"A hundred years from now, people will listen to the music of The Beatles the same way we listen to Mozart," Paul McCartney famously remarked in 1992. If his prediction comes true, the listeners of the future will need an intelligent guide to steer them through the complete works in much the same way that H.C. Robbins Landon, for instance, offers a way into Mozart, and this could well be, it Mark Hertsgaard examines not just the songs but successive takes of the songs in minute detail, charting their development from vague idea to finished product and giving a grand overview of the Beatles phenomenon along the way. If you're bursting to know how the alarm clock got into A Day in the Life and a bit of a BBC radio production of King Lear made its way into I Am the Walrus, this is the book for you.
