the Beatles

The Fab Four. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The Beatles were four young musicians from the working-class seaport city of Liverpool, England, who accomplished nothing less than changing the course of rock and roll and transforming youth culture. From 1962, the year that Ringo Starr joined up with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, until 1970, the year the quartet split up, the Beatles served as the global polestar for the hopes and dreams of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.

Making their name with traditional, perfectly crafted pop songs such as “She Loves You” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” they soon began experimenting with more challenging instrumentation, introspective lyrics, and music genres ranging from folk and country to chamber ballads and psychedelia. As such, the Beatles were rock music’s leading innovators in the 1960s. Songs such as “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” not only became immortal pop songs but also changed the nature of songwriting.

Perhaps more remarkable than the Beatles’ phenomenal success during the band’s short run is their enduring popularity with generations born decades after the band’s breakup. One of the most profoundly influential musical acts in history, the group inspired too many rock and pop artists to possibly list.

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Early years

Formed around the nucleus of Lennon and McCartney, who first performed together in Liverpool in 1957, the group grew out of a shared enthusiasm for American rock and roll. Like most early rock-and-roll figures, Lennon, a guitarist and singer, and McCartney, a bassist and singer, were largely self-taught as musicians. Precocious composers, they gathered around themselves a changing cast of accompanists, adding by the end of 1957 Harrison, a lead guitarist, and then, in 1960 for several formative months, Stuart Sutcliffe, a promising young painter who brought into the band a brooding sense of bohemian style. After dabbling in skiffle, a jaunty sort of folk music popular in Britain in the late 1950s, and assuming several different names (the Quarrymen, the Silver Beetles, and, finally, the Beatles), the band added a drummer, Pete Best, and joined a small but booming “beat music” scene, first in Liverpool and then, during several long visits between 1960 and 1962, in Hamburg, West Germany—another seaport full of sailors thirsty for American rock and roll as a backdrop for their drinking and carousing.

First success: Brian Epstein, George Martin, and “Please Please Me”

In autumn 1961 Brian Epstein, a local Liverpool record store manager, saw the band and fell in love. Unshakably convinced of their commercial potential, Epstein became their manager and proceeded to bombard the major British music companies with letters and tape recordings of the band, finally winning a contract with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the giant EMI group of music labels. The man in charge of their career at Parlophone was George Martin, a classically trained musician who from the start put his stamp on the Beatles, first by suggesting the band hire a more polished drummer (they chose Starr) and then by rearranging their second recorded song (and first big British hit), “Please Please Me,” changing it from a slow dirge into an up-tempo romp.

Beatlemania and A Hard Day’s Night

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Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1963, the Beatles continued their rise to fame in England by producing spirited recordings of original tunes and playing classic American rock and roll on a variety of British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs. In these months, fascination with the Beatles—at first confined to young British fans of popular music—breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances into matters of widespread public comment. In the fall of that year, when they belatedly made a couple of appearances on British television, the evidence of popular frenzy prompted British newspapers to coin a new word for the phenomenon: Beatlemania. In early 1964, after equally tumultuous appearances on American television, the same phenomenon erupted in the United States and provoked a so-called British Invasion of Beatles imitators from the United Kingdom.

Beatlemania was something new. Musicians performing in the 19th century certainly excited a frenzy—one thinks of Franz Liszt—but that was before the modern mass media created the possibility of collective frenzy. By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day’s Night, a movie that dramatized the phenomenon of Beatlemania, the band’s effect was evident around the world as countless young people emulated the band members’ characteristic long hair, flip humor, and whimsical displays of devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, their transformative social and cultural influence was even recognized among the upper echelons of political power. In 1965 each of the four Beatles was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), having been recommended for the honor by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (and despite a brief storm of protest by some previous recipients, mainly military veterans, against what they perceived as a lowering of the dignity of the royal order).

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Reinventing rock music: “Yesterday” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The popular hubbub proved to be a spur, convincing Lennon and McCartney of their songwriting abilities and sparking an outpouring of creative experimentation all but unprecedented in the history of rock music, which until then had been widely regarded as essentially a genre for juveniles. Between 1965 and 1967 the music of the Beatles rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied. Their repertoire in these years ranged from the chamber pop ballad “Yesterday” and the enigmatic folk tune “Norwegian Wood” (both in 1965) to the hallucinatory hard rock song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966), with a lyric inspired by Timothy Leary’s handbook The Psychedelic Experience (1964). It also included the carnivalesque soundscape of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (1967), which featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics by Lennon and a typically imaginative arrangement (by George Martin) built around randomly spliced-together snippets of recorded steam organs—a tour de force of technological legerdemain quite typical of the band’s studio work in this era.

