The Beatles

By BJ Heinley

Key Moments

John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
Auditions for John (February 6, 1958): On the top deck of a Liverpool bus, playing 'Raunchy'. John thought he was too young and took him anyway.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Joins the Beatles (August 18, 1962): Recruited from Rory Storm's band days before the first EMI session.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Rishikesh (8 weeks) (February 15, 1968): John stays until April, then leaves after allegations. Writes 'Sexy Sadie' on the plane home.
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): Impromptu 42-minute set on Apple Corps' roof. Their last public performance.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Announces the split (April 10, 1970): The Daily Mirror breaks it, from a Q&A sent out with press copies of McCartney the day before.
Now and Then (November 2, 2023): Fifty-three years after the split. Machine learning separates John's voice from the piano on a 1977 demo.

Every event

Born in the Dingle (July 7, 1940): 9 Madryn Street, Liverpool 8 — the poorest of the four childhoods by some distance.
Born in Liverpool (October 9, 1940): Liverpool Maternity Hospital, during a war his father was away at sea for.
Born in Liverpool (June 18, 1942): Walton Hospital, where his mother had been a nurse — which got the family a private ward.
Born in Liverpool (February 25, 1943): 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree. A two-up two-down with an outside toilet.
Year in hospital (April 1, 1947): A burst appendix leads to peritonitis and a coma. He is six, and misses so much school he never catches up.
Tuberculosis sanatorium (January 1, 1953): Two years at Heswall. The ward band hands him a mallet to keep patients occupied, and he refuses to join in unless he gets a drum.
Dien Bien Phu falls (May 7, 1954): French colonial rule in Indochina ends. The country is partitioned at the 17th parallel.
Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954): School segregation ruled unconstitutional. The same September, Paul meets George on a bus in Liverpool.
'That's All Right' (July 5, 1954): Sun Studio, Memphis. Three years before John and Paul met.
Meets George on the bus (September 1, 1954): The 86 to the Liverpool Institute. Paul is twelve, George eleven — the earliest thread of the band, three years before John.
Rosa Parks arrested (December 1, 1955): Four days later, the Montgomery bus boycott begins.
Ravi Shankar first tours the West (January 1, 1956): A decade before a Beatle picked up a sitar, and he had been playing for thirty years before that.
'Heartbreak Hotel' (January 27, 1956): His first national number one. John Lennon bought a guitar.
Forms the Quarrymen (September 1, 1956): A skiffle group named after Quarry Bank High School. Washboard, tea-chest bass, borrowed guitar.
John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
Liverpool College of Art (September 1, 1957): Where he met Cynthia Powell and Stuart Sutcliffe, and did very little coursework.
Sputnik (October 4, 1957): The space age opens three months after John and Paul meet at Woolton.
Gets his first kit (December 25, 1957): A second-hand set bought by his stepfather for about ten pounds.
Auditions for John (February 6, 1958): On the top deck of a Liverpool bus, playing 'Raunchy'. John thought he was too young and took him anyway.
Drafted into the Army (March 24, 1958): Two years away at the exact moment British teenagers needed something to replace him.
Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (January 1, 1959): Liverpool's biggest draw before the Beatles, and where the name Ringo Starr comes from.
Berry Gordy founds the label (January 12, 1959): Detroit, on an $800 family loan.
Joins on bass (January 1, 1960): Buys a Höfner 500/5 with prize money from a painting he sold, and learns the instrument in public.
Sharpeville massacre (March 21, 1960): 69 killed at a pass-law protest. South Africa leaves the Commonwealth the following year.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Starts driving the van (February 1, 1961): Lodging with the Best family and hauling the gear.
Gagarin orbits the Earth (April 12, 1961): First human in space.
Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25, 1961): Before this decade is out.
Leaves for art school (July 1, 1961): Stays in Hamburg with Astrid Kirchherr to paint. Paul moves to bass.
The Berlin Wall goes up (August 13, 1961): Overnight. The Beatles are in the middle of their Hamburg years, a few hundred miles west.
