We love the Beatles.
When the Beatles appeared on the international stage in 1963,
they changed popular music overnight.
They were an unparalleled commercial phenomenon
and paved the way for all the artists who followed them.
They sold huge amounts of albums,
a quarter of million per week.
No one had accomplished that before. Not even Elvis or Lonnie Donegan.
They sold every week a quarter of a million albums.
There was a revolution, just in terms of sales.
But on top of that , we would not have had the Rolling Stones.
There would have been no The Byrds, or Dylan would have gone to the electric.
There would have been neither The Doors nor all those bands
that we associate also with the 60.
Without the Beatles, it was very unlikely that they all existed.
However, the band had an impact far beyond music.
As faces of a thriving young culture, i>
its influence reached the heart of the postwar world.
They were agents of change. They took everyone with them.
Everything felt modern, new, original.
You'll see where you would look, > the world was beginning to look different.
Colors began to emerge,
the green shoots of a new culture.
Since The Beatles arrived,
completely reinvented how the culture works.
Suddenly, the adults left their hair long .
Adult women wore miniskirts.
Suddenly, it was the young who decided everything.
That started with the Beatles.
For the second half of the 60,
the band became the leader of the emerging counterculture.
By bringing new ideas social, sexual and artistic
to the dominant culture through its peaceful revolution,
became the undisputed voice of a generation.
They were the most commercial band in the world.
But they were also the most avant-garde and experimental.
That was their role. With their music, they opened people's heads. </ P>
They helped mobilize many people that they would not otherwise have accepted...
END THE WAR IN VIETNAM NOW
BRING THE SOLDIERS HOME
what happened those years.
ARREST THE HOUSING SECRETARY
They were inspiring and influential in that sense. </ P>
But as they became more involved in the counterculture
and they represented it more, they became a political threat.
GO HOME, BEATLES
This movie follows the path of the Beatles
during the most extraordinary decade < br /> 20th century.
Reveals the lasting impact of four Liverpool musicians
that passed from being class warriors to cultural revolutionaries
and, at the same time, musicalized a generation.
They were catalysts for many things. </ P>
They changed practically everything.
Great Britain, 1962.
A small and once dominant kingdom
that was finally recovering years of austerity
after the Second World War.
A nation of discipline and order,
of industrial cities and tranquil green towns.
And although it seemed stuck in the past
under the surface a new culture developed </ p >
that would transform it quickly.
At the end of the year, the UK suffered
one of the coldest climates of its history,
with which the routine was interrupted, with the country covered in snow. >
On January 11, 1963, breaking through this cold winter,
launched a disc who took a first look
to the new world that was coming.
"Please please me", the second single
from the Beatles band, from Liverpool, </ p >
quickly reached number two position on the British charts
and its overall success announced the arrival
of a revolutionary force in both music and culture.
"Please please me" was like a rash. >
They took the direct strength of the rock and roll of the 50s,
which was a blunt instrument, only in that way could it be described.
Musically and socially, it was a blunt instrument.
And they combined that with the harmonies
and the querulous vocal quality of the female groups
of the early 60s.
Nobody had heard something like that before. </ P>
It was a group that had two of the best singers
from his time in the same band,
and I think it had never happened like this before.
The voices of Lennon and McCartney together...
AUTHOR
are the best of music of the 20th century. </ P>
They were a whole Concussion.
"Love me do" was the first single and it was like a false start.
En " Please please me " the band sounds in unison. </ P>
AUTHOR MUSICAL AND JOURNALIST
Sing:" Come on, come on ".
There is a sense of anticipation and excitement.
It was an original sound. Now it sounds very traditional.
But back then, the appearance and the sound were totally original.
They were positive, inspiring and modern.
The Beatles... John Lennon, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison and Ringo Starr,
they gave a much-needed stimulus to the British pop scene.
Although the US rock it had been extremely popular in the mid-1950s,
its initial explosion, so electrifying, it proved to last very little.
The main stars were sold or disappeared from the scene,
and the musicians who followed them were much healthier and less threatening.
British artists imitated them,
and the UK music scene was dominated by talented impersonators
and the teen idols of the puppeteer of pop Larry Parnes.
With the support of his agent, Brian Epstein, and his producer, George Martin,
< i> The Beatles offered something very different.
Driven by Lennon and McCartney's unique composition composition, </ p >
this band composed their own material.
Great part of the English show business,
As we see it, it was actually a pale reflection of the US.
It had not always been like that, but, since the war, it certainly was .
There were singers like Matt Monro,
who did an almost perfect imitation of Frank Sinatra.
, there were the famous English stars, superficial
and fatuous of the moment,
of which Cliff Richard was, by far, the more known and successful.
It was a kind of version of Elvis third category.
And no from Elvis from "Heartbreak Hotel", but from Elvis from King Creole,
from Elvis movie star.
It was quite professional.
Cliff Richards and The Shadows played well.
It was a good group.
But it was for the whole family.
p>
And there were also characters like Larry Parnes,
with his gang of pretty boys doing what they were I used to say,
that they were singing what they were being told to sing
and that they were not creative contribution whatsoever
Then, when someone like the Beatles arrives...
MUSICIAN AND AUTHOR
who play their own instruments, /> they sing beautifully
and, in addition, they sing their own songs, it is something very uncommon for the time.
They wrote the songs for the audience, to address the audience.
They knew that 80% of the audience was made up of teenage girls
and they wrote songs that provoked the perfect reaction.
And after that, the alluvium came.
Let everyone know that you can write your own song,
be part of the action. i>
One or two years later, all bands composed
or tried to do it.
It was not just the extraordinary sound of the Beatles
and the unique talents of Lennon and McCartney
that revolutionized popular music.
As they came to dominate the charts in 1963,
their string of successes transformed the commercial destiny i>
of the British record industry.
As the Beatles became more popular
and each album seemed to sell more and more,
there was a revolution in the British recording industry,
only in terms of sales.
We have never seen anything like this, as much in terms of sales
as in the time that the Beatles remained on the lists,
for months, months and months.
On top of that,
was the constant impact of one success after another,
that never let quality go down.
In any case, the quality increased,
from "Please please me" to "From me to you" ,
she was a little calmer, but no less astute.
And then she came to surprise us "She loves you",
that explodes on the radio to this day.
People like Cliff, Billy Fury and Elvis...
PARTNER OF THE BEATLES
sold fairly large quantities of discs,
but, by the beginning of 1963,
with "Please please me", "From me to you"
and the album Please Please Me,
They sold astronomical amounts of discs.
Nobody had seen anything like this in the pop industry.
Suddenly, it was a fashion industry
that not only did young people notice,
but also accountants .
So everyone was looking to The Moody Blues for Birmingham,
to The Hollies for Manchester. And in Liverpool, of course,
the headhunters were looking for the next Beatles.
Everyone wanted to be part of the action
because they had revolutionized the music industry
in just a few months in 1963.
But the impact of the band was not limited to the musical world only.
They also represented a seismic change, which also inspired,
in the very core of British society.
How these four young people /> working class of Liverpool
managed to head such a change?
The answer is in the past of the Beatles and the country.
In the two previous centuries to the Second World War,
the United Kingdom had led the Industrial Revolution
and ruled the greatest empire on earth.
One of the pillars of this superpower
was their class system,
which divided and, at the same time, ordered citizens. </ p >
After being victorious from the war in 1945,
the elite class of the system,
known as the ruling class,
which included the monarchy, the aristocracy
and the heads of the main institutions
that governed the society,
immediately tried to reinforce /> your power.
Once again, this chain of command
would shape life in Britain during the postwar period.
Great Britain was a very class society.
We were a nation of subjects, not citizens.
And as long as there was a real family...
WRITER AND FRIEND OF THE BEATLES
and a group of ladies and gentlemen, the whole hierarchy of privilege,
obviously someone I was going to be down.
After the war, the ruling class tried to reassert itself, obviously.
So, for example, there were still the old Christian values.
On Sundays nothing happened.
Even the swings for children in the parks were chained.
The 60's was the first time that someone questioned something of that
and began to challenge all those traditional assumptions.
In truth, the same group of middle class people
who thought he had the right to tell others how to live
was still in power.
<p But the power of Britain was in decline
and its empire slowly crumbled.
< i> I was almost bankrupt due to the war effort,
and the difficult years that followed saw the whole country suffer.
The north of England in particular struggled to survive,
and the formerly dominant port city of Liverpool ,
attacked severely by the Germans,
was afflicted by the damages suffered and an industry in extinction.
During the 19th century,
the north developed this sense of self-pride
Liverpool Port was the largest in the world
i>
because England was the largest trading nation in the world,
and most things came and went around.
But in the course of the 20th century,
England experienced a phenomenon that is now well known
for Americans of the late 20th century:
By the 1940s, it was clear that Liverpool was in decline.
Thus, the Beatles generation it grew in this place
that was full of emblems of imperialist power,
but that it was becoming
a very bad place to live in many ways.
There was rubble everywhere.
The streets were full of bombed buildings.
All children used to play in buildings and abandoned places.
