“I
get by with a little help from my friends,” the Beatles famously sang in 1967. But if the Liverpool foursome had come from around here, they’d have probably echoed a different chorus: “I get by with a little help from Best of Marin.” Love may be all you need — but knowing the county’s finest in entertainment, dining and beautification doesn’t hurt either. For our 2012 Best of Marin readers poll, the Pacific Sun is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the formation
of the classic Beatles lineup and the release of their first single! It was in 1962 that John, Paul and George added Ringo to the band, completing the lineup that would be forever known as the Fab Four — and before the year was out “Love Me Do” would hit the charts and the rest, as they say, is history. So never mind the Walrus, put a hold on the revolution and don’t pine too much for yesterday. Just let it be...the Best of Marin.
Were the Fab Four really the greatest rock ’n’roll band of all time?
R
ock intelligentsia tell us time and again—the Beatles were the greatest rock band of all time. End of discussion. Let’s move on. The concept has become so ingrained in popular music’s collective consciousness that it nears heresy to suggest otherwise. When Rolling Stone magazine publishes one of its now-quite-frequent lists of the greatest albums of all time, it goes without saying that Sgt. Pepper’s is going to top the list. When that magazine issued its 100 Greatest Artists of All Time list, the question wasn’t “who will be at number one?” it was “what order will everyone else be following the Beatles?” But could it be that the Beatles rise to the top of these lists not because they’re the best band—but because they’re the most well known and least offensive? A lot of British Invasion obsessives would rank such ’60s contemporaries as the Rolling Stones, the Who or the Kinks as high, or higher. Consider the cult of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—the so-called greatest album of all time. The record was groundbreaking in a lot of ways: its use of multi-tracking, sound collages, printed lyrics, song segues, a loose “concept” to the album featuring char-
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acter Billy Shears, etc. (It also broke new ground in pretentiousness.) Everything about it is quite provocative—if this were 1967; and none of this makes anyone want to listen to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”more BY JA SO than once. There are plenty more wellproduced duds to be found on that album—you can’t blame John and Paul for questioning George’s songwriter abilities after hearing “Within You Without You”; “She’s Leaving Home” is a dreary example of the maudlin “ditties” McCartney would plague fans with throughout his solo career. “Fixing a Hole,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Getting Better” and “Good Morning, Good Morning” are OK, but would’ve been filler on any Dylan or Stones album of the same period. In fact, it seems that the legend of Sgt. Pepper’s is based largely on Ringo’s charming offkey vocals on “A Little Help from My Friends,” the effectively dramatic “A Day in the Life” and an admittedly cool album cover. Worse than the overrated status of Sgt. Pepper’s itself, could be its influence on other bands far less talented than the Beatles. After the Beatles gave pop music prestige and artistic
credibility, a slew of terrible “concept” albums were set forth upon the rock landscape—Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes, Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues, Tarkus by Emerson, Lake and N WAL SH Palmer, everything ever released by Styx. The punk and new wave bands that dominated the late ’70s and ’80s (and their descendants today) were a direct backlash to such “art rock” meanderings—creating tight, catchy, lyrically direct songs based on ’50s rock ’n’ rollers and the edgier ’60s work of the Kinks, Stones, Who—and pre-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles. It’s an anti-Beatles reaction that defined the ’80s and ’90s. The Clash growled “No more Elvis, Beatles and the Rolling Stones”; R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe referred to the Beatles as “elevator music”; and the Replacements named an album Let It Be simply to emphasize that the Beatles were “just another band”— there’s a reason these major bands weren’t picking on Herman’s Hermits or the Dave Clark Five. One can’t argue that the Beatles wrote and recorded some of the greatest songs of their era—I could name at least two songs per Beatles
album that are beyond reproach. I could also name at least two songs per album that no band in contention for the title of greatest band of all time should have to its credit (the White Album is especially bloated with filler; if it had been kept to a single album, it’d have a strong argument for best album of all time). So after bashing the Beatles for 600 words, it may come as a surprise to reveal I was one of the aforementioned British Invasion obsessives during high school in the late ’80s— had all the Beatles albums (U.K. and U.S. versions) and even bought several of the Fab Four solo works (a fool on the hill and his money soon parted, gotta say). Name a Beatles song and I could name the album, year and lead vocalist for it. But after all these years and several other great bands later, there’s a lot more to discuss about which band is the greatest. As Paul McCartney sang in 1968, “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da life goes on, brah! La la, how life goes on.” Man, that’s an annoying song. < Stones or Beatles? Weigh in with Jason at jwalsh@pacificsun.com.