Sees them at the Cavern (November 9, 1961): A record-shop manager walks down into a lunchtime session after customers keep asking for a German import single.
Signs the Beatles (January 24, 1962): Signs management contract at NEMS Enterprises, Whitechapel.
Decca turns them down (February 1, 1962): Guitar groups are on the way out, Epstein is told. Decca signs Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead.
Dies in Hamburg (April 10, 1962): Brain haemorrhage, aged twenty-one, weeks before the band's Parlophone audition.
Parlophone audition (June 6, 1962): Unimpressed by the songs, impressed by the people. Asks if there is anything they don't like; George says he doesn't like Martin's tie.
First gig at the Marquee (July 12, 1962): Five weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Mandela arrested (August 5, 1962): Two weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Fired from the Beatles (August 16, 1962): Sacked without notice by Brian Epstein — replaced by Ringo two days later.
Joins the Beatles (August 18, 1962): Recruited from Rory Storm's band days before the first EMI session.
Weds Cynthia (August 23, 1962): Secret Liverpool marriage after Cynthia's pregnancy.
Records "Love Me Do" (September 11, 1962): First Beatles single. Ringo has been in the band for less than a month.
Surfin' Safari (October 1, 1962): Released the same week as 'Love Me Do'.
'Love Me Do' released (October 5, 1962): Their first single. Reaches number seventeen.
Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16, 1962): Thirteen days. 'Love Me Do' had been out for eleven of them.
Please Please Me session (February 11, 1963): The whole debut album cut in one day at Abbey Road — ten hours and forty-five minutes, with John singing 'Twist and Shout' last because it would wreck his voice.
Please Please Me (March 22, 1963): Debut LP, recorded in a single 10-hour session at Abbey Road.
Julian Lennon is born (April 8, 1963): John's first child. He's on tour and can't visit for three days.
Relationship with Paul begins (April 18, 1963)
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 27, 1963): The Beatles played it constantly in Paris the following January.
With the Beatles sessions (July 18, 1963): Recorded in snatched days between tours and TV dates.
Partial Test Ban Treaty (August 5, 1963): Atmospheric nuclear testing banned by the US, USSR and UK.
Hired as road manager (August 11, 1963): Recruited from the Cavern door. Ends up playing anvil, counting bars and finding the elephant for the Magical Mystery Tour.
'She Loves You' (August 23, 1963): Begun with John on tour in Newcastle. The best-selling UK single of the decade.
March on Washington (August 28, 1963): 'I Have a Dream'. Three months before the band's first American single.
'Don't Bother Me' (September 11, 1963): His first recorded song, written in a Bournemouth hotel bed while ill, mostly to prove he could.
'I Wanna Be Your Man' (November 1, 1963): Written for them by Lennon and McCartney in about twenty minutes, in front of them. Keith Richards said it was the moment the Stones decided to write their own.
Royal Variety Performance (November 4, 1963): Prince of Wales Theater, in front of the Queen Mother. John tells the cheap seats to clap and the rest to rattle their jewelry.
With the Beatles (November 22, 1963): Released at the peak of UK Beatlemania.
The Beatles cover three Motown songs (November 22, 1963): With the Beatles carries 'Please Mr. Postman', 'You Really Got a Hold on Me' and 'Money'.
Kennedy assassinated (November 22, 1963): Dallas. With the Beatles was released in Britain that same day.
A Hard Day's Night sessions (January 29, 1964): Started at Pathé Marconi in Paris, finished at Abbey Road around the film shoot.
First US visit (February 7, 1964): Ed Sullivan, Washington Coliseum, Carnegie Hall, Miami. Beatlemania hits America.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Washington Coliseum (February 11, 1964): First US concert, two days after Ed Sullivan. 8,092 people, a boxing ring stage, Ringo's kit turned by hand between numbers.
Meets George on film set (March 2, 1964)
Rivonia Trial: life sentence (June 12, 1964): Mandela and seven others to Robben Island. He would be there for eighteen years.
Civil Rights Act signed (July 2, 1964): Segregation in public accommodation outlawed — mid-way through the Beatles' first American tour, on which they refused to play segregated venues.
A Hard Day's Night (July 10, 1964): First LP entirely by Lennon–McCartney.
