The Beatles & the 60s : Soundtrack to a Social Awakening | MUSIC | Full Documentary in English
[reel ticking] [intense instrumental music] [gentle instrumental music] – [Crowd] We want the Beatles. We want the Beatles. We want the Beatles. We want the Beatles. We want the Beatles. We want the Beatles. [energetic rock music] – [Narrator] When
The Beatles burst onto the world stage in 1963, they transformed
popular music overnight. A commercial phenomenon
like no other, they paved the way
for every artist who followed in their wake. – They were selling
vast amounts of records, a quarter of a million a week. No one has ever
done that before. Even Elvis hadn’t,
Lonnie Donegan hadn’t. Every week selling a quarter
of a million records. – You had a revolution,
just in terms of sales. But in addition to that, we wouldn’t have had
The Rolling Stones. You wouldn’t have The Byrds, you wouldn’t have had
Dylan going electric. You wouldn’t have had The Doors, and all those other bands
we associate with the 60s. The chances of them existing without The Beatles
are pretty slim. – [Narrator] Yet the band’s
impact spread far beyond music. As figureheads for a
blooming youth culture, their influence
penetrated to the heart of the post-war world. – [Mark] They were
agents of change. They were carrying
everyone with them. Everything felt modern, new,
fresh, everywhere you looked. The world started
to look different. – [Mark] The colors
started to really emerge, the screen shoots
of a new culture. – From the point of
The Beatles’ arrival, they completely reinvented
how culture looks. Suddenly, adults were
growing their hair long. Grown-up women were
wearing mini-skirts. Suddenly, it was young people who were determining everything. That started with The Beatles. – [Narrator] By the
second half of the ’60s, the band transformed into leaders of the
emerging counterculture. Bringing new social,
%*# and artistic ideas into the mainstream, through
their peaceful revolution they became the undisputed
voice of a generation. – The Beatles were the most
commercial band on earth. But they were the most
avant-garde and experimental. That was their role. Through their music, they
opened up peoples’ minds. – They helped to
move a lot of people who might not otherwise
have gone along with the stuff that happened
in ’66, ’67 and ’68. They were inspirational and
influential in that way. But as they became more
involved in the counterculture and more representative of it, they became a political threat. – [Narrator] This film
traces The Beatles’ path through the most extraordinary
decade of the 20th century. It reveals the lasting impact of four musicians
from Liverpool, who went from class warriors
to cultural revolutionaries, while providing the
soundtrack for a generation. – They were catalysts
for a great many things. They changed just
about everything. [gentle instrumental music] – [Narrator] Great
Britain, 1962. A small and once
dominant Kingdom, finally recovering
from years of austerity following the Second World War. A nation of
discipline and order, of industrial cities and
quiet village greens. And although outwardly it
appeared stuck in the past, beneath the surface a fresh
culture was developing that would rapidly transform it. At the close of the
year the UK was hit by some of the coldest
weather it had ever suffered, everyday life grinding to a halt as snow covered the country. Breaking through this bitter
winter, on January 11th, 1963, a record was issued that
provided the first glimpse of the brave new world
that was to come. Please Please Me,
the second single by Liverpudlian
four-piece The Beatles, quickly rose to number
two on the British charts, and its mainstream success
announced the arrival of a revolutionary force
in both music and culture. ♪ You don’t need me
to show the way love ♪ Why do I always
have to say love ♪ C’mo, ♪ C’mon, ♪ C’mn ♪ C’mon ♪ C’mn ♪ C’mon ♪ C’mn ♪ C’mon ♪ Please please me, whoa
yeah, like I please you… ♪♪ – Please Please Me was
a kind of eruption. They took the blunt force
of 1950s rock and roll, which was a blunt instrument. There’s no other
way to describe it. Musically and socially,
it was a blunt instrument. And they grafted on
to that the harmonies and the whole plaintive vocal
quality of the girl groups of the early 1960s. Nobody had ever heard anything
quite like this before. This was a group that had
two of the best singers of their era in the same group, and something like that I don’t think had
really happened before. The sound of John Lennon and
Paul McCartney singing together is one of the great sounds
in music of the 20th century. ♪ Last night I said
these words to my girl ♪ ♪ I know you never
even try, girl… ♪♪ – They were a shock
to the system. Love Me Do was the first single, and it was a bit of a false
start. Please Please Me is when
you had the unison sound of the band. They’re singing,
“Come on, come on.” There’s this sense
of anticipation and a sense of excitement. It was a fresh sound. It sounds so traditional now. But at the time, the look and the sound
was completely fresh. It was positive,
uplifting and modern. – [Narrator] The Beatles,
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, provided a much
needed shot in the arm to Britain’s pop scene. Although American rock and roll
had been enormously popular in the mid 1950s, its electrifying initial
surge proved short-lived. With its major stars
either selling out or disappearing from the scene, the musicians that came in
their wake were more wholesome and less threatening. British artists followed suit, and the musical
landscape in the UK was dominated by
talented imitators and the teen idols of pop
Svengali Larry Parnes. With the support of their
manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, The Beatles offered
something very different. Driven by the unique
songwriting partnership of John Lennon and
Paul McCartney, this band composed
their own material. – Most of conventional
English show business as we think of it, was really a pale reflection
of American show business. It had not always been the case. But since the war,
certainly it was. You had singers like Matt Monro who did an almost letter perfect
imitation of Frank Sinatra. By the same token, you had the famous facile,
fatuous English pop stars of the period, of whom Cliff Richard
was by far the best known and the most successful, who was a kind of third
rate version of Elvis. And not of the Elvis
of Heartbreak Hotel but of the Elvis of King Creole, the Elvis of Elvis
the movie star. [“Summer Holiday”] ♪ We’re all going
on a summer holiday ♪ ♪ No more working
for a week or two ♪ ♪ Fun and laughter
on our summer holiday ♪ ♪ No more worries for me
or you ♪ ♪ For a week or two… ♪ – It was pretty professional. Cliff Richard and The
Shadows were good players. It was a good act. But it was family friendly. And you had also characters
like Larry Parnes, with his stable of pretty boys
who did what they were told, who sung what they
were told to sing, and who had no particular
creative input at all. So when somebody like
The Beatles comes along and they’re not only playing their own instruments,
singing beautifully, they’re also singing
their own compositions. This was incredibly
rare at the time. – The Beatles were
keen from the start to write their own material. They wrote the songs
to the audience, to address the audience. They knew that the audience
was 80% teenage girls and they wrote songs that elicited the perfect
response from them. And after that, the
deluge followed. It sent the signal
out to everybody that you can all
write your own song, get a slice of the action. Within a year or two,
all bands were writing, or having a crack at it. – [Narrator] It wasn’t only
the extraordinary sound of The Beatles or the unique
talents of Lennon and McCartney that were revolutionizing
popular music. As they came to dominate
the charts in 1963, their string of hit records transformed the
commercial fortunes of the British record
industry itself. – As The Beatles
became more popular, and every record seemed
to sell more and more you had a revolution in the
British record industry, just in terms of sales. They’d never seen
anything like this, both in the amount of sales and the how long The
Beatles would hang around in the charts, for months
and months and months. In addition to that, there was the rolling impact
of hit after hit after hit, that never let the quality drop. If anything, the
quality increased, from Please Please
Me to From Me to You, which was a little more
downbeat but was no less wily. And then between the
eyes She Loves You, which explodes out of
the radio to this day. ♪ She loves you,
yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ She loves you,
yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ She loves you,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ You think you’ve
lost your love ♪ ♪ Well, I saw her
yesterday… ♪♪ – People like Billy
Fury and Elvis, they were selling quite
substantial amounts of records per se, but
by the beginning of 1963 when Please Please Me
and From Me to Y ou and the Please Please Me
album, they were selling vast
amounts of records. – No one had seen
anything like this in the pop industry before. This was suddenly a
happening industry that not only young people
were taking notice of it, but the bean counters too. So you had everyone scouring
Birmingham for The Moody Blues, The Hollies in Manchester. And Liverpool of course, all the scouts were up there
looking for the next Beatles. Everyone wanted a
slice of the action because they’d revolutionized
the music industry in just a matter
of months in 1963. [gentle instrumental music] – [Narrator] But
the group’s impact was not merely confined
to the musical world. They also both represented
and inspired a seismic shift at the very heart
of British society. How these four young
working class Liverpudlians managed to spearhead
such a change lie in The Beatles’,
and the country’s past. In the two centuries before
the Second World War, the United Kingdom had led
the Industrial Revolution and had ruled over the
greatest Empire on earth. One of the foundations
behind this super power was its class system, which both divided and
ordered its citizens. After emerging victorious
from war in 1945, the elite class in this system, known as the Establishment,
which included the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the heads of all the major institutions
governing society, immediately tried to
reinforce their power, and this chain of
command would once again shape life in Britain
during the post-war years. – Britain was a very
class-ridden society. We were a nation of
subjects, not citizens. And as long as you do
have a royal family and a set of lords and ladies, the whole hierarchy
of privilege, then obviously someone’s
going to be at the bottom. After the war, the Establishment obviously
tried to reassert itself. So you still had the old
Christian values, for instance. Nothing happened on a Sunday. Even children’s
swings in the parks were chained up on Sundays. The ’60s really
was the first time that anyone kicked a
hole in any of that and started to challenge all of these traditional
