| The Beatles |
The Beatles in 1964
Top: John Lennon, Paul McCartney
Bottom: George Harrison, Ringo Starr |
| Background information |
| Origin |
Liverpool, England |
| Genres |
Rock, pop |
| Years active |
1960 (1960)–1970 (1970) |
| Labels |
Parlophone, Swan, Vee-Jay, Capitol, United Artists, Apple |
| Associated acts |
The Quarrymen, Plastic Ono Band |
| Website |
thebeatles.com |
| Members |
Principal
John Lennon (1960–69)
Paul McCartney (1960–70)
George Harrison (1960–70)
Ringo Starr (1962–70)
Other
Stuart Sutcliffe (1960–61)
Pete Best (1960–62) |
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960 and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. The group's best-known lineup 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 pop ballads to psychedelic rock, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. Their enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania"; as their songwriting grew in sophistication, by the late 1960s they came to be perceived by many fans and cultural observers as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the era's sociocultural revolutions.
As a five-piece line-up of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison on guitar and vocals, with Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums), the band built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg 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 act by manager Brian Epstein, their musical potential was enhanced by the creativity of producer George Martin. They gained popularity in the United Kingdom after their first single, "Love Me Do", became a modest hit in late 1962, and they acquired the nickname the "Fab Four" as Beatlemania grew in Britain over the following year. By early 1964 they had become international stars, leading the "British Invasion" of the United States pop market. The band toured extensively around the world until August 1966, when they performed their final commercial concert. From 1966 they produced what many critics consider to be some of their finest material, including the innovative and widely influential albums Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (1968) and Abbey Road (1969). After their break-up in 1970, the ex-Beatles each found success in individual musical careers. Lennon was murdered in 1980, and Harrison died of cancer in 2001. McCartney and Starr remain active.
The Beatles are the best-selling band or musical act in history, with estimated sales of over one billion units according to Guinness World Records. They have had more number-one albums on the UK charts and have held the top spot longer than any other musical act. According to the RIAA, as of 2012 they have sold 177 million units in the US, more than any other artist, and in 2008 they topped Billboard magazine's list of the all-time most successful Hot 100 artists. As of 2012, they hold the record for most number-one hits on the Hot 100 chart with 20. They have received 7 Grammy Awards from the American National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and 15 Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. They were collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most influential people.
[edit] Formation, Hamburg, and UK popularity (1957–1962)
In March 1957 John Lennon, then aged sixteen, formed a skiffle group with several friends from Quarry Bank school. They briefly called themselves the Blackjacks, before changing their name to The Quarrymen after discovering that a respected local group was already using the name. Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney joined as a guitarist shortly after he and Lennon met that July. In February 1958 McCartney invited his friend George Harrison to watch the group. The fourteen-year-old auditioned for Lennon, who was impressed by his playing but initially thought him too young for the band. After a month of persistence, Harrison joined as lead guitarist. By January 1959 Lennon's Quarry Bank friends had left the group, and he began studies at the Liverpool College of Art. The three guitarists, billing themselves at least three times as "Johnny and the Moondogs", were playing rock and roll whenever they could find a drummer. Lennon's art school friend Stu Sutcliffe, who had recently sold one of his paintings and purchased a bass guitar, joined in January 1960, and it was he who suggested changing the band's name to "Beatals" as a tribute to Buddy Holly and The Crickets. According to band historian Mark Lewisohn, they used the name through May, when they became "the Silver Beetles", before undertaking a brief tour of Scotland as the backing group for pop singer and fellow Liverpudlian Johnny Gentle. By early July they changed their name to "the Silver Beatles", and by the middle of August to "the Beatles".
Their lack of a full-time drummer posed a problem when the group's unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged a resident band booking for them in Hamburg, Germany, so before the middle of August they auditioned and hired Pete Best. The five-piece band left four days later, contracted to club owner Bruno Koschmider for what would be a 3½-month residency. Lewisohn writes: "They pulled into Hamburg at dusk on 17 August, the time when the red-light area comes to life ... flashing neon lights screamed out the various entertainment on offer, while scantily clad women sat unabashed in shop windows waiting for business opportunities".
Initially placing the group at the Indra Club, in October Koschmider moved them to the Kaiserkeller, after he closed the Indra due to noise complaints. When he learned they had been performing at The Top Ten Club, a rival venue and thus in breach of contract, Koschmider gave the band one month's termination notice, and reported the underage Harrison, who had obtained permission to stay in Hamburg by lying to the German authorities about his age, causing his deportation in late-November. A week later, Koschmider had McCartney and Best arrested for arson after they set fire to a tapestry on the wall in their room; they were also deported. Lennon returned to Liverpool in early December, while the newly engaged Sutcliffe remained in Hamburg through late-February, staying with his German fiancée Astrid Kirchherr. Kirchherr took the first semi-professional photos of the group, and she encouraged Sutcliffe to comb his hair forward in the pilzkopf or "mushroom head" style popular among university students in Germany and France at the time. In 1961, during their second Hamburg engagement, she cut his hair in the "exi", or existentialist style that was later adopted by the other Beatles. When he decided to leave the band in early 1961 and resume his art studies in Germany, McCartney took up the bass. Producer Bert Kaempfert contracted what was now a four-piece group through June 1962, and he used them as Tony Sheridan's backing band on a series of recordings. Credited to "Tony Sheridan & The Beat Brothers", the single "My Bonnie", recorded in June and released four months later, reached number 32 on the Musikmarkt chart, and was group's first worldwide release.
