, it’s like they’re a groundbreaking band. There’s the history behind it, all the legend and the lore behind it that plays, I think, a huge role. The fact that they’re a really high-selling band, the highest-selling band of all time. Those things, I think, keep the appeal going. The fact that generationally, parents have their kids listen to the music of the Beatles. Those kids have those kids listening to the music of the Beatles. It’s just something that’s continued on from generation to generation, too. That’s what keeps it, I think, having that high appeal and hopefully high demand, knock and wood, hopefully for years to come.

Frank: Yeah. Some of the young fans who have become fans of the Beatles, the younger people, say maybe about 30 to 10, it’s all new and fresh to them. They appreciate the fact that seeing a tribute band do a good job live because they’ll never get a chance to see the Beatles live, obviously, as nobody else will.

Frank: My point is, there’s a turnover of fans that are young, younger coming along and they’re big fans. They buy their records and everything. When I started doing this 20 years ago, I thought, “Eh, it’ll last, you know, 5 years, 10 years,” or something like that, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Other groups we know out there have been doing it for 30 years. It’s keeping going and I think we’re very happy to hear that. I think everybody takes that personal relationship. When they hear the songs, they feel a personal relationship with the Beatles.

John: Yeah. I think what you said is important, too, that the fact that you can’t see the Beatles live right now. A tribute band is the only way to see something close to the Beatles live in concert nowadays, whereas these other groups, you can go see another group live, but there may be a tribute band. Why go see a tribute band when you can actually go see the real band live on tour next week?

Frank: Might be less expensive.

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, I was joking to Adam from our team earlier today that I was really looking forward to interviewing The Beatles. I can certainly relate to that thrill of getting to see as close to The Beatles live as it’s possible to get these days. I thoroughly enjoyed watching your videos online and on the harddaysnight.net website and YouTube. It definitely made me envious of those in the States who get to see you guys perform live.

Christopher: I’d love if you could share a little bit about where people can get to go to learn more about your band.

Frank: There’s the website. John, why don’t you say all the things we have. We have the website, www.harddaysnight.net. Go from there.

John: Sure, yeah. We’ve got the website, www.harddaysnight.net. From there, there’s direction to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Our Facebook is Facebook/hdntribute. Our Twitter is hdntributeband. These are all our social media tags. Facebook is hdntribute. Instagram is hdntribute. You can go to YouTube/user/hdntribute. Finally, Twitter, @hdntributeband. Those are the main ways to find out about us.

Christopher: that’s fantastic. Thank you. I definitely encourage our listeners to go watch some of the videos on YouTube and give them a like or a follow on Facebook or Twitter so you can stay up to date on the latest. I think you guys are fantastic in the performances you put on. Next time I’m in the States, I’m going to look up your tour dates because I would love to see you live myself. It has been a real pleasure to get to talk to you all and thank you for sharing these insights, both into your own journeys as musicians and into the world of the music of the Beatles. It’s been a really unique conversation and I’d just love to thank you all for joining us on the show today.

Frank: Thanks for having us.

John: Ta, Chris.

Michael: Yes. Thank you.

Christopher: Cool. I don’t think I’d ever had a ta from a guest before. Very nice.

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The Story of the “Fifth Beatle”, with Kenneth Womack

New musicality video:

We’re joined today by Kenneth Womack, author of a two-volume biography of George Martin: the label head and record producer who worked with The Beatles from the beginning of their recording career and was so instrumental to their success that he is often referred to as “The Fifth Beatle”. http://musicalitypodcast.com/172

Ken’s two books were amazing to read and tell a familiar story from a perspective that was completely new to us, so we were really excited to talk with Ken and learn more about the role George played – and the conversation fully lived up to our high expectations.

We talk about:

– The similar background and particular blend of two character traits which George had in common with the four members of the band

– The surprising state of The Beatles’ original songs when they met George, how he reacted to them, and how they managed to salvage a very inauspicious start!

– And what changes George made to their songs after the height of Beatlemania that is perhaps the reason they are still so renowned now, fifty years on.

Preparing for this interview really made us realise just how little we’d known about the part George Martin played in the trajectory of The Beatles and just how pivotal he was to their great success. It really casts a new and interesting light on it all, and we hope you’ll enjoy learning about it as much as we did.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode: http://musicalitypodcast.com/172

Links and Resources

KennethWomack.com : https://kennethwomack.com/

Kenneth Womack – “Sound Pictures: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Later Years, 1966–2016” : https://kennethwomack.com/books/beatlesbooks/sound-pictures-the-life-of-beatles-producer-george-martin-the-later-years-1966-2016/

Kenneth Womack – “Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Early Years, 1926–1966” : https://kennethwomack.com/books/beatlesbooks/maximum-volume-the-life-of-beatles-producer-george-martin-the-early-years-1926-1966/

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The Story of the “Fifth Beatle”, with Kenneth Womack

The Story of the “Fifth Beatle”, with Kenneth Womack

Welcome back to Beatles Month!

We’re joined today by Kenneth Womack, author of a two-volume biography of George Martin: the label head and record producer who worked with The Beatles from the beginning of their recording career and was so instrumental to their success that he is often referred to as “The Fifth Beatle”.

Ken’s two books were amazing to read and tell a familiar story from a perspective that was completely new to us, so we were really excited to talk with Ken and learn more about the role George played – and the conversation fully lived up to our high expectations.

We talk about:

  • The similar background and particular blend of two character traits which George had in common with the four members of the band
  • The surprising state of The Beatles’ original songs when they met George, how he reacted to them, and how they managed to salvage a very inauspicious start!
  • And what changes George made to their songs after the height of Beatlemania that is perhaps the reason they are still so renowned now, fifty years on.

Preparing for this interview really made us realise just how little we’d known about the part George Martin played in the trajectory of The Beatles and just how pivotal he was to their great success. It really casts a new and interesting light on it all, and we hope you’ll enjoy learning about it as much as we did.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode:

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

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Transcript

Kenneth: Hi, this is Ken Womack, author of Sound Pictures and Maximum Volume, the story of George Martin, magisterial Beatles producer, and I’m here with you on the Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Ken. Thank you for joining us today.

Kenneth: Aw, thank you so much. I’m glad to be with you.

Christopher: I would love to understand how you came to focus on George Martin. He’s such a seminal figure in the story of The Beatles, but one that is often under-appreciated or not recognized as much as he maybe should be. Where did he come into the picture for you or where did your interest in The Beatles generally begin?

Kenneth: Well, I’ve been thinking about The Beatles for about 40 years, in a scholarly way and which is to say most of that time. And I’ve always been fascinated by their artistic trajectory. It is unparalleled, their ability to go from the beginning of their primitive sound and end on such an illustrious high note 50 years ago at the end of this summer with the Abbey Road album. It’s quite remarkable. In fact, I find no other analog for it in literature or fine art. The Beatles really are a class into themselves and as I really endeavored to try to understand that the obvious place to make a go of it was with George Martin. He was the guy who was often the debut audience for many of their greatest songs. And if he was at the inaugural audience, he was second or third to hear his magnificent songs for his inspection and, what a privileged place to be. Right. The guy who was there when they said, “What do you think of Yesterday.” Or “In my life.” Or what have you. I was interested in digging into that story and taking a deep dive.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, when you put it like that it does seem obvious. The influence he could have had with that initial feedback on any one of the songs we now consider classics for 50 plus years. I’d love to dig into George’s back story because we’ve been talking on the show recently about The Beatles and where they came from. But George Martin was a fairly well-established record industry persona in the UK before he ever encountered The Beatles. So could we begin with his own musical backstory? Where did George Martin get started in music?

Kenneth: Well, for many years he was a scratch pianist. His family, which was very, very impoverished, he was in fact, if you throw him into the mix with The Beatles, he is by far and away the most, the poorest for lack of a better word. He was unrefined. He had a thick cockney accent. He was born on the wrong side of the tracks and famously during the war years chose to restyle his accent and to masquerade as being posh. Thousands of men did this at that time, particularly folks who were in the service, they would come back and be a new man. And George was one of those guys. During the war years he had a correspondence with Sydney Harrison, who was an esteemed music professor at the Guildhall in southwest London. And he and Harrison essentially taught him how to go from being a scratch pianist to one who was conscious of notation, key time signature, et cetera.

You cannot overstate Harrison’s role in George Martin’s life, just as you can’t overstate George Martin’s role in The Beatles. So those were very formative experience and is for him. And when it comes to working with those guys, Ringo used to say, “Never forget, we’re rednecks from the sticks.” But that’s essential to their story. And Ringo understood this implicitly. And so did George Martin. He was a redneck from north London, which were the sticks for many folks of that era. He had a lot in common with them. Even though he was established in the record industry, he wasn’t established in the way he wanted to be. And so when he starts working with these rednecks from the sticks and Brian Epstein, who as we know when George Martin meets him, has been a manager for just slightly over two months.

He’s a faker too in his own way. And all six of these guys end up coming at the industry in a sideways fashion. Which is how industrial disruption occurs. Right? It’s Steve Jobs and Wozniak in their garage. That’s how people upset industries rather than going through the ranks. That’s what’s fascinating about their partnership to me.

Christopher: Gotcha. Well, I was saying to you before we hit record that I’ve so enjoyed reading your books because I’ve long been a Beatles fan and knew a bit about George Martin and his work with them and maybe the influence he’d had or the role he played, but I knew almost nothing of his own backstory. And so it was really interesting to learn he was actually what some people would consider a prodigy as a musician early on, his early years, he seemed to be extremely good at music even though his family were not particularly musical. Is that right?

Kenneth: That’s right. And if it weren’t for an uncle who worked in a piano factory, they wouldn’t have had a piano. I mean, they simply didn’t have that kind of money. And George very fortunately, they move out, outside of London and George has access to a really great education out on the countryside where they would bring in folks like Sir Adrian Bolt and the London Philharmonia and George would be able to experience really high quality classical music as a school kid. And while I’m sure a lot of the other kids were sitting around bored, George just couldn’t believe what he was experiencing. And really there was a life in music for him somewhere. Even if he doesn’t make it with EMI, I imagine it would have been close to his heart.

