The Beatles

The Beatles saga on July 6, 1957, at St. Peter's Church in Liverpool. Sixteen-year-old John Lennon's Skiffle group, the Quarry Men, was between sets at the church's annual Garden Fete when a mutual friend introduced him to fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney. Paul showed off by playing Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" and Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," and a few weeks later John invited him to join the band. The next year, Paul brought in his friend George Harrison, and in 1960 John's art-school pal Stuart Sutcliffe became the group's bass player.

 Later that year, in honor of Buddy Holly's Crickets and John's fondness for puns, the band's name was changed to The Beatles, and a short while later Pete Best joined them as drummer. Shortly after they recruited Best, but Stu, who had fallen in love with German photographer Astrid Kirschherr,quit the band and stayed behind in Hamburg. Back in England, club owners were amazed by how much progress The Beatles had made, fans went wild,In November of 1961, Brian Epstein.In June, they auditioned for George Martin, the head of A&R at the EMI subsidiary Parlophone Records, who offered them a contract the following month Best was sacked in favour of RIngo Star. Despite their lightning ascent in England--where the press was now using the term "Beatlemania" to describe the frenzy the band created--as 1963 came to a close, The Beatles had yet to make any inroads on the American music scene; neither the single "Please Please Me" nor the album Introducing the Beatles (a shortened version of the British Please Please Me) made the U.S. charts. But in January of 1964, with the release of the single "I Want To Hold Your Hand," Beatlemania hit America; two weeks after it landed in stores, the record had sold more than one million copies.

 In February, The Beatles made their first, phenomenal appearance in the U.S. on the Ed Sullivan Show; By the end of the month, The Beatles practically owned the Billboard charts: in addition to having the No. 1 single, they had four other 45s on the singles chart and three LPs on the album chart. Over the next two years, they had twenty-six singles in the Billboard Top 40 (including ten number ones, which held the top spot for thirty-eight of 104 weeks), and seven No. 1 albums. In addition to this prolific recording pace, they were touring constantly, conquering Japan and Australia as well as Europe and North America Remarkably, the album they released in December of 1965, Rubber Soul, was their most vibrant and subtle work so far, betraying no signs of the exhaustion they no doubt felt. 

Their concerts had long since devolved into events where the fans' screaming was louder than the music, while their studio work was becoming more and more amazing. The same month they toured America for the last time, they released Revolver, a phenomenal record that increased the progress they'd made on Rubber Soul by leaps and bounds. The remainder of 1966 was a period of great personal growth for The Beatles. The album that followed, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, continued in the same vein.It quickly became the most critically and commercially successful rock album of all time, holding the No. 1 spot on Billboard's album chart for a record-breaking fifteen weeks.

 In August of 1967, their manager, Brian Epstein, died of a drug overdose. Early in 1968, The Beatles followed the Maharishi to his ashram in Rishikesh, India: Ringo lasted only ten days, Paul five weeks, and John and George almost two months. These were confusing times for The Beatles, and that confusion showed in Magical Mystery Tour, a one-hour television film that aired on the BBC in December of 1967. They bounced back with the "Hey Jude," a hymn-like McCartney ballad that clocked in at more than seven minutes, making it far and away the longest No. 1 single of all time; Packed with great songs, "The White Album" spurned the conceptual pretensions of Sgt. Pepper in favor of straightforward rock- and folk-based material That summer, the Fab Four reunited at EMI Studios to record Abbey Road, their final album of new material. But despite the success of the Abbey Road sessions., The Beatles continued to disintegrate. Business problems led John to seek out Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones' manager, to represent The Beatles, while Paul wanted his father-in-law, attorney Lee Eastman, to manage the band. In 1995, the remaining Beatles got together to record new backing tracks to some rudimentary Lennon demos, and "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were included as part of the Beatles Anthology albums and documentaries. That project earned Paul, George, and Ringo three Grammys and introduced their music to a whole new generation of fans.

 Forty years after John and Paul's first, fateful meeting, no one doubts their place in the history books: they were the greatest band in rock-and-roll history, and the most important musicians and composers of the twentieth century.