assumptions. Really, it was the same
group of middle class people, who assumed they had the right to tell everybody how to live, were still very much in power. – [Narrator] Yet
Britain’s power was waning and its empire slowly crumbling. Almost bankrupt as a
result of its war effort, the years of hardship
that followed saw the entire country suffer. The North of England in
particular struggled to recover, and the once dominant
port city of Liverpool, heavily targeted by
German air raids, was beset by widespread damage
and disappearing industry. – During the 19th century, the North developed this
proud sense of itself. The port of Liverpool was the
greatest port in the world because England was the
greatest commercial nation in the world and most things
came in and out there. But over the course
of the 20th century, England went through
a phenomenon that is now very familiar to Americans of the
late 20th century, which is the decline
of industrialization, the decline of manufacturing. By the 1940s, it was very clear that Liverpool was in decline. As a result, The Beatles’
generation grew up in this place that was filled with the
emblems of imperial might but which was becoming a
very dire place to live in many ways. – Everywhere there was a debris. The streets were full
of bombed buildings. All the kids used to play in the buildings
and deserted places. The debris was still going
20 or 30 years later. There was no money about
and it was very hard. What did young people have in
Liverpool to look forward to? Everything was closing down. All the factories
were closing down. It was pretty tough times
in Liverpool in those days. – [Narrator] And it was
within this stark landscape that The Beatles grew up. The band’s founder and
eldest member, John Lennon, was the product of a broken home and was raised by
his aunt and uncle in a fairly affluent
area of the city. His future band mates, Paul McCartney and
George Harrison, however, both came from working
class neighborhoods. Despite the dereliction
surrounding them and the hard times in
which they were raised, the future prospects of all
three were given a boost by a new educational initiative that saw the brightest children
enrolled in grammar schools, whatever their
financial background. – John Lennon, Paul
McCartney and George Harrison took an examination when
they were 11 years old that essentially
certified them as clever. And as a result of passing
what was called the 11+ exam, that meant they were eligible
to go to grammar schools. Grammar schools were
designed to educate children in order to go on to some
form of higher education. What this meant was that
at a relatively early age, at the age of 11, particularly Paul McCartney
and George Harrison, whose origins were
truly working class. John Lennon was a
bit more complicated. John was a little
betwixt and between. But in the case of both Paul
McCartney and George Harrison, at the age of 11, they
were somewhat isolated from the world of
the housing estates that they had grown up on. Every day they took the bus
into the center of Liverpool to go to a place called
the Liverpool Institute and they were essentially marked and educated from the age of 11 to transcend their
working class origins. – [Narrator] With far better
schooling than their parents, these future Beatles
were a new breed, raised within the proud
Liverpudlian working class, yet unfazed by the educated
elites supposedly above them. And with the coming of
rock and roll in 1956, a musical form exploded that
spoke directly to their youth and their sense of difference. It was the following year that John Lennon
met Paul McCartney and invited him to join
his band The Quarrymen, with George Harrison
joining shortly thereafter. All around them in Liverpool a new phenomenon was finding
its own rebellious voice: the teenagers had arrived. – The ’50s became the era when teenagers really
came into their own. We were together in
our love of the music. Up until that time a young
lad would be taken to the pub for his first pint, when he
turned of age, by his dad. He’d dress like his dad. He’d go into the
union of his dad and he’d go in the
same work as his dad. With the girls, she
was in the kitchen learning how to
make the breakfast, do the cleaning,
all the rest of it. But suddenly the youngsters
were now earning money and they wanted to
spend it their way and do their things and
not be told what to do. – [Narrator] A generation
gap was opening up and this would dominate
cultural life in Britain across the next decade. And while rock
and roll resonated with young working
class %*#, other American influences, from the Beat poets
to jazz and blues, were embraced by
middle class teenagers. If the future Beatles were at
heart rock and roll rebels, none of them more embodied
this than John Lennon. But having failed
his exams in 1957, he found a place at the
Liverpool College of Art, where he was thrown
into an unfamiliar, Bohemian student culture. Although this would prove
vital in expanding his talents, here Lennon was an outsider. – I first met John Lennon
at the College of Art. I was sitting down
in the canteen. Suddenly I noticed
this guy walk past. And I thought, what’s
he dressed up like? He was dressed almost
like a teddy boy, in a completely
unconventional type of dress compared to all
the other students. I looked round and everyone
was wearing duffle coats and turtleneck sweaters. I thought, oh, they’re
all wearing the same, they’re all conventional. He’s the rebel. He’s the one who’s different. I must get to know him. [playful instrumental music] – If you were in art
school in the 1950s you would have been exposed to the intellectual radicalism
and rebellion of figures like Jack Kerouac and
the Beat generation who were anti-established
religion, pro self-expression anti any kind of
Establishment repression. An angry young men of theater,
John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, these guys were angry
but they were clever. They found a way of
directing their anger which may well have
been a personal angst but when it’s directed
to the outside world it can create a great articulate
voice of a generation, if you like. – [Man] 954, 950 bloody five, I could get through in half
the time if I went like a bull but they’d only slash my
wages so they can get stuffed. Don’t let the %*#s
grind you down, that’s one thing I’ve learned. – This sort of influence
would have been very appealing to someone like John Lennon who was himself an
angry young man, for all kinds of
personal reasons. But if you could be
an angry young man and thoughtful with it,
then that’s very appealing. – [Narrator] By
the summer of 1960, the school days of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George
Harrison were over. Yet they were quickly thrust into an education
of another kind. In August, the band, now
calling itself The Beatles, headed for a season of shows in the vibrant
German city Hamburg, and over the following year it was here that they
earned their stripes as a rock and roll band. Upon their return to
Liverpool in 1961, they quickly rose to the very
top of the city’s music scene. Yet they were
isolated in the North, and the rest of the country
paid little attention. – I started writing to
papers like The Daily Mail saying what is
happening in Liverpool is like New Orleans at
the turn of the century, but with rock and
roll instead of jazz. Of course, no one
was interested. So I decided to do it myself
and created Mersey Beat and of course my friends, John and the group he
formed, The Beatles, were the main people
I wrote about. – [Narrator] With a teenage
audience hungry for information about this new rock
and roll scene, Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat music
paper proved a huge success in the North of England. Celebrating The Beatles
in almost every issue, it brought them to the attention
of one of its contributors, local businessman Brian Epstein. The manager of a
Liverpool music store, through Bill Harry, Epstein
arranged to see the band play at the city’s
legendary Cavern Club and was blown away
by their performance. He immediately offered
to manage the band and by January 1962 a
contract was signed. Wary of the controlling approach of managers like Larry Parnes, Epstein was still conscious
of the unwritten rules of the British
Entertainment industry. If The Beatles were going
to change the world, they’d first have to
change their look. – What I think he
had was the instinct to realize the general
overall pattern of how things worked
in this country. They were the savag e
young Beatles dressed in black leather, and playing rock and
roll to %*#es, gangsters and all the rest of
it in Hamburg, taking drugs and all the rest. They were the savag e
young Beatles. They would never
have been accepted by the established media. – [Narrator] And The Beatles’
breakthrough in early 1963 confirmed that Epstein’s
instincts were spot on. He had successfully smuggled
a unique band of rebels into the heart of
the mainstream. Yet unlike the
controlling managers that dominated the British
entertainment world, he then simply set them loose. From the moment they
soared to the top of the British charts, the press, radio interviewers
and television presenters came face to face
with The Beatles, and these quick-witted,
confident and very modern young men chose to play the game
by their own rules. – In the beginning, The
Beatles’ behavior with the press was the most revolutionary
thing about it. Nobody of their age group, and to an extent,
of their background, had ever behaved this way
with reporters before. – Do you know, you
look like Matt Monro? – He was Russia with Love. – [Interviewer] Thanks, boys. – The Beatles were
just audacious. When they were
being interviewed, they kind of turned the tables. When Adam Faith or someone like
that was interviewed before, it was very much a master
and servant kind of thing. – Cliff, what sort
of tour did you have? – I can honestly say it’s been probably the most pleasurable
one we’ve had for some time, mainly because, not
just the audiences, but because we’ve
had a few hours off, we’ve been swimming
and sunbathing. – The Beatles just
ripped into that, and almost ridiculed
the whole thing, turned the whole thing
into a Marx Brothers farce, which was fantastic. – I hear the four of you
are going to be millionaires by the end of the year.
– Oh, that’s nice. – Have you got time to
actually spend this money? – What money? He said. – Doesn’t he give any to you? – No. – Have you seen that car of his? [laughing] – It was very, very
close to the way groups of male adolescents
interacted with one another as a matter of course. This is what teenage boys do. They try to top one another. They try to cut
one another down. The Beatles simply had the
nerve to take this thing and to perform it in front
of microphones and cameras. – John, we hear there’s a rumor in The News of The Beatles paper that you might be
leaving the group. – Rubbish, I’m contracted. I’ve been trying to
get out for years. – You’ve been
writing some poetry. – What paper? – [Interviewer] A paper called
The News of The Beatles. – Never heard of it.
– Do you want to see it? – No.
