Released in summer 1964 (only a year and change after Please Please Me), A Hard Day’s Night was arguably the first glimpse of our modern idea of The Beatles: safe but a little strange warm but with shades of bleakness a band that experimented tirelessly without ever leaving the mainstream.

In other words, where other cultural avenues had taken new directions, pop music had mostly stayed the course.

(We’re talking about Bob Dylan here.) What he did acknowledge was that their sound-the energy, the harmonic language, the combination of universally appealing but unprecedented-was somehow inevitable that they pointed the direction of where music had to go.Īt the time, folk-Dylan’s province-was considered part of a vanguard in jazz, composers like John Coltrane had already signaled a move toward abstraction in visual art, pop had happily unseated the macho hugeness of abstract expressionism independent filmmaking was developing a momentum. Whether or not Dylan liked the band’s music was unclear. By then, the band had saturated America with the same bizarre speed they’d saturated England, first broadcast on American radio about a week before Christmas 1963 by a Washington, D.C.-area DJ whose friend-a flight attendant for BOAC-had brought a copy of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” over in their luggage, essentially unplugging the last finger holding back a transatlantic flood. Driving through Colorado during a road trip in early 1964, Bob Dylan heard a rundown of the country’s Top 10 singles, more than half of which were by The Beatles.

Beatles tell me why a hard day's night