It occurs to me that although I split up The Beatles albums into three “periods” I never really explained this. The “early” Beatles, Please, Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Days Night and Beatles for Sale all show a new group devoted to rock and roll music. They often contain very clean and simple songs that are easy to listen to and dance to. You can clearly see the influences of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
“Middle” Beatles, Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Peppers, which is my focus this week, shows us the group in transition. They are starting to be influenced by folk music and people like Bob Dylan. They are also experimenting with new instruments. By 1966 the Beatles gave up touring altogether and the Revolver album in the first album where they could concentrate totally on writing songs and producing ablums.
Finally “Later” Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be, we see all kinds of experimentation with not only instruments, but with music itself, and I think these works to be some of the most important music ever written.
So now, getting back to my exploration of “Middle” Beatles. I am choosing a song that is a great example of this period and can be found on the Revolver album. With Eleanor Rigby you can see a pop band suddenly now a serious experimental studio group. The song is notable for using a double string quartet as the only music. None of The Beatles play any instruments in the song. It is also notable for its theme of loneliness in old age. Serious topics like that were not covered in pop music at the time.
This also happens to be mykidsmoms favorite Beatles song.
This clip is from the movie “Yellow Submarine”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boc7rnhkLAk&hl=en]
nice clip. i’ll have to look for “it’s only a northern song,” which is probably my fave from that movie. very psychedelic!
Its funny. I never really liked the movie all that much. That might be because the copies I have seen have been pretty poor. I just got a DVD of it as a gift for a friend. I should check that out.