In the years after the Beatles broke up, John Lennon found a kindred spirit in an unlikely musician: Frank Zappa.

The iconoclastic composer and guitarist was an odd choice for Lennon. Zappa's music was avant garde and frequently irreverent. Lennon, on the other hand, was a pop songwriter. At the time he and Zappa met in 1971, he was on the verge of releasing his heartfelt ode to peace, "Imagine."

That said, Lennon had his experimental side too, as did his wife and musical partner, Yoko Ono. But the former Beatle wasn't just inspired by Zappa's music — he also liked Zappa's attitude when it came to leadership of his band, the Mothers of Invention.

As the former Fab revealed in his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, he was unhappy dealing with artistic differences in the Beatles and, especially, with how he believed he was portrayed in the media alongside Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

“I’m sick of reading things that say Paul is the musician and George is the philosopher. I wonder where I fit in, what was my contribution?” he mused.

“I’d sooner be Zappa and say, ‘Listen, you fuckers, this is what I did, and I don’t care whether you like my attitude saying it. That’s what I am, you know, I’m a fucking artist, and I’m not a fucking PR agent or the product of some other person’s imagination.

"Whether you’re the public or whatever, I’m standing by my work," he added, "whereas before I would not stand by it.”

It didn't take long for Lennon to meet his new hero. It happened on June 6, 1971, in an unusual introduction that Zappa recalled on The Frank Zappa Interview Picture Disk, released in 1984.

“A journalist in New York City woke me up, knocked on the door, and is standing there with a tape recorder and goes, ‘Frank, I’d like to introduce you to John Lennon,’ waiting for me to gasp and fall on the floor,” he said.

“I said, ‘Well, Okay. Come on in.’ And we sat around and talked, and I think the first thing he said to me was, ‘You’re not as ugly as I thought you would be.’ I thought he had a pretty good sense of humor, so I invited him to come down and jam with us at the Fillmore East.”

Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were engaged in a two-night stand at the famed New York CIty venue for June 5 and 6. The shows were being recorded and would be released that August as Fillmore East — June 1971.

Lennon and Ono came out for the encore that second night and played for half an hour with the group. The couple were well-suited to Zappa’s idiosyncratic musical approach, and the show was a success.

Although Zappa didn't include the Lennon and Ono songs on the initial release of Fillmore East – June 1971, the recordings appeared roughly one year later on the couple's 1972 double-album set, Some Time in New York City.

A sprawling album containing songs inspired by the couple's growing activism for peace and justice, Some Time in New York City was a divisive effort among Lennon's fans. The politically themed content on the first disc was at times blunt and unvarnished, while the second disc showed the couple's more avant-garde side via recordings from a 1969 UNICEF charity concert in London (featuring George Harrison) and the Fillmore East concert.

But the fans' disappointment was nothing compared to what Zappa must have felt when he discovered Lennon and Ono had remixed one of the Fillmore East tracks and claimed it as their own.

“There’s a song that I wrote called ‘King Kong’ which we played that night," Zappa explained. "And I don’t know whether it was Yoko’s idea or John’s idea, but they changed the name of the song to ‘Jamrag.’

“[They] gave themselves writing and publishing credit on it, stuck it on an album, and never paid me. It was obviously not a jam session song: It’s got a melody, it’s got a bass line; it’s obviously an organized song. [It was a] little bit disappointing.”

In remixing the track, Lennon and Ono removed the vocals sung by Mothers members — and former Turtles — Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. Only Ono's wailing vocals were retained.

“After they had sat in with us, an arrangement was made that we would both have access to the tapes,” Zappa explained. “He wanted to release it with his mix, and I had the right to release it with my mix, so that’s how that one section came out.”

Because Zappa was legally prevented from releasing his version of the Lennon-Ono jam until 1992, his mix of the recording didn't come out until it was featured on Playground Psychotics, one of the last releases before his death the following year. The set was also included on the 2022 expanded edition of Fillmore East – June 1971.

Although Lennon and Zappa had connected creatively, their relationship didn't last. Lennon was clearly eager to continue collaborating. It was around this same time that he asked Eric Clapton to form a new band with him that would pull him out of his drug troubles and “bring back the balls in rock ‘n’ roll.”

The former Beatle would continue to collaborate — and with more mutually satisfying results — in the coming years. In 1974, he and Elton John joined together for the recording of Lennon's hit song "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night." Months later, in January 1975, Lennon and David Bowie would join forces to write and record the hit track "Fame" and cut a cover of Lennon's Beatles-era song "Across the Universe," both from Bowie's Young Americans album.

Mick Jagger says he was “stupid” to follow John Lennon’s advice — because it meant he never met his hero, Elvis Presley.

The Rolling Stones frontman has been busy promoting the band’s 25th album, Foreign Tongues, released last week. Their second record in three years sees the British rock legends reunite with producer Andrew Watt and Paul McCartney as they continue a remarkable late-career hot streak.

But during an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, O’Brien was just as interested in the past as the present, prompting a simple question: Did you ever meet Elvis?

“No, I never met Elvis,” Jagger replied. “You know why? The Daily Mirror, an English tabloid that still exists, always did publicity, and there was a journalist who took the Beatles to Los Angeles to visit Elvis.

“Afterward, I remember John saying, ‘You should never meet your heroes. I’d never meet Elvis if I were you.’

“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice, which is very stupid of me.”

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis — reportedly arranged by manager Brian Epstein — took place on August 27, 1965, at the King’s Bel Air mansion. Although the Daily Mirror had hoped to cover the encounter, the press were ultimately barred after George Harrison pushed for the meeting to remain private.

The Fab Four idolized Elvis. Lennon drew direct inspiration from him for one of the band’s darkest songs, “Run for Your Life,” while Harrison later said Presley’s music had “an incredible impact” on him because he had “never heard anything like it.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the visit, Lennon ultimately came away disappointed.

According to the Beatles’ longtime press officer Tony Barrow, Lennon wasted little time getting to the point, asking Elvis: “Why do you do all these soft-centered ballads for the cinema these days? What happened to good old rock ’n’ roll?”

Conversation soon stalled until Elvis called for guitars to be brought in and a piano wheeled into the room.

“The boys found that they could make much better conversation with their guitars than they could with their spoken word,” Barrow later wrote. “Music was their natural meeting point, their most intelligent means of communication.”

Even so, the afternoon fell well short of Lennon’s expectations — explaining why he later warned Jagger against meeting his own musical heroes.

“I’d love to have met Elvis,” Jagger said with a wry smile. “Why did I take John’s advice? But at the time, it seemed to ring true.”

O’Brien noted that Lennon famously spent the Beatles’ first trip to America asking, “Where’s Elvis?” After finally meeting him, he was left asking much the same question.

“He told me that whole story more than once,” Jagger replied. “It put me off. I wanted to keep my version of Elvis to myself. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was. Maybe my version of Elvis would have been different.”

Elsewhere during the Foreign Tongues press campaign, Jagger explained why the Stones have adopted a “bulldozer approach” in the studio, while also branding one of the band’s most beloved albums “lousy” — a view Keith Richards decidedly does not share.

It’s not hard to get Little River Band guitarist Graeham Goble to reminisce about “Reminiscing.” The 1978 single was the Australian group’s most successful in the U.S., peaking at number three on both the Billboard 200 and Cash Box charts.

It was named Australian Record of the Year at the 1978 King of Pop Awards and was honored by Broadcast Music International (BMI) for five million plays on American radio, the most for any Australian pop song up to that point.

It was also, somewhat surprisingly, a favorite of the late John Lennon during his affair with former assistant May Pang, which continued from the mid 1970s to the latter years of the decade .

“She wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing,’” Goble says, “and he was asking her to play it again and again and again. That was pretty amazing.”

Originally released as the second single from LRB’s fourth album, Sleeper Catcher, “Reminiscing” can be found on the new LRB compilation, Ultimate Hits. Still in Melbourne where the band was formed, Goble has nothing but fond memories of “Reminiscing” and all that came in its wake.

“It was inspired by my love of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s musicals, ’cause I was 12 years of age when we got a black-and-white television in Adelaide,” Goble explains. “The programs I immediately loved were all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals — all of that American romantic era. A lot of my songwriting, but particularly ‘Reminiscing,’ was about the life I wished I had, putting myself into those situations I saw in the movies.

The song arrived in April 1977, when the group was in Melbourne for a TV appearance. “We were in the green room, just playing our guitars,” Goble says. “The lead guitarist, David Briggs, was showing me some jazz chords, one of which was a C9 chord, a shape I never knew about.

“When I came home after the television show, I picked up my Martin 000-18 acoustic and played that chord. Immediately, I had this melody and lyric, all at the same time, almost like it was a spiritual download that just flowed through me. In about a half an hour, the whole thing was finished, and I had this very different song with key changes and quite a lot of jazz chords — quite a sophisticated piece!”

As Goble recalls, the Little River Band made two attempts at recording the song before they struck gold. “The keyboard player I wanted for it was Peter Jones, and he was not available,” he says. “So I was forced to pick another player, and it didn’t work. And then we did it with a second player and that didn’t work out, either.

“Then I heard Peter Jones had come back into town. So under protest from some of the guys, mainly from [vocalist] Glenn Shorrock, they reluctantly agreed to give it a third go. As soon as we sat down with Peter, the whole thing came together. Our guitarist Beeb [Birtles] played a syncopated riff from the third verse to the very end of the song, which I really loved. It was a lovely lift to the latter part of the record.”

In addition to “Reminiscing,” Sleeper Catcher included “Lady,” another song with which the LRB would make their name in America. Although Goble and the band were convinced they’d recorded something special, their label, Capitol, had trouble hearing it. “We waited five weeks with no response,” Goble says.

“They eventually Telexed us and said, ‘We think the album is great but we can’t hear any singles’ — and they had ‘Reminiscing’ and ‘Lady,’ our two biggest singles of all time!”

Eventually the label decided to take a chance on “Reminiscing.” “They said, ‘But we really don’t know if it will connect at all.’ Within a couple weeks it went ballistic, right to number one in New York and number three on Billboard.”

Goble calls it “our pinnacle song. It’s double any other song we’ve ever had in terms of listens. It’s been in a lot of movies, and a lot of soundtracks. Sinatra said he thought it was the best ’70s song in the world, though he never recorded it.

“But when John Lennon calls your song one of his favorites, does that really matter?”

Sean Ono Lennon says his fascination with dark, dissonant music can be traced back to two unlikely sources: Disney’s Fantasia and one of his father John Lennon’s heaviest Beatles songs.

Speaking with Rick Beato, Lennon reflected on the musical influences that shaped him, arguing that “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” deserves far more recognition as one of rock’s foundational heavy electric guitar moments before revealing another story behind one of the Beatles’ most sophisticated compositions.

As his work with Primus bass guitarist Les Claypool has shown, Sean Lennon has inherited more than his father’s surname. There’s a psychedelic streak to his music, but it’s the darkness that fascinates him most.

Of his early musical influences, he says, “All of my classical tastes came from the [Disney] film, Fantasia. I was obsessed.

“It might sound a little gauche, but it’s true,” he adds. “It’s actually an incredible selection of pieces. I mean, it’s Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ by Modest Mussorgsky.”

That soundtrack also introduced him to music’s darker side.

“All those notes are so dark and cool, and I think I’m really attracted to dark and dissonant notes,” he continues. “I’ve always had a love of that, and I think it’s actually because of the [Beatles] song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ as well. That really impacted me as a kid. My dad had written this very dark riff. I really wondered where it came from.”

The John Lennon composition, which closes side one of 1969’s Abbey Road, arrived at a time when rock music was growing noticeably heavier. The Who had become synonymous with sheer volume, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had laid much of the groundwork for heavy riffing, Blue Cheer had supercharged “Summertime Blues,” and Black Sabbath were about to codify heavy metal. Against that backdrop, Sean Lennon believes his father deserves more credit in the genre’s origin story.

“It was so unprecedented at that time,” he says of the song. “In a way, I think of it as maybe the first really heavy guitar riff. It’s so sophisticated, and it’s so unlike anything he wrote otherwise. It reminds me that ‘The Rain Song’ is unlike any other Led Zeppelin song. There are certain songs that just kind of stick out, like, ‘What was happening when that one was written?’”

Lennon then turned to another Abbey Road standout, offering a glimpse into how one of the Beatles’ most remarkable songs came together.

“‘Because’ is really shockingly complex,” he says. “The famous story is that my mom was playing ‘Moonlight Sonata’ [on piano] and my dad said, ‘Wait, stop. Can you play those chords backward, or maybe write them down for me?’ She did, and that was sort of the basis of ‘Because’—at least according to my mom.”

Beethoven’s sonata, composed in 1801, shares the same melancholy that attracted John Lennon—and later captivated his son.

Speaking to Guitar Player about his songwriting partnership with Claypool, Sean Lennon previously said that a shared love of music’s darker side is a cornerstone of their work. The stark juxtaposition of bizarre comedy and dark surrealism underpins the music of both generations of Lennons.

Meanwhile, McCartney has said he still writes songs as though John Lennon were sitting beside him, imagining how his longtime songwriting partner might respond to each new idea.

By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had left behind their matching suits and clean-cut image in favor of something far more bohemian. Rubber Soul was famously dubbed the band’s “pot album” by John Lennon, while increasingly mind-altering substances helped shape the psychedelic sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It was a period of constant experimentation, both musically and chemically. As Paul McCartney later told Howard Stern, “Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict.”

Stern asked McCartney about one of the best-known stories from the making of Sgt. Pepper: the claim that Lennon was tripping on LSD while recording the album’s fourth track, “Getting Better.”

“It was crazy, because he had a little pillbox,” McCartney recalled. “He’d have his little uppers and his little downers, and he thought he was taking a little upper, and we could get on with the session.

“[Then] he comes over to me and whispers, ‘I took the wrong pill.’

“‘What did you take?’

“‘Acid.’”

A bandmate unexpectedly taking LSD isn’t the ideal recipe for a productive recording session, but McCartney remained remarkably unfazed.

“Okay,” he remembered thinking, “let’s work around that, then.”

The bigger challenge was keeping producer George Martin in the dark.

“At one point, George Martin comes in, who knew nothing about anything,” McCartney said. “He said, ‘John doesn’t look too well.’

“‘No, he’s not feeling a little under the weather,’ because we had to hide it all from George. He was a grown-up.”

Martin’s innocence wouldn’t last forever. George Harrison later revealed that he and the other Beatles once spiked the producer’s tea with LSD during a late-’60s recording session to keep the vibe going, and Martin didn’t learn what had happened until decades later.

On this occasion, though, Martin simply tried to help. Concerned for Lennon’s wellbeing, he took him up to the roof of EMI Studios for some fresh air before leaving him up there alone.

Knowing exactly what was happening, McCartney and Harrison rushed upstairs to retrieve their bandmate before he wandered off the roof's edge and plummeted to the ground.

When Stern asked whether incidents like that were debilitating or simply part of the Beatles’ creative process, McCartney suggested it was a bit of both.

“Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict, and a lot of it was very good,” he said. “So we rolled with the punches. We were pretty good at rolling with the punches; that one was quite a punch to roll with, but we did it, and we finished the track.”

It was an approach that served the Beatles well. Whether it was recording reverse electric guitar parts for “Tomorrow Never Knows” or devising Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) to spare Lennon the chore of double-tracking his vocals, the band consistently turned unexpected situations into innovations. Finishing “Getting Better” despite Lennon’s accidental acid trip was just another example of how they kept the session — and the music — moving forward.

Before the British Invasion swept the Beatles across American airwaves, popular music in the United States had a distinct sound. Roger McGuinn, who co-founded the Byrds, accented by his now iconic Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, was a big part of it.

When the Beatles landed in America on February 7, 1964, McGuinn was working as a session player and songwriter, writing songs for singer Bobby Darin’s T.M. Music company. He says that despite Paul, John, George and Ringo being relative unknowns in the States, he was aware of them.

“I was living in New York, and I was a studio musician, and also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building,” he tells Guitar Player. “And as it turned out, I think there was a CBS TV Channel 2 in New York, and there was a clip of the Beatles, maybe about two minutes long. It had girls screaming, and had the Beatles playing… I don’t know if it was ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but it was one of those songs.

“I went, ‘Man, these guys are good,’” he admits. “I realized they were using folk music chords for rock and roll. They’d come up as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, and they’d been playing folk tunes with chords they’d developed into a rock band.”

This realization led McGuinn to change course with varied results. “I started putting folk songs to a Beatles beat and taking it to the Village [in New York City] and playing that for people in the coffee houses.

“They didn’t like it,” he adds with a laugh.

But he knew he was onto something. When George Harrison began playing a Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964, McGuinn — who had been playing 12-string for years — picked on up as well.

The same year, McGuinn founded the Byrds with David Crosby on guitar and vocals, Gene Clark on vocals, Chris Hillman on bass guitar and Michael Clarke on drums. A 1965 tour followed, orchestrated by their press office Derek Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles in 1964 (and would again from 1968 to 1970). Through Taylor, the Byrds met the Beatles, leading to a friendship between the bands that had a profound impact on both their musical and personal lives.

That impact is evident in George Harrison’s Rubber Soul track “If I Needed Someone.” It also provides the back story to “She Said She Said,” one of John Lennon’s tracks from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. In August 1966, near the end of their last tour, the Beatles were visiting the Byrds. LSD was a popular drug of choice at the time, and the Byrds and Beatles dropped acid together, along with actor Peter Fonda.

It was Fonda, who, while tripping on acid, said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

“Peter had somehow shot himself in the stomach when he was a kid,” McGuinn explains. “He died on the operating table. But they brought him back. So he did know what it was like to be dead.”

Lennon was appalled at the Fonda’s statement. Long after the party ended, still reeling from the episode, Lennon wrote “She Said She Said,” substituting a woman for Fonda, who says, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Asked what he made of Lennon’s creation, McGuinn shrugs. “I liked it. I like the song,” he says, “I loved everything the Beatles did, really. There’s nothing that I would put down.”

Despite these connections, the friendship between the two groups is rarely discussed. But the Beatles and Byrds were tight, so tight that when the Beatles gave a press conference at Capitol Records on August 24 of that year, Crosby tagged along.

“Yeah, we were friends,” McGuinn says. “And Crosby kind of followed them around. He’d poke his head out, and whoever was interviewing the Beatles said, “Who’s that guy with the long hair over there?’ And the Beatles would say, “Oh, that’s our mate from the Byrds, David Crosby.’”

Is it true that George Harrison inspired you to start using a Rickenbacker 12-string?

Yeah. We all went to the movies and saw A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d heard that sound on the records, but I didn’t know what instrument it was. But George came out with a Rickenbacker, and it looked like a six [string] from the front.’

But he turned it sideways, and you could see six other tuning pegs, like a classical guitar, sticking out of the back. I went, "Oh, they kind of condensed the 12-string head into something good-looking.” And it sounded great. I had to get one.

What was the first Rickenbacker 12-string you had after seeing George’s?

I traded an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me because he broke the one that I had before that. I put it up against the piano, and the piano was on casters, and it rolled, and the guitar fell down, and the neck broke off. So he brought me a new Gibson 12-string.

I also traded my five-string banjo — a Vega long-neck five-string banjo, like Pete Seeger played — and some cash, and I bought a Rickenbacker 360 12-string in a guitar store in L.A. I played it for about seven hours a day. [laughs]

Was it tough to get used to the 12-string?

Oh, Jim Dixon, who was our manager, said, “You can’t put a capo on an electric guitar, it’s just not done.” So, I had to learn a lot of scales and learn how to play all kinds of stuff up the neck. I had to practice like seven hours a day to do this. That’s how the “Eight Miles High” thing came about, because I’d been doing a lot of scales.

George influenced you, but if you listen to “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, it’s obvious that you influenced him, too.

Well, Derek Taylor had been in London, and George gave him, I think, a three-inch reel-to-reel of “If I Needed Someone.” He came over — Derek had been living in L.A., and we were all in Laurel Canyon. He was a few houses down from me, and [Byrds bassist] Chris Hillman.

But Derek came over to my house with this three-inch reel-to-reel tape, and said, “George wants you to play this.” So I played it, and it was “If I Needed Someone.” He said he wants you to know that he got that riff from [Pete Seeger’s] “The Bells of Rhymney” [which the Byrds recorded a famous live version of in 1965].

That same year, in 1965, the Byrds and the Beatles met in August for a psychedelic experience. Can you recount that?

The Beatles had already come over to America and declared that the Byrds were their favorite group. And when they first came over, they would send a limo down to pick us up at our various locations and take us to the house that they were renting up in the Hills, in Beverly Hills.

It was the estate of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor that they had rented for, like, a week, or however long they were there for. And so, we’re coming up in the limo, and there’s all these girls, and they’re up on the fences, and there were policemen, and they took us in. The gate opened up, and we go down to this house, and that’s when we all dropped acid.

What was that like?

Peter Fonda was with us, Ringo [Starr] took acid, and Paul [McCartney] didn’t want to do it. So, George, John, and I did, and Ringo, I think, was playing with some girls in the pool.

Did Paul say why he didn’t want to drop acid, too?

No. I really didn’t have any interaction with Paul at that time. I did when we first met the Beatles in London. It was during that tour that we went over, and they billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” Derek Taylor was with us, and, of course, he had been their press officer, so he introduced us to the Beatles.

I met George and John the first night, and then Paul invited me to the Scotch of St. James, his private club. We had a Scotch and Coke, went outside, and he got into his Aston Martin DB5, and we drove around London. It was really cool.

And later on, we went to a party with the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones. The Stones told us how their butler would roll up hash joints and put them on the steps for breakfast every morning. [laughs]

Circling back to dropping acid in Beverly Hills, that’s also when you and David Crosby introduced George and John to Ravi Shankar, right?

George, John, David Crosby and I went into this big shower, like a big, maybe nine-foot-square shower, where you could sit on a ledge. And we had one guitar that we kept passing around, and that’s when we showed him some Ravi Shankar stuff — and we all were on acid.

That was especially impactful on George.

George started freaking out. [laughs] He said, “I feel like I’m dying…” And then, Peter Fonda said, “Oh, I know what it’s like to be dead.” And John Lennon said, “Oh, don’t tell me that… you’re creeping me out. This is terrible.”

George was pretty into Indian music by then, so it’s surprising that he hadn’t heard of Ravi Shankar.

Well, Jim Dixon was a producer and engineer at World Pacific Records in Hollywood, and they had Ravi Shankar as one of their artists. So we got a preview of the recordings of Ravi, and we knew about Ravi early on. That’s how we were able to tell George about him, and that he’d been an influence. He had been exposed to Indian music prior to that, but I guess he just didn’t know about Ravi Shankar.

You mentioned earlier that when you went to London, the Byrds were billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” But given how you fed off each other, it’s clear that it wasn’t so much about an answer as it was a call-and-response.

Well, what was going on was that America was blindsided by the British Invasion. They were looking for some kind of counter to it. I remember watching American Bandstand, and Dick Clark said, “The best Beatles antidote? It’s probably the Beau Brummels.”

And then, he’s on the phone with somebody, saying, “What? The Byrds? Oh, yeah, okay. It’s the Byrds.”

Today is Global Beatles Day.

As Paul McCartney’s longtime guitarist and occasional bass player, Brian Ray has gained unique insights into the former Beatle’s songwriting process. Over his 24 years with McCartney, Ray says he learned just how prolific — and instinctive — the songwriting partnership between McCartney and John Lennon really was.

“I asked Paul if he wrote to a title or a little melody, or a riff or something, and he said, ‘No. It was always lyrics, music, melody and guitars all at once,’” Ray told Guitar Player in 2005.

As a result, Lennon and McCartney worked quickly — and had to. “You have to remember that the Beatles did a record every six months,” said Ray, a veteran electric guitar player known for favoring a 1957 Les Paul Goldtop.

For all their productivity, however, McCartney told Ray there was one occasion when the pair hit a creative roadblock.

