Landon Miller
MH68 Final Paper
UID 804543216
How the Beatles Revolutionized Pop Music’s Lyrics and Production
In October of 1965, just a month and a half after concluding their second North American tour and within it their famous Shea Stadium concert, the Beatles began recording Rubber Soul in what would later be called Abbey Road Studios. In the 21st century it seems the claim that pop music is formulaic and shallow is dealt a significant blow almost monthly, with artists simultaneously selling out large venues and releasing albums that rock critics’ worlds. However, at the time Rubber Soul was in production, being able to appeal to the masses and conveying a meaningful, personal message through artistic expression seemed to be mutually exclusive possibilities for songs. There was no one better to bridge this gap than a band loved by its massive fanbase, with resources at its disposal, whose members were looking to find meaning and purpose beyond the frenzied crowds and their overpowering noise. Thus, in Rubber Soul the Beatles took rock music beyond its previous lyrical limitations, making a full poetic album instead of just providing covers and a few shallow tracks that would stick in the listener’s heads. Then, just a year later in April 1966, the Beatles began recording Revolver. Taking comfort in the fact that they would not perform this new material in their last-ever tour in the U.S. in August, their producer George Martin and his team experimented with the sonic production of the album to meet challenging requests by the band’s members. In doing so Martin (along with Brain Wilson) was one of the first to use the studio as an instrument to abstract beyond what physical instruments were capable of in a way that could be used in pop music. In this and other ways, Martin and his team changed the role of the producer in pop music forever. Thus, in back-to-back years the Beatles revolutionized pop music in ways that hugely influence the music we hear on the radio today.
In “’Try Thinking More’: Rubber Soul and the Beatles’ Transformation of Pop”, James Decker seeks to explain how the Beatles took the risk to deviate from their previous catalog of songs about “puppy love” and incorporate the confessional, serious topics of folk music into their pop music, thus expanding their audience and heightening their credibility. Decker notes that the Beatles sometimes felt uncomfortable about the constant sunshine and rainbows of their early music. Several of their previous tracks seemed at least to convey a bluesy dark side of love, such as Please Please Me’s “Misery” with the line “without her I will be in misery.” These may have only been small deviations from the status quo, but they showed that some anxiety was there, especially for Lennon. As one can notice when listening to Rubber Soul, McCartney was a bit more comfortable sticking with the puppy love than Lennon was, and they didn’t transition to the same degree in what was inherently a transitional album. McCartney’s “Michelle” is about the shyness and “butterflies” he gets around a girl he is interested in and would’ve fit in just fine in their earlier catalog. Meanwhile, Lennon’s “Girl” depicts a girl who seems bent on torturing her lover until he threatens to leave her, but then suddenly breaks down and “promises the earth” to him so that he stays, thinking it will be different this time. Lennon’s track seems much more personal, like the words came from experience, especially because the lyrics paint specific pictures of events, such as the girl “putting [him] down” around their friends. Meanwhile “Michelle” feels like it could’ve been sung by anyone, like it was a stone’s throw from being a Tin Pan Alley track or the equivalent of a modern-day Nashville country track. Paul eventually got on board and made incredible strides of his own (and already had “Yesterday” to his name), but the contrast between these two songs is still striking and quite illuminating.
