The Beatles landed at JFK Airport on February 7, 1964, greeted by 3,000 of the fans that had sent “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to the top of the Hot 100, and America’s love affair with the Fab Four hasn’t abated in the six decades since. George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr spent just over seven years assembling the most beloved catalog in popular music. While solo careers, films, covers, and archival releases have kept the Beatles brand profitable, it’s really those original albums that have remained durable objects of fascination that still reveal new depths.
Over the years, popular opinion has evolved about the Beatles’ albums, although the second half of their career looms large over those early Beatlemania years. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was for many years their consensus masterpiece, and in subsequent decades, The Beatles (“The White Album”) and Revolver have enjoyed reappraisals. Abbey Road has emerged as their most popular record in the streaming era, and while Let It Be has never surged to the top, documentaries and its prominence on classic rock radio have elevated the divisive album’s stature.
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Beatles ‘64, director David Tedeschi’s documentary about the Beatles’ first visit to America in 1964, was released on Disney+ in November. One of the albums the band released that year, Beatles for Sale, turns 60 on December 4, but where does it rank in their towering discography?
13. Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
The soundtrack to the Beatles’ TV special Magical Mystery Tour is a minor work, whether you’re talking about the six-song double EP released in the U.K., or the American version that adds five tracks from singles, including the classics “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “All You Need is Love.” The cello-driven psych rock of “I Am the Walrus” is one of the Beatles’ great uses of symphonic strings, integrated into a proper full-band performance in contrast to “Yesterday” or “Eleanor Rigby.” For the most part, though, this release feels like a pleasant echo of the Sgt. Pepper era before they turned the page to something different. Of the five Beatles albums nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year, Magical Mystery Tour is the only one that didn’t deserve it, losing the award to Glen Campbell’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix.
12. Yellow Submarine (1969)
Like Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine is a soundtrack project with only a few new songs, this time padded out with George Martin’s instrumental score for the animated film. I would warn against passing it over entirely, though. I didn’t hear “Hey Bulldog” or “It’s All Too Much” until my 30s, and those are two of the Beatles tracks that bring me the most joy these days; both loose, keyboard-driven rockers from the fertile 1967-1968 period. And honestly, even if the Beatles had nothing to do with it, the Martin score is quite lovely.
11. With the Beatles (1963)
The individual personalities of each Beatle were a major selling point in the band’s rise as teen idols, but you can only just start to hear them drift in different directions on With the Beatles. Harrison’s inauspicious debut as a songwriter, “Don’t Bother Me,” is the surliest song the band recorded prior to Beatles for Sale, and McCartney’s cabaret balladeer instincts come out in his pleasantly professional cover of “Till There Was You” from The Music Man. Lennon and McCartney were writing smash hits at a blistering pace in 1963, but “All My Loving” is just about the only essential song on With the Beatles.
10. Beatles for Sale (1964)
Lennon initially wrote “No Reply” for Tommy Quickly, a singer managed by Brian Epstein. Quickly, who’d retire from the music industry in 1965, didn’t release the song. So it became part of the trio of tracks that opened Beatles for Sale that reflected Lennon’s increasingly dark and disillusioned mood, along with “I’m a Loser” and “Baby’s in Black.” Beatles for Sale was recorded quickly between U.S. and U.K. tours, and the unusually heterogeneous album stuffs raucous Chuck Berry and Little Richard covers into a set of originals that reflected the influence of Nashville and Bob Dylan. It all makes a sort of sense together, though, and even the album’s most chipper and playful Lennon-McCartney song, “Eight Days a Week,” featured the innovative flourish of a fade-in intro.
9. Let It Be (1970)
Among the many rock cliches that the Beatles invented or epitomized, Let It Be was conceived as an archetypal “back to basics” album, in which an established group attempts to strip away the layers of complexity and artifice that they’ve built up over the years and return to the essence of their early music and/or their oldest influences. Like many other albums made in that spirit, Let It Be doesn’t really return to anything, and the band sometimes sounds restrained by their abstinence from using all the inventive studio techniques they’d spent years developing. There’s a beautiful intimacy to “Two of Us,” and “I’ve Got a Feeling” as one of the last times Lennon and McCartney threw two fragmentary ideas together and wound up with one beautifully complete song. Mostly, though, you have to empathize with McCartney’s frustration at Phil Spector’s overcooked mix, finished a year after the initial 1969 sessions were shelved, and wonder what could have been.
