During the Beatles’ early hit-making years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney took most of the plaudits for their songwriting. George Harrison was slower to find his voice as a writer, and when he wrote his first solo composition for the Beatles, he was sick in bed. Even then, he wasn’t convinced what he had written could even be considered a song.

By the time the Beatles landed in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast, for a six-show residency at the Gaumont in August 1963, their debut album, Please Please Me, was already fueling the first ripples of Beatlemania. Harrison had come away from those sessions without a songwriting credit, despite handling lead vocals on “Chains” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”

Harrison had already co-written songs with fellow Beatles, including “In Spite of All the Danger” with Paul McCartney and “Cry for a Shadow” with John Lennon, but “Don’t Bother Me” was different. This was his first Beatles song written entirely by himself.

Harrison wrote it while he was sick in bed in Bournemouth. It would appear on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, released in November 1963. But its creator wasn’t exactly impressed with his first solo effort.

“I don’t think it’s a particularly good song,” he once confessed in his autobiography, I Me Mine. “It mightn’t be a song at all.”

That assessment is striking in hindsight. Harrison would go on to write some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs, including “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which featured an uncredited lead-guitar contribution from Eric Clapton. But in 1963, he was still trying to establish himself as a songwriter within a group whose creative partnership was already dominated by Lennon and McCartney.

Paul McCartney remembered that Harrison’s growing desire to write for the band had become an issue.

“A lot of the girls were mad on him, so we always wanted to give him at least one track,” he said in the Anthology box set. “Then George started to catch on, [asking] ‘Why should you write my songs?’ And then he started writing his own.

“It was an option to include George in the songwriting team. I remember walking up past Woolton Church with John one morning and going over the question: ‘Without wanting to be too mean to George, would the three of us write, or would it be better to keep it simple?’ We decided we’d just keep the two of us.”

Harrison nevertheless kept writing. And getting a song into the Beatles’ repertoire wasn’t easy for him. In 1969, he admitted that he felt uncomfortable even telling his bandmates that he had written something for an album.

“I used to have a hang-up about telling John, Paul and Ringo I had a song for an album,” he said in 1969. “I felt mentally, at that time, as if I was trying to compete. And in a way, the standard of the songs had to be good, because they were very good. I don’t want the Beatles to be recording some rubbish for my sake just because I wrote it.”

“Don’t Bother Me” did make the cut, despite Harrison’s reservations. And the Beatles took the song seriously enough to experiment with its sound. John Lennon tried to give his rhythm-guitar part — played on his 1958 Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — a harsher, more aggressive character by using a Maestro Fuzz Tone pedal, one of the earliest commercially available fuzz units. Producer George Martin rejected the effect, however, feeling that the primitive fuzz created too much distortion and noise.

Instead, Lennon used the built-in tremolo on his Vox AC30, switching the effect on and off with a foot-switch. During overdubs, the group added percussion, including an Arabian bongo played by Ringo Starr, giving the song an unusual exotic sound. These are small details, but they show that “Don’t Bother Me” was more than a token Harrison composition: the Beatles regarded it as deserving the same creative support they gave Lennon and McCartney’s.

Harrison himself saw the experience as a starting point rather than a triumph.

“At least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good,” he wrote in I Me Mine.

He was right. “Don’t Bother Me” may not have been a classic, but it was a watershed moment: for the first time, Harrison had put a song of his own alongside the work of Lennon and McCartney. He would soon prove he belonged there.

And Harrison wasn’t the only Beatle to have doubts about the quality of his own material. John Lennon later dismissed “Run for Your Life” as a throwaway macho number and said he loathed the song. The Beatles were never entirely unanimous about their songs or their sound.

For Harrison, though, “Don’t Bother Me” represented something more important than a hit. It was the moment he stopped waiting for Lennon and McCartney to give him a song and began insisting that he had songs of his own.

The Beatles’ business empire is about to get a new chapter.

Universal Music Group and Apple Corps have unveiled a new exclusive, long-term global partnership that will expand how The Beatles’ brand is managed and presented to fans around the world. The agreement will bring together Apple Corps’ stewardship of the Beatles’ legacy with UMG’s global expertise in music, merchandising, retail and fan experiences.

It’s a far cry from the way the Beatles’ licensing business began.

In early 1964, as Beatlemania landed in America, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was facing a problem almost no music manager had ever encountered before. U.S. companies wanted to put the Beatles’ name and image on everything they could sell.

There were offers for electric and acoustic guitars, dolls, wigs, T-shirts, clocks, games, jewelry and countless other products. Overwhelmed, Epstein told his lawyer David Jacobs to find someone who could take over the Beatles’ increasingly lucrative merchandising business.

Jacobs turned to an entrepreneur named Nicky Byrne. Byrne agreed to handle the business through two companies: Stramsact in Britain and Seltaeb — “Beatles” spelled backward — in the United States.

In return, Byrne proposed that his company would receive 90 percent of the money, leaving just 10 percent for NEMS and the Beatles.

It was a remarkable proposal. More remarkable still, Epstein accepted.

He simply had no idea how valuable the Beatles’ name was about to become in the American marketplace.

Epstein was a gifted manager with a remarkable instinct for the Beatles’ image. But his background was running his family-owned NEMS record shop in Liverpool, not international merchandising. And there was little precedent for what was happening. Even Elvis Presley had never generated a consumer frenzy on the Beatles’ scale.

Tony Bramwell, a NEMS executive, later explained that they were thinking about the arrangement much like a record deal: the company making and selling the products would do the work, while the Beatles simply collected a percentage.

They were about to discover just how badly they had misjudged the market.

In February 1964, during the Beatles’ first American trip, Epstein was bombarded with samples and offers from manufacturers. He directed all of them to Byrne, who had already established himself in New York as the man handling the Beatles’ merchandising.

The money quickly began pouring in. The Reliant Shirt Corporation paid $100,000 for a license and sold more than a million Beatles T-shirts in three days. Remco Toys had made 100,000 Beatles dolls and already had orders for another 500,000. A company selling Beatles wigs was producing them faster than it could keep up with demand. Seltaeb would eventually license more than 150 different products.

Then Epstein received a check for $9,700. He was impressed, but wondered how much of that Byrne was owed.

“Nothing Brian,” Byrne replied. “That’s your 10 percent.”

in an instant, Epstein realized the colossal blunder he’d made. He had effectively handed Byrne control of a potential merchandising gold mine and kept only a fraction of the proceeds.

To his credit, Epstein ordered Jacobs to renegotiate the contract immediately. In August 1964, the Beatles’ share was raised to 49 percent.

But by then, the original agreement had created a much larger problem. Epstein and Byrne became embroiled in a bitter legal fight over the contract, licensing rights and money owed.

The timing was disastrous. Major American retailers that had been eager to sell Beatles merchandise suddenly faced uncertainty over who had the authority to license the band’s name. Woolworth’s, J.C. Penney and other companies cancelled or refused to finalize deals worth a reported $78 million. The legal battle dragged on for nearly three years.

By then, the Beatlemania frenzy had cooled. Estimates of the money the Beatles and NEMS lost as a result of the Seltaeb affair have reached $100 million. That figure is an estimate of potential income rather than a precise accounting, but there’s little doubt that enormous sums were left on the table.

In Epstein’s defense, he had no playbook to follow. The Beatles were creating something new: a pop group whose name had become a global consumer brand almost overnight. American businesses saw the opportunity immediately. Epstein took longer to understand it.

Today, of course, the Beatles’ name is one of the most valuable brands in popular culture. Apple Corps has spent decades building systems for protecting and developing the group’s intellectual property, while UMG has become a global force in music, merchandising and brand management. The new partnership reflects how sophisticated the business surrounding the Beatles has become.

It also shows just how far the Beatles’ commercial operation has come since 1964, when their first major American merchandising deal nearly gave away the store.

Years later, John Lennon was characteristically blunt about the episode: “On the business end he [Epstein] ripped us off on the Seltaeb thing.”

But for whatever business instinct he lacked, Epstein had the gift of seeing what the Beatles could become. The Seltaeb affair showed that seeing their potential and knowing how to turn that potential into money were two very different things.

Filming for Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles biopics is well underway, and the on-screen Fab Four have been spotted in London re-creating the band’s iconic Abbey Road album cover.

Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan are set to play John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, respectively, in a four-film project directed by Mendes. Each film will focus on the backstory of a specific Beatle, making it one of the most ambitious music biopic projects ever to hit the big screen.

But the shoot to re-create the Abbey Road album cover this past weekend was getting all the attention.

Since the record’s release in 1969, the image of the four Beatles walking in line on the zebra crossing in front of Abbey Road — the historic studio where they made nearly all of their recordings — has become one of the most recognizable album sleeves ever produced.

Famous as the image is, the idea behind it was actually quite simple. The Beatles were struggling to come up with a suitable design for the record cover, and Paul McCartney suggested photographing the group crossing the street outside the studio.

On the morning of August 8, the late photographer Iain Macmillan was brought in to make the idea a reality. Beginning at 11:35, Macmillan was allowed 10 minutes to shoot the photo while a policeman held up traffic.

In the days leading up to the shoot, the photographer had used stand-ins to meticulously plan the shot. Still, he couldn’t predict the issues on the day. He managed to get just six shots. One was ruined by a car pulling out from behind the studio; another was marred by too much spacing between Starr and Lennon.

The fifth shot proved to be the perfect choice. Selected by McCartney, it was chosen partly because it was the only one that featured all four members mid-stride.

As former Apple Records creative director John Kosh told Forbes in 2019, he had just days to work on the design for the completed album jacket.

“I suddenly found myself [thinking], ‘By God, I’ve got to do this and get it out on Wednesday?’” he remembers.

Kosh had assumed the photo had been taken for publicity. He was already busy working on the cover for what he assumed would be the group’s next album, Get Back, recorded the previous January (and ultimately released as Let It Be in May 1970).

“But in the middle of all of this,” Kosh says, “they put that on hold, and Abbey Road came in.”

It was trial by fire, but Kosh stuck to his vision for the cover. He was against having any type on the front of it, insisting no one would have any doubt as to who the four musicians were.

“I thought, ‘Here are the four Beatles walking across the street. If you do not know who they are, you have definitely been in a cave somewhere.’”

His decision outraged Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, Apple Records’ parent company. He called Kosh in the middle of the night to complain that he was ruining the Beatles’ career.

When Kosh showed up at Apple headquarters the next morning, he ran into George Harrison and told him what had happened.

“George looked at me and said, ‘Oh fuck it. We’re the Beatles.’

“So that was the end of that. George was such a sweet man. All the Beatles were fun to work with.”

In the end, Kosh got the cover he wanted — and one that went down in history.

“This was my first album cover, not really knowing what I was doing,” he confessed. “The fact that it’s turned into an icon, and possibly the most parodied album cover of all time, is really thrilling to me.”

But the cover not only birthed an icon — it drew untold numbers of visitors to re-create the crossing themselves. Artists copied it as well, including Booker T. & the MGs (1970’s McLemore Avenue), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1988’s The Abbey Road E.P.) and even McCartney, who repeated the crossing with his sheepdog for the cover of his 1993 album, Paul Is Live.

Unfortunately, the original photo fueled the late-1960s rumor that McCartney had died and been replaced by a look-alike. Sleuths pointed to the fact that he was the only Beatle walking barefoot as a hint that the bass guitarist was dead.

“Back in the Sixties, the wild rumor was that I was dead because of certain alleged ‘clues’ on the Abbey Road sleeve,” he wrote in the press notes accompanying the Paul Is Live album sampler. “Because I was barefoot, it being a scorching summer’s day, it was taken as a bizarre Mafia sign of death.”

The Volkswagen parked on the side of the road in the photo provided another clue. Its license plate read 28IF. “It meant I, being 27 at the time, would have been 28 if I’d lived,” McCartney wrote.

More than half a century later, the image is still being copied. This time, it’s the actors playing the Beatles in Mendes’ films who have taken the famous walk, giving a new generation of Fab Four a chance to step into one of the most recognizable photographs in music history.

Pretenders guitarist Chrissie Hynde, who carved out her reputation with her eye-catching — and now time-beaten — Ice Blue Telecaster, may have been born in Ohio, but it was in the U.K. that she made her name.

“I don’t know what my parents thought of me moving to London when I was 22,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I never thought about it, and I didn’t go home to Akron, Ohio, for 35 Christmases.”

Indeed, the guitarist confessed to having had “a strong sense of destiny in my youth.” That burgeoning sense of self-determination saw her move from an ill-fated job at an architectural firm to music journalism, and then to a position at Sex — the clothing store owned by Vivienne Westwood and her husband, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.

That job afforded her some important contacts and, one way or another, thrust her into London’s punk scene — including an early encounter with Lemmy. At first, he seemed like a caricature, proof that the stories were true.

“The first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King’s Road. We exchanged no words at all,” she wrote in her memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, with the quotes unearthed by Classic Rock.

“He eyed me up and down,” she says, “moved in close, dipped the silver tube he wore on a chain around his neck into a plastic bag of white powder, shoved it up my snout, then turned around and walked out. I was up for three days.”

Stories like this make it little wonder Motörhead played so fast and loud. Phil Campbell, the band’s guitarist from 1984 until Lemmy’s passing in 2015, once reflected on his own first meeting and audition for the group — when Lemmy was seeking a replacement for Brian Robertson — by joking that “he remembered the amphetamine, not me.”

So that side of Lemmy was very real. But in time, Hynde saw more than the mythology suggested.

“We liked the same things — we were mongrels with an appreciation for the finer things in life,” she says.

That included music that wasn’t quite as fast, loud, and ferocious as Motörhead.

“He was a Beatles fan at a time when the Beatles were like a throwback to a distant, almost forgotten past,” she adds. “He was far more musically knowledgeable than anyone who ever saw Hawkwind or Motörhead would have suspected. He kept it well hidden.”

Later in life, Lemmy became more forthcoming about his appreciation for the Fab Four — and in particular their bass player, Paul McCartney.

Speaking during a 2012 interview, he explained how his sex drive inadvertently introduced him to the band. He lived near a holiday resort, he said — presumably when he was residing in the Welsh seaside town of Anglesey — and struck up what he diplomatically described as a friendship with four Liverpudlian girls.

“It was all Billy Fury: ‘Oh, isn’t he gorgeous,’ you know?” he said. “Then one year they came down and Billy Fury was gone — it was ‘Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.’ I didn’t know who they were, so I went up to Liverpool. I really fancied one of these birds anyway, so it was two birds with one stone.”

