Beatles, The

THE BEATLES

Formed: 1957, Liverpool, England; Disbanded 1970

Members: George Harold Harrison, lead guitar, vocals (born Liverpool, England, 25 February 1943; died Los Angeles, California, 29 November 2001); John Winston (later changed to Ono) Lennon, rhythm guitar, harmonica, vocals (born Liverpool, England, 9 October 1940; died New York, 8 December 1980); James "Paul" McCartney, bass, vocals (born Liverpool, England, 18 June 1942); Ringo Starr, drums (Richard Starkey Jr., born Dingle, England, 7 July 1940). Former members: Peter "Pete" Best, drums (born Liverpool, England, 24 November 1941); Stuart "Stu" Sutcliffe, bass (Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe, born Edinburgh, Scotland, 23 June 1940; died Hamburg, West Germany, 10 April 1962).

Genre: Rock, Pop

Best-selling album since 1990: The Beatles 1 (2000)

Hit songs since 1990: "Free As a Bird," "Real Love"

The Beatles were the most innovative, emulated, and successful music group of the twentieth century. The Beatles set in motion both the creative and marketing paradigms of the modern rock era—through transforming hairstyles and fashion; evolving attitudes about youth, politics, and drug culture; writing their own songs and making the first music videos to accompany them; performing the first arena rock concerts; creating the first unified rock albums alongside hit singles; and being the first rock performers who were truly considered groundbreaking artists in their own time.

British Invasion

In January 1964 New York disc jockeys such as "Murray the K" began playing the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" virtually nonstop, introducing it with the cryptic adage, "The Beatles are coming." The record went to number one on the music charts in early February, and a fascination developed for this new "British" sound with its raw energy, wild electric guitars, and syncopated clapping. The next month, on February 7, 1964, a plane carrying the Beatles arrived at New York's Idlewild—soon to be renamed Kennedy—Airport. More than 3,000 screaming fans were there to greet the lads from Liverpool, England, as they got off the plane and waved, quickly to be ushered into a room of waiting reporters and photographers who were assigned to cover what was then negatively referred to as the "British Invasion."

The big news at the time was the group's "mop top" hairstyle. Men's crew cuts were still common and reporters had tremendous difficulty telling one Beatle from the other. Editors thought it was a funny story: the screaming girls, the foreign lads with the insectlike group name, and the long hair. Some forty-eight hours later, 73 million curious television viewers tuned in to Sunday night's Ed Sullivan Show to watch the Beatles perform live. The next day there was hardly a teenager in the country who did not want to go out and buy a guitar and scarcely a parent around who was not horrified at the prospect of his or her son emulating, or his or her daughter loving, the Beatles. The phenomenon, pejoratively dubbed "Beatle-mania," would only grow and by the time of the group's departure back to England in late February 1964, over 60 percent of all records sold in America were Beatles records.

Liverpool Roots and Early Recordings

The group's roots extend back to the Liverpool of the late 1950s, when then teenagers John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a chance meeting at a church fete. Lennon was performing with his group the Quarrymen and McCartney was brought by a mutual friend to hear them. McCartney loved that Lennon had a band, and Lennon loved that McCartney knew more than three guitar chords. McCartney's younger schoolmate George Harrison was soon recruited as another guitarist, as was Lennon's art college friend Stu Sutcliffe, to play bass. The group broke through the Liverpool club scene and eventually made its way to Hamburg, West Germany, to play clubs there, but not before hiring drummer Pete Best to accompany them. Liverpool record shop owner Brian Epstein was getting orders for a single of "My Bonnie" (1961) that the band had made with British rock pioneer Tony Sheridan and that had charted in West Germany, and decided to check out the Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club. Sutcliffe, who never really learned how to play bass, remained in Hamburg, where he later died of a brain hemorrhage related to a head injury; after his departure, McCartney began playing bass. Epstein was charmed by the quartet's charisma, energy, and humor, and took them on as a manager, immediately trading in their leather look for tailored suits and long, thin ties and helping the band to polish its overall presentation.

