The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960, who became one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music.2009a In their heyday the group 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 folk rock to psychedelic pop, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. The nature of their enormous popularity, which first emerged as the "Beatlemania" fad, transformed as their songwriting grew in sophistication. The group came to be perceived as the embodiment of progressive ideals, seeing their influence extend into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s.

With an early five-piece line-up of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums), The Beatles built their reputation in Liverpool and Hamburg clubs 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 outfit by music store owner Brian Epstein after he offered to act as the group's manager, and with their musical potential enhanced by the hands-on creativity of producer George Martin, The Beatles achieved UK mainstream success in late 1962 with their first single, "Love Me Do". Gaining international popularity over the course of the next year, they toured extensively until 1966, then retreated to the recording studio until their breakup in 1970

. Each then found success in an independent musical career. McCartney and Starr re
During their studio years, The Beatles produced what critics consider some of their finest material including the album ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' (1967), widely regarded as a masterpiece. Nearly four decades after their breakup, The Beatles' music continues to be popular. The Beatles have had more number one albums on the UK charts, and held down the top spot longer, than any other musical act.2009 According to RIAA certifications, they have sold more albums in the US than any other artist.2009a In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the all-time top-selling Hot 100 artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with The Beatles at number one.2008 They have been honoured with 7 Grammy Awards,sfn Grammy.com and they have received 15 Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.2000a The Beatles were collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most important and influential people.1998

History

Formation and early years (1957–1962)

Aged sixteen, singer and guitarist John Lennon formed the skiffle group The Quarrymen with some Liverpool schoolfriends in March 1957.2009a Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney joined as a guitarist after he and Lennon met that July.2005 When McCartney in turn invited George Harrison to watch the group the following February, the fourteen-year-old joined as lead guitarist.20011997 By 1960 Lennon's schoolfriends had left the group, he had begun studies at the Liverpool College of Art and the three guitarists were playing rock and roll whenever they could get a drummer.2000b Joining on bass in January, Lennon's fellow student Stuart Sutcliffe suggested changing the band name to "The Beetles" as a tribute to Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and they became "The Beatals" for the first few months of the year.2000b2000a After trying other names including "Johnny and the Moondogs", "Long John and The Beetles" and "The Silver Beatles", the band finally became "The Beatles" in August.2000a The lack of a permanent drummer posed a problem when the group's unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged a resident band booking for them in Hamburg, Germany.1996 Before the end of August they auditioned and hired drummer Pete Best,2000a and the five-piece band left for Hamburg four days later, contracted to fairground showman Bruno Koschmider for a 48-night residency. "Hamburg in those days did not have rock'n'roll music clubs. It had strip clubs", says biographer Philip Norman.

Rubber Soul, released in early December, was hailed by critics as another major step forward in the maturity and complexity of the band's music.2009b Biographer and music critic Ian MacDonald observes that with Rubber Soul, The Beatles "recovered the sense of direction that had begun to elude them during the later stages of work on Beatles for Sale".2005 After ''Help!'s foray into the world of classical music with flutes and strings, Rubber Soul's'' introduction of a sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" marked a further progression outside the traditional boundaries of rock music. The album also saw Lennon and McCartney's collaborative songwriting increasingly supplemented by distinct compositions from each (though they continued to share official credit). Their thematic reach was expanding as well, embracing more complex aspects of romance and other concerns.2009b As their lyrics grew more artful, fans began to study them for deeper meaning. There was speculation that "Norwegian Wood" might refer to cannabis.2008 In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" ranked Rubber Soul at number five,2003 and the album is today described by Allmusic as "one of the classic folk rock records".2009a According to both Lennon and McCartney, however, it was "just another album".2008 Recording engineer Norman Smith saw clear signs of growing conflict within the group during the Rubber Soul sessions; Smith later said that "the clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious" and "as far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right."2000b

Controversy, studio years and breakup (1966–1970)

Events leading up to final tour

In June 1966, Yesterday and Today—one of the compilation albums created by Capitol Records for the US market—caused an uproar with its cover, which portrayed the smiling Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic dolls. A popular, though apocryphal, story was that this was meant as a response to the way Capitol had "butchered" their albums.2000a Thousands of copies of the album had a new cover pasted over the original; an uncensored copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction.2007 During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, The Beatles unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace.2005 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.2005 The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking "no" for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they escaped the country with difficulty.2005

