This week I was listening to some old recordings by the Beatles, and for the first time – to my ears – they sounded more tied to their era than present. For me, the memories are passing, and the reality is moving on ….
When I was in college, a long time ago, one of the best aspects of the Beatles was that they sounded current even as they were no more. One of the experiences that I had as I dove into the pieces of the music to figure out “why is that” [?] was to find a whole different level of both engineering – on the technical side – and lyric structure – on the music side. There will never be another explosion like the first, and the Beatles were the first – because of the circumstances of their rise in life & the art that they presented.
As I listened to the recordings, which still can take me back to the living moments when I first heard them & experienced them, I could also hear the distance of time washing over the memory of what is in the music itself. There were two parts of the whole aural picture that were particularly special. While there were other musicians recording on similar machines & creating similar sounds – listen to KRTH 101 while they still feature the 60’s, and you will know – the process fed the Beatles in ways that others did not get entirely, except as observers. Learning about how George Martin produced music was a whole historical story – a lesson to be learned – in itself. Piecing together the lyrical meaning in context and in expanded imagination is the “other half of the sky”. Sadly, much of the importance of what is there is being washed away, at least in America, by the current crop of younger musicians – say those born in music after 1989 …. The view of the 1960’s grows distant, lost in the current political fringes as they fight over the outcome of that previous era. The rise of “rap music”, which was a rejection of 1960’s & 1970’s era jazz music, has penetrated the culture of “new musicians” to the point of making celebrity the point, dollars the the point, and quality of connection to History, well, not so much the point.
I hope people won’t get so lost in today that they forget yesterday … and the stories behind it …
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