Sally O'Rourke
Essays
I'm Looking Through You: The Beatles and American Music
Part 1: From Me to You
The period after World War II in Britain was characterized by the influence of pop cultural styles from across the Atlantic, particularly on young people. “In those days the major films were all American, the music we all loved was American, even the ‘in’ books such as On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye were American,” recalls Bill Harry, music journalist and early friend of The Beatles (Harry 7). The emerging youth subculture of Teddy Boys borrowed style and attitude from American Western and gangster films and combined it with retro Edwardian fashion (Gould 53). Interest intensified with the arrival of rock and roll music in the mid-1950s. Because the British Broadcasting Corporation refused to play rock until the Sixties, pirate radio stations such as Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline stepped in the fill the void (Stark 14). The thrill of furtive listening added a special allure to the new foreign music. “It was this obsession with America that caused the future legions of the British Invasion to plug in their guitars in the first place … unconsciously adding a modicum of Old World style and class in the process,” Nicholas Schaffner writes (Schaffner 10).
Perhaps the British city most affected by American culture was Liverpool, a seaport in the Northwest of England. “A lot of imports, like blues records, country-and-western and rock-and-roll records, would come into Liverpool through the ships,” Paul McCartney recalls (Pritchard and Lysaght 15). Even after the Fifties rock and roll boom fizzled out in the rest Britain, Liverpool’s rock scene continued to thrive based on these American records. Liverpool and the rest of the Merseyside area also hosted the largest country music scene in Britain (including a Grand Old Opry) and served as the biggest market for Motown Records (Harry 17). The city, as part of the Industrial North, felt isolated from more bourgeois areas in the Midlands and the South of England. Schaffner argues that “the rock and roll of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley struck an especially responsive chord among Liverpool’s tough, underemployed and restless working-class youth, who almost instinctively began banding together to create music themselves” (Schaffner 13).
The music these British youth made was called skiffle. Skiffle originally developed in African-American communities in the 1920s, and was played on household objects and inexpensive musical instruments. The first British skiffle bands developed out of artists in the jazz scene seeking a return to a more ‘authentic’ style of music (Ingham 7). While it was not exactly rock and roll (which many still saw as only truly belonging to America), skiffle bands played American folk songs, spirituals and blues (Norman 50). The style’s popularity was fueled in large part by the success of the 1956 single “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan, a British artist who nonetheless sounded American enough to appeal to English youth (Stark 61). In addition to Donegan’s success, skiffle owed its popularity to the ease and lack of expense with which teenagers could play the music. Compared with the British pop artists ripping off American music on the radio, skiffle was exciting and energetic (Ingham 7).
One such skiffle band, The Quarry Men, was formed in late ‘50s Liverpool by John Lennon and some classmates. After hearing Little Richard and Elvis Presley (whom Lennon stated was “bigger than religion” in his life) at age 15, the group took on a more rock and roll orientation (Hertsgaard 19). Lennon’s fellow student Paul McCartney, who had joined The Quarry Men, also became infatuated with rock after watching Bill Haley’s performance of “Rock Around the Clock” in the film Blackboard Jungle: “I remember it very clearly because it was the first piece of music that ever sent a tingle up my spine” (Pritchard and Lysaght 13). McCartney was also influenced by the close harmonies and lower volume of The Everly Brothers, even unsuccessfully attempting to form an Everlys-styled duo with his own brother Michael (Norman 41). The band “started off by imitating Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry … we just copied what they did. … The people we copied were all American, of course, because there was no one good British” McCartney recalls (Gould 58).
