The Beatles (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles, released on the 22nd of November 1968, arrived in a plain white sleeve with no artwork, no colour, no decoration beyond the band's name pressed faintly into the cardboard. It was a deliberate provocation. The previous album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, had been an explosion of colour and orchestration that Time magazine called a historic departure in the progress of music. Now, less than eighteen months later, the same band handed the world a double album of thirty songs in a cover that said almost nothing.

  What had happened between those two records? The answer involves a retreat to India, the arrival of a woman who changed the room's chemistry entirely, a drummer walking off the job in August, and a producer who slipped away on holiday without telling anyone. The Beatles was recorded during the sessions that, as Lennon later put it, made the break-up of the band audible. It is the ninth studio album and only double album the Beatles ever made. It has since been certified 24 times platinum by the RIAA, tied for fifth all time in the United States. And it began, quietly, in a meditation centre in Rishikesh, India.

• 2. Rishikesh and the Writing

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  Between February and April 1968, the Beatles joined Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation course in Rishikesh, India. Lennon described the trip as a chance to "get away from everything". The only Western instrument available during the stay was the acoustic guitar, and so that is what everyone played.

  Lennon and McCartney treated the retreat less as a sabbatical than as a writing room. They met, in McCartney's recollection, "clandestinely in the afternoons in each other's rooms" to review new work. Lennon later said that despite being expected to meditate, "I did write some of my best songs there." Collectively, the group wrote around forty new songs during the stay.

  For George Harrison, Rishikesh was a turning point of a different kind. He had spent two years studying the sitar, and now re-engaged with the guitar. Musicologist Walter Everett compared Harrison's development as a composer in 1968 to Lennon and McCartney's five years earlier, though Everett noted Harrison remained "privately prolific" given his usual subordinate standing in the group.

  The four Beatles did not leave together. Ringo Starr departed less than two weeks after arrival, unable to tolerate the food. McCartney left in mid-March. Harrison and Lennon stayed longer; Lennon eventually left after hearing rumours that the Maharishi had behaved inappropriately towards women accompanying the group. McCartney and Harrison later concluded those accusations were untrue. Lennon's wife Cynthia said there was "not a shred of evidence or justification". Lennon wrote "Sexy Sadie" shortly after leaving, originally titled "Maharishi", before changing the name for release.

• 3. The Studio Unravels

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  Recording began at Abbey Road on the 30th of May 1968 and continued until the 14th of October. The sessions were soon defined less by music than by conflict. Engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the group since Revolver, walked out on the 16th of July. He announced mid-session that the constant bickering made it impossible to continue and left immediately.

  The central rupture ran between Lennon and McCartney. Lennon found McCartney's songs, in biographer Philip Norman's account, "cloyingly sweet and bland", while McCartney viewed Lennon's as "harsh, unmelodious and deliberately provocative". Peter Doggett writes that "the most essential line of communication" between the two was broken on the very first day of recording, when Yoko Ono arrived.

  Ono's presence was unprecedented. The Beatles had a strict policy of excluding wives and girlfriends from sessions. Lennon brought her to work on "Revolution 1" and she became a near-constant presence thereafter. Her role between Lennon and McCartney impeded the intuitive creative shorthand the band had long relied on.

  Producer George Martin's authority had also been fading. He left for an unannounced holiday during recording, deputising his young assistant Chris Thomas to oversee production. Martin had argued the group should cut the thirty songs down to a single, stronger album. The band refused. Harrison later acknowledged that some tracks could have been B-sides, but said "there was a lot of ego in that band." Starr joked that the record should have been two separate releases: "The White Album" and "The Whiter Album".

• 4. Ringo Walks Out

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  On the 22nd of August 1968, Ringo Starr abruptly left the studio during the session for "Back in the U.S.S.R.". He felt his role had become peripheral and was particularly stung by McCartney's persistent criticism of his drumming on that track. Abbey Road staff noted that Starr was typically the first to arrive at the studio, waiting in the reception area for the others.

  With Starr gone, the remaining three Beatles divided the drum parts among themselves. McCartney played drums on "Dear Prudence". For "Back in the U.S.S.R.", the drum track is a composite of contributions from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Only sixteen of the album's thirty tracks feature all four members performing.

  Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison eventually asked Starr to return. He came back on the 5th of September to find his kit covered in flowers, a gesture organised by Harrison. The first backing track the full group recorded after his return was "Glass Onion", Lennon's pointed joke aimed at fans who hunted hidden meanings in Beatles songs.

