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“[Ads by Yahoo!] $85 The Beatles 16Cd+DVD” plus 1

“[Ads by Yahoo!] $85 The <b>Beatles</b> 16Cd+DVD” plus 1

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Should the <b>Beatles</b> have worked it out?

Posted: 08 Apr 2010 08:47 AM PDT

Seven years and seven months. That's how long the world officially knew the Beatles as a recording act, spanning from the date they released their first single in England to the day their breakup was announced on April 10, 1970.

Looking back after 40 years, that seems like a ridiculously short lifespan for such an important band. The time frame seems ever tinier considering the longevity of other popular bands of their era, like the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks, or bands that came later, like Bon Jovi and U2.

Did the Fab Four call it quits too soon? The answer might seem to be yes, considering interest in the band never really faded. Sales were massive for both the "Anthology" series from the mid-1990s and last year's CD remasters. Rolling Stone reported in December the surprising fact that the Beatles had the biggest selling album of the last decade with "1," and that they were second only to Eminem as the top selling artists of the decade.

In 1983, Keith Richards told Musician magazine there "was no need" for the Beatles to have broken up and that the band "could've taken a couple of years off, resolved their problems and still carried on." But as tantalizing as that "what if" scenario might seem to fans, there was little chance the band could have worked as a unit any longer, said eight authors of Beatle books (three of whom knew the band). In both the personal and artistic realms, these writers said, it was time for each band member to let things be.

By summer 1969, when the Beatles recorded their final album, "Abbey Road," the musicians were already feeling they'd long realized any collective artistic aspirations, said Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles' label Apple and author of "The White Book: The Beatles, the Bands, the Biz: An Insider's Look at an Era."

'No place to go'

"There's one subtlety that people don't realize, and we discussed this one time at a meeting in a Hyde Park hotel: they had no place to go," Mansfield said. "They couldn't be more No. 1 — they couldn't be bigger. They had the wealth, they had the success, they had all the things that would be goals for a rock band. That was one of the reasons we did Apple Records. It gave them something new to do."

The decision to stop touring in 1966 deprived them of the normal performer-audience dynamic that keeps bands energized, said Chris O'Dell, a former Apple Records employee who penned the tome "Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days And Long Nights With The Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton And the Women They Loved."

"As a live band on tour, they had nothing to shoot for," she said. "They couldn't hear themselves. It wasn't fun for them. George (Harrison) once told me the best fun he ever had in the Beatles was in Hamburg, Germany — that was like really touring and really being out there, but that didn't happen for them afterwards."

Because the Beatles in their early days were united like few other bands, they were able to weather troubles that might have destroyed other acts, Mansfield said. But by 1969, that unity was coming undone. Paul McCartney disagreed with the other three members about who should manage the group, John Lennon was more interested in working with new wife Yoko Ono, and Harrison was disgruntled at not getting more songs on the albums.

Bob Spitz, author of the New York Times best seller "The Beatles: The Biography," said these disagreements alone would have kept them from sticking around much longer, much less releasing another record up to the high standard of "Abbey Road."

"It wasn't likely, based on their emotions at the time, that we were going to get fabulous material as a group from them," Spitz said. "Emotionally they weren't in any shape to be the Beatles anymore. They didn't like each other. When the Beatles got together they were young guys. By the time they put out 'Abbey Road,' their relationships had no bearing on each other as a group anymore."


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