In 1966 the Beatles retired from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full resources of the recording studio. A year later, in June 1967, this period of widely watched creative renewal climaxed with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by young people around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band’s genius but also of the era’s utopian promise. More than a band of musicians, the Beatles had come to personify, certainly in the minds of millions of young listeners, the joys of a new counterculture of hedonism and uninhibited experimentation—with music and with new ways of life. Various members of the band in these years flirted with mind-expanding drugs such as LSD and also with spiritual exercises such as transcendental meditation, a technique taught to them by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a barnstorming guru from India.

In those years the Beatles effectively reinvented the meaning of rock and roll as a cultural form. The American artists they admired and chose to emulate—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, the pioneering rock composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the influential soul songwriter Smokey Robinson, and, after 1964, folksinger and topical songwriter Bob Dylan—became widely regarded as canonic sources of inspiration, offering “classical” models for aspiring younger rock musicians. At the same time, the original songs the Beatles wrote and recorded dramatically expanded the musical range and expressive scope of the genre they had inherited. Their close vocal harmonies, subtle arrangements, and clever production touches, combined with an elemental rhythm section anchored by Starr’s no-nonsense drumming, created new standards of excellence and beauty in rock music.

Apple and Abbey Road

After 1968 and the eruption of student protest movements in countries as different as Mexico and France, the Beatles insensibly surrendered their role as de facto leaders of an inchoate global youth culture. They nevertheless continued for several more years to record and release new music and maintained a level of popularity rarely rivaled before or since. In 1968 they launched their own record label, Apple; hoping to nurture experimental pop art, they instead produced chaos and commercial failure, apart from the work of the Beatles themselves. The band continued to enjoy widespread popularity. The following year Abbey Road went on to become one of the band’s best-loved and biggest-selling albums.

The dream is over: the Beatles’ breakup and the death of John Lennon

Meanwhile, personal disagreements magnified by the stress of symbolizing the dreams of a generation had begun to tear the band apart. Once the collaborative heart and soul of the band, Lennon and McCartney fell into bickering and mutual accusations of ill will. By now millions of dollars were at stake, and the utopian aura of the performers was in jeopardy, given the discrepancy between the band’s symbolic stature as idols of a carefree youth culture and their newfound real status as pampered plutocrats.

In the spring of 1970 the Beatles formally disbanded. In the years that followed, all four members went on to produce solo albums of variable quality and popularity. Lennon released a corrosive set of songs with his new wife, Yoko Ono, and McCartney went on to form a band, Wings, that turned out a fair number of commercially successful recordings in the 1970s. Starr and Harrison, too, initially had some success as solo artists.

In 1980 Lennon was murdered by a fan-turned-stalker outside the Dakota, an apartment building in New York City known for its celebrity tenants. The event provoked a global outpouring of grief. Lennon is memorialized in Strawberry Fields, a section of Central Park across from the Dakota that Ono landscaped in her husband’s honor.

Life goes on: solo projects

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In the years that followed Lennon’s death, the surviving former Beatles continued to record and perform as solo artists. McCartney in particular remained musically active. In the pop field he produced new albums every few years. In the field of classical music he completed Liverpool Oratorio in 1991; in 1997 he supervised the recording of another symphonic work of large ambition, Standing Stone; and in 1999 he released a new classical album, Working Classical. McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. Starr was also very visible in the 1990s, touring annually with his All-Star Band, a rotating group of rock veterans playing their hits on the summertime concert circuit. Beginning in 1988 Harrison recorded with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in a loose amalgam known as the Traveling Wilburys, but, for most of the 1980s and ’90s, he had a low profile as a musician while acting as the producer of several successful films. After surviving a knife attack at his home in 1999, Harrison succumbed to a protracted battle with cancer in 2001.

Early in the 1990s McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had joined to add harmonies to two previously unreleased vocal recordings by Lennon. These new songs by “the Beatles” served as a pretext for yet another publicity blitz, aimed at creating a market for a lavishly produced quasi-historical series of archival recordings assembled under the supervision of the band and released in 1995 and 1996 as The Beatles Anthology, a collection of six compact discs that supplemented a 10-hour-long authorized video documentary of the same name. A compilation of the band’s number one singles, 1, appeared in 2000 and enjoyed worldwide success, topping the charts in several countries.

Legacy

The afterglow of Beatlemania may have disappeared, but the iconography of an era of youthful tumult had been reverently preserved for posterity. The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and Lennon (1994), McCartney (1999), Harrison (2004), and Starr (2015) were also inducted as individuals. In September 2009 specially packaged digitally remastered versions of the Beatles’ entire catalog and a Beatles version of the popular electronic music game Rock Band were released simultaneously. After it was reported in February 2010 that the financially troubled EMI was soliciting buyers for its Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles made the great majority of their recordings, the British Department for Culture, Media, and Sport declared the recording complex a historic landmark. EMI subsequently announced that it would retain ownership of the iconic studio while seeking outside investment to improve its facilities.