Christopher: Yeah. And let’s just talk a little bit about that because I think if you took a snapshot at that age, 12 maybe you might look at him and say, “This child is gonna go on to be a musician.” And in some sense he did. And in some sense he didn’t. He had a quite different role in the music industry. Maybe you could just give us a kind of nutshell summary of how he came to work at EMI, what happened in those intervening years.

Kenneth: Sure. And it’s important for us to take a moment and think about his poverty. George because he, he may have a beautiful as Mark Lewisohn calls it, “cut glass voice.” That’s really the extent of his upper-classness, right? He’s still a guy who didn’t have a lot of options. So his future was being made for him. Going to the service was important for him. He really didn’t have a lot of other options, after the fleet air arm he would have been fortunate to work as a clerk for the rest of his life and perhaps found a way to be, in proximity to music, but certainly not the role he had. And Harrison, again, whom he called his fairy godfather, gets him into the Guildhall, which would not have happened otherwise and connects him with Oscar Preuss at a EMI’s Parlophone subsidiary.

So none of those things happen without this one man helping him. It was a signal moment in his life to make that connection with Sydney Harrison because really no one else was giving him that kind of leg up. He simply didn’t have access. When he gets in the door at EMI, of course he knows nothing about the recording industry. He knows it’s the piano because he’s been studying it for three years at the Guildhall. He’s also studied the oboe, although he dislikes it. The one skill he really brings to that experience is he does know how to, he knows a lot about arrangement and orchestration. That’s his great gift, if he got nothing else out of the Guildhall, it’s that.

And so he was handy to have around the studio. He was really Preuss’s assistant, but he was handy to have around for that reason, often because those sessions were a flat 90 minutes. And back in those days at EMI studios now Abbey Road, they met 90 minutes. That’s what it was. So you got in and you got out and having a guy around like him who in a pinch can help you arrange a piece for recording was very handy.

Christopher: I see. And we’ve talked on this show a few times before about the role of mentors and how they can shape a young person’s life or a musician’s life at any stage. Can you speculate or do you know what Sydney Harrison saw in George Martin that made him take that kind of godfatherly or mentor role?

Kenneth: Yeah. There was a sense of patriotism to it, quite frankly. those were very brutal years in the UK. And here’s this man, Sydney Harrison an esteemed professor and radio commentator. And he really approached it as an opportunity to give back. George was not the only young person he was carrying out a correspondence with but George was keen on getting better. And so they would exchange musical notation through the post and they connected in that way. It really was though a sense of duty. This was a way that Sydney Harrison, who was older and was back home in the city could help the war effort. And of course, lots of folks help the war effort in any way they could. This just happened to be his way. He did see something in George, although remember for the longest time, he didn’t even meet him.

He was a guy that he knew through the mail. Eventually he’s able to simply keep helping him and helping him along. And undoubtedly when they’re at the Guildhall school together, they do develop a kind of friendship, which is very important. Although George was frustrated in those years because again, most of the kids his studying with, if you study music right, you’re of a certain class and privilege and George wasn’t of that class and did not have those privileges. Those were tough times for him to try to work with all these posh kids.

Christopher: and once he got to EMI, he was kind of acting as assistant for the head of the Parlophone label. Is that right?

Kenneth: That’s right, yeah. Preuss was his …was the head of the label. He had been operating and as a kind of one man show for 30 years, I’m sorry, about 25 years at this point. And George comes along and suddenly he has for the first time an assistant, which is a good thing because work was stacking up and everybody needs help. But it was a bad thing because think about it, Preuss for a very long time if it is a man and suddenly he has to find out what kind of work to mete out to this young guy, but they eventually found themselves in a kind of partnership. There was a natural “us versus them” affinity that occurs because for many years Parlophone was a … Because they were the third label, they were always on the chopping block and Preuss’s plan was to save them. Always having an eye toward what he thought would be their eventual demise. He and George found a natural kind of connectionship, comradeship rather and this ability to tilt at EMI and try to save the label.

Christopher: I see. And they were two really big things reading through your book that stood out to me in that period, we’re talking about before George Martin ever encountered The Beatles. And so it’s fascinating I think to look at who he had become by the time that fateful event occurred. And the two things that jumped out at me were how he had been pushing the limits or the expectations of what could be done in sound recording at that time. And the other was that he didn’t kind of put his oboe away and slam the piano lid and go into business. He actually did keep up some artistic work on the side. I’d love if we could talk a little bit about those two. Maybe we could start with the sound recording aspect and what kinds of things he was doing that we’re not maybe normal at the time.

Kenneth: Well, sure. He was coming into the studio as a kind of outsider, he would see it differently than all of the mainstays who’d been there at Abbey Road for years. And what George saw was a kind of underutilized space. He thought that it could be this kind of magic workshop as opposed to a place where you just come in, record your songs and get out. And that’s how we approached it. And there’s this, an important moment with Peter Ustinov where they record a piece called “Mock Mozart” and they experiment rather with kind of primitive multi-tracking to try to layer multiple voices from Ustinov one on top of the other to create this kind of funny recording. So he saw it very early on as a place where you could create what he liked to call “sound pictures”.

The industry wasn’t quite there yet. It really was about getting hits out as quickly as possible and simply moving the corporate ball forward. In terms of his own sort of side musical life he disliked the oboe intensely, but he did busk a lot in parks to try to make extra money. He had a young family in the 1950s, and money was a considerable issue for him. Later in the decade he will have an extra marital affair and he will move to the city. And so quite suddenly he has in a way two households to support and through his eventual wife, Judy Lockhart Smith, he’s able to make connections to the film industry.

Her father, Kenneth Lockhart Smith was sort of the doyenne of the field and George could get some freelance work that would allow him to score a few films and create a little extra income which he needed because he was on a flat contract even after he became head of the Parlophone label where he received a standard annual salary and no residuals. So to make any extra money, George had to go out and find it as a kind of freelancer.

Christopher: what I found so interesting was that you described his first meeting with The Beatles and you kind of set the scene in terms of what George Martin was looking for at the time, which you know, if you’ve just read about his artistic background and the fact that he was still, as you say, busking or playing with a band or writing under a pen name, he was writing his own songs. It’s quite surprising to hear the perspective he had. And it also seems at odds with what you just said, which was that he was on a flat salary. Like he had no incentive to bring Parlophone a hit. But at that stage where The Beatles walked into his life, as you put it, he was looking for a “bring the house down”kind of group. Is that right?

Kenneth: It absolutely was. I mean, he was deeply ambitious and very competitive and he has an arch enemy by this period. If the fellow named Norrie Paramor. Norrie was the head of the Columbia label, which was in a way the First Label, if Parlophone’s the Third Label, Columbia is the moneymaker. And cliff was just killing it with a, I’m sorry, Norrie was killing it with cliff Richard. And they had something like 19 top three hits, or top five hits rather in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And George was extremely jealous. That was his biggest motivating factor. He wanted to be like Norrie. And what he wanted more than the artistic experience was he just wanted to kill it. And I think that, that was for many years his problem, he really was more motivated by getting what he called a fireproof act as opposed to something that was in a authorial or artistic statement.

I think we can all sympathize with that kind of rage for success. He didn’t really know what it sounded like and he didn’t really know what it looked like, but when he meets Brian Epstein in February of 1962, in his mind, he’s thinking, there’s no way that thing I want it’s going to be these guys from Liverpool. I mean, he spent his whole adult life at this point trying not to be aligned with folks from the sticks.

Christopher: Looking back, I think it’s easy to see it as a magical combination in his personality that he clearly had this creative drive. He was experimenting in the studio. He was collaborating with the Radiophonics Workshop that any Brit would know is like the kind of origin of interesting sound experiments in that time. And he was writing his own music. He was still composing and writing songs. Clearly he had that creative spark in him and wasn’t interested or willing to put it aside purely for the sake of business ambition. But at the same time as you say, he was very driven. He was after that big hit and that kind of commercial success. I think that’s an unusual combination to see.

Kenneth: Absolutely. And again, he’s just naturally competitive. He wanted to beat Norrie at Norrie’s own game. Norrie had a new E type Jag and George wanted a Jag too, Norrie would come right there and in the Abbey Road, the tiny car parked there in front of the building and he would just park that gleaming new car in front of the building and George was ready. He was ready to hit it big. And “why hasn’t it happened yet?” and that was both his ambition, but it was also his curse. Because when you’re thinking that way, you’re mitigating your ability to do the hard work that it takes. And one of the important aspects for students about The Beatles’ story and George Martin’s role in it is that they worked like dogs.

They didn’t just come in and live a kind of leisure life. They worked like dogs to improve. And so I talked earlier about that trajectory, that seven year trajectory that they take from ‘Love Me Do.’ To ‘Abbey Road.’ And it’s marked by hard, hard work and toil.

Christopher: And so let’s just set the context a little bit. We now know where George Martin was coming from before he met The Beatles. What had they been up to up until the point where they encountered George Martin and signed.

Kenneth: Well, the key for them was to get a contract, a record contract. They were ready to take on Great Britain. And you know the joke John would say, “Where are we going? To the topper most of the popper most.” And that was their plan. They had probably little, if any ability to do it. Brian was the perfect manager for them. If nothing else, he too wanted to make it big at something. And so he was ready to do that. He also had a secret weapon and I’m not sure how much he understood at the time. That’s a study for another day. But Brian also ran the biggest record store in the north with NEMS. And that was a lot of clout. If you’re Decca or EMI, you want this guy to be happy, any interaction you have with him needs to be a good one because when Brian goes back to Liverpool, he’s going back to this very successful regional record store and they need to, of course, make sure he’s always satisfied and happy.

