Beatles Band Quotes

Asleep by the Smiths Vapour Trail by Ride Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum Dear Prudence by the Beatles Gypsy by Suzanne Vega Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues Daydream by Smashing Pumpkins Dusk by Genesis (before Phil Collins was even in the band!) MLK by U2 Blackbird by the Beatles Landslide by Fleetwood Mac Asleep by the Smiths (again!) -Charlie's mixtape

the beatles were always a great band. nothing more nothing less

Voicemail #1: “Hi, Isabel Culpeper. I am lying in my bed, looking at the ceiling. I am mostly naked. I am thinking of … your mother. Call me.” Voicemail #2: The first minute and thirty seconds of “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” by the Bee Gees. Voicemail #3: “I’m bored. I need to be entertained. Sam is moping. I may kill him with his own guitar. It would give me something to do and also make him say something. Two birds with one stone! I find all these old expressions unnecessarily violent. Like, ring around the rosy. That’s about the plague, did you know? Of course you did. The plague is, like, your older cousin. Hey, does Sam talk to you? He says jack shit to me. God, I’m bored. Call me.” Voicemail #4: “Hotel California” by the Eagles, in its entirety, with every instance of the word California replaced with Minnesota. Voicemail #5: “Hi, this is Cole St. Clair. Want to know two true things? One, you’re never picking up this phone. Two, I’m never going to stop leaving long messages. It’s like therapy. Gotta talk to someone. Hey, you know what I figured out today? Victor’s dead. I figured it out yesterday, too. Every day I figure it out again. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel like there’s no one I can —” Voicemail #6: “So, yeah, I’m sorry. That last message went a little pear-shaped. You like that expression? Sam said it the other day. Hey, try this theory on for size: I think he’s a dead British housewife reincarnated into a Beatle’s body. You know, I used to know this band that put on fake British accents for their shows. Boy, did they suck, aside from being assholes. I can’t remember their name now. I’m either getting senile or I’ve done enough to my brain that stuff’s falling out. Not so fair of me to make this one-sided, is it? I’m always talking about myself in these things. So, how are you, Isabel Rosemary Culpeper? Smile lately? Hot Toddies. That was the name of the band. The Hot Toddies.” Voicemail #20: “I wish you’d answer.

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

Even the most successful ideas in the world such as the telephone, radio and The Beatles band initially received negative feedback.

But being born on the same planet as the Beatles is one of the ten best things that’s ever happened to me.

We hate Simple Minds. They were no.1 in our Top Five Bands or Musicians who will have to be shot come the musical revolution (Michael Bolton, U2, Bryan Adams, and, surprise surprise, Genesis were tucked in behind them. Berry wanted to shoot The Beatles, but I pointed out that someone had already done it.

We ate, did our homework, got good grades, kissed our parents goodnight and always had the secret door and shared experiences to go to. It was truly remarkable, and doing it as a group made us feel invulnerable. As soon as the drums and amps were set up and Jean and Kathie hit it, I tell you there was nothing more to say. Conversation stopped, and the magic carpet ride took off. I’ve never felt anything more powerful in my life.

The Beatles.” “What about The Beatles?” “They nailed it.” “Nailed what?” “Everything.” “What do you mean?” Dev takes his arm and puts it right against mine, skin to skin, sweat on sweat, touch on touch. Then he glides his hand into mine and intertwines our fingers. “This,” he says. “This is why The Beatles got it.” “I’m afraid I’m not following…” “Other bands, it’s about sex. Or pain. Or some fantasy. But The Beatles, they knew what they were doing.You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?” “What?” ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can’t hide. Every single successful love song of the past fifty years can be traced back to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.

Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band.

I don't even know how to respond to that. Like, I'm in an actual band, Wells. I'm not saying we're the Beatles, but we're not exactly honking our way through "Hot Cross Buns" in the school auditorium

They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band’s best record, and how Sgt. Pepper’s wasn’t really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.

We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren't. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically 'Don't bother,' so we didn't. I left Cambridge and starved for three years.

I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.

(on learning Westlife had beaten Oasis, U2 and The Beatles in an album chart battle in November 2006): There is no God.

People are always complaining that American culture has conquered the world. In fact, British culture probably remains more dominant. This fading midsize island has kept a bizarre grip on the global imagination. It’s not only their sports that the Brits have exported. The world’s six best-selling novels of the past hundred years are all British: four Harry Potters, one Agatha Christie, and one J. R. R. Tolkien. The world’s best-selling band ever is the Beatles. And the sports league with the biggest global impact is surely the Premier League.

