Welcome to Week 3 of The Music of The Beatles here on Coursera.

And this week, we'll spend mostly talking about what

happened with The Beatles and their music in 1965.

As you remember, in previous weeks, the first week, we really

sort of took it up to 1963, last week was 1964.

And so here, we head into 1965.

And one of the, here are some of the themes that we're going to cover

over the course of of this week's lecture, just to kind of give you a summary of

some of the main points of of what

we're going to, our main arguments are going to be.

We said, or I said, in 1964 with A Hard Day's Night, that The Beatles kind

of reached the kind of peak, or a

certain arriving place point of arrival, as pop craftsmen.

That is, people who's, who's, who saw their

job as putting together, you know, great pop songs.

Not artists, but craftspeople and a great pop

song you know, results, hopefully, in a hit record

and, and stardom and all that kind of thing.

So 1964 was really a mark of success and A Hard Day's Night really is that album.

Then, I made the argument that towards the end of 1964, you

begin to see The Beatles, I think, re-calibrating their style a little bit.

Starting to push on the boundaries.

Maybe not satisfied with just repeating what they did with A Hard Day's Night.

A lot of people see that, that album as being a kind of

a weak successor to A Hard Day's Night.

But I see it as an important precursor to what's happening in 1965.

And what's happening in 1965 is The Beat, is The Beatles move a lot closer,

or a lot, travel a much farther distance in 1965 than they did in 1964.

Toward the artist model, and we'll come back to this, idea of the artist

model a number of times during the week as we, we focus on the material.

And in fact if, if, if I have a bias in

choosing which pieces that I talk about, I'm going to choose the

pieces that really sort of show this transformation happening, at the

risk of maybe making it seem like that's all that was happening.

But I'll try to balance that by telling you

that still a lot of what was happening with A

Hard Day's Night and Beatles For Sale, the craftsman approach

is still a big part of what's happening in 1965.

But as we move toward the artist model,

what exactly does that mean?

Well, it means the lyrics become more serious.

Remember talking about the, the meeting with

Dillon and in, August or September of 1964.

And them kind of challenging or at least suggesting to

The Beatles they might move beyond this sort of,

boy meets girl, boy kisses girl, holds your hand,

she loves you, kind of things, into something more serious.

And so, what you'll see over 1965, is the lyrics become more serious.

The forms become more buried. eh, more, buh, varied, that is.

I've made a big point of, of talking about how prevalent

the AABA form is, and I've, I've basically made the argument that

AABA is kind of synonymous with pop songwriting coming out of the

great American songbook tradition of Tin Pan Alley, and that kind of thing.

So to see it seems to be an indication that

The Beatles are, are, totally buying into the idea of pop

songwriting and using the, the form that, one

of the forms that's most often associated with it.

But now, as they begin to move away from that model and begin to, maybe

the better idea is to expand their portfolio

so that it's not only this craft thing.

The forms will become more varied, and we'll see that

as we start to look through the tunes this week.

New instruments come to be used, so the old

the old idea of two guitars, bass, a drums,

vocals, there's still plenty of that, but

we're going to see some new instruments coming in

to the recordings as they begin to

experiment with with, with, with expanding their style.

And they also start to look at styles outside

of the pop rock of, of their, of 1965, starting

to reference other styles, classical music, avant-garde music, to

a certain extent, in this case, a French popular song.

You're starting to see them sort of expand stylistically

in terms of instrumental color, in terms of

varied forms, and in terms of meaningful lyrics.

That's what it means to move increasingly from the craft model to the artist

model, so that's one of the big stories we're going to talk about in 1965.

Let's do a quick review of important events that span the year 1965.

We'll, we'll of course come back to the albums and the music and some of those

kinds of things, as we continue to talk, but here, here is a sort of an overview.

The

Beatles continued to dominate the charts in the United States, in the UK.

But I have to say that it's, what's surprising when you go back and

look at some of the press coverage that they got, and what some people were

saying about The Beatles, that still, there

was this expectation that any minute now,

they could fall off the top of the charts and become, go back to obscurity.

There was still the suspicion that they were still something like the

flavor of the week, and now it was the flavor of the

month, and maybe now it's become the flavor of the year.

But still, something was, something had to give, it couldn't continue.

But in fact, it did.