After completing their second Hamburg stint the group enjoyed increasing popularity back home in Liverpool, particularly in Merseyside, where the Merseybeat movement was gaining popularity. However, the band were also growing tired of the monotony of numerous appearances at the same clubs night after night. In November, during one of the band's frequent appearances at the Cavern Club, they encountered Brian Epstein, a local record store owner and music columnist. Epstein later recalled: "I immediately liked what I heard. They were fresh and they were honest, and they had what I thought was a sort of presence and ... star quality." Epstein courted the band over the next couple of months and was appointed manager in January 1962. He made efforts throughout the winter and spring to get them released from their contractual obligations to Bert Kaempfert Productions, and he negotiated for the band to provide one last recording session, at the end of May, during their next visit to Hamburg, to secure an early release from the contract. Tragedy greeted them upon their return there in April, when a distraught Kirchherr met them at the airport with news of Sutcliffe's death the previous day from a brain haemorrhage. After Decca Records rejected the band in early February with the comment "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein", George Martin signed the group to EMI's Parlophone label in May.
Abbey Road Studios main entrance
The Beatles' first recording session under Martin's direction took place at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London on 6 June 1962. He immediately complained to Epstein about Best's poor drumming and suggested they use a session drummer in his stead. The band, already contemplating his dismissal, replaced him in mid-August with Ringo Starr, who left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join them. A 4 September session at EMI yielded a recording of "Love Me Do" featuring Starr on drums, but a dissatisfied Martin hired drummer Andy White for the band's third session on 11 September, which produced recordings of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" and "P.S. I Love You". Initially, Martin selected the 4 September version of "Love Me Do" with Starr on drums for the band's first single, though subsequent re-pressings included the White version, with Starr on tambourine. Released in early October, "Love Me Do" was a top twenty UK hit, peaking at number seventeen on the Record Retailer chart. In mid-October, they made their television début with a live performance on the regional news programme People and Places, and a late-November studio session yielded their second single, "Please Please Me", after which Martin accurately predicted, "You've just made your first No.1."
In December 1962 the band concluded their fifth and final Hamburg stint. By 1963 it was agreed that all four members should contribute vocals to Beatle albums despite Starr's restricted vocal range, to "affirm his status as a full-fledged member". Lennon and McCartney had established a songwriting partnership, and as the band's success grew, their dominant collaboration limited Harrison's opportunities as a lead vocalist. Epstein, wanting to maximize their commercial potential, encouraged the group to adopt a professional attitude to performing. Lennon recalled him 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".
[edit] Please Please Me and With The Beatles
After the moderate success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a more emphatic reception. Released in January 1963, it reached number one on every national chart except Record Retailer, where it stalled at number two. Martin originally considered recording their debut LP live at the Cavern Club, but after deciding that the building's acoustics were inadequate he elected to simulate a "live" album with minimal production in "a single marathon session at Abbey Road". Ten songs were recorded for Please Please Me, accompanied by the four tracks already released on their two singles. Recalling how the band "rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine 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, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."
Their logo was based on an impromptu sketch by instrument retailer and designer Ivor Arbiter.
Released in March 1963, the album reached number one on the top four British charts, initiating a run during which eleven of their twelve studio albums released in the United Kingdom through 1970 reached number one. The band's third single, "From Me to You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit, starting an almost unbroken string of seventeen British number one singles for the band, including all but one of the eighteen they released over the next six years. Released 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 surpassed by "Mull of Kintyre", by McCartney's post-Beatles band, Wings. Their popularity brought increasing press attention, to which the band members responded with an irreverent and comical attitude that defied what was expected of pop musicians at the time, inspiring even more interest.
The band toured the UK three times in the first half of the year: a four-week stint that began in February, the band's first nationwide tour, preceded three-week tours in March and May–June. As their popularity spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold; they were greeted with riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans—a phenomenon dubbed "Beatlemania". Although not billed as tour leaders, they overshadowed American acts Tommy Roe and Chris Montez during the February engagements and assumed top billing "by audience demand", something no British act had previously accomplished while touring with artists from the US. A similar situation arose during the band's May–June tour with Roy Orbison.
McCartney, Harrison, Swedish pop singer
Lill-Babs and Lennon on the set of the Swedish television show
Drop-In, 30 October 1963
In late October the band began a five-day tour of Sweden, their first time abroad since the final Hamburg engagement of December 1962. Upon their return to the UK on the 31st, they were greeted in heavy rain at Heathrow Airport by "several hundred screaming fans", and fifty to a hundred journalists and photographers as well as representatives from the BBC, "the first of a hundred so-called 'airport receptions'". The next day, they began their fourth tour of Britain within nine months, this one scheduled for six weeks. As Beatlemania intensified, police found it necessary to use high-pressure water hoses to control the crowd before a concert in Plymouth in mid–November.
Please Please Me maintained the top position on the Record Retailer chart for thirty weeks, only to be displaced by their follow-up, With The Beatles, which EMI delayed the release of until sales of Please Please Me had subsided. With The Beatles was released in late-November to record advance orders of 270,000 copies, topping the half-million mark in one week. It held the top spot for twenty-one weeks with a chart life of 40 weeks. Recorded between July and October, the album made better use of studio production techniques than its "deliberately primitive" predecessor. Erlewine describes With The Beatles as "a sequel of the highest order—one that betters the original". In a reversal of then standard practice, the album was released 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 The Times' music critic William Mann, who suggested 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 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. In writing the sleeve notes for the album, the band's press officer Tony Barrow used the superlative "the fabulous foursome", which the media widely adopted as "the Fab Four".