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, " Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

Like I told you, Sam and Patrick love their big song, so I thought I'd read it to have something to discuss with them. In the end, the magazine compared him with John Lennon from the Beatles. I told that to Sam later, and she got really mad. She said he was like Jim Morrison if he was like anybody, but really, he isn't like anybody but himself. We were all at the Big Boy after Rocky Horror, and it started this big discussion. Craig said the problem with things is that everyone is always comparing everyone with everyone and because of that, it discredits people, like in his photography classes. Bob said that it was all about our parents not wanting to let go of their youth and how it kills them when they can't relate to something. Patrick said that the problem was that since everything has happened already, it makes it hard to break new ground. Nobody can be as big as the Beatles because the Beatles already gave it a "context." The reason they were so big is that they had no one to compare themselves with, so the sky was the limit. Sam added that nowadays a band or someone would compare themselves to the Beatles after the second album, and their own personal voice would be less from that moment on.

It is the sound of the crowd that can be heard in the second, crescendoing rush of the orchestra that follows the final verse, rising from a hum to a gasp to a shout... fusing at last to a shriek (its similarity to the sound of the crowds at Beatle concerts is surely no accident). The onrushing sound of the orchestra at the end of "A Day in the Life" has transcended more than the conventions of Sgt. Pepper's Band. It is the nightmare resolution of the Beatles' show within a show. It is the sound in the eras of the high-wire artist as the ground rushes up from below. There is a blinding flash of silence, then the stunning impact of a tremendous E major piano chord that hangs in the air for a small eternity, slowly fading away, a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member if the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all.

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers.

We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother,

Chelsea fans may have been listening to the Beatles and the Stones, but at Highbury half-time entertainment was provided by the Metropolitan Police Band and their vocalist, Constable Alex Morgan. Morgan (whose rank never changed ...) ... sang highlights from light operettas.

The world couldn’t have been hungrier for Anthology, with a ten-hour documentary and three huge-selling volumes of outtakes, turning into a joyous global celebration. The Anthology double-CD packages might have been more purchased than played (everybody back then bought more music than they had time to listen to). They included two new songs, Lennon tape fragments that the others finished: “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” The flaw was Jeff Lynne’s production—George Martin wasn’t invited, because Harrison flatly refused to work with him. It’s ironic that when you watch Anthology, the only music that sounds dated is from 1995. But no matter how blasphemous the idea seemed, both songs were disarmingly beautiful, as was the documentary, to the point where you could drop in on any random hour (or binge all ten) and enjoy. One of the wisest decisions of Anthology was

Men who love the Stones are fixated on cock. I’m sorry, but that’s the only word. And a firehose is a symbolic fantasy cock. It’s pathetic. Male Stones fans are frozen at eighteen months old, just discovering the thrill of yanking on the rubber band of their own phallus. Female Stones fans are even worse. Mick Jagger has a weird gross mouth that makes him look like a cod, and this turns them on. They’re sexually aroused by fish-men. They’re deviants.” “So what are Beatles fans fixated on? The glory of pussy?” “Exactly. Strawberry Fields is not just a place in Liverpool, Mr. Rookwood.

But if the "genius" campaign gave the other Beach Boys short shrift, the real damage was to Brian himself. It put even greater pressure on him. It made him even more driven and caused him to fear failure all the more. It was hard enough to match the Beatles, but now he had to keep up with Mozart?

There was a Ringo album coming down the pike, and a reunion, at least by the three of them (Harrison, Lennon, and Starr), that was all planned out. That was going to be Lennon’s next move after the world tour,” Douglas continues. “He talked fondly about McCartney every night, and he always wanted to redo certain Beatles songs, but he really spoke more like he really loved those guys. The only person that he was pissed at was George, because George put out this memoir [I Me Mine] and John was really, really pissed about that. I remember him saying, ‘How do you write about your life and not talk about the guy whose band you were in?

The Rubber Soul woman stays up late drinking wine on her rug after midnight, until it’s time for bed. She speaks languages he can’t translate. She’s not impressed by the Beatle charm—when you say she’s looking good, she acts as if it’s understood. She’s cool. She makes the Rubber Soul man feel like a real nowhere boy.

More popular than Jesus "More popular than Jesus" is part of a remark made by John Lennon of the Beatles in a March 1966 interview, in which he argued that the public were more infatuated with the band than with Jesus, and that Christian faith was declining to the extent that it might be outlasted by rock music. Wikipedia

As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.

The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights—the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, the Beach Boys’ 1974 Endless Summer. Best of all: Bob Dylan’s 1971 Greatest Hits Volume II, with virtually no hits, just deep cuts chosen by the artist.

PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called “Spies Like Us,” and I am a horrible person for being the one to tell you. It was the theme for a big-budget Hollywood spy comedy starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Nobody saw the movie, but Paul’s theme was worse than the movie could have been. MTV played it constantly during the 1985 holiday season, though radio wouldn’t touch it. Paul does a rap that goes something like, “Oooh oooh, no one can dance like you.” In the video he plays multiple roles as members of a studio band, mugging and biting his lower lip. The drumming is where his cheeky-chappy act gets profoundly upsetting. You see this video, you’re going to be depressed for at least ten minutes about the existential condition of Paul-dom. His enthusiasm makes you doubt the sincerity of his other public displays. It makes you doubt yourself. You might think it’s a cheap laugh but it will cost you something.

Harrison’s visit to Dylan’s Woodstock sessions and his invitation to Eric Clapton to solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” convinced him that an outsider could revive stalled sessions. Dylan and the Band treated Harrison as an equal, while in his own band, Lennon and McCartney persistently patronized his material, even as it began to peak. (Lennon, in fact, sat out most of Harrison’s Beatle recordings from here on out.) Taking in an ally could only ease Harrison’s reentry into the contentious Beatle orbit. Along with lobbying for Ringo Starr to replace Pete Best, bringing Preston into the Get Back project stands as a defining move for Harrison: he single-handedly rescued Let It Be, and pushed his material throughout 1969, until Abbey Road featured his best work yet.

But the intimate candor of their voices, the wit of the guitars and drums—it all makes Rubber Soul my favorite story they had to tell. Even the American version—this is the only case where the shamefully butchered U.S. LP might top the U.K. original, if only because it opens with the magnificent one-two punch of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Norwegian Wood.” I still can’t decide which Rubber Soul is my favorite, having had a mere lifetime to make up my mind.

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,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation.

Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,” Norman went on. “It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet an entrepreneur from Liverpool in Soho who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno but with other club owners as well. They kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.

Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would.

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

And complaining about Paul is what the rest of us do. That’s his role in our lives. We prosecute Paul for the flaws we despise in ourselves. In real life I’ve always been attracted to Paul types because they don’t sit around and talk about the shit they’re going to do—they get it done. They’re quick to say “good enough” and move on. Paul was a closer, not a tinker-forever artist like Brian Wilson, who set out to top Sgt. Pepper with Smile but failed because he couldn’t tell himself “pencils down” and let go. He couldn’t stop doing retakes of tracks he’d already finished. The musicians’ joke at the Smile sessions: “Perfect, just one more.” Brian had the melodies, but lacked the killer instinct. So people decided Brian was a heavier artist. There’s something uncool about closers. It’s hard to trust them.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a Rolling Stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins “Reminder” by Mumford & Sons “Barton Hollow” by The Civil Wars “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele “Can’t Break Her Fall” by Matt Kearney  “Stillborn” by Black Label Society “Come On Get Higher” by Matt Nathanson “I Won’t Give Up” by Jason Mraz “This Girl” by City & Colour “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday “I would be Sad” by The Avett Brothers “Hello, I’m Delaware” by City & Colour “99 Problems” by Hugo (originally written and performed by Jay-Z) “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons “Let It Be Me” by Ray LaMontagne “Rocketship” by Guster “Don’t Drink The Water” by Dave Matthews Band “Blackbird” by The Beatles

One story sums up their magical quality. On June 30th 1968, at the height of Apple optimism, Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor were driving back to London from Saltaire, Yorkshire, where they had been recording the Black Dyke Mills Band on a song of Paul’s called ‘Thingummybob’. They were in Bedfordshire. Let’s pick a village on the map and pay it a visit, said Beatle Paul. He found a village called Harrold, which they found quite hilarious, and turned off the A5. Harrold turned out to be a picture-perfect village, with a picture-perfect pub at its heart. The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up. Soon the whole village was in the pub, listening to Paul McCartney on the pub piano playing the as-yet-unreleased ‘Hey Jude’. Every Harrold resident danced and sang along, and the revelry went on until 3 a.m. It was beautiful, perfect, spontaneous and full of love. Harrold. You couldn’t make it up.

