In terms of legacy-making months, February has always been good to The Beatles. The band’s triumphant 1964 appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" will always resound in the history of popular music, to be sure. Then there’s the group’s first full-length concert at the Washington Coliseum a few days later. And these Fab Februarys have never truly ebbed, with Paul McCartney staging a series of intimate, pop-up concerts in Brooklyn this very week.
Which brings us to the latest Beatles book to hit the shelves. Robert Rodriguez and Jerry Hammack, the authors of "Ribbons of Rust: The Beatles’ Recording History in Context," are undertaking one of the most ambitious new projects in Beatles studies. In a painstaking effort to account for the band’s origins and influences, Rodriguez and Hammack contextualize the bandmates’ lives and work in terms of their historical and sociocultural moment. The book series draws its name, by the way, from the recording tape upon which the group imprinted their masterworks, those “ribbons of rust”—iron oxide bonded to polyethylene terephthalate.
