The Complete History of the Beatles as Told By Conan O’Brien

The world end­ed in the nine­teen-six­ties. Or rather, one world end­ed in the nine­teen-six­ties and gave way to anoth­er, a tran­si­tion per­son­i­fied by no human beings more clear­ly than the Bea­t­les. “They are light­ning rods for so much that makes the six­ties a rev­o­lu­tion­ary decade,” says The Rest Is His­to­ry pod­cast co-host Tom Hol­land in the video above. “In all kinds of ways, in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, we’re liv­ing in the after­math of what hap­pened in the six­ties, rather like peo­ple in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry were liv­ing in the after­math of what hap­pened in the fif­teen-twen­ties.” Many of the show’s reg­u­lar lis­ten­ers will grasp that anal­o­gy imme­di­ate­ly, though per­haps few­er of those who’ve tuned in to this espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar episode, in which Hol­land recounts the com­plete his­to­ry of the Bea­t­les with Conan O’Brien.

O’Brien has nev­er made a secret of his Bea­t­les obses­sion, but here he demon­strates it defin­i­tive­ly by sup­ply­ing most of the details of the band’s sto­ry him­self. (That goes even for rel­a­tive­ly obscure ones: he men­tions, for exam­ple, the score Paul McCart­ney com­posed for the film The Fam­i­ly Way, fea­tured ear­li­er this year on Open Cul­ture.) He also man­ages to win the triv­ia con­test against Hol­land at Abbey Road Stu­dios in the video just above, but then, he’d been study­ing in one sense or anoth­er for quite some time. A decade ago, he held his own in con­ver­sa­tion with Mark Lewisohn, the first vol­ume of whose painstak­ing three-part Bea­t­les biog­ra­phy comes to near­ly a thou­sand pages in the abridged edi­tion. That was on his YouTube inter­view series Seri­ous Jib­ber-Jab­ber, the pre­de­ces­sor to his cur­rent pod­cast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Hol­land and his co-host Dominic Sand­brook appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend last fall. They may have seemed an odd choice in a guest ros­ter con­sist­ing most­ly of come­di­ans, actors, and musi­cians, but O’Brien him­self has declared The Rest Is His­to­ry “the best pod­cast in the world,” and their shows’ fan bases turn out not to be mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. That wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion went stim­u­lat­ing­ly enough to inspire a com­ple­tion of the crossover just a few months there­after, when Hol­land brought O’Brien to Abbey Road for an hour and a half of noth­ing but talk about the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the Bea­t­les, whom O’Brien declares “a com­plete break from what hap­pened before.” (Sand­brook, the rare non-appre­ci­a­tor of the Fab Four, absent­ed him­self from the dis­cus­sion.)

O’Brien prais­es books like Lewisohn’s, as well as Ian Leslie’s more recent John & Paul: A Love Sto­ry in Songs, but his under­stand­ing of the group as a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non sug­gests that he’s also read the work of crit­ic Ian Mac­Don­ald. After Revolver, “it seemed to West­ern youth that The Bea­t­les knew — that they had the key to cur­rent events and were some­how orches­trat­ing them through their records.” So Mac­Don­ald writes in his book Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, whose title refers to “the true rev­o­lu­tion of the Six­ties”: an uncon­scious men­tal adap­ta­tion to the pas­sage from a local real­i­ty of “con­sen­sus, hier­ar­chy, and fixed val­ues” to a glob­al one of indi­vid­u­al­ism, sen­sa­tion­al­ism, and “jeal­ous­ly lev­eled stan­dards.” The Bea­t­les did­n’t cause those changes, as they them­selves well under­stood. But they accept­ed the roles of its avatars, and more than 60 years after the rise of Beat­le­ma­nia, we still live in the world they rep­re­sent­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bea­t­les Songs: 338 Tracks Let You Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of the Icon­ic Band

How the Bea­t­les Made their Most Acclaimed Album, Revolver, Released 60 Years Ago This Month

How the Bea­t­les Wrote Their Songs: From Ear­ly Demos to Final Record­ings

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Conan O’Brien Writes Chica­go Blues Songs With School Kids

Conan O’Brien Plays Char­lie Rose, Talks Pres­i­den­tial His­to­ry with Edmund Mor­ris

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.