Perhaps the most important influence on The Quarry Men, at least initially, was the Texan rocker Buddy Holly. Other early rock and roll idols tended to be either African-American (Chuck Berry, Little Richard) or overtly masculine (Elvis). Holly was a figure with whom Lennon and other British rockers could identify both physically and musically, as he was thin, wore glasses and had a limited vocal range. Holly, who was also one of the few performers to write his own material, based his songs on chords easy enough for beginning guitarists to pick up quickly (Norman 51). The first song Lennon learned to play on guitar was Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” which would also be the first demo recording The Quarry Men would produce (Stark 73-74). In addition, Holly’s band The Crickets appealed to The Quarry Men as an example of a group that was truly collaborative in a creative sense, not just a lead singer with backing musicians (Gould 66). Finally, The Crickets’ insect moniker provided the inspiration for the The Quarry Men’s new name, which eventually morphed into “The Beatles” (Schaffner 15).
Although Elvis Presley’s career was beginning to go into decline by the end of the Fifties, due to his two-year stint in the U.S. Army, his early releases were also seminal to the birth of The Beatles. “It was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool. Once I heard it and got into it, that was life, there was no other thing,” Lennon later said (O’Brien 173). Lennon was particularly impressed with Presley’s novel use of casual language. When writing the 1963 single “She Loves You” with Paul McCartney, he recalled that “we stuck everything in there – thinking when Elvis did ‘All Shook Up,’ that was the first time I heard ‘uh huh,’ ‘oh yeah,’ and ‘yeah yeah’ all in the same song” (Ingham 176). (When McCartney’s father first heard the song, he suggested they change the soon-to-be-famous ‘yeah yeah yeah’ in the chorus to the more British ‘yes yes yes’ [ibid.].) Presley would continue to be a touchstone for The Beatles throughout the band’s career. “Run for Your Life,” the closing track on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, opens with the lines “I’d rather see you dead, little girl/Than to be with another man,” the same couplet that appears in Presley’s song “Baby Let’s Play House.” Likewise, The Beatles’ return to roots music after their experiments with psychedelic rock in the late Sixties was initiated by the March 1968 single “Lady Madonna.” Ringo Starr remarked, “It sounds like Elvis, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t sound like Elvis – it is Elvis” (Schaffner 40). However, among the dozens of covers the band released of their musical idols, particularly on the remake-heavy albums preceding Rubber Soul, none were Presley originals. Writer Jonathan Gould suggests that this lack of a tribute to “the King” was actual an act of deference, “almost as if he were indeed the reigning deity and they a group of novitiates, proscribed from speaking his name” (Gould 305-306).
Another musician who remained in The Beatles’ reference file throughout the Sixties was Chuck Berry. Like Buddy Holly, Berry wrote most of his own songs and was a talented guitar player. Unlike Holly and Presley, Berry was African-American. His influence on The Beatles is most blatant on the band’s early covers of Berry songs, like “Roll Over Beethoven” on 1963’s With The Beatles and “Rock and Roll Music” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale. As the British band’s artistry improved, however, the references to Berry became more subtle. “Back in the USSR” (The Beatles, 1968) and “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (single, 1969) both bore the influence of Berry’s driving guitar sound and his lyrical trips through American place names, such as “Back in the U.S.A.” (Schaffner 44). “Come Together,” the opening track of 1969’s Abbey Road, borrowed its opening line (“Here come old flat-top”) and its style of rhythm guitar from Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” (Gould 574-575).
However, part of The Beatles’ genius was that they did not carbon-copy particular American rock and roll acts in an attempt to be “the British Crickets” or “the British Elvis,” á la Cliff Richard and other pop idols of their native country. Instead, they borrowed elements from artists they admired across a wide range of musical styles. Horst Fascher, manager of the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, where The Beatles played regularly in the early Sixties, describes their how the band developed their style:
The Beatles watched Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and all those names very carefully to see what they were doing onstage. The Beatles were behind the curtains or backstage, taking in all the moves and performance tricks and trying to copy them. I think that had a lot to do with their success later.
[Pritchard and Lysaght 93]
Original drummer Pete Best, who played with The Beatles during their years gigging in Hamburg, concurs: “We were into the American stars – Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Fats Domino. … But we were always looking for something different. We were listening to any records we could find, trying to be a little bit different” (Pritchard and Lysaght 44).
