But someone at James' station had already sent a tape of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to a DJ friend in Chicago, who started playing it, too; Chicago soon sent it to St. Louis. Capitol decided to press a million copies of the record immediately, and to promote the group hard. The rest is hysteria.
Except for the details: Carroll James wasn't a rock DJ, and his audience was mostly grown-ups. James did a talky afternoon drive-time show for WWDC, a popular AM station. Back then, WWDC was a laid-back outlet with a so-called "middle of the road," or MOR, format that was aimed at an older audience. What did it do besides break the Beatles? When it wasn't running its oddball contests, the station drew on a mostly pop play list, mixing Andy Williams and Al Hirt with soft-rock acts like Ruby and the Romantics, Bobby Vinton, and Ben E. King. WWDC's morning guy had been around for decades, played the organ behind his own wake-up patter, and had a pair of miked, twittering canaries in the studio with him. At night, WWDC didn't play any music at all; it interviewed touring book authors. The only show it aimed at a young audience was in the evening, when its preferred adult listeners were watching TV, and that show was targeted at the dutiful children of the station's core middle-class following. The "teen" show was called The House of Homework, and its gimmick was letting kids call in to ask for help with their assignments.
In short, WWDC was a station for dorks. Nobody who aimed for Hip or Cool would have listened to it. Carroll James himself used to play snippets of Bob Dylan's early records as jokes, in disbelief that the folkie actually existed. On the other hand, every single program director at every hip, cool rock station in America had already thrown his copies of "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You" into the trash. One dorky Washington station played the Beatles for an audience of commuting office workers, at-home moms, and their bookish kids -- and they wanted more. How could this be? Who could the Beatles have been to these listeners?
In fact, the MOR audience had a template for receiving the Beatles that nobody else had, because MOR stations were the only part of the American music scene at all open to British vocal acts. Top 40 rock listeners accepted foreign singers only as sideshow displays; Lonnie Donegan's 1961 novelty "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor?" was a Top 10 hit. But, unlike rock listeners, the MOR audience was familiar with Britain's biggest pre-Beatles singer, Cliff Richard, who was one of the most popular acts in the world. Richard and his band, later famous as the Shadows, had had a middling 1959 hit here called "Living Doll," and Richard was getting some MOR airplay in 1963 with "Lucky Lips." (He would finally get a Top 10 U.S. hit -- "Devil Woman" -- in 1976.) MOR stations had featured a string of mostly minor hits by British singers, including Frank Ifield ("I Remember You"), Helen Shapiro ("Tell Me What He Said"), and Matt Munro ("My Kind of Girl"). These were largely treacly, '50s-style pop records: Munro had a lounge-crooner sound; Shapiro was a Connie Francis-style torch singer. What did the Beatles have in common with acts like these?
Quite a bit, actually. The early Beatles sang Ifield's hits in their live shows, and toured with Helen Shapiro. (Indeed, "She Loves You" could well be an "answer record" -- then a genre of its own -- to Shapiro's musically inventive "Tell Me What He Said.") While boomers may cherish the image of the early Beatles as leather-clad bad boys playing raw rock in smoky Hamburg clubs, the reality is that along with the rock covers, their Hamburg repertoire also included lots of sappy old pop standards like "Red Sails in the Sunset." The mammoth Meet the Beatles album, after all, features a version of Anita Bryant's syrupy "'Til There Was You." Perhaps the greatest tribute to the intensity of the original U.S. Beatlemania is that even this intolerable piece of anti-rock made the era's Top 40 playlists.
Just let me hear that pop music
So what? Given the Beatles' long career, their dozens of hits, and their various notable innovations, what possible significance can their early, brief connection to a pop audience have? In fact, it is in the context of their career that it matters, because the group's pop dimension is a key factor not only in their musical "growth," but in the longevity of their music as well.
Although Beatles' music is currently fixed in the musical canon as having revolutionized rock, that is not quite correct. What is true is that the group's enormous success opened the door to a lot of groups who energized the era's rock playlists, though even this element can be -- and has been -- vastly overstated. Early '60s rock was far from being the string-laden wasteland it is sometimes made out to have been (think of the Crystals' "Da Do Ron Ron," for instance). It is also true that the Beatles made long-form compositions possible, introduced the concept album, and, through their lyrics, helped bring personal expression into a field that was largely formulaic. However, the Beatles are themselves indebted to others for some of these advances (among them, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon). Besides, these later changes often occurred at the cost of the very musical energy that the Beatles are otherwise credited with restoring to the rock scene.
But is the Beatles' own career and development really a study in rock revolution, as it is usually portrayed? Or is it actually something different: a study in the extension of the otherwise despised pop form? The answer to that question could help resolve the apparent mysteries of the group's persistence. Here's the short answer: The mature Beatles, the Beatles who "revolutionized" rock music from Revolver through Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band through the end of their common career, the Beatles who helped construct the foundation of the '60s counterculture, were themselves built on an essentially pop foundation and enjoyed an essentially pop florescence.
By 1966, the Beatles were far more interested in melody than in beat, had largely abandoned the influences from American country music and American blues that had been apparent on their earlier recordings, and were building an increasing number of their compositions around narrative lyrics that told stories rather than expressed adolescent emotions. The more they developed as composers and lyricists, the less they tried to harmonize like the Everly Brothers or whoop like the Isley Brothers, and the more they drew on their own roots in British popular music. While they continued to use rock elements to make their music, there is almost as much British Music Hall in their later work as there is rock.
The apotheosis of their personal development is not the avant-garde experimentation of the White Album (only a few of its cuts get much play anymore). It is Abbey Road, which, dear as it is to the hearts of many rock enthusiasts, could just as well be hailed as the greatest pop album of all time. Certainly, it could have been played almost in its entirety on MOR radio. As for the Beatles' career coda, the Let It Be album, its major songs -- especially the title number and the whining "Long and Winding Road" -- out-treacle anything that Matt Munro ever dared record.
Getting back
Does this distinction between "pop" and "rock" actually matter? From the point of view of the music, no. One either likes the stuff or doesn't. But from the vantage point of rock mythology, the distinction is potentially revealing.
Over the years, what might be called the rock establishment -- the music's historians, its journalists, often its performers, and now a class of academics, too -- has developed a complex story of the music's origins, nature, and social role. As humanities professor Robert Pattison has pointed out, this story has been laid out along the lines of 19th-century Romanticism. Unlike other forms of music, goes the myth, rock prides itself on being elemental. Though it was commercialized by whites, its soul is black. Its true roots are in Africa by way of the Mississippi Delta. Stolen from blacks by Sun Records in the guise of Elvis Presley, the music nevertheless remains true to its undeniable nature. It is a music that stands outside middle-class restraint, reveling in its sexual power, emerging from -- and this is a real phrase from a real musicologist -- "orgiastic magic." Some statement of primitivist obligation is essential to the pose of rock seriousness, and it is in fact part of the Beatles' persona as well.
No grand narrative is complete without a vanquished villain, and this narrative features one, too: pop music. Pop was everything rock hated. Pop was polite; rock is outspoken. Pop was false; rock is authentic. Pop was constrained; rock lets it all hang out. Pop was commercial artifice; rock is, in Pattison's portrait, Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp," updated and indispensable to surviving a corrupt consumerist world.
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