By Chris Rea
I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not crazy about the Beatles.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first record that I listened to as a young child and even today it reverberates with the sensibility of early consciousness.
I became fascinated by the extraordinary story of the Beatles’ achievements and accepted without question the orthodox narrative about their uniqueness, which was the answer to any nagging doubts I might have had about how exactly they became so good so quickly and so enormously – they were unique. They were just … the Beatles.
The Beatles were above all the other groups and solo artists of the 1960s, a decade which produced some outstanding pop and rock music. Everything flowed from them. Their best songs, and there were very few duds in their catalogue, were imperishable achievements of popular musical culture which warranted the exceptional praise they received from music establishment critics and the acclamation they received from the public.
Fixing a rabbit hole
I cleaved to this view until 2022 when I watched a presentation by the US researcher Mike Williams entitled Did the Beatles write all their own music?
Williams argues that at least between 1962 and 1966 they did not, and that they may not have done so from 1967 to 1970 either.
Williams’ thesis is built on an analysis of the recording of the 1965 Rubber Soul album.
It’s a fascinating exposition and I won’t attempt to describe it in detail. The four-and-a-half-hour presentation is worth investing your time in.
In short, he argues that the official narrative about the production of Rubber Soul is not credible.
The band went into the EMI studios on Abbey Road on 12th October 1965 with an almost empty musical locker, faced with the challenge of composing, writing, rehearsing, demoing and recording 14 original songs for the new album and two for a double A side single (‘Day Tripper’/ ‘We Can Work it Out’).
They are supposed to have completed all this by 11th November – and they did not work every day between these dates – with the album mixed, pressed and ready for the Christmas market by 3rd December.
Williams argues that it was simply not possible for the band to produce such a quantity of original music in so short a time.
According to the mainstream story, Rubber Soul’s songs were recorded in an extraordinarily small number of takes. ‘Drive My Car’, for example, was knocked off in four takes, the fourth being the only complete one.
For the conventional narrative to work, there had to be no failed attempts at songs and minimal reworking. Every song they wrote had to be nailed quickly and perfectly.
This would be a tall order under any circumstances but it becomes gigantic when you think about the great leap forward in musical sophistication and complexity Rubber Soul represented compared to its predecessors.
When they were signed by EMI in 1962, the Beatles were a hard-gigging covers band that showed no signs of the musical chops that would be required to write and perform songs like ‘Girl’, ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘In My Life’ and ‘If I Needed Someone’.
If you’re not sure about this, listen to the Live! at the Star-Club album which was recorded in Hamburg in December 1962, less than three years before the recording of Rubber Soul.
The sound quality is terrible but it is possible to hear the singing and playing beneath the murk and there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this record that indicates that this was a band destined for world-straddling greatness, not to mention high-grade studio proficiency.
Williams also identifies problems with Rubber Soul’s production timeline, suggesting that for all the record’s components, including the sleeve and the disc’s label, to have been ready for manufacturing on 19th November, the running order of the songs must have been known before they had all been recorded – or written, since the mainstream version says that the band were composing throughout the time they spent in the studio.
His conclusion is that the songs that appeared on Rubber Soul were already written and the instrumental parts already recorded by the time the Beatles arrived in the studio on 11th October.
And not by the Beatles. Their job was to learn and lay down the vocal tracks. This task alone was more than enough to fill up the available recording time, Williams argues.
Williams and other researchers have also examined the set lists for the Beatles’ live shows between 1962-1966 and questioned the absence of many of their ‘original’ compositions.
Out of 91 songs allegedly written by the band (almost all of them by Lennon and McCartney) during their time as a touring outfit, just 25 were performed live at their concerts, less than 30% of the total.
There are 26 songs on the aforementioned Star Club album and just two of them are Beatles ‘originals’.
‘Love Me Do’, which had been released as a single that October, wasn’t one of them. It’s extraordinary to think that they weren’t routinely playing their first big hit at this time.
They didn’t play their next big hit single ‘Please Please Me’ either. Although it wouldn’t be released until January 1963, the song had already been recorded by the time the band played the December 1962 Hamburg shows.
