History 4
Not content with their unprecedented commercial success, the Beatles began to take their music more seriously, shifting from covers and upbeat pop love songs to more introspective, experimental material, highlighted on December 1965's Rubber Soul. The next U.S. Beatles album, Yesterday...And Today, was released on June 15, 1966 and featured a shocking cover featuring the handsome Fab Four surrounded by raw meat and butchered baby dolls, a protest against Capitol's "butchery" of their albums in the U.S. market.
Complaints from retailers immediately rolled in, and the album was withdrawn, reissued the following week with a new, mundane cover of a steamer trunk. (Today copies of the album with the original cover are worth thousands of dollars.) Further controversy plagued the group when John Lennon claimed in a newspaper interview that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus."
Many radio stations stopped playing their songs, and protesters appeared outside their concerts. Meanwhile the group was increasingly under the influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru; this flirtation with Eastern religion soon became common among '60s rock stars, and, more interestingly, lead the Beatles to experiment with Indian sitar music on their next few albums. The band also began using copious amounts of psychedelic drugs, foreshadowing the "flower children" of the next few years.
Following the release of Revolver, their most mature effort to date, in August 1966, the Beatles embarked on their final U.S. tour, playing their last live show at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29th. Henceforth, the band announced, they were going to eschew live performances to concentrate on more elaborate studio recordings.
Rumors of a breakup were spread in the media as the band disappeared from the public. The Beatles spent much of early 1967 in the studio, recording their magnum opus, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This groundbreaking concept album completely changed the way rock albums created: it used numerous studio effects, placed the emphasis on the album as a whole rather than on singles, and rewrote the standard for cover art with its famous mannequin-based photo collage.Sgt. Pepper's later won four Grammys, including Best Album.
Complaints from retailers immediately rolled in, and the album was withdrawn, reissued the following week with a new, mundane cover of a steamer trunk. (Today copies of the album with the original cover are worth thousands of dollars.) Further controversy plagued the group when John Lennon claimed in a newspaper interview that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus."
Many radio stations stopped playing their songs, and protesters appeared outside their concerts. Meanwhile the group was increasingly under the influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru; this flirtation with Eastern religion soon became common among '60s rock stars, and, more interestingly, lead the Beatles to experiment with Indian sitar music on their next few albums. The band also began using copious amounts of psychedelic drugs, foreshadowing the "flower children" of the next few years.
Following the release of Revolver, their most mature effort to date, in August 1966, the Beatles embarked on their final U.S. tour, playing their last live show at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29th. Henceforth, the band announced, they were going to eschew live performances to concentrate on more elaborate studio recordings.
Rumors of a breakup were spread in the media as the band disappeared from the public. The Beatles spent much of early 1967 in the studio, recording their magnum opus, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This groundbreaking concept album completely changed the way rock albums created: it used numerous studio effects, placed the emphasis on the album as a whole rather than on singles, and rewrote the standard for cover art with its famous mannequin-based photo collage.Sgt. Pepper's later won four Grammys, including Best Album.
