The Beatles were never a boy band. Sheesh. They were popular with teenagers but that alone does not a boy band make. Heck, Jim Morrison was on the cover of Tiger Beat during the Doors’ heyday - does that make them a boy band?
Well, the Beatles themselves idolized Holly- their very name was a tribute to the Crickets.
John Lennon sang Holly’s "Words of Love " on the ***Beatles for Sale ***album, and “Peggy Sue” on his solo ***Rock and Roll ***album.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney bought up Holly’s song catalogue.
I see that song as the first glimpse into Macca’s saccharine and banal aesthetic. Muzak to my ears.
Gimme Lennon any day over that cheesy sap.
By all accounts they were unbelievably exciting performers, up until they could no longer be heard. Ask anyone who saw them prior to 1963-1964.
1965, Dylan, ganja.
I tend to agree, although Macca wrote some great tunes, too. I just never could get into “Yesterday” or “Hey Jude” or any of those kinds of McCartney songs. For the earlier stuff, “All My Loving” and “Things We Said Today” are among my favorite Beatles tunes.
Sgt. Peppers IMHO.
I think Sgt. Peppers is way late. I think by Help! they were expanding the vocabulary of rock–you can catch glimpses of it even as early as With the Beatles!. But as far as a full-out revolutionary album, Rubber Soul would be my vote.
If you want to name a particular album I’d say it was Rubber Soul, the first studio-only album (after they had stopped touring and performing live). The fact that they didn’t need stage versions of the songs allowed them to experiment more. It was the beginning of their move toward psychedelia, for instance with the use of sitar in “Norwegian Wood”.
The intermediary stage between Rubber Soul and Revolver might also be a good place to pinpoint, specifically the single “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”, which is said to be their first single that wasn’t about love/relationships (or perhaps the first such rock single, which I am extremely dubious about), backed with what is said to be the first pop/rock song to use reversed tape loops.
But I was actually completely serious with my first reply - I think the experimentation with sound really did begin with including those 5 (or 6, perhaps) seconds of amplifier feedback in “I Feel Fine”. That seems to have been the first time they did something really revolutionary. I don’t think they were just an average or ordinary band before that, but I would say they never really pushed boundaries up to that point.
Agreed.
Prior to the Beatles, rock and roll was considered to be an “American” thing.
I’m going to hop on board the Rubber Soul bandwagon.
That one really ushered in the psychedelic 60s.
I’m with Dylan in that I also hear the lyrics as “I get high, I get high”.
*Rubber Soul *was released in December 1965; the Beatles stopped touring in August 1966.
And they did do a couple of the Rubber Soul songs in concert: “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone.” The most recent song they ever played live (prior to the rooftop concert, of course) was “Paperback Writer.”
Yeah, this is the moment (as much as there could be just one). The Beatles had already established themselves as top-flight performers and songwriters, but as others have noted, they were hardly the first to do those things. “I Feel Fine” was their coming out party as a band intent on pushing the envelope with their recordings as much as their live work.
I was debating Rubber Soul but despite some quintessential Beatle’s songs on there, and a glimpse of what would come, the overall tone feels more folk-rock than the stuff the started to explore on Revolver and IMHO perfected with Pepper’s.
And was on the fence between Revolver and Peppers. Some of my favorite Beatle’s tunes are on all three of the aforementioned (not all that much of a fan of their earlier stuff, I like them better when they were on drugs 
), yet Revolver seems like the transition album into their latter stuff.
Ultimately, I have to give it to Pepper’s for starting the foundation of music they began to write that would go on to this day to become a major influence in Rock up to this day.
Whoops. Thanks for the corrections! It would have been nothing short of amazing to see Nowhere Man or If I Needed Someone performed live.
Also, “A Day in the Life” has to be in the top 3 greatest rock songs of all time. Just sayin’ 
Indeed – and it was playing especially Paperback Writer on their tour of Japan that was a contributing factor to the cessation of touring: because they couldn’t hear themselves, they’d got a bit sloppy, figuring if they messed up, no one would hear them for the screaming. But Japanese fans were relatively quiet and polite: realising they were headed for an embarrassing gaffe with ‘Paperback’ notice how they sabotage their own performance (George waves deliberately to get the girls screaming to cover up the bad harmonies):