A couple of years
ago I was asked to write introductions to four Beatles sheet music books aimed
at guitarists and decided to talk about about the instruments they used. The
‘guitar’ book was in two parts, one dealing with the period up to and including
1966, the second 1967 onwards. Then there was a bass book and finally a drum
book. This is the first ‘guitar’ intro, which will be followed by the other
three over the next few days.
First and foremost The Beatles was a band of guitarists. As
a teenager John Lennon picked up the guitar because Elvis played one, and he
learned a few rudimentary chords to front his skiffle group The Quarrymen. John
invited Paul McCartney to join because Paul was more advanced on the guitar than
him and knew how to tune the instrument properly. George Harrison arrived
several months later because Paul, and eventually John, both recognised his
superior guitar skills. The drums – and the band went through several drummers
before Ringo arrived – seem in hindsight to have been an afterthought or at
least a perpetual problem, just as they are with most bands of beginners.
John, Paul
and George taught themselves to play. John might have picked up a banjo chord
or two from his mother Julia, Paul probably inherited some musical talent from
his father, who played trumpet in a Liverpool jazz band, and George had a
lesson or two from an older player, but when they got together they learned to forge
their own style, expanding the guitar’s rock vocabulary as they did so.
Countless hours of honing their craft in Liverpool and Hamburg, much of it in
front of demanding audiences, led to an instrumental fluency that not only matched
their rivals but bred in them an instinctive sense of musical communication. Once
they’d mastered these skills they were ready to take on the world.
John was a
rhythm guitarist, one of the best ever. His speciality was not so much his
encyclopaedic knowledge of chords, some of them his own invention, but his
immaculate timing and a fearsomely powerful right hand strumming action that powered
the group, the engine that propelled it forward. Paul learned to play a regular
guitar first but took over on bass at the beginning of 1961 and, probably because
he knew his way around a piano, became one of the most inventive, melodic
bassists of his generation, the group’s harmonic core. George, a rockabilly
fanatic, was simply in love with his instrument from the word go and determined
to master every style he could, and to use his skills on any other fretted
instrument he encountered, not least the sitar. He was the group’s instrumental
backbone.
In the
mid-fifties, when John, Paul and George first decided to learn to play guitar,
the choice of instruments was very limited. Guitars were a novelty then and
those that were available to British schoolboys were cheap and badly made, with
poor actions and inaccurate fretting. Because of import restrictions, well constructed
American models – Fenders, Gibsons and Gretsches – had yet to arrive in the UK
so the three future Beatles split their fingertips on poor quality guitars
bought for them by mums and dads who knew no better. This was not necessarily a
bad thing: learning on an inferior instrument demands a greater degree of
dedication and perseverance than learning on a quality guitar, and makes the
eventual upgrade that much more satisfying.
Accordingly,
John’s first guitar was a Gallotone Champion which was bought for him by Julia
through mail-order, and which he is seen playing in the now famous photograph
of The Quarrymen at the Woolton Church Fete on July 6, 1957, the day he met
Paul. His future partner’s first guitar was a Zenith 17 which, because he was
left-handed, Paul would have had to restring and play upside down, with the
scratch plate above the soundhole and not below. Both subsequently acquired
Hofner Club 40s, superior certainly and better looking but still far from
ideal. George’s first guitar, meanwhile, was a second-hand Dutch-made Egmond
but by the time he joined the Quarrymen he’d graduated to a Hofner President.
It wasn’t
until the Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960 that they equipped themselves with
anything approaching professional instruments. John went for a Rickenbacker
325, a short-scale solid body, and Paul’s first bass, after the Hofner he inherited
from Stuart Sutcliffe, was the famous violin bass, also made by Hofner, the
first of many similar models he would own. George’s first electric guitar was a
Futurama III, an inferior Stratocaster copy made in Czechoslovakia
by Resonet, but in 1961 he got his first Gretsch, a Duo Jet and, in 1963, a
Country Gentleman designed for Gretsch by the country guitarist Chet Atkins. By
now both John and George had also acquired Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars with
single electric pickups at the base of the fretboard, which they are seen
playing in early photos and TV appearances.