WRITER AND FRIEND OF JOHN LENNON
The rubble was still there decades later. </ P>
There was no money and the situation was complicated. </ P> i>
What could young people in Liverpool aspire to?
Everything was closing down. They were closing all the factories.
It was a very difficult time in Liverpool at that time.
And it was in that austere scenario that the Beatles grew up.
The founder of the band and senior member, John Lennon,
was born in a divided household i>
and was raised by his uncles
in a relatively wealthy area of the city.
But his future companions, Paul McCartney and George Harrison,
came from working class neighborhoods.
Despite the deterioration that surrounded them and the difficulties with which they were raised,
the future possibilities of the three were driven
by a new educational initiative
that made the brightest children enter institutes
regardless of your financial history.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison >
gave an exam at 11 years
which, in essence, certified that they were ready.
And for having passed the so-called 11 + exam,
were candidates to go to the institutes.
These were designed to educate children
to then be able to receive some type of higher education.
This meant that, at age 11, at a relatively young age. ..
Particularly Paul McCartney and George Harrison,
who really were working class.
John Lennon was a bit more complicated. It was a little bit of everything.
But in the case of Paul McCartney /> and George Harrison,
at age 11, they were isolated in a certain way
from the world of suburbs where they had grown up.
Every day they took the bus to the center of Liverpool
to go to a place called Liverpool Institute,
and basically they were marked and they were educated from the age of 11
to transcend their origins of the working class.
With an education higher than that of their parents,
these future Beatles were a new breed,
raised within the proud working class of Liverpool,
but undaunted by the educated elites supposedly superior to them.
And with the arrival of rock in 1956...
DO NOT MISS THE TRAIN OF ROCK
exploited a musical form aimed at young people
and their sense of difference.
< i> The following year, John Lennon met Paul McCartney
and invited him to join his band, The Quarrymen,
to which George Harrison joined shortly after.
Around them, in Liverpool,
a new phenomenon found its rebellious voice...
The teenagers had arrived.
The 50s became the era
< i> that the teenagers really reached maturity.
We were united by our love for music.
Until then, a boy went to a bar
for his first beer with his father when he came of age. >
He dressed like his dad.
She went to her dad's union and worked the same as her dad.
The women were in the kitchen, learning to make breakfast,
clean and so on.
But suddenly, the young people were earning money ,
and they wanted to spend it their way
and do what they wanted, instead of being told what to do .
It was opening a generation gap,
which would dominate the cultural life of Britain the next decade.
And while rock was affecting British working-class youth,
middle-class teenagers took other influences from the US,
from the beat generation to jazz and blues.
If the future Beatles were rebels of rock at heart,
none personified this much as John Lennon.
But in disapproving his exams in 1957, >
found a vacancy at the Liverpool College of Art,
where it was launched into a culture unknown bohemian student.
While this proved essential to expand their talents,
here Lennon was a stranger.
I met John Lennon at the College of Art.
I was sitting in the canteen .
Suddenly, I saw a boy pass by.
And I thought: "What's he wearing?"
He was dressed almost like a Teddy Boy,
with a clothes completely out of the ordinary </ p >
compared to the others.
I looked around and they all wore braids
and turtlenecks.
I thought: "Everyone uses the same,
they are all conventional.
He is the rebel. He is different. </ P>
I have to know him. "</ P>
If you went to art school in the 50s, you would be exposed
to intellectual radicalism and the rebellion of figures
as Jack Kerouac and the beat generation,
which were a repression against established religion,
in favor of self-expression and against any system.
And the "angry young people" of the theater, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker,
they were angry, but they were ready.
They found a way to direct their anger, it could have been anguish personal,
but, when addressing to the outside world,
can create an articulated voice of a generation, by so to say.
Nine hundred and fifty-four...
EVERYTHING BEGINS ON SATURDAY
cursed 955.
It could end in half the time,
but it would only reduce my salary. go to the devil.
Do not let the unfortunates discourage you.
It's the only thing I learned.
type of influence would have been very attractive
for someone like John Lennon, who was an irate young man himself,
for many reasons personal. But if you can be an angry young man
and, moreover, reflective, that's very attractive.
By the summer of 1960, John Lennon's institute days,
Paul McCartney and George Harrison had finished.
Even so, they quickly moved into an education of another kind.
In August, the band, that now it was called the Beatles,
went to a show season in the vibrant German city of Hamburg
and, during the following year,
it was there that they won their place as a rock band.
When they returned to Liverpool in 1961,
they quickly reached the top of the city's music scene.
However, they were isolated in the north,
and the rest of the country paid little attention to them.
I started writing to newspapers like the Daily Mail
telling that what was happening in Liverpool was like New Orleans
at the beginning of century,
but with rock instead of jazz.
Of course, nobody was interested.
So I decided to do it myself and I created Mersey Beat. </ p >
Of course, my friends,
John and the group he had formed, the Beatles,
were the ones he wrote the most about.
With an adolescent hungry for information
about this new world of rock,
< i> Bill Harry's music newspaper, Mersey Beat,
was very successful in the north of England.
With their constant praise to the Beatles...
FIRST COLOR PHOTO OF THE BEATLES
it caught the attention
from one of your taxpayers, local businessman Brian Epstein.
Epstein was running a music store in Liverpool
Epstein i>
and agreed with Bill Harry to go see the band
at the legendary Cavern Club in the city, where he was amazed with his performance.
He immediately offered to represent them
and, by January 1962 , a contract was signed.
Sorry for the controlling approach of agents like Larry Parnes,
< i> Epstein was aware of the unspoken rules
of the British entertainment industry.
first they had to change their appearance.
I think he had the instinct
to understand the pattern general
of how things worked in this country.
They were the young and wild Beatles, < br /> dressed in black leather
and playing rock for prostitutes,
mafiosi and others in Hamburg,
consuming drugs and others. < They were the young and wild Beatles.
They would never have accepted the consolidated media.
And the Beatles achievement a Early 1963
confirmed that Epstein's instincts were very successful.
He managed to smuggle < br /> a singular band of rebels
at the heart of the dominant culture.
But instead of being a controller like the other agents in this industry,
he gave them freedom.
Since they reached the top of the British charts,
the press, the TV drivers and the radio interviewers
came face to face with the Beatles ,
and these ready, confident and very modern men
chose to play the game according to their own rules.
At first, the behavior of the Beatles with the press
was what most revolutionary of all.
Nobody in your age group
and, to some extent, its origin,
has never behaved like this with reporters.
Do you know that Do you look like Matt Monro?
Sing us "Russia with love".
Thank you, guys.
The Beatles were daring.
In the interviews, they turned the tables.
When interviewing Adam Faith or someone like that,
>
was a matter as a master and servant.
Cliff, how was your tour?
INTERVIEW IN 1962
Sincerely , I think it was the most pleasant in a long time,
more than anything, not only for the public,
The Beatles cut with that and almost ridiculed the thing,
they turned it into a farce in the style of the Marx Brothers,
which was Fantastic.
They say that you four will be millionaires by the end of the year.
Wow, that's good.
Do you have time to spend that money?
What money? He said. </ P>
- Do not you give them anything? - No. </ P>
Did you see the car you have? </ P>
It was very similar as the groups
of male adolescents interacted with each other
naturally.
This is what teenagers do.
They try to outdo each other.
They try to knock each other down /> and that kind of thing.
The Beatles simply had the audacity to take this
and do it in front of the microphones and the cameras.
John, it's rumored in the newspaper The News of the Beatles
that maybe you leave the band.
It's a lie, I have a contract .
I've been trying to quit for years.
- You've been writing poetry. - What newspaper?
The News of the Beatles .
- I do not know him. - Do you want to see it?
- No. - It must be from the USA.
p>
Part of their success was because they were not artificial.
They were just themselves, and that was surprising.
That being oneself was something new.
<p When presented genuinely,
the Beatles managed to highlight the mannered and unnatural exterior
of British cultural life
at a time when it already showed signs of weakness.
The attitude of society in the face of any behavior,
in particular with regard to sex,
had been puritanical and conservative for centuries,
but, by the early 60s, things were changing.
< i> At the beginning of the decade, the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover
was published successfully.
It was hidden from the general public since the late 1920s. </ p >
It was an erotic love story despite class differences.
It was a phenomenon since its launch
and it sold quickly more than three million copies.
At the same time, a scandal arose
in the midst of the British ruling class,
when an illicit affair was exposed
between the politician John Profumo and a model of 19 years.
The conservative sexual attitudes of the English
they were confronted in public.
And then came the Beatlemania.
Towards the summer of 1963, the overwhelming effect of the band
about teenagers was becoming a national epidemic.
Critics warned that the band
had unleashed a wave of sexual furor in the female audience.
But the release that the Beatles offered to these girls
i>
was more complicated than it seemed at first glance.
What everyone wanted already the time they did not want to think
was that all this was part of eroticism,
It was that these girls had something
that seemed to simulate a sexual experience
in response to the fact of seeing and listening to the Beatles.
Therefore, always
was spoken and written about in the Freudian terms of hysteria,
which is also a sexually charged term.
