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  But as wondrous as some of the tracks are on the first two Anthology sets, neither collection really plays through as a truly satisfying or moving listening experience. Anthology 1 is unfairly bogged down with speech excerpts that deprive the rock & roll sequencing of much of its momentum. Anthology 2—which should have been the most monumental of these packages—lacks real cohesion; it moves from simple, wonderful, primal rock to baroque psychedelia too quickly, too inexplicably. Also, two versions of “Fool on the Hill”—let’s admit it—are two too many. (Though the set also includes a fierce, punklike version of the “Sgt. Pepper” reprise, with McCartney affecting a Bob Dylan-inflected yowl, that burns the original version to the ground.)

  It is surprising, then, that Anthology 3 not only works as the best of this series, but is also perhaps the most revealing album in the Beatles’ entire catalog. This set covers 1968 to 1970: the Beatles’ fateful period. These were the years when friction set in between the band members, when John Lennon met Yoko Ono and embarked on making avant-garde art and dabbling in radical conceptual politics, and it was the period when Apple Records (the Beatles’ own label) was established and then quickly spun out of control. The music on the albums from this time proved wildly uneven. The two record set The Beatles (better known as the White Album) was brilliant yet disjointed—as if it had been made by four independent men rather than fashioned by a true band—whereas Abbey Road came across as a unified masterstroke from start to finish. Let It Be (recorded before Abbey Road, but released later) began as an album and film project called Get Back, and was to present the Beatles playing live, uncluttered by studio artifice (in keeping with late 1960s’ pop’s return-to-the-roots rage, inspired by Bob Dylan’s acoustic rock & roll gem, John Wesley Harding). The Beatles lost interest in Get Back and put it on hold. By the time the album was released—as Let It Be—the band had broken up and John Lennon had recruited producer Phil Spector to remix and orchestrate some of the tracks (sort of John’s revenge on Paul—maybe on all the Beatles). Coming as the Beatles’ final album, Let It Be felt indifferent and haphazard—by far the lowest moment of the band’s output. After hearing it, it was a bit easier to let the Beatles go.

  Anthology 3 changes the way one hears this period’s music—in a way that I’ve never heard another pop retrospective accomplish. The set’s alternate tracks play pretty much in the order the music happened, and what emerges redeems some of what had once seemed abject. Many of the versions of the White Album tracks included here are from solo acoustic demos recorded by the various songwriters (Beatles Unplugged!), while others are rough sketches with different configurations of the band playing together. Either way, these alternate White Album tracks are mesmerizing—like ghostly survivors that divulge the music’s real, long-ago secrets. Paul McCartney, not usually regarded as the Beatles’ hard-tempered personality, turns in a lengthy, ominous reading of “Helter Skelter” that feels scarier than the frenetic original. He also takes the one-trick “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” and imbues it with a weirdly wonderful, deranged passion. There is much, much more on Anthology 3 that is transfixing—especially George Harrison’s acoustic solo version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and John Lennon’s spooky “Come Together”—but the set’s real value is in what it tells us about the Beatles’ relationship during this period. Clearly, this was bottom-of-the-soul time. Many of this collection’s songs are brimming with desolation, aloneness, and fear, and yet from that came some inspired and enduring songwriting. More important, while you can hear the tension between group members in some of the tracks (John mocking Paul at various points in “Let It Be” and “Teddy Boy”), you can also hear the real pleasure and affinity that took place within this band. Listen to John and Paul’s lovely harmony singing on “Two of Us”: These men were already on the way out of each other’s lives, and yet they could still bring out the best in one another, and could still revel and take pride in that realization. Anthology 3 is a wonderful story of lost and found and lost-again community. It is the Beatles’ equivalent to Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, perhaps even darker. Hard to believe that, in 1996, we could receive a new Beatles album that is so moving.

