The Beatles and Their Impact on My Life Philosophy

A summary of The Beatles career and their impact on culture. The personal lessons I’ve gained from listening to the group and studying the history of the phenomenon and sixties decade. After doing a deep dive the last six weeks and reading “Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties” by Ian MacDonald, I find parallels with 2020.

The Beatles are the greatest band of all-time.

No one will argue against that statement—even the most contrarian of the contrarian people. It cannot be denied. Pointing out that they’re the greatest band of all-time might actually be understating their impact and success. They changed the world. And, in my opinion, their music is the human experience. The Beatles and the philosophy I’ve extracted from listening to their music, learning about them, and studying everything around it, is one of the main pillars of influence in my life.

I first learned about The Beatles through my mother—but not directly. I would say that my parent’s taste in music isn’t too stellar. Many people talk about how their parents influenced what music they like. That’s not really my case. No particular bands or musicians were stressed or thrust upon me. Even today I’m not really certain what music my dad likes. I know he likes Elvis. Mainly he likes upbeat female pop stars: Cher, Donna Summer, Oliva Newton John—currently Lady Gaga is a favorite of his.

Every Sunday my mom took us church. My mom is Catholic and my dad is Lutheran. So it’d be my mom, my siblings, and me driving fifteen miles to town. We’d go to mass, visit with our relatives, and then drive home listening to the radio. Contemporary music was probably too overtly sexualized or angry. I remember every time a song with a guitar solo came on she’d groan and change the station. “I can’t stand that noise.” When I rode shotgun, I tried to listen to stuff I liked. I’d tried to get away with listening to a song I knew she wouldn’t like just to see how long it’d take for her to change the station. One of my proudest moments was surpassing the minute mark of “Slim Shady” by Eminem. It blew my mind that she took that long.

There was an oldie’s radio station that played music from the ‘50’s and ‘60s. Oldies 95.7. That’s what we often listened to. I think she had a nostalgia for it. It seemed safe. It’s what she grew up listening to. She was just a kid in the sixties. Life seemed simple. Life was rosy. But it was actually a lot of hippie music. Songs were about love, peace, and creating a better world. It mirrored the teachings and lessons we learned two hours earlier at church, really. My mom is the furthest you could imagine from a hippie. She’s ten years too late to have been a hippie in the sixties. Her youth probably shielded her from understanding how tumultuous the decade was as well.

But there would be this program called Brunch with The Beatles. I don’t recall the specific name. And they only played Beatles songs and talked about The Beatles. I loved the music. I especially loved the high energy rock n’ roll songs like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Twist & Shout,” or “All My Loving.” But their other stuff was different and awesome too. It was a treat to imagine what style of song they’d play next. I never thought to change the radio station when the Beatles were on. My mom wasn’t a huge Beatles fan, but she approved. We could mutually agree on the music.

When I was thirteen I got the Blue Album, which is a compilation of Beatles songs from 1967-1970. That summer I listened to it all the time. I decided who I would be (that’s why I often ask that question to podcast guests—I’m curious if there was a time in their life that had an impact like that). I was entering 8^th grade at Raymond Elementary School. I love my hometown of Raymond so much that I just wanted all my classmates to have the best time they could before we all went to high school in another town. I stopped caring about how people perceived me and just had the confidence to be myself and to give me all in every situation. It’s the only time I jumped out of bed every morning because I was so excited to go to school. It was probably the best year of my life. I contribute a lot of that to the Beatles. You can just be who you are. That’s what they did. That will make all the difference. Everyone else is so scared of life that they just try to replicate what they see other people do and succeed at. That won’t make you happy. You naturally push boundaries when you’re yourself because there is only one you. Living your truest self will make you the happiest and people gravitate towards that. When you just want to give your love to the world, the world around you changes.

The Beatles were from city of Liverpool on the west coast of England. It was a powerhouse port during the Industrial Revolution but was decimated by WWII. The Beatles were born in the early ‘40s and the city struggled through the ‘50s. Pop culture wasn’t really a thing yet—because The Beatles really elevated that—but the “teenager” concept started to emerge. You weren’t your parents and you weren’t an adult yet. You just wanted to express yourself. This is Rock n’ Roll. Rock n’ Roll is American. So you’d have these English teenagers listening to American music and creating their own bands. Since Liverpool was a port, it would get American records before all the other English cities. So The Beatles would get their hands on them and listen. They didn’t read music; they just listened to the notes and figured them out for themselves.

Flash forward after they played in Hamburg, Germany to when they played at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and Ringo had joined them. Brian Epstein, the son of a record shop owner heard about them and checked them out. He knew they were something special. He worked on getting them a record deal and recording songs. No one really knew what to do with them. Pop music was usually one leader backed by a few others. Blank and the so and so’s. Here, The Beatles seemed to have no stand out leader, all four could sing, and three could write songs. The Beatles wanted to record their own songs. The studio had a song called “How Do You Do It?” that was going to be a number one hit, but The Beatles didn’t want to record it. It wasn’t them. They didn’t have any clout yet, so they recorded it (if you listen to it on the Anthology records, you can tell hear the sarcasm in the singing). The song passed to Gerry and the Pacemakers and became a number one hit. The record industry then was focused on selling singles.

