Remember the Beatles!

During their time as an active group, the Beatles never paused to anthologize themselves. Unusually — maybe uniquely — among popular rock bands with large song catalogues, the Beatles never released a greatest hits or concert album before their breakup. They couldn’t stop to anthologize their old songs, because they were too busy surpassing themselves with new ones.

And somehow — despite a prolific output of songs and records, punishing touring schedules in the early years, and saturation levels of publicity — the Beatles always left you wanting more. They stopped performing live too soon, in 1966. They stopped recording too soon, in 1969. John Lennon stopped existing too soon, in 1980. Unlike Elvis with his many “comeback” specials, the Beatles never came back.

In contrast, The Beatles Anthology trilogy — comprising a six-CD collection of live performances and studio outtakes, an ABC documentary, and, now, a group “autobiography” — is curatorial and superabundant. The contents of these recordings, film, and book are useful, often delightful, and quite revealing. But unlike the band’s original output, the Anthology does not leave you with an appetite for more.

The newly published autobiography, also called the Beatles Anthology, is the latest and final piece of this sprawling, three-legged multi-media history of the twentieth century’s most successful recording artists. With a first printing of one and a half million copies, the coffee-table book weighs 6.6 pounds and is clad in a shimmering silver dust jacket, its colorful glossy pages crowded with rare photos and scribbles, doodles, and documents from the Beatles’ personal collections. And this scrapbook eye-candy is fitted in among 340,000 words of text. You may need your Lennon glasses: The type is small, and looks even smaller on the oversized pages.

Like the Anthology CD compilation (how many retakes of “Strawberry Fields” are enough?), the book suffers from repetition. The multiple re-tellings of the same events (the speed-fueled white nights on the Reeperbahn, say, or Yoko encamping in the studio during the White Album sessions) by the individual Beatles may make you feel like a replay official reviewing the same play from every conceivable angle.

The autobiography also suffers from an inescapable asymmetry. In long interviews conducted for this volume, the three surviving Beatles look back on their eventful lives from the settled maturity of men approaching sixty. In contrast, John Lennon’s “autobiography” is pieced together from interviews spanning almost two decades, when he was still caught in the riptides of a turbulent life cut short at a relatively young forty. The emotional debris churned up by parental abandonment in childhood and mass adoration in adulthood never quite subsided.

Fragments of Lennon’s interviews given years apart are often fused together, sometimes in the same paragraph, to create the illusion of continuous narrative. The effort to blend the Lennon fragments in with the oral histories of the other three is unconvincing and rather sad, much like the new “Beatles” songs “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” confected for the Anthology CDs by bringing the surviving three into the studio to layer their voices and instruments on top of homemade demo tapes of unfinished songs recorded by Lennon in the late 1970s.

The Beatles’ development paralleled that of the 1960s counterculture so conveniently that the band’s identity seemed to merge with that of an entire generation. They began their professional career in earnest in Hamburg in 1960. No hubcap was safe from these boys, dressed in leather and jeans like their 1950s idols Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, and Marlon Brando. They broke up in 1969, by which time they looked like wizened religious ascetics.

And in between, it seemed like the Beatles couldn’t catch cold without a generation sneeze. They discovered pot during the recording of Rubber Soul, and it seemed like right angles softened into gentle curves everywhere. They costumed themselves as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and undergraduates started turning up in their fathers’ old service jackets and boots. They escaped to an ashram, and a generation seemed to abandon utopian politics in favor of self-discovery.

The baby-boom generation spent more time entertaining itself than any of its predecessors. Inevitably perhaps, it was driven to justify itself by ascribing larger significance to its entertainment and entertainers than any of its predecessors. Its supreme entertainers were, of course, the Beatles — and the extent to which they were precedent-setters, musically and socially, for good and for ill, has often been exaggerated.

The Beatles, for example, were hardly the first rock stars to write their own songs, as admirers have so often claimed. Indeed, the Beatles themselves have repeatedly acknowledged their debt to such composer-performers as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, and Ray Charles, many of whose songs they recorded or featured in their live acts.

It is frequently the case with “marvelous boys” who achieve astonishing success at young ages — Lennon and McCartney were still just in their mid-twenties when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded — that their talent appears to have erupted spontaneously, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their originality has been often exaggerated.

By the same token, they really weren’t slyly promoting the 1960s drug culture through their songs, as their detractors suspected. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (stands for LSD, remember?) truly was inspired by a school drawing brought home by John’s son, Julian. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” really wasn’t about heroin. In fact, with the exception of Paul McCartney admitting in an ambush interview to having taken LSD (the ever-sensible, career-minded McCartney was actually the last of the four to try it), the Beatles were guarded in the 1960s about their personal drug use. They had every reason to be. The Beatles presented enticing targets to narcotics police.