These girls were orgasmic? This was Orgasmic?
That was not what was happening.
The rock of the 50s
was a catalyst for many young men
to find a reason to be more than a version
of their father when they were teenagers.
Dressing up like Teddy Boy and acting quarrelsome in the street
maybe it was not incredibly expressive,
but at least it meant finding an identity.
I think for a young woman it was not that simple. >
Something like the Beatlemania,
the cries that surrounded the Beatles,
< i> it is tempting to interpret it as a cry of frustration
as they try to find their own identity,
and it's so little expressive, in some way,
that the quarrelsome kids in the cinemas.
Do you deliberately try to generate this reaction to the screaming?
No, we arrived at the theater, and they are always there, waiting.
When we do a show, the police come to tell us:
"Do not look out the window because you will excite them". </ P>
These women controlled public spaces
and nobody I could do nothing about it.
It's a perfect example of what we would call misconduct.
Shout , screaming and whining in public.
It was bad behavior one way or another.
But he was authorized, not by the authorities,
but by the band itself.
The Beatles phenomenon was unstoppable.
At the end of August, the single "She loves you"
became the fastest-selling disc sold in the history of the United Kingdom.
In less than a year, The success of the band exceeded
to that of any other previous artist.
The final stage of its conquest of Britain
arrived on November 4, 1963,
when they found for the first time...
PRINCE OF WALES
with the highest level of the ruling class: the royal family.
The occasion unleashed the rock rebel that John Lennon was carrying inside,
that he saw in that night's show /> an opportunity that I could not waste.
John, in this program, when you appear in front of royalty,
your vocabulary should be good, of course.
This about Ted Heath /> He said he could not distinguish...
- I do not understand. - The English of the queen...
I do not understand why Teddy would say something like that. </ P>
I will not vote for Ted. </ P>
But you will not change your way of acting, for...
No, we will continue doing the same, right?
- Yes. - Yes, that's right.
Lennon always had an ambivalent relationship with how </ p >
the show's leading class became attached to the Beatles.
On the one hand, their professional side loved the fact </ p >
that they were fabulously successful.
But, for his rebellious side, it was difficult to assimilate.
So, in the Royal Command Performance,
scoffed at Brian Epstein suggesting
that he would take the stage and curse in front of the queen.
But in the end, he beat his professionalism.
He managed to create a small subversion,
but it was carefully thought out
Thanks.
For our last issue, I would like to ask for your help.
Could you, please, applaud the people from the cheapest seats? ?
And the others, please, clink their jewelry.
And this was a moment of insurrection, that's how it felt.
But the thing is that maybe it was not so radical
because, if you see Lennon after saying it,
looks like it's just admit to your mom
what was done on top of it or something like that.
It was a humbling cure. He felt ashamed. >
But nobody but him would have the guts to say that.
What might have seemed a kind of moment
revolutionary and rebellious, by saying "make your jewels tinkle"
in a very marked area by the difference of classes,
was overshadowed by this feeling
that the Beatles were good guys and could do whatever they wanted. </ p >
With the British youth at your feet,
The Beatles targeted new territories.
They traveled to Scandinavia at the end of the year
and then to France.
The national pop scene that they left
had been transformed with your success
and, as well as Gerry and the Pacemakers from Liverpool
or the London Rolling Stones ,
new groups emerged almost every week
to fight for their place the clubs and the lists.
But the Beatles were advancing,
and the look of Brian Epstein was firmly placed
in the largest territory of all: United States.
Now that you are going to the USA, did you generate a reaction there?
Do you have a fan club?
There is supposed to be one.
They are having a very good response, 12,000 letters a day.
But is there a Beatle movement there?
Yes, it can even empower us.
p>
By the way, at the University of Detroit, there is a movement to take down you.
- Yes? - No.
We will finish with Detroit. </ P>
They believe that their haircuts are not American. </ P>
Well they are very observant, because we are not Americans. </ P >
There was always the question what would happen next.
But it never exploded. It just kept on existing.
If Britain suffered a difficult summer when the Beatles
they lit for the first time the lists in 1963,
when "I want to hold your hand"
arrived in the USA the following year,
entered a nation dealing with much greater misfortunes.
After the Second World War World, they were one of the two superpowers of the world,
and the next decade was dominated
by the hostile relationship of the country with the Soviet Union
and the threat of a real nuclear war.
But Americans enjoyed the fruits of a growing economy,
had emerged a strong consumer culture >
and the national trust was high.
In 1960, he became president John F. Kennedy, >
a young and charismatic politician who personified this new confidence
and promised a bright and optimistic future .
My fellow citizens of the world,
do not wonder what the US will do. for you,
but what can we do together for the freedom of man.
Three years later, in November 1963,
i>
He represented an injection of energy to life in the US.
He was young, he was handsome.
It represented a very marked change to Dwight Eisenhower.
REVIEW ROLLING STONE
Eisenhower was a remnant of World War II.
He was a war hero, of course.
It was an extension of that generation in the modern United States.
But John Kennedy was the modern United States. </ P>
All the optimism and youth. The birth explosion was taking place. </ p >
In a way, it was embodied by John Kennedy.
And the Kennedy assassination...
ended that.
The Beatles also represented youth,
just like John Kennedy, and cunning and intelligence.
No doubt, for young people, this changed things immediately .
The Beatles lit USA.
Sure it could have been something else.
Some other happy manifestation of something
surely could have happened, but what happened was a song.
And it's very important to understand
that, in Great Britain, the personalities of the Beatles,
their witty talk, all his public performance
was an important part
of how they got the attention of the public from there.
In the US, it was with a song.
It was the perfect vehicle
to enter this traumatized national atmosphere.
What is the dominant quality of the sound
of Lennon and McCartney singing together?
The joy, the joy of playing,
of listening to the voice of the other,
of any kind of stimulus that took place there.
That's painting with broad strokes. There's nothing subtle about it.
Undoubtedly, the Beatles changed everything immediately.
"I want to hold your hand" had a tremendous impact.
And then, of course, the doors opened, p>
not only with an excellent Beatles song after another,
but with the British invasion.
The Beatles knocked down the door.
What they had done to Britain now they did it to EE .
"I want to hold your hand", released at the end of 1963,
sold in two months more than a million copies
and was the first single number of the band in the USA. >
One week after arriving at the first place,
John, Paul, George and Ringo crossed the Atlantic
and they arrived in New York
to greet a new group of enraged teenage fans.
They were also welcomed by members of the press
eager to understand this foreign phenomenon,
and the band presented them their unique informal humor,
than in the US it was as uncommon as in Britain.
No doubt, his way of dealing with the press was original.
It was clear that they were something like no other.
How smart they were, how funny they were!
John and Paul in particular
p>
were extremely clever, eloquent and original people.
George was also a very funny guy. </ p >
And Ringo was something like a born clown.
Who was that fast, so smart,
I must be forgetting someone,
but I can not think who the hell could it be.
Do you think your records are funny or are music?
We think they are something peculiar. That's right.
Do you consider them musical?
Obviously they are, because it's music, right?
The instruments make music.
- It's a record. - It's musical.
Is it music? no?
That's also music.
It's good. He knows music. </ P>
But how do you call it? Do you call it rock? </ P>
We try not to define it. </ P>
There are many misclassifications.
It does not make sense, we call it music and that's it.
Even if you do not do it.
- Do you doubt that classification? - How?
- Do you doubt that classification? - No.
We are sure.
The subliminal message of the Beatles' wit
in their press conferences was about a youth movement
that they were not going to determine...
the elders.
Since the Beatles arrived,
reinvented totally the functioning of culture.
Before that, everything, fashion, cinema, music ,
was vertical.
Everything was what adults liked and then it filtered down to children.
After one or two years, suddenly it was the young people
who decided everything.
That started with the Beatles.
After breaking all record sales in Britain, the following year,
in April 1964,
the band made history on the Billboard Hot 100
by turning the only group
to occupy the top five positions of the list.
The boys with cut of bowl now revolutionized
US popular music
And Beatlemania expanded /> like gunpowder all over the country.
SHOW DE LOS BEATLES SUNDAY 30 AUG 1964
And then, in July, following the traditional career path
of any post-war folk artist,
the band starred their first film.
< i> However, A Hard Day & apos; s Night was, as expected,
different from everything that preceded it. </ p >
Musical films before A Hard Day & apos; s Night
were lucrative projects
intended exclusively to the young audience
of any artist that was fashionable at the time.
A Hard Day & apos; s Night changed that.
They took something that was easy to achieve, the rock movie,
and they made it great.
Directed by the American Richard Lester,
the film created a totally new language for rock cinema.
Before, the musicians had passed...
NORTH PREMIERE THE BEATLES IN A HARD DAY & APOS; S NIGHT
to the big screen with fictional characters </ p >
created by screenwriters.
But in A Hard Day & apos; s Night,
The Beatles They made themselves
in a comedy inspired by their own experiences of fame.
It was a phenomenon both commercial and critical.
They interpreted themselves in a fiction movie.
