Reviewing the Beatles

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend and a longtime contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, is an avid Beatles fan—right from their very start in this country.  He also happens to be musically educated, so he’s written for this blog many times on both music and the Fab Four,

[Furthermore, Kirk’s knowledgeable about the art of review-writing—as he demonstrated with his book The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press, 2009; http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272)--so this time around he’s applied those three attributes (believe me, he has more, as frequent readers of ROT will know) to comment on the press coverage of the Beatles during the years they were together.

[Kirk is focusing on the coverage in the New York Times—I’ll let him tell you why—but not only is his analysis valid for other outlets, but it can be applied to reviews in other fields: theater, books, and art, among others.]

I have in front of me a collection of articles about the Beatles printed in The New York Times from 1963 through 2013. I have written extensively about the Beatles in this blog; their cultural influence is so vast that it doesn’t seem out of place to discuss them in a context primarily devoted to theater.

[The past Beatles posts contributed to Rick On Theater by Kirk Woodward include: “The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,” 30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary” by Kirk Woodward & Pat Woodward, 8 January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; “Now, Live, the Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; and “Help!,” 17 September 2020.]

Besides, this time I will be discussing, not so much the Beatles themselves, as how they were covered in one newspaper of reputation and impact, up to the end of their time together as a group (roughly, late 1969). I could have chosen any number of other approaches; there are hundreds of books about the Beatles written from every possible angle, from the foolish to the penetrating.

The Times, of course, began covering the Beatles as a news event – huge crowds, screaming fans – at a time when reviewing popular music was not a primary focus of journalism. The paper did its best, I’d say, by printing articles written by the outstanding rock reviewers of the day. As we will see, its coverage of the Beatles’ music improved steadily.  As we will also see, where critical opinions are concerned, anything goes!

We have the advantage, as the writers of many of the Times pieces did not at the time, of knowing how the Beatles “turned out.” Successfully predicting the future is difficult; second-guessing is easy, and probably unfair. However, if there are agreed-on standards for reviewing, it is fair to apply them and see how well they were met. Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) proposed such standards and they have held up well. A reviewer, Goethe suggests, should ask:

What is the artist trying to do?
How well do they do it?
Is it worth doing?  

Based on observation I would say that reviewers who habitually ask and answer these questions are few and far between, and that many if not most reviewers go immediately to the last question, with some of the second perhaps thrown in for good measure.

In any case, these questions will be invaluable as we look at the Times’ coverage of the Beatles. Many writers contributed to that coverage, of course, and the results vary.

The first article, from 1 December 1963 by Frederick Lewis for The New York Times Magazine, is light on examination of the Beatles’ music. To be fair, there was not at that point a great deal to examine. Lewis provides a non-hysterical examination of the Beatles’ sociological and psychological significance:

They are working-class, and their roots and attitudes are firmly of the North of England. Because of their success they can act as spokesmen for the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation which is becoming a force in British life. In their uncompromising Northernness, they are linked with actors like Albert Finney and with novelists like Alan Stilltoe [1928-2010, novelist and author of the short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”] and John Braine [1922-1986, novelist noted for the book Room at the Top].

On 10 February 1964, the day after the first appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, Jack Gould (1914-1993, television reporter for the Times) was dismissive and patronizing, talking about “the cyclical turnover in teenage trauma.” He said basically nothing about their music. Surprisingly, Theodore Strongin (1918-1998), a composer who sometimes wrote for the Times, made an effort to come to terms with the Beatles musically, if bafflingly:

Their harmony is unmistakeably diatonic. A learned British colleague, writing on his home ground, has described it as pandiatonic, but I disagree. [With more music to examine, he probably would have actually agreed, at least to some extent. “Pandiatonic” basically means the use of notes that the average ear would not expect.]

The Beatles have a tendency to build phrases around unresolved leading tones. This precipitates the ear into a false modal frame that temporarily turns the fifth of the frame into the tonic, momentarily suggesting the Mixolydian mode. But everything always ends as plain diatonic all the same.

At least he is trying to engage with the music; good luck reaching the readership. He continues:

The Beatles’s vocal quality can be described as vocally incoherent, with the minimal communication necessary to communicate the schematic texts.

