1966–70: controversy, studio years and break-up
Events leading up to final tour
In June 1966, Yesterday and Today – one of the compilation albums created by Capitol Records for the US market – caused an uproar with its cover, which portrayed the grinning Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls. It has been suggested that this was meant as a satirical response to the way Capitol had "butchered" the US versions of their albums.[137] Thousands of copies of the LP had a new cover pasted over the original; an unpeeled "first-state" copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction.[138] In England, meanwhile, Harrison met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train him on the instrument.[139]
During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, the Beatles unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected them to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace.[140] When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on the band members' behalf, as it had never been his policy to accept such official invitations.[141] They soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they escaped the country with difficulty.[142] Immediately afterwards, the band members visited India for the first time.[143]
Almost as soon as they returned home, the Beatles faced a fierce backlash from US religious and social conservatives (as well as the Ku Klux Klan) over a comment Lennon had made in a March interview with British reporterMaureen Cleave.[144] "Christianity will go," Lennon had said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."[145] The comment went virtually unnoticed in England, but when US teenage fan magazine Datebook printed it five months later – on the eve of the group's August US tour – it sparked a controversy with Christians in the American "Bible Belt".[144] The Vatican issued a protest, and bans on Beatles' records were imposed by Spanish and Dutch stations and South Africa's national broadcasting service.[146] Epstein accused Datebook of having taken Lennon's words out of context; at a press conference Lennon pointed out, "If I'd said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it."[147] Lennon claimed that he was referring to how other people viewed their success, but at the prompting of reporters, he concluded: "If you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."[147]
As preparations were made for the US tour, the Beatles knew that their music would hardly be heard. Having originally used Vox AC30 amplifiers, they later acquired more powerful 100-watt amplifiers, specially designed byVox for them as they moved into larger venues in 1964, but these were still inadequate. Struggling to compete with the volume of sound generated by screaming fans, the band had grown increasingly bored with the routine of performing live.[148] Recognising that their shows were no longer about the music, they decided to make the August tour their last.[149]
Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
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Sample of "Eleanor Rigby" from Revolver (1966). The album involves innovative compositional approaches, arrangements and recording techniques. This song, primarily written by McCartney, prominently features classical strings in a novel fusion of musical styles.
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Rubber Soul had marked a major step forward; Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the Beatles' final tour, marked another.[150] Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef identifies it as "the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence" and "redefining what was expected from popular music".[151] Revolverfeatured sophisticated songwriting, studio experimentation, and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles, ranging from innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock.[150] Abandoning the customary group photograph, its cover – designed by Klaus Voormann, a friend of the band since their Hamburg days – "was a stark, arty, black-and-white collage that caricatured the Beatles in a pen-and-ink style beholden to Aubrey Beardsley", in Gould's description.[150] The album was preceded by the single "Paperback Writer", backed by "Rain".[152] Short promotional films were made for both songs; described by cultural historian Saul Austerlitz as "among the first true music videos",[153] they aired on The Ed Sullivan Show and Top of the Pops in June 1966.[154]