The Star Club recordings were made less than two months before the band recorded their debut album, Please Please Me. Just two of the eight Beatles ‘originals’ from that album feature in the set list. Surely by then they would have been road-testing the songs that they were shortly to lay down on their debut album?
And just two songs from Rubber Soul were ever performed live.
More extraordinarily still, the Beatles’ August 1966 tour of the United States that concluded with the band’s last ever public concert at Candlestick Park in San Franscisco featured not one song from the Revolver album that had been released on 5th August.
In 1966, with nearly 100 original pop classics in their armoury, the Beatles were still including rock and roll cover songs in their sets, which typically lasted for no more than half an hour.
The orthodoxy has it that by this time in the band’s career, their songs had become too complicated to replicate live.
According to Wikipedia, ‘none of the tracks from Revolver were included due to the difficulty in reproducing their sophisticated studio sounds and arrangements in a concert setting.’
It is interesting how widely accepted this point of view is. I subscribed to it myself for many years.
But it’s nonsense. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ admittedly would be hard to perform live in a way that sounded like the original. The brass parts from ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ would have to go.
But as for ‘Taxman’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, ‘Dr Robert’, ‘She Said She Said’ etc – Beatles tribute acts have easily mastered these songs. You can find many examples on YouTube. The Jam seemingly had no trouble picking up ‘Taxman’ and turning it into ‘Start!’ fifteen years later.
The idea that the band that wrote and performed these songs to such a high standard in the studio couldn’t reproduce them live just weeks later is absurd.
Returning to ‘Drive My Car’ – if it’s the case that they recorded just one complete take for the album, that will have been the only time the band ever played the song right through. Why would they have not wanted to include it in their live shows? Were Lennon and McCartney not proud of their composition? It’s a terrific pop song. You would think that they would be itching to play it, and all their other brilliant songs. ‘Drive My Car’ would have been great live. The band could have dropped out the vocals while the crowd all sang ‘beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah!’ That would have been amazing. But it never happened.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth
It makes no sense at all that the Beatles did not routinely perform their latest studio records at live concerts. With respect to Sherlock Holmes, these are the songs that weren’t played in the night.
Williams believes that the most likely reason they performed such a small part of their own catalogue was because they hadn’t learned how to play most the songs that had been attributed to them.
If it was the case that the Beatles’ job in the studio was to record the vocal tracks for songs that had already been written and instrumentalised, there would have been no need for them to learn to play the instrumental parts.
The Beatles did of course perform some of their ‘original’ compositions live. It would not have been possible to maintain the ‘Lennon and McCartney genius songwriters’ persona otherwise. Therefore, they would have learned just enough of their ‘originals’ to uphold the artifice, with the balance filled out by covers.
This explains why a) their shows were so short, b) why reasonably uncomplicated and straightforward ‘original’ songs like ‘She’s A Woman’ and ‘Baby’s in Black’ stayed in their set for so long, and c) why they had to include the rock and roll covers they had been performing for most of the decade.
The Beatles had a limited palette and they stuck to it right up to the point where it would have been difficult for the biggest band in the world to explain away the absence of great swathes of their own catalogue from their live shows.
I have come to the sad conclusion that John, Paul, George and Ringo were merely the dancing puppets in the shop window of a gigantic psychological operation called Beatlemania and that the Beatles were in fact the world’s first Beatles tribute band – and a tribute band that played fewer Beatles songs than their successors, and not as well.
The Beatles were finished as a unit by 1970 but they have cast a vast shadow over popular culture ever since. It is impossible to treat them insignificantly, which is why what was intended to be a preamble to a larger article has already expended 1,700 words on them.
Thank you for bearing with me while I exorcised my Beatles possession. It hasn’t been a pleasant experience but it has been less traumatic than the realisation in 2020 that most of the Left had sided with the ruling class in the covid war. I don’t think there are many more scales to fall from my eyes now.
By the time we got to Tavistock
If the Beatles were a construct created by powerful ruling class forces, most likely the combined efforts of the intelligence agencies, the Tavistock Institute, media interests, commercial/financial networks, elite families etc, then who knows how many other artists from that era and beyond were not the authentic articles we have been led to believe.
To read the rest, go to the article: https://real-left.com/no-conspiracies-please-were-reality-theorists/