I'll just say sorry for yet another Beatles post first because I know it might irritate a few, but I feel they need some respect.
The Beatles seem to have been mentioned quite a bit recently in various threads, and a lot of the comments aren't always very complimentary, I'm always a bit baffled by this, ok, they might be everybody's cup of tea, especially now 50+ years later, but for me they were extremely influential.
I was eleven when I got my first guitar for Christmas, and me and my next door neighbour who was a year older than me had been messing around playing Shadow's stuff, but when [b]Love Me Do[/b] was released and we first heard the opening riff where the harmonica and the guitars came in, we thought [b]what is this?[/b]
It was just so much different to what we had heard before, don't forget that we only had about a hour of "youngster's music" on the radio a [b]week[/b] in those days, so we never really got to hear what was out there, Cliff and the Shadows and maybe a bit of Buddy Holly was about as raw as it got in 1962/3.
At the time I loved everything the Beatles did, they had an edge about them, unlike Cliff who as many have said in the Cliff's Roll Over Beethoven thread, he always sounds a bit too polite.
Yes, other bands soon followed like the Stones, the Who, Pretty Things, etc, who took the rawness even further, and then came the super groups like Cream, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, but for me, it was the Beatles who started it all, at the time they were different, original, and wrote amazing songs.
Now don't get me wrong, I did move on to preferring the bands I mentioned above, but I still love listening to the beatles music, and I can still sing along to almost every song word for word, and it brings back happy memories of the early to mid-sixties when I was really getting into music.
And I'm with Blue when he says, "[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif][b][i]I'll never understand why you guys mock and have very little appreciation for this incredible part of music history which is yours[/i][/b]".[/font][/color]