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The Beatles Story by Celina Oseguera and Wikipedia writers
volu tion from the best Bea ban tnic d ar k kid oun s to d
Cover photos by James Vaughan and Roger Flickr
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he journey all began in Liverpool in the 1950s, when teenagers John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a chance meeting at a church fete. Lennon was performing with his group the Quarrymen. The two hit it off right away. 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,
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energy, and humor, and took them on as a manager, immediately trading in their leather look for tailored suits and long, thin ties. Epstein secured studio auditions for the Beatles, but these were unsuccessful until the record label EMI signed them in 1962. Producer George Martin agreed to work with the group, but wanted to use a drummer rather than Pete Best. The band fired Best, and Liverpool drummer Ringo Starr of Rory and the Hurricanes was 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 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, 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
According to the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, the band would have to ditch their beatnik clothes for suites and ties before appearing before the public eye. Photo provided by United States Library of Congress
number they gave him was “Please, Please Me,” which became the Beatles’s first number one single and the title of their first album (1963).
New Material, New Sounds A Hard Day’s Night (1964) was the first Beatles album 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.
With their newfound fame in the U.S. the Fab Four started meeting celebrities like boxer Muhammad Ali. Photo provided by United States Library of Congress
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
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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.
Lennon met Yoko Ono at one of her art exhibitions in London in 1966. Photo provided by Nationaal Archief
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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). 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 Breakup The death of Epstein in 1967 was a blow from which the group was never able to recover. Though the band continued to evolve artistically, business concerns that Epstein had always taken care of s 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 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.
In the 1969 sessions for the film Let It Be (1970), where the group was 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 by quitting the group the following spring with the release of his McCartney (1970) album. 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.
Graphic by Celina Oseguera
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