Epstein secured studio auditions for the Beatles, but these were unsuccessful until the record label EMI decided to sign them in 1962. Comedy and novelty producer George Martin agreed to work with the group, but wanted to use a session drummer rather than Pete Best. The band then fired Best, and Liverpool drummer Ringo Starr of Rory and the Hurricanes was successfully recruited for the spot. As the group began to record, the struggle was on to convince producer Martin that its own material was as good as the cover material it was recording. Martin, for instance, thought that the group's first attempt at a number-one hit should be a song by Mitch Murray called "How Do You Do It" and the Beatles did record that number—it was never released, but did show up on Anthology 1 (1995)—but the group wanted one of their own songs to be their first big hit. Martin was skeptical, but told them that if they came up with something as good, he would consider it. The number they gave him was "Please, Please Me," which did indeed become the Beatles's first number one single, and subsequently the title of their first album (1963).

New Material, New Sounds

Martin kept his ears open, and as material warranted inclusion, the number of Beatles originals put to record kept expanding. A Hard Day's Night (1964) was the first Beatles album—indeed the first rock album by anyone—to be made up entirely of original compositions. Several had been written for the Beatles's film of the same name, which established the distinctive personalities and offbeat humor of the group in the public consciousness. The field scene of the group horsing around in fast and slow motion to "All My Loving" established a new visual language to accompany rock music that anticipated the heyday of MTV by two decades. For the acoustic ballad "Yesterday" on Help! (1965), Martin suggested the use of strings, and an arrangement for string quartet was made. This inaugurated a process in which the group took an unusual interest in the sound of its music: a constant drive to come up with new sounds, new textures. An Indian sitar, for instance, dominates "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" on Rubber Soul (1966), the Beatles's memorable take on the popular folk rock movement of the time. Revolver (1966), which many consider the Beatles's masterpiece, features the melancholic "Eleanor Rigby" accompanied by a bouncy string octet with no Beatles playing whatsoever, while "Got to Get You into My Life" features a soulful brass band; "Tomorrow Never Knows" incorporates the then common technique in avant-garde "serious" music circles of taking recorded bits of random sounds, committing them to tape, and then "looping" the bits of tape together into tape loops that could play the sound at will.

The developing complexity of the Beatles's music made it increasingly difficult for the band to reproduce what it was doing in the studio in live performance. This, combined with the incessant screaming and general chaos that accompanied Beatlemania, made the group give up touring in 1966 after setting box office records everywhere it played. The first Shea Stadium Concert (1965) was not only a record setter, but a prototype of the megaconcert spectaculars that are still commonplace among rock music's biggest acts.

No longer having to worry about reproducing their music live, the Beatles reached a climax in studio creativity with the groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which took the drive for new sounds and textures to new heights. Expanding the same recording techniques that had been used on Rubber Soul and Revolver, Sgt. Pepper even incorporated a full orchestra rising to a psychedelic wall of sound in the climax of the urban melodrama "Day in the Life," banned by the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) because of its supposed drug references. Sgt. Pepper ushered in a new era not only for the Beatles, but for popular music in general with its colorful cover, double-sleeve printed song lyrics, and band cut-outs. It was not only the first rock concept album, but also the first rock album that was widely considered to be "art" by those outside the genre.

The Break-Up

The death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967 was a blow from which the group was never able to recover. Although the band continued to evolve artistically, business concerns that Epstein had always taken care of so efficiently were now left for the four to fight over. By the time of The Beatles (1968) double album, which came to be known as the "White Album" because of its plain white cover, the beginning of the end was clearly in sight. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting team was mostly writing apart, and George Harrison's own compositional style had evolved to a point where one or two tracks per album were no longer adequate to contain his talents. The creation of Apple Records, which was so mismanaged that the Beatles began hemorrhaging money, and Lennon's refusal to be anywhere—including Beatles recording sessions—without his future wife Yoko Ono, all added significantly to group tensions.

The low point came in early 1969 with sessions for the film Let It Be (1970), which showed the group literally coming apart at the seams. The band came back together that summer to record Abbey Road (1969), which turned out to be the last time the group would work together. John Lennon had privately indicated his intention to leave the group, but had hoped that the band members could continue to pool their individual creative efforts as Beatles projects. Without Lennon as a direct collaborator and with the group still unwilling to perform live, McCartney wanted to move on completely, and beat Lennon to the punch in "officially" quitting the group the following spring with the release of his McCartney (1970) album. Lennon was livid, as were Harrison and Starr, that the album was released mere weeks before the Beatles' long-dormant Let It Be (1970) was due out. Bitter litigation began, which lasted nearly a decade beyond Lennon's 1980 assassination by an obsessed fan outside of his New York apartment, and which effectively prevented any real possibility of a group reunion even while Lennon was still alive.