There, he watched them play at the now-infamous Cavern Club and saw them many more times before the “excellent” band blew up “into the stratosphere.”

“The Stones got the reputation of being hard men, and the Beatles got the reputation of being smart, but it was the other way around,” he once quipped. “The Stones were just dressing up. The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a tough place.”

Reflecting on her life in the Pretenders in 2023, Hynde told Guitar Player that lead guitarist James Honeyman-Scott was naturally solo-shy — but she pushed him to take the spotlight, coaxing guitar solos out of the gifted player while she pummeled her Telecaster into submission.

Johnny Marr was devastated when the Smiths acrimoniously collapsed in 1987, five years after he’d co-founded the cult independent rock band.

The guitarist read in the music press that his group were poised to fire him. Suspecting the story had been planted by lead singer Morrissey — as part of their increasingly angry communication breakdown — Marr decided to jump rather than be pushed, and found himself in a personal hell.

Around the same time, he also found himself spending “one long, incredible day with Paul McCartney and his late wife Linda, which provided him with the emotional energy he needed to carry on.

“Linda was so generous as a person,” Marr told Mojo. “She was asking me all about my life. And [Paul] was sat there, so I just told him about the breakup of the band. I looked to him and waited, and he just said, ‘That’s bands for you.’”

It wasn’t just the words; it was who they’d come from — McCartney had endured the same kind of hell when the Beatles had disintegrated in 1970, but he’d had time learn to live with it and move on.

“It’s such a brilliant answer coming from him,” Marr said. “Over the years I’ve been asked to give advice. There is just a time to say, ‘That’s bands for you.’”

Marr picked up his electric guitar and began to accept invitations to play sessions, where found “sanctuary.”

“I just have to give credit to the people I was working with,” he said. “Matt Johnson [The The] is one of my closest friends to this day. Bernard Sumner and Chrissie Hynde — that collection of people. I get very tight with people.”

He added, “If you’re looking at it like a CV, it seems to be flitting around a lot, but I know when I’ve got a good job — [like] playing with Bryan Ferry and turning up on his records. There’s a time to not look too deeply at stuff.”

By the time the Beatles broke up in late 1969, they had 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 they rejected for one reason or another.

Among them was the first song written for drummer Ringo Starr: “If You’ve Got Trouble.” Composed by John Lennon for inclusion on 1965’s Help!, the tune was a heavy riff-rocker built on a modified three-chord blues progression.

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 fan base. Because he wasn’t a songwriter in the group’s early years, he sang either covers — “Boys,” on 1963’s Please Please Me, and “Honey Don’t” on 1964’s Beatles for Sale — or Lennon and McCartney cast-offs like “I Wanna Be Your Man,” from 1963’s With the Beatles.

“If You’ve Got Trouble” falls into the second category. According to Ray Coleman, the former editor-in-chief of Melody Maker, Lennon knew it was not his finest work.

“I wrote it. It's the funniest thing I've ever done,” Lennon told Coleman, who attended the recording session for the track on February 18, 1965, and wrote about it for the magazine's February 27 issue,. “Listen to the words,” Lennon said, laughing. “I didn't expect anybody to want to record it.”

Despite Lennon’s disregard for the tune, the Beatles put a fair amount of effort into the recording. The basic track — drums, bass guitar and rhythm guitar, played by George Harrison on one of his Gretsch electrics, according to producer George Martin’s notes — is energetic and polished. As Coleman reported, 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 Beatles tracks on which McCartney played guitar, joining 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! songs that were among 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.”

McCartney’s sudden emergence as a guitarist during this week in the group’s history may help to explain Starr’s rather unusual shout out leading into the guitar solo on “If You’ve Got Trouble.” On previous recordings, he had made a habit of announcing Harrison’s solo breaks, calling out “All right, George,” on “Boys,” and “Rock on, George, one time for Ringo,” on “Honey Don’t.”

But on “If You’ve Got Trouble,” he says the rather unusual, “Oh, rock on, anybody!” Perhaps the Beatles 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 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. Although the song received mono and stereo mixes on February 20 and 23, respectively, it was ultimately abandoned.

Remarkably, that February 20 mix session saw the Beatles record 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” was nearly released in 1984 when former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick prepared the recording for inclusion on the group’s unreleased rarities album, Sessions. His work included cutting the first verse, thereby shortening the song by 20 seconds.

But after the surviving Beatles blocked the album, “If You’ve Got Trouble” remained unreleased until it was included in its full length on Anthology 2 in 1996. Commenting on the song, music critic Ian MacDonald called it “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.”

For Beatles fans, the forthcoming expanded edition of Rubber Soul promises a wealth of new discoveries, from revealing session outtakes to the previously unheard John Lennon composition “Little Girl.” But the most important story surrounding the album isn't what listeners will hear in the vault recordings — it's what happened inside Abbey Road Studio Two during the autumn of 1965.

The sessions marked the moment when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped accepting the technical limitations imposed by EMI Studios. Instead, they began demanding that the recording process itself become part of their creative vision—a philosophy that would lead directly to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By late 1965, the Beatles had become students of sound. Between tours, they were listening obsessively to records coming from America. Motown singles leaped from radio speakers with deep bass and crisp percussion. The Byrds’ jangling Rickenbackers electric guitars shimmered with remarkable brilliance. Compared with these productions, the Beatles felt their own records reflected EMI’s conservative engineering philosophy more than the sound they heard in their heads.

For years, EMI’s procedures had emphasized technical accuracy and consistency. The company’s recording standards had been developed during an era dominated by classical music and traditional pop. Engineers were expected to produce clean, balanced recordings while staying within carefully defined operating practices.

The Beatles had reached the point where those rules were getting in the way. Paul McCartney later recalled the constant tug-of-war between the band and EMI’s engineering staff during the Rubber Soul sessions:

“EMI had very firm rules about that, which we always had to break,” he told Mark Lewisohn in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “It wasn’t a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better.”

McCartney was particularly unhappy with the muffled sound of his bass guitar on the group’s recordings. He’d been told it was necessary to keep the bass low to prevent needles from jumping out of the groove of the vinyl record. But he noticed the records from America had full, prominent bass and suffered not in the least.

“‘What do you mean we can’t have bass?,’” he recalled asking in one conversation with Abbey Road’s staff. “‘I was down the disco last night and I heard a record with that kind of bass!’”

The engineers would respond by citing company policy.

“‘Well, our rule book says…’”

The Beatles had little patience for rule books.

“‘They’re out of date, come on, let’s move!’”

One of the defining moments came during the recording of “Nowhere Man.” The Beatles wanted the electric guitars to be dazzlingly bright, with far more treble than EMI normally permitted. Norman Smith, the band’s recording engineer since 1962, turned the high-EQ potentiometer all the way up.

It still wasn’t enough.

“‘But that’s all I’ve got,’” McCartney recalled Smith replying. “‘I’ve only got one pot and that’s it!’”

The Beatles’ solution was simple.

“‘Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that,’” McCartney replied. “’And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.

“‘Try it for us. If it sounds crappy, okay, we’ll lose it. But it just might sound good.’”

Often, it did. McCartney believed Smith and his fellow engineers quietly enjoyed breaking the rules alongside the band.

“You’d then find, ‘Oh, it worked!’ and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who’d put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of all those things.”

That spirit of experimentation transformed Rubber Soul into a turning point in the Beatles’ career. The studio became a laboratory, and the band began taking creative control of the recording process itself. No longer was the control room simply documenting performances. Musicians, producer and recording engineers had become collaborators, working together to create sounds that had never before been heard on a pop record.

When Geoff Emerick succeeded Norman Smith as the Beatles’ principal recording engineer in 1966, he inherited a band that no longer viewed the studio as a place with limitations. Working alongside producer George Martin, Emerick embraced the same willingness to challenge EMI convention, helping the Beatles realize increasingly ambitious ideas on Revolver.

Microphones moved closer than the rule book allowed. Tape machines were manipulated in novel ways. Artificial Double Tracking, tape loops, extreme compression, and radically reimagined instrument sounds became part of the group’s expanding sonic vocabulary.

By the time work began on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, experimentation had become the norm rather than the exception. The studio itself was now an instrument—every knob and every tape machine another means of expression.

And it all began during the Rubber Soul sessions, when four musicians decided they would no longer accept limitations.

As listeners explore the newly released outtakes and alternate performances — including the long-awaited unveiling of “Little Girl” — they’ll hear more than songs in progress. They’ll hear a band discovering that the recording studio could be as creative an instrument as a guitar or a piano.

That’s the true legacy of Rubber Soul. It wasn’t simply the bridge between Beatlemania and psychedelia. It was the moment the Beatles stopped recording records and started inventing them.

Even after six decades of Beatlemania, the Beatles are still capable of springing genuine surprises.

The forthcoming Rubber Soul Special Edition, which comes out October 2, will include a previously unheard John Lennon song. A home demo of “Little Girl” was discovered on a tape reel from Lennon’s archive, and so little was known about it that there hadn’t even been whispers of its existence.

Rolling Stone has had a sneak preview of the track and describes it as “a fragile, gorgeous, bittersweet little tune.” It features nothing but Lennon’s voice and acoustic guitar. The song appears to be a tender love song, putting it a world away from another Lennon composition written during the Rubber Soul sessions that contains the phrase “Little Girl” — the dark and disturbing “Run for Your Life.”

The project’s producer, Giles Martin, says the song’s sudden emergence is “surprising.”

“It came from the Lennon Estate — I think it was Sean,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was one of those things where they say, ‘Oh, and then there’s this.’

“Like with all that stuff, I wasn’t sure whether people knew about it or not, or whether it was on YouTube,” he adds. “Quite often I’ll find something and go, ‘This is amazing.’ Then someone goes, ‘Yeah, it’s on YouTube. Everybody knows about that.’ I’m always the last person to know.”

In this instance, it really is a diamond in the rough. Discovered on a Lennon tape reel, Martin ultimately spliced together two sections to complete the 2:17 recording.

Martin says discoveries like this satisfy fans’ enduring appetite for unheard Beatles music.

“Apart from ‘It’s another song that would have made the album,’ there’s an insatiable desire for something more,” he says. “But I think it’s good to see all of the pencil drawings before you see the picture.”

The exact origins of the song are still unknown, but Martin and his team have deduced that it can be no older than the summer of 1965, given that it includes a tweaked Paul McCartney hook later heard on the Help! track “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”

Yet the song’s emergence from obscurity shouldn’t be wholly surprising, given the mad-dash nature of Rubber Soul’s creation. Much of the album was written in London following the band’s U.S. tour in August 1965, with their marijuana-fueled encounters with Bob Dylan still fresh in their minds.

Their manager, Brian Epstein, and producer, George Martin, had agreed that another album in time for Christmas was good for business, despite Help! having been released only weeks earlier. The band scrambled to write new material, with many songs arriving at Abbey Road unfinished. Given those frantic circumstances, the idea that one composition slipped through the cracks — despite Beatlemania and the exhaustive documentation of the group’s career — doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

Some songs have already been rescued from those sessions, with the bluesy instrumental “12-Bar Original” eventually finding its way onto Anthology 2.

Rolling Stone reports that many of the demo’s lyrics are placeholders; there’s a lot of “I love you” and “la la la,” as though Lennon is feeling his way through the song in real time. Speculation about the inspiration for the mysterious little girl ranges from a postcard sent by a Japanese fan to a nod to Brian Wilson’s “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”

The unanswered questions only add to the track’s mystique, reinforcing the remarkable fact that, more than half a century after Beatlemania and the Beatles’ breakup, the band’s story can still produce genuine surprises.

“Little Girl” isn’t the first Lennon demo to surface decades after it was recorded, and, judging by this latest discovery, it may not be the last.

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

John Lennon turned the lyric into “Run for Your Life,” the closing track on Rubber Soul — a song he would later call his least favorite Beatles recording.

The track is about to return to the spotlight as the Beatles prepare to release a Super Deluxe edition of Rubber Soul on October 2, expanding the landmark 1965 album with new stereo mixes by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, unreleased session recordings and demos, and the original mono version.

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 Lennon. Nearly a decade later, he borrowed it almost verbatim for the opening line of “Run for Your Life” before building the rest of the song around the same jealous premise, warning its subject that if he ever caught her with another man, “that’s the end.”

Years later, Lennon admitted 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 Beatles’ sixth studio album and one often regarded as the point where the band fully embraced the LP as an artistic statement rather than simply a collection of songs.

It was also the first Beatles album to hint at the psychedelic era through increasingly adventurous studio experimentation. 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,” reflecting the group's growing willingness to expand its sonic palette.

“Run for Your Life,” however, had simpler origins than many of the album’s other songs. Lennon later described it as a quick composition built around the Presley lyric 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 replacing it. With the holiday season approaching, the Beatles were racing to finish Rubber Soul in time for its December 1965 release.

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 write and record another song. “Run for Your Life” remained in place as the album’s closing number.

And while Lennon would later call it his “least favorite Beatles song” and say 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.”

The Beatles are set to revisit Rubber Soul, their transformative 1965 album that blended folk, baroque pop, soul, and early psychedelic experimentation — a record that captured a year when popular music was rapidly expanding in every direction. Bob Dylan was one of the artists helping push those boundaries.

Dylan’s influence could be heard in the Beatles’ increasingly introspective songwriting, particularly on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl,” as the band moved beyond the youthful optimism of their early years. But while the Beatles were absorbing elements of Dylan’s folk-driven approach, Dylan himself was undergoing a revolution of his own.

In 1965, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, an electrified masterpiece that pushed beyond the conventions of traditional folk and embraced the power of a full rock band. Months later, when he brought that sound to the stage — with Robbie Robertson along playing a Fender Telecaster — and the world was stunned. He was even branded “Judas” during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, U.K., in May 1966.many fans felt betrayed — but George Harrison, himself a songwriter constantly looking toward the future, saw the change as a natural progression.

The Beatles’ sixth album will arrive October 2 as an expansive new box set featuring a new stereo mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, alongside previously unheard session recordings and home demos. The collection offers fans an unprecedented glimpse into the making of a record that marked a major turning point for the band.

The shift represented by Rubber Soul had roots in the Beatles’ famous 1964 meeting with Dylan, an encounter Paul McCartney later described as a life-changing experience. Dylan introduced the band to marijuana that night, and McCartney later joked that he had discovered “the meaning of life.” The meeting helped reinforce the creative connection between two artists who were both beginning to move beyond the limits placed on them by their audiences.

