My latest book with Sonicbond Press is due out on August 29th! Just over a month away! Can’t wait! This series explores the most iconic Rock Music albums! I picked this one as a follow-up to my one on Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home.
I’m really enjoying researching and writing these book!
It’s available for pre-orders! You can buy it from Amazon or directly from the publishers Burning Shed site.
Please don’t forget to leave a review!!
Extract from the Introduction
Incredibly, The Beatles had not only risen with the tide but had adopted a leading role in this revolution. What had started as a standard rhythm and blues (r&b)/rock ‘n’ roll cover band, had developed into a highly original teeny-bop band that had taken the whole world by storm with their energy, originality and effervescent personalities. That might have been it if they had not been so clever and creative, so eager to absorb new ideas and develop. Their infamous meeting with Bob Dylan in August 1964, the experimentation with pot and acid, the delving into Indian music, folk, country, electronic and blues coupled with their interest in Beat poetry, art and fashion, set them apart from their contemporaries. They absorbed and evolved; always enthusiastically pushing the limits. The songwriting became more varied and sophisticated with greater depth of poetic lyric coupled to expanding musicality. The folkie essence of Beatles For Sale evolved into the harder pop-rock of the soundtrack Help and thenveered off into greater elaboration with Rubber Soul whichsaw the beginning of a new type of songwriting ultimately exploding into full ferocity in Revolver. The Beatles had transitioned. By 1967, with the help of George Martin and all the possibilities of unlimited studio time and the latest equipment, that transition culminated in the psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It set a new standard in writing, performing and complexity. Rock music had come of age and even the most avant garde bands were looking to the Beatles to set the standard.
Sgt Pepper was a statement. Drenched in acid, displaying great stylistic range, soaked with the most astounding production techniques, and readily identifying with the new emergent underground scene, it set a new benchmark. The Beatles had matured, aligned themselves with the new counterculture, yet, due to their brilliant songwriting, accessible melodies and pop sensibilities had still retained their commercial standing and popularity outside of that youth culture.
Sgt Pepper had proved to be a phenomenon, a revelation. In the UK, following its release on the 26th of May, it had sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week, staying twenty seven weeks at number 1 in the British charts.
I was almost the right age for the Beatles. A couple of years older would have been good, but I can’t complain. I started getting into rock and pop at the age of ten when an older friend, Clive Hansell, introduced me to the delights of Adam Faith and Buddy Holly. That was back in 1960. Over the next few years, I extended my appreciation to include the wonders of the Shadows, Eddie Cochran, the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, with a smattering of Elvis. I liked my music fast and rockin’. Even at the age of twelve the likes of Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin and Bobby Ridell sounded too tame. The charts were far too poppy.
By the time I was thirteen I was ripe for something to explode and explode it did.
On the day that the album Please Please Me came out I was more than ready. Somehow ‘Love Me Do’ had passed me by but it hadn’t gone unnoticed by my mate Tony Hum. He’d gone out and bought the album the day it came out. On that fateful day my life changed forever, Tony took me into his room, we sat on the bed and he ceremoniously placed the album on his Dansette record player, lowered the stylus and the universe shifted.
‘I Saw Her Standing There’ stormed out. My ears were blasted with the rawest, most exhilarating sound I had ever experienced. That was it. I was hooked. We were there all afternoon playing the album over and over as I absorbed every track. The most exciting afternoon of my life.
The next day I went and bought the album and ‘From Me To You’. After that the world shifted. I bought every Beatles album and single on the day of release. Still got them all!
The Beatles formed the backdrop to my youth. They grew and developed and I grew with them. From a spotty fourteen-year-old, feasting on the pop charts; a lad with greased back hair, skin-tight jeans and sideburns, who had a liking for blues, folk, Dylan and beat groups, I grew into a Kerouac-drenched long-haired denizen of the London underground scene. I moved on from the Yardbirds, Animals and Stones to Roy Harper, Hendrix, Floyd, Beefheart and Country Joe & the Fish. As I progressed from rock and beat to psychedelia and acid, the Beatles were right there with me, leading the way.
At the age of eighteen I was an aging raver frequenting UFO, Middle Earth and Les Cousins. Sgt Peppers sat side by side with Fleetwood Mac, Notorious Byrd Brothers, Drop Out Boogie, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Axis Bold As Love, Strange Days, Come Out Fighting Ghenghis Smith, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, Forever Changes and Buffalo Springfield.
As I say, a couple of years older might have been advantageous. I was somehow too young to get to see the Beatles live. As a kid I had no transport and it always seemed too big a thing to actually go to a Beatles concert. They were too special. That seemed unattainable and never even crossed my mind. By the time I bought my first motorbike at the age of sixteen, in 1965, they were coming to the end of touring. I’d missed my chance.
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The Beatles: White Album – Rock Classics: Amazon.co.uk: Opher Goodwin: 9781789523331: Books
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