That it did not happen.
A lot of what happened at the beginning of the Beatles' career
It had never happened before.
They opened borders on many levels.
Tell me, how did you find the USA ?
<pCrossing Greenland.
- Has success changed your life? - Yes.
I do not want to waste paper.
Are you a mod or a rocker? ?
No, I'm a moquero.
Do you have hobbies?
In my opinion, it was actually A Hard Day & apos; s Night
what consolidated them as something completely new
and interesting beyond of the imagination from anyone.
- I do not snore. - Yes you do, constantly.
Ronco, John?
Yes, like a pig, son.
That's your opinion. Ronco, Paul?
With such a nose, it would not be normal not to do it.
No, Paulie, do not make fun of the afflicted.
Please, it's just a joke.
It may be a joke, but it's his nose.
He can not help but have a horrible nose
and a poor little head shivering under the weight of this.
It was not the rock movie
that one would expect to see, at all.
And although his wit...
It had always been clear that they were funny at the microphone,
but their irreverence and their irreverence to themselves. ..
THE BEATLES IN HIS FIRST MOVIE
was something unprecedented.
12 ROTUNDOS SUCCESSES!
And, of course, made them even more venerable.
And while the Beatles started a major US tour
In the summer of 1964, in Britain , the whole country
evolved after its passage.
After the sexual scandals of the previous year .. .
THE VOTE OF "THE RIGHT" IS MISSING... WILSON ON THE THRESHOLD
The ruling class had lost support.
The people had voted for the government of the new prime minister Harold Wilson,
a man who it seemed to represent the voice
of a younger UK and progressive.
Wilson became /> Leader of the Labor Party
around the same time that the Beatles had
the first sensations of resounding success.
It was from the north. Let's not forget that.
So this was, again, part of the great power of the north. </ P>
There were the Beatles in the sense of popular culture,
and then there was Harold Wilson, reflecting modernity
in the political sense.
We will enter a new world.
We were behind Europe in the 50s. The Tories They had let us down.
Let's modernize. Like the Italians, the French and the Germans,
let's get to work
y hagamos que todos disfruten los frutos del éxito.
And a central part of this new and progressive England was his youth.
The amazing international success of the pop scene of the country
had given confidence to the generation of young people
and, thanks to the growing prosperity of the country,
a new consumer culture emerged.
Of the fertile land that were the art institutes,
emerged the modern ideas of the incipient English designers.
Where this was more obvious it was in fashion,
whose nerve center was the overflowing London Carnaby Street.
It was the first time that the young people had money
to buy records and clothes, to cut their hair.
That's where a separate youth market emerged almost immediately
Carnaby Street thrived. </ Until then, at the end of school, girls
dressed like their mother.
While people like Mary Quant
i>
made dresses with which you could run,
you could dance and do things that young people do.
Of course, that completely transformed the face of English fashion.
Everything felt modern, new , original.
Wherever you looked, the world began to look different.
The black and white of principles of the Beatles and prior to them,
The Beatles in black and white,
until A Hard Day & apos; s Night was black and white. >
In a matter of a year, the colors started to appear,
the green shoots of a new culture.
Although they had played the central role
in cultivating this new cultural scene,
towards the end of 1964, Beatles themselves were getting tired
of their fame for "Eight days a week".
In an attempt to escape < Beatlemania,
John Lennon and George Harrison
had moved to the Surrey camp, 48 kilometers from central London,
and Ringo Starr would join them > the following year.
In December, Beatles For Sale was released,
the fourth album of study of the band,
that showed clear symptoms of fatigue.
You just have to look at the cover. >
They are really exhausted young people for a couple of years of Beatlemania.
It was more than obvious that they were getting tired
and that the incredible attractiveness of the initial fame,
that they took as a wonderful opportunity,
and you can see and feel the joy on the albums and in the interviews.
By the time Beatles left for sale, they were losing the charm quickly.
Even so, the constant march of the culture juvenile
would soon revive the band.
While the kaleidoscopic colors of Carnaby Street were in full swing
was developing a more experimental subculture
West London, whose leaders > Soon they would come across the Beatles.
Inspired by literature, avant-garde art and music,
this little defined group of artists and artisans
lacked a sense of community.
Nonetheless, in June 1965, Barry Miles, the agent
of the famous independent bookstore Better Books,
organized a transcendental poetry event at the Albert Hall in London,
which Allen Ginsberg participated in < br /> and other writers of the beat generation.
It was very important,
since it united the different creative clans of an emerging English counterculture.
The great poetry reading at the Albert Hall in 1965
was, in my opinion, the first time that an electorate was seen in London.
Until then, the actors, the poets,
the filmmakers and the people who had stores
They did not know each other.
In this event, which was basically a reading of the beat generation
by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso,
all these people met at the Albert Hall, 7,000 people. >
It was like a huge party,
as the first massive session of networking, I suppose.
In this crucial event that he helped organize,
Miles met John Dunbar, an artist friend
both Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso
who had recently married with the young singer Marianne Faithful.
Together, they planned a new center for clandestine activities,
the Indica Bookshop and Gallery,
which would take Miles directly into the world of the Beatles.
We went to the Albert Hall
and a friend named Paolo Leone said:
"You have to meet this guy".
FIGURE OF THE COUNTERCULTURE
Thousands worked in Better Books.
So we chatted.
I do not know how many people enter the Albert Hall,
about 2,000, 5,000, I do not know.
Anyway, we thought that everyone had paid for it,
so maybe we could make a store.
We decided to join forces and combine a bookstore and an art gallery.
His best friend was a subject named Peter Asher,
that at that time I was in Peter and Gordon, a rock and folk duo
that in fact had number one successes in England, EE .US. and Japan.
So Peter had money, and therefore we looked for it
to finance this venture.
As a result, we founded a company called Miles, Asher and Dunbar, MAD.
Of course, through this, I was able to meet Peter .
He lived in his parents' house.
He also lived with his sister, Jane Asher.
Jane was a television personality. I interviewed people.
I had starred in children's films and worked a lot on the radio.
I also lived with them Jane Asher's boyfriend,
who was Paul McCartney < br /> and lived on the top floor,
in a small attic next to Peter's room.
< i> So I got to know this extraordinary home.
And when I was assembling the library,
they sent all the books to the basement because we still did not have a place.
Obviously, that's how I was able to meet Paul.
< i> I was late at night, I leafed through the books
and let me know what he had taken.
In fact, was my first client from the library. </ p >
When we found a place, it helped to put the shelves and paint the walls,
so he was very, very involved throughout the project.
It was great to meet him.
While his colleagues had fled London
in favor of quiet suburban life,
through its contact with progressive modern art,
Paul McCartney soon became the most cultured of the Beatles.
John Lennon had been married for years
and raised a small child,
George Harrison lived with his girlfriend Patti Boyd,
and Ringo Starr was newly married,
while McCartney was actively seeking new sounds and concepts,
with Miles as his avant-garde guide.
In his own words, he used to walk through London with the antenna on. </ P>
One day I was going to watch a concert by John Cage,
by Luciano Berio or some electronic musician. </ P>
Then I went to see Tessie O & apos; Shea
to Talk of the Town,
or some ballad singer to the Blue Angel.
He absorbed everything.
< i> McCartney was the Beatle with cultural awareness
who was walking around the city
while the others lived a somewhat more comfortable existence
in residential areas.
He was still curious, he was still thirsty for any stimulus.
It was around this time, in 1965 or 1966,
that McCartney really started directing the Beatles. </ p >
He stayed in London, receiving stimuli
and raising all of that to the Beatles
and he kept giving them > an artistic advantage.
The artistic advantage would turn out to be unmistakable
when the Beatles went to the studio in mid-1965
to record the Rubber Soul disc.
During the previous year,
the wave of bands inspired by the example of the Beatles
not only had achieved the Liverpool band,
but, in some cases, threatened to surpass it.
Following Lennon and McCartney,
< i> the Rolling Stones had arrived in the USA.
And now they wrote their own songs.
Bob Dylan, folk icon,
had switched to the electric
and had become the poet excelso of rock,
while new bands emerged, like The Who and The Byrds,
that featured original sounds and perspectives.
But the Beatles were ready to lay the foundations again. >
In search of total creative control,
with Rubber Soul, producer George Martin booked
Abbey Road studios for an entire month for the band,
with which she turned conventional recording rules.
Before Rubber Soul, a day of professional recording
was supervised < br /> by engineers with white coats.
And there were three hours in the morning, a break for lunch
and three hours in the afternoon.
And that was it. That was the day of recording.
When Rubber Soul arrived, they had enough influence to say :
"We want more flexibility than that.
We may want to stay and burn during the night."
They invented the idea to treat a record
as if it were a work of art.
Take time to do something worthwhile.
DECIBELES
So there was this new idea,
the idea of the recording studio as a composition laboratory.
This was an incredible real revolution,
how to make records and how to make music.
Rubber Soul seems like the moment that pop music
could become popular art.
The whole album gave the feeling of being an artistic statement. </ P>
The same Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys said:
"When I heard Rubber Soul,
I knew how good it could be pop albums ".
