The Beatles had just released another seemingly meaningless album full of pop songs about girls and having fun. The Beach Boys, over on the west coast, were doing the same. But the forces behind each of these groups, John Lennon and Paul McCartney for the Beatles, Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys, were becoming more and more complicated with their craft. A Hard Day's Night was the Beatles' first motion picture, and went over well with the public, as did anything produced by the Fab Four during Beatlemania. In fact, the craze over the Beatles had become intense, so intense that it masked what was going on behind the stage acts. When the album was released, July 10th of 1964, it contained more original songs by the Bealtes than any of their previous albums. The songs were getting more and more advanced, musically, even if the content remained generally the same. The fans devoured it, and packed the concerts that followed. The Beatles were being hounded at every stop, and their personal safety was very much a concern. They subsequently released "I Feel Fine", which demonstrated that the Beatles were becoming more and more experimnetal with their music, from the feedback that starts the song to the overall roughness of the recording. By August of 1965, they were back in the theatres after a series of lengthy tours. This time, their film was entitled "Help!", and, unlike Hard Day's, it was more of a story involving the Beatles than a mockumentary of their lives. Pursued by a group of religious fanatics searching for a ring mistakingly given to Ringo by a fan, the group finds time to perform at Stonehenge, in their London flat and in the studio. Most importantly, the music was unlike anything before. Well, most of it ("Dizzy Miss Lizzy" was a Cavern favorite.)
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