“Ribbons of Rust” revisits The Beatles’ roots and the sounds that shaped them

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.

The first volume in the series traces the fertile and transformative era from July 1954 through January 1963, when the Beatles were poised to conquer Great Britain with the chart-topping “Please Please Me” single. Rodriguez and Hammack are ideally situated to undertake this multivolume work. Rodriguez is the author behind one of Beatles criticism’s seminal books, “Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and the host of the popular “Something about the Beatles” podcast. For his part, Hammack is the author of “The Beatles Recording Reference Manual” series. 

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Volume One pointedly begins in 1954, when the young Beatles’ worlds were transfigured by pop explosions both near and far — Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle craze in England and the dawn of Elvis Presley, respectively. In this richly illustrated book, Rodriguez and Hammack bring the boys’ story—and the era itself—vividly to life through period ephemera that highlights the emergence of the myriad new sights and sounds impacting the future Beatles’ lives. To their great credit, the authors don’t merely confine their study to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. They devote considerable attention to the pre-fame experiences of George Martin, the producer behind their world-breaking sound.

As Rodriguez and Hammack deftly point out, The Beatles’ story didn’t occur in a bubble, but rather, a highly particular and impactful history. “Ribbons of Rust” affords much-needed shape and context to the band’s evolving story. For my money, the mark of any music book worth its salt is measured by the number of times I find myself cuing up another tune. With “Ribbons of Rust,” I am delighted to report, the music of the 1950s and early 1960s was in heavy rotation.