Colegiul Naţional “Inochentie Micu Clain” Blaj

ATESTAT LA LIMBA ENGLEZĂ

THE BEATLES
-SESIUNEA MAI 2010-

REALIZATOR: Dărămuş Alexandra

PROFESOR COORDONATOR : Iuga Marcela

 Contents

• 1 History
o 1.1 Formation and early years (1957–1962)
o 1.2 Beatlemania and touring years (1963–1966)
 1.2.1 UK popularity, Please Please Me and With The
Beatles
 1.2.2 The British Invasion

• 2 The Breakup
• 2 Musical style and evolution

o 3.1 Influences
o 3.2 Genres
o 3.3 Contribution of George Martin
o 3.4 In the studio
• 4 Legacy
• 5 Awards and recognition

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 1. HISTORY

1.1 Formation and early years (1957–1962)

Aged sixteen, singer and guitarist John Lennon formed the skiffle group The Quarrymen
with some Liverpool schoolfriends in March 1957. Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney joined as
a guitarist after he and Lennon met that July. When McCartney in turn invited George
Harrison to watch the group the following February, the fourteen-year-old joined as lead
guitarist. By 1960, Lennon's schoolfriends had left the group, he had begun studies at the
Liverpool College of Art and the three guitarists were playing rock and roll whenever they
could get a drummer. Joining on bass in January, Lennon's fellow student Stuart Sutcliffe
suggested changing the band name to "The Beetles" as a tribute to Buddy Holly and The
Crickets, and they became "The Beatals" for the first few months of the year. After trying
other names including "Johnny and the Moondogs", "Long John and The Beetles" and "The
Silver Beatles", the band finally became "The Beatles" in August.
The lack of a permanent drummer posed a problem when the group's unofficial manager,
Allan Williams, arranged a resident band booking for them in Hamburg, Germany. Before the
end of August they auditioned and hired drummer Pete Best, and the five-piece band left for
Hamburg four days later, contracted to fairground showman Bruno Koschmider for a 48-night
residency. "Hamburg in those days did not have rock'n'roll music clubs. It had strip clubs",
says biographer Philip Norman.
Bruno had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this
formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the
other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an
American red-light district, they would call it nonstop striptease.
Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool...It was an accident.
Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in
Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over.
Harrison, only seventeen in August 1960, obtained permission to stay in Hamburg by lying to
the German authorities about his age. Initially placing The Beatles at the Indra Club,
Koschmider moved them to the Kaiserkeller in October after the Indra was closed down due to
noise complaints. When they violated their contract by performing at the rival Top Ten Club,
Koschmider reported the underage Harrison to the authorities, leading to his deportation in
November. McCartney and Best were arrested for arson a week later when they set fire to a
condom hung on a nail in their room; they too were deported. Lennon returned to Liverpool in
mid-December, while Sutcliffe remained in Hamburg with his new German fiancée, Astrid
Kirchherr, for another month. Kirchherr took the first professional photos of the group and cut
Sutcliffe's hair in the German "exi" (existentialist) style of the time, a look later adopted by the
other Beatles.
During the next two years, the group were resident for further periods in Hamburg.
They used Preludin both recreationally and to maintain their energy through all-night
performances. Sutcliffe decided to leave the band in early 1961 and resume his art studies in
Germany, so McCartney took up bass. German producer Bert Kaempfert contracted what was

