http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jlks/pike/beatle.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)But the Beatles were not as innocent as they seemed, at least not in the way they'd been taken, nor did they remain as removed. By the time John had made his odd inflammatory statements about the Beatles and Jesus in 1966, they were a firmly entrenched part of American life. Thus it made all the sense in the world when John, particularly, fought to live in the U.S. in the '70s (just as it also made a kind of sense for the U.S. government to harass and persecute him). Throughout the '60s all the Beatles' actions -- drugs, TM, thinly conceptual work, internal strife -- seemed to anticipate, prefigure, and even direct the ongoing moral crisis in the U.S., which served only to make them more popular, of course. But in retrospect it was all illusion; the Beatles were always only unconscious reflections, never messiahs.
Hailed as "bigger than Elvis," an incontrovertible fact at the time, they have diminished remarkably over the years. They were on hand for the conception of rock culture, which gestated several years before being born at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. But it's clear now that Dylan and the British blues players had vastly more to do with that than the Beatles. They contributed the weakest "major" album in all of rock'n'roll, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and were in fact neatly and wholly supplanted the following year by the Rolling Stones (finally: they'd been chasing the Beatles for five years). The Stones' Beggars Banquet marked the beginning of a pop hegemony that lasted until 1972 with music that was fresh, complex, dangerous, thrilling, and still emerging from the familiar country and blues sources -- music that has remained far more influential and vital than nearly anything in the Beatles' canon.
But give the Beatles their due. In their time they were wonderful fun; perhaps you had to be alive and aware then to know. They marched in the vanguard of an enormously affecting explosion of pop sensibility. Their early work (taking Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry as its starting point) finished the work begun by '50s rock'n'roll, altering forever our concepts of pop music. Such mid-'60s albums as Rubber Soul and Revolver stand up to the very finest work from a fertile period, including significant contributions from Dylan, the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, and others; and they supersede everything the British Invasion had to offer before 1968. Even the later Beatles albums and hits boast undeniable charms, though their conceits and insulations now work mostly only to date them.