The avalanche of Beatlemania started with “Love Me Do then Please, Please Me then From Me to You then She Loves You.” It was just hit after hit after hit. They sounded entirely original. You would have John and Paul’s voices harmonizing together. Their LPs sold incredibly too. The girls went into hysteria at shows and would camp out at random places to just get a glimpse of them. They were becoming a cash cow—an entire enterprise. The Beatles were in Paris when they learned “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit number one in the United States. They crossed the Atlantic in February 1964. The Beatles raised the bar for music: in order to be a serious band, you had to write your own music. Other artists were blown away by the quality of songs on their albums. They could have just released those as singles.

They’re a comet that can’t be replicated. They were the right band for the right time. They cleared away the cloud of WWII. They brought hope and optimism after the Kennedy assassination. The way their personalities mingled with adults in interviews provided confidence to their generation to be their own. They were witty and funny—which was part of the Liverpool fabric compared to the rest of England. They brought joy when it was needed most.

John and Paul usually wrote like 85% of a song and bring it to the other for the last 15%. They split the royalties with their publishing. They competed against each other of who could write the better song, but they were also on the same team and benefited from it.

I think the worst Beatles album is Beatles For Sale. Half of the album is covers. They sound kind of exhausted on it. They’re just touring all the time. They’ve been just writing love songs and stuff. The Beatles are getting older and wondering how much longer it can last like this. George gave Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ to John. They were getting into Dylan more. Dylan, on the other hand, was confused how the biggest pop group knew how to play all these weird chords that no one outside folk music would know. But The Beatles taught themselves how to play. In August 1964 the Beatles met Dylan in New York City. The Beatles started going in an introspective direction and Dylan went electric.

John, George, and Ringo bought big houses in the London suburbs while Paul lived with his girlfriend, Jane Asher, in London. Her brother, Peter, started Indica Bookshop. Paul started emerging himself into the London underground culture. He was their first customer. He’d borrow books and leave notes which ones he took. So he’s exploring all these ideas and art and it starts entering the songwriting of The Beatles. John visited more and got into it too. In 1966 he actually met Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery. I think it starts seeping into Help! You can even notice a difference in their album covers moving forward. It’s presented more as a work of art as well. So it’s like this whole artistic package.

Their next album, Rubber Soul, completely changes everything. This is the album, I think, that triggers the decade to become what we think of the Sixties. Pop music moving forward wasn’t the same. Rubber Soul is more acoustic, more tambourine, and the lyrics are much more emotion based. They talk about love in a different way than before. Love isn’t just this thing between two individual people, it’s about experiencing it on a human level. They’ve been a money machine for so long that they have pull. They get more studio time because they’re The Beatles, so they can experiment more with their sounds and ideas. The Beatles will sell, so just let them do what they’re going to do. It’s compounding.

Compounding is such an important concept to understand about life. Putting energy into something and then that energy creates multiplied energy from those results. Learning compounds into more learning.

Revolver continues the intellectual and sound journey of Rubber Soul. By this point, their excitement is not in touring, it’s in recording, writing, and creating art not in touring. Touring is what bands did; that’s how bands and record labels made money. But with The Beatles, every show became a circus. It was an opportunity for whoever to protest this or that. They would get death threats. International royalty and ambassadors would get mad at them from not meeting them. The members were on this nonstop schedule and they preferred to have a day off here and there instead of just doing a public appearance with someone “important.” They couldn’t hear themselves on stage. They weren’t getting better as musicians. It wasn’t enjoyable anymore. So they stopped.

They went pretty much dark for a while. They took three months off from everything before coming back to start recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The world didn’t hear from them. All the articles about The Beatles being done or washed up were written. Then it dropped and blew people’s minds. It changed music again. Since they no longer planned to tour, why not make an album that can’t be performed live? Two singles, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were released. They thought about making an entire album based around Liverpool, but Paul had the idea of being a made-up band. He was amused by the new names of the American bands. It’s considered the first concept album. They’re at the peak of their power here—still ascending really.

This was the Summer of Love. Summer of 1967. Flower power is in full force. The younger generation detached and rebelled against their parents and their ideals. Loosen the rules of society. And then the last years of the Sixties is chaos.

Two months after Sgt. Pepper’s, Brian Epstein died. It’s a huge blow to the members. Paul thought the best thing to do was to move forward on a new project to keep the group focused. They’d film The Magical Mystery Tour. When it came out, they had poor reviews for the first time. It took them aback. George got the guys to travel to India for a meditation retreat—they didn’t forget to bring their guitars though. They returned with a ton of new songs. It became known as the White Album.