Gulf of Tonkin (August 2, 1964): The incident that produced the resolution, and with it an American war. Six months after Ed Sullivan.
'You Really Got Me' (August 4, 1964): A slashed speaker cone, and arguably the first hard rock record.
Beatles for Sale sessions (August 11, 1964): Squeezed between two tours. The exhaustion is audible and largely the point.
North American tour (August 19, 1964): 32 shows in 31 days. Hollywood Bowl, Forest Hills, Toronto.
Supremes: 'Where Did Our Love Go' (August 22, 1964): The first of five consecutive American number ones.
Meets the Beatles at the Delmonico (August 28, 1964): New York. He introduced them to cannabis, having misheard 'I can't hide' as something else entirely.
Beatles for Sale (December 4, 1964): Written and recorded between tours.
Brian Wilson stops touring (December 18, 1964): A panic attack on a flight to Houston. He stays home to write — two years before the Beatles do the same.
Ringo and Maureen Wed (February 11, 1965): Caxton Hall, London, UK
Marries Ringo (February 11, 1965)
Help! sessions (February 15, 1965): Film soundtrack first, then the rest — including 'Yesterday' with a string quartet.
Selma to Montgomery (March 7, 1965): 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
First combat troops land (March 8, 1965): 3,500 Marines at Da Nang. The band is in the middle of Help!
Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965): Half electric. The line between folk and rock stops existing.
Banned from touring America (June 1, 1965): Four years, for reasons never made entirely clear. It cost them the American market at the moment it mattered most.
'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' (June 4, 1965): The riff Keith Richards wrote in his sleep.
'Yesterday' (June 14, 1965): Arrived complete in a dream at Wimpole Street; carried around for months as 'Scrambled Eggs' while he checked he had not stolen it.
Goes electric at Newport (July 25, 1965): Booed off after three songs.
Meets Ravi Shankar (August 1, 1965): George's introduction to Indian classical music.
Help! (August 6, 1965): Second film soundtrack, contains 'Yesterday'.
North American tour (August 15, 1965): Opens at Shea Stadium in front of 55,600. Ten cities in seventeen days.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
The Beatles visit Elvis (August 27, 1965): Bel Air. Awkward for an hour, then they played together. No recording was made, which everyone involved later regretted.
Zak Starkey born (September 13, 1965): Ringo's first son. Future drummer for The Who.
Rubber Soul sessions (October 12, 1965): Four weeks against a Christmas deadline. The studio starts becoming the instrument.
'My Generation' (October 29, 1965): Recorded four weeks before the Rubber Soul sessions ended.
Rubber Soul (December 3, 1965): The studio pivot. Sitar debuts on 'Norwegian Wood'.
Marries George (January 21, 1966)
Marries Pattie Boyd (January 21, 1966): George and Pattie marry — Paul serves as best man.
Revolver sessions (April 6, 1966): Opens with 'Tomorrow Never Knows' — tape loops, Leslie-cabinet vocal, artificial double tracking.
Pet Sounds (May 16, 1966): Made in answer to Rubber Soul. Paul called it the record that made him want to make Sgt. Pepper's.
Shankar begins teaching Harrison (June 1, 1966): Six weeks in London, Srinagar and Bombay, starting with how to sit.
Begins teaching George sitar (June 1, 1966)
Germany, Japan, Philippines (June 23, 1966): Death threats in Manila. Precipitates the end of live touring.
Nippon Budokan (June 30, 1966): First rock act to play the martial-arts hall. Nationalist protests and 35,000 police on duty.
Motorcycle crash (July 29, 1966): Woodstock, New York. He disappears from public view for eighteen months.
Revolver (August 5, 1966): Tape loops, reversed tape, Indian drone in a pop song.
South Africa bans Beatles records (August 8, 1966): Over John's remark about Christianity. The ban was not lifted until 1971.
Final tour (August 12, 1966): Chicago through San Francisco. Last live concert at Candlestick Park.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
The television show debuts (September 12, 1966): Built on A Hard Day's Night, down to the running.
India — sitar study (September 14, 1966): Six weeks in Bombay and Kashmir studying sitar with Ravi Shankar.
Arrives in London (September 24, 1966): Chas Chandler brings him over. Within weeks Clapton, Townshend and Beck have all come to watch.
'Good Vibrations' (October 10, 1966): Seven months, four studios and around ninety hours of tape for three and a half minutes.