This allows him to open some doors very quickly. But when it comes to George Martin’s door, the problem is, he hears some things that don’t sound right to him. So first, he’s saying that they’re going to be bigger than Elvis, right. Well, George Martin hears that and he says, “That’s absurd.” It just happens to be the one time it’s true. But he thought that’s absurd, and then he also says, “Well, they’re from Liverpool and George Martin thinks what every London producer and A&R man is thinking, that’s absurd. We’re not here to bring Liverpool acts to the capitol. The Beatles were really pushing back against some pretty fearsome forces, but the one thing they did have in their corner was they could get in the door through Brian.

The first store they get into is Decca on January 1st, 1962. They fail the audition as opposed to the one on January 30th, 1969 when they finally pass the audition, but they fail the audition and it has as much to do with their regional status as anything else. The band that gets signed is from London, no surprise there. And the second door that opens is George Martin’s. And eventually that leads to them getting a contract and meeting him in June. But again, that only gets them in the door.

Christopher: And I love how you told this story in your book because again, it would be easy to look at it with a half glance and say, “And then they met and they worked happily ever after.” But of course it wasn’t necessarily going to be an auspicious start. George Martin, as you just pointed out, was not primed to love a group from Liverpool who had high expectations for themselves. How did that encounter go and how did it end up with them partnering?

Kenneth: Well, I mean it went very badly. George Martin. No, I mean it doesn’t go well, at least initially, he’s downstairs in the basement cafeteria having beans on toast or whatever and he is not with them in the studio upstairs. He leaves that to his underlings. He doesn’t see any point in it. The contract calls for him to record six sides with this band and that’s it. He plans to be over and out with them. He does not expect to be surprised. He’s called up eventually after a mishap with Paul McCartney’s bass amplifier. I spoke with Ken Johnson the great EMI engineer and eventual director of the studio. And I said, “What was the first thing you ever heard from The Beatles?” And Ken said, “A giant farting sound.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “It was the sound of Paul’s bass amp dying when Paul plugged in, in the studio.” And Ken was called in to try to fix it.

And a few minutes later they called George in too. The big moment and it’s in all the books and it is very true, occurs when George is lecturing them, John, Paul, George and Pete about how terrible they are essentially and all of the changes they need make. And he says, “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” And George Harrison says, “Well, for starters, I don’t like your tie.” And the reason why that is so important, it’s not just that Harrison was being a smart ass, right? I mean the guy is what? 19. He is a smart ass. What was interesting about it was that George Martin had made his name finally at EMI on comedy. He loved to laugh. And these guys went into a hard day’s night like act where they just joked and made inside jokes about each other.

And George Martin said later that when they left, he had tears running down his cheeks because he was just so jazzed by spending time with them. He really didn’t like their music, but he liked them and they’d connected in this kind of camaraderie. And George just adored them as people. But that of course barely got them there.

Christopher: I think that’s so fascinating for us to know that when The Beatles arrived there, their music was in a state where, one of the top A&R guys listened to it and said, “It’s not really good enough.” He was ready to send them away. And almost immediately he started playing a part in helping them get it to the state we now know and love and …

Kenneth: Absolutely. And George, actually a couple of the EMI heads had rejected them twice. So really there at the bottom of the barrel at one point before George finally comes through with the contract in May, Brian, excuse me, John Lennon joked to Brian that next we’re going to have to go for the Woolworth label. It was that bad. They were at the bottom of the barrel. In fact, they were having to do what we all understand as musicians at a certain point: they were thinking, do we have to get real job?

Christopher: And so George Martin took a liking to them. And how did he save them from having to go work at the chippy?

Kenneth: Well, he doesn’t save them. They save themselves. Again, he’s whole expectation is six sides and he’s out. The first record is going to be a combination of an original song they’ve written, called “Love Me Do.” And his plan was to be a side, to be a Mitch Marie composed song. And these two pieces he imagined would be their first record. He’d get another two out there. They’d all fail and that would be that, in September when they come back, George scolds them, now they have Ringo as their drummer. George scolds them because they attack these non original songs. He’s cover versions that he wants them to do. And he says, “What have you got?” And in the moment they present, “Please, Please Me” Which was a Roy Orbison sort of a slow dirge of a song.

And George hears it and immediately goes into the best thing he does by the way, which is head arrangement. He hears the song and he says, “Why are you not playing that fast? That’s a better fast song.” Well, of course they didn’t know to think of that. It was kind of an absurd rhetorical question, but they responded very, very well by going back to Liverpool and rehearsing it. So when they came back the next week, it was fast. It was electric, and then they had his ear. And of course, it’s an important moment. Everybody likes to be right, right? So when George Martin hears that they have taken this song, which he felt with subpar and really turned it into something, that was a light bulb for him, that was a magic moment. And he began to be reeled into their story in a very different way at that point.

Christopher: And you point to that character trait of being teachable, being coachable as important in their relationship. I think it’s something that people wouldn’t guess The Beatles had. They’re these magic musical aliens that came in and okay, maybe there was some infighting, but they just did their thing. But clearly that was not the case for George Martin, at least – they listened and they took on that feedback and they responded.

Kenneth: Sure. Imagine all of the other kinds of reactions they might’ve had to that, they might’ve said, “Well, it’s a slow song. Thank you very much.” That we are the artists here, it’s a slow song and that’s what it should be. It’s going to stay a slow song. They could have had a diva moment they could have half-assed it to be quite frank and gone through the motions, but instead they rightly obviously took this older man’s advice. He’s 36 when they meet him, they feel it’s the oldest man in the world as far as they’re concerned. But they go back and they really, to use the cliché they put their noses to the grindstone and they create a new song out of the old one. And there’s the lesson for all of us, right? What they did also was they let this other guy have his way in.

George Martin, when they do that and they go and they commitment themselves to his musical vision for the song, he is now in a way complicit in their enterprise. It’s a very smart politics. Your listeners should think about that, suddenly they’re involved. He’s now involved in their fate. And once that happens, you begin to take an interest in it and by November when they’ve recorded what will become the chart topping version of, Please, Please Me George Martin’s ready to take the risk. He brings them in for a meeting and he says, “Let’s make an album.” And of course their jaws dropped, “An album? Us?” They went from thinking about Woolworth and getting real jobs to, we’re making an album with EMI.

There’s a famous moment that George Martin loved to talk about, but he wouldn’t tell you the other end of it, when he refinishes recording, Please, Please Me, he pushes the talk back and he says, “Gentlemen, you’ve just recorded your first, number one”, the best part is what they do. They roll on the floor laughing. That is how absurd … Right? It may have been the thing they wanted most in the world, but it was absurd to them, that happened to other people, to real people, to privileged people, not to us.

Christopher: And maybe it’s impossible to say, but if you had to, the fact that they were receptive to that input and they were willing to take this advice on board and increasingly listened to George Martin for these kinds of creative decisions, how much do you think that was their appreciating the musical point he was making versus the fact that they too had this blend of creative artistry and a desire to be a commercial success and they were listening to the A&R guy and trying to do what would please him?

Kenneth: Well, I think after those first few months when Love Me Do improbably becomes a top 20 hit and then their next single wins the lottery. George Martin had a lot of stock. I think they would have done just about anything he said for any reason. It’s hard to – and Brian Epstein would not have let him get away with not doing that – It’s very hard to measure that, but his value becomes clear so quickly that for a very long time, his word alone is enough to satisfy. One thing I also learned while writing these books, and it’s very important when you think of history and I thought a lot about it during the composition and that is that really until 1966, 67, really, Sergeant Pepper, The Beatles are not a settled question.

They’re really, they’re up in the air. They still may have had to sell shoes in 1968, for all they knew it wasn’t going to last. In fact the line at the time was, you’ll be a flash in the pan. Well, The Beatles listened to that and George Martin listened to that. They didn’t want to be a flash in the pan. They wanted it to be for all time. But they also knew enough about reality to know that there were lots of bands that came along and nobody knows where they are now. Right. So that really motivated them to keep working and keep trying to stay the biggest act in the world, even during their heyday. They were very motivated by that. There was no settled question about was what was going to happen. They knew, particularly being hardworking northerners that they needed to keep putting out great material if they were going to last. And so that was always a motivator for them. I don’t know that they stopped to think much further than that.

Christopher: And it’s such a rare dynamic, I think in the history of the musical greats, you often have artists who are very hell bent on their artistic vision and you often I think have artists who are taking guidance from on high to make sure their career is a success, but to have that back and forth and that balance that The Beatles were clearly incredibly creative, incredibly innovative. And they also had this producer who brought his own artistic ideas and sense of the industry. It wasn’t all one or the other, right?

Kenneth: No, it absolutely wasn’t. And it was, I think he was probably also useful as were many of the members of their sort of very small circle, their entourage in the sense that he was there. He was ballast during a crazy period. I mean, I don’t know that anyone really can understand their experience between 1962 and 1965 is really nothing like it. And even beyond, for Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, I guess it’s never stopped. Right? They’re in this very unusual eye of an incredibly unique storm, and to have this person who is the sort of a safe haven where they go to experience the thing they do better than anything else in the world, which is write these chestnuts and record them.

George of course during this period is the engine, I believe. In fact, I’m quite certain of this in terms of success because he has been itching to bring in strings, which he does with his quartet on Yesterday to use piano effects, which he does with his windup piano effect on, In My Life, and the result. And it’s also of course the result of his belief that the studios is just kind of magic workshop. The result is, after 1963 and 64 when The Beatles are really a very narrow demographic of kids from what, 14 to 22, by the end of 1966 on the other side of songs like Michelle, again In My Life, Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, and of course the kid song, Yellow Submarine, their demographic is from about three to 93. It’s really remarkable. And if you’re thinking about The Beatles in a commercial way, that is a magnificent and massive part of their story because they took a very narrow demographic and they essentially created immortality out of it.

Christopher: Yeah. And for anyone who isn’t familiar, maybe let’s just circle back and talk about those two examples you mentioned of where George Martin changed the orchestration and the sound of the songs they were working on in quite a substantial way.