Compact Disc Configurations, a Reunion, and an Ongoing Feud

One of the burning issues of the 1980s involved deciding in which configurations Beatles albums should be re-released in the then-new compact disc (CD) format. In England, the Beatles had originally released material during the vinyl era on EMI singles, short albums (EPs), and long-playing albums (LPs) that rarely included the same songs. This was a bold move, as it meant that new Beatles albums were not dependent on previously known hit singles, which was in direct opposition to standard industry practice at the time. When the same Beatles piece did appear as a single and an album, the mixes—and sometimes even the takes, solos, or arrangements—would be slightly different. The original American Capitol releases of Beatles material, however, often combined material from singles and albums and sometimes in configurations that, although shorter than the British albums, were often more logically organized. The longer British LP configurations won out in the end, along with leftover single and EP material released as two separate Past Masters collections (both 1988). The initial re-release of Beatles albums on CD in the mid- and late 1980s became an event that created booms in the purchase of CD players and helped propel CD sales across the board. Few considered the CD little more than a novelty until the Beatles catalog was finally available in the format.

When Northern Songs, the publishing company that owned the entire Lennon-McCartney song catalog, came up for sale in 1984, McCartney saw a unique opportunity to finally have control over his own music. While he was still attempting to set up a bid with Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, pop icon Michael Jackson made an offer of $47.5 million with the enormous profits from his Thriller (1984) album that in effect put him in control of how and when Beatles songs would be used. The result has been an influx of Beatles songs being used for commercial purposes. Although McCartney publicly complains about this, he continues to make a 25 percent profit from the licensing of any Lennon-McCartney song.

The speculation that a Beatles reunion might take place at the group's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 was dashed when McCartney was a conspicuous no-show. Harrison, Starr, Ono, and Lennon's sons, Julian and Sean, accepted the award together, but McCartney issued a statement that said that, with all of the unsettled legal matters that still existed between the surviving Beatles, he thought it would be hypocritical to participate in a "fake reunion."

The soundtrack to the film Imagine (1988) included all Lennon-penned Beatles numbers alongside Lennon's best post-Beatles solo material in a move clearly designed by Ono to minimize the McCartney side of the LennonMcCartney equation. McCartney responded by going out for the first time ever as a solo artist performing McCartney-penned Beatles material live alongside Wings and McCartney solo material on a gargantuan world tour that broke box office records everywhere, and which was subsequently released as a film (Get Back!, 1990) and a live double album (Tripping the Live Fantastic, 1990). All legal matters between the former Beatles having finally been settled after nearly two decades of wrangling, McCartney began speculating during the tour on the possibility of getting the Fab Three back together.

A reunion of sorts did finally occur in the mid-1990s when the surviving Beatles created music "around" some Lennon demos that were released to much anticipation and fanfare as part of The Beatles Anthology television documentary miniseries (1995) and the three-volume double CD Anthology sets (1995, 1996), which saw the group finally profiting from unreleased material, alternate takes, and demo recordings that had been available in bootleg form for years. A print account of The Beatles Anthology appeared just in time for Christmas 2000 and an expanded DVD version appeared in 2003 with unreleased footage of the truncated trio jamming together.

Harrison's death in late 2001—the first Beatle to die of natural causes—was a sobering moment for aging baby boomers. As with Lennon's death in 1980, entire magazines and television specials were devoted to the late Beatle and the Fab Four, and Beatles albums sold out seemingly everywhere. This followed upon the enormous success of The Beatles 1 (2000), a collection of all of the Beatles's number one hits packaged together, which saw new generations of listeners discovering Beatles music. McCartney's postmillennial contribution to the longstanding Lennon-McCartney feud was to reverse the order of the songwriting credits for nineteen Beatles songs on his Back in the U.S. album (2002), from the traditional "Lennon-McCartney" to "Composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon." In 2003 long-missing stolen tapes from the Let It Be sessions were recovered in Holland, revealing a trove of "lost" Beatles performances and uncovering even more group bitterness than the film had. The ongoing interest in this material served as a reminder that nearly four decades after they first appeared on the scene, the public appetite for anything Beatles-related continued to be insatiable.

