John Lennon

By BJ Heinley

Key Moments

Born in Liverpool (October 9, 1940): Liverpool Maternity Hospital, during a war his father was away at sea for.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
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.
Montreal Bed-In (May 26, 1969): Eight days in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, from which 'Give Peace a Chance' is recorded.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Imagine (September 9, 1971): The most successful of his solo records, and the one he later described as sugar-coated.
Murdered outside the Dakota (December 8, 1980): Shot returning home to West 72nd Street, hours after signing an album sleeve for the man who did it. He was forty.
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 (April 24, 1906): Mary Elizabeth Stanley, the eldest of the five sisters.
Born (March 12, 1914): The youngest but one of the five Stanley sisters.
Born in Tokyo (February 18, 1933): Into a banking family; evacuated to the countryside during the firebombing of 1945.
Born (September 10, 1939): Blackpool, raised in Hoylake across the Mersey.
Born in Liverpool (October 9, 1940): Liverpool Maternity Hospital, during a war his father was away at sea for.
Goes to live with Mimi (July 1, 1946): After a custody scene in Blackpool where he is asked to choose between his parents. He is five.
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.
Teaches John banjo chords (January 1, 1955): His first guitar parts are banjo shapes with two strings ignored — which is why his early playing sounds the way it does.
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.
Meets Paul at Woolton (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête. Paul, fifteen, tunes John's 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.
Meets John at art college (September 1, 1957): Lettering class. She was the well-spoken one from over the water.
Sputnik (October 4, 1957): The space age opens three months after John and Paul meet at Woolton.
Drafted into the Army (March 24, 1958): Two years away at the exact moment British teenagers needed something to replace him.
Julia is killed (July 15, 1958): Struck by a car outside Mimi's house, weeks after John had begun to know her. He was seventeen.
Berry Gordy founds the label (January 12, 1959): Detroit, on an $800 family loan.
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): Eight hours a night at the Indra, and the making of the band as a live act.
Gagarin orbits the Earth (April 12, 1961): First human in space.
Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25, 1961): Before this decade is out.
The Berlin Wall goes up (August 13, 1961): Overnight. The Beatles are in the middle of their Hamburg years, a few hundred miles west.
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.
Marries John (August 23, 1962): Mount Pleasant register office, with a pneumatic drill outside. The marriage is kept from the public.
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.
Born (April 8, 1963): John is on tour and sees him three days later.
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.
March on Washington (August 28, 1963): 'I Have a Dream'. Three months before the band's first American single.
'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.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moves to Poole (July 1, 1965): A bungalow on the Dorset coast bought by John, after fans made Mendips impossible.
Goes electric at Newport (July 25, 1965): Booed off after three songs.
Help! (August 6, 1965): Second film soundtrack, contains 'Yesterday'.
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.
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'.
"More popular than Jesus" (March 4, 1966): An offhand remark to the Evening Standard, unremarked in Britain, that detonates in America five months later.
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.
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.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. Thirty-three minutes, and John never plays with them on a stage again.
The television show debuts (September 12, 1966): Built on A Hard Day's Night, down to the running.
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 at the Indica (November 7, 1966): Climbs a stepladder to read one word through a magnifying glass. The word is YES.
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.
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'.
Tet Offensive (January 30, 1968): The turn in American opinion. Runs through the weeks the band spent in Rishikesh.
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.
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.
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' released (August 26, 1968): Written by Paul on the drive to see Julian and Cynthia after the separation. Originally 'Hey Jules'.
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.
Divorce from Cynthia finalised (November 8, 1968): On grounds of adultery, after six years.
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.
Two Virgins (November 29, 1968): Tape experiments with Yoko, in a sleeve that got it sold in a brown paper bag.
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.
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 Yoko in Gibraltar (March 20, 1969): Chosen because it was quick and quiet. The song about it was not.
Tommy (May 23, 1969): A rock opera, arriving as the Beatles were recording Abbey Road.
Montreal Bed-In (May 26, 1969): Eight days in room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, from which 'Give Peace a Chance' is recorded.
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'.
Live Peace in Toronto (September 13, 1969): The Plastic Ono Band assembled on the flight over, Clapton included. His first concert without the Beatles.
Tells the band he is leaving (September 20, 1969): Says he wants a divorce from the group, at a meeting about a new Capitol contract. Kept quiet for seven months.
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.
Paul announces the split (April 10, 1970): A press release with Paul's solo album. John's reaction is that he had left first and had been asked to keep it to himself.
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.
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.
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.
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (December 11, 1970): Released the same day as John's, with a mirrored sleeve.
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.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Shankar asks Harrison for help with famine relief; the result invents the benefit concert.
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, taking a suite at the St Regis and then a loft in the Village.
Imagine (September 9, 1971): The most successful of his solo records, and the one he later described as 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.
Some Time in New York City (June 12, 1972): Headlines set to music, and his worst-reviewed record.
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)
Mind Games (October 29, 1973): Recorded as the marriage came apart.
Walls and Bridges (September 26, 1974): Home of 'Whatever Gets You thru the Night', his only solo US number-one single in his lifetime.
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. It did.
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.
Blood on the Tracks (January 20, 1975)
Rock 'n' Roll (February 17, 1975): Covers of the records he learned on, ending a lawsuit over a borrowed Chuck Berry line.
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 is born (October 9, 1975): On John's own thirty-fifth birthday.
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.
Dies at 42 (August 16, 1977): Graceland. Lennon: Elvis died the day he went into the Army.
Some Girls (June 9, 1978): The answer to punk and disco in the same record.
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.
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): A dialogue album with Yoko, and the comeback.
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, hours after signing an album sleeve for the man who did it. He was forty.
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.
Valotte (October 15, 1984): His own first album, four years after his father's death.
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.
Kokomo reaches No. 1 (November 5, 1988): Their first chart-topper in 22 years, without Brian.
Steel Wheels (August 29, 1989): The reconciliation record; the tour that reinvented the stadium business.
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.
Time Out of Mind (September 30, 1997): The late-career resurrection; Album of the Year.
Into the Sun (May 8, 1998): His own debut, at twenty-two.
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.
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.
50th anniversary shows open at the O2 (November 25, 2012): Fifty years and four months after the Marquee.
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.
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.
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

Liverpool (1940–1960): Childhood with his Aunt Mimi at Mendips, his mother Julia’s death, the Quarrymen and art college.
The Beatles (1960–1970): John’s Beatles years, from Hamburg to the split, as one chapter of his life.
Solo (1970–1980): From Plastic Ono Band to Double Fantasy: political years in New York, the Lost Weekend, and five years at home raising Sean.
Afterwards (1980–2005): After his murder: his music, his estate and the people he left.
Activism (1969–1973): Bed-ins, “Give Peace a Chance,” returning his MBE, and radical politics in New York.
Lost Weekend (1973–1975): Eighteen months apart from Yoko, mostly in Los Angeles with May Pang: drinking, Harry Nilsson, and Walls and Bridges.
Househusband (1975–1980): From Sean’s birth until he went back to the studio: no records, home life at the Dakota.

John Lennon

Key Moments

Every event

Eras

Sources

Original Horizontal (Phone) · mockup