There were quite a few deep cuts and some of their influences there that unless one listened to every Beatles record and saw their interviews one might not recognize, only the big hits got airplay on genre stations (some pop, some classic rock, some countdown best of) 10-20 years later. I'm about the same age but had all their albums. The last few albums had eclectic mix of songs compared to earlier pop hits centered albums.
Sometimes an artist is so influential that to go back to discover them for the first time, from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche ... when in fact they invented the cliches. Right?
I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
True, but there's also the tendency of people to look at a fairly rich period of change and wrongly attribute the new ideas to just one or two popular people/groups. This happens a lot with the Beatles (you even get extreme ideas like the Beatles creating the genre of rock) but it's not uncommon with other bands from the 60's either (Velvet Underground, to name one prominent example).
If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.
I don't know: fuzz bass, guitar feedback, orchestral pieces in a rock song, the "concept album", reverse guitars/vocals, countless other studio tricks. I read Geoff Emrick's book "Here, There and Everywhere" and he goes into great detail on the new ground the Beatles forged.
Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.
The thing is, people tend to exaggerate how many of these the Beatles actually were first with. For example, here's fuzz bass from 1961[1], and another instrumental from 1961 with a lot of fuzz[2]. Both by Grady Martin, who's hardly a household name.
There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.
It is true but consider also that whoever made the first song with a new tech which became popular actually was the first to truly make it work well enough to make it popular.
I listened to everything by the Beatles that I could get my hands on to make a playlist for my wife. The theme was "Beatles-adjacent but as good or better". The Beatles finally clicked for me.