Here we see in embryo an approach frequently encountered in reviews of the Beatles: the dismissal of rock as an inferior form, without principles or values of its own. (We will encounter the opposite of this approach later.)

The video of the first Ed Sullivan appearance is available on YouTube; the words can be understood, and the Beatles are “communicating” as rock musicians. That was what they intended to do, and that was what they did, with obvious success. They were unquestionably communicating effectively within their chosen field.

It is reasonable to note that, at this early point in the Beatles’ career, screaming audiences were the first thing many people noticed, because, first, you couldn’t miss them, and, second, they made it difficult at best to hear the performances of the songs, or to think about anything else. So most early articles review the audiences more than they do the Beatles. That is not our approach here, and, of course, that situation would change.

I do feel it’s worthwhile to point out that some people in early 1964 already had a high opinion of the Beatles’ music – me, for one, because very early I heard “From Me to You” on the radio (it originally got brief airplay in the United States in 1963) and loved its brightness and its harmonies. Not surprised when they “hit it big,” I was listening for more good music, and got it. Similarly, I remember in college asking my friend John Burgard, a musician and still a figure in the Louisville, Kentucky, blues scene, if he had been surprised by the Beatles’ success. “No,” he said, “I had listened to the records.”

Robert Shelton (1926-1995), in an article published 11 August 1965 in anticipation of the Beatles’ famous appearance at Shea Stadium, accurately summarized their earliest music:

The music of the Beatles is a form of American music that ricocheted to Europe, became infused with the group’s personality and has since bounced back here. Mostly, the “Liverpool Sound” is a buoyant, infectiously rhythmic series of cadences, with some unsettlingly exciting harmonies (in open fourths and fifths), a bedrock blues beat and an aura of youth, channeled sexuality and exuberance. Often there is a wistful, plaintive quality to their slower ballads.

The Beatles were influenced while working in the Cavern in Liverpool, directly or through recordings brought by American seamen from the Gulf Coast, with American rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, or rockabilly interpreters, such as Mr. Presley, Little Richard, the Everlys or Buddy Holly and the Crickets. From this, with a dash of the British folk-jazz called “skiffle,” the Beatles’ style emerged.

There is more that Shelton could have said – by this point the Beatles had issued several albums, including Help! (although Shelton may not have heard it in its remarkable British form), and Rubber Soul was just ahead.

Dan Sullivan (b. 1935) in an article in the Times on 3 March 1967 had enough information to say:

The funny thing about teenage idols is that some of them turn out to be artists. Frank Sinatra illustrated the process years ago. Now we have The Beatles. . . . Beatlemania and the editorials about it quickly grew tiresome, but not the Beatles themselves. Entirely apart from their authentic personal charm, they proved to be far more original musicians than they had seemed at first. . . . The Buddy Holly yelps and Elvis Presley growls gradually fall away, and are replaced by odd intervals, antique harmonies, raga-like sequences and rhythmic devices new to pop music. . . . [Paul McCartney’s] casual way with the traditional harmonic circle-of-fifths has stretched the public’s ear considerably – as has his decision . . . not to limit himself to conventional four- or eight-bar melodic units.

The next major evaluation of Beatles music in the Times came with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), memorably reviewed for the paper by Richard Goldstein (b. 1942) on 18 June 1967.

Goldstein’s review, we may confidently say, goes against the flow of opinion about the album, which he describes at different points as “busy, hip and overcluttered”:

The obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, pervades the entire album. There is nothing beautiful about “Sergeant Pepper.” Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about [a reference to the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever”]. The Lennon raunchiness has become mere caprice . . . . Paul McCartney’s soaring Pop magnificats have become merely politely profound. . . . With one important exception, “Sergeant Pepper” is precious but devoid of gems.

(The exception Goldstein describes is the monumental track “A Day in the Life.”) Goldstein’s review has been the subject of astonishment since its publication; the reputation of the review has hounded him through the years. Several things are going on here.