The four solo careers unveiled previously hidden internal politics as each man packed and moved out from the cozy Beatle mansion. Lennon seemed closest to Ringo, and then George; neither Harrison nor Lennon ever appeared on a McCartney solo album or vice-versa, whereas Ringo played for all three. Of course, Lennon’s solo “career” had begun as early as 1968 with numbers like “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9” during the White Album sessions, and then his avant-garde projects with Ono. Casual jams reflected these affinities as well: John and Yoko appeared onstage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and the Bonnie and Delaney band in London in December of 1969. Harrison was slumming with the band after sitting in for a night and having rather too much fun; he appeared onstage anonymously until it got reported in the music press. Mostly they got away with two weeks of touring, with Clapton and Harrison sharing lead guitars almost before most audiences figured this out.

If you tell people you’re writing a book about the Beatles, at first they smile and ask, “Another one? What’s left to say?” So I mention “Baby’s in Black,” or “It’s All Too Much,” or Lil Wayne’s version of “Help” or the Kendrick Lamar battle rhyme where he says “blessings to Paul McCartney,” or Hollywood Bowl, or Rock ’n’ Roll Music, or the Beastie Boys’ “I’m Down”—but I rarely get that far, because they’re already jumping in with their favorite overlooked Beatle song, the artifact nobody else prizes properly, the nuances nobody else notices. Within thirty seconds they’re assigning me a new chapter I must write. And telling me a story to go with it. Every few days, I get into a Beatles argument I’ve never had before, while continuing other arguments that have been raging since my childhood. And though I’ve spent my whole life devouring every scrap of information about them, I’m constantly learning. I guarantee the day this book comes out, I will find out something new. Things like that used to pain me. But that’s what it means to love the Beatles—you never run out of surprises.

24. The Rutles, “Cheese and Onions” (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: “Did the Rutles influence you at all?” Simon: “No.” Interviewer: “Did they influence Art Garfunkel?” Simon: “Who?”) “Cheese and Onions” is a psychedelic ersatz Lennon piano ballad so gorgeous, it eventually got bootlegged as a purported Beatle rarity. Innes captures that tone of benignly befuddled pomposity—“I have always thought in the back of my mind / Cheese and onions”—along with the boyish vulnerability that makes it moving. Hell, he even chews gum exactly like John. The Beatles’ psychedelic phase has always been ripe for parody. Witness the 1967 single “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” by the genius Brit comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, from Beyond the Fringe and the BBC series Not Only . . . ​But Also, starring John Lennon in a cameo as a men’s room attendant. “The L.S. Bumble Bee” sounds like the ultimate Pepper parody—“Freak out, baby, the Bee is coming!”—but it came out months before Pepper, as if the comedy team was reeling from Pet Sounds and wondering how the Beatles might respond. Cook and Moore are a secret presence in Pepper—when the audience laughs in the theme song, it’s taken from a live recording of Beyond the Fringe, produced by George Martin.

right to use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings. Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would. Bono Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple’s marketing muscle. He was confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that the band’s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.” Bono knew he needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs. “I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called ‘Vertigo’ that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times.” He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned

When George was a kid he used to follow me and my first girlfriend, Cynthia—who became my wife—around. We’d come out of art school, and he’d be hovering around like those kids at the gate of the Dakota now.

Try describing a few of the most wildly successful pop albums of the twentieth century without mentioning the artist and title. A concept rock album about a fictional Edwardian military band, featuring musical styles borrowed from Indian classical music, vaudeville, and musique concrete, its sleeve design including images of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Gustav Jung, Sir Robert Peel, Marlene Dietrich, and Aleister Crowley? That’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, one of the biggest selling records of all time. How about a record exploring the perception of time, mental illness, and alterity? Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which has to date sold around 45 million copies worldwide. Ask any of those 45 million who bought a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon if they thought themselves pretentious for listening to an album described by one of the band members as “an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy,” and the answer would almost certainly be no.

Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser’s parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, 'Life can be other than it has been.

