July 19, 2025 • 17 mins
Guest host Rich Berra and author Mark Brake discuss how the Beatles became the most influential band in music history, their songwriting and recording innovations that were years ahead of their time, and how the band's music continues to bring in new fans decades after it was released.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. I'm your host,
Rich Parer. This evening, our guest is Mark Break and
I think it's great that we have Mark Break on
because I know that in my years of playing out
with bands, whenever we've finished, I know a lot of musicians,
a lot of touring musicians, and people gig and they
get off of their shows and they listen to Coast
to Coast AM. I always thought there was a great
(00:27):
connection between music and Coast to Coast Maybe it's the
mystery of magic from music that brings it all together.
But I think this is going to be really cool tonight.
But let's talk about Mark Break and let's bring him on.
He's communicating science through film, television, print and radio on
five continents, including for NASA, Seattle Science Fiction Museum, the BBC,
(00:49):
the Royal Institution in Sky Movies. His books include the
Science of series, namely The Science of Harry Potter, The
Science of Star Wars, The Science of Superheroes in now
the Science of the Beatles. I'm very excited to talk
to our guests. Let's welcome Mark break to the show.
Hey Mark, nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Yeah you too, Ritch, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Good morning. I'm wondering as we talk, why do we
even like music? Is there a science behind that?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Oh? Well, that's an excellent question as to why music evolved.
Scientists haven't quite yet worked that out because we're the
only species of all the animals on the earth that
actually listen to music in the way that we do.
There are a number of different theories, but it remains
a mystery to some extent that there are some theories,
(01:42):
but there's no perfect explanation, which I think is quite
neat in the way.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Don't you think I did too.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Two.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I've spent many hours in studios as a musician myself,
and some of my favorite musicians that I sit with
we talk about, well, nobody really even knows where music
comes from. So are you really when you say you
wrote a song, did you really write it? Or is
it already there and you're just you're just pulling it
(02:08):
out of the ether. Because you hear that all the
time with artists. In fact, you hear Paul McCartney talk
about how yesterday it just came to him in a
dream and he thought it was maybe somebody else's song.
Now I personally do that too, where i'll I'll come
up with something I'm like, well, did I write that?
Or did I write somebody else's song that they already
wrote that I heard and forgot about. But I mean
the Beatles, if they were doing that, they were doing
(02:30):
it at a level that nobody else in the history
of the world. Besides maybe js Bach has accomplished.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, you just made me think about the deja vu
when somebody has deja vu code the scientists what deja
vu actually is. It's not you remembering the same memory again.
It's you being consciously aware of a memory as it's
been laid down. Okay, so you're actually you're actually conscious
(02:57):
of a memory track being set down in your mind
as it's happening, rather than remembering something else. And I'm
wondering if a song like Yesterday by Paul McCartney is
actually McCartney being aware of the memory of a song
as he's creating it, rather than remembering an old one.
That makes any sense?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well it does, But that is quite a brain trick,
isn't it. Yeah, absolutely, And that's really that's an obscene
amount of talent to come up with that.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Yeah, I remember, I mean when he was awarded with
the what was it called it, It was called the Library
of Congress Juichemin Price for Popular Music. When McCartney was
awarded for that in twenty ten by President Obama, Obama
pointed out that McCartney had composed almost two hundred songs
that had made the charts, two hundred and those songs
(03:49):
had stayed on the charts for a cumulative total of
thirty two years, which I thought was stunning.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, there is something about the staying power that Beatles.
I was thinking about this a lot because we've had
you on our list for I mean probably booked for
about a month and a half now. So I really
did enjoy reading your book, The Science of the Beatles,
and it is linked up at coast to coast to
am by the way, and even if you don't fancy
yourself a Beatles fan, which I don't know why you wouldn't,
(04:18):
but if you're not, but you you can't argue with
the fact that those are some of the catchiest songs
of all time. They're played the best. That's why you
don't hear a ton of people trying to do Beatles
covers albums because there's the originals are so good it's
kind of hard to top them and to bring something different.
They're so complete. And what kind of fascinates me, and
(04:40):
you cover this in your book that a lot of
those those tracks in the early days were first takes.