Interestingly enough, John and George have their first LSD trip in spring of 1965,

which seems very early because we think of summer of 1967 as

being the summer of love and the break-out of psychedelia, to think that

The Beatles, two of The Beatles at least, had experienced LSD over two

years before all of that. I think it's instructive.

Remembering as well that they've been exposed to

marijuana, in the, in the second half of 1964.

John's second book, A Spaniard in the Works, was published in June of 1965.

You know, his first book, In His Own Write, had been published in 1964.

These two books, if you haven't read them, they're, they're a lot of fun.

They're great sort of

John, John Lennon kind of wordplay and sarcasm and

outrageous humor, and a lot of that kind of thing.

But it did really kind of help to build the

image of John Lennon as being more of this

literary, more than the kind of words guy, whereas

Paul McCartney is often seen more as the music guy.

Now often, it turns out that Paul's got great lyrics and John's got great music.

So that's maybe a little bit too facile a distinction to make.

But still, the fact that, that John Lennon had now

written two books kind of reinforced him as a kind of literary type of person.

A Hard Day's Night, the movie and the album,

were released in the summer of 1965, in August.

The Beatles played the first Shea Stadium concert for 55,000 fans in August of 1965.

That's often seen as a real sort of high watermark for a live

performance to play Shea Stadium, to play a sports stadium, and have all

these people show up.

Nobody'd really done anything quite like that before.

In August of 1965, The Beatles also meet Elvis Presley,

and you may, try, try to find it on the Internet

or, or various spots, a new documentary that I just recently

heard about being made about the day Elvis met The Beatles.

That's something I'm looking forward to checking out myself.

Lots of stories told about that meeting.

The Beatles received

their MBE awards in the Great, in Great

Britain in October of 1965, somewhat of a scandal

for some of the older generation who actually

sent their MBE's back because The Beatles got theirs.

And then Rubber Soul is released in December of 1965.

So as we look at the two big albums for 1965, we've got A Hard Day's Night.

I mean, I'm sorry,

Help occurring in the, in the summer of 1965.

And then Rubber Soul at the end of the year in December of 1965.

Let's take a quick look at the singles

because remembering that Beatles For Sale came out

at the end of 1964, and then there

wasn't another new album out until August of 1965.

How did they fill that space?

Remember, in popular music, if you're off the, off the charts, out of mind, right?

So you gotta

keep stuff on the charts.

But this is still, at this point in the

music business, singles are still the important unit of trade.

Albums are kind of secondary.

When we talk about Sgt Pepper, we'll talk about how that

flips, and how the album starts to become the important thing.

Bur right now, singles are the thing, so if you want to see how The Beatles sort

of were, were sort of still present on the charts, you need to look at the singles.

So Eight Days a Week, which we talked about

last week, had been drawn from Beatles For Sale,

was released in February of 1965, and went to number

one, so as of February, they had a number one hit.

The B-side of that, by the way, was I Don't Want to Spoil the Party.

Eight Days a Week being a Paul song, I

Don't Want to Spoil the Party being a John song.

Then in April of 1965, another number one hit on

both sides of the Atlantic was John's Ticket to Ride.

The B side of that was Yes It Is.

Yes It Is is an

interesting track, also a John song, because it's

a reworking of an earlier Beatles song, This Boy.

Both This Boy and Yes It Is kind of show their

debt to early rhythm and blues,

doo-wop, African-American sort of pop singing groups.

so, you can really see that, Yes It Is again, reworking This Boy

also shows us something about The Beatles going back to the old formulas.

If they'd done something before, they could try doing it again.

The

Help, the song Help is released along with the just,

just before the album and the movie in July of 1965.

That's of course a John song, with the

B-side of that being I'm Down, a Paul song.

And then Yesterday, a Paul song, which was on Help, was released as a single

in September of 1965 in the US only and went to number one.

The B-side of that was Act Naturally. And then,

at the very end of the year together with the release of Rubber Soul, we get the

single, the sort of double double A-sided single Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out.

So you can see that as I've gone through

all of these singles during the course of the year.

You can see The Beatles every couple of months have got some,

something newly released on the charts, sort of staying in the public eye.

As I said before, off the charts out of

mind, and so in, in, with this sort of steady succession of hit singles,

and then of course we've got the movies and the albums to go with that.

So, in the next video, let's turn our attention

to The Beatles' second movie, this one called Help.

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Overview of 1965: Beatlemania Continues

The Music of the Beatles

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