In a recent interview, legendary rock singer Van Morrison objected to the use of the phrase “pre-Beatles rock and roll” and even took a small jab at Rolling Stone Magazine for being the peddler of such inaccurate mythologizing of rock history.
“That’s a cliché,” Morrison told The New Yorker. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”
Perhaps Morrison was a little mad to be placed on RS’s “The Immortals” list at number 42 with U2 twenty spots ahead of him and The Beatles at number 1.