Word: lennon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...summer festival at St. Peter's Parish Church in Liverpool's Woolton district on a hot day in 1957, and being transfixed by a skiffle band called the Quarry Men. Paul happened to have brought his guitar and impressed the band's leader, a cocky lad named Lennon, with raucous renderings of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs. That's the big cosmic moment, but in official Beatles lore there's an even earlier bit of predestiny. It is 1955, and George Harrison, just 12, is a miserable student putting in an hour's commute...
Without rehashing the many permutations of the evolving Quarry Men of the late '50s--the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles, the endless series of exploding drummers--we arrive in the Reeperbahn, the famous cabaret district in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s with a band whose front line is Lennon-McCartney-Harrison because Lennon, in his wisdom, had decided that he would put at risk his dominance to build the strongest group. The way to think of those early Beatles is as one of the grittiest, nastiest, best punk bands ever, getting tighter by the night during sets that might last...
...might have cost him his place in history. During the group's first five-month gig in Germany, authorities discovered that Harrison, at 17, was too young to be working in the Reeperbahn nightclubs. They had him deported. Guitarists can be replaced, but by then McCartney and Lennon were protective of their little brother--the Beatles were as much a fiercely insular family as they were a ferocious rock band--and a few weeks later the boys were playing together again in England. Sounding better than ever, and much better than other Liverpool pop bands, the Beatles became local legends...
...city had wanted to give the group a ticker-tape parade, but the boys nixed the idea. They were terrified by the crush of Beatlemaniacs and thinking not only of John F. Kennedy's assassination but also of death threats the Beatles had received in the wake of Lennon's recent "We're more popular than Jesus" comment.) With the end of live performance, the band, and Harrison in particular, moved on to what he considered more serious endeavors. His marriage to Patti Boyd in early '66 had altered his perspective, as had what he called "the dental experience," which...
...second Beatles film, Help!, called for chase scenes involving cartoonish Hindu villains, and Indian sitar players were brought in to provide some zippy chase music. George started noodling on a sitar--if indeed one can noodle on a sitar--and asking questions. This led to exotic instrumentation on the Lennon ballad Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and later to an apprenticeship with master sitarist Ravi Shankar, who gave Harrison lessons on the instrument and in life itself. "He was a friend, a disciple and son to me," said Shankar, who visited Harrison for the last time on Wednesday. "George...