For the Beatles, that meant songs that explored new emotional territory, from Lennon’s enigmatic “Norwegian Wood” and the aching “Girl” to McCartney’s elegant “Michelle” and the dark, unsettling “Run For Your Life.” The group was leaving behind the straightforward charm of its early singles and embracing something more complex.

Dylan’s own transformation was even more dramatic. When he performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, some members of the folk community reacted with outrage. By the time he toured the U.K. the following year, the backlash had intensified, culminating in the infamous moment when an audience member shouted “Judas” at his concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in May 1966.

But when Harrison saw Dylan perform his electric set at London’s Royal Albert Hall, he couldn’t understand the controversy.

“The set was in two halves, and in the first half, he came out and did his usual thing with the guitar and the harmonica,” Harrison recalled. “Then in the second half he came out with the band.”

The Beatles guitarist understood why some fans were unsettled. Many had embraced Dylan as a symbol of the folk revival and saw the electric performances as a rejection of that identity.

“A lot of them were really uptight. They were like, ‘Hey, he’s forsaken the folk,’” Harrison said. “But Bob just came out and said, ‘Well, you know, you all may know this song. Remember how it goes? Well, here’s how it goes now!’ and they just went off wailing.”

Harrison, however, saw the performance differently.

“It was a great show. I mean, it was ragged, but that is the nature of Bob: raggedy,” he said. “And all through that second half, people were getting up and walking out, and shouting, and it was controversial.”

More than 60 years later, Dylan’s decision to embrace electric guitars and instrumentation seems less like a betrayal and more like a defining moment in rock history. Musician and author Dr. CP Lee has described the “Judas” incident as one of “the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century,” capturing the divide between tradition and experimentation that defined the era.

Dylan, for his part, appeared unfazed. As recalled in the book Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, he responded to criticism of his Newport performance by telling one journalist, “They must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn’t afford it if I was in their shoes.”

And Harrison agreed with Dylan’s instinct to keep moving forward.

“It was interesting. It seemed natural,” Harrison said. “There’s a limit to what you can do just with acoustics; it didn’t seem that Bob should particularly be limited to just doing that. It seemed kind of a natural progression.”

As most Beatles fans know, John Lennon quit the group first, on September 20, 1969, bringing the Fab Four to what most would agree was an untimely end.

What many don’t know is that just two weeks before he announced his departure, Lennon proposed that the group record another album as well as release a new single in time for the holidays.

The evidence comes from a tape recording made on September 8, 1969, at Apple Corps headquarters in London, of a meeting between Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The recording exists because drummer Ringo Starr was unable to attend. He’d been taken to the hospital with intestinal complaints — Starr had a history of abdominal ailments and food allergies — and the recording was made for his benefit.

“Ringo,” Lennon explains on the tape, “you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”

But as the tape shows, Lennon wasn’t merely thinking about one more Beatles album and single — he was planning a future strategy for the group.

The key evidence is his plan for how he, McCartney and Harrison — the group’s main songwriters — would share space on future albums. He planned that each of them should be allowed four songs per album, with another two reserved for Starr, if he wished.

“When we get into the studio, I don't care how we do it, but I don't want to think about equal time,” he said. “I just want it known I'm allowed to put four songs on the album, whatever happens. I don't have to say, ‘Should we do it now?’ because I think we'll all get fed up in three weeks, or actually the album will be full because we did two of Paul’s last week or one of Ringo's or one of George’s, whatever, and, well, it's too late now. Next album.”

Lennon was also eager to abandon what he called “the Lennon and McCartney myth” about their songwriting partnership. While the two men had occasionally written together in the past — going back to their earliest days as teens struggling to play acoustic guitars — they mostly composed alone. Despite this, each of their songs was credited to Lennon-McCartney, regardless of who wrote it. Lennon suggested that, moving forward, only the sole writer should get credit.

One might think McCartney would have been thrilled by the suggestion to record a new album. He’d been despondent over Lennon’s lack of interest in the group and had corralled the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, back into the studio to record Abbey Road earlier that summer.

But he said very little in the meeting, aside from rejecting Lennon’s suggestions for a more equitable division of songs and a more accurate assigning of songwriting credits.

Lennon’s suggestion to give Harrison a larger share of each album’s real estate was in recognition of the younger guitarist’s growth as a songwriter. Over the previous year, Harrison had contributed “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” to the group’s catalog, each song as good as anything Lennon or McCartney created.

The Beatles felt strongly enough about “Old Brown Shoe” that they made it the B-side of their single “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” released the previous May 30. As for “Something,” it would become Harrison’s first, and only, Beatles A-side (albeit a double A-side) when it was released with “Come Together” on October 6, 1969.

The fact that Harrison could score placement on two singles within a matter of months, while McCartney was left out in the cold, was proof that he had become a stronger songwriter and that, moreover, his bandmates and producer had taken note.

“We always carved the singles up between us,” Lennon said to McCartney. “We have the singles market, [George and Ringo] don’t get anything! I mean, we’ve never offered George B-sides; we could have given him a lot of B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B-side.”

It’s also possible that Lennon was thinking about Harrison’s abrupt decision to quit the group the previous January 10 during a dustup with McCartney while making Let It Be. Following Harrison’s departure, Lennon and McCartney had a conversation, recorded without their knowledge at Twickenham Film Studios, about what Lennon referred to as the "festering wound" of Harrison’s discontent after years of having his songs ignored. As Lennon saw it, Harrison’s resignation wasn’t a sudden decision but the inevitable culmination of years of feeling marginalized.

To ensure only the strongest songs made Beatles albums, Lennon suggested they give away tunes that would be better suited to other performers. All three had already been doing this to some extent: Lennon had released “Give Peace a Chance” with his and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band project; McCartney had given his songs “Goodbye” and “Come and Get It” to Apple Records artists Mary Hopkins and Badfinger, respectively; and Harrison had passed his White Album reject “Sour Milk Sea” over to Apple signee Jackie Lomax.

In making his argument, Lennon specifically mentioned McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a pair of old-timey singalong tunes Lennon was known to have reviled.

"Wouldn’t it be better — because we didn’t really dig ‘em, you know? — for you to do songs that you dug and for ‘Ob-La-Di’ and ‘Maxwell’ to be given to people who like music like that. Like Mary [Hopkins] or whoever it is that needs a song. Why don’t you give that to them?

"The only time we need something vaguely of that quality is for a single, and for an album we can just do only stuff that we really dug. It’s a drag to put that song on an album that nobody dug, including the guy who wrote it, just because it was going to be popular. ‘Cause the LP doesn’t have to be popular in that way.”

In fairness, McCartney never said he didn’t like either song, but Lennon’s point was clear: The Beatles should choose the material most representative of them as a collective, rather than serve as each other’s backing band, a practice that had begun with the White Album and continued during the making of Abbey Road, in particular with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and McCartney’s side-two medley.

Sadly, rather than discuss the merits of Lennon’s suggestions, the three Beatles descended into a debate about Harrison’s songwriting — McCartney said his tunes had only improved that year, while Harrison argued that they’d been written even earlier — and whether or not Lennon had participated enough in recording Harrison’s songs.

“Most of my tunes, I never had the Beatles backing me,” Harrison falsely complained.

“Oh, c’mon, George! We put a lot of work in your songs, even down to ‘Don’t Bother Me,’” Lennon responded, referring to Harrison’s first song, which appeared on 1963’s With the Beatles. “We spent a lot of time doing all that, and we grooved. I can remember the riff you were playing, and in the last two years there was a period where you went Indian and we weren’t needed!”

“That was only one tune,” Harrison said. “On the last album [the White Album] I don’t think you appeared on any of my songs. I don’t mind.”

“Well, you had Eric, or somebody like that,” Lennon replied defensively, referring to Eric Clapton’s electric guitar contributions on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” recorded with Harrison’s “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul.

It’s remarkable that neither Harrison nor McCartney seemed to grasp that Lennon was, for the first time in at least a year, showing his commitment to the group’s future.

It was a missed opportunity. Soon after the meeting, Lennon and Ono departed for a September 13 performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival with an ad hoc Plastic Ono Band lineup featuring Clapton, bass guitarist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White.

By the time they returned, Lennon wanted out. On September 20, 1969, he told his bandmates he was quitting. The Beatles’ last chance to stay together had passed.

It may be more than 60 years since the Kinks–Beatles rivalry was at its peak, but Dave Davies isn’t letting sleeping dogs lie.

Speaking at a new Kinks artwork exhibition at the Gibson Garage in London, the guitarist took aim at two members of the Beatles while naming the only one he says he genuinely liked.

In conversation with British tabloid The Mirror at the launch of The Kinks: Brothers, Davies didn’t hold back when asked about the Fab Four and the long-running rivalry between the two bands.

“John Lennon didn’t like the Kinks, he really didn’t,” Davies said, confirming something he has long suggested. “In fact, John Lennon didn’t really like anybody!”

Paul McCartney, who recently released his nostalgia-tinged album The Boys from Dungeon Lane, also came in for criticism. Davies said the 18-time Grammy winner “wrote a few decent songs,” but offered little more by way of praise.

Ringo Starr, who duets with McCartney on Dungeon Lane, escaped mention altogether. Instead, Davies reserved his warmest words for George Harrison.

“George Harrison was the only one I really liked,” he said. “He was the nicest guy.”

The roots of the Kinks’ rivalry with the Beatles are widely traced to a Bournemouth show in the summer of 1964, where the Kinks opened for the Liverpool band. According to later accounts, Lennon approached Davies before the show and made several cutting remarks, including a dig at the Kinks’ lack of hit records.

Writing in his 1994 autobiography, X-Ray, Kinks frontman Ray Davies suggested Lennon’s put-down stemmed from insecurity. He claimed the audience was calling for the Kinks to return to the stage for an encore just as the Beatles were preparing to perform.

If so, Lennon’s comments quickly proved ill-timed. Just days later, “You Really Got Me” topped the U.K. charts and reached the top 10 in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ireland and Sweden. In a fitting twist, it displaced the Beatles single “A Hard Day’s Night” from the number one spot.

The song — later introduced to a new generation through Van Halen’s explosive cover — became one of electric-guitar rock’s defining moments. Davies famously slashed the speaker cone of his guitar amp with a razor blade to create the raw distortion that helped lay the groundwork for modern rock guitar.

This has already been a busy year for Davies. In March, he pushed back against transphobia accusations made by electronica artist Moby, and he has also criticized a new Kinks biography, saying it contains “misinformation.”

The renewed attention has also prompted fresh questions about a possible Kinks reunion, with Davies suggesting his relationship with older brother Ray may finally be improving.

“We enjoy each other’s company,” he recently said (via MusicRadar). “We have fluctuated between getting on really well and not getting on at all over the years, but there’s always been telepathy, since childhood... Never say never.”

In George Martin, the Beatles had a producer who excelled at thinking outside the box. Martin‘s innovative studio techniques and openness to new ideas made him the ideal producer for a group as wildly creative as the Beatles.

But he was only human, and like most people he preferred to wrap up the workday at a reasonable hour.

That didn‘t always sit well with the Beatles, particularly in their later years, when recording sessions frequently carried over past midnight..

“Some of the people here — the engineer, for instance — would always be trying to go home at 5:30, and we'd be trying to make history,” George Harrison says in the 1991 Beatles Anthology documentary as he, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sit in Abbey Road Studios.

The Beatles certainly knew how to fight fatigue. When performing night-long sets in Hamburg in the early 1960s, they‘d take Preludin, an appetite suppressant and stimulant with effects similar to amphetamines — a.k.a. speed, or uppers — to help them stay awake.

Which is how they managed to get Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to work after hours on one particular night in the late 1960s: by lacing a pot of tea — prepared by their roadie, Mal Evans — with speed.

“Mal had this big teapot,” Harrison explained. “It was a big aluminum teapot, and I remember one specific incident where he made a pot of tea, and we doused the tea with uppers.”

Evans proceeded to take cups of tea up to the control booth overlooking the studio. "‘Cause they were asking, ‘Can we go home now?’” Harrison continues. “‘No, you can’t, you bastard. Have a cup of tea!’

“And then they were up there until 11 o‘clock at night.”

“Yeah, and then they didn’t want to go home,” McCartney adds. “They wouldn‘t let us leave.”

It was only when the 1995 documentary first aired that Martin learned about the episode.

Ironically, Harrison and John Lennon's first time taking LSD came after a dentist friend spiked their coffee.

It wasn‘t all fun and games, though. McCartney's love of pot got him busted in Japan. And American singer-songwriter James Taylor — who signed to the Beatles' Apple label in 1968 — claimed his heroin use influenced Lennon's decision to try the drug. He subsequently became addicted.

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.

Phil Collins thought he’d been fired by George Harrison for more than 30 years — until the former Beatle finally let him in on the joke.

The two first met in 1970, when a 19-year-old Collins landed a £15 session (roughly $280 today) playing congas during the recording of Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass. Collins recorded parts for “Art of Dying,” but they never appeared on the finished album.

For decades, he thought little of it. Then, while Harrison was preparing the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue, he unearthed an old session tape and sent Collins a copy with a handwritten note.

“Dear Phil, could this be you? Love George.”

Collins later recalled to Mojo (via Guitar.com) that he eagerly listened to the tape, convinced he was finally hearing the performance he’d recorded as an unknown teenager.

Instead, he got a shock.

“The conga player sounded like a hyperactive toddler,” Collins said. “At the end, I heard George’s voice saying, ‘Can we try one without the conga player?’”

“I rewound it and played it again and again and thought, ‘Fuck… I was sacked, and I never knew!’”

He left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had disappeared from the album.

A few days later, Harrison called to see whether Collins had received the tape.

“I said, ‘You fucking bastard. You sent me this tape, and it turns out I was sacked!’”

Harrison burst out laughing.

When he finally caught his breath, he revealed the truth.

“Oh no, no, no — that was [famed percussionist] Ray Cooper on the congas. We made the tape as a joke for you!”

Collins admitted he eventually saw the funny side.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Of course, Collins’ career — from Genesis to a string of chart-topping solo hits and even Disney film soundtracks — suggests he wasn’t too badly wounded by the experience.

He also wasn’t the only future star to appear on All Things Must Pass. Peter Frampton contributed electric guitar leads to Harrison’s landmark solo album years before either musician became an international superstar.

