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The Beatles

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"All My Loving"

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TITLE: "All My Loving"

YEAR: 1964

ARTIST: The Beatles

Hey, lads! Remember the Ed Sullivan Show? Boy, do I ever! The girls went crazy over us! I ended up marrying a beautiful model. So how did I end up with Yoko?

The Beatles

John Lennon performing with The Quarrymen.

Early Beatles (left to right): Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Pete Best, and George Harrison.

The Beatles playing at The Cavern in Hamburg in 1961.

The Beatles arrive at New York's Kennedy Airport in 1964.

The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

One of the first Beatles albums. Believe it or not, I still have it!

John Lennon and Paul McCartney formed the greatest songwriting duo in history.

John Lennon

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band : The best album ever made?

The (animated) Beatles in the film Yellow Submarine.

Paul McCartney

The album Let It Be was a huge disappointment due to internal bickering.

The Beatles last concert was actually the rooftop session for Let It Be in 1969.

Abbey Road: The Beatles final album (not counting anthologies and greatest hits collections).

The murder of John Lennon in 1980 was as shocking to the world as the deaths of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ringo Starr

George Harrison

The Beatles 1: The CD that produced yet another new generation of Beatles fans.

For the official Beatles website, including a complete discography of the band, click here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
It is only appropriate to begin our year of Beyond the Music with the most influential band in the history of rock and roll music - The Beatles.

The impact of The Beatles cannot be overstated; they revolutionized the music industry and touched the lives of all who heard them in deep and fundamental ways. Landing on these shores on February 7, 1964, they literally stood the world of pop culture on its head, setting the musical agenda for the remainder of the decade. The Beatles' buoyant melodies, playful personalities and mop-topped charisma were just the tonic needed by a nation left reeling by the senseless assassination of its young president, John F. Kennedy, barely two months earlier. Even adults typically given to scorning rock and roll as worthless "kid's stuff" were forced to concede that there was substance in their music and quick-witted cleverness in their repartee. Without exaggeration, they transfixed and transformed the world as we knew it, ushering in a demographic shift in which youth culture assertively took over from its stodgy Eisenhower-era forbears.

The long journey resulting in the mob scene that greeted The Beatles' arrival at Kennedy Airport began in Liverpool back in 1958. A series of groups, including The Quarrymen and Johnny and the Moondogs, variously included Liverpool natives John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. With a rhythm section consisting of bassist Stu Sutcliffe (an art student with great looks and scant musical ability) and drummer Pete Best, the group assumed the name "The Beatles." The group became a fixture on the rough-and-tumble bar scene in Hamburg, Germany, where their five-set-a-night marathons helped mold them into a tight performing unit. Their early repertoire consisted of well-chosen rock and roll and rhythm & blues covers, running the gamut from Chuck Berry to Little Richard. In April 1961, Sutcliffe left and McCartney switched from guitar to bass. On the local scene in their hometown of Liverpool, the group landed a lunchtime residency at a club called The Cavern, where they were discovered by a local record merchant and entrepreneur, Brian Epstein, who became their manager in December 1961.

Epstein helped polish the group's appearance, dressing them in dapper collarless gray suits and making them appear more friendly than menacing. After being rejected by Decca Records following a January 1962 audition, The Beatles signed with EMI-Parlophone that April, having impressed producer George Martin. In August, Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey), who'd been drumming with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, was brought into replace Pete Best. The group's first single, "Love Me Do," briefly dented the U.K. Top Twenty in October 1962, but their next single, "Please Please Me," formally ignited Beatlemania in their homeland, reaching the Number Two spot. It was followed by four consecutive chart-topping British singles, issued throughout 1963: "From Me to You," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Can't Buy Me Love." They conquered the U.K., even inducing a classical music critic from the London Sunday Times to declare them "the greatest composers since Beethoven." The group's success was based around the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, Harrison's guitar-playing prowess, and Starr's amiable disposition and artful simplicity as a drummer.

The Beatles' conquest of America early in 1964 launched the British Invasion, as a torrent of rock and roll bands from Britain overtook the pop charts. Most adults over the age of 40 can remember the impact of The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. The group performed five songs that night. The first, "All My Loving," is the MP3 appropriately chosen for this page.

The Fab Four's first Number One single in the U.S. was "I Want to Hold Your Hand," released on Capitol Records, EMI's American counterpart. This exuberant track was followed by 45 more Top Forty hits over the next half-dozen years. During the week of April 4, 1964, the Beatles set a record that is likely never to be broken when they occupied all five of the top positions on Billboard's Top Pop Singles chart, with "Can't Buy Me Love" ensconced at Number One. Their popularity soared still further with the release of their playfully anarchic documentary film, A Hard Day's Night, in August 1964.