Among the experimental songs that Revolver featured was "Tomorrow Never Knows", the lyrics for which Lennon drew from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Its creation involved eight tape decks distributed about the EMI building, each manned by an engineer or band member, who randomly varied the movement of atape loop while Martin created a composite recording by sampling the incoming data.[155] McCartney's "Eleanor Rigby" made prominent use of a string octet; Gould describes it as "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognisable style or genre of song".[156] Harrison was developing as a songwriter, and three of his compositions earned a place on the record.[157] In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Revolver as the third greatest album of all time.[135] During the US tour that followed its release, however, the band performed none of its songs.[158] As Chris Ingham writes, they were very much "studio creations ... and there was no way a four-piece rock 'n' roll group could do them justice, particularly through the desensitising wall of the fans' screams. 'Live Beatles' and 'Studio Beatles' had become entirely different beasts."[159] The band's final concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on 29 August was their last commercial concert.[160] It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by almost nonstop touring that included over 1400 concert appearances internationally.[161]
Freed from the burden of touring, the Beatles embraced an increasingly experimental approach as they recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, beginning in late November 1966.[162] According to engineer Geoff Emerick, the album's recording took over 700 hours.[163] He recalled the band's insistence "that everything on Sgt. Pepper had to be different. We had microphones right down in the bells of brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins. We used giant primitive oscillators to vary the speed of instruments and vocals and we had tapes chopped to pieces and stuck together upside down and the wrong way around."[164] Parts of "A Day in the Life" featured a 40-piece orchestra.[164] The sessions initially yielded the non-album double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" in February 1967;[165] the Sgt. Pepper LP followed in June.[166]
The musical complexity of the records, created using relatively primitive four-track recording technology, astounded contemporary artists.[167] For Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, then in the midst of a personal crisis and struggling at the time to complete the ambitious Smile, hearing "Strawberry Fields" was a crushing blow and he soon abandoned all attempts to compete with his friendly rivals.[168][169] Among music critics, acclaim for the album was virtually universal.[170] Gould writes:
The overwhelming consensus is that the Beatles had created a popular masterpiece: a rich, sustained, and overflowing work of collaborative genius whose bold ambition and startling originality dramatically enlarged the possibilities and raised the expectations of what the experience of listening to popular music on record could be. On the basis of this perception, Sgt. Pepper became the catalyst for an explosion of mass enthusiasm for album-formatted rock that would revolutionise both the aesthetics and the economics of the record business in ways that far outstripped the earlier pop explosions triggered by the Elvis phenomenon of 1956 and the Beatlemania phenomenon of 1963.[171]
Sgt. Pepper was the first major pop/rock LP to include its complete lyrics, which appeared on the back cover.[172][173] Those lyrics were the subject of critical analysis; for instance, in late 1967 the album was the subject of a scholarly inquiry by American literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier, who observed that his students were "listening to the group's music with a degree of engagement that he, as a teacher of literature, could only envy".[174] Poirier identified what he termed its "mixed allusiveness": "It's unwise ever to assume that they're doing only one thing or expressing themselves in only one style ... one kind of feeling about a subject isn't enough ... any single induced feeling must often exist within the context of seemingly contradictory alternatives."[174] McCartney said at the time: "We write songs. We know what we mean by them. But in a week someone else says something about it, and you can't deny it. ... You put your own meaning at your own level to our songs."[174] In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number one on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[135]
Sgt. Pepper's elaborate cover also attracted considerable interest and study.[175] A collage designed by pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, it depicted the group as the fictional band referred to in the album's title track[176] standing in front of a crowd of famous people.[177] The heavy moustaches worn by the group reflected the growing influence of hippie style,[178] while cultural historian Jonathan Harris describes their "brightly coloured parodies of military uniforms" as a knowingly "anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment" display.[179]