“Paul said that in the more than 300 songs he and John wrote, he could only remember one time where they got stuck, and that was when they were writing ‘Drive My Car.’ They thought the title wasn’t working, but they liked the song. So they took a break, had some tea, and changed it.”

What exactly changed during that tea break? Ray wasn’t saying.

“I won’t tell you the lyric they tossed, because that’s Paul’s right to do that. I don’t want to be the guy who tells everybody what ‘Drive My Car’ was originally written as. And, you know, even with the rewrite they still finished the song at the end of the day.”

As some Beatles fans know, the discarded lyric centered on “golden rings.” McCartney had mined similar imagery before with the phrase “diamond rings,” notably in “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “If You’ve Got Trouble,” a Help!-era outtake later released on Anthology 2. Lennon had also referenced them in “I Feel Fine.”

As McCartney explained to Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, “‘Drive My Car’” was “one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session.”

“The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal,” he said.

When McCartney presented the song to Lennon, neither could come up with a satisfactory replacement. “So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘golden rings,’” he recalled.

Which means Ray was faithfully protecting a secret that McCartney himself had revealed years earlier.

The murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, sent shockwaves through the music world. For Mark Knopfler, it also sparked an idea that would eventually become one of the most unusual songs of his solo career.

Lennon's killer was an obsessed fan, and the tragedy forced musicians everywhere to confront the darker side of fame. Knopfler found himself thinking about that subject through the lens of his own experiences, particularly a German autograph hunter named Rüdiger who regularly appeared outside Dire Straits concerts.

The idea came quickly.

“I wrote the lyrics to ‘Rüdiger’ without changing a word right after John Lennon was assassinated,” Knopfler told Vulture.

While the lyrics arrived almost immediately, the music did not. Knopfler has often described himself as a songwriter first and a guitarist second, believing that songs emerge in their own time rather than through force of will.

“There are definitely some that hang around in the junkyard out the back in bits,” he explained. “One song took 16 years. Other songs can take 16 minutes.”

In this case, he was talking about “Rüdiger.” Although the lyrics were written in the immediate aftermath of Lennon's death, the song remained unfinished until it appeared on his 1996 solo debut, Golden Heart.

The finished track — an acoustic-led number with weeping clean electric guitar lines — tells the true story of a devoted fan who followed Knopfler from show to show in search of an autograph. While Rüdiger was harmless, the song's origins reveal how Lennon's murder prompted Knopfler to reflect on the fine line between admiration and obsession.

That long gestation period was entirely in keeping with Knopfler's approach to songwriting. Rather than chase ideas that aren't working, he prefers to leave them alone until inspiration returns.

“I enjoy songwriting so much, but if it's not working, I'll get up and leave it,” he said while promoting One Deep River in 2024. “I know it'll be alright if I come back to it, eventually.”

For Knopfler, “Rüdiger” became proof of that philosophy: a song born from one of rock's darkest moments, but one that took 16 years to find its final form.

Paul McCartney says he often found himself consulting an old songwriting partner while writing his latest solo album, The Boys from Dungeon Lane.

The record is an ode to the Liverpool streets, landmarks and memories that shaped McCartney's youth — territory he famously explored decades earlier alongside John Lennon in some of the Beatles' most celebrated songs.

“My collaborator was probably one of the best writers of the century,” McCartney tells The Guardian. “So, yeah, you're going to miss him.”

As the Beatles' principal songwriters, McCartney and Lennon spent years in constant creative dialogue, challenging and inspiring one another both in conversation and through song. Their shared memories of Liverpool often became fertile ground for that exchange.

When the pair turned their attention to childhood memories in late 1966, Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever,” inspired by the grounds of a Salvation Army children's home near where he grew up. McCartney answered with “Penny Lane,” a vivid portrait of the Liverpool street and surrounding neighborhood where he, Lennon and George Harrison spent time as teenagers.

Nearly 60 years later, McCartney found himself revisiting the same landscape while writing The Boys from Dungeon Lane. Even without Lennon by his side, he says the conversation continued.

“I kind of know he would've known it,” McCartney says. “I can gauge his reaction: ‘That's good, stick that in.'”

The imagined exchanges were a reminder of a partnership that helped define popular music — and of the loss that came when Lennon was murdered in 1980.

“But that's life,” McCartney says. “You lose people.”

The subject of loss is one McCartney has thought about increasingly as he has grown older. He recalls Beatles producer George Martin, who was older than the band members, warning him that aging inevitably means watching friends and colleagues pass away.

“Now I'm probably at that age,” McCartney says, “and I'm very conscious of that, having lost John and George — two big touchstones for anything we're talking about.

“So, yeah, you do miss them,” he continues. “I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.' It's not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it's life, and it's what we've got.'”

McCartney and Lennon grew up together and learned to write songs together, face to face, with acoustic guitars in hand. While one half of the partnership has been gone for more than four decades, McCartney's comments suggest that, in some ways, the conversation never really ended.

When the Beatles arrived at Olympic Studios in May 1967, Eddie Kramer and the staff knew it wouldn’t be a typical session.

“Olympic gets the call: The Beatles are coming in,” Kramer tells Rick Beato in a new interview. “Holy shit, that’s royalty.”

The band had just completed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but their creativity showed no signs of slowing. Sessions soon began for the songs that would become Magical Mystery Tour.

But when Abbey Road was unavailable, the Beatles decided to record outside their usual home for the first time. The session would produce “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” and give Kramer — who would soon go on to engineer many of Jimi Hendrix’s most celebrated recordings — a front-row seat to one of John Lennon’s most inspired studio moments.

“The session started at 7:00 p.m., and we finished at 7:00 a.m. the next morning,” Kramer recalls. “We tracked it, overdubbed it and mixed it all in one night. Bam, done. Thank you. Gone.”

What stuck with him most, however, was watching Lennon stumble across the song’s distinctive keyboard sound.

“We’ve got the table full of junk, all kinds of stuff,” Kramer says. “On ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’ there’s a sound that goes [imitates the song’s warbling synth solo]. So John, being John, looks at the table and he says, ‘What’s all this, then?’ I said, ‘Well, this is left over from a previous session.’

“There was this beautiful wooden speaker cabinet with an amplifier in it and a series of little keyboards. And one was a Clavioline, a French electronic instrument for musique concrète.

“So I said, ‘Look, it’s a keyboard. You can play the note, but you can shake the keyboard from side to side to get vibrato.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s great then. Let me have a go.’”

Lennon put on a pair of headphones and, within minutes, had worked out the part and recorded it. The Clavioline's wobbly lead remains one of the defining sounds of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and one of the instrument’s most famous appearances on a hit record.

The session also offered a glimpse of how differently Olympic operated from Abbey Road. A former theater converted into a recording studio in 1966, Olympic prided itself on being more contemporary and rock-oriented than Abbey Road, which was built for classical and pop music.

“We were the competitors, let’s face it,” Kramer says. “And I think we had a better shot at it because I think our stuff was more aggressive, more state-of-the-art.”

According to senior engineer Keith Grant, the pace surprised the Beatles.

“I do a lot of orchestral work and you naturally push people along. The Beatles said that this was the fastest record they’d ever made,” he recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “They were used to a much more leisurely pace. They kept on playing, version after version, then we spooled back to the one they liked and overdubbed the vocals.”

The Beatles were impressed enough to return to Olympic a few weeks later. On June 14, they recorded the backing track for “All You Need Is Love,” which they would perform on the global television broadcast Our World on June 25. Producer George Martin wanted a prerecorded track available in case technical problems derailed the live transmission.

Kramer was once again behind the console.

“I got the call: ‘Eddie, the Beatles are coming back, you wanna do it?’” he recalled to Guitar World in 2012. “I said, ‘Yeah, lovely.’

“They were so disarming and so great in the studio. They were very targeted about what they’d come in to achieve. They were wonderful.”

As one of the most recorded guitarists in history, Louie Shelton has stories to tell about recording tracks by Boz Scaggs (“Lowdown”), Whitney Houston (her global breakthrough “Saving All My Love for You”) and Lionel Richie (“Hello”), among dozens of others.

But one gig hit particularly close to home — not for Shelton but for Guitar Player.

“I was playing at the Flamingo in Las Vegas with Seals & Crofts,” Shelton recalls of his time with the soft-rock duo from the 1970s. “There was another similar group that was alternating with us. On this particular night, the guitar player of the other group broke his foot, so I had to fill in for him for that show.”

Years later, Shelton had a chance meeting with the anonymous guitarist.

“I never knew who he was until much later, when I walked into the offices of Guitar Player magazine in Monterey, California, to introduce myself to the president,” he says. “And he says to me, ‘You may not remember me, but you filled in for me once in Las Vegas.’ It was Guitar Player magazine founder Bud Eastman!”

Shelton has spoken to us about his time recording for the Monkees. Here, he tells us tales behind two other sessions: one famous, one infamous.

Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown”

By the 1970s, having made a name for himself through his session work, Shelton decided to expand his horizons by moving into production. Over the next decades he produced albums for soft-rock acts that included his friends Seals & Crofts, Art Garfunkel, and England Dan & John Ford Coley. But he still found himself in demand for studio recording.

“When I did a lot of those big records like the Boz Scaggs, Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie records, I wasn’t even a session player,” he states. “I would occasionally get called asking if I could come in for a session on guitar. And I’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’

“But I had moved into producing Seals & Crofts and was officially a producer on the Seals & Crofts records. And when I started producing Seals & Crofts, I had used [future Toto members] David Paich, Jeff Porcaro and David Hungate [keyboards, drums and bass, respectively].”

In the fall of 1975, Paich, Porcaro and Hungate were at work on Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs’ 1976 album. After years without a hit — including a memorable session with Duane Allman — Scaggs would score big with Silk Degrees, making him a breakout star and going five time Platinum.

“When David got the gig to do the Boz Scaggs gig, he thought I would be the right guy to join that little group. So he called me and asked me if I wanted to do it.

One of Shelton’s favorite moments on record is the fiery solo he put to tape on “Lowdown.” Scaggs has referred to the song — little more than a two-chord vamp from Em9 to A6 — as “an accident” that didn’t have “a chance in hell” of becoming a hit. Still, they all liked the song and put it on the album as the opener to side two.

“The solo was an improvised thing where they just simply asked me to fill in the spaces,” Shelton says. “We had a chord chart and they instructed me to play something from bar 38 or whatever. All of that stuff was spontaneous. Nothing was planned. I was just listening to the song and reading the chord chart and I improvised something straight off the cuff.

“And it was all a first take. There was no going back and punching in or planning a solo. I just played a clean rhythm with my Telecaster through a ’69 Fender Princeton Reverb amp throughout the song until it was time to play some guitar lines. Then when it came to the guitar solo, I had a little distortion pedal, a basic Boss pedal that cost $30, that I clicked on to add some color to the solo.”

Shelton’s solo was exactly the element the track needed to help it crossover from disco to rock. When a Cleveland disc jockey decided to play “Lowdown” right off the album — it hadn’t been released as a single yet — it quickly caught on with listeners, leading other radio stations to follow suit. It became the album’s breakout hit, serving as a gateway to Silk Degrees’ chart-topping success.

John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album

But not every session is as successful. Shelton was among the many guitarists — including Larry Carlton — hired to perform on John Lennon’s 1975 solo album, Rock ’n’ Roll. Produced by Phil Spector, the album was made over one year, from October 1973 to October 1974, during a time when Lennon was deep into partying and drinking.

The sessions were so loose that no one can be sure exactly who played on what songs. Carlton says that while he and Leon Russell attempted a recording of “Bony Moronie” with Lennon, the session ended in failure, yet both performers are credited on the album.

Shelton’s experience was quite similar.

“The session was very disorganized,” he recalls. “John pretty much didn’t have much say as far as the arrangement or anything else on that album. When John showed up for the session, Jim Keltner, the drummer on the session, introduced me to him, and John couldn’t have been nicer.

“But Spector, who was producing the session, came in late wearing a black cape, a top hat and the darkest sunglasses he could find. He was supposed to bring in an old Stax R&B record that he and John wanted us to cover for the session, but Spector didn’t have the record with him. They had to send his driver back to the hotel to retrieve it.”

While they waited for the producer to return, Shelton and Lennon chatted.

“We had a conversation about my playing on the Monkees’ ‘Last Train to Clarksville,’” he recalls. “John told me that I had a done a great job on it. But I told him that I was just copying George Harrison!

“It was a great opportunity to just have a chat with him, because I was a big Beatles fan. I was the kind that, even though I'm a guitar player that liked to listen to the jazz guys like Wes Montgomery and others, I’d also grab the next Beatles record and take it home and really listen to it with my sound system. So I was flattered that I even got to do that one session with John.”

When the driver finally returned with the record, Spector ordered Shelton and the crew to listen to the record and figure out their parts by ear.

“We had a lot of musicians in the room, but none of us were given a chart,” the guitarist explains. “Usually there's at least a chord chart. If you’ve got five or six musicians, you’d want to give them a chord chart but, instead we had to listen to the record and do our own chord charts.”

At the outset of Shelton’s session career, his gear had been limited to just a ’64 Fender Telecaster and a ’64 Fender Super Reverb combo. “Before all the session gigs, I could only afford one guitar, as we didn’t make a lot of money playing the club,” he explains. “So if I wanted a different guitar, I had to trade my old one.

“But as the sessions became regular work, I was able to I buy an ES-335, a Fender Strat, a Gibson Byrdland and a bunch of acoustic guitars. But the Telecaster was my main electric guitar, and still is to this day. The Tele seems to handle just about everything.”

For months after the session, Shelton heard nothing about it, and no new Lennon album was released. Spector had been taking the master tapes home at night and they “disappeared” some time after the sessions wrapped.

“The master tapes from the sessions went missing and because of that, John and Phil had a falling out,” Shelton says. “A couple of years after my session, Phil got into a car accident in L.A. and they found those tapes in the boot of his car. And that’s when the album, with the session that I played on, finally came out.”

Paul McCartney has spent more than six decades moving forward as one of rock’s most prolific artists. But lately, the past keeps pulling him back.

At a listening event at Abbey Road Studios, the former Beatles songwriter previewed his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and explained why memories — of childhood, lost friends and family — have become the driving force behind his latest music.

“Why am I doing all these songs about memories?” McCartney asked himself at the event, as reported by The i. “Well, it’s where your big bank of information is. Quite a few of the songs on this album go back in time.”

The legendary bass player will release the record May 27. Its title references Speke, Liverpool, where McCartney grew up — and several of the songs revisit moments from those early years.

The album’s opener recalls a teenage crush on a neighbor named Jasmine that never quite blossomed. “She did knock on the door once, but I was on the toilet,” McCartney laughs.

But some memories cut deeper — particularly those involving his former bandmates.

Lead single “Days We Left Behind” looks back on McCartney’s early adventures with John Lennon and George Harrison, long before the three would change popular music forever.

“I still get a little bit emotional talking about John and George,” McCartney admits.

One memory behind the song involves a youthful hitchhiking trip he took with Harrison. At one point the pair caught a ride on a battery-powered milk delivery truck as they headed “down south.”

“There was the driver’s seat, a battery, and a passenger seat. George got the battery,” McCartney recalled (via The Guardian). “He had jeans with a zip on the back, and they connected with the battery. Later, at a B&B, he showed me the big zip burn!”

When McCartney later told the story to Olivia Harrison, she remembered hearing a similar version from her husband — though with a different culprit.

“She said, ‘Yeah, George told me that story about you getting your zip stuck in the battery,’” McCartney said. “I maintain it was him.”

The past isn’t only present in memories on the album. It also surfaces in the music itself.

The record features a duet between McCartney and fellow Beatle Ringo Starr — the first collaboration between the two surviving members of the band on one of McCartney’s solo releases.

McCartney has paid tribute to his former bandmates before, including performing at the 2002 Concert for George at Royal Albert Hall. And Beatles history has continued to echo into the present through projects such as the band’s AI-assisted 2023 single, “Now and Then.’

Memories of McCartney’s family also play a role on the album. His mother died while he was still a boy, leaving him and his brother, Mike McCartney, to be raised by their father.

“I’ve never written about my mum and dad before,” McCartney explains. Reflecting on the turmoil of today’s world led him to think about his parents’ experiences during World War II — his father a firefighter, his mother a nurse.

“Imagine any minute now you’re expecting bombs to fall,” he says. “I wondered what that would do to you.”

Even the album’s creation began with a moment that felt almost accidental. It’s McCartney’s first record with producer Andrew Watt, known for his work with Ozzy Osbourne and the Rolling Stones. Their collaboration began five years ago over a cup of tea, when McCartney — casually strumming an acoustic guitar — stumbled upon a mystery chord that sparked the opening track, “As You Lie There.”

The album sessions were completed between legs of McCartney’s Got Back Tour.

During that tour, another piece of McCartney’s past resurfaced: his iconic Höfner bass, which had been missing for more than 50 years before recently returning to the stage.

For McCartney, it seems the past isn’t something easily left behind. Instead, it’s the well he keeps returning to — for stories, for songs, and for the memories that still shape his music.

Freddie Mercury may hold the record for history’s most profitable half hour in the bathtub.

In May 1979, as Queen were preparing to record The Game at Musicland Studios in Munich, Queen’s lead singer stepped into a bathtub in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel and emerged 30 minutes later with a new song fully formed: “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

Grabbing an acoustic guitar, he quickly worked out the tune in his hotel room.

“’Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or 10 minutes,” he confirmed to Melody Maker in 1981. “I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline, because I simply had to write within a small framework.”

As quickly as Mercury wrote it, Queen got to work tracking it in the studio.

“We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album,” drummer Roger Taylor explained in a 1989 interview for In the Studio With Redbeard.

“It took half an hour to record. I remember he came in the studio. He says, ‘My dear, I just wrote this in the bath,’ and he did. He'd just been lying in the bath, and there it was. It was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it.”

As it turned out, everyone was present for the session except Brian May, who had been at the studio late the night before. In his absence, Mercury strapped on an acoustic guitar to lead Taylor and bass guitar player John Deacon through the song.

“It always happens: If I go out for a couple of hours, they create something else,” May humorously griped to In the Studio with Redbeard in 1989.

“I came back and they'd already put down the backing track. Roger just had the live drums, Freddie had played acoustic guitar — ‘cause that rhythm on there is Freddie. I don't think I played any of that.”

While he’s most often thought of as a singer and piano player, Mercury was also a talented guitarist. “Certainly in the early days he used the guitar as much as the piano to write songs,” May wrote in his Queen in 3D book.

May also notes that Mercury had solid rhythm chops, especially on acoustic.

“Freddie was really a good acoustic player. He was very modest about it, but he could really play the acoustic guitar very well in an inimitable, very frenetic kind of style.

“I can still his kind of horny fingers hitting the strings — Freddie doing his Elvis, very successfully.”

As May revealed in a February 2008 interview with Guitar and Bass magazine, Mercury even attempted to record the song’s guitar solo.

“He did the original solo on ‘Crazy Little Thing,’” the guitarist confirmed, “on a version that got lost, and I had to redo it. He was very good in a particular style of his own.”

While Mercury’s guitar solo is absent from the recording, we do have May’s, which is widely considered one of his best. Remarkably, it doesn’t feature his homemade Red Special.

In fact, by his own account, May was railroaded into using a Telecaster by producer Reinhold Mack, who decided that classic model was best suited to the song’s vintage rock-and-roll style.

“I said, ‘Well, I can make my guitar sound like a Telecaster, like those old rock and roll records,’” May told In the Studio with Redbeard. “And he said, ‘If you want it to sound like a Telecaster, play a Telecaster.’

May did so, calling it “one of the few times I ever played something that wasn't my regular guitar.” Taylor, who both plays and collects guitars, delivered a rarity from his vault.

“I used one of Roger's really old, beat-up, natural-wood Telecasters,” May told Guitar Player in our January 1983 issue “I got bludgeoned into playing it. That was Mack's idea.

“I said, ‘I don't want to play a Telecaster. It basically doesn't suit my style.’ But ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was such a period piece, it seemed to need that period sound.

“So I said, ‘Okay, Mack, if you want to set it up, I'll play it.’ He put it through a Mesa/Boogie, which is an amplifier I don't get on with at all. It just doesn't suit me. I tried it, and it sounded okay.”

It may have sounded “okay” to May’s ears, but it was an absolute knock out to everyone else. May’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” solo is a stunning example of his ear for giving a song exactly what it needs — and in a style that has no equal in Queen’s catalog.

For that matter, it wasn’t the first time May had to fight over a solo. As he told Total Guitar, he had to push to convince Mercury to let him track a solo on Queen’s 1979 hit “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

With "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" completed, the band took a break from making The Game, during which time they performed at the Saarbrücken Open Air Festival in Germany that August.

Meanwhile, their label, eager for something new to release, took “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” for an advance single, releasing it in the U.K. in October 1979. The song quickly reached number two, leading the group to launch a short tour — dubbed, appropriately, Crazy — where they played a number of theater dates in the U.K. from November through December.

By December, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” had been released in the U.S., where it quickly began moving up the charts. Queen were back at work on The Game when it hit the top of the charts, becoming the group's first U.S. single to do so.

Roger Taylor recalled the strangeness of hearing the song had reached peak position in the States while they were still recording The Game in Germany.

“It seemed unreal because we were in the other side of the world, and we hadn't even finished the album, which the single was from,” he told In the Studio With Redbeard. “We were still working on it. And we thought, We’re off to a good start here!”

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would continue to pay dividends as a radio staple and popular cover tune. But for Taylor, the best of these rewards came in the form of a compliment from no less than John Lennon.

“I remember actually one of the things which made me very proud,” Taylor said, “was that John Lennon said in some article... ‘I heard the Queen record and it made me wanna get back in the studio.’”

The former Beatle would soon do just that, recording what would be his final album, Double Fantasy, in 1980.

“And I thought, Wow, fantastic!” Taylor remarked. “To have actually had any little dent on somebody like Lennon is great.”

The Beatles drew inspiration from all over the musical map — Motown, acoustic folk, rockabilly and beyond. But one of the darker lines ever sung by the band can be traced directly to a 1950s rock and roll record by Elvis Presley.

The lyric appears in Presley’s 1955 Sun Records single “Baby, Let’s Play House,” written by Arthur Gunter. Early in the song, Presley delivers a line that’s as blunt as it is unsettling: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”

The phrase stuck with John Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he used it as the starting point for a Beatles song — one that would eventually appear on the band’s landmark 1965 album, Rubber Soul.

That song was “Run for Your Life.”

Lennon borrowed Presley’s line almost verbatim for the song’s opening lyric. From there he built the rest of the track around the same jealous premise, warning the song’s subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon would admit the song wasn’t something he thought much about at the time.

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from Elvis.”

The track ultimately became the closer on Rubber Soul, the group’s sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the Beatles fully embraced the idea of the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first record on which they presaged the dawn of psychedelic rock by using the studio to change the sound of their instruments. The sessions saw the Beatles experimenting with new textures and instrumentation. George Harrison famously introduced the sitar to the band’s sound on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” while Paul McCartney used a fuzz bass tone on Harrison’s “Think for Yourself.”

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than other tracks on the album. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley line that had caught his ear years earlier.

“I wrote it around that,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was that important.”

In hindsight, the song also reflected something about Lennon’s state of mind at the time. As McCartney later noted in his memoir Many Years From Now, Lennon’s lyrics often revealed a possessiveness that contrasted with McCartney’s own outlook on relationships.

“John was always on the run, running for his life,” McCartney wrote. “He was married; whereas none of my songs would have ‘catch you with another man.’ … I wasn’t as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song.”

Even if Lennon dismissed the track as a throwaway, there was little chance of it being replaced. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time to be released for Christmas 1965.

The album’s final recording session — which began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and stretched into the early hours of the next morning — saw the band record McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me” and Lennon’s “Girl,” while also adding overdubs to “Wait.” With the deadline looming, there simply wasn’t time to create another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon later called it his “least favorite Beatles song” and said he “always hated” it, at least one of his bandmates felt differently.

