LET'S MEET AND GREET THE BEATLES
- Top Beatles Questions
- Who were the members of the Beatles?
- How did the Beatles become a band?
- What was Beatlemania?
- What was the Beatles’ first hit?
- When did the Beatles break up?
100 BEATLES SONGS PLAYLIST [VIDEO]
Formerly called Fab Four, the Silver Beatles or the Quarrymen, the Beatles is a British musical group which originated from Liverpool, that took the world by the storm in their wake.
The core of the Beatles band members consisted of:
- John Lennon (Oct. 9, 1940 - Dec. 8, 1980)
- Paul McCartney (Jun. 18, 1942 - Now)
- George Harrison (Feb. 25, 1943 - Nov. 29, 2001)
- Ringo Starr (July 7, 1940 - Now)
While Stuart SutCliffe and Pete Best joined the Beatles band later.
The Beatles band shone bright in the 1960s as a light of hope and motivation. Originally formed in 1957 around just John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Beatles band was structured around American Rock and Roll. It will interest you to know that both John Lennon (singer and guitarist) and Paul McCartney (singer and bassist) were self taught musicians and didn't in anyway go through any music school but they turned out to rule their world, musically.
In 1961, after playing locally for a couple of years, a local record shop manager, Brian Epstein, discovered and fell right in love with the Beatles. This metamorphosed into Epstein becoming the Beatles manager. In this capacity, Epstein flooded all major music companies in Britain with tape recordings and contract proposal letters of the Beatles band - this move eventually paid off as it landed them a record deal with Parlophone, an EMI music label subsidiary.
At Parlophone, the Beatles band was handed over to, George Martin, a classically tutored musician and was handed the responsibility of both supervising and nurturing the budding talents of the Beatles band members to stardom. At Parlophone, the Beatles rearranged and released one of their popular songs - Please, Please Me - which became their first big British hit.
The huge success of the Beatles can be attributed to the media frenzy caused by their new wave of American Rock and Roll fused into mainstream British entertainment culture, this ripped off the hold of age, class and even the traditional music taste of the average Briton.
The media had spotted their talent and first stop, were big time British radio shows granting the Beatles interviews, airplays and shout-outs, topmost among them being the British Broadcasting Corporation. Next stop, were large British television stations who also arranged interview sessions for the Beatles, the frenzy being on - the British print media coined the frenzy that came with that phase and time: Beatlemania and the phrase caught on.
Due to the Tsunami caused by the Beatles songs, they were catapulted in 1964 to the United States. The wave was infectious, as the Americans also caught the Beatlemania fever. Funny enough, the absence of the Beatles from the British market during their United States sojourn caused a flood of Beatles imitators to invade the British entertainment scene.
Beatlemania became the first global collective frenzy in the age of modern mass media, before music icons like Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks broke that record. The year 1964 was quite an eventful one for the Beatles as they got featured on a movie that depicted the Beatlemania phenomenon, titled - A Hard Day's Night. Beatlemania influenced and changed society the world over especially among the youths, it came with a wave of reckless abandon - away from the cultured way of life society was used to, before the frenzy.
Because of the magnitude of influence that came with their music, the Beatles got endeared to the elites who got the most dose of the Beatlemania drug. In 1965, then British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, himself recommended the Beatles for the prestigious MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) honors. Amidst mass protests from some previous MBE recipients, citing that it would reduce the dignity of the royal order - each of the original members of the Beatles band received and became a Member of the Order of the British Empire, subsequently.
The Beatles also, in 1967, released a major global hit song that shook the Rock and Roll world to it's foundations, titled - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was welcomed with open arms by the counterculture youth community of the day and an age where hedonism and other social experiments was rife, a period that made transcendental meditation (an exotic spiritual exercise taught my Indian guru - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - often times fused with the use of a mind expanding narcotic called LSD) very popular.
In 1969 the band went on to release another great hit - Abbey Road - which became one of the Beatles best-selling and most cherished studio albums. In and around this time inner bickering within the band, had pit John Lennon against Paul McCartney this threatened every and anything the musical group had through the years worked hard to build together from money, to fame and even to the Beatlemania pop culture which they created.
The Beatles officially broke up in 1970 and all four members went on to release solo albums which also did well in the market at different levels, although not as well, as when they were together as a group.
Unfortunately, in 1980 John Lennon was murdered by a demented fan outside his New York apartment. The following years, saw Beatles band mate, Paul McCartney, go on to record very successful hits and he has since been very active in the music field over the years.
The Beatles Comeback:
It came as a shocker in the early 1990s when fans heard that the remaining members of the Beatles band were in the studio again - together. McCartney along with Starr and Harrison had come together to put their harmonies on two of Lennon's unreleased vocal recordings. These were released in both 1995 and 1996 along with a 10 hour video documentary of the Beatles footages all contained in 6 compact discs - released as - The Beatles Anthology. Year 2000 saw another release by the Beatles, a singles compilation titled - 1 - which enjoyed huge global success.
The Beatles were inducted (as a group) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Members of the Beatles band were individually inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - as follows:
