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January 10, 2022 - September 12, 2023
act that’s bigger than all the rest of pop music combined. At this point, rock and roll is famous mostly because it’s what the Beatles did, just as the theater is famous because plays are what Shakespeare happened to write. The Beatles’ second career has lasted several times longer
The world keeps dreaming the Beatles, long after the Beatles themselves figured the dream was over. Our Beatles have outlasted theirs.
Taylor upped the ante with his 1995 liner notes for Anthology, calling the Beatles’ story “the twentieth century’s greatest romance.” How was he supposed to know the romance was just beginning?
PARTIAL (BUT ONLY PARTIAL) EXPLANATION: THE BEATLES are the world’s greatest rock and roll band. They had no choice—they were four working-class Liverpool boys, and they knew nobody would notice them if they were merely good. Over the years, the Cute One proved he was also the Smart One, the Smart One proved he could sound as cute as the Cute One, the Quiet One got mystical, and the Drummer grew a mustache.
They bashed out their first album in a mammoth all-day session, saving nothing for later, knowing their first chance to get out of Liverpool could be their last. You can hear John completely blow out his throat in the last song they cut that night, “Twist and Shout.”
So many questions, so many girls. Does the “Martha My Dear” girl fall in love with the boy? Or does she leave him like the “For No One” girl does? Does the “Ticket to Ride” boy ever get her back? If the boy who sings “This Boy” turned into the boy who sings “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” would he win her away from the boy who sings “You Can’t Do That”? Is Jude a boy or a girl? Is the “Day Tripper” girl secretly a boy? Are Desmond and Molly both girls? At the end of “Norwegian Wood,” does he burn the house down?
Over the years, your Beatles keep changing, because you keep changing. You grow up, you fall in in love, you lose love, you work, you fail, you parent, you suffer, you can’t go on, you go on, etc. By the time you’re an adult, you are no longer mystified by the paper bag on Paul’s knee (just an airsick bag) or “heavy metal duck” (that’s actually “Edmund, Earl of Gloucester”). But love? That’s something you keep wrestling with—even if you’re alone in your room, and the only people to discuss it with are the Beatles. The Beatles got a lot of things wrong. But they didn’t lie about girls.
THE BEATLES ENDED THEIR FIRST CAREER, BECAUSE THEY felt they didn’t have enough control, then began their second career, where they had no control at all.
They all kept suing each other. They were sick to death of the band. They begged the world to get the fuck over it and let them get on with their lives, the least they could ask after everything they’d given. The world smiled politely and said, “I think I disagree.”
The Beatles invented most of what rock stars do. They invented breaking up. They invented drugs. They invented long hair, going to India, having a guru, round glasses, solo careers, beards, press conferences, divisive girlfriends, writing your own songs, funny drummers. They invented the idea of assembling a global mass audience and then challenging, disappointing, confusing this audience. As far as the rest of the planet is concerned, they invented England.
Lol
The Beatles also innovated things other rock stars don’t do, things that (as it turned out) only they did, because nobody followed them. Here’s a big one: John and Paul both quit the Beatles to start new bands with their wives. Can you imagine the Stones breaking up at their peak so they could make music with any women? Mick and Keith splitting up to jam with Bianca and Anita? (What a shame—we missed out on the Plastic Pallenberg Band.) Can you imagine a timeline where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant quit Led Zeppelin to collaborate full-time with their ladies, who have no previous musical
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This tale is extremely famous, but much less well-known is the fact that Paul plays drums on it. And the reason: Ringo just quit the band.
Ringo will come back a couple of weeks later, after much cajoling. The Beatles will find out where he’s hiding (in the Mediterranean, on Peter Sellers’s yacht)
When Ringo quit, he went over to John’s house to break the news, explaining, “I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.” John’s reply: “I thought it was you three.” As Ringo tells the story, “So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing. ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three.’ ”
As a teenager, Hunter S. Thompson typed out the whole text of The Great Gatsby, just to get the rhythm into his fingertips; that’s what the Beatles were doing in Hamburg, playing rock and roll covers under fire, thriving on the violence in the crowd.
Even in the Seventies, when they went years at a time without seeing each other, they couldn’t escape. As John quipped in 1975, “If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul’s bowling.”
They do “I Saw Her Standing There,” their big finale. Even in the raw recording Elton released as a B-side, you can hear John get caught up in the crowd’s excitement. It’s his night to shine—onstage in New York, for the first time in years and the last time ever. Why
(John tells the girl plainly why he loves her—“because you tell me things I want to know.” A line he’ll rewrite his whole life.)
“I SAW HER STANDING THERE” IS THE BEST FIRST SONG ON A debut album, ever. The longest, loudest, drunkest debate I’ve ever had about this was with Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, where we narrowed it down to the final two candidates: “I Saw Her Standing There” and Joy Division’s “Disorder.” Both songs by Northern English yobs, knowing they have only three minutes to seize their chance; both bar bands jittery at finding themselves in a real studio; both bands with maniac drummers; everyone jumping into the violence of it, getting faster now, getting out of hand, until it’s impossible not to get
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holds the promise of all the other first-song first-album breakthroughs: not just “Disorder” but GNR’s “Welcome to the Jungle,” The Smiths’ “Reel Around the Fountain,” N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton,” Patti Smith’s “Gloria,” Public Enemy’s “You’re Gonna Get Yours,” the Hold Steady’s “Positive Jam” (obviously disqualified that night), Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times,” Eric B. & Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke,” Liz Phair’s “6’1’’,” the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis,” Metallica’s “Hit the Lights,” Suicide’s
And without helping himself to a slice of the songwriting credits, which would have been standard practice. The failure of George Martin to rip them off remains one of the most bizarre elements of their story.
Brian got curious enough to visit the Cavern, where he was hit by the thunderbolt. So now he was a beginner in the world of music hustling, and the Beatles had a manager who made up for his naiveté with his devotion—dreaming the Beatles became his all-consuming passion. He got them out of leather, dressed them up in suits, made them stop swearing and eating and drinking and belching onstage. Mr. Epstein’s dream was so seductive, they began to share it. The
John and Paul were strictly in it for the songs. They wrote the Stones’ first hit “I Wanna Be Your Man,” dashing it off in a few minutes right in front of Mick and Keith’s astonished faces.
They later admitted they made a show of “writing” a song they’d already come up with but didn’t rate as a keeper. In John’s words, “We weren’t going to give them anything great, right?”
He was the one Beatle who, in a true sense, had originally been a Beatles fan. He was the young kid tagging along behind the older, cooler guys, John and Paul, trying to become part of their bond.
Even in 1965, his tension with Paul in Help! doesn’t feel feigned—he bristles at him the whole movie, especially when Paul’s doing one of his hammy bits and George sniffs, “Don’t encourage him. You’ve got the part, Paul.”
he was the one who had most to lose by remaining a Beatle and the most to gain by going solo. Although he enjoyed his elite status—he famously snapped at one of the engineers, “You don’t talk to a Beatle like that”—he was the one the others underestimated. His lead-guitar solos were sometimes played by Paul; to make it more galling, Paul didn’t claim the credit, leaving the world to spend years thinking George played the solos in “Taxman” or “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” John called him “the invisible man,”
George did more complaining about the group than the other three combined.
When he had John and Paul over to the house to play one day, George’s dad barged in to throw a fit about the scandalously tight jeans George was wearing. George just said, “How can I do my ballet without tight jeans?” and began dancing ballet poses until his parents laughed.
He was just seventeen when the Beatles went to raise hell in Hamburg, in August 1960; he was the one who lost his virginity there, with the others in the room. Alas, after four months in Hamburg, he got deported for being underage.
As John said in 1968, “George himself is no mystery. But the mystery inside of George is immense. It’s watching him uncover it all little by little that’s so damn interesting.” His guitar gave glimpses into that mystery.
They never played “It Won’t Be Long” live, maybe because they were afraid of what they might unleash, but it’s one of their wildest “yeah” songs. It won’t be long! Yeah! Yeah! Yeeeeaaaah!
The Beatles loved girl groups with a passion—John Lennon famously spent his first night in New York City in his hotel room, calling up radio stations and asking them to play the Ronettes. They craved the extravagant girliness of the Shirelles (mentioned as the band’s biggest influence on the back cover of their first album) and the Shangri-Las and the Crystals—the way these girl singers combined deep fervor and silliness at top volume, acting out the run-mascara-run melodramas scripted
The whole point of a classic like the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day” (or the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” the Shangri-Las’ “The Boy,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby,” so many more) is that the guy on the receiving end has no clue this song is about him. He barely knows this girl’s name, much less all the agony she’s going through.
listen to an epiphany like “Eight Days a Week”—it’s all vowels and handclaps, fading in after the band is already underway, sung in unison as if the boys can’t spare time to work out harmonies. That’s another trick they learned from the Shirelles.