8. Please Please Me (1963)
From that first “Woo!” on “I Saw Her Standing There” to Lennon’s hoarse, frenzied vocal on the cover of “Twist and Shout” made famous by the Isley Brothers, Please Please Me offers several thrilling moments befitting the album that launched a pop culture phenomenon. In between, there are some blander cover selections and a whole lot more harmonica than you’ll ever hear on the band’s post-1963 output. The interplay and vocal harmonies that they’d honed over those hundreds of gigs in Hamburg and Liverpool, though, imbue even trifles like “There’s a Place” with that electric Beatles chemistry that would take them far over the next seven years.
7. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Harrison bought a Rickenbacker 360/12C63 12-string electric guitar before the recording of A Hard Day’s Night that would make its debut on the title track’s opening chord one of the most discussed and analyzed chords in music history. The only album fully written by Lennon and McCartney, the band’s third album finds the duo channeling the Everly Brothers on “If I Fell” and R&B girl groups on “When I Get Home.” They’d soon move beyond simple two-minute love songs, but they perfected the form on the soundtrack to the first Beatles film.
6. Help! (1965)
The two covers on Help! bookend side two of the album in ways that feel integral to the running order. “Act Naturally,” originally recorded by Buck Owens, is perhaps the definitive Starr lead vocal. Larry Williams’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” acts as an exclamation point for the album after “Yesterday,” a landmark McCartney composition and the first of many Beatles songs that was essentially a solo track by one member of the band. The title track represents the pinnacle of Lennon’s ability to turn his personal anguish into something that can be heard as both a simple pop hit and a raw expression of his complex inner life.
5. Rubber Soul (1965)
The Beatles finished their final tour a few weeks before the sessions for Rubber Soul and tracks like “I’m Looking Through You” and “You Won’t See Me” show the road-tested band at their tightest and most dynamic. Even “Think for Yourself,” which displayed Harrison’s increasingly sophisticated lyrical outlook, gets an irrepressible charge from McCartney’s novel fuzz bass sound. Harrison’s sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” which preceded the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” by just a few months, helped introduce the Indian instrument to Western pop music. “In My Life” also made harpsichord trendy, despite the fact that George Martin’s instrumental bridge was actually played on piano and then sped up to achieve a harpsichord-like sound.
4. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
The only Beatles album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was rapturously received as the rock album that elevated the form to high art. In retrospect, it may be the only album of the band’s peak period where the experimental production and trippy psychedelic arrangements outshine the hit-and-miss songwriting. When the songs and the inventive sound design are unified, though, on “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Sgt. Pepper’s is a marvel that allowed the Beatles to briefly pretend to be someone else and continue being a band for at least a couple more years.
3. Abbey Road (1969)
Understood now as the last album the Beatles made together, though released before Let It Be, Abbey Road sounds like a remarkable final moment of harmony, including lush vocal harmonies on “Because” and “Sun King,” before the band permanently frayed. Lennon and McCartney, pulling the album in opposite directions, both still cheered Harrison on to his maturation as a major songwriter on “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” (the persistent little beauty that would eventually become the first Beatles song with a billion streams on Spotify). “That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite, as they’ve done on side two, seems potent testimony that no, they’ve far from lost it, and no, they haven’t stopped trying,” John Mendelsohn wrote in the Rolling Stone review of Abbey Road.
2. Revolver (1966)
It took 300 hours in the studio to create Revolver, three times as many hours as the Beatles had spent on Rubber Soul, and probably far more time than anyone had put into a single album at that point. The album teems with strange ideas and unexpected details like the backward guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.” Harrison’s continued interest in Indian classical music led to the droning guitar tones and shifting meters on “Love You To” and even Lennon’s LSD-inspired “She Said She Said.” “Yellow Submarine” affirmed that the band hadn’t lost their whimsy, instead outfitting their sillier ideas with more complex production flourishes and cinematic sound effects. “‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is musically most original, starting with jungle noises and Eastern-inspired music which merge by montage effect into the sort of electronic noises we associate with beat music,” Edward Greenfield wrote in the Guardian’s review of Revolver.
1. The Beatles (1968)
Whether you know it as their self-titled album or by its popular nickname, “The White Album,” the Beatles’ only double album is such an overwhelming feast of songs that it’s hard to believe they also had “Hey Jude” to set aside as a non-LP single. It’s an album of extremes, even within the contributions of each Beatle. McCartney gives us both the tender “Blackbird” and the proto-metal frenzy of “Helter Skelter.” Lennon’s songs range from the pop perfection of “Dear Prudence” to the surreal sound collage of “Revolution 9.” Harrison is unusually playful on “Savoy Truffle” but as philosophical as ever on the magnificent “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Even Starr gets two very different showcases on the country rock romp “Don’t Pass Me By” and the Lennon-penned lullaby “Good Night.” A condensed single LP of the best songs from The Beatles would be their best album by some distance, but the shaggy, confounding sprawl of the album in its entirety is something to behold.
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