The Ultimate Guide to The Beatles

The recorded musical story of the Beatles may begin with In the Beginning: The Early Tapes, but sorry is the fan who begins with this compilation of early material. Taken from 1961, most of the tracks on this collection were actually Tony Sheridan recordings featuring Sheridan on lead vocals. As such, it is questionable to label them Beatles songs, and the album is much more interesting historically than artistically.

Largely recorded in a one-day marathon session, Please Please Me sports a peppy, vibrant sound that served as a foundation for much of the pop music that followed. The work is so influential, it is easy to overlook how novel the music actually is. The Beatles threw disparate musical styles together with such vigor that a new sonic beast took shape under the flung layers of girl group tunes, Chuck Berry, Everly Brothers, R, and beat music. The final songs sound infectious, innovative, and invigorating, refusing to betray their roots in favor of pealing out in a single, mighty, unified chime of energy, melody, and genius. Aside from the palpable electricity shooting from the four young men, they sounded as if they were perfecting a style rather than creating it.

With the Beatles was even better, gelling the various strands of influence while actually adding more to the mix. Additionally, the songwriting was making quantum leaps of quality. Beatlemania broke into America with A Hard Day's Night, and while truthfully, the album sounds a bit more routine than the band's first two release, moments of brilliance outshine much of the finest works on those early albums, particularly as the band refined their mellower vibes with And I Love Her, Things We Said Today, and others.

The final track of A Hard Day's Night promised I'll Be Back, and with Beatles for Sale, the band did return, albeit a bit worse for the wear. A tired, exhausted album, Beatles for Sale still contained several classic songs such as I'm a Loser, No Reply, and Eight Days a Week. More important than the fatigue drifting throughout this album, however, is the fact that the band, especially John Lennon, was growing more confessional, a move soon to pay great dividends.

Help! was the first of four nearly perfect albums that cemented the Beatles' reputation not only among their fans, but also with the world at large. While a bit disjointed and uneven, none of the weaker moments on Help! could begin to overwhelm its moments of glory in the title track, You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, You're Going to Lose That Girl, Ticket to Ride (a song that that excellently capitalizes on the weariness of Beatles for Sale), I've Just Seen a Face, and the innovative and eternally popular Yesterday. Most bands would be thrilled to have an album as good as Help! as their peak work, but the Beatles were only getting started again.

With Rubber Soul, the Beatles largely left behind the classic Liverpool sound they had created in favor of more experimental fare. Here, those excursions into the musical unknown were largely more folk and acoustic based than they would be later, but the songwriting matched the music. The killer set of songs, including Drive My Car, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), and Nowhere Man, was their best yet. If The Beatles had broken up before Rubber Soul, they would largely be remembered as a great band that created a new sound for rock. With this album, they began their journey to become rock innovators of the nth degree. Luckily, the fans bit their finely crafted hooks and were trailed along with them to Revolver.

Rubber Soul bent the rules; Revolver ignored them. A kaleidoscope of new styles, new sounds, even new instruments (to rock), Revolver burst forth onto the world and announced the split of rock from rock 'n' roll. She Said She Said managed to graft psychedelic influences onto a pop song, but the genre-shattering Tomorrow Never Knows didn't bother to be straddled by pop at all. The dizzying whirl of music may keep this album from ever really finding a form, but the songs are some of the best 3 minutes slices of rock ever created.

Revolver might boast equal songs to its follow up, but Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band somehow mysteriously clings together more than it has any right to. This soaring carnival takes time to both sympathize and gently critique the parents of a runaway, contemplate aging without growing maudlin, and delight in the refreshing pull of a lovely meter maid, and these are the lesser known songs! Ragged after years of touring, the Beatles entered the studio intent on creating music too complex to be played live. They ran insruments through dozens of effects and layered the music more than anybody had done before. Some believe the results changed the world. Some simply believe it to be the best album ever recorded. Some believe it destroyed rock and roll, replacing its sparse energy with sophistication. It doesn't matter, anyway, since after track 12, the world ends.

Luckily, the Beatles didn't. While Magical Mystery Tour suffers from sounding like the patched-together album that is, several of the songs were the best rock would ever offer. The double-A side single Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane offered definite proof that Lennon and McCartney were starting to write in different universes, but what a glimpse of those separate worlds the songs are! I Am the Walrus opened the window to Lennon's mind a bit wider, while All You Need is Love and Hello, Goodbye quickly became Beatles' standards. The band was fragmenting, but they were still creating great music.

Just how wild can a double album get and still manage to hold together as a unified work? Perhaps The White Album is an answer of sorts. The Fab Four were now individuals more than a group, and the personalty of each bursts from these songs. Some of the songs are brilliant, some are fair, and some are entirely too short to be judged on their own. Somehow, though, they manage to merge for the most part, creating a massive album that is quite unlike anything else in their large body of work. As the post-modern age proceeds, spewing forth eclectic talents such as Beck and World Party, this album sounds less and less fragmented and more and more triumphant.

Yellow Submarine, however, continues to sound weaker and weaker. The album only features four new Beatles tunes (all rather mediocre by the band's standards), while the second half of the album is filled out by George Martin's score to the film of the same name! This dreary situation was improved upon, and nearly perfected, by a late nineties rerelease as a 'song track'. The new rerelease stripped off Martin's score in favor of nine previous released songs featured in the film. With the strength of the new songs, the album is greatly improved, although docked a star for the fatal mistake of remixing the songs in lieu of simply remastering them.

With the White Album, the Beatles tested the limits of the form of an album, straining the format with every style they could throw its way and watching to see if it would shatter. By some miracle, it didn't, but with Abbey Road, they took many of those wild tangents and attempted to unite them once more. The result was Abbey Road, the Fab Four's finest hour. Though the outfit was still working as individual songwriters, this final show of solidarity produced music that took advantage of Lennon's wild rock side, McCartney's love of classic pop, Harrison's now mature explorations, and George Martin's top-notch production skills. It is the staggering display of every one of the band's strengths in final, full flower, and the second side especially managed to wrap most of the band's elements into a single suite of short songs of perfection. It is too bad that this was truly the end of so much, including a vital, essential band and the creative mass of confusion we call the sixties.

Let It Be, recorded before Abbey Road but released afterwards, was a fine if anticlimatic farewell for the band marred by misguided production provided by Phil Spector. Still, one last supply of ace songs rescues the album.

Of course, after the band ended, the inevitable repackaging of the music, along with the release of previously unavailable material, began, with decidedly mixed results. The two double albums sets, 1962 - 1966 and 1967 - 1970, work best, collecting the Beatles finest singles and album tracks perhaps as well as can be done inside the limits of four albums. Since many of the Beatle's greatest singles never appeared on their actual albums, collectors craving those songs must either find them here or on the Past Masters series. While the Past Masters series was specifically created with this use in mind, it suffers from its concept, sounding confused and lacking any true cohesion or personality.

Live at the BBC is an interesting, if marginally entertaining, collection of much of the band's early performances for the British network. The Anthology series is a patch-work collection of unreleased material, some brilliant, some quite mundane. Interested parties should begin with volume three, which sheds new light on the White Album and the troubled Let It Be sessions, often stripping away much of Spector's harmful production touches to the final album.

While Beatles One is indeed a collection aimed at getting fans to buy material they largely already own, special kudos are deserved for finally trying to update the sound of the original discs. Sadly, entirely too much processing was used on the album; while it sounds great on a small boom box, the sound quickly falls apart on a better system. I dream of the day Steve Hoffman can remaster this material, but this starter set is reluctantly recommended until Apple finally gets off its duff and delivers a complete collection of properly remastered Beatles albums.