Project: Abbey Road
Apple, EMI, publishing rights and rumor: the business and myth machinery behind the Beatles.
- 1Project: Abbey Road
There are bands that become popular, and then there are bands that stop behaving like bands.
- 2Before Steve Jobs, the Beatles Had an Apple Store — Then They Gave Everything Away
Long before Steve Jobs turned the Apple Store into a cathedral of glass, aluminum, pale wood, and controlled consumer desire, another Apple opened a shop in London. It belonged to the Beatles, stood at 94 Baker Street, covered an…
- 3Magic Alex: The Man Who Promised the Beatles the Future and Built Them a Studio That Barely Worked
By the end of the 1960s, the Beatles had enough money, fame, and cultural authority to ask a dangerous question: why should they have to wait for the future to arrive? They had already helped transform recording, fashion, film…
- 4John Lennon Invented a Country Because the United States Was Trying to Deport Him
In the spring of 1973, John Lennon had a problem that fame could not solve. The United States government had ordered him deported, his immigration lawyer was fighting through a maze of statutes and administrative decisions, the…
- 5How a Detroit Radio Call Turned Paul McCartney Into a Dead Man
On October 12, 1969, Detroit-area disc jockey Russ Gibb was working at WKNR-FM when a caller brought him an irresistible piece of radio. The caller claimed that Paul McCartney had died years earlier, that the Beatles had secretly…
- 6Sosumi: How the Beatles’ Apple Fought Steve Jobs’ Apple for Nearly Thirty Years
For years, millions of Macintosh users had a tiny joke hidden inside their computers. Open the Mac sound settings, choose the alert named “Sosumi,” and the machine would play an ordinary little electronic chime whose name made…
- 7Paul McCartney Told Michael Jackson to Buy Publishing. Then Jackson Bought the Beatles.
Before Michael Jackson owned the publishing rights to hundreds of Beatles songs, he was sitting in recording studios with Paul McCartney making pop records. The two were friends, collaborators, and two of the most recognizable…
- 8Mark Staycer, Let Him Be, and the Strange Afterlife of John Lennon
Mark Staycer did not need a secret identity to have an extraordinary story. He was a Michigan radio personality, a lifelong Beatles obsessive, and a John Lennon tribute performer whose resemblance, voice, timing, and knowledge of…
- 9How AI Helped Finish the Last Beatles Song Without Creating a Fake John Lennon
When the Beatles announced “Now and Then” in October 2023, one word almost immediately threatened to distort the entire story: AI. Headlines described an “AI Beatles song,” social media users imagined a computer-generated John…