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now a four-piece to act as Tony Sheridan's backing band on a series of recordings. Credited to
"Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers", the single "My Bonnie", recorded in June and
released four months later, reached number 32 in the Musikmarkt chart. The Beatles were also
becoming more popular back home in Liverpool. During one of the band's frequent
appearances there at The Cavern Club, they encountered Brian Epstein, a local record store
owner and music columnist. When the band appointed Epstein manager in January 1962,
Kaempfert agreed to release them from the German record contract. After Decca Records
rejected the band with the comment "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein", producer
George Martin signed the group to EMI's Parlophone label. News of a tragedy greeted them on
their return to Hamburg in April. Meeting them at the airport, a stricken Kirchherr told them of
Sutcliffe's death from a brain haemorrhage.
The band had its first recording session under Martin's direction at Abbey Road
Studios in London in June 1962. Martin complained to Epstein about Best's drumming and
suggested the band use a session drummer in the studio. Instead, Best was replaced by Ringo
Starr. Starr, who left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join The Beatles, had already
performed with them occasionally when Best was ill. Martin still hired session drummer Andy
White for one session, and White played on "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You". Released
in October, "Love Me Do" was a top twenty UK hit, peaking at number seventeen on the
chart. After a November studio session that yielded what would be their second single, "Please
Please Me", they made their TV debut with a live performance on the regional news
programme People and Places.
The band concluded their last Hamburg stint in December 1962. By now it had become
the pattern that all four members contributed vocals, although Starr's restricted range meant he
sang lead only rarely. Lennon and McCartney had established a songwriting partnership; as
the band's success grew, their celebrated collaboration limited Harrison's opportunities as lead
vocalist. Epstein, sensing The Beatles' commercial potential, encouraged the group to adopt a
professional attitude to performing. Lennon recalled the manager saying, "Look, if you really
want to get in these bigger places, you're going to have to change—stop eating on stage, stop
swearing, stop smoking." Lennon said, "We used to dress how we liked, on and off stage. He'd
tell us that jeans were not particularly smart and could we possibly manage to wear proper
trousers, but he didn't want us suddenly looking square. He'd let us have our own sense of
individuality ... it was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on stage."

1.2 Beatlemania and touring years (1963–1966)

1.2.1 UK popularity, Please Please Me and With The Beatles

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McCartney, Harrison, Swedish pop singer Lill-Babs and Lennon on the set of the Swedish television show
Drop-In, 30 October 1963
In the wake of the moderate success of "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me" met with a
more emphatic reception, reaching number two in the UK singles chart after its January 1963
release. Martin originally intended to record the band's debut LP live at The Cavern Club.
Finding it had "the acoustic ambience of an oil tank", he elected to create a "live" album in one
session at Abbey Road Studios. Ten songs were recorded for Please Please Me, accompanied
on the album by the four tracks already released on the two singles. Recalling how the band
"rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day", an Allmusic
reviewer comments, "Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because
of its intense origins." Lennon said little thought went into composition at the time; he and
McCartney were "just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with
no more thought of them than that—to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant."
Released in March 1963, the album reached number one on the British chart.
This began a run during which eleven of The Beatles' twelve studio albums released in
the United Kingdom through 1970 hit number one. The band's third single, "From Me to
You", came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit. It began an almost unbroken run of
seventeen British number one singles for the band, including all but one of those released over
the next six years. On its release in August, the band's fourth single, "She Loves You",
achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a
million copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million copies, and
remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978 when it was topped by "Mull of
Kintyre", performed by McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings. The popularity of The
Beatles' music brought with it increasing press attention. They responded with a cheeky,
irreverent attitude that defied what was expected of pop musicians and inspired even more
interest.

The Beatles' drop-T logo

The Beatles' iconic "drop-T" logo, based on an impromptu sketch by instrument

retailer and designer Ivor Arbiter, also made its debut in 1963. The logo was first used on the
front of Starr's bass drum, which Epstein and Starr purchased from Arbiter's London shop. The
band toured the UK three times in the first half of the year: a four-week tour that began in