– Must be American. – Part of their success
came from the fact that they were not plastic. They were authentic. They came out of a
fairly tough city. They were just being themselves
and that was astonishing. That was new to actually
be yourself, it was new. – [Narrator] By presenting
themselves genuinely, The Beatles managed to
highlight the mannered, stilted exterior of
British cultural life at a time when it was already
showing signs of weakness. Polite society’s attitude
to all forms of behavior, in particular %*#, had been prudish and
stuffy for centuries, but by the early 1960s
things were changing. At the beginning of the decade the novel Lady
Chatterley’s Lover was successfully published. Withheld from the general
public since the late 1920s, this erotic tale of love
across the class divide became a phenomenon
upon its release, quickly selling over
three million copies. At the same time,
a scandal erupted at the very heart of the
British Establishment, with the exposure
of an illicit affair between politician John Profumo
and a 19 year old model. The uptight %*#
attitudes of the British were being confronted in public. And then Beatlemania happened. By the summer of 1963, the
band’s overwhelming effect on teenage girls was becoming
a nationwide epidemic. Their critics warned
that the Liverpudlians had unleashed a wave
of %*# frenzy in their female audience. Yet the liberation that The
Beatles offered these girls was more complicated
than it first appeared. – What everybody
wanted to think, and also didn’t want to think, was this was somehow
all about eroticism, this was all about %*#, and that what was going on here was that these young women
were having something that looked like it
simulated a %*# experience in response to the sight
and sound of The Beatles. Therefore, it was always
talked and written about in the Freudian
terms of hysteria, which of course is a
%*#ly charged term also. Were these girls orgasmic? Was this orgasmic? That’s not what was going on. – [Chris] With rock
and roll in the 1950s, that was a catalyst
for a lot of young men finding a reason to be
something other than a version of their dad when they
became adolescents. It wasn’t necessarily
fabulously articulate to dress as a teddy boy and
be a bit rowdy on the street, but at least it was
finding an identity. I think for a young female, it wasn’t quite as
straightforward. Something like Beatlemania, the screaming that
surrounded The Beatles, it’s quite tempting
to interpret it as a sort of howl of frustration as they try and find
their own identity, and it’s as
inarticulate, in a way, as teddy boys
rampaging in cinemas. – [Interviewer] Do
you deliberately try and create this
screaming reaction? – No, we just arrive
at the theater, and they’re always
there waiting. Whenever we’re doing a show,
the police always come and say, don’t look out the window,
‘cause of the excitement. [laughing] – These girls were
controlling public space, and nobody could do
anything about it. It’s a perfect example of what
we would call bad behavior. Screaming, yelling,
weeping in public. This is bad behavior
in one way or another. Yet, it was sanctioned,
not by the authorities, but by The Beatles themselves. – [Narrator] The Beatles
phenomenon was unstoppable. At the end of August,
the single She Loves You became the fastest
selling record that had ever been
released in the UK. In less than a year, the
band’s success outstripped that of any artist
who had preceded them. And the final stage in
their conquest of Britain came on November 4th, 1963, when for the first time The
Beatles came face to face with the highest order
of the Establishment, the royal family. The occasion unleashed
the rock and roll rebel in John Lennon, who saw
in the night’s performance an opportunity too
good to pass up. – [Interviewer] John, In
this Royal Variety Show, when you’re appearing
before royalty, your name has got to be
pretty good, obviously. This thing about
Ted Heath saying that he couldn’t distinguish– – I can’t understand that.
– The Queen’s English… – I can’t understand Teddy
saying that at all really. [laughing] I’m not going to vote for Ted. – [Interviewer] But
you’re not going to change your act,
just for the opening– – Ah no, like, we’ll keep the
same kind of thing, won’t we? – Oh aye, yes.
– Yeah, that’s right. – Lennon always had an
ambivalent relationship with how the Entertainment Establishment
were cozying up to The Beatles. On the one hand, the professional in
him loved the fact that they were being
fantastically successful. But the rebel in him
found it all hard to take. So on the occasion of the
Royal Command Performance, he teased Brian
Epstein by suggesting that he was going to go up and
swear in front of the Queen. But in the end, his
professionalism won out. He managed to create a
little bit of subversion, but it was very carefully
thought through. [audience applauding] – Thank you. For our last number, I’d
like to ask your help. Would the people in the
cheaper seats clap your hands? [laughing] And the rest of you, if you
just rattle your jewelry. – And this is like a moment
of insurrection, it felt like. But the thing is it wasn’t
quite as radical perhaps because you look at Lennon’s
face after he says it and he looks as if he’s
just admitted to his mum that he’s messed himself,
or something like that! It was something
really humble pie. He felt quite sheepish. But no one else but John
Lennon would come out and even have the
gall to say that. What may have seemed a
kind of revolutionary, insurrectionary moment by
saying, rattle your jewelry, in a really class driven moment, was actually punctured
by this sense that The Beatles were nice boys and they can get
away with anything. – [Narrator] With the youth
of Britain in their thrall, The Beatles headed out
to new territories, traveling to Scandinavia
at the close of the year and then on to France. The domestic pop scene
that they left behind had been transformed
by their success, and from Liverpudlian acts
like Gerry and the Pacemakers to London’s The Rolling Stones, new groups were emerging
on an almost weekly basis to battle it out in the
clubs and on the charts. The Beatles were
moving on, however, with manager Brian
Epstein’s sights set firmly on the largest territory
of all, America. – [Interviewer] Looking
forward to this American trip, have you had any
reaction over there? Have you got any
fan clubs going? – There’s one
supposedly started. They’re getting quite
a good response. 12,000 letters a day. [laughing] – But The Beatle movement’s
going over there? – Yeah, it can even be
a Beatle booster, folks. – I must tell you, by the
way, that Detroit University have got a Stamp out
The Beatles movement. – Oh yeah?
– Ah, no. – We’re going to
stamp out Detroit. – They think your
haircuts are un-American. – Well, that’s very
observant of them because we aren’t
American actually. – There was always a thing
of, what happens next? Is The Beatles’ bubble
is going to burst? But it never did. It just kept going on. – [Narrator] If
Britain was suffering a particularly harsh
winter when The Beatles had first set the charts
alight in early 1963, when their single I
Want to Hold Your Hand reached America
the following year, it entered a nation grappling
with far greater misfortunes. Having emerged from
the Second World War as one of the world’s
two super powers, the following decade
had been dominated by the country’s
hostile relationship with the Soviet Union and the threat of a
full blown nuclear war. But Americans
themselves were enjoying the fruits of a
flourishing economy, a strong consumer
culture had developed and domestic confidence
was running high. In 1960, President John
F. Kennedy came to office, a young, charismatic politician who embodied this new confidence and who promised a bright
and optimistic future. – My fellow citizens
of the world, ask not what America
will do for you, but what together we can
do for the freedom of man. – [Narrator] Three years
later, in November 1963, his assassination shook
the country to its core. – There was this injection
of energy into American life that he represented. He was young, he was handsome. It represented such a marked
change from Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a carry-over
from World War II. Obviously, he was a war hero. He was an extension of that
generation into modern America. But John Kennedy
was modern America. All of the optimism
and youthfulness. The baby boom was going on. You know, it was kind of
epitomized by John Kennedy. The Kennedy assassinationjust, it just ended that. The Beatles
represented also youth, just as John Kennedy did,
and wit and intelligence. Certainly, for young people it turned things
around immediately. The Beatles just lit America up. – I’m sure it could have
been something else. I’m sure that some other joyful
manifestation of something could have occurred, but
what occurred was a song. And it’s really
important to realize in Britain The
Beatles’ personalities, their repartee, their
whole public performance was a critical part of the
way they came to the attention of the British public. In America, it was a song. ♪ Oh yeah I tell you somethin’ ♪ I think you’ll understand ♪ When I say that somethin’ ♪ I want to hold your hand ♪ I want to hold your hand… ♪ – It was the perfect vehicle to come into this traumatized
national atmosphere. What is the dominant
quality of the sound of John Lennon and Paul
McCartney signing together? Joy, joy in performance, joy in listening to
one another’s voices, joy in whatever kind of
reinforcement is going on here. That’s painting with
really broad strokes. There’s nothing
subtle about that. – There is no
question The Beatles changed everything immediately. I Want to Hold Your Hand
made a gigantic impact. Then of course the
flood gates opened, not only with one great
Beatles’ song after another, but the British invasion. I mean, The Beatles just
knocked the door down. – [Narrator] What The
Beatles had done to Britain they were now doing to America. Released at the close of
1963, within two months I Want to Hold Your Hand had
sold more than a million copies and became the band’s first
number one single in the US. A week after they
topped the charts, John, Paul, George and
Ringo crossed the Atlantic and arrived in New York City to greet a new set of
screaming teenage fans. They were also met by
members of the press keen to understand this
foreign phenomenon, and the group introduced them to their unique brand
of informal humor, as rare in America as
it had been in Britain. – There’s no question that the way they dealt
with the press was original. It was quite clear that they
were not like anything else. How smart they really
were, how funny they were! John and Paul in particular were extremely intelligent,
articulate, original people. And George was also
a very droll guy. And Ringo was sort
of a natural clown, who was just that quick, that
smart, who was a pop star. I must be forgetting somebody, but damned if I can
think of who it would be. – Do you think of your records
as funny records or as music? – No, we think that
it’s rather peculiar. – Do you feel they’re musical? – Obviously, because it’s music. Instruments make music. It’s a record.
– It’s musical. You know, bom, it’s
music, isn’t it? – That’s music too. – He’s good. He knows music. – All right, but
what do you call it? Do you call it rock and roll? – We try not to define it. We’ve got so many wrong
classifications of it. It’s no use, we
just call it music. Even if you don’t. – With a question mark?
– Pardon? – With a question mark?
– No. With an exclamation mark. – The underlying message
of The Beatles’ wit in their press conferences
was about a youth movement that wasn’t going to be
determined by old people. From the point of
The Beatles’ arrival, they completely reinvented
how culture works. Before that everything,
fashion, movies, music, it all was top down. It all was what grown-ups liked, and then it filtered
down to the kids. After a year or two,
suddenly it was young people who were determining everything. That started with The Beatles. – [Narrator] Having broken
all previous sales records in Britain the year beforehand, by April 1964, the band made
Billboard Hot 100 history by becoming the only act ever to occupy the first five
positions on the chart. The Four Mop-Tops were now
revolutionizing popular music in America too, and Beatlemania spread like
wildfire throughout the country. And then, in July, following the time-honored
career trajectory of all post-war
popular entertainers, the band starred in their
first full-length feature film. Yet A Hard Day’s Night
was, unsurprisingly, unlike anything that
had preceded it. ♪ It’s been a hard day’s night ♪ And I been working like a dog ♪ It’s been a hard day’s
night… ♪♪ – Music movies before
A Hard Day’s Night were profit-making ventures intended exclusively
for the teen audience of whatever artist
happened to be in now. A Hard Day’s Night
just flipped that. They took what was a toss-off
form, the rock movie, and made it something great. – [Narrator] Directed by
American Richard Lester, the film created an
entirely new language for rock and roll cinema. Previously, musicians had
all made their transition to the big screen playing
fictional characters created by screenwriters. In A Hard Day’s Night, however, The Beatles played
themselves in a comedy inspired by their own
experiences of fame. It was both a commercial
and a critical phenomenon. – They’re playing themselves
in a fictional film. That didn’t happen. So much of what happened in
the early career of The Beatles hadn’t really happened before. They were breaking through
on so many different levels. – Tell me, how did
you find America? – Turn left at Greenland. – Has success changed your life? – Yes. – I’d like to keep Britain tidy. – Are you a mod or a rocker? – No, I’m a mocker. [laughing] – Have you any hobbies? – As I see it, it’s
really A Hard Day’s Night that establishes them as
something completely new and interesting beyond
your wildest imaginings. – I don’t snore.
