“Talk about peer pressure - The Beatles!” he whines. Says Paul, “He looked like Elvis.” Thanks, Paul.Ġ5:35 - The rest of the lads drop acid, but Paul wimps out. I am awake again.Ġ5:11 - The Beatles meet Elvis. But did they really smoke a joint before the ceremony? Ringo: “I was too stoned to remember.”Ġ4:55 - About 15 minutes of footage from Shea Stadium. “I laughed and laughed and laughed,” says Ringo.Ġ4:13 - Help! Not the movie my butt is falling asleep.Ġ4:44 - Three words: Ringo Starr, MBE. I invade the bathroom.Ġ2:41 - The Ed Sullivan Show footage - edited! Sacrilege!Ġ3:56 - Bob Dylan introduces the Fabs to grass. Excellent!Ġ2:07 - Three songs from the 1963 Royal Command Performance where Lennon made his infamous “rattle your jewels” quip. Finally, the good stuff!Ġ1:59 - A vintage 1963 TV appearance. The coffee has kicked in.Ġ0:39 - Augmented by George (who auditioned on a double-decker bus) and the “mean, moody and magnificent” drummer Pete Best, the lads leave Liverpool for Hamburg.Ġ0:56 - Clad in leather pants, they return home to The Cavern Club, gaining manager Brian Epstein and dumping Pete - seemingly no longer so magnificent - for Ringo.Ġ1:05 - Several minutes of stunning footage from a 1962 Cavern show by the boys.

Spoiler alert: Paul is still the cute one.Ġ0:20 - Paul meets John at a village fete in 1957.

I may need more coffee.Ġ0:09 - We get our first glimpse of Paul, George and Ringo, who were interviewed extensively for this set. The strains of Love Me Do fill the air.Ġ0:04 - The story begins with the birth of Ringo in 1940. Here’s my minute-by-minute diary:Ġ0:01 - Armed with a giant mug of coffee, I push play on Disc 1.

But with more than 11 hours of footage on five DVDs - including five hours of stuff that wasn’t shown on TV back in 1995, along with tons of unedited archival footage (very cool), plenty of artsy montages (not always cool) and even a mid-’90s jam by the surviving Beatles (sorta cool) - this definitive Beatlography is as close as anyone could get to a day in the life of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Or can it? To find out, I decided to watch the exhaustive new Beatles Anthology DVD in one sitting. In these days of decade-long gaps between albums - Axl Rose, come on down! - that sort of fast-forward existence just can’t be fully appreciated. Pepper, The Beatles’ long and winding road was marked by incredible milestones.Įven more incredible, perhaps, is how short that road really was - barely six years separate the band’s breakthrough and breakup. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):įrom Sullivan to Shea to Sgt. This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it.

The beatles anthology book