“It was sort of a throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of,” Lennon later said. “But it was always a favorite of George’s.”

“Did I ever think that one day I’d get good enough to play with John Lennon?” Earl Slick asks. “Of course not. The idea still blows my mind. Lennon was this huge guy; he was a hero. A little kid from Brooklyn doesn’t get to be in a room with him.”

Famous for his nearly career-spanning work with David Bowie, Slick rose through the New York music scene in the 1970s before becoming the heir to Mick Ronson as Bowie's foil for the Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. The straight-talking guitarist would help usher in a new, post-Ziggy Stardust era for Bowie, and would later feature on two ‘70s LPs, Young Americans (1975) and Station to Station (1976).

He would be return to Bowie‘s orbit over the following decades, perhaps most famously when Stevie Ray Vaughan quit the band on the eve of the Serious Moonlight Tour. But Slick was also present when Bowie had his career-changing onstage heart attack, and would ultimately play on five of his studio records, ending with 2013‘s The Next Day.

Asked which records were the most challenging to make, Slick tells Thinking About Guitar, “The ones I don't like!

“I can't name names, but I've been hired by people who hired me because of the name value, but not what I did,” he explains. “So when I got there, they expected something completely different.

“And most of the time I ended up working for a day and leaving, not because the guy was being an asshole, but because [the music] is so out of my range that it ain't gonna sound right. I'm deadly serious; sometimes, they'd call the wrong guy.”

Working with John Lennon, however, proved to be very different for Slick. The former Beatle hired him for his and Yoko Ono‘s 1980 album, Double Fantasy, which also featured Tony Levin on bass a year prior to his joining King Crimson.

“I know why John hired me,” Slick says. “[Album producer] Jack Douglas told me it was because everybody else in that room could read [music]. Hugh McCracken — I love Huey, he was so good, man — Tony Levin and all these guys could read. I knew as much as John did.”

In other words, not much.

“He wanted a street rock and roll player that didn't know any of that shit,” Slick continues. “That’s why I got the gig. And I had pretty much free rein on that thing. John was just looking for a good take.”

Double Fantasy would prove to be the last record Lennon made before his death in 1980.

A year later, Slick would unite with Ono, Lennon‘s wife and musical partner, to play on Season of Glass, her highest-charting solo record.

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2021, Slick says he wasn't sure how many people he had to compete with to get his gig with Bowie, but once he did, he “was off and running.” It certainly helped bring him to Lennon’s attention.

In 1980, Frank Veteran was a resident in surgery at Roosevelt Hospital on New York City’s west side. At 30 years old, he was in his fifth and final year of surgical training Between the pressures of medical school and his job, he’d had little time to keep up with current events, let alone the comings and goings of his childhood heroes.

“I was into the Beatles, and I followed them,” Veteran told me when we spoke in 2005 for a Guitar World Presents special issue. “But by the time I was the chief resident in surgery, I wasn’t listening to them anymore. I was too busy. I didn’t even realize John Lennon was living in New York.”

One of three chief residents at Roosevelt, Veteran was on call for emergencies every third night. There, he attended to the routine injuries of city life.

“Gunshot wounds, stab wounds. You wouldn’t have to be in the hospital all the time, but if anything happened, you’d have to come in and take one of the younger residents through the procedure,” he explained. “When you were chief resident, you were the primary head doctor. You ran the whole show.”

On the night of December 8, 1980, the show was unlike any Veteran had seen before.

He’d spent the evening at his girlfriend’s apartment, on 10th Avenue, across from the hospital. Around 11 o’clock, as they were getting ready for bed, his beeper went off.

“They said, ‘We have a gunshot wound to the chest,’” Veteran recalled. “I asked, ’What’s status of the patient?” They said, ’Well, Dr. Halloran’ — one of the younger residents — ‘is opening his chest.’ I said, ‘Well, if Halloran is opening his chest, you don’t need me.’”

Opening the patient’s chest, Veteran explained, is a last resort, performed when the heart has stopped and the patient is unlikely to live. “But they said to me, ‘No, we need you now!’”

Puzzled by the call, Veteran dressed quickly, took the elevator down to the lobby and ran across 10th Avenue to the hospital. As he walked upstairs and down the hall to the emergency room, he encountered a pair of nurses.

“One of them looked at me and said, ‘John Lennon.’ I looked at them and thought, What does John Lennon have to do with it? It made no sense to me. It was so ridiculous that it didn’t even register.”

As Veteran entered the ER, the significance of the nurse’s remark became vividly clear.

“I walked in, and there was John Lennon, on the table, with all these people around him.”

Just minutes earlier, Lennon had been shot while returning with his wife, Yoko Ono, to their home at the Dakota, a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Bleeding heavily, his vital signs quickly ebbing, Lennon had been sped to the hospital by officers who had responded to the shooting.

“Standing there, suddenly, everything just hit me,” Veteran said. “For some reason, I thought of John Kennedy and Jesus Christ. It was just a weird thing that flashed in my head.”

The doctors had already begun trying to resuscitate Lennon. “His chest was open,” Veteran said. “They were doing everything to save him.”

He stepped up to the surgery table and took a grim assessment of the patient. Lennon had been shot four times from the left at point-blank range with a .357 magnum revolver. Two bullets had passed through his left upper arm and entered his chest; two more entered his chest just behind the arm.

Traveling through his torso, they ripped through his lungs and arteries. Three of the bullets exited the front of his chest: one under his left clavicle and two on the left side of his sternum. The fourth remained lodged inside his body.

According to Veteran, the worst injury was to Lennon’s subclavian artery, a major branch of the aorta, the heart’s main artery.

“He was bleeding heavily.”

For 20 minutes, Veteran and his associates worked to get Lennon’s heart beating again.

“Once your heart stops, you have five minutes, basically, to resuscitate it before lack of oxygen causes brain injury,” Veteran explained. “So how long does it take to get from the Dakota to Roosevelt Hospital, get into the emergency room, get stripped, get your chest opened? Well, it takes longer than five minutes.”

Lennon’s heart never beat again.

“And had we gotten it going, he would have been brain dead. It would have been a disaster anyway.”

Veteran recalled a conversation he had with an officer on the scene at the Dakotas. “He said the last evidence of any life was a groan when they put him in the backseat of the police cruiser.”

At 11:15 p.m., Lennon was pronounced dead. Chief medical examiner Dr. Elliott M. Gross said after the autopsy that Lennon died of shock and blood loss and that no one could have survived more than a few minutes with such injuries.

Veteran was still in surgery attending to Lennon’s body when he heard a scream from a nearby room.

“That was Yoko Ono,” he says. “The head of the emergency room had given her the news. It was a horrendous scream.”

For months afterward, Veteran suffered from depression.

“I’d feel normal, and then I’d wake up in the middle of the night in this deep depression. It took six months for that to go away.”

During his tenure at Roosevelt, Veteran estimates that he attended to as many as four gunshot or stab wounds each night. “I was used to it. I didn’t feel freaked out. But something deep down affected me that night.”

By the next year, he was a practicing plastic surgeon. When we spoke in 2005, Veteran had left the medical profession and become an investor on Wall Street investor. Simultaneously, for the preceding two decades, he had pursued his craft as a painter of abstracts. He had recently been the subject of a sculpture by New York artist Keith Edmier, who built a series of pieces around the former surgeon’s memories of December 8. The centerpiece was a cassette boom box that played a tape on which Veteran related the story of what happened that night. Physically and psychically, the events of December 8, 1980, never left him.

“I was a kid when Kennedy was assassinated,” he said, “and I remember watching [Lee Harvey] Oswald” — Kennedy’s alleged assassin — “get killed on live TV.” He recalled how, just three months later, he was watching again when another transformational moment in American history took place: the Beatles’ February 9, 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

“I was a big Beatles fan,” he said, sounding suddenly younger as a glimmer of light entered his voice. “How couldn’t you be?”

The Beatles’ Anthology doc-series is back on screens this week, and as the first installment reveals, Paul McCartney and John Lennon spent a lot of time playing face to face as they learned to play guitar and write songs.

As a lefty, Paul McCartney had an extra complication. Left-handed guitarists have never had it easy, especially in the early years of the instrument's U.S. popularity. Reportedly, Jimi Hendrix’s father forced him to play right-handed when he was a youngster out of belief that left-handedness was a sign of the devil. Jimi accommodated his dad when he was around and then flipped the guitar for left-handed playing when he was gone.

Paul McCartney had it somewhat easier. A southpaw, his dad didn't force him to play right handed, but like other lefty guitarists he had to tweak his Zenith acoustic guitar by switching the string order and making homemade fixes to the nut. Even so, over time he managed to learn how to play guitar right-handed given that much of the time he was among right-handed guitarists with no suitable instrument in sight.

“I can play right-handed guitar a bit, just enough for at parties,” he confirmed to Guitar Player in 1990. “Hopefully, by that point everyone is drunk when I pick it up, because otherwise they're going to catch me. But I could do that."

He explained that it would have made little sense to ask if he could re-string someone's guitar. "And at a party, you only want to play it for 15 or 30 minutes or so, and by the time you've goofed up their guitar and you hand it back to them, they've got to string it back again, and it's silly. So I had to learn upside down.”

John Lennon found McCartney’s left-handedness useful for when the two were practicing. Lennon, whose early musical skills consisted of playing banjo chords on guitar strung with five strings, picked up much of his chord knowledge from McCartney, who would position himself opposite Lennon, providing him with a mirror image of how to fret a chord. Some of that left-handed knowledge undoubtedly seeped into his brain. As McCartney revealed, Lennon had no difficulty playing McCartney’s left-strung guitar.

“It's funny: John learned upside down too, because of me — because mine was the only other guitar around for him, if he broke a string or he didn't have his,” McCartney said. “That's more unusual; left-handed guys can nearly always play a straight guitar.”

McCartney’s recollection offers an interesting insight into Lennon’s guitar talents. As he told Guitar Player in that same interview, Lennon was also the only Beatle who learned how to properly fingerpick, a skill he learned from folksinger Donovan while they were in India studying with the Maharishi.

McCartney recalled that he was playing a Rosetti Lucky 7 electric guitar by the time the Beatles began performing in Hamburg in 1960. The guitar didn’t last long,

“When I went to Hamburg, I had a thing called the Rosetti Lucky 7, which is a really terrible British guitar with terrible action,” he said. “It just fell apart on me — you know, just the heat in the club and the sweat made it fall apart. Eventually I sort of busted it — early rumblings of the Who! — in a drunken moment. It was busted somewhere, and it had to go. So I ended up with my back to the audience, playing piano, which was then the only thing I could do unless I could get a new guitar.”

It soon wouldn't matter. When bassist Stuart Sutcliffe quit the group in July 1961, it fell to McCartney to take on bass guitar duties. Lennon didn't have the skill for it, and Harrison was too valuable as a lead guitarist. While McCartney at first resented his new position, he came to embrace it.

But he said it wasn’t until 1965, during the making of Rubber Soul’s “Michelle,” that he discovered the instrument’s power to create harmonic tension and release.

“I did pretty much get lumbered into playing bass. I didn't really want to do it, but then I started to see some interesting things in it,” he said. “One of the very earliest was in ‘Michelle.’ There's that descending chord thing that goes, [sings bass notes] ‘do do do do, words I know, do do do do do, my Michelle’ — you know, the little descending minor thing.

“And I found that if I played a C, and then went to a G, and then to C, it really turned that phrase around. It gave it a musicality that the descending chords just hadn't got. It was lovely.”

It’s a transformational power acknowledged by players like Sting, and one that Neal Schon discussed when he spoke with us about creating the Journey hit recording of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

“And it was one of my first sort of awakenings,” McCartney continued. “’Ooh, ooh, bass can really change a track!’ You know, if you put the bass on the root note, you've got a kind of straight track.

“But later I learned how to make other notes work for me, as Brian Wilson was to prove on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, a big, influential album for me. If you're in C, and you put it on G — something that's not the root note — it creates a little tension. It's great. It just [takes a long, expectant, gasping breath] holds the track, and so by the time you go to C, it's like, ‘Oh, thank God he went to C!’

“And you can create tension with it. I didn't know that's what I was doing; it just sounded nice. And that started to get me much more interested in bass. It was no longer a matter of just being this low note in the back of it.”

The Beatles Anthology continues streaming with Episodes 4–6 on Thursday, November 27 and Episodes 7–9 on Friday, November 28.

As the Beatles Anthology returns to screens this week with a new Episode 9, fans will be able to relive the group’s birth and rise from Liverpool to the global stage.

The key moment in the Beatles’ creation is July 6, 1957, when Paul McCartney and John Lennon met. Lennon was 16, and McCartney 15, but the younger musician had more skill on guitar. It was that ability that earned him Lennon’s respect and a spot in his skiffle group, the Quarrymen.

And, as McCartney reveals in a 1999 interview, it was all due to one song.

Their fateful meeting took place at St Peter's Church Hall fête in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. McCartney only attended the event because of his mate Ivan Vaughan, who was a friend of Lennon’s.

“He used to be in one of the little skiffle groups that John was in,” McCartney told British TV host Michael Parkinson in a 1999 interview for his BBC talk show, Parkinson. “So he said you should come along to this thing. You know this group's playing, and my mate John's in it.”

The Quarrymen were a rough-and-tumble skiffle act consisting of Lennon and a group of musical friends from the Quarry Bank High School. McCartney and Vaughan arrived in time to catch the band's afternoon set and see Lennon sing “Come Go With Me,” by the Del Vikings. Lennon didn’t know the words and improvised them, which McCartney found both amusing and impressive.

“John just looked like he had something,” he told Parkinson. “What happened was, they did their first set and then they had a break, and then they were due to do the evening set. So the break was an opportunity for the band to get drunk, really.”

By the time Vaughan took McCartney around to meet the band, Lennon had had a few beers, he recalls. When Vaughan explained that McCartney played guitar, Lennon asked him to play.

“One of them lent me his guitar and I had to turn it right, because I'm left-handed,” he said. “They wouldn't let me change the strings. But because I had a mate who had a right-handed guitar, I'd learned to play upside down. So that was a little bit impressive.

“But I also knew the words to this song that they all loved,” he continues. “And they didn't know the words. That was enough to get me in.”

The song was Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock.” Cochran and his band had performed the tune in the 1956 U.S. musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, which also featured standout performances by McCartney favorites Fats Domino, Little Richard and Gene Vincent (who would also prove to be a big influence on Jimmy Page). But it was Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” that had captured the hearts of young guitarists with its insistent riff and Cochran’s twanging, heavily vibratoed voice.

Despite the song's popularity, there was a good reason Lennon and his group didn't know the lyrics: The tune hadn’t been released yet, not even in America. Cochran recorded it for release after the movie, in May and August 1957, but it still wasn’t issued until the following November. And it wasn’t even released as a single in the U.K.

The absence of a record didn't matter at all to the song's popularity. The Girl Can’t Help It and the musicians it showcased made a huge impact on Liverpool teens, who were enthralled by the performances. Thanks to the film, Little Richard began selling more records in Liverpool than Elvis Presley. It is undoubtedly the reason Richard began touring England, where he found he could play bigger and better venues than in the U.S., where he was usually relegated to dingy clubs.

As for McCartney, upon seeing the movie he headed out to his local record store to order Cochran's record, only to learn it wasn’t available. So how did he know the lyrics? He was a huge fan of The Girl Can’t Help It and had apparently seen it several times during its seven-week run at the Scala Cinema on Liverpool’s Lime Street.

“We idolized these people, and we always thought they were given crummy treatment — until The Girl Can't Help It," he said in the Beatles’ Anthology book. The film was so important to him that the Beatles took a break from recording "Birthday" for the White Album on September 18, 1968 so they could so go to McCartney's house to watch the film's British TV premiere.

Cochran, in particular, was appealing to musically inclined teens. He was just 19 at the time — not much older than Lennon or McCartney — and played a Gretsch 6120 hollowbody electric guitar. And, as McCartney explains to Parkinson’s audience, it was his “Twenty Flight Rock” that would bring him and John Lennon together, setting the stage for the creation of the Beatles.

“So I'll just do a little bit of it,” McCartney said to Parkinson’s audience. “Show you what got me in the Beatles.”

The Beatles Anthology begins streaming with Episodes 1–3 on Wednesday, November 26 on Disney+, followed by Episodes 4–6 on Thursday, November 27 and Episodes 7–9 on Friday, November 28.

The Beatles’ Anthology 4 dropped on November 21, adding another volume of outtakes and rarities to the three Anthology albums released in the 1990s. Now, as the Anthology docu-series returns to screens this week — along with a revealing new Episode 9 — it’s worth remembering that the group churned out a core catalog of 213 songs between 1962 and 1970.

That’s a lot of tracks in just eight years. And, as you might imagine, the Beatles themselves weren’t fans of everything they produced.

That goes double for John Lennon. In the latter years of his career, the most critical Beatle took a particularly dim view of many songs in the group’s catalog, including his own.

His most withering condemnations were saved for the songs he stamped out in cookie-cutter form or peeled off as nonsensical filler. "It's Only Love" is an example of the former, a Help! track he called “abysmal”, while the latter includes Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard," a bit of light-hearted fluff he denounced as “a piece of garbage.”

And then there's the song Lennon called his “least favorite.” It appeared on the group's 1965 album Rubber Soul, which may seem odd, given that record's status as the group's first conceptual work, in which every song received its own well-considered musical arrangement.

Released on December 3 of that year, it was the Beatles' sixth album and the second to come out in 1965, following Help! As long-players go, it was something of a rush job, with 13 of its 14 songs written and recorded in two month's time following the Fab Four's U.S. tour. (Another two original songs — "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" — were also created for a single release during this time, such was the Beatles' remarkable creative output.)

Even so, the band took care in the studio to give the songs exactly what they required, experimenting with folkier sounds and new instruments, including George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on Harrison's "Think for Yourself."

As for that 14th song? It was "Wait," a leftover from the Help! sessions. It was revived and added to Rubber Soul's lineup when no one could muster the strength to write and record one more song to meet the long-player's requisite 14-track quota.

And John Lennon's least favorite song? It's the very first song recorded for Rubber Soul and the last one featured on the album: "Run for Your Life."

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off," he explained to Rolling Stone in 1970. "It was inspired from [Elvis Presley’s] ‘Baby, Let’s Play House.’"

Released in April 1955, "Baby, Let's Play House" was Presley's fourth single for Sun Records. It was written Arthur Gunter, who cut and issued his own version of it in late 1954. Lennon was particularly enamored of its line "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man." He took it for the opening phrase of "Run for Your LIfe," and drove the point home in the chorus refrain: "Catch you with another man, that's the end, little girl."

"So I wrote it around that," he told Rolling Stone, "but I didn’t think it was that important.”

Important or not, Lennon's song, and it lyrical appropriation, said a lot about his insecurities at that time in his life. He could be extremely possessive in his relationships. And as Paul McCartney explained in his memoir, Many Years From Now, Lennon was also unhappily married at the time.

“John was always on the run, running for his life," McCartney wrote. "He was married; whereas none of my songs would have 'catch you with another man.' It was never a concern of mine, at all, because I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls....

"I wasn't as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song."

Regardless of Lennon's disregard for it, "Run for Your Life" had little chance of being cut. With Christmas around the corner, the rush was on to have a new Beatles disc in shops in time for the holidays.

The album's final session — a marathon that began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and ended at 7 a.m. the next morning — saw the group record two songs — McCartney's "You Won't See Me" and Lennons' "Girl" — as well as add overdubs to "Wait." There was simply no time left for anything more.

Although Lennon might have wished that "Run for Your Life." had been excised from Rubber Soul's track listing — calling it his “least favorite Beatles song” and one he “always hated” — there was one Beatle who loved it: George Harrison.

“[It was] sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of, but it was always a favorite of George’s,” Lennon told author David Sheff in 1980. Most likely Harrison loved the chance it offered to play the twanging rockabilly riffs that punctuate its solo interludes, giving it an upbeat motif that stands in stark contrast to Lennon's dark threats.

In related news, John Lennon's 12-string Framus that was featured on "Help!" has been reissued following its landmark sale last year, while McCartney has explained how his left-handed playing forced himself and Lennon to become ambidextrous.

That follows the auction of a letter Lennon had written to Eric Clapton in 1971 when he made an ill-fated attempt to start a supergroup with him.

After nine years away from the stage, guitarist Carlos Alomar is touring once again in memory of David Bowie and the D.A.M. Trio. Featuring drummer Dennis Davis, Alomar and bass guitarist George Murray — D.A.M. was an acronym made up from the initials of their last names — the trio backed up Bowie in the 1970s on critical albums like Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. on which the singer redefined his sound

Alomar has been working on the education side of things lately, but says the California wildfires of 2024 and the fact that he felt he could have lost his old pal in rhythm, bassist George Murray, influenced his decision to hit the road one last time. His celebration of life, family, and music is a reminder of his career recording and performing with rock and roll royalty, including Chuck Berry, David Bowie, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and many others.

To that end, Alomar dialed in with Guitar Player to dig into his memories of working with those greats.

“It’s fortuitous that it happened, but it never happened the same way every time,” he offers. “So I cherish the moments that we have, because those little moments in time should be cherished and shared, but never really repeated.”

Chuck Berry

“I got this phone call to do a job at the Rye Playland [in Rye, New York, north of New York City]. It was an amusement park, but they had entertainment there under the giant tent and everything. I get there and in walks Chuck Berry with his electric guitar. He walks right up to us and says, ‘When I do like this’ — and he takes his headstock and moves it sideways — ‘you stop.’

“‘And when I do like this’ — and he moves his headstock up and down — ‘you play.’ That was it.

“He turns around to walk out, and I said, ‘Come on…’ I was maybe in my early twenties and naive. I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Berry, are we gonna rehearse?’

“That man turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Boy, I ain’t gonna rehearse rock and roll.’

“He turned around, walked out.

“We hit that stage in true form. And every time that headstock went up, every time that headstock went sideways — bam! I mean, it was amazing, and to this day, I still kind of conduct the same way that Chuck Berry did. [laughs]

“To me, the biggest lesson was you don’t rehearse rock and roll. You either know it, or you don’t.

“But I also learned that you did not talk to Chuck. Chuck talked to you. And how do I remember him? As a mean drunk. [laughs] You only remember your last experience with someone. It’s like a song: You can do a whole song, but if you mess up the ending, all you remember is the messed-up ending. Chuck Berry is like that song. It was great. But at the end, he came and stunk that up real good.”

David Bowie

“I was a session musician for RCA Studios when I got called to work on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. I was in a session, and in comes this thin, 98-pound, translucent dude with white skin, orange hair, fedora — everything. I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, you look like crap. You need to come to my house and get a home-cooked meal.’ [laughs]

“Little did I know he would take me up on it. We got on really, really well. I took him to the Apollo Theater, and he met [comedian] Richard Pryor, of all people, who was opening for [soul group] the Main Ingredient, which I was playing with. And then, I took him to the Latin clubs to hear some Latin music. We just hung out. There was no work.

“His intelligence was really amazing. I started talking to him about the chitlin circuit and James Brown — man, I found out at that moment how much the Brits studied Black music. Not only was I impressed with his intellect and his knowledge, but I was also impressed with his accent. You gotta remember, I was a kid from the Bronx, and I’m speaking to a Brit with that weird accent. So I was very curious.

“Eventually, he told me he was doing his Diamond Dogs album, but there was no money. There was no way I was gonna drop my gig with the Main Ingredient for this gig with no-paying David Bowie. [laughs]

“So I turned him down. Then later, after the Diamond Dogs album and tour, I got another phone call, and I turned him down again. He was very disappointed. I told him, ‘I’m married. I can’t take a pay cut like this.’ David said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

“And that was it. He took care of it. So from there we formed the band that relaunched his career with Young Americans.

“The last time I talked to David was at a birthday party. I didn’t realize that he was under the grip of his own demise. Although we had a good time, I didn’t realize that was our goodbye. That was it. Later on, I found out what was happening, and then of course, it affected me deeply. It was a pretty brutal year.”