  The video half of the Anthology series—which purports to be the Beatles’ sole true autobiography—is an elaborate expansion of the three-part TV special of the same title, first broadcast in November 1995, to mixed reviews. This extended edition is a vast improvement, and is generally worth the ten hours required to sit through it. In particular, there is some amazing black & white footage in its early parts (from a film by Albert and David Maysles) of February 7, 1964—the day the Beatles first arrived in America. Following a hilarious press conference, we view the band members in the back of a limousine, entering Manhattan for the first time. We see their looks of nervousness—then astonishment—as they listen to live radio’s coverage of their coming. When they pull in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater, from inside the limousine you see the swarm of screaming young women that engulfs the car, stopping it. The limousine slowly draws away from the crowd, and is flanked by policemen on galloping horses. There are several other great moments throughout Anthology—including concert scenes in the United Kingdom; Sweden; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles, and the recording session for “A Day in the Life”—but there is nothing that matches the impact of the Beatles’ arrival in Manhattan. It is a moment of pure, true, meaningful history—the Beatles’ entry into the modern mind—and after that day so much would be different.

  Unfortunately, as Anthology progresses, the Beatles (or at least Harrison, Starr, and McCartney) tend to gloss over some of the rougher milestones of the band’s story. There is no reference, for example, to the Beatles’ tense parting with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968, nor is there any mention of John Lennon’s sudden separation from his first wife, Cynthia, for whom the divorce was especially hurtful. It’s as if Yoko Ono simply materialized at an ideal time in Lennon’s life, and filled him with new purpose. For that matter, there’s precious little of Yoko Ono in Anthology at all (though when she makes her appearance, it’s accompanied by a somewhat sinister song fragment: “She’s not a girl who misses much . . . ,” from “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), and there is no admission of the resentment she met with. Indeed, the Beatles fairly idealize the whole last period of their association, making it seem as if their break were simply a logical development. They had done enough together, and it was time to go their severed ways. In truth, the Beatles’ ending was ugly and nasty. There were rancorous fights between McCartney and the others over accepting Allen Klein as the band’s new manager (Paul wanted Lee Eastman, his father-in-law), and there was real aversion and blame leveled at Ono by some of the people in the Beatles’ circle. Most obviously, there was the bitter rift between Lennon and McCartney, which effectively finished the group. None of this is admitted here, though after so many years of legal suits and other strains, it’s understandable that today’s Beatles wouldn’t want to go back to those moments.

  Even so, Anthology makes it plain that there was a great deal of pain involved in being the Beatles, and that pain started much earlier than many of us might have realized. Ringo Starr tells a harrowing story about how a plainclothes policeman accompanied him onstage at a Canadian appearance, after Starr had received a death threat for being Jewish (“One major fault is I’m not Jewish,” says Ringo), and George relates how, during a tense appearance in Japan, every time an unexpected loud sound occurred, the band members would look around to see which of them had been shot. Harrison also discloses his anger about the Beatles not being able to control their own schedules or movements during their hectic tours, and also tells how, in 1964, he finally balked and insisted that the Beatles not participate in a ticker tape parade planned for a San Francisco appearance. “It was only . . . a year,” he says, “since they had assassinated Kennedy. . . . I could just imagine how mad it is in America.”

  The Beatles were at the eye of a tremendous storm of public feeling, and th
ough Harrison claims they were the sanest people in that scenario, it’s also clear that their fame had isolated them from some of the meaning and pleasure of their experience. As you watch Anthology, it becomes plain that the Beatles—or at least some of them—may not have really loved their audience, at least after a certain point. In the Beatles’ minds, it appears, that audience became an enclosing and demanding reality, always wanting, often threatening, rarely understanding enough. Harrison, in particular, has the most to say on this point. “They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did,” he states, “and then they blamed it on us.” Later, he tells a story about visiting the Haight-Ashbury—the San Francisco district identified with the hippie movement—at the height of its fame, and shares his disgust at the constituency he saw there. “Grotty people,” he labels them, with clear disdain. And in Anthology’s closing section, Harrison says: “They [the Beatles’ audience] gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles kind of gave their nervous systems, which is a much more different thing to give.”

