Ian Anderson and the Beatles

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 moshkito wrote:

Hi,
I kinda think that the Beatles did for rock music, what the Jazz did for American music in the 50's and 60's.

It brought it to the mainstream.

The part that is missing, and probably should be mentioned, was how the Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones and others even GOT to the mainstream, which was Pirate Radio in that part of the world. 

Remember that even the Beatles, and Rolling Stones, are considered two of the worst BUSINESS DECISIONS ever made, even with folks at the BBC trashing it.

All in all, they all helped usher in the new era of the arts, and an era that should be remembered as the most valuable and important in the 20th century for its incredible array of diversity and explosion of creativity and development of instruments.

There probably wasn't even such a thing as 'rock music' before the mid-60s - The Beatles, along with the Stones, The Who, The Animals, The Kinks, etc helped to invent the medium out of a fusion of what had gone before. That was rock'n'roll (itself a fusion), R&B which emerged from blues, with elements of soul and jazz and - let us not forget - British "Music Hall".

You mustn't underestimate the power of the pirates - before that, young people tuned religiously into the very limited pop output of the BBC including TV shows, the ITV shows, and perhaps most important, Radio Luxembourg in the evenings despite the awful signal. When pirates came along in the wake of Beatlemania kids bought transistor radios just to listen to the all-day pirates, and from there they went to record stores in their droves, listened again there, and bought what they liked. It was the limited availability of broadcast rock and pop which made it so valuable and powerful to us back then.