Meets Yoko Ono (November 7, 1966): At the Indica Gallery, preview of Yoko's 'Unfinished Paintings' show.
Sgt. Pepper's sessions (November 24, 1966): Nov 1966 – Apr 1967. 700 studio hours across five months.
Four No. 1 albums in a row (January 1, 1967): 1966–67. The story that they outsold the Beatles and the Stones combined came from Nesmith, who later admitted it wasn't true.
Apollo 1 fire (January 27, 1967): Three astronauts killed on the launch pad, during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions.
Magical Mystery Tour sessions (April 25, 1967): Runs straight out of Pepper and through Epstein's death in August.
Smile abandoned (May 1, 1967): Wilson hears Sgt. Pepper's and shelves the record meant to answer it. It stayed shelved for thirty-seven years.
'Waterloo Sunset' (May 5, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and largely buried by it.
Are You Experienced (May 12, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and kept off the top by it.
Meets Linda Eastman (May 15, 1967): At the Bag O' Nails club during a Georgie Fame show. Two weeks before Sgt. Pepper's.
Headquarters (May 22, 1967): The one they actually played on. It went to number one and was immediately displaced by Sgt. Pepper's, where it stayed for eleven weeks.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Opens with 'Sgt. Pepper's' (June 4, 1967): Saville Theatre, nine days after the album came out, with Paul and George in the audience. Paul called it one of the great honours of his life.
Burns his guitar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): The introduction to America.
Shankar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): Three hours on a Sunday afternoon, and a standing ovation from an audience that had come for rock.
Monterey Pop (June 18, 1967): They smashed their equipment; Hendrix followed and set fire to his.
Jagger and Richards sentenced (June 29, 1967): Drug convictions, quashed on appeal. The Times: 'Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?'
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 4, 1967): Recorded at Abbey Road in the studio next door to Sgt. Pepper's. The Beatles dropped in.
Brian Epstein dies (August 27, 1967): Manager's death at 32 changes the group dynamic forever.
Magical Mystery Tour (November 27, 1967): Soundtrack to a widely-panned TV film. But: 'I Am the Walrus'.
Runs Apple Corps (January 1, 1968): Forty years managing the catalogue, the lawsuits and the Anthology project.
Tet Offensive (January 30, 1968): The turn in American opinion. Runs through the weeks the band spent in Rishikesh.
Rishikesh study period (February 15, 1968)
Rishikesh (8 weeks) (February 15, 1968): George stays until April with John. Rethinks his spiritual approach.
Rishikesh (8 weeks) (February 15, 1968): John stays until April, then leaves after allegations. Writes 'Sexy Sadie' on the plane home.
Maharishi's Rishikesh course (February 16, 1968): Sixty students including four Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow and Mike Love. Around thirty songs came out of it.
Rishikesh (6 weeks) (February 19, 1968): Paul stays six weeks before returning to London for business.
Rishikesh (2 weeks) (February 19, 1968): Ringo lasts two weeks. Brought suitcases of baked beans.
Martin Luther King assassinated (April 4, 1968): Memphis. The band had returned from India eight days earlier.
Syd Barrett leaves (April 6, 1968): They stopped picking him up for gigs. He was twenty-two.
Yoko at Kenwood (May 19, 1968): An all-night session that becomes Two Virgins. Cynthia comes home from Greece to find them together.
White Album sessions (May 30, 1968): May–Oct 1968. Recorded across five London studios amid fraying relationships.
Engagement ends (July 20, 1968)
Soviet tanks enter Prague (August 20, 1968): The Prague Spring crushed. 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' had been recorded ten days earlier.
'Hey Jude' (August 26, 1968): Written on the drive to see Cynthia and Julian after the separation.
First gig (September 7, 1968): Denmark, billed as the New Yardbirds, while the Beatles were finishing the White Album.
Head (November 6, 1968): A film built to demolish their own image, co-written by Jack Nicholson. It worked.
Divorces John (November 8, 1968): Divorce granted after Yoko moves in. Cynthia keeps custody of Julian.
The Village Green Preservation Society (November 22, 1968): Out the same day as the White Album, and sold almost nothing.
The White Album (November 22, 1968): Sprawling double LP recorded amid fracturing relationships.
