The Beatles
The Beatles in 1964
Clockwise (from top left): John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr,
George Harrison
Background information
OriginLiverpool, England
GenresRock, pop
Years active1960 - 1970
Labels EMI, Parlophone, Capitol, Odeon, Apple, Vee-Jay, Polydor, Swan,
Tollie, UA
Associated actsThe Quarrymen, Plastic Ono Band
Website
www.TheBeatles.com
Members
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Former members
Stuart Sutcliffe
Pete Best
History of The Beatles
The Quarrymen
The Beatles in Hamburg
The Beatles at The Cavern Club
Beatlemania in the United Kingdom
American releases
The Beatles in the United States
1966
Studio years
Breakup
Reunions
Line-ups
Timeline
The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, who became
one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the
history of popular music. In their heyday, the group consisted of John Lennon
(rhythm guitar, vocals), Paul McCartney (bass guitar, vocals), George Harrison
(lead guitar, vocals) and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals). Rooted in skiffle and
1950s rock and roll, the group later worked in many genres ranging from folk
rock to psychedelic pop, often incorporating classical and other elements in
innovative ways. The nature of their enormous popularity, which first emerged as
the "Beatlemania" fad, transformed as their songwriting grew in sophistication.
The group came to be perceived as the embodiment of progressive ideals, seeing
their influence extend into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s.
With an early five-piece line-up of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Stuart
Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums), The Beatles built their reputation in
Liverpool and Hamburg clubs over a three-year period from 1960. Sutcliffe left
the group in 1961, and Best was replaced by Starr the following year. Moulded
into a professional outfit by music store owner Brian Epstein after he offered
to act as the group's manager, and with their musical potential enhanced by the
hands-on creativity of producer George Martin, The Beatles achieved UK
mainstream success in late 1962 with their first single, "Love Me Do". Gaining
international popularity over the course of the next year, they toured
extensively until 1966, then retreated to the recording studio until their
breakup in 1970. Each then found success in an independent musical career.
McCartney and Starr remain active; Lennon was shot and killed in 1980, and
Harrison died of cancer in 2001.
During their studio years, The Beatles produced what critics consider some of
their finest material including the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967), widely regarded as a masterpiece. Nearly four decades after their
breakup, The Beatles' music continues to be popular. The Beatles have had more
number one albums on the UK charts, and held down the top spot longer, than any
other musical act. According to RIAA certifications, they have sold more
albums in the US than any other artist. In 2008, Billboard magazine released
a list of the all-time top-selling Hot 100 artists to celebrate the US singles
chart's fiftieth anniversary, with The Beatles at number one. They have been
honoured with 7 Grammy Awards, and they have received 15 Ivor Novello Awards
from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. The Beatles
were collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's
100 most important and influential people.
History
Formation and early years (1957 - 1962)
Aged sixteen, singer and guitarist John Lennon formed the skiffle group The
Quarrymen with some Liverpool schoolfriends in March 1957. Fifteen-year-old
Paul McCartney joined as a guitarist after he and Lennon met that July. When
McCartney in turn invited George Harrison to watch the group the following
February, the fourteen-year-old joined as lead guitarist. By 1960,
Lennon's schoolfriends had left the group, he had begun studies at the Liverpool
College of Art and the three guitarists were playing rock and roll whenever they
could get a drummer. Joining on bass in January, Lennon's fellow student
Stuart Sutcliffe suggested changing the band name to "The Beetles" as a tribute
to Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and they became "The Beatals" for the first few
months of the year. After trying other names including "Johnny and the
Moondogs", "Long John and The Beetles" and "The Silver Beatles", the band
finally became "The Beatles" in August. The lack of a permanent drummer
posed a problem when the group's unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged a
resident band booking for them in Hamburg, Germany. Before the end of August
they auditioned and hired drummer Pete Best, and the five-piece band left
for Hamburg four days later, contracted to fairground showman Bruno Koschmider
for a 48-night residency. "Hamburg in those days did not have rock'n'roll music
clubs. It had strip clubs", says biographer Philip Norman.
Bruno had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They
had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of
people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play
all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district,
they would call it nonstop striptease.
Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool...It was an
accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a
Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he
arranged to send some bands over.
Harrison, only seventeen in August 1960, obtained permission to stay in Hamburg
by lying to the German authorities about his age. Initially placing The
Beatles at the Indra Club, Koschmider moved them to the Kaiserkeller in October
after the Indra was closed down due to noise complaints. When they violated
their contract by performing at the rival Top Ten Club, Koschmider reported the
underage Harrison to the authorities, leading to his deportation in
November. McCartney and Best were arrested for arson a week later when
they set fire to a condom hung on a nail in their room; they too were
deported. Lennon returned to Liverpool in mid-December, while Sutcliffe
remained in Hamburg with his new German fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr, for another
month. Kirchherr took the first professional photos of the group and cut
Sutcliffe's hair in the German "exi" (existentialist) style of the time, a look
later adopted by the other Beatles.
During the next two years, the group were resident for further periods in
Hamburg. They used Preludin both recreationally and to maintain their energy
through all-night performances. Sutcliffe decided to leave the band in early
1961 and resume his art studies in Germany, so McCartney took up
bass. German producer Bert Kaempfert contracted what was now a
four-piece to act as Tony Sheridan's backing band on a series of recordings.
Credited to "Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers", the single "My Bonnie",
recorded in June and released four months later, reached number 32 in the
Musikmarkt chart. The Beatles were also becoming more popular back home
in Liverpool. During one of the band's frequent appearances there at The Cavern
Club, they encountered Brian Epstein, a local record store owner and music
columnist. When the band appointed Epstein manager in January 1962,
Kaempfert agreed to release them from the German record contract. After Decca
Records rejected the band with the comment "Guitar groups are on the way out,
Mr. Epstein", producer George Martin signed the group to EMI's Parlophone
label. News of a tragedy greeted them on their return to Hamburg in
April. Meeting them at the airport, a stricken Kirchherr told them of
Sutcliffe's death from a brain haemorrhage.
Abbey Road Studios main entranceThe band had its first recording session under
Martin's direction at Abbey Road Studios in London in June 1962. Martin
complained to Epstein about Best's drumming and suggested the band use a session
drummer in the studio. Instead, Best was replaced by Ringo Starr. Starr, who
left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join The Beatles, had already performed
with them occasionally when Best was ill. Martin still hired session drummer
Andy White for one session, and White played on "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I
Love You". Released in October, "Love Me Do" was a top twenty UK hit, peaking at
number seventeen on the chart. After a November studio session that yielded
what would be their second single, "Please Please Me", they made their TV debut
with a live performance on the regional news programme People and Places.
The band concluded their last Hamburg stint in December 1962. By now it had
become the pattern that all four members contributed vocals, although Starr's
restricted range meant he sang lead only rarely. Lennon and McCartney had
established a songwriting partnership; as the band's success grew, their
celebrated collaboration limited Harrison's opportunities as lead vocalist.
Epstein, sensing The Beatles' commercial potential, encouraged the group to
adopt a professional attitude to performing. Lennon recalled the manager saying,
"Look, if you really want to get in these bigger places, you're going to have to
change—stop eating on stage, stop swearing, stop smoking." Lennon said, "We
used to dress how we liked, on and off stage. He'd tell us that jeans were not
particularly smart and could we possibly manage to wear proper trousers, but he
didn't want us suddenly looking square. He'd let us have our own sense of
individuality ... it was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on
stage."
Beatlemania and touring years (1963 - 1966)
UK popularity, Please Please Me and With The Beatles
McCartney, Harrison, Swedish pop singer Lill-Babs and Lennon on the set of the
Swedish television show Drop-In, 30 October 1963In the wake of the moderate
success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a more emphatic reception,
reaching number two in the UK singles chart after its January 1963 release.