In short, the Beatles myth is ripe for some healthy subversion. But it is a little surprising that, by design or not, they themselves supply it in the autobiography. Don’t misunderstand. The Beatles Anthology is not a dishy book. About their personal affairs, the Beatles are tactful, especially where third parties might be involved. But, as told by themselves, the Beatles story is objectively subversive of the myth, because it is primarily about their relationships to their music and to each other, and only incidentally about their relationship to their well-chronicled generation and its social upheavals.

As artists, the Beatles are remembered chiefly for two things: for Lennon and McCartney’s seemingly inexhaustible flow of beautiful melodies, and for exploiting the resources of the recording studio more fully than anyone before them. But the Beatles themselves seem to place more emphasis on their musical cohesion as a band as a source of their greatness. It is one of the surprises of the book.

The Beatles became polished rock ‘n’ roll musicians and performers before they became stars. Unlike Elvis Presley, who was thrown together in Sam Phillips’s Sun recording studio with three strangers to record his breakthrough song, “That’s Alright, Mama,” the core of the Beatles — John, Paul, and George — had been playing together for more than five years when their first single “Love Me Do” hit the British charts in late 1962. They were boys when they began together: Mc Cartney remembers plastering the fourteen-year-old Harrison’s lip with garden soil so he could pass for sixteen. They listened to the same records, they learned simple guitar chords together. To a large extent, they formed their musical sensibility collectively.

One takes from the Anthology a fuller appreciation of how crucial live performing was to their development. They came of age as a band, if not quite as men, in Hamburg in 1960. During a months-long engagement at the Kaiserkeller in the Reeperbahn, the port city’s notorious red light district, the Beatles played six hours every night. They expanded their repertoire of rock ‘n’ roll (learning to play entire albums, instead of just hit singles, by their favorite artists) and diversified beyond the genre, adding show tunes and schmalzy ballads (“Til There Was You,” “A Taste of Honey”) to their act. To keep boredom at bay, their own as well as the audience’s (they were playing the same club nightly, so repeat business must have been considerable), they learned to make the familiar new through musical improvisation.

By the time they returned to Liverpool, they weren’t a finished band (they still had to dump the uninspired stop-gap drummer Pete Best for Ringo), but they had vaulted past the local competition in range, showmanship, and, most important, musical cohesion. Before they ever released a record and before John Lennon and Paul McCartney emerged as songwriters, the Beatles had already become the premier band in Liverpool.

After they took the world by storm, the Beatles continued to tour relentlessly for another three years. But they no longer enjoyed the same freedom to experiment. Their sets shrank to half an hour, their fans grew deafening, audiences demanded that songs be played as closely to their recorded versions as possible, and the group had far too much at stake to risk the mistakes that come with improvisation. At this point the Beatles lost interest in performing live, and they retreated to their recording studio in Abbey Road, where the most famous musicians in the world were still free to take chances, make mistakes, and grow through trial and error.

Eventually, their recording sessions in turn would grow less collaboratively inventive. Reading between the lines of the autobiography only a little, one surmises that the resulting feelings of stifled creativity became an important source of the frictions that led to the band’s disintegration. Guitarist George Harrison, usually considered the best instrumentalist in the band, grew especially frustrated as Paul McCartney became increasingly prescriptive about what the others should play on his songs. Apparently feeling like a glorified session musician, Harrison actually left the band briefly during the unpleasant recording of the Let It Be album.

It may seem trivial to dwell on the musical chemistry among the four Beatles. Lennon and McCartney were exceptionally gifted songwriters. But there were other exceptional songwriters working in the same idiom. The Kinks’ Ray Davies, for example, matched both Lennon’s stinging wit and passion and McCartney’s streaming melodicism. But while Davies’s songs hold up as well as Lennon and McCartney’s, the Kinks’ records don’t hold up as well as the Beatles’, because the band’s performances did not bring as much added value to the songs as the Beatles’ did.

Conveniently enough, 1960s pop supplies a rough test of the importance of the kind of mutual musical sympathy enjoyed by the Beatles. There was another group of four talented, photogenic, and appealing young men full of whimsical humor, who were brought together to record near-perfect pop songs by many of the best songwriters around. They were backed on records by crack session musicians, far better schooled musically than the Beatles. The resulting project never sounded like a great band, although at times they sounded like great Beatles imitators. The band was the Monkees, the prefab four.