As your life grows longer, and your memory gets fuller, The Beatles come with you, and mutate along the way. They define the extremes of your memory; they are with you when you are just discovering music, too young to know better, and they remain with you, on top of all the other heart noise crowding your chemistry, when you are supposedly too old for surprises.

Then the center of influence shifted to London, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Who, the Kinks, and all the bands that orbited them. San Francisco, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana, had its moment in a psychedelic spotlight around the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but as the 1960s gave way to the '70s, the center of the musical universe shifted unmistakably to Los Angeles. "It was incredibly vital," said Jonathan Taplin, who first came to LA as the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band and later relocated there to produce Martin Scorsese's breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. "The nexus of the music business had really moved from New York to Los Angeles. That had been a profound shift . . . It was very clear that something big had changed."'' For a breathtaking few years, the stars aligned to glittering effect in Los Angeles. The city attracted brilliant artists; skilled session musicians; soulful songwriters; shrewd managers, agents, and record executives; and buzz-building clubs. From this dense constellation of talent, a shimmering new sound emerged, a smooth blend of rock and folk with country influences. Talented young people from all over the country began descending on Los Angeles with their guitar cases or dreams of becoming the next Geffen. Irving Azoff, a hyper-ambitious young agent and manager who arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, remembered, "It was like the gold rush. You've never seen anything like it in the entertainment business. The place was exploding. I was here—right place, right time. I tell everybody, `If you're really good in this business, you only have to be right once,' so you kind of make your own luck, but it is luck, too. It was hard to be in LA in that time and have any talent whatsoever in the music business—whether you were a manager, an agent, an artist, a producer, or writer—[and] not to make it, because it was boom times. It was the gold rush, and it was fucking fun.

The so-called Rad Four donned comedic Technicolor dream coats, consumed seven hundred sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a ground breaking record no one actually likes.

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

But the experience was also fulfilling: Paul’s new album had the variety that was his hallmark, with ballads and rockers, acoustic tracks, and high-energy electric cuts. But most importantly, where each of his post-Beatles releases had tracks that Paul knew were throwaways—throwaways that he liked, or that struck him as having a personality that earned them a place on an album, but throwaways all the same—Band on the Run had an energizing consistency, track for track.

Wings had become a formidable live band, in which Seiwell’s fluid drumming and Henry’s sleek lead playing were crucial. Paul was dying to tour Australia and America, huge markets for both the Beatles and himself, but he held off until Wings were ready. At the end of the British tour, they were. And then they were gone, just as he was about to record a hit album to take on tour.

Elvis had been a truck driver, but John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ray Davies, and Keith Richards were all art college students who tended to think of themselves as artists.

over-the-top humor and iconoclastic take on conformity, censorship, hypocrisy, and sexual inhibition. Mad magazine on steroids, with sound. Talking about the album and his band several months later, Frank Zappa said, “I am trying to use the weapons of a disoriented and unhappy society against itself. The Mothers of Invention are designed to come in the back door and kill you while you’re sleeping.

On 22 November, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Parlophone released the band’s second album, With the Beatles. Advance orders of half a million put it instantly at the top of the UK album charts, so finally ending the seven-month reign there of Please Please Me. It would eventually sell one million copies, more than any album previously released in Britain except the cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

As a guitarist, though much of the world didn’t know it, since the Beatles’ album credits rarely mentioned who played the solos, he contributed some of band’s most virtuosic playing, including the stinging solo on lead guitarist George Harrison’s ‘Taxman.

John Lennon once claimed that his band, The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon’s life paralleled Christ’s - both came from nothing, became figureheads of worldwide cults and changed the world. They also had premature, painful and undeserved deaths at the hands of others who envied and craved their abilities, influence and popularity. In the late Sixties, Lennon even seemed to adopt a Christ-like image with his long hair, beard and the various robes he started wearing, perhaps as a sly visual parody of his previous remarks.

Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.

Children learned to play instruments not with the hope of becoming a “star” but because playing and singing were regarded as social assets. (James McCartney, born in Lancashire in 1902, told future Beatle Paul: “Learn to play the piano, son, and you’ll always get invited to parties.”)

Listening to music—it takes time. Human bodies respond to music over time in different ways, and that’s where the surprises are.

Nyro’s plodding craftsmanship wasn’t out of step with that of her most sophisticated male peers, including the Beatles, who were tackling projects that were long both in nature and time of execution. The Beatles set the standard for such experimentation with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—considered by many to be the first concept album—

I Saw Her Standing There’ is the best first song on a debut album, ever.