Martin originally intended to record the band's debut LP live at The Cavern
Club. Finding it had "the acoustic ambience of an oil tank", he elected to
create a "live" album in one session at Abbey Road Studios. Ten songs were
recorded for Please Please Me, accompanied on the album by the four tracks
already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to
deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", an Allmusic
reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh,
precisely because of its intense origins." Lennon said little thought went
into composition at the time; he and McCartney were "just writing songs à la
Everly Brothers, Ã la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than
that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."
Released in March 1963, the album reached number one on the British chart. This
began a run during which eleven of The Beatles' twelve studio albums released in
the United Kingdom through 1970 hit number one. The band's third single, "From
Me to You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit. It began an
almost unbroken run of seventeen British number one singles for the band,
including all but one of those released over the next six years. On its release
in August, the band's fourth single, "She Loves You", achieved the fastest sales
of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million
copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million
copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978 when it was
topped by "Mull of Kintyre", performed by McCartney and his post-Beatles band
Wings. The popularity of the Beatles' music brought with it increasing press
attention. They responded with a cheeky, irreverent attitude that defied what
was expected of pop musicians and inspired even more interest.
The Beatles' drop-T logo The Beatles' iconic "drop-T" logo, based on an impromptu
sketch by instrument retailer and designer Ivor Arbiter, also made its debut in
1963. The logo was first used on the front of Starr's bass drum, which Epstein
and Starr purchased from Arbiter's London shop. The band toured the UK
three times in the first half of the year: a four-week tour that began in
February preceded three-week tours in March and May–June. As their popularity
spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold, dubbed "Beatlemania".
Although not billed as tour leaders, they overshadowed other acts including
Tommy Roe, Chris Montez and Roy Orbison, US artists who had established great
popularity in the UK. Performances everywhere, both on tour and at many
one-off shows across the UK, were greeted with riotous enthusiasm by screaming
fans. Police found it necessary to use high-pressure water hoses to control
the crowds, and there were debates in Parliament concerning the thousands of
police officers putting themselves at risk to protect the group. In late
October, a five-day tour of Sweden saw the band venture abroad for the first
time since the Hamburg chapter. Returning to the UK, they were greeted at
Heathrow Airport in heavy rain by thousands of fans in "a scene similar to a
shark-feeding frenzy", attended by fifty journalists and photographers and a BBC
Television camera crew. The next day, The Beatles began yet another UK tour,
scheduled for six weeks. By now, they were indisputably the headliners.[54]
Please Please Me was still topping the album chart. It maintained the position
for thirty weeks, only to be displaced by With The Beatles which itself held the
top spot for twenty-one weeks. Making much greater use of studio production
techniques than its "live" predecessor, the album was recorded between July and
October. With The Beatles is described by Allmusic as "a sequel of the highest
order—one that betters the original by developing its own tone and adding
depth." In a reversal of what had until then been standard practice, the
album was released in late November ahead of the impending single "I Want to
Hold Your Hand", with the song excluded in order to maximize the single's
sales. With The Beatles caught the attention of Times music critic William
Mann, who went as far as to suggest that Lennon and McCartney were "the
outstanding English composers of 1963". The newspaper published a series of
articles in which Mann offered detailed analyses of The Beatles' music, lending
it respectability. With The Beatles became the second album in UK chart
history to sell a million copies, a figure previously reached only by the 1958
South Pacific soundtrack.
The British Invasion
Beatles releases in the United States were initially delayed for nearly a year
when Capitol Records, EMI's American subsidiary, declined to issue either
"Please Please Me" or "From Me to You". Negotiations with independent US
labels led to the release of some singles, but issues with royalties and
derision of The Beatles' "moptop" hairstyle posed further obstacles.
Once Capitol did start to issue the material, rather than releasing the LPs in
their original configuration, they compiled distinct US albums from an
assortment of the band's recordings, and issued songs of their own choice as
singles. American chart success came suddenly after a news broadcast about
British Beatlemania triggered great demand, leading Capitol to rush-release "I
Want to Hold Your Hand" in December 1963. The band's US debut was already
scheduled to take place a few weeks later.
The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7 February 1964When
The Beatles left the United Kingdom on 7 February 1964, an estimated four
thousand fans gathered at Heathrow, waving and screaming as the aircraft took
off. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had sold 2.6 million copies in the US over
the previous two weeks, but the group were still nervous about how they would be
received. At New York's John F. Kennedy Airport they were greeted by another
vociferous crowd, estimated at about three thousand people. They gave their
first live US television performance two days later on The Ed Sullivan Show,
watched by approximately 74 million viewers—over 40 percent of the American
population. The next morning one newspaper wrote that The Beatles "could
not carry a tune across the Atlantic", but a day later their first US
concert saw Beatlemania erupt at Washington Coliseum. Back in New York the
following day, they met with another strong reception at Carnegie Hall. The band
appeared on the weekly Ed Sullivan Show a second time, before returning to the
UK on 22 February. During the week of 4 April, The Beatles held twelve
positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the top five.
That same week, a third American LP joined the two already in circulation; all
three reached the first or second spot on the US album chart. The band's
popularity generated unprecedented interest in British music, and a number of
other UK acts subsequently made their own American debuts, successfully touring
over the next three years in what was termed the British Invasion. The
Beatles' hairstyle, unusually long for the era and still mocked by many adults,
was widely adopted and became an emblem of the burgeoning youth culture.
The Beatles toured internationally in June. Staging thirty-two concerts over
nineteen days in Denmark, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, they were
ardently received at every venue. Starr was ill for the first half of
the tour, and Jimmy Nicol sat in on drums. In August they returned to the US,
with a thirty-concert tour of twenty-three cities. Generating intense
interest once again, the month-long tour attracted between ten and twenty
thousand fans to each thirty-minute performance in cities from San Francisco to
New York. However, their music could hardly be heard. On-stage amplification
at the time was modest compared to modern-day equipment, and the band's small
Vox amplifiers struggled to compete with the volume of sound generated by
screaming fans. Forced to accept that neither they nor their audiences could
hear the details of their performance, the band grew increasingly bored with the
routine of concert touring.
At the end of the August tour they were introduced to Bob Dylan in New York at
the instigation of journalist Al Aronowitz. Visiting the band in their hotel
suite, Dylan introduced them to cannabis. Music historian Jonathan Gould
points out the musical and cultural significance of this meeting, before which
the musicians' respective fanbases were "perceived as inhabiting two separate
subcultural worlds": Dylan's core audience of "college kids with artistic or
intellectual leanings, a dawning political and social idealism, and a mildly
bohemian style" contrasted with The Beatles' core audience of "veritable
'teenyboppers'kids in high school or grade school whose lives were totally
wrapped up in the commercialized popular culture of television, radio, pop
records, fan magazines, and teen fashion. They were seen as idolaters, not
idealists." Within six months of the meeting, "Lennon would be making records on
which he openly imitated Dylan's nasal drone, brittle strum, and introspective
vocal persona." Within a year, Dylan would "proceed, with the help of a
five-piece group and a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, to shake the monkey
of folk authenticity permanently off his back"; "the distinction between the
folk and rock audiences would have nearly evaporated"; and The Beatles' audience
would be "showing signs of growing up".
A Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul
Capitol Records' lack of interest throughout 1963 had not gone unnoticed, and a
competitor, United Artists Records, encouraged United Artists' film division to
offer The Beatles a motion picture contract in the hope that it would lead to a
record deal. Directed by Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night had the group's
involvement for six weeks in March–April 1964 as they played themselves in a
boisterous mock-documentary of the Beatles phenomenon. The film premiered in
London and New York in July and August, respectively, and was an international
success. The Observer's reviewer, Penelope Gilliatt, noted that "the way the
Beatles go on is just there, and that's it. In an age that is clogged with
self-explanation this makes them very welcome. It also makes them naturally
comic." According to Allmusic, the accompanying soundtrack album, A Hard
Day's Night, saw The Beatles "truly coming into their own as a band. All of the
disparate influences on their first two albums had coalesced into a bright,
joyous, original sound, filled with ringing guitars." That "ringing guitar"
sound was primarily the product of Harrison's 12-string electric Rickenbacker, a
prototype given him by the manufacturer, which made its debut on the record.
