The Worst Musicians In the World

Recently the celebrated arranger and producer Quincy Jones, best known for his work with the late Michael Jackson of The Jackson 5ive, has been shooting his mouth off about all sorts of things, ranging from Marlon Brando’s fervent promiscuity to his own ongoing erotic ravenousness to the musicianship of various famous musicians. Its his having pronounced The Beatles nothing less than The Worst Musicians in the World that caught my own eye. I can understand how someone who for decades had worked with the world’s best jazz players might have thought the boys from Liverpool something less than red-hot on their respective instruments, but wonder if he ever heard The Rolling Stones, or, for that matter, The Caterpillars of Democracy. 

The late Lesley Gore

Of all nine members of the Beatles and Stones, I would submit that Paul McCartney, on bass, was by far the best player, especially after he started getting adventurous around the time of "Rain". As for the Caterpillars of Democracy, a sort of psychedelic band for which I auditioned late in the Summer of Love, they weren’t just ghastly players, but also avidly pretentious. They advised me at my audition that they weren’t just musicians, but Artists, capitalisation mine, and that we wouldn’t play any of their actual repertoire together that morning, for fear of my being unable to resist the temptation to steal it, and claim it as my own. We played The Standells’ Dirty Water, I ineptly, they even more ineptly, and The Sunshine of Your Love. When they pronounced me Not What [They] Were Looking For, I was actually relieved. I wanted (as I still want, all these decades later) to be the least talented member of the band, and to feel that I must strive constantly to up my game. In any event, Quincy Jones couldn’t both have been aware of these guys, whose real group name I have long since forgotten, and able to call The Beatles the worst musicians in the world.

While we’re here, I will point out that Q, as his friends call him, had already begun producing glorious pop records 20 years before he’d even heard of the late Michael Jackson. To this day, Lesley Gore’s "You Don’t Own Me" sounds like pure genius, with "Maybe I Know" not far behind. As you’re probably aware, Les, in the glamorous “flip” hairstyle so many of the hottest hotties at nearby Santa Monica High School favoured at the time, to their own considerable detriment, performed at the famous TAMI show, filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in the fall of 1964. There is photographic evidence that The Rolling Stones, who headlined the show, chatted there with James Brown, who somehow managed not to die laughing (or crying) at their being billed above him, but none of them and Ms. Gore getting chummy, possibly because she was a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey who’d based her career on perky pop songs that reinforced gender stereotypes, while they had branded themselves as uncouth louts who played the blues, often in leather waistcoats. 

Les, who turned out later to be a lesbian — albeit not the Dusty Springfield kind, with immoderate eyeliner and mascara — may not even have been in the building at the same time as they. The TAMI show, of which I somehow managed to learn only months later, was taped over the course of a few days. Donald Trump’s own version of Josef Goebbels, Stephen Miller, is an alumnus of Santa Monica High School, as I am too, but he was no more present than I at the TAMI show taping. His, of course, is the superior excuse. He wouldn’t be born for another 21 years. I suspect that Lesley might be perceived as having inspired England’s Helen Shapiro, with whom The Worst Musicians in the World, toured before Beatlemania. Though herself Jewish, and from Clapton (!), east London, Helen had a rather more flattering coiffure than Lesley’s.