One direction The Beatles pursued was country music and rockabilly. George Harrison’s guitar style bears greater resemblance to that of his idol Carl Perkins (whom the band covered thrice in 1964, with “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby”) than to the blues-derived riffs of his British contemporaries (Stark 61). The other Beatles also experimented with country on original songs like “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (Help!, 1965) and “What Goes On” (Rubber Soul, 1965), while Lennon stated (somewhat facetiously), “You could call our new one [1964’s Beatles for Sale] a ‘Beatles country-and-western LP’” (Gould 255). Perhaps no band member loved country music more than Ringo Starr, who in his pre-Beatle years had applied unsuccessfully for a job in Houston, Texas, based on his love of the music and cowboy culture (Schaffner 28). One of Ringo’s most memorable vocal performances with The Beatles was his version of “Act Naturally” by Buck Owens (Help!, 1965), while his first self-penned track, 1968’s “Don’t Pass Me By” (The Beatles) is clearly in the honky-tonk vein. Perkins himself even charged that The Beatles “sort of saved rockabilly when it could have been lost forever. It was really in danger of dying a fast death in the early 1960s … they put a nice new suit on it and they never strayed from its basic simplicity. They just made it a lot more sophisticated” (Pritchard and Lysaght 168).
The Beatles developed their trademark close vocal harmonies by also looking outside the list of the usual rock and roll suspects. McCartney claimed that the band learned to sing three-part harmony from a recording of The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him is to Love Him,” a 1959 pop ballad written and recorded by legendary girl group producer Phil Spector (MacDonald 80). The Beatles covered five girl group songs on their first two albums, ranging from popular hits (The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”) to obscurities (The Donays’ “Devil in [Her] Heart”; both on 1963’s With The Beatles). When asked to describe The Beatles to Mersey Beat magazine in 1963, producer George Martin said they “sound like a male Shirelles” (Stark 129). The debt The Beatles owed to American girl groups would continue to be evident years later. Spector produced the band’s final album, 1970’s Let It Be, while Harrison was successfully sued for unconsciously plagiarizing The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” on his post-Beatles solo hit “My Sweet Lord” (ibid.). The Beatles’ vocal sound also owes a debt to doo-wop groups such as The Four Seasons, both in the three-part harmonies (Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) and the use of falsetto, as heard in such tracks as “From Me to You” (single, 1963). But where falsetto was just part of the harmony in the doo-wop records, The Beatles twisted the formula by presenting the somewhat eerie sound on its own (MacDonald 59).
But the genres apart from rock and roll that most clearly influenced The Beatles were R&B (rhythm and blue and soul, otherwise referred to as “black music.” “The Beatles were the first white artists to ever admit they grew up on black music,” songwriter and musician Smokey Robinson declared (Sawyers xlv). The Beatles alluded to their inspiration from the artists on the record labels Motown and Atlantic by giving one album the self-deprecating title Rubber Soul (MacDonald 143). “If The Beatles ever wanted a sound,” stated McCartney, “it was R&B” (Hertsgaard 50). Lennon stated that he liked R&B and soul songs “because they were more simple. … The blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex” (Hertsgaard 28). The most obvious example of R&B’s impact on The Beatles’ sound is on the cover of The Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” (Please Please Me, 1963), with its straightforward construction and gospel-style call-and-response vocals (ibid.). Original tracks such as “You Can’t Do That” (B-side, 1964), “I Feel Fine” (single, 1964) and “Drive My Car” (Rubber Soul, 1965) all borrow rhythm, riffs and a bass-heavy sound from R&B hits like Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Ray Charles’s “What'd I Say” and Otis Redding’s “Respect” (MacDonald 143). Smokey Robinson & The Miracles was one group that held a special importance for The Beatles. The band had borrowed themes and song structures from Robinson for songs like “This Boy” (B-side, 1963). When The Miracles released “Tracks of My Tears” in 1965, Lennon recognized that Robinson had borrowed the same from the Beatles songs “I’m A Loser” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (both on 1964’s Beatles for Sale). Lennon responded to “Tracks of My Tears” with the singing and instrumentation of “In My Life” (Gould 303). Robinson’s influence would carry over to 1968’s The Beatles, with Lennon’s song “Sexy Sadie” featuring falsetto melismas in the style of the singer and quoting The Miracles’ “I’ve Been Good to You” in its lyrics (Gould 519).
