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Bob Dylan and the Band brought their reunion tour to arenas all across North America in January 1974 before touching down in New York City at the tail end of the month for three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Demand for tickets was feverish, and a handwritten spreadsheet at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shows that Yoko Ono, Miles Davis, David Bromberg, Bob Gottlieb, Allen Ginsberg, Murray The K, Mary Martin, Noel “Paul” Stookey, and Sid Bernstein were all on the guest list. (Paul Simon’s name was crossed out.

Pop music phenoms come and go, fall in and out of favor and sometimes fade into total obscurity. Very few remain relevant a decade removed from their initial success, and you can count on maybe two hands the number of artists who can knock out a new song or reissue and top the Billboard charts 50-plus years after their debut.

And then there's The Beatles.

From the moment they scored their first number one hit in the U.K. with 1963's "From Me to You," The Beatles drew on their multitude of musical influences — blues, country, rockabilly, and the sui generis soul sounds pulsating out of Motown — to create perfectly constructed, infectiously catchy singles that earwormed their way into the fabric of your being. Within three years of breaking big in the U.S., they released the pioneering folk-rock LP "Rubber Soul," flirted with psychedelia and raga on the expansive "Revolver,...

The box was about two feet high and made out of wood, a rudimentary but useful tool to allow Jerry Blavat to get an unencumbered view of his dancers at bars and clubs that didn’t have a proper stage. In his later years, Blavat, a diminutive but supremely influential DJ, placed the box in the middle of the dance floor, hopped upon it like a king on his throne, and began what to some might be considered a shtick, but to those in Philadelphia was the soundtrack of their...