The Best Band Of All Time: The Beatles

I annoyed some folks by claiming the Police were the worst band ever, but I don’t know who can seriously disagree with the Beatles being the best band of all time. I have no second choice on this, no internal debate. Spearheading the greatest video documented decade,  the Beatles rose from the ashes of WW2 in death, illness, abandonment and borderline poverty and in ten short years exploded in and exploded out. Ten years after that, their leader was shot to death in the streets of New York and cemented their legend.

Beginning as a skiffle band with attitude, they metamorphosed  into hard rocking, multi tasking amphetamine blasted bad boys in Germany,  then resident leather clad hoodlums at the Cavern, boy band par excellence  around the world, and finally studio rats at Abbey Road. After which one was murdered, one died of cancer, and the other two never got out from under their own shadow.

If that was the entire story, those UK albums and finito, it would be impossible to overestimate the Beatles. While it might not be precisely true, claiming the Beatles never recorded a bad song is close enough to stand as an aphorism. My favorite album of all time is Revolver UK, it is an indelible part of my childhood (inescapable in the summer of ’66 and who wanted to?) that I listen to till this day.

That’s all true but there is one thing more. While we don’t know how the world  will react to the Beatles 100 or 300 years from now, it is a fair bet the perception of their entire oeuvre will change from pop to classical. Like the greatest of the greatest classical composers, like Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, and maybe Schubert, they will be performed in recital, analyzed, discussed and studied.

The Beatles are immortals and the best band of all time is almost am underestimation: wherever people think about music they will think about the Beatles.