Although the Beatles already had songs like “Yesterday” that were melancholic, there wasn’t anything ambiguous or poetic about these songs; what you heard was what you got, and they all involved relationships between a guy and a girl. In Rubber Soul that changed, such as in “Nowhere Man”, where Lennon tackles existential issues not through questions as a philosopher would, but by describing a man who seems to be the very embodiment of a lack of direction. He first seems to be criticizing this man and saying that he has “no point of view”, also having no idea where he’s going. However, he then seems to empathize with the “Nowhere Man”, noting that he’s not all that different from the rest of us, and that we all feel like we have no direction sometimes. Thus, when Lennon states that he doesn’t know “what he’s missing” and that “the world is at [his] command”, there isn’t an absolutely clear meaning. It could be perceived as a comforting pat on the back for this “Nowhere Man” (and thus every listener who feels directionless), saying that maybe he can’t see it right now, but he has plenty of options and thus shouldn’t feel stuck. It could also be viewed as a criticism towards ignorant or lazy people, saying that it is better to have opinions and goals than to be ignorant or complacent with one’s current position. Decker views the song as partially being a commentary on how Western society’s bounties have subdued people from wondering about their future, societal issues, or existential questions, in the same way a zombie wouldn’t think about anything that wasn’t right in front of it that didn’t provide immediate satisfaction. From his viewpoint the Nowhere Man doesn’t seem to care about the bigger questions and is content with enjoying what Western society has to offer, this mostly being instant gratification that keeps one happy but doesn’t help them move forward in their lives and doesn’t require them to form opinions about the world, including opinions about events that have allowed for the splendor of Western society itself. Decker argues that Lennon is trying to say that if this Nowhere Man learns how to love his fellow man, he will see the things he is “missing”- true human connection through love that will unlock these higher-order thoughts and will take away his ignorance, making him able to “transcend his own material needs” and search for Truth. It is like poetry in that there are many possible valuable interpretations. Therefore, it isn’t strictly happy or sad because it offers either hope for change or comfort depending on which interpretation one takes, and it certainly isn’t about a romantic relationship, and the Beatles thus seem to break free of these tacit rules.
“Nowhere Man” isn’t the only song on Rubber Soul that bucks the trend. Others are about romantic relationships but show much more nuance instead of vaguely idealizing them. “Drive My Car”, its opening tune, shifts from pop music norms by making the girl the one making the advances and “objectifying” the guy, reversing the typical roles of the guy and the girl in pop songs. Sexual undertones of the song are hidden behind the metaphor of the girl “driving [his] car”, which the narrator has trouble decoding at first just like the listener. Moreover, the idea of a purely sexual relationship and just maybe loving him seems to put the power in her hands, and when the girl admits that she doesn’t actually have a car, it shows that the road to her stardom may be a long one, but she will find pleasure in the meantime through flings with the narrator. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”, featuring Harrison’s sitar for the first time, sounds like a nostalgic song but below the surface is actually quite bitter and dark in theme. Right off the bat the narrator claims that the woman in the story didn’t really love him back. Then, according to Decker, the conversation the narrator describes represents vapid small talk, with the Norwegian wood representing how fake their so-called relationship was. However, the narrator is willing to “bide his time” and “drink her wine” in order to earn the reward of sex. Apparently he bides his time for nothing, though, as she says she has work in the morning and has to go to bed, which results in him burning her house down after she leaves the next morning. The lover-turned-arsonist ironically repeats the line about Norwegian wood being good as he watches it burn. Needless to say, this subject matter was not being written about by The Four Seasons.
There are a few more relationship-related songs worth mentioning. Harrison showcased his development as a songwriter in his track “Think For Yourself”, another song that shatters the portrait of an idealistic romantic relationship. In it the narrator criticizes a lover for wanting to settle down and lead a materialistic but uninspired life together, and for thinking that he would be ever be willing to limit his mind and its questions to do so. He warns her that he will not be there for her anymore if she champions that idea any further, saying that valuing comfort over a sense purpose and a “spiritually aware existence”, as Decker says, will only lead to “misery”. Therefore, he urges her to think for herself and create positive change in her own life by doing so. The track that follows it, “The Word”, is the Beatles first track about a universal, spiritual type of love, stressing the value of opening oneself up to this love and being willing to receive its “sunshine”, and tells the listener that this will bring freedom and peace, making it his responsibility to then spread the word to more people and help them see the light in the process. As Decker notes, this song seems to offer the antidote to the problems the woman in the previous song suffers from. “I’m Looking Through You” tackles the disillusionment that can come with being hurt by a lover, as when the narrator feels as if he is if he is talking to a ghost and that the girl he once knew has disappeared. Nothing she says anymore has any meaning to him, and her ability to impact him or affect his life has gone from great to nothing overnight. “In My Life” seems like a nostalgic song about the people and places one has known and loved in the past and how some of these things will never come back, but leads into the narrator optimistically stating that the girl he loves and the possibilities their relationship offers are more than enough to bring him to peace with having to lose these things.
