John Wesley's theological and literary productions are, by any standards, prodigious. Even within his lifetime, Wesley's output ran to thousands of pages, hundreds of volumes, which included sermons, journals, tracts, edited abridgements, and numerous other commentaries. Readers today, however, might be surprised to discover that a slender medical manual, written first in 1747 to “prepare and give” physic to the poor, ran to more editions and stayed in print longer than any of Wesley's other publications - twenty-three editions went to press although the Methodist leader was alive, with the last and thirty-seventh edition being published in 1859. Wesley's medical manual had broad reach geographically and was republished in Europe and the United States. Such sustained demand firmly established within eighteenth-century medicine the popular and controversial status of Primitive Physic: or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (1747). However, this has not been adequately reflected in historical scholarship of the period, which has tended to treat Wesley's text as idiosyncratic or backward-looking. This attitude has meant that scholars have failed to examine the theological, intellectual, and cultural resonances of Wesley's enormously successful medical work, which he believed helped to heal sickness, remove pain, and save lives.

Distinguishing religious revivalism from the cultural revitalization that often seems to accompany it, the late American religious historian William McLoughlin defined the former as “the Protestant ritual (at first spontaneous, but since 1830 routinized) in which charismatic evangelists convey 'the Word' of God to large masses of people who, under this influence, experience what Protestants call conversion, salvation, regeneration, or spiritual rebirth.” McLoughlin was describing the revivals, awakenings, and reform that he saw recurring periodically in American history, but the description fits the English evangelical revival that John Wesley led, with two qualifications. First, Wesley lived long enough to contribute mightily himself to its routinization. Second, that routinization involved not only a quickly developing tradition of preaching, but also the support of nurturing small group structures that were adapted from preexisting models and evolved into a remarkably effective organization. The revival was a “Protestant ritual,” which Wesley helped cobble together from a number of sources, contributing to its eventual institutionalization as Methodism.

The sixties and cultural politics

In July 2006, I was invited to take part in a day of national and regional press interviews. The topic was “The 60s: The Beatles Decade,” a five-part series by UKTV History which explored the influence of music on the 1960s. The series was accompanied by a survey which compared the experiences of those growing up in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and revealed that over a third (34 percent of the 3,000 adults interviewed) conceded that at one time or another they have embroidered their past in order to gain the respect of their family and friends. A quarter of these claimed that they were flexible with the truth in order to appear “cool” to their children. Yet only 15 percent of those growing up in the seventies, and a mere 5 percent of those growing up in the eighties, admitted to lying about their past.

In particular, those growing up in the sixties were most likely to exaggerate their “beat generation” credentials – with a quarter claiming that they were a part of or had associations with the hippy movement, when in reality a mere 6 percent could really lay claim to this being true. One in five admitted lying about the drugs they had taken. Twenty-two percent of those questioned admitted that they had used the line, “I was too stoned to remember the sixties,” whereas in reality a mere 8 percent had tried cannabis and only 1 percent had tried acid.

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.

When the Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best – recorded their first tracks as professionals in Hamburg, Germany, in June 1961, the “art” of electrical analog recording was essentially as it always had been. Basically, the players positioned themselves in front of microphones and performed as if they were live on stage – except there was no audience. Only present were producers, technicians, other musicians, and onlookers. The performance happened all at once, everyone playing the whole way through and as many times as it took to get it “right.” And in the end, it was the producers and technicians, not the Beatles, who had control over the final sound, what listeners heard when the record was played.

As to the songs, half the ones the Beatles recorded that day were curiously archaic: “Ain't She Sweet,” “My Bonnie,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” all throwbacks to a previous generation, as were, for that matter, the circumstances of the session itself. Pete Best said he was taken aback by the make shift “studio.” “We wondered if we had come to the right place. We had been expecting a recording setup on the grand scale … Instead, we found ourselves in an unexciting school gym [actually, Friedrich Elbert Halle] with a massive stage and lots of drapes.”

This book is about the Beatles' musical art. It is about the songwriting and recording processes that brought it to fruition, while also studying their recording career as an evolving text that can be interpreted as a body of work. But how, then, do we trace the contours of the Beatles' art? If we understand a work of art to be both the expression or exploration of a creative impulse and the process of creating a material object – whether that object be a novel, a painting, a sculpture, or a song – then we also implicitly recognize the art work to be the result of an indelibly human drive to communicate a set of ideas, to draw upon a sustained sense of aesthetics or ethos in order to establish beauty, and to engage in acts of storytelling in order to generate an emotional reaction. These latter elements enable the art object to function as a symbolic vehicle of cultural expression. If we accept the notion of the Beatles as recording artists, how, then, do we define the principal aesthetic and literary-musicological elements that inform John, Paul, George, and Ringo's enduring “body of work”? In order to comprehend their art as the result of a creative synthesis, we must work from a set of principles that assists us in understanding the range of their artistic pursuits as they are made manifest in the recording studio.