First of all, every reviewer’s nightmare, I should think, is to pan an art work that turns out to be a classic. In the field of music, Nicholas Slonimsky (1894-1995), a conductor and composer, has compiled a Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953) which Wikipedia correctly describes as “a collection of hilariously scathing, insulting, vituperative, and enraged contemporary critiques of musical greats in their time,” including Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Puccini, and many, many others. Goldstein’s review belongs in such a collection (along with at least one other review to be discussed below).

Sometimes reviewers simply have bad days. Anthony Lane, the movie reviewer for The New Yorker, has described how he watched much of a film disapproving of its shadowy cinematography before realizing that he had his sunglasses on. Similarly, Richard Goldstein, although he does not apologize for his review, has confirmed to The Washington Post (11 May 2017) that he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a broken stereo record player, so the sound he heard was incomplete!

More importantly, however, Goldstein’s review illustrates a condition common in reviewers: they criticize a work, not beginning with its artist’s intentions, but with their own opinions about what such a work ought to be. In Goldstein’s case, he clearly states what he wanted to hear:

The best Beatle melodies are simple if original progressions braced with pungent lyrics. Even their most radical compositions retain a sense of unity.

That is to say, the Beatles should stick to the straightforward rock ’n’ roll that established their early reputation. Instead,

for the first time the Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent.

The notion that an album is “fraudulent” occurs often in music reviews – other terms are “phony,” “not genuine,” and so on. This kind of attack has always mystified me. What does it mean? If it refers to insincerity on the part of the artist, how does one know that, and even if the artist is trying to produce deceptive work (I suppose that happens, but how often?), the resulting object is not honest or dishonest – it just is. (Pablo Picasso is supposed once to have said, “I can paint a fake Picasso as well as anybody.”)

More importantly, though, Goldstein actually senses what the Beatles intended to do – he just doesn’t like it. They intended – I believe, and many others have said – to create a “soundscape,” a set of aural images of unique beauty, and they succeeded.

Rock was their heritage, songs were their material, but their aim went beyond a collection of “good songs,” toward a new experience of sound. Goldstein senses this – but it doesn’t fit his idea of what they should be doing, so his review is off kilter from the start. Had he listened to Goethe, he likely would not have made this mistake.

Although Paul McCartney, according to reports, has held the review against Goldstein ever since, the Times did not. On 31 December 1967 Goldstein doubled down on his criticism in a review of the Magical Mystery Tour album which is even more an attack on what the Beatles were becoming:

The Beat is no longer implicit to the Beatles. In its place, they have created a collage of sound-images masquerading as Brechtian vaudeville. Sometimes this free inquiry into the nature of pop art stuns with a resonant power; at other times it seems capricious and gimmick-ridden. But rarely does it rock. . . . All these touches exemplify an approach to song that is closer to programmatic music than it is to rock. . . . Scratch the surface of “Magical Mystery Tour” and it bleeds like show music . . . . This electronic posturing is what I found fraudulent in “Sergeant Pepper,” and it is even more apparent here. . . . Does it sound like heresy to say that the Beatles write material which is literate, courageous, genuine, but spotty? It shouldn’t. They are inspired posers, but we must keep our heads on their music, not their incarnations. In that critical distance lies the deepest sort of respect.

One would guess Goldstein had received a certain amount of pushback from his review of Sgt. Pepper. One notices his insistence that the Beatles should be creating more “rock”; anything else is “electronic posturing,” “fraudulent” (there is that word again), created by “posers.” Again, he understands what the Beatles are trying to achieve – a “free inquiry into the nature of pop art.” He simply knows better than they what they ought to be doing.

Imagine his relief when he heard the album The Beatles (the “White Album”), which he reviewed on 8 December 1968. One would assume that a review that ended with the following sentence was a positive review:

This album is so vast in its scope, so intimate in its detail, and so skillful in its approach, that even the flaws add to its flavor.

In fact the opening paragraphs of the review drip with scorn:

The Beatles . . . epitomize the pretenses of their culture. For, more than anyone in the pop hegemony, the Beatles involve themselves in the times. Unlike Dylan, who wanders like a pilgrim across the fiery plains of his own imagination, the Beatles are inspired groovers, equally at home in the haute monde (which cherishes them as clever rakes) and the underground (where they are loved as magic rebels).