The Beatles' releases in the United States were hindered for over a year by EMI's American subsidiary, Capitol Records, who initially declined to issue their music, including the first three singles. Concurrent negotiations with the independent US labels Vee Jay and Swan led to the release of the songs in 1963, but legal issues with royalties and publishing rights proved an obstacle to the successful marketing of the group in the US. Exercising complete control over format, Capitol began to issue the material in December 1963, compiling distinct US albums from the band's recordings and issuing songs of their choosing as singles. American chart success began after Epstein arranged for a $40,000 US marketing campaign and secured the support of disk jockey Carrol James, who first played the band's records in mid-December 1963, initiating their music's spread across US radio. This caused an increase in demand, leading Capitol to rush-release "I Want to Hold Your Hand" later that month. Released 26 December 1963, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold a million copies and was a number one hit in the US by mid-January, with the band's previously scheduled debut there just weeks away.
The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7 February 1964
The Beatles left the United Kingdom on 7 February 1964, with an estimated four thousand fans gathered at Heathrow, waving and screaming as the aircraft took off. At New York's John F. Kennedy Airport they were greeted by another uproarious crowd estimated at three thousand. They gave their first live US television performance two days later on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by approximately 73 million viewers in over 23 million households, or 34 percent of the American population. According to the Nielsen rating service writes Gould, it was "the largest audience that had ever been recorded for an American television program." The next morning critical consensus in the US was generally against the group, 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 during two shows at Carnegie Hall. The band then flew to Florida and appeared on the weekly Ed Sullivan Show a second time, before another 70 million viewers, before returning to the UK on 22 February.
[edit] A Hard Day's Night
Capitol Records' lack of interest throughout 1963 had not gone unnoticed, and a competitor, United Artists Records, encouraged their film division to offer the group a three motion picture deal, primarily for the commercial potential of the soundtracks. 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 mock-documentary. The film premiered in London and New York in July and August, respectively, and was an international success, with some critics drawing comparison with the Marx Brothers. According to Erlewine, the accompanying soundtrack album, A Hard Day's Night, saw them "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 and irresistible melodies." 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.
The Beatles held twelve positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart during the week of 4 April, including the top five. That same week, a third American LP joined the two already in circulation; two of the three reached the first spot on the Billboard album chart, the third peaked at number two. 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 mocked by many adults, was widely adopted and became an emblem of rebellion to the burgeoning youth culture.
McCartney, Harrison and Lennon perform on Dutch television in 1964
The Beatles toured internationally in June and July. Staging thirty-seven shows over twenty-seven days in Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Starr was briefly hospitalised after a tonsillectomy, and Jimmie Nicol sat in on drums for the first five dates. 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.
In August, journalist Al Aronowitz arranged for the group to meet Bob Dylan. Visiting the band in their New York hotel suite, Dylan introduced them to cannabis. Beatles biographer 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 audience of "college kids with artistic or intellectual leanings, a dawning political and social idealism, and a mildly bohemian style" contrasted with their fans, "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 writes Gould, "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 distinctions between the folk and rock audiences would have nearly evaporated [and the group's] audience ... [was] showing signs of growing up." In September they refused to play a show in Florida until the local promoter assured them that the audience would not be racially segregated.
[edit] Beatles for Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul
According to Gould, the band's fourth studio LP, Beatles for Sale, indicates an emerging conflict between the "intense commercial pressures" of global success, and the group's "creative aspirations". Recorded between August and October 1964, they had intended the album to continue the format established by A Hard Day's Night which, unlike the band's first two LPs, contained only original songs. However, having nearly exhausted their backlog of songs on the previous album, and the challenges posed by constant international touring to the band's songwriting efforts, Lennon admitted, "Material's becoming a hell of a problem", and as such six covers from their extensive repertoire were chosen to complete the album. Released in early December, its eight original compositions stood out, demonstrating a growing maturity in the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership.
In early 1965, while they were his guests for dinner, Lennon and Harrison's dentist secretly added LSD to their coffee. Lennon described the experience: "It was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. I was pretty stunned for a month or two." He and Harrison subsequently became regular users of the drug, joined by Starr on at least one occasion. McCartney was initially reluctant to try it, but eventually did so in the fall of 1966. He later became the first Beatle to discuss LSD publicly, declaring in a magazine interview that "it opened my eyes" and "made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society."
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.
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 wrote and sang lead on most of its songs, including the two singles: "Help!" and "Ticket to Ride". The accompanying album, the group's fifth studio LP, contained all original material save for two covers, including the LP's closing track, "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", which 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". Help! reflects the band's increased use of vocal overdubs and the incorporation of 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 band's third US tour opened with, "[p]erhaps the most famous of all Beatles concerts", when they performed before a world-record crowd of 55,600 at New York's Shea Stadium on 15 August 1965. A further nine successful concerts followed in other American cities. On this tour they were credited with being the first artists to use on stage or foldback monitors, at their Atlanta show. Towards the end of the tour they were granted an audience with Elvis Presley, a foundational musical influence on the band, who invited them to his home in Beverly Hills, where they discussed the music business and exchanged anecdotes.
Released in December 1965, Rubber Soul has been hailed by critics as a major step forward in the maturity and complexity of the band's music. Musicologist Ian MacDonald observes that with the album they "recovered the sense of direction that had begun to elude them during the later stages of work on Beatles for Sale". Their thematic reach was beginning to expand as they embraced more complex aspects of romance and philosophy. Biographers Peter Brown and Steven Gaines attribute the new musical direction to "the Beatles' now habitual use of marijuana", an assertion confirmed by the band—Lennon referred to it as "the pot album", and Starr said, "Grass was really influential in a lot of our changes, especially with the writers. And because they were writing different material, we were playing differently." After Help!'s foray into the world of classical music with flutes and strings, Harrison's introduction of a sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" marked a further progression outside the traditional boundaries of popular music. As their lyrics grew more artful, fans began to study them for deeper meaning. There was speculation that "Norwegian Wood" might refer to cannabis, a claim Lennon refuted: "I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair ... but in such a smokescreen way that you couldn't tell."
