We wrote tons of songs in India.” John, the most distractible Beatle, had the hot streak of his life during his three months in Rishikesh, which is why the White Album is their most John-intensive record.
As John Lennon said years later, “We sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all these songs.
They also had no drug connections, which might help explain why they came up with their sturdiest tunes in years. They wrote these songs on retreat with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India, a place where they had no electric instruments. When the boys gathered at George’s pad in the last days of May – nobody’s sure of the exact date – they had excellent reason to feel cocky about their new material. Billed as “The Beatles-Direct from Hamburg!”, when they began playing in the Litherland Town Hall in Liverpool (27 December 1960), for the first time the crowd spontaneously rushed the stage in the frenzy that would become familiar in the succeeding years.Fifty years later, the Esher demos remain one of the Beatles’ strangest artifacts. To hear the Beatles tell it, the seven-hour sets in Hamburg under pressure to “make a show” and bring in customers transformed their music, so much so that when they returned to England after their first stint in Hamburg, the world had its first taste of Beatlemania. Like the television series and CD-sets to which it is a companion, Anthology is meant to be a picture of their life as a band from the inside-what it was like “in the eye of the hurricane,” as McCartney puts it. Told through the words of surviving band members Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, supplemented by extensive culling of old interviews with John Lennon, the history of the band is recounted from its beginnings as the Quarrymen in 1957 to the final acrimonious breakup in 1970.
Chronicle Books $60), the group’s collective ‘autobiography’ published October 5th, describes how their musical apprenticeship served on the Reeperbahn produced the sound that defined the 1960s and, arguably, popular music ever since. Now it’s the official story: The Beatles Anthology (367 pp. For more than thirty-five years, the Beatles have credited their musical success to the long hours they spent playing in Hamburg, before they were discovered by Brian Epstein and then the rest of the world.
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