On 25 June 1967, the Beatles performed their forthcoming single, "All You Need Is Love", to an estimated 350 million viewers on Our World, the first live global television link.[180] Released a week later, during the Summer of Love, the song was adopted as a flower power anthem.[181] Two months later, the group suffered a loss that threw their career into turmoil. Having been introduced to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi only the previous night in London, on 25 August they travelled to Bangor for his Transcendental Meditationretreat. Two days later, their manager's assistant, Peter Brown, phoned to inform them that Epstein had died.[182] The coroner ruled the death an accidental carbitol overdose, although it was widely rumoured to be a suicide.[183] Epstein had been in a fragile emotional state, stressed by personal issues and concern that the band might not renew his management contract, due to expire in October, over discontent with his supervision of business matters, particularly regarding Seltaeb, the company that handled their US merchandising rights.[184] His death left the group disoriented and fearful about the future. Lennon recalled: "We collapsed. I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, 'We've had it now.'"[185]
Magical Mystery Tour, "The White Album" and Yellow Submarine
Magical Mystery Tour, the soundtrack to a forthcoming Beatles television film, was released in the UK as a six-track double extended play disc (EP) in early December 1967.[75][186] In the United States, the six songs were issued on an identically titled LP that also included five tracks from the band's recent singles.[93] Unterberger says of the US Magical Mystery Tour, "the psychedelic sound is very much in the vein of Sgt. Pepper, and even spacier in parts (especially the sound collages of 'I Am the Walrus')" and he calls its five songs culled from the band's 1967 singles "huge, glorious, and innovative".[187] In its first three weeks, the album set a record for the highest initial sales of any Capitol LP, and it is the only Capitol compilation later to be adopted in the band's official canon of studio albums.[188] First aired on Boxing Day, the Magical Mystery Tour film, largely directed by McCartney, brought the group their first major negative UK press. It was dismissed as "blatant rubbish" by the Daily Express; the Daily Mail called it "a colossal conceit"; and The Guardian labelled the film "a kind of fantasy morality play about the grossness and warmth and stupidity of the audience".[189] Gould describes it as "a great deal of raw footage showing a group of people getting on, getting off, and riding on a bus".[189] Although the viewership figures were respectable, its slating in the press led US television networks to lose interest in broadcasting the film.[190]
In January 1968, the Beatles filmed a cameo for the animated movie Yellow Submarine, which featured cartoon versions of the band members and a soundtrack with eleven of their songs, including four unreleased studio recordings that made their debut in the film.[191] Released in June 1968, the film was praised by critics for its music, humour and innovative visual style.[192] It would be seven months, however, before the film's soundtrack album appeared.[193]
In the interim came The Beatles, a double LP commonly known as "The White Album" for its virtually featureless cover.[195] Creative inspiration for the album came from a new direction: without Epstein's guiding presence, the group had briefly turned to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their guru.[196] At his ashram in Rishikesh, India, a "Guide Course" scheduled for three months marked one of their most prolific periods, yielding numerous songs including a majority of the 30 included on the album.[197] However, Starr left after only ten days, likening it to Butlins, and McCartney eventually grew bored and departed a month later.[198] For Lennon and Harrison, creativity turned to questioning when an electronics technician known as Magic Alex suggested that the Maharishi was attempting to manipulate them.[196] When he alleged that the Maharishi had made sexual advances to women attendees, a persuaded Lennon left abruptly just two months into the course, bringing an unconvinced Harrison and the remainder of the group's entourage with him.[198] In anger, Lennon wrote a scathing song titled "Maharishi", renamed "Sexy Sadie" to avoid potential legal issues. McCartney said, "We made a mistake. We thought there was more to him than there was."[196]
During recording sessions for The White Album, which stretched from late May to mid-October 1968, relations between the Beatles grew openly divisive.[199] Starr quit for two weeks, and McCartney took over the drum kit for "Back in the U.S.S.R." (on which Harrison and Lennon drummed as well) and "Dear Prudence".[200] Lennon had lost interest in collaborating with McCartney,[201] whose contribution "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" he scorned as "granny music shit".[202] Tensions were further aggravated by Lennon's romantic preoccupation with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, whom he insisted on bringing to the sessions despite the group's well-established understanding that girlfriends were not allowed in the studio.[203] Describing the double album, Lennon later said: "Every track is an individual track; there isn't any Beatle music on it. [It's] John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band."[204] McCartney has recalled that the album "wasn't a pleasant one to make".[205] Both he and Lennon identified the sessions as the start of the band's break-up.[206][207]
