The Beatles were born, in some cases, while there was a battle between fighter pilots going on directly over their very maternity wards. It would come to symbolize the struggle they would face as John Lennon took the Beatles and used them to change the world.

January, 2002

Bono of U2 sings some new douchey song at the Superbowl. No problem. Bono does it all the time. Yet this act is different -- it's accompanied by a rolling scroll of the names of the 9/11 victims. It's long enough where if scrolled at a slow enough speed (clever, guys!), one will see every single one. It was just another in the long line of examples...of someone trying to be like John Lennon...and screwing up tremendously.

late 1956

As the Quarrymen head to a fair in Edinburgh where they can hopefully get paid gigs, John Lennon plays with a guitar that he doesn't particularly prefer. Not like his baby, which sits broken until he can raise the money to find a tunesmith who can fix it. As it turns out, he meets and ends up IMMEDIATELY HITTING IT OFF with the leader of a skiffle group who's about a year younger named Paul McCartney. While John didn't particularly starve, he wore all the signs of someone disadvantaged...he reeked of 100% rawness as far as ability to learn when instructed, as did the other Quarrymen who were mostly guys like us who were the creative type and liked primarily to sit around and talk and think about anything in general then draw what comes out of that. He was thoroughly disarmed by this kid Paul McCartney who actually could sit through a piano lesson and do the homework for it in anticipation to be professionally instructed again. John always thought people who listened to their teachers were squares, meanwhile here was someone actually cool enough to make his big outside passion in life more enjoyable. This was how to become that one-in-a-million that makes it big at rock n roll, reasoned John. For there are millions of kids out there, millions of them want to be like Elvis, and millions of them who can actually play music are doing so on Elvis's level because they long surrendered the possibly of achieving in school and were trying to make a living ON THE WAY to trying to make a living, getting distracted, having to pay rent, and having no way to do that because they weren't good students and never learned ways to like it enough to finish their homework and terms papers and know enough for exams. Perhaps that was why, thought John, for all of these countless imitators it WAS only a dream...

1958

Paul has a friend who's a year younger named George Harrison. Can he be in our band? Sure, John says. You can put him on bass guitar.

Which one?

late 1958

Paul McCartney allegedly comes up with the name Beatles because of a dream in which he's looking up at the sky and sees a piece of pie that's on fire, with the letter A on it. But according to John, it was concieved by his best friend Stu Sutcliffe.

1960

Stu Sutcliffe dies, leaving a young widow and newborn child. It is possible in the estimation of yours truly that this, not Superman, was the inspiration behind Uncle Ben's death in Spider-Man. Sutcliffe was the Paul McCartney of Lennon's teenage circle that wasn't Paul McCartney. He had posture, he had presence, he had ambition, he had aim, and if not being present for Lennon's greatest creative visions, was the only guy who could provide ones that Lennon really really respected. It's also been estimated by countless articles and books about the Beatles that John Lennon...went off the deep end after this. Not during the big publicized drug phase of the late 60s, but way back in these early days. For John Lennon, only days before Sutcliffe's death, was a happily married man who had 100% support from his new bride for essentially throwing away the corporate world in order to go to Hamburg for days and months and risk getting critically injured on stage for pennies while singing showtunes in a leather jacket ala Clay Aiken.

Early 1962

The Hamburg crowds would throw glass beer bottles at the bands that performed live in their pub basements. They would assemble in the near thousands and be thoroughly unmanagable. At the end of the show, they would throw all the chairs in the room. But very slowly, very gradually, the Beatles managed to charm. Girls, as it turned out, showed up to these pubs in big numbers (which explains the high turnout of guys looking to show off). While many Beatles acts even in those days were drowned out by the noise before being rudely interrupted and even postponed within minutes due to the rampant bottle throwing, girls didn't have to look at them long to realize they wanted to see more of them. And they would tell their friends this, and their friends, and their friends...

mid-1962

Finally one night, record producer Brian Epstein is literally walking down the street when he hears them play. Whether it's England or Germany I don't remember but it was in fact just as simple as...who's that playing that music...let's go take a look....how would you guys like to play some bigger, better venues?