Interesting band. I want to manage them. It will cost me 4 hours per week.

The craze surrounding the Beatles—as well as demonstrations and a near-riot by hundreds of kids in Leipzig in October 1965 after authorities there banned almost all the local Beat bands—elicited commentary directly from head of state Walter Ulbricht during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party: I am of the opinion, comrades, that we should put an end to the monotony of the Yeah Yeah Yeah and whatever else it’s called. Must we really copy every piece of garbage that comes from the West?

But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he’d never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofessional. It worked, too, with Hugh McCracken playing that great guitar break in “Too Many People.” (My favorite McCracken solo, except maybe Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.”) For Paul, country life meant stretching himself. He kept featuring

CARY GRANT IS THE MCCARTNEY OF MOVIE STARS—HIS STORY has much to tell us about Paul’s. They share a spiritual connection, beyond their pronunciation of “Judy.” (Paul described his “hey Judy-Judy-Judy” ad libs as “Cary Grant on heat.”) They dazzled Americans as the ultimate English dream dates—yet both were self-inventions, street guys who taught themselves to pose as posh charmers. Both grew up working-class in hardscrabble industrial cities; both lost their mothers at a young age. (Grant, whose real name was Archibald Leach, was nine when he was told his mother had gone on a trip; more than twenty years later, after he was famous, he learned she was locked up in an institution and got her released.) Both dropped out of school to fight their way into the sleaziest sewers of show biz—Grant joined a troupe of traveling acrobats, which must have been an even rougher scene than the Reeperbahn—yet to them it was a world of freedom and excitement. But both found lasting fame by turning on the charm for Americans who saw them as dapper gentlemen. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.

« Laisseriez-vous votre fille sortir avec un Rolling Stone ? », leurs trognes de repris de justice détrônaient les aimables Beatles à l'heure du divorce. Ce mélange détonnant de blues noir et de soul blanche, de rock minéral et d'effervescence pop, d'énergie suicidaire et de rébellion affichée. Une acmé. ~ p 109

always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: “The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which just doesn’t work.” So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing—just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible.

Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by “Mind Games” when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise money for the cause of spaying cats and dogs. (You’d think the sound of Toad the Wet Sprocket doing “Instant Karma” would be enough to neuter any animal.)

But “God” is the best song any Beatle wrote about religion, with all due respect to George’s “My Sweet Lord.” Both were produced by Phil Spector the same year—with Ringo on drums. (Talk about ecumenical.) “God” is where John does his most beautiful singing, reaching for a doo-wop tremble straight out of his beloved Rosie and the Originals, with that “Elvis echo” on his voice. It’s one of the two or three songs I’d play if I had ten minutes to convince a jury that John was the greatest of rock and roll singers-as-singers. Along with “Girl,” and maybe “Ticket to Ride.” Or “You Can’t Do That”? “Money”? “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”? “Oh My Love”? “I’m So Tired”?

Some records turned out better than others: Off the Ground quite rotten, Flaming Pie and New and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard quite excellent. One of my favorites is Run Devil Run, from 1999, the year after Linda died,

Lennon was – whether by luck, accident or perceptive foresight – at the forefront of the psychedelic era’s passion for rose-tinted introspection, which channelled the likes of children’s literature, Victorian fairgrounds and circuses, and an innocent sense of wonder. McCartney, too, moved with the times when writing his children’s singalong Yellow Submarine. Among the hippie era’s other moments of nostalgia were Pink Floyd’s Bike and The Gnome from their debut album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, recorded at EMI Studios as the Beatles worked on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, laid down in 1966 but released in the same month as Sgt Pepper, and which drew from Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories just as Lennon did; and many more, from Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through The Tulips to Traffic’s psychedelic fantasy Hole In My Shoe. The Beatles continued writing songs evoking childhood to the end of their days. Sgt Pepper – itself a loose concept album harking back to earlier, more innocent times – referenced Lewis Carroll (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds), youthful anticipation of old age (When I’m Sixty-Four), a stroll down memory lane (Good Morning Good Morning), and the sensory barrage of a circus big top extravaganza (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!). It was followed by Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, two films firmly pitched at the widest possible audience. A splendid time was, indeed, guaranteed for all.