George Harrison never had any interest in reuniting the Beatles after the band’s breakup in 1970. While several members collaborated during their solo years — David Bowie even claimed he, John Lennon and Paul McCartney once discussed forming a group — the Fab Four never returned to the studio or stage together.

But Harrison hadn’t completely soured on his former bandmates. As he revealed in a 1974 press conference, he was open to forming a new band with one Beatle in particular.

The Beatles’ breakup came at an unfortunate time for Harrison. After years of being overshadowed by the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, he was flourishing as both a writer and guitarist. Songs like “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun” and “Old Brown Shoe” proved he could match his bandmates as a songwriter, while his increasingly distinctive guitar work established him as one of rock’s most original stylists.

The release of All Things Must Pass, his ambitious 1970 solo debut, vindicated years of frustration. Powered by the hits “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life,” it became the most commercially successful solo album by any former Beatle in the immediate aftermath of the split.

By 1974, Harrison was preparing to launch the tour behind Dark Horse with a band that included organist Billy Preston, bassist Willie Weeks, drummer Andy Newmark and a young Robben Ford. During a press conference promoting the tour, he made it clear that a Beatles reunion held little appeal — but revealed there was one former bandmate he’d happily work with again.

“It’s all a fantasy, the idea of putting the Beatles back together again,” he said, as recounted in the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. “If we ever do that, the reason will be that we are all broke. I’d rather have Willie Weeks on bass than Paul McCartney. That’s the truth, with all respect to Paul.

“Paul is a fine bass player,” he admitted, “but he’s a bit overpowering at times.”

Elsewhere in the press conference, Harrison expressed his fondness for drummer Ringo Starr, calling him a player with “the best backbeat I’ve ever heard.”

But in the end, it was Lennon whom he held in the highest regard.

“John’s gone through all of his scene, but he’s like me, he’s come back around,” Harrison said. “To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney. But it’s nothing personal. It’s from a musical point of view.”

Harrison may also have been remembering Lennon’s generosity during a September 1969 meeting, when he suggested future Beatles albums should feature a more equal distribution of songs among the four members. Lennon also said he regretted not giving Harrison and Starr the lucrative B-sides to Beatles singles so they could gain greater exposure — and make more money. Two weeks later, Lennon privately announced he was leaving the band, rendering the proposal moot.

Harrison had already worked with Lennon on the latter’s 1971 solo album, Imagine, contributing lead and slide guitar to several tracks. He also played Dobro on “Crippled Inside,” demonstrating the musical chemistry the two still shared.

Aside from his work with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison continued recording and performing as a solo artist until his death in 2001.

How do you play the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Beatles’ hit single released on this day in 1964?

More than 60 years later, no one can say with complete certainty.

One of the most recognizable sounds in rock history has inspired decades of debate among musicians, scholars and Beatles obsessives. Even George Harrison gave conflicting accounts over the years of exactly what he played, and with John Lennon, Harrison and producer George Martin all gone, the mystery may never be fully solved.

Part of the challenge is that what listeners hear as a single chord is actually the combined sound of as many as four instruments: Martin’s piano, Lennon’s Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric, Harrison’s Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric and Paul McCartney’s Höfner bass. Some analyses omit Martin’s contribution altogether, but however you account for the parts, the famous opening can’t be reproduced faithfully by a single guitarist.

“We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack album, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning,” Martin explained. “The strident guitar chord was the perfect match.”

Indeed it was. More than six decades later, the chord remains a favorite subject for YouTube creators, with countless videos attempting to decode its secrets. But one of the earliest serious investigations appeared in the pages of Guitar Player magazine in 2005, roughly a year before YouTube’s public rollout.

The investigator was Dr. Jason I. Brown, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who used a mathematical technique known as Fourier transform to decompose the recording into its component frequencies.

As Brown explained, one of the most common transcriptions at the time defined the chord as G, D, F, C, D and G, all played on a single guitar. The Beatles Complete Scores, meanwhile, described it as a composite chord made up of G, D, G, C, D and G played by Harrison on his Rickenbacker 12-string, D, G, C and G played by Lennon on his Gibson acoustic-electric, and a low D played by McCartney on bass.

To test those theories, Brown analyzed a one-second digital recording of the chord. After applying a Fourier transform to the audio, he rounded the 48 loudest frequencies to their nearest semitone.

“These are the notes that comprise that marvelous chord,” he wrote. The analysis identified nearly two dozen distinct pitches spanning nearly five octaves: A2, D3, F3, G3, A3, C4 (middle C), D4, G4, A4, C5, D5, G5, B5, C6, D6, E6, F#6, G#6, A6, D7, E7, F7 and G7.

“We see now why the most popular versions of the chord must be wrong,” Brown wrote. “Each shows a low G2 being played, but this note is definitely not included in the frequency analysis. Examining the frequencies, I found that one D3 is louder than the others, which suggests it is a bass note played by McCartney—but it was impossible to match the other low notes to Harrison’s 12-string, even taking into account the notes played on Lennon’s six-string.”

The breakthrough came when Brown stopped assuming the sound came entirely from guitars.

“With a bit more deductive work, I found the presence of the piano did indeed solve the frequency problem,” he wrote. “The important point is that the piano is there because the math says it is.”

Brown’s conclusion doesn’t answer every question surrounding the famous opening chord, and it’s unlikely the debate will ever disappear entirely. But it does explain why generations of guitarists have struggled to recreate it: they were trying to play what was never the work of a single guitar in the first place.

On 7 July, 1967, the Beatles released All You Need Is Love, a song that seemed to capture the spirit of the Summer of Love. The song had been debuted live just twelve days earlier, in extraordinary circumstances: in front of a load of friends – including Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and Graham Nash – for a BBC broadcast that went live to 14 different countries and an audience of over 400 million.

Now that's a pressure gig.

The Our World program was not intended to be the global launch of the new Beatles single All You Need Is Love, but that's how it turned out. Our World was the first ever international satellite television show, with segments from all the participating countries. The UK's segment featured The Beatles, with a song either written by John Lennon especially for the occasion, or chosen because its message could be easily understood by its international audience. (McCartney thinks it was the latter.)

The backing track for the song had already been laid down at Olympic studios a couple of weeks before and overdubs added at Abbey Road. The One World broadcast cued up the performance as though the viewers were catching the band just as they were about to nail the final take. It wasn't a complete ruse: Lennon was singing live, McCartney playing bass live, and George Harrison would play guitar live. (Live drums would have leaked into the other mics, so Ringo was spared.)

Below is the original broadcast and a new colorised version.

The way sound Engineer Geoff Emerick remembers it, the day before the broadcast, Brian Epstein talked the band into rush-releasing the performance as a single.

"John, of course, was keen," says Emerick, in his book Here, There And Everywhere, "it was his song, after all. It didn't take much effort to talk Paul into it, either... Only George Harrison was reluctant; presumably he was worried that he might muff his solo, even though it was only four bars long. He was finally persuaded when George Martin assured him that we could stay late afterward and do any necessary repair work.”

Of the performance itself, he adds: "John came through like a trouper, delivering an amazing vocal despite his nervousness and the plug of chewing gum in his mouth that he forgot to remove just before we went on air. Paul's playing, as always, was solid, with no gaffs, and even George Harrison's solo was reasonably good, though he did hit a clunker at the end."

He did hit a clunker – seemingly starting to play after the fourth bar, before stopping to let the orchestra in. An easy mistake to make, it's meant that the solo (around 4:08 on the original video, 1:19 on the new version) has appeared on "Worst Solos Ever" lists ever since.

Which is harsh. Everyone makes mistakes, after all. The question is: Why didn't they fix it later? The following day, Lennon laid down a new vocal and Ringo added new drum parts – why didn't the guitarist perfect his solo?

It's a question that's vexed Beatles fans and guitar players for decades.

Emerick thinks that Harrison was just assured it could be fixed in production: “From the very first playback, the four Beatles were knocked out by what they were hearing. Harrison winced a little during his guitar solo, but Richard [assistant engineer Richard Lush] took the initiative and reassured him, saying, 'It'll be fine; we'll put a little wobble on it and it will be great.' In the end, all we had to do was add the effect and duck the last bad note.”

The band were also up against a tight deadline. The single was released on July 7, just 12 days after the performance, a quick turnaround in 1967.

And maybe The Beatles were no longer striving for perfection. In his definitive book, Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald suggests that, after the rigours of Sgt Pepper, the band were happy to leave in some imperfections.

To paraphrase Lennon: there's nothing you can play that can't be played. It's easy. Unless, that is, there's 400 million people watching.

The corporate buyouts of Fender and Gibson in the mid to late 1960s have long been perceived as a trigger for a significant dip in the quality of musical instrument manufacturing. But a session guitarist wants to dispel that belief. In fact, he points to the Beatles’ breakout success as the cause for the era’s production chaos.

The claim comes from Brad Allen Williams, who has worked with Alabama Shakes guitarist Brittany Howard, jazz drummer Nate Smith, and soul singer Bilal, amongst others. Of course, he acknowledges that the two biggest guitar firms of the period underwent tough changes at this time, which today are blemishes on their histories. Yet he feels the root of the problems can be traced back to February 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

It was the dawning of a turbulent time for instrument makers, with corporate buyouts, an overwhelming surge in demand, and experiments with production techniques creating a perfect storm that flooded the market with subpar instruments.

Two electric guitar giants, Fender and Gibson, were both on the end of buyouts that dramatically changed their operations. CBS acquired Fender for $13 million in 1965, with Leo Fender facing a staggering production backlog and health issues. He was happy to sell up. Gibson, meanwhile, was acquired by Norlin in 1969, while Baldwin assumed control of Gretsch upon the founders’ retirement.

For years, many guitarists have pointed to CBS’s cost-cutting measures as the reason its reputation started to slide, as it bid to churn out the instruments the market was ravenous for by any means necessary. Some view its moves as quantity over quality, and similar stories have been spun about the Norlin and Baldwin-era operations, too.

Williams, though, wants musicians to take a step back and assess the bigger picture.

“I don’t want to rage bait, but I am about to argue against probably one of the most widely held and uncontroversial beliefs about vintage guitars,” he says in an Instagram post. “That’s this idea that the big corporate acquisitions and mergers of the 1960s were what caused the decline in quality of the major American guitar brands. I don’t think it was.

“I do think quality was declining around the time,” he notes, “I just think that in most cases that was already well underway by the time the actual mergers happened, and if I had to affix a turning point, it would be the same date for every American guitar and drum company: February 9, 1964. That’s when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

Culturally, the Beatles’ five-song performance was a landmark moment. It was, for the likes of Tom Petty, Gene Simmons, Joe Perry, and Nancy Wilson, among so many others, the singular moment that made them want to pick up an instrument and play. That, from a supply-and-demand perspective, was troublesome.

“This was such a seismic pop culture moment that it caused this massive overnight sudden spike in demand,” Williams says. “And all these companies were blindsided. When Ted McCarty started at Gibson in 1948, total production was around 2,000–3,000 guitars a year [other sources claim the figures are around 1,100 and 3,700].

“By the time he was burnt out and leaving in 1966, that was over 100,000 guitars a year,” he expands. “When Leopeningnder sold to CBS in January 1965, Fender was something like $9 million in inventory backordered. In a later interview, he said that with the Fender Mustang alone, they were 150,000 units backordered.

“I don’t care who owns the company; if you’re trying to ramp up your production rate that fast, something’s got to give,” he adds. “You’re going to have a lot of people making guitars, amps, and drums who have never made them before.” One of the first things CBS did once it assumed control of the Big F was to expand its production operations, with new facilities opened in hopes of chipping away at those daunting backorder numbers. But he believes by the time their new corporate owners tweaked production and processes, these companies were already on the slide.

“Vintage Gibson collectors know that, 1969 with the Norlin era is not a hard cut off of the quality,” Williams continues. “You start to notice things changing as early as 1965 or 1966.”

He uses Ludwig “flinging” drums out of its factory before their finishes had even dried as evidence of “the environment these guitars were made in.”

“So, I don’t really think that the corporate buyouts were the cause,” he concludes. “I think they were more the effect.”

It’s a fascinating perspective. Music lovers are quick to point to the incredible impact the Beatles’ success had on Western musicians, and the list of future stars seduced by rock’ n’ roll after watching the Beatles on that February evening in 1964 underscores the romanticism swirling around that night. But there was a darker side to the story that is spoken about far less.

Still, CBS produced some iconic guitars despite its mounting challenges, and Stratocaster enthusiast Walter Trout believes CBS-era builds don’t deserve the bad rep they get. The Beatles helped reshape the music industry in a myriad of ways, but did their success also come at a price?

Much – some would say too much – has been written about Taylor Swift’s marriage to NFL star Travis Kelce, but away from all the gossip-waffle there was a surprise Beatles-themed sub-plot.

Paul McCartney was among the litany of celebrities in attendance for the pair’s big day, and he dusted off a Fab Four classic at the ceremony to mark the occasion. Sources (via People) say the 84-year-old, of whom Swift is a long-term admirer, performed the early Beatles track “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the wedding reception, 62 years after he last played it.

McCartney had co-written the song in 1963 with his inimitable hitmaking partner, John Lennon, and it was the first song the group ever recorded on a four-track. It would go on to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for the band and kickstart a run of 20 record-breaking chart-topping singles in the States.

“These four youngsters have created an international stir with ‘Beatlemania,’ and have hit our shores with unprecedented impact,” Billboard wrote at the time, with their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show right around the corner.

The song would go on to close out that show, which Jimi Hendrix had watched with the Isley Brothers. Still, after making the set list for a show at New York’s Paramount Theatre on September 20, 1964, it was never played again, either by the Beatles, Paul McCartney, or John Lennon as solo acts.

It’s perhaps quite fitting that the song would eventually rear its head again before a modern-day pop star who has enjoyed a fandom arguably as fierce and passionate as Beatlemania. Swift has also gone on to break a score of the Beatles’ long-standing chart records, including the most weeks in the US Billboard Top 200 and the fastest trio of number-one albums in the UK.

However, it was British pop act Robbie Williams who finally toppled the Beatles’ record of 15 number one albums back in March. And he did it with a record that featured Tony Iommi, no less.

Swift has often spoken in reverence about the Beatles, and when she got the chance to sit down with McCartney for a chat in November 2020 for Rolling Stone, it was his ability to play all the instruments on a solo record that stood out to her.

“To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, 'I can do all this on my own if I have to,” she had said.

The ever-humble McCartney, however, played it down, citing his first solo album in particular as a necessity rather than a statement of individualism.

“With [1970’s] McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself,” he noted.