While the Beatles were hardly the first rock ‘n’ rollers to write their own material, they, along with Bob Dylan, certainly made it much harder for artists who followed them to gain credibility unless they wrote. The portraits that Lennon and McCartney paint of their contrasting childhoods illuminate the directions in which each would later develop as a songwriter.

McCartney grew up in a musical household with cosy, hearthstone values. His father and uncle played horns in a jazz band. His father was also a self-taught pianist who entertained at the family’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a role which Paul eventually inherited. Paul loved popular music before he was exposed to rock ‘n’ roll, and in his family, music was a means of providing pleasure and binding people together.

Abandoned by his father and mother, John was raised by a surrogate mother, his Aunt Mimi. The radio was seldom on in the house, and he discovered the broader world of music only through the medium of rock ‘n’ roll. Creative, self-absorbed, and carrying the burden of double abandonment, he sought expressive outlets in drawing and writing poems and stories. For him, rock ‘n’ roll was a medium of personal expression, a safely non-poufy one for an outwardly tough and rebellious but emotionally wounded teen in the brawling, working-class port of Liverpool.

Against this background, it seems natural that Lennon’s songs tended to be more personal, raw, and lyrically experimental — but more closely tethered as music to the folk and blues-based structural conventions of rock ‘n’ roll. McCartney’s songs were typically safer, sunnier — some would say emptier — in lyrical content, but more inventive melodically and harmonically, borrowing unabashedly from British music hall tradition and ranging far afield from rock conventions.

The Lennon-McCartney partnership was unusual, though not without precedent. Instead of the usual composer-lyricist songwriting team, both wrote music and lyrics. In the early years, they tended to write jointly (in part, because touring placed them in constant proximity to each other). Later, they wrote separately for the most part, though still under the Lennon-McCartney rubric, and the differences in their writing grew more pronounced.

They split credit and writers’ royalties on every song that either wrote, and the fact that they maintained the fifty-fifty split all through the Beatles years is moving testimony to their enormous confidence in each other’s ability as a songwriter. If either had failed to maintain rough parity over the years with the other, the deal would have failed. The arrangement, struck in naivete when the pair were still very young, proved shrewd in practice. It eliminated the financial stakes from the competition (keen enough without that) between the two to have their own songs chosen for albums and singles. The deal that manager Brian Epstein made for them with song publisher Dick James, on the other hand, was so bad that it still rankles McCartney, who justifiably complains that he is only “on for 15 percent” of “Yesterday,” the most recorded song of the century.

Each partner in this complicated and fabulously successful relation apparently felt a need to justify himself in terms of the other’s strengths. McCartney seems to have viewed the Anthology as an opportunity to dispel once and for all his image as a saccharine balladeer, the cute Beatle adored by teenaged girls and, worse, their parents. He protests with embarrassing frequency that he too was kind of arty and avant garde (when John was still living in the stockbroker belt with his first wife), and that he too was a true rock ‘n’ roller who could write and sing with wild abandon. But all too often he gives himself away, as when he describes arriving early at the studio every day for a week to sing “Oh! Darling” by himself, so that his voice would sound suitably strained when the time came to record.

John, for his part, seems to have suffered through periods of intense anxiety provoked by Paul’s unearthly facility in turning out lithe, lovely melodies. Just as Paul protests that, after all, he wrote the raucous “Helter Skelter,” so too John was given to reminding Beatles’ fans and, one suspects, himself, that he had written his share of elegant melodies, such as “In My Life” (for which Paul irritatingly attempts to grab too much credit in the book) and “Across the Universe.” One suspects, however, that John, unlike Paul, would have understood that harping on the point would tend to convey an impression opposite to the intended one.

The perennial question — Lennon or McCartney? — resolves itself into a question about what popular music is supposed to do. Those who believe it is primarily a medium for communication will prefer Lennon. Those who believe it is primarily a medium for creating beauty are apt to prefer McCartney.

The mutual defensiveness and anxiety the two provoked in each other is a pity. When one thinks of the long period of vapid and infantile, pureed pop that saturated the teen market in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the rise of the Beatles, one realizes how badly music needed John Lennon’s honesty and emotional heat. And when one thinks of the tuneless propaganda of today’s rap and the static drone of club music, one misses Paul McCartney’s gentle melodies and dedicated craftsmanship. In fact, when one thinks about it, one may conclude that in the combination of their complementary talents, John Lennon and Paul McCartney raised popular music to a peak of balanced artistry we are unlikely to see again soon.

A writer in Washington, D.C., Daniel Wattenberg is a regular contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.