The Comeback Special (December 3, 1968): Black leather, back on television, seven years after his last live show.
Marvin Gaye: 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' (December 14, 1968): Seven weeks at number one.
Get Back sessions (January 2, 1969): Twickenham then Apple. Culminated in the rooftop concert.
Led Zeppelin I (January 12, 1969): Released the same month as the rooftop concert. The decade turns over.
Yellow Submarine (January 17, 1969): Half unreleased Beatles material, half orchestral score.
Joins the Get Back sessions (January 22, 1969): George brings him in from a Ray Charles tour. Credited on the single as 'The Beatles with Billy Preston'.
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): Impromptu 42-minute set on Apple Corps' roof. Their last public performance.
Abbey Road sessions (February 22, 1969): Recorded after the abandoned Get Back sessions were shelved.
Marries Linda (March 12, 1969): Marylebone Registry Office, London. Eight days before John marries Yoko.
Marries Paul (March 12, 1969)
Marries Yoko (March 20, 1969): Brief civil ceremony in Gibraltar.
Tommy (May 23, 1969): A rock opera, arriving as the Beatles were recording Abbey Road.
Bed-In for Peace (May 26, 1969): Montreal bed-in produces 'Give Peace a Chance'.
Brian Jones drowns (July 3, 1969): Aged twenty-seven, a month after leaving the band he founded.
Hyde Park free concert (July 5, 1969): Two days after Brian Jones died; a quarter of a million people.
Apollo 11 lands (July 20, 1969): Six weeks before the Abbey Road sessions finished. Roughly 600 million people watch.
Woodstock (August 18, 1969): Monday morning, most of the crowd gone, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.
Mary McCartney is born (August 28, 1969): Paul and Linda's first child.
Live Peace in Toronto (September 13, 1969): The Plastic Ono Band assembled on the flight over, Clapton included. His first concert without the Beatles.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Moratorium march on Washington (November 15, 1969): Half a million people. Pete Seeger leads them in 'Give Peace a Chance', written in a Montreal hotel room five months earlier.
Returns his MBE (November 25, 1969): With a note citing Biafra, Vietnam, and 'Cold Turkey' slipping down the charts.
Altamont (December 6, 1969): A stabbing in front of the stage, four months after Woodstock. The counterculture's other bookend.
Sentimental Journey (March 27, 1970): Standards his mother liked. His first solo album.
Announces the split (April 10, 1970): The Daily Mirror breaks it, from a Q&A sent out with press copies of McCartney the day before.
McCartney (April 17, 1970): Recorded at home on a four-track, everything played himself. Released a fortnight before Let It Be.
Solo and All-Starr career (April 17, 1970): Still recording and touring with the All-Starr Band.
Solo and Wings career (April 17, 1970): Still touring more than half a century later — which is why the document's extent has no end yet.
Kent State (May 4, 1970): National Guardsmen kill four students. Three weeks after the Beatles' split is announced.
Let It Be (May 8, 1970): Recorded before Abbey Road, released after.
All Things Must Pass sessions (May 26, 1970): Abbey Road and Trident, produced with Phil Spector, with Clapton and most of what became Derek and the Dominos.
Lola released (June 12, 1970): Banned by the BBC until Coca-Cola became cherry cola.
Dies at 27 (September 18, 1970): London, five months after the Beatles announced the split.
Third child born (November 11, 1970)
All Things Must Pass (November 27, 1970): A triple album of everything the others had turned down. The first solo Beatles number one.
Plastic Ono Band (December 11, 1970): Primal-scream therapy set to a three-piece. 'God' lists everything he no longer believes in, the Beatles last.
Sticky Fingers (April 23, 1971): First on their own label; the tongue logo arrives.
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (May 21, 1971): Gordy thought it would fail. A soul record about Vietnam, poverty and ecology.
Forms Wings (July 1, 1971): With Linda on keyboards, to general derision, and then for a decade of number ones.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Madison Square Garden, with Dylan, Clapton, Ravi Shankar and Ringo. The template for every benefit concert since.
Joins Wings (August 1, 1971)
Who's Next (August 2, 1971): Salvaged from an abandoned science-fiction project.
Surf's Up (August 30, 1971): The title song, shelved since SMiLE, finally surfaces.
Moves to New York (August 31, 1971): Leaves England for good. Spends the next four years fighting deportation.
