The story of The Beatles has been told often and in various formats, but there’s no good reason not to tell it again. To that end, Slate’s culture blog Brow Beat has launched a feature that offers a new angle on some familiar material, allowing fans to follow the progress of the group on a week-by-week basis from a remove of half a century. Since the band recorded “Please Please Me,” its first No. 1 single, 50 years ago today, that’s the subject of the first entry. And with that, we’re off on a journey through time designed to last eight years, span the globe, drop out and turn psychedelic, and eventually feature an odd character named Magic Alex. But first, the early, crowd-pleasing years, when the members didn’t hate each other and everyone fell in love with songs that sounded like this: