When Paul McCartney looks back at his days in The Beatles, he’ll note the friendly rivalry he and John Lennon had when it came to songwriting. In Paul’s mind, the “amazing competition” he and John had pushed the two to produce their best work in the peak Fab Four years.

“It was a great way for us to keep each other on our toes,” Paul told Uncut in 2004. “I’d write ‘Yesterday’ and John would go away and write ‘Norwegian Wood.’ If he wrote ‘Strawberry Fields’, it was like he’d upped the ante, so I had to come up with something as good as ‘Penny Lane.’”

It didn’t start out that way. Before Paul and John began writing on their own, they often worked together “face to face” and “eyeball to eyeball.” That’s how we got early hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.”

Most Beatles writers see the competition really kicking off in 1964, around the time the pair composed songs for A Hard Day’s Night. After Paul won the A-side of a single with “Can’t Buy Me Love,” John went on a tear that made him the driving force on the band’s next record.

Source: cheatsheet.com

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As time goes by, some songs, some albums, and some bands become legends. So cult that even after decades of 'discovery', they still have an army of people behind them who respect and listen to them. The Beatles, English pop band, founded in 1957 in Liverpool, is one of those bands.

The members included George Harrison, solo guitar and vocals; John Lennon, rhythm guitar and vocals; Paul McCartney, bass and vocals; and Ringo Starr (real name Richard Starkey; born 1940), drums. First, they became famous in England, and after that, they caused the unprecedented hysteria of youth (Beatlemania) all over the world. After the split in 1970, each of the members of the band achieved, with varying success, a separate music career. These are their top 10 highest-grossing albums of all time.

Source: thetalko.com

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There are a plethora of songs that John Lennon can hang his creative hat on. From his work with The Beatles to his enigmatic solo work, ‘Instant Karma!’ provides the perfect bridge between the icon’s career islands.

The song was written and recorded in one day, January 27th, 1970, and released just 10 days later, with John Lennon once boasting that he “wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch and we’re putting it out for dinner.”

While that is a slight exaggeration, ‘Instant Karma!’ was one of the most hastily put together songs John Lennon ever wrote. The singer and songwriter’s choice to put out the track so quickly would have some huge implications for the rest of The Beatles and quickly put Lennon out into the public as a solo artist before the confirmation of the band’s split had been announced.

Source: Jack Whatley/faroutmagazine.co.uk

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While Sinatra was certainly still the Chairman of the Board in the mid-’60s, his days of topping the charts with two albums in the same year (as he’d done in ’58) were over. Still, he had plenty left in the tank (including a No. 1), and he had enormous respect in the music

Following his ’65 release, September of My Years. Matched up against McCartney’s smash-hit “Yesterday,” Sinatra took home the Grammy for best male vocal performance for “It Was a Very Good Year.” (The same song topped “Yesterday” for the best-arrangement Grammy.)

And Sinatra wasn’t done one-upping the Fab Four when the Grammy Awards went out in early ’66. Though Help! had spent nine weeks at the top of the charts in ’65, Sinatra’s September of My Years won the Grammy for the year’s best album. The following year, The Beatles had deja vu all over again.

Source: entertainment--news.com

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The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are two of the greatest bands, not only in British history, but in rock history. Their first meeting is the stuff of legend. Here’s what went down when the two bands collided for the first time.

According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones remembers when he was performing at the Crawdaddy Club in 1963 and noticed the Beatles in the audience. “Halfway through the set we kind of glanced up, and there were four silhouetted leather-clad persons standing just in front of the bandstand in amongst all these kids who were all dancing and playing around.” He remembered that the Fab Four were “being totally ignored by the audience.”

According to Slate, he elaborated “We’re playing a pub … and we’re whacking out our show and everybody’s having a good time, ya know? I suddenly turn around: there’s these four guys in black leather overcoats standing there. Oh fuck me! Look who’s here!”

After noticing the Beatles, Wyman “turned round to Charlie [Watts], and I said, ‘It’s the Beatles!’ They’d had two or three big No. 1 hits and they were like the rave of England at that time.”

Source: cheatsheet.com

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The final year of John Lennon’s life will be the subject of a new documentary timed to mark the 40th anniversary of the music legend’s death. John Lennon: The Final Year, from Reda Films, will include never-before-seen material and interviews with those who spent time with the slain Beatle during the last year of his life. Lennon died December 8, 1980, as a result of a fatal gunshot wound, while standing with his wife, Yoko Ono, in front of his apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side.

The film’s producer is noted Beatles author, Ken Womack of Wonderwall Communications. Womack’s forthcoming book, John Lennon 1980: The Final Days in the Life of Beatle John, will be published on Lennon’s birthday, Oct. 9. His most recent book was Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, published in 2019 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road.

Source: Best Classic Bands Staff

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