In Search of Beatles Rock but not Pop

Some superb posts here, particularly Zaikesman, and a great thread. One aspect of the evolution of the Beatles' music which doesn't seem to be mentioned above is the emergence of "Album Rock" from the top 40 AM-based radio that took place starting in 1967-68 or so. Remember, most songs, to get any airplay on AM, had to be 3 minutes long or less, and the Beatles' earlier work was tailored to meet that restriction. It wasn't till Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which initially was played without the last two verses) that some of the longer, more complex work came to be played on AM radio, and then FM album rock stations started to spring up (WNEW FM here in NY, for example) which would play full album cuts, thereby freeing up the artists from the restrictions pop radio put on them. The Beatles' earliest work was geared for airplay; their later work was not all masterworks by any means, but clearly involved more complex music and lyrics and longer cuts. To some extent, I think you can probably attribute album rock and FM stations to the emerging maturity of the Beatles and their progeny; who knows, maybe you can draw an analogy to classical music, with the evolution from the Classical to the Romantic periods, as composers broke from the strictures of form to put more and more emotion into their music. Food for thought, anyway.