The Beatles 100

100 Pivotal Moments in Beatles History

John M. Borack

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781644281802
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

Was John Lennon meeting Paul McCartney more significant than John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono? Rubber Soul or Revolver? Which Wings album was Paul McCartney's solo pinnacle? In 100 brief chapters, John M. Borack breaks down the biggest moments in Beatles history. Based on a life time of being an avid Beatles fan and a career as a music journalist, Borack digs into the hard questions. A book to nod along to, disagree with, and start conversations about, The Beatles 100 is a love letter to the biggest rock band of all time.

Chapter 1

John Lennon Meets Paul McCartney

“I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good…and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’
Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave.”

—Paul McCartney on his first meeting with John Lennon

“I ruined Paul’s life. He could have been a doctor. He could have been somebody!”

—John Lennon

This is where it all began.

On a 1957 summer’s day in Liverpool, England, two teenage boys—one with an artistic bent and a rather large chip on his rebellious shoulder and the other a somewhat pudgy, self-conscious boy who tended to obey his father—met for the first time. Although neither of them could possibly realize it as they initially bonded over their love of American rock and roll, the seemingly innocuous introduction of John Lennon and Paul McCartney at the Woolton Parish Church garden fete would eventually change the face of popular music forever.

Lennon’s local skiffle outfit, the Quarrymen (or the Quarry Men, depending on whom one believes), was one of the featured performers at the fete on Saturday, July 6, 1957, sharing the outdoor space with a Liverpool police dog display and the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. Ivan Vaughan, a mutual friend of Lennon and Paul McCartney, brought Paul along to the fete in order to introduce him to John. After hearing John and his mates bash out some tunes, Paul was suitably impressed: “I thought, wow, he’s good. So backstage, I was singing a couple of songs I’d known. I used to know all the words to [Eddie Cochran’s] ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and a few others and it was pretty [cool] in those days to know the words to that. John didn’t know the words to many songs, so I was valuable. I wrote up a few words and showed him how to play ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and another one, I think. Anyway, that was my first introduction.”

(Incidentally, Beatles historian/author Mark Lewisohn suggests that the Woolton fete might not have been the first time the two met, and that Lennon and McCartney had even “exchanged a few words,” possibly in 1956.)

Not only are there photos still in existence of the Quarrymen at the Woolton fete—one that shows the band planted on a flatbed truck, as well as the iconic photo of a checked-shirted John at the mic with a guitar—but a tape of the Quarrymen’s show has survived. It sold for approximately $120,000 in 1994 but was deemed to be of too poor quality to be used as part of The Beatles Anthology.

Years later, John Lennon remembered the baby-faced McCartney on that fateful day as seeming very young, but also very talented. In addition, as John told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, “He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.” A few weeks after the Woolton fete, Paul was invited to join the Quarrymen, and he played his first gig with the band on October 18, 1957, at the New Clubmoor Hall in the north end of Liverpool.

John and Paul may have dug each other, but Paul’s father Jim didn’t share Paul’s enthusiasm about his son’s newfound pal: “He’ll get you into trouble, son,” were Jim McCartney’s exact words. But despite Jim Mac’s warnings, the Lennon/McCartney relationship would blossom both personally and professionally, with the two young men beginning to write tunes together and eventually bonding—albeit in an unspoken fashion—over the tragic loss of their respective mothers. Paul: “I don’t pretend to have had as painful a childhood as John. My memories are very pleasant. I’m sure that’s one reason why I became the warm side of Lennon-McCartney.”

Paul would soon convince John that the Quarrymen should take on a hotshot young guitarist and schoolmate of Paul’s called George Harrison, and the rest, as they say, is—quite literally—history.

The significance of their partnership and the magic it was to create was certainly not lost on John Lennon or Paul McCartney. “I think it’s possible for John and Paul to have created the same thing with two other guys,” John told Playboy shortly before his death in 1980. “It may not have been possible for George and Ringo to have created it without John and Paul.” And Paul was up front about his feelings on the matter, as well; as he told journalist Barry Miles, “John and I were two of the luckiest people in the twentieth century to have found each other. The partnership, the mix, was incredible.”

Indeed.

Chapter 2

America Greets the Fab Four in 1964;
Beatlemania Ensues

“So this is America. They all seem to be out of their minds.”

—Ringo Starr, 1964

By the end of 1963, the British public had been knocked on their collective backsides by the Beatles’ songs, style, and witty charm. The band had begun making major inroads in Europe (having performed multiple gigs in Sweden and France in October 1963 and early 1964, respectively), and next on the agenda was to attempt to win over the United States.

But the US would be tough, and the band knew it: Capitol Records had passed on the Beatles’ 1963 singles in the United States, and while smaller labels such as Swan and Vee-Jay had released them, the response was effectively nil. But eventually Capitol Records was made aware of the frenzy surrounding the band overseas and deigned to release the Beatles’ latest single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” on December 26, 1963.

“It was only after all the publicity and the Beatlemania in Europe that Capitol Records decided, ‘Oh, we will have them,’” George Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology. “They put out ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ as our first single, but in fact it was our fourth.”

As the single rocketed to the number-one spot on both the Cashbox and Billboard charts, plans were afoot for the Beatles to travel to the United States in early February 1964 to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as to play a few live shows on the east coast. Still, the band was a bit apprehensive as to how they would be received. On the Beatles’ initial flight to New York, Paul McCartney asked, “They’ve got their own groups. What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?” He later reminisced, “We’d gone to number one there with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but we had no idea how big we were out there. So we stepped off the plane and the crowd was enormous. The noise was deafening. On a scale of one to ten, that was about 100 in terms of the shock of it.”

The deafening noise—a.k.a. thousands of frenzied teenagers—was the sound of Beatlemania, which would soon become a worldwide phenomenon. Capitol admittedly spent some major dollars promoting the Fab Four’s first US visit, but as Voyle Gilmore, vice president of Capitol Records said, “There was a lot of hype, but all the hype in the world isn’t going to sell a bad product.”

Aside from the group’s fresh, new, and exciting musical sound, John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s healthy irreverence and playfulness helped to provide America—still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous November—with a much-needed breath of fresh air. “Being cheeky chappies saved our arses on many occasions…because the guys from the press had come to bury us,” Ringo recalled. Hordes of media followed the Beatles’ every step, with McCartney in particular doing his best to accommodate them. Former Beatles press officer Tony Barrow said, “Paul turned out to have such a natural flair for public relations. He seemed to know instinctively how to work the media to the best advantage. Paul was the one-man Barnum & Bailey Beatle.”

The band’s US debut, Meet the Beatles!, was released on January 20, 1964, and contained nine tracks from the previous year’s With the Beatles LP, along with “I Saw Her Standing There” (from Please Please Me), “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “This Boy.” In short order, the band’s music would become all-pervasive in the United States: during the first week in April 1964, the Beatles had the top five singles on the Billboard charts. A week later, a staggering fourteen of the top one hundred songs in the nation belonged to the Fab Four.

As America showed their love for the Beatles, the boys in the band were similarly as enthusiastic about the US—particularly the music. “The thing is, every bit of music we loved came from America, whether it was blues, country & western, rock ’n’ roll, all of that; to us, it was from Valhalla,” Paul McCartney said in 2016. “And so you go there, and you can see it, in all the early footage, just us listening to ourselves on the radio…we’re just thrilled by it all.”

McCartney has ...