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viewed a teen-rooted, mass entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had accomplished in the 1950s.

    WHEN ROCK & ROLL’S rejuvenation came, it was from a place small and unlikely, and far away. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Liverpool, England, was a fading port town that had slid from grandeur to dilapidation during the postwar era, and it had come to be viewed by snobbish Londoners as a demeaned place of outsiders—in a class-conscious land that was itself increasingly an outsider in modern political affairs and popular culture. But one thing Liverpool had was a brimming pop scene, made up of bands playing tough and exuberant blues- and R & B-informed rock & roll.
    One Saturday morning back in 1961, a young customer entered a record store called NEMS, “The Finest Record Store in Liverpool,” on Whitechapel, a busy road in the heart of the city’s stately commercial district. The young man asked store manager Brian Epstein for a new single, “My Bonnie,” by the Beatles. Epstein replied that he had never heard of the record—indeed, had never heard of the group, which he took to be an obscure, foreign pop group. The customer, Raymond Jones, pointed out the front window, across Whitechapel, where Stanley Street juts into a murky-looking alley area. Around that corner, he told Epstein, on a smirched lane known as Mathew Street, the Beatles—perhaps the most popular of Liverpudlian rock & roll groups—performed afternoons at a cellar club, the Cavern. A few days later, prompted by more requests, Epstein made that journey around Stanley onto Mathew and down the dank steps into the Cavern. With that odd trudge, modern pop culture turned its most eventful corner. By October 1962, Brian Epstein was the Beatles’ manager, and the four-piece ensemble had broken into Britain’s Top 20 with a folkish rock song, “Love Me Do.” There was little about the single that heralded greatness—the group’s leaders, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, weren’t yet distinguished songwriters—but nonetheless the song began a momentum that would forever shatter the American grip on the U.K. pop charts.
    In many ways, Britain was as ripe for a pop cataclysm as America had been for Presley during the ennui after world war. In England—catching the reverberations of not just Presley, but the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac—the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth subcultural class: the by-product of a postwar population, top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen. For those people, pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion: It signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren’t just rejecting their parents’ values—they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms—in the music of Presley and rockabilly; in blues and jazz tradition.
    When Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles at the Cavern, he saw not only a band who delivered their American obsessions with infectious verve but also reflected British youth’s joyful sense of being cultural outsiders, ready to embrace everything new, and everything that their surrounding society tried to prohibit them. What’s more, Epstein figured that the British pop scene would recognize and seize on this kinship. As the group’s manager, Epstein cleaned up the Beatles’ punkness considerably, but he didn’t deny the group its spirit or musical instincts, and in a markedly short time, his faith paid off. A year after “Love Me Do” peaked at number 17 in the
New Musical Express
charts, the Beatles had six singles active in the Top 20 in the same week, including the top three positions—an unprecedented and still unduplicated feat. In the process, Lennon and McCartney had grown enormously as writers—in fact,