| Name | The Beatles |
|---|---|
| Img alt | A square quartered into four head shots of young men with moptop haircuts. Clockwise from top left, one smiles jauntily towards his right, one faces forward excitedly with an opened mouth, one smiles with his left eye half closed as if blinking, and one looks up with his tongue stuck out slightly as if licking his lips. All four wear white shirts and dark coats. |
| Background | group_or_band |
| Origin | Liverpool, England |
| Genre | Rock, pop |
| Years active | – |
| Label | Parlophone, Capitol, Apple |
| Associated acts | The Quarrymen |
| Url | |
| Current members | John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr |
| Past members | Stuart Sutcliffe Pete Best |
The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, who are often recognized as the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed act in popular music. From 1962, 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 rock, 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.
Initially with a 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 creativity of producer George Martin, The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the United Kingdom 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, and then retreated to the recording studio until their break-up in 1970. Each then found success in an independent musical career. Lennon was murdered outside his home in New York City in 1980, and Harrison died of cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain active.
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. Four decades after their break-up, 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 the RIAA, they have sold more albums in the United States 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 .
Harrison, only 17 years old 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 nailed to a wall in their room; they too were deported. Lennon returned to Liverpool in mid-December, while Sutcliffe remained in Hamburg with his new German fiancée, 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", 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.
In Liverpool, the Merseybeat movement was gathering force. The band had its first recording session under Martin's direction at EMI 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 in Best's occasional absence. Martin still hired session drummer Andy White for one session. White played on the single "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."
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.
and Lennon on the set of the Swedish television show Drop-In, 30 October 1963]] 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.
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.
When 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, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, they were ardently received at every venue. Starr was in hospital after a tonsillectomy for the first half of the tour, and Jimmie 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".
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 from their extensive repertoire were 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 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. 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 American 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."
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, for the Evening Standard. 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."
Among Revolvers most experimental tracks was "Tomorrow Never Knows", for whose lyrics Lennon drew from Timothy Leary's . 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. It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by touring that included over 1,400 concert appearances internationally.
Freed from the burden of touring, the band's desire to experiment increased 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 }}
, "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. Peppers 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 (International TV special), 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 disorientated 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."
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 break-up, 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,
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General critical opinion eventually turned in favour of the White Album, and in 2003 Rolling Stone ranked it as the tenth greatest album of all time. Pitchfork describes it 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".
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, Harrison and Starr favoured Allen Klein, who had negotiated contracts for The Rolling Stones and other UK bands during the British Invasion. McCartney wanted 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." 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. 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 1969 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 transistorized 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 Academy Award for Best Original 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." McCartney filed a suit for the dissolution of The Beatles on 31 December 1970. Legal disputes continued long after the band's break-up, and the dissolution of the partnership did not take effect until 1975.
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. Commonly known as the Red Album and Blue 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. All This and World War II (1976) was an unorthodox nonfiction film that combined World War II newsreel footage with covers of Beatles' songs by two dozen major recording artists. 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". 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. In 1987, Harrison's Cloud Nine album included "When We Was Fab", a song about the Beatlemania era.
The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, their first year of eligibility. 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 Voormann, 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.
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... Naked, a reconceived version of the album with McCartney supervising production, was released to mixed reviews. One of the main differences with the original was the omission of the original string-arrangements. 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 The 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. McCartney headlined a charity concert on 4 April 2009 at Radio City Music Hall for the David Lynch Foundation with guest performers including Starr. , 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, Magical Mystery Tour, and the compilation Past Masters were issued.
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 , describes McCartney as "a natural melodist—a creator of tunes capable of existing apart from their harmony". His melody lines are characterized 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."
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 concrète 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 " roar" of McCartney's "Helter Skelter".
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 stabilizing influence: }} Harrison echoed Martin's description of his stabilizing 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."
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.
; 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 1965 stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul (The 1987 CD issues of these two albums were remixed by George Martin). For a limited time, a brief video documentary about the remastering was included on each stereo 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."
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. 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".
Category:Music from Liverpool Category:Musical groups established in 1960 Category:Musical groups disestablished in 1970 Category:Musical quartets Category:Parlophone artists Category:Paul McCartney Category:Ringo Starr Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Vee-Jay Records artists Category:World Music Awards winners
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