Issued in November, The White Album was the band's first Apple Records album release, although EMI continued to own their recordings.[208] The new label was a subsidiary of Apple Corps, which Epstein had formed as part of his plan to create a tax-effective business structure.[209] The record attracted more than 2 million advance orders, selling nearly 4 million copies in the US in little over a month, and its tracks dominated the playlists of American radio stations.[210] Despite its popularity, it did not receive flattering reviews at the time. According to Gould:
The critical response ... ranged from mixed to flat. In marked contrast to Sgt. Pepper, which had helped to establish an entire genre of literate rock criticism, the White Album inspired no critical writing of any note. Even the most sympathetic reviewers ... clearly didn't know what to make of this shapeless outpouring of songs. Newsweek's Hubert Saal, citing the high proportion of parodies, accused the group of getting their tongues caught in their cheeks.[210]
General critical opinion eventually turned in favour of The White Album, and in 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it as the tenth greatest album of all time.[135] Pitchfork's Mark Richardson describes it as "large and sprawling, overflowing with ideas but also with indulgences, and filled with a hugely variable array of material ... its failings are as essential to its character as its triumphs."[211] Erlewine comments: "The [band's] two main songwriting forces were no longer on the same page, but neither were George and Ringo", yet "Lennon turns in two of his best ballads", McCartney's songs are "stunning", Harrison had become "a songwriter who deserved wider exposure", and Starr's composition was "a delight".[212]
The Yellow Submarine LP, issued in January 1969, contained only the four previously unreleased songs that had debuted in the film, along with the title track (already issued on Revolver), "All You Need Is Love" (already issued as a single and on the US Magical Mystery Tour LP) and seven instrumental pieces composed by Martin.[193] Because of the paucity of new Beatles music, AllMusic's Unterberger and Bruce Eder suggest the album might be "inessential" but for Harrison's "It's All Too Much": "the jewel of the new songs ... resplendent in swirling Mellotron, larger-than-life percussion, and tidal waves of feedback guitar ... a virtuoso excursion into otherwise hazy psychedelia".[213]
Abbey Road, Let It Be, and break-up
Although Let It Be was the Beatles' final album release, it was largely recorded before Abbey Road. The project's impetus came from an idea Martin attributes to McCartney, who suggested they "record an album of new material and rehearse it, then perform it before a live audience for the very first time – on record and on film".[214] Originally intended for a one-hour television programme to be called Beatles at Work, much of the album's content came from extensive rehearsals filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg at Twickenham Film Studios, beginning in January 1969.[214][215] Martin has said that the project was "not at all a happy recording experience. It was a time when relations between the Beatles were at their lowest ebb."[214] Lennon described the largely impromptu sessions as "hell ... the most miserable ... on Earth", and Harrison, "the low of all-time".[216] Irritated by both McCartney and Lennon, Harrison walked out for five days. Upon returning, he threatened to leave the band unless they "abandon[ed] all talk of live performance" and instead focused on finishing a new album, initially titled Get Back, using songs recorded for the TV special.[217] He also demanded they cease work at Twickenham and relocate to the newly finished Apple Studio. The other band members agreed, and the idea came about to salvage the footage shot for the TV production for use in a feature film.[218]
In an effort to alleviate tensions within the band and improve the quality of their live sound, Harrison invited keyboardist Billy Preston to participate in the last nine days of sessions.[219]Preston received label billing on the "Get Back" single – the only musician ever to receive that acknowledgment on an official Beatles release.[220] At the conclusion of the rehearsals, the band could not agree on a location to film a concert, rejecting several ideas, including a boat at sea, a lunatic asylum, the Tunisian desert, and the Colosseum.[214] Ultimately, what would be their final live performance was filmed on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, London, on 30 January 1969.[221] Five weeks later, engineer Glyn Johns, whom Lewisohn describes as Get Back's "uncredited producer", began work assembling an album, given "free rein" as the band "all but washed their hands of the entire project".[222]
