ELVIS vs THE BEATLES

[A rope leash]

These Beatles reissues were on sale downtown, so I picked them up since I'm not doing anything and I don't have any money anyway:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Rubber Soul
Revolver

I've been trying to get back in touch with what the fuck it was that made The Beatles so great. They changed pop, that's for sure, but they sure were a bunch of manipulated pussies. They were corporate display product.

I sure would have liked to have seen the look on those three faces when they were told that Paul had died and was being replaced by a look-alike. No wonder John withdrew.

They never did anything Elvis couldn't do on his own.

Led Zepplin - same thing.

Long live The King.

[Mike Boom]

I assume your talking "our" Elvis??
errr ... well they could write a number one hit single or twenty.

[pip_52]

Elvis covers the Beatles really well.

There are several Beatles songs that I would really love to hear Elvis take on ... I think has the perfect voice/way of singing for it.

[A rope leash]

Hey Boom - there's a CD called 1 that has all of the Beatles Number one hits. I recieved it as a gift, and that's what got me going on The Beatles. I guess what got me about that CD is what wasn't a number one.

Elvis hasn't had a number one because he doesn't want one. He can sell Mandys all day long. The Beatles were good writers and players at a time when popular music needed a boost. "Greats" though they may be they are still a collaboration, one that was heavily influenced by trend-mongering marketers. They became a church of sorts, selling love in the face of war. All rock-hero worship is religion. Some do The Beatles, some do Led Zepplin, some do Black Sabbath.

I guess I'm doin' Elvis.

Perhaps I should combine my heros and call it the Frank-n-Elvis Club.

Elvis should cover Revolution, maybe with a bit of Doll Revolution mixed in. That'd be a number one...

[Dr. Luther]

Rubber Soul and Revolver are 2 of the finest LPs ever created -- and are almost certainly the Beatles best.

The songwriting is truly amazing.

And the execution / construction of the tracks are tremendous given the Beatles instrumental virtuosity -- i.e., fairly unremarkable, collectively.

As a most avid Costello proponent -- one who considers EC the finest songwriter (judging entire career) of our times (and possibly any other) -- I can safely say that Declan Macmanus would not exist, as we know him, were it not for the talents of Lennon/McCartney.

[A rope leash]

I love it when someone's chained gets jerked so hard they declare Elvis non-existant without The Beatles.

While I think the statement may be true when applied to such bands as The Grateful Dead or Led Zepplin, I don't think it is true when it comes to Elvis. He was already born into a musical family, and he was bound to be a musician, perhaps not a famous one known as Elvis Costello, but this guy would have wrote songs and played them whether or not The Beatles had ever been.

I've listened to both Rubber Soul and Revolver today, and I suppose I'm just not grasping how "creative" they were at the time. It's snappy, pleasant, cool, and wicked, but what are they saying? All you need is love?

O no, I don't believe it!

You say you want a revolution? Okay! Just don't hate anybody!

[Mike Boom]

Im not so sure that Elvis has never wanted a number one hit single.

- but what the Beatles had a great talent for was writing hit songs that were still artistic and interesting and in lots of ways groundbreaking - yet still appealing to masses of people - and yes - a lot of that was to do with image and marketing etc - but they basically pulled the seldom achieved trick of being hip AND poplular!

I see what your saying about collaboration Rope, but your forgetting one Mr Dylan - and if theres a King of the Songwriters Im afraid the crown belongs to Bob not Elvis.

[Dr. Luther]

Rope Leash-

No chain-jerking involved, and I did not say EC would not exist without the Beatles.

I implied, I believe, that he would have had a different incarnation.
And given his rather unconventional voice and delivery (particularly in his early years) it's quite debatable to what extent he would have been acknowledged by the narrow-minded record industry in a forum more conventional than the one in which he germinated...
(A Randy Newman type, perhaps. You know, as a songwriter, largely...)

Yikes.

[Dr. Luther]

Mike Boom-

I love Dylan, but he was largely a lyricist.
His strength was not in Melodic Songwriting.

EC has both.

(apples & oranges...)

[Mike Boom]

People often deliver up that criticism of Dylan, but I would strongly disagree that he isnt a melodic songwriter - I Want You, Just Like a Woman, Simple Twist of Fate, to name but a few, all feature very strong melody lines.
His style is obviously less stylistically varied than ECs, but I dont see that as a bad thing - it just means hes put more work into filling his own particular style of songwriting with as much substance, meaning and
craft as possible,pushing limits and refining it over the years - something I wish Elvis would concentrate more on rather than leaping all over the musical map all the time - Id love to see Elvis just try to experiment a bit and push some limits within the structure and format of the "Rock n Roll" /"Pop" song.

