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With his recent book Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, veteran British journalist Ray Connolly offered a rare glimpse behind the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s dizzying highs and soul-crushing lows. His latest work, entitled Being John Lennon: A Restless Life, affords the Beatles legend with similar treatment, reminding us about the powerful, always wavering spirit […]

Released in November 1968, The Beatles (popularized as The White Album) remains the most complex, most beguiling of the Fab Four’s masterworks. Where Revolver is pop music’s reigning tour-de-force and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is its multicolored, phantasmagoric cousin, The White Album exists as a strange admixture of beauty and terror, a work of portraiture […]

In May 2017, Apple released a remixed version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to mostly critical acclaim. While a slew of audiophiles adored the expanded soundscape, die-hards took issue with any suggestion that twenty-first-century hands might trifle with the Beatles’ masterpieces. After all, you can’t improve on the Mona Lisa, right? Well, it turns […]

The Beatles’ final American tour in the summer of 1966 was a harrowing experience, to say the least. Having begun under the cloud of John Lennon’s widely-criticized remark about the band’s popularity relative to Jesus Christ, things had gone from bad to worse, culminating in a spate of staged Beatles record burnings and, later, their […]

In rock ‘n’ roll’s nascent years—when Bill Haley was giddily rocking around the clock and later, as the Who’s Roger Daltrey screamed “hope I die before I get old!”—the notion that popular music had any lasting cultural value was almost uniformly dismissed. Fast forward seven decades, and college courses on Popular Music have become the […]