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

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

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.

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.”

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

The Stones were Stonesier. The Beatles were merely better.

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.

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

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