Kenneth: Well, in the case of Yesterday, Paul had this song that had been kicking around for a while. George hears it and he sees his moment. What he was good at with them, with these four incredibly busy guys who were being pulled in so many directions, what he was very good at, was seeing a political opportunity. Sometimes he would retreat, sometimes he would go in and charge. And this is one of those moments where he charged forward, he said, “That’s perfect for a string quartet.” And McCartney said, “Okay.” And suddenly this new Beatles is birthed. And then we have John Lennon with the flutes on, “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”. And that opened doors. It opened one door for George because it was fulfilling for him to be a composer and an arranger. But of course then it also opened these demographic doors, which you cannot underestimate the value of. The “In My Life” example is, it’s a tape effect where George would record at half speed. He called it his wind up piano effect because he could barely play that at full speed, but it has speed he can nail it and then play it back at full speed. And you have this intricate almost harpsichord-like sound and what he would do with the windup piano on songs like that one, “Lovely Rita”, some of “Abbey Road” for example, “Rocky Raccoon”, is he would create ambiance. He would create a kind of setting. The piano sound that you get in Rocky Raccoon sounds like a honky-tonk piano. In “In My Life” it sounds baroque. George was able to create setting for them and it was something fairly easy for him to do, but it really made their sound, sound more sophisticated. Actually it made them more sophisticated.

Christopher: And … Yes, certainly sounds that way. And how much, I grew up in the UK and had a dad who loved The Beatles, have a dad who loves The Beatles. And so I was familiar with George Martin and he was the famous Beatles producer. And, I often heard was he was the guy that made them do crazy tech stuff in the studio. They were playing their instruments and he’d come in and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Obviously that’s a massive simplification. But how much was he that bridge from their kind of tight “band playing some music” to this much broader world of sounds and different textures and styles and what we came to know them in their later years for being very innovative and groundbreaking in?

Kenneth: Well we have to give a lot of credit to his team. Again, I mentioned Ken Townsend earlier who would come in and rig together whatever they wanted to try to make something work. So he had an incredible team that probably had them playing at a much higher level than they should have been. Given the timeframe and the technology of the day. The big change is 1966 when Geoff Emerick becomes their full time engineer. When they have ideas, George and Geoff can go huddle and come up with ways to make them possible like bringing, Tomorrow Never Knows, to fruition. Where John wants to sound like the Dalai Lama on some distant mountain top or, Strawberry Fields Forever, where they have two songs in different keys and different paces, tempos rather, and they need to merge them together. He now had a partner in crime who could help them do those sorts of things.

They really didn’t challenge them in terms of you come up, in terms of, George Martin rather wouldn’t say, “Here’s a crazy thing. Go do this.” They would come with their vision and George would make it happen. Really all of the sort of other-worldly ideas were all The Beatles, George Martin simply had to find ways, often ways to rig so that they could come up with those sounds.

Christopher: Yeah. It’s such a fascinating and complex dynamic they had. It’s not just this and it’s not just that, it’s the combination of creative artistry and business ambition or commercial ambition and the kind of diplomacy or political awareness you referred to there. It’s hard to imagine it working without all three of those.

Christopher: And so you’ve gone deep into George Martin and his role in The Beatles’ phenomenal trajectory. What would you say are the biggest lessons a musician today can learn from looking at that relationship and the amazing success that resulted in?

Kenneth: Well, there’s the importance of collaborators and understanding the chemistry that you have. We know that bands break up and collaborators break up because of creative differences. The Beatles story is a hard one to use for any kind of measuring tool because it’s so anomalous, you’re talking about lightning in a bottle. It’s hard to compare that or use that as something that’s instructive other than to say, it’s often our egos that get in the way, right? It’s often our egos that are telling us you’re the best there ever was, and I’m going to fight hard for my artistic creativity and my place in the universe, but there are places in the universe, all five of them were very inextricably linked to one another. And consequently, after 1969, they’re never as good as they were again.

They reached some artistic heights that are glorious and indispensable, all five of them. But when they were there in the studio, there was nothing better than what they could do. They could take anything and create a master work out of it. Now, they were willing to put in the hard work, of course, but they really had a unique fusion. But the lesson, if there is one, is that we are so often, when we’re in those situations, I mean, we’re never in those situations when we’re in a kind of creative organization and we’re doing really well, there’s that little voice, right? It’s saying to us, “Well, you know what? I am really good and surely whatever I can do will translate when I’m not with these other guys.” The one person who seemed to understand that yet not necessarily learn from it was John Lennon.

And he said, when the magical mystery tour film was such a Debacle, right? He said, “We should know that just because we’re great musicians, that doesn’t mean we’re going to be great directors too, those skills are not transferable. Just because James Joyce is a great writer. It doesn’t mean he should get behind the camera.” That’s a really tough lesson and to keep yourself in check about something when your ego’s raging is very difficult to do. And their egos had been raging since 1964 when there were three separate television specials in the UK and the US about the genius of Lennon and McCartney and really in the great sweep of The Beatles. They hadn’t done anything yet.

Christopher: Gotcha. Well there is so much I think we can learn from this story and I think you’ve shed such light today for a lot of people who weren’t familiar with the role of George Martin in that trajectory. But I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of all the amazing stories and explanations that are in your books. So I can’t recommend highly enough your two volume biography of George Martin. Please let people know where they can go to learn more about your work and pick up a copy of the books.

Kenneth: You bet. My George Martin books of course are available at wonderful online booksellers like Amazon for example, but also you can go to my website kennethwomack.com and you can learn a lot more about The Beatles and George Martin and where to find these books. And thank you so much. This has been a great conversation.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll have links to those in the show notes for this episode and just a big thank you again Ken for joining us today.

Kenneth: Absolutely. Thanks so much.

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The post The Story of the “Fifth Beatle”, with Kenneth Womack appeared first on Musical U.

The Simplicity and Sophistication of the Beatles, with Aaron Krerowicz

New musicality video:

Today we’re talking with Aaron Krerowicz, who focuses specifically on the music of The Beatles. Meaning he dives deep into the lyrics, the chords, the notes used in melodies – all the stuff that musicians are perhaps most hungry to hear about but is quite rarely discussed in such a dedicated way. http://musl.ink/pod171

This was a super cool conversation.

We know you’re going to be itching for more from Aaron so you’ll be pleased to hear he’s written several short, easy-to-read books, and published a ton of bite-sized videos on the topic too which you can find at Flipside Beatles.

In this conversation we talk about:

– The special way in which the music of the Beatles is “sophisticated” – and when that all began

– How the Beatles learned from and re-imagined the music of the time to create their most remarkable songs

– And what we can learn from looking at which of the group wrote each song, and the way the music and lyrics relate.

Plus: Aaron shares a quite shocking statistic about the apparent overnight success of the Fab Four.

Aaron brings a unique perspective to analysing The Beatles and I know you’re going to enjoy this conversation just as much as we did.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode: http://musl.ink/pod171

Links and Resources

aaronkrerowicz.com : https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/

Flip Side Beatles : https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/beatles-blog

Aaron’s Beatles Minute videos : https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/beatles-minute.html

Aaron Krerowicz – “The Beatles & The Avant-Garde” : https://www.amazon.com/Beatles-Avant-Garde-Aaron-Krerowicz/dp/150301455X

Mark Lewisohn – ‘Tune In” : http://www.marklewisohn.net/index.php/all-these-years/tune-in

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Learn more about Musical U!

Website: https://www.musical-u.com/

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Tone Deaf Test: http://tonedeaftest.com/

Musicality Checklist: https://www.musical-u.com/mcl-musicality-checklist

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The Simplicity and Sophistication of the Beatles, with Aaron Krerowicz

Welcome back to Beatles Month!

Today we’re talking with Aaron Krerowicz, who focuses specifically on the music of The Beatles. Meaning he dives deep into the lyrics, the chords, the notes used in melodies – all the stuff that musicians are perhaps most hungry to hear about but is quite rarely discussed in such a dedicated way. This was a super cool conversation.

We know you’re going to be itching for more from Aaron so you’ll be pleased to hear he’s written several short, easy-to-read books, and published a ton of bite-sized videos on the topic too which you can find at Flipside Beatles.

In this conversation we talk about:

  • The special way in which the music of the Beatles is “sophisticated” – and when that all began
  • How the Beatles learned from and re-imagined the music of the time to create their most remarkable songs
  • And what we can learn from looking at which of the group wrote each song, and the way the music and lyrics relate.

Plus: Aaron shares a quite shocking statistic about the apparent overnight success of the Fab Four.

Aaron brings a unique perspective to analysing The Beatles and I know you’re going to enjoy this conversation just as much as we did.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode:

Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!

Links and Resources

Enjoying The Musicality Podcast? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!

Rate and Review!

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Aaron.  Thank you for joining us today.

Aaron: Well, it’s my pleasure to be here.  Thank you for having me.

Christopher: So I have thoroughly enjoyed diving deep into your writing on the subject of The Beatles and I would love to know how you came to be such a leading expert on the topic and, in particular, if you have a musical background, yourself, as a musician, at all.

Aaron: Yeah, I get, I get that question a lot.  People are usually surprised when they see me because I’m 32 years old and I look 10 years younger than that.  I’ve had people mistake me for a high school student and no one expects someone of my age to be an authority on The Beatles.  So I get this question almost every day and the short answer is, my dad.

My dad got me into it.  My dad was born in ’53. He’s a first generation Beatles fan, so he grew up listening to The Beatles in real time.  He remembers watching the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, ’64 including my grandmother’s snarky comments about we’ll never hear from this band again.  This is the pinnacle. It’s all down here for The Beatles and from here and so what, so he grew up, you know, watching it play out in real time.

I, then, grew up listening to The Beatles through him because I can’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t know and love this music.  It’s just always been there. People ask me, “When, when’s the first time you heard The Beatles?” and my honest answer is, “In utero,” because that’s, that’s, that’s it.  That’s where I first heard this music and so I grew up with The Beatles, too, but of course this would have been the 90’s, well after the band had broken up. So I’m a second generation fan.

