The Beatles as a live performance band

[Buried Alien]

For all the acclaim the Beatles achieved for their recorded work, how did they rate as a live band?

I've been watching selected DVD footage of the Beatles in concert from 1962-1966 recently. From a sheerly technical standpoint, the Beatles were inferior live performers compared to bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and a host of others. As great all-around musicians as they were, none of the Beatles were virtuoso musicians. Many of their performances (especially in 1966, when they had gotten sick of performing live) were out of tune and somewhat lackluster compared to the sound of their records. Some of this was undoubtedly due to the effect of Beatlemania itself: the screams of thousands of frenzied teenagers made much of the live Beatles music inaudible.

Still, there was a unique excitement and energy to Beatles concerts that came through even when the musicianship, strictly speaking, wasn't up to par. In these performances, even the sonic shortcomings seemed to be part of the charm: the music sounded real...organic...like something anybody with three guitars and a drumset could play in their garage or family room. This was something that was an accidental fortune of the primitive state of rock performance gear at the time (pre-solid state amplification and recording systems) and gave the performances of all rock musicians of that era a distinct sonic texture that today's digital-quality technology can't quite reproduce.

It's a strange paradox. Taken in purely objective terms, the sound quality of those early Beatles live performances wasn't very good (owing to the technological and circumstantial limitations of the time as well as the fact that the Beatles were not the virtuoso musicians that some of their successors would be), but on a more subjective, personal level, it hardly mattered. It wasn't perfect, but it seemed real. It was rock 'n roll...rough around the edges and played with sincerity.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

[elheffe]

I don't know. I'm certainly no Beatles expert, but judging from the live songs on Let It Be, the band was pretty tight.

[Saracen Pig! Spartan Dog!]

Please.

If you aren't a good live band after playing eight hours a night, as The Beatles did during their Hamburg residency, then you not only aren't a good band to begin with, but you don't get a recording contract. The only reason that Brian Epstein went to see The Beatles was because he'd heard they were ag reat live act, which they were.

But when Beatlemania hit, it quickly became apparent that the pitiful amps and PA systems at the venues the Beatles played were no match for the endless waves of shrieks and screams from the teenagers. In fact The Beatles couldn't even hear themselves play.

As a result, they quickly grew to hate playing live, because as McCartney said, ...It's no fun for us, playing live, if we can't even hear ourselves. There's no way that the audience can hear us, and what's the point, you know. There's no way for us to tell if we're improving or not when you have this wall of screams, so live performance, for us has lost all of the fun.

[Adam Crocker]

From a sheerly technical standpoint, the Beatles were inferior live performers compared to bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and a host of others.

Well I don't know about the Stones, but then again I'm not sure what era of their career you're comparing them to, but it's a given that the Beatles would inferior technically to the bands you just mentioned who came about the late 60s and sustained strong careers throughout the seventies back when high technical skill in playing was necessary in rock music.

However, is that really all that useful of a comparison? It seems we're comparing apples and oranges because the Beatles, back when they played live, were playing basic, three-chord rock'n'roll. Most of these bands are playing something very different from that (again the Stones, but even that depends on what era). How about the Who back in the sixties? Or the Kinks of that era? Or for that matter early Clash (or is that too technically inferior)?* Or the Smiths? Seems to me that if we really want to know how the Beatles stack up as a live band one would compare them to other three-chord rock'n'roll bands. Just a thought.

(*Then again your description of their performances giving off the vibe that anyone could do it reminded me a lot of the impulse that has driven the development of punk.)

[Rob Imes]

Another thing to consider is how they compared with the live acts that immediately preceded the Beatles. The Beach Boys, for example, were propbably their biggest American rivals among "guitar groups," and they are not known for virtuoso playing. Both bands were influenced by Chuck Berry's playing. In 1964, George Harrison described the main difference between then-current rock and 1950s rock by saying that the new rock was "louder."

Look at the video clips (only partly live) of The Beatles performing "Revolution" and "Hey Jude" in 1968. If that's what their 1968 live set would have looked like, I don't think anyone would have complained. While some of their competitors in the rock world were employing fancy light shows and whatnot, there were also a lot of tamer artists in the pop world at the time, that we tend to forget about.

[Ilash]

There are a few things to take into account when dealing with the Beatles as a live band. Firstly, the most obvious place to look at them as a live band would be during their touring years upto 1966 but as has been mentioned, the sound quality and the HIGH level of audience noise means that it's hard to tell what they were actually like. We could look at the pre-Fab days in Liverpool and Hamburg but since no good recordings have ever come out of those performances, we would be basing our opinions on hearsay. Looking at the few later live performances the Beatles had (the Rooftop concert, live footage of Hey Jude on the Anthology series), they seem to hold their own but none of these performances were really all that different from their studio counterparts. And I guess that's the crux of the matter. Looking at the live stuff that the solo Beatles put out, one thing is very clear, none of them really did anything different with the songs to seriously distinguish them from their studio counterparts. As far as I can see, there's a simple reason for this: unlike most other bands, The Beatles got their music so absolutely perfect in the studio that any marked changes from the way these songs sounds on record would invariably make the song worse. This applies most to their mid-sixties output but the rest of their stuff is almost as studio-perfect. Hell, this even applies with some of their solo stuff too. The guitar solo in Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed is almost always played as close to the original as possible because when it isn't, it is ALWAYS inferior.

And to me, the great live bands weren't defined by their virtuosity but by their ability to successfully expand on what their music sounded like on record. The Who, the greatest live band that ever was, exemplify this perfectly with their radically different from the studio, and in my opinion better, live takes of A Quick One and Magic Bus. The Who also understood that the subtelty of the studio could not be replicated on stage so they replaced that with this unsurpassed electrifying energy. Of course the fact that they were exemplary musicians who could actually pull this off certainly didn't hurt but it was the space in the original songs for expansion and radical reinterpretations that allowed them to be such a phenomenal live presense. No matter what level of musicianship the Beatles may have possessed, could you imagine what radical live reimaginings of Strawberry Fields Forever or Let It Be would sound like? It just wouldn't work at all and I'm sure even more likely candidates like A Hard Day's Night or Get Back would lose much of their charm if changed too much in their live readings.

The Beatles are a band that will mainly be remembered for their recorded studio out put - and their is a perfectly good reason for that.