Lennon was performing with his amateur skiffle group the Quarrymen at a church picnic on July 6, 1957, in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton when he met McCartney, whom he later invited to join his group; soon they were writing songs together, such as "The One After 909." By the year’s end McCartney had convinced Lennon to let Harrison join their group, the name of which was changed to Johnny and the Moondogs in 1958. In 1960 an art-school friend of Lennon’s, Stu Sutcliffe, became their bassist. Sutcliffe couldn’t play a note but had recently sold one of his paintings for a considerable sum, which the group, now rechristened the Silver Beetles (from which "Silver" was dropped a few months later, and "Beetles" amended to "Beatles"), used to upgrade its equipment. Tommy Moore was their drummer until Pete Best replaced him in August 1960.

Once Best had joined, the band made its first of four trips to Hamburg, Germany. In December Harrison was deported back to England for being underage and lacking a work permit, but by then their 30-set weeks on the stages of Hamburg beerhouses had honed and strengthened their repertoire (mostly Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly covers), and on February 21, 1961, they debuted at the Cavern club on Mathew Street in Liverpool, beginning a string of nearly 300 performances there over the next couple of years.

In April 1961 they again went to Hamburg, where Sutcliffe (the first of the Beatles to wear his hair in the long, shaggy style that came to be known as the Beatle haircut) left the group to become a painter, while McCartney switched from rhythm guitar to bass. The Beatles returned to Liverpool as a quartet in July. Sutcliffe died from a brain hemorrhage in Hamburg less than a year later.

The Beatles had been playing regularly to packed houses at the Cavern when they were spotted on November 9 by Brian Epstein (b. Sep. 19, 1934, Liverpool). After being discharged from the British Army on medical grounds, Epstein had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London for a year before returning to Liverpool to manage his father’s record store.

The request he received for a German import single entitled "My Bonnie" (which the Beatles had recorded a few months earlier in Hamburg, backing singer Tony Sheridan and billed as the Beat Boys) convinced him to check out the group. Epstein was surprised to discover not only that the Beatles weren’t German but that they were one of the most popular local bands in Liverpool. Within two months he became their manager. Epstein cleaned up their act, eventually replacing black leather jackets, tight jeans, and pompadours with collarless gray Pierre Cardin suits and mildly androgynous haircuts.

Epstein tried landing the Beatles a record contract, but nearly every label in Europe rejected the group. In May 1962, however, producer George Martin (b. Jan. 3, 1926, North London, Eng.) grew interested in the quartet and signed it to EMI’s Parlophone subsidiary. Pete Best, then considered the group’s undisputed sex symbol, was asked to leave the group on August 16, 1962, and Ringo Starr, drummer with a popular Liverpool group, Rory Storme and the Hurricanes, was added, just in time for the group’s first recording session. On September 11 the Beatles cut two originals, "Love Me Do" b/w "P.S. I Love You," which became their first U.K. Top Twenty hit in October. In early 1963 "Please Please Me" went to #2, and they recorded an album of the same name in one 10-hour session on February 11,1963. With the success of their third English single, "From Me to You" (#1), the British record industry coined the term "Merseybeat" for groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Searchers, who also hailed from Liverpool on the Mersey River. By midyear the Beatles were given billing over Roy Orbison on a national tour, and the hysterical outbreaks of "Beatlemania" had begun. Following their first tour of Europe in October, they moved to London with Epstein. Constantly mobbed by screaming fans, the Beatles required police protection almost any time they were seen in public. Late in the year "She Loves You" became the biggest-selling single in British history. In November 1963 the group performed before the Queen Mother at the Royal Command Variety Performance.

EMI’s American label, Capitol, had not released the group’s 1963 records (which Martin licensed to independents like Vee-Jay and Swan with little success) but was finally persuaded to release its fourth single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and Meet the Beatles in January 1964 and to invest $50,000 in promotion for the then unknown British act. The album and the single became the Beatles first U.S. chart-toppers. On February 7 screaming mobs met them at New York’s Kennedy Airport, and more than 70 million people watched each of their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9 and 16. In April 1964 "Can’t Buy Me Love" became the first record to top American and British charts simultaneously, and that same month the Beatles held the top five positions on Billboard’s singles chart ( "Can’t Buy Me Love," "Twist and Shout," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Please Please Me").

Their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night (directed by Richard Lester), opened in America in August; it grossed $1.3 million in its first week. The band was aggressively merchandised -- Beatle wigs, Beatle clothes, Beatle dolls, junk food, lunch pails, a cartoon series -- from which, because of Epstein’s ineptitude, it made surprisingly little. The Beatles also opened the American market to such British Invasion groups as the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.

By 1965 Lennon and McCartney rarely wrote songs together, although by contractual and personal agreement songs by either of them were credited to both. The Beatles toured Europe, North America, the Far East, and Australia that year. Their second movie, Help! (again directed by Lester), was filmed in England, Austria, and the Bahamas in the spring and opened in the U.S. in August. On August 15 they performed to 55, 600 fans at New York’s Shea Stadium, setting a record for largest concert audience. McCartney’s "Yesterday" (#1, 1965) would become one of the most often covered songs ever written. In June the Queen had announced that the Beatles would be awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire). The announcement sparked some controversy -- some MBE holders returned their medals -- but on October 26, 1965, the ceremony took place at Buckingham Palace. (Lennon returned his medal in 1969.)