Spot Light: The Beatles Reunion

"There will be no Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead," read George Harrison's much-publicized statement made in 1990, responding to Paul McCartney's media speculation that the surviving Beatles might get back together. Yet, ironically, it would be Harrison and Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, who would come up with the means to musically raise Lennon from the dead, so to speak. After Roy Orbison died of a heart attack in 1988, Harrison and fellow Traveling Wilbury band mates Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Lyne investigated using some solo tracks of Orbison's voice to complete a Wilbury album when an even more bizarre idea hit Harrison: to use the voice of Elvis Presley. Presley's estate loved the idea and was willing to allow the Wilburys to strip his voice electronically from some unreleased tracks and have the Wilburys record around it. Presley himself was to have been credited as "Aaron Wilbury." In the end, the band decided it was too gimmicky of an idea, but when Harrison shared the story with Yoko Ono, she indicated that she possessed unreleased Lennon songs that were so bare that they would not need to be stripped down. In the wake of the phenomenal success of Natalie Cole's "Unforgettable" (1992) duet with her dead father Nat "King" Cole, the option of using Lennon demos that would be reworked by the other Beatles began to take on greater appeal. In February 1994, behind locked doors, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr—along with the electronic presence of John Lennon—reunited in the studio to record "new" Beatles tracks. The first of these, "Free as a Bird," had its much-anticipated unveiling at the conclusion of the first part of the 1995 prime-time week-long television airing of The Beatles Anthology, the Beatles's own documentary that had been called The Long and Winding Road while it was a work in progress for more than two decades. Secrecy was paramount, as screeners and advance releases of The Beatles Anthology did not contain the song, which was released as part of Anthology 1 a few days later and as a single. Another spruced-up Lennon demo, "Real Love," appears at the conclusion of the series and was released on Anthology 2 (1996) and as a single. All of this was a far cry from the elaborate Beatles reunion that fans and promoters had desperately hoped for throughout the 1970s when Lennon was still alive, but in light of Harrison's death in 2001, it becomes the final chapter of the Fab Four, for better or worse.

In 1964 composers Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein were among the few to see the Beatles not merely as captivating performers, but as great songwriters as well. Though the Lennon-McCartney song catalog is standing the test of time and continues to enchant generations of new listeners with an undiminished freshness, its overwhelming presence set a new standard in pop and rock music by which artists were suddenly expected to write—as well as perform—their own music, for better or worse. The six-year period when the Beatles were at the peak of their powers was one of those rare, brief, and wonderful moments when popular culture and high art converged. Their ultimate influence can be seen in the fact that no subsequent act has even remotely captured the public imagination as the Beatles did, and that the creative and cultural revolution that the group helped launch remains a work in progress.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Past Masters, Volume One (Capitol, 1988); Past Masters, Volume Two (Capitol, 1988); Please, Please Me (Capitol re-release, 1990); With the Beatles (Capitol re-release, 1990); Beatles for Sale (Capitol re-release, 1990); Rubber Soul (Capitol re-release, 1990); Revolver (Capitol re-release, 1990); Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol re-release, 1990); Magical Mystery Tour (Capitol re-release, 1990); The Beatles (Capitol re-release, 1990); Abbey Road (Capitol re-release, 1990); Live at the BBC (Capitol, 1994); Anthology 1 (Capitol, 1995); Anthology 2 (Capitol, 1996); Anthology 3 (Capitol, 1996); The Beatles 1 (Capitol, 2000). Soundtracks: A Hard Day's Night (Capitol re-release, 1990); Help! (Capitol re-release, 1990); Let It Be (Capitol re-release, 1990); Yellow Submarine (Capitol re-release, 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

H. Davis, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York, 1968); G. Martin with J. Hornsby, All You Need Is Ears (New York, 1979); P. Norman, Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation (New York, 1981); M. Lewisohn, The Beatles Live (New York, 1986); M. Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions (New York, 1988); G. Martin with W. Pearson, With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (New York, 1995); A Kozinn, The Beatles (New York, 1995); The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology (New York, 2000).

WEBSITE:

www.thebeatles.com.

dennis polkow