Harrison's ringing 12-string inspired Roger McGuinn, who obtained his own
Rickenbacker and used it to craft the trademark sound of The Byrds.[90]
Beatles for Sale, the band's fourth studio album, saw the emergence of a serious
conflict between commercialism and creativity. Recorded between August and
October 1964, the album had been intended to continue the format established by
A Hard Day's Night which, unlike the band's first two LPs, had contained no
cover versions. Acknowledging the challenge posed by constant international
touring to the band's songwriting efforts, Lennon admitted, "Material's becoming
a hell of a problem". Six covers were eventually included on the album.
Released in early December, its eight self-penned numbers nevertheless stood
out, demonstrating the growing maturity of the material produced by the
Lennon-McCartney partnership.
In April 1965, Lennon and Harrison's dentist spiked their coffee with LSD while
they were his guests for dinner. The two later deliberately experimented
with the drug, joined by Starr on one occasion. McCartney was reluctant to
try it, but eventually did so in 1966, and later became the first Beatle to
discuss it publicly. Controversy erupted in June 1965 when Queen Elizabeth
II appointed the four Beatles Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)
after Prime Minister Harold Wilson nominated them for the award. In
protest”the honour was at that time primarily bestowed upon military veterans
and civic leaders”some conservative MBE recipients returned their own
insignia.
The US trailer for Help! with (from the rear) Harrison, McCartney, Lennon and
(largely obscured) Starr The Beatles' second film, Help!, again directed by
Lester, was released in July. Described as "mainly a relentless spoof of
Bond", it inspired a mixed response among both reviewers and the band.
McCartney said, "Help! was great but it wasn't our film ”we were sort of guest
stars. It was fun, but basically, as an idea for a film, it was a bit
wrong." The soundtrack was dominated by Lennon, who was lead singer and
songwriter on the majority of songs, including the two singles performed on it:
"Help!" and "Ticket to Ride". The accompanying album, the group's fifth
studio LP, again contained a mix of original material and covers. Help! saw the
band making increased use of vocal overdubs and incorporating classical
instruments into their arrangements, notably the string quartet on the pop
ballad "Yesterday". Composed by McCartney, "Yesterday" would inspire the
most recorded cover versions of any song ever written. The LP's closing
track, "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", became the last cover the band would include on an
album. With the exception of Let It Be's brief rendition of the traditional
Liverpool folk song "Maggie Mae", all of their subsequent albums would contain
only self-penned material.
On 15 August, The Beatles' third US visit opened with the first major stadium
concert in history when they performed before a crowd of 55,600 at Shea Stadium,
New York. A further nine successful concerts followed in other US cities.
Towards the end of the tour the group were introduced to Elvis Presley, a
foundational musical influence on the band, who invited them to his home.
Presley and the band set up guitars in his living room, jammed together,
discussed the music business and exchanged anecdotes. September saw the
launch of an American Saturday morning cartoon series featuring the Beatles and
echoing A Hard Day's Night's slapstick antics. Original episodes appeared for
the next two years, and reruns aired through 1969.
Rubber Soul, released in early December, was hailed by critics as another major
step forward in the maturity and complexity of the band's music. Biographer
and music critic Ian MacDonald observes that with Rubber Soul, The Beatles
"recovered the sense of direction that had begun to elude them during the later
stages of work on Beatles for Sale". After Help!'s foray into the world of
classical music with flutes and strings, Rubber Soul's introduction of a sitar
on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" marked a further progression outside
the traditional boundaries of rock music. The album also saw Lennon and
McCartney's collaborative songwriting increasingly supplemented by distinct
compositions from each (though they continued to share official credit). Their
thematic reach was expanding as well, embracing more complex aspects of romance
and other concerns. As their lyrics grew more artful, fans began to study
them for deeper meaning. There was speculation that "Norwegian Wood" might refer
to cannabis. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine's "The 500 Greatest Albums of
All Time" ranked Rubber Soul at number five, and the album is today
described by Allmusic as "one of the classic folk rock records". According to
both Lennon and McCartney, however, it was "just another album". Recording
engineer Norman Smith saw clear signs of growing conflict within the group
during the Rubber Soul sessions; Smith later said that "the clash between John
and Paul was becoming obvious" and "as far as Paul was concerned, George could
do no right."
Controversy, studio years and breakup (1966-1970)
Events leading up to final tour
In June 1966, Yesterday and Today ”one of the compilation albums created by
Capitol Records for the US market” caused an uproar with its cover, which
portrayed the smiling Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw
meat and mutilated plastic dolls. A popular, though apocryphal, story was that
this was meant as a response to the way Capitol had "butchered" their
albums. Thousands of copies of the album had a new cover pasted over the
original; an uncensored copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction.
During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore,
The Beatles unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who
had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential
Palace. When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on
behalf of the group, as it had never been his policy to accept such official
invitations. The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed
to taking "no" for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they
escaped the country with difficulty.
Almost as soon as they returned home, they faced a fierce backlash from US
religious and social conservatives (as well as the Ku Klux Klan) over a comment
Lennon had made in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave.
Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that The Beatles
were "more popular than Jesus now". The comment went virtually
unnoticed in England, but when US teenage fan magazine Datebook printed it five
months later” on the eve of the group's final US tour ”it created a controversy in
the American South's "Bible belt". South Africa also banned airplay of
Beatles records, a prohibition that would last until 1971. Epstein publicly
criticised Datebook, saying they had taken Lennon's words out of context,
and at a press conference Lennon pointed out, "If I'd said television was more
popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it." Lennon said he had only been
referring to how other people saw The Beatles, but "if you want me to apologise,
if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."
Revolver and Sgt. Pepper
Rubber Soul had marked a major step forward; Revolver, released in August 1966 a
week before the band's final tour, marked another. Pitchfork identifies it
as "the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence" and "redefining what
was expected from popular music." Described by Gould as "woven with motifs
of circularity, reversal, and inversion", Revolver featured sophisticated
songwriting and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles ranging from
innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock. Abandoning
the group photograph that had become the norm, its cover”designed by Klaus
Voorman, a friend of the band since their Hamburg days”was a "stark, arty,
black-and-white collage that caricatured the Beatles in a pen-and-ink style
beholden to Aubrey Beardsley." The album was preceded by the single
"Paperback Writer", backed by "Rain". The Beatles shot short promo films for
both songs, described as "among the first true music videos", which aired
on Top of the Pops and The Ed Sullivan Show.
Among Revolver's most experimental tracks was "Tomorrow Never Knows", for whose
lyrics Lennon drew from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual
Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The song's creation involved eight tape
decks distributed about the recording studio building, each manned by an
engineer or band member, who randomly varied the movement of a tape loop while
Martin created a composite recording by sampling the incoming data.
McCartney's "Eleanor Rigby" made prominent use of a string octet; it has been
described as "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognizable style or genre of
song." Harrison was developing as a songwriter, and three of his
compositions earned a place on the record. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked
Revolver as the third greatest album of all time. On the US tour that
followed, The Beatles played none of its songs. The final show, at
Candlestick Park, San Francisco, on 29 August, was their last commercial
concert.[130] It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by touring that
included nearly 60 US concert appearances and over 1400 internationally.
Freed from the burden of touring, the band's creativity and desire to experiment
grew as they recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in
December 1966. Emerick recalled, "The Beatles insisted that everything on Sgt.