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.

During a 1963 visit to St. Louis, George Harrison found a record he couldn't stop thinking about.

He even imagined the Beatles recording it. But despite his enthusiasm, the song never made its way into the band's repertoire. Harrison would eventually get another chance with it — 24 years later.

It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.

“In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, who was living there at the time,” Harrison wrote in The Beatles Anthology. “The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we’d had three or four hit singles.

“So while visiting my sister, I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album, If You’re Gonna Make a Fool of Somebody.”

In particular, the song that grabbed his attention most was “Got My Mind Set on You,” and Harrison thought it had the makings of a Beatles recording — despite one significant drawback.

“It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll,” he admitted. “It was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff.”

As Harrison later recalled, the song “stuck in my mind.” More than two decades passed before he finally revisited it while working on Cloud Nine, his 1987 comeback album after a lengthy break from recording.

Produced by Jeff Lynne, Cloud Nine found Harrison returning to a more electric guitar–driven sound. Revisiting Rudy Clark’s song, he stripped away the brass-heavy arrangement that had bothered him in the first place and gave it a contemporary rock treatment.

“I finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song,” he wrote.

The changes made all the difference. Driven by punchy drums and a leaner arrangement, Harrison’s version of “Got My Mind Set on You” became a massive hit, reaching number one in the United States and giving him one of the biggest singles of his solo career.

In a fitting twist, the song Harrison once hoped the Beatles might record ultimately found its audience through him instead. After carrying it around in his head for nearly a quarter-century, he finally discovered what he'd sensed back in that St. Louis record store: the song had staying power.

Notably, the success of “Got My Mind Set on You” paved the way for Harrison’s next success, the Traveling Wilburys. When his record company asked for a B side to accompany a 12-inch remix of the hit, Harrison enlisted Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty to help him write "Handle With Care." The song was ultimately deemed too good to waste as a flip side and became the debut single by the newly christened Wilburys, one of the biggest supergroups of all time.

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.”

Although he took influence from George Harrison, as a session player Roger McGuinn had been experimenting with 12-string guitar sounds long before he was captivated by the Beatles and Harrison’s use of the Rickenbacker 360/12.

“I always loved the sound of a 12-string because it sounds like a harpsichord,” he tells Guitar Player. “It's got so many nice overtones in it.”

After catching the Beatles' 1964 movie, A Hard Day’s Night, where Harrison brandished a 12-string Rickenbacker, McGuinn followed suit and picked up his own Rickenbacker, a 370/12. It was with this guitar that McGuinn went on to not only impact the guitar scene via his chiming clean tones but also launch folk-rock as a genre.

The proverbial musical patriarch of the folk-rock era was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song penned by Bob Dylan in 1965, which the Byrds covered and scored a hit with. At the time, McGuinn had no expectations, but when he looks back, he admits the track's importance.

“I'm happy with what we did,” he says. “I think it was innovative. I was trying to tune it for the AM radio audience, and it worked! I look back on it as a happy experience, really.”

As the ’60s progressed, McGuinn and the Byrds would influence the Beatles as well as Harrison, by turning him on to the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds eventually ventured into country, psychedelic rock and the merging of the two. His 12-string was never far from his reach, but he did eschew folk rock for a while.

Recently, though, with his Folk Den project, McGuinn has gotten back to his folk roots in its purest form.

“I just love it,” he says. “It’s historical. It's human history, and real people writing about real things that happened.

It’s something that should not get lost,” he adds. “I compare traditional folk music to Victorian architecture: You don't want to tear down a beautiful Victorian building and put up a steel and glass structure instead, right?”

What initially drew you to the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar?

Well, I’d been playing 12-string acoustic before that. I got into it because of Pete Seeger playing one, and Bob Gibson playing one. And I got into Lead Belly and the folk scene, so I was a 12-string player. Actually, I was a studio musician in New York, doing sessions for 12-string acoustic and five-string banjo for a lot of folk acts, including Judy Collins and Paul Simon.

How big of an influence was George Harrison on you as far as the 12-string electric guitar goes?

We all went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, and copied down notes about what the Beatles were playing: that Ringo played Ludwig drums, Paul had that Höfner violin bass…

And then George came out with the Rickenbacker, which looked like a six-string from the front. They’d condensed the tuning pegs into a six-string format from the front, and they had another six sticking out of the back of the headstock. It was like a classical guitar, with a channeled head.

What did you think of that?

I went, “Wow, I love the sound of that.” I’d heard 12-string sounds on the radio before, like the Searchers and the Seekers — although I learned later that they were playing six-string guitars, but with another guitarist playing octaves, or something like that. But that 12-string sound was something that I loved.

It became very popular after the Byrds had a hit with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Yeah, after we got the hit, everybody got a Rickenbacker. The Beach Boys had one, Paul Revere & the Raiders had one. It was a new sound in rock and roll, and it came out of England.

You’re also an originator of folk rock. Is it also true that the Beatles were your inspiration for that style?

Yeah! The Beatles had first been a skiffle band called the Quarrymen, and skiffle is a form of folk music. So they were doing chords that were more than one, four and five; they were doing things that were more than subdominant and dominant chords. And they ere doing things in the middle of songs where they got into other minor chords, instead of just playing G, C and D major.

Did you ever talk with them about their influence on folk rock?

No, I never did. But there’s also a theory that the Animals invented folk rock by doing “House of the Rising Sun,” which had been a blues song that Bob Dylan recorded. But I don’t think it's the same, you know?

There’s a story that when the Byrds first heard “Mr. Tambourine Man,” David Crosby said, “The two-four folk beat isn’t going to cut it on radio.” Is that true?

Yeah. I realized when I heard the Beatles that they were onto something — that anything with a four-four beat was going to be a hit. So I rearranged “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

We had a demo that was originally recorded in New York by Bob [Dylan] and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, but Ramblin’ had too much to drink and was out of tune on the demo. [laughs] It actually wasn’t meant to be a demo; it was intended to be released, but Bob didn’t because Ramblin’ was out of tune.

So we got a copy of that, and that’s where we first learned it. And that version was four and a half minutes long, in two-four time, and out of tune.

That’s when Crosby said, “I don’t like it, man. Two-four time is never going to play on the radio.” And besides that, it was too long; radio wouldn’t play anything over two and a half minutes at that point.

Is it true that the Byrds’ manager, Jim Dickson, invited Bob to hear the Byrds rehearse the song? If so, what was his reaction?

Yeah, it was at World Pacific Studios, where we would rehearse. Jim let us come in there, play on the tape machines, and rehearse, and he invited Bob over.

Bob came over, and he was listening to us to this rock-inspired version of the song. I remember I played the song, and Bob said, “What’s that?” I said, “That’s one of your songs, man…”

He didn’t really recognize it, but he did like it and gave us his approval.

Bob was recording Highway 61 Revisited, the album where he really delved into folk rock, around the same time that the Byrds released “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Do you believe you influenced Bob’s rock leanings?

Well, you know, we all come from rock and roll. I was into Elvis and Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. And Bob had played piano in rock and roll bands when he was a kid. So Bob was already there. He already had that in his system.

Your Back from Rio record is perhaps one of the greatest star-studded albums of the ’90s. It’s got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, David Crosby and Chris Hillman on it. How did that come about, and how do you look back on it now?

I feel great about it. It’s probably my best commercial release.

It came about because I went on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan in Europe for what was called the Temples in Flames tour.

It was 1987, and we had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune. So I showed the tune to Tom, and he and I sat down and wrote “King of the Hill.” And then, Mike Campbell came in, and he had a four-track cassette studio in a briefcase.

So he recorded a demo of it, and we took that demo, and somehow got it to Arista Records, who signed me to a record deal. And then Tom helped me out with the recording, and so did Elvis and the other Byrds. It was a pretty cool project, and I’m still really happy with how it came out.

You’ve returned to folk music in its purest form with your Folk Den project. What led you back there?

I got concerned that it was going to get lost in the shuffle. All the new folk singers were singer/songwriters, and they weren’t doing the old, traditional songs. If you look at NPR's lists of traditional songs, like, only eight of the top 100 are traditional. So traditional music got kind of swept into the dustbin of history.

Do you see the tide turning to where there’s enough quality traditional folk music out there today?

Well, it depends on where you are. If you go to Scotland, there’s plenty of it. But if you go around the United States, you’re not going to find too much of it. It’s all kind of gone, but I’m doing my bit to keep it going by putting things up.

And it’s all for free. It’s a public service sponsored by UNC, North Carolina. I’ve got over 330 folk songs up there for free download on The Folk Den at mcguinn.com.

When the British rock scene exploded in the 1960s, the media were quick to manufacture rivalries — and few sold papers better than the supposed feud between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

But according to Paul McCartney, the reality was very different. Far from being enemies, the bands were part of a close-knit musical community that regularly crossed paths in London.

Speaking with Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2 about the songs that shaped his life, McCartney reflected on the camaraderie shared by the era’s biggest acts while discussing “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks.

“It was a lot of fun,” McCartney recalled. “The thing I liked about it was that it was a community. Even though we’d all come from different parts of the U.K., we were all now in London, and so there was great camaraderie.

“I think the newspapers really played it up like there were terrible rivalries and we hated each other. It wasn’t true.”

McCartney then shared a story that illustrated the bond between the bands.

“John and I were down in Charing Cross Road, where our music publisher was, and we were looking enviously into the windows of all the guitar shops,” he said. “At some point, we heard, ‘Oi!’ and we looked out in the street. There’s a London taxi going along, and there’s Mick and Keith hanging out.”

The pair — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — invited them into the cab, where the conversation soon turned to the Stones’ need for a new single.

“‘Well, we haven’t got a single,’” McCartney recalled Jagger saying. “‘We need a new single.’”

McCartney immediately thought of a song the Beatles had recorded but didn’t plan to release as a standalone single.

“Me being entrepreneurial or pushy, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got one that Ringo’s done on the album, and we’re not going to release it as a single,’” he said. “‘You guys would do it great, because it’s Bo Diddley style.’”

That song was “I Wanna to Be Your Man,” which the Rolling Stones released in November 1963. It became the band’s first U.K. Top 20 hit, reaching number 12.

“That just shows the camaraderie,” McCartney then says. “We gave them a song instead of jealously guarding it, not wanting them to do it.”

The Beatles would later release the song on their second album, making it the only song shared across their discographies.

The two groups continued to cross paths over the years, including in the studio. Brian Jones sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and played saxophone on the 1970 B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” while Jagger sang background vocals on their 1967 recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones’ 1967 single “We Love You,” and Lennon performed with Keith Richards in the group the Dirty Mac for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus event in December 1968.

Decades later, in 2023, McCartney joined the Rolling Stones on record again when he played bass on the Hackney Diamonds track “Bite My Head Off” and “Covered in You,” the latter of which is on the group’s new album, Foreign Tongues.

“I showed up as a session player,” McCartney said. “It was a really good feeling, because I wasn’t a star, I was just the bass player.

“I’m standing there playing, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ I should be blasé and say, ‘I’ve known them for years,’ but it was special.

“You better believe when I got home that evening, I said, ‘I’ve just played with the Stones. I loved it!’”

By the late 1960s, the Beatles were driving much of pop culture’s direction, from electric guitars to psychedelia to Indian music and meditation. But their influence also became entangled in the era’s more controversial shifts — including widespread experimentation with drugs.

That tension surfaced directly when George Harrison appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in November 1971. The host asked whether the Beatles bore responsibility for America’s growing drug culture.

“You had this tremendous influence on young people,” Cavett said. “Everyone knows you went through a drug phase. Did it ever occur to you that the fact that was known, and the fact that you were the Beatles, might have caused thousands of people to have drug problems that might not have otherwise?”

The audience bristled at the question, but Harrison responded without hesitation, beginning with a story that reframed the premise entirely.

“First of all, when we took the notorious wonder drug LSD, we didn’t know we were having it,” he said. “John and I had the drug when we were having dinner with our dentist. He put it in our coffee and never told us.”

The doctor, John Riley, had invited the two Beatles to dinner in spring 1965, where he spiked their coffee. At the time, Harrison said, neither he nor John Lennon knew much about LSD at all.

“It’s a good job we hadn’t heard of it,” he said, “because there’s been so much paranoia now created around the drug that people, if they take it, they’re already on a bad trip before they start.”

“So we had it; we went out to a club, and it was incredible.”

Harrison then shifted the discussion toward what he saw as a broader issue: the role of the media in turning LSD into a cultural flashpoint.

He pointed to the moment Paul McCartney publicly acknowledged taking LSD in 1967 after repeated pressure from reporters.

“If you’re going to ask me if I’ve had it, I’m not going to lie,” Harrison recalled McCartney telling one reporter.

Harrison said McCartney also warned journalists that broadcasting the admission would inevitably produce sensational headlines — and amplify the drug’s visibility far beyond the Beatles themselves.

“Really, it was their fault,” Harrison said. “They asked the question, Paul said yes, and then they put it [out there] and the world goes crazy.”

Pressed again on whether the Beatles still bore responsibility because of their fame, Harrison pointed to the constant surveillance the band faced during the 1960s.

“There were always reporters who’d follow us around on tour and always try breaking into our room,” he said, “catching us doing something we maybe shouldn’t have been doing.”

“The whole thing,” he added, “is that people want other people to do nasty things because they feed off it. And then they write, ‘Ha, they’re doing nasty things.’”

The Beatles’ experimentation with the drug spilled into their songwriting when an LSD trip with the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda led John Lennon to write “She Said She Said.”

And in a scene that recalls their own introduction to the drug, members of the band spiked a tea pot — likely with amphetamines — at one of their Abbey Road sessions to keep producer George Martin and members of the recording crew working late into the night.

You’ve seen the film footage: four Beatles on a London rooftop, playing their final live performance above the streets below. Soon, you’ll be able to stand in that very same place.

Apple Corps announced today that the building at 3 Savile Row in Mayfair, London — home to the Beatles’ late-1960s headquarters and the site of their famous rooftop concert — will open to the public in 2027.

The location housed the studio where the band recorded much of what became the Let It Be project and served as the setting for their final performance, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr staged an impromptu rooftop concert on January 30, 1969.

The new attraction, The Beatles at 3 Savile Row, will span seven floors and feature previously unseen material from Apple’s archives, rotating exhibitions, a retail store and a re-creation of the basement studio where Let It Be was recorded.

