Seven years and seven months. That's how long the world officially knew the Beatles as a recording act, spanning from the date they released their first single in England to the day their breakup was announced on April 10, 1970.
Looking back after 40 years, that seems like a ridiculously short lifespan for such an important band. The time frame seems ever tinier considering the longevity of other popular bands of their era, like the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks, or bands that came later, like Bon Jovi and U2.
Did the Fab Four call it quits too soon? The answer might seem to be yes, considering interest in the band never really faded. Sales were massive for both the “Anthology" series from the mid-1990s and last year's CD remasters. Rolling Stone reported in December the surprising fact that the Beatles had the biggest selling album of the last decade with “1," and that they were second only to Eminem as the top selling artists of the decade.
In 1983, Keith Richards told Musician magazine there “was no need" for the Beatles to have broken up and that the band “could've taken a couple of years off, resolved their problems and still carried on." But as tantalizing as that “what if" scenario might seem to fans, there was little chance the band could have worked as a unit any longer, said eight authors of Beatle books (three of whom knew the band). In both the personal and artistic realms, these writers said, it was time for each band member to let things be.
By summer 1969, when the Beatles recorded their final album, “Abbey Road," the musicians were already feeling they'd long realized any collective artistic aspirations, said Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles' label Apple and author of “The White Book: The Beatles, the Bands, the Biz: An Insider's Look at an Era."
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