[Dr. Luther]

I can't say that I disagree with you.

I was just saying that Dylan's strength wasn't in melody -- not to say that it was sub-par by any means.

You are right, to a degree, about Elvis being all over the board with his stylings. But I think that is just his nature, and a product of his prolificness.

(By the way -- I just picked up a bootleg DVD of "Eat the Document".
Fascinating, but pretty unsettling. That tour, to me, is one of the monumental moments in musical history. That Dylan and the band were able to function at all in that climate is amazing, and what they achieved is spectacular. I guess that they were feeding off of the conflict...)

[A rope leash]

Well, I don't know what you guys are talking about. I was talking about The Beatles.

There's no doubt that The Beatles had a huge influence on many performers. They also had influence over young culture. I get a little nervous at the extent of that infuence when I hear songs like Dr. Robert or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

How many folks took some of this mind-bending music and rabbit-hole lyrics as tacit permission to delve into the world of brain-altering substances? Did I?

I worry about the balance of lives improved as opposed to lives damaged. I worry about the fact that those same experimenters of the time are now running things. I really think The Beatles wanted people to explore their minds, but the marketplace turned it into slavery for some folks.

O yeah, I get high with some help from my friends. It keeps the cops busy.

O yeah, we'll need some cash...

It's like a church.

[A rope leash]

Listening to these albums, the band I am reminded of the most is the Traveling Wilburys. A collaboration...

The drug reference thing has got my spidey sense tingling. Look, these guys made drugs look pretty. Drug references became a staple of rock and pop from then on. People use drugs because they see their friends doing it, and if The Beatles said it was cool, then there you go.

Anyway, tons of people get addicted while the government starts a "drug war". Some die from drug use, some wind up in prison. Many people will drag their addiction to their own deaths, all the while staying clear of the "war". A person may not be a threat, but they can always be picked up on a drug charge, and if they don't have any, there's always the evidence locker. Meanwhile, the subtle approval blasts away over the airwaves, and in our video media. It seems like every Hollywood movie I've seen lately features a dope-smoking scene. People still go to jail for that shit.

Hollywood glamorizes it, Washington prosecutes it.

It's mainly the fault of John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

Elvis rarely writes about drugs, and as far as I can tell, he has never glamorized them. It also seems to me that the supposed bad boys The Rolling Stones didn't do much with drug references. (Am I wrong?)

I think Evis is more like The Rolling Stones (a collaboration) than he is The Beatles.

[wardo68]

Elvis rarely writes about drugs, and as far as I can tell, he has never glamorized them.

He hasn't written expressly about drugs, no. There are a few references on Armed Forces. For the most part he writes about alcohol.

It also seems to me that the supposed bad boys The Rolling Stones didn't do much with drug references. (Am I wrong?)

Umm... I think their drug references were limited to the six or seven albums they released between 1966 and 1973.

But back to an earlier point. Can you give an example of a line from a Beatles song that explicitly advocates drugs? And not one that has been interpreted that way?

[BlueChair]

These Beatles reissues were on sale downtown, so I picked them up since I'm not doing anything and I don't have any money anyway:

There are no Beatles reissues...

But without the Beatles there would have been no Elvis, period.

[noiseradio]

At least that's what ELvis seems to think. He regularly credits the Beatles (among others, but none quite as much as the Beatles) as helping to shape his musical identity. Maybe he would have been a musician. But he wouldn't have written most of the songs you love him so much for. That's not just hero worship; it's just how it works. If Elvis hadn't heard the Clash's debut, he wouldn't have written "Watching the Detectives." The Beatles changed the language of pop music (not just interms of lyrics). I don't know what language pop music would be in without the Beatles (I suspect Afro-Cuban), but either way, Elvis' records would probably have sounded a lot more like jazz or Elvis Presley w/o the Beatles.

But the Beatles wouldn't have been able to do what they did without Chuck Berry, the other Elvis, the Byrds, and Dylan. It's a two-way street

[alexv]

Damn right, Noise, in fact the language of pop music in Latin, South and Central America is Afro-Cuban music, yeah baby!! But for those Beatle boys coming along we'd have the whole Western world doing some proper dancing!! Come to think of it we had jazz (when it mattered) pretty much taken over too thanks to Diz.

[A rope leash]

These are brand new CDs in wrap. Okay, perhaps they are not reissues, but they are new.

O, of course there is little if any DIRECT approval of drug use, but anyone growing up at the time knew what some of these songs were really about, and even if we were mistaken, it was common to suppose that they were speaking almost specifically of psychedelic drug trips. This sort of thing opened the door for songs like Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf or Clapton's Cocaine.