However, The Beatles never felt truly comfortable with performing in an R&B style as white musicians. One part of this was due to the band’s guitar-based sound, which differed from the typical R&B set-up including piano and horns (Gould 105). More important, though, was the feeling of appropriating another race’s music and dialect. Lennon disliked singing “Twist and Shout” when The Beatles played with black musicians, believing it to be “their music,” and that “they can do these songs so much better than us” (Hertsgaard 28). This reticence is also reflected in the minimal influence of the blues, the “blackest” of genres, on the music of The Beatles as compared with many of their British colleagues such as The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. McCartney states that The Beatles’ first single, 1962’s “Love Me Do,” “was probably the first bluesy thing we tried to write. It came out whiter because it always does” (Gould 135). Even though “Love Me Do” shares prominent harmonica instrumentation with many blues songs, the style in which it is played (“passionate overblowing and no ‘bent’ notes”) better recalled the soundtracks to British kitchen-sink dramas than American blues records (MacDonald 42). The few cases where The Beatles worked in a full-on blues mode were those couched in parody or pastiche, such as “Yer Blues” (The Beatles, 1968) and “Oh! Darling” (Abbey Road, 1969) (Gould 520-579). Still, The Beatles borrowed certain chord progressions and stylistic touches from the blues for songs like “Can’t Buy Me Love” (single, 1964), “She’s a Woman” (B-side, 1964) and “I’m Down” (B-side, 1965). Even then, though, the blues referenced seem to fall more in line with the jazz/pop/swing stylings of artists like Ella Fitzgerald (who covered “Can’t Buy Me Love”) than with the more hardcore and “authentic” sounds becoming popular in the British Blues scene (Ingham 181; MacDonald 82).
That The Beatles managed to condense their myriad influences into something consistently listenable is impressive enough; that they achieved the level of artistic and commercial success that they did is a testament to the talents within the band. By 1964, The Beatles had shown that they could receive inspiration from American musicians. The question was whether or not America would break tradition and receive them.
Part 2: Get Back
America’s influence on Western popular culture in the early Sixties was such that its entertainment industry was almost purely export-only. Although a few British artists had some minor chart successes in the United States, the general feeling was that the British acts were too much like existing American performers (Pritchard and Lysaght 131). When The Beatles “invaded” America in 1964, though, their style of rock and roll was one that had all but vanished from the American cultural landscape. In place of highly original (but morally questionable) stars like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis was bland music by bland people. “After the 1958 disc jockey convention in Miami Beach, where there was a lot of graft and payola, America went soft, musically,” declares Rock and Roll Hall of Fame disc jockey Red Robinson (Pritchard and Lysaght 138). The Beatles provided an alternative that the country found appealing. Television personality Dick Clark recognizes “everything old is new again” reception of The Beatles:
They, and the English artists in general, shipped back to America what we sent them to begin with. And it was all new to that audience. It’s strange when you stop to consider that they borrowed the look of The Everly Brothers, much of the harmonies and the sounds and then the music of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino, shipped it over with a slight Liverpudlian accent and a little longer hair, and it was all brand-new again. We were just ready for that.
[Pritchard and Lysaght 199]
Whereas British youth just a few years prior had been entranced by the imported rock and roll sound, American youth now strove to emulate the music of The Beatles.
Teenagers weren’t the only ones affected, however. Fellow musicians began to take notice as well. Surf-rock band The Beach Boys began searching for techniques that would elevate their music to a more sophisticated level, while former folkies The Byrds began experimenting with creating a new hybrid of two genres. However, one artist in particular would be influenced in a way that would impact Sixties culture as much as The Beatles had.