– You do, repeatedly. – Do I snore, John? – [John] Yeah, you’re
a window rattler, son. – That’s just your opinion. Do I snore, Paul? – With a trombone
hooter like yours it would be unnatural
if you didn’t. – No, Paulie, don’t
mock the afflicted. – Ah, come off it. It’s only a joke. – It may be a joke,
but it’s his nose. He can’t help having a
hideous great hooter, and a poor little
head, trembling under the weight of it. – This was not the
rock and roll movie that you were expecting
to see, not at all. And although their wit, it had been clear
they were always funny on the microphone, its
irreverence and its irreverence about themselves was just
completely unprecedented. And, of course, it just made
them seem even more godlike. – [Narrator] And
while The Beatles embarked on a substantial US
tour in the summer of ’64, back in Britain
the whole country was evolving in their wake. Following the %*# scandals
of the previous year, the nation had turned
against the Establishment and voted in the
Labor government of new Prime Minister
Harold Wilson, a man who seemed to
represent the voice of a younger, more
progressive United Kingdom. – Harold Wilson actually became
leader of the Labor party around the same time that
The Beatles were having the first stirrings
of huge success. He was northern. Let’s not forget that. So this was again part of
this big northern powerhouse. You had The Beatles on
the popular culture sense, and then you had Harold Wilson
who was reflecting modernity in the political sense. We’re thrusting
into a new world. We were behind
Europe in the ’50s. The Tories had let us down. He wanted to… Let’s get modern. Like the Italians, like the
French, like the Germans, let’s get working and let’s make everyone enjoy
the fruits of the success. [gentle instrumental music] – [Narrator] And
central to this new, progressive Britain
was its youth. The staggering
international success of the homegrown pop scene had injected the younger
generation with confidence and, boosted by the
country’s growing prosperity, a new consumer culture emerged. Fresh from the breeding
grounds of the art colleges, the modern ideas of Britain’s budding
designers were unleashed. This was nowhere more
apparent than in fashion, and its nerve center in London’s
bustling Carnaby Street. – This was the first time that
young people had enough money to buy records, to buy clothes,
to have their hair cut. Out of that almost immediately
came a separate youth market. Carnaby Street thrived. Up until that point,
when a girl left school, she immediately began
dressing like her mother. whereas someone like Mary Quant made dresses you could run in, you could dance in and do
stuff that young people do. And, of course, that
transformed the whole face of British fashion. – Everything felt
modern, new, fresh. Everywhere you looked the world
started to look different. The black and white of the
early Beatles and pre-Beatles, even with The Beatles
all in black and white, even A Hard Day’s Night
was in black and white. Within a year, the colors
started to really emerge, the green shoots
of a new culture. – [Narrator] Although they
had played the central role in cultivating this
new cultural landscape, by late 1964, The Beatles
themselves were growing weary of their Eight Days a Week fame. In an attempt to escape
from Beatlemania, both John Lennon
and George Harrison had moved to rural Surrey, 30 miles from the
center of London, and Ringo Starr would join
them there the following year. In December, Beatles For Sale, the band’s fourth studio
album, was released, and it clearly showed
signs of fatigue. – You only have to
look at the cover. These are young men
exhausted really by a couple of years
of Beatlemania. It was just obvious that
they were becoming worn out, and that the incredible
appeal of early fame, which they just rode that
like a wonderful wave, and you can see and feel the joy in the records and
the interviews. By Beatles for Sale, it’s
losing its luster quite quickly. – [Narrator] Yet the onward
march of youth culture would soon revive the band. While the kaleidoscopic
colors of Carnaby Street were in full bloom, a more experimental
subculture was developing in West London, the
leaders of which would soon cross paths
with The Beatles. Inspired by avant-garde
literature, art and music, this loose group of
artists and artisans lacked a sense of community. In June 1965,
however, Barry Miles, the manager of
renowned independent bookshop Better Books, arranged a momentous poetry
event at London’s Albert Hall, featuring Allen Ginsberg and other leading
American Beat writers. It was of huge significance, uniting the various
creative clans of an emerging British
counterculture. – The big poetry reading
at the Albert Hall in ’65 and was I think the
first time a constituency was seen in London. Up until that point the
actors and the poets and the filmmakers and the
people who ran boutiques, none of them knew each other. At this event, which was basically a
Beat generation reading of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, all of these people
came together into the Albert
Hall, 7,000 people. The whole thing
was a giant party, really like the first mass
networking session, I suppose. – [Narrator] At
this pivotal event that he had helped organize, Miles met John Dunbar,
an artist friendly with both Allen Ginsberg
and Gregory Corso and who had recently married
young singer Marianne Faithful. Together, they
planned a new center for underground activities, the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, and this would
bring Miles directly into The Beatles’ world. – We went along
to the Albert Hall and a friend called
Paolo Leone went, “Oh, you should meet this guy.” Miles worked at Better
Books at that point. So we got chatting. I don’t know how many people
it holds, the Albert Hall, couple of thousand,
5,000, I don’t know. Anyway, we kind of thought, everybody’s paid a
quid to see this, so maybe we could do a shop. – We decided to combine forces and start a bookshop
art gallery combined. His best friend was a
guy called Peter Asher who at that point was
in Peter and Gordon, a little rock and folk duo who had number
one hits, in fact, in Britain and
America and Japan. Peter had some money so
naturally we looked to Peter to finance this venture. Consequently, we
started a company called Miles, Asher
and Dunbar, MAD. I got to know Peter, of
course, through this. He was living at home
with his parents. Also living at home was
his sister Jane Asher. Jane was a TV personality. She interviewed people. She was a child star in films
and did a lot on the radio. Also living there was
Jane Asher’s boyfriend who was Paul McCartney, who was living on the top floor in a little attic room
next to Peter’s room. So there was this
extraordinary household that I got introduced to. And when I was setting
up the bookshop, we had all the books
delivered to the basement because we hadn’t
found any premises yet. Obviously, through that I
got to know Paul as well. He would come in late at
night, browse through the books and just leave me a note
saying what he’d taken. So he was my first customer,
in fact, in the bookshop. When we did find some premises, he helped put up the
shelves and paint the walls so he was very, very involved
with the whole project. It was wonderful
to get to know him. – [Narrator] While his
band mates had fled London in favor of the
quiet suburban life, through his contact with
the progressive art world, Paul McCartney soon became the
most cultured of The Beatles. Where John Lennon had
been married for years and was raising a young son, George Harrison had moved in
with girlfriend Patti Boyd and Ringo Starr was a newlywed, McCartney was actively
pursuing fresh sounds and fresh concepts, with Miles
as his avant-garde guide. – In his own words, he used to go round London
with his antenna out. One day he would go to
see a John Cage concert or Luciano Berio or
some electronic music. Then the next day he would
go to see Tessie O’Shea at the Talk of the Town, or some torch singer
down at The Blue Angel. It was all being sucked in. – McCartney was very much
the culturally aware Beatle about town, while the others went into a slightly
cozier existence in the stockbroker belt. He was still curious, he was still hungry
for any stimulation. It’s around this
time, 1965, 1966, that McCartney really
begins to drive The Beatles. He hung around in
London, being stimulated, and bringing all of that
back to The Beatles’ table and giving them, continuing
to give them an artistic edge. – [Narrator] That artistic
edge would prove unmistakable when The Beatles headed
to the studio in mid-1965 to record the album Rubber Soul. Across the previous year, the wave of bands inspired
by The Beatles’ example had not only begun to catch
up with the Liverpudlians, but in some cases
threatened to overtake them. Following Lennon and
McCartney’s lead, the Rolling Stones had
managed to break America and had begun to
write their own hits. Folk icon Bob Dylan
had gone electric and transformed into the
preeminent poet of rock, and new bands were emerging,
from The Who to The Byrds, introducing fresh
sounds and perspectives. Yet The Beatles were ready
to pave the way once again. In pursuit of total
creative control, with Rubber Soul, producer
George Martin booked the band into Abbey Road Studios
for an entire month, turning conventional
recording rules on their head. – Before Rubber Soul, a
professional recording day was overseen by recording
engineers in white coats. And there was three hours in
the morning, a break for lunch, and three hours
in the afternoon. And that was it. That was your recording day. When Rubber Soul came along,
they had enough clout to say, we want a bit more
flexibility than that. We might want to stay on
and record into the night. – They invented the idea
of treating a record album as if it were a work of art. It takes time to do
anything that’s worthwhile. So you had this new idea, the idea of the recording studio as compositional laboratory. This was this incredible
real revolution, not just how to make records,
but how to make music. [“In My Life” by The Beatles] ♪ There are places I
remember… ♪♪ – Rubber Soul looks like
the moment when pop music could become popular art. The whole album had a sense of
being an artistic statement. Brian Wilson himself
of The Beach Boys said, when I heard Rubber Soul I knew that’s how good
pop records could be. They could be a
whole artistic world. That’s how good Rubber Soul was. ♪ Is there anybody going
to listen to my story ♪ All about the girl
who came to stay ♪ She’s the kind of girl ♪ You want so much
it makes you sorry ♪ Still you don’t
regret a single day ♪ Ah, girl ♪ Girl, girl … ♪♪ – John Lennon is suddenly
writing lyrics like: was she told when she was young that pain would
lead to pleasure? Did she understand
it when they said that a man must break his back,
to earn his day of leisure? Will she still believe
it when he’s dead? And that’s in a
song called Girl. Those aren’t pop song lyrics. That gave Rubber Soul just
a very different feel. [“The Word” by The Beatles] ♪ Say the word
and you’ll be free ♪ Say the word and be like me ♪ Say the word I’m thinking of ♪ Have you heard
the word is love…♪♪ – You could hear that they
were actually writing songs as artists, not just
as pop performers. So you had songs like The Word, which is an extraordinary
song for 1965. Say the word and
that word is love. This is two years before
the Summer of Love. The despair of Beatles for Sale, and there they are
now reaching out for something that they’ve
picked up on something else. – [Narrator] And
just as Rubber Soul reestablished the band’s
musical superiority, the four young Northern radicals
were officially recognized by the British Establishment. Having already received
the highest accolades from the entertainment
world, in October 1965, they were invited to Buckingham
Palace to meet the Queen. Here they would be
anointed as members of the Most Excellent Order of
the British Empire, or MBEs. – This has been one of the
talents of the Establishment for a long time. In fact, this is what
the MBEs and knighthoods and all sorts of things
like that were all about. At a certain point, renegades need to be
brought into the fold. But it’s at that very
moment that they now, ‘cause they were always
importing musical influences, but they also become a conduit for imported American influences in these other fields that
they’re getting interested in. Miles is turning them
onto Ginsberg’s poetry. Robert Fraser is turning them onto American pop
artists, things like this. They’ve become
citizens of the world. So it’s perfectly appropriate
that at that very moment the British
Establishment should say, time for you to come
to Buckingham Palace and be certified as members
of the British Empire. – [Interviewer] John, had
you met the Queen before? – No, first time. – [Interviewer] What did she
think of you in the flesh? Did she tell you? – No, she’s not going
to say either way. She seemed pleasant
enough to us. Made us relaxed. – [Interviewer] Now
you’ve got this, do you feel that you’re becoming
part of the Establishment, as it’s so called? – No, don’t feel any different. I still feel just like before. I feel exactly the same.