Pepper had to be different. We had microphones right down in the bells of brass
instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins. We used
giant primitive oscillators to vary the speed of instruments and vocals and we
had tapes chopped to pieces and stuck together upside down and the wrong way
round." Parts of "A Day in the Life" required a forty-piece orchestra.
Nearly seven hundred hours of studio time were devoted to the sessions. They
first yielded the non-album double A-side single "Strawberry Fields
Forever"/"Penny Lane" in February 1967; Sgt. Pepper followed in June. The
musical complexity of the records, created using only four-track recording
technology, astounded contemporary artists seeking to outdo The Beatles.
For Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, in the midst of a personal crisis and
struggling to complete the ambitious Smile, hearing "Strawberry Fields" was a
crushing blow and he soon abandoned all attempts to compete. Sgt.
Pepper met with great critical acclaim. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number
one among its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and it is widely regarded
as a masterpiece. Jonathan Gould describes it as
a rich, sustained, and overflowing work of collaborative genius whose bold
ambition and startling originality dramatically enlarged the possibilities and
raised the expectations of what the experience of listening to popular music
on record could be. On the basis of this perception, Sgt. Pepper became the
catalyst for an explosion of mass enthusiasm for album-formatted rock that
would revolutionize both the aesthetics and the economics of the record
business in ways that far outstripped the earlier pop explosions triggered by
the Elvis phenomenon of 1956 and the Beatlemania phenomenon of 1963.
Front cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "probably the most famous
album cover in popular musical history" Sgt. Pepper was the first major pop
album to include its complete lyrics, which were printed on the back cover.
Those lyrics were the subject of intense analysis; fans speculated, for
instance, that the "celebrated Mr K." in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"
might in fact be the surrealist fiction writer Franz Kafka. The American
literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier wrote an essay,
"Learning from the Beatles", in which he observed that his students were
"listening to the group's music with a degree of engagement that he, as a
teacher of literature, could only envy." Poirier identified what he termed
the "mixed allusiveness" of the material: "It's unwise ever to assume that
they're doing only one thing or expressing themselves in only one style ... one
kind of feeling about a subject isn't enough ... any single induced feeling must
often exist within the context of seemingly contradictory alternatives."
McCartney said at the time, "We write songs. We know what we mean by them. But
in a week someone else says something about it, and you can't deny it ... You
put your own meaning at your own level to our songs". Sgt. Pepper's
remarkably elaborate album cover also occasioned great interest and deep
study. The heavy moustaches worn by the band swiftly became a hallmark of
hippie style. Cultural historian Jonathan Harris describes their "brightly
coloured parodies of military uniforms" as a knowingly "anti-authoritarian and
anti-establishment" display.
On 25 June, the band performed their newest single, "All You Need Is Love", to
TV viewers worldwide on Our World, the first live global television link.
Appearing amid the Summer of Love, the song was adopted as a flower power
anthem. Two months later the group suffered a loss that threw their
career into turmoil. After being introduced to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, they
travelled to Bangor for his Transcendental Meditation retreat. During the
retreat, Epstein's assistant Peter Brown called to tell them Epstein had
died. The coroner ruled Epstein's death an accidental overdose, but it was
widely rumoured that a suicide note had been discovered among his
possessions. Epstein had been in a fragile emotional state, stressed by
both personal issues and the state of his working relationship with The
Beatles. He worried that the band might not renew his management contract,
due to expire in October, based on discontent with his supervision of business
matters. There were particular concerns over Seltaeb, the company that handled
Beatles merchandising rights in the United States. Epstein's death left the
group disoriented and fearful about the future. Lennon said later, "I didn't
have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music
and I was scared." He also looked back on Epstein's death as marking the
beginning of the end for the group: "I knew that we were in trouble then ... I
thought, We've fuckin' had it now."
Magical Mystery Tour, White Album and Yellow Submarine
Magical Mystery Tour, the soundtrack to a forthcoming Beatles television film,
appeared as a six-track double extended play disc (EP) in early December
1967. In the United States, the six songs were issued on an identically
titled LP that also included tracks from the band's recent singles. Allmusic
says of the US Magical Mystery Tour, "The psychedelic sound is very much in the
vein of Sgt. Pepper, and even spacier in parts (especially the sound collages of
'I Am the Walrus')", and calls its five songs culled from the band's 1967
singles "huge, glorious, and innovative". It set a new US record in its
first three weeks for highest initial sales of any Capitol LP, and it is the one
Capitol compilation later to be adopted in the band's official canon of studio
albums.[153] Aired on Boxing Day, the Magical Mystery Tour film, largely
directed by McCartney, brought The Beatles their first major negative UK press.
It was dismissed as "blatant rubbish" by the Daily Express, which described it
as "a great deal of raw footage showing a group of people getting on, getting
off, and riding on a bus". The Daily Mail called it "a colossal conceit",
while the Guardian labelled it "a kind of fantasy morality play about the
grossness and warmth and stupidity of the audience". It fared so dismally
that it was withheld from the US at the time. In January, the group filmed
a cameo for the animated movie Yellow Submarine, a fantasia featuring a cartoon
version of The Beatles. The group's only other involvement with the film was the
contribution of several unreleased studio recordings. Released in June 1968, it
was well received for its innovative visual style and humour in addition to its
music. It would be seven months, however, before the film's soundtrack album
appeared.
McCartney, Starr, Harrison and Lennon in the trailer for Yellow Submarine. Their
cameo was filmed 25 January 1968, three weeks before they left for India.In
the interim came The Beatles, a double LP popularly known as the White Album for
its virtually featureless cover. Creative inspiration for the album came from an
unexpected quarter when, with Epstein's guiding presence gone, the group turned
to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their guru. At his ashram in Rishikesh, India,
a three-month "Guide Course" became one of their most creative periods, yielding
a large number of songs including most of the thirty recorded for the
album. Starr left after ten days, likening it to Butlins, and McCartney
eventually grew bored with the procedure and departed a month later. For
Lennon and Harrison, creativity turned to questioning when Yanni Alexis Mardas,
the electronics technician dubbed Magic Alex, suggested that the Maharishi was
attempting to manipulate the group. After Mardas alleged that the Maharishi
had made sexual advances to women attendees, Lennon was persuaded and left
abruptly, taking the unconvinced Harrison and the remainder of the group's
entourage with him. In his anger Lennon wrote a pointed song called
"Maharishi", but later modified it to avoid a legal suit, resulting in "Sexy
Sadie". McCartney said, "We made a mistake. We thought there was more to
him than there was."
During recording sessions for the album, which stretched from late May to
mid-October 1968, relations among the band's members grew openly divisive. Starr
quit for a period, leaving McCartney to perform drums on several tracks.
Lennon's romantic preoccupation with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono contributed to
tension within the band and he lost interest in co-writing with McCartney.
Flouting the group's well-established understanding that they would not take
partners into the studio, Lennon insisted on bringing Ono, anyway disliked by
Harrison, to all of the sessions. Increasingly contemptuous of McCartney's
creative input, he began to identify the latter's compositions as "granny
music", dismissing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "granny shit". Recalling the
White Album sessions, Lennon gave a curiously foreshortened summing-up of the
band's history from that point on, saying, "It's like if you took each track off
it and made it all mine and all Paul's... just me and a backing group, Paul and
a backing group, and I enjoyed it. We broke up then." McCartney also
recalled that the sessions marked the start of the breakup, saying, "Up to that
point, the world was a problem, but we weren't" which had always been "the best
thing about The Beatles". Issued in November, the White Album was the
band's first Apple Records album release. The new label was a subsidiary of
Apple Corps, formed by the group on their return from India, fulfilling a plan
of Epstein's to create a tax-effective business structure. The record
attracted more than two million advance orders, selling nearly four million
copies in the US in little over a month, and its tracks dominated the playlists
of US radio stations. Despite its popularity, it did not receive flattering
reviews at the time. According to Jonathan Gould,
The critical response... ranged from mixed to flat. In marked contrast to Sgt.