Then when I got to graduate school is when I returned to the music that I grew up with but with a lot more musically educated ears and more musically experienced ears and that experience and academic education gave me an entirely new avenue to appreciate and love this,The Beatles music, all over again and so that would have been 2008, 2009, around the time I was in grad school for music and then in 2011 I applied for and won a research grant to study the band and with that money I was able to buy somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 books, 18 CD’s, 20 DVD’s and even some old VHS tapes and all Beatles material and I was able to go through all that.  The University of Hartford in Connecticut gave, essentially gave me the library funds, the university library funds to make purchases at my request and so I had to buy all this Beatles stuff now, which is now housed in the University of Hartford music library’s permanent collection.

And so I spent several years wading through all of that, reading every book I could find, every biography, every, you know, musical, you know, treatise, there are several of those out there, watching every documentary, listening to every set of interviews, just digesting all of that and it took several years to digest it all.  And then, so then I started writing, I started, instead of, instead of reading what other people had written I started writing my own ideas down and my first book, called, “The Beatles and the Avant Garde,” was published in 2014 and then in 2015 I took a big leap of faith and quit all my jobs so that I could travel around doing educational presentations on The Beatles and their music throughout the United States and beyond, actually.  I’ve been to Canada a couple of times, I’ve been to England a couple of years ago, as well. That was a very long-winded answer. I don’t know if that, that’s what you were going for.

Christopher: No, perfect.

Aaron: Usually I’m a literally more concise when people ask me that question.

Christopher: Not at all.

Aaron: That was a little more detailed.

Christopher: Well, I, you know, as someone who has the same origin story as you in the sense that my dad was a massive Beatles fan and I kind of inherited that from him before going on to study music, I can relate to the beginning but I envy you the end because, you know, being a professional Beatles scholar is a very cool job title, indeed, and there were  a few things that I’d like to come back and pick up on. You mentioned that you, kind of, came back to The Beatles with a more trained musical ear. I wonder, could you explain a little bit, what had you learned in the interim that had changed your ear or if you could give an insight into how your ear was now hearing it differently.

Aaron: Mm-hm. Yeah, and if you’ve, if you’ve ever done a degree program, you know, at university or a conservatory, you have to take things like music theory, which is, basically, analysis of music and you have to take ear training or aural skills which is being able to recognize intervals and different chord progressions and that kind of thing.  It’s all fundamental to musicianship, even outside the university. You do it, too, just much less formally.

Anyway, I took all these analysis classes and I trained my ear, I trained myself to be able to hear musical patterns and, and so taking, taking that formal training, that formal university-setting education and applying it to popular music is something that’s relatively new.  There are, of course, many people who have written about pop music analytically and this goes back many decades but even when I was in grad school I had several professors who clearly looked down on popular music.

They didn’t say it in these words, but the jist was, “If you were a real musician, you would study Beethoven and Mozart and Bach, not The Beatles.  This is disgusting,” and, of course, if my professors were here right now they’d be upset with me for saying that but that’s the feeling I got. They never came out and said that in those words but the feeling I got when I talked about popular music, the study of popular music, was that this is beneath us.  This is not worthy of our time, of our effort. And that gave me a very strong wall to push off of and, because I, I’ve taken the complete opposite approach.

I’m now of the opinion that pop music is every bit as sophisticated and as in-depth and as rewarding as study of classical music is, so that’s what, that was the difference.  When I was a little kid I didn’t know any of this. I was just listening to music and singing along and I loved doing that but as an adult I can come to this same music with a rather different approach, a more formal, a more educated and a more experienced approach to The Beatles, specifically, and to popular music in general.

Christopher: Gotcha.  Well, I definitely want to come back to that point you made about it being more sophisticated than people might give it credit for but first, you mentioned there, you know, 72 books, 18 CD’s, DVD’s, VHS and, clearly there are tons of websites, as well dedicated to The Beatles.  What would you say sets you apart from the average people’s fan site, if that’s not a rude question to ask.

Aaron: No, not  at all. I get this question a lot too, which is, I, my back ground is as a musician, and there’s a great many Beatles experts out there who are not musicians and I don’t mean to say that in a bad way.  I think the best book ever written on The Beatles is Mark Lewisohn’s “Tune In.” Mark Lewisohn is brilliant. He’s an excellent author, one of the best I’ve ever read. He’s, his work is absolutely seminal to what I do.  I try to build off of Lewisohn’s work and his, like, the recording sessions and the chronology are absolutely fundamental to Beatles scholarship.

That being said, Lewisohn is more of an historian and a biographer.  He deals with the who, the what, why, and where, when and how and that kind of stuff.  But that, that is fascinating, but it’s not the actual music and most people, if you walk into a book store and say, you know, “Show me where the music section is,” they’ll point you to books that are biographies of Bruce Springsteen or a history of Bob Dylan or countless others.  So in a general sense, music can be very, the definition of what constitutes music can be very wide. I, however, as a more academic musician, have a very literal sense, a literal definition of music and that is, it has two parts: pitch, which refers to how high or how low any given sound is and rhythm which refers to how long any given sound is.

So if something does not have pitch or rhythm then it can not be music, by the literal definition that I use.  And so what I ultimately do is I look at the spectacularly sophisticated way in which The Beatles use pitch and rhythm and it can be very simple but it can also be extremely sophisticated and that’s part of the reason why it’s so endlessly compelling to study their music, because it is so complex and so carefully crafted and sophisticated.

Christopher: So let’s dwell on that for a moment, then, because I think if someone’s listening to that, imagining, you know, something like, “Twist and Shout,” or a really early Beatles number like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” maybe, they might be, you know, a bit surprised to hear you talk about sophisticated music and that the title of your book is, or your first book is “Beatles and the Avant Garde,” you know, that sounds very lofty and I think we all know, you know, the early music of the Beatles, at least much of their later stuff, can you explain why The Beatles or how The Beatles are sophisticated?

Aaron: Sure.  Well, you mentioned one song, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” which has a rather interesting chord progression.  So it’s in G major, so I’m just going to try this, here. Does that come through clearly?

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Aaron: (Plays) All right, so, it’s a G major, to a D major, E minor, and then a B seven and it’s that last chord that’s rather unusual.  Most songwriters would go, G to D, to E (minor), to C back to G. That’s one of the great cliché’s of popular music, is that particular chord progression, one to the five to the six to the four.

There are thousands of songs that use that particular pattern of chords but not The Beatles, or, rather, not in “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”  There are other songs where they do use that but, so, just, tweaking it, that last chord, instead of C dropping it to a B is something fresh.  There are thousands of chords that use the standard progression and I don’t know of any others off the top of my head that use the same progression found in “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with what’s known as the three chord instead of the four chord, a B chord into the C chord.  I don’t want to go overly technical here but that’s one instance of the early Beatles doing something surprising and something that I think the vast majority of the popular music composers of the time did not do.

Christopher: That’s super interesting.  And tell me, did I just inadvertently stumble on one great example to make that point or is it something you often find in Beatles with their earlier catalog?

Aaron: I, to be honest, I find it more with the later stuff but you do find it frequently with the earlier songs, as well.  That’s just the first one that came, that popped into my head. If you want to take the time, I could also show “I Saw Her Standing There.”

Christopher: For sure, yeah.

Aaron: Sure, okay.  So that was in E major.  you know, “She was just seventeen, you know what I mean, and the way she looked was way beyond compare,” so, here it is, so “I’ll never dance with another” then to this chord, that right there.  All right, so it’s E major, “how could I dance” it’s E major first inversion, E major with a G sharp in the base, “with another” there’s your four chord, to A major.

Most composers would lead to a five chord, a B and then back to E, that sounds perfectly fine. (Plays chord progression)  Right? Totally fine, but it’s not what Paul does. He goes E, E first inversion to an A to a flat six or in this case, C, back to E.  So, again, it’s a, it’s another example of how they take something that’s standard and they tweak it. They kind of goose it ever so slightly and create something that is quite fresh and quite original.  Again, I can’t think of any others, I’m sure there are some out there, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head

Christopher: So that was beautifully illustrated and I think a great demonstration of how The Beatles were innovating right from the beginning.  At the same time, I think it’s fair to say that their music fit in perfectly fine with the era, you know, if you think of someone like Carl Perkins that was of that time, The Beatles songs certainly existed alongside those and didn’t confuse the radio listeners too much.  Do you think The Beatles, kind of, went off in a completely different direction right from the beginning or how did they co-exist with that musical era?

Aaron: Yeah, well, the 50’s is very much the decade of rock and roll.  You have guys like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and Little Richard and Carl Perkins, like you mentioned and part of what makes Beatles study so fascinating is how they grew out of that, how they start out as a rock and roll band playing covers of guys like Elvis and Carl Perkins but then they take the music in a rather different direction.

So one of them, to stick with the Carl Perkins idea, one of his songs is “Honey, Don’t.”  It came out in, I think, ’56 or 57 and The Beatles covered it in ’64 and it uses a particularly interesting set of harmony as well.  So it starts on an E major chord (Plays chord) then it goes to a C major (Sings) And so that particular chord progression, E major to C major is a little bit unusual.  It’s not terribly rare. There are other songs like “Take It Easy” by Buddy Holly that uses the same progression but it’s also not terribly common and so it stands out in Carl Perkins as being a bit unusual and, as a result, quite interesting.

The Beatles, then, covered Carl Perkins “Honey Don’t” and they would  play it live and they recorded it but they would also use that unusual progression in their original songwriting and so the verses to “It Won’t Be Long,” feature the same chords so it’s E major, (Sings) and it’s the same, it’s the same chords, E major to C major and back again.

So is this conscious, did John Lennon sit down and say, “Hey, I’m writing this song called, ‘It Won’t Be Long’,” you know, “How should I write this?  Well, there’s, remember that song, ‘Honey Don’t’ by Carl Perkins? Remember the E major to C major unusual chords? I think I’m going to use those same chords in my song.”  It’s possible John was thinking that clinically but I kind of doubt it. I imagine that John is just writing what he thinks works. I don’t think he’s worried about copying Carl Perkins or anything else.  He’s just, he hears these chords and he thinks, “Yeah, this is what I’m going for. This really works. I really like this.”

