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Yet I loved both songs as a boy, and still do-Elton, always the kindliest-sounding of rock megastars, sings on John’s hit, and sounds like the guiding spirit of Paul’s, as if he’s a yenta nudging them together.The Beatles began recording "She Loves You" on a tour bus in England in late June 1963. John’s sax solo is Bobby Keys, Paul’s is Tom Scott, though they could have traded places without anyone noticing. “I don’t know but I think love is fine.” Both hit Number One, for just one week. Both serve love-is-the-answer platitudes, though attractively warmhearted ones: “Whatever gets you to the light, ’sall right” vs. The song it really resembles is the Wings hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” with the same yacht-rock studio sheen.

But the most shocking thing isn’t the gun line-it’s the lush pop feel. It’s not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is “Don’t need a gun to blow your mind.” After December 1980, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” dropped off the radio and hasn’t been heard since. “John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with a big assist from Elton John. But that’s what it means to love the Beatles-you never run out of surprises.” I guarantee the day this book comes out, I will find out something new. And though I’ve spent my whole life devouring every scrap of information about them, I’m constantly learning.

Every few days, I get into a Beatles argument I’ve never had before, while continuing other arguments that have been raging since my childhood. Within thirty seconds they’re assigning me a new chapter I must write. “If you tell people you’re writing a book about the Beatles, at first they smile and ask, “Another one? What’s left to say?” So I mention “Baby’s in Black,” or “It’s All Too Much,” or Lil Wayne’s version of “Help” or the Kendrick Lamar battle rhyme where he says “blessings to Paul McCartney,” or Hollywood Bowl, or Rock ’n’ Roll Music, or the Beastie Boys’ “I’m Down”-but I rarely get that far, because they’re already jumping in with their favorite overlooked Beatle song, the artifact nobody else prizes properly, the nuances nobody else notices. The morning after his first listen, he sat at the piano and wrote “God Only Knows.” As he said, “We prayed for an album that would be a rival to Rubber Soul.”ĭreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World Brian Wilson was still writing surf hits until he heard this record. For artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, it was a model of artistic independence. It’s where the Beatles became the Beatles. Yet unlike some of their later artistic statements, this one was fun to make, and it shows. After that, they went full-time into the masterpiece-making business. It was an accidental masterpiece-but one that stunned them into realizing how far they could go. Since these guys were riding new levels of musical fluidity and inspiration, firing on so many more cylinders than anybody else had, they stumbled onto discoveries that changed the way music has been made ever since. “But with their backs against the wall, the Beatles produced an album far ahead of anything they’d done before.