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.2005 Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now".19662008 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 in the American South's "Bible belt".2004 South Africa also banned airplay of Beatles records, a prohibition that would last until 1971.2009 Epstein publicly criticised Datebook, saying they had taken Lennon's words out of context,2008 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 said he had only been referring to how other people saw The Beatles, but "if you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."2008

Revolver and Sgt. Pepper

title="Eleanor Rigby"
Rubber Soul had marked a major step forward; Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the band's final tour, marked another.2008 Pitchfork identifies it as "the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence" and "redefining what was expected from popular music."2009 Described by Gould as "woven with motifs of circularity, reversal, and inversion", Revolver featured sophisticated songwriting and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles ranging from innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock.2008 Abandoning the group photograph that had become the norm, its cover—designed by Klaus Voorman, a friend of the band since their Hamburg days—was a "stark, arty, black-and-white collage that caricatured the Beatles in a pen-and-ink style beholden to Aubrey Beardsley."2008 The album was preceded by the single "Paperback Writer", backed by "Rain". The Beatles shot short promo films for both songs, described as "among the first true music videos",2007 which aired on Top of the Pops and The Ed Sullivan Show.20092006

Among Revolver's most experimental tracks 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 song's creation involved eight tape decks distributed about the recording studio building, each manned by an engineer or band member, who randomly varied the movement of a tape loop while Martin created a composite recording by sampling the incoming data.2008 McCartney's "Eleanor Rigby" made prominent use of a string octet; it has been described as "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognizable style or genre of song."2008 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.2003 On the US tour that followed, The Beatles played none of its songs.1989 The final show, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, on 29 August, was their last commercial concert.1997 It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by touring that included nearly 60 US concert appearances and over 1400 internationally.2008

title="Within You Without You"

Freed from the burden of touring, the band's creativity and desire to experiment grew as they recorded ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in December 1966. Emerick recalled, "The Beatles insisted that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different. We had microphones right down in the bells of brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins. We 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 round."2008 Parts of "A Day in the Life" required a forty-piece orchestra.2008 Nearly seven hundred hours of studio time were devoted to the sessions. They first yielded the non-album double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" in February 1967; Sgt. Pepper followed in June. The musical complexity of the records, created using only four-track recording technology, astounded contemporary artists seeking to outdo The Beatles.2000a For Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, in the midst of a personal crisis and struggling to complete the ambitious Smile, hearing "Strawberry Fields" was a crushing blow and he soon abandoned all attempts to compete.19862004 Sgt. Pepper met with great critical acclaim. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number one among its "500 Greatest Albums of All Time"2003 and it is widely regarded as a masterpiece.2008 Jonathan Gould describes it as

During recording sessions for the album, which stretched from late May to mid-October 1968, divisions and dissent started to drive the group apart. Starr quit the band for a period, leaving McCartney to perform drums on several tracks.1988a Lennon's romantic preoccupation with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono contributed to tension within the band and he lost interest in co-writing with McCartney.2008 Flouting the group's well-established understanding that they would not take partners into the studio, Lennon insisted on bringing Ono, anyway disliked by Harrison, to all of the sessions.2000b Increasingly contemptuous of McCartney's creative input, he began to identify the latter's compositions as "granny music", dismissing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "granny shit".Massey Recalling the White Album sessions, Lennon gave a curiously foreshortened summing-up of the band's history from that point on, saying, "It's like if you took each track off it and made it all mine and all Paul's... just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group, and I enjoyed it. We broke up then."2000b McCartney also recalled that the sessions marked the start of the breakup, saying, "Up to that point, the world was a problem, but we weren't" which had always been "the best thing about The Beatles".2000 Issued in November, the White Album was the band's first Apple Records album release. The new label was a subsidiary of Apple Corps, formed by the group on their return from India, fulfilling a plan of Epstein's to create a tax-effective business structure.2008 The record attracted more than two million advance orders, selling nearly four million copies in the US in little over a month, and its tracks dominated the playlists of US radio stations.2008 Despite its popularity, it did not receive flattering reviews at the time. According to Jonathan Gould,

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