– You feel exactly the same. – It was a recognition that
the pop world had come of age. They were the aristocracy
of the pop world, of pop culture, of
working class culture. So it was inevitable in a way
that they would be rewarded in the spirit of
the new democracy. But also it closed a
chapter because from then on they went off and
did it their way which wasn’t the
Establishment’s way. In fact, it was the
beginning of a period of great antagonism with the
Establishment and pop culture and The Beatles, as usual, were pretty much at
the center of that. – [Narrator] The Beatles’
position at the center of these new developments
in youth culture was crucial to their evolution
over the next two years. With McCartney now
closely affiliated with key players in London’s
underground artistic scene, and with similar movements in
both New York and Los Angeles influencing American musicians, the stage was now set
for more radical ideas to enter the mainstream. And as these were developing, a new drug and a new figurehead
were gaining prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. – The message is very simple. Six words. Turn on, tune in, drop out. – [Narrator] Psychologist
Timothy Leary had emerged in the US as a
prominent spokesman for the hallucinogen
LSD, or acid. Having led psychedelic
experiments at Harvard University since the turn of the ’60s, and with Beat poet Allen
Ginsberg a key early supporter, by 1965 Leary was becoming a
major countercultural figure. – Tim Leary was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist. He claimed to have
something like seven PhDs. He was a professor at Harvard who began working
originally with Psilocybin before he got onto LSD as a way of treating prisoners
and treating mental illness. I mean, the thing is
Leary was very much part of the Establishment. He’d worked right across the
normal lines of psychiatry. But, of course, when he started
to take all these things, he contacted his own
self on a cellular level and he realized that
an awful lot of this was gameplaying and rubbish. So he basically felt that this
was in fact a spiritual key, and that his message
really should be to encourage people to
leave the Establishment and find themselves
creatively or spiritually. – [Narrator] And the newly
appointed MBEs, The Beatles, were already on their way
to leaving the Establishment and rediscovering themselves
through hallucinogens. John Lennon and George
Harrison had been introduced to LSD in early 1965, and had
been joined by Ringo Starr for their second experience
with the drug later that year. Combined with Paul
McCartney’s newfound interest in experimental art through
his London social circle, the world’s most commercial band were ready to take a
very unexpected detour. – They wanted to
discover who they were. They had no real sense of who
they were, I think, anymore. So they were picking
up the pieces, putting it together it again. How the hell did they make sense of the goldfish bowl life
they’d been thrown into? From playing at the Casbah
in Liverpool, and the Cavern to being feted all
around the world and just seeing
themselves reflected back, people getting pieces
of them everywhere, not knowing really
who they were. And I think that was the
engagement of pop culture, represented by The Beatles
with the counterculture, which was growing in confidence. And the fact that the two
started to join forces in London, in San Francisco,
they sparked off each other. – [Narrator] It was
at the close of 1965 that McCartney drew the
ever skeptical Lennon out of his Surrey sanctuary and introduced him to the
underground world of Miles and the Indica
Bookshop and Gallery. – One day, very shortly
after we opened, Paul McCartney showed
up with John Lennon, I think it was the first time
John was ever in the shop. He was looking for
a book by Nitzske. I just didn’t know who he meant. It took me about half a minute to figure out it was Nietzsche. And that was just enough time
for him to get quite irritated and think I was being this
middle class university type, putting him down. And then Paul had
to do his usual role of sort of calming everybody. No, no, he went to art
school just like you. It’s just ‘cause you
didn’t know how to say it! In the meantime, I remembered we had
only just the day before had a big shipment of The Psychedelic
Experience by Tim Leary. John curled up on
the settee with it. And literally in Tim
Leary’s introduction before you even get to the text, it says, turn off
your mind, relax and drift down the stream,
or however the lines are. That finally showed up
only about a month later in Tomorrow Never Knows. – [Narrator] This song would be the most innovative composition of the band’s career to date. Alongside Lennon’s
Leary-inspired lyrics, Paul McCartney’s contributions to the track were
equally radical. Having joined Miles at a number of avant-garde
electronic music events, the Beatle had begun
enthusiastically working on his own experimental
compositions using loops of recorded tape. As The Beatles
entered the studio to begin producing
Tomorrow Never Knows, George Martin invited McCartney to bring these to the sessions. – He had produced a
whole load of them and brought them into the
studio just in a plastic bag. They arranged the studio so that there were
different tape recorders in different parts of the
Abbey Road studio complex. And I was in a room
with Peter Asher and we were playing
quite a long loop which entailed
holding a jam jar. The loop went round the jam jar. then past the playback
head and then back over. We had to keep it in tension. I think there were eight
or maybe even 10 of us around the building, all standing holding
pencils or jam jars. And all of this information
was going into the deck. George Martin was just sitting
there with his headphones. Whatever he did, of course, it was impossible
to ever reproduce. That was it. That was the master as
soon as he pressed record. When I heard the playback,
it was astonishing actually. I thought, good god,
this is the future. [“Tomorrow Never
Knows” by The Beatles] ♪ Turn off your mind,
relax, and float downstream ♪ It is not dying,
it is not dying…♪♪ – The studio was an instrument. Once upon a time, it was just
this almost invisible console that was just there to absorb what was being
played on the floor. Now it was actually being
used as an instrument. And it was more important than individual
instruments, in a way. This was unprecedented and
the other interesting thing about Tomorrow Never Knows, it was the first
recording for Revolver. It was done in April ’66. I mean, this is extraordinary. Tomorrow Never Knows is undoubtedly the most
psychedelic song recorded at that period. There’s nothing else like it. I mean, the word
psychedelic wasn’t really in popular parlance at all. It was the title of a book that John got from
Indica Gallery. – Tomorrow Never Knows is definitely the world’s
first psychedelic track. The interesting
thing is, of course, The Beatles were not only the
world’s most commercial band but at that point they were also the world’s most experimental
band, which is very unusual. – [Narrator] That became clear
when The Beatles’ follow-up to Rubber Soul, Revolver,
was issued in August 1966. Alongside Tomorrow Never Knows, the album’s tracks were brimming with invention and originality. If Rubber Soul had suggested
that pop music could be art, Revolver confirmed it. – Revolver really
was The Beatles moving towards the
fifth dimension. She said, she said I know
what it’s like to be dead. The Beatles, Lennon,
singing about I know what
it’s like to be dead. -%*# is going on? Well, they’ve been
partying with The Byrds on the West Coast and
dropping acid by then. Drugs, we have a very
negative view of them now and you can be imprisoned
by them, but in the mid ’60s people felt it was the opposite. It was to loosen the
chains of imprisonment. This single view of who you were and then suddenly
you had perspectives and with Revolver
you can hear it, with all the different
production sounds. It was all altered
states and perspectives. – The idea was to basically
turn rock and roll into a legitimate art form. And I think they did it. So many of the
things they tried, from feedback and
reverse tapes and sitars, whatever they did, all over the world other
bands immediately tried out. They were tremendous leaders. Brian Epstein was concerned that they were going too far
ahead with their fan base. But they were very,
very sensible like that. They always wanted to bring
the fans along with them. They didn’t want to
become some kind of wild, avant-garde band that only
150 people had heard of. – [Narrator] Epstein’s
fears that the band would start to lose some of
their audience were unfounded regarding their musical output, but would prove accurate
in terms of their politics. With The Beatles’ compositions expressing a more
complex world view, journalists began to ask them
more significant questions. In a series of
landmark interviews for British newspaper
The Evening Standard, the individual band
members were quizzed over their thoughts
on current affairs. Lennon’s frank opinions
on Christianity proved uncontroversial upon
their publication in Britain, yet when they were
reprinted in America, the first scandal of The
Beatles’ career erupted, with a single quote
becoming instantly infamous, “We’re more popular
than Jesus now.” – The first time anybody
had asked John Lennon questions about his
life and his philosophy. And it just passed without. And months later, all
these teenage magazines just printed that:
we’re bigger than Jesus, which caused a lot of problems. A lot of problems. Death threats and
records being burnt and broken and smashed. And the Ku Klux Klan. And concerts being canceled. It was very unpleasant
for everyone. – Well, originally I was
pointing out that fact in reference to England, that we meant more to
kids than Jesus did or religion at that time. I wasn’t knocking it
or putting it down. I was just saying it. It was a fact. – Lennon’s “The Beatles are
more popular than Jesus” line, which even to me as a kid, I
could see what he was saying. I mean, he wasn’t saying. That’s what he said in his
quote unquote “apology.” I wasn’t saying we’re
better than Jesus. I wasn’t saying it’s
good or it’s bad. It’s just that it’s true. And to me it was
absolutely true. It was unquestionable. There was such a
backlash against that. It made you aware of
some of the fault lines in American culture. Or made you aware once
again that what seemed maybe like a unified
culture, really wasn’t. And it was harsh. It was scary. – [Narrator] These fault
lines in American society had been growing
since the early 1960s, and where the civil rights
campaigns for racial equality had most clearly exposed
these divisions earlier in the decade, by the mid 1960s there was no issue more
pressing or more polarizing than the Vietnam War. Since the US entered into
the conflict in 1962, it had provoked widespread
public opposition and organized protests both
in the US and across Europe. The underground movement
McCartney had become involved in had itself emerged from the
early ’60s pacifist movement in the UK, and by the time
of their 1966 US tour, privately both he
and his band mates were opponents of the war. As they traveled across America, already battling controversy, the ever honest Liverpudlians
came under fire once again when they made this position
absolutely clear to the press. – In 1966, the war was
without any question much more on people’s minds
in America than The Beatles. 1966 was the year
the war exploded. 1966 was the year that
the number of draftees more than doubled
in this country. 1966 was also the year in which the war really got
terrible in Vietnam itself. It was a bigger, bigger
deal all the time. There was more
destruction going on. – At the height of American
involvement in Vietnam, they had 550,000
troops in that country. I mean, that’s a
lot of young people. There was a draft in
the United States. The war had come
home in a big way. It wasn’t an abstract
issue in any regard. And youth representatives
like The Beatles, people who were part
of youth culture were expected to
take a stand on it. – [Richard] It seems to me
you’ve always been successful because you’ve been outspoken
and direct and forthright and all this sort of thing. Does it seem a bit hard to you that people are now knocking
you for this very thing? – Yes, Richard. – It seems very hard.