The White Album is my favorite Beatles album. Back in 2011, a couple days before I lived homeless, I found this CD laying around at home and played it. It struck me. I knew I loved the Beatles, but I didn’t listen to them much in high school or college. So while I had a nine-year hiatus, they randomly entered back into my life at a transformative moment. The next nine years I listened and learned about the Beatles so much. However, about a month and a half ago, there was another moment. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the world saw the murder of George Floyd. People have had another of this. Protests have ensued and the stress level increased. People are on edge. They want a better world. I think it mirrors a lot of the events of the late Sixties. I was back home in Wisconsin working on the farm. I put on The Beatles. When I reflected on it, I think it’s because I find comfort and joy listening to them, but I also think I can find an answer. What can I learn about The Beatles that can help me during this time? I’ve been on a deep dive since. One of the books I read was Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald. It discusses the relationship between The Beatles and the Sixties.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an intense year. MLK Jr. was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. There were riots and protests. The Vietnam War started. Anger was high on both the right and the left. People looked towards The Beatles to take a stand on everything. Their message was peace. Haven’t you been listening to our music? They could sense violence bubbling up, but they stood for Love and Peace. There was especially pressure from the Radical Left. A lot of protest songs were coming out. Lennon recorded “Revolution” as a response from the pressure. “If you’re talking about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.”

The Beatles cared more about creating a sound rather than emphasize lyrics. Their lyrics were often highly vague. This is a critique to some. To me, it’s a positive. The Beatles music sounds like the human experience. It’s art. Art doesn’t tell you what to think. It opens your mind and you get to decide for yourself, unlike protest songs that tell you what you should believe. In life, people care more about how you make them feel, not what you say. You don’t change someone by talking, you change them by connecting with them emotionally and through love.

The Beatles had a unique balance of personalities. The way I think of it, Paul represents beauty and aesthetics, John represents energy and darkness, George represents spirituality and peace, and Ringo represents fun. All of these elements are part of life. You need all of them. When they come together musically, you get The Beatles. That’s why their music is still relevant today and will be in the future, it sounds like life. Protest music is powerful in the moment. Art impacts forever.

My favorite Beatle is Paul because I think I’m most like him. I respect all the others, of course. Everyone needed to be themselves in order for it all to work. In a group project, I’m going to be the one to make sure everything goes right. He’s the more organized one that knew what success required. So when Brian Epstein wanted them to dress in suits and do public appearances, Paul knew that was part of being professional. A lot of artists don’t get that. They’d rather stay broke than compromise. You can’t create change without taking these considerations. Society rarely considers the other way to rebel. They want to change or stand out by doing something negative or dressing a certain way. What if you do it through actions and in a positive way?

The Let It Be sessions were a disaster. By this point, the group members had their own creative visions and lives going on. Their work sessions were ugly—at each other and bickering. They knew the band was falling apart. John brought Yoko into the studio and would want her opinion, angering the other members. Paul took charge of the group, unofficially, after Epstein’s death and the others didn’t appreciate it (even though they probably knew it had to happen).

Tensions were so high they scrapped it and started on what would be their last album, Abbey Road. Abbey Road is so beautiful because they sort of knew it’d be their last. It’s incredible. Side 2 with the medley. Perfect.

I don’t foresee a band within my lifetime having the same musical, artistic, and cultural impact as The Beatles. They transcended what a band was. The only other artist I think of is Kanye West. He’s not a rapper. He originally used rap as a vehicle to express himself the way The Beatles used rock n’ roll. True artists keep growing and keep learning. You cannot box them in. For a band to be so synonymous with a decade speaks to their impact.

I can feel similarities with this decade and the Sixties. I sense a culture war brewing online. The internet disrupted traditional companies—especially media companies. They don’t have much left to hold onto. They can’t be neutral because there’s no money in being neutral news. Instead, they have to take a side of a culture and sensationalize their “news” and headlines to draw attention to attain ad revenue. They dehumanize people by putting them in categories, demographics, and tribes—because if you’re part of that group, this is how you’re supposed to think. If you scroll social media, you’d think the world is ending. If that’s the case, you’re going to want to focus on the news all the time in case something breaks. It’s classic “divide and conquer.” Who do you think gains the most from dividing the country culturally? The status quo. The most upper class. I believe the majority of Americans can get along and work together.

Love is answer. I think people are experiencing a hard time loving themselves. The 21^st century is off to a very quick start. Our screens promise us that we’ll always be entertained and never bored. It delivers on that promise too. People attach their personal worth to external things or the “team” the media tries to put someone on. The way to love yourself is long and difficult, so it dissuades many. You must unplug and reflect. You have to think about yourself, your experiences, and who you want to be. You’ll understand who you are, what strengths you have, and how you can help others around you with those talents. You will see a change in yourself, as well as the community around you. You accept yourself for you are. It’s love. And then all you want to do is share that love with others. You listen to other people. You’re in control of your thoughts and actions. You’re human. Because we’re all human, we can connect and find a way. There are no teams or enemies.

All you need is love.