Bob Dylan was impressed the moment he first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in January 1964. “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid,” Dylan recalls (Stark 24). Less than a year after his August 1964 meeting with The Beatles, Dylan abandoned his folk purist roots by strapping on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Shortly after that, he began to record his first electric material on Side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home, which would ultimately lead to his high chart positions for songs including “Like a Rolling Stone” that he never got for his straightforward folk material (Stark175).
As great as The Beatles’ impact on Dylan was to be, Dylan’s impact on The Beatles was at least as great. The Beatles had started listening to Dylan when Harrison introduced the rest of the group to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The band felt sufficiently inspired by his harmonica sound as to record “I Should Have Known Better” (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964) (MacDonald 85). Once the group met Dylan a few months later, however, The Beatles’ music began to change profoundly. Dylan advised Lennon that the lyrics were at least as important to the music, to which Lennon responded, “I can’t be bothered. I listen to the sound of it, the overall sound”(Hertsgarrd 116). Lennon quickly changed his mind, however, becoming the first songwriter in the band to attempt to find his own poetic voice. He discarded Dylan’s overtly political lyrics in favor of a general desire to “tell it like it is” (Porterfield 104). After initial efforts at serious lyrics like “I’m a Loser” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” (both on Beatles for Sale, 1964), The Beatles recorded their first all-acoustic song, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (Help!, 1965), inspired by the album Another Side of Bob Dylan (MacDonald 118). Later in 1965, the band released “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (Rubber Soul), which the group considered to be their first song where the lyrics were more important than the music (MacDonald 130).
Dylan’s renewed influence also proved essential even after The Beatles had long since been writing in a more sophisticated style. After the group’s experiments with psychedelic music in the mid-Sixties, Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding, came as a bolt out of the blue. The album was stripped down to basics, providing the perfect solution to the question “Where do The Beatles go after Sergeant Pepper?” In addition to the sound The Beatles created, the very structure their 1968 self-titled release was also inspired by Dylan’s work. His 1966 record Blonde on Blonde had proved that double albums could be successful (Gould 525). The Beatles would cement this idea, with many artists working in the format for years to come.
Dylan’s ascension to the top of the American rock scene killed the British Invasion. Bands that could develop complex lyrical themes and musical ideas, like The Beatles and The Who, continued to flourish, but groups unable to make this leap would vanish almost forgotten (Schaffner 26). Replacing the second-rate British bands were Americans who were inspired, like Dylan, to move out of the folk scene, including The Mamas and the Papas and The Lovin’ Spoonful (Stark 175). Instead of a pop scene dominated by disposable music, America’s musical landscape began to focus on genuinely talented artists (MacDonald 171).
An informal competition began between the surviving British acts and the American upstarts. One of those most famous was the rivalry between The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, inspired by the craftsmanship and melody of Rubber Soul, attempted to create an album that would top it. The result, 1966’s Pet Sounds, would be called by McCartney “the album of all time” (MacDonald 171-172). His attempts to analyze and understand the innovative production resulted in The Beatles’ own response, 1967’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (Gould 334). The 1966 Beach Boys single “Good Vibrations” proved to be especially influential, compressing “a half-dozen sea changes of harmony, rhythm, texture and timbre into the standard three-minute format of an AM radio song” (Gould 376). The Beatles now saw no need for artistic restraint, launching into the flights of fancy characteristic of Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour (1968).
