In celebration of Abbey Road being released 55 years ago today (September 26, 1969), here is a short, Beatles-related excerpt from my upcoming book: “How Not To Invest: The ideas, numbers, and behaviors that destroy wealth – and how to avoid them.”
The book is being published ~March 18, 2025, and is available for pre-ordering today.
Is there any greater gap between “Expert Opinion” and subsequent history than The Beatles?
AllMusic sums up the Fab Four as “The most popular and influential rock act of all time, a band that blazed several new trails for popular music.”1 That’s obvious today, but it was not the consensus early in their career.
Many amusing details were recounted by Bob Seawright is his “Better Letter.” Nobody skewers humanity’s cognitive failings with more amusing flair than Seawright. He giddily recounted the early reviews of the Beatles when they first came to America. At the time, they had five singles in Britain’s Top 20, three of which hit #1 – all in 1963. Their debut album, “Please Please Me,” held the top spot on Britain’s charts for 30 weeks, displaced only by the band’s next album, “With the Beatles.“
Despite the sensation they were causing in Great Britain, The Beatles’ record label (EMI) could not persuade its American counterpart (Capitol) to release any of the band’s singles in the States. Dave Dexter was the man in charge of international A&R for Capitol, and ostensibly an industry expert on the public’s musical tastes. He repeatedly rejected The Beatles singles, calling them “generally amateurish and unappealing.” One after another, Dexter vetoed those singles tearing up the charts in the UK, starting with “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.”
Ed Sullivan had also turned down the Fab Four (twice) for his television show. He was by coincidence at London (now Heathrow) Airport, when he witnessed “Beatlemania” firsthand. The band was returning home from a tour in Sweden, greeted by a raucous, screaming mob of teenage girls. That convinced Sullivan to book the lads.2
The Ed Sullivan Show was a huge platform for breaking new acts, and Capitol decided to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” a few weeks before The Beatles’ appearance. This was not some insightful exec reversing Dexter’s misguided rejections or a change of musical heart but rather, simply good corporate opportunism. How could you not capitalize on the demand one of the country’s most popular TV shows might create?
And how did the Sullivan Show go? 3
The Beatles played five songs on two broadcast segments, ending with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Ray Bloch, Ed Sullivan’s musical director, was unimpressed: “The only thing different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year.” 4
He was not alone in panning the appearance. Seawright collected a string of headlines and reviews that have not aged particularly well:
The New York Herald Tribune: “BEATLES BOMB ON TV.”
The Boston Globe: “Don’t let the Beatles bother you. If you don’t think about them they will go away and in a few more years they will probably be bald.”
The New York Times: “The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.”
The Los Angeles Times: “Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well.”
The New York Herald Tribune: “75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut and 5 percent lilting lament.”
Talk about “Nobody Knows Anything.”
It wasn’t just that the reviews missed the mark. What is noteworthy is all of biases evident in those critiques. This is also evident in the prior section on Media (later on, we explore what causes this).
Consider Newsweek:
“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody.” (emphasis added)
Whether you like their songs or not, The Beatles’ harmonies and melodies are simply not debatable. The musicality and beauty of their songs is simply beyond reproach.
And this was The Washington Post revealing their inside-the-beltway angle:
“They are, apparently, part of some kind of malicious, bi-lateral entertainment trade agreement. The British have to sit through dozens of dreadful American television programs. In return, we get The Beatles. As usual, we got gypped. Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”
What was the 1960s equivalent of “Okay, Boomer”…? 5
You probably know what happened next: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to number one in the U.S., quickly selling a million copies.5 American tastes were not so different than Britain’s after all, and Beatlemania became a cultural phenomenon here too.6
***
Ironically, these music “experts” missed the biggest cultural shift in generations, and it was happening right before their eyes and ears. How did they blow it? In his book “Hit Makers,” 7 Derek Thompson explains Raymond Loewy’s concept of MAYA: New products that are “most advanced yet acceptable.”8
Loewy “believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible.” Any innovation too far ahead of the curve gets rejected by much of the public.
But with music, I suspect that MAYA line varies with age. The receptiveness to new music is different for a critic in their 40s or 50s than for teenagers. One group is still in its formative age, embracing new things (while rejecting most of what their parents liked); the others’ formative years were decades earlier. Once your musical taste hardens, you may be less receptive to the latest sounds.
This might explain the bad reviews from Beatles’ critics throughout their career. Many of their albums, including some of the best music ever recorded, were initially panned. Musicologist and Historian Ted Gioia observed that critics “literally were handed the greatest recordings of their era to review, and blew them off. Every classic song on these albums was not only attacked, but actually mocked.” 9
MAYA helps explain why.
Gioia notes that The Beatles were “punished for how quickly they were pushing rock music ahead . . . the critics misunderstood the lads from Liverpool for the worst possible reason – namely, that they were constantly learning, growing more ambitious, and willing to take risks.”
Or as UK rocker Elvis Costello said, “Every [Beatles] record was a shock.” 10
The Ed Sullivan appearance was merely a single episode in an explosive career. Throughout the 1960s, bad reviews of Beatles’ albums such as Sgt. Peppers, The White Album, and Abbey Road would come back to haunt the critics who penned them.
Previously:
Say it with me: “Nobody Knows Anything” (May 5, 2016)
Nobody Knows Anything, John Wick edition (September 6, 2023)
Nobody Knows Anything (Full archive)
Eyes Wide Open: The Beatles and Their Critics.
Bob Seawright, The Better Letter, Feb 1, 2024
Pre-Order now for March 18, 2025
__________
1. Some try to make the case for the Rolling Stones in the #1 position through a combination of great songs, great live performances, and sheer longevity. The GOAT case for The Beatles is the unbeatable catalogue of amazing albums, and how their influence changed (and continues to change) music in so many ways. And, they created all of that astonishing music in less than a decade.
2. “The Ed Sullivan Show received 50,000 ticket requests for the 728-seat Studio 50 (now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater) where the band was to perform, far surpassing the previous high (7,000 tickets requested for Elvis Presley’s 1957 debut).” -Ibid, Seawright, Better Letter.
3. Seawright adds: “The broadcast drew a then-record of more than 73 million viewers (60 percent of all viewers), as compared to 21 million on a typical week.”
4. “The Beatles had no U.S. chart presence before February 1964 but sold 2.5 million records in the U.S. in the month after their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance and soon became the first act to hold all top 5 spots in the Billboard Hot 100 chart (they also held spots 16, 44, 49, 69, 78, 84 and 88). By the end of the year, the band had placed 28 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles chart, 11 of them in the Top 10.” –Billboard Hot 100 via Seawright
5. See: “What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964” By Cary Schneider, LA Times, February 9, 2014
6. Also laughable: Alan Rinzler of The Nation: Headlined “No Soul in Beatlesville:” The Beatles “remain derivative, a deliberate imitation of an American genre” whose “loud, fast, and furious, totally uninfluenced by some of the more sophisticated elements” music was “amplified to a plaster-crumbling, glass-shattering pitch.” It was “vapid,” and “Beatlemania as a phenomenon is manna for dull minds.”
Conservative writer William F. Buckley, September 9, 1964: “The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.”
Source: Early Criticism of The Beatles, Steve Silverman February 11, 2016
7. “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction,” by Derek Thompson, Penguin Books, February 7, 2017
8. MAYA was first published as “The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything” By Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, January/February 2017.
9. Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? An inquiry into how critics stumble, Ted Gioia, January 30, 2023
10. Elvis Costello, Rolling Stone, 100 Greatest Beatles Songs