So to a certain extent intent is irrelevant because my job as an analyzer of music is to analyze what they did.  My job is to analyze what The Beatles actually did. That is not necessarily the same thing as what they thought they were doing nor necessarily what they intended to do.

The Beatles’s repertoire is littered with examples of happy accidents, as Bob Ross might say.  I’m thinking of the opening of ‘I Feel Fine,” when Paul plucks the A string, I think it is, or maybe it’s George, and it feedbacks on the amplifier and they didn’t intend to do that but when it happened, when the accident happened they were wise enough to recognize it and another one is the edit on “Revolution,” right before the dum-dah-dah-dee-dum, dee-dee-dum, dee-dee-dum, the little guitar lick, there was an editing error that added an extra couple of notes in there and that was not done on purpose but they liked it .  They saw that and they thought, “Hey, this is great. This is not what we meant to do but we’re going to keep it in.” The first note of “Her Majesty” is another famous example where they, it was not originally intended that way but they decided to keep it in. So there’s many examples throughout The Beatles repertoire of things that they didn’t necessarily intend to do but that they did, anyway, and this unusual chord pattern (Plays piano) that we find in both “Honey Don’t” and “It Won’t Be Long” is one such example.

So there’s a little bit about how “it Won’t Be Long” and “Honey Don’t” are related from that E major, to the C major and back.  Now, you’d be less likely to think about “Eleanor Rigby” as being inspired by Carl Perkins but as it turns out, “Rigby” is about as close as it could be, the, the chords to “Eleanor Rigby” are about as similar as they could be without being identical.

Now, in this case it’s in E minor,(Plays chords) not in E major but in E minor going to a C major and, in fact, “Rigby” only uses two chords.  The entire song vacillates between E minor and C major. So “Rigby” sounds nothing like “It Won’t Be Long” or “Honey Don’t.” You would never listen to these and think, “Oh, yeah, there’s a strong connection here.”  It’s only when you start analyzing and looking at the different chords and how they work and how they’re juxtaposed and how they interact within a single song that we can trace it to, we, then we can trace a song like “Rigby” back to “It Won’t Be Long” and further back to Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t”.

Christopher: Hm.  So that touches a little bit on a question I was really keen to ask you because you obviously bring this very well-educated music theory perspective to the music of The Beatles and one comment I hear a lot when talking about music theory is, you know, “Music theory is unnecessary – if The Beatles could write the amazing songs they did without knowing music theory,  I don’t need to learn it.” I’d love if you could speak to that a little bit and specifically, you know, I think we all accept that The Beatles did not study formal music theory in the way that a grade school student might, but what would your viewpoint be having analyzed their music and read all of these biographies? How much did The Beatles know or understand music theory, would you say?

Aaron: Not much.  They never had any sort of formal musical training.  They never took lessons beyond a few weeks of guitar, guitar classes, I think, when they were little but they were more or less intuitive, and that’s not to say that it’s easy for them.  It takes a tremendous amount of work but they know what they’re going for, so, you know, they’re playing these chords, they’re writing these songs and they’re playing different chords and when they happen to find a chord they really like they know it.  They kind of intuitively understand “That’s what I’m going for. That’s, the,” you know, “That’s the feeling,” or “That’s the sound,” or whatever it is. “That’s what I’m going for,” and so their education became encumbered when they had to play many hours a night for months on end but it wasn’t a blackboard, it wasn’t an academic formal education.  It was a hands-on practical education from, I mean, to play, to entertain an audience for five or six hours a night for months on end.

Christopher: I see.  Interesting.  And we’ve gone quite quickly into some of the, kind of, interesting nitty-gritty of what makes particular songs so notable but if we step back from that for a moment, and I don’t want to try and put you on the spot in terms of  generalizing, but is there any kind of way of explaining why The Beatles are so remarkable, given your extensive work analyzing their music? Is there any reason they stand out and have had such success and longevity compared with other groups of the era?

Aaron: Yeah, I think so.  I think the single biggest reason The Beatles were so successful and remain successful half a century later is that they balance two things.  One is accessibility, meaning Beatles music is very easy to like. It doesn’t take a lot of study to appreciate it. Now, as someone who has done a lot of study I think it deepens my appreciation but you don’t need, you don’t need to know that the chords of “It Won’t Be Long” are the same as Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t” in order to, you know, you can appreciate it just fine just by listening to it.  You don’t have to do all the analysis but when you do, it deepens your understanding. It’s very easy to like this music.  It’s very catchy, it’s very hummable, very melodic.
It gives you a more, more, a deeper understanding and  a deeper appreciation for what they were able to do and when you look at how sophisticated some of their songs are and it’s kind of mind boggling how right they sound and yet at the same time it’s pretty spectacularly complex in spots.  I’m thinking right now of “Here Comes the Sun,” George Harrison’s song, “Here Comes the Sun,” and I’m wondering if I can play a clip of it to illustrate the rhythmic sophistication.

All right.  Here’s the bridge part.  So I’m going to do a couple of things.  First is, I’m just going to play a couple seconds of the clip on a, as we hear it on the record and then I’m going to go back and I’m going to play the same clip but I’m going to count aloud the meter, the rhythms.

So here it is without my counting.  (Plays song) All right. So what’s going on rhythmically there?  Well, we have all sorts of different meters, different groupings of beats and to illustrate, I’m going to play the same clip again but this time I’m going to count aloud the meters. (Plays song) One and two and three and four. One two, three for five six and one two three four five six, one two three four five, one and two.

So most songs are in four, one two three four, one, two three, four, the entire time. Most of The Beatles songs are in four the entire time but not “Here Comes the Sun.”  “Here Comes the Sun” is spectacularly rhythmically sophisticated and so that’s an example of the sophistication that I’m talking about.

This goes way beyond what other bands of the time were doing, like the Monkees or the Beach Boys, even.  I’m fond of both the Monkees and the Beach Boys but The Beatles are more sophisticated. So to get back to your question, “What makes The Beatles so great?” They balance both of those things.  It’s accessible, it’s easy to like but at the same time it’s extremely sophisticated and complex and The Beatles strike that balance between those two things as well as any band I’ve ever encountered in history.

Christopher: Tremendous.  That’s really well explained.  I think that you’ve just managed to put into words what I always kind of vaguely and instinctively liked about The Beatles and I think you have it in a nutshell, there, that’s very good.

On that topic of longevity and, you know, outlasting, maybe, other bands from that era or having a stronger place in the cultural memory than other bands, I was thinking about this earlier this week because I thought about our interview today and I realized that you and I are maybe on the cusp of people who can totally relate to the music of the Beatles and just kind of take it for granted that they’re among the greats and their music is still amazing and relevant and maybe the following generations that I’m not sure will have that same perspective.  I have no doubt they’ll come across the Beatles and get some of their songs but I feel like today’s pop music, and, you know, a lot of it is actually dance music or hip hop or electronic music, it feels to me sort of far removed from that world of even the later Beatles stuff, I find it hard to imagine that, you know, 50 years from now people will still think of The Beatles in the same way. I’d love to hear your perspective on that. Do you think they will still be not just appreciated as good for that era but actually still relevant and interesting a few generations from now?

Aaron: Yeah, I kind of have mixed feelings about that because on one hand, yes, absolutely, The Beatles are going to survive.  I mean, when you look at composers of past centuries like Beethoven, part of what makes Beethoven Beethoven is that he is able to appeal to every successive generation, not just in his own time but, you know, 150 years later we’re still celebrating Beethoven and people will for as long as humans exist.

I suspect the same will be the case for The Beatles.  Paul once said, I think it was in 1993, Paul said, “The way people think about Mozart today,” meaning 1993, “is how they’re going to think about the Beatles in 150 years,” and I think he’s right.  Now, you also made a comment, will they be thought of in the same way, or I forget how you worded it, but will The Beatles be thought of in the same way that they are today and I don’t think they will be thought of in the same way because this decade in particular is really a golden age for The Beatles.  They’re young enough to be still within living memory but they’re old enough to be taken seriously as history and plus this is, this decade is all the 50th anniversaries.  The 50th anniversary of “Sergeant Pepper” was last year, the 50th anniversary of “The White Album” is this year, 2018 so this decade in particular seems to be a really good time to talk about The Beatles.

As time progresses, however, I think there will be much less emphasis on nostalgia so a lot of baby boomers have a lot of nostalgia for The Beatles and rightfully so but as the baby boomers cede  to subsequent generations I think the music itself is going to become more important. The nostalgia will dwindle with time but the music itself, I think, will only continue to grow.

Christopher: Fantastic.  I think it’s really interesting that you touched on Beethoven and Mozart, there.  One of the questions I was keen to put to you was on the topic of talent and The Beatles and I, again, I think you have a unique perspective and I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic, generally.

You know, The Beatles have often held up as one of these magical groups where they couldn’t get anything wrong and I think a lot of people imagine that they, just, kind of came out of nowhere in the 60’s, blew the world away, continued to do so for a few decades and they are inexplicably wonderful. And certainly they’re wonderful! But we’ve had some interesting conversations here on the podcast before about the amazing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven and what might have actually been going on during their early years that led to that amazing success.  I wonder if you could give any insight or thoughts on this question of “talent versus hard work or practice” or you said something interesting earlier about them “growing out” of their early essential songs and maybe that’s a good point to pick up on.

Aaron: Yeah. So, I have a program called “Before They Were Fab: The Beatles Prior to Beatlemania” and I start that program by putting to rest this myth that you’re talking about, that, you know, The Beatles are somehow magical creatures and it didn’t take them any, any, it didn’t take work for them to achieve, you know, they just, they arrive and they’re superstars and, you know, like, it’s pre-destined, like, there’s nothing that could have deterred that.

Well, I would beg to differ because if you count July 6, 1957 which is the day John and Paul met for the first time, if you count that as day one of Beatles history and if you count April 10, 1970, which is the day Paul McCartney announced The Beatles’ breakup as the last day of Beatles history then that history lasted precisely 4,661 days and, at least in the United States, we tend to think of their Ed Sullivan debut as the start of Beatlemania.  ow, I know in England it’s earlier, it’s ’63 but in the States people tend to think of February 9, 1964 as the start of The Beatles. 