While many of Rubber Soul's more notable songs were the product of Lennon and McCartney's collaborative songwriting, it also featured distinct compositions from each, though they continued to share official credit. The song "In My Life", of which each later claimed lead authorship, is considered a highlight of the entire Lennon–McCartney catalog. Harrison called Rubber Soul his "favorite album" and Starr referred to it as "the departure record". McCartney said, "We'd had our cute period, and now it was time to expand." However, recording engineer Norman Smith later stated that the studio sessions revealed signs of growing conflict within the group—"the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious", he wrote, and "as far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right". In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Rubber Soul fifth among "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and Allmusic's Richie Unterberger describes it as "one of the classic folk-rock records."
In June 1966, Yesterday and Today—a compilation album created by Capitol Records for the US market—caused an uproar over its cover, which portrayed the grinning Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls. It has been suggested that this was meant as a satirical response to the way Capitol had "butchered" the US versions of their albums. Thousands of copies of the album had a new cover pasted over the original; an unpeeled "first-state" copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction. In England, meanwhile, Harrison met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train him on the instrument.
During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, they 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 band and they escaped the country with difficulty. Immediately afterward, they made their first visit to India.
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: "Christianity will go," Lennon said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." 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 with Christians in the American "Bible Belt". 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 claimed he was referring to how other people viewed their success, but when prompted by reporters he concluded by saying, "If you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."
The nature of their modest on-stage amplification meant their music could hardly be heard. Originally using the Vox AC30 amplifiers, the Beatles later received more powerful 100 watt amplifiers, specially developed by Vox for the band as they moved into larger stadiums in 1964, but these were still inadequate. The group's amplifiers struggled to compete with the volume of sound generated by screaming fans, and the band grew increasingly bored with the routine of performing live. Realizing that their shows were no longer about the music, they decided to put an end to concert touring.
[edit] Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Rubber Soul marked a major step forward; Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the band's final tour, marked another. Lewisohn identifies it as, "The vital plateau between their "touring years" and "studio years" ... the album which ... shows the Beatles at the peak of their creativity ... a masterpiece born out of a sudden artistic and creative freedom, and the remarkable maturation of [the band]". Described by Gould as "woven with motifs of circularity, reversal, and inversion", Revolver featured sophisticated songwriting, studio experimentation, and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles ranging from innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock. Abandoning the customary group photograph, its cover–design by Klaus Voormann "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 made short promotional films for both songs, which Harrison described as "the forerunner of videos." They aired on The Ed Sullivan Show and Top of the Pops in June 1966.
Among Revolver's experimental songs 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 track's creation involved eight tape decks distributed about the EMI building, each manned by an engineer or a Beatle, 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; Gould described it 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. During the US tour that followed its release however, the band performed none of its songs. As Chris Ingham explains, they were very much "studio creations ... and there was no way a four-piece rock 'n' roll group could do them justice, particularly through the desensitising wall of the fans' screams. 'Live Beatles' and 'Studio Beatles' had become entirely different beasts." The final show, at San Francisco's Candlestick Park 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 embraced an increasingly experimental approach as they recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in late-November 1966. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, the album's recording took over seven hundred hours. Emerick recalls the band's insistence "that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different ... [w]e had microphones right down in the bells of brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins ... [w]e 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 around." Parts of "A Day in the Life" featured a forty-piece orchestra. The sessions initially yielded the non-album double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" in February 1967; the LP Sgt. Pepper followed in June. The musical complexity of the record, created using relatively primitive four-track recording technology, astounded contemporary artists, and was met with wide critical acclaim. Gould writes,
The overwhelming consensus is that the Beatles had created a popular masterpiece: 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".
Sgt. Pepper was the first major pop/rock LP to include its complete lyrics. In late 1967 the album was the subject of a scholarly analysis by American literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier, who 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 ... [y]ou put your own meaning at your own level to our songs".
Sgt. Pepper's elaborate album cover also attracted interest and study. A collage designed by pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth depicted the group as the fictional band referred to in the album's title track and reprise, standing in front of a crowd of famous people. The heavy moustaches worn by the group reflected the growing influence of hippie style, while their clothing "spoofed the vogue in Britain for military fashions". In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number one on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
On 25 June the band performed their forthcoming single, "All You Need Is Love", to an estimated 350 million viewers during Our World, the first live global television link. Released a week later during 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. Having only been introduced to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the previous night in London, on 25 August they travelled to Bangor for his Transcendental Meditation retreat. Two days later, their manager's assistant Peter Brown phoned to inform them that Epstein had died. The coroner ruled the death an accidental carbitol overdose, though publicly it was widely rumoured a suicide. He had been in a fragile emotional state, stressed by personal issues and his working relationship with the band: worried they might not renew his management contract, due to expire in October, based on discontent with his supervision of business matters, particularly the Seltaeb fiasco. His death left the group disorientated and fearful about the future. Lennon recalled: "We collapsed. I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music and I was scared. I thought, we've had it now."
[edit] Magical Mystery Tour, White Album and Yellow Submarine
The soundtrack to a Beatles television film, Magical Mystery Tour was released in the UK 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 five tracks from the band's recent singles. Unterberger 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". In its first three weeks, it set a record for the highest initial sales of any Capitol LP, and is the only Capitol compilation later to be adopted in the band's official canon of studio albums. First aired on Boxing Day, the Magical Mystery Tour film brought the group their first major negative UK press. It was dismissed as "blatant rubbish" by the Daily Express, and 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". Gould describes it as "a great deal of raw footage showing a group of people getting on, getting off, and riding on a bus". Although TV viewership was respectable, broad critical consensus in the UK caused US television networks to lose interest in broadcasting it.