But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week”—beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,”
Beatles “only” wanted to hold your hand. There’s no “only” about it, since the way the Beatles sang about it, the boy-girl connection could be the most complex nook of the cosmos.
He remains the kids’ first favorite Beatle—as Paul called him, “a knockabout uncle.”
he said, “I was an only child, and suddenly I felt as though I’d got three brothers. In the old days we’d have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of the hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other.”
People just love to be around him. Woody described his role in the Stones as “diplomatic liaison officer”—the only guy on speaking terms with both Mick and Keith. Some musicians have that quality; they can play with people. The Smiths didn’t have a Ringo, and neither did the Clash, which is why these bands imploded too soon. It’s often the drummer’s job, whether that’s the Velvets’ Mo Tucker, U2’s Larry Mullen Jr., or R.E.M.’s Bill Berry. (“Michael said he liked my eyebrows,” a bemused Berry told Rolling Stone in 1985. “He claims to this day that’s the reason he wanted us to get together.”)
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He inspired his mates to hang on as long as they did. Toward the end, in the January 1969 sessions for John’s raw confessional “Don’t Let Me Down,” he asks Ringo to hit the cymbal extra hard for support: “Give me a big kssshhhh. Give me the courage to come screaming in.”
It chills the blood to see the guy who has to come out and follow them that first night—a Dutch magician named Fred Kaps, in white tie and tails, doing a card trick that drags on for long minutes of silence. You have never seen flop sweat like this. To the 93 million viewers, it looked like he was bombing live, but he taped his bit before the show, which just makes his awkward pauses more agonizing. “I
want to congratulate you. You’ve been a fine audience. Despite severe provocation.”
The cliché used to go that they deteriorated as a live band, but that claim has been definitively debunked by the footage of their 1965 and 1966 tours in the film Eight Days a Week. Even at Shea, they sound great.
“Ticket to Ride” might be the first Number One hit about a man and woman living together—“living with me was bringing her down,” not “loving me” or “being with me,” in 1965—yet he’s so blasé about it.
Most of the stories here continue on Revolver. “Norwegian Wood” turns into the full-on tabla trip of “Love You To.” The pothead harmonium drone of “The Word” turns into “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The “Girl” becomes the woman in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” The “Nowhere Man” becomes the boy from “I’m Only Sleeping.” The lovers and friends of Rubber Soul are all works in progress.
But John probably started with a joke because he frightened himself with how vulnerable he got in the other song he brought in that day: “Norwegian Wood.” As he admitted, “I was trying to write about an affair without letting me wife know I was writing about an affair. I was writing from my experiences, girls’ flats, things like that.” It was popular for Swinging London trendies to decorate their homes with Norwegian pine. “So it was a little parody really on those kinds of girls who when you’d go up to their flat there would be a lot of Norwegian wood,” Paul explained years later. “It was
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While in retrospect it seems like a no-brainer that the world would embrace the new grown-up Beatles, this was by no means clear. As Geoff Emerick, later their engineer, reports, “There was almost no buzz at all in the Abbey Road corridors about Rubber Soul. Though everyone agreed that it had quite a few good songs and a crisp, clean sound, the general feeling among the staff that were working on it was that it was a pleasant diversion into the realm of folk and country music.” Early reviews were mixed—the U.K. music press called it “monotonous” and “not their best.”
Paul doesn’t want to talk much about the road, because it brought him to your door. Why grumble—he got here, didn’t he? Aren’t you pleased to see him? Glad that’s behind us now. Aretha, however, is not so relieved to be here. She does not look on the bright side. She spent too long on that road; it took a lot out of her. As she sang a few years earlier in a song her sister wrote, “Ain’t No Way,” she paid too much for what she got. Aretha ends the song still out on the stoop—“don’t leave me standing here”—and you wonder, as you never do in Paul’s version, if she’s ever getting through the door.
Weird Al Yankovic, “This Song Is Just Six Words Long” (1988) One of the only Weird Al parodies where the joke is how much he despises the original. If you’re under forty, you’re lucky in that you’ve possibly never heard George’s huge 1987 comeback hit, “Got My Mind Set on You.” Words cannot describe its wretchedness. The video forces George to sit in an armchair, lip-synching by the fireplace. Then his body double gets up to dance. It lingered at Number One for weeks. Weird Al pays tribute by chanting the endlessly repeated headache of a chorus—“This song is just six words long! This song is
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