With 1965’s Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ ambitions began to extend beyond love songs and pop formulas. Their success led adults to consider them, along with Bob Dylan, spokesmen for youth culture; and their lyrics grew more poetic and somewhat more political. In summer 1966 controversy erupted when a remark Lennon had made to a British newspaper reporter months before was widely reported in the U.S. Lennon said, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus Christ right now." The remark incited denunciations and Beatles record bonfires. Lennon later apologized.

The Beatles gave up touring after an August 29, 1966, concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park and made the rest of their music in the studio, where they had begun to experiment with exotic instrumentation ("Norwegian Wood," 1965, had featured sitar) and tape abstractions such as the reversed vocal tracks on "Rain." "Strawberry Fields Forever," part of a double-sided single released in February 1967 to fill the unusually long gap between albums, featured an astonishing display of electronically altered sounds and hinted at what was to come. With "Taxman" and "Love You To" on Revolver, Harrison began to emerge as a songwriter.

It took four months and $75,000 to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band using a then-state-of-the-art four-track tape recorder and building each cut layer by layer. Released in June 1967, it was hailed as serious art for its "concept" and its range of styles and sounds, a lexicon of pop and electronic noises; such songs as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "A Day in the Life" were carefully examined for hidden meanings. The album spent 15 weeks at #1 (longer than any of their others) and has sold over eight million copies. On June 25, 1967, the Beatles recorded their new single, "All You Need Is Love," before an international television audience of 400 million, as part of a broadcast called Our World.

On August 27, 1967 -- while the four were in Wales beginning their six-month involvement with transcendental meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (which took them to India for two months in early 1968) -- Epstein died alone in his London flat from an overdose of sleeping pills, later ruled accidental. Shaken by Epstein’s death, the Beatles retrenched under McCartney’s leadership in the fall and filmed Magical Mystery Tour, which was aired by BBC-TV on December 26, 1967, and later released in the U.S. as a feature film. Although the telefilm was panned by British critics, fans, and Queen Elizabeth herself, the soundtrack album contained their most cryptic work yet in "I Am the Walrus," a Lennon composition.

As the Beatles’ late-1967 single "Hello Goodbye" went to #1 in both the U.S. and Britain, the group launched the Apple clothes boutique in London. McCartney called the retail effort "Western communism," but the boutique closed in July 1968. Like their next effort, Apple Corps Ltd. (formed in January 1968 and including Apple Records, which signed James Taylor, Mary Hopkin, and Badfinger), it was plagued by mismanagement. In July the group faced its last hysterical crowds at the premiere of Yellow Submarine, an animated film by German poster artist Heinz Edelmann featuring four new Beatles songs.

In August they released McCartney’s "Hey Jude" (#1), backed by Lennon’s "Revolution" (#12), which sold over six million copies before the end of 1968 -- their most popular single. Meanwhile, the group had been working on the double album The Beatles (frequently called the White Album), which showed their divergent directions. The rifts were artistic -- Lennon moving toward brutal confessionals, McCartney leaning toward pop melodies, Harrison immersed in Eastern spirituality -- and personal, as Lennon drew closer to his wife-to-be, Yoko Ono. Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgins (with its full frontal and back nude cover photos) was released the same month as The Beatles and stirred so much outrage that the LP had to be sold wrapped in brown paper bags. (The Beatles went to #1, Two Virgins peaked at #124.)

The Beatles attempted to smooth over their differences in early 1969 at filmed recording sessions. When the project fell apart hundreds of hours of studio time later, no one could face editing the tapes (a project that eventually fell to Phil Spector), and "Get Back" (#1, 1969) was the only immediate release. Released in spring 1970, Let It Be is essentially a documentary of their breakup, including an impromptu January 30, 1969, rooftop concert at Apple Corps headquarters, their last public performance.

By spring 1969 Apple was losing thousands of pounds each week. Over McCartney’s objections, the other three brought in manager Allen Klein to straighten things out; one of his first actions was to package non-album singles as Hey Jude. With money matters temporarily out of mind, the four joined forces in July and August 1969 to record Abbey Road, featuring an extended suite as well as more hits, including Harrison’s much-covered "Something" (#3, 1969). While its release that fall spurred a "Paul Is Dead" rumor based on clues supposedly left throughout their work, Abbey Road became the Beatles’ best-selling album, at nine million copies. Meanwhile, internal bickering persisted. In September Lennon told the others, "I’m leaving the group. I’ve had enough. I want a divorce." But he was persuaded to keep quiet while their business affairs were untangled. On April 10, 1970, McCartney released his first solo album and publicly announced the end of the Beatles. At the same time, Let It Be finally surfaced, becoming the group’s 14th #1 album (a postbreakup compilation would become their 15th in 1973) and yielding the Beatles’ 18th and 19th chart-topping singles, "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road."

Throughout the Seventies, as repackages of Beatles music continued to sell, the four were hounded by bids and pleas for a reunion. Lennon’s murder by a mentally disturbed fan on December 8, 1980, ended those speculations.

In 1988 the Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. McCartney, citing business conflicts with the two other surviving members, did not attend. Relations between him and Harrison, in particular, had been strained for some time. But in January 1994 Goldmine magazine reported that McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had begun recording music for a long-rumored Beatles documentary the previous August, with more secret sessions scheduled. George Martin was said to be the producer. Later that year Live at the BBC was released, featuring 56 songs the Beatles performed on British radio between 1962 and 1965. It debuted at #1 in the U.K.; in the U.S., it debuted and peaked at #3. In March 1995 McCartney confirmed that he, Harrison, and Starr were recording new songs. When released, they will be the first new Beatles songs since 1969.

Formed 1959, Liverpool, England

*Discography reflects original U.S. album releases.

Copyright ^© 1983, 1995 by Rolling Stone Press