Lennon’s vituperative Rolling Stone interview was conducted in New York City in December 1970, shortly after the completion of his debut solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and his involvement with primal therapy. The album, Lennon’s masterpiece, showed the artist stripped bare: in turns paranoid, wounded and angry, railing against targets including fame, the Beatles, religion, drugs, his family and the media. In the interview he was similarly irascible, detailing the many grievances he felt at the disintegration of the Beatles and Apple, and reshaping the band’s historical narrative in the wake of the split. He later

The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephemeral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock 'n' roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I'd like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn't stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural resources.

That’s another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul’s scatting at the end of the “Pepper” reprise. The mono version was the one the Beatles, Martin, and Emerick spent three weeks mixing. The stereo mix was a quickie afterthought, with none of the Beatles involved or even present

The other songs they recorded that May were silly ones—“All Together Now,” “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” “It’s All Too Much” might seem silly too, but it rocks, which the Beatles weren’t much interested in doing in 1967, a chance to hear all four Beatles concentrating on a single idea for a stretch of time. They show off individually (at any moment, you can pick out what any particular Beatle is doing) yet slip into the collective groove.

(five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps

Despite all the solo vocals, each using the others as a back-up group, the White Album still sounds haunted by memories of friendship—that “dreamlike state” they could still zoom into hearing each other sing. They translated Rishikesh into their own style of English pagan pastoral—so many talking animals, so many changes in the weather. One of my favorite British songwriters, Luke Haines from the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, once told me in an interview that his band was making “our Wicker Man album.” He was miffed I had no idea what he meant. “You can’t understand British bands without seeing The Wicker Man. Every British band makes its Wicker Man album.” So I rented the classic 1973 Hammer horror film, and had creepy dreams about rabbits for months, but he’s right, and the White Album is the Beatles’ Wicker Man album five years before The Wicker Man, a rustic retreat where nature seems dark and depraved in a primal English sing-cuckoo way. They also spruced up their acoustic guitar chops in India, learning folkie fingerpicking techniques from fellow pilgrim Donovan, giving the songs some kind of ancient mystic chill.

Dandelion” is easily the best faux-McCartney song of the Sixties.

They made their greatest music in a five-year rush, starting in 1968: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street. I can’t really argue that the Stones were better when they were ripping the Beatles; I’m not going to look you in the eye and claim that “Dandelion” beats “Gimme Shelter” or “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Rocks Off.” But it’s tempting. For a couple of years there, in 1966 and 1967, Mick was the bitchiest rock and roll singer who ever arched an eyebrow. And just as Aftermath was the Stones racing to catch up with Rubber Soul, Revolver was the Beatles racing to catch up with Aftermath.

THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever called it The Beatles.) In the predigital days, everybody made their own cassette for actual listening, with each fan taping a different playlist.

I’d have too much John (“Oh Yoko!,” “I’m Steppin’ Out,” “Oh My Love,” “New York City,” “Nobody Told Me”) and too much Paul (“Jet,” “Friends to Go,” “Flaming Pie,” “Too Many People,” “We Got Married,” “Simple as That,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “You Gave Me the Answer”).

will always ride hard for Mick’s Paul phase, summed up by the compilation Through the Past, Darkly, with its awesomely ridiculous octagonal cover.

True, there’s nothing as great as “A Day in the Life,” but “2000 Light Years From Home” isn’t far behind, while “Citadel,” “2000 Man,” or “The Lantern” can hang with anything else on Pepper. The psychedelic Stones peaked with the August 1967 double-sided single of “Dandelion” and “We Love You,” an “All You Need Is Love” parody with backing vocals from John and Paul. The Stones filmed a video for “We Love You” as a commentary on their drug trials, set in a Victorian courtroom. Mick plays Oscar Wilde, in the dock for crimes of love; Marianne Faithfull plays his boy toy Lord Alfred Douglas. And as the judge—Keith, of course, complete with wig, robe, and gavel.

One of the things I love about the Stones is that whenever they aimed for Beatle-style warmth—as in “The Singer Not the Song” or “Wild Horses”—they still sounded fabulously surly. That’s what made them the Stones. They never got close to the unzipped exuberance of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “I Feel Fine” or “Eight Days a Week”—part of Mick’s vast intelligence was to understand he didn’t have that kind of sincerity in his empty heart, and he was too crafty to make a clown of himself trying to fake it. He knew he couldn’t out-Beatle the Beatles. So the Stones chose different turf to conquer. The Stones were Stonesier. The Beatles were merely better.