Imagine (September 9, 1971): The most successful of his solo records and the one he later called sugar-coated.
Led Zeppelin IV (November 8, 1971): Untitled, four symbols, and one of the best-selling records ever made.
Deportation fight (March 6, 1972): Four years of visa hearings begun over a 1968 cannabis conviction, and widely understood to be about his politics.
Exile on Main St. (May 12, 1972): Recorded in a basement in the south of France, in tax exile.
Aloha from Hawaii (January 14, 1973): Beamed by satellite to more than a billion people.
Paris Peace Accords (January 27, 1973): American withdrawal agreed.
The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973): Fifteen years on the American chart, recorded in the same building as everything above.
The Lost Weekend (October 1, 1973): Eighteen months in Los Angeles apart from Yoko — drinking, producing, and making two of his better records anyway.
Quadrophenia (October 26, 1973)
Ringo (November 2, 1973): The only post-split record all four contributed to, though never in the same room.
Band on the Run (November 30, 1973): Cut in Lagos after two band members quit the week before the flight.
Dark Horse tour (November 2, 1974): The first North American tour by an ex-Beatle, played with laryngitis and a set that refused to be a nostalgia show. Reviewers were merciless.
Last stage appearance (November 28, 1974): Madison Square Garden with Elton John, honoring a bet that 'Whatever Gets You Thru the Night' would top the chart.
Partnership dissolved (December 29, 1974): The legal end, nearly five years after the public one. John signs last, at Disneyland; the court makes it final on 9 January.
The drinking years (January 1, 1975): By his own account he remembers very little of it. The records got worse and then stopped selling entirely.
Blood on the Tracks (January 20, 1975)
Fall of Saigon (April 30, 1975): The war ends, twenty-one years after Dien Bien Phu.
Househusband years (October 9, 1975): Five years off. Baking bread, raising Sean, and releasing nothing at all.
Sean born (October 9, 1975): On John's own thirty-fifth birthday. He steps away from music for five years.
Soweto uprising (June 16, 1976): Schoolchildren protest against Afrikaans-medium instruction; hundreds are killed.
Green card granted (July 27, 1976): Permanent residency at last, four years and a change of US administration later.
Loses the 'My Sweet Lord' case (September 7, 1976): Found to have subconsciously copied 'He's So Fine'. He said afterwards he became paranoid about writing anything at all.
Dies at 42 (August 16, 1977): Graceland. Lennon: Elvis died the day he went into the Army.
Founds HandMade Films (January 1, 1978): Mortgages his house to finance Life of Brian after EMI pulls out — the most expensive cinema ticket ever bought, as Eric Idle put it.
Some Girls (June 9, 1978): The answer to punk and disco in the same record.
Marries Olivia Arias (September 2, 1978): A month after their son Dhani was born.
Keith Moon dies (September 7, 1978): Aged thirty-two. He had given Ringo's son Zak his first proper kit.
Slow Train Coming (August 20, 1979): The first of the gospel records.
The Wall (November 30, 1979)
Cincinnati stampede (December 3, 1979): Eleven fans died in the crush before the show.
Arrested in Tokyo (January 16, 1980): Half a pound of cannabis in his suitcase. Nine days in jail and the tour canceled.
Double Fantasy sessions (August 7, 1980): The Hit Factory, New York. He is back at work and writing quickly.
John Bonham dies (September 25, 1980): The band ends within three months.
Double Fantasy (November 17, 1980): The comeback record, released three weeks before his death.
Led Zeppelin disband (December 4, 1980): We could not continue as we were.
Murdered outside the Dakota (December 8, 1980): Shot returning home to West 72nd Street. He was forty.
Marries Barbara Bach (April 27, 1981): They met on the set of Caveman the year before.
Tattoo You (August 24, 1981): Start Me Up, salvaged from a shelved reggae take.
Dennis Wilson drowns (December 28, 1983): The only Beach Boy who surfed.
The Never Ending Tour begins (June 7, 1988): Concord, California. It has not really stopped.
Motown sold to MCA (June 28, 1988): The end of Gordy's independent Detroit-born label.
Gets sober (October 1, 1988): Checks into a clinic in Arizona with Barbara after years he says he can barely remember.
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (October 18, 1988): With Dylan, Petty, Orbison and Lynne, assembled in about nine days around a B-side that was never a B-side.
