John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — the four Liverpool musicians who, between 1960 and 1970, remade popular music. They honed their craft in Hamburg's clubs, led the 1964 British Invasion of America, and stopped touring in 1966 to work exclusively in the studio. The Lennon-McCartney partnership drove them from three-chord singles to the orchestrated complexity of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. Their debt to Black American blues and rock and roll is foundational. The 1970 breakup — and its causes — remains contested; the music is not.
In February 1964, four young men from Liverpool stepped onto an American television stage and roughly seventy-three million people watched. It was one of the largest audiences television had ever drawn. The Beatles played a few short songs about holding hands and wanting love, and the screaming nearly drowned them out. They had been a band for only a few years. They would last only six more. Yet in that short span they would stop writing songs about holding hands, turn the recording studio into a kind of laboratory, and remake what a pop record could be. The band that arrived as the latest teenage craze left as the group that taught the world to hear popular music as art.