They could be a whole artistic world.
That's how good Rubber Soul was.
Suddenly, John Lennon wrote letters like:
"Did they tell you when she was young that the pain would lead to pleasure?
Did you understand when they said
that a man must kill himself to win his day off?
Will you still believe it when he is dead? "
And that, in a song titled" Girl ", that is," Girl ".
Those are not pop song lyrics.
That gave Rubber Soul a very different style. </ p >
It was heard that they wrote songs
as artists, not just as pop singers.
There were songs like "The word ",
which is an extraordinary song for 1965.
" I gave the word, and the word is love. "
This was two years before the Summer of Love.
In Beatles for Sale they had no hope, but now there they were,
looking for something that they had taken from another side.
And just as Rubber Soul restored the musical superiority of the band,
the four young radicals received official recognition i>
of the English ruling class.
They had already received the highest praise
< i> from the world of entertainment, and, in October 1965,
were invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the queen.
There they would be consecrated members
of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
This was one of the talents of the ruling class a long time ago.
In fact, that's what those titles were about, the chivalry and those things.
To a certain extent,
had to accommodate the rebels.
But it was at that precise moment that they ,
which were always transcendent musical influences,
became a conduit to transcendent US influences.
In the other areas that interested them.
Thousands were interested in in the Ginsberg's poetry.
Robert Fraser interested them in US pop artists, things like that.
They were citizens of the world. >
So it was more than appropriate that, at that precise moment,
the English ruling class said: i>
"They must come to Buckingham Palace
for us to certify them as members of the British Empire. "
John, did you already know the queen?
No, it was the first time.
p>
What did he think of you personally? Did he tell you?
No, whatever it is, he would not tell me. But he seemed kind to us.
It helped us to relax.
Now that you have achieved this,
do you think you are becoming part of the so-called leading class? </ p >
No, I do not feel different.
I feel the same as before.
- Same as before. - Same as before.
It implied recognizing that the pop world was already older.
They were the aristocracy of the pop world,
So, in a way, it was inevitable that I would be awarded
in the spirit of the new democracy.
But this also closed a chapter because, from that moment,
they did things their way , that was not the ruling class's.
In fact, it was the beginning of a period
of great antagonism with the leading class and pop culture,
and the Beatles, as always,
were at the center of that.
The position of the Beatles in the middle
of these new events of youth culture
was crucial for its evolution for the next two years.
Now that McCartney was affiliated...
MARIJUANA IS FUNNY
with the clandestine artistic world of London ,
and that there were similar movements in New York and Los Angeles
that influenced to US musicians,
it was propitious for them to enter...
JOIN THE CLANDESTINE GENERATION
more radical ideas to conventional culture
And as these developed, a new drug >
and a new figure gained prominence
on both sides of the Atlantic.
The message is very simple.
Three words.
Connect, tune, let go.
The psychologist Timothy Leary had emerged in the USA. as a prominent spokesperson
of the hallucinogen LSD or acid.
I had done psychedelic experiments
at Harvard University since the early 60
and, with the early fundamental support of the poet Allen Ginsberg,
around 1965, he was becoming a great figure in the counterculture.
Tim Leary was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist.
He said he had about seven doctorates.
He was a Harvard professor
who worked with psilocybin before using LSD
as a way to treat prisoners and to treat mental illness.
Leary was, to a large extent, part of the ruling class.
I would have worked beyond the normal lines of psychiatry.
But when he started taking all this,
he contacted his own self a cellular level
and understood that a lot of this were games and nonsense.
So he basically felt that this it was a spiritual key
that had been granted and that its message should
encourage others to detach from the ruling class
and to find themselves creatively or spiritually.
And the new members of the British Order, the Beatles,
they were on their way to let go of the ruling class
and to rediscover themselves by hallucinogens.
John Lennon and George Harrison met LSD in early 1965,
and Ringo Starr accompanied them
in his second experience with that drug that same year.
This, combined with the recent interest of McCartney
in experimental art thanks to his social circle in London,
made the band more commercial
was ready to take a very unexpected detour.
They wanted to discover who they were.
I think they no longer had a real sense of who they were.
So they took the pieces and put them back together .
How the hell did they understand the fish tank life they had been stuck in?
They had played at the Casbah in Liverpool, < In the Cavern,
had praised them all over the world
and they only saw their reflections,
people took parts of them
without really knowing who they were.
And I think that was the interaction of pop culture,
represented by the Beatles, with the counterculture,
that was increasingly confident.
And both began to unite forces...
LEGALICEN LA MARIHUANA
in London, in San Francisco. They were igniting each other. </ P>
It was at the end of 1965
that McCartney took the skeptic Lennon
from his sanctuary in Surrey
and introduced him to the clandestine world of Miles
and the Indica Bookshop and Gallery.
One day, shortly after opening, Paul McCartney arrived with John Lennon.
I think it was the first time that John went to the place.
I was looking for a book by "Nitzske".
I did not know who he was talking about.
It took me half a minute to understand that he was talking about Nietzcshe.
And that time was enough for him to get upset
and believe that I was a middle-class student who lowered him .
Then, Paul had to assume his usual role and calm the waters.
"No, he studied art like you.
It's just that you do not know how to pronounce it! "
Meanwhile, I remember that the previous day
we had received a great package
from The Psychedelic Experience by Tim Leary.
John snuggled into the chair with him.
Literally, in Leary's introduction, before getting to the text,
says: "Turn off your mind, relax
and let yourself go with the flow ", or whatever the text
that finally appeared just a month later
in" Tomorrow never knows ".
This song would be the most innovative composition
of the band's career until then .
Next to Lennon's lyrics inspired by Leary,
McCartney's contributions > They were just as radical.
Having accompanied Miles
to many avant-garde electronic musical events ,
The Beatle had started working enthusiast
on their own experimental compositions i>
repeating recordings.
When the Beatles came into the studio
to start producing "Tomorrow never knows",
George Martin suggested that McCartney take those compositions to the sessions.
Paul had produced many
< i> and took them to the studio in a plastic bag.
They accommodated the study with many different recorders
in different parts of the Abbey Road recording complex.
I was in a room with Peter Asher
and we were playing a long loop
which involved holding a jar of jam.
The loop ran through the jar,
iba to the playback head and it came back.
We had to keep it tense.
I think we were eight or ten in the building,
all standing holding < br /> pencils or jars of jam.
And all this information went to the plate.
Martin I was sitting there with the headphones.
Obviously, what he did was impossible to reproduce.
That was all. This was the teacher as soon as he pressed "Record". </ P>
When I heard the reproduction, the truth is that it was amazing.
I thought: "Holy God, this is the future."
The study was an instrument.
Once it had been just an almost invisible console
that was only there to absorb what was being played on the floor.
Now it was actually being used as an instrument.
And in a way it was more important than the instruments.
This was unprecedented, and another interesting thing
of "Tomorrow never knows" is that it was the first recording of Revolver.
It was made in April 1966. I mean, this is extraordinary.
"Tomorrow never knows" is, without a doubt, the most psychedelic song recorded
in that period. There's nothing like it.
The word "psychedelic" did not exist in popular jargon.
It was the title of a book that John had taken from the Indica Gallery.
This is undoubtedly the first psychedelic song in the world.
The interesting thing, of course,
is that the Beatles were the most commercial band,
but, to some extent, they were also
the most experimental band of all, which is very unusual.
That was clear when the disk that followed
to Rubber Soul, Revolver, was launched in August 1966.
Along with "Tomorrow never knows",
the songs of the album brimmed with invention and originality.
If Rubber Soul had suggested that pop music could be art,
Revolver confirmed it.
Revolver really was the breakthrough of the Beatles to the fifth dimension.
"She said: & apos; I know what it's like to be dead & apos;". </ p >
The Beatles, Lennon, sang about what it's like to be dead.
What the hell was going on?
They went out partying with The Byrds
i>
on the west coast and they consumed acid at that altitude.
Today we see a drugs as something negative
and you can go to prison for them, but, in the mid-60s,
They meant breaking the chains of the prison,
from this one single point of view who you were from.
And then there were perspectives,
and with Revolver you hear that, with the different production sounds...
everything was perspectives and altered states.
The idea was basically to turn rock into a legitimate form of art.
And I think they succeeded. A lot of what they tried,
from the coupling, /> the reverse tapes and the soldiers,
whatever they did, other bands from around the world were trying.
They were great leaders .
Brian Epstein was worried
to get ahead too much of their fans.
But they were very sensible,
< i> always wanted to bring their fans with them.
They did not want to become a kind of band
avant-garde and crazy /> to which only 150 people knew.
Epstein's fear that the band would start to lose
of your audience was unsustainable
regarding the musical contribution,
but it would be successful in terms of politics.
The Beatles' songs expressed a more complex world view,
with which the journalists started asking more serious questions.
In interviews for The Evening Standard...
HOW DOES A BEATLE LIVE? LENNON LIVES SO
they were individually asked what they thought about current issues.
