Greg Hawkes Beatles

With Revolver, the Beatles made the Great Leap Forward, reaching a previously unheard-of level of sophistication and fearless experimentation. Sgt. Pepper, in many ways, refines that breakthrough, as the Beatles consciously synthesized such disparate influences as psychedelia, art song, classical music, rock & roll, and music hall, often in the course of one song. Not once does the diversity seem forced – the genius of the record is how the vaudevillian "When I'm 64" seems like a logical extension of "Within You Without You" and how it provides a gateway to the chiming guitars of "Lovely Rita." There's no discounting the individual contributions of each member or their producer, George Martin, but the preponderance of whimsy and self-conscious art gives the impression that Paul McCartney is the leader of the Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Beatles intended Abbey Road as a grand farewell, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the elegiac note Paul McCartney strikes at the conclusion of its closing suite. It’s hard not to interpret “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make” as a summation not only of Abbey Road but perhaps of the group’s entire career, a lovely final sentiment. The truth is perhaps a bit messier than this. The Beatles had tentative plans to move forward after the September 1969 release of Abbey Road, plans that quickly fell apart at the dawn of the new decade, and while the existence of that goal calls into question the intentionality of the album as a finale, it changes not a thing about what a remarkable goodbye the record is.

With this album eleven British and American blues stars took the fabric of some of the best songs of the 20th Century and spun their own magic, performing from the heart in the way great Blues and Soul artists have always done.

A Collection of Beatles Oldies (subtitled But Goldies!) is a compilation album by the English rock band the Beatles. Issued in the United Kingdom in December 1966, it features hit singles and other songs released by the group between 1963 and 1966…

On toward the mid-'70s, it dawned on the powers-that-were at Capitol/EMI that millions of listeners had come of age since the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 and, thus, had never experienced the group except in a historical context. (This notion was aided by true tales of younger Wings fans discovering – to their amazement – that Paul McCartney had been "a member of another group"). All of the Beatles' albums were still in print and easily available (and routinely stocked by most record stores), but it was thought that some new excitement was needed, some fresh exposure, to re-introduce their work to these younger listeners…