They just went in and did it tell people about
how rare that is in the recording world?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah, I mean that's the first album, Please Please Meet
was recorded in twenty four hours, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, basically the first take. They'd go back and like
Paul had add like a slide guitar on something, and
they add sound good, the first one sounds better, and
they ended up putting the lot of the first ones
on the album.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yes, absolutely, And so twenty four hours for the first
album and then of course much later in their career
they spend that amount of time on a single song.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Well sure, and and well we'll get into that a
little bit as we unpack this, But I want to
I want to kind of go back to sort of
the beginning because I know that kind of growing up
in the I'm a I'm a gen X kid, so
kind of growing up in the eighties, I would hear
a lot of these shows. In fact, a shout out
to Rockline hosted by Bob Koburn. I used to listen
to it every Monday night and they'd have on, you know,
(05:42):
back back in this day, it would be bands like
Cheap Trick, Brian Adams, Hart and Toto and these bands
pretty much would all say there was a seismic boom
the night that they saw the Beatles on the Ed
Sullivan Show, and all these you know, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight year olds were captivated, and a lot of them
(06:05):
that you hear about said, well, that's what.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I want to do.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I mean, we would not have a lot of that
music if it weren't for that appearance on that show.
That that sort of changed everything. Can you take me back
to that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, I've looked at a number of different reasons why
that was such an impact. I mean, I think one
of the things you have to realize is in the
nineteen fifties the idea of youth and youth culture was
certainly on the up. I remember reading that about in
the fifties about thirty five percent of the buying culture
(06:40):
in the United States was actually youth. So the young
people actually had money, and they had a budget to spend.
It's all with regard to the impact. Of course, it
has to be to do with the charisma of the
group themselves and the music. But it's also allegedly, according
to a lot of people, associated with the death of
Jaf Kennedy in November previous then the Beatles make an
(07:03):
appearance on Ed Sullivan in February of sixty four. Of course,
Gorsese has made that recent documentary about that. The Beatles
in sixty four documentary goes into all this kind of stuff,
and I think it's a combination of different factors that
made the impact so great. And of course we're talking
about seventy three million people.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Well it's really truly seventy three million people. Now you
you have a hit show. If a half a million
people watch it, I guess no. Streaming has changed everything,
of course, but those kind of numbers are just astounding.
I mean, that's that's almost Super Bowl numbers, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Well, yeah, and when you talked about in your intro,
when you were talking about record sales, I was listening
to you, and I made me think that the advanced
sales for Hey Jude was eight hundred thousand, so it's
so late hundred thousand before the records are released released.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Wow, that's quite impressive even heard it yet, Is that
what you say? Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Okay, so I
want to go let's go back to the beginning, because
you chose to write about things like Harry Potter and
Star Wars. But I'm trying to get a little sense
of your Mark Brigg is our guest, and he's written
the book The Science of the Beatles. Now, what was
(08:19):
your first exposure? It sounds like you might be from England,
so maybe maybe you were around back then kind of
hearing things for the first time too. When did you
first find yourself into the Beatles?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Oh? Yeah, I mean I remember seeing the Beatles on
top of the Pops, which is a British program, British
music program, quite a long standing one. So I remember
seeing on top of the Pops. I was recently rooting
through some stuff in my attic and I found a
news book from primary school as we call it in England,
(08:52):
you know, kindergarten. I must have been about five years also,
this news book is from nineteen sixty five and in
the book, the kid has to write whatever's been on
the news. And I've actually got put this in the
in the Science of Beatles book at the front of
the book. The drawing that I did at the age
of about five or six all the Beatles on stage.
