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How The Beatles Helped Bob Prechter Develop His Waves of Social Mood Theory
After college, Bob Prechter met Paul McCartney by chance in London and spoke with him briefly. The former rock-band drummer (Prechter not Macca, obviously) writes about going to a McCartney concert in Atlanta 34 years later in his current Elliott Wave Theorist:
On August 15, I went to see Paul McCartney’s benefit concert at Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Given the current position of the Elliott wave structure of social mood, I suspected this might be my last chance to see him live, because Paul is a positive-mood performer, and the long-running positive mood is on its last legs. On that basis, the remastered Beatles catalogue, released on September 9, will probably turn out to be perfectly timed. -Excerpted from The Elliott Wave Theorist, Sept. 15, 2009
What makes this concert particularly interesting is that it was the Beatles' music that first helped Prechter to make the connection between social mood and stock trends. Here's a Q&A that explains the connection.
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You were a musician back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This background has obviously been an asset to you. Actually it helped the whole thesis gel in your mind! What prompted recognition of a connection between the trend in the market and pop music?
Bob Prechter: Well, The Beatles’ Revolver album affected me viscerally. Although I have come to appreciate it since, I hated it when it came out. Sergeant Pepper was even worse. Besides two or three songs, where were the inventive melodies, harmonies, chord changes and joy that had made them stars? It was in thinking about that change years later that I realized that the melodic, energetic and rather innocent (at least in retrospect) music of 1958 to 1965, which included doo-wop, teen idols, girl groups, and particularly in the final two years, the “British Invasion,” stopped dominating the charts precisely at the end of Primary wave 5 in 1966. Quite abruptly, it nearly disappeared. Following the second peak in 1968, it was gone.
You connected what you experienced musically to the trend change on the stock chart?
Bob Prechter: Yes, and that’s what eventually triggered the realization that everything worked this way, all the time. Not just music. Not just in 1966.
Did The Beatles change the public or did the public change The Beatles?
Bob Prechter: Pop cultural heroes are made by the public, so the public mood determines who’s popular. The mood can also affect the creative direction of the heroes as well, so there are two effects.
You have maintained that a song dominated by major keys, harmony, melody and musicality is representative of a bull trend while one dominated by minor keys, starkness and noise characterize a bear market sound.
Bob Prechter: You can literally hear the difference between a bull and a bear market hit in the composition of the music.
On The Beatles, which was known to most people as “the white album” of 1968, for instance, Lennon sang “She’s coming down, yes she is,” and on his 1980 comeback album, Double Fantasy, he declared, “Hard times are over, over for a while.” Applied to the stock market, those are two pretty good calls.
Bob Prechter: Yes, but let’s not isolate a few lyrics to make our point. That’s a typical approach to cultural analysis, and it’s not scientific. Lennon wrote a lot of lyrics. But as a whole, your point is correct. His bull market lyrics stand in immense contrast to his bear market ones. What we need are objective statistics on pop music style and content and to see if the chart matches the stock market. I think it would demonstrate that mood and its expression through myriad outlets is an objective reality. It is difficult to prove because the social sciences are so primitive and data so scarce. Some day, people will start collecting the proper data. We may do it ourselves to prove the point.
But people shouldn’t require data to understand what you’re talking about if they experienced the changes firsthand. Do you find that they can relate to the message on some basic level?
Bob Prechter: Sure. Remember U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt’s embarrassment when he canceled the Beach Boys concert in Washington, D.C. in 1983 to keep out “undesirable elements”? Everyone laughed at him because they knew the Beach Boys don’t attract undesirable elements — they’re a bull market band. But no one could articulate that point; they just knew it was funny.