Pepper, which had helped to establish an entire genre of literate rock
criticism, the White Album inspired no critical writing of any note. Even the
most sympathetic reviewers... clearly didn't know what to make of this
shapeless outpouring of songs. Newsweek's Hubert Saal, citing the high
proportion of parodies, accused the group of getting their tongues caught in
their cheeks.
General critical opinion eventually turned in favor of the White Album, and in
2003 Rolling Stone ranked it as the tenth greatest album of all time.
Pitchfork describes the album as "large and sprawling, overflowing with ideas
but also with indulgences, and filled with a hugely variable array of material
... its failings are as essential to its character as its triumphs."
Allmusic observes, "Clearly, the Beatles' two main songwriting forces were no
longer on the same page, but neither were George and Ringo"; yet "Lennon turns
in two of his best ballads", McCartney's songs are "stunning", Harrison is seen
to have become "a songwriter who deserved wider exposure" and Starr's
composition is "a delight".
By now the interest in Beatles lyrics was taking a serious turn. When Lennon's
song "Revolution" had been released as a single in August ahead of the White
Album, its messages seemed clear: "free your mind", and "count me out" of any
talk about destruction as a means to an end. In a year characterized by
student protests that stretched from Warsaw to Paris to Chicago, the response
from the radical left was scathing. However, the White Album version of the
song, "Revolution 1", added an extra word, "count me out ... in", implying a
change of heart since the single's release. The chronology was in fact
reversed—the ambivalent album version was recorded first—but some felt that The
Beatles were now saying that political violence might indeed be
justifiable.
The Yellow Submarine LP finally appeared in January 1969. It contained only four
previously unreleased songs, along with the title track (already issued on
Revolver), "All You Need Is Love" (already issued as a single and on the US
Magical Mystery Tour LP) and seven instrumental pieces composed by Martin.
Because of the paucity of new Beatles music, Allmusic suggests the album might
be "inessential" but for Harrison's "It's All Too Much", "the jewel of the new
songs... resplendent in swirling Mellotron, larger-than-life percussion, and
tidal waves of feedback guitar... a virtuoso excursion into otherwise hazy
psychedelia".
Abbey Road, Let It Be and breakup
Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, site of the Let It Be rooftop
concertAlthough Let It Be was the band's final album release, most of it was
recorded before Abbey Road. Initially titled Get Back, Let It Be originated from
an idea Martin attributes to McCartney: to prepare new material and "perform it
before a live audience for the very first time on record and on film. In other
words make a live album of new material, which no one had ever done
before." In the event, much of the album's content came from studio work,
many hours of which were captured on film by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
Martin said that rehearsals and recording for the project, which occupied much
of January 1969, were "not at all a happy ... experience. It was a time when
relations between the Beatles were at their lowest ebb." Aggravated by both
McCartney and Lennon, Harrison walked out for a week. He returned with
keyboardist Billy Preston, who participated in the last ten days of sessions and
was credited on the "Get Back" single”the only other musician to receive such
acknowledgment on an official Beatles recording. The band members had reached an
impasse on a concert location, rejecting among several concepts a boat at sea,
the Tunisian desert and the Colosseum. Ultimately, the final live performance by
The Beatles, accompanied by Preston, was filmed on the rooftop of the Apple
Corps building at 3 Savile Row, London, on 30 January 1969.
Engineer Glyn Johns worked for months assembling various iterations of a Get
Back album, while the band turned to other concerns. Conflict arose regarding
the appointment of a financial adviser, the need for which had become evident
without Epstein to manage business affairs. Lennon favoured Allen Klein, who had
negotiated contracts for The Rolling Stones and other UK bands during the
British Invasion. McCartney's choice was John Eastman, brother of Linda Eastman,
whom McCartney married on 12 March (eight days before Lennon and Ono wed).
Agreement could not be reached, so both were appointed, but further conflict
ensued and financial opportunities were lost.
Martin was surprised when McCartney contacted him and asked him to produce
another album, as the Get Back sessions had been "a miserable experience" and he
had "thought it was the end of the road for all of us... they were becoming
unpleasant people—to themselves as well as to other people."[176] Recording
sessions for Abbey Road began in late February. Lennon rejected Martin's
proposed format of "a continuously moving piece of music", and wanted his own
and McCartney's songs to occupy separate sides of the album.[176] The eventual
format, with individually composed songs on the first side and the second
largely comprising a medley, was McCartney's suggested compromise. On 4
July, while work on the album was in progress, the first solo single by a member
of The Beatles appeared: Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance", credited to the Plastic
Ono Band. The completion of the Abbey Road track "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"
on 20 August was the last time all four Beatles were together in the same
studio. Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on 20 September,
but agreed that no public announcement would be made until a number of legal
matters were resolved.
Released six days after Lennon's declaration, Abbey Road sold four million
copies within two months and topped the UK chart for eleven weeks. Its
second track, the ballad "Something", was also issued as a single—the first and
only song by Harrison to appear as a Beatles A side. Abbey Road received
mixed reviews, although the medley met with general acclaim. Allmusic
considers it "a fitting swan song for the group" containing "some of the
greatest harmonies to be heard on any rock record". MacDonald calls it
"erratic and often hollow": "Had it not been for McCartney's input as designer
of the Long Medley... Abbey Road would lack the semblance of unity and coherence
that makes it appear better than it is." Martin singled it out as his
personal favourite of all the band's albums; Lennon said it was "competent" but
had "no life in it", calling "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" "more of Paul's granny
music". Recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the replacement of
the studio's valve mixing console with a transistorised one produced a less
punchy sound, leaving the group frustrated at the thinner tone and lack of
impact.
For the still uncompleted Get Back album, the final new Beatles song, Harrison's
"I Me Mine", was recorded on 3 January 1970. Lennon, in Denmark at the time, did
not participate. To complete the album, now retitled Let It Be, in March
Klein gave the Get Back session tapes to American producer Phil Spector. Known
for his Wall of Sound approach, Spector had recently produced Lennon's solo
single "Instant Karma!" In addition to remixing the Get Back material, Spector
edited, spliced and overdubbed several of the recordings that had been intended
as "live". McCartney was unhappy with Spector's treatment of the material and
particularly dissatisfied with the producer's orchestration of "The Long and
Winding Road", which involved a choir and thirty-four-piece instrumental
ensemble. He unsuccessfully attempted to halt the release of Spector's
version. McCartney publicly announced his departure from the band on 10
April, a week before the release of his first, self-titled solo album.
Pre-release copies of McCartney's record included a press statement with a
self-written interview, explaining the end of his involvement with The Beatles
and his hopes for the future.
On 8 May, the Spector-produced Let It Be was released. The accompanying single,
"The Long and Winding Road", was the band's last; it was released in the United
States, but not Britain. The Let It Be documentary film followed later in the
month; at the Academy Award ceremony the next year, it would win the Oscar for
Best Original Song Score. The Sunday Telegraph called it "a very bad film
and a touching one ... about the breaking apart of this reassuring,
geometrically perfect, once apparently ageless family of siblings." More
than one reviewer commented that some of the Let It Be tracks sounded better in
the film than on the album. Observing that Let It Be is the "only Beatles
album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews", Allmusic describes it as "on
the whole underrated... McCartney in particular offers several gems: the
gospel-ish 'Let It Be', which has some of his best lyrics; 'Get Back', one of
his hardest rockers; and the melodic 'The Long and Winding Road', ruined by
Spector's heavy-handed overdubs."[190] McCartney filed a suit for the
dissolution of The Beatles on 31 December 1970. Legal disputes continued
long after the band's breakup, and the dissolution of the partnership did not
take effect until 1975.