When all was said and done, the Beatles charted 20 Number One singles in the States - a number even greater than runner-up Elvis Presley's 17 chart-toppers. For such feats of sales and airplay alone, The Beatles can unassailably be regarded as the top group in rock and roll history. Yet their significance as a band extends beyond numbers to encompass their innovations in the recording studio. The Beatles' legacy as a concert attraction is distinguished primarily by the deafening screams of female fans overcome by the group's very appearance. Consequently, The Beatles began to indulge their creative energies in the studio, layering sounds and crafting songs in a way no one had attempted before. The results included such musically expansive and lyrically sophisticated albums as Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966). For various reasons, ranging from safety concerns to frustration that no one could hear or was listening, The Beatles retired from touring after a San Francisco concert on August 29, 1966.

Ten months later, they released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that has almost universally been cited as the creative apotheosis of rock and roll, a watershed event in which rock became "serious art" without losing its sense of humor (or sense of the absurd). Realizing the band members' collective ambitions took four months and all the technical wiles of producer George Martin. A completely self-contained album meant to be played and experienced from start to finish, Sgt. Pepper broke the mold in that no singles were released from it. The album's heady artistic reach further cemented the notion of a viable counterculture in the minds of youthful dropouts everywhere. Anyone who was alive in the summer of 1967 can remember the pleasant shock of hearing it and the reverberations it sent outward into the world of rock and roll and beyond.

In the wake of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles began to splinter in ways that were, at first, subtle but that gradually grew more pronounced. Subsequent events included the death of manager Epstein due to an overdose of sleeping pills; the release of the TV film Magical Mystery Tour, which earned The Beatles some of their first negative reviews; a trip to India to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, about whom Lennon wrote the scabrous putdown "Sexy Sadie"; and the launching in January 1968 of Apple Corps, Ltd., a disastrously mismanaged entertainment empire that helped bring down The Beatles amid a tangled maze of money matters.

Through all the chaotic events of the late Sixties, The Beatles managed to retain their integrity and focus as recording artists. Released in August 1968, the single "Hey Jude" became their most popular single. The Beatles (1968), a double-LP popularly referred to as "The White Album," was like a prism that found the group refracting into four individual and highly estimable talents. The album and film Let It Be, recorded in 1969 but shelved until 1970, essentially documented The Beatles' dissolution and breakup amid internal squabbles and the presence of John Lennon's new mate, Yoko Ono. Yet The Beatles came together and exited on a high note, uniting in the summer of 1969 to record their swan song, Abbey Road.

On April 10, 1970, Paul McCartney announced his departure from The Beatles, and the group quietly came to an end. Throughout the Seventies, fans hoped for an eventual reunion, while the group members pursued solo careers with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success.

During the 1970s, each member of The Beatles released solo albums. McCartney, performing with wife Linda in the group Wings, was the most commercially successful; Harrison began his solo career with All Things Must Pass; Lennon recorded on and off with Yoko Ono, and continued to attract attention for his radical politics (though he semi-retired from music in 1975 to spend time with his newborn son, Sean). Throughout the decade, there was idle talk of a reunion, peaking around 1976 when a Beatlesque Australian group named Klaatu was rumored to be the Fab Four under a false name (they weren't, though their manager and record company encouraged speculation) and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels half-seriously offered The Beatles $3,000 to perform on his show. Though all four Beatles did contribute to the 1973 Ringo Starr song "I'm the Greatest," no genuine reunion ever took place. On December 8, 1980 all chances of that happening were ended when deranged fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside his New York apartment.

Although the Beatles had not released any new albums since 1970, interest in the group remained high into the '90s, their backcatalog selling millions of copies a year and providing Capitol with a large percentage of its annual income. Publishing rights to all Lennon-McCartney compositions were sold during the '80s for hundreds of millions of dollars, at one point passing through the hands of Michael Jackson. Though Capitol issued singles and out-takes compilations, a lot more unreleased material remained unavailable due to ongoing legal problems, and ended up on illegal bootlegs.

By the early '90s, Paul, George, Ringo and Yoko Ono settled their contractual disagreements, permitting the re-release of long unavailable recordings. In 1994, Capitol issued a double CD of early Beatles recordings for the BBC. Phenomenal sales of Live at the BBC inspired more exploitation of the group's legacy. In 1995, the surviving Beatles came together to contribute to a TV documentary about the group and select material for a planned rarities anthology of out-takes and demos. While together, Paul, George, and Ringo laid down music for two John Lennon demo out-takes, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love." Though the sound quality was often abysmal, the material inferior, and the surrounding hype insulting, America's aging populace ate up the three 1996 Beatles Anthology releases. which sold over 15 million copies in less than a year.

Throughout the rest of the '90s, Paul McCartney continued recording and touring with various bands. Ringo Starr also toured with a variety of rock and musicians, dubbing these groups Ringo Starr and the All-Star Band.

On November 29, 2001, almost 21 years since the murder of John Lennon, George Harrison died at the age of 58 following a long battle with cancer.

The Beatles' legacy continues to endure today, as evidenced by their most recent CD compilation of number one hits, The Beatles 1 .

Research information courtesy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and RollingStone.com.