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February preceded three-week tours in March and May–June. As their popularity spread, a
frenzied adulation of the group took hold, dubbed "Beatlemania". Although not billed as tour
leaders, they overshadowed other acts including Tommy Roe, Chris Montez and Roy Orbison,
US artists who had established great popularity in the UK. Performances everywhere, both on
tour and at many one-off shows across the UK, were greeted with riotous enthusiasm by
screaming fans. Police found it necessary to use high-pressure water hoses to control the
crowds, and there were debates in Parliament concerning the thousands of police officers
putting themselves at risk to protect the group.
In late October, a five-day tour of Sweden saw the band venture abroad for the first
time since the Hamburg chapter. Returning to the UK, they were greeted at Heathrow Airport
in heavy rain by thousands of fans in "a scene similar to a shark-feeding frenzy", attended by
fifty journalists and photographers and a BBC Television camera crew. The next day, The
Beatles began yet another UK tour, scheduled for six weeks. By now, they were indisputably
the headliners.
Please Please Me was still topping the album chart. It maintained the position for
thirty weeks, only to be displaced by With The Beatles which itself held the top spot for
twenty-one weeks. Making much greater use of studio production techniques than its "live"
predecessor, the album was recorded between July and October. With The Beatles is described
by Allmusic as "a sequel of the highest order—one that betters the original by developing its
own tone and adding depth." In a reversal of what had until then been standard practice, the
album was released in late November ahead of the impending single "I Want to Hold Your
Hand", with the song excluded in order to maximize the single's sales. With The Beatles
caught the attention of Times music critic William Mann, who went as far as to suggest that
Lennon and McCartney were "the outstanding English composers of 1963". The newspaper
published a series of articles in which Mann offered detailed analyses of The Beatles' music,
lending it respectability. With The Beatles became the second album in UK chart history to sell
a million copies, a figure previously reached only by the 1958 South Pacific soundtrack.
1.2.2 The British Invasion
Beatles releases in the United States were initially delayed for nearly a year when
Capitol Records, EMI's American subsidiary, declined to issue either "Please Please Me" or
"From Me to You". Negotiations with independent US labels led to the release of some
singles, but issues with royalties and derision of The Beatles' "moptop" hairstyle posed further
obstacles. Once Capitol did start to issue the material, rather than releasing the LPs in their
original configuration, they compiled distinct US albums from an assortment of the band's
recordings, and issued songs of their own choice as singles. American chart success came
suddenly after a news broadcast about British Beatlemania triggered great demand, leading
Capitol to rush-release "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in December 1963. The band's US debut
was already scheduled to take place a few weeks later.
When The Beatles left the United Kingdom on 7 February 1964, an estimated four
thousand fans gathered at Heathrow, waving and screaming as the aircraft took off. "I Want to
Hold Your Hand" had sold 2.6 million copies in the US over the previous two weeks, but the
group were still nervous about how they would be received. At New York's John F. Kennedy
Airport they were greeted by another vociferous crowd, estimated at about three thousand
people. They gave their first live US television performance two days later on The Ed Sullivan
Show, watched by approximately 74 million viewers—over 40 percent of the American
population. The next morning one newspaper wrote that The Beatles "could not carry a tune
across the Atlantic", but a day later their first US concert saw Beatlemania erupt at

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Washington Coliseum. Back in New York the following day, they met with another strong
reception at Carnegie Hall.
The band appeared on the weekly Ed Sullivan Show a second time, before returning to
the UK on 22 February. During the week of 4 April, The Beatles held twelve positions on the
Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the top five. That same week, a third American LP
joined the two already in circulation; all three reached the first or second spot on the US album
chart. The band's popularity generated unprecedented interest in British music, and a number
of other UK acts subsequently made their own American debuts, successfully touring over the
next three years in what was termed the British Invasion. The Beatles' hairstyle, unusually
long for the era and still mocked by many adults, was widely adopted and became an emblem
of the burgeoning youth culture.
The Beatles toured internationally in June. Staging thirty-two concerts over nineteen
days in Denmark, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, they were ardently received at
every venue. Starr was ill for the first half of the tour, and Jimmy Nicol sat in on drums. In
August they returned to the US, with a thirty-concert tour of twenty-three cities. Generating
intense interest once again, the month-long tour attracted between ten and twenty thousand
fans to each thirty-minute performance in cities from San Francisco to New York. However,
their music could hardly be heard. On-stage amplification at the time was modest compared to
modern-day equipment, and the band's small Vox amplifiers struggled to compete with the
volume of sound generated by screaming fans. Forced to accept that neither they nor their
audiences could hear the details of their performance, the band grew increasingly bored with
the routine of concert touring.
At the end of the August tour they were introduced to Bob Dylan in New York at the
instigation of journalist Al Aronowitz. Visiting the band in their hotel suite, Dylan introduced
them to cannabis. Music historian Jonathan Gould points out the musical and cultural
significance of this meeting, before which the musicians' respective fanbases were "perceived
as inhabiting two separate subcultural worlds": Dylan's core audience of "college kids with
artistic or intellectual leanings, a dawning political and social idealism, and a mildly bohemian
style" contrasted with The Beatles' core audience of "veritable 'teenyboppers'—kids in high
school or grade school whose lives were totally wrapped up in the commercialized popular
culture of television, radio, pop records, fan magazines, and teen fashion. They were seen as
idolaters, not idealists." Within six months of the meeting, "Lennon would be making records
on which he openly imitated Dylan's nasal drone, brittle strum, and introspective vocal
persona." Within a year, Dylan would "proceed, with the help of a five-piece group and a
Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, to shake the monkey of folk authenticity permanently off
his back"; "the distinction between the folk and rock audiences would have nearly
evaporated"; and The Beatles' audience would be "showing signs of growing up".

