Were you there? If not, you really can never know Amazement must be experienced firsthand, and the coming of the Beatles was an amazement. Girls screamed: the captions in NEWSWEEK'S Feb. 24, 1964, cover story read: "eeeeeeeeeeeee.. EEEEEEEEEEEEE ... EEEEEEEEEEEE!" And the London Times music critic praised the Beatles' "pandiatonic clusters" and "flat-submediant key-switches." Both reactions were perfectly appropriate: the Beatles were blowing minds and nervous systems. And cash registers. On their first U.S. tour. two entrepreneurial ty es bought the pillowcases on which the four moptops had reposed in a Kansas City hotel and sliced them into 166.000 tiny squares, which they sold for a dollar each.

The girls were screaming not at key-switches (which the Beatles, , who could not read music, arrived at instinctively) but at things like the "Yeah, yeah, yeahs," in "She Loves You," delivered by Paul McCartney and George Harrison. But what linked the screechers and the scholars was a sense of something new, an absolute freshness that the Beatles manifested musically and personally. Those early songs &emdash;"I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Please Please Me"-were both sexy and innocent. Like those two "pleases," the first a polite supplication, the second a verb vibrating with sexual possibility. A British writer described the band as "beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way."

That's a perfect description of rock-and-roll charisma. But what made the Beatles the key pop artists of the '60s was the synthesis that they made out of almost every conceivable pop element. Both John Lennon and Ringo Starr hailed their hometown of Liverpool as a crucible, a port city that brought together Irish, blacks, Chinese and sailors coming from America with blues records. Clubs and pubs jumped with the sounds of country and Western, British music-hall songs and rural folk tunes. The classical composer and critic Wilfrid Mellers said that the Beatles, like "other geniuses such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, knew the right time and place to be born."

Out of all these elements, plus the influence of pioneer rockers like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the Beatles created a unique multifaceted music. It rocked hard, it glinted with irony, it sang with poignant melancholy, as in "Yesterday, McCartney's anthem of loss, in which he sings solo and turns his guitar into the heartstrings of loneliness. The Lennon-McCartney songs were minidramas that evoked a wide spectrum of emotion. McCartney's "Penny Lane" and Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" (coupled on one amazing single) conjured up their lost worlds of childhood, Paul's a ,'very strange" Utopia, John's a place where "nothing is real/and nothing to get hungabout."

In less than five years the Beatles produced a series of albums of increasing complexity, notably "A Hard Day's Night", "Rubber Soul." "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The album's climactic number. "A Day in the Life," is the Beatles' peak achievement. "I read the news today oh boy." sings Lennon. with a sweet hopelessness. Recounting news items of death. war and absurdity, John's refrain, "I'd love to turn you on." fuses the Beatles' drug experience with the desire to transcend the horrors of a foundering civilization. The number ends with the now legendary gigantic crescendo, played by a 41-piece orchestra. that wells up like a groan from the anguished heart of the city.

For many. "Sgt. Pepper" was an epochal event, the matriculation of rock into high art. Kenneth Tynan called it a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization. But some critics thought that high art was exactly what rock shouldn't be. "What's so great about Art?" demanded critic Nik Cohn. insisting that the Beatles "have flown away into limbo." In a review I compared "A Day in the Life" to T. S. Eliot's apocalyptic poem "The Waste Land." In his illuminating survey of the Beatles' career, "Revolution in the Head." Ian MacDonald rejects the comparison. He says of 'A Day in the Life": "The fact that it achieves its transcendent goal via a potentially disillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what makes it so moving." But that splendid sentence is also a succinct summation of "The Waste Land."

What the Beatles did in the '60s remains the most thrilling surge of creativity in the history of pop culture. They obliterated distinctions of high and low, like Chaplin, like Buster Keaton, like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. They made it clear that if art is to survive in the techno-millennium that looms ahead, it must be hooked into the realities and redemptions in the days of our lives.