John Lennon

“One day, I was in the studio, and in walked David Bowie with John Lennon and May Pang [Lennon’s girlfriend during his separation from Yoko Ono]. At the time, I didn’t really know who David Bowie was. But hell, I knew who John Lennon was. And John Lennon was a character who understood who he was.

“We had the groove down for ‘Fame’ [Alomar wrote the song’s underlying funk riff], but that was all we had at the time — not even the words. John came in with just an acoustic guitar, and they said, ‘Would you like to play?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ And every time he would play, he would sigh the word ‘fame.’

“They left to go to dinner and invited me, but I decided to stay and put some parts down. But I kept hearing that sound that John had been making. So we isolated his track, and we could hear him playing the guitar and saying ‘fame.’

“And that’s how the song became ‘Fame.’ It was my first number one hit. I was young and sandwiched between David Bowie and John Lennon on the song.”

Paul McCartney

“I had just finished writing with Mick Jagger when I was invite to work with Paul on his next album [1986’s Press to Play] at his studio, Hogg Hill Mill, in England.

“He was just the most endearing individual, very self-effacing, and his family was just so inviting and friendly. We walked upstairs to a studio filled with equipment. There were the Vox amplifier, the Höfner bass, the Mellotrons… I was drooling, man. [laughs]

“As I’m taking all that in, the man proceeded to roll the biggest spliff I’ve ever seen in my life. [laughs] I thought I was back in Jamaica! We talked about all kinds of music, and the Black experience. Again, I was reminded of the way the British studied R&B music and their curiosity, and, with all due respect, the way they always give proper respect to the African-American experience, the blues, and all the music we’ve done. They really hold it in high esteem, and rightfully so, you know?

“So he played me his first track, and I said, ‘Oh, sorry, Paul, I like what I hear, but I don’t hear myself in that.’ Same with the second track. I said, ‘Respectfully, I think it’s just great, so that I wouldn’t touch that one.’

“When we got to the third song, I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I hear something in that!’ So I’m just practicing, you know, putting little things out there. Little did I know that Paul was recording all of that. The minute I got the record home, I listened to it, and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought I was just practicing!’ So it was just a wonderful experience.”

Shepherding Julian Lennon across the Atlantic during the summer of 1974 came with an unexpected bonus for Davey Johnstone.

John Lennon's first son and ex-wife, Cynthia Lennon, joined the Elton John crew on the S.S. France for the trip to New York City, where Lennon would be visiting his father. During the journey John, Johnstone and company were working up songs and arrangements for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirty Cowboy, which they'd be recording at Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado, where they'd also made the Caribou album earlier that year.

The session would also include a cover of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," on which Lennon would play electric guitar and provide backing vocals under the pseudonym Dr. Winston O'Boogie.

"We were kind of chaperoning Julian, making sure he didn't get in too much trouble," Johnstone tells Guitar Player via Zoom from his home in California. "John met us at the New York Harbor, and it was quite a remarkable time. I'm a huge Beatles fan, so I'm going, 'Shit, this is John Lennon and he's enjoying our music.' There was talk of him coming to Caribou and hanging out for a couple of weeks, and we were like, 'Yeah, come, hang out!'

"And he did do that. He came to the ranch. I think we had pretty much finished Captain Fantastic when he arrived, which freed us up to do other things -- like 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.' I let him use my [1969 Les Paul] goldtop on the track, and we all played together. It was just a blast to do that, especially a song from Sgt. Pepper's. That was a really decent version of that song."

Elton John's version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which came out as a standalone single during mid-November of 1974, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was certified Gold. The session also included the standalone single "Philadelphia Freedom." Both are included on a recently released 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Captain Fantastic... The Gold Top, sadly, was stolen some years later, Johnstone says.

Although John's Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour ended back in July of 2023, Johnstone — also the Rocket Man's longtime bandleader — has hardly been living a life of leisure.

"I don't think I've retired. I don't think I ever will retire," he says. "That's just the way I am. I'm really enjoying this part of my life. I get to revisit some of that older music by playing with the band occasionally, and I'm doing a lot of my own stuff."

The Scottish native, who started working with John during sessions for 1971's Madman Across the Water album before joining the band full-time, still performs the occasional private show with John — "maybe six a year instead of six a week," he says. "We're really having a lot of fun. It's much more enjoyable than all the work we did before."

But he also has other projects he's working on, including a new solo album Johnstone says he's finished, with his son Charlie — who also worked on Johnstone's last album, Deeper Than My Roots in 2022 — co-writing and engineering. Johnstone's first solo album, Smiling Face, came out during 1973, while he and John Jorgenson, who's also recorded and toured with John over the years, collaborated on Crop Circles in 1999.

"I'm really proud of this new record," says Johnstone, 74, who hopes to release it during the first half of 2026. "It's got a lot of older sensibilities. It's not a modern record by any stretch of the imagination, although Charlie is a modern engineer, so maybe it is a moder record.

"Charlie and I finished a couple months ago, and once a week I listen to the whole thing. It's blowing my mind — and I'm very self-critical. If I'm still loving it, I'm thinking people are really gonna like this record."

Johnstone — who spoke with us last year about key guitar moments from John’s 1973 smash Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — says he's also in the midst of writing a memoir, but he's particularly excited about a documentary that's in progress about the early Elton John band with himself, bass guitar player Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson and, later, Ray Cooper. The project, he says, was inspired by a conversation 20 years ago with the late Murray's first wife, Anett.

"She called me one day and said not enough people know about Dee," Johnstone says. "There's not books about him, nobody knows. They don't have a clue about him, and he was such a brilliant player.

“So we started kicking ideas around. Over the years, we had to let it gather dust because Elton and his manager and husband, David Furnish, were doing their own documentary. Now that that's out we came back into it earlier this year and we've got a great team behind us, and we're very, very excited about it."

There's no timetable for the film's release as of yet, but Johnstone says he hopes it will engender a greater appreciation for how good the band was in its early 70s heyday, something that's hammered in, he says, on the new Captain Fantastic... set.

"When you hear the work we did, I'm always amazed by the level of musicianship," says Johnstone, who has shared five guitar tips with us. "The playing itself and the parts for each musician are so unique. Dare I say it, we were modeling ourselves on kind of a Beatles thing. I'm a huge Beatles fan, so we had that sensibility. It was a great band."

No song better represents Alice Cooper's emergence on the world stage than "Elected," the 1972 single from his sixth — and best-selling — album, Billion Dollar Babies. Basking in the fame and notoriety of his previous hit, "School's Out," he used the moment to remake himself from a shock rocker to a proto-punk provocateur, taking on the American establishment and the traditions it holds dearest. Small wonder Sex Pistols singer John Lydon considers Cooper one of his musical heroes.

But before it was a sharp piece of political satire, "Elected" was "Reflected," the group's 1969 debut single, taken from their first album, Pretties for You. The band was still in its psychedelic phase — a period that briefly saw them sharing living space with Pink Floyd — and "Reflected" was filled with nonsensical lyrics.

“It was that fake, quasi-spiritual '60s thing,” Cooper says of the song in a new interview with Classic Rock. “The lyrics were stupid. We didn’t know what we were talking about.”

The single bombed; Cooper says the band “never really expected anything to happen with it.”

But in 1972, after the band established its brand of shock rock with hits like “I’m Eighteen” and “Be My Lover,” Cooper found himself embroiled in controversy when parents and educators came together to demand radio stations ban his latest single, “School's Out,” believing it encouraged rebellious behavior.

Amused by the firestorm he'd unintentionally created, Cooper was inspired to poke his finger in the eye of another institution: American government. And why not? It was, after all, an election year, and no less than "Tricky Dicky" Nixon was running for re-elestion.

“I decided to write a song as a general poke at politicians,” Cooper explains. “And in America at that time, we had Richard Nixon, who was the ultimate target. Your president is always a focal point for satire, but Nixon — you couldn’t satirize him enough.”

Besides, as Cooper said in a 2024 interview, “the idea of Alice, the scourge of the entire world, being president was just too good.”

Cooper made himself the epitome of a grotesque politician, supplementing his trademark ghoul make-up with the show-biz trappings of a cane, a top hat and a cape. He even included a bogus $1 billion dollar bill bearing a photo of himself in Billion Dollar Babies.

The idea to reprise “Reflected” came from producer Bob Ezrin, whom the band had worked with since 1971's Love It to Death.

“Bob was our guru,” Cooper says. “And he loved 'Reflected.'”

Ezrin wanted the song to be reborn “100 times bigger.” To achieve that, he had the band perform it with what Cooper calls “a tip of the hat to the Who and those big Pete Townshend chords.” Coincidentally, Who drummer Keith Moon was present when the song was recorded at Morgan Studios in London. (And it wasn't the only song on the record to channel the band, either.)

T.Rex's Marc Bolan and Beatles drummer Ringo Starr would also pop by during the sessions for Billion Dollar Babies, while Donovan provided backing vocals on the title track. Steve Hunter, who featured on Aerosmith's cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'," also provided a host of guitar solos across the record.

“Elected," however, was strictly a Cooper band special with Ezrin, their unofficial sixth member, adding the all-important finishing touches.

“Bob knew how to get your records played on the radio,” Cooper says. “And when he added on the orchestration at the end of 'Elected,' it really did sound like a big brass band playing at somebody’s election rally. The song became so theatrical, and that was what Alice Cooper was all about.”

The icing on the cake, though, came after a brief chance encounter with John Lennon.

“Right after we cut ‘Elected,’” Cooper recalls, “I was at our record company office in New York, and John Lennon walked past me. He said, ‘Great record, Alice!’

“I said, ‘Thank you’. And then he took about three more steps, turned around, and said, ‘Paul would have done it better.’”

“I looked at him and went, ‘Well of course he would — he’s Paul McCartney!’,” Cooper retorted.

“But I was so thrilled. I mean, come on — John Lennon loved my song. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

(Cooper and Lennon would soon be spending time together, when Lennon moved out to Los Angeles during his Lost Weekend.)

In related news, the Alice Cooper Band has just reunited for one last album, and though the void left by the late Glen Buxton had to be filled, the guitarist still features on the record, thanks to a rediscovered guitar riff.

Cooper has also spoken to Guitar Player about the band’s early days and running the L.A scene with the Doors.

The Beatles’ breakup brought about a years-long hiatus in the friendship of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With their hit-making songwriting partnership legally dissolved — each had been writing on his own for years, despite the Lennon-McCartney credit attached to their Beatles’ output — there was no longer any doubt about who was the main writer behind their songs.

As their simmering feud went on display in media interviews — similar to the ongoing animosity between Pink Floyd alumni David Gilmour and Roger Waters — it was only a matter of time before it played out in their solo songs.

McCartney delivered the first salvo with “Too Many People.” Co-written with his wife, Linda, for 1971’s Ram, the song was a veiled slap at Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, for their political and social activism.

“He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit,” McCartney told Playboy in 1984. “I wrote [in the song], ‘Too many people preaching practices.’ I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn’t need to be told what to do.

“The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, to each his own. Freedom. Suddenly, it was ‘You should do this.’ It was just a bit of the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it.”

Ram came out on May 17. Lennon clearly got the message. Almost immediately, he began composing his retort in the form of “How Do You Sleep?," from his 1971 album, Imagine. “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead,” he sang in one of its most famous verses, a not-at-all-veiled reference to the conspiracy theory that the real Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike.

The fact that the track featured George Harrison peeling off a blistering electric guitar solo — performed with a slide — was surely salt in the wound. Lennon had, after all, been vocal in the Beatles’ final months about how poorly they had treated Harrison, and had even pitched a proposal to give him a more equitable share of songwriting on future albums, to McCartney’s displeasure. The thought of his old mates teaming up against him on a recording caused him pain.

“You see the atmosphere of 'Let’s get Paul. Let’s nail him in a song,’” he told British GQ in 2020. “And those things were pretty hurtful.”

Roughly three years on, however, both men were eager to put their feud behind them.

In 1974, while Lennon was separated from Ono and in the midst of his infamous Lost Weekend period, he and McCartney reunited in Los Angeles. Soon after, they were traipsing around together in New York City, where they spent a late night with David Bowie.

But McCartney apparently couldn’t resist one last — albeit much softer — dig at his old friend.

For years, critics had been complaining about his soppy love songs, which grew in frequency once he became a family man and formed Wings with Linda. Lennon had been leading the chorus against McCartney’s lighter fare for years. He infamously derided Macca’s old-timey music hall–inspired fare — “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Your Mother Should Know” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the like — which he reportedly referred to as “Paul’s Granny tunes.”

As McCartney revealed in his 2023 book, The Lyrics, Lennon had given him some guff about his “silly love songs” as well.

“There were accusations in the mid-1970s, including one from John, that I was just writing ‘silly love songs,’” McCartney wrote. “I suppose the idea was that I should be a bit tougher, a bit more worldly.”

He intended to compose a song rebutting that claim, until he thought it made more sense to plant his flag on that ground.

“I suddenly realized, that’s exactly what love is. It’s worldly. ‘Some people want to fill the world/With silly love songs.’ I’d been given that reputation, and I had to stand up for it.”

Released in 1976, “Silly Love Songs” was a poppy, disco-tinged retort to his critics that simply asked what was wrong with writing songs about love. The world apparently agreed with him and promptly sent it to the number one spot on the U.S. charts, making it McCartney’s 27th trip there in his career.

Did Lennon understand that McCartney was talking to him with the song? That’s up for debate.

Back in 2010, a member of the Steve Hoffman forum said Lennon’s friend, the New York City photographer Bob Gruen, told him John thought the song’s refrain, “I love you,” was a message to him: “John took the song quite personally,” the writer claims, “and saw it as Paul sending a message to him.”

The message has been repeated many times online. It’s a nice thought, but is it accurate?

Reached for comment, Gruen told Guitar Player he couldn’t remember Lennon making that remark.

“I do remember that I said that I thought it was Paul’s answer to John’s ‘How Do You Sleep,’” he says, “and that the ‘I love you’ was directed to John, but I don’t remember John saying it.”

By then, of course, it hardly mattered. The two friends had long ago made up. McCartney was a frequent visitor to Lennon and Ono’s home in the Dakotas, and they had even flirted about making an impromptu visit to Saturday Night Live that never materialized.

They would meet at least one more time, according to Lennon’s friend Elliot Mintz, in 1978. By then, the days of talking to each other through their songs seems to have been long passed.

With the Byrds, Roger McGuinn gifted us chiming electric 12-string anthems like “Turn, Turn, Turn,” riff-laden cuts like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and proto-country-rock classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Beyond that, there’s his appearance alongside Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, wild LSD trips with John Lennon and George Harrison, and notable collaborations with Tom Petty, not to mention his profound influence over Petty and his partner in crime, Mike Campbell.

All of this is to say that McGuinn isn’t just an unassuming electric and acoustic guitar (and banjo) hero — he’s also lived one hell of an eventful life. It was with that in mind that McGuinn dialed in with Guitar Player to peel back the curtain on his relationships with his early mentor, the 1960s singer Bobby Darin, as well as David Crosby, Lennon and Harrison, Dylan, Petty and Campbell.

Bobby Darin 

“I first met him at the Crescendo Club, where he offered me a job. I took it because I was looking to, well, actually, Barry Maguire [“Eve of Destruction”] had invited me to be part of the New Christie Minstrels, and I got my picture taken with them on the cover of TV Guide with the band. But I told Bobby that, and he said, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea. That’s too big a group. You’ll get buried in a group that size.’

“Bobby offered me twice as much, so I took the gig and stayed with him for about a year and a half. Then he quit performing for a while, moved to New York, and became a songwriter in the Brill Building.

“But he was a mentor to me. I followed him around, and I used to ask him questions about the music business, and I told him I’d like to get into the movies. He came up with a script from [American actor and director] Jackie Cooper at one point, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do. But I did move to New York, and I became a studio musician at that point.

“But the script from Jackie Cooper was about a banjo player. I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And then, I read the whole script, and it was about a banjo player. Bobby had remembered that I wanted to get into a movie, so he wrote this movie for me to be the lead in, but it was about a heroin addict. [laughs]

“I said, ‘Oh, Bobby, I don’t think I can do this,’ so I turned him down. I never did a movie with or for anybody. I didn’t work in Hollywood, but I’m still a banjo player.

“Bobby was a boss. It wasn’t like a friendly, ‘we’re buddies’ relationship. But he was kind and mentored me. He really cared about my growth as a musician and artist. I was with him the night he discovered Wayne Newton [the famed Las Vegas singer, known for his signature hit “Danke Schoen”].

“We were in Vegas, had a show in the main showroom, and were walking around the casino. Around the corner was the lounge where the acts who don’t play in the main room perform. And it was the Newton Brothers [Wayne and Jerry]. Bobby saw Wayne, and said, ‘Him. I’m gonna sign him.’ And he did.”

David Crosby

“He taught me how to drive. [laughs] I didn’t drive when I lived in Chicago — and this is 1960 — while I was working with [the folk group] the Limeliters. But after I left Chicago, David had this old Chevy convertible with four-inch seat belts that he got out of a DC-3. You know, he was really into safety.

“So he taught me how to drive in that. And with a good sense of humor, he took me to the corner of La Cienega and Sunset with a stick shift, and I wasn’t familiar with clutching and putting the thing in first gear and getting around the corner, but I did it.

“But in the Byrds, I think for the vocals, he was definitely important. And guitar-wise, he was a good rhythm player, but he didn’t play any lead, and I didn’t like his songwriting all that much. It was different from what we wanted to do. So I’d say his vocals were the main asset.

“And he and I were friends. I met him in 1960, and then, when we were getting the Byrds together, we were still friendly and having a good time. But tensions rose when people were getting songs on the record and other people weren’t.

“It became difficult. I think the final blow to me was when he said, ‘You guys are not good enough musicians to be playing with me.’ I didn’t think it was right, so Chris [Hillman] said, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of David.’ I agreed, and we went up and asked him to leave, and that was that. But we did him a big favor because he got into a ‘better’ band after that with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.”

John Lennon and George Harrison

“I first met them in London in late ’65 or ’66. They were all really friendly, and they just loved the Byrds. We were having a great time together, and so I maintained a friendly relationship with all of them. I don’t think there was a rivalry. We were all friends. I don’t remember being rivals with the Beatles, or anybody! And the Bible says to seek one’s own glory is not glory, so I don’t think like that.

“But they were inspirational. Everybody I ever ran into inspired me to do something. I did take acid with them in Laurel Canyon, but my first LSD experience was in San Francisco in 1960, when it was still legal. The acid came from the Sandos Labs. It was on a sugar cube wrapped in aluminum foil and cost $10. [laughs] I was living in a commune in Russian Hill. That was my first acid experience.

“But when we and the Beatles took it in Laurel Canyon, I don’t think it really helped anything musically. It just got you high. [laughs] For me, it was just recreational. But I quit doing it because I had a bad trip. It was iffy. You could have a really fun time or a really bad time.

“I remember, later on, when Paul McCartney was playing at the Forum in LA. It was sold out, and I called up the Forum, and somebody backstage picked up the phone. I said, ‘This is Roger McGuinn from the Byrds.’ He got Paul, and Paul said, ‘Oh, come on down. I’ll get you in!’ So we were friendly.

“And I remember back during John Lennon’s Lost Weekend in LA, with Harry Nilsson. I was at the Record Plant. They were in one of the studios, and I walked by, and they invited me in. I played with them. I said, ‘You know, I didn’t fill out a W-4 form…’ [laughs] I just did it for old times’ sake, just to be friendly. John said, ‘Well, you’re the only one…’ I think that was the last time I talked to John.

“And then George I saw quite often when he was hanging out with Tom [Petty] at his house. We talked about guitars and stuff, and George really got into the ukulele and gave one or two to Tom. They’d be playing it, and we all really had a good time. We were just all hanging out and being friends.”

Bob Dylan 

“Bob and I were neighbors in Malibu. He used to come over to my house, and he liked my house! I remember I was on the road, and I’d just bought this house in Malibu, and I got a call from my real estate agent, and she said, ‘I’ve got Bob Dylan here. He wants to talk to you.’

“Bob got on the line, and he said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

“I said, ‘Well, I just bought it, man. I wanna keep it. I love it.’ [laughs] He would come over to my house, and I don’t know if he wanted to see me or the house, you know? [laughs]

“But he’d come over, and we’d play pool. At one point he saw a basketball hoop out in the back, and he asked me if I had a basketball. I didn’t, but I got one the next day.

“So we we’re playing basketball in the back by the carport, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, man?’ He said, ‘I don’t know… like a circus.’

“And that’s what the Rolling Thunder Revue was. I got to New York, and I saw him again, and he invited me on the Rolling Thunder tour, and that was how that worked.

“If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, Bob is like Sheldon. [laughs] It’s like… he’s out there. He thinks in abstractions. And social graces are different. He doesn’t really have a conversation with you; he talks in abstractions a lot. I love the guy like a brother. But… he’s a little… challenging to have a friendship with.

“So he likes me at times. [laughs] He goes hot and cold. He liked me when we were hanging out together in Malibu. He liked me on the Rolling Thunder tour. He liked me when I did the 30th anniversary thing at Madison Square Garden with him. He was happy about my performance at that. I remember he told Tom Petty and George Harrison, ‘Wow, Roger really stole the show!’ He was very positive about that.

“So I know he’s liked me at times. I love the guy. And I loved performing with him. I loved singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ with him.”

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

“I met Tom in 1976, when I was getting ready to do an album for Columbia Records. I had most of the songs ready to go, but I needed a couple of extra songs to fill it out. And my manager was around the corner playing records and tapes, and I couldn’t see what he was putting on. And he put ‘American Girl.’

“I said, ‘When did I record that?’ [laughs] And he said, ‘It isn’t you!’ And I said, ‘I know. It’s a great song. Who is it?’

“And he said, ‘It’s this new guy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’ I said, ‘I want to meet him.’

“So the next day they arranged a meeting, and I got to meet Tom. We became friends, and I invited them to come to New York to play at the Bottom Line with me. We remained really good friends until his death.

“And I was honored because when I read Mike Campbell’s book [the 2024 memoir Heartbreaker]: There was one point where he was talking about playing like Roger McGuinn. I thought that was fun, you know? Mike’s a good friend, too, and I congratulated him on a really fun book to read. It brought back a lot of good memories.

“But Tom was great. He was very gracious, very kind, and a friendly person. Some of my favorite memories are hanging out with him and George Harrison at his house in L.A. and just jamming. It was great working with him on [McGuinn’s 1991 album] Back From Rio. And the way that came about was a direct result of being on the Temples and Flames tour in Europe with Tom and Bob.

“We had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune, but I didn’t have any words for it. I showed the tune to Tom, and he liked it, and we sat there in the hotel room and wrote down ‘King of the Hill.’ And Mike Campbell had a four-track cassette recorder — a little kind of mini studio in a briefcase — so he came into the hotel room and recorded the demo of ‘King of the Hill.’

“That somehow got to Clive Davis, and they gave us a record deal, so it came out of that. Tom was a great songwriter. He described it as being from outer space. He didn’t want to investigate it too hard because he thought it might go away. I’ve had that, too. Some songwriters say that it comes from maybe from God, where you’re just getting the Holy Spirit telling you to write stuff.”

During his early career, Eric Clapton launched a trio of musical acts as he built a fierce reputation as one of the finest guitar players to break out of the British blues explosion. But his dream of having his own group nearly cost him his career.

Clapton’s legend was formed during his brief tenure in the quartet John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, leading someone to spray paint “Clapton is God” on a London wall.

But soon after recording Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton in 1966, he found himself standing mouth agape as he watched Buddy Guy perform in London with a bassist and drummer.

“What it said to me was, 'This was possible,’” Clapton explained. “If you were a good enough guitar player, you could do it as a trio. It seemed to be so free, you could go anywhere.”