For many visitors, however, the biggest draw will simply be the chance to walk through the same rooms where the Beatles worked, rehearsed and recorded the music captured in their films and albums — and to step onto the rooftop where their time as a live band came to an end.

The Beatles launched Apple Corps in 1968 as an ambitious multimedia venture overseeing film, music, electronics, clothing and home furnishings. Its most successful arm proved to be Apple Records, which released the Beatles’ own recordings as well as solo projects by the band members and albums by artists signed to the label, including Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston and Badfinger.

McCartney and Starr recently returned to Savile Row for a look inside the building.

“It was such a trip to get back to 3 Savile Row recently and have a look around,” McCartney said. “There are so many special memories within the walls, not to mention the rooftop. The team have put together some really impressive plans, and I’m excited for people to see it when it’s ready.”

Said Starr, “Wow, it’s like coming home.”

The Savile Row project arrives as the Beatles prepare for another major cultural moment. In April 2028, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Neal Street Productions will release a four-film cinematic event directed by Sam Mendes — the first scripted project for which Apple Corps and the Beatles have granted full life-story and music rights. The films will star Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Starr, Paul Mescal as McCartney and Joseph Quinn as Harrison.

In the meantime, fans have plenty to keep them occupied. McCartney and Starr both have new albums coming out — as well as their first duet — and McCartney’s first Höfner bass guitar is the subject of the recently released documentary McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass.

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.

Paul McCartney has collaborated with scores of artists over the decades, from Elvis Costello to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Johnny Cash.

But he has never recorded a proper duet with his former Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr — until now.

Titled “Home to Us,” the track is a featured moment on McCartney’s upcoming solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due May 29. The record was produced by Andrew Watt, whose recent credits include Dark Matter by Pearl Jam and Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones.

The collaboration, however, didn’t come together entirely smoothly, as McCartney and Starr reveal in separate conversations.

Speaking on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Starr explains that the song began life two years ago as a jam between him and Watt, who lives down the street from him.

“I went down, and there was a kit in his studio,” Ringo says, “and he played guitar and we jammed.”

When Starr began working on his new album, Long Long Road, he thought the track might be right for it.

“I said, Andrew, send me that bit we did of the jamming. He never did,” he deadpans.

As McCartney revealed at a listening party for The Boys of Dungeon Lane, he heard their jam and began crafting it into a song. When Watt called Starr to ask him to add more drums to it, Ringo was, McCartney says, “a bit pissed.”

Nevertheless, McCartney pressed on with the track, writing lyrics about growing up in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool. It was there that he first joined forces with John Lennon and George Harrison — and where he and Lennon began crafting their earliest songs together on acoustic guitars.

“Even though where we lived was a little rough, it was home to us,” McCartney says.

Confusion continued to reign over their track, even after McCartney sent the demo to Starr to add vocals. Rather than sing the entire song, Starr recorded only the chorus, leading McCartney to assume that the drummer didn’t like the track.

After the two former Beatles talked it through, however, everything fell into place. Starr returned to the studio to record additional drums, and the song ultimately evolved into a true collaboration.

In all likelihood, the misunderstanding came down to Starr’s lack of experience, McCartney joked, noting with a laugh: “Ringo’s never done a duet with one of the Beatles.”

According to Billboard, the finished track has a distinctly Beatles-esque feel, featuring tempo shifts, key changes and layered harmonies. Among the voices joining McCartney and Starr are Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas.

It’s been a busy period for McCartney. In addition to preparing the new album, he’s been celebrating the release of the documentary McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass, which chronicles the search for his long-missing Höfner 500/1 violin bass. The instrument disappeared in 1972 and was finally recovered in 2024 after the Lost Bass Project launched a global hunt for the legendary guitar.

Opeth guitarist and bandleader Mikael Åkerfeldt has made a claim that might enrage many modern musicians, but he has the receipts to back it up.

Under Åkerfeldt's leadership, the Swedish group has transformed from a death metal outfit into one of modern prog rock’s biggest bands. While never truly losing their metal edge, save for their divisive 10th album, Heritage, Åkerfeldt has interwoven influences as wide-reaching as Yes, Camel, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham and Slayer into the band's expansive sound.

But, he says, not all artists in the contemporary progressive scene are as progressive as their genre tag implies. The Beatles are much more deserving of the title.

“I like to think that we're a progressive band, maybe even belong to that genre, but I make a difference between the genre and actual progressive music,” he tells American Music Supply. “It doesn't have to be wiggly guitar solos.

“For my taste, progressive music of today has become very technical, as opposed to mixing musical styles, which is kind of what I think it was in the beginning.”

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson has cited both an obscure 1970s jazz record and Eric Clapton's Cream as prog's progenitors for that very reason. Both acts, which actually shared two members, mashed genres together at will. The lasting impression it left on Anderson is evident in Tull's pivot from blues-rock to folk-tinted angularity as they immersed themselves in the booming prog scene of the early ‘70s.

Equally, Åkerfeldt points to two seminal Beatles records, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and The White Album (1968) as templates for progressive music in its purest, casually rule-breaking form.

“I think they were progressive,” he echoes. “If you listen to The White Album or something like that, it's like, ‘My God!’ You can't say it’s one genre, because they have avant-garde music on there, and they have blues. They have singer-songwriter folk, rock – almost hard rock [in “Helter Skelter”]. There are all sorts of things going on.

“I wouldn't compare us to The Beatles, but I think that we are one of those old school bands that blend styles, and we like to think that we don't have any limitations when it comes to composing music that's too far off,” he develops. “We don't spend too much time on time signatures and subdivisions.”

The PRS signature artist, who was recently bestowed a signature Martin acoustic guitar, isn't alone in making this connection.

Speaking to Prog, Yes frontman John Anderson argues that “The Beatles were the first progressive band.”

“There were other bands making adventurous music – The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, and various others,” he accepts. “But The Beatles were doing it first – not just with Sgt Pepper, but before too.”

Notably, Sgt. Pepper came off the back of the band's sojourn to India, fuelling George Harrison's love affair with the sitar, although it was David Crosby who introduced him to Ravi Shankar's music. It paved the way for a more experimental Beatles era, with genre cross-pollination galore.

But as Anderson says, that lineage can be traced even further back. Steve Hackett concurs.

“‘Eleanor Rigby’ was such a groundbreaking song,” the guitarist enthuses. “It wasn’t a traditional pop song. It was this character portrait, this short story. And you can almost smell the dust on the old instruments that were being used. It had such an adventurous spirit, and you can trace that thread into Sgt Pepper.”

Meanwhile, Keith Richards had a priceless reaction when he caught the rest of his band watching the Beatles on TV in the early ‘90s.

Ian Horne can vividly recall the moment he realized he had lost Paul McCartney’s Höfner 500/1 violin bass.

“It felt like the worst moment of my life,” Horne tells RadioTimes of the morning in October 1972 when he discovered the instrument missing. “I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank.”

This was no ordinary bass. It was the instrument with which the Beatles became famous in 1962 and ’63, heard on early hits like “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.” McCartney was just 18 when he purchased it for £30 in Hamburg in April 1961 during the band’s residency on the Reeperbahn.

Within two years, the bass had been worn down from constant use, prompting McCartney to purchase a second Höfner as a replacement. The original instrument was largely retired, surfacing only occasionally, most notably during the filming of Let It Be.

By 1972, the Beatles had been broken up for two years, and McCartney and his wife, Linda, were recording and performing with their new band, Wings. Horne had joined them the previous year as their sound engineer. At the time, Wings were bouncing between London studios while recording tracks for their second album, Red Rose Speedway.

At the end of one long studio session, Horne loaded the band’s equipment into their truck.

“It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls.

Afterward, he drove Wings crew member Trevor Jones to his flat in Notting Hill, in West London. It was late, and Jones suggested Horne stay the night. In what would turn out to be the worst decision of his career, Horne agreed. He parked the truck nearby on Cambridge Gardens, in what he describes as a rough neighborhood of drug dealers and artists.

“There were lots of nice people in the hippie culture,” he says. “But there were some dodgy people about as well.”

The next morning, Horne returned to the truck and immediately saw something was wrong. The padlock that secured the roller shutter was lying on the ground.

“When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straight away that it was gone,” he says. “The bass wasn’t there.”

Jones led Horne to several nearby houses where he suspected the instrument might have ended up. Armed with tools from the truck, the two men knocked on doors and confronted a few residents.

“We went to two or three places in a sort of threatening manner,” Horne recalls. “But we didn’t find it.”

There was nothing left to do but report the theft to the police — and then deliver the news to McCartney himself.

“I realized I had to go and tell Paul in person.”

At the time, McCartney was living near Abbey Road Studios. Horne, clearly shaken, went to see him and broke the news directly.

“I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’”

Horne braced for the worst.

“I expected him to go ballistic,” he says. “But Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’”

In fact, McCartney was so concerned about Horne’s reputation that he chose not to publicize the loss, fearing it might damage the engineer’s career. The decision had an unintended consequence: with little attention drawn to the theft, the bass quietly disappeared into obscurity.

Which helps explain why it took decades for the search to begin in earnest. In 2023, the Lost Bass Project launched a global search to find the Höfner. Within weeks, a woman discovered the instrument was among the guitars her husband left behind when he died during the COVID outbreak. That search is the subject of the new documentary Paul McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass.

So why did McCartney finally decide to look for it in 2023?

“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back — especially if it has sentimental value,” he said. “It just went off into the universe, and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.”

When the Lost Bass Project launched a search for Paul McCartney’s missing Höfner bass in September 2023, it quickly became a global event.

What no one realized was that, around the same time, a woman entirely unaware of the search had already found the instrument. It was upstairs in the attic of her home — roughly 12 miles from where McCartney lives.

The story was revealed in The Times on March 28, just ahead of a new BBC documentary about the instrument — McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass — that debuts in England this week.

McCartney’s 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass is the stuff of legend. The instrument, which he purchased at age 18 during the Beatles’ second trip to Hamburg, was played at the band’s early shows and on their early recordings, including their debut album.

By October 1963 the Höfner needed repair, prompting McCartney to purchase an almost identical 500/1 while the original was serviced. He rarely played the 1961 bass afterward, although it did make a brief appearance during the band’s sessions for Let It Be.

In 1972, while McCartney and his band Wings were recording Red Rose Speedway at studios around London, the 1961 Höfner was among several instruments stolen from an equipment van parked in the city’s Notting Hill neighborhood.

According to the story that later emerged, George Glenister stole the bass in an act of petty thievery, believing he could sell it “for a few quid.” Once he realized what he had, Glenister knew the instrument was far too recognizable to sell. Instead, he gave it to Ron Guest, proprietor of the Admiral Blake pub in Ladbroke Grove, in exchange for a few pints of beer.

When Guest died in 1992, the bass passed to his son, Haydn Guest. Haydn married Cathy, and they moved to Hastings in East Sussex. When Haydn died during the COVID-19 pandemic, his guitars — including the Höfner — went to her.

“I inherited about 15 guitars,” she told David Collins. “I knew there were a few in the attic but hadn’t been up there for years as it was inaccessible.”

She discovered the bass in September 2023, around the time the Lost Bass Project announced its search. Cathy said she was unaware of the effort and only realized what she had after uploading a photo of the instrument to Google Images.

“The results immediately came up with Paul McCartney,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it, but I knew he only lived about 12 miles away, so I thought I would just drive there.”

“There” was McCartney’s farm in East Sussex. He was in Los Angeles at the time, so Cathy instead spoke with his security team and sent photos of the bass for verification.

“I slept with it that night because I was worried,” she said.

After McCartney confirmed it was his Höfner, the bass was returned to him on September 21, 2023, and was later restored.

McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass captures the moment he was reunited with the instrument. Holding it for the first time in more than 50 years, he murmurs: “Welcome home, honey.”

August may have heralded news of a brand-new Beatles Anthology release and an expanded companion documentary — following some not-so-cryptic teasing from Paul McCartney — but February has delivered even more Fab Four content.

McCartney has just released the new documentary Man on the Run, which focuses on his life after the end of the Beatles. The film, available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, charts his transition from one half of the band’s storied songwriting partnership to forming Wings with his wife, Linda McCartney.

“The Beatles had broken up and I was thinking, ‘What do I do now?’” the bass guitarist explains in the film. “How can I ever do anything that’s anywhere near as good as the Beatles? I was on my own for the first time, so I had to look inside myself.”

McCartney arguably had the most complicated adjustment to life after the band. George Harrison, long frustrated by his peripheral role in the group, came flying out of the gates with All Things Must Pass. John Lennon and Ringo Starr each carved out distinct solo identities as well, while McCartney’s early post-Beatles years were comparatively uneven.

That’s ironic, considering he was the one who closed the door on John Lennon’s plans to keep the Beatles going into the 1970. Man on the Run explores how he navigated those uncharted waters and rebuilt his confidence from the ground up.

As McCartney notes in the documentary, he was the only member of the quartet to “put a band together,” leaning back into collaboration while the others embraced solo autonomy.

“I thought we should start from square one,” he says. “It was a puzzle I had to unravel.”

According to Amazon MGM, “The film chronicles the arc of McCartney’s solo career as he faces down a myriad of challenges while creating new music to define a new decade,” offering “unprecedented access to previously unseen footage and rare archival materials,” with the story told “through a uniquely vulnerable lens.”

The documentary captures key moments from McCartney’s post-Beatles career, including footage from his 1973 TV special, which proved a pivotal turning point in his solo trajectory. It also addresses the deterioration of his friendship with Lennon — documented in the pointed songs they wrote about one another — as well as its eventual reconciliation.

More significantly, the project is not a one-off. It kickstarts a new working relationship between McCartney, Universal Music Group, and Amazon, encompassing exclusive music and merchandise initiatives.

“Right now, I have 25 songs that I’m finishing in the next few months — new songs that are interesting,” McCartney revealed in an interview with Vulture. “Often, a constant thread through my writing is nostalgia, the memories of things past. I don’t question too much how it happens. I’m just thrilled it does.”

Elsewhere, super-producer Mark Ronson has offered fresh insight into what it was like to work with McCartney, noting that his penchant for “weird” sounds has always been part of the creative equation.

Meanwhile, Guitar Player has unearthed its historic 1990 interview with McCartney from the archives, in which he makes some surprising revelations about his favorite guitar.

George Harrison didn’t need the Beatles to prove himself. But according to his closest collaborators, he still needed a band.