Post-breakup (since 1970)
See also: Collaborations between ex-Beatles
1970s
Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr all released solo albums in 1970. Further
albums followed from each, sometimes with the involvement of one or more of the
others. Starr's Ringo (1973) was the only album to include compositions and
performances by all four, albeit on separate songs. With Starr's collaboration,
Harrison staged The Concert for Bangladesh in New York City in August 1971 with
sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Other than an unreleased jam session in 1974 (later
bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore in '74), Lennon and McCartney never recorded
together again.[194]
Two double-LP sets of The Beatles' greatest hits compiled by Allen Klein,
1962–1966 and 1967 - 1970, were released in 1973, at first under the Apple Records
imprint.[195] Commonly known as the Blue Album and Red Album respectively, each
earned a Multi-Platinum certification in the United States and a Platinum
certification in the United Kingdom. Between 1976 and 1982,
EMI/Capitol released a wave of Beatles compilation albums without input from the
band members. The only one to feature previously unreleased material was The
Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl (1977). The first officially issued concert
recordings by the group, it contained selections from two shows The Beatles
played during their 1964 and 1965 US tours. After the international release of
the original British albums on CD in 1987, EMI deleted this latter group of
compilations—including the Hollywood Bowl record—from its catalogue.
The Beatles' music and enduring fame were commercially exploited in various
other ways, outside the band members' creative control. The Broadway musical
Beatlemania, a nostalgia revue featuring four musicians performing as The
Beatles, opened in early 1977 and proved popular, spinning off five separate
touring productions. The Beatles tried and failed to block the 1977
release of Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962. The independently
issued album compiled recordings made during the group's Hamburg residency,
taped on a basic recording machine with one microphone. Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), a musical film starring the Bee Gees and Peter
Frampton, was a commercial failure and "artistic fiasco".[203] In 1979, the band
sued the producers of Beatlemania, settling for several million dollars in
damages. "People were just thinking The Beatles were like public domain", said
Harrison. "You can't just go around pilfering The Beatles' material."
1980s
Lennon was shot and killed on 8 December 1980, in New York City. In a personal
tribute Harrison wrote new lyrics for "All Those Years Ago", a song about his
time with The Beatles recorded the month before Lennon's death. With McCartney
and his wife, Linda, contributing backing vocals, and Starr on drums, the song
was overdubbed with the new lyrics and released as a single in May 1981.
McCartney's own tribute, "Here Today", appeared on his Tug of War album in April
1982.
The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, their
first year of eligibility.[205] Harrison and Starr attended the ceremony along
with Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and his two sons, Julian and Sean. McCartney
declined to attend, issuing a press release saying, "After 20 years, the Beatles
still have some business differences which I had hoped would have been settled
by now. Unfortunately, they haven't been, so I would feel like a complete
hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion." The
following year, EMI/Capitol settled a decade-long lawsuit by The Beatles
concerning royalties, clearing the way to commercially package previously
unreleased material.
1990s
Live at the BBC, the first official release of previously unissued Beatles
performances in 17 years, appeared in 1994. That same year McCartney, Harrison
and Starr reunited for the Anthology project, the culmination of work begun in
the late 1960s by Neil Aspinall. Initially The Beatles' road manager, and
then their personal assistant, Aspinall began to gather material for a
documentary after he became director of Apple Corps in 1968. The Long and
Winding Road, as Aspinall provisionally titled his Beatles history, was shelved,
but as executive producer for the Anthology project Aspinall was able to
complete his work. Documenting the history of The Beatles in the band's own
words, the project saw the release of many previously unissued Beatles
recordings; McCartney, Harrison and Starr also added new instrumental and vocal
parts to two demo songs recorded by Lennon in the late 1970s. During 1995
and 1996 the project yielded a five-part television series, an eight-volume
video set and three two-CD box sets. The two songs based on Lennon demos, "Free
as a Bird" and "Real Love", were each released as singles. The CD box sets
featured artwork by Klaus Voorman, creator of the Revolver album cover in 1966.
The releases were commercially successful and the television series was viewed
by an estimated 400 million people worldwide.
2000s
1, a compilation album of every Beatles number one British and American hit, was
released on 13 November 2000. It became the fastest-selling album of all time,
with 3.6 million sold in its first week and over 12 million in three weeks
worldwide. It was a number one chart hit in at least 28 countries, including the
UK and the US. As of April 2009, it had sold 31 million copies globally,
and is the highest selling album of the decade in the United States.[213][214]
Harrison died from lung cancer on 29 November 2001. McCartney and
Starr were among the musicians who performed at the Concert for George,
organized by Eric Clapton and Harrison's widow, Olivia. The tribute event took
place at the Royal Albert Hall on the first anniversary of Harrison's death. As
well as songs he composed for The Beatles and his own solo career, the concert
included a celebration of Indian classical music, Harrison's interest in which
had influenced the band. In 2003, Let It Be, a reconceived version
of the album with McCartney supervising production, was released to mixed
reviews. It was a top ten hit in both the UK and the US.
As a soundtrack for Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas Beatles stage revue Love,
George Martin and his son Giles remixed and blended 130 of the band's recordings
to create "a way of re-living the whole Beatles musical lifespan in a very
condensed period". The show premiered in June 2006, and the Love album was
released that November. Attending the show's first anniversary, McCartney and
Starr were interviewed on Larry King Live along with Ono and Olivia
Harrison. Also in 2007, reports circulated that McCartney was hoping to
complete "Now and Then", a third Lennon demo worked on during the Anthology
sessions. It would be credited as a "Lennon/McCartney composition" with the
addition of new verses, and feature a new drum track by Starr and archival
recordings of Harrison playing guitar.
Lawyers for The Beatles sued in March 2008 to prevent the distribution of
unreleased recordings purportedly made during Starr's first performance with the
group at Hamburg's Star-Club in 1962. In November, McCartney discussed his
hope that "Carnival of Light", a 14-minute experimental recording The Beatles
made at Abbey Road Studios in 1967, would receive an official release.[222]
McCartney headlined a charity concert on 4 April 2009 at Radio City Music Hall
for the David Lynch Foundation with guest performers including Starr. The
Beatles: Rock Band, a music video game in the style of the Rock Band series, was
released on 9 September 2009. On the same day, remastered versions of the
band's twelve original studio albums plus Magical Mystery Tour and the
compilation Past Masters were issued.
Musical style and evolution
See also: Lennon/McCartney
In Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever,
Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz sum up The Beatles' musical evolution:
In their initial incarnation as cheerful, wisecracking moptops, the Fab Four
revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock
and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts. Their initial impact
would have been enough to establish the Beatles as one of their era's most
influential cultural forces, but they didn't stop there. Although their
initial style was a highly original, irresistibly catchy synthesis of early
American rock and roll and R&B, the Beatles spent the rest of the 1960s
expanding rock's stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical
territory on each release. The band's increasingly sophisticated
experimentation encompassed a variety of genres, including folk-rock, country,
psychedelia, and baroque pop, without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal
of their early work.
In The Beatles as Musicians, Walter Everett points out Lennon and McCartney's
contrasting motivations and approaches to composition: "McCartney may be said to
have constantly developed—as a means to entertain ”a focused musical talent with
an ear for counterpoint and other aspects of craft in the demonstration of a
universally agreed-upon common language that he did much to enrich. Conversely,
Lennon's mature music is best appreciated as the daring product of a largely
unconscious, searching but undisciplined artistic sensibility."
Ian MacDonald, comparing the two composers in Revolution in the Head, describes
McCartney as "a natural melodist ”a creator of tunes capable of existing apart
from their harmony". His melody lines are characterised as primarily "vertical",
employing wide, consonant intervals which express his "extrovert energy and
optimism". Conversely, Lennon's "sedentary, ironic personality" is reflected in
a "horizontal" approach featuring minimal, dissonant intervals and repetitive
melodies which rely on their harmonic accompaniment for interest: "Basically a
realist, he instinctively kept his melodies close to the rhythms and cadences of
speech, colouring his lyrics with bluesy tone and harmony rather than creating
tunes that made striking shapes of their own." MacDonald praises Harrison's
lead guitar work for the role his "characterful lines and textural colourings"
play in supporting Lennon and McCartney's parts, and describes Starr as "the
father of modern pop/rock drumming... His faintly behind-the-beat style subtly
propelled The Beatles, his tunings brought the bottom end into recorded drum
sound, and his distinctly eccentric fills remain among the most memorable in pop
music."