– It seems hard. But you know, free speech. – [Richard] But is
it possible just to say what you
think all the time? What about 14
year old teenagers who think you’re
absolutely marvelous and can’t bear to be hurt? – When we say anything
like that, we don’t say it, as older people seem to
think, to be offensive. We mean it helpfully, you know. And if it’s wrong what
we say, okay, it’s wrong. People can say you’re
wrong about that one. But in many cases, we
believe it’s right. We’re quite serious about it. – [Richard] Do you mind
being asked questions? For example, in America people keep asking you
questions about Vietnam. Does this seem useful?
– Well, I don’t know. If you can say
that war is no good and a few people believe
you, then it may be good. You can’t say it
too much, though. That’s the trouble. – It seems a bit
silly to be in America and for none of them
to mention Vietnam as if nothing was happening. – They were the first band
to be asked about politics, about Vietnam, about a whole
number of social issues. And in fact, I mean, although Dylan came
a little bit before, as far as I know, he never
once ever came out in public against the Vietnam War. So maybe The Beatles
were the first there, in terms of a very
well-known band. – Well, it cost them a lot. There were then teenage girls
in the South, in the Midwest, who didn’t like The
Beatles anymore. – I think The Beatles
are a real talented group but I think they need
to watch what they say. They’re in such a position that a lot of teenagers
really think of them as something really big. When they say things like that some teenagers are going to
just believe anything they say. – In 1965, The Beatles
were universally beloved. Nobody didn’t like them. They were just
wonderful and funny and creative and unthreatening. As they became more involved
in the counterculture and more representative of it, they lost a lot of
that belovedness. They helped to move
a lot of people who might not otherwise
have gone along with the stuff that happened
in ’66 and ’67 and ’68. Without any question, they were inspirational and
influential in that way. But they also lost
a lot of people. They became part of what
many, many people in America, probably a majority
of people in America, regarded as a disturbing
loosening of values and morals. And a political threat. – [Narrator] And at exactly
this point The Beatles ceased operating as
a traditional band. Upon their return from the US, they announced that they were
abandoning live performance, with the final show of the American tour
their last ever paid gig. And then the most photographed
celebrities in the world simply disappeared from
the public eye altogether. – Can I have a word? Are The Beatles going to
go their own ways in 1967? – We could be on
our own or together. We’re always involved with each
other, whatever we’re doing. – Could you ever see a time when you weren’t
working together? – I could see us working
not together for a period but we’d always get together
for one reason or another. I mean, you need other
people for ideas as well. You know, we all get along fine. – Will you– – [Narrator] Rumors of a
break-up began to circulate. Yet, away from the spotlight, the four Liverpudlians
were hard at work on their most ambitious
production to date. The public would have
to wait for months before The Beatles reappeared, and when, in February
1967, they finally did, both their image and their sound had undergone a
startling transformation. – Strawberry Fields of course
was originally intended as part of the Sgt.
Pepper sessions. But the press kept on saying,
“Are The Beatles finished? “They’ve disappeared,
they’ve run out of ideas,” not realizing, that
they were working on one of their
greatest achievements. And to me, obviously,
it wasn’t unexpected because I was at
some of the sessions. But I think to the public
it came as quite a shock. ♪ Let me take you down ♪ ‘Cause I’m going
to Strawberry Fields… ♪♪ – “Strawberry Fields Forever”
was something else again. The Beatles had gone weird. That was basically
what people felt. What is wrong with them? “Let me take you down ‘cause I’m going to
Strawberry Fields.” The voice, it didn’t
sound like Lennon. Well, that’s because they’d
slowed the voice down. Nothing sounded
normal on that record. The whole production. Everything was up in the
air, put through effects. And then there was a video
was made at the time as well, shot in Sevenoaks or somewhere. It was the strangest thing. You had Ringo as if
he was disembodied. They were falling out of trees. There was nothing
like that at all. ♪ Living is easy
with eyes closed ♪ Misunderstanding all you see ♪ It’s getting
hard to be someone ♪ But it all works out ♪ It doesn’t matter much to
me…♪♪ -It had more in common
with Salvador Dali and the Surrealists and Dada. All these highfalutin
art kind of ideas, which was once the
preserve really mainly of the educated elite. But this is The Beatles now
bringing it to everybody. – The short film for Strawberry
Fields had a seismic impact because it showed that they
had traveled the distance. That, well, I felt it
kind of incumbent on me to then travel as a young
person who believed in them. It was like, wow, okay, this is what’s being
asked of me now. It wasn’t just,
oh, they look cool. It was, all right,
this is the path. – [Narrator] And that
path became even clearer as the year progressed. By the turn of 1967, the counterculture
was gaining momentum, with huge numbers of youths gravitating towards
its new Mecca, San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury district. From here, a strong musical
scene was developing, headed by psychedelic
bands The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, and word spread of a new
phenomenon, the hippy. In the UK, the underground’s
influence expanded, with its own newspaper,
The International Times, a live music club, UFO, and emerging stars
the Pink Floyd and the American Jimi Hendrix. Into this blooming
scene of peace, love and mind-expanding drugs, came The Beatles’ most
ambitious work to date, one which would not
only capture the essence of this new sensibility, but also transform the
record industry once again: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band. Presented as a work of art, with a single concept
unifying the album as a whole, it announced that the age of
the traditional pop single and the pop band was over. – Sgt. Pepper revolutionized
the record industry. All of a sudden, albums
sold as much as singles. Sgt. Pepper sold
in the millions. On pure business terms, it
was a revolutionary release. But also it was
revolutionary in terms of letting the
record industry know precisely what it could sell. What you could do is invest
in the finest artistic minds of a generation and give them
the freedom to make their art, package it up as an album
and sell it in the millions. – Paul had this idea
of we want to get away from being the four mop
tops and The Fab Four. So we create this new
name for ourselves. We’re going to be
a different group. That’ll give us the freedom
to do %*# we want. That is the basic
concept of the songs. Many of those songs
could have been on any of the other albums. They weren’t specific
to that particular one. But the influence of
it was staggering. The Beatles were a force
to be reckoned with. Even The Stones were badly
affected by them at that point. Everyone just had
to deal with them. They were like a roadblock. If you were in the
music business, you had to deal with
this great big thing in front of you and get
round it the best you could. ♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪ Lucy in the sky with diamonds ♪ Ah ♪ Follow her down to a
bridge…♪♪ – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Heart Club’s Band, I mean, just the title
itself was a piece of art and something that
mystified people. Peter Blake did the cover and Peter Blake was the
father of British Pop Art. Everything about Sgt.