He promptly quit Mayall and secretly formed his own power-trio, Cream, with bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker. Their group was nearly revealed too soon when the three were picked at random to contribute to a compilation album featuring London's hottest players. When they did come out, Cream became rock's most groundbreaking power trio, much as Clapton had hoped.

But behind the scenes, he anguished over the band's interpersonal tensions as well as Bruce and Baker's jazz leanings.

“Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and be like Buddy Guy," Bruce later said of his and Baker's jazz-rooted tendencies. “We had different ideas."

The band was ultimately run into the ground by their greedy management, who only ever saw the band as a quick cash grab. They even approached Rory Gallagher to step into Clapton's vacated position when the trio inevitably disintegrated in 1968 after just two years .

Blind Faith became Clapton's next project. Featuring Traffic keyboardist and singer Steve Winwood, bassist Ric Grech and Baker on drums, the quartet never jelled. After the group was supported on a gig by the American group Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, Clapton saw their brand of southern-fried blues as more to his liking. He befriended frontman Delaney Bramlett, and with his pal Beatle George Harrison in tow, joined the group for a handful of gigs before launching his 1970 self-titled solo album, recorded with the support of the band.

That inevitably led to the creation of his next group, Derek and the Dominos, a quartet designed to give Clapton a degree of anonymity. Formed with members of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, the project was very close to Clapton's heart. As he revealed shortly before the release of their 1970 album, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, he expected Derek and the Dominos to outlive its predecessors. In the end, they made it no further than one album.

There were highs and lows to their time together. Clapton's guitar tandem with Duane Allman, who guested on the record, has gone down in rock as one of the greatest the genre has ever seen. But Clapton was pained by the knowledge their guitar fusion was temporary.

“I knew that sooner or later he [Duane] was going to go back to the Allmans,” he admitted to Guitar World. “But I wanted to steal him.”

In the end, Allman died in a motorcycle accident roughly one year after Layla was recorded. Prior to his death, Derek and the Dominos, minus Allman, regrouped in early 1971 to record their followup. The sessions, Clapton said, “broke down halfway through because of the paranoia and tension. And the band just dissolved.”

“When we broke up, I went into that dark place. I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore,” Clapton told Guitar World. “I didn’t like the sound of my guitar, I didn’t like the way I played.”

Clapton’s drug usage, in particular heroin, had reached its zenith during this period. John Lennon, himself a former heroin user, recognized his friend’s struggles, and reached out to help by asking him to form a new band with him. .

A letter Lennon wrote to Slowhand in 1971 proposed they start a new supergroup together. Among his lines of persuasion, he wrote, “I really feel that I can bring out the best in you and bring back the balls in rock ‘n’ roll.”

The guitarist declined the invitation, confining the project to the annals of what could have been. Lennon’s support did little to pierce his darkness at that time.

Eventually, though, Clapton found his way back, not through blues but through the power of reggae, courtesy of Bob Marley. Clapton would go on to have his first number-one hit — and as a solo artist — with his 1974 cover of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff."

“When I came back, it was with a different point of view, a fresh enthusiasm, and a kind of open-mindedness to learn about new music,” Clapton told Guitar World. “That’s when I heard reggae. I was just like a kid in a sweet shop again.”

Despite all the bad feelings around the Beatles’ breakup in the final months of 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were back on good terms as early as 1974. Lennon — newly separated from his wife, Yoko Ono — was in the throes of his drunken Lost Weekend. May Pang, his girlfriend, reunited the two former Beatles on March 28 of that year, in Los Angeles, where Lennon was producing Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats at Burbank Studios.

McCartney and his wife, Linda, dropped by, resulting in an impromptu jam session featuring both former Beatles, Nilsson, Stevie Wonder, Jesse Ed Davis on electric guitar, Ed Freeman on bass, and saxophonist Bobby Keys, as well as Pang and former Beatles roadie Mal Evans.

Although it was unproductive, the jam was enough to mend their broken relationship. Sometime later, back in New York City, Lennon and McCartney dropped in at the Pierre Hotel for a 3 a.m. visit to David Bowie. As Bowie recalled in an interview with Marc Riley, the three men discussed the possibility of working together, an idea that faded with the morning light.

As far as anyone knows, Lennon and McCartney never again considered re-teaming — except once, in 1976. And it was all thanks to Lorne Michaels, producer of Saturday Night Live.

The show was in its first season, delivering 90 minutes of sketch comedy and music “live from New York” beginning at 11:30 p.m. SNL had become an instant hit with its youthful cast, edgy humor and smart choice of musical guests.

Then, as now, part of the show’s appeal was its satirical take on topical issues. And in early 1976, one of the biggest stories in music was about attempts to reunite the Beatles.

Concert promoter Bill Sargent had offered the band $10 million in 1973 and upped his offer to $50 million in January 1976. According to an article in the April 5, 1976 issue of People magazine, a "top-level rock functionary" said he knew "for a fact that George, John and Ringo have talked among themselves about a reunion, and their attorneys say it is possible."

With perfect timing, Michaels made a tongue-in-cheek proposal to get the Beatles back together on SNL — for the humorously low price of $3,000. (He would sweeten the offer to $3,200 on the May 22 episode.)

Appearing onscreen, Michaels made his pitch on the April 24, 1976 episode.

“Please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people: John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Beatles. Lately there have been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together.

“Now, we’ve heard and read a lot about personality and legal conflicts that might prevent you guys from reuniting,” he said. “That’s something which is none of my business. That’s a personal problem. You guys will have to handle that.

“But it’s also been said that no one has yet to come up with enough money to satisfy you. Well, if it’s money you want, there’s no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you this check to be on our show. A certified check for $3,000.”

As the audience laughed, Michaels continued.

“All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs. ‘She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah’ — that’s $1,000 right there. You know the words. It’ll be easy.

“Like I said, this is made out to ‘the Beatles,’” he said, holding the check. “You divide it any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you. I’d rather not get involved.”

John Lennon, an avid fan of the show, was watching as the skit aired, and he loved it.

Although it’s often said Lennon and McCartney were both at Lennon’s house at the time, McCartney says he didn’t visit until the following Saturday.

“I was at John's place and Saturday Night Live was on. And John said to me, ‘Have you seen this?’ I said, ‘No’ — I’m living in England; he was living in America.”

Lennon told him about Lorne’s “offer.”

“And he said, ‘We should go down, just you and me. We should show up. There’s only two of us — take half the money.’

“And for a second, it was like —” McCartney said, indicating they gave it a thought.

What stopped them? Apparently it would have been too much effort, even though Lennon’s home was a five-minute cab ride from the NBC studios at 30 Rock.

“It would have been work,” McCartney said.

“We were having a night off. So we elected to not go and go to work.

“It was a nice idea. We nearly did it.”

They didn’t, but George Harrison did. On the November 20 episode later that year, he appeared in the cold open, complaining to Michaels that he had showed up to play and wanted his share of the money, only for Michaels to remind him that the pitch was for all four Beatles, not one.

As a consolation, Harrison got to announce the show, and then went on to perform with the night’s host and musical guest Paul Simon.

The lazy thinking goes that John Lennon was the thought-provoking rocker and Paul McCartney the happy-go-lucky pop-song writer.

Now super-producer Mark Ronson has weighed in with a well-informed point of view on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting tandem that puts McCartney in a new light.

Ronson certainly knows the pop music landscape. The British-American songwriter and producer has worked with pop royalty like Amy Winehouse, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars.

But he also know McCartney's diverse solo catalog and has first-hand experience working with the former bass-playing Beatle. As he revealed on a recent episode of the YouTube show Track Star, McCartney is considerably left-field when it comes to his musical interests.

Track Star challenges musicians to guess songs that are played to them while they're out on the streets. The show played Ronson the tune “Temporary Secretary,” from McCartney’s second solo album, 1980's McCartney II. It's an obscure, synth-propelled track, and a deep cut by any measure.

But Ronson got it straightaway. And he seized the moment to share his view of McCartney's diverse talents as a songwriter.

“There's a tendency to misremember him as, like, ‘John Lennon was a rock and roll badass and Paul was kind of like the happy poppy guy,’” Ronson says. “But Paul made the weirdest fucking music.”

In 2013, Ronson was one of four producers to work with McCartney on his 16th solo album, New. During the project, he got to see one of McCartney's lesser-known sides.

“I went to his studio one time and I got there early,” he recalls. “He was literally step sequencing a Moog keyboard to make the weirdest fucking sounds I've ever heard. ‘Ooh, I like a bit of that.’”

Ronson is a tech wizard who is always keen to embrace new technologies. McCartney, he says, is very much the same.

“He was the first person to use Moogs on a recording with ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ [from “Abbey Road],” he continues. “He was always pushing it forward.”

He is always on the hunt for new artists to be inspired by, too.

“When I was in the studio with him and we were working, I was like, ‘What have you been listening to lately?’ He played me ‘Climax’ by Usher [from 2012],” Ronson says. “I remember being shook. It’s a fucking great record.”

Demonstrating that drive for innovation, McCartney has revealed three guitar techniques that helped the band stand out from the rock and roll pack.

He's also shown it in his own solo career, as he shifted gears from one album to the next. Although he had a difficult time establishing his solo career — at one point undertaking a TV Special to promote his work, and working with Elvis Costello at another — he's continued to explore new tangents, from electronica to classical, making him one of modern music's most well-versed composers.

While Beatles fans dreamed of the group reuniting in the 1970s, David Bowie once revealed that he nearly managed to get John Lennon and Paul McCartney back together in 1974 to form a supergroup with him.

It was the year Bowie moved to New York City, just three years after Lennon himself had emigrated there. Shortly after Bowie’s arrival, he met Lennon at a party hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. Of all the Beatles, Lennon was his favorite.

“He was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.

Although he was nervous when the two met privately, they quickly formed a bond that led to Lennon visiting Bowie one night, with McCartney in tow.

As Bowie explained to BBC 6 Music with Marc Riley, he was lodging at the time at the Pierre Hotel.

“I’d taken over a suite virtually for months and months,” he said. “I was kind of living there.”

Bowie explained that he was obsessed with the newly released Sony video recorder and would spend hours making his own films. “Fortunately, I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night and complete these things,” he said, tongue in cheek.

It was on one of these late-night creative sprees that he was surprised by a pair of visitors.

“About three in the morning, there's a knock on the door. And John was there and he had got Paul with him. It was the two of them been out on the town for the evening.”

Lennon was in the midst of his Lost Weekend, the period from roughly early 1974 to mid 1975 when he and his wife Yoko Ono separated. The rocker was dividing his time between New York City and Los Angeles, and spent much of his time on a bender. It was also during this time that he began recording his album of rock classic covers, Rock ’n’ Roll.

Lennon, whose previous meeting with Bowie had lasted until nearly dawn, knew the singer would be up at that hour.

“He said, Can we come in?’” Bowie recalled. “He said, ‘You won't believe what I've got here!’

“And I said, ‘I thought you two…’, and he said, ‘No. All that's gonna change.’”

Bowie believed it was possibly the first time the two had been back together since the Beatles.

“It was great. We spent the evening just like rapping and talking. There was kind of a strange thing between them. There was a little bit of distance every now and again, but that must have been the first time they'd been back together for, you know, since the big bust up, you know.”

In the course of talking, the three music icons hit on the idea of working together.

“They actually asked me if I'd kind of join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something else: David Bowie and the Beatles. They liked the idea there’d be two — like, DBB. I think they wanted to call it DBB.”

Sadly, it was all a long-night's pipe dream.

“The next morning, it just never came to anything,” Bowie concludes.

Soon after, however, Bowie and Lennon did go on to work together by recording a cover of the former Beatles’ 1968 song “Across the Universe” and co-writing “Fame.” Both songs would be included on Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans, with “Fame” becoming the singer’s first number one song in America after it was released as that album’s second single.

Bowie wasn’t the only musician Lennon collaborated with at this time. He and Yoko Ono also performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers at the Fillmore East. However, the couple ran afoul of the electric guitar virtuoso when they remixed their performance of Zappa’s song “King Kong,” released it under the name “Jamrag” on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City and claimed it as their own composition.

And in 1974, shortly before his sessions with Bowie, Lennon had piano rocker Elton John guest on his hit song "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night."

Considering all that, it’s not surprising Lennon would be open to a new collaboration with McCartney, his original writing partner. Unfortunately, it never happened.

In 1974, David Bowie was fresh off his reign as the glam-rock’s biggest act. After his breakthrough success that began with Ziggy Stardust and continued through Diamond Dogs, he was about to make a turn toward soul and funk with his next album, Young Americans.

Despite his success, he could still be in awe of his idols. When the opportunity to meet John Lennon arose that year, Bowie was beside himself.

Like millions of teens in the 1960s, he had been a Beatles fan. His own career began to take off in the mid 1960s, during which time he flirted with influences ranging from the Rolling Stones to the Who to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. But while Bowie never dabbled in the Beatles’ style of pop, but he was enamored of the group, and John Lennon in particular.

“Oh hell, he was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.

“I felt such kin to him in as much as that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside, on the periphery of what was the mainstream — and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered populist and make it work. He would take the most odd idea and make it work for the masses.

“And I thought that was just so admirable. I mean, that was like making artwork for the people and not sort of having it as an elitist thing. There was just so much about him that I admired. He was tremendous, you know?”

By 1974, Bowie had moved to New York, the same city to which Lennon had emigrated in 1971. It was perhaps inevitable the two would meet. It happened soon after at a party given by actress Elizabeth Taylor.

“I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way,” Bowie recalled of their meeting.

As his longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti revealed in a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 4, Bowie was intimidated by the former Beatle.

“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” he recalled. When shortly after the party Lennon scheduled a visit to Bowie, the singer insisted Visconti come along “to buffer the situation.”

Bowie didn’t need to worry. Lennon was a fan.

"I must say, I admire him for the vast repertoire of talent the guy has, you know,” Lennon said in 1980. “I was never around when the Ziggy Stardust thing came, because I’d already left England while all that was going on, so I never really knew what he was… I think he’s great."

Visconti recalled that the meeting took place late in the day. When he arrived, he found Bowie on the floor sketching on an art pad with charcoal while Lennon sat nearby. Neither said much to the other for a couple of hours, when Lennon broke the silence by asking for a few sheets of paper so he could draw as well.

“So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John and they kept swapping them,” Visconti said. “And then they started laughing and that broke the ice.”

Bowie recalled in a later interview how Lennon responded when he asked his opinion of glam rock.

“‘Yeah, it’s great,’” Bowie said, mimicking Lennon’s Liverpool accent. “‘But it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on.’

“And I was impressed as I was at virtually everything he said. He was probably one of the brightest, quickest witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in true definition, not in a fabricated political sense. But a real humanist.

“And a really spiteful sense of humor — which, of course, being English, I adored. I just thought we’d be buddies forever and we’d get on better and better and all that.”

The two artists collaborated soon after meeting. Bowie had just completed recording his album Young Americans in Philadelphia. But in January 1975, he and Lennon got together at New York City’s Electric Lady Studios to cut two more tracks for it: a cover of Lennon’s 1968 Beatles tune “Across the Universe” — included on the group's 1970 swan song, Let It Be — and a new song composed by Bowie, Lennon and Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s guitarist and the player behind the tune’s signature funk electric guitar riff. Titled “Fame,” it became Bowie’s first number-one single.

But Bowie got considerably more than a hit out of his collaboration. He got a friend for what little time remained in Lennon’s life.

And along the way, he picked up some priceless advice from Lennon about songwriting.

“I’ll never forget something John Lennon told me,” he recalled in a 1983 interview, in which he reflected on Lennon’s death three years earlier. “We were talking about writing, and I would always admire the way he used to cut through so much of the bullshit and just come straight to the point with what he wanted to say.

“He said, ‘It’s very easy, all this. All you have to do is say what you mean, make it rhyme, put a backbeat to it. I keep coming back to that principle.”

Bowie added that “Fame” came about in just that way.

“Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was so easy.

“John had an incredible charisma that made you cut through things. I can see the effect that he must have had on Paul McCartney. I’d imagine McCartney sorely misses that now.”

When it comes to recording with an ex-Beatle, there’s never been a shortage of takers for the gig — and who could blame them? In the early 1970s, playing on a John Lennon record wasn’t just a cool credit — it was the musical equivalent of a golden ticket.

However, as Larry Carlton reveals in a new interview, a studio session with one of music’s biggest names could turn out to be a real “drag.”

The session in question was for Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll, a mid-’70s covers vehicle. But to tell the story properly, we need to head back to 1969, when music publisher Morris Levy accused Lennon of lifting lyrics from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” for the Beatles’ Abbey Road cut “Come Together.”

Levy sued, and after years of legal back-and-forth, they settled out of court. (Interestingly, Berry himself never seemed all that bothered and even made an appearance with Lennon in 1972 on the syndicated Mike Douglas Show.) Lennon’s deal with Levy required him to record a few songs from Levy’s publishing catalog. Lennon was only supposed to knock out a few covers and call it a day, but he instead used it as an excuse to make an entire album of the rock and roll classics he’d grown up on.

He called his old buddy Phil Spector — who, as far as Lennon was concerned, had done a bang-up job on Let It Be and his 1971 solo opus, Imagine — to rally the musical troops and produce the sessions. It was all great on paper. But it quickly went to hell once the studio doors closed.

The Rock ’n’ Roll recordings took place sporadically from 1973 to early 1975, with the album dropping in February of that year. From day one, the sessions were unruly. Lennon, newly split from his wife, Yoko Ono, was in the throes of his “Lost Weekend” out in L.A., running wild with Harry Nilsson and the Hollywood Vampires. Spector was largely calling the shots, and allegedly fired a few — but more on that later.

Of all the bad habits on display, Spector, never shy on eccentricity, developed a new, soon-to-be infamous one: At the end of each night, he’d slip out the door with the master tapes under his arm, like a villain in a heist movie.

It was somewhere in the midst of these sessions that Larry Carlton found himself called to A&M Studios for a week's work on the album. Armed with his signature Gibson ’69 ES-335 electric guitar, the 26-year-old player was a major name in the session world, having cut tracks with the Partridge Family, Linda Ronstadt, Vikki Carr, Tom Scott and Andy Williams, and even turning up on TV and film scores. He was also a key part of Quincy Jones’ massive orchestral pop and jazz productions of the era.

In short, if you needed a guitar part in L.A., you were probably calling Larry Carlton. His reputation was built on always delivering, sometimes on a literal moment’s notice, and always with total professionalism. And that was what he expected in return, no matter the star power.

“Phil Spector, the producer, had booked a lot of us musicians for seven o’clock every night that week, five nights,” Carlton remembers. The players arrived. Among them was piano great Leon Russell, who had performed at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh.

But seven o’clock came and went. Then eight. Nine-thirty arrived, but there was still no sign of Lennon or Spector.

“Leon Russell and I went into another studio,” Carlton recalls, “and he sat at the piano, and we just kind of jammed a little bit."

By the time Lennon and Spector arrived, around 10 o’clock, the vibe had turned dark.

“It was a bad time for John,” Carlton explains, “He was drinking.”

The song for this night's session was "Bony Moronie," a classic rock and roll hit written and recorded by Larry Williams in 1957.

“Now, I played ‘Bony Moronie’ when I was 12 years old,” Carlton recalls. “So I’m in my cubby right here, and John’s right here. And he had been drinking. So he’s calling the chord changes — it’s only three — and he’s going, ‘A, I got a gal named Bony Moronie. D.’ I said, ‘I got it.’

“It was a drag. It was. It was not professional and not what I expected.”

When the session came to an end — seemingly not too long after it finally got underway — Carlton ended up driving Leon Russell back to his hotel.

“I said, ‘Man, that was a drag. Darn it,’” he recalls.

“And with his Oklahoma accent, Leon just looked at me and goes, ‘You kidding? I’m back to Tulsa in the morning.’”

Carlton laughs about it now, but at the time it must have felt like a missed opportunity, and a difficult decision to make.

“I got home and called Phil Spector’s office and just left a message at midnight. I said, sorry, I can’t make it the rest of the week. So I cancelled. That wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time. It could have been so cool. But... one of those things, you know?”

By late 1973, Spector had vanished completely, with the tapes in tow. Then, like some kind of Batman villain, he cold-called Lennon to announce, in a sly nod to the Watergate scandal, “I’ve got the John Dean tapes” — and he wasn’t giving them back without a deal.

As if that wasn’t enough, in March ’74 the producer was in a serious car crash that put him in a coma, freezing any hope of making progress on the album or retrieving the tapes. In the meantime, Lennon pivoted to working on a different project that became his 1974 album, Walls and Bridges.

Meanwhile, record execs at Capitol were tasked with getting the tapes back, and after a drawn-out process, they reportedly shelled out around $90,000 to recover them from Spector.

In the end, nothing about the recording sessions appears to have gone smoothly. Spector was producing, which meant you could expect a wall of sound and some chaos — and that’s exactly what happened. His behavior in the studio became so extreme that there are rumors of him firing a gun in the A&M control room in close proximity to Lennon’s head. Lennon reportedly told him, “If you’re gonna shoot me, kill me, but don’t mess with my ears, Phil.”

So who actually played guitar on the version of “Bony Moronie” that appears on the finished album? For years, even reputable compendiums like The Beatles Bible listed Larry Carlton as a guitarist on the Larry Williams cover. But as Carlton himself said in his new interview on the Thinking About Guitar YouTube channel, he “didn’t end up on the album.” The finished version likely features Steve Cropper and Jesse Ed Davis, considering their handling of the guitar duties in the sessions that followed, but the jury’s still out.

Lennon would eventually finish the album in New York, producing the last sessions himself at Record Plant East. Rock ’n’ Roll was released in February 1975 and stands today as a rowdy time capsule of the man’s musical life at that stage. It would be Lennon’s last true solo album before 1980’s collaborative effort with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy. Tragically, Lennon was shot and killed outside his and his wife’s apartment at the Dakota, in New York City, just a few weeks after the latter’s release.

Had he lived longer, it’s easy to imagine Lennon and Mr. 335 might have crossed paths in a studio somewhere in the world, but in the end, it’s another one of music’s “what could have been.” Looking back, Carlton stands by his call. “Yeah, that wasn’t fun. I’m an admirer, but that was a bad time.”

With a fourth Beatles Anthology on the way, a previously unseen interview with George Harrison discussing the creation of the first in the series from 1995 has surfaced online.

The so-called philosophical Beatle discussed the breadth of the comprehensive Anthology 1 release, which featured 60 tracks, including “Free as a Bird,” the first new song from the Fab Four in 25 years. The project saw surviving members Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr trolling the archives, right back to the group's formative days as the Quarrymen.

“Long before we came to Abbey Road, we recorded 'That'll be the Day' in a studio in Liverpool,” Harrison tells bass player Mo Foster in the clip. “It was just a place you go in and go straight onto disc, and we paid for it ourselves. We're going really from A to Z.”

The exhaustive collection, which includes outtakes and rarities from across the band's lifespan — including a live cover of Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven” — ensured the release represented every era of the band. But the further back in time the three musicians travelled, the more difficult their task became.

“We've sifted through the early tapes, but you see, a lot of the early tapes were done in mono,” he explains. “The only tapes remaining are the actual masters. All the outtakes were thrown away long before people thought we were any good.”

The band had pored through the tapes at Abbey Road, the London studio with many ties to the band. That included their audition tapes they tracked for Decca Records, when they were eying their first record deal.

“We got turned down, and they signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead,” Harrison laughs. “Somebody said to Brian Epstein, ‘Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein,’ and that was probably the biggest error in music history.”

There are also stark parallels with how the Struts' record label told the band not to have too many guitars on their new Brian May-powered reworking of their biggest song. They, too, were told that guitar music was on its deathbed.

“It's a great room,” Harrison says of the studio. “At the very first session we did here, which was before Ringo was in the band, in June 1962, we recorded ‘Love Me Do’ with Pete Best.”