In January the group filmed a cameo for the animated movie Yellow Submarine, which featured a cartoon version of the band and a soundtrack with eleven of the group's songs, including four unreleased studio recordings which made their debut in the film. Released in June 1968, it was well received by many critics for its music, humour, and innovative visual style. A soundtrack album followed seven months later.
In the interim came The Beatles, a double LP commonly known as the White Album due to its virtually featureless cover. Without Epstein's guiding presence, the group briefly turned to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their guru. At his ashram in Rishikesh, India, a "Guide Course" became one of their most creative periods, yielding numerous songs including a majority of the thirty included on the album. However, Starr left after only ten days, likening it to Butlins, and McCartney eventually grew bored and departed a month later. For Lennon and Harrison, creativity turned to questioning when an electronics technician known as Magic Alex suggested that the Maharishi was attempting to manipulate them. When he alleged that the Yogi had made sexual advances to women attendees, a persuaded Lennon left abruptly, bringing an unconvinced Harrison and the remainder of the group's entourage with him, just two months into the three-month course. In anger Lennon wrote a scathing song entitled "Maharishi", renamed "Sexy Sadie" to avoid potential legal issues. McCartney said, "We made a mistake. We thought there was more to him than there was."
The album's recording spanned nearly six months, from late May to mid-October 1968, during which time relations within the band grew openly divisive. Starr quit for a period, and Lennon's romantic preoccupation with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono contributed tension, as he lost interest in collaborating with McCartney, and insisted on bringing Ono to the sessions, breaching the group's well-established understanding that girlfriends were not allowed in the studio. He was openly contemptuous of McCartney's contribution "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", identifying it as "granny music shit." Describing the White Album, Lennon said, "Every track is an individual track; there isn't any Beatle music on it. [It's] John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band." McCartney recalled, "it was a very good album ... but it wasn't a pleasant one to make." Martin argued that a condensed single album would have been "fantastically good".
Issued in November, the White Album "sold faster than any of their previous records", and was the band's first release on their new label Apple Records, though EMI continued to own their recordings. The label was a subsidiary of Apple Corps, formed as part of Epstein's plan 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 five weeks, its tracks dominating the playlists of American radio stations. Despite its popularity, it did not receive flattering reviews at the time; according to Gould:
The Beatles, known as the
White Album for its minimalist cover, conceived by pop artist
Richard Hamilton "in direct contrast to
Sgt. Pepper, while also suggesting a "clean slate."
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 favour of the White Album, and in 2003 Rolling Stone ranked it as the tenth greatest album of all time. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson 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." Erlewine comments, "The [band's] 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 had become "a songwriter who deserved wider exposure" and Starr's composition was "a delight".
The Yellow Submarine LP, issued in January 1969, contained only four previously unreleased Beatles songs, along with the title track, "All You Need Is Love", and seven instrumental pieces composed by Martin. Because of the paucity of new Beatles music, Allmusic's Unterberger and Bruce Eder suggest 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".
[edit] Abbey Road, Let It Be and break-up
Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, site of the
Let It Be rooftop concert
Although Let It Be was the band's final album release, most of the material on it was recorded before Abbey Road. The project's impetus came from an idea Martin attributes to McCartney, who suggested they "record an album of new material and rehearse it, then perform it before a live audience for the very first time – on record and on film." Originally intended for a one-hour television programme called "Beatles at Work", much of the album's content came from the extensive studio rehearsals filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Uncharacteristically, work began at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969, not EMI or Apple. Martin said the project, was "not at all a happy recording experience. It was a time when relations between the Beatles were at their lowest". Lennon described the largely impromptu sessions as, "hell ... the most miserable ... on Earth", and Harrison, "the low of all-time". Aggravated by both McCartney and Lennon, Harrison walked out for five days. Upon returning, he threatened to leave the band unless they "abandon all talk of live performance" and instead focus on finishing a new album, initially titled Get Back, using songs recorded for the TV special. He also demanded they cease work at Twickenham and instead commence at a newly-finished Apple Studios, the band agreed, and at this point the idea came about to salvage the footage shot for the TV production for use in a feature film.
In an effort to alleviate tensions within the band and improve the quality of their live sound, Harrison invited keyboardist Billy Preston to participate in the last nine days of sessions, and he received "label billing" on the "Get Back" single—the only musician ever to receive that acknowledgment on an official Beatles' release. At the conclusion of the rehearsals, the band could not agree on a location to film a concert, rejecting several ideas, including; a boat at sea, a lunatic asylum, the Tunisian desert, and the Colosseum. Ultimately, what would be their final live performance was filmed on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, London, on 30 January 1969. Five weeks later, engineer Glyn Johns, whom Lewisohn describes as Get Back's "uncredited producer" began work assembling an album, having been given "free rein" while the band "all but washed their hands of the entire project."
Conflict arose regarding the appointment of a financial adviser, when Lennon, Harrison and Starr favoured Allen Klein, who had managed The Rolling Stones and Sam Cooke, while McCartney wanted John Eastman, brother of his soon to be wife Linda Eastman. Agreement could not be reached, so both were temporarily appointed, but further conflict ensued and important financial opportunities were lost. On 8 May, Klein was appointed manager of the band by three signatures.