John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with a big assist from Elton John. It’s not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is “Don’t need a gun to blow your mind.” After December 1980, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” dropped off the radio and hasn’t been heard since. But the most shocking thing isn’t the gun line—it’s the lush pop feel. The song it really resembles is the Wings hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” with the same yacht-rock studio sheen. Both serve love-is-the-answer platitudes, though attractively warmhearted ones: “Whatever gets you to the light, ’sall right” vs. “I don’t know but I think love is fine.” Both hit Number One, for just one week. John’s sax solo is Bobby Keys, Paul’s is Tom Scott, though they could have traded places without anyone noticing. Yet I loved both songs as a boy, and still do—Elton, always the kindliest-sounding of rock megastars, sings on John’s hit, and sounds like the guiding spirit of Paul’s, as if he’s a yenta nudging them together.

Side One of 1967–1970 is up there with Side Three of Hot Rocks in the annals of great vinyl sides. (“Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “With a Little Help,” “Lucy,” “A Day in the Life,” and “All You Need Is Love” vs. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Gimme Shelter.” Damn.) For the Beatles, it was just another rip-off repackage.

Give Me Love” was a hit around the same time as Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken,” a superficially similar hippie-dad prayer, yet I violently hated “Morning Has Broken,” just hated it, despised the choked sobs and prissy whispers, still hate it, because it sounded to my ears (and might still sound, if I had the stomach to investigate) like a phony version of what “Give Me Love” does for real. All four Beatles were surrogate dads to Seventies kids, which partly why we fantasized about them so much, and if George was the dad who’s perpetually disappointed in you, “Give Me Love” is a song that did and still does make me fantasize about what a world fathered and raised by George might look like. Yet it’s the kind of song George distrusted—a song that could get people’s hopes up, making promises he was scared he couldn’t keep.

20. Bob Dylan, “4th Time Around” (1966) Right after Rubber Soul dropped, Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde, where he sang this scorchingly funny parody of “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan unkindly played “4th Time Around” for John in London. As Lennon recalled in 1968, “He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Yeah, well—talk about the anxiety of influence. All over Blonde on Blonde, you can hear how hard Dylan was feeling Rubber Soul—especially in songs like “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” So he probably wrote “4th Time Around” as a diversion to keep people from noticing how much “Norwegian Wood” there was in “Visions of Johanna.

They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow’s nastiest and best noirs, Where Danger Lives and His Kind of Woman) said he was the only director who could outdrink him. When he wasn’t hitting the bar, Farrow liked to discuss theology with visiting nuns and priests.

Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap—every music genre you could name (or couldn’t)—(and a few that probably didn’t really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devoured—and paid for—more music than ever before or since. The average citizen purchased CDs in numbers that look shocking now, and even shocking then. Every week, thousands of people bought new copies of the Grease soundtrack, from 1978, and nobody knew why. Even critics had trouble finding things to complain about (though we sure tried).

It all culminated in the 1995 Anthology, which would have seemed like an embarrassing defeat only a few years earlier. The record company had figured out how to treat the catalog as a prestige item; the 1982 Reel Music compilation was the final U.S. release that could be described as a rip-off. The “drop-T” logo belatedly became a thing, with its elegant serifs—it never appeared on any original Beatle albums, but in the Nineties it became a brand as powerful (in a different way) as the Black Flag bars. The 1994 Live at the BBC, two CDs of radio tapes (proving, as Robert Christgau wrote, “in addition to everything else, they were the funniest rock stars ever”), was a tantalizing hint of how many goodies still remained in the vaults.

Silly Love Songs” wanders on for a bizarre and very unpop six minutes. Paul was passionate about music-making, which is different from being passionate about music.

(The Chiffons had so many hits better than “He’s So Fine”—“Out of This World,” “Why Am I So Shy,” “I Have a Boyfriend”—and it’s a shame George never got around to rewriting those.) Just

My favorite prototypical Beatlemaniac appears in the great documentary The Compleat Beatles, in a TV news clip.

There are two schools of thought about Ringo: (1) he was a brilliant drummer who made the Beatles possible, or (2) he was a clod who got lucky, the biggest fool who ever hit the big time.

Prince, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (2004)