By Bill Carroll
May 26, 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the
release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band. In its day,
critics were split on its musical value, and they still are; but it was and
remains a milestone. An album so iconic
that it dominated the marketplace and yet yielded no contemporaneous 45 rpm singles. In those days, popularity for individual cuts
was measured by singles’ sales and Top 40 radio station airplay. Sgt.
Pepper effectively took its contents out of both categories (FM and
underground radio was, at most, nascent) relying solely on the album charts.
It’s no surprise that the 50th anniversary has spawned backward looks at the album and the Beatles’ portfolio. A recent
review ranked all Beatles’ cuts critically from "worst to best." Individual critical opinions are important, but does “worst and best”
need to be a 2017 subjective view? It’s
also possible to compare the Beatles’ singles objectively, in the
context of public opinion and anchored in their time.
The usual method for doing so, of course, involves the
popularity charts published by the national trade magazines. Billboard
itself did a ranking based on its charts in 2014. This article extends that approach utilizing charts
from all three of the major magazines of the time--Billboard, Cash Box and Record World. More
explanation of the methodology can be found HERE.
A “best ever” list that spans a long period has to consider
performance in time context. On an
absolute basis, Barry Bonds hit the most home runs in a major league season: 73
in 2001 (Sammy Sosa finished second with 64). But was that the greatest
performance ever? Consider Babe Ruth’s
1920 season wherein he hit only 54, but second place was 19. The most home runs in a non-Babe Ruth season
in the modern era to that point was 24. His
performance was transcendent not just beyond what had been done, but what had even
been imagined.
And that’s my approach to normalizing for era: look for
performances that are transcendent in their time. In this case, develop a raw score for every
record, then divide it by the average score of all records entering the charts
plus or minus 26 weeks. Thus, an
“average” record is always 1, and the score of any record is multiples of the
average. A record 10 times as popular as
the average in one era should be comparable to a record 10 times the average in
another era, and that ratio is certainly a better comparison than raw score.
Moreover, extending that analysis to the three magazines incorporates three points of view. In some
cases there is variability approaching 25% in the way the different charts rate
a record.
So here are the results.
Sixty-eight Beatle records charted in any of the magazines, and there’s
not one “best ever” but two. Scoring
over 14 times the contemporary average—and near the highest scores ever--I
Want To Hold Your Hand and Hey Jude differ by less than 0.04%--one
more week on the charts at almost any level flips the result. Finishing third is She Loves You, also a
transcendent success.
It’s not remarkable that the first two hits were
among the most popular. It’s common for acts that the first hit is the biggest.
What is less common becomes apparent when all the records are plotted as
a function of release date.
Note that there are three performance bands—Transcendent,
Great, and Kind of Average (over half the canon is in that one). Surprisingly, Kind of Average includes icons
like Strawberry Fields Forever and Eleanor Rigby. What?
Well, say what you will about artistic value, that’s how they scored in
their day.
But within those three performance bands remarkably, there
is no time dependence: The Beatles
singles carried their initial popularity profile straight on to the end—at
least until the band broke up. The
singles of the later ‘70s scored as the afterthoughts they were. Still and all, the entire catalog taken
together scores 3.35 times the average competitor, which sets a pretty high
bar.
“Best of All Time” lists and discussions are deep and
remarkable because of the burnishing value of time and a knowledge of how life
turned out. The beauty is, there’s a
place for every opinion in the discussion.
But there’s also a place for evaluating metrics of how they were in
their time, and the comparison of numbers and opinions can be enlightening.
In the coming weeks I'll post a similar look at other important acts of the Rock Era.
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