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Yellow Submarines and Segues:
The Beatles Jamband Legacy

by Ali McDowell

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"When, in a generation or so, a radio-active, cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about -- Did you actually know them? Don't try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play the child a few tracks from this album and he'll probably understand what it was all about. The kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of wellbeing and warmth as we do today." from the jacket of the Beatles' fourth album, Beatles for Sale.

When I was a kid, the Beatles were constantly played around my house. But because I wanted to be a rebellious rock and roll kid, I wouldn't listen simply due to the fact that it's just not cool to listen to the same music your parents do. But the Beatles became more and more unavoidable as I hit my teenage years, and I realized there was far more than "Please Please Me" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." And then it hit me somewhere around '93 (yes, before Halloween '94): Phish liked the Beatles. Okay, maybe this was something worth seriously checking out.

Well, duh, Ali, everyone likes the Beatles. (I'd finally learned.)

It goes without saying that we owe the majority of today's rock and pop music scene to the influence of the Beatles. Upon further investigation, it also becomes apparent that their influence on jam bands is of a large magnitude as well. The Beatles embraced the main concept behind improvisational music: the willingness to experiment with different sounds, mesh different styles together, and work together as a group to access unknown destinations. The Beatles paved the way for the rest of us to jump off the cliff and see what happens.

There are many different phases, musical and otherwise, that can come to mind at the mention of the band: in just seven years in the spotlight, there was everything ranging from moptops to psychedelia to, well, Yoko. However, none of these are aspects one could directly relate to improvisational music, so what makes them so crucial to the jambands scene? They played unvaried sets of short pop tunes during their brief live career, which they quit after 1966, even though they still made recordings until 1969's Abbey Road. They sent a car out on tour instead of sending themselves around the world to play (The Sgt. Pepper "tour." The idea was actually stolen from Elvis). They holed themselves up in the studio for the majority of their career, producing album after album.

Despite all this, their influence is everywhere - live and otherwise. To call them "the original jam band" would be silly. The original jam band, if it could even be defined, might be The Duke Ellington Orchestra or Glen Miller's band. Or probably someone even earlier. But the Beatles, as the first pop group to stay together as a group for so long, pushed the then-narrow limits of improvisation in early- to mid-sixties mainstream music. One of the more notable things about bands that improvise is that their musicianship is defined by the spontaneous composition that occurs either while practicing or in front of an audience. I'd argue, however, that this is more likely the situation in the latter case. Playing live give the musician the opportunity to shape his playing ability and style in the most ideal of situations. Given the mass hysteria that occurred at early Beatles performances, it's amazing they were able to play live at all. Aside from dealing with the thousands of high-pitched screams of teenage girls, the band didn't even have monitors on which to hear themselves as they played. It has been said that this is why Ringo's style of drumming was so simplistic; he couldn't hear the other members of the band, so he had to keep a solid beat and avoid any fancy fills, rolls, and other techniques. He kept the style as they turned into a studio band.

In many ways, the second side of Abbey Road ("Here Comes the Sun" through "The End") is the ultimate sequence of segues. The songs flow seamlessly into each other, as if the band is so tightly together that they can just jump effortlessly from "Mean Mr. Mustard" into "Polythene Pam," or make "Golden Slumbers > You're Gonna Carry that Weight > The End" feel like one whole composition. But I know what you're going to say - you're going to say, "Of course they could do that. They did it in the studio - all those segues could be pre-planned." And yes, if you said that, you would be correct. Those segues were planned out. But I've heard that those pieces were not always planned to be together- apparently "Her Majesty" was originally in the middle of "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam," which pretty much changes the bulk of the arrangement around. I haven't heard this arrangement (it's not on any legal recordings), but regardless, it's yet another example of how this band was willing to be spontaneous and curious enough to venture to these unknown musical destinations.

The Beatles were willing to push the envelope farther than anyone at the time dared to, which is why college and high school students of the 1990's are still listening to them avidly, as if their records just showed up in the store. They were the masters of album recording, crowd pleasing, and, most importantly, playing together as a group in order to go beyond pop expectations and achieve some sort of musical completeness exceeding simplistic ideals of commercial music. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?