For a start, I doubt that anyone who wasn’t there would be able to comprehend the overwhelming pervasiveness of Beatle music in pop culture between 1963 and late 1967.
Things started to fall away in the wake of Sgt Peppers, which is not to downplay the White Album or Abbey Road as albums. It’s just that the cultural dominance was waning.
If it was possible to slip into a time machine, travel back to an ageing baby boomer’s heyday and frame a betting market on the soundtrack playing in the background at certain pivotal moments, you would have Lennon & McCartney as a very short-priced favourite, with, in horse racing parlance daylight second. Quite simply, if you were compiling the soundtrack to the average mid-sixties teenager’s misspent youth, a sizeable chunk of it would have been performed, written or heavily influenced by a certain Fab Four..
But beyond that pervasiveness, there were other things that the quote at the top of the page overlooks.
First up, it’s significant to note that they were British. Again, if you weren’t there at the time, that’s a factor you’d totally overlook. But, quite simply, if the Beatles hadn’t existed, we probably wouldn’t have seen the British acts that went on to become huge once the Beatles broke big in America.
On a slightly different tack, I suspect that their popularity in Australia, and their acceptance by the older generation was, largely, a matter of their Britishness at a time when a large chunk of the Australian population still thought of Britain as home - of course, by the time that Lennon was having his Rolls painted in psychedelic splendour, that had changed...
What we now know as rock music was, up until the Beatles burst in on the scene, an almost totally American affair, with a handful of local practitioners in other countries who were almost uniformly regarded as a pale imitation of the real American thing. Yet, by 1965 we see Doug Sahm and a bunch of Hispanic musos passing themselves off, at the record company’s insistence, as the Sir Douglas Quintet....