A number of those interested in the music of the Beatles have singled out for discussion its rhythmic inventiveness. Most discussions of the Beatles' rhythmic devices start and end with an appreciation of their remarkably wide-ranging approaches to the metric surface, paying particular attention to asymmetrical meters (those representing measures containing numbers of beats not divisible by two or three, as in the 5/4 meter appearing in “Within You Without You” [SP]) or the many examples of freely mixed meter (as with the repeated alternation of 4/4 and 3/4 bars in “All You Need is Love” [MMT]). Another interesting development in the Beatles' rhythmic invention is their flexibility with strongly accented patterns of syncopation, which arises when normally weak beats or weak parts of beats (such as the second and fourth beats in 4/4 meter, or the second eighth within a quarter-note beat) are accented by strong melodic events (as with a sudden high note), rhythmically unexpected chord changes (normally changing on downbeats but subject to expressive versatility), or obtrusive dynamics (as with the normal rock drumbeat pattern, which loudly accents the snare on beats two and four). Because these and other related effects are manifest for the most part at the beat level (between the barlines), they are all relatively superficial and may be accounted for chiefly in the musical foreground (as opposed to groupings of measures and of phrases, which may be thought to occupy progressively deeper middle-ground and background orientations).

In mid-May 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney flew to New York to announce the Beatles' latest venture, Apple. After holding interviews in their hotel suite with Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and Forbes magazines and conducting a press conference, the two Beatles appeared on NBC-TV's Tonight Show on May 14. While viewers may have naïvely hoped the pair would perform, John and Paul were there to talk business.

John explained that their accountant had told them that they could give their money to the government or do something with it. “So we decided to play businessmen for a bit, because we've got to run our own affairs now. So we've got this thing called Apple, which is going to be records, films, and electronics, which all tie up. And to make a sort of an umbrella so people who want to make films about … grass … don't have to get on their knees in an office, you know, begging for a break. We'll try and do it like that. That's the idea. I mean we'll find out what happens, but that's what we're trying to do.”

One evening in April of 1965, Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon, Along with George's fiancée Pattie Boyd, and John's wife Cynthia, dined with John Riley, a prominent dentist in London. Their host secretly slipped LSD-laced sugar cubes into the after-dinner coffees, and so began a night filled with bouts of intense sensory excitement. Lennon later exhorted listeners to “take a drink from [the] special cup” of a physician named “Doctor Robert,” a song on which dreamy, seemingly floating vocal harmonies declared: “well, well, well, you're feeling fine,” quite likely commemorating the quaffing of their first and subsequent magic cups. In August of that same year, Harrison and Lennon again took LSD; this time, Ringo Starr joined in, as did actor Peter Fonda. As Harrison sat poolside, struggling somewhat with the effects of the drug, Fonda related a story from his youth in which he nearly died from blood loss. “I know what it's like to be dead,” he stated. Lennon, perhaps in an effort to free the group from the morbid impact of Fonda's story, retorted: “Who put all that shit in your head?” Lennon memorialized this event in “She Said She Said,” a track on which he changed the sex of his interlocutor and related that: “She said I know what it's like to be dead … / I said who put all those things in your head.”

Given the high amount of magnificent music the Beatles recorded in 1969, it may surprise millions of casual listeners to learn that aside from a few numbers, all of the official tracks from the band's last full year – including classics such as “Let It Be,” “Get Back,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Come Together,” “Across the Universe,” “Something,” “Don't Let Me Down,” and the medley on side two of Abbey Road – were created to the tune of four once inseparable friends going through an ugly divorce. Most of the tracks belie sessions where egos were so wounded by the slightest offense, whether real or imagined, that only in patches did the Fab Four function with a unified vision and in a collaborative spirit. Abbey Road and Let It Be, along with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and three B sides, were made amid spats, sulks, shouting matches, temporary alliances, simmering jealousies, and many sessions with one or more of the Beatles absent. “Given these circumstances,” writes Walter Everett, “it is somewhat remarkable that Abbey Road is universally recognized as a coherent demonstration of inspired composition, impeccable vocal and instrumental ensemble, and clean and cleverly colorful engineering.” And while Let It Be may not possess the polish of Abbey Road, many listeners prefer it for that very reason. Shining through the ramshackle and at times poorly performed and indifferently recorded pieces are melodies, harmonies, and grooves as addictive as any in the Beatles' canon.