2. THE BREAKUP
The explanations are as numerous as Kennedy conspiracy theories. Some blame Yoko
Ono. Some blame Linda McCartney. Others just think the band was growing apart. But in
reality, a whole host of reasons, coming together like the perfect storm, drove the band apart in
1970 - permanently.
What are those reasons?
• The death of Brian Epstein. The first crack in the Beatles' relationship began three
years earlier when the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, died of a drug overdose.

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 Epstein had discovered the Beatles and had closely monitored their rise to fame. When
he died, the group had no direction, no one to tell them what to do. And one disaster
led to another - the panned film "Magical Mystery Tour," the rancorous Let it Be
sessions, the money pit that became Apple Records, and the rise of Paul McCartney as
the de facto leader of the band - something the rest of the band did not like.
• Yoko Ono. As stated above, she is often accused of breaking up the band. And it's a
strong point, though not for the reason many think. Whether it was her intent to do so
is not known, but there is no doubt that once Lennon and Ono became a couple, the
Beatles were at best a distraction for him. He dedicated himself and his activities to
Ono and her avant-garde art and activism, and became more independent with each
passing day.
• Allen Klein. Realizing that they needed financial and business help, the Beatles finally
agreed in 1969 that they needed a manager. Lennon wanted Klein, a tough New York
music executive who had recently managed the Rolling Stones. McCartney preferred
Lee Eastman, an attorney who also happened to be his father-in-law. George Harrison
and Ringo Starr backed Lennon's choice, and the rift between McCartney and the rest
of the band grew even more.
• The Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival Festival. Concert promoter John Brower,
desperate to sell tickets to his rock festival, called John Lennon to see if he would
attend. Lennon trumped his request by saying he wanted to play at the festival. Despite
an amateurish, plodding set, Lennon was energized by the solo appearance and later
told Allen Klein that he wanted to quit the Beatles.
• Let It Be. The title cut from this ill-fated album was about the only good thing to come
from the sessions, which were at times contentious and divisive. Tired of McCartney's
overbearing attitude, Harrison walked out at one point, and Lennon was mostly
uninterested. The recording of the session was so poor that Lennon turned the tapes
over to Phil Spector, who added his overproduction techniques to several cuts,
including McCartney's title cut and "The Long and Winding Road." He did so without
McCartney's permission, and when McCartney found out, he was furious. He released
his first solo album two weeks before Let It Be was released.

