At this point, rock and roll is famous mostly because it’s what the Beatles did, just as the theater is famous because plays are what Shakespeare happened to write.

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

To contemplate the mystery of girldom, the Beatles had to pose new questions about sexuality. Their gender sacrilege had a little to do with their hair, but much more to do with how they sounded and how they felt. They invented a form of rock and roll in which boys wanting to be girls (be as real as girls, as honest as girls, as deep as girls, as

They’ve gone from being the world’s biggest group to the act that’s bigger than all the rest of pop music combined. At this point, rock and roll is famous mostly because it’s what the Beatles did, just as the theater is famous because plays are what Shakespeare happened to write.

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.

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.”

Everybody used to assume the Beatle myth was driving the music—it turned out to be the other way around.

The Stones were Stonesier. The Beatles were merely better.

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