The remainder bins of musical history

I don't know this for sure because I
haven't had time to spend my life researching
this stuff, but I have little doubt that
The Beatles were under tremendous pressure
to keep rewriting "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
with every new record.

If The Beatles had given in to those
pressures, where would they be today?

Just another oldies act in Las Vegas,
is my guess.

Fortunately, they refused to listen. And
because they were making Capitol Records
here in the US and their English record
company HUGE piles of cash, they were in
a strong position to resist this
pressure -- in the mid-60s they were in
strongest position of any recording
artist in history.

Any record company would have paid a
large fortune to sign them away from
Capitol and the English one.

So although Capitol and British record
company executives must have been pretty
frightened by the trend of their music --
they couldn't stop The Beatles from
doing whatever they wanted -- until
their popularity went downhill.

Which it absolutely failed to do.

Although the mania of 1964-1966
Beatlemania did die down -- we kept
buying their records by the millions.
If they'd kept on giving concerts,
we'd have kept on buying tickets
and selling out Shea Stadium.

So The Beatles had clout as no other
musical performers in history had --
before or since.

And to their credit, they used it to
the max.

They grew artistically. George Harrison
met a sitar player who had a bit part
in the filming of the movie HELP! -
and soon was studying under Ravi
Shankar. And all of them were taking up
transcendental meditation.

(I'm not going to say that meditation
had anything to do with their musical
growth, just that their willingness to
do something which in those times was
SO weird . . . and SOOOOO far out,
reflects their willingness to explore
new territory, especially inner
territory.)

(Drugs is another part of that story,
probably much more significant, but
I'm avoiding that subject, at least
for now!)

So by 1966, The Beatles were making
music that was still basically pop, and
was certainly popular, but was way
more sophisticated than "I Want to
Hold Your Hand." (my least favorite
of their early songs anyway.)

Singles Travel