Most of us agree that the Beatles made great music. But some people don’t believe the Beatles to have been especially good musicians. Quincy Jones famously called them “the worst musicians in the world.” He’s exaggerating, but he has a point. By modern standards, the playing on Beatles records is sloppy. The parts are interesting by the standards of 60s rock, but not nothing that would challenge a jazz or classical player. John, Paul, George and Ringo are pretty good singers and instrumentalists, but you could walk into any music school and quickly find yourself dozens of better ones.
The thing is: I do think the Beatles are great musicians. However, it is not because of their playing, or their singing, or even their songwriting. The Beatles are great because of their ability to create studio recordings. Their albums from Revolver onwards are hugely greater than the sum of the material, arrangements, and performances. Those late albums are masterpieces of recording, editing, mixing, and effects, of hyperrealist timbral and spatial manipulation, and of surrealist tape editing.
Traditional instrumentalists severely undervalue “playing the studio” as a form of musicianship. We live in the recorded music era. To a good approximation, all of the music that a person hears in modern Western society is recorded. In this world, playing the studio is the most culturally significant kind of musical creativity. “Real” musicians tend to undervalue studio creativity, because the pleasure of recordings are immediate and sensual, and we don’t have the formal and analytical vocabulary to analyze them the way we do for harmony and melody. But a formal vocabulary of timbre and space is starting to emerge. The Beatles are standard reference points for scholars of the recording studio for the same reason that Bach is for scholars of counterpoint, or that Coltrane is for scholars of jazz improvisation: they took some wild ideas from their eras’ fringes and moved them into the core of their respective practices.
In a way, the Beatles are more culturally significant now than they were in the 1960s. In the hip-hop era, we take it for granted that there can be entire genres of music that only exist as electronically produced recordings. In the 1960s, however, this wasn’t obvious at all. The idea of the recording as the canonical form of a song is a relatively new one. Until the 1950s, the sheet music industry was bigger than the recording industry. During this time, records were documents of live performances. The early Beatles records were no exceptions. When they made Please Please Me, they played each tune live a half a dozen times each, and the album is the best take of each one. This was the same process people used to record classical, jazz, folk, and just about everything else.
The situation changed when the Beatles stop performing live. At that point, they became a studio band, making albums without any concern for how the music might translate to the stage. In so doing, the Beatles effectively became electronic music producers as much as rock musicians. The sonic invention of their late albums changed listener expectations of pop music. Studio manipulation became a core competency of modern musicians, rather than a technical craft performed after the fact.
Every sound on those last few Beatles albums is sonically manipulated, often in extreme ways. The sludgy drums on “Come Together” are the result of vari-speed and compression. It’s not possible to make drums sound like that live in a room. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is full of tape loops that were “performed” on the mixing desk. The run-out groove after “A Day In The Life” isn’t conceivable in any form other than a recording.
The Beatles certainly weren’t the first people to make experimental recordings and tape collages. Karlheinz Stockhausen appears on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for a reason. But the Beatles put those techniques on the pop charts.
The music school students who I teach are often better musicians than the Beatles in terms of their technical abilities, knowledge of music theory, and stylistic versatility. However, few of them know how to make a decent-sounding recording, much less an extraordinarily great one. Outside of specialized music technology courses, studio creativity is not much taught or even appreciated in the music academy. That represents a severe imbalance that I would like to see corrected.
