Along with most of Staten Island, I’ve been watching the ginormous Beatles Anthology via Netflix. It’s not too shabby, although it’s literally about 80% concert footage, 5% reaction shots of the screaming, hyperventilating young girls in the crowd, and only about 15% interview snippets from the Beatles themselves.
The series was made after John’s death but before George’s, so you get archival recordings and footage of John for his side of the story and plenty of footage with George that’s sad not only because he’s now dead but because so much of it features him during a phase in his later years when he apparently believed he looked fly with a pencil-thin moustache.
The Beatles don’t tax themselves dispelling their own perhaps literally mythical achievements: biggest concert ever (Shea Stadium), first use of backwards vocals in a song (“Rain”), first music videos (also “Rain,” with the more popular A-side, “Paperback Writer”), that they didn’t discover reefer until Bob Dylan practically forced it on them, all those #1 hits and bigger than Jesus, etc.
But the concert footage is fun, even if it does seem to go on too long—the clips nearly always features entire songs, concert-film style, which can drag after awhile. But it’s the Beatles. It’s fun to watch their styles change and their fans along with them, from the bobbed British wallflowers in horn-rimmed specs during 1962 to the borderline-hippie kids in Kodachrome-colored clothing less than five years on. Musical styles changing, too: the sudden lust for electric piano, George snapping up that sitar, the obsession with Dylan’s folksiness and the Beach Boys’ crystalline harmonies. And I haven’t even yet reached the episodes where persistent touring and infighting soured their outlook and ground them out.