Dreaming the Beatles

session, saving nothing for later, knowing their first chance to get out of Liverpool could be their last.

This tale is extremely famous, but much less well-known is the fact that Paul plays drums on it. And the reason: Ringo just quit the band.

Ask a hundred people on the street who Manson is—ninety-nine will tell you he’s the hippie freak who stabbed a bunch of people after playing the White Album backwards.

But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week”—beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting

The Stones were Stonesier. The Beatles were merely better.

And without helping himself to a slice of the songwriting credits, which would have been standard practice. The failure of George Martin to rip them off remains one of the most bizarre elements of their story.

And just as Aftermath was the Stones racing to catch up with Rubber Soul, Revolver was the Beatles racing to catch up with Aftermath.

Yet for all their changes between 1962 and 1970, one constant is that they did not hold back. They bashed out their first album in a mammoth all-day

Lou Reed, 1970: “In his mansion Brian Epstein kept Spanish servants, none of whom could speak English. Let that be a lesson to us all in discretion.”