The Beatles saga began four and a half years before their Decca audition, 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 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, The Beatles headed to Hamburg, West Germany, where they played all-night sets in a variety of seedy clubs. They stayed in Hamburg for three months. John followed them back to Liverpool, but Stu, who had fallen in love with German photographer Astrid Kirschherr quit the band and stayed behind. Stu died of a brain hemorrhage in April of 1962.

 

In June, they served as the backing group for vocalist Tony Sheridan on six songs, including the single "My Bonnie." By this time, John and Paul were regularly writing their own songs. In November of 1961, Brian Epstein, who managed his family's local NEMS record shop, went to see The Beatles at the Cavern Club, and he thought they showed potential. He offered to manage the group, and arranged for their audition with Decca two months later. Despite their failure to win a contract from Decca, The Beatles signed a management contract with Epstein, and he set about refining their image. Epstein convinced them to give up their scruffy outfits and wear suits onstage, and he sent copies of their failed Decca audition to other record labels. 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. They didn't tell Pete about the contract and let him go. When Ringo showed up with the other Beatles for their first official recording session at EMI Studios on September 11, 1962, he was told by George Martin that his services would not be required. Martin had hired seasoned studio drummer Andy White for the session, and the humiliated Ringo ended up playing tambourines and maracas on "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You," the two sides of the first Beatles single. Their second single, "Please Please Me," went straight to No. 1 in February of 1963, and The Beatles were on their way to superstardom. In March, their debut album, also titled Please Please Me, was released, and it remained at the top of the charts for thirty weeks, until it was dislodged by their follow-up, With the Beatles. 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 made the U.S. charts. But in January of 1964, with the release of the single "I Want To Hold Your Hand," the record had sold more than one million copies after 2 weeks of it's release. 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 albums on the album chart, including Meet the Beatles in the No. 1 spot. Over the next two years, they had twenty-six singles in the Billboard Top 40 and seven No. 1 albums. They also made two hit movies, A Hard Day's Night and Help!

Not surprisingly, given the artistry they'd displayed on Rubber Soul, 1966 was a watershed year for The Beatles, both professionally and personally. In January, George became the third Beatle to tie the knot, and Paul, the last bachelor among their ranks, was seriously involved with actress Jane Asher. They were tired of spending all their time on the road, and decided to stop performing following their summer tour of the U.S When John said "I don't know which will go first--rock and roll or Christianity." This comment caused a frenzy in the southern part of the U.S., where Beatles records were burned, John received numerous death threats, and fans were urged to boycott the band's concerts. In Chicago, the day before their final tour was to begin, a visibly shaken John apologized for his comments about the relative stature of Jesus and The Beatles, but the death threats continued to roll in, and by the end of their final show, at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, they'd had enough. It was just as well. 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.

The remainder of 1966 was a period of great personal growth for The Beatles. While Ringo returned to Surrey to spend time with his family, Paul immersed himself in London's "underground" scene and composed a score for the film The Family Way , George went to India to study the sitar, yoga, and Indian culture, and John went to West Germany and Spain to film How I Won the War, in which he played a large supporting role. Late in 1966, The Beatles reunited at EMI Studios to record their next album. The first song they cut was John's "Strawberry Fields Forever." The song eventually ended up not on the album, but on a single, paired with Paul's cheerfully nostalgic "Penny Lane." The album that followed, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, continued in the same vein, alternating between Paul's chipper mid-tempo numbers ("Getting Better," "Fixing a Hole," and "When I'm Sixty-Four") and John's moodier psychedelic pieces ("Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"). Their increasingly disparate approaches to songwriting came together on the album's last track, "A Day in the Life. " Musically, it far surpassed anything anyone else in pop music had ever attempted, and 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, the Beatles manager died of a drug overdose. Now, in the wake of Brian's death, they started branching out, starting their own record label. Early in 1968, The Beatles followed the Maharishi to his ashram in Rishikesh, India The Beatles distanced themselves from the Maharishi after they heard rumors that he had attempted to seduce actress Mia Farrow; utterly disillusioned, John penned the song "Maharishi," but eventually changed it to "Sexy Sadie." 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. Dull and muddled, it was the band's first critical failure, despite containing some great music, including "I Am the Walrus" and "The Fool on the Hill." They bounced back with the 45 "Hey Jude," making it far and away the longest No. 1 single of all time; the B-side, John's political rocker "Revolution," was just as great.

A couple of months later, they released an eponymous two-record set called "The White Album." Packed with great songs. "The White Album" spurned the conceptual pretensions of Sgt. Pepper in favor of straightforward rock- and folk-based material. Paul's best songs were "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Blackbird," John's "I'm So Tired" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," George's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." At this point, they were three solo artists using each other as session musicians. Ringo quit the band for a few days, George brought in Eric Clapton to play lead guitar on "Gently Weeps." By the time The Beatles reconvened in Twickenham Film Studios in January of 1969, Paul had a new companion of his own. Having broken his engagement to Jane Asher the previous summer, he was involved with Linda Eastman. Unlike John, Paul was not so obsessed with his lover that he was willing to forsake The Beatles. The Twickenham sessions were set up to film The Beatles at work for a documentary tentatively titled "Get Back" after the band's new single. But the sessions didn't go well, and the band members didn't get along. Despite a loose, joyful concert on the rooftop of their Apple Corps building, the tapes for the proposed album and the film were temporarily shelved. On March 12, 1969, Paul and Linda were married, and eight days later John and Yoko tied the knot. John returned in April to record the new Beatles single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko." 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. George and Ringo sided with John, but the point was moot, as The Beatles effectively split up. Eventually, it was Paul who announced the breakup, in a "self interview" included with his first solo album, McCartney, which was released in April of 1970. A month later, the Get Back sessions, which had been retitled Let It Be, were finally released. In the years after the split, the four ex-Beatles achieved varying degrees of success. But two days after Double Fantasy entered the charts, John was gunned down by a deranged ex-fan in front of his Central Park apartment building, and any chance of the Fab Four reuniting was lost. But 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.

Source: The Internet
 

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