  This distaste for the public’s clamor is possibly the single greatest revelation to be found in Anthology. But there is another side to the story—namely, that this same public also gave the Beatles something tremendous, something more than money and screams. That audience gave the Beatles an inspiration to get better, an opportunity to grow, and a willingness to grow along with them. Without the context of that audience, it doesn’t seem likely that the group could have made such a form-stretching work as Revolver or such a culture-defining statement as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, because the pop audience of that time, as much as any of the era’s musicians, was also raising the stakes on what was allowable and what was necessary, and was also delivering judgment on the caliber of what was being offered. The Beatles’ record sales were, as much as anything, a sign of love and appreciation for the band—a mass of go-ahead votes. Without that support, the Beatles would have mattered a lot less, and probably would have accomplished a lot less as well.

  And yet, in Anthology’s insularity, there is never any acknowledgment of that debt. The audience that loved this band was perhaps never seen as real or worthy partners in the group’s journey. The Beatles had only each other and their work for solace, and in time, they didn’t even have that.

  WHATEVER ITS FLAWS or merits, The Beatles Anthology proved fairly eventful in 1996—at least in a certain way. When Anthology first aired in America in 1995, the program drew over 50 million viewers during its three nights of broadcast—something smaller than the record-breaking audience of 70 million who tuned into the group’s first “Ed Sullivan Show” broadcast in 1964, but still, no other popular music figures have ever been granted a six-hour prime-time television special. In the show’s wake, much of the Beatles’ extant catalog (the thirteen original albums, and five collections, including the 1994 Live at the BBC) returned to Billboard’s charts, and sold dramatically. In addition, the three double CD Anthology packages, released over the course of the year following the broadcast, also did well—selling over 5 million units to date. Once again, the Beatles loomed as a big and competitive force in the pop world. In fact, according to SoundScan—the company that monitors music sales—the group has sold 27 million CDs since 1991. All this sales activity prompted the London Observer to remark: “In 1996 the Beatles have achieved what every group since them has failed to do: become bigger than the Beatles.”

  It’s a clever comment, but it also begs a few other comments. In the 1960s, the Beatles being “big” meant something—a great deal, in fact. It meant that not just the Beatles, but whole new styles and values had become big, and were upsetting prior styles and values. It meant that an increasingly bold and empowered generation had elected its own aesthetics, its own ideology, its own leaders—and that such pop artists as the Beatles (or Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones, or Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin) were the exemplars of this movement. In this context, to become “bigger than the Beatles” would have meant signifying a greater consensus. It would have meant to be not just more popular, but also more embodying, more centralizing, for an entire generation. Today, such a possibility no longer seems practical or desirable. Indeed, the notion of gigantism as consensus, as a sign of unifying agreement in the pop world, has now collapsed, for better or worse. In the years since the Beatles’ disunion, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, Madonna, the Grateful Dead, Whitney Houston, Nirvana, U2, Garth Brooks, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Alanis Morissette (among others) have all been “bigger than the Beatles”—that is, they have all sold more individual albums or played to greater numbers of people. But as often as not, the size of these artists’ successes has meant nothing more than just the triumph of size itself—or at least has meant nothing more outside the artist’s particular audience. Bruce Springsteen’s fans will attest to the meaning and worth of his music and popularity, but Prince’s audience (or Michael Jackson’s, or Madonna’s) might not agree—and whatever their merits, few if any of the performers mentioned in this sentence appeal to today’s younger progressive audience.

