Beatles became the biggest rock & roll band in the world because they didn’t have it choice: they were four geeks from the working class in Liverpool and knew that none would never have considered them if they were simply a good band. We we will never know what a good Beatles album could have been, because they recorded just absurdly great albums. They were the great albums of the other bands that all comparison just looked good. If the Beatles had decided to be a band by singles they would have been the best ever, by far. Instead they invented the concept albums as we know it today. They dealt with each of their records as an artistic adventure, filling them with variations, harmonies, jokes and emotional jumps beyond imagination.
All four members of the band continued to challenge each other by aiming more and more in tall, and George Martin continued to refuse to say no to their ideas, even the most absurd. Da Please Please Me at Abbey Road, from A Hard Day’s Night to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, every Beatles record marks a fundamental step forward in their journey, and everyone has their own unique personality. Revolver it begins with counting 1,2,3,4 exactly as it did Please Please Me four years earlier, but that count was full of creative explosions, and made everything, every sound possible. They are the songs to do albums, but also albums to make songs.
The Beatles were so big that even the smallest moments they have become legendary. Even when they weren’t working hard, they were able to pull out goodies like Yellow Submarine. Sometimes they tried with all their might to sound like they weren’t there believing for nothing, as in Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, which reportedly took 40 hours to register (where did the first 39 go?). The things they discarded seem to have inspired the entire career of other bands: the hit chord of She’s a Woman seems to be the first suit of Black Sabbath, the harmonies and the theme Baby’s love-in-black sex is John and Paul who invent David Bowie. As much as it may seem absurd, before Sgt.Pepper the Beatles records were not released in the United States in their form original. The American public did not hear the versions released in England until 1987 when they were published on cd. Beatles for Sale didn’t exist in America because half the songs came out on Beatles 65 and the other half on Beatles VI. Fans are thrilled by these fragmented editions, but for many of us, once we hear the originals, it seems impossible to think that Drive My Car is not on Rubber Soul.
For many, the Beatles records define the 1960s. But the Beatles still remain the favorite band today in the world, 40 years after dissolving, 30 years after John Lennon’s death and 10 years after his disappearance by George Harrison. Their collection of singles 1 was the best-selling album of the 2000s, and there is no boy don’t go crazy the first time you listen to Eight Days a Week. Most fans of Beatles wasn’t born when their records came out, but the power of their music keeps growing. Up those albums you can hear the Beatles with their extreme and different ideas, voices and identities coming together to create something absolutely new.