Influences
The band's earliest influences include Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck
Berry, whose songs they covered more often than any other artist's in
performances throughout their career. During their co-residency with Little
Richard at the Star Club in Hamburg from April to May 1962, he advised them on
the proper technique for performing his songs. Of Presley, Lennon said,
"Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn't been Elvis,
there would not have been The Beatles". Other early influences include
Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison. The Beatles
continued to absorb influences long after their initial success, often finding
new musical and lyrical avenues by listening to their contemporaries, including
Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, The Byrds and The Beach Boys, whose 1966 album Pet
Sounds amazed and inspired McCartney.[234][235] Martin stated, "Without Pet
Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet
Sounds."
Genres
A Hoffner "violin" bass guitar and Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, models
played by McCartney and Harrison, respectively. The small Vox amplifier behind
them is the kind The Beatles used in concert.Originating as a skiffle
group, The Beatles soon embraced 1950s rock and roll. The band's
repertoire ultimately expanded to include a broad variety of pop music.
Reflecting the range of styles they explored, Lennon said of Beatles for Sale,
"You could call our new one a Beatles country-and-western LP", while
Allmusic credits the band, and Rubber Soul in particular, as a major influence
on the folk rock movement. Beginning with the use of a string quartet on
Help!'s "Yesterday", they also incorporated classical music elements. As
Jonathan Gould points out however, it was not "even remotely the first pop
record to make prominent use of strings—although it was the first Beatles
recording to do so ... it was rather that the more traditional sound of strings
allowed for a fresh appreciation of their talent as composers by listeners who
were otherwise allergic to the din of drums and electric guitars." The
group applied strings to various effect. Of "She's Leaving Home", for instance,
recorded for Sgt. Pepper, Gould writes that it "is cast in the mold of a
sentimental Victorian ballad, its words and music filled with the clichés of
musical melodrama."
The band's stylistic range expanded in another direction in 1966 with the B-side
to the "Paperback Writer" single: "Rain", described by Martin Strong in The
Great Rock Discography as "the first overtly psychedelic Beatles record".
Other psychedelic numbers followed, such as "Tomorrow Never Knows" (actually
recorded before "Rain"), "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds", and "I Am the Walrus". The influence of Indian classical music was
evident in songs such as Harrison's "Love You To" and "Within You Without You",
whose intent, writes Gould, was "to replicate the raga form in miniature".
Summing up the band's musical evolution, music historian and pianist Michael
Campbell identifies innovation as its most striking feature. He writes, "'A Day
in the Life' encapsulates the art and achievement of the Beatles as well as any
single track can. It highlights key features of their music: the sound
imagination, the persistence of tuneful melody, and the close coordination
between words and music. It represents a new category of song—more sophisticated
than pop, more accessible and down to earth than pop, and uniquely innovative.
There literally had never before been a song ”classical or vernacular—that had
blended so many disparate elements so imaginatively." Music theorist Bruce
Ellis Benson agrees: "Composers may be able to conceive new rhythms and chord
progressions, but these are usually improvisations upon current rhythms and
chord progressions. The Beatles ... give us a wonderful example of how such
far-ranging influences as Celtic music, rhythm and blues, and country and
western could be put together in a new way."
In The Songwriting Secrets of The Beatles, Dominic Pedler also emphasizes the
importance of the way they combined genres: "One of the greatest of The Beatles'
achievements was the songwriting juggling act they managed for most of their
career. Far from moving sequentially from one genre to another (as is sometimes
conveniently suggested) the group maintained in parallel their mastery of the
traditional, catchy chart hit while simultaneously forging rock and dabbling
with a wide range of peripheral influences from Country to vaudeville. One of
these threads was their take on folk music, which would form such essential
groundwork for their later collisions with Indian music and philosophy." As
the personal relationships between the band members grew increasingly strained,
their individual influences became more apparent. The minimalistic cover artwork
for the White Album contrasted with the complexity and diversity of its music,
which encompassed Lennon's "Revolution 9", whose musique concrate approach was
influenced by Yoko Ono; Starr's country song "Don't Pass Me By"; Harrison's rock
ballad "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; and the "proto-metal roar" of McCartney's
"Helter Skelter".
Contribution of George Martin
George Martin's close involvement with The Beatles in his role as producer made
him one of the leading candidates for the informal title of "fifth Beatle".[247]
He brought his classical musical training to bear in various ways. The
string quartet accompaniment to "Yesterday" was his idea ”the band members were
initially unenthusiastic about the concept, but the result was a revelation to
them. Gould also describes how, "as Lennon and McCartney became
progressively more ambitious in their songwriting, Martin began to function as
an informal music teacher to them". This, coupled with his willingness to
experiment in response to their suggestions—such as adding "something baroque"
to a particular recording ”facilitated their creative development. As well
as scoring orchestral arrangements for Beatles recordings, Martin often
performed, playing instruments including piano, organ and brass.
Looking back on the making of Sgt. Pepper, Martin said, "'Sergeant Pepper'
itself didn't appear until halfway through making the album. It was Paul's song,
just an ordinary rock number and not particularly brilliant as songs go ... Paul
said, 'Why don't we make the album as though the Pepper band really existed, as
though Sergeant Pepper was making the record? We'll dub in effects and things.'
I loved the idea, and from that moment on it was as though Pepper had a life of
its own." Recalling how strongly the song contrasted with Lennon's compositions,
Martin spoke too of his own stabilising influence:
Compared with Paul's songs, all of which seemed to keep in some sort of touch
with reality, John's had a psychedelic, almost mystical quality ... John's
imagery is one of the best things about his work—"tangerine trees", "marmalade
skies", "cellophane flowers" ... I always saw him as an aural Salvador DalÃ,
rather than some drug-ridden record artist. On the other hand, I would be
stupid to pretend that drugs didn't figure quite heavily in The Beatles' lives
at that time. At the same time they knew that I, in my schoolmasterly role,
didn't approve ... Not only was I not into it myself, I couldn't see the need
for it; and there's no doubt that, if I too had been on dope, Pepper would
never have been the album it was.
Harrison echoed Martin's description of his stabilising role: "I think we just
grew through those years together, him as the straight man and us as the
loonies; but he was always there for us to interpret our madness—we used to be
slightly avant-garde on certain days of the week, and he would be there as the
anchor person, to communicate that through the engineers and on to the
tape."
In the studio
See also: The Beatles' recording technology
The Beatles made innovative use of technology, treating the studio as an
instrument in itself. They urged experimentation by Martin and their recording
engineers, regularly demanding that something new be tried because "it might
just sound good". At the same time they constantly sought ways to put
chance occurrences to creative use. Accidental guitar feedback, a resonating
glass bottle, a tape loaded the wrong way round so that it played backwards—any
of these might be incorporated into their music. The Beatles' desire to
create new sounds on every new recording, combined with Martin's arranging
abilities and the studio expertise of EMI staff engineers such as Norman Smith,
Ken Townsend and Geoff Emerick, all contributed significantly to their records
from Rubber Soul and, especially, Revolver forward. Along with studio
tricks such as sound effects, unconventional microphone placements, tape loops,
double tracking and vari-speed recording, The Beatles augmented their songs with
instruments that were unconventional for rock music at the time. These included
string and brass ensembles as well as Indian instruments such as the sitar in
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and the swarmandel in "Strawberry Fields
Forever". They also used early electronic instruments such as the
Mellotron, with which McCartney supplied the flute voices on the "Strawberry
Fields" intro, and the clavioline, an electronic keyboard that created the
unusual oboe-like sound on "Baby, You're a Rich Man".