Decker notes that the Beatles had to deviate from the standard pop formula in increments, pointing out that although the Beatles’ fanbase loved them this love wasn’t completely unconditional. As is evidenced by more vapid songs on the album like “You Won’t See Me” and “What Goes On”, the Beatles still had to make some concessions to their label. He quotes a German philosopher who points out that many consumers of an artist’s product expect the product to remain relatively the same and see any change as a threat, often dismaying the artist and damaging the artist’s creative vision in the process. Thus, the Beatles were still forced to follow some pop conventions on Rubber Soul, and certain shallow tracks feel out of place. That said, perhaps it all worked out for the better. Decker notes that if the Beatles hadn’t been kept in check, they could’ve experimented too much on the album, had bad sales, and then been forced to perform puppy songs forever. Luckily, the label waited to let the Beatles off the leash until 1966, when Revolver came out, and with it a flurry of unheard sounds that made it groundbreaking from a studio standpoint, rivaled only by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
In “’Tomorrow Never Knows’: The Contribution of George Martin and his Production Team to the Beatles’ New Sound”, McDonald and Kaufman stress the importance of Revolver in changing the role of a producer into someone that not only organized and “casted” songs but also was now heavily involved in creating the final product itself, blurring the line between producer and musician. Since the Beatles didn’t have anything close to a strong grasp of music theory and Martin had formal musical training from the Guildhall Music School of London, Martin from the start was involved in the band’s output by being a guiding hand for the Beatles in terms of helping them to learn basic song composition and recording techniques and deciding which songs would be singles. However, he went from mentor to musician for the production of Revolver, which is really where the argument that he was the Fifth Beatle begins to find support. After all, starting with Revolver, the Beatles and Martin seemed to truly blend into a group of five as the Beatles now composed and rehearsed in the studio to create this true studio album, McCartney and Lennon got more involved in the production of the songs by making mixing and editing decisions, and Martin’s sonic creations in the studio left an unprecedented impact on the final product. Together Martin and his team helped the Beatles change the way songs were produced by using the studio as an instrument and by bringing orchestral instruments into the pop music spotlight, while also inspiring future pop groups to experiment in the studio themselves instead of handing the job to someone else.
Ken Townsend, who had been working with Abbey Road Studios since 1954, was a vital part of Martin’s team who discovered many creative tricks that could be done in the studio, making him not just a sound engineer but a sound inventor. The most impactful and famous of these was Artificial Double Tracking. Double tracking had already been used for over a decade to make a singer’s voice sound fuller, but it took quite a lot of time because it required perfect timing and a lot of effort on the part of the singer to get it right, as Lennon often complained about. Townsend essentially used took Abbey Studios’ Studer J37 4-track recorder’s sync-repo (recording) head, connected it to a second tape recorder, and then output the signal from the second recorder’s playback head and combined it with the signal from the first recorder’s (J37’s) playback head, creating a slight delay effect. An oscillator could then be used to adjust how much power was supplied to the second recorder, allowing the delay to be changed to whatever degree the engineer wanted. This required only one of the four available tracks to be used, and was used in much of the Beatles’ later output. Another invention of Townsend was used to create a fuller sound for Paul’s Rickenbacker bass in “Paperback Writer” (a 1966 single), which involved using a loudspeaker as a microphone by putting the bass amplifier right against the speaker and wiring the speaker backwards as a microphone. This experimentation with two-way electric currents was dangerous and got him in some trouble, but also created a wonderful sound so huge, fuzzy, and distorted that they had to apply Automatic Transient Overload Control just to keep the needle from shaking so hard that it jumped out of its groove in the record when it was eventually cut.
Geoff Emerick, for whom Revolver was the first chance to help engineer an album, contributed by changing how microphones were used in the studio. He viewed microphones as being like camera lenses that could add texture to a song and be more than a conduit for the storage of sound. One of the most notable effects of his effort is the instantly recognizable sound of Ringo’s drums that started with Revolver, in which he put a “sweater inside the bass drum” to dampen the sound, broke the convention of keeping the instruments several feet from the microphones, and then compressed that sound. The close-miking technique was used for other instruments too, and Emerick quite literally got the microphones as close to the instruments as possible. Before Revolver, no one would’ve dared try to put microphones inside the bells of brass instruments like Emerick did in “Got To Get You Into My Life”, or placed microphones so that they “almost touched the fret-board on the string instruments” in “Eleanor Rigby”.