Lennon's candid opinions about Christianity
did not generate controversies when they were published in England,
but, when they were reprinted in the USA, >
the first scandal </> in the history of the Beatles emerged,
and a particular event He instantly became infamous:
"We are more popular than Jesus."
JESUS DIED FOR YOU, JOHN LENNON
It was the first time to John Lennon
they asked him questions about his life and his philosophy.
And it just happened without...
But a few months later, all those teen magazines...
printed that of: "We are bigger than Jesus",
which caused many problems.
Many problems.
There were death threats, and people burned or broke discs,
there was the Ku Klux Klan, concerts were canceled.
It was very unpleasant for everyone.
I originally referred to that
about England,
where, for children, we had more importance than Jesus
or that the religion back then.
I did not want to lower it or throw it down. I just said it. It's a fact. </ P>
Lennon's phrase "The Beatles we're more popular than Jesus"
was something that even I, as a child, understood what did he mean?
That is, he did not say...
As he said in his "apology", so to speak.
"I did not say we're better than Jesus. I did not say it was good or bad. </ P>
Only it's true." </ P>
And for me it was totally true. < It was unquestionable.
The response was very negative.
GO HOME, BEATLES
KEEP COMMUNISM /> OUTSIDE THE USA. </ P>
I made you notice some of the flaws of the US culture.
Or it made you notice once again that what might seem like
a unified culture was not really so.
And it was hard. You know, it was scary.
These failures of the US society They came from early 60s,
and, while the civil rights campaigns for racial equality
had exposed these divisions at the beginning of the decade,
by the mid-1960s, there was no more pressing or polarizing issue
>
that the Vietnam War.
Since the USA The conflict began in 1962, </ p >
and organized protests both in the US as in Europe.
The clandestine movement that McCartney participated in
had emerged from the pacifist movement /> of the United Kingdom of the early 60
and, by the time it happened the US tour. of 1966,
both he and his companions were intimately opposed to the war.
While traveling through USA, already facing a controversy,
the always honest Liverpool band returned to be the target of criticism
when they left more than clear their position before the press.
In 1966, the war without a doubt >
had more weight than the Beatles in the heads of the Americans.
In 1966, the war broke out.
In 1966, the number of recruits more than doubled in the country.
Also in the year 1966 </ p >
the war became terrible in Vietnam itself.
Every time it was a more and more serious problem
There was more and more destruction.
At the peak of the US participation in Vietnam,
had 550,000 troops in that country.
They are many young people.
In USA a recruitment was made.
The war had come to the country in a terrible way.
It was a matter that had nothing abstract about it. i>
And it was expected that youth representatives, such as the Beatles,
members of the young culture,
would speak at respect.
I think they were always successful
because they were frank, direct, sincere
and that kind of thing.
Is it a bit difficult for
people to criticize them for that?
Yes, Richard.
- It costs us a lot. - It costs us.
But, freedom of expression.
But can you say what you always think?
What about teenagers of 14 years who think they are wonderful
and they would not tolerate being hurt?
When we say something like that, we do not say it,
how older people seem to think, to be offensive .
We say it to help, do you understand?
And if what we say is wrong, well, it's wrong.
People can say that we're wrong about that.
But, in many cases, we think it's okay.
We're very serious about it.
Does it bother you to ask them questions?
For example, in the US, they are asked about Vietnam.
- Do you find them useful? < br /> - I do not know.
If you can say that war does not work, and someone believes you, maybe it's good.
But you can not tell much .
It seems silly to me to be in the US and that none mention Vietnam,
As if nothing happened.
They were the first band to talk about politics,
about Vietnam, < br /> on many social issues.
And although Dylan came a little earlier,
as far as I know, he never publicly opposed
to the Vietnam War.
So the Beatles were perhaps the first,
as they were a known band.
It cost them a lot.
teenage girls in the south, in the Midwest,
who did not like The Beatles.
I think the Beatles they are very talented,
but they should take care of what they say
Because they have such a position that many teenagers
consider them very important.
When they say things like that,
some teenagers will believe whatever they say.
In 1965, the Beatles were loved all over the world.
Nobody did not like them.
They were wonderful, funny,
creative and harmless.
As they got involved more in the counterculture
and they were representing it more,
they lost that love to a great extent.
They helped mobilize many people who would not otherwise have accepted
the things that happened in 66, 67 and 68.
Without a doubt, they were inspiring and influential in that sense.
But they also lost a lot of people.
They became part of what a lot, a lot of people in the US,
probably most of the US,
considered a worrying...
loss of values and ethics.
And a political threat.
And just at that moment,
The Beatles left to function as a traditional band.
When they returned from the US,
announced that they would stop playing live
and that their final tour show in the US /> It would be his last paid concert.
And then, the most photographed celebrities in the world
they just disappeared completely from the public stage.
- Hello! Can we talk? - Yes. </ P>
Will the Beatles separate in 1967? </ P>
EMI RECORDING STUDIES
We can split up or stay together.
We always have a deal, whatever we do.
Do you think it's possible that in the future you do not work more together?
Maybe we might not work together for a while,
but we would always get together for one reason or another. </ P>
Other people are needed to generate ideas,
you know, and we get along very well.
Rumors of a separation were circulating.
But far from the public light, the four young people worked hard
in its most ambitious production so far.
The audience would have to wait for months until the Beatles reappeared i>
and, when they finally did in February of 1967,
both their image and their sound had undergone a surprising change.
Originally, "Strawberry fields" was thought of
as part of sessions by Sgt. Pepper.
But the press kept asking: "Did the Beatles end?
They disappeared. They ran out of ideas ",
without knowing they were working on one of their greatest achievements.
And for me obviously, it was not unexpected
because I was in some of the sessions.
But I think the public took it by surprise.
"Strawberry fields forever " it was original, again.
The Beatles had become rare.
That was what people felt, basically.
What's wrong? It's...
"Let me take you down 'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields." </ P>
The voice did not look like Lennon's. > It's because they slowed down the voice. </ P>
Nothing sounded normal on that record. In the whole production.
It was all in the air, everything was put on effect.
And there was also a video, that was made at that time,
filmed in Sevenoaks or I do not know where, that was most strange.
Ringo seemed disembodied. They fell out of the trees.
There was nothing like that.
I had more in common with Salvador Dalí, </ p >
the surrealists and Dadaism.
They were ideas very presumptuous art style,
that once was a domain mainly from the educated elite.
But now the Beatles took it all over the world.
The short video of "Strawberry fields" " it had a seismic impact
because it showed that they had traveled a distance.
I felt it was , in a way, my duty
travel at that time as a young person who believed in them.
It was like saying: "Gosh, well, this is what I am asked to do".
p>
It was not just saying: "They look good".
Rather it was saying: "Alright, this is the way".
And that road became even clearer as the year progressed.
Towards the end of 1967, the counterculture gained momentum,
i>
and large numbers of young people gravitated to their new mecca,
Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.
Here was developing a strong musical scene,
and the word was spreading of a new phenomenon: the hippies.
In the United Kingdom, it spread the influence of the counterculture,
that had its own newspaper, The International Times,
a club live music, UFO,
and rising stars Pink Floyd
and American Jimi Hendrix. >
In this flourishing scenario of peace, love and psychedelic drugs,
came the most ambitious work of the Beatles until then,
that would not only capture the essence of this new sensibility,
but it would also transform once again the record industry.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. </ P>
Presented as a work of art,
with a unique concept that unified the album as a whole,
this album announced the end of the era
of the pop song and the band traditional pop.
Sgt. Pepper revolutionized the record industry.
Suddenly, the albums sold as much as the singles.
Sgt. Pepper sold millions of copies.
In strictly commercial terms, it was a revolutionary release.
But it was also revolutionary as it let the industry know
precisely what it could sell.
It could be reversed
in the best artistic minds of a generation
and give them the freedom to do their own art, i>
package it into a disk and sell it to millions.
Paul had an idea:
"We no longer want to be the four types of the bowl cut, the Fab Four.
So we created a new name. We will be a different group.
We will be free to do whatever we want. "
That's the basic concept. < The songs...
Many of those songs could have been on other albums.
They were not specific to that particular album.
But the influence it had was amazing.
The Beatles had a lot of power .
They had even seriously affected the Stones by then.
Everyone had to deal with them . They were like a barrier.
If you were in the music industry, you had to deal with this big obstacle
and get around it the best what could you do.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club's Band,
that is, the title itself
was a work of art and something that confused people. </ P>
Peter Blake did the cover,
and he was the father of English pop art.
Everything related to Sgt. Pepper was an enigma.
The fact that they pretended not to be the Beatles,
but another band.
The beat closed at the end of side two.
"Lucy in the sky with diamonds". Sure, LSD.
There were secret messages from beginning to end. p>
It was like a literary work.
It was like Ulysses or something, people thought:
"I do not understand Well this, but you sure have something. "
This combination of imagination and mystery proved irresistible.
With Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles went
from being icons of pop culture to being mystics of the modern era.
When the Beatles appeared with their new song,
people started to consider these guys
they were people you go to in search of meaning.