Legacy
See also: The Beatles' influence on popular culture
The Beatles' influence on popular culture was ”and remains ”immense. Former
Rolling Stone associate editor Robert Greenfield said, "People are still looking
at Picasso ... at artists who broke through the constraints of their time period
to come up with something that was unique and original. In the form that they
worked in, in the form of popular music, no one will ever be more revolutionary,
more creative and more distinctive than The Beatles were." From the 1920s,
the United States had dominated popular entertainment culture throughout much of
the world, via Hollywood movies, jazz, the music of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley
and, later, the rock and roll that first emerged in Memphis, Tennessee.[258]
Drawing on their rock and roll roots, The Beatles not only triggered the British
Invasion of the US, but themselves became a globally influential
phenomenon.
The Beatles' musical innovations, as well as their commercial success, inspired
musicians worldwide. A large number of artists have acknowledged The
Beatles as an influence or have had chart successes with covers of Beatles
songs. On radio, the arrival of The Beatles marked the beginning of a new
era; program directors like Rick Sklar of New York's WABC went as far as
forbidding DJs from playing any "pre-Beatles" music. The Beatles redefined
the album as something more than just a few hits padded out with "filler".
They were primary innovators of the music video. The Shea Stadium date with
which they opened their 1965 North American tour attracted what was then the
largest audience in concert history and is seen as a "landmark event in the
growth of the rock crowd." Emulation of their clothing and especially their
hairstyles, which became a mark of rebellion, had a global impact on
fashion.
More broadly, The Beatles changed the way people listened to popular music and
experienced its role in their lives. From what began as the Beatlemania
fad, the group grew to be perceived by their young fans across the
industrialized world as the representatives, even the embodiment, of ideals
associated with cultural transformation. As icons of the 1960s
counterculture, they became a catalyst for bohemianism and activism in various
social and political arenas, fueling such movements as women's liberation, gay
liberation and environmentalism.
Awards and recognition
See also: List of awards and nominations received by The Beatles
In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II appointed the four Beatles Members of the Order of
the British Empire (MBE). The Beatles film Let It Be (1970) won the 1971
Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. The Beatles have received 7
Grammy Awards[5] and 15 Ivor Novello Awards.[6] They have been awarded 6 Diamond
albums, as well as 24 Multi-Platinum albums, 39 Platinum albums and 45 Gold
albums in the United States, while in the UK they have 4
Multi-Platinum albums, 4 Platinum albums, 8 Gold albums and 1 Silver album.
The group were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2008,
Billboard magazine released a list of the all-time top-selling Hot 100 artists
to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary—The Beatles ranked
number one. In 2009, the Recording Industry Association of America certified
that The Beatles have sold more albums in the US than any other artist.[3] The
Beatles have had more number one albums, 15, on the UK charts and held down the
top spot longer, 174 weeks, than any other musical act.[2] The Beatles were
collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100
most influential people.
Discography
Main article: The Beatles discography
Further information: List of The Beatles songs, List of The Beatles' record
sales, and The Beatles bootlegs
Original UK LPs
Please Please Me (1963)
With The Beatles (1963)
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Beatles for Sale (1964)
Help! (1965)
Rubber Soul (1965)
Revolver (1966)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
The Beatles (aka White Album) (1968)
Yellow Submarine (1969)
Abbey Road (1969)
Let It Be (1970)
(For Magical Mystery Tour, see CD releases below.)
CD releases
1980s
In 1987, EMI and Apple Corps released all of The Beatles' studio albums on CD.
With this release, the band's catalogue was standardized throughout the world,
establishing a canon composed of the twelve original studio albums as issued in
the United Kingdom (listed above), as well as the US album version of Magical
Mystery Tour (1967), which had been released as a shorter double EP in the
UK.[267] All the remaining Beatles material from the singles and EPs which had
not been issued on the original studio albums was gathered on the two-volume
compilation Past Masters (1988).
2000s
The US album configurations from 1964 - 1965 were released as box sets in 2004 and
2006 (The Capitol Albums Volume 1 and Volume 2 respectively); these included
both stereo and mono versions based on the mixes that were prepared for vinyl at
the time of the music's original American release.
On 9 September 2009, The Beatles' entire back catalogue was reissued following
an extensive digital remastering process that lasted four years. Stereo
editions of all twelve original UK studio albums, along with Magical Mystery
Tour and Past Masters, were released on compact disc both individually and as a
box set. A second collection included all mono titles along with the original
stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul. For a limited time, a brief video
documentary about the remastering was included on each CD. In Mojo, Danny
Eccleston wrote, "Ever since The Beatles first emerged on CD in 1987, there have
been complaints about the sound". In support of the opinion that the original
vinyl had significant advantages over the early CDs in clarity and dynamism, he
suggested, "Compare 'Paperback Writer'/'Rain' on crackly 45, with its weedy Past
Masters CD version, and the case is closed." Prior to the release of the 2009
remasters, Abbey Road Studios invited Mojo reviewers to hear a sample of the
work, advising, "You're in for a shock." In his release-day review of the full
product, Eccleston reported that "brilliantly, that's still how it feels a month
later."
Digital music
The Beatles are among the few major artists whose recorded catalogue is not
available through online music services such as iTunes and Napster. Apple
Corps' dispute with Apple, Inc. (owners of iTunes) over the use of the name
"Apple" is partly responsible, although in November 2008 McCartney said the main
obstacle was that EMI "want something we're not prepared to give them." In
March 2009, The Guardian reported that "the prospect of an independent,
Beatles-specific digital music store" has been raised by Harrison's son, Dhani,
who said, "We're losing money every day... So what do you do? You have to have
your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with [Apple, Inc. CEO]
Steve Jobs... [He] says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we
disagree." On 30 October, Wired.com reported that an online service,
BlueBeat, was making available the entire Beatles catalogue, via both
purchasable downloads and free streaming. Neither EMI nor Apple Corps had
authorized the distribution, and within a week BlueBeat was legally barred
from handling the band's music. In December 2009, The Beatles' catalogue
was officially released in FLAC and MP3 format in a limited edition of 30,000
USB flash drives.
Song catalogue
In 1963 Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr agreed to assign their song
publishing rights to Northern Songs, a company created by music publisher Dick
James. Administered by his company Dick James Music, Northern Songs went
public in 1965 with Lennon and McCartney each holding 15% of the company's
shares and James and the company's chairman, Charles Silver, holding a
controlling 37.5%. After a failed attempt by Lennon and McCartney to buy the
company, James and Silver sold Northern Songs in 1969 to British TV company
Associated TeleVision (ATV), in which Lennon and McCartney received stock.[282]
Briefly owned by Australian business magnate Robert Holmes à Court, ATV Music
was sold in 1985 to Michael Jackson for a reported $47 million (trumping a joint
bid by McCartney and Yoko Ono), giving him control over the publishing rights to
more than 200 songs composed by Lennon and McCartney.
Jackson and Sony merged their music publishing businesses in 1995, becoming
joint owners of most of the Lennon-McCartney songs recorded by The Beatles,
although Lennon's estate and McCartney still receive their respective shares of
the royalties. Although the Jackson-Sony catalogue includes most of The Beatles'
greatest hits, some of their earliest songs were published by an EMI subsidiary,
Ardmore & Beechwood, before Lennon and McCartney signed with James. McCartney
acquired the publishing rights to "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" from
Ardmore in the 1980s.[284] Harrison and Starr allowed their songwriting
contracts with Northern Songs to lapse in 1968, signing with Apple Publishing
instead. Harrison created Harrisongs, which still owns the rights to his
post-1967 songs such as "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something", while
Starr's Startling Music holds the rights to his own post-1967 songs recorded by
The Beatles, "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".