Pepper was an enigma. The fact that they were
pretending to not be The Beatles but to be another band. The locked groove at
the end of side two. Lucy in the sky with
diamonds, ah, LSD. Secret messages all
the way through. It was like a work
of literature. It was like a
Ulysses or something, where people were just thinking, I don’t quite understand this but there’s definitely
something really going on. – [Narrator] This
combination of imagination and mystery proved irresistible. With Sgt. Pepper, The
Beatles transformed from pop culture icons into
mystics of the modern age. – When The Beatles came
out with their new song, people started pondering
that these are people that you’re looking
to for meaning. – [Barry] By ’67,
I think the release of Sgt. Pepper in America established The
Beatles basically as the leaders of
the counterculture along with a few other people like Allen Ginsberg,
Timothy Leary. But The Beatles were
the musical leaders. Right across the board, they
were seen as, yes, as Gods. Leary himself said a lot
of silly things about them, they were a type of new
superheroes, leaders of men, and all this stuff. – I’m not convinced that the
youth culture in the mid ’60s were terribly aware of
LSD and Timothy Leary and even counterculture
attitudes. If it hadn’t been for that
conduit that was The Beatles, this sort of stuff
might have just stayed in San Francisco, in California. The counterculture wasn’t
called the underground for no reason. Not many people knew about it. – [Narrator] Yet The
Beatles were determined to spread the word even further. At the end of June 1967, less than a month after
the release of Sgt. Pepper, the band were invited to represent Britain
in the first ever international satellite
television broadcast. Across the US,
Canada and Europe, the youthful optimism
of the counterculture was reaching its peak
during the Summer of Love, with thousands flocking
to large public events. With their historic contribution
to the One World broadcast, The Beatles delivered the
scene’s definitive anthem to an audience of over 500
million viewers worldwide. – The Beatles, true to form, national representatives
representing their country, they start with the
national anthem. The only problem is it’s
the French national anthem! That’s a classic. That is total Beatles humor. [“All You Need Is
Love” by The Beatles] ♪ Love, love, love ♪ Love, love, love ♪ Love, love, love…♪ – It was fun. I was at that one. It was like a party. They’d invited a load
of their friends, The Small Faces and
The Rolling Stones and everybody was there, all in our psychedelic finery. Sitting on the floor there, it looked like it might
all explode at some point. There was a lot of
frantic waving and people rushing around, holding on to their headphones
and talking to people. That was mostly to do with the international
link up, though, because no one had
ever done that before. It really did go out live
all around the world. It was fantastic. ♪ All you need is love ♪ All you need is love ♪ All you need is love, love ♪ Love is all you need…♪ – This is mere weeks after
the release of Sgt. Pepper. Every other band would
choose to use that moment to promote Sgt. Pepper by doing
a couple of tracks from it. It just makes total
business sense. But they took the opportunity
to send a message to the world that all you need is love. They’d already been
saying it on Rubber Soul, the word is love. But this was the time they
could tell the whole world all at the same time. The Beatles are clearly
leading the way. I think there’s a
great significance in the idea of them sitting
on those high chairs, with the beautiful people of
London, including Mick Jagger, sitting at their feet,
looking up at them and singing along to a song
they’ve only just heard. That’s powerful. – [Narrator] All You Need Is
Love was an anthem of hope from a youth movement
certain that the old order was about to crumble. The Beatles were steering
an entire generation into uncharted territory, yet it would not take
the Establishment long to respond to these
peaceful revolutionaries. In the UK, the
police were mobilized and began to make a
number of drug busts, arresting not only
prominent figures on the underground scene but also Mick Jagger,
Keith Richards and later Brian Jones
of the Rolling Stones. These high-profile cases didn’t faze Paul
McCartney, however. Following the arrests,
he not only paid for, but also put his name to
a national press advert calling for the
legalization of marijuana. Weeks later, he
admitted to a journalist that he had taken LSD and repeated this in a
television interview, much to the shock
of Brian Epstein. – Brian didn’t like
things being made public. He was a very private person. Obviously, it was
his way of life. The thing about
drugs is it wasn’t anything about them
being good or bad. It was illegal. – [Interviewer] Paul, how
often have you taken LSD? – About four times. – [Interviewer] Where
did you get it from? – If I was to say where I
got it from, it’s illegal. It’s silly to say that. – Don’t you believe
that this was a matter which you should
have kept private? – The thing is, I was asked
a question by a newspaper and the decision was
whether to tell a lie or to tell him the truth. I decided to tell him the truth. I really didn’t want
to say anything. If I had my decision,
if I had it my way, I wouldn’t have told anyone. ‘Cause I’m not trying to
spread the word about this. But the man from the
newspaper is the man from a mass medium. I’ll keep it a personal
thing if he does too, if he keeps it quiet. But he wanted to spread it. So it’s his responsibility
for spreading it, not mine. – The thing is, Paul
was always honest. If a reporter asked him,
have you taken LSD?, he’s going to say yes. He wouldn’t lie. Why should he? If they’re going to
ask that question, they get an honest answer. It was a risky thing
for him to say. It probably gave Brian
Epstein a conniption. But basically, although The
Beatles had made a lot of money, they were never really
in it for the money. Once they had enough to
really live well, that was it. I think that was a
very good sign of them. They paid their tax and
they said what they wanted. – [Narrator] The Beatles’
sense of security was about to be
challenged, however. In late August, the band were
shocked to receive the news that their manager
Brian Epstein had died, their most trusted accomplice. In his absence they
were suddenly left without his
stabilizing influence. At the same time, their quest for personal and
spiritual growth continued. George Harrison had
become fascinated by Indian music in 1965, and as he immersed
himself in its techniques, he became increasingly drawn
to its spiritual foundations. This led him to
discover the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his technique of
transcendental meditation. By mid-1967, Harrison was
introducing his band mates to the Maharishi’s ideas, and soon The Beatles had
a new spiritual advisor. – When they first got
involved with him, I wrote and asked Allen
Ginsberg what the story was on the Maharishi in India. Ginsberg had lived there
for a number of years. He knew a lot of the
gurus and the teachers. He wrote back saying the
Maharishi was very commercial and that he was under a
lot of criticism in India for taking disciples’ money, because in fact the
teaching should be free. So I reported this to
John Lennon who came out with a wonderful line of, “Ain’t no ethnic %*# going to get any golden
castles out of me.” – [Narrator] Despite his
initial reservations, in February 1968, Lennon
and his band mates traveled to India for an
extended retreat with the guru. Joined by their various
wives and girlfriends, their departure to the East
for spiritual fulfillment made headlines worldwide. The press swarmed
around the perimeter of the Maharishi’s
14 acre compound, both intrigued and baffled
by this latest chapter in The Beatles’
unpredictable journey. This exposure brought Eastern
religion to the attention of an enormous audience. – Sometime in January,
it was sudden, right, we’re off to Maharishi to live in a holiday
camp in India. Have a good time. But they did write a
heck of a lot of songs while they were there,
churning them out. – The Beatles
introduced the world, especially the young world, to things they would
never have stumbled upon had The Beatles not been there. The philosophy
behind transcendental meditation, Buddhism, they were looking outwards. Meditation was at
the center of it. That’s actually really
all that matters. It’s the soul. The reality is here. Not many people had really
thought about that before. And if The Beatles, the most
popular band in the world, the most popular cultural
phenomenon in the world were talking earnestly
about this stuff, obviously, as much as a lot
of the elders might laugh, at least as many young
people went along with them. And, you know, sales of
texts of eastern wisdom went through the roof
in the late ’60s. People flocked to
see the Maharishi. The Beatles were this
gateway to another world. – [Narrator] Although the
band emerged from India both spiritually and
creatively refreshed, this sense of calm
would be short-lived. In February 1968, they set up
their own corporation, Apple. This multifaceted
company was developed to broaden The
Beatles’ activities and to retain full
control over their output, yet it would prove the first
of many overambitious projects for the band. As they entered the
studio in the summer to work on their
follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, for the first time, creative
and personal disputes crept into the
recording sessions. A particular source of
tension was the daily presence of an outsider in The
Beatles’ inner sanctum, the conceptual artist Yoko Ono, with whom John Lennon had
fallen deeply in love. It was a relationship that had
been blossoming, in private, for more than a year. While McCartney had been
growing in confidence through his
underground activities, Lennon’s sense of isolation
in rural Surrey had increased. Initially finding a
release through LSD, it was Yoko Ono who offered
him a means of escape. A relatively unknown artist
when she had traveled to London with husband Tony Cox in 1966, it was through
the Indica Gallery that she came into
contact with Lennon. Its owner, John Dunbar,
provided the space for Ono’s first UK exhibition, and it was he who
invited his Beatle friend to attend this unusual show. – She was plainly an
interesting, powerful woman. I didn’t show ordinary pictures
on the wall at all, really. She had some good
ideas and I liked them. She wanted to do a show. We managed to find
a couple of weeks where we didn’t
have something on. Yoko was reluctant to
have anybody look at it until she’d totally finished
and labeled everything. So we were sort of doing that. But me and Tony had
to sort of tell her, look, this guy might buy
something, you never know. He came round and he
did like the ladder and then looking through the
magnifying glass it says yes. He liked that. – [Narrator] The
relationship that developed across the following two years would be consummated
in May 1968, just before The Beatles began
work on the White Album. Lennon emerged a changed man, released from an
unhappy marriage and liberated as an artist. – The arrival of Yoko
Ono into John’s life transformed Lennon completely. She was the mother,
lover, teacher. She was kind of
everything really to John. He needed that. – When he met Yoko, she was
basically a mother figure. I mean, he used to
call her mother. For her own reasons, she
took him on, and saved him. [crowd chanting] – [Narrator] As Ono’s presence
made an impact on both Lennon and the bond
between The Beatles, the world outside of the
band began to darken. As the war in Vietnam spiraled
further out of control and with no apparent end
to the conflict in sight, across the West, the
cultural movement so inspired by The Beatles no longer believed
love is all you need. The progressive, liberal
core of the counterculture came under fire, with
the assassinations of first civil rights
leader Martin Luther King and then Presidential
candidate Robert Kennedy increasing tensions. Both in the US and Britain, once peaceful anti-war
demonstrations descended into violence. Student riots brought
Paris to a standstill and images of street skirmishes and police brutality
became commonplace. As the authorities led
an unforgiving onslaught on the counterculture, revolution replaced love
as the new objective. – In ’68, it all exploded. You know, you had
