A band that changed the working rules
Influence is hard to measure, and the Beatles are often credited with changes that were already under way. It is safer to say that they were the most visible and commercially successful group to adopt several new habits at once, and that their success made those habits normal. The effects ran across their whole career, from the first EMI sessions in 1962 to the final recordings in 1969 and 1970, and 1967 was only one stretch of it.
Songwriting
In the early 1960s, British and American pop acts commonly recorded songs supplied by professional writers. The Beatles were not the first group to write their own material, but the success of Lennon and McCartney’s songs helped make it an expectation that a serious pop act would write much of its own repertoire. Later bands, whether or not they admitted it, worked in a world where self-written songs were treated as a sign of credibility.
The range of their songs also widened over time. Early singles dealt mostly with love and courtship. By 1965 and 1966 the lyrics included memory, boredom, loneliness and social observation, and the arrangements used instruments such as string quartets and sitars. Lennon has been described as having learned from the example of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics showed that a pop song could carry more personal or oblique material. The influence ran both ways, as other writers responded to the Beatles in turn.
The recording studio
The Beatles worked at EMI’s Abbey Road studios with producer George Martin and a succession of engineers, and over the years they treated the studio as something closer to an instrument. Tape loops, reversed recordings, varied tape speeds and heavy overdubbing appeared on tracks such as the closing song of Revolver in 1966. Artificial double tracking, a technique developed by EMI technician Ken Townsend to save the band from recording vocals twice, became widely used. Orchestral players, Indian instruments and early synthesised or keyboard-based sounds were mixed into rock arrangements.
The larger point is a change of attitude. Before this, a record was usually understood as a document of a performance. The Beatles’ later records were built piece by piece and could not be played live in the same form, which encouraged many artists to regard the finished recording as the real work. Their decision to stop touring after the final concert in San Francisco in August 1966 is one sign of that shift.
The album as a statement
In the early 1960s, albums in pop were often collections built around a hit single or two, and in Britain singles were frequently kept off the LPs. The Beatles’ albums from Rubber Soul onwards were planned as full-length works, and Sgt. Pepper, released in 1967, went further with a lavish cover, printed lyrics and linked tracks. Many critics regard it as a milestone in the idea that a rock album could be an artistic statement, though the question of which album came first or did it best is still argued. The claim is easier to defend when stated modestly: they made the idea mainstream. Other landmark rock albums of that year, discussed elsewhere, were part of the same movement, not simply copies.
The business of pop
Their commercial effect was equally large. Their arrival in the United States in early 1964, including an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February, helped open the American market to British acts in what became known as the British Invasion. In April 1964 they held the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 at once, a feat that has rarely if ever been repeated. Their 1965 Shea Stadium concert is often cited as a milestone in large-scale stadium shows, even though the sound systems of the time were poor.
They also affected how artists thought about ownership and control. In 1968 they set up Apple Corps, an attempt to run their own business affairs, which became tangled in disputes after the death of manager Brian Epstein in August 1967 and was not a financial success. The legal and financial arguments of the band’s final years are a reminder that influence is not always a story of triumph. Still, later artists took from it the idea that musicians could seek more control over their own work.
Culture around the records
The Beatles also shaped the culture that surrounded music. Their image and interests were widely copied. The band’s public interest in meditation and Indian music, and in 1967 in psychedelia, fed a wider mood in the Summer of Love. They were among the pop figures whose names helped to give new outlets legitimacy, from the music press to Rolling Stone magazine, which was founded in the autumn of 1967 and treated rock as a subject for serious writing. On British radio, the demand for pop that pirate radio exposed was part of the pressure behind the BBC’s creation of Radio 1.
Other musicians responded directly. Jimi Hendrix opened a London show in early June 1967 with his own version of the Sgt. Pepper title song, only days after the album appeared, and the audience reportedly included members of the Beatles. Looking at the wider music of 1967, it is clear that the group both led and reflected a moment when many artists were pushing at the same limits.
How far the influence goes
It is easy to overstate. Rock and pop would have evolved without the Beatles, and studio innovation involved many engineers, producers and artists. The Beatles also benefited from a stable relationship with a supportive label and producer, a luxury many acts lacked. What can reasonably be said is that their combination of popularity, ambition and willingness to experiment made new practices harder to ignore. Self-written songs, adventurous studio work and the album as a unit became part of the ordinary expectations of pop, and the Beatles remain the usual starting point for any account of how that happened.