Martin said he was surprised when McCartney asked him to produce another album, as the Get Back sessions had been "a miserable experience" and he "thought it was the end of the road", nevertheless, recording sessions for Abbey Road began in July. Lennon rejected Martin's proposed format of a "continuously moving piece of music", and wanted his 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 consisting largely of a medley, was McCartney's suggested compromise. The completion and mixing of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" on 20 August 1969 was the last occasion on which, "All four Beatles ... were together inside the recording studio from where they had changed the face of popular music." Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on 20 September, but agreed to withhold a public announcement to avoid undermining sales of the forthcoming album.
Released six days after Lennon's declaration, Abbey Road sold four million copies within three months and topped the UK charts for a total of seventeen weeks. Its second track, the ballad "Something", was issued as a single—the only Harrison composition ever to appear as a Beatles A-side. Abbey Road received mixed reviews, although the medley met with general acclaim. Unterberger 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", despite the "semblance of unity and coherence" offered by the medley. 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". Recording engineer Emerick noted that the replacement of the studio's valve mixing console with a transistorized one yielded a less punchy sound, leaving the group frustrated at the thinner tone and lack of impact and contributing to its "kinder, gentler" feel relative to their previous albums.
For the still unfinished Get Back album, one last song, Harrison's "I Me Mine", was recorded on 3 January 1970. Lennon, in Denmark at the time, did not participate. In March, rejecting the work Johns had done on the project, now retitled Let It Be, Klein gave the session tapes to American producer Phil Spector, who had recently produced Lennon's solo single "Instant Karma!". McCartney was unhappy with the producer's treatment of the material and particularly dissatisfied with the lavish orchestration on "The Long and Winding Road", which included a fourteen-voice choir and a thirty-six-piece instrumental ensemble. McCartney's demands that the alterations to the song be reverted went ignored, and he publicly announced his departure from the band nine days later on 10 April 1970.
On 8 May the Spector-produced Let It Be was released. The LP and its accompanying single, "The Long and Winding Road", were the band's last. The Let It Be documentary film followed later that month, and would win the 1970 Academy Award for the Best Original Song Score. Film critic Penelope Gilliatt calls it, "a very bad film and a touching one ... about the breaking apart of this reassuring, geometrically perfect, once apparently ageless family of siblings." It was the opinion of several reviewers that some of the performances in the film sounded better than their equivalent album tracks. According to Unterberger, Let It Be is the "only Beatles album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews", though he describes it as "on the whole underrated", praising in particular the McCartney contributions "Let It Be", "Get Back", and "The Long and Winding Road", calling "Two of Us" a "highlight" and adding that "there are some good moments of straight hard rock in "I've Got a Feeling" and "Dig a Pony." McCartney filed suit for the dissolution of the band on 31 December 1970, and the partnership legally ended on 9 January 1975.
Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr all released albums in 1970, beginning solo careers for each that sometimes involved one or more of the others. Starr's Ringo (1973) was the only album to include compositions and performances by all four ex-Beatles, albeit on separate songs. With Starr's collaboration, Harrison staged The Concert for Bangladesh in New York City in August 1971. 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.[239]
Two double-LP sets of the band's greatest hits, compiled by 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 compilation albums without input from the ex-Beatles, starting with the double-disc compilation Rock 'n' Roll Music. 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 they played during their 1964 and 1965 US tours. The band unsuccessfully attempted 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 using only one microphone.
In April 1974, the musical John, Paul, George, Ringo...& Bert, written by Willy Russell, and featuring singer Barbara Dickson opened in London. It included, with permission from Northern Songs, eleven Lennon-McCartney and one Harrison composition, "Here Comes the Sun". Displeased with the production's use of his song, Harrison later withdrew his permission to use it. The Broadway musical Beatlemania, a nostalgia revue, opened in early 1977 and proved popular, spinning off five separate touring productions. In 1979, the band sued the producers, 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." 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 December 1980 Lennon was murdered. In a personal tribute, Harrison re-wrote a new but yet to be issued song "All Those Years Ago" in his honour. With new lyrics, McCartney and his wife Linda contributing backing vocals, and Starr on drums, the song was 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 inspired by the Beatles era.
When the band's studio albums were released on CD by EMI and Apple Corps in 1987, their catalogue was standardized throughout the world, establishing a canon of the twelve original studio LPs as issued in the United Kingdom, as well as the US LP version of Magical Mystery Tour (1967), which had been released as a shorter double EP in the UK. EMI also deleted all but the Red and Blue compilations from its catalogue. The remaining material from singles and EPs not issued on these albums was gathered on the two-volume compilation Past Masters (1988).
The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, their first year of eligibility.[253] Harrison and Starr attended the ceremony with Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and his two sons, Julian and Sean. McCartney declined to attend, citing unresolved "business differences" that would make him "feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion." The following year, EMI/Capitol settled a decade-long lawsuit filed by the band over royalties, clearing the way to commercially package previously unreleased material.
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 collaborated on the Anthology project, the culmination of work begun in 1970 by Apple Corps director Neil Aspinall. Their former road manager and personal assistant, Aspinall had started then to gather material for a documentary, originally called The Long and Winding Road. Documenting their history in the band's own words, the Anthology 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, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love"; both were released as new Beatles singles.
During 1995 and 1996 the project yielded a five-part television series, an eight-volume video set and three two-CD box sets featuring artwork by Klaus Voormann. The releases were commercially successful and the television series was viewed by an estimated 400 million people worldwide. In 1999, to coincide with the re-release of the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, a new soundtrack compilation CD called Yellow Submarine Songtrack was issued.
1, a compilation album of every UK and US number one Beatles 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, 13 million within a month, and it was a number one in 28 countries. As of April 2009 it had sold 31 million copies globally,[265] and was the best selling album of the decade in the United States.
