SOURCE: "The Beatles as Artists: A Meditation for December Ninth," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Winter, 1984, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Winn traces the developing complexity of the Beatles' music, arguing that their withdrawal from the concert scene to focus on making albums allowed them to more fully realize their collaborative potential.

The stark white graphics on the television screen were terrible in both their symmetry and their finality: John Lennon: 1940-1980. If you had thought of him as permanently twenty-five, the knowledge that Lennon had reached age forty became a part of the larger, more horrifying news that he was dead. For even in separation and disarray, the Beatles served several generations as symbols on which to hang fantasies, aspirations, and not-yet-formed identities. And as they came to realize, first from the physically dangerous way their young fans pelted them with jelly beans and...