Word: rockingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stylistically, The Band is Country and Western rock, with mandolin, jew's harp, and some very funky ragtime piano to hint at the down home atmosphere, while drums, organ, and electric guitar give the music a drive which CandW does not possess. The album is technically sound and it is the kind of music you can hum in your mind when you're falling asleep in lecture. Each cut is very professionally arranged and performed to project the atmosphere which the Lyrics describe. As a unit then, the Band works. But judged according to standards set by people like Cream...
...rock and roll freaks are also inveterate list-makers, and we spend a large part of our non-listening hours Ranking the Groups we listen to the rest of the time. The puzzle is that in nearly every such reckoning the Beatles come out regularly, monotonously on top of the heap. This is puzzling because the other groups that populate the upper reaches of today's pop hierarchy are so incredibly good in their own special professional ways that it is difficult to see how a bunch of amateurs like the Beatles invariably manage to surpass them all. Thus...
...secret of the great Memphis Delta blues-men (and of folk artists in general, they could knock you dead by the mere aura of unself-conscious authority that they projected. I think that what is happening with the Beatles is that they are beginning to achieve, in a rock context, that exact amalgam of easy natural strength and sure-footed integrity born of a complete command over the medium. (Exciting to think that, before our eyes, the Beatles are doing it all over again-taking rock and roll up to yet another higher plane of cultural and artistic value...
...forever free. Their first reaction to this freedom was to push it to its furthest limits which they did in continuous experiment from "Strawberry Fields" to "I Am the Walrus." What we have been seeing ever since has been a retrenchment. The Beatles are back to being a standard rock band (drums, bass, guitar/piano) but the richness of their immediate background enables them to transform this seemingly limited form by magical proportions. The Beatles may be musical amateurs but they have more experience than anyone in the business...
...Beatles at the very height of their creative powers, a combination of extraordinarily strong songs written and performed with a kind of relentless assured zeal, and-on Side two in particular-infused with a mature and compassionate poetic vision, No wonder the Beatles are still Number One on every rock freak's list...