Their time­less influ­ence, and why we keep on listening

Is any­thing more intri­cately inter­twined with its time than the career of the Bea­t­les? Accord­ing to the usual account, the group’s shift­ing per­sonae, from the orig­i­nal 1964 mania through the 1970 break-up, either led or reflected the period’s chang­ing tastes and behav­ior. For Amer­i­cans of a cer­tain age, it was seven deliri­ous years of teeny­bop­per scream­ing, androg­y­nous hair-doing, cartoon-India med­i­tat­ing, psy­che­delic drug tak­ing, syn­cretic sitar strum­ming, and all-you-need-is-loving.

Is that wrong? Surely not. If the increas­ingly brit­tle idea of “the ‘60s” has any mean­ing aside from com­mon nos­tal­gia, it describes the trans­for­ma­tion of a type of cul­tural fan­dom into a type of social and polit­i­cal iden­tity. The Bea­t­les man­aged to remain at the cen­ter of this phenomenon–if not ahead of it–as long as they existed. Their fans, pri­mar­ily leading-edge boomers, became what they beheld. Which of them is not part Beatle?

“The Bea­t­les” or as it’s more com­money known the ‘White Album”, is con­sid­ered by many, includ­ing John Lennon him­self, as the album that saw the Bea­t­les reach their peak as song­writ­ers. I choose the “White Album” for this in depth exam­inaction because of its incred­i­bly diver­sity, both in its lyri­cal con­tent and musi­cal style. This web­site hopes to bring a bet­ter under­stand­ing as to why this par­tic­u­lar album con­tin­u­ally shows up on those “All-Time Top Albums” list and remains to this day the Bea­t­les best sell­ing album of all time.

The Bea­t­les worked in that hap­haz­ard way many artist do, cre­at­ing on the fly, utilize­ing what­ever resources were at hand. Like the artist who splashes paint on a can­vas and decides to leave it there because they like the way it looks, the Bea­t­les cre­ated in just this fash­ion. Only in their case the paint was sound, and their can­vas, a recording.

The Bea­t­les them­selves were hard pressed to explain exactly how it all hap­pened and why. It’s as though they were con­duits attract­ing this unseen yet absolutely real energy, so pal­pa­ble you could feel it in the air. Their uni­verse was in con­stant flux, and they were at the cen­ter of it. Many books have been writ­ten try­ing to explain all this, I won’t attempt to do so here, I’ll leave that to all those seri­ous Bea­tle scholars.

What I’ve endeav­ored to do with this web­site is to gather every imagine­able piece of infor­ma­tion avail­able surround­ing the cre­ation of what I believe was, and still is, some­thing very spe­cial. In some strange kind of way I am still try­ing to under­stand why this album con­tin­use to move me after all these years. The sim­ple fact is I never tire of hear­ing it, read­ing about it, or dis­cussing it. Over the years I’ve man­aged to accu­mu­late a huge amount of infor­ma­tion from var­ious books, mag­azines, boot­leg record­ings and such. An I have always loved shar­ing this infor­ma­tion with other fans like myself. Per­haps it’s sim­ply nos­tal­gia, who really knows for sure but maybe we should all just take Paul McCartney’s advice who when ques­tioned about its rel­e­vance has been known to have com­mented, “It’s a great dou­ble album, it sold, it’s the bloody Bea­t­les White Album, shut up!”

Take Paul’s advice if you’d like, but my advice to you is this… “surf this web­site… I’m sure you’ll come away with at lease one thing you hadn’t know before. An while your read­ing through it take a few moments to lis­ten to some of these great radio specials.This web­site con­tans a rather large col­lec­tion of gath­ered con­tent, but above every­thing else just lis­ten to the music because in the end it’s always been… all about the music!”

No other bands exis­tence has been as well doc­u­mended or for that mat­ter has had so many books writ­ten about their day to day exis­tence than the Bea­t­les. It’s also highly unlikely any band will ever again receive this kind of scrutiny. Nor is it likely any other group of musi­cians will ever have the influ­ence on pop­u­lar music and cul­ture as the Bea­t­les did. In a reel­actively short period of time, less than eight years actu­ally, they cre­ated a body of work that some­how man­ages to sound as fresh and imag­i­na­tive today, as it did over 40 years ago. In ret­respect it seems the Bea­t­les were a clas­sic ­sic exam­ple of the old adage, “The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts.” In the end they were both uniquely a prod­uct of their time… and timeless.