Bred in the proletariat trappings of Northern England, a foursome of floppy-haired rock stars would eventually emerge to transform the landscape of rock’n’roll during the 1960s. Speaking in distinctive Scouse accents, disposed toward a demeanor of flippant boyishness and irreverence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr; would eventually coalesce to what is frequently considered to be the greatest rock band of all-time, the Beatles.
Beginning humbly with a mere pairing of Lennon and McCartney in 1956, George Harrison soon joined in 1957. The “Lost Beatle,” Pete Best, joined quickly thereafter and the Beatles eventually signed a recording contact in 1962. With catchy singles such as “Please Please Me” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles popularity soon transfixed Britain. In a seminal moment for British rock, the Beatles traveled to the United States in 1964, sparking what would come to be known as “Beatlemania.” Their performance on the Ed O’ Sullivan show, a mainstay program in the United States, prompted a record-breaking 73 million viewers, capturing almost 40% of the entire American population at the time.
Through 1964 to 1968, the Beatles entirely revamped their musical brand, deviating from traditional rock sources like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly; instead exploring different rhythms in ballads, psychedelic hard rock, to more varied and experimental melodies. In this article, we’ll review the albums that most thoroughly capture the evolution of the Beatles, music whose resonance and influence still lingers to this day.
Hard Day’s Night (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night was the first Beatle’s album to consist exclusively of original songs. Fresh off their raucous appearance on the Ed O’ Sullivan show, the Beatles were rolling along a rollicking wave of popularity in 1964. Despite a whirlwind schedule, the band managed to record A Hard Day’s Night in nine non-consecutive days, between January and June. It featured future classics such as the eponymously titled “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I Fell, and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Recalling the emerging maturity of the Beatles during the production of this album, Lennon once recalled: “We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers.” Gone were the shoddy covers of classic rock songs in ruddy German taverns. In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles established a formation of identity that would brook their confidence in ensuing years, when they would experiment with more novel genres of music.
Help (1965)
Help!, like A Hard Day’s Night before it, accompanied a feature film produced by the Beatles. In this album, the Beatles had established themselves firmly as the wunderkinds of the rock world. It is no coincidence that, as a result, the album’s namesake song “Help,” grapples with the group’s escalating worldwide popularity. In ruminating on the song, Lennon opined “When ‘Help’ came out, I was actually crying out for help…I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help.” The album also marked the band’s continuing evolution, incorporating country-western, bluegrass, folk and classical music into their compositions. Featuring a classic cover of the foursome, Help! Introduced several iconic tracks into the mainstream, including “Help,” “Yesterday,” and “Ticket to Ride.”
Rubber Soul (1965)
The Beatles sixth album release, Rubber Soul introduced audiences to a distinctive new sound, featuring a significant influx of studio experimentation. No longer were the Beatles entirely bound to pop nor beholden to the sole desires of their mass fanbase. Each artist within the group began to become more insistent on establishing their own sound, flourishing their own songwriting style. As Paul McCartney alluded to, “[Our] early material was directly relating to fans, saying ‘Please buy this record,’ but now we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that. Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining.” Rubber Soul did not invest solely in love songs, it instead reflected on broader themes like nostalgia, memory, insecurity, and deceit. It remains a transcendent album of the group, replete with memorable melodies like “Norwegian Wood,” “Michelle,” and “In My Life.”
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1966)
Likely the peak of the Beatles creative threshold, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band invoked the Beatles thorough embrace of the psychedelic. It also implied a desire for the Beatles to break away decisively from the constraints of their popularity and invest in a completely concocted identity. Though it was still John, Paul, George, and Ringo; they attired themselves entirely differently, betraying more of an affinity for the Beatnik culture of the West Coast than their own working-class roots in Liverpool.
Considering the conception of this iconic album, Lennon mused: “The whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in, when people were no longer ‘The Beatles’ or ‘The Crickets’ – They were suddenly ‘Fred And His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes.’ I think [Paul] was influenced by that.” Paul corroborated Lennon’s conclusion, noting further: “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place.”
The culmination of their ambitions resulted in an eclectic, imaginative, and singular masterwork. Moreso than any of its preceding albums, Sgt Pepper’s saw the Beatles pushing the boundaries of the studio, making extensive use of orchestras, varied instrumentation, and a cacophony of hired musicians; to create a bombastic, garish and irreverent sound fit for the age. George Martin, who worked with the Beatles on the album, commented on its legacy: “Looking back on Pepper, you can see it was quite an icon, and it probably did change the face of recording, but we didn’t do it consciously…I think Pepper did represent what the young people were on about, and it seemed to coincide with the revolution in young people’s thinking. It was the epitome of the Swinging Sixties. It linked up with Mary Quant and miniskirts and all those things – The freedom of sex, the freedom of soft drugs like marijuana and so on.”
White (1968)
The album White, in myriad ways, reflected the growing disintegration of the Beatles. The album is disjunctive, lacking an overall narrative among the featured tracks, which usually had been a notable feature of previous albums. It wasn’t so much a story, as an indicator that the band was becoming more insular with one another; more keen on expressing themselves individually rather than holistically. In contrast to the ostentatious album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, the White album cover sleeve was strikingly monotone and bland, featuring only a white sleeve with the band’s name flourished across the front. Notably fragmented stylistically, it included varied music genres, consisting of folk, country rock, British blues, ska, and avant-garde. Popular tracks from the album include “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Blackbird,” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
For further information on culture and popular music, reference the following articles:
10 of the Best Rock Stars of the 70s
10 Of The Best Pop Artists From The Seventies