Love, love me do

You know I love you

I’ll always be true

So please, love me do

Whoa, love me do

“Love Me Do” from The Beatles first album

The Beatles have been studied in every possible way for over 50 years. Every few years there seems to be another surge of study or a new retrospective book about them. One of the best books I’ve read was Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles by Geoff Emerick, who stumbled into the Abbey Road studio as a junior assistant engineer and became the primary architect of most of their unique sounds.

The Beatles are mainly talked about for their amazing popularity, their musical brilliance, their humble roots rags to riches stories. But they were more than anything very successful innovators, reinventors of themselves. Those not old enough to have lived through the 1960s probably don’t realize that they were in the public eye for only a short time, about 7 years.

Twenty albums over 7 years; nine albums in the first two years. Some of their songs were written years before they started recording, some were pieces of songs stuck together, but most were written and recorded in almost real-time. With all the fame and productivity they somehow never stopped innovating. The songs on “Let It Be”, their final album, are just as mesmerizing as their first hits.

Why were they so big? Mainly because they used their artistic brilliance sparingly; they knew the difference between innovation and invention. They employed simplicity and smoothed out the music of their immediate predecessors. Most of the songs were very short, about 2 minutes long. They didn’t invent or reinvent Rock and Roll, they converted it into something so palatable and addictive that it became the most popular music ever played — still is.

“We’re bigger than Jesus Christ”

John Lennon

Today bands last much longer with much less innovation or true originality — GreenDay, Foo Fighters, Offspring have all exceeded 25 years. I love all these bands but they’re pretty much the same formula as they’ve always been; their primary innovations occur when band members quit and have to be replaced.

But The Beatles, once they started recording in 1963, were an ever changing, evolving band. They became a sound engineering lab, that’s why Geoff Emerick was so important to the success and uniqueness of the band.

Because they kept changing it up almost every year, The Beatles wound up creating sounds that are still emulated today. Heavy metal, grunge, orchestration, sound effects all started with them. Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, so many others innovated off of them.

Of course they didn’t invent most of their sounds; they took inspiration heavily from Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley and other pop stars of the late 1950s and early 60s. They happily admit specific songs were knock-offs of others’ music. They were innovators, not inventors.

So today, as people all over the world try to innovate and have more freedom than ever before, as our society depends more on creativity in all aspects of life, we can draw inspiration from this group of lower middle class guys from an unknown town in England.

Listen to their music, listen for the background sounds. Read Goeffs book. Watch some of their YouTube videos and interviews. It’s an amazing startup case study.

Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour

Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour

Roll up (We’ve got everything you need), roll up for the mystery tour

Roll up (Satisfaction guaranteed), roll up for the mystery tour

The magical mystery tour is hoping to take you away

Hoping to take you away

“Magical Mystery Tour” from The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour album

Innovate! Disrupt!