Martin himself, having been the head of Abbey Road’s Parlophone division since 1955, had some experience with creating sound effects from his time producing comedy albums. This is most notable in “Yellow Submarine”. In the spirit of this children’s song in which the narrator tells the tale of his fantastical experiences with a mariner, a “sound effects party” of sorts was thrown in the studio. Friends and staff whooped and hollered, dragged chains through a metal bathtub to make nautical noises, and “blew bubbles in a bucket.” Additionally, Martin revolutionized pop music by bringing orchestral instruments and complex harmonies into pop music in tracks such as “Eleanor Rigby”. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of a few 1966 “electrosongs” on which Martin’s contributions influenced exactly what producers do today: turn the imaginations of musicians into reality by using the studio as an instrument.
Lennon’s famous request on “Tomorrow Never Knows” was to sound like “the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop,” inspired by his LSD use and recent reading of The Psychedelic Experience. Martin accommodated Lennon’s wish by taking a Hammond organ and modifying it so that Lennon’s vocals would play out of the horns of its rotating Leslie speaker, which utilizes the Doppler effect to create a vibrato sound that can be sped up and slowed down. Then, they put a microphone at a point of the rotation so Lennon’s voice seemed to be warbling and floating in from the heavens, taking over one’s senses. Another aspect of the song that made it extremely influential was how it integrated Musique Concrète, using five tape loops that could be scaled up or down in volume by faders. Originating with the “lock-grooving” which allowed for a record to stay locked in the same groove, repeating a sound sequence over and over, this eventually evolved into the tape loops the Beatles used (and has today evolved into loop pedals). The reason the tape loops were so essential for the Beatles integrating Musique Concrète into pop music was that the tape could be edited, spliced, rearranged, changed in speed, and even reversed, turning one sound into a completely different sound. This is especially prevalent on the solo about a minute in, which is actually a former guitar solo of McCartney’s, but with the tape reversed and changed around in all kinds of ways. Some of the other four other tape loops included Paul’s laughter, generating the odd seagull sound, and George’s sitar playing at fluctuating speeds. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the song is its “psychedelic interlude”, which is again just “a series of tape loops.” To close the song, Martin plays a honky-tonk piano, and then Lennon tells the listener to do more than just exist, with the tape loops all coming together at the end, which ends the entire album. This was the first song recorded for the album and the way sounds are manipulated and put together in different combinations makes it seem quite similar to today’s electronic music, hence the term “electrosong” that was assigned to it. Later popular artists such as Pink Floyd, the Grateful, and Frank Zappa utilized this technique, and one could argue that whenever one records a few sounds and manipulates and arranges them in Logic Pro or GarageBand, they are doing what the Beatles did over fifty years ago.
In an alternative universe where the Beatles were complacent and happy to keep racking up hits without experimentation or risk, they could’ve just been another mostly-forgotten act that millennials and Gen-Z kids today would vaguely know about from their parent’s stories. After all, everyone seems to grow boring over time if they don’t change, even Elvis. Instead, when the youth of today listen to their favorite pop artist one could say with certainty that they were at least indirectly inspired by the Beatles. Any time a pop artist tells a story and this connects with the masses successfully, he is doing something first attempted and made legitimate by the Beatles. Also, any time a producer in the studio gets on a Mac and adds an interesting flair to a song that makes ones eyebrows raise, knowing that without experimentation and recording techniques he never would’ve heard that sound in his life, they are doing something inspired and made legitimate by the Beatles. Perhaps this is why listening to the Beatles can feel like such a religious experience- their success and career path (well, at least up until the end) seem to have been planned and orchestrated by God to save pop music (and thus most people’s only experience with music), as the Beatles were given an enormous fanbase through Beatlemania willing to love them even if they tried new things, the resources and sound-engineering team to ingeniously experiment in an abstract sonic way, and most importantly, the gift of incredible musical minds and two legendary songwriting minds.
Works Cited
Decker, James M. “’Try Thinking More’: Rubber Soul and the Beatles’ Transformation of Pop.”
McDonald, Kari and Sarah Kaufman. “’Tomorrow Never Knows’: The Contribution of George
Martin and his Production Team to the Beatles’ New Sound”.
MrAudioSoundImages. “Artificial Double-Tracking”. YouTube.