The band then returned in October of that year to rerecord the song again with Starr behind the kit. “But George Martin didn't know about Ringo, and he'd hired a session drummer. That's the famous story,” says Harrison, again with a chuckle. “He put out the single without Ringo playing on it! So, we're going to put out the version with Pete Best on it, because it never did come out.”

The second Abbey Road session was also memorable for all the wrong reasons. Harrison had been in a fight with some Liverpool locals who were upset about Best being replaced by Starr. Harrison recalls: “I had a black eye because people were shouting, ‘Get Ringo out. Ringo never, Pete Best forever.’

“We did so many takes of ‘Love Me Do.’ In those days, we never had light gauge strings; we used to have to have a really high action and very heavy gauge strings. After take 20, it was pretty hard on the fingers.”

Two new songs featured on the Anthology releases, with both “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” coming from John Lennon demos handed to the group by his widow, Yoko Ono.. It was the first time the trio had worked on a song together since 1970, and McCartney believes that John Lennon’s spirit often made itself known during the sessions on several occasions.

For Beatles fans, new music a quarter of a century after the heartbreak of their breakup was headline news. For Harrison, the biggest takeaway from those sessions was that water was passing under the trio’s proverbial bridge.

“The thing that's the most pleasing is that we're all friendly again,” he says. “I mean, we had some turbulent years in the meantime. It's just fun to have your old friends back again.”

John Lennon, however, felt the individual members flourished after the band broke up, even if it took several attempts for McCartney to get his solo career off the ground.

During a whirlwind decade, the Beatles were transformed from a group of four fresh-faced Liverpudlians into the biggest band in the world. Across 12 studio albums, they built a legacy that, over half a century later, remains largely unchallenged.

But despite that, John Lennon believes the Fab Four “flowered” after the group’s demise in 1970. In particular, he says his lyric-writing talents grew “a millionfold,” and he singled another member out for the way he came into himself away from the band environment.

When it came to establishing themselves as solo artists, each of the Beatles — Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — moved quickly. In 1970, the same year they released their final album, Let It Be, each of the four released solo albums. Harrison, having grown frustrated by having his wings clipped in the Beatles, released his triple album, All Things Must Pass, a commercial success that saw him establish himself outside the shadow of the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

Although All Things Must Pass performed the best of the group's solo albums that year, Lennon got high marks for his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, and quickly shot back with his second full-length, 1971's Imagine. The album was a huge success, selling double Platinum in the U.S. while its title track, "Imagine," became Lennon's signature tune and the song most associated with his solo years.

Starr, meanwhile, was having success as a solo artist with his hit song "It Don't Come Easy" and attempting to build a second career as a film actor in eccentric comedies, like his spaghetti-western film, Blindman.

“Imagine how we've flowered since then,” Lennon told Hit Parader in February 1972, a few months after the release of Imagine. “George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music's improved a millionfold lyric-wise, and Ringo's coming out and writing 'It Don't Come Easy,' and now he's going to write the title song for this cowboy thing he's in. It's really beautiful.”

Interestingly, Lennon had no praise for McCartney. At that point, the bass guitarist was having a rough time launching his solo career. His solo albums McCartney and Ram were critical and sales disappointments, and Wild Life, the debut album from his band Wings, fared even worse. Another year would pass before his well-timed TV special coincided with a turning point in his fortunes.

"The fact is, the Beatles have left school, and we have to get a job,” Lennon had told Hit Parader. “That's made us work — really work harder. I think we're much better than we ever were when we were together.

“Look at us today. I'd sooner have Ram, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, George's album, and Ringo's single and the movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road,” he said, referring to the group's final two albums.

Yoko Ono, sitting in the interview for her part in Imagine, added rather diplomatically, “If the four of them had gone on, then they would have suffocated each other.”

Talking to the magazine about Imagine, Lennon revealed that he had intended it to feature three-quarters of the Beatles.

“George is on half of my new album playing guitar. The only reason Ringo wasn't on it was because he was abroad, making his movie,” he had said. “So then the three of us would have been on, but then it wouldn't have been the Beatles. It would have been Plastic Ono because I would have had the final say.

“There would be no decision-making by George or Ringo, other than if I liked an idea I'd take it — which is what happened with the Beatles — but then it was more diplomatic.”

Of course, fans would have to wait until the 1990s for the release of any new material featuring the four Beatles. The Anthology series, issued in 1995 and 1996, brought with it two new singles — "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love" — created from Lennon's unfinished demos. Although he had been murdered in 1980, Lennon was present at those sessions like a ghost, according to McCartney.

More recently, Starr and McCartney labored to finish an old Lennon demo the guitarist had said would be “great” for the drummer.

Last month, a new, ninth chapter in the Beatles Anthology documentary, and a fourth album in the same series were announced. The release includes 13 previously unreleased demos, session recordings, and other rare recordings.

And in a new development, radio and TV personality Elliot Mintz has revealed what he believes to be the last meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, coming two years after what was, for years, thought to have been their last.

When the surviving Beatles — Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — reunited in the studio in the mid ’90s, the band members felt they weren’t alone, as “strange goings-on” hinted at John Lennon’s supernatural presence.

The trio’s team-up, coming 25 years after the Fab Four disbanded, and a decade and a half after the death of John Lennon, represented the time they’d worked on new music together as they set about bringing the unreleased John Lennon song “Free as a Bird” to life.

It was one of two new songs, alongside “Real Love” — also born from John Lennon’s mind — to feature on 1995’s Anthology box set. As news of a fourth addition in the Anthology series broke last week, McCartney’s reflections on the unusual incidents that surrounded the recording of “Free as a Bird” have come to light.

“There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio — noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things,” McCartney once told OnHike.com (via The Mirror). “There was just an overall feeling that John was around.”

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had given the rest of the band the two of his demos with the view of transforming them into finished songs. The unexplainable occurrences weren't exclusive to "Free as a Bird" either; the "Real Love" sessions were just as creepy.

“We put one of those spoof backward recordings on the end of the single for a laugh, to give all those Beatles nuts something to do,” McCartney said with a laugh. “I think it was the line of a George Formby song.” Formby was a popular entertainer when the Beatles were growing up and a favorite of the group's members, particularly Harrison.

“Then we were listening to the finished single in the studio one night, and it gets to the end, and it goes, ‘zzzwrk nggggwaaahhh jooohn lennnnnon qwwwrk.’ I swear to God.

“We were like, ‘It’s John. He likes it!’”

Lennon once told his son Julian if he ever needed to contact him from beyond the grave, he'd send a white feather. That wasn't lost on McCartney when the three musicians stepped outside the studio for an impromptu photo opportunity. At the last minute, a white peacock entered the frame.

“That’s John. Spooky, eh?” McCartney reflects. “It was like John was hanging around. We felt that all through the recording.”

Those kinds of instances might have given them the chills, but in truth, the band had welcomed Lennon's presence into the studio. Starr himself had said they kept hitting a wall when they pushed on as a trio, with Lennon’s absence a gaping hole.

“I invented a little scenario,” McCartney later said (via the HollyHobs YouTube channel). “He’s gone away on holiday, and he’s just rung us up and says, 'Just finish the track for us, will you? I’m sending the cassette, I trust you.'

“That was the key thing, 'I trust you, just do your stuff on it.'

“I told this to the other guys, and Ringo was particularly pleased. It was very nice, and it was very reverent toward John.”

Years later, after Harrison had also passed on, Starr would reunite with McCartney for his solo track "Grow Old With Me." As things stand, it is the only track from one of the four's solo releases to feature songwriting credits from the entirety of the Fab Four, with another old Lennon demo revitalized, and a touching tribute to Harrison woven into its music.

As hoped for, the band's latest Anthology release includes outtakes and rarities, and the band's now nine-part documentary has been expanded with another episode that charts the making of the first Anthology in 1994 and 1995. The ghost of JohnLennon will undoubtedly haunt that, too.

It hasn’t been hugely uncommon for Beatles members to collaborate together in the wake of the band’s demise in 1970 – that infamous rooftop concert was their final public appearance. They have, however, usually been a little limited in their scope.

Ringo Starr guested on George Harrison's third album, “All Things Must Pass”, soon after the group’s split and Ringo's solo career – which has yielded an exhaustive 21 studio albums since "Sentimental Journey" (1970) – has seen the drummer frequently join forces with the rest of the Fab Four.

But rarely did more than two Beatles get together for a song. Sure, many of Starr’s albums have featured contributions from Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon, but on separate tracks. Harrison’s 1981 single, "All Those Years Ago", reconfigured as a tribute to John Lennon after his murder the year before, featured Starr on drums and McCartney's backing vocals. But Starr's "Grow Old With Me" shattered that precedent in a remarkable way.

Released in 2019 as part of his 20th album, “What’s My Name”, the song started life in Lennon’s imagination. Little came of the demo until it serendipitously ended up in Starr's hands years after Lennon's passing.

“John wrote it,” he told TMS Global Entertainment during the record’s press tour. “And I like to mention this because Jack Douglas [the record’s producer], sent it to me out of the blue. That's why I love life. Things just arrive.

“Jack Douglas said, ‘Did you ever hear what John said on the Bermuda tapes?’”

As the name suggests, the Bermuda tapes relate to a series of demo recordings made by Lennon in Bermuda. Most songs would end up on his 1980 album “Double Fantasy” with Yoko Ono, the last record he released before his death. This idea, however, remained untouched nearly 40 years later.

“At the beginning of the cassette – I have to well up, I can’t help it. I’ve told this story nine times today – he says, “Oh, that would be good for Richard Starkey. This would be great for you, Ringo!’

“I thought, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ We’ll never know why he didn’t finish it, but we did a lot of the track. Paul was coming into town, and I said, ‘I’d love for you to play on this track.’ I thought he'd be just perfect because he's so melodic and he can only enhance the track. That's all he does when he plays, every time.”

And so, three-quarters of the Beatles featured on the track, with a touching guitar solo coming courtesy of Joe Walsh. But, with the memory of another fallen Beatle in mind, Douglas had one final touch in mind.

“Jack, who did the strings, does a George line. He plays a title of one of George's song in the with the strings, and if you listen to it carefully, you'll hear it.”

The melody in question – spoiler alert – is from Harrison’s resplendent Beatles hit, “Here Comes the Sun”. It's a delicate, heartfelt touch

“So it’s like George is on it, too,” Starr smiles, a look of disbelief visible despite his aviator shades covering much of his face.

In related news, Derek Shulman has revealed how his pre-Gentle Giant band secretly recorded an album with Beatles gear, and, following Ozzy Osbourne's passing, comments on how the Beatles saved his life have resurfaced. He compared crossing paths with Paul McCartney in 2001 to meeting Jesus.

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, bringing to an end a decade of music-making that changed the shape of popular culture forever, it had a profound effect on their fan base. But it also impacted the Fab Four, too.

The death of the band was, in truth, a perfect storm of factors. Personal and creative differences along with business matters – the quartet of Liverpudlians had gone from working-class nobodies to the world's biggest pop stars in record time – meant their break-up was inevitable. As the news sunk in, the next steps from the individual members were eagerly awaited.

Their 12th and final album, "Let It Be", was released in May 1970. In the months that followed, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison had all put out new solo albums – though Lennon's is credited as the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Paul McCartney had already put out a debut solo release, "McCartney" in March after recording it in secret, and both he and Lennon would release follow-ups the next year.

While Harrison would go on to have a fairly prolific solo career – temporarily blighted by his troubled "Dark Horse" tour – he also turned to an unlikely muse as he looked to adjust to life after the Beatles.

“In the late ‘60s, when [British comedy group] Monty Python first came on television in the UK, there [were similarities],” he says in a recently unearthed interview with David Hartman from 1981.

“What the Beatles represented, we were trying to be something new and give some alternatives. Likewise, in the comedy situation, everything was pretty boring for years and years, I thought. Then Python came along with this totally off-the-wall type of humor. They didn't leave many stones unturned.

“So, going into the '70s, it was a bit depressing. It was good to have a laugh and for something to keep me smiling.”

Indeed, Harrison co-founded HandMade Films in 1978 and helped fund the making of the group's film, "Life of Brian", after their original backers had pulled out. His contributions were rewarded with a small cameo as Mr. Papadopoulos, and their working relationship would extend into the '80s.

Harrison’s interview with Hartman served to promote two new projects: his album, "Somewhere in England", and his scoring of the film "Time Bandits", which featured three Python members.

In the resurfaced clip, Hartman then asks if he felt there was pressure for the Beatles' members to continue releasing music after the band had split. Their output of 12 albums in seven years was impressive, and he felt many fans expected more of the same from their solo projects.

“There's not too much pressure to produce records, but it's what we do, it's what we've done in the past,” he replied, deeming their time in the Beatles as their “apprenticeship.”

“The pressure is now coming from the other way,” develops. “Everyone and their granny is in the music business. Everybody has million-dollar record deals, to the point where the record business is so saturated that a rot set in on the radio. Nobody knows what people want, or some people think they know what the public wants, so there's this great confusion.

“The most difficult thing is trying to continue with what comes naturally and hoping that, somehow, it still fits into the picture.”

In the 11 years between “Let it Be” and “Somewhere in England”, Harrison had released a further six albums. That’s hardly a muted output, but one of his most poignant solo songs featured on “Somewhere in England”.

“All Those Years Ago” was written before John Lennon’s murder in 1980, but his death saw him rewrite the lyrics as a tribute. That led to Hartman asking Harrison to reflect on his partnership and friendship with Lennon.

“Well, it's pretty hard to say in a minute or so,” was his retort. “We grew up together. I was about 13 when I first met him. He was a tough guy, he wanted to do something different, and likewise so did I and Paul.

“We gained strength from each other. He was always the noisy one; he'd be more outspoken than the others. I think that was important: John being upmarket with the intellectuals, Paul being cute, and Ringo being cuddly. I was the quiet one, so it all kind of worked out.

“It helps having the music,” he then says, before being cut off by timing issues. But even with that incomplete sentence, he makes a point. Though he never turned his back on music after the Beatles, Harrison needed a little comic relief too. But when tragedy struck, it was music that helped him express his emotions.

Earlier this year, gypsy jazz guitarist Robin Nolan, who Harrison had brought under his wing, turned one of his unused chord progressions into a brand new song. It sits as the focal point on a new tribute album recorded with a number of his guitars.

And David Crosby has recalled the moment Harrison fell in love with Ravi Shankar's music after loaning him one of the sitar great's records.

Guests on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast have brought up some fascinating anecdotes in recent months. Gene Simmons told how Ace Frehley lifted a guitar solo from the Doors for a Kiss track. Zakk Wylde revealed how a chance to work with Guns N' Roses sidelined his career with Ozzy Osbourne.

But few have delivered a history-changing story quite like Elliot Mintz. A friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mintz has countered the long-held belief that Lennon and Paul McCartney last met on April 25, 1976. According to that rather sad tale, McCartney turned up unannounced at Lennon's New York apartment at the Dakota, and was turned away by Lennon, who was busy with his son, Sean. Supposedly the two former musical partners never met again.

However, Mintz says the two men crossed paths two years later during the Christmas hoilday. And he knows, he says, because John and Yoko invited him over.

“They invite me to Dakota to spend one of the Christmas days with them,” Mintz tells Corgan. “And I go up to the Dakota, and I notice in the living room, there's a vase with a single branch of a tree. That's their Christmas decoration.

“I sat down on the white couch in the white living room, and we're just making small talk,” he goes on. “Then there's a knock on the door after the intercom. [Lennon] opens it, and Paul and Linda McCartney walk in.”

Mintz, who had been a radio DJ in the 1960s and gone on to become a TV personality, had become friendly with Lennon over the years. But he says this was his first meeting with the other half of the iconic Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership.

“We sat and we talked for a while. It wasn't overly jubilant. It wasn't icy. It was just correct,” he says.

The McCartneys then suggested they go to Manhattan’s celebrity hotspot restaurant, Elaine’s.

“Elaine's had a reputation,” Mintz states. “I mean, you walk in and there's Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, and there's Tom Wolf and all those people. But the food was miserable, and everybody knew it.”

Leafing through the menu did little to inspire. Then an idea struck.

“Linda said, ‘You know, there's a great pizza place not far from here. Really thin-crusted pizza. Do you think you could get a pizza delivered here?’ And she said it directly to me. Who else was she going to suggest it to? ‘Yoko, would you drop the dime?’”

Knowing that Elaine could be “problematic,” it was arranged to have the pizza “delivered through the back door. It was taken out of the cardboard box,” Mintz explains, “put on Elaine's beautiful plates, and brought out so a casual observer would think it's a dish that they hadn't seen yet.”

With the sun setting, the group retreated to Lennon's white living room, and soon it was just the two Beatles and Mintz.

“John and Paul kind of wandered over to this very, very tall window that looked down upon the west side of Manhattan,” Mintz says. As he was still on the couch, he could hear only “spasms” of their conversation.

“It was small talk,” he says. “Nothing of substance. But I do recall Paul asking John, ‘So, are you making any music these days?’, and John replying, ‘No. My time is with my baby,'" he said, referring to Sean, who was born in 1975. "'What about you?’

"And Paul says, 'I'm always making music. I make music every day of my life. I can't stop making music.’”

Indeed, he was always writing, sometimes solo, sometimes with Linda, and, by in the 1980s, with guests that included Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Elvis Costello.

Mintz sighs. He theorizes that, if Lennon had taken the bait, the pair could have “sat in the living room and changed the face of contemporary music one more time.” But that didn’t happen. The McCartneys were gone within the hour.

Corgan’s interviewee admits that this final-ever meeting of two of music’s greatest ever minds was “anticlimactic,” and yet, it perhaps still represents a more touching final moment for their partnership than the alternative that has been passed down through history.

Before they formed the legendary prog group Gentle Giant, the Shulman brothers were blue-eyed soul pioneers. Their outfit, Simon Dupree & the Big Sound, is barely remembered today, but the British sextet put out an album in 1967 that featured musical instruments owned by some very famous musicians who recorded at the same studio, namely the Beatles.

Dupree & the Big Sound were formed in the 1960s by Derek Shulman and his brothers, Phil and Ray. In 1967, the group scored a record deal with EMI’s Parlophone label that put them in very close proximity to their fellow label mates, the Beatles.

To secure their contract, they had to pass an audition, Derek Shulman writes in his autobiography, Giant Steps, which comes out October 7 from Jawbone Press. Present were Beatles producer George Martin, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, engineer (and future Pink Floyd producer) Alan Parsons, Cliff Richards and the Shadows producer Norrie Paramor "and 12 other high-level producers and engineers at EMI.”

“They had us play a whole set, like a mini-concert, and most of them didn’t smile the whole time,” Shulman writes. “When it was over, they said goodbye, and we were sure they didn’t like us. Two weeks later, we got a record contract.”

Dupree and company released only album, 1967's Without Reservations, recorded at EMI's Abbey Road Studios at the same time the Beatles were present to make their psychedelic-rock classic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

With the Beatles in and out of the famed London studio at regular intervals, they’d often leave their instruments lying around. The Shulman brothers were all for taking advantage of the gear in their absence.

“We picked up these amazing guitars, like George Harrison’s 1957 Gretsch Duo Jet and John Lennon’s Rickenbacker 325,” he reveals. “We even borrowed the prized Mellotron they used on 'Strawberry Fields Forever' for a few of our songs.”

Harrison had bought the Gretsch off a sailor who'd returned from America with the electric guitar in tow. It was most famously used on early Beatles tracks like “Please Please Me,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout.” Lennon's Rickenbacker was also a key part of the band's early days and was played during the group's 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and in the studio on numerous tracks, including their U.S. breakthrough hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Dupree & the Big Sound scored only one hit, 1967's "Kites," a psychedelic-rock tune created at the urging of their management and EMI, who thought the band needed to update their sound. Although they never made another album, they continued to record singles at Abbey Road and were there once again when the Beatles were making Abbey Road, their final recorded effort, named for the facility, in 1969.

Arriving for their day's work, the Shulmans were surprised to find a king-sized bed installed in the studio. In June of that year, John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had been involved in a car accident, and Ono, who was pregnant and had a history of miscarriages, was told to get plenty of bedrest. Not wanting to be away from her, Lennon had London's luxury department store Harrods deliver a bed to the studio so she could be present while the Beatles recorded.

The Shulmans knew none of this and began jumping on the bed as if it were a trampoline. Which is exactly when they were discovered by John and Yoko.

“We were having so much fun, jumping around like idiots, that at first we didn’t see them,” Shulman says. “Then John became quite agitated and said, ‘Jesus Christ, what kind of bullshit is this?’ And Yoko screamed, ‘Get the fuck off our bed!’

“I immediately blamed Phil, even though it was a [group] effort, but John and Yoko didn’t care who was at fault.

"I can only imagine how they would have reacted if they had seen us playing their guitars.”

In related Beatles news, an English guitarist unknowingly became the owner of a Fender amplifier that John Lennon used on the group's White Album. He purchased it for roughly $4,000 and now intends to sell it at auction, where it is expected to fetch a six-figure sum.

Ozzy Osbourne said throughout his career that the Beatles saved his life. He couldeven recall exactly where he was when he first heard their music.

So when it came to summing up the legacy of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s legendary songwriting partnership, Ozzy responded in a way that only the Prince of Darkness could.

Born John Michael Osbourne, Ozzy was raised in Aston, a working-class area of Birmingham, where opportunities were bleak. Like so many others, Ozzy seemed destined to work in one of the area's numerous factories — the old adage goes that Birmingham’s industrial air influenced the sound of heavy metal — or live life behind bars. He lacked purpose. It felt like his life was drifting nowhere.

Adding to his gloom, he suffered sexual abuse from school bullies at age 11, which left him contemplating suicide.

Three years later, when he heard the Beatles' “She Loves You,” he suddenly found purpose.

“Sometimes when you hear a song, you remember when you fell in love, or broke up with someone,” he said in a 2017 interview.

“ I remember exactly where I was. I was walking down a road called Whitten Road in Aston,” he continues. “I had a blue transistor radio, and when it came on, I knew from then on what I wanted to do in my life.”

Although the often dark, usually heavy music that has defined Ozzy Osbourne’s career is a far cry from the Beatles' sonic template, their unwitting influence on the birth of heavy metal is clear. Osbourne was obsessed.

“This was so brand-new,” he said. “It was such a great feeling. Can you imagine going to bed tonight and waking up tomorrow to a completely exciting brand-new world?

“My bedroom walls were covered with anything that had the word 'Beatles' on.”

When he later joined forces with a then-Strat-playing Tony Iommi, bass player Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward — initially plying their trade as Earth — "Day Tripper" became a part of their early live shows. And his love for the Beatles never diminished.

In 2010, Ozzy covered Lennon's 1971 song "How?" to coincide with his late hero's 70th birthday and raise funds for Amnesty International USA. The video sees him wearing Lennon-esque round sunglasses and laying flowers on the Imagine Mosaic at New York City's Memorial Park.

“It floored me,” Ozzy told Rolling Stone of that fateful day with his blue transistor radio. He'd been asked to pick his top 10 Beatles songs, leading to his typically poetic three-word response to the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

“It was as if you knew all the colors in the world,” he said. “Then someone shows you a brand new color, and you go, ‘Fucking hell, man.’”

When he finally crossed paths with McCartney, backstage at The Howard Stern Show in 2001, Ozzy gave him a massive hug and told him that meeting him had been “a lifelong ambition.”

Later, recounting that moment on an episode of The Osbournes podcast, he said, “When I first met Paul McCartney, it was like meeting Jesus Christ.” The event was captured in McCartney's documentary The Love We Make, which chronicles his journey through New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Ozzy never got to fulfill his dream of collaboration with the Beatle, but it could be very easily be argued that, for heavy music, Black Sabbath were the Beatles. And that’s quite a fitting legacy.

“As a performer,” Paul McCartney says, “you’re often thinking, “Is this any good? Is this rubbish? Is this a cliché?”

You wouldn’t expect someone with Paul McCartney’s catalog of hits to have moments of self-doubt. But the 83-year-old former Beatle says he’s no less critical of himself today than he was in his youth, despite being one of popular music’s most successful songwriters and musicians.

