In 1967 the cover of a "vinyl" titled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club complex), showed – with a photomontage – a crowd gathered around a grave, there were: Edgar Allan Poe, Lawrence of Arabia, Sonny Liston, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West and 8 Beatles . Like eight?
Actually four were wax puppets and represented the Beatles, exactly as they appeared at that moment, with long hair, altar boy faces and black clothes. The other four however, always them, with flamboyant clothes hippie and all mustachioed.
The Beatles thus announced their first metamorphosis and at the same time began even more original and stylistically interesting compositions. Just think of their unforgettable composition She's Leaving Home one of the 12 included in the disc of Sergeant Pepper, like that so beautiful as to be compared to a romance by Schubert. And as musicologist Henry Pleasants said in 1968: “The Beatles are where the music is today”.
Like all talents, the Beatles knew how to distill the spirit of their time. If the redundancy of the Victorian era was the satirical, joyfully cheerful wit of Gilbert and Sullivan, the songs of Rodgers Hammerstein were the expression of the sentimentality and earnestness of the Second World War years. The Beatles with their collage they reflected the sense of loneliness of the messy 70s. If their early music was exuberant, see I Want to Hold You Hand (five million copies sold in 1964 alone), was a sugary text about two young men, he and she. They themselves had realized that the music seemed too conventional and decided to think of a first breakthrough. John Lennon, the band's principal composer, was taken by the allure of Bob Dylan's freedom of expression – to tell it like it is. And little by little even the Beatles began to compose songs and to “tell it like it is".
In 1965 Paul McCartney set to music the most beautiful of his songs, Yesterday, with the accompaniment of an octet of strings, a “Baroque-rock” genre. Another form of "raga-rock" was born when George Harrison fell in love with Indian music (which he had studied with a sitar virtuoso, Ravi Shankar) and played some sonatas.
As their music became increasingly complex and daring, the Beatles lost some of their prime fans, the younger ones. And soon after they won not only college students, but also parents, professors and even top executives.
The Reverend B. Davie Napier, Dean of the Chapel of the American University of Stanfort – he said at the time – “Sergeant Popper lays bare the immense loneliness and terror of our lonely age”.
No ensemble, however vital and imaginative, has ever managed to match the originality and strength of the Beatles. But their flirting with drugs and the renunciation spirit, which lingers in songs like A day in the life, it annoyed many of their fans and their parents. But while all four admitted to taking drugs from time to time, Paul McCartney said: “I don't recommend it to anyone. Maybe she opens some doors, but that's not an answer. The answer must be found on your own“.BeatlesWhen the Beatles spoke, millions of people listened to them, as icons that symbolized the youthful distrust of the principle of authority, contempt for conventions and impatience with hypocrisy.
For the young people of the time, they represented the expression of a bold honesty and admired their freedom and open-mindedness. They saw them as their equals.
The Beatles have always led a life away from the noise, away from any risk of image and always protected by bodyguards. Their public but private releases have always been designed with a military strategy, to always have a way out in case of an onslaught of admirers.
Once married, they moved with their wives to different areas outside London, but the friendship that bound them, which arose from particular ties, always kept them together. It wasn't just the fact that they were the Beatles or the success that united them, but above all the fact that they all came from the same social class of the same city, the famous Victorian Liverpool.
Paul, the son of a cotton hitter, and John, who was raised by an aunt after his father abandoned the family, had been playing together as early as 1955. George, the son of a bus driver, joined them in 1958 and two years later Ringo, the son of a dock worker, also arrived.
In those days, however, playing in a Liverpool complex did not pay much and nor did it offer musical satisfaction, but it was an opportunity to meet Brian Epstein, manager, who led there professionally until 1967.
Their characters were very different, Paul was an extrovert and talkative, capable of spreading great charm around him, but he was also the one who smoothed out the difficulties and always tried to explain everything, good or bad. George was the least showy of the group, a lover of philosophy but also the most complete instrumentalist of the group, always first guitar. Ringo, on the other hand, appeared modest and unpretentious, gifted with comedy, the one who knew how to act as a catalyst for others. The most mysterious was instead John, the true creative source, reflective and with a difficult character, sometimes closed and solitary.
From there their brilliant future that we can encapsulate in George's words “Actually we never started. So far we have just discovered what we can do in the field of music, what thresholds we can cross. The future stretches beyond our imagination." Everything else they have managed to do can be defined as the result of their ability to change with maturity and combine experience and art.