My drawing wasn't particularly good, to be honest, nor was
(09:14):
my spelling, but nonetheless it made such an impact on
everybody the year there was a kid drawing the Beatles
on stage and pleased to say that I had Paul
McCartney down as left handed. So I obviously I.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
See that I'm looking at it right now that you
got the guitar facing the right way.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yes, that's right. Yeah, as you can see as rather poor,
but you know what I mean. It's obviously made an
impression on my life very early, and I remember having
you could buy a Beatles wick made of plastic believer
or not, which is just basically a scale cap you
put on your head, and there's all sorts of things
you could that was the impact was so big. There's
all these things that were you know, you could buy.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And so that sort of got you interested. Now, why
did you choose to write a book about the science
of the Beatles?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Oh, A couple of things. First of all, I had
family members kept on saying to me they didn't really
understand what the fuss of the Beatles was about.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So I hear that every now and then, even from
musicians they're like, I don't know, if you know, like
they're such a big deal to me. And normally what
I think about when I hear that is that I
guess for most of us, we've heard that music our
entire lives, and we've heard it a lot. But at
some point you come to a spot where you're like, Hey,
I'm rediscovering that and that's pretty that's pretty great. That's
(10:35):
a great song, and you almost absolutely we forget to
give it credit.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
I think they need to think about context in some senses.
I mean, without sounding a bit preachy to people like that.
If you think of a song like, oh, there's so
many of them, but a song like I Am the
Walrus or Tomorrow Never Knows or being for the benefit
of mister Kite on Sergeant Peppa. The sounds are so
complex and so and yet they made in nineteen sixty
(11:02):
seven with four tracks, two years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
With these four different tracks, right, so they keep on
bouncing things over and over again.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, very primitive technology, but hugely accomplished given
what they were actually using in the lab, and so
I called it the lab, which is often what I
do in the recording studio, which is like a lab.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Really sure, now it's it's one of my favorite. I
don't know if you've heard recently that Jill's Martin, George
Martin's son went and remastered some of the very first recordings.
They basically redid the Red album and the Blue Beatles album,
the two you know, double disc best ofs and it
(11:45):
sounds so good. When I'm listening to it, it's almost
like you're hearing it for the first time and you think, well,
I go see that band right now. They are tight.
They sound really good. There's something about the way he
put it in his lab, as you say, and the
way it came out. Well, things are more pronounced, they
sound more emotional. I think maybe is the word I'm
(12:07):
looking for. I don't know if you heard much of that,
but it's really pretty great.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, the thing about the songs. There've been a couple
of documentaries recently, was one called McCartney CE two one
I think with a guy with a record bouse called
Rick Rubin. Yeah, I was talking to McCartney asking him
about all the songs being so memorable, and McCartney said,
he thinks it's to do with the lack of technology.
(12:34):
So when the band, when the Beatles are on tour
in the early days, and they don't have the wherewithal
like smartphone to be able to record something that's just
come into their minds. What you could record into a
smartphone may or may not be rather throwaway in terms
of an idea in terms of melody and tune. But
(12:55):
what McCartney said is because we didn't even have an
old fashioned taper or we had to make the memories memorable. Sorry,
we had to make the melodies memorable, so they're stuck
in the mind so you could set them down on
paper the following day, because you may not be in
a position to write this stuff down, so you have
to remember it. So I thought that was kind of interested.
(13:18):
The lack of technology is very interesting and more memorable.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So he would he would keep the melodies even almost
simple in the chord progression simple because they were they're
basically playing it on the on the bus on the
way back from Hamburger, Germany. Yeah, so they were playing
it on the bus on the way back. They're like, well,
we don't want to forget it, so we'll keep the
chord changes and the verses and the chorus is nice
(13:44):
and tight and easy to remember and repeatable. And then
little did they know that they were creating songs that
would just get stuck at everybody's head and be memorable
for everybody, not just them, for the next day. Which
you keep on wondering about all these happy accidents that
cause this just sort of a explosion of pop. And
then I think too that something probably had to come
(14:06):
along to take out the do woptness of the fifties, right,
We couldn't just keep doing that forever. Something was going
to come along.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, that's very true. There's a great quote by David
Bowie when he was asked about the British doing music,
and he says the British are often quite smug about
the things that they do, which is undoubtedly true. And
bands like the Beatles knew that rock music's American. It
comes from the American soul, so what they do is
(14:38):
kind of they do it but with a British twist.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Not well, there's the magic right there.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Well, yeah, but it's a lot to do with the
kind of sense of humor about it. They're not Rick Biato,
the record producer's got a great YouTube channel. YouTube channel
talks about the fact that there's a lot of goofing
about when you watch the Beatles on Get Back Yeah,
on that documentary, there's an awful lot of good thing
about and that is a lot to do with the creativity.