In the aftermath of the group’s breakup, Harrison appeared to adapt to solo life more naturally than any of his former bandmates. He was the first to release a solo album, 1968’s Wonderwall Music, and when the group finally dissolved, he surged creatively. His 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass, was both a commercial triumph and a personal vindication, proving that the guitarist long overshadowed by Lennon and McCartney had a world-class voice of his own.

Yet even at the height of that success, Harrison never fully embraced being a solo artist.

Instead, fate — and friendship — would pull him back into a band setting, alongside Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys.

Speaking to Uncut in 2007, Harrison’s widow Olivia said the supergroup restored something he’d been missing since the Beatles’ collapse.

“George had those intense moments in his career when it was absolute bedlam,” she said (via Guitar.com), referring to periods including his turbulent final years in the Beatles and his personal upheaval involving Eric Clapton. “So there were times when he craved solitude, but he also loved being with friends.”

Lynne saw that conflict firsthand while producing Harrison’s 1987 comeback album, Cloud Nine.

“We were three-quarters of the way through Cloud Nine, and every night, as we were relaxing with a few drinks after mixing a big epic or whatever, George and I had the same conversation,” Lynne recalled. “‘We could have a group, you know?’ ‘Yeah, we could.’

“He didn’t like the idea of being a solo guy — that’s what he told me. He was never comfortable with it. He wanted a group, and, of course, George could do anything he wanted.”

Harrison’s explosive burst of creativity in 1970 suddenly makes more sense in that light. All Things Must Pass wasn’t just artistic release — it was backlog, as years of suppressed songs were finally given oxygen. But as the decades passed, his output slowed. He released six albums in the 1970s, but only three in the 1980s. Cloud Nine was his first in five years.

The Traveling Wilburys began almost accidentally, when Harrison needed a B-side for a single. What followed was something far bigger.

“George had the track done for a week or so,” Lynne said. “Then he came over again, and he was really excited. He said, ‘Let’s do nine more of these and have a band!’

“Right after that, George, Jeff and I drove down to Anaheim, where Roy was playing, to ask him to be in the band. After the set, we went backstage.

“We threw everybody out of the dressing room, and we told him, ‘We’ve got this band, and we want you to be in it.’ He said that he’d do it, and we drove home really happy, going, ‘Roy Orbison’s in our band!’”

The project quickly became a true collective. Petty even stepped aside during one session, inviting his Heartbreakers bandmate Mike Campbell to play slide guitar before insisting Harrison take over instead, effectively surrendering his own spot for the good of the song.

Operating under pseudonyms — Harrison was first Nelson, then Spike Wilbury — the group released two hit albums and, perhaps most significantly, coaxed Harrison back onto the stage for his first tour since his troubled 1974 Dark Horse Tour.

Harrison had proved he could survive and thrive without the Beatles. But the Wilburys proved something else: Even a Beatle didn’t want to be alone.

When Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded “Let It Be” for her 2023 album, Rockstar, it marked a historic meeting of English and Nashville music royalty.

“I just sent them a love note through their managers, and I just said what I was doing,” Parton told NPR in 2023. “And I said, ‘I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to have you sing with me on my rock album. And if you’re interested, call me at this number.’”

Dolly had already recorded “Let It Be” when she got the idea to contact Paul McCartney. “And so I contacted him. He was so gracious.

“And then I thought, Well, we got to have Ringo, because that’s the last of the Beatles. So I asked Ringo if he would do it. Same thing: ‘I’d be glad to do it.’”

The recording was another milestone in the career of Parton, the hit-making singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist, who turns 80 on January 19.

But it turns out she had already met both Beatles years earlier, in the 1970s. What’s more, each occasion had been memorable for reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles.

Dolly met McCartney and his first wife, Linda, on June 16, 1974, backstage at Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul and Linda were in town with their family for a six-week stay, during which time they recorded a quartet of non-album singles with their group Wings, including the number three hit “Junior’s Farm.”

During their time in Nashville, the McCartney's decided to attend the Grand Masters Fiddling Contest taking place at Opryland. When intermission came, they were invited backstage, where they met Dolly and country star Porter Wagoner and were photographed by Jack Corn for a story in The Tennessean.

Coincidentally, the event was special for another reason: It marked the last appearance Dolly and Wagoner made together in the 1970s. They had teamed up as a duo in 1967, a few years after Dolly left behind her family and first Martin guitar and set off on a music career. She and Wagoner had performed their final concert as a duo one week before meeting the McCartneys, on June 9. (Their split was the impetus for her to write her hit “I Will Always Love You” as thanks to Wagoner for all he had done for her career.)

A few years and a cross-country journey later, Dolly met Ringo Starr courtesy of Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles’ Apple Records, as well as a Grammy award–winning producer. The time was the late 1970s, and the place was Los Angeles, where Mansfield was luring Nashville stars in an attempt to break the rock-and-roll stronghold on clubs along the Sunset Strip. Waylon Jennings and Dolly were among the country artists who picked up their acoustic guitars and made the move west.

Several years before then, Starr had settled in Los Angeles, where he remained close with Mansfield. As a lifelong country music fan, the former Beatle was thrilled with the Nashville expatriates and spent one memorable evening watching Waylon Jennings perform and hanging out with him afterward.

It turned out Starr was eager to meet Dolly.

“He was very intrigued by Dolly‘s career,” Mansfield wrote in his entertaining 2007 memoir, The White Book. Dolly was, he writes, “a giant Beatles fan and, knowing that I had worked with them, had jokingly mentioned that someday she would like to meet them, Ringo in particular.”

In short order, Mansfield arranged dinner at his home for a small group, including Dolly and Ringo. Neither knew the other would be there.

“Both invitees were thrilled at the surprise,” Mansfield wrote, “and the intimacy of the evening really made the whole thing very special.”

Special — but not eventful. That is, not until Mansfield’s friend Stewart Levine crashed the party. Levine was a producer of note, with clients that included Simply Red, B.B. King, Lionel Richie, Sly Stone, Patti LaBelle and Joe Cocker. He was also a huge Dolly Parton fan and was dying to meet her. Unfortunately, Mansfield insisted the guest list should be small, “to keep the focus on just Ringo and Dolly spending time together.”

Levine didn‘t care. Shortly after dinner, he rang Mansfield’s doorbell. When the host answered the door, the producer muscled his way in, leading to a noisy confrontation.

As the men argued in the hallway, Dolly suddenly appeared. Seeing Levine, she stopped in her tracks and stared at him wide-eyed.

“After a very pregnant pause, Dolly began to speak and in a stuttering, shaky voice asked Stewart if he was Stewart Levine, the famous producer,” Mansfield wrote.

Struggling to comprehend what was happening, Levine mumbled “yes” as Dolly gazed lovingly at him.

“She continued to explain that in her lifetime she never expected that she would ever get the chance to be in the same room with Stewart Levine, let alone have the privilege of meeting him,” Mansfield wrote. ”She went on further saying that she was a giant fan of his and had absolutely adored him from afar for quite a long time.

“She then delivered the fatal blow by announcing that she was going to have to leave the room for fear that she would no longer be able to contain herself and might jump his bones right in front of everyone,” Mansfield recalled.

“She made an abrupt about-face, as if fearful of being unable to control her emotions, and returned to the living room.”

The men stood speechless for a long while. Eventually they made their way to the living room where Dolly and the others were waiting. As they appeared, everyone burst into laughter.

It had all been a joke. Hearing the commotion after Levine forced his way in, Mansfield’s wife explained to Dolly that the producer was infatuated with her, and Dolly decided to have a little fun at his expense.

“I think Stewart was so stunned by what had gone down that he wasn't even the least bit disappointed that Dolly didn't really have the hots for him,” Mansfield wrote.

Although Dolly had met her second Beatle that evening, she managed to make the night memorable for an entirely different reason.

Music producer Don Was has worked with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and WIllie Nelson, to name just a few, so he knows a thing or two about guitarists. Now he has singled out John Mayer as they player he believes is the modern-day equivalent of the Beatles' George Harrison.

The producer first linked up with Mayer for his 2012 album, Born and Raised. He worked on its followup, Paradise Valley a year later, and returned for Sob Rock in 2021. Throughout those experiences, Was says, one thing consistently struck him.

“The thing that separates John from everybody else that I've worked with, in terms of the process we go through, is that I've never seen anyone with that many ideas for arrangements,” he says in a new interview with the Everything Mayer Podcast.

“He's never short of ideas. We know we have to do something in a section, and he'll find 10 different, really elegant ways of making that section work. My job is never to tell him what to play; it's to help him sort through the wealth of information that he's laid down to choose the most effective.”

However, while Mayer’s well of ideas seems never to run dry, it’s another aspect of his musicianship that leads to the Harrison comparisons.

“His guitar tones are unparalleled,” he goes on. “They're not just evocative, cool sounds, but they're thick, and they're warm, and they jump out of speakers. I'm not sure how he does it.

“Yes, he's got the best gear you can have, but I've played his guitars, and I don't sound like him,” he adds, quick to dispel any cynical comebacks. “I think people might take that for granted.

“George Harrison was good at stuff like that, getting distinctive sounds that you only hear once on a certain song. That's a strength of John’s. It’s the same thing.”

Harrison provided a guitar solo on the title track of Bob Dylan’s Under the Red Sky in 1990, which Was produced. In that moment, he was able to see the Liverpudlian conjure magic in real time, which is why he says the parallels are so stark. And they might even see Mayer go one better than a man who could extract some rather one-of-a-kind sounds out of his collection of guitars and amplifiers.

“I was loath to say John's better than George Harrison,” Was says. “It ain't gonna sit well with people, but he might be better than George Harrison.”

Indeed, Was’s time in the studio with Dylan and Harrison was an eye-opening experience, with Dylan sitting in the producer’s chair as the session got underway.

“He didn't play the song for George, he didn't tell him what key it was in, and George hadn't tuned his guitar; he just fast-forwarded to the part where the solo would be,” he once told Kenny Aronoff. “George is scrambling to play something, and all things considered, it was pretty decent. But it was out of tune.

“Bob said, ‘Okay, that's great, man,’ and George was flabbergasted. So George turns to me and says, ‘What do you think, Don?’ and Bob Dylan goes, ‘Yeah, what do you think?’

“Time slowed down,” he continues. “My mind flashed to the time I was going to sell my career so I could go to the Concert for Bangladesh. And I was terrified.

“Then a voice went off in my head: ‘He's not paying you to be a fan.’ So I said, ‘It's good, George, but let's tune up and see if you can beat it.’”

Harrison, in return, thanked the producer. Right there, he learned “to tell the truth, but don't be a dick about it,” — something that would help when he teamed up with the Stones for Voodoo Lounge four years later.

Meanwhile, Mayer's guitar tone wizardry was pushed to new limits as he figured out an ingenious solution to the strict noise rules of the Las Vegas Sphere.

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?”

SansAmp was way ahead of the game with the amp pedal concept, and the likes of Nuno Bettencourt have gigged its ready-made pedalboards under the Tech 21 banner. The Mop Top Liverpool is its take on British Invasion amp tones of the Beatles and beyond, but how it's hit the low, low price of $99 down from $249 over at Sweetwater for Black Friday is beyond me.

That's 60% off the price of a lot of analog pedal, and the Sweetwater listing states that there are no restocks coming for this bargain – when it's gone, that's it.

Though it's not quite the Sweetwater bargain price, European players can take advantage over at Thomann for £133 (plus delivery) and the UK's Gear For Music even has a couple left at £139. Still a very significant saving.

The inspiration is unquestionably the Vox AC 30 for this two-channel amp pedal. It also has built-in speaker emulation to go straight to a PA or FRFR cab, – alternatively, you can just bypass it to go straight into a power or guitar. The Mop Top Liverpool is perfect for a light to fit in your gigbag rig or backup option.

The onboard switchable treble boost is your gateway to Brian May-style gain glory here. A three-band EQ with mid shift and high control makes it a user-friendly way to dial in your sound. With the two channels at your feet this could handle a whole gig, not bad for just $99!

The Mop Top Liverpool might just be the dark horse bargain of Black Friday.

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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.

Eric Clapton’s guitar solo on the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is among the most noteworthy moments in the band’s history. It marked the first time an outside guitarist contributed to the group's recordings.

Classical musicians had played on their tracks over the years, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, as well as Marianne Faithfull, sang on their 1966 hit "Yellow Submarine." But Clapton's solo on the George Harrison composition was a game changer.

Even Clapton was surprised when Harrison made the invitation. "I can't do that," he said. "Nobody ever plays on the Beatles' records."

Remarkably, many of those involved in the recording have no recollection of the session. That includes the man behind the recording console that day in Abbey Road Studio Two: engineer Ken Scott.

“I remember absolutely nothing about it,” he says in conversation with Rick Beato [via Guitar World]. “When I was writing my book [Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust], I asked the question, ‘What was it like, Eric playing on that? How did they react?’ and I had to answer, ‘I can’t remember.’”

He even underwent hypnotherapy, which uses relaxation and focus to access the mind's subconscious, to try to get his memories back.

He was surprised to find he's not alone.

“I went to John Smith, who was my assistant engineer, [who said], ‘I don’t remember anything about it.’

"I went to Chris Thomas, George Martin’s assistant, who was producing at that point because George was on holiday, and [he said], ‘I don’t remember anything about it.’

“The one thing I vaguely remember is Eric saying that the only way he’d play on it is if he sounded like the Beatles, as opposed to Eric Clapton.”

The guitar part was later treated to ADT — Artificial Double-Tracking — to pull its sound further away from the guitarist’s usual realm. The device — which used a tape delay with a variable-speed oscillator to create a slightly mismatched copy of a recorded track — had been dreamed up by the engineer Ken Townsend at the request of John Lennon, who was looking for a way of avoiding double-tracking his vocals.

When applied rather heavily to Clapton’s electric guitar part — which he played on Harrison’s “Lucy” Les Paul — it gave his solo its rather peculiar, wobbling sound.

There is at least one member of the Abbey Road crew who recalled Clapton's session. The late engineer Brian Gibson spoke about the recording with Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn for his book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.

His memory was quite clear, and it may explain why the session passed without making much of an impression on those involved.

"Eric behaved just like any session musician," Gibson said. "Very quiet. Just got on and played. That was it... There were no theatrics involved."

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" would kick off a fruitful creative period for Harrison, who had begun collaborating with Clapton to escape the creativity-stifling atmosphere in which he found himself in the Beatles. Their partnership spawned Cream’s "Badge" as well as "Here Comes the Sun," another Harrison hit, from 1969's Abbey Road.