 However, if you do the math The Beatles were more than 50% through their history by the time they played on Ed Sullivan.  In other words, there was less than half of Beatles history to go after Ed Sullivan than there was before Ed Sullivan and so that’s, the point is, the point is that this took a long time to develop.  It took a lot of work, many hours playing in Hamburg, playing hundreds, if not thousands, of gigs in England before they reached worldwide superstardom and so, you know, The Beatles prior to Beatlemania constitutes the majority of the band’s history and it helps explain their meteoric rise to superstardom in Britain in ’63 and in the United States in ’64 but it’s easy to miss that fact.  It’s easy to just think of them, “Oh, they’ve arrived and they just take off, like, you know, as if it doesn’t take work,” and the simple numbers don’t bear that out. Lady Gaga once said, I’m paraphrasing Lady Gaga, she said, “It took a lifetime to become an overnight sensation,” and I think that applies to The Beatles just as much as it does to Gaga.

Christopher: I love that answer.  I’ve felt that must be true but I’ve never had that detailed set of statistics and numbers and years to back it up and that’s great to have you explain it like that.
I’m not sure I could have told you that it was so striking as that, that they were halfway through their lifetime, as it were, as a musical group when they had that pivotal performance on Ed Sullivan.  Amazing.

And as someone who’s studied their music from the earliest days through to the later years is it fair to say it becomes more and more sophisticated, I guess, while still retaining the accessibility you mentioned?

Aaron: I would say so.  My personal favorite it “Abbey Road” in no small part because of “Here Comes the Sun” and that other clip I played a minute ago and “The White Album”, which happened to be my second favorite because it is, in my opinion, the second most sophisticated album.  Now, sophisticated doesn’t necessarily mean good. I mean, I’ve, you can have sophisticated music that’s not very good to listen to. I should know, I’ve written an awful lot of it but then the opposite is equally untrue. Just because something is simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad but, again, The Beatles balance that.  It’s accessible and it’s sophisticated in a way that few others are with the possible exception of Led Zeppelin.

Christopher: Gotcha.  And you have given the whole presentations on particular songs or albums from The Beatles back catalog, which I think speaks to that level of sophistication, you know, I think it would be hard to pick a Monkees song and talk about it for 60 minutes.  And you talk about “Yesterday,” about “Strawberry Fields Forever”, I think, one on the album of Sergeant Pepper’s. I wonder if you could give a glimpse to the kind of stuff you would cover in one of those presentations.

Aaron: Yeah.  Absolutely.  So I have a, I have an, you know, an entire 60-minute program all about the song, “Yesterday”, and it traces it from conception through the thousands of covers that have been released over the last five decades and so one of the things that I talk about is that there is a certain conflict in the lyrics of “Yesterday.”  There is a, there is, you know, the singer is kind of longing for the past. “I believe in yesterday.” He’s looking not at a literal yesterday, not 24 hours ago but to a metaphorical yesterday, a simpler time in his life that has been lost, you know, a simpler, more innocent time, perhaps and he’s kind of jealous of that so there’s this kind of twinge of nostalgia.

He kind of, you know, there’s a contrast.  There’s a contrast between what is real, what is reality and what the singer wishes was real and musically we find a parallel in that.
We see a certain musical conflict that parallels the lyrical conflict and it’s between the note B and B flat.  So the question is, which one is it? Is it B flat or is it B natural? And if you route the, the, throughout the verses, we have that conflict.

So, for example, if we start out (Plays piano) with B natural, now, wait a minute. B flat. B flat again.  Now it’s back to natural, it’s a G major chord in natural, oh, now it’s flat again. So the conflict that we see in the lyrics of “Yesterday” plays out in the music of “Yesterday” as well regarding the tone B and it’s that back and forth, you’re never sure if it’s a B natural or is it B flat that helps give the music of “Yesterday” the twinge of nostalgia for which the song is so famous.

Christopher: Gosh.  I don’t think many people would have picked up on that listening to the song and I’m sure we’ve all heard it a thousand times and never appreciated that mirroring in the lyrics and the music.

Aaron: That’s what makes this kind of analysis so fascinating and rewarding is no matter how well you notice music, no matter how many books you’ve read, no matter how many times you’ve listened to the songs there is always more to find.  I find new things every day and that kind of analysis gives you that deeper understanding and a greater appreciation for the vast artistry of The Beatles.

There’s another really interesting thing about “Rigby” and that is, the, that the structure of the song tells the story of the song.  So there are three verses. The first verse is (Sings) “Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where the wedding is done.” It’s all about the title character.  The second verse, then, is about Father McKenzie, the priest and, you know, how he’s (Sings) ” writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near.”

The third verse, then, this is where it gets really interesting, brings these two characters together.  It’s about both Rigby and Father McKenzie but it’s too late because these two lonely characters who could have been friends in real life only meet with the title character’s death and this is what defines Rigby as a tragedy.  It’s not a happy song. It’s too late by the time these two characters meet in the third verse.

Paralleling that musically, then, we have a couple of different things that are going on.  One is (Plays)  So in, in, in that, what I’ll call the chorus.  It’s debatable but is this a refrain or a chorus?  I’m just going to call it a chorus. We have two things.  One is the melody (Plays) and two is the harmony down below. (Plays) When you put it together (Plays).

So we have that chorus but then we also have this refrain:(Plays) So at the end of the song, just as the characters Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie come together lyrically, so, too, that refrain and that chorus come together musically and for this  I want to play the actual clip

(Plays) So we have Paul singing (Plays piano) at the same time we have Paul going (Plays) so the refrain and the chorus are heard simultaneously at the end.  These two musical ideas come together just as these two characters in the lyrics come together at the end but, and this is the cherry on top, the harmony voice is now absent.  We don’t get that lower. (Plays) We only get the high melody (Plays piano) and so it’s as if Eleanor Rigby’s ghost remains even though her body is gone.

Christopher: So it’s interesting that you touch on there on the interplay of music and lyrics because I think often we think about them in isolation a little bit, you know, when I’ve seen analysis of The Beatles in the past it’s often been purely in lyrical terms or purely in a music theory analytical sense.  I wonder if you could speak a bit to that and the interplay beyond that example of “Yesterday.” Are there interesting things to learn about the music and lyrics of Beatles songs?

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely.  It’s a bit oversimplified but John tends to start with words and then adds music lyric later where Paul tends to start with music and add the words second and so with John we tend to find, in general, we tend to find very compact melodies.  For example, (Sings)

Here come old flat top
He come groovin’ up slowly
He got joo joo eyeballs
He one holy roller
It’s only three notes and he spins it all out into the, to, into, essentially, the entire verse of “Come Together” because it’s not really the music itself that’s most important.  Now the music is important. I’m not saying the music is unimportant, I’m just saying that the lyrics are more important. He starts with words and then makes the music fit the words and that’s part of the reason why we see such compact melodies in the songs of John Lennon.  “Help” is another example. “I Am the Walrus” is another good example.

Paul, however, is the opposite and that’s part of the reason why we find such sweeping melodies in Paul’s music.  It’s because the music is more important than the lyrics. Now, again, the lyrics are of course important. Nobody try and misread this that I’m saying Paul’s lyrics are unimportant.  Of course they’re important. It’s just the music is more important and that’s why we get a coda like “Hey Jude” that all it is is just “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey Jude”.  He doesn’t need, he doesn’t need lyrics that are anything other than nonsense syllables and the title lyrics. What matters there is this big, sweeping melody that spans more than an octave. John didn’t write too many melodies that spanned more than an octave the way Paul does on “Hey Jude.”  So, so, again, at some oversimplification, John starts with words and adds music where Paul starts with music and adds words.

Christopher: Wow.  That’s fascinating.  I have to confess it was fairly late in my own Beatles fandom that I even was able to tune in my ear to which one of them was singing on any given song but I think you just hinted at why it might also be fascinating to check which of them was the primary songwriter on any given song because it sounds like they had very different characters to the way they wrote a song.

Aaron: They did, and there’s a lot of debate.  I just read an article the other day about a statistics professor at Harvard who did a study.  He analyzed all the melodies and chord progressions and came to the conclusion that John Lennon did write “In My Life.”  Paul explained that he wrote the music and this particular professor came to the conclusion that no, Paul is wrong. He gave him a 1.8% chance of statistical probability that Paul actually wrote “In My Life” and I would have to disagree with him, because when you look at the melody it tends to be more Paul-like.  So I’d be very curious to meet this probability, you know, statistics professor and really get into the nitty-gritty of “What exactly are you hearing? Because I’m hearing the same stuff, I mean, the same song and I’m coming to a very different conclusion than you are.” But I don’t know. I haven’t read the full paper.  It was just a summary that I read.

Another really interesting one is “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” because that, I think, is actually an exception.  That’s John writing this big sweeping melody. “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” I would tend to think that’s more Paul’s style because it’s so wide-ranging and mellifluous and melodic and yet the literature, most of the repertoire, says that that’s a John song.  So don’t take it too literally. I’m not about to say it’s a 1.8% chance that I think he’s a little misguided but there remains much debate, even 50 years later, you know, who actually wrote this song and Paul’s happy to take credit for just about everything and sometimes he’s right but sometimes he’s wrong, you know, there’s that phrase, if you remember the 60’s you weren’t there.  Well, Paul does not remember the 60’s.

Christopher: Gotcha.  Well, you know, this being the Musicality Podcast, naturally our interest in The Beatles is particularly for all of this stuff around music theory versus instinct and songwriting and melody versus lyrics, all of those interesting inner expressive skills of music that The Beatles clearly possessed.  We’ve talked a bit there about John and Paul and at the risk of neglecting poor George, you’ve actually written a book about the Beatle who’s most often neglected or underestimated, I think, Ringo Starr. Could you tell us why you thought Ringo was worthy of an entire book in himself?

Aaron: Right.  Yeah. The book you’re referring to is called “Flip Side Beatles” and the idea is that you read the A side, which is a transcript of one of my presentations called “The Beatles: Band of the 60’s.”  And when you’re done with the A side, you flip it over, just like a record, and then you read the B side and the B side is a transcript of a program I have called “Star Time: A Celebration of Ringo Starr.”

And I am  of the opinion that Ringo is vastly underrated as a drummer and one of the best examples of that would have to be “Long, Tall Sally.” This is a Little Richard song.  Little Richard did it in ’58, ’57, don’t quote me on that. I forget but when you look at how the two songs are structured, even though they’re the same song, you know, Little Richard and The Beatles both recorded “Long, Tall Sally” but The Beatles add an extra chorus at the end of the song.  One, there’s one, one more chorus than what we find in the Little Richard original and I think the reason why The Beatles add that extra chorus is to let Ringo do his thing and Ringo just goes, you know, just goes bonkers on the drums in that final chorus.

So give me just a second.  I’m going to find it. I’ll play the clip. So here’s the last couple of seconds, the last chorus, of The Beatles’s version of “Long, Tall Sally.”  Pay close attention to Ringo’s drumming, absolutely frenetic and fantastic. (Plays end of song)

So there I think is an example of Ringo’s drumming being just, just out of this world.  He’s not necessarily the flashiest drummer, he’s not necessarily the most technically gifted drummer but for what that band needed, they couldn’t have found anybody better.

Christopher: Nice, and does it go beyond his drumming at all?  I think, you know, he definitely gets short credit or short shrift for his drum technique or his sophistication of drumming but what I think is really interesting about Ringo is that he did grow into a bigger role in the band here and there than just being, you know, the drummer sitting in the background.

Aaron: Yeah, I would agree.  I think that is his single biggest contribution to The Beatles is not as drummer but rather his personality because he, you know, part of what makes The Beatles special is that you really have a two-headed monster in John and Paul constantly competing and by the end of the decade it’s a three-headed monster.  George is very bit as competent as John and Paul is and that’s not necessarily the most stable dynamic for a band.

This is in contrast to The Rolling Stones.  The Stones have a clear front man in Mick Jagger and it’s much more stable to have that single lead guy, to have your single front man as opposed to The Beatles who have two and two-three and Ringo’s personality, then, helps smooth out the problems between John and Paul and George towards the end and so he helps, he’s kind of the glue.  You know, I’ve heard people describe the rhythm section as the glue to music and I would agree with that but I also think that’s true for Ringo in terms of has personality. His personality held The Beatles together in a way that I’m not sure they could have sustained for as long had they had a different drummer.

Christopher: Huh, that’s super interesting. And for anyone who’s not too familiar with the lore of The Beatles could you just explain in a nutshell what was Ringo’s personality?  Like, why could he act as a counterbalance in that way?

Aaron: Yeah, well he’s, he’s very jovial.  He’s, he’s very gregarious. He’s very social and he’s constantly cracking jokes and he doesn’t take himself too seriously and that’s not to say that the other Beatles do take themselves too seriously but it is to say that at times they can take themselves maybe a little too seriously.  So Ringo kind of helps smooth that out. He famously replaces Pete Best as the drummer.

Pete was rather shy and rather introverted and there’s nothing wrong with being shy and introverted.  I’m shy and introverted. I don’t mind at all but it’s not really what this band needed. They needed someone who was just as witty and extroverted as John, Paul and George were and someone who could match their personalities and he, Pete’s a fine drummer.  He’s not a bad drummer the way a lot of people have made him out to be. I don’t think he’s a terribly great drummer but I, he didn’t, the bigger, the bigger concern is Pete really didn’t fit in with all, with the others and Ringo did and so when the opportunity comes to get rid of Pete and bring in Ringo instead, well, John, Paul and George don’t miss it.

Christopher: I see. Wonderful.  So I said at the outset I have thoroughly enjoyed diving into your books and your writing, Aaron, and I think you’ve given us a glimpse in this conversation of the richness that is there to be tapped into when thinking about The Beatles in this way, not just in a biographical sense or in a very broad way of being a great musical group but really taking the time to think about, you know, who wrote the song or what is the song doing lyrically and musically or what maybe is it doing different than the genre and all those artists.

Aaron: Yeah. Right.

Christopher: I’m going to highly recommend anyone who’s enjoyed this conversation go directly to Aaron’s website, “Flip Side Beatles”, is it aaronkrerowicz.com, and we’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode and also, specifically, I would recommend checking out his “Beatles Minute” videos.  Aaron, maybe you could just give the listener a sense of what you cover in those videos?

Aaron: Sure, yeah.  I call it “The Beatles Minute” because they’re roughly 60-second video clips that I post on Youtube and on my website and each one analyzes one specific aspect, one very focused aspect of Beatles music and I think I’ve got, I don’t know, 40 or 50 of them now that I’ve done and you can find them on Youtube and my website.  If you don’t want to try to spell, Krerowicz, my last name, no one gets it right anyway, just go to flipsidebeatles.com and it will take you to my website.

Christopher: Perfect.  Well, it has been such a pleasure to speak with you, Aaron and I really have to hold back to not dive into every one of these topics more because I know your expertise could certainly accommodate that but I want to be respectful of your time and so I will just say a big thank you, again, for joining us today and sharing some of these insights on the podcast.

Aaron: It’s been an absolute pleasure.  I can talk Beatles all day long.

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The post The Simplicity and Sophistication of the Beatles, with Aaron Krerowicz appeared first on Musical U.

The Message in the Music of the Beatles, with Scott Kuehn

New musicality video:

How did the Beatles produce the extreme reactions of fans during “Beatlemania” and carry it on throughout their career? http://musicalitypodcast.com/170

Today we’re talking with a Beatles expert who also happens to be a member of Musical U. As a Professor of Communications at Clarion University, Scott is trained in the study of semiotics: the meaning within media such as pop music.

And he’s taken this lens of analysis to the music of the Beatles and specifically in the “Beatlemania” years of the early sixties when teenage girls would scream and faint at concerts and TV performances – to find out what exactly the band did that produced such extreme reactions. And how they carried that on throughout their career in ever-changing ways.

In this conversation we talk about:

– The combination of music and visuals that led to Beatlemania and the specific techniques the Beatles used to stoke that hysteria

– Whether the Beatles did all these clever things instinctively and subconsciously or if it was an intentional, conscious process

– And how the Beatles’ use of musical elements to support the message of the lyrics changed over time through the five distinct eras of their music that Scott identifies

We love when an interview on this show provides a new way of looking at or listening to music, and we think you’re going to enjoy the little “homework” exercise Scott sets at the end of our conversation as a way to open your mind and your ears to what made the Beatles so effective and so successful.

Listen to the episode: http://musicalitypodcast.com/170

Links and Resources:

Alan Pollack “Notes on …” Series – http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-notes_on.shtml

Scott Kuehn on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/scott.kuehn.12

Clarion Faculty Profile for Dr. Scott Kuehn – http://www.clarion.edu/directory/employee-dir/communication/skuehn.html

If you enjoy the show please rate and review it! http://musicalitypodcast.com/review

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Let us know what you think! Email: hello@musicalitypodcast.com

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The Message in the Music of the Beatles, with Scott Kuehn

Writing Songs the Beatles Way, with Matt Blick

New musicality video:

What makes songs Beatles songs so infectious and catchy? http://musl.ink/pod169

Today we’re joined by Matt Blick, who is the man behind the Beatles Songwriting Academy, a website dedicated to analysing every single Beatles song to learn what makes them tick.

Since founding the site in 2009 Matt has written over 500 detailed posts on what he’s learned from studying the songs of the Beatles – and he’s written over 300 songs himself.

You see, unlike some song analysis websites you find, Matt’s site is particularly notable for being very practical in its focus. Although it’s fascinating to read his posts purely for interest, every one is written with the active songwriter in mind, to inspire and guide them to better and easier songwriting, inspired by the principles used by The Beatles themselves.

In this conversation we talk about:

– How The Beatles could obey and break the conventional rules of songwriting so expertly if they never learned music theory.

– Some specific ways The Beatles modified chord progressions to be more effective and distinctive in their songs.

– Matt also shares what actually causes writer’s block and how to fix it.

We also talk about the ways Matt has benefitted from all his Beatles studies in his own songwriting, including specific examples of songs he’s written using particular principles he learned from the Fab Four.

You’re tuned in to Beatles Month at Musical U.

Listen to the episode: http://musl.ink/pod169

Links and Resources

Mattblick.com – http://www.mattblick.com/

Beatlessongwriting.com – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.com/

Matt’s “Be-altetudes” – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.com/p/be-atletudes.html

Ticket to Write 1: Use the flat 6 (bVI) chord in a major key song – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/ticket-1-flat-6-chord.html

Ticket to Write 33: Subvert a 12 bar blues by altering the chord sequence – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.com/2014/07/ticket-33-subvert-12-bar-blues-by.html

Ticket to Write 67: Repeat Verse 1 – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.com/2014/02/ticket-67-repeat-verse-1.html

Ticket to Write 24: Repeat words and sentence structures – http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/ticket-24-use-parallel-lyrics.html

Stream Matt Blick – “Let’s Build An Airport” – https://mattblick.bandcamp.com/track/lets-build-an-airport-2

Matt Blick on Twitter – https://twitter.com/realmattblick

If you enjoy the show please rate and review it! http://musicalitypodcast.com/review

Join Musical U with the Special offer for podcast listeners http://musicalitypodcast.com/join

Let us know what you think! Email: hello@musicalitypodcast.com

===============================================

Learn more about Musical U!

Website:
https://www.musical-u.com/

Podcast:
http://musicalitypodcast.com 

Tone Deaf Test:
http://tonedeaftest.com/

Musicality Checklist:
https://www.musical-u.com/mcl-musicality-checklist 

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https://www.facebook.com/MusicalU 

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Writing Songs the Beatles Way, with Matt Blick