John Lennon

Is it? What came before?

Buddy Holly & the Crickets. He was really the first of the rock singer/songwriters to make it a thing and that was very unusual at the time(though Chuck Berry wrote much of his own stuff). He also wrote both ballads and rock and was a huge influence on young Lennon and McCartney. Their band's name was a big nod to him. McCartney even bought the publishing rights to his music(while losing his to Michael Jackson).

What the Beatles did was take that seed and really run with it and made composing your own stuff a near given. Indeed pretty quickly made covers old hat for upcoming bands and singers if they wanted to be authentic(the Monkees got serious static for being a fake band, though funny enough the Beatles themselves were very supportive of them). Then after the Beatlemania madness got too much and they retreated into the studio they took it to a completely different level of invention.

They also did so in a staggeringly quick time, going from lovable moptops to serious innovation in not much more than a year. Put it this way their entire output that changed the maps was over just seven years, releasing twelve albums, one a double, thirteen EPs and twenty two singles. With pretty much each year moving forward. Never mind near constant worldwide touring in the early days, four films, a load of what came to be seen as music videos and helped changed how studio recording was done. And then we have solo projects. Albums, acting, soundtracks, "happenings", writing for and playing with other people. Lennon even wrote two best selling books and they got into the whole drugs debate and other political movements of the time. And they started their own record company, opened a fashion shop and changed album art, packaging and marketing.

No wonder they were burnt out by 1969. Their workload was positively insane. Curent artistes would be screaming for their therapists after a year of that. No wonder too that they couldn't capture tha lightning in a bottle as solo artists, or did so very rarely. Though McCartney was the stand out here. Lennon was the driver early on, but by the end of their time McCartney had taken over, with even Harrison coming out with beauties.

To put all this in context; if they were around these days and you heard they broke up today, you would have heard their first blink and you'll miss it single in 2015 and by 2019 they'd be releasing music and sounds that you simply wouldn't have heard before. Like, loath or indifferent to them, their place in musical history is assured*.

*I'm not so sure about their direct influence. Other than sorta copyists like ELO and Oasis, you don't really hear them in the majority of music since. IMHO their biggest influence was much more along the lines of you can have a band, write your own songs and are free to innovate, not copy and we've ploughed that field for you. I seem to recall Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd saying that was what they did fo him and when recording their first album down the hall from the Beatles recording their latest it gave him and his band confidence.

I'd personally say 1968 EmmetS, but yeah spot on. Of course Lennon dying so tragically amped that "dead genius" thing way up. His solo career stuff was pretty much dead after about a year of the band going their separate ways. His final album before he was murdered barely registered and critics were very meh about the whole thing, then...

Harrison got a great double album out of the stuff he'd been saving up/rejected by the others and then flatlined. That was pretty much all he had in the tank, with a brief sparkle in the 80's(where oddly his once thin voice got better with age, unlike Macca's).

McCartney kept cranking out the hits for over a decade more including one of the biggest selling singles of all time. Sadly too often let down by his weakness of going twee, which Lennon had been a brake on. He had the widest talent and most longevity of the two of them and was the best musician, though Lennon was a helluva rhythm guitarist and could come up with incredibly interesting melodies and lyrics at his peak.

Harrison had come up from skiffle and early rock/country, but ended up in the middle of the guitar hero era, but was pretty OK and got Indian music on the map(good slide guitarist too). Oh and he made a good few cool films with the company he set up. Even mortgaged his gaff to help produce Life of Brian and help out his friend Eric Idle. Others included The Long Good Friday and Withnail & I.

Ringo for all the static he sometimes gets was twice the drummer someone like Charlie Watts ever was. Made the matched grip pretty much the standard in rock and was very inventive in his playing and rarely repeated himself to the point where a fan could tell the Beatles track from just his isolated drums. Ringo kept being Ringo, did a bit of acting, actually had a couple of hits, went full nuts on the drink and drugs to the point that Keith Richards would have been dead after a month of Ringo's intake, married a Bond girl, got sober, became Thomas the Tank Engine, went vegan, still tours like a mad thing and looks incredible for an 80 year old. He also got the most fan mail out of the four of them.

So they kinda did OK all in.

Helluva bass player alright. He was quite "basic" in the early days, but then he started to get really inventive and melodic as their output strayed more and more away from pop/rock/blues. One of the best bass players of his generation IMHO. Lennon was a pretty good rhythm guitar player too. He damn near attacks the strings, but also has a great ear for melody, at least in the early days. Ringo was pretty much the best drummer for them. In all their recording sessions they only had to stop a take because he fecked up a tiny handful of times and he had an incredible feel for a song. Even McCartney the most control freakery of them has said he very rarely asked him to change his drumming. He and the rest just accepted no matter what else was going on that the drums would kinda just work out. Even Lennon's odd timings and changes of timing didn't phase him. Though once Lennon brought in a record and asked him to try and do something like that. "But John there are two drummers on that track". "Ah sure don't let that bother you Richie".