The Beatles Fucking Rock, Eff You

Somehwere along the line it became fashionable to assume The Beatles sucked live. And based on some bootlegs where they play for 20 minutes and you can't hear a thing, it's not a hard sell. Especially since they couldn't hear themselves any more than anyone else could, thanks to the antiquated amps/sound systems they were playing against the thousands of hysterically screaming fans.

But of course,even a non-Beatles fan who's read Malcom Gladwell knows that The Beatles had spent years in Hamburg etc playing 8 hours at a time, honing their chops. So thanks to them playing on a radio show in front of only 100 fans, we can hear them rocking live like they were perfectly capable of, in what one guy calls the greatest Beatles performance of all time:

With their last club residency in Hamburg’s boozed-up Reeperbahn district less than a year in the past, the Beatles were still one kickass bar band: adrenaline junkies with something punkish about them, though that punk vibe was shot through with rhythm and blues. But unlike when the band played Hamburg, now they had their own formidable compositions to perform...The four guys sound thrilled, maybe over the fact that for once hardly anyone is screaming back at them.