John had also taught himself to play
the harmonica, an instrument he first picked up when he was 12. He can be heard
playing it, in intros that establish the melody line, on The Beatles’ first three
singles ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me To You’, though from this
point on it’s guitars to the fore, as it was for most of the songs on their
debut album. Remarkably, ten of the 14 songs on Please Please Me were recorded at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London,
in one day – February 11, 1963 – and for the two
most upbeat songs on the record, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist And
Shout’, it’s likely that John and George used the Rickenbacker 325 and Gretsch
Duo Jet respectively. ‘Twist And Shout’ was the final song to be recorded that
day, at 10 in the evening, and some reports have John – grappling with a cold
and his voice raw from the day’s efforts – stripped to the waist to belt out
what was, at the time, the most frenzied piece of pop music recorded this side
of the Atlantic.
After a break for touring The Beatles
reconvened at Abbey Road on 1 July to record ‘She Loves You’, the song most
associated with that chaotic summer of Beatlemania. A photograph taken in the
back yard at Abbey Road that day shows John with his Gibson acoustic and George
with a new Gretsch Country Gentleman, a double cutaway model, on which he would
have played the song’s descending arpeggios.
The sessions for The Beatles’ second album were spread out during the summer
and autumn of 1963 but, all the same, only seven days from their hectic
schedule were set aside for recording the songs. By now George was using his
Country Gentleman in the studio for solos and fills, and for rhythm John
alternated between his Gibson acoustic and the Rickenbacker which he used for the
fast-paced, dense rhythm track on ‘All My Loving’. The final single of 1963,
the one that broke them in America, was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, on which
the instrumentation was probably the same as ‘She Loves You’ and, indeed,
‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
The Beatles’ third album, A Hard Day’s Night, was the first on which all the songs were group
compositions and by this time George had bought his Rickenbacker 360-12, the
12-string with the jangly tone that was to inspire Roger McGuinn’s Byrds, and
which can be heard on the title track and ‘You Can’t Do That’. In the studio
George was also using a José Ramírez Spanish guitar, as heard on ‘And I Love Her’.
For ‘I Feel Fine’ both John and George doubled up on the
tricky riff, with John using the Gibson acoustic which was prone to feedback,
hence the iconic burst of electronic whine at the beginning of the record. It
wasn’t until they learned something about studio techniques that The Beatles
realized a song could fade out at the end instead of coming to a natural
climax, and for ‘Eight Days A Week’ they reversed the effect, fading in at the
beginning with George’s chiming Rickenbacker and John’s acoustic Gibson playing
in unison.
In 1965 The Beatles expanded their guitar collections
considerably, with John, Paul and George all buying – or more likely being
given – Epiphone Casinos, and Paul adding a Rickenbacker 400IS bass to his
array of Hofners. John and George also got sonic blue Fender Strats – John
played his on ‘Ticket To Ride’ – and George added a Tennessean to his
collection of Gretsches. Paul also acquired an Epiphone Texan acoustic for
writing in the studio and performing ‘Yesterday’ live.
As a result of all these acquisitions it becomes
increasingly difficult to state accurately what instruments were played on what
songs, especially as Paul was inclined to play the odd guitar part himself as
well as bass. George had bought his first sitar in time for the sessions for Rubber Soul, and can be heard playing it
on ‘Norwegian Wood’. During 1966 he acquired a Gibson SG Standard and can be
seen playing it in the promotional films for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’,
both of which were shot at Abbey Road.
Photographs taken by Robert Freeman in Studio 2 at Abbey Road
during the Revolver sessions show all
manner of guitars racked up behind the group. The more successful they became
the more they were inclined to experiment, and more instruments were used.
Sooner or later – like all superstar rock musicians – they were given guitars
as presents by other musicians, though the evidence suggests they didn’t give
many away themselves. Those they did have become extremely desirable
collectors’ items which fetch astronomical sums at auctions of rock and roll
memorabilia.
No comments:
Post a Comment