Kokomo reaches No. 1 (November 5, 1988): Their first chart-topper in 22 years, without Brian.
First All-Starr Band tour (July 23, 1989): A rotating cast of people with their own hits to play. Still going more than thirty years later.
Steel Wheels (August 29, 1989): The reconciliation record; the tour that reinvented the stadium business.
World tour (September 26, 1989): His first in thirteen years, and the one where the Beatles songs came back for good.
Voodoo Lounge (July 11, 1994): First without Bill Wyman.
Anthology 1 (November 20, 1995): Outtakes, demos and 'Free as a Bird' — the three surviving members recording over a John Lennon cassette.
Knighted (March 11, 1997): Knight Bachelor for services to music.
Throat cancer diagnosis (July 1, 1997): He blamed the cigarettes of his twenties.
Time Out of Mind (September 30, 1997): The late-career resurrection; Album of the Year.
Linda dies (April 17, 1998): Breast cancer, in Arizona. They had been married twenty-nine years and apart for barely a night of it.
Stabbed at Friar Park (December 30, 1999): An intruder breaks in and attacks him; Olivia stops it with a lamp.
Dies at 58 (November 29, 2001): Lung cancer, in Los Angeles. His ashes are scattered in the Ganges.
Marries Heather Mills (June 11, 2002): Divorced in 2008 after a settlement conducted largely in the newspapers.
John Entwistle dies (June 27, 2002): The night before a tour was to open.
Live 8 reunion (July 2, 2005): Waters and Gilmour on one stage, once.
A Bigger Bang (September 5, 2005): Followed by the highest-grossing tour yet staged.
Reunion at the O2 (December 10, 2007): One night, with Jason Bonham on drums.
Marries Nancy Shevell (October 9, 2011): Old Marylebone Town Hall, where he had married Linda forty-two years earlier.
The SMiLE Sessions released (November 1, 2011): The great lost album, 44 years late.
That's Why God Made the Radio (June 5, 2012): The 50th-anniversary reunion with Brian back at the center.
Olympics opening ceremony (July 27, 2012): 'Hey Jude' to eighty thousand people and a billion more.
50th anniversary shows open at the O2 (November 25, 2012): Fifty years and four months after the Marquee.
Rock Hall, as a solo artist (April 18, 2015): The last of the four to be inducted on his own, with Paul doing the honors.
Dies at 90 (March 8, 2016): The producer who treated the studio as an instrument before anyone asked him to.
Nobel Prize in Literature (October 13, 2016): For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
Blue & Lonesome (December 2, 2016): Back to Chicago blues covers — where they came in.
Knighted (March 20, 2018): Twenty-one years after Paul.
WHO (December 6, 2019): Townshend and Daltrey, still at it.
Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 19, 2020): A 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination went to No. 1.
Charlie Watts dies (August 24, 2021): The quiet center of the band, 58 years at the kit.
Headlines Glastonbury at 80 (June 25, 2022): The festival's oldest solo headliner, three days after his birthday.
Hackney Diamonds (October 20, 2023): First originals in eighteen years; Paul McCartney plays bass on one track.
Now and Then (November 2, 2023): Fifty-three years after the split. Machine learning separates John's voice from the piano on a 1977 demo.
Hackney Diamonds tour opens (April 28, 2024): Houston. Still touring, sixty-two years in.

Eras

Pre Beatles (1954–1960): From John and Paul’s first meeting to the night the band took its name to Hamburg: the Quarrymen, skiffle, art school, and the lineup taking shape.
Active (1960–1970): The ten years from Hamburg to Paul’s announcement that he’d left: the life of the band.
Post Beatles (1970–now): After the split: four solo careers, the lawsuits, John’s and George’s deaths, and the band’s afterlife in reissues, the Anthology and Get Back.
Hamburg & Cavern (1960–1962): The apprenticeship: hundreds of hours on stage in Hamburg’s clubs and Liverpool’s Cavern, Brian Epstein, and the change from Pete Best to Ringo.
Beatlemania (1962–1966): From “Love Me Do” to the last paying concert, at Candlestick Park: the hysteria, the films, the American invasion and constant touring.
Studio years (1966–1969): No more touring: the band becomes a studio act, from Sgt. Pepper and the White Album to Abbey Road.
Break-up (1969–1970): From Abbey Road to Paul’s announcement: business quarrels over Apple and Allen Klein, solo records, and the end.

The Beatles

Key Moments

Every event

Eras

Sources

Original Horizontal (Phone) · mockup