The Beatles have added to the allure of the occasion by contributing two “new” songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were created when the surviving Beatles added vocal harmonies, instruments and new lyrics to two of Lennon’s working tapes, supplied by his widow, Yoko Ono.Īll this may net Apple $130 million next year, according to Forbes magazine, which recently listed the Beatles as the world’s best-paid rock band this year, a quarter century after their breakup.īut money aside, the attraction of the project for the Beatles is that after years of reading, hearing and seeing others tell their story, it allows them to tell it as they remember it. 22 and 23, will be followed by home-video releases and a series of compact disks of previously unreleased music. Right now, Apple’s staff of about five is putting into motion a plan meant to rekindle the world’s fascination with the Fab Four.Īpple’s six-hour documentary, which will be broadcast by ABC next Sunday at 9 p.m. Yet if there is one place where that spirit lives, it is on Abbey Road, in the elegantly appointed Knightsbridge headquarters of Apple, the company the Beatles founded in 1967 to oversee the band’s business affairs.Ĭoncert posters line a foyer wall that leads into the office, with its twostory wall of gold and platinum records and its reception area dominated by Richard Avedon’s 1968 psychedelic portraits. One thing that comes through in the documentary is the group’s ambivalence about Beatlemania. And as they approach their mid-50s, the time seemed right to put their memories on tape before they grew too murky or too encrusted in myth.

But their climb from obscurity in Liverpool to global fame was a matter of single-minded slogging.

Now fixtures in our culture, they seemed to have leaped fully formed into the limelight.

They eclipse even Elvis Presley as the subject of books, documentaries and critical studies, not only because their work represents a creative peak in the history of popular music but also because they influenced the attitudes of a generation. The Beatles, after all, have been the most thoroughly dissected and analyzed musicians of the 20th century. “They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then blamed it on us,” George Harrison observes a couple of hours into “The Beatles Anthology,” the television documentary to which Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have been contributing reminiscences for the last four years.īack together for the project - with John Lennon represented by excerpts from radio and television interviews he gave before he was murdered in 1980 - their idea was to tell the Beatles’ story in their own words.

The beatles anthology book