While some artists at his age might decide they’ve done enough, McCartney continues to create music and perform. He just announced his Got Back fall tour of the United States, which kicks off September 29 in Palm Desert, California.

So what keeps him going? As it turns out, it’s the self-doubt. But it’s also having someone in your corner who points out the brilliant thing you didn’t see in your creation.

“Any time you write a song, you’re going, ‘This is crap. This is terrible. Come on,’” he revealed to GQ. “So I kick myself and say, ‘Get it better. If it’s terrible, get it better.’

“And sometimes someone will come along, someone who you respect, and say, ‘No, that’s great. Don’t worry about that,’ and then show you a side to it that you didn’t notice and, then you’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

For years in the 1950s and ‘60s, that person for McCartney was John Lennon. When the two met in 1957, they were both struggling guitarists and budding songwriters who would sit face to face with their acoustic guitars, writing their tunes and pushing each other toward greatness.

In 1968, some 10 years after they first sat down to build their songwriting partnership, McCartney found himself presenting a song to Lennon. And though he had doubts about one line — McCartney said it was simply a “crummy” placeholder at the time — Lennon helped him realize it was actually brilliant.

“A classic example of that was when I was playing ‘Hey Jude’ to John,” McCartney explained, “and I said, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder.’ I turned round to him and Yoko, who was standing behind me, and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.’

“And John said, ‘No, you won’t. That’s the best line in it.’”

McCartney has said elsewhere that a little nudge of support can make him actually like what he was ready to reject all that much more.

“When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in,’ so, of course, you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever,” he said.

“I love those words now,” he added, saying, “when I’m singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line; it’s an emotional point in the song.”

It’s one reason why artists benefit from working together and sharing their work.

“But if you don’t have that, you can sometimes be, ‘What I’m doing is crap and my life amounts to nothing,’” McCartney told GQ. “And I say to people, ‘God, you know, if I can say that!’ Pretty weird.”

As he explains, it’s all part of creating.

“I suppose in the end you have to go, ‘You know what? This is the process.’

“I mean, one thing that’s good is that I care. I’m not just pumping out bullshit all the time. I am trying to do good stuff. Maybe you can’t succeed all the time, but I love it. That’s why I keep going.”

An English father of two got more than he bargained for when he purchased a mid-’60s blackface Fender Deluxe on Facebook Marketplace for £3,000, a little more than $4,000 at current exchange rates. It turns out the amp was owned by John Lennon and likely used on the Beatles' 1968 White Album.

“I saw this old 1960s Fender amp on Marketplace,” James Taylor, 45, of Brighton, told The Manchester Evening News. “They told me it might have been gifted to someone by John Lennon, but I have heard these stories before and I didn't pay it much mind.”

Research into the Fender amp, however, revealed that he should have given more weight to the claims. The amp was used by one half of the Lennon-McCartney tandem during the Beatles' final years and into his early 1970s solo career.

Writing in his book Beatles Gear, musical instrument historian Andy Babiuk confirms the Beatles received a care package of equipment from Fender in 1968, ahead of the White Album sessions. It included a Fender VI six-string bass, a silverface Deluxe Reverb and the blackface Deluxe. Lennon plugged his Epiphone Casino into the Deluxe for the “Hey Jude” music video. The VI, meanwhile, was used by Lennon and George Harrison, respectively, on “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie,” among other White Album tracks.

Lennon held onto the Deluxe for three years before gifting it to Rod Lynton, who played acoustic guitar on four tracks from his 1971 solo album, Imagine. Lynton confirms he received the amp as a token of Lennon's gratitude for his contributions to Imagine, and he has a certificate of authenticity to prove the amp's provenance.

Taylor believes the amp was also used in the Beatles' video for “Revolution” and is looking for help authenticating its roles in the group's recordings.

“I bought the amp because I wanted the amp, and I didn't pay John Lennon sort of money for it,” he says. Indeed, Lennon’s first Vox amp recently resurfaced at auction. Though it was purchased for £16,000, now that its history has been confirmed, it's worth an estimated £250,000, about $320,000.

“Once I had it, I started researching the history, and all the details started checking out, I realized I had something very exciting on my hands,” Taylor continues. “I wasn’t expecting it at all.”

“One of my earliest listening experiences was my parents introducing me to Sgt. Pepper at a young age,” he adds. “And now I have John Lennon's amp, which is crazy to think about.”

“It plays and sounds fantastic. I had used it in my own band practices prior to authentication. I might have been a bit more cautious had I realized the historical importance!”

Given its value, Taylor doesn't expect he'll be able to hold onto the amp for too long.

“I will probably have to sell it because of the value,” he admits. “It would be scary for me to have something so valuable in the house. There are many parts of me that wish I could hold onto it, but it is a risk to keep in a house with toddlers rushing around.

“I could probably use the money from selling it to get myself a mortgage and get on the property ladder.”

Several auction houses have reportedly contacted Taylor with estimates that the amp could fetch six-figure sums at auction. Time will most certainly tell.

John Lennon was well aware of his limitations as a guitarist. When asked how he rated himself during a December 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, he didn't hesitate or waffle.

“Well, it depends on what kind of guitarist,” he replied. “I’m okay. I’m not technically good, but I can make it fucking howl and move.

“I was rhythm guitarist. It’s an important job. I can make a band drive.”

There’s no denying Lennon’s rhythm guitar talents. From his chord voicings to his impeccable timing and sense of dynamics, he combined the skills, knowledge and drive that made him one of rock’s greatest rhythm guitarists.

One of his standout moments comes early in the Beatles’ catalog, on 1963’s “All My Loving,” where he pushes the verses along with steady triplet strumming. He does it while flawlessly navigating chord changes every measure on his 1958 Rickenbacker 325 Capri electric, making for a remarkable show of stamina and precision.

In his 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon called the song “a damn good piece of work,” before adding, “but I play a pretty mean guitar in back.”

For all his rhythm work in the Beatles, Lennon played only a few guitar solos. They include the first solo in “Yer Blues,” the lap-steel slide work on “For You Blue,” the bluesy solo breaks on “Get Back,” and the third, sixth and ninth solos on “The End,” among a few others.

But there’s one solo of his that impressed Beatles guitarist George Harrison above the others. And it’s not even on a rock and roll track — it’s on one of Paul McCartney’s so-called “granny" songs, as Lennon dubbed his songwriting partner’s old-timey tunes.

The solo is on “Honey Pie,” from the Beatles’ White Album. It’s brief — just four measures — but, stylistically, it’s right on the money.

"John played a brilliant solo on ‘Honey Pie,’" Harrison told Guitar Player editor-at-large Dan Forte during his celebrated interview in our November 1987 issue.

"Sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. It was one of them where you just close your eyes and happen to hit all the right notes — sounded like a little jazz solo."

What's more, Lennon plays all the electric guitars on the song, almost certainly using his Epiphone Casino as he navigates the jazzy chords that hearken back to Britain’s music hall tradition, something with which Lennon had more than a passing familiarity.

His rhythm work is, as you would expect, flawless, and his chord knowledge is on display as he comps along up and down the guitar’s neck.

“Both John and I had a great love for music hall, what the Americans call vaudeville,” McCartney said in his Barry Miles cowrite Many Years From Now. “I very much liked that old crooner style, the strange fruity voice that they used, so ‘Honey Pie' was me writing one of them to an imaginary woman, across the ocean, on the silver screen, who was called ‘Honey Pie.’

“So it's not a parody, it's a nod to the vaudeville tradition that I was raised on “

It’s probably safe to say Lennon wasn’t fond of “Honey Pie,” given his dislike of McCartney’s old-fangled tunes. But we do know he preferred his style of guitar playing to Harrison’s. When Rolling Stone asked in that same interview what he thought of his former Beatle as a guitarist, Lennon quipped, “He’s pretty good. I prefer myself.”

By the time the Beatles called it a day in late 1969, they’d recorded and released more than 200 songs — most of them originals — and left dozens more in the vault. While the bulk of those unissued tracks ranged from rough demos to jams, several were completed recordings that, for one reason or another, they rejected.

Among them was a song that was the first ever written expressly for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the song was a riff-driven rocker built around the I-IV-V chords common to blues and rock. In many respects it bears similarity to a few other Beatles tracks from this period, including “She’s a Woman,” “I’m Down” and “I Feel Fine,” another Lennon-composed riff rocker, albeit one with a great deal more sophistication than “If You’ve Got Trouble.”

From the start of the Beatles’ recording career, Starr was given a vocal spot on each of their albums (except for 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night) in order to please his rabid fan base. It may be hard to fathom today, but for at least the first year of Beatlemania, Starr was the most popular Beatle, certainly in America, where his friendly, down-to-earth demeanor made him a favorite. It’s little wonder he got his own sizable scene in the Beatles’ debut film, A Hard Day’s Night, and was the main focus of its followup, 1965’s Help!

Because Starr wasn’t a songwriter, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or inferior cast-offs composed by Lennon and McCartney, such as “I Wanna Be Your Man,” a throwaway from 1963’s With the Beatles, and “What Goes On,” from 1965’s Rubber Soul.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the latter category. With lyrics like “you can’t be as worried as me” and “you think I’m soft in the head,” it played off Ringo’s popular image as a lovable, sad-sack everyman.

According Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, credit for the song goes entirely to Lennon. As he revealed in an article in the magazine's February 27, 1965 issue, Lennon admitted it was not his finest work.

“I wrote it,” Lennon told to Coleman, who was present at the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965. “It's the funniest thing I've ever done. Listen to the words,” he said laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”

Despite Lennon’s obvious disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electric guitars, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman noted in his report, McCartney was happy with the vibe the group was creating.

“Paul thought the sound was one of the best ever,” he wrote.

The song is notable as one of the first on which McCartney played lead guitar, joining George Harrison to perform its driving riff with his Epiphone Casino hollowbody electric. Interestingly, in the same week that it was recorded, the Beatles also cut “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl” and “The Night Before,” three Help! tracks that were the first to feature McCartney playing guitar solos and leads.

“Hey, listen, hear that play by Paul?” John asked Coleman at one point. “He's been doing quite a bit of lead guitar work this week… Listen on that one. George and Paul are playing the same break, exactly, both playing in different octaves.”

McCartney’s sudden emergence as a lead guitarist during this week in the group’s history may help to explain Starr’s rather unusual shout out leading into the song’s guitar solo. Up to then, he’d made a habit of announcing solo breaks on previous recordings: On “Boys” he cried out, “All right, George.” For “Honey Don’t,” he exclaimed, “Rock on, George, one time for Ringo.”

But on “If You’ve Got Trouble,” he says the rather unusual, “Oh, rock on, anybody!” Perhaps they had yet to decide whether Harrison or McCartney would play the solo; according to George Martin’s notes, Ringo’s vocals (which he double-tracked) were recorded before the solo was laid down.

That job eventually fell to Harrison, who, for the evening’s final performance, delivered what is easily his most uninspired solo in the Beatles’ catalog. Perhaps everyone realized by the night’s end that the song was hopeless. Following a mix session on February 20, "If You've Got Trouble" was shelved.

Remarkably, also on February 20, the Beatles recorded yet another song that wouldn’t be released for years. “That Means a Lot” was a McCartney tune played in a heavy, R&B style, with a thudding beat and a medium tempo similar to “Ticket to Ride.” It would be subjected to a remake one month later, on March 30. Dissatisfied with the results, the Beatles gave the song to American singer P.J. Proby, whose version reached number 24 on the U.K. charts that September.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” languished until 1984, when former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick prepared the recording for inclusion on the group’s unreleased rarities album, Sessions. He swapped around the verses and made a few cuts to shorten it by 20 seconds. But after the surviving Beatles blocked the album’s release, the recording remained in the vault — although Emerick’s edit did find a release in the bootleg market.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” wouldn’t be officially issued, and in its original full length, until the release of the Beatles Anthology 2 compilation in 1996. Judging by the reception it received, they were right to keep it under heavy wraps. Music critic Ian MacDonald railed against its lyrics and melody, calling the tune “the only unmitigated disaster in the Lennon–McCartney catalog.”

Even George Harrison was unsparing in his criticism. “It’s the most weird song,” he commented in the Beatles’ Anthology book. “I’ve no recollection of ever recording it. It’s got stupid words and is the naffest song. No wonder it didn’t make it onto anything.”

“I knew we had something pretty special,” guitarist and singer Norman Greenbaum says of “Spirit in the Sky,” his groovy and altogether irresistible psychedelic hard rock gem that dominated AM radio upon its release in 1969. The tune was a worldwide phenomenon, hitting number one in half a dozen countries (it reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart) and selling over two million copies. “That was an awful lot of records back in those days. It was pretty big.”

Often cited as one the greatest “one-hit wonders” of all time, “Spirit in the Sky” boasts a recipe of ingredients one might need AI to cook up, not the least of which is its hypnotic, fuzzed-out boogie electric guitar riff that grinds steadily throughout the song. Combined with a righteous, handclapped groove, rapturous background vocals and spiritual lyrics that sounded hip instead of preachy, the song struck a nerve with the public months before George Harrison’s gospel smash, “My Sweet Lord.”

Even John Lennon mentioned the track as one of his favorites in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone.

“Wow, John Lennon! That gave me a shiver,” Greenbaum says. “I liked his tunes, too, but I never got a chance to tell him.”

Greenbaum had been plunking around with the music for “Spirits in the Sky” as early as 1962, when he performed acoustic gigs in coffeehouses as a student at Boston University. “I played it a bunch of different ways,” he recalls. “I knew it sounded like something, but I just didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have any lyrics, so I put it aside. It sat around for a while.”

By the mid ‘60s, he had moved to Los Angeles, where he formed Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band, a wild-and-woolly outfit whose mix of comedy and found instruments (the drummer literally played car parts and trash cans) had a moment when their 1967 novelty folk song, “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago,” reached 52 on Billboard. The band soon broke up, and Greenbaum went back to playing solo gigs in L.A.

Something about the music he had begun writing in Boston haunted him, but he was still unable to complete the song. Then he happened to catch country singer Porter Warner singing a gospel number on TV.

“That hit me, yeah, like ‘I can do that,’” Greenbaum says. But what really clinched the deal was seeing a greeting card with American Indians sitting around a fire in front of a teepee. “They were looking up, and there were the words — ‘Spirit in the Sky.’ I thought, Let’s see if that becomes something.”

Around the same time, Greenbaum had attracted the attention of producer Erik Jacobson (best known for his work with the Lovin’ Spoonful), who signed him to Reprise Records. The two began working together at Coast Recorders in San Francisco, where Jacobson brought in guitarist Russell DaShiell and bassist Doug Killmer from the band Crowfoot, along with drummer Norman Mayell from the band Sopwith Camel.

At these sessions, “Spirit in the Sky” took on a new life when Jacobson encouraged Greenbaum to explore a psychedelic rock direction for the song. Fortuitously, Greenbaum now had just the guitar for the job, a Fender Telecaster customized with a built-in fuzz box.

“I asked a friend to work on the guitar, and he surprised me with the fuzz device,” he says. “It was only as big as a nine-volt battery. I could flip a switch and activate that sound.”

The modification worked like a charm. Suddenly, the opening lick that Greenbaum had played for years on an acoustic guitar sounded huge and gnarly — downright cosmic, in fact.

“I went, ‘Wow, now that’s something!’ Once I heard that fuzz-tone riff, I knew it was a hit.”

Basic tracks went by with relative ease. “I don’t know how many takes we did,” Greenbaum says. “It sure didn’t take a week, I know that.”

Once he laid down riff and rhythm parts (played through a Fender Twin Reverb), he welcomed DaShiell to take over with not one but two searing solos. In addition, DaShiell added a key sonic ornament in the form of echo-enhanced boinks and dive bombs.

“I didn’t give him any kind of direction about what to play,” Greenbaum notes. “I just asked him to use a clean tone, because at the end of the ‘60s, that was different from what every lead guitarist on the Sunset Strip was doing.”

He felt confident that the completed track was a winner. The label folks weren’t convinced.

“There were lots of negatives,” Greenbaum recalls. “One, it was too long for AM radio. Two, it was about Jesus with a fuzz box. Three, it didn’t make any sense — there was nothing like it. I never thought about any of that stuff. This was just me being creative.”

The only market where the song got airplay was in L.A., but after a few weeks spins were waning. And that’s where the tale could have ended were it not for a crafty Warner Brothers promo exec who told a station program director the label had 20,000 preorders for the single.

“After that, the song went back on the playlist, and it was number one in two weeks,” Greenbaum says. “From there, it took off.”

Not with everybody, however. Greenbaum had finally gotten around to writing the song’s lyrics (in all of 15 minutes), but some lines rubbed devout Christians the wrong way. The lyrics “Never been a sinner / I've never sinned / I got a friend in Jesus" drew the most criticism. The line goes against the Christian tenet that no one is born without sin.

Greenbaum, who was raised Jewish, was caught off guard by the blowback. “Well, obviously I wasn't Christian and, you know, stuck with that. So I kind of went beyond it,” he says. “To me, I was just saying, ‘I never did anything that bad.’ Eventually, millions of people didn't care.”

Following up the song’s success proved difficult for Greenbaum. While the album Spirit in the Sky reached as high as number 23 on the Billboard Top Albums chart, the guitarist’s follow-ups, 1970’s Back Home Again and 1972’s Petaluma, failed to chart.

“We toured quite a bit at first,” he says, “but I fell into the ‘one-hit wonder’ hole. A lot of booking people got wary.”

But the spirit of “Spirit in the Sky” wouldn’t die. Thus far, the song has been featured in numerous movies, TV series and commercials, and it’s a staple on oldies radio.

“It’s embedded in people’s minds,” Greenbaum says, “and it gets passed down from generation to generation. I hear from people who want it played at their funeral services.”

One of the more notable send-offs occurred in 2005, when the ashes of famed gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson were blasted out of a cannon at the writer’s home in Colorado. “Spirit in the Sky” provided the ceremony’s soundtrack.

“That was arranged by Johnny Depp,” Greenbaum says. “I always thought it would be interesting to talk to him about that, and I finally got the chance when his band, the Hollywood Vampires, played around here. That was incredible.”

Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky will be reissued on vinyl on June 13 by Craft Recordings. The LP is available for pre-order.

In the Beatles’ evolution from rock and rollers to psychedelic rock innovators, no figure looms larger than Bob Dylan. It was Dylan who introduced the group to pot, a drug that would have a transformative affect on their artistry, leading them to LSD and the psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It may not be an exaggeration to call August 28, 1964 one of the most significant dates in Beatles history. It was on that day that the Fab Four met the Voice of a Generation, who. turned them on to pot.

At the dawn of 1964, as Beatlemania descended on the U.S. shores, Dylan was the indisputable leader of the folk music movement centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He’d just released his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, his first LP to feature entirely original compositions. As with his previous albums, Dylan focused on social themes, including poverty and racism.

But as he prepared to make his next album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he was eager to leave behind the socially conscious “finger-pointin’ songs,” as he called them, and write about love and personal matters, themes more common to pop than to folk.

Although Dylan had originally dismissed the Beatles’ music as “bubble-gum,” he was floored by “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the single that had helped the group break through in the U.S. when it was released in late December 1963. Somehow, Dylan didn’t take notice of the song until the following February. He and a few friends had packed up a station wagon and were headed across the country to meet with “people in bars, miners,” Dylan said, in an attempt to drum up inspiration to help his lyrics move beyond topical themes to matters of immediate personal concern.

They were in Colorado when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came on the radio. Dylan “nearly jumped out of the car,” recalled his tour manager Victor Maymudes, who was along on the ride.

“Did you hear that?” Dylan asked his friends. “Fuck! Man, that was great!”

When he returned to New York City that March, the folksinger promptly bought his first electric guitar, an instrument with which he would ultimately transform his music and make his break from folk. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” he recalled of the Beatles, explaining their influence on him and his decision to go electric.

“Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid … I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”

Remarkably, almost simultaneously, Dylan had made his own deep impression on the Beatles. That previous January, during an 18-day residency at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, the group had discovered his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and were captivated by it.

“I think Paul got the record from a French DJ,” John Lennon recalled. “And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty on Dylan.”

Given their admiration for one another, the Beatles and Dylan were eager to meet. As it happened, they had a mutual friend, journalist Al Aronowitz. In spring 1964, while in England on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, Aronowitz had met Lennon and subsequently covered the Beatles’ return to the U.S. for a tour that August. When the road show arrived in New York, Aronowitz arranged for the meeting to take place.

On August 28, as the group returned to its suite at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan following a performance at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, Aronowitz rode in from Woodstock with Bob Dylan in a blue Ford station wagon driven by Maymudes. Parking around the corner from the hotel, the men barreled through the throng of teenagers surrounding the Delmonico and made their way up to the floor where the Beatles and their entourage were entrenched.

There they were met by a battalion of police assigned to protect the group, and a throng of reporters, deejays and performers — including folk artists the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary — who were waiting to meet with the Beatles.

The three men were quickly whisked into a room, where the Beatles were waiting with their manager, Brian Epstein, and a few others. Introductions were made. Dylan was offered a drink and asked for cheap wine. With none available, the Beatles sent their roadie Mal Evans out to buy some.

While they waited for Evans to return, Dylan suggested they smoke some weed. He fully expected the Beatles were into pot. Aronowitz had even brought his own personal stash along as a special treat for them.

When they told Dylan they didn’t touch the stuff, he was perplexed.

“But what about the song?” he asked.

“What song?” John replied.

“The one that goes, ‘And when I touch you I feel happy inside,’” he said, referencing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “‘I get high, I get high, I get high.’”

The Beatles looked around at one another.

“Those aren’t the words,” Lennon finally replied. “It’s ‘I can’t hide.’”

Dylan may have got the words wrong, but he wasn't entirely incorrect in assuming the Beatles were experienced pot smokers. They had tried it once before, while performing in Hamburg in 1960, but were unimpressed by its effects.

“I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time,” Harrison recalled in the Beatles’ Anthology. “Everybody was saying, ‘This stuff isn’t doing anything.’

"It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, ‘This stuff doesn't work, man.’”

Now, however, with their hero offering to turn them on — and despite the heavy police presence beyond their door — the Beatles decided to give pot another chance. After making sure the room was secure, Dylan rolled a joint and gave it to Lennon, who nervously handed it off to Ringo Starr.

“My royal taster,” Lennon said.

Starr took a puff and continued dragging on it, apparently unaware he was supposed to pass the joint along. Upon consuming it, he announced that it had no effect on him. Meanwhile, Dylan and Aronowitz had rolled joints for each of the others, including Epstein.

“Soon, Ringo got the giggles,” Aronowitz wrote years later, and “the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically.”

Eventually, the entire group was experiencing its first real high.

McCartney was particularly struck by the drug’s effect. He recalled feeling like he was “thinking for the first time” and told Evans, who had since returned with Dylan’s cheap wine, to follow him around with a notebook and write down everything he said.

“Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, ‘There are seven levels!’” he said. “And we pissed ourselves laughing.”

Following their meeting with Dylan, the Beatles moved in a more decisive folk direction. Their next album, Beatles for Sale, saw Lennon put his Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric to greater use on folk-influenced songs like "No Reply" and "I'm a Loser," tunes that, like Dylan's, were confessional in nature.

The trend would continue over the next year on Help! — where Lennon played a Framus Hootenanny 12-string acoustic on the highly personal "Help!" and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" — and on Rubber Soul's "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)."

Equally notable, the Fab Four became confirmed potheads. Ultimately, marijuana would help Lennon dig deeper into his psyche and write some of his most personal songs. It would also lead the group to explore new ways of presenting their music.

“You would smoke a joint and then sit down at the piano and think, Oh, this might be a great idea!” McCartney explained in his autobiography, Many Years from Now.

The Beatles’ pot use peaked in 1965 during the making of their second feature movie, Help!, where they smoked it to help pass time on the set waiting for filming to begin.

“The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension,” Lennon said. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.”

