Quote Originally Posted by MOZZER2 View Post
not doubting there talent and the works they produced some great tunes but the thread i responded to mentioned changing the world .The Beatles were a product of the previous generation and if you look at there influences the likes of cliff richard , buddy holly , elvis , bob dylan , chuck berry , beach boys , everly brothers to name a few were the real game changers in music . All forms of popular music came from gospel , blues , jazz and country music in the 1950's
I suspect you’re not old enough to have lived through all of the years when the Beatles were active and selling records (I.e. 1962 to 1970). I’m a bit too young for my memories of their early years to be entirely reliable, but,I think it’s generally accepted that the sixties were a seminal decade - put simplistically, it was when the world went from black and white to colour in ways beyond just cinema and television.

My impression is that the first three years of the sixties were just an extension of the fifties, musically, the shot in the arm provided by rock and roll in the mid fifties had died out as it had gone mainstream with “safer” versions of some of the artists you mention dominant. That all changed in 1963 when I can recall She Loves You (one of my least favourite Beatles songs) getting to number one and it seemed like everyone, and I mean everyone, was singing it.

That was when the sixties started as far as Im concerned. The Beatles didn’t create the sense of rebellion that was a characteristic of that decade, the conditions were in place already for what that decade became, but, for me, they were the focal point of it in that they kicked open a door through which others could follow.

There are those who say the Beatles were “safe” in the way that Hollywood Elvis became safe, they were like Pat Boone, Paul Anka etc, and, certainly, Brian Epstein tried to steer them in that sort of direction while he was still alive, but he couldn’t. In my experience, it is very rare for the biggest, most famous bands and performers of an era to be able to sell huge amounts of records and be good - the ones that sell the most singles tend to be unadventurous and predictable musically, but the Beatles were the biggest band out there for a while and they were also very good and musically adventurous.

There was a time when eight hours worth of television showing the Beatles working in the studio in their latter days would have been lapped up by me, but I’m in no hurry to watch it now, so I suppose I agree with the Whisperer to some extent, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t fully understand why people are still driven to produce such work more than half of a century later - the Beatles were a phenomenon and our lives would have been different if they had not existed, their influence in so many facets of life is greater than any other musical act of my lifetime.