The Beatles

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Douglas Cooke

Emerging out of the Liverpool, England, rock scene of the 1950s, the Beatles became the most successful and best known band of the twentieth century. In 1956, a Liverpool local named John Lennon formed the Quarrymen. At one of their first performances, John met another guitarist, Paul McCartney. The two hit it off immediately: Paul was impressed by John's energetic performance, and John was impressed that Paul knew how to tune a guitar, knew more than three chords, and could memorize lyrics. John and Paul developed a close friendship based on their enthusiasm for rock'n'roll, their ambition to go "to the toppermost of the poppermost," and a creative rivalry which drove them to constant improvement and experimentation. The pair soon recruited Paul's friend George Harrison to play lead guitar and nabbed a friend of John's, Stu Sutcliffe, to play the bass (though he did not know how). The Quarrymen, eventually renamed the Beatles, developed a local reputation for their rousing, exuberant performances and the appeal of their vocals. John and Paul were both excellent singers; Paul had a phenomenal range and versatility, while John had an uncanny ability to convey emotion through his voice. The sweetness and clarity of Paul's voice was ideal for tender love songs, while John specialized in larynx-wrenching rockers like "Twist and Shout." Their voices complemented each other perfectly, both in unison and in harmony, and each enriched his own style by imitating the other. The inexplicable alchemy of their voices is one of the most appealing features of the Beatles' music.

In 1960 the band members recruited drummer Pete Best for a four-month engagement in Hamburg, Germany, where they perfected their stage act. In 1961, Sutcliffe quit the band, and Paul took up the bass, eager to distinguish himself from the other two guitarists. The Beatles procured a manager, Brian Epstein, who shared their conviction that they would become "bigger than Elvis." After many attempts to get a recording contract, they secured an audition with producer George Martin in July, 1962. Martin, who liked their performance and was charmed by their humor and group chemistry, offered the Beatles a contract, but requested that they abandon Pete Best for studio work, whom he found musically unsuitable to the group chemistry. The Beatles gladly consented, and recruited Ringo Starr, whom they had befriended in Hamburg. Their first single--"Love Me Do" (released October, 1962)--reached number 17 on the British charts. Their next single, "Please Please Me" (January, 1963), hit number one. Delighted with their success, they recorded their first album, Please Please Me (March, 1963), and it too reached the top of the charts.

In those days, rock albums were made to cash in on the success of a hit single, and were padded with filler material, usually covers of other people's songs. If the artists had any more decent material, it was saved for the next single. However, the Beatles included eight Lennon-McCartney originals, along with six cover songs from their stage repertoire on their debut album. This generosity marked the beginning of the album as the primary forum of rock music, displacing the single, and setting a new standard of quality and originality. Please Please Me may sound less impressive today, but it was far superior to the average rock album of 1963. The opening track, "I Saw Her Standing There," was a revelation, a rousing, energetic rocker teeming with hormonal energy. (Released in America as Introducing the Beatles, the album didn't sell well.)

Their third single, "From Me To You" (April, 1963), also hit number one in England, but it was their fourth, "She Loves You" (August, 1963), which brought "Beatlemania"--the name given to the wild form of excitement which the Beatles elicited from their fans--to a fever pitch around the world. Most of the Beatles' lyrics during this period were inane--the "yeah yeah yeah" of "She Loves You" being perhaps the silliest--but when delivered with the Beatles' delirious enthusiasm, they worked. Real Beatlemania seems to have begun in late 1963 (the term was coined in a London paper's concert review in October). Their second album, With the Beatles (November, 1963), was similar to the first, with six cover songs and eight originals. The American release of "She Loves You" in January 1964 ignited Beatlemania there, and the group's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, was viewed by an estimated 73 million people.

The phenomenon of Beatlemania wasn't just a matter of screaming girls; the madness took many forms. A music critic for the London Times declared the Beatles "the greatest composers since Beethoven," and another detected "Aeolian cadences" in "Not a Second Time," though none of the Beatles knew what these were. Beatlemania often seemed divorced from the music itself: everything from dolls to dinner trays bore the likeness of the Fab Four, who had by now become the most recognized faces in the world. Grown businessmen would wear Beatlesque "moptop" wigs to work on Wall Street. Soon the franchise led to film with A Hard Day's Night, a comedy which spotlighted the Beatles' charm and humor as much as their music. The soundtrack--released in July, 1964--was the best album of the Beatles' early phase. Side one contained the songs from the movie, and side two provided six more hits. It was their first album of all original material, an unheard of accomplishment in rock music. Unfortunately, Capitol Records ripped off American fans by including only the songs from the movie on their version of the soundtrack, and filled the rest of the album with instrumental versions of those same songs. The Beatles' popularity was so great at this point that American fans were willing to pay full price for albums that barely lasted a half hour. The first seven British albums were diluted into ten American albums by offering ten songs each instead of the usual thirteen or fourteen. (The situation was not rectified until the advent of the CD, when the British versions were finally released in America.)