By 1967, I think the release of Sgt. Pepper in the USA. UU.
Basically consolidated the Beatles as the leaders of the counterculture,
along with a few more, like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.
But the Beatles were the musical leaders.
They looked at them universally as... Yes, as gods.
Leary himself said many silly things about them,
they were a new kind of superheroes, male leaders and things like that.
I'm not convinced </ p >
that the youth culture of the mid 1960s
was very much aware of the LSD, by Timothy Leary
i>
and even the attitudes of the counterculture.
If it had not been for the conduit that they were the Beatles,
this kind of thing would have been relegated to San Francisco, to California. </ P>
The counterculture was not called "clandestine" by nothing.
Not many people knew her.
But the Beatles were determined to spread the word even more.
less than a month after launching Sgt. Pepper & apos; s,
the band was invited to represent England
in the first international broadcast of satellite television.
Across the US, Canada and Europe,
the youthful optimism of the counterculture
was reaching its maximum during the Summer of Love,
and thousands of people flocking to large public events.
With their historical contribution to the One World broadcast,
The Beatles sang the final anthem of the scene
before an audience of more than 500 million worldwide.
The Beatles, as expected,
national representatives representing their country,
they start with the national anthem.
But the problem is that it's the French national anthem!
It's a classic. It's the typical humor of The Beatles.
It was fun. I was there. It was like a party.
They had invited many friends,
to The Small Faces and the Rolling Stones,
and we were all there, with our elegant psychedelic clothes.
There sitting on the floor,
it seemed that everything could explode at some point.
And people waved their arms like crazy,
ran here and there,
with your headphones and talking to other people.
That had to do with the international connection,
because nobody had done that before.
It was actually broadcast live all over the world.
It was fantastic. </ P>
This was only weeks after the launch of Sgt. Pepper.
Any other band would have chosen to use that moment
to promote Sgt. Pepper by playing some songs from there.
No? It made a lot of sense from the commercial. </ P>
But they took advantage to send a message to the world:
The only thing you need is love.
They were already saying it in Rubber Soul: the word is "love".
But this time they were able to tell the whole world at the same time.
The Beatles clearly marked the way.
I think it's very significant the idea
that they were sitting in those high chairs,
with the beautiful people of London, including Mick Jagger,
sitting at their feet, watching them
and singing a song < you just heard it.
It's something powerful.
"All you need is love" was a hymn of hope
of a youth movement convinced that the old order would crumble.
The Beatles were driving a whole generation
into unknown territory,
but the ruling class would not take long
to respond to those peaceful revolutionaries.
In the United Kingdom, mobilized the police, who started drug raids
and arrested not only important figures from the underground world,
but also to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards
and, later, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones .
These cases of great media coverage did not worry Paul McCartney.
After the arrests, paid an advertisement for the national press,
where he also put his name, that asked to legalize marijuana.
THE LAW AGAINST MARIJUANA IS IMMORAL IN PRINCIPLE AND INVISIBLE IN PRACTICE
Weeks later, he admitted to a journalist that he had consumed LSD
and repeated it in a television interview,
which surprised Brian Epstein a lot .
Brian did not like it make things public.
He was a very private person, obviously, because of his lifestyle. </ p >
The problem with drugs is that it was not...
that they were good or bad. It was just that they were illegal.
Paul, how many times did you consume LSD?
About four times.
Where did you get it?
If I said where I got it... I mean, it's illegal. It would be silly to say it. </ P>
Do not you think this is a question that you should have kept private? </ P>
The thing is that a newspaper asked me a question
and the decision was to tell a lie
or tell him the truth.
I decided to tell him the truth.
But, really, I did not want to say anything.
If I could have decided, if I had done what I wanted,
I would not have told anyone.
Because I do not try to spread the word about this.
But the man in the newspaper is the man in the mass media.
I'll keep it private if he does too, if he does not say anything.
But he wanted to spread it.
So the responsibility is his for spreading it, not mine.
Paul is always sincere.
If you were asked if you had consumed LSD,
he would say yes. I would not lie. </ P>
Why should I do it? </ P>
If they ask that, they get an honest answer. </ P>
It was risky for him to say something like that.
Surely it made Brian Epstein very angry .
But basically, even though the Beatles had made a lot of money,
they were never interested in the money itself.
Once they had enough to live well, it was over.
i>
They paid their taxes and said what they wanted.
The Beatles' sense of security was going to be tested. </ p >
At the end of August, the band received the shocking news
that Brian Epstein had died, his agent, his most reliable accomplice.
In his absence, suddenly they were without their stabilizing influence.
At the same time, he continued his search for personal and spiritual growth.
George Harrison had been fascinated with Indian music in 1965
and, as you stepped into those techniques,
they were attracting you more and more your foundations spiritual.
This led him to discover the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
and his technique of transcendental meditation. >
In mid-1967, Harrison presented the Maharishi's ideas to the band,
and soon the Beatles /> They had a new spiritual advisor.
When they met him,
I wrote to Allen Ginsberg to know what I knew about Maharishi in India,
because Ginsberg had lived there for a few years
and knew many gurus and teachers.
He replied saying that the Maharishi was very commercial
and that he was the target of much criticism in India
for accepting money from the disciples,
because in reality the teaching should be free.
So I told this to John Lennon, who responded with the wonderful phrase:
"No ethnic miserable is going to get golden castles for me. "
Despite their initial reservations,
in February 1968, Lennon and his companions
traveled to India for an extended retreat with the guru.
They were accompanied by their girlfriends and wives ,
and his departure in search of spiritual realization
was world news.
The press swarmed around the perimeter
of the five-hectare complex of Maharishi,
intrigued and in turn stunned by the latest chapter
of the unpredictable journey of the Beatles.
This exhibition caught the attention of a large audience
towards the religion of the East.
At some point in January, it was sudden:
"Well, we're going with the Maharishi
to live in a holiday camp in India."
"Ah, Have fun. "
But they wrote a lot of songs
while they were there, they produced them a lot.
The Beatles showed the world, and especially the young world,
things that I would never have known </ p >
if they had not existed.
Philosophy
behind transcendental meditation, < br /> Buddhism...
They looked out.
Meditation was the center. It was, in fact, all that mattered.
It's the soul. The reality is here. </ P>
Not many people had thought about it before.
And if the Beatles, the most popular band of the world,
the most popular cultural phenomenon in the world,
they were serious about these things,
obviously, like many adults could laugh,
at least many young people agreed.
And the sales of Eastern wisdom
texts soared in the late 1960s.
People were going in a flock to see the Maharishi.
The Beatles were like a portal to another world.
Although the band came back from India revitalized spiritually and creatively,
this feeling of calm It would last very little.
In February 1968, they founded their own corporation, Apple.
This company multifaceted was developed to expand the activities of the band
and to maintain full control of what they produced.
Even so, it would be the first of many overly ambitious projects .
When they entered the studio in the summer to work on their next album,
for the first time there was creative and personal disputes
in the recording sessions.
A particular source of tension was the constant presence
of an intruder in the sanctuary of the Beatles,
the conceptual artist Yoko Ono,
who John Lennon had fallen in love with.
It was a relationship that was /> more than a year growing up in private.
While McCartney had gained confidence with his clandestine activities,
Lennon's sense of isolation in the rural area had increased .
At first, the LSD had been liberating,
but it was Yoko Ono who offered her a way to escape.
She was a little known artist when she traveled to London
with her husband Tony Cox in 1966,
and it was through the Indica Gallery that she came into contact with Lennon.
Its owner, John Dunbar, provided the space
for the first exhibition of Ono in the UK,
and it was he who invited his friend Beatle to this unusual show.
Clearly, she was a interesting and powerful woman.
I did not exhibit ordinary pictures on the walls.
So she had some good ideas, and I liked them.
I wanted to make a sample.
We were able to find two weeks in which we had nothing planned.
Yoko did not want anyone to see it
until she had finished and tagged everything.
i>
So we did that.
But Tony and I had to tell him:
He came and really liked
the ladder, and then, if you saw through the magnifying glass,
said: " Yes, "so he liked that. </ P>
The relationship that developed over the next two years
would be consummated in May 1968,
just before the Beatles started with their new album.
Lennon emerged as a new man,
free from an unhappy marriage and released as an artist.
The arrival of Yoko Ono to the life of John
transformed it completely. </ P>
She was the mother, lover and teacher.
It was more or less everything for John. He needed that.
When she met Yoko, she was a mother figure.
He used to say "mother".
She, for her own reasons, took care of him
and saved him.
The presence of Ono caused an impact on both Lennon
and on the link between the Beatles,
while the world outside of the band started to get dark.
As the Vietnam War got out of control
>
and it seemed that the conflict would have no end,
throughout the West, the cultural movement so inspired by the Beatles
The progressive and liberal core of the counterculture
was the target of many attacks, with the murders
of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King
and then of the candidate for president Robert Kennedy,
which increased the tensions.
In the USA. and in England,
the previously peaceful demonstrations were plunged into violence.
Student revolts they stopped Paris completely,
and the images of street fights
and police brutality they became something normal.