After five years of uninterrupted success, in which their achievements as composers, recording artists, and performers had attracted unprecedented levels of attention and acclaim, the Beatles entered 1968 in somewhat uncertain mood. Delighted with the critical impact of Sgt. Pepper, confused by the consequences of Brian Epstein's death, startled at the overwhelmingly negative reactions to Magical Mystery Tour, and separated through their growing involvements in a number of (often film-related) projects, the group – for the first time in their career – seemed to have temporarily mislaid the sense of direction and purpose that had previously distinguished it. This lack of unity gradually became so apparent that it became the defining characteristic of the Beatles' music throughout 1968.

While it was always true that historical and cultural conditions helped to implicitly shape the Beatles' output, the dramatic and divisive events of 1968 created a political context of fragmentation, argument, disunity, confrontation, and disillusionment, which inevitably – and explicitly – found its way into their music. These events included US escalation of the war in Vietnam, following the Tet Offensive launched by the Viet Cong at the start of the year; Czechoslovakia's election of Alexander Dubček as its leader, and its subsequent invasion by the Soviet Union; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the increasing numbers of student-led demonstrations, rallies, and occupations across Europe; the violent police response to protests at the Democrat convention in Chicago; Irish Catholic marches leading to street battles in Londonderry and military intervention in Northern Ireland; Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s “river of blood” speech and the focus on anti-immigration policies to which it led; the punitive response to the iconic black power salute given by 200- meter medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico Olympics; and the election of Richard Nixon as US President.

While Mary Gaitskill's character Alison Owen does not refer to the Beatles in the above epigraph, the musical and lyrical range of what she deems the “new songs” owes a tremendous debt to the group from Liverpool. While some early pop artists, such as Chuck Berry, had occasionally explored topics other than puppy love, teen angst, and the exuberance of youth, serious considerations of subjects beyond this terrain fell mainly to performers in the traditional and folk genres, and few ever reached the level of “visions and adventures.” Indeed, had a few brave souls forayed into this uncharted territory, the audience might have taunted them off the stage. Starting with A Hard Day's Night, however, and reaching fruition in Rubber Soul and Revolver, the Beatles crossed a the matic threshold that would both inspire their pop contemporaries and develop an audience ready for songs about more than hand-holding and whispered secrets. It is no coincidence that Rubber Soul took its narrative cues more from folk crossovers such as Bob Dylan and the Byrds than from the Beatles' pop cohorts. Sonically the influences were numerous, from the soul alluded to in the album's title to country and western and Indian sitar music.

Remarkably, while critics inevitably cite Rubber Soul as the Beatles' “transitional” album, the shift from successful pop act to unparalleled masters of the studio took but three years. Ultimately, the demarcation between Beatlemania and the studio years proves an arbitrary one, for from the beginning the Beatles, especially John Lennon, showed a lyrical uneasiness with their expected subject matter.

Introduction

The chapter deals with the formative years of both the Beatles and the six youths who were group members in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, who left the band in 1961 and 1962 respectively. Although it cannot claim to be a complete inventory (to borrow a term from Gramsci in the quotation above), it is intended to present the boys and the band as products of the historical process in the England of the 1950s through the presentation of some of the “infinity of traces” deposited in them by that historical period.

In this account of the dual formation of the group and the six individuals, I will discuss first the various networks within which the six were enmeshed as children, adolescents and young men: those of the family and social class, of the school and youth culture peer group. The second part of the chapter describes and analyses the musical factors and features that coalesced to form first the Quarrymen skiffle group and then the early Beatles.

The data upon which this chapter is based are drawn from published biographies and autobiographies. These publications are of three types: authorized biographies such as those of Shepherd, Davies, Miles, and the Beatles “themselves”; unauthorized biographies such as Goldman's, Connolly's, and Sullivan's psychoanalytical volume; and the memoirs of colleagues, friends, and family such as Epstein, Cynthia Lennon, and Pauline Sutcliffe. The overall quality of this material is uneven, with a number of errors and discrepancies that have confused the general understanding of the early years of the Beatles.