  The point is: There is no longer a center to popular music, no longer any one single, real mainstream. Instead, there are many diverse mainstreams and excluding factions, each representing its own perspective, its own concurrence. Snoop Doggy Dogg may reign over one mainstream, Whitney Houston or Hootie and the Blowfish over another, R.E.M., U2, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins over yet others. But nothing unifies popular music’s broadest possible audience in the way that Elvis Presley or the Beatles once managed. Not even the idea of “popular” music binds that many of us—and maybe that’s not a bad thing. In any event, about the only thing today’s pop world might agree on is not to agree on too many shared tastes or tenets.

  The Beatles are still big—no question. They still sell millions of albums, and their legend probably remains unrivaled. But the Beatles—at least today’s Beatles—are not really “bigger” than the Beatles, because today’s Beatles can no longer change the world the way yesterday’s Beatles did.

  So the final real question is: What is it, then, that the Beatles can possibly say or mean to modern times?

  IF ONE IS TO judge that question solely by the band’s two new songs, the answer would be: Probably not that much.

  Never mind all the criticism that there’s something false or shameful about the surviving Beatles modifying the late John Lennon’s unfinished music. Harrison, McCartney, and Starr did not embarrass themselves or the Beatles’ reputation with these efforts. The final results sound as if everybody involved worked sincerely and meticulously, and with “Free as a Bird” in particular, they even created something rather moving. At one point, McCartney asks: Whatever happened to the time and life that the band once shared? How did they go on without one another? The song isn’t a statement about nostalgia, but rather a commentary on all the chances and hopes, all the immeasurable possibilities, that are lost when people who once loved each other cut themselves off from that communion. Not a bad or imprecise coda for what the Beatles did to themselves, and to their own history (and to their audience) with their dissolution. The only problem is, neither “Free as a Bird” nor “Real Love” imparts any real urgency, or aims to capture a mood or moment—which is something the old Beatles accomplished so well in albums like Revolver and the White Album, and in songs like “Revolution,” “Hey Jude,” “Get Back,” and even “Let It Be,” with the latter song’s yearning for serenity as the outside world turned troubling and uncertain. The modern Beatles sound . . . careful, maybe even a bit removed from the world around them.

  But that only makes sense. The world around them has changed considerably since these men last gathered together to make music. These are harder times, in terms of both style and content, and the sensibilities that the Beatles once stood for are not as dominant now. In today’s cutting-edge popular music, one doesn�
�t hear the residue of the Beatles so much as you hear, say, the long-shadow influence of the Velvet Underground (whose primal drive and dissonant textures have had great bearing on the music of David Bowie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, U2, and R.E.M., among others), or the sway of James Brown (whose sharp, tense style of funk propulsion had tremendous rhythmic impact on numerous diverse artists, including George Clinton, electric-era Miles Davis, funk and disco bands like Ohio Players and Chic, and many of today’s hip-hop performers and producers). Moreover, the Beatles’ most oft-cited thematic concerns—their reflections on love, concord, and spirituality—may seem quaint in comparison to the concerns of artists like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Hole, or Tupac Shakur, who sang vital, rageful songs about vulnerability and self-destruction, loneliness and malevolence. It isn’t that the Beatles didn’t allow darkness into their music. There was a frequent mean streak in some of John Lennon’s earlier songs—such as “Run for Your Life” and “Norwegian Wood”—later replaced by the existential dread of “She Said She Said” and “A Day in the Life.” In addition, as the bulk of Anthology 3 makes plain, much of the Beatles’ concluding music was rife with images of chaos, isolation, anger, panic, and drug-steeped sadness. Even so, many commentators tend to remember the Beatles for their blithe sentiments about love as a major work of will, and courage and redemption. Fine ideals, to be sure, and in the setting of their time, even somewhat inspiring and comforting. But in the real end, you likely need a lot more than love to make it through this world or redeem your losses. Sometimes darkness is irrefutable, and sometimes love and understanding can’t save a troubled heart or a soul in harm’s way. Just ask Kurt Cobain or Tupac Shakur—or for that matter John Lennon. That is, if you could ask them anything today.