3. MUSICAL STYLE AND EVOLUTION

In their initial incarnation as cheerful, wisecracking moptops, the Fab Four
revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors
to a tidal wave of British rock acts. Their initial impact would have been enough to establish
the Beatles as one of their era's most influential cultural forces, but they didn't stop there.
Although their initial style was a highly original, irresistibly catchy synthesis of early
American rock and roll and R&B, the Beatles spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's
stylistic frontiers, consistently staking out new musical territory on each release. The band's
increasingly sophisticated experimentation encompassed a variety of genres, including folk-
rock, country, psychedelia, and baroque pop, without sacrificing the effortless mass appeal of
their early work.
In The Beatles as Musicians, Walter Everett points out Lennon and McCartney's
contrasting motivations and approaches to composition: "McCartney may be said to have
constantly developed—as a means to entertain—a focused musical talent with an ear for

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counterpoint and other aspects of craft in the demonstration of a universally agreed-upon
common language that he did much to enrich. Conversely, Lennon's mature music is best
appreciated as the daring product of a largely unconscious, searching but undisciplined artistic
sensibility." Ian MacDonald, comparing the two composers in Revolution in the Head,
describes McCartney as "a natural melodist—a creator of tunes capable of existing apart from
their harmony". His melody lines are characterised as primarily "vertical", employing wide,
consonant intervals which express his "extrovert energy and optimism". Conversely, Lennon's
"sedentary, ironic personality" is reflected in a "horizontal" approach featuring minimal,
dissonant intervals and repetitive melodies which rely on their harmonic accompaniment for
interest: "Basically a realist, he instinctively kept his melodies close to the rhythms and
cadences of speech, colouring his lyrics with bluesy tone and harmony rather than creating
tunes that made striking shapes of their own." MacDonald praises Harrison's lead guitar work
for the role his "characterful lines and textural colourings" play in supporting Lennon and
McCartney's parts, and describes Starr as "the father of modern pop/rock drumming... His
faintly behind-the-beat style subtly propelled The Beatles, his tunings brought the bottom end
into recorded drum sound, and his distinctly eccentric fills remain among the most memorable
in pop music."

3.1. Influences
The band's earliest influences include Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, whose
songs they covered more often than any other artist's in performances throughout their career.
During their co-residency with Little Richard at the Star Club in Hamburg from April to May
1962, he advised them on the proper technique for performing his songs. Of Presley, Lennon
said, "Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn't been Elvis, there would not
have been The Beatles". Other early influences include Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Carl
Perkins, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers. The Beatles continued to absorb influences
long after their initial success, often finding new musical and lyrical avenues by listening to
their contemporaries, including Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, The Byrds and The Beach Boys,
whose 1966 album Pet Sounds amazed and inspired McCartney. Martin stated, "Without Pet
Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds."

3.2. Genres

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A Höfner "violin" bass guitar and Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, models played by McCartney and
Harrison, respectively. The small Vox amplifier behind them is the kind The Beatles used in concert.

Originating as a skiffle group, The Beatles soon embraced 1950s rock and roll. The
band's repertoire ultimately expanded to include a broad variety of pop music. Reflecting the
range of styles they explored, Lennon said of Beatles for Sale, "You could call our new one a
Beatles country-and-western LP", while Allmusic credits the band, and Rubber Soul in
particular, as a major influence on the folk rock movement. Beginning with the use of a string
quartet on Help!'s "Yesterday", they also incorporated classical music elements. As Jonathan
Gould points out however, it was not "even remotely the first pop record to make
prominent use of strings—although it was the first Beatles recording to do so ... it was rather
that the more traditional sound of strings allowed for a fresh appreciation of their talent as
composers by listeners who were otherwise allergic to the din of drums and electric guitars."
The group applied strings to various effect. Of "She's Leaving Home", for instance, recorded
for Sgt. Pepper, Gould writes that it "is cast in the mold of a sentimental Victorian ballad, its
words and music filled with the clichés of musical melodrama." The band's stylistic range
expanded in another direction in 1966 with the B-side to the "Paperback Writer" single:
"Rain", described by Martin Strong in The Great Rock Discography as "the first overtly
psychedelic Beatles record". Other psychedelic numbers followed, such as "Tomorrow Never
Knows" (actually recorded before "Rain"), "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds", and "I Am the Walrus". The influence of Indian classical music was evident in
songs such as Harrison's "Love You To" and "Within You Without You", whose intent, writes
Gould, was "to replicate the raga form in miniature".
Summing up the band's musical evolution, music historian and pianist Michael
Campbell identifies innovation as its most striking feature. He writes, "'A Day in the Life'
encapsulates the art and achievement of the Beatles as well as any single track can. It
highlights key features of their music: the sound imagination, the persistence of tuneful
melody, and the close coordination between words and music. It represents a new category of
song—more sophisticated than pop, more accessible and down to earth than pop, and uniquely
innovative. There literally had never before been a song—classical or vernacular—that had
blended so many disparate elements so imaginatively." Music theorist Bruce Ellis Benson
agrees: "Composers may be able to conceive new rhythms and chord progressions, but these
are usually improvisations upon current rhythms and chord progressions. The Beatles ... give
us a wonderful example of how such far-ranging influences as Celtic music, rhythm and blues,
and country and western could be put together in a new way."
In The Songwriting Secrets of The Beatles, Dominic Pedler also emphasizes the
importance of the way they combined genres: "One of the greatest of The Beatles'
achievements was the songwriting juggling act they managed for most of their career. Far
from moving sequentially from one genre to another, the group maintained in parallel their
mastery of the traditional, catchy chart hit while simultaneously forging rock and dabbling
with a wide range of peripheral influences from Country to vaudeville. One of these threads
was their take on folk music, which would form such essential groundwork for their later
collisions with Indian music and philosophy." As the personal relationships between the band
members grew increasingly strained, their individual influences became more apparent. The
minimalistic cover artwork for the White Album contrasted with the complexity and diversity
of its music, which encompassed Lennon's "Revolution 9", whose musique concrète approach

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was influenced by Yoko Ono; Starr's country song "Don't Pass Me By"; Harrison's rock ballad
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; and the "proto-metal roar" of McCartney's "Helter Skelter".

3.3 Contribution of George Martin

George Martin's close involvement with The Beatles in his role as producer made him
one of the leading candidates for the informal title of "fifth Beatle". He brought his classical
musical training to bear in various ways. The string quartet accompaniment to "Yesterday"
was his idea—the band members were initially unenthusiastic about the concept, but the result
was a revelation to them. Gould also describes how, "as Lennon and McCartney became
progressively more ambitious in their songwriting, Martin began to function as an informal
music teacher to them". This, coupled with his willingness to experiment in response to their
suggestions—such as adding "something baroque" to a particular recording—facilitated their
creative development. As well as scoring orchestral arrangements for Beatles recordings,
Martin often performed, playing instruments including piano, organ and brass.
Looking back on the making of Sgt. Pepper, Martin said, "'Sergeant Pepper' itself
didn't appear until halfway through making the album. It was Paul's song, just an ordinary rock
number and not particularly brilliant as songs go ... Paul said, 'Why don't we make the album
as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant Pepper was making the record?
We'll dub in effects and things.' I loved the idea, and from that moment on it was as though
Pepper had a life of its own." Recalling how strongly the song contrasted with Lennon's
compositions, Martin spoke too of his own stabilising influence:
Compared with Paul's songs, all of which seemed to keep in some sort of touch with
reality, John's had a psychedelic, almost mystical quality ... John's imagery is one of the best
things about his work—"tangerine trees", "marmalade skies", "cellophane flowers" ... I always
saw him as an aural Salvador Dalí, rather than some drug-ridden record artist. On the other
hand, I would be stupid to pretend that drugs didn't figure quite heavily in The Beatles' lives at
that time. At the same time they knew that I, in my schoolmasterly role, didn't approve ... Not
only was I not into it myself, I couldn't see the need for it; and there's no doubt that, if I too
had been on dope, Pepper would never have been the album it was.
Harrison echoed Martin's description of his stabilising role: "I think we just grew through
those years together, him as the straight man and us as the loonies; but he was always there for
us to interpret our madness—we used to be slightly avant-garde on certain days of the week,
and he would be there as the anchor person, to communicate that through the engineers and on
to the tape."

3.4 In the studio

The Beatles made innovative use of technology, treating the studio as an instrument in
itself. They urged experimentation by Martin and their recording engineers, regularly
demanding that something new be tried because "it might just sound good". At the same time
they constantly sought ways to put chance occurrences to creative use. Accidental guitar
feedback, a resonating glass bottle, a tape loaded the wrong way round so that it played
backwards—any of these might be incorporated into their music. The Beatles' desire to create
new sounds on every new recording, combined with Martin's arranging abilities and the studio
expertise of EMI staff engineers such as Norman Smith, Ken Townsend and Geoff Emerick,
all contributed significantly to their records from Rubber Soul and, especially, Revolver
forward. Along with studio tricks such as sound effects, unconventional microphone

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placements, tape loops, double tracking and vari-speed recording, The Beatles augmented their
songs with instruments that were unconventional for rock music at the time.
These included string and brass ensembles as well as Indian instruments such as the
sitar in "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and the swarmandel in "Strawberry Fields
Forever". They also used early electronic instruments such as the Mellotron, with which
McCartney supplied the flute voices on the "Strawberry Fields" intro, and the clavioline, an
electronic keyboard that created the unusual oboe-like sound on "Baby, You're a Rich Man".

4. LEGACY
The Beatles' influence on popular culture was—and remains—immense. Former
Rolling Stone associate editor Robert Greenfield said, "People are still looking at Picasso ... at
artists who broke through the constraints of their time period to come up with something that
was unique and original. In the form that they worked in, in the form of popular music, no one
will ever be more revolutionary, more creative and more distinctive than The Beatles were."
From the 1920s, the United States had dominated popular entertainment culture throughout
much of the world, via Hollywood movies, jazz, the music of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley
and, later, the rock and roll that first emerged in Memphis, Tennessee. Drawing on their rock
and roll roots, The Beatles not only triggered the British Invasion of the US, but themselves
became a globally influential phenomenon.
The Beatles' musical innovations, as well as their commercial success, inspired
musicians worldwide. A large number of artists have acknowledged The Beatles as an
influence or have had chart successes with covers of Beatles songs. On radio, the arrival of
The Beatles marked the beginning of a new era; program directors like Rick Sklar of New
York's WABC went as far as forbidding DJs from playing any "pre-Beatles" music. The
Beatles redefined the album as something more than just a few hits padded out with "filler".
They were primary innovators of the music video. The Shea Stadium date with which they
opened their 1965 North American tour attracted what was then the largest audience in concert
history and is seen as a "landmark event in the growth of the rock crowd." Emulation of their
clothing and especially their hairstyles, which became a mark of rebellion, had a global impact
on fashion.
More broadly, The Beatles changed the way people listened to popular music and
experienced its role in their lives. From what began as the Beatlemania fad, the group grew to
be perceived by their young fans across the industrialized world as the representatives, even
the embodiment, of ideals associated with cultural transformation. As icons of the 1960s
counterculture, they became a catalyst for bohemianism and activism in various social and
political arenas, fueling such movements as women's liberation, gay liberation and
environmentalism.

5. AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II appointed the four Beatles Members of the Order of the British
Empire (MBE). The Beatles film Let It Be (1970) won the 1971 Academy Award for Best
Original Song Score. The Beatles have received 7 Grammy Awards and 15 Ivor Novello
Awards. They have been awarded 6 Diamond albums, as well as 24 Multi-Platinum albums,
39 Platinum albums and 45 Gold albums in the United States, while in the UK they have 4

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Multi-Platinum albums, 4 Platinum albums, 8 Gold albums and 1 Silver album. The group
were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2008, Billboard magazine
released a list of the all-time top-selling Hot 100 artists to celebrate the US singles chart's
fiftieth anniversary—The Beatles ranked number one. In 2009, the Recording Industry
Association of America certified that The Beatles have sold more albums in the US than any
other artist. The Beatles have had more number one albums, 15, on the UK charts and held
down the top spot longer, 174 weeks, than any other musical act. The Beatles were
collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the 20th century's 100 most
influential people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. www.wikipedia.org
2. “Magical mystery tours” by Tony Bramwell and Rosemary Kingsland
3. “The Beatles As Musicians” by Walter Everett
4. “Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties” by Ian
MacDonald

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