Goldstein essentially accuses the Beatles of pandering to their times, a conclusion undercut by the fact that their music has vitality more than half a century after it was first heard. Oddly, he also feels that the Beatles are trying to regain their own past:

What the Beatles are really attempting to revive here is the spontaneous vitality of their earliest songs. They mean to project a sense of the immediate, the makeshift and the incomplete – all missing from their recent work.

I simply do not believe that an open-minded listener will take away from the album a sense of “the makeshift and the incomplete.” But once again, Goldstein senses the real thrust of the Beatles’ intention with the album, at least as I understand it:

Even more effective is the album’s burlesque of musical forms. In this respect, “The Beatles” is almost a mock-history of pop.”

“Mock” does not strike me as the correct word, but I definitely hear the album as a tribute to what music can do, and a successful one. (It’s my favorite of any album, Beatles or otherwise.) So when Goldstein says he hopes that “Yer Blues” is meant as “a parody of white blues,” I want to say, “Yes, of course it is, as you’d know if you’d calm down and listen to what the Beatles are actually doing.”

A minor detail is that Goldstein exercises his reviewers’ right to contradict himself. Writing about The Beatles he speaks of “the meticulous structure of ‘Sergeant Pepper.’” Here is what he wrote of that structure in his review of Sgt. Pepper: “There is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” So much for “meticulous structure!”

“This time, the Beatles have dared to be restrained,” Goldstein writes, a conclusion that seems incomprehensible to me if he listened to the album at all, as he obviously did – demonstrating again the power of the preconceived opinion.

“Restrained,” moreover, is hardly the word for the next major review of Beatle music in the Times – a cautionary tale of a review written by Nik Cohn (b. 1946) and published 5 October 1969 about the Beatles album Abbey Road. If a review is in part a consumer report, would you buy this album?

On “Abbey Road” the words are limp-wristed, pompous and fake. Clearly, the Beatles have now heard so many tales of their own genius that they’ve come to believe them, and everything here is Instant Art. Give me just five minutes in the privacy of your own home and I can make you a super-bard.

I am uncertain what he feels makes a lyric either limp-wristed or a fake.

Cohn then quotes a lyric from the album, about which I would like to say, as I have before, that quoting words from songs to prove their worthlessness is worthless, because a song lyric is only a part of a whole. Cohn should know better – he wrote a book called Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969), a quotation from a song recorded by Little Richard (Richard Penniman, 1932-2020), a nonsense lyric and a great and memorable one.

Cohn admires the medley that concludes the second side of the album, although even that admiration is mixed:

Apart from [a couple of short sections], it’s all pretty average stuff. Most of the melody lines have been used elsewhere, and some of the lyrics are quite painful. . . . Most of the lines here are steals, partly pinched from other people and partly from other Beatle albums.

And, he continues,

The rest of this album is an unmitigated disaster. . . . The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse.

Finally we get to the foundation of the review, and, as with Richard Goldstein, it’s a notion of “real” rock as a sort of primitive musical Garden of Eden. Cohn is discussing the song “Oh! Darling”:

Slow 1950’s rock was something very formal, a ritual as classic and changeless as bullfighting, in which each embellishment and each progression had its own exact function. On “Oh! Darling,” Lennon flounders in an orgy of gulps, howls and retches, flung together at random, and the whole point is lost.

This kind of overkill, in fact, has become very much a Beatles trademark. It ruined their last double-album, and it ruins two-thirds of “Abbey Road.” The great strength of the medley is that it doesn’t overkill – no repetitions, no heavy breathing. It gets back toward the kind of ease and style that the Beatles had five years ago.

One can argue with this screed on factual grounds – the long medley does include repetitions, and, embarrassingly, John Lennon doesn’t sing “Oh! Darling,” Paul McCartney does, as even a casual listener, much less an important rock reviewer, ought to know.

The more important point is that Cohn’s primary interest is in his picture of what he thinks the album ought to be, rather than in what it is. He seals this point with another illustration, this one from a song that actually is sung by John Lennon:

“Come Together” is a slowed-down reworking of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and is intriguing only as a sign of just how low Lennon can sink these days. “You Can’t Catch Me” is a very great song, after all, and lumbering it with the kind of “Look Ma, I’m Jesus” lyrics that Lennon unloads here is not a crime that I’d like to have on my conscience.

