Beatles press officer Derek Taylor got some things wrong in his 1964 liner notes for Beatles for Sale. Certainly he was off with the Saturn bit, and the claim with which he closed – Beatles for Sale “is the best album yet” – missed the mark by 180 degrees, at least if you accept the critical consensus that sees the band's fourth LP as a cover-filled rush job, the exhausted gasp that pretty much had to follow the ecstatic peak of A Hard Day's Night.

But Taylor was on to something about AD 2000. On November 13 of that year, Apple Corps released 1, a CD collecting twenty-seven chart-topping Beatles singles which, in its first week, sold 3.6 million copies, a sales pace that held up for weeks, such that 1 became the year's biggest-selling album and the top seller “in 30 countries.” In the same month, ABC television broadcast a two-hour documentary, Beatles Revolution, which featured luminaries such as Salman Rushdie, J. K. Rowling, Al Green, and President Bill Clinton attesting not just to the Beatles' tunefulness but to their transformative impact on world culture. The month before had seen the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum unveil a huge exhibit entitled Lennon: His Life and Work, an installation designed to showcase its late subject as both multimedia artist and world-historical individual. Late fall was also rollout time for the print edition of the Beatles Anthology, the last phase of a documentary project which first went public (in televisual and audio form) in November 1995.