(15:06):
I think there's a lot of fun in it, but
there's a lot to do with the British making that
that they go along a little bit of party in it.
So when they do when they go yeah, yeah, yeah,
or they're going ooh, you know, like kind of like
a girl band and shaking their heads. And there's the
early days.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You're talking about the you're talking you're talking about the
documentary that was on Apple TV UH and it's Get
Back And Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings Fame
went and found a lot of footage from UH from
what what album was it was after Abbey Road, right,
it was recording let It Be Yes, Thank You, and
(15:43):
they're in the studio and there's these just there is
quite a bit of them just being goofy and you know,
playing songs that they've heard on the radio, and then
literally you see Paul McCartney just kind of plunking away
on his base and boom, get back happens like that.
It's just like, you know, like rolls through him and
you're watching something that's just beautiful piece of history. But
(16:05):
I think what I learned from that is I kind
of thought that that album was a struggle to record
because I thought they had broken up and that Yuga
had broken up the band, and there's a little bit
of tension, but mostly they're goofballs. They're they're having great
And to think that they recorded all of that stuff.
Those eight albums, those six hundred million albums sold, are
(16:29):
only eight albums, and they achieved all of that before
they were like twenty eight or twenty nine, all of them.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yes, that's right. It's also worth remembering that before he
became the producer of the Beatles, George Martin mostly worked
on comedy records and novelty records. Oh wow, part of them. Yeah.
So in Britain there's a comedy group called the Goons
who were precursors of Monty Python, and George Martin was
(16:55):
the guy who produced the goons, and there's a lot
of sound effects. Kind of sound college is in those
novelty records and in those comedy records, which he then
brought to very very many of the Beatles's tracks, including
things like Yellow Submarine. To talk about all the sound
effects in Yellow Submarine, George Martin was well versed in
(17:15):
that kind of stuff, you know, to produce a kind
of texture and a fabric that the song sits in.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. I'm your host,
Rich Parer. This evening, our guest is Mark Break and
I think it's great that we have Mark Break on
because I know that in my years of playing out
with bands, whenever we've finished, I know a lot of musicians,
a lot of touring musicians, and people gig and they
get off of their shows and they listen to Coast
to Coast AM. I always thought there was a great
(00:27):
connection between music and Coast to Coast Maybe it's the
mystery of magic from music that brings it all together.
But I think this is going to be really cool tonight.
But let's talk about Mark Break and let's bring him on.
He's communicating science through film, television, print and radio on
five continents, including for NASA, Seattle Science Fiction Museum, the BBC,
(00:49):
the Royal Institution in Sky Movies. His books include the
Science of series, namely The Science of Harry Potter, The
Science of Star Wars, The Science of Superheroes in now
the Science of the Beatles. I'm very excited to talk
to our guests. Let's welcome Mark break to the show.
Hey Mark, nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Yeah you too, Ritch, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Good morning. I'm wondering as we talk, why do we
even like music? Is there a science behind that?
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Oh? Well, that's an excellent question as to why music evolved.
Scientists haven't quite yet worked that out because we're the
only species of all the animals on the earth that
actually listen to music in the way that we do.
There are a number of different theories, but it remains
a mystery to some extent that there are some theories,
(01:42):
but there's no perfect explanation, which I think is quite
neat in the way.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Don't you think I did too.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Two.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I've spent many hours in studios as a musician myself,
and some of my favorite musicians that I sit with
we talk about, well, nobody really even knows where music
comes from. So are you really when you say you
wrote a song, did you really write it? Or is
it already there and you're just you're just pulling it
(02:08):
out of the ether. Because you hear that all the
time with artists. In fact, you hear Paul McCartney talk
about how yesterday it just came to him in a
dream and he thought it was maybe somebody else's song.
Now I personally do that too, where i'll I'll come
up with something I'm like, well, did I write that?
