Beatles

Beatles
On New Year´s Eve, 1961, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best loaded their equipment into a van and drove from Liverpool to London, where the folowing morning, they auditionet for Decca Records. Decca turned them down, and the label has beem regretting the decision ever since. Within 2 years, the Beatles were the most popular recording artists on the planet.

Shortly after they recriuted Best, the Beatles headed to Hamburg, where they played allnight sets in a variety of seedy clubs, taking amphetamines for energy and honing their rough, driving covers of American rock-and-roll songs.

Back in England, club owners were amazed by how much progress the Beatles had made, fans went wild, and the press started writing about Liverpool´s „beat“ music scene. 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. Epstein covinced them to give up their scruffy outfits and wear siuts onstage, and he sent copis of their failed Decca audition to other record labels. In June, they auditoned for George Martin, the head of EMI RECORD, who offered them a contract the following month despite the fact that he was unimpressed with their original songs and thought Pete Best wasn´t much of a drummer. On the latter point, John, Paul, and George agreed. They never told Pete about the contract, and had Brian Epstein sack him the next month in favor of Ringo Starr, a fellow Leverpudlian whom they ´d met in Hamburg.

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. As 1963 came to a close, the Beatles played a Royal Command Performance attended by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, during which John uttered the famous line, „The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you´d rattle your jewelry....“

Despite their lightning ascent in England – where the press was now using the term „Beatlemania“ to describe the frenzy the band created.

Other very famous records were for example Revolver, Sgt. Pepper´s lonely hearts club, Rubber Soul, White album /Beatles/, Abbey Road...

They made two hit movies, A hard Day´s Night and Help!

In August of 1967 their manager, Brian Epstein, died of a drug overdose.

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, a rock photographer and daughter of a prominen New York lawyer.

On March 12, 1969, Paul and Linda were married, and eight days later John and Yoko Ono tied the knot, non of the other Beatles attended either wedding. While Paul and Linda celebrated their wedding quietly, John and Yoko turned their honeymoon into a series of happenings.

After record Abbey Road came a business problems. 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 sesions, which had been retitled Let it Be, were finally released, but Paul denounced the results, which had been re-mixed and overdubbed by Phil Spector.

In the years after the split, the four ex-Beatles achieved varying degrees of success. Not surprisingly, Ringo was the least accomplished ex-Beatle, appearing in the occoasional movie role and recording sporadically, his album Ringo was his greatest success.

George´s first two solo albums were very good and famous.

Paul has been the most commercially successfull ex-Beatle, with seven No. 1 albums and nin No. 1 singles to his credit. But he has often been attacked by the press.

John´s own solo career was a mixed bag. In 1975, when Yoko gave birth to their son, Sean, and John went into retirement to be househuband, it was no great loss. But when John re-emerged in 1980 shortly after his fortieth birthday with Double Fantasy, he sounded like a new man.

Two days after Double Fantasy enterd 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 reunitni 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 a 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.