Photo from PaulMcCartney.Wordpress.com.
There are many versions of The Beatles. There are the lovable mop-tops — a creation of Brian Epstein that took advantage of the band’s photogenic image and its incredibly quick wit. There are the pioneers, the experimenters, the huge stars. And, often forgotten, there are the punks.
In 2005, Devin McKinney wrote in Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, that The Beatles of the Star-Club period, playing to an audience of sailors, prostitutes, drug addicts and hardcore toughs, discovered something essential, that sense “that something will happen. That there will be that point of breakout, when the noise coming from under the ground thunders through the crust to shake everything free of itself.”
Reading that book — and reviewing it for PopMatters — made me understand something essential about The Beatles. They were a punk-rock band before punk was a thing.
From my review:
It is this promise, this sense of creation, that carries the band through its earliest years. It is almost the converse of punk rock, the sound that will lay waste to the late 1970s. The critic Greil Marcus has described punk rock as a massive negation, a generation hollering “no” at the top of its lungs, a brutal, harsh middle-finger that obliterated what came before. By doing so, Marcus implies, bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash cleared the way for something new, for some kind of new promise.
Swing back 15 years, maybe 20, and you can see The Beatles engaged in the same project, only rather than shouting “no” or trilling out “no future”, as the Sex Pistols would do, The Beatles created the possible, pointed a way toward the new, synthesized the anger and repression, rage and sheer joy of action into something no one had ever heard before. The Beatles were the first punks, the most important punks and nothing that would follow could have the same impact.
This realization, an epiphany really, came when I was in my 40s, after I had been listening to The Beatles for about 35 years. It gave me a new way to listen, and a new way to understand, the wild variations in style, in sound, that the band presented to the world. “Love Me Do” and “She Loves You” are remarkable pop songs, perfectly constructed, meeting the promise that Bob Dylan saw in the band when he told Anthony Scaduto (see his biography Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography or the excerpt from Rolling Stone —
“They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you’re playing your own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.”
Dylan knew the band had “staying power” and “they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”
And Dylan, who led so much of the musical transformation of the era (my essay on Highway 61 Revisited, which also posits Dylan as punk, is here), followed, electrified, and with The Beatles, The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, created the hybrid folk-rock sound.
What Dylan and The Beatles had in common, ultimately, and what the Stones at their best and some other seminal bands offered, was that “fuck you” attitude identified by Marcus as central to the punk ethos (as opposed to the sound of the narrow genre designation created as shorthand for record buyers). I don’t mean to imply that The Beatles — or Dylan, the Stones, or even the later punk bands — did not care about record sales or chart placement. The Beatles obviously cared, but that was secondary to a deep desire to create, to stretch the boundaries of what pop and the blues could be.
The Beatles’ catalog, however, includes a large number of tracks that I think can fairly be described as punk rock because of their sound. As I do every year in October (a personal birthday celebration), I’ve been binging on The Beatles, and screeching out the lyrics to balls-to-the walls rockers like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “Money (That’s What I Want)” and “Bad Boy.” These songs snarl from the speakers, showing the tougher, nastier side of a band too often caricatured as anything but.
Here is “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which they wrote and gave to the Stones, but then released on their 1964 (British) record With The Beatles.
The song, lyrically, is banal at best, silly, shallow, and certainly not up to the standards of what is to come. It would seem to be a forgettable bit of fluff — except that it stands as two and a half minutes of fire. From Ringo Starr’s drumming, which has the quality of a mind racing on amphetamines, to George Harrison’s knife-to-the-gut guitar, to the added maracas and harmony vocals that splinter into anarchic joy, “I Wanna Be Your Man” becomes far more than what it appears to be on paper.
The same could be said about the band’s covers of Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want),” and Larry Williams on “Bad Boy,” “Slow Down,” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” The Beatles are perhaps the greatest cover band in history (along with the Stones). Often, artists take others’ music and rework it, make it theirs through a deft shift in arrangement, instrumentation, production. Listen to Marvin Gaye’s version of “Yesterday” to see how it can be done well.
The Beatles, however, offer faithful reproductions that, somehow, get transformed in their hands into Beatles’ songs. The songs feel speeded up, amped up, and yet most of them follow the arrangements used by Chuck Berry, the Shirelles, Buck Owens. How this metamorphosis occurs is hard to understand and I’m not sure I can explain it, but for me it seems to start with Ringo’s drums. Ringo has long been unfairly maligned as a drummer for not being John Bonham, Neil Pert, or Ginger Baker (the gold standard). But no rock and roll band could have attained the artistic heights attained by The Beatles without a high-caliber drummer. Ringo, as Philip Norman points out in Shout! (Still my favorite biography of the band), kept the White Album sessions from spinning farther out of control than they did. His steadiness on the drum kit tied the disparate strands of pop, rock, experimental noise together. In many ways, the White Album is Ringo’s album.
Those early scorchers are driven by Ringo’s amphetamine drumming, with Paul McCartney’s bass layered atop, and George Martin providing one of the greatest piano performances to be found in rock and roll. What brings it together, though, what gives it the “fuck you” or the “no” to go back to Marcus’ formulation is Lennon’s snarling delivery, which matches the lyrics line for line in their disdain for what the outside world might think — a feat he pulled off on his Larry Williams covers.
This version of The Beatles, the punks, is not something separate from the whole, but an integral element of it, entwined with the mop-tops, the pop stars, the balladeers, and groundbreakers. The records that would come later — especially Rubber Soul and Revolver, their two best — would not have been possible without it.