While the authorities rushed mercilessly against the counterculture,
the revolution replaced love as a new goal.
In 1968, everything exploded.
There were murders in the US, the threat of a civil war,
riots in the Democratic Convention, in Paris,
in London, violence in the streets.
In fact, there was a kind of struggle.
Power is not achieved just like that, does not filter down.
In a way, you have to...
force it.
If you look at the story, that is usually the case.
The Beatles' revolution was benign, by art and love,
but, towards 1968, everything was falling apart.
It was not the sweet utopian style of the Summer of Love,
but rather it was a day of anger.
< i> The demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968
were a kind of dividing line.
You saw the police pummeling children
and, truth be told, one felt: "It seems we are at war".
While the unleashed brutality police advanced through Chicago in August 1968,
The Beatles launched the single "Revolution"...
SIDE ONE, HEY JUDE SIDE TWO, REVOLUTION
about the difficulties of a threatened young culture
But unlike of "All you need is love", from the previous year,
John Lennon's composition
refused to express the voice of this disillusioned movement
and accept the call to arms on the left radical.
For the first time, the Beatles were rejected by their own peers.
But the reluctance from Lennon to violence,
for which there were two different versions of the song,
also reflected the internal struggles with which many young people struggled.
The song "Revolution" has two versions.
Lennon says again and again: "Do not count on me"
as far as the revolution is concerned.
It was difficult to know which position exactly each one should adopt. </ p >
All the young people felt that.
You know, go to a protest? Yes, of course.
Go to a protest that maybe /> Occupy a building? It can be. </ P>
You know, set fire to the building? </ P>
Is that where you say enough? </ P>
"If you talk about destruction." ..
Lennon said not to tell it. And then he said they would tell him.
He does not know. At that point, he's undecided.
Lennon, just as he was a bit skilful,
felt seduced by this idea of peace and love.
He had just written the hymn of the previous year.
The Beatles always had a kind
of inherent optimism ,
that was not the case with Dylan,
nor was it the case with the Stones.
They were almost like Martin Luther King.
Now nobody says it, but, in a way,
a lot of blacks
radicals that appeared to be rather something of the moment.
Dr. King seemed to be part of the class Protestant leader.
And in a way, the Beatles seemed to be too.
If the band was losing part of its importance
as a cultural force, by the influence of Yoko Ono,
John Lennon made sure they were still
as musical pioneers. While "Revolution" had been content in the political ,
an experimental collage that Lennon created with his new partner
captured the chaos of 1968 /> only with sound.
When the band released their namesake vinyl
at the end of the year, the song "Revolution 9"
became the most heard avant-garde composition in history.
It was a striking statement of a man who had preached
the Summer of Love just one year before.
He went from one extreme to the other.
Suddenly, Lennon understood that everything had gone wrong.
He went to the other side,
and the other side was "Revolution 9", </ p >
that it was a panorama very, very different from the future.
"Revolution 9" was the sound
not only of the riots in Paris or on the streets of Chicago,
but it was the sound of the apocalypse.
This is your incredibly frank representation
of the greatest fear of all,
which is a society and a world mired in global chaos.
p>
It's an extraordinary piece
and one of the most frightening musical works you could hear. </ p >
"Revolution 9" is much more relevant than it was in 1968.
After presenting the most extreme composition of the Beatles catalog,
i>
Lennon performed his next experimental activities
out of the band.
Towards the end of 1968,
launched the first of a trilogy of albums with Yoko Ono,
Two Virgins, with a cover showing the couple naked.
Lennon, who was still a member of the most popular group and commercially successful,
was now breaking all the rules imaginable.
But the anger of some sectors of the counterculture towards "Revolution"
also gave it a greater political role.
In 1969, Richard Nixon took as the new US president,
and John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerged
as the most important activists in the world.
When Lennon came out to say:
"If they talk about destruction, do not count on me",
was criticized very much by the far left.
And it seems to me that his reaction to that
was not to change his mind about the destruction,
but rather say:
"No, I really do not think that the destruction is the answer.
I think that, in reality, the answer is peace."
In March 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married.
On their honeymoon, the couple undertook a media campaign for peace,
presented as a series of conceptual art events.
In consonance with the initial attitude of the band with the press,
the first of these events took place in their honeymoon suite,
in which they invited journalists to speak frankly about politics.
This is for world peace.
And we thought that, instead of going out to fight
and make war, something like that, we should better stay in bed,
everyone should stay in bed and enjoy spring.
There he risked his career for his beliefs.
PEACE IN HAIR PEACE IN BED
And you have to applaud him for that, of course.
It caused him a lot of harassment and a lot of problems.
When they're in bed and they give press conferences
dressed in pillow cases,
- do they laugh at us? - No.
No more than you of us.
We laugh, we find it funny
that the front-page news is about
that a couple lie on their moon of honey.
We see him funny.
And that in Vienna, which is a rather old-fashioned place,
there are beautiful photos of microphones before a bag,
waiting for the bag speak.
It's nice.
But we're serious about about peace.
Brave, imprudent, they were all that.
But who else would have done it?
It would be front-page news if they were in bed talking about peace. </ p >
John did not necessarily know the details
of the Vietnam issue.
He and Yoko they knew it was wrong to throw napalm over the villages
and to skin the children.
In that he was not wrong. Really, he was not wrong.
When the honeymoon went from Europe to Canada,
the couple was visited by Timothy Leary, i>
Allen Ginsberg and a variety of counterculture figures
to record a hymn for your campaign.
i>
And while their experimental discs
and their public appearances have confused many,
this song managed to transmit its message to a global audience.
"Give peace a chance" was its intent >
to do something on its own terms that was really useful,
and I think it turned out to be.
but one that has a good heart and a good message
and that people sing since then. </ p >
It moved away more and more
from the elegant combination
of musical artistic decisions and resonant texts
and went into discs that only had a message.
Had the ability to synthesize something
to its pure essence, to make it communicative,
to make it unforgettable, and that continues to resonate today.
While Lennon continued to campaign for peace,
the end of the decade witnessed lower youth movements than ever, i>
like the death of the Rolling Stone Brian Jones
and permanent drug damage
< i> Brian Wilson, Beach Boys, and Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd.
The utopian vision of a new world was falling apart ,
and this was reflected within the Beatles themselves.
The tensions that before had emerged in the studio
now extended to the relationships between the members of the band.
And when McCartney married with Linda Eastman in 1969,
none of his bandmates attended the ceremony.
While the world was advancing towards the 1970s,
Paul released his first solo album
along with a press release
announcing that he was leaving the band.
It was official. The Beatles no longer existed.
The dissolution of the band shocked all the fans,
but those close to the musicians had seen them move away little by little
over a period of two years.
There was no cohesion.
The old Liverpool bubble < in which they used to live,
see themselves constantly, love each other
and tolerate the manias of others /> and their differences, everything broke.
So now they took different directions,
with new ideas, new families, new brides, new children.
It did not work anymore, that's all. It was obvious
that the Beatles as a group had come to an end.
i>
Did a billionaire showbiz group
ever break up because...
no longer fun?
In fact, we know, because many groups of that period
followed, followed and followed
>
when it was certainly no fun.
The Beatles ended because the reasons that had led them to start
I can not think of another statement about its integrity,
its intentions and its values stronger than that.
After the step of the Beatles, the young culture became more divided,
rock music became heavier and self-indulgent,
and the pop turned attention to glamor.
As for the boys,
< i> despite continued activism and Lennon's string of successes,
McCartney's overall triumph with his band Wings
and Harrison's successful outcrop as an artist with his own name,
his impact as individuals is never would equal
to his days as a Beatles.
But even though his utopian vision could not materialize,
the world changed forever thanks to the innovations of the Beatles
and the values they represented.
Even if nobody has been able to compete with that impact,
with each successive generation of musicians,
The Beatles are still the parameter
of how popular artists can interact with the world.
< i> The cultural and musical changes, with which they undoubtedly
contributed more than anyone, had a permanent effect i>
how do you think about yourself rock?
Yes, a permanent effect on how rock perceives itself.
Even now, in this era of flamboyant pop,
pop stars consider it an option,
who can accept or reject,
being aware, controversial...
Some choose one thing, others they deny it
and others are extremely insipid,
but the possibility is.
It's always there, for everyone.
Just as the incredible achievements of the band
continue to make an impact half a century later,
the legacy of the Beatles and the extraordinary decade
where they flourished is still unmatched.
The unique story of four working class youths in Liverpool >
that changed the world.
Lennon said something like: "We were not leaders of this world. >
We were just the mast types who were screaming: & '; Earth in sight! & apos;
Just we counted what we saw. "
And without the Beatles, understand the 1960s
would have been completely different.
They had an effect on everything. The Beatles covered everything.
If you want to know what the 60s were about, listen to the Beatles albums.
They tell you... The story is there.
It seems like a cliché, but it's impossible
to exaggerate the impact of the Beatles.
It seems that one exaggerates, and the young people who did not live it
seems ridiculous.
But it was true. They changed everything.