It is impossible to adequately explain to someone not around forty years ago when this album was released its importance and what it meant to so many of us. The Beatles were at their height. In the U. S., it was before the assassinations of Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King when all the world seemed young and everything was possible. It was more than just world class music, it was a social and cultural phenomenon. There had never been anything just quite like it before. It helped define the 1960's.