The problem was that Brian Epstein's idea of commercial was like Sony's when it came to Spider-Man 3. The man who would be responsible for Cyrkel's "Red Rubber Ball" was not enthralled by the leather jackets, nor the long hair, nor the perceived callousness, and so...four happy Beatles with the same short haircut, always dressed in suits and ties what was you got...

late 1962

The Beatles as it turns out...aren't very good.

They can't play music very well as a group. Epstein's assistant at the time was a man who would grow to be the Phil Jackson of the Beatles, and his name was George Martin. Epstein was Doug Collins. At the time, the younger Martin would work with them and try to locate the answer as to what was holding them back. One of the problems was that Paul McCartney, for all his brilliance, was not as original of a songwriter as Brian and George had thought. Paul mostly liked to do extracts from old showtunes, renditions of blues and Chuck Berry songs, and later...contorted versions of 500-year old chamber symphonies. The Beatles when it came to this however, were in luck. Epstein knew he could pad the albums with these songs because that's what every producer does -- they introduce new products by putting them on the coattails of products everyone's already familiar with. Every assistant coach who becomes a head coach, every staff writer of L.A. Law who gets to have his own Doogie Howser M.D. and Boston Legal, every Wanda Sykes that comes from a Chris Rock, every Dr. Phil that comes from an Oprah, every Maude that comes from an All In The Family.

One problem -- the drummer, who was even more instrumental then Paul in attracting chicks while they were broke roughnecks who never got any sleep, had been deemed by George Martin to really suck and would need to be replaced. Pete Best's looks were no longer necessary in Martin and Epstein's mind...because the Beatles were about to have no problems getting any chick they wanted.

late 1962

The Beatles release their first single -- "Love Me Do". It's huge in England, and the Beatles appear to be now on their way to being...single-thousandaires.

1963

The Beatles release their first two albums -- "Please Please Me" and "With the Beatles". The lead vocalist of every song is the guy who wrote it, but Paul and John form a company between themselves called "Northern Songs" in which they each claim equal ownership in each song AND...get more then 95% of the collective final say when it comes to songs that appear on the album. This means that George Harrison can continue writing in secret if at all, because even if he comes up with thirteen or fourteen, John and Paul will probably only like one. And that's EXACTLY WHAT WOULD HAPPEN...

Yet George could feel better about himself, for his egotistic overlords weren't selling the way they thought. Now instead of being a face in the crowd in a Hamburg pub, the Beatles were simply big for their renditions of Twist and Shout and Roll over Beethoven.

Late 1963

It seemed as though Brian Epstein had poisoned them.

When it gets to this point, you say to yourself man...we should have gone with the Quarryman image. At least when we were broke, we were local jokes, not INTERCONTINENTAL jokes. But something was developing 3,000 miles away in the United States...

John F. Kennedy's assassination.

What was clear is that if you could possibly provide a source of mass happiness for this heartbroken land, please, come on out here, we'll pay you big money. Please, help us cheer up America.

Suddenly the idea to do away with the leather jackets and present a happy, family-friendly image had served to be the KEY. Brian Epstein hadn't poisoned the Beatles...Brian Epstein would become the VERY REASON that the Beatles were about to hit it bigger then anyone in the history of time...

February, 1964

The Beatles return to their hotels in Paris after a very disapppointing show. It seemed like the last stop. They couldn't play to Paris anymore, what did they have?

And so they go into their rooms, all ready to kick walls and fall asleep drunk...when they get a mysterious phone call. It's from Brian Epstein...

"I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is the new number one song in the United States...

TO BE CONTINUED in Part 2 of 3

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Beatles-Part-2-to-December-1966

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Beatles-Part-1-to-February-1964