How on earth do you follow The Beatles? It’s like the Wright Brothers wondering what they should do next. The size and scope of their success are barely comprehensible. We might view Taylor Swift as a giant of modern times thanks to the 114million albums she has sold, but the Fab Four have flogged in excess of 600million. That’s seismic.
When you dig a little deeper, the scope of the success proves even more monumental. The young Liverpudlians burst on the scene when the world’s population was only 3.1billion, remarkably about 38.75% of what it is today. That places The Beatles at their pomp at around 14 times more popular than Swift is presently. Imagine that. Frankly, it’d be borderline insufferable. Beatlemania truly was tantamount to the first global revolution.
But that didn’t necessarily promise untold riches for the band after they split. As the decline of Elvis Presley had proven before them, hysteria has a rather prominent off switch. Even during their initial pomp, the rise to unprecedented heights was not without the odd dip. “During 1966, The Beatles were having a bit of a setback,” George Martin once explained, “It wasn’t generally known that their general popularity seemed to be a little bit on the wane. Brian Epstein was very worried about it indeed.”
In some ways, the setback was indicative of the sort of entanglement that may have prognosticated similar issues when they called it quits. Change and evolution were always part of their brilliance. It’s what helped to make them so massive. They collected fans from spheres as disparate as avant-garde art circles to teenybopper cliques. Tracks like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ played into two very different marks. However, uniting these forces at the same time was tricky during transitory phases.
When they split, one young fan interviewed by the press that day outside of Abbey Road commented, “Nobody will ever replace The Beatles. It’s just one Beatles group. We grew up with them. They started when they were younger and we were younger, and they belong to us in a way. There could never be another Beatles, never!” There was no guarantee that she would be a fan of their solo stuff.
She wouldn’t be alone. “To my mind, The Beatles are like two different bands,” Dougie Payne of Travis told Far Out. “When I was little, my sister was a Beatles obsessive, and her room was next to mine so their records would filter through the wall — so, they just sort of seeped in. But Gill was only into the mop-top Beatles albums, so that to me was The Beatles.“ With the bandmembers almost certain to attempt to prove themselves as artistic forces in their own right, there was also no guarantee that Gill would get back into them this time out.
However, there was also an internal drive, apparent in each member to some extent, to beat their old buddies in the battle of the charts. As Todd Rundgren would later reflect, ”The only one who seemed to have recovered from any of the effects of that was Ringo. He did the music for fun. He didn’t feel that there was some burden to it; he just liked to play. Any opportunity to sing was fine, but I never saw him having any pretence that he was building some giant musical legacy.”
While his claim is purely a personal corroboration, it’s easy to see that when the Fab Four went solo, they really did take a serious approach to their unfurling legacy. One quote from Paul McCartney really elucidates the matter, with Macca commenting, “That’s my theory, that in years to come, people may actually look at all my work rather than the context of it following the Beatles. That’s the danger, as it came from ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Fool On The Hill’, to ‘Bip Bop’, which is such an inconsequential little song.”
So, which member of The Beatles had the biggest solo hit?
This mindset placed the former Fab Four in a race to revive their career following the fallout of their torrid split. And it was the star who had been inadvertently stockpiling songs who came out on top. All Things Must Pass saw George Harrison release what much of the public considered to be the first proper solo album by a former Beatle.
Of course, his experimental Wonderwall Music arrived in 1968 when The Beatles were still together, as did a few avant-garde oddities by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Moreover, McCartney’s announcement of his solo debut pretty much made their demise clear. However, All Things Must Pass was the first to arrive since the break-up had been fully confirmed and the dust was settling.
The guitarist was ready to move on in more ways than one. On rock’s first triple album, Harrison unleashed a breezy spiritualism that went on to sell around eight to ten million copies, with ‘My Sweet Lord’ scoring the first number one by a Beatle in a solo capacity. Even the title seemed to tap into the sense of the public moving on from the shadow of the Fab Four, and that resonance resulted in record sales.
McCartney and Wings might have run it close with Band on the Run, and Lennon’s Imagine certainly shifted whopping units, but ot this day, All Things Must Pass remains fitting out in front, proving in some strange way that the magic of The Beatles truly was down to the group being more than the sum of their parts—and those parts were monstrous all the same.