Skiffle music — a sort of jug-band clatter ideally suited to inexpensive and homemade instruments — was all the rage, and in 1957 Lennon formed a band called the Quarrymen. By the following year, the group had been joined by McCartney and his school friend George Harrison, then just 14. In 1960, calling themselves the Silver Beatles, and with drummer Pete Best in tow, they sailed to Germany to play the riotous red-light-district bars of Hamburg, drink Herculean quantities of beer and gulp down handfuls of illicitly energizing pills to keep them stage ready seven nights a week. In 1962 Best was replaced by another Liverpool drummer, basset-eyed Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey in 1940). After passing an audition that their manager, Brian Epstein, had arranged with EMI's Parlophone label, the group cut its first single, Love Me Do, a moderate hit. In January 1963 a second single, Please Please Me, went to No. 1, and Beatlemania was born.

It is commonly thought that by the time the Beatles arrived in the U.S., rock-'n'-roll music, an uproarious sound forged by such pioneers as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, had all but died out, leaving the charts littered with such unconvincing rock-lite commodities as Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker. This is not entirely true. Although Presley had been drafted into the army in 1958 (and was never quite the same after he got out), and Buddy Holly had been killed in a plane crash in 1959, and Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were all otherwise sidelined, there was no gaping lack of good music around. In 1963 — the year before the Beatles broke Stateside — the charts were filled with great records by the Drifters, the Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Motown's Miracles and Martha and the Vandellas, and celebrated Phil Spector girl groups such as the Crystals and the Ronettes.

What set the Beatles apart, amid all those fabled acts, was their dazzling interpersonal chemistry (showcased to irresistible effect in the 1964 feature film A Hard Day's Night, which critic Andrew Sarris called "the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies"), their novel sound (produced on offbeat — to most Americans — Gretsch, Rickenbacker and Hofner guitars and cranked out through snarly little Vox amplifiers brought over from England) and of course their awesome facility for making ravishing hit records.

By 1965 even the non-fab world had been forced to take notice of this all-conquering cultural force. The Beatles had become such a huge British export that they were given a royal award: the Member of the Order of the British Empire, or M.B.E. (They took this about as seriously as anyone might have expected, all four of them firing up a joint in a Buckingham Palace washroom before the ceremony, and Ringo commenting on his M.B.E., "I'll keep it to dust when I'm old.") Having scored a breakthrough with their chart-topping 1965 album Rubber Soul — the record whose elegant lyrics and luminous melodies lifted them forever out of the world of simple teen idols and into the realm of art — the Beatles, exhausted, decided to stop touring. After a final concert in San Francisco in 1966, they would come together again as a group only in recording studios. But there they spun out ever more elaborate masterpieces: the tripped-out psychedelic special Revolver in 1966; the breathtaking (at the time) concept epic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967; the strangely alienated, every-man-for-himself White Album (officially called The Beatles) in 1968; and the gorgeous Abbey Road in '69.

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Sep. 22, 1967	Dec. 22, 1980	Dec. 10, 2001
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