I wrote about early times with The Beatles but that’s just a small piece of their musical history. There are volumes of books about their musical history. So I can just try.
In the mid-sixties they started to have a new sound. It certainly was something I’d never heard before. There were still songs about love but some of the music on Rubber Soul had, sometimes, a melancholy sadness. Also, the imagery was new. We were on the brink of a major historical shift. Rubber Soul was different.
All of the soul-sounding groups from Motown sang about love and loss and finding love again. None had the slightest whisper of drug-related lyrics. I researched this and I think I’m right. Motown was glamorous clothes, tight and exciting body movements done perfectly in sync, the right hair styles, and “Standing in The Shadow of Love,” “I Second That Emotion,” and “Stop in the Name of Love.”
When Sergeant Pepper came out in 1967 we all went a little crazy. Harold remembers something about driving to my house to play the album, then on to somebody else’s; who could remember historical dates of wars and names of kings when all of this was going on in the real world? Even the album cover was a kind of shock to the system, with all those costumes and stuff. And the lyrics…what did they mean? What were they singing about? Nobody knew for sure. With Motown you knew exactly what they were saying when they sang.
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” John Lennon kept to his word when he said that this was not a song about LSD but a drawing his four year old son Julian made.
“For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” People thought for sure this was about drugs. High as a kite, right?? No, it was based on a poster one of them saw, advertising a fair.
Weird, unheard-of sounds and songs composed in a minor key–I can only speak for myself when I say that this music was getting into my head and changing me.
lgmwriting 