Harrison died from metastatic 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 group and his own solo career, the concert included a celebration of Indian classical music, which had influenced the band through Harrison's interest.
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 Spector-produced version was the omission of the original string arrangements. It was a top-ten hit in both the UK and the US. The US album configurations from 1964 to 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.
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 what Martin called "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. In 2008 McCartney discussed his hope that "Carnival of Light", a 14-minute experimental recording made at Abbey Road Studios in 1967, would receive an official release.
The Beatles were among the few major artists whose recorded catalogue was not available through online music services such as iTunes or Napster during the first decade of the 2000s. Residual disagreement stemming from Apple Corps' dispute with Apple, Inc. (owners and creators of iTunes) over the use of the name "Apple" was partly responsible, although in November 2008, McCartney stated that the main obstacle was that EMI "want something we're not prepared to give them."
On 9 September 2009, the band's 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 the compilation Past Masters, were released on compact disc both individually and as a box set. A second collection, The Beatles in Mono, included all mono titles along with the original 1965 stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul (the 1987 CD issues of these two albums had been remixed by George Martin). For a limited time, a brief video documentary about the remastering was included on each stereo CD. The Beatles: Rock Band, a music video game in the Rock Band series, was also released on this day.
Mojo's Danny Eccleston writes, "Ever since the Beatles first emerged on CD in 1987, there have been complaints about the sound." He singles out "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" as examples of a songs which had superior clarity and dynamism on their original 45 RPM vinyl release. He praises the remastered sound quality, particularly its effects on the group's singing: "[T]he remastered vocals are purer, more natural-sounding and give the illusion of sitting slightly higher in the mix."
In December 2009, The Beatles' catalogue was officially released in FLAC and MP3 format in a limited edition of 30,000 USB flash drives. On 16 November 2010, the official canon of thirteen studio albums, Past Masters and the Red and Blue greatest-hits albums were made available on iTunes.
In Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever, Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz describe the band's 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 describes 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 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 Beatles' earliest influences include Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. 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, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers. 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 Lovin' Spoonful, The Byrds and The Beach Boys, whose 1966 album Pet Sounds amazed and inspired McCartney. Martin stated, "Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened ... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds". Ravi Shankar, with whom Harrison studied for six weeks in India in late 1966, had a significant effect on his musical development during the band's later years.
Originating as a skiffle group, they quickly embraced 1950s rock and roll, and their 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 Gould credits Rubber Soul as "the instrument by which legions of folk-music enthusiasts were coaxed into the camp of pop."
The 1965 song "Yesterday" made prominent use of a string quartet; and while it was not the first pop record to employ strings, it was the group's first incorporation of classical music elements in their recordings. They continued to experiment with string arrangements to various effect, as with Sgt. Pepper's "She's Leaving Home"; Gould writes, "[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 as "the first overtly psychedelic Beatles record". Other psychedelic numbers followed, such as "Tomorrow Never Knows" (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 Harrison's songs, "The Inner Light", "Love You To" and "Within You Without You"; Gould describes the latter two as attempts "to replicate the raga form in miniature".
Describing the band's creative 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 ... and uniquely innovative. There literally had never before been a song—classical or vernacular—that had blended so many disparate elements so imaginatively." Philosophy professor Bruce Ellis Benson agrees: "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."
Author Dominic Pedler describes the way they crossed genres: "One of [their] greatest ... 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 tastes 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 "proto-metal roar" of McCartney's "Helter Skelter".
George Martin's close involvement in his role as producer made him one of the leading candidates for the informal title of the "fifth Beatle". He applied his classical musical training in various ways, and functioned as "an informal music teacher" to the progressing songwriters. Martin suggested to a sceptical McCartney that the arrangement of "Yesterday" should feature a string quartet accompaniment; according to MacDonald, his contribution was significant for its "disclosure to them of a hitherto unsuspected world of classical instrumental colour." The Beatles' creative development was also facilitated by Martin's willingness to experiment in response to their suggestions, such as adding "something baroque" to a particular recording. As well as scoring orchestral arrangements for recordings, Martin often performed, playing instruments including piano, organ and brass.
Collaborating with Lennon and McCartney required Martin to adapt to their different approaches to songwriting and recording. MacDonald comments, "While [he] worked more naturally with the conventionally articulate McCartney, the challenge of catering to Lennon's intuitive approach generally spurred him to his more original arrangements, of which 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!' is an outstanding example." Martin said of the two composers' distinct songwriting styles, and of his own stabilizing 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 Dalí, 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 ... 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. Perhaps it was the combination of dope and no dope that worked, who knows?
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 made innovative use of technology, expanding the possibilities of recorded music. They urged experimentation by Martin and his recording engineers, while seeking 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. Their desire to create new sounds on every new recording, combined with Martin's arranging abilities and the studio expertise of EMI staff engineers Norman Smith, Ken Townsend, and Emerick, all contributed significantly to their records from Rubber Soul and, especially, Revolver forward. Along with innovative studio techniques such as sound effects, unconventional microphone placements, tape loops, double tracking and vari-speed recording, they 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 swarmandal 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".
The Beatles' influence on popular culture was—and remains—immense. Former Rolling Stone associate editor Robert Greenfield compares the band to Picasso as "artists who broke through the constraints of their time period to come up with something that was unique and original.... [I]n the form of popular music, no one will ever be more revolutionary, more creative and more distinctive". 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. The Beatles not only sparked the British Invasion of the US, they became a globally influential phenomenon as well.