The Beatles’ effect on Dylan would become evident on his next album, Bringing It All Back Home, half of which featured him backed by an electric rock band. Among the record’s tracks is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song whose surreal and at times psychedelic-inspired lyrics have often been interpreted as a tribute to LSD.

Dylan’s embrace of electric rock, along with the development of his intimate, confessional style of songwriting, eventually marked the end of his involvement with the folk scene. The final break came the following July 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, when he performed with an electric band, leading the folk movement to disown him.

While his new sound alienated his folk-loving admirers, not all of them were put off by it. Many stuck with Dylan as he continued his evolution from folk singer to rock artist. In the process, they discovered that, drugs and fashion aside, the hippie lifestyle was not so different from that of the folkies. For that matter, both shared common ideals of peace, ecology, racial harmony and sexual equality.

“The hippies went for the rock and roll of the British Invasion groups and of Bob Dylan after he scandalized the folk purists by adopting the electric guitar,” Charles Perry writes in The Haight-Ashbury: A History. “ A lot of hippies, in fact, were folkies who had followed Dylan in his switch to rock.”

The four Beatles came and went in a whirlwind eight years. While several problems were likely to blame for their breakup — including disagreement over management, financial problems with Apple Corps and a desire to pursue other creative interests — the most likely factor was each member's emerging sense of individuality. After years of looking, dressing and creating as a group, the four Beatles were each coming into a sense of their own possibilities as solo artists.

John Lennon became interested in pursuing art rock with Yoko Ono. Ringo Starr was developing a new career as an actor. Paul McCartney had moved to fill the void left by the 1967 death of manager Brian Epstein and had by the end of 1968 become the one Beatle with any strong ambitions left for their future.

And then there was George Harrison, easily the most independent of the group. It was Harrison who, in 1966, began exploring sitar with Ravi Shankar, and who subsequently quit playing guitar for a year, unless required to for recording sessions. And it was Harrison who led the others into the study of Transcendental Meditation, a practice that had a transformative effect on each of them.

Finally, there was Apple Corps, the group's multimedia conglomerate. More than any other Beatle, Harrison had risen to the challenge of finding and developing new talent for the firm's Apple Records label, and he was the first to create his own solo albums with the release of his Wonderwall Music soundtrack in 1968.

Through it all, Harrison continued to write music for the Beatles, although little of it made it on to their records. From the start, Lennon and McCartney had cemented their place at the core of the band’s songwriting, an indelible partnership that feels as potent today as it did decades ago.

And yet, ironically, it was Harrison who would have the last word when it came to the Beatles' recordings. Disregarding the recent, AI-powered “Now and Then,” the final song recorded during the Beatles' existence as a group was actually a Harrison tune: "I Me Mine," from their 1970 swan song, Let It Be.

And, not surprisingly perhaps, it is a song about ego, the very thing that was tearing the group apart.

As Harrison explained in 1995's Anthology film, "I Me Mine" is all about “the ego problem" engulfing the Beatles. He, in particular, was tired of having Lennon and McCartney veto his songs, and fed up with McCartney's bossy nature, which caused Harrison to briefly quit the group during Let It Be. His frustration led him to write "I Me Mine" almost spontaneously.

“It is a very strange song which I wrote the night before it was in the film you see,” Harrison told the BBC of its origins in 1970. “At this time we were at Twickenham and I wrote this song; it took five minutes just from an idea I had."

Like many of Harrison's other songs, "I Me Mine" was rejected by Lennon and McCartney. In fact, it wouldn't have even been recorded had a snippet of the song not made it into the Let It Be film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. In the scene, Harrison, McCartney and Starr rehearse the song at Twickenham Film Studios in London — where shooting began for the Let It Be film — while Lennon and Ono dance to its waltz-time beat.

“I went into the studio and sang it to Ringo," Harrison explained," and they happened to film it. And that film sequence was quite nice, you see, so they wanted to keep that sequence in the film. But I hadn't really recorded it in Apple [Studios] with the rest of the songs [on the album], so we had to go in the studio and record it.”

The song was tracked on January 3, 1970. By then, the Beatles were as good as finished. Lennon who doesn't feature on the track, had quit in September, although it was agreed his departure would not be immediately publicized.

Let It Be was released the following May, a month after Lennon cast the first stones of his solo career with John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, dawning a new era for the Fab Four.

When Gibson announced a special Murphy Lab reissue of Eric Clapton’s 1958 Gibson Les Paul Custom last month, it didn’t quite paint the full picture.

Sure, it was Slowhand's favorite and famed triple-humbucker Les Paul for quite some time, but it's also a guitar that Albert Lee has owned since 1979, and under his care, it's passed through some rather distinguished hands. Clapton may have put the guitar on the map, but it’s far more traveled than that.

Lee often frequented the guitar shop, Selmer, on London’s Charing Cross Road, which is where his tale with the Les Paul begins.

“Every Saturday I'd come up on the train to see what was in Selmer's," Lee says. "So they opened up this guitar case, and there's a brand-new Les Paul Custom,” he recounts to Guitar World. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll join your band!’" he says with a laugh.

“I played that guitar throughout the early ’60s. And then this guy persuaded me to sell it to him. He pestered me and pestered me. I let it go, and I regretted it for a long, long time.”

Fast forward to 1978 and Lee is the fresh face in Eric Clapton’s touring band.

“I remember the first day, chatting with Eric. For some reason, I had a picture of my old guitar with me, you know, and I showed it to him,” he says. “I told him how much I missed that guitar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I've got one of those at home somewhere.’”

Lee had forgotten about their conversation almost as soon as he’d had it. But it stayed at the forefront of Clapton’s mind.

“The next day at rehearsals,” Lee remarks, “the roadie walked in with this big case and opened it up, and it's Eric's Les Paul Custom for me to play.

“I guess it was mine,” Lee says with a smile.

“From there on, I used it on the whole tour. Eric never asked for the guitar back. He was happy that I was enjoying it and using it onstage.”

It turns out the guitar has a very prestigious history.

Under Clapton's ownership, it was featured on Disraeli Gears , where the guitarist wielded it to create his "woman tone" by switching to its bridge pickup and rolling down the tone control. The Custom was also played at countless Clapton-related shows in the 1960s and '70s, where it made history with other famous artists of the day.

“From Paul Kossoff to Eric and John Lennon and George Harrison playing it,” Lee quips. “I’d no idea Eric used it with Derek and the Dominos [where he employed it for slide guitar]. Great bit of history there.”

Clapton can't recall what happened to the guitar after Disraeli Gears. He thinks it ended up in Kossoff's hands when Free and Blind Faith, Clapton’s post-Cream supergroup, toured together. He says the two groups jammed together “quite a lot.” In the end, Kossoff got the guitar and used it on Free's debut album, Tons of Sobs.

The Les Paul wound up back in Clapton’s possession in time to be used for his cameo with John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Rock n’ Roll Revival in September 1969.

From one Beatle to another, the Custom would star when he and George Harrison toured with Delaney and Bonnie, later in 1969.

While researching the guitar’s patchy but fascinating history for Gibson’s new replica, Michael Doyle found evidence of Harrison playing the guitar onstage — with Clapton on Harrison’s Stratocaster.

Clapton then used the guitar for his prominent slide work on Derek and the Dominos' Layla. The Custom was chosen because Clapton didn't like its skinny frets.

If you can't get on with a guitar because the frets aren't right for you, what do you do?" asks Doyle. "Well, set it up for slide.”

The guitar’s history post–’78 has been a little less star-studded. After Clapton had removed the pickguard and pickup covers, he restored the guitar to its former glory and found it simply too good to share. Until, of course, he gave it away to Albert Lee.

The authors behind a new book exploring the Beatles’ recording career cite what they believe was the crux of John Lennon and Paul MacCartney’s celebrated songwriting partnership.

Robert Rodriguez and Jerry Hammack Ribbons of Rust, is the first in a series of new books charting the history of the Beatles' recordings,. The first volume charts Lennon's and McCartney's histories alone and together from July 1954 to January 1963.

During the authors' appearance on the Booked on Rock Podcast, Rodriguez says the Lennon-McCartney partnership thrived on each man's individual natural abilities.

The origins of the Lennon-McCartney partnership pre-date the Beatles. McCartney joining Lennon's outfit, the Quarrymen, in 1957, after seeing them perform at a church fete in their hometown of Liverpool, England.

“One of the things that impressed Paul the first day he saw John performing was that he was playing peculiar fingerings of chords using banjo chords on guitar,” Rodriguez details.

But that wasn't all.

“Where he didn't know lyrics he apparently was making them up on the spot,” Rodriguez adds. “And they were witty. That was something that Paul was wowed by.”

In addition, each could fill in for the other shortcomings. Where Lennon faltered, McCartney flew. Where McCartney stumbled, Lennon would break his fall.

“I think the real dynamic between them was once they figured out each other had some kind of gift that the other really admired,” Rodriguez adds. “They both were on the same page in terms of taste, in terms of being these kinds of connoisseurs of rock and roll. That out of convenience, if nothing else, they could help each other where one of them might have started the song and then got stuck. And the other would hear it and go, 'Oh, you should go here now, and then circle back to this.'

“So it became this sort of partnership out of editing each other's material, which would carry on all through the whole of the Beatles' career, as well as consciously sitting down and saying, 'Okay, we're gonna write a song together.'”

Their camaraderie also saw the pair developing unique quirks to their skill sets. With McCartney famously being left-handed and Lennon right-handed, the pair learned to become ambidextrous through necessity.

“I can play right-handed guitar a bit, just enough for at parties,” McCartney had, with a wry smile, told Guitar Player in 1990. “Hopefully, by that point, everyone is drunk when I pick it up because otherwise, they're going to catch me. But I could do that.

“It's funny: John learned upside down too, because of me,” he goes on. Because mine was the only other guitar around for him, if he broke a string or he didn't have his. That's more unusual; left-handed guys can nearly always play a straight guitar.”

One benefit of their opposing dexterities was that, when practicing, they provided a mirror image of one another’s playing. It seems a portion of that left-handedness seeped into Lennon’s brain.

Interestingly, Lennon was the only one of the Fab Four to master fingerpicking techniques, having watched folksinger Donovan up close while they were in India studying with the Maharishi.

“John was the only one who actually stuck at it and learned it,” McCartney tells GP. For evidence, he singles out “Julia” from “The White Album”. “If you listen to ‘Julia,’ he's playing properly with fingerpicking on that. I was always quite proud of the lad.”

But where Lennon proved patient in learning new skills, McCartney’s wanderlust proved a fruitful counterpoint.

“I could never be bothered, really, learning things. I always sort of figure something out,” he admits. “I've never had guitar lessons, bass lessons, piano lessons, music-writing lessons, songwriting lessons… I always jump into things, and so by the time I'm ready for my first lesson, I'm beyond it.”

The fruitfulness of their partnership was perhaps partly down to fate then, and partly due to their ability to work as a collective to turn vague ideas into works of art.

Elsewhere, Paul McCartney's pithy songwriting got the band back to playing guitar rock and roll, but also landed the band in hot, politically-tinted waters.

It may seem the four Beatles were fated to be together. But in reality, the group's lineup was defined from the beginning by the members accepting their individual limitations and bringing in players who could make up for them.

It’s well known that, in the beginning, the Beatles had three guitarists: John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Along with bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best, the five-piece Beatles landed in Hamburg in 1960, where for roughly two years they honed their skills.

But when Sutcliffe left the group in July 1961 to continue his art studies, it fell to McCartney to take over bass guitar duties. The instrument was beyond Lennon's abilities, and Harrison’s lead guitarist skills were too valuable.

But perhaps most crucial to that decision was McCartney's ill-fated attempt at a guitar solo on his first gig with Lennon. It not only put him off playing lead guitar — it also led directly to Harrison being hired as the group's lead guitar. And it all happened one fateful night in January 1958.

It's not that McCartney lacked the talent to grow into the role. One of Lennon’s first observations when he met his future bandmate on July 6, 1957, was his skill as a guitarist. McCartney showed his strengths by spontaneously performing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” for Lennon and his group, the Quarrymen, nailing both the lyrics and, more importantly, its twanging electric guitar riff. It was precisely why Lennon invited him to join the Quarrymen in 1957.

“I was very impressed by Paul playing ‘Twenty Flight Rock,’” Lennon told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies. “He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ I’d been kingpin up to then… But he was good, so he was worth having.”

McCartney was so good, in fact, that it was decided he should handle lead guitar duties, something well beyond the skills of Lennon, who was still playing banjo chords he’d learned from his mother, Julia. (It was McCartney who would teach him proper chord fingering.) McCartney welcomed the role and stepped into it confidently and without hesitation.

But one bad night changed it all. It was, by sorry coincidence, McCartney’s very first gig with the Quarrymen. It happened Friday, October 18, 1957, at the Clubmoore Conservative Men’s Club, on Broadway, in the north of Liverpool.

McCartney’s big solo was a piece called “Guitar Boogie,” by Arthur Smith and His Cracker-Jacks. Smith was an American musician, composer and record producer, as well as a radio host and the man behind The Arthur Smith Show, the first nationally syndicated country music show on television.

Smith wrote and recorded “Guitar Boogie” in 1945, and the song went on to sell three million copies, earning him a Gold disc at the time and making him famous as Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith. The song was so popular that, the year after the Quarrymen were performing it, a U.S. group called the Virtues worked up a rock and roll version that became an international hit.

As McCartney explained in the Beatles’ Anthology book, the song and its solo were well within his adolescent grasp.

“I could play it easily in rehearsal,” he recalled, “so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; I thought, What am I doing here?”

McCartney stumbled onstage and — worse — in front of John Lennon. Just 17, Lennon was nearly two years older than McCartney and looked more like a man than a teen. It was a humiliating defeat for the 15-year-old.

“I was just too frightened,” he explained. “It was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn't do it. That's why George was brought in.”

It’s no coincidence that McCartney almost immediately began pushing Lennon to let Harrison join. Having been humiliated once, he was eager to let his younger and more experienced friend take the spotlight.

Lennon wasn’t convinced at first. George was nearly two and a half years his junior and, at 14, looked younger than his years.

"George looked even younger than Paul," Lennon once remarked. "And Paul looked about 10, with his baby face."

Everything changed when Lennon agreed to let Harrison audition. The deed went down on the night of February 6, 1958 — about three weeks before Harrison's 15th birthday — on the top deck of a Liverpool bus.

“I told John and the other Quarrymen about this guy at school called George,” McCartney recalled in Anthology. “ ‘He is a real good guitar player, so if you're thinking of guitar — this is your boy.’”

George’s showpiece was “Raunchy,” a greasy guitar vamp by American guitarist Bill Justis. The song had been released just months earlier, on September 23, 1957, and quickly became an international hit.

“George could play 'Raunchy' so well, it really sounded like the record,” McCartney recalled. “We were all on the top of an empty bus one night and I said, 'Go on, George.' He got his guitar out and sure enough he could play it, and everyone agreed, 'You're in. You've done it.’ ”

Despite McCartney's fear of soloing, he did eventually get his courage back. By early 1965, he was taking the lead on the Help! tracks "The Night Before," "Another Girl" and "Ticket to Ride." He would go on to play solos on numerous other Beatles recordings, including Harrison's own song "Taxman," from 1966's Revolver.

As McCartney has revealed in previous interviews with Guitar Player, despite playing bass as his main instrument, he’s always felt that acoustic guitar is his main instrument. It was on acoustic that he composed “Blackbird,” from the Beatles’ White Album, using Bach’s Bourée in E minor as the springboard. Ultimately, McCartney more than acquitted himself as a guitarist in the Beatles and demonstrated a range and diversity that grew more impressive by the band's end.

Framus has announced a reissue of John Lennon’s famous 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar to commemorate its recent discovery and multi-million dollar sale.

Lennon had bought the instrument after being drawn to the folk music that Bob Dylan was making a name for himself with, in the mid-’60s. It’s purchased kickstarted a brief but intense love affair with the instrument.

The guitarist soon wrote "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" with it, and it would later be used in other seminal Beatles moments, including the songs "Norwegian Wood," and "Girl," as well as the band’s feature-length film, Help! Harrison also played the guitar in the film, extending its legacy.

It has since become one of the most famous Beatles guitars but had been lost and presumed gone forever for over 50 years until its unlikely discovery last year.

Against the odds, it had been found in the attic of a house in the rural British countryside. It sold for an “unprecedented” $2,857,000 months later, becoming one of the most expensive guitars sold at auction. Only four guitars, including Eddie Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher Kramer, David Gilmour’s Black Strat, and Kurt Cobain's Martin D-18E have fetched higher prices.

The sale also made it the most expensive Beatles guitar sold at auction, beating the $1.27m sale of George Harrison's peculiar Futurama guitar.

The Hootenanny acoustic was a hybrid concoction, pairing aspects of the German luthier's jazz guitars and concert models, with Lennon's model featuring a mahogany neck, a rosewood bridge and fingerboard, and a Trapeze tailpiece.

While Framus was unable to get its hands on Lennon's exact model, it did pull “an identical 12-string Hootenany” from the Framus Vintage Museum. With the help of old documents, the luthier has reconstructed the celebrated six- and 12-string models “to the exact specifications of the original,” with the blessing of the Lennon estate.

The new models, also available in six- and 12-string formats, mirror the Hootenany’s heritage with solid Sitka spruce tops, mahogany back, sides, and neck, and flat, 19 nickel silver fret rosewood fingerboards. They’ve been given an oil finish for added authenticity.

Like the legendary original, it features a nickel, height-adjustable trapeze tailpiece, with vintage-style, closed nickel machine heads aiding its retro chic.

Decorative elements include ivory and black binding, a black pickguard just like the one found on Lennon’s 12-string, and a decorative sound hole rosette made of individual pieces of wood.

Each model has a special Hootenany headstock 6st or 12st headstock.

“The ingenious blend of jazz and classical guitars gives this guitar an exceptional look and sound,” says Framus. “Warm and surprisingly loud. It's the sound you recognize when you hear You've Got To Hide Your Love Away.”

The 12-string models are priced at (€1.099, approx. $1,145), with the 6-string marginally cheaper at (€999, approx. $1,040). Both come with a special Hootenany hard case.

“This guitar happens to be one of the most important Beatles guitars and instruments ever to come to the auction block,” Julien’s Auction’s founder Darren Julien had said at the guitar’s unveiling last year. “It’s so important, so historic. We thought this guitar was gone – we thought it was lost forever.”

Adding to its mystique in the wake of its sale, David Goodman, the chief executive of Julien’s, told The Guardian UK: “We are absolutely thrilled and honored to have set a new [Beatles] world record with the sale of John Lennon’s lost Hootenanny guitar.

“This guitar is not only a piece of music history, but a symbol of John Lennon’s enduring legacy.”

The Framus Hootenanny reissue guitars are available now.

Visit Framus for more details.

Although he started out as a guitar player, Paul McCartney took on bass guitar duties for the Beatles in July 1961, while the group was performing in Hamburg. Until then, he’d been one of the band's three electric guitar players, along with John Lennon on rhythm guitar and George Harrison on lead guitar. On the occasion when bassist Stuart Sutcliffe failed to show up for performance, it fell to McCartney to take over for him. When Sutcliffe finally quit the group in July 1961, McCartney took on those duties full time.

But by 1965 he began to show his guitar talents on the Beatles’ recordings, most evidently on “Yesterday,” his solo performance from the group’s album Help!, which also saw him play lead guitar on the tracks “Ticket to Ride" and “Another Girl.”

While McCartney continues to play bass to this day, guitar has remained central to his musical life.

“I guess I think of myself as a guitar player, really,” he told Guitar Player in our July 1990 issue. “Mainly acoustic — that's my main instrument, I suppose.

"If I couldn't have any other instrument, I would have to have an acoustic guitar. I always take one on holiday, and most times I have one in the dressing room.”

By the time the Beatles recorded Revolver in 1966, McCartney was showing greater facility with the instrument. Most notable of his achievements on that album is his angular solo on Harrison’s “Taxman,” performed with his Epiphone Casino through an overdriven Vox amp. Although Harrison had attempted a solo, he was unhappy with it. As was often the case, McCartney had an idea of what the song needed.

“With ‘Taxman, I got the guitar and was playing around in the studio with the feedback and stuff,” McCartney told Guitar Player. “And I said to George, ‘Maybe you could play it like this.’ I can't quite remember how it happened that I played it, but it was probably one of those times when somebody says, ‘Well, why don't you do it then?’ rather than spending the time to get the idea over.

“And I don't think George was too miffed. But when people say, ‘Great solo on “Taxman,”’ I don't think he's too pleased to have to say, ‘Well, that was Paul, actually.’ I didn't really do much like that — just once or twice.

“I liked ‘Taxman,’ just because of what it was,” he added. “I was very inspired by Jimi Hendrix. It was really my first voyage into feedback. I had this friend in London, John MayaII of the Bluesbreakers, who used to play me a lot of records late at night — he was a kind of DJ-type guy. You'd go back to his place, and he'd sit you down, give you a drink, and say,’ Just check this out.’ He'd go over to his deck, and for hours he'd blast you with B.B. King, Eric Clapton—he was sort of showing me where all of Eric's stuff was from, you know.”

As McCartney has explained before, it was Mayall who led him to purchase his Epiphone Casino, a model that both Lennon and Harrison also began to play soon after. “He gave me a little evening's education in that. I was turned on after that, and I went and bought an Epiphone. So then I could wind up with the Vox amp and get some nice feedback.

“It was just before George was into that," he added. "In fact, I don't really think George did get too heavily into that kind of thing. George was generally a little more restrained in his guitar playing. He wasn't into heavy feedback.”

Regardless of his talent with guitar — and in spite of feeling that acoustic is his main instrument — McCartney never thought he should make it his main instrument within the Beatles.

“Not really, no. I'd always felt that the bass thing was really it, because we had to have a bass player,” he said. “At the very beginning, I did think, Well that's put shot to any plans I had of being a guitar player.

“But I got interested in bass as a lead instrument. I think around about the time of Sgt. Pepper — ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ — there were some pretty good bass lines. Like Motown. Like Brian Wilson's lines in the Beach Boys.”

McCartney added that, among his many guitar contributions to the Beatles, “Blackbird,” from the 1968 White Album, remains “one of my favorites.”

But while his fretwork and fingerpicking on that song are quite advanced, he admits he never learned how to fingerpick correctly.

“I normally use a flatpick,” he said. “John learned. I think I read recently he'd learned it off Donovan or one of Donovan's friends who were more into the folk thing, so they would fingerpick in the proper way — first string, third string, and all that. The proper thing.

“I got my own little sort of cheating way of doing it, so on ‘Blackbird’ I'm actually sort of pulling two strings all the time. But then, when it gets to the little fingerpicking sort of thing, it's not real. I figured anyway that everyone else was doing that correct stuff, so it wouldn't hurt. I was trying to emulate those folk players.”

Remarkably, McCartney revealed that it was Lennon — often considered the least accomplished of the group’s guitarists — who mastered fingerpicking.

“John was the only one who actually stuck at it and learned it,” McCartney explained, pointing to Lennon’s acoustic “Julia,” from the White Album. “If you listen to ‘Julia,’ he's playing properly with fingerpicking on that. I was always quite proud of the lad. I think he just had a friend who showed him, and so that's really a nice part on ‘Julia.’

“But I could never be bothered, really, learning things. I always sort of figure something out. Like, I've never had guitar lessons, bass lessons, piano lessons, music-writing lessons, songwriting lessons, or horse-riding lessons, for that matter, or painting — I do some of that. I always jump into things, and so by the time I'm ready for my first lesson, I'm beyond it. I always did try to have music lessons. I always tried to have someone teach me how to notate music, because I still don't know to this day.”

Likewise, McCartney said guitar, like piano, remains his main instrument when composing. With a bass, he told Guitar Player, “you come up with a groove, but when you're writing, you need the guitar or a piano. So I would always remember that first and foremost I started off as a guitar player.”