It’s hard to decide which claim is more absurd – that Lennon’s song is Berry’s slowed down (it quotes, more or less, about eight words from the second verse of Berry’s song, and shares a two chord progression typical of the blues), or that Chuck Berry’s song is so great that it should represent the farthest advance of songwriting.

The New York Times is a great newspaper, and Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn have both made significant contributions to the reviewing and criticism of music. The reviews discussed here did no great harm to the Beatles – Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are widely considered masterpieces, are among fifteen Beatle recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and have sold millions of copies. The reviews didn’t help Goldstein and Cohn, but both have nevertheless had long and productive careers.

And reviewing is a difficult and often arduous job. The pitfalls are many, some of which have been illustrated here:

Ignoring, dismissing, or minimizing the intention(s) behind the work.
Upholding standards that may not be appropriate to new work.
Factual errors.

It has been suggested more than once that reviewers ought to stick to description, and entirely avoid evaluation – in effect, to be reporters in the strictest sense of the word. This advice seems likely to be taken only by reviewers with little to offer. The greater their ability, the more likely they are to make a review a personal matter. In any case, a little humility and a little curiosity will help, and perhaps an internal conversation with Goethe.

[I don’t do footnotes on ROT, but occasionally I feel that a post should have a list of the sources at least of the quotations and other references.  Kirk’s “Reviewing the Beatles” fits that bill, I think, so I’m appending below a list Kirk assembled of the reviews from the New York Times he quoted and a couple of other sources of statements he made in his article. 

Cohn, Nik. “The Beatles: For 15 Minutes, Tremendous.” New York Times 5 October 1969: 13.

Edgers, Geoff. “Getting better all the time.” Washington Post 14 May 2017: E 1, 16. [On-line edition: “Meet the critic who panned ‘Sgt. Pepper’ then discovered his speaker was busted. He’s still not sorry,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/meet-the-critic-who-panned-sgt-peppers-then-discovered-his-speaker-was-busted-hes-still-not-sorry/2017/05/11/aa0058b4-2f44-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html, 11 May 2017.]

Goldstein, Richard. “Are They Waning?” New York Times 28 August 1967: D 14.

Goldstein, Richard. “The Beatles: Inspired Groovers.” New York Times 8 December 1968: 33.

Goldstein, Richard. “We Still Need the Beatles, but . . .” New York Times 18 June 1967: D 24.

Gould, Jack. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 1964: 53.

Lane, Anthony. “Introduction.” Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker (Vintage, 9 September 2003), xx.

Lewis, Frederick. “Britons Succumb to ‘Beatlemania.’” The New York Times Magazine 1 December 1963: 124-26.

Shelton, Robert. “The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed.” New York Times 11 August 1965: 40.

Strongin, Theodore. “TV: The Beatles and Their Audience.”  New York Times 10 February 196: 53.

Sullivan, Dan. “Beatles: More Than a Mania.” New York Times 5 March 1967: D 33.

[Geoff Edgers’s Washington Post article in which Richard Goldstein admitted he listened to Sgt. Pepper on a damaged stereo is on line, as are the New York Times reviews.  (Both papers have been digitized so there are databases which also have the .pdf versions of those articles as well, if you have access to one.)

[Readers should note that in articles dating from before the start of online publication (1996 for the Times), the digitization process sometimes introduces transcription errors or other problems into the online text that effects readability and accuracy. 

[Anthony Lane’s book, the source of the anecdote about his wearing sunglasses when he watched Contact, the movie he was reviewing for the New Yorker, is not online in its entirety.  Google Books offers a preview that includes most of the introduction, where Lane tells the story, and it’s quoted on several Internet websites.  One such site is http://richardgilbert.me/noted-anthony-lane/. 

[(For the curious, most of Lane’s 21 July 1997 review of Contact is also in the Google Books preview of Nobody’s Perfect [pp. 194-97] as well.  The sunglasses incident isn’t mentioned.)]