In related news, the 1913 Gibson acoustic the pair frequently wrote on surfaced on Reverb earlier this year with a hefty $1 million price tag. It's currently up for auction.

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.

The Beatles' music and career returns to the spotlight this week with the re-release of the group's 1995 Anthology project. The docu-series returns to screens over the Thanksgiving holiday with a new Episode 9 that relates the reunion of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the 1990s and the more recent creation of "Now & Then," the song McCartney and Starr completed from a John Lennon demo the other three former Beatles first worked on in 1995.

While Anthology will serve to remind everyone that the Fab Four were trailblazers, there was a time when the Liverpudlians were doing the idolizing. For George Harrison, in particular, no one was better than Buddy Holly.

To be clear, Holly held sway over the entire group. Lennon and founding bassist Stuart Sutcliffe took inspiration for the Beatles' name from Holly's group, the Crickets. His songwriting style would be equally inspirational to Lennon and Paul McCartney's early compositions.

But it was Harrison who, as the group's lead guitarst, felt Holly's influence most keenly in his playing.

“I think one of the greatest people for me was Buddy Holly,” he told Rock Around the World in 1974. “He was very good — exceptionally good.”

Harrison recalled trying to learn guitar with the help of a book that was far from complete. "A few months or a year later, I found, ‘Those stupid buggers have given me a manual that doesn’t show me all the notes!’ " he complained. "So then I had to start learning again.”

Holly’s influence was paramount to filling in the gaps in his knowledge.

“Buddy Holly was the first time I ever heard A to F-sharp minor,” he told the BBC in 1974. “Fantastic! He was opening up new worlds there. And then A to F, A, D, E, F and F# minor. He was sensational.”

Speaking to Guitar Player 13 years later for an interview in the magazine's November 1987 issue, Harrison showed that his passion for Holly’s music hadn’t diminished. He told contributing writer Dan Forte how he had created the emotive volume-swelling chords on the Beatles' 1965 tracks "Yes It Is," "Wait" and "I Need You": Unable to coordinate strumming the chords and raising his guitar's volume control at the precise moment, Harrison enlisted Lennon to turn the knob.

“So some of those," he said, "I played the part, and John would kneel down in front of me and turn my guitar's volume control.”

It was Forte who pointed out that Holly had done something similar for his 1957 hit "Peggy Sue." Unable to flick his pickup switch in time for his solo, Holly had Crickets guitarist Niki Sullivan move the switch from the neck position to the bridge position and back at the crucial junctures.

“Yeah, that's great stuff, isn't it?” Harrison replied. “That's still one of the greatest guitar solos of all time. Right till this day I could play you the 'Peggy Sue' solo any time, or 'Think It Over' or 'It's So Easy.' I knew all them tunes.”

And lest anyone forget, Harrison purchased his first electric guitar — a Futurama — in 1958 because it looked similar to the Fender Stratocaster that Holly played. Harrison would use the Futurama through many of the Beatles' early Hamburg gigs and on their first professional recordings with Tony Sheridan in June 1961. Although Harrison thought little of the guitar, it's now expected to fetch between $600,000 and $800,000 when it heads to the auction block in November.

Throughout his career, Harrison's admiration for other musicians proved as strong as ever. Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has recently recalled the time in 1984 when Harrison sheepishly asked to jam with the band. Together, they treated an Australian crowd to a rendition of a Little Richard classic, with Harrison so deeply in his element that he didn’t notice Blackmore was playing in the wrong key.

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.

Hands both old and new have put their imprint on this fall’s 30th anniversary incarnation of The Beatles Anthology – now streaming on Disney+ in an incredible Black Friday deal.

The 1995 docuseries, which was expanded to eight episodes for its home video release, is an outgrowth of longtime Beatles aide de camp and Apple chief Neil Aspinall’s proposed early ’70s project The Long and Winding Road, which was shelved due to animosities surrounding the Fabs’ breakup. It marked the first time the group — with John Lennon posthumously, of course — told its own story, and was fueled by two new singles: “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” both built from Lennon recording demos.

For the anniversary, the Anthology has added a ninth episode, directed by Oliver Murray, while the companion albums have grown with a fourth volume, overseen by Giles Martin — son of the late Beatles producer George Martin. It includes remixed versions of the singles as well as “Now and Then,” the purported “final” Beatles single that came out during 2023.

“People think there’s a huge planning system to what we do, and there really isn’t,” Martin told us when the latter was released. “We’re amateur at best — we just seem to get away with it. I suppose it has an element of high risk involved in it. I suppose I’m used to it; most of the work I do gets examined by people. But generally I get away with most things.”

The refreshed Anthology is not Martin’s first Beatles rodeo, of course. Having worked as an assistant for his father, he’s been working with the catalog since The Beatles: Rock Band in 2009 and also took part in recent reissue projects, including 50th anniversary editions of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (a.k.a. the White Album) and Abbey Road, as well as the 2022 Revolver: Special Edition, Peter Jackson’s acclaimed The Beatles: Get Back documentary project and accompanying Let It Be: Special Edition, and much more. He’s also helmed reissues for Paul McCartney and George Harrison (as well as the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and the Elton John Rocketman biopic).

It’s a tall order, not unlike a sacred duty. But after, really, a lifetime of being around the music, Martin says there’s no question about what his brief is on these projects.

“We don’t really discuss a plan, if you like, because it is what it is,” he explains. “My job is to represent as truthfully and as best I can what [the music] is. I never, ever wanted to change what the Beatles are playing. The heartbeat of the Beatles is always there.” That philosophy, he adds, has allowed for a kind of carte blanche whenever work begins on one of the endeavors.

“The direction really isn’t discussed,” he adds. “In any of these projects what happens is I’ll do a mix and select outtakes and send them to all of them, then discuss. I suppose I’m used to it; most of the work I do gets examined by people. One thing I’ve always tried to get across is the fact they were a four-piece band, and a really good four-piece band. They were a great band. The sum of them together is better than them individually. They all play the right things, and very economical, with great thought and great sympathy. That’s what I want to come through.”

Not surprisingly, one of Martin’s highlights over the years was “Now and Then,” another Lennon demo that was considered for The Beatles Anthology but was deemed to need too much work to be finished in time. In the new Episode 9, in fact, McCartney, Harrison and Starr are even shown starting to work on it, with the former noting that it “needs so much work we’re a bit terrified to get around to it.”

It was technology Peter Jackson and his team created at their New Zealand Park Road Post Production studio that finally allowed the Beatles team to clean up and isolate Lennon’s vocal and piano enough to build a song around it, using elements that Harrison, who died in 2001, had recorded during the mid ’90s, along with new contributions by McCartney and Starr.

“It was pretty much a new version of the song,” says Martin, who wasn’t even aware of its existence until McCartney played it to him during May 2022. “The things that were kept were George’s guitar, acoustic and electric, and obviously John’s voice, and I think that was about it, really. Paul redid the bass and Ringo redid the drums.

“It was only when we finished it and some people heard it and, ‘Omigod, this is gonna be huge!’ — that was the only time I remember thinking, ‘Okay…’

“I think had I thought that way to begin with I’d probably be a little nervous about it. But I’ve got Paul and I love him dearly and I have his trust, which I don’t take for granted. Whatever you do you hope it’s good enough. I’m working with some pretty good people, you know what I mean? So it’s trying to live up to the standards.”

For Anthology Episode 9 director Murray, meanwhile, “Now and Then” represents “a full circle moment.” He came into the Beatles camp as the director of a short promotional film that accompanied “Now and Then’s” release. He was then approached to create a new Anthology episode, which serves as a kind of epilogue and coda to the series in documenting the making of the series, including the recording of all three “new” songs with producer Jeff Lynne.

“It kind of relies on an understanding of exactly what happened throughout the ’90s, principally,” Murray says via Zoom from England. “But also Episode 9 needed to offer a new layer of self-reflection and step out of the familiar chronology that was so wonderfully done... It was a chance to sort of poke holes in the mythology, sometimes, and be able to linger on a subject where the earlier episodes couldn’t, ’cause they had the march of this story to tell.”

Murray considers the nearly hour-long episode “a ’90s time capsule,” showing the three surviving Beatles meeting, sitting on a blanket playing ukuleles on the lawn of Harrison’s Friar Park estate, or at a previously unseen gathering from 1994 in Abbey Road Studios. He also makes use of individual interviews that were done to promote Anthology and unearths a few grails — including a vintage clip of McCartney playing part of “Helter Skelter” acoustically and a close-up of Harrison coming up with his electric guitar part for “Real Love.”

“I love that,” he says. “It’s thin and powerful at the same time, his elasticity in bending the strings, but also a mighty sound. I almost forgot about the ‘Real Love’ stuff because I was so immersed in everything, but to put everything from the ’90s sessions together was fantastic — especially given that I started with the ‘Now and Then’ short film.”

Murray eschewed the idea of new interviews with McCartney and Starr. “It would have messed with the sense of time and place in this material,” he notes. And he feels that the punctuation mark Episode 9 puts on the Anthology is showing the three surviving Beatles were truly reunited, emotionally as well as physically, by the project.

“Even though they really hadn’t spent much time together at all... they sort of slip back in like a well-fitting glove with each other,” the director says. “It was an opportunity to see them talk about the weight of being a Beatle — dare I say the cost of being a Beatle.

“Obviously, it’s very melancholic when you hear just how difficult it is for them to embark on Anthology without John. Some of my favorite stuff is George talking about how cathartic it is to be able to use Anthology almost like therapy, but there’s always the anchor of John not being there, and how it reminds them that John never had this opportunity to look at their own legacy from outside of its shadow.

“It’s not an ending. It’s a handover,” Murray adds. “My North Star was my sense of this being a conversation between one generation and the next. Their songs are like a shared cultural language that gets passed on, and it evolves. That’s probably the hardest thing, to service people coming to the story for the first time and the people who know way more than I do — the superfans who know everything and are thirsty for even more.”

A new significant Beatles project has become a tradition every fall, and there’s more in the vaults to be considered in the future. But one thing Martin says we won’t see, or hear, is another “new” song à la the Anthology singles — despite Peter Jackson intimating otherwise when “Now and Then” was released.

“There’s no bigger Beatles fan than Peter Jackson, so, God bless him, he’d love that,” Martin says. “But it wouldn’t be the Beatles. What makes [‘Now and Then’] the Beatles is the fact George is there. We could take a John demo and Ringo and Paul could play on it, but that wouldn’t be the Beatles. You could take a George demo whatever, and it wouldn’t be the Beatles. You’d have to synthesize something.

“Why this song sounds like the Beatles is because it is the Beatles. There’s no Beatles plug-in, if you know what I mean. And lyrically it sounds like the last Beatles song. I think if we did things other than that, it wouldn’t be the Beatles. So this has to be the last Beatles song — sorry, Peter.”

The expanded The Beatles Anthology Collection is released today, November 21. 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.

For Paul McCartney, life began to come apart in the fall of 1969. John Lennon quit the Beatles that September. The following month, rumors that he’d died in a 1966 car crash and been secretly replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, fueled by a Detroit DJ and a caller who offered clues to his death, hidden in the cover art and songs of the group’s albums.

In an excerpt from his new oral history book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, out today, the 83-year-old rocker opens up about the struggles he faced during the transition between his time as a Beatle and his new life as a solo artist, husband and father.

Remarkably, “Paul is dead,” the urban legend of his death, seemed to have a bit of truth to it.

“We had heard it long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone,” McCartney writes.

“At one point, I turned to my new wife and asked, ‘Linda, how can I possibly be dead?’”

Now, however, he says, “I’m beginning to think that the rumors were more accurate than one might have thought at the time. In so many ways, I was dead … A 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle.”

As he relates in the book, “The breakup hit like the atom bomb,” shattering the friendships and routines he had built his life around for the past decade.

To complicate matters, the group’s breakup created a legal morass — as well as personal problems between him, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — that were draining his energy.

He successfully sued his bandmates in 1970 to dissolve their partnership and keep manager Allen Klein — the choice of the other three Beatles — from overseeing their financial affairs. In 2020, he told British GQ it was “the only way for me to save the Beatles and Apple,” the company they formed in 1968 to oversee their creative endeavors.

But he was left with doubt about his future: “Would I ever be able to move on from what had been an amazing decade, I thought. Would I be able to surmount the crises that seemed to be exploding daily?”

Against all odds, he says, he continued to hope the Beatles weren’t finished.

"I hung on, wondering if the Beatles would ever come back together again, and hoping that John might come around and say, ‘All right, lads, I’m ready to go back to work.’

“In the meantime, I began to look for something to do. Sit me down with a guitar and let me go. That’s my job.”

After releasing a pair of solo albums — on which he played everything from electric and acoustic guitars to keyboards, bass and drums — McCartney and Linda focused on building a new band, Wings, to lift them from the ruins of McCartney's former life.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run was created from hours of interviews with McCartney and other members of the band, tracing their difficult journey, from their arrival in 1971 to their dissolution in 1981. The band’s tumultuous ride was a mix of chart hits and bombs, lineups swaps and changes of fortune both good and bad.

In one of his lowest moments, McCartney agreed to create a TV special to settle a dispute with his publisher over Linda McCartney’s writing credits, which the publisher claimed were invalid because she was not a professional composer.

The resulting program, titled James Paul McCartney, was a disaster, savaged by critics and ignored by a public that had once adored him. Magically, its timing couldn’t have been better, bringing him publicity just as Wings released their first chart-topping U.S. hit, “My Love,” in March, and scored another smash with the theme song to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die just three months later.

Ultimately, the pressures of raising a family — and a famous pot bust in Japan — convinced him it was time to put Wings to rest and return to his solo career.

McCartney’s new book is just one of many Beatles-related projects coming out soon. He’s releasing Wings, a compilation album of that band’s tracks — available in two- and single-disc versions — on November 7. The documentary Man on the Run comes out February 25, 2026, and charts his transition from one half of the Beatles’ songwriting partnership to the leader of Wings.

In between, the Beatles 1995 Anthology series will get a reboot with a new, ninth episode in its documentary series, a new fourth volume in its music collection and a 25th Anniversary Edition of the Beatles Anthology book, featuring the group's story told by all four Beatles and their associates.

The now nine-part Anthology documentary will stream exclusively on Disney+ beginning November 26. The new episode includes unseen behind-the-scenes footage of McCartney, Harrison and Starr reuniting between 1994 and 1995 to work on Anthology and reflecting on their lives in the Beatles.