Or did I write somebody else's song that they already
wrote that I heard and forgot about. But I mean
the Beatles, if they were doing that, they were doing
(02:30):
it at a level that nobody else in the history
of the world. Besides maybe js Bach has accomplished.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, you just made me think about the deja vu
when somebody has deja vu code the scientists what deja
vu actually is. It's not you remembering the same memory again.
It's you being consciously aware of a memory as it's
been laid down. Okay, so you're actually you're actually conscious
(02:57):
of a memory track being set down in your mind
as it's happening, rather than remembering something else. And I'm
wondering if a song like Yesterday by Paul McCartney is
actually McCartney being aware of the memory of a song
as he's creating it, rather than remembering an old one.
That makes any sense?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well it does, But that is quite a brain trick,
isn't it. Yeah, absolutely, And that's really that's an obscene
amount of talent to come up with that.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Yeah, I remember, I mean when he was awarded with
the what was it called it, It was called the Library
of Congress Juichemin Price for Popular Music. When McCartney was
awarded for that in twenty ten by President Obama, Obama
pointed out that McCartney had composed almost two hundred songs
that had made the charts, two hundred and those songs
(03:49):
had stayed on the charts for a cumulative total of
thirty two years, which I thought was stunning.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, there is something about the staying power that Beatles.
I was thinking about this a lot because we've had
you on our list for I mean probably booked for
about a month and a half now. So I really
did enjoy reading your book, The Science of the Beatles,
and it is linked up at coast to coast to
am by the way, and even if you don't fancy
yourself a Beatles fan, which I don't know why you wouldn't,
(04:18):
but if you're not, but you you can't argue with
the fact that those are some of the catchiest songs
of all time. They're played the best. That's why you
don't hear a ton of people trying to do Beatles
covers albums because there's the originals are so good it's
kind of hard to top them and to bring something different.
They're so complete. And what kind of fascinates me, and
(04:40):
you cover this in your book that a lot of
those those tracks in the early days were first takes.
They just went in and did it tell people about
how rare that is in the recording world?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah, I mean that's the first album, Please Please Meet
was recorded in twenty four hours, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, basically the first take. They'd go back and like
Paul had add like a slide guitar on something, and
they add sound good, the first one sounds better, and
they ended up putting the lot of the first ones
on the album.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yes, absolutely, And so twenty four hours for the first
album and then of course much later in their career
they spend that amount of time on a single song.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Well sure, and and well we'll get into that a
little bit as we unpack this, But I want to
I want to kind of go back to sort of
the beginning because I know that kind of growing up
in the I'm a I'm a gen X kid, so
kind of growing up in the eighties, I would hear
a lot of these shows. In fact, a shout out
to Rockline hosted by Bob Koburn. I used to listen
to it every Monday night and they'd have on, you know,
(05:42):
back back in this day, it would be bands like
Cheap Trick, Brian Adams, Hart and Toto and these bands
pretty much would all say there was a seismic boom
the night that they saw the Beatles on the Ed
Sullivan Show, and all these you know, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight year olds were captivated, and a lot of them
(06:05):
that you hear about said, well, that's what.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I want to do.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I mean, we would not have a lot of that
music if it weren't for that appearance on that show.
That that sort of changed everything. Can you take me back
to that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, I've looked at a number of different reasons why
that was such an impact. I mean, I think one
of the things you have to realize is in the
nineteen fifties the idea of youth and youth culture was
certainly on the up. I remember reading that about in
the fifties about thirty five percent of the buying culture
(06:40):
in the United States was actually youth. So the young
people actually had money, and they had a budget to spend.
It's all with regard to the impact. Of course, it
has to be to do with the charisma of the
group themselves and the music. But it's also allegedly, according
to a lot of people, associated with the death of
Jaf Kennedy in November previous then the Beatles make an
(07:03):
appearance on Ed Sullivan in February of sixty four. Of course,
Gorsese has made that recent documentary about that. The Beatles
in sixty four documentary goes into all this kind of stuff,
and I think it's a combination of different factors that
made the impact so great. And of course we're talking
about seventy three million people.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Well it's really truly seventy three million people. Now you
you have a hit show. If a half a million
people watch it, I guess no. Streaming has changed everything,
of course, but those kind of numbers are just astounding.
