They Found Themselves By Losing Their Minds But Also Made The Statement They Were Crazy

"The Beatles posed as rebels against class conventions and the supposed stuffiness of their elders, but their appeal was always to nice boys and girls, who enjoyed the patronising sentimentality of Eleanor Rigby and When I'm Sixty-Four.

In New York they met Bob Dylan, who introduced them to smoking pot. Dylan was in every way a superior artist and performer.

His songs, rasped out in that distinctive snarling voice and interrupted by jerky mouth organ recitatives, truly did herald something new in the world.

The sung lyrics of Dylan are very nearly in the league of some of the great songs of the world, such as those of Robert Burns. The Beatles are pappy by comparison.

This fact, obvious to everyone else, was certainly not clear to The Beatles themselves, who, the moment they were famous, became invested with a risible degree of self-importance.

Lennon was the most pretentious and self-regarding, and the more he made an exhibition of himself, the more he seemed to believe himself to be some kind of poet-sage or philosopher.

Lennon's own self-importance, however, was as nothing to that of his second-wife, Yoko Ono.

When they married, they lay in bed being photographed and offering such useful advice to the world as 'stay in bed' and 'grow your hair'.

Going further, they suggested that the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East and between the super-powers of the Soviet Union and the United States would evaporate were the politicians involved only to remove their trousers.

...There was a mindlessness about the 1960s, a sheer silliness not to see the consequences of such vandalism."

-- A.N. Wilson, author, on when the world lost it's way, for the Daily Mail.