[Les Cargill[_5_]]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
Don Pearce wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2020 17:34:34 +1000, Trevor wrote:
On 28/08/2020 5:14 pm, Don Pearce wrote:

They were rock, not pop.

Didn't come much more popular than the Beatles! :-)

Another use of the word.... But you knew that

The Beatles...

You mean the band Paul was in before Wings?

they were a phenomenon unto themselves. They weren't rock,
they weren't pop, they weren't blues, they were all three at the same time
but really they weren't anything but the Beatles. I fear we shall not see
their like again.

My father said they destroyed American music and they certainly transformed it.

I wouldn't argue with your Dad much.

Around 1964, American music was primarily musical theater and the film
adaptations of it. The movie industry was setting up for "Cleopatra" to
pretty much end that era[1], and the writing for musical theater
had seen its best days.

[1] the period between HUAC and Cleopatra, the winding down of the
momentum from the studio system.

"The Sound of Music" was the last of its kind. 1965.

We might as well blame the transistor radio. Or "Hair".

This completely ignores entire continents centered around
record labels that produced better-than-pop pop, like Motown,
Stax, the LA labels built on the Wrecking Crew and then all the stuff
outta Muscle Shoals. That's just a start.

And the Stones were, in the end, very American. But in the end,
having the performers write the material is a "better" business model
- for the people who worked on percentage anyway.

--scott


--
Les Cargill