I'm really having trouble picking out a drug reference by The Rolling Stones, but I haven't listened to much of them lately, so I'm going from bad memory. I still think Elvis is more like them than he is like the Beatles. The Rolling Stones owe a lot to American R&B, and so does every Elvis. Our Elvis owes something to The Beatles, but he doesn't owe his existence.

Hey, I do like The Beatles, but I hate them, too. I do sometimes wonder what would have been without The Beatles.

Herman's Hermits?

[pip_52]

"Mother's Little Helper" ...

Im not sure how much you can blame the Beatles for the prolific drug use of the 60s, especially. I mean, did people really do drugs because the Beatles sang about it or did the Beatles sing about it because it was so prevalent in youth culture already?

I wasnt there so I dont know ...

[BlueChair]

Even more drug references came in the 70s, pretty much all of Exile On Main Street is about drugs... and later, especially Keith's songs.. "Before The Make Me Run"


The Kinks are the only band I can think of that didn't really sing about drugs in the 60s. But they were busy singing about beer instead

[alexv]

rope, the albums you bought recently are late Beatles albums, and the drug themes in them (which you are right about) were really incorporated by them from Dylan and stuff others were doing at the time. The Beatles were late converts to public espousals of drug use. In fact, I would argue that the Beatles changed pop music not once but twice. Their first few years (full of poppy singles about love and girls) changed pop music and made EC possible; starting with the albums you mentioned (and influenced by the great Dylan) they turned druggy and serious and gave birth to progressive rock (yuck) in the same way that Dylan birthed the "singer songwriter" (double yuck). The Beatles revolution, the first one, had nothing to do with drugs. And that revolution I would hate not to have happened; the second one I could do without, for some of the reasons you mention. As a teenager in the 70s I too saw a lot of kids turned on to drug use and screw up their lives because of idol worship, particularly of the rock heroes of the time, Paul, John, George and Ringo included.

[wardo68]

anyone growing up at the time knew what some of these songs were really about

By the same logic you could also say that those same people are the only ones who could still comprehend the importance of the Beatles since they were there when it happened.

This sort of thing opened the door for songs like Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf or Clapton's Cocaine.

Plus Clapton didn't write that song; Jerry Jeff Walker did. About 50 years after a song called "Cocaine Blues" that Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan both still perform.

I'm really having trouble picking out a drug reference by The Rolling Stones

"I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon" (Dead Flowers)
"I can't get no connection" (Connection)
"On our first trip" (19th Nervous Breakdown)
"Sister Morphine"
"Coming Down Again"
"When you need a little coke and sympathy" (Let It Bleed)
"All my friends are junkies" (Monkey Man)

[BlueChair]

Not to mention Their Satanic Majesties Request

[A rope leash]

I like the idea of two "Beatle Revolutions". They kind of went from the Light to the Dark.

I'm obviously remembering all drug references form The Rolling Stones now. Of course they mention drugs, but they tend to paint it black, don't they?

As I recall growing up, The Beatles were admitting their drug use in public, and that is why the lyrics, however vague, were taken as derived from experience. To this day I don't think we can deny that pop music gives a wink to drug use, and it's just ironic that this began at about the same time that governments began declaring war on it.

I tend to see in circles.

[pophead2k]

An opinion for your consideration:

The Beatles as individuals used drugs throughout their entire career, including and before the happy poppy singles. And while it is true that there are no 'prelly' references in I Want to Hold Your Hand, the culture of the 60s began to value things that were seen as genuine and real. Dylan cemented the idea of someone singing about their own experiences instead of pretend romances and car races. The Beatles (and many others) followed him down this path. Drugs were a part of their existence; hence they became a part of their art and expression, particularly with Lennon, the 'most real' Beatle of them all. In fact, a lot of the reason many who started with the group didn't like John later on was because he was too real (Cold Turkey, anyone?).

Did the Beatles turn more kids onto the possibility of drugs? Or were they just reflecting the culture that was going on around them? I don't have an answer to this. I will say that performers and entertainers and artists have had chemical problems since time began. Until the 50s and 60s, the popular media (which was limited in scope pre-television) was not very interested in the private, private lives of stars. Once the Beatles, the Stones, and the rest became involved in the media frenzy, their private habits were publicized by the media, which in turn exposed more kids to their drug use than any obscure references in their songs ever did. Paul McCartney was asked if he took acid, so he replied truthfully. Had he not been asked, he certainly would not have brought it up himself.

Finally, my parents were HUGE Beatles fans from 1963-1970. They knew what was going on, but as individuals, never felt the need to wear what the Beatles wore, talk like the Beatles spoke, or smoke or ingest what the Beatles were tripping on. I like Public Enemy and Dr. Dre and I have no plans to shoot any cops any time soon.