  McCartney later said the sessions were "a turning point" because "we were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". Engineer Ken Scott, present on the night of the 20th of August when Lennon and Starr briefly joined McCartney in a different studio, recalled that "you could cut the atmosphere with a knife". The tensions from these months continued into the following year and fed directly into the band's dissolution.

• 5. Thirty Songs, Every Genre

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  Edwin Faust of Stylus Magazine captured what made the album structurally different from everything the Beatles had previously released: on The Beatles, "every song is faithful to its selected genre. The rock n' roll tracks are purely rock n' roll; the folk songs are purely folk; the surreal pop numbers are purely surreal pop." Earlier albums had woven multiple styles into a single track. Here each piece stayed in its lane.

  The acoustic guitar, the only available instrument in India, left its mark on the finished record. "Blackbird", "Julia", "Wild Honey Pie", "I Will", and "Mother Nature's Son" were all recorded solo or by only part of the group. "Julia" is the only Beatles song on which Lennon performs entirely alone. It is a tribute to his mother Julia Lennon, who was killed in a road accident in 1958 when Lennon was seventeen.

  At the opposite extreme sat "Helter Skelter", written by McCartney after the initial takes ran so long they would not practically fit on a vinyl side. The session was described as chaotic. Harrison reportedly circled the studio holding a flaming ashtray above his head. The stereo version of the track contains almost a minute more music than the mono, ending with Starr's celebrated shout: "I've got blisters on my fingers!"

  "Revolution 9", assembled by Lennon, Harrison, and Ono from tape collages and spoken-word extracts in the style of Karlheinz Stockhausen, occupied a different extreme entirely. McCartney was out of the country when it was made and was reportedly unhappy it made the final cut. It opens with an extract from a Royal Schools of Music examination tape and was the track critics most consistently singled out for criticism from the start.

• 6. The White Sleeve and Its Number

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  Conceptual artist Richard Hamilton designed the cover in collaboration with McCartney. The result stood in deliberate opposition to Peter Blake and Jann Haworth's vivid artwork for Sgt. Pepper. Hamilton's design was a plain white sleeve. The band's name appeared in Helvetica, crookedly blind-embossed slightly below the middle of the right side.

  Every copy of the original pressing carried a unique stamped serial number. Hamilton described the purpose as creating "the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies". The first four copies went to the members of the band, making number 0000005 the first one sold publicly. That copy was purchased in 2008 for £19,201 on eBay.

  In 2015, Ringo Starr's copy, number 0000001, sold for $790,000 at auction, a world record. Members of Hotline TNT later revealed on the Impossible Way of Life podcast that the buyer was Jack White, and that the album is now held in the vault at the headquarters of Third Man Records in Nashville.

  The album was almost called A Doll's House during production. That working title was dropped when the English progressive rock band Family released an album called Music in a Doll's House earlier that same year. The record was referred to as "the White Album" from the moment of its release, a nickname that has endured far longer than any formal title.

• 7. Sales, Charts, and Charles Manson

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  Capitol Records moved over 3.3 million copies of The Beatles to US stores within the first four days of release. The album debuted at number 11 on the US charts on the 14th of December 1968, reached number one on the 28th of December, and spent nine weeks at the top. In the UK it spent eight weeks at number one, including the entire competitive Christmas period. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, on the album's 40th anniversary, described it as "30 songs you can go through and listen to at will, certain of finding some pearls that even today remain unparalleled".

  The album also attracted something darker. Cult leader Charles Manson and his followers listened to it repeatedly after its release. Manson was unaware that "helter skelter" is British English for a fairground spiral slide. He interpreted several tracks, including "Blackbird", "Piggies", "Revolution 1", and "Revolution 9", as an apocalyptic message predicting a racial uprising. He drew parallels with chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation. McCartney later said: "Charles Manson interpreted that Helter Skelter was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse."

  The political left found the album unsatisfying for different reasons. New Left writers argued the Beatles had adopted parody and pastiche because they were, in Jon Landau's phrase writing for the Liberation News Service, "afraid of confronting reality". Many critics in that camp preferred the Rolling Stones' concurrent album Beggars Banquet as a more engaged response to 1968. Meanwhile, the John Birch Society claimed "Back in the U.S.S.R." was promoting communism, and Christian evangelist David Noebel read it as evidence of a communist plot to influence American youth.

  In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked The Beatles at number 10 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In the revised 2020 edition, it moved to number 29.