assassinations in the States, the threat of civil war, riots in the
Democratic Convention, riots in Paris, in London,
violence on the streets. Actually, there was a
sort of a fight for power. You don’t really get power. It won’t trickle down. It was to be forced. If you look at history,
that tends to be the case. The Beatles revolution
was a benign one, through art and love, but by ’68, the bricks were
flying all over the place. – It wasn’t just
the sweet utopianism of the Summer of Love,
but really days of rage. The demonstrations at
the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 you know, was a kind
of dividing line. You saw the police out
there clubbing kids. There really was a sense of,
we’re kind of at war now. – [Narrator] Just as this
unrestrained police brutality tore through Chicago
in August 1968, The Beatles issued
the single Revolution, addressing the struggles of
a youth culture under threat. Yet unlike All You Need
Is Love the previous year, John Lennon’s composition
refused to express the voice of this disillusioned movement or to accept the call to
arms of the radical Left. For the first time, this
saw The Beatles turned upon by their own peers. Yet Lennon’s reluctance
to commit to violence not only led to two different
versions of the track but also reflected
the inner struggles that many young people
were dealing with. – The song Revolution, there are two versions of it. Lennon goes back and forth on “don’t you know that
you can count me out” in as far as Revolution
is concerned. Exactly where you were supposed
to stand was difficult. All young people
were feeling that. Go to a protest, yeah, sure. Go to a protest that maybe
occupies a building, oh, maybe. You know, burning
that building down… Do you draw the line there? ♪ You say you want a revolution ♪ Well, you know ♪ We’d all love to
change the world ♪ You tell me that
it’s evolution ♪ Well, you know ♪ We’d all love to see the world ♪ But when you talk
about destruction ♪ Don’t you know that
you can count me out, in… ♪♪ – If you’re talking
about destruction Lennon’s saying count me out
then he’s saying count me in. He doesn’t know. He’s on the fence at that point. Lennon, as much as he
could be a bit handy, was seduced by this
idea of peace and love. He’d just written the
anthem of the previous year. – There always was a
kind of inherent optimism in The Beatles somehow, whereas
that wasn’t true of Dylan, it wasn’t true of The Stones. It was almost like
Martin Luther King. People don’t say this now but there was a sense in which
a lot of the black radicals who were emerging seemed
more of the moment. Dr. King seemed
like kind of part of the protest Establishment and in a certain way The Beatles seemed a
little bit like that too. – [Narrator] If the band were
losing some of their relevance as a cultural force through
Yoko Ono’s influence, John Lennon insured that they
remained musical pioneers. Where Revolution had pulled
its punches politically, an experimental collage that
he created with his new partner captured the chaos of 1968
simply through sound itself. When it was issued on
the band’s self-titled LP at the close of the year,
the track Revolution 9 became the most widely heard avant-garde composition
ever released. It was a startling
statement from a man who had been heralding in the Summer of Love
only a year beforehand. – He went from one
extreme to the other. Lennon suddenly saw
it’s all gone wrong. He turned to the flip side, and the flip side
was Revolution number 9 , Revolution 9 Which was a very, very
different view of the future. ♪ Number nine, number nine ♪ Number nine, number
nine, number nine… ♪♪ Revolution 9 was
the sound really of not just the riots in Paris
or the streets of Chicago. This is the sound
of the apocalypse. [“Revolution 9” by The Beatles] [“Revolution 9” by The Beatles] This is his incredibly
honest depiction of the worst fear of all which is a society and a
world in global turmoil. It’s an extraordinary piece, and one of the scariest pieces
of music you could ever hear. In the 21st century, Revolution
9 is far more relevant than it ever was in ’68. – [Narrator] Having delivered
the most extreme composition in The Beatles’ catalog, Lennon’s further
experimental activities continued outside of the band. By the end of 1968, the first of a trilogy of albums
with Yoko Ono was issued – Two Virgins, with a cover
depicting the couple naked. Still a member of
the most popular and commercially successful
act in the world, Lennon was now breaking
every rule imaginable. Yet the anger in some
quarters of the counterculture toward the song
Revolution also led him into a greater political role. In 1969, as Richard
Nixon was sworn in as the new President of America, John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerged as the world’s most
prominent activists. – When Lennon came out and said, if you’re talking about
destruction, count me out, he was terribly criticized
by the hard Left. And it seems to me that
his reaction to that was not to change his
mind about destruction, but actually to say, no, I really don’t think
the answer is destruction. I think the answer
actually is peace. – [Narrator] In March 1969, John Lennon and Yoko
Ono were married. With their honeymoon,
the couple embarked on a high-profile
campaign for peace, presented as a series of
conceptual art events. In the spirit of The Beatles’
initial attitude to the press, the first of these took place
in their hotel bridal suite, in which they
invited journalists to discuss politics
openly and frankly. – This is for world peace. And we’re thinking that
instead of going out and fight, and make war,
something like that, we should just stay in bed, we should just stay in
bed and enjoy the spring. – He put his career right on
the line there for his beliefs. And you have to applaud
him for that, of course. It brought him an awful lot
of harassment and trouble. – [Interviewer]
While you’re in bed and you’re giving your press
conferences in pillow cases, are you laughing at us? – No, no. – No more than you’re
laughing at us. We have a laugh, we
think it’s funny, the fact that the front
page news should be the fact that two people went to
bed on their honeymoon. We see the funny side of it. And that in Vienna, which
is a pretty square place, there’s all these
beautiful photographs of microphones
being held to a bag, to wait for the bag to speak. But we’re serious
about the peace bit. – Brave, foolhardy,
they were all of that. But who else would
have done that then? It would be front page
news if they were in bed, talking about peace. John didn’t know
necessarily the ins and outs of the whole Vietnam thing. He and Yoko knew
that it was wrong to be dropping
napalm on villages and stripping the
skin off children. I mean, he wasn’t
wrong in that thinking. He really wasn’t wrong. – [Narrator] As the
couple’s honeymoon moved from Europe to Canada, they were joined in their
hotel room by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and a variety
of counterculture figures, to record an anthem
for their campaign. And where their
experimental records and their public appearances
had left many confused, this song managed to
bring their message to a global audience. – Give Peace a Chance
was his attempt to do something in his own
terms that was actually useful and I think it proved to be so. He wrote an anthem. It’s a simplistic anthem. But it’s anthem that has a
good heart and a good message and that people have
been singing ever since. [“Give Peace A Chance”] ♪ Ev’rybody’s talking
‘bout Bagism, Shagism ♪ Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism ♪ This-ism, that-ism,
is-m, is-m, is-m ♪ All we are saying ♪ Is give peace a chance ♪ All we are saying ♪ Is give peace a chance… ♪ – He’s moved further
and further away from the elegant combination of artistic musical
choices and resonant text into records that
only have a message. He had that ability to
distill something down to its bare essence,
make it communicative, make it unforgettable, and it
still resonates to this day. – [Narrator] While
Lennon pressed on campaigning for peace, the close of the decade saw
the first major casualties of the youth movement, with the death of
Rolling Stone Brian Jones and permanent narcotics damage on both Beach Boy Brian Wilson
and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. The utopian vision of a brave
new world was crumbling, and this was reflected within
The Beatles camp itself. The tensions that had
previously arisen in the studio now spread into the band
mates own relationships with each other,
and when McCartney married his new partner Linda
Eastman in 1969, none of his fellow Beatles
attended the ceremony. As the world moved
into the 1970s, Paul issued his
debut solo record along with a press release, which announced that he
was quitting the band. It was official. The Beatles were no more. The demise of the band
shocked their fans worldwide, yet those close to the musicians had watched them
gradually drift apart over a two year period. – There was no cohesion. The old Liverpool bubble that
they all used to live in, see each other all the
time and love each other and be tolerant of
each other’s foibles and differences had gone. So now they were spinning
off in different directions with new ideas, new families,
new girlfriends, new children. It just wasn’t working anymore. It was obvious really that The Beatles as a group
had pretty much come to an end. – Has a multi-million
dollar entertainment act ever broken up because
it wasn’t fun anymore? Well, we know actually because so many groups
from that same period continued and
continued and continued when it most definitely
wasn’t fun anymore. The Beatles ended it
because the reasons that they had
gotten into doing it ceased to have value for them. So they said, let’s
not do this anymore. That’s as powerful a statement
about their integrity and their intentions
and their values as anything that I can think of. – [Narrator] In
The Beatles’ wake, youth culture
became more divided, rock music got heavier
and more self-indulgent and pop turned its
attention to glamor. As for the band
members themselves, despite Lennon’s
continued activism and string of hit singles, McCartney’s mainstream
triumph through his band Wings and Harrison’s
successful emergence as an artist in his own right, their impact as individuals
could never match that of their Beatles glory days. Yet although their
vision of utopia had failed to materialize, the world was still
forever changed by The Beatles’ innovations and the values that
they represented. Even if no one has ever managed
to compete with that impact, with every successive
generation of musicians The Beatles remain the benchmark for how popular
entertainers can interact with the wider world. – Did cultural and
musical changes, to which they were
without any doubt the largest contributors,
have a permanent effect on how rock and roll
conceived itself? Yeah, permanent effect on how rock and roll
perceived itself. So that there’s even now
in this glitzy pop era, pop stars see it as an option that they have to
accept or refuse to be conscious, controversial, and some choose one, and
others really deny it, and some are extremely bland. But it’s there on the table. Always there on the
table, for everybody. – [Narrator] And as the band’s
astonishing achievements continue to make an impact
half a century later, the legacy of The Beatles, and of the remarkable decade in which they flourished,
remains unrivaled. The unique story of four
working class Liverpudlians who changed the world. – [Chris] Lennon said
something along the lines of, we weren’t leaders
in this world. We were just the guys on
the mast saying land ahoy. We were letting you
know what we could see. Without The Beatles,
understanding the ’60s would have been a completely
different experience. – They touched everything. The Beatles covered it all. If you want to know what
the ’60s were about, you listen to Beatles records. It tells you, the
story is there. – It sounds like a cliché,
but it’s really impossible to overstate The
Beatles’ impact. It sounds like
you’re exaggerating to younger people
who weren’t there. It just sounds ridiculous. But it was true, they
changed everything. [energetic instrumental music]
Interviews and rare archival footage illuminate how the Beatles’ influence over music and culture continues to be felt around the world.
Original Title : Beatles : How the Beatles changed the World
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