I mean, that's that's almost Super Bowl numbers, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Well, yeah, and when you talked about in your intro,
when you were talking about record sales, I was listening
to you, and I made me think that the advanced
sales for Hey Jude was eight hundred thousand, so it's
so late hundred thousand before the records are released released.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Wow, that's quite impressive even heard it yet, Is that
what you say? Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Okay, so I
want to go let's go back to the beginning, because
you chose to write about things like Harry Potter and
Star Wars. But I'm trying to get a little sense
of your Mark Brigg is our guest, and he's written
the book The Science of the Beatles. Now, what was
(08:19):
your first exposure? It sounds like you might be from England,
so maybe maybe you were around back then kind of
hearing things for the first time too. When did you
first find yourself into the Beatles?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Oh? Yeah, I mean I remember seeing the Beatles on
top of the Pops, which is a British program, British
music program, quite a long standing one. So I remember
seeing on top of the Pops. I was recently rooting
through some stuff in my attic and I found a
news book from primary school as we call it in England,
(08:52):
you know, kindergarten. I must have been about five years also,
this news book is from nineteen sixty five and in
the book, the kid has to write whatever's been on
the news. And I've actually got put this in the
in the Science of Beatles book at the front of
the book. The drawing that I did at the age
of about five or six all the Beatles on stage.
My drawing wasn't particularly good, to be honest, nor was
(09:14):
my spelling, but nonetheless it made such an impact on
everybody the year there was a kid drawing the Beatles
on stage and pleased to say that I had Paul
McCartney down as left handed. So I obviously I.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
See that I'm looking at it right now that you
got the guitar facing the right way.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yes, that's right. Yeah, as you can see as rather poor,
but you know what I mean. It's obviously made an
impression on my life very early, and I remember having
you could buy a Beatles wick made of plastic believer
or not, which is just basically a scale cap you
put on your head, and there's all sorts of things
you could that was the impact was so big. There's
all these things that were you know, you could buy.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
And so that sort of got you interested. Now, why
did you choose to write a book about the science
of the Beatles?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Oh, A couple of things. First of all, I had
family members kept on saying to me they didn't really
understand what the fuss of the Beatles was about.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
So I hear that every now and then, even from
musicians they're like, I don't know, if you know, like
they're such a big deal to me. And normally what
I think about when I hear that is that I
guess for most of us, we've heard that music our
entire lives, and we've heard it a lot. But at
some point you come to a spot where you're like, Hey,
I'm rediscovering that and that's pretty that's pretty great. That's
(10:35):
a great song, and you almost absolutely we forget to
give it credit.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
I think they need to think about context in some senses.
I mean, without sounding a bit preachy to people like that.
If you think of a song like, oh, there's so
many of them, but a song like I Am the
Walrus or Tomorrow Never Knows or being for the benefit
of mister Kite on Sergeant Peppa. The sounds are so
complex and so and yet they made in nineteen sixty
(11:02):
seven with four tracks, two years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
With these four different tracks, right, so they keep on
bouncing things over and over again.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, very primitive technology, but hugely accomplished given
what they were actually using in the lab, and so
I called it the lab, which is often what I
do in the recording studio, which is like a lab.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Really sure, now it's it's one of my favorite. I
don't know if you've heard recently that Jill's Martin, George
Martin's son went and remastered some of the very first recordings.
They basically redid the Red album and the Blue Beatles album,
the two you know, double disc best ofs and it
(11:45):
sounds so good. When I'm listening to it, it's almost
like you're hearing it for the first time and you think, well,
I go see that band right now. They are tight.
They sound really good. There's something about the way he
put it in his lab, as you say, and the
way it came out. Well, things are more pronounced, they
sound more emotional. I think maybe is the word I'm
(12:07):
looking for. I don't know if you heard much of that,
but it's really pretty great.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, the thing about the songs. There've been a couple
of documentaries recently, was one called McCartney CE two one
I think with a guy with a record bouse called
Rick Rubin. Yeah, I was talking to McCartney asking him
about all the songs being so memorable, and McCartney said,
he thinks it's to do with the lack of technology.
