Which is your favorite Beatle-period ? | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

So, what you got against 1970’s I Me Mine , @vonbontee?

@meanmistermustard said
Still the end of 1965. They looked incredibly cool, confident and together, knowing no one could touch them. This is when they strided off into the distance of their competitors who took 18 months or so to get near them again – and their competitors were Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks etc, not your acts who had a few hits then faded away into obscurity.

Ooo, that is just silliness including Dylan. After releasing Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, end of 1965 into 1966, he’s recording an album that will make up one of rock’s Holy Trinities, and is generally regarded his greatest album, Blonde on Blonde. Bob was still very much giving them a run for their money and recording work considered equally as important as what the Boys were up to. And that’s without bringing in his live performances with The Hawks at the end of 1965, and their 1966 tour, which are considered some of the most important and influential live performances ever.

Yeah, he dropped off the map for a couple of years in mid-’66, using the motorcycle accident on 29 July 1966 to get off the treadmill Albert Grossman had him on, but up to that point they were very much running on a par with each other when it came to redefining what popular music could be and creating new paths for it to explore.

And Bob’s withdrawal was voluntary, you could call them his Watching The Wheels  years, but The Basement Tapes showed his still breaking barriers, even if it would take 8 years to officially scratch the surface of what he was doing in the Red Room and at Big Pink throughout 1967. Had he pulled an album, possibly a double, out of those sessions with The Hawks as they became The Band, it’d be considered as one of the great albums of 1967, with a lasting influence. Instead he chose to give many of the songs away, while his own versions would influence via the bootleg market.

There’s a reason his is only one of their contemporaries among the gallery of faces we find on the cover of Pepper (an album that was the antithesis of how he created and recorded music, with it involving more studio time than all of his ’60s studio recordings put together).