Their musical innovations and commercial success inspired musicians worldwide. Many artists have acknowledged their influence and enjoyed chart success with covers of their songs. On radio, their arrival marked the beginning of a new era; programme director Rick Sklar of New York's WABC went so far as to forbid his DJs from playing any "pre-Beatles" music. The Beatles helped to redefine the LP as something more than just a few hits padded out with "filler", and they were primary innovators of the modern music video. The Shea Stadium show with which they opened their 1965 North American tour attracted an estimated 55,600 people, then the largest audience in concert history; Spitz describes the event as a "major breakthrough...a giant step toward reshaping the concert business." Emulation of their clothing and especially their hairstyles, which became a mark of rebellion, had a global impact on fashion, writes Gould.
According to Gould, the band changed the way people listened to popular music and experienced its role in their lives. From what began as the Beatlemania fad, he writes, the group grew to be perceived by many fans and cultural observers as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the era's sociocultural revolutions. As icons of the 1960s counterculture, Gould continues, they became a catalyst for bohemianism and activism in various social and political arenas, fuelling movements such as women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. According to Peter Lavezzoli, after the "more popular than Jesus" controversy in 1966, the Beatles felt considerable pressure to say the right things and "began a concerted effort to spread a message of wisdom and higher consciousness."
In 1965 Queen Elizabeth II appointed Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). The film Let It Be (1970) won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. The Beatles have received 7 Grammy Awards and 15 Ivor Novello Awards. 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 most successful Hot 100 artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary—The Beatles ranked number one. As of 2012, they hold the record for most number one hits on the Hot 100 chart with 20, and the Recording Industry Association of America certifies that the group have sold 177 million units in the US, more than any other artist. They 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. They were collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most influential people. The Beatles are the best-selling band in history, with estimated sales of over one billion units.
See also the EP Long Tall Sally (1964) and the double-EP Magical Mystery Tour (1967), which contain music unavailable on the original UK LPs.
The Beatles' catalogue was published almost exclusively by Northern Songs Ltd., a company formed in February 1963 by music publisher Dick James specifically for Lennon and McCartney, though it later acquired songs by other artists. The company was organised with James and his partner, Emmanuel Silver, owning a controlling interest, variously described as 51% or 50% plus one share. McCartney had 20%. Reports again vary concerning Lennon's portion—19 or 20%—and Brian Epstein's—9 or 10%—which he received in lieu of a 25% band management fee.
In 1965 the company went public, and five million shares were created, of which the original principals retained 3.75 million. James and Silver each received 937,500 shares (18.75% of 5 million); Lennon and McCartney each received 750,000 shares (15%); and Epstein's management company NEMS Enterprises, received 375,000 shares (7.5%). Of the 1.25 million shares put up for sale, Harrison and Starr each acquired 40,000. At the time of the stock offering, Lennon and McCartney renewed their three-year publishing contracts, binding them to Northern Songs until 1973.
Harrison created Harrisongs to represent his solo compositions, but signed a three-year contract with Northern Songs that gave it the copyright to his work through March 1968, which included "Taxman" and "Within You Without You". The songs on which Starr received co-writing credit before 1968, such as "What Goes On" and "Flying", were also Northern Songs copyrights. Harrison did not renew his contract with Northern Songs when it ended, signing instead with Apple Publishing while retaining the copyright to his work from that point forward. Harrisongs thus owns the rights to his later Beatles songs such as "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something". Also that year, Starr created Startling Music, which holds the rights to his solo Beatles compositions "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".
In March 1969, James and his partners arranged to sell their shares of Northern Songs to the British broadcasting company Associated Television (ATV), founded by impresario Lew Grade, without first informing the band. The Beatles made a bid to gain controlling interest by attempting to work out a deal with a consortium of London brokerage firms that had accumulated a 14% holding. The deal collapsed over the objections of Lennon, who declared, "I'm sick of being fucked about by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City." By the end of May, ATV had acquired a majority stake in Northern Songs, controlling nearly the entire Lennon–McCartney catalog, as well as any future material until 1973. In frustration, Lennon and McCartney sold their shares to ATV in late October 1969.
In 1981, financial losses by ATV's parent company ACC prompted the sale of its music division when according to authors Brian Southall and Rupert Perry, Grade contacted McCartney offering to sell ATV Music and Northern Songs for $30 million. According to McCartney, he met with Grade and explained he was only interested in the Northern Songs catalog, but that if he were ever willing to "separate off" that portion of ATV Music he would be interested, and soon after, Grade offered to sell him Northern Songs for £20 million, giving the ex-Beatle "a week or so" to decide. By McCartney's 1995 account, he and Ono countered with a £5 million bid that was rejected, though reports at the time cited £21–£25 million, and had Grade refusing to separate Northern Songs from ATV Music. In 1982 "the whole of ACC" was sold to Australian business magnate Robert Holmes à Court for £60 million.
Three years later, Michael Jackson purchased ATV for a reported $47.5 million. The acquisition gave Jackson control over the publishing rights to more than 250 Northern Songs titles, including over 200 Beatles songs as well as 40,000 other copyrights. In 1995, in a deal that earned him a reported $110 million, Jackson merged his music publishing business with Sony, creating a new company, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, in which he held a 50% stake. The merger made the new company, then valued at over half a billion dollars, the third largest music publisher in the world.
Despite the lack of publishing rights to most of their songs, they continue to receive their respective shares of the writers' royalties, which together are 33⅓% of total commercial proceeds in the US and which vary elsewhere around the world between 50 and 55%. Two of their earliest songs—"Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You"—were published by an EMI subsidiary, Ardmore & Beechwood, before signing with James. McCartney acquired their publishing rights from Ardmore in the mid 1980s, and they are the only two Beatles songs owned by McCartney's company MPL Communications.
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- Turner, Steve (2005). A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song (3rd ed.). New York: Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 0-06-084409-4.
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