(12:34):
So when the band, when the Beatles are on tour
in the early days, and they don't have the wherewithal
like smartphone to be able to record something that's just
come into their minds. What you could record into a
smartphone may or may not be rather throwaway in terms
of an idea in terms of melody and tune. But
(12:55):
what McCartney said is because we didn't even have an
old fashioned taper or we had to make the memories memorable. Sorry,
we had to make the melodies memorable, so they're stuck
in the mind so you could set them down on
paper the following day, because you may not be in
a position to write this stuff down, so you have
to remember it. So I thought that was kind of interested.
(13:18):
The lack of technology is very interesting and more memorable.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So he would he would keep the melodies even almost
simple in the chord progression simple because they were they're
basically playing it on the on the bus on the
way back from Hamburger, Germany. Yeah, so they were playing
it on the bus on the way back. They're like, well,
we don't want to forget it, so we'll keep the
chord changes and the verses and the chorus is nice
(13:44):
and tight and easy to remember and repeatable. And then
little did they know that they were creating songs that
would just get stuck at everybody's head and be memorable
for everybody, not just them, for the next day. Which
you keep on wondering about all these happy accidents that
cause this just sort of a explosion of pop. And
then I think too that something probably had to come
(14:06):
along to take out the do woptness of the fifties, right,
We couldn't just keep doing that forever. Something was going
to come along.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, that's very true. There's a great quote by David
Bowie when he was asked about the British doing music,
and he says the British are often quite smug about
the things that they do, which is undoubtedly true. And
bands like the Beatles knew that rock music's American. It
comes from the American soul, so what they do is
(14:38):
kind of they do it but with a British twist.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Not well, there's the magic right there.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Well, yeah, but it's a lot to do with the
kind of sense of humor about it. They're not Rick Biato,
the record producer's got a great YouTube channel. YouTube channel
talks about the fact that there's a lot of goofing
about when you watch the Beatles on Get Back Yeah,
on that documentary, there's an awful lot of good thing
about and that is a lot to do with the creativity.
(15:06):
I think there's a lot of fun in it, but
there's a lot to do with the British making that
that they go along a little bit of party in it.
So when they do when they go yeah, yeah, yeah,
or they're going ooh, you know, like kind of like
a girl band and shaking their heads. And there's the
early days.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You're talking about the you're talking you're talking about the
documentary that was on Apple TV UH and it's Get
Back And Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings Fame
went and found a lot of footage from UH from
what what album was it was after Abbey Road, right,
it was recording let It Be Yes, Thank You, and
(15:43):
they're in the studio and there's these just there is
quite a bit of them just being goofy and you know,
playing songs that they've heard on the radio, and then
literally you see Paul McCartney just kind of plunking away
on his base and boom, get back happens like that.
It's just like, you know, like rolls through him and
you're watching something that's just beautiful piece of history. But
(16:05):
I think what I learned from that is I kind
of thought that that album was a struggle to record
because I thought they had broken up and that Yuga
had broken up the band, and there's a little bit
of tension, but mostly they're goofballs. They're they're having great
And to think that they recorded all of that stuff.
Those eight albums, those six hundred million albums sold, are
(16:29):
only eight albums, and they achieved all of that before
they were like twenty eight or twenty nine, all of them.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yes, that's right. It's also worth remembering that before he
became the producer of the Beatles, George Martin mostly worked
on comedy records and novelty records. Oh wow, part of them. Yeah.
So in Britain there's a comedy group called the Goons
who were precursors of Monty Python, and George Martin was
(16:55):
the guy who produced the goons, and there's a lot
of sound effects. Kind of sound college is in those
novelty records and in those comedy records, which he then
brought to very very many of the Beatles's tracks, including
things like Yellow Submarine. To talk about all the sound
effects in Yellow Submarine, George Martin was well versed in
(17:15):
that kind of stuff, you know, to produce a kind
of texture and a fabric that the song sits in.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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