New strains developed between the band members regarding the appointment of a financial adviser, the need for which had become evident without Epstein to manage business affairs. Lennon, Harrison and Starr favoured Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and Sam Cooke; McCartney wanted John Eastman, brother of Linda Eastman, whom McCartney married on 12 March. Agreement could not be reached, so both were temporarily appointed, but further conflict ensued and financial opportunities were lost.[223] On 8 May, Klein was named sole manager of the band.[224]
Martin stated that he was surprised when McCartney asked him to produce another album, as the Get Back sessions had been "a miserable experience" and he had "thought it was the end of the road for all of us".[225] The primary recording sessions for Abbey Road began on 2 July 1969.[226] Lennon, who rejected Martin's proposed format of a "continuously moving piece of music", wanted his and McCartney's songs to occupy separate sides of the album.[227] The eventual format, with individually composed songs on the first side and the second consisting largely of a medley, was McCartney's suggested compromise.[227] On 4 July, the first solo single by a Beatle was released: Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance", credited to the Plastic Ono Band. The completion and mixing of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" on 20 August 1969 was the last occasion on which all four Beatles were together in the same studio.[228] Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on 20 September, but agreed to withhold a public announcement to avoid undermining sales of the forthcoming album.[229]
Released six days after Lennon's declaration, Abbey Road sold 4 million copies within three months and topped the UK charts for a total of seventeen weeks.[230] Its second track, the ballad "Something", was issued as a single – the only Harrison composition ever to appear as a Beatles A-side.[231] Abbey Road received mixed reviews, although the medley met with general acclaim.[230] Unterberger considers it "a fitting swan song for the group", containing "some of the greatest harmonies to be heard on any rock record".[232] Musicologist and author Ian MacDonald calls the album "erratic and often hollow", despite the "semblance of unity and coherence" offered by the medley.[233] Martin has singled it out as his personal favourite of all the band's albums; Lennon said it was "competent" but had "no life in it". Recording engineer Emerick notes that the replacement of the studio's valve mixing console with a transistorised one yielded a less punchy sound, leaving the group frustrated at the thinner tone and lack of impact and contributing to its "kinder, gentler" feel relative to their previous albums.[234]
For the still unfinished Get Back album, one last song, Harrison's "I Me Mine", was recorded on 3 January 1970. Lennon, in Denmark at the time, did not participate.[235] In March, rejecting the work Johns had done on the project, now retitled Let It Be, Klein gave the session tapes to American producer Phil Spector, who had recently produced Lennon's solo single "Instant Karma!"[236] In addition to remixing the material, Spector edited, spliced and overdubbed several of the recordings that had been intended as "live". McCartney was unhappy with the producer's approach and particularly dissatisfied with the lavish orchestration on "The Long and Winding Road", which involved a fourteen-voice choir and 36-piece instrumental ensemble.[237] McCartney's demands that the alterations to the song be reverted were ignored,[238] and he publicly announced his departure from the band on 10 April 1970, a week before the release of his first, self-titled solo album.[237][239]
On 8 May, the Spector-produced Let It Be was released. Its accompanying single, "The Long and Winding Road", was the Beatles' last; it was released in the United States, but not Britain.[152] The Let It Be documentary film followed later that month, and would win the 1970 Academy Award for Best Original Song Score.[240] Sunday Telegraph critic Penelope Gilliatt called it "a very bad film and a touching one ... about the breaking apart of this reassuring, geometrically perfect, once apparently ageless family of siblings".[241] Several reviewers stated that some of the performances in the film sounded better than their analogous album tracks.[242] Describing Let It Beas the "only Beatles album to occasion negative, even hostile reviews", Unterberger calls it "on the whole underrated"; he singles out "some good moments of straight hard rock in 'I've Got a Feeling' and 'Dig a Pony'", and praises "Let It Be", "Get Back", and "the folky 'Two of Us', with John and Paul harmonising together".[243] McCartney filed suit for the dissolution of the Beatles' contractual partnership on 31 December 1970.[244] Legal disputes continued long after their break-up, and the dissolution was not formalised until 29 December 1974.[245]