Another American band with whom The Beatles exchanged musical ideas was The Byrds. Called ‘America’s first long-haired band,’ The Byrds were one of many of the folk artists who turned to rock after hearing The Beatles for the first time. They recorded a version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but with Beatles-like harmonies and 12-string Rickenbacker guitar favored by Harrison during the Hard Day’s Night period (Schaffner 26). In doing so, The Byrds essentially invented folk rock. This sound would be an important element of the Beatles’ mid-period catalogue. Perhaps the most obvious example of The Byrds’ influence can be heard in Harrison’s contribution to Rubber Soul, “If I Needed Someone.” Harrison derived the guitar riff from The Byrds’ “The Bells of Rhymney,” played on a Rickenbacker and then filtered electronically to give it the most jangly sound possible (MacDonald 135; Hertsgaard 155). The backing track was then overlaid with the three-part harmony employed by the American band, who had actually modeled their harmonies on The Beatles (Gould 304).
Other North American groups of the time also made an impact on The Beatles. The arrangement of the 1969 B-side “Don’t Let Me Down” recalled the style of The Band, a four-fifths Canadian, one-fifths American group who had backed rockabilly musician Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before striking out on their own the year before with the album Music From Big Pink. Jonathan Gould describes the elements cribbed from The Band’s sound as “the weary tempo, the loose phrasing of Paul’s harmony, and the groundswells of bass, Leslie-toned guitar and electric piano that answer John’s voice in the chorus” (Gould 555). (The musician playing the electric piano on “Don’t Let Me Down,” incidentally, was Billy Preston, an American soul artist who holds the distinction of being the only person ever co-billed with The Beatles on a record.) Another artist who had recently emerged to influence The Beatles was Dr. John, the voodoo-doctor alias of New Orleans piano player Mac Rebennack. Rebennack’s spooky music owed a debt to both the swamps of his birth and the heroin he and his band took on a constant basis (Gould 575). Lennon borrowed this murkiness for “Come Together” (Abbey Road, 1969), fusing it with the older style of Chuck Berry to create an intriguing mixture of the old and the new.
In addition to borrowing specific elements from rock and roll and selling it back to Americans, The Beatles effected even more fundamental changes in rock and pop. Before, rock and roll had been considered a style of music best suited for teenagers, to be discarded when they became adults. It was The Beatles, along with acts they influenced, who made rock into a true form of art that ruled popular musical culture through the second half of the Twentieth century (Hertsgaard 315; Schaffner 2). “We were descendants of rock and roll. We sort of intellectualized it for white folks,” Lennon later stated (Stark 27). In contrast to the pop songs then heard on the radio, The Beatles wrote lyrics that were more natural, and more believable: “There’s no reason why a pop song should distort everyday facts for the sake of fantasy. It should reflect normal happening in everyday language,” Lennon maintained (Stark 25). The fact that The Beatles wrote their own music at all was mind-boggling in a time when professional songwriters were de rigueur even for rock and roll musicians. Their example inspired countless other aspiring rockers to take a soup-to-nuts approach to music (MacDonald 52).
These elements of The Beatles’ sound and style, when combined with their social impact as personalities and cultural commentators, help explain why the band was so admired by a nation ready for something interesting after a drought in musical creativity. However, the reason The Beatles remain celebrated today is not merely Baby Boomer nostalgia. The group had a talent for knowing how to blend their influences together in a seamless manner, so that they could never be accused of ripping off a particular musician or genre. Perhaps most importantly, the songs they wrote were quite simply great songs, worthy of being discovered by new generations almost 50 years later.
Works Cited
Gould, Jonathan. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.
Harry, Bill. The British Invasion: How the Beatles and Other UK Bands Conquered America. Surrey: Chrome Dreams, 2004.
Hertsgaard, Mark. A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of The Beatles. New York: Delacorte, 1995.
Ingham, Chris. The Rough Guide to the Beatles. London: Rough Guides, 2006.
MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994.
Norman, Philip. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation. New York: MJF Books, 1981.
O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Seven Fat Years.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, 167-176.
Porterfield, Christopher. “Pop Music: The Messengers.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, 102-114.
Pritchard, David and Alan Lysaght. The Beatles: An Oral History. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
Sawyer, June Skinner. “Introduction.” In Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on The Beatles, Their Legacy and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2006, xli-xlvii.
Schaffner, Nicholas. The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Stark, Steven D. Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender and the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
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