Beatlemania

In February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a single marathon studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me.  The album was supplemented by the four tracks already released on their first two singles.  After the moderate success of Love Me Do, their next single Please Please Me met with a more emphatic reception.  Released in January 1963, two months ahead of the album of the same name, the song reached number one on every chart in London except Record Retailer, where it stalled at number two.  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. In late October, the Beatles began a five-day tour of Sweden, their first time abroad since the final Hamburg engagement of December 1962.  Upon their return to the UK on 31 December, several hundred screaming fans greeted them in heavy rain at Heathrow Airport.  Around fifty to a hundred journalists and photographers as well as representatives from the BBC also joined the airport reception, the first of more than one hundred such events.  The next day, they began their fourth tour of Britain within nine months, this one scheduled for six weeks.  In mid-November, as their popularity spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold, before a concert in Plymouth police resorted to using high-pressure water hoses to control the crowd.  The press dubbed this riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans as Beatlemania. Please Please Me, the album. maintained the top position on the Record Retailer chart for thirty weeks, only to be displaced by their follow-up, With the Beatles, which EMI delayed the release of until sales of Please Please Me had subsided.  Recorded between July and October, With the Beatles made better use of studio production techniques than its predecessor.  It held the top spot for twenty-one weeks with a chart life of 40 weeks.  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.  In writing the sleeve notes for the album, the band's press officer, Tony Barrow used the superlative the fabulous foursome, which the media widely adopted as the Fab Four.

The British Invasion, February 7, 1964, the Beatles left the United Kingdom with an estimated four thousand fans gathered at Heathrow, waving and screaming as the aircraft took off.  Upon landing at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, an uproarious crowd estimated at three thousand greeted them.  They gave their first live US television performance two days later on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by approximately 73 million viewers in over 23 million households, or 34 percent of the American population.  According to the Nielsen rating service, it was the largest audience that had ever been recorded for an American television program.  Their first US concert saw Beatlemania erupt at the Washington Coliseum.  Back in New York the following day, the Beatles met with another strong reception during two shows at Carnegie Hall.  The band then flew to Florida and appeared on the weekly Ed Sullivan Show a second time, with another 70 million viewers, before returning to the UK on 22 February. United Artists Records, encouraged their film division to offer the group a three-motion-picture deal, primarily for the commercial potential of the soundtracks.  Directed by Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night involved the band for six weeks in March–April 1964 as they played themselves in a mock-documentary.  The film premiered in London and New York in July and August, respectively, and was an international success, with some critics drawing comparison with the Marx Brothers.  The accompanying soundtrack album, A Hard Day's Night, saw them coming into their own as a band.  All of the disparate influences on their first two albums had coalesced into a bright, joyous, original sound, filled with ringing guitars and irresistible melodies.  That ringing guitar sound was primarily the product of Harrison's 12-string electric Rickenbacker, a prototype given him by the manufacturer, which made its debut on the record. During the week of 4 April 1964, the Beatles held twelve positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the top five.  Their 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.  Their hairstyle, unusually long for the era and mocked by many adults, became an emblem of rebellion to the burgeoning youth culture.

Beatles for Sale, the Beatles' fourth studio LP, evidenced a growing conflict between the commercial pressures of their global success and their creative ambitions.  They had intended the album, recorded between August and October 1964, to continue the format established by A Hard Day's Night which, unlike the band's first two LPs, contained only original songs.  However, they had nearly exhausted their backlog of songs on the previous album, and the constant international touring posed a problem for their songwriting efforts, as a result, six covers from their extensive repertoire were chosen to complete the album.  Released in early December, its eight original compositions clearly stood out from the covers, demonstrating the growing maturity of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. The Beatles' second film, Help!, also directed by Lester, was released July 29, 1965.  A comedy adventure, described as a relentless spoof of Bond, with the the group up against an evil cult.  The soundtrack was dominated by Lennon, who wrote and sang lead on most of its songs, including the two singles: Help! and Ticket to Ride.  The accompanying album, the group's fifth studio LP, contained all original material save for two covers.  The band expanded their use of vocal overdubs on Help! and incorporated classical instruments into some arrangements, notably the string quartet on the pop ballad Yesterday.  Composed by McCartney, Yesterday would inspire the most recorded cover versions of any song ever written. The group's third US tour opened with a performance before a world-record crowd of 55,600 at New York's Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965.  A further nine successful concerts followed in other American cities.  At a show in Atlanta, the Beatles gave one of the first live performances ever to make use of a foldback system of on-stage monitor speakers (rear-facing loudspeakers that enable the band to hear what they play).  Towards the end of the tour they were granted an audience with Elvis Presley, a foundational musical influence on the band, who invited them to his home in Beverly Hills.

Rubber Soul, released in time for Christmas 1965, has been hailed by critics as a major step forward in the maturity and complexity of the band's music.  Their thematic reach was beginning to expand as they embraced deeper aspects of romance and philosophy.  After Help!'s foray into the world of classical music with flutes and strings, Harrison's introduction of a sitar on Norwegian Wood marked a further progression outside the traditional boundaries of popular music.  As their lyrics grew more artful, fans began to study them for deeper meaning.  Of Norwegian Wood Lennon commented: I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair ... but in such a smokescreen way that you couldn't tell.  The smokescreen was the Beatles' now habitual use of marijuana, an assertion confirmed by the band — Lennon referred to it as the pot album, and Starr said, Grass was really influential in a lot of our changes, especially with the writers.  And because they were writing different material, we were playing differently. Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the Beatles' final tour, redefined what was expected from popular music.  Revolver featured sophisticated songwriting, studio experimentation, and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles ranging from innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock.  In many respects, Revolver is one of the very first psychedelic LPs – not only in its numerous shifts in mood and production texture, but in its innovative manipulation of amplification and electronics to produce new sounds on guitars and other instruments.  Specific, widely-heralded examples include the backwards riffs of I'm Only Sleeping, the sitar of Love You To, the blurry guitars of She Said, She Said, and above all the seagull chanting, buzzing drones, megaphone vocals, free-association philosophizing, and varispeed tape effects of Tomorrow Never Knows.

Wanderin' Spirit
January, 2014
"Beatlemania"

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