The Beatles became who they were on the back of their catalog — which is to say, as songwriters — but that endgame would never have been secured without them first being absolute badasses of the stage. You hear an absolute mother of a band on something like the Star Club tapes, recorded — in exchange for free beer — in Hamburg in late 1962. This was a group that, from an in-concert standpoint, could beat the piss out of all comers. The songs were almost always not theirs, but the point wasn't ownership in the compositional sense, but rather a kind of sonic rank pulling — in effect, saying, "Yep, we'll have this bad boy number by you, Fats Waller, and you, Arthur Alexander, and we will make it no one else's but ours."
Sunday, August 16, 2015
